Omigod! Another BOOK???

View from the first juniper --

My previous post told of a climbing adventure Sunny Juliet and I had on Saturday morning after I admitted that, before our adventure, I had “gotten up on the wrong side of the bed,” as my parents used to express morning crabbiness. Returning to the cabin post-adventure, then, with no possibility of a coffee house visit in town, would I also return to crabbiness? That was the big question! I had no social plans for the day, and no plans for further adventures, so the danger was real. I busied myself by starting to cook a pot of lentils to stave off bad temper, but the success of this plan would depend on the success of the lentils….

 

Ah-ha! Suddenly I remembered that the day was Saturday, not Sunday, and that meant there might be something in my mailbox down the road! Purposely stretching out the period of anticipation, however, I chopped onion and carrot to add to the lentils, adding also dissolved tamarind paste, Better than Bouillon (chicken flavor), and plenty of curry powder. Swept the floor. Picked up a book. 

I love USPS, and they do an excellent job here!

Because, you see, if the mailbox is empty on Saturday, all hope must be deferred until Monday; but until my key unlocks the box, hope can imagine a happy outcome. Is Schrodinger’s cat dead or alive? Is my mailbox empty, or does it hold a surprise to gladden my heart? Possibilities exist, if only in the mind, until a box is opened, so why hurry, since one possibility is always disappointment? 

 

(Please note I do not say the mailbox was both empty and containing a surprise, any more than I say the cat in Schrodinger’s closed was both alive and dead until the box was opened. This frequent interpretive error of a famous argument in physics is made by those who do not recognize the argument as a reductio ad absurdum. Thank you very much!)

 

Cut to the chase. Waiting for me on Saturday was not emptiness but a book I had ordered from Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Note: When I order online, I always try to order from real bookstores.) Carry the package back to the cabin. Remove brown cardboard. Next, open the book! Again, a range of possibilities presents. Will I be made happy? Disappointed? Left indifferent?

 

Flashback. One or two friends had posted links on Facebook to the personal home library of the late Dr. Richard Macksey, humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University. Seductive images of the library made me want to know more about Richard Macksey, and after I’d read about his life and work, naturally I wanted a book he’d written, which is how this particular volume came to be in my mailbox on Saturday. 

 

Not one you would have chosen?

The book. What I found at Midtown Scholar was a paperback edition of the proceedings of an international symposium on structuralism convened at Johns Hopkins in 1966 – not only papers presented but discussion following each presentation – with, thanks to Richard Macksey, an all-star multidisciplinary cast: René Girard, Richard Macksey, Charles Morazé, Georges Poulet, Eugenio Donato, Lucien Goldmann, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Jean Hippolite, Jacques Lacan, Guy Rosolato, Neville Dyson-Hudson, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Nicolas Ruwet, to give the names in the order in which they appear on the book’s cover. The book itself is The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism & the Sciences of Man.

 

Reminder and disclaimer. I was never an English major, please recall. Reading literary and art criticism can put me off, and writing it (I learned early on, when given such an assignment, not to choose work I loved!) I found downright painful. One graduate class in Philosophy of Literature and a semester as a teaching assistant in Philosophy of Film, with another in Philosophy of Art – that is the extent of my formal background in criticism. Graduate classes in philosophy in the late 1980s, however, introduced me to Foucault and Derrida, structuralism and deconstruction. But that’s all, and it was not a road I traveled very far.

 

Back to the book. Richard Macksey’s opening remarks to the assembled group bore the title “Lions and Squares.” It was – I suppose predictably and appropriately – academic, historic, and jargon-studded. It was fine. It did the job. My heart was not set on fire, but neither did I regret having ordered the volume. I read on….

 

I should probably re-read, “Tiresias and the Critic,” presented by René Girard, and before doing that should re-read Oedipus Rex, but as there was no discussion following that short piece, I moved on to Charles Morazé on “Literary Invention,” in which he proposed to question “the relationship of literary invention to invention in general.” Both the paper and the discussion following leaned on a distinction between invention and discovery, and I found myself smiling at the discussion, so familiar from my graduate school years. I was reading happily, crabbiness banished.

 

Jackpot!

