January’s poem
R.I.P. Glynis Johns, one of the all-time cutest cuties.
Karin received a final Christmas gift: a calendar of cats of medieval art. Do check out these cats if you haven’t seen this sort of thing.
I read J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, a slim novel about a Great War survivor undergoing various crises, who accepts a job restoring a mural in a village church. The theme of the novel seems to be: This too shall pass (the good no less than the bad). The mural – a masterpiece – has lain under cover, relatively well preserved, since the Middle Ages; once uncovered, it will likely be whitewashed over by an unsympathetic churchman. The genius who painted the mural is long forgotten; the young artisan restoring it knows that his own glorious summer in the countryside will have no significant or lasting effect.
Halfway through, I realized how infrequently I read anything so alien to my own way of thinking as this book. Not alien because I believe my own actions are worth much, but because “his eye is on the sparrow.” This belief I share with almost all the murder books I read, even lurid or despairing ones.
This year I am reading the New English Bible, including, for the second time, the Apocrypha. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the translation, but the English is lovely.
(John Keats, Endymion, the first twenty-four lines)
Karin received a final Christmas gift: a calendar of cats of medieval art. Do check out these cats if you haven’t seen this sort of thing.
I read J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, a slim novel about a Great War survivor undergoing various crises, who accepts a job restoring a mural in a village church. The theme of the novel seems to be: This too shall pass (the good no less than the bad). The mural – a masterpiece – has lain under cover, relatively well preserved, since the Middle Ages; once uncovered, it will likely be whitewashed over by an unsympathetic churchman. The genius who painted the mural is long forgotten; the young artisan restoring it knows that his own glorious summer in the countryside will have no significant or lasting effect.
Halfway through, I realized how infrequently I read anything so alien to my own way of thinking as this book. Not alien because I believe my own actions are worth much, but because “his eye is on the sparrow.” This belief I share with almost all the murder books I read, even lurid or despairing ones.
This year I am reading the New English Bible, including, for the second time, the Apocrypha. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the translation, but the English is lovely.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
(John Keats, Endymion, the first twenty-four lines)