Findings

The Family of Man, edited by Edward Steichen with a prologue by Carl Sandburg, was on my parents’ bookshelf when I was very young. It had been a gift from my uncle, who perhaps had seen firsthand the original art exhibit preserved in this collection of photographs. I’ve thought of this book several times lately, and felt excited to find it was still available for purchase.

My copy arrived this week, and as I’ve revisited the photos I’ve felt deeply moved. I’m not sure if it’s the quality of the photography, or the conception, or the sense of rediscovering a latent piece of myself.

The book’s 503 photos from 68 countries are all in black and white, taken by both amateur and professional photographers. (273 of them.) In Steichen’s words the photos run “the gamut of life from birth to death with emphasis on the daily relationships of man to himself, to his family, to the community and to the world we live in.” Sandburg, Steichen’s brother in law, writes in his prologue that it is “a camera testament, a drama of the grand canyon of humanity, an epic woven of fun, mystery and holiness.”

The pictures reflect the sensibility of their historical context in the decade after World War II. It was intended as an expression of humanism, an affirming of the common bond between peoples and cultures. A modern critic would very likely fault it for America-centeredness, or naivete. This article, for instance, speaks of the exhibit as reflecting “a series of popular, feel-good ideas about global humanity, well meaning but platitudinous.” And this one points out that “some critics, particularly in Europe, viewed the exhibition as Cold War propaganda and a projection of American values in thinly universalistic disguise.” Some of the pictures reflect an earlier photographic sensibility no longer in fashion.

But when have the critics ever essentially changed our own instinctive response to art? My introduction to The Family of Man happened when I was just 5 or 6 years old, so for me the experience of viewing these pictures is inescapably personal. It served as a gateway into a broader world, one that included wonder and joy, but also pain. There’s a spread of photos of children in conflict with each other. There are photos of lovers — not nude ones, but still conveying the unmistakable power of sexuality to pull people together and designate a private pocket of experience even in the midst of the most bustling crowd. And — most fascinating of all to me as a child — two photos of a woman’s face in pain, followed by a photo of a gloved, masked doctor holding up a wet newborn roughly by the leg, umbilical cord still trailing down into an undistinguished pile of sheets. The faces in particular have stayed with me with their vast range of expressions. Organized by theme, the book contains little text – mostly just lines of poetry or proverb.

Why does it still strike me so powerfully? As a child I picked up on its life-affirming theme because I believed in the essential goodness of the world. This book resonated with how I already felt, and gave me more diverse categories for understanding it. As an adult, I still need its life-affirming theme because I’m sometimes far too broodingly aware of fallenness. The vestiges of my original childlike, uncritical fascination with this book are a bracing tonic for the cynicism hovering at the edges of my adult mindset. Whatever its faults, it speaks encouragement to my often very tentative and half-hearted optimism. In a very real sense, it restores my less protected child’s eyes. How glad I am to have it on my shelf.

It wouldn’t be fair to blog about my raw reading responses, then not come back and revise my initial impressions as I learn more about the book. This’ll probably be my last entry on Job for awhile, though there’s plenty I haven’t touched yet (Elihu, for instance). Here are some discoveries so far, followed by my reading list: 

1.) I asked if the story sanctioned questioning, or discouraged it. Despite the tone of God’s answer in the story, the fact that Job gets an answer at all suggests that God honors the seeking heart. His respect for his creation extends to Job. What’s more, he speaks as to an equal: “Gird yourself up, and I will question you!” He is as honest with Job as Job is with him, allowing his anger to be apparent — but not to annihilate Job.

2.) Related to this was my complaint that Job’s prayer isn’t answered – that God used a kind of misdirection or non sequitur. I see a parallel between the way God answers Job without addressing his specific question of “Why?” and Jesus’ method of being asked one question, and answering another — puzzling to us, but not to those interacting with him. Here, Job’s question has been viewed as a legal complaint against God for his treatment. God’s answer is to justify himself by saying, basically, “My dealings with you are interwoven with the rest of what I’ve made. See how large and complex it is? See how many other questions are tied in with yours? Do you really want me to try to explain my creative process to you?” Job replies, “No. I see that it’s too big for me.” God’s answer isn’t evasive so much as impossible to reduce to Job’s terms.

