Month: December 2012

Tim Falconer notices that more and more of his friends are "orchestrating their own farewells":

One friend arranged everything: the place (a suburban golf club where she’d hosted several successful breast cancer fundraisers), the time (Friday after work), the speakers, the musicians. I know she would have been thrilled if she’d been able to make it.

As we seek to transform a traditional, and routine, ritual into something a little more personal, funeral directors are scrambling to keep up. Suzanne Scott, executive director of the Funeral Services Association of Canada, says her members are offering video streaming for out-of-towners, adding reception areas and even seeking liquor licences. A home in Saskatchewan now offers a bed for the dead instead of a casket. Mostly, though, they’re responding to families and friends who are dreaming up their own twists. The funeral procession for a Tim Hortons habitué, for example, included a coffee run at a drive-thru.

Reviewing Listening for Madeleine, a collection of interviews conducted by Leonard S. Marcus about Madeleine L’Engle, Ruth Franklin reveals the woman behind A Wrinkle in Time. On the primacy of religion in her life:

One of Marcus’s interviewees recalls glancing at L’Engle’s notebook during a meeting to discover that she was writing a prayer. Another person calls her the greatest preacher he had ever heard. Her piety should not come as a surprise: A Wrinkle in Time is a fairly obvious allegory of the struggle between good and evil, and the Austin chronicles allude often to the family’s Christianity. One of L’Engle’s editors muses that her books always reflected “her very deep faith . . . embedded in a great story with great characters,” but the reverse can also be true: L’Engle’s characters are embedded in her faith, which is the real raison d’être of her novels. She liked to speak of her writing as an “incarnational act,” an inseparable part of her religious life.

How her faith complemented her fantastical writing:

In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg’s mother explains that the sudden arrival of Mrs Whatsit did not surprise her because she is able to have “a willing suspension of disbelief.” The phrase comes from Coleridge, who suggested that a little reality infused into a fantastical narrative helped to convince the reader—a lesson L’Engle learned well. The suspension of disbelief is also what links literature and religion, both of which require a leap of faith as the first step. L’Engle’s friends often describe her as “open to grace”—the chance encounter or random sign that offers an entryway to mystery. It’s a quality that most of us start with and gradually lose. Her faith-based novels may now sometimes seem to go too far, either into the fantastic realistic or the realistic fantastic. But back when we needed them, they were just right.

Urban and rural parallels:

(Hat tip: Ignant)

Walter Russell Mead uses Advent, the season of the liturgical calender when Christians "wait" for the coming of the Messiah at Christmas, to ponder how we read the Bible:

[These stories] validity doesn’t depend on whether there “really was” a prodigal son who returned to his father, or whether police reports in Jericho would corroborate the story about the Samaritan. The parable of the Good Samaritan doesn’t lose its force if archaeologists can’t find the receipt for the innkeeper’s bill.

Those examples of Jesus’ actual method of teaching—of God’s process of revelation—condition the way I and many other Christians down through the centuries have read the holy books. As far as I can make out, this is the tradition in which C.S. Lewis read the Bible. It is a serious but not always literal approach. It doesn’t run around with a crowbar gleefully smashing the credibility of biblical narratives, but it doesn’t assume that every book or passage of the Bible aspires to the same kind of literal Truth. The famous story of Jonah and the whale reads a lot more like a parable than like a newspaper article; for many Christians it’s enough to see that God teaches us in parables and stories in the Bible, just as Jesus did during his ministry.

