Can I marry a stockbroker?

"It is true that if you want to write well and live well at the same time, you'd better arrange to marry a stockbroker or a rich woman who can operate a typewriter."

-Flannery O'Connor

When one first begins writing, one hears lots of advice:

"Never end sentences this way: example."

"Never ever do this in this situation: example."

"And above all, show, don't tell."

As a young writer, I didn't realize that much of this advice drew from public opinion of the moment. True, lots of it is good advice when one looks at it from the viewpoint of having one's manuscript accepted by a big-time editor and put on the New York Time's Bestsellers list. I've read many books but I will admit that, till recent years, the majority of what I had read was written pre-1950. That meant that my literary examples were of the old style. My literary education was performed at an old school. While popular tastes demanded the modern cosmopolitan flair of Manhattan Prep from White Collar, I spent my school years at something with more of the flavor of Eton, to use a great school in a loose analogy. Naturally, I came to the class reunion talking slang from years back and finding "yo dawg" was not exactly what people these days go around saying. And yes, I felt as cheesy as that sounded. How is a girl to write the way she has been taught without sounding like an ancient tome? Because I have picked up books by authors who obviously had a similar literary education to my own and have thought, "Yeah, I wouldn't choose to publish this either." In many ways, the advice I was given was exactly what I needed to hear.

It is true that the modern reading public has a shorter attention span than in the days of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. I consider myself a fairly patient reader and even I had to have three go's at the unabridged Les Miserables before I could finish, and even then it was a terrible struggle to push through his ponderous lectures to get to the heart of the story.
It is true that modern readers expect a certain hook at the front of the book and look for page-turning plots. The books I put down are inevitably the books that bore me to tears. If you can't capture my attention within the first chapter or two, how am I to trust you with my valuable reading-time not to continue to bore me throughout?
It is true that it's always nice to show instead of tell. We all like details. Details! Juicy, fat, details.

 I'm here to say that though much of what the modern writer is taught is good advice, pleasure remember that it is just advice after all. It is someone else's idea of how to you ought to write. Perhaps this other person is more qualified than you to say what sells, what readers like, and what will attract the attention of a worthwhile publisher. But when it comes down to whether modern taste is Holy Writ, I'm here to say it is not. To illustrate my point: at a coffee shop the other day I chose an old, weathered book off the community shelf. I picked this book because the illustrations looked similar to those in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. My Ten Years in a Quandary by Robert Benchley. Between rounds of mancala I read the first two chapters. Nothing much happened in those two chapters. Gasp. Rob Bell would have a fit. But the book entertained me well enough to the point that I left a note inside at the place I left off for the next reader. How? Nothing happened! The plot did not advance in the slightest and I can hardly see how each sentence mattered to the whole of the book's events. Here's the secret power of this book and the best of the those in the old style: they didn't arrest a reader by virtue of action, but activity. Benchley's voice in the first two chapters of his book is anything but passive. It romps about with as much energy as The Hunger Games could possibly give, though in the latter you're thrown right into the midst of a world gone mad.
I also know from experience that I don't mind character-driven fiction. Sure I like things to happen and plot is terribly important. Glaring at you, The Notebook. But if the characters are well-drawn, the voice lively enough, and the story-world interesting, I am one-hundred percent okay with a sauntering pace. Just like I don't run marathons because I prefer walking and enjoying my surroundings (and let's be honest: I'd feel like I was dying), I almost prefer a story that, while well-constructed, leaves me time to savor the summer pace of its pages. I think of some of my favorite films (Cinderella, The Devil Wears Prada, The Help, Saving Mr. Banks, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Miss Potter, Master & Commander...) and realize that though plot is present and well-formed, the real reason I am invested is the strength and color of the characters.
I'd been throwing these thoughts around in my head and waiting for them to gel before writing a blog post when the final driftwood was thrown onto my seaside fire: Flannery O'Conner (yes, that paragon of all things Southern) gave me a lift in denouncing the prophetic law that the Modern Reader has tried to make of "Show, Don't Tell":

"All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, 'She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen with his sheet of paper in his hand.' The more you look at a sentence like that the more you can learn from it."

