books

other, stories

I suppose there’s a good reason that the ‘great books’ are called great. East of Eden was incredible.

And I feel that a man is a very important thing–maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent towards gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed–because ‘Thou mayest.’

-John Steinbeck

other

The land of Israel is a small country. You can walk its length, north to south, in a few days, and from its central mountains you can see its lateral boundaries, the sea to the west and the river to the east. But it has had an importance out of all proportion to its size. Empires have fought over it. Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of it as the natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead. There are many places which, once beautiful, are now battered and mangled with the legacies of war. And yet it has remained a beautiful land, still producing grapes and figs, milk and honey.
The New Testament has not been around as long as the land of Israel, but in other ways there are remarkable parallels. […] There are many places whose fragile beauty has been trampled on by heavy-footed exegetes in search of a Greek root, a quick sermon, or a political slogan. And yet it has remained a powerful and evocative book, full of delicacy and majesty, tears and laughter.

-N.T. Wright in The New Testament and the People of God

N.T. Wright’s series about the origins of Christianity are the easiest to read hard-to-read books I’ve read. This is the first of the series and the third one for me to read (..yeah). It’s work getting through these books, but the only good beer is beer won, not conceded; good things are earned, thankfully. He says that in writing this book he’s a fascinated amateur not an explaining expert..not sure I completely buy it, but I see where he’s coming from. I think that’ll actually help, make the book more readable. His “expert” work, the tome about the life of Jesus, definitely has a clearly expert tone. It is very dense, takes a lot of time to read, the bibliography is enormous, and at the end one is left awestruck.

stories

There’s anothern.
He ran his arm down the hole and lay on the ground feeling about in the dark beneath them. He closed his eyes. I got him, he said.
The dog he brought up was dead.
Yonder’s your runt, Billy said.
The little dog was curled and stiff, its paws before its face.
He put it down and pushed his shoulder deeper into the hole.
Can you find him?
No.
Billy stood. Let me try, he said. My arm’s longern yours.
All right.
Billy lay in the dirt and ran his arm down into the hole.
Come here you little turd, he said.
Have you got him?
Yeah. Damn if I don’t think he’s offerin’ to bite me.
The dog came up mewling and twisting in his hand.
This aint no runt, he said.
Let me see him.
He’s fat as a butterball.
John Grady took the little dog and held it in his cupped hand.
Wonder what he was doin off back there by himself?
Maybe he was with the one that died.
John Grady held the dog up and looked into its small wrinkled face. I think I got me a dog, he said.
——-

You sure you don’t want a glass of water?
No mam. I’m alright.
Betty, he said.
Yes.
I’m not what you think I am. I aint nothin. I don’t know why you put up with me.
Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now. I’ll see you in the morning.
Yes mam.

From Cities of the Plain, by Cormac McCarthy

I’m gonna make a big stretch…McCarthy is like Messi. Yup. Messi doesn’t use tricks or gimmicks or anything that he doesn’t need, just perfect timing and sense of the game. He’s so good he doesn’t need that silly stuff. Reading these books, it’s like that–there aren’t tricks or gimmicks in the plot, and it’s all so much more story for it.

Down drift the leaves of change, I think the long time standing winner in my book of series of books, the Hitchhikers Guide, has come to the end of it’s season there.

ideas

Take a look at the first before you read this second one,
http://wp.me/p14q4r-Rx

Also, I’m not sure whether or not I think the word god, as used here, should be capitalized or not. Thankfully the word Christian is a straight up syntax question without baggage, so it stays normal.

I don’t like to write something that’s not a story; I’m not very good at it and it feels stuffy.That said, here she goes.

The churches here in Guatemala have given me some problems, of them there’s one whopper. They made me realize something: I feel that god is for people who have good education and read lots of good books. If you don’t wonder deeply about redemption and covenant and all that and then go have a scotch and cigar and talk about all that with another  well educated book reader, if you don’t ponder infinity or make philosophical jokes about god…I feel you’re pretty much screwed.

When I first arrived here I first noticed that the churches are loud–the one across the street from my house is unfortunately very exemplary. They sing a lot of songs that sound much like what I imagine pagan chants sound like. They don’t sing the worship songs I know, like and am moved by. Then, when I began to visit churches and hear radio sermons, I noticed that they always preach very topically*. That’s not all, the topic almost every time hits hard on prosperity doctrine. Also, when someone prays it does not sound to me like a boy talking to his father or a woman to her mentor, what I feel prayer should be closest to. Instead it sounds like a screenplay being exagerated by an unskilled actor.

