Category Archives: history

Enduring and Truthful Fictions

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Today is Book Lovers’ Day, my friend Myriah just informed me, and I’m so glad she did. It’s actually one of two days that are celebrated for and by people like us. To mark the day I am re-posting an old book review I wrote, from 2009. It’s a response to three books, so we could think of it as a triple treat for our readers’ party:

Three Truthful Fictions

In early summer I read three works of fiction in a short space of time:

Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful by Alan Paton
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Folding Cliffs by W.S. Merwin

These were all pretty dramatic stories of historical fiction. Paton’s book follows closely the events in South Africa mid-20th century. Hosseini writes about Afghanistan in the last 30 years, and Merwin’s book is an epic poem about Hawaii, mostly in the 19th century.

I was sitting around after surgery with my foot up, and that was what had made it possible for me spend more time reading and thinking. Some things I thought about: How funny that the settings of these thr3 truthful fictions picee books were at three corners of the globe. Obviously they were not part of any theme. So were there some ways they were alike? What made them all worth reading to the end, when so many books I’ve tried lately were not?

Suffering was a large part of all the stories. The Afrikaners in Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful were treating all people of color unjustly and inhumanely. Whites who did otherwise suffered along with the oppressed, and often sacrificed their careers, homes, and reputations.

All the women suffer miserably in A Thousand Splendid Suns. War and famine, selfish and sinful men and women supported by bad cultural traditions, all combine to keep the women trapped in complicated and painful predicaments. Factions of Muslims hate one another.

The Folding Cliffs makes vivid the way conquering peoples oppress the vanquished, all the while thinking it is “for their own good.”

What benefit is there in dwelling on Man’s Inhumanity to Man? Don’t we already know how wretched we are? If that were all one gets from these stories, I don’t think they would be worth reading, but there is another bigger part to all of them, and that is Man’s Love. Just as Christ gave His life in love for us suffering humans, so He gives grace to men to rise above their suffering, show compassion to their fellow man, and do deeds of mercy.

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality,” said C.S. Lewis, and it is this courage that is shown by the young parents in Cliffs who flee to the hills and fight off government agents who are shooting at them, rather than have their family torn apart by the health officials who are shipping lepers off to Molokai like so many unclean animals. Their love is demonstrated in the test of courage.

In Land, the author and his companions find joy and fellowship in realizing the sacrificial, mercy-giving aspect of their humanity as they fight what seems to be a losing battle against political power. Perhaps they were living what Winston Churchill was talking about when he said, “We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.”

Alan Paton in his autobiography Towards the Mountain writes of the experience:

“…the inhumanity of man to man could be made endurable for us only when we manifested in our lives the humanity of man to man….there is a wound in the creation and…the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.”

I haven’t lived with the kinds of suffering I read about, and that is partly why I think these writings are valuable, for as we read we take as our companions in mind and heart characters who are historically real or fictionally true, who can train us in Christian virtue.

Khaled Hosseini has given his countrymen and all of us a wonderful gift in the two books of his I am familiar with. In Kite Runner and in A Thousand Splendid Suns he paints a backdrop of horror, including much personal moral failure. Kite Runner exposed my own innate cowardice as I empathized with the protagonist, and as he was able to find healing and hope after repentance, I was also comforted.

In Suns the author gives a tender role model to women everywhere who are beaten down by life. The character of Miriam is the ultimate in misery, as she has no friends and no family who care about her, and she is barren, so her husband hates her. Then a young woman comes into her life, a woman who could easily slide into being another tormentor. But instead she shows kindness and becomes a true friend, and Miriam finds hope and courage, as well as other parts of her humanity and womanhood that had been obscured. She is transformed from a passive recipient of abuse into a woman who can return love, and she is happy, even in the face of continued abuse.

These stories have the potential to become part of the collective consciousness of a people, and help us to live more humanly, more humanely. I hope that Suns in particular can give vision to the women of Afghanistan, a vision of themselves as able to rise above their circumstances by means of love toward others.

We won’t eliminate the oppressors; our hope does not consist of that, as Father Alexander Schmemann has summarized:

“The fundamental Christian eschatology has been destroyed by either the optimism leading to the Utopia, or by the pessimism leading to the Escape. If there are two heretical words in the Christian vocabulary, they would be ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism.’ These two things are utterly anti-biblical and anti-Christian…. It is for us, Christians, to reconstruct this unique faith, in which there are no illusions, no illusions at all, about the evil.”

