Surly Saints and Greek Geeks

I'm with the Carolina Cannonball:  gotta love the irascible saint. There really are some people so unlovable you can't help loving them, and I've always had a soft spot for the desert monastic with his lion and his skull, lest he forget.

Meanwhile, some of us are learning New Testament Greek. My friend Josh is keeping a running tally of instances in which someone, in class, utters the phrase, "It's Greek to me." Today it happened twice, which seems modest enough, all things considered. It was the first day and all. We wrote out the Greek alphabet and learned that Saint Jerome had hated learning Hebrew, but had persevered as we should persevere so as not to be, as he says, ignorant of Christ.

And now I am so tired that I think I might just pass right out, here in this uncomfortable chair.

Binders!

Some glimpses of our daily binder system, for first and second grade (the big kids have theirs squirreled away in their rooms, and they're just full of lesson plans, anyway):

 

This is the first-grader's binder. See how nicely her Mead Primary Journal fits in the front pocket? Her pink pouch holds her pencils, Addition Wrap-Up, erasers, various math manipulatives like dice, and her collection of rosaries. That's her September calendar, colored to mark the liturgical season and the month's feasts, on the right. Friday we'll do one for October. 

The binder holds her reading and spelling (that goat story had her incoherent with laughter this morning) . . .

her math workbook-work (as opposed to things like drawing fractal trees, which we did today in journals) . . .

and random science stuff (this was a parts-of-a-flower coloring page):

The back pocket holds her handwriting book:

Here's a quick tour of the second-grader's binder, with journal, current reading, supply pouch . . .

and reading log.

He does also have math, science, and handwriting sections;  it's just that once you've seen one workbook page or flower-parts coloring sheet, you've more or less seen them all.

Meanwhile, we've abandoned ancient Mesopotamia to the sands of time and emigrated to Egypt. We've watched the Civilizations episode, which features some fascinating recent archaeological discoveries, and are reading Elizabeth Payne's Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt aloud. We'll be using all these resources, though I'm not sure in what order:

And, in what I anticipate will be a crowning moment, we plan to mummify a chicken.

As I say, I spend a lot of blog time on the younger kids, because I work with them more face-to-face, and what they're doing is easily photographable, though now that I think of it, I probably ought to hover with the camera while the senior does whatever it is she's going to do with the lye, red cabbage, and vinegar which she has requested for her next chemistry experiment.

If anyone's interested in seventh-grade or twelfth-grade plans, however, I'd be happy to share mine via email. I am rather proud of the twelfth-grade plans, particularly the History of Ideas course which has the senior reading Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization and, currently, Dante's Inferno. It's a lot of reading and essay-writing this term;  next term she'll write a researched senior thesis on some historical/philosophical topic.

Meanwhile, the seventh-grader has been writing weekly papers on the Phoenicians, Alexander the Great, the Persian Empire (Persia rocks, he says), Roman military tactics, and, this week, persecution of the early Church under the Emperor Diocletian. So far they've been straight expository papers of the "who/what/where/when/why" variety, but I'm starting to let him substitute some more creative writing projects for some of these. His Diocletian paper, for example, is taking the form of a newspaper article;  he could also opt to "interview" an historical figure, have that figure write a long, detailed "Dear Abby" letter, write an historical story in which a young character shares adventures with a real historical figure, and so forth. I had thought that writing would be a blood/turnip affair for him, but as it turns out, he has a hard time keeping his papers under five pages. So . . . there's that to work on instead.

So, the little kids are spending this rainy afternoon cleaning the first-grader's room, but the sounds of something hard, like maybe a golf ball, being thrown down the hall repeatedly are starting to intrude on my reverie here. Perhaps I should get up out of this chair.

Feast of the Holy Archangels

This time last year, I wrote: 

This [a homily of St. Gregory the Great] makes me contemplate, among other things, our tendency to confer angelic status on those who have died. Jesus said that we will become as angels, not that we will be angels ourselves; if Saint Gregory is right, to be an angel is to be at once something far more and far less than a human being. As they, pure intelligences, have much that we don’t have, so also do we, being embodied, have much that they don’t.

We have, oddly enough — oddly, because it’s too easy not to think of it as a gift — the capacity for suffering. The angels, for all their brilliance and power, cannot enter into our sufferings, any more than they could enter into Christ’s on the Cross. 

When we bear the Cross with the Lord, whether we take it upon ourselves, find it thrust upon us, or both, we meet Him in the power of His weakness, and the triumph of His humility.

Last night I read for the first time Regina Doman's spare and beautiful book, Angel in the Waters, in which a baby remembers his life in the womb.  There, in the darkness and stillness and warmth, an angel gives him light and company and comfort. The story made both Crispina and me teary;  in the most powerful moment, when the baby, now born, is mourning what he thinks is the loss of his angel, the angel whispers that not only is he still there, in the larger, brighter world outside the womb, but that when the time comes, he will lead the child in his care to a world outside this one, which is larger and brighter still.

The angels do live and move among us, though the light of this world seems to diminish their brightness, as a flashlight fades when you turn on a lamp. And what they are for, whether we see them or not, is the same thing the flashlight is for:  to brighten the path, to show us where to set our feet, to keep us company and guard us through the night.

And For More Beautiful . . .

Check out this very lovely blog, by a young woman whose writing and photography radiate joy. 

I Thought This Was Sort of Beautiful, Too

Not to mention the fact that walking around taking pictures of stuff that people leave lying around is a heck of a lot more satisfying than hounding them to put it away.

Random Crazy Beauty

This stuff is all over my front porch even now, and it's kind of a pain for people -- and they're out there, though maybe not right this minute -- who want to approach the door, knock, and enter. Still, the other day as I was standing around neither picking things up nor making other people pick them up, I was struck by the accidental composition of these blocks, and by the way the afternoon light fell on them.

My Hands-Down Favorite Homeschool Resource This Year

 

What can't you do with these things? We've done copywork, narrations, sentences with spelling words, past-and-present sentences, stories . . . all illustrated. I need to remember to have us make up some math story problems and illustrate those as well. Plus, these fit nicely in a binder pocket, so you have them with all the rest of your work, and at the end of the year they can go in the pocket of the big "finished-work" binder, to be taken out and reminisced over by . . . someone . . . someday. 

Life Continuum

People are arguing that research like this serves only to make pregnant women anxious and guilt-ridden. What nobody, apparently, wants to acknowledge is that it also indicates that you're alive, and yourself, long before you leave the womb. We accept fully that your childhood environment, though it doesn't explain everything about you, imprints itself on your person in significant and lasting ways. What we as a culture are less ready to accept is that your life in utero is as real a part of childhood as kindergarten is.

