Year 1 of Decade 3 was a year of letters: Lewis letters, Dickens letters, Tolkien letters. In reading a collection of correspondence from the man who created Sam and Frodo and Legolas and Eowyn, I noticed many striking parallels between him and myself. I remembered from reading Tolkien’s biography several years ago that I saw myself in his habits of getting to class late and reading to his children. But the parallels run even farther.
• SNL’s Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey used to play a couple of friends who sat in the basement watching television and talked about huge projects they had in mind. After the description of every castle in the air, they’d look at each other, laugh, and say, “Aw! There’s another thing I’ll never do!” I had to laugh at myself in these characters, although I gave myself the consolation that I at least often began the novels and the game designs and the businesses that I only dreamt of completing. But Tolkien described my own desultory ways in calling himself a “notorious beginner of enterprises.” It took him twelve years to finish The Lord of the Rings; the book he worked on for fifty years, The Silmarillion, he left for his son Christopher to finish. How many other great projects did he merely begin?
• Tolkien complained sometimes of proofs and other extra bits of work coming at the worst time: when some large amount of grading was due. “Evil fate has plumped a doctorate thesis on me,” he once complained, and I sympathize.
• After one of these intense periods of task upon task, Tolkien said, “I have been chasing lost days ever since.” For years, without exactly knowing it, I had been searching for this phrase to describe a feeling of dyssynchrony with the world. I once dealt with a family crisis the week before a school year began and felt one week out of step the entire semester. Now I know: I was chasing lost days. (I found them again at Christmastide.)
• Tolkien believed that no commercialism can defile Christmas unless one lets it.
• Tolkien wanted to teach young people elevated vocabulary by simply using words like (and this was his example) argent, which has a beauty of sound all its own and so does not mean the same thing as silver. See the last paragraph from my June post this year on the effect of such writing on me in my childhood.
• Tolkien loved quoting one of his old professors in characterizing Oxford University not as an institution of learning but as a factory that makes fees. Amen! But at least “Oxford U.” isn’t routinely taken to mean a football team. (Hmm, I wonder if any Oxonian has ever referred to that academy as OU.)
• Hoping to find the Church a place of solace in times of trouble, Tolkien instead had to admit it was “just another arena of strife and change.”
• Tolkien loved Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.
Of course, I also noted some differences. I, for instance, did not create the Misty Mountains from my impression of Lauterbrunnen and then include my mental creation in an influential, best-selling, genre-creating novel. Also, I actually like Dorothy Sayers’s mystery stories. And I love The Chronicles of Narnia. But I’ll let Tolkien have his odd quirks.
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Keeping Up Appearances
No, this post isn’t about one of my favorite TV shows. It’s just that most of my reading for August involved plots that turned on appearances and especially the difference between appearance and reality.
Phineas Redux is the fourth book in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, a group of six novels centering on characters with positions in Parliament and the Ministry. Its constant inspection of the tension between duty to party, duty to truth, and duty to country ceratinly read like a commentary on current news. But what stood out to me even more was a theme of the appearance of faithlessness. Phineas appears to be faithless to his party near the beginning of the book. A few chapters in, Adelaide Palliser and Gerard Maule appear to abandon their love for one another. And about halfway through, Phineas appears to have murdered Mr. Bonteen.
Yes, he only appears to have killed the president of the Trade Board. I’m not giving anything away in saying he didn’t actually commit the deed. Like Hitchcock in Dial M for Murder, Trollope has a talent for revealing endings at the beginning of a story and then filling the path to those endings with suspense. I suppose I could say that Trollope himself gives an appearance of faithlessness to his readers by showing his hand. But (and here’s another almost certainly original analogy) as Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent showed, sometimes a joke is funnier when the punchline comes first.
In a year of reading Arthurian sources, I caught up on Chrétien de Troyes just about the time Phineas was standing trial. Among Chrétien’s late twelfth-century contributions to the legends were Camelot, the Holy Grail (which he identified merely as a “holy object”), and Lancelot: in other words, about half of what immediately springs to mind at the mention of everyone’s favorite King of all Britain. (In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, Arthur comes into the world with Merlin and Excalibur at his side. Wace added the Round Table to the recipe in 1155.)
Lancelot enters the world in a wonderful story in which he is known as the Knight of the Cart. The tale begins with Lancelot, having lost his mount, accepting a ride on a cart. Today’s reader learns two things very quickly: (1) riding a cart is the most shameful act any knight could ever commit, and (2) news of cart-riding travels very fast in Chrétien’s chivalric Britain. Everywhere he goes, everyone sees Lancelot as a disgrace to all that is good and decent, and yet he’s just doing whatever it takes to track down the kidnapped Guenevere. Appearances can be so deceiving!
When Lancelot finds his queen, he tears out the bars to her cell with his bare hands. Because the battle of appearance and reality is the theme of the story, he later restores the bars and leaves her in the cell in order to performs some deeds that will make the rescue perfect. But he has left the blood of his raw hands on the bed clothes, which doesn’t look so good for Guenevere.
Later in the story, the tables have turned: Guenevere is in Camelot and Lancelot is a prisoner. Lance hears of a tournament back home and convinces a serving girl who brings his daily food to let him out of his cell just long enough to compete. The poor girl points out that if he fights under his own colors and escutcheon, everyone will know that she has betrayed her master. So to protect her, Lancelot leaves for the weekend and jousts in disguise. Guenevere susses him out, though. As the Lady of the Tournament, she secretly bids the mysterious stranger to do his worst one day, and, honor bound to obey, he loses every match. The next day she instructs him to do his best, and sure enough, he wins every match. Only Lancelot could have the prowess to control his success so exactly.
By the date of this post, it appears as if I wrote and published it in August. But it is actually December as I type. The semester is almost over, and I’ll have more time to catch up on blogging in the next three weeks. So now it’s beginning to appear as if I will finish my minimal plan of one post for each month of 2017.
Phineas Redux is the fourth book in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, a group of six novels centering on characters with positions in Parliament and the Ministry. Its constant inspection of the tension between duty to party, duty to truth, and duty to country ceratinly read like a commentary on current news. But what stood out to me even more was a theme of the appearance of faithlessness. Phineas appears to be faithless to his party near the beginning of the book. A few chapters in, Adelaide Palliser and Gerard Maule appear to abandon their love for one another. And about halfway through, Phineas appears to have murdered Mr. Bonteen.
