At 10:00pm not-quite-four-year-old Daniel runs through the house like a madman, or a young cat. So he does most nights.
So Samuel used to do. But now he must rise for Kindergarten, and has conditioned himself to retire before eight o’clock.
Abel, at thirteen months, sleeps last. He has taken a turn toward ultraviolence.
Adrian Mole is in his fifth book. He is thirty years old. He has two sons. One of them, he recognizes as his son. The reader recognizes them both. Adrian isn’t the most self-aware diarist.
It’s the 1990s. Blair is the new Prime Minister. Adrian works as an offal chef at Hoi Polloi, a Tory restaurant. In his spare time he scripts an unsold radio serial, The Windsors, about the Royal Family. Princess Diana’s death scuttles Adrian’s plot. Adrian’s own life seems plotless, notwithstanding his acquisition of sons.
His parents also are chronic failures – after a livelier fashion (even what with Adrian’s father’s depression). The most impressive figure in this book is Adrian’s mother, who unexpectedly succeeds as a ghostwriter, spinkling pages with unsolicited references to Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch).
“Philistines” always succeed where Adrian fails.
Adrian considers writing his vocation. Thus he wastes time agonizing over semicolons.
Pity. He is eloquent.
I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded as “a big Jessie.” It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.
I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. “It was a golden age,” he said, almost choking with emotion. “I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.” His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, “That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.”
Bear in mind that Adrian is on the liberal end of the political spectrum.
I reflected on his feelings as I chopped vegetables for our “hobo’s stew.”
It’s available in these translations: NKJV, NIV, and – less easily obtained – NRSV.
I’m reading the NKJV because I’ve read NIV and NRSV bibles in recent years.
I’m trying to read all the notes. I’ve never done this with any bible.
There are a lot of notes. They’re interesting, but they don’t aim to redirect one’s life or improve one’s soul – except perhaps gradually and cumulatively, by shining tiny light-beams upon thousands of details of the divine portrait.
One reads about, e.g., ziggurats because the Babel tower probably was a ziggurat. One learns why ziggurats were built, how they differed from Egyptian pyramids, etc. Does this change one’s life? No. Does it change one’s understanding of the Babel story? Up to a point, yes: it turns out that the builders weren’t trying to climb up to the heavens but coaxing heaven-dwellers down to earth. (Other ancient sources tell us that this is what ziggurats were for, and this information is summarized in the notes.)
One learns how radical the Abrahamic covenant was. Abraham’s society assumed that gods were to be manipulated, not covenanted with. What is more, gods – at least, the ones whose favor people typically sought – were associated with particular groups and places. It was believed that their powers were limited to their localities. But Abraham’s God told him to leave his family and its lands and to trust Him in a new place, among strangers. God asked Abraham not to try to establish himself in his own people’s memory. And that was radical because remembrance of the dead was thought to sustain the dead in the next life (as in the Disney movie Coco) (this last comparison is not in the notes).
This bible is bulky. I can’t read it with Abel in my lap – a significant limitation, since Abel rests in my lap much of the day.
It takes a long time to read each day’s passages and notes.
Frankly, I’m struggling to follow the schedule. But I think it’ll be very rewarding if I do so.
The group has been reading Being Mortal: Medicine and What Happens in the End – hardly the last word on dying, but a good starting-point for preparing for one’s own death and thinking how to help those whose turn it is to die.
The best thing about reading this book – and I mean this as a sincere compliment, not in any backhanded way – was that it prompted me to finally read “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”
It, it, it … the passage is like that horror flick – that great mortality parable – It Follows.
The typeface sampled above is Jovica Veljovič’s Agmena. Tolstoy’s story serves as the epilogue of the anthology Leading Lives that Matter.
… missionaries to Ecuador (and other countries) who died within days of each other. Fixtures of my early life. Good men. Heroes, arguably. Keith gave his wife, Ruth Ann, a kidney. He died of complications from the surgery. Stu’s death was brought on by lung trouble resulting from Vietnam War wounds. He climbed mountains and ran marathons, but, over time, his injuries took their toll.
Stu and his wife, Bev, managed my dorm during two of my boarding-school years. They were kind. Stu used to take me jogging, and he helped me to get the hang of algebra. We’d talk about his reading: Dante, Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Herman Wouk, Bodie and Brock Thoene. I got him to read Kenneth Grahame and Jerome K. Jerome.
I remarked to someone, the other day, that my favorite missionaries were from Canada and the Midwest – especially, Minnesota. Keith was from Ontario, and Stu was from the Gopher/North Star State.