Frame This

"Outsource memory, and culture withers."

There's so much that you could potentially say about this, in so many different directions, and I have no time now. Because I have to talk to some children, that's why.

Items of Interest and Amusement

Taking a quick lunch break during our school day to bring you these things, without which you should not be. 

Federal Regulators Sue Makers of POM Wonderful Pomegranate Juice.

This is an item of both interest and amusement to me. One of my little (read "tiny") extra-cash jobs involves filling out surveys, and while in general I occupy a demographic group whose opinions apparently nobody wants to know, I have done several surveys related to this very pomegranate juice, evaluating its packaging (I told them it looks like a bottle of bad aftershave) and its advertising campaigns. The latter surveys were basically reading-comprehension exercises, asking me whether, based on the information provided, I would conclude that POM-Wonderful-brand pomegranate juice cures prostate cancer. Based on the information, yes. Based on . . . oh, I don't know, natural skepticism . . . not so much. And now it turns out that the FTC agrees with me.

No health claims here! Burgundy Mushrooms from The Pioneer Woman. 

New York Times:  40 Years of the Op-Ed Page.

Simcha Sez:  Mirror Writing Perfectly Normal.

Not writing on mirrors, that is;  teenagers do that, with dry-erase pens, when they have Latin to memorize. No, this is the getting-your-writing-turned-around-backwards kind of mirror writing. And Simcha's  right, at least to judge from all my children's progress. The 8-year-old has it more or less straightened out by now, but I'm still having to say, constantly, to the 6-year-old, "Turn your five around. That six is backwards. No, that word is not deb, but bed."

Meanwhile, at The Guardian, John Mullan probes the history of the present tense as a literary device.

Poll! If you were writing a novel, and maybe you are, which tense would you use? And why? Feel free to answer in the combox, or take the handy poll at the top of the sidebar.

 And to go with Ree's mushrooms . . . 

 Advice Goddess takes on piercings and tattoos. Not herself personally;  I mean she talks about them, and about some possible consequences of thinking you're entitled to your lifestyle choice.

Air-Tran/Southwest Airlines merger:  Will Southwest become Air Tran? Or will Air Tran become Southwest? Commenters at the WSJ seem to fear the latter. The Onion, meanwhile . . .  (warning:  you caint hardly get a Onion article without there bein some kinda vulgaritrocity. The token one in this article is in the last sentence. So if it's going to bother you, don't look.)

I thought we were all through fighting about clothing. But no. Danielle offers some sanity.

Zoe Romanowsky questions the wisdom of the yearly mammogram.

That oughta do it for now. Take the poll! Write the novel! We'll be back after a brief pause for station identification, or something like that.

My New Favorite Lazy-Sunday-Afternoon Site

Go visit Flashlight Worthy Books,  What you'll find there are lists of books you won't want to stop reading at lights-out. It's a pan-literary kind of site, and some lists will be more you than others,  but you could eat up an afternoon in worse pursuits, that's for sure.

I especially like 5 Vintage Children's Books for the First Day of School (even though that was weeks ago now);  Off the Beaten Canon (what books might you add to this list?);  All in the Family (another reminder to me that I MUST read I Capture the Castle before I die);  and Out-of-Print Great Children's Books (again, what would you add?).

Enjoy. And then step away from the computer and pick up a book. (But before you do, read this!)

Which advice I'm going to take myself. Now, where did I see Mr. Heaney last?

Thirty-Six Second-Graders

Thirty-six rosary-making kits. Eight teenaged girl-volunteers. Two actual adults. Add them all together, and I think you get thirty-six rosaries with more or less the right number of beads. An awful lot of kids had a bead left over, but if you think we were going to go back and count up every single decade to determine where that bead should have gone -- well, we didn't. If it turns out that somebody has a nine-bead decade, I don't think any natural law is violated by the repetition of two Hail Marys on one bead. And anyway, nobody else has to know.

So far in First Communion class this year, we have done the following (besides making rosaries):

1. kept a checklist of the ways in which we love God every week by

*Mass attendance.  They now know the phrase "Sunday obligation," and we rehearse weekly the question of when it's ever okay to miss Holy Mass. (Answer:  When you're too sick to watch TV)

*Coming to Faith Formation class. That's kind of a gimme, obviously. If you're there, you get to check it off.

*Prayers. They can check off a generic "prayers" column if they said anything to God at all during the week, but they can also check off, specifically, the Sign of the Cross, the Morning Offering, the Our Father, etc, all of which we're making a point of memorizing this year.

*Good works. We also rehearse weekly a litany of things you can do -- obey your parents cheerfully, do your chores before you're asked, and so on -- as presents to God.

2. Colored and consulted, weekly, a calendar page. Next week they'll get an October page, which they'll color green except for feast days, which I've already noted on the copies they'll get. What I want them to see is how the liturgical calendar overlays and sanctifies the secular. I send a copy of each month's calendar home, too, with encouragements to celebrate feasts as they arise.

3. Made a simple "Sign of the Cross" mini-book. Really it's just a single piece of paper folded in half horizontally, then turned on its side and holes punched on the side with the fold, so it goes in their notebooks. I had them copy the words of the prayer thus:  "In the name of the Father" (front page);  and of the Son (left-hand inside page); and of the Holy Spirit (right-hand inside page)."

4. Worked on the concept of the Trinity. We went at this from an angle suggested by Marigold Hunt in Saint Patrick's Summer:  nature vs. person. Just as our nature is human, God's nature is God. Ask me what I am, and I'll say I'm a human being. Ask God what He is, and He will say  -- well, really, we all know that He says, "I AM," but He means that He is the God-Being.

And then our person is who we are, our name. Ask me who I am, and I'll say:   Sally. Ask God who He is, and He will say:   Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Three different whos;   one same what. One what;  three whos. That's the Holy Trinity for you.

We read about this in Saint Patrick's Summer, and then I had three kids get up and go through with me the little thought exercise I just described. Then we drew that famous diagram of the Trinity. That made another big page in our notebooks.

4. Read the story of the Creation and focused on God the Father as Creator. We began with that famous first question in the catechism -- "Who made you?" -- and determined that to answer that question meaningfully, we had to ask ourselves, always, "What and who is God? (see "Trinity," above). After some discussion, they went back to their Sign of the Cross mini-books and illustrated the "Father" page with images of the Creation. Objective:  to think about who that Person of the Trinity is whenever we make that prayer. (and obviously we'll be thinking about the other two, too, as time goes on.) Trying to connect the prayers to the theology behind them.

