...and then, a few more words from the week

I tried to choose just one quote for the Week in Words carnival, but here are a few more, all on different topics, that have struck me lately.

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These two are from what my daughters call “The Talking Heads and Shoulders” on the Newshour. They’re actually from last week, in a discussion about President Obama’s recent populist tone:

Mark Shields: “All great revolutions are led by aristocrats. That is the reality of history.”

David Brooks:  “Populism and elitism are the same thing. They are class prejudices, crude class prejudices that so-and-so, because they are uneducated, is less worthy, or so-and-so, because they are richer or more educated, is unworthy.”

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Then there’s this, a description of a woman’s feelings about how she’s aging, taken from a book I’ve actually abandoned for now called While I Was Gone by Sue Miller:

I examined myself objectively, clinically now. I saw a nice-looking middle-aged person, someone you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed her on the street. And I’d never been beautiful, in fact. I’d been attractive…

Now, though, when my face was in repose, I looked tired. The downcurving lines at the corners of my mouth made me seem judgmental and stern… Sometimes my receptionist, Beattie, a woman I’d known and loved for twenty years, would ask me — out of the blue, from my perspective — “What’s wrong?” and I’d realize my face had fallen into those lines again. “Nothing,” I’d say. And then consciously try to open my face, to make it pleasant. To make it, I suppose, younger.

I had to laugh. I don’t think I have lines around my mouth, but I do have a distressing one between my eyebrows. It’s either a scowling wrinkle, or a thinking wrinkle. Why don’t we all agree that it’s the latter, shall we?

And as far as looking stern, alas, it’s haunted me all my life. A few weeks ago, my husband and daughter both commented that I looked unusually serious while playing the piano in church on Sunday. These days I feel tired and kind of weighed down, but I don’t know that I can blame it on that. I remember my second grade gym teacher literally chasing me around the gym, trying to get me to smile. It made me furious, and deepened my frown immeasurably. (And there goes our agreement about thinking vs. scowling…)

But seriously, who wants an on-demand smile? Real ones are better. I’m happy (sort of) to confess that I also have my share of crow’s feet settling in, proving that I do in fact smile on occasion. But back to the quote, I guess it’s obvious that I could relate to this speaker’s awareness of aging, and others’ reactions to it.

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I’ve been struggling to read George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons. They come highly recommended by minds as diverse as C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain, but I seem to be drawn to lighter fare lately. Well, maybe it also has to do with the fact that the text looks like this:

Very dense with print and thought, and I have an undisciplined mind. But this essay on prayer got my attention right at the start with this passage:

Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces, checks some tendency to abandon the strait path, leaving open only the way ahead. But there is a reality of being in which all things are easy and plain — oneness, that is, with the Lord of Life; to pray for this is the first thing; and to the point of this prayer every difficulty hedges and directs us.

I love that, especially the first clause. I love the idea of prayer as an enterprise that enlarges our theory of life. It combats the mundane struggle I have with bothering to articulate things to God when he already knows everything.