I can't tell you how excited I am by this prospect, as a person who lives with books in a field in the remote English countryside. Thank you so much for this community. Its very existence is an act of kindness; at least it feels that way to me.
I've felt out of alignment with larger systems my whole life. Strange to say, given I was endowed with plenty of privileges. I just turned 76, an age that sounded impossible not so long ago, and I ask myself what to do every day. Well, what I do is not going to make a difference in the way what George does will make a difference, talking about literature here, but I can only do what I can do. Some things sound much the same as George. I have two young grandsons who look up to me - there's a huge place to do good. There's a wider family too, of which I am the oldest. I almost slipped and said patriarch ! I'm fortunate to live in an amazing town where strangers say hello when they pass on the street. Small things make a big difference. I just started thinking that years from now when we're gone, there will be books people will read as being definitive of our era. I wonder what those books will be.
Me at eight years old is the only photo I possess of me that I like. I see someone taking photos of me, I run a mile. As for the "dashing man" (lol), I think a six-year-old very dear to me got to work on the photo with a black felt-tip and gave me pooled black empty eyes like one of his favourite weirdo cartoon characters. Anybody know Poppy Playtime? Sprunkli?
While we're on Christmas stories I have to mention Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory." Introduced to me by my grandmother, I read it to my children every year, and now to grandchildren, and still can't read it without tears.
Thank you Tod - I really felt these words. When I was younger I saw that POV - we can only do what we can do - as defeatist and limiting. There's a whole world, I would think, heal it all! But now, in my core, I believe that the greatest thing we can give is our time and presence. And while it's harder to throw your arms around the whole world with that shift in perspective, the love that breeds in your family/community is infinitely richer.
As you mention patriarchy Tod my mind takes me back - down the lengthening vista of extending years as David Herbert Lawrence might have put it - to a working visit to Cairo, Egypt. We landed on a local Bank Holiday, at Orthodox Christian Eastertime, and we're invited and taken along by our hosts to a garden party at which we hooked up with no less a patriarchal figure that the incumbent Coptic Pope.
I don't have any reason to think that any written record of that memorable encounter will either have been recorded or surface in any historical annals but mention it here simply because my memory of that part of that afternoon sticks with: as yet another, of the many moments in which "I've felt out of alignment with larger systems".
I read, not so long ago, somewhere that Alice Munro's considered view was that "Anecdotes don't make good stories" (or words to that effect). Thinking back to a three-day fly-in, fly-out visitation to Cairo perhaps I'm weakening in my sense that I agree with that great,lady of short fiction.
Ahhh George, you always manage to articulate so well something that is happening in my brain, and surely in other people who are inherently optimistic but facing the reality that we are living in a world more "unvirtuous" than not. I would cite two pieces of timeless art that are helping me with this processing. I am rereading "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro to try to understand the raw accumulation and imposition of power, and what that does to the people who wield raw power. I have been thinking a lot about "Hope Against Hope" by the wife of Osip Mandelstam as inspiration to keep creating and loving beauty and art, even in the face of the brutality of dictatorship. Both of those point me toward exactly what you describe: accept that we only control what we can control, focus on the best work that we can do, and look forward to the world of our children and grandchildren with optimism and hope.
Not so far back in my mind is the question, what do we control? When do we step out of what we control now and attempt to change something currently not in our control. This is what Revolutionaries have done over and over around the world forever. Some threw tea in the ocean, picked up arms and marched on Lexington and Concord. There have been times when not enough has been done to prevent genocide. It can be a comfortable position, maintaining one's work, one's art, through trying times. What one can do will be different for everyone.
Tod, I am ready to join your revolutionary force whenever you make the call. I think the real question is not when and whether we must become revolutionaries — to fight the truly evil (not just unvirtuous but where is the line between unvirtuous and evil). But what? What is it that we are fighting for or against that is outside of our realm of control? If I knew that I would be marching tomorrow. It is so fraught and amorphous this age …
You signpost us towards, contemplating, going for a head on encounter with a big, basic, question, which is to my mind: what, more exactly, is 'control'?
What a wonderful idea for Christmas. FWIW, Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) has several versions of this, including a reproduction of the original edition, with some manuscript pages in Dickens' handwriting, including cross-outs and fill-ins, and with the original illustrations. Another version is the original with original illustrations in color
I love the idea too and can't wait to spend some time with the reproductions of Dickens original manuscript pages! Thank you, Ron! I've downloaded a very nice (typographically pleasing) version from Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens/a-christmas-carol).
