Quick Roundup

In between mini-trips, I’ll just drop some short notes on recent reading.

I continue my plan to read Finnegans Wake over the course of fifteen years, the time it took Joyce to write it. After having consumed my annual slice of Finnegan Pie for 2025, I can say that it remains as wacky as ever with its nonstop wordplay and elusive sentence structure. But I think the man (who has several names and stands for several people, I think, or maybe all men) goes to an inn, has a drink and a meal, and then hires a woman. If this is the passage that got the book banned for pornography in some places, then I’m pretty sure neither the boards who did the banning nor their kids – assuming they even read this far – understood it or got any excitement from it. I don’t see anyone ever reading Finnegans Wake and then thinking, “Oh, now that I’ve read that, I can’t wait to commit adultery!”

George MacDonald’s Heather and Snow is the first of the Scottish pastor's novels I’ve really enjoyed in at least three years. There is no wise old man this time, the kind that in other books me wonder if MacDonald saw himself in these lofty characters. There are no polemics in which some leading character decides that anyone who disagrees with him (i.e. with George MacDonald) isn’t doing Christianity right. The protagonist is a young rural woman who understands God the best she can, which is to say that she understands Him better and more biblically than her mother or silly neighbor. But then all of them understand and serve God the best they can, as well. There are no judgments, just discussions and respectful attempts to explain or to persuade. The differences are nothing as compared to the difference between the belief of the faithful and the disbelief of the local baron’s son. There’s also a brother with some kind of mental developmental issues and a big snow that causes some deaths and a neighborly intervention before fornication (which didn’t involve reading James Joyce!), and all these events lead to very interesting thoughts and discussions about life in all its complexities and how best to live it in service of God and neighbor.

Finally, I will merely recommend Anthony Trollope’s short story (with eight chapters it could really be called a novella) “Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices.” 

I’ll have more after the next trip!

George MacDonald and Adoption

When I wrote a post last year on George MacDonald’s sermons, I didn’t say anything about his deep feelings about the theological use of the word “adoption.” Early in his life, George MacDonald was told that he was not a child of God but that God could adopt him as a son. MacDonald grew up thinking that this message meant that God had rejected him to the point that He no longer recognized MacDonald as part of his creation. As an adult, he discovered, he tells us, that the Greek word translated “adoption” in the New Testament does not in fact mean adoption. He indicates the textual context of Galatians 4 in which the heir in Paul’s metaphor is in fact the son of the house but is treated as no better than a slave until “adoption,” which must therefore mean full recognition as a son, not chage of status from non-son to son. Tell a child he is not in his right relationship with his heavenly Father, MacDonald says, but don’t tell him God is not his Father.

This year, I read MacDonald’s novel Donal Grant, and partway through I started thinking: MacDonald sees Donal as himself, and Donal must believe that most Christians are wrong to think that God has adopted them. Then, sure enough, Donal says, in words understandably reminiscent of the sermon I read last year, that the word has been mistranslated and that the mistake has done grave harm to many people. I may be overreacting, but it seemed in this novel as if MacDonald were saying that any Christian who understood “adoption” as a valid theological concept was something like an enemy to the Truth, and that stance made it sound like MacDonald was pitting himself not just against a word or a detail but against the vast majority of English-speaking Christians.

I think that some Christians are wrong about some things. I think, for instance, that MacDonald is wrong to see the acceptance of the word “adoption” as a line in the sand. But I hold my disagreements with other Christians in two very important contexts. First, if most Christians disagree with me on some given doctrine, I simply must attenuate my absolute confidence that I am right. You know. Human. Fallible. Etc. Second, if I truly believe that person A is a Christian and I truly believe that A believes the wrong thing about doctrine B, then, if I see an enemy at all, I hold what I see as the wrong view on B as the enemy, not person A. We wrestle not with flesh and blood.

