Un Post Senza Un Titolo

As this picture should make clear, green is quickly becoming - as it should - the dominant color here in New Hampshire. Spring has absolutely and irreversibly arrived! Of course, it isn't yet late spring here, as evidenced by the fact that Eagle Wings remains placidly parked in the driveway.

Other signs of spring: peepers, beavers, open windows, open doors, sprouting lilies, later sunsets, and (gulp) mosquitoes. (Say it isn't so!) Fortunately, the last item in that otherwise happy list has not yet become a nuisance. So far I have seen about ten of the little bloodsuckers and have killed about five. If I can maintain that ratio of mosquitoes killed to mosquitoes seen (or is it the other way around?) throughout the summer, I will be very, very pleased with myself.

One of the ways I have been taking advantage of the relatively, and sometimes indescribably, beautiful weather we have been enjoying of late is to go rowing in the morning before I do school. As you can see by Exhibit B (at right), the pond is currently clear, glassy, and full. Alas, before long the algae will have significantly marred our view to the west, but so far so good. Several times now I have been in our boat when one or more beavers have come out of their lodge and swum around the pond. One time, while I was enjoying the breeze and reading American Literature, I tied the boat to a tree at the end of the pond. I was just lazily studying (there's a paradox for you!), when two baby beavers swam out of the swamp, right by my boat, and into their lodge. After a while, a big one came out, swam around for a while, and then returned.

The more exciting time was when I was actually rowing. As I went from one side of the pond to the other, the beaver would swim to the opposite side, swim around for a bit, and then dive under with a terrific smack of its tail against the water. 'Twas cool.

And now for a confession: after writing my last post, I have only read about seventy-five pages of Les Mis, and most of that today. At first it was from lack of time, but as the week went on and the book remained untouched, I was struck by this observation: sometimes the less you do of something, the more tired of doing it you feel. Now I have resumed reading it and am enthralled once again.

A Long, Long Book

Maybe I'm too obsessed with blogging. It's been only five days since I last posted, but I feel like it has been an eternity. For the last couple days, I have been watching in horror as my then-newest post sank lower and lower on the list of blogs, until I simply could not stand it any longer. Plus, I didn't like its title. Time for a new post!

The reason I have not been blogging much recently is that I've been spending most of my free time reading Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. It is a FANTASTIC book! True, it's almost as long as the Bible (in pages), but it is worth it. I have found it to be simultaneously profound, gripping, and stirring.

One thing I've noticed is that Victor Hugo tends to expound more than some readers might think is necessary. In the beginning of the book, there is a fifty page biography of a character who promptly dies once the action actually starts. When another character is known once to have looted some dead soldiers on the battlefield of Waterloo, Hugo deems it necessary to write a sixty-five page dissertation on the strategies of Napoleon and Wellington, the various circumstances that changed the course of the famous battle, and the philosophical and international ramifications of the outcome. Fortunately, I found it intriguing. Finally, when the main character hides from his pursuers in a convent, the description of this action is quickly followed by a thirty-seven page section covering every aspect of this specific convent, from its location and layout to its inhabitants and history, and expounding on the philosophies, appropriateness, severity, ambitions, correctness, and results of monasticism, its followers, and its opponents.

As you can see, I am beginning to acquire Victor Hugo's propensity to use long, complex sentences.

I am currently about 500 pages into the book, and I can hardly believe I still have 750 more to go. I can't understand how anyone can write something that long without losing the reader's interest (at least, without losing it often). Whenever I try to write fiction, my stories end up far short on substance. I'm not sure I'd be able to come up with enough storyline to write a novel. Yet even if I had the plot of Les Mis to start with, I would probably have written it in one hundred pages in a very boring way. Victor Hugo transforms it into a twelve-hundred page tome that is fascinating! That is just unfathomable to me. HOW DOES HE DO IT?

A good quote from the part of the book discussing monasticism:

There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classed pathologically, which denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness.

To set up a sense we lack as a source of truth, is a fine piece of blind man's assurance.

And the rarity of it consists in the haughty air of superiority and compassion which is assumed towards the philosophy that sees God, by this philosophy that has to grope its way. It makes one think of a mole exclaiming: "How they excite my pity with their prate about a sun!"

