Hello and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast about books, beauty, and music. So make yourself a cup of tea, sit down and let's begin.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free,

therefore they want to do things repeated and unchanged.

They always say, do it again, and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. Perhaps God is strong

enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, do it again to the sun and every evening, do it again

to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes

every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal

appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we.

Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to Speaking with Joy. You may have noticed that we had a rather unexpected

furlough in this year's season. And let me say that this was an unexpected furlough for you and for me.

This came as a result of the fact that I have two large projects that are always looming. One is the great fun of putting together these

podcasts and sharing them with you. And the other is the constant exciting but also overwhelming

reality of writing a PhD. And over the last several weeks, I have been indeed overwhelmed by

that project. So I had several podcast episodes that were planned out that I was

going to record for you, but I kept on not having quite enough time to throw myself into them

in the same way that I wanted to. So I thought rather than making a half-hearted episode,

I would save those episodes for later when I had more time to record them, take the two weeks off and throw myself

into writing as much as I could of this chapter of my PhD. Because you see, I have another chapter

of my PhD due July 8th, which is actually kind of an exciting thing because that means I will be

60% done with writing the PhD. And writing is kind of comes after thing because that means I will be 60% done with writing the PhD and writing

is kind of comes after you've already done the work so I'm getting so close really hopefully

towards next year a graduation date and so I hope you will all be patient with me for having had

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