Yes, dear Flannery O'Connor. We can learn that the editor at Harper & Row would fling the papers into Flaubert's satchel and say, "Try again some other time when you've learned the market." Yet one of the most well-respected writers of Southern fiction goes on past the quote I shared and continues to praise a very obvious lapse of POV and showing vs. telling. Now I don't mind so much. I'm accustomed to that kind of description and that kind of description is, in fact, what I tried for when I first began writing. But such a thing would admittedly not stand up in today's court again a jury of modern readers. I suppose the point of all this is to show you that there is both wisdom and error in the advice given to the modern writer. Wisdom, in that the current marketplace wants a certain thing and if you want to engage in commerce, you must learn to cater to their whims. Error, in that the modern way is the only way to write well. Flannery O'Connor reminded me that in each era there is, speaking of literary technique, a temporary right and wrong. Each era's faux pas were different. Our era's are one thing...fifty years from now it will be another.

For now....just try not to write like Flaubert.

Goodbye.

Never say goodbye.
As the rain falls, silvering a field green with wheat. As small drops on a breeze sift onto the back of your neck, refuse.

The goodbye wells up in my heart, thrusts itself forward for notice, and the sky weeps for me. This melancholy strokes my soul with a meaningful fingers and says....what?
That it is time?
That old things must change?
No, the rain sings a many-tongued song but it is not that. The meaning lies just beyond my reckoning but the body needs no words to feel the import of this painful pleasure. Have you ever worked till blisters form? A hot, swollen testament to purpose, a work completed.
Well done, old girl, well done.

This rain blisters me. Under old callouses a new but familiar pain forms, swelling to the chafing of the true things it flings earthward. A cardinal flaunts on a gaunt pine-branch and its small voice is as sharp and acid-sweet as the rain: a goodbye that won't come.

Train-song drives upwind, iron wheels hammering the same tune. Away, away, away, away. How I want to reply, "I will away with you!"
But I can't. Never say goodbye to good things. To good friends. To best times. I never do. How could I?

Harder, fleeter, faster fall the raindrops. The pain intensifies, becomes sweeter and firmer in its vintage. Goodbye, goodbye!
I could say it. If my soul was more tender or a deal harder I could say that dolorous word, goodbye. But I think that if I hold onto Them, those things I cannot set free, They will stay. Goodbye would be easy if I did the leaving. But while the song drums "away," it is a gypsy-call for Them. Those things I feel I must keep. The song has two words...
"Remain," is mine.

Like rain, my word spreads feather-light mist over my eyes and soul.
Let them away. You remain here, for here is your place. Say goodbye.
But I cannot. Never say goodbye. Goodbye is a severe word. If they go away, who promises I will see them again? Who promises I will not remain obedient and empty-handed and absent-hearted?

A train shouts through the mizzle: away, away, away, away.
And again.
And again.

I shiver. A divisive pleasure and pain this is, though as dusk falls I have learned its tongue, dividing my will in shards of yes and no.
Remain.
I will. I believe and trust it is right.
Away. Give them away.
But can I? Greater than a fear of tangible evil is the thought of being left behind, forgotten, shrugged out of like a coat They once loved but grew too large for. Must we keep growing? Can we not stay as we are? Remain young and safe so They will never have to give me away? I would like that. We could walk in this rain together and balance on the tracks along the railroad and staunch its song. Never have to say goodbye. We could all stay. Would that be so wrong? We are so happy.

More rain. Green now yawned up by slate and darkness. If my heart would not grow, would not breed such eager dreams, maybe the rain could not chafe its palms. We all accept the good agony of a heart's sprawling expansion, though it sometimes makes to burst the chest apart.
Oh. That is why we grow bigger, isn't it?
If we could not, would our frightened, brittle child-bones crush the thrumming soul? Or would the heart grow like cancer and force the indolent frame apart? The frame that would not say goodbye, at war with itself.

