#they could go either way and it's not really foundational for them. cs lewis is rolling

[iscariotapologist]

That was such an interesting poll! I picked infinite nuance because I don’t read the Bible as a modern history book but as a holy text. I subscribe to the Nicene Creed and I don’t read the Bible as metaphor but that doesn’t mean I read it uncritically or unthinkingly, it’s just using a different brain muscle so to speak.

For instance, the ‘fully God, fully man’ dogma. Mathematically this makes no sense, no-one can be 100% one thing and 100% some completely other thing. But how are you supposed to see that as metaphor? What would that even signify? I read that in faith, I believe it on a spiritual level and take it to mean that Jesus knew all human experiences and suffered thus, but is also and has ever been God, in a way that is not naturally possible.

When I read archeology, ‘did that really happen?’ is fascinating, because we are looking for material, historical facts. When I read the Bible, ‘did that really happen?’ is the most boring question. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, but when I read it I have faith it happened and start thinking about what that means.

it does seem like that would be an almost irrelevant question from this perspective. thank you 🌻

[stephhannes]

A Grief Reserved

Introduction: I don’t know how to grieve. Every substantial loss I’ve felt, I’ve repressed, ignored, pushed down until it doesn’t exist anymore. So far, that’s worked for me. My dad died three years ago and as soon as it happened, I returned to college, took 21 hours of class and somehow came out with my first 4.0 in my collegiate career. I lived a normal life, mostly. Every once and awhile the grief would bubble to the surface, I’d find myself shaking and sobbing and bursting, briefly. Then I’d return to what I knew, which was pretending like I never even had a father, let alone one that had died. 

When my dad died, I was prepared. This was something I thought about a lot. Not in a tangible sort of way, not like something I daydreamed about. It was something I had built up in my head- which I promise is significantly less psycho than that sentence sounds. I was an actor when I was younger, and in an attempt to be able to conjure up emotion quickly, I had to have something that I could use to make myself immediately cry. The worst thing I could fathom happening was my dad dying. This is what I would use to make myself cry in scenes. In a sense, doing this exercise so much almost prepared me for the real thing. I knew that it was the worst thing that could possibly happen to me, and then when it actually happened, though I was shocked, it was something I had practically already processed.

In this same vein, losing Nathan was something that had crossed my mind from time to time. For some reason, this was a topic that we talked about a lot. We were both in agreement that the worst loss someone can suffer is the loss of a spouse. We were both incredibly moved every time we heard of a friend or celebrity, or whoever, losing their partner. Nathan and I flirted with losing each other, in the sense that there were so many times in our friendship where it seemed as if we truly had lost touch, and were never going to come back to each other. We somehow always managed to re-converge. Even when we had gone two years without contact, we still managed to come back to each other.

If I had things my way with this loss, I would do what I always do, and repress it. I would hermit myself away and try to occupy myself with something that would temporarily distract me until I crack. I would go out to lunch with people, and smile, and pretend like nothing ever happened. I would go to work and show up to happy hour and never say a word. I would meet new people and craft a lie as to what brought me to the city so I didn’t have to keep pouring salt in my wounds. But that wouldn’t be fair to Nathan. Not after he spent the last two years trying to get me to talk about my feelings. Not after letting him get to know me so deeply that he could look at my face and tell that something was wrong- and then making him ask me “what’s wrong?” for hours before I finally would cave and give a couple of vague sentences on whatever garbage I had been ruminating on and letting ruin me that day. For being a person who feels things so deeply, and so frequently, I hate sharing my feelings. I hate talking about them, I hate letting people help me. I hate showing weakness, and in my head, talking about my problems is making them tangible and real, and having tangible problems is weakness.

I know that I should be doing things to make Nathan proud, or to honor Nathan or whatever, and this is really the only way that I can do that in the most appropriate way for our relationship. We spent so much time working on getting me to a place where I’d openly talk about how I was feeling, where I’d actually ask for help when I needed it. I had finally reached a point where I felt comfortable leaning on him, and I’m so thankful that I got to that point because having someone to lean on makes things slightly bearable and less overwhelming for my tiny, anxious body. As much as I’d love to just throw all of that in the trash, I know that I can’t. It’s hard for me to talk about my feelings because I think that they’re stupid, they’re insignificant, they’re things that I shouldn’t be upset about. I’ve spent so many years silencing myself because I was afraid of being judged for my constant anxieties. Nathan worked so hard to make me feel like my emotions were never insignificant. If they were, he would never judge me for being upset, but rather help me redirect my anxieties onto more important things.

