Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 20

more on enchantment

In response to my recent post, Brad East defines enchantment as:

a true apprehension of reality as it actually is: the fallen but good handiwork of a loving Creator; the recipient of his lasting care and unfailing providence; the medium of astonishing beauty; the impress of his grace; the theater of glory as well as of suffering; the audience of the incarnation; the vehicle for the eventual final epiphany of God become flesh. Here, in this cosmos of the Spirit, truth is discovered and disclosed, communication lies at the heart of things, and the grain of reality is compassion and mercy, not brute violence. The numinous is not psychotic, it is to be expected — if not to be sought, since this world is the haunt not only of angels but also of demons. You and I live our small and out of the way lives as bit parts in the grand drama of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, the triumph of the former secured but not yet manifest. Join which side you will. 

But this is to say that “enchantment” is merely another name for Christianity. If that’s what enchantment means, then of course I am all for it. 

But that’s not what “enchantment” means; it has never meant that. There are ten thousand ways of rejecting the idea of “the world as fundamentally meaningless, chaotic, and godless, and therefore inert or plastic before the constructions and manipulations of rational man,” and Christianity is only one of them. You can also believe that the sun is angry with us and demands sacrifices; that our ancestors hover about us and plead for (or demand) our honor; that witches steal men’s penises; that this amulet wards off evil spirits; that God does not yet exist but is emerging through the dialectical process of history; that you have a lucky number that will enable you to win a pile in Vegas; that you are well on your way to becoming an operating Thetan. And as I keep saying — though to no avail — in relation to many or all of these beliefs Judaism and Christianity are disenchanting. 

(Also, I didn’t know that Rod had written a book on this subject, or I probably wouldn’t have made my original comment. I think Rod some time ago took a disastrous turn in his thinking, but I wish him well and don’t want to say anything against him. My post was prompted by the new DBH book, Paul Kingsnorth’s many posts on holy wells in Ireland, and a lot of the people Tara Isabella Burton writes about.) 

some enchanted evening

It seems that “enchantment” is having a moment right now — e.g. — and, well, okay, but I’d like to make two points: 

Experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that at the end of history every knee will bow and every tongue confess this. That is to say, Christians who have boarded the Enchantment Train should realize that what it promises is often (if not always) something quite different than what the Christian faith — which is often disenchanting — promises, and demands. A related point: As I wrote a decade ago, “The porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The ‘showings’ manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only.” 

You want to live in an enchanted cosmos? Cool. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it. 

Is the cosmos enchanted? Is it disenchanted? Is it standing on one leg and singing “When Father Painted the Parlor”? (Tom Stoppard reference there.) It’s not something I’m inclined to think about much, because for me — YMMV, and it really and truly may vary, you may be aided enormously by such reflections — it’s just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus. I already have a thousand of those, I don’t need a thousand-and-one. 

There’s a beautiful moment in the Introduction to Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels, when Price is remembering his childhood encounters with the Christian message: 

By then, in the countryside near my parents’ home, I had also undergone solitary apprehensions of a vibrant unity among all visible things and the thing I guessed was hid beneath the visible world — the reachable world of trees, rocks, water, clouds, snakes, foxes, myself, and (beneath them) all I loved and feared. Even that early I sensed the world’s unity as a vast kinship far past the bond of any root I shared with other creatures in evolutionary time, and the Bible stories had begun to engage me steadily in silence and to draw me toward the singular claim at their burning heart — Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived here. 

Note that in the young Price’s experience, the perception of the “vibrant unity of all visible things” and the guess that some deeper unity lay beneath and beyond it led to something more surprising, challenging, and specific. That “singular claim” that he perceived is all that I place my hope and trust in, and I am disinclined to pursue avenues of reflection that seem to promise metaphysical comfort without reminding me that my life is willed and watched with care by a God — the only God there is — who once lived here. 

the smog of unknowing

Peter Hitchens:

I think [Arthur] Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly. 

Two thoughts about this: 

Hitchens mentions with sadness many cultural productions, major and trivial, that were prominent in his childhood but are unknown by young people today. Is he aware that precisely the same lament could have been, and almost certainly was, made by people thirty or forty years older than him? And yet he does not feel deprived through his ignorance. Time passes. You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for. 

re-reading

I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it. 

But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely. 

I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though.

Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, “Library” (2007), archival ...

Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, “Library” (2007), archival pigment print, 48 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, and Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, Florida. 

Kinda scary book art

Kinda scary book art

Tom

Laura Miller says here that 

Tolkien himself admitted to a correspondent that Tom is “not an important person—to the narrative,” but then, crucially, he added that Tom does represent “something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”

Tolkien resisted explaining Tom … 

Well, not really. If she had kept quoting the letter that she was quoting — a very long April 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison — we’d have seen: 

I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron. 

