“Everybody in Amsterdam Speaks English.” Not.

It was our 25^th anniversary trip – a week in Amsterdam and then a week in Paris. My wife had been to Amsterdam some years before on a business trip; I’d been to neither city. 

We arrived early one May morning. It turned out to be Ascension Day, a public holiday in the Netherlands. We’d reserved seats for a shuttle bus, but as we neared the city center, everything looked like an early Sunday morning. Many shops were closed; little traffic was moving on the streets. Our shuttle driver dropped us off across the canal from the hotel; he decided the street wasn’t wide enough to accommodate his (very small) bus.

 

We had a lot of luggage. I mean, a lot of luggage. Even then, we didn’t really travel; we migrated.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: The Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, via Unsplash.

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Genuine Petrarchan Note on William Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets – poem by Tom Riley at Society of Classical Poets.

 

“The Moons” by Grevel Lindop – Malcolm Guite.

 

Burdens – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

A king goes out to cheer his men on the night before battle – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Top 10 Dip into Poetry – Tweetspeak Poetry.

When You Don't Speak Czech or German

It was 2002. Four of us comprised a communications team, sent to Eastern Europe to talk with missionaries all over central Europe. Our team was all Americans, with one of us based in Budapest and three of us in St. Louis. Since everyone we would be talking with was American or spoke English, we were assured we would not have a language problem. 

Right.

 

It was a packed schedule. In six days, we would be in Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Dresden, Erfurt, Dresden again, Prague and Brno, and then a return for a final day in Budapest.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: a village in the Sudeten Mountains, similar to one where we stopped to eat dinner. Credit: lur. Ch via Pexels. Used with permission.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“The Alchemist,” poem by Louise Brogan – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

English Poet, Catholic Exile – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

He said – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Poet Laura: In the Glow of the Desert – Sandra Fox Murphy at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Moo!,” poem by Robert Hillyer – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

"A Time to Keep Silence" by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was best known for two books he wrote about a walk across Europe to Constantinople. He wrote quite a few other works considered just as good, including A Time to Keep Silence, republished a few years ago by the New York Review of Books.  

The book is about extended visits Fermor made to monasteries, including the Abbey of St. Wardrille de Fontanelle, Solesmes, La Grande Trappe, and the Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia. All were places one might visit to keep silence and not speak. Fermor could write, but rules restricted speech, including mealtimes.

 

Monasteries, and especially those associated with the Trappists, bear no relation to anything we regard as normal life. And that perhaps may the point. Abbey life is supposed to be different, removing any and all distractions and impediments to experiencing God. Fermor found himself attracted by more than curiosity.

 

“In the seclusion of a cell,” he writes, “an existence whose quietness is only varied by silent meals, the solemnity of ritual and long solitary walks in the woods, the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.’

 

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Fermor had visited monasteries all over the world, but these four are th ones he chose to highlight. The Abbey of St. Wardrille is in northern France, and it’s been destroyed and rebulit many times over the centuries. Solesmes, also in France, had been an important rallying point for the Crusades. The Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in what is now Turkey have been largely converted to living and hotel spaces, with the modern amenities expected by travelers. 

 

He was a fine writer; what could have been dry and repetitive is instead engaging and interesting. His intense focus on monasteries reflects some of his own leanings and inclinations as well as being interesting subjects of and in themselves.

 

Fermor was of Anglo-Irish descent but raised in England. His walk across Europe was the subject of A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). He served in the Irish Guards during World War II, fighting in both Crete and Greece. His awards include the Distinguished Service Order and the Order of the British Empire, and he was knighted in 2004 for his service to literature and British-Greek relations. 

 

A Time to Keep Silence is relatively short; perhaps Fermor felt he didn’t need to say too much about places where one often didn’t speak at all. But what he does say invites you to join hm and explore these places of silence, contemplation, prayer, and purpose.

 

Related:

 

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s obituary.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The enduring Influence of James M. Cain – Tom Milani at CrimeReads.

 

Booknotes: Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military 1861-1865 by Damien Sheilds – Civil War Books and Authors.

 

“I Am the Ghost That You Haunt”: Paul Auster’s Final Novel – Lily Corwin at Literary Matters.

Saturday Good Reads - July 17, 2020

Barry Meier, a reporter for The New York Times, has written a book entitled Spooked, in which he describes the mischief (and the wreckage) when the news media get caught up in the world of private spies – like they did with the Steele dossier. T.A. Frank at New York Magazine interviews Meier: “The Steele Dossier was a case study in how reporters get manipulated.” 

Way back in the Dark Ages, aka the 1970s and 1980s, I was a fan of the mystery novels of Dick Francis. His books invariable were set in hors- racing venues with horse-racing plots – and I was no fan of horse racing. But I was a fan of his books. John Fram at CrimeReads “discovered” the Francis mysteries, and he describes how they became the answer to a personal crisis and a mysterious illness.

