What I Am Trying to Teach Myself About Reading, Part II: The First Hundred Pages and Some Other Suggestions.

So you have decided to read a book. Maybe it is the “Book You Always Avoid[ed] Starting.” How do you keep it from becoming a “Book You Always Avoid Finishing?” In just the last few years the number of books I read has increased dramatically. I remember the first time--my Freshman year in college--I set out to read 50 books in a year and balked at the task. Last year I read 100. This year I am on course to surpass last year. I have been asked recently what the secret is to consistently working through book after book. So I thought I would share a few of the things that have worked for me. Maybe they will prove helpful to some other people who have struggled, as I have, with being consistent and diligent in their reading goals.

Don’t speed read. Don’t do the obvious thing and just try and buzz through a 500-page book. In the end, you won’t feel any sense of accomplishment for swallowing a book like it was a very large pill even if you were able to do it in an impressively brief duration. Quite to the contrary, I believe it is deep engagement and investment in the text that will continue to keep you interested, not merely forcing your eyes to move over the words rapidly. I am quite a slow reader. If you are, don’t see it as a handicap; it may be your greatest strength. In fact, “slow motion” reading is itself a recognized critical technique.

Start a Goodreads page. Tracking your reading will give you a sense of accomplishment. Rating works, writing reviews, and sharing with others are all good ways to make your reading about much more than what happens when you stare into a book alone. Also Goodreads has an application that allows you set reading goals and periodically check your progress. 

Read authors, not works. I probably spent 10 hours reading the first Shakespeare play I ever tackled on my own. Now I could easily read a whole play in three hours. Sometimes the hardest part of reading a new work is developing your own technique of how to read the author’s work. The next work you read by that author will not only be much, much easier, it will also allow you to begin to understand an author’s entire body of work. Soon you will think about an author in terms of a nexus of different and complementary writings. Your reading will go faster and will be much more rewarding.

Make your book the most interesting thing in the room. Leave the house. Go to the library. Take nothing but your book, and maybe a pencil for underlining and making marginal notes to yourself. When it is set in front of a computer tapped into the internet a books looks like an musty clump of old papers. However, thing about how you feel when you are sitting in a waiting room with nothing to read. Suddenly even the back of a cereal box or your DVD player’s instruction manual would be a welcome diversion. Your task before you read is to recreate that waiting room and place yourself in it with a book in your hands. 

My best recommendation: read the first 100 pages of your book all in one sitting. When we watch a television show we experience an entire narrative with a beginning, middle, and end all in a half hour, or maybe even 20 minutes if you subtract time for commercials. It is not surprising that it is hard for us to sustain interest in a story that will take 10 hours or more to completely unfurl. The good news, however, is that it is worth it. The first time you read a particularly lengthy classic all the way through you might feel more like leaping from a cliff than reading another page of florid descriptions of one. Take heart! You will be glad the book is so long the next time you pick it up to read it, when it has become a good old friend and not bar after bar of ornate prose separating you from an “A” in English 218. 

TO THE 21ST CENTURY CHURCH: 10 Words from Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, and, according to some, a poet (I will elaborate on this under the heading “poetry” later on). This and my next several blog posts will be an attempt to give a tiny peek at some some of Kierkegaard’s most profound ideas, ideas which I believe suggest creative solutions for many of the pitfalls of contemporary American Christianity.

WORD #1:

Maieutic [mä-YOO-tik] : of or denoting the Socratic mode of inquiry, which aims to bring a person’s latent ideas into clear consciousness. 

The word maieutic comes from the greek word for “midwife.” This is how Kierkegaard understood his work as an author; as one who comes alongside and helps during the painful and strenuous work of birth. The maieutic mode of teaching does not concern itself with introducing new information, in seeing how many facts it can cram into the learner’s head, rather it seeks to draw out what the learner already knows, to help the learner to live out of their knowledge with passion and authenticity.