Edited to add: Lewis’s chapter on divine omnipotence in The Problem of Pain is relevant here too: “With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act, and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element of it could have been removed, will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the ‘best of all possible’ universes, but the only possible one.” A creation spawned from a single, unified creative act means God can’t respond to Job’s question separately from a discussion of the rest of creation.

3.) I pointed out the wisdom of Job’s friends. Yup, they have some rudimentary wisdom, but its purpose in the story is to reveal its utter failure to account for what’s happening to Job. We know from the opening scene that this is a test, permitted by God, and their explanations nowhere acknowledge this as a possibility. Their conception of God allows him no room for free and independent action. This is what displeases God, and why Job’s point of view is superior to theirs.

4.) I suggested that Job matures. Maybe so, a bit. But this isn’t a bildungsroman. I think my overall sense that his righteousness is never in question tips the scales toward viewing him mostly as a static character. He gets a bit more daring, perhaps, but doesn’t substantially change. This is consistent with the type of literature this is: I’ve seen it referred to as myth, legend, parable, and wisdom literature, all of which lean toward the symbolic. As we know right away when we find ourselves witnessing a scene in Heaven, it’s not a record of actual events (except perhaps at a core that’s been varnished with many layers of fictional embellishment and poetry). 

5.) I complained that the God of Job isn’t consistent with the covenant God of the rest of scripture. Well, no; its writing was probably pre-Mosaic, and Job’s cultural background wasn’t Hebraic. The book’s purpose seems to be as a “What if?” story… “What if we strip away the trappings of culture and reduce this conflict to the bare, primal bones: man, creator, evil.” Though there’s no “covenant” applicable to this relationship between God and Job, it’s still clear that this is a relational God; he enters into dialogue with Job.

6.) I questioned whether unconditional love for God is possible. Sad to say, I’m seeing that this is basically Satan’s question in the story. Perhaps “unconditional” isn’t the best word, but he (and the story as a whole) asks, “Is there a love for God that survives suffering, loss of his blessings, and deprivation of his justice?” Is God worthy of love if he doesn’t meet the conditions of our rational framework of justice? The answer of the story is yes. I think it’s what keeps Job petitioning God until the answer comes, and it’s what pleases God in the end.

Here are some resources (in no particular order) I’m exploring, and finding helpful, as I experience this book:

• Bill McKibben’s The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job and the Scale of Creation offers the vision of creation God proudly sets forth from the whirlwind as a still-relevant paradigm.
• Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Job was Bill McKibben’s chosen text, and I’ve ordered a copy of my own. Though Mitchell’s decisions about what to include and what not to include are controversial (he leaves out Elihu’s speech entirely), the power of the language is a delight. 
• Putting God on Trial is an online commentary by Robert Sutherland that offers philosophical, literary and legal analysis of Job.
• Wonders for Oyarsa is blogging through the Bible and provides a thoughtful grappling with the book, as well as useful discussion.  
• William Blake’s Book of Job contains his own provocative illustrations. Without endorsing his theology, I think his pictures reflect some real insight.
• Jerry Gladson’s “Job,” in A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible, provides a run-down of the literary techniques and structural issues of Job. 
• G.K. Chesterton’s Introduction to the Book of Job gives a theological overview.
• Beyond Suffering: Discovering the Message of Job by Layton Talbert is recommended by Barbara of Stray Thoughts. I look forward to getting ahold of a copy.
• David Malik’s Introduction to the Book of Job supplies an overview including information about authorship, genre, and historical context.

It’s partly a theology book. Partly a personal meditation. Partly a Jeremiad. Partly prophetic.

That’s a lot of categories for a book just 95 pages long. Crisply written, provocatively presented, and compellingly argued, The Comforting Whirlwind by Bill McKibben offers an analogy between Job facing down the religious orthodoxy of his day, and modern-day western culture’s need to confront a similarly bankrupt orthodoxy.

For Job, the status quo is that “God is just, and therefore Job suffers because he is guilty.” The only problem with this simple calculus is that Job isn’t guilty. Yet “this pious orthodoxy is the baseline for the entire story,” writes McKibben. “It is the seemingly sturdy and immense castle that Job and God will totally demolish with the explosive force of their encounter at the end of the book.”

