Tasting Life Twice

Archive for the category “Book Sense”

26 Jul 2010
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The Need for Empty Space

image Today I was visiting with friends who just returned from their annual trip to Florida and the beach.  Kristin was saying that with her children now older, it was the first time she could actually rest some and not have to be so fully attentive to young babies.   It got me thinking of one of my favorite books, Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  I first learned of this book in a Ministry & Spirituality class with Eugene Peterson.  Lindbergh, wife of the aviator Charles Lindbergh and mother of six, would make occasional trips to the sea to find rest and renewal in the middle of an extremely hectic life.  In preparing to loan my copy out, I took a glance through the book once again.  Here’s a nugget of gold.  To more fully appreciate it, consider that she wrote this in 1955.  Imagine what she would have to say to us today.

“My life in Connecticut, I begin to realize, lacks this quality of significance and therefore of beauty, because there is so little empty space. The space is scribbled on: the time has been filled. There are so few empty pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures – an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Posted in Book Sense and tagged , , , , ,
31 May 2010

Making Saints from an Old Bucket

image Yesterday at church I made reference to Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Work of Local Culture”.  He uses an evocative metaphor of an old bucket hanging on a fencepost and the miracle of making earth that takes place inside there over many years.  He connects what goes on inside that bucket with what goes on in the work of an individual life and community.  His image helps one appreciate the value of storytelling, the slow growth that is involved in becoming “a human being fully alive” and the role that our losses (“death, gravity and decay”) play in bringing about life. 

For many years, my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather’s farm.  A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside.  For what is going on in” that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth.  The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two.  This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus.  I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human.  I have seen the same process at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world.  All creatures die into it, and they live by it….

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial.  It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself.  And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time.  It collect stories, too, as they fall through time.  It is irresistibly metaphorical.  It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully.  A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into account.  It must build soil, and build that memory of itself – in lore and story and song – that will be its culture.  These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.

Posted in Book Sense, Storytelling, Sunday Leftovers and tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment
15 May 2010

Resurrecting Stories from the Ground

Resistance to tyranny and oppression can take many forms.  During the Holocaust, there were those who fled to other countries, took up arms, plotted an assassination attempt or retreated to the forests.  Another effort that is equally laudable and noteworthy took place in Warsaw, Poland beginning in 1940.  Emmanuel Ringleblum started a clandestine operation known as the Oyneg Shabes project.  The phrase means, “joyful Sabbath” and it involved a group of undercover researchers recording daily life inside the Warsaw Ghetto.  Ringleblum assembled a team of story-collectors, whose job it was to describe what what was happening to European Jewry under Nazi occupation.

Over a couple of years time, when everything was crumbling around them and image they were facing starvation, death, the loss of loved ones and possessions, these gallant individuals went about the ghetto collecting artifacts and stories.  Then they placed their collection of writings in milk bottles and tin cans to be buried in the earth in the hope that their stories would be raised to life after the terrible ordeal had passed.

Shortly after World War 2 had finished, resurrection happened.  Only a few of the project’s members had survived.  And one of them, Rachel Auerbach, knew where the archives were buried.  She led a team to the site and, in what was described as an “archaeological expedition”, they found the documents buried under the rubble of war.

Two of three collections would eventually be found and with them, 35,000 documents that remembered both a horrific crime and the people who suffered.

A recently published book, Who Will Write Our History by Samuel Kassow tells the story of the Oyneg Shabes project and offers another valuable contribution to Holocaust studies.  Both the Warsaw project of Ringleblum and this recent book by Kassow remind us of the power of a narrated life.

Posted in Book Sense, Storytelling and tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment
04 May 2010
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Imagination and Morality

“To me, imagination is the key to morality.  If you can’t imagine yourself as someone else, to walk in their skin, you’re more likely to hurt them or demean them or legislate against them.  The golden rule depends on the power of imagination.”

Michael Chabon

Posted in Book Sense, Insidedness, Storytelling and tagged , , , ,
18 Apr 2010

Festival of Faith & Writing

Anna I returned last night from a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan and the Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College.  Anna made the trip with me back in 2004 and, judging by the weight of her travel bag on the return flight home, her interest in books has grown over the years (she needs either a Kindle or a Himalayan sherpa).  

