Or The Undeniable Benefits of Hindsight
Hands are such beautiful things, I often have to remind myself to stop gazing at the hands of the people I am talking to, but often it seems their eloquence lies there, rather than in their faces and voices. I often wonder if the beauty of hands evokes some universal archetype of beauty, or whether our sense of what constitutes beauty has been shaped by our hands themselves. All the more poignant in that they obey us unquestioningly, for good or ill; eager instruments that go where we will them.
Usually, I am a bit of a spectator as far as my hands are concerned. They wave and gesticulate when I talk. I love to watch them draw, eager to see what they’ll come up with. I love to feel what they touch, when seeing things is not enough to fully understand them.
My father’s hands were like the farm tools he used. Thick and hard and scarred by innumerable cuts and scrapes. My son’s hands are versions of my own, with thirty years less of wear and tear – stray blades of all kinds, various closing doors and unfriendly animals, and bits of mountainside…
I would happily write out one thousand times “I will never again put my hands under 300-lb. rocks.” if only I could hold the pencil properly…
LITERARY LESSONS
Quite a long while ago, I received a rather shy e-mail from a pleasant-sounding lady in the US, asking if it would be possible to use one of my Tolkien illustrations on a textbook she was developing. I dispatched the (pleasant) standard repy: “Please go and talk to HarperCollinsPublishers in London, they are the ones to judge in such cases.”
Usually, that is where enquiries end, but in this case, the pleasant-sounding lady returned, having hammered out a deal with HarperCollins for use of the imagery, survived the colour separation, pluckily ploughed through the printing and binding and made “Literary Lessons From The Lord of the Rings” a spiral-bound reality.
While it is destined for the home-study market in the USA, it is most definitely worth taking a peek at. (The guide has the heft of a Greater Vancouver phone book, so there is a LOT in there.) I’d even suggest it to non English speaking Lord of the Rings enthusiasts as way of meeting academic English head-on in a context that would make grammar and syntax actually fun.
The pleasant-sounding but iron-willed lady is called Amelia Harper.
Her web site is here:http://www.homescholar.org/
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MAKING MYSELF SCARCE
No more news for a while – not only are long days and warm evenings hardly condusive to spending time looking at the world through a computer screen, but I am now so late once again with all the deadlines to meet and promises to keep, that I every time I think of writing something, my conscience awakes and growls at me. Not one to provoke dangerous critters (when wandering in your mind, stay on the path and NEVER leave food in your tent), I’ve decided, with prudence and regret, to set aside meanderings for a month and concentrate on things at hand.
See you in August
J
