When asked my favorite book of 2010, I’m tempted to say, the first 10 pages of Mary Karr’s Lit. The introduction. Nothing more. That’s all I’d read, until a few nights ago.

In the beginning of December, after I’d driven through the snow-covered mountains of North Carolina to attend a concert – a tribute to the 70‘s Memphis band Big Star, for which I’d done the music prep and a bit of orchestrating – I was waiting to meet my cousin, a Seminary student, for lunch one afternoon at a greasy pizza place when I wandered into the nearby Barnes and Noble. I noticed Lit prominently displayed near the front of the store, and, remembering my friend Jeffrey Overstreet’s enthusiastic endorsement, picked it up to find out what all the fuss was about.

Mary Karr is, first and foremost, a poet. She has four books of poetry to her name; the latest, from 2006, Sinners Welcome, includes poems ruminating on her recent conversion to Christianity. But she is probably best known for her three memoirs, with the first, 1995’s Liar’s Club, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. The blurb on the back of her newest book says: “Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up – as only Mary Karr can tell it.”

The introduction, those first ten pages I read that afternoon sitting in an over-stuffed chair at Barnes and Noble, is written to her son. She remembers the way she has hurt him, the wounds he carries from childhood, writing that “just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as a plumbee. Believe me. It’s a discomfiting sensation.”

“You’re disembarking now, I can see it,” is the way she ends the introduction. “Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean to get free of us.”

In a writing class I attended the end of last summer, at Image Journal’s Glen workshop, Lauren Winner, leading the class, directed our attention to the way one can communicate a world of meanings with just a few words. The way a pastor told her, after her divorce, that God could no longer use her (a passage from her follow-up to Girl Meets God, tentatively titled Still at the time, to be published sometime this year). My mention of a shot of Tennessee whiskey downed in a gulp before lunch after a sermon I once heard, in the essay I was workshopping. Passages that, in place of pages of description and explanation, communicate in just a few words something important about the narrator and the story.
Mary Karr, the poet, choosing each word with careful attentiveness, accomplishes this on almost every page of Lit. Look, for example, at the first paragraph of the first chapter.

“Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific Ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest – a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.”

I read that paragraph several times in a row, amazed at how much I knew about the narrator from those seventy-three words, those three sentences. That feeling comes up again and again as one reads, an awe for the kind of writing that communicates so much so eloquently but never seems to get in the way, never seems to be about itself. I’m only on page 50, but I do know this much: run, don’t walk, to find yourself a copy of Mary Karr’s Lit. Take time to savor every sentence, every page. And enjoy.

In the meantime, check out the interview Kristin Russell did with her for the Art House America blog.

Dark dreams in the dead of night
And on the reckless brow
Bent to let chaos in,
Tell that they shall come down,
Be broken, and rise again.

History
Micheal O’Siadhail

And we keep beginning afresh
an endless history
as if this odyssey
had never happened before? Yes,

yes, ours was a spoiled generation
secure, even tepid
somehow untested —
no plague or war, torture or starvation.

Look how some were keeping faith
in a gulag while we
fumbled out our destiny,
walking our easy under-urban path.

So it wasn’t their route (wince
at the thought). Still,
freedom was a crucible,
blundering chalkless tour in labyrinths.

Maybe we grope the same journey
scooping the oracular
in scandals of the particular
light we throw on some greater story.

Why does the word keep taking flesh?
O nameless dream
wild stratagem
wanting to shape our venture. O Gilgamesh

forever traveller, your myth brooding
in us, we grapple
with redemption’s fable.
O Scheherazade healing a cuckolded king.

