Calling this one in off the bench because my Collected (Possibly Complete) Seamus Heaney poems was grinding me down.
"I am a strong believer in the idea that the mathematical structures that underpin both art and nature are timeless. That they do not need a moment of creation. They exist outside time and space. The universe we live in is a physicalization of these abstract structures.
"There will be a moment when the human mathematician will see and articulate that structure for the first time in an act that often feels like a feat of creativity, but that moment is always mixed with a sense that this was a structure waiting there to be discovered, whose existence is independent of human involvement. Mathematicians are revealing the pure abstract structures that are the true origin of the things being projected onto the wall of Plato's cave. The universe we see around is simply a physical manifestation of those abstract forms. And within that universe artists are creating their own works which reinterpret these structures once again." (3)
x + 372 pages = 382
Day 1 (DDRD 3,006) January 24, 2026
Read to page 10. Ahhhh.
Day 2 (DDRD 3,007) January 25, 2026
Read to page 41. And it was not a struggle. And when I stopped for breakfast and lost my place, it was easy to find it again because I remembered what I had read previously. 👍
There was an extended reference to a piece called Quartet for the End of Time by Messiaen:
https://youtu.be/zYpBHc8px_U?si=2zbNEf_PVl3PlCY9
Very strange.
Now THIS is the way it's supposed to work: reading about Messiaen led me to a video of Quartet for the End of Time, and reading the comments on that video led me to a novel that looks very interesting: Orfeo by Richard Powers. Which is, alas, unavailable for free...except as an audio recording. I don't do well with audio recordings, but I'll give it a shot. I don't do well with audio recordings but I'll give it a shot. News as it happens.
"Both mathematics and the arts emerge out of our encounters with the world around us. They are languages that we have developed to make sense of our environment." (27)
There's also a lecture on this book by The Author at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqH-oscXKTM.
Later...
I went back for more. If you get to page 42 and don't know "Take 5" by Dave Brubeck & Co., here ya go: https://youtu.be/vmDDOFXSgAs?si=2giquhmb3H7I7rar
No, no, no...thank YOU.
Read to page 49, btw.
Day 3 (DDRD 3,008) January 26, 2026
Read to page 82.
This book is making me happy. Get this: there's discussion of the dome for Florence Cathedral, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi and finished in 1436. According to du Sautoy, it was the belief that the universe was a sphere that inspired these structures.
 |
| Public Domain* |
Guillaume Du Fay wrote Nuper Rosarum Flores to Celebrate the consecration of the cathedral in 1436. It was (much) later discovered that he "used the dimensions of the cathedral as a blueprint for the composition. There are four sections, each comprising two sets of 28 units made of four lots of seven-beat phrases. The four sections repeat the same music, but at different speeds, in a proportion of 6 to 4 to 2 to 3. All these numbers that Du Fay used to create the piece are the same numbers that define the proportions of the cathedral that Brunelleschi had worked on." (65)
Music, maestro?
https://youtu.be/P9yzTTwAj5U?si=sSUopDeImd97-2Hr
Ah, yes.
On page 79 there's a reference to the short story "A Subway Called Moebius." I read that story a few days ago in the Asimov edited anthology Where Do We Go From Here? Do do do do, do do do do.
Day 4 (DDRD 3,009) January 27, 2026
Read to page 112.
Speaking of architecture, check this out: L'unite d'habitation. Apparently this "self-contained city" was an example of Brutalist architecture. The details of its construction are worth looking into.
Now I feel like watching The Brutalist again.
Day 5 (DDRD 3,010) January 28, 2026
Read to page 155.
Got to Philip Glass today, starting with a piece I'd never heard of previously...and I've been listening to PG for over 50 years. It's a simple bit of rhythm performed by one person with two hands:
https://youtu.be/A3IYzX0yJKc?si=UtT6laZGLk9V9Fec
I don't know if it's Music, but I sure as hell couldn't do it, so there's a vote in favor of.
Day 6 (DDRD 3,011) January 29, 2026
Read to page 214.
I'm thinking that Matryoshka (as in doll) would be a good name for a novel. Or a character.