These are sweet children and, so far, very good to be so big a class. My great objective is to keep their hands busy to stave off restlessness. An hour a week is far too short for all the formation I'd like to do, but it's still a long time for a seven- or eight-year-old to be still and quiet.

Next week we'll be praying the Rosary as part of a parish-wide Life-Chain effort. Stay tuned. 

Boys and Reading

Via some friends, an examination by Thomas Spence of the current situation in re: boys and books:

According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.

Whoa. Of course, statistics are meant to be taken with salt, especially those based on standardized assessments of reading comprehension, as we know.  On the other hand, that's an awful lot of boys tuning out Kate Greenaway, over and over for years and years.

Everyone agrees that if boys don't read well, it's because they don't read enough. But why don't they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are"—that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.

For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."

They don't like Kate Greenaway? Give them -- good grief. I've led a very sheltered adulthood, which explains  why I've never even heard of Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger. I thought we were pushing the envelope with the Horrible Histories series which, I will admit, my boys have liked very much. What's not to love about a book on the Celts whose cover features a Druid saying to his victim, "We all have to make our little sacrifices"? I mean, even I think that's funny for a few minutes.

At the same time, I fully concur that a steady diet of what somebody would reach for naturally, without stern recommendations from above, is no good for the character. If I wouldn't let a girl subsist on romance novels -- way to develop some realistic expectations, honey -- then it would be similarly criminal of me to turn a boy loose in the world of . . . but I can't keep typing these titles.

Though you'll want to read the whole article, I can't resist giving away the ending:

Most importantly, a boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man. Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter's husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?

I offer a final piece of evidence that is perhaps unanswerable: There is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls.

OK, so right now I've got one boy reading The Silver Chair, while the other one has been absorbed in the history of the laboratory mouse. We've been spending a lot of dinner-table time on the nude mouse in particular, and its capacity for, say, having a human ear grown on its back. Beat that, boogers. 

And take a number, future husband-seekers of America. Take a number and sit right down. Because we're working on them. Honestly we are.

Addendum, in the interest of full disclosure:  The boy reading The Silver Chair  spent all yesterday afternoon reading . . . Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I actually followed a lot of those episodes via Funbrain, when my older kids were reading it online, and while it's not exactly high literature, I don't remember anything really gratuitously disgusting about it. And, well, I don't have anything against things like that, or comics, either -- my kids read a lot of Foxtrot, Dilbert and Get Fuzzy -- just as I don't have anything against sugar, per se.

The other week, I caught this same kid eating a bowl of Cheerios which at first I thought was full of milk, until I looked more closely. He'd already eaten more than half the bowl before I realized that that white substance in which the Cheerios were treading water, so to speak, was sugar. It was then that I went ballistic.

So now not only he but his younger sister, who doesn't tend quite that much to excess, but over whom he exerts a lot of influence, are eating cereal without sugar for a month, to learn what food actually tastes like when you don't blizzard it up.

Something about this also applies to literature, it seems to me.

I'm With Her

 Amy Welborn writes:

The blogosphere is full of Mommybloggers.  Pregnant, homeschooling, crafting, lactating, birthing, monetizing…mommybloggers!

You know what I don’t see out there?

Catholic Menopausebloggers!

Yeah, well.

Indeed. Here we are. But then, here most of us were already, which is kind of the story of menopause:  same old, same old, only older. And is it just me, or is it warm in here?

I suppose one reason you don't see the Menopausebloggers so much  is that there's not much to write about what's not happening. Or, you do see them, but you see them being those homeschooling mommy-types, because that's what they were doing when they became hormonal changelings, and being a changeling means only that you change. Everything else stays the same. The only difference is that now you're not pregnant, birthing, or lactating any more (even at the height of my fertile glory, I never crafted), and you're maybe a little more taken up with weight-loss, because after all, there is something to say about some things that don't happen.

Or maybe the reason you don't see the Menopausebloggers is that they're the tired bloggers. They're the ones putting up seven YouTube videos in one blog post, because that's easier than trying to think. It's easier than confronting the fact that sometimes your mind . . . won't . . . work, and you can't think of the name for that thing . . . you know, that ordinary household item which has a name, and you knew it until the moment when you tried to ask for it, and then -- gone. Yeah, that thing.

Or it's that they're busy attending to all the ways in which the body presents itself as a metaphor:  a clock unwinding, a well going dry, a tree whose leaves make a brittle sound in the wind. You find yourself on this downward slope, gravity pulling you forward, all the things which were you for so long, and which you felt would go on forever -- the babies, the little children, the kneeling in church that didn't hurt -- vanished behind you. Still you walk on, but sometimes that's all you're up to doing. 

I am a sunset person. I don't mean that figuratively.  I mean, I really like sunsets, even non-spectacular ones. In our town they happen behind the water tower:  the sky draining of color, so that the clouds stand out on it, slate-blue. The darkness washing down, the warm light still radiating from the hearth of the horizon. Every clear night of the world it happens, and I never tire of it or find it, in itself, all that sad. Even the end of a good day isn't a melancholy thing, though I know that just as I'll never be four, or twenty-five, or forty again, I'll never live that day again, either. The ending's just inevitable -- I'd be alarmed if it didn't happen, because then the universe would be out of joint. And, as long as the universe isn't out of joint, you know there'll be another day, which is why a sunset is never tragic. At least, it's never as tragic as it might be.

Anyway, I'm with Amy. If there's going to be a tribe of Menopausebloggers, I'd like to join. But things around here will probably look just the . . . what was that word?

Seven Quick Takes: Me and My Pandora

I just created a bunch of Pandora music stations, and only after I'd made the fourth or fifth one did I realize that they all had basically the same music. If you make a "Steeleye Span and Maddy Prior" station, it's going to have a lot of the same songs that turn up on your "Red Clay Ramblers" station,  including these guys from Newfoundland:



*

Of course, I'm getting Maddy Prior, too.



*

Not to mention the Red Clay Ramblers.



Here they're singing a shape-note song that includes the phrase "Jesus' smiling face; "  they're also notable for having written the music for the Sam Shepard play A Lie of the Mind. My favorite song of theirs, in fact, is from that soundtrack and apparently was inspired by Shepard's saying to the band, "I want a song about killing."

*

But then after the Red Clay Ramblers it's back to



Not that I'm really complaining. And with The Chieftains! Swoon!

