Bethel McGrew offers a poem for Thanksgiving that begins this way:
Let me not waste the days You’ve given me.
The mornings I might sleep away, the nights
When all my fears are all that I can see,
Trapped in the glow of flickering blue lights.
She notes our Internet-driven fears and her personal ones, asking the Lord to revive her with His goodness.
Let me believe that this, my grateful prayer
Is not in vain. Lord, let me not despair.
Today’s Thanksgiving hymn is “We Gather Together,” a 1625 anonymous song, translated from the Dutch anthem “Wilt heden nu treden” by Theodore Baker. The melody is a popular sixteenth-century Dutch folk tune.
“… for the LORD your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory” (Deut 20:4 ESV).
Sheila had written the shortest letter, asking plainly for Scrabble, providing no alternative. They decided on a spinning globe of the world for Grace, who wasn’t sure what she wanted but had written out a long list. Loretta was not in two minds: if Santa would please bring Enid Blyton’s Five Go Down to the Sea or Five Run Away Together or both, she was going to leave a big slice of cake out for him and hide another behind the television.
Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, is a story about Bill Furlong, a hard-working father of five girls. He’s the man who keeps his 1980s Irish town, New Ross, warm, selling timber, coal, anthracite, and slack. It’s honest work that puts a roof over your head, though the windows may be drafty. He regularly remembers his childhood as the son of a single woman who worked for a kindly widow. Surely, he thinks, someone in town knows who his father is, if by nothing else than a strong resemblance. But no one has even suggested a possibility.
With the Christmas holidays coming and typical last-minute fuel orders to fulfill, Furlong makes a delivery that raises significant questions about his role as a man and member of the community.
I don’t know why I love Irish things. I think half of my family hails from Ulster, which probably means they were Scottish, but something provoked me as a teenager to define myself as being half-Irish (in the loose way many Americans talk about their heritage). All that to say, Keegan’s novella had cozy moments in both the Christmas atmosphere and the Irish dialogue. I found those pages nostalgic somehow. I bought the book wondering if the whole story would be that way.
No, this is a sparing, literary work that captures a few days of Bill Furlong’s life. He’s a man of few words, so a brief story like this fits him, leaving us with a good impression of him and perhaps the same questions he has. I don’t want to spoil the book by articulating those questions, but I will say they are relatively timeless and fit with the Christmas story, just as the title echoes the primary theme: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Mt 25:40 NKJV).
Photo by Dahlia E. Akhaine on Unsplash
Today’s hymn of humble reliance on the Lord comes from an Englishman who was devoted to Sunday School. William Freeman Lloyd (1791-1853) was born in Uley, Gloucestershire and worked in Oxford and London. The tune is an adaptation of an aria from Giovanni Paisiello’s opera La Molinara (The Miller Girl).
“But I trust in you, O LORD;
I say, ‘You are my God.’
My times are in your hand;
rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!” (Psalm 31:14–15 ESV)
1 My times are in Your hand;
my God, I wish them there!
My life, my friends, my soul, I leave
entirely to Your care.
2 My times are in Your hand
whatever they may be,
pleasing or painful, dark or bright,
as You know best for me.
3 My times are in Your hand;
why should I doubt or fear?
My Father’s hand will never cause
His child a needless tear.
4 My times are in Your hand:
Jesus, the Crucified;
those hands my cruel sins had pierced
are now my guard and guide.
5 My times are in Your hand;
such faith You give to me
that after death, at Your right hand
I shall for ever be.
A hundred years ago in Vietnam, when the French controlled their education, Edgar Allan Poe was believed to be “America’s literary giant.” They were familiar with eerie stories of supernatural beings, which a long-standing Chinese genre gave them, so discovering Poe was like grandkids discovering Mam-ma.
“Poe’s name evoked liberation of the mind, and he was praised as someone who had ascended from the mundane by the power of imagination,” Nguyễn Bình writes for Literary Hub, offering several examples of Poe’s influence on the nation’s literature.
In 1937, author Thế Lữ began writing detective fiction. “In the story “Những nét chữ” (Letter Strokes), [Hanoi-based hero] Lê Phong told the Watson-like narrator: ‘The stuff about reading people’s thoughts from their faces like Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle said… I’m only more convinced that they’re true. Because I just did so.'” (via Prufrock)
A couple more links for today.
Ted Gioia says the big guys are out to get independent creators. For example, Apple is squeezing Patreon. Google says it can’t find select websites. It’s ugly. Gioia writes, “I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.”
And is this the best sci-fi classic most fans have missed? “Though it routinely ends up on best-of-all-time lists, somehow, the 1974 science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye never actually seems to get read.” A quick glance at the first of 2200 reviews on Goodreads suggests the book hasn’t aged well.
Photo: Dinneen Standard station, Cheyenne, Wyoming. (John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)
Guest review by Adam H. Douglas
David Ignatius’ new novel, Phantom Orbit (2024), is like a Zen koan asking: When is a thriller not a thriller?
Let me explain.
Those of you familiar with Mr. Ignatius know he is a renowned reporter for the Washington Post who writes a twice-weekly column there. He is also the author of several works of fiction, mostly thrillers. Personally, I wasn’t familiar with his creative writing until I picked up this new novel.
