Forty Autumns: a Family's Story of Courage and Suffering on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Willner

I see that it has been six weeks since I lasted posted here, but while I haven't written for a while, I have finished quite a few books. The one that I am going to write about today isn't one that was on my shelf, in fact, I don't even have a copy of the book. We recently went on a trip, and I downloaded this one to listen to in the car. We never got around to that, but I've been listening to it since I got home.

One reason I chose to resume writing with Forty Autumns is that today is Veteran's Day and the 100th anniversary of the World War I armistice. This book is not about World War I, but about the aftermath of World War II. It reminds us, though, of why it is important to remember our history, and why wars are fought, and what happens in a country where there is no freedom, and where the goals of the government are more important than the lives of the people who live there.

Nina Willner's mother, Hanna, escaped from East Germany in 1948, two weeks before her 21st birthday. Almost 40 years later, a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Willner moved to East Germany as an intelligence agent for the United States. In Forty Autumns, Willner weaves together the story of her mother's escape and future life, the life of the family she left behind, and the political history of East Germany.

Willner chronicles all the difficulties her family suffered under the East German regime.  They were hungry. The people had to harvest their crops and then turn them over to the government to be distributed, but not much came back to the family. The children were more or less compelled to undergo Communist Party indoctrination in Youth Groups and schools. The Statsi (East German equivalent of the KGB) were everywhere, and everyone was encouraged to spy on their neighbors. No one could trust their neighbors or even their children. Products were scarce, and shoddy and quickly wore out. And, of course, they were held prisoners within the borders of the country.

Despite all this, Oma (Hanna's mother) was determined to keep her family intact and loyal to one another. She raised what she called the Family Wall. She taught her children that the family came first, and to not let anyone divide them, and in this, she was successful. She seems to have always persevered no matter how difficult things were, and to believe that one day things would be different.

Opa (Hanna's father), on the other hand, was not so sanguine. He was a teacher, and was disgusted by the things he was required to teach. He was appalled at the falsified version of history presented by the government, but he went along with what was expected, because to complain was to ask for serious trouble. Eventually, though, he did begin to rebel with the result that he was kicked out of the Communist party, fired, sent away to a small home in an area where there were only a few other people, and eventually put in an insane asylum for 6 months.

There was some occasional communication between Hanna and her family, although all their mail was read by the Stasi, so they had to be very careful about what they said. Twice while Hanna was still living in West Germany, family members were allowed to visit her in there, partly because the Stasi hoped that her mother would convince her to come back. In 1954, Oma and her youngest daughter, 5 year-old Heidi, were the first visitors. Heidi was born after Hanna had escaped, so this was the first time that they had met, and Heidi decided then and there that she was going to pattern her life after Hanna's.

In 1958, Opa and Oma were allowed a to come. Since Oma's last visit, Hanna had married Eddie Willner, a Jewish holocaust survivor, now a U.S. intelligence agent. The Stasi knew who he was, and they encourage Opa to somehow find out information from Eddie. The topic never came up during the visit, and they had a wonderful time. However, since Oma and Opa had failed to cooperate, they were never allowed to visit again.

One of the most encouraging stories in the book is that of Heidi, and her husband Reinhardt. Because neither of them had ever joined the Communist Party, they could not get very good jobs, but they and their children managed to get by on, and be happy with what they had. After a time, Heidi was rewarded a small plot of land on which to raise food. Reinhardt built a small shed on the land from a prefab kit, and they worked hard to make it into a nice little place to stay. They called it Paradise Bungalow and spent their weekends there.

In a way, Forty Autumns reminds me of Eleni. Although Hanna's family did not suffer the torture and martyrdom of Eleni Gotzoyiannis, there were those who did. Willner writes about a terrible women's prison, and, of course, many people were killed trying to escape. Like Eleni, Forty Autumns is a reminder of the corruptions of the Communist government that seems to be sorely needed today, when there are those that seem to see Communism as a positive good.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone. It is a very good read. It has all the elements of a good novel, and is also very informative, but the chapters that talk about the political climate are never tedious because they are related to what is going on in the lives of these people that we care about.

AMDG

The Most Beautiful House in the World by Witold Rybczynski

Ever since I read Home: a Short History of an Idea, I have wanted to read another book by Witold Rybczynski, and now I have. I mentioned (well, not in so many words) in my former post that Rybczynski never met a rabbit trail he didn't like, and he proceeds along on (and off) the same path in The Most Beautiful House in the World. I was happy to see this because the digressions are one of the main charms of the books.

In the newer book, however, he doesn't only follow rabbit trails in his narrative, but in his life. After a while, I couldn't help thinking about the children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. One thing leads to another, and eventually Rybczynski reaches a totally unexpected end.

The one thing was his idea that he would like to build a boat. This wasn't as unrealistic an idea as it would be for me--I daydream about learning how to build stuff--because he was experienced with construction and the tools he would have to use, and being an architect, he would be able to come up with a plan. But there was one problem--he needed a place to build the boat. He needed a boatbuilding shed. And then, of course, he needed a piece of land to put the shed on.

It was a five year journey from the day Rybczynski first made sketches for a boatbuilding shed in September, 1975, until the day that he and his wife, Shirley, moved into their Most Beautiful House. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Rybczynski says:

I told the story of my house to a fellow visitor (at Tianjin University), a Belgian engineer. "You must write about this," he said . . . I thought that this would be an easy book to write, or at least a straightforward one. Instead it has take many unexpected twists and turns . . .

The book was published three years later.

As we join Rybczynski in navigating all those twists and turns, we learn many things. First, we learn about feng-shui, and ask the question, "What is architecture?" Then, we learn the history of construction toys--latecomers to the toy game, we also learn about pre-construction toy toys--from building with playing cards to the first building blocks introduced by Friedrich Froebel in 1837 as part of his method of education to Meccano to the ubiquitous Lego. Rybczynski describes architecture as the building game. It's not a game you play with others, but more like a word puzzle, something that you do alone in quiet times, when you draw plans, make models, and dream about what you will do next.

Along the way we learn about why a building has to fit into it's environment, what happens when it doesn't. We find out a lot about barns and their history--there's a reason for the barn discussion. And when the building project is finally reaching its end, Rybczynski tells the story of a man who built his own house from almost nothing in a poor area of Mexico, and also about five well-known men who built their own houses: Samuel Clemens, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, and my favorite, Carl Larsson. You have probably seen pictures of Larsson's home and family on calendars and Christmas cards.

The Most Beautiful House in the World was just the kind of book that I expected from Rybczynski. It underscores something that I have really learned while reading all these diverse books. A good author can make almost any subject interesting if he loves what he is writing about. This book is a good example of that concept. It's also a great book to read when you are looking for something that is enjoyable and not terribly demanding--a book to relax with.

AMDG

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

From Michael Shaara's note to readers of The Killer Angels:

You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war. I have there fore avoided historical opinions and gone back primarily to the words of the men themselves, their letters and other documents. I have not consciously changed any fact. . . . The interpretation of character is my own.

Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels is a wonderful book. When before reading the book, I saw Ken Burn's liner notes on the back and read, "REMARKABLE . . . A BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE," I thought, "Well, I guess." However, while I don't think the book quite changed my life, it did peel back a sort of film over my vision and clarified some things for me.