Ten days before Nathan died, I was an emotional wreck. That weekend, I had planned on driving to a friends’ for a small vacation, but a couple of days before I had a tire blow out. When I took the car in to have the tire replaced, the mechanic informed me of another problem that “needed to get fixed ASAP.” I went home and frantically researched the issue, and agreed that it needed to be fixed. It was one of those car issues that you can get away with for a period of time, but as soon as the part breaks- either your car is totaled or you just die on the road. So because of this issue, the Tuesday before I was supposed to leave, I had some sort of weird breakdown. I was so scared to have to drive my car because I knew that it was going to break at any point, I just didn’t know when and that thought terrified me. Eventually, Nathan got tired of hearing me stress about the situation, and sat me down to tell me one thing. Firmly, he said  “Look, your car is going to die, eventually. You’re going to die, eventually. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen in two years, you don’t know. You can’t spend every day stressing about it like this. It’s not worth the energy.”

The moral of all of this pre-cursory garbage is this: I can’t sit around and repress this grief, I can’t spend forever stressing about things I can’t change or have no control over, I have to continue to build on the foundation that Nathan helped me build.

A few years ago, maybe even when we were in high school, Nathan told me to read CS Lewis’ “A Grief Observed,” and of course, I never did. Until a couple of days ago when I decided that I wanted to make myself sad on purpose.

In my attempts to understand my own grief, reading “A Grief Observed” gave me a lens to approach my feelings, a way to organize them into coherent thoughts. It gave me a way to even recognize the feelings I was having. Since I had never truly let myself experience grief, I didn’t realize that the thoughts I was having were so universal.

Chapter One: It almost seems cruel that her death was delayed long enough for him to grow to love her so completely that she filled his world as the greatest gift that God had ever given him, and then she died and left him alone in a place that her presence in his life had created for him. — Madeline L’Engle, Introduction- “A Grief Observed”

I don’t know a life without Nathan. We met when we were 11 and I honestly don’t remember much of my life before then. I don’t know a life where he isn’t just a text away. Even in our worst times, when it felt like we were never going to see each other again, I knew that if things got too bad, I could call him and he would be back in my life, like nothing had ever happened. I’d just recently learned how to live a life where I wasn’t trying to fight for our relationship. We spent so many years almost dating that for awhile it felt like a dream when we actually started dating. We spent seven years quietly in love with each other and never actually acting on it. When we finally got together, I didn’t have to fight any more. Being with him was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Deciding to move to New York to live with him was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. We had spent so long being so close that when we got together, we were able to skip the weird precursory ‘getting to know each other’ part of a relationship. We were able to get straight into the meat of everything. We knew we were going to get married the day that we started dating. Before that day, neither of us were ‘marriage people.’ Being married was never something that I had on my radar. It was never something I felt attracted to, I never planned out a dream wedding as a child, never thought about what kind of dress I wanted. I had resolved that I would only get married for some sort of legal benefit, if it came down to it- but there was never any draw for me to do it for some kind of romantic gesture, and definitely not for any sort of religious participation. But Nathan and I had fought for so long to have a relationship that we knew that we had to do it. It was what we deserved. It was what we had worked for for so long. When I moved to New York, that truly was the start of our life together. We started working as a team. I consciously started to live my life in a way where I would try to do at least one thing a day to make his life a little better. Whether that be washing the dishes, or picking up dinner without him asking, or just giving him some space when I got off work so he could work without distraction. The purpose of my life became trying to be the best partner I could be. I carried this onto when we moved to Philadelphia. Moving to Philly was such an exciting and terrifying time in my life. This was where I was finally truly leaning on him. We drove 1647.5 miles across the country, my small, shitty car following his. We moved into an apartment that we had both found, and were actually both on the lease together for once. We picked out furniture together, we made dinner together, we watched movies together. We were finally living some sort of a normal, entwined life. I caught myself falling into a false sense of security. We were engaged, and in my head I convinced myself that we had forever. We had forever to work on the small problems we would have, we had forever to help me find a perfect job, we had forever to work on paying off his student debt. We had just laid out a 15 year plan, and we were just starting to plan our wedding. And then he died and now I can just slam-dunk that 15 year plan straight into the trash can. I don’t know how to live a life without Nathan, and I don’t know how to build a future without him. I hate that I’ve gone from a person with a 15 year plan, to a person who just plans to wake up every day. Everything in my life has been colored by him, and I don’t know how to white that out. It’s hard to go anywhere without seeing him. I recently moved back in with my mother, and being in that house has been a tiny nightmare. My parents moved into the house after I left for college, so I never technically lived here, only really visited. And every time I came home to visit, in the days before Nathan and I were dating, I would go over to his apartment in Abilene and see him. Then when we started dating, he would spend a lot of time at this house. There were days when our sleep schedules weren’t aligning, and he would come over here at 5am just to sleep next to me while I watched TV. He’d keep me company on the nights when my mom was working, and would hang out with the two of us when she was at home. Driving around this town just makes me think of all of the late-night McDonald’s runs, and all of the times going to Market Street to just wander around a grocery store. Being in his neighborhood makes me think of all of the times I’d show up at his parents’ house at 10pm, and then go back to my place at 3am, or when I’d go over there just to take a nap, because again, misaligned sleep schedules. This is how I’d imagine moving back to Austin would be. There were a few weeks that Nathan came to visit me when I lived there, and I always refer to that period of time as “when we’d play house,” because it was like some sort of trial run of living together. That was where we cooked dinner together for the first time. And where we went grocery shopping together for the first time. And where we had our first fight. And the first time he met all of my friends. When I think of the time that I lived in Austin, the first thing that comes to my mind isn’t the fact that I did undergrad there, or that I lived there for the first 11 years of my life, I think of the brief times that Nathan was there with me, because that was the most important time I spent in Austin. New York reminds me of everything that I’ve lost, there were so many things we had planned to do when we lived there, but just weren’t possible because of how we couldn’t afford to do anything. I loved being back in New York recently, but I know that the city weighs me down. It was easier when we were together, but I’m not built for the NYC hustle. There were so many things that we had planned, so many things we wanted to do. Eventually, maybe I’ll start going through the list on my own, but I’ll always wish that we were doing those things together. Everything good that I have in my life now is because of him, and I hate having to navigate through everything without him.

