"Artists, like cats, communicate abstractly, at a remove. This is why artists hate to be asked what their work means. Even if what they make is a picture of a landscape, or a race riot, it's not 'about' only those things. It's about much more -- including itself, its materials and how they were used, and how the artist sees the world."
"As for art itself, that's much more like a dog: never quite behaving, making a mess, costing a lot, always making you get supplies, but paying you back in wonder and delight."
From the 2016 memoir The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, by Andrew Klavan:
The fact was, as a story -- even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean -- the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning.
I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalog of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are not the inescapable plot of the story we're in.
The Old Testament traces one complete cycle of that history; one people's rise and fall. This particular people is unique only in that they're the ones who begin to remember what man was made for. Moses' revelation at the burning bush is as profound as any religious scene in literature. There, he sees that the eternal creation and destruction of nature is not a mere process but the mask of a personal spirit, I AM THAT I AM. The centuries that follow that revelation are a spiraling semicircle of sin and shame and redemption, of freedom recovered and then surrendered in return for imperial greatness, of a striving for righteousness through law that reveals only the impossibility of righteousness, of power and pride and fall. It's every people's history, in other words, but seen anew in the light of the fire of I AM.
It made sense to me too -- natural sense, not supernatural -- that after that history was complete, a man might be born who could comprehend it wholly and re-create within himself the relationship at its source. His mind would contain both man and God. It made sense that the creatures of sin and history -- not the Jews alone but all of us -- would conspire in such a man's judicial murder. Jesus had to die because we had to kill him. It was either that or see ourselves by his light, as the broken things we truly are. It's only from God's point of view that this is a redeeming sacrifice. By living on earth in Jesus, by entering history, by experiencing death, by passing through that moment of absolute blackness when God is forsaken by God, God reunites himself with his fallen creation and reopens the path to the relationship lost in Eden. Jesus' resurrection is the final proof that no matter how often we kill the truth of who we're meant to be, it never dies.
[That summary right there is worth the price of the book, I think].
But there's more:
For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual's delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn't so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? By joy I don't mean ceaseless happiness, of course. I don't mean willed stupidity for the sake of a cheap smile. The world is sad and it is suffering. A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can't eat your tears. The poor can't spend them. They're no comfort to the afflicted and they don't bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.
Klavan's insight summoned a song for me.
The "Nazareth" that Robbie Robertson of The Band was writing about pulling into "half past dead" was Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Martin Guitar company. But we all know which Nazarene put the original town in Judea on the proverbial map. And I don't think it coincidental that the refrain of "The Weight" is deliberately redemptive: "Take a load off, Annie" [or Fannie, if you sing it that way]. Take a load for free!
If you take a load off, what are you supposed to do with it? Jesus is the man who stepped up to say "You put the load right on me!" Moreover, he volunteered for that.
The best kind of Christian music is stealthy Christian music. Ol' Luke ain't the only one "waitin' on Judgement Day." [Remember the stream of pilgrims going "down to the river to pray" in O Brother Where Art Thou, or Jake and Elwood Blues putting the band back together because they were "on a mission from God"? Remember the question about "Will the Circle be Unbroken" by and by, or Rick Beato pointing out that U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" has gospel music phrasing in it?].
It's not too much of a hop from "The Weight" to C.S. Lewis and what he wrote about "The Weight of Glory." Think of the same theme in two different keys. But as the Klavan excerpt (and the harmony between Levon Helm and Mavis Staples in their live recording) makes clear, the Chronicles of Narnia author wasn't the only one "surprised by joy."
While I'm on a roll, let me drag J.R.R. Tolkien up to the bar so he can help me make the argument from Middle Earth that Frodo and Sam and the other hobbits were invited into the Fellowship of the Ring not merely for their humility, but also because the most obvious characteristic of hobbitry (hobbitdom?) is joy (in contrast to the fragile valor of the humans, the cultivated detachment of the elves, the pugnaciousness of the dwarves, and the wisdom of wizards).
