Spiritual Quote of the Day (Hubert Butler, on the Assurance Provided by Christ)

“To me God is the assurance that the world of men is not purposeless or evil and that we can trust ourselves to it, and that when old laws lose their significance, new ones will slowly shape themselves to take their place. As for Christ, he is the assurance that a man can learn when and how to free himself from the power of the law, however strongly it may be reinforced with venerable traditions and popular approval. The show bread may have to be eaten, the sabbath profaned, the prostitute exalted. ‘GOD’ is the promise that out of this disorder a better order will ultimately ensue.”—Anglo-Irish essayist Hubert Butler (1900-1991), “Little K,” in Independent Spirit: Essays (1996)

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on Adolescence)

“There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Swann’s Way, Book I of In Search of Lost Time, translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1913-1927)

Faithful reader, maybe you’re thinking, “Marcel…wasn’t the name of Ross’ monkey on Friends?” If you’re comparing the label on this blog post to the picture, you may be thinking, “What does Molly Ringwald (let alone Jon Cryer) have to do with a French guy?”

A fair amount, as it happens.

For the longest time I had this idea that adolescence was this peculiarly American phenomenon of the postwar period, probably fostered by movies like Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Summer of ’42, and American Graffiti.

Even though these films from earlier years should have demonstrated otherwise, in my coming of age in the mid-Seventies I had a hard time imagining how teens in other times dealt with matters like school, class, acne, bodies out of sync with our ideals of perfection, love, or simply coming to terms with a world we never made.

In one way or another, of course, those were the very same issues that obsessed Gen X and made them gravitate to John Hughes’ mid-80s teen trilogy that made the carrot-topped Ms. Ringwald an icon of her time: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink (from which, as you surely have guessed by now, the image accompanying this post comes from).

Perhaps tiring of the demands of Hollywood in the mid-1990s, Ms. Ringwald briefly relocated to Paris, where she not only made some films but even married a French writer.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps when she was learning French, Ms. Ringwald must have encountered Marcel Proust’s enormously influential novel sequence. Three years ago, she told an interviewer from Entertainment Weekly that she’d been reading Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess, a triple biography of three women who furnished Proust with the model for his character the Duchesse de Guermantes.

At times, I have wondered how a sickly asthmatic like Proust could cut himself off from the society that furnished him with his subject matter, staying inside a bedroom with walls lined with cork as he worked obsessively to complete his life’s magnum opus.

But memory can be an enormously powerful force, and especially so adolescence, with its outsized emotions. Proust wouldn’t have needed his fabled madeleines to summon up that period of his life. The kids of “The Breakfast Club” might not have tackled his book, but they definitely would have understood the regret and spontaneity he identified as being central to this time in their lives.

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, on Fate Waiting to Strike)

“Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.” — British humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), Very Good, Jeeves (1930)

The image accompanying this post shows Hugh Laurie (right) as the clueless Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as his imperturbable butler Jeeves in the British comedy series of the early 1990s, Jeeves and Wooster.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Cindy Perazzo, on ‘A Mary We Can Understand and Relate To’)

“As we begin to be in touch with Mary in the mysteries of the rosary and in Scripture and as we take the time to listen during the quiet times we carve out of our busy lives, we find a Mary we can understand and relate to. We become in touch with her gentle spirit and thoughtful ways. We become amazed at her underlying strength and acceptance. We are able to imagine the beauty in her that captured God’s heart. With this newfound awareness we realize that imitation, even if it is in some small insignificant manner, is the true way to model her many virtues and this in turn will honor Mary.”— Cindy Perazzo, coordinator of Lay Carmelites, “Hail Mary!”, Carmelite Review, Fall 2013-Winter 2014 issue

Quote of the Day (Thomas Cahill, on History as ‘Narratives of Grace’)

“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.”—American historian, editor and academic Thomas Cahill (1940-2022), How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1995)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘GoodFellas,’ on How the Mob Murders One of Its Own)

“If you’re part of a crew, nobody ever tells you that they’re going to kill you, doesn’t happen that way. There weren’t any arguments or curses like in the movies. See, your murderers come with smiles, they come as your friends, the people who’ve cared for you all of your life. And they always seem to come at a time that you’re at your weakest and most in need of their help.”—Longtime mobster-turned-informer Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta), in GoodFellas, screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, directed by Martin Scorsese (1990)

The image accompanying this post shows Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito, thinking he was going to a celebration for himself. Oh, well!

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on Reading ‘The Book of Fate’)

“O God, that one might read the book of fate
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea, and other times to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune’s hips; how chance’s mocks
And changes fill the cup of alteration.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Henry VI, Part II (1594)