“sparing or economical with regard to money or food”.
I believe Emily feared a man of frugal speech due to the fact that so much could remain unknown about the person, that they might remain a mystery or even be superior in some way. Her last line states :
“I fear that He is Grand.”
I interpret a man or woman of “frugal speech” as one who says as little as necessary and/or weighs his/her words carefully before spending/speaking them, especially in non-intimate company. This type of person might appear aloof or taciturn to others at first, and is more than likely to be a thoughtful introvert. How did I come to these conclusions, you might ask? Because they describe me! I have always loved words and could often be found perusing dictionaries as a child. An avid and curious reader, I to this day, keep a litttle notebook of new words I’ve come upon, looked up, and learned. You won’t find me trying to use them in my speech to impress anyone though.
Words are cheap as the saying goes, and cheaper still when they are used superfulously by someone droning on and on about something with the obvious intention of impressing others with their “50 cent words”. In my younger days, I willingly boarded quite a few beautiful word boats only to find myself in metaphorical deserts with people whose extravagant, yet often empty words impressed and lulled me into smoke and mirrors situations.
You can Google hundreds of quotes about silence, but one of my favorites is this Arabic proverb:
Older and wiser now, I know that silence scares some people, but it doesn’t bother me. In fact, I believe it to be essential to find balance in our increasingly noisy world and I rather treasure it because there is so much to be found in it. In the outdoors we find the beautiful, awe inspiring sounds of nature and wherever we experience silence we can utilize it to begin to examine our own thoughts and emotions and increase our mindfulness and self awareness.
I’ll leave you with a parting thought that perhaps might spur you to seek your own intimate adventure with silence.
“There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling.” –Erich Segal
I ardently agree with Emily that beauty simply IS, its cause unidentifiable. Of course the beauty we are both referring to (and I’m assuming, since I can’t ask her) is the natural untouched beauty of the earth and all things natural in it. But it might also be the beauty we each see through our own particular lenses that could be referenced here. The judgement of beauty is said to be “in the eye of the beholder”* therefore existing in our individual minds, and I don’t disagree.
When a tree falls in the woods and no person is around to hear the noise made, the sound still occurred and existed. Similarly, I have proposed that an unviewed object’s beauty is not lessened by the fact that it goes unviewed. Unappreciated, yes, but still, its “beauty IS”.
There are so many types of natural beauty in the world that we could begin an adventure to seek them all out, and never complete the journey, for it abounds everywhere. In my humble opinion, that’s exactly how we should live our lives though, hunting for the beauty in everything, everywhere, consciously, all the time. In some ways, and sadly increasingly, it’s actually a basic and necessary survival skill, given the fact that all kinds of ugliness coexists in our world as well.
Emily never ventured far from her home to seek beauty, but she sought it out all around her and appreciated its myriad of expressions in nature and in the written and spoken word. I think I’ll follow her example.
*Most sources attribute the first use of the modern-day expression to Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton) who wrote a number of books under the pseudonym of “The Duchess,” and, in her 1878 work Molly Bawn, wrote “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
The Carol and Emily Project 