A Litany of Humility. “From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.”
The Chess Machine, by Robert Löhr
For his first novel, accomplished German author and playwright Robert Löhr spins a remarkable yarn from an obscure historical incident. In 1770, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen revealed a clockwork device called the Mechanical Turk. It was a chess-playing automaton or at least was presented as such. In reality, it was a clever bit of gears and controls beneath the wooden façade of a stern Turkish chess master (about which Edgar Allen Poe writes in this essay, having witnessed the Turk many years later).
In The Chess Machine, Löhr uses that stone to produce a 300-page soup of deception, ambition, lust, loyalty, prejudice, and faith—with a touch of murder. The lead character is the man within the machine, the brilliant Tibor Scardanelli. Tibor’s religious worldview frames most the drama. When he is first offered a job as the automaton’s mind, he refuses it, citing the commandment to avoid false witness. Within a day his circumstances become so desperate that he runs to find Kempelen to accept the offer. From that point on, Tibor, a dwarf who had lived as an outcast of society, has to become non-existent, because no one can know that Kempelen has been associating with a man who could fit inside his new chess machine.
When he arrives at the workshop which is to be his entire world for several months, Tibor meets another outcast working with Kempelen, a Jew named Jakob whose woodcarving gives the Turk its mystic aura. The three men are a wild success everywhere they perform, which stirs up envy among the mechanicians who know it can’t be done and fear from priests and parishioners who believe it’s of the devil. The deception grows dangerous when a beautiful woman dies while alone with the machine. That’s more of a teaser than you’ll get from the video created by the book’s Dutch publisher.
Tibor causes the most trouble for himself when he sneaks away from Kempelen’s in-house arrest to breathe the wild air of the world. One time he gets caught up in a Viennese masquerade party. Another time he takes refuge with a somewhat deranged sculptor. In both cases, he is carried away by the lust of the flesh and deeply troubled by his sin. This is the most realistic conflict Löhr describes. Tibor is powerless over his sin, and he pleads for God’s absolution. Yet even while he prays, one time, his thoughts turn salacious. Horrified at himself, he stabs his legs with carving tools, hoping to pay for God’s forgiveness. I wish I could say he learned that forgiveness was already bought for him through Jesus Christ, but the story ends ambivalent on this point—perhaps leaving his faith at an altar, perhaps only leaving one faith tradition for another.
The Chess Machine winds up slowly and spins a dramatic finish. It isn’t a safe book (thinking of Association of Christian Retailer guidelines), but it is enjoyable and smart. Translator Anthea Bell did an excellent job bringing this work to English.
Getting the Kids to Sleep with Pachelbel
Kudos to the writer of the song, A Dad’s Lullabye. Great lyrics.
Dark night of the soul on a bright day
I’m happy to report that my TV has decent color again. I told you a couple weeks ago how a nearby lightning strike messed up its color, leaving the people with purple faces. The set’s internal degaussing function may have been gradually mproving the problem, but the progress was at a rate of about one pixel per start-up.
My renter persuaded me to take a magnet and pass it over the screen in the bad places. Not just a couple passes, but a real “scrubbing.” And behold, I’ve got my picture back.
Now if only there were anything worth watching on.
The weather today was wonderful (or so I surmised from looking out the library windows and checking the temperatures online). One of those ideal days—lightly clouded skies (though it was clouding up by the time I took my walk), neither too cold nor too hot—that you imagine when you’re young, thinking about what the future will be like. It’s never like that, of course, but sometimes you get a little of the weather.
The world is a-buzz today with news of the publication of letters from Mother Teresa, in which she expressed feelings that God was far away from her.
This is news?
Only to people who a) have never been serious Christians (granted, there are a lot of those) or b) have never read any serious Christian writers. Sure, you won’t get much about Dark Nights of the Soul from Joel Osteen or Benny Hinn, but try reading St. Augustine. Or Pascal. Or C.S. Lewis.
Make up your minds, folks—you can criticize us for being Pollyannas, out of touch with the harsh realities of life, or you can call us posers because we don’t always feel the joy of the Lord.
But you can’t have it both ways.
Language and Thinking
Does language frame our thinking? Stefanie blogs about it on So Many Books.
How to remove CD scratches with a banana.
I found this video by way of The Evangelical Outpost. Joe didn’t actually link to it, but he linked to something else that gave me a further link to this.
I haven’t tried it and can’t vouch for it. But it seemed too cool not to share.
Not much of a post, I know, but I gave you the Colebatch link this morning, and this evening I’m saving your CDs. Whaddya want from me?
The Next President: William Jennings Bryan?
I don’t have a favorite in the presidential primaries yet, and I’m growing more tolerant of all of them (except Ron Paul, whom I like as little as John McCain). So I’m not campaigning here. I’m just blogging. Dennis Ingolfsland points out some interesting commentary on Mike Huckabee, which calls him a reflection of William Jennings Bryan.
Yesterday In Coffee History
On 22 August 2001, The Trojan Room coffee pot was turned off. Now THAT was reality TV. I should put a coffee cam on BwB.
Colebatch on Christian resonances
Hal G. P. Colebatch wrote a great essay on Christian themes in Tolkien, Star Wars and Harry Potter for The American Spectator Online today.
C. S. Lewis is also involved (as a subject).
The weenie horror
Mowed the lawn tonight, for my evening exercise. The grass was kind of wet. I don’t like to mow wet grass as a rule, but they’re predicting more rain tomorrow and Friday, so if I don’t do it now I’ll have to hack my way through it with a machete (or my new saex), like Ramar of the Jungle.
Anybody out there remember Ramar of the Jungle? I actually recall it from re-runs, but it got re-run a lot. My primary memory of the show is how the characters would be hacking their way through the jungle (with machetes, not saexes), and somebody would pause and point off to the right or left. Then the film would (with extreme clumsiness; you could almost hear the projector clunk) switch to stock footage of lions or giraffes in the savannah. It appeared that they almost never went anywhere in the jungle except along the edge, where it bordered the savannah.
Which raised the question, why not just walk through the savannah, and save yourself all that hacking?
I wanted to link to this post by Gaius over at Blue Crab Boulevard. Partly because I think it’s a pretty clever comic pastiche of Conan Doyle, and partly because the news story that sparked it just makes me mad.
This, in my opinion, is the real problem with increasing government “compassion and care” in our lives. It put this kid’s parents in an impossible situation.
The law allows parents to do only one thing to discipline a kid – talk sternly to him. That’s it. Anything more would be child abuse and get them into Really Big Trouble.
So the only thing the neighbor who found the kid a nuisance could do, in a situation where Stern Talks weren’t working, was report him to the police.
And the police have only one weapon – they put people in jail. Which is what they did with this kid. It was insane, and I’ll bet everyone involved knew it was insane. But the law – the law intended to protect the child – left them with no other option.
This is what happens when the government becomes the parent. The world is full of horror stories about traditional families that abused and mistreated children (I have a story like that of my own). But that’s how freedom works. You get a small percentage of excellent homes, a large middle of middling homes, and a small percentage at the bottom of very bad stuff.
But when the government raises the kids, Churchill’s description of economic systems kicks in. He said Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, and Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.
Traditional families are an unequal distribution of good nurturing. But government parenting is the equal distribution of dysfunction. Has anybody raised in a government institution ever grown up well-adjusted?