Mental Beauty

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
Clematis at the Backdoor ~ Similar to Passion Flower*

According to Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers, this flower symbolizes Mental Beauty
[other sources say, Artifice, Ingenuity]
Wreath by Kate Greenaway

"If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. . . .

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."from Letter Four: 16 July 1903
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

I also like this alternate translation from Stephen Mitchell:

"Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer."
As I wrote a few years back, my inclination to blog is fueled by "those moments when Life offers its own theme to a strand of apparently accidental events, and everything hangs together for a moment in such an uncanny way that you'd swear it was all planned out somehow!" The latest thrilling trail of irresistible coincidence that I just had to follow concerns the above quotation by Rilke.

I guess the first link in the conversation was my recent post on cursive writing and the meaning of life (scroll down or click) -- more on that later.

The next day, my insightful neighbor, author Patricia Henley posted the first line of the Rilke passage on facebook: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . ." I loved it, liked it, shared it, and googled it to learn more about the source, context, etc. I discovered that it was part of beautiful excerpt from Rilke's well loved (but new to me) book of writing advice Letters to a Young Poet (to read online). I stored the longer quotation in my saved file of future blog - post material.

The following day, concerning the Fortnightly post, "Cursive," my friend Meg wrote: "Love this entry, Kitti! But I still root for the art of cursive, practicing it in moments of musing -- not expecting any answers, knowing that any flourish is a momentary enjoyment, a ruse that distracts from the clutter of daily life."

I wrote back to Meg right away to tell her that her comment reminded me of my newfound Rilke quotation, sending her the opening line that Patricia had shared with me.

Meg replied: "That quote is part of a larger passage that Rich and I had read at our wedding. Another part of it: 'And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.' "

What a beautiful and unique reading for a wedding -- and congratulations to Meg and Rich for their vision and passion! At that point, I had to let Meg know that she had so inspired me that I would surely be posting the longer version on my blog very soon, along with her comments.

Shortly after that my brilliant literary friend Kathleen O'Gorman wrote to share another link in the chain: "Kitti, Apropos of the Rilke quote (which I adore), if you haven't read Carole Maso's novel, AVA, I recommend it with the greatest of enthusiasm. It incorporates that quote and many others in a breathtakingly beautiful evocation of the texture of a life."

Well, who could resist such a heartfelt recommendation; and it was true that I had been casting about for something rich to read. So I went straight to amazon and ordered Rilke's Letters and Maso's AVA. I look forward to reporting my impressions very soon on Kitti's Book List (see also "Last Fruits"). The ingenious web of connection and coincidence has once again taken of a vibrant life of it's own.

Now some may call that Artifice, but I call it Mental Beauty.

*E - card from jacquielawson.com
~ click on picture below to enlarge
for reading more about the Passion Flower ~

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, September 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Girl at Writing Table
by Kate Greenaway (1846 - 1901)
English children's book illustrator

***************

P.S. June 2026
Thanks to my friend Eve:

"Love You Can't Imagine"

WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSSurreal Valentine by William Rowe

“To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
~ Emily Dickinson ~

*******************
The following long beautiful passage has already appeared on both my book blog and my daily blog, yet it's only right that I include it again, here and now ~ on Valentine's Day! ~ since the title of this post is borrowed from Henley's short story: "Love You Can't Imagine." Even if you have read it before, it is well worth reading one more time:

"Sandra's love for Kelly is not the sort you hear about in songs on the jukebox. It's not desperate or crazy. They met three years ago and it was one year before they made love. Kelly said he wanted to get to know her first and Sandra thought that was a novel idea. When she remembers that year going by, she imagines ranging in the high country on a long hike, when it's tough-going at first and you don't know what to expect. Maybe you slip and fall when the trail crosses a creek bed, maybe the first lake is small, disappointing, but you push yourself, you glory in the little things along the way, the shooting stars and glacier lilies, the marmot whistling, and before long, just as you are simply traveling, putting one boot in front of the other, for the bliss of it, you come upon grand peaks and a string of alpine lakes so rare and peaceful that you imagine no one else has ever been there before you. It's where you belong. That's what being with Kelly is like. Easy, once you reach cruising altitude. Paradise, kind of. And ordinary. Common pleasures renew them. Razzing one another; watching a video in their bathrobes; dividing a foxglove in the fall; lying awake in one another's arms at midnight, waiting for Desiree [Sandra's teenage daughter] to come in from some breakneck double date. Love you can't imagine when you're young, when you think that love is you winning him over, a treadmill of pursuit and chicanery."

from the story "Love You Can't Imagine"
in Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories
by Patricia Henley
Twenty years have passed since my first reading of "Love You Can't Imagine," and in that time I have collected a number of poems and passages that capture for me the concept of a "love you can't imagine."

First of all, these quaint lines from Doctor Zhivago describe a simple quest for companionship and sustenance, no frills, no chicanery:

Now my ideal is the housewife
My greatest wish, a quiet life
And a big bowl of cabbage soup

by Boris Pasternak
Incredibly straightforward, yet undeniably romantic, that "big bowl of cabbage soup," no matter how homely, is the perfect metaphor for "love you can't imagine." The same metaphor appears in this next tenderly crafted poem about making soup as an act of love. Like Sandra and Kelly, this couple is renewed by the ordinary, common pleasures -- "day after day." Their love is deep, soft, and wise, despite the somewhat incongruous reference to "decay." Like William Blake's contraries of Innocence and Experience or Heaven and Hell, Baker gives us decay and wisdom; weeping and song:

The Couple
Day after day their deep love softly decays.
This makes them wise. It makes them want to sing.
Sometimes, over cups in the kitchen or stirring
a warm soup in the dark, they feel such tenderness
as to turn quietly weeping for each other's arms.
Weeping. Song. They are so much alike after all.

in After the Reunion: Poems
by David Baker
Reading Couple by Renoir
Novelist Kathryn Harrison explores in more detail the sacred connection between decay and a love that is strong enough to "contemplate death":

" . . . the point Shakespeare makes in one after another love sonnet is that a rose can only smell so achingly sweet to those who know that someday they will die to that smell, to it and to every other joy and sorrow. . . . Marriage is made, from the start, between two people who are willing to contemplate death together--to have and to hold, until death do them part. Such contemplation is possible only for those who understand and embrace the boundaries of a life, both temporal and existential."
from the article "Connubial Abyss"
by Kathryn Harrrison
Andre Dubus explores the idea of this connection even further in this long and sadly tender passage about sacraments and sustenance:

" . . . one of my favorite scenes in the movie [Bergman's The Seventh Seal] is the knight sitting on the earth with the young couple and their child, and the woman offers him a bowl of berries; he reaches out with both hands and receives the bowl from her, and eats; and the scene is invested with his awareness that his time is confused and lonely and fearful and short, but for these moments, with these people, with this gift of food, he has been given an eternal touch: eternal because, although death will destroy him, it cannot obliterate the act between him and the woman. She has given him the food. He has taken it. In the face of time, the act is completed. Death cannot touch it now, can only finally stop the hearts that were united in it.

Apple Blossoms by John Everett Millais
"Yet still I believe in love's possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. . . . I take our plates; spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

"As lovers we must have these sacraments, these actions which restore our focus, and therefore ourselves. For our lives are hurried and much too distracted . . . We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn't need words, and act which dramatizes for us what we are together. The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved. They are all parts of that loveliest of all sacraments between man and woman, that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: we are, we are, we are . . . "

from the essay "On Charon's Wharf," in Broken Vessels
by Andre Dubus
Girl Reading by Picasso
And finally, from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, the endearing image of reading in bed. What better way to end the day, after preparing and sharing a big bowl of cabbage soup:

"Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?"
[See my book blog for more Calvino]

~ HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! ~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com