28/1001 - Tuesday, February 11, 2025

 Short Story: The Waiting Maid's Parrot from the collection of Chinese Fairy tales.

Essay: On Maltreating Words by GK Chesterton. Such a good essay! You can read it here: https://archive.org/details/generallyspeakin0000gkch/page/158/mode/2up

"In the matter of language, which is the main matter of literature, it is clear that words are perpetually falling below themselves. They are ceasing to say what they mean or to mean what they say; they are always beginning to mean something that is not quite different, but much less definite and strong. And, in this fall of man's chosen symbols, there may well be a symbol of his own fall. He has a difficulty in ruling his tongue; not only in the sense of the talking organ, but in the sense of the language he talks. Almost when he is not looking, it is always running wild; or, worse still, running weak."

He concludes the essay with this:

"...this distinction directly concerns all the talk about new art or experiments in literature. ... All we are doing, when we pick our words or try our experiments, is resisting the general trend of all style towards staleness. Some traditionalists do go a little too stale. Many get a great deal too fresh, as the landladies were supposed to say. But their mistake is merely in supposing that they have any claim to progress or claim to pride. What they are doing, at the best, is to resist retrogression, the retrogression that simply goes with repitition. In other words, all artists are dedicated to an eternal struggle against the downward tendency of their own method and medium. For this reason they must sometimes be fresh; but there is no reason why they should not also be modest. There is nothing to brag about, in the mere fact that your mode of expression is perpetually going to the dogs. The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep. There are some to whom this may even seem a sombre version of human existence; but not to me; for I have long believed that the only really happy and hopeful faith is a faith in the Fall of Man. (emphases mine)

Poem:

The Reader

by Richard Wilbur (written for his wife)

She is going back, these days, to the great stories

That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light

Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,

And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.

Onward they come again, the orphans reaching

For a first handhold in a stony world,

The young provincials who at last look down

On the city’s maze, and will descend into it,

The serious girl, once more, who would live nobly,

The sly one who aspires to marry so,

The young man bent on glory, and that other

Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does

What will become of them in bloody field

Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times

She sees their first and final selves at once,

As a god might to whom all time is now.

Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps

She meets them this time with a wiser eye,

Noting that Julien’s calculating head

Is from the first too severed from his heart.

But the true wonder of it is that she,

For all that she may know of consequences,

Still turns enchanted to the next bright page

Like some Natasha in the ballroom door—

Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,

The blind delight of being, ready still

To enter life on life and see them 

The moon was so bright this morning that it cast deep shadows everywhere. It looked like snow had fallen.