So what’s the orthodoxy McKibben is concerned about in the present-day? An orientation based on two assumptions: more is better, and growth is good. In the same way the formula of Job’s friends is inadequate to explain the facts of his situation, these modern tenets are called into question by the facts of our growing impact on nature. Structured simply in three chapters, The Comforting Whirlwind explicates both orthodoxies, then discusses their human-centeredness, then details the ways in which our impact on the planet might put us in a position to make different answers to some of God’s questions to Job — to our detriment.

Though Christianity has been accused by some (notably Lynn White) of encouraging environmental exploitation, McKibben emphasizes the biblical theme of God’s pleasure and love for all of his creation. (This reminded me of another more pointed discussion, Wendell Berry’s”Christianity and the Survival of the Creation.” It’s one of the essays in this book.) A main thrust of God’s response to Job is that the earth was not made for man. Most of the natural wonders he calls to Job’s attention have nothing to do with human life. Rather than answering Job’s questions, he calls him into a larger view of the world, one in which creation doesn’t exist for man’s pleasure or use, but for its own, and its creator’s, delight. This is a far cry from the anthropocentrism and conquesting attitude the Bible has been accused of having.

At its heart, though, this book is neither a theology book nor a defense of Christianity. It’s a celebration of the vision of the earth God puts forth from the whirlwind when he speaks to Job. McKibben suggests that this new paradigm is not just for Job and his friends, but for us. Central to God’s view, he writes, are two callings: a call to humility, and a call to delight. The book spells out ways we can fulfill both of these callings.

One of my favorite parts was McKibben’s description of an experiment he conducted for his book The Age of Missing Information. He recorded 100 channels-worth of television for 24 hours, then spent a year watching it. His questions and conclusions about American culture are fascinating, and helped me to think more carefully about my own life. Do our technological advances make us more, or less, happy? At what cost do these things come? Have our so-called advances made any truly significant improvements in quality of life over the last 30 years? 

I also liked the book’s ongoing emphasis on the importance of wildness, of having aspects of the world that are not humanly controlled. One of the most important ways we’re made in the image of God, he contends, is that we have the power of restraint. Though at times I wasn’t ready to plunge quite as far as McKibben in his speculations about the future, his urgency about our increasing ability to alter our environment, and about what we lose if we replace all aspects of wildness and mystery with humanly-engineered “nature,” certainly resonated with me.  

I’ve read McKibben’s The End of Nature, and this book shares its strengths. Reading it recalled to mind other fine nature writers as well, some of whom he mentions: John Muir, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry. His factual support is varied and interesting, his analysis is incisive, and his exact and loving description of nature makes me homesick for the hill behind the house I grew up in. This book raises awareness and introduces some ongoing questions sure to be beneficial to any of us who care about our own, or our children’s, quality of life in a consumer age.

I’ll conclude with McKibben’s own words. He’s usually identified as an environmentalist. But like other nature writers I admire, McKibben argues not for “environmentalism,” which implies an artificial separation between human life and the world we live in, but for at-one-ness with

something much larger. A planet, filled with the vast order of creation. It is a buzzing, weird, stoic, abundant, reckless, haunting, painful, perfect planet. All of it matters, all of it is glorious. And all of it can speak to us in the deepest and most satisfying ways, if only we will let it.

I wasn’t aware that Madeleine L’Engle had written a volume of poetry till I went looking for this title, published in 2000, in the fiction section of the library and couldn’t find it. (I’ve discovered since that she has at least one other collection, The Weather of the Heart, which I’ve yet to see). Though L’Engle is most familiar for her fiction, her autobiographical Crosswicks Journal books and her treatise Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art have achieved a level of recognition as well. Her poems appear to be less well-known. I consider A Cry Like a Bell a treasure.

This book starts with a brief intro by Luci Shaw, and contains poems written from the perspective of different biblical characters, and filtered through L’Engle’s speculative imagination. Some of them are characters in starring roles, but quite a few are the the less textually fleshed-out but indispensable characters: Gershom, Herman the Ezragite, Balaam’s donkey, the ram slaughtered in Isaac’s place. A few characters warrant series: Mary, Abraham and Isaac, David. But many are given a single “bell-tone” in this feast for the ear.

