Summer Reading: Post 6 - Circling Faith

"Faith is . . . not firm.  Nor is it a settled state or a fixed noun.  We've decided it is an ongoing process, a verb" (Reed and Horne 6).


"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide and seek"
- - Terry Tempest Williams

Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, Ed. by Wendy Reed and Jennifer Horne (Source)

I love the cover art for the book I've been reading this past week: simple, elegant, and it appropriately reminds me of the south - the bees, the bones, the flowers.  The lovely cover is what made me pick it up off the 'new in religion/spirituality' shelf at the library.  I thought it would be a great one to read after Winner's Still and although I didn't read all the essays in the collection, I did very much enjoy the ones I did read, skimming through many of the others.  The introduction to the book, written by the two editors, discusses the process of coming out with this second collection after receiving such great feedback from their first, All Out of Faith.  However, with their first book of essays they suspected a controversy but were met instead with lots of women who felt their own stories had been told - their voices were being heard and there were other women having questioning conversations about faith and spirituality.

So, they started work on this second collection: "The story begins: Two women and a laptop walk into a monastery. (There is no bar - the country's dry; there are no men - it's all nuns).  For inspiration, they'd brought books.  For sleep, they'd brought PJs.  For thirst, they'd stashed a cooler in the trunk.  This was before Eat, Pray, Love had sold millions of copies, inspiring women all over the world to seek spiritual retreat . . ." (3).  I was intrigued.  And what followed was a book of essays written by women discussing their relationship oftentimes with their body/flesh and their faith/spirituality.  "As several of our essayists note, we are, after all, creatures of flesh and spirit.  Remaining open to the wonder and mystery of both sometimes take courage.  With this book we are hoping to inspire conversation and encourage vulerability, to challenge memory, to up the volume.  What follows are voices, sartorial words echoing and tumbling, patching and mending . . ." (8). I became even more intrigued and excited as I began reading the essays.

What follows are quotes from the introduction and a couple of the essays that interested me and I found worth sharing.  Similar to the authors' comments in their introduction I was moved by the essayists' discoveries about their own connections with their bodies and spirits.

Reed and Horne (Source)

- - from "Introduction: A Faith of Verbs" by Reed and Horne
'Some keep the Sabbath going to church; / I keep it staying home" - - Emily Dickinson

"One mother expressed delight to read of faith being discussed outside the church walls.  For a while, she'd been telling people who asked, 'We home-church'" (5).

"We passed a pawn shop that proclaimed 'Jesus Saves' right alongside 'We Buy Guns.'  The oddest part, we decided, was that it didn't seem odd, and we agreed that it was a Southern thing, inexplicable to many, even - if we thought about it - to ourselves" (5).

"We remembered wondering, as a child, why you had to dress up to go to church and being told that it had to do with showing respect to God, which included wearing a slip with your dress . . . Was God some kind of fashion police?  Did God listen only to those who were properly attired?  Wasn't God more present in the exaltation you felt in the high limbs of a tree or in the feeling of running barefoot across a soft lawn, than in the itchy tights and hard patent-leather shoes you wore to church?" (7-8).


"It's all very well to consider the lilies in the field, but a lily never experience closet trauma or wondered whether the field made her butt look big" (8).


- - from "Amazons in Appalachia" by Marilou Awiakta:

"I am Cherokee.
      My people believe in the Spirit that unites all things.
      I am woman.  I am life force.  My word has great value.
      The man reveres me as he reveres Mother Earth and his own spirit . . .
      Women share in all of life.  We lead sacred dances.  In the Council we debate freely with men until an agreement is reached.  When the nation considers war, we have a say, for we bear the warriors.
      Sometimes I go into battle.  I also plant and harvest . . .
      I love and work and sing.
      I listen to the Spirit.
      In all things I speak my mind.
      I walk without fear.
      I am Cherokee" (63-4).

"The Grandmother's hand on my arm halts my imaginings.  We stand at the edge of a secluded clearing, rimmed with tall pines.  In the center is a large log house and around it women - many women - move through sun and shadow.  Some walk in the clearing . . . A great weaving is going on here, a deep bonding . . . 'This is the menstrual lodge,' says the Grandmother.  'When our power sign is with us, we come here.  It is a sacred time - a time for rest and meditation.  No one is allowed to disturb our harmony.  No warrior may even cross our path.  In the menstrual lodge many things are known, many plans are made'" (68-9).

