As we approach the end of November, I’m afraid it doesn’t look terribly good for my SciFi month goals. I have a Heinlein novel I’m almost done with, but I keep pecking at several Star Trek and Star Wars novels and not getting sucked into any of them yet. History is also launching an assault, bound and determined to right the scales and restore itself and its nonfiction compatriots to glory. Presently it still trails fiction by three points, but I have faith it will prevail. It doesn’t help that I’ve been writing more this weekend than reading — not for NaNoWriMo, which is evidently extinct from scandal, but just for the pleasure of it. I’ve been playing with two short stories and began reading one of my successful Nanowrimo runs from back in 2018. (It’s fantasy, if you can believe that, based on a Heroes of Might and Magic II scenario I designed in high school.) Anyhoo, today’s TTT is about being thankful, sooo I’ll just link to my Long and Short Review post from last week and let people who click on it blindly be slightly confused. But here is a Teaser Tuesday!

Another Yank of five weeks’ service featured by long marches complained: “If there is anything particularly attractive in marching from 10 to 20 miles a day under a scorching sun with a good mule load, and sinking up to one’s knees in the ‘Sacred Soil’ at each Step, my mind is not of a sufficiently poetic nature to appreciate it.” (THE LIFE OF BILLY YANK)

“When enemies had at him they quickly found that his weight was the least of their difficulties; what really sent them sprawling was the fact that his whole huge carcass seemed to be made of iron. There was no give in him, no bounce, no softness. He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.” (H.L. Mencken on Grover Cleveland, as quoted in A MAN OF IRON.)

This next one is less of a tease and more of a whole chonka text, but I love the Book of Common Prayer and enjoyed reading this passage. (Yes, I’m nibbling at three nonfiction books and three SF books simultaneously. I am insane. I do get a four day weekend, though.)

Yet for all its modesty and derivativeness, Cranmer’s 1544 Litany was the beginning of something very big indeed. That single rite would be the first installment of a book, the Book of Common Prayer, that would transform the religious lives of countless English men, women, and children; that would mark the lives of millions as they moved through the stages of life from birth and baptism through marriage and on to illness and death and burial; that would accompany the British Empire as it expanded throughout the world. When Cranmer was still alive a version of that book was the first book printed in Ireland; a quarter-century after his death prayers from it were read in what we now call California by the chaplain of Sir Francis Drake; and versions of it are used today in Christian churches all over the world, as far from England as South Africa, Singapore, and New Zealand. That book’s rite of marriage has become for many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, the means by which two people are joined: I participated many years ago in a Unitarian wedding in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that began with the minister’s intoning of the familiar words: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony.” Whatever Cranmer was thinking when he sat among his books in Croydon Palace, in “an obscure and darke place” surrounded by trees, whatever he thought might come of his little exercise in vernacular rite-making, he was imagining nothing even remotely like what would come to pass. (THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, Alan Jacobs)

I especially enjoyed this passage because I remember going through the Book of Common Prayer in one of my first Episcopal services as a visitor, I found the service of marriage and marveled at how influential it was.