With manuscript pages in Dickens’ handwriting? Wow! Thank you.
For people looking for a physical copy of the book, Wordsworth editions have a hardcover collector’s edition with black-and-white illustrations. It’s a beautiful book.
I just downloaded the ebook; #46, with color and b/w illustrations and the original first-edition cover (EPUB3 version) and it looks fine on Apple Books. Thanks for the tip!
For anyone suffering from 'the centre is not holding' type of feeling, I recommend Naomi Klein's latest book; Doppelganger - A Trip Into The Mirrorworld. It's a masterful analysis of the way things are in the world right now and how we got here. In it she quotes Philip Roth from his novel Operation Shylock: "It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous." I think that is a perfect description of modern society.
I'm reading that. The "other" Naomi stayed in my apartment once, years ago, before she was famous with her first book. "Doppelganger" is a trip. That story when she was in the bathroom stall, and heard those two women confusing her with the "other" was so crazy.
I think we might be sharing a brain, George. I've been wandering around with very similar thoughts, recently - and feeling like I'm somehow out of step and without anything of value to offer this strange, out-of-center world. But yesterday I read something that zipped deep into my writer's soul and made me say, "Ah, yes, that's what you're doing. That's what you're writing offers." And - this is the zippy part - "That's what this out-of-center world needs right now." So, that's what I'm going to put in my center - stories that elevate a kind heart, the magic of love, and the importance of community. And now I'm adding this to the mix: "Maybe, we could construe “writing a beautiful, timeless story” as a large-scale act of kindness, with the potential to bless anyone who reads it, on into the future, long after these hardships have resolved and others have arisen." Thank you! Can't wait to slow read A Christmas Carol with my fellow Story Clubbers!
Your words were received at the perfect moment for me and they appear so uncanny and serendipitous.
Your piece - peace - is comforting and consoling and hopeful. We, who can do so, who have breath, must act with hope.
You suggest we read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I had just taken A Christmas Carol out of Tūranga our beautiful library in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. This edition illustrated by Quentin Blake. The writing leaps off the page, the meaning is as profound now as it was then.
A clever tale, a delight, a cautionary tale.
A story which stirs the winds of conscience.
Thank you for your insight and outsight and for the reminder that we can write and write we must.
"The writing leaps off the page"... I don't know the edition Saige but you write it exactly as it impacts on its readers, of all ages. Quentin Blake has been, and thankfully (having just checked) still is a most salient illustrator in the pantheon of salient illustrators.
Having said which I'm off to see if I can locate and acquire a copy of the edition you've been able to access through your, beautiful, local library. Aren't they just, local libraries, beautiful places and liberating spaces?
No idea what the specifics of the words underpinning the acronym may 'cash out' to be.
I more than totally, let's say UTTERLY agree Saige.
Without a little help from his creative friends would Andrew Lloyd-Webber have managed to get his Contemporary Musical / Operatic Theatrical Versioning of 'The Phantom of The Opera' out on the page, put on the stage, and projected into The Literary Stratosphere?
It's funny, I've not read it either... I'm willing to bet other people here haven't read it, but we all "know" it from the countless TV/movie/stage versions and parodies of it. And I'm looking forward to reading it and discovering how much I don't know about something I think I know.
Interesting notion Rolf, dare I gently suggest, this "knowing it", in this case 'A Christmas Carol'.
"What the Dickens", I sense, the real author of the real published text, might be heard, or at least the Ghost of Dickens Past, to be wailing aloud on the passing wind?
"How in the name - remembering, with due reverence, that, believe it or not the text what was writ, by hand, by CD - yes that same and very name, "The Name of Dickens", can such and so many Un-Thunk Thoughts be come to have been posted, even as I write, supposedly in the name of I, gone long past, known in my sentient lifetime as CD... Charles Dickens?
If you haven't read it Rolf, frankly, what can you positively evidence in your support of your claim to 'know it'?
Not intending, in the least, Rolf to somehow be 'personal'. Rather that knowing, emotionally and intellectually, from reading your posts over time passing here on Story Club, I'm most genuinely interested in your reflective reply, should you ever care to air and share it.
Best, and thanks for your latest and ever genial thought provocation Rolf.
"Know" really is such a readily loadable word. As, for example:
"You do, I presume, "know" Chaucer; don't you?"
"You are, aren't you, familiar and fully au fait with Alice Munro? What a canon of work in the terroir of short fiction, I'm sure you agree. To have read her is to have come to "know" her?"
