That sounds like a good book. In that quote, one sees the insight of age (or maturity) over the immediacy we all experience as teens.
Another of my favorite books is “The Chosen,” by Chaim Potok.
Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?
I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”
Thanks Randy. I’m putting a hold on it as soon as I finish this reply. I don’t really want to talk about my knee surgery anymore except to say it was put off until the beginning of November. So I may well need another book or two and apparently with this one, where there is one there are also two others.
Oops, apparently there are a few books by that name and perhaps this is not the one which is part of a trilogy. Either way the one by Potok looks good.
Well live and learn. After such a promising beginning the book becomes obtusely written with paragraphs split in two and separated by other text for no apparent reason. That sent me searching for a reason for such a weird approach which led me to a review I only wish I’d read sooner.
After that beginning one might expect that the issue between the grandfather and the father would be of some importance in the story. Surely the grandfather’s admonition to give the other side a fair chance would amount to something. Nope. What’s more the author, writing from the point of view of the daughter/granddaughter Sybilla soon reveals that she has no interest in any such balance herself. She strives and seeks to instill also in her son an absolute reliance on rationality in every corner of life. Here is an excerpt rom the article by Miranda Popkey appearing in a 2016 issue of the Paris Review which has helped me to walk away from the book.
I suspect Sibylla would object to being called brilliant. I suspect she does not believe that she has access to truths unavailable to others; that she believes merely that others usually prefer to avoid traveling the sometimes-arduous path to those truths. “The fact is,” she explains early in the novel, “that 99 out of 100 adults spare themselves the trouble of rational thought 99% of the time.” Sibylla seems like the kind of person who’d only admit to being the one out of the hundred who doesn’t. (Though if this is true, what else could brilliance consist of but refusing to be one of the ninety-nine?) Regardless, Sibylla is a woman confident in her convictions. Immediately after her declaration about adults’ general reluctance to engage in rational thought, she concedes, parenthetically, “studies have not shown this, I have just invented the statistics so I should not say The fact is, but I would be surprised if the true figures were very different.”
I’m a big fan of rational thought but I’m an even bigger fan of balance. I also prefer books which do not hide what they have to say behind puzzling arrangements of the text. Clear writing is challenge enough. Deliberately chopping it up to make the trail harder to follow is … not rational. @Randy, I withdraw my recommendation.
Thanks for the review! It still sounds like I can learn from it somehow, in some way; but your warning helps prepare the way that if I do sit down with it some day (I’m reading by Audible mostly now), I will get the most out of what I do read.
I hesitate to mention it because I’ve had so many surgery dates postponed at this point that I am losing faith I will ever get that knee replaced. But barring another postponement it’ll happen at the beginning of November so I needed more reading material on hand. One of them is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. I read his much more famous Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp in the last couple years and thoroughly enjoyed and was uplifted by both of them. So I hope this one will measure up.
At the back of this book is an About the Author and About the Book section. In the latter he begins "I may one day write a better first sentence to a novel than that of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I doubt it. He then goes on to evaluate his first sentences in many of his other novels before returning to the one that opens this book. Here is what he writes:
The greatest of all accidents, of course, is an accidental death, which brings me back to the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany. “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
The semicolon helps, but the clause that follows it was a risk; doubtless there were some readers who’d had it up to here with Christians and stopped right there. I don’t blame them. In the United States today, there is an excess of Christian bragging - to many holier-than-thou zealots in politics, too much righteous indignation in God’s name - but that’s another story. What makes the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany such a good one is that the whole novel is contained in it.
Now I am intrigued but I will wait unit I finish Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should A Person Be, which I’m only half through. Lately I’ve only been reading to get tired enough to sleep at night. Without almost an hour on the exercise bike every other day it becomes slow going. But there is a lot to do to prepare to put my upkeep in the hands of my 77 year old wife who already has her hands full maintaining her own fragile health. But it will be a good book to have at hand in between physical therapy and waiting to heal.
I won’t have time to copy the paragraph I just read in the book I was just given yesterday because my older dog has an appointment with a bone specialist in forty minutes. But we finally went to visit a good friend whose husband died almost a year ago. For six months she didn’t want to actually get together with anyone and then COVID hit. So yesterday we went to a socially distanced tea in their new garden. We arrived wearing masks and since I’d never been to their new home were given a tour. Her husband Bill, a Jungian analyst, had always been my favorite conversation partner whenever the women artist’s group got together and included we guys. While looking into Bill’s old office I happened to spy a newish book with by the author Antonio Damasio, an author whose book A Feeling of What Happens I’d ordered for myself in the last year. (So much for resolutions not to buy any new books.) Marriana insisted I take it. The book is titled The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. I just read the introduction to the fifth chapter titled The Making of Minds. When we get back from the vet I will copy the first paragraph here.
Now I have more books to add to my Christmas list! Best wishes on your knee. I have a friend who just had one replaced, and am amazed at how quickly she recovered. I think the big change over the years is the pain control has improved to where early mobilization is possible.
I have a friend who retired after me from the same school where I taught who beat me to TKR surgery. After just a couple weeks it seemed she was struggling a little but she told me recently she’d walked 3 miles around Lake Merritt five weeks removed her surgery. So now I’m getting excited.
First I need to contact a neurologist to get Heidi an MRI but it looks likely she’ll be getting her left hind leg removed. Sad but what are you going to do. Definitely the most athletic dog I’ve ever had but when you see the grace with which she copes how can I complain? Then I’ll copy out that paragraph. At the vet while waiting I found an interesting passage on religion which I think takes a nicely respectful and nuanced approach. I may have more transcription to do there.