*

But eventually I have to pick myself up off the floor and either thumbs-up or thumbs-down some songs. And then I think, "What about --?"



Yeah. Another station. And about the third song is . . . wouldn't you know it . . .



*

Then I made a station which I thought would be absolutely, one-hundred-percent-impermeable, Great-Big-Sea-Proof. Because, you know, sometimes I want to listen to something else.



*

But not for long.



Thanks, Jen, for indulging me once again, and hosting Seven Quick Takes every Friday of the universe.

Poem

Insomniac at Daybreak

The trees shrug off the dark

As you’d flick tapwater

From your fingers in a filling-station

Toilet so filthy you

Wouldn’t touch the paper towels.

 Across town in the night 

A double-wide, set down

On a wedge of land where

The highway forks, the place

Where every stray plastic

Bag scuttered on

The wind comes to rest,

Burned to its metal skeleton,

Nothing left but an electrical

Smell, a cat vanished down the creek.

Now the early train crawling

From the coalyard sets the dogs barking.

When they stop you can almost hear

The kudzu grow toward the road.

My dream is not to dream

And then to be startled awake

By the catbird in the forsythia

Unraveling a stray end of song. 

 *******


Thank you, Karen, for hosting Poetry Friday, and for being obsessed with Richard Wilbur. It is a good obsession, especially if it doesn't keep you up all night. 

A Classicist Reads St. Paul

Sarah Ruden, author of Paul Among the People:  The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, comments at Christianity Today on her experience of reading Paul against the rest of ancient literature. Having been dismissive of Paul -- "the word was . . . that he was no friend of women" -- she began reading him alongside the Greco-Roman texts which had been her first and greatest love. This as she says, was an intellectual awakening:

[T]here has been a sense of separation between classical literature and sacred literature, even though there is very substantial cultural overlap. There isn't any logical reason for the separation. One reason has been the historian Edward Gibbon—he was very contemptuous of Christian culture. He thought it was basically barbarism and had an almost satirical attitude toward it. This had a huge influence on the academy, especially in the classics. So in classics it has been fashionable for hundreds of years to have contempt for sacred literature. Even before, since the Renaissance, during the rise of humanism, people tended to think, Well, the Golden Age was the classical one. That was the epitome of civilization.

What she discovered went utterly against the grain of this received narrative.

What becomes clear is that there's a single civilization, and it moves toward greater idealism. You have Platonism. You have Stoicism, Epicureanism. You have all these philosophies arising from the ancient world as educated people struggle against the brutality of idol worship, of superstition, of all of this fairly crude traditional religion. And these aspirations find a home in Christianity. And it's not only that the elite find their spiritual home in Christianity; it's that the common people do, too, because this new religion is providing new possibilities for ways to live.

Ruden herself is a fascinating voice:  a Quaker, a poet, a translater of the great texts of antiquity who says that her gift as a translator is a bent for "ventriloquism."You'll want to read the whole interview.

(via David Mills at First Thoughts)

Morning Glory

Morning, Glory. Flower you?

Vine. Just vine  . . . 

And when you're done cringing, read Ruth Pitter's poem. 

Some Quick Homeschool Notes: Narration

If I dwell overmuch on the early-elementary stuff, it's because there's more to take pictures of than there is for the seventh and twelfth grades, unless you want facial expressions suggestive of major digestive upset (say, to indicate a person's feelings about Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example). Or unless you want endless shots of double-spaced typed pages.

But the little kids are doing visual things, so that's what you get. Like this: 

And this:

And this:

Or this -- a math narration, depicting life in Pancake Land:

The triangle, in case you can't see it, is saying, "Up and Dawn, wuts that?" And Penrose, who's invisible, because you can't see a three-dimensional being in Pancake Land, is saying, "Dont you no up and dawn?"

We're not strict Charlotte-Masonites, but especially after a certain person's erratic standardized-test performance, I have given renewed attention to the practice of the narration, among other things.  At this level, we do some written narration, more oral narration, and a lot of artistic-expression narration.  The goal is to shift those proportions over time towards the written, but for now, talking and drawing are good ways to gauge how much somebody has understood something we've done.

I had not, however, given that much thought to narrations in math. Math literature does lend itself in obvious ways to this practice, but as I was writing these notes, the thought struck me that having people draw addition, or subtraction, or place value, or whatever we happen to be doing, would be a useful exercise.

The big kids, of course, do far more writing -- enormous amounts, they would tell you right now. It's not that exciting photographically, but it's happening.  The seventh-grader is writing two shortish papers a week for history:  one "who-what-why" paper on a researched topic, and one summary of his reading. He's written a sort of "who-what-why-ish" paper on a topic in life science as well. The senior, meanwhile, is cranking out five-paragraph essays, mostly in history, though I also assigned her one on a topic in moral theology, which she's finishing up right now.

Maybe I should suggest that they also draw me some math pictures.

Don't We Need a Beauty Break?

I thought so.

Newman Beatus, Plus Us

When we entered the Catholic Church in January 2007, Aelred, who had been until that moment an Anglican priest, quietly and unofficially took the now-Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman as his patron. “Quietly,” in fact, if not “unofficially,” was how we wanted to enter the church, after the style of Cardinal Newman. If only we could ask a Jesuit to tea, we kept saying, although in fact it hadn’t been a Jesuit but a Passionist who received him, and there had been no one lump or two? about it. Meriol Trevor’s spiritual biography has it thus: 

Fr. Dominic was passing through Oxford on his way abroad and Dalgairns [ a young disciple of Newman’s] had asked him to visit . . . again – he had been there once before, now dressed a l’anglais in boots, a scratch lot of clothes and an odd hat. Newman had not only liked him, but felt at once that he was a man of true holiness. Dalgairns later recorded that as he was going to meet the coach Newman said to him, ‘in a very low and quiet tone:  “When you see your friend, will you tell him that I wish him to receive me into the Church of Christ?” . . . ‘I took up my position by the fire to dry myself,’ Fr. Dominic later wrote to his superiors. ‘The door opened and what a spectacle it was for me to see at my feet John Henry Newman begging me to hear his confession and admit him into the bosom of the Catholic Church! And there by the fire he began his general confession with extraordinary humility and devotion.’

Next day, a day of pouring rain, the priest heard “the rest” of Newman’s confession and those of two companions, and at the Mass which followed, each made his profession of faith and was conditionally baptized before receiving his first Holy Communion in the Catholic Church. Newman, writes Trevor, “marked the occasion in his diary with a little cross.”