"You "know" George Saunders surely, as well as you "know" eggs are eggs, you just "know" he's one of the great, living, go to guys n' gals when it comes to time of need for a short story. Oops, I'll stop now, "knowing" I've over-egged what I meant to make as but the pithiest of pointed posts!"
"As much as it ever was, this word "know" can turn out to be a claim of a most dangerous kind" said George Smiley, quietly, to the guy who he knew was a spy sat facing him across the scratched table top in the shabby cell they found themselves in. "What you "know" Percy is as likely to be the end of you,"
Oddly, I've managed to avoid the TV etc versions. But I read it several times as a kid, in the full original version. Then let it slide. I read it again recently. It didn't exactly light a fire in my mind. But we will soon be discussing it, great!
George's concept of virtuous systems made me think of the bit I just read in 'It Can't Happen Here' by Sinclair Lewis-written in 1935. I'm rereading this book just to scare myself regarding our current political situation.
At this point in the novel, a fascist has become the U.S. president, and Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is in prison for writing that some good people were recently murdered by the president's men. In his cell, he's thinking "The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup,." Later, he goes on, "It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution and now the Fascist Dictatorship."
If I remember right, despite his self-criticism, he goes on to do what he thinks is right, and continues to struggle against the tyranny of the totalitarian government.
Beautifully said (written). When I feel (light, or heavier) despair I often turn to writing to find my way back to my "home", back to "myself". I am very stubborn with my hope. I have to be. I have two teenage daughters that remind me everyday of my responsibility. No matter how small it is in the grand scheme of things. I show up and do my best.
And you know Imola that your first word, "said", and your second word, "written" are both correct. George writes his starter posts so well and conversationally that his words, in a literal sense, do speak off the page to us his Story Club Readers.
Like you he always shows up and does his very best.
At least that's the way I read him and hear him :-))
This is so interesting that you point this out Rob, because I couldn’t decide which word (said, or, written) was more accurate! So I guess you read me well! :)
I used to read A Christmas Carol every December- when I taught eighth grade English. As the language is a bit archaic for thirteen year olds I often read great chunks of it aloud to them- and I loved it. I don't how many of them did, but they were more than happy to be shed of reading it on their own for homework. I believe I did a very good Jacob Marley if I do say so myself. "I wear the chains I forged in life. Is its pattern strange to you???" Bring it on you Christmas spirits!!
George says, "It’s such a short time we have on this earth, to be happy, to be present, to perform, every day, whatever acts of kindness we can." This is the conclusion, (not said as well), I came to in 1969 as a freshman in college participating in protests against the Vietnam War. I remember realizing that I would never be an anti-war leader or someone who could affect change in a big way, but that I could be nice to the people around me, and maybe that would be something.
Oh, wow, George. This is so very close to what is brewing, souring, poisoning my heart and my creative life. I to feel that the world around me is out of sync with the ideas, well, with the composition that is me. Writing does help me also. I feel like I am a product of a continual exercise that is writing, that is my art. In other words, I don't separate myself from the craft that is writing. Every scene, every conversation is the writing that is my life.
"A Christmas Carol," yes, I look forward to our reading and discussion. I first read it when I was in my teens. I absolutely know that since I'm slightly older now :) the many themes present in the work will feel so different now.
Thanks for your writing and, everyone, thank you all for being part of our continuing dialogue.
I can't tell you how excited I am by this prospect, as a person who lives with books in a field in the remote English countryside. Thank you so much for this community. Its very existence is an act of kindness; at least it feels that way to me.
'...community. Its very existence is an an act of kindness.' A great description of how communities can nourish and replenish when we share and care.
I've felt out of alignment with larger systems my whole life. Strange to say, given I was endowed with plenty of privileges. I just turned 76, an age that sounded impossible not so long ago, and I ask myself what to do every day. Well, what I do is not going to make a difference in the way what George does will make a difference, talking about literature here, but I can only do what I can do. Some things sound much the same as George. I have two young grandsons who look up to me - there's a huge place to do good. There's a wider family too, of which I am the oldest. I almost slipped and said patriarch ! I'm fortunate to live in an amazing town where strangers say hello when they pass on the street. Small things make a big difference. I just started thinking that years from now when we're gone, there will be books people will read as being definitive of our era. I wonder what those books will be.
"but I can only do what I can do" That's the truth of it, right there.
My mum used to say: you can't do better than your best.
There may be books, texts, whatever the format may be, that squeak through the gaps and speak of humanity, the beauty of children and of the earth.
It would be quite something if we could create seeds, for now and for the future.
