This past year I read 92 books, eight short of my goal of 100. I guess if I wanted to reach for the number I could also count the additional 15 books that I listened to on my phone while running or driving. But I won't. Let's leave it at 92. And seeing as the year ends in a few days I don't think I'll be adding any more notches to this bedpost for the year. Below I will breakdown what I read and do something very gimmicky: list my book of the year. Fiction Of that 92, they breakdown into genres as follows: 41 novels, 25 theology/philosophy, five dramas, nine that focus on cultural or sociological issues, five on literary criticism, three on athletics, two on education, and two epic poems. Of the novels, roughly half were rereads, eight exceeded 600 pages in length, 14 were written within the past five years, 19 would count as canonical/Important books, five would count as genre fiction (mystery or sci/fi), and the rest were the new ones for which it's too soon to tell or ones that I read for the hell of it. My favorites, only including new reads were: Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and In Shadow T.H. White, The Once and Future King Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord David James Duncan, The River Why I also read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time this year. I was mostly unimpressed, undoubtedly because I am too old and phony. Theology/Philosophy Of the theology/philosophy books, most were from the past 30 years, four would qualify as intellectual biographies, two were essay collections, and the rest more straightforward philosophical or theological treatises, usually on a particular point. My favorites were as follows: Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googolplex Sociology/Culture The only other category I'll cover in any depth is the sociological/cultural books. Here my favorite was far and away Michael Lewis's The Big Short, which doubles as one of my favorite movies of the year. I was also greatly entertained by Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
Read this book NOW!
Best Book of the Year My favorite overall book of the year was Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head. I wrote about it extensively on this blog, though not nearly as much as it deserved. Since reading it, anytime that I have spoken with someone who is lamenting anything about the state of our world I recommend Crawford's book. And thus I do for you as well. Read it. I'll post in a day or two some reading reflections and ambitions for 2017.
"For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you will break forth into singing, and all the tress of the field shall clap their hands."
Isaiah 55:12
"I tell you, if these were silent the very stones would cry out."
Luke 19:40
Ten years ago tonight my mom almost died when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain. My dad was in the shower when it happened; my brother was watching TV in the living room; my mom was ironing my dad's clothes for work the next day; I was driving across Kansas with some friends on my way to a church conference in the Ozarks. My dad gave her CPR--or his hodgepodge version of what he had seen in movies anyway--still dripping from the shower while my brother called 9-1-1. He kept her alive until the paramedics arrived and sped her to the local hospital. After my dad dried off and got dressed he followed with my brother. And I drove on down I70 oblivious. It is weird to look back on what has proved an epochal day in my life and try to remember it as it was and not as I have made it to be, inflating it over time as it came to be a Day and not just a day. I have snatches of that first night. My brother's first call and the confused nature of what had happened/was happening. The next call that told of the Flight for Life helicopter ferrying my mom to the old University Hospital location on Colorado. For that phone call I was at a truck stop in Salina, Kansas putting gas in my car. I was in my T-shirt because I was tough and I wasn't going to let a little thing like a blizzarded-over central Kansas force me into thicker layers. I remember crumpling towards the ground there, just outside, away from my friends. I remember the impulse to turn around and drive back but being shamefully frozen in place. We slept at my grandparents' church outside of Topeka that night. Or, some slept, I should say. I didn't blink. The next morning my grandpa and other of our family friends were at the church and prayed for me. I talked with my dad on the phone for the first time. This was the first time I heard the word 'aneurysm'. I had no idea what it meant. But he said he wanted me home. A family friend booked me a ticket back to Denver from the Kansas City airport. We went to my grandparents' home and I took a shower and tried to steel myself for what was to come. My friends drove me to the airport. It was the loneliest and perhaps the worst moment of my life when they pulled away. Having booked the ticket three hours before the flight I suffered the indignity of overzealous TSA scrutiny. A woman sitting next to me on the plane tried to hit on me--the first, so far only, and, giving my aging dadbod I can only assume, last