Back to Ordinary Things

Some thoughts gleaned from Writers Almanac:

1.  Robert Coover:  "The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it."

2.  Though he'd previously been a pacifist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. He said, "Will the church merely gather up those whom the wheel has crushed or will it prevent the wheel from crushing them?" The assassination plot was a failure, and Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the woman to whom he was engaged, Maria von Wedemeyer discussed ordinary things in their letters. She asked him if he liked dogs. He asked her if she liked skiing. They made plans for their wedding, and picked which flowers they might use at the ceremony. She told him that she had drawn a chalk line on the floor around her bed the size of his prison cell, so she could imagine she was with him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "Love is not something in its own right, it is what people are and have become."

He was executed a few months later. The correspondence between him and Maria were collected in the book Love Letters From Cell 92 (1994).

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of ordinary things.  Recently, while commenting on the Elizabeth Bishop poem, "The Fish," a student mentioned that the poet's fish was no ordinary fish--otherwise there would be no need to write a poem about it.  However, it is only though the imagination of the author that the fish becomes something out of the ordinary.

I find it touching and also exciting to read that Bonhoeffer and his fiance discussed such ordinary things when they were separated from each other, when he was facing execution.

Truly, we cannot afford to think of anything as "ordinary" in this life; otherwise we are missing out on life.  It seems almost cliche to say that.  But I believe the poems and stories that have most excited me are the ones that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.  Those authors make me feel awake.