Y'know, this book really should be produced with hyperlinks. References to paintings, images of other sorts, videos, music, literature abound, and I often have to stop in my reading to access those references. It'd be so cool to have that embedded in the text. Let him who has ears and unlimited funds listen.
Nietzsche: "...we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once." (186)
The Flagellation of Christ (1459–1460) by Piero della Francesca
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| Public Domain |
Day 7 (DDRD 3,012) January 30, 2026
Read to page 254.
Greek composer Iannus Xenakis: Metastasis.
https://youtu.be/Jjpq2Y4tUGI?si=Eihwa-Rozb8S99nk
This sounds so much like the weird symphonic progression in "A Day in the Life" that I'd think the Beatles had ripped it off if it weren't so obscure.
Guess I'm not alone:
Day 8 (DDRD 3,013) January 31, 2026
Read to page 284.
Messiaen "stopped a rehearsal in order to complain that the clarinet had turned dark blue when it was meant to be green. The blue clashed with the colour of the other instruments. What had actually happened is that the clarinet had played a B, not a B flat. But for Messiaen, this had translated into the wrong colours appearing in his mind." (258)
So...there's this group named Oulipo. Here's part of what Wikipedia has to say about them.
"Oulipo (French pronunciation: [ulipo], short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature", stylized OuLiPo) is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/creative??,
And that got me thinking. This was a group that specifically thought out different kinds of limitations in order to spark greater creativity. And that's what poetry does as well: it creates false limitations in order to subvert the conscious mind and drive the creative person's consciousness into other areas. As a matter of fact, that same concept applies to sports: create false limitations (the dimensions of the playing "field," time limitations, etc.) in order to make the game more exciting. Would anyone want to watch a basketball game if there were no baskets at the ends of the court? And that got me thinking about corporeal existence. What if immortal and limitless spirits wanted to ensconce themselves in finite bodies in order to accentuate their ability to be creative? Would some choose such drastic limitations as crippled or diseases bodies? Well, you see where that goes. 🤔
Two more pieces of music, both of them by Emily Howard:
"Torus"
https://youtu.be/PoRLvQwuzYM?si=LGGd_1LE5JSfln6_
&
"Four Musical Proofs and a Contradiction"
https://youtu.be/ZWjaUuk51pg?si=khUFvO8sI0wPzREY
https://youtu.be/pUHU_PfGUY8?si=71I5nlLXC0okHTsq
https://youtu.be/YyAEUYM1_cQ?si=-i3rEAcPdhy6xkOL
https://youtu.be/kg4MBc9HpTM?si=TgHcUamsegH5WfyZ
https://youtu.be/Wf9J795s_AQ?si=MQ-ejDReYVrh5X8I
Day 9 (DDRD 3,014) February 1, 2026
Read to page 339.
"Albert Einstein said "If you ask in whom I am most interested at present, I must answer Dostoevsky - Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!" (292)
Day 10 (DDRD 3,015) February 2, 2026
Read to page 372, The End.
I had coffee with some friends yesterday morning and mentioned that I had read that Jackson Pollock's paintings followed fractal patterns. C. remarked that that was bullshit, that all Pollock did was pour paint onto the canvas in a random pattern. I let it lie there as I am pretty non-confrontational in real life, but as I read through the bibliography of this book, I saw a reference to an article on this which I hope to read soon.
Fantagraphics also charged $4.47 for shipping.
Now riddle me this: why does Amazon charge $3 more for the book...and 52¢ more for shipping (for a total of $3.52 up charge)?
Answer: because they can.
Fuckers.
Oh, by the way, in case you're interested...
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Scrooge)
Every Tuesday (when I volunteer at the hospital) I pass this door four times. And every time I pass it, I think, "I should print out the word RUN and tape it onto this sign." But by the time I get home, I've already forgotten about it.
Maybe next time.
