2. My husband was playing "Happy Birthday" on the harmonica and I realized: I still don't hear the words in English when I hear that tune. Someone starts playing the "Happy Birthday" tune and my brain goes, "Bonne fête à toi, bonne fête à toi . . ." Never in English, never.
Such is the result of going to early elementary school in Canada.
3. My husband's work gave him a pedometer (cool!) that tracks both his walking, and his aerobic walking. You know, because you can walk without using your lungs.
4. By the way, I assume “for Pete’s sake” must have once been “for St. Peter’s sake”? I think that makes me like the saying better, if it’s not profane. St. Peter is so familiar to all Christians, after all, and in the end, such a comforting figure. Even in his epistles, where he’ll ream you up one side and down the other and you know you deserve it, in the end he is the rock and you know you can rest your chastened self against his assurance of Christ’s goodness and borrow his conviction for awhile, letting it soak into your bones and become your own. I love St. Peter. If I’m allowed to. You know what I mean.
5. When I printed out my calendar for November, I got to print out "Christ the King" on November 20, which put a big smile on my face. It's my favorite feast!
6. I've often written sentences that use "that" twice in a row - like "who would have guessed that that would happen?" - and felt that it must be wrong, but thanks to Daily Grammar, I now know why it's correct. The two "that"'s are doing different things. They're both pronouns (who knew? not me) and the first one is a "relative pronoun" joining the two clauses together and the second one is a "demonstrative pronoun", pointing you back to the antecedent.
Even knowing that, it still doesn't sound quite right, does it?
7. I'm rereading "The Elizabethan World Picture" by E. M. W. Tillyard, a favorite from college, and finding his picture of the "chain of being" - a cosmic ordering of creation moving from the inanimate through the beasts and men and up to the angels - compelling. In that ordering of things, each realm of being mirrors the others, which means that you can learn about man, say, by studying either the animals or the angels, and extrapolating. Try this on for size:
Morally the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, if taken seriously, must be impressive. If the heavens are fulfilling punctually their vast and complicated wheelings, man must feel it shameful to allow the workings of his own little world to degenerate.Ouch.
Anyway, I'm not saying I'm ready to subscribe to the idea of the four humors and such - I have reason to be grateful to modern medical science after all - but it seems to me that there's a great deal of wisdom in how Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne saw the world, and it'd be a pity to ignore what they knew. Especially as what they knew made for such excellent poetry.
For more Quick Takes, go visit Jennifer at Conversion Diary.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
1 comment:
I'm a historian, so now I'm interested to read the book you mention in #7! And as such, I have to say it gratifies me that someone else sees the purpose of reading and understanding our history. If we don't understand where we've come from, how can we possible know where we are going (or to quote George Santayana, who stole it from an ancient Greek, "those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it.")
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