Jim Janus > Recent Status Updates

Enjoying this very much!

Read this now for the third time in my life. This time I enjoyed it more than ever. I love the way Scout tells her story. The way she and Jem and Dill play on their block in Alabama in the early 1930s...it reminds me of how I and my friends played on our block in Niles (a Chicago suburb) in the 1970s. We didn't have anyone like Boo Radley as a focus of curiosity, but our explorations and exploits were similar.

The last story, The Dead, blew me away. I'll explain why soon, when I write a review.

There are those who say a native will not speak to a white man. Error. Words are spoken by the campfires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by forests—words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks—another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life.

"A misunderstanding between a man and his ship in a difficult river with no room to make it up, is bound to end in trouble for the man."

"Before the end of the third day he had revealed himself as a confirmed opium smoker, a gambler, a most audacious thief, and a first class sprinter. When he departed at the top of his speed with thirty two golden sovereigns of my own hard earned savings it was the last straw."

A reading lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below...and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement, to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous stillness.

'Ashley used leisure for thinking, spinning brightly colored dreams with no touch of reality. He moved in an inner world more beautiful than Georgia and came back to reality with reluctance. He looked on people, and neither liked nor disliked them. He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened. He accepted the universe and his place in it and, shrugging, turned to his music and books and his better world.'

—It happened that you were peloothered, Tom, said Mr Cunningham gravely. 😀