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Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

Dorothy Sayers, one of the great Oxford Inklings contemporaneous with C.S. Lewis, Charles Lamb, and J.R.R. Tolkien, wrote marvelous mysteries. My introduction to her was one I will not forget for we still sometimes share whispered mysteries in a haunted corner of the house and her brilliance can change from telling an unraveling mystery to [...]

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The Silmarillion

I recently started to listen to The Silmarillion on CD, Tolkien’s posthumously published mythic work which gives the origins of Middle-Earth. The following quote gave me chills in realizing that my painful sins, the adversaries’ means in my trials, and even death are all a part of accomplishing His purpose. Ponder this: …thou, Melkor, shalt [...]

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I forget which writer was being described by a critic, but s/he used the term “the perfect fit of metaphor,” which I like quite a bit. My suspicion is that the object of the compliment was G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis, but today I thought I’d share one from I.K. Taylor– that’s my daughter. Now, [...]

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FROM ROCHESTER… Mr. Rochester: Jane, you’re a strange and almost unearthly thing. Mr. Rochester: This is my wife. Your sister, Mason. Look at her. She is mad! So was her mother. So was her grandmother. Three generations of violent lunacy. I wasn’t told about that, was I, Mason? All I was told about was that [...]

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For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’

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Seems very much like C.S. Lewis’s line, “Unattainability. The most intense joy lies not in the having, but in the desiring.” The ripest peach is highest on the tree – And so her love, beyond the reach of me, Is dearest in my sight. Sweet breezes, bow Her heart down to me where I worship [...]

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THE CLOCKMAKER Time should be heard as well as seen, Says the clockmaker, carving a cuckoo bird. My wife gives the sick child his medicine. Who said children should be seen, not heard? – I work all night until my sight is blurred, At this abandoned craft that now is mine For all the comfort [...]

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Recently, I was asked to name the top five American novels. Let me boil down the list to two: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In some ways, two books could not be different for I believe that in them, we have represented the two broad strokes in which the [...]

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G.K. Chesterton (1818-1901), the great British mystery writer and Dickens critic, wrote a life of Thomas Aquinas called The Dumb Ox, a pejorative leveled at Aquinas’ bulking presence and quietude by some of his fellow students. Chesterton asserts that nothing could be further from the truth and spends the whole of the book praising Aquinas’ [...]

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Well, it certainly ain’t James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but Ratatouille, Pixar’s stellar computer animated film about a Rat’s quest to cook, has some great language capping the end of the film. The writer behind the food critic, Anton Ego, uses a turn of phrase and some self-analysis of a critic’s role that is both touching [...]

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