LITTLE FREE LIBRARY NEAR THE DC BELTWAY
November 27, 2020
Visiting my daughter in the DC area, I visited a “Little Free Library,” of which there are 100,000 in the US (https://littlefreelibrary.org). I borrowed six books from this little, glass-doored cabinet-on-a-pole in the park, and scanned them for goodies (or notable toxins). Here’s some of what I found:
Sam Intrator & Megan Scribner’s Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach—This and its partner book (next on this post) appear in a Jossey-Bass “Leadership/Inspiration” series. With an introduction by the Quaker, Parker Palmer (a self-described builder of “an abundant storehouse of heart-and-soul resources”), you can be sure the leadership tips run more in the SNL, Al Franken/Stuart Smalley vein than in the George Patton corridor of counsel. Still, I found some promising material, as in this piece of poetry which, I think, parallels the Apostle Paul’s testimony in Acts 22. It’s by Charles Olson:
Whatever you have to say,
leave the roots on,
let them dangle
And the dirt
Just to make clear
Where they come from
Then there’s an intriguing take on statistics by Wislawa Szymborska:
Out of a hundred people
Those who always know better
—fifty-two,
doubting every step
—nearly all the rest . . .
capable of happiness
—twenty-something tops . . .
Mortal
a hundred out of a hundred.
Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.
Sam Intrator & Megan Scribner’s Leading from Within: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Lead— Continuing with the series, I found myself enjoying a fair amount of the poetry, including these lines from Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance:
I had some cards printed
The other day.
They cost me more
Than I wanted to pay.
I told the man
I wasn’t no mint,
But I hankered to see
My name in print.
And this from “To be of use” by Marge Piercy:
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real.
And, from John Fox:
When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you’ve had since childhood
and watching it fill up with
cold, fresh water.
And from Naomi Shihab Bye:
Before you know what kindness really is
You must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
May Sarton’s I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography—Born in Belgium in 1912, Sarton, a lesbian, generated an enormous body of work (poetry, novels, non-fiction, children’s books, a play) before her death in 1995. She was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the following passage, she sketches her version/vision of heaven:
It looks exactly like [London’s] 5 Acacia Road. Kot [translator, critic, and literary intermediary S.S. Koteliansky] is sitting at the kitchen table, pronouncing, ‘In the hierarchy of creation there is God Almighty and Leo Tolstoy’; [D.H.] Lawrence is putting a duck in the oven; K. M. [New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield, known for her short stories and poetry] is writing at her table in the upper room; James [Stephens, an Irish poet] is drinking gin and crooning poems; and down at the end of the garden the pear tree is in flower.
Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall—First of all, Evelyn is a guy, with the named pronounced “Eve-lun,” not “Ev-lun.” Yes, it still sounds feminine, but, apparently, this works for a man in England. Second, one of my favorite quotes in aesthetics, one with a humorous whiplash, comes from EW’s Labels: A Mediterranean Journey:
I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.
Delicious, as is much of his writing, including Decline and Fall. (Made me want to read more Waugh; in fact, I went ahead and ordered Labels and am well into it.) Decline and Fall starts with the main character’s expulsion for misbehavior from his university and carries him into a secondary-school job for which he’s not prepared. The fateful incident occurred at the annual meeting of a Scone College club, with Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington in attendance. We pick up the story with these words:
At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles . . . [F]rom all over Europe old members had rallied for the occasion. For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes . . .
Robert Wicks’s, Everyday Simplicity: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Growth—This little book issues from Sorin Press in South Bend, named for the priest who founded Notre Dame, Father Edward Sorin. (Sorin is an imprint of Ave Maria Press.) It’s a hodge podge of “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey” material, drawn from a wide range “spiritual” sources, some broadly Christian, many not. The list includes Abraham Heschel, Thomas Merton, Paramahansa Yogananda, Anne Morrow Lindberg, Karl Rahner, W. B. Yeats, and Mark Twain. (Incidentally, Rahner provided inspiration for Molly Marshall-Green, the former SBTS prof who believed in post-mortem evangelism and the spiritual usefulness of world religions, such as Islam.) Along the way, he recommends, for training in meditation, Hinduish books such as Anthony de Mello’s Dadhana and Ram Dass’s Journal of Awakening. And he takes a Freudian turn when he urges us to move away from a “superego-oriented God” (of an angry conscience) to an “ego-oriented God” (of warm encouragement).
