I don’t know if I succeeded this year in reading more fiction, or reading more in general than last year, but at least I can say that all of these books have brought great value to me. I would recommend each of them to the right person. There was a theme this year in these reflections: bridging the distance between past and present. Many of these books are probably considered difficult reading. I think they appear so not merely because of a stylistic difference in prose but in the fact that the authors’ cultural body of knowledge is largely alien to us in our isolated modernity. I find myself constantly wanting to justify why a person of our era should pay attention to things of antiquity. But I am not here to say you need to be more acquainted with history. I think we all know that and agree in principle. It is just that we feel ourselves engaged in a constant war raging over the capture of our attention and difficult, old books hardly seem to keep up. Why then, should give our time and attention to such things?
Paul Among the People
Sarah Ruden
Since reading this book I have found myself continually recommending it. Perhaps I had some inkling of its relevance when I sought it out immediately after hearing about it in a Youtube comment, of all places.
Here’s the problem. The Bible is hard to read, especially Paul. He says things that are hard to understand, and from time to time, things that appear deeply offensive to our modern sensibilities. We want to grapple with this, but we do not want to read another theologian struggling to explain away that which is inexcusable.
We would prefer either if he said something else, or if there was some strong internal reason as to why our perception of Paul’s words were mistaken, only we can’t see how this can be the case. We suspect that we are open minded people of sensitivity and depth, and that we can project our understanding backwards, discerning the truth without having much direct knowledge of an ancient land and language. And by the metric of our own time and taste, we suspect that Paul is somehow lacking.
This is where Sarah Ruden is quite helpful in expanding our contextual understanding, and by this, dramatically changing our perspective on Paul’s writings. Ruden is a scholar of Greek and Latin literature, having translated many works of antiquity, even so lofty a work as The Aeneid. She describes her own journey of loving the Gospels and the words of Christ, but disdaining the Pauline Epistles, which seemed backwards and sexist by comparison. She found the defenses of Paul by theologians lacking. Finding no answers, she decided to read the New Testament in its original Greek (no big deal.) She realized that theologians, by and large, only read the philosophers, and they rarely read the Greek comedians and tragedians, that is to say, the fiction writers, the artists of antiquity. She found that her area of expertise lent her a unique picture into Greek life and culture, the very milieu into which Paul’s epistles are directed, and in reading the original Greek, her entire perspective on Paul was changed.
Ruden lets us read extended passages of Ovid, Aristophanes, Seneca, and other famous ancients, giving us a fuller picture of Greek and Latin life than many of us have encountered. We learn that a woman’s veil was not considered a symbol of oppression, but a sign of her being unavailable for exploitation. This was an honor only bestowed upon married women of class, and it is in this context that Paul says that all women should wear veils.
I read this book in only a few nights, for wherever Ruden turns her focus, she reveals Paul’s heart for the downtrodden, the weak, and the oppressed. It has been there all along for us to see, but was hidden by the centuries between us.
Labyrinth of Solitude
Octavio Paz
I can’t remember where I first heard about Octavio Paz except for the fact that I wanted to read this book on the simple basis of its title. The Labyrinth of Solitude — this was so evocative to me that I bought the book with scarcely a grasp of its contents.
Within The Labyrinth of Solitude, we encounter Octavio Paz’s sensitive reflections on the nature of Mexican identity. He traces this back to its origins in the indigenous peoples of central America and their downfall at the hands of the conquistadors, who come to share an equal portion of Mexican heritage. He traces this lineage through the Mexican revolution and the present reality of his in 1960s Mexico.
I suspect many readers in my own generation will be somewhat uncomfortable accepting the characterizations that Paz makes of the Mexican identity. Something about this project, even if it is conducted with sensitivity and by a native speaker might strike us as ill begotten. We are possessed by rather global sensibilities and intuitions about humanity, suspecting that no peoples have any significant differences between them, that everyone is deep down, quite like us. While we fret often about race and racism, we are oftentimes blind to the impact of culture.
I find Paz hard to dismiss. We who are Americans would not hesitate to make some generalizations about American life and American sensibilities, and while we know that in the specifics of each individual there is significant room for deviation, we would be quite confident in certain generalizations about our own time and our own peoples. We ought to listen carefully to those thoughtful persons who have spent their whole lifetimes observing and reflecting upon the idiosyncrasies, strengths, and foibles of their own people. Octavio Paz, when he speaks of his culture, is such a person.
What is perhaps most striking for an American reader is Paz’s description of the Mexican identity in relation to that of the American. He speaks of America’s confidence, its utter assurance in its purpose wherever it goes, right or wrong. This is held in stark contrast to Mexico’s isolation and stoic indifference, a place of national identity crisis, torn between a European, Catholic sensibility, and an earthy nativism. He describes a land having no universal past of its own, and no certain future, a land in search of purpose and identity.