Yes, he only appears to have killed the president of the Trade Board. I’m not giving anything away in saying he didn’t actually commit the deed. Like Hitchcock in Dial M for Murder, Trollope has a talent for revealing endings at the beginning of a story and then filling the path to those endings with suspense. I suppose I could say that Trollope himself gives an appearance of faithlessness to his readers by showing his hand. But (and here’s another almost certainly original analogy) as Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent showed, sometimes a joke is funnier when the punchline comes first.
In a year of reading Arthurian sources, I caught up on Chrétien de Troyes just about the time Phineas was standing trial. Among Chrétien’s late twelfth-century contributions to the legends were Camelot, the Holy Grail (which he identified merely as a “holy object”), and Lancelot: in other words, about half of what immediately springs to mind at the mention of everyone’s favorite King of all Britain. (In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, Arthur comes into the world with Merlin and Excalibur at his side. Wace added the Round Table to the recipe in 1155.)
Lancelot enters the world in a wonderful story in which he is known as the Knight of the Cart. The tale begins with Lancelot, having lost his mount, accepting a ride on a cart. Today’s reader learns two things very quickly: (1) riding a cart is the most shameful act any knight could ever commit, and (2) news of cart-riding travels very fast in Chrétien’s chivalric Britain. Everywhere he goes, everyone sees Lancelot as a disgrace to all that is good and decent, and yet he’s just doing whatever it takes to track down the kidnapped Guenevere. Appearances can be so deceiving!
When Lancelot finds his queen, he tears out the bars to her cell with his bare hands. Because the battle of appearance and reality is the theme of the story, he later restores the bars and leaves her in the cell in order to performs some deeds that will make the rescue perfect. But he has left the blood of his raw hands on the bed clothes, which doesn’t look so good for Guenevere.
Later in the story, the tables have turned: Guenevere is in Camelot and Lancelot is a prisoner. Lance hears of a tournament back home and convinces a serving girl who brings his daily food to let him out of his cell just long enough to compete. The poor girl points out that if he fights under his own colors and escutcheon, everyone will know that she has betrayed her master. So to protect her, Lancelot leaves for the weekend and jousts in disguise. Guenevere susses him out, though. As the Lady of the Tournament, she secretly bids the mysterious stranger to do his worst one day, and, honor bound to obey, he loses every match. The next day she instructs him to do his best, and sure enough, he wins every match. Only Lancelot could have the prowess to control his success so exactly.
By the date of this post, it appears as if I wrote and published it in August. But it is actually December as I type. The semester is almost over, and I’ll have more time to catch up on blogging in the next three weeks. So now it’s beginning to appear as if I will finish my minimal plan of one post for each month of 2017.
Monday, July 31, 2017
The World Expands
I have loved reading about American history for almost as long as I can remember – and I can remember my third birthday. I was reading biographies of Lincoln and Edison and history articles in the World Book long before fifth grade. Then on the first day of fifth grade I brought home a large textbook called, creatively enough, American History. I was so excited, I read many, many pages of it that first night.
I may have skipped the first part about the explorers, though. It didn’t seem so interesting to me simply to learn a list of names to associate with certain places on the maps. In my school district, we studied American history again in eighth grade and then in eleventh grade. Each time it was the same: I knew that I would enjoy the text and the class as soon as we got past the explorers.
By my third year of college, something had changed. I don’t remember if I had developed a new interest in Cabot and Cartier or if I just thought I needed to get over my aversion. But in 1978, I took as a history elective a course on the age of European exploration and colonization. My hopes to enjoy the textbook were dashed early, though. The professor announced on the first day of class that the best book on the subject, by Samuel Eliot Morison, had sadly just gone out of print. One day three or four years ago, as I was putting together the list for my third (now current) ten-year reading plan, I remembered that first day of class in college and feeling cheated by the publishing industry, and, finding that the book had made its way back into the marketplace, I made sure to put Morison’s The Great Explorers on my plan for the first year. No reason to wait longer than thirty-nine years to right a Great Wrong.
The excellent book was worth the wait. Morison sailed to many of the places he wrote about and could explain from personal experience the conditions of particular harbors and the intricacies of the maneuvers Magellan & Co. made in their travels of discovery. He drew not just dissociated names but living characters from journals, financial logs, and contemporary histories, and he presented a story that far transcended the mere placement of names on familiar shorelines.
But the part that interested me most was, ironically, the story of those shorelines. Eliot presented them in what for me was a new way. And because of this fresh approach, I am now prepared to announce What’s Wrong with the Way American History Has Been Taught – at least in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grades in Hazelwood School District in the 1960s and 70s. The problem is that my school books showed me those names on maps whose outlines were familiar to me. By contrast, Eliot showed me the maps drawn by contemporaries of the explorers themselves, and they looked quite different from what I’m used to seeing. John Cabot thought that Newfoundland was a peninsula of Asia, and a map drawn from his notes shows it as a large promontory projecting southward from the eastern end of Asia. Maps incorporating Columbus’s discoveries showed the islands he reported as parts of the Japanese archipelago. To put these sailors’ names on maps drawn from our position in time misrepresents their thinking and purposes and, most importantly of all, the way their adventures shaped the advancement of knowledge. We see two continents and then draw explorers’ names on shorelines. They saw shorelines and eventually had to learn to draw continents behind them.
To my mind, the most amazing discovery – the most monumental and yet frustratingly short-sighted – was that of Verrazano. His trek up the eastern coast from what are now the Carolinas to Canada proved that the lands Columbus and Cabot and Cartier and Frobisher investigated were not peninsulas and islands of Asia but parts of a New World, a new continent between Europe’s western reaches and Asia’s eastern bourne. But, amazingly, all along the Outer Banks, Verrazano believed he had discovered a very narrow continent. He never once sailed through the breaks to see if any land lay beyond but simply assumed that he was seeing a new ocean, what we would call the Pacific, just over the dunes.
