All Flame

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."

Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Charlie Peacock

This week we’ve had a star on campus – singer, songwriter, pianist, producer, author, and more. Yet you wouldn’t have known it to see him walking the campus in jeans and sneakers, and a sweatshirt to hold off the sudden cold, with a quiet word and a warm smile for anyone who greets him: self-effacing and God-honoring, humble – and yet confident in his identity as a child of the Father called to be a musician for His glory in the created world.

I’ve appreciated Charlie’s wisdom these past three days. I hope to give more specifics when grading subsides (or I give up pretending that I might get caught up), but one thing I especially appreciated is his emphasis on story. The gospel, of course, is a story, from Genesis – “I am making all things” – to Revelation – “I am making all things new.” Can you tell this story, beginning to end, he asked us – with or without reference to Scripture – to anyone? Can you apply the story to the world – all the world? because the Creator is interested in everything He has made, contemporary church life, yes, but all the rest of His world just as much.

Creativity is a spiritual labor, Charlie reminded us: submit your creative work to the Holy Spirit and tell the story to point people to the truth, to leave the world a better place than it was when you arrived. He spoke of this gospel story as the “controlling story” of the world, of our lives, and reminded us to wake each morning with thankfulness for His new mercies, then step into the story and live out our roles, wherever God has called us.

I kept thinking of the Willow Tree angel LuCindy gave me, the one holding a book, called the angel of learning. But LuCindy wrote this for me on the accompanying card: “She’s called the angel of learning, but to me she is a constant reminder [. . .] to turn loose and trust my Abba to write my story, moment by moment, in faith that He will make it more light-filled and wondrous than I ever could.”

So a bonus blessing from Charlie’s time with us – a reminder of my friend’s loving generosity and of her message through his. Blessings abound; if I can remember that the story is His, I will better see them as I walk through each day in His grace.

Happy Endings

Last week on Criminal Minds, the team searched for a missing child, finding out in the course of the search that she had been abused by her uncle. The quotation at the end was from G.K. Chesterton: "Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed."

I was thinking about this yesterday morning while reflecting on why I write. Generally speaking, children's literature does have happy endings, because we know that children need to believe in hope. And I am always seeking a vision, an ideal, hope, when I write. And so I wrote:

"I am, then, seeking happy endings when I write. Not sappy, unrealistic, 'perfect' endings, but ones that are possible in a broken world which has been entered by redemptive power, ones that are possible because brokenness is not all there is. The flawed beauty we see all around us, the flawed goodness of people we meet on our way, tells us this -- so much of beauty and goodness within the brokenness, if we look for it, tells us this, tells us that the world is indeed still 'charged with the grandeur of God,' that 'there lives the dearest freshness deep down things' even in a world 'seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.'

"I write to find and articulate gems of joy, glimpses of the ideal, prisms of hope. I only know that my world is flawed because I know there is an ideal by which to judge it. And without this ideal, if we reject the vision of an ideal, there is only despair. We must offer hope by offering the ideal we glimpse, the vision shimmering always on the edge of sight."

I have never been ashamed of happy endings, of beauty, of hope. I am grieved that so many in the past century have found it more likely that life doesn't offer these, that so many have turned from the search and offered the lies of despair in the name of realism. Because, as I also wrote:

"I read for the same reason: I read to find the ideal. Not to avoid reality, but to see that reality is not the mere observable broken world that drowns me every morning when I wake, that drowns me when I wake from a literary world that has drawn me into its beauty, when I wake from a rare immersion in the reality of God's love. Reality is not brokenness and despair; reality is redemption with all its hope in the midst of the brokenness and despair."

Our happy endings here will always be tinged with some edge of sadness. And yet -- there is an ultimate happy ending where all tears, all sorrow will be washed away forever. How, otherwise, can one find courage to live?

