56/1001 - Catching up

 Well, it has been a minute since I managed to follow the Bradburian plan. Thankfully, ai had *one* day two weeks ago where I was able to read an essay, short story, and a poem. The poem feels like nothing big since I read poetry everyday. It is making time for short stories and essays that is more challenging, especially when I am reading to teach my classes at our homeschool co-op.

Essay: A Facebook friend shared an essay by William James called, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." In it, he quotes a beautiful passage from a Robert Louis Stevenson essay:

"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse... And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall." 

Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Lantern Bearers"

Short Story: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

Poem:

Bees And Morning Glories

By John Ciardi 

Morning glories, pale as a mist drying,

fade from the heat of the day, but already

hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg

hooks have found and are boarding them.

This could do for the sack of the imaginary

fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they

one by one vanish and leave still real

only what has been snatched out of the spell.

I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except

when the hive is threatened. They know

the good of it must be grabbed and hauled

before the whole feast wisps off.

They swarm in light and, fast, dive in,

then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy

with gold and sunlight. The line of them,

like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge.

And back again to find the fleet gone.

Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off

they cruise to what stays open longer.

Nothing green gives honey. And by now

you’d have to look twice to see more than green

where all those white sails trembled

when the world was misty and open

and the prize was there to be taken.