Chapter Two: Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back—to be sucked back—into it?

This is the hardest part for me. Trying to keep myself from retreating back into my shell. I spent 20 years creating a cozy home for my suffering. I locked myself away and threw away the key, I boarded up the doors and the windows. I invested in furniture, and snacks, and hung tapestries of everything that had ever hurt me. My own personal pain museum to sit in any time I felt a human emotion. I didn’t know what it was like to let someone else into that home- to let someone come in and open the blinds for a couple of hours a day, or to dust off the bookshelves. Nathan was the first person to knock on the door, and that was the first time I’d cracked it open to let a little light inside. Eventually, I opened the door completely to let him in. I gave him his own key to come in and out as he pleased. He spent time packing up all the furniture, cleaning out all the clutter. Dusting the shelves and throwing out the knick-knacks. Folding the tapestries. I never fully moved out of that home though, the boxes never left. They’re all still there, just waiting for me to rebuild. It’s like when you’re moving houses and you have to go back and forth between houses because you haven’t turned the wifi off at the old place and you need to check your emails and even though your new house has all of your belongings in it, you’ve still got to go back to the old place. It took such an incredible amount of work to get me to move out of that house, and there’s always something so comforting about trying to return home, even if you know that there’s a new life waiting for you somewhere else.

Chapter Three: Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.

I’m 23, and for lack of a better word, a widow. It’s not like I’m 65 and my husband just died after a long battle with cancer. Eventually I’m supposed to move on. And I know that it’s only been a few weeks since Nathan died, but I feel the weight of the 21st century coming down on me already. Theoretically, he and I were so lucky to have found each other so early, not having to navigate our 20s with awkward dates and rifling through dating apps. But in reality, now that’s where I’m going to have to find myself again. I don’t know how to date someone that I haven’t already known for 10 years. How much is appropriate amount to mention my dead fiancé during a blind date? When is the appropriate time to update my Facebook relationship status to ‘single’? When am I supposed to take off my engagement ring and show my face on 6th street? What’s an appropriate tinder bio? “Hi, I’m Stephanie. I used to be engaged but now I’m not! Hit me up!” How do I navigate a new relationship with someone when I know that they will never know me as well as Nathan did? I can spend all day talking about who I was in high school, I can explain with detail every moment of my collegiate years, but no one will truly know who I was during those times because they weren’t there. Eventually, I’ll stand on two feet again, but how far can those feet carry me when the concrete underneath them is fractured beyond belief? Eventually, someone will walk beside me, but is it fair to them when I know that there will never be anyone that can compare to Nathan? There are like 8 billion people in the world and I would swipe left on every single one of them because they’re not Nathan.  I was in relationships before Nathan, and they all ended for more or less that same reason, I was always waiting for something better, I was always waiting for Nathan to come around. I don’t see this problem getting any easier to navigate, especially now that we had been together for a few years.  I know that I’ll never be engaged again. That was a one-time deal. Maybe that’s the trade-off, maybe that’s how I make it fair. The only person that deserved my hand in marriage was Nathan, and I have a hard time believing that that will ever change.

