Taking Notes On The Good Book

For Mother’s Day, Byliner has made available to Dish readers Walter Kirn’s My Mother’s Bible, his commentary on the first two books of the Bible, Genesis and Exodus, which was prompted by the discovery of his mother’s annotated King James Bible after her death. Here Kirn describes his surprise at what he found:

Aside from a brief experiment with Mormonism thrust upon her by my father in his attempt to finesse a fierce depression that afflicted him in the 1970s, my mother wasn’t religious as far as I knew. She was, however, immoderately literate. Between her annual rereadings of her favorite masterworks by Gibbon, Dickens, Tolstoy, Goethe, and Shakespeare, she managed over the years to teach herself at least three modern languages and one ancient one. She also kept abreast of the bestseller lists and the more talked-about novels and biographies in the leading book reviews. The Bible, though? I’d never seen her touch it. It must have been a pastime pursued in private, perhaps in her bedroom after her evening gulp of codeine-laced cough syrup, her pet relaxant. (Perhaps this explained her high tolerance for morphine.) I wished I knew where in her house I’d found the volume. A shelf? Her nightstand? Hidden or in the open?

One night about two months after she died, as I entered that manic stage of grief when even rationalists hire mediums, I opened my mother’s Bible to a blank page on which were copied out thirty or forty passages, most of them from the Old Testament. I knew a few of them verbatim and many others in paraphrase, but some, such as this one, were new to me: “For a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter” (Eccl 10:20). Why had my mother found this image remarkable? Seeking an answer, perhaps even a sign, I turned at random to a verse in Genesis that she’d underlined and starred. It spoke of two more birds, a raven and a dove, which Noah released from the ark to find dry land. I remembered the dove—it flew back with an olive leaf—but I’d forgotten about the raven “which went forth to and fro” and never returned. How had the raven managed to stay aloft so long, with water still covering even the mountaintops?

For the next day, you can read the rest here. Purchase it as a Kindle Single here. Previous Dish on My Mother’s Bible here and here.