As it turns out, it is this occasion and not Newman’s death – his “entrance into Heaven,” as Fr. James Martin writes -- which is to be commemorated in the Church’s calendar.  Though I suppose that this might appear a snub to Anglicans, who after all already commemorate Newman as a saint in their own calendar, the implication is not that Newman’s journey into holiness began, out of nothing and out of nowhere, on 9 October, 1845, but that a good work already begun had entered the only possible next phase towards its completion. 

A month or so before our reception into the Catholic Church, a friend asked me, “Why do you want to be Catholic?” I answered that it was either that or nothing, which still seems to me the only possible thing to say. It was not that we were fleeing adverse conditions in Anglicanism.  Simply to be a refugee is not a reason. We were not looking for some kind of lateral move, into a more congenial ur-Anglicanism, and we did not hope to discover a religious utopia in Rome.  We had eyes to see, and even if we hadn’t, what people generally said to us when we mentioned our desire to convert was, “Come on in. The water’s terrible.” Terrible as it might have been, we had come to the edge of a cliff, and ultimately, the only real question in our minds  was how long we were prepared to dither before we jumped. 

Our conversion had not come out of nothing and nowhere. We were not blind (not abnormally, anyway), and then we saw.  Anglicanism had been, for us, a process of ever-sharpening clarity:  seeing men like trees walking, then seeing more. And more. As Anglicans, we had learned to love the saints and to venerate the Mother of God. As Anglicans we had prayed the Angelus, and the Divine Praises at Solemn Benediction. As Anglicans we had come to believe that Christ was present in the Blessed Sacrament. And slowly, over several years’ worth of mornings, we woke to the realization that we were Catholic, and that there was nothing else for us to be. 

As we approach the anniversary of the release of Anglicanorum Coetibus,  I think on the Anglican clergy and lay people who have considered accepting the offer which this set of norms extends. Frankly, I'm still mystified by it;  not that I've been paying that close attention, but at this point I don't understand how it's going to play out logistically, and I don't know that anyone else does, either. Still, it is a formal recognition of a reality which Newman's own experience exemplifies:  not every Anglican who kneels to make his first confession is a Newman, of course, but that sense which Fr. Dominic had, that the man who knelt before him bore already a considerable weight of Catholic tradition on his shoulders, is a sense which ought to inform any Catholic priest's reception of Anglicans into the Church. 

At the same time, Anglicans considering conversion can learn from Newman's example. Much of the persistent rhetoric among clergy, particularly of the Continuing-Anglican variety, centers on Rome's "terms," and whether or not they are acceptable. Will Rome recognize x, or y, or z;  can an Anglican clergyman cross over by walking on water, with his cassock hem spotless? While on the one hand it's perfectly right and natural for a man with a family, especially, to ponder long and hard what his move will be -- we were peculiarly lucky in being penniless already -- on the other hand, at the end of the day, the only reason to accept what is offered is that you believe that it, and nothing else, is the gift of the fullness of truth;  that there is nowhere else for you to go and nothing else for you to be. Either it is, or it is not. And if you concluded that it was, even if you were as great as Newman, which I am not, and Aelred is not, and our children are not, and you probably are not, either, you would beg the first priest who presented himself to hear your humble confession, made on your knees, and you would take whatever came next.

Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his – if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work. I am a link in a chain . . . He has not created me for naught . . . He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me – still He knows what He is about.

 

Heaney on Eliot

Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this:  in the realm of poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place. Nothing is final, the most gratifying discovery is fleeting, the path of positive achievement leads to the via negativa. Eliot forfeited his expressionist intensity when he renounced the lyric for philosophical song. It may even be truer to say that the lyric renounced Eliot. But in accepting the consequences of renunciation with such self-knowledge and in proceeding with such strictness of intent, he proved a truth that we want to believe not perhaps about all poets but about those who are the necessary ones. He showed how poetic vocation entails the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life.

Seamus Heaney
"Learning From Eliot"
Finders, Keepers
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002

In Which Penrose Is a Theologian

So at intervals the short people and I have been reading The Adventures of Penrose, the Mathematical Cat. It's good fun so far:  Penrose has learned about Base Two, been shaken down by a bunch of numbers trying to take away his square-root sign, and discovered that polygons have stars inside them. This, I presume, is what is meant by a "mathematical romp."

Yesterday Penrose ventured into a two-dimensional world in which he had words with a triangle, whose hexagonal house Penrose had caused to disappear simply by picking it up. The triangle kept talking to Penrose's feet;  eventually Penrose realized that in a world with no "up," no "down," no "in" or "out," the triangle could see nothing of him but his pawprints.

The expressions on the short people's faces at the end of this story can best be summarized as, "Wuh?" I got out a piece of paper, cut a triangle and a hexagon, and laid them on a second piece of paper on the floor next to the "Lake-Town" which the short people have been building out of Lincoln Logs.

"Okay," I said, "tell me the difference between Pancake Land and Lake-Town."

We quickly deduced that, among other things, the triangle could not go into his hexagonal house in the same way that the Playmobil people could go into their Lincoln-Log house. The hexagonal house occupied length and width, but not height:  in Pancake Land, things could slide around on the surface, but there was nothing else they could do. The triangle, for instance, could not stand up, as we understand "up." And as far as anyone in Pancake Land was concerned, the reality of that piece of paper was all the reality there was.

And, though I didn't belabor the point aloud, it seemed to me suddenly that although people put pressure on science to prove the existence, or not, of things beyond ourselves, it's the mathematicians who have the right end of the stick after all. At the very least, they propose the great Why Not?

Hours of Mesopotamian Fun: Updated

 Many people ask me, "But what is happening with this ultra-fabulous 'Old-Testament-World' history thing?"

In my dreams they ask me this. In reality, what many people ask me are things like, "Can I play my Gameboy now?" And "Can Jazzmine come over after church on Sunday?" And "Would you take me to Dollar Tree?" Why people want to go to Dollar Tree so much I don't know. I don't know why I want to go to Dollar Tree so much. Tonight we went in to get Epiphany a new pair of reading glasses and came out with a bead-stringing kit, a gun that makes sparks when you pull the trigger, two bottles of some oxygen-type cleaner, some Yardley's English Lavender soap, and three religious plaques. 

But meanwhile! We are romping through Mesopotamia. Abram has gone up from Ur of the Chaldeans, and now we know what all he left behind.

