So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless. What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.
A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God.
What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
From Bel Canto
Excerpt from "Bel Canto" by Anne Patchett. I loved the whole book, but this part particularly stood out to me. I like that it beautifully expresses the importance of art.
"Fyodorov began his story, putting himself in the mind of Russia and his childhood, the dark switchback staircase that led up to the apartment where his family lived. He bent his shoulders towards Roxane. He wondered what direction Russia was from where he sat.
'When I was a boy, the city was called Leningrad, but you know this. In those days, we all lived together, Mother and Father, my two brothers, my grandmother, who was my mother's mother. It was my grandmother who had the book of paintings. It was a massive thing.' Fyodorov held up his hands to mark the dimensions of the book in the air. If he was to be believed, it was an enormous book.
'She told us it was given to her by an admirer from Europe when she was a girl of fifteen, a man she called Julian. If that is true, I do not know. My grandmother was one for telling stories. Even more than how she came by the book, how she managed to hold onto it through the war remains a great mystery to me. That she did not try and sell it or burn it for fuel, because there was a time when people would burn anything, that it was not taken from her as it would have been a difficult thing to hide, all of these things are remarkable.
But when I was a boy, it was many years past the war and she was an old woman. We did not go to museums to look at paintings in those days. We would walk past the Winter Palace, a marvelous place, but then we did not go inside. I imagine there was not the money for such things.
But in the evenings, my grandmother brought out her book and told my brothers and me to go and wash our hands. I was not allowed to even touch the pages until I was ten, but still I washed my hands just for the privilege of looking. She kept it wrapped in a quilt under the sofa in the living room where she slept. She struggled to carry it, but would let no one help her. When she was certain the table was clean we would put the quilt with the book inside it on the table and slowly unfold the quilt. Then she would sit down. She was a small woman, and we stood beside her. She was very particular about the light over the table. It couldn't be too strong because she was afraid of fading the colors, and it couldn't be so weak that she felt the painting could not be fully comprehended. She wore white cotton gloves that were perfectly plain and saved for only this occasion and she turned the pages while we watched. Can you imagine this?
I will not say we were terribly poor because we were as rich or poor as everyone else. Our apartment was small, my brothers and I shared a bed. Our family was no different from the other families in our building except for this book. So extraordinary a thing was this book. "Masters of the Impressionist Period" it was called. No one knew we had it. We were never allowed to speak of it because my grandmother was afraid someone would try to take it away from her.
The paintings were by Pissarro, Bonnard, van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Cezanne, hundreds of paintings. The colors we saw at night while she turned the pages were miraculous. Every painting we were to study. Every one she said was something that deserved great consideration. There were nights that she only turned two pages and I'm sure it was a year before I had seen the book in its entirety. It was an extremely good book, I think, expertly done. Certainly, I have not seen the originals of all the painting, but the ones I saw years later looked very much the way I had remembered them.
My grandmother told us she spoke French in her youth and she would read to us as best she could remember the text beneath the plates. Of course she was making it up because the stories would change. Not that it mattered. They were beautiful stories. 'This is the field where van Gogh painted sunflowers,' she would say. 'All day he sat in the hot sun beneath the blue skies. When the white clouds curled past he would remember them for future paintings and here on this canvas he placed those clouds.'
This is the way she spoke to us, pretending she was reading. Sometimes she would read for twenty minutes when there was only a few lines of text. She would say that was because French was a much more complicated language than Russian and that every word contained several sentences' worth of meaning.
There were so many paintings to consider. It was many, many years before I had memorized all of them. Even now, I could tell you the number of haystacks in the field and from which direction the light is coming.' Fyodorov stopped to catch his breath. He took the opportunity to think of the people around the table: his grandmother, now dead, his mother and father, dead, his youngest brother Dimitri, drowned in a fishing accident at the age of twenty-one. There was only him and his brother Mikal left now.
'Every now and then she wouldn't bring out the book at all. She would say she was tired. She would say that so much beauty hurt her. Sometimes a week or even two would pass. No Seurat! I remember feeling almost frantic, such a dependency I had come to feel for those paintings. But it was the rest from it, the waiting that made us love the book so madly.
I could have had one life, but instead I had another because of this book my grandmother protected,' Fyodorov said, his voice quieter now. 'What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to opera, the the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings, I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that, I attribute to this book.
Towards the end of her life, she could not pick it up at all and she sent me to get it. Her hands shook so, she was afraid of tearing the paper and so she let us turn the pages. My hands were too large for her gloves by then, but she showed me how to use them between my fingers like a cloth so I could keep everything clean.' Fyodorov sighed.
'My brother has the book now. He is a doctor outside of Moscow. Every few years, we hand it off to each other. Neither of us could do without it completely. I have tried to find another copy, but I believe there is no other book like this in the world.