My lane is a pale blue horseshoe in the grass. Rain trots down the gutter and asks again:
Won't you say goodbye?

Will it hurt? I don't like to hurt.
Will I be lonely? I can't bear to be alone.
Will I ever get it back?
But the rain has only one double-edged sword: away, remain. It is my choice to let us grow or to make us suffocate in a body ill-shaped for the shape of our souls. If I say goodbye, if They never come back, will I miss Them? Will other days and people and times come to fill the emptiness They left? And will the day arrive when "remain" will have become too small a word for my life? And will They have to say "away" to me?

Down, down comes the mist and all glistens in the gloaming. Maybe, soon, I could say goodbye.

My blisters cool in the rain.

Away, away, but you: remain.

And somehow it's enough.

Advent: The Paradox

photo credit: tatum teels

Lord, deliver!
Rend the shiver
As our swollen
bodies lie
In the dark net
of the "not yet"
where we, wandering,
fear to die.
From "Adventus"

I sit down this evening to write and my heart is full with so many things. I am happy because I have spent the last several days with the best sampling of family and friends. I am overwhelmed by the generosity of people who have not much more than we have ourselves, yet give lavishly. I am wistful because we are having our woods cleared and replanted and there is an ache inside me when I think of how pillaged it will look...how long those trees grew. I am grateful because I know what it is to love and be loved. I am cozy because the sun curtsied goodbye with the colors of saffron and I am cold because there is none of summer's riot to the show. I am perfectly content and discontent all at once, happy and sad, up and down, satisfied and yearning, peaceful and anxious.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. It is perhaps the only month in the twelve where the paradoxes are realized in this old event of waiting for the coming. The coming of Christ. The re-coming of Christ. We are content, peaceful, gentled, joyful in the assurance that it will happen. We are unsatisfied, anxious, pacing, saddened that we wait yet a while longer. And the preciousness of this season for me is the permission to feel myself torn in half sometimes by the beauty that is not yet versus the beauty that is right now. I often find myself upset by the many, conflicting minds of me. Have you ever felt your soul wrung by the fact that though you long for heaven's joys, there are beautiful moments that belong peculiarly and perhaps only to earth, and you wonder if you'll miss them? Moments like laughing so hard that you choke on your lemonade; moments where you slowly freeze with a friend's arm thrown companionably around you while you watch the sun set and nearly suffocate with bonfire smoke; moments where an Irish beat pounds as you reel down and down and down a line that never ends; moments where the stars are so clear and close you feel as if you could reach up and pluck one. Maybe in the new heaven and on the new earth, we'll have lemonade and choke with laughter too. I'm certain there will be sunsets more glorious than any I've seen here. Maybe there will be wild Celtic dances in the timeless time and we'll never retire with aches in our sides. Maybe the stars will be ours for the touching and we'll wear them in our hair. Perhaps it will be all these things and more. I know that the stabs of joy I experience in these earth-moments are so precious to me because they are reflections of the joy to come. But there is a fierceness in me that clings to earth because it is home. It is not home, but it is familiar. The familiarity is a home in itself. Heaven is unfamiliar, or rather so familiar it seems strange, so homelike it is almost unrecognizable as home.
So I long for earth.
And then I hear news of wars, plagues, uprisings, children brutally murdered by psychotic parents, abortions, terrorism, pain. Pain everywhere. And when I think it cannot get worse, death happens. I know our souls are immortal, that we are beings created for eternity, but again, earth has a beauty of its own. Because I live here, I want to be comfortable here. I don't want to know that if one of my beloved friends or family dies, that I will never be able to see them again until eternity. I want them to be here to snort lemonade with me, to nearly suffocate around the bonfire, to make my arms ache with the force of a grand reel. People sicken and grow old and their bodies belong less and less to earth. I wait for things. I wait for many things. I wait for a man who will pledge his life to mine and sometimes the waiting is especially hard. Not because I am tired of waiting, but because the people who are growing old and sickening belong to my heart. I want my grandmother to be at my wedding more than anything. And while time wears down her body and her lungs grow weary, I am still waiting. There are no men. There are no weddings. Will there be no Grandmama as well? And in those moments I ache as I have never ached before with wanting eternity. No more wars. No more separations. No more death. No more sickness. No more strife and arguments and tears and financial worry. I sin again. And again. And again. I doubt, I stumble, I fall, I rise, I deny, I admit, I inflict hurt, I ask forgiveness. And some moments I hate my beloved earth with a passion deeper than all the rest. I long for Christ. To be in His presence and have all this blown away in the glory of Himself. I thought I wanted earth when what I really want is eternity and a life in His presence--literally. In His presence. Able to reach for His hand and wander an amber wood and just adore Him. This is the thing for which I was created and I realize that I'll never be at home on earth. Earth is just a passing-through. Glory is beyond. But the real kicker? I'm stuck here. You're stuck here. We're stuck having precious earth and wanting wondrous heaven. Loving heaven but clinging to earth. Aching for what we'll leave, breaking for what we know is before us. The End is withheld. For now. It is coming but it has not come. You aren't imagining the feeling of pacing a room you love, scenting change in the air, knowing that any moment the glorious unfolding will gloriously unfold. But the "will" is not the "has."

