Fire and Water

"Ginger ale bottles" by hugovk
Dandelion & Burdock, Ginger Ale.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Last week I sat down in the comfortable chair in my office (finally cleared of the accumulation of end of semester stuff) to read.  I had my notepad, my favorite pen — and a cold can of ginger ale.  Once settled in, I reached for the still closed can, but knocked it over.  It hit the floor, punctured and began spinning, spraying soda everywhere. Including on a bookshelf.  And on the three sorted-but-not-yet-shelved stacks of books on the floor.

My panicked mind fished out the line from a 14th century prior of the Carthusian charterhouse, Le Grande Chartreuse, "My fathers, my fathers, ad libros, ad libros; let the rest burn, but save the books."¹

I dried off my collection of Karl Rahner's writing and my books on the Exercises, and there seems to be no lasting damage.  But what does it say about my mind?

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Ginger has a fiery bite.  If you're up for some chemistry, you can read about chemical names and zingiberene, the molecule responsible for much of ginger's flavor on my other blog.

1.  As quoted in An Infinity of Little Hours (Nancy Klein Maguire), p 29.