Miller's Modesty

He remembered that a cynical compatriot had once told him that American women - the pretty ones, and this gave a largeness to the axiom - were at once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness.

From Henry James' Daisy Miller this caption takes the American beauty/brat and gives her a slap across the face. Except for the one that fills such a characteristic (or label) is usually unaware that she deserves such a characteristic (or label). Funny how that works. There are some women who are unconscious of their beauty, a fragile sort of innocence. For example, my fiance is beautiful. In my eyes she is the most beautiful person in the world. In her eyes, she is not very beautiful at all. She spends too much time in comparisons of what others look like and who she might be if she looked different. Nothing I can do will really change that. It is part of her insecurity. I say many things, compliments and praises of her beauty are on my mind all the time and fall from my lips just as frequently. Still she won't believe me. Again, it's her insecurity. Nevertheless, she is - in her eyes - unconscious. Then there are others. There are those who are unconscious of their brattiness. They might be aware (or conscious) of their beauty, hence the brattiness. But they will be unaware of what kind of person they are. They will be aware of their beautiful "endowment" but not of their "exacting" behaviour or their lack of "indebtedness" (that is, ungratefulness).

Probably the best medium between a bratty beauty and an insecure beauty is the beauty that is indeed conscious but modest in their consciousness. A modest awareness and a modest appearance of that beauty.

My Soul's Courage

Faith is the soul's courage in its pursuit of the invisible.

That was a friend's Facebook status this morning. It was also exactly what I needed. Last night my fiance an I went shopping for Mother's Day presents. My card was rejected 3 times at Bath and Body Works. When I went to a nearby ATM it said I had some 250 dollars in my account but then when I tried to draw 20 it said I was overdrawing. Apparently my balance was a negative 250 dollars. Not cool.

My last paycheck (which I hadn't cashed) was for approximately 250 dollars. It was a smaller paycheck than usual because of a few days I had to miss due to school or missions activities. That paycheck was going to be my means of survival for the upcoming couple of weeks. The upcoming weeks are filled with craziness. Utter insanity. After my graduation on Friday I am completely destitute. I have a week of unconfirmed May school and then a summer full of insecurities. Not only do I not have a secure place to live, I don't have a job either. That paycheck was going to be my lifeline. Now it has to go to paying off a huge bank mistake.

After fuming (and terrifying my fiance) we went for a walk in the park. She let me vent. She also shut me up. I was acting like a jerk. I was full of fear and anger. I felt like kicking myself. I felt like crying. She was such an encouragement. She let me vent. She rebuked me. She prayed for me. She encouraged me. She held me. She loved me.

With someone like her in my life I know God will care for me. I know that He will care for us. My soul has faith in Him, and faith is my soul's courage as I pursue the invisible - both now in the summer and after, once we are married.

Books

Billy Collins is a personal favourite of mine. He was Poet Laureate for the US during, I believe, the early 2000's. One of the poems I love of his is the one titled Books. In this poem he tells of a library "humming" late at night and each book "together forming a low, gigantic chord of language."

Collins develops different scenarios - childhood reading, college reading, etc. But towards the end, the final stanza, he writes:

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

He does keep going, but these are the lines that interest me most. Do we read ourselves away from ourselves in search of more light? Is this a form of escapism? Is escapism a bad thing? I do think we read ourselves (the universal man) in literature and yet are able to lose ourselves in the piece, immersing ourselves in it until we lose ourselves. I also think we read in light because it is nigh impossible to read in darkness, but I also think we read to find light. That light can be an analogy for hope or some other virtue, but it is nevertheless true. We are searching for some sense of light. Thus being able to see truth. The truth that is found in our escapism of happily ended fables or the truth of violent tragedies of fiction or fact. Either way we find truth, by escaping into a book. And that is what keeps us going, that is the trail of crumbs we follow across and on to the next page.