As you may have gathered, this is a novel about the battle at Gettysburg, and it is the book from which the movie of that name is taken. I have always had an interest in the Civil War, and wanted to read more about it, but I thought it would be a bit of work. I have a hard time following battles, both in print and on the screen. I usually just skip to the end of the battle to find out who won and who is still alive. However, since many of the most important moments of The Killer Angels take place during the battles, my usual practice just wouldn't work, and because of the many maps Shaara included, and his clear descriptions of the action, I didn't have much trouble.

The story is told from the point-of-view of the participants, and each chapter's title is the name of the man whose thoughts and experiences we are sharing. The only exception to this is the first chapter which is called, The Spy. and is about a man named Harrison, a paid scout, who first informs the Southern generals that Union soldiers are gathering in the area of Gettysburg. The narratives are mainly those of Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (who commanded the Union forces at the Battle of Little Round Top), with a few others appearing at the beginning and end of the book.

One of the main strengths of the book is Shaara's ability to get us into the heads of the men who fought this battle. As I was reading I was with the man whose life I was sharing. It didn't matter if he was Union or Confederate, it was only important that he was a person who was struggling through that moment. The battle, and the war itself, are only the background for the thoughts, fears, motivations, and physical experience of the characters.

What struck me most, I think, is the motivations of the soldiers. I know that the big reason for the war was slavery, although I think it is much more complex than that, but I wonder what drove each individual soldier to battle. I'm pretty sure that the real answer would differ quite a bit from man to man.

I'm trying to remember, and I can't, an instance where the Southern soldiers discuss slavery. The only one of Shaara's characters that really professes slavery as his reason for joining the Union army is Chamberlain, who is not a professional soldier, but a professor of Rhetoric. This conversation between Chamberlain and his brother, Tom, after the Union had won the battle made me think.

[Tom said,] "Thing I cannot understand. Thing I never will understand. How can they fight so hard, them Johnnies, and all for slavery? . . . When you ask them prisoners, they never talk about slavery. But, Lawrence, how do you explain that? What else is the war about?"

Chamberlain shook his head.

"Well then, I don't care how much political fast-talking you hear, that's what it's all about and that's what them fellers died for, and I tell you Lawrence, I don't understand it at all."

 What it makes me think is this. Slavery was the big, over-riding cause for the war, but in some way, slavery was just the spark that lit the wick of the war between the North and South. That wick was there to be lit, and if it hadn't been slavery, I imagine it would have been something else.

It seems to me that the Civil War was not so much a political battle, but a battle between cultures, and I don't mean the slave culture. I think that had there been no slavery, that difference would still have been there--well, it still is, I guess. It has always seemed to me that the great tragedy for the South in the war was that by refusing to give up slavery (which was clearly wrong, although I think that maybe some people were blind to that fact), they lost something very important that they would miss much more than their slaves. But that is a discussion for another day.

I would recommend The Killer Angels to anyone who likes to read. If you like history, or are interested in the Civil War, that would be a bonus, but not at all necessary for anyone to enjoy the book. I should also mention that it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975, so I guess I'm not the only person who likes it.

And here is a bit of trivia that I picked up while looking around for the date of the Pulitzer Prize. Joss Whedon says that The Killer Angels was his inspiration for the TV series Firefly. In an interview that I found here, Whedon say, in answer to a question about his inspiration . . .

It was The Killer Angels. It's a book. I think it won the Pulitzer. It's a very detailed account of the Battle of Gettysburg that I read in London when I was on one of my vacations where I didn't write anything, but I did come up with Firefly and a couple other shows. I read The Killer Angels. The minutia of the Battle of Gettysburg and the lives of the people in it really made Firefly just pop out of my head. I want to get into people's lives this intimately. I want to do it in the future and show that the future is the past. So I built the structure of the world and the look of the show on the Reconstruction Era.

AMDG

The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter

This book doesn't quite fit the rules of the blog. I have read The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter before, and I wouldn't have written about it, but the Memphis C. S. Lewis Society, of which I am a member, has been reading it, and so I thought I would add it to the shelf. In a way, it does fit, though, because it has been a very long time since I first read it, and I remembered nothing about it.

When I first bought The Inklings on the recommendation of a friend, I had read a bit of Lewis, almost certainly all fiction. I knew who he and Tolkien were, but not much about them, and the rest of the Inklings were completely unknown to me, so, when I read the book it was interesting, but I had nothing to link the information to, and since it was a long time before I read anything by the other Inklings--well, I think to this date I have only read Charles Williams, and that only in the past 15 years or so--I quickly forgot what I had read.

In case you do not know who the Inklings were, they were a group of friends, most of them academics in Oxford, who met to talk, drink beer, and read each other what they were currently writing. The meetings first took place in the mid--50s on Thursday nights in Lewis's rooms. They also met more informally on Tuesday mornings at a pub officially named The Eagle and Child but more commonly known as The Bird and Baby because of the inn's signboard which pictured Zeus disguised as an eagle, flying off with the infant Ganymede.

Most of the people who attended are not well-known, especially in the United States, but there as a third member whose novels still enjoy a moderate popularity, and that is Charles Williams. Williams also wrote poetry, but it was his six supernatural novels that captured the attention of the reading public.

The Inklings is divided into four long sections, and has brief biographies of the main members: Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams. There is also information about the less-known members, including Lewis's brother, Warren, and Tolkien's son Christopher, and the story of how their friendship came about. Part Three has a reconstruction of a typical Inklings meeting which Carpenter scripted from Warren Lewis's record of the meetings, and things which the members had actually said in other contexts.

The book is a great resource for those who have read Lewis and Tolkien, and maybe some of the others, and are interested in the men behind the stories. It is also a great record of a group of friends who enjoyed each other, good conversation, and good beer. I am pretty sure that they were all Christians of one sort or another, and their Christianity informed their conversation. It drew them together, but where they differed, it could be a source of friction.

The meetings lasted until 1949.

The end came almost imperceptibly, and for no apparent reason. The last Thursday Inklings to be recorded in Warnie Lewis's diary was on 20 October 1949, when there was a 'ham supper' in his brother's rooms. The next Thursday, 'No one turned up after dinner, which was just as well, as J. [Lewis was called Jack] has a bad cold and wanted to go to bed early.' 

Carpenter ends the book with the story of Lewis's meeting with his wife Joy, their friendship and marriage, and her death. He concludes with the story of Lewis's own death. The end of the book is very moving if you are a reader of Lewis, and probably even if you are not. I cried for at least ten pages.

My edition, but not all editions, has a good many photos of the Inklings. If you are looking for a copy of the book, you might want to look for an older edition that includes them. You can have this one if you like.

AMDG

Memoirs by Louis Bouyer

Quite some time ago, I was reading something somewhere, and the writer said he (I am almost sure it was a man.) was reading Louis Bouyer's Memoirs, and highly recommended the book. For some reason, I think the somebody might have been Scott Hahn. So, as so frequently happens, I found it at a book sale, and brought it home to gather dust on my shelves.

Fr. Bouyer was born in Paris in 1913. His description of the people and places of his childhood is very charming in a very French sort of way. Although his young life took place during World War I, the war did not affect him very much at all. The areas where the Bouyers lived were safe, and although there were air raids, young Louis was not afraid. He was more amused by the air raids with their search lights and the boom boom of Big Bertha, although he was aware of his mother's fears.

