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Lives of the Saints: From Mary and St. Francis of Assisi to John XXIII and Mother Teresa (2001)
by Richard P. McBrien
646 pages - HarperSanFrancisco
'Lives of the Saints' is a fairly common moniker for a book or series of books, and there's a number of works that take that title (the most famous in english being the work of Alban Butler, which in a recent edition took up 12 volumes). This particular book is a fairly recent attempt at a single-volume collection.
There is introductory material at the beginning that takes a look at the role of saints, and the history of sainthood. As the author states, "The saints confirm us in the hope that holiness is an achievable goal; they manifest holiness in the concrete texture of ordinary human existence. They live in history, and are shaped by it, and, in turn, often shape it as well. Consequently, they function as 'the initiators and the creative models of the holiness which happens to be right for, and is the task of, their particular age. They create a new style; they prove that a certain form of life and activity is a really genuine possibility; they show experimentally that one can be a Christian even in 'this' way; they make such a type of person believable as a Christian type.'" Material at the end of the book provides more historical data, as well as various charts and lists, such as those of patron saints.
But the main body of the book is the biographical sketches of the saints themselves. They are organized by date, and correspond to the feast days. On some days only one person is highlighted, while others have three or four different biographies. The entries can range from the length of a paragraph to several pages. Though the emphasis is on those saints recognized by the Catholic Church, the book also features figures that play significant roles in other churches, such as the Eastern Orthodox, or various Protestant denominations, and the author even includes some non-Christian saints, such as Gandhi.
I've read about a quarter of the profiles so far, and usually try to keep up with the real calendar. It's a decent book, but to be honest the main reason I bought it is that it was remaindered at a book store, and if I'd done a bit of research before my purchase I might have bought another book that covers similar territory. Occasionally the opinions of the author do sneak into the text, in terms of praising people he agrees with, and attacking those he does not - I would have much preferred a more neutral author. Also, some of the profiles read as being very dry and a bit dull, to the point where a lot of the times you wonder why this person was declared a saint at all.
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Lynch on Lynch (1997)
edited by Chris Rodley
269 pages - Faber and Faber
'I'd like to bite my paintings, but I can't because there's lead in the paint.' (pg.18) A book-length interview with film director David Lynch, which also touches upon his other art, such as painting, which is actually what he started out doing. This edition goes up to the film Lost Highway, though apparently there is a new edition out that interviews him further about more recent projects. I haven't seen all of Lynch's work, and I can't say that I like everything I've seen, but I found it really rewarding to read what he says about his work and his methods. One day I would love to meet him and we could go to a Big Boy diner and have a couple of milkshakes and have conversations like this: 'I happen to like electricity but I'm not really wild about the new plugs in America. I like forties and thirties electricity. And I like smokestack industry. I like fire, and I like smoke, and I like the noise. But sounds have become little.' (pg.73) It would be awesome. 'Well, film is really voyeurism. You sit there in the safety of the theatre, and seeing is such a powerful thing. And we want to see secret things, we really want to see them. New things. It drives you nuts you know! And the more new and secret they are, the more we want to see them.' (pg.145)
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Dreaming to Some Purpose (2004)
by Colin Wilson
402 pages - Arrow Books
"When I was sixteen, I decided to commit suicide," are the first words in the autobiography. However, Wilson, born in a working-class family, decides to put the poison down because some deeper part of him realizes the ridiculousness of the suicide impulse. He goes on to tramp around after finishing high school, until he becomes an overnight sensation at the age of 24 with the publication of The Outsider, a philosophical book that is still by far his most notable work, and in a way defined the rest of his career. The backlash wasn't long in coming, and he has spent most of the many decades since then living in a house in the Cornwall countryside and churning out many thousands of words each year, publishing books in the areas of philosophy, crime, history, fiction, psychology, and really any other subject for which he will be cut a cheque.
I've read quite a few books by Wilson, and I'm always struck at the combination of talent and crackpot-ism. This is also a book that's quite good as an autobiography, but there are things holding it back from being great. There's a lot of detail about Wilson's life (including waaaay too much information about his sex life), but it is mostly told as a casual relation of events, you never feel like you are there in the past; you're not transported back fully into that time. I think this is because Wilson is quite distanced from most of his emotions, which is also a problem with his theories, where he says that people must always keep the rational mind in charge, and he categorizes the times when we follow emotion as potentially disastrous and horrific. Like a lot of people, he basically thinks that everyone is like himself, which makes his ideas easy to dismiss when he throws out very simplistic models of the way human beings function.