I liked the book partly because I’ve written a few imaginative pieces myself from within the perspective of Bible characters who’ve caught my fancy. The Bible includes plenty of poetry, but it’s frustratingly terse about many of its main players. With the exception of the Psalms, we don’t get many passages of “inside” description of how characters feel. We can often guess easily enough; it doesn’t take much imagination to grasp how Mary felt at the foot of the cross. But generally speaking, those of us who enjoy the readerly voyage into other personalities aren’t often indulged in the biblical stories. So L’Engle’s poems supply a welcome glass of water to a parched, if perhaps unfair, expectation of the text.

It’s not a tepid glass, either. Much of the devotional poetry I’m familiar with flirts with (or dives headlong into) the sentimental or the dogmatic. But these poems are refreshingly honest, deeply reflective, and have a simplicity that feels more like life than a churchly emanation. In this volume, Malchus, the high priest’s servant whose ear is cut off by an enraged Peter, saves the ear that fell to the ground after Jesus gives him a new one. Isaac begins by stating flatly, “From now on, no fathers are to be trusted. I know.” The angel who appears to Mary in “Annunciation” is sorrowful, fearing to ask of her the task he knows will be almost unbearable.

The variety of speaker is matched by variety of form. Some, like the opening poem about Eve, are consciously molded to a form:

When we left the garden, we knew that it would be forever.
The new world we entered was dark and strange. Nights were cold.
We lay together for warmth, and because we were afraid
of the un-named animals, and of the others: we had never
known about the giants, and angels gone wild. We had not been told
of dwarves and elves; they teased us; we hid whenever they played…

This poem, with its carefully crafted six stanzas, six lines each, abcabc rhyme, poses a contrast to the rapid-fire staccato of the second poem about Ishmael and Hagar finding water in the wilderness:

Light
eye-thirsting for light
oh come
sight-drenching
night-wrenching
cloud-clearing
fountains of light
refreshing
renewing
caressing
blessing…

L’Engle attempts a number of different formal approaches: sonnets, dialogues, a character’s response to one of the epistles, others. The diversity testifies to L’Engle’s sophistication as an artist, and the content reflects the sweeping imaginative reach readers of her fiction have come to expect. I’m glad she tried her hand at poetry, especially considering her initial obstacles as a 5th grade poet, which she mentions self-deprecatingly in a commencement address here:

There was a poetry contest which was open to the entire school, and judged by the head of the English department. The entries weren’t screened, or I’d never have got one in. My poem won the contest, and my home room teacher predictably said, “Madeleine couldn’t possibly have written that poem. She’s not very bright, you know. She must have copied it from some place.”

Poor teacher. She lived to reconsider her criteria of judgment, I’m sure. I recommend A Cry Like a Bell to anyone who needs a dash of water on spiritual drought, to fans of L’Engle who (like me) may be unfamiliar with her foray into poetry, and to those looking for imaginative devotional writing to be savored.

There’s another review of this book online here, and a sampling of her poems from other sources here. Poetry Friday is at Wild Rose Reader this week.

A friend gave me Sally Clarkson’s Seasons of a Mother’s Heart, and I’ve been savoring it over the last few weeks. It’s a book written by a homeschooling mother of four who also runs the home-based endeavor Whole Heart Ministries. Using the four seasons as a principle of organization, this book addresses the attitudes and challenges that Christian homeschooling mothers face.

My friend commented to me, “Sally Clarkson has a neat heart. It’s not really an intellectual book, but it’s inspiring.” I would agree. It’s not a book that showed me new things so much as a prolonged exposure to a positive attitude about already-familiar things. At the end of each chapter is a short Bible study section providing passages of scripture to read and an opportunity to write your thoughts down.

