Diana Holman-Hunt—“My Grandmothers and I”
Diana Holman-Hunt’s “My grandmothers and I” is thoroughly enjoyable.
As her name suggests, she is the grand-daughter of William Holman-Hunt who has given us iconic and beloved images like Light of the World. She was also, on her mother’s side, the great-niece of Millais.
Nothing guarantees happiness, of course, not even the most exalted Pre-Raphaelite lineage.
Diana’s father is young, adolescent and absent, in India. She is farmed out between two families–her very wealthy, self-absorbed, coddled, absent-minded maternal grandmother who lived a life of Edwardian privilege in what sounds like the most amazing, romantic and dreamy country house, and her equally wealthy but psychotically stingy paternal grandmother, Mrs. Holman-Hunt.
Mrs Holman-Hunt was a character. She was the painter’s second wife, and bitterly jealous of his first. When things are demanded of her, survival money for instance, she gets tearful thinking of her husband cavorting in heaven with her sister, who again got him first!! Her life is dominated by clever and ingenious shrifts to save money.
Mrs. Holman-Hunt suffers from the mental illness of extreme parsimony, which particularly inflicts the old. (This is perhaps not a well-recognized or diagnosed mental illness, but it should be!!). Her house is full of priceless paintings and precious treasures, all unguarded. Meanwhile, she shepherds her considerable wealth, crying if Diana requires pocket money from her.
Diana invents a style of her own in narrating this charming memoir. First person, present-tense, novelistic techniques (techniques which are commonplace in our generation, of course.)
It reads well, is absolutely winsome and charming, partly because she narrates her poor little rich girl story dispassionately, without self-pity but which much humour.
Bookmark this on Delicious
And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, Joel 2.25
And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.KJV, Joel 2.25
When, oh Lord, when? When we turn to you. When we place them in your hands. When we ask you to!
I am a bit of literalist sometimes in reading scripture. When I read, “They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. They will mount with wings like eagles,” I ask: How does that happen?
Which is what I usually ask when I read this: And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten?
I ask, How does that work out in practice?
Now, forgive me, God, and do not smile–for trying to reduce the immensity of your power to my capacity to understand it. But that is what I need to do, right now as I paddle in the shallows of your immensity
* * *
The phenomenon of the years the locusts have eaten being restored to us is actually not an unfamiliar one in the story of creativity.
I think of the wonderful poet Rainer Maria Rilke who gathered up strength and sweetness all his life as he struggled with a writers’ block which lasted for decades, indeed intermittently all his life. And then, in his phraseology, the angel came. And he wrote the beautiful Duino Elegies in an astonishing burst of creative power. Like Handel who wrote the Messiah in three weeks.
Faulker wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks working six hours a night from midnight to six a.m. Annie Dillard comments on this, “Some people cross the Niagara Falls on a bike. Some eat cars. Who would offend the spirit who hands out such gifts?”
Samuel Johnson wrote his classic Rasselas in a week to pay for his mother’s funeral, creativity blossoming under time pressure. Sylvia Plath wrote her astonishing Ariel poems in her life blood over a period of weeks, “The blood flow is poetry/There’s no stopping it.”
I suppose Van Gogh experienced a similar burst of creativity before his incarceration.
The trick I suppose is to accept God’s gifts of creativity with open hands, flowing with his rhythms so that one can be creative for a long time, and not burn out like Plath or Van Gogh after their bursts of genius.
"My Grandmothers and I"– the charming memoir of Diana Holman-Hunt
My Grandmothers and I— the charming memoir of Diana Holman-Hunt
Diana Holman-Hunt’s “My grandmothers and I” is a unique and thoroughly enjoyable memoir.
Diana Holman-Hunt’s “My grandmothers and I” is a unique and thoroughly enjoyable memoir.
As her name suggests, she is the grand-daughter of William Holman-Hunt who has given us iconic and beloved images like Light of the World. She was also, on her mother’s side, the great-niece of Millais.
Nothing guarantees happiness, of course, not even the most exalted Pre-Raphaelite lineage.
Diana’s father is young, adolescent and absent, in India. She is farmed out between two families–her very wealthy, self-absorbed, coddled, absent-minded maternal grandmother who lived a life of Edwardian privilege in what sounds like the most amazing, romantic and dreamy country house, and her equally wealthy but psychotically stingy paternal grandmother, Mrs. Holman-Hunt.
Mrs Holman-Hunt was a character. She was the painter’s second wife, and bitterly jealous of his first. When things are demanded of her, survival money for instance, she gets tearful thinking of her husband cavorting in heaven with her sister, who again got him first!! Her life is dominated by clever and ingenious shrifts to save money.
