Book Awards – 2024

One year ago, I said that I was especially looking forward to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, a biography of Gen. Longstreet, Charles Williams's Many Dimensions (an old favorite), the rest of Shirer's Third Reich, and, of course, Dickens (Great Expectations and Pickwick Papers this year). Most of these books campaigned hard in the last three or four weeks for Academy votes, and some of them will find that their efforts have been rewarded. The red carpet is out. The electricity is in the air. Welcome to the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2024!

Author of the Reread Book that Most Contradicted My Memory: Charles Dickens
The Inimitable always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. The melancholy Great Expectations is always a beautiful chiaroscuro painting, a hearty feast with bitter herbs, and a best friend with special needs all rolled up into one. I know I’ll enjoy greatness every time I pick it up to reread it, and it never disappoints. Pickwick Papers, on the other hand, I had remembered as a good but relatively shallow book with a string of forgettably silly episodes. But once Sam Weller, heir to Sancho Panza and harbinger of Samwise Gamgee, comes on the scene, the book gains direction and develops a good pour of stout underneath the head of foam.

Best Reread in History: Herodotus, The Histories
I was worried back in January that I would forget about Herodotus by the time the Book Awards came around and that he would lose to a historian whose book was both written and read more recently, and who probably won a Pulitzer Prize. But then I remembered that I can grant one award for the best new read and one for the best reread. Congrats, Herodotus!

Best New Read in History: James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations
It just now occurred to me that I read both a book called Great Expectations and book called Grand Expectations in the same year. It seems crazy that I could have been so unobservant, but it’s true. And so now my head is swimming with the idea that the two books tell the same story. Dickens tells the story of Pip, who wants to live out the British Dream of becoming a gentleman, and then gets disappointed. Patterson tells the story of the people who survived the Depression and beat two aggressive totalitarian empires, people who wanted to live the American Dream of making a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining, more exciting world for their children through free choice, ingenuity, and hard work, only to be disappointed by Vietnam, lying leaders, a Generation Gap, and stagflation. Patterson’s book did indeed win a Pulitzer Prize and is, I think, the second best volume of the very good Oxford History of the United States.

Best New Read in Fiction: Jules Verne, Mysterious Island
The pre-Watergate American child in me read Mysterious Island and marveled at this motley group of shipwreck survivors learning to get along and striving to build a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining world for themselves through ingenuity and hard work. I had no idea when I scheduled this book that it would be the sequel to last year’s Children of Captain Grant, and I had no idea when I had read half the book that it would prove to be also a sequel to another one of Verne’s greatest books. The experience took me right back to the time when reading was the most joyful: summer days when I had nothing to do but sit alone in a cool basement (maybe with a 1970s-formula, real-sugar Pepsi in a chilled glass bottle!) reading a great book for hours on end.

Most Disappointing Read: E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
Lewis liked Eddison, and Tolkien said this book influenced him. But Eddison was a man who thought three men named Juss, Spitfire, and Goldry Bluzco could be brothers. What kind of language, what kind of culture, what kind of father could conceivably give siblings such incongruent names? They live in a world where everyone constantly clashes and wars as much as those names, and they like it that way. Thoroughly unpleasant.

Best Poetry: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, first third
Granted, I read very little poetry this year. But, although I liked Auden’s poetry, it was very hard for me to understand, so I have to go with a book that could also win an award for best epic. At some point I need to give Shakespeare this award.

Best New Read in Drama: August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
Family, ghosts, and a woman whose painful memories keep her from playing the piano she loves. All three strike chords (pun very much intended) with me. I just found out last week that Denzel Washington’s son has made a movie of this play!

Best Biography: Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet
Varon revealed a man almost entirely different from what I assumed he was and explained a lot about the way we commemorate and teach about the Civil War.

Best New Read in Religion: A Four-Way Tie
It was way too hard to decide between Augustine’s On the Trinity, Abelard’s Yes and No, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, so I’m just going to put in the extra expense and get statuettes made for each of them.

Best Offroading: Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters
The road to China’s inclusion in the modern world was paved with questions about its language. How can the Chinese language be typed? In what order should the Chinese characters be arranged so Chinese titles can be found in a card catalog? What numbers will represent the Chinese characters in digital communication, and which version of the characters will be represented? Every chapter presents a new conundrum that made me say, “Oh, yeah! How do they do that?” Honorable mention goes to Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” It’s a short story; maybe I’ll give it a micro statuette.

Best Reread: Charles Williams, Many Dimensions
I already gave Orlando Furioso an award, so I’m going with Many Dimensions here, a good supernatural thriller with a good message. God’s power is not a commodity to be distributed, sold, patented, used, and consumed. We are not the consumers in this relationship, God is, for He is the Consuming Fire. Now that I think of it, I’m going to give this book an award for Religion as well. So many extra statuettes!

Janus, for whom January is named, had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. At least that’s what I’ve been told, and it’s been my understanding that the respectable fellow’s unusual anatomy lies behind our habit of both contemplating the old and anticipating the new at the turn of the year. (I highly suspect that the cause and effect are reversed – that our friend took on the extra visage after he learned of our quite natural custom.) What 2025 reading am I most anticipating? Graham Greene’s Quiet American, Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Pascal’s Pensées stand out upon a quick glance at my list for the next twelve months. Will any of these win awards? It all depends on how the Academy that lives in my head votes!

I hope that your New Year’s Day is filled with happy memories of books read this year and fond hopes for books you plan to read in 45 squared. See you then!

Year-End Round-Up

My blogging hasn’t kept up with my reading this last month, so I’ll need to cover three books in one post. In July, I said I was hopeful that I would have happy things to say about Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, Williams’s Many Dimensions, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. I did indeed enjoy all five of those books immensely, but I’ve only blogged about three so far. So I’ll say something about the other two and toss in some comments about William James for free.

I’m so glad I finally read Julian of Norwich: the Revelations are so very happy! God is our friend, she learned in her visions, and cannot be angry with those He has redeemed. In a beautifully quaint phrase, she says that God displays towards us “abundant largesse . . . through his marvellous courtesy.” We worry about sin more than God does, she says; He knows it had to happen, and He dealt with it. Repent, move on, and rejoice! “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” If you get an edition like mine, you will see that two versions of the book have survived: a short version and a long version. It’s mildly interesting to think about which might have come first and why Julian (or someone else) thought there should be a second version. But just go ahead and read the “long” version: it’s only about 150 pages long.

The last time I read Charles Williams's Many Dimensions, eleven years ago, I wrote in my personal notes only these thirteen characters: “pp. 118, 128.” I just checked my copy of the book to see what happens on those pages, and I have to say I don’t have any idea why I recommended page 118 to myself. But 128 does get at the heart of the matter. In this marvelous book of, well, um . . . , marvels, the Stone from the crown of Solomon finds its way to England. The Stone, marked with the Tetragrammaton, has some of the properties of God and, in fact, seems to be an inlapition (to coin a term parallel to “incarnation” while using the Latin for “stone” in place of the word for “flesh”) of the Divinity, showing clear manifestations of the powers of teleportation, telepathy, self-multiplication, and healing. Some people don’t believe what they see; others, following the Sanhedrin of Jesus’ time, believe what’s happening but think it can only cause trouble if word gets out; and yet others see the Stone and its powers as mere commodities to be sold or phenomena to be studied for personal enrichment. Alone in all of England, Lord Arglay and Chloe Burnett see the Stone as a divine object expecting fealty and sacrifice, and on p. 128, they decide to “choose to believe.” And by that bit of insightful phraseology, Williams indicates that the type of belief the Stone demands is more than mere acknowledgment of the truth; after all, the demons believe yet tremble. Belief in the Stone requires a personal choice and commitment.

Having enjoyed small pieces of James’s Principles of Psychology over the course of fifteen years or so, I knew I had to read The Varieties of Religious Experience. I didn’t know what I was in for, but I was certain it would be interesting. The first interesting surprise was to find out that the book wasn’t 140 pages long, as my planning notes said, but about 530, so I had to read a bit faster than I thought I would in order to finish before the holidays. I can’t begin to do justice to 530 fascinating pages in a one-paragraph review, but I’ll say a word about one cautionary point. James says to his audience (the book consists of transcripts of lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh) at the outset that studying religious experiences from a psychologist’s point of view can never prove, nor does he wish to suggest, that God is not involved in the experience, just as no amount of textual criticism can ever prove that God didn’t superintend the composition of the Bible. One of his conclusions is that visions, callings, divine assurance, etc. come from the subconscious part of the mind (he prefers other terms such as the “fringe” or the “extraliminal”), but again he assures his audience that he doesn’t mean to say that locating the immediate source of the experiences in one part of the mind precludes a prior, divine source working on the subconscious. Someday I’m going to have to do some experimentation with reading “subconscious” anytime I see the human spirit mentioned in the Bible and thinking “spirit” everywhere I see the subconscious (or “fringe”) mentioned in psychological writing.

