Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #51

I realize it's been a while since I've posted, what can I say. You've heard all the excuses before anyway. In fact, almost all of them are probably neatly catalogued across the annals of this site!

This blog is never far from my mind, however; and even though it may take me a while to get back to it, I always have new posts planned, and definitely intend to continue the virtual conversation here for as long as I can. Soon I hope to throw up here a second entry into my fledgling UNSHELVED series (see April 2007 archives for the inugural entry on Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird).

For now, another POTW entry, and this one from an unlikely source. Peter Kreeft is certainly one of my favorite authors and Catholic thinkers, but he is not a poet -- at least, is not known as one. Yet I recently came across a very rare poem by the Boston College philosopher, which I thought was both fun and profound. In fact, it reminded me very much of some of the bits of poetry that are found sprinkled liberally throughout the Lord of the Rings book -- not just in style, but also in substance, in a way. Like those poems, which are usually in fact song lyrics, this one has a steady rhythm and cadence to it. And yet, also like those fragments in J. R. R. Tolkien's work, it also contains deep and lasting truths. Kreeft himself I am sure would be honored by the comparion to Tolkien, since he has both written and lectured extensively on the treasure of his language and his imagination.

Come to think of it, another well-known hero of Kreeft's (and, as it happens, of mine), the incomparable C. S. Lewis, was also an academic who dabbled in poetry more or less for fun, but came up with some profound lines from time to time in the process.

At any rate... here is one to both enjoy and, perhaps, meditate upon. When you do, you will discover that like a verbal Trojan Horse, this light verse is sneaking some pretty heady insights into your soul!

*******

The Philosopher's Stone

The care with which he cut the jewel
Was sharper than his cutting tool.
The love with which he shaped the stone
Outweighed, outlasted and outshone
All diamonds and rubies; but
Until a greater Jeweler cut
The diamond mind of darkened man,
None but the mystic ever can
Measure care's weight with fallen mind
Here on this planet of the blind
Unless that greater Jeweler turn
The facets of Mind's jewel to burn
With his reflected fire alone
And thus produce a wisdom stone.

A Prose Excerpt from Halldor Laxness

This was my favorite chapter from Laxness' semi-autobiographical novel, The Fish Can Sing. It contains all of the hallmarks that makes Laxness such a unique and enchanting writer -- his love of nature, his respect for the old traditions and values of a culture, his preference for life experience over classroom learning, and most of all, his Icelandic heart. He was truly THE great literary ambassador for his tiny but incredibly imaginative country.

To set up this passage, the narrator was abandoned by his mother at the modest village home of his grandparents, a place called Brekkukot. He has been raised by his grandmother and grandfather, and this chapter describes his idyllic life with them and the moment in time when he realized he could not stay there and enjoy their company forever. With beautiful prose (even in translation), a keen eye and a penetrating human wisdom, Laxness captures the wide-eyed magic of youth, and the pain that comes when one realizes that one can't remain a child forever.

*******

Chapter 19:
Morning of Eternity: and End

Late in the winter, my grandfather Bjorn started calling me at six o'clock every morning so that I could help him to see the lumpfish-nets in Skerjafjordur. These mornings have always remained fresh in my memory.

What happened? Nothing really happened, except that the sun was getting ready to rise. The stars are seldom as bright as they are in the morning, either because one's eyesight is clearest just after waking, or because the Virgin Mary has been busy polishing them all night. Sometimes there was also a moon. A tiny light had been lit in a cottage on Alftanes; probably someone was going out fishing. Often there was frost and frozen snow, and the ice creaked in the night. Somewhere out in the infinite distance lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like the babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb.

My grandfather had a large boat, and a small one. The small boat was used for lumpfishing; it was beached at the high-water mark in front of a shed in which we kept our gear. The boat was easy to launch; it went practically of its own accord if the rollers were placed correctly. And so we rowed out among the rocks and skerries to where the nets lay. Sometimes the gulls followed us in the moonlight. Lumpfish-nets are not normally hauled in; you row alongside them and gaff the fish, or else just grab them by hand, wearing mittens. I kept one oar out and held the boat in position while grandfather used the gaff.

My grandfather was always in a good humor and always reasonably cheerful, but never exactly jolly. He could be mischievous in an innocent sort of way, and enjoyed trying to out-row me. He also laughed if some of his snuff were blown into my eyes when he was taking a pinch, probably because he did not think it was manly to show if one's eyes watered. I never knew what he was thinking about, because he talked mostly in stylized phrases, both about the weather and about the fish. But I somehow felt that in this man's presence, nothing untoward could happen. I often thought to myself how good the Savior had been to send me to this man for protection and help, and I made up my mind to stay with him for as long for as long as he lived and always to catch lumpfish with him at the end of the winter. And I hoped to God that he would not go from me before I myself was well on the way to being as old as he; and then I would find myself a little boy somewhere and have him row out with me to the nets early in the morning when the stars were still bright at the end of the winter. In the moonlight, the gulls seemed to have golden breasts. If you looked down over the gunwale you could see the lumpfish gliding among the seaweed, feeding; occasionally they would even turn their pink-shaded bellies upwards in the water.

Sometimes we would fill both the hand-cart and the wheelbarrow with this fat fish. And just when the stars were really beginning to pale, we would cart our catch homeward straight across the Sands. Grandmother would give us coffee, and then we would go down town to sell the catch just as people were getting up. Grandfather would stop with his hand-cart somewhere in the square, and people would come along with money to buy lumpfish while others just came to greet him and discuss the weather. I was often sent with a string of lumpfish to bring to the regular customers; usually the maid came to the door with the money and took the fish, but sometimes the lady of the house herself would be there, or else, for some incomprehensible reason, the daughter of the house...

These mornings when we were seeing to the lumpfish in Skerjafjordur (and they were really all one and the same morning) -- suddenly they were over. Their stars faded: your Chinese idyll ended.

My grandfather had given me a sign to ship the oars. The boat came to a rest with its bows on a shelf of rock, and the red clusters of seaweed eddied around the prow in the calm sea as the sun rose. It was almost spring. Grandfather took a careful pinch from his snuff-horn, and then said,

"Your grandmother has been talking to me."

I kept silent, and waited.

"She says that according to Helgesen, the teacher, you can learn. We want you to have an education."

"Why?" I asked.

"Her people in the past were all educated men," he said.

"Then what will I be made to do?" I said. "Will I not be allowed to come out fishing with you again?"

"We were thinking of sending you to school, my boy, and making you learn what they call Latin. The idea is that you start in the autumn, if you are accepted. I went to see Pastor Johann; we have got a university student from Copenhagen to prepare you. There was some talk of you starting tomorrow."

I asked, "Are you then not going to wake me tomorrow morning to go fishing?"

He replied, "Your grandmother wishes you well, my boy. And so do I, even though I am ignorant."

