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Silence

Silence

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I just finished reading Jane Brox’s lovely new book Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives. Brox plumbs her topic by comparing the silence of solitary confinement with the silence of the cloister, an interesting approach that gives her a chance to examine the trials of silence as well as its gifts.

She draws often from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived much of his life in the cloistered Abbey of Gethsemani but whose writings gave him a worldwide audience. Here she quotes from Merton’s Asian Journal: “Our real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever-greater surrender to the creative action of grace and love in our hearts.”

Brox notes the creative power of silence, and its necessity. She concludes with this thought:

Silence can seem like a luxury. Or the fraught world has labeled it that way. But from what I know of it, I would argue that silence is as necessary as the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, which we so carefully guard and endlessly ponder, for it affirms the meaning of speech even as it provides a path to inner life, to beauty, observation and appreciation. It presents the opportunity for a true reckoning with the self, with external obligation, and with power.

Walking in Pace

Walking in Pace

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The tiger does it, in his cage. Weary parents do it, up and down a hall, hoping that the baby in their arms will soon nod off to sleep.

Pacing is to walking as the treadmill is to the sidewalk. It is walking on adrenaline, super-charged with nervous energy that must be let out, even if there’s nowhere to put it.

While I’m lucky enough to have a strip of asphalt on which to pound out my anxieties, there have been times when nothing made me feel better than walking the circuit through my house: living room, hall, office, kitchen … living room, hall, office, kitchen.

I’ve never thought this a failing, only a useful habit. But reading A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, has given me second thoughts:

…[I]t had been the Count’s experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively. For while the men who pace are being whipped along by logic, it is a multifaceted sort of logic, which brings them no closer to a clear understanding, or even a state of conviction. Rather it leaves them at such a loss that they end up exposed to the influence of the merest whim, to the seduction of the rash or reckless act—almost as if they had never considered the matter at all.

I’ll never look at pacing the same way again.

(It’s not pacing if you do it in a portico.)

Soporific

Soporific

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Last November, I took the National Novel Writing Month challenge and produced 54,000 or so words of fiction in 30 days. The idea is to punch out a draft, and punch it out I did. But at the end of the month I tucked it away on my computer hard drive and barely looked at it again.

Until my recent getaway, that is. Curious to see just how bad this thing was, I opened it up, held my breath and started reading. And I learned that, well, it wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.  Which is not to say that it’s ready for the New York Times bestseller list — or for any eyes other than my own.  But it has a couple of likable characters.

This morning, I discovered that the novel, which I call For Sale, has another attribute.  I’d been trying to read myself back to sleep for almost two hours without success. But after 10 minutes of For Sale I was out like a light.

Perhaps this could be a marketing tool. Watch out, Ambien, here I come!

The Contemplative Life

The Contemplative Life

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Shortly before leaving the house on Saturday, I panicked about what books to bring.  I jettisoned the hefty library book, a novel scheduled for September book group. There will be plenty of time for it, and it hadn’t grabbed me yet.

I thought about packing a book I’d already read, a security blanket of sorts. But that seemed too unadventurous.

I ended up with Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl. It is part travelogue, part memoir and part spiritual exploration.

The contemplative life is what Hampl is after, but to get to it she takes a walking tour to Assisi, home of St. Francis.  The walking feeds the contemplation, and provides authentic moments like the one when a woman in a kerchief runs out to offer the pilgrims two bottles of her homemade wine, a gesture “a million years old, far beyond courtesy, rooted in ancient communion.”

“Walking allowed such timeless moments, making us slow-moving parts of the landscape we passed through. Maybe the world isn’t, at its daily heart, as modern as we tend to think. As we walked, it kept reverting to an ancient, abiding self.”

And it is in that “ancient, abiding self” that Hampl discovers — and perhaps all of us could find — the lives we are looking for.

A Diller A Dollar

A Diller A Dollar

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I miss reading Mother Goose rhymes to little people, but this morning it was almost like I was reading one to myself.

Into my mind, unprompted, came these words:

A diller, a dollar, a 10 o’clock scholar
What makes you come so soon?
You used to come at 10 o’clock,
But now you come at noon.

I know why this nursery rhyme suddenly came to mind.  It’s the first day of my vacation, and I slept from 11 p.m. till 9 a.m.

The feeling, like the nursery rhyme, is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. And, like both, it is much fun.

Writing a Life

Writing a Life

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An article in yesterday’s Washington Post says that writing a narrative of one’s life helps prepare one for death. It makes sense to me. But I would amend it slightly to say that writing a narrative of one’s life prepares us for … life!

I’ve been keeping a journal since high school, and wouldn’t trade those books for anything. They are a motley bunch of spiral-bound and hardbound volumes, with writing cramped and tiny or loose and free depending on my mood. They preserve more than I could ever remember — and quite a bit I’d rather forget. But they are a record of my life, for good or ill, and as such are valuable to me.