Art and Philosophy

In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver talks about the relation of reason to sentiment (not "sentimentality"): "We do not undertake to reason about anything until we have been drawn to it by an affective interest" -- in other words, we must care about something before we will bother to think carefully about it. He then goes on to say, "We have no authority to argue anything of a social or political nature unless we have shown by our primary volition that we approve some aspects of the existing world. [. . .] We begin our other affirmations after a categorical statement that life and the world are to be valued. It would appear, then, that culture is originally a matter of yea-saying."

I like this. It is so easy to get caught up in "what's wrong with the world" -- after all, there is a great deal wrong with it! But if we forget or refuse to acknowledge that there is good, that there is that which should be valued, then we argue from negativism, bitterly and hopelessly. The best art affirms even as it critiques; that which can be affirmed forms the standard by which we critique that which has fallen from it.

But it's not mere sentiment that's needed, not sentimentality, by any means. Sentiment, to provide the foundation for right reasoning, must be formed and informed by what Weaver calls "the metaphysical dream" -- an understanding of design and purpose outside of and beyond man himself: "There must be a source of clarification, of arrangement and hierarchy, which will provide grounds for the employment of the rational faculty" (and which forms the sentiment).

How is this "dream" inculcated in us? The "poetry of representation ['mythology' broadly understood as answering our questions about who we are and how and why we are here], depicting an ideal world, is a great cohesive force, binding whole peoples to the acceptance of a design and fusing their imaginative life. Afterward comes the philosopher, who points out the necessary connection between phenomena, yet who may, at the other end, leave the pedestrian level to talk about final destination." Both art and philosophy are needed, then -- art to show us the ideal, to move us, to make the dream alive to us; and philosophy to help us understand how the metaphysical (including the metanarrative of art) and the physical world are conjoined, to be able to articulate the dream when necessary, to reason from it to evaluate action.

He sums it up like this: "Thus, in the reality of his existence, man is impelled from behind by the life-affirming sentiment [belief that there is that which is of value in the world] and drawn forward by some conception of what he should be [pictured by the artist and articulated by the philosopher]."

Why We Teach

Richard Weaver, writing in Ideas Have Consequences in 1948:

"There is no difficulty in securing enough agreement for action on the point that education should serve the needs of the people. But all hinges on the interpretation of needs; if the primary need of man is to perfect his spiritual being and prepare for immortality, then education of the mind and passions will take precedence over all. [Weaver refers to a liberal arts education here, not particularly a religious education.] The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehensible to the majority. Those who maintain that education should prepare one for living successfully in this world have won a practically complete victory. Now if it were possible to arrive at a sufficiently philosophical conception of success, there would still remain room for idealistic goals, and attempts have been made to do something like it by defining in philosophical language what constitutes a free man. Yet the prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires a reverence for good.

"In other words, it is precisely because we have lost our grasp of the nature of knowledge that we have nothing to educate with for the salvation of our order. Americans certainly cannot be reproached for failing to invest adequately in the hope that education would prove a redemption. They have built numberless high schools, lavish in equipment, only to see them, under the prevailing scheme of values, turned into social centers and institutions for improving the personality, where teachers, living in fear of constituents, dare not enforce scholarship. They have built colleges on an equal scale, only to see them turned into playgrounds for grown-up children or centers of vocationalism and professionalism. Finally, they have seen pragmatists, as if in peculiar spite against the very idea of hierarchy, endeavoring to turn classes into democratic forums, where the teacher is only a moderator, and no one offends by presuming to speak with superior knowledge.

"The formula of popular education has failed democracy because democracy has rebelled at the thought of sacrifice, the sacrifice of time and material goods without which there is no training in intellectual discipline. The spoiled-child psychology [. . .] has sought a royal road to learning. In this way, when even its institutions of learning serve primarily the ends of gross animal existence, its last recourse to order is destroyed by appetite."

