One Effect of Holiness

Courtesy of Somerset Maugham's "The Painted Veil":

But to all that moving experience there had been a shadow (a dark lining to the silver cloud), insistent and plain, which disconcerted her. In the sober gaiety of Sister St. Joseph, and much more in the beautiful courtesy of the Mother Superior, she had felt an aloofness which oppressed her. They were friendly and even cordial, but at the same time they held something back, she knew not what, so that she was conscious that she was nothing but a casual stranger. There was a barrier between her and them. They spoke a different language not only of the tongue but of the heart. And when the door was closed upon her she felt that they had put her out of their minds so completely, going about their neglected work again without delay, that for them she might never have existed. She felt shut out not only from that poor little convent, but from some mysterious garden of the spirit after which with all her soul she hankered. She felt on a sudden alone as she had never felt alone before. That was why she had wept.

the courage to wander into the wilderness

I recently stumbled upon a blog called Catholic Phoenix that I really enjoy. It has lots of eloquent, thought-provoking contributors who write on everything from liturgy to poetry to teenagers to philosophy. And they're funny! You can't beat that. Anyway, I recommend this post on the Lenten longing for Easter. The author tells us how, after converting to Catholicism, he followed the older tradition of fasting the duration of Lent, which left him....hungry. Literally. And this hunger underscored everything he did for 40 long days. He writes

Penance during Lent seems to be the way that we submit to that [cleansing] purgative fire. Or rather, it is the way that we embrace it. We simply don’t get to the glorious promise of Easter until we have suffered, because the triumph of Easter was obtained only through Christ’s suffering. Indeed, His voluntary suffering. Fasting is difficult not only because constant hunger taxes our bodies. Fasting is difficult because it requires us to voluntarily suffer; we must choose to be hungry. In Practice in Christianity, Søren Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) argues that Christian suffering is Christian precisely because it’s avoidable. All who suffer because of Christ could quit their suffering by quitting Christ. But those who subject themselves to suffering subject themselves to Christ, who is our ultimate example of voluntarily suffering. With imitation in mind, Christians strangely fight the impulse to flee the burning house. Christians instead walk headlong into the blaze, hoping that their loved ones are somewhere nearby, consumed by flames.

The sentiment reminds me of an absolutely breathtaking meditation on Jesus' seven last words from the cross called Death on a Friday Afternoon. I think I reread it every Lent, and each time I'm struck by the beauty and humility and sacrifice and love of our Lord, magnified and intensified under the lens of Father Neuhaus' incomparable way with words. Neuhaus urges readers to enjoy his book slowly, consciously digesting the implications of what happened on that Friday afternoon, rather than rushing headlong into Easter. It's so easy to just survive Lent, quietly checking off the boxes labeled "fasting" and "abstinence" and "prayer" without spending time savoring the taste of sacrifice while we hunger for our reward.

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” (Mt. 4:1) “If you are the son of God,” said the tempter, “command these stones to become loaves of bread.” (Mt. 4:3) Though “he was hungry,” Christ refused. Do you refuse? Or do you turn your stones into bread? Do you even have the courage to wander into the wilderness in the first place?

 Please say a prayer for me that I'll have the courage, and I'll say one for you.

Yet Another Use for Super-Disguise Mustaches

Super X-Treme Mega History Heroes!

Vindication!

My husband was pretty excited to find this post over on the First Things blog yesterday. He and I have about five giant bookcases in our small one-bedroom apartment... and that doesn't even account for the books we have squirreled away at our parents' homes. To be frank, we love books. Like, really love them. Old books, new books... I enjoy just looking at all their spines, ready and waiting for someone to pluck them off their sagging shelves. I adore reading with and to children, and we've already started a small collection of books to enjoy with Baby Boy once he decides to arrive...assuming he savors the written word as much as his parents.

The First Things post is about a study which finds that “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books. This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”

Now, to me, this just seems obvious. Children take their cues from the world around them, and if Mommy and Daddy spend hours a day watching television, then the children tacitly understand that television is highly valued. Children have far more common sense than we give them credit for - just take a look around you the next time you're at Mass. Find the children who don't kneel or sing along or reverently receive the Eucharist - are Mommy and Daddy kneeling or singing along or reverent? It follows that a home with books (and not just as decoration, but as something read and shared and discussed) will foster children who see that reading and thinking are worthwhile endeavors.