What I would like to see is a computer animation of the changing view of the global map from 1492 to, say, 1592. I’d like to see Asia sprouting peninsulas like an amoeba extending pseudopods that break off to form new amoebas. To see islands popping up in the ocean like quantum particles appearing from nothing. To see the ocean divided as Verrazano’s journey extends a few scattered islands into a continent. To see the Earth grow larger as America extends south and west to meet the discoveries of Magellan and Drake. I’d like to see it, so I may have to draw it and program it myself. Maybe by the time my grandchildren are in fifth grade, they can learn about this era the right way.
I may have skipped the first part about the explorers, though. It didn’t seem so interesting to me simply to learn a list of names to associate with certain places on the maps. In my school district, we studied American history again in eighth grade and then in eleventh grade. Each time it was the same: I knew that I would enjoy the text and the class as soon as we got past the explorers.
By my third year of college, something had changed. I don’t remember if I had developed a new interest in Cabot and Cartier or if I just thought I needed to get over my aversion. But in 1978, I took as a history elective a course on the age of European exploration and colonization. My hopes to enjoy the textbook were dashed early, though. The professor announced on the first day of class that the best book on the subject, by Samuel Eliot Morison, had sadly just gone out of print. One day three or four years ago, as I was putting together the list for my third (now current) ten-year reading plan, I remembered that first day of class in college and feeling cheated by the publishing industry, and, finding that the book had made its way back into the marketplace, I made sure to put Morison’s The Great Explorers on my plan for the first year. No reason to wait longer than thirty-nine years to right a Great Wrong.
The excellent book was worth the wait. Morison sailed to many of the places he wrote about and could explain from personal experience the conditions of particular harbors and the intricacies of the maneuvers Magellan & Co. made in their travels of discovery. He drew not just dissociated names but living characters from journals, financial logs, and contemporary histories, and he presented a story that far transcended the mere placement of names on familiar shorelines.
But the part that interested me most was, ironically, the story of those shorelines. Eliot presented them in what for me was a new way. And because of this fresh approach, I am now prepared to announce What’s Wrong with the Way American History Has Been Taught – at least in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grades in Hazelwood School District in the 1960s and 70s. The problem is that my school books showed me those names on maps whose outlines were familiar to me. By contrast, Eliot showed me the maps drawn by contemporaries of the explorers themselves, and they looked quite different from what I’m used to seeing. John Cabot thought that Newfoundland was a peninsula of Asia, and a map drawn from his notes shows it as a large promontory projecting southward from the eastern end of Asia. Maps incorporating Columbus’s discoveries showed the islands he reported as parts of the Japanese archipelago. To put these sailors’ names on maps drawn from our position in time misrepresents their thinking and purposes and, most importantly of all, the way their adventures shaped the advancement of knowledge. We see two continents and then draw explorers’ names on shorelines. They saw shorelines and eventually had to learn to draw continents behind them.
To my mind, the most amazing discovery – the most monumental and yet frustratingly short-sighted – was that of Verrazano. His trek up the eastern coast from what are now the Carolinas to Canada proved that the lands Columbus and Cabot and Cartier and Frobisher investigated were not peninsulas and islands of Asia but parts of a New World, a new continent between Europe’s western reaches and Asia’s eastern bourne. But, amazingly, all along the Outer Banks, Verrazano believed he had discovered a very narrow continent. He never once sailed through the breaks to see if any land lay beyond but simply assumed that he was seeing a new ocean, what we would call the Pacific, just over the dunes.
What I would like to see is a computer animation of the changing view of the global map from 1492 to, say, 1592. I’d like to see Asia sprouting peninsulas like an amoeba extending pseudopods that break off to form new amoebas. To see islands popping up in the ocean like quantum particles appearing from nothing. To see the ocean divided as Verrazano’s journey extends a few scattered islands into a continent. To see the Earth grow larger as America extends south and west to meet the discoveries of Magellan and Drake. I’d like to see it, so I may have to draw it and program it myself. Maybe by the time my grandchildren are in fifth grade, they can learn about this era the right way.
Friday, June 30, 2017
What Shapes Us
In June, I read a variety of things, none of which offers a main point around which to build a blog post. But all touch upon the structures, relationships, and forces that shape the individual. They even talk about forces that act upon us to make us free agents, a process that sounds like a contradiction at first but appears on closer inspection not to be.
According to his introduction, Augustine wrote On Grace and Free Will not, as a casual student of the history of theology might suppose, to emphasize grace in the persisting relationship of the two, but to defend free will against, as he says, those who take grace too far. Some religious thinkers at the time apparently wanted to place the immediate cause of every action in God’s Being, but Augustine points out that the Scripture speaks commandments as if to people who have the free power to obey or to disobey those commandments. The intention stated at the beginning of the book notwithstanding, as soon as Augustine mentions the Pelagians, he shifts to defending grace. He concludes that grace and free will work together: God shapes our wills, and we act freely to obtain what we will.
A biography of William James, William James in the Modern Maelstrom, is harder for me to summarize because it was harder for me to follow. I think I have a grasp on James’s psychological view after reading parts of his Principles of Psychology every year for many years. But to watch the ideas form, change, blend, crystallize, strengthen, and weaken over his life reminds me that even the most careful, insightful thinker is human after all. James’s work often addresses the forces that shape us, and forces indeed shaped his views of just how this works. His narcissistic father, the death of a girl he loved, other writers (Peirce and Emerson notably), experiences with his patients – all these experiences played roles in the development of his mature philosophical system. And that system in turn partly said that all thought and belief is grounded in experience. Late in his life, James turned to philosophy of religion and said that, since religious thought, too, should be grounded in personal experience, “earnest” religion must eschew institutions and dogmas. But what if my experience (including my experience of having read about James’s changing ideas) tells me that I should honor Church and dogma? Credo ut intelligam.
One quick note from some letters of C. S. Lewis: While America’s favorite Anglican held, as I do, reverence for the Christian Church and its ancient creeds, he held suspect a different kind of dogma. Lewis said he disapproved of lists of “greatest books” since, he complained, any such list handed people their tastes ready-made.