And with these words he put out his oar and we pushed off from the rock and rowed ashore.

In Stephan G. Stephansson's biography it says that when the poet was a foster-child up north in Skagafjordur he saw some young men riding over the mountains on their way to school in the south one autumn. He was so deeply distressed by his own misery at not being able to go to school himself and become an educated man that he threw himself down on the heather out there on the moor and wept for a whole day. I have always found it difficult to understand that story. The thought of becoming a Latin scholar had never once occurred to me. I had never been impressed by seeing schoolboys walking around with their tattered books under their arm, nor had I ever wanted to be in their shoes. And now that I had been informed that I was to go and start learning Latin, I inwardly felt as if my grandfather had told me to become an organ-grinder or a scissors-sharpener -- the sort of riffraff that sometimes came over from Denmark during the summer.

It came like a thunderclap out of a clear blue sky. All my plans for eternal life at Brekkekot were destroyed. My joy in existence was shattered. The Great Wall of China, within which I was the Son of Heaven himself, was breached -- and not at the blast of a trumpet, but at a word. How bitter that it should have been my grandfather who spoke the word that ruined for me our turnstile-gate at Brekkukot. I broke down. I had not cried since I was small, because we did not cry at Brekkukot. I felt that nothing could ever console me again. I rowed and rowed with all my strength to keep pace with my grandfather, and cried and cried.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #50

"Let's do the math," as Eminem once rapped (with admirable honesty)... hmm, 50 poems of the week, and this blog has been going for coming on two years... 52 weeks in a year... maybe "Poem of the Week" has become something of a misnomer? Maybe I should be calling this series "Duke Altum's Poem of Every Other Week"!?!

Well guess what folks, I ain't changin' it at this point... the original name has a nicer ring to it, inaccurate or not! I'll put it this way: the word "week" doesn't necessarily mean every week, it only refers to that week in which it appears! How's that for a contorted justification?

Anyway, this week's poem is noteworthy for the amount of freight it carries in just a few short verses... in these fascinating lines, the forces of poetry, science and politics combine to create a brief but powerful meditation on the turmoil and uncertainty of the created world we live in. Several aspects of Miroslav Holub's background as a poet/immunologist living in the Czech Republic come through in this short poem -- the fascination of peering at complex organisms under high magnification; the imagination of the poet's heart ("dreaming landscapes"); echoes of the political upheaval and physical/spiritual violence of war so common to Eastern Europe. Through the dual lenses of scientific observation and creative imagination, Holub presents to us an entire universe in microcosm, in all of its beauty and pain.

*******

In the Microscope

Here too are the dreaming landscapes,
lunar, derelict.
Here too are the masses,
tillers of the soil.
And cells, fighters
who lay down their lives for a song.

Here too are cemeteries,
fame and snow.
And I hear the murmuring,
the revolt of immense estates.

Memory and the Loom of Fiction

Below are five isolated strands of my actual memory. In other words, they are true events, unless I am forgetting or misrepresenting details due to the passage of time, etc. In honor of this blog, we’ll call them threads. They seem unrelated, but as we will see below, they are linked, or have recently become linked, in a process I find interesting.

Thread #1: When I was growing up, there was a younger, dynamic priest named Father Frank Delia in the parish I attended with my family who was a very talented homilist, and who used to close out his homilies from time to time by sitting down at a piano and belting out a song before the congregation.

Thread #2: Years ago, maybe 12 or 14 years back, I went on a weekend trip to the beach with some friends. One night we were just goofing around and a group of us decided to go out and take a walk on the boardwalk. While we were out there we saw some young boys with these long, harpoon-like lances standing on the pier. When we got closer we saw that they were actually fishing for miniature sharks. They would wait until they had a ‘shot’, then spear them with the lances and toss them onto a pile on the pier. I remember staring at this pile of bleeding, semi-dead sharks at night near the ocean.

Thread #3: In 1996 as I was closing out my career in the US Army, I was in the process of leaving Fort Benning, Georgia, after 4 years of living in that area. My Dad came down to help me with the transition. While he was there we went for a weekend in a facility in Alabama, a very quiet, isolated Retreat Center in a town that was called Holy Trinity. This was way in the backwoods. One night while we were at this retreat house, I couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night I wandered out from my very Spartan little room into the common area of the facility. There was an indoor grotto with a little pond and a statue of Mary in that area. I remember sitting there in absolute silence in the middle of the night. I wasn’t even praying, I was just sitting there. I guess it was some sort of awareness that my life was in a major transition and that I knew nothing about the road ahead of me. After a while I just went back down the hall and went to bed. Nobody ever knew I had been awake.

Thread #4: My mom always had this very old looking, beat-up breviary, a kind of old-fashioned guidebook that people used to bring to Catholic Mass to follow along with the prayers. It was jacketed in black leather and had an antiquated appearance. Later, I found out that it had once belonged to her father and she kept it as an heirloom and a reminder of him. She still has it.

Thread #5: About two or three years ago I was visiting with some friends of ours who were (still are) married with two children at the time (they have three now). In this marriage the husband was a ‘cradle Catholic’ from Boston and the wife was an evangelical Christian who had gone through the RCIA program so they could get married in the Catholic Church. I always had the sense from her that she did this reluctantly, but it’s hard to say. I do know his family highly encouraged it. He was the quintessential Boston Catholic boy. And yet when the sex abuse scandals hit in 2002, and one must remember they hit worst in the Boston area, he lost his fidelity to Catholicism. It also came out that one of the clergy involved in the scandals had been a part of the RCIA program that the wife had been through when she converted. Because of all these things, they both left the Church; her after a short stint, him after a lifetime. When I talked to him, he had no regrets; in fact, he was adamant that the Church, not him, had changed. ‘It’s just not the Church I grew up in any more,’ he told me. ‘It’s all based on nothing.’ I disagreed then and I still do. But I didn’t go through what he went through, and the words stuck with me like a splinter.

Why do I bring all these unrelated memories up here? Because they have all come together somehow in a short story I’ve just written called “In The Throes”. As I have been revising and re-thinking the story I realized just how many different elements of it – some of which are ancillary and some are crucial to the tale at hand – came from these random memories from very different times in my life.

It’s fascinating how the medium of stories – writing fiction – works with the material that is already there in your life. A lot of writers have argued that one of the keys to writing fiction is going out and living a very full and wide-reaching life, and that experience is the only teacher. Therefore you have to accumulate a lot of it. But this is the counter-argument, that one can also find the elements of (hopefully) good fiction within one’s own experience. Emily Dickinson comes to mind, as well as a host of others.

The point is not to draw comparisons, but to reflect on how interesting it is that by sitting down and attempting to write a short story or a poem or novel, you come into that process with these loose threads of memory and experience hanging around, and it can be like sitting down at a loom. You just start weaving, toss in a few made up threads, and before you know it you have created a tapestry. Whether the pattern or colors or design of the tapestry are any good is another matter. But creative writing – fiction, in my case – is the loom. You need the structure and the form of it to create your art. How well you weave depends on your talent and your effort.

