Andrew Wyeth is no longer with us

Andrew Wyeth, whose paintings and drawings had such impact on the developing mythology of America, has passed away at the age of 91 -- you can read more here. He died peacefully in his sleep.

No one else ever painted America with the keen insight and moodiness that Wyeth did. To share a quote from a family friend interviewed in the article I've linked to:

Andrew Wyeth is to me the most solidly American artist of the twentieth century. He continued steadfastly to invest his paintings with deep and metaphoric emotion even when it was completely unfashionable in the period of pop art and abstract expressionism, which was ironic, distant and cool.

Which is to say, he was an artist who never compromised.

Please join me in a moment of silence to recognize his achievement and that now that he has moved on, we are down one of our great artists.

The painting shown above is Christina's World.

Good-bye my dear Doctor

David Tennant was the tenth Doctor on the British television show Doctor Who. The show is the longest running television show ever, with the immortal character of the Doctor. He lives forever by regenerating into a new incarnation with each death. The Doctor is a modern (alien) phoenix. Instead of rising from ashes and flame, he uses cosmic energy to regenerate. The tenth doctor (the doctor for the last three series) has announced that he is leaving the show, leaving a gap for the eleventh doctor. http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/misc/news

Now while Doctor Who is often considered Sci-fi, the tenth doctor has also delved into the land of fantasy and myth. In his second episode as the Doctor ("Tooth and Claw"), he and his companion encounter werewolves in the Victorian age. In "The Impossible Planet and Satan Pit," the origins of the Devil mythos are explained and expanded. During his second season in "Shakespeare's Code," witches are explained with a scientific twist using Shakespeare's never written (or lost) play, "Love's Labors Won." In the third year of this Doctor, Agatha Christy's work is brought into play in "Unicorn and the Wasp."

The tenth Doctor also referenced Harry Potter, stating once that he cried while reading the seventh book (this was before the seventh book was out). He takes myth seriously and often finds in his time travels that it is mixed with truth. All three of his companions have viewed the world as we would see it. They marveled at myth made factual through history and science.

The Tenth Doctor was lighthearted and entertaining. He was my favorite doctor, and will be my true Doctor (as the fifth Doctor was David Tennant's, as he stated in the episode "Time Crash"). He will be missed, but hopefully the eleventh Doctor will live up to the title, and bring something new to the table.

Forever a Who fan,
J.R West The Raccoon

The Pumpkin Cinderella's Carriage Turned Into

This is an unusual obituary, to say the least, but his death cannot be passed over without a word. A few weeks ago, Howard Dill died at the age of 73. Dill was a Canadian farmer who dedicated great effort to producing pumpkins of fairy tale size. The photograph to the left is no hoax. After decades, Dill bred a strain of pumpkins (his Atlantic Giants) whose seeds produced, year after year, pumpkins weighing hundreds of pounds. In 1979, he grew a 438lb pumpkin that he drove to a U.S. competition in the back of his pickup truck. His later agricultural victories exceeded 1,000 lbs. Those he inspired are now breeding pumpkins in search of an eventual one-ton pumpkin. You can read more about it here in The Wall Street Journal.

Also, you can order giant pumpkin seeds here. Just make certain your garden is big enough.

It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the quiet wonders that gardeners have given us. Our fast-paced, urban world is often tempted to overlook both crop-growers and gardeners. But many of us remember reading The Secret Garden as children, and longing for a little bit of earth, and some of us were blessed enough to grow up tending our mother's or our father's garden, enjoying the warmth of dark, tilled earth in our hands and reveling in things that grow.

Imagine going to a pumpkin regatta or walking, Charlie-Brown-like, through a patch, and seeing such a pumpkin as the one to the left...one that a carriage might have turned into, at midnight!

Robert Fagles is no longer with us

Dear readers, I bear ill news. Robert Fagles, classicist, scholar, and prolific translator (best known for his compulsively readable yet erudite translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey) died this last week, on Wednesday, at age 74. There is a beautiful obituary for him here at the Denver Post. This is a great loss to all who are interested in myth and the classics. It was Fagles who introduced me to The Odyssey, and to a love for Greek. Read this passage aloud, and you will see what this poet and scholar of ancient languages achieved in English:

Cables cast off, the crew swung to the oarlocks.
Bright-eyed Athena sent them a stiff following wind
rippling out of the west, ruffling over the wine-dark sea
as Telemachus shouted out commands to all his shipmates:
"All hands to tackle!" They sprang to orders,
hoisting the pinewood mast, they stepped it firm
in its block amidships, lashed it fast with stays
and with braided rawhide halyards hauled the white sail high.
Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out
and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow,
sang out loud and strong as the ship made way,
skimming the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.
All running gear secure in the swift black craft,
they set up bowls and brimmed them high with wine
and poured libations out to the everlasting gods
who never die--to Athena first of all,
the daughter of Zeus with flashing sea-gray eyes--
and the ship went plunging all night long and through the dawn.

Ah, what a sea-sway rocking of poetry that is! The best obituary I think for any writer is to read from his or her work. Fagles showed English readers that Homer was meant to be read on a hill, the listeners swept up in the foaming of the waves.

Over the past decades Fagles had also published a translation of the Aeneid and of many of the Greek tragedies. He retired from the faculty at Princeton only a few years ago, in 2002, and last year was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters; the faculty of Princeton awarded it to him for "four decades of feats on behalf of Princeton, as the founding father of comparative literature, as a gracious and wise colleague and as an inspiring mentor and teacher." To his credit had gone also the PEN/Ralph Manheim prize for lifetime achievement, the National Humanities Medal, and many other prestigious awards. The Denver Post article even reports that a reader once wrote to Robert Fagles asking him to suggest a name for his new cat. The classicist replied not "Aristotle" or "Pericles" but "Bobcat." Which is fitting: while a human being may look up to Aristotle or Pericles, I suspect a cat will probably look up to such an intimidating and athletic animal as a bobcat. We all have our own heroes.

I mourn the passing of one of mine.

Madeleine L'Engle is no longer with us

Returning from vacation to get my fix from the Endicott blog, I have just read the saddest news: of Madeleine L'Engle's death, at age 88. I cannot possibly write an obituary or memorial here that would do justice to our loss. Endicott has written the best memorial there will probably be. But now I find myself picking up my tattered old copy of A Wind in the Door with sadness, such sadness, and my insides are a winter day. Madeleine L'Engle was one of the great ones, and had the deepest heart and spirit - it shows in all of her work. She lived life kindly and fully, and knew, like the characters in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, how to make the clock strike the right time:

Kairos. Real time. God's time. That time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards, because kairos has nothing to do with chronological time. In kairos we are completely unselfconscious, and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time. The saint in contemplation, lost (discovered) to self in the mind of God is in kairos. The artist at work is in kairos. The child at play, totally thrown outside himself in the game, be it building a sand castle or making a daisy chain, is in kairos. In kairos we become what we are called to be as human beings, co-creators with God, touching on the wonder of creation.

And she understood fairy tales better than anyone:

I am a writer. When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.

She was the first great storyteller I met as a child, and she has been the one to whom I've returned many times as an adult to remind myself to listen to the heart's own music. Losing her is like losing a grandmother. I believe she is in a beautiful place, but she is not here, telling stories.

When I was thirteen, I started writing a letter in my horrible penmanship to tell her how much her books meant. I never finished or sent the letter.

Mourn with me. And celebrate her many books - novels, poems, plays, faith journals (such as Walking on Water, which is the source of the passages I've quoted) - which have taught so many young readers so many things about love, death, loss, faith, art, and hope. Long may her stories live in our memories.