Chapter Four: And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of H. and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But presumably all lovers are. She once said to me, ‘Even if we both died at exactly the same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just as much a separation as the one you’re so afraid of.’ Of course she didn’t know, any more than I do. But she was near death; near enough to make a good shot. She used to quote ‘Alone into the Alone.’ She said it felt like that. And how immensely improbable that it should be other- wise! Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop?

For some reason, I never imagined things would end this way. I always pictured myself dying before Nathan. Probably because I completely lack any sense of danger and do stupid shit all the time, but mostly because I thought of him as immortal. In the grand scheme of things, I guess I’m glad that things happened in this order. Maybe this sounds narcissistic, but the thought of him having to go through his life without me was something that always really fucked me up. There’s a reason I started looking both ways before crossing the street. I spend a lot of time thinking about how much he impacted my life, how much he changed and bettered for me, but I can’t completely discredit myself. In looking back at the progression of our relationship, I can easily see so much change that happened within him. After he died, I spent some time looking through his old phone. He got a new one right around the time we got together, so his old phone is like a time capsule from a time right before everything started. I keep thinking about a text he sent to his sister that said, “Stephanie is the only person I’ve ever really needed before.” I keep thinking about so many texts that I got from him during the year that we were in a long-distance relationship. “baby, I love you so much. I can’t even get near my bed tonight because you’re not in it and it doesn’t feel right. I miss you too much.” “I can’t believe I’m with someone that I miss so much when they’re gone. I really love you.” “I haven’t figured out how to get by without you taking care of me yet.” “I miss you baby, being without you just feels weird. I’m just so mad because I know I want to marry you and being apart is the worst.” “I’m so glad we fell in love again. Like sometimes it’s overwhelming how you make me feel and I can’t even imagine how much I’m going to love you when we’ve been married 10 or 20 years” I don’t know how, or why, but somehow he needed me. There was something that I did for him that was so important to him. It’s so hard for me to reconcile that in my head, because I know him as being such an independent human, so stubborn and so strong-willed, so resilient. I think the fact that I was able to crack him in the way that I could is what I loved about our relationship. It was symbiotic. We always walked this fragile line, we knew each other so intensely that at any moment we could break one another with ease. But we never did. It always moved me so much when he would show these moments of vulnerability to me. I loved it. When we first started dating, we would have interactions where I could see where he had been hurt before. He didn’t even have to explain anything, just the way that he would talk to me, or try to approach me about certain subjects I could see where he had been hurt before. Over time, I stopped seeing these things in him. He was eventually self-assured, and easily talked to me with confidence. I knew that he trusted me from the beginning, but I also knew what he had been through beforehand, and I understood these hesitations he had. I was so happy to see how he had grown. At least at the end of everything, he had been in a relationship that actually did something for him. The day that he left for New York, he sent me a letter, and in the letter he said, “There’s no way somebody this funny and kind and breathtakingly beautiful could actually be in love with me too. There’s no way I could have thought that I could have such a healthy and affirming and wonderful relationship as this. It’s not that I don’t actually think you’re real, you are just in every way better than I could have dreamed somebody could be, and I’m so lucky that you picked me. I am so helplessly in love with you, you make me so incredibly happy, and there is no amount of time or distance that could ever keep me from you. I am completely yours and I’ll spend every day this year waiting for the day you come to New York so we can sleep together every night. Our relationship makes me so happy and I can’t wait to marry you.” That’s all I needed to know that things were on the right track, that I had done something right. That I was a good partner. ++ It’s hard saying goodbye, but we did so much for each other. The last 6 months I spent with him were the happiest I had ever seen him, and maybe that’s a gift. The gift is that we loved each other, and we were better for it. As much as I wish we could have had an infinite amount of years, an infinite amount of highs and lows together, at least he was happy. At least things were good. At least we were together at the end of everything.

Finally: When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful. —Ann Druyan, on husband Carl Sagan’s death

I’ve included this last quote because it was something that Nathan sent me right before we started dating.

Despite everything, I wouldn’t change how our story played out. In the seven years we spent trying to work out a relationship, we had a lot of tough conversations, we had a lot of tough periods of silence. We worked on ourselves, we became good people- people that could exist independently of each other. When we finally got together, we were ready. We were perfect for each other. Our relationship was easy, but we both still worked so hard to maintain it and take care of each other. We both felt extraordinarily lucky that we were together. We never took that for granted.