An Exorcist Tells His Story

Thanks to a Barnes & Noble gift card, Zach and I got yet another book to add to our super-duper library earlier this week. We were debating between various titles in the Christian section (besides Jane Austen and Dostoevsky, what else is there worth reading?) when we found Fr. Gabriele Amorth's An Exorcist Tells His Story. I've been really intrigued by the subject since we listened to a talk by Fr. Euteneuer earlier this year. It's a topic that Christians hear about so little within the religious community. The secular world seems much more willing to enter into the conversation, if only to use exorcisms as material for cheesy movies or as a subject to be denounced as an anachronism rendered moot by the development of modern psychology and the introduction of Prozac and Zoloft. Besides educating his readers on the mechanics of exorcisms, bringing the subject back to the table is one of Fr. Amorth's main goals in the book. He fears for the souls of those suffering from demonic possession who find it nearly impossible to locate a modern exorcist, and he fears for the souls of those bishops who fail to recognize the expulsion of demons as a necessary and crucial task given by Jesus Christ to the Church Militant. It is the job of Bishops to appoint exorcists to parishes and diocese, yet Fr. Amorth tells how he (the chief exorcist of Rome) performed exorcisms on victims from around the world, all unable to find an exorcist when they or a concerned family member approached their local bishops.

Whatever the reason for the dearth of modern exorcists (and the author has many damning things to say about certain religious leaders and theologians and their lack of backbone and proper catechesis), Fr. Amorth insists that the need for exorcisms grows stronger with each passing decade as faith is falling by the wayside and new age "spirituality" is on the rise. In the age of Harry Potter, no one seems to find it odd or disturbing that the Wiccan section of Barnes & Noble appears to have doubled in size every time you look. Fr. Amorth, in reinvigorating the discussion of demonic possession, asserts the Catholic truths that religious leaders (often) at best present as abstract, and at worst completely ignore: that there is a very real battle for the surrender of our souls. Fr. Amorth emphasizes the teaching that Satan and the legions of demons are real creatures and that they desire nothing more than to win possession of our immortal selves. If one internalizes this Catholic teaching, than the very real need for exorcisms logically follows.

Lest potential readers of An Exorcist Tells His Story think that the book is a depressing lamentation on the state of modern souls and the Church's unwillingness to provide a cure, I want to say that it is one of the most uplifting and heartening religious works I have read in a long time. First, Fr. Amorth reminds readers that the final battle has already ultimately been won, by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the soul of every man, woman, and child. Demonic possession, although very real, is nothing more than a last-ditch effort by a group of defeated creatures whose last chapter is already written! Additionally, there are many nuances to possession which Fr. Amorth outlines eloquently and by analogy and example, but the point to take away is that a demon can only enter or oppress a soul which has invited the demon's presence, which includes living life in a state of sin. Frequent reception of the sacraments and the living of a Christian life are like immunizations against evil (as one victim in the book puts it). Fr. Amorth calls confession "more painful to a demonic creature than the act of exorcism," presumably because it dilates the soul and increases receptivity to grace while closing oneself off from the hollow whispers of Satan.

Finally, I'll end with a quote from a victim's story in the book. Posting the following words is really the reason I wanted to write this entry in the first place, but I thought they would be best received on the foundation of an explanation of what I had been reading.

"Satan's true goal is not to make you suffer or to harm you. He does not seek our pain but something more. He wants our defeated soul to say, 'Enough. I am defeated; I am a piece of clay in the hands of evil. God cannot liberate me. God forgets his children if he allows such suffering. God does not love me; evil is greater than he is.' This is the true victory of evil. We must rebuke it even if we no longer have faith because our pain dulls it. 'We must want faith.' The devil cannot touch our will. Our will does not belong to God or to the devil; it is ours alone because God gave it to us when he created us. We must always say 'No' to those who want to destroy it. We must believe, like St. Paul, that 'in the name of Jesus Christ every knee must bend in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth.' This is our salvation."


