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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 278 responses total. |
davel
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response 42 of 278:
| 
Apr 7 01:06 UTC 1999 |
I'm looking forward to finding out this one. Nice.
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mcnally
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response 43 of 278:
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Apr 7 04:51 UTC 1999 |
Farley Mowat?
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bookworm
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response 44 of 278:
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Apr 7 05:53 UTC 1999 |
Got me. About all I'm reading nowadays are texts.
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remmers
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response 45 of 278:
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Apr 7 09:36 UTC 1999 |
Not the Unabomber, Richard Bach, Piers Anthony, or Farley Mowat.
Unabomber was an interesting guess, except that although he might have
worked out of a shed, he would never have had a computer or other
high-tech equipment in it. He'd likely have favored quill pens.
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cconroy
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response 46 of 278:
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Apr 7 14:41 UTC 1999 |
Sounds like a room description from an Infocom text adventure (except
for the first-person statements).
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remmers
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response 47 of 278:
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Apr 7 16:26 UTC 1999 |
Hm, it does at that. But the quote is not from Infocom. :)
I'll try to continue the quote later today, assuming nobody's gotten
the author by then.
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remmers
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response 48 of 278:
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Apr 9 00:53 UTC 1999 |
Okay, here's more of the author's workplace description begun in
resp:38 - perhaps there are some clues here.
I walk up here from the house every morning. The study
and its pines, and the old summer cottages nearby, and the
new farm just north of me, rise from an old sand dune high
over a creeky salt marsh. From the bright lip of the dune
I can see oyster farmers working their beds on the tidal
flats and sailboats underway in the saltwater bay. After
I have warmed myself standing at the crest of the dune, I
return under the pines, enter the study, slam the door so
the latch catches -- and then I cannot see. The green spot
ini front of my eyes outshines everything in the shade. I
lie on the bed and play with a bird bone until I can see
it.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a
room with no view, so imagination can dance with memory in
the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I
pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not
see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote
in a cinderblock cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a
tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under the trees is not
quite so good as the cinder-block study was, but it will
do.
"The beginning of wisdom," according to a West African
proverb, "is to get you a roof."
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flem
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response 49 of 278:
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Apr 9 04:09 UTC 1999 |
Skinner? :)
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remmers
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response 50 of 278:
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Apr 9 10:42 UTC 1999 |
Heh. Cute guess, but nope.
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danr
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response 51 of 278:
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Apr 9 12:37 UTC 1999 |
Annie Dillard.
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remmers
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response 52 of 278:
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Apr 9 14:20 UTC 1999 |
Yup - Annie Dillard it is. Her best known work is "Pilgrim at Tinker's
Creek". I've been quoting from an essay published in the late 1980's.
Nice job. Dan's up.
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bookworm
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response 53 of 278:
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Apr 9 23:40 UTC 1999 |
Oooh. I'd never have guessed that one.
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danr
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response 54 of 278:
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Apr 10 00:43 UTC 1999 |
Whoa....This is the first one I've ever gotten. :) I do like Annie Dillard,
though.
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davel
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response 55 of 278:
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Apr 10 00:54 UTC 1999 |
(Who's Annie Dillard? (The _Pilgrim_at_Tinker's_Creek_ I've met is unlikely
to be the one you're referring to, John.))
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md
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response 56 of 278:
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Apr 10 22:58 UTC 1999 |
I'd be very surprised to learn that there's a book with that
name by another writer, but you never know.
Annie Dillard had one magical book in her, _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek._
(Not "Tinker's.") A kind of hippie or proto-New-Age _Walden_. Her
subsequent work (like Thoreau's after _Walden_) fell so far short
of her one masterpiece that you begin to wonder where _Tinker Creek_
came from.
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danr
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response 57 of 278:
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Apr 10 23:30 UTC 1999 |
Here's the next quote:
"How beautiful and how terrible are the words with which Gods speaks to the
soul of those He has called to Himself, and to the Promised Land which is
participation in His own life--that lovely and fertile country which is the
life of grace and glory, the interior life, the mystical life. They are lovely
to those who hear and obey them: but what are they to those who hear them
without understanding or response?"
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aruba
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response 58 of 278:
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Apr 11 15:01 UTC 1999 |
Herman Hesse?
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danr
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response 59 of 278:
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Apr 11 23:54 UTC 1999 |
Not Herman Hesse.
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davel
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response 60 of 278:
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Apr 12 01:11 UTC 1999 |
I could swear I've read this one, but have no idea who it's by.
Re #56: the book I'm thinking of was given to me when I was a kid, back in
the early 1960s or so. I think the title must be a quotation, though I don't
know the source.
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aruba
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response 61 of 278:
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Apr 12 02:16 UTC 1999 |
Umberto Eco?
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mcnally
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response 62 of 278:
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Apr 12 05:40 UTC 1999 |
re #57: is the "s" on the end of "Gods" in the first line of the quote
correct or is it meant to be singular -- "God"?
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danr
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response 63 of 278:
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Apr 12 12:32 UTC 1999 |
oops. sorry. It should indeed be 'God' and not 'Gods'. The God being spoken
of here is the Christian God.
It's not Umberto Eco.
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other
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response 64 of 278:
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Apr 12 22:42 UTC 1999 |
i have the same feeling as davel.
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danr
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response 65 of 278:
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Apr 12 22:56 UTC 1999 |
Here's another quote:
"The monastery is a school--a school in which we learn from God how to be
happy. Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection
of his unlimited freedom and the perfection of His love.
What has to be healed in us is our true nature, made in the likeness of God.
What we have to learn is love. The healing and the learning are the same
thing, for at the very core of our essece we are constituted in God's
likeness by our freedom, and the exercise of that freedom is nothing else but
the exercise of disinterested love--the love of God for his own sake, because
He is God.
The beginning of love is truth, and before He will give us His love, God
must cleanse our souls of the lies that are in them. And the most effective
way of detaching us from ourselves is to make us detest ourselves as we have
made ourselves by sin, in order that we may love Him reflected in our souls
as he has remade them by His love. That is the meaning of the contemplative
life, and the senes of all the apparently meaningless little rules and the
observances and fasts and obediences and penances and humiliations and
labors that go to make up the routine of existence in a contemplative
monastery: they all serve to remind us of what we are and Who God is--that
we may get sick of the sight of oursleves and turn to Him: and in the end,
we will find Him in ourselves, in our own pruified natures which have become
the mirror of his tremendous Goodness and of His endless love..."
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danr
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response 66 of 278:
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Apr 12 22:57 UTC 1999 |
Hmmmm. That indenting is kinda strange, but that's the way Backtalk formatted
the text. Each new indent level is a new paragraph.
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