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"What if you had a dying child, spouse, lover, parent, and the world caved in? It could happen. What was it like, after the Towers fell, to live in a war zone with a gravely ill husband? Julia Frey's BALCONY VIEW is far more than a 9/11 story. In this unique, historic diary -- the handwritten original is in the 9/11 Museum in New York -- Frey, a distinguished biographer, found herself in the unenviable position of writing about a life as it was falling apart -- her own. Her vivid, wry, tender book describes living for six months at Ground Zero with writer, Ron Sukenick during his terminal illness. It's a beautifully written, clear-eyed portrait of simple courage, remarkable humor, generosity and decency." Douglas Penick, writer, literary critic "The view from this balcony is compelling and utterly unique. Julia Frey has a first row seat for the two tragedies which mark her existence -- the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and her husband's progressively disabling malady. She peers down at the excavation of Ground Zero and brings us an account both riveting and thoughtful, despairing and buoyant, graceful and frank. As she navigates post 9-11 Manhattan, and a marriage that has been dealt the blow of untimely illness, we get to see, up-close, how ordinary people get through extraordinary times. With her deft touch and her sharp-warm humor, Frey is the perfect guide for such daunting territory." Elizabeth Scarboro, author: Phoenix, upside down Very quietly Ron said, "You know, I think the Towers are going to go. Maybe we'd better get out of here." If either of the Towers fell at a certain angle, our building was directly in the line of fall. Above the raging flames, the steel I-beams were beginning to bulge out, softening in the heat. Again his unnaturally quiet voice, "I can't stay here. If the Towers start falling on us, I'll die of fright." (BALCONY VIEW - a 9/11/ Diary ) Julia Frey's remarkable account begins on September 11, 2001, as the couple decide that no matter how weak Ron is, they must somehow flee. They abandon his wheelchair. He is too frail to climb on a boat. Later that day, covered with ashes, they struggle home through a neighborhood pitched into destruction and chaos, to look out his study window at their new view: "the stage-set for Dante's Inferno." The domino effect of one burning, collapsing building setting fire to the next one makes it clear that their own building could still go. "The electricity was out. Ron could never go down 26 flights on his rear end. We were trapped in the sky." That's when Julia decides to write it all down -- if only for the people who will find their bodies. Describing the first night in the the ruins, being evacuated, then returning weeks later, to live at Ground Zero, she discovers that their world has totally changed, yet finally not changed at all. "Our previous problems didn't magically disappear. They were just waiting for us to come back in the door." This hugely powerful narrative of double coping -- with Ron's progressive illness and with the after-effects of 9/11 -- describes a situation the manuals don't cover -- caregiving in a disaster. Her intense yet humorous 'you are there' style moves the diary swiftly along, catching us in a gripping, touching, brave, and yes, funny story of falling towers, a failing husband and a floundering ménage à trois. "Nothing happens in a vacuum," she says, weaving in the leitmotif of a love affair. Unflinchingly, she faces the ruins outside and her frightening, inner ambivalence as she sacrifices creative and professional life to nurse her husband. Ron is no angel either -- the self-centered, willful novelist insists she take a lover, then wants her to give him up. "What makes him think he can turn us off and on like televisions?" she wonders. In a poignant Coda, she describes an almost supernatural series of events after Ron dies. There is even a happy ending.
The prize-winning story of American women's devotion to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. Robert Orsi examines St. Jude's rise to national popularity, beginning in Chicago in 1929, when the daughters and granddaughters of Catholic immigrants called on the saint to help them during the tumultuous years of depression, war, and changing family lives. 14 illustrations.
Mysticism is a phenomenon fraught with nuances, both linguistic and metaphysical. The Metaphysics, consequently, as a philosophic work, presumes to address issues of a nature less than congenial to the universe of ordinary discourse. Philosophy, to be sure, demands a rigorous language, a syntax, if you will, that is subtly antagonistic to the fluid and sometimes extremely volatile concepts intrinsic to the phenomenon of the mystical experience. The austere language that philosophy arrogates to itself is sometimes too rigid a probe to uncover, reveal, the subtle and often delicate complexities that inevitably arise in a careful examination of mysticism; hence a sometimes involuted terminology will be encountered in our fragile attempt to render linguistic what merely verges on becoming intelligible. I have, to the best of my ability, limited this proliferation of abstruse language applied to an already abstruse subject. I have attempted to keep neologisms to a minimal, but have not blenched from employing them when my own linguistic resources are exhausted. Notwithstanding the difficulties inevitably encountered in language, I have endeavored in this work not simply to clarify what is obscure, but to address what is unique and compelling in this type of experience, an experience that has challenged philosophy for something more than a parenthetical account, an account, more often than not, much too eager to either dismiss this phenomenon, or to relegate it to psychology through its own failure to provide it with an adequate epistemological framework. Philosophy, in a word, has not yet coherently responded to this challenge. I am not satisfied that I have done so to the extent required, and many readers will no doubt concur with my assessment. Nevertheless it is a beginning of sorts, and if it provokes more questions than it answers it will at least have served to rehabilitate the philosophical arrogance that has been too ready to dismiss what it finds uncongenial. Hence the impetus of this work. But why St. John of the Cross? Why not Eckhardt, Gerson, or Tauler? Even the briefest historical survey of the great Western Christian Mystics offers, especially in the way of speculative mysticism, a wide variety of other and perhaps better known candidates. The reason that I have chosen St. John is simply this: the works of St. John of the Cross, particularly the Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul, stand, I think, as the culmination of the Western tradition of mysticism. On the other hand, it is equally important to the reader to understand what this book is not. This book is not a compendium. While it carefully attempts to chronologically accompany the text where possible, it does not blench from a departure where an examination of concurrent issues is warranted. Some will undoubtedly find this vexing. And while it adverts to the Mystical Tradition in general, a tradition out of which the thought of St. John very clearly emerges, it does not presume to exhaustively treat of the many notable figures who have contributed to this long-standing tradition. Deidre Carabine's "The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena", I suggest, would be much more suitable to this purpose. The goal of this book is unabashedly epistemological. Neither do I presume the reader to be intimately acquainted with Thomism as such, from which many of the metaphysical doctrines articulated by St. John unquestionably derive. For the sake of clarity, and the convenience of the reader, I have endeavored to reiterate them when necessary, providing pertinent documentation should the reader wish to explore the issue further. As dearly as I wish this work to be all things to all people, I have settled for the more modest goal of providing epistemological perspective on the sometimes fluid, sometimes volatile, but always paradoxical issues that mysticism perpetually engenders.
... ʺHow can prayers said over and over again like that be any good?ʺ Mistress Margaret was silent for a moment. ʺI saw young Mrs. Martin last week,ʺ she said, ʺwith her little girl in her lap. She had her arms around her motherʹs neck, and was being rocked to and fro; and every time she rocked she said ʹOh, mother.ʹ ʺ ʺBut, then,ʺ said Isabel, after a momentʹs silence, ʺshe was only a child.ʺ ʺ 'Except ye become as little children --' ʺ quoted Mistress Margaret softly ‐ ʺyou see, my Isabel, we are nothing more than children with God and His Blessed Mother. To say, ʹHail Mary, Hail Mary,ʹ is the best way of telling her how much we love her. And, then, this string of beads is like Our Ladyʹs girdle, and her children love to finger it, and whisper to her. And then we say our Our Fathers too; and all the while we are talking, she is showing us pictures of her dear Child, and we look at all the great things He did for us, one by one; and then we turn the page and begin again. ...