In January of 2007, Kevin Roose walked on to the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, ready to join 25,000 other students for the start of the spring semester. But there was one thing that set Kevin apart from his classmates, something his new friends wouldn’t know about until after he left Liberty at the end of the semester. Kevin was a transfer student from Brown University, a school every bit as secular as Liberty was religious, and had decided to spend his “semester abroad” in Lynchburg, VA, instead of England or Italy. After spending a couple days on the campus of Liberty several months earlier, on a research trip with an author he was working for, he had realized he didn’t know anything, really, about evangelical Christians, and found that trying to carry on a conversations with “them,” even with his peers, was like trying to communicate with someone from a completely different culture, someone who didn’t even speak the same language. He wanted to get past the stereotypes, beyond what the culture wars tell us about who our enemies are, and so decided to spend a semester at an Evangelical university, with plans to write a book about his experience. The decision to attend Liberty, then, was an easy one: he couldn’t imagine a more conservative institution, and he wanted to get the full immersion experience.

When I read The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, Kevin’s story of his time at Liberty, just after it was published a couple years ago, the first thing that struck me was how different our stories were. While Kevin chose Liberty because of how conservative and extreme he thought it was, I chose not to attend Liberty for the exact opposite reason.

When I started looking around at different schools as a junior in high school, I briefly considered attending Liberty, in part because of the friendship Jerry Falwell had with my great grandfather, John R. Rice. The one time Falwell preached at my childhood church, he spent several minutes of his sermon talking about my great grandfather and the way he looked up to him as an example. I remember this because the only other times Rice was mentioned at that church (a church he had his membership at for several years in the 70’s, due to his friendship with long-time pastor Lee Roberson, even thought he didn’t live in the same city), was to make sure that people knew that although John R. Rice was “a great man, he was wrong about storehouse tithing.”

I’ve read that Falwell was “called to preach” at the age of 18 while listening to Rice preach, although I haven’t been able to find the source of that quote. (A similar story involves a 26-year-old Rice counseling a 12-year-old boy, during a revival meeting he was leading with a friend, confirming what the boy thought was a calling to be a preacher. That boy, W.A. Criswell, went on to be a be a highly influential Southern Baptist preacher and two-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and he and Rice remained friends for the rest of their lives. And just to continue this line of thought a bit further, an example of why it helps to understand the history of Fundamentalism and see where our beliefs come from, there’s another story about a 19-year-old Bible College student, Rick Warren, who was “called to preach” after listening to a sermon from W.A. Criswell.) What I do know about Falwell is this: one of his first books, American Can Be Saved! (1979) was published by my great grandfather’s Sword of the Lord Publishers, a collection of sermons that had first appeared in the Sword of the Lord newspaper; they spoke at each other’s conferences; and Falwell was a member of the cooperating board of the newspaper, appointed in 1971 after Bob Jones, Jr. and Bob Jones III were dropped from the board due to the controversy over secondary separation. Rice also provided support for the founding of the Moral Majority, including giving Falwell access to his large mailing list of fundamentalist pastors to help spread the word about the new organization.

But all of that happened before I was born. By the time I graduated from high school in 2000 and was ready for college, things had changed. When I said earlier that I briefly considered attending Liberty, by “briefly,” I meant that I thought about it seriously for about thirty seconds before quickly deciding that there was no way I could attend a school that was so liberal. I knew that God wasn’t pleased with the way Jerry Falwell had led his school to abandon Biblical principles – the all-important principle of separation being a chief area where they had turned away from God – and their dangerous slide toward complete liberalism meant that no one who truly feared God and wanted to honor Him and grow closer to Him could participate in that kind of unrighteousness. (If someone needed more proof that Liberty had abandoned the path of righteousness, all one had to do was mention that the Christian rock group dc Talk had come from there, and their fate was sealed.)

With Liberty out of the picture, I found myself torn between two good fundamentalist schools, Pensacola Christian College and Bob Jones University, and leaning toward the latter, my mother’s alma mater, despite her forbiddance of my attending there because she didn’t want me to develop the kind of judgmental attitude she was sure I would leave there with. I’m more glad than I can say today that I didn’t end up at either of those schools.

