Tag Archives: bookreview

The Discarded Image

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The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis has been on my shelf for several years. 

Last summer while I was talking to my beloved Latin teacher, I mentioned reading Stuart Isacoff’s Temperament.  I had found it fascinating how both the ancient and medieval thinker linked all of life together.  Thus the numbers and distances of the planets were thought to be the link between the distances and ratios of musical intervals.  Even though their facts weren’t always correct they were certainly significant.  They looked at the details of life as symbols for some other reality. 

“Carol,” my teacher said. “Have you read The Discarded Image?  That’s precisely what that book is about!”  The Image in the title refers to the Model of the Universe, “the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organisation of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe.” (p.11) We cannot read medieval works with modern or post-modern minds and really know what they meant without understanding how they thought.

The first chapter was glorious and exciting. But, I’ll be honest: it was a hard book to read.  The difficulty lay in my own ignorance.  There were so many unfamiliar references and background chapters to wade through.  So I went to the last chapter, The Influence of the Model, and read that.  Next, I dipped into sections which looked interesting and then began again.  What helped me persevere were the lovely little pearls that were scattered across the pages.

The [evil] influences do not work upon us directly, but by first modifying the air…Hence when a medieval doctor could give no more particular cause for the patient’s condition he attributed it to ‘this influence which is at present i the air.’  If he were an Italian doctor he would doubtless say questa influenza.  The profession has retained the useful word ever since. (p.110)

To medieval folk looking into a night sky was not looking at darkness but through darkness.  They believed that space was not dark, nor silent. 

The ‘silence’ which frightened Pascal was, according to the Model, wholly illusory; and the sky looks black only because we are seeing it through the dark glass of our own shadow.  You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music.  (p.112)

This just made me smile:

One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien’s Hobbits, enjoyed books which told them what they already knew.  (p.200)

This book is worth the effort required in reading it.  After reading this book I guarantee that you will read Lewis’s children’s literature differently. 

Here is a diamond of a quote which you need to copy into your journal or commonplace book. 

Literature exists to teach what is useful,
to honour what deserves honour,
to appreciate what is delightful.
The useful, honorable, and
delightful things are superior to it:
it exists for their sake;
its own use, honour, or delightfulness
is derivative from theirs.
(p. 214)

Too Small To Ignore

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This book is part memoir, part mission statement for Compassion, International, and part call to action to Christians in America.   The story of Dr. Stafford’s time as a MK (Missionary Kid) is so stunning that it dominates the book: both his life in a small village on the Ivory Coast and his misery in a missionary boarding school led by abusive tyrants.   As the cadence of the stories rise and fall, so do your emotions.  Funny stories are followed by warm stories of boyhood friendships; then the horror of the boarding school is told with careful honesty. 

Next, Stafford moves to the issues of poverty and a call to focus on children. 

American Idol Gives Back, a huge, self-congratulatory fundraiser, was a fascinating context in which to read this quote:

Poverty, you see, is a lot more complex than it looks.  Too many people assume it’s just a shortage of money.  If the poor had an adequate supply of money, they’d quickly solve their problems, and the world would be a beautiful place.  So let’s think up another fund-raiser, another benefit concert, another charity drive.  p. 175

In a brief overview, Stafford, highlights economics, health, education, environment, socio-political and spiritual issues involved with poverty.  He warned against “microwave solutions” and suggested a slower “crock pot approach”.  I’ve flirted with the idea of really studying economics one day.  This section fed that flirtation and made me thirsty to understand.

At this point I take a respectful exception with Stafford’s solution.  In short, he suggests changing one child, who will change that child’s family, which will influence a church and eventually transform communities.  He employed surveys that study the statistical percentage of people who become Christians at a certain age, such statistics decreasing as the person ages. I have heard these same surveys used to promote certain evangelistic outreaches to children. 

But is this the focus of the Bible?  Certainly the gospel is preached to all people, which includes children.  But shouldn’t we be preaching to fathers and mothers who will influence their children (household) rather than vice versa?  The last verse of Malachi speaks of turning the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.  I think the order of the verse is significant. 