This story I have just written may turn out to be one of my better ones, it may not. But I was surprised to see that it had brought together these unrelated fragments of my memory in a way that I never anticipated it would. I love this about the writing process; it’s why I do it. It gives me a way to mine my own experience, arrange the pieces, see what I can make out of it. It’s a way to mirror God’s ultimate act of creation that was to bring all that we see and know and experience to life out of an empty void. To create something where originally there was nothing is a hardship and a gift, a struggle and a joy, a means and an end.

MuttRolls

Blog readers: I am back. After weeks of a lengthy hiatus from the blog to attend to personal matters, namely moving my whole family of four from one state to another and all of the various “Muttrolls” associated with that, I now return to The Secret Thread where I will hopefully resume making quasi-regular posts on matters related to literature, spirituality, film, etc.

Meanwhile, props are in order for the efforts of my man and co-blogger Duke Altum, who has mightily carried the torch while I was off doing the above. Since I make up for roughly 30% of the entire Secret Thread readership, maybe the whole of his contributions to the blog in recent weeks has not been fully appreciated. But if anyone has taken the time to read his last two posts, his insightful essay on children, innocence and the film The Spirit of the Beehive and his new Unshelved feature on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, you will know that he has been dishing out the content for any starved TST readers to lap up hungrily. Hopefully some were nourished by these noble servings. Since I have recently caught up on them I can tell you they are worth checking out.

Now then. Mutt rolls.

A lot has gone down for me lately in the new experiences related above. I’m now living in a house I own for the first time in a new state, and there are a lot of new demands on my time and resources. I have two young children who started branching out into new experiences almost immediately, and that sure isn’t going to slow down. I have not been able to do a lot of the literary work that I like to do very consistently in the last few months (this blog included), so it would seem that some of the projects I like to mention here might have taken a hit.

Reading-wise, I have not slowed much. Duke has kept the books on the right well updated. No time or real need to go through everything, but I will say this: I have been starting to read through Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series, and so far I have read two of seven volumes. When I finish that series I was planning to do a blog-only essay encompassing my overall thoughts on whether that series has any merit. I have long been curious as to whether this drawn-out series of fantasy books is worth the time it takes to read them or if they belong among the finest of that very popular writer’s expansive canon. He seems to hold these books dear. I am curious about their effect as one long story, and I plan to capture some of my conclusions here in the future, hopefully before the end of the year.

Recently I have been reading more cryptic fiction – I’m on my third fairly difficult book in a row, beginning with Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass, The Camberwell Beauty by V. S. Pritchett and now with Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch ­– which may be considered something close, if there is such a thing, to a South American Ulysses. All three of these books, while being very different in form, structure, tone, and just about everything else, have been challenging reads, but they are all immensely impressive and they are all written by acknowledged masters. Gass is an esteemed novelist and philosopher; Pritchett was one of the masters of the short story in English and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and Julio Cortazar was a visionary and experimental genius who has been a tremendous influence on a bevy of writers from around the world.

Lastly, on my own writing, things have taken an interesting turn. I more or less stopped writing my novel a few weeks before we moved because of the difficulty of working on something like that while trying to relocate. But I found that I was still feeling a desire to be working on something. So I plugged that time with two smaller pieces that I did not expect to write. The first was a tribute to one of my literary heroes, the novelist Ron Hansen. Simply titled, “Ron Hansen: An Appreciation”, I thought the piece turned out well and I tried to sell it to three magazines. But each rejected it. I’m running out of places to send it, but I am glad I tried. Incidentally, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish Hansen’s novel Exiles on the life of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 2008 and I am looking forward to that with great enthusiasm.

Then, still wanting to write but living out of boxes by that point, I sat down and wrote a new short story which is now in the revision process. This was a surprise to me. The story is called “In The Throes” and it is a fictional response to the sexual abuse scandals of 2002 in the Catholic Church. It is a kind of bleak story, but it comes out of some of the comments I have heard others make after it all went down, my own ruminations on the fallout and what it all means, and a semi-subconscious but potent concern I have for my daughters’ futures. The story is about a seventeen-year-old girl whose life is upended when her parents decide to abandon the Catholic faith they raised her in, thereby casting her adrift on the spiritual seas. As a result, she makes a decision that could have long-term consequences. It has been an interesting story to write and edit and I am not totally sure about the story’s success.

The only thing about all this is that with the mental investment involved in writing those two pieces, it leaves me in a curious and unclear spot with regard to the novel I was writing since March. I am pretty sure I want to stick at it but it feels distant to me at the moment and I have had some doubts about how well it was ‘working’. I figure the only way to find out what is what here is to attempt to dive back into it as soon as I can after I finish “In The Throes” and send it out to a couple magazines. That is what I will do, which is well and good, but right now I have no idea what the prognosis is for it. We’ll see. And as it becomes clearer I will report on it in my ‘Journal’ on these pages.

Ergo, like I said: Mutt rolls.

The Weapons of Childhood (Part I)

Sometimes it feels like we're living in a culture that is at war, whether it's fully realized or not, against the very idea of childhood. Everyone laments publicly how quickly kids grow up these days, and yet when you look at the culture, especially the media (its main engine), everything is geared towards faciliating exactly that which we moan and wail about. Now that I'm fully immersed in the wonderfully challenging task of raising my own children (sons, in my case), I am realizing to my chagrin how difficult it is to "just let your kids be kids" in a world that is constantly forcing them to grow up faster and faster -- bombarding them with violent and sexual images, giving them games that put them into adult situations they should never even be thinking about in real life, showing them films that are supposedly safe for them but loaded with all kinds of innuendo, etc. The list could go on and on.

Even within one or two generations, the length of time one can enjoy "just being a kid" and not contending with adult situations and adult worries seems to have been radically reduced. For example, I am a child of the 70's, a decade which had its own problems and proclivities of course, but I cannot remember ever being worried about being gunned down at school, or being blown up on a PATH train to New York. Now, just a generation or two later, these are (sadly) very real threats against our children, and they're very much aware of them at younger and younger ages. And then there's just the ubiquity of information -- unfiltered information -- that everyone, including young children, is constantly being subjected to. When the recent Virginia Tech shootings occurred, it was indeed a national tragedy and it's understandable that a national conversation about it took place. And yet, you could not walk into a grocery store or a doctor's office without CNN hitting you with "amateur video" of running people, gun shots being fired, SWAT teams, etc. In just a few minutes of waiting in my doctor's waiting room, my three young sons were treated to a eyewitness description (in graphic detail) of the carnage in the classroom on that campus, and a clip of someone's cell phone footage that had captured a constant tatoo of gunfire from just outside the hall where the violence occurred. "Is that guy shooting people Dad?" was my four-year-old's eminently reasonable question. All I could do was tell him yes, and watch the implications of that thought work themselves out across his face.