As you might expect, his writing skills are very good. The man can craft the textures of a wide variety of global cultures and wield national idioms with a time-honed and deft ability. His professionalism shines through on every page.
That’s the good part.
On the flipside, this was a frustrating, meandering read that I would’ve given up on about a quarter of the way through if not for a sense of masochistic curiosity that made me wonder how long it would remain so pointless.
The story of Phantom Orbit follows three characters over three decades, from the mid-90s to the current time.
Our first hero is Ivan Vladimirovich Volkov, a one-time student of astronomy and astrophysics at Tsinghua University (Beijing), who is feeling the effects of the dissolution of Soviet Russia. As a young man studying hard, he hooks up with a visiting American woman named Edith Ryan—our second heroine. The two have an intense romantic relationship that ends in a tearful separation.
Ivan greatly regrets the breakup yet wonders if he might’ve dodged a bullet. After all, there were subtle indications that the young woman might’ve been a CIA operative.
Our third character is Professor Cao Lin, a distinguished researcher and member of the Academy of Sciences who eventually becomes head of a committee on “special projects” that reports to the Central Military Commission. Essentially, he’s there to get China’s spy/intelligence space program working, including attacking the Americans by whatever means they can manage.
Phantom Orbit commits what I consider to be one of the most grievous sins for thriller novels (or indeed any novel genre if you get right down to it): Failing to follow through on its promises.
The book is marketed as a taut page-turning thriller that is part The Martian, part The Da Vinci Code. The dust jacket teases us with the story of a Russian student (Ivan) stumbling upon an “unsolved puzzle” contained in the writings of the famous 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Ivan brings this puzzle to a prominent scientist within China’s space program, expressing his determination to find the solution that could have “significant implications for space warfare.”
Sounds intense and dynamic, right? Moreover, the book’s prologue is practically textbook-format for attracting thriller aficionados. Here’s a summary:
Continue reading Phantom Thriller: Review of Phantom Orbit by David IgnatiusToday’s hymn is a new one from the great Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. “My Heart Is Filled with Thankfulness” was completed in 2003. The video above is a 2020 evensong version. The lyric is still copyrighted, but it is displayed in the video.
“I will give to the LORD the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the LORD, the Most High” (Ps 7:17 ESV).
Over the past several days, I’ve looked for peaceful, beautiful images or videos to share on Twitter in an effort to calm people down. No doubt dozens of readers had a momentary sigh because of it. Not a long enough sigh to like the tweets. Of course not. That would be too much like making eye contact on the street.
But I have tried to share peace on Twitter, the primary social media I use, because what Thomas Kidd says about news consumption is true. “News Anxiety Is a Waste of Time.”
He recommends dialing back your daily news calories to almost nothing, giving this detail on contextual reporting. “Newspapers are generally better at telling readers what’s going on – normally with some hours or days of time to digest events – than the insta-reactions of cable tv and social media.” Add to that good magazines and podcasts, like the good people at World News Group.
A 24-hour news cycle should not be the soundtrack of our day. Let’s set it aside and take up good and praise-worthy things instead.
For an All Saints hymn today, let’s meditate on “Shall We Gather at the River” by Philadelphia-born minister Robert Lowry (1826-189). The Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers praises his musical work.
“His melodies are sung in every civilized land, and many of his hymns have been translated into foreign tongues. While preaching the Gospel, in which he found great joy, was his life-work, music and hymnology were favorite studies, but were always a side issue, a recreation.”
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:1–2 ESV)
1 Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod;
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God?
Refrain:
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
2 On the margin of the river,
Washing up its silver spray,
We will walk and worship ever,
All the happy golden day. [Refrain]
3 Ere we reach the shining river,
Lay we ev’ry burden down;
Grace our spirits will deliver,
And provide a robe and crown. [Refrain]
4 Soon we’ll reach the shining river,
Soon our pilgrimage will cease;
Soon our happy hearts will quiver
With the melody of peace. [Refrain]
Douglas Murray discusses the success of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and its failure of as both a concept and a conclusion from the trail of Adolf Eichmann.
“Together with Eichmann’s contemporary attempts at memoir-writing—which were known about by the time of the trial—an Eichmann entirely different from Arendt’s emerges. Wonder of wonders, it is the Eichmann that the world knew existed until Hannah Arendt came along.”
He wasn’t “a mere bureaucrat” but a man who was proud to be a part of the murder of six million Jews. Nazis in Argentina wanted to believe the Holocaust was a hateful lie. “To Eichmann, these efforts to minimize the Holocaust were offensive—something like spitting on his life’s work. Eichmann knew that the six-million figure was accurate, and he seems to have only realized gradually that his audience was hoping for something quite different from him.”
Murray then describes the use of evil banality by contemporary journalists as a way to wave away the acts of terrorists.
“Pure evil. Terrible evil. Unfathomable evil—all of these things for sure. But ‘banal’? No—nothing could be further from the truth. And yet today, the idea of pure evil seems unavailable to many cultured minds. Perhaps it is too theological. Or perhaps we think such terms come from a metaphysics that we have abandoned as insufficiently subtle for our more enlightened times.”
(Photo of Eichmann trail by Israeli GPO photographer/ Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