Death Be Not Proud

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“This is not so much a memoir of Johnny in the conventional sense
as the story of a long, courageous struggle between a child and Death.” 

So opens a book written by a father two years after his son died of a brain tumor at the age of seventeen.   The title, taken from my favorite Donne sonnet, was the reason I picked this book up. 

It’s a sad story, but it really didn’t move me; it didn’t cause even one teardrop to fall.  That bums me out and makes me wonder what’s wrong with me. 

Perhaps I was too detached, too clinical in my reading.  Johnny Gunther died of a malignant glioblastoma, the same tumor my sister had/has (part was removed and part remains).  Whenever I give medical histories and mention the glioblastoma the nurse sighs and asks how long my sister lived.   Defying all odds and attributable only to Divine Providence, she’s lived with this tumor nigh until thirty years.  It was interesting to note the treatment prescribed in 1947 and see how much has changed. 

The alternative diet therapy, considered quack treatment, turned to by the Gunthers in desperation added many months to Johnny’s life.   What diet you ask?  Saltless, fatless, sugarless, with lots of fresh fruit and fresh veggies, oatmeal and an apple-carrot mash.  Add in multiple enemas a day.  “The regime was certainly onerous.  Johnny said wearily after the first week, ‘I even tell time by enemas.'”

Perhaps I didn’t connect because the family didn’t share my faith in and dependence on God to make it through this kind of crisis.  However, I would say that was true of Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking and I was touched by her grief.  Johnny, best described as a humanist, wrote an Unbeliever’s Prayer:

Almighty God
forgive me for my agnosticism;
For I shall try to keep it gentle, not cynical,
nor a bad influence.

And O!
if Thou art truly in the heavens,
accept my gratitude
for all Thy gifts
and I shall try
to fight the good fight. Amen.

Johnny was a bright, curious, kind and determined young man.  The crowning achievement of his life was to graduate with his class at Deerfield Academy after missing the last 18 months of classes.  He worked and read independently and with tutors and made up tests one by one.  He joined his class for the graduation, turban around his head.  He died two weeks afterwards.

One phrase about writing captured me (emphasis mine):

We discussed Sinclair Lewis and I told him about the ups and downs in the life of an artist,
of the deep, perplexing downdrafts a writer may have.

I read somewhere that this was standard high school reading.  Do any of you remember reading this?  Any further thoughts?

The Cloister Walk

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Kathleen Norris writes about laundry and liturgy in The Quotidian Mysteries.  This was my first exposure to her writing. Finding the sacred in the everyday, discovering communion in the common, is a life-long pursuit of mine.   Intrigued by Norris,  I went on to read The Cloister Walk. 

Norris wrote this book during a residence at St. John’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery. Since the book follows the liturgical year,  I read the short chapters slowly, correlating my reading to the liturgical calendar.  I found The Cloister Walk a welcome companion to my medieval studies.  After reading the Rule of St. Benedict, it was fitting to read how the living by the Rule fleshes out today.  Norris references many of the works I have studied; she quotes many of the lights of the early and medieval church.

Restricting your reading and studies to people with whom you agree often leads to tedium.  On one level it is warm and comfortable, but you end up feeling cramped and stoved up because your mental muscles aren’t being stretched.  I appreciate reading authors outside of my worldview, outside my theology, outside of my chronology, and outside of my culture.  Interacting with different frameworks provokes me to think; it challenges me and keeps me alert.   

In the past I have described Norris as very L’English.  By that, I mean that reading Kathleen Norris is very similar to reading Madeleine L’Engle.  They are both articulate poets.  There is a considerable bit I disagree with when I read both authors.  However, after I have skipped over or disregarded that which I would describe as stubble, I discover chunks of gold.  Here are some nuggets I’ve been examining:

~   “A life of prayer is a life of beginning all over again.” ~ Charles Cummings

~   The idea of attentive waiting. [What does this look like?]

