Month: December 2023

That Which We Measure May Be Forgotten

It’s the end of a year and a new one beckons, another way in which we humans try to control things by measuring them. I am as guilty of this sort of thing as any, and probably more than most — how much time have I wasted over the last few years meticulously noting down everything I eat into a food journal, for literally no actual purpose?

I also track the books I read, movies and TV I watch, and my opinions about them, etc., for only slightly greater purpose — unlike the food journal, the book lists might be revisited once or twice in the future. These lists also let me do things like this, an end of year summary that will certainly be of interest to no one but me. (Of course, the same can be said of all the other articles on this little WordPress outpost.)

For many unmeasurable reasons, this has been a very good year. Below are some of the things that can be weighed, tracked and listed.

Books

I finished 64 books this year, down a bit from prior years, but then this is also the year I dove eagerly down the Kierkegaard rabbit hole. It started with a Catherine Project reading group of Fear & Trembling, continued with another CP group tackling Sickness Unto Death, and then a courageous few of us decided to stick together for The Concept of Anxiety. We’ve also read a few of Kierky’s discourses, including the three contained in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

All of these books rank naturally as my best reads of the year, probably the best reads of my life; in January, our group begins Part 1 of Either/Or, and I begin thinking about how to actually turn Kierkegaard’s insights into personal action (or to use more precise words, inwardness and reflection).

I am still, of course, unfinished with Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World, which I am reading at perhaps the slowest pace of any book in my life. I’m glad to be doing so. God willing, I will continue notating my way through it here at the blog through 2024.

A few other books I read and loved this year:

Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell (2020) — Beautiful writing about a messy life (and is there any other kind?).

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin (2009) — Quiet and wonderful. How did it ever become a movie?

Secret City, by James Kirchick (2022) — Long but fascinating.

Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates (1992) — Should have read this a long time ago, but I am a latecomer to JCO’s work.

Jessica Fayer, by John L’Heureux (1976) — I read two L’Heureux novels in 2023 as part of my ongoing meander through his work; this one shows its age, but is a provocative examination of how death creates meaning for even the most desultory life. (The other one, The Handmaid of Desire, a weak attempt at academic satire, was mediocre.)

Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons, by Rowan Williams (2018) — Small but dense, worth rereading again. Also convinced me that I really need to read Iain McGilchrist, if only his books weren’t so damn massive.

Works of Mercy, by Sally Thomas (2022) — A first novel from a Catholic poet; funny and heartbreaking.

Howards End, by E. M. Forster (1910) — A good friend convinced me to read this as part of a group, and I didn’t regret it.

Philosopher of the Heart, by Clare Carlisle (2019) — A very good biography of Kierkegaard, though there are others I plan to read as well.

How to Inhabit Time, by James K. A. Smith (2022), and For the Time Being, by W. H. Auden (1944) — I didn’t plan on ending the year reading these particular two books, or imagine that they would wind up being such a one-two punch.

Movies

Not a lot of movies this year, though we wound up actually going to the movies more than I would have expected, and mostly just for fun: Barbie (which was more serious than most people seem to think), the new Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible films (which were both more fun than most people seem to think), Theater Camp (which was hilarious). Also saw both Vertigo and Shadow of a Doubt on the big screen, which were terrific experiences.

Passages, which I wrote about here, was the best new film I saw all year; I still enjoy thinking about it.

Finally, we stumbled across Brian de Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise on the Criterion Channel, and what the actual fuck? Amazing weirdness; I can’t believe I’d never heard of it, let alone never seen it before.

Television

Not a lot of TV this year, and hopefully even less next year. But we finally got around to watching the third season of Atlanta, and it was such pure genius that we are putting off watching the fourth and final season until we feel a craving for something perfectly sublime.

Also, Somebody Somewhere on HBO (or whatever they call it now) is heart-wrenching and hilarious and beautifully acted; and the first season of Poker Face was just sheer fun; and All Creatures Great and Small starts every year on the perfect note. (New season next week!)

This Blog

This will be the 44th post since June 27. It feels weird to launch a blog in 2023, knowing that, unlike the glory days of 2005, it will be pretty much impossible for anyone to find it. But I’ve never really felt at home anywhere else, and whether anyone else ever reads any of these posts or not, I still feel a particular moment of apprehensive excitement when I press the “publish” button. Here’s hoping I am able to do so even more frequently in 2024.

Books In and Out of Season

I admire people like Joel Miller who are able to plan out their reading, which seems infinitely preferable to my habit of perusing my to-be-read shelves (now numerous, spanning multiple rooms) waiting for a certain inspired curiosity to fall on my head like, well, a book from a high shelf.