The only places I felt defensive were in some spots where Ms. Clarkson makes it sound like homeschooling is the only biblical option. “If my decision to homeschool is because I am being obedient to the design for motherhood and family that I see revealed in Scripture, then I have no other options,” she writes near the end. I feel my hackles go up just a bit, because I’m not necessarily in agreement with that. I start formulating arguments about how not everyone is cut out for homsechooling, or can afford to live on one income, etc. I think she would probably agree with that on its face, but if you really think homeschooling is the ”design…revealed in Scripture,” and you live by Scripture, then do you see those who choose not to do it as disobedient?

One other spot where I found myself disagreeing was in a chapter on discipleship where she writes, “We can love our children dearly, teach them diligently, train them effectively, live with them day-in and day-out, and yet still not really have a relationship with them. We can occupy the same space with them in our home, yet fail to fill the relational space between their hearts and ours.” 

To which I reply: “Huh?”

This seems to set an abstract ideal as a standard. I think someone who is really doing all those things surely has a relationship with their kids. Case closed. Please don’t give us something else to wake up at night wondering about. Frankly, that whole list of parental activities is a definition of a relationship. Sure the relationship can be worked on and improved; sure we need always to avoid defaulting into being mechanical. But it seems that “loving our children dearly” is the best, and only necessary, safeguard against really going off the rails in that respect.

I like books that engage me, so I didn’t mind my quibbles with this one. Probably my favorite point the book makes is about the way the homeschool movement has become an often complicated, bewildering array of philosophical approaches and curriculum packages, and sometimes the shared vision gets lost. I don’t believe that anyone would intentionally take shots at my approach to teaching my children (my approach is classical, by the way), but whenever I go to a meeting or a curriculum fair, I’m immediately assailed by doubts and anxieties. A month or so ago, I went to one where a certain language arts product was on display. I found the colorful array of cd’s, games, books etc. quite dazzling. Beside it stood two women agreeing fervently that they would swear by it.

My kids are missing out on all of that. And I’m missing out on the price tag, which I found eye-popping. My approach is simpler, less colorful, less “fun-looking.” Shoot, I suddenly felt gypped myself not to be playing all those fun games and everything, and so are my poor children… Guilt, guilt, second-guessing, more guilt.

But have they learned all the same material? Yup. Have I followed through on my goals set at the start of the year? Yup. Would I buy the product if I had it to do over again? Nope. I would have liked it more if I could have sat down with those two mothers and talked about why they were homeschooling, and what their struggles were, and what their favorite parts were.

Which brings me back to Sally Clarkson, who talks about those very things in this book. With apologies for lapsing into sports metaphors, she “keeps the main thing the main thing.” That’s what I appreciated most about this book, and that’s why I’m glad it’s a keeper.

When I was in 8th grade, I found myself assailed by questions about the faith I’d been raised in. How would I prove God’s existence to my friends? What does all the church-speak mean? How could I know this was real? At the time, my Sunday school teacher heard my questioning and took it to heart, organizing the class around it. She had us all write down our questions, and she dealt with one each week.

I’m not sure how fully mine were answered. Sometimes living and gaining experience is required before things make sense. But the affirming respect and responsiveness she dared to offer us on her maiden voyage as a Sunday school teacher meant — and still means — a great deal to me. Os Guinness’s God in the Dark has been a fitting sequel to that first experience. Whereas the 8th grade class laid a foundation of viable Christian love and relationship, this book is a rigorous intellectual voyage that tackles exhaustively the nature of doubt in all its dimensions and varieties. It was a good read for me now, almost thirty years later, with a fuller range of experience under my belt and therefore different kinds of questions.

My only other experience reading Guinness was Fit Bodies Fat Minds, a much more witty and fast-paced book dealing with anti-intellectualism in the church. This book is written more reflectively and sensitively. A glance through the other reviews posted at Amazon shows that it’s unanimous: this book is a profound, unflinching tour through a difficult subject. It’s structured in three parts: first, an overview; second, a survey of seven “families” of doubt; and last, a look at two specific doubts, “Why, Lord?” and “How long, Lord?”

It’s an excellent book, though I had my usual struggles grappling with nonfiction. The unrelenting focus on its subject is a strength of the argument, but plowing through the many kinds of doubt was slow going at times. I also had to guard against the “That’s me!” syndrome of thinking I suffer from every single variety of spiritual doubt in the book.