~   Obey and listen are etymologically related [That’s one of my top 2007 word finds.]

~   “for all the military metaphors employed in the Old Testament, the command that Israel receives most often is to sing.”  p. 155

~   The fruit of celibacy is hospitality, because celibacy requires loving all well. 

~   The prominence of the psalms (reading, singing, chanting) in the Benedictine lifestyle.  The idea being so immersed in the psalms that the psalms surface in response to the circumstances of life, that I respond to life with the words God has given to me. 

~   Essentials of the monastic way: sacred reading, liturgy, work, silence, vigilance and stability.  [are these good and realistic goals for my life? Where am I unbalanced?]

 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  has always left me a little on edge.  Really, it’s such a strange story.  I didn’t get the point and was left shrugging my shoulders. 

This time, reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s alliterative translation was pure delight. Maybe as I age I can find beauty in works without demanding that they conform to my modern sensibilities.   Reading Sir Gawain was as delicious as reading and listening to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.  They really are companion books.

Do you know the story?  Sir Gawain, a knight of the Round Table, enters a be-heading (!) game with a Green Knight.  He finds himself at a warm castle at Christmas, knowing he is engaged to meet and be beheaded by this Green Knight on New Year’s Day.  His host tests him with another game in which the host’s wife enters Sir Gawain’s bedroom and offers herself to him.  Three times he refuses, but the last time he accepts a gift from her.  The rest of the story, gentle reader, is in the book.

In the introduction, Tolkien writes:

The story is good enough in itself.  It is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and color; and it has virtues that would be lost in a summary, though they can be perceived when it is read at length: good scenery, urbane or humorous dialogue, and a skilfully ordered narrative.

and

Let us be grateful for what we have got, preserved by chary chance: another window of many-colored glass looking back into the Middle Ages, and giving us another view.

I feel like the lady in Costco, passing out samples, persuading you to come, buy and eat.  Here are some morsels:

The fair head to the floor fell from the shoulders,                    
and folk fended it with their feet as forth it went rolling.           
                                        p.39 this just makes me laugh!

 After the season of summer with its soft breezes,
when Zephyr goes sighing through seeds and herbs,
right glad is the grass that grows in the open,
when the damp dewdrops are dripping from the leaves,
to greet a gay glance of the glistening sun.                                
                                        p.43 more lush seasonal descriptions follow

soups they served of many sorts, seasoned most choicely,
in double helpings, as was due, and divers sorts of fish;
some baked in bread, some broiled on the coals,
some seethed, some in gravy savoured with spices,
and all the condiments so cunning that it caused him delight.
                                           p. 57  what a feastly description!

*     *     *     *     *        

Quick story:  I was teaching a literature class and mentioned Sir GAH-win.  After some discussion, one of my students erupted, “OH! Sir Guh-WAYNE!  I didn’t know who you were talking about!”  

At that point, I realized that I had never heard the Sir Gawain’s name spoken!!   My student  hadn’t either.  I’ve listened to a Teaching Company tape and the lecturer said GAH-win. Now we know!

*    *    *    *    *    *

A bonus find:  A lovely site on alliterative poetry called Forgotten Ground Regained.  Paul Deane offers his 1999 translation of parts of Sir Gawain.  If you like poems, check out  A Cry to Heaven (after Psalm 6). The site is worthy of time to explore.  Great fun.

Millet and Words By Heart

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Fine Art Friday – Millet


The Shepherdess, 1864
Jean-François Millet

“The human side of art is what touches me the most.”  Jean-François Millet

Here is yet another piece of art with a girl absorbed in knitting.  Notice the stance of the dog on the right.   Yep, that’s a watchdawg!

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

Ouida Sebestyen’s book Words By Heart will go on my bookshelf next to Black Boy, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry,  and Black Like Me.  Or should I have a Scripture Memory section which includes Tom Sawyer, Right Ho, Jeeves and this book? 