But I doubt I will ever be able to join the ranks of the planners. Instead, every time I must choose my next book, I’m seized with a bit of paralysis. What’s the book for me right now? is one of the questions with which I struggle. And, is it a book I want to have read, or one I want to read? — which are sometimes the same, sometimes not.

This is why my husband rolls his eyes at how many books I bring whenever we go anywhere, weighing down the luggage. Well, I don’t know what I will feel like reading when I finish the one I’m reading right now! I must have choices.

Unfortunately, once I defeat the paralysis and answer the questions, sometimes those answers are wrong.

I have a habit of accumulating books that make sense for a certain time and place in my life, but then never getting around to reading them — until, possibly, they are well past their season.

For example, John Fowles’ The Magus has existed in a corner of my shelves in various editions throughout multiple housing situations since I was in high school. I didn’t know much about it, but as a young man (boy) the idea of it, as encapsulated in whatever marketing copy was on the back of that original tattered paperback, thrilled me.

But I always put off reading it, imagining it would be an experience I could savor at any time. Last summer I found a very nice Modern Library edition at a bookstore in Maine, and then last week, when asking myself, What’s the book for me right now?, I decided to answer myself, Why, it must be The Magus, finally.

Oof. Wrong answer. 700 pages of, to be frank, absolute shit, which does not qualify as the most insightful book review ever written, I agree. But this book started off as the sort of faux intellectual potboiler I would ordinarily enjoy, and very quickly devolved into what can only be termed a “hate read.” I finished it only because I couldn’t believe it was as bad as it was. I sometimes wondered if Fowles was pulling my leg.

But, no. This was his first book, though he worked on it for years and published it as his third, and then later revised it again in 1977. (If this edition was an improvement, I shudder to think what the original was like.) Fowles was as serious as the seriously despicable-yet-dull narrator he had created.

I hated this book so much that I don’t even want to dwell on all the reasons why I hated it — the complete misunderstanding of women (or men), of sex, of religion, of simple adult human living and decision-making. I wasn’t bothered by how horrible all of the characters were, I was bothered by how boring they all were, despite the author’s desperate, interminable attempts to make them all seem so sinister and twisty and interesting.

Anyway. Even Fowles admitted in a foreword that he didn’t quite understand the book’s popularity, and that said popularity seemed to be centered among adolescents. If I’d read the book when it first caught my eye, instead of putting it off for 30 or so years, I might have found it just as transformative as some of the gaga Amazon reviewers. I was a pompous ass, after all — God is dead, so let’s drink coffee, and all that crap — and the book’s naive ramblings and endless circularities would probably have struck me as profound when I didn’t know what profundity was.

This isn’t the only time this has happened; I had a similar experience with John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was first published when I was in college, and reviews convinced me so thoroughly that I would love the book, that I always held off on reading it until there might be a time when I felt the need for a truly transformative reading experience. Such a time finally came, and I read the novel while in the waiting room every day for six weeks undergoing radiation treatments.

And oh my God, I hated that book, all of it, every word. Again, perhaps I would have loved it, if I experienced it earlier in life.

I know, some will say — life’s too short, stop reading if you don’t like it. And generally, I do; there are lots of books I’ve started and set aside, but I don’t hate those books, they just weren’t for me at that time. (Some of them I return to, and find it has become the right time.) The books I loathe, for some reason, I tend to finish. It may be that the books which engender such strong feelings have other compensatory traits that drive me forward.

So I’ve learned that the books I self-consciously put aside as a younger self to read later may not scratch any particular itch I develop in, shall we say, middle age. But I’m not sure this lesson is compelling enough to change my haphazard approach to selecting books, even though a schedule, or at least a goal, might be helpful. For example, I’ve been toying with the idea of declaring 2024 a “big book” year, and focus on finishing a few big novels I feel guilty about not having read.

But I’m hesitant to make a commitment. After all, any fiction I read is in addition to all of the Kierkegaard, Ellul and similar authors I am determined to continue absorbing. Can one actually read Either/Or and Moby-Dick in the same year?

Hmm. Come to think of it, perhaps one can and should.

Ellul on the Illusion of Inner Freedom

This entry is part 20 of 28 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing in chapter 3, Ellul dwells a bit more on the meaning of means, which is “that they are totalitarian. Our civilization is entirely one of means, and means affect every domain. They respect nothing.”

There are two angles from which to consider the totalitarianism of means.

First, means destroy everything that might hinder their advance. Morality? It falls before technique (if it works, how can it be immoral?). Humanism falls, because technique will not be limited to the interest of human beings. (Paging AI, again.) “Gratuitiousness” — anything for its own sake, such as art — is flatly rejected; everything must serve. (What’s the point of art with no market value? Is it even art?)