That does it for the regular posts this year. I’ll be back in a few days with the yearly awards ceremony, and then it’s on to 2025, when, among other reading adventures, I’ll explore some more Thomas Hardy and the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, finish up The Forsyte Saga, and revisit two novels by the Great Man himself, one near the top in my ranking and one very near the bottom in everybody’s ranking. Stay tuned to find out which two books I mean and what I think about everything else!

I hope your Merry Christmas brings you some new books!

Read Your Notes!

My wife and I love to watch The Amazing Race. In this show, a ten-time Emmy winner for Best Competition Series, teams travel around the globe and perform challenges that might involve learning a location’s traditional dance, participating in a local business like food delivery or denture fitting (!), or matching portraits of historic figures with living models appropriately dressed and coifed. It’s an inspiring travelogue with the added bonus of human interest and competition.

But occasionally during an episode, the viewer’s almost continuous sense of awe is interrupted by frustration as a team heads out on a challenge without picking up the required equipment or hails a tuk-tuk when the clue explicitly says to proceed on foot to the next destination. The most frequently uttered phrase on the lips of the Amazing Race afficionado: READ YOUR CLUE!

I recently finished Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion for the third time in my life. I remembered (incorrectly, it turns out) not understanding it before and amazed myself at how much I was able to absorb in this book by the most abstruse of my favorite authors. But today I read what I wrote eleven years ago after my previous encounter with the book. I appeared to understand even more then and recorded some very smart, very helpful observations. Why didn’t I review what I had written before rereading the book? Chapter 15 would have made so much more sense!

Hmmm. Am I going to share any of those smart, helpful ideas with you, reader? No. Today’s post is only about admitting my intellectual frailty and publicly scolding myself to READ YOUR NOTES!

Speaking of Being Expected to Know History . . .

In my last post, I noted that Winston Churchill expects readers of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples already to know the outline of the history he recounts so that he can spend most of his effort putting his own spin on it. I opened my next book only to find this dynamic even more applicable: Charles Williams clearly expects his readers to know the history of Christendom and of Europe before taking on his The Descent of the Dove.

The passage that most clearly shows this assumption comes near the end, where Williams introduces one important personage, without naming him, simply as "the most famous man in all Europe," a man who cried "Ecrasez l'Infame." Now, I recognized Voltaire in the description. But I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t read about Voltaire and this motto only last year in the Durants' history. Did any of my readers recognize the man by the description?

Williams is hard to read in other ways as well. He had a peculiar view of the Church and of the world and described them constantly in terms of “coinherence and exchange.” And he wrote as if we all knew what he meant by those terms. (Blogspot’s editor doesn’t know the word “coinherence”!) And he has a fondness for identifying biblical personages (including the Persons of the Trinity) by foreign forms of their names. Page 1 of The Descent of the Dove includes this intriguing passage: “The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the descent of the Paraclete.” I like it, but after reading two-hundred pages of this kind of writing, I can’t say I truly understood more than about 75% of it.

What I did understand, though, I found inspirational – the last point especially. Belief is not exactly knowledge, and the Church flirts with pride and hatred when she treats people who don’t believe in Christ as if they don’t know as much as she does. (And every denomination within the Church runs the same dangers with regard to their attitudes towards Christians who don’t believe exactly the same.) What Christendom needs in order to be again “close to the Descent of the Dove,” he says, is to “feel intensely within itself the three strange energies which we call contrition and humility and doctrine.” I am called to be humble and contrite, as are all other Christians; what makes me think that we are not called corporately to feel, express, and act on communal humility and contrition?

By the way, why don’t Americans know about the most famous man in eighteenth-century Europe and his crusade? Is it that we – No, let me correct that. Is it that the historians of our grandparents’ time decided that the most important fact about eighteenth-century Europe is that this country made a break from it, so that we Americans wouldn’t have to worry about the need for Voltaire’s crusade? Or do we think that we don’t need to learn about Europe’s past problems because we have found the proper solution to all Europe’s problems in our missiles and aircraft carriers?

*sigh* We will be close to the Descent of the Dove only when we feel contrition and humility.

Book Awards -- 2019

The good old Earth has spun around the good old Sun once more, and so again it’s time for me to present my awards for some good old books.

President of the Awards Academy: Charles Dickens
In 2019, I read one of my favorite Dickens novels, Dombey and Son; and one of my least favorite, Barnaby Rudge. I read A Christmas Carol about two-and-a-half times in preparation for a series of adult Sunday School classes I taught this last month. And I revisited Cricket on the Hearth for the first time in over thirty years. Dickens is so especially good that even some passages of Barnaby were better than anything I read by anyone else this year. Fortunately, the Great Man took himself out of the running for these awards so others would have a chance.

Most Confusing Reread: Charles Williams, Descent into Hell
Ten years ago, I wrote to myself that this book was like a firehose of stew: most of it went down my neck not understood, but what landed in my mouth was hearty and nutritious. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about Charles Williams, including the fact that his friend and champion, C. S. Lewis, thought that his figures were sometimes so individual, so impossible for the reader to unravel, as to risk being literary mistakes. So I may have swallowed more this time around, but the vegetables and sauce left on my neck just felt like a mess!

Best History: Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty
Every chapter of this history of the United States from the end of the Revolution until 1815 was full of surprising nuance. The most interesting point, made in the last chapter and led to by a thread that started on the first page, stated that neither Jefferson nor Hamilton, the two rivals on Washington’s cabinet, holding two rival agendas for the country, got their way in the end. Hamilton’s vision of entrepreneurs borrowing from banks and inventing new manufactures to trade internally certainly became more of a reality than Jefferson’s nation of agrarian gentlemen. But the people who created these businesses were not the educated elite Hamilton foresaw but common, middle-class citizens – sometimes even the farmers that Jefferson so loved. I also know that if you write to Gordon Wood with praise for his book, he’ll write back to you!

Best Pseudo-History: Ferdowsi, Shahnameh
When I read the first half of this book around ten years ago, I loved the legends. But within pages of starting the second half last January, the legendary heroes gave way, and the living legend, Alexander, came on to the scene. From then on, there were far fewer magical feats and, the editor assures me, more of something that approximates what archeology can corroborate. No more women with bodies like cedars that touch the star Canopus, but I still loved reading the ancient stories from an area we all need to understand more.

Best Short Story: Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Lantern Bearers”
OK, it may have been the only short story I read this year. But I thought about it often and found encouragement in its brilliant image.

Best Theology: Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity
Hooker argues for a Church that recognizes difference of opinion without giving up central beliefs such as those in the Nicene Creed, and he does it all without calling his enemies childish, stubborn, or traitorous. It is such a welcome relief to find that Christians can be Christian.

Best Mystery: Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise
Except that Harriet and Bunter don't appear, this is the perfect Peter Wimsey mystery! First, the book lacks the mistakes of the Wimsey novels written just before it. No onslaught of times. No onslaught of essential information in chapter 1. The hidden information is there and doesn't need to be recalled in detail in order to understand the solution. But the novel has plenty of positive virtues, as well. Peter's athletic prowess and sense of fun comes out more than ever. Dialogs between people of various classes and professions are full of interesting detail. And the book is replete with philosophical ruminations about the ethics of marketing. Is advertising, as Jack Gilbert said of poetry, a kind of lying, necessarily?

Best Longfellow Poem: Longfellow, “The Ladder of St. Augustine”
I wrote earlier this year about “The Bridge of Cloud.” But today, partly to mention something new, and partly because my year has been filled with such stress (a year that ends tonight!), I’ll give the award to “The Ladder.” (Longfellow can be upset if he wants to, but he still gets the statuette.)
            [Do not] deem the irrevocable Past
                  As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
            If, rising on its wrecks, at last
                  To something nobler we attain.