We knew that we were the beneficiaries of chance. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

[thedogsled]

QOTD - reference

Pre-season 13

The best journeys answer questions that in the beginning you didn’t even think to ask – Jeff Johnson

Forget what we became, what matters is what we’ve become, and our potentials to overcome - Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved – WJ Bryan

New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings – Lao Tzu

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing – Elbert Hubbard

Anger: an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured – Mark Twain

Education is the kindling of a flame not the filling of a vessel - Socrates

Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide – Marva Collins

13.01 - Lost & Found

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone – Harriet Beacher Stowe

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life – Bertolt Brechy

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve – George Bernard Shaw

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end – Seneca

We must travel in the direction of our fear – John Berryman

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope – Epictetus

A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure – Pico Iyer

13.02 - The Rising Son

Cease endlessly striving for what you want to do and learn to love what must be done – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning – Sam Shepard

If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun – APJ Abdul Kalan

History is a vast early warning system – Norman Cousins

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell. You see, I have friends in both places – Mark Twain

To succeed in life you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone – Reba McEntire

13.03 - Patience

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age – Jeanne Moreau

Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams – Ralph Waldo Emerson

It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wears you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe – Mohammed Ali

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once – William Shakespeare

Indifference and neglect often do more damage than outright dislike – JK Rowling

Too many people know the price of everything and the value of nothing – Oscar Wilde

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a ride!” – Hunter S Thompson

13.04 - The Big Empty

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious – Oscar Wilde

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned to momentum – Frances Willard

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward – CS Lewis

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul – Victor Hugo

One can never creep when one feels an impulse to soar – Hellen Keller

In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. That means we have 1,440 daily opportunities to have a positive impact – Les Brown

13.05 - Advanced Thanatology

Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny – Christopher Markus

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them – Henry David Thoreau

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope – Dr. Seuss

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm – Willa Cather

The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. It’s about what you’re made of, not the circumstances – Unknown

The hardest thing in life is to learn which bridge to cross and which to burn – David Russel

When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower – Alexander Den Heijer

Bravery never goes out of fashion – William Makepeace Thackray

13.06 - Tombstone

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly – Morticia Addams

A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for – William G T Shedd

The roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that made all the difference – Robert Frost

Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway – John Wayne

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future – Oscar Wilde

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that – Martin Luther King

13.07 - War of the Worlds

Remember that just because you hit rock bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there – Robert Downey Jr

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on – Franklin D Roosevelt

Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary – Oscar Wilde

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision – Helen Keller

To thrive in life you need three bones – A wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone – Reba McEntire

We build too many walls and not enough bridges – Isaac Newton

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds – Albery Einstein

13.08

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality – Lewis Carroll

Practice like you’ve never won. Perform like you’ve never lost.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us – Charles Bukowski

Life has a way of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once – Paulo Coelho

13.09/13.10 - The Bad Place/Wayward Sisters

Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow – Helen Keller

Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all deadly sins – Edith Wharton

You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them – Shanda Rhimes

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back – Maya Angelou

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials . You need something scary to overcome – Maragaret Atwood

I would rather wait with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light – Helen Keller

The further we’ve gotten from the magic and mystery of our past, the more we’ve come to need Halloween – Pata Guran

I desire the things which will destroy me in the end – Sylvia Plath

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself – Chimomanda Ngazi Cidichie

Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it – Jodi Picoult

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are – Anaois Nin

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to pick up the pieces when it’s all over – Octavia Butler

If your dream is only about you, it’s too small – Ava DuVerney

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any – Alice Walker 

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: REH Foundation Awards, Arthur Machen, Tunnels & Trolls, Terry Pratchett

Writing (Kairos): Last night I stopped by the Superversive SF live stream to discuss my new book Combat Frame XSeed: Coalition Year 40. My gracious host and the enthusiastic chat brought up lots of tantalizing questions about the mysteries I’ve planted in the series thus far. I addressed those questions and gave additional clues to those mysteries, which will be revealed in Combat Frame XSeed: CY 40 Second Coming.

We also embarked on an in-depth discussion of plot and pacing. I contend that the latter is derived more from character than from sentence and paragraph level mechanics. See the video for a full explanation and a mini writing clinic.

  Awards (REH Foundation): Congratulations to the REH Foundation Award winners! The winners were announced at a ceremony at Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains, Texas on June 7th.

Atlantean — Outstanding Achievement, Book (non-anthology/collection)

Winner: DAVID C. SMITH – Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography (Pulp Hero Press)

Finalists: FRED BLOSSER – Western Weirdness and Voodoo Vengence (Pulp Hero Press) DON HERRON and LEO GRIN – Famous Someday: A Robert E. Howard Biography (The Cimmerian Press).

  Fiction (Patheos): Machen (The Great God Pan) has had an enormous influence on horror literature. He is a HP Lovecraft without the overt white supremacy and Stephen King with interesting ideas: both tip the hat to the Machen (as they should). Not surprisingly for someone who has poked around in the scary attics and basements of the Christian past, Machen ends up with a more elevated view of sin then one finds in someone like CS Lewis, who experimented with the occult briefly, but had too much philosophy to stay there for long.