I cannot speak to the veracity of Paz’s vision of his country, but I do feel enriched for having encountered it.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
Moby Dick took me almost half a year to read. I was aided in the completion of this by Melville’s relatively short chapters, which assists one in the feeling of steady progress. Had the chapters been longer, there would have been little to stop my being lost in the sea of pages. (Sorry)
This book is impossible to review. It will take a greater and more patient mind than mine to catalog the innumerable passages with transcendent command of the English language. The time it took for me to read, along with knowing all the major spoilers of the story, meant that I was there to enjoy each episode for its own worth, and not so much for the unveiling of the plot. Those who are looking for a mere page turning adventure at sea will be quite flummoxed with this book.
Although I suspect most modern readers will know the general landscape of the story of Moby Dick, such that the main plot will reveal little in the way of surprises, I found much to enjoy along the way. I was fascinated to encounter an almost documentarian approach to the details and physical process of whaling. Although Melville’s prose is lofty and Shakespearean at times, this elevation does not prevent him from portraying the crass, and vulgar realities of harpooning a whale and harvesting the precious oils from its innards. He is similarly honest in his portrayal of the crew, paying great attention to the parlance and linguistic intricacies of the disparate band of shipmates. He is neither romantic nor reductively stereotypical. One can only marvel at the immense body of personal experience that Melville must have drawn upon to write with such specificity and assurance.
The chapters detailing harpooning make the most dramatic of impressions. For some reason, I always had the picture of 19th century whaling taking place from the safety of the large ship. In actuality, at the first whale sighting, the crew would scramble down by the dozens into small row boats in the midst of the ocean. There amongst waves, they would breathlessly row right up to the sides of a breaching whale. Captains were expected to stand regardless of the tumult, for to sit or to stumble was a sign of weakness. All of this effort was to place the star fishermen in the opportune place to hurl roped harpoons at the helpless creature, hoping to stick one of the long spears deep into its flesh. When the whale dived there was nothing to do but hold on for dear life and hope to outlast it and to not be capsized. Melville captures the exhilaration and utter insanity of it all. It is this combination of visceral reality with the highest and loftiest reflections that help Moby Dick to retain its relevance and power even for a cynical, modern reader.
Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse bears a surprising tonal resemblance to Moby Dick, and even a shared sense of rather bodily humor. But Eggers in the end cannot match Melville’s moral depth or his moments of pathos. Still, if you enjoyed that atmospheric and opaque film, you may find you are just the right person to appreciate Melville’s classic. And if you come to Melville’s fifth chapter about whale anatomy, you can skip it while no one is looking.
The Silmarillion
J.R.R. Tolkien
I must be a glutton for punishment because I read Tolkien’s notoriously difficult historical prelude to Lord of the Rings right after Moby Dick. But The Silmarillion turned out to be a wonderful change of pace. I ended up reading for hours on end and finished it in less than a week. (Weird flex, I know) Maybe it was the discipline of reading all that whale anatomy or the fact that I had been listening to the excellent Amon Sûl podcast for months, but I found myself instantly connecting to Tolkien and loving every line along the way.
The Silmarillion is dense. Its best comparison in style is nothing less than The Bible. If The Lord of Rings is the New Testament, then The Silmarillion is The Old Testament. Tolkien’s approach here is different than most literature, even by the standard of his own The Lord of the Rings. The story and character, similar to Genesis and Exodus, are quite compressed. We view the narrative from great distances of time and space, as if through an oral tradition, passed down over the centuries. In this manner only the richest, most potent details are preserved. This is in stark contrast to the emphasis on moment to moment immersion, and minute, sensory detail that is so characteristic of modern literature.
This was Tolkien’s intent, although he did not finish the book in his own lifetime, and his son Christopher was left with the immense task of compiling the story from decades of his father’s writing, still Tolkien captures my imagination in only a few words.
This precursor to The Lord of the Rings, is told mostly through the perspective of the ancient Elves who lived thousands of years before Frodo ever set off on his journey from Hobbiton. It is a sadder and grimmer tale than Frodo’s trilogy, and perhaps it is this more than anything else that makes it difficult for Lord of the Rings readers to approach The Silmarillion. Yet for those who can bear it, one will find the most heart aching beauty in all the sadness of the folly of Elves, who slowly grow weaker and less glorious over the generations, until finally we meet them as they are in Lord of the Rings “diminished” and returning at last to The Undying Lands.
After reading I am left in what I would call a “middle earth swoon,” where I find reality drab for a few days when compared to Tolkien’s creations. It is at this precise moment that rather than dive further into Tolkien’s lore, I turn away, for it is easy for me to see in myself a propensity to turn too deeply inward, and into fantasy. But rather than do this I must get on with life, so I return The Silmarillion to the shelf, and remove The History of Middle Earth from my shopping cart and go about my days, knowing that I will at some point return to Middle Earth once again.
