The Treasure Shelf: Week I

The Treasure Shelf

I have decided (for many reasons which I will explain at a later date) to embark on a slightly more intentional reading journey this year, with a goal to finish 50 books within 2017. Towards the end of each week, I'll be listing what I read and typing out a few favorite quotes as a treasury for myself to look back on and continue to digest when the year ends. I recognize that some of the quotes will make little sense out of context, and I apologize for that. But if you find yourself reading this, and you've read the book I'm quoting, hopefully it will bring back happy or worthwhile passages to your mind. If you haven't read the book, and hate plot spoilers, perhaps you should take care in reading these posts. But then agin, theres just a chance that a quote might serve as an enticing morsel drawing you towards another great read. In either case, I hope you'll join me and perhaps comment with a suggestion or two to add to my list! 

Week I

1) Wild Birds by Wendell Berry. 

"While they looked at each other, time stopped. Or I suppose it did, for it is a moment that has not stopped happening, at least in my mind, and whatever happened next never got into my mind at all. I knew that something powerful had passed, something strange to me, as from another world, yet pertaining to all I had ever known in this one." 

~~

"I want to make in on my own. I don't want a soul to thank," 

"Well...putting aside whatever Mary Penn might have to say about that, and putting aside what it means in the first place just to be a living human, I don't think your old friends has left you in shape to live thankless....I mean you're a man indebted to a dead man. So am I. So was he. That's the story of it. Back of you is Jack Beechum. Back of him was Ben Feltner. Back of him was, I think, his own daddy. And back of him somebody else, and on back that way, who knows how far? And I'm back of you because Jack Beechum is, and because he's back of me, along with some others. 

It's no use to want to make it on your own, because you can't. Oh Glad Pettit, I reckon, would say you can, but Glad Pettit deals in a kind of property you can put in your picket. Or he thinks he does. But when you quit living in the price and start living in the place, you're in a different line of succession." 

~~

"Every fold of the land, every grass blade and leaf of it gave me joy, for I saw how my own place in it had been prepared, along with its failures and its losses."

~~

"Once he woke me to recite me the Twenty-third Psalm. "Andy," he said. "Andy, Listen." He said the psalm to me. I lay listening to his old, slow voice coming through the dark to me, saying that he walked through the valley of the shadow of death and was not afraid. It stood my hair up. I had known that psalm all my life. I had heard it and said it a thousand times. But until then I had always felt that it came from a long way off, some place I had not lived. Now, hearing him speak it, it seemed to me for the first time to utter itself in our tongue and wear our dust." 

~~

"They drove in to the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dance. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful, and touchingly, touchingly mortal. They were spending themselves as they worked, giving up their time; they would not return by the way they went." 

~~

"Elton had as much gab as Burley, when he wanted to, but he served us as the teller of the tale of our own work. He told and retold everything that happened that was funny. That we already knew what he was telling, that he was telling us what we ourselves had done, did not matter. He told it well, he told it the way we would tell it when we told it, and ever time he told it he told it better. He told us, also, how much of our work we had got done, and how much we had left to do and how we might form the tasks still ahead in order to do them. His head, of course, was not the only one involved, and not the only good one, but his was indeed a good one, and his use of it pleased him and comforted us. Thought we had a lot of work still to do, we were going to be able to do it, and these were the ways we could get it done. The whole of its stayed in his mind. He shaped it for us and gave it a comeliness greater than its difficulty."

~~

"If change happens, it happens. Wheeler can recognize a change when he sees one, but change is not on his program. Difference is. His business, indoors and out, has been the making of differences."

~~

"...for she is still a beautiful woman, her beauty now less what she has than what she is."

~~

"What is done is done forever. I know that. I've said that the ones who have been here have been the way they were, and the ones of us who are here now are the way we are and to know that is the only chance we've got, dead and living to be here together. I ain't saying we don't have to know what we ought to have been and sought to be, but we oughtn't to let that stand between us. That ain't the way we are. The way we are we are members of each other. All of us."

~~

"If we had been brothers you wouldn't have put up with me. Or anyhow you partly wouldn't have, because a lot of my doings haven't been your kind of doings. As it was, they could be tolerable or even funny to you because they wasn't done close enough to you to matter. You could laugh."