A lot happened this year, and I barely finished my reading list for 2019. There wasn’t even time to blog about anything in September, October, and November. But now the awards are handed out, and tomorrow, once the after-ceremony parties are over (Dorothy Sayers’s is usually pretty good), I’ll get started on a New Year of reading and a New Year of blogging. I hope your New Year is full of some good old books!

Book Awards – 2018

Because Americans love awards, on this last day of 2018, as I have at the end of each of the last several years, I offer you my list of encomiums on the highlights of my twenty-second year of planned reading.

Most Deserving of His Own Category: Charles Dickens
Yes, once again, I enjoyed Dickens so much (The Old Curiosity Shop on this circuit of the merry sun), it just wouldn’t be fair to others in the fiction category if they had to compete with the Inimitable.

Best Reread, Fiction: White, The Once and Future King
And since Dickens has his own category, E. B. White is able graciously to accept this well deserved award. When I first read this Arthurian work, I thought White made up a lot of the zanier material to keep it all a little irreverently weird. After all, in the first part, “The Sword in the Stone,” Merlin lives backwards, turns Wart into a fish, and transports himself by accident to Bermuda. Oh, yeah: and Arthur is called “Wart.” So naturally I thought White made up episodes like Lancelot rescuing a girl from a bath that she had been unable to get out of for five years. But now that I’ve read so many of the original Arthurian sources, I can say, Nope, that’s right from Malory. It just hadn’t been in the children’s version by Lanier that I had read.

Best New (to me) Poetry: Horace, Odes
Speaking of Sidney Lanier, I had assumed for years that I would enjoy all of his poetry as much as I did his King Arthur and the handful of his poems I had read before. But on the whole they disappointed me and certainly didn’t stand up to the Odes by the ancient Roman. Whether singing to the gods themselves, country life, drinking, or a lowly fellow whose girlfriend no longer likes him, the activity and character and presence of the gods is always in Horace’s mind, as are geography and flora and fauna and weather. Here is a man whose mental world is made constantly richer by the ever-present context of both nature and supernature.

Best New Read, Fiction: Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister
This novel of wealth and ethical dilemma in the highest political offices seemed terribly relevant.

Best History: Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny
I learned amazing things on every page about the last two-hundred years in Italy. My only disappointment is that alongside Napoleon, schools, rebels, the Cosa Nostra, bandits, kings, railroads, poetry, Fascists, economics, and football, Duggan didn’t have much to say about food.

Weirdest Drama: Charles Williams, Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury
You’d think that Tom Stoppard would win this award with his multiple timelines sharing the stage simultaneously and his plays-within-plays that aren’t really plays. But Williams’s unique (and uniquely opaque) poetic vision coupled with a personified death wins out. In fact, it received 14 of 19 votes in this category, many of which were cast in the Stoppard plays.

Best New Read, Religion: Justin Martyr, “Hortatory Address to the Greeks”
Justin read the classics and taught Greek philosophy. Then he became a Christian and continued to teach philosophy, even opening up his own school in Rome. His basic point in the Address is that no ancient follower of Greek philosophy should have any trouble accepting the truth of Christianity since Plato and company lead us right to the brink. The Roman authorities did have trouble, though, and killed him for his faith.

Best New Read, Nonfiction: C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Since it changed the way I think about reading, I should actually just call it the best new book, period.

Three Others Who Need to Be Mentioned Without Unfairly Competing for Prizes
(1) Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers: Beautiful, heart-wrenching, funny, exciting, and inspiring.
(2) Jane Austen, Mansfield Park: Beautiful, heart-wrenching, funny, exciting, and inspiring, except here all the swashbuckling adventure takes place within Fanny Price’s heart.
(3) Dante, The Divine Comedy: Beautiful, heart-wrenching, funny, exciting, and inspiring, except here all the adventure takes place literally everywhere in the physical, spiritual, and moral universe.

Who will receive awards in the coming year? Robert Louis Stevenson? Isaac Asimov? Evelyn Waugh? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Abu ‘l-Qasim Firdowsi Tusi? Come back in a year, and we’ll find out together!

Dante, Charles Williams, and Echoes of the City

When I first read Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions, it immediately became one of my favorite books. (It remains high on my list and has grown with each rereading.) So, like all readers discovering a new favorite author, I looked at the other titles by Williams with great hope. Now, hope usually sets one up for disappointment. (I waited fifteen years to find out that young Obi-Wan needs to negotiate with a Trade Federation?!) But when I turned to other Charles Williams books, I mostly just experienced confusion. The little bits I understood, I enjoyed. But what to make of visions of masses of hands? Women who are also local hills?

A few years ago, I got a huge assist in understanding Williams through the commentary by his friend C. S. Lewis on Williams’s Arthurian poetry. (Any of you wanting insight on the relationship of this pair, Williams’s outlook on life and the the meaning of the universe, or modern takes on Welsh Arthurian legend should read Taliesin Through Logres. But start with part III, Lewis’s part, and let him be your Virgil as he guides you through the labyrinth of parts I and II all out of order.) Two revelations that stand out in my memory are Williams’s love of Dante and his view of the City as a symbol for divinely endowed human fellowship. In fact, as I read Dorothy L. Sayers’s commentary on The Divine Comedy earlier this year, I became even more aware of the connection between these two themes, as Williams seems to have picked up his idea of City directly from Dante.

I grew up thinking of cities as, frankly, evil places. I saw them as ugly, dirty, poor, and full of crime. As a child, it didn’t occur to me that my vision was one of a corrupted city that could be redeemed. I simply thought it was obvious that when my family left our suburban home for a vacation, we would get away from people and go to beautiful wilderness locations. Dante and Williams, though, while of course recognizing God’s good presence in National Parks, would, if they could talk to me directly, warn me about my urge to get away from people. People are meant to interact, to be sociable, to trade and do business, to love and share with one another. For both, the emblem of the culmination of this purpose is the well working City. (Obviously, I could add Plato, Augustine, and Dickens to the crowd of favorite authors who have worked so hard to get me to see the importance of the City, but today my topic is Dante and Williams.)

This morning I started my third reading of Williams’s All Hallows Eve, my first after Taliesin Through Logres. And Dante’s presence couldn’t have been clearer. Lester Furnival finds herself newly dead (although she doesn’t know it for the first five pages) in a strangely empty London. The City (I’m following Williams’s habit of capitalizing the word) stands silent as a result of Lester’s pattern of life. She admits to herself that she has hated everyone but her husband, Richard. Lester, thy will be done. But the seeds of human compassion lie in the soil of her attitude toward Richard. It isn’t truly love, says the narrator, but at least needing and wanting are on the right road. I thought of Dante putting the illicit lovers in the highest circle of Inferno because, he says, at least their sin was directed toward others. But, as Sayers points out, Paolo and Francesca are blown about incessantly in the winds of Hell, unable to interact. (Traitors, who destroy the fellowship of the city altogether are put in the lowest circle.) Similarly, Lester sees the still-alive Richard briefly but can’t touch him.

The examples go on. Lester begins her spiritual journey of redemption in the place of the dead. She looks at the stars. She even references the famous sign on the gates of Inferno in her fears that she will find the città dolente if she goes to an Underground station. Dante is everywhere in the first chapter.

I don’t remember exactly where it all goes, but I think Lester has a Marleyesque mission of connecting with a few select people among the living as a way of spreading the light of love. In any case, the first chapter ends with Lester taking the hand of her friend, killed in the same accident, a sign that she recognizes her need for human interaction. I also believe I remember that the book involves a painter who creates a nightmarish view of the City. I’ll be interested to see if the artwork corresponds better with Dante’s Inferno or my childhood impression of cities.

By the way, the Bible begins in a garden but ends in a city. I should have seen that as a child. But the New Jerusalem has at least one park, an area of amazing twelve-fruited trees along the River. Perhaps all tastes in travel can be satisfied in Heaven.

Book Awards – 2014

Happy New Year’s Eve! If I don’t publish the awards for Year 8 today, I’ll be a year late! So let’s get to it.

Hall of Fame: Charles Dickens
I reread my favorite book, this year: A Tale of Two Cities. So, as usual, I just placed Dickens in his own category so no one else has to compete with him.