Beautiful Nature

Before I say anything else, let me assure you that I did NOT take this picture. (Click here for the source.) Neither I nor my camera are capable of producing such a work of art. Nevertheless, I have been excited and blessed to see that our pond is the current residence of no fewer than five equally gorgeous wood ducks. Whether they intend to make this their permanent residence I don't know, but I have been enjoying them while they last. They swam around in the pond throughout all of yesterday's snow, and they're still here this afternoon.

The inclement weather actually seems to have been good for naturalistic purposes. My feeders have been alive with goldfinches, chickadees, cardinals, sparrows, and juncos. It is amazing how beautiful wildlife can be. God is amazing!

Panic is...

...let me TELL you what panic is!

(Spell check says I should say "what panic are", but I didn't go through eleven years of A Beka Book Grammar and Composition just to lose my reputation for great noun-verb coordination by deferring to a computer! No, siree!)

Oh, yeah. Panic. I'll start from the beginning.

Well, first of all, as most of you know, I am a member of Chestnut Hill Chapel, a nice little rustic church in one of the prettiest parts of the prettiest state. (That'd be New Hampshire.) I have attended Chestnut Hill my entire life, and it is a wonderful church for many reasons. One of the least important is its tendency to produce superb bloggers. These bloggers include current members such as Bria, Cara, Ryan, Evan, Jill, Lindsay, Susan, Melody, Jenna, and Wesley, as well as former members such as Claire, Liane, Karena, Derrick, Carrie, and Darren.

Back to my story about panic:

Well, since last Sunday was Easter, Pastor Evan asked if our family could do any special music. In honor of a great family heritage of spontaneity, I quickly replied in the affirmative but put off the decision on what we would sing until the night before. By that time some of us had decided it was too late to do anything, and declared that they would not become involved in a musical piece that would bring shame to the S___ name by its obvious want of preparation. (They didn't say that exactly, but I'm using the Dan Rather approach. To paraphrase, "I know that's not what they really said, I know the evidence doesn't exist, but the spirit behind it is certainly, beyond any doubt, true.")

Despite all objections, however, Daddy and I looked through all his music books (I had exhausted mine of possibilities) for an appropriate song that we wouldn't have to learn. We settled on an old favorite: Michael Card's Love Crucified Arose. I'm never quite sure how to punctuate that title, but, as punctuation does little to affect musical pronunciation, I did not panic about THAT. (I'll get to what I DID panic about later.) I looked over the chords and decided to change some of them. Actually, I changed a LOT of them. As a music theory student and ardent fan of frequent and violent modulations, I implemented no fewer than four key changes in a two-verse and three-chorus song: C to D to E flat to F. It was SO MUCH FUN! I've always wanted to sing "Wonderful Grace of Jesus" raising the key one step per verse, but I can rest somewhat more easily having used pivot tone modulation in church by ear!

After the church brunch on Easter morning, Daddy, Ryan, and I went upstairs to practice in the sanctuary. Practice seemed fine, although we didn't do the whole song because people were starting to come in for the meeting. I wanted to check one more key transition before I went to sit down. Wanting to be unobtrusive, I placed my foot on the soft pedal of the piano. As I tried to press it, however, I was perplexed to find that the whole pedal assembly was wiggling more than the pedal itself. "How very strange," were, I am sure, the words which ran through my head. Curious as to the source of the problem, I dropped to my knees and looked at the apparatus. For some strange reason, I decided to press the sostenuto pedal with my hand and see what would happen. Well, what happened was that the entire pedal stand separated itself from the rest of the piano and fell to the floor with a crash.

PANIC!

At first I was afraid I had ruined Easter for everyone. How can Easter be happy without a good Easter service, and how can there be a good Easter service without music, and how can their be music without piano pedals?!?!?!? Then I looked at the end of the assembly, and lo and behold, it was not broken! It had merely come out of its socket, and in a matter of two or three minutes, my uncle and I had reunited the two pieces of the piano.

And that's how the boy saved Easter.

