Ingroup, Outgroup, Fargroup

I suspect that—to borrow a tripartite distinction from the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander—most people...are fine with their ingroup ("antiracist, anticolonial, anticapatalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people") and fine with the fargroup (pigeons), but the outgroup? The outgroup that lives in your city and votes in the same elections you do? Maybe not so much. Does the project of making kin extend to the couple down the street from you who have five kids, who attend a big-box evangelical church, and who voted for the wrong person in the last presidential election? And who, moveover, are a little more likely to talk back than pigeons are?

-Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 33.

Nursery Rhymes

And yet there is an irony. For with all the frightening march of contemporary life, we still read of Little Miss Muffet and Wee Willie Winkie to our children, and sing "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" and "Sing a Song of Sixpence". But this is all wrong. What are we doing? Are we trying to cozen them by leading them to believe that there are joy and naïveté and rhythm in life, when all the time we know that their whole experience of life will be a relentless dashing of all these notions? Aren't we deceiving them with these pictures of simplicity and quaintness, setting up the conditions for disenchantment? Why not be honest with them? Why not Sing a Song of the Devaluated Pound, or of Little Herr Hitler? Better yet, why sing a song of anything? Why not read a column from the Times? Wouldn't it be more realistic, to say nothing of more merciful, to begin early to brace them for what life is really all about, rather than beguiling them with all this trumpery, knowing full well it is fraudulent?

...The argument of this book is that there is in nursery rhymes a case in point of what the human imagination suspects—that the formal disposing of common things may not be misleading.

-Thomas Howard, Chance and the Dance, 51, 53

Poetry

It is as though poetry laid a hand on our arm and said, "Now steady. You are missing this in your prosaic dash past experience, and it is worth not missing."

...

This is part of the business of poetry, from the nursery rhyme to the Divine Comedy. It addresses our imagination and, with everything that is at its service, it tries to beguile us into the intense awareness of experience. It knows that our attention is cudgeled by functional concerns morning, noon, and night, and it suspects that this not the desideratum. But it does not call us away from the "real" world of function into a garden of fancy that never existed anywhere. Rather, its high office is to ransom us from thrall to the deadly myth that life is cluttered and obstructed by necessity, and to return us to life with the awareness that is packed with glory.

-Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?, 72-73.

Tending the Garden

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

-J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

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The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: "For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don't like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see this is trash and I don't like it."

-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 133.

Totally Hosed

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannopt exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

-David Foster Wallace, quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 85.

That Eye-on-the-Object Look

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

-W. H. Auden, quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 87.

Reading with Hope

For if this particular book is not giving me pleasure now, it may give me pleasure later, if I allow it to do so. Maybe it's just starting slowly but will pick up speed; maybe I haven't fully grasped the idiom it's working in but eventually will figure it out; maybe the problem is not with the book but with my own powers of cocentration because I slept fitfully last night. Or maybe, for some reason I don't understand, today is not one of the High Holidays of my spirit.

- Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 42.

High Holidays of the Spirit

When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit...

- W. H. Auden quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 23.

Watching Part 2

The doctor had given him a few books to bring away with him, and lying in his hammock at night, he would try and shut out the den and stench of the lower cockpit and read. He did not take in very much, but every now and then some lovely phrase would shine up at him from the page, as though it were a pin prick in a dark curtain, letting in the light. When vile things happened outside himself, he now always managed to find something to pay attention to besides the vileness–the flash of fine anger in one man's eyes when another was flogged at the gangway, the sudden gleam of moonlight through a rent torn in the clouds by the frenzy of a storm...

-Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill,206.

Watching Part 1

For a moment or two they enjoyed the delicate innuendo and elegant reparatee of the art of conversation in which they had been trained, meanwhile watching, without appearing to do so, the gradual unfolding of this hour placed like a flower in their hands. For such was unconsciously the attitude of both of them towards the new phase of each day – it was not unimportant, it had some new discovery hidden within it for the finding. It was the attitude of the trained mind collecting the evidence, in their case for the Christian thesis that all things, somehow, work together for good.

-Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill, 196

The Search

...One way or another the journey through time starts for us all, and for all of us, too, that journey is at least in one sense the same journey because what it is primarily, I think, is a journey in search. Each must say for himself what it is he searches for, and there will be at least as many answers as there are searchers, but perhaps there are certain general answers that will do for us all. We search for a self to be. We search for other selves to love. We search for work to do. And since even when to one degree or another, we find these things, we find also that there is still something crucial missing which we have not found, we search for that unfound thing too, even though we do not know its name or where it is to be found or even if it is to be found at all.

-Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, 58.

Reeking of Holiness

...Holiness is not something hazy and elusive that we know apart from the earth but something we can know only as it wells up out of the earth, out of people even as clay-footed as Jacob, the trickster crook, out of places as elemental as the river Jabbok, where he wrestled in darkness with a Stranger who was no stranger, out of events as seamy as the time he gulled his half-blind father out of Esau's blessing. "See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed," old Isaac says as he lays his hands upon Jacob, and there it is all in a moment: Jacob betrays his brother, dupes his father, all but chokes on his own mendacity, yet the smell of him is the smell of blessing because God, no less than Isaac, has chosen to bless him in spite of everything. Jacob reeks of holiness. His life is as dark, fertile, and holy as the earth itself. He is himself a bush that burns with everything, both fair and foul, that a man burns with. yet he is not consumed because God out of his grace will not consume him.

-Frederick Buechner, Now and Then, 19-20.

Living or Dying

For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.

-Romans 14:7-8

All Saints

On All Saints' Day, it is not just the saints of the church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.

-Frederick Buchner, The Sacred Journey, 74.

The Thick of the Battle

The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle. To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake—even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death—that little by little we start to come alive. It was not a conclusion that I came to in time. It was a conclusion from beyond time that came to me. God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling.

-Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, 107

Evergreen

The righteous flourish like a palm tree
and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the LORD;
they flourish in the courts of our God.
They still bear fruit in old age;
they are ever full of sap and green,
to declare that the LORD is upright;
he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.

Psalm 93:12-15

So Then

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.

-Romans 14:8

In Praise of Spoilers!

And here perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage...

...And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. "Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta, of course she accepts Gustavus in the end." "How very ill-natured you are, Susan," says Kitty with tears in her eyes: "I don't care a bit about it now." Dear Kitty, if you will ready my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the third volume if you please—learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.

Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.

-Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

Semper Gumby

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God's tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us for God's help too always comes from unexpected directions—but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.

-Helmust Thielicke's sermon on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, H/T Alan Jacobs