January Commonplace
in which we give you a peak into where our minds have been this month
Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.
Kelsie
“Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.”
-Alain de Botton (quoted in How to Stay Married)
“One who takes note has listened well.”
-Dante (Inferno 15.99…Esolen translation)
“It needs a special quality to be a martyr- just as it needs a special quality to be a writer. Mine is a humbler role, but one must not think it quite valueless. One might combine two provers and say: ‘Art is long and will prevail.’ You see it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing and the wrong form to the right thing…He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote would remain in people’s minds when the refutations were quite forgotten. That is what style does- it has the Egyptian secret of the embalmers. It is not to be despised.”
-Lactantius (a character from Helena by Evelyn Waugh)
Hannah
“...I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.”
-Mildred (character from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym)
“It is useless to meet revenge with revenge; it will heal nothing.”
-Frodo (character from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King)
“Our only means of true intimacy with a child is the power of recovering our own childhood.”
-Charlotte Mason (Home Education)
Jessica
“You’re like a person who has come to know
what a thing’s called, but does not know its essence,
unless another draws it out for you.”-Dante (Paradiso, XX.91-93,
translation)
“She thought of the vast ritual of the church, like a chasm into which the beloved falls.”
-Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 112
“Paradoxically, it is because we want to understand and take pleasure in our actual physical world that we make up tales about imaginary worlds.”
-
, Beauty and Imitation, 24
Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.
In Case You Missed It:
On the Podcast:
Read Along Guides for the the Space Trilogy:
What We’re Reading Now/Next:
February
Out of the Silent Planet AND Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
March
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
April
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
A Few Reminders:
If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!
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I love Excellent Women!!