Post script

As an afterthought to the last post, I think of the comment made by Sophia Croft, wife of Admiral Croft and sister of Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, that wives of sailors should be treated like rational creatures instead of fine ladies: “We none of us expect to be in smooth waters all our days.” She and the Admiral enjoy one of Austen's happiest marriages, probably because of this courage toward the weather of life.

And here's another description of the felicity of the Crofts' marriage, observed and admired by Anne Elliot:

They brought with them their country habit of being almost always together. He was ordered to walk to keep off the gout, and Mrs Croft seemed to go shares with him in everything, and to walk for her life to do him good. Anne saw them wherever she went. Lady Russell took her out in her carriage almost every morning, and she never failed to think of them, and never failed to see them. Knowing their feelings as she did, it was a most attractive picture of happiness to her. She always watched them as long as she could, delighted to fancy she understood what they might be talking of, as they walked along in happy independence, or equally delighted to see the Admiral's hearty shake of the hand when he encountered an old friend, and observe their eagerness of conversation when occasionally forming into a little knot of the navy, Mrs Croft looking as intelligent and keen as any of the officers around her.

Made in Heaven

We are wed and honeymooned, and life continues on. When I reflect on our wedding day it's with mingled emotions. The things I prayed hardest for in the weeks preceding were good health and fine weather. Neither of these prayers were answered. In spite of ill health and foul weather, we managed to plight our troth (troths?) in some joy, but I have a lingering grizzle, not unlike my lingering cough, and the lingering drizzle outside, about my unanswered prayers.

It's quite unreasonable, I know. Especially when I think about the texts we chose and the words Alistair spoke over us. Our reading was Deuteronomy 11:8 - 21, and Al talked about the land we were entering as a land of hills and valleys, joy and sorrow. Joy follows sorrow, he said, as birth follows death, and spring follows winter. We promised to love each other in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, in plenty and in want. Why shouldn't this unfaltering love in a faulty world begin on our wedding day? Why should I expect an eerie brightness to fall on that day when every day thereafter would be a pied beauty, a dappled thing?

I'm also coming slowly to see the truth of the poem we chose: Robert Frost's “The Master Speed.” 

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still -
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Life is only life. A wedding day is not a special day. It is only the first day. The first of many travels, through hills and valleys, through winters and springs, together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Of silence and slow time

As my nuptials are fast approaching, I was looking for an epithalamium for today, but most of them are too long to publish here, and lots of them seem to focus on the bride and the bridal chamber in a way that brings a blush to the bridal cheek. So instead, I chose Keats’ “bride of quietness” and the festal scene depicted on the Grecian Urn. If you want to read the whole thing it's here, but I felt the first two stanzas would do nicely.

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,  
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, 
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: 
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape      
Of deities or mortals, or of both, 
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? 
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? 
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?    
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?   

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,  
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave         
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; 
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;  
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!        

On William Morris

I’ve become interested lately in the writings of William Morris, more famous now for his graphic designs, but quite an engaging thinker and theorist. Morris was prolific as a writer, craftsman, designer, painter, and typographer. His work in the ‘decorative arts’ included book design, calligraphy, furniture, paintings, drawings, stained glass, tapestries, textiles, and wallpapers. He was a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, and was also involved in the Socialist movement.  You can read more about him here.  His work resonated with the hippies in the 60s and 70s, and the revival of lost crafts (my mother still has earthen kitchenware from this period), and I think now it might well resonate again with our renewed interest in ethical and organic means of production, and in design. I can see Morris relishing a Saturday morning spent at the farmers’ market, and perhaps a Saturday afternoon browsing design sites like Apartment Therapy or Dwell.

This fragment seems to sum up his philosophy neatly: “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour.”

Stewart / Colbert Rally

 I’m a huge fan of Jon Stewart and his counterpart Stephen Colbert, and I think what they do is tremendously important. In response to Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honour, Stewart and Colbert hosted their own Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) on the mall in Washington on 30 October, and drew a crowd of around two hundred thousand people. Looking at the pictures and quotes (here), I am touched and inspired by this mass demonstration of friendliness and whimsy. The mock protest was punctuated with costumes and signs that ranged from the political:

Your friendly neighbourhood Muslim 

Hands off our death panels!

How many people have checked 'Atlas Shrugged' out of the public library without realizing the irony?

to the nerdy:

Eschew obfuscation!

Plurals don’t need apostrophes

What do we want? Moderation!
When do we want it? In a reasonable time frame!

to the satirical:

I’m mildly irritated and I’m going to keep taking it.

Don’t believe everything you think

God hates Fox!

God hates figs! (Mark 11:12-14)

to the absurd:

Bears are people too

This sign intentionally left blank

What’s your zombie plan?

(My favourite)  End Road Work

In response to fear and anger, this rally smacked of gentle mockery and intellectual generosity.  One might expect only the hot-headed and single-minded to rally in these numbers; it was refreshing to find the rational, the nerdy, the ironically self-aware, the comically bemused gathered to a crescendo that was really a collective humourous shrug. Only Jon Stewart could have pulled that off. But he was pulling at (a different) ‘real America’, and up it came in reassuring plenitude.