Losing Battles

       "Well, that was different!"  This phrase was often said as a euphemism by the people in my childhood. It could mean something was bad, stupid, unhelpful, silly, etc. It kept the speaker from dangerous commitment either positive or negative.

    "Well, that was different" also sums up my reaction  to Eudora Welty's Losing Battles.  Others, far more erudite than I, have said "it's important literature. Reading it caused me to violate one of the rules I've adopted from Joanne...give it a chapter. A writer in newspaper's book section recently wrote that pursuing a book in a bookstore she reads page 17. If page 17 engages her she buys the book. I was well past page 17 and the first chapter before Losing Battles engaged me. Even then engagement was sometimes tenuous.

     The book, set in Mississippi during the 1930's, is the story largely of one family. Very little happens and it's mostly dialogue. Occasionally it is quite funny though it strains my credulity to the point it seems too ludicrous to seem plausible. Some English major reading this could offer a helpful corrective to this curmudgeonly report. Anyone???

      The quotation below come from Richard Rohr's daily meditation,

"Genuine mystics, like Buddhist bodhisattvas, don’t renounce the world for the sake of a private spiritual illumination. Rather, they use the enlightenment they’ve achieved to do something about the world’s ills.

The reason for this, says Soelle, is that mystics have been liberated from the three powers that typically hold humans in bondage: ego, possession, and violence. They recognize that the standardly accepted division between I and not-I is an artificial one born from overvaluing oneself and competing with others for possessions . . . [which] in turn sets the stage for the “onset of violence.”

      With the accumulation of possessions over the years I've recognized how our possessions own us. Linking self, possession and violence is a key insight. "Foxes have holes, birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." 

Takk for alt,

Al

Grade 5, last year.