Read this book and Psalm 27 and you'll sleep soundly at night.

The Lord is my light and my salvation/whom shall I fear?

a most excellent book to read

Is Matt Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft. I found it to be a refreshing apology for the manual trades, which in my time have been derided to the point that anyone who practices "a trade" can be seen as less of a person. This criticism comes from a common class of people who view academic accomplishment as the primary thing that makes a person valuable. This book is an excellent antidote for that felonious idea.

It's also a rather profound contribution to philosophical conversation, as Professor Deneen explains here. Check out Front Porch Republic's symposium for a greater appreciation of this interesting book.

a must read

Professor Leon Kass delivers the 2009 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, (he follows the great Harvey Mansfield).

Peter Lawler comments:

Kass discovered through his personal experience that he was, from one view, more of a humanist than a scientist. He "found that I loved my patients and their stories more than I loved solving the puzzles of their diseases." His fellow scientists "found disease fascinating," but he found particular people fascinating, especially "how they struggled with suffering." Solving puzzles is the particular pleasure of the impersonal scientist and the philosopher; loving or even personally identifying with the tough personal struggles of patients or interlocutors was not even a characteristic of Socrates. Kass, the scientist, "tasted the great pleasures of independent discovery" during "the golden age of molecular biology," but those, it seems, were never his greatest pleasures or deepest concerns. Kass's distinctive concerns must have continued to owe something to the personal decency of his "saintly" and "moralist" parents, as much to his exposure to the questioning characteristic of Great Books Theirs, because of their quasi-religious community, was not the kind of quasi-socialism that abstracted from the greatness and misery of ordinary persons.

Kass adds that he "hated the autopsy room, not out of fear of death, but because the post mortem exam could never answer my question: What happened to my patient?" The medical explanation of the cause of death "was utterly incommensurable with the awesome massive fact" he could see with his own eyes. Death is "the extinction of this never-to-be repeated human being, for whom I had cared and for whom his survivors now grieve." Science is incapable of wondering properly about both the reality of and the utter disappearance of the unique and irreplaceable person. Our desire to know is not properly animated without some assistance from personal care and grief.

It would seem that, from the beginning, Kass was a humanistic dissenter from a scientific consensus about the true relationship between eros and logos. (I know I promised Rousseau and all that. Next time...)

An education in virtue (not that it took)

In high school I was able to feign familiarity with the books I was required to read. Some of my friends and I shared a utilitarian educational philosophy, one that, in retrospect, I see as immature foolishness. We would be as knowledgeable as was required for us to succeed at a high level, nothing more (but in our defense, our school encouraged this). But because of this philosophy, I missed out on reading a great number of classic works of literature. I'm trying to remedy this situation now.

And so I've been reading Jane Austen's novels. Jane Austen is marvelously attentive to detail and a great painter of the possibilities of human relationships. She takes virtue and vice very seriously, and shows her readers all the considerations that can shape human sentiment and affection. By taking these things seriously, Austen provides her readers with a vivid portrait of a type of human greatness: greatness in human love.

My most recent encounter with Ms. Austen's work was Mansfield Park, the story of Fanny Price. Mansfield Park is first a story about the perseverance of virtue during great trial. The novel's heroine, Fanny Price, is a mild-mannered girl who gets put through some awful trials by some supposedly reputable, high-class characters. But their flaws eventually come to a head in a few great crises that precipitate a happy ending. All the while Fanny Price remains steadfast in her commitment to what is true and good. In the end, she is rewarded. The story is a reminder that virtue is its own reward even if the circumstances of our lives do not seem to justify that proposition.

In short, Jane Austen is a great teacher of virtue. She doesn’t tell us what virtue is, she shows it to us in her characters. This showing is a unique function of literature, and it is one of the reasons her books are so great. And they are at least half-entertaining, too!

our theatricals

"It is as a dream, a pleasant dream!" he exclaimed, breaking forth again after few minutes musing. "I shall always look back on our theatricals with exquisite pleasure. There was such an interest, such an animation, such a spirit diffused! Every body felt it. We were all alive. There was employment, hope, solicitude, bustle, for every hour of the day. Always some little objection, some little doubt, some little anxiety to be got over. I was never happier."