Wheeler sits forward now, comfortless, straight up in his chair openly bearing the difficulty he knows it is useless to hide. Though this has never occurred to him before, because nobody has said it to him before, he knows with a seizure of conviction that Burley is right. He knows they all know, and again under his breastbone he feels the pain of a change that he thought completed, but is not completed yet. A great cavity has opened at the heart of a friendship, a membership, that not only they here in the office and the others who are living but men and women now dead belong to, going far back, dear as life. Dearer. It is a cavity larger than all that they know, a cavity that somebody - their silence so testifies - is going to have to step into, or all will be lost. 

If things were going slower, if he had the presence of mind he had even a minute ago, Wheeler would pray for the strength to step into it, for the knowledge to step into it. As it is, he does not know how. He sits as if paralyzed in his loss, without a word to his name, as if suddenly pushed stark naked into a courtroom, history and attainment stripped from him, become as a little child. 

But Burley is smiling, and not with the vengeful pleasure that Wheeler feared, but with understanding. He knows that what he has given Wheeler is pain, his to give, but Wheeler's own. He sees. 

"Wheeler, if we're going to get this will made out, not to mention all else we've got to do while there's breath in us, I think you've got to forgive me as if I was a brother to you." He laughs, asserting for the last time the seniority now indisputably his, and casting it aside. "And I reckon I've got to forgive you for taking so long to do it." 

He has spoken out of that cavity, out of that dark abyss. 

It is as if some deep dividing valley has been stepped across. There can be no further tarrying, no turning back. To Wheeler it seems that all their lives have begun again - lives dead, living, yet to be. 

2) The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales by George MacDonald.

A) The Light Princess:

"Perhaps the best thing for the princess would have been to fall in love. But how a princess who had no gravity could fall into anything is a difficulty - perhaps the difficulty. As for her own feelings on the subject, she did not even know that there was such a beehive of honey and stings to be fallen into."

~~

"Then she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. What it was, I find myself unable to describe. I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow - morbidezza, perhaps. She never smiled." 

~~

"Of course the prince and princess were betrothed at once. But the princess had to learn to walk, before they could be married with any propriety. And this was not so easy at her time of life, for she could walk no more than a baby. She was always falling down and hurting herself. 

"Is this the gravity you used to make so much of?" said she one day to the prince, as he raised her from the floor. "For my part, I was a great deal more comfortable without it." 

"No, no, that's not it. This is it," replied the prince, as he took her up, and carried her about like a baby, kissing her all the time. "this is gravity." 

"That's better," said she. "I don't mind that so much."

And she smiled the sweetest, loveliest smile in the prince's face. And she gave him one little kiss in return for all his; and he thought them overpaid, for he was beside himself with delight. 

I fear she complained of her gravity more than once after this..." 

B) The Giant's Heart

C) The Golden Key

"She sat down with her on her lap, and there the girl sat staring at her. She had never seen anything so beautiful. She was tall and strong, with white arms and neck, and a delicate flush on her face. The child could not tell what was the colour of her hair, but could not help thinking it had a tinge of dark green. She had not one ornament upon her, but she looked as if she had just put off quantities of diamonds and emeralds. Yet here she was in the simplest, poorest little cottage, where she was evidently at home. She was dressed in shining green." 

~~

"How old are you, please?" returned Tangle.

"Thousands of years old," answered the lady. 

"You don't look like it," said Tangle.

"Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!" 

And her great blue eyes looked down on the little Tangle, as if all the stars in the sky were melted in them to make their brightness.

"Ah! but," Said Tangle, "when people live long they grow old. At least I always thought so." 

"I have no time to grow old," said the lady. "I am too busy for that. It is very idle to grow old -- but I cannot have my little girl so untidy. Do you know I can't find a clean spot on your face to kiss!" 

"Perhaps," suggested Tangle, feeling ashamed, but not too much so to say a word for herself, -- "perhaps that is because the tree made me cry so." 

"My poor darling!" said the lady, looking now as if the moon were melted in her eyes, and kissing her little face, dirty as it was, "the naughty tree must suffer for making a girl cry." 

"And what is your name, please?" asked Tangle.

"Grandmother," answered the lady. 

"Is it really?" 

