Little ones, baby ones

I've read a lot this week about last Friday's shocking massacre of six adults and twenty little children in a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut. There's a lot to read: ferocious commentary on America's idiotic gun laws, exposes of the NRA's membership and funding structure, histories of what Philip Roth calls “indigenous American berserk”, the President's moving homily.

What came home to me most vividly was imagining how little these victims were; how trustingly they must have walked into their classrooms that morning, sat at their little desks. It was an act of indescribable violence, yet it was not only their lives but their world that was violated. How different a six-year-old's world is from the one in which gunmen, policemen, ideologues, and lobbyists swirl and clash.

Their world, their school, was a place of discoveries, loyalties, stories, wonders, dreams. A place of possibility, curiosity, experiment, of exhilarating leaps of cognition and capacity. A place where they learned beautiful, venerable ideas; where the lovely aimlessness of infancy was just beginning to be tamed; where they read books and chanted poems and drew pictures and ran around in the sunshine and raised their hands to ask and answer questions. Where they learned things we have all forgotten long ago. In many ways the world of these little ones was bigger, much bigger, than ours. What shattered it was a terrible smallness.

Something made me think of this poem, from AA Milne's collection “When We Were Very Young,” with its invitation, its invocation of the world, so wide and deep, of childhood. 

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
Down to the stream where the king-cups grow-
Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

Where am I going? The clouds sail by,
Little ones, baby ones, over the sky.
Where am I going? The shadows pass,
Little ones, baby ones, over the grass.

If you were a cloud, and sailed up there,
You'd sail on water as blue as air,
And you'd see me here in the fields and say:
“Doesn't the sky look green today?"

Where am I going? The high rooks call:
“It's awful fun to be born at all." 
Where am I going? The ring-doves coo:
“We do have beautiful things to do."

If you were a bird, and lived on high,
You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,
You'd say to the wind when it took you away:
“That's where I wanted to go today!"

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

Come down to the water

One of the books in my armchair pile is Annie Dillard's 1975 Pullitzer-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's modern nature writing with a streak of spiritual memoir. Reading it in a garden chair on the weekend, this passage caught my attention - and drew forth an ‘amen’:

We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and descirbe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

At the time of Lews and Clark, setting the priaries on fire was a well-known signal that meant, 'Come down to the water.' It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. 

Between a book and a hard place

In the tussle between books and their e-cousins, I probably come down somewhere in the middle. Yes, digital books are tremendously handy, but no, they'll never replace the joy of reading physical books. I don't get particularly worked up about the advent of e-reading or the decline of print (I suspect most readers are the same) so I tend to ignore the steady stream of articles that couch it as a dilemma. 

However, I did find myself persuaded by this excerpt from Andrew Piper's Book was There: Reading in Electronic Times. He argues that there's more to books than the pleasures of touching and turning pages. There's the space they create around you while you read; the connection they build between head and hands; the marks you make on them as you read; the way they give form and dimension to the written word, so you always know where you are, even when you're ‘lost’ in a book. One thing I complain about is having no sense, when reading on my iphone or kindle, of how far through the story I am, how close to the end. There's something about the place you've reached, and the diminishing thickness of pages behind it, that adds to the pleasure of reading even a familiar book. The more advanced e-texts now look more like real pages than the earlier versions did, in part I think because their makers have learned that the shape of a printed page, with its sharp edges and bare border, is indelibly part of how and why we read.

“There is a punctuatedness, a suddenness, but also a repetitiveness to pressing buttons that starkly contrast with the sedate rhythms of the slowly turned page...With my e-book, I no longer pause over the slight caress of the almost turned page—a rapture of anticipation—I just whisk away. Our hands become brooms, sweeping away the alphabetic dust before us.”

It's beautifully and lucidly argued - worth the read, though you may be inspired to print it off first. I was inspired to spend more time with books and less with screens. In keeping, I've put a pile of worthy books next to my favourite armchair, so I can read whenever I sit, thus indulging in the ‘readerly rest’ Piper recommends. 

There and back again

Coming home after a month away made me realise how thin was our veneer of habit. It's taken more than a month to retrieve all our good habits (I count blogging among them). Being away was wonderfully refreshing and produced the kind of serenity only distance and utter detachment can, but it makes it all the harder to again take up one's ordinary life. However, if Bilbo Baggins is to be believed journeys change you for the better. Ordinary life is larger when you come back to it, sweeter for being left so long. And the road is waiting at your door whenever you choose to travel it. Here's to habits, and hobbits, and coming home again. 

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known. 

When I put out to sea

This is the last post for a while as we're travelling overseas for the whole of October. Tennyson's “Crossing the Bar” is really more about death than travel, but it's beautiful and I've been wanting to post it for a while.  

Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

  Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

  Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

  And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

  When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place   

  The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

  When I have crost the bar.