Advent is a paradox. Your paradox, my paradox. Christ's paradox.
Weakness and strength.
Baby and King
Here and There
Now and Soon
We are the "and" in these arrangements. We don't belong to either world yet. Too much alive for heaven, much too immortal for life. But we have been called to a paradox and who are we to complain? Life is the messy bits. Our call is to live the paradox and draw into it the souls around us. Advent is the time when we remember this. The ache under my breast-bone is not a bad thing. The love I have for this life and the passion I have for the next are not meant to be lived one or the other. Somehow they combine. Some messy, messy way they do.

Advent: the coming. I wait with open arms.

"For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace; Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end." -Isaiah 9:6-7

Whence Came the Scars

This short story or flash-fiction is rather different than usual. Thoughtful. I wrote it after thinking for some time about the gift of grace and how--for one of us--it isn't free. And what a wonder it is that Jesus keeps extending that grace to us. Anyway. I hope you enjoy it and can, possibly, relate.

He bent over his knees, the suffocation of guilt pressing him to the marble floor in a way no discipline had yet managed. Breath seemed futile in his shame, but breath came anyway, swift and hot in the pocket of air between his belly and knees. The throne room was empty and silent, but he would come. He always knew when one of his brothers had arrived. Armeddeonan spat a curse on himself into the stillness and his breath quickened. The skin of his belly and chest flashed on and off his sweating thighs like the sleek sides of a hound after a race.

How many times had he folded himself in shame, dissolved in submission and fear...and lived to hurt his older brother again? For he knew it hurt him, somehow. He was not certain how, but he knew he inflicted pain on this most gentle of men and the thought dirtied him further.

Armeddeonan flinched at the sound of the heavy doors being thrown open and the inward rush of jasmine-scented air. His brother had been walking in his gardens again among the pure beauty of the warm summer night while Armeddeonan had been less...nobly occupied.

“Brother, why lie you on your countenance in so sorrowful a state?” His voice was rich and quiet and he drew near with an easy step.

Armeddeonan crumpled deeper into his fold and despised the kindness that chose not to accuse him.

“Please arise,” he said and his courtesy held a regal command both imminent and gentle.

Heart pounding, senses alert, Armeddeonan arose and stretched himself to his full height. In stature, he now stood a head taller than his brother, but he had never felt more insignificant and yet significant than he did now with that comprehensive gaze on his features.