As with William James, reading Lewis, learning from him, and agreeing with him is exactly what makes me want to argue with him here. Was Lewis’s profession as a literature teacher not a matter of shaping his students’ tastes? Lewis’s interests have certainly shaped mine. His reading lists have influenced mine. His analysis of various Renaissance books has increased my understanding of them. I started my entire program in reading Great Books because of something Lewis said about Orlando Furioso. Maybe there are other books out there somewhere that I haven’t heard of that I would like better. It seems unlikely, but it’s theoretically possible. In my ignorance, though, I’m happy with my tastes and grateful that Lewis handed them to me ready-made.
But grace and free will are in tension. I wouldn’t accept and enjoy the gift of taste from Lewis if it didn’t resonate with what I already want. For Christmas when I was eight years old, my dad gave me an edition of Sidney Lanier’s boys’ version of King Arthur. I opened it up that December morning eager to enjoy it and read, “It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon.” I immediately closed the book, realizing that if I couldn’t understand the first line, I wouldn’t be able to get through 300 pages. Not yet, at least! If I knew I wasn’t up to the task at eight, I also knew that I would be one day, and that I wanted that day to come. My dad and Sidney Lanier were trying to shape my tastes, and I knew that I wanted what they had to offer even when I was too young to understand it. I knew it was in me to like a book that began “It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon.” And now I do like that book (and Malory’s “original”), partly because it presents a story in which God’s grace and the knights’ free will interact and cooperate to shape the story.
According to his introduction, Augustine wrote On Grace and Free Will not, as a casual student of the history of theology might suppose, to emphasize grace in the persisting relationship of the two, but to defend free will against, as he says, those who take grace too far. Some religious thinkers at the time apparently wanted to place the immediate cause of every action in God’s Being, but Augustine points out that the Scripture speaks commandments as if to people who have the free power to obey or to disobey those commandments. The intention stated at the beginning of the book notwithstanding, as soon as Augustine mentions the Pelagians, he shifts to defending grace. He concludes that grace and free will work together: God shapes our wills, and we act freely to obtain what we will.
A biography of William James, William James in the Modern Maelstrom, is harder for me to summarize because it was harder for me to follow. I think I have a grasp on James’s psychological view after reading parts of his Principles of Psychology every year for many years. But to watch the ideas form, change, blend, crystallize, strengthen, and weaken over his life reminds me that even the most careful, insightful thinker is human after all. James’s work often addresses the forces that shape us, and forces indeed shaped his views of just how this works. His narcissistic father, the death of a girl he loved, other writers (Peirce and Emerson notably), experiences with his patients – all these experiences played roles in the development of his mature philosophical system. And that system in turn partly said that all thought and belief is grounded in experience. Late in his life, James turned to philosophy of religion and said that, since religious thought, too, should be grounded in personal experience, “earnest” religion must eschew institutions and dogmas. But what if my experience (including my experience of having read about James’s changing ideas) tells me that I should honor Church and dogma? Credo ut intelligam.
One quick note from some letters of C. S. Lewis: While America’s favorite Anglican held, as I do, reverence for the Christian Church and its ancient creeds, he held suspect a different kind of dogma. Lewis said he disapproved of lists of “greatest books” since, he complained, any such list handed people their tastes ready-made.
As with William James, reading Lewis, learning from him, and agreeing with him is exactly what makes me want to argue with him here. Was Lewis’s profession as a literature teacher not a matter of shaping his students’ tastes? Lewis’s interests have certainly shaped mine. His reading lists have influenced mine. His analysis of various Renaissance books has increased my understanding of them. I started my entire program in reading Great Books because of something Lewis said about Orlando Furioso. Maybe there are other books out there somewhere that I haven’t heard of that I would like better. It seems unlikely, but it’s theoretically possible. In my ignorance, though, I’m happy with my tastes and grateful that Lewis handed them to me ready-made.
But grace and free will are in tension. I wouldn’t accept and enjoy the gift of taste from Lewis if it didn’t resonate with what I already want. For Christmas when I was eight years old, my dad gave me an edition of Sidney Lanier’s boys’ version of King Arthur. I opened it up that December morning eager to enjoy it and read, “It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon.” I immediately closed the book, realizing that if I couldn’t understand the first line, I wouldn’t be able to get through 300 pages. Not yet, at least! If I knew I wasn’t up to the task at eight, I also knew that I would be one day, and that I wanted that day to come. My dad and Sidney Lanier were trying to shape my tastes, and I knew that I wanted what they had to offer even when I was too young to understand it. I knew it was in me to like a book that began “It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon.” And now I do like that book (and Malory’s “original”), partly because it presents a story in which God’s grace and the knights’ free will interact and cooperate to shape the story.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Dickens the Character
I looked back at some previous posts the other day trying to find something I had said about Augustine’s views of skill and education. (I finally found what I was looking for in a post about Jane Austen, whose last name, as I think of it, is a variation on the name “Augustine.” ) I fairly amazed myself, frankly. The posts, all from several years ago, were generally written well, with good form and a somewhat pleasingly varied rhetoric. And more importantly, it seemed that I actually had things to say: ideas I felt strongly and that I conveyed clearly. I felt at moments while reading as if I were learning things from another person. How did that all that meaningful writing happen, and why isn’t it happening now? Where once I wrote a hundred posts a year, I’m now (in November!) struggling to get out just my fifth post for 2017, a look back at May’s reading. Did this blog suddenly slow down (a blog clog?) because I only have ten years’ worth of things to say in my soul? Did I just get tired of posting? Or did I get spooked by the Russian bots that troll my site after the potential mischief of Russian bots has hovered near the top of the news for over a year?
My favorite writer had much more than a ten years’ supply of words and ideas and never tired of sharing them. In May of this year, I finally got around to reading the (selected) letters of Charles Dickens. I had read two biographies of Dickens before and numerous articles about him, but in his letters I sensed that I was meeting the man himself. Or perhaps I should say that I discovered that the narrative voice in Dickens’s books was the Great Man all along: that the glowing face of Oz (or Boz in this case) is the man behind the curtain. In many ways, Dickens’s life was a novel and he was the hero of the tale. (He had no reason to have Copperfieldian doubts on that score. Hmmm. Or is that Copperfieldesque?) Dickens the man was Dickens the character, and the collection of his letters presents his story.