But this is still an excellent portrait of a real writer's life, albeit one on the fringes who is living advance-to-advance (though I somewhat suspect that there is a part of the author that thrives off constantly being overdrawn at the bank). And when you look at the place that Wilson came from, you have to admire the life he has built for himself, and acknowledge that he may have found the best of all possible options. Also, in a modern world filled with nihilistic thought and many cultural figures that hold humanity in contempt, and wallow in their conceit that everything is meaningless, it's wonderful to have someone who builds his work on a cornerstone that affirms the basic goodness of existence.
I'll also add a link to a very amusing interview with Wilson about his autobiography.
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The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (1948)
by Thomas Merton
467 pages - Harvest
This is the autobiography of Thomas Merton, from his birth until the time when he took his vows at a Cistercian monastery at the age of 33. Merton was born in France, but in his early years his family moved often between France and Britain and the US. His mother died when he was young, and his father also passed away before he entered university. Merton first attended Cambridge University in England, but because of his freewheeling ways he was made to understand that he did not have a future there, and so he moved back to America and enrolled at Columbia. It was during his time at Columbia that he became more and more drawn to the Catholic Church, finally converting and being baptized. In his post-university years he did some teaching as he tried to discover his calling, finally becoming a Trappist monk and closing himself up in monastic duties for the rest of his life; as he put it, "the four walls of my new freedom." His only sibling, a brother, died soon after Thomas had entered the monastery, while fighting with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II.
This is quite a remarkable book, and the above summary doesn't do much justice to it at all. People have compared it favourably to St. Augustine's Confessions, but I thought that while that book was somewhat dull and obtuse, this one was full of life and immediacy. But perhaps that's just because Merton's times are so much closer to our own. Merton does not talk down to the reader, but he doesn't try to make things too complicated either. You can see that he's intelligent and well-read, but not without his faults or weaknesses. Perhaps the book's greatest strength is that it doesn't come across on simply an intellectual level, or as a recorded series of events, but with the full force and richness of life experience. Which is what Merton thought literature should truly be.
The book was written with Merton still in the first fervour of his conversion and his decision to dedicate his life to being a Trappist, and so it can come off as very fiery and a bit absolutist at times; and I think I was helped by my earlier reading of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which was a biography of four American Catholic writers, including Merton, and illuminated some of the things Merton continued to struggle with, drawing especially from his journals which were published after his death. Merton certainly wasn't perfect, and he sometimes seems even quite flaky and restless, but the great advantage of the sacrifices he made and of his works is that they afford the possibility for the reader to recognize some common ground in each individual soul's struggle towards the light.
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The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son (2007)
by David Gilmour
247 pages - Thomas Allen Publishers
I mostly know David Gilmour from the time when I was a kid and would stay up with my parents on Fridays to watch Dallas and then the CBC news at 10, where he used to wrap up the week with a movie review. He hasn't been on TV much lately, but last year did win an award for a novel (which I gave a try at reading before it won, and I found it dreadful - it read like a rough outline). This particular book is a memoir of the time when Gilmour's son is 16 and is having a very bad time at school - flunking out because of spotty attendance and zero interest. Gilmour thinks that his son is going to soon drop out anyway, so he makes a deal with him that he'll allow him to quit school and not get a job as long as his son watches 3 movies a week with him, and they spend some time discussing the films before and after viewing them.
The film part of this book doesn't go too badly, as you can understand how it's really just a mechanism for them to spend time together. Even then, you don't really get much out of the discussion in the book, and Gilmour seems to be the sort of person that puts a big stock in the performances of actors, 'moments' and 'cool' stories. Personally, I think acting is the least important part of filmmaking (though that's separate from casting). Yes, films are a very powerful medium that can have a profound effect on us, but there's very little exploration of what greater effect films might have than just killing time.
But, there's another strong thread in this book, and it's the one that's at the top of my mind both because it's more prominent at the end of the book, and because it's very, very infuriating. Gilmour's son Jesse goes through a couple of relationships with women, and when the break-ups happen not only is he a neurotic whiner, but his father becomes a total enabler because he hasn't ever grown up himself. The author's fatherly advice seems to consist of unquestioningly approving of his son obsessing about the current personal life of ex-girlfriends months after they've broken up, because he acts the exact same way. This must be how stalkers start. Well, his other classic piece of advice is, "You can get over this girl, but you can't get over her with cocaine." (direct quote - pg.228).