The family moved more than once, but wherever they went, there were always gardens, and it was gardens that Louis loved, and described in his memoirs. He also loved to visit the shop of his uncle, who was also his godfather.

Even after years of visiting this pleasant shambles, I would not be able to recount everything to be found there, and still less what might not be unearthed. Dry goods, knick-knacks, stationery goods, perfume, hardware, newspapers (especially the most popular illustrated ones), all in an inextricable jumble, even for my aunt. But, in an emergency, all my uncle had to do in order to go straight to the desired object to satisfy the request of an imaginative client was to adjust his pince-nez with its black cord.

 The joyful childhood was brought to a sudden end with the unexpected death of Louis' mother in 1924 when he was 11. He was overwhelmed with grief, and when after a year or so, his father remarried in order to provide a new mother for him, it only made matters worse.

Increasingly absorbed in my reading and [writing] . . . I would soon arrive, under these conditions, at a veritable obsession that could well have turned into dementia praecox. I in fact came to doubt that there could be other consciousnesses than my own, that the idea of God or of other beings in the world was anything more than a projection of my own thinking.

 On the recommendation of a psychiatrist, he was sent to recuperate in Sancerre in the Loire Valley, and the peace and beauty of the place brought him healing. He began to receive religious instruction from a local pastor who introduced him to the Fathers of the Church. He spent many hours reading in the library of the home where he was staying with friends. There, he found the impetus for the rest of his life.

I believe that it was in Adolphe Monod that I found for the first time so clearly expressed the idea that God is love and that this love had its manifestation par excellence in the Cross of Christ: there I saw in all clarity what the heart of Christianity is . . .

I must also note that I was reading at that time, with personal satisfaction, a very subtle essay by Pastor Henri Monnier . . . on the redemption, which convinced me that the Cross of Christ saves us as a supreme act of solidarity with us. That presupposes, obviously, as he did not fail to point out, that it saved us, not by exempting us from suffering, but by making us capable of a suffering that is fruitful. 

 It was the next year at Sancerre that he discovered John Henry Newman. He read Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and some other works. This began a lifetime interest in Newman which culminated in his writing a biography of the Cardinal.

At some point, Bouyer entered the Protestant Theological Seminary in Paris. There are very few clues in the text as to exact dates, but he must have been there roughly between the ages of 14 to 17. While he was young, his family had attended whatever Protestant church was close to their homes in Paris, but he entered the seminary, which educated both Reformed and Lutheran seminarians, with the intention of being ordained a Lutheran minister.

All the while he was at seminary though, he was praying the Roman breviary, sneaking off to hear Étienne Gilson explain Thomas Aquinas, and becoming entranced with the orthodox liturgy of Russian émigrés. He had begun to see that the sacraments, and beautiful and appropriate liturgy were essential, but he also wanted to hold on to what he felt was true in protestantism, that is, "a passionate interest in the Bible as well as the totally personal character of the life of faith as the awareness of a grace that is effectively gratuitous to the highest degree." For a while, he and some friends had the idea that they might bring the fullness of the Eucharistic and the liturgy into the Lutheran church by bringing apostolic succession back into the church. I don't really understand exactly how they thought to do this--they were getting some very bad advice--but it had something to do with Bouyer receiving the sacraments in the orthodox church, which he did.

In the end, however, he knew that he had to become Catholic, and so he was received into the Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Wandrille in 1939, and eventually became a priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri at the College of Juilly. In his time there, and indeed during the rest of his life, he found himself in conflict with those he worked with over his insistence on the importance of the Bible in the life of the Catholic, or the development of appropriate liturgy, and this led him to work and live in many places, although he never severed his connection with the Oratory.

Fr. Bouyer spent much of his life teaching, both in Europe and America. He taught Theology at Notre Dame, and Mount St. Mary Seminary. He wrote many books, not only theological texts, but also novels. He served on a preparatory Commission for Studies and Seminaries for Vatican II, and on the International Theological Commission which was responsible for the new liturgy. He was very unhappy with the results of both. In writing about his frustration with the council, he refers to Cardinal Ratzinger quoting St. Gregory Nazianzen about the Council of Constantinople.

To tell the truth, I am convinced that every assembly of bishops is to be avoided, for I have never experienced a happy ending to any council; not even the abolition of abuses . . . , but only ambition or wrangling about what was taking place. 

I have never been very interested in all the machinations involved behind the scenes of the council, but I found Fr. Bouyer's account of his disheartening experience interesting.

Much of this book is taken up by comments on people that Fr. Bouyer worked with and was friends with over his life, and that is a lot of people, most of whom I have never heard of before. Sometimes his commentary was funny and engaging, but often there were just a lot of facts that I found difficult to navigate. However, I was delighted by the friends whom he seemed to care about the most.

He first mentions visiting, ". . . that . . . beautiful house where Elizabeth Goudge, who was to become one of my best friends, had spent her youth and written her first stories." Elizabeth Goudge takes turns with J. R. R. Tolkien as my favorite writer, and was someone whom I would have loved to meet, so that is impressive. Then a few pages later, he mentions two other very close friends, T. S. Eliot, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Near the end of the book, he talks more about his close friendship with Goudge, and also with Julien Green, an author whose Each Man in His Darkness I recently read for the first time, and found very, very good. So, if a man is known by the company he keeps, I'd say this is all in his favor.

I also really enjoyed his descriptions of all the beautiful places where he has lived, and there were many. Both the natural settings and the rooms he inhabited make one long to visit them. My favorite passage about a room, though, is this one.

. . . I spent many weeks, if not months, in the very room where Newman died, among his own furniture, handling his papers at leisure, nearly all just where he had left them.

I will end with a quote that I think sums up the thinking of Fr. Bouyer very well.

I was suffering from having only a very reduced priestly ministry. While other priests with a theological vocation may be delighted to be able to devote all their time to study and teaching, I have never shared that view of things. And I believe I can say that the more or less outrageous fantasies spread about after the council as products of a new theology, but which have only brought chaos and hindered any renewal, are the typical products of those armchair theologians who leave the ministry to those they consider clerical plebians who cannot hold a candle to themselves. On the contrary, it seems to me, and it is obviously what Saint Tomas himself, just like the Fathers of the Church, thought about it, the revealed truth is revealed to us only in order to lead us to salvation and to lead others to it. As soon as it is made a mere subject of cogitations and discussions, one no longer knows what one is saying because one has begun no longer to have any knowledge of what one is talking about.

AMDG

Scars by Paul Murray, O. P.

Scars is one of the few books I've written about that I actually bought new. I heard Fr. Murray speak at a local church, and I was so impressed by his talk, that I wanted to read something he had written. I don't remember why I bought this particular book because the name puts me off. I'm not sure why, but I think it reminds me of something else, or maybe it is just a personal idiosyncrasy. He must have mentioned the book during the talk.

 The first question that Fr. Murray asks in the book is how we can talk to someone who is undergoing great affliction, or whether we can really have anything to say to them at all. We are all familiar with this situation. Some person whom we care about is going through some terrible thing, and they seem to be in another place that we can't reach. Anything we think of to say sounds inadequate. I'm not sure how much of an answer this book gives. For one thing, every person and every situation is so different. The exact thing one person needs could be the very thing that upsets someone else.

