2023-04-24 - Wise Child by Monica Furlong ========================================= I picked up this young adult fiction from a little free library. I was pleasantly surprised by how much i enjoyed reading it. The main characters are an orphan named "Wise Child" and her adoptive guardian Juniper. Juniper acts as a mentor and role model and she is very good at teaching. I enjoyed reading about their nurturing and positive relationship. Chapter 1 ========= I was not called by my proper name, but by a teasing word that you would translate into English as "Wise Child." This was not a compliment--it was a word for children who used long words, as I often did, or who had big eyes, or who seemed somehow old beyond their years. Chapter 3 ========= "ARE you spoiled, Wise Child?" "My cousins always said so..." "It's not how I see you. At all." ----- "I don't like cleaning or dusting or cooking or doing dishes, or any of those things," I explained to her. "And I don't usually do it. I find it boring, you see." "Everyone has to do those things," she said. "Rich people don't," I pointed out. Juniper laughed, as she often did at things I said in those early days, but at once became quite serious. "They miss a lot of fun," she said. "But quite apart from that--keeping yourself clean, preparing the food you are going to eat, cleaning it away afterward--that's what life's ABOUT, Wise Child. When people forget that, or lose touch with it, then they lose touch with other important things as well." "Men don't do those thing." "Exactly. Also, as you clean the house up, it gives you time to tidy yourself up inside--you'll see." ----- "Don't they want to feel well?" I asked in surprise. "Not always. Sometimes life is too difficult to be lived. So it's better to be sick for a bit." "So what happens then?" "You have to tease out the pain--in their minds, that is--like teasing burrs our of wool." ----- "Well, why don't you beat me, then?" [Like her mother did when she caused trouble.] I was genuinely puzzled. "I can't be bothered," she said. "That's no way to bring up a child," I said primly, copying the voices of the village women I knew, and because Juniper began to laugh again, I laughed myself. "You'll just have to behave yourself, Wise Child," Juniper said. "Or not, as the case may be. I shall never beat you, whatever you do." Chapter 4 ========= [Juniper took Wise Child to mass every Sunday as she promised before she became Wise Child's guardian. After the first mass, Juniper asked Wise Child what Fillan had preached about.] "He talked about Pelagius," I lied. Pelagius was an English scholar who had a quarrel with the great St. Augustine, and Fillan was always defending him... "Pelagius? He who thinks we are good entirely by our own endeavors?" Juniper asked. "The man's a fool." Although Juniper was not a Christian, from then on Sundays became our holy days, and apart from caring for the animals we did no work. ----- It was fun to eat the pat of butter or the tiny cheese I had shaped for myself. "It tastes so much better when you do it yourself," Juniper said. ----- "I thought if you were educated you didn't have to do boring things," I had said to Juniper the day before. "There are people who think like that," Juniper said. "Such a pity. Boredom is so valuable." I could not imagine what she meant. Chapter 5 ========= It was not until lunchtime that I mentioned the leper. "That horrible Cormac was shambling around here. I soon scared him off." Juniper stared at me with such astonishment that I stared back. "You did WHAT?" "I threw a stone at him," I said virtuously. "I knew you wouldn't want him stealing eggs or staring through the window." ... A look of pain passed across Juniper's cheerful sunburned face. "I must go and see him" she said suddenly. "What?" "I must go and see him. I have been caring for Cormac--for his face, and giving him food--for... oh, several years..." "But he's horrible. All the children throw stones at him and he's been punished by getting leprosy." "Did you know he was Fillan's brother?" "No. Honestly? But he gives me the shivers. He's disgusting." "He's sick. And very lonely." [Later, after Wise Child comes to remorse what she did...] "I didn't know he was like that," I said at last. "Fillan said he had committed a terrible sin and that was how God had punished him." "Fillan may hate Cormac, but I don't think God does," said Juniper. "Your God loves people, doesn't he? Jesus healed the lepers, and he forgave people who did wrong, even the ones who crucified him. Isn't that right? So why would he give Cormac--dear good Cormac--such a dreadful punishment? What could he possibly have done that was bad