- - from "What the Body Knows" by Barbara Brown Taylor:
"Sacraments schooled me in the wedding of spirit and flesh.  I learned how to do the official ones in church - not just communion, but also baptism, reconciliation, the laying on of hands - and then, when I had the hang of seeing the holy in the most ordinary things, I moved on to celebrating the sacraments of picnic lunches, ordinary baths, forgiving embraces, and rubbing sick friends' feet.  Once you get the pattern down, there is really no place to stop.  Every material thing opens a door to the infinite.  Every bodily activity holds sacred possibility.   All that is necessary for this transformation to take place is someone to see it and say so, taking one small piece of the world in her hands and saying a blessing over it" (107).

"Every single day I am presented with the opportunity to wake up, say something kind and thankful over this body, and offer it to the world in a way that promises to be useful.  I accept the sacraments of other people's bodies in the same way.  They feed me, I feed them: bread of heaven, cup of salvation, given for you . . . Knowing neither the end nor the beginning, my body knows this: this is my soul's home on earth, in which I am pleased to dwell" (110).

- - from "Alice Walker Calls God 'Mama:' An Interview with Alice Walker" by Valerie Reiss
"I think that if there are periods when you're not doing something that you're used to doing, it means that you can spend that time doing something else.  If I get up and I think I'm going to write something and it's not there, rather than sitting there and trying to wait for it or try to give it a little nudge, I think, 'Oh, I can do something else with this time.' And then, there's so much else to do" (189).

"I paint.  I garden.  I dance.  I cook. I farm.  I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am" (189).

- - from "Signs of Faith" by Barbara Robinette Moss
"I put my hands on my torso and felt the metal staples under my shirt; my belly seemed hot, but I felt cold.  Cold and thin.  As if I'd been washed in hot water and had shrunk to practically nothing.  Or to my very essence.  No matter what - there was an awareness inside me, so unexplainable.  Isn't that God?  I argued.  God essence?  The drugs were catching up with me and I felt too confused to go on ruminating.  A floating feeling washed over me and my eyes closed.  Dear God, I prayed, help me find my way" (197).

Summer Reading: Post 5 - Still

"...the whole bookstore is a self-help section to me.  When something needs to be fixed. When I need something to change, my first and abiding instinct is to read.  I think I can read my way to a solution.  Or at least an evasion." - - Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

Lauren Winner's Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (Source)

I picked up Lauren Winner's newest book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis from the library last week, planning to read it between breaks with Iris Murdock's Nuns and Soldiers, which I'm reading with a couple of my girlfriends. Scott introduced me to Winner by giving me Mudhouse Sabbath for Christmas, which I love, so I thought I'd read this one next (she also has one called Girl Meets God which is more about her journey into Christianity).  Winner was raised Jewish but became a Christian in college, and she now teaches at the Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.  Her writing has an easy, conversational flow, and I oftentimes find myself taking notes (or highlighting) when I read her.  I seem to really relate to her self-deprecations, her honesty and humor in admitting that she's not perfect by any means, but that admitting it and working towards positive change is the first step.  And ironically, though I wasn't raised Jewish I seem to relate to her more than other contemporary Christian writers I've tried.  I also enjoyed this book in particular because its structure and format reminded me somewhat of blog posts since many of her chapters were short and seemed like brief (but profound) reflections on daily activities.

In her own words, Winner describes Still as "a book about entering the middle, about being in the middle of the spiritual life . . . Once upon a time, I thought I had arrived.  Now I have arrived at a middle.  If life is long, I am still at the beginning of the middle.  Once I would have said, 'Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.'  From here, I say with the poet, 'O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.'  This books represents a few miles of the climb.  I share it in the hope that you might find it good company for your own climbing" (Preface).

In the 'author q and a' section at the back of the book she describes it further: "I wanted to emphasize the subtle but hugely significant shift from depressed, intense crisis to pacific openness, from no sense of God to a new sense of God.  From wrenched and wrecked to calm communion with a God I both know and don't know . . . the real crisis point . . . is the prelude to the book.  The spiritual unraveling, the alienation from God that I felt . . . that is the backstory. . . [it] opens at the tail end of darkness.  The book is not primarily a picture of the darkness.  It is a picture of the end of the darkness, of the stumbling out of the darkness into something new" (202).

While I'm thankfully not going through the death of my mother or a divorce after a five-year marriage like Winner describes in her book, her story has certainly comforted me in my recent climbing (or I might even call it, hiking) the small hill that is job-hunting/what's next?/letting go-letting God/trying to remember everything's going to work out in the end/continuing my journey toward patience.