It was a tragedy to my grandmother that none of us showed a talent for painting. But it was not something I was capable of learning. My brothers and I were all excellent observers. Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see."
"Fyodorov began his story, putting himself in the mind of Russia and his childhood, the dark switchback staircase that led up to the apartment where his family lived. He bent his shoulders towards Roxane. He wondered what direction Russia was from where he sat.
'When I was a boy, the city was called Leningrad, but you know this. In those days, we all lived together, Mother and Father, my two brothers, my grandmother, who was my mother's mother. It was my grandmother who had the book of paintings. It was a massive thing.' Fyodorov held up his hands to mark the dimensions of the book in the air. If he was to be believed, it was an enormous book.
'She told us it was given to her by an admirer from Europe when she was a girl of fifteen, a man she called Julian. If that is true, I do not know. My grandmother was one for telling stories. Even more than how she came by the book, how she managed to hold onto it through the war remains a great mystery to me. That she did not try and sell it or burn it for fuel, because there was a time when people would burn anything, that it was not taken from her as it would have been a difficult thing to hide, all of these things are remarkable.
But when I was a boy, it was many years past the war and she was an old woman. We did not go to museums to look at paintings in those days. We would walk past the Winter Palace, a marvelous place, but then we did not go inside. I imagine there was not the money for such things.
But in the evenings, my grandmother brought out her book and told my brothers and me to go and wash our hands. I was not allowed to even touch the pages until I was ten, but still I washed my hands just for the privilege of looking. She kept it wrapped in a quilt under the sofa in the living room where she slept. She struggled to carry it, but would let no one help her. When she was certain the table was clean we would put the quilt with the book inside it on the table and slowly unfold the quilt. Then she would sit down. She was a small woman, and we stood beside her. She was very particular about the light over the table. It couldn't be too strong because she was afraid of fading the colors, and it couldn't be so weak that she felt the painting could not be fully comprehended. She wore white cotton gloves that were perfectly plain and saved for only this occasion and she turned the pages while we watched. Can you imagine this?
I will not say we were terribly poor because we were as rich or poor as everyone else. Our apartment was small, my brothers and I shared a bed. Our family was no different from the other families in our building except for this book. So extraordinary a thing was this book. "Masters of the Impressionist Period" it was called. No one knew we had it. We were never allowed to speak of it because my grandmother was afraid someone would try to take it away from her.
The paintings were by Pissarro, Bonnard, van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Cezanne, hundreds of paintings. The colors we saw at night while she turned the pages were miraculous. Every painting we were to study. Every one she said was something that deserved great consideration. There were nights that she only turned two pages and I'm sure it was a year before I had seen the book in its entirety. It was an extremely good book, I think, expertly done. Certainly, I have not seen the originals of all the painting, but the ones I saw years later looked very much the way I had remembered them.
My grandmother told us she spoke French in her youth and she would read to us as best she could remember the text beneath the plates. Of course she was making it up because the stories would change. Not that it mattered. They were beautiful stories. 'This is the field where van Gogh painted sunflowers,' she would say. 'All day he sat in the hot sun beneath the blue skies. When the white clouds curled past he would remember them for future paintings and here on this canvas he placed those clouds.'
This is the way she spoke to us, pretending she was reading. Sometimes she would read for twenty minutes when there was only a few lines of text. She would say that was because French was a much more complicated language than Russian and that every word contained several sentences' worth of meaning.
There were so many paintings to consider. It was many, many years before I had memorized all of them. Even now, I could tell you the number of haystacks in the field and from which direction the light is coming.' Fyodorov stopped to catch his breath. He took the opportunity to think of the people around the table: his grandmother, now dead, his mother and father, dead, his youngest brother Dimitri, drowned in a fishing accident at the age of twenty-one. There was only him and his brother Mikal left now.
'Every now and then she wouldn't bring out the book at all. She would say she was tired. She would say that so much beauty hurt her. Sometimes a week or even two would pass. No Seurat! I remember feeling almost frantic, such a dependency I had come to feel for those paintings. But it was the rest from it, the waiting that made us love the book so madly.
I could have had one life, but instead I had another because of this book my grandmother protected,' Fyodorov said, his voice quieter now. 'What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to opera, the the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings, I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that, I attribute to this book.
Towards the end of her life, she could not pick it up at all and she sent me to get it. Her hands shook so, she was afraid of tearing the paper and so she let us turn the pages. My hands were too large for her gloves by then, but she showed me how to use them between my fingers like a cloth so I could keep everything clean.' Fyodorov sighed.
'My brother has the book now. He is a doctor outside of Moscow. Every few years, we hand it off to each other. Neither of us could do without it completely. I have tried to find another copy, but I believe there is no other book like this in the world.
It was a tragedy to my grandmother that none of us showed a talent for painting. But it was not something I was capable of learning. My brothers and I were all excellent observers. Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see."
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