Vocab

The Book Club, consisting of Nate Wolff, David Hoos, and myself had its first meeting last night. We discussed Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables a bit, and made plans for our next reads, which will probably include some Tobias Wolff short stories, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Yes, we set out to read some Catholic writers.

Besides the learned words listed below, we talked about the sometimes insultingly obvious tools many classic authors employ in relating themes. For example, much of THOT7G is about generational sin and curses. In order to make sure we hadn't missed it before, Hawthorne goes to great lengths to tell us how a descendent of the cursed ancestor bears an uncanny resemblence to the orginal Pyncheon. This led me to revisit one of my old gripes about middle/high school literature programs that tell kids that the classics are simply too dense and difficult to understand. Oh, and they also were written too long ago to have any bearing on a 17-year-old who drives a Mazda and has an iPod. The fact is, many of the classics function as textbooks on Themes in Writing. Dickens, much to Nate's frustration, will carry you along a nice little theme in his novels, show you bits and peices here and there until you are comfortable and fairly pleased with having gleaned something from the text, then say something like 'And the wooden table was a metaphor for the Clark family.' To which the appropriate, Wolffian response is to bring an open hand to the forhead, hold it briefly, extend the hand and cry "Dude."

Words I've learned:

lugubrious - ridiculously, excessively mournful.

Daguerreotype - an obsolete photographic process, invented in 1839, in which a picture made on a silver surface sensitized with iodine was developed by exposure to mercury vapor.

matutinal - pertaining to or occurring in the morning; early in the day.

escritoire - a writing desk.

obstreperous - noisy and stubbornly defiant, aggressively boisterous.

piquant - agreeably pungent or sharp in taste or flavor; pleasantly biting or tart.

dromedaries - the single-humped camel, Camelus dromedarius, of Arabia and northern Africa.

approbation - official approval or sanction.

effulgence - shining forth brilliantly; radiant.

physiognomy - the outward appearance of anything, taken as offering some insight into its character.

alacrity - cheerful readiness, promptness, or willingness.

testator - a person who has died leaving a valid will.

propinquity -

1.	nearness in place; proximity.

2.	nearness of relation; kinship.

3.	affinity of nature; similarity.

4.	nearness in time.

augury - an omen, token, or indication.


And I'm only halfway through...

Lewis on the Lazy

Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.
It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call 'ourselves', to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be 'good'. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way - centred on money ore pleasure or ambition - and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing by grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown

From Mere Christianity

Return

Back from Estes with pictures to come soon. I ended up not only taking out a backpacking group, but helping the rock climbing guides on their two trips as well. Moody Bible Institute did a little write-up on First Adventure that you can read here.

Check It

I have a lot of foam-core and mat board left over from the Spring Gala. If you have photos or art that you would like matted or mounted onto foam-core (or both), let me know and I'm sure we could arrange something. I haven't had a chance to do much in the way of photo-ing or writing since starting at the TerrorMark, but in exchange I'm now relatively wealthy. So I'd love a few projects to work on.

In other news, I'll be down in Colorado this next week helping my good friend AJ Dudek start his guiding company, First Adventure. A group of guys from a church back in Wisconsin are coming out for a week of climbing, backpacking, and fly-fishing and AJ has asked me to guide the backpacking trip. We'll be tramping about just south of Rocky Mountain National Park in the Indian Peaks Wilderness and Roosevelt National Forest. Hopefully some good pictures to follow.

Hancock: Probably my least favorite Will Smith movie , but hey, that's like describing the least delicious ice cream. It's all tasty.