  Cinema (Jon Mollison): Terry Pratchett has an impressive gift for stringing words together.  The man could make the back of a cereal box interesting to read.  His brain works in strange ways that follow clever paths, a trait that helps him paper over the thinness of his works’ overall plots and characters and underlying worldview.  That wizardry doesn’t lend itself to translation to the screen, particularly when the producers of said translation choose to translate Pratchett’s words literally.

  Fiction (DMR Books): Mundy’s comments in the Camp-Fire, along with his portrayal of Caesar in the first two installments of Tros of Samothrace, ignited one of the most remarkable controversies in the history of American fiction magazines.  The readership of Adventure split into groups that were for and against Talbot Mundy’s views on Caesar and the Camp-Fire was where their opinions were aired.  A number of writers and historians came down on one side or another of the issue and the Caesar controversy grew to fill the entire space of the Camp-Fire.

  D&D (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): So, the new D&D Adventure/Campaign from WotC is now out, and it’s an interesting return to days of old. How old? So old that when the last time these adventures saw the light of day, TSR was still run by Gygax and the Blumes.

What they’ve done here is take one of their lesser-known classic adventure series and expanded it into a book-length campaign by the addition of several related adventures that had appeared in DUNGEON magazine over the years.

  Fiction (Shiver in the Archives): In September 1966, a previously unpublished short story “Forms of Things Unknown” by C.S. Lewis appeared posthumously in his collection Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, edited by Walter Hooper.  It was later collected in The Dark Tower and Other Stories (1977), also edited by Hooper.

  Cinema (Wasteland and Sky):  Welcome back to this series of posts where I try to nail down what exactly inspired me to write what I do. This is my personal Appendix N of art that has stuck with me. More than a favorites list, I’m focused first on what really attached itself to what I do. This hasn’t been as easy to compile as I would have thought.

As the years have gone by I’ve been watching less and less of the old boob tube or spending money to stare at a bigger screen.

  Adventure (M D Paust): “Wow! What a book!” So shouted W. M. Krogman in the Chicago Sunday Tribune of Kon-Tiki, saying the aforementioned exclamation could easily comprise his entire review. But he went on anyway gushing, “It has spine chilling, nerve tingling, spirit-lifting adventure on every page and in every one of its 80 action photographs. It is the fiction of a Conrad or a Melville brought to reality. It might be added that the writing is of itself worthy of either pen.”

      Fiction (Frontier Partisans): Summer of 2019 was already shaping up pretty damn good in the world of Frontier Partisans literature and cinema, what with a Deadwood movie, the return of Yellowstone and a mountain of research books to read. But this piece of news blows the whole thing up: Craig McDonald’s tale of Hector Lassiter and the Punitive Expedition is hitting the streets in July.

  RPG (Jeffro Johnson): One of the big changes in the new edition of The Fantasy Trip is that Steve Jackson has recanted on the old rule that IQ provided a harsh upper limit on the total number of spells and/or talents a character could have. The reason is… under the old advancement system there comes a point where attributes get ridiculously and pointlessly high.

  Robert E. Howard (M Porcius): Tarbandu’s recent blog post about Spanish artist Sanjulian reminded me about my acquisition back in February of 1979’s The Howard Collector, edited by Glenn Lord, for which Sanjulian provided the cover painting of an axe-wielding muscleman freeing a scantily clad woman from captivity in some dimly lit temple or other place of unspeakable deviltry.

  Fiction (Old Style Tales): There is something carnal and lascivious about these torch bearing sirens with their come hither faces and their glistening jewelry. Le Fanu employed such subjects in “Ultor de Lacy,” “Carmilla,” and “Laura Silver Bell” – femme fatales, victims of the supernatural, who leer out of the darkness with just enough attention (light) cast onto their beauty the lure us towards the darkness that engulfs them. But none of these stories contains quite the potency or indecent revulsion as the tale that bears Schalcken’s name.

  Pulp Magazines (Pulpfest): In June 1929 there were over a dozen air-oriented magazines available on the newsstands. Gernsback was riding a popular wave with AIR WONDER STORIES, a pulp that would tell “flying stories of the future, strictly along scientific-mechanical technical lines, full of adventure, exploration and achievement.”

  Fantasy (DMR Books): Carter is perhaps best regarded for his pioneering early critical studies of the fantasy fiction genre. These include works like Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings, H.P. Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, and Imaginary Worlds. While some of the scholarship particularly in the former two lacks rigor, Carter was working largely without precedent in the very early days of fantasy, before the latter existed as a defined genre.