With silent indignation, Fanny repeated to herself, "Never happier! - never happier than when doing what you must know what not justifiable! - never happier than when behaving so dishonorably and unfeelingly! - Oh! what a corrupted mind!"

Mansfield Park
Vol II Chapter V
Jane Austen

sick of the revolution

A while back I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I admit I didn't really understand the book, but I remember it being an enjoyable read, at least. Apparently its hipster author, David Eggers, publishes a quarterly literary journal, "McSweeney's", with content available online. Perusing the site, I found this short story; it's sort of amusing. So I present to you Part One of "Sick of the Revolution" :

My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution. Nicaragua had the best revolution, he and I agreed. There were several other revolutions in the area—in El Salvador and in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Panama (sort of). My boyfriend said we should get shots and malaria pills and that we would ride the bus there.

I knew my mother and father were not going to go for this so I didn't tell them. I wrote them a letter from Mexico. Actually I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border and mailed it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side.

The letter went something like:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I'm sorry to tell you in this way but I've left school and I am going to join the revolution. I'm going to first go to the one in El Salvador, then to the one in Nicaragua, due to the layout of the land. I have been called by God.

- - - -

My father still tells the story of the time I went to join the revolution.

That girl told us nothing, he says. I had no idea. I open the mailbox and there's a letter from Mexico saying she's off to foment the revolution.

He used to shout it, She told me nothing! and point at me—there she is, the traitor, the tramp.

Later he said it sadly, shaking his head: I had no idea.

Later he said it with pride. His loony girl, a bit like him. Do you know he once owned a Communist bookstore?

Now he tells it like an old joke. So one day I open the mailbox ...

- - - -

As it happens, it was the very end of the revolution, the year my boyfriend and I went, but the way it looked to us, we were arriving at the very beginning. It was a new world order. Everybody in the world was talking about it. The revolution was coming over the ocean. It was floating up through Texas. It could spread over America. People were writing their ideas in the papers. But a year later the Berlin Wall came down and soon after that the Sandinistas were gone, the Cold War was over, and the FMLN signed a peace accord. By the time we arrived, the decay had set in but we didn't know. There were a lot of us like this on the scene.

I like the theme of disillusionment. Then again, I wasn't an English major, so do I really know what I'm talking about?

Howard Zinn and self-defeating pessimism

I am currently reading the ever-popular high school history text-book, "A People's History of the United States". The author, Howard Zinn, looks at American history through the lens of Marxist class-analysis, or class-warfare, as the case may be. So far, the history book has shown me that people have done, in word and deed, horrible things to each other. This is not a new idea to any Christian familiar with the doctrine of original sin, but perhaps it is shocking to secular humanists convinced by Rousseau and blinded by enlightenment confidence.

As interesting and depressing as Zinn's account can be, I cannot help but think something significant is lacking from Zinn's narrative. It is undoubtedly, doubt. Doubt that his narrative might be incomplete. A professor David Bobb of Hillsdale college hits the mark in his review for Claremont:

Zinn answers his own questions, of course, and he presents the Cold War as a struggle between "empires of influence." His interpretation is consistent with his ideology, in which moral and political differences (he berates Democrats almost as much as Republicans) are subsumed in class differences. In his tidy tale of how the rich hate everyone else, Zinn assumes the mantle of chief spokesman for the oppressed. He writes not so much from historical hindsight as from historical omniscience. A good historian will spur questions and prod his readers to investigate his claims. Zinn does neither, but instead makes students fearful, distrusting, and ultimately despondent about the possibility of patriotism. Instead of emboldening them to do noble things out of admiration for the great people and deeds they have studied, his book only serves to embitter them about America.

Has anyone else read this particular history? I think after reading a book like this, it is easy to adopt an attitude where you focus only on evil. A better attitude is one rejoices in what is good and rejects what is bad.