The Fellowship needed joy, which I think is why Tolkien inserted two "spare" hobbits into it for a total of four, and no more than two representatives of any other free race among the nine heroes. As Saint Paul had before them, Tolkien and Lewis saw joy as a hallmark of the Christian life.
It's inspiring to see a contemporary thriller writer like Andrew Klavan wrestle his way into the same insight, and then surrender to it.
This myth-busting book makes a wonderful Advent read, and Fr. Dwight Longenecker's enthusiasm for his own archeological and scriptural detective work is contagious. I came away from the book convinced that its thesis about the Magi being envoys from the Nabatian kingdom of King Aretas IV has considerable merit.
Longenecker's insights about the politics and economics of the ancient Middle East are fascinating. A chapter on the Star of Bethlehem starts muddled by dint of having to sift through half a dozen theories in as many pages, but eventually makes the case for the star (or planet or comet) being one of several significant astronomical events that the wise men viewed through a well-developed astrological and cultural lens.
Fortunately for all concerned, Longecker understands myth-busting as a handmaid of Truth rather than as a label that iconoclasts give their temper tantrums. The infancy narrative in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew is ultimately strengthened and deepened by this informative work.
The only missed opportunity here (it seems to me) is that although he's writing for non-specialists, Longenecker never explains the wiggle room in what became the divide between BC and AD notation. It's all well and good to point out that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, but lay readers may do double-takes if they know Latin abbreviations well enough to wonder why "Anno Domini" usage apparently suffers from a five- or six-year rounding error.
This is from the novel, A Star is Bored, by Byron Lane. The mother of a movie star (herself a star back in the day) has taken enough of a shine to her daughter's new personal assistant to warn him about her:
"Dear, I have some advice," Miss Gracie says, leaning forward only a few centimeters, but she may as well have come nose-to-nose with me; she's that engaging. "You're family now, so I can share this with you. You know the story about the man who wanted to fly, so he made wings out of wax, but he flew too high and the sun melted the wax and he fell back down to earth and landed flat on his ass in front of Jesus? It's in the Bible."
"I'm thinking, That's not the Bible. I'm thinking, Do not correct her."
Part of a dialog between pupil and teacher, before Hogwart's was a gleam in J.K. Rowling's eye:
"Sir, all these charms are much the same; knowing one, you know them all. And as soon as the spell-weaving ceases, the illusion vanishes. Now if I make a pebble into a diamond" -- and he did so with a word and a flick of his wrist -- "what must I do to make that diamond remain diamond? How is the changing-spell locked, and made to last?"
The Master Hand looked at the jewel that glittered on Ged's palm, bright as the prize of a dragon's hoard. The old Master murmured one word, 'Tolk,' and there lay the pebble, no jewel but a rough grey bit of rock. The Master took it and held it out on his own hand."This is a rock; tolk in the True Speech," he said, looking mildly up at Ged now. "A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of the dry land on which men live. It is itself. It is part of the world. By the Illusion-Change you can make it look like a diamond -- or a flower or a fly or an eye or a flame --" The rock flickered from shape to shape as he named them, and returned to rock. "But this is mere seeming. Illusion fools the beholder's senses; it makes him see and hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the thing. To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow..."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, from his book A Republic, If You Can Keep It:
"Who, after all, would hire nine people to write laws for a continental nation and then insulate them from any electoral accountability? Let alone pick for the job nine lawyers from fancy law schools, with a majority from East Coast urban centers? That sounds more like the monarchy the Constitution rejected than the republic it ordained." (p. 134)
"Legislators are responsive to their constituents and have institutional resources designed the help them discern and enact majoritarian preferences. Politically insulated judges come armed with only the attorneys' briefs, a few law clerks, and their own idiosyncratic experiences. They are hardly the representative group you'd expect (or want) to be making empirical judgments for hundreds of millions of people." (p. 157)
I'm no lawyer, but I can read, and I have opinions. This one is partly inspired by a book I'm reading now: Neil Gorsuch's A Republic If You Can Keep It.
Some of my thinking is also shaped by Mark Levin's Men in Black: How Judges Are Destroying America, although the Gorsuch book will assuredly age better than Levin's screed from 2005 has.
