Quote of the Day 5/25/08

I am under no delusion that mine is the definitive account. It is just a version like everybody else's, and I suppose it is no less flavored than all the others by the cask it was aged in.

Antonio in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

$1.09 from the Gutter

A young Nasrani boy named Elias has been coming into the AHT for the past several weeks. His family emigrated from Palestine when he was a toddler. He is 13 now and is trying to make his way in what is still the New World.

For some reason, he is absolutely fascinated with the antique store and all the amazing things herein. It's a rare day now that he doesn't jump off the bus and come in at least for a few minutes.

One day he was looking at an antique letter opener in one of the cases, and I asked him if he would like to have it. He didn't have enough money for it, so I asked him how much he did have. He said he had five dollars and 41 cents. (Boys that age, if they haven't grown up too fast, will often have this kind of exact accounting of their funds).

I told him I could sell it to him for six-fifty, plus tax.

Looking crestfallen he said, "Oh. I don't have six-fifty."

I said, "I bet you could earn the rest in a day. In fact, if you can earn it in a day, I'll give it to you for twenty percent off and pay the tax myself.

He thought about it for a minute, perhaps doing the math in his head, then said, "Yes!" and raced out the door trailing his jacket in his hand.

About two hours later just before I was closing up, he walked back in, flushed but beaming from ear to ear with his six-fifty. And he had found it all in loose change, just walking along the gutters in the neighborhood!

It really is amazing what the snow melt leaves on the streets around here.

So I gave him the letter opener for five-twenty and probably launched my young man on a career as a seeker-errant. Once you find out you can live out of the gutter you probably increase your freedom for such things three fold. Besides, he is already something of a seeker even at his young age.

Since the incident of the letter opener he stops by regularly and I've started to recommend books for him to read, and, when I can, loaning him books from the Temple library downstairs.

Most recently I gave him The Chosen and he found that very interesting.

Quote of the Day 4/27/08

Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason,” but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will to ward the light of being, and to receive the world as a gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” – indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail – and cannot be truly known if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything one must first love, and having known one must fully delight; only this “corresponds” to the trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so in its every detail revelatory of the light that grants it.

David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite

For Camilla, Wherever You Are

I don't know why some people love Spring.

Spring makes me feel like this:

Jamais Vu and The Chosen

Last week a group of Hasidic Jews came in to the AHT looking for a large dining room table.

I noticed one of them had a pipe tucked into his pocket, so struck up a conversation that ranged about in topic from good tobacconists in the Twin Cities, to favorite pipeweed, to the virtues of cherry wood pipes.

I opened up the humidor and smoking lounge for them. I even pulled out a special pouch of a perique I picked up from a wandering seeker a couple months back.

They bought a nice old mahogany table. Sturdy but well crafted and ornamented with some gold inlay. Nicely turned legs. A beautiful piece of furniture.

Whenever I come into contact with the Orthodox Jews in the Twin Cities, it always gets me thinking about Chaim Potok's The Chosen. This time I picked up the book again and read it over the last few days.

In the book, the protagonist, Reuven Malter, has an accident in which he nearly loses his eye. But everything turns out all right and the accident kicks off a remarkable turning point in his life.

One of my favorite chapters is the chapter describing Reuven's homecoming from the hospital.

He says of the hydrangea bush in the front yard of his two story brownstone, "I had never really paid any attention to it before. Now it seemed suddenly luminous and alive."

And of his apartment he says, "I had lived in it all my life, but I never really saw it until I went through it that Friday afternoon."

And finally: "Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life."

Reading the book this time, in the context of thinking about whether it was all over or not, Baby Blue, made me wonder if this sort of dawning, this sort of illumination, this sort of jamais vu is not in fact one necessary component to the restoration of whatever has gone awry.

Maybe there is hope yet - a hope borne not of political action or conscious cultural renewal but of seeing afresh.

And maybe, so long as "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" that sort of learning to see as if you have never seen before will be possible.

Quote of the Day 4/16/08

The one advantage I know to living in a dream is that in dreams you may never get more than a shadow of the things you really want, but you also never really get hurt either.