Best New Read, Philosophy: Thomas Reid
Reid answered a question that had needled me for almost thirty years. Locke and Hume came to doubt many things because of the images we see. Our thought, they said, is thought of a picture, and that picture, in a second relationship, is a picture of a thing; how do we know, they asked, that these images represent things faithfully or that the things exist at all? Reid’s solution: to doubt the existence of the images themselves. My mental activity is not the sight of a mediating image which itself represents (or doesn’t) an object. My mental activity is that image, and that image is the thought of the visible object. Changes of perspective, rather than making us doubt the reliability of our senses as Locke and Hume argued, prove their reliability by following the rules of geometry.

Best New Read, Poetry: G. K. Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse
I had to read it twice, but the second time was magical. Alfred the Great asks a vision of Mary to show him what will happen on earth, since knowledge of Heaven lies beyond him. You have it all backwards, replies Mary: any schoolgirl can know about Heaven, but God has placed tomorrow’s earthly events outside our reach. We must simply do what’s right without knowing if it will achieve results. Alfred ends up successful, but like the chalk horse, his success will fade to oblivion if people don’t continue to refresh the memory.

Best New Read, Fiction: Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset
As if the first five books in the series weren’t joy enough, the sixth book brings back all the characters and stories and makes them all glow with twice as much warmth of wisdom, wit, and cheer.

Best New Read, Theology: Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind into God
I had once before tried this book and couldn’t make any sense out of it. This time, it all fell into place. Bonaventure outlines a plan for mental activity at six levels, showing how even the most basic daily thought about the most mundane things can reveal God and bring us closer to Him.

Best Comparative Read: Electra x 2
While Sophocles presents some interesting alternatives, he simply accepts the idea that Apollo might rightly tell Orestes to kill his mother. But Euripides, struggling with belief, has Castor and Pollux tell Orestes that Apollo’s command itself was evil. Euripides gets better with every play!

Best Second Visit: Williams, The Greater Trumps
Yes, I already said that Bonaventure greatly improved on rereading. But I only read a few pages of that one the first time. I read all of The Greater Trumps several years ago, but I was feverish, so Williams’s mystical narration was two times as confusing. This time around, he was only obscure, not opaque. And I received wisdom from watching the dance of the figures and smiling with the Fool.

Lowest Wait-to-Payoff Ratio: Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences
After waiting twenty years to try to finish this dense book, I had to wait one-hundred more pages before Husserl finally stated his purpose: his view of philosophical history will provide the ground for solving all philosophical problems. All. Then a few score pages later, he says he can’t solve the problem of the existence of the world. That’s a pretty big exception to “all.” He should have read Thomas Reid.

Best Answer to an Old Question: (Tie) Edward Gibbon, Julian Havil
(1) I’d heard that Gibbon wasn’t kind to Christianity in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now I see why people have said it, but it seems Gibbon really just wanted to correct some popular notions: the persecutions weren’t continuous and widespread, Constantine wasn’t all good, and Julian the Apostate wasn’t all bad. No argument here. (2) The first chapter of Julian Havil’s The Irrationals explained why Euclid teaches so much algebra with lines and shapes: he couldn’t accept the idea of irrational numbers, but he did acquiesce to the existence of incommensurable lengths.

Best Offroading: Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, Taliessen Through Logres
It’s confusing even knowing what the book is that you’re reading. It’s a book of three books, and the third book has two parts, one by Williams and one by Lewis. And then the editor says in the introduction that you should read Lewis – the last part – first and then read the rest of the volume all out of order. Then you read according to the instructions, and you find yourself immersed in the bewildering world of Charles Williams without the touches of realism that necessarily ground the novels. But Lewis’s guide makes sense of it all, opens the door to exquisitely moving poetry, explains Charles Williams in a way that makes sense of his poems and his novels, and outlines Lewis’s basic method of poetic criticism. Fans of Lewis and Williams: this last part is a must read! Why didn’t anyone tell me before?

And that wraps up the year. Tomorrow Year 9 officially begins (although I’ve already started the first two items on the list). May our New Year be filled with great reading!

A Roller Coaster of a Read

I’ve been looking forward to revisiting Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps for many years now. If so especially eager for this one, why did I place it as late as year 8 when I first drew up The Plan? I can only answer myself by saying that I look at the Tolkien/Williams category of my list and wonder what else I would have delayed to make room for it.

But I did have a special anticipation for this one. I first read it while I was in bed with the flu one time in the 90s. Now the problem is – well, it’s a beauty and a wonder if you’re in good health and a problem only if you have the mental diffuseness that comes with a fever – the problem is that Charles Williams covers his prose with a layer of mysticism. And three or four times in each book, that mystical patina digs deep down into the body of the drama where one or more characters undergo a transcendent encounter with the weird. These passages, usually five to twenty pages long, are hard to follow in the best of conditions. I generally treat them the way I treat the giant drops on a roller coaster: I tense up, realize I’m going to lose control to an overpowering force, and hang on while I enjoy the free fall knowing it will be over soon. In the semi-delirium of 102 degrees, though, I lost my grip on the lapbar of The Greater Trumps and ended up getting thrown out into the trees.

But this time, fifteen or more years later, I climbed onto the ride much better prepared to follow its track all the way to the end. Not only did I enjoy my full faculties, but just last year GAMES magazine ran a story on the history of the Tarot cards, the main prop, if you will, of this Williams fantasy. It turns out that the stories about the cards’ origin in ancient Egypt were fabricated in the nineteenth century. Their medieval or early-modern Christian provenance is actually quite clear. The Hierophant wears a Pope’s mitre and sits over the keys of Peter. The Ace of Cups is the chalice of the Lord’s Table. The Judgment involves an angel with a trumpet and bodies rising from the grave, right out of I Corinthians. The Priestess sits between two pillars marked J and B, the Jachin and Boaz of I Kings. The World is surrounded by the traditional symbols for the four gospel writers. And on and on. This knowledge made it much easier for me to buy Williams’s fictional conceit that the cards represented the eternal dance of the biblical God’s creation, that their figures were symbols or types of objects and attributes from the eternal world.

Williams had his own set of types that he drew on in writing his novels. All his stories seem to have a character of a faith so strong that it is almost sight of the Blessed: a character with a Marian acceptance of every adventure of God’s will. In The Greater Trumps, Sybil plays this role, the woman for whom “nothing is certain but everything is safe” because God is in control. They all have the young person entirely ignorant of the ways of the Lord, totally inexperienced in the supernatural, but ready to learn at each new surprise. Such is Nancy in this book. They all have the worldly skeptic with a “rational” explanation for everything (Lothair Coningsby here), the person who believes but only wants to possess the Power (Aaron), and the pagan ready to worship the Power but under the wrong name (Joanna).

Everything fell into place this time, and I felt very comfortable. The characters all seemed familiar according to their types, and the mystical cards worked well as portals to the Other Side. But halfway through, I came across the totally unexpected. The interaction with the uncanny that began around chapter 10 (magic snow storm, glowing mist, a crazy cat, visions of towers made out of hands, a guy who can’t feel his own head – you know, the usual stuff) didn’t last just part of a chapter, not just one whole chapter, not even just two chapters. It went all the way to the end. This plunge of the tracks never let up. I definitely stayed in the car this time, but I was pretty rattled by the time it pulled back into the station. Well, I’ve scheduled the book once more for the next decade, and I’ll be even more prepared for the next ride.

Many More Dimensions

I’ve written before about the power of hype to shape my reaction to something. To give a couple of cinematic examples (and to show my age fairly precisely), after hearing so much about Ishtar being history’s worst movie, I enjoyed it. On the other hand, after hearing so many positive things about Dances with Wolves, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. It works on me so well, that I get concerned sometimes when I come back to a book I’ve enjoyed before. With my memory touting the book so highly, I fear that I’ll become the victim to my own hype and end up finding that the book couldn’t possibly live up to the reputation I’ve built up for it in my own mind. But Charles Williams's Many Dimensions did not disappoint at all. It’s been a couple of weeks now since I finished it, but I can’t let it go without saying more: just two things that I love about the book that I can’t quite find anywhere else.

