I took Sunday off of the reading plan. I figured I could use Sundays for devotional readings, particularly sermons. Or not. It's sort of a free space in the reading plan bingo card. And it's not like I've got some kind of time crunch. I want to stick with it for the long term and not burn out in the first month.
Story: The Jockey by Carson McCullers
This was a sharp picture of bitterness eating someone alive. It's not a small detail that the jockey can't eat anymore; he is devouring himself by means of resentment.
Essay: Health is Membership by Wendell Berry
Quintessential Berry. This essay is going to figure pretry prominently in a post I have planned for this week about the film It's a Wonderful Life. I know we are past Christmas, but I saw some new things when I watched it Christmas Day and Berry helps me put words to what I could only put in broad improvise terms.
Poem:
Reading in Wartime
Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled
For four and a half years,
And wives' and mothers' tears
Collected would be able
To water a little field
Untouched by anger and blood,
A penitential yield
Somewhere in the world;
Though in each latitude
Armies like forest fall,
The iniquitous and the good
Head over heels hurled,
And confusion over all:
Boswell's turbulent friend
And his deafening verbal strife,
Ivan Ilych's death
Tell me more about life,
The meaning and the end
Of our familiar breath,
Both being personal,
Than all the carnage can,
Retrieve the shape of man,
Lost and anonymous,
Tell me wherever I look
That not one soul can die
Of this or any clan
Who is not one of us
And has a personal tie
Perhaps to someone now
Searching an ancient book,
Folk-tale or country song
In many and many a tongue,
To find the original face,
The individual soul,
The eye, the lip, the brow
For ever gone from their place,
And gather an image whole.
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