welsie's cousin, henry
the longing (thoughts from love in the ruins by Walker Percy)
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
I just finished Walker Percy's novel, Love in the Ruins...my blog's name sake. Like the rest of Percy's novels that I have read, it has a way of conveying longing and real life experience alongside a wierd, farfetched, and complex story line. It's kind of like watching a Seinfeld episode. Just real enough to relate, but exagerated enough to be entertaining.
LITR is a story of Dr. Thomas More, a machine, three ladies, and the end of the world. I won't bother with a synopsis, but one general theme of the book is the issue of longing and the soul. For thomas more, it is usually in the form of whisky and women..but he is wise, as all percy characters are, and tangled up inthe why's and how's of living right in the world. percy's characters fail unashamedly, but they also find redemption in a way that is both hopeful and yet still honest about what he has been redeemed from.
At the end of LITR, Dr. thomas more is in his office, eyeing a bottle of early times whiskey. He is suddenly filled with the longing...
"Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for good drinking and fighting comrades, for football game girls in the fall and faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being 15 and 50 and with the winter sun striking down into a brickyard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill into linoleum. Desire has a smell; of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a backlot in a small town"
josh and i were talking about the longing...i asked josh, when is the first time you remember longing? I ask myself the same question. I think, for me, it was a song...
April Come She Will
P. Simon, 1965
April come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stayResting in my arms again
June, she'll change her tune In restless walks she'll prowl the night
July, she will flyAnd give no warning to her flight
August, die she must, The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September I'll rememberA love once new has now grown old
LITR is a story of Dr. Thomas More, a machine, three ladies, and the end of the world. I won't bother with a synopsis, but one general theme of the book is the issue of longing and the soul. For thomas more, it is usually in the form of whisky and women..but he is wise, as all percy characters are, and tangled up inthe why's and how's of living right in the world. percy's characters fail unashamedly, but they also find redemption in a way that is both hopeful and yet still honest about what he has been redeemed from.
At the end of LITR, Dr. thomas more is in his office, eyeing a bottle of early times whiskey. He is suddenly filled with the longing...
"Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for good drinking and fighting comrades, for football game girls in the fall and faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being 15 and 50 and with the winter sun striking down into a brickyard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill into linoleum. Desire has a smell; of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a backlot in a small town"
josh and i were talking about the longing...i asked josh, when is the first time you remember longing? I ask myself the same question. I think, for me, it was a song...
April Come She Will
P. Simon, 1965
April come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stayResting in my arms again
June, she'll change her tune In restless walks she'll prowl the night
July, she will flyAnd give no warning to her flight
August, die she must, The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September I'll rememberA love once new has now grown old
thirty years of life
Monday, January 02, 2006
I turned thirty Saturday. I celebrated with pancakes and a movie. It came and went, and I feel ready to embrace the next decade. So far so good. Josh and I are gearing up for the next semester. I think I will forever live in semesters.I like it. Since Josh is a bonified professor, I feel quite obligated to do so. Speaking of the professor, he is tucked away in some coffee shop as we speak, preparing for the next semester that starts tommorrow. I am enjoying one more lazy day before work begins tommorrow. My dog is laying beside me, snoring loudly. I find some kind of odd comfort in her snoring. She reminds me (though I usually don't need much reminding) that naps are good. For those who didn't receive the holiday picture of Welsie, I thought I would share...so cute.
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