Back to Kevin Roose’s book, The Unlikely Disciple. What I found most fascinating about his story – and I read the first 250 pages in one sitting, the first time I picked it up on a Sunday afternoon, finishing it the next morning – was that when Kevin described his bewilderment over some of the rules and attitudes he found at Liberty, or his surprise at the way certain unquestioned presuppositions shaped the way they viewed the world, I was a little surprised to find that I felt exactly the same way, that I shared his bewilderment. Several years after stepping out of that world, it can be hard to remember how sure I once was of the convictions I held and positions I advocated, and, more importantly, my forgetfulness can lead me to selectively apply what Jesus said was one of the two most important commands, the exhortation to love our neighbor, by excluding those who believe the way I was taught to believe growing up.

That leads me to the other book I want to talk about here, Andrew Himes’ The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family, which was published this week. (You can order it from Amazon here.) As I mentioned in an earlier post I wrote about my uncle Andrew’s book, it is filled with stories of many of the fundamentalist leaders of the 20th century, such as Falwell, J. Frank Norris, Jack Hyles, the Bob Jones family, and of course Billy Graham, documenting his friendship with Rice and what led to his split with fundamentalism. Andrew’s book is helpful, I would say, not only for those wanting to understand fundamentalism better, but also for those wanting to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in America. In his excellent work Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation, author Rodney Clapp suggests, “by way of broad and rough contrast,” that, “American democracy is composed of two dominant strains: the democracy of the parade, based predominantly in the North; and the democracy of the revival, predominantly of the South.” It doesn’t take much work on his part to go on and assert that America today speaks with a southern accent.

In an essay published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, Redefining Christian Fundamentalism: Following the Example and Teachings of Jesus, Andrew gives us a brief overview of his book and explains why he thought it was important to write it and how we can move forward today, living under the weight of history. “ As I try to follow the example and most fundamental teachings of Jesus,” he writes, “I come to better understand my grandfather’s motivations, his own all too human attempts to follow Jesus. I find myself having more compassion for my neighbor, and slower to condemn those who don’t understand the world exactly as I do. Following Jesus requires more than right belief. It requires right practice: placing Christ’s incarnation of love and justice at the center of your life and practice. Fundamentalism that recalls the unearned grace proclaimed by Jesus will be open-hearted, generous, kind, and hopeful, and will seek the Kindom (my intentional spelling) of God on earth.”

Link to buy book on Amazon.

From his work with his first band, The Normals, through the years he was with Caedmon’s Call – as Derek Webb’s replacement – to his five solo albums (and counting), I find something in Andy’s music that I need, lyrics that provide comfort and encouragement, words that give voice to unspoken yearnings, disappointments, and desires, confessions and promises. Lines that remind me of the kind of person I want to be, and how I might get there.

And then, of course, as anyone who knows Andy’s music will tell you, there are the guitar solos. At the 2008 Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College, Andy sang one of my favorite songs he wrote (with frequent writing partner Randall Goodgame) while he was with Caedmon’s Call, Hold the Light, and after he sang everything that could be said, begging friends to walk alongside him, a plea for community, he played an extended solo on his electric guitar, a solo that expressed everything he wanted to communicate that couldn’t be put into words. That concert still ranks up there as one of the best concerts I’ve been to in my life.

One example of the kind of lyrics Andy writes: At a recent Square Peg Alliance house show here in Nashville, Andy played a song that will be on his upcoming project (more about that shortly). When he sang the first chorus, I was caught off guard by the first line, as it started off in a way that led me to think I knew what he would say. “God help the man who helps himself,” he sang. “He needs no other demons.” By leaving off one “s,” he changed the meaning of the phrase, asking the listener to rethink what they thought they knew and creating a space for him to tell a story, building off the presuppositions we bring to that grouping of words.

So about Andy’s new project: He’s going to space. And he needs your help.