Another quick example of what I mean: recently, we had a "grand opening" (what's so "grand" about another convenience store competing for our business in town is, of course, an open question) of a Royal Farms gas station and food mart -- one of these big, shiny, new Wawa-type stores that tries to offer you everything and ends up specializing in nothing. Except maybe gas. Anyway, a good friend of ours went in to check out the mini-store with her family (husband, son aged 7, and daughter aged 4), and when walking down one of the aisles was confronted with an entire rack of pornographic magazines, mostly uncovered, about 3 1/2-4 feet tall. Why give the height, you ask? Well, the way they are set up, just about all of these magazines fall right smack in line with the eyes of small kids. First of all, aren't there regulations about where such magazines can be displayed in these stores anyway, if we must have them at all (i.e., behind the counter, under wraps, where young kids won't ever look?)? And even if there aren't, why in the name of all that's holy would you set up an entire rack of these magazines right at the eye level of smaller children?? Our friends were dumbstruck first, then angry right after -- especially when they were forced to answer their daughter's question about why those two women were kissing each other on that page.

Well, all of this is sort of a long preamble to what I really wanted to post about here, which is movies. More specifically, movies that feature young children retreating from the ugliness and brutality of the world being presented to them using the only "weapons" they really know how to wield -- innocence and imagination. I've just gotten through a whole series of them -- unplanned, but afterwards I realized the common theme. I've seen no less than four movies in the last several months that are built around this central motif. The films are, in chronological order (not in the order I saw them): Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973); Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987); Terry Gilliam's Tideland (2005); and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006). I thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast the way each of them handles this intriguing theme.

The idea of children retreating into the realms of fantasy and imagination, rather than deal with the terrors of the "grown up" world, is of course nothing new in the arts. These films are, to a large degree, entering into the stream of a much larger, and older, storytelling tradition -- call it the Alice in Wonderland school of fiction. And in each one, the central character, a child (happens to be a young girl in three of the four mentioned), is dealing with forces and realities in their "real lives" that are quite beyond their comprehension, and are far too complex and terrifying for their young and innocent minds to process. Like my four-year-old son in that doctor's waiting room, the horrors they are forced to contend with are thrust upon them at far too early an age, and they simply don't have the tools yet to deal with them. So, they make use of the only "weapons" they have: those that are inherent to childhood, and thank God for it. I mentioned them before -- innocence and imagination. But as these films seem to be positing, these weapons are a lot more potent than we often give them credit for. And yet, you also wonder when watching these films: are they powerful enough to overcome the traumas these children are facing? Most of the movies leave this as an open question.

The least known of these among the general movie-watching public is probably Erice's fascinating The Spirit of the Beehive. I just saw this the other night for the first time (once again, I find myself thanking heaven for the mere existence of the incredible Criterion Collection!), and part of the reason I wanted to watch it was I heard it in an interview with del Toro that it was one of the films that inspired him. I had seen and loved Pan's Labyrinth, so any film that played a role in the formation of the imagination that created it I thought would be well worth checking out. The 1973 Spanish film is a treasure for many reasons. One thing that strikes you about it right away is its amazing cinematography: it delivers a long series of stunning images, almost like paintings, that stay burned into your memory well after the film is over (I suspect they will be with me for a long time). If you appreciate at all the craft of movie-making, you can't miss Beehive for that reason alone. The final scene in particular has an eerie, quiet beauty that is like the cherry on top of a very rich sundae. It is one of those "last shots" in a film that you see and immediately realize it couldn't have ended any other way. And in this scene, and many others, the influence it must have had on Pan's Labyrinth is as clear as a mountain stream.

The story of this quietly mesmerizing film revolves around a young girl growing up in rural Spain during the time of Franco, just after the horrible Civil War (the trauma is which is almost palable throughout). The opening scene features an old truck lumbering along the dirt road into town, being mobbed by children when it stops in front of what you quickly realize is something of a makeshift movie theatre. What is being delivered to the small town are large, metal reels of film that will be cobbled together to show James Whale's Frankenstein, and the entire town (it seems) crams into the smoke-filled, dirt-floored room to see what Hollywood hath wrought. Erice brilliantly shows us the original introduction to the film, in which the producer walks out onto a lit stage to "warn" the moviegoing audience about the shocking nature of the film they are about to see (an idea which seems so quaint and archaic to us now, but at the time may actually have been necessary, as Whale's film set a new standard for realism and shock-value at the time!). I say "brilliantly" because it almost serves as an introduction to Beehive as well -- not that the movie is so shocking, but it does have a lot to say about the power of film to influence the imagination. Certainly Ana, the protagonist (an adorable little girl of about 5, I'd say), won't be the same after seeing it.

Erice shows us the famous scene in which the monster meets up with a little girl on a river bank, who is playing with a doll and thowing flowers into the water. Most will remember what comes after this scene: we are not shown the actual act, but the monster, thinking it is all part of the game, reaches out for the little girl, and the next thing you see is the girl's father, walking somberly through town with the soaked girl hanging limply in his arms (obviously drowned). We see Ana's intense eyes take in the scene, and can feel her bewilderment as she turns to her sister, asking, "Why did he kill that little girl?" Her sister explains to her impatiently that it's all fake since it's a movie, but adds that the spirit of the monster is real, and sometimes inhabits human form. She even claims to have seen him once at a rundown farmhouse outside of town, and tells Ana that she can invoke this spirit whenever she wants to by just closing her eyes and whispering, "It's me, Ana. It's me, Ana."

Of course Ana's sister, Isabel, takes her to see the abandoned old farmhouse with a well outside of it, and Ana returns there on her own often, obviously obsessed with the idea of seeing the spirit of the monster for herself. One day she goes there and runs into a wounded revolutionary soldier who's obviously hiding out there from the law, and she is convinced that he is incorporating the spirit she seeks. The rest of the film follows her increasingly bold efforts to confront the "monster," which is obviously her way of escaping from not only the doldrums of her everyday life in the hardscrabble town, but also from her uninspiring home life, with her eccentric father (who tends bees and works all night writing extended philosophical descriptions of their activities) and disengaged and lonely mother (who we see writing to and burning letter from an ex-lover of hers in France).

Erice's finely-crafted film is a beautiful and intriguing example of what I love about these stories that immerse us into a child's mindset in the midst of disturbing circumstances: they take seriously the power and, yes, wisdom of innocence. None of these films go so far as to imply that this innocence is ultimately going to protect or save their main chararcters from the world's evils, but they show an all-too-rare (these days) respect and appreciation for this under-valued, and under-cultivated, quality. There's a reason why stories that feature children escaping into fantasy worlds that may or may not be "real" often achieve classic status and are loved by many generations running: they have something to say that strikes right at the heart and soul of all but the most hardened and skeptical readers. They also remind us of a quality most of us had at one point in our lives -- the ability to look upon a world of wonders and accept the mystery of what we see at face value, not try to analyze it or excuse it away as mere illusion or, worse, delusion.

