Jim’s Jottings for Nov 3, 2017
Scary times we’ve been living through, what with Halloween, Dia de los Muertos…it’s been a bit damp to picnic on the grandparents’ graves like they do in Olde Mexico, but whatever we do to honor our ancestors is a good thing. These celebrations and the recent PBS American Masters about Edgar Allen Poe brought to mind those memento moris that were made a hundred years ago when death was a reality in about every family. Poor Poe had a young wife that succumbed to consumption, along with childbirth, a very common way for women to depart this life. Have you ever seen one of those lovingly made samplers suitable for hanging in your entry hall that incorporated pressed flowers and hair from the deceased? Poems, prayers, etc…all included. In these parts, it seem like those cars you often encounter in front of you at a stop light with a legend that is made to remember “Dad,” “of Loving Memory,” “1932-2017” or the like? Seems to me that’s a pretty interesting regional tradition. R.I.P.
He who has provoked the lash of wit cannot complain that he smarts from it. [James Boswell, biographer and lawyer]
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been. [writer Madeleine L’Engle]
TIME: Is marching along as if it cared not one iota about us…however, it seems we must care about it, so turn your clocks BACK an hour at 2 AM on Sunday morning. I can count how many of you will set your alarms to get up at 2, or was that 3 (?) so best do it just before retiring for the night.
I have to report that Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Sequel,” still has not played her, but I just received the DVD in the mail so we are going to plan a member event for winter term to show it as a special Film Forum date with discussion and maybe an expert on hand. Stay tuned.
Lutherans are rightly celebrating the 500th anniversary year of Martin Luther’s posting his “95 Theses” on the Wittenberg church door. I think I might honor the event by listening to Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony No. 5. If you have thought at all about this, has it hit you that this revolution in religious thought was aided and abetted by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440? The spread of such inventions took quite a while, so we can assume that by 1517, Luther could hand over his Theses and know that it would be available all over the place. With the printing press there was also a boom in literacy and, to my mind, the single greatest thing Martin Luther did was to translate the New Testament into the common German language so that everyone could read and interpret it for themselves with no intervention from priests. Now, Christians could have the close, personal relationship with the scriptures that Jews had pretty much always had.
Just Jim