Friday, May 28, 2010

11:09

Uncle Tom's Cabin and Robin Hood have been two things tugging at my heart lately. Seems like an unlikely connection, doesn't it?

Because it is quite late for me, because there is no one around to whom I can pour my heart's yearnings, and because my words probably couldn't express them anyway, I will resort to quotations.

I'm probably breaking all the rules with quotations this long, but trust me, they do indeed have a purpose.


"The brown, frosted grasses under [Emily's] feet were velvet piles. The old, mossy gnarled dead spruce-tree, under which she paused for a moment to look up into the sky, was a marble column in a palace of the gods; the far dusky hills were the ramparts of a city of wonder. And for companions she had all the fairies of the countryside -- for she could believe in them here -- the fairies of the white clover and satin catkins, the little green folk of the grass, the elves of the young fir-trees, sprites of wind and wild fern and thistledown. Anything might happen there -- everything might come true.
"And the barrens were such a spendid place in which to play hide and seek with the Wind Woman. She was so very real there; if you could just spring quickly enough around a little cluster of spruces -- only you never could -- you would see her as well as feel her and hear her. There she was -- that was the sweep of her grey cloak -- no, she was laughing up in the very top of the taller trees -- and the chase was on again -- till, all at once, it seemed as if the Wind Woman were gone -- and the evening was bathed in a wonderful silence -- and there was a sudden rift in the curdled clouds westward, and a lovely, pale, pinky-green lake of sky with a new moon in it.
"Emily stood and looked at it with clasped hands and her little black head upturned. She must go home and write down a description of it in the yellow accound book, where the last thing written had been, "Mike's Biograffy." It would hurt her with its beauty until she wrote it down. Then she would read it to Father. She must not forget how the tips of the trees on the hill came out like fine black lace across the edge of the pinky-green sky.
"And then, for one glorious, supreme moment, came 'the flash.'
"Emily called it that, although she felt that the name didn't exactly describe it. It couldn't be described -- not even to Father, who alwasy seemd a little puzzled by it. Emily never spoke of it to any one else.
"It had always seemd to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside -- but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond -- only a glimpse -- and heard a note of unearthly music.

"[The flash] isn't ordinary -- it's the most extraordinary and wonderful thing in my whole life. When it comes I feel as if a door has swung open in a wall before me and given me a glimpse of -- yes, of heaven."

-L.M. Montgomery, "Emily Climbs"

"You may think that there is another reason for our silence about heaven -- namely, that we do not really desire it. But that may
be an illusion... There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words; but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported... Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul but have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away jsut as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- ou would know it .. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all."
-C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain"


"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."
Ecclesiastes 3:11



1 comment:

  1. my heart both soars and aches reading this. yes, yes, and yes again! how beautiful and hopeful and painful and bitter it all is. thank you for these incredible extended quotations, my friend. i'm e-mailing you something...do i even have your e-mail? haha - if i don't, can you send it to me?

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