Addendum

Having posted the last, I've just come across these thoughts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor imprisoned for opposing Hitler.

He wrote from prison to a friend that the Christian should live “unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane.” And later, to the same friend: “It is only when one loves life and the world so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in the resurrection and a new world.”

After his execution, in April 1945, a fellow prisoner wrote of him that he “always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and a deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive.”

Intimations of mortality

I confess to returning Brenda Walker’s Reading by Moonlight to the library unfinished. It’s an intimate, meandering meditation on how books helped her survive breast cancer and its treatment, at points very lyrical. Adrift in dark waters, her lights are works of imaginative literature and what others have written about death, love, family, and loss. I read the first few chapters and found myself a tearful mess. I resolved not to finish it, but still there followed one of the most piteous and unshakeable moods of gloom I’ve had this many a day; a realisation that though nothing’s wrong yet, by getting married I’ve knowingly signed up for eventual wrenching loss; combined with a generalised regret at the lot of humans who must all bid a bittersweet goodbye - for me never far from the surface.  Dawkins or Hitchens or somebody like that wonders why Christians don’t look eagerly for death. At one level he’s right, and we do, but at another, we could hardly be human if we didn’t feel the pathos of this ultimate severance. John Ames, the hero of Gilead, is sure of his salvation, but nonetheless filled with sadness at the ending of his long loved life.  In Gethsemane, Jesus is ‘overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,’ a state which must have comprehended more than the simple fear of pain or loss of friends. I believe in the resurrection – the remedy for mortality – but that belief has never made my heart hard to the thought of going. Like Walker, I find that literature helps. My gloom was dissipated by a good sleep, a kind spouse, and a dose of poetry. This is that skylark Hopkins (a better guide than Hitchens or Dawkins) and his poem “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Paradise Lost?

Growing up in a house with lots of books, our trips to the public library were occasional. Post-school, I always had access to university libraries which seemed much more plentiful than the public libraries in the kinds of things I wanted to read. But now, with more limited access to the university, I’ve turned to the public ones and found them lovely. There are queues, but I don’t have to stand in them; I simply watch my progress in them via my personalised online account, and when I get to the top, I stroll over to my library of choice in my lunch hour, pick up my books, flash my card and I’m on my way. 

It seems I’m not the only one to have discovered public libraries. So, apparently, has David Cameron, who plans to close 350 of them in the UK (“Do you mean we're actually paying for people to read?” he might have spluttered) as part of a broader program of slashing the legs off society in order to make it bigger. To the economic rationalist libraries are sitting ducks. Their only source of revenue is the twenty cent fines they are so reluctant to impose (one Canberra library offers patrons the choice of a fine or a donation to the Salvos) and their services, attractive spaces and expansive collections are provided free to their users, with no apparent dividend except unmeasurable (if not immeasurable) enjoyment. If, as Borges imagined, paradise will be a kind of library, libraries are, in their way, a kind of paradise.

The thing about economic rationalists is that they rarely take the long view, or the deep view; that old line about the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Philip Pullman has recently risen to impassioned defense of the public libraries, citing not only what they do but what they represent as compelling reasons to keep them open. He’s right: as well as preserving the knowledge and wisdom of the ages, libraries provide democratic access to them, fostering community and civility and many other things that a ‘big society’ might be thought to comprehend. And if one were still looking for a dividend, what about the potential of a society with free and unfettered access to learning? A view both long and deep, but not without some precedent. Before shooting these sitting ducks, Cameron should have checked for golden eggs.

Close close all night the lovers keep

Much has been made this month of what would have been Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, had he lived beyond 2004.  Much less has been made of another dead centenarian, Elizabeth Bishop, who also would have turned 100 this week, had she not died in 1979. She was an orphan from New England who became America's poet laureate in 1949. A graduate of  Vassar, she inherited enough to live independently and travel widely, especially in South America, later taking up teaching posts. She was gay, and wrote of longing and loss. Her most well-known poem is probably “The Waiting Room,” but as it's rather long, I chose this one.

Close close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,

close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.

Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.

Beyond the pale cast of thought

Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions might better have been called That Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, or even When, as he doesn’t really explain How, much less Why. The book is a pleasing rant with some delicious verbiage that sets out to give short shrift to anything that falls on the wrong side of rational. For Wheen, this line is a sharp divide, drawn in roughly 1750, that casts into an intellectual wilderness a quite bewildering array of human history: free market fundamentalism, Islamism, creationism, new ageism, managerialism,  leftism, self-helpism, Tony Blairism…the list goes on.

And it is simply a list, though an entertaining one. Wheen makes no attempt to connect these rebellions or retreats, (except that they all somehow offer an affront to the Enlightenment thinkers he admires), or to account for the persistent hungers that drive the embrace of irrationality, conspiracy, spirituality, alterity across such a dispersed range of human life.  Even within these groups, divisions or diversions don’t show up in Wheen’s view of them over the fence. He tends to expose inconsistent behaviour in groups too broad to be consistent; for example ‘the left’ does this or that, thinks this or that, apparently as one.  And he naturally has no room for difference (certainly not for differance!) within the thought or acts of one person, so his world is one of goodies and baddies. Most of the last three decades (the decline of reason beginning precisely in 1979) are peopled by baddies.

He offers no acknowledgement of whence the cultural revolutions of the last fifty years sprung and what they achieved, sourcing any good or compassionate impulses in the enlightened thinkers of two hundred and fifty years ago.  His purpose is ‘to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters.’ With the egregious exceptions of suicide bombers and Enron, he doesn’t really show ‘why it matters’ except that it annoys him. He allows no gains to proceed from irrational foundations, and does not begin to imagine what, if his rationalist agenda were rigorously pursued, might be lost.

Thanks to Wheen’s gift for insult the book is amusing; the sheer quantity of synonyms for ‘nonsense’ is impressive.  But it is a product of journalistic ire, rather than sustained thought or analysis. And for all its rationalist bluster, the book falls readily into idealism, in particular an idealism about America that his own evidence would seem to discredit. He writes as though America began in 1776, as an idea founded on principles, instead of a culture that grew from a chaotic melange of nations, religions, ideologies, and pathologies.  He writes about the enlightenment with the reverence of a true believer, and about its prophets with a blind faith in their enduring soundness. A prophet himself, rebuking an apostate modernity, he sounds in the end like the voice of one crying in the wilderness.