One could certainly pen the same words today. Of course there are schools and teachers who understand education to be for more than material gain. But the prevailing philosophy remains the same as that which Weaver described six decades ago. Even colleges which hold to a higher ideal than material gain are every day making decisions about admissions, retention, curriculum, programs, etc. based on whether these will attract students who want to get a piece of paper to get a job, losing sight of their ideals not in the big picture but in the details -- but, of course, it is in the details where the battle for liberal education will be won or lost. As long as the bottom line -- for the college or for the students who attend it -- remains the primary concern (instead of a vision and enough trust in the Lord that He can make the vision reality), we will continue to lose the most important battle we are here to fight.

Meanwhile, those of us who still believe in the vision of a liberal arts education from a specifically Christian perspective are preparing to face another set of young people, many of whom have been spoiled by their culture into thinking college should be primarily lots of fun, leading to a high-paying job without much effort on their part. May we find ways to challenge them out of that cultural morass of lies into a world of deeper satisfactions through the discipline of mind that John Henry Newman calls for in The Idea of a University.

Walking on Water

I've been re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water, as I am using it in my Creative Nonfiction course this fall. It always amazes me how a truly good book, when one returns to it, seems both like an old friend and a text one has never read before. I have been enjoying it immensely.

L'Engle writes at one point about reading someone's theory that all artists are "neurotic, psychotic [. . .], not one is normal." She admits her first reaction was outrage, but since then she has accepted that such labels are not worth getting upset over ("he means one thing by his labels; I would call it something quite different"). Then she goes on to discuss what she thinks makes an artist the way he is:

"[T]here is no denying that the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness, and then rushes to canvas or paper. An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world. Along with Plato's divine madness, there is also divine discontent, a longing to find the melody in the discords of chaos, the rhyme in the cacophony, the surprised smile in time of stress or strain.

"It is not that what is is not enough, for it is; it is that what is [has] been disarranged, and is crying out to be put in place. Perhaps the artist longs to sleep well at night, to eat anything without indigestion; to feel no moral qualms; to turn off the television news and make a bologna sandwich after seeing the devastation and death caused by famine and drought and earthquake and flood. But the artist cannot manage this normalcy. Vision keeps breaking through, and must find means of expression."

If it's only the suffering, the discontentment, that keeps one awake, then indeed that way lies real madness. But L'Engle seems to suggest that it's also the search for the melody, the rhyme, the surprised smile that keeps one awake, -- because these exist, they are real, and they tell us that suffering is not all there is. Vision . . . the little pictures of hope, of order in the midst of the seeming chaos, these are what make life worth living, and these are what I hope to capture in my writing. I write about the suffering because one must process it somehow and because it is real. But it's the little gems of loveliness that remind me that suffering is not, in fact, all there is.

L'Engle's book itself has been one of those gems for me this past week.

Dillard Thoughts

Glancing through the last chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this morning, I was struck with the following passage:

I think that the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.

I long to be fearless, seeing. I long to be, instead of always striving. I will not part with the live coal I carry, and I will not take comfort where no comfort may be truly found. Be Thou my vision . . . nought be all else to me save that Thou art . . .

Madness and Vision

Megan asked in a comment on my last post:
"What does Gardner mean by 'divine madness,' and in what way do we live or die by the artist's vision? "

Here are some excerpts that suggest his answers:

On madness:
“The writer and the psychotic make use of the same faculty and similar energy, the same ability to escape external time and space. If it is true that the motive force of this energy is some tension in the life of the artist or madman [. . .] then a proper use of artistic energy is one which treats the tension, makes decisions about it rather than evading it. The artist is free, the psychotic – helplessly driven by his fear – is not. The theoretical border between art and madness seems to be, then, that the artist can wake up and the psychotic cannot. In fact, though, the difference must be one of degree. Psychotics, we know, can snap out of it, and sometimes do, and an occasional artist relinquishes his hold. Shakespeare understood this. When Hamlet plays mad, he takes a step toward real madness. Sanity is remembering the purpose of the game.”

On the purpose of art:
“In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, in addition, hollow and academic, I argue – by reason and by banging the table – for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does [. . .]. The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. [. . .] That art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. [. . .] Art asserts and reasserts those values which hold off dissolution, struggling to keep the mind intact [. . .]. Art rediscovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness.”