Then came “Criticism and Interiority.” At first the paper’s title gave me a sinking feeling, a feeling that could be named the “Anticipation of No Fun at All.” How wrong that prediction was, and how glad I was to have been wrong! Why was I never introduced before to Georges Poulet? Here is how he begins:

 

At the beginning of Mallarmé’s unfinished story Igitur there is the description of an empty room, in the middle of which, on a table, there is an open book. This seems to me the situation of every book, until someone comes and begins to read it. Books are objects. On a table, on shelves, in store windows, they wait for someone to come and deliver them from their materiality, from their immobility. When I see them on display, I look at them as I would at animals for sale, kept in little cages…. They wait. Are they aware that an act of man might suddenly transform their existence? Read me, they seem to say. I find it hard to resist their appeal. No, books are not just objects among others. 

 

This man is speaking my language! And while his position becomes increasingly complicated as he proceeds, I was with him all the way. He speaks of how, when we read, the mind of the author enters our own. We think the writer’s thoughts – or they think us – but we are not thereby invaded. No, in the intimacy of reading, “I begin to share the use of my consciousness…” as the author and I “…start having a common consciousness.” From his personal experience, Poulet says,

 

Thus I often have the impression, while reading, of simply witnessing an action which at the same time concerns and yet does not concern me. This provokes a certain feeling of surprise within me. I am a consciousness astonished by an existence which is not mine, but which I experience as though it were mine. 

 

Haven’t you felt this, too, at times? “Lost in a book,” now and then you remember that you are reading, that you are not the character with whom you identify or the author of the characters, that you are holding in your hands a physical object, a book, and that the words on the page are creating visions in your mind. Really, it is astonishing, is it not?

 

I will not attempt a complete exposition of the ideas in Poulet’s paper, as I’ve probably lost 95% of my readers by now, anyway, and you few stalwarts hungry for more can treat yourselves to reading his works firsthand. But first, just a little more, because I find this so delicious. Poulet draws a contrast between two kinds of critics, one who loses their [you see? I can use current pronouns, though it still goes against the grain!] own consciousness in that of the writer, the other who refuses such identification altogether. The first kind of critical thought (I might say ‘reception) he calls ‘sensuous,’ the second ‘clear.’

 

…In either case, the act of reading has delivered me from egocentricity. Another’s thought inhabits me or haunts me, but in the first case I lose myself into that alien world, and in the other I keep my distance and refuse to identify. Extreme closeness and extreme detachment have then the same regrettable effect of making me fall short of the total critical act: that is to say, the exploration of that mysterious interrelationship [my emphasis added] which, through the mediation of reading and of language, is established to our mutual satisfaction between the work read and myself. 

 

He then suggests – perfect, I say! – combining the two methods “through a kind of reciprocation and alternation,” and I am delighted! Well, there is much more about subjects and objects, subjectivity and objectivity, but I leave it to you who are interested to follow up with primary sources. 

 

The first question asked of Georges Poulet in the discussion that followed his presentation was how, if at all, reading was to be differentiated from understanding another’s speech, and while acknowledging the fundamental similarity in the two cases, Poulet pointed out that in conversation, two or more participants are not only listening but also themselves speaking,

 

…and when we speak, we don’t listen. Thus very often, conversation, instead of becoming an inquiry in which someone who listens (or who reads) strives to identify himself with the thought of someone who speaks (or writes), becomes instead, quite to the contrary, a sort of battle….

 

Here, now, re-reading, I pause. [Pause. What do you think?] Because when I read history or opinion of any kind, I read not to lose myself (as in reading a novel or a poem) but as if I am a participant in a conversation, agreeing and disagreeing, questioning, objecting – in short, definitely keeping my distance. As when I read this very paper! But this is not a major disagreement….

 

Only one more bit that I can’t stop before including: In response to a philosophical question from James Edie, Poulet addresses an implied side issue: 

 

Am I “for” or am I “against” structuralism? I simply do not know; it is not for me to say; it is for the structuralists themselves. For my own part, sometimes I feel rather alien to the abstract and to the voluntarily objective way in which these structuralists express their own discoveries, and sometimes I am even shocked by that position. Sometimes I am shocked especially by their air of objectivity (I think particularly of one of them whom I consider a friend). I am particularly shocked when he claims to arrive thereby at scientific attitudes. I must confess that, to my own mind, very clearly, very definitely, criticism has the character of knowledge, but it is not a kind of scientific knowledge, and I have to decline very strongly the name of Scientist. I am not a scientist and I do not think that any true critic when he is making an act of criticism can be a scientist. [Again, the emphasis added is my own.] 

