We’re fast forgetters, though, aren’t we?

“A decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man”

[Exerpted from "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy, first published 1891.]

Some two or three years before Angel’s appearance at the Marlott dance, on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home, a parcel came to the vicarage from the local bookseller’s, directed to the Reverend James Clare. The vicar, having opened it and found it to contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm.

‘Why has this been sent to my house?’ he asked peremptorily, holding up the volume.

‘It was ordered, sir.’

‘Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.’

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

‘Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,’ he said. ‘It was ordered my Mr. Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him.’

Mr. Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and dejected, and called Angel into his study.

‘Look into this book, my boy,’ he said. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘I ordered it,’ said Angel simply.

‘What for?’

‘To read.’

‘How can you think of reading it?’

‘How can I? Why–it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral, or even religious, work published.’

‘Yes–moral enough; I don’t deny that. But religious!–and for you, who intend to be a minister of the Gospel!’

‘Since you have alluded to the matter, father,’ said the son, with anxious thought upon his face, ‘I should like to say, once for all, that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent. I shall always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry.’

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was stultified, shocked, paralyzed. And if Angel were not going to enter the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely religious, but devout; a firm believer–not as the phrase is noe elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and out of it, but in the old and ardent sens of the Evangelical school: one who could

Indeed opine
That the Eternal and Divine
Did, eighteen centuries ago
In very truth . . .

Angel’s father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

‘No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest), taking it “in the literal and grammatical sense” as required by the Declaration; and, therefore, I can’t be a parson in the present state of affairs,’ said Angel. ‘My whole instinct in matters of religion is towards reconstruction; to quote your favourite Epistle to the Hebrews, “the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”‘

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

‘What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used for the honour and glory of God?’ his father repeated.

‘Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father.’

. . . .

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies, undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable indifference to social forms and observances. The material distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the ‘good old family’ (to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives.

. . . .

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career. Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly–the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters, and mists, shades and silence, and the voices of inanimate things.

Look at this amazing earthling I share my birthday with! :)

Scientist, Turning 100, Still Works

ROME (April 19) — Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

Stories That Made Us Smile

Riccardo De Luca, AP

20 photos

 

 

As she turns 100, Italian scientist and senator for life Rita Levi Montalcini said she is as sharp as ever. Her advice for life? “Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.” Here, Montalcini sips wine at a press conference in Rome for her 100th birthday. Click through this gallery to see other stories that will make you feel good.

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She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

“At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20,” she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

“Above all, don’t fear difficult moments,” she said. “The best comes from them.”

“I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom,” the scientist said.

Her white hair elegantly coifed and wearing a smart navy blue suit, she raised a glass of sparkling wine in a toast to her long life.

[I wonder if I can find her address anywhere..I want to write her a letter! Oh!]

We’ve got the dreamers’ disease.

Prayer for Dreamers by Vienna Cobb Anderson

We pray for the dreamers of this life, O God,
for those persons who imagine new possibilities,
who long for what others cannot perceive,
who spin dreams of wonder and majesty in their minds.
Defend them from ridicule and harsh criticism,
from self-doubt and lack of faith in their dreams,
and from abandonment of this call to make things new.
Grant that from their dreams
may come forth blessings for humankind
to enrich the quality of life
and the wonderment of us all.
Amen.

If you made a resolution:

:)

What a wonderful world it would be.

You know how in general I don’t believe in making New Years resolutions, etc.? Besides Jonas Brothers concerts, I’ve found one that is really, really swell. It sounds extremely difficult. It sounds impossible. But of course it could also change the world. It balances out.

“I’m thinking about…not committing yet, just thinking about it…making a New Year resolution–to try to drop polarizing words from my vocabulary in 2009–including words I’ve used in this short piece: left, right, liberal, conservative, pro-life, pro-choice, and so on. I wonder what would happen if a bunch of us tried it…as a way of breaking with the insanity of always doing what you’ve always done while expecting to get otherwise than what you’ve already got. Hmm.” -Brian McLaren

We could at least try. Have you ever tried that experiment, you know, that one they used to pull on us at youth conference and things like that? The group leaders or whoever used to challenge us to go an entire week without thinking about other people in negative ways. Or if that was too scary we could start smaller. We could start with one day. We always failed, of course, but I wonder who we could have become by now if we hadn’t given up after four hours disgusted with ourselves and our negativity. If, for instance, I hadn’t abandoned the whole idea as hopeless, but instead had actively replaced wrong thinking with right thinking, if I had sooner come to terms with my own inner condition, if I had looked for creative ways to spread goodness, I would probably be a better person by this time than I am now, and that’s the small picture. I used to think that if I tried to do something like that and failed, then that was it, I failed, I was a failure. My thinking’s been changing. I think now that if I try something and fail and keep trying, I am not a failure at it. The only way to get somewhere is to move. PS, this is one of my fave movies: :]

I’m not afraid to fall
It means I climbed up high
To fall is not to fail
You fail when you don’t try
I’m not afraid to fall
I might just learn to fly
And I will spread
These wings of mine

I’m not afraid to fall
And here I told you so
Don’t want to rock the boat
But I just have to know
Just a greener side
Or can I touch the sky?
But either way
I will have tried

I’m not afraid to fall
I’ve fallen many times
They laughed when I fell down
But I have dared to climb
Not afraid to fall
I know I’ll fall again
But I can win this in the end [Superchic[k], “Get Up”]

Let me light up the sky, light it up for you.