Readings

“Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular…Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in–whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no–is what we mean by having a religion.”

–George Santayana, Reason in Religion

A Coke vs. Soda vs. Pop map–why hasn’t anyone done this before?

Ok, this is truly great. Just as one would suspect, the areas where “coke” is the preferred generic term for soft drinks is pretty much a map of the South (the Confederate states, kind of plus Kentucky and almost minus Virginia).

Readings

A friend passed this quote to me on the death of the author. It’s timeless.

 

…. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts…If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

          –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Is Tim Keller the new C.S. Lewis? No, but…

I’m on vacation, and here’s what I’m reading…

Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God is awkwardly named. It is also well-organized, pithy in its arguments, and broad in its array of references to literature and scholarship. Many in evangelical circles have been comparing Keller’s book favorably with C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, but the comparison doesn’t work for me, and it’s not because Keller’s book isn’t good.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Keller examines seven common objections to the faith, running from a chapter titled “There can’t be just one true religion,” to “You can’t take the Bible literally.” In the second part of the book, Keller makes the argument for Christianity as a worldview that makes sense of the human condition in chapters ranging from “the Clues of God” to “The Reality of the Resurrection.”

Keller’s own writing is workmanlike–sturdy and at times not inelegant.

Will we be writing the history of the suburbs soon?

An International Herald Tribune article points out that housing prices in the suburbs are falling faster than prices in the urban core, possibly because of rocketing fuel costs. Will fuel prices remake our cities and kill our suburbs?

Readings

‘You are fond of history! — and so are Mr. Allen and my
father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So
many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable!
At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any
longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very
well; but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes,
which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look
into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and
girls, always struck me as a hard fate ; and though I know it
is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at
the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to
do it.’
‘That little boys and girls should be tormented,’ said
Henry, ‘ is what no one at all acquainted with human nature
in a civilised state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished
historians, I must observe, that they might well
be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim; and
that by their method and style they are perfectly well qualified
to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature
time of life.’

–Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

The fact that, as a historian, I find this funny, means that it’s more than a little true…

Review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Pt 2

An edited version of this review appeared in the April, 2008, edition of Touchstone

In his two characters, McCarthy presents us with a study of the tension between moral pragmatism and moral purity. In the father, McCarthy has written a character burdened with a responsibility–caring for his son–that complicates his moral choices. He is frequently presented with decisions that demand pragmatism in exchange for their survival, and yet even in transgressing boundaries he seems to acknowledge their fixedness. He justifies this to his son: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” Not surprisingly, the father is a more understandable and empathetic character than the son.

In the son, McCarthy has written a character of elemental innocence that throws the pragmatism of the father into sharp relief. The son is strict with himself and his father, always asking if the owners of the houses they loot for food and supplies are alive (in which case they would be stealing) or dead. He is compassionate towards others even when that compassion runs counter to their need to survive. “He was just hungry,” he says, begging his father not to leave a thief without clothes or food that they desperately need themselves. He is certainly a type of Christ figure, but his innocence is human–rooted in his ignorance. He can offer no solutions to the often intractable problems that he and his father face, he can only offer the simple, innocent, and blind response of conscience, which sees only right and wrong, not the necessary.

It is his son’s innocence, along with his life, that the father struggles to preserve as they make their way south.

Review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Pt 1

An edited version of this review first appeared in the April, 2008, edition of Touchstone

As I read The Road, I kept imagining two people sitting on a darkened stage with the ruins of the world around them, one saying “everything is gone,” and the other asking “what is left?” McCarthy is probably best known for All the Pretty Horses, and for his unflinching commitment to portrayals of human depravity. Among those who have read McCarthy’s other work, his newest novel is either the best work of an aging American master or the betrayal of an existential vision so severe that he is easily in the running for authoring the most violent novel in the American canon (Blood Meridian). I believe it is an aging McCarthy’s answer to the question “what is left?” that has provoked conflicting responses from his readers and that most deserves our attention in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Taking place in what appears to be a nuclear winter following a global disaster, The Road follows a man and his son fleeing south through the smoldering remains of the world for reasons unknown to us, and possibly unknown to them. Everything about the novel is stark, and yet McCarthy consistently achieves rich descriptions of a dead world using the combination of a sparse, muscular style and a truly evocative vocabulary.

Of Thomas McGregor and the pen knife…

From the 1806 minutes of the Mountain Creek Baptist Church in Anderson, South Carolina:

Thomas McGregor made report to the church, that he had been drinking too much. And in the time of his drinking he took a pen knife off of the counter and put it in his pocket. And then denied that he had it until search was made and it found in his possession. But he made acknowledgment. And the church restored him.

Well, we all know what it’s like to drink too much and want your nighbor’s pen knife…

David Reader, Cellist (an old friend’s death)

“The victim’s cello was still inside the car.” That seemed right. He was one of the most brilliantly talented people I have known. When I read it I wondered unconsciously if it could be the same cello I had seen him play Hendrix tunes on in high school.

His death fanned memories to life. I remember how he played basketball, how determined he was, how his tall, skinny self seemed to flow in between the defenders to get the shot. I remember how he played one game with a metal pin stuck through his shattered middle finger to stabilize it. And I remember how he didn’t think it was a big deal.

I remember him playing Hendrix’s “Red House” on the piano, while I tried to keep up on guitar.

I remember how he looked perpetually disheveled, how he was always running late, always charmingly distracted, always smiling. Always the one to laugh first and loudest. Always headed somewhere.

And then he would focus. Seeing him play the cello was to see very nearly a different person, hunched over his instrument, eyes locked on the music, his long, thin fingers pulling music out of the strings and wood of the cello. And then, after the last note, a smile would signal the return of his old person. I hadn’t seen him in years.

The comment section of the online article was a compendium of reactions.

“There are folks in this world whom you think you know but have many demons. It is so sad.”

“…I do wonder about what his reason was for being in that complex at that time of night. It is not a place to be if you don’t live there.”

“I knew him since he was five years old…”

“…He went to our church and we all got to know him real well. He performed for us many times. I very seriously doubt he was into anything bad, as he was a very serious believer.”

“As long as this ineffective, idiotic ‘war on drugs’ continues, so will incidents like this.”

There are many ways to try to understand the thing, to give it meaning. From afar, its meaning might seem to be a social one, the meaning that the last comment above lays on it. But the closer to the thing you get, the more it becomes evident that the only important meanings involve loss. A family lost a son, a brother. A symphony lost a cellist. An audience lost his music. He lost his life.

The details offer a false promise of explanation. A 1998 Camry, 12:05 AM, two gunshots, a cello in the backseat. But the way he lost his life means little except perhaps that he, like all of us, struggled with his humanness and sometimes lost. None of us win that battle all the time. I am sure that he won sometimes, as well. 

For myself, I will remember the cello in the back seat, and that he performed with the symphony a few hours before he died. 

He was unique, and human, and he played the cello.