 

Well, my love only deepens with the statement quoted above. Not all knowledge should be called science, and science does not exhaust all the possibilities of knowledge. Thank you, Monsieur Poulet, for knowing so clearly where you stand and for allowing me, in reading your words, to stand with you!

 

And, once again, I echo fervently the words of the fictional Roger Mifflin, “Thank God I am a bookseller!” Magic and mystery are on every page of every book!

 

Postscript on Wednesday: 

 

State of the Union address: I listened and was very, very proud of President Biden, both for what he said and how he said it. At the same time, I couldn’t help remembering that last year David and I listened together, and that brought tears to my eyes. Several times the president made a joke, and I thought of how important a sense of humor was to David, in his friends and in anyone who intersected with his life. I also noted times when we both would have said, “Yes!” to the president’s statements. (Unlike me, my husband always listened quietly to political speeches, saving his comments for afterward, so with him I tried to do the same.) I remembered how David’s opinion of the president (make no mistake: we both voted for him!) rose considerably after the State of the Nation address. This year again, the president showed dignity, strength, and resolve. He did not avoid controversial subjects, either. The office of the president is strong and honorable under this president.

 

Throughout the year, President Biden is not always in our faces from one day to the next and acting like the “great and powerful Oz." No, he is a team player -- but he is also a strong leader, and when he does speak out, he speaks out strongly. 

 

David, I miss you! I wish we could have listened together again this year! Hope for my country, hope for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren — that’s what I got out of President Biden’s State of the Union address, and I know I am not alone. 

Keep calm. Carry on.

Interim Thoughts: The Eyes and Hearts of Women

With women writer friends at our annual luncheon
 

[I’m calling today’s post “Interim Thoughts” because it’s only been four days, not a full week or more, since I last posted, this summer having settled down into a once-a-week blogging routine.]

 

Only on the morning of August 27, very early, with the sky still dark outside my window, did I learn that August 23 had been the official Mari Sandoz Day and that, in my ignorance, I had completely missed it. Four days late already, and 67 years after Nebraska’s governor first proclaimed the day, I read about the date in a chronology of the author’s life at the end of a University of Nebraska edition of Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections, by Mari Sandoz, memoir essays reaching back to her childhood days in the sandhills before she learned English (although born in Nebraska, her immigrant parents still spoke the French and English of their native Switzerland) and extending to the apartment she rented in Greenwich Village and occupied periodically for a number of years, beginning at a time when the Village was still occupied primarily by Italian immigrants.

 

Of the many volumes of fiction and history written over her lifetime, the two books for which Mari Sandoz is best known today are biographies, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas and Old Jules, the story of her father’s life. Of the latter biography, she later wrote that

 

…it gradually dawned on me that here was a character who embodied not only his own strengths and weaknesses but those of all humanity – that his struggles were universal struggles and his defeats at the hands of his environment and his own insufficiencies were those of mankind; his tenacious clinging to his dream the symbol of man’s undying hope that over the next hill he will find the green pastures of his desire.

        - Mari Sandoz 

 

I read her Crazy Horse biography only last year but need to read it again now to answer my new question, which is if Sandoz also saw the struggles and defeats, hopes and insufficiencies of Crazy Horse as “universal.” How could he have pursued his desire – which would not have been his alone but that of his people – “over the next hill”? And after all, Old Jules was not one of those restless Westerners continually on the move, leaving one region for the next until stopped by the Pacific Ocean. He put down roots. I probably need to read Old Jules again, too.

 

Another, more general but personal realization came to me on Friday morning: without intentionally seeking out books by women for my reading pleasure this year, I have been discovering books by women, a dizzying variety of fiction and nonfiction, that seem to have sought me out: novels and a memoir by Penelope Lively; Barbara Olenyk Morrow’s book about the life and work of Gene Stratton-Porter; murder mysteries set in Cochise County, Arizona, by J. A. Jance; a re-reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Soon-Young Yoon’s experiences working with poor and indigenous women around the world; and numerous other books of both fiction and nonfiction.

