Across the Page

The Senator’s Wife

By Janet 23 August, 2009 Novels

I picked up The Senator’s Wife because of Ruth’s review. She said, “All the characters are vividly drawn, and all are deeply flawed. Even though I knew something dreadful was ahead, I couldn’t stop reading.” How could I resist after that?

I wasn’t disappointed. For one thing, this is an accomplished novel, my first by this author. The narrative alternates successfully between two characters’ points of view. Which is the main character: the newly married, uncertain Meri, wife to aspiring academic Nathan? or the confident, elegant Delia, wife to two-term senator Tom Naughton? It’s impossible to tell, we come to know both of them so thoroughly, and to pull for — or judge — both of them so fully.

Delia’s long marriage to Senator Naughton represents the hard-earned wisdom of a cheated-on wife who has stayed married. At times I found myself feeling judgmental, thinking of her as an enabler, a person who should see things in a clear-cut, simple way: once the vow to be faithful is broken, that’s that. At other times, I admired her, admired her ability to love after being wronged. At still other points I saw her as manipulative, the grand old controller.

For instance, after years of living separated, circumstances bring husband and wife together again with Delia the stronger party. Miller raises a comparison to Jane Eyre’s final pairing with a blinded and weakened Mr. Rochester. Is it love on Delia’s part? Or triumph? These are the kinds of questions the story inspired in me as it unfolded.

Similarly, on the one hand it was easy to feel critical of Meri. At times, she seemed terribly self-centered and childish. She’s impulsive, and sometimes downright foolish. Then, without warning, I’d recognize some similarity between myself and her that took the wind out of my self-righteousness.

I think that part of my struggle was with the book’s underlying, consistent rejection of any notion that there are rules for living. Anywhere. Discovering meaning and purpose is a strictly personal adventure, as Nathan affirms explicitly more than once: “I don’t think there are any rules.” Anyone who approaches ambiguous situations with dogma seems to be characterized as shrill. But at the same time, the novel’s conclusion about “whatever feels right to you must be right” remains ambiguous. There is no clear winner, and the consequences of selfishness are shown unsparingly.

I couldn’t relate to either woman fully. Their values and worldview are too different from my own. But where I could relate the connection was real and interesting. I cared about the characters, and as Ruth warned, I felt uncomfortable more than once. All in all I found this tale to be a provocative study of the different seasons of marriage that left me with lots to think about.

The Abolition of Man: Contemplating Skepticism

By Janet 19 August, 2009 Nonfiction

Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

–from Lewis’ title essay, “The Abolition of Man”

The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality consists of three lectures given by Lewis in 1943. Partly because my reading experience was fractured by countless interruptions, I found it a challenge. But in essence, the three essays together develop an argument about the erosion of common consent to the existence of a universal moral law — and what kind of society emerges from that skepticism.

Lecture 1:

“Men without Chests” focuses on an English textbook for British secondary school students. Lewis takes one example, the textbook’s discussion of Coleridge’s claim that a waterfall is not merely “pretty,” but “sublime.” The textbook authors undermine the idea of objective value by stating unequivocally that Coleridge is really talking about his own feelings, not the waterfall at all. The school boy who reads this passage, Lewis points out, “will believe two propositions: firstly, that all statements containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.”

Not so, Lewis argues. A central aim of education is to instruct the “chest” — the faculty that mediates between intellect and feeling, head and heart. The point of reference, across many different cultures and throughout history, has been what Lewis calls the Tao: “The doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” He gives examples from Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, Christianity, and Oriental forms of thought, but makes no attempt to “prove” the Tao, taking it as a doctrine of first things.

My favorite passage from “Men without Chests:”

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments… A hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

Today, when our most eloquent cultural critics challenge the undiscerning worship of science and technology that have resulted in part from embracing “head” without reference to the seats of either emotion or morality, they are observing the result of the trends Lewis is focused on in this essay.

