Lazy blogging at its best!

Here's a nice little article on one of my favorite literary heroines and her approach to life in general and suffering in particular, well worth a look!

An Incomprehensible Classic?

I finally got a real (vs. a virtual one) of 'Pride and Prejudice,' and with it came a two page synopsis and analysis of what was to come.  Apparently Jane Austen writes entirely of marriage, according to the introduction, and then it goes on briefly trying to reconcile Miss Austen's writings with modern feminist thought, that certainly it was the stultification of her society that thus rendered her stories so abhorrent to modern thinking.  I'm glad I read the intro, for as often as I've read Austen or watched the various films, I never knew what she was trying to say!  Yes, you are detecting a heady dose of Austenian snark in that comment, whereas this writer gets it.  Austen writes about many things, including marriage, but one might as well say she writes of horses or whist by that theory.  Rather, her main topic is ever virtue or its lack.

But in a world where virtue and political correctness are synonymous, what should I expect?  Oh that she had lived to write a satire of our modern societal messiness!  Yet her works live on in popularity even 200 years later though many a modern much celebrated work of literature has flourished for a day and then been forgotten.  For though our technology and our cultural morals may change, at heart, man is ever the same creature.  This is why Miss Austen's works and writings like Ecclesiastes are still viable centuries after their publication.  My only fear is that there are far more Wickhams and Lydias in the world now than in Miss Austen's day, that the Darcys, Elizabeths, Bingleys, and Janes are all but extinct.  But that is like saying one should not have children because the world is such a dark and dangerous place: it has always been so.  The virtuous are rarities, even in Miss Austen's novels and history is a story of darkness for as far back as memory can reach.

And why should I be surprised that critics and academians and the literary elite misunderstand the works of Miss Austen?  Such too is an all too common failing of man: we see in a work only what we wish to see and hear only what we wish to hear.  We must either twist the meaning or dismiss as bunk anything that does not support our own goals or ideals.  But let he who has an ear, hear and he who has eyes to see, behold all that is good and right and true, to enjoy the delightful wit of Miss Austen, and to all who cannot, I am truly sorry for you.

When Joy Knocks

There's a monster in my house.  It upsets all my ideals of efficiency and order, save in the area of mayhem, which is carried out in a frighteningly efficient manner and with a smile to boot.  She's a strange creature, this Miss Joy, in a home occupied by two adult efficiency fiends and one junior member of the OCD squad.  We are all insecure and uptight and preoccupied, but nothing fazes the little monster.  She leans back and flops down, sometimes into midair, never caring if there is anything or anyone to catch her.  She shoves her way into your lap or arms, behind furniture and into starless closets, fearless.  You tell her 'no' and she smiles at you, makes some adorable little noise of indifferent acknowledgement and plunges in anyway.  All those neat and tidy milestones her brother nailed early, she could care less about, getting around to it when it pleases her; enjoying her food rather than worrying about learning the strange art of utensils or loving the joy of messiness when he would cry if any dirt whatsoever got on his rubber boots.

We accidentally, or rather providentially, named her Joy twice over, this little imp three years in the coming.  My nice prosaic girl name, which had resided in my imagination for well over a decade, was  cast aside in a moment, for that is quite literally all we had to consider the matter, for she came into our lives as abruptly and unannounced as ever she lives life now.  We got a call one evening, 'the call' as the adoption community puts it, that after three years of nothing, of waiting, of nearly despairing it would ever happen, it did.  We drove four hundred miles to a hospital to meet our new family member, of which we did not even know the sex.  We went into the room and met our little girl, and her mother had named her.  It wasn't the Name, agreed upon and cherished for so many years, it wasn't even on the List of other names I rather liked, but it was her, she could be nothing else.  We did ask to change the proposed middle name to Joy, to which the parents agreed, none of us knowing the meaning of the first name, which turned out to be Gaelic for Joy.  Our double portion of Joy.

And she is a Joy, sweet and happy and ridiculous and carefree and social and fun, tearing down the walls of our fear and care and worry as easily as she tears up the living room.  Teaching us what Joy is, what Trust is, what it means to live Fearlessly, how to enjoy the moment and play in the laundry; showing us what it means to be a Child of the Kingdom, not worrying about tomorrow but living in today.  It's a message our family desperately needs, and also our entire Western Society.  We are drifting into the dangerous waters of utilitarianism, wherein nothing is valuable unless it is useful.  The old, the young, the weak, the poor have no use and therefore no value in the eyes of Society, but it was to these very folk the long prophesied King came, not with an army or trumpets or a social media campaign or slick TV ads, but rather in the guise of a baby, born to the poorest of the poor in so socially awkward a manner as to endanger his mother's life and thereby His own, which might have been the kinder end, for He died in the most gruesome way imaginable, as the worst of criminals and traitors did.  But one cannot kill Joy!  Love triumphed over Death and the power of Darkness was broken, that the meek might verily inherit the earth.

Is it time for a disruption in your neat and tidy life?  If Joy knocks, will you open the door of your heart?  Once you let it in, you will never be the same, and that is a very good thing!