Literature

I love to read.  I don't often have all the time I want to do it, but there are definitely days when I'm up later than I ought to be trying to work through some extra pages.

I was struck this morning (now many mornings ago) listening to a lecture on Voyage of the Dawn Treader at how much reading really makes a difference in the way we understand life.  CS Lewis was an avid reader:  in fact, that's what he was best at.  Not writing, and certainly not theology, but reading.

There is a line in Hamlet where he says to Horatio:  "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Shakespeare rings true here.  Horatio's materialist bent cannot accommodate Hamlet speaking with his father's ghost.  Hamlet's response is a reminder that there is more to life than what we appropriate with our senses.

Literature is a sort of collected articulation of these things.  One of the reasons I love CS Lewis' writing, if not his theology, is because he says things the Right Way.  When he writes of Lucy in the Magician's House, he speaks to our universal experience:  the things that give us joy are the ones that illuminate what we have forgotten or tweak the craving for those "things in heaven and earth" that we have misplaced by an unrelenting philosophy of materialism.  His line in The Horse and His Boy ("I would rather be eaten by you than fed by anyone else") is one of those rare moments in which he captures the sense of Joy as a desire, a want, a lack, that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.

I complained a lot as a student in my English classes, especially when reading the classics (Greek tragedy drove me nuts, and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was not very well taught).  But in reading The Resurrection of the Son of God, I realize how much cultural information I missed.  While I think Wright is wrong to try to reconstruct Pauline theology in light of the gospels (especially since it seems likely that Paul was writing before the gospel authors), he makes a lot of really good points about the culture of the Greeks and Romans with respect to resurrection (specifically that it didn't happen, and that the concept of resurrection was a primarily physical one).

These days, contextualizing usually means taking the literary plot and making it relevant to a modern culture (context).  While making things relevant is great, it often happens that "relevant" is replaced with "relative" (as I discovered in our discussions on the aforementioned play—all we really talked about was the way that farmland was being sucked up by commercialization instead of understanding anything about the Bolshevik revolution, a subject about which I still have no knowledge).  What I really wish sometimes is that I actually had the context in which many of these great literary works were written.  I can't imagine how differently The Iliad and The Odyssey would read.

One of the things I wish I had more time to do is to simply read.  If I got bored of a book, to find out why it was written, to learn its history, and approach it again.  It's how I found Chesterton and others.  Milosz's poetry collection (A Book of Luminous Things) led me to his prose works, and I still consider his ABC's to be one of the more illuminating things I've read.  The same goes for Eliot:  his poetry (Love Song is pretty awesome) led me to his essays.  No one ever told us he was a Christian, or that his personal life was a real mess, or that he was accused of anti-Semitism.  Or that CS Lewis and friends used to make fun of him.  (I can imagine that Lewis, a champion of what we might consider some what more common literature, would have concurred with the characterization of Eliot's The Waste Land as "wilfully difficult.")


Berlinski's The Tour of the Calculus is one of the only math books that I've read that is so prosaic.  So prosaic, in fact, that it's overwrought.  But unlike most writing on the subject, he weaves biographical information into the discussion and manages to present the historical issues in a straight-forward fashion.  In other words, he actually motivates the calculus by connecting it to a shared heritage of Zeno's Paradoxes and other issues.  Gödel, Escher, Bach was similar, although his philosophy ramblings at the end were pretty problematic.


Similarly, the vignettes in Copleston's volumes on the history of philosophy were worthwhile.  They were short enough to read and helped provide an appreciation for the chain of philosophical thought through the ages.  This was one of my beaten-upon books during the long plane ride into Nairobi.  Most of it is lost in the recesses of my memory, but it will come back out so that I can finally make some headway in Maximus' essays.


In many ways, the people of my generation have lost a lot of this shared heritage, I think.  We live in an essentially mechanical world, so much so that the idea that humans are just machines (B. F. Skinner, anyone?) is pretty well accepted despite our (well-grounded) intuition that we aren't, actually.  One of the things I've always hoped is that my kids wouldn't just turn into engineers, but that they could understand at an earlier age all the stuff I never knew.  I like to think if I had I probably wouldn't have been such a jerk and idiot.  Not that I'm not anymore, but hopefully a little better.