Thus, the maieutic teacher does not even teach in the sense we normally experience teaching at school (or even at church, which, in my opinion is a big problem). You do not go to learn from the maieutic teacher because he or she is doing groundbreaking research on Flashy New Subject X, nor do you go to discover a few esoteric truths only available to a handful of initiates. Instead you go to be changed or remade, to ignite a concern for life, to make things matter that had ceased to matter for you. For this reason Kierkegaard claimed that he never taught anything that a 16-year-old girl did not already know, he simply tried to make this knowledge valuable again.

A good example of this kind of communication applied to faith (though good examples abound in Kierkegaard’s writing) is Kierkegaard’s cherished work, Fear and Trembling. Fear and Trembling is a meditation on the story of Abraham from the book of Genesis. Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio (“John of Silence”), aims to juxtapose the raw, gutsy faith of Abraham against the easy, speculative pseudo-faith of his era. In the end, Silentio has succeeded if the reader is shocked and perhaps even horrified by Abraham’s faith and the price he was called to pay in following it: he had to be ready to kill his own son. Overall, Johannes de Silentio may not present clear, airtight theology, but he certainly puts some muscle back into one notoriously weak and overused word (in Kierkegaard’s time just as in ours): faith.

In an era where information is so readily available--not to mention an economy that is increasingly information based--there is a lot of talk about communication and not enough talk about the vocation of teaching. We assume that the ability to transfer ever-larger files at ever-increasing speeds will somehow make all of our lives better--and perhaps there is a sense in which it can, but not without teachers that come alongside students and help them live out of the depths that they already have within them.

To paraphrase something Kierkegaard writes in The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: it is healthier to know a few things that matter to you and to live them out with all of your passion than to know everything there is to know and let it remain a set of cold and meaningless facts.

The remarkable thing about the maieutic teacher is that the more the student learns, the more the teacher fades into the background, because after all, the teacher was only there to help the student stand on his/her own. Kierkegaard considers this a gift that can only come through love. More on this to follow.

A Musical Moment Made Possible by Kierkegaard

A major portion of part I of Either/Or (Kierkegaard's first major work) is devoted to a painstaking analysis of a few aspects of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard's statements are so stunning, I couldn't help but share one here. Here is a link to the Overture [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemAKvtXL8w], which is what Kierkegaard is talking about at this point. I suggest listening to it while you read.

"This overture is no mingling together of themes; it is not a labyrinthian interlacing of associations of ideas; it is concise, defined, strongly structured, and, above all, impregnated with the essence of the whole opera. It is powerful like a god's idea, turbulent like a world's life, harrowing in its earnestness, palpitating in its desire, crushing in its terrible wrath, animating in its full-blooded joy; it is hollow-toned in judgment, shrill in its lust; it is ponderous, ceremonious in its awe-inspiring dignity; it is stirring, flaring, dancing in delight. And this it has not attained by sucking the blood of the opera; on the contrary, it is rather a prophecy in its relation to the opera. In the overture, the music unfurls its total range; with a few powerful wing beats it soars above itself, as it were, floats above the place where it will descend. It is a struggle, but a struggle to a higher atmosphere. To anyone hearing the overture after he has become more familiar with the opera, it may seem as if he had penetrated the hidden workshop where the forces he has learned to identify in the opera move with a primitive power, where they wrestle with one another with all their might. The contest, however, is too uneven; before the battle one force is already the victor. It flees and escapes, but this flight is precisely its passion, its burning restlessness in its brief joy of life, the pounding pulse in its passionate ardor. It thereby sets the other force in motion and carries it along with itself. This, which at first seemed so unshakably firm that it was practically immovable, must now be off and soon the movement is so swift that it seems like an actual conflict" (p. 126-127).

What I am Trying to Teach Myself About Reading, Part I

An illustration of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

(the story is about an infinite library)

Everybody has one: it sits on your shelf or in your amazon.com shopping cart, it stares you down, it is the the Book You Always Avoid Starting. Perhaps you pick it up each time you visit a bookstore and roll it over in your hands. You calibrate its thickness with your fingers, and try to reassure yourself by saying, “Well, a lot of this is probably the index...”.

Most of the time we don’t read the Book We Always Avoid Starting until it becomes so overwhelmingly embarrassing that we haven’t read it that we are forced to ingest it like an antibiotic. Otherwise, maybe we will read it when it becomes especially obvious that we can impress a few important people by having read it. This often happens when we have been pretending we had read it and are worried our disguise is wearing thin.

