A use of fiction

Posted on by albrooke

Fiction is, among other things, an aid to reflection: a means by which we can more vividly and rigorously encounter the world and try to make sense of it, to confront “the problems of being” as freshly as we can. But we vary in our interpretative needs: the questions that absorb some of us never occur to others. Each of us has her own labyrinth . Every genre of fiction puts certain questions in brackets, or takes their answers as given, in order to explore others. Not even the greatest of writers can keep all the balls in the air at once: some have to sit still on the ground while the others whirl. People who come to a book by Murakami, or Neal Stephenson, or even Ursula K. LeGuin with the questions they would put to a Marilynne Robinson novel are bound to be disappointed and frustrated. But if we readers attend closely to the kinds of questions a book is asking, the questions it invites from us, then our experience will be more valuable. And the more questions we can put to the books we read — in the most generous and charitable spirit we can manage — the richer becomes our encounter not just with the books themselves but with the world they point to.

Alan Jacobs, Reverting to Type: a Reader’s Story, loc. 561-570 (Kindle ed., 2012).

Learning to learn

Posted on by albrooke

“Another fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take up the study that interests him most. For a small number of students this is in the main right. Even at a very early stage of school life, we can identify a few individuals with a definite inclination towards one group of studies or another. The danger for these unfortunate ones is that if left to themselves they will overspecialize, they will be wholly ignorant of the general interests of human beings. We are all in one way or another naturally lazy, and it is much easier to confine ourselves to the study of subjects in which we excel. But the great majority of the people who are to be educated have no very strong inclination to specialize, because they have no definite gifts or tastes. Those who have more lively and curious minds will tend to smatter. No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest – for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”

— T. S. Eliot (1932) reblogged from Alan Jacobs, More than 95 Theses (http://ayjay.tumblr.com/).

If you aren’t already watching out for anything Alan Jacobs writes, you should be.  (This quotation of Eliot’s reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote about the test of being well read being whether you could find something to interest you on the discount table at any used bookshop.)

Meursault, revisited

Posted on by albrooke

A first-time author re-views the events of Albert Camus’ The Stranger from the perspective of the murder victim’s brother.  The brother shares the murderer’s disdain for faith:

“I detest religions and submission. . . .Who wants to run panting after a father who has never set foot on earth, has never had to know hunger or work for a living.”

Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation (2015).

Ah, but a deity who walked and worked, sweated and suffered, loved and lost his life — now that would be a God to worship.

Nice review at the NYT site — http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/books/review-kamel-daoud-interrogates-camus-in-the-meursault-investigation.html?mabReward=A6&moduleDetail=recommendations-2&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&configSection=article&isLoggedIn=false&src=recg&pgtype=article — I’m looking forward to reading this one.

“Augustine falls apart”

Posted on by albrooke

Thomas Cahill says that Augustine, fascinated with Plato’s concept of man seeking Truth, considers Paul’s writings, and is brought to the point of wondering whether humans are capable of seeking and acquiring truth.

Cahill imagines that Augustine must have read Romans 8:29ff (concerning God’s role in salvation) and concluded something like

[I]f we mud-spattered human beings are ever to ascend to Truth, we can do it only because God, a force ineffably greater than our war-torn selves, has predestined us and calls us upward.  We will never make it under our own steam.

Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart.

Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization 56 (1995).