This book, like it's author, is most of all just really shallow and lacking in substance. It's an illustration of the sort of things that result when people hold 'coolness' as their highest value (and really, I think Gilmour's unfitness for parenthood is demonstrated by not smothering Jesse to death in his sleep the moment he showed any inclination to be a rapper). The moment near the end where Gilmour goes to the hospital to visit Jesse after he overdosed on cocaine after learning that an ex-girlfriend slept with her ex-boyfriend is so infuriating, because Gilmour just goes in and is all weepy and identifying with his son, when I really wanted him to storm in there and shake Jesse by the lapels and say "You dont own other people, it's your own stupid fault you did this to yourself, and after I'm done with you you're gonna wish that coke gave a fatal heartattack."
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The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (1987)
by Ingmar Bergman, translated by Joan Tate
312 pages - Hamish Hamilton
Film and stage director Ingmar Bergman died earlier this week, and I thought to myself if I don't use this opportunity to read this book (that I bought used several years ago), I am never going to get to it. The first few chapters start off with his childhood, but pretty soon the chronology breaks up, as some chapters are still about his youth, but experiences much further on in his career are interspersed in something of a random order.
The early childhood section is notable because there are some very unusual early memories from when most people would admit they cannot remember anything, and a lot of the things that Bergman has 'recovered' from memory sound less like real life and more like Freudian archetypes; scenarios that would be suggested in books and therapy sessions. It's also amusing how Bergman slams others for having no psychological insight into themselves, yet in every other chapter he is leaving one family he has established and starting up another, only to find the same misery.
The main thought going through my mind reading this book was that I wondered if some people are simply destined to have a happier life than others; or, that is to say, have a more cheerful attitude to life. Bergman comes across as someone who very clearly sees life as essentially meaningless, ugly, horrific, and he seemingly cannot relate any experience without finding the ugliness, dirt, and misery it contains. I really can't relate to this at all.
I've seen quite a few of Bergman's films, but overall I do have to admit that I probably dislike as least as many as I've enjoyed. At the start of the book I thought that at least some of the ways he described situations and atmospheres was worthwhile, but as the book went on it became sloppier (one short chapter is clearly just 'Put in some names of famous non-Swedish people you've met, even if it was only for half an hour') and more 'poetic' (in a cringe-worthy way) and by the end I realized I didn't get much out of the book at all.
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Albrecht Durer: 1471-1528: The Genius of the German Renaissance (2006)
by Norbert Wolf
96 pages - Taschen
This brief book displays many of the paintings, drawings, etchings, woodcuts, and other works of Albrecht Durer. The accompanying text is competent, but didn't really engage me or provide much sparkle. I do like some of Durer's work, such as his famous drawings of a hare and a rhinoceros (done without ever seeing one in real life), but some of the other stuff leaves me cold. Still, a good introduction, not too brief or too overwhelming.
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Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple (1998)
by Deborah Layton
309 pages - Anchor Books
Deborah Layton came from a well-off, highly cultured family. Her mother's side of the family were non-religious Jews who fled the rise of Nazism in Germany, while her father was a prestigious university professor before he took a job with the US military working with chemical weapons. Deborah was a very rebellious, troubled youth, but in her late teens she found the structure she needed by becoming involved with the Peoples Temple, headed by Jim Jones. Other members of her family were pulled into the church too, before and after her, and Deborah become a trusted operative (as well as victim) of Jones, stashing away millions of dollars in secret accounts, participating in publicity and intimidation campaigns, and building the blackmailing database. She eventually flew down to the 'Promised Land' of Jonestown in Guyana and became a prisoner in the horrific forced-labour camp. Re-gaining a bit of the trust of Jones, she was able to go on a mission to Guyana's capital after five months, where she made her escape, despite the (purposeful?) bungling of the American embassy. Her decision to go public with her concerns once she returned to the US is part of what prompted congressman Leo Ryan to investigate Jonestown in person, where he and several reporters were killed and then almost 1000 people went through with their well-rehearsed mass suicide plans. I was motivated to read this after watching the documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple.
This is an incredibly gripping and engaging book. It's written in a style that is a lot like a novel, and much of it is conversations between the author and others, which are re-created from memory and from many volumes of tapes which were made immediately after her escape. I suppose in a few spots the conversation seems to be 'better than real', but for the most part I'm sure it at least represents the core truth of events, and doesn't seem to be needlessly exaggerated. The final escape may be related in a suspenseful way, but it's also very muddled and confused, and I suppose Layton was trying to relate her mindset at the time, though at the end it also does bring up a question of how much of the actions of the American embassy might have been trying to stall her departure from Guyana.