time that has ever happened. My fiancé--now wife--picked my up the airport and we drove toward the hospital through Denver traffic. What happened next was almost unreal. My mom's inevitable brain surgery, a four hour ordeal to clip off the blood vessel and clean up blood that had accumulated on the brain, had kept getting delayed throughout that day (the 27th now) and when I landed the word was she was about to go in. I thought that there was no way I would make it. But then we did. My dad escorted me through to her room just as they were taking her out for the surgery. She looked so frail, hooked up to machines and sunken under hospital clothes and bedding. But I got to see her. I held her hand and told her that I was there and I wasn't leaving. She squeezed my hand back and I leaned over and kissed her and then she was whisked away. As far as we all knew she might not live through that surgery. Statistically she shouldn't still have been alive anyway. I crumpled into my dad's arms, sobbing for the first time. It was a great gift, though, to see her then. To touch her. To speak to her. I am forever grateful for it. So much of the drama was to come in the time that followed this first dramatic 24 hours. I don't have time to get into everything here. Plus, I am not sure I remember it right. I don't know what's been added on, embellished, what timelines have collapsed from a sporadic morass into a more cohesive and spatial whole. There are a few things I can cling to because there are dates tethered to the experience. For example, I know that I went home for the first time on the 28th to watch Kansas State play their bowl game. My dad, uncle, and brother headed back to the hospital after the disappointing performance but my best friend and I stayed at my parents' house. After drinking ample amounts of cheap whiskey--I don't remember the brand, just the price range--we called it a night. After he fell asleep I got back up, unable to slow my mind and rest. A few days before, Colorado had endured an historic snowstorm when a 36" monster bombarded the front range. On the night of the 28th the second storm hit, dumping another 20" on an already stressed infrastructure. I remember this particularly because unable to sleep, and depleted by the recurring lack of sleep, I went outside. I went outside in nothing but my boxer shorts and sat there as the snow fell and the cold quickly numbed my body. I sat there as long as I could bear it before going inside and curling up in a ball on the floor in the same spot where my mom had passed out. The ironing board was still out. I stayed there for a long time.
Here's another that I basically trust but still wonder about. I tried to go back to work one morning--shortly after the new year (and I am skipping over a lot here)--but stumbled around in a haze and decided to go home. A coworker mercifully talked me down from my original plan of just quitting. My grand plan was to cook a big pot of chili for my dad and me to eat. We had subsisted for the past week or so on takeout Thai and burgers and whatever else we could scrabble together or was kindly donated to our perpetual vigil. I went to King Soopers and as I walked into the house I got a call from my dad. I don't remember exactly what he said (sidetone: if anyone should try to recount dialogue when telling a story it's safe to say they're extemporizing; I can't remember verbatim discussions I had earlier this morning), but the gist of it was clear: mom was dying. In what turned out to be simply another in a set of scenes ripped from a Hallmark movie I sped away towards the hospital in my beloved old Nissan Pathfinder, alternately praying fervently and swearing ferociously at drivers with the temerity to slow my progress. I screamed into the parking lot at the hospital (the tires are screeching in my memory), vaguely aware that Sufjan Stevens' version of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" was playing through my iPod and ran towards the neuro unit. In what I can only find darkly comedic now, after dramatically running through the length of the hospital I got to the elevator to get to the floor my mom was on and, patients and visitors being denied stair privileges, I had to wait for an excruciatingly long time for the elevator to arrive. As I waited people I had previously bumped past in my headlong effort for the third floor walked past me. By the time I reached the floor the situation was calmed. I don't remember exactly the resolution or exactly the problem but they had to do an emergency angiogram on my mom and prevent something bad from happening. And they did. And now my mom is fine. She is literally in the 100th percentile for aneurysm recovery. If I remember correctly that was the last major scare. As fuzzy as those memories are of that time they are nevertheless incomprehensibly dear to me. Because of God's grace and mercy I can look back on them with joy. _____________________________________________________________________________ We just got back from Hawaii earlier today. My family and the two (soon to be three) grandchildren my mom might never have met, my brother and his girlfriend, my parents and my grandmother. We went to celebrate Christmas and celebrate