Since I am running out of time and this post is growing rather long, I will cut this off now and make it a two-parter... for I would still like to say some things in appreciation for the other films I mentioned. For now, I hope that anyone who reads this and is interested in the subject will make an effort to find and watch The Spirit of the Beehive. It is a true work of art, and though it seems slow at times when you're watching it, the overall effect of the film is powerful indeed. I can almost guarantee you'll be thinking about it for a long time after you've seen it, and you may, if you're lucky, never forget it.

"The Golden Grains of Truth"

Duke here, reporting in after a hectic week of work travel, followed by a weekend helping this blog's co-founder, Mutt, move into his new house... on behalf of everyone at the TST, I would like to congratulate Mutt on his provision of a magnificent new home for his family. I know Mutt is very happy and proud -- and he has every right to be, as he's worked damned hard to get there. It don't come free, and no one knows that better than he does... but it if you're blessed enough for it to come at all, it is indeed sweet in the tasting.

At any rate, to work: I have a passage I wanted to share with readers of this blog, mostly because of its relevance to the subject matter at hand... not so much about literature per se, but the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful in whatever form it can be found. This is from a fantastic book I am reading called The Spirit of Catholicism by Fr. Karl Adam, who was a German priest living and writing in the early part of the last century.

One of the things I love most about the Catholic faith is its insistence on a proper balance of both faith and reason in the life of the believer. Here, Fr. Adam expresses this aspect of Catholicism with both eloquence and wisdom. These are profound words revealing even more profound truths. I found them to be very inspiring, and thought others might too.

The catholicity of the Church is manifested not least in this, that she does not allow knowledge and faith to be separated and set in an unhealthy antagonism, but conjoins them in intimate harmony, making knowledge accessible to faith and faith accessible to knowledge. Her greatest minds, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas and Newman, made it their life's task to establish this synthesis of faith and knowledge. Nor do the theologians of our own day know of any more important task than that of making modern knowledge fruitful for the faith. Catholicism lays its hand on every branch of knowledge, seeking everywhere the golden grains of truth, that it may adorn its sanctuary with them...

...such is Catholicism: an affirmation of values along the whole line, a most comprehensive and noblest accessibility to all good, a union of nature with grace, of art with religion, of knowledge with faith, "so that God may be all in all."

Not a bad manifesto for a life that is truly Catholic (and catholic!), huh???

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #49

Galway Kinnell is a very Catholic, and catholic, poet. I am growing to love his poetry because it seems to always be about the stuff that really matters: faith, family, friends, human suffering and loneliness, and... God. His is a very sacramental poetry. He speaks unabashedly of death, of dirt, of sights and smells, of skin, of sex. Rather than shy away from the puzzle of our existence here, he embraces it in its totality. I love the large, looming presence of family life in almost everything he writes. And, even now in his 70's, the distinguished poet still writes lovingly about his children, remembering when they were young and appreciating them now that they're older. I like that.

Here is a wise and wonderful poem about nothing less than the mystery of life itself. See what you might hear in it.

*******

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Introducing UNSHELVED: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' by Harper Lee

That's right folks, it's time to unveil a new feature here on The Secret Thread: a new and occasional series of posts I am calling Unshelved. Each Unshelved post will feature an old and, either on a personal or even a national basis, forgotten classic that I have pulled off of the shelf to read (or re-read, as the case may be), so that I can then report back on what I got from the experience, if anything. There have been series' like this in other publications of course, from The Washington Post Book World's "Second Reading" series to Paste magazine's "Dusted Off" column -- the latter of which, coincidentally, will be featuring a review from TST's own Mutt Ploughman in an upcoming issue (his review of Philip K. ####'s novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, which was posted here in January: see the Archives section, right hand column to read it!). But none of those other series will have the special Secret Thread touch that millions of you have come to depend upon...

Um, right. OK. Without further ado, let's get started with the series... shall we?

To kick off TST's Unshelved series, I have selected a book I recently finished listening to on audio (I confess, occasionally I listen to rather than read books, but with an hour commute each way to work every day, I can't think of a better way to use that otherwise dead time!): Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. I first read this classic and beloved story in my sophomore year of high school, and I hadn't touched it or even thought about it much since. It was one of the very few assigned books in high school that I actually read (William Golding's Lord of the Flies is another one, which had much more of an impact on me at the time, I recall, which makes sense given its shocking subject matter), and I remember enjoying it at the time, but that's about all I could remember. So in picking it up now in my mid-30's, it was almost like coming to it fresh. At any rate, I'm going to do these Unshelved entries in a bit more structured, less rambling way than I usually do in my posts, so let's just get right into it:

Plot Synopsis:
As just about everybody knows, To Kill A Mockingbird is a sort of coming-of-age tale about two young children who are being raised by their father (having lost their mother) in a small town in rural Alabama during the Depression years. The novel's memorable narrator is young Scout (Jean Louise) Finch, daughter of Atticus Finch, the town's one lawyer, and kid sister to Jem (Jeremy) Finch. Scout is a precocious five years old at the beginning of the story, and probably reaches the age of 6 or 7 by the story's end. The novel recounts the adventures of their youth growing up in this very small Southern town with its inherent charms and prejudices. All seems idyllic and nostalgic -- until Atticus is assigned to defend a poor black man who's been charged with raping a white woman, and in doing so exposes the flaws in our legal system and not-so-hidden bigotries that thrive just under the surface in the hearts of the townspeople. The story is a beautifully told, poignant tale of innocence lived and lost... and Lee's charming prose, authentic dialog and clear-eyed, non-sentimental insight into human nature establish the book as a bonafide American classic.

Surprises:
There were several things that struck me upon re-visiting this tale as an adult. First, how funny it is: I don't remember this aspect of the novel from tenth grade, probably because I was too much an ignorant moron to get most of the jokes (I'm only slightly less ignorant and foolish now, of course, but maybe enough to help in this case!). Much of the genius and enjoyment in this book comes from Lee's inspired narration of events through Scout's inimitable tomboyish perspective -- she goes from crawling into her Daddy's lap and asking questions in one minute, to whooping some smaller boy's butt in the playground in the next... and sees both as natural as sunlight! And as her brother grows up and starts to distance himself from her a bit, she begins to realize the differences between the sexes -- both in terms of natural fact and artificial, societal expectations. Her refusal to accept either provide for some amusing and poignant moments.

