![]() ![]() This slim volume is a transcript of Lewis’s journal after the death of his wife, Helen Joy Davidman, and in its pages Lewis tracks the process of his own mourning: its repetitions and its strange boredoms, its agonizing small moments. One of the best literary examinations of grief that I know of is C.S. But as a nation, America has been afforded little space to stop and feel the grief that comes with the tragedy of this moment in history. And even if you don’t personally know anyone who died, you still have to reckon with the loss of the world that used to exist. More than half a million Americans are dead. In this terrible pandemic year, it has been oddly difficult to find ways to talk about the onslaught of bitter and unrelenting grief. ![]()
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![]() Then Eloise gets up to all her tricks again before she joins Nanny as the latter plays 'We Three Kings of Orient Are' on the piano Eloise accompanies her by banging a spoon on a silver dish. They put up the Christmas tree in their suite and fill it with 'Ornaments big and bright and all of these sparkling icicles and twirling balls of white'. ![]() Blow music of trinkles and drinkles of glass there's Christmas everywhere.'Ī plan of The Plaza charts Eloise's progress through it as she runs, leaps, skibbles, zapps and zimbers around while Nanny tries to organise the Christmas decorations. Cut from this somewhat idyllic scene to Eloise dashing around the place doing a variety of tricks and singing a silly song that goes something like 'Fa la la la fa la la lolly tingledy here and there. The story begins quite promisingly on Christmas Eve with a blizzard raging outside and Eloise lounging in front of a blazing log fire with her Nanny, Skipperdee her turtle and Weenie her dog at The Plaza. As Hilary Knight's illustrations are excellent that would be unfair although Kay Thompson's text is at times rather wishy-washy and banal and at other times quite amusing. It could be said that 'Eloise at Christmastime' falls between two stools but that would perhaps be being a little too unkind for the literal meaning of the phrase usually implies that the object fails to fit into either of two categories. ![]() ![]() ![]() His attraction to airpower first emerged in 1915, when he worked in British army intelligence in Cairo. Yet Lawrence always was bound up with military aviation. The public knows him as an Englishman in flowing white robes and riding a camel, leading sweeping attacks across the desert. Lawrence’s involvement in airpower long preceded his RAF tours. One of recent history’s most charismatic figures, laboring in anonymity, made important contributions to Britain’s airpower and did so from the lowly enlisted ranks. Yet Lawrence’s life after Arabia is remarkable, too. Most of Lawrence’s biographers give limited attention to this period and focus on the earlier exploits of the young, glamorous, Oxford-educated officer as he led Bedouin tribesmen against the Ottoman Empire in 1916-1918. ![]() ![]() But at their core they have the same sort of mental energy, the same sort of world view, and strike me as different versions of the same person having chosen, or become trapped in, different life paths. ![]() Sure, their characters want different things, hold to different morale codes, are seduced by different vices. I've noticed in some authors a tendency toward sameness in their characters. Nor are they really as they believe themselves to be, either. Reading it I was reminded again and again of the film Roshomon, where changing points of view give us completely different views of characters and no one is exactly as their observers believe them to be. I would say it has the most remarkably well-developed cast of characters I can remember from a novel, and a devilishly intricate plot. Heart of Darkness certainly struck me that way. ![]() Much of Conrad's other work seems to rely heavily on description, with plot and characterization taking a back seat to the unfolding panorama of the world he sees. ![]() |