By “going to space,” I mean he’s building a spaceship, or the interior of one, dressing up like an astronaut, and writing and recording a new album that tells that story of Leonard the Lonely Astronaut. As the biggest science fiction nerd that I know, Andy has been dreaming of this project for a couple of years, bringing it up in conversations with friends and hoping it would happen someday. He’s realized that if he doesn’t go ahead and make it now, “I’ll end up 75 years old muttering, “Dang it. I never built that spaceship.”’ He’s raising the funds for his space ship through Kickstarter, which is where you come in. Here’s a video he put together about the project, and I hope you’ll head over to Kickstarter to help him out after watching the video.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to know who you are without knowing where you came from, without knowing the history of your people, your place. For me, that story revolves around my great grandfather.

My mother’s grandfather, John R. Rice, was an Independent Baptist preacher and evangelist. Although he died fifteen months before I was born, his shadow loomed large over my childhood. My identity came from him, and he was, first and foremost, a Fundamentalist. From a sermon preached in 1928, early in his ministry, “Why I Am a Big F Fundamentalist,” to one of his last books, published in 1975, just five years before his death, “I Am a Fundamentalist,” that remained his most important identifier. With two hundred books and pamphlets to his credit (more than sixty million copies in print) and a biweekly newspaper he edited, the Sword of the Lord, that had a circulation topping out at over three hundred thousand, he was sometimes called “America’s Mightiest Pen.” His role as a principle player in two of the defining moments of 20th century American Fundamentalism – the 1957 split with Billy Graham over his ecumenical New York crusade, the end of a long friendship between the two, and the very public disagreement with Bob Jones, Jr., over the issue of secondary separation in the mid 70’s – cemented his role as an elder statesman of Fundamentalism. At his funeral service, one mentoree of his, Jerry Falwell, called his death the “passing of an era…He was God’s man for the hour. I looked on him as the guardian of fundamentalist truth for this generation. More than any other person, he was the most trusted man in fundamentalism…”

In the last couple of years, in an attempt to better understand my own history, the reasons why I grew up believing what I believed in childhood, beliefs that still shape me today, I’ve started reading through my great grandfather’s books – I currently own about 40 of them, I think – a process that is both difficult and often times frustrating, to put it mildly. I’ve read through the various Ph.D theses written about him, like Howard Edger Moore’s The Emergence of Moderate Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and The Sword of the Lord and Keith Bates’ Moving Fundamentalism Toward the Mainstream: John R. Rice and the Reengagement of America’s Religious and Political Cultures, as well as other books that focus on his role in shaping the beliefs of fundamentalists (and, consequently, evangelicals), like Margaret Lamberts Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, in an attempt to help me place his work in a larger framework, to better understand the context in which he spoke and wrote.

More importantly, though, for the past three or four years, I’ve walked with my uncle, Andrew Himes, through the process of his writing a book that is part memoir, part history of fundamentalism, viewed through the lens of our family. Drawing its name from the newspaper my great grandfather started, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in One American Family, it is finally nearing publication, with a street date of May 15th.

The book opens with a story about my great grandfather’s funeral, where my uncle, at that time the “black sheep” of the family, was seated next to Jerry Falwell at the post-funeral dinner for family and friends. Falwell, one of the speakers at the funeral and fresh off the recent success of the newly-formed Moral Majority, spent most of the meal bragging to Andy about his friendship with Reagan, glad that “for the first time in a century we have a fundamentalist living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” My uncle did his best to avoid serious questions and actual conversation, content to let Falwell carry the conversation and stay on safe ground. “Fundamentalism was a difficult and painful topic for me, to say the least,” he writes, “and I had no idea how to talk about it without getting into an unseemly and angry debate with Jerry Falwell, with all my family as witnesses.”

The rest of the book is, among other things, his account of coming to terms with his story, coming to a place where he could talk about fundamentalism and his own history without solely reacting to the worst parts of the story, able to see the many facets that made up both his own history and the history of fundamenatlism. In the forward, Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach, writes, “Andrew went from worshipping his grandfather to hating him to loving him. So the arc of this story has ancient and archetypal power: it moves from the neediness that leads us to cling to false gods, to the anger that fuels rebellion and individuation, to the love that strives for understanding and communion.”