Okay, the first aspect appears in other books, but they’re all by the same author, and that’s the way Williams makes the familiar exotic and puts the supernatural back in what seems merely cultural. For instance, in this very Christian book, the most devout believer is a Persian Muslim. No English person in the novel seems ever to have read the book of Kings or to have heard of the boy who slew the giant with his sling or of his son who showed his wisdom by threatening to split a baby in half. So when they hear of Suleiman ben Daood, they encounter a bigger-than-life potentate wrapped in the mystical glory of ancient times and faraway lands. Watching through their eyes as we read, we too encounter Solomon son of David for the first time. The Persian speaks of the Mercy, the Peace, and the Protection. The definite article and initial capital lifts each characteristic to divine status and brings the reader, through a few marks of ink on paper, to an understanding of a God Who Is What He Has. The Muslim even hints at the basis of the Trinity by explaining that “the Way to the Stone is in the Stone.” The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What I enjoyed most this time through, I had completely forgotten about: the mystical Stone’s own personality and mysterious ways. The supernatural focus of the plot is a small Stone that embodies the power of God. Inscribed with the tetragrammaton, it can transport people bodilessly, reveal the thoughts of others, and heal the sick. Characters may argue over who owns this marvelous, wonder-working Stone, who has paid for the Stone, or who has rights to the Stone. But after all, it is just a small stone, and small stones can be lost. While one of the best characters, Cecilia Sheldrake, rides down a country lane in an open roadster, admiring the Stone her husband bought her – or rather admiring herself for being the one person in the world who deserves to have such a powerful object – the Stone flies out of her hand. She and her husband search for the Stone, but perhaps they should have asked themselves whether the Stone was searching for them. Along comes Oliver Doncaster, who, with no notion of what’s going on, spies the stone immediately, picks it up, and walks away. When he arrives home, his landlady’s dying mother rises from her bed completely healed. Most of the characters have strong intentions concerning what to do with the Stone, but in the end human intentions have very little to do with what the Stone itself does.

Writing a Christian novel is such a terribly tricky business. Portraying spiritual states faithfully requires a careful eye and an imaginative eloquence. But sooner or later, if the novel is to be a novel, some character’s spiritual state has to change, and spiritual change, if the novel’s theology be sound, must come from God. How can the author presume to know what God would do in the situation he has subcreated? I’ve wondered sometimes if the inclusion of God as a character in a story, even if only implicitly, doesn’t flirt with violating the Commandment against likenesses. What I do know, though, is that I remember no other novel that displays more clearly the principle that those who strive for control of their lives never change, while those who do change do so only by submitting their wills to the Stone. Whoever loses his life will preserve it.

Charles Williams’s Twist on Time Travel

Like a lot of readers who grew up in the last century and a half, I love time-travel stories. But ever since I was a kid, I’ve laughed at the literary and (for obvious reasons) cinematic cliché that time travelers take their clothes with them. If I remember correctly, Wells’s time traveler took along everything within the volume if the machine, air included. But his invisible man didn’t take anything else with him into invisibility: an observer could see even the food he ate, sitting in his stomach but apparently floating in air, until his body assimilated it and it became him. So why couldn’t his time traveler show up in the past naked and gasping for air?

In Many Dimensions, Charles Williams explores the idea that a time traveler doesn’t even take his body, let alone his clothes. The time travel situation, though, involves a complication that might make more sense if I explain a different kind of travel first. The plot of Many Dimensions centers on a stone that embodies the power of God and contains all of space, time, and personality within it. People who hold the stone can will themselves into different locations, times, and minds. Those who use the stone to read other people’s minds travel mentally to their target’s location; the traveler’s body conveniently remains behind, preferably seated comfortably while its captain leaves the ship momentarily. The mind free from material underpinnings, then, is able to observe what the target personality observes. But the mind traveler in the book doesn’t become the other person; he retains his own train of thought and knows it as his own, while simultaneously observing the other’s train of thought with some kind of objective distance.

Observing the train of thought reminded me of the Principles of Psychology of William James, in which I read last year that the train of thought is the thinking thing. There is no higher observer, James says, that constitutes the “I” that has the thoughts. “I” is the thought. But Williams remains consistent with his psychological model involving an ego-mind dichotomy, and the dichotomy causes some interesting problems when people try time traveling with the stone. One character who travels to the future finds first that the clock appears to have moved rather quickly, but then realizes he has memories of the intervening minutes, although the memories seem detached and hazy. It seems that Williams has both the body and the train of thought live without interruption and moves only the higher “I” ahead, causing a disturbing conflict in the character of remembering both living through and skipping over the intervening time.

Williams isn’t entirely consistent, though. One poor fellow tries to go back in time, only to live the same few minutes over and over, since each time he gets to T-Time, he again relives the choice to go back in time. His body doesn’t travel back, and he doesn’t meet himself: the usual, McFlyesque scenario. But in this case, the body disappears. No captain, no ship this time. What’s more, when the heroes of the book recover the fellow through some clever manipulations of will and thought, he doesn’t seem to have any higher self that has observed the looping train of thought, the way the person moving forward in time observes the memories of the time he skipped.

Now I can call this inconsistency, and blame Williams for not thinking it through carefully enough. Or (and since I love the book, I’m more inclined to choose door no. 2), I can say that it’s Williams’s imaginative world, and that he can have it as mysterious and unexplained as he wants. But I am disappointed that when characters use the stone for mystical, instantaneous travel through space, they take their clothes with them.

A Great Book that Hasn’t Been Written, but Should Be

The film-producer character in Argo says, “If I’m going to make a fake movie, it’s going to be an award-winning fake movie.” In a similar vein, I’d like to announce today that I’m pretending to write an award-winning novel. It’s a completely derivative book, this imaginary, award-winning novel. And the book I’m deriving it from is Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions.

In Many Dimensions, characters deal with the amazing properties of a cubic stone imprinted with the Name of God. Most of the characters see the stone as an object to possess, buy, steal, or legally confiscate. They treat the miraculous virtues of the stone as powers to be manipulated and used. Others see the stone as an incarnation – or, to coin a parallel word (as long as I’m being derivative) using the Latin word lapis, an inlapation – of God, an entity not to use but to submit to.

All of that second set of characters and some of the first discover that the tiny stone, which appears to fit in the palm of a human hand, actually holds the whole world within it. As one character observes: the stone is not in time, time is in the stone. Several characters have visions of being inside the stone. In one vision, the light in the stone radiates to become the other objects in the room. The character receiving this vision comes to realize that everything in our world exists only by the creative and sustaining power of the stone.

It’s that last vision that got me started writing my new book. I’ve experienced the presence of God in music many times. It’s not just that I’ve had a spiritual epiphany while listening to music, but that the music itself seems the very echo – a viscerally solid echo – of a primordial Sound from an immaterial dimension. Imagine being under the water in a pool and hearing the dim, muffled sound of music playing from a radio on the deck above. As the beautiful sounds coming out of the speaker plunge into the water to join you, they take on wetness. They get thicker and spread more slowly and enter your water-logged ears as the muffled, wet translation of the crisp, clear music ripping through the dry air above. Well, when I listen to music in the normal, nonswimming way, I often get the sensation that the sounds have plunged into our material world from an even drier realm, that our gross atmosphere has muffled the unimaginably coruscating music of Heaven itself.

In the opening chapter of my award-winning novel, a musicology professor named Brister McConnell has found a glassy shell on the beach of Martha’s Vineyard. (His family is rich; he could never afford to summer on the Vineyard on a musicology professor’s salary.) The shell thrills in his hand as he holds it. And when he puts it to his ear, he hears a noise whiter than the whitest white noise he’s ever heard before. The professor wants to analyze the sound with a spectrograph and finds that the mystifying shell registers frequencies beyond the capabilities of the microphone.

Prof. McConnell doesn’t run the experiment himself, of course. He has his graduate assistant, Lucy Graves, do all the work. And when Lucy puts her ear to the shell (she can’t bring herself to say that she puts the shell to her ear), she has a different experience. Rather than hearing blended noise, she finds that she can hear every frequency individually, as if an aural prism separates all the colors for her. In time, she learns that she can hear the frequencies moving from one to another, and that she can in fact focus in on individual lines of the infinite counterpoint to hear any piece of music ever played, any line ever spoken. She hears Lincoln’s voice delivering his Second Inaugural. She discovers how Caesar pronounced both his name and his famous three-word report. (There’s a definite labial buzz to the opening sound of each word. Pace classical pronunciationists.) In one mystical experience, she perceives the divine sound to be emanating from the shell and becoming the sounds of her voice, of the cicada in the tree outside, of the hum of the fluorescent light and the whisper of the air rustling through the air-conditioning vent. Before she falls into a blissful coma from which she never recovers, she utters ecstatically her claim that the blessed shell bears the Voice of God, the master Melody with which every symphony has only made the attempt to sing along.