Lena knows her Bible verses.  Lots of  ’em.  Her participation and eventual success in the local verse quoting contest is reason enough to read this book.  Sebestyen’s humor in Lena’s choices will fly right over the young reader’s head.  Lena begins with “God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise…”; after a momentary panic late in the contest she resorts to quoting verses from Song of Solomon usually left unspoken in public “I am black, but comely.” 

Lena, who has to this point been sheltered from racial conflict, discovers the resentment and hostility of the community from her public triumph over a white boy.  Her Papa begins teaching her how to to respond to different neighbors, all of whom are white. Some are to be avoided, some are to be ignored, some are to be obeyed, and some are to be bargained with.  Lena trusts and adores her Papa, but struggles with the injustice of their living situation. 

This would be a great book to read and discuss together with pre-teens.  Caveat:  Lena’s Papa dies from violence at the end of the book.  There are no graphic descriptions, but you need to know what your reader can handle emotionally before you embark.

Framley Parsonage

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~ Have you ever made a foolish financial transaction and hid it from your spouse?
~ Have you loved your son, but disliked his choice of wife?
~ If you loved a man, but knew that his mother didn’t like you, what would you say to a marriage proposal?
~ Do you sometimes yearn to be an accepted member of the inner circle?
~ Should a pastor have nice things?
~ Has a formerly close friendship changed because your friend was promoted and you couldn’t deal with the differences in your situations?

Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, the fourth book in the Barsetshire novels, leaves the theme of class divisions and explores the complete orbit of ambition.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina takes the reader through every stage of an affair, from the stolen glances across the room to the clandestine meetings to the pleasure of consumation.   Tolstoy accurately narrates the zest and tingly shivers that accompany illicit love. Then he carries the story to its logical conclusion; the eventual boredom of the relationship, estrangement from family, the problem of the children, the loss of respectability, the loneliness of self-imposed banishment and despair that ends in tragedy.  

I thought of Anna K as I read Framley Parsonage.  Mark Robarts is a nice guy: a young, well-established vicar with a growing family and a generous patroness.  He is invited to a party of the upper crust, unscrupulous high rollers, and also asked to preach a sermon at their church.  The invitation to preach legitimizes whatever questions may be raised by the company he would keep.  Robarts is naive; he is manipulated; he is outrageously foolish. 

It is no doubt very wrong to long after a naughty thing. But nevertheless we all do so.  One may say that hankering after naughty things is the very essence of the evil  into which we have been precipitated by Adam’s fall. When we confess that we are all sinners, we confess that we all long after naughty things. … Clergymen are subject to the same passions as other men; and, as far as I can see, give way to them, in one line or another, almost as frequently. Every clergyman should, by canonical rule, feel a personal disinclination to a bishopric; but yet we do not believe that such personal disinclination is generally very strong. (p.66)

Mark thought he could touch pitch and not be defiled.  After he is entrapped, he muddles around, scrambling to cover and hide his situation. When his courage builds to the point of facing his wife, confessing his foibles, and enduring public embarrassment, we admire and enjoy this country vicar and adore his wife Fanny.

Is not that sharing of the mind’s burdens one of the chief purposes for which man wants a wife? For there is no folly so great as keeping one’s sorrows hidden. And this wife cheerfully, gladly, thankfully took her share. To endure with her lord all her lord’s troubles was easy to her; it was the work to which she had pledged herself.  But to have thought that her lord had troubles not communicated to her; – that would have been to her the one thing not to be bourne.  (p.400)

Trollope always writes with humor, clarity, and a supreme understanding of human nature. His tone is warm, not preachy; he is funny! Yet in his humor, he is serious.  He likes women who are “ready-witted, prompt in action, and gifted with a certain fire” not “missish, and spoony, and sentimental”.  He unveils many forms of pride: the refusal of poor Mr. Crawley to accept needed help; the idolatrous pride of mothers in their children; the haughty statue of a girl whose only desire is to sit and be admired; the difficulty of a stubborn aristocratic mother to admit her judgment was wrong. 