Keeping with the theme of inspiring fiction, I’ll end with a quote by Whittaker Chambers from Witness (which book I love, but it is not fiction) about a novel that was formative for him. I haven’t read Les Miserables, but I noticed a few years ago that at least three important writers I knew of had mentioned they read it more than once as children. Sorry, I can’t remember who the others were. Chambers describes what can happen when a good writer connects with the reader:les miz pic

“I read and reread Les Miserables many times in its entirety. It taught me two seemingly irreconcilable things–Christianity and revolution. It taught me first of all that the basic virtue of life is humility, that before humility, ambition, arrogance, pride and power are seen for what they are, the stigmata of littleness, the betrayal by the mind of the soul, a betrayal which continually fails against a humility that is authentic and consistent. It taught me justice and compassion, not a justice of the law, or as we say, human justice, but a justice that transcends human justice whenever humanity transcends itself to reach that summit where justice and compassion are one….”

Savor the heady dry breath.

books, history, poetry, ,

I miss spending time in the public library, not that I have had a great deal of that experience. In my youth the city library was not a convenient place to study, being ten miles from our house, and my elementary school had no library.

When I stayed with my grandma she would actually drop my sisters and me off at the branch library in Berkeley while she ran errands and we could roam at liberty for an hour. I’m sure none of us knew what a lavish gift that was, but from this vantage point I can appreciate the sublimity, and the mental picture of the room where I spent the most time is still there.

Back home in the country we depended on the bookmobile that every two weeks provided plenty of the sensory excitement that is the subject of the poem below. The visits were brief and fairly businesslike, as we had to jostle a bit with the other young patrons in that cramped space and there certainly was nowhere to sit and ponder. Mom was waiting outside in the car.

I paid no conscious attention to anything but the book titles, being mainly interested in getting my stash to take home and savor in a more purely intellectual fashion. But now, so long removed, if I think on that county van for only a minute, I can remember the clunking sounds  of books being pulled off shelves and put back, and our tennis shoes scuffling around in the grit that we’d brought in from the gravelly parking lot. The librarian-driver would speak as few quiet words as possible as she stamped our cards. And the scent of the books — it’s still in me.

Library
by Valerie Worth

No need even
To take out
A book: only
Go inside
And savor
The heady
Dry breath of
Ink and paper,
Or stand and
Listen to the
Silent twitter
Of a billion
Tiny busy
Black words.

From All the Small Poems and Fourteen More

Revisiting the Fort Ross Fourth

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I wasn’t able to participate with my church in the Fort Ross pilgrimage this year, but I thought I’d re-publish my article about the yearly event that I shared five years ago. I hope you all had a blessed Independence Day!

Fort Ross State Historic Park has been a favorite destination of our family for decades. It is a restored fort from the early 1800′s, when California was not yet a state in the Union, and for a while the Russians had an outpost in Northern California for fishing and trapping and growing food. You can see lots more photos and read about the history of Fort Ross online.

I loved the place from our first discovery of it when the children were small. A historic association holds yearly re-enactment days that are great fun, but just visiting on our own was relaxing and renewing, at least in the summer, when the sun would break through the fog and you could smell the ocean and the baking grasses at the same time, and imagine the people of long ago.

After I joined the Orthodox Church, I was delighted to learn that our diocese has permission to use the chapel at the fort twice a year, including on the 4th of July. We worship in the morning and have a picnic afterward when the sun usually comes out. There is plenty of time to get back home in the evening for Vespers and maybe fireworks later on. I’ve made the pilgrimage three times now, and my pictures here are collected from all the visits.


It’s a short walk from the parking lot to the actual fort enclosure. The photo at right is looking across the field from the chapel.

 

 

The church building as restored is small, and sometimes we let the whole of it serve as the altar, with the congregation and the choir standing outside and the priests and deacons coming in and out frequently as they pray and serve Communion.

This year we all squeezed into the chapel, which is very intimate. I couldn’t get a good picture because of that window, but I am posting a bad one just to give an idea of the atmosphere. Very thin idea, indeed, as there is only the one visual dimension, and no conveyance at all to the other senses.

 

 

 

 

After the liturgy, the clergy and many others made the trek to the cemetery to sing a short service for the ones buried there. Others of us waited within the walls of the fort for their return.

 

 

 

The bishop brought a picnic lunch, too.

 

We waved plenty of flags to show our thankful allegiance to the nation whose birthday we were celebrating, at a fort now owned by Americans.

 

 

One year N. brought his hammered dulcimer and treated us to music at the picnic.

After lunch, K. and I took a walk down to the lovely cove below the fort.

One young parishoner and his mother had found treasures in nearby tidepools.

 

 

 

When we got back, the history talk by the park ranger was still going on. It leads up to instruction in loading and firing the cannons.

My favorite priest is getting ready to load the cannon.

 

A blue study of guys waiting for the explosion.

Bang! Poof! No cannonball was shot–only gunpowder.

The majority of California’s state parks are likely to be closed because of the deep debt our state is in. If that happens, our Fort Ross pilgrimages may become a fragrant memory, and something to hope for in the more distant future.

Update: Since I wrote that last gloomy paragraph, grassroots efforts of many people have improved the likelihood that the park will endure and continue to be one of my favorite destinations — and maybe as a pilgrim in 2015.

Bicycling ages considered.