The first kind of connection between the letters and the novels is the most direct one: Dickens wrote from life, so events in the books came from events in life. Dickens’s description in an early letter of a snowy ride to Greta Bridge, for instance, reminded me very much of Nicholas Nickleby’s first ride to Yorkshire. The grief he expressed over the death of Mary, his teen-aged sister-in-law, hangs over the whole volume and presents a tragic story in itself deeply moving. But that watershed event in the author’s life also explains a lot of things in his books, most notably his penchant for including dying children (and the Tiny cripple who did NOT die). On virtually every page, I could have ticked a box on a list: yeah, there’s the thing from that book, and there’s that funny fellow from that book . . . .
The manner of presentation corresponds as well. Dickens the novelist could write 800 pages of serious drama (Bleak House), of comedy (Nicholas Nickleby), of satire (Pickwick), of social lecturing (Hard Times), or of heartwarming homey stuff (David Copperfield). His tone changed with the needs of the story. Which of these voices was the voice of the real Dickens? All of them. Like Robin Williams, Charles Dickens was the amalgam of all of his personas. He wrote funny, ironic letters to his friends when the occasion allowed it and scolded forcibly when the occasion demanded it. He could be tender, indignant, facetious, or magniloquent. And he could be more than one of these things at a time: many a poor writer sent in a manuscript asking for advice, and Dickens regularly returned a kind but detailed rationale for why the correspondent needed to pursue a career outside the field of letters. (Had I been alive then, I would hope I would have better sense than to try.)
If the content and the style are both novelistic, then Dickens is indeed his own hero. No, literally: a hero. As his life and career progressed and he became the second most admired person in the British Empire (always second, of course, to the Queen who gave the era her name), Dickens recognized and accepted the responsibility of celebrity (a lesson that only Spider-Man seems to understand these days), several times exhibiting needed moral and emotional leadership in a crisis. Once during one of his public readings, a gas lamp fell in the theatre. Knowing that the fear of fire among a closely packed audience could cause more harm than the easily contained fire itself, Dickens stood his ground on stage and told the crowd to remain seated while officials took care of the problem, saving trouble, damage, and perhaps even life. But the most astonishing example came late in Dickens’s life when a bridge collapsed under a train he was riding. The engine plummeted off the rails ahead of his car, and the other carriages went off behind him. Dickens’s carriage alone teetered precariously on what was left of the trestle, yet he calmed the others on the car and asked a railway official to help him get the people out, then spent two hours helping and comforting the wounded and dying in the wreckage. (Note: the paid employee of the rail service responded to instructions from the author. He knew who was in charge.)
Every story needs a good ending, and the end of Dickens’s life reads like the crisis in a Sophoclean drama. Dickens takes on public readings and then gets weak from overexertion. He starts Edwin Drood, the novel death will interrupt, leaving its murder mystery tantalizingly unsolved. Dickens then decides to add the emotionally taxing scene of Nancy’s murder (from Oliver Twist) to his reading routine. Like a good Christian in a sentimental novel, he expresses his faith before departing. His letter to Rev. Macrae reminds that reader (as well as this one) that every last one of his morally good characters expresses faith in the Savior and that each Christmas book is meant as a sermon on a given Scriptural text. And then in his final letter, on the day before he died (critics have vilified him for including coincidences less outrageous in his stories), he tells John Makeham, “I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour.”
Then the letters cease. Dickens’s first stroke occurred on stage during a public reading of Nancy’s murder a year earlier. His last stroke occurred on June 8, 1870, the day of the letter to John Makeham, and he died the next day.
I will now shock the world by announcing that I am not Charles Dickens. I don’t have much to say and certainly nothing original: I can only pass on the contents of books I have read. And I don’t have an ending. If I were to die before finishing this very sentence, the post would at least end with a flair if not a period.
Nope. Didn’t happen.
So I’ll go back to Augustine and Jane Austen. What they said, according to my blogpost anyway, is that any skill requires ability, education, and practice in order to be actualized. I have some ability and supposedly some education. So maybe my problem with writing this year stems from a lack of practice. Maybe it isn’t that I wrote all those previous posts because I had something to say: maybe I had so much to say because I wrote frequent posts. Well, only about six weeks remain in this year (again, I’m writing May’s piece in November), and if I’m to fulfill my vague determination to complete a month-by-month review of my reading for 2017, I’ll have to increase the frequency of these posts. So we’ll see.
My favorite writer had much more than a ten years’ supply of words and ideas and never tired of sharing them. In May of this year, I finally got around to reading the (selected) letters of Charles Dickens. I had read two biographies of Dickens before and numerous articles about him, but in his letters I sensed that I was meeting the man himself. Or perhaps I should say that I discovered that the narrative voice in Dickens’s books was the Great Man all along: that the glowing face of Oz (or Boz in this case) is the man behind the curtain. In many ways, Dickens’s life was a novel and he was the hero of the tale. (He had no reason to have Copperfieldian doubts on that score. Hmmm. Or is that Copperfieldesque?) Dickens the man was Dickens the character, and the collection of his letters presents his story.
The first kind of connection between the letters and the novels is the most direct one: Dickens wrote from life, so events in the books came from events in life. Dickens’s description in an early letter of a snowy ride to Greta Bridge, for instance, reminded me very much of Nicholas Nickleby’s first ride to Yorkshire. The grief he expressed over the death of Mary, his teen-aged sister-in-law, hangs over the whole volume and presents a tragic story in itself deeply moving. But that watershed event in the author’s life also explains a lot of things in his books, most notably his penchant for including dying children (and the Tiny cripple who did NOT die). On virtually every page, I could have ticked a box on a list: yeah, there’s the thing from that book, and there’s that funny fellow from that book . . . .
The manner of presentation corresponds as well. Dickens the novelist could write 800 pages of serious drama (Bleak House), of comedy (Nicholas Nickleby), of satire (Pickwick), of social lecturing (Hard Times), or of heartwarming homey stuff (David Copperfield). His tone changed with the needs of the story. Which of these voices was the voice of the real Dickens? All of them. Like Robin Williams, Charles Dickens was the amalgam of all of his personas. He wrote funny, ironic letters to his friends when the occasion allowed it and scolded forcibly when the occasion demanded it. He could be tender, indignant, facetious, or magniloquent. And he could be more than one of these things at a time: many a poor writer sent in a manuscript asking for advice, and Dickens regularly returned a kind but detailed rationale for why the correspondent needed to pursue a career outside the field of letters. (Had I been alive then, I would hope I would have better sense than to try.)