“Good evening, my brother,” Armeddeonan murmured.

“Good evening.”

He watched the uncertain torchlight burnish his brother’s crimson robes to burgundy and play on the auburn flecks in his dark hair. His face was patient and kind but the scars driving up his arms and extending, as Armeddeonan knew, across his back and shoulders showed him capable of bearing untold sorrows. How did he get the scars? What kept them fresh and red when time ought to have bleached them skin-smooth?

“I have not come merely to say hello,” Armeddeonan said at last. He had spoken too loud and startled the shadows into activity. A dark breeze fell through the open doorway and shook the twin torches, rattling them in their iron brackets.

When Armeddeonan looked back to his brother, he saw that the man’s eyes dwelt on his features as if searching for the Truth in him. Was there truth in him? Had there ever been? Pain like branding seared Armeddeonan’s chest and bitter gall rose in his throat.

“I am sorry,” he whispered. Visions of last night--soft arms, red lips, warm bronze skin and linen sheets slayed him over again with stinking guilt. “I am so sorry.”

“Jazmeriana?” his brother asked and his glance was so swift and piercing it cut the flesh from his bones.

Armeddeonan hung his head. “Again. Always again.”

They breathed together for a quiet space of time and somewhere beyond the doors of the throne room a nightingale sang the tune of all the purity Armeddeonan had spent on the girl. The sound flayed his spirit and he clenched his tunic in his fists, willing the creature to die with its song in its throat.

“Did you enjoy it?” his brother asked. “Jazmeriana’s company?” From anyone else, the question would have seemed insufferable, laden with accusation and despising. From Armeddeonan’s brother, it was only a question.

“I did.” Armmedeonan ground out between clenched teeth. “I always do.” That was what stung like the sting of a thousand bees. It was only here, in the throne room in the presence of his scarred brother, that he ever felt the weight of his wrongs. In Jazmeriana’s arms, he had no thought but pleasure. She did not capture him--he sought her. There was no question of whether the guilt was his own. It was there, pungent and horrible in his mind’s eye.

“Why must it be so good?” he spat in contempt of himself and his problems.

“Because it was created good,” his brother said with quiet finality. “But not to be stolen and enjoyed in a hurried corner by those who will not swear the oath that makes it beautiful. You cheapen it. The gift is not yours.”

Cheap? He was not cheap--he was extravagant. That was why he stood here now, bent and sweating and horrible. He never thought of the price of anything--his nights with Jazmeriana or any of the hundred other sins that now crowded his thoughts. How much did it cost anyway? His head throbbed with the reckoning under the warm pulse of the night. The price to be paid was death--it was death to break the King’s law. How many times over would he need to die to pay it off? Gooseflesh stood up along his bronzed arms even as the sweat dripped down his chest.

His brother waited, silent and sure in the darkness.

“I know I have sinned against my King,” Armeddeonan said at last, head bent. “I am willing to pay the death-price. Forgive me.”

The nightingale sang again but this time it sounded like liquid sorrow and he felt tears joining the sweat on his face. He knew what would come now and he hated and craved the mercy of it, white against his blood-stained blackness.

His brother stepped in and pressed firm, warm lips to his forehead, and the kiss was scented with triumph and grace.“I stand in your stead,” he whispered, pulling away.

Their eyes locked. Armeddeonan tried to look away. He could not look at the golden knowing in his brother’s eyes. He could not accept this. How many times had his brother taken his death-punishment for him? For him and for every one of his subjects in the realm? How many times would he still insist on carrying for them their sins? Was he not weary of the same pageant over and over again?

“It is not a pageant,” came the voice, heavier now as if it came from the center of a soul much-wearied by a weight it bore. “You belong to me. To my King. You are my brother.”

Armeddeonan sliced the air with one fore-arm. “I am adopted! I have spat in the King’s face with my sins!”