Wicks describes himself as one who helps the helpers “in integrating the psychological and the spiritual so people can extend their emotional flames to others without burning out in the process.” Some of what he writes here is good, though obvious—“Converse honestly, openly, and often with God each day.”) Some of it won’t bear even cursory scrutiny—“Spiritual kindness is, at its core, offering people acceptance, as well as a little of our time and attention when they are with us, no matter what their response to us may be.” (To Hitler on the run from advancing Allied forces?) Some of it fun—Mark Twain’s “Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” Some of it pure scripture, as in the “Don’t worry” counsel of Matthew 6:22-34 (from the Sermon on the Mount). Some of it is intriguing, though probably deleterious in many cases—Galett Burgess’s maxim, “If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.” Some with possible, though unsuspected, political implications—“Recognize that ‘entitlement’ is one of the greatest enemies of the spiritual life.” Some of it gaseous nonsense—as from the fellow who said, “I know Desmond Tutu is holy because when I’m with Desmond Tutu I feel holy.” (The same Desmond Tutu who supported the normalization of homosexuality in the Anglican Church.)
Catholics sometimes say that Protestantism is an unholy mess, a fruit salad of unregulated conceits. With this as background, they recommend the stability and gravitas of Mother Church. I don’t see it.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—This is a nasty piece of work, a cheap shot at Baptist piety and missions, written in the Elmer Gantry genre. I was astonished to see that one of my SBTS colleagues in years’ past cited it as favorite in a seminary publication, in effect commending it to the students. Perhaps he came from a rude religious background, from which he was continuing to flee. But it plays into a toxically liberationist narrative.
The short version is that a zealot of a father and pastor drags his family to “darkest Africa,” where he clumsily and imperiously offends the natives and his family. The wife and girls are more or less emotionally battered and alienated. The whole thing is cartoonish, a piece of caricature—“Fundy porn,” if you will for the gratification of condescending liberals, agnostics, and atheists. Of course there are terrible and terribly awkward people in the Church, and, of course, there is room for criticism. As the Bible says, “The wounds of a friend can be trusted” (Proverbs 27:6), but Kingsolver is no friend of Christians. Of course, she’s garnered prizes and honorary doctorates from the world, but the faithful should be slow to honor her. And, by the way, the book is a tiresome slog, self-indulgently tedious.
Along the way, we hear the mother say, “And my husband, why, hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher. I married a man who could never love, me, probably. It would have trespassed on his devotion to all mankind.” The tone is often snide and supercilious, whether it targets dad’s preaching or the King James Bible, which, “if it catches you in the wrong frame of mind . . . can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.”
One interesting passage describes the preacher’s forays into disciplining his children, such as that meted out to a daughter when he heard the family parrot mimic an unsavory expression the kids may have taught him:
The dreaded Verse is our household punishment. Other lucky children might merely be thrashed for their sins, but we Price girls are castigated with the Holy Bible. The Reverend will level his gaze and declare, “You have The Verse.” Then slowly, as we squirm on his hook, he writes on a piece of paper, for example: Jeremiah 48:18. Then say ye good-bye to sunshine or the Hardy Boys for an afternoon as you, poor sinner, must labor with a pencil in your good left hand to copy out Jeremiah 48:18, “Come down from your throne of glory and sit in the mire, O daughter that dwells in Dibon,” and additionally, the ninety-nine verses the follow it. One hundred full verses exactly copied out in longhand, because it is the final one that reveals your crime. In the case of Jeremiah 48:18, the end is Jeremiah 50:31, “Lo! I am against you, O Insolence! saith the oracle of the Lord, the God of hosts; For your day has come, your time of reckoning.” Only upon reaching that one-hundredth verse do you finally understand you’re being punished for the sin of insolence.
And so she learns to hate the Bible and her father and God and the Church and so on. Check and mate, at least in the world’s eyes.