Lecture 2:

“The Way” examines subjectivism and shows how moral relativism ultimately undermines even itself. If all value is subjective, there is nothing authoritative on which to base this claim. Also in this essay, however, Lewis raises another alternative, not subjectivism but nihilism:

The Nietzchean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man who says to us: ‘You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?’ and a man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.’

Lewis, explaining that he’ll need another lecture to do justice to this problem, moves on to his culminating final address.

Lecture 3: “The Abolition of Man”

Ultimately the rejection of all value leaves brute force as the only governing power. “In what sense is man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?” Lewis begins. Taking the airplane, the “wireless,” and contraceptives as his examples, he concludes:

What we call man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane and the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target for both bombs and propoganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive… Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

This final lecture would have been excellent to read in conjunction with That Hideous Strength. In this lecture, Lewis does in prose what the novel does in fiction: paints a picture of the logical outcome of human society “sanitized” of the Tao in which the law of Nature replaces the humane. (That Hideous Strength gives a vivid picture of this happening to the members of the “advanced” society of the N.I.C.E. — “National Institute for Controlled Experiments”). The Tao, after all, instructs us in right living within the framework of Nature’s order. Humanity may throw out the roadmap, but we cannot escape Nature.

Lewis concludes by coming full circle, making oblique reference to the official skepticism of the school English text he began with and extending it to its resulting moral blindness:

The kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ’seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ’see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ’see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

Appendix:

The final section of the book is an appendix of illustrations from the Tao. Different moral laws are given, with their occurrence in various writings, including ancient Egyptian, Jewish, Norse, Babylonian, Hindu, Chinese, Greek and Roman sources.

My thoughts:

I grew increasingly interested as I read. I could see that Lewis was writing prophetically. There are so many present-day trends that illustrate the surrender of the humane to the technological and the scientific, a surrender that could not have happened without the moral preparation Lewis observed in his day.

It’s impossible not to think of the books I’ve read recently by Neil Postman. In Technopoly, Postman discusses the evolution of a culture from tool-using to technological to technopoly, with the power of a shared worldview diminishing with each phase. Lewis is talking about the same phenomenon in more philosophical terms.

At the time I write this, the debate over health care reform is raging in the country. Over the past year, during the presidential campaign, other debates have raged as well over issues of science (abortion, stem cell research, birth control in schools), America’s use of power, and the role and extent of government. When I read this passage from “The Abolition of Man,” I had to stop and consider these things in the light of what Lewis says here about the essential political equations that remain despite how “progressive” humanity becomes:

I am not speaking of particular corruptions and abuses which an increase of moral virtue would cure: I am considering what the thing called “Man’s power over Nature” must always and essentially be. No doubt, the picture could be modified by public ownership of raw materials and factories and public control of scientific research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones.

It seems to me that our politics and our public discourse reflect what Lewis describes in these lectures. They are not entertaining reading; they take some work. But they provide terms for thinking about our present lives. The terms available to Lewis in 1943 are much more categorical and unequivocal than those considered permissible today. Lewis addressed an audience that might disagree with his view, but would not find the notion of “absolutes” offensive. What a change 66 years have made in the “spirit of the age.”

Great Possessions

By Janet 18 August, 2009 Essays

I’ve had Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer’s Journal on my shelf for years. I kept passing it over for more “compelling” fare. Fortunately I didn’t pass it over this time.

The book has a foreword by Wendell Berry. I expected it to be a record of farming practices. Instead, it’s a book of natural history essays based on Amish farmer David Kline’s wildlife observation around his Ohio farm. (He has a more recent book called Scratching the Woodchuck that develops this theme further.) As someone who’s been enjoying our garden, our yard’s rich population of birds and bird’s nests, and the various wild visitors who pass through, I found lots of interesting material here.

Kline writes about all aspects of nature — seasons, plants and animals, timber, birds and bird-feeding, the “ribbon of life” of a fencerow, and anything else that captures his attention as he goes about his work. Everything about his farming practice bespeaks both an attitude of cooperation with the wilderness in which his farm exists, and a rich ecological understanding. All of it occurs within a context of his community’s gratitude and reverence for the world humanity is charged to steward in the creation account of Genesis.

