March 9, 2011 Leave a Comment

Don Quixote – Cervantes (2)

Man of La Mancha CD cover

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Jack reads selected passages
from his favorite books

Unscripted. Unrehearsed. Unedited.
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TODAY’S READING –

The History and Adventures of the
Renowned Don Quixote, 
Miguel de Cervantes, 
London, Folio Society, 1995
(Part 2 of 3) 

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Of the enchantment of Dulcinea I refuse to speak. All readers of Don Quixote must discover this final miracle for themselves.  (From the Introduction, Folio Society Limited Edition)

THE EXCERPT:

“How was that queen of beauty employed when you arrived?” said Don Quixote. “I daresay, you found her stringing pearls, or embroidering some device for this her captive knight, with threads of gold.”

“No, truly,” answered the squire, “I found her winnowing two bushels of wheat in the yard.”

“Then you may depend upon it,” resumed the knight, “the grains of that wheat were converted into pearls by the touch of her hand. And didst thou observe, my friend, whether it was of the finer or common sort?”

“Why neither,” said Sancho, “it seems to be as it were red wheat.”

“But since it was winnowed by her fair hands,” answered Don Quixote, “I dare affirm, it will make the whitest bread in Spain. Go on with thy information. When the letter was delivered did she not kiss it, and place it on the crown of her head, in token of respect? Did she not perform some ceremony worthy of the sender? Pray how did she receive it?”

“When I presented the letter,” answered Sancho, “she was in a main hurry, winnowing a large heap of wheat that was in her sieve; and said to me, ‘Friend, lay down the letter on that sack; for I can’t pretend to read it, until I have made an end of my work.’”

“Discrete lady!” cried the knight. “Her intention certainly was to read it at her leisure, that she might recreate herself with the contents. Proceed, Sancho, and while she was thus employed, what conversation passed between you? What questions did she ask concerning me? And what answers didst thou make? Recount the whole, without leaving one syllable untold.”

“She asked me no question,” replied the squire, “but I told her, how I had left your worship doing penance for loving of her, skipping among those rocks, naked from the waist upwards, like a mere savage, sleeping on the bare ground; neglecting to eat your food like a Christian, or to comb your beard like a decent man, and whining, and weeping, and cursing your fortune.”

“If you said I cursed my fortune, you misrepresented me,” said Don Quixote, “for I bless my fate and will bless it all the days of my life, for having made me worthy to aspire to the love of such an high lady as Dulcinea del Toboso.”

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LISTEN to episode 3 in this series

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March 7, 2011 Leave a Comment

Don Quixote – Cervantes (1)

Don Quixote Cover

x
Jack reads selected passages 
from his favorite books

Unscripted. Unrehearsed. Unedited.

TODAY’S READING – 

The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote,
Miguel de Cervantes,
London, Folio Society, 1995
(Part 1 of 3)
x 

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Don Quixote offers something unique in literature: the sight of an author teaching himself to write the first modern novel. As we read, a book is born and grows up before our eyes and eventually becomes so universal, so funny, so sad, so wise, that we wish it would never end. (From the Introduction to my Folio Society Limited Edition)

THE EXCERPT: 
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In a certain corner of La Mancha, the name of which I do not choose to remember, there lately lived one of those country gentleman, who adorn their halls with the rusty lance and worm-eaten target, and ride forth on the skeleton of a horse. . . .

Be it known, therefore, that this sad honest gentleman at his leisure hours, which engrossed the greatest part of the year, addicted himself to the reading of books of chivalry, which he perused with such rapture and application, that he had not only forgot the pleasure of the chase, but also utterly neglected the management of his estate: nay to such a pass did his curiosity and madness, in this particular, drive him, that he sold many good acres of Terra Firma, to purchase books of knight-errantry, with which he furnished his library to the utmost of his power; but none of them pleased him so much, as those that were written by the famous Feliciano de Silva, whom he admired as the pearl of all authors, for the brilliancy of his prose, and the beautiful perplexity of his expression. How was he transported, when he read those amorous complaints, and doughty challenges, that so often occur in his works.

“The reason of the unreasonable usage my reason has met with, so unreasons my reason, that I have reason to complain of your beauty;” and how did he enjoy the following flower of composition! “The high heaven of your divinity, which with stars divinely fortifies your beauty, and renders you meritorious of that merit, which by your highness is merited!”

The poor gentleman lost his senses, in poring over, and attempting to discover the meaning of these and other such rhapsodies, which Aristotle himself would not be able to unravel, were he to rise from the dead for that purpose only.

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LISTEN to episode 3 in this series
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March 4, 2011 Leave a Comment

The Christian Imagination

 

Christian ImaginationJack reads selected passages 

from his favorite books

Unscripted. Unrehearsed. Unedited.

TODAY’S READING – 

The Christian Imagination
“Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader”
Peter J. Leithart, 2002. 

