Liberal Arts Blog — Alice Munro (1931–2024) Canadian Short Story Writer, Winner Of Nobel Prize In Literature In 2013
Liberal Arts Blog — Tuesday is the Joy of Literature, Language, Religion, and Culture Day
Today’s Topic: Alice Munro (1931–2024) Canadian short story writer, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013
Are you an Alice Munro fan? I had not heard of her until this week. But her death made the front page of the New York Times and I decided to poke around and see if she wrote any sentences or paragraphs worth remembering. I was not disappointed. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE CONSTANT HAPPINESS, KISSES, MESS AROUND THE HOUSE (below Alice age 2 or 3 in home in Wingham, Ontario)
1. “The constant happiness is curiosity.”
2. “The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
3. “There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around the house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.”
NB: “In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”
THE MEANNESS IN PEOPLE’S SOULS, MEN AND WOMEN, GRIEF
1. “Never underestimate the meanness in people’s souls…Even when they are being kind…especially when they’re being kind.”
2. “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind….When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
3. “Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.”
NB: “She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood — that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.”
A STORY IS NOT A ROAD — IT’S MORE LIKE A HOUSE
1. “A story is not like a road to follow..it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”
2. “And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.”
3. “You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time.”
NB: “It also has a sturdy sense of itself being builtr out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
FOOTNOTE — her father was a farmer, her mother a school teacher (below Megan Follows as Anne of Green Gables)
1. “There was a lot of killing going on, when I come to think of it. The horses had to be turned into meat and the fur-bearing animals culled every fall to leave just the breeders.”
2. “But I was used to this and could easily ignore it, constructing for myself a scene that was purified to resemble something out of the books I liked, such as Anne of Green Gables” or “Part of Silver Bush.”
3. “I had the help of the elm trees, which hung over the pasture and the shining river, and the surprise of a spring that came out of the bank above the pasture providing water for the doomed horses and the cow and also for me, out of a tin mug I had found.”
NB: “There was always fresh manure around, but I ignored it, as Anne must have done at Green Gables.”
Alice Munro Quotes (Author of Dear Life)
Dear Life: Alice Munro Remembers Her Childhood Home
Anne of Green Gables — Wikipedia
Lucy Maud Montgomery — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY INTO FOURTEEN BOOK-LENGTH PDFS:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to words, language, literature, religion, culture.
Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to Words, Language, Literature (eg. quotes, poetry, vocabulary) that you have not yet shared.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to Byour heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
