How did that happen?

I like to think of myself as a person that stays reasonably current on news and world events. I read a couple of newspapers each day, subscribe to several general news and science magazines, visit news and commentary sites, etc. It is true that there are periods of days and sometimes weeks when the press of business means I am not as thorough as usual but still, I think I am pretty well on top of things.

So how on earth did I miss a completely new rift system emerging in Ethiopia four years ago? And this isn't just some obscure deep earth geological survey. This is a right-out-in-the-open, 20 foot wide, 35 mile long rift that formed in a matter of days. Seems like it would be hard to miss that event. But apparently miss it I did.

I guess the lesson is: We never know as much as we think we know.

Talking and Conversing

I came across this via The Long Boy and Others by B.L. Reid but is actually from James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson

Though his usual phrase for conversation was talk, yet he made a distinction; for when he once told me that he dined the day before at a friend's house, with 'a very pretty company;' and I asked him if there was good conversation, he answered, 'No, Sir; we had talk enough, but no conversation; there was nothing discussed.'

I wonder if the distinction between societies and communities is that members of a society talk with one another, where members of a community converse?

The Man Who Was Thursday

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. An early mystery novel but a deeply contemplative and even philosophical one and studded with memorable lines.

"The poor object to being governed badly. The rich object to being governed at all."

Ooph!

One of the reasons we started Through the Magic Door was to give parents a resource where they might find not just good books but books that are somewhat more affirming and positive than many of the titles deemed appropriate by more refined tastes. This need for something a little more leavening was reaffirmed while perusing a catalogue I received a couple of days ago. This is a supplier of books to teachers for classroom libraries. The following are snippets of the synopses of the first twenty recommended titles.

Death, drug dealing, smuggling, prison, abuse, abandonment, lying, premeditated murder, juvenile detention, illegal immigration, homelessness, bullying, depression, revenge, and handicaps. Who would inflict this kind of fare on kids? More to the point, what teacher would consider this appropriate? Despite what I might think, there clearly is a healthy business to be had catering to such a dark world view.

Poignant tale of five handicapped boys at a summer camp.

Donnie has always ignored the bullies. He lives under the radar, sailing through classes and working on his graphic novel. Then a...

Hakeem and his family must relocate to Detroit where he quickly becomes enemies with a former childhood friend, who also happens to...

Feeling alienated from everyone around her, Los Angeles high school senior Victoria hides behind the identity of a favorite movie...

After Martin's little brother, is killed, all Martin can think about is revenge. When a new teacher reaches out to him and he meets...

In the picture, Aunt Donna is very, very pregnant. My mother is not. I look at my mom and she is crying silently, her hand over her...

After being tormented by a bully at his new school for months, Darrell is faced with the decision to keep running away, or find a...

Tired of being hungry, cold, and dirty from living on the streets of New York City with other homeless teenagers, dying one by one,...

Orca Soundings series. For mature readers.

Fifteen-year-old Victor Flores journeys north in a desperate attempt to cross the Arizona border and find work in the United States...

Just when she thinks she knows who she is, Hope falls in love and her world is turned upside down. Orca Soundings series. For mature...

Remy has just been released from juvenile detention, there because he assaulted a guy who insulted his immigrant girlfriend. Remy...

In 1962 England, despite observing his father's illness and the suffering of the fire-eating Mr. McNulty, as well as enduring abuse...

Fifteen-year-old Zits has been tossed around the foster child system since he was six years old. When he decides to gun people down...

When 16-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke...

When Hannah gets stung, she rises out of her body, where she's greeted by her dead boyfriend, Logan, and a loving but unseen...

When Anna, Emma, and Mariah concoct a story about why they are late getting home one Friday night. Their lie has unimaginable...

With gritty details of drug use and prison violence, the author relates how, as a young adult, he became a drug user and smuggler,...

Kate is in the dumps. She's tired of her tomboy image and she misses her best friend. Opportunity knocks when fly-girl Naleejah...

New in town, Casey is desperate to fit in and make friends. Her parents leave for the weekend, so she has a party. The living room...

Ghost House
by Robert Frost

I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me -
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad, -
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
by W. H. Auden

I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Brett Harte - ". . . at which they silently spat in some accepted sense of social communion"

In picking up a couple of books on hold at one of the branch libraries, I stumbled across a library book sale - always a delight to which I am susceptible. I walked away with a grocery bag of books (about fifteen or so) for $6. I always like these sales for the surprises you come across as well as for the fact that at the prices that prevail, you can hardly afford not to try some book on the fringe, something you have heard of but not ever checked into, an author whose name is familiar but for an unknown reason.

Such was the case for me with Tales of the Gold Rush by Bret Harte. Both the author's name and the title rang some distant bell but with no answering sound of real recognition. But home it came in the grocery bag with other good finds. A handsome edition from 1944 by the old Heritage Press. I sampled one of the short stories, How Santa Came to Simpson's Bar while waiting for my computer to reboot. What a delight. I look forward to the other stories.

A couple of great lines:

As night shut down on the settlement, a few lights gleamed through the mist from the windows of cabins on either side of the highway now crossed and gullied by lawless streams and swept by marauding winds. Happily most of the population were gathered at Thompson's store, clustered around a red-hot stove, at which they silently spat in some accepted sense of social communion that perhaps rendered conversation unnecessary.

snip

The Old Man hesitated. His conjugal experience had not been a happy one, and the fact was known to Simpson's Bar. His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered keenly and secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband, until one day he invited the whole Bar to his house to expose her infidelity. On arriving, the party found the shy, petite creature quietly engaged in her household duties, and retired abashed and discomfited. But the sensitive woman did not easily recover from the shock of this extraordinary outrage. It was with difficulty she regained her equanimity sufficiently to release her lover from the closet in which he was concealed and escape with him. She left a boy of three years to comfort her bereaved husband. The Old Man's present wife had been his cook. She was large, loyal, and aggressive.

snip

The night was pitchy dark. In the first gust of wind their temporary torches were extinguished, and only the red brands dancing and flitting in the gloom like drunken will-o'-the-wisps indicated their whereabouts.