In Defence of Chick Flicks...

Only good chick flicks, of course, along with Jane Austen, Anne of Green Gables, Disney princess movies, and every fairy tale in which the knight in shining armor saves the day. Westley may be a fiction, but why shouldn't we set the standards high? Ideals need not blind us to reality.

"If what mothers mean by a good match, is the alliance of a man of position and means-- or let them throw intellect, manners, and personal advantages into the scale-- if this be all, then we grant [that] the daughter of cultivated imagination may not be manageable, will probably be obstinate. We hope she will be obstinate enough. But will the girl be less likely to marry a gentleman, in the grand old meaning of the sixteenth century? ...Will she be less likely to marry one who honours women, and for their sakes, as well as his own, honours himself? Or to speak from what many would regard as the mother's side of the question-- will the girl be more likely, because of such a culture in her imagination [that is, images planted by The Princess Bride or Pride and Prejudice], to refuse the wise, true-hearted, generous rich man, and fall in love with the talking, verse-making fool, because he is poor, as if that were a virtue for which he had striven? The highest imagination and the lowliest common sense are always on one side."
-George MacDonald in "The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture"

Mellifluous Mondays: More Frost

A day late, here's a beautiful poem by Robert Frost. It's called "Bond and Free." The contrast between love and thought, passion and pure reason, reminds me of the debate which has recurred in my Englightement-era literature class this semester. Is is better to operate under the dictates of reason, free of this world's distractions and error? Or should we listen to human feelings and compassion?

Or . . . can we simply embrace both? I think the answer lies there, since clearly, God gave us both faculties, not to oppose but to complement one another.

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about--
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turn, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius' disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

Thankful Thursdays: Echinacea

I'm sick (recovering soon, or such is the hope) and therefore sucking down vast quantities of Vitamin C and echinacea. I am so grateful for natural remedies like these, because they do help, and I do not have to visit the health center and pay for a batch of artificial antibiotics.

Isn't it amazing how a beautiful flower can also yield a potent medicine? I love how God works so many levels of goodness into His creation.

Political Thoughts

I'm not happy that Obama won. But neither do I think that McCain was God's gift to mankind, and much less do I think that O's win spells disaster for life as we know it. I've had enough of these ridiculous prophecies: "Socialists will overrun America! Every other child will be aborted! Taxes will rocket through the roof!" Please, people. He's only the executive. The House holds the power of the purse; the Senate has more influence on laws than the president ever will. You should be worrying about our liberal legislative branch more than our liberal president. Constitutionally speaking, Obama can't make any of that awful stuff happen unless he orchestrated a Nazi-style coup d'etat and pulled the wool over the entire nation's eyes on the force of his own rhetoric. And pardon my French, but if he pulled that off, we'd damn well deserve it.

. . .

I live on a very conservative campus. I can only imagine what an uproar there will be today. A couple thoughts on the common responses I'm seeing:

1) Fear. How about these reassuring words from Scripture? "The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps" (Proverbs 16:9). "Kingship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations" (Psalm 22:28). "God my King is from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth." (Psalm 74:12). If the Lord truly is King over all the earth, a paltry president should not worry us.

2) Hatred. Guess what? Obama is not the devil incarnate. He is simply a sinful man in need of God's salvation, and who knows, the Lord may be at work in him even now. I'm praying that He is. Nothing can stand before God's irresistible grace, not the most hardened heart and wayward soul. Do you think that it was any easier to save you?

. . .

All that said, I do think we're going to hell in a handbasket. Socially and politically, we have rejected so many of the foundational truths of our freedom that it would be hard to extricate ourselves from the downward spiral. Without respect for our constitution, and (more importantly) without the individual virtue that's required to make a republic work, we're never going to recover. The United States may not collapse, but it will soon look very different from what the Founders had in mind.

Mellifluous Mondays: A Sad Woman

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you-- lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind-- with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.
-"Portrait D'Une Femme" by Ezra Pound

This woman leads such an empty life, filled with "idols and ambergris and rare inlays" but void of family or lasting friendship. At worst, I think, she might be a courtesan ("great minds have sought you, lacking someone else"). At best, she's simply a crabby woman who refused to marry for fear of losing her independence, and now pays dearly in loneliness.