True Freedom and the Economy

This Fourth of July weekend I had the privilege to finish reading William Cavanaugh’s latest book, “Being Consumed.” I am surprised and happy to say that I have good things to report. Professor Cavanaugh’s book is, in the first place, an illuminating discussion of what Christianity says to the free market. Namely, he takes the Christian teaching that the human person ought to be the central concern of our economic and political systems and draws out its consequences.

What does it mean for our central concern to be the human being? It means our economic and political systems ought to be conducive to proper human flourishing – to true human freedom. True human freedom is not maximized by a base libertarianism where we are free to choose rightly or wrongly without influence (as if such a condition could exist) - no, true human freedom is freedom for excellence, freedom to choose the good.

Cavanaugh’s first step is to apply this teaching to economics. He argues, rightly I think, that a market detached from any sense of purpose, or of the good, or of morality is not really a free market. This is another way of saying that human beings cannot and should not operate in a moral vacuum. In many ways, a persons in a free market economy acting without any sense of purpose become slaves – slaves to desire, to consumption – maybe the very act of shopping itself. This should be avoided. Cavanaugh reminds us that people need a sense of transcendent purpose. But a distinction must be made.

What Cavanaugh proposes may be revolutionary (in some sense), but he does not propose a revolution. His intention is primarily meliorative. Indeed, he forthrightly states he rejects the socialist solution:

“Even if Augustine is right about the need for objective ends to guide the will, the question remains: Who is to say what those ends are? There is no doubt that Augustine’s view can be taken in a very paternalistic direction: “We know what you really want, and we are going to organize society accordingly.” I do not wish to endorse such a view. This is the specter of a socialist command economy that free-market advocates rightly reject. Free-market advocates would prefer to have individuals make their own mistakes. That some will make bad choices is inevitable; but it is far better to give individuals the freedom to damn themselves than to subject everyone to a power that is no more guaranteed than any other individual to choose well.” (pp.15)

The issue is then the way individuals interact with each other on a personal basis, i.e., how individuals act with other individuals face to face. In Cavanaugh’s words “the direct embodiment” of free economic practices is most important. So in this way his book is not political at all; nor is it really concerned with economic systems. In fact, it assumes the free-market is here and ought to stay. His goal is to inform interested parties how to act with concern for the human person in all economic exchanges. I think this is a good goal.

I’m not technically qualified to offer criticism of his argument, but I’ll do it anyways because this is the internet. My only contention is that Professor Cavanaugh goes way out of his way to criticize defenders of the free-market economy. In this little book, he manages to take pot shots at Michael Novak and Milton Friedman. As we briefly talked about an example in an earlier post, I think he misunderstands the free-market economists. So much so that I think Michael Novak would find most of Prof. Cavanaugh’s book on target and perceptive (especially his discussion of the Eucharist and consuming rightly!). Where is the disagreement then? Cavanaugh errs in thinking that Michael Novak et al. defend a type of economics where morality plays no role, or where morality is subservient to market forces. I think this is quite simply false, and even a crude reading of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, for instance, serves to demonstrate. If Cavanaugh were to read Novak et al. as arguing specifically against socialism, (i.e. against governmental usurpation of property and the means of production) he might be willing to tolerate their use of the word freedom in a more limited, secular sense.

But anyways let me conclude by saying that this is a challenging, good, and thought-provoking book. I intend to post notable selections from it over the next few days. Aside from the cheap shots, Cavanaugh has great ideas about how we can work for greater justice and make our free-markets not only free of legal restrictions, but truly free.

'They were very up-to-date and advanced people.'

An enjoyable passage from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia:

THERE WAS A BOY CALLED EUSTACE Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and his masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother," but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open.

Haha!

Cavanaugh and the free market

William Cavanaugh is a professor of theology at St. Thomas. Apparently his writing on political and economic issues has made him popular in "radical" Catholic circles. Considering myself something of a radical, and also learning that Prof. Cavanaugh is rather well respected, I thought I should become acquainted with his thought. I have heard a good introduction is his book, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire.

