Henry D. Thoreau ~

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.  I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."

~ Henry D. Thoreau (Waldon, published in 1854) "Where I lived, and What I lived for."

H. D. Thoreau Memorial at Waldon*

*Photo source:  Wikipedia

Thought for Today ~

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.  It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautified; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.  To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.  Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."

~ Henry D. Thoreau (1817 - 1862) A Fully Annotated Edition Walden, Yale University, 2004.  Edited & annotated by J. S. Cramer, curator of collections, The Thoreau Institute Walden Woods.

Tomorrow:  Thoreau tells us why he went to the woods to live.

READING ~

Author John Passfield

Thursday, January 17, 1:00 p.m.

"Coffee Pot's Always on..."

Everyone Welcome ~ no admission

Note:  Local author John Passfield has a new book, Babe Ruth.  Sports fans won't want to miss this one.  We hope to bring to you details and front cover image.

(To our Readers:  The Neat Little Bookshop blog has always included photographs and illustrations.  Of late, you may have noticed an odd repetition.  That is because something happened when we agreed to purchase additional storage from Goggle's Blogspot.  Suddenly, the only photos available for posting are those from earlier posts.  We are working to remedy the problem.) 

 This is Ontario* by Katherine Hale
Chapter II ~ Grand River Valley

Her Majesty's Church of the Mohawks

2012 Addition to Accomodate a Lift

* Ryerson Press, Toronto. Copyright, Canada, 1937.  Photos:  lbwalker, 2012.

Word Watching ~

The origin of words or phrases is always fascinating.  The label "peeping tom" comes from a seventeenth-century embellishment of the story of Lady Godiva's naked horseback ride in the year 1057.

Almost certainly an apocryphal tale, the story has it that Lady Godiva had pleaded with her husband, Leofric, English nobleman and Earl, to lower the taxes on the people of Coventry.  He agreed only if she would ride naked through the town's market place.

The seventeen-year-old Godiva called her husband's bluff.  However, she had previously made a pact with the townspeople that they would remain indoors behind closed shutters if they wanted their taxes lowered.  Everyone complied except a tailor by the name of Tom.  "This prurient citizen peeped through his curtains, drawing upon himself instant calamity by an unspecified agent; he was struck blind or in some versions dead."

Tailor Tom left a legacy to the English language, the phrase, "peeping Tom."

~ Source: The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman General Editor, 1985.

The Beauty of Things ~
by Robinson Jeffers*

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things ~ earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars ~
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality ~
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant ~ to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry,
The rest's diversion:  those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing:  reasons, but not the reason.

*American poet ( Jan. 10, 1887 ~ Jan. 20, 1962)  ~ The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford Univ. Press, 1988.

Thoughts on Writing ~

"Good writers work themselves physically.  Melville and Sandburg did farm chores.  H.L. Menken, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay all gardened.  Malcolm Cowley saws wood.  And Robinson Jeffers did stonework as a daily ritual, adding one room after another to the house he had built himself in Carmel, California, with huge stones he hauled up from the beach below.  I like the image that routine suggests ~ Jeffers struggling to catch flighty words in the morning and lifting heavy stones in the afternoon.  It's as if the one activity gave substance and form to the other."

~ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Introduction, Writers in Residence. The Viking Press, 1981.

Banks of The Grand ~ Mohawk Chapel Brantford ON

Authors:
H. Mellville (Moby Dick)
C. Sanburg (Three Pulitzer Prizes)
H. L. Mencken (Happy Days)
Wm. Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
Malcolm Cowley (WW 1 Correspondent, writer)
Robinson Jeffers (Poet, environmentalist)

"The best place for a writer to work is in his head," remark attributed to Ernest Hemingway.


(To our readers:  The only photos currently available through Blogspot are previously published ones.)