“You are my brother,” he repeated. “I have chosen to carry your debts.”

They shared a long look and the shadows of the room closed in about them except where his brother stood, and here a crimson glow shed like drops of blood from his robes. His brother put out a hand and grasped Armeddeonan’s.

“You have been bought at a price,” he whispered, and his lips curved into a smile, curious for its mingled joy and gravity. “Go now, and sin no more.”

A feather’s breadth of a moment and his brother had gone, leaving Armeddeonan alone in the throne-room. He realized he had been holding his breath, and let it out in a ragged stream. He felt cooler and clean now, and he knew his ledger had again--for the untold time--been blotted clean. But there was another stirring beneath the relief; a pulsing in his blood that begged him to keep this moment in his soul and by it, live his life.

On quiet, humbled feet, Armeddeonan hastened across the room. He would thank his brother--he must do that, at least. He tugged open one of the great doors with as little noise as he could manage and stepped into the moon-washed whiteness of the garden. He made to descend the steps of the portico, but a gut-rending sound stopped him short and clenched his heart with cruel fingers.

The sound of a whip lashing the air. The slap of it biting into the skin. A faint cry, then silence. The whip again, the fleshy cut, the painful noise. On and on the hellish thing played and its notes wound tendrils of disgust and hatred over Armeddeonan’s chest. He could not yet discern from whence it came. Why did his brother allow whippings to be carried on in his own garden? It was not like him. Quickly now, before the victim could be beaten any more, Armeddeonan loped across the yard. The stones were cool under his bare feet and jasmine perfumed each breath he drew. A fountain burbled moon-diamonds at his right and the nightingale continued to haunt his hearing. Where was the man?

He entered a circle of pyracantha bushes planted like a thornsome crown around a white sandstone piazza and there he saw a thing that knit terror and confusion into his heart. His brother stooped below a cloaked figure with a whip, back bare and open to the bite of the leather. The figure whipped him with a sickening regularity. Lash, lash, lash, lash.

Frissons of sickness quaked inside Armeddeonan’s gut. He saw whence came the scars.

Lessons from Cell 92

I am sitting tonight with a heart full of poetry and no words. Not terribly productive, perhaps, but beautiful. Deep thoughts have been stirred within me by reading Bonhoeffer's biography; I dread the approaching final chapters, for I know he is executed and it aches me. I dread it, and yet he was so brave a man, so noble a man, you can't help but feel it was a fitting end. I know that sounds horrible, but it's not, when you realize a martyr's death--a crucifixion--is the sort of death Jesus died. And the lives of those who share in that manner of death seem to echo in deep, holy tolls throughout the rest of history. Would the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer rattle us so poignantly if he had lived to be an old man and died of congestive heart failure? I think not. No, people like Bonhoeffer, Sophie Scholl, Peter and Paul and so many others are the people who have left beautiful legacies. It is still sad, though, this approach to re-living a great man's death. Reality and history have been meshed inextricably in my mind, what with the Ukraine Crisis and reading about World War II in Bonhoeffer, and generally being in a thoughtful mood. So I read slowly, savouring the lessons in peace and patience given to me across the years by this kind, extraordinary man, and approach the end of the book a different girl than I began. It is times like these I know I've read a book worth reading.

The day has been beautiful and mild, feathered with sunlight and warmth and the peaceable kiss of Winter's surrender. I would fair say with Browning's Pippa: "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world"; and so it is, in these moments. To live by moments rather than years is such a richer existence. You might say, "That was a bad year", but you could never say, "Those were a million terrible moments." Perhaps that is the key to living under the Mercy: taking life as it is given us, which is breath by breath. More beauty is captured and held and inspected, living this way. There will be room for three hundred and sixty-five sunsets in the twelve-month. I'm nearing my twenty-second birthday; I'll have seen eight thousand and thirty sunsets by the time I've had my birthday, but is that any reason I ought to miss a single one more? I think not. I have kissed the baby's dimple a thousand times if I have once, but is there a reason I oughtn't to kiss it again today and yet another time tomorrow? Someday he'll grow too old for such nonsense, but not for a while yet. I've seen the sun shine through my window every morning (more or less) since I was born, but is that a reason the fire-dart of sun flared through a falling dew-drop shouldn't astonish me as much as it did when first I saw it?