The Amish are regarded as a curiosity by some, an anachronism. But as our acquaintance with this author grows, he’s more and more obviously merely a sane voice. “The Amish are not necessarily against modern technology,” he writes. “We have simply chosen not to be controlled by it.”

Besides writing in loving detail about his place, his observations are contextualized with many references to his wide reading in poetry and ecology. There is a quiet persuasiveness and delight in his literate reading of his native landscape. I have great respect for this tradition of farming, with its values on diversity (not monocropping), scale (not super-sized agribusiness), health (not just production), humility (not conquering), and stewardship (not depletion).

These pages also contemplate loss: loss of species, loss of pure water, loss of habitat for some wildlife irreplacable in the ecological network of relationships. One of the most compelling chapters describes the destruction of a patch of old-growth forest on a neighboring farm. It reminded me of the scene in Berry’s Jayber Crow in which an old forest is similarly flattened for profit. Before the wood vanishes, Kline gives us a glimpse of it as a world of life. It’s impossible not to grieve when it is destroyed — and even the original settlers’ grave markers are broken and scattered.

Last but not least, this book touches the nerve of my own deep loneliness as a modern person. Kline lives in an intact community, one in which people are still connected to the land they tend, to the God they worship, and to the neighbors they labor with in the most practical of ways. There is nothing comparable in my experience. I don’t have the cultural inheritance, the knowledge, the skill, or frankly the practical need for my neighbor that are enforced by the Amish lifestyle.

But what I do share with Kline is his love for the world around us. This book affirms that as only the work of a first-class naturalist can.

Lafcadio

By Janet 13 August, 2009 Picture Books

Question: Is it a success or a failure when my five-year-old bursts into tears at the end of a book?

I should add that they weren’t tears of disappointment that the story was ending. Nor were they tears of joy. They were tears of heartbreak.

Shel Silverstein’s Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back is a chapter book, generously illustrated with spare line drawings of the sort that adorn the pages of The Giving Tree. It’s a little awkward to read aloud at times because the first-person narrator, “Uncle Shelby,” is intrusive. But this didn’t bother my audience. The tale begins with Lafcadio, a talking lion, engaging in an intelligent and curious conversation with a hunter who answers his questions, then shoots at him. He misses. Lafcadio eats him, and learns to shoot.

What follows is a rambling tale — let’s call it a picaresque — in which our hero is taken to the city and made a star. He eats lots of marshmallows. He wins many fans. He’s in a parade. He returns to the other lions and feels he doesn’t fit in. Neither does he fit in at the city. The story concludes with Lafcadio wandering off by himself because he doesn’t belong in either of the two settings he has to choose from.

When asked, my five-year-old declares passionately, “Oh I loved it.” Yet from the outside looking in, her tears made me sad. I almost wished I hadn’t read it to her. I think she felt the way I used to (still do?) when Rudolph floats away on the iceberg, his friends asleep on the shore, the abominable snow monster roaring beyond the hillside. “I cried because I was afraid he’d go someplace and get hurt,” she says. The book is clearly effective art; it got a response. But it was surprising to me.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

By Janet 5 August, 2009 Novels

I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed a book this much.

This novel is an unusual animal: a Victorian novel published in 2004. It has the scope, cast of characters, and wit of Dickens, the social satire of Jane Austen, the thorough imaginative conception of Tolkien. It’s funny, scary, compelling, shivery with otherworldliness. I enjoyed every one of its 782 pages.

Some have complained about the length. I agree with Deb that it could have been published in three smaller books rather than one large one. Others have complained about the extensive footnotes, which sometimes span two pages. But even the footnotes were interesting — often stories in themselves.