Part One of the book, Impossible Words is subtitled Essays on affliction. The first essay is The fourth friend: Poetry in a time of affliction. Fr. Murray talks about how after 9/11 poems began to appear all over New York City. He quotes the New York Times:

In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, people have been consoling themselves--and one another--in an almost unprecedented manner. Almost immediately after the event, improvised memorials often conceived around poems sprang up all over the city, in store windows, at bus stops, in Washington Square Park, Brooklyn Heights and elsewhere. And poems flew through cyberspace across the country in e-mails from friend to friend.

He calls poetry the fourth friend after Elihu, who after Job's three friends have spoken, appears to defend God to Job and his comforters. Fr. Murray references Fr. Victor White, O. P., who calls Elihu, "something of an intuitive, a poet." But then asks, "But should the poet, in a time affliction presume to speak at all? .  . . how, confronted by the enormous affliction of an individual or of a people, can the words of a poet be said to bring consolation?"

In the rest of this section, Fr. Murray gives examples of poetry written both by and to people who are in great affliction. The most beautiful example, though, is about the poetry of music. He quotes a letter that Mendelssohn wrote to Handel:

She [Dorothea] told me that, when she lost her last child, Beethoven was at first unable to come to her house any more. Finally, he invited her to come to him, and when she came he sat at the piano and merely said: 'We will now converse in music,' and played for over an hour and, as she expressed it, 'He said everything to me, and also finally gave me consolation.'

The remainder of Part One contains reflections on affliction in sickness and in prison, and on the martyrs of the last 100 years. He then writes about his friend Sister Joan and the conversations they had after she was diagnosed with an incurable blood disorder that took her life two months later.

Part Two, The dark hours; Songs for the afflicted is a collection of poems written by Fr. Murray. There is a great deal of poetry that I really love, and still more that I like quite a bit, and I recognize it as good poetry. However, I don't consider myself a really good judge of poetry, and I might not always be able to see that a poem is good. That said, I do not think that much of this is really poetry. I'm not saying there is no merit to what Fr. Murray writes, but that it is more like prose formatted like poetry. But, maybe I am wrong. Here a couple of the ones that I like.

               The Cry

When I awoke, the room was dark
and the rain was beating
against the window pane,
it was the room that faces out to sea,
the room in which I was born.

And from my bed I thought I saw
the dark curtains lifting
and moving, and thought I heard
far out at sea
a lone seabird crying in the storm.

But, as I listened, there leaned
against my heart
- and it made me tremble - the memory
of that other dream,
the same dream, that other night.

And I thought to myself: Is it
possible, then, I am
not awake at all, and the rain
is not now beating
against the window pane,

and there is no seabird crying
in the storm
but that instead, once
more, this stark, isolated cry
is, perhaps, my own? 

               A Reading

The text opens like a river
in full spate. Or it's like a window
opening with a sudden gust of wind.
And it's as if an archangel
had entered the room. And everybody
has to stop what they're doing.
And the air is a river of divine words.
And all of a sudden you see
 - and with a start -
that an archangel has entered,
and your heart is in your mouth,
And you feel you are drowning
in a river of divine words, and hear
yourself saying, over and over,
'How can this be?'

 Part Three, The scars of God: Meditations on the seven last words is, as it says meditations on the seven last "words" of Jesus from the cross. If you are not familiar with this terminology, these are not just seven solitary words, but sentences that Jesus said, or prayed, as He was dying.

I did not read through these all at once, but prayed with one each day for seven days. Some of them were helpful, and some were not, and maybe I don't really know which was which. That's a very personal thing, and you might benefit from some that I didn't and vice versa.

My thoughts and feelings about this book are very mixed. When I first read part of the book (I'm not sure I even finished Part One.) I really liked it. Then, it got put aside somehow, and when I came back to it a couple of weeks ago, I didn't like it much at all. Only parts seemed good to me. This probably says more about me than about the book, but maybe it also had something to do with having just heard Father speak, and being more in tune with the way he thinks and expresses himself. If you would like to see for yourself, I'd be glad to give you the book.

AMDG

The White Fathers by Glenn D. Kittler

For eight years, I worked at a protestant seminary, and there were frequently piles of books being given away: sometimes by the spouse of someone who had died, sometimes the library was giving away discards, and sometimes they were donated by someone who was just cleaning off their shelves.  Being one of the very few Catholics around, I was able to pick up a lot of Catholic books that no one else was interested in. The White Fathers had belonged to one of the professors at the seminary professors. The date 72-73 is written on the title page, so I assume that is when he read it. It is full of underlining and notes (frequently illegible), which made reading the book even more interesting.

This book was not on the shelf of books that I am reading, although it would have ended up there eventually. It was on a shelf that is next to the chair where I sit when I pray in the morning. I usually do a bit of spiritual reading, or reading about the saints every morning, so when I finished the last book I was reading, I pulled this one off the shelf, and had been reading about ten pages a day--until it got so interesting that I just kept reading.

When Bishop Charles Martial Allemand-Lavigerie was appointed Bishop of Algiers in 1867, he already had a heart for the missions. He had previously been the chairman of L'Oeuvre d'Orient  which was organized to erect Christian schools in the Middle East. Although Bishop Lavigerie was almost always opposed by the French government, who wanted him only to minister to the French in Algiers, he had a vision for Africa, and he worked tirelessly for the vision all his life.

The fact that Lavigerie was not allowed to evangelize the Arabs did not slow him down at all. He knew that the Arabs would not be open to evangelization until they lost their deep suspicion of Christians. He decided to organize an order of missionary priests who would live as Arabs--would be Arabs as much as possible without violating their Catholic faith. They would dress, and eat like Arabs, and of course, be proficient in Arabic, and eventually many African languages. Most important to Lavigerie was that they be men of prayer. Their first work would be to provide medical assistance to the Arabs, and then education for children, and agricultural help.

The White Fathers in their habit which consists of a white, traditional Arab gondoura
or robe, and a red fez.

It took a long time for the bishop to find men for the Missionaries of Africa, or White Fathers as they came to be known because of their white habits. Many men did not persevere through the noviate, and even this first three recruits, one of whom had become superior of the order, never made it into active ministry. Time and again, Lavigerie thought that the end had come, but something always came through, and in time they established many missions in Northern Africa.

The next goal of the missionaries was to send caravans to set up a series of missions through the Sahara, and eventually to reach Central Africa. The three priests in the first caravan were murdered, but more caravans followed. Eventually, they reached Uganda, and their work there and the tragedies that followed make up a large part of the book. If you are not familiar with Charles Lwanga and the Martyrs of Uganda, you can read a bit more about them on my other blog, in a post written by my friend Paul.

Kittler also writes about the life of one former student of the White Fathers' schools, and two of the priests of the order. The first gives an idea of the quality of education the students in the schools received; and the second shows the kind of work the priests were doing, and also the very different types of men who belong to the order.

Bishop, eventually Cardinal Archbishop Lavigerie's vision can be seen in this passage:

It was . . . Lavigerie's idea that his missionaries should always remember that they were in Africa for the sake of the African. He was stern in his instructions not to Europeanize the African, believing that in time the African could decide for himself what there might be in Europe he wished to make his own. 

This practice of not trying to change the culture of the Africans was very contrary to what most governments, and in truth most missionaries of the time considered appropriate. Lavigerie was also very constant in asserting the missionaries they were working toward the day when Africans could assume leadership of their own countries.