Gardner is not saying that all art must be deathly serious, but he does say that serious art makes the world "safe" for "trivial" art that is merely showy, merely entertaining. When he says we live or die by the artist's vision, he is saying, I think, that art does not merely reflect culture but also influences and even perhaps creates it.

If we embrace the vision of the true artist, we receive from it hope that we can live by. The true artist is the one with the vision of love, the one who rejects falsehood in all its forms and calls us back to truth -- and if we don't listen to his vision, we will listen to the false vision of the false artist.

I think we can see this today in the films we embrace (art doesn't have to be novels or poetry of course, and today's most popular art is film, or perhaps contemporary music). We may say we want "truth" in the films we view, but what do we usually settle for? The world's version of truth, which is cynicism and nihilism and dark, dark, dark pictures of what life is all about.

Not that we shouldn't know that vision -- it is the only vision the man without God can ultimately have -- but to immerse ourselves in it and accept it as "true"? That is another thing altogether, yet it is what many today do, and without the grounding of true art of any sort with which to compare it. My students, for example, know the truth intellectually, but they live in a world of falsehood in the images they constantly view (and the music they constantly play) and don't even see the disconnect between mind and heart that this requires.

Ed Veith talks about this in a book my son read last semester, the title of which I cannot now recall. He points out that art surrounds us -- in the ways we decide to decorate our homes as well as in the art museum or at Barnes and Noble. And if what surrounds us is "tinny and commercial" and there is no antidote in exposure to true art . . . then our hearts will be formed by the subtleties of the art we embrace, not the philosophical or theological propositions we give voice to.

I fear I am not explaining myself very well here, but I wanted to address Megan's excellent questions; take this as a kind of thinking out loud as I try to (too) quickly articulate my ideas. I'll try to get back to them when I have time to do a clearer job!

Woundedness and Love

Gardner again, from the book's final chapter:

"Art begins in a wound, an imperfection -- a wound inherent in the nature of life itself -- and is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it. It is the pain of the wound which impels the artist to do his work, and it is the universality of woundedness in the human condition which makes the work of art significant [. . .]."

"True art's divine madness is shot through with love: love of the good, a love proved not by some airy and abstract high-mindedness but by active celebration of whatever good or trace of good can be found by a quick and compassionate eye in this always corrupt and corruptible but god-freighted world. [. . .] The business of civilization is to pay attention, remembering what is central, remembering that we live or die by the artist's vision, sane or cracked."

Myths to Live By

Gardner sums up this chapter (the first chapter of part 2 of On Moral Fiction) this way:

"Real art creates myths a society can live instead of die by, and clearly our society is in need of such myths. What I claim is that such myths are not mere hopeful fairy tales but the products of careful and disciplined thought; that a properly built myth is worthy of belief, at least tentatively; that working at art is a moral act; that a work of art is a moral example; and that false art can be known for what it is if one remembers the rules. The black abyss stirs a certain fascination, admittedly, or we would not pay so many artists so much money to keep staring at it. But the black abyss is merely life as it is or as it soon may become, and staring at it does nothing, merely confirms that it is there. It seems to me time that artists start taking that fact as pretty thoroughly established."

I keep looking back at the original publication date of the book, because I find it hard to believe that it was written in the late 1970s. Nothing much seems to have changed . . . Of course what he says about good art, about moral art, if true at all will be always true. But what he says about the bad art of the '70s strikes me as not essentially different from what we still see today. So many of my students still think that a "happy ending" of any sort is inevitably "cheesy" and "unrealistic" because all that is "real" is evil and despair. And my students are Christians, young folk who profess to believe in the ultimate happy ending . . .