After reading this book, I feel like I’ve “figured out” MacDonald, and, as I just explained, I’m not sure I like what I figured out. I have three more of his novels on my list for this ten-year reading plan, and right now I’m not sure what I’ll do when they come up.

Influences and George MacDonald’s Sermons

I’ve been reading George MacDonald’s novels for many years. This year I set aside the fiction in favor of two sets of sermons. I don’t remember who recommended that I read some of his sermons, but I’m glad that person did. MacDonald writes clearly and passionately in these “unspoken” addresses, a difficult combination to pull off. And his lessons are quite good. Some examples: Life has many daily questions the Bible doesn’t answer, which is why we must daily rely on Jesus for guidance. Each follower of Christ will receive in Heaven a new name written on a white stone, unique and secret because each believer can worship God in a way that no one else can. We could not hate our cruelest enemy except for a shred of humanity in him that makes us think he could be different, and that shred is what we can love. Jesus gives the rich young ruler things to do in order to receive eternal life rather than things to believe or things to be partly because when someone asks how to reach the top of a mountain, you don't say, "Put your foot on the peak."

I know of MacDonald only through C. S. Lewis and read him at Lewis’s recommendation. And although I don’t always understand why Lewis admired him so deeply, here in the sermons, I see the influence of MacDonald on Lewis very clearly. Why does God even have his children ask for things if He knows what we need and can give it? Because prayer is the thing we need most, says MacDonald, and I hear the echoes of that excellent point reverberating throughout Lewis’s work. Miracles show the hastening of natural processes, says MacDonald, an idea repeated by Lewis a few decades later in his book on miracles. And when MacDonald says that God will strip away our sin layer by layer, I can’t help but think of Lewis’s Edmund having his dragon skin peeled from him.

Strangely, I also saw influences of Hegel on MacDonald. Hegel, the ultimate philosopher of progress in the century of progress, essentially taught that the purpose of the universe was to evolve to the point that some part of it understood it as a whole. In other words, according to Hegel, the purpose of the universe was to produce Hegel. I see Hegel’s influence where MacDonald talks about progressive revelation as God’s working toward humanity’s comprehension of Him. I see it again where MacDonald says, “Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.”

I’m far from alone in seeing Hegel as a big problem. Right now, I’m also reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (more on that book in a later post), in which protagonist Joseph Knecht blames Hegel for the world wars of the twentieth century. As Lewis said that MacDonald baptized his imagination, I could say that MacDonald baptized Hegel’s ideas, Still, two months ago, I would never have imagined a line of influence from the pagan Hegel to the Christian C. S. Lewis with only one stop in between.

Alec Forbes Is an Unco Bonnie Buik

On numerous occasions, C. S. Lewis emphatically expressed his debt to George MacDonald. He said Phantastes baptized his imagination. He said, “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master.” And yet, while it was a novel of MacDonald’s that so changed Lewis’s imagination, he also said of his “master,” “Few of his novels are good and none is very good.” It seems it was not MacDonald’s handling of character, plot, and description that so inspired Lewis. And to be clear, Phantastes is, as its name implies, a fantasy novel, and most of MacDonald’s fictional output consists of realistic (not to say realist), domestic novels.

Somewhere in the last eight years or so, I read that, among those novels he thought weren’t very good, Alec Forbes was Lewis’s favorite; I know I read it somewhere because I put a note to that effect on my current ten-year plan. I don’t remember now where I read that factoid, and the source could have been wrong. I also wrote a note to myself saying that at some point (again, I didn’t bother with the details; *sigh*) someone writing for Christian History magazine said that What’s Mine’s Mine was Lewis’s favorite of MacDonald’s novels. Well, the good professor may have said different things at different times. One thing seems certain to me, though. After reading Alec Forbes, I can’t help thinking that Lewis must have liked it better than some of the other novels I’ve read in recent years. Two pervasive features of the book direct me to this conclusion.