That is where I see this story having value. Remembering Frederick Buechner’s oft-quoted observation that the story of any one of us is the story of us all, Andrew, by telling his story, creates a space for us to look at our own stories, maybe even pointing out the way for how we can arrive at that final stage Parker Palmer points out, a love that strives for understanding and communion.

Before the book officially releases on May 15th, we’re looking for bloggers interested in reviewing it, with a goal of having a strong push of people buying the book from Amazon on release day to help spread the word. If you’re interested in reviewing it for your blog, click here for more details. We’ll have more info when the book releases.

Here now is Andrew, telling one story that appears in the book.

When it came time to critique the piece I was workshopping at a writing class I took part in the end of last summer, Lauren Winner, the esteemed leader of our class, offered as one of her critiques that she thought I quoted Frederick Buechner too many times. When I attempted to explain that my quotations of Buechner were there because reading his books had helped me arrive at where I stand today, but that I was sure later drafts of the piece would rely less on Buechner’s words as I found my own, Lauren interrupted me, saying, “then write that. Write about how reading Buechner helped you become who you are today. That I would be interested in reading.”

So here it is: my attempt to explain something of what the writings of Frederick Buechner have meant to me. I have said elsewhere, and readily repeat it here, that I count myself among those are are still able to call themselves Christian, at least in part, because of the work of Buechner. When the voices of my fundamentalist religious upbringing threaten to drown out everything else, I have only to read something from Buechner to remember, once again, that maybe, just maybe, there is something to this whole thing.

I first heard about Frederick Buechner through the singer and author Michael Card, a few years before I started working for him as part of his road crew. Back in ’94, he recorded an album, Poiema, that he said in the liner notes was “inspired by the writings of Frederick Buechner, the C.S. Lewis of our time.” I bought Buechner’s first memoir, The Sacred Journey, not long after I discovered Poiema, along with a collection of his work organized for daily reading (Listening to Your Life), but aside from skimming the latter every now and then, they both sat untouched on my bookshelf for several years, through finishing high school and three and a half years working at a fundamentalist radio station, through a fifteen-month adventure at a Bible school in Argentina, and through a two-year stint working for a Pentecostal TV network. It wasn’t until a year or two after I moved to Nashville, Music City, U.S.A., that I finally picked up The Sacred Journey one cold evening, read it slowly over the next couple of weeks, and then quickly moved on to his next two memoirs, Telling Secrets and Now and Then, devouring both of them over the course of one week, feeling very much like a parched man stumbling onto an oasis. I like to think they were there waiting for me for the time when I needed them most.

Buechner has only released one book since that time – The Yellow Leaves, which I reviewed for the Rabbit Room – but every time I come across one of his books in a used bookstore that I don’t yet have, I immediately buy it to add it to my collection, knowing that at some point down the road, it will be there when I need it. I find a certain comfort in that.

Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale is the last book of his that I finished, and I was reading it one Sunday morning a couple weeks ago, a day that happened to mark the one-year anniversary of when I stopped going to church – a story too long to retell here except to repeat one of Buechner’s quotes that I’ve used countless times in the last year, that “the sermons that have the biggest impact on us are those that we preach to ourselves in between the lines of whatever is being said from the pulpit,” and what I was hearing “between the lines,” informed by twenty-eight years of being in church every Sunday – and more – was drowning out the possibility of hearing life-giving words in that context. So on that recent Sunday morn, here are the words I read when I picked up Telling the Truth, words found in the last chapter:

“[In the fairy-tale world] Joy happens, to use Tolkien’s word, and the fairy tale where it happens is not a world where everything is sweetness and light. It is not Disney Land where everything is kept spotless and all the garbage is trundled away through underground passages beneath the sunny streets. On the contrary, the world where this Joy happens is as full of darkness as our own world, and that is why when it happens it is as poignant as grief and can bring tears to our eyes…