 

Father Jonathan Tobias at Second Terrace loves the novel Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, and he thinks you should read it, too (for the record, I agree with him).

 

More Good Reads

 

Poetry

 

Hiding – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Sonnet to William Wilberforce, Esq. – William Cowper at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

The Falcon’s Eyes – Joe Spring at Hoe Spring Writes.

 

A Girl in Her Own Words – Eustache Deschamps (1346-1406), translated by Margaret Coats at Society of Classical Poets. 

 

Faith

 

Standing with the Little Guys – Barry York at Gentle Reformation. 

 

Let’s Examine Our Motivations for Work – Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

There’s Too Much Christian Content – Samuel D. James at Insights.

 

American Stuff

 

Don’t Take My Photograph! Incidents at the Dedication of the 44th New York Monument at Gettysburg – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

 

Making Missouri: Carving Out a State – Christopher Alan Gordon at Missouri History Museum.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Take a virtual tour of Walden Pond – Walker Caplan at Literary Hub.

 

Art Nourishes Community and Community Nourishes Art – Kyra Hinton at The Rabbit Room.

 

Writing as a Spiritual Discipline – Daniel Eaton at The Fight of Faith.

 

Life and Culture

 

China: Empire: What is China to us, anyway? – N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval.

 

The Inevitable Capitulation of Conservatism – Samuel D. James at Insights.

 

Travel

 

Intermission: The Green Martyrdom – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Those Were the Days – Mary Hopkin

Painting: Portrait of a Man Reading, oil on canvas by Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929).

Travel and Love: The Poetry of Catharine Savage Brosman

             

It was a chance reading of an article on poetry that led me to Catharine Savage Brosman. That, and a reference in the article to her having taught for 35 years at Tulane University. I found other poems of hers online, and I became so interested in my fellow New Orleanian that I ordered one, and ultimately three of her later collections. 

What I found was an inquisitive mind, ranging over subjects as diverse as flowers, theEmpress Eugenie’sflight from Paris in 1870, a New Orleans wine bar, False River in Louisiana’s Point Coupee Parish (part of the old Mississippi cut off when the river changed course), Antarctica, postmodernism (she’s not a fan), and the landscape and geography of western Colorado. 

And travel. A considerable number of the poems in these three later collections are about travel; almost all of her most recent collection, A Memory of Manaus, is about travel. And not only travel, but travel with and about people. Her remarriage to her first husband Patric Savage created significant changes in her life – a move to Houston and a joint decision to travel were only two. (Savage died in 2017 at the age of 88; I learned that he was born in St. Louis, where I now live, and he worked for most of his career at the same company I worked for in Houston.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh’ by Robert Crawford

Scotland beckons.

We’ve taken vacations to the United Kingdom for the last four years, and focused on London and southern England. But given the fact that my first novel has scenes set in Edinburgh, which I’ve never visited except via the internet, Scotland has started exerting a stronger pull. After reading Robert Crawford’s On Glasgow and Edinburgh, the pull has become irresistible.

This is not traditional travel writing. This is more like a well-researched, filled-with-fascinating-facts love letter to two cities, which, Crawford points out in a long introduction, maintain a usually friendly rivalry for pre-eminence in Scotland.

What Crawford does for both cities is to take the areas where most visitors would see – the historical areas, the museums, the shopping districts, the historical neighborhoods – and then provide a detailed look at where they came from, who lived there, what life was like, and interesting facts (like murders and trials). The result is a rich tapestry of understanding, a look into life and people across different historical eras, and how these two cities developed as they did.

This is the kind of book you read before you visit. Perhaps you even bring it with you to consult during your visit.

Edinburgh Castle

You walk with Crawford on streets and neighborhoods, like the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and Buchanan Street in Glasgow, and you find history, commerce, art, literature, architecture, science, medicine, and people. You discover who built the universities, where the great art collections and libraries came from, and how Edinburgh became a royal capital and Glasgow a manufacturing one (and why both revere the poet Robert Burns).

And you discover Edinburgh’s poetry library, and Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. You learn who it was who pioneered what today we called an English literature course (Adam Smith, he who wrote The Wealth of Nations and the “father” of capitalism). You meet Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Kelvin, Dr. Joseph Lister (pioneer of antiseptic surgery), the murderers Burke and Hare who supplied cadavers to Edinburgh’s medical school, the architects, artists, sculptors, tobacco merchants, and shipbuilders. Best of all, Crawford does this in a well-written narrative; this is no laundry list of facts and figures but a story, a great story of two cities which have had a tremendous influence worldwide.

Robert Crawford

Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St. Andrews, and a fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. He’s the author of The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (1991), and well as several works on Scottish literature, including Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination 1314-2014, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (2009), and Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (2009). He is also a published poet, with six poetry collections, including Talkies (1992), Masculinity (1996), Spirit Machines (1999), Full Volume (2008), The Tip of My Tongue (2011), and Testament (2014). Earlier this year, he published Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, which I reviewed at Tweetspeak Poetry.

