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Death is yodeling quiet in green woodlots
Aug. 12th, 2012 01:36 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 21.
The weather has turned; today was the third cool, rainy day in a row. Around the cottage, ( fall is unmistakably plotting to murder summer. ) It's probably too late to do anything about it.
Back in the backyard--like I said last year, everyone ought to have some thistles around. I've seen two different butterflies land on thistle flowers that already had bumble bees on them; last week, ( I saw a cabbage patch butterfly do it, ) ( and today I saw the same monarch do it twice. )
I doubt I would've thought to go look at this--
--if I hadn't had cicadas near the top of my mind from reading Annie Dillard talking about them and seeing a bit about them on a series TVO is showing about mathemagic. (You so often see people talking about periodic cicadas and no other kinds of cicadas that you come to wonder, or you do if you're me, whether these things you hear buzzing every summer, and not once every thirteen or seventeen summers, are actually cicadas. But not all, and not most, cicadas are periodic cicadas.) I just heard and saw this thing fall, clattering, into the vines in the fence, and thought, maybe it's a cicada, and it was. It left that leaf pretty much by falling off of it.
Speaking of Annie Dillard, I finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a couple of days ago, and I'm sorry I did. Most books I'm interested in I want to have read, but this is a book I wanted to read and still want to read. (I can't remember the last book I still wanted to read after I'd read it. I enjoyed reading Howards End, but it couldn't have gone on any longer.) I did sometimes get annoyed or frustrated by some of it, but of course I could only love her deep seriousness about, her sense of response-ability toward, "the natural world". You might expect, I might've expected, that what would annoy me about the book would be something like woolly-headedness, but it was actually more something like stridency. What frustrated me--apart from her occasional venture into obscure metaphor, which is restrained just enough to be frustrating in a good way--is that the book seems stricken with a dualistic outlook that is stuck in contradiction rather than resolving in a dialectic. I wish I could know whether I would've thought to call the book a theodicy if I hadn't seen Dillard call it that in the 25th anniversary afterword. Much of the book is concerned to prosecute creation and its creator for hideousness and cruelty. Much of it on the other hand describes the grace of creation. She veers from one to the other and back again; in the end she affirms the latter, but the weight of evidence she presents doesn't seem to support the verdict. (For some reason it hadn't occurred to me until just now to think of Dillard as a Nietzschean.)
I'd like to say more about Dillard sometime, but it's going to have to wait. For now, just one thing, on a tangent, that the book somehow prompted me to think about, which many serious things about God prompt me to think about, which is Howard Adelman's posing to a class I was in once this question: "How many of you live in the presence of God?" It's such a great question, side-stepping the question of belief--people talk about believing in God as if it was obvious what that means, but it's not at all. Of course, it may not be entirely clear what "living in the presence of God" means, either, but it does seem like the more important issue. (Mother Teresa said that there was a stretch of many years in her life in which God was absent. Presumably she still believed, but she did not live in the presence of God.) I mean, it seems positively ridiculous that whether or not you "believe in" God could have anything to do with your salvation, but whether or not you live in the presence of God surely must: if you live in the presence of a loving God, you simply are saved.
The weather has turned; today was the third cool, rainy day in a row. Around the cottage, ( fall is unmistakably plotting to murder summer. ) It's probably too late to do anything about it.
Back in the backyard--like I said last year, everyone ought to have some thistles around. I've seen two different butterflies land on thistle flowers that already had bumble bees on them; last week, ( I saw a cabbage patch butterfly do it, ) ( and today I saw the same monarch do it twice. )
I doubt I would've thought to go look at this--
--if I hadn't had cicadas near the top of my mind from reading Annie Dillard talking about them and seeing a bit about them on a series TVO is showing about mathemagic. (You so often see people talking about periodic cicadas and no other kinds of cicadas that you come to wonder, or you do if you're me, whether these things you hear buzzing every summer, and not once every thirteen or seventeen summers, are actually cicadas. But not all, and not most, cicadas are periodic cicadas.) I just heard and saw this thing fall, clattering, into the vines in the fence, and thought, maybe it's a cicada, and it was. It left that leaf pretty much by falling off of it.
Speaking of Annie Dillard, I finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a couple of days ago, and I'm sorry I did. Most books I'm interested in I want to have read, but this is a book I wanted to read and still want to read. (I can't remember the last book I still wanted to read after I'd read it. I enjoyed reading Howards End, but it couldn't have gone on any longer.) I did sometimes get annoyed or frustrated by some of it, but of course I could only love her deep seriousness about, her sense of response-ability toward, "the natural world". You might expect, I might've expected, that what would annoy me about the book would be something like woolly-headedness, but it was actually more something like stridency. What frustrated me--apart from her occasional venture into obscure metaphor, which is restrained just enough to be frustrating in a good way--is that the book seems stricken with a dualistic outlook that is stuck in contradiction rather than resolving in a dialectic. I wish I could know whether I would've thought to call the book a theodicy if I hadn't seen Dillard call it that in the 25th anniversary afterword. Much of the book is concerned to prosecute creation and its creator for hideousness and cruelty. Much of it on the other hand describes the grace of creation. She veers from one to the other and back again; in the end she affirms the latter, but the weight of evidence she presents doesn't seem to support the verdict. (For some reason it hadn't occurred to me until just now to think of Dillard as a Nietzschean.)
I'd like to say more about Dillard sometime, but it's going to have to wait. For now, just one thing, on a tangent, that the book somehow prompted me to think about, which many serious things about God prompt me to think about, which is Howard Adelman's posing to a class I was in once this question: "How many of you live in the presence of God?" It's such a great question, side-stepping the question of belief--people talk about believing in God as if it was obvious what that means, but it's not at all. Of course, it may not be entirely clear what "living in the presence of God" means, either, but it does seem like the more important issue. (Mother Teresa said that there was a stretch of many years in her life in which God was absent. Presumably she still believed, but she did not live in the presence of God.) I mean, it seems positively ridiculous that whether or not you "believe in" God could have anything to do with your salvation, but whether or not you live in the presence of God surely must: if you live in the presence of a loving God, you simply are saved.