However, I value it in two ways. First, it legitimizes — almost blesses — doubt as a stamp of authenticity on faith. “The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof,” writes Guinness, “but a world where doubt is never far from faith’s shoulder.” I’ve gotten whiffs of a spiritual gestapo mentality from some quarters where doubt is viewed as unbelief or sin, so I found this refreshing air to breathe. I also value this book for its incisive, constructive discussion. It’s not a book that wallows; solutions are proposed, and they’re complex, not simplistic.

On the whole the varieties of doubt that I could relate to best were the doubt of disuse and the doubt of injury (not Guinness’s names for them, but my shorthand). By the doubt of disuse, I mean the uncertainty that comes of not activating faith through choice, but waiting in the wings, safely outside the fray. My life at present is pretty insulated, and faith can take on an air of unreality except as a verbal thing. The doubt of injury has to do with the kind of deep-seated mistrust that comes of old wounds, the pain of which is attributed to God rather than the real offender. I know this is an area I need to give more thought to. I have a great suspicion of authority, and the cultural atmosphere makes me right at home in that. But some authorities are trustworthy, and need to be trusted, not hidden from, if faith is to escape being stunted. I’ll probably refer to this book along the way, because it sharpens focus and gives a language for thinking through a potentially paralyzing subject.

I’ve always liked Ralph Ellison’s ideas about invisibility in Invisible Man. Here’s a sample from the opening pages:

I am an invisible man… I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, anything and everything except me… I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

He goes on to describe the anger that boils up out of the “doubt that you really exist” as a result of being unseen. So being invisible is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s an advantage, but ultimately we’re meant for visibility, and his book explores this rich metaphor on many levels.

Here’s Eudora Welty’s comment on the subject:

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible — actually a powerful position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision — these set a distance. (One Writer’s Beginnings 87)

It’s invisibility (boy do I have a hard time typing that word!) in a different context than Ellison’s, but similarly double-edged; on the one hand it’s “powerful,” but on the backside is the potential of tipping into “effacement.”

At a level much less significant than either of these writers, I can affirm the psychological truth of what they’re saying. It brings back the memory of experiences as a child with an older boy down the street from us. Jimmy was really a sweetheart of a boy, but he was about 3 years older than I and when he would come over to play with my brother, he was convinced that he had to talk baby-talk to me. It used to infuriate me. So what did I do?

I pretended I couldn’t talk.

I remember that complex inner awareness of frustration at being regarded as less than I was, mixed with a sense of superiority that I knew more than Jimmy did, mixed with the knowledge that I could make him feel silly any time I wanted to by revealing that I could speak quite well. But I chose not to, I suppose because it felt powerful. I think the danger lies in the chance that you might play the role for too long, and forget the hidden truth of who you are.

This book has been on my shelf for years, but though I’ve read pieces of it (my tagline comes from it), never before this week have I sat down and read it all the way through. It’s an autobiography of Eudora Welty’s writerly persona, but this doesn’t mean it’s a dry, theoretical treatise. Far from it. She explores her family history, complete with photographs and early childhood memories recounted with wonderful clarity of detail. It’s a short book, organized simply into three sections: “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.”

I’ve only read one of Welty’s novels, The Optimist’s Daughter, and both my great liking for it and its alleged autobiographical nature compelled me to pick up One Writer’s Beginnings. The two books truly do bear a close resemblance to each other. I find it interesting that Welty quotes a passage from Optimist in the concluding pages of this book. Apparently she wrote Optimist first, and in One Writer’s Beginnings she’s following in the footsteps of the heroine of that story, Laurel Hand. I love the idea of a writer who’s inspired by her characters, rather than always implanting her own already-lived experience into them.

The commonalities between the two books are many and substantial. The characters, the locales, the events, and even the central, organizing situation of a woman returning to explore her family’s past are identical. I was glad that along with other aspects of writing and the genesis of stories, Welty touches on character creation, a discussion that’s invariably provocative and discerning. On the subject of her own autobiographical explorations she has this to say:

Through learning at my later date things I hadn’t known, or had escaped or possibly feared realizing, about my parents — and myself — I glimpse our whole family life as if it were freed of that clock time which spaces us apart so inhibitingly, divides young and old, keeps our living through the same experiences at separate distances.