Mrs. Holman-Hunt suffers from the mental illness of extreme parsimony, which particularly inflicts the old. (This is perhaps not a well-recognized or diagnosed mental illness, but it should be!!). Her house is full of priceless paintings and precious treasures, all unguarded. Meanwhile, she shepherds her considerable wealth, crying if Diana requires pocket money from her.
Diana invents a style of her own in narrating this charming memoir. First person, present-tense, novelistic techniques (techniques which are commonplace in our generation, of course.)
It reads well, is absolutely winsome and charming, partly because she narrates her poor little rich girl story dispassionately, without self-pity but which much humour.
How Well Read are You? The BBC’s 100 Book Test
How Well-Read are You–BBC’s 100 Book Test
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. . Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.
63 read, 5 on the go or abandoned.
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
The Disciples’ PR advice: No one who wants to be a public figure acts in secret
I just read the blog of a minister who mentioned dating again after a divorce. “I didn’t know the Anglican Church permitted divorced ministers,” I say to Roy.
(Evidently, what I don’t know about the Anglican Church can fill a blog. I learn more every day, even in the arcana of my own church. I see a member of staff is a Missioner! What’s that? What’s a Parish Vicar? A Pastor of Theology?)
Roy snorts. “The Anglican Church was founded on divorce,” he says. (We are ex-Catholics, so forgive our reductionist history.)
He sees gleam in my eye which tells him that this conversation is going to be recorded. In my journal if he’s lucky; on Facebook or my blog, if he’s not.
He reads my thoughts; we’ve been married for 21 years after all. “I’ll attribute it,” I offer generously.
“Oh don’t bother!” he says. “I do not want to be a public figure. I want to operate privately.”
Now where have I heard that before? I ask him.
It comes to us, the PR advice his cocky disciples offer Jesus. “Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. 4No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” John 7.
Facebook and Twitter and blogging have apparently inaugurated a culture in which everyone is a celebrity, and shares their thoughts and movements with the world in 240 or 140 characters.
But the phenomenon of the public figure, of a life lived in the public arena, and advice on how to get there is apparently not new at all.
Visitors on Horseback
Roy and girls back from spending a day with their Uncle Jeph in London. Jeph and his wife Kaaren Mathias are missionary doctors in India; their 4 kids are along for the ride.
Jeph informs us that he is going to visit us again in 2012. By way of Central Asia, and on horseback. They are against large carbon footprints and unnecessary fossil fuel consumption.
Is being eccentric a genetic trait of Mathiases? Roy now wonders.
"Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can"–Wesley. I disagree!!
Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can
Now, being a mostly sensible woman, I respect John Wesley, of course. I love reading about him.
Wesley had gone to Georgia with James Oglethorpe to work as a missionary to the Indians. He soon returned to England in despair and wrote, “I went to America to convert the Indians; but O who will convert me!” On the ship going to Georgia, Wesley had met Moravian immigrants and was impressed by their spiritual strength and joy in the Lord. Back in England, as Wesley struggled with his own sinfulness and need of salvation, he received spiritual counsel from the Moravian Peter Boehler. On May 24, 1738, during a meeting at Aldersgate, Wesley experienced God’s saving grace and wrote, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins.”
But O who will convert me? Nearly 250 years ago, Wesley realizes that one can be a Christian, even a clergyman, as he was and not yet converted, not yet fully turned to Christ, fully surrendered. What is total conversion? Total surrender to the will of God, beautifully described in a wonderful biography of Oswald Chambers, “Abandoned to God.” Am I totally converted? I would love to be, but am still in the process of surrendering the nooks and crannies of my mind, emotions and life to God.
However, I strongly disagree with Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can. The statement makes me angry, and if it was not John Wesley who said it, I would have said it was a wicked statement.
I think of an opposite image from a biography of George Mueller. George Mueller visits the poor in Bristol. He visits a man who works 16 hours a day in a mill, and works on Sundays too at other things. He tells him not to work so hard. The man says he must. He must provide for his wife and children.
And so Mueller decides not to ask any one for money but God alone. “To move man through God by prayer alone,” as Hudson Taylor (whose ministry Mueller supported generously!!) put it. Mueller reasoned that if people saw that God provided for his needs and the needs of his orphans in response to prayer, they would realize that they too did not need to work in such an unhealthy fashion.
Wesley’s dictum is just the opposite–as if man were no more than a machine, wedded to the monotonous treadmill of getting and saving, getting and saving, albeit to give it away.
I find the saying so outrageous that it makes my blood boil. Why would anyone advocate so unbalanced a life–Make all you can? At present, we own the sort of business where the more you work, the more you make. Because life is so much more than money, we have set limits–both on how much we work (less than half the hours that society considers a normal workday—society’s current work day leaves little time or energy for “living”) and on how much we make. We have set an income cap, which we have shared with others for accountability. When we reach that, we cut back on our already reduced work hours, substituting them even further with reading, gardening, service, thinking and praying. Will we have the resolve to see it through? I don’t doubt it; leisure is more attractive to us than more money.
