C S Lewis on love

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

-- C S Lewis The Four Loves, chapter 6

Blindness

Met M and V for a cuppa milo and wound up venting a whole load of frustration at them - the poor things - I don't they'd ever seen me in such a snit before.

So tired and drained now and so so angry at myself.

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The four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. Self control isn't staying calm all the time, but also knowing when or where you can safely vent.

Friends, let me lean on you for a bit? I'm ok - or I will be - but for now, I just need a hug very badly.

Meditation: 1 Cor 1:22 - 31

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers:not many of you were wise according to worldly standards,not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written,"Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."

1 Cor 1:22 - 31

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There isn't really anything else that's important.Not intellectualism, not name dropping, not money. Just that attitude of meekness, humility, surrender.

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Biblical worship invades the human soul. It is the soul that too often has been banished from modern worship. We are a people preoccupied with self-image, self-esteem, and self-gratification. Yet in all this we don’t even know what a “self” is.

The human soul is in exile from our thinking. No wonder, then, that it is not considered relevant to worship. Heaven is too distant to contemplate. Our lives are lived within the restricted boundaries of our terrestrial horizon. We have so despised the notion of pie in the sky that we have lost our taste for it altogether.

But when our souls are engaged in worship, our gaze is lifted heavenward, our hearts are set aflame by the divine fire, and we are ready to be done with this world. There is such a thing as mystic sweet communion with Christ in worship.

I’m speaking about something that goes beyond emotion (but includes it); that transcends passion (but doesn’t annul it); that penetrates to the deepest core of our being, where we sense—nay, we know—that we are in the presence of the living God.

-- R C Sproul

Rules for writing fiction

The Guardian went and asked a bunch of writers for ten rules of writing fiction apiece - some of the funnier ones are reproduced below.

Essentially, there are no rules.

Just write.

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(Original article is here(part one) and here(part two))

Using adverbs is a mortal sin

- Elmore Leonard

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.

- Ian Rankin

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

- Margaret Atwood

Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

- Roddy Doyle

Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said"

- Roddy Doyle

If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto­correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes ­"photography" and so on. ­Genius!

- Geoff Dyer

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

- Anne Enright

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

- Jonathan Franzen

(Yup, I'm never writing that Booker Prize winning novel - me and the internet? Inseparable.)

Write

- Neil Gaiman

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.

- Al Kennedy

If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.

- Michael Moorcock

(Oh and Terry Goodkind does NOT follow that rule. SO much ranting on about free market capitalism while standing around.When will he learn? No one talks like that!)

No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.

- Colm Toibin

Talent trumps all. If you're a ­really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, ­crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.

- Sarah Waters

(Mm, put this up because people seem to love the hard bright faceted Hemingway style these days - and while I don't deny Hemingway's genius - it's not the only way to write. Diversity of style is what makes the world of literature so varied and rich. It can be fun to revel in lush ornate Angela Carter-esque prose at times.)

Neruda and WCW at lunch

Fun lunch with Y today, soup and good chat about inter alia, Neruda, imagism, mergers and acquisitions and law school. We started talking shop rather a lot but ended off with a discussion of the gorgeousness of Neruda's poetry.

There's nothing wrong with the mundane but it's nice to have excursions into the sublime once in awhile - went back to work with some half remembered Neruda lines reverberating around my head and feeling thrills down my spine.

Promised to send her some William Carlos Williams - there's such a sense of cleanness about his verse. One gets the same sense with well taken photographs - this clarity of vision - when every object speaks and is heightened beyond its everyday self. (Gah, I know there's a Harold Bloom line on this somewhere but I haven't got the book with me now so I can't type it out)

Below are three very commonly reproduced WCW poems; I doubt there's a lit student alive who hasn't read that plums poem :) but it has somehow escaped becoming cliched, probably because of its sharp crisp simplicity.

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Nantucket

Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

changed by white curtains –
Smell of cleanliness –

Sunshine of late afternoon –
On the glass tray

a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which

a key is lying – And the
immaculate white bed

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The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

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This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous ones we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be good as fingers.
They can be trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

-- Anne Sexton

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Oh how I love this poem. Brimful of the literary love of words laced with the reminder to be careful with them as "they can be both daisies and bruises" (cf James 3).

Of late, my words have been failing me - in speech (Got ticked off good and proper by Mr Gray on careless use of slang!) and on paper - so for awhile, I might be using the words of others: Lewis, Challies, Sproul, Donne, Elizabeth Jennings and poems poems poems.

Before I was a grown up or anything that required a name or label, I was the girl sitting in her room reading reams of funny rhymes and oddball poems. In this stuttering season, I might go dig some out; poems today are so serious! So full of sex, love gone wrong, suicide (all Plath's fault!) and existentialist angst - gimme some Edward Lear, Shel Silverstein, Mary Oliver, Jonathan Swift and Ogden Nash with a dollop of Oscar Wilde thrown in for good measure please.

From whom all blessings flow

We are in the old year about to enter the new,according to the Chinese calendar. But then confusingly, we're also already in the new year, 2010. So for the last month or so, we've inhabited a liminal, twilight space - in the new year, but also in the old - depending on which calendar/ethnicity you look at.

The thought has occupied me in the last month; this odd magical time that we're in. Mainly though, it struck me that this is the state we'll be in for the rest of our lives, until the day we really go home.

We're fully justified but not yet sanctified. The old has passed and the new has come, but we are not perfected yet, not yet caught up in the clouds, not yet given our completed new selves. We're born again, made new, but still inhabit our old bodies, still tempted by our old temptations, still living on this side of heaven.

We will enter fully into the new year in 24 hours but for the rest of our lives, we'll be waiting to go home and be made new.

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For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God,a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God,who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.(2 Cor 5:1-7)

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Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise Him all ye heavenly hosts
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Amen