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Madeleine L’Engle on the reader: The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life. Creative involvement: that’s the basic difference between reading a book and watching TV.  (from Walking on Water)

THE EXCERPT: 

Works of fiction present a world to us. In some sorts of fiction, like fantasy or science fiction, the world of the novel is a world quite completely different from the world of our experience. In many cases, of course, the world presented is much like our own world. Paris and London were really cities in the late 18th century, the Bastille really did fall, severed heads really were mounted on pikes and paraded through the streets of Paris — these are not figments of Dickens’s imagination. But even the novel that strives for historical accuracy invites us to enter a world different from our own. Danton and Robespierre really existed, but Lucy Manette and Sidney Carton did not, and the world of A Tale of Two Cities is different from ours precisely because it is a world peopled by the likes of Sidney Carton and Lucy Manette.

No matter what the difference between the real and fictional worlds, reading intelligently requires a humble acceptance of the world of the novel. It is a poor reader, and a proud one, who throws aside A Tale of Two Cities with the sneering complaint that “It’s unrealistic. Sidney Carton never went to the guillotine.” A “suspension of disbelief” is elementary in reading fiction, but it is rarely recognized as an act of humility. In part, that is due to the dour connotations that “humility” has in contemporary usage, but here those connotations are completely out of place. As G. K. Chesterton said, humility makes a small, and that means that everything around us becomes large and astounding and magnificent. Humility before the world that the author presents means that we allow him to set the rules, but it also gives reading an element of play. Across the centuries, Dickens says to us, “I’ll pretend Jerry Cruncher was real if you will.” By opening the book and beginning to read, we are saying, “Let me play too.” To read well, we must become as little children.

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March 2, 2011 Leave a Comment

Adventures of Tom Bombadil – Tolkien

Tolkien Reader cover

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Jack reads selected passages 
from his favorite books 

Unscripted. Unrehearsed. Unedited.

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TODAY’S READING – 

The Tolkien Reader
“The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” 
J.R.R. Tolkien, 1966. 

 

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While many are familiar with Tolkien’s involvement with the literary group The Inklings, it wasn’t the only literary group of which he was a member. Tolkien himself started the Coalbiters (meaning those who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they ‘bite the coal’), to persuade his friends that Icelandic literature was worth reading in the original language. The influence of the rhyme scheme of Icelandic mythology is evident in today’s reading.
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There was a merry passenger,
A messenger, a mariner;
He built a gilded gondola
To wander in, and had in her
A load of yellow oranges
And porridge for his provender;
He perfumed her with marjoram
And cardamom and lavender.

He called the winds of argosies
With cargoes in to carry him
Across the rivers seventeen
And lay between to tarry him,
He landed all in loneliness
Where stonily the pebbles on
The running river Derrilyn
Goes merrily for ever on.
He journeyed then through meadow-lands
To Shadow-land that dreary lay,
And under hill and over hill
Went roving still a weary way.

He sat and sang a melody,
His errantry a-tarrying;
He begged a pretty butterfly
That fluttered by to marry him.
She scorned him and she scoffed at him,
She laughed at him unpitying;
So long he studied wizardry
And sigaldry and smithying.

He wove a tissue airy-thin
To snare her in; to follow her
He made him beetle-leather wing
And feather wing of swallow-hair
He caught her in bewilderment
With filament of spider-thread;
He made her soft pavilions
Of lilies, and a bridal bed
Of flowers and of thistle-down
To nestle down and rest her in;
And silken webs of filmy white
And silver light he dressed her in.
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February 28, 2011 Leave a Comment

Autobiography of William Butler Yeats

IStock_000005761016XSmall Jack reads selected passages
from his favorite books

Unscripted. Unrehearsed. Unedited.

TODAY’S READING – 

Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 1914. 

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I began reading W. B. Yeats after coming across a favorable recommendation from another author I admire, C. S. Lewis. Of his fellow Irishman, in a letter to a friend, Lewis wrote: “I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart, whom I am sure you would delight in, W. B. Yeats. He writes plays and poems of rare spirit and beauty about our old Irish mythology.”

THE EXCERPT:

Someone at the Young Ireland Society gave me a newspaper that I might read some article or letter. I began idly reading verses describing the shore of Ireland as seen by a returning, dying emigrant. My eyes filled with tears and yet I knew the verses were badly written — vague, abstract words such as one finds in a newspaper. I looked at the end and saw the name of some political exile who had died but a few days after his return to Ireland. They had moved me because they contained the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life, and when I met my father I was full of the discovery. We should write out our own thoughts in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend. We should not disguise them in any way; for our lives give them force as the lives of people in plays give force to their words. Personal utterance, which had almost ceased in English literature, could be as fine an escape from rhetoric and abstraction as drama itself. But my father would hear nothing but drama; personal utterance was only egotism. I knew it was not, but as yet did not know how to explain the difference. I tried from that on to write out of my emotions exactly as they came to me in life, not changing them to make them more beautiful. “If I can be sincere and make my language natural, and without becoming discursive, like a novelist, and so indiscreet and prosaic,” I said to myself, “I shall, if good luck or bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet; for it will be no longer a matter of literature at all.” Yet when I re-read those early poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic convention, unconscious drama. It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is. (p. 62)

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