Instead of accepting human values, means will construct their own. What Ellul calls the “new myths” — such as state, nation, race, labor, parties — are mere props for means. Humans accept these illusions because they hide the “appalling desiccation of the world” created by means.

Second, means relentlessly extend their dominion over all aspects of human existence. Humans, Ellul says, are just as much objects of technique as material goods. We are hacking our lives, not just living them; psychological problems, spiritual problems, “self-knowledge” — these are all grist for the mill of means. One “solution” leads to another to another. We never stop working on ourselves because we are actually being worked upon. Ellul writes:

“Because human beings have become objects and the spiritual is classed among spiritual means, existence no longer has any possible meaning. Existentialism, the philosophy of our time, is correct to remind us that our existence is such, but it is incorrect in saying that human beings are free to restore meaning to their lives. The irreversible triumph of means eliminates any freedom for human beings to follow this path.”

We have all been captured in a trap laid by means, whose triumph is total. “It is useless to act smart and claim inner freedom,” Ellul writes. “When a freedom is not a part of my life, it is false.”

Ellul claims that this predicament is especially hard on Christians because, while it has always been impossible to live out one’s faith fully as Christian, that was always because of inner weakness. Now, it is made even more impossible (if you’ll pardon the expression) because of the external world.

This external world, controlled by means, constrains modern humans not only physically, but mentally. It is totalitarian precisely because it changes the ways in which humans value themselves and others. Historically, Ellul believes that all ancient “civilizations have exercised certain constraints, but they left to each person a wide field of freedom and invididuality. The Roman slave or the medieval serf was more free, more individual, more socially human (I do not see materially content) than is the modern worker or Soviet functionary.”

I think that Ellul is suggesting here that, even in a world of limited social mobility and physical constraint, people were allowed the freedom to think for themselves. In the modern world (and Ellul does not deny the benefits of modern medical and scientific advances), societies claim to be free from constraints, but actually they try to “seize human beings in their totality and confine them within a detailed framework, in which all their gestures and secret thoughts will be controlled by the social system.”

Under the system of means, our human “inner freedom” is an illusion. The modern social system makes it twice-over “impossible” to live out one’s Christian faith, by layering this external framework on top of our inner weaknesses. As David Gill notes in a footnote on page 50, Ellul is arguing dialectically here, that it is impossible to live as a Christian but also, because we are called to resist and act against both internal and external forces, possible. We must ensure the continued “social expression” of Christianity by fighting “to the death” (in a specifically spiritual sense) against the primacy of means.

Advent Begins. Or Continues.

So Advent begins, the season in which we recognize the state in which we all live, all of the time — this in-betweenness. Lately I’ve been thinking not about Christ’s birth, or even his return (whatever that may mean), but about his death and resurrection.

Lorenzo Lotto, "The Nativity": Jesus is born in a manger and a crucifix hangs on the wall.
Spoiler alert.

I’m part of a group Advent reading of Auden’s For the Time Being, and before our first meeting yesterday, I became somewhat fixated on the poem’s epigraph, from Romans 6: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.”

This verse sounds, fittingly for Advent, as if we are in mid-conversation with Paul. It pulls me not toward the verse itself, or what comes after, but what comes before: Romans 5 and its discussion of Adam and Jesus, the one whose trespass brought sin and death, and the one whose sacrifice brought grace and life. I can’t help then but read the opening sections of For the Time Being (which is all I’ve read so far), about the annunciation, through the lens of Jesus’ death (and resurrection) rather than birth. Which I think is what is intended.

One of my favorite quotes comes from the Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill, who once wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury: “The interesting thing about religion is God.” The italics are mine but that’s how I hear the words, and I can imagine her emphasizing each with a poke in the Archbishop’s chest.

I think of something similar about Advent, reduced to overpriced calendars of jams and dog treats and tiny bottles of booze counting down the days to a federal holiday: “The interesting about Jesus’s birth is his death.” The point of the Incarnation wasn’t the God-baby in the manger, which is the frustrating obsession of the modern church, but the God-man brutally murdered on the cross — and his miraculous, unbelievable, paradoxically life-bringing-for-all resurrection.

This particular theme is also on my mind because I’ve started reading Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus in preparation for a class (just “for fun,” ha) on the Theology of the Cross. I may note my way through Rutledge’s book here on the blog, but for now I will take comfort in the way she makes it sound sensible to focus more on Good Friday than Christmas, even at this time of year.

“Surprisingly,” she writes, “the liturgical season of Advent, rather than Lent, best locates the Christian community. Advent — the time between — with its themes of crisis and judgment, now and not-yet, places us not in some privileged spiritual sanctuary but on the frontier where the promised kingdom of God exerts maximum pressure on the present, with corresponding signs of suffering and struggle.”

Or, as Auden writes, “The Demolisher arrives / Singing and dancing!”