the past decade. I cannot imagine the past ten years without my mom. I cannot imagine a world in which my kids don't have their gaga. Life is so normal and so uninterrupted by that event that it is easy for me to be tricked into forgetting what a blessing my mother's mere existence is. Her physical presence defies explanation. Her ability to walk with, talk with, play with, color pictures with, and get into the ocean with my kids is miraculous. Even if her natural timidity prevented the latter activity from getting above knee-high water. I don't know why things happened this way. I don't know why my mom lived and other people on her unit in that month died from the same thing. I've been asking that question for a decade and I'm no nearer an answer than I was then. But the miracle of my mother's existence and life has reinforced the miraculousness of all life. The blessing of each of her breaths reminds me of the blessing of every breath we unconsciously and ungratefully take. The beauty of watching her play with my children emphasizes the everyday beauty in the movements of my children and the physical suppleness of play. The utter undeservedness of drinking wine with her over a steak dinner overlooking the Pacific Ocean admonishes me to drink deeply of the undeserved grace that saturates our entire world. The lesson, in other words, is gratitude. If my mother's continued presence on this planet is cause for wonder it is really only slightly more wonderful than my presence here. Than yours. What I can cling to even as the memories fade or collapse into each other is the imperative of thankfulness. And I pray that I may cultivate this virtue of gratitude--of praise to God for all of these holy gifts--all my life. For, as Christ says, if you have been given much, much is therefore expected of you. And I have certainly been given much.
I haven't read much history this year. One of my goals at the beginning of the year was to read more philosophy and theology and while I've certainly accomplished this goal it seems like the Peter I robbed to pay the Paul of philosophy was history. Towards the end of this year in a belated attempt to rectify my neglect I started reading Shelby Foote's three-volume classic on the Civil War. I'll pick up Volume II at some point in 2017 but I took a break to read the biography of Alexander Hamilton that inspired the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. It is named, fittingly, Alexander Hamilton. Seven hundred page biographies are an interesting genre. I've waded through a few in my life and while I've always ultimately felt it was worth it, I've also had times where I've woken up with drool coating the page I was reading before falling into a doze. Which is only to say that I commiserate with my students when they complain about reading being boring. It certainly can be at times, particularly when slogging through financial data from the eighteenth century. Which I never make them do, so on second thought, shut up, students. Reading is great! One of the most enjoyable parts of reading this biography is all the resonances between Ron Chernow's book and Lin-Manuel Miranda's play. Miranda is an avid student of the work and even when he deviates from the source material, as all creative work must to do to one extent or another, the changes feel recognizable within the broader span of Hamilton's actual life and work. Another enjoyable and commonplace aspect of historical reading is tracking the resonances between the era described and our own. And here there are many: the size and role of government, the role of immigrants in national prosperity, true democracy versus republicanism, states' rights versus federal prerogative, etc. And then there is the figure of George Clinton, the seven-term governor of New York state, two time Vice President, and thorn in Hamilton's side (how's that for a resume?). See if this sounds familiar: "If uncouth in appearance, he was a wily politician who clung tenaciously to power. . . Clinton represented what would become a staple of American political folklore: the local populist boss, not overly punctilious or savory yet embraced warmly by the masses as one of their own. As his biographer John Kaminski put it, 'George Clinton's friends considered him a man of the people; his enemies saw him as a demagogue.'" Miranda is insistent in interviews that Hamilton's story is relevant for audiences today. I've not heard him mention this particular, but it is worth remembering that the figure cut by Trump is nothing new to the American political stage. George Clinton is but one example of a Trumpian precursor. And it is worth remembering, too, that Trump certainly will not be the last bombastic ass masquerading as a populist hero. I don't stand much stead behind the old saw about those not knowing history being doomed to repeat it--if pressed to logical conclusions the only validity such a saying can have is in very abstract applications, i.e. people still go to war! crazy!!!--but it is worth reading and reminding ourselves that what we're seeing here is nothing new. Call it the Solomonic wisdom rather thanGeorge Clinton had his day but is now an historical footnote. Trump, prayerfully, will be the same.