I was also pleasantly surprised upon this second reading to discover what a wise book To Kill A Mockingbird is. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the fact that I'm a father to three young children of my own now -- for in the character of Atticus Finch, we have a father who loves his children and does the best he can to raise them with integrity, humility and a sense of morality, while always admitting his own flaws and weaknesses. He is a towering figure in the lives of his children for all the right reasons -- and as they witness him defend the defenseless in the face of almost universal opposition and bigotry from the rest of the town, they are provided with a priceless demonstration of integrity and compassion that, you sense, will be with them forever. And the fact that not everything comes up roses in the end -- by a long shot! -- seems to only strengthen and intensify the goodness and moral strength of Atticus' actions.

Reason it's worth reading (or re-reading):
Besides all of the above, this is simply a great story, told with wit, wisdom and a winsome spirit. Lee was clearly inspired in its telling, because its endurance in both popular and academic circles as a canonical work of American fiction continues on and appears to have no end in sight. It is not so much in the tale itself as in its telling -- somehow, even though you were likely not born in nor lived in such a place, the book makes you feel as if you were reliving your own memories of life in the rural South, and that things as rendered are precisely as you remember them. I realize that sounds strange, but Lee just seems to get all of the details right -- the descriptions of local characters, the buildings, the school, the churches, the sound of people's voices, the town traditions -- so much so that you can picture the Radley's dilapidated house, the good Southern ladies' gossip sessions-disguised-as-prayer-meetings, the wooden, non-air-conditioned one-room courthouse, or the ramshackle black Baptist church as if you'd been there yourself. I suppose if I had to choose one word to describe the key to Lee's success in this book, that word would be authenticity.

But more than anything else, what struck me about To Kill A Mockingbird, and what would make me recommend it to anyone, is its enduring moral message -- which is delivered in a totally unassuming, non-preachy way. This message is more or less embodied in the character of Atticus Finch, whose humble, world-weary yet hopeful servant leadership of his family is achieved through his actions, not his words. I was moved by his obvious love for his children, but also by his unwillingness to hold their hands through every little trial of life -- they are responsible for their own actions, and when they violate or neglect those responsibilities, Atticus does not shield them from the consequences.

Finally, Lee's triumph is to almost perfectly capture the emergence of a social conscience and the loss of innocence in the life, and voice, of a young child. Think about it: how difficult would it be to describe, even in your own life, the gradual dawning of a realization that people will try to hurt other people, that folks aren't always honest, or that sometimes justice is not served despite every indication to the contrary? (I was severly tested in this regard recently, as my eldest son, only 6 years old, came up to me at random one day and, picking up on something he had heard at school, asked : "Dad, why would somebody strap a bomb to themselves and then blow themselves in front of a bunch of other people?" Scrambling for an answer he could understand, I realized anew how incredibly difficult it is to explain the evil that exists in our world to young hearts, still blessedly protected by the fragile but beautiful armor of innocence...) Many books attempt to do so -- the "coming of age" tale is a cliche in its own right -- but hardly any in the last 100 years or so are as successful in the venture as this one is. All of this combines to explain why the book stays in your memory for long after you've read it, and why its lessons feel like truths that have been sleeping peacefully in your own heart for as long as you can remember. Like all great works of art, Harper Lee's timeless novel awakens those truths from their slumber, allowing you the chance to get re-aquainted with them all over again.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #48

The latest in my increasingly-misnamed series...

Effusive commentary on this one would literally wreck its impact... suffice it to say that this short masterpiece by an American poet I am learning to deeply admire, Franz Wright, somehow manages to be utterly hilarious and quietly profound at the same time.

*******

Description of Her Eyes

Two teaspoonfuls,
and my mind goes
everyone can kiss my ass now--

then it's changed,
I change my mind.

Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.

And Now For Something Completely Different.....

(The following is a very short and extremely apocolyptic story I uncovered in my parents' house. According to a handwritten note by my mother, it was written by me in the Spring of 1979, when I would have been eight years old. Note the conclusion which would make Roger Waters proud!!! The story is presented here unedited. - M. P.)


G.F.G.?

It was a sunny day in New York. An explorer found 5 huge eggs! He gasped. Soon it was in the paper, "Five Huge Eggs Sighted". One day severel people were taking pics of the huge eggs. Suddenly, the eggs hatched! The people could not believe their eyes! Giant flying Gargoyles came flying out! Thier planet sent them down, already grown in five huge eggs! One of the gargoyles wrecked apart a factory with it's claws. Everything started blowing up in the factory. Machine guns fired. Suddenly, a roar rung out. They tore apart the city. They smashed the people. Soon the city got desserted.

The End.

Great Writers? or, Further Thoughts on the Mountain That Crush'd Duke

Poor Duke Altum. He got veritably crushed under the weight of a massive, purportedly classic novel. In his case it was death by bludgeoning, for it sure sounds like Mann's The Magic Mountain has pummelled him repeatedly over the head over a period of weeks - months!? - without him having a whole lot to show for it. Mann is a Nobel Prize winner, and that's usually a safe bet, we find - but evidently, not in this case. Duke's shared literary experience - indeed, the essence of The Secret Thread - got me thinking about the times that I had had the experience of taking on a writer of high reputation, only to be flattened by the weight of dashed expectations and disappointment.

I can't say it's a long list, but every once in a while I do find that one of the 'great' writers in the history of literature leaves me wanting more (or less) from the experience. Thus, inspired by Duke's post, here's my short list of famous writers whose work I have not enjoyed, and a few words about why. There may be others, but these are the ones who come to mind for me:

Philip Roth. I've only read one of Roth's books, so I'm really not one to judge, but the problem is the one book I read left me totally uninterested in reading anything else. The novel I read was awarded the Pulitzer Prize that year, somehow. It was called American Pastoral. Somehow, Roth's combination of melancholy, cynicism, and obsession with sex doesn't trip my trigger, sorry to say. Also his books are very much about the Jewish American experience, more about secular Jews than religious ones, and that tradition is very foreign to me. I'd be interested in it if a writer made it interesting: Isaac Bishevis Singer is a writer who has made the Jewish experience fascinating: but Roth is not the guy to do it, in my view.

Gertrude Stein. I was assigned Stein's novel The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in grad school around 1999. At least I think it was a novel. Although maybe Alice B. Toklas was Stein's name for herself. Or she was the fictional writer but the book was really about Gertrude Stein. So maybe it was biography-cum-auto-biography. All I know is any way you slice it, this is one of the most boring books I've ever read. Side note: Stein was kind of a mentor to that whole Paris crowd in the 1920s, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the like. The teacher who assigned it also recommended another book of hers called Tender Buttons. No thanks.

James Joyce. It is probably not even accurate to put Joyce on here because I like the stories in Dubliners - 'The Dead' is a masterpiece - and I think Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is pretty good too. But Ulysses ain't much fun to read and it's nearly impossible to understand, and the follow-up, Finnegan's Wake, IS impossible to understand. I'll probably read Ulysses again, but I don't know if it will be that enjoyable. That's a long haul, that book.......