First, Alec finds Christian counsel in multiple sources. MacDonald’s novels often feature one Christian sage mentoring the young people. (I always imagine that MacDonald saw in these characters the kind of pastor and teacher he hoped to be.) Alec Forbes has at least four spiritual guides. There’s the minister at the state church. He has no “enthusiasm” (i.e., he doesn’t go in for revival meetings and prefers staid, liturgical worship services), but he consistently teaches godly love, through his actions even more than by words. Recognizing an awareness of the constant presence of God in the dissenting preachers, Alec prefers to go to their church, although he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he hears there. (They read only the Old Testament, MacDonald explains, and view covenant as the only thing standing between them and what God really wants to do to them.) Alec finds a model of simple and joyful Christian humility in young Annie Anderson, with whom he goes to school. And then there’s the town stonemason, who constantly talks to Alec frankly about his need to escape Hell by getting right with God. I was reminded of the many doors in the foyer of Lewis’s house of “Mere Christianity,” all leading to rooms where Christian fellowship and worship of God can be found.

Second, MacDonald talks in the narration about God calling people "through a back door." The scent of flowers, the warmth of sunlight, a blanket of snow, a windstorm, a gift of a couple of shillings – one earthly thing after another in the story flashes forth grace and beauty and speaks divine truth to the hearts of Alec and Annie. But, the narrator explains, if they – or we – pursue any gracious thing directly, hoping to make the sacred moment last forever, the freshness goes away. These moments in the novel not only make me think of Lewis saying that MacDonald was the first author he had read who could transform common objects into conduits of light, they also remind me of Lewis’s central idea of joy. I won’t try to explain Lewis’s special definition of joy here. If you don’t know about Warnie’s toy garden, but you’re the kind of person to read this much of this blog post, I guarantee that you will thank me for telling you to read Surprised by Joy sometime in the next . . . OK, sometime in the next ten years.

But should you read Alec Forbes? If you enjoy nineteenth-century coming-of-age novels as much as I do, if you love to hate the draconian schoolteachers of Nicholas Nickleby and Jane Eyre, if you think you would like a story in which the male protagonist (sixteen years old?) builds a snow fort and the female protagonist (twelve?) wanders into it and falls asleep and needs a respectful rescue, if you long for a book in which the ultimate spiritual state of the boy is as important as whether or not he gets the girl, then yes, you should read Alec Forbes. Oh, and there’s one more thing. Gin the unco mickle Scots mak ye frichtit, dinna gang greitin’ and speirin’ me a’ aboot it.

From the Baptizer of Imagination

Somewhere George MacDonald made the excellent observation that all mirrors are magic mirrors. Who hasn’t looked in one and thought of the reversed human image inside as the living being who sees you as the reflection? Or tried to imagine crossing the glass and moving into the unseen flip-flop world around the corner or through the door that limits your sight of Mirrorland? Knowing MacDonald’s line about magic mirrors, I sensed good things to come when his Lilith started with a magic mirror in the garret.

MacDonald wrote many “realistic” novels (well, as realistic as Victorian literature gets with all its coincidences and hidden identities and long-thought-dead spouses suddenly reappearing) and several fantasies. I prefer the novels but enjoy the riddles of his fantasies. And Lilith is chock-full of riddles. When Mr. Vane (I couldn’t help thinking of Bunyan when I discovered the protagonist’s name) ends up in a parallel world where ravens read books that are fake decorations in our world and where all the best people are perpetually asleep, the reader has to start thinking. Sometimes you have to think about when to stop thinking and just enjoy for a while since things get so bizarre. What could be called the weirdest riddles are the easiest to understand when reading Christian literature: people have to die to truly live and aren’t themselves until they give up themselves. If you still don’t understand those riddles (and does even the most faithful Christian truly understand?), at least you recognize that they come straight from the Savior’s parables.

