Dear Learners,
- There is nothing so soft that it may not become the wheeled hub of the
universe.
Walt Whitman
- And then such a hurly-burly on the surface...and then that summer simmering
which our ears used to, which would otherwise be christened confusion worse
confounded, but now is ironically called "silence inaudible".
Henry David Thoreau
- the self regulating action of the psyche when not disturbed by too much
rational explanation or dissection can support the development process of the
soul.
CG Jung
Extracts from a book on my table that I ordered and arrived yesterday...
Chapter heading: A Great Burning.
" The first time I heard Elinor cough, I tried to will my ears into
disbelieving it. It was one of those summer days as soft as the blow-ball
fluff drifting on the honeysuckle breeze."
" 'Why should one like me, who is weary of this life and ready for the
harvest, be spared, when all the young ones are plucked up unripe?' I
patted his hand and shook my head, unable to command my voice to reply to
him. -- Elinor and I spoke on this as we walked back to the rectory, for
we had still come no closer to fathoming why the Plague felled some yet
not others. Some few -- had taken themselves off to live away from others
in caves and rude huts, certainly escaped infection. So much we knew;
proximity to the ill begat illness. But that was ever known. What remained
a puzzlement was why some lived who dwelt together in one house, sharing
with the ailing there food and bedding and even the very air they
breathed."
" We fell silent then. I tried to rest my mind from such imponderables by
keeping my thoughts only in the moment, watching the lazy wheeling
kestrels and listening to the raw calls of the corncrakes. When Elinor
coughed, I told myself it was a crake I had heard. -- I could no longer
see the bright buttercups or hear the birdsong. There was a roaring in my
ears from my pounding heart, any my eyes misted and over-flowed with tears
that ran unchecked down my face. -- I wept then in earnest, standing right
there in the middle of the field."
(SPRING 1666: the Great Plague is raging through London, killing more than
7,000 souls in a week, driving hordes of people out of the city to escape
contagion. But news travels slowly, and in a quiet village of farmers and
lead miners in the Derbyshire Peak District, eighteen-year-old Anna Frith
goes about her chores, unaware that in her very own home a bolt of cloth
from London carries the seeds of bubonic infection.
With the arrival of the plague the charismatic young rector Mompellion
asks for an extraordinary sacrifice, one that will inevitably mean great
suffering. The villagers elect to isolate themselves in a fateful
quarantine. So begins the Year of Wonders, seen through Anna's eyes, as
she confronts the loss of her family, the Disintegration of her community,
and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As the death toll rises and
people turn from prayers and herbal cures to 'sorcery and murderous
witch-hunting, Anna emerges as an unlikely and courageous heroine in the
village's desperate fight to save itself.
Based on the true story of Eyam known as the 'plague village', Year of
Wonders explores love and learning, fear and fanaticism, and the struggles
of seventeenth-century science and religion to interpret the world at the
cusp of the modern era. It is also a moving testament to the Derbyshire
country people who chose to suffer alone during one of the greatest
catastrophes ever to befall England: the incomprehensible terror of the
plague.)
- " (Andrew,) any act of thought is an attempt to recover history, because
it is the use of memory.If we are to be able to think, we must find
history. This woman contains history, and thus she contains the single
key that can unlock, in us, our own capacity to think. We must therefore
lean over her, lean over in the act of inquiry, and begin." Michael
Leyton, Rutgers University, New York.
Andrew Campbell
Oxford
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