The basic gist of the story, set in England during the Napoleanic Wars, is that the faerie magic of ancient Britain is returning to an England long impoverished of anything fantastical. The two “practical” (vs. theoretical)  magicians named in the title begin to re-establish the reputation and practice of English magic not as it has survived in dusty academic circles, but as it’s related in the old mythic stories of fairies and mysterious magician-kings. Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell represent two very different temperaments: Mr. Norrell is secretive, scholarly, manipulative, and dull, whereas Jonathan Strange is more sociable, daring, and at home in fashionable circles. Their relationship takes twists and turns against a backdrop of (among other things) war with France, the antics and enchantments of a wicked fairy, and philosophical disagreements about what kind of magic England needs.

My favorite aspect of the story is the depiction of the magical realm as an ever-present, not-quite-visible dimension of the day-to-day physical world. I came across this title most recently in a biography of C.S. Lewis as an example of the kind of fairytale he would have loved, so it’s little surprise to find that the faerie world bears some resemblance to Narnia in being often inaccessible, yet always immanent. Narnia leaks into Britain through wardrobes, doorways, train stations, and pictures. In this story, the faerie dimension does the same thing, as in this scene:

As Lady Pole said this something happened which Arabella did not quite understand. It was as if one of the paintings had moved, or someone had passed behind one of the mirrors, and the conviction came over her once again that this room was no room at all, that the walls had no real solidity but instead the room was only a sort of crossroads where strange winds blew upon Lady Pole from faraway places.

The fantasy is grounded thoroughly in “reality” — scholarly quarrels, gossiping people, real historic events, physical nature, varied personalities — including such well-known figures as the Duke of Wellington, Shelley, and Byron (whose Manfred is said to be based on Byron’s observation of Jonathan Strange). It has something of the flavor of a George MacDonald tale, in which the holy is both “here” — all around us — and “there” — a part of the unseen spiritual realm. (This book makes no Lewis-like allegorical relationship between religion and magic; it’s pure fantasy. Yet it does lend itself to an imagination colored by Christianity as mine is.)

In any case, I was sorry to see it end. A book like this leaves me in awe of the author behind it. How does one mind conceive such a complicated, satisfying story? Dickens composed his novels serially, and their multiple plot threads and huge casts of characters were shaped in part by the form. This novel apparently took ten years to write, but it hangs together as a coherent whole. And even at 782 pages, it’s probably one I’ll read again.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

By Janet 26 July, 2009 Nonfiction

In the eighties, a movie came out called The Gods Must Be Crazy. A pilot flying over the Kalahari desert in South Africa tosses his empty Coke bottle out the window, and it lands near a tribe of bushmen. They think it’s a gift from the gods, and find it has its uses: crushing grains, making music, I forget what else.

But it also creates problems. They have no concept of private ownership, and the Coke bottle begins to breed competition. Eventually, someone uses it as a weapon, and hits someone else over the head. That’s it. One brave bushman takes the bottle to look for the edge of the world, and throw it off.

It’s a good metaphor for technological innovation, which has its uses, but can breed unforeseen and undesirable consequences too. Neil Postman, writing during the Reagan era, attempts to analyze television and its pervasive effects in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. But this is no diatribe against television. It’s an argument in favor of examining television, and the way it has shaped our view of knowledge, culture, and even, Postman would argue, truth itself.

Reading it on the heels of Postman’s more recent book Technopoly, I found some repetition, though the focus of this book is narrower. It makes a persuasive case against television for simplifying, decontextualizing, and misrepresenting reality as a mere stream of unrelated, amusing information. Postman finds the brand of thought fostered in the television age to be far inferior to that of print, or “typographical rationality,” which is more linear and capable of dealing with complexity.

I agree with many of Postman’s points. How could I not? He’s brilliant, prophetic, and often wise. As a teacher, I was struck by the same inability in many of my students that Postman writes of here — an inability to develop a line of thought, or to work with texts at the most basic level. I remember in one freshman comp class using the book Asking the Right Questions to give students the tools for analyzing print matter, and it was a real struggle for them. Reading some of Postman’s examples of political discourse in preceding centuries (the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for instance), or the scathing chapter on televised Christianity as compared to the more intellectually rigorous and discerning religious discourse of the past, provided sobering evidence that ours is in many ways a banal and hollow age — in part because our ability to think has been altered by media designed not to challenge or instruct, but to entertain.

