36/1001 - catching up

 I've fallen behind posting this week and I've forgotten some of what I've read. Posting here helps me keep track of things, and gives me a place to share with others some of the gems I've found. I'm going to just go ahead and smoosh things I remember reading from the last few days and call it Day 36 of 1001

Essays: This might not be an essay proper, but it's worth mentioning and sharing. I was messaging with a friend about T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and I mentioned that I had watched a video of Malcolm Guite talk about the final section of the poem called Little Gidding. I searched on Google for the link to send her, when this podcast came up. I want to say right out that I am not comfortable with the intense mystical-ness that the priest brings, but it's worth it to listen to anyway because Malcolm Guite's comments are absolutely fabulous. I would love to hear him work through this poem slowly, stanza by stanza. Here are some excellent quotes from the episodes:

"Poetry is wooing apprehension into comprehension." 
"Poetry is patterned language." 

"It is by poetry that we attend to the unattended moments."

- Malcom Guite

Here are both episodes of the podcast, part 1 and part 2
Here is Alec Guiness (a.k.a. Obi Wan Kenobi) reading the entire poem: https://youtu.be/ccupYGfiDEw
And here is a wonderful lecture from Thomas Howard on the Quartets: https://youtu.be/fnTqmpti6So?si=Yceinw3qgKtLLH_e

On Wednesday night, I read Charlotte Mason's chapter 15 of School Education, "School Books and Education." This part is everything: 

Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life.––

We begin to see what we want. Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Thou hast set my feet in a large room should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him? I know you may bring a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. What I complain of is that we do not bring our horse to the water. We give him miserable little text-books, mere compendiums of facts, which he is to learn off and say and produce at an examination; or we give him various knowledge in the form of warm diluents, prepared by his teacher with perhaps some grains of living thought to the gallon. And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children.

Short Stories: I've been slacking on this part. I'm reading Old Yeller for the first time in my life and aloud to my 11 y.o. So maybe I'll count that. Every chapter is a different episode. It's been so nice to have a read aloud with just him and me. I can feel the time of these kinds of activities winding up. There's a golden haze about it, like the light in September that still has hints of Summer about it, before Autumn turns its face to Winter.

Poems:

I've been reading You read to me I'll read to you by John Ciardi to my kids (including the adult ones) after we read our bible, but for myself, I've been loving the early modern poets. Today I decided to look up my favorite Burns poem for the second one. 

The Pilot
by Edwin Arlington Robinson

From the Past and Unavailing
Out of cloudland we are steering:
After groping, after fearing,
Into starlight we come trailing,
And we find the stars are true.
Still, O comrade, what of you?
You are gone, but we are sailing,
And the old ways are all new.

For the Lost and Unreturning
We have drifted, we have waited;
Uncommanded and unrated,
We have tossed and wandered, yearning
For a charm that comes no more
From the old lights by the shore:
We have shamed ourselves in learning
What you knew so long before.

For the Breed of the Far-going
Who are strangers, and all brothers,
May forget no more than others
Who looked seaward with eyes flowing.
But are brothers to bewail
One who fought so foul a gale?
You have won beyond our knowing,
You are gone, but yet we sail.

To a Mouse
by Robert Burns
On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss ’t!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Here is Billy Collins reading it, too good to miss - 

https://youtu.be/5kFST60dNgY?si=7F5VL6Qtsg7Oj1sJ