A Single Layer

I just finished reading this for the second time last week, thanks to the forever book group of Grace. It was equally as lovely the second time around, and while reading it, I wrote down a dozen more quotes from the incomparable Ames, who is both too beautiful a man to be real and too beautiful a man not to be real. (I'm grateful and amazed to know a few like him.) "It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water." (p.82) I have found this to be remarkably true. I see it in myself, and in many others as well. "I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect." (p.91) This seems to be about the only way I experience visions, but because memory is a rickety thing, I tend not to trust them much. Which makes me a poor prophet. "I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, shelte...

I wrote the following about nine months ago, but it didn't feel right to post at the time. I still mean every word. In the film Wives and Daughters , and the book by Elizabeth Gaskell which inspired it, Squire Hamley lives through the deaths of both his wife and his eldest son. He's a proud man, whose pride is greater than either his education or his purse. But each of these deaths, coming as they do at the beginning and the end of the story, change him in significant ways. The first hardens him; the second softens him. We see in the squire (perfectly portrayed by Michael Gambon in what I consider to be one of the greatest performances on screen) a complete character transformation. He is changed, but we still recognize him. In fact, we see him all the more clearly. Grief does that to a person. It uncovers them. Today I went to a memorial service for a woman I never knew. Before the service started, her two year old son found his way up to the podium, pacifier in his mou...