chrysanthemum

(Over at Vary the Line: divine suppleness and strength)

I'm planning to log twelve hours of work on The Current Project before I go to bed tonight, and have been revving up to it by eating breakfast very slowly...

From photoblogging

(Lima beans, a cucumber, an apple, and tofu)

...and making in-roads on a stack of to-reads and to-writes. Some bits I want to remember:

Kelly Miller Smith Jr., a local Baptist pastor featured in a Tennessean article by Bob Smietana(8/23/10):

Smith said that he learned from his father that a congregation's work is never done. And he believes that God still has plans for First Baptist.

"The reality of it is, the church always has unfinished business," he said. "When a church gets a place where it feels like it's done everything, it ceases to be the church."

Maia de la Baume's March 7 obituary of Henri Salmide, ne Heinz Stahlschmidt, a bomb-disposal expert in the German navy who chose to blow up ~50 fellow Nazi soldiers rather than the port of Bordeaux, which would have killed ~3,500 French dock workers. The story fascinates me because it's about a man who followed his conscience and never seems to have received his due; as his widow put it, "No one wanted to admit that he had done it. If he had been French, it would have been easier for him."

It reminds me of a striking essay I read a while back that was inspired by the French movie I Have Loved You So Long:

"It's very hard never to make a mistake in life and always to know what the right choice is. Many years ago I met the French anthropologist Germaine Tillion, who had always been on the good side of things: she was in the Resistance early on, she denounced torture during the Algerian War. I asked her, 'How did you manage never to make a mistake?' " Mr. Claudel paused for a moment. "She replied, 'It was just by chance.' "

And, on the theme of memory and preservation, Pagan Kennedy on Marilyn Johnson's This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All:

At the end of her travels, Johnson whisks the reader to a cat-hair-covered living room where a professional archivist pores over the work of her dead husband, a song lyricist and unpublished science-fiction writer named Joseph Victor (Jersey Joe) Hamburger. He was not famous, but the archivist is trying to find a library that will accept his stories, lyrics and place-mat scrawlings, storing them in archivally correct boxes until the day he is accepted into library heaven. "She thought his work was worth saving, and so it was saved," Johnson writes. "That is the story of all archives."

At such moments, Johnson tips her hand, revealing what fascinates her about both librarians and obituary writers [the subject of her previous book]. They are people who struggle to bring the dead back to life. Johnson's characters desperately care about half-forgotten brawlers, freedom fighters and canine celebrities. They are the guardians of all there is to know. It doesn't matter whether they carry on their efforts in analog or digital format. For they are waging the holy battle to resurrect the entire world, over and over again, in its entirety -- keeping every last tidbit safe and acid free.