Here is the first paragraph of the fifth chapter titled The Origins of Minds from Antonio Damasio’s 2018 book titled The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures.
How does one get from the deceptively simple life of nearly 4 billion years ago to the life of the past 50,000 or so years, the life that harbors human cultural minds? What can we say about the trajectory and about the instruments it used? To say that natural selection and genetics are a key to the transformation is entirely true but not enough. We need to acknowledgethe presence of the homeostatic imperative - put to beneficial use or not - as a factor in the selective pressures. We need to acknowledge the fact that there was neither a single line of evolution nor a simple progression of complexity and efficiency of organisms, that there were ups and downs and even extinctions. We need to note that a partnership of nervous systems and bodies was required to generate human minds and that minds occurred not to isolated organisms but to organisms that were part of a social setting. Last, we need to note the enrichment of minds by feelings and subjectivity, image-based memory, and the ability to enchain images in narratives that probably began as nonverbal, film-like sequences but eventually, after the emergence of verbal languages, combined verbal and nonverbal elements. The enrichment came to include the ability to invent and produce intelligent creations, a process I like to call “creative intelligence” and that is a step up from the smarts that enable numerous living organisms, including humans, to behave efficiently, quickly and winningly in everyday life. Creative intelligence was the means by which mental images and behaviors were intentionally combined to provide novel solutions for the problems that humans diagnosed and to construct new worlds for the opportunities humans envisioned.
I missed that but will find it as soon as this canine neurology vet answers the phone. Hopefully before the jaunty, infinitely repeated jingle drives me out of my mind.
Have you also read Cider House Rules? That is right up there with my favorites as is his World According to Garp, but while the latter is entertaining in a zany way. Cider House Rules is a dead serious look at life in an orphanage, a perfect setting to consider all the ramifications of abortion. Also just a moving story of one the orphan who becomes the doctor’s protege. So glad I found my way to reading it.
I haven’t read any of Irving’s other books. Cider House Rules sounds good. I need to pick it up one day. Maybe after I finish my own novel, assuming I get the time. A Prayer for Owen Meany is more of a meditation on fate. I read it 30 years ago in my late 20s, but I still vividly remember the story, which is rare for me. (I forget most modern novels shortly after putting them down.) The ending was a 2-by-4 between the eyes.
I can’t tell you how reassuring that is to hear you say. In the few years I’ve been retired I’ve read many more novels than I ever have in the entire rest of my life. I’ve metamorphosed from a a stubborn nonfiction adherent to a flaming proponent of the novel. Just now discovering the power of narrative for making feeling fueled sense of life. But I doubt I could remember a fourth of the titles or authors of the books I’ve been reading, or the story line of most of the books i know I’ve read. Though I did have the experience of talking to a young woman newly hired at Cal to teach Irish lit. We frequently talk about the books we’re reading while exercising our dogs in the park next door. But in first semester in that role she taught Crime and Punishment which was one of the view novels that made it past my non-fiction bias long ago. I told her my favorite, most often quoted passage comes from that. I remembered a little, then she remembered some which triggered more from me and finally we produced pretty much the whole thing.
I thought it had elements of being a tragedy. Here the doctors’s interest in furthering the orphan named Homer’s interest in medicine seems to spare him from the emotional blankness or turmoil which seems to afflict all the other orphans. But while the doctor, seeing first hand how neglect has damaged the orphans, very willingly performs abortions on young women in trouble for little or no cost. While assisting the doctor in delivering babies and dealing with medical crises which arise in child birth, Homer does at first also help him with problematic abortions. But he is obviously troubled by doing so. Obviously he himself could have just as easily have been aborted as become an orphan there. What a bind to be put in.
“In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Return of the Prodigal Son
I think that advice applies especially as we have gifts subtracted. Keeping in mind that our fading mobility or memory was always a gift rather than an entitlement can help preserve ones outlook as old age continues to undo what was accomplished in the womb and in childhood.
I’m beginning to think @Jay313 is right about A Prayer for Owen Meany. A few chapters in and I can’t recall when a book has made me laugh harder. But I can see why it would appeal to many of you here at this site. What comes out as he compares the rector and the pastor at the two churches his mother and prospective stepfather are choosing between is quite informative. Wiggins is the rector of the Episcopal church which is where our narrator Johnny has grown up and Merrill is the pastor at the Congregational church. It is easy to see which Johnny favors.
…Whereas Pastor Merrill spoke an educated language - he’d been an English major at Princeton; he’d heard Niebuhr and Tillich lecture at Union Theological - Rector Wiggins spoke in ex-pilot homilies, he was a pulpit-thumper who had no doubt.
What made Mr. Merrill infinitely more attractive was that he was full of doubt; he expressed our doubt in the most eloquent and sympathetic ways. In his completely lucid and convincing view, the Bible is a book with a troubliing plot, but a plot that can be understood: God creates us out of love, but we don’t want God, or we don’t believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us - at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reasuuring evidence that we don’t inhabit a godless universe.
Although he knew all the best -or, at least, the least boring - stories in the Bible, Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite. By comparison, whatever the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had seen to make him believe in God, he had seen absolutely - possibly by flying an airplane too close to the sun. The rector was not gifted with language, and he was blind to doubt or worry in any form: perhaps the problem with his “eyesight” that had forced his early retirement from the airlines was really a euphemism for the blinding power of his total religious conversion - because Mr. Wiggin was fearless to an extent that would have made him an unsafe pilot, and to an extent that made him a madman as a preacher.
Edited to clarify that this passage is merely insightful in a witty way. There are also many other passages which are almost slapstick funny, the kind of funny that seems necessary to make painful passages palatable.