Glenn D. Kittler's obituary in the New York Times says that he had at one time studied for the priesthood, and that he was a contributing editor of Guideposts (an inspirational Christian magazine founded by Norman Vincent Peale). One gathers from this that he isn't exactly impartial toward his subject (which is true), and that the book is not written in an academic manner (which is also true). The professor who formerly owned the book complained more than once about a lack of documentation. There was a real problem with dates in the book--years, not months and days--that might have been as much attributable to bad copyreading as to any error on Kittler's part. Given that, it is still a very readable narrative of the beginning of an order which is still at work in Africa today. In fact Kittler's obituary stated "Mr. Kittler wrote ''The White Fathers'' in 1957. The New York Times called it ''a magnificently comprehensive historical introduction to the last hundred years of Christian Africa.''

You can hear a bit about the current ministry of the Missionaries of Africa here:

AMDG

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

When I woke up this morning, I had read about 50 pages of The Violent Bear It Away. About halfway through the book, if you had asked me what it was about, I would have told you that I wasn't really sure what I was reading, but I couldn't stop reading it. By 3:30 this afternoon, I had finished the book.

This book is about the God of grace and mercy, but it's not easy grace, and it's not the mercy that droppeth as a gentle rain from heaven. It's about the God who is a consuming fire. The title of the book comes from Matthew 11:12, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."

Mason Tarwater is one of those who bear it away. He is a prophet (and bootlegger) who lives on a secluded farm, and who is raising his great-nephew, Francis Marion Tarwater (called Tarwater), whom he kidnapped from his legal guardian, his uncle George Rayber. Old Tarwater is preparing his great-nephew to be his successor. He already tried this once with his nephew George, whom he kidnapped for four days when George was seven, but this attempt backfired.

If you have read much about prophets, you know that they are not particularly comfortable to be around and that some of them might even be regarded as out of their minds, and the Tarwaters certainly fit the bill. I wondered what tarwater or tar water was, and looking around the internet I find that it is made from a cold infusion of pine resin in water, and is used for healing and to get rid of spirits, the latter being more appropriate to our story.

Old Tarwarter has charged Tarwater with two tasks to accomplish after his death. One is to bury him with a cross at his head, so he can be found at the last day. The other is to baptize George's son, Bishop. This book is about Baptism, and water, and Baptism by water, but maybe even more about Baptism by fire.

I am not going to say any more about the story because if you read it in a summary, you will completely lose the power that is behind O'Connors masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece--maybe I should say tour de force.

In a letter to a friend written on November 14, 1959, shortly before publication of her novel in January, 1960, O'Connor said;

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial. I'm afraid it will just be dammed and dropped, genteelly sneered at, a few superior kicks from one or two and that  will be that. . . . Well, we will have to wait and see. I expect the worst. At least this is an individual book. I can't think of anybody else's that it might remind you of. Nobody would have been found dead writing it but me . . .

The Violent Bear It Away did get a lot of bad reviews, but it has stood the test of time. O'Connor spoke to at least a couple of friends about a sequel to the novel, but I guess she ran out of time. It took her a long time to write a novel, she was talking about this one as early as 1954, and she died about four and a half years after it was published.

I recommend this book very highly, but I would strongly suggest you not read it unless you are already fairly familiar with O'Connor, because it takes most people a while to see what she is doing in her work. In this case, I would suggest that you begin with a few short stories: Revelation, A Temple of the Holy Ghost, and A Good Man is Hard to Find. (It was while reading Revelation that I first got O'Connor. Then you might read The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters, and maybe Mystery and Manners, a collection of talks and essays.

UPDATE: There have been a lot of new visitors here in the past 24 hours, and I would like to welcome you all. I would love to hear any thoughts you have about the post, or even how you got here.

If you are curious about what I'm trying to do on this blog, you can find that information here.

Please come again.

AMDG

The Autobiograhy of Charles Darwin: 1809 to 1882 edited by Nora Barlow

For some time now I have wanted to find out more about Charles Darwin, both about the man, and also about his work. Before I read this autobiography, I knew that Darwin had taken a voyage on a ship called the Beagle, and that while on that voyage he collected many specimens, and then proposed a theory of evolution and natural selection. I wanted some more specific information about his collections, and his science, and also about his thought process. I don't remember when I bought the book, but I'm sure that this is why I bought it.

I have to say that I am disappointed. At the point in the narrative where he tells about the Beagle, he relates how the position of naturalist on the ship was offered, how his father was against the voyage, and how he was convinced to give his son permission to accept the position. Darwin says very little about the voyage itself, the chief impression one takes away from this section is that the captain of the ship was very difficult to get along with. The reason for his reticence in speaking of the scientific aspects of the voyage is that he had already written about them in The Voyage of the Beagle.

The autobiography begins with Recollections of the Development of my mind and character. I will include the first paragraph because it says a great deal about the state of Darwin's mind when he wrote it.

A German Editor having written to me to ask for an account of the development of my mind and character with some sketch of my autobiography, I have thought that the attempt would amuse me, and might possibly interest my children or their children. I know that it would have interested me greatly to have read even so short and dull a sketch of the mind of my grandfather written by himself, and what he thought and did and how he worked. I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pain about my style of writing.

I will attest to the truth of this last sentence. I exaggerate, and most of the time Darwin writes well enough, although sometimes I cannot follow the thread of an argument because his sentences are confusing. You might think that it is I who am at fault here, and you may be right, but I don't think so. You might also thing that I am frequently guilty of the same fault. I'm pretty sure you are correct.

This chapter proceeds with eight pages about Darwin's early life and then fourteen pages about his father. This is rather telling. Dr. Robert Waring Darwin was a large man with a personality to match, and he loomed large over at great deal of his son's life. He was very successful in his practice, and had a great gift for winning the confidence of his patients, especially the ladies. This is one of the most engaging sections of the book, and you would think after reading it that Darwin had a wonderful relationship with his father, but one later learns that there is a great deal of tension between father and son.

Dr. Darwin was frequently disappointed with his son, and his disappointment is somewhat understandable as Charles was not a very good student. It seems that this was partly due to a lack of both ability and interest in his studies. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a doctor, but Charles had no interest in this. Dr. Darwin's second wish was that Charles would be a clergyman. Charles thought this might do, but it may be best that this never came about. While he was shirking the responsibilities of his studies, however, he stumbled upon the passion that informed the rest of his life.

But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.

This is the zeal that I was looking for in the book, and it is the only instance of it. A great deal of the remaining book discusses other famous scientists whom he knew, and their personalities and disagreements. The most important disagreement of all is known as The Darwin-Butler Controversy, and involves a series of misunderstandings between Darwin and novelist Samuel Butler, which were blown out of all proportion. The Butlers and Darwins had a relationship of several generations, and sadly this disagreement continued and was not resolved until after the deaths of both men when Darwin's son, Francis, and Butler's friend, Henry Festing Jones, communicated with one another and brought the whole sorry mess to a peaceful conclusion.

Darwin seems to have been very fortunate in his choice of wife, his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. They raised nine of their ten children, one having died in infancy, and the family was very close. When Darwin was 33, they moved to Surrey where they lived a very secluded life due partially to Darwin's frequent long bouts with some undiagnosed ailment, and partially with a disinclination for society. In later life, their main visitors were their grown children, who came often. When Darwin was trying to figure out how to respond to Butler's attack, he did nothing until he had consulted all his children. Their practice seemed to be not to make any important decision without the agreement of the whole family.