Here are two reasons why I will not be reading the Book I Always Avoid Starting this summer:

1. Good readers aren’t bluebook skimmers, they are project-focused. I have two major projects this summer: reading all of Kierkegaard, and reading all of Shakespeare. Confession: the main Book I Always Avoid Starting is Moby Dick. (Stop snickering, please; yes, I am an English major who has never read Moby Dick.) Is it cooler or more “important” to read Kierkegaard’s unpublished drafts for newspaper articles than  it is to read Moby Dick? No, definitely not. You get more canonicity points for Moby Dick, that is for sure, but ultimately I am going for depth and not breadth. I have found a few writers who are really speaking to me, who are changing who I am. My worry in attempting merely to “have read” some sort of Imagined Totality of Important Works (what I am equating here with an anthology) is that it would be like plastering over walls that were never built well in the first place.
2. A related reason: There is always another Book You Always Avoid Starting. After Moby Dick there would be Gulliver’s Travels, then Bleak House, then Anna Karenina, then Vanity Fair, then...and the list goes on. If I paid careful attention to lists and rating and that kind of thing, maybe by the time I die I could read something like the 1,000 Most Important Books according to most people. But then I would just be attempting to satisfy someone else’s list which was probably only created to impress someone else. On some level, I find the admission unavoidable that I can no more say that my favorite book is “the best book” than I can say that my foot is the best foot. It is what it is to me because it is a part of me, and I can’t remove it from that context just as I cannot remove my foot and take it around to compare with others’ feet.

In our culture and academic climate there is something scandalously subversive about clinging to one author or book to the exclusion of other perfectly good ones, but I believe that this is precisely what we must do. In an information-saturated world, we need to practice attention and love rather than intellectual consumership. We each have a finite capacity to love well. I am reminded of a question Jacques Derrida poses in The Gift of Death: how could I ever justify feeding only my cat while all other hungry cats are left to starve? I imagine all the Books I Always Avoid Starting as hungry cats pawing at my windows, meowing desperately at my front door. I could--maybe--manage to provide the paltriest possible level of nutrition for all of these cats, but none would flourish.

In part, I want to identify this realization as one that informs what we are doing on this blog: conversing. If we knew everything we wouldn’t realize that we need friends. Also, it is the experience of having friends that reminds us what we don’t (and will never) know. It reminds us that the idea of a totality of knowledge is bogus. We--and our minds--aren’t containers to fill, but dynamic actors that learn by riffing and recontextualization, as well as some good-natured sparring now and then. So hopefully we interact toward the utilization of the depths and particularities of one another’s knowledge, not in some feeble attempt to fill in the supposed “gaps” in what we know. Hopefully we will remind ourselves that our differently-depthed-ness (I just made that word up) is what makes learning powerful.


By the way, if you want to confess the Book You Always Avoid Starting please feel free to do so below. This is a safe environment.

Faculty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education

Just a brief post for an article on the collapsing of the academic profession in the United States. An admirable piece, and an insightful and fresh voice on the tenure question. It's worth the fifteen minutes to read the piece.
J.W.

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education

Four Soldiers

[This is the second story in my ongoing translation project of Wolfgang Borchert's On this Tuesday: Nineteen Stories.]

