My very first literature course as an undergraduate was with a man named Paul Betz in the fall of 1993. Now, Prof. Betz’s life work was the study of the British romantic poets, in particular William Wordsworth. That first semester of my college experience, we read a lot of things — Coleridge, Hardy, Hopkins, Strindberg, Kate Chopin, but Wordsworth more than anything else. And, I have to say, even though I wasn’t very good at English literature (I know that this is a totally relative statement, but I didn’t feel like I was any good at it), I loved it. The Prelude just held me transfixed through that fall. We’d go sit on the lawn in small groups and discuss Wordsworth’s coming of age in the Lake District–for something like 4 hours a week. Bizarre, I know, but I truly loved it.

So, our friend Wordsworth describes these instances that he calls “spots of time” in which all of the elements of experience and sense and memory come together to take a person back through their lives. (All of you English lit scholars out there, sorry if I’ve butchered this in the shorthand….) At anyrate, spots of time show up in Book XI of The Prelude:

There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating Virtue, whence, … our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired

Pretty great, right? I thought so, and I had to wonder whether he was secretly friends with Proust and really liked cookies (think time-travel). But, that’s beside the point.

The Point. Right. So, lately I’ve been consciously spending more time with my music collection than usual — not just letting it float in the background as I usually do, but really listening. In part, I’m doing this to try to pull out some iconic pop culture from the 80s and 90s for a friend. But, really, it’s been a tremendously interesting autobiographical journey. I know exactly where all 3000 songs came from and why I bought them. More importantly, I keep having these crazy sensory experiences that are the closest thing I’ve ever known to spots of time. If Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” can put me in a beat-up Mustang on a country road at 14, and The Cure’s “Pictures of You” can put me in a convertable Rabbit a little more than 10 years later, what would Wordsworth have done with an ipod?

On a less serious note, I seemed to have missed the fact that Waterford/Wedgewood bought All-Clad in 1999. Now, not that I can afford either of these things, but it warms my heart that an Irish company owns the best cookware manufacturer in the United States–in fact, cookware that is manufactured in Canonsburg PA (which is about fifteen minutes from where I grew up).

So, according the the NYTimes, Waterford hasn’t been doing so hot lately. When the Irish CEO stepped down recently, the head of All-Clad took over. Here’s hoping they lower their prices on all counts…..
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Reading the newspapers lately, and Sheila’s posting the other day, about the tragedy on the gulf coast reminded me of something that seemed worth relaying….

Just about a month ago, Fr. McFadden (the voice of Hoyas basketball, and the man who taught me my first formal theology) gave a pretty great homily about water. Now, Fr. McFadden can tell a story, and he usually does. On this Sunday the gospel was about Peter walking out to meet Jesus on the water, and then getting scared, and starting to sink.

Rather than starting here, Fr. McF. began with the wonderful imagery from Gilead, where John Ames is recalling walking to his church one morning when he comes up behind some young lovers out for a walk. He sees the young man jump up and shake a tree branch, showering the young woman with glistening drops of water from the leaves. Rev. Ames is overwhelmed with the pure joy of this interaction, and comments that, “it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.” It’s this infusion of the holy into the mundane that makes Gilead such a great book.

But, Fr. McF’s point was altogether different–though he loved the imagery–we know, as Peter knew and the folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas know, water can be a tremendously dangerous and scary thing. It’s hard to see how this water could be a blessing. But, I suppose, it’s our chance to pony up some serious support, ’cause these folks are sinking.

• American Red Cross — (800) HELP-NOW
• America’s Second Harvest — (877) 817-2307
• Catholic Charities USA — (800) 919-9338
• United Jewish Communities

So, I finished reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday about two weeks ago, but I haven’t had time to get down my reflections on it. Like his last book, Atonement, this is a very quiet, but very good book. Ordinary people with ordinary lives, who sometimes find themselves spinning slowly out of control. Saturday is an explicitly post-9/11 book, and it was more than a little eerie to being reading the opening scenes, in which the main character rises from bed in the middle of the night, walks over to the window and sees a flaming airplane heading toward Heathrow–particularly because my reading corresponded with the London bombings.

For the most part, the text is an exploration of how we live our everyday lives in the post-9/11 era. It’s about our assumptions and fears. And, it’s about our ambivalence concerning US interventions in Iraq. These larger geopolitical concerns float around the periphery of Henry Perowne’s not so typical Saturday in February 2003. For me, there is always a haunting possibility that the next time I turn on the radio or the TV or the computer and see something tragic and intentional. The feeling of subtle vulnerability is pervasive. And, so it is for Perowne.

Perowne is a neuro-surgeon who is making his way through the day. He is anticipating a dinner marking the arrival from France of his daughter and his father-in-law, both of whom are poets. His involvement in a minor traffic accident early in the day–caused in part by his efforts to circumnavigate an enormous anti-war protest–provides an infusion of drama for the story. By the evening hours, this brief altercation has put his entire family in a great deal of danger.

Such a normal day, but really not….