Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
The Need to Interpret Our Tragedy
Adam Kirsch writes about the novel and our current instant-information environment.
In our lifetime, no event has ignited the human instinct to find and create meaning like the 9/11 attacks. From the first moment, Americans spoke of the catastrophe as unprecedented in its enormous deadliness and sheer surprise; it was natural to feel that America had changed forever in a single morning. But on reflection, it’s clear that neither the scope nor the surprise nor the sheer malevolence of the 9/11 attacks was new in human history. Ten years later, it seems that the real uniqueness of 9/11 was, rather, the sheer speed with which we spectators moved from seeing the disaster to interpreting it.
Though many have written fictional accounts of the September 11 attack and some have argued against the need, Kirsch says the definitive 9/11 novel has yet to be written and may never be. (via Books, Inq.)
Outreach
Thabiti Anyabwile, a great pastor who is blogging with the Gospel Coalition, links to a story from a man who had a visit from a neighborhood Muslim family. “Muslims understand well that predominant and typically affluent cultures atrophy over small amounts of time due to decreased marriage and reproduction rates.”
He also points to another timely article on Islam, fear, and the Gospel’s demands. “It is easy for us to assume,like my friend did, that they are coming for us,” Ted Esler writes. “But we are not the reason for their anger.”
E-book: The Donzerly Light, by Ryne Douglas Pearson
I got this book free for my Kindle (it still is free, at least as of this writing), and I have to say it’s one of the better free books I’ve downloaded. Ryne Douglas Pearson is known as an author of techno-thrillers, but, as he explains in an Author’s Note, before he started in that genre he wrote The Donzerly Light
The time is the late 1990s. Jay Grady wakes, tied up and blindfolded, in a dark closet, with a cast on a broken leg. Rough hands lift him up and carry him to an interrogation room, where he is questioned by a man who does not seem to be a policeman. Jay was captured after being seen shooting a man to death. He does not deny the act. Once, we learn, he was a Wall Street celebrity, a young man with a gift for picking winning stocks, a mover on the way up. Then he suffered what looked like a psychotic break, and disappeared. For years he survived as a transient. Now here he is.
Jay hides nothing. His life was altered forever, he says, when he stopped one morning and gave money to a panhandler on Wall Street. The panhandler rewarded him with a “gift,” a form of magic that allowed him to identify rising stocks ahead of the market. The gift might almost have seemed a divine one, except that it led Jay into all the stereotypical excesses and acts of selfishness that so frequently go with being young and rich. Then, when his power changed in a terrifying way, he fled his old life. But he could not avoid a final showdown with the supernatural forces in which he’d dabbled.
I found The Donzerly Light (the title refers to a child’s misunderstanding of the line from the national anthem) an utterly fascinating story, worthy of comparison with Dean Koontz in his middle period, before he started adding explicitly Christian elements to his stories. (I might note that this book treats Christians with respect, and Jay, although he shares a motel room with an attractive woman drawn into his adventure, does not share a bed with her).
Fascinating, moving, with a genuine, page-turning mystery at its bottom, The Donzerly Light is a winner. If you have an e-book reader, I recommend it. Mild cautions for language and adult situations.
Photographer at WTC Ten Years Ago
“Photographer behind 9/11 ‘Falling Man’ retraces steps”–Richard Drew says, “I don’t like coming down here,” but he went with a Yahoo News reporter to the site of the World Trade Center “to retrace his steps for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, when he had watched dozens die through the lens of a Nikon DCS620,” to quote reporter Joe Pompeo.
Degeneration
I was going to review a book tonight, but I forgot my Kindle at work, and so can’t re-check my highlights. Ah well. This is the busiest bookselling week of the year, and I’m training a new assistant. That about exhausts my multitasking skills.
Our friend Ori Pomerantz directed me to this music video (sorry, embedding disabled) by a Quebecois musical group. I suppose I read my own beliefs into it, but it seems to me a succinct post mortem on the whole social history of the 20th Century.
Of course it’s a good thing that we have more options in our lives than our ancestors did. I take great pride, as a Christian pietist, in the part we played in creating an order where a man (or woman) doesn’t have to be exactly what his father (or her mother) was.
But I think we all sense that something has gone missing, too. We’re plants uprooted from the soil. We aren’t sure what we are, or where we fit in the scheme of things.
Something has been lost. Our great disagreements in this culture (I think) consist in deciding what particular things out of the past we need to carry with us as we go forward.
By the way, Ori lives in the Austin, Texas area, as does our friend Aitchmark. Let’s pray for everybody down there in the midst of the fire danger.
But That Was Before
How To Be a Writer
Harlan Coben talks shop on Speakeasy: “As much as we like to think otherwise, it isn’t the act. Writing isn’t about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.” He recommends three steps to becoming a writer: inspiration, perspiration, and desperation. These will make you a great writer, or perhaps cure you of the writing bug forever.
Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, by Melville Davisson Post
“Abner,” replied Dillworth, “how shall we know what justice is unless the law defines it?”
“I think every man knows what it is,” said Abner.
“And shall every man set up a standard of his own,” said Dillworth, “and disregard the standard that the law sets up? That would be the end of justice.”
“It would be the beginning of justice,” said Abner, “if every man followed the standard that God gives him.”
“But, Abner,” replied Dillworth, “is there a court that could administer justice if there were no arbitrary standard and every man followed his own?”
“I think there is such a court,” said Abner.
This passage, from a story entitled, “The Tenth Commandment,” in the book, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, by Melville Davisson Post (published 1918), encapsulates, in its moral libertarianism, much of what I found fascinating, and irritating, in this collection. I would like to recommend it for some readers, but have a hard time saying what kind of readers those might be.
“Uncle Abner” is a Virginian backwoodsman living some time in the early 19th Century (I was never able to work out exactly what period. The clues were all over the map.) Most of his stories are narrated by his hero-worshiping nephew (hence the “Uncle”). Abner is a Christian of unimpeachable (frankly overdrawn) integrity and intelligence, a man without official office who nevertheless acts as an investigator whenever a murder is discovered in the neighborhood. His reading of the human heart is infallible, his observations invariably correct, his judgments infallible.
He has little regard for human institutions of justice. When he discovers a murder he’s as likely to let the guilty party off as to turn him over to the authorities, sometimes on the basis of reasoning that seemed pretty obscure to me. He seems to believe that God’s justice is active and inescapable, not only in eternity but in the present, and regards himself as God’s instrument.
In short, he’s a man many of us would like to be, and is also kind of insufferable. In addition I think his theology weak (at one point he says that the devil “is very nearly equal, the Scriptures tell us, to the King of Kings.” The Scriptures tell us no such thing).
The puzzles are interesting, some of them noteworthy in the history of mystery writing. The stories reminded me of Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, but were less didactic in terms of theology, and the characters less rounded.
I’d like to recommend this book to adults, but I suspect most readers (even Christians) will find them a touch naïve in terms of realism. I’d like to recommend them for children, but the depictions of black people (mostly slaves at that point in time in Virginia) are not the kind I’d like to see children exposed to.
So make your own judgment.
Detroit
From our interdisciplinary desk for art and current events, we ask you to consider the chilling, almost fantastic photos in this essay, Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.