Hamnet

This late 2025 release, based on Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel of the same title, uses a few known facts about the life of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (Anne) Hathaway as the foundation for this moving historical drama.

The movie set, costumes, and lighting, masterfully convey the raw, gritty realities of life in the 16th century.  The performances are highly effective with a particularly poignant portrayal by Jessie Buckley as Agnes (she received multiple well-deserved awards, including Oscar for Best Actress).  The liberties taken to fill the gaps around the few known facts, are artfully woven to create a believable and compelling vignette.

A pervasive sense of weight hangs over the entire movie, making it impossible not to be drawn into the family's struggles and sorrows.  Unless you have ice in your veins, expect to feel...a lot...maybe even like you're drowning in their grief.  And don't be at all surprised if you shed a few tears of your own.  

For me, the most poignant, felt reality is how very difficult it can be to access one another in our grief.  Grief is a lonely, isolating, and very personal experience.  In this story, that connection finally comes for the couple through a performance of Hamlet which allows Agnes to recognize for the first time that her husband's grief - though experienced differently - matches her own.

Hamnet is a beautifully crafted film that I highly recommend.

Buechner's Magic Kingdom

The Eyes of the Heart is the fourth and final in a series of memoirs by Frederick Buechner in which I was strung along on an unexpectedly tumultuous journey through moments of laughter, tears, discomfort, uncertainty, and resonance.   

In this book, Buechner's library - charmingly known as the Magic Kingdom - is full of books (of course), curated objects, and mementos, which serve as the springboard for his actual and imaginary conversations with family and friends.  It's a unique way of remembering and, I confess, at times I was confused about which conversations were actual memories and which were conceived in his consciousness as a means of calling someone back to life and memory.  Both effectively brought his characters into my view where - though often tragic - they were treated with gentle dignity.      

The library almost functions as a "character" as it comes to life through his vivid descriptions.  In the following passage, he comments on the current silence of it's many inhabitants (Chesterton, Hopkins, Carroll, Gandhi, Donne, Shakespeare, Dostoyevski, etc), asking questions that hit home with me. 

"The air of the Magic Kingdom is electric with the silence they are keeping.  What would I have been if I had never heard them break it?  What would I have failed to see if they had not pointed it out to me, and what would I have never heard without their ears to hear it through?  What would I have missed loving without them to show me its loveliness?  What marvelous jokes would have been lost on me?  What tears would I have never found the heart to shed?  And yet no less a gift is the mercy now of their keeping still...and the whole room holding its breath.  They are there for when I need them, but in the meanwhile, there is not a word out of any of them." 

For anyone who hasn't read Buechner previously, I probably wouldn't recommend this as a starting point.  Some of his musings might feel more unsettling without a broader context of his work.  Consider starting with The Hungering Dark or Telling the Truth as a gateway to his writings. 

Refractions

I was introduced to the art of Makoto Fujimura more than a decade ago, and while I still can't say I *understand* his art, I absolutely can say I respect the form, the technique, the slow deliberateness of the creative process, and his words about art and faith in Refractions.  This book of his essays, written primarily around the time he and his family were displaced by the 9/11 attacks on New York City, gave me a more intimate look at his approach to art.  

One of the ideas that resonated with me is the Japanese aesthetic concept "mono  no aware" translating roughly to "beauty in the pathos of things" or "a wistful awareness of impermanence". It describes a bittersweet emotion—finding beauty, sadness, and serenity simultaneously in the realization that all things, including life and beauty, are transient.  Fujimura says, "The age old concept of wabi (poverty) and  sabi (rusting away) insists that what is truly beautiful is not the permanence of things but the impermanence." 

This perspective plus his creative process - from paper making, to sourcing and grinding of minerals for the paint, to the application of layer upon layer of these slow drying pigments - inform how he applies his Christ-saturated worldview into his creations.  

Here is a tiny snippet on his Theology of Making that may whet your appetite to learn more: 

Plucky Passage

Pelican's prominent prehistoric probiscis passes preposterously proximate to my porch

Flora & Ulysses

This wildly original, laugh-out-loud adventure from Kate DiCamillo, held a can't-put-it-down fascination for me.  Her prime character, Flora, navigates some pretty weighty family dynamics plus other perils of 10-year-old cynics, through the voices of her oft read comic TERRIBLE THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO YOU!

An unpredictable story from beginning to end that children will find both astonishing and hilarious. 

