Today It Reads

I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb “to think” in the impersonal third person: saying not “I think” but “it thinks” as we say “it rains.” There is thought in the universe—this is the constant from which we must set out every time.

Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” “Today it is windy”? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb “write” in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual.

And for the verb “to read”? Will we be able to say, “Today it reads” as we say “Today it rains”? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to get beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.”

-Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, 176.

(This makes my head spin...)

Ideo (Therefore)

On this day earth shall ring
With the song children sing
To the Son, Christ the King,
Born on earth to save us;
Him the Father gave us.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

His the doom, ours the mirth,
When he came down to earth;
Bethlehem saw his birth;
Ox and ass, beside him,
From the cold would hide him.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

God's bright star, o'er his head,
Wise men three to him led;
Kneel they low by his bed,
Lay their gifts before him,
Praise him and adore him.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

On this day angels sing;
With their song earth shall ring,
Praising Christ, heaven's King,
Born on earth to save us;
Peace and love he gave us.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

-Piae Contiones

Serious Frivolity

People are losing the power to enjoy Christmas through identifying it with enjoyment. When once they lose sight of the old suggestion that it is all about something, they naturally fall into blank pauses of wondering what it is all about. To be told to rejoice on Christmas Day is reasonable and intelligible, if you understand the name, or even look at the word. To be told to rejoice on the twenty-fifth of December is like being told to rejoice at quarter-past eleven on Thursday week. You cannot suddenly be frivolous unless you believe there is a serious reason for being frivolous.

-G. K. Chesterton, "The New War on Christmas," G. K.'s Weekly, December 26, 1925, quoted in Advent and Christmas Wisdom from G. K. Chesterton, 50.

Poetry

...She thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

-Jane Austen, Persuasion, 74.

Calvinism

If God is to save souls, he must do so with people who for the most part fight tooth and nail against the process.

-Frederick Buechner, quoted in A Proper Scaring, Baumgartner.

Biography

My assumption is that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

- Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 56.

Rereading

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: But what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? Yet I think the test has a special application to the matter in hand. For excitement, in the sense defined above, is just what must disappear from a second reading. You cannot except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened...

The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain ideal surprisingness...We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep are we at leisure to savor the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the “surprise” of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia...

-C. S. Lewis, “On Stories,” quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 454-455.

Eureka!

When we read the poem, or see the play or picture or hear the music, it is as though a light were turned on inside us. We say: “Ah! I recognize that! That is something which I obscurely felt to be going on in and about me, but I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t express it. But now that the artist has made its image—imaged it forth—for me, I can possess and take hold of it and make it my own, and turn it into a source of knowledge and strength.

-Dorothy Sayers, “Towards a Christian Aesthetic,” quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 234.

Paradise

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

-Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 232.

Review: The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken

I stumbled across this book last weekend, as I perused Wheaton's card catalog in search of lesser-known essays by some of my favorite authors (Buechner, Chesterton, O'Connor, etc...). This is a marvelous book, exploring literature as an art-form from a Christian perspective. I'm sorry I didn't have time to read it more thoroughly (alas, 500 pages or so), but I had a lovely browse, and copied out as many quotes as I could - many from Lewis, but a few from other sources too. Some are posted below, and there will be more over the next few days...

Lit Crit

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment...is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 137.

Books as Doors

Now there is a clear sense in which all reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read history or science no less than when we read fictions. All such escape is from the same thing; immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to...

Escape, then, is common to many good and bad kinds of reading. By adding –ism to it, we suggest, I suppose, a confirmed habit of escaping too often, or for too long, or into the wrong things, or using escape as a substitute for action where action is appropriate, and thus neglecting real opportunities and evading real obligations. If so, we must judge each case on its merits. Escape is not necessarily joined to escapism.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 147.

Books as Windows

What then is the good of—what is even the defense for—occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist...? The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself...We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own...We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors...

Literary experience heals the wounds, without undermining the privilege, of individuality...In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 51, 52.

Granfalloon

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, 90, 91.