If the content and the style are both novelistic, then Dickens is indeed his own hero. No, literally: a hero. As his life and career progressed and he became the second most admired person in the British Empire (always second, of course, to the Queen who gave the era her name), Dickens recognized and accepted the responsibility of celebrity (a lesson that only Spider-Man seems to understand these days), several times exhibiting needed moral and emotional leadership in a crisis. Once during one of his public readings, a gas lamp fell in the theatre. Knowing that the fear of fire among a closely packed audience could cause more harm than the easily contained fire itself, Dickens stood his ground on stage and told the crowd to remain seated while officials took care of the problem, saving trouble, damage, and perhaps even life. But the most astonishing example came late in Dickens’s life when a bridge collapsed under a train he was riding. The engine plummeted off the rails ahead of his car, and the other carriages went off behind him. Dickens’s carriage alone teetered precariously on what was left of the trestle, yet he calmed the others on the car and asked a railway official to help him get the people out, then spent two hours helping and comforting the wounded and dying in the wreckage. (Note: the paid employee of the rail service responded to instructions from the author. He knew who was in charge.)
Every story needs a good ending, and the end of Dickens’s life reads like the crisis in a Sophoclean drama. Dickens takes on public readings and then gets weak from overexertion. He starts Edwin Drood, the novel death will interrupt, leaving its murder mystery tantalizingly unsolved. Dickens then decides to add the emotionally taxing scene of Nancy’s murder (from Oliver Twist) to his reading routine. Like a good Christian in a sentimental novel, he expresses his faith before departing. His letter to Rev. Macrae reminds that reader (as well as this one) that every last one of his morally good characters expresses faith in the Savior and that each Christmas book is meant as a sermon on a given Scriptural text. And then in his final letter, on the day before he died (critics have vilified him for including coincidences less outrageous in his stories), he tells John Makeham, “I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour.”
Then the letters cease. Dickens’s first stroke occurred on stage during a public reading of Nancy’s murder a year earlier. His last stroke occurred on June 8, 1870, the day of the letter to John Makeham, and he died the next day.
I will now shock the world by announcing that I am not Charles Dickens. I don’t have much to say and certainly nothing original: I can only pass on the contents of books I have read. And I don’t have an ending. If I were to die before finishing this very sentence, the post would at least end with a flair if not a period.
Nope. Didn’t happen.
So I’ll go back to Augustine and Jane Austen. What they said, according to my blogpost anyway, is that any skill requires ability, education, and practice in order to be actualized. I have some ability and supposedly some education. So maybe my problem with writing this year stems from a lack of practice. Maybe it isn’t that I wrote all those previous posts because I had something to say: maybe I had so much to say because I wrote frequent posts. Well, only about six weeks remain in this year (again, I’m writing May’s piece in November), and if I’m to fulfill my vague determination to complete a month-by-month review of my reading for 2017, I’ll have to increase the frequency of these posts. So we’ll see.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
The Quest for the Holy Grail
One of the main purposes of a multi-year reading list is to assure getting to those things “that I need to read Someday.” My plan is a way of making sure Someday comes. April showers brought with them a couple of long books that had been waiting for Someday a long time indeed.
The first “biography” of King Arthur appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth, ca. 1136. Not much of the familiar legend is there: Geoffrey puts Arthur in his list of regum Brittaniæ, but he concentrates in this section of his chronicle on a long prophecy by Merlin. A fellow named Wace added the Round Table to the picture around 1155. Between 1170 and 1190, Chrétien de Troyes added the Grail (which he called simply a “holy object”), Camelot, and Lancelot. Robert de Boron made the Grail a vessel of the Last Supper and put it in the hands of Joseph of Arimathea. In the early thirteenth century, the lengthy Lancelot-Grail cycle, a collection of stories in the French language by multiple writers, first puts everything together. In April, I read the Lancelot-Grail Reader, a collection (and translation) of the main stories from this collection.
I’ve been on my own quest the last few years: to read the Arthurian sources written before Malory and try to find some missing information. The biggest question in my mind is this: What is the purpose of the Grail Quest? The Grail appears above the Round Table one Pentecost, and Arthur and all the knights accept the apparition as an invitation to a quest. So how do they know the event announces a quest? All vow to “achieve” the quest. What does that mean? How do they intend to do it? What is their goal? It can’t be that they simply want to see the actual Grail: several knights have been to the castle of Corbenic and seen it before this time, so the fellowship of knights doesn’t need a vision to know what to see and where to go. We have to assume that God has brought this quest; what is his purpose? To get Galahad to Corbenic so that he can heal the Fisher King? Apparently the knights don’t understand this since every last one of them wants to try. Talk about your riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas! (Poor Arthur. He knows that the Grail is the best and most holy object in the world, yet he also knows that the unavoidable quest means the end of the Round Table. Don’t let it be forgot that there was once a spot . . . .)
Sadly, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle doesn’t explain any of this conundrum. At some point in history – possibly in the history of French religious thought in the thirteenth century or possibly even in what little of actual history makes its way into the Arthurian legend – a connection existed that made sense to people. If the Holy Grail appeared to me and filled my plate with food, I would be amazed and grateful and frightened and suspicious and a hundred other things, but I don’t think it would ever spontaneously occur to me that the phenomenon was an invitation to get up from my table and look for the original of the shadow I’d just seen. So my quest continues.
Almost a thousand years and a full thousand figurative miles separate the medieval tales of King Arthur and the science-fiction tales of Isaac Asimov. But both represent quests. The Complete Robot collects all of Asimov’s stories about robots (rather obvious, no?) and sets the reader off on a journey into a future that Asimov spins out over more than a dozen novels in three interwoven series. The robot collection has few weak members and no duds. My favorite involves a computer programmed to search (Asimov’s prescient view of) the internet for the programmer’s perfect woman. The crafty machine, though, made to think like its maker after all, naturally sees the woman it locates as perfect for itself, gets its programmer fired, and then waits for the arrival of its new mistress. Oh, the stroke of her fingers on my keyboard!
