This Week's Miscellany (09/30/23)
In My Tired Thirties, Eucatastrophe, Brideshead, Levitation, and More
Hi, I’m Haley! Book midwife (editor) and author. Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.
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“How are you?” a friend asks.
“We’re good….busy!” is always my reply.
I don’t really like being busy. I like margin in my days. And yet, we are in our “tired thirties” as Madeleine L’Engle calls them. Just as our work lives start to hit their stride, our children have grown into people who very much need us as guides, chauffeurs, supervisors, confidants. They are developing their own beautiful interests: Music! Literature! Theater! Languages! Friendships! And these wonderful developments require us to coordinate and drive them places.
The days begin early before 6am. We get the children off to school and then begin our other work, good work that we love. As the work day wraps up we begin the second shift: choir, Shakespeare club, Latin club, youth group, bowling, theater rehearsals. “Get involved. Try new things,” we tell our children. Their gifts and preferences emerge over time. Our son has tried five sports over the past two years and has decided to only focus on the one that is in air conditioning (bowling). I don’t blame him. Other things are just starting to be explored. It’s exciting.
But by dinner time I am wiped out. The girls have questions about their homework. The printer isn’t working. I call in tech support (my teenager) to fix it. Daniel usually rallies to cook a good meal while Hildie snuggles with me and her favorite blankie on the couch to tell me about what happened in Charlotte’s Web today (her teacher is reading it aloud).
She still likes me to lay down with her at bedtime so she can fall asleep on my shoulder. I rustle up enough energy to read aloud to her and then tiptoe away. She is not quite asleep and calls me back. I return and almost fall asleep myself.
I walk the dog and drink a cup of herbal tea. It’s 9:30pm. We’re good…busy.
While you may not be in exactly the same season of life, I imagine your life is busy, too. I hope full of good things. But sometimes you have to stop, say no, do one less thing.
There was a request this week for my chauffeuring services to a social event across town. Drop off plus pick up would have meant two hours of driving time in traffic. “I can’t,” I told my kid. “You are perfectly capable of driving me!” was the reply. But I had to explain that I wasn’t. I had reached my limit. I couldn’t ask that of myself. And I must model rest in order for my children to learn its importance.
Instead I used those two hours to take a long shower, wash my hair, and do a puzzle of cats. I felt much more human after that. We are not capable of constant motion. We must rest. All of us.
I hope you get to rest this weekend. Today I’m putting the final touches on a draft for a new book. I’ll be tweaking for the next few weeks, but that will be one less thing on my plate for now, in my tired thirties—in these happy, full days that will be over more quickly than I can wrap my mind around. Soon the house will quieter and my chauffeur services will not be required. And I will miss all of it.
Links
I posted Part 2 of my series drawn from a talk I gave this summer at the Chesterton Conference:
Chaos Is Dull: G.K. Chesterton and Detective Fiction (Fairy Tales and Eucatastrophe)
In detective fiction, we enter an environment of chaos. Justice has been breached. The world is in disorder. And from this chaos, the detective must enter the scene and bring order from chaos. And this restoration of order results in wonder and delight.
Yet what they’re all missing is what keeps drawing readers in: Waugh’s artistry. In Brideshead, Waugh is the best 20th-century writer of dialogue. His comic monsters, such as Charles’s father, surpass even Jane Austen’s equivalents, such as Aunt Norris. Small moments of grotesque absurdity—the tortoise with the diamonds studded in its shell—are simply unforgettable.
And Dr. Jen Frey’s piece on the difference between the servile and the liberal arts and why we so desperately need the latter is a must read:
The Liberality of Liberal Education by Jennifer Frey
The servile arts—what today we would call professional schools and majors—dominate today’s academy. In spite of all the hysteria around gender studies or critical race theory, very few students are pursuing these or other humanistic modes of inquiry—including traditional liberal arts, such as mathematics, music, and philosophy. Even natural sciences like physics and chemistry seem increasingly pointless.
If you’re following the shocking state of literacy in American schools and the “reading wars” about which methods we should be using to teach reading, you’ll find this interesting. Yes, we need phonics! I taught all my children to reach with that method and they are great readers. But you also need more than phonics to make a reader. We have to teach kids to appreciate reading, to love to read. There are many ways to do this but I think one thing is key: talk about books with your kids as if they matter. They do! The ideas in books matter. Literature helps us encounter the big questions about what it means to be a human being and live a good life. We need to DISCUSS literature, ENJOY literature, and MAKE TIME for literature.
We Need to Make More Readers by
To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”
And fascinating review of They Flew that touches on miracles, saints, and more:
Meet Me in the Middle of the Air by Eve Tushnet
Most early modern Europeans (and settlers in the Americas) were convinced that some people could fly. The only question was how they did it. Eire notes that his own profession generally excludes this question: Respectable history has no place for God, let alone the Devil, as a historical actor.
People who are desensitised or addicted to artificiality are going to be content with the mass-produced ultra-processed artificiality of the machine’s “creations”. And whether we like it or not, more and more people are going to be content in this way. For them the machine can provide all they need - and on instant demand. No matter how hard we try we cannot compete with the machine for the wants and attentions of these people.
The Death of the Literary Feud by William Fear
For the writer Will Self, the decline of the literary feud is symptomatic of the broader decline of “serious literature” in our culture at large. “Feuds aren’t happening because literature isn’t important,” he remarked down the phone. He explained that the decline of literary feuds is a result of what he called “the neoliberal commodification of the literary product”. Publishing houses now care only about book sales because they’re aware that the reading public is both shrinking and oversaturated. He pointed out that this results in “banalisation” of literature.
And a piece on Etty Hillesum, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil:
The Feminine Way to Wisdom by David Brooks
I’ll conclude with two questions. The first question is: Does it matter that the three thinkers I’ve described here were women? Was their femininity part of what caused them to adopt this shared moral philosophy?
I think it does.
Reading
I’m reading Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan with my girls and I had forgotten how perfect and beautiful it is. Every sentence like a line of poetry.
The Year of Jane
Details for our October read of Northanger Abbey coming soon!
Coming Soon!
-More excerpts from my recent talk on G.K. Chesterton’s detective fiction (find the first part here)
-Mini book reviews (for paid subscribers)
2024 Pilgrimage
Our pilgrimage to Belgium and Germany in 2024 is already half full! We’re keeping it small (we just love the experience of a smaller group of pilgrims). Considering how many sign ups we already have, I would advise interested parties to register immediately:
REGISTRATION NOW LIVE: Heavenly Hops Pilgrimage with Fr. Harrison Ayre to Belgium and Germany.
Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions at all about the trip. Let’s go to Belgium!
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. And a huge thank you to Michael, Erin, Katelyn, Joy, Susanne, and Peggy for upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription (at 20% off for the rest of September!) with the button below.
Thanks for reading!
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
oh my... tired thirties... too real
I feel the need for more margin in my life as well!