"...churches were...feats of spiritual engineering...they... represented another level of reality, the divine, which was present in the midst of everyday toil, and there stood open to the future, when the kingdom of heaven would be. Established on earth. That no one seeks the divine level of reality any more and that the churches stand empty means that it is no longer necessary. That it is no longer necessary means that the kingdom of heaven has come. There is nothing left to long for other than longing itself, of which the empty churches I can see from here have become the symbol." (38)
Some of that goes a bit too far, but I thought that the way that KOK expressed the essential nature of churches summed up my beliefs nicely: "engineering...they... represented another level of reality, the divine...." That's one of the reasons that the physical appearance of a church matters to me. Old Catholic churches, with their huge stained glass windows, statuary, and sometimes relics suit my idea of the proper way to signal that you have entered the presence of God.
"...the wisest person knows that 'I' is nothing in itself." (133)
"Madame Bovary is the world's greatest novel.... Flaubert's sentences are like a rag rubbed across a window pane encrusted with smoke and dirt which you have long since grown accustomed to seeing the world through." (178 - 179)
I think this would make a great title: "The archaic light of the soul...." (224) Somebody should tell a writer.
And the 🎤 drop: "to gaze into the eyes of the one you love when love is at its most powerful belongs among the highest joys." (224)
This wasn't really a good book. More a series of descriptions, most of them banal and unnecessary--like the description of how a toilet functions, for instance--but occasionally there'd be a flash of inspired stuff, and I don't feel that Autumn was a waste of time. In fact, I'll probably be starting Winter tomorrow.
Day 1 (DDRD 3,001) January 20, 2026
Read to page 21 and 693 to 700.
This book is divided between poems (3 to 689) and 691 to 1219). Which makes for awkward reading...especially in a book as heavy as this one. Still I persisted.
It was nice and a revelation to find out that not only did Seamus Heaney admire Gerard Manley Hopkins, but that he even imitated Hopkins' style in his earliest poems.
Day 2 (DDRD 3,002) January 21, 2026
Read to page 38 and 701 to 713. Some of the notes on the poems seem ridiculous to me...many of them point out things like "sheep," in the original, revised to "sheep." I'm not exaggerating, either. Have to admit that it's kind of draining to read this. But het, only a little over 1,200 pages to go, right?
Day 3 (DDRD 3,004) January 22, 2026
Read to page 57, 724.
I do love Seamus Heaney, but I'm thinking hard about whether or not I want to continue this for my DDR. It's kind of exhausting, and I feel like the words are slipping through my fingers.
Day 4 (DDRD 3,005) January 23, 2026
Read to page 77, 734.
Pages 58 to 68 went pretty quickly as (1) they were somewhat interconnected, (2) had few notes, and (3) weren't very good, so easy to glide through. As total last, most of these were song lyrics, and were rhymey and superficial.
My frustration with reading this collection made me think about reading the collection of the complete Blaise Cendrars poems, which I don't recall gave me this trouble. Thinking about that made me think about "Easter in New York," and when I went looking for that I found this (by Cendrars):
"In 1912, at Easter, I was starving in New York, and had been for a number of months. From time to time I took a job, by force of necessity, but I didn’t keep it a week and if I could manage to get my pay sooner than that I quit sooner, impatient to get on with my sessions of reading at the central public library. My poverty was extreme and every day I looked worse: unshaven, trousers in corkscrews, shoes worn out, hair long, coat stained and faded and without buttons, no hat or tie, having sold them one day for a penny in order to buy a plug of the world’s worst chewing tobacco."
Day 5 (DDRD 3,006) January 24, 2026
Read to page 89 / 740 (12 + 6)
I stopped reading for some Dad of Two Autistic Kids Who Are Freaking Out About the Incoming Snowmageddon stuff, and when I got back to it I had to search for where I'd stopped...even though I had a bookmark. As I read backwards, I realized that these poems had moved through me like a Big Mac through my digestive system--swift slide, splash, and no trace left behind.
That's not good.
In fact...I need a break. I might be back, but this just ain't gettin' it right now.
44 + 89 + 40 = 173 pages
I've been meaning to get around to Laurence Sterne for some time now, and when I was in Half-Price Books and spotted this little gem for $5, I thought there's no time like the present to begin. As you can see, it's a tiny book, but evenso it has xvii + 233 = 250 pages, so I'm skeptical about my ability to finish it in 3 days. But I thought I'd give it a shot, so awaaaaaay we go!