One thing I found quite interesting is the minimal role that religion seemed to play in the actual life of the members of Peoples Temple. Though Jim Jones called himself 'Reverend' and occasionally related stories from the Bible, he considered religion 'the opiate of the masses' and most of his spiritual ideas that he ingrained in his followers had to do with auras, mind-reading, staged 'healings', and a vague concept of reincarnation. People such as Mao, Lenin, Che Guevara and Castro were held up as heroes, and Deborah Layton and others believed that when they were setting up blackmail lists, taking away medications from the elderly, working long days in the fields while the Temple had millions in the bank, and torturing those who didn't follow the rules, it was all for the glory of socialism. In an ironic sort of way, the psychosis and lies and degradation and murder of Jonestown closely resembled many of the other communist utopias set up around the world.
Anyhow, a really great book in which you very vividly get to spend some time in another person's shoes.
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Searching for Bobby Orr (2006)
by Stephen Brunt
295 pages - Alfred A. Knopf
Bobby Orr is considered, along with Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe, to be one of the three greatest hockey players of the modern era. Emerging from Parry Sound in Ontario's near-north, he revolutionized the defenceman's position and brought 2 Stanley Cups to the Boston Bruins, though he was plagued with bad knees almost from the beginning, which eventually forced him to retire at age 30. He also became a professional athlete at the dawn of the age of the sports agent and the player union, exemplified by Orr's brash agent, Alan Eagleson, who would later serve time in jail for defrauding players.
I usually stay away from books about sports, because they're usually written for the sort of person that might read a couple of books a year, written in the tone of a tabloid newspaper or talk-radio. But Stephen Brunt is a thoughtful sports columnist, and this book has gotten a lot of good press, so I thought it would be a worthwhile read. Bobby Orr declined any involvement, and none of his close friends or family members were involved either, so most of it is constructed from records of the time, and whatever interviews the people involved have given over the years.
It starts out as an engaging read, but at the end I found it didn't really have much substance; no revelations that are hinted at throughout the book, and I even wonder what the exact purpose of writing it was. As mentioned, it is well-written, by a person whose perspective extends beyond the sports page, and so much of the book becomes not just about Bobby Orr or hockey, but about the changes of the 60s in society and in professional sports. Also, game summaries and statistics are kept to a minimum, which is fortunate, because I can't see how anyone can find that to be gripping reading.
But the book is very odd in some other ways. It focuses a lot on the build-up to Orr's professional career, his youth and time in the junior leagues, but then zooms through his time in the NHL and then pretty much breaks off the narrative while he is still a pro, just giving little snapshots of the end of his career, and where he is at the present day. It's as if Brunt was following an outline, and then somewhere along the way realized this was going to be a 500 or even 800 page book if he kept writing in this style, and then he just jammed in 'the rest of the story'.
Another very strange thing is almost the entire tone of the book, criticizing how Orr always projects a squeaky-clean, boy-next-door image, both during his days as a player and even now when he appears in advertisements or in public. The problem is, that Brunt keeps talking about how Orr has become a pro at putting up this 'false front', constantly saying that 'the reality isn't so publicly palatable', and then providing close to zero detail about what this dark private self might actually be up to. The closest he comes is talking about some one-night-stands and a string of girlfriends in the first few years of Orr being a pro, and that he has a temper, especially if he's been drinking. But no actual details of anything especially seedy, or at all violent, or even hurting another person in any way. The more I think about it the cheaper it seems to keep harping on someone's public face as disguising something dark and unacceptable, but then not actually providing the slightest proof -- it's really the sort of attack that could be levelled at anyone, because we all have public faces that aren't the whole story.
'The Canada of our imagination, the Canada that Canadians imagine when trying to pin down their elusive national identity, is somewhere just like Floral or Parry Sound or Brantford. When we look in the mirror, we want to see tough, decent people, honest workers, deferential, polite, grateful for what they have, willing to stand obediently in line, team players but unafraid to go into the corners, elbows high when it serves the collective good. We are hockey players the way Americans are, in their own very different mythology, Wild West gunslingers (independent and God-fearing and wary of authority, their individual rights held sacred above all).' (pg.12)
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Let God's Light Shine Forth: The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI (2005)
edited by Robert Moynihan
215 pages - Image Books
'The deepest poverty is not material poverty but spiritual poverty: the inability to be joyful, the conviction that life is absurd and contradictory. In different forms this poverty is widespread today, both in the materially rich and in the impoverished nations.' (pg.84)
This is a collection which uses excerpts from various publications, interviews, and other sources, to give a sketch of the life and views of the current pope, Benedict XVI (formerly Joseph Ratzinger). The first part is a biography which follows his life from his childhood in Bavaria to his role at the Vatican defending and defining Church doctrine, to his election as Pope. The second half uses excerpts, usually just one or two paragraphs, to give his views on issues pertaining to the Catholic faith, the modern world, and to the life of a Christian. The format of the book allows a wide view, but the short excerpts do not allow you to follow along the development of a thought, and sometimes don't make as much sense when taken out of context. But it's a pretty good introduction to a person that many people know only by newscast snippets.