Prof. McConnell goes to prison for attempted murder, unjust charge though that may be. The university’s lawyers, however, are unable to abrogate his tenure on the grounds of something as slippery and inconsequential as a felony, so he continues to teach and direct dissertations online from his cell.

My book will receive all its awards posthumously in the year 2063.

Returning to Many Dimensions

I’ve groaned for a long time at the weakness of the title of one of my favorite books: Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions. Both words are vague, and the combination is vague. Just think how much better it would have sounded had Williams anticipated the 60s singing group and called his book The Fifth Dimension. To flip the coin, think how silly Dickens would have sounded writing A Tale of Some Cities.

But starting the book again has me so excited, I can see value even in its title. After all the book does start with talk about nearly instantaneous translation in both time and space. But the word dimensions might actually apply better to the layered dimensions of both the characters and the narration.

The novel begins in medias res with a conversation about the crown of “Suleiman ben Daood,” a term that instantaneously transports the typical reader of this book to a new dimension of King Solomon’s character: his depiction in the Qur’an. One of the characters, Sir Giles Tumulty, has bought the crown from a Persian. But the Persian’s nephew (it seems every male character in the book is either an uncle or nephew to another) demands that Sir Giles give the crown back, calling the transaction “theft by bribery,” adding a new dimension to the idea of a purchase transaction. The crown contains a stone with miraculous properties, including the aforementioned power of travel, and stockbroker Reginald Montague only wants to make money off of it. “By God,” he says, “you’ve got the transport of the world in your hands,” unwittingly telling the truth in his swearing and restoring the literal dimension to what had become in England at that time an empty oath. Another unconscious dimensional link occurs when one character says he ought to know more about the son of Daood, by which Williams no doubt means to suggest that the man should know more not about Solomon but about Jesus.

The character (or as I suppose I should write it, Character) displaying the most dimensions is God Himself. The stone in the crown has the letters of the tetragrammaton in it . . . or on it, or they are it. (Yet again, many dimensions.) So the stone represents God in the story, and the characters’ relationships to the stone represent their relationships to God. Sir Giles wants to contemplate the stone with fascination. Reginald wants to make money from it. Persian Prince Ali Khan wants to regain it to restore honor to his family. Each of these characters recognizes virtue in the stone, but only for selfish motives. Each wants to use the stone, to become master of the stone, or in essence to become God’s god. They each want the stone to give something. But two characters (I don’t remember their names and probably shouldn’t spoil things by telling you if I did) eventually realize that the existence of the stone demands that they give themselves to it.

Book Awards – 2012

The end of the year has come, so it’s time for a review, once again in the form of awards. I don’t have consistent categories in mind for these. I just make up the awards so I can talk one last time about some of my favorite reading from the past year.

Out of the Running for Any Category Because He’s in the exlibrismagnis Hall of Fame
Charles Dickens. ’Nuff said.

Best New Read: History
Durant on the Florentine Renaissance. After living an hour from Florence for four-and-a-half months, I came home to find that my Durant for the year covered the Renaissance there. I’d call it the perfect coincidence except that I wish I had read it just before we went, if only so I could have known that I needed to go just one block from where I stood several times to a church with some masterpieces by del Sarto. The voice of LOST’s Jack Shephard has been in my mind for months: “We have to go BAAAACK!”

Best New Read: Religion
Sermons by John Chrysostom. The Golden Mouth goes verse by verse, sometimes phrase by phrase, through the book of Romans and reveals nuances, implications, attitudes, and excluded alternatives. The last twenty to fifty percent of each sermon builds on the Biblical text to give wisdom and exhortation to lead a better life. "It is not suffering ill, but doing it, that is really suffering ill."

Most Pleasant Surprise
Don Juan. Byron’s poem had all the lush imagery and beautiful language I expected plus all the humor, philosophy, and morality I didn’t.

Best New Read: Drama
Wild Duck, Peer Gynt. Ibsen seemed to have changed a lot between college days and now. When I was twenty, I didn’t see why Hedda Gabler needed to shoot herself. But this year I read plays with deep, nuanced, and very sympathetic characters.

Best New Read: Fiction
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. I think the title exerts undue influence on some reviewers: the affair is only a small part of this beautiful tale of Everyman’s descent into sin.

Best New Read: Biography
Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes. Just this Thanksgiving, I played a game with my family called Evil Baby Orphanage, in which each player tries to take care of naughty little babies who will grow up to become infamous villains. Hitler, Caligula, Lizzie Borden, and all their bloodthirsty little baby friends are there. But so is Rutherford B. Hayes. “Oh, you know what he did,” says the card cryptically. I was horrified – but not by Baby Rud. OK, so he promised to pull occupation troops out of the southern states in return for their agreement to give him the electors in our history’s most disputed election. But, first, those troops had had only negative influence on long-term respect for Black’s voting rights. And second, the confusion in that election far outstripped the weirdness of 2000, and no one else had any workable solutions. Other than that deal, Hayes just appointed many women to federal posts, brought on an economic boom, stood against monopolies, and worked tirelessly for prison reform, citizenship for Indians, and civil rights and education for Blacks. Hardly evil.

Best New Read that Crosses Categories
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Theology, history, economics, philosophy, politics, cultural studies: every angle is fascinating.

Best Offroading
Roy and Lesley Adkins, The War for All the Oceans. Hefty quotations from source material feature on every page of this history of the naval side of the Napoleonic wars. It was a little strange to read several pages on the Battle of New Orleans and only a few lines on Waterloo, but then all the British troops in Louisiana came directly off of ships, and it is a history of the war for the oceans. It was also a little strange reading about the War of 1812 from a British point of view: they call it our Great Mistake.

Almost Perfect Fantasy
Summa Elvetica by Theodore Beale (Marcher Lord Press). This Christian fantasy book centers on a theological debate over whether elves have immortal souls, worded in Latin and patterned after the dialogical arguments of Thomas Aquinas. A novel's premise could not possibly appeal to me on more levels. If only it weren’t missing an absolutely essential “non” in a couple of crucial places!

Best Reread
Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion. I didn’t know enough about theology, Plato, psychology, or life to understand this book the first time I read it. I don’t understand it all now, either, but I definitely got more. Just hold your bucket under Williams’s wild, spraying fountain of mystical light. Most of it will miss your bucket, but what you catch will cleanse and satisfy.

And that’s it for 2012. Readers, may your New Year be filled with great books!

Oh, It’s What You Do to Me

The university that employs me pays me once a month. At the beginning of this month – a month that includes Christmas, by the way – I received over $400 less than I usually do. I called up and heard this detailed explanation: “It must have been a mistake.” No apologies or offers to correct the mistake. Enjoy the Holiday. Yours, Uncle Ebenezer.

The woman on the other end said someone would call me back. No one did. So I called a second time and heard (1) that someone would call me back (they never seem to get tired of that line) and (2) that the mistake would be corrected at the end of December. But I checked online this morning and found out that my next paycheck doesn’t include any correction or bonus. So I looked the office up to see if I could find a name of someone in charge that I could send an email to. But I found only lists of offices and phone numbers. The Human Resources department doesn’t lay claim to any humans.

Words have such great power. You know what they say: sticks and stones just break my bones, but words can really hurt me. OK, well, that’s what they ought to say, because that’s the real truth. The words from the Human Resources object (it doesn’t consist of people, so let’s just call it an object) don’t merely convey or fail to convey information. They reach out through the phone and through the computer screen, grab me, and put me in my place. I am an irrelevant nuisance trying to insinuate myself between the Payroll division of the Human Resources object and its mission, which apparently doesn’t include the payrolling of  my $400.

So I started thinking about my reading plan along these lines, pondering what the books I read this year did to me, what position they put me in. Calvin for instance, by consistently taking a polemical tone and throwing insulting names at people who disagree with him, makes me an adversary. I want to learn about his theological system and would love to enjoy agreeing with him. But instead, he leaves me only two choices: kneel in fear before his lightning-filled fist, or stand up in defiance. And I’m just not much of a kneeler. (If The Avengers were true, I’d be that corny guy who stands up to Loki.)