The Supreme Court's "Hall of Shame," (we got your stare decisis right here, pal) IMHO:
Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (companion cases tied for first in the "overreach sweepstakes," and handed down in 1973) -- In which the court used "substantive due process" to create a hitherto unknown and wholly unfettered constitutional right to abortion on demand.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): In which the court decided that there's no such thing as an African-American, because black people can't be U.S. citizens.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): In which the court affirmed racial segregation under the fig leaf of "separate but equal" posturing that only Justice John Marshal Harlan was willing to dissent from.
Korematsu v. United States (1944): In which the court decided that it was okay to place American citizens of Japanese ancestry in internment camps because we were then at war with Japan.
Ohio v. Roberts (1980): In which the court decided that the Founding Fathers weren't serious about the Sixth Amendment.
Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984): In which the court decided that whenever ambiguity in legislative language makes punting on controversy look smart, judges may defer to the judgment of federal bureaucrats who pinkie swear that they're policing themselves.
Kelo v. City of New London (2005): In which the court said it was cool for the government to take land from one private party and give it to another one.
Wickard v. Filburn (1942): I got this one from lawyer David Limbaugh, who mentions that this was a 'New Deal' case in which the Supreme Court sanctioned the federal government's regulation of purely intrastate activities under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn was just minding his own business, but the court screwed him over for the sake of letting the feds set limits even on localized wheat production.
"While abandoning some of their proper role, courts have also usurped the powers normally reserved to Congress. The legislative process is notoriously messy, and nobody thinks the sausage factory produces a perfect product every time. So when a judge is faced with a law that seems to function poorly, there is a temptation to step in. The legislators appear sloppy or foolish or, if it is an old law, blinded by the prejudices of their time. A nip here, a tuck there, and the law will function so much better. But the Constitution doesn't establish the judiciary as the copy editors of the legislature. They are supposed to apply the law, not improve it."
The call to 'define what kind of country we are' is an ominous agenda for Americans. The Constitution already defines the kind of country we are. That document has served America well for over 200 years. It has made this nation a beacon of freedom for the entire world. America is unique among nations in having been defined in its creation. But redefining America is exactly what the radical left and the Democratic Party have been doing for the last fifty years.
This is from the book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America (2018). David Horowitz writes about how the 1974 murder of his friend Betty Van Patter by members of the Black Panther Party gave spurs to his political journey from Left to Right:
"Betty's murder confronted me with a brutal reality: injustice is not caused by an abstraction called 'society,' as we on the left had maintained. Nor was injustice caused by oppressive races and genders, or solely by our political enemies. Injustice is the result of human selfishness, deceitfulness, malice, envy, greed, and lust. Injustice is the inevitable consequence of our free will as human beings. 'Society' is not the cause of injustice. Society is merely a reflection of who we are.
"The politically correct, who think it is their mission to save the world, cannot fix the problems that afflict us, because the problems are our creations. Theirs and ours. Because the self-appointed social redeemers seek too much power, and do not understand the source of evil and injustice, they will only make the problems worse-- as the romance with Communism has shown."
"In writing this book I had to decide whether to use the term Indian or Native American when referring broadly to the native inhabitants of North America. I chose Indian in large part because many of the authors I admire use that term, and it is the term with which I am most comfortable. Thus, I was glad to read in David Hackett Fischer's book Champlain's Dream that when he asked a gathering of Indian leaders what they preferred to be called, they gave two answers. If one is referring to a specific nation, then they said that the name of the nation should be used, e.g., Mohawk. But if one is referring to 'all of them together,' then they said the term Indian 'was as good as any other,' and that 'they used it with pride.'
"The moral conflicts that permeate our public policy debates are endless and irresolvable because our culture no longer has a rational, mutually accepted way of getting to moral agreement. The answer of the liberal state (including our own) to these stubborn disputes is to remove morality to the private sphere. But that course of government is itself a value judgment, a morally loaded act disguised as neutrality. All law and all public policy embody somebody's idea of what we ought to do, including the notion that we 'ought' to keep personal moral beliefs out of public debates.