Four soldiers. And they were made of wood and hunger and earth. Of snowstorm and homesickness and whiskers. Four soldiers. And over them shells roared and bit into the snow with black poison yelps. The wood of their four lost faces stood stiffly chiseled in the flickering oil light. Only when the iron above them cried and shattered with frightful barking, one of the wooden heads laughed. And the others grinned gray afterwards. And the oil light bent despondently.
Four soldiers.
Then two blue-red streaks contorted themselves amid the whiskers: Good Lord. Here it won’t need to be plowed in the spring. And not fertilized either, hissed the earth.
One of them confidently rolled a cigarette: Hopefully this isn’t a turnip field. I couldn’t stand turnips in death. But for instance, how do you like radishes? Radishes for all eternity?
The blue-red lips contorted: If only there weren’t earthworms. That will be mighty hard to get used to.
The one in the corner said: But you won’t notice that anymore.
Who said that? asked the cigarette roller, why, who said that?
Then they were quiet. And above them screamed an angry death through the night. It tore black blue at the snow. Then they grinned again. And they looked at the beams above them. But the beams promised nothing.
Then one of them coughed out of his corner: Well, we will see. On that you can all count. And the “count” came so hoarse that the oil light flickered.
Four soldiers. But one who said nothing. He slid his thumbs up and down his rifle. Up and down. Up and down. And he pressed himself against his rifle. But he hated nothing so much as he hated this rifle. Only when it roared above them, then he held himself firmly to it. The oil light bent despondently in his eyes. Then the cigarette roller nudged him. The small one with the hated rifle nervously rubbed the stubble around his mouth. His face was made of hunger and homesickness.
Then the cigarette roller said: You, hand that oil lamp here. Sure, said the small one, and he put his rifle between his knees. And then he took his hand out of his coat and took the oil light and handed it toward him. But then the light fell from his hand. And went out. And went out.
Four soldiers. Their breath was too large and too lonely in the darkness. Then the small one laughed out loud and smacked his hand against his knee:
Boy do I have a shudder! Did you see that? The lamp fell right out of my hand. Such a shudder.
The small one laughed loudly. But in the dark he pressed himself tightly against the rifle that he hated so much.
And the one in the corner thought: No one is amongst us, no one, who does not shake.
The cigarette roller however said: Yes, one shakes all day long. It comes from the cold. This miserable cold.
Then the iron roared above them and shredded the night and the snow.
They are blowing up all the radishes, grinned the one with the blue-red lips.
And they held themselves firmly to their hated rifles. And laughed. Laughed at the dark dark valley.

Scattering Musings on Twentieth Century and Contemporary Catholicism

[I’ve been thinking a fair amount about Catholicism of late, reading a fair number of articles on the subject, but especially this past week since I’ve read both a Chesterton book, and a book long interview with Joseph Ratzinger, taken about ten years before he became Pope. These musings, ramblings more like, are mostly inspired by those two books. I apologize for the stream of consciousness quality; it wasn’t intentional, but necessary, as I’d rather post something to prompt discussion now, rather than wait, and probably never get around to editing these thoughts. All of the references and citations to the two Catholics belong to the two books cited at the end. I apologize, too, for the length of my senseless wanderings. I’d be shocked it some of this makes any sense whatsoever. Welcome to the life of my first drafts.]

The Catholic world, surprisingly, seems to be experiencing some sort of rejuvenation of late. Of course I likely imagine trends, rather than quantify them. Perhaps, though, I merely have paid more attention to the news of late, but it seems Catholicism, and articles on exclusively Catholic themes seem to be surfacing more often in the news. I hear, too, and from a large variety of sources that Orthodox, and even, I think, Catholic Churches, are growing as a result of current splintering in Protestant denominations as churches fight over such issues as the ordination of homosexuals. Increasingly liberal liberals distance themselves from continuingly conservative traditionalists. There’s little room for dialogue, it seems, in many Christian traditions, and people like myself (and it seems Brett) are increasingly attracted to the seeming, or at least claimed, universality of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is, well, catholic; Catholics across the world read the same missals, and celebrate the same rites. There is an incredible draw to this normality, or traditionalism, or whatever what opines to label it. That everyone partakes in the same tradition avoids the seeming pandemic of individualism I see in American Evangelicalism (and I know, again, that Brett and I have had numerous conversations over this subject). That Catholicism simply isn’t so focused on the self, on one’s own personal choice in worship, in devotionals, in marketing faith to our own particular Chicken Soup life-style seems somewhat refreshing. A little compromise, even in faith, cannot always be the worst of solutions.