This edition, "The Only Complete Edition" of the autobiography, is 133 pages long. Originally, the family removed many passages that they thought would reflect badly on Darwin, and these have been replaced in this edition. After Darwin's text, there is an Appendix of 97 pages, two-thirds of which deal with The Darwin-Butler Controversy. Also found in the appendix are: an index of where all the formerly-omitted passages can be found, a list of Darwin's pros and cons with regards to getting married, and the correspondence that took place between Dr. Darwin and Emma's father over whether or not Charles should be allowed to undertake the voyage on the Beagle.

It was during the two years following his explorations on the Beagle that Darwin found himself questioning his faith. He had been a firm Christian previous to this, but began asking the familiar questions that people do ask, and decided against the Christian faith.  I'm not going to go into this, but I'm sure you can imagine the sort of things he briefly discusses in the book. Darwin says at one point in the book that he would not have made a good metaphysician, and this is likely true. At this time he considered himself a Theist, but later this conviction also began to fade, and he added an addendum so stating. His wife asked her son Francis that this addendum be removed from the book because it was painful to her.

In the appendix, there are two letters which Emma Darwin wrote to her husband expressing her sadness over his rejection of his faith. In the first she says:

May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, and which if true are likely to be above our comprehension. I should say also there is a danger in giving up revelation which does not exist on the other side, that is the fear of ingratitude in casting off what has been done for your benefit as well as for that of all the world and which ought to make you still more careful, perhaps even fearful lest you should not have taken all the pains you could to judge truly.

Darwin saved these letters all his life. At the bottom of this one he wrote, "When I am dead. know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this. C. D." On the other, "God Bless you C. D. 1861"

I am currently reading The Voyage of the Beagle, which I find much more to my purpose.

AMDG

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

"Call me Ishmael." I think that when I was younger everyone knew that that was the first line of Moby Dick, even if they didn't know anything else about the book. I wonder how many people know that know, especially young people.

The thing is, it's not really the beginning of the book. Before we get to the story there are 79 quotes or "extracts" about whales from a wide variety of sources which take up 10 pages in my edition. This ought to be, but probably isn't for most people, a sort of foreshadowing of what is to come in the rest of the book.

Moby Dick is unlike any other book I've ever read. It's impossible to classify. It is fiction, and non-fiction; science, and history; geography, and anthropology; philosphy, and metaphysics; and much more besides with a great adventure novel making sporadic appearances in the midst of it all.

By the time you finish reading Moby Dick, you will know how to spot, harpoon, and cut up a whale; and how to render sperm oil. You will know the name and description, and habits of every sort of whale that Melville, who had been a sailor himself, knew anything about. You will have intimate knowledge of whales from head to toe: what their eyes, ears, spout holes, tails and innards are like. You will know about whaling ships, and the different jobs of the sailors who man the ships. You will know how to make a peg leg and a harpoon. You will know about friendship, and seafaring humor and stories, and fear, and obsession.

I'm not sure if I should have begun this post by telling you all this, because reading it might have put me off the book forever. I remember reading War and Peace which has constant interruptions of the narrative for chapters about Tolstoy's historical/political theories, and thinking, "Just get on with the #$%& story!" But somehow Melville gets away with it. I think it must be due to the enthusiasm of the teacher who loves his subject so much, and transmits his passion to his students.

I'm sure that most of my readers will know the outline of the narrative of Moby Dick, but briefly, in case it has slipped into 21st century obscurity somehow . . . . The story relates the voyage of the Pequod, a whaler out of Nantucket (Oh, you are also going to learn some things about Nantucket.), and its captain, Ahab, who on a previous voyage, lost his leg to the huge white whale, Moby Dick. The crew, including our narrator, Ishmael, signs on for a typical whaling voyage. They know it will be quite dangerous, and that they won't see land for three or four years, but they don't know that in the Captain's fevered mind, it is a voyage for vengeance.

I'm not going to say much about the narrative itself, because the way it unfolds is part of the reader's own voyage, but I want to say a bit about the characters, because they are so important to the book. We get to know several of the sailors on the Pequod very well, and it would be fascinating to sit down with any one of them and hear his story. The first mate, Starbuck, is a very upright man, who just wants to do his job well and get back home to his wife and little boy. The second mate Stubb, is more relaxed and generally of good cheer. We also really get to know Ahab, who sometimes begins to see through the cloud of vengeance that surrounds him sees that he could overcome it, but chooses not to. Because of these changes of mood, he is a much more rounded character than he might have been. Then there is the mysterious Fedallah, about whom we known nothing much, other than that he is a Parsee, and that he knows some secret about Ahab, and Moby Dick, and has prophesied how the captain's story will end.

My favorite character is Queequeg, the island prince, and harpooneer whom we meet at the beginning of the book, and my favorite aspect of the book is his friendship with Ishmael.

Ishmael, having arrived in New Bedford, from whence he will take a ship to Nantucket, is searching for an economical place to stay until the ship arrives. He finally finds the Spouter Inn, where he is told that there is no room available, except for one that he will have to share with another boarder. The landlord is rather mysterious about said boarder, and Ishmael is suspicious, but he has no other choice.

The other boarder has not arrived by the time Ishmael goes to bed, but when he finally arrives, Ishmael is taken aback by this large dark man with harpoon and tomahawk, who is tattooed from head to toe. Queequeg is fairly shocked himself, but they manage to settle down for the night.

On the second evening Ishmael and Queequeg have dinner, and then Ishmael tells us:

Soon I proposed a social smoke; and producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.

If there lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.

I love this passage, and whole story of this friendship, but when I think about what it would be like to try to teach this book in a 21st century classroom, I just shake my head. Not only the friendship which would probably be given a very different interpretation in that classoom, and the political incorrectness of much of the book, but the sheer length of the book makes it seem very difficult to do successfully. I wonder if anyone tries.

It is probably obvious by now that I really liked this book, and would highly recommend it. I should caution you, though, that you need to have some good, long stretches of quiet time to spend with it. It isn't light reading my any means.

AMDG

Addendum: Amusing (I hope) disclaimer. I have a really difficult time reading old books with disintegrating pages. Immediately on opening them, my eyes begin to burn and itch, and my vision gets blurry--obviously not the best conditions for enjoying a book. As you can see above, my copy is one of those. So, after putting up with it for a bit, I decided to get a library copy.

Well, this is a big, heavy book, and as I have gotten older, it has been increasing difficult for me to read big, heavy books. The weight hurts my legs, and it hurts my hands to hold them, so I started reading a Kindle version that I've had for a long time, but I didn't really want to do that and I was spending a lot of time in the car, so I finally ended up listening to most of it on an Audible recording. The narrator was Frank Muller, and he was very good, so you might want to try this on your next long trip.

Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal by David Kline

On May 9, 2002, I made my first purchase from Amazon, and it was David Kline's Great Possessions; however, I did not know it was David Kline's Great Possessions. Friends on a listserv were talking about how great Wendell Berry's books were, so I decided to buy one. A search for Wendell Berry on Amazon turned up Great Possessions. I want to say that it was the only result of the search, but how could that have been? Maybe Amazon wasn't selling books from his publisher at the time. Maybe it was just the cheapest result. That might well have been it. I see I only paid $4.94.