Day 1 (DDRD 2,998) January 17, 2026
Read to page 25. Which is not on pace to finish in two more days. But Joe had a basketball game and there were two NFL playoff games. 1313
Day 2 (DDRD 2,999) January 18, 2026
Read to page 113...so maybe I CAN finish this off tomorrow. Plus I'll probably read a bit more today.
Smelfungus and Mindungus, you say? 🤔
Tobias Shandy...from Sterne's first novel...makes an appearance.
And...read to 133. Leaving an even 100 pages for tomorrow. Can do!
Day 3 (DDRD 3,000) January 19, 2026
Read to page 233, The End. And a pleasant little canter it was...though hardly A Sentimental Journey. A more apt title would be In Search of Pussy...or Wang, Dang, Sweet Poon-Tang, perhaps. Sterne is an amusing fellow, though, and I'll need more of him soon.
"Sweet pliability of man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments!—Long,—long since had ye number’d out my days, had I not trod so great a part of them upon this enchanted ground. When my way is too rough for my feet, or too steep for my strength, I get off it, to some smooth velvet path, which Fancy has scattered over with rosebuds of delights; and having taken a few turns in it, come back strengthened and refresh’d.—When evils press sore upon me, and there is no retreat from them in this world, then I take a new course;—I leave it,—and as I have a clearer idea of the Elysian fields than I have of heaven, I force myself, like Æneas, into them.—I see him meet the pensive shade of his forsaken Dido, and wish to recognise it;—I see the injured spirit wave her head, and turn off silent from the author of her miseries and dishonours;—I lose the feelings for myself in hers, and in those affections which were wont to make me mourn for her when I was at school." (159 - 160)
And this bit--
"But there is nothing unmix’d in this world; and some of the gravest of our divines have carried it so far as to affirm, that enjoyment itself was attended even with a sigh,—and that the greatest they knew of terminated, in a general way, in little better than a convulsion." (162)
--is just funny. Keep in mind that this was Sterne trying to be GOOD...to make up for the shock he'd caused with Tristram Shandy.
So there it is...3,000 days of reading every day (minus one for a trip to the emergency room for a faltering heart). I'm going to tally up pages read from 2,001 to 3,000, but it's going to take awhile.
353 pages minus 104 read, so 249 pages and 5 days. Yep.
Day 2 (DDRD 2,996) January 15, 2026
Read to page 188. Starting to wonder what all of the fuss (Booker Prize, paeans from the pantheon) is about. This is a series of snapshots (with blackness between them) of pretty ordinary stuff...with the exception of the first chapter's sexual molestation of a minor by a middle-aged woman. And this dude has used the word "okay" at least 100 times. (Not hyperbole.) I'm going to finish this thing, but unless there's something astonishing up ahead, I don't think I'm going to enjoy it.
I mean...shit, get a room.
Day 3 (DDRD 2,997) January 16, 2026
Read to page 294. Well...shit. Only 59 pages to go. Which means I'm probably going to finish it today...which means I'll have three days to finish something else if I want to come out even. Hmmm.
And the dialogue. It's probably the worst I've ever read outside of a Learning To Read book. Slow-moving and so inconsequential that you could edit it out and the story wouldn't suffer at all. (It might even give a little sigh of relief.)
And the plot. It's like DS wrote out the whole story, then edited out all of the most interesting parts. Like when Helen's husband dies. Or when Helen and Istváne get married. Didn't Jean-Paul Sartre already do this whole elevation of the banal thing?
Addendum: Read to page 353, The End. Unfortunately, the speed with which I read this book is indicative of the intensity of my back pain and the consequent immobility it necessitated, not the quality of the writing. This was not a good book. I cannot imagine why it was even nominated for the Booker Prize, much less won it. The only thing to be gained from reading it for me is the satisfaction of knowing that I can tell you not to waste your time on it. It is banal, superficial, and unfulfilling. In fact, the best use Igot out of it was when I used it as a coaster for my bowl of hot vegetables.
