The Floating Nun - Harris Burdick

     The air in the upper part of the cathedral had more movement than the cold and stagnant heaviness down below. She could almost imagine what it would have felt like on her hair, had her hair not been so severely constricted by her habit.
     She had been floating here - in the centre of the nave, on one of the hard chairs that they used instead of pews - for at least half an hour now. The strange thing was not the floating chair, but the complete peace she felt up there: no fear of falling, not even any questions of why she was where she was. She wondered when she might get back down to earth, but she certainly didn't worry about it.
     The Bishop and his aide had walked into the church, and seemed as unfazed as the Floating Nun.
     "You've been there long?" asked the Bishop in his nasal drawl.
     "Not too long," she replied. "I seem to be in a place quite beyond the constant state of flux existent down there. I think I shall stay here for the foreseeable future."
     "Stay there?!" exclaimed the Bishop, for the first time showing an inkling of emotion, though it wasn't clear if that emotion was anger, horror, or just surprise.
     "Yes! Stay here."
     The Bishop frowned his frown that the Nun knew only too well, for he employed that frown for his many employments: praying, preaching, teaching, disciplining, and even - if his aide was speaking the truth - for sleeping.
     The Nun had always been beyond the reach of the Bishop; as a woman she answered to her Mother Superior, and of course to the Lord her God, but to no one else. Now, however, she was beyond him in a whole new way, and as she realized that she smiled, and as she smiled her chair floated higher towards the vast and ornately decorated ceiling.

The Perfect Sentence

Currently I am reading Death comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James. This is my first foray into the land of James' mysteries, and I have to say that although I was eagerly anticipating the content of this novel, I had low expectations about the quality of the writing. Having read Steig Larsson and Dan Brown, I assumed that mystery writers were all in the same class, yet I am pleasantly surprised - and consistently blown away - by the beauty of her sentences.

Here, then are a few of my favourites so far:

"They also accused [Elizabeth] of being sardonic, and although there was uncertainty about the meaning of the word, they knew that it was not a desirable quality in a woman, being one which gentlemen particularly disliked."

"An assembly ball was a penance to be endured only because it offered an opportunity for her to take centre stage at the piano forte and, by the judicious use of the sustaining pedal to stun the audience into submission."

"Mr Bennet was a quiet and reassuring presence in the house, rather like a benign, familiar ghost."

Lovely.

The BBC and Me

I have had a lot of different television obsessions over the years - MuchMusic, then Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and then, more recently, The Office. Television viewers have, for the last decade, been collectively obsessed with detective/police/crime shows, (or have we been forced into it - the chicken and the egg?), and although I have watched them now and then, only in the past few months have I, myself, become infatuated with mysteries.

This fixation, however, is focused solely on the mysteries presented by the BBC, namely: Masterpiece Mystery, shown every Sunday night on PBS. While being not only of an obviously higher quality (as pertaining to the writing, acting, story line) than network series, these mysteries captivate me with their locations, their wit, and the nuances of the relationships between the characters.

Whether it be Zen in Rome, Wallander in Sweden, Poirot on the Orient Express, Jackson Brodie in Edinburgh, Sherlock in London, or Inspector Lewis in Oxford, I want to know each and every one of them (especially Lewis). I want to be a first-hand witness to their intelligence, to their bravado in the face of danger, and to their assurance that there will always be a truth to be found. And, more than anything, I want to drink at the pub with them (or maybe just with Detective Sargent James Hathaway).

Thanks, BBC.

Reading Hemingway Aloud

The Sun Also Rises has been on my shelf for almost two years now, ever since one of my camino friends declared it the best book of all time, and then took us to the Iruna, Hemingway's Pamplona pub, and the favourite haunt of Jake Barnes in the aforementioned novel.

I usually read books with an excess of words, superfluous adjectives, and a wealth of semi-colons - and that's the way I write, as well. Hemingway was a startling change: as the dust jacket explains, he "revolutionized American writing with his short, declarative sentences and terse prose." I found his style shockingly choppy, but clearly he made that into a style all its own. The only problem with his writing, then, is that I tend to read aloud a lot - at school I am constantly reading out loud, whether it be poetry, short stories, or even novels (Animal Farm being my favourite read-aloud). Hemingway, especially in his dialogue, sounds completely ridiculous out loud. Here is one of the best passages I read aloud to my roommate (because I just had to share it with someone, and if I read this aloud to my kids they would hate me). So, give it a try and read it out loud to anyone who will listen. Context is irrelevant: just look at these sentences.

"Bill," Edna looked at me. "Please don't go in again, Bill. They're so stupid."
"That's it," Mike said. "They're stupid. I knew that was what it was."
"They can't say things like that about Mike," Bill said.
"Do you know them?" I asked Mike.
"No. I never saw them. They say they know me."
"I won't stand it," Bill said.
"Come on. Let's go over to the Suizo," I said.
"They're a bunch of Edna's friends from Biarritz," Bill said.
"They're simply stupid," Edna said.
"One of them's Charley Blackman, from Chicago," Bill said.
"I was never in Chicago," Mike said.

To enhance this Hemingway experience, now watch Midnight in Paris, and imagine the great man himself reading this aloud to his friends...

A Searching Sonnet

I found my journal from 2010, and I got a lovely surprise in the form of a number of sonnets that I had written - now almost two years ago - and had completely forgotten. So many questions...

Is wisdom found just in the fear of God?
In learned obedience? In what is heard?
In small moments of grace when we are awed?
In what we read in life: the Living Word?

Can it be found without action or sound,
When life takes a quick second to be still?
When I have shut my eyes to all around,
Is that when I with wisdom will be filled?

Or should I leave the stillness far behind?
To not just be, but now also to do?
To act with love along the paths that wind,
And thus to search and learn all that is true?

But as these questions through my mind do flow
A message comes from God:"I'm here to know."

I am Vertical

This month for book club we wanted to try something new, so we challenged ourselves to each memorize a poem or two to present to the group, along with some prepared discussion of these poems. Although I have a good number of poems memorized that I teach again and again (especially Emily Dickinson), I thought I should rather challenge myself by memorizing a poem that does not have a rhythm/rhyme structure, so I can't just rely on that. Thus, here it is, my poem recitation, by Sylvia Plath:

I am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing that I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them -
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once,
And the flowers have time for me.

Translating Nostalgia

I just finished reading I'm Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago, by Hans Peter Kerkeling, a German comic. When I walked the camino - now two full years ago - I again and again met Germans who were doing the pilgrimage because of this book, so when it was recently translated into English, I had to add it to my Camino Library.

I read many books that are not originally in English: I love Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, and I just finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As I am reading these, I seldom think about the fact that they were translated, yet with Kerkeling's book I couldn't think about anything else. If I hadn't felt so incredibly personally connected to his topic I wouldn't have made it past page 10, since the translation is so awful (I felt like I was reading the simple sentences of an elementary student). By the second half of the memoir, though, I was so engrossed in his story - he was so often telling my story - that I was able to mostly ignore his sudden stops and awkward phrases. The story worked in spite of the language, rather than through the language.

Tomorrow marks two years exactly that I walked into Santiago de Compostela, thus finishing my 800-kilometre pilgrimage. It's hard to let that experience go: I feel this strange tension between wanting to hold on to this nostalgia and wanting to move on. I guess in essence, though, the camino is about holding on, letting go, and moving forward all at the same time, so I'm okay for now.

(Next camino-text adventure = going to see Martin Sheen's The Way, which he was filming alongside of us as we walked.)