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Today* is a momentous anniversary: 200 years since the publication of Pride and Prejudice. As my friend Deb cleverly remarked, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that some literature is timeless.”
Until a few years ago, I had only read Pride and Prejudice and Emma, so I recently read all the rest of Austen, with that mix of pleasure and dread that one gets from reading a wonderful writer who produced tragically few books.
Pride and Prejudice is packed with passages that strike one as extremely quotable as one is reading, but aren’t really, because the context is essential. This is hilarious, but only if you know the characters (Jane and Elizabeth):
“Will you tell me how long you have loved him?”
“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”
Yeah. If you’re shocked by the venality, it’s time you read the book. But here’s a quote that will do even if you’ve never read it:
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”
I would have loved to know Jane Austen, but I would have hated to get on the wrong side of her.
*Yesterday! Darn! I would’ve mentioned it in the Sunday service!
I have so many Sunday afternoon responsibilities that I can’t join the Immigration as a Moral Issue class our Adult Religious Education program is offering starting this Sunday (it’s led by a newly-forming Task Force on Immigration). But I really want to learn more about the subject, so I’m going to read along and, I hope, chat with others who aren’t in the class, or for that matter who are, at the UUCPA blog. Just the first week’s readings were a wake-up. First entry here.
One of the persistently weird things about working in Silicon Valley is that I am constantly passing billboards for items that I not only don’t use (nothing new about that), but I don’t even know what they are. Just not a clue. I don’t think I’m expected to. There are enough people going up and down Route 101 who are versed in the inner workings of computers that the advertisers aren’t even trying to talk to mere end users like me.
I really enjoyed the first few posts of a well-written new blog, Raising Faith, which deals with such questions as “should you let your 2-year-old play with the baby Jesus”? Glad to have this addition to the UU blogosphere!
I will not be preaching or blogging about the imminent end of the world. My friend and colleague Dan Schatz had this wisdom to share, though, and I recommend his sermon highly. “The world is ending. The world has always ended. Let it go.”
Sorry to be so quiet on the blog recently. I blog on my own time, and both church and family have been busy. However, I’m plotting several posts and will be back in pixels soon.
Two poems, a prayer, and a song for this Tuesday, September 11:
“110 Stories,” by John M. Ford
“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust,” by Patrick Murfin
A Prayer, Rev. Molly Housh Gordon
and thanks to N. at UUCPA, who pointed me to the Mary Chapin Carpenter song “Grand Central Station.” Sorry there’s no link, but it’s the first hit on YouTube if you put in the title and singer. I agree with N’s recommendation: don’t watch the pictures, just listen to the song. No doubt you have your own pictures, as we all do who are old enough to remember that bright, beautiful, horror-soaked Tuesday morning.
Tomorrow evening, my family and I will be joining an anniversary celebration that raises some interesting questions. See, the folks we’re toasting have been married to each other twice. They married, divorced several years later, and several years after that, married each other again, on the same date that they were married the first time. So while the date for celebration seems clear, neither they nor anyone else is ever sure what number they’re celebrating. Is it the number of years that have passed since their first wedding? The number of years that have passed since their second wedding? The net number of years they’ve been married?
How one answers might depend on one’s philosophy of life (or possibly just on how many glasses of champagne one has had at the party). Counting only the years since wedding #2 suggests that the first marriage, well, doesn’t count. It’s reminiscent of the don’t-look-back, something-might-be-gaining-on-you approach to the past that I suspect all of us take at times. “Who wants to remember old failures,” we reason, tempted to throw all our imperfect experiences down the memory hole. In contrast, counting the net–all of the years married to each other–says that what matters most is the time spent together, both the happy days and the sad. That’s a nice thought, affirming in a larger sense that the plans we’ve had that didn’t work out quite as we dreamed are not failures. They contribute meaning to our lives.
But what about that time in between? Something in it led to the second, lasting marriage–so surely it’s important too. That way of counting affirms a philosophy that everything in our lives has worth. (“The thing about working with time instead of against it . . . is that nothing is wasted. Even pain counts.” [Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed]) Of course, if we want to take that approach, then maybe we need to go farther back than the first wedding date. Every couple knows that their life together didn’t begin on their wedding day. Nothing in our lives begins on the day we mark it. The first day of school, the first love, the longed-for or hated job, the life-changing discovery made at age 50, all have roots going back to our birth, or even further back than that, past our parents’ births.
I have also been married twice, but more conventionally, to two different people. In a very real sense, the first marriage is an essential ingredient of the second, because everything in my life is an ingredient of my marriage. That’s just a subset of the larger, almost tautological statement: everything in one’s life is an ingredient of one’s life. Some parts of it make happier memories than other parts, but they all made us who we are now.
Of course, if we go too far down that road, we might end up deciding that since all dates are important, we won’t celebrate anniversaries at all. And it would be a shame to lose an excuse to go out to dinner with beloved people and wish them many more years of happy life together.
photo by Edsel Little
I popped into a dim sum place today, all by myself. It was past my lunchtime, I had done the grocery shopping that I needed to do, and I had an hour at most before I had to pick Munchkin up at a birthday party. And I was jonesing for dumplings, as I frequently do, and was in the neighborhood of a very good dim sum palace I’ve been to before. Service is fast–as soon as a cart comes by with something you want, you’re eating. It would be the perfect quick lunch.
Except that it wasn’t, because on my own I can only eat about six dumplings, and that means only two dishes. That somewhat defeats the purpose of small-plate eating, of which dim sum is the cuisine par excellence: to have lots of little dishes and taste a bit of each one. Some foods are just meant to be shared with many friends. Which, now that I think about it, is one of the charms of dim sum.
Edna St. Vincent Millay is speaking for me right now.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains–but the best is lost.The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,–
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Black History Month, day 17
I gave blood today (thank you, Stanford Blood Center!), which always puts me in a good mood and gives me reason to reflect on Charles Drew, the surgeon who developed blood-preservation processes such as the separation of plasma that made blood banks possible.
Charles Drew (Drew is sitting on the table on the right). Collection of the National Library of Medicine.
His research came just in time to save thousands of lives in World War II–the “Blood for Britain” program sent US blood donations to English soldiers and civilians, and would not have been possible a few years earlier. However, when the US entered the war, the US military requested that the American Red Cross only accept blood from whites, and they complied. When humanitarian groups protested, the policy was changed so that all blood was accepted, but it was segregated so that white people would receive only white people’s blood, black people only black people’s, a ludicrous and dangerous form of discrimination that Drew publicly protested.
Drew died at age 45 in a car accident. The legend that he bled to death for lack of medical treatment–specifically, being refused blood–at a whites-only hospital is just that, an urban legend that sounded probable enough but, according to reliable witnesses, was not true. It got its legs not only because the painful irony makes a compelling story, but because of its plausibility: African-Americans were routinely turned away from hospitals, with many deaths as a result. Spencie Love, author of One Blood, pairs the story of Charles Drew with that of Maltheus Reeves Avery, another man who died of car-accident injuries in the same county, in the same year, because the hospital to which he was taken–a different one–had no remaining “black beds.”
African-Americans’ warranted mistrust of doctors and blood banks still keeps many African-American potential donors from giving blood, piling tragedy upon tragedy.
A bright spot in the story, however, is that hundreds of millions of people have received donated blood since the development of the blood bank. It is a safe bet that if you’re reading this, someone you love is alive today because of Drew’s research.
Sermons in Stones 
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