All flesh is grass (Hebrew: כָּל־הַבָּשָׂ֣ר חָצִ֔יר kol-habbāsār ḥāṣīr) is a phrase found in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, chapter 40, verses 6–8. The English text in King James Version is as follows:
6 The voice said, Cry.
And he said, What shall I cry?
All flesh is grass,
and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:
because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it:
surely the people is grass.
8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:
but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_flesh_is_grass
I don't know if I've read this book before or not. I read a lot of Clifford D. Simak in my youth, and the title seems familiar, so it's possible. But that was at least 55 years ago, so I don't imagine I'll remember anything as I (re-?) read it. Let's see.
I'm going with an e-book on this, but a reliable source (the library) tells me it's 272 pages long in the print version, so I'll go with that. Can I read it in 7 days to round out DDRDs 2,001 to 3,000? That's about 39 pages per day.
☮ o' 🥮.
Judging from the number of covers I found, this book has gone through quite a few editions...and more than a few translations. (See https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2439)
Day 1 (DDRD 2,994) January 13, 2026
The e-version of this book has 197 pages, so that means I'll need to hit a mere 28 pages per day (plus change) to meet my goal.
Again, ☮ o' 🥮.
I hope.
Hmm. So after a mysterious thing happens (no spoilers, but VERY mysterious), our hero, Brad Carter, goes to a bar for a beer, meets a friend he hasn't seen for six years, and invites this friend to go fishing the next day. Say what?
There was also a reference to a man who lives in the town who seems to be special needs and Brad refers to him as an "idiot" who drools when he talks. I know times were different when this book was published but that still stuck in my craw. (Later on ge refers to this man as a "jerk" and a "dope." 😠
Read to page 38.
Day 2 (DDRD 2,995) January 14, 2026
Read to page 64. Hmm. 133 pages to go, and 5 days to do it in. I'm either going to have to slow down or give up on the goal of an Even Finish for my third K. (Oh, anal retention....)
"You had to have a hunger, a different kind of hunger, to finish up a book." (46)
I used to have that hunger. I wrote senior year in high school, The Lone Cry of a Wolf during my senior year, and Yesterday's Rebel during my first semester in college. Things get a bit blurry after that, but there was Images of Pilgrimage, Somewhere Between Being and Nothingness, and A Matter of Reason, Master Lyghthum's Journey. Then my great era of false starts, Flies & Bees, ...Then There Is No Mountain. One of those was several hundred pages long.
And what finally stopped me in my tracks wasn't the crushing workload of being a high school English teacher, wasn't the diagnosis of my daughter with autism, wasn't even the diagnosis of my last child with autism, wasn't the death of my father, wasn't the death of my mother, wasn't my first divorce, wasn't my second divorce. It was my heart failure. It was when I truly realized that I was not in control of my life, that despite my greatest efforts and strongest will, my life would go where it would, careening like a drunken novice skier down a dangerous slope. Many is the time when I thought, "I'll pick it up again. I'll finish those unfinished novels. I'll start a new novel." But nothing. Last night I had another of those times. I was stoned on Delta 8/9, listening to an audiobook of Feodor Chin's The God Equation and just starting to drift into sleep when this line snagged my attention: “If the apple falls, does the moon also fall?” It is (purportedly) what Isaac Newton said when he spied his iconic apple. And I immediately thought Does the Moon Also Fall? would be a good title for a novel. I first told myself that I would remember it the next day and allowed myself to continue to drift towards sleep, but then I realized there was no chance that I would, so I made myself sit-up and write it down. And now this morning I'm thinking, "Sure...but I'm not a writer anymore, am I?" 🤔
Or am I?
News as it happens.
Meanwhile...
Oh. Chapters 2 through 6 were Flasbacking. That wasn't clear to me, and led to more than a little bit of confusion.
On Second Thought...
I just picked this
P.S. Stop me if this sounds familiar: in this book, alien invaders with a hive mind communicate with Earthlings via telephone, and get this...they can't lie. Oh, and they offer to take care of all humans' needs. What the fuck, man? I find it very hard to believe that Pluribus isn't ripping off this novel. Google time.
And?
