Belated and partial Wednesday reading meme

[larryhammer]

Late, because between a mostly crashed old computer, building up a new one, and week's worth of stomach glurge, well, wasn't happening on time. Not that I had much to report beyond a large helping of Yuletide. To wit, one thing:

For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, W.H. Auden - This is not exactly an annual reread, but I pick it up more years than not. Probably my favorite of his longer works (and it's competing with The Sea and the Mirror and "Letter to Lord Byron"). In the initial "Advent" section, the narrator begins:

If, on account of the political situation,
There are quite a number of homes without roofs, and men
Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor asleep,
If all sailings have been cancelled till further notice,
If it's unwise now to say much in letters, and if,
Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,
The two sexes are at present the weak and the strong,
That is not at all unusual for this time of year.
If that were all we should know how to manage. Flood, fire,
The desiccation of grasslands, restraint of princes,
Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,
These after all are our familiar tribulations,
And we have been through them all before, many, many times.

And of course the narrator's final section, on the return to daily life in "the time being" after an approach to revelation, just nails it. Recommended if the above excerpts appeal and you have any stomach for existential Christianity. For those without a text, here's are two readings.

I was going to make the rest of the post a last large helping of Yuletide recs, but I haven't yet recovered the list. So for that, anon.

Comments

[mount-oregano.livejournal.com]

"...In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,"

I remember we used the Christmas Oratorio as a reading at church on a morning when my car engine caught fire as I was parking it when I arrived. (Leaking gas line, not a huge disaster, but still pretty scary.) Machines to be kept in repair, indeed. In a perverse way, I found the poem, with a specific mention of my immediate predicament to be comforting.

[larryhammer]

Yes, that. Exactly.

(Caught fire? EEP!)

---L.