This year, we heard Wally Lamb, Thomas Lynch, Eugene Peterson, Mary Karr, Kate DiCamillo, Rhoda Janzen, Scott Cairns, Mark Perry and Richard Rodriguez. 

Here a few pictures from the trip, including Anna with  Avi, auhor of Crispin and Poppy and Kate Dicamillo, author of The Tale of Desperaux and Because of Winn Dixie. 

Posted in Book Sense, Family Matters, Tales from the Road and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
08 Jan 2010

The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery

A few years ago, I attended a conference where one of the speakers noted that someone living in 1905 would have more in common with Moses the patriarch than with someone living in our own time.  There have been so many sweeping changes in such a relatively short time that the past seems too distant to yield any valuable contributions to the present day. 

During my university studies, I would face this matter practically every day. On one side of College Avenue, I was involved in a campus ministry that emphasized returning to “New Testament Christianity”.  In fact, the ministry grew out of the historic Restoration Movement which sought to return the Church to its simple, first-century character. The idea was that the farther we get away from the origins of this great thing, the more corrupt or distorted it becomes.  When I crossed the street for my classes at Mizzou, the belief was reversed: the past was held suspect and the modern was privileged.  The idea was that our expanding knowledge and our newer cosmologies required that we also outgrow antiquated worldviews and have a more modern notion of God, sex, the human person, fill in the blank. 

image Early in the Christmas break I finally got around to reading New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery by Anthony Grafton.  It had been on my short list for the last two years.  The author explores how intellectual history changed in the wake of the European discovery of the “new world”.  Prior to that, people still held that authority principally resided in the ancient books.  For example, to discern the pattern of the heavens, you read Aristotle.  To make sense of the world that existed within the human body beneath the skin, you read the physician Galen.   For centuries, the assumption for many, if not most, was that a “complete and accurate body of knowledge already existed.”

Grafton shows how with new world exploration and the rise of scientific inquiry, scholars had to revise inherited paradigms, if not abandon them altogether.  In the new world after Columbus,

“the ancient texts continued to be read, translated, and admired, to provide the model genres for ambitious modern writers: epic, history, tragedy.  And belief in progress would not become universal in the West for a very long time; not even in the Enlightenment would it find universal assent…Those who knew the ancient world best – the professional scholars – took the side of the Modern in the Battle, arguing that the ancients had in fact known far less than moderns about nature, the surface of the world, and much else.  New standards of arguments – based, supposedly, on ‘facts’ rather than mere texts – played a larger and larger role in many fields.

The book is a tour de force as it relates to intellectual history, scholastic methodology, cartography and the nature of cultural encounter.  And it provides a wonderful background to our current debates about curriculum (see the recent New York Times article on making college relevant) and how the past should resource the present in areas of religious belief, social values and new technologies.  Highly recommended. 

Posted in Book Sense, Curiosity's Trail, Reviews, Worldviews and Paradigms | Leave a Comment
24 Dec 2009

The Holy Instincts of Christmas

image There are all kinds of things wrong with the way we celebrate Christmas. We eat too much, we spend too much, we sentimentalize too much, we worry too much. Those excesses cannot douse the holy instincts that underlie them. We really are hungry. We really do want to give and receive. We really do want to feel deeply, live peaceably, sleep soundly and rise renewed. As the season moves toward its apogee, those of us who believe we know where the instincts lead may do more good by wading into the culture than by separating ourselves from it. God is in the midst of it, after all, still hunting new flesh in which to be born. – Barbara Brown Taylor

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02 Dec 2009

Black Friday in The Road

Cormac McCarthy must have Black Friday shopping in mind when he describes a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape this way: it was “a world largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”

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19 Nov 2009

Stories for the Body and Soul

When I was at graduate school at Regent College, I was lucky enough to have  an independent study with Eugene Peterson.  I suggested to him what I wanted to imagestudy – the narrative shape of pastoral life – and he asked me what books I would include in such a study.  I asked him to pick the books out, interested in what he would suggest.  Out of that meeting came a semester long research project entitled, “A Storied Life: Pastors, Novels and Novelists”.  One of the books he assigned for me was The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles. 