We take too broad a view of things. We've forgotten how to appreciate minutiae. While imprisoned, Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents of a thrush that sang in the prison courtyard every morning, and again in the evenings. He wrote of the gift of solitude and how he was happier he'd been imprisoned, being accustomed to and liking solitude, than another of his friends. This wasn't a Pollyanna triviality: this was a man in tune with God's ways, pressed into the heart of God, living with borrowed and sustained courage and joy in knowing his life was not his own. To be given examples like him and gifts like these, I feel keenly the call to a higher existence and a nobler life. How can anyone not realize we were destined for eternity when they feel these things? I should make a terribly morose Atheist, for I think I would always wish there was an existence beyond this life and always trying to look for it, hoping against hope. Thank God I have access to the same peace and courage as Bonhoeffer. I can live under the Mercy; I can listen for thrushes. Life, lived in step with God's heart, is never truly complicated on His eternal level. Hands fixed on earth, heart fixed on heaven; that's the way to live this noble life.

Soup or Salad? A Boxing Match between Hugo and Dickens. :)

I have only about 500 pages of Les Miserables left, which means I am just about 2/3 of the way through that elephantine book. It has been an Olympian task, I will admit, reading this 1463-page giant! I am not finished, of course, but I have found it to be a great stimulant to my mind. It demands me to think.

Think? The nerve!

I am reading the un-abridged version and I will admit that I know why they abridge the book. You see, Victor Hugo, in my opinion, did not decide whether he was writing a book of essays or a novel. Indeed, if you summed up all his dissertations on Waterloo, Napoleon, Convents, Bishops, the Parisian gamin, young love, beauty, guilt, prison, poverty, and everything else, you would find that bit far heavier in page-weight than the actual plot.
This, of course, got me to thinking--if Les Miserables was intended to be a social commentary (as I can only assume it was) what possessed Victor Hugo to write a novel? Okay. Let me first explain myself. I am a Dickens-girl. Every one of Charles Dickens' books are loaded with political, social, and occasionally spiritual commentaries and parallels. They can only be classified as Social Commentaries. So what is the difference between Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens?

Hugo--what a comely old bird!

Dickens--hair brilliantly askew. ;)

The difference is this:
                Victor Hugo made a salad, Charles Dickens made a brew.
               Victor chopped his words up coarsely, Charles stirred and stirred his stew.
               Flavors sep'rate, flavors mingled; both a mighty turn of phrase,
                But the stew will go down quicker--Hugo puts me in a daze.

Ahem. Forgive the lapse into poetry. :P That little ditty is the definition of these two authors in my opinion. Victor Hugo, while an amazing author, bewilders me with his constant division. He carries the plot for a few pages, then casts it aside while he lectures. You almost begin to wonder if his characters serve only as lackeys to carry his social-dissertations. I like his lectures. I like his plot. But in my opinion, he did rather a careless, clumsy job of mingling the two.

Charles Dickens, on the other hand, took his social ideas, his morals, his lectures, and mixed them into his plot and characters so seamlessly that, to speak childishly, "You can't find the pill amongst the jam." I have seldom felt the weariness in reading Dickens that I feel in finding myself at the brink of yet another 30-page ramble through a random history with Victor Hugo for an overly-zealous guide.
Now, please understand that I am not hacking on Les Miserables--I am actually enjoying the book and I will do a review once I am finished. I am merely commenting on Victor Hugo's style and the way he executed all the brilliant things kerbobbling around his mind.