(Happy Birthday, Tod! I hit the same age last summer. :))
John, you've changed your photo from that dashing man to a sweet youngster. Don't think I don't notice these things.
Me at eight years old is the only photo I possess of me that I like. I see someone taking photos of me, I run a mile. As for the "dashing man" (lol), I think a six-year-old very dear to me got to work on the photo with a black felt-tip and gave me pooled black empty eyes like one of his favourite weirdo cartoon characters. Anybody know Poppy Playtime? Sprunkli?
Thanks John.
I'm confident all that is happening as we speak.
While we're on Christmas stories I have to mention Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory." Introduced to me by my grandmother, I read it to my children every year, and now to grandchildren, and still can't read it without tears.
Thank you Tod - I really felt these words. When I was younger I saw that POV - we can only do what we can do - as defeatist and limiting. There's a whole world, I would think, heal it all! But now, in my core, I believe that the greatest thing we can give is our time and presence. And while it's harder to throw your arms around the whole world with that shift in perspective, the love that breeds in your family/community is infinitely richer.
As you mention patriarchy Tod my mind takes me back - down the lengthening vista of extending years as David Herbert Lawrence might have put it - to a working visit to Cairo, Egypt. We landed on a local Bank Holiday, at Orthodox Christian Eastertime, and we're invited and taken along by our hosts to a garden party at which we hooked up with no less a patriarchal figure that the incumbent Coptic Pope.
I don't have any reason to think that any written record of that memorable encounter will either have been recorded or surface in any historical annals but mention it here simply because my memory of that part of that afternoon sticks with: as yet another, of the many moments in which "I've felt out of alignment with larger systems".
I read, not so long ago, somewhere that Alice Munro's considered view was that "Anecdotes don't make good stories" (or words to that effect). Thinking back to a three-day fly-in, fly-out visitation to Cairo perhaps I'm weakening in my sense that I agree with that great,lady of short fiction.
Ahhh George, you always manage to articulate so well something that is happening in my brain, and surely in other people who are inherently optimistic but facing the reality that we are living in a world more "unvirtuous" than not. I would cite two pieces of timeless art that are helping me with this processing. I am rereading "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro to try to understand the raw accumulation and imposition of power, and what that does to the people who wield raw power. I have been thinking a lot about "Hope Against Hope" by the wife of Osip Mandelstam as inspiration to keep creating and loving beauty and art, even in the face of the brutality of dictatorship. Both of those point me toward exactly what you describe: accept that we only control what we can control, focus on the best work that we can do, and look forward to the world of our children and grandchildren with optimism and hope.
Not so far back in my mind is the question, what do we control? When do we step out of what we control now and attempt to change something currently not in our control. This is what Revolutionaries have done over and over around the world forever. Some threw tea in the ocean, picked up arms and marched on Lexington and Concord. There have been times when not enough has been done to prevent genocide. It can be a comfortable position, maintaining one's work, one's art, through trying times. What one can do will be different for everyone.
Tod, I am ready to join your revolutionary force whenever you make the call. I think the real question is not when and whether we must become revolutionaries — to fight the truly evil (not just unvirtuous but where is the line between unvirtuous and evil). But what? What is it that we are fighting for or against that is outside of our realm of control? If I knew that I would be marching tomorrow. It is so fraught and amorphous this age …
You signpost us towards, contemplating, going for a head on encounter with a big, basic, question, which is to my mind: what, more exactly, is 'control'?
Why tie yourself up
With the notion of 'trying'
When you're doing
Whatever this 'writerly'
Wonder-shit is, has been
Will be tomorrow, time future
Will stretch as infinitely
Whether we pause to ponder
Why, ever we wonder
Was Eternity our
What's passed us by
Will it be our, next, horizon?
Luv' ya' George, luv' y'all!
Wise, profound, witty.
What a wonderful idea for Christmas. FWIW, Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) has several versions of this, including a reproduction of the original edition, with some manuscript pages in Dickens' handwriting, including cross-outs and fill-ins, and with the original illustrations. Another version is the original with original illustrations in color
Cool, Ron! Thank you.
I love the idea too and can't wait to spend some time with the reproductions of Dickens original manuscript pages! Thank you, Ron! I've downloaded a very nice (typographically pleasing) version from Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens/a-christmas-carol).
With manuscript pages in Dickens’ handwriting? Wow! Thank you.