It’s the other, more routine puzzles that make the story so murky. It’s the mystery land where our rules don’t work. It’s the string of elements that seem like connected symbols but without obvious connections or clear symbolic reference. For instance, Vane hears rumors of people with fairy-tale names: one is called the Cat Lady. Then he encounters a lot of cats, some of the domestic variety and some of the leopardous. (Hah! I just added a sixth member to the very select list of common-ish English words ending in -dous.) Then some of the larger cats change into princesses. But neither of them is the Cat Lady. I think. Other shrouded vales of mystery abound. The reader slowly meets the various characters he hears about early on and learns their names, but still without knowing who’s good and who’s bad. The characters eventually seem to fall into two camps, each of which calls the other bad. But how to decide whether Mr. Vane is choosing correctly between them or asking the right questions? It’s like a blown-up version of the two-doors-liar-and-truthteller riddle.

And yet it’s fun to be confused by this book. Today I thought about sewing while reading Lilith. My mind often wanders while reading; I’m the kind of reader who can suddenly realize that the words of a whole page have each passed under my eyes without any meaning registering on my mind because I’ve been thinking of something else the whole time. William James calls the habit a mark of genius, and I choose to agree. Usually the mental sidetracks are inspired directly by the topics in the book. But the sewing thread (see what I did there with the word “thread”?) came up because of the way I have to read Lilith. Like a backstitch (I don’t really know anything about sewing; I think it’s a backstitch), I have to go forward a bit and then back to search for what I missed, then forward again until I realize I’ve gone too far again and have to scramble back to tighten up that hem.  

One thing stood out clear as crystal right away, though. The land behind the mirror’s glass has no rivers, no ponds, and no tears. But once Lilith – Adam’s first wife according to the Talmud, and the monarch of the fairy land in MacDonald’s book – has learned to cry, the waters cascading from her eyes meet waters springing up from below the surface, and rivers start to flow. MacDonald gets to make a pretty point about remorse and repentance with this fantastic image. But the moment also struck me as the clear inspiration for Lewis’s coming of spring in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a moment brought about at the end of the reign of the White Witch, who, says the narrator, is descended from Lilith, the first wife of Adam.

Scottish and English in George MacDonald

As much as C. S. Lewis professed a debt to George MacDonald, he says (somewhere), “Few of his novels are good and none is very good.” I know that my reading project centers on the “Great Books,” but I also enjoy visiting satellites of those marvelous lights. I have Tom Clancy on my list for this year, after all! So maybe I could be allowed to write today on a nineteenth-century author whose novels aren’t “very good.”

Last year, I didn’t say anything about MacDonald, because I thought the book I read then, Malcolm, didn’t even rise to the level of “not very good.” Part of it had to do with the nearly total lack of the Wise Christian Teacher who so often features in MacDonald’s novels, a void replaced by a soap opera involving a marquis and his brother (who was also the marquis at some point), wives possibly dead and possibly alive (which makes for possible bigamy), the question of which character is whose child, the question whether two of these younger characters with a possibly budding mutual attraction might be siblings (Hello, Luke and Leia!), and the further question whether such children are legitimate – the last point depending on whether a certain wife was dead or alive when . . . . Oh, it’s all too confusing.

It’s not enough that the potboiler’s pot boileth over. Most of the answers to the mysteries of the plot are given by characters speaking in Scottish dialect. Now I’ve read enough MacDonald to have a good familiarity with the language of his rustic Scottish characters, but here we have a character, a piper, with a stranger than usual patois, a linguistic idiom whose origin I can’t explain. This piper might say, “She’ll pe seein’ a’,” when he means, “I see everything.” Among his quirks, he uses she for the first-person singular pronoun, future continuous verb constructions for all tenses, and voiceless consonants for all stopped consonants: p for b, t for d, etc. Add to this confusion the fact that the piper is blind and yet talks about seeing things, and I found myself almost always in the middle of the North Sea when he spoke. So why, oh, why did MacDonald place the solution to the main conundrum of the wives in the mouth of this piper?

