“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.”
In the book, And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard, protagonist Emily is sorting out the world by writing poetry and reading Emily Dickinson. The book is full of poetry and is written with a very poetic tone. Here is a particularly beautiful passage:
So sew. Either way you spell it, on its own, the word looks wrong. Emily could write a poem about it, about how sew needs a subject, an object. About how a girl needs a duty to lock her in place. So if she sits at a desk, scrawls words on paper, are the words as lonely as she, or do they sow seeds into a soul across time, across centuries? Was Emily Dickinson ever able to thread the words together in such a way that she was beyond the need for stitches?
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Just came across this in my audio book today:
“An insult is like a drink, it affects one only if accepted.”
Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road
How true is this!
The difference between being ‘thin-skinned’ and ‘thick-skinned’ lies in if you ‘accept’ the insult or not. If you do not, it rolls over you and you can remain jovial and calm. If you accept an insult, it can be toxic, taking bitter root and poisoning both you and others around you as you spread the toxicity.
This brings to mind that some need more gentleness than others.
While insult may be completely unintended, those who presume a negative intent will let their ‘acceptance’ of the insult fester. Their perception is their reality.
This is when one can either wait for the one presuming insult where none was intended or implied to either wake up or move on, or one can say “I’m sorry you felt that way, it was not the intent.”
I am prone to the former, with a shrug of shoulders. For those of us who ignore even intentional insults (some of us have taught junior high and therefore have a lot of practice) it can be hard to feel sorry for those who are so fragile or victimized that they see insult wherever they turn. They’re emotionally exhausting to be around.
I don’t drink either literally or figuratively. It seems like a sound way of avoiding trouble.
(for DG) 🙂
In whatever capacity
you deal with animousity,
develop a good strategy
to sort out dreaded calumny,
then avoid falling into laxity
and resolve it with alacrity!
.
.
Another poem dedicated (with tongue in cheek) to Outlander author, Diana Gabaldon. The phrase ‘with alacrity’ appears frequently in Outlander, and whenever it does I shout enthusiastically “WITH ALACRITY!” and chuckle. (Alacrity means haste, FYI). It’s silly, but it is not much different than throwing boxes of KD at a Barenaked Ladies concert or toast during Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Neither of which I’ve done, unfortunately, so I have to settle with shouting to a book. Kind of sad, really.) 😉
Row on row
books rest, wise and eager
waiting for a hopeful reader
Someone seeking information
or an escape into fiction.
In racks and stacks
new worlds await
and the library is the gate.
“I want to look,”
she says.
Finger outlining
the focus of
her attention,
she walks
a slow, studious circle
of analysis
and inevitable
appreciation.
.
“Fair’s fair,”
he says,
stepping back
with a glint in his eye,
joyfully
thankful for circumstance
that made her
his.
.
.
.
Another poem based on Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander; this one based on Ron Moore’s TV series, specifically episode 107, “The Wedding.”
“Score one for the pig,” she said,
but a hunter limping, partially gored
not prudent from the perspective
of a boar.
A roar marks the victory:
Geordie’s blood stains the earth
entrails pour onto leaves
at what is the more satisfying score
for the boar.
.
.
An Outlander poem, based on TV show ep 104 “The Gathering”
