Wednesday What Are You Reading

Currently Reading

The Wayward Bus (John Steinbeck). Wondering whether Pa has read it; it feels as if he ought to have, but I don't remember his ever mentioning it. I am swimming in the gorgeous descriptions and rolling my eyes at the occasional Fail.

Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan) - Christiana is objecting to the fact that robins eat spiders. Good protein on a spider, I'd have thought.


Recently Finished

Abiding (Ben Quash) - never really got into this, and I don't know whether this was because it was too lightweight or too heavy. Some interesting thoughts on the verge of moving house, and some good leads on things I might like to read/watch, but not the Lent book I was looking for.

The Gap in the Curtain (John Buchan) - I am not entirely sure how I feel about this. The first chapter was rather embarrassing, in the same way that the Professor Challenger books get embarrassing when Arthur Conan Doyle gets into spiritualism. The rest of it was great, proper Buchan with adventure and creepiness in more or less equal measures. I'm finding it easiest to think of this as a supernatural AU.

Out of the Blue (Charlotte Bingham) - was dreadful; needed some serious editing. I am ambivalent about 'show, don't tell', but my goodness, I could have done with being told a lot less here.


Up Next

Silence and Honey Cakes (Rowan Williams) - will need to take it back to the library before I leave Surrey.

Life after Life (Kate Atkinson) - is for book club, but I've heard very good things about this and am looking forward to it.


Poetry

A. E. Housman and Leonard Cohen.


Other Media

Rev. gets more and more harrowing, and, as it moves further away from the cringe-humour, easier to watch. (My most painful episode is still the one with the inter-faith football match.)

Listening to a lot of Tom Paxton; also the King's Singers Lord's Prayer sequence/meditation/album/thing.

April Moon: Day 9

Yearning

What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?

'Tell me, child,' says the poet Bunthorne to the milkmaid Patience, 'do you ever yearn?'

'I earn my living,' she replies.

Which makes me think about my earning and my yearning. I work for an organisation with high ideals, an organisation that's trying to change the world, yearning, if you like, for change. My daily duties, however, are pretty prosaic. I don't think I ever expected anything else: I'd already got my head around the idea that a servant with this clause/makes drudgery divine, that if a job's worth doing it doesn't matter if it's frontline or backroom. Even when it's stuffing a thousand envelopes, there's something at the back of it that's about yearning.

It is tempting to say that earning is yearning in action, but I know well enough that I'm in a privileged position, to be able to think so.

And then yearning does not have to be about action. A wish is an act in itself, even if one then doesn't follow it up with an obvious action. We must be the change we want to see; fine, but we begin not by changing, nor by being, but by wanting. I remember last May, when I was burned out with all my causes, feeling corroded and unappreciated, going to a lecture by Leslie Griffiths, Baron Griffiths of Burry Port, a prominent Methodist. He was angry. He was angry about a whole lot of things, most of which I was angry about too, but which I was just too damn tired to do anything useful about.

I cannot remember what exactly he said, but the effect was to give me space, to let me be angry, to let me want change - yes, to let me yearn - to remove the expectation that I would immediately go out and fix it. I could breathe again.

I've been trying to let myself just want things. To desire a change, an outcome, a quality, and not to be ashamed of desiring it. Not to be afraid that I might not get it. To yearn.