To pay for her nursing school my wife
worked as a CNA in the alzheimer's unit of an assisted living facility. She
worked with people whose former lives were shrouded in darkness. They were
often angry, lashing out at her with biting words they never would have said in
another context. They were often sad, dissolving into panicked tears
randomly. Perhaps most often they were lonely. About one half
of nursing home residents receive visitors; the rest pine away in front of
daytime TV, watching The Price is Right, Matlock and Murder,
She Wrote reruns while commercials for class-action lawsuits against
pharmaceutical companies and used car dealerships play in an infinite loop.
One of the obsessions of
my thought life is memory, specifically related to time and its
effects. After reading the famous madeleine scene in Proust's Swann's
Way I was reminded of a segment I had heard on NPR years ago
about the power of music to awaken the memories of patients with Alzheimer's. A
few seconds of Googling yielded me the story and the name of the documentary
that was being profiled: Alive Inside, a profile of a man, Dan Cohen,
who has made it his mission to put music into the ears of the forgotten
elderly.
While the movie traded in the scientific
for the saccharine all too often, the effect was nonetheless moving and
beautiful. There are no other words to describe the feeling of watching someone
locked out of her memory come alive and start singing and dancing (relatively
speaking) and smiling and telling stories. I am sure there were painful periods
of therapy and buildup to the epiphanies catalogued in the film that were
less camera-worthy, but the central point--that music has the power to unlock
our degraded and obscured memories--is vital.
I encourage you to watch the
following clip which went viral and gave Cohen's work a higher profile:
Isn't that beautiful? That moment when
this nearly unresponsive old man perks up and starts moaning and scatting and
remembering who he once was. Music restored his humanity, his dignity. I
cried, often profusely, through this film.
A philosopher I really enjoy, Michael
Polanyi, wrote about what he called "tacit knowledge," the stuff that
we pick up on implicitly, that we can't be directly taught in the manner
of the multiplication table or Latin declensions. It can be argued that most of
the important things we "know" we know tacitly. So much of the formation
of our children, of ourselves as moral beings, of citizens for a state, depends
on tacit knowledge development.
Music shapes us without our being aware of
how we are shaped. It teaches us how to feel and validates emotion. It teaches
us how to move and how to respond in synch with another human. It is so
powerful that it can overcome the degradation of the mind that comes with
dementia. There is a reason that for centuries peoples of various faiths have
sung their prayers. For in so doing songs, too, can shape our theology, our
metaphysics.
And what this film taps into is the
importance of what we listen to and what we love. For if music has this great
power--and it certainly does--it can also be wielded without care and
shape us badly. I don't mean to sound more conservative on this topic than
I actually am--I'm not listening to Christian music right now, after all, but
Neutral Milk Hotel--but it should at least give us pause.
But what this film points to just as
profoundly is our startling lack of reverence for our elders, for
any conception of elderhood at all. The film argues that we privilege
adulthood as the pinnacle of existence, an assertion that a generation that has
turned the word "adult" into a verb, as in "I don't want to
adult today", would surely contest. We don't privilege adulthood because
we have a sad lack of adults. And, as my recent posts on Neal Postman's book The
Disappearance of Childhood note, we don't really have childhood
either. We privilege ease and luxury and the notion of perpetual youth and
a pain free dotage (which we steadfastly refuse to think about).
Old people remind us that we'll get old;
old people have pill dispensers for their daily intake and remind us of the
eventual breakdown of our bodies; old people die and remind us that we will
die; and, perhaps most pertinently, old people retain belief systems
discredited by our enlightened peers and therefore have nothing to teach
us.
All of this is, to quote Donald Trump,
"Sad." And what this film shows is that there is life after adulthood,
there is richness to be mined from the last years of life. It shows us that
we're wrong. It is a lesson I pray that I heed in my own life.
