Ladydale Diary
Feast of the Sacred Heart, 2021
This is the week that the tsunami hit. I knew it was coming. I’ve seen it for weeks. It’s been getting bigger and close with every day that passed. I braced myself. And then it hit.
The tsunami in question was the simultaneous start of two separate new courses, one of which, a summer course for Homeschool Connections, consisting of six separate class sessions in only two weeks. This week has, in consequence, been taken up with preparing for classes and then teaching them, followed by the writing of the daily quizzes.
But, and taking a deep breath, let’s go back to the calm before the storm.
Last weekend was blissfully uneventful. We went nowhere and simply enjoyed our own secluded and tree-enclosed plot of land. I finished reading R. H. Benson’s final novel, Initiation, which he had written only months before his tragically early and unexpected death in 1914. The death scene in the novel was, in consequence, especially potent and evocative. It’s a very good novel, which I’m happy to recommend it. Not his best but definitely worth reading. The bare bones: Beginning in Rome but set mainly at the country estate of an English Catholic aristocrat from an old recusant family, with occasional excursions to London, it is a meditation on the meaning of suffering.
As I was finishing Benson’s novel, Susannah was finishing On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, the novel which inspired one of The Pirates of the Caribbean films. I’d asked her to buy this so that I could read it as a means of discerning what the producers and screenwriters of the film had done with Powers’ book. Knowing that Powers is a good and faithful Catholic, I was suspicious of the way that the film had portrayed Christianity in a perverted and twisted light, though not altogether negatively.
To her own surprise, Susannah couldn’t put the novel down. She had never been one for action-adventure page turners, especially those with creepy supernatural stuff thrown into the mix. She loved it! I have now started to read it and, unlike Susannah, I am expecting to really enjoy it. I’ve read two of Powers’ other novels, the two that he especially recommended that I read when I met him and his wife for dinner during a relatively recent (pre-covid) sojourn in California. These were simply wonderful, in a weird sort of way. Their titles are Declare and Last Call. Thoroughly recommended for those who can stomach supernatural weirdness within an ostensibly realistic framework.
So much for the calm before the storm.
Now for the tsunami.
It hit on Monday.
I had a mountain of class preparation for the five classes I was due to teach during the week but I couldn’t begin with this until I had phoned all the corrections to the next issue of the St. Austin Review to StAR’s graphic designer. Prior to the call I needed to integrate all the corrections sent in by our constellation of proof readers onto my master copy of the PDF of the magazine’s layout. This effectively took most of Monday morning. In the afternoon, I had to do some reading for that afternoon’s recording of the FORMED Book Club; not that reading Chesterton’s essays, which is still the Book Club’s focus, could be considered an onerous way of spending one’s time! Nonetheless, the class prep was being squeezed out rather than squeezed in.
On Tuesday I taught the first of this week’s three classes for Homeschool Connection. The course is on “Catholic Literary Giants”, focusing on one “giant” per class. Shakespeare was the focus on Tuesday, Newman on Wednesday, and Hopkins on Thursday. All three classes went well.
On Wednesday was the first class in a summer seminar on Chesterton that I’m teaching online for Memoria College. The first class was on “Chesterton the Man” in which I used my biography of GKC as the course text.
The fifth and final class of the week was taught this morning for Red Cultural, my friends in Chile. It was the second of a four-session course on Elizabethan Shakespeare. This week I focused on the character of Sir John Falstaff in general and Shakespeare’s rambunctious lampooning of him in The Merry Wives of Windsor in particular. Great fun!
This morning on Sacred Heart Radio, we continued our series on the history of poetry, using my book Poems Every Catholic Should Know, as our guide. Today we discussed “The Lament of Walsingham” which is ascribed to the English Martyr, St. Philip Howard. I believe that I have recited this poem in the Poem of the Week podcast for those interested in hearing it recited.
Somehow, in the midst of the maelstrom, I also managed to write my weekly essay for the Imaginative Conservative, which is entitled “Chesterton Meets the Devil”.
Breathing a sigh of relief on this Friday afternoon, and sipping from the glass of vodka and seltzer which sits reassuringly by my side, I feel that I have handled this week’s tsunami rather well.
Looking ahead, to the not-so-distant horizon, I see the next tsunami moving inexorably towards me. It won’t hit until July, which is when my travel schedule will reach pre-covidious proportions, taking me to Chicago twice, upstate New York and low-country Charleston, all in the space of three weeks.
I’m bracing myself!
