The Title

I realize that the title of my blog isn't the most concise thing in the world. Hence, explanation:

I read a lot of Madeleine L'Engle's work as a kid, and Troubling a Star, was one of my favorites. This, of course, was before I went to college and really understood that the subtext regarding the fall of the sparrow that L'Engle uses throughout the book was based off the famous Hamlet quote: "...There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come-- the readiness is all." ( Hamlet Act 5 Scene 2, 217-224) 

Strange child that I was, I gave a lot of thought to the death of innocence. Not in a Blake-y sort of way, his obsession of children's innocence and the thought that it would never return. More, I thought of it in the way I saw it taking place all around me. Kids who were teased at school for wearing the "wrong" thing; were they the sparrow? How about when they took their quiet revenge, who was the victim when the downtrodden nerd had suddenly tricked the bully into sitting on a thumb-tack?

Really, the fall of the sparrow has Christian connotations, dating back to the Gospel of Matthew.  There are two, both in red:

"Look at the birds in the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" (Matthew 6:26)

"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father." (Matthew 10:29-31) 

Now, what I am most concerned with thinking about is what happens after the sparrow falls. When the ball drops, when the fairy tale ends, what then? Clearly, 'bad things happen to good people' as the horrid cliché goes. But then the people, the sparrows, seem to fall right out of the frame. They keep living their lives though, the sparrows. We look out over the abyss and see them all, us all, the dried skeletons of many sparrows. Their parched remains the echo of injustices past, with only subtle reminders to the rest of us of how they got through it. 

We "fall," we stray from God, turn to art, like Dorian Gray, or to pleasure, or to the business of family life. So these are my twilight wonderings-- the sparrow is long gone, but the question remains:

 What's for dinner?

How's that for postmodern jibberish?