Because most of my current 'hiking/climbing' deals with trying not to worry about what's next in my life job-wise, Winner's sections on anxiety particularly resonated with me.  I felt like everything she was saying was addressed to me and I wanted to scream, "Yes, that's exactly how I feel!!"  Sometimes I think there are a lot of us who deal with anxiety but we feel like we're the only ones.  And then we hear other people's battles and finally realize it's not some weird phenomena.  Even sweating the small things, Winner suggests about herself and others that this is  "a sort of practice worrying so that when the next . . . crisis rolled around [we're] in good shape . . . This is one of the many ways I am just like my mother.  As far back as I can remember, anxiety has been my close companion, having taken up residence in the small second-floor bedroom of the house that is my body . . . I don't imagine it will ever tire of the neighborhood and move out."  Similarly, I can admit my battle with anxiety; like Winner I've been told all my life not to worry, but it's what comes naturally, the thorn in my flesh.

Again, Winner's words are a comfort: "One way to give up anxiety is to meditate . . . The desert saints said that the beginning of renouncing a thought is simply noticing it . . . after noticing a thought replace it with prayer."  Although I've been told all my life not to worry, it has never truly sunk in; I know worrying does absolutely no good and it's not going to change a thing.  But I'd never really considered it as "the greatest evil which can happen to the soul, sin only excepted" (Francis de Sales, 17th Century priest and writer).  "The anxious heart, in its flailings, loses hold on whatever graces God has bestowed upon it, and is sapped of the strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One who is all the more ready to fish in troubled waters."

Winner suggests, "When you are conscious that you are growing anxious, commend yourself to God and resolve steadfastly not to take any steps whatever to obtain the result you desire, until your disturbed state of mind is altogether quited," praying this prayer . . .

"O God of Peace, who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of the spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence where we may be still and know that thou art God."

When I picked up this book I didn't think it would have such an effect on me, mainly because I don't feel that I'm going through a 'mid-faith crisis;' but I am climbing, and aren't we all most of the time?  Or at least resting from a very recent climb? I'm sure I'll have to remind myself of these words about anxiety (perhaps tomorrow), remembering the prayer when I begin doubting, and I know that I've not gone through some kind of drastic change after reading this book - I will still get anxious and worried.  But I have been comforted a bit in knowing there are others who struggle with these same feelings, and others who are climbing even taller, more dangerous mountains than my current little mole-hole.  

Sumer Reading: Post 4 - The Night Circus

Source

So I admit that including this one in my summer reading series is a little like cheating because this is a book Scott and I have been reading aloud together, but in my defense it is part of my summer reading.  I highly recommend Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, a fun, magical escape read.  My husband actually picked it out for us to read together (he rarely reads fiction) and described it to me as a book about two dueling magicians and a circus that appears mysteriously in different towns and cities across the world; one day it's there, the next it could possibly disappear without notice.  I was hooked and I hope you think it sounds magical too, because it is! It's been so much fun to read.

The plot and character development keeps your attention, you can't wait to see where it takes you next, and you're traveling everywhere from London, Paris, Munich, and Cairo.  The descriptions of the circus acts, costumes, and enchantments are brilliant and unique.  As one reviewer describes it, "It is intensely visual . . . Morgenstern paints precise, evocative and visually lush scenes within the tents of her fictional circus. Reading the novel is, in this respect, more like watching a film in the making – not an ordinary film, however, but an imaginative collaboration between writer and reader."  Though I wouldn't quite compare it to the genius world of Harry Potter, the world Morgenstern creates is similarly magical and dangerous (minus the monsters and creatures) but I'm sad to see that Twilight fans are lumped in as expected fan readers here.  Whatever you might hear, from what I can tell about Twilight, The Night Circus is vastly different!

There are several different covers of the book, but each one is really spectacular, and they give you a feel for what awaits inside.  I think it would certainly be fun to see it made into a movie; my bets are that it will be before we know it, and Scott and I have had a time trying to decide who would be best to play the various characters.  So if you're looking to get away this summer we highly recommend Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus!

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Summer Reading: Post 3 - 1984

"Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."

My (hopefully consistent) summer reading series about books I somehow missed reading till now continues.  This week I read 1984 by George Orwell (and yes, this was my first time reading it unfortunately).  I read Animal Farm in my sophomore English class in high school and I remember I really enjoyed it, particularly the brief discussions we had in class.   A friend of mine gave me my copy of 1984 for my seventeenth birthday at the beginning of my senior year.  It's traveled with me during my three moves since then, and though I hadn't yet read it, I always included it in my boxes of books, placing it on the shelves with all the others upon arrival in my new places.  For the past two and a half years it's spent its days next to Scott's paperback copy of Animal Farm.