My search--Vince Gilligan's Plur1bus and All Flesh is Grass by Clifford D. Simak--turned up zero hits. Something is rotten in the state of Gilligan.
I've been laid up with a back that hurts so much that I had to crawl across the floor this morning, yelping in pain. Since then it's been Ben Gay, heating pad, and drugs left over from my lung removal surgery. Which explains wby I've now read to page 100 of this book, and might could read some more later on.
Day 3 (DDRD 2,996) January 15, 2026
Read to page 197, The End. And quite a bit ahead of schedule. The fringe benefit of being incapacitated by pain. And now...back to Flesh!
Watching an old lady (Mrs. Tyler) walk away, Brad thinks, "...she could take harsh reality and twist it into something that was strange and beautiful." (166) With respect to Mrs. Tyler, thus means living in a world of delusion, but I think it applies to everyone to some extent, and especially to writers.
I read this in Karl Ove Knausgård's Autumn this morning...
"...pudenda...literally means 'things to be ashamed of.'"
...and didn't believe it. So I Googled. And?
So there it is. What an incredibly misogynistic world we live in.
This is abook I've been thinking about reading for a long time. When I saw this cover online (@ Biblio.com) I had to buy it. It arrived in the mail yesterday. I finished the DDR I'd been working on today. I have 15 more days until DDRD 3,000. Figuring that I'd read an average of 30 pages per day, I wanted a book about 450 pages long. This is 319 pages. So I decided to go with this, then see if I can tuck in one more short book before Day 3,000.
So let's go.
Day 1 (DDRD 2,986) January 5, 2026
Read to page 35.
"...we must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do." (9) An interesting line. While I'm not necessarily in agreeing it, it seems to me that this is very close (and perhaps identical to) something I had Brother Zachary say in my novel, A Matter of Reason: "God is the only one who cares more about what you want to be than about what you are." (Obviously) if I don't know if I agree with that either. Just sayin', sir.
"...in old age we live under the shadow of Death, which like a sword of Damocles may descend at any moment, but we have so long found life to be an affair of being rather frightened than hurt that we have become like the people who live under the Vesuvius, and chance it without much misgiving." (27) This Butler fellow is quite the smart ass. I like that in a writer.
BTW, my copy of this book was published in 1954. 72 years ago!
Day 2 (DDRD 2,987) January 6, 2026
Read to page 72.
Day 3 (DDRD 2,988) January 7, 2026
Read to page 110.
Day 4 (DDRD 2,989) January 8, 2026
Read to page 150.
There's a reference to an organ with wooden pipes which stopped me in my tracks and sent me Googling. I found this fascinating video:
https://youtu.be/p0iL0FQL92s?si=QviEfs7VX37YiqWfDay 5 (DDRD 2,990) January 9, 2026
Read to page 185.
Hey, look!
My old friend Henry Thomas Buckle!
"We can conceive of St. Paul or even our Lord Himself as drinking a cup of tea, but we cannot imagine either of them as smoking a cigarette...." (180)
Now that's funny.
When young Ernest hears Mr. Hawke's sermon and tips over into religious fervor, I have to admit that he reminds me of young me. Oh, the things I did. The prayer circle in the woods. Carrying a Bible around. Other stuff. I guess I've always been on the edge of religious fanaticism. Even now.
In other news...sorry to say that my 72 year old copy of this book has begun to come apart. First the cover, then the spine split most of the way up. Tape is holding things together for now, but it's in fragile shape.
"We must all sow our spiritual wild oats." (183)
Day 6 (DDRD 2,991) January 10, 2026
Read to page 226.
"The Bible is not without its value to us, the clergy, but for the laity it is a stumbling block which cannot be taken out of their way too soon or too completely. Of course, I mean, on the supposition that they read it, which, happily, they seldom do. If people read the Bible as the ordinary British churchman or church woman reads it, it is harmless enough; but if they read it with any care--which we should assume they will if we give it them at all--it is fatal to them." (188)
Well. That's from a conversation between Ernest and another minister. The other minister also insists that the church must go back to some basic Catholic thoughts and practices if it is to properly serve its people. For instance, he insists upon the necessity of confession.
