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Thanks and Praise: a Narration from Volume Two of Ourselves

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

Most of us who have an idea of God offer thanksgiving to Him occasionally, whether when our blessings are brought unusually to our notice or when a prayer—for an opportunity, for a success, for the recovery of a loved one—is answered. But these thanksgivings can be few and far between; the Lord has told us through Scripture that He is honored by our thanksgiving, and we ought to make thanksgiving often. These frequent thanksgivings should be habitual in two ways—that we often have voluntary-involuntary liftings of the soul toward God in thanksgiving, and that at regular intervals we remember what we are thankful to Him for. We should remember that we all have many, many things to be thankful for: the gift of life and family, the gladness of work, whatever amount of health the Lord has given us, the pleasantness of our clothing. To go outside, even when we are in the city, should always be a joy to us, and we should thank God for it.

Praise, too, we should often offer to God—He has told us that He is pleased and honored by our praise, as the human artisan is honored and pleased by judicious praise of his work. The works of God for which we may offer praise are always before us, from the trees outside my window to the iPad I am writing this narration on—because God designed the world in which the human artisans could discover, the way of making the device. The wonders that the scientists show us of the universe are wonders by seeing which we can see more the wonders that God has wrought; and we should offer Him praise for them.

A Saturday Evening Flood

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

Now all we need are Fire and Earthquake: yesterday evening the washer leaked all through the mudroom and out into the entry and around to the game table, making for Flood, and we have already had Plague: perhaps we can get a complete collection this month. “The May of the Cataclysms.” Mom says she hopes not. Well, still, “sluttishness may come hereafter…”

However that may be, we got to have an adventure this evening—our drawing lesson was adjourned, without formality, by wordless mutual consent, when Hannah pointed out the puddle creeping around the corner. Then we got to spend a while cleaning it up: moving a table and a cabinet, setting things out to dry, laying towels down so we could traverse the flooded rooms, and getting over half a gallon of water off the mudroom floor by sponge and wetted-and-wrung-out towel.‘If I were Pollyanna,’ I said, ‘I’d say that at least the floor was getting well cleaned.’ ‘I was thinking about the same thing,’ Mom said, though she didn’t detail if that included Pollyanna. A good deal of gunk got cleaned out of corners, and the whole mudroom floor got meticulously hand-sponged; none o’ yer in-and-out speed-mopping jobs. The water in the tubs which we wrung sponges and towels into was of the color that water used to become when my siblings and I were in outdoor play-kitchens and wanted to make hot chocolate—though I’ll guess that we tried to keep bits of twig and bark out of our beverages.

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Sunset State Beach, 5/7/18

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ 6 Comments

From our campsite to the sea there are two dunes. The first is high, dirt mixed into its sand, covered in brush and wildflowers: yellow and blue and white lupins, orange-hearted, yellow-edged California poppies, ice-plant like pink sea anemones, blue on a bush reminiscent of rosemary, majestic deep-red thistles, light purple on a low, spreading plant growing at the dune’s seaward base. The second dune, much smaller and gentler, is all of sand, fewer plants growing there, but the lavender-flowered plant is happy. So is one with succulent-like leaves and blooms like small, flat, yellow poppies. They hug the sand closely, but are cheerily bright.

As we come up to the top of each dune, all we can see over its edge is sky and clouds and layered, cris-crossing contrails. It is like walking up to the edge of the world. Then we come up over the sandy crest, and see another blue, a darker one, in the trail’s sand-floored hollow between the bush-topped hillocks covering the dune. A few steps higher, and the edge between the sand and the blue is seamed with white. A little higher still, and there is a broad band of brown between the sea and us. The sea: we can see the real edge of the world now, inasmuch as it has an edge.

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Geologic Time on the Human Armspan

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

Yes, I’ll admit it. I have trouble visualizing geologic amounts of time. Then again, you probably do too. I doubt that there are many people for whom the span of time “a hundred and thirty-five million years” makes immediate, intuitive, graspable sense. This still doesn’t make much sense for me… but at least now I have an idea of “Paleozoic,” of “Mesozoic,” of “Cenozoic,” relative to the age of the earth, via a visualization from Basin and Range, by John McPhee. This is a school read, so I copied the helpful concept into my science notebook, then figured that I’d share it on here!

