19/1001 - Wendell Berry and Charlotte Mason

 Short story: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

It's been a few years since I read this story. It was interesting to watch her build the tension. She includes details that seem innocuous or unimportant, but there is no such thing as an unimportant detail in a short story. It's like a poem; every line has to earn it's space.

Essays: I went at little hog-wild with essays today. 

• Recipe versus Thought by Essex Cholmondeley
  
• "We Narrate and Then We Know" by E.K. Manders
  
• Some Thoughts on Narration by Helen E. Wix
  
• Concerning "Repeated Narration" by Elsie Kitching
  
• Health is Membership by Wendell Berry (a reread)
  

Narration has been much on my mind lately. It seems like such a simple thing, but its power to order and discipline thoughts and train the student in verbal expression, whether spoken or written, is undervalued in education. Cholmondeley's article especially connected with Berry's article about Healthcare. If we were to substitute all the health-related words in Berry's essay for words about education, I believe the essay would still be true. 

Education is membership. It is bringing the things we have learning into living relationship with each other within ourselves and with ourselves in allowing that information to inform us in the actual sense - to form us inwardly.

Poem:

Beauty

by Edward Thomas

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,

No man, woman, or child alive could please

Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh

Because I sit and frame an epitaph-

" Here lies all that no one loved of him

And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim

Has wearied. But, though I am like a river

At fall of evening while it seems that never

Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while

Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,

This heart, some fraction of me, happily

Floats through the window even now to a tree

Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,

Not like a pewit that returns to wail

For something it has lost, but like a dove

That slants unswerving to its home and love.

There I find my rest, and through the dusk air

Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.