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Tuesday, August 10, 2004


690 

That's Hymn #690 in the Hymnal 1982 - "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" and it is the hymn that has been on my mind of late. It seems to fit a number of circumstances in which I find myself and I am thankful to my friend Jack for pointing it out to me. I am wandering through the strange land that is CPE, as you faithful readers know, and am encoutering a number of struggles there. The pure emotion of it all is so hard to take in for me because if I take it in, it will bring me to my knees, which, granted, isn't always a bad place to be before the Almighty. But, sometimes it's an uncomfortable place to be. So, sometimes willingly but reluctantly, and sometimes unawares, I have let it catch up with me and it's been a powerful force. I am wading through this unfamiliar territory known as seminary, though by now it is beginning to be familiar and I imagine will be all to recognizable once classes start up again. I look around me, especially in the wintertime, and find myself in the north (which my brothers will hastily point out to me was my choice to come here), but it too is a strange land to me in many ways. So, 690 is a good hymn for me right now.

It is also a good hymn for me right now for another reason. I broke up with Myra this past Sunday and while it was sad, it was something I felt needed to be done for reasons of which it would not be appropriate to go into here.

In happier news, my fraternity brother Beal will be coming to visit on Friday. Much silliness, tomfoolery, ridiculosity, and general frivolity will ensue. I am looking forward to his visit greatly. He will arrive in the middle of the night, due to his insane driving habits, while I am on call. So, it will be funny; when I return from work at 9am on Saturday morning, he will be asleep in my living room. Strange.

In literary news, I have finished Andrei Makine's Requiem for a Lost Empire. It was an excellent story and I thank Jives for pointing it out to me! Told from the perspective of a modern day Russian army doctor, it is the tale of three generations of his family, tracing the history of Russia through their eyes mediated by two great wars and one cold one. The language and style of it remind me of a cross between Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (a book which I've been thinking a lot about lately) and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. A lyrical melancholy underlies the entirety of the novel and it left me feeling satisfied but longing, exactly as the word in the title suggests. For my next novel, I have picked up a book I've long wanted to read but have been waiting for the right mood to strike. It seems appropriate after Makine's work, or at least sticking with a general theme: Patrick Smith's A Land Remembered. Written with a similar device of multi-generational storytelling, it is a saga of Florida as it was, and, in some places, is still. Spanning three generations as well, it seeks to impart something of the natural beauty of the land, its people, and its times. From the little that I've read so far, it is doing a superb job of making me homesick, so that means it's pretty good. Names that once were only a part of Order of the Arrow productions appear as colorful characters and places now populated by retirement centers and golf courses are described as being havens of nature, last bastions of wild creation. It also does a nice job of describing how Florida was indeed, despite popular belief, deeply touched by the Civil War and how we native "crackers" (in the best sense of the word) are indeed Southerners. I look forward to this book, as only 47 pages have now passed me by.

-R

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