Here we find a third quest: the Quest for the Future. And I have as many questions about this quest as I do about the Grail. What is the future that Asimov, readers, tech gurus, and computer users are seeking? It now seems that Asimov was exactly right in predicting that it has something to do with computers and robots. But who will use them and to what end? And what are we to think of the ultimate potential of computers and robots? Will they be beneficent aids to a world of progressing happiness? Will they simply take away (and help tyrants take away) our freedom to pursue happiness? Or is the digital future like the Grail: something so good it will break society apart forever?
The first “biography” of King Arthur appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth, ca. 1136. Not much of the familiar legend is there: Geoffrey puts Arthur in his list of regum Brittaniæ, but he concentrates in this section of his chronicle on a long prophecy by Merlin. A fellow named Wace added the Round Table to the picture around 1155. Between 1170 and 1190, Chrétien de Troyes added the Grail (which he called simply a “holy object”), Camelot, and Lancelot. Robert de Boron made the Grail a vessel of the Last Supper and put it in the hands of Joseph of Arimathea. In the early thirteenth century, the lengthy Lancelot-Grail cycle, a collection of stories in the French language by multiple writers, first puts everything together. In April, I read the Lancelot-Grail Reader, a collection (and translation) of the main stories from this collection.
I’ve been on my own quest the last few years: to read the Arthurian sources written before Malory and try to find some missing information. The biggest question in my mind is this: What is the purpose of the Grail Quest? The Grail appears above the Round Table one Pentecost, and Arthur and all the knights accept the apparition as an invitation to a quest. So how do they know the event announces a quest? All vow to “achieve” the quest. What does that mean? How do they intend to do it? What is their goal? It can’t be that they simply want to see the actual Grail: several knights have been to the castle of Corbenic and seen it before this time, so the fellowship of knights doesn’t need a vision to know what to see and where to go. We have to assume that God has brought this quest; what is his purpose? To get Galahad to Corbenic so that he can heal the Fisher King? Apparently the knights don’t understand this since every last one of them wants to try. Talk about your riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas! (Poor Arthur. He knows that the Grail is the best and most holy object in the world, yet he also knows that the unavoidable quest means the end of the Round Table. Don’t let it be forgot that there was once a spot . . . .)
Sadly, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle doesn’t explain any of this conundrum. At some point in history – possibly in the history of French religious thought in the thirteenth century or possibly even in what little of actual history makes its way into the Arthurian legend – a connection existed that made sense to people. If the Holy Grail appeared to me and filled my plate with food, I would be amazed and grateful and frightened and suspicious and a hundred other things, but I don’t think it would ever spontaneously occur to me that the phenomenon was an invitation to get up from my table and look for the original of the shadow I’d just seen. So my quest continues.
Almost a thousand years and a full thousand figurative miles separate the medieval tales of King Arthur and the science-fiction tales of Isaac Asimov. But both represent quests. The Complete Robot collects all of Asimov’s stories about robots (rather obvious, no?) and sets the reader off on a journey into a future that Asimov spins out over more than a dozen novels in three interwoven series. The robot collection has few weak members and no duds. My favorite involves a computer programmed to search (Asimov’s prescient view of) the internet for the programmer’s perfect woman. The crafty machine, though, made to think like its maker after all, naturally sees the woman it locates as perfect for itself, gets its programmer fired, and then waits for the arrival of its new mistress. Oh, the stroke of her fingers on my keyboard!
Here we find a third quest: the Quest for the Future. And I have as many questions about this quest as I do about the Grail. What is the future that Asimov, readers, tech gurus, and computer users are seeking? It now seems that Asimov was exactly right in predicting that it has something to do with computers and robots. But who will use them and to what end? And what are we to think of the ultimate potential of computers and robots? Will they be beneficent aids to a world of progressing happiness? Will they simply take away (and help tyrants take away) our freedom to pursue happiness? Or is the digital future like the Grail: something so good it will break society apart forever?
Friday, March 31, 2017
Things Start to Get Good Right About Now
In the previous post, I explained that I worried through most of February that my new ten-year reading plan needed to be pared down, my ambitions tamed, my expectations leveled. By the end of March, though, the book list had started to do what it was supposed to do and felt exactly right.
What was it supposed to do? Make me eager to pick up my books every day without thinking that I’d have to make myself get through a certain number of pages in order to keep up. And the books of March did exactly that.
We’ll start with C. S. Lewis: as Sister Maria says, “A very good place to start.” Obviously, a book called Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature will only feel fun to someone who enjoys medieval and Renaissance literature. As it happens, I do. I first read The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy only prompted by a drive to check boxes on a mental list. But self-imposed duty quickly turned into externally prompted devotion. I love every one of these classics and have read some parts three and four and five times. And now the wise professor tells me how to understand and enjoy them even more. Check this sample of nifty points from Lewis:
• How far do you go in studying background to understand old literature? It's up to you. Just as there are two ways to visit a foreign country – staying at the British hotels or immersion into local culture – there are two ways of enjoying an old book.
• It doesn't help, however, to learn about some prior myth that supposedly shapes the story. The only way of understanding the myth is to get inside what it feels like to believe it, and that means reading the poetry. “The poem is illuminating the myth; the myth is not illuminating the poem.”
• A medieval book is the product of several people, rather like a cathedral.
• Medieval scholars loved and revered books, sacred or profane, and accepted the contradictions, assuming that there was some truth in every stated view.
• The interweaving of stories in Faerie Queene is a “polyphonic narrative.” Such a convoluted structure may not be to modern taste and may make it hard to remember who’s where doing what with whom (what a relief to find that Lewis couldn’t always keep track of everything, either!), but (1) this way of writing stories lasted longer than our narrative style has, so a lot of readers over the centuries have found it completely suiting, and (2) no one complained about it then, so they must have had superior powers of memory that our technologies have impaired.
Yeah, I didn’t have to keep checking the calendar and doing math in order to turn enough pages every day to keep on track with this one.