If you still have something more than just eyes to see with, the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can – the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn’t even flicker…

The joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief. Even in church you catch glimpses of it sometimes though church is apt to be the last place because you are looking too hard for it there. It is not apt to be so much in the sermon that you find it or the prayers or the liturgy but often in something quite incidental like the evening the choral society does the Mozart Requiem, and there is your friend Dr. X, who you know thinks the whole business of religion is for the birds, singing the Kyrie like a bird himself – Lord, have mercy, have mercy – as he stands there among the baritones in his wilted shirt and skimpy tux; and his workaday basset-hound face is so alive with if not the God he wouldn’t be caught dead believing in then at least with his twin brother that for a moment nothing in the whole world matters less than what he believes or doesn’t believe – Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison – and as at snow, dreams, certain memories, at fairy tales, the heart leaps, the eyes fill.”

There it is. That’s why I read Buechner, the reminder of the holy lurking under the commonplace, the reminder of what we maybe desire most – Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison – always present in our actions. If those words mean nothing to you now, if they don’t move you in some way, I ask you, please, remember his name, and if, somewhere down the road you’re struggling to believe in anything, much less the fantastical claims of Christianity, pick up one of his books. I recommend Telling Secrets or the collection of his sermons, Secrets in the Dark. For those of you already reading him, or those who’ve always meant to pick up something by him, treasure his work. Remember these words that he says sum up everything he’s tried to say, repeat them to your family, to your neighbor. And, most importantly, don’t stop repeating these words to yourself, maybe the person who needs to be reminded most of all: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

I was, then, as you might imagine, happy to hear President Obama allude to another Niebuhr quote in his recent speech in Tuscon, and so wrote up some thoughts about it for Jesus Needs New PR, along the way tossing in quotes from Wendell Berry, David Dark, and Frederick Buechner.

In his address in Tucson on January 12th, for the memorial service remembering the victims of the gunman who opened fire at U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords open meeting, President Obama exhorted those gathered, along with a listening nation, to “use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” His choice of words – “expand our moral imaginations” – was deliberate. He has used that phrase at least once before in a speech, in his Nobel Lecture delivered in December of 2009, where he encouraged “the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there is something irreducible that we all share.” In both cases, President Obama was undoubtedly referencing the work of the greatest American theologian of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr – whose work has been an influence upon Obama – and his book Moral Man and Immoral Society, where he wrote the following: “The most perfect justice cannot be established if the moral imagination of the individual does not try to understand the needs, interests and feelings of his fellow human beings.”

Read the full post here

“Becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader,” she writes near the beginning of the book, “and that is the real payoff.” The act of putting the words down on the page is the part we should value, the reason why we do it, she repeats over and over, not the end goal of possibly being published.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

The problem that comes up over and over again is that [students in her writing class] want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them. There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.

And for one last quote, she clearly articulates the reason she loves good writing. Why is it worth spending any time, expending any effort, on this activity?

Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life-wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.

Looking back, I think I see now how Jimmy and I were not much better than my characters at communicating with each other the innermost truth of who we were, not, I think, because it was a truth that either of us shied away from sharing-what made us such fast friends was that there was no topic we shied away from-but because we were only beginning to glimpse it ourselves. The selves we were beginning to grow into that summer were still in the shadowy wings awaiting their entrance cues… In the meantime we went on being the only selves we knew how to be just then[.]

Finally, though, I kept reading past the second chapter, and found a lovely passage in chapter three where he describes his library and some of his favorite books. Something he said there reminded me of a conversation I had recently with my friend Barbara. Barbara posted an entry on her blog, This Liminality, last month that included a quote from Thomas Merton, and she had the foresight to include the page number of the book where she found the quote.

