"Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)"

I've been reading a lot recently. Or maybe I should say that I've been reading a lot of different things recently, all at the same time.

As a little kid, I was addicted to books. I couldn't wait to start a new one, even if I hadn't finished the one that came right before it! This meant that I ended up reading four, five, or even six books at a time. I once took a backpack full of eleven books to stay overnight at my cousin's house--I was a fiend!

I liked to jump back and forth between each book, tasting a few chapters of Black Beauty before shuffling over to The Black Stallion (I had a thing for horses, what can I say!) before switching over to one of the Goosebumps books or to a Dr. Seuss book that my mom read to me when I was small, like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

I'm sure that this ecclectic style of reading was caused mostly by a short attention span and too much enthusiasm for the next new thing. Yet, somehow, I managed to finish almost all of those books, even if I read them in ten page increments!

The last few weeks, I've been going back to my old habits and reading several books at once. I'm still working on Rebecca, but I'm also working my way through another Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel (I'm on number seven now: Burnt Offerings). I've been listening to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead on my drives to and from Lawrence. I've also been sampling a few books of poetry, including William Carlos Williams's Sour Grapes and Louise Gluck's Ararat.

On top of those, I've also been furiously reading The New Yorker. Charlie bought me a subscription for my birthday, and I've loved every issue so far! The only problem is that there are too many interesting articles in each issue; I usually only have enough time to read two or three before the next issue arrives!

I love my new/old arrangement of reading so many things at once, sampling here and there, feeling edified by my New Yorker articles, excited by the wonderfully extravagant plots of Laruell K. Hamilton, and calmed by the wise old narrator of Gilead. Each thing I read seems to satisfy one part of me that the others cannot. And, week by week, my head is filled with such wildly different stories and thoughts and experiences that I feel enlivened by the variety of it all.

Last night, my class and I read a poem that reminded me of this experience. "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the first poems I read during high school, and it has always amazed me. I love the beauty of its language, the vibrant roughness of its sounds (read it aloud, I beg you!), its joyful message, and the sense of peace that always descends on me when I come to the last lines.

Every time I read this poem, I agree with Hopkins once again: it is the strangeness of this world, its overwhelming variety and frantic richness, that makes living such a wonderful thing.

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Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
           

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                                                Práise hím.