Celebrilomiel > Recent Status Updates

“Your ingenuity leaves me spellbound! The things you think of!” ¶ “It’s never difficult to think of things,” said Mrs. Oliver. “The trouble is that you think of too many, and then it all becomes too complicated, so you have to relinquish some of them and that is rather agony.”

[The Christian faith] was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future.

[His followers] coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.

You are breathing / patiently; it is a / beautiful sound. It is / your life, which is so close / to my own that I would not know / where to drop the knife of / separation.

Past and present, God's will prevails. Hence, understanding is always best and a prudent mind. Whoever remains for long here in this earthly life will enjoy and endure more than enough.

Fire comes from the same family as famine. It can feast, unfulfilled, forever.

God was lord then of all the race of men, even as He yet is. Wherefore is understanding and the heart that taketh thought in every time and place the best. Much must he endure of sweet and bitter, who long time here in these days of trouble enjoyeth life in the world!

“Harrow…scooped up more of the bingsu and strawberries—enough to precipitate a collapse of the entire structure, which made it necessary for Athelas to go to the undignified extreme of eating some of it himself to prevent a sticky overflow onto the table. Ridiculous to find himself enjoying such a childish treat, he thought, in vague irritation.”

I will forever love Athelas enjoying good things despite himself.

I do so love a data-gathering heroine.

The moonlit herb garden! The statue! The shadows in the alcoves, the sculptures in the lantern-light. The rose window and the stars. The crisp and vivid image of it all!

Reading chapter sixteen gave me similar vibes to reading the in-the-dark-and-ancient sections of "Mara, Daughter of the Nile" and "The Thief." Yet this is a cozy book and the tension resolved so quickly and beautifully, with awe rather than dread.

“It won’t do for me to write there; he’ll talk to me. He’ll read out bits of books to me every time I have a thought, and my thoughts will run screaming away.”

*rolls eyes heavenward, claps hand to chest* Such a MOOD.

It is both pleasurable and desirable to read more than one translation of this poem, because when it comes to translating Beowulf, there is no sacred clarity. What the translated text says is a matter of study, interpretation, and poetic leaps of faith. Every translator translates this poem differently. That's part of its glory.

He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power... Whether in medieval art or in modern Disney cartoons, the dragon can strike us as far less horrific than he is meant to be, but in the final movement of Beowulf, he lodges himself in the imagination as wyrd rather than wyrm, more a destiny than a set of reptilian vertebrae.

Chiasm, when it is used well, is not hidden the way a code is hidden, or a message in invisible ink. Rather, a chiasm is hidden the way a skeleton is hidden—but without that framework holding everything up, the words on the surface of the text would not have nearly the force that they do.

The use of the phrase "pushing up daisies" to describe the state of one whose footsteps grew flowers is such poetic justice and delicious irony.

Also, the PARALLELS. The way Athelas, however much he resists, is being neatly and tidily and inexorably pulled into exorcising and redeeming his own past... I have kicked my feet over this so many times already and I have never been so invested in a redemption arc??

“Sunlight lit the side of his face furthest from Athelas, limning his profile with liquid light and casting shadow on the side closest.”

mmm yes, visual theming

“I seem to have made a small misstep.”
“Have you? Are you sure it wasn’t a deliberate kick?”

“I no longer ignore hidden youths in kitchens,” Athelas said. “I find it unwise.”

Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.

"We are not left like Sisyphus, cursed by the gods to a life of meaninglessness, repeating the same pointless task for eternity. Instead, these small bits of our day are profoundly meaningful because they are the site of our worship. The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines."

Only one chapter in and I'm already loving it. I have chortled most gleefully several times.