The (formally) Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger emphasized this Catholic emphasis on liturgy, and on universality, on the transnational and intercommunity aspect of faith and Christianity. “We need…a new liturgical education, especially of priests. It must once again become clear that liturgical scholarship doesn’t exist in order to produce constantly new models, though that may be all right for the auto industry. It exists in order to introduce us into feast and celebration, to make man capable of the mystery. Here we ought to learn not just from the Eastern Church but from all the religions of the world, which all know that liturgy is something other than the invention of texts and rites, that it lives precisely from what is beyond manipulation. Young people have a very strong sense of this” (177). His mention of mystery reminds me, naturally, of that staggering Catholic genius of the early twentieth century, that G. K. Chesterton, of course, whom I have been reading again this week. The genius of Chesterton is a genius which upsets social norms and conventions; precisely by taking the mundane, and rendering it the most wild and unconventional of activities, and by magically reducing anarchy into an undesirable and boring normality, Chesterton turns logic on its head, and laughs in the process. For Chesterton, common sense is gone strangely awry, and the illogical has become strangely logical. Chesterton, like the Catholic Church, does not take tradition lightly, and in embracing the traditional, and the universal claims of the Church, one begins to attempt something truly radical. “The upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm because they are afraid to look back” (What’s Wrong with the World). Or as Ratzinger echoes, “The Catholic Church also contributes something important to humanity in that she keeps these worlds together, different as they are, within a basic consensus and thereby also creates bridges from world to world” (130). The Catholic Church’s goal seems to be to unite, to bridge gaps, rather than permit fracturing. And I might add, on a pessimistic note, that Protestantism seems to be entirely based on nit-picking and fracturing; entirely new churches are formed for the slightest divergence of theological opinion; that’s a luxury and a liberty (and a vice) Catholicism cannot indulge.

The universal ideals of the Catholic Church do exist in confusion, and tension, Ratzinger does admit. “Uniformity and division exist in mutual dependence. Greater and greater outrage with one another develops paradoxically with more and more uniformity” (229). But as I saw it reading through the long interview Peter Seewald conducted with the Cardinal, the genius of his Catholicism was and is an ability to draw limits on one’s own personal ideas, and that of the church. Seewald constantly emphasized the Cardinal’s close relationship with the Pope, and frequently asked the German priest of conflicts between the two priests. Ratzinger made no secret that the two disagreed, but that his opinions were just that—opinions, and that he could not hope or dare to enact only his own ideas in the face of the Pope’s and of the Church’s. Part of faith and of Catholicism is simply submitting oneself and one’s own ideas to another. Faith, says Ratzinger, is to join a community larger than oneself, and thus, “To believe means that we become like angels, they say. We can fly, because we no longer weigh so heavily in our own estimation” (28), a statement, of course, reminiscent of Chesterton’s celebrated “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” Thus Ratzinger does conclude that “If there is no willingness to subordinate oneself to a whole that one has recognized and to let oneself be taken into its service, then there can’t be any common freedom. Man’s freedom is always a shared freedom. It has to be borne together, and it therefore demands service” (79-80).

The genius of twentieth century Catholicism—and we see it in the Catholic novelists of the midcentury, too, François Mauriac, to an extent, and Georges Bernanos—is driving spirit to take the struggles, the trials, and confusion of life, and accept this complexity, attempt to frame life around the inexplicable sorrows and pains; something it seems Benedict is willing to do. It’s a willingness to take one’s concerns, one’s objections, and simply deal with them, or to recognize the greater issues of the Church. One’s own personal issues cannot always be the most important. The current Pope seems to me to be doing a convincing job of addressing the common Catholic citizen, at least in the very little I’ve followed of his papacy. Benedict XVI seems to be doing a substantial amount of convincing and important work from his papal see, though much of his work has been somewhat overshadowed by the sexual abuse scandals (but a recent, and criticized, study, seems to downplay the scandals http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/18/136429556/study-finds-homosexuality-celibacy-did-not-cause-catholic-sex-abuse-crisis). Of course, though, somewhat un-observed, Benedict has managed to accept—somewhat tacitly—the theory of macroevolution; and two years ago he welcomed defecting Anglicans into the Catholic fold. He’s brought John Paul II largely and significantly on his way into beatification. And apparently, just recently, he’s brought the Catholic Mass into a slightly new variation; a new translation of the Latin version of the mass will be introduced into parishes this Fall, one supposedly more accurate to the nuances of the original texts. Benedict, in many of these moves, seems to be attempting to bridge the gap between contemporary factions of the Catholic Church; his various actions can appeal equally often, if not always at the same time, to both liberal and conservative parties. He appears to want to engage theological issues of great importance at the same time as making small and important changes which the daily parishioners understand, see, and enjoy. This emphasizing of universality of the Catholic Church seems to be his stated goal and aim, even from long before his papacy.