David Wood dissects our romantic notions of the writer's workspace – and why they often aren't as idiosyncratic as we'd like to imagine:

For the most part, these buildings are small, plain, unprepossessing and sparsely furnished. This poses a problem for my first hypothesis — that the fascination of these dwellings rests on the hope that we may glean something of the secret of the writer’s genius from the creative space to which they habitually retreated. For we might well conclude from Wittgenstein’s famously almost empty college room in Cambridge (in which he had a deck chair), and indeed from the plainness of so many of these huts, that far from giving expression to, or feeding in some revealing way, the otherwise inaccessible inner workings of the brilliant mind, they reflect a disdainful resistance to the importance of surroundings, an asceticism, an architectural tabula rasa. This would explain why some people work well on planes, in hotel rooms, library carrels, even monastic and indeed prison cells. (Boethius, Bunyan, Gramsci and Negri all wrote significant works while imprisoned.) They are relieved of distraction. Sartre was famous for writing in the corner of Les Deux Magots – cafe privacy, where the white noise of conversation and cutlery damps down distracting input, fashioning a creative cocoon in the midst of the world.

Mira Ptacin's pilgrimmage to E.B. White's rather plain writing shed furthers that view:

The cabin is plain and encloses only what a writer truly needs: the urge to communicate something, the means to record words, and solitude. There is the woodburning stove White used during the cold winter months, and in a very old Abercrombie & Fitch box, now used as a shelf, are a pair of loafers that were there before the new tenants moved in, a box of sharpened pencils, and an old tin can full of rusty paperclips.

(Photo by Nomadic Lass)

Adam C. English, the author of a new book on St. Nicholas, describes the man as an "every saint" who appealed to the common Christian:

Many saints are biblical saints, or they're usually remembered because they were martyred or they performed some tremendous miracle. But Nicholas stands out because he didn't do supernatural miracles. He wasn't martyred. He was more of a social activist, politician, businessman, lawyer, judge, and protector.

English goes on:

He also was a man of God who stood up for his faith, who challenged pagans, who was willing to confront people. Into the Middle Ages, he's depicted using the whip against Christians who have fallen astray. He may bring punishment as well as good things—to determine, in other words, whether we've been "naughty or nice." We tend to downplay this side of him—a true and faithful judge of character and someone who is standing for the faith.

Spurred by Robert Bellah's recent volume of essays, Mark Vernon asks if we're living in a second Axial age, a time of unorthodox, but invigorating, religious and philosophical experimentation. He describes the first Axial Age this way:

The first Axial Age, it is said, ran across the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE. It marked a transformative time in human experience, broadly accepted now by sociologists of religion, which can be summarized as an inward turn and a discovery of transcendence. So, in this period the Hebrew prophets declared that God was more concerned with attitudes of heart than with bloody rituals in the Temple. Not long after, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – that extraordinary procession of master and pupil – "brought philosophy down from the heavens": they were gripped by the nature of the human condition. The Buddha probably lived at the same time as Socrates, attempting reform of the religions of India by his attention to human suffering and desire. Confucianism and Daoism were born too, creating between them a rich dialectic of humanist rationalism and spiritual non-rationalism in China.

Munich, Germany, 10.50 am

In a recent interview, the Austrialian novelist Thomas Keneally declared that "Fiction was king. Now it isn't." Alan Jacobs reflects on the debate over Keneally's comment:

The idea that the cinema displaces fiction, in multiple ways, goes back at least to Walter Benjamin. Adorno and Horkheimer were complaining about fiction’s displacement by the “culture industry” in the 1940s — though they saw that the nineteenth-century novel began this process. … For a few — relatively speaking, a very few — fiction will always be king. But it’s impossible to imagine it having the kind of stature again that it had 150 years ago.

D.G. Myers summarizes fiction's place in the contemporary scene:

If fiction is no longer king the reason is not, as Tom Wolfe once prophesied, that something else has superseded it as “the number one genre.” There are no more genres (a concept as square as the novel). There are mashups; there are porous boundaries between high and low, popular and serious, literature and its negation; but there are no longer any distinct kinds. Indeed, there is a creeping horror of distinctions as such. If fiction is no longer king the reason is that the faith which sustained it for so long, the belief system which led writers and readers alike to defer to its supremacy, has disappeared. What has disappeared is any confidence in the power of the word.