The Custom of the Sea

I have a longstanding morbid fascination with disasters at sea, so when the Avett Brothers referenced this book as the "inspiration" for their early album Mignonette, as well as their more recent Broadway musical, Swept Away, I immediately added it to my library.  

It likely goes without saying, but this is a harrowing tale of survival after 4 men's yacht sank in tumultuous open seas.  They rode out the next 24 days in a 15 foot dinghy with no fresh water and only 2 small tins of turnips.  In 1884, it was "the custom of the sea" that if it became necessary for survival, a ship's crew could draw lots to determine which of them would become "sustenance" for the rest of the crew.  

The Mignonette crew refused to draw lots so the Captain - on day 19 - chose to take the life of their youngest member who had drunk seawater (a fatal choice) and was near death, to prolong the lives of the remaining 3 who had wives and children counting on their return.  

The story recounts, not only the intense drama of their survival, but the personal and legal drama that ensued when they were subsequently the first to be tried for murder for practicing this "custom."   It's easy to dislike the Javert-like prosecutor, especially given the dire circumstances, the upstanding character of the Captain, and his refusal to hide or deny what he had done.  It's also impossible to imagine a level of distress that would allow otherwise civilized, rational, moral humans to justify taking another's life to sustain their own.  

Be prepared to wrestle with empathy for and solidarity with the Captain, and expect a hearty internal debate on situational ethics and the nature of self-preservation vs. self-sacrifice.

A worthy read. 

Feathered Frenzy

 Our famished friend flits frantically, foraging fragments for his forthcoming feast.

Heron Rising

Heron Rises from The Dark, Summer Pond

by: Mary Oliver

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself–
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

Beach Bum

 Black-browed and bristly, the bedraggled biped broods. 

Wordsmith Wednesday

Back in the day, the rhythms of my life included natural encounters with etymology (through teaching Latin and Literature) or with unfamiliar words (through frequent reading of theology, philosophy, literature, etc.), so at that time Wordsmith Wednesdays were routine (as was writing in general). Since my transition to the world of commerce, those encounters no longer occur naturally, and are mostly relegated to vacations when I make time to read something other than emails and contracts.  I'm on the beach for two weeks, so here we go!  

After years of owning this compilation of essays, I FINALLY picked up Lewis' On Stories and encountered these rarely used words:

otiose - from the Latin otiosus, meaning "at leisure, unoccupied, or idle" - generally used to denote something as useless, unproductive, or futile

sidereal - from the Latin sidereus, meaning "of or relating to the stars or constellations" 

jejune - from the Latin jejunus, meaning "empty, hungry, fasting, or barren" - generally used to reference something lacking nutritive value, or devoid of interest or significance

pusillanimous - this word comes from two Latin words: pusillus, meaning "weak, small, or petty"; and animus, meaning "spirit or soul"; so together it literally means weak-souled or without courage

diuturnity - from the Latin diuturnus, meaning "lasting a long time" - a word so rarely used it's considered archaic

architectonic - from the Greek words arkhi, meaning "chief"; and tekton, meaning "builder"; so together with the adjectival "ic," it means "pertaining to a master builder" - I love that he uses this word when speaking about Dorothy Sayers.

dyslogistic - from the Greek words dys, meaning "bad"; and logos, meaning "words, language, speech"; together it means "bad words" - basically, the opposite of the word we are more familiar with: "eulogy/eulogistic" which we think of as funereal, but it literally means "good words" (spoken about another person).

optative - from the Latin optativus, meaning "expressing desire" - it is used to name a grammatical "mood" of wishing (not to be confused with the subjunctive which is the mood of "possibility" - what *may* happen - not "desire" - what I *wish* would happen).  I'll share Lewis' quote on this one because I find his pull-no-punches style enlivening. 

"...I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education.  The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry.  The other begins with "Appreciation" and ends in gush.  When the first fails, it has, at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like.  He may decide that he doesn't care for knowledge; but he knows he doesn't care for it, and he knows he hasn't got it.  But the other kind fails most disastrously when it most succeeds.  It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce.  It makes him think he is enjoying poems he can't construe.  It qualifies him to review books he does not understand, and to be intellectual without intellect." 

prosody - from the Latin prosodie meaning "the accent of a syllable" - generally used to refer to verbal intonation or poetic meter (Lewis' sense in the passage above)