Month: October 2013

Reviewing a new edition of John Updike’s short stories, Scott Dill praises the late writer’s attention to the surface of things:

What shines so pervasively in his short stories is the ability to burnish everyday routines with those carefully chosen adjectives. He may not convince us with weighty theology, but he does give us a grammar for praise. When our sins harden us to God’s goodness, Updike not only reminds us of it, but he surprises us with specific gifts, faithfully retrieving them for us to taste and see. In these stories, the famous chronicler of adulterous affairs (twice profiled on the cover of the magazine Time) appears less as a lascivious provocateur than as a patient archeologist, polishing each fragment of human desire for our inspection. True, several stories explore the moral failings of marriages gone awry while simultaneously celebrating infidelity’s sexual pleasures. Yet this is a function of what we might call, with all due respect, Updike’s shallowness. In one of the adulterous stories a man tells his lover, as he ends their affair, “For me it was wonderful to become a partner in your response to textures. Your shallowness, as my wife calls it [ … ] broke a new dimension into my hitherto inadequately superficial world.” When I was recently asked if I could justify having students read Updike’s sensual descriptions, I should have responded that such shallow sensuality would do them good.

From the newly-released Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume II:

We deal in a curious and laughable confusion of notions concerning God. We divide Him in two, bring half of Him down to an obscure and infinitesimal corner of the world to confer salvation upon a little colony of Jews—and only Jews, no one else—and leave the other half of Him throned in heaven and looking down and eagerly and anxiously watching for results. We reverently study the history of the earthly half, and deduce from it the conviction that the earthly half has reformed, is equipped with morals and virtues, and in no way resembles the abandoned, malignant half that abides upon the throne. We conceive that the earthly half is just, merciful, charitable, benevolent, forgiving, and full of sympathy for the sufferings of mankind and anxious to remove them.

Apparently we deduce this character not by examining facts, but by diligently declining to search them, measure them, and weigh them. The earthly half requires us to be merciful, and sets us an example by inventing a lake of fire and brimstone in which all of us who fail to recognize and worship Him as God are to be burned through all eternity. And not only we, who are offered these terms, are to be thus burned if we neglect them, but also the earlier billions of human beings are to suffer this awful fate, although they all lived and died without ever having heard of Him or the terms at all. This exhibition of mercifulness may be called gorgeous. We have nothing approaching it among human savages, nor among the wild beasts of the jungle.

Michael J. Altman pays tribute to religious historian Mircea Eliade, whose comparative approach “dominated the field of religious studies in the latter third of the twentieth century in America”:

Eliade refuses to explain religion. Rejecting the reductionism of psychoanalysis or sociology, Eliade demands that religion be understood “on its own terms.” We do not explain religion, rather, the historian of religion describes and categorizes religion. The historian of religions looks for symbols, myths, and archetypes through comparison. Because the sacred is sui generis, unique, irreducible, we should seek understanding, interpretation, and pattern. Explanation is anathema.

Philosopher Charles Foster considers how foreign we are to ourselves:

I can know, in a scientific sense, almost nothing about myself. I have no real insight into my motives or influences. I say that I have views and desires, but I have no way of saying whether they are really mine, rather than parroted. … Those close to me probably know me better than I know myself. At least they constantly surprise me by telling me things about me that I would never have suspected, or never had the psychological ability to identify or acknowledge. But, although their view of me is more accurate than my own, it’s still woefully incomplete and distorted.

As a consequence, Foster says, “we should approach humans with awe”:

The Judaeo-Christian tradition insists that humans are made in the image of God. God, in that tradition, is unknowably vast. Unknowability and vastness generate a vertiginous awe whenever we look at God and they should, by extension, generate a similar awe when we look at creatures moulded in his/her/its image. You don’t have to accept the notion of the Imago Dei or any other theological principle to conclude that human beings should be viewed this way. You just have to be baffled. I’m unfathomable, you’re unfathomable: stand back in wonder, confusion and reverence.

“Religion … is not, as some would persuade us, an interest attached to life, a subsidiary activity; nor is it a power which governs life from the outside with a, no doubt divine, but certainly incomprehensible, sanction for its authority. It is simply life itself, life dominated by the belief that its value is in the present, not merely in the past or the future, that if we lose ourselves we lose all. ‘Very few men, properly speaking, live at present,’ writes Swift, ‘but are providing to live another time.’ Such seems to me an irreligious life, the life of the world. The man of the world is careless of nothing save himself and his life; but to the religious man, life is too short and uncertain to be hoarded, too valuable to be spent at the pleasure of others, or the past or of the future, too precious to be thrown away on something he is not convinced is his highest good. In this sense, then, we are all, at moments, religious…

A religious revival is sometimes preached and spoken of as if it could be quite independent of other conditions and without relation to anything save, perhaps, a stricter moral behaviour. But, since the religious life, in the view I have tried to represent it, is synonymous with life itself at its fullest, there can be no revival of religion which is not a revival of a more daring and more sensitive way of live. And such a life may as easily be stifled under a mountain of moral prejudice, as dissipated by moral experiment – perhaps more easily,” – Michael Oakeshott, “Religion and the World,” in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life.

After detailing what he’d like his funeral to be like, from his casket to his suit, Wes Janisen gets to the heart of the matter:

I suppose I could continue, could tell you that Panda Express should cater the wake, could go into the kinds of flower arrangements I’d approve of and how to handle any awkward speeches from drunk family members — but that would really be more for your comfort than it would be of any importance to me. I guess that’s really what funerals are all about though, aren’t they, appeasing the living more than the dead? We hold these ceremonies for people we loved and we talk about “what they would have wanted,” but at the end of the day it’s our own peace of mind we’re looking for. Death is so heinously incomprehensible that we living folk go to elaborate lengths to give our dearly departed a proper send-off, but I can’t help but feel we’d skip it all if only we knew what came next. After all, the person in the casket never finds out if their funeral doesn’t go well; they don’t hear the priest mispronounce their name, they don’t sit through the embarrassing cat talk — they’re way too busy being dead, whatever you imagine that entails (sweet oblivion, golfing with God, a new life as a llama at a petting zoo?)

It is this line of thinking which leads me to the final instruction for my funeral: no matter what happens, no matter how badly it goes, don’t sweat it too much. Life is so full of serious, so full of tribulation; death seems like a great opportunity to have a no-pressure gathering of friends and family.