For this part of our history study for first and second grade, we

1. Read the Bible:  Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham/Ur/Chaldeans

2. Read selected sections of  Step Into Mesopotamia. This is a fun series, not unlike Usborne or DK books, with a different self-contained topic for each double-page spread, and a craft project for every topic. Last Friday we read about the development of cuneiform writing and then made clay tablets on which we practiced pictograms and cuneiform symbols using popsicle sticks. (more good stuff about cuneiform here). We also made an entry for our timeline scrapbook, copying the date of the first known writing, with examples like unto those which we scratched on our tablets.

3. Watched the Civilizations episode on Mesopotamia (very well done, in six parts on YouTube. Long sections of un-subtitled French, some of which I translated, but we wound up fast-forwarding through most of them, which I regret, because I think what the man says is interesting, if only I could listen to it two or three times slowly).

4. Visited this site, where we read about C. Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur and virtually explored the "Royal Tombs."

5. Tomorrow I think we'll read a bit of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

At any rate, as I say, now we know what it was Abram went up from, called by God. Having fixed this firmly in our imaginations, we can now proceed into the wilderness and the nomadic life which Abram surely must have thought his remotest ancestors had left behind. And then we can go to Egypt.

So now you know. Because even if many people haven't asked, I know it's been on their minds.

More good resources:  

The Golden Bible Atlas
The Usborne Encyclopedia of World History, which provided us with most of the internet links we've been using in our study.

Update:  Today (Tuesday), instead of reading Gilgamesh, we got all caught up in the Step-Into book's double-page spread on Mesopotamian schools. Tomorrow we'll be having a Mesopotamian schoolboy's lunch (curd cheese, aka yogurt, flat bread, and dates. I'll splurge on a pomegranate for them, too, because I'm not sure they've ever seen one).

Interestingly, we were reading about the job of the scribe, for which schooling was meant to groom many boys. Then we went on to read the chapter in Prince Caspian in which Peter dictates his challenge to King Miraz, and it is written down by Doctor Cornelius. Aha, a scribe, we said. If you were the king, you wouldn't be scratching out your own letters, would you? So that was a serendipitous little dovetail in our day.

This and That

This week I've been away, observing the papal visit to Great Britain. Initially, I was really going to be away, as in in Great Britain observing the papal visit in some sort of intrepid fashion, but plans changed, plus ca change and all that, so I've been at home keeping half an eye on things while other people who know far more than I do did it far better than I could have. I've written on hate comments on the BBC blog and other bits and pieces, but the big stuff has been happening in another part of the field, as those Shakespearean battle scenes do while you're standing around offstage thinking about getting a milkshake.

So the Holy Father is back home, and grateful to be there, I would imagine, after a grueling four days. I'm grateful to be at home myself;  even from a distance it was a grueling four days, and I wasn't paying nearly enough attention, either, to be as grueled as I feel.

To make up for my long absence, even though I never went more than four miles from home the entire time, here's a roundup of miscellaneous papal links to cap off the weekend:

At Cofton Park, supporters “Love U Papa More Than Beans on Toast.” For slide shows of the four-day visit, visit the BBC’s Papal Visit in Pictures.

Guardian: “Benedict Leaves Without Denting Divide” Between Religious and Secular. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they.

Meanwhile, at the Irish Times . . . 

Street Cleaners Ponder False-Arrest Suit:  Really Were Disaffected Youths

Highlights from Catholic Herald’s Live Blog:

Re: New Mass Translations. Benedict tells Bishops to “seize the opportunity that the new translation offers for in-depth catechesis on the Eucharist and renewed devotion in the manner of its celebration”.

“Here’s the lunch that the Holy Father is about to get stuck into:
Spinach Ricotta Flan
Welsh Lamb
Treacle Sponge”

Communion hymn at beatification Mass has verses by Newman’s friend and contemporary John Keble: “Is this a gesture to Anglo-Catholics and a reminder also of Newman’s place in Anglican theology?”

Benedict calls for recognition of “the holiness of a confessor, a son of this nation who, while not called to shed his blood for the Lord, nevertheless bore eloquent witness to him in the course of a long life devoted to the priestly ministry, and especially to preaching, teaching, and writing”.

Damian Thompson Calls Visit “Triumph for Pope, Humiliation for Secular Fanatics.”

Cameron Says UK Nation of Faith

Channel 4 On the Street: "Is it really a bad thing if we are faith-less, as long as we are tolerant and respect one another?"

In real life we've been doing cuneiform writing on clay tablets, which is very relaxing, and everyone should try it.

Actually, what it is is humbling.

Want to Stay Up All Night With Me

. . . trying to beat the Jumping Math Cats game? I finally figured out how to get the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage across the river, but these jumping cats! When I close my eyes, I still see them tessellating around, or whatever verb it is, exactly, which renders their action into language. And that's it:  I can render them into language, but I can't think three moves ahead and foresee that jumping this cat over that one is going to result in some dead end or other.

No, you don't want to play chess with me. Or maybe you do, if you like short games and blood on the floor that isn't yours.

Anyway, my record so far is three cats left on the board, which isn't bad. According to the scoring system, this means I'm a cat. It's like taking the entrance exam for hell:  if you win, you become a game piece. And you want to win. Oh, how you want to win.

Actually I have beat the cross formation repeatedly;  don't want to speculate about what that means for my soul. I also beat the plus sign. It's the solitaire form that's driving me over the absolute last edge, where the waters of endless oceans pour into the abyss, and the monotony of that thundering makes the sea monsters a little crazy while they wait.

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Crux Fidelis

Faithful cross, above all other,
One and only noble tree:
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit thy peer may be.
Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
Sweetest weight is hung on thee!

My favorite setting of this text is the motet by King John IV of Portugal. Traditionally it's a text for Good Friday and the Veneration of the Cross, but it's appropriate for today, as well.

More about this great feast here. And, because I really can't help myself, more music.

Also, from today's Office of Readings comes this sermon from St. Andrew of Crete:

Rightly could I call this treasure the fairest of all fair things and the costliest, in fact as well as in name, for on it and through it and for its sake the riches of salvation that had been lost were restored to us.
Had there been no cross, Christ could not have been crucified. Had there been no cross, life itself could not have been nailed to the tree. And if life had not been nailed to it, there would be no streams of immortality pouring from Christ’s side, blood and water for the world’s cleansing. The legal bond of our sin would not be cancelled, we should not have attained our freedom, we should not have enjoyed the fruit of the tree of life and the gates of paradise would not stand open. Had there been no cross, death would not have been trodden underfoot, nor hell despoiled. (read the rest)

And while I'm unleashing all my favorite things on an unsuspecting world, here too is a simple one-two punch of a sonnet from the late Cornish poet Charles Causley:

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
I am the captain you will not obey.
(read the rest)

It's morning as I'm writing this. Outside the window a wren is scolding some unseen object of wrenly derision, and upstairs my children are still asleep. By the time you see this post, in the evening, things will have happened in a day none of us can foresee, though we've got it sketched out on our calendars:  9:30 orthodontist, 7:00 Cub Scouts. But if you are a person who makes a Morning Offering, or if you've said with Saint Joseph Pignatelli, for example,

My God, I do not know what must come to me today. But I am certain that nothing can happen to me which You have not foreseen, decreed, and ordained from all eternity. That is sufficient for me. I adore Your impenetrable and eternal designs, to which I submit with all my heart. I desire, I accept them all, and I unite my sacrifice to that of Jesus Christ, my divine Savior,

then you will have nailed it all already to that Cross we exalt.

