Summer Reading

I’m in a reading group this summer, experiencing a classic: GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. While there are moments I read and think “What IS this guy saying?” for the most part I have thoroughly enjoyed it. This past week I read my favorite part of the book thus far, a little thought or two about courage:

“It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

And later in the paragraph:

“A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.”

The big dude can write!

In other (lighter) reading news, I cried my eyes out last night finishing Marley and Me by John Grogan. If you’ve ever owned a lab this is a must read for you. The irony of crying my eyes out was that as I sat propped up, weeping, Benj (previously asleep) suddenly and literally jumped off the side of the bed, whirled around and yelled “I don’t know why I just did that!” and promptly went back to sleep. Ahh, the sleepwalking fairy strikes again.

Reading late. Crying. Sleepwalking. Laughing. This is my life.