Today, on the other hand, I finished reading The Marquis of Lossie, the sequel to Malcolm, and I’m ready to say that the joy I had in the end was worth all the confusion of the first book in the dilogy. (Dilogy? Really?) I got not just one Wise Christian Teacher, but two. I also found a nineteenth-century female character not defined simply by her degree of chastity in relation to men but by her philosophical doubts and struggles. I enjoyed a plot set mostly in London, where Malcolm did his best to speak the Queen’s. And I faced many needed challenges to my complacent Christianity, which is really why I read MacDonald. Just one example: Which is worse, to doubt the existence of God, or, believing He exists, to doubt his importance to every moment in life?

Before I sign off, a word about the 1980s editions of MacDonald novels “retold for modern readers,” complete with new titles and covers that make them look like today’s Christian romances. Of course, I’m reading MacDonald’s original versions, but I don’t look down my nose at these reworkings. I read my first MacDonald novel in a book club that used the updated, abbreviated version, and I’ll always be grateful for that introduction. Editor Michael R. Phillips, knowing his audience, shortened the books and toned down their Scots vocabulary considerably. But by doing so, he introduced a new generation to stories with lessons deeper than any found elsewhere in their section of the Zondervan Christian bookstore, even if MacDonald’s spiritual pupil, Lewis, thought the books weren’t “very good.”

The Great Conversation

I listened in on a conversation the other day – a conversation between books. Mortimer Adler, the guide and patron saint of my reading project (and the pitching coach of my fantasy baseball team), sometimes spoke of the classic works of literature as The Great Conversation. Across time and space, brilliant writers explore the Great Ideas of truth, justice, being, number, cause and chance, government and democracy, form and substance, will and memory, and many others including, yes, the idea of ideas. The best authors respond to ideas expressed before them, add to them or clarify them, and influence thinkers who come after them.

The metaphor of a conversation makes a lot of sense to me; I experience a conversation between books every day. I discovered a few years ago that I read more and assimilate more of what I read if I keep multiple books going at a time. From the beginning of my current ten-year plan, I’ve always planned to read two books at once, and I read a few pages from each one every day. You can see this parallel nature of the plan in any of the calendars tabbed at the top of this page. In general, one of the books (the ones in the left column on my schedules) is heavier, both in terms of content and of physical weight. These works – typically philosophy, history, and theology – I usually read fairly slowly, sitting down, and taking notes. The books in the right column, on the other hand, I take with me on walks. They’re the books I could read for hours on end (and sometimes do).

In just the last few days, I’ve actually started enjoying portions of three books most days. Getting to my new job involves almost an hour of driving each day, something I wasn’t used to. I listened to music on the drive during the first few weeks in the new situation. But earlier this month, I downloaded an audio version of Phantastes from librivox.org and listened to about half of it. This pleasurable experience made the commuting time go by quite quickly. So once I finished the MacDonald book, I thought I’d get another audiobook for the car. But what to choose? Everything on the plan for the rest of the year is copyrighted, and I was hoping for something free. So I looked at next year’s plan and picked Tristram Shandy. One, two, three – three books at once. Friday, as geeky as it sounds, I listened to Tristram on the way to work, took Mann’s Magic Mountain on my daily walk, and read in Durant’s The Renaissance during lunch. (Yes, I did some work in between all that reading!)

And that's where the conversation comes in. The conversation I horned in on last Friday had to do with time. Mann has a lot to say about time from the very beginning of The Magic Mountain, especially the difference between perceived time and objective time. Protagonist Hans Castorp, for instance, experiences time flowing quickly when his day is scheduled, plodding slowly as he waits the seven minutes for his thermometer to register his fever, and disappearing altogether as each day, each week, each month repeats the same patterns over and over. Well, during my walk on Friday, I read Mann’s narrator moving this distinction to a literary level. There’s a difference, he points out, between the real-world time taken reading a narrative and the fictional-world time within the narrative. A few seconds of narrative time might take several minutes to read; the split second of action and thought under the train at the end of Anna Karenina came to my mind as an example. On the other hand, years sometimes rush by in a matter of a few words at the beginning of a chapter.