Haley’s Latest Fan: A Short Story

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

Kyim breathed deeply and stared at his bedroom wall. Then he stretched his stiff neck, rolled onto his side, and read the acknowledgements and the author bio. He almost always did. That way he could stay inside the book for as long as possible, even if he wasn’t reading about the characters anymore. At last he had to close the book. It was a physical one, paper and covers and ink. Kyim liked a book he could hold. This book was Haley Ferrier’s Ichthus: a Planet. He thought for a moment. Yes, he had read it five times now. Each time he wanted it not to end. A good book, he thought, should be like that: at the end you should feel both that it had to end there and that you wanted it to go on and on forever. Each time, too, he wondered about the second-last acknowledgement: To Kyim, who showed me all about the Leaf. Who was this mysterious person with his name? And how had this Kyim of hundreds of years before known how to describe a piece of modern technology so perfectly, even to the name? In her teen journals, Ferrier occasionally mentioned when she’d been alone for afternoons, even when she was sixteen, his own age. If only…

Kyim was getting the vacuum cleaner out when he realized: of course he could! He followed the silent little machine around, lifting chairs out of the way for it, in a daze. It would take some doing, of course. It wasn’t easy to secretly finagle a trip into the past, even when your dad did work in ACTeR, and that was short for Authorized Cross-Temporal Researches. But if Cora could do it, he could. And his sister had used it to go to some twentieth century Olympics or other!

Whoever wanted to go to the Olympics?

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Choosing Loves in The Merchant of Venice

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

“Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire,” the gold casket says. “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves,” says the silver casket. “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he has,” says the lead casket. (II.VII, 5,7,9) The portrait of Portia, a beautiful and wealthy young noblewoman, lies in one of these caskets; if a suitor picks that casket, he weds her, but if he choose another, he must forswear marriage forever. Besides finding Portia’s husband, the caskets illustrate different ways – gilded but false, or true as a plumbed line – of looking at love.

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The Masks of Richard III

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

Not all great men are good men: and as portrayed by Shakespeare in the play which bears his name, Richard III illustrates this excellently. In his first speech, laying out the setting of the play, Richard declares his intention “to prove a villain” and calls himself “subtle, false, and treacherous” (I.I, 30; 37). But this is only for the audience: when he interacts with the other characters, Richard wears a mask of plainness, gentleness, and honest loyalty—as he says, “I … seem a saint when most I play the devil.” (I.II, 337). He can lie, deceive, and murder his way into near-absolute power without blinking an eye except to shed hypocritical tears. He is skillfull and poised, walking, when he needs to, a knife’s edge such as that he dares when he bids Anne tell him to kill himself. By his own and the world’s standards, he is very successful; enough, I think, that he can be termed a great, if not a verily great, man.

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The Dragons of Building: A Sonnet

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ 1 Comment
It’s not where I thought to write this sonnet, but don’t you just see the dragons in this view taken from near my home out across the Central Valley, and even to the Coastal Range?

The Dragons of Building

This land of dragons lies asleep, and we
Who walk it do not see on what we tread
Until we meet a hillside glade and see
The ridge’s other, serpent, shape lie spread.
They sleep. To see this land, you would not guess
The battles they have fought, the mountains made
And kingdoms crushed. Their mortal combat is
More great, strong, slow, than man can comprehend.
To us, they sleep. Or sleep uneasily;
We feel the shield-wall’s jar sometimes, catch how
Beneath our feet they war on steadily
With wing and claw of stone that ages grow.
The dragons of this land are huge and strong,
Seen but when science matches eye with song.

The Good, the Bad, and the Unwise in King Lear

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

After following Henry V with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, we read King Lear in my class through Roman Roads Media. I was assigned a “reading response” to each of these—I’ve posted the one about Henry V. The guideline about length is to make our responses 400-500 words long, and I had a hard time bringing my piece about the sonnets up to that. Once I’d found my subject(s) about King Lear, though, I had the opposite problem… I had to keep pruning comments and quotes I wanted to include, and if you subtract the words counted for line citations and count words typed like “[S]erve” as one word, this comes to exactly 500 words!

Besides the Fool, whose task is providing pithy commentary, there are three types of significant characters in King Lear: the all-out good, such as Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar; the all-out evil, such as Edmund, Goneril, and Regan; and those who intend good but do not properly use authority and/or discernment – Lear, Albany, and Gloucester.

You cannot get rid of Cordelia, Kent, or Edgar, no matter how hard you try. Disown them. Dismiss them. Put bounties on their heads. They’re coming back. These characters are the Christ-figures in the play, people who come back to those whom they love, even after being rejected, as God keeps coming back to us. “[S]erve where thou dost stand condemn’d,” Kent tells himself, mentioning “thy master, whom thou lov’st.” (I.IV, 5,6)

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Henry V, Changing Wars, and Powerful Words

~ Emma Vanderpol ~ Leave a comment

Roman Roads Media offers several history/literature courses, and right now I’m enrolled in one focusing on Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets, and Milton. A recent assignment was to read Shakespeare’s Henry V and write a response to it. Here—somewhat edited—is what I came out with.

Henry V opens with English characters discussing whether or not to launch a campaign against France. The bishops at court have financial reasons for wanting the campaign pursued, while King Henry is more interested in whether he may “with right and conscience” (Act I, Scene II, line 96) claim the crown of France. I am not, however, going to only cover what they did discuss, but what, to my surprise, they did not discuss—whether it was morally acceptable for them to invade France!

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