Any Greek Classic. This list is getting more and more damning, but I can't say I really like reading the ancient Greek writers very much and never have. I know it's canonical reading, but I have never much cared for it. I have The Iliad and The Odyssey ready for me to read but I haven't mustered up the courage for such a long slog through narrative poetry yet, no matter how influential it is. I also have some plays by Sophocles that I should read too. I haven't read very much of it and probably would appreciate it more if I would just dive in, but I must admit to being not all that pumped to do so.

Ernest Hemingway. Not a big fan. Particularly of his novels. His short stories are very impressive especially from a craft point of view and their wide-reaching influence has been felt by writers of literally all nations. Many of the stories I find very powerful and memorable. But, I don't respond all that much to his hyper-minimalistic, journalistic style and his depressing outlook on the world, especially on romantic matters, is burdensome to me. This especially rings true for me when I read his novels. I read The Sun Also Rises not too long ago and didn't particularly enjoy it.

I think there might be others, but this is enough to get my point across I guess. Sometimes writers that the world or the critical establishment think are great just don't work for you personally as a reader. It's unfortunate that Duke had to spend so much effort to read Thomas Mann and get so little out of it. Then again it's the pioneering literary spirit, which leads one to try out these major (and minor) writers of the world, that we aspire to maintain here on this blog, and although there are risks involved, it helps us continue to grow into deeper appreciation of our own tastes and of the extraordinary gift of literature.

Crashing into The Magic Mountain

Well folks, it's been a long time. I'm aware of that. As I explained before, circumstances in my "real life" (the one outside of this virtual one, with deadlines and payments and responsibilities and heartaches and obligations and all that) have been so hectic that it's been hard to get a chance to post anything. My job has been busy basically since 2007 began (with no end in sight), and my wife took on a part-time job in February, which means I've been hanging out with our three sons on my own several nights a week, which certainly cuts into both my time and my energy (but it's been great "bonding" with them -- sorry, but I'll take the bonding any day of the week over this!).

Anyway, blah blah blah... who really cares, right? It's not like I'm singing a unique tune or anything here. I can hear the violins crying in the background even now.

There's another reason, though, why I haven't been posting lately. It's because I've been bogged down, reading-wise, in one of the most difficult (admittedly self-imposed) reading challenges I've had in years -- slogging through Thomas Mann's lumbering behemoth of a novel The Magic Mountain. As my subject line indicates, I almost feel like I haven't been reading it, I actually crashed into it, and I'm the sole survivor of the wreck, and I'm marooned at the top and no one seems to realize I'm there, and I haven't seen a soul for months... well, obviously I'm exaggerating, but I am really struggling to get through this novel, and it got me thinking, "Have I ever had this much trouble getting through a work of fiction?" And I'm being quite serious when I say that next to the experience of reading this, reading Moby Dick felt like reading a Jack Higgins thriller or something. I'm not kidding. Melville's magnum opus is a long read requiring diligence and concentration, to be sure -- but it fascinated me on almost every page, the language is almost Shakespearean, and it raises all kinds of heavy and important theological and philosphical questions. And while Mann is a Nobel Prize winner and viewed as one of the most important novelists in modern times, I can't quite understand what it is about this novel that gave it its high reputation.

I've never read Marcel Proust before (I know Mutt has, but I am no Mutt Ploughman), but I suspect that reading In Search of Lost Time feels a bit like reading this -- except, perhaps, Proust's language may be more poetic and flowery than Mann's is. That's just a guess, I obviously don't know for sure. But in both cases, the "action," if you want to call it that, seems to take place all internally, that is, in the rambling thoughts and inner experiences of their protagonists. Mann is not (at least in this work) so much a surveyor of the mind and its meanderings as, say, Virginia Woolf is, but this novel is certainly about a specific young man's experiences in a specific milieu, and not much else. Not that I require a lot of adventure and intrigue to enjoy a novel, but it is, I am finding, pretty difficult to get through a 715-page novel consisting entirely of philsophical (and sometimes political/theological) conversations between people in one setting. Hilariously, there is only one "event" to speak of in the entire book, that Mann builds up to for hundreds of pages -- all we're talking about is the young protagonist's getting up the courage to declare his feelings for a young woman and fellow patient there -- and when you finally get to it, midway through the book, the entire conversation, which goes on for pages, is conducted in French, without translation, so I had absolutely no idea what transpired in the entire critical scene. How's that for a literary letdown? Then, of course, Mann keeps referring back throughout the rest of the book to those shared moments -- and unless you know French, these references sail over your head and get lost forever into the great wide open, like John Rickman's "Aerobie" frisbee.

Anyway, I'm certainly not going to go on and on about the plot, themes, and ideas of this novel, because a.) there is no plot to speak of; b.) the themes essentially boil down to human mortality and our experience of time; c.) and as for ideas, they are all over the map in this novel and would be impossible to sum up. As I've been telling Mutt, there are indeed many things that are impressive about Mann and this novel -- his erudition, his way of expressing things verbally, his poetic descriptions of the Swiss mountains, his talent for creating a huge cast of different personalities and philosophies. But in the end, it's been very difficult for me to filter this reading experience into much that is meaningful for me. And that's what I tend to look for, mostly unconsciously, when reading novels -- what life lessons and insights can I take away from this experience, along with the obvious pleasure of a good story that's been well-told (that's a given)?

I understand that this a very highly-regarded novel that includes among its many, many admirers some of the world's greatest writers -- that is, of course, part of the reason I was interested in reading it in the first place. (For example, one of my personal favorite writers, Walker Percy, was a huge fan of the book.) And the funny thing is, unlike many readers, I tend to enjoy and even search out "philosophical" fiction. And this is all part of why I am coming away from the experience of The Magic Mountain perplexed (as well as exhausted!). I can appreciate, to butcher Hopkins, "the achieve of" the thing... but as for its "mastery," I can only leave that to the literary pundits. It's hard to admit it, but -- it's beyond me.

Mann's talents certainly aren't lost on me, but perhaps his insights are. More than likely I am missing much about the book that I should be catching and appreciating. But it's hard to fully appreciate a novel when it keeps falling face-down into your lap, due to the loosening of your sleep-softened grip.

This Is Lame

Mutt here, it's ridiculous how lousy we're doing on the postings these days. I am not really helping matters much either, but there is a lot going on in my world these days as Duke alluded to. One thing is for sure, Duke ain't updated the "What We're Reading" thing in a while. Since reading God's Grandeur and Other Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, I've read the following as part of my Lenten spiritual reading program:

Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Echoing Silence, Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing
and currently I am in the middle of a superb book, What Is the Point of Being a Christian? by Timothy Radcliffe, OP

I also hope to some time soon post again in my Journal of a 'Novel', since I have been making stilted but nonetheless period progress in that effort as well.

