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# 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
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Monica_Furlong
LOC: PZ7.F96638
tags: book,fantasy,fiction
title: Wise Child
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) fantasy
(DIR) fiction