Octavio Paz Collected Poems
Octavio Paz
Paz’s poems are much more corporeal than English poems. I think I was made aware of this because of Paz’s own writing on the subject from The Labyrinth of Solitude. In the 20th Century, English poetry became quite abstract, relying heavily on literary metaphor and linguistic intricacies, emotive by the proxy of more abstract association. Paz is much more elemental, more bodily, and sanguinary. My copy has the original Spanish and English translations side by side. I have no background in Spanish but I am enjoying trying to pronounce the words and guessing how they correlate to the English.
For instance, we might come across the word “Piedras” and wonder as to its meaning. I was struck that “piedras” seems quite similar to the name Peter, which means “Rock” and it so happens that Rock is a word I can find across the page on the English translation, and so there it is. Piedras means rock, or stone in Spanish. This for me is a quite entertaining, albeit nerdy pass time. Spanish is the perfect language for such a game due to its shared origins in Latin. I suspect a similar game with a Russian-English translation would prove more difficult.
The Ballad of the White Horse
GK Chesterton
In the Wikipedia summary, The Ballad of the White Horse is quoted as “one of the last great traditional epic poems ever written in the English language,” and that is a fair place to start. I heard a small section of Chesterton’s poem read by Richard Rohlin on the aforementioned Amon Sûl podcast, and knew that I must read the whole thing for myself. If you have ever tried to read Dante’s Inferno, Beowulf, or Canterbury Tales, you will know that, for a modern mind, reading an epic poem is something of an epic feat. But The Ballad of the White Horse, with a few caveats, is a great place to start.
I began reading without taking any time to research the backstory and context within which Chesterton set his story. I wanted to take in the work without anything to guide, shape, or taint my perspective, but I think this was actually a mistake. There are a number of things I wish I would have known upfront that I think would have greatly helped my enjoyment and comprehension had I known them before starting. This fixation on the spoiler, on the turn of the plot, is truly a modern concern. You cannot ruin timeless writing such as this by knowing the simple facts of how things turn out.
So this misguided concern led me to set out in the dark. I was not even sure where between pure history and pure fantasy I was reading. And not being English, the names were not familiar to me except as faint memories that I might have encountered in one sentence along the journey of my sparse history education. First, the eponymous White Horse, which Chesterton describes at many points, is actually a paleolithic monument. The story itself is a fictionalized tale of the 878 AD Battle of Ethandune between Saxon king Alfred the Great, and invading Vikings under King Guthrum.
This battle turns out to be a pivotal moment in the history of Christendom and the fall of Paganism. Had I known even this simple outline of the events, I think I would have been in a much better spot to appreciate The Ballad of The White Horse. Many of the early chapters have passed in and out of my mind without my comprehension, but what moments I did comprehend are of astounding richness, and the final two chapters resonated deeply so that I desire soon revisit Chesterton and his other works.
Bergman: Images
Ingmar Bergman
A good friend of mine gifted this to me for my birthday. Ingmar Bergman has long been a favorite filmmaker of mine, but his personal character was, prior to reading this book, elusive to me. Bergman writes not so much about his films directly, but much more autobiographically about his internal mental states while making his films. He reveals to us a fragile and deeply sensitive artistic personality, wounded from childhood by the authoritarian religious style of his father. Bergman would subsequently grapple with the questions and trauma of this upbringing for the rest of his life. He is quite self-aware. He describes himself as having many demons, but “always managing to fasten them to his chariot so that he might go somewhere.”
Shadow and Act
Ralph Ellison
Those who recognize the name Ralph Ellison will probably recall it as belonging to the author of Invisible Man. No, not H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but the other one. Ellison’s book is not about a man with an invisible body, but about a man with an invisible soul. I first read this book in my High School AP Literature class, where it made quite the impression on me.
Shadow and Act is a collection of essays and interviews with Ellison through which we gain a rich autobiographical picture of his life and his well developed views on art, American culture, literature, race, music and more. We discover in him a highly individual perspective, only participating with the popular movements of his time as an onlooker and as a cultural critic. For as in Invisible Man, we learn of Ellison’s wariness of popular movements and political groups, which often end up serving the ends of their masters, not of the communities they claim to serve.
Ellison’s caution and general skepticism towards large social movements goes some distance to explain why he appears less often cited or discussed in modern discussions on race, but I feel his work is ripe for rediscovery. For my own generation shall find in Ellison a kindred spirit who shares a similar distrust and hesitance towards group identities imposed on us by others. His trajectory can offer us a model of success for any aspiring writer or artist. At every step Ellison insists not upon the primacy of a racial or cultural identity, but on that of his own person, his own specific upbringing, his own sentiments, tastes and experiences. Ellison further insists that the artistic context of his work needn’t be limited to the constraints of the sliver of his own life, but should be understood in the broader perspective of world of literature. Whether it be Dostoevsky, Melville, Twain, or Hemingway; Ellison is free to draw influence from whomever he likes regardless of his race or his upbringing. In Shadow and Act we can witness firsthand Ellison’s discomfort at once again being pigeonholed into narrow racial categories by well meaning interviewers. Ellison cringes inside, we feel he wants to ask, “why must I be called a great Black American Novelist? Can I not simply be a great American Novelist?”
