One Good Graf: Oranges
While I work with Brandon McGinley on our month’s reading, here’s one good graf from Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe’s “Oranges Are Orange, Salmon Are Salmon” in The Paris Review.
To the west, oranges followed the path of Spanish missionaries and lent their name to Orange County and the Orange State. In California, the fruit fed the miners of the gold rush who passed through mission towns. In Florida, there were so many groves that, by 1893, the state was producing five million boxes of fruit each year. In this tropical climate—nights too humid and too hot—oranges would ripen too quickly: they were ready to be eaten while still green. And so, from the twentieth century onward, green oranges have been synthetically dyed orange, coated to match consumer expectations. Orange reveals that humans cannot imagine a species detached from its color, even when we are the ones who detach it.
I was mulling putting this into my Tiny Book Club queue, but I’m not very patient, so feel free to discuss it or share your own good grafs from your recent reading in the comments.
And meanwhile:
If you’d like to hear me and Brandon in live conversation, he’ll be my guest today as I do an hour-long radio special on the Catholic Channel for SiriusXM. I’ll be on at 3p ET to talk about how to build community, even in the midst of the pandemic.
I’ve written a one-page RPG inspired by the Sandia warning for long term storage of nuclear waste: This Is Not a Place of Honor.
My husband spruced up the Tiny Book Club logo! And he also wrote a one-page RPG, but his is about tending to a plant that you will eventually send off to war.
Ex libris,
Leah
“Let it be said before resuming the prophet’s mournful tale that, for those whom the Lord is treating as He treated Osee, the day will dawn when the old initial folly will be seen as the herald of countless graces, nay more, as the very means itself of introducing the soul to its real vocation. If blunder it was to have married Gomer years ago it was a blunder provided for, a blunder precipitated and sacramentalized by God, a blunder without which the life of the soul would never have been complete, a blunder calculated to refine, to humble, and to waken trust.” from Dom Hubert Van Zeller’s “The Outspoken Ones: Twelve Prophets of Isreal and Juda”
I am currently rereading George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” while concurrently reading for the first time Brené Brown’s “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.”
From “Middlemarch,” Chapter XXIX:
“He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity.”
I submit that if Brené Brown were to assess Mr Casaubon, she would hone in on Eliot’s phrase “fears most of all that it should be known” and diagnose Mr Casaubon with a crushing inability to be vulnerable.
Also, I share with the previous poster (Vikki W) a sense that I cannot bring myself to call a paragraph a “graf.” Pray defend this practice, Leah!
And also, is there a way I can italicize book titles in a Substack comment?