 

So now I have another question, more general than Mari Sandoz and Crazy Horse, and it harks back to Mary Helen Washington’s study, The Other Blacklist, in which she notes that Black artists, writers, poets in the 1950s were encouraged to stop writing of their experience as Black men and women and write instead from a “universal” perspective, leaving race aside. My question is this: where is the “universal” to be found, other than in the particular? Each of us has only our own experience. Zora Neale Hurston could only write as a Black American woman, because that is what she was. Mari Sandoz could only tell her life stories from her own experience, that of a child of immigrants growing up during pioneer days on the Great Plains, and her interest in historical subjects was also shaped by her living in that place and at that time. So do these women’s writings fail somehow to be “universal”? Surely they are not writings only for women readers!

 

Shakespeare, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Marcel Proust – all of them, too, had the experiences they had because of where they were born, the era in which they lived, and how they were seen and treated by others. Their experiences were particular to them, and their writings were thus saturated by that particularity, whether or not it is obvious to all their readers. I am not saying these men failed to discover and write of universal truths – hardly! -- only that the universal is always and only to be found, as they found it themselves, in particulars, in the infinite variety of our endlessly repetitive human experiences. 

 

From the foregoing you may correctly conclude that I am not a Platonist. Peasy is not a Platonist, either. For him, life is all about discovering the ephemeral universe of smells, about making the most of each fleeting moment. 

Would you disagree? And if you say we need larger goals, that we should work to better our world, I ask you, what time do you have to work for those goals except right now? The present moment is the time we have, even as it continually slips away from us.

 

Doing It My Way: Haphazard Lit-Crit

A book review is one thing. Literary criticism is another. I’m guessing, however, that the two might sometimes appear side by side (or end to end) in the pages of, say, The New York Review of Books. At least, that is my surmise after reading two books of criticism of the highest literary quality by two writers whose work I have long loved and admired, Annie Dillard and Alfred Kazin. Serendipity (i.e., dumb luck) led me to reading these two books one almost simultaneously, beginning with Kazin and jumping around from essay to essay, then picking up Dillard and reading it from beginning to end, finally returning to the beginning of the Kazin book and reading every essay I hadn’t yet read. The two go very well together.

Caveat: I have a bookstore, it’s true, but I was never an English major.  In graduate school, studying philosophy, I ran across literary criticism in Philosophy and Literature and then again in Aesthetics, but for me those were painful experiences. I had no taste for dissecting and analyzing poetry (although—or perhaps because--I love it) and no patience for any theory arguing that all artists were aiming at a single goal (although each theory might, I allow, be useful in understanding a certain grouping of artists). The anything-goes postmodern school of criticism I found entertaining, but one must take it as entertainment rather than elucidation: however brilliant the performance of the critic, I will never believe that Nietzsche is a feminist or that Hamlet is a story of a boy and his dog. Son et lumière, and after the fireworks a small pile of ash. That’s what I get from Derrida. 

Kazin and Dillard are different, and I’m no longer in a classroom these days.

We love Alfred Kazin at our house. A Walker in the City is a favorite of mine, while David reads and re-reads the sequel memoir, New York Jew. (It’s on the porch right now, awaiting his after-dinner reading hour.) This explains why I picked up Contemporaries--not for its subject matter but for its author. A collection of over seventy of Kazin’s essays on modern literature (“modern” beginning with Melville), Contemporaries offers a rich buffet, tempting a reader to browse and graze, and in this manner I began, reading first, beginning on page 230, “J. D. Salinger: ‘Everybody’s Favorite,’” and then, from nearer the end of the book, “Writing for Magazines.” In the first essay I marked several passages. Here is one:

A short story which is not handled with necessary concentration and wit is like a play which does not engage its audience; a story does not exist unless it hits the mark with terrific impact. It is a constant projection of meanings at an audience, and it is a performance minutely made up of the only possible language, as a poem is.

In laying out for readers what it is about Salinger’s stories that makes them exciting, Kazin is also reminding writers of their task:

A short story does not offer room enough for the development of character; it can present only character itself—by gesture.

From the broad claim he goes on to note how remarkably well Salinger fulfills the task, catching each small, telling gesture that gives us, at a momentary glance, the character he is letting us observe. And yet, in the end he finds Salinger’s characters too sensitive, the presentation of them too “cute,” the fiction writer’s sympathy too one-sided. Salinger’s beloved, tortured characters, Kazin says, are in love with the idea of themselves, and when their author sets them up as martyrs, the deeper, exploratory possibilities of fiction are excluded.