Clever Shake-speare allusion here: "The world was all out of joint, and instead of feeling it to be a cursed spite that he was born to set it right, he thought he was just the kind of person that was wanted for the job, and was eager to set to work, only he did not exactly know how to begin...." (198)
Reference Ernest's, education, the narrator tells us "By far the greater part, moreover, of his education had been an attempt, not so much to keep him in blinkers as to gouge his eyes out altogether. " (212)
The discretion Butler shows vis-a-vis Ernest's "attack" on Miss Matland is not helpful. We're left with no idea if Ernest physically assaulted her or limited his actions to words...and that matters. Sign of the times, I suppose.
Day 7 (DDRD 2,992) January 11, 2026
Read to page 260.
"The greater part of every family is always odious: if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected." (230)
"WHEN I think over all that Ernest told me about his prison meditations, and the conclusions he was drawn to, it occurs to me that in reality he was wanting to do the very last thing which it would have entered into his head to think of wanting. I mean that he was trying to give up father and mother for Christ's sake. He would have said he was giving them up because he thought they hindered him in the pursuit of his truest and most lasting happiness. Granted, but what is this if it is not Christ? What is Christ if He is not this? He who takes the highest and most self-respecting view of his own welfare which it is in his power to conceive, and adheres to it in spite of conventionality, is a Christian whether he knows it and calls himself one, or whether he does not. A rose is not the less a rose because it does not know its own name." (235)
I have often had a similar thought. So many people that I've talked to have expressed the idea that they have no faith in the existence of God, but that they do believe, for instance, in the Big Bang. When they talk about what they believe in, however, it seems to me that they are just using a euphemism for God because they lack the strength* to name it God.
It seems astonishing to me that someone could have written this in 1884 (-ish; the book was written between 1873 and 1884):
"As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies. This was the crowning point of the edifice; when he had got here he no longer wished to molest even the Pope. The Archbishop of Canterbury might have hopped about all round him and even picked crumbs out of his hand without running risk of getting a sly sprinkle of salt. That wary prelate himself might perhaps have been of a different opinion, but the robins and thrushes that hop about our lawns are not more needlessly distrustful of the hand that throws them out crumbs of bread in winter, than the Archbishop would have been of my hero." (237 - 238)
When Ernest leaves the prison, he is overcome with emotion and turns to lean against the wall and weep. He was leaving behind his entire life, setting out on a new road with nothing to hang onto. This made me think of the divorces in my life, especially the second one. I lost the love of my life then, and it emptied me out. For years I was in a desperate state, and the only thing that kept me going...kept me from suicide... was the knowledge that my children needed me. Many (but not all, thankfully) of the friends who had supported me during the divorce got tired of my shit and wandered away. I don't blame them. I was barely even recognizable as human. All of the strength that I had in me was reserved for my kids. Even now, 15 years after that divorce, I am conscious of the gap that's been left inside of me. I no longer long for the love that was lost, but I know that I won't ever recover...no matter how much I want to. It's like wanting to regrow a lost limb. All the desire in your heart, all the strength of your will, cannot make it happen.
In other news...in case you ever need to know, the phrase "sported the oak" means "From sport (“(archaic) to close or shut (a door)”) and oak (“outer (lockable) door of a set of rooms in a college (especially of the University of Cambridge or University of Oxford) or similar institution, especially one made of oak wood”)."
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sport_one%27s_oak)
"...he had, in fact, had to burn his house down in order to get his roast sucking pig...." (255)
You know, I really like this Butler fellow. There are a couple dozen of his books at the library, but most of them are in e-versions. Hmmm.
* It may be unfair of me to label this as a lack of "strength," but I have to admit that that's what it seems like to me.
Day 8 (DDRD 2,993) January 12, 2026
Read to page 299. So might as well go ahead and finish it up, right?
Day 9 (DDRD 2,994) January 13, 2026
Read to page 319...TheEnd. Well. That was quite a good read, actually. I think I'm going to read some more Samuel Butler right soon. But first..I'm thinking maybe Clifford D. Simak's All Flesh is Grass. A little Flesh unit.
