For a lighthearted history of elves, brownies, goblins and such like, and how they became part of our Christmas folklore, visit: “The Evolution of Elves,” by Rebecca Sicree.
“Over the past centuries, three major events changed the perceptions of elves. First, the arrival of Christianity dethroned them as gods. Then the Reformation shrank them. And finally, the American Revolution sent them to the North Pole.”
This post that is very fallish in more than one way, I am sharing again nine years later. It is about Lin Yutang, whose writings my late husband and I were reading aloud together, during the illness that was to end his earthly life only a few months later. Much of what I read during that period is very foggy in my mind at this point, and many of those and other books from the past keep calling me back, especially when I read my own reviews.
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If you like thought-provoking quotes as much as I do, you might sometime run across one by the eloquent Lin Yutang. I find that I did have a quote by him about autumn in my files, so that is probably how he came under my radar recently, long enough for me to decide to borrow his book The Importance of Living from the library. It was in the closed stacks, and looks old and Chinese. But as Samuel Butler said, “The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them,” and for me, Lin Yutang is definitely a new and exciting discovery.
I expected a small book of proverbs, perhaps, but The Importance of Living is a large conversational and philosophical treatise that I won’t be able
to read in bed. I may have to buy a copy, because in the very first paragraph of the preface I found beautifully written lines that drew me in to his mind and his ruminations:
“Very much contented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy. Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, one’s spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground.”
I opened the book randomly in the middle and there, also, his words were worth thinking about as poetry or motivational talk. Did someone very gifted translate the works of this Chinese man? No, he wrote in English in such a graceful way that it is pure joy to read him aloud.
Lin Yutang was born in China in 1895 of Chinese Christian parents. His father was a pastor and a very progressive, forward-thinking man who made sure that Lin learned his Bible stories and went to the schools that produced the best speakers of English. He eventually got a degree from Harvard and another from Leipzig University.
I began to read The Importance of Living aloud with Mr. Glad. I usually do the reading because I enjoy it more than he does, and I immediately noticed the easy flow of Lin’s prose and the equally smooth progression of ideas. Everything he says makes perfect sense given his worldview in 1937, and at that time he was no longer a Christian.
What happened? Mr. Glad and I were very curious, because we had information Lin didn’t have at the time; we knew that later in life he would return to the faith and live to write about it, in his book From Pagan to Christian. So we stopped reading Importance and started in on the book about his spiritual journey that he wrote about 20 years later.
Putting together what he says in the relatively little we have read of him so far, I can tell you this about Lin’s first change of mind: As soon as he came of age to notice, he realized that he had not received the usual Chinese philosophical or literary heritage, much of which was typically learned through the theater; the theater was forbidden to Lin and his siblings who were in some ways raised as Puritans. He hadn’t taken the time to learn to write beautiful calligraphy, either, so he found that he was by Chinese standards completely uncivilized. At this point the one very Chinese thing he did know was intense shame.
He felt he had to go back and learn to be an authentic Chinese man, and having learned as a child the diligence and study habits of a Puritan, he did a very thorough job of learning Chinese philosophy and literature, not to mention a stunningly broad understanding of Western culture. This knowledge base combined with the ability to think and write about all that he has figured out — or is figuring out, as the story evolves — makes him fascinating to me.
We haven’t progressed very far in either of these books, but having this articulate author “friend” to explain Chinese culture and history to me from the inside has given me an interest in that part of the world that I have always lacked. So I hope to read more, and I expect to have more to share. But for now, I’ll close with his quote from My Country and My People about the 
seasons of the year.
“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colours are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring,nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content.”
This meditation seems to me an expression of a perspective that could be both Chinese, as he felt at the time, and truly Christian. I’m looking forward to reading more of the kindly wisdom of Lin Yutang.
A Touchstone magazine article from a while back ponders “On the Loss of Poetry as Necessary Knowledge.” In it Stephen Faulkner warns,
“Our modern poetry is in pieces…. This makes a defense of poetry difficult. But defend it we must, for poetic knowledge is an essential kind of knowledge. Without it, our understanding of the world suffers a severe distortion. It is as if we have grown up in an age of one-eyed men who have heard rumors that people could once judge distances, depths, and colors by the use of two eyes, but are now reduced by this flat, prosaic information age that relies on scientific analysis as virtually our only source of knowledge. We are a century of Cyclops.”