Giving! Should one work harder just to give it away? I don’t agree. I don’t agree that my only value is my money, or that I should make as much money I can to give it away. If one can live with less money, one can give of oneself and of one’s time to spouse, children, friends, and in ministry.
So many Christians I know are hideously overworking in this current climate of fear of cuts and a double dip recession. Working long hours, coming home after the children’s dinner and bedtime, marriages are under strain.
How brilliant it would be to scale back, to work humane hours that leave time to see the sun and one’s children, to pray and read and think and garden, and trust God with one’s lifeand wealth—which after all comes from God–though to watch us work, we often forget that!!
The Willingness to Make Mistakes and the Acquisition of Wisdom
The Willingness to Make Mistakes
As I may have mentioned, I own a publishing company which specializes in reprinting out of print classics.
I became a businesswoman about 4 years ago. I was a poet and writer before that.
Big shift.
And guess what?
I made mistakes.
Some big ones.
For instance, a few months ago, I realized that we made a mistake which cost us several thousands of pounds over the last 2 years. At least.
Am I sad?
You want the honest answer?
The honest answer is NO.
Because I have so come to accept that making mistakes is part of being human, part of being limited, is, in fact, the way to high and interesting achievement. In 3 years, I got my publishing business to earn enough that my husband who was a Professor with a Chair in Mathematics, at the top of his pay-band, or whatever they call it, was able to take early retirement this summer. I did that by the willingness to keep the car moving, try things, make mistakes. This particular mistake I mentioned we realized was because I did not take the good advice of a professional, who had repeatedly advised us to take a particular step. I did not take it because of fear. It was an expensive gamble which she had advised. Then we gambled, and it paid off richly. So I just have to forgive myself for not gambling earlier.
* * *
My husband Roy is very clever. When he was 17, he won two scholarships. One was to do his senior year of high school in Japan (and learn Japanese!) One was the Girdlers’ scholarship for 3 years at Cambridge University, all expenses generously paid. There was ONE scholarship for the brightest schoolboy in New Zealand, where Roy grew up. He decided to win it, and did. After Cambridge, he did a Ph.D at Johns Hopkins, postdocs at Cornell and Stanford and Minnesota, won international prizes, won numerous prestigious grants and prizes.
Not a trajectory of someone who would be easy on himself or anyone else who made mistakes and messed up.
While I am too wide-ranging in my interests to be a scholar, I’ve generally done well academically. I went to Oxford. I have got several big life decisions right operating on a fuel mix of prayer, intuition and thinking. And so, when I get things wrong, I too am hard on myself. When clever people like Roy or my children get things wrong, I am not pleased.
And so when Roy and I started a business, we were very hard on each other. Roy was particularly hard on me when I got things wrong because of the largish sums of money involved.
Now, I must find the exact quote, but something I read in the summer of 2007, just when our publishing business was getting off the ground, set me free. Carol Wimber writes in “The Way it Was” about her life with John Wimber, and how they established The Vineyard Movement at high speed. “Who were we to think that we were so smart that we should never make mistakes?”
Gosh, that idea set me free. Who am I that I shouldn’t make mistakes? All human beings are limited. All human being make mistakes! Who am I to think that I am so smart that I should never get things wrong.
How liberating that willingness to get things wrong is. How fast one can steer one’s car! Think it out, make a decision, act. If it’s wrong, sigh, and drive in the opposite direction. It is easier to steer a moving car than one which never begins its journey.
Why did I write this post now? Because I bought two laptops fairly rapidly last month, one for myself, one for Zoe. Both, according to Roy, were far more expensive than they needed to be.
Yes, probably I made a mistake. Buying laptops is not something I know a lot about, or do every day. I got the information, and made a swift decision. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest decision, but who am I that I should never make a mistake? And think how much time that swift decision saved
That is what I am saying to myself these days as I declutter and deal with things I’ve bought which I haven’t needed or used. Who am I to to expect to be so smart that I should never make mistakes? Everyone makes mistakes. I too!
And the willingness to steer your car fast, to make a decision after absorbing a reasonable amount of data rather than an infinite amount of data liberates an enormous amount of time for more fruitful pursuits.
And here’s something from Thomas Merton. Thank you, Anne Jackson, http://flowerdust.net/category/merton-mondays/page/2/
“We must expect to be making mistakes all the time. We must be content to fail repeatedly and to begin again.
The thing you do, when you have made a mistake, is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.
(Merton, Journals, Oct 7, 1949, II.372)
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 188
- 189
- 190
- 191
- 192
- …
- 279
- Next Page »