The piece called “Writing for Magazines” is a celebration of a kind of older writing for periodicals that did not pretend to claim more than brief public attention. I could not help relating Kazin’s thoughts of that older magazine writing to the current phenomenon of blogging. When Kazin quotes Chekov, for example, I hear my blogger friend Kathy from the U.P.:

“I wrote as a bird sings. I’d sit down and write. Without thinking of how to write or about what. My things wrote themselves. I could write at any time I liked. To write a sketch, a story, a skit cost me no labor. I, like a young calf or a colt let out into the freedom of a green and radiant pasture, leaped, cavorted, kicked up my heels....”

Unlike the light-hearted Chekhovian approach (no one, he says, was fact-checking in those days), Kazin is concerned that the magazine writers of his own day—and here I pose the question of a parallel with many (not Kathy!) of today’s bloggers—take themselves far too seriously and have an influence on public opinion disproportionate to their short, ephemeral pieces. Magazine writers, he says, have become “pompous,” take themselves as “pundits,” and they have left joy behind. Chekhov in his time, on the other hand, was allowed to be “easy,” not required to bundle up his themes in a weighty conclusion. A “slice of life,” for Chekhov, was not painstaking analysis but “the moment seized in its actual and seeming significance.”

Here, you see? The moment seized. Character in a gesture. In these words of praise Kazin the critic tells us what he values in short fiction.

Turning back to a 1959 essay, “The Alone Generation,” I was arrested by the first sentence of the second paragraph: “I am tired of reading for compassion instead of pleasure.” Weary of “psychological man,” the lonely protagonist of 20^th-century American fiction, the navel-gazing, self-pitying individual interested in nothing so much as his own social situation and emotions, Kazin the critic finds that his weariness extends from the “quivering novels of sensibility by overconscious stylists” to the “deliberately churned-up noels of the Beat Generation.” There are no large social themes, he laments, and no large action, only small, lonely, self-absorbed individuals.

He has another complaint about the fiction of his age, which is that “novels can now be sent off as quickly as they are written and published immediately afterwards.” What would he say today, with packages of self-published pages flying at the public in both physical and virtual form as quickly as the words fly from the mind to the fingertips? “More and more,” he notes, “we judge novels by their emotional authenticity, not by their creative achievement.” Self-absorbed reader, meet self-absorbed writer:

And here I come to another complaint, the increasing slovenliness, carelessness, and plain cowardice of style in fiction today.

Too many writers, he says, rely on language to do the work of characterization. Well, he says much more besides, but I want to get to what he calls “the heart of my complaint,” for it is at that point that I reached for Annie Dillard’s book and found in it a continuation of the conversation Kazin had begun half a century earlier. The heart of Kazin’s complaint is this:

I complain of the dimness, the shadowiness, the flatness, the paltriness, in so many reputable novelists. ... I thought of George Santayana’s complaint that contemporary poets often give the reader the mere suggestion of a poem and expect him to finish the poem for them.

Too many modern novels, in Kazin’s eyes, are “solemnly meaningful in every intention, but without the breath or extension of life,” while he finds the majority of short magazine fiction “only stitchings and joinings and colorings of some original model.” 

So there you have it. Do you think he has too many complaints? The important thing is that this man loved literature and never lost faith in fiction’s capacity to present to all of us (despite the plethora of lonely individuals in novels) a shared world and its possibilities. I was particularly struck by the complaint of “flatness,” in which I couldn’t help hearing a precursive echo (if such a thing can be imagined) of Tom Wolfe’s essay on modern art, The Painted Word (first published as a long magazine piece, subsequently as a book). Is there content, is there a subject, behind “the dimness, the shadowiness, the flatness, the paltriness” of the modern novel? Or does the “flatness” itself intentional? Does it have a literary value?

(I am in deep water, probably over my head. Again my caveat: I have never been an English major!)

This is where I changed horses and picked up Dillard’s book—not, I hasten to say, because I was tired of Kazin but because I had been reading his essays in a desultory fashion, skipping about in the book, and thought I would try another on the same general theme—and right away was struck by the way her beginning picked up the thread of his complaint. You see the serendipity in haphazard, unplanned reading?