Of course, what Gardner writes about here is why The Lord of the Rings resonates so truly. But one needn't write literally mythic fiction to write "myths to live by"; realistic fiction, any genre of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry . . . any form of art can create a myth to live by. A student of mine once wrote a short story about a boy (a painter) and a girl (a writer) who are spirited away to another world where their stories and paintings come true: what they envision becomes the reality of that world. Ever since, I have considered all that I write as containing a vision which I pray may come to fruit in someone's life.

"On Moral Fiction"

Reading John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, I found some ponderings on the purpose of art that strike me as profoundly true:

"Moral art in its highest form holds up models of virtue."

"Great art celebrates life's potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love."

"In art, morality and love are inextricably bound: we affirm what is good -- for the characters in particular and humanity in general -- because we care."

"True art [. . .] clarifies life, establishes models of human action, casts nets toward the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns. [. . .] It designs visions worth trying to make fact. [. . .] It strikes like lightning, or is lightning; whichever."

Therefore:

"We need to stop excusing mediocre and downright pernicious art."

Aiming for the Chopping Block

I sent a review/essay off today to a journal I've wanted to publish in for a very long time. I'd sent an earlier draft and received good advice, so it will be good to find out how close I've "got" it now.

When I write, I feel fully alive. The first phase is hardest -- getting down on paper what it is I want to say. The striving for clarity, for coherence, for internal logic, for something truly worthy of my time and the time of others . . . Once that is roughly accomplished, my favorite part begins -- making it say that idea how I want it said. Striving now for conciseness without loss of meaning, the telling detail, the most effective syntax, precise diction, making it exactly right -- or as close as a mere human can ever come.

When I write, I learn. Not just about the subject matter, but about myself. How I think, how I work, how I relate to ideas but also how I relate to people. I am reminded of the value of patience and revision, the need to be quiet and listen, to let the work be the focus instead of myself. All of these I need continual lessons in as I try to be a wife, a mother, a colleague, a friend, a teacher.

from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:

"Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

"The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time's scrawl as a right and your daring as a necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with your life's strength: that page will teach you to write.

"There is another way of saying this. Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."

Writing brings me fully alive, because it connects me as nothing else but childbirth ever has with reality.

Trusting in the Dark

Many years ago, a friend drove me home one night to change clothes between some more and less formal activities our group of buddies was enjoying. It was a several mile drive, and my friend one who had made some important decisions, and someone I could talk to honestly.

I told him my fears, the only person who had heard them. I described my place at that time as standing with darkness before me and nothing of value behind me. My friends mostly seemed to be going down the same old path, a path I had finally realized led nowhere (or perhaps worse). I didn't want to continue on that path. And yet . . . I could at least see something on it -- not least people I'd known and been at ease with for many years -- and in front of me: utter blackness, the kind in the caves in Missouri where Tom and Becky got lost, darkness you can actually see because you can't see through it to anything else.

And I was terrified that one more step would take me over a cliff into a bottomless canyon . . .

Well, with the help of loving words from my friend and others, I stepped into the darkness, and the path indeed took me over a cliff, and I died, and though I try to resuscitate myself pretty regularly, He helps me to stay dead as much as I'll let Him. It was worth it.

Years later, I made another significant change, and someone called me "courageous." I wasn't. That change was from one familiarity to another (how different can teaching be, wherever you do it?), and since the life was being choked out of me where I was, the change couldn't very well be for the worse even if it turned out not to be for the better. And today, a couple of similar changes later, it is certainly better.

But I find myself facing that darkness again. There is a change in the wind, a subtle internal voice pushing towards something new, but this time,
again, something I cannot see at all. The familiar calls to me, siren-like -- here is comfort, here is security, here are material needs met, here you know who you are and you are recognized and respected. It is not, however, like that path years and years ago which held no good; it is a good in itself, and that makes it all the harder.

But that other call . . . I've heard it before. It terrified me then, and following it was the best choice I've ever made. But still I'm terrified. I want to see if there's another cliff there. I want to see the path and where it will lead.