I just started reading Victor Lee Austin's book Up With Authority.Austin is a resident theologian at an Episcopalian church in New York City and most recently published a memoir on his wife's multi-decade fight with cancer and slow diminishment and death, called Losing Susan: Brain Disease, the Priest's Wife, and the God who Gives and Takes Away.I am hoping to read the book soon, but in the meantime if issues of God's sovereignty and pain are on your radar I recommend this excellent first things conversation between Austin and R.R. Reno. This conversation and an interview in Ken Meyers' extraordinary Mars Hill Audio first brought Austin's work to my attention. When I saw that he had written a book on authority, a subject near and dear to my own heart, I had to pick up a copy. The dearth of respect for and trust in authority is undeniable in our culture. And there is without doubt good reason for mistrust. Washington, our national emblem of authority, is a cesspool of corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and ethnically insensitive NFL teams. Despite clear abuses of authority in our culture, Austin's thesis is that, paradoxically, submission to authority frees us to be more free. The modern desire for a manager rather than a leader is symptomatic of what Austin sees as "leaders' who stand for nothing except fair process"--harnessing the energies of their subordinates rather than actively leading them. This lack of understanding of true leadership signals a "cultural impoverishment that we have a lack of a notion of authorities who have something to convey to us, have a place to lead us toward, authorities, that is, who embody a sense of what the human good is and who exist to help us flourish in it." In reaction to bad authority (coupled with the human desire for complete autonomy), we have rejected all formative authority and exalted the individual. But true authority rightly exercised leads us to a more human and more excellent existence, unleashing potentials that will remain forever latent outside of submission to authority. Austin's final encouragement in the introduction is that Christian believers must of necessity embrace paradox. Our faith is shot full of paradox of which freedom through submission is perhaps one of the least vexing. We believe in the incarnation where the God-man came to earth to grow as a child and teach and heal and die and rise. But the church has forever maintained that Christ's dual position of fully God and fully man is not a contradiction but a paradox. Something, while outside of the bounds of our full understanding, we still can recognize as true. The modern mind has little room for paradox.I just taught my juniors Donne's great poem "Batter My Heart Three-Person'd God." They bristle, as they ought, at Donne's final request in the poem that he cannot be "chaste" unless he is "ravish[ed]" by God. But Donne is not literally asking God to overpower him sexually, but expressing the paradox that our moral purity depends on God's overpowering our weak desires with fulfillment beyond imagination. The lines prior to the shocking conclusion are just as paradoxical (though less incendiary): "But I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free." There it is. Freedom through enthrallment. Freedom through imprisonment to the will of God. Freedom through submission to be who we were made to be and thus be truly free. (I plan on blogging more in detail through this book as I go. In my faltering manuscript on obedience and Paradise Lost the philosophical underpinning provided by Austin will be invaluable. And, while the index isn't overly-detailed, it doesn't seem that he covers Milton as an authority on this matter.)
I am slogging right now through Shelby Foote's three volume Civil War masterpiece, about halfway through Volume I: Fort Sumter to Perryville. It is fascinating historical reading. It is weird to say that a series of books weighing in at close to 10 pounds and including nearly 3,000 pages of densely-packed and meticulously-researched work could ever feel like it's leaving stuff out but Foote is such a good writer that he makes me wish he had written more (editorial note: I reserve the right to reverse this opinion at any time during Volume III). An interesting thing that cropped up early in the first volume is the absolute Southern confidence in quick victory. They were so assured of the Southern man's dominance that they thought a single Confederate soldier was equal to ten Federals. But here's the thing: they were so good at selling this narrative that not only were the Union soldiers scared of the fighting ferocity of the Southerner, everyday residents of the South believed it too. This made the early successes in the war, especially in the western theater, particularly hard for the South to understand. If one Confederate was equal to ten Union, then why in the world were the Union soldiers riding roughshod over their Confederate opponents? In other words, the propaganda convinced both the enemy and the friends. When the enemy punctured the propaganda it was shattered for both sides. This is all notable to me now in the wake of our recent election. The propaganda machine of the left (i.e. nearly every major media outlet) was so efficient in ensuring the easy victory of Hillary Clinton--even imagining a congressional shift because of the public distrust in Trump--that they forgot it was actually just propaganda. That elections are nutty. That they didn't actually have a clue what was going to happen. And just as the reaction in the South to the first defeats of the war was open and confounded disbelief, so the reaction amongst the left to this election has been the same. Combined, in both cases, with lots of anger and recrimination. I don't know what the lesson is here, exactly. Reach some golden mean of propaganda saturation and believability? Avoid propaganda altogether? Maybe. But at the very least it ought to inject a bit of humility into people. There is so much that we cannot know; so much that we assume based on half facts and half truths.