Though Faulkner wrote that in the 20th century, I doubt whether he would think the situation has improved in the 21st. In the same year as the Touchstone article, Czeslaw Milosz published this offering that is a form of therapy for our distorted vision: In the introduction to the anthology of poetry that he compiled, The Book of Luminous Things, he writes:
“Many poems that I like or admire are not in this anthology because they do not correspond to my criteria of size and accessibility to the reader.”
“My proposition consists in presenting poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. I act like an art collector who, to spite the devotees of abstract art, arranges an exhibition of figurative painting….”
He also thinks we moderns are missing something essential to our soul’s health. Whereas Faulkner writes metaphorically of a problem with our eyes, Milosz says, also metaphorically but more generally, “We seem to be missing some vital organs…”
“I have written elsewhere of this deprivation as one of the consequences brought about by science and technology that pollutes not only the natural environment but also the human imagination. The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days, and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief.
“Poetry is quite different…. Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot — if it is good poetry — look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting; and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.”
Almost all of the poems are introduced with a line or two about what he likes about that one, as an example of good poetry. None of his own poems is included. Here is one from the collection with a teacherly comment from Milosz to introduce it:
“The strong presence of a thing described means that the poet believes in its real existence. That is the meaning of a programmatic and unfinished poem by Walt Whitman, ‘I Am the Poet,’ which rehabilitates a ‘naïve’ approach and rejects philosophy’s unfavorable opinion on the direct testimony of our senses.”
I AM THE POET
I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea
And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,
And bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense every one
And that what they seem to the child they are
[And that the world is not a joke,
Nor any part of it a sham].
-Walt Whitman
As I may have said here before, I have probably watched fewer movies than anyone you know. So I don’t often mention them. The two I saw most recently were “My Octopus Teacher” and “Babies,” both of which I’ve enjoyed more than once. I watched “Babies,” a 2010 French documentary, with my four-year-old grandson just last month. Its subjects are four babies in their first year of life, in Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo, and San Francisco.
I very much love that movie, for the meditative and close-up way it shows vastly different styles of mothering across cultures and around the world. I admit, my own style doesn’t exactly fit with any of those shown, but if I had to choose among the four, I feel most akin to the Mongolian way. In any case, all the families in the movie are pretty traditional for the local culture in which they are raising their children.
The contrast between that movie and the current one everyone is talking about, “Barbie,” didn’t cross my mind until I read this article in Salvo Magazine: “Existential Barbie: A World Without Love is Never Kenough,” by Annie Brownell Crawford. The author starts with a brief introduction:
“The plot begins when Barbie suddenly starts thinking about death, her feet fall flat, and she discovers cellulite on her thighs. To solve her existential crisis, Barbie travels to the real world with her unwanted Ken tagging along. When she arrives in California, Barbie is shocked to discover a world of exaggerated patriarchy where men think of her as an object and girls hate her for her beauty. Here, as the teen character Sasha explains, ‘Men hate women, and women hate women.’”
Crawford notes that “the film moves chaotically between satire and sincerity,” and she wouldn’t be quick to draw conclusions from the above statement alone, but there are reasons to think it was meant seriously. So she responds,
“Modern feminists seem to hate women as much as they believe men do, for the female body confronts all of us with our intrinsic dependence on one another and ultimately upon God. As the apostle Paul reminds us, ‘woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.’ (I Corinthians 11) We only know ourselves as women and as men through our relationship with each other, and we only know ourselves as humans in relationship to the God we image. The female body reminds us of this interdependence and the givenness of our existence, for our mothers literally gave us life.”
Of course the biggest difference between these two movies is that one is all about babies, and the other one lacks babies entirely, except for the unfortunate baby dolls:
“The film opens with an origin story wherein the newly created Barbie rescues little girls from being forced to play with baby dolls. After independent, infertile Barbie arrives, the young girls of the world celebrate their liberation from motherhood by smashing their babies to bits.”
I’m not enough of a movie buff that I am likely ever to see “Barbie,” but if I did, I might afterward go on to read some of the critics who are saying that if you dig deep through those layers of irony and satire, it’s actually anti-feminist and conservative in its message. Maybe how you feel about that depends partly on what you think The Patriarchy is. Is Ken in or out of it?
I wonder if Kimberly Ells has seen “Barbie”…. She attended the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations this spring and heard much about the desire to “smash” and “eradicate” the patriarchy; so she started asking around at the event, What is The Patriarchy, exactly? She wrote succinctly about the answers she got in this article: “In Praise of Men.”
I’d be interested to hear if any of my readers has thoughts about these movies or the questions raised by “Barbie.” And if you haven’t seen “My Octopus Teacher” or “Babies,” I definitely recommend those!
Gladsome Lights 