Dillard’s first chapter, “Fiction in Bits,” addresses the fracturing of time and space in modernist (her preferred term) narrative collage:

Time no longer courses in a great and widening stream, a stream upon which the narrative consciousness floats, passing fixed landmarks in orderly progression, and growing in wisdom.  Instead time is a flattened [my emphasis added] landscape, a land of unlinked lakes seen by air.

With the arrow of time shattered, different versions of events come from different characters, some of rely entirely on their imaginations rather than interpreting facts, with the result that cause and effect vanish, and reason finds no home. As with time, so with space, “no longer a three-dimensional ‘setting’ it once was, the scene of the action may be “public, random, or temporary,” alien, even extraplanetary. When there is great geographical breadth, with characters appearing all over the globe, there will still generally be “the same narrative distance,” such that the geographical breadth brings with it no emotional depth. Like time, space has been flattened. Events have no meaning, and whatever happens to the novel’s characters appears “jerked, arbitrary, and fundamentally incoherent....”

Dillard in 1982 has described a development in fiction that already seemed to be irritating Kazin in 1959, and she comes right to the salient point before the end of the first chapter of Living by Fiction, asking,

...[M]ay a work of art borrow meaning by being itself meaningless? May it claim thereby to have criticized society? Or to have recreated our experience? May a work claim for itself whole hunks of other people’s thoughts on the flimsy grounds that the work itself, being so fragmented, typifies our experience...?

There are two questions here (though I realize it looks like four!): One has to do with slipshod, dishonest writing. James Joyce fractured the narrative of Ulysses over and over again, but no one—certainly neither Kazin nor Dillard—would dismiss that great work as slipshod. The second question, assuming great care and courage on the part of the writer, remains very serious:

If the writer’s honest intention is to recreate a world he finds meaningless, must his work then be meaningless?

On the way to her answer to this question, Dillard addresses the problem of flatness. In terms that again remind me of The Painted Word, she notes,

A writer may make his aesthetic surfaces very, very good and even appealing, in the hope that those surface excellences will impart to the work enough positive value, as it were, to overwhelm its negativity.

But in the final analysis, attractive surfaces are not enough for Dillard. The flattest, most fractured piece of fiction, however attractive, to succeed as art requires integrity. The “broken, sophisticated” feature of modernist may be reproduced by a writer lacking the effort or skill to finish the job:

He may fool himself into shirking the difficult, heartbreaking task of structuring a work of art on the grounds that art is imitation (all of a sudden) and a slapdash fiction imitates a seriously troubled world.

Style can be imitated. Integrity cannot.


The “flatness” of what Dillard calls modernist fiction, therefore, is not a problem for her, as she sees it, but the “slovenliness” of which Kazin complained definitely is. There is a wide gulf between “art and mere glibness,” and similar surfaces do not always indicate the quality of different works. Narrative unity may be lacking, but without integrity, without artistic coherence, there is only smoke, no fire.

These two books are so deep and rich, as well as so wonderfully, tantalizingly quotable, that it is almost impossible to read either one without dog-earing pages or underlining sentences or writing in margins. Luckily, mine are paperback copies, and so I have been giving myself this rare treat. Here’s what I mean:

Far from being like a receptacle in which you, the artist, drop your ideas, and far from being like a lump of clay which you pummel until it fits your notion of an ashtray, the art object is more like an enthusiastic and ill-trained Labrador retriever which yanks you into traffic. – Annie Dillard 

Actually, if there were more intimate experience of art and less self-conscious use of art, we might see that none of us can fully explain the effect of art, or correct it when it is unsatisfactory, or keep it up as an ecstatic experience all the time. If we in this country had an honest sense of the limits of art, we would have a more grateful sense of its power. – Alfred Kazin 

What shall it be? Do art’s complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist in nature? Is nature whole, like a completed thought? Is history purposeful? Is the universe of matter significant? I am sorry; I do not know. – Annie Dillard

* * *

P.S. Northport Notes: This Friday evening is high school graduation. There are seven graduates this year. Saturday evening and Sunday morning are lectures at Trinity Congregational by this year's Belko Peace speaker. (See right-hand column for more detail.)