Picture of the slogan in 1984: War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength.  Source

Similar to Beloved I started 1984 once before, but was unsuccessful, obviously.  But once again, picking it up now I was hooked from the beginning.  Because I'd already read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale twice I couldn't help but envision her world while reading 1984.  I highly recommend both Atwood and Orwell if dystopian literature appeals to you at all.

Even though I envisioned similar 'worlds' while reading these two books, they are not at all similar in their portrayal of women and the working-class (Atwood focuses more on women while Orwell focuses more on the working-class - referred to as the 'proles/proletarains' - there's a lovely diagram of the hierarchy of social classes in Orwell's world here).

Treatment of Women
I'm sure I could write a whole post devoted solely to the differences between how Orwell and Atwood treat women differently (and maybe I will).  Atwood is certainly concerned with how women are currently treated in society, giving us an over-exaggerated version so we can see the similarities between their society and ours - women are often used and viewed only as bodies and child-bearers.  Orwell's, on the other hand, seems to allow women more agency - - you have this (so it seems) kick-ass woman who is rebellious, but also talks of women, saying she lives "always in the stink of women! How I hate women!" (130).  While reading, I was taken aback several times by some of the small comments Orwell makes about women throughout the novel, referring to them as stupid and easily-manipulated, but perhaps we would have gotten similar comments if Atwood's novel had been written from a man's point of view; I'm sure the men in her world were thinking similar thoughts of abuse towards women.  But it was often hard to understand Orwell's motives and message about women (unlike Atwood who sets up a complex feminist agenda - although I'm sure some could and would argue about this).

Working-Class Heroes 
Though I didn't particularly appreciate Orwell's treatment of women, I did find the working-class/ 'proles' commentary fascinating.  Thanks to my last few classes in grad school I am intrigued by working-class studies; in fact, I've just ordered a book called What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies, edited by Janet Zaney.  I'm dying for it to arrive so I can explore  this new discipline, and honestly I'm interested in what this community of writers has to say about the working-class.  I'm also curious to see if these are people from the academy discussing working-class issues, or people who come from a working-class background (hoping it's a mixture of both).  Anyway, back to 1984...the proles play a huge role in the story and become quite glorified as a people (for me at least) throughout the book.  Though they are obviously looked down on (or better yet, ignored) by the Inner Party and Party members, the narrator certainly gives us reason to believe they're something special in fixing 'the problems:'

"What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.  The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition.  They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.  For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world.  The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.  They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort . . . 'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud, 'We are not human'" (165).

And to me this is so powerful: "The proles were immortal; you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant [woman] figure in the yard.  In the end their awakening would come.  And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill . . . The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing . . . everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable [woman] figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.  Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.  You were the dead; theirs was the future.  But you could share in the future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four" (221-2).


"And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.  If there was hope, it lay in the proles!"

There were several times when reading about the working-class proles of 1984 I was reminded of two recent films - In Time and The Hunger Games - which both depict working-class characters trying desperately to change the socio-political hierarchies in their respective worlds.  But the working-class characters also display the 'human' qualities discussed in Orwell, examples of humanity in societies that have become inhumane in their actions and policies.

The Role of Sex
Finally, it's interesting that the role of sex is similar in both Orwell's and Atwood's novels.  Sex is repressed by the societies, and sex is only seen as appropriate for procreation (if you've read the book, you'll see why the cover illustration below is so funny - or maybe that was just me).  As Orwell writes,

"Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema" (65).


"What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship . . . When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.  They can't bear you to feel like that.  They want you to be bursting with energy all the time.  All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour . . . There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy" (133).

Interesting cover art, not at all what I pictured while I was reading (source)

And per routine, here are some more quotes I found intriguing:

"He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.  But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.  It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage" (28).

"It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones" (48).

I particularly found the discussions about Newspeak interesting: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.  Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well.  It isn't only the synonyms; there are also antonyms.  After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words?  A word contains its opposite in itself . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller" (51-2).

"Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.  It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different.  In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had enough socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, Tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-colored, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient - nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin . . . Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?" (60).

"The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.  Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change.  Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center" (81).

I guess one of the things that fascinated me most about reading 1984 was how relevant and timeless it is, not in every aspect of course, but certainly in many: "For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they have done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority [a.k.a. the 1%] had not function, and they would sweep it away.  In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.  To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practical solution.  It conflicted with the tendency toward mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals" (190).

