In One Ear and Out the Other

Continuing to make my way through Helprin's In Sunlight and In Shadow and found myself nodding along to this part. The main speaker is the protagonist, Harry Copeland, and his interlocutor is an older man complaining about not being able to learn as quickly. As someone who reads far more than I have time to process, I resonate with this deeply: 

"Think of it. Throughout your life you've read thousands of books, newspapers, journals, monographs, letters, documents, magazines--millions of pages, scores of millions of sentences, hundreds of millions of phrases, and perhaps a billion words. Of this, what do you remember? How much can you quote? Most likely not a thousandth of one percent, perhaps much less, which, of course, is what it's written down. 

"And yet your reading, your education, what you have seen and learned, have shaped you. Although the exact form falls away almost immediately, the essence remains. In what you have read, the difference between the great and the pedestrian is something very subtle that rides above the static form. The clarifying spirit can't be memorized, and the essence is in what's elusive, which is why those who can't grasp it other than willfully tend to deny it, because they can't see it." 

"Go on." 

"To know what you have read isn't necessarily to understand or to benefit from it immediately, as its central qualities exist above its mere form. If you and a cow listen to Mozart, you both know exactly the same sounds, the same notes, but you and presumably not the cow would hear a lot else, beyond the sounds, meaning, and meter. You would hear something the cow would not, and that the cow, if he could, would strenuously deny--I imagine."

Mark Helprin is a Genius, or Why Courtly Love Still Matters

This post is tangentially related to the news out of the Pentagon a few weeks back that women are now able to kill and be killed in combat just like men. This makes sense in our brave new world of gender obfuscation, but is a tragedy from a certain, classical point of view (a view that I happen to find myself sympathetic with). 

I say tangential because mostly what I want to do is put this beautiful passage from Mark Helprin's novel In Sunlight and In Shadow in front of as many people as possible and let it do the arguing for me. 

To set the stage ever so briefly, the main character, Harry Copeland, a recent World War II veteran has fallen madly, wildly, and intoxicatingly in love with the socialite Catherine Hale. In a fit of mutual love and youthful zeal, she has abandoned her well-connected fiance on the night of their engagement and fled the Hamptons with Harry in tow. Over a pre-dawn dinner on the return ride to the city, Harry tells Catherine--who has previously been misused by men--that he wants to court her: dress up in his best suit, meet her parents, get her back before curfew, etc. She begins to protest and this is where I turn it over to Helprin:

"We were told," she began, "that courtly love. . . ."
"Told by whom?"
"By our professors. . . that courtly love is twisted."
"How so?"
"Demeaning. Controlling."
He straightened in his seat, lifting himself up until he seemed taller, unconsciously positioning his upper body as if for a fight--not with Catherine, but with an idea. His eyes narrowed a bit as they seemed to flood with energy. "I don't know who told you, but I do know that whoever said this was a fucking idiot who must never have seen anything, or risked anything, who thinks too much about what other people think, so much so that he'll exterminate his real emotions and live in a world so safe it's dead. People like that always want to show you that they're wise and worldly, having been disillusioned, and they mock things that humanity has come to love, things that people like me--who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing--have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard. . . The deeper I fell, the more I suffered, and the more I saw. . . the more I knew that women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time. And to say that they neither need nor deserve protection, and that it is merely a strategy of domination, would be to misjudge the highest qualities of man while at the same time misreading the savage qualities of the world. This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell. How shall I treat it? Love of God, love of a woman, love of a child--what else is there? Everything pales, and I'll stake what I know against what your professors imagine, to the death, as I have. They don't have the courage to embrace or even to recognize the real, the consequential, the beautiful, because in the end those are the things that lacerate and wound, and make you suffer incomparably, because, in the end, you lose them."

A Christmas Letter to My Students

I wrote the following letter to my students for Christmas this year. Teaching is so much more enjoyable in my second year, and I have been incredibly blessed by a few outstanding groups of students with which to work. Anyway, I don't know how much time I am going to have to write, so I thought I would post what I have already written. Merry Christmas!

Hey all,

So there are a few things I want to say here at the end of the semester: some is simply reiterating things I have already said; some is somewhat new. I usually try to write individual letters to students but that proved impossible this semester. I promise to be more individualized in the spring.

First of all, I want to tell each of you how much I enjoyed this semester. I love teaching juniors because you guys have reached this stage where you are becoming more emotionally and intellectually mature. Teaching freshmen is garbage. This is the prime year of high school, I think. I have enjoyed your willingness to talk, discuss, philosophize. I have enjoyed the honesty with which you have approached our time together, the honesty with which you wrote in the faith poetry unit. I appreciate the clarity of thought I have seen developing over the semester. And I look forward very much to our time together in the spring. We know each other a bit better now and we will be able to build on that going forward.