And to me, this call, this charge to embrace a reality, a community larger than one’s own personal views on infant baptism or what-have-you is really the most compelling part of faith and of Catholicism. Really, Christianity isn’t so much about what the individuals think but about losing oneself so one can find a truer self, a self in a communion. And perhaps this is why so many people (rightly) call for the next Pope to be a non-European. The Church, particularly the Catholic Church is a global one; it crosses ethnic and continental borders. For the time being, though, under the leadership of Ratzinger, Catholics seems to be in something of a stable but interesting place. The Catholic Church will greatly change and evolve during his papacy, but his commitment to tradition and to the universal appeal of the Church should help it weather some difficult storms. I am reminded, again, that I really am after all very much of a Pope-ite.

J.W.

For lack of a better place, or lack of volition to find that better place which I know is sitting several paragraphs up, I should close with one final citation from Chesterton: “There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.”

-“Catholics Around the World Celebrate John Paul II” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=135884651; this one’s got some nice photographs)

-“Le nouveau pouvoir des cathos” (http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/religion/le-nouveau-pouvoir-des-cathos_984322.html)

-“Pope John Paul II beatified before massive crowd” (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/01/us-pope-johnpaul-idUSTRE73Q2HT20110501)

-“Study finds Homosexuality, Celibacy Did not Cause Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis” (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/18/136429556/study-finds-homosexuality-celibacy-did-not-cause-catholic-sex-abuse-crisis)

-Salt of the Earth, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in conversation with Peter Seewald

-What’s Wrong with the World, G. K. Chesterton

The Bowling Alley

[This is the first story of On this Tuesday. It opens Part One: In the Snow, in the Clean Snow.]

We are the bowlers.
And we ourselves are the bowling balls.
But we are also the pins,
which topple.
The bowling alley, upon which they thunder,
is our heart.

The Bowling Alley

Two men had made a hole in the earth. It was quite roomy and almost cozy. Like a grave. You endured it.
In front of them they had a gun. Someone had invented it so that you could shoot it at people. Mostly you did not know the people at all. You did not understand their language. And they had done nothing to you. But you had to shoot at them with the gun. Someone had ordered it. And so you could really kill lots of them, someone had invented the gun so that it shot more than sixty times per minute. That’s what had been paid for.
Somewhat farther off from the two men was another hole. Out of it peeked out a head that belonged to a person. It had a nose that could smell perfume. Eyes that could see a town or a flower. It had a mouth, with which he could eat bread and say Inge or Mother. This head saw the two men, to whom someone had given the gun.
Shoot, said the one.
He shot.
So the head was broken. It could no longer smell perfume, no longer see any town and no longer say Inge. Never more.
The two men were in the hole many months. They broke many heads. And those always belonged to people whom they did not know at all. Who had done nothing to them and whom they could not understand. But someone had invented the gun that shot more than sixty times per minute. And someone had ordered it.
Gradually the two men had broken so many heads that you could have made a big mountain out of them. And when the two men slept, the heads began to roll. Like at a bowling alley. With quiet thunder. That woke the two men up.
But someone still ordered it, whispered the one.
But we have done it, cried the other.
But it was frightful, groaned the one.
But sometimes it was also fun, laughed the other.
No, cried the whisperer.
Yes, whispered the other, sometimes it was fun. That’s really it. Real fun.
For hours they sat there in the night. They did not sleep. Then the one said:
But God made us this way.
But God has an excuse, said the other, he doesn’t exist.
He doesn’t exist? Asked the first.
That is his only excuse, answered the second.
But we, we exist, whispered the first.
Yes, we exist, whispered the other.
The two men, whom someone had ordered to break a lot of heads, did not sleep at night. For the heads made quiet thunder.
Then the one said: And now here we sit.
Yes, said the other, now here we sit.
Then someone called: Make ready. It’s getting started again.
The two men stood up and took a hold of the gun.
And always, if they saw a man, they shot at him.
And always it was a man whom they did not know at all. And who had done nothing to them. But they shot at him. For that purpose someone had invented the gun. He had been paid for that.
And someone—someone had ordered it.