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I didn’t know C.S. Lewis had written about bicycles until I read The Inklings blogAntique-Bicycle-Girl-Image-GraphicsFairy-1024x984, but I was considering my own history of bicycling when, while on vacation and staying in a house whose amenities included eight bicycles in the garage, I went for a spin with my granddaughter.

It was the first time I’d been on a bike in about 20 years, as lower back problems had made perching on a bike seat uncomfortable during my last pregnancy and beyond. I wasn’t motivated to try very hard, because by the time my back was healthier, we had moved to the suburbs,  and riding where there are a lot of cars and stop signs to look out for and accommodate is at worst harrowing, and at best a chore.  So we gave away my bicycle.

The bike I rode for just a few minutes in Oregon was a bit large for me, but that didn’t prevent me from enjoying the sensation of rolling along with the wind in my hair, smelling the pines and listening to the chatter of my little companion.

It all took me back to the freedom and happiness of my youth, when for a few years in adolescence two or three friends and I would tool around the back roads of our Central Valley villages, spanning the miles that separated our houses hidden in orange groves.

From Lewis: “‘Talking about bicycles,’ said my friend, “I have been through the four ages. I can remember a time in early childhood when a bicycle meant nothing to me: it was just part of the huge meaningless background of grown-up gadgets against which life went on. Then came a time when to have a bicycle, and to have learned to ride it, and to be at last spinning along on one’s own, early in the morning, under trees, in and out of the shadows, was like entering Paradise. That apparently effortless and frictionless gliding — more like swimming than any other motion, but really most like the discovery of a fifth element — that seemed to have solved the secret of life. Now one would begin to be happy. But, of course, I soon reached the third period. Pedalling to and fro from school (it was one of those journeys that feel up-hill both ways) in all weathers, soon revealed the prose of cycling. The bicycle, itself, became to me what his oar is to a galley slave.’

“‘But what was the fourth age?’ I asked.

“‘I am in it now, or rather I am frequently in it. I have had to go back to cycling lately now that there’s no car. And the jobs I use it for are often dull enough. But again and again the mere fact of riding brings back a delicious whiff of memory. I recover the feelings of the second age. What’s more, I see how true they were — how philosophical, even. For it really is a remarkably pleasant motion. To be sure, it is not a recipe for happiness as I then thought. In that sense the second age was a mirage. But a mirage of something.’

“‘How do you mean?’, said I.

“‘I mean this. Whether there is, or whether there is not, in this world or in any other, the kind of happiness which one’s first experiences of cycling seemed to promise, still, on any view, it is something to have had the idea of it. The value of the thing promised remains even if that particular promise was false — even if all possible promises of it are false.'”

— C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns, “Talking About Bicycles”

For myself, my memories also include unpleasant experiences on bicycles in my youth, both involving moments of panic at the realization of my helplessness. Once I was borrowing the bike of my grandmother’s friend, in a strange neighborhood. The bike had been offered to keep me entertained while the ladies had tea indoors. I blithely pedaled around the residential streets for a very few minutes and suddenly knew that I had no idea where Grandma’s friend lived, or how to get back there. I didn’t know her name; I hadn’t noted what street she lived on.

The feeling of being lost was so sharp and guilty — it was my own stupid fault, of course. With my heart beating madly I rolled along vaguely back the way I had come, and eventually saw my grandmother’s car. I went back in the house with the awareness that no one there knew how close I’d come to disaster; and I never told my secret, about how the lighthearted floating through space took away my common sense.

bicycle bloomersAnother time, with my cousins in their city, we walked our bikes up a hill so that we could ride down fast. I was wearing my cousin’s child’s cowboy hat, and as we picked up speed on the descent I felt the hat fly off at the same moment I saw that the traffic light at the bottom of the hill was turning red. My instincts told me not to slam on the brakes, for fear of losing control even more, so I ran a red light, and I think I might have screamed at least a little. Drivers of cars waited for us to go through, and as we slowed to a saner speed I noticed that the cowboy hat had a neck cord that had kept it on my head after all.

No, I didn’t get off to a good start with city riding. My favorite rides of all time are the country ones I took with Pippin riding on a small plaid child’s seat behind me, when she was a toddler. We would take a half-hour ride in the mornings sometimes, when her father worked swing shift and could watch the older children. There was a narrow road I liked to take, with oaks arching over, and in springtime the banks along the way were covered with sweet-smelling broom.

Even then, the pleasure of bicycling was for me as much in the surrounding sights and smells as in the mode of travel — which means a preference for meandering rural rides. Mr. Glad has teased me for decades about getting a tandem machine for us to pedal together, but that has never sounded relaxing in the least.

I wonder if there could be some more appealing variation of my earlier experience still ahead for me, maybe a “third age,” as above, followed by a richer “fourth age”? The gentle prodding I received to revisit the topic has made me more open to the possibility of a bicycle (or a tricycle??) in my future.