I agree, too, with Postman’s horror at the unthinking, uncritical acceptance we’ve given to television. Using the contrast between Orwell’s totalitarian vision in 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as his jumping off point, Postman argues that Huxley’s vision was the truer: a culture in which books don’t need to be banned because no one wants to read them, where power doesn’t have to be forcibly exerted because no one is interested in freedom, and where the desire to be entertained has replaced the desire for truth. If we’re going to allow a technology into virtually every aspect of our lives, we should at least be willing to think consciously and evaluate its values and effects.

I like to watch the Newshour with Jim Lehrer on Friday nights. That’s it. We have a Netflix subscription, but I rarely even watch movies anymore. My children watch a total of perhaps an hour a week, usually videos that we either own or borrow from the library. So I didn’t need much persuasion on the subject of television. One of the main reasons I started homeschooling was the amount of television my daughter’s kindergarten class watched in the name of schooling. At a visceral level, I’ve simply rejected it, mainly because it’s boring and passive and crude (in both senses — blunt-edged, and often crass in its perspective). I think my resistance began when my nephew was an energetic, creative toddler whose face fell into a slack, open-mouthed stupor whenever he was watching television. In a nutshell, that says it all.

But while I would agree with Postman that every form of media carries its own assumptions and values and even its own theory of knowledge, I stop short of his assertion that it alters truth. That’s a little too relativistic for me. I also think that Postman’s bias in favor of print media (a bias I share) has its limitations. The discovery of writing, and the further development of the printing press, were both blessing and curse. They greatly improved and refined knowledge on the one hand, and fragmented or abstracted it on the other. Postman would agree, I think. One of the cornerstones of his perspective is that any technology is a “for better and for worse” proposition. Yet even though he acknowledges this, I got the sense while reading that he would be happy to return to the typographical discourse of the 19th century as the high-water mark of humanity. Was it? The Age of Reason carried its own idolatry, and by elevating rationality over transcendence it paved the way for the further emptying and fragmenting of meaning that the idolatry of the image has accomplished.

“Our notions of truth… have changed as a result of new media replacing the old,” writes Postman. Is this really the case today, a few decades later? I think most of us are aware of the extent to which our culture and politics and spirituality have been turned into entertaining, often plainly false, games through their media packaging. We may not always know what to do about it, but we recognize it because our criteria for truth haven’t changed. I wonder, too, if the internet — not Facebook or YouTube, but the blogosphere and the internet news sources that rely so heavily on the written word — has at all counteracted the image-mindedness Postman observes.

I can’t quite concede the deterministic notion put forth by Marshall McLuhan that “the media is the message.” I think it overstates the case — kind of like the bumper sticker, “I’m not perfect — just forgiven.” Without being naive about the great pervasiveness and power of our media, I would still venture to disagree with Postman (and with Birkerts, who writes that “We have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable”) that our fundamental humanness is being changed by our media. It boils down to my belief as a Christian that human beings are created by God, in the image of God, and simply can’t be mutated into a different species of soul on our own power.

I do find it interesting, though, that Christ — called “the Word” in the book of John — came before the technological era. Think how much easier and more efficient it would have been for him to have been able to broadcast his face and words instantaneously all over the world in a mass crusade. Think how much more clearly those in the back row would have heard the Sermon on the Mount if he’d had a cordless microphone. Instead, God chose an age before highly developed communications.

One conclusion I draw from that is that he found something superior to technology: the personal, in-the-flesh manifestation of himself, stubbornly physical and bound to a context in ways that image-centric mass media are not. If God chose not to take advantage of the technological age, maybe his followers should give some thought to its spiritual ramifications, too. I don’t mean simply the content of given movies or television shows. I mean the whole attractive package of “the age of show business.”