When discussing the current Pope, obviously the current world becomes a focus of attention. I was interested in how on one hand, Benedict says that consciousness of the presence of God needs to re-enter common cultural life, and indeed that the culture itself needs to be 'converted', and elsewhere he speaks about how "It is likely that there lies before us a different epoch in the history of the Church, a new epoch in which Christianity will find itself in the situation of the mustard seed, in tiny groups apparently without influence which nevertheless live intensely bearing witness against evil and bringing good into the world. I see a great movement of this type already underway." (pg.41) I don't see this as contradictory, more like what you'd like and what you'll get.
I'm not sure how I feel about the former, as my own childhood experience is a sad example of when participation just becomes an empty social obligation which occurs by default, where rituals are occasionally observed, and a little lip service is paid, if only for the sake of ethnic nationalism or nostalgia, but nobody really believes. On the other hand, I do see how when the Church retreats entirely from the public life it can lead to a culture with what I would call American-style values: a focus entirely on the individual and autonomous liberty as the highest ideal. It's all thought-provoking, at any rate.
'The future of the Church...will be a spiritualized Church that does not rely on a political mandate and that curries favor with the right as little as with the left. It will be a difficult time for the Church. For the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor, it will make her a Church of the meek. The process will be all the harder because it will be just as necessary to root out sectarian narrow-mindedness as boastful self-will. The way will be long and wearisome, just as was the way that led from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution...But after the purification of these uprootings a great strength will emanate from a spiritualized and simplified Church...It seems certain to me that very hard times await the Church. Her own crisis has as yet hardly begun.' (pg.144)
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Kierkegaard: A Biographical Introduction (1973)
by Ronald Grimsley
127 pages - Scribners
As the subtitle states, this is a look at Kierkegaard and his ideas which is organized in biographical fashion. There wasn't a lot of information that was new to me, but it's organized and well-written and doesn't make Kierkegaard and his work either over-complex or over-simplistic. At this point I've read most of the major works, but there's a usefulness in having all those hundreds of pages summarized into about a hundred, giving you a good overview.
'Because human existence is always in movement and in a process of becoming, its decisive expression can take place only through an act which is more like a 'leap' than a gradual transition from one stage to another. Since it is not a fixed static quality, existence does not operate within the sphere of pre-established certainty, for it involves a change of quality rather than an increase in quantity. Yet the consciousness that an existential choice has absolute though unpredictable significance for the fate of the individual explains the mood of 'dread' by which it is always accompanied. The man who chooses his being in this absolute way feels he is floating 'over seventy thousand fathoms of water'. Choice is inseparable from risk: it is an adventure into the unknown.' (pg.70)
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2001)
by Marjane Satrapi
153 pages - Pantheon
This is the autobiographical story of the author as a young girl (from about ages ten to fourteen) growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution and then the Iran-Iraq war. She grows up in a privileged family that is full of communist supporters, and an everyday view is given of events like demonstrations, police raiding homes, social restrictions, and bombings. Eventually the parents decide to send their daughter, who has been educated in a french school, to Vienna.
There's really rich potential here but for several reasons I found it really difficult to identify with the story. A lot of the adult characters in the first part of the story are communists, still spouting stuff about the proletariat even after they've been arrested and are awaiting execution, and there's not much done to humanize them so they just come off as people fighting for a different flavour of destructive ideology. Also, I don't know how heavily events were fictionalized, but a lot of the stories seem unreal, like going to extreme measures just to smuggle in some rock'n'roll posters, or walking the streets in nikes and a jean jacket, with a Michael Jackson button, while there are fundamentalist groups roaming the streets looking for veils that are being worn improperly. I think the author was trying to emphasize how caring and free-thinking her parents were, and how rebellious she was, but it just makes them seem stupid and reckless. Overall, the book takes a remarkable story and makes it seem kind of bland.