Quote of the Day

"You know, Tom, I'm not David - I never will be! - but today I found that who I am is pretty good."

(President Wayne Palmer from 24, as remembered by Aaron)

Um, good, Mr. President. I'm glad you have such good self-esteem!

An Obiter Dictum

As my last post made clear, snow has returned to the hills of New Hampshire. Once again the familiar crystalline white is spread over the surrounding countryside like vanilla icing. The sun has returned, fortunately, but it smiles not on budding flowers but on ubiquitous white. As an autochthonous New Hampshirite, I cannot be very surprised; nevertheless, I had no presentiment of this foreboding doom, and I have an animadversion to obnoxious surprises.

As the dour clarion calls of the pessimists reverberate throughout the land, I must allow that their lamentations have not completely convinced me that winter has become perdurable. Although I was disillusioned by the return of the hiemal weather, I am something of a realist. The return of favonian weather is inevitable, so if I simply exercise my longamity all will eventually be satisfactory. In the meantime, I have often found music to be a roborant when the prophesies of the clerisy are less than roseate. Therefore, allow me to present a little song I wrote to alleviate the pain of those who are suffering (including you in Georgia, where the temperatures last night were in the twenties!), to ameliorate, as I was saying, the discomfiture of any who both endure psychrophobia and read my blog.

Neither the sound quality nor the nor the stridulous tones of my voice in the nether regions of its range are outstanding, but I hope you found this diverting anyway.

P.s. Can you tell I was trying to get Claire to comment? :)

Upon the Return of Winter

Wherefore, once we the taste of spring had known,
Didst Thou, O Lord, deem right another storm?
The snow, whose ceaseless falling does transform
The scenery, has over flowers blown;
The vernal sun, which just so brightly shown,
Is hidden: sunshine is no more the norm,
And infant buds, perplexed it is not warm,
Must once more wait for south winds to be blown.
Is it to make the springtime fairer still?
I truly yearn for verdancy the more
Now that the white of winter has returned;
If this surprise was sent by Thy pure will,
‘Tis worth the wait; the spring for which I yearned
Will come, and I'll be gladder than before.

- The brilliant Eric Snadforth

What I Heard On the Radio Today

I don't listen to talk shows very much, but I do enjoy them when I can. It's always nice to get a more conservative perspective of the news, especially when there's some humor mixed in. One thing that makes me really happy is when the shows broadcast parody songs. For instance, the December before last, Glenn Beck ran a song entitled, "Happy Hanna-kwanza-*beep*mas" (to the tune of "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas") that ridiculed the commercial emphasis on "the holidays" instead of Christmas and the acceptance of Kwanzaa as a legitimate holiday. On the other end of the spectrum, I heard another one that was supposedly President Bush singing, "Bomb, bomb, bomb....Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann." Stupid, biased, misinformed, and/or wrong? Yes, but it made me laugh anyway. I'm sure I've heard others, too, but they just don't spring to mind....

...except for the one I heard today, which I think made me laugh harder than any I had heard before. It was on the Rush Limbaugh program, and it was supposedly Al Gore singing to the tune of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." The lyrics went something like this:

The earth is a lovely thing,
But it is .... warming.
The temperature has risen half a degree,
Soon we'll all be burning.

The earth's becoming a burning ball of fire;
Polar bears drown, drown
As the seas creep higher;
And it burns, burns, burns,
The earth on fire,
A ball of fire.

There were more verses, too, but that's all I remember. If you were lucky enough to be listening to the EIB network around 2:10 this afternoon, you know just how hilarious the whole thing really was: specifically, EXTRAORDINARILY hilarious.

While we're on this subject, did you know that in 1975 some scientists actually proposed MELTING the polar ice cap to avoid global cooling? (Link found on GlennBeck.com.) Ha! Maybe that plan for saving the earth will be back in vogue in another twenty-five years.

Prepare To Be Shocked!

I showed Brad and Claire's self-portrait to Daddy, and right away he said, "You know, what they SHOULD have done is make a picture of them together as one person."

It is Biblical, after all: "[Therefore] a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one." (Gen. 2:24) Now technology has made it more possible than ever before!