Coles describes being raised in a home with stories were savored and the spoken word cherished. His parents would sit together and read out loud until deep in the night and young Robert could tell that his parents were entranced by the sorcery of Dickens and Eliot and Tolstoy. It was as if these long dead authors were somehow mysteriously alive and had dropped in for a visit.  

image Later, when Coles grew up and became a student of medicine, there were two advisers working with him.  The one doctor treated every patient like a sickness to be cured.  This adviser spoke of diseases and case files and medical charts.  The other adviser was the alter ego.  He told Robert to go in the room and listen to the stories of these men and women.  Find out who they are.  Remember they are persons.  The latter advice would lead Coles to eventually require his own medical students to take a literature course as part of their degree program.

I have returned to that book often and have given away copies of it to people working in the helping professions.  Imagine my delight on Tuesday when I caught NPRs “All Things Considered” and heard them interviewing two medical doctors on the importance of stories.

Here’s an excerpt from the broadcast with the important parts highlighted:

Terrence Holt comes from a family of doctors, but he was a writer and a teacher long before he decided to go to medical school. His new book of stories, "In the Valley of the Kings," reflects his fascination with language rather than his life as a physician. Being comfortable in the world of literature, Holt says, is enormously helpful in the practice of medicine.

Dr. TERRENCE HOLT (Author, "In the Valley of the Kings"): You are used to dealing with ambiguities if you are familiar with literature, and a lot of medicine is ambiguous. But I think maybe the most important thing is that you get, vicariously, but I think in a very useful way, experience with other people that you couldn’t get any other way, with seeing the world as other people see it.

(Soundbite of elevator bell)

NEARY: Now a specialist in geriatrics, Holt is on the faculty in the school of medicine at the University of North Carolina. One recent morning, he went on rounds with a group of residents and interns.

Unidentified Woman: Mr. S. He’s our 50-year-old guy, history of alcohol and marijuana abuse, presenting from (unintelligible), found to have an MRI finding suggestive of (unintelligible), and…

Dr. HOLT: Patients bring us stories. We drop into the middle of patients’ stories and try to change the plot for the better. First we have to try to understand it, however. I mean, the first thing that happens when a patient comes in is they start telling a story, and you try to figure out what it means.

Unidentified Man: He was a little bit more spastic this morning than I’ve seen him. He was having some pretty significant (unintelligible) in his upper extremities, and I hadn’t seen that before. And I asked him if that was usual for him, and he says that happens fairly frequently. He says it particularly happens when he’s around women. He says he gets a little nervous and starts shaking when he’s around women, so…

NEARY: Abraham Verghese also says a patient’s history is like a story. If you listen carefully, he says, you will hear the clues needed to make a diagnosis.

Dr. VERGHESE: I’m always struck that when I’m called in as a consultant, it’s very rare that some extra piece of knowledge tucked away in my brain solves the puzzle. Much more often, it’s the fact that the story I am hearing resonates with my collection of stories, and – or there is an element in that story that reminds of something in my catalog of stories, and I go seek out the other elements. So I think narrative is huge in medicine.

Posted in Book Sense, Storytelling and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
14 Nov 2009
1 Comment

Interview with Cormac McCarthy

Ahead of The Road’s November 25 film release, The Wall Street Journal has a wide-ranging interview with the author Cormac McCarthy.  In the interview he discusses the creative process, the back story to some of his books, his thoughts on the human future, the presence of beauty and goodness in a world out of sorts and the question of God.

image

Here are some excerpts from the article, Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy.

WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?

CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

…the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

…I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

….I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Is there a line between art and science, and where does it start to blur?

CM: There’s certainly an aesthetic to mathematics and science. It was one of the ways Paul Dirac got in trouble. He was one of the great physicists of the 20th century. But he really believed, as other physicists did, that given the choice between something which was logical and something which was beautiful, they would opt for the aesthetic as being more likely to be true.

Do you think people start as innately good?

CM: I don’t think goodness is something that you learn. If you’re left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble. But people tell me from time to time that my son John is just a wonderful kid. I tell people that he is so morally superior to me that I feel foolish correcting him about things, but I’ve got to do something–I’m his father. There’s not much you can do to try to make a child into something that he’s not. But whatever he is, you can sure destroy it. Just be mean and cruel and you can destroy the best person.

WSJ: Do you feel like you’re trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?

CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there’s something about writing about it that flattens them. You’ve used them up. I tell people I’ve never read one of my books, and that’s true. They think I’m pulling their leg.

Posted in Book Sense, Movie Moments, Storytelling, Writing and tagged , , , , , ,

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