On Glasgow and Edinburgh is an informative, entertaining delight.

Yes, Scotland beckons.

Top photograph: The main building of Glasgow University on Gilmorehill. Photograph of Edinburgh Castle by Kevin Casper via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Best Vacation(s) Ever

My friend Emily Wierenga has a new book coming out July 1 – Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look. I pre-ordered on my Kindle; I’m hearing that the paperback version is already shipping, but I suppose I have to wait until July 1 for the Kindle maginc to happen.

Emily went traveling to find herself, and to fine home – Canada, Central America, the united States, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. And she posed a question to those of us interested in reading her book. Actually, she posed several. The one that intrigued me was what inspires you to travel?

I don’t really travel, at least in the sense Emily means. When I think of travelers, I think of Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux or, more popularly, Rick Steves.

But we have been blessed in our married life to have taken some wonderful vacations.

Before kids came along, my wife worked for the Houston Chronicle in the department that did the travel section, and one time I got to tag along on one of her business trips to Hawaii (Maui, to be specific) for the price of my plane ticket. A few years later, as the result of recognition for a huge project I completed at work, she got to tag along on one of my business trips to Hawaii.

A tenth anniversary trip to London. A couple of family trips to Gulf Shores, Alabama. A week in Charleston, South Carolina when tourists had cancelled plans because of a hurricane scare; we held on to our reservations, the hurricane went north, and we had the city virtually to ourselves. A 25^th anniversary trip to Amsterdam and Paris. A week in Montreal (we loved Montreal; I was even able to do a bike ride along the St. Lawrence River and a nearby 15-mile canal).

If I had to pick a best trip, however, I would have to pick two – back-to-back trips to London, in 2012 and 2013, each trip about two weeks. The first one inspired the second one; I think them as one vacation with a pause in between.

In 2012, we arrived at the tail end of the Paralympics and the 2012 Summer Olympics; the Paralympics marathon passed right in front of our hotel on the south bank, right across the Thames from Parliament. And we went to the parade called by the Queen to honor the athletes of both events, joining millions of Londoners and Britons (and waving our British flags, too). We experienced perfect weather, too; I didn’t open the umbrella once the entire time. We did a side-trip to Oxford, and my wife fell in love with the place (me, too, truth be told). And our seats for the play version of Chariots of Fire in London’s West End were on the stage – we were part of the Olympic stadium “crowd.”

In 2013, our hotel was three blocks from Buckingham Palace and two blocks from Westminster Abbey. The room was wonderful, as was the breakfast they would serve in our room any morning we wanted it. The normal London weather had returned, however; it rained every day we were there. We didn’t care (much).This time, we took a side-trip to Canterbury. We got to see James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic Theatre. I spent a morning at the Charles Dickens House near Russell Square.

The back of Westminster Chapel as seen from our hotel room.

Two things happened on this trip that turned a wonderful vacation into something unexpected, and almost profound. I’ve written about them before. One was my Sunday morning visit to Westminster Chapel, a short half-block from our hotel. The congregation prayed out loud during the individual prayer time; I’d never seen or experienced anything like it.

The other was what happened during the daily 3 p.m. prayer time at Canterbury Cathedral. This is a daily event; all activity in the church stops for a few minutes as a prayer is said over a loudspeaker. I was standing next to a group of Japanese tourists (yes, with their cameras) and when we were invited to join in saying the Lord’s Prayer, they joined in as well, saying the Lord’s Prayer in English. To be standing in one of major sites of Christendom on the planet and saying the Lord’s Prayer with all the rest of the tourists was, most likely, the highlight of the entire trip.

We take vacations for any number of reasons – to get away, break the routine, see something we haven’t seen before. In a city like London, we are drawn to the museums (and especially the art museums), the theater, and day-trips to places we have read about but never experienced. And while our vacations have been exciting, stimulating, informing, and exhausting, the one I would call our best vacation was best because of prayer.

While this is a very different kind of travel from what Emily describes in her book, it appears we ended up in something of the same place.

If you have a great vacation story to tell, The High Calling wants to hear from. Check The High Calling's web site for information on submission and linkup.

Poetry at Work: The Airport Security Check-In

I’m on my way to San Antonio, and I’m standing in the security line at the airport, waiting my turn to deposit my belt, shoes, jacket, wallet and change, laptop and carry-on bag in the plastic bins for x-ray, and then to follow through x-ray myself. This is air travel in 21^st century America: herded, x-rayed, checked, peered at, prodded and eventually you get to your destination.

I’m thinking about the first time I flew on an airplane – it was 1959, and I was flying to spend a week with my grandmother. I had to dress up, Sunday best, because that’s what you did in the glamour days of flying. The stewardesses wore white gloves; even coach had linen napkins.

I notice a TSA agent standing in front of the x-ray scanners. He’s counting down the line. I look around; no one else notices, too intent on preparing for the security ordeal.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.