Quickly Commonplacing #4

The colorful leaves have come, and the colorful leaves have (mostly) gone in our corner of CT, and I am already mourning their loss. One of my favorite fall beauties is a tunnel of maple trees that shades a delightfully windy section of road near our home. With their bright yellow leaves and silvery-brown trunks, they remind me of Lothlorien’s mallorn trees. On mornings when getting the kids out the door for school drop off has been a marathon, driving underneath their canopy was a balm to the soul. And speaking of balms to the soul, happy all All Souls’ Day! This year, my husband tried his hand at baking Soul Cakes, which are absolutely delicious. We will also be visiting the graveyard down the road from our home (built in 1790), where many of the men and women who lived in our historic home are buried. There is something very moving about praying for the souls of those to whom we owe the home we love, and imagining the joys and sorrows, births and deaths, that they experienced in the same rooms we now haunt. We are part of a tale begun long before we were born, and that will continue long after we die, and our part in the tale is changed. May God grant our chapters are ones we need not be ashamed of.

And with no real transition from that little meditation, here’s a fall-themed Quickly Commonplacing post!

Current Reads:

1. Reread: The Custom of the Country By: Edith Wharton

   1. I’m continuing my Edith Wharton reread with the final of the three books that I read for my high school research paper on Wharton. And boy did I forget how absolutely insane this book is. Undine Spragg, our main character, is a determined social climber from Ohio seeking to break into New York City’s aristocracy. Beautiful, fond of luxuries, and greedy for admiration, Undine has no compunction about using others in her restless quest for the next best thing. Her lack of empathy, combined with the ultimately shallow nature of her desires, makes her a perfect monster and a true anti-heroine. Yet, she is also pitiable in her inability to find ultimate satisfaction or form truly loving relationships with others. Wharton posits that Undine is is the product of both poor parenting and a society that infantilizes women and encourages them to concentrate their desires on lesser goods. It’s an oddly fitting fall read; a book that speaks to questions of education, conscience, and gender roles raised in gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

2. New Read: The Ninth Hour By: Alice McDermott

   1. This is my first foray into McDermott’s fiction and I will definitely be reading more of her work. Set in Brooklyn during the early 20th century, The Ninth Hour focuses on Annie, a young woman newly widowed by her husband’s suicide. With help from the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, who attended Annie on the night of her husband’s suicide, she raises her daughter Sally. The novel also explores Sally’s vocational discernment, and the repercussions of Annie’s affair with a married man, Mr. Costello. The book also jumps around in time; whether forward to Sally’s married life, or backwards to the ancestors of Sally’s husband. While I enjoyed this time-hopping, I was a bit thrown off by the choice of narrator: the unnamed children of Sally, who employ both an omniscient third person and limited first person narrative voice. I also found myself annoyed by the ending, particularly what seemed to me to be an our of character/poorly justified choice made by one Sister Jeanne. Despite these flaws, I think the book is a worthwhile read, if for nothing else than it’s portrayal of nuns: hard-working, imperfect, and self-sacrificing heroines who remind me how important it is to pray for an increase in vocations to the religious life.

Recent Commonplace Quotes:

1. “This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him and deposed him out of life.” (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by: Robert Louis Stevenson)

   1. An excellent work to read at a time of year when death and darkness are on the mind. I love the richness of Stevenson’s language and the imagery it evokes. In discussing Dr. Jekyll’s hatred of his evil alter ego, Mr. Hyde, Stevenson pens an achingly accurate description of the sin that slumbers within each of us. Stevenson’s words echo St. Paul’s famous lament in his Letter to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions…For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me” (7:15-20). We all know what it is to be disgusted by our own actions, to fall into the same sins over and over again, to realize that “the slime of the pit” is alive and well within us, however much we want to escape it. As we learn from Dr. Jekyll, however, trying to quiet the “mutter” of this “insurgent horror” by purely material means, or by indulgence of its desires, are efforts doomed to failure.

2. “He was so crooked you could have used his spine for a safety pin.” And “Mr. Ashton was a farmer of the sold school…He spoke in a series of gruff barks, and held himself so rigidly that if he had swallowed a poker it could only have produced unseemly curves and flexions in his figure.” (The Nine Tailors, by: Dorothy Sayers)

   1. Sometimes, I write down quotes for no ‘deeper’ reason than that I find them to examples of excellent writing, or because they made me laugh. These quotes did both, and I love the completely opposite personalities they describe.

Excellent Earworms:

1. Podcasts

   1. I discovered the Shameless Popery podcast when I was looking for some Catholic podcasts to listen to. I posted it’s extremely insightful episode on Halloween in my notes and highly recommend checking it out.

   2. When looking for some good podcasts on Jane Eyre, which we just finished up in the Reading Revisited book club, I stumbled across “A Well-Read Life.” An excellent bookish podcast with bite-sized episodes; it’s ideal for those of us in a busier season of life.

Substack Shares:

1. I learned a lot from this episode of Visitation Sessions, and it’s the perfect time of year to learn about exorcists and demons from reputable sources.

The Truth About Exorcists and Demons

2. The Catholic Church’s sexual ethic can seem incredibly burdensome, particularly to individuals who identify as LGBTQ. Believing something to be true doesn’t necessarily make it easier live out, particularly when that something can seem like it’s going to leave you lonely and miserable. If Catholics want to minister to the people we love who identify as LGBTQ, we should prioritize listening to their experiences. I found this piece very moving, and very courageous in its honesty.

   My Father Gives Me Bread: What the LGBTQ Community Needs from the Church

3. I really enjoyed this read about befriending children and the importance of strengthening kinship relationships.

On Befriending Kids

Polling the People:

Last post I asked which group of writing greats you’d like to have dinner with. The “Brit Lit Ladies:” Jane Austen, Bronte sister of your choice, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Shelley, won with 35% of the vote and I thoroughly approve. “Detective Dabblers” (Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Edgar Allen Poe) and “The GOATS” (JRR Tolkien, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Homer) shared second place with 26% of the vote. And no one wants to eat with the “American Dudes” (Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanial Hawthorne, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison) when they have better options apparently.

My next poll is a simple one, but one that I am curious about because my answer to this question has changed over the years!

Finally, please consider supporting my writing with a one-time donation. Living in a beautiful historic home also means paying for less-beautiful things to be repaired, like rusty oil tanks and cracked septic tanks. Your generosity is appreciated!