Translation Project: Borchert

At some point last semester Jared introduced me to Wolfgang Borchert (1921-1947). At the end of the Second World War and in the immediate postwar period, Borchert rapidly produced an impressive body of work before dying of sickness contracted while serving on the Eastern Front. His play, Draussen vor der Tür (Outside in Front of the Door), was first performed on stage the day after he died.

I started reading Borchert's collection of short stories, An diesem Dienstag (On this Tuesday), a month or so ago, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to translate some of them and post them on this blog. The stories deal with soldiers' lives on the Eastern Front and with their challenges reintegrating into postwar society. They extremely short, usually only a few pages long, and written in a rhythmic, minimalist style that sometimes seems more like poetry than prose.

There are nineteen short stories in On this Tuesday. I will post the stories one at a time, as I translate them. Enjoy!

Inaugural Links Post

In place of a more ambitious initial post at this blog, I would like to pass along a selection of reading that I have found interesting in the past few weeks.

1. The Un-Shock Doctrine.
Zizek explains the "radical negativity" of the "eternal Idea of communism". Chock-full of memorable Zizekisms.

2. Divine Drudgery.
Review of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.

3. Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library.
Revelations from David Foster Wallace's private papers.

4. A History of Christian Rock.
What was Christian rock? Or: My childhood, explained.

5. Off the Shelf: Six Types of Reading.
Ben Meyers, theology blogger extraordinaire, discusses how he reads.

6. Politics and the English Language.
A classic essay on the dangers of lazy and euphemistic writing.

Salt of the Earth

"The French Revolution saw the birth of the ideology according to which Christianity, because it believes in the end of the world, in judgment, and the like, is by nature pessimistic, whereas modernity, which has discovered progress as the law of history, is by nature optimistic. We now see that these comparisons are slowly dissolving. We see the self-confidence of modernity increasingly crumble. For it is becoming clearer and clearer that progress also involves progress in the powers of destruction, that ethically man is not equal to his own reason, and that his capability can become capability to destroy. Christianity in fact does not have such a notion that history necessarily always progresses, that, in other words, essentially things are always getting better for mankind.

"When we read the Book of Revelation, we see that humanity actually moves in circles. Over and over there are horrors that then dissipate, only be followed by new ones. Nor is there any prophecy of an inner-historical, man-made state of salvation. The idea that human affairs necessarily get better and better has no support in the Christian outlook. What does, on the other hand, belong to the Christian faith is the certainty that God never abandons man and that man therefore can never become a pure failure, even though today many believe it would be better if man had never appeared on the scene."

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in conversation with Peter Seewald, in Salt of the Earth.

Can you guess who wrote this love letter?

Dearest Heart:

I am writing to you again because I am alone and because I find it embarrassing always to hold conversations with you in my head, without your knowing anything about them or hearing them or being able to answer me. Bad as your portrait is, it serves me very well and I can now understand how even the "Black Madonnas," the most vulgar portraits of the mother of God, find the most devoted admirers, and even more admirers than the good portraits. In any case, no such Black Madonna has been kissed more often, has been eyed and adored more often, than your photograph which is admittedly not black, but which is sour, and does not, by any means, reflect your dear, sweet, kissable, 'dolce' face. But I myself improve on the sun which is painted falsely, and I find that my eyes, so ruined by lamplight and tobacco, can still paint your face, not only in dreams, but even when I am awake. I have you before me in the flesh, I carry you on my hands and I kiss you from head to toe, and I fall on my knees before you and I groan, "Madam, I love you." And I really love you, more than the Moor of Venice ever loved...

There are indeed many women in the world and some of them are beautiful. But where shall I again find a face of which every lineament, every wrinkle even, reminds me of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life? Even my never ending pains, my irreplaceable losses I read in your sweet face, and I kiss until I have forgotten my pain when I kiss your sweet face…

Your _____