Needless to stay, I was pretty unhappy when I started reading the book and realized that the author wasn't Berry, who wrote only the two-page foreword, but someone I'd never heard of before, and yet it was a fortuitous mistake. It's a wonderful book. I remember writing at the time that reading Great Possessions was like having a friend walking you around his property and showing you all the things he loved. I didn't, however, get very far into the book. I don't know why, but I always meant to get back to it.

Great Possessions is a collection of essays from Family Life, an Amish magazine. Because of this, the chapters are fairly short, and it is a good book to read in spare moments. Despite this fact, I did not read it in spare moments, because once I started reading, I didn't want to stop.

Kline has lived on, and farmed his property all of his life. He knows it in a very deep way. It isn't just the amount of time he has lived there, but the way he lives there. And he is so observant. I know less per square foot about the 1/6 acre that I lived on for 24 years than he knows about any square inch of his farm. This really makes me want to go outside and learn more about the 10 acres we have now, but, of course, I'm not going to do it until it gets a bit cooler.

The essays cover many different kinds of plants and animals that live on the farm, but the greatest portion of the books is devoted to birds: large and small birds, land and shore birds. It's amazing to me the 100s of different species that his family spots every year. Off the top of my head, I can only think of 18 that I see around here. Of course, I probably have several species of sparrows, but I can't tell them apart.

It's rather ironic that this book written by a man who uses very little modern technology in his life constantly sent me to my phone or Kindle. I had to find out, "What does a red-eyed vireo look like? A cecropia moth? A serviceberry tree? (Gorgeous. The next tree I plant will be one of these.) What does an eastern bluebird sound like? There were times when it took me ten minutes to read one page because I was looking up so many things.

I learned a lot of interesting things while reading the book, but I am only going to mention three. One is that the horned lark builds a little patio of pebbles on one side of its nest. (It is permissible to share the photo below for non-commercial purpose. I don't really understand how it works, so I put the we address in the rollover.)

Photo credit: Amy Evenstad

The second is that some birds, one being the American Golden-Plover, migrate to South America. I find this rather wonderful to think about. In the fall, the plover leaves the wintery arctic, where it breeds, flies through the fall, and the perpetual summer of the tropic, and reaches South America in their spring, and stays through the southern summer. If a human made this trip, he would have to take a huge wardrobe.

And third, many hawks migrating from the north follow the Appalachian mountains. There are a few spots, including Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, and Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve in Duluth, MN,where the flyway narrows due to the physical characteristics of the land, and so hundreds of thousands of hawks are funneled through these small areas. There are times when you can see more than 10,000 in a day.

Most of the essays are beautiful, or informative, and mostly upbeat, but the essay titled Farewell to the Giants made me tear up a bit. Kline tells of making a visit with his son to an old-growth woodland that abutted their property, and which was soon to be logged by new owners.

Arising from our cushiony bed of moss, we walked through the woods to look and admire for the last time. We paused beneath red and white oaks and poplars towering sixty feet to their first limbs. Their branches, joining high overhead, gave the impression of a green-and-gold cathedral ceiling supported by massive wooden columns. In autumns past, like my older brothers before me, I would often take a morning off on the pretense of hunting for squirrels to come here and revel in this grandeur--an experience both humbling and exhilarating.

The description reminds of Mallorn trees in Lothlórien (Lord of the Rings). It's not so much a physical resemblance, as the feeling that it evokes. 

There are some chapters near the end that are instructive and are giving me ideas. One is called Planting for Wildlife and one is Winter Bird Feeding. I tried some summer bird feeding this year with absolutely no success, but maybe I'll do better in the winter. I want to make a bird list. And I need a pair of binoculars. I am definitely keeping this book.

AMDG

The Shelf

August 1

A bit late posting this, but I did take it on July 1.

June 1, 2018

We Hold These Truths:Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S. J.

It has been a long time since I have written anything here, partly because I have been having out-of-town company, and partly because I have been busy with other things, but mostly because I have been very unwise in my choice of books. It is not that I should not have been reading these particular books, but that I have been reading them at the same time, because two of them, the Big Book that I wrote about before, and this book by Fr. Murray, are political, philosophical, and discuss situations and authors whose work is unfamiliar to me. And the third book I'm reading is a long novel wherein there is a great deal of pedagogical material dispersed within the narrative.

However, I have finally finished We Hold These Truths, and am very glad to be able to say so. I thought several times that I would just quit, and move on to something else, but I was really interested in learning what I could from the book. It was published in 1960, and that means both that some of the situations that he is discussing are very different than they were then, and that his solutions seem well-nigh impossible at this point.

Sometimes it is downright disheartening, one of the saddest passages being this one:

In America we have been rescued from the disaster of ideological parties. They are a disaster because, where such parties exist, power becomes a special kind off prize. The struggle for power is a partisan struggle for the means whereby the opposing ideology may be destroyed. It has been remarked that only in a disintegrating society does politics become a controversy over ends; it should be simply a controversy over means to ends already agreed on with sufficient unanimity.

Before I go any further, I would like to say that I am ill-qualified to comment on most of this book. Political theory is definitely not my area of interest or expertise. I am, in fact, usually disinclined to pay any attention to it at all.

Part One, The American Proposition comprises almost half the book, and discusses how we can reach consensus in a pluralistic society. Fr. Murray says that when he asks groups of people this question, they generally respond that we can't. It always amazes me that while I was in grade school (remember this was 1960) being taught about our government, and living in what seemed to be a very patriotic world, the foundations of our country must have already been getting very weak.

Fr. Murray describes public consensus as:

"a set of ideas, widely held by the community . . . that certain uses of power are 'wrong' that is contrary to the established interest and value system of the community." It is "essentially a body of doctrine which has attained wide, if not general, acceptance." This body of doctrine contains "principles," "tenets," "rules," "standards" and "criteria" of judgment on individual cases or situations.

The quotes come from Power without Property by Professor Adolf. A. Berle.

Fr. Murray also points out that public consensus has a growing end, and that those who seek it are locked in a never-ending argument.

This definition is found within a larger discussion concerning how those in power (in this case big business) can often be controlled by public consensus. The quote is from Prof. Berle.

"Observing the American scene you note that as power goes, the present concentration has in recent years been (on the whole) relatively free from the excesses which often make concentrated power odious. Certainly this was not because historical chance located American economic power in a collection of saints. Checks (not 'balances') appeared in the form of periodic political interventions demanded by American public opinion. To explain this it becomes necessary to import a political conception--the 'public consensus' . . . So, it seems the ultimate protection of individuals lies not in the play of economic forces in free markets, but in a set of value judgments so widely accepted and deeply held in the United States that public opinion can energize political action when needed to prevent power from violating these values."  

There is a long section on the First Amendment which discusses its importance to consensus in a pluralistic society, and a problem of interpretation that arises from the amendment as to whether it requires faith or is simply an instrument of peace. In other words, must we believe that Church and State must always and everywhere be separate, or do we only agree to abide by this law because it is the only way to keep peace in a pluralistic society? He says that many Protestants would subscribe to the former, but that the latter would be the Catholic point of view, and explains why he believes this is so.

Part Two is titled Four Unfinished Arguments which arguments are:

Is It Justice?: The School Question Today - This section deals with the question of whether or not the government should support religious schools. Almost 60 years later, we're in about the same place.

Should There Be a Law?: The Question of Censorship - In what circumstances is it the government's business to impose censorship?