Cross-posted . . . so to speak. Or will be in about three hours. Enjoy it here, enjoy it there.

Two Snaps

I cropped this, so it's a little fuzzy, but here is Our Lady of Manhattan, who made the trip to Charlotte on Saturday by bus, in the company of a tiny Filipino lady. She accosted these guys -- one of them told me about it later -- at the start of the procession and persuaded them to give Our Lady, who had traveled so far, a nice tour of the city.

Another cropped-ergo-fuzzy shot of my First Communicant and his new, for-that-moment best friend Nick, strewing His way, as the hymn goes, with rose petals.

My camera, as I say, is in Munich with Epiphany;  many thanks to my friend Kimberly for taking these with her phone.

Too Lazy to Cross-Post

So if you want to read about Jesse Owens or solve the venerable problem of Mr. Goat, Mr. Wolf, Mr. Cabbage, and Mr. Ferryman, you'll have to visit me at The Anchoress, where Simcha Fisher, Danielle Bean and I are still subbing for a few more hours.

Weekend Diary

Friday:  My digital camera has gone to Germany to see the Oberammergau Passion Play, in company with my teenaged daughter and her grandmother. My husband, a fluent German speaker, has provided this daughter with lifelong language coaching, to the end that she can now say things like "fig" and "silver altarware" and "It's all the same to me," which might actually come in useful while she's over there. In addition to her grandmother, the daughter's traveling companions include my high-school biology teacher -- she was a brilliant teacher who made me love biology, but after a few years of my friends and me, not to mention a long sucession of fetal pigs in formaldehyde, she gave that up and went into the travel business instead. I told the daughter to tell her that she (the daughter) had enjoyed the whole mystery-of-pickled-life thing herself;  fortunately she can say that in English.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have gone to Charlotte. It's not Rome, and it's not Germany, but it will do. The Eucharistic Congress opened last night with a concert of sacred music performed by the diocesan choir:  motets by Amner and Croce, a very haunting and lovely Filipino  Ave Maria (Aba Ginoong Maria), John Rutter's setting of Psalm 23 with its gorgeous oboe accompaniment, the Gounod Sanctus, and the Hallelujah Chorus from the Messiah. Above right you see an artist's rendering of this concert, with organist and a selection of choristers -- they were really loud at certain junctures -- and smiling crowds in the background. I'm not sure who the kneeling people are supposed to be. The artist kept asking me in a stage whisper what "that little house" to the right of the choir was:  it was a pulpit. She thought perhaps it was a tabernacle, because it had a sort of gothic-arch detail on the front of it which might have been a door.  As far as I can tell, that didn't make it into the picture, and I'm not sure who the people in the sort of curtained box seats to the upper left of the mysterious kneeling people are, either, but otherwise, it's a fair representation of what went on, and since my camera is in Germany seeing other sights, I'm afraid it's all the illustration you're going to get.

They also performed this piece,which I especially love,  from the Brahms German Requiem -- 




-- and an arrangement of "Eternal Father, Strong to Save," by Joseph and Pamela Martin, composed in response to the devastating events of 9/11, the ninth anniversary of which we mark today. I couldn't find a video of a choir performing the piece, but somehow this simple piano rendition -- the person had found the music in a box and was trying it out -- moved me at least as much as the choral performance did last night.



Saturday: A lovely day. Fair weather for the procession. We were sharing the streets with a big blues-and-barbecue festival, and according to my older son, who was carrying the banner for the adoration society he belongs to, some guy in a booth was saying ugly things as the procession passed, but I didn't press for details. Younger son marched with this year's First Communicants and is now mourning the fact that he can't ever do it again.

If I can pull my thoughts together, I'd like to post more about the weekend. Right now, though, the image which stays in my mind is that of something the children and I saw on our drive home. We had dropped my husband in Belmont, where he'd left his car, and had struck out towards home on the back highways we like to drive when there's no hurry. As you travel north and west through this part of North Carolina, the land starts to roll, intimating the approach of the foothills;  we were riding the gentle swells of the road in the clear blue-gray twilight of a perfect early-September day, when the crape myrtles are still blooming and the leaves still hang green on all the trees.

About halfway between Belmont and home, our way takes us over the railroad tracks in a little town. As we swung through this town tonight, I noticed that the far end of the main street, where we never go because we're on our way someplace else, had been blocked off. Every fire truck from every municipality for miles around, so it seemed, was parked in the street, and the hook-and-ladders had their ladders extended to their full height. From every ladder hung an American flag.

What's that? we said to each other. A street festival? But that didn't seem right. There was something off about the scene somehow. The road crossed the tracks and ran parallel to them for a long way, and as we came up opposite the gathering of fire engines, we saw the people standing beneath those flags, and we didn't have to hear them to know that this was a quiet thing, not a celebration.

They were just standing there, it looked like. Seventy or a hundred people, in the street, under flags hung from firetruck ladders. Just standing. We caught a glimpse of them, and then they were behind us, and we were gone.

It struck me that they looked like people gathered to pray. And then I remembered what day it was. I'd known, in the morning, when we set out, but somehow on the way home, it didn't seem possible that we were still in the same day, that it was still September 11, and these people were remembering what, for a few hours in the presence of the Eucharistic Lord, we had managed to forget.

And you know, what can you say? I came to guiltily. And at the same time, I thought, Thank God. I vividly remember  thinking, in 2001, that we were looking at the end of the world. My husband, children, and I were living in England;  I thought we might never come home again. I thought that quite possibly everything I knew and loved was ready to go up in flames.

If you had said to me, nine years ago today, that in nine years I would be driving through a peaceful American countryside with my children, at the end of a day of ordinary happiness, I would have said, Well, that's a nice thought. What I would have believed, privately, is what I believed five years ago, in the hours before my father died:  I knew that he was dying, I sat beside him in the small hours of the night watching the life drain away from him, and I knew, as one knows that it's hot or cold outside, that without him none of us would ever be happy again.

