Dogs ~

"The good Lord in his ultimate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable, hope, jokes and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs."
~ Roblyn Davidson

"The dog was created especially for children.
He is the god of frolic."
~ Henry Ward Beecher


Command:  he thee obeys most readily.
Strike him:   he leaves his game and comes to thee
With wagging tail, offering his service meek.
If so thou wilt, a Collar he will wear;
And when thou wish to take it off again,
Unto thy feet he crouchest down most fair,
As if thy will were all his good and gain.
~ J. Molle

"Animals are such agreeable friends ~
they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms."
~ George Eliot

The Tables Turned ~ by Wm. Wordsworth

Up! Up! my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double;
Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening luster mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet*,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle* sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless~
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal* wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things~
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

* linnet ~ a small common Eurasian songbird related to the finch.
* throstle ~ a song thrush.
* vernal  ~ appropriate to spring.
~ The Canadian Oxford Dictionary

"At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then...
"The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter.  I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. "

~ Henry D. Thoreau (1817 - 1862) American author, poet, philosopher.

Walden A Fully Annotated Edition, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer*, Yale University Press, 2004. (based on the original 1854 edition)

*J.S. Cramer is curator of collections, The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.

"I went to the woods..."  ~ Henry 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, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion...

"Our life is frittered away by detail.  An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.  Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!  I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen..."

~ Walden, A Fully Annotated Edition, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer, Yale University Press, 2004.

Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher, essayist and ecologist cried out "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!*" urging man to follow the lessons of nature and "spur the seductive marvels of the new technology."

Today, I confess this bookshop blogger cried for "Simplicity!"  Cried out more than "simplicity" actually.

Google/Picaso/Blogspot will not allow The Neat L'l Bookshop to "Continue to Checkout" in order to add a few GB to our photo storage and to our GMail.  This is important if we want to continue posting photographs.  Considering "the marvels of the new technology," we are optimistic that we will soon be able to make it to "checkout"  and go wild adding photographs.

~ *Walden, Life in the Woods, 1854.

Joseph Heller, perhaps best known for his novel Catch-22, wrote "in airports, on airplanes, between appointments."

"To me, writing is largely a matter of memorizing.  I will have in mind what I want to write, often to the extent of language, phrases and sentence structure.  I walk from where I live to where I write, and by the time I get there I know most of what I'm going to do in the next two hours."

Oh, the Advantage of the computer!

"My method of work is to get a very good idea of what I want to cover ~ assign a time percentage ~ and I will rewrite each page, then each few pages, moving ahead very slowly with the handwritten page.  When I finish a whole section I go back and type what I've rewritten.  That is an extensive rewriting process ~ largely with language; usually it will be taking out much and then getting new ideas to put in.  Then I'll read it again and pencil it and give it to a typist to type."

~ Interview with Lawrence Grobel, Endangered Species, Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives,  Da Capo Press, 2001.

Joseph Heller, American novelist (May 1 1923 - December 12, 1999)

Gypsum, one of Haldimand's First Industries

Jean Farquharson will speak today at The York Grand River Historical Society.  For the book, Stories Along the Grand*, Jean researched and wrote the chapter on the gypsum mines.  The first mine opened in 1842.  A flourishing little settlement grew up, the only one in Ontario dependent exclusively on gypsum mining.  The village of Gypsum Mines was three miles south of Cayuga on River Rd. (#17) consisted of a post office, various general stores, sawmills, blacksmith shops and a log school house.
Everyone welcome.  2:00 p.m. today, Tuesday, November 20, Caledonia, in the lodge opposite Tim Hortons beside the railway track, Hwy 6.

~ * Published by the YGRHS, 2010.