Audio Books:
I am a Strange Loop
Doug Hofstadter
Doug Hofstadter has written several books on consciousness, most famously, Gödel Escher Bach. Hofstadter believes that what ties these three luminaries together is a kind of fractal self-reference in their works. Escher is the easiest example, with his famous, Drawing Hands, or Ascending and Descending; infinite staircases and other visual paradoxical loops that seem to fold into themselves. Hofstadter believes human consciousness is something like this. In I am a Strange Loop, he develops this idea further.
I was interested in this subject because I’ve felt that Christian intellectuals are often too content with a rather simple dualistic model of consciousness, in which there is some vague interaction between the physical brain and an immaterial soul, and nothing more beyond that is said. I am similarly frustrated by overly deterministic visions of reality that leave no room for human free will when this strikes me as the most utterly basic of assumptions about existence. When I heard that Hofstadter’s approach was a more nuanced attempt to grapple with these questions I was intrigued. I think it is important for theists and dualists in general to contend with the best models of consciousness available, and Hofstadter’s model of consciousness in particular.
I was surprised to find that, in spite of the differences of perspective, theists would likely nod their heads in agreement with Hofstadter’s critiques against more reductive physicalist models of consciousness that too quickly dismiss the notion of freewill and reduce consciousness to a mere chemical process of the brain. The mathematical sections about Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theory were a bit above my ability to follow along with. He nonetheless is rather engaging and his abundant metaphors and analogies make his points understandable. This reliance on analogy is quite deliberate. One of the chief premises in this book is that we fundamentally view and understand the world in a symbolic manner, in which we perceive complex, abstract wholes, instead of constituent parts of reality.
On Hofstadter’s view, our minds are not merely neurons firing and sensory stimuli triggering certain receptors instead of other ones. These firing neurons are rather a membrane in which thoughts are suspended in a “strange loop” of consciousness; something similar to, but more complex and paradoxical than a video feedback loop, where a video camera is pointed at a monitor displaying its output.
I think this book would be much better experienced as written word than in the form of an audio book. Hofstadter’s lengthy analogies and mathematical explanations can be difficult to follow in the ephemeral form of an audio book, and I think it would be preferable to experience this in the solidity of text, where you can proceed at your own pace, grasping the content of each sentence one at a time. Still, I am happy I listened to this as I doubt I would have approached this at all had I waited to read it on paper. For me, audio books are best used to expand my breadth to those things which I am interested in, but am not likely to take the time to read.
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
Given the difficulty and seriousness we attribute to early 20th Century novels, The Magic Mountain is humorously written, but languidly paced. I suspect it will be difficult for modern readers. One has a sense of being ahead of the narrative. The protagonist is one Hans Castorp, who comes off as a rather hapless fellow. He has decided that he shall visit his cousin who is recovering from illness at a sanitarium high in the Alps. Castorp’s stay is meant to last a mere three weeks, but it is not long before we sense that he will not be leaving any time soon, for perhaps Castorp is not as well as he thought. We can guess from early on that he shall not be leaving the sanitarium any time soon and because of this we feel anxious as the days draw on and want the author to come to his point. The narrative voice does not invite us to empathize with Franz, but to look down upon him as a rather naïve, and provincial fellow.
I say none of this as a true critique of the novel but only to explain why I think it will be difficult for modern readers. It was so for me, I have yet to finish this, being only some ten hours into an almost forty hour audio book; I am really still in the opening chapters of the novel. But like most great stories, the author here has much more on his mind than the mere unfolding of the plot, and if we are to truly benefit from undertaking such a tome as this, we must enjoy all the stories, the reflections and the pontifications of the characters we meet along the way. Mann’s narrative form allows him to represent the political landscape, worldview, and values of his time through the differing perspectives of the eccentric personalities we meet through Castorp’s stay.
In an amusing connection, I am nearly convinced this book was the inspiration for the setting and tone of the Gore Verbinski film A Cure for Wellness. Since I haven’t finished Magic Mountain, I can’t say that the similarities don’t continue but, well, I kinda doubt it.
Through the written word we live vicariously, we strive, we fail, and we learn. The suffering of all the centuries is in some small way redeemed by the wisdom left behind, but only if we incline our eyes, if we participate in the universal telling and retelling of stories. This life is as broad as you want it to be, and as deep as you want to delve.