The entertaining subplots add interest without distracting from the main storyline.  The wealthy heiress, Miss Dunstable, is adroit at batting off marriage proposals with her “I am much obliged to you”s until she receives a most unusual love letter from a hero of a previous book.  Young Lucy Robarts is a genius in dealing with a potential mother-in-law problem.  If you’d like to know her solution, email me and I’ll tell you without spoiling it for the others.  TBOI (tasty bit of information): Mr. Spurgeon makes a brief entrance.

It is only mid-February, but I suspect that this book will be my favorite 2007 read.  Elizabeth Gaskell, a contemporary of Trollope, wrote, “I wish Mr. Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage for ever.”
 

Fine Art Friday

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Pastourelle (Shepherdess) (1889)
by William Bouguereau

I’m listening to Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and this picture closely resembles my mind’s picture of Tess.  Tess’s story is a sad tale: she grew up in a dysfunctional family, was assaulted by a “gentleman”, struggled as a single mother, lost her baby, and moved away to start anew.  This book reminds me of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  I’ve never before read Hardy; listening is an easy way to get some exposure to this author I feel I ought to know. 

Listening to Hardy is an odd juxtaposition to reading Wendell Berry.  Hardy makes you indignant and angry about the tragedy of this young woman, the toil and drudgery of her life as a dairy maid; he is unsettling and edgy.  Berry paints pictures of healthy, nourished families within an agrarian community where work is valued, souls are fed, generations are connected, and hope abounds.  

Wendell Berry

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wendellberry wendellberry      i love his writing       wendellberry wendellberry wendellberry wendellberry
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I read two short stories aloud to my husband and son this weekend: The Hurt Man and Don’t Send a Boy to Do a Man’s Work.   After hearing The Hurt Man my husband exclaimed, “That’s some of the best writing I’ve ever heard.” I want to get up in the middle of the night and read more.  I want to grab people, stop them in their tracks and make them listen.  I want to buy 50 copies and pass them out left and right.   I am smitten.

Here are a few phrases which have captured me:

At the age of five Mat was beginning to prepare himself to help in educating his grandson, though he did not know it.

The shape of his hand in printed on the flesh of my thigh as vividly as a birthmark.  This man who was my grandfather is present in me, as I felt always his father to be present in him.

At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house.

Pride

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Pride is a denial of God,
an invention of the devil,
contempt for men.

It is the mother of condemnation,
the offspring of praise,
a sign of barrenness.

It is a flight from God’s help,
the harbinger of madness,
the author of downfall.

It is the cause of diabolical possession,
the source of anger,
the gateway of hypocrisy.

It is the fortress of demons,
the custodian of sins,
the source of hardheartedness.

It is the denial of compassion,
a bitter pharisee,
a cruel judge.

It is the foe of God.

It is the root of blasphemy.

John Climacus as quoted in The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This devastating quote stopped me, stunned me. Each time I read it a different phrase sticks like Velcro to my soul. 

    Gateway of hypocrisy     
Custodian of sins

I am reading The Cloister Walk slowly and intermittently.   Norris’s journal of extended visits to a Benedictine monastery dovetail  beautifully with our study of medieval  life and literature; her meditations bring that far distant time of monks and tonsures closer to the now. The book is structured around the liturgical year, an idea which is so foreign to my low church upbringing. 

Norris is very L’English to me: at times I appreciate her style, the poetry in her soul which illumines the prose, more than the substance of her words.  For example, I think it very strange that a married woman would spend months apart from her husband in a monastery.  Maybe there were extenuating circumstances which she chose not to include in her book.  Undoubtedly our theology would zig zag were we to line it up side by side.  Nevertheless gems of insight, piercing perception, pop off the page as I continue reading.     


Which one of these phrases grabs you today?

[Added: More about John Climacus and excerpts on the memory of insults, hypocrisy and lies, and love as light, fire and flame.]