This distinction between reading time and narrative time stayed in the back of my mind all day after that walk, even until I got in the car at the end of the day and turned Tristram back on. And then it happened. The conversation was so stunning, so vivid, so direct, I could practically see Laurence Sterne and Thomas Mann sitting together at a table talking it over. As soon as the recording started, I heard first-person narrator Tristram apologize for taking so long getting to his birth! He’s announced the day, but before he delivers the details, he has to tell the reader about the midwife and the parson who come to the house, about his parent’s arguments about the midwife, about the parson’s horse, about his mother’s desire to have her lying-in in London, about his father’s theory of names (the Shandian System), and so on.

Having read the book before, I know I have a good forty chapters to go before I experience any narration of Tristram’s actual coming into the world. Today, for instance, I heard a digression about the Jesuits’ theory of baptism before birth, a digression about Uncle Toby, a digression on forms of argument, and even a digression on digressions. And it will go on. Several days will lapse before I hear the end of a sentence uttered by Uncle Toby that I heard begin today. Several weeks will lapse before I witness Tristram’s unlucky arrival.

The reader will remember that I was discussing a conversation and an apology. When I heard his apology, I laughed out loud. It wasn’t the first time I laughed out loud while listening to this audiobook. I’ve done it several times. Now, you may not understand the significance of the statement or the reason for my repeating it unless you know that I usually don’t laugh out loud. I have a well developed sense of humor, and I laugh. Sometimes I laugh hard. I have convulsions as good as anyone’s. I just normally don’t make any sound. Sometimes my family wonder why I’m not enjoying myself watching a funny movie. “Don’t you like it?” they ask. “Of course, I like it. It’s funny.” “Then why aren’t you laughing?” “I am laughing.” “I didn’t hear you laughing.” “Ah, but did you see me laughing?” “No your chair was turned around.” I often sit on a swivel chair when we watch movies together. Or I did. Now that we’ve moved, I have a recliner.

Speaking of the time it takes to read a narrative, might I interrupt my pleasant relaxation on the recliner and stop my silent, merry shaking long enough to tell you that Magic Mountain is too long?

Searching for Plot in Fairy-Land

We generally think of memories getting “fuzzy” as the years wear over them. But some memories do just the opposite: they contract and become focused on one or two details. For instance, I lived in Georgia for a few months when I was six and seven years old, and I had a best friend that I hung out with every day. We must have done a lot together, but I only remember three things about him (other than that he was my best friend): (1) his name was Len Matlock, (2) he liked drawing monsters, and (3) he thought it was rude to say “Thanks” instead of “Thank you.” That last memory stands out in my memory very vividly indeed, even though almost everything else has disappeared.

As a second example, most people call Ishtar the worst big-budget film ever made. But even though I’ve forgotten almost everything about the movie (maybe because it was the worst ever made; I don’t know) my clear and present memory of one detail serves me very faithfully: Ishtar contains the funniest song-writing scene ever made. When all has faded, that one scene is now what Ishtar means to me. My memory of that scene is the drawer in which my impression of the whole movie is stored.

I didn’t like George MacDonald’s Phantastes the first time I read it. Until about three weeks ago, thousands upon thousands of the details had escaped my active memory entirely, but still I held on to an impression of the book, a headline that all my memories had coalesced into. What I called my memory of the book was simply this: near the beginning the protagonist finds a magical woman who runs away and hardly ever shows up again, a salient symptom of the complete absence of coherent plot. For about twenty years, that was Phantases in my mind: a book I didn’t like because it had no plot.