All these things together in my mind made for a single mental swing of ego and judgement: “wait-all these people are fake Christians. What’s all that   about?” If you want to duke it out with me for having thought that thought, take your best shot and see what happens.
So I notice all these things that are so different, and I am really bothered. I think to myself that I’m not like them. The next thing I think is “why?”

Why am I not like them?

I’ve come to the place I am at with respect to god by four things: (1) praying, (2) arguing about god and man, (3) thinking and (4) reading. So then I think to myself “of these four things, what makes me not like them?”

They pray here; they pray really differently, but prayer is such a complicated and peculiar thing I’m just going to leave it at “they pray here,” and so rule out number one. I’ll smoosh 2 into 3: arguing about god and man only counted when the arguement made me think, and what counted was the thinking, not the arguing. I know that the major part of how I think came from my studies at the university, and I know that very few here have had an education like mine. I’ll keep number three, with smooshed-in 2, and rename it “education.” Lastly there is reading. I’ve simply read more substantial books than the majority of churchgoers here. Through these books I’ve seen so many crazy different ideas and wild created worlds. Without doubt what I’ve read is key to how I think and a not-insignificant part of how I’ve come to where I am with respect to god. So I’ll keep number four.

So the result is that I threw out number one (prayer), smooshed number two (talking) into number three (thinking), and kept number four (reading). Education and books. So I look at these people and think to myself, they are spiritually fake and I am the real deal because of a degree I earned and the weekends and evenings I’ve whittled away reading books.

And worst of all, I have neither scotch nor cigar nor another “educated” book-reader to go argue, banter and joke about this with.

…maybe for now that’s best.

The end

———-

PS:
I implicitly cursed once. If you spotted it on the first pass, come visit me and I will make you a complex three course meal in 2 minutes flat and then give it to you.

*If you’re not familiar with preaching, there are two general ways to make a sermon. Exegesis is exposition using something resembling the “when did who say what to whom, where were they, and so why they say it like that at that moment?” It’s like this: imagine you were my boss’s coworker and needed to completely understand a very quickly-written incomplete email I’d written to him. You’d first need some knowledge of me and my job. You’d need some feel for the context of the email: was I pointing out a problem, clarifying a detail of an in-progress design job or maybe poking fun at the CEO with an inside joke? This is a good way to preach: good exegesis leaves little room for subjective error. Obviously there must still be a personal element-a preacher can’t just spew facts. But without the presence of rigorous reason and fact, sermons are at best lukewarm and at worst extremely decieving. Topical preaching is exactly what it sounds like: an arbitrary topic and an arbitrary batch of bible verses, almost always clipped out of context, that “talk” about it, where the definition of “talk” is up to the preacher’s whim. It is, at the core, the preacher expressing an idea or viewpoint in terms of phrases from the bible. If the idea or viewpoint is good, then often no harm is done.
stories

He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west. He turned south along the old war trail and he rode out to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something.

-All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

He really knows how to make things with words. That’s only one part of many that it takes to put out a good book, and that book is certainly a good book. I don’t know much of the many other parts it takes–I’m thinking I’d like to, though.

ideas, other

I’m moving to a little town out in the sticks..of Central America.

Book list, in the order the stack sits in on my bedroom floor, with little notes when fitting

1. Scarne on Cards (my late Grandpa P.’s copy, with his notes. He was a poker boss), Scarne
2. Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
3. The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis (yes..Lewis again)
4. A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
5. The Applications of Elliptic Functions, Alfred Greenhill (I will go nuts, guaranteed, if I don’t have a math book on my shelf to study once in a while)
6. The World’s Last Night, C.S. Lewis (and again)
7. The Signature Classics (seven of his most popular books), C.S. Lewis (yeeeeah…)
8. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty
9. The Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway
10. Jesus and the Victory of God, N.T. Wright (Big thank-you to my friend Grant V. for the recommendation)
11. Bible, NKJV
12. Bible, Spanish (I have no clue what “translation.” It fits in my pocket though..win.)
13. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
14. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy (read it this summer, holy crap incredible. It’s actually a funny story, it’s my Christmas gift from Mom, and I wasn’t supposed to know she was sending it with me. I came across it in a used bookstore, and got very excited. You can figure out the rest)
15. The Blue Valleys, Robert Morgan
16. The Mountains Won’t Remember Us, Robert Morgan

stories

A bible should be filled with food crumbs, ink stains and creased pages.