Dickens, to take the opposite extreme, makes mankind my business. He assembles the human family – sweet nieces, swaggering uncles, eccentric aunts, brave cousins, senile grandfathers, good Samaritans, black sheep, and all – and drops me right in the middle of their holiday party. While and just after reading a Dickens novel, every person I meet comes from his world; he makes me more sympathetic and the world more worthy of sympathy. From Dickens I learn to love people I wouldn’t give much thought to in my usual world.

Aquinas buys me a ticket and welcomes me right onto his train of thought. Even when I don’t completely agree with him, I just keep riding along because the comfortable line runs on schedule, and because I know his train takes me to my destination. Trollope draws me into his sitting room, sits me down by his fire, and talks to me intimately about his favorite people and his most cherished beliefs. While I read his words, I am the close friend of a wise moral teacher. Greene turns my heart inside out and exposes some dark, festering corners to the healing influences of the light and the air. Charles Williams turns the world inside out and reveals the spiritual power behind every object, thought, and cultural mannerism. And Aristotle makes me an eager student, thirsty for knowledge.

Well, even if mankind isn’t the business of Human Resources (despite the name), it is my business. So I’ll end today by calling it a department again and wishing its unidentified people a Merry Christmas. Then while I wait until that office opens up again in January, I’ll just read a couple more books.

Charles Williams Sees Reality, Part III

Read Part I here.
Read Part II here.

My guide, Plato, has shown me the reality above the shadows and the reality above the reality. But he has just told me that if I am to progress farther, I will need new guides. He surprises me the next day by bringing, not the friends that I expected, but books. I have seen the shadows of books on the cave wall, and I have heard people speaking after opening books. But I never understood before that the books have speech inside them. Plato teaches me that certain shapes make certain sounds, and after a few days of practice, I can sound out the words myself. My joy at my accomplishment is soon replaced by a moment of sorrow as Plato announces that he can now leave me. He has grown very old in the few weeks we have spent together, but of course I now see in his face not wrinkles or blemishes but Time and the passage of succeeding generations. He is gone now, but I receive comfort when I find that one of the books he has given me bears his name.

I begin to explore the other books in my new library. The first is a collection of Holy Scriptures that in several places compare the Word of God with the penetrating light of the sun and identify the Word with the Glory of God. The next one I turn to is a very large set of books by a man called the Angelic Doctor. That teacher explains that God is the light by which we understand all things. We do not understand God directly, though, just as I cannot look directly at the sun; we know God only through his material effects. Then I devour a triplet of books by an exile from Florence, who also begins his journey of discovery with an ancient guide that must give over his duty to others. The last volume depicts the blessed soul rising through the lights of the celestial spheres, coming ever closer to the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. After these books, I read the words of a great professor from England who one day in a toolshed found the difference between looking at a beam of sunshine and along a beam of sunshine. I smile when I read in one of his stories of an old teacher who says repeatedly, “It’s all right there in Plato. What are they teaching in these schools?”

I keep reading in the treasures my mentor has left me, I know not how long. It may be hours and it may be years. My heart races when I come to a small book called The Place of the Lion by a man named Williams, a friend of the great professor I mentioned earlier. In the book, I read of a man named Anthony Durrant who has visions like those I have had in the forest. He sees a great butterfly that attracts and encompasses all butterflies as if they merely participate in its delicate beauty. He sees the world peeled back to reveal Strength, Subtlety, Beauty, and Speed working in balance and friendship. He sees a Lion that is at once the archetypal Lion and the personification of Strength. He sees the Lion in the great trees around him, and he sees the trees in the Lion. Anthony’s friend Damaris then sees Anthony subsumed in the archetypal Man, naming the beasts in love.

Taking a mental step backwards, I see the book, and suddenly the book becomes the shadow of a world. I see that world, and it suddenly becomes a shadow of the Strength and Beauty it speaks of. I see the author and his friends and predecessors, and suddenly they turn transparent, and through them I see Love and Friendship. Before my eyes, Love becomes both Lion and Lamb. All the words in all the books reveal the archetypal Word. Each book shines a light, and the lights mingle and become the Light by which I see the world.

But these ethereal visions do not take me out of the world. In the book of the lion, I discover that some people who see Ideals lose contact with the material world while others do not. Damaris’s father is enraptured by the Butterfly and has no further need for the world and, sadly, no notice to spare his daughter. But Anthony, who sees farther and higher than anyone else in the story and encounters the Absolute by seeing what the Light illuminates, ends the story by offering Damaris a coat. Through lions we see the Lion, and through the Lion we see Strength. Through butterflies we see the Butterfly, and through the Butterfly we see Beauty. Through Strength and Beauty we see Love. Sphere by heavenly sphere, the vision mounts toward the Absolute. But we do not see Strength, Beauty, Love, Friendship, Balance, Time, and Light correctly unless by their radiance we can still see a woman who is cold and in need of a coat.

Charles Williams Sees Reality, Part II

Read Part I here.

Plato, my guide and liberator, has taken me out of the cave in which I have lived all of my life. He has promised to show me a new world, but so far I have been able to see nothing because I cannot stand to open my eyes.

“Your eyes,” he says, “are not permanently blind but only require a few moments to adjust to the brightness of the light. Put your hand over your face, and open your eyes slowly.”

I do as he instructs, and as I do, I soon find myself in the most beautiful surroundings imaginable. “What do you think of the forest now?” he asks. I lift my hands in awe and turn my body slowly in one direction, while my mind seems to spin in the other, overwhelmed by the sights around me. It is as though the trees I have known from the cave wall have exploded into a million pieces and yet remain intact. Each one has depth and dimension and color, features that my senses are capable of taking in although they have never experienced them before. I feel a breeze on my face for the first time and hear the sound it makes as it strokes the leaves. I reach out to touch various trees with my hand. The leaves of the oak tree feel smooth, while its trunk feels rough. The trunk of the pine makes my fingers sticky, and its needles cause a delicious pain in my fingers. My nose fills with an ecstatic, warm sensation that Plato tells me emanates from the trees, the ground, the flowers, the animals, and the moisture in the air.

“So this is reality?” I ask.

“Actually,” he begins and then clears his throat. “Although what you see now is more real than what you saw in the cave, it is not the ultimate reality. The objects as you sense them now are still only as shadows compared to a yet higher world, the world of ideals.”

“But how,” I ask, “can anything be more real than these trees? I understand now that the shadows are only outlines of real things, for the objects I see now fill in the outlines with detail. But no more room for detail remains.”

He explained, “You find that you are equipped with the faculties to experience the material world that projects the shadows even though you could never before have imagined what the experience would be. So you will find that you are equipped to experience the higher world, as well, even though you cannot imagine it possible now. And just as your eyes had to become used to the light that first overpowered them, you will have to wait on your higher faculties and train them.”

Over the next few days, Plato instructs me on methods of meditation that allow me to see the ideals he so passionately pursues. Soon I see neither individual trees alone nor a forest. I see Life surging through the ground and bursting up into the air. I see Strength in each trunk and delicate Order in each leaf. I see Beauty and Balance in the complementary colors of sky and earth and, seeing yet farther than I ever have before, in the community of Strength and Order.

My hunger for these experiences grows over the weeks and is soon insatiable. “Is there more?” I ask Plato. “Or does ultimate reality consist of Life, Strength, Order, Beauty, and Balance?”

“No,” he says, “these noble ideas are but resting places on the ascent to the Absolute. But in order for you to climb higher in your vision, I must now hand you over to other guides.”

Concluded in the next post, which finally has something to say about Charles Williams.

Charles Williams Sees Reality, Part I

I am in chains, held prisoner in a cave. Iron fittings hold my head so that I can only look ahead of me, where dark objects appear and move on the far wall. During what I know as the night, I see mostly people and the objects they hold; their figures jump and flicker erratically. During the morning a stately forest takes its place in my field of vision, the tall noble trees standing firmly and then drifting to the left as they slowly shrink back into the ground over the course of about two hours.

Suddenly I hear noises behind me and see a new human figure on the wall, waving his arms and shouting incomprehensible things about “reality.” A few moments later, I have what I assume is a hallucinatory vision. Something like a man appears before me, only he is more than a man. Where men are all the color of the rock in the cave wall, only darker, this man has many colors. The colors make shapes appear where I never imagined shapes could be; you may think I am mad, but this man has details in his inside. No, it is not the inside, either. But if you can imagine a man lowering his arms to his hips and then think of where his hips would be within that dark outline, you might have an idea of what I see on this bizarre figure. Stranger yet, he seems to occupy a new, third dimension: some of these features appear closer to me than others, and – I wouldn’t blame you if you quit reading after you hear this news from the halls of insanity – he can move his arm not just up and down or to the side but across his middle without having it disappear, and then he can move it toward me and cause an urgent physical sensation on my chest.