This time through, though, MacDonald’s fantasy pleasantly surprised me. Anodos found the woman (it turns out she was made of white marble), and she took off, and I said to myself, “Don’t expect to see her again anytime soon.” And then, freed from this weird assumption that one particular living statue would have to lie at the center of a narrative structure, or that there would be a unified linear structure at all, I went wandering with Anodos through the woods of his Fairy-Land and enjoyed every scene, including all the diversions and stories within stories.

Suddenly just a few days ago, while thinking about how much I enjoyed wandering through Fairy-Land this time, it occurred to me that I had written blog posts about “wandering through the woods” with characters in other books – books I absolutely love. Faerie Queene. Le Morte D’Arthur. In fact, just last month I blogged about how much I enjoyed the scarcity of plot in Moby-Dick. And yet all my memories of Phantastes had boiled down to “I didn’t like it because it didn’t have enough plot.” What was I thinking?

The Song

A long time ago, before there were any galaxies, even before there was any far away, there was a globule of blazing matter, a cosmos in a bead, expanding at breakneck speed, stretching space with it as it grew.

All was even at first, featureless, every bit just like the bit next to it.

And then the One, the Merciful, the Wise sang. His divine note coursed through the exploding world, its waves compressing particles here, separating them there, in glorious series of concentric spheres, each emanating and crossing the others on its journey across the spreading universe.

Eventually, length, breadth, and width unfolded enough to leave gaping holes in the humming mass. The largest ripples then subsided and their ultimate effect appeared: clumps of matter scattered over the material realm in virtually random, mathematically chaotic fashion, every clump held together by gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force, and yet separated from all the others by the silence of distance.

But the motion of the song went on in the urgent rotation of these massive clouds of stuff. Great spinning galaxies coalesced, the symphonies of the sky. Within the galaxies, spinning suns, like motives within a melody, fell in on themselves and burst into nuclear flame. Around these suns, spinning planets and comets gathered.

Still the song continues. The morning stars sing. Night calls to night. Sitting here on one of those spinning planets revolving around one of those suns in one of those galaxies, we don’t hear the divine music. But why? Because we have forgotten the tune? Or to the contrary, because we are inured to its persistent presence?

Either way, were we to hear the melody, we might not be able to comprehend it. The song might well strike us with a power beyond our human capabilities to perceive, like a light too bright for us to discern its color.

Anodos, the protagonist from George MacDonald’s Phantastes, hears the song occasionally. He hears it in the water of the magical land he wanders through. He hears it from the lips of fairies and of living statues. He hears it, but he can’t reproduce it, although he can sometimes translate its import into poetry. For that matter, the poetry he hears in fairy land is in a language too lofty to register in his memory, and again he can only render the impression it makes on him into new verse, which he apologizes for.

So what enters my ears when I read Phantastes is at best only Anodos’s rendition of the memory of the performance of the song. Or maybe my experience is even farther removed from the true Source. Maybe the words in the book offer George MacDonald’s recasting of the impression made on him by the utterance of the invented man in his mind, who renders the memory of a performance of the original song. Six degrees of separation.

But still, I think I can hear the echoes of the song.

And the Winners Are . . .

While Hollywood studio execs rush to get out all the movies they hope the Academy will remember long enough to give awards to, I'm enjoying the calm and quiet of the week between Christmas and New Year's and remembering all the reading I've done for the last twelve months.  I think I'll give some awards as well: the ex libris magnis awards for 2010.

So Good It Wouldn't Be Fair to Include Him in the Running for Any Other Awards
Charles Dickens.  Dombey and Son was twice as good as I remembered it, and his delightful but little-known Christmas stories taught me a lot about Dickens and about Christmas.

