Top 100 – Part VII

What?! 700 posts on exlibrismagnis.com?! Yes, even with my slower pace over the last few years, I have made it to my seven-hundredth contribution to this blog. Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from writing about current reading to offer moments from my past reading, ideas and stories and images that I think about often. My original idea for the subseries was to outline my hundred favorite books, but that idea quickly changed. These books are not necessarily in my top 100 books, in spite of my misleading title. In fact, if I were ever to put such a list into black and white, at least four of these titles wouldn’t make it. (I don’t even remember one of the titles.) Maybe if I get to 1000 posts I’ll actually try to decide what my favorite 100 books are.

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. At Thanksgiving a few years ago, a distantish relative (the exact description of our relationship would involve the phrase “in-law” three times) wanted to talk at me about the Commedia. Knowing my education, he still assumed I knew nothing of this greatest of all classics, and tried to explain to me that no one reads anything but the Inferno because the other parts aren’t enjoyable. I told him that I read all three parts every few years and actually preferred Purgatorio and Paradiso. He corrected my pronunciation of commedia and moved on to his next topic. I think of many passages from all three parts of the epic poem often, but for now, I want to mention just one moment, when Dante gets to the empyrean heaven and sees all the concentric spheres of the heavens turned inside out so that God is at the center while everything else revolves around Him in a dance of love. I fail in all my attempts to put the image into words, and yet the topographical oxymoron shines clearly and distinctly in my inner eye. It is the master image in my mind of the God who encompasses all things, is at the center of all things, and yet stays separate from all his creation, the God who rules by orderly love. I love Dante, and I love God more because of Dante.

• John Milton, Paradise Lost. While we’re on the subject of epic poetry about Heaven and Hell, let’s talk about Milton a minute. In book IV, Satan visits Paradise. Many readers have thought that Milton makes Satan too sympathetic in these passages. Perhaps the poet, seeing his own antimonarchical bent in the archfiend who rebelled against the Divine Throne, injected too much of himself into the character. In any case, Satan’s sympathetic moment (“Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King! / Ah, wherefore? He deserved no such return / From me”) works for me and makes his next scene even more powerful. The Deceiver now takes the form of a cormorant and sits on the walls of the Garden of Eden, viewing first the flowers, the fruit, and then our first parents. “Ah! gentle pair,” he says, “ye little think how nigh /  Your change approaches, when all these delights / Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe.” An unforgettable turn!

• H. W. Brands, TR. President Teddy Roosevelt is visited by a French ambassador and takes him on his daily rugged walk. After crossing a river, the President looks back to see his visitor, still on the opposite bank stripping naked except for a pair of pink gloves. “Why did you remove your clothes?” asks Roosevelt once his fellow hiker completes the crossing. “I do not think we will meet any ladies out here,” replies the Frenchman. “Then why did you keep the gloves on?” “Just in case we do.” I hope the story is completely true.

• John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. I love Newman’s description of the properly educated mind and aspire to approach its condition. “It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.” Without the “almost,” the description would be heresy. With it, it is merely overly optimistic: I believe in the vision of this mind, but how could even the best university ever produce it?

• Malcom Gladwell, Blink. Forget careful, prolonged judgment of new people and situations, advises Gladwell. The human mind is equipped to make reasonable judgments in the blink of an eye. In one example, he cites a study showing that students viewing fifteen seconds of video of each of several professors rate them essentially the same as do other students after taking entire courses with the same professors. I thought about times I made decisions to hire people as soon they walked in the door; I no longer feel privately ashamed to have done so. (Not one that I chose in this way gave me any cause for regret.)

• Isaac Asimov, A-story-that-has-a-title-which-I-have-forgotten. In the future, everyone uses calculators. One day one person shows his ability to add up a couple of multi-digit numbers, and everyone else is amazed. Thus does new technology diminish traditional skills. Have we already reached this future?

• Michael Ward, Planet Narnia. Michael Ward, admitting that he sounds like a conspiracy theorist, says that he has discovered the secret organizing plan to Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a plan so secret that no one – not one friend of Lewis, not one professor, not one faithful reader, not Warnie, not Joy, not Douglas – no one suspected it. And yet his evidence is totally convincing not just to me but to apparently all C. S. Lewis experts. Each of the volumes in the series corresponds to the Renaissance image of one of the seven planets. (OK, more exactly, each corresponds to Lewis’s image of the Renaissance image of one of the planets.) And each is ultimately about Christ, displaying Him not only in the person of Aslan but in the pervading atmosphere of each book, the very medium through which each plot swims. Christ is Jupiter, the jolly King with a red spot on his wounded side (LW&W). He is Mars, Forger of iron, Master of courage, Lord of Hosts (PC). He is the Sun of Righteousness, our Light, more precious than gold (VotDT). He is the Moon, Reflector of God’s glory, Mediator between Earth and Heaven, Great Physician of health and sanity (SC). He is Mercury, the Word, He who sunders and unites (HaHB). He is Venus, God of Love, Creator (MN). And He is Saturn, End of Desire, Keeper of the keys of Hell and of Death (LB). Is this a favorite book? I don’t know. It is a book about other books. All of its virtue cultivates love but directs all that love away from itself. And yet it has changed my thinking more than any other book I’ve read in the last twenty years or more.

There you have it. Seven more bits from my reading that I think about often. If I make it to post 800, I’ll have seven more. I hope you stick with me until then.