The Worlds Have Collided

Sometimes I wonder if my interest in collecting and discovering children’s literature is, at its heart, a desire to recreate my childhood library. I spent many afternoons at this library, and probably read most of its books (which, albeit, was not many). After I had grown up, and started to take my younger siblings there, I realized that it was bizarrely stuck in the 1950s. The majority of the non-classics that I grew up reading were boy’s adventure fiction, usually published circa 1950 (I turned up my nose at the girly, “soppy,” stories of orphans suddenly becoming wealthy and nurses falling in love with their patients).

No, I was all about the stories of Canadian Mounties struggling through blizzards with their wolf/husky companions, the young marines stuck on an island in the Pacific, trying to escape the Japanese, etc. Jim Kjelgaard, Jack O’Brian, Robb White, Jules Verne– these were the authors I read. It shouldn’t be any wonder that I couldn’t stomach the Victorians when I came upon them.

Last night I randomly came across an online biography of Robb White. He lived a fascinating life … fighting in WWII, buying an island in the Caribbean for $60 (as a newlywed) and then living on it for several years, writing adventure novels, writing for various magazines … these were all things I known. But then to my surprise, I scrolled down to discover that he wrote the screenplays for several of William Castle’s 1950s and 60s horror flicks … 13 Ghosts, House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, and others.

Oh my. Horror films. Children’s literature. It’s a good thing for CH that Mr. White has long since passed away.

I can see the common love of the bizarre, melodramatic, and grotesque between the books and screenplays, but of course, now I want to go back and read/watch several.

This is almost as exciting as discovering that William Faulkner worked on the screen play for The Big Sleep.

R

Listening to: Swamp Sessions, Danielle Howle

What is faith, but inexhaustible endurance? — G. Hill

Living the examined life is no easy task, especially when life stretches to include more variety than you thought possible. The pain of a fallen world can be ignored, at the cost of one’s soul. But, examining, loving this world as it is requires patient listening and consistent presence. These are the months that persuade me the hours spent training for marathons were not in vain. Endurance of body and soul move hand in hand. Joyous Gard (my home) is in the midst of its most nurturing season (at least in the two plus years that I’ve lived here). One cannot walk from room to room without being greeted by deep affirmation, respect, and love from fellow housemates. I am experiencing the great healing power of words, conversation, listening.

My fiancé just left after a week of puppet shows and visiting friends in the LA area. We’ve been on opposite sides of the country for almost four months. Planning our wedding and life together via letters and phone calls has been comically frustrating at times, but the end is in sight. He returns in a couple weeks for good, to marry me. I’m pretty happy about this.

Planning a wedding has not been particularly stressful (although this seems to be the number one question everyone wants to ask me). It is thrilling to have the chance to create something meaningful and beautiful, and then get to invite all our friends and family to participate in it. Seeing CTH’s and my ideas mesh, collide, and sometimes explode reminds me every moment why
this is the man with whom I am going to spend my life.

We spent an afternoon this week driving the side streets, hills, and corners of Los Angeles– hunting out possible apartments. Falling in love with a city is a strange experience. Was it turning the corner to find the street sharply fall before us, being faced with the sunset splayed across a smeared sky? Maybe.

Maybe.

More later,

R

Dream S’More Appetizers

So I had a dream in which I made the following appetizers. I haven’t had a chance to try them out in waking life because we are out of propane and enduring our first October chill with no heat, no stove, no oven, and no hot water.

As far as I can make out, the recipe is as follows:

Graham crackers, trimmed into bite-size squares (half of a half of a half?)
Banana, sliced thinly into circles
Pieces of chocolate or chocolate chips
Mini marshmallows

On a baking sheet lined with foil, set out the graham crackers, top with one slice of banana, one small piece of chocolate and two mini marshmallows. When you have the desired amount assembled, broil them until the chocolate melts and the marshmallows brown. Enjoy!

Caitlin

On Home. Marilynne Robinson’s, that is.