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American Splendor: Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill (2003)
by Harvey Pekar, illustrated by David Collier
80 pages - Dark Horse Comics
This is a collection of 3 issues of American Splendor that focused on the story of Robert McNeill, a young marine who did a tour of duty in Vietnam during the war and was awarded a medal. The story focuses on a lot of mundane and absurd stuff that comes up in the day-to-day details, which is Pekar's style even though this isn't specifically about him. A short but interesting read, and the art is unremarkable but adequate.
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I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (1993)
by Emmanuel Carrere, translated by Timothy Bent
315 pages - Metropolitan
'And if for reasons of His own, He decides to speak to an American writer, it won't be Norman Mailer or Susan Sontag but some hack toiling away in the dark, grinding out cheap novels that no one takes seriously.' (pg.267)
This is a biography written 'from the inside'. Dick's life is treated as a narrative, and there is much more of an effort to evoke truths rather than verify facts. There are no footnotes or endnotes, no bibliography or references, and very little attention is paid to dates. The book follows his life from the death of his twin sister when she was several weeks old to his beginnings as a SF writer in Berkeley, his various adventures in marriage and womanizing, his conversion to Christianity, his most drugged-out years when his home was a virtual open house for addicts, and his later mystical experiences and his attempts to make sense of them. A few of Dick's books are gone into in detail, illustrating how events and characters from his novels are tightly interwoven with his real life; often it is hard to know where the set of mirrored events happened first, in reality or on the page.
For what it is, this is a really fantastic book. It is essentially Carrere's view of Dick's life. You can try to guess but you won't know for sure where a verified anecdote might become authorial license, but if you constantly worry about that sort of thing while reading it you probably won't enjoy the book. I was surprised to learn that, contrary to the public image that was played up at the time, Dick didn't use street drugs until a late age, and apparently only dropped LSD once, a drug he was terrified of and that he had a horrific experience with. He did however, from the beginning, use prescription pills copiously and recklessly. The narrative gave me a headache at times when it flows into the various paranoid and deluded thoughts that Dick held at certain times, and there is no comparison made between these thoughts and 'reality' so theoretically the reader might indeed come to believe, if going strictly by this book, that Stanislaw Lem was merely an avatar for a Soviet think tank looking to abduct Dick, and that Richard Nixon, when he became president, was the number one Communist operative in the United States.
The big mystery I ponder is, what drew Carrere to write a quite thorough, 300-page biography on Dick? Certainly his affinities seem to lean more towards authors like H. P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson, two others he found seminal, whom he mentions in passing here. As Dick's life moves forward, there are more and more references to the New Testament. Much like a drug in one of Dick's novels, Saint Paul promises that through the taking on of Christ, through his body and his blood, all of humanity will be changed and transformed. The images become unmistakable--in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch drugs are Satan's perversion of the Eucharist, trapping souls in the endless cycle of sin, in separation from their true selves. In Ubik the promise of the true Eucharist is presented, the cure against entropy, the gesture of love and charity, the path from death into life.
Dick for a time believed that we were all still living in 70 AD, that the Roman empire had never fallen, that a demon was presenting the modern world as a sort of movie projection over true reality, so we would forget that the second coming of Christ was imminent, and thus making literally true Jesus' statement that, "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place." Was God, or one of His intermediaries, really talking thorough Philip Kindred Dick? Certainly he was terribly flawed, had emotional problems, mental problems, could be unpleasant to know, and ruined much of his health by abusing drugs; but these things alone are not argument enough against it, looking back at the past history of saints and prophets.
'There's nothing more pathetic than the mistrust of immediate reality by people who never stop splitting hairs over Ultimate Reality. They always think they're getting to the bottom of things, whose surfaces they turn away from as unworthy of their attention; they end up never knowing the flesh of the world, the softness of resistance it offers to the touch. They manage to bypass their own lives.' (pg. 308)
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The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception (2000)
by Emmanuel Carrere, translated by Linda Coverdale
191 pages - Stoddart
"After I killed Florence, I knew that I was also going to kill Antoine and Caroline and that those moments in front of the television were the last that we would spend together. I cuddled with them. I must have said sweet things to them like 'I love you.'" - from Jean-Claude Romand's testimony
Jean-Claude Romand was known to his family and community as a successful doctor with a prestigious position with the WHO, someone who travelled the world and rubbed shoulders with intellectuals and politicians. In early 1993, he was the sole survivor of a fire he set in his home after he murdered his wife and their two young children. When a relative went to inform his parents, he found them murdered as well. In the next few days it was discovered he had also tried to murder his mistress, and was probably guilty in the less recent death of his father-in-law. It soon came to light that eighteen years ago Romand had dropped out of medical school after missing his exams, did not have any kind of job with anyone, and merely stayed in the airport hotel when he told people he was travelling. He lived off the money he took in from relatives, promising to put it in long-term investments that would generate immense amounts of interest. His life, with his family, his best friend, his mistress, was a complete lie. But he wasn't hiding another life underneath it all; he was just a zero.
