A year in the Here and Now under a Paradise Sky

Each year at this time I enjoying a game that involves answering questions, the same ones each year, using only the titles of books read that year. Let's see what happens.

Describe yourself: Ruined by Reading

How do you feel: Going Around in Academic Circles

Describe where you currently live: Here and Now

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Bookstore

What's your favorite form of transportation: Trains and Lovers

Your best friend is: Our Mutual Friend

You and your friends are: The Invisible Ones

What's the weather like where you are: Paradise Sky

What is the best advice you could give: The First 25 Years Are the Hardest

Thought for the day: No Time to Spare

How would you like to die: Die Laughing

What is your soul's present condition: The Heavenly Table

Well that was easier than I thought. Most of my answers even contain at least a grain of truth.

Fun with superlatives

I can't think of a superlative for Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, edited by J. Peder Zane. This book, however, is all about superlatives. Bebe Moore Campbell writes about the most memorable book she has read, Frederick Busch writes about the most dangerous book he has read, Robert Morgan about the wisest, Charles Frazier about the most tempting, Lee Smith about the most luminous, and so on.

The chosen books are fascinating, as are the superlatives and the essays explaining how those particular superlatives apply to those particular books. Many of the books are classics, or at least books you are likely to have heard about. Among these are E.M. Forster's Howards End, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Other books may be new to most readers, such as The Tarahumara by Antonin Artaud and  Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo.

The superlatives don't always mean what you might think they mean. When Eric Wright calls Howards End the classiest book he has read, what he refers to is the novel's focus on the British class system of the time. Perhaps the most interesting thing Wright has to say is his observation that all the great children's books by British writers, from The Wind in the Willows to the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, were written by middle-class writers for middle-class children. All those references to nannies, cooks and housemaids meant little to children in lower classes. (Of course,  they mean little to today's middle-class children, but those children still love the stories.)

Possibly the book's best essay (there's my superlative) is the one in which Nasdijj describes To Tame a Land by Louis L'Amour as the saddest book he has read. He doesn't mean he shed any tears while reading it. Rather he means the novel is what he terms "cow manure." Nasdijj has worked as a cowboy and knows something of the history of the West, and this novel, he says, "kills even the shadow of truth." It describes "a picture of a place that never was and a time that never happened." He says he and other modern cowboys would sit around campfires at night and make fun of Louis L'Amour novels. That is sad.

A sad comic novel

There's something special about novels that can make a reader both laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time. Patrick deWitt's French Exit is such a novel.

Frances Price is a 65-year-old heiress who has gone through her fortune and has virtually nothing left but a mama's boy son, Malcolm, who depends upon his mother for everything. A young woman, Susan, has fallen in love with him against her better judgment, but Malcolm prefers the company of his mother.

Booted out of their longtime New York City residence, they sell what possessions they have and escape to Paris, where they move into the apartment of Frances's only friend. Yet almost immediately she begins to make new friends, or at least hangers-on who want to see what happens next in the life of this fascinating woman. As for Frances herself, her main goal in life seems to be to spend what little money she has left as quickly as she can.

But I have not mentioned Little Frank, the cat Frances believes is her late husband reincarnated. Frank Price was a cut-throat attorney who made lots of money for his beautiful wife to spend. When she discovered his naked body following his heart attack, the cat was on his chest. Rather than call the authorities, Frances had just gone ahead with the ski trip she had planned. That act made the newspapers and made her a notorious woman, even in Paris when she arrives there years later, Little Frank in her handbag.

The book's title has multiple meanings, but at novel's end DeWitt leaves a hint of a possible French Entrance, a new life about to begin for at least one of his characters.

I listened to the audio version of the novel, perfectly read by Lorna Raver.

Swaddled

At Christmas Eve services around the world tonight, Christians will hear these words from the Gospel of Luke: "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn." When I hear them tonight I will likely focus most on the word swaddling.

Until a few days ago I had never given the phrase “swaddling clothes” much thought. I assumed it was just another term for baby blanket. Weren't all babies wrapped in something warm soon after birth? It turns out the purpose of swaddling has as much to do with restriction of movement as warmth. A Wikipedia article states, "Swaddling clothes described in the Bible consisted of a cloth tied together by bandage-like strips. After an infant was born, the umbilical cord was cut and tied, and then the baby was washed with salt and oil, and wrapped with strips of cloth. These strips kept the newborn child warm and also ensured that the child's limbs would grow straight."

Swaddling went out of fashion in Europe about three centuries ago, although it is still practiced by some parents in some cultures, usually for less than the eight or nine months common in earlier times. I would think that swaddling would limit muscle development more than it would ensure straight limbs, but what do I know?

More recent translations of the Bible do not mention swaddling at all. In the New Internatonal Version, Mary just wraps her baby in cloths. In The Message it’s just a blanket. Perhaps the use of the word in the King James Version stems from the fact swaddling was still practiced in England at that time.

What prompted my attention to the practice of swaddling was the article “The Gift of Wrapping” by Jeff Peabody in the December issue of Christianity Today. “The conditions of his advent were a small metaphor for his entire life,” he writes. Consider what happened after Jesus died. He was anointed with oil and wrapped tightly in cloths and placed not in a manger but a tomb. And he died nailed to a cross. What could be more constricting than that? And yet, Peabody points out that as the Son of God, Jesus “experienced an unfathomable limitation of himself” his entire life. Perhaps the Resurrection was not just a victory over death but a victory over life itself.