Random thoughts on the Little House books

By Janet 22 July, 2009 Chapter Books

My mother read us the Little House books when my family drove across the country. We drove from New York to California, tent-camping all the way, the summer before I entered 7th grade, and these stories about another westward-moving family were a wonderful accompaniment. Those were the days before iPods or portable dvd-players (or even dvd’s, truth be told). We were in it together.

Now my daughters and I have gone through them all — all the books for children, that is. The First Four Years we’ll save for when the girls are older.

Some random thoughts, revisiting the books as an adult:

*It’s so striking, the happy, optimistic ending of These Happy Golden Years. Knowing the hardship of the life that followed, and the distance that eventually separated Laura and Almanzo from their families, gives it a bittersweet feel.

*Growing up with Laura. From the Big Woods all the way to Almanzo’s tree claim, we’ve watched a little girl mature. I felt that Laura’s courtship and marriage gave my girls a way of imagining themselves one day as young ladies. I loved hearing their opinions and interpretations along the way. And I especially hoped they noticed how much both Pa and Almanzo seemed to care about providing for their wives’ needs, and how much respect both couples radiated.

*Race. The books give an honest insight into their age. For instance, Pa seems open-minded about the Indians — even though he does take part in their displacement, and even squats on Osage land in Little House on the Prairie. But Ma, along with Mr. and Mrs. Scott, are as anti-Indian as can be, utterly racist in their views. Then in Little Town on the Prairie Pa performs in a minstrel show for one of the town sociables in a parody of “darkies.” It seems racially degrading, but I’d have a hard time believing it’s intentionally so. Later in life, Laura writes in her newspaper column against a racist or provincial attitude. So there are different levels of awareness running through the age — and through the books.

*Almanzo is willing to risk his life for wheat for the town-dwellers in The Long Winter. He makes a heroic trip with Cap Garland and persuades a settler to sell his seed wheat for the starving women and children of DeSmet. Yet Almanzo himself has a big supply of seed wheat that he hides and refuses to sell.     ?

*A few weeks ago my hairdresser was talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder with my daughters, and she told them that if Laura were alive today she would be “green.” How would Laura feel about being put in that category? I don’t sense any of the agrarian nostalgia in Laura that I (and other readers) are tempted to feel when we read her books. She and Pa both seem to see the railroad, and the idea of Progress, as glamorous. And Pa isn’t only a farmer, but a jack-of-all-trades (and master of most).

*Last but not least, a word on my ongoing discussion (with myself, even if no one else is interested!) about audiobooks: We read the first half of These Happy Golden Years aloud, at a fairly slow pace. Then we listened to the last half via audiobook in the car. There were things I liked better about doing the reading myself; the girls obviously had the story on their minds more, and asked more questions, and thought things through more. On the other hand, I like the audiobooks, which include occasional accents from the fiddle, and include the tunes of songs Pa sang. Besides that, they carried on long past the point where I would have gotten carsick or sleepy.

I like both approaches to the books, for different reasons. I’ve given some thought to the reservations I’ve had about audiobooks. It does bother me that my oldest is not quicker to pick up a book and work at it; she’d rather multitask, and listen to a story while doing something hands-on. I’ve wondered if I’ve allowed too many audiobooks, and made her lazy about the more skill-dependent process of reading.

However, it occurs to me that she is a hands-on person, with or without audiobooks. When I stop and think about it, I’m not sure she’d be any quicker to pick up a book in a silent house than in a house forever breathing stories. But with audiobooks, she has the opportunity to be exposed to much more literature, many more instances of the rhythms of written speech, and many more imaginative furnishings of her mind than she would have in a house silent except for when I’m reading aloud. Like anything else, there are pros and cons, and excesses to be avoided. But on the whole I think audiobooks are a good thing.

And Cherry Jones does an excellent job with the Little House books, too — even though I can’t keep from picturing her as the U.S. President, as she was in 24 last season.

