Resonant Reading (Saturday)
Literary Scene during Surpresssion
An exploration of ideas, feelings, and our life experiences, using a different short reading as our springboard each time. The sessions are on Saturdays, 4-5, and on Wednesdays, 12-1. All are wide open and you are welcome to come twice a week or once in a while.
The participants over the years have found that the approach we take, and the respectful, affectionate community of inquirers in which we read and converse, are as important as the reading itself. While many small groups begin with a check-in, with a session only an hour long, Resonant Reading jumps right in to the conversation. Those who are frequently in the group get to know each other very well this way, and those who are new will soon find they are among friends.
Facilitators use a light hand, posting the reading in the chat and calling on whoever’s Zoom hand is up. Suggestions for readings* come from group members, who also take turns facilitating, if they want to try that role.
The reading for this session:
Saturday, June 28th
Then came the German invasion, and the picture changed again. Such authors of distinction as had survived the Great Purge and had managed to retain their human semblance responded passionately to the great wave of patriotic feeling. An astonishing phenomenon took place: poets whose writing had been regarded with disfavour by the authorities, and who had consequently been published rarely and in very limited editions, began to receive letters from soldiers at the fronts. []
[In these and later years] what was novel was a fact described to me by both Pasternak and Akhmatova, that when they read their poems before the vast audiences who packed assembly halls to hear them, and occasionally halted for a word, there were always scores of listeners present who prompted them at once – with passages from works both published and unpublished (and in any case not publicly available). []
I can testify only that in the autumn of 1945 the crowded bookshops, with their understocked shelves, the eager literary interest– indeed, enthusiasm – of the government employees who ran them, [] argued a degree of intellectual hunger unlike that found elsewhere.Background: Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin describes the literary scene in Moscow in the autumn 1945 as he recounts a trip he took there, on which he met the poets Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova
[In these and later years] what was novel was a fact described to me by both Pasternak and Akhmatova, that when they read their poems before the vast audiences who packed assembly halls to hear them, and occasionally halted for a word, there were always scores of listeners present who prompted them at once – with passages from works both published and unpublished (and in any case not publicly available). []
I can testify only that in the autumn of 1945 the crowded bookshops, with their understocked shelves, the eager literary interest– indeed, enthusiasm – of the government employees who ran them, [] argued a degree of intellectual hunger unlike that found elsewhere.Background: Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin describes the literary scene in Moscow in the autumn 1945 as he recounts a trip he took there, on which he met the poets Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova
How to join:
- Join this class from your Web browser: https://zoom.us/j/91019857324, passcode 227385
- Join this class using the Zoom app: Meeting ID: 910 1985 7324
- Join this class by phone: 669 900 9128 US (San Jose), Meeting ID: 910 1985 7324
- Join this class by on-tap on mobile phones: +16699009128,,91019857324# US (San Jose)
- Phoning in, but not in the bay area? Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abL8clvIYT
This is the Zoom link for Saturdays. For the Wednesday Zoom link, go to the Calendar and click on a Wednesday session.
Questions? Drop an e-mail to resonant-reading+owner@uucpa.org.
*This activity was formerly called “Sacred Text Reading.” That proved misleading–for one thing, more often than not our sources are secular–but it’s worth describing the qualities of a sacred text, which we still look for in the readings we choose. It is any reading that helps us to:
- connect to something of supreme importance to us
- feel more connected to other beings or to the universe
- feel more intensely alive
- align our lives with our values,
- perceive or feel more deeply
- be more fully and authentically ourselves.