Bookcase in my living room

As you enter the Magic Kingdom, biographies are immediately to your right in floor-to-ceiling shelves, hundreds of them ranging all the way from James Agee, Thomas Aquinas, and Louis Armstrong, who crowd each other way up in the left-hand corner, down to Oscar Wilde, the Duke of Windsor, Virginia Woolf, Wordsworth, and, last of all, Captain R. F. Zogbaum, whose privately printed memoirs, like a great many other books I own, I have never read. (“Why on earth would I want to do that?” a friend of mine answered when somebody asked him once if he had read all his.) Captain Zogbaum is there-one-time commandant of the Naval Air Station at Pensacola and commander of the aircraft carrier Saratoga-because I used to see him as a boy when he had retired to Tryon, North Carolina, where we were then living, and because my cousin Tony Wick married his son Rufus. The son of an artist praised by Rudyard Kipling, he was a striking-looking old man with thin sandy hair and part of one ear missing who, when ladies he admired came for tea, would always pipe them into his house with a bosun’s whistle. When I think of him, I can all but see him entering the room with a stiff little limp but straight as a mast-the patrician profile, the clipped, faintly British way of speaking, the heathery tweed jacket worn threadbare at the elbows.
Others enter with him-Satchmo, his lips wobbling around his ecstatic, bojangles smile, G. K. Chesterton, colossal in cape and pince-nez, tiny little Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mozart peers mouselike out of an oversized wig. Franklin Roosevelt rolls through the door in his chair. Clara Barton is there-Naya’s mother, who died a year after having her, was her cousin-to say nothing of Lewis Carroll, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. John Donne. Scores of others are close behind them, but the room is not big enough for them all, thank heaven, and they vanish so that only the biographies are left. Thank heaven too that the biographies are silent, as are all the other books as well-fiction, poetry, drama, religion, and what-have-you.
Shakespeare is not saying anything, and neither is L. Frank Baum. The Duc de Saint-Simon, the Buddha, Dostoyevski, and Paul Tillich are all holding their tongues. Not a peep out of Abraham Lincoln, Meister Eckhart, or Emily Dickinson. Even Walt Whitman and the prophet Jeremiah are for the moment speechless. The air of the Magic Kingdom is electric with the silence they are keeping. What would I have been if I had never heard them break it? What would I have failed to see if they had not pointed it out to me, and what would I have never heard without their ears to hear it through? What would I have missed loving without them to show me its loveliness? What marvelous jokes would have been lost on me? What tears would I have never found the heart to shed? And yet no less a gift is the mercy now of their keeping still with the sunlight lying in squares on the green carpet and the whole room holding its breath. They are there for when I need them, but in the meanwhile there is not a word out of any of them. Like wise parents, they are giving me room to be myself. They are giving me this room.

Although she is probably best known for her fiction, she has several published collections of essays, and gave this answer when asked why she writes essays:

To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out—I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea—or open up something that would have been closed to me before. That’s the point and the pleasure of it. I continuously scrutinize my own thinking. I write something and think, How do I know that that’s true? If I wrote what I thought I knew from the outset, then I wouldn’t be learning anything new.

In this culture, essays are often written for the sake of writing the essay. Someone finds a quibble of potential interest and quibbles about it. This doesn’t mean the writer isn’t capable of doing something of greater interest, but we generate a lot of prose that’s not vital. The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

I also got a kick out of her following up her statement that “there’s a puritanical hedonism in my existence” with the confession that “I read books like The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine. Oh, terrific.” My appreciation of that confession comes from the fact that she’s the only person I’ve ever heard mention that Rudolf Otto book. I picked up a copy at a used bookstore earlier this year, paying more than I normally would for an unfamiliar book because it looked so interesting and was a second edition hardback, published in 1952, in perfect condition. I’ve picked it up several times to thumb through it, but have not yet had the chance to dive into it. I think I’ll move it up in my to-read pile after Robinson’s endorsement.

The full interview, for those interested, can be found here. And speaking of her essays, I wrote a review of sorts for the Rabbit Room last month of her newest book, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self that includes links to videos of a lecture series she gave at Yale, well worth checking out.