Which is a very revealing, very helpful, and very “explanatory” comment. 

The Rings of Power really does sound like a terrible show. I haven’t seen a minute of it. 

unshelved

Over the summer the Honors College moved: we have new digs, and my students who lived in the Honors dorms have, after a year away, moved back into a thoroughly renovated space. But many of us have a problem: bookshelves. Or the lack thereof. 

Before the move, we faculty were informed that each office would be provided with two bookcases. When I pointed out that my then-current office had eight bookcases, all of which were full, I was told that, okay, I could have three in my new space. And, I was reminded, there really wasn’t room for any more; the new office isn’t a big one.

(I ended up taking a good many books home, where I don’t really have room for them either … but when I retire all my books will have to fit in our house, so I, and my poor wife, might as well get prepared for the forthcoming challenge.)  

I don’t mind moving into a smaller office. My former one was bigger than I needed, and the new one is better situated and is a pleasant, comfortable space — I’ll be happy there. But when I moved in I was a bit surprised to find that the bookcases — and yeah, it would’ve been hard to fit in any more than three — are thin-industrial-steel things instead of the well-made cherrywood ones I had had in my former office. 

Yesterday I spoke to one of my students who had just moved back into the Honors dorm and discovered that his room had no bookshelves at all. And one of my colleagues had talked to a project manager (the “project” being our move) and was told that in assigning two bookcases to each office they thought they might be buying too many — so many other departments in the university seem not to use books any more. It’s all screens all the time for them. 

Maybe someday soon people taking tours of the university will be brought to the Honors College faculty offices. “And look: professors who still use books. But don’t worry — there aren’t many of them.”  

(View from my office window through the scrim of my blind)

Grahame and the Inklings

Re-reading The Wind in the Willows recently for the first time in many years, I was taken with what I should have noticed long ago: How powerfully influential it was on the Inklings, especially Lewis and Tolkien. I knew of course that they loved it, but it worked its way into their imaginations in ways that I hadn’t really noticed.

For instance, consider this passage from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.

Now look at this from the chapter “Wayfarers All,” in which Rat’s imagination and will are captured by the Adventurer, a seafaring rat from whose influence Mole can only with difficulty tear him away:

Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.

“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,“ he remarked. ”You might have a try at it this evening, instead of — well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down — if it’s only just the rhymes.”

The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.

Consider also the book’s feasts, especially the one that occurs when the near-frozen Rat and Mole stumble upon the house of Mr. Badger:

When at last they were thoroughly toasted, the Badger summoned them to the table, where he had been busy laying a repast. They had felt pretty hungry before, but when they actually saw at last the supper that was spread for them, really it seemed only a question of what they should attack first where all was so attractive, and whether the other things would obligingly wait for them till they had time to give them attention. Conversation was impossible for a long time; and when it was slowly resumed, it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full. The Badger did not mind that sort of thing at all, nor did he take any notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once…. He sat in his armchair at the head of the table, and nodded gravely at intervals as the animals told their story; and he did not seem surprised or shocked at anything, and he never said, “I told you so,” or, “Just what I always said,” or remarked that they ought to have done so-and-so, or ought not to have done something else. The Mole began to feel very friendly towards him.

This is the very pattern for hobbit-feasts, including (in tone) the one in the house at Crickhollow after the four hobbit-friends have escaped the Black Riders and crossed the Brandywine, or (in substance) the one they enjoy when they have been rescued from Old Man Willow and taken to the house of Tom Bombadil. The particular joy of solid plain food and a big fire after great toil and fear is described by Grahame in a way that evidently captured Tolkien’s imagination.

78s

Vanishing Culture: On 78s | Internet Archive Blogs: 

The cultural record of the 20th century is different from all other periods of human history by the presence of audiovisual recordings. Prior to 1877, there was no way to record the sound of a nursery rhyme being read at bedtime, a musical or theatrical performance, or the world around us. During the ensuing 147 years, formats came and went as technology and preferences changed. Yet for nearly half that time, 78rpm discs were the way we learned about each other and entertained the world. It was a time when the world became a much smaller place. The invention of the automobile and the airplane, the expansion of the railroads, the telephone and radio, to the dawn of the space age, 78s were there. Through 78s, we could hear traditional music from Hawaii long before it was a state. American popular music – jazz, fox trot, big bands, even the Beatles – spread out across the globe, well ahead of Hollywood, and long before television. A thousand people might attend a concert, a theater performance, a speech, or a dramatic reading by Charles Dickens. With the 78, it became possible for those experiences to be shared and repeated, and spread far and wide, not once and done.

The most important technology of sound reproduction so far?