A week of vacation. Somehow that never quite turns out to be a week of rest. I find that to be an elusive venture any longer. I enjoy the rituals of vacations, from either the driving, the packing, the tourist thing of walking and buying as well as the stints of boredom from not being close to that what makes me comfortable.
I find that the older I become (isn’t that a silly phrase, as if I could become younger) I really relax when I can stay home and have time to wander about the web reading divergent texts and ideas. I like the mental stimulation that it causes and the ideas that it forces me to think or to rethink my previous concepts.
Books have become a major vacation staple. I remember when I was in my early 20’s that I would take a week at Soda Springs in the OSJ Cabin. I would drag up my stereo system (Thank God for iPods, boom boxes and CDs today) as well as a set of vinyl records. I would set up the system in the front room, open the cabin up, put on the obligatory gym shorts and lay about on the porch and sun myself while reading books for a week. To this day when I hear Al Stewart’s Time Passages, I associate it with The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I was a lazy record changer, and the album (remember I am talking vinyl here) would play over and over as I read through the 3 volumes of the Gulag. Usually during that week, friends would stop by and we would talk about things, have dinner and the drink a bit too much as college students tend to do, and we solved all life’s problems. Then I grew up.
I still bring books on vacation. I finished two that I had started earlier this year. One, The President, The Pope and The Prime Minister, Three Who Changed the World by John O’Sullivan, was very interesting. It discussed the role of Ronald Reagan, John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher in the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. A very one sided view of the Reagan Administration, as well as the Thatcher period. His approach to John Paul is even handed. Overall a very good read, but that may be that I agree with his premiss that the three above mentioned are the pushers and shakers that helped the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and with out their strong and steady wills, with lesser people in command, never would it have happened. Over all I would rate this one well up on a list of easy reads too. Not complicated and broken down so as to easily be interrupted and still pick it up and carry on as if no time has passed.
The second book, Christianity and the Transformation of the book, Origen, Eusibius and the Library of Caesarea by Anthony Grafton & Megan Williams, was amazing. The skills that these two authors, Origen and Eusebius, in the way they wrote and critically studied early Christian writings as well as pagan and late antiquity writings is amazing. In fact the very format of the book, as we know it today, is a direct descendant of these two men. I remember Fr. Gus talking about how St. Jerome had in his hands a copy of a book with the Hebrew, Greek books of the Bible. I now know what he had was the Hexapla.
The Hexapla was a book “written” by Origin that had a Greek equivalent for every Hebrew word. It contained not just the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, but two other Hebrew versions of the Old testament as well. What makes this such an amazing thing is that they were laid out in columns on a page so you could read across from the Hebrew word to the Greek equivalent to the text of each of the versions side by side. Where they differed in content Origin made diacritical marks and noted the difference for the reader. The reason for the quotation marks about written is that Origin’s hand may not have written the book, as copyist or scribes would have and he really isn’t writing a book as much as laying it out to be seen and read. He did write comments, and critical comments of origins of words and how they were used, but he is really not “writing” a book as much as presenting a book.
This last book was a good read and I have been trying to finish it while still reading on the ideas of Predestination and Free Will. It was a nice break to have some light reading to relax. I have one more I wanted to get done before Tuesday and my return to work, but that will have to wait until summer. Looks like I am back to the scholastic study of Predestination again and the lighter books will be put off for a few more weeks.
I had hoped to have pictures from vacation to post today, but Costco (at least the one I went to) was having difficulties with its processing machines and may not have my hour developed film ready until Tuesday! Oh well, I am sure we can all wait for that.
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