Perhaps contrary to your intuition is the idea that the study of God could have anything to say about the study of economy. And in some important way, you'd be right. In the first place, theology does not say anything about human economy; theology studies God. But in the Christian tradition, the revelation of God to Man was also the revelation of Man to Man. This is because Christians believe Jesus was both fully Man and fully God. As such, the study of God is also the study of man. And so in learning the truth about man, we learn things that we necessarily need to incorporate into our economic thinking. That is, if our economics is going to have any basis in reality, any basis in the nature of man.

Theology can teach us about anthropology, and anthropology is, or ought be, the basis of economics. And so Cavanaugh's book teaches us about human anthropology. His first major argument is that democratic capitalism explicitly condemns the notion of a public telos, a public purpose, and that this is a bad thing:

All of this indicates that there are true desires and false desires, and we need a telos to tell the difference between them. The second corollary of free-market economics is that freedom is maximized in the absence of a common telos. A market is free if individuals are free to choose their own ends based on nothing more than their own wants. (pp.10)

I am following along with the professor until he states his "second corollary" of free-market economics, which seems to me to be largely of his own convenient invention. He says that free-market economists believe 'freedom is maximized' in the absence of a common telos. Is that quite right? Yes, but it's not the whole story, or the most important part of the story. If he is going to criticize the free-market economists, he ought to fairly represent their argument. They do not love freedom qua freedom. They value freedom because they believe that freedom is the key to the maximization of prosperity. They also believe that the free market best respects the the nature of man. So the point of the free economy is not just that people are free; it is that this freedom is most conducive to human flourishing and creating wealth - i.e., moving people out of poverty. So I think Prof. Cavanaugh, at least in these first few chapters, is misreading the free-market economists and making a straw-man argument. He is correct about the necessity of a telos - nothing can or ought to happen in a moral or spiritual vacuum, economic choices included. (Whether it ought or can be common to all members of a society is another question.) But he is not fairly representing their whole argument, he is reducing it to love of freedom for freedom's sake.

the man who lies to himself

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. the man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill - he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness. But get up, sit down, I beg you. All this, too, is deceitful posturing..."

from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
Part One, Book Two, "The Old Buffoon"

Peter Kreeft as Socrates as Time-Traveler

He does a pretty good job. At worst, the book is overwhelmingly corny, and the course of the dialog hard to believe. But if you are reading the book for apologetic insights, you will be overwhelmed. Kreeft is a master articulator of the many reasons to believe in the Christian Gospel. In addition, there are a number of psychological insights in the earlier chapters where his Socrates is dissecting the pretensions of the modern mind. Overall, highly recommended, as long as you can stomach some serious lameness.

some quick recommendations

I have recently had the great pleasure of reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. The book is a resounding testament to the deleterious effects arrogance can have on science. If you want to be entertained, I recommend reading it along with David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion, a highly entertaining book that assesses the argument at hand. Finally, I must mention the movie Iron Man: it is awesome.

I was wrong about Life of Pi, Catherine was right.

"I'm sorry to say it so bluntly, we don't mean to hurt your feelings, but you don't really expect us to believe you, do you? carnivorous trees? A fish-eating algae that produces fresh water? Tree-dwelling aquatic rodents? Those things don't exist."

"Only because you've never seen them."

"That's right. We believe what we see."

"So did Columbus. What do you do when you're in the dark?"

"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal." Leo Tolstoy.

My brother sent me this quote this morning. I think it is from Moby Dick. It covers a lot of ground, but mostly made me think of Nietzsche. I would love to know what y'all who know about Solomon, think.

"Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp - all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true - not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity". ALL. This willful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave- yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; - not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain" (i. e. even while living) "in the congregation of the dead". Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

The Story of Pi

I won’t spend too much time rehashing the plot, as Zach already commented on the mechanics of the book and most people have probably read Life of Pi at least once. The basic outline of the novel is that an Indian boy (so moved to develop a relationship with God that he practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam) must leave his home in Asia to start a new life in Canada. The Patel family, along with all the animals from the family zoo, board a modern-day ark/cargo ship and set sail for North America. After 4 days at sea, the ship sinks, the Patel family drowns (minus Pi), and the main character finds himself alone in a lifeboat with only a Bengal tiger as company. The vast majority of the book is devoted to Pi surviving at sea, gory details included. If ever there was a test for a God-loving pluralist, this is it.