Mudhouse Sabbath

By Janet 13 July, 2009 Christianity, Nonfiction

Yesterday in Sunday school, my friend Polly extracted some excerpts from the chapter in this book about mourning. A young mother known to many people at church had died earlier in the week when another car inexplicably veered into her lane and hit hers head-on. Her husband and three children — one, who was in the car with her, in critical condition — are left to make sense of this tragedy and somehow “get on with their lives.”

The excerpts Polly chose rightly observed that “Christianity has a hopeful and true vocabulary for death-and-resurrection. It is Judaism that offers the grammar for in between, for the mourning after death and before Easter.”

“I have to read that book,” I told Polly afterward. At which point she drew the book out of her purse and handed it to me. I asked her if she was sure she could spare it. “You’ll read it fast,” she said.

She was right. Here I am, a day later, having finished Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline. It’s a short book, just 142 pages, that takes eleven of the spiritual practices of Judaism and shows how they can enrich a Christian spiritual life. Like Girl Meets God, the style is reflective and intelligent without being the least bit ponderous, and it’s a worthwhile read (and, probably, re-read).

I tend to view Christianity as an enriched, completed form of Judaism — or at least, it should be. Looked at this way, the Jewish practices Winner describes here become not new discoveries that (as the back cover promises) “can transform the way Christians view the world,” but perhaps as elements essential to Christianity that have been lost. It’s a sadder way of seeing things, actually. But thanks to writers like Winner, a hopeful way, because I feel like some of that loss can be recovered.

Winner’s way of viewing these practices seems consistent with Jesus’s own way of seeing them. In the same way Christ’s authority was frequently recognized through his insight into the meaning behind rituals and practices that could become merely legalistic, Winner’s approach here is to suggest ways that the Christian can incorporate them meditatively and meaningfully.

My favorite chapters were those on the Sabbath/Shabbat, Mourning/Avelut, Body/Guf, and Fitting Food/Kashrut. (The latter two chapters recalled to mind some of Wendell Berry’s writings, such as “The Pleasures of Eating” in What Are People For?) I feel grateful for the good teaching I’ve had in my life; I wouldn’t say Winner’s perceptions into how Christians “should” think or believe were new or surprising. What I appreciate is her insight into the relationship between the outward disciplines and the inner life.

This book speaks, too, to a hunger in me to re-connect with tradition. A few months back, in a conversation with some family members, I think I may have alarmed them in my insistence that the ancient Jews in the Old Testament had something we’ve lost. Their more communal experience of their faith, of prayer, and their need to rely on authority and memory in the absence of books and literacy, gave them an experience that was in some ways more whole than we have in this post-Gutenberg, post-Luther, “literate” age. “But we can talk to God ourselves,” said one. “We don’t need all those rituals and legalism.” This book is a reminder that ritual does not lead inevitably to legalism. As Gary Thomas writes, “Symbols have nothing to do with saving us, but they have everything to do with realizing the effects of that salvation upon our everyday lives. Just because we’re saved doesn’t mean we don’t need help to live holy lives.”

Technopoly

By Janet 11 July, 2009 Nonfiction

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology has been on my shelf for 12 years. At the Asbury College faculty retreat in the fall of 1997, the Provost gave us all a copy of the book. It looked interesting to me then, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to reading it until now.

It’s an excellent read, especially worthwhile for any educator interested in exploring the ramifications of the age we live in. It was published in 1993. While the book sat on my shelf, its author died of lung cancer in 2003. Time has shown it to be a prophetic book, and though its impact was greater when it was first published, it still has much light to shed on the present day.

Postman offers first a lens for reading the progression of culture from tool-using (in which tools remain firmly subordinated to the worldview and belief systems of those who use them), to technocratic (in which technology gains a life of its own and co-exists alongside the systems of belief — the “narratives” — that give a culture its coherence), to technopoly, in which technology becomes totalitarian. In a technopoly, technology overrides the stories and value-systems that give a culture its shared identity and moral order, redefining its terms, elevating “efficiency” and “progress” above all other values, and creating a whole new thought-world.