And yet it turns out that we are. The sun rises, and the world, though sadly changed, still has its goodness after all. And the thing about remembering is that you know what you're able -- by some miracle of time -- not to carry as an intolerable burden at the forefront of your mind every minute. And I don't know what to say about that, except that my children are waiting to be read to, and for the fact that we are here, that the house is quiet and safe, that the hills outside are swathed in no more than the usual, natural darkness, I want to fall down in gratitude.

(Cross-posted)

Math-Discovery Friday

We've been having some fun with these. Ours is a little more simple and probably less regular in pattern, but this is a fun way to experiment with lines inside a circle, and how the shape . . . shapes things.

 Addendum:  in case you can't see clearly, which is in fact very probably the case, that's a cream-cheese tub with plastic push-pins stuck around the perimeter, and pale-green thread looped and criss-crossed around the pins and over the bottom of the tub. This time we didn't follow the directions, just played around with the idea. That was pretty much the theme of our entire math-playtime.

We've also been trying some of this. We don't seem to have such regularly-sized pencils, and we're also short on rubber bands (hello? planning ahead? ever heard of it?), so this is turning into more of a Boy-Scout lashing-things-together project, but our goal is to produce a teepee that will stand up on its own.

So what we wound up with is, again, not so mathematically perfect, but it works reasonably well . . .

Who started this? Penrose did. What is it, by the way, about math and cats?  There don't seem to be any mathematical dogs, and I wonder why.

Rereading Kristin Lavransdatter

My faculty-wives' book club struggles with the question of whether to be a book club, or else to give up all literary pretensions and call itself Wine Night at K's House.  My friend K. does, as it happens, have the kind of house that makes you want to collapse onto an inviting sofa with a glass of something in your hand and not think about anything except how comfortable you are, and how pleasant it is to recline with other women who also, truly, at the end of a long day, want nothing more than to collapse on inviting sofas with glasses of somethings in their hands, too.

Last month, to keep ourselves from dissolving into the upholstery -- there wasn't even wine that night, either, just herbal tea, so it wasn't that kind of dissolution -- we vowed to draw up a reading list to carry us through the academic year, because otherwise . . .  well,  we all remember what Mr. Darcy says, about an accomplished woman's improving her mind with much reading, and we all Heart Mr. Darcy, as my oldest daughter's favorite t-shirt has it, so there you are.   

Our list for the year includes Walter Miller's Canticle for Liebowicz, the first book of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy, a new novel by Annie Dillard called The Maytrees, and (my choice) Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark. We just finished reading Memento Mori, by the late superlative Muriel Spark;  this novel, also my recommendation,  is a strange read, though I find it no end of fascinating. At any rate, I thought I'd suggest something a little more straightforward for my next turn.

But for the entire fall, we are reading Kristin Lavransdatter. For some of us it's an introduction to Sigrid Undset, while for others of us it's a welcome reread. Our thought was that taking on a long novel to begin with was a good thing, so that we wouldn't lose our momentum. It's awfully hard not to get invested in Kristin, and we're counting on her to carry us forward for months to come.

I know that people have strong feelings regarding the proper English translation of this novel;  that is to say, there is argument over which translation is the best one to read. For me there's no question:  the book I own is an old single-volume edition of the Archer translation. It's the one I've read, and it's the one I'll read this time. Others, meanwhile, are reading the recent translation by Tina Nunally. which restores lost portions of the story as well as, in Nunally's own words, offering a corrective to the "archaic and really bad" language of the earlier translation.

Personally, I never had a problem with the "archaic and really bad language," though I am eager to see what I've been missing in the way of reclaimed fragments. To my reader's ear, the old translation at least didn't occlude what seems most Nordic about the story. Reading the opening of the first book of the trilogy, The Wreath, which in my edition is called The Garland, what struck me afresh is how, from the beginning, the story fits itself into the structure of the old Sagas, in which whole genealogies are mapped out and irrelevant-seeming narrative rabbit trails pursued, because it is the tiny happening -- the failure to say Good morning to a certain person, the minor insult or oversight -- which ultimately explodes into consequence, even if two or three generations intervene between the small event and its aftermath.

So Undset's novel begins with the laying-out of the land, in terms of characters. Thus we learn, from the first paragraph, who Lavrans is, where he comes from, what are his people. We learn that it's by a dogleg of fate that he inherits his land and wealth. We learn of his wife Ragnfrid's dark interiority, intensified by the loss of three infant sons. All the weight of this history, the random giving and taking-away which has formed the family, comes to rest on the one living child, Kristin.

As I was reading this first section --  in the orthodontist's office on Tuesday, while my twelve-year-old was getting braces -- it occurred to me that in the hands of another novelist, the scene which gives the first book of the trilogy its title might have set the story in motion in a radically different direction. That tiny but crucial moment in which Kristin, looking at her own face in the water, finds herself watched and beckoned to by an elf-woman holding a wreath of flowers might, in a different novel, have been the spark igniting a great freedom:  from the superstition of religion, from the all-defining social mores of a narrow world, all of that which does, in fact, shape everything which happens to Kristin from the moment of this encounter. That would, in fact, be the most likely  pattern for a contemporary retelling, though as I revisit that thought, it's hard to see where the story would go, absent the set of consequences -- absent the idea of this set of consequences -- which proceed from that half-glimpsed almost-meeting.

In any event, in the middle of these thoughts  I was called back to discuss the finer points of oral hygiene and to cart home my newly orthodontified adolescent, who right now feels that the consequences of his meeting with Dr. Nice Teeth are not at all, in any way, worth what we paid for them.  Given all that, I'm  looking forward with redoubled avidity to Wine Night at K's House. And if I get to have some conversation along these lines, that'll be nice, too.

PS:  At my friend Maclin Horton's blog, Light on Dark Water, there was some good conversation a few months back about Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, and the question of translations. But I think all the good stuff was in the comments, which since the blog's move from Blogger to Typepad  I can't find any more. Seems to me that most people were heartily in favor of the new translation, but I may be remembering that wrong. Meanwhile, here's a meditation on Kristin's character which might start some new conversation.

PPS:  Overheard as I was finishing this post:  "I don't think you're a very good brother, and I'm not going to let you feed my fish."

Speaking of character . . . which is to say, ultimately, "Speaking of the human condition . . . "

PPPS:  A question it's never occurred to me to ask . . . 

(Cross-posted)