Thursday musings

Well, I've been sick again. The flu, with a 104+ fever, and I wouldn't recommend this to ANYONE. Take your vitamins. Get your flu shot. Do what your mother tells you to. You want to avoid this flu. I am deeply grateful my family hasn't gotten it.

Some things I have managed to read in my fevered state:

Books and Culture January/February 2006
Sleep Therapy
In search of a counterculture for the common good.
by Lauren Winner

"According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average adult sleeps six hours and 58 minutes per night during the work week. One hundred years ago - before Mr. Edison's marvelous invention - people slept about nine hours a night....Now we are a nation of the chronically sleep-deprived."

"Last year the Washington Post reported that naptime is increasingly 'a luxury that 4-year-olds no longer can afford.' Many Washington-area schools are eliminating naps from the kindergarten curriculum, so that 45 more minutes can be devoted to instruction."

"Sleep more: this may seem a curious answer to the question of what Christians can do for the common good. Surely one could come up with something more other-directed, more sacrificial, less self-serving."

"We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent. For much of Western history, the poets celebrated sleep as a welcome memento mori, a reminder that one day we will die...Is it any surprise that in a society where we try to deny our mortality in countless ways, we also deny our need to sleep?"

The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey

"I've said something pleasant to every member of my family, almost, so now I can ignore them for a while in favor of literature. And it is Leo Tolstoy who is giving me the eye. No, not War and Peace. I'm not that brave this early. But I do think I have enough courage for Anna Karenina.

Great books rarely make their way into daily conversation (or at least my daily conversation), but I remember my father saying once that he disagreed with the first sentence of Anna Karenina. Unlike Tolstoy, Dad thinks all unhappy families are alike, and every happy family is happy in its own way. I hate to disagree with Tolstoy so early in our relationship, and yet I do trust Dad. But to put them both in their place, I can't imagine finding a family that could manage to be always happy or always unhappy, hard though they may try."

Thanks (yes, again) to M-mv for recommending this gem. The adventures of Hailey's reading and thinking are well-written, funny, and were most excellent company when all I could do was rest.

And, when reading becomes too much work (those books can get heavy to hold, let alone the thinking) I turned to the little box on the shelf to keep me company. A favorite choice:



Shackleton with Kenneth Branagh. Seeing men trying to survive in the Antarctic helps put sickness in a cozy bed in its place. I no longer felt cold, and I was confident that, should I ask, a bowl of chicken soup would head up the stairs. That's nothing to take for granted.

Give me a few more days and I will be back to my fully-functioning self. Thanks for your emails. When I get sick for days-on-end, my thoughts can turn terribly gloomy. It's very nice to be remembered.