Summer Reading: Post 2 - Night

" . . . books, just like people, have a destiny.  Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both." 

- - Elie Wiesel

Source

Night by Elie Wiesel
I've read a lot of Holocaust Literature and other books, fiction and nonfiction, centered around the Jewish Holocaust (To See You Again, The Sunflower, Sarah's Key, The Book Thief, and Maus to name a few great ones) but I sadly hadn't read Night, which we all know is so short it can literally be read in an afternoon.  So what was I doing with my time and in my classes?  Well, for one reading Jane Austen's novels over and over again for numerous different courses.

Even though Night is deemed one of the 'classics of Holocaust Literature,' I found its abrupt ending somewhat unsettling and it just seemed like there was something missing.  In the Preface, Wiesel mentions that the book, which "was written in Yiddish as And the World Remained Silent and translated first in French, then into English - was rejected by every major publisher, French and American" (8).  He also notes that he made numerous cuts and was told countless times that it was just too long (although most of us know it's fairly short for a memoir/novel, my copy was just 135 pages).  Though the version I read was a more recent translation, I sensed that perhaps these cuts might have been extremely important and should have been left in as he would have liked.  In the Preface he gives several examples of narrative that was cut when translated into English and these seemed to me the strongest, most reflective of the book.  Most likely he included them in the Preface so that they could, in a sense, be included despite publishers' best efforts to keep them out.

Perhaps I've just read so many other narratives about the Holocaust that touched me more (others were written from young women's perspectives, which might have something to do with it?) or maybe I started reading, knowing that there were things missing that he would have liked to have included.  Either way it was an honest portrayal of his devastating experience during the Holocaust, but more importantly, as he writes in the Preface:

"In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words.  I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer - or my life, period - would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory" (6).

Source

More quotes from the Preface . . .

"Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle.  It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language.  But how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy?  Hunger - thirst - transport - selection - fire - chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else" (7).

"And so I persevered.  And trusted the silence that envelops and transcends words.  Knowing all the while that any of the fields of ashes in Birkenau carries more weight than all the testimonies about Birkenau.  For, despite all my attempts to articulate the unspeakable, 'it' is still not right" (8).

"To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time" (13).

"Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz;' I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.  What I do know is that there is 'response' in responsibility.  When we speak of this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant, 'reponsibility' is the key word.  The witness has forced himself to testify.  For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow.  He does not want his past to become their future" (13).

Summer Reading: Post 1 - Beloved

One of my plans for this summer is to catch up reading books I (somehow) missed despite receiving a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature.  Though I don't want to make a rigorous schedule (like a job) for myself now that I've got some free time, I do want to check off some books that I've been somewhat ashamed to say I haven't read.  I'll be adding to my list as the summer goes on and hopefully I'll stay motivated to keep it up.  Most of the books I already own; I've been collecting them from book sales and clearance bins, hoping to get around to it.  I graduated from my Masters' program going on two weeks now and I'm only working a part-time job this summer (along with applying to new ones) so I figure now's a better time than ever to catch up!

To keep myself (and this blog) going I thought I'd post a few reactions or maybe just some quotes I found interesting while reading these summer books (I am on break after all), and to kick it off I've pulled quotes from the first two on my list: Toni Morrison's Beloved and Elie Wiesel's Night (Post 2).

Beloved by Toni Morrison
Though I've heard numerous conference papers on Beloved and others of Morrison's books I had yet to read any before this past week.  I already owned it and even attempted reading it once in undergrad, obviously unsuccessfully.  But this time as soon as I started I couldn't put it down.

Toni Morrison - source

"To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.  The 'better life' she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one . . . As for Denver, the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered" (42).


"For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love" (45).


"'I don't care what she is.  Grown don't mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing'" (45).


And perhaps my favorite parts were the descriptions of Baby Suggs, holy . . .
"In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.  She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more.  She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.  She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.  That if they could not see it, they would not have it.


'Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it.  Love it hard . . . Move than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.  For this is the prize'" (88-9).


"[The voices] had become an occasional mutter - like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at work: a sth when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens.  Nothing fierce or startling.  Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks" (172).


"Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined" (190).


"Grandma Baby said people look down on her because . . . [s]laves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them.  Still, they were not supposed to have pleasure deep down. She said for me not listen to all that.  That I should always listen to my body and love it" (209).


". . . we got more yesterday than anybody.  We need some kind of tomorrow" (273).