Antonio in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

Quote of the Day 4/12/08

An associate of mine once wrote a novel called Corridors of Power, which told the story of various people discussing how the world has become a corrupt and dangerous place and whether or not there are enough people with the integrity and decency necessary to keep the entire planet from descending into despair. I have not read this novel in several years because I participate in enough discussions on how the world has become a corrupt and dangerous place and whether or not there are enough people with the integrity and decency necessary to keep the entire planet from descending into despair without reading about it in my leisure time. in

Lemony Snicket's The Slippery Slope

A Find

Some antique dealers prefer to go only to major estate sales to find their product.

The volume you can aquire in a short amount of time at reasonable enough prices to profit is sufficient for them.

I, however, still like to go out to the little garage sales and yard sales in older communities, working class neighborhoods where portable goods have been passed down from generation to generation. First of all, the people are nicer. Secondly, with some time and elbow grease it really is still possible to find that hidden gem, the holy grail of antiquing, the item that is considered junk by the owner but by virtue of its scarcity or unrecognized craftsmanship is worth a great deal of money.

I found such a deal in the first garage sale of the season. I happened to be out in Delano on Saturday morning and noticed a little 'garage sale' sign sitting there in the snow. And sure enough a late middle aged couple (Jake and Wendy) was sitting in their garage in the middle of a snowstorm around a pot bellied stove! They were also serving hot chocolate.

I love rural Minnesota.

At any rate, they had a box of old jewlery marked $5.00 with a piece of masking tape. In amongst the tangles of cheap faux-pearl necklaces, guady rings, and braided gold was this:




It is a victorian era mosaic necklace worth around $4,000 on the current market.

Even though I guess this is now my "livelihood" I still felt bad taking it for only five dollars. I noted the address and the next day sent them a check for $200 telling them I had had it appraised and wanted to pass on the wealth. I didn't tell them what it was worth. It's best they not know.

Quote of the Day 3/22/08

The life that is untouched by authentic things recognizes that it has been captured in the mirror of the artistic construct, and thereby gains consciousness, albeit negative, of its distance from reality and of its illusory status.

Siegfried Kracauer in "The Hotel Lobby"

Spring - Keeping Things Together This Side of the End

Spring of my 35th year. Midway through our life's journey.

If I did decide it was all over, I think I would want to buy the finest aged ruby port I could find, take out a smooth $50 smooth cuban cigar and put these songs on the turntable in this order.

(If the video's not there, you can click on the linked song title.)

Bryan Adams, "Summer of '69"



Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"

Heart, "These Dreams"



Peter Cetera, "The Glory of Love"



Kenny Loggins, "Meet Me Half Way"



Phil Collins, "Against All Odds"



The Beatles, "Penny Lane"



The Rolling Stones, "Ruby Tuesday"



Bruce Springsteen, "My Hometown"

Billy Joel, "Scenes from an Italian Restaraunt"



The Beatles, "In My Life"



Bob Dylan, "Sara"



Dan Fogleberg, "The Last Nail"



Kansas, "Dust in the Wind"



Bob Dylan, "Mr Tambourine Man"



REM, "Man in the Moon"



The Beatles, "Long and Winding Road"



Eric Clapton, "Tears in Heaven"



The Beatles, "Let it Be"



John Lennon, "Imagine"



Louis Armstrong, "What a Wonderful World"



Bob Dylan, "When the Deal Goes Down"

Bob Dylan, "Dixie"



It's never as bad as we think because "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

Enjoy. Arise. Live.

Quote of the Day 3/11/08

During my years as an English teacher, students were always handing in stories that ended up with a sentence or two to the effect that the next morning they woke up and found out the whole thing had been just a dream. It is one of the easier ways, certainly, to bring a story to a close--it saves you from having to draw all those loose ends together, for one thing, and excuses you for any improbabilities you may have committed along the way, for another--and for reasons like that most of my colleagues regarded the practice with considerable disfavor and docked the grade accordingly. I, on the other hand, always tended to like such stories. In life as in fiction, it seems to me, the richer and more memorable moments inevitably do take on a dreamlike quality once you emerge from them. The birthday party, the walk through the park in the snow, seeing the old man with the umbrella knocked down to the tax-- did they happen really, or did you just dream that they happened?

Antonio in Frederick Beuchner's The Book of Bebb