Dear Ms. Robinson,

I have been a fan of your work since my then friend, now fiancé, read your essays aloud to me. You lay claim to a deep knowledge of the English language in your opening paragraphs, but then go on to use it. Not flaunt it. “All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.” You exploit the sparsity of our language, and then indulge in its unnecessary, although common, phrases.

You draw one into the experience of something so painful and quiet that it usually takes years of therapy to do the same. This causes me to wonder if some sections of psychological therapy would be made obsolete if we, as a culture, read more widely. You’ve chosen the circumstances that we didn’t think formed us to dwell upon, digging carefully into them with a slowness that we rarely can sustain.

The pastor. Loneliness. The youngest child. These are the portions of human existence that you delve into. Not rape, not murder, not war. Not romance, but disappointment. Not the salvation of humanity, but regrets and unvoiced repentance. You are no Dostoevsky (but then, who is?). You are life between the grand fasts and feasts of the year, the summer and the autumn.

We wouldn’t think that returning home, after a disappointing life, deserves space on a page surrounded by margins. But it is in the quiet sadness of Glory that we see the growth of the self, or the merely the self. Yes, it is the story of Jack (the prodigal son) returning, or rather, learning that he can’t return. But it is mostly the story of a youngest daughter who was never told what was going on, who tried to make her own way and instead allowed herself to be used by a selfish man, letting it drag on for years in the hope that humanity would not disappoint. It is the story of a faithful man of God who ends his life loved, but lonely and disappointed.

It is the story of unanswered prayers. This is the reality of life as a human.

I am loved by the truth and beauty of your words. Thank you.

Sincerely,

R. Card

A Thought to Share

“When all eyes are on you, wink.”

– from a Mike’s Hard Lime bottle

Countering the Principle of Inertia

Today, I drove up to CSD’s new home and painted walls with her.  This raised fond memories of painting theater sets into the early hours of mornings before opening night.  We have been painting things since we met, over six years ago.

Friendships change, people move, and “love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter,” to quote Mr. Eliot.  Love is divine.  It is not limited to place, to being in physical presence.

R

It’s All Relative

G.K. Chesterton on his pre-conversion experience with Christianity: (please excuse the ellipses — Gilbert was a loquacious fellow)

“As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradluagh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind — the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing… It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons…One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery…One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges were inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world…

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something ever weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape…This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with…

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only conluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed…if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and blooodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solumn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique…The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ, He must have been the Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him to dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall…Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad — in various ways.”

(From his book, “Orthodoxy”. A favorite of mine.)

In class last night, we began arguing about whether or not we should be optimists or pessimists. Both sides felt that their perspective offered the best conditioning for the unexpectedness of life. Thinking of the above quote from Chesterton, I said I thought that perhaps as Christians we are not called to pessimists or optimists; we are called to be reality-seeking-truth-tellers. To the secular optimist, our views of human depravity and the ultimate destruction of the world as we know it will seem the most despairing pessimism. To the secular pessimist, our views of redemption, hope and joy will seem irrational optimism. Regardless, we are called to be the normal which appears extraordinary.

CSD

A Preference for Primary Texts

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

– C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation

jer-uh-mahy-uhd, -ad

jeremiad – noun

a prolonged lamentation or mournful complaint.

Karen Armstrong’s “Case for God”

I recently commented on the Wall Street Journal article which pitted Richard Dawkins against Karen Armstrong. I hadn’t heard of Ms. Armstrong before that time, but her name came up again today on NPR.org. It seems she’s written a book called The Case for God, which seems to be an extension of her thesis in the WSJ artcle:

“Until the modern era, Armstrong claims, religion was not something people thought, but something we did. It was a series of practices and rituals designed to help us ‘discover new capacities of mind and heart.’ And God was unknowable — undefinable, in fact.”

NPR calls it “exhaustive and invigorating”. I call it misguided.

CSD