I wonder sometimes if I will ever truly trust. Trust is a scary thing. And because I'm always wanting life to go my way, answers to be those I want, I am often blinded to the blessings He holds out until I look back much later and realize . . . oh, that's what He was doing.

I have been reading Chambers again lately, and what keeps leaping out at me from the pages of his meditations is our need to know God. He is continually rebuking us for our propensity to work for God, to gain His approval by our good works. But what He wants, Chambers keeps reminding us, is for us to know Him and in that way become like Him.

Have no other motive than to know your Father in heaven, Chambers writes; God does not hear us because we are in earnest, but only on the ground of redemption.

Father, may I long to know You, and thus trust You, and banish the fear of not knowing where You are leading me -- because my Father will never lead me wrongly or to my ultimate hurt. May I learn to let You be my vision indeed, taking each step you open before me with a childlike trust in Your lovingkindness toward me.

En-Visioning Again

It's fall break here. This morning, K and the YM went to run errands. I fixed something to eat, stared at the book I am reviewing, read a bit in Lilith again, then pulled our hymnal off the shelf. It's been so long since I've just sung hymns, and the rare times we do so in our church it's to a new tune or with added choruses, and never all the verses, as though the writer's thought can be known and edify us in snippets or by cut and paste. So I just sang, hymn after hymn, and found myself for the first time in a very long time feeling something in worship. It was good, very good.

This particular hymn has always been a favorite, and it spoke to me strongly today, so I thought I'd share.

"Be Thou My Vision"

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Nought be all else to me, save that Thou art --
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word:
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord,
Thou my great Father and I Thy true son,
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise,
Thou mine inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

"Without a vision, the people perish." May the vision be His, indeed Him, and may I learn to pursue with a whole heart. Vision and wisdom, Lord; grant me vision and wisdom.

Perspectives

Pippin to Merry in the Houses of Healing in Gondor: "Dear me! We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can't live long on the heights."

"No," said Merry. "I can't. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could attend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little."

And Frodo to Sam as they meet the Elves on the way to the Havens, where Frodo will go over the sea in search of healing: "I have been too deeply hurt [to stay in the Shire], Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them."

Just as Well

A journal entry from last fall that I ran across, slightly revised:

My best friend was here for a few days, and we ripped the tenure essay to shreds and put it back together. Today I showed my freshmen the effects of a couple of hours work on one particular page, where the typed words are barely visible for the revisions, edits, corrections, stets and arrows. They were suitably awed.

However, when I began talking to them about the importance of words, of precision, of getting an essay to show, as closely as you possibly can, the vision in your head, so that the vision in the reader's head is as close to yours as you can get it in a fallen world, when I talked about words being our only means of doing this and how we must therefore respect (if not love) them and use them as precisely as possible . . .

I was reminded of Dillard in Holy the Firm, at the end of a description of exhorting her creative writing students to know and understand that it takes everything you have to be a writer: "They thought I was raving again. It was just as well."

Oh -- but if just one could catch the vision . . . !

NRO Atlanta

(I had the privilege last week of attending a seminar/dinner with several of the editors and writers of National Review, the journal of conservatism founded by William F. Buckley some 50 years ago. The following is from my journal of the evening.)

During the panel discussion and Q & A time, I am certainly impressed by the NRO editors and writers – they are articulate, funny, knowledgeable, at ease with themselves and each other, confident in their opinions yet arguing differences with respect. Jay Nordlinger – the most gracious human being on the planet – moderates; Andrew Stuttaford holds forth on movies, Kate O’Beirne gives us an inside look at CNN; between sessions, Kathryn Lopez seems to be in constant motion, yet stops to give her full attention when I approach and accepts a compliment with delighted sincerity, while John Derbyshire admits his perfectionism about writing and laments the demise of decent copyediting.

At dinner, several of us are carrying on a conversation with Ramesh Ponnuru. He is seated about midway down the side of a longish table; we are across from him and/or to his right. As our plates are removed, a young lady quietly excuses herself to move to the opposite end of the table, where a crowd is beginning to gather. Ramesh glances that way and rolls his eyes, feigning aggravation. “Why does Jonah have to come to my table? No one will want to talk to me now.”