Second, I want you to know how much I deeply care for you all in every respect of your life: intellectual, spiritual, emotional. I want each of you to know Christ and to seek him and savor him in your life. From what I have seen, that is the surest path to fulfillment in all three of those arenas of life. And I fully know and gladly acknowledge that for some of you that is not a reality or a possibility. I hope you don’t feel like I am ever too forceful in the way I talk about faith in the classroom; mostly I try to confine what I say to that which is overflowing out of my life. I don’t try to manufacture spiritual feeling or emotion for the benefit of the class. In other words, I try to be real with you guys. I hope that is the way it is perceived by each of you. I hope you trust, too, that I want this school to become a better place—a place that meets your spiritual needs (or at least attempts to do so) and answers the burning questions you have about life. I hope to do this more explicitly with some of our class time in the spring. But I want you to know that despite its problems I do love this school. I am happy to be here and happy, too, that each of you is here.

Third, I want to one more time encourage you (especially if you are a Christian) to geek out about the Christmas season upon us. Stare at a baby (in a non-creepy way) and contemplate God becoming man; find your way into a barn and smell the smells and imagine that is the place God decided to be born; go check out the crew waiting for work outside of a Home Depot or collecting your trash and imagine that the equivalent cohort is whom God first declared his presence in the world to (the shepherds). Sing songs, drink egg-nog (un-spiked, of course), eat sugar cookies cut into Christmas trees and angels and candy canes. Write a letter to someone you love. One thing I have been thinking a lot about this advent is Christ’s promise to return again, about the fact that I will one day see Christ face to face. It blows my mind (and I don’t understand it at all), but it is the future that I believe in, the end of the cosmos that is actually a beginning. The Bible tells us that when Christ comes back he will wipe away every tear from every eye and make all things broken, degraded, and destroyed brand new. And because of Christ’s first coming—the advent, Christmas—we can look forward to this second coming because we know now that we can be made right with God.

There is a song I wanted to play for you all, but I lost track of time and we never got to it. I will print the words below.

O Holy Night

O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining

It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth;

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

Till he appeared and the soul felts its worth

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

Fall on your knees, O hear the angels’ voices

O night divine, O night when Christ was born

O night divine, O night, O night divine

Truly he taught us to love one another

His law is love and his gospel is peace

Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother

And in his name all oppression shall cease

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we

Let all within us praise his holy name

Christ is the Lord! O praise his name forever!

His power and glory evermore proclaim

I love the whole song, but the second verse is what sticks out to me, because for most of my life the reality of Christianity has diverged from what this verse promises: that in Christ the chains with which we bind each other and ourselves have been broken by Christ and because of his triumph all oppression—all evil, malice, judgment, deceit—will end. Forever. I long for that day. Long for it with me, friends.

Have a great Christmas.

Cheers,

Coffman

At Least Fundamentalists Sing and Dance

When I was younger and newer to faith my beliefs were simple and my reactions emotional to much of what happened at church. I had no qualms in raising my hands, dancing and jumping around, saying things like "hallelujah" and "yes, Lord" in the middle of worship songs. Call it age (maturity?), call it less faith, call it whatever you want, but I don't do that anymore.

I think in many ways my faith has changed and not always for the better. I miss the emotion; perhaps I relied on it too much in my youth, but I miss it nonetheless. I am smarter now, better read, even a better man in a number of ways, but I still can't help feel like I am missing something.

This was heavily on my mind as I read a section of Chaim Potok's The Promise (a follow-up to The Chosen, a book many of us probably read in high school) this past week. Potok was a Jewish novelist whose novels tended to focus on the collision of faith and the burgeoning systems of thought--sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.--that marked the twentieth century. I do not know how devout Potok was in his Judaism, but he is a humane writer in the very best sense of the word and has compassion on all of his characters across the spectrum of Jewish religiosity. 

The particular scene that stuck out was an engagement ceremony between the son of a highly regarded Hasidic rabbi and the daughter of a mostly nonobservant family. After the formalities of the engagement are completed, the tables and chairs of the synagogue are moved to the side and the party begins. For hours, these highly devout, highly fundamentalist Jews sing and dance and drink wine. The narrator is more moderate in his beliefs but both he and his father leave the event in awe of what they have witnessed.

In processing the event as they walk home, Rueven, the son, tells his father that despite the beauty of the evening "[w]e can't ignore the truth, abba." In other words, it was fun to get swept up in the emotion of the evening, but let's not get carried away: what these fundamentalists believe is wrong. His father replies: "'No,' he said. 'We cannot ignore the truth. At the same time, we cannot quite sing and dance as they do. He was silent a moment. 'That is the dilemma of our time, Reuven. I do not know what the answer is.'"

I dwelled on those words--"we cannot sing and dance as they do." I feel that way. I cannot sing and dance as I used to, as I know other people now still can. It is not that the substance of my belief has changed dramatically--if anything, I am far more aware of the doctrinal claims I am making these days. It is simply that whatever emotion bound up in simple faith allowed those expressions in my youth is mostly dried up. What good is liberation to a higher truth if it prevents you from singing and dancing?