WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
“[I]n nature there is a far better balance of work and rest than I normally follow in my day. There are seasons of great fruitfulness, and seasons when all lies fallow. I sense that much the same might be true in the rhythms of my social and spiritual life. Several years ago I noticed that evern in my service to others, I normally started with what I thought ought to be done, and later found myself exhausted with very little to show for it. So instead I began to ask this question first: What is already beginning to bloom that needs nurture in order to continue its growth? Then I would seek to cooperate with what I noticed was already underway. Gradually I realized that I was finally aksing: Where is the Holy Spirit already at work? And cooperating there with God.”
–Norvene Vest, from Preferring Christ: A Devotional Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict
“Because there is not just one silk, there is not just one story of silk. Not one road, not one people who found it, nor one nation that made it. Not one country can lay claim to its source. In silk is science and history, mythologies and futures. Through accounts of scientists who have studied silk, and the animals from which it has been drawn, what follow are stories from its many metamorphoses: caterpillar to moth; cocoon to commodity; simple protein chains to threads with very extraordinary capabilities.”
–Arathi Prasad, from Silk: A World History
“Were a naturalist to announce to the world the discovery of an animal…which for the first five years of its life existed in the form of a serpent; which then penetrating into the earth, and weaving a shroud of pure silk of the finest texture, contracted itself within this covering into a body without external mouth or limbs, and resembling more than anything else an Egyptian mummy; and which, lastly, after remaining in this state without food and without motion for three years longer, should at the end of that period burst its silken cerements, struggle through its earthy covering, and start into day a winged bird—what would you think would be the sensation excited by this strange piece of intelligence?”
–William Kirby and William Spence, An Introduction to Entomology, 1828 (quoted in Silk: A World History)
I like this Free Press piece from Lionel Shriver, decrying the scolding, hectoring literary mobs (and to my mind, by extension all scolding mobs) who purport to bully the rest of us into one same-thinking, mindless bloc. Everything in me rises up against this kind of surge.
If we see injustice in the world, the writer’s job is to write.
I’m also reading a biography of the late British writer Dennis Potter, semi-forgotten today, best known in his own day for the BBC serial drams “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Singing Detective.” Potter suffered from psoriatic arthorpathy, an affliction one would not wish on one’s worst enemy. He was apparently not an easy man to get close to. He had many faults. He also had an incandescent gift which he fought till his last breath to honor.
Potter was not a churchgoer but he was deeply formed by the hymns (his father was a collier) and Bible stories from his childhood. Molested by an uncle when he was 10, he was conflicted all his life about sex, God, good and evil.
This YouTube, an interview with well-known broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, was taped three months before Potter’s death. In it, he chain-smokes, drinks, brandishes his clenched, paw-like hands, and offers a stirring example of the artistic vocation and the suffering human spirit.
“At the end he was all but exhausted,” Bragg later noted. “Frankly, all in the studio felt drained, and yet there was a feeling of relief and even exhilaration that the job had been done properly by him. After he had left, one of the cameramen came up to me and said,'”That was a privilege.'”
The psoriasis was so severe that at times Potter could not open his eyes, sit up, or move his hands. The skin over every inch of his body was cracked and bleeding. He strapped a pen to his hand and continued writing anyway.
With all that, and for the seeming darkness of his stories, at the National Film Theater in October, 1980, he averred that he was propagating an essentially Christian message:
“I believe absolutely and without qualification in a loving creation, in a loving God…I think of myself as a religious writer. I know people don’t pick that up, they don’t see it, they don’t understand the two poles, they don’t understand either the disgust for a soiled, brutalized and diminished world, or the hope in it that we have a duty and an obligation to make that world–to make the Kingdom, if you like–to make that world more just, more beautiful, more perfect, and fill it with more mercy and more light than we bother to do.”