For people looking for a physical copy of the book, Wordsworth editions have a hardcover collector’s edition with black-and-white illustrations. It’s a beautiful book.
https://wordsworth-editions.com/book/christmas-carol-collectors-edition/
I just downloaded the ebook; #46, with color and b/w illustrations and the original first-edition cover (EPUB3 version) and it looks fine on Apple Books. Thanks for the tip!
For anyone suffering from 'the centre is not holding' type of feeling, I recommend Naomi Klein's latest book; Doppelganger - A Trip Into The Mirrorworld. It's a masterful analysis of the way things are in the world right now and how we got here. In it she quotes Philip Roth from his novel Operation Shylock: "It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous." I think that is a perfect description of modern society.
Reading this too, and do recommend - although, I have to admit, it’s giving me that “outgunned” feeling George described.
I'm reading that. The "other" Naomi stayed in my apartment once, years ago, before she was famous with her first book. "Doppelganger" is a trip. That story when she was in the bathroom stall, and heard those two women confusing her with the "other" was so crazy.
Yes and yes!
I think we might be sharing a brain, George. I've been wandering around with very similar thoughts, recently - and feeling like I'm somehow out of step and without anything of value to offer this strange, out-of-center world. But yesterday I read something that zipped deep into my writer's soul and made me say, "Ah, yes, that's what you're doing. That's what you're writing offers." And - this is the zippy part - "That's what this out-of-center world needs right now." So, that's what I'm going to put in my center - stories that elevate a kind heart, the magic of love, and the importance of community. And now I'm adding this to the mix: "Maybe, we could construe “writing a beautiful, timeless story” as a large-scale act of kindness, with the potential to bless anyone who reads it, on into the future, long after these hardships have resolved and others have arisen." Thank you! Can't wait to slow read A Christmas Carol with my fellow Story Clubbers!
Onward <3
Dear George.
Your words were received at the perfect moment for me and they appear so uncanny and serendipitous.
Your piece - peace - is comforting and consoling and hopeful. We, who can do so, who have breath, must act with hope.
You suggest we read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I had just taken A Christmas Carol out of Tūranga our beautiful library in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. This edition illustrated by Quentin Blake. The writing leaps off the page, the meaning is as profound now as it was then.
A clever tale, a delight, a cautionary tale.
A story which stirs the winds of conscience.
Thank you for your insight and outsight and for the reminder that we can write and write we must.
"The writing leaps off the page"... I don't know the edition Saige but you write it exactly as it impacts on its readers, of all ages. Quentin Blake has been, and thankfully (having just checked) still is a most salient illustrator in the pantheon of salient illustrators.
Having said which I'm off to see if I can locate and acquire a copy of the edition you've been able to access through your, beautiful, local library. Aren't they just, local libraries, beautiful places and liberating spaces?
I have a shameful confession - I’ve never read A Christmas Carol. I’m excited to rectify this.
No shame at all, I love it when we can acknowledge works that escape us and find them and escape.
SHAME.
No idea what the specifics of the words underpinning the acronym may 'cash out' to be.
I more than totally, let's say UTTERLY agree Saige.
Without a little help from his creative friends would Andrew Lloyd-Webber have managed to get his Contemporary Musical / Operatic Theatrical Versioning of 'The Phantom of The Opera' out on the page, put on the stage, and projected into The Literary Stratosphere?
It's funny, I've not read it either... I'm willing to bet other people here haven't read it, but we all "know" it from the countless TV/movie/stage versions and parodies of it. And I'm looking forward to reading it and discovering how much I don't know about something I think I know.
Interesting notion Rolf, dare I gently suggest, this "knowing it", in this case 'A Christmas Carol'.
"What the Dickens", I sense, the real author of the real published text, might be heard, or at least the Ghost of Dickens Past, to be wailing aloud on the passing wind?
"How in the name - remembering, with due reverence, that, believe it or not the text what was writ, by hand, by CD - yes that same and very name, "The Name of Dickens", can such and so many Un-Thunk Thoughts be come to have been posted, even as I write, supposedly in the name of I, gone long past, known in my sentient lifetime as CD... Charles Dickens?
If you haven't read it Rolf, frankly, what can you positively evidence in your support of your claim to 'know it'?
Not intending, in the least, Rolf to somehow be 'personal'. Rather that knowing, emotionally and intellectually, from reading your posts over time passing here on Story Club, I'm most genuinely interested in your reflective reply, should you ever care to air and share it.
Best, and thanks for your latest and ever genial thought provocation Rolf.
Rob
That's why I had "know" in quotes, but I should have been more clear in that I really don't know it.
"Know" really is such a readily loadable word. As, for example:
"You do, I presume, "know" Chaucer; don't you?"