Best New Read: Fiction
George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie.  While I loved the first two MacDonald novels I read (by which I mean adult, nonfantastic novels: Robert Falconer and Thomas Wingfold), the last one was a bit of a disappointment (David Elginbrod).  So I was glad to find another one that worked for me.  Chapter 6 is amazing, with little Gibbie learning last lessons from his dying, drunken father.  Through Gibbie's eyes (and MacDonald's) we see that an alcoholic can love and be loved even while his addiction horrifies us.  Many other characters also mix good and bad traits like real people; MacDonald's narration scolds the Sclaters, for instance, for their religious humbuggery, and yet they end up doing good things for Gibbie.  Have they truly met God?  We aren't told.  The book is full of quotable quotes, like this one for instance: "There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self -- God's idea of us when he devised us -- the Christ in us.  Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which, most of us are so fond and proud.  And that self no man can find for himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for."  Having read Sir Gibbie, C. S. Lewis's reverence for MacDonald finally makes sense to me.

Best New Read: Religion
Tie: Upanishads and Barth's Dogmatics in Outline.  The challenging and helpful central idea of Dogmatics is that the Church is here to proclaim, not to prove; that people have the message to proclaim is proof enough.  It does no good, Barth says, to look at the world and try to prove God as a Creator; right thinking starts with God and sees the world as the amazing thing.  What we read in the newspapers and in history -- especially Church history -- is bad.  Only God is good, so proclaim Jesus, and learn to see the world his way.  For a bit on the Upanishads, see an earlier post.

Philosophy Most Likely to Pop into My Mind from Day to Day
Wittgenstein.  I love Aristotle and Aquinas and can barely wait to read more of each of them each year.  They probably quietly influence my thinking more than any other philosophers, but Wittgenstein's analysis of language and communication will come vividly to mind many times over the years to come.  (For more on my adventure with Wittgenstein, see an earlier post.)

Best Reread
Tolkien's Silmarillion.  This book is like a cathedral in a prairie.  It offers truth whose stony solidity cannot be ignored, boisterously teeming images whose beauty fascinates, dizzy heights that raise hopes, and tragic tombs whose silence evoke shame and humility.  And it does it in a form that is unlike anything else around it.  (For more on Tolkien's fantastic history, see the previous post.) 

Best Recommended Offroading
I read quite a few things not on The List this year.  One of the greatest surprising treats was The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.  In this cross between magical fantasy, science fiction, and literature review, people can jump into and out of fiction.  When one steps out of a novel (or is taken out against his will), every copy in the world of that book changes to reflect the absence.  In order to save Jane Eyre (both the character and the novel), heroine Thursday Next (not the wackiest name in the book!) must enter the fictional realm, get into Rochester's house, and alter the course of events before Grace Poole starts the fire.  Mix Harry Potter, Peabody's Improbable History from Bullwinkle, and TV's Eureka, and you have Jasper Fforde's weird, wonderful world.  If only Mr. Fforde would match nouns and pronouns by number ("If anyone forgets their instructions . . . ." AAARRRGH!), I could say I loved every word.

Biggest Disappointment on The List
The Education of Henry Adams.  The book starts great; in telling of his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, walking him forcibly to school, Adams writes, "He violated the inalienable rights of boys and negated the social compact," thus dismantling the New England spirit of rebellion and the sacred words from his great-grandfather's time all at once.  But the book quickly becomes a series of confusing metaphors and unexplained topical references.  "His [the historian's] object is to triangulate from the widest base possible to the furthest point he thinks he can see, which is always far beyond the curve of the horizon."  Does that sentence actually make sense?  "The interference of the German and Russian legations, and of the Clan-na-Gael, with the press and the Senate was innocently undisguised."  Huh?  None of this -- none of this -- is explained.  I wish someone had told me to read the first few chapters, up to where he explains the first part of his point -- that eighteenth-century education did not prepare him for twentieth-century capitalism -- and then jump to chapter 29, which finishes up his point: that all previous forms of education taught the student to seek unity, while Adams's experience had shown him only multiplicity.

So that's a brief look back at 2010.  Like Janus, in the next post I'll look forward.