Warren Bell arrives and sits next to Ramesh, and the conversation turns to Hollywood, feminism, and his journey to conservative thinking. Ramesh joins for a while, but soon turns to the conversation going on to his left, where Jonah Goldberg is indeed attracting a growing crowd.

I have been up since 5:00 a.m., given a final exam, and driven 3 hours to be here. 5:00 a.m. is now some 15 hours gone. As tends to happen when I am fatigued, I find myself checking out from direct involvement and becoming an observer.

The small group around Warren is quietly serious now, talking education. Laughter punctuates the conversation at Rich Lowry’s table behind me, where Rich leans back, suit jacket gone but tie still professionally in place, holding forth earnestly on something or other. I hear Ramesh say something about Kansas – my home state, as his – and turn my attention to that end of our table.

Immaculate in a perfectly tailored dark suit and tie, Ramesh is leaning forward, gesturing eloquently to his rapid and impassioned words as he dissects the insulting book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Jonah is leaning back, eyes half-closed, nodding and listening. His sport shirt, open at the neck and tieless, the casual blazer and worn blue jeans, and his unruly mop of hair offer a contrast with Ramesh, as does his style of speech – slower, pausing to choose his words, fewer gestures and more deliberate body language.

But the passion is there, in his eyes and in his tone, and it is the same passion I have noted in all these folk today, and I am struck with hope.

Immersed in the writing of college freshman for nine months, it is easy to lose perspective, to begin wondering if anyone will in the future be able to defend truth, to articulate sanity and moral principles. But I thought the same thing a decade and two decades ago, when many of these writers were college age, and here they are – accepting the mantle of William F. Buckley and carrying on his vision in a worthy manner.

I find it amazing that these highly intelligent people, especially those younger ones whose generation abounds with cynicism and materialism, have chosen to use their considerable gifts with language to challenge the rapid downward spiral of our culture and society. They are not content to use their gifts and energy for personal gain, as they so easily could. They refuse to succumb to cynicism or elitism. Rather, they hold ideals and values which they have decided are worth sacrificing to live by. The sacrifices they make are real – but the vision is clear. We owe them more than we know.

May their wisdom continue to increase and their influence to expand. My heartfelt thanks to them all.

Seeking the Vision

I love language, and especially the written word. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, says of reading: "Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? [. . .] Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?"

Habbakuk received this commission from the Lord: "Write the vision on tables, that he who reads it may run." Reading should give us wings, give us courage to use them. I wrote my tenure paper on the power of the artist, especially the writer, to do this for us. The conclusion reads as follows:

It’s summer, time for some reading I just want to do, and I’ve finally found Charles Williams’ novel The Greater Trumps, one I’ve been wanting to revisit since I became a Christian in college. It rivets me, draws me in, and I lose myself to the story and especially to the character of Sybil, the calm center of difficult and even chaotic circumstances. Suddenly, however, I am pulled out of the imaginative world to intellectual awareness when I read the narrator’s definition of responsibility: “that burden which is only given in order to be relinquished, that task put into the hands of man in order that his own choice may render it back to its creator, that yoke which, once wholly lifted and put on, is immediately no longer to be worn.”

I’ve already decided I want to be Sybil – and here is the reason she is as she is: she has “lifted and relinquished” the yoke of responsibility and thus lives in “the freedom of a love” that is single-minded – focused on only One being, who Himself loves those around her through her,
rather than she trying to love them through her own human efforts.

I know it; it’s in the Scriptures and I’ve read and heard it how many times. But Williams makes it real to me through Sybil, and I know in a way I’ve never known before that it’s possible to live this way. Once again through literature I am given a vision, and a challenge to discover how to
live it out; once again I long to be what I was created to be.

“Write the vision and make it plain upon tables, that he who reads it may run.” May I learn to run, and to write the vision so that others may even outpace me.