Can you feel the world turn upside down?

I want to return to the rather cryptic post I made in April about Christ's resurrection and elaborate on the idea which dominated my thought process this Easter season. Sometimes we fail to remember that Easter really is all about celebrating the staggering event of the Resurrection. The same phrase kept returning to me during that season: "Can you feel the world turn upside down?"

"It was the Water Rat!"

One of the great delights of summer is the opportunity to explore the literary world at whim, rather than abiding by the constraints of syllabuses. Despite the business of some of these weeks (and, indeed, the apathy of others), I've been able to take advantage of this opportunity quite a bit recently, reading books I wouldn't ordinarily pick up during the school year. This venture seems to have thrust me into the territory of non-fiction, a country I'm rather too inclined to neglect. At present, I'm perusing Simon Winchester's fascinating book, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. While the book as a whole has proven both intrigueing and incredibly informative, the highlight for me has been a minor digression in the book's second chapter, which reveals that the inspiration for the character of the Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows was "the half-mad scholar--gypsy who was secretary of the Philological Society, Frederick Furnivall" (38).