"Yes indeed. I never tell stories, even in fun."

"How good of you!" 

"I couldn't if I tried. It would come true if I said it and then I should be punished enough." 

And she smiled like the sun through a summer shower.

~~

"Now Mossy was the name his companions had given him, because he had a favourite stone covered with moss, on which he used to sit whole days reading; and they said the moss had begun to grow upon him too."

~~

"Mossy held out his hand. The moment the lady saw that it was the golden key, she rose from her chair, kissed Mossy on the forehead, made him sit down on her seat, and stood before him like a servant. Mossy Could not bear this, and rose at once. But the lady begged him, with tears in her beautiful eyes, to sit, and let her wait on him.

"But you are a great, splendid, beautiful lady," said Mossy. 

"Yes, I am, But I work all day long -- that is my pleasure; and you will have to leave me so soon!" 

"How do you know that, if you please, madam?" asked Mossy. 

"Because you have got the golden key."

"But I don't know what it is for. I can't find the keyhole. Will you tell me what to do?"

"You must look for the keyhole. That is your work. I cannot help you. I can only tell you that if you look for it you will find it." 

~~

"Where is the Old Man of the Fire?" she said.

"Here I am," answered the child, rising and leaving his balls on the moss. "What can I do for you?"

There was such an awfulness of absolute repose on the face off the child that Tangle stood dumb before him. He had no smile, but the love in his large grey eyes was deep as the centre. And with the repose there lay on his face a shimmer as of moonlight, which seemed as if any moment it might break into such a ravishing smile as would cause the beholder to weep himself to death. But the smile never came, and the moonlight lay there unbroken. For the heart of the child was too deep for any smile to reach from it to his face. 

"Are you the oldest man of all?" Tangle at length, although filled with awe, ventured to ask. 

"Yes, I am. I am very, very old. I am able to help you, I know. I can help everybody." 

And the child drew near and looked up in her face so that she burst into tears.

"Can you tell me the way to the country the shadows fall from?" she sobbed.

"Yes. I know the way quite well. I go there myself sometimes. But you could not go my way; you are not old enough. I will show you how you can go." 

~~

"In the centre stood seven columns, ranged from red to violet. And on the pedestal of one of them sat a woman, motionless, with her face bowed upon her knees. Seven years had she sat there waiting. She lifted her head as Mossy drew near. It was Tangle. Her hair had grown to her feet, and was rippled like the windless sea on broad sands. Her face was beautiful, like her grandmother's, and as still and peaceful as that of the Old Man of the Fire. Her form was tall and noble. Yet Mossy knew her at once. 

"How beautiful you are, Tangle!"he said, in delight and astonishment.

"Am I?" she returned. "Oh, I have waited for you so long! But you, you are the Old Man of the Sea. No. You are like the Old Man of the Earth. No, no. You are like the Oldest Man of all. You are like them all. And yet you are my own old Mossy!"

They told each other all their adventures, and were as happy as man and woman could be. For they were younger and better, and stronger and wise, than they had ever been before. 

~~

"It began to grow dark. And they wanted more than ever to reach the country whence the shadows fall. So they looked about them for a way out of the cave. The door by which Mossy entered had closed again, and there was half a mile of rock between them and the sea. Neither could Tangle find the opening in the floor by which the serpent had led her thither. They searched till it grew so dark the they could see nothing, and gave it up.

After a while, however, the cave began to glimmer again. The light came from the moon, but it did not look like moon light, for it gleamed through those seven pillars in the middle, and filled the place with all colours. And now Mossy saw that there was a pillar beside the red one, which he had not observed before. And it was the same new colour that he had seen in the rainbow when he saw it first in the fairy forest. And on it he saw a sparkle of blue. It was the sapphires round the keyhole. 

He took his key. It turned in the lock to the sound of Aeolian music. A door opened upon slow hinges, and disclosed a winding stair within. The key vanished from his fingers. Tangle went up. Mossy followed. The door closed behind them. They climbed out of the earth; and, still climbing, rose above it. They were in the rainbow. Far abroad, over ocean and land, they could see through its transparent walls the earth beneath their feet. Stairs beside stairs wound up together, and beautiful beings of all ages climbed long with them. 

They knew that they were going up to the country whence the shadows fall."