even*cleveland: grace

grace

My first job out of college was teaching at a private primary school. One school tradition was that every day after lunch, all of the children would sing a short grace of thanksgiving, often in rounds. It only took a minute or two, but it settled them down for the afternoon and was always completely wonderful. My family is not religious, but since then we almost always use one of the graces I learned there at the end of holiday meals.

I.
We give thanks and celebration for this food that we may share,
and we seek a world where hunger is not present anywhere.

II.
We love our bread and we love our butter,
But most of all we love each other.

III.
Oh, the Lord is good to me
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me
The things I need
The wind and the rain and the apple seed—
The Lord is good to me.
Ah-men!

The last one was my favorite. Happy Thanksgiving.

*

Originally posted 11/2009; re-posted 11/2013.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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