Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Prayer
Oh God, you are as present in a nanosecond
as in the great rolling waves of eternity,
as present in cramped closet as in the cathedral.
Help me, during this busy season,
to find you in those nanoseconds
and in those infinitesimal spaces.
Amen.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Saturday post on Saturday the novel
Finally finished Ian McEwan's Saturday which Pru wanted me to read. I didn't want to read it most of the way through since it only seemed to increase my anxiety; he did such a good job of describing that lingering fear that has colored our lives since our awakening to uncertainty on 9/11. This wasn't the kind of reading I wanted to do in my few spare minutes for light reading. Give me Pym, give me Howatch, I yearned, but plowed through . Spoiler warning ahead. I didn't know what to expect, having not read any of his books before and when I started a review that said something about how one knows what to expect when reading some other authors and McEwan, I stopped, because I was enjoying not knowing. (Although I did know, from the character's comments on magic realism--that if anything can happen, nothing matters--that this author would probably not have characters start flying out the window, at least, not unless they fell to gruesome death). I feared the worst, deciding, midway through, that his beloved wife would probably be murdered right before his eyes. But the actual ending turned out, after all, to be cathartic and satisfying. But. The idea that listening to someone recite "
But still, it is of course the perfect poem to act as a unifying thread in the novel. It functions much the way the recitation of the Wreck of the Deutschland did in Muriel Spark's, The Girls of Slender Means. That classic explored the nature of good and evil in an