Miraculously, Pi survives, both physically and spiritually. His comment on reaching the soft sands of the Mexican shore is that the beach is “like the cheek of God, and somewhere two eyes were glittering with pleasure and a mouth was smiling at having me there.” The novel, to be sure, is filled with Martel’s beautiful descriptions of people, places, and emotions, and his characterization of the modern reaction to zoos and confinement nicely parallels Pi’s marine confinement with a carnivorous cat, but I think that Martel does his best work in the chapters that bookend the ocean narrative. The novel is broken into three parts, with the opening chapters describing Pi’s life in India, his family zoo, and the way in which people tend to feel pity for animals in artificial environments. Pi’s passionate defense of zoos inevitably leads to one of the most integral quotations of this first part of the book: “I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both” (19). The message is that agnostics and atheists look at people practicing religion as animals in a cage, lacking the ability to move about freely in a world with innumerable choices. The existence of a choice, however, does not make it a viable and healthy option, and Pi’s assertion that a properly maintained zoo enclosure is ultimately a liberating experience for an animal (because it frees them from lives of compulsion and necessity in the wild) parallels his defense of religion, freeing human lives by emancipating them from enslavement to baser (animal) passions.

In the third part of the novel, Pi, after washing upon Mexican shores, is visited by two Japanese businessmen from the company who owned the cargo ship. They are interested solely in hearing Pi’s tale so they can determine the cause for the sinking of the ship. After hearing Pi’s version of the events, they bristle with confusion and doubt over the “believability” of the events related to them. They call his tale a “story,” and ask again to know “what really happened” to the boy. Pi assumes they want another story, but the men say no, because Japanese stories have an element of “invention” in them, and these businessmen want only the facts. Pi argues that life can be deemed a “story” while still reflecting factual reality. In fact, the word story is derived from the Latin historia, essentially meaning a record of events. It is the Japanese businessmen who give Pi’s tale the epithet of “untrue” or “unbelievable” simply because they cannot fathom that such a series of events would happen. Isn’t the same true of scientists, who tell of their own experiences with the natural world, precluding the occurrence or existence of a possibility that has not yet been tested within the confines of this “story?” Like the Japanese businessmen, scientists too often hear the word “story” when a person begins to speak of religion; the two terms become conflated, and both are deemed at odds with “fact.” Pi is saying that a story need not be seen as anathema to truth.

Pi, ever polite, obliges the men with a rendition of the facts in which the animals aboard the lifeboat are actually humans from the cargo ship. This story is far more gruesome, with murder and cannibalism, a picture of human nature at its lowest point. At the tale’s conclusion, Pi offers the Japanese men the choice of two stories, “with animals or without.” It is interesting that these are the options named, not a story with animals or a story with humans. The Japanese businessmen, the “scientists” who search Pi’s story for facts, assume that the tale of cannibalism and barbary must be true because it aligns with their experience of human nature, of life as “nasty, brutish, and short.” But the men know, in their hearts, that the narrative of Pi taming the tiger, overcoming that base and primitive portion of the human soul, is more palatable. This does not necessarily automatically exclude it from reality. It is the better story, the two men decide, and Pi replies “So it goes with God.” Perhaps the idea is that men, like animals, prefer the civilizing and morally elevating effects of religious “confinement,” a cage that ironically allows men to be freer than a life of sin ever could. The reluctance to enter this cage is expressed as the desire to equate a religious life with the unbelievable, with something that is essentially at odds with human nature, as something that requires more of men than they are able to give. “If you stumble at mere believability,” Pi had asked the Japanese businessman earlier in the interview, “what are you living for?...Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?” (297).

That is Pi’s query posed to the businessmen, and that is the question posed to the reader by Life of Pi. Although more spiritual than religious, the book is a welcome respite from the hackneyed tale of the unrequited wanderings of modern youth. Despite initial misgivings, I did enjoy the book. However, I found it to be more palatable in the digestion of its message rather than during actual reading.