Georgeann Murphy

Practical Humanism and the Will to Live

  • Easter Morning

    Wallis Sands, New Hampshire, 17 April 2022

  • Ashamed to be well

    A visit to New York City

    One World Trade Center soars 1776 symbolic feet above the memorial pools whose voids commemorate the absent presence of the North and South Towers. To visit on a bright spring day is to recall the blue sky of 9/11/2001, cleaved by images too shocking to acknowledge real, grieve the losses, marvel at the juxtaposition of horror and hubris, and wonder at one’s own good fortune. I lunched extravagantly with a friend at an Oculus restaurant, and dined that night at the East Village Ukrainian Restaurant, trying for solidarity but feeling pathetically inadequate. That morning we had taken the subway to Brooklyn to stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge, admire the Manhattan skyline, and join the hoard of selfie takers. Eight days later, gas, gunfire, terror, and blood changed the connotation of “Brooklyn subway,” and again left me wondering at my good life.

    Hanna is a character in 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2011 novel, THE LAST GIFT, a tale of family secrets, late revelations, and the legacy of colonialism. Having renamed herself “Anna,” she writes to her brother Jamal as she processes what she has learned of her parents’ past: “My mind is crowded with my little thoughts when our world is full of so many unspeakable anguishes. Sometimes knowing about such things makes me ashamed to be well” (p. 278).

    I know how she feels.

  • Sweet are the uses of adversity

    And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

    Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

    Sermons in stones, and good in everything. (AYLI, 2.1.12-17)

    This Good Friday seems a good day to address a dear friend’s question about the meaning of daffodils–and also to shape the wherefore of this new blog. Anthropologist Leslie Alvin White proposed symbols as the basis of human behavior, and certainly it is a truth universally acknowledged that humans make, deploy, interpret–and mistake!–symbols. Daffodils, those brave vernal trumpets, undaunted by late frosts and hungry deer, manifest rebirth, spring, and new beginnings. For lives shaped by literature, as mine has been, they recall the “jocund company” that flashed on Wordsworth’s inward eye, filling his heart with the remembered pleasure of their breezy, fluttering dance.

    Communion with nature is a balm my family, immediate and extended, share, and many more have rediscovered in our current time of plague. The quotation that heads this post comes from Shakespeare’s AS YOU LIKE IT, when Duke Senior encourages his brothers in exile from a corrupt court to appreciate how much better is their life in the Forest of Arden; his counsel to find salutary meaning in nature provided our granddaughters’ nursery a painted motto to help them grow and find the good in everything. My parents, Virginia, planter of trees, and George, rose gardener and guide to the natural wonders of our National Parks, continue to nurture me–as do their ashes the daffodils that return each year in my garden. As, this year, does my darling departed husband, David.

    Finding adversity useful, even sweet, is today’s lesson, Dear Reader. Maybe it took my contracting COVID to begin this blog, a new venture the daffodils help launch. I hope you find this, and them, useful. And sweet!

  • wand’ring steps and slow

    Spring has not yet arrived at 43 degrees north latitude to the extent this host of golden daffodils from 2021 displays. Still, this blogger, untutored in a medium so many others have mastered, in this her maiden post hopes their cheering presence will shed some grace on this enterprise. Harvard’s Arthur Brooks touts the “crystallized intelligence” of us older citizens, less “fluid” than our juniors, but wiser. Reader, we’ll see. Here’s to connecting as we make our solitary way.

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