  Pulp Magazines (SF Magazines): The reason I picked up this magazine was that the Herbert Best novel The Twenty-Fifth Hour had been recommended to me as one of the works I should consider reading for the 1940 Retro Hugo awards in the novel length category.1 Ah, I hear you say, but this is a 1946 magazine, so what is going on? Well, as I am sure most of you already know, Famous Fantastic Mysteries was a magazine that specialised in reprints.

  Games (Table Top Gaming News): Today on the platter we have: New Warbus Available From Puppets War, New Tactical Command Table From Kromlech, Orcs in Shorts Metal Minis Up On Kickstarter, Buy 3 Get 1 Free Sale Going On Now at Kraken Dice, New Late War Accessories Available From Battlefront For Flames of War, Undead Miniatures Up On Kickstarter, and Mighty Lords Miniatures Up On Kickstarter.

  Sensor Sweep: REH Foundation Awards, Arthur Machen, Tunnels & Trolls, Terry Pratchett published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[the-chaotic-neutral]

Is it possible to go home again? Are your favorite books of childhood actually as good as you remember? Or should they simply remain just that, memories, never to be revisited? I went back to my childhood touchstones to see. The results were varied and interesting.

Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis

One of the earliest of my childhood loves to be taken off a pedestal. I was near obsessed with these novels as a child. I found the amount of world-building to be enthralling. It felt grounded and fantastic, and there always seemed to be more out there to be discovered. However, my memory failed me a bit regarding the specifics of the later books (or earlier depending on your preferred reading order).

Revisiting this was crushing. I suddenly remembered being put off by the nonsensical rules that seemed to govern Narnia… sometimes. And Aslan never. There were holes in the storytelling that eclipsed the actual story. And the Christianity. It’s not fair to call it symbolism or imagery. The reason I kept petering out toward the end of the series is that it goes from Christian allegory to a blatant Christian bible retelling. Which, both as a child and adult, is incredibly unfulfilling. But to my younger self, the Rapture ending was unforgivable. There was enough magic in Narnia and the other realms to save everything. Either the people could have rallied, or the citizens of Narnia, or Aslan. In order to stick with the canonical bible ending, Lewis was forced to write an ending where everyone essentially either forgets their power or forgoes their power, giving up and running away. It’s dull, derivative, and didn’t really hold up when I was a kid.

Still, there are aspects of the world-building that appealed to me as an adult. The parts that aren’t Christian, that is. There’s a mundanity to the magic that seems both sincere and slightly ironic. That sensibility is what I’ve kept with me. The fact that after magic is discovered then it simply is. The act of discovery can’t go on forever, and at some point the magic will either be gone or become part of every-day life. And the latter is what Narnia showed me.

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville

I was the most nervous about picking this one back up. I’ve written at length about this book meant and means to me. My adult self is delighted to tell you that this book still works. Not necessarily on a prose level. The story is very simple, many details that I recall likely came from my imagination. It moved along as was over before I expected. It was, dare I say, breezy. The book was a perfect cocktail for my younger self because it was made of two ingredients.

The first was Jeremy Thatcher and his dragon. He was simplistic enough that my imagination could put me in his shoes, and his emotional bond with the dragon Tiamat. Style aside, the fact that I had a book with an emotional core to latch on to, rather than the story-driven books I was used to (a la Louis Sachar and the like). That just clicked with me. It stood out from the rest of my books at the time. This variation was showing me a difference between drama and emotional resonance. Did I understand that at the time? Hell no. But I had a book I could get emotional over that featured a dragon.

The other is the framing device of S.H. Elives’ Magic Shop. The shop shows up across a number of titles by Bruce Coville, creating a loose series. The fact that it was a place that revealed itself to each protagonist gave me just a bit of day-dream fuel that the next time I was walking home from school on a foggy day or just biking around town I had a small chance of finding an old shopfront I had never noticed before. And whereas with the wardrobe you get Narnia, or with an owl letter you get Hogwarts, the shop was so mysteriously stocked that I would often wonder what item should call to me from the shelves.

So yeah, this book still has some magic in it. It didn’t blow me away now, but I can clearly see all the parts that cemented it into my imagination as a child.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

This one is probably the most disappointing revisit. I absolutely adored these books as a child. And unlike the Narnia books, I whole-heatedly loved the entire quintet. But upon revisiting these they were the biggest fall from grace, so to speak. Unlike the Narnia books they aren’t blatantly Christian, but they are blatantly pro-religion. There’s a pervasive, albeit holistic, focus on selfless devotion, grace, and faith.  To some that may not sound terrible, but I remembered these as being about children who found personal strength. The focus on faith takes away some of their agency and replaces it with a weak version of destiny.

