good day

Cupboard Maker Books is truly a friend to college students. Well, only if you are an English major and not in need of an actual textbook. While most of the books this place sells are timeless, the minority that you wish could be of use to you are pretty much outdated as far as volumes and editions go. Sure it looks like a ugly old concrete warehouse (it is)...BUT, most of the books are $3-10 and they have sales! Why have I not done the majority of my book shopping here for the past three years?? I could have saved hundreds of dollars. Not even exaggerating a little. Oh well. I bought:
Huckleberry Finn
Walden and Other Writings
The Portrait of a Lady
Perelandra

...all required texts for classes for $9 because there was a sale on classics. And then I decided to buy For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway) and The Power and the Glory (Greene) for fun bringing my total up to $16. It was wonderful. I think there are a couple more books I can get there so I'm going back tomorrow.

And THEN I went to Borders with a 40% off one book coupon and bought The Landmark Thucydides for the Victor Davis Hanson class for $16 as well (originally 35 or something at the bookstore). Such a great day. I love books.

I was flipping through For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I noticed in the front he quotes John Donne from Meditation XVII, the "no man is an island" excerpt. I don't care who is quoting John Donne, or where I read it, I always get excited. I am sure it was an act of Providence when Dr. Whalen assigned to me "The Sun Rising" for a paper topic. I loved writing about that poem. But anyway, I didn't know that Hemingway borrowed the title from him.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Read the rest here. I read it and swoon. The context gives even more life to this popular excerpt. Here a couple more amazing lines:

"And when she (the church) buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."

"Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security."