“My name is Plato,” he says, “and I am here to free you and show you the reality beyond the shadows.”

“I know not what shadows are, friend,” I reply, “and I already understand reality – or thought I did. But you have already shown me a dimension I had never before imagined possible. So release me and teach me.”

“I am a man,” Plato says, “and the shapes of men you see on the cave wall are cast by such as I when we step in front of a source of light. The shapes you have seen all your life are but the shadows of things more real.”

“I have heard of light from my captors. They say it is the space between objects, that it is nothingness.”

“Nothing could be farther from the truth,” he says. “Light is the source by which you see all that you have seen. The shadows you call men are actually the spaces – the spaces between the light, and they are as nothing compared to it. Even the vibrant, three-dimensional Plato you see before you now comes to your eyes because of light. Come, let me show you.”

The chains fall from my limbs, and Plato takes me by the hand. I have seen people hold hands on the wall, but I have never felt it. We walk a while; he tells me we are walking out of the cave. How one can walk out of the world, I do not understand. But that I am leaving all I have ever known, I have no doubt, for suddenly I must close my eyes because of a strange, overpowering sensation.

“What do you see?” he asks me.

“Nothing.” I answer. “You said you would show me things, but you have blinded me instead.”

The story continues here.

Three Degrees of Separation from Truth

Many graduate courses in music research require students to purchase a certain reference text that lists all the reference texts in musicology. Using this book, the student can’t look up any ideas or information about music. In the sections concerning bibliographies, the student can’t even look up where to find ideas or information about music; here he’s finding works in which he can find works in which to find ideas and information about music. I don’t begrudge the book its value. But requiring its purchase projects what I see as a misguided approach to research. Somewhere along the line, scholarship changed from being a pursuit of truth to being a pursuit of organization.

I had several classes like this in grad school. In the History of Music Theory, for instance, I learned what many theorists thought about music and, in some cases, what they thought about other music theorists. But never did we discuss whether these theorists from the past were right. Academic musicians never agreed on why minor keys came about or work for us, so we quit talking about it. Now the study of the subject consists merely in an exercise of learning what Rameau said when.

But music theory isn’t the only academic subject suffering the malady. I’ve been trying to remember where I read it for several days now, but I just can’t: somewhere in the last month I read the observation that the study of philosophy has become the study of philosophers. The passage stuck in my mind, if not its author, because it so strongly resonated with my experience. In one of the constant coincidences that attend my reading, when I started The Place of the Lion a few days ago, its author, Charles Williams, introduced me to the character Damaris Tighe, a philosophy student fascinated by philosophers and writing a dissertation called “Pythagorean Influences on Abelard.” Damaris has also written papers on “Platonic Tradition at the Court of Charlemagne” and on the parallels between Plato’s Ideas and the angels of Dionysius. She estimates that her dissertation will need no fewer than five appendices, including a three-dimensional map tracing connections to a hundred other ancient and medieval philosophers. She knows exactly who thought what about extramaterial universals, but she remains completely unconcerned about whether universals exist or how they affect her life. Her friend Anthony Durrant divides thinkers into people like himself, who like their philosophy “living and intelligent,” and people like Damaris, for whom it is “dying and scholarly.” But both of them are about to discover that not only philosophy but the ideal universals themselves are living and intelligent.

I could say that the story of their discovery symbolizes an encounter with God or perhaps represents a moment on their respective paths to God. But Charles Williams isn’t exactly an allegorist for all his rich symbolism. Although he doesn’t spell it out explicitly, I believe that Williams – Lewis and Tolkien’s fellow Inkling – would have said that the embrace of philosophy, as opposed to a commitment to scholarship in philosophy, is the reconciliation with God. God is Love, living and intelligent Love, and Christ is living and intelligent Wisdom. So philo-sophy, the love of wisdom, must literally, ultimately mean a life baptized in Christ.

Charles Williams is not for the faint of heart. Although his novels are relatively slim, they’re not quick reads. If you read one, for one reason or another you will read passages twice. But they are always worth the repetition. Reading Williams’s novels is like plunging your face into a running fountain of hearty stew; a lot of it, maybe most of it, will run down your face unassimilated, but what gets into your mouth will enrich and satisfy. I took in a lot more of Place of the Lion this time around than I did thirty years ago. The first time I plunged into this stream, I had never read Plato or Dionysius and had no way to understand half of the book. This time around, I’ve read things by most of the writers Damaris studies, and I know a bit of who said what when. But Williams reminds me why they said it and brings me face to living face.

The Mysteries of Robertson Davies

With its eloquent characters brimming with conflicting spiritual ideas and its constant hinting that mundane objects and events have significance also in an ethereal realm, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels persistently brought to my mind the novels of Charles Williams, so much so that as I read, I constantly expected the world of mystery to break through the veil and manifest itself on any given page. In fact, something supernatural may take place about halfway through the book: Maria’s Gypsy mother gives two characters Tarot readings that seem to come true. Davies doesn’t specify whether the cards truly serve as a conduit of insight from another world or whether Maria’s mother simply played a psychological trick, but that ambiguity itself contributes to the mysterious aura of the novel.

Several of the characters have personal mysteries, as well. What does Maria Magdalena Theotoky draw from the rich Christian heritage residing in her names? Does she bear seven devils, or as a bearer of God, have the devils been driven out of her? Or is a name just a name? Why does Arthur Cornish insist on an orthodox Christian wedding? What spiritual benefit does he think he will draw from having the words of the 1706 edition of the Prayer Book spoken at the service, complete with its stern public warnings against fornication?

The most mysterious character is Parlabane. His name suggests that his words carry death, and one character describes him as an outright evil person. He belches, lies, sponges off his acquaintances, and sings bawdy songs – loudly – at public restaurants. He claims to be a complete skeptic about every proposition dealing with anything in the natural world. But he believes that the glory of God lies beyond skepticism, and he argues with Maria about the inadequacy of codes of honour as ethical systems. A code of honour is, he says, “no bigger than the man – or woman, if you are going to be pernickety – who possesses it. And the honour of a fool, or a pygmy-in-spirit, or a redneck, or a High Tory, or a convinced democrat are all wholly different things and any one of them, under the right circumstances, could send you to the stake, or stop your wages, or just push you out into the cold. Honour is a matter of personal limitation. God is not.” That little speech implies unskeptical belief in several propositions. At the end of the book, Parlabane asks for a special Christian ceremony for himself. So does he believe? I can fault Davies for the inconsistency only as long as I ignore the fact that every Christian believer I know (including myself) sometimes contradicts his confessional words by his committed actions.

Mystery religions show up in the book in the form of Gnostic gospels and kabbala and other heterodox traditions. The title of the book refers to a story of two angels who, without casting in their lot with Satan, come to earth to share God’s knowledge with humanity. I’m not sure how that agenda separates them from Satan since the sharing of divine knowledge seems to have been the chief rebel angel’s first ploy against mankind. In any case, the claim that their gift not only influenced Hermes Trismegistus and Paracelsus but also led to the institution of universities has me thinking about the possible motivations for intellectual research.

Having read all of Charles Williams’s novels and having enjoyed all but one of them, I was fully prepared to take the Tarot and the Gnostic gospels as literary devices that convey the mystery of the supernatural with a blunt force that scriptural quotations don’t always have for Christians inured with Biblical language. But near the end of the book, I started to suspect that Davies was trying to claim orthodox Christianity insufficient even outside the world of his novel. Arthur Cornish may want an orthodox wedding at the climax of the story, but Darcourt, the presiding clergyman and one of the two first-person narrators, questions the wisdom of living within strict orthodoxy. I’m also happy with a book that leaves spiritual questions open, but details kept goading me into thinking that Davies was closing the question with an answer I’m not so happy with. So right now, the biggest mystery for me is Davies himself. I started my adventure with Robertson Davies with one Google search, and I finished my reading of The Rebel Angels with another. Just after finishing the novel, I read online that the author once characterized himself as “not a card-carrying Christian.” Suitable, since mysteries can only be defined, not by what they are, but by what they are not.