enough?" Chapter 6 ========= Juniper was a wonderful teacher, partly because lessons got mixed in with everything else. She would draw a picture of the seas and countries around Britain so that I would understand a story of a voyage or a love story or a battle, and she would alternate a piece of history with a fairy story so that my attention remained sharp. I puzzled over what was "real." ... "There are many kinds of reality," Juniper explained, "Only silly people thin there is only one kind. I don't live in the fairy reality and neither do you. I live in two or three different kinds of reality, though. So, I expect, will you." She did not explain this, even when I begged her to. She could be quite obstinate about the things she would, and would not, talk about. "I might spoil something for you, you see," she said. ----- "You always feel someone must be to blame when you are cold or miserable or frightened, Wise Child. It may not be so at all--it is just the weather of life--but even if they are to blame... does it matter?" ----- At once I knew that the movement of the blood within me was part of the same pattern that moved the sap in the oak tree to my right. The decay of the food in my stomach was the same as the autumn decay of the plants and trees. When Juniper and I shoveled earth upon our human droppings, I knew that the flies and little earth creatures fed upon them; this was their food as the fish and animals and roots and berries and seeds were ours. I began to weep at the beauty of this, to say a psalm that Fillan had once taught me praising the good God. Chapter 7 ========= I could feel an idea bubbling away energetically at the back of my mind, and at first I could not imagine what it was. Something about life with Juniper had encouraged me to notice ideas floating around in the back of my mind, like, as she said, fishes swimming past you if you were in a house under the sea. ----- No one could have lived with Juniper as long as I had without getting into the habit of pondering the why of things. ---- If I was a part of everything, then I was also a part of the bridge and stream, of the sharp rocks beneath the water and the tumbling, rushing waters. EVEN if I feel into the waters, and EVEN if I was swallowed up by them, I would still be a part of it all. In such a world, such a universe, nothing terrible could happen to me. Suppose, I asked myself, just suppose that I walked across that bridge as if I was part of it and part of the water, that I decided that whatever happened as I did so, it would be alright, what then? Suddenly it was as if a weight had been dropped off me. I stood up, walked to the bridge, and crossed it with only the slightest hesitation as I got to the middle. ... One part of me felt very relieved and rather proud. Another part missed the thrill of being terrified; it had been exciting in a way. How muddling everything always was. Chapter 19 ========== "Why does he [Fillan] hate you so much?" "I think he misunderstands. He thinks that I am working against the new religion, but it is not so. I love and revere Jesus as he does--how could one not? But in the new religion they think that nature, especially in the human body, must be fought and conquered--they seem to fear and distrust matter itself, although in the Mass it is bread and wine that is used to show how spirit and matter are one. They think that those like the dorans, who love and cherish nature, must be fought and conquered too. Jesus did not tell them this--it is their own invention because they fear nature, their own and that of others." ----- "Whatever happens, Wise Child, we trust one another to do the best we can. And we love one another. This is a weapon they cannot take from us. In the end it makes us stronger than they are." Chapter 20 ========== [Juniper and Wise Child are arrested by The Inquisition, jailed, and put on trial for witchcraft.] By concentrating on each moment as it happened--something I suddenly realized I had learned from Juniper--I could keep myself from gnawing anxiety. ----- "Not everyone is familiar with the vocabulary of witchcraft. Perhaps you will tell us now what a doran is." "It is someone who loves all the creatures of the word," I said, "the animals, birds, plants, trees, and people, and who cannot bear to do any of them any harm. It is someone who believes that they are all linked together and that therefore everything can be used to heal the pain and suffering of the world. It is someone who does not hate anybody and who is not frightened of anyone or anything." author: Furlong, Monica detail: LOC: PZ7.F96638 tags: book,fantasy,fiction title: Wise Child Tags ==== book fantasy fiction