Is it Basket Weaving?: The Question of Christianity and Human Values - This section has to do with the City of God and the City of Man, and asks if there is any real value to merely human achievements, e.g. the works of classical antiquity. Also, there is the question of whether there is such a thing as mere human achievement, or does the inspiration for these achievements come from elsewhere.

The basket weaving in the title comes from this passage:

The old monk wove a basket one day; the next day he unwove it. The basket itself did not matter; but the weaving and unweaving of it served as a means of spending an interval, necessary to the frail human spirit, between periods of performance of the only tasks that did matter, the contemplation of heavenly things.

This is found in the description of the thinking of those who think that human works have no intrinsic value.

Are There Two or One?: The Question of the Future of Freedom - Is there only one authority that we must obey, i.e. the civil authority, or is there another, i.e. the Church, or a Natural Law that is present in all men?

Part Three is titled The Uses of Doctrine, and consists of four sections.

Doctrine and Policy in Communist Imperialism: the Problem of Security and Risk is to me one of the most interesting parts of the book. Fr. Murray discusses the Cold War and what kind of danger we were, and were not in from the Soviet Union. It is the first time I've ever read anything that discussed what the Cold War looked like from the Soviet point-of-view, and how nuclear weapons were, and were not consistent with their goals.

The Uses of a Doctrine on the Uses of Force: War as a Moral Problem discusses when the use of force is just and required, and when and how it is not.

The Doctrine is Dead: the Problem of the Moral Vacuum deals with the demise of Natural Law.

The Doctrine Lives: the Eternal Return of Natural Law discusses just that.

I would like to close with another quote from Fr. Murray, and some thoughts of my own about it.

The fact today is not simply that we hold different views but that we have become different types of men, with different styles of interior life. We are therefore uneasy in one another's presence. We are not, in fact, present to one another at all; we are absent from one another. That is, I am not transparent to the other, nor he to me; our mutual experience is that of an opaqueness. And this reciprocal opaqueness is the root of an hostility that is overcome only with an effort, if at all.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how we can overcome the hostility on even a small scale, well, I think that most of us can only overcome it one-on-one. But, something else that this passage made me think about was, how earlier in our history, I would guess up until World War II, people were still pretty much divided in many ways by their cultural heritage. There were still a lot of areas that were Irish, or Italian, or any number of different ethnic identities, but while they may have dressed, eaten, prayed, and worked differently, most of them had a common idea about what it meant to be an American.

Since then, our cultures have to a great extent merged. There has been a great deal of intermarriage. I know very few people now who are 100% Irish, or Italian, or German. We eat the same things; we eat each other's foods. We live in the same neighborhoods, and work in the same offices. And yet, there is this vast schism of ideology. I find it a bit ironic and extremely sad.

As I've said before about other books, if you are interested in this sort of thing, you will find this book worth your while, even though to a great extent its time has passed. And yet, there are eternal verities within its pages.

AMDG

Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters by William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh

I really didn't plan to read two biographies in a row, but when I realized that's what I was doing I thought that Jane Austen ought to cleanse my palette after Graham Greene. She certainly led a very different life and had a very different outlook on life.

The first biography of Jane Austen's life, Memoir of Jane Austen was written in 1869-70, by (James) Edward Austen-Leigh, the son of her oldest brother, James with help from his sisters Anna, and Caroline. All three knew her well. Edward was about 20 when she died, Anna, 24, and Caroline, 12.

By 1913 when Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters was written, newer sources of information were available, especially Letters of Jane Austen, edited by Edward Lord Brabourne, the son of Jane's niece and dear friend, Fanny Knight. Fanny was the daughter of Jane's brother Edward who was adopted by the Knight family. William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, the son, and nephew respectively of the author of the Memoir used the previous work, the letters, and other resources to write a more complete narrative of Jane's life.

The book begins with a long chapter on the Austen and Leigh (Jane's mother was a Leigh) family genealogies beginning with one John Austen who died in 1620, 155 years before Jane was born. It was so confusing that I made myself a family tree, but then I found there was one in the back of the book, which I was constantly consulting while reading. The second and third paragraphs of this post might give you some idea of how hard it is to straighten out the family relationships. There are about 10 first names that are used over and over again, and sometimes their last names change.

Most of the letters in the book were written to her sister, and closest friend, Cassandra. Because of this there are long periods of time when there are no letters because they only wrote when one or the other was away from home. Thankfully, this was more often than I would have thought from reading articles and short biographies in Jane's novels that describe her life as quiet and circumscribed. I suppose in some ways it was, but they had a large family, and friends in many different places, and were frequently traveling to visit one or the other, and later in life they lived in Bath where they stayed fairly busy.

Another reason why there are few letters is that Cassandra destroyed most of those that were written. Anything personal or that may have had unpleasant news was destroyed, so the remaining letters are mostly newsy accounts of where Jane had been and who she had been with. There are also a few letters to other family members. My favorites are the letters to her nieces, Fanny, Anna, and Caroline.

From all accounts Jane seems to have been universally (almost) loved. She is frequently described as being very even-tempered, and pleasant. A niece says:

She was singularly free from the habit . . . of looking out for people's foibles for her own amusement, or the entertainment of her hearers . . . I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing.

Of course, (almost) every account we have in this book comes from a family member. The one dissenting opinion comes from the mother of (competing?) authoress Mary Russell Mitford, who told her daughter that Jane was, "the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers." But then, the author tells us that Jane was only about 10 when Mrs. Mitford knew her.

Some of Jane's letters are a bit enigmatic. They are often so tongue-in-cheek (I think.), teasing, or coy that I don't know what to make of them. I suspect the problem is that she is writing to a sister who always knows when she is playing and when she is being sincere, and we do not. She is sometimes pretty snarky about people in a way that belies the above quote, but then, she was talking to her sister.

Often while reading the book, I was reminded of passages from Jane's novels. In one of her early letters she speaks of a woman whom she describes as being always present and never wanted. (I wish I could quote that accurately, but I have looked, and looked and can't find it.) Then years later, she speaks of the same woman in a much more charitable way, and it reminds me of Emma being so rude to Mrs. Bates, and being brought to task by Mr. Knightley.

The family often wrote and performed plays, although they must not have caused the type of scandal found in Mansfield Park, and the family's years in Bath, and a trip to Lyme are evocative of Persuasion. There is a letter written to tell Cassandra about the house they have rented in Bath which says:

I have a very nice chest of drawers and a closet full of shelves--so full indeed that there is nothing else in it, and it should therefore be called a cupboard rather than a closet, I suppose.

Shades of Lady Catherine de Bourgh!

The picture in the upper righthand corner is one I found online. I usually take a picture of my own book, but I didn't think that a picture of a plain green book would be very interesting. This one has the added interest of a sketch drawn of Jane by her sister Cassandra, although the original was black and white. The picture of Jane Austen below is found in the front of the book. It is a mystery picture because there is a question as to whether it is our Jane Austen, or a cousin.

A Dr. Newman wrote to a friend saying:

I have another picture that I wish to go to your neighbor, Morland Rice [James Edward Austen-Leigh's grandson]. It is a portrait of Jane Austen the novelist, by Zoffany. The picture was given to my stepmother by her friend Colonel Austen of Kippington, Kent, because she was a great admirer of her works.

There appears to be a lot of controversy about the painting. You can read more about it here.

If you would like to read this book, you can have my copy if you ask in the next week or so, or you can get it online free here.

AMDG