"You are, aren't you, familiar and fully au fait with Alice Munro? What a canon of work in the terroir of short fiction, I'm sure you agree. To have read her is to have come to "know" her?"
"You "know" George Saunders surely, as well as you "know" eggs are eggs, you just "know" he's one of the great, living, go to guys n' gals when it comes to time of need for a short story. Oops, I'll stop now, "knowing" I've over-egged what I meant to make as but the pithiest of pointed posts!"
"As much as it ever was, this word "know" can turn out to be a claim of a most dangerous kind" said George Smiley, quietly, to the guy who he knew was a spy sat facing him across the scratched table top in the shabby cell they found themselves in. "What you "know" Percy is as likely to be the end of you,"
Oddly, I've managed to avoid the TV etc versions. But I read it several times as a kid, in the full original version. Then let it slide. I read it again recently. It didn't exactly light a fire in my mind. But we will soon be discussing it, great!
Totally
I only hope this isn’t your most shameful confession.
Not even close :)
Let's do it!
Man. I wonder if I've only experienced the theatrical productions...have I ever read it? Maybe not!
Up above I said I hadn't, but I don't know, maybe I did when I was a teenager...
George's concept of virtuous systems made me think of the bit I just read in 'It Can't Happen Here' by Sinclair Lewis-written in 1935. I'm rereading this book just to scare myself regarding our current political situation.
At this point in the novel, a fascist has become the U.S. president, and Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is in prison for writing that some good people were recently murdered by the president's men. In his cell, he's thinking "The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup,." Later, he goes on, "It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution and now the Fascist Dictatorship."
If I remember right, despite his self-criticism, he goes on to do what he thinks is right, and continues to struggle against the tyranny of the totalitarian government.
Echoes of the words of well meaning Liberals of late. How often I have heard the words "educated" and "uneducated," referring to our situation.
Pithy, pointed, incisive.
How interesting!
Beautifully said (written). When I feel (light, or heavier) despair I often turn to writing to find my way back to my "home", back to "myself". I am very stubborn with my hope. I have to be. I have two teenage daughters that remind me everyday of my responsibility. No matter how small it is in the grand scheme of things. I show up and do my best.
And you know Imola that your first word, "said", and your second word, "written" are both correct. George writes his starter posts so well and conversationally that his words, in a literal sense, do speak off the page to us his Story Club Readers.
Like you he always shows up and does his very best.
At least that's the way I read him and hear him :-))
This is so interesting that you point this out Rob, because I couldn’t decide which word (said, or, written) was more accurate! So I guess you read me well! :)
Suggest you, first, read A Christmas Carol quietly to yourself; then, second, read it aloud, to either yourself, or better, to those around you.
For the second suggestion a flat roof on the top of a block of apartments is, at any suitable time, a grand venue.
Point is: I bet my pound to your penny that you will have a sense of gain by first reading quietly and second reading aloud.
I used to read A Christmas Carol every December- when I taught eighth grade English. As the language is a bit archaic for thirteen year olds I often read great chunks of it aloud to them- and I loved it. I don't how many of them did, but they were more than happy to be shed of reading it on their own for homework. I believe I did a very good Jacob Marley if I do say so myself. "I wear the chains I forged in life. Is its pattern strange to you???" Bring it on you Christmas spirits!!
Care to unpack, a little more, quite what underpins "the language is a bit archaic for thirteen year olds" Carolyn?
George says, "It’s such a short time we have on this earth, to be happy, to be present, to perform, every day, whatever acts of kindness we can." This is the conclusion, (not said as well), I came to in 1969 as a freshman in college participating in protests against the Vietnam War. I remember realizing that I would never be an anti-war leader or someone who could affect change in a big way, but that I could be nice to the people around me, and maybe that would be something.
Oh, wow, George. This is so very close to what is brewing, souring, poisoning my heart and my creative life. I to feel that the world around me is out of sync with the ideas, well, with the composition that is me. Writing does help me also. I feel like I am a product of a continual exercise that is writing, that is my art. In other words, I don't separate myself from the craft that is writing. Every scene, every conversation is the writing that is my life.
"A Christmas Carol," yes, I look forward to our reading and discussion. I first read it when I was in my teens. I absolutely know that since I'm slightly older now :) the many themes present in the work will feel so different now.
Thanks for your writing and, everyone, thank you all for being part of our continuing dialogue.
Along with the Dickens I was going to read Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor by John Cheever and give it the Story Club treatment.
Persist.