Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich, 1809

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— 

Little we see in Nature that is ours; 

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 

The winds that will be howling at all hours, 

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; 

For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be 

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. 

- William Wordsworth, 1802

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

- The Great Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

I have thought for some years that the worst day for traffic is Thursday...

Image: Christoforou, C. (2014). Cartoon traffic jam. [illustration]. Retrieved from http://conversation.which.co.uk/transport-travel/live-traffic-sat-nav-worth-paying-for/

I should comment on something. One of the most important concepts in the series is the number 42. You just have to accept that right off. When I started reading the series again a few days ago, I went to pick out a bookmark. And. Seemingly "at random" and without thinking about it at all, I selected a bookmark from the movie "42" about Jackie Robinson. I did not even notice for a couple of days.

This, if you know about it, suits the books perfectly.

"How would you react if I said that I'm not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelguse?"

"I don't know...Why, do you think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say?"

- The Great Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

Image of Betelguse

I'm going to attempt to post on one of my favorite collections of books. It's a big job - it's a big set of books. The complete collection of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There are only two authors I can read over and over without any ill effects. One is Nick Hornby. The other is Douglas Adams. I can see that they are similar in certain ways. Yet nothing beats the droll poetry of Adams, the pure Englishness, and the visionary quality of his work. No TV or movie version does it justice, though the movie with Sam Rockwell was okay. The TV version, even though it was British, and even though Adams helped with it, just did not do it for me. Which just goes to show that we all come to a story differently.

So to start:

This planet has-or rather had-a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

- The Great Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,  1979

Cowardly Lion quips:

"It's a mystery," replied the Lion. "I suppose I was born that way. All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave..."

"I know it," returned the Lion, wiping a tear from his eye with the tip of his tail; "it is my great sorrow, and makes my life very unhappy. But whenever there is danger my heart begins to beat fast."

"You will be very welcome," answered Dorothy, "for you will help to keep away the other wild beasts. It seems to me they must be more cowardly than you are if they allow you to scare them so easily."

You don't really understand without the books how very brave the lion is, and how frank Dorothy is.

"Yes," answered the tin man; "I did. I've been groaning for more than a year, and no one has ever heard me before or come to help me."

I had forgotten, until a recent re-reading, how many heads the tin man chops off.

Scarecrow gems:

"My life has been so short that I really know nothing whatever. I was only made day before yesterday. What happened in the world before that time is all unknown to me."

"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."

"'Certainly; that is why I know it,' returned the Scarecrow. 'If it required brains to figure it out, I never should have said it.'"

The Scarecrow is wonderfully, blithely sarcastic.

"Dorothy did not know what to say to this, for all the people seemed to think her a witch, and she knew very well she was only an ordinary little girl who had come by the chance of a cyclone into a strange land."

Art by Alexis Vivallo

"The Witch gave Dorothy a friendly little nod, whirled around on her left heel three times, and straightway disappeared, much to the surprise of little Toto, who barked after her loudly enough when she had gone, because he had been afraid even to growl while she stood by.

But Dorothy, knowing her to be a witch, had expected her to disappear in just that way, and was not surprised in the least."

By the way, in the book, the shoes are silver, not red.

I thought that I would like to do a selection of passages from the Wizard of Oz. Perhaps it is an odd idea, yet I feel that certain sections, while not necessarily "quote-worthy", call to mind for me my memories of the story - not the movie, but reading the original series as a child. I am realizing more and more how profoundly the series as a whole impacted my imagination. In some ways I still see emerald vistas and cloud stairways, sawhorses and patchwork girls.

"All the same," said the Scarecrow, "I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one."

"I shall take the heart," returned the Tin Woodman; "for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world."

~ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, originally published in  1900

But what is worship? To do the will of God. That is worship. And what is the will of God? To do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me. That is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his. Ergo, I must turn idolator.

- Melville, Moby Dick

Supplication, 2005, by J Swofford

"I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy." 

~ Ishmael, Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851

A good man can be honest in any type of skin. - Melville, Moby Dick

"The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable affliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us." ~ Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise
Masaccio, 1425

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

~  Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Great Whale

Hugest of living creatures, in the deep

Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims

And seems a moving land; and at his gills

Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.

Milton's Paradise Lost as cited in Melville's Moby Dick