This is an amazing and profound book that tells the story of Romand in a personal, intimate, matter-of-fact way. Carrere tells the story as it has been pieced together by the accounts of others, the police investigation, and Romand's own (sometimes questionable) version of events. It's also a very personal tale, Carrere letting you into his thoughts and feelings and speculations on events. Reading the book was an immense and involving experience but now that I'm finished I feel struck silent. There's so many things to reflect on here. Identity and authenticity. Certainly we all tell little lies sometimes, and we begin every day inheriting a history that we have mixed feelings about. But at what point does this slip into completely sociopathic behaviour? And perhaps is there really a force of evil active in the world that enters in at our weakest places?
Many psychiatrists on the case, and external observers, believed this entire charade was an attempt by Romand to narcissisticly avoid and escape feelings of depression that he was never allowed to feel. He denied them until he entirely separated his public self from reality. Now he is a model prisoner, being the sort of remorseful criminal prison officials dream about, friendly with fellow prisoners and prison workers and volunteers, and clinging to a reborn Catholic faith. But isn't he still playing the role that will please everyone else? Putting on an act that is expected of him and will cause the least dissatisfaction and rejection? Is he still as dead inside as ever? Carrere finishes his narrative with, "He is not putting on an act, of that I'm sure, but isn't the liar inside him putting one over on him? When Christ enters his heart, when the certainty of being loved in spite of everything makes tears of joy run down his cheeks, isn't it the adversary deceiving him yet again?"
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The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003)
by Paul Elie
555 pages - Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
This is a well-written, deep, searching, and fascinating look at four American Catholic writers who gained prominence after WWII. In her short life, Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and many short stories of unsurpassed artistic quality. Walker Percy, whose father and grandfather had committed suicide, was a doctor who came down with tuberculosis, and became a novelist and self-taught philosopher. Dorothy Day was the founder of The Catholic Worker, which started as a newspaper and grew into a family of missions for the poor and destitute, as well as a nonviolent peace movement. Thomas Merton gained a wide audience for his writing after he became a Trappist monk and wrote material rooted in autobiography. Though they never formed any kind of formal movement, as they grew in prominence they either met and corresponded, or at least read and were affected by each other's work.
Except for the introduction and epilogue, the book mostly flows chronologically. This means that O'Connor, because of her late birth and early death, is the last to arrive and the first to leave. However, it also gives the book the feeling of a sort of novel with four distinct, fascinating characters, and the story emerges like the exciting action of a novel, and you feel cheered by successes and heartbroken by defeats. O'Connor is the only one born and raised a Catholic, believing from the beginning to the end; all the others being converts from a sort of vague popular secularism they previously swam in.
It's a book I read deeply and reflected on much. Four very different people, each finding their own way, sometimes coming together to find understanding, while sometimes seeing the sparks of conflict fly. A very different and unique look at the development of four writers, far from the usual popular psychology and worn-out cliches. Much of that is likely due to the author Elie, who writes with impressive literary clarity (this is his first book) and seems to have read an amazing amount of primary, secondary, and tertiary material. These were all people that were very gifted, and one of the themes of the book is how their early reading of great books of fiction and non-fiction, and then, in their later life, their writing and the reading of each other's work, helped them along the way to discover their own selves, and helped them along the pilgrimage of the subtitle.
But, this is certainly not hagiography (though the process toward canonization is underway for Dorothy Day). Each person is presented with their flaws, sometimes glaring. Merton, to me personally, came across as extremely flakey, unstable, and it cast doubt on just how much basis there was for anything he wrote. Percy is the one I identify with most, but he's unfortunately the least present (or so it seemed to me) as he did not have a lot of dramatic correspondence or public presence, living a very everyday life and working at things slowly, never displaying bold strokes of genius. As I've said, certainly a book I've read deeply, though, perhaps ironically, somewhere near the end I felt a sort of ease in my heart that I, who was brought up 'nominally' Catholic, should probably stop trying so hard to believe in things that have never meant much to me, like the liturgy or holy communion or the suffering and death of Christ as atonement for our individual sins, but instead trust in the inclinations of my own soul, 'crypto-religious' (to use a term used by Czeslaw Milosz, who corresponded with Merton) as it may be. Though I don't really keep track of such things, so I couldn't say for certain, this certainly feels like the best book I have read all year.
