too much time to fill arranging rearranging not last forever
Adapted from the book, Noah’s Compass (2009, Alfred A. Knopf) by Anne Tyler, and the passage:
He had too much time to fill; that was the truth of the matter. For a brief while, the fuss of moving in had entertained him—arranging and rearranging his books, scouring three different kitchen stores for the exact type of wall-mounted can opener he was used to in the old place. But that couldn’t last forever.
Part of the series of Haiku inspired by from Noah’s Compass (2009, Alfred A. Knopf) by Anne Tyler. Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-three novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). I came across Noah’s Compass as an audio book when living in Atlanta I commuted 1 hour each way. As the book had to deal with memories and memory loss and it involved someone my age, I was taken with the book. I have enjoyed reading most of Ms. Tyler’s work. Accidental Tourist maybe better known for the movie which I also recommend.
mush, mush, mush all night had to get the serum through roar! ice! no escape!
If you are my age and your family had a television, you grew up watching Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons.
One of the goofy things about these cartoons is that they were created in the 1930’s for adults.
These cartoons were filled with references and asides written for that time and that audience that went right over my head.
One example that stands out is in, I think, the famous Fearless Freep cartoon where Yosemite Sam bangs on a door, yelling “Open that, Open that Open that door I say”.
Sam stops, breaks the 4th wall, and says to the audience, “Did you notice I didn’t say Richard?”
To this day, I have no clue to what Sam was talking about.
And NO I am not going to do the Google to find out.
In another cartoon, Daffy Duck is being chased by a dog and he hides in a freezer.
When the dog opens the freezer, Daffy jumps out wearing earmuffs, scarf and gloves and proclaims, “What a trip. What a trip! Blizzard all the way. Snow twenty feet deep, but we had to get the serum through. It was mush, mush, mush all night. Come on! Mush! Mush! Mush! Mush! Mush! Suddenly the glacier cracks! There’s a roar! Tons of ice! No escape! Aaaagh! How’s things been with you?”
At the time I just thought it was funny but I was clueless to what it meant.
Because of the mush, mush, mush, I knew it had something to do with dog sleds but that was about it.
Years later, I got older (didn’t grow up), I kept watching cartoons and every once in a while this one was on and through historical awareness osmosis, I became aware that this was a reference to what wikipedia calls, “the most famous event in the history of Alaskan mushing is the 1925 serum run to Nome, also known as the ‘Great Race of Mercy'”
Again from wikipedia, “It occurred when a large diphtheria epidemic threatened Nome. Because Nome’s supply of antitoxin had expired, Dr. Curtis Welch refused to use it and instead sent out telegrams seeking a fresh supply of antitoxin. The nearest antitoxin was found to be in Anchorage, nearly one thousand miles away. To get the antitoxin to Nome, sled dogs had to be used for part of the journey, as planes could not be used and ships would be too slow.”
Focus on that line, “It occurred when a large diphtheria epidemic threatened Nome.”
Focus on that word, “diphtheria.”
It, much like Darth Vador for Darth Vador (back when Darth was his first name), diphtheria is a perfect name for a dread disease.
It is not heard much anymore.
Due to vaccines, diphtheria isn’t the threat it used to be.
I must have been vaccinated against it.
It got me wondering what other dread diseases was I protected from so I looked it up.
According to the CDC, Americans my age have been, since childhood, protected against things like:
to gain confidence cultivating contrary rare perspective
Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
To inoculate ourselves against this derision, and to gain confidence in cultivating a contrary, more meditative attitude towards objects, we might profitably pay a visit to a museum of modern art. In whitewashed galleries housing collections of twentieth-century abstract sculpture, we are offered a rare perspective on how exactly three-dimensional masses can assume and convey meaning – a perspective that may in turn enable us to regard our fittings and houses in a new way.
According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”
What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
inundated with advice we hear little why and how we should
Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on whereto travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.
Adapted from the book, The Art of Travel (2002, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton.
According to the website, GOOD READS, Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why.
As I said in the section on Architecture , what I find irresistible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
speak on topics which can readily be discerned there might be a way
Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
However, there might be a way to surmount this state of sterile relativism with the help of John Ruskin’s provocative remark about the eloquence of architecture.
The remark focuses our minds on the idea that buildings are not simply visual objects without any connection to concepts which we can analyse and then evaluate.
Buildings speak – and on topics which can readily be discerned.
They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.
What Ruskin is quoted as saying is:
‘A day never passes without our hearing our architects called upon to be original and to invent a new style,’ observed John Ruskin in 1849, bewildered by the sudden loss of visual harmony.
What could be more harmful, he asked, than to believe that a ‘new architecture is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or parish church?
According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”
What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
No Haiku For You 