Of course that’s only the broadest outlines of Postman’s argument, made in the book’s first chapters. The rest examines aspects of how technopoly has taken hold and manifests itself in various areas, and concludes with a chapter on how it might be resisted through a stirring description of Postman’s educational plan.

The generally depressing reality described in this book is tempered not just by Postman’s constructive final chapter, but by his sense of humor. I’ll give just a few examples:

The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information.

Useless, meaningless statistics flood the attention of the viewer… For example: “Since 1984, the Buffalo Bills have won only two games in which they were four points ahead with less than six minutes to play.” Or this: “In only 17 percent of the times he has pitched at Shea Stadium has Dwight Gooden struck out the third and fourth hitters less than three times when they came to bat with more than one runner on base.” What is one to do with this or make of it?

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.

Postman’s discussion is insightful and wide-ranging, and his view of education develops in much greater depth and detail the view of western liberal arts tradition I’ve touched on in previous posts here. His reflections on writing struck the nerve I’ve been thinking about lately; he also recalled to mind Wendell Berry — particularly in his discussion of the worship of quantification. (I thought of the poem in which Berry writes, “I take the side of life’s history against the coming of numbers.”)

There were a few things I hesitate to agree with. I always feel naive when writers speak of the decline of the “Christian narrative;” a little voice inside says meekly, “But I believe it. And lots of others do too. Their numbers are growing.” I think he means not that no one believes it anymore, but that the Christian story is no longer the majority moral authority in American culture. Science is, but it cannot answer the meaningful questions.

Flipping through the book, I find too many underlined passages and dog-eared pages to do it justice. I’m glad that Postman along with a number of other cultural critics (including Sven Birkirts) have stepped into the fray to offer a thoughtful response to the trends at work so pervasively in American culture today. They’re voices of sanity.

Postman was a firm supporter of public education, and even regarded it as “America’s principal instrument for correcting mistakes and for addressing problems that mystify and paralyze other social institutions.” That’s one of the very reasons I home school, actually. I’m not interested in the state working out its social agendas in my children’s hearts and minds. But Postman’s prescription for education is one I can get behind — in fact, I’m already putting it into practice: a curriculum with history at the center of all the subjects that fosters some critical distance and a restored sense of humanness in a technopolist age.

The Wizard of Oz

By Janet 11 July, 2009 Chapter Books

My daughters and I finished reading The Wizard of Oz. I read the book years ago, but I’d forgotten a lot of it. I remembered the movie better, which had made such an impression on me as a child. But even that was fuzzy.

I posted some observations about the book here. The book’s religious overtones were striking to me, partly because most of my Oz books were given to me by a firmly atheistic aunt when I was around 9. But I wouldn’t argue, as some have, that the book is primarily intended as an argument or exposition of Baum’s spiritual leanings.

I see it merely as a fairytale, and one which worked well as a read-aloud. My daughters always pushed for another chapter and my youngest asked frequently how it was going to turn out. (She knows I’ll say, “Let’s keep reading and see.” But she always tries!) My older daughter was focused in on it too.

As an adult reader, I enjoyed the way Dorothy’s friends so obviously were in possession of the traits they sought from the wizard. It was fun to see my daughters processing their insecurity and their willingness to accept meaningless tokens from the wizard. The back of the book contained a few biographical notes and some trivia about the comparison between book and movie. The notes point out that while in the movie Dorothy is always getting rescued, in the books, she’s always doing the rescuing. She’s a spunky, loyal, likable heroine. I would add that in addition to a number of plot alterations made in the movie, it adds considerably to the stress level. The book impressed me as far more low-key than the movie, perfect for reading aloud.

My aunt always insisted that this was far from the best of the Oz books, though it was the most popularized by the movie. It struck me as more hollow, somehow, than the Narnia books or George MacDonald’s fairy tales. I don’t remember the other Oz books any better than this one, but I have a few of them. We’ll probably make a few more trips to the land of Oz before we’re done.