Gilded toys of dust

On Tuesday I did laundry and washed my ipod. It doesn't work anymore.

This is the most recent in a long line of possessions lost (or now broken) in little over a year. I'd thought myself a fairly responsible, if sometimes absent-minded, person, but I'm developing a bad track record. A few notable entries, the ones in italics are things I lost for long enough that I thought they were gone forever but eventually recovered them:

favorite brown cardigan

beautiful drawings from Guanajuato, MX

off-white cardigan

black fleece

rain jacket

swiss-army knife

Perelandra

toothbrush plus travel case

several favorite earrings

The Case for Life

a favorite scarf

socks. always the favorite wool ones.

Similarly to my last post, this list seems a little less impressive written out. But I persist. Perhaps I've forgotten things. In any case, it's made me think a fair bit about the relative insignificance of the stuff I own. I still miss my brown sweater, but it matters little whether I have one or not. Not to put to fine a point on it, what matters most is that I have Christ. I guess I needed practical reminders of this.

I am trying to hold things loosely in the metaphorical sense, while realizing it probably wouldn't hurt to hold onto stuff a little more tightly in the literal sense.

I've been remembering this verse from All for Jesus:

Worldlings prize their gems of beauty

Cling to gilded toys of dust

Boast of wealth and fame and pleasure

Only Jesus will I trust.

My heart sank a bit when I uncovered my ipod, tangled in my sheets in the washing machine. That's the worst it did, so I'm imaging that having an ipod wasn't an idol of mine, but since then I've been thinking about what my reaction might be to having other, more precious things taken from me, and what that reveals about my heart. It's sobering.

This post is a bit roughshod, but I knew if I didn't write tonight I'd never get back to it. These are my recent musings, friends. I want to relinquish my grasp on what really isn't mine.

Labor Day and Today

Ages and ages ago I went to the Warren Dunes in Sawyer, Michigan with some friends on Labor Day. Looking at this pictures is making me feel a little wistful. I'd like to be sitting on the sand right now, listening to the quiet lap of the water.

We drove up early afternoon, walked along the beach a short ways until we found a deserted dune and settled there. We braved the water, tossed around a frisbee, and romped on the dune. My friend Amy had brought with her a tiny charcoal grill for cooking some bratwurst, so we were well fed too.

I spoke much of the reading I had to do, and did very little of it. I might have made it through four pages of Congreve's "The Way of the World" on the beach, an act or two more in the car by aid of a headlamp. No regrets.

This is my roommate, Robin. She is very cool.

This semester I had a particularly hard time buckling down to do work on weekends, or weekdays for that matter. It was far too appealing to play ultimate, mosey around the farmer's market, walk a dog. . . I've gotten better (or worse?). Saturdays have been full of homework (with scarcely time to blog, evidently). And it's been far too long since walked a dog.

Today reminded me a bit of those first few guiltily pleasurable weekends. Except this time without the guilt (except that I should probably be sleeping now). I slept in a tad, did some reading, visited the French Market with a friend to buy coffee and a freshly made hot donut, read a bit more, lunched, played Ultimate, and read a bit more before dinner and afterwards. Written down, this sounds rather tame. I'm almost tempted to delete it, but I'd rather bask in the extraordinary truth that I finished all my reading for Tuesday and had some fun too.

Language thrills

I am back now from a lovely Fall Break Retreat in Lake Geneva, WI with friends from church. I didn't bring homework with me, which was blissful, so today I will be reading all day long. There are worse fates. I am enjoying a book for my Senior Seminary class on reading called Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Here are a few quotes that resonated with me within the first hour of reading. More to come, I hope.

Despite all this mental pirouetting, or maybe because of it, I don't remember much of what I've read. My lifelong capacity for forgetting distresses me. I glance at a book on the shelf that I once read with avid interest - Dorothy Gallagher's All the Right Enemies, about the 1943 murder of the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca - and while I struggle for the details, all I recall is the excitement of the reading. I couldn't give a cogent account of its dense intrigue or social history, yet I have some inchoate sense of the texture and dynamics of the subject. (p. 4)

In truth I have made some tentative steps toward freedom. Over the last ten years or so, I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills. (p. 5)

In which I feel vindicated for my frustration with Shakespearean critics

There are indeed a sort of underlying auxiliars to the difficulty of work, call'd Commentators and Critics, who wou'd frighten many people by their number and bulk, and perplex our progress under pretense of fortifying their author.

- Alexander Pope to Joseph Addison, 1714.

Thank you, Mr. Pope.