Faith in and of itself is not a good thing. It is made through the pairing of belief and an absence of evidence, which is a terrible combination. Faith, both in definition and in practice within these books, requires a certain degree of ignorance. Faith without ignorance becomes confidence and loyalty. These books made me appreciate mysteries as a part of life, but I hadn’t realized how much they also eschewed the act of solving said mysteries.The takeaway I had with this series as that as a child I believed they were about strength and perseverance, but as an adult they have a strange reliance on faith and fatalism.

Tom Swift Jr. (Tom Swift IV)

Jesus, what was I thinking? The takeaway from these? Shame. Actually, that was what they taught me back then, as well. I stopped reading them after I had chosen it for a “what did you read over the summer” book report in elementary school and then was too embarrassed to talk about it for my presentation. I got a zero.

Okay, in all honesty I could see an anthology TV show being made of these today. They would be over-the-top faux 90s nostalgia and based solely on the covers, rather than any of the actual novels. They’d be produced by (and first episode directed by) Chris Miller & Phil Lord or John Carpenter, depending on how much they wanted to lean into the humor. And lord help me, I’d probably watch it.

The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs

This was an odd one. If you’ve ever revisited grade school as an adult you know how everything seems so much smaller. Well, the prose felt smaller. I remembered these books as dripping with a wry darkness. Not sinister, but macabre and mysterious. They don’t read that way to me now. Granted, they’re not bundles of sunshine. There’s death, children in peril, and well-meaning adults keeping kids in danger because they don’t believe they need all the facts. This isn’t the dark favorite I remember.

But it’s the foundation of it. There are elements that, when properly fermented and aged, will grow into my love of dark literature and sinister storytelling. There’s danger without cruelty. There’s darkness and the threat of violence, but it’s the mystery that fuels it all, not the threat of death. Death is just the seasoning, and that’s still pretty satisfying.

And then there are the illustrations. These books, or at least the editions I read and re-read, are illustrated by the illustrious Edward Gorey. Whether or not you know the name, there is little doubt you know his art. His creepy Victorian/Edwardian-esque art probably has at least as much to do with what I took away from these books as the text. I don’t really feel the need to contextualize that aspect of these books. It’s Edward Gorey. I loved his art then and I love it now.

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

This one is probably the strangest and most complicated as far as lasting influence and  how well it holds up over time. This book may be the only one that could be considered more solid now than when I read it as a child.

The plot is bizarre and convoluted and purposefully opaque. The book is dense. I had a bit of a touch go with it this time around, though don’t remember it being a particularly hard read as a child. Now it comes across as a mix between Jeff Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the Canadian horror film Cube. But for kids.

Looking outside just the plot, the author, Diana Wynne Jones, dedicated this novel to Neil Gaiman, who had previously dedicated his mini-series The Books of Magic to four witches, one of which was her. There’s also the fact that the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle is based on one of her novels, something I did not know when I first saw it. Coming back to this book, with all these pop-culture threads that have woven back into my life, was like finding out that someone you befriended recently was in the background of some of your childhood vacation photos. It’s strange and unsettling but also a little comforting in a cosmic way. Like a little validation from the universe about who I am and what I like today.

There are countless books I did not go back to, including The Tripods trilogy by John Christopher, The Time Warp Trio by Jon Scieszka and Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin. These weren’t out of fear so much as I realized that once I finished the titles that came immediately to mind there really wasn’t a point on delving deeper. These books all made my childhood to one extent or another. Some were emotionally fulfilling, others helped build my literary taste and personal aesthetics. The point isn’t whether they’re still fulfilling to me now, but that they served their purpose at the time. A Wrinkle in Time’s awkward religion felt like a huge blow to discover, but it’s not that bad. I tore through those books as a kid, often identifying with Meg and sometimes oddly put off by Charles Wallace. But that series left a desire for mystery in my genre stories. I liked that there was always more somewhere else in their world. The Narnia chronicles gave me a taste for concrete world-building, for an underlying mechanic and logic in the substructure of a book. This eventually led me to delight in the construction of Eric Nylund’s fantasy and is probably why the Feed and Wayward Children books by Seanan McGuire are utterly compelling and fulfilling to me as an adult. The John Bellairs books gave me a taste of the macabre with prose, and a second helping of darkness from the Edward Gorey illustrations.

That might seem like an obvious lesson, but it’s still worth learning on your own. There’s a security in knowing that while a loved story from youth may lose its appeal, that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. None of my subsequent loves and discoveries came tumbling down. I think there’s a strength in knowing that first-hand. It lets me be less precious with what I loved in the past. And when some of those old stories turn out to hold up, it makes them all the more magnificent.

Nostalgia calls! But do these classics from my childhood hold up? Can You Go Home Again? Revisiting Favorite Childhood Books Is it possible to go home again? Are your favorite books of childhood actually as good as you remember?