Opinion
The Clearlake City Council has enthusiastically and proudly appointed Mr. Dale Neiman as our permanent city administrator. Mr. Neiman possesses all of the attributes that our community has been looking for in our future leader. We believe that Clearlake has finally found the diamond it has been in search of for so many years.
All of us as citizens can do our part so that Mr. Neiman and our city can succeed. This all begins with a dream that our city has had for a long time. It is the dream of our city for our community to come together and work together. We can build this dream if we all have a willingness to want to try to succeed.
Our community is a profile of many people from different walks of life. Some are business owners and professionals in their prospective fields, some are hardworking citizens, some are retired and others are interested in the welfare of our city. We all share various cultures and customs.
The one thing that we all share and have in common is that we all live within the community. It is the affection of our city that we each possess in one degree or another and the respect for each other that will determine our city’s future. The opportunities within our city are at our doorstep, but we must open the door together.
The future of our city will always be surrounded by hopes and dreams which can become realities if we keep in the forefront all of us working together for the betterment of our community. By doing this, we can achieve anything. We all want a city that we can be proud of. No longer do we have to settle for less than we can do. Our successes are only limited if we allow them to be.
Our city now has a fresh beginning. It is a beginning that we can all be a part of. We have learned that there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going. It is important that we come together, sharing in the thrill of our victories and the agony of our defeats. Defeats will not weaken us, but rather they will strengthen us if we join together and remain united. The strength we find in each other will help us meet the challenges that we face.
Our historical predecessors built our great nation with generations of people working together in order that our nation would have a legacy to bestow on future generations. They stood together regardless of successes or failures, setting the stage for our future. They gave us the tools to work with. It is now up to us to put these tools to use.
A community that works and builds together will always stand together. City officials cannot build this city alone. We can only build our city with the help of our citizens, as the heart of the city is the people within. There is no elevator to success. We must all climb the stairs together if we are to succeed. Embrace your city, as the city belongs to all of us. When you help your city, you help your fellow neighbor. We are all equal, so we should all share in the equality of our city.
America is the land of opportunity. Clearlake is the land of hope. It is time for all of us to exercise the will to make changes in order that we begin to work together. Let us all join together so that no artificial barriers of any kind will ever be able to cast a shadow over our city. Together, we can create the image that will become our city’s legacy.
Let us all honor the splendor of the characteristics of our community, the richness of our various cultures and the courage and fortitude to embark together on unchartered areas which will enrich the diversity of our wonderful community. We can all be confident and proud that whatever we do, protection and preservation of public health, safety and welfare will always surround our city.
Judy Thein is mayor of the City of Clearlake.
- Details
- Written by: Judy Thein
"She pushed the light of the language a little further against the darkness,” E.M. Forster said of Virginia Stephen Woolf.
"To know the psyche of Virginia Woolf, and this is what she is in effect asking of a biographer, one
would have to be either God or Virginia, preferably God," wrote Quentin Bell, her biographer and nephew.
Woolf was born Jan. 25, 1882, at the height of the Victorian Era, and has since become an important figure in the history of women and literature. So it's fitting to remember her during March, Women's History Month, the same month in which she died 66 years ago.
Bell, the son of Clive and Vanessa Stephen (Virginia's sister), grew up amongst the Bloomsbury
Group.
"What did you feel when she walked in a room?" someone once asked him.
"I don't know," he replied. "She was my aunt. I wasn't observing for posterity's sake, I was just living."
I've only ever met two people who actually met Bell – one of them is Sandra Wade, Lake County's Poet Laureate.
Anne Olivier Bell, the editor of Virginia's diaries, saw Virginia only once.
"It was across a crowded room, in the summer of 1939," she said in an interview two years ago. "She was like a vision."
"The exteme beauty of her writing," Eudora Welty wrote, "is due greatly to one fact, that the imprisonment of life within the word was as much a matter of the senses with Virginia Woolf as it was a concern of the intellect."
Virginia wrote of "Orlando," he who became she and skated through centuries of time. She wrote of "Mrs. Dalloway," a day in the life. She wrote of "A Room Of One's Own."
"If truth is to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where – I asked myself picking up a notebook and a pencil – is truth?" she said in the latter, an essay Quentin Bell claims is "very close to her conversational style."
Not to forget the "Letters," in six volumes edited by Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann; the other
essays, nine volumes, including "The Common Reader, First Series," and "The Second Common Reader;" the non-fiction biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, "Flush," and of "Roger Fry."
There are books about Virginia and books about and by Leonard Woolf, her husband. There are books about Bloomsbury and books about Bloomsbury People. There are even books about Virginia and Leonard's Hogarth Press.
And there is the other fiction, from the most famous, "To The Lighthouse," to the early, "The Voyage Out," to her masterpiece, "The Waves."
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, her American publisher, has helped make Virginia Woolf's life one of the most examined in literary history.
From this, Edward Albee has his play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
From this, Madison, Wis. has its feminist bookstore, "A Room of One's Own."
From this, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich had its centenary editions of "A Room of One's Own," "Mrs. Dalloway," "To The Lighthouse;" and a play, "Virginia" by Edna O'Brien.
From this the composer and once member of another Bloomsbury Group (his first rock band) Sigmund Snopek III has his symphonic song, "Virginia Woolf."
"Virginia walked into the sea, because she wanted nothing to be," Sigmund sings.
He told me one midnight morning in the 1970s of Virginia coming to him in a dream ... inspiring a piece of music about singing and life, suicide and dreams and "a sea, which rhymes better than the River Ouse does with 'be'."
Does a vision of Virginia singing seem strange?
She wrote to Violet Dickinson in 1927: "Many scenes have come and gone unwritten, since it is today 4th September. A cold gray blowy day, made memorable by the sight of a kingfisher and my sense, waking early, of being visited by 'the spirit of delight.' 'Rarely comest thou spirit of delight.' That was me singing this time last year; and sang so poignantly that I have never forgotten it."
Sigmund told me later that he had never read Virginia Woolf.
I believed him and it no longer seemed strange.
Though "A Room of One's Own" most closely approaches Virginia in the flesh, I remain partial to "The
Common Readers" particularly to her essay, "The Russian Point of View."
Here it seems, in describing Dostoevsky's writing, she describes her own:
"It is all the same to him whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not
restrained by barriers. It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others ... nothing is outside
Dostoevsky's province, and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvelous, terrible, oppressive – the human soul."
"Her words are very strange," Aldous Huxley once said.
"They're very beautiful, aren't they?” he wrote. “But one gets a curious feeling from them. She sees with incredible clarity, but always as through a sheet of plate glass. Her books are not immediate. They're very puzzling to me."
Yet there remains that incredible clarity.
And there remains Vanessa writing to Madge Vaughn about Virginia in 1904:
"She is really quite well now – except that she does not sleep very well – and is inclined to do too much
in some ways ... she ought not to walk very far or for a very long time alone.
"... Now she goes out before beginning to write in the morning for one-half an hour alone ..."
And there remains that final walk into the River Ouse, 28 March 1941.
She wrote, before going out this time. "I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we cannot go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time ..."
Then, she took a stone, placed it in her pocket, walked alone into the river and drowned like Ophelia,
leaving our sight, but never our minds.
Yes, "Virginia walked into the sea." But before she did she pushed the light of the language a little
further against the darkness."
"Rarely comest thou, spirit of delight."
E-mail Gary Peterson at
{mos_sb_discuss:5}
- Details
- Written by: Lake County News Reports
How to resolve AdBlock issue?