An expert quoted in the Post article mentions that merely listing one’s life events doesn’t work. It’s creating the narrative that brings perspective, linking one incident, one person, to another, a chain of belonging, a chain of being.

In other words, it’s figuring out the question that Charles Dickens so aptly asks at the beginning of David Copperfield. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

(If life is a journey, it is also a narrative.) 

Small Fry

Small Fry

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I tore through Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ memoir Small Fry in a few days. It’s honest and it’s titillating, since Lisa’s father is Steve Jobs, and his paternal behavior is quite strange, to put it mildly.

Steve has little to do with Lisa and her mother (who he never married) in the beginning, and only acknowledges paternity under duress. Eventually, he has a relationship with Lisa, albeit an unusual one. They skate together, have dinner together and in high school Lisa even lives with Steve and his wife and son. But it’s a relationship fraught with uncertainty and even meanness. Steve won’t admit he named his Lisa computer after his daughter. He belittles Lisa and refuses to pay for her last year of college. Lisa has the final word, though, in the way of all memorable memoirists.

What I liked best about Lisa’s writing was when she described the California of her youth, the sights and smells of the land she came alive to: “Here the soil was black and wet and fragrant; beneath rocks I discovered small red bugs, pink- and ash-colored worms, thin centipedes, and slate-colored woodlice that curled into armored spheres when I bothered them. The air smelled of eucalyptus and sunshine-warmed dirt, moisture, cut grass.”

It reminds me of George Eliot’s line: “We would never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”

Embracing the Puritans?

Embracing the Puritans?

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I’m finishing up Marilynne Robinson’s book What Are We Doing Here? Throughout her career, Robinson has been fascinated by erasures and omissions, and in an essay titled “Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself,” she asks us to rethink our Puritan heritage, its spirit of reformation, its genius for education and institution building.

Puritans get a bad rap, Robinson says, in so many words. Some of their greatest achievements have been forgotten, including a code called the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) that anticipates the Bill of Rights. The abolition movement flowered in colleges founded by Puritans. There is much to appreciate about them. But they are not hip.

This latter point is my own opinion, and an extrapolation, but I make it because Robinson opens her essay by mentioning an article about herself in which she is described as “bioengineered to personify unhipness.”

She laughs off the characterization — figuring that it’s because she’s in her 70s, a Calvinist and lives in Iowa — but she takes seriously the fact that Americans are inclined to “find their way to some sheltering consensus that will tell them what to wear, what to eat, what to read, how to vote, what to think.”

Anyone watching the Democratic debates last week would be hard pressed to disagree with her.

(Picture of the Westminster Assembly by John Rogers Herbert, courtesy Wikipedia)

Words That Live On

Words That Live On

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Yesterday would have been the 90th birthday of Anne Frank. Seventy-seven years ago, she received a diary for her 13th birthday, a diary she would fill with words that would live on for decades, and, most likely centuries, beyond her.

The contents were in many ways typical — conflicts with her mother, questions about her future. But it was written in 500 square feet of hidden space that Anne shared with her parents, sister and four other people. And it was written amidst the horrors of Nazi Europe.

“When I write, I can shake all of my cares,” Anne wrote in her journal. “My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived. But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something truly great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”

Anne would die not long after her 15th birthday. The diary she called “Kitty” was left behind in the “Secret Annex.” She could not take it to Auschwitz or on to Bergen Belsen, where she and her sister died of disease and malnutrition shortly before Allies freed the concentration camps. But a family friend saved the journal, and gave it to Anne’s father, Otto, who eventually had it published. It would be translated into 70 languages and sell tens of millions of copies around the world.

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” Anne wrote. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”

(Above: a page from Anne Frank’s Tales book. She also penned what she called The Book of Beautiful Sentences — copying passages of writing that she liked — started a novel and planned a book called The Secret Annex. Photo and information courtesy of the Anne Frank Museum website and The Writer’s Almanac.) 

What Are We Doing Here?

What Are We Doing Here?

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I’m picking my way through Marilynne Robinson’s book of essays, What Are We Doing Here? I love Robinson’s fiction and am enlightened by her nonfiction. But I have to read the latter carefully, and more than once, so dense is the prose, so tightly packed are the ideas it holds.

The extra time is never wasted, as her ideas are countercultural in the best sense of that word. Robinson writes about humanism and religion — and she writes unapologetically. Most of our great institutions grew out of our theology, which she defines as “the great architecture of thought and wonder that makes religious experience a house of many mansions, open to the soul’s explorations.”

Robinson does not shy away from delivering charges. Here’s an example: “One thing theology must do now is to reconsider and reject the kind of thinking that tends to devalue humankind.”

To read Robinson is to be reminded of a world richer and fuller than the one we inhabit now, one where what she calls the “moral self, that old wanderer through the trials and temptations of earthly life,” was freer to roam and risk and challenge and live.