While I read these and other fascinating and helpful lessons about medieval and Renaissance literature, I also enjoyed rereading my adolescent self’s favorite Jules Verne novel: Hector Servadac. As a teen, I knew it as Off on a Comet. (It’s the only title I know of that includes two opposite prepositions in a row!) That American title change is the tip of an iceberg of weird problems caused by translators trying to make Verne acceptable to English readers’ expectations. According to certain Verne fans with internet presence (such as this guy), all those wonderful science-fiction novels that have inspired generations of Doc Browns have come to us in bad translations that actually cut a lot of the scientific descriptions! To read the most complete translation, I had to stitch together two documents (the Wikipedia article explains it) and suffer through the ham-fisted work of translators who believe that good renditions copy every French turn of phrase word for word. (For example, the Gallic propensity for inserting ce after a perfectly good subject has already been stated makes sonic sense in French but just adds a weird redundancy in English. “This spheroid we are on, it is a comet.” C'est une comète.)
Still, with all its stilted language and absurd plot (a comet grazes the Earth and picks up some of the land formations, buildings, and living creatures without harming them?!), I ate up every last crumb of Verne’s hearty meal of bizarre metallic cliffs, British soldiers who will never abandon their post even though that post be sailing through the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and cavern-apartments inside a volcano complete with central heating provided by streams of lava.
And then there’s Arundel, which occupied a prominent place on my dad’s bookshelf as I was growing up. I looked at that spine practically every day for eighteen years and then fairly often for another twelve, all that while believing it held something really good before discovering that I could indeed, in this case at least, judge a book by its cover. Kenneth Roberts dared to suggest in his historical fiction that the Sons of Liberty were mostly unruly hotheads and that Benedict Arnold had many virtues – and won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for doing it. He has unjustly been forgotten, but I can’t imagine a resurgence of interest in anything so subversive in today’s America. Americans would have to know accepted 1750s history in order to appreciate the subversion of it.
Oh, but I can point out my own blind spots, too. Let’s just say that this second reading of the novel showed me that at the time of my first trip through its pages, I was just as stupid about the women in the book as protagonist Steven Nason was. Every time I tried to shout at him, “Why can’t you see what she’s doing?” I ended up scolding myself as well: “Why didn’t I see what she was doing?”
What was it supposed to do? Make me eager to pick up my books every day without thinking that I’d have to make myself get through a certain number of pages in order to keep up. And the books of March did exactly that.
We’ll start with C. S. Lewis: as Sister Maria says, “A very good place to start.” Obviously, a book called Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature will only feel fun to someone who enjoys medieval and Renaissance literature. As it happens, I do. I first read The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy only prompted by a drive to check boxes on a mental list. But self-imposed duty quickly turned into externally prompted devotion. I love every one of these classics and have read some parts three and four and five times. And now the wise professor tells me how to understand and enjoy them even more. Check this sample of nifty points from Lewis:
• How far do you go in studying background to understand old literature? It's up to you. Just as there are two ways to visit a foreign country – staying at the British hotels or immersion into local culture – there are two ways of enjoying an old book.
• It doesn't help, however, to learn about some prior myth that supposedly shapes the story. The only way of understanding the myth is to get inside what it feels like to believe it, and that means reading the poetry. “The poem is illuminating the myth; the myth is not illuminating the poem.”
• A medieval book is the product of several people, rather like a cathedral.
• Medieval scholars loved and revered books, sacred or profane, and accepted the contradictions, assuming that there was some truth in every stated view.
• The interweaving of stories in Faerie Queene is a “polyphonic narrative.” Such a convoluted structure may not be to modern taste and may make it hard to remember who’s where doing what with whom (what a relief to find that Lewis couldn’t always keep track of everything, either!), but (1) this way of writing stories lasted longer than our narrative style has, so a lot of readers over the centuries have found it completely suiting, and (2) no one complained about it then, so they must have had superior powers of memory that our technologies have impaired.
Yeah, I didn’t have to keep checking the calendar and doing math in order to turn enough pages every day to keep on track with this one.
While I read these and other fascinating and helpful lessons about medieval and Renaissance literature, I also enjoyed rereading my adolescent self’s favorite Jules Verne novel: Hector Servadac. As a teen, I knew it as Off on a Comet. (It’s the only title I know of that includes two opposite prepositions in a row!) That American title change is the tip of an iceberg of weird problems caused by translators trying to make Verne acceptable to English readers’ expectations. According to certain Verne fans with internet presence (such as this guy), all those wonderful science-fiction novels that have inspired generations of Doc Browns have come to us in bad translations that actually cut a lot of the scientific descriptions! To read the most complete translation, I had to stitch together two documents (the Wikipedia article explains it) and suffer through the ham-fisted work of translators who believe that good renditions copy every French turn of phrase word for word. (For example, the Gallic propensity for inserting ce after a perfectly good subject has already been stated makes sonic sense in French but just adds a weird redundancy in English. “This spheroid we are on, it is a comet.” C'est une comète.)
Still, with all its stilted language and absurd plot (a comet grazes the Earth and picks up some of the land formations, buildings, and living creatures without harming them?!), I ate up every last crumb of Verne’s hearty meal of bizarre metallic cliffs, British soldiers who will never abandon their post even though that post be sailing through the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and cavern-apartments inside a volcano complete with central heating provided by streams of lava.
And then there’s Arundel, which occupied a prominent place on my dad’s bookshelf as I was growing up. I looked at that spine practically every day for eighteen years and then fairly often for another twelve, all that while believing it held something really good before discovering that I could indeed, in this case at least, judge a book by its cover. Kenneth Roberts dared to suggest in his historical fiction that the Sons of Liberty were mostly unruly hotheads and that Benedict Arnold had many virtues – and won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for doing it. He has unjustly been forgotten, but I can’t imagine a resurgence of interest in anything so subversive in today’s America. Americans would have to know accepted 1750s history in order to appreciate the subversion of it.
Oh, but I can point out my own blind spots, too. Let’s just say that this second reading of the novel showed me that at the time of my first trip through its pages, I was just as stupid about the women in the book as protagonist Steven Nason was. Every time I tried to shout at him, “Why can’t you see what she’s doing?” I ended up scolding myself as well: “Why didn’t I see what she was doing?”
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