I think it's a case of two men, one who loved his country best, the other his people. Victor Hugo's beloved is France--the country--and though he loves the people, his patriotism outshines his plot. Charles Dickens loved his people--social commentary comes through because he cared about what was happening to his countrymen and wished to set things right. Both men have noble motives--both are fabulous authors.

I suppose you just have to decide on a given day whether you'd rather have a salad or a bowl of soup. :)

Thus runs time

“I demand to know what your business is—why you sought us out. Prithee, what is this, sir?” It was not until later she realized she had lapsed into the graceful lilt of the Scarlettanian tongue."      -The Scarlet-Gypsy Song

A few thousand words back now in my Gypsy-Song I began to notice a strange thing occurring to my characters. At the start of the book--back in London, I mean--the Macefield children were very...childish, for lack of a better term. They were rambunctious children, irresponsible, naughty, cheeky. But as they tumbled out of our world and into Scarlettania something happened to them. Something imperceptible as it was definite.

 My children grew up.

At first I worried--what had happened to my characters? Should they remain as they were? And then I realized that the change had grown naturally out of the rhythm of the tale. As the plot progresses, so do the children. It is, therefore, not surprising that the dastardly Peter Quickenhelm should make advances toward Adelaide before finally kidnapping her. It is not surprising that Eugenie learns to talk and Fergus loses his lisp. It is not surprising that Charlotte becomes the sole caretaker of "the babies." It is not surprising that Darby and Bertram go off to war. How many ten and eight year-olds do you know that are manly enough to handle battle? None, I'll warrant. And yet they were somehow changed in that passage from Earth to Scarlettania. People grow stronger there. They grow older. There is nothing startling in the change but it is a change all the same. I think the change lies mostly within. The children are not noticeably taller and yet they are certainly wiser, wittier, capable of more. Why? Why? Certainly it is not the sweet waters of the River Rhune that made the change, nor the clear air of the East Striding. What then? And then I happened upon it. the change came with the expectations of the people of Scarlettania.
“You have been weighed in the balance and found lacking,” the king said... "But we Scarlettanian-folk specialize in just and noble weights and measures; and if one considers—in addition to the weights of your trespasses, which are heavy indeed—the weights of your lives’ experience, one must acknowledge that is not so grievous a matter after all. You have had a paltry dose of lessons in what matters in this world and your own.”

Once in this new world, the Macefields were required to have their faults weighed and balanced as grown-ups might. They were not treated as children any longer. With this new treatment came the change. When more than customary expectations are demanded from a person, his courage and character [ought to] rise to the occasion. That's what happened to the Macefield bunch. That's what happens to us if we see ourselves in the Lord's mirror for what we are. And then, when we look in the back of the mirror to see Christ's gift, we grow. We grow in ways imperceptible and visible. We grow in ways we'd never imagined. We grow and we are forever changed.

"...What say you, Adelaide-mine?" The long fingers closed around her arm and rooted her to the spot.
Adelaide's heart thundered in her chest but she would not show fear to this man. She raised her eyes to meet his with frank clarity. "I say to death with you. To death with your traitorous wolf-kind."  

-The Scarlet-Gypsy Song

Sometimes Less is More

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”-Patrick Rothfuss

I think of description in general. I think of the power words can have. I think of my bleak skill in turning them--I make pretties now and then. Sometimes I make a gleaming sentence or two. But then I read someone who really knows how to turn words to their advantage. I use reams of words and am able to build something readable. They pin it to the exact point in one sentence. And I fall silent. Not silent from discouragement. Not silent from dismay. Silent with the silence that one feels in the presence of something greater than themselves. There is no desire to say anything. It is enough to look and be amazed....

"He wasn't that good looking, he had the social skills of a wet cat, and the patience of a caffeinated hummingbird." -Karen Chance

"It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside." -Maud Hart Lovelace Betsy, Tacy, and Tib

“Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.”-Daphne du Maurier Rebecca

“I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.”-Rosemary Sutcliff