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The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists (rev. ed., 2002)
edited by Irene and Alan Taylor
686 pages - Canongate
'A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen.' - William Soutar
Here is quite an interesting idea, a collection of diary entries from various authors, arranged by the day of the entry so that, for example, all the entries for January 1st are together, whatever the year they were made. Most days cover a couple of pages, with entries ranging from a couple of sentences to a page's length. There's a lot of famous names here, as well as many I haven't heard of, along with some everyday people whose only claim to fame is the diary they kept. There are also a few entries from fictional diaries, which I thought was a bad editing choice.
Despite the 'World's Greatest' in the title, the selection is definitely England-centric. It's a worthwhile concept, but I was disappointed that so many of the entries were very gossipy in tone, with a lot of space spent on things like scandals, celebrities, and nasty comments. And there is also a lot about war, especially the second world war. The ones I enjoyed the most have less to do with those sorts of subjects and more just everyday observations or ponderous thoughts, whether by the world-famous or unknowns.
I bought this a little less than a year ago and thought it would be good to follow along through the year, reading one day each day. I mostly fell behind; I guess I'm not really a 'routine' type of guy. In this last catch-up, I decided to go right to the end and finish it in one fell swoop.
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Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (2000)
by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Shultz
385 pages - Ohio University Press
In his relatively short life, Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote between seventy and eighty thousand letters, many of them tens of pages long. What the editors have done here is assembled and edited some of his letters so that they form a thorough biography of the man in his own words. Along with early childhood memories, the main areas of concern are his writings, friendships, discussions of philosophy and literature, travels, and just everyday concerns and issues.
I've read a portion of Lovecraft's fiction, and my memory of it is that the prose was just too weak and awkward. However, I was intrigued by the excerpts from his letters, and reading this entire volume was a really absorbing experience. I suppose that without all the pressure to produce and have a 'point', Lovecraft felt a lot more free to just be himself. Since it covers an entire life there's too much material to mention it all, but I wasn't aware that he had travelled so much, having a reputation for being a recluse. In various trips he travelled up and down the east coast of North America, up to Quebec City and down to Key West, and as far west as Cleveland and New Orleans. However, he was raised in a fairly closed anglo-saxon circle, and there are times when his racism comes out in his writing and is quite ugly and distasteful.
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The Confessions (398 CE)
by Saint Augustine
translated by Rex Warner
353 pages
Signet Classic
The first two-thirds of this is Saint Augustine's autobiography, the final third being a sort of layman's philosophical notes about the idea of God and such. The story of his life deals with growing up in northern Africa, journeying to Italy as part of his education and work, and then going on some other travels and journeys. The signficant story here is the distance he created between himself and the Catholic faith which his mother was strongly devoted to, his time exploring the secular world and philosophies such as those of the Manichees, and his eventual return and dedication to Catholicism. In fact, the book (quite annoyingly) is written in a style where Augustine is addressing God.
Wow, this book was really really really boring. I guess being such a classic (and relatively short and not written in an overly complex style) I kept waiting for the payoff, for the time when it would get good. The biographical narrative was somewhat bearable, but when he got purely into his various ideas and deductions, it was like an endless, pointless ramble. I skipped the last fifty pages.
I don't know if it's just the hot summer weather or what, but I haven't been reading much, and what I've enjoyed has been a bit different. I think my tastes are changing, which is probably a good thing (in that, who wants to just ponder all the big questions endlessly? Sometimes it's time to just live). I just don't see how God demands your constant, endless praise; if He came over He'd probably just want to have a beer and toss around a frisbee.
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Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
by Carl Gustav Jung
recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe
translated by Richard and Clara Winston
Revised Edition
410 pages
Pantheon Books
This is Jung's autobiography, though he concentrates mostly on inner events and the evolution of his ideas, and so it is certainly not a linear biography and the narrative of the ideas themselves is quite fragmented and works more as a sampler than a complete and coherent story. Jung tells of times from his childhood, days at school and university, his work with Freud and patients, and his experiences travelling abroad or spending time alone.
This was interesting at times, but it also was slow and dull at some places. Though it's not written at an academic level it's not an introductory work either, so some familiarity with Jung's ideas and concepts makes everything more coherent. He does get fairly personal, going into different visions and intense feelings he's experienced, but it did not seem to build up to any larger picture. A lot of people treat this as a very important and life-changing book, but my reaction to it is that Jung is an interesting character that brought some fantastic things to general attention, but I don't feel a desire to read any more of his works.
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