Category Archives: Literature

One Art

I just discovered a new favorite poem, One Art by Elizabeth Bishop.  It has a deep meaning to me that is probably not the exact meaning the author meant for the poem.  Here it is to mean something to you, if you like.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Currently reading or planning to read

Auralia’s Colors, by Jeffery Overstreet.  It is wonderful so far, and the author is alive and still writing, which is my favorite kind.  Send him vitamens here.  Or just buy his book and he can buy his own vitamens, live long and keep writing books for me to read.

Culture Makers, by Andy Crouch.  Get in on the discussion here.

Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, by Daniel Harrell.  Read it, and/or come to my church where he is the associate pastor and listen to him preach.

I have recently been exploring the wide world of podcasts and audio books, and recommend very highly PRI: Selected Shorts, available on itunes, The Writer’s Almanac and The NewYorker Fiction podcast, also on itunes.  All of those are free.  There are also collections of old Selected Shorts episodes which are really fun to listen to.  The art of reading stories has suffered, I think, in our age of multimedia, but these readers do the great old stories justice.  My favorites so far are D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse read by John Shea, “There must be more money; there must be more money,” and Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever read by Maria Tucci.  They are on itunes or here.

I am here to kneel.

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel.

This is an exerpt from Eliot’s The Four Quartets, and it is a vivid description of the experience I have been having this past year, which I can also find described in books like The Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross.

The Latin for “dark” is obsura — obscure. We don’t understand why the removal of our joy, our peace, our dearly loved connection with our Lord is necessary, but we trust that it is. We have prayed to give Him everything, and it turns out that the taking away of everything includes the things we depended on for our faith. These things are not He. As a character in a Charles Williams novel says, “Neither is this Thou.”

We wanted to live for Him. We find we can barely live at all. We wanted to conquer the world for His Kingdom. We find we can not even conquer ourselves.

Even this is too much explanation. It is obscure. I am not here to instruct myself, nor to carry report. I am here to kneel.

*Thanks to Sleight of Hand for sending me to this passage.

The last turn of the page

There is something wonderful, even sacred, about finishing a book.  My preference is that it be late at night, later, perhaps, than I should be awake, and that everyone else in the house be asleep.  I should be in bed, the book and bed illuminated by a single lamp.  It should be silent, but I had not noticed the silence, as absorbed in the pages as I had been.  Then, I turn the last page, I slow my pace, lingering, savoring the last paragraph as the last bite of an ice cream cone.  Close the book, lay it on my chest and…

Well, if you don’t know what I mean, my explanation isn’t going to make any sense, and if you do understand I don’t have to tell you.  But there is a shock of coming to the end of something that has totally absorbed you, a realization of reality, but a new perspective on that reality.  You return to the world, but you return to it changed.  Even a bad book can have this effect, but, Oh, Lord, the good ones.

Last night I finished The Brothers Karamazov.

In my bed, lit by a single lamp, the rest of the house long asleep.

The house was silent.  I closed the book, laid it on my chest.

And was suddenly in the deepest, truest prayer I had been in in months.

You see how I can’t write about “how” or “why,” or even  explain what it means to be met, to meet yourself, at the end of a book.  But if you know, you know.

And about The Brothers K.

Read it.  That’s all.

Go.

Now.

Read.

The Brothers Karamazov

Is absolutely destroying me once again.  It’s like being hit in the head with a slab of concrete wrapped in a lemon wedge, as Zaphod Beeblebrox once described a certain beverage.  I am absolutely smitten with Alyosha.  More than smitten.  I desperately want to channel his amazing ability to take his own ego out of a situation and be there wholly and unconditionally for God and for others.  Of course I realize that he is a fictional character.  I’m sure Dostoevsky himself was not so winsome.