It is our inward journey that leads us through time — forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

These fascinations with time, different kinds of time, overlapping experience, and the function of memory, run through both this story and Optimist. Welty’s ideas about a transcending ”confluence” of experience are what give her exploration of the past meaning, and resolve the story. Through memory, we can reach into the past and access the truths of our own “beginnings.” What Welty wasn’t aware of as a child, she can uncover in this book, writing in her seventies, through memory. Her perspective reminds me very much of Wendell Berry’s, which surfaces over and over in his stories and poems, and includes like Welty’s not just the importance of memory, but the equally important tempering influences of faith and love.

This all sounds very abstract, so I’ll conclude by handing the microphone back to Welty herself as she links art and life and memory far more succinctly than I seem able to do:

It seems to me, writing of my parents now in my seventies, that I see continuities in their lives that weren’t visible to me when they were living… Could it be that I can better see their lives — or any lives I know — today because I’m a fiction writer? See them not as fiction, certainly — see them, perhaps, as even greater mysteries than I knew. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.

I’ve struggled with guilt feelings that I read too much, because when I’m reading I’m not as accessible to my children. Turns out I’m not the only one. Another mother also tried to balance her passion for reading with her mothering, and her daughter ended up a writer to be reckoned with: Eudora Welty. Here’s one of Welty’s memories of her mother from One Writer’s Beginnings:

Now, I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else. In my mind’s eye The Origin of Species is lying on the shelf in the pantry under a light dusting of flour — my mother was a bread maker; she’d pick it up, sit by the kitchen window and find her place, with one eye on the oven. I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol, Mary Pickford. A generation later, when my brother Walter was away in the Navy and his two little girls often spent the day in our house, I remember Mother reading the new issue of Time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of “Little Red Riding Hood” with the children. She’d just look up at the right time, long enough to answer — in character — “The better to eat you with, my dear,” and go back to her place in the war news.

Welty doesn’t detail her own feelings about this, but I know one thing: when I read this description, I feel an instinctive liking for her mother! Looks like I need to get better at multi-tasking…

We read Mildred Mastin Pace’s Old Bones the Wonder Horse as a read-aloud. I remember my mother reading it to me many years ago. It’s the true story of Exterminator, a racehorse dubbed Old Bones because of his ungainly appearance. Bought as a “work horse” to challenge Sun Briar, a more favored thoroughbred in training, Exterminator instead begins a long and illustrious racing career of his own when Sun Briar is unable to run the Kentucky Derby. Exterminator races in his place and wins.

This book follows his racing career until he retires at the age of 9; his adjustment to retirement and attachments to Peanuts and Peanuts II, two ponies bought as companions for him; and his lifelong friendships with Henry McDaniel (his trainer), Mike Terry (his groom, who meets him at his first Derby and never leaves him), and others. The book does justice to this remarkable animal, developing his intelligence, his steady personality so unusual in a thoroughbred, and his sociability. My 7-year-old (and I) laughed aloud at times over the characterization of this distinctive horse who embodies a combination of wisdom. playfulness, determination and physical giftedness. There’s more information about Exterminator here, here, and here. 

My daughter has been listening to Black Beauty on cd alongside our reading of this book, and there’s a marked contrast between the two stories. Black Beauty is a tale I’d never survive as a read-aloud because it’s so desperately sad. Its arguments against vice and cruelty gain their momentum from the tremendous hardship Black Beauty and his fellow horses have to endure at the hands of their human handlers. But this story is poignant without being heart-breaking. Its reading level is 3rd-6th grade, but as an adult I enjoyed it every bit as much as my daughter did.

Interestingly enough, in reading about Exterminator I’ve discovered two interesting facts about him: first, that he was born on Almahurst Farm near Lexington, a few miles from my alma mater in the heart of bluegrass country; and second, that my daughters were born in a hospital located on property that was once part of the Kilmer farm at which he lived out his last years. He’s buried at a pet cemetery close by. When I talked this over with the librarian, he told me he visits the gravesite every year, because Exterminator was “one of the greats.” This book makes a convincing argument that he’s right.