This is a thought to ponder not just on Christmas Eve but on Christmas morning as I remove the wrappings from my gifts and set them free.

Vigor, complexity and flavor

I love to look at old books for some of the same reasons botanists like to study old vegetable strains. They have not been through the often highly dubious processes of refinement that have weeded out vigor and complexity, and flavor, too, from the contemporary language of ideas.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Linguist John McWhorter tells of Civil War soldiers, many of them with barely eight years of formal education, writing wordy letters, filled with (to us) challenging sentences and references to Greeks and Romans and great works of literature, to their wives, sweethearts or parents back home. That's just the way people were taught to write once upon a time, with prose full of what Marilynne Robinson terms vigor, complexity and flavor.

Today clarity and simplicity are favored by those who teach writing and most of those who read it and write it. The use of words that somebody might have to look up or cultural references that are not clear to everyone are discouraged. As I noted a few weeks ago, those who read the Bible today are more comfortable with The Message, a paraphrase by Eugene Peterson, than the King James Version. Clarity trumps grace and beauty, especially when one is in a hurry, as we all seem to be.

To be sure, one can still find writing of recent vintage that is full of vigor, complexity and flavor. Try reading Robinson's essay in its entirely, for example, or any of her novels.

Thankfully Robinson is not alone either in writing books of this type or in preferring to read them. There will always be some who would rather read Jane Austen than Danielle Steel, Charles Dickens than James Patterson, King James than Eugene Peterson.

Grace and beauty, peanut butter and jelly

As a fiction develops, a writer has the exhilarating experience of losing options, of saying "Of course!" to things that emerge on the page with an aura of necessity about them.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Marilynne Robinson

Imagine desiring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and then having to select a supermarket from all those in your area, at which you must pick one loaf of bread from all those many available, one jar of peanut butter from all those on the shelves and one jar of jelly from the many different brands and flavors you have to choose from. Thankfully, unless we happen to be in the mood for something different, we already know which supermarket, which kind of bread, which brand of peanut butter and which flavor of jelly we prefer. Thus we can shop with our mind free to ponder more important decisions, such as what to get for that evening's main course.

So is this the kind of "exhilarating experience" Marilynne Robinson is talking about? As a writer makes more and more choices about a story and the characters who populate it, there become fewer and fewer choices yet to be made. The writer is free to focus on more important questions, such as where to go with the story and how best to get there.

But there is something more here, suggested by that phrase "aura of necessity." Those early decisions don't just make the later ones easier. They also make them obvious, or at least more obvious. Many authors speak of their characters as having minds of their own. Once they are given a personality and a backstory, they seem to make their own decisions about what to do next. From the author's perspective, what those characters do is what they must do. Yet somehow in the best fiction, what may seem so obvious to the author never seems obvious to us readers. We are almost always surprised. Perhaps that's because we readers don't know the characters as well as the author does.

Robinson goes on to say this about Charles Dickens, "A great part of the pleasure of reading Dickens comes from the strange compound of utter originality and perfect inevitability invested in his best characters. After one or two brilliant details, every subsequent choice is disciplined by them." The result is grace and beauty, the subjects of Robinson's essay.

Two tips for readers

H.W. Brands

Historian H.W. Brands tells in Remarkable Reads about being assigned the book The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams as an 18-year-old college student and finding it lacking. Many years later he read it again, and then again and again, each time finding much of value there. So why the difference? Brands offers two explanations: he was a different person when he read the book a second time, and as a student he had skipped the book's introduction.

If one were to make a list of tips for readers, these two should be on that list:

1. Read a book at the right time.

2. If a book has an introduction, read it.

When I wrote about Middlemarch earlier this year I told how I had found George Eliot's novel incomprehensible when I attempted to read it as a college student. Decades later I found it rich and rewarding. The book hasn't changed, but I have. Some books, such as The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, are best read in one's youth. I think the high school and college years are the best time to read most of the classics. That time of life is when great literature is most likely to speak profoundly to us.

As for nonfiction, the obvious time to read it is when it interests us. You wouldn't read a book about parenting before parenthood or after the kids are in college. Of course, some books would interest us if we would only give them a chance, so a reader needs to be open to new possibilities.

As for introductions, reading them is wise, especially for students. A book's introduction is often like the overture to a Broadway musical, summarizing what is to come. It can make a book, especially one one like The Education of Henry Adams, easier to follow. An introduction often tells how the author came to write the book, as does the introduction to The Rhine, a new book by Ben Coates. He says the idea for the book came to him after ice skating in Amsterdam. Bryan Kozlowski's introduction to What the Dickens?, a book I reviewed a week ago, tells of Charles Dickens's passion for unusual words.

Not all books have introductions. Taking a few books off one of my shelves I found, for example, that David McCullough didn't think one was necessary for The Great Bridge, nor did Oliver Sacks for his autobiography On the Move. Good for them. I admire writers who can get right to the point. But when a writer deems an introduction necessary, it's best not to ignore it. If it's important to them, it may be important to us.

Introductions are rare in novels. There are often prologues, but they are a different beast. An author might write an introduction for a new edition of a successful novel first published 20 or 30 years earlier. Classic novels often have new introductions penned by professors of literature. The edition of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens that I read earlier this year has such an introduction. It helped me follow the novel, and students especially would be wise not to pass it over.