"The underlying assumption of our public discourse today is that facts and values are radically distinct. 'The plane crashed' is a statement of fact, and therefore 'real.' Crash evidence is tangible. Nobody can argue with debris. On the other hand, 'Don't kill the disabled' is a statement of value. It's an expression of opinion and sentiment-- so the logic goes-- and therefore not 'real' or 'true' in the same solid sense. For example, the importance of protecting disabled persons is an admirable and widely shared view; surely that's obvious. But some people might disagree. Some people might argue quite sincerely that disabled persons are a waste of precious resources, and we'd be better off without them. Some people did argue that way in Germany in the last century, with great effect.
"Of course, for most of us, murdering the disabled, starving the poor, or deliberately targeting innocent civilians in war is an appalling idea, a crime against humanity. But apparently sucking the brains out of unborn children, or trading in their body parts, is not so appalling. It may even be 'good,' because we already do it. We not only do it, but we also build a fortress of pious-sounding chatter about reproductive rights to surround and bless it.
"This is the kind of obscenity that comes from reducing a nation's politics to a clash of allegedly equal values. What it masks is a transfer of power from proven traditions of moral wisdom to whoever can best lobby the media, the courts, Congress, and the White House."
-- from Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World, by Charles J. Chaput (Archbishop of Philadelphia)
I like Thomas Cahill's perspective. This is from the introduction to his book, "How the Irish Saved Civilization," which I've read once before, but am reading again:
"We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage-- almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.
"In this series, The Hinges of History," I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West...
"The great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found."
"Before he left for America [from his anchorage off the Island of Groix near L'Orient in northwestern France], [John Paul] Jones needed to live up to his promise to get his men paid and rewarded with their prize earnings. This seemingly straightforward task would require literally decades to accomplish. By the time the U.S. Congress voted to compensate the crew of the Bonhomme Richard for the prizes taken on their famous cruise of September, 1779, the year would be 1848. The men and officers of the Bonhomme Richard were all dead by then. The money -- $165,598.37-- was ultimately paid to their descendants."
-- from the book, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy, by Evan Thomas
In a doff of my cap to all things nautical, here's a lively arrangement of "Fisher's Hornpipe"
This behemoth of a book is an extended meditation on good, evil, and human fallibility. The publisher's summary on the back of many paperback editions is a bit misleading because it suggests larger roles for protagonist and antagonist than those memorable characters actually have. For example, Mother Abagail, the unwilling 108-year-old leader of the "can't we all just get along?" remnant of people who survive a terrifying epidemic of weaponized "super flu," makes her entrance late, and not until eastern and western strands of the story have begun to coalesce. Her opposite number, the unrelentingly evil Randall Flagg, shows up first -- but even he does most of his work through other characters, which to him are disposable. You wouldn't know either of those things by reading the publisher's summary.
That said, shortcomings in teaser text on the back cover are easy to forgive, because King leans hard on his storyteller's art to deploy a large cast here. Larry, Stuart, Glenn, Frannie, Tom, Nick, Rita, Harold and Nadine are all memorable for different and eminently believable reasons. A sad-sack pyromaniac nicknamed "Trashcan Man" almost steals the story out from under the other characters. And in what might be a tip of the cap to a favorite trope of fellow horror writer Dean Koontz, King even creates an effective role for a dog named Kojak.
Some of the plague aftermath described in Book One went on too long for my taste, and a feral child to whom we are introduced seems to become an afterthought once King decides to make him a guitar prodigy and send the teacher who had taken him under her wing off to her gruesome destiny for reasons never fully explained. In a book of this length, however, neither of those missteps proves fatal to the momentum and dread for which King's writing is known.
The book has some deeply poignant scenes also, especially near its end, when a confrontation with evil in Las Vegas and an unexpected Christmas in the Rocky Mountains are written particularly well.
This is not a novel I'd recommend to the squeamish, but it's memorable and worth reading, and I am grateful to my friend Debbie for having brought the story to my attention.