Tell you what, if Duke doesn't post a POTW soon, I'm gonna do it myself.......

LIFE INTERVENES

Our thousands of readers have likely noticed by now the scarcity of posts and updates on The Secret Thread recently. Well, all I can do is sum it up in this simple, two-word phrase: life intervenes! Personally, I’ve been mired down in a number of major projects at my work that have prevented me from ringing in lately… and with Mutt, forget about it! He’s attempting to do what I stumbled through in the summer of 2005: switch jobs, buy a house and relocate an entire family with children, all at the same time! (And just to make it even more fun, when I was doing it we decided to throw in the delivery of a brand new baby and the selling of our old house in there as well.) That right there is enough to drive any man insane. It brings to mind this famous passage (famous at least to the founders of this blog anyway) from Stephen Wright’s tour de force novel Going Native – a description we’ve always thought was gut-bustingly hilarious of a man (owner of a small-time motel) trying to juggle too many competing responsibilities and thoughts at one time:

The basic problem, as ever, was holding it all together in his head -- the guests, the employees, the paperwork, the family -- as if he were this ludicrous white-faced buffoon balancing on a bulbous red nose a towering superstructure of tables and chairs while being pelted by gaily colored tennis balls and rich cream pies as a barking seal attempted to scale the teetering for the set of bicycle horns at its peak to peck out with glistening mammalian snout, for the edification and entertainment of the adoring upturned mob, a recognizable rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel."

Whoo boy… cracks me up every time! Anyway, we’ve basically both been totally snowballed with work and family responsibilities and have had trouble keeping up… but soon I will be posting again and kick-starting the engines. The reading and film-viewing has continued on unabated of course (as the side column has shown), and to paraphrase Dylan Thomas paraphrasing an Irish folk tale, “we’d be damned fools if it didn’t.”

We shall return soon… never fear! Can anyone else hear the collective sigh of relief of thousands of blog readers across the country??

Duke Altum's Poetry Workshop (Poem of the Week #47)

Nothing like putting yourself out on a limb... well, for this week's Poem of the Week I've decided to try something different. The author of the poem featured is none other than yours truly. I'll pause politely to allow time for laughter...

...thank you. Seriously, by now it's no surprise to readers of this blog that I've got a deep interest in poetry, both as a reader and, in my more confident/foolish moments, a writer. I enjoy the process and the challenge of writing poetry -- whether or not I meet that challenge is something I am certainly not qualified, nor sufficiently objective, to judge. But it's almost besides the point. I say 'almost' because no one who writes poetry sets out to write bad poetry -- if one were to be satisfied with that, one has no business writing or expressing anything! And yet, I honestly don't find myself worrying about whether or not my poems reach an audience beyond myself and maybe a few of those I am close to. For me, at least in this stage in my life, the challenge of writing a few decent lines -- and the thrill that comes along with the suspicion that you might, just might, have actually done so -- is enough to keep me coming back to the pen and the paper (actually, the keyboard, if we're telling the truth... but somehow that doesn't sound as, well, poetic).

Whether I've done so or not with this poem, I can't say... but then that's one of the reasons why I wanted to post it. My idea here is to throw it up here as a "work in progress," much like Mutt's unedited novel excerpts (notice the glaring lack of quotes there Mutt!), and see if I can't elicit some free constructive feedback from TST's legion of faithful readers.

So without further ado or annoying commentary, here is the raw first draft of a new poem I've been composing in my head, and then on paper, for the last few days. It originates from a very tragic accident that occurred in a town just down the road from ours over the past weekend. I don't want to say anything more about it, by way of introduction, than that. With any luck, the poem itself will say what it has to say (although its subject is, by nature, pretty opaque!).

I invite comments, constructive criticism, questions or suggestions for improvement from whoever's interested...

*******

Theodicy

The very properties of the ice
that failed to support the small boys,
whose combined final tally of years
barely stretched across two decades,
seem to apply to the arguments
claiming that the same God
Whose breath buffets the sparrow’s wing
wasn’t somehow looking away
when the younger brother
(ignoring his mother’s explicit warning)
stepped out onto the water’s beckoning surface
on that ashen afternoon.

Painfully brittle.
Shockingly cold.
Human reasoning, like pond ice,
shatters easily under the slightest pressure.

Whatever praises we might express
for the foolhardy bravery
of the older brother’s attempted rescue
are instantly numbed silent
as hope’s tenuous structure shatters
and the hyperborean flood of death
engulfs the heart, stopping it cold in mid-beat.

I have sons too, and I know
my faith in that same God
Whose breath buffets the sparrow’s wing
offers me, just as it offered
these precious boys’ hapless parents,
no blessed assurances
that the world’s ubiquitous sufferings
will spare them.
Yet their very presence scintillates
my life with miracle every day,
bearing witness to transcendent graces.
As surely the Robinson brothers' did
for those who knew and loved them --
whether it was acknowledged or
(God forbid)
realized only in hindsight,
in a winter morning’s awful clarity.

(For Jarris Robinson, age 8, who drowned on 2/11/07 in Cambridge, MD, after falling through thin ice on a pond -- and Aaron Robinson, age 12, who also drowned when he tried to rescue his brother. Recquiescat in pace Dei. And for their parents.)

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 32

Teaser: Chapter 3, "A Secret Revealed, Letter from Texas"

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of the novel, in draft, unrevised format. Hope the reader enjoys!

Greta rose at six o’clock exactly, the alarm jarring her from a fitful sleep swollen with incoherent dreams, dark forms, unspoken fears. She glanced over at the rumpled bedclothes where her husband of five months had slept, rising at 5:15 or so and taking consideration not to wake her. Greta had heard him when he first pulled himself out of bed and hunted around for his things in the dark, but quickly fell back asleep. Having grown up in the house in relatively close quarters, she was accustomed to blotting out its noises until it was actually time for her day to begin.
The first thing she heard after the alarm’s bells saved her from her dreams’ fogginess – only to replace it with a physical fatigue – was the low growl of her father’s gravelly voice already expressing indignation over something to her mother. A sigh escaped from Greta’s lips. How many of her days had started out in a similar fashion? What would it take to make her father into a happy, satisfied person? She’d been asking herself this question for a long time, so there was no reason to think there might be an answer forthcoming. The only question to which there might be an answer was that of what he was railing about on this particular morning. It could have been any number of things – the financial status of his two businesses, The Golden Room and the new auto service station, for example. Or the election results from earlier in the week, which certainly troubled everyone in the house, with the possible exception of her younger sisters. But something about the tone of his voice even as it came up through the stairway and the framework of the house told her right away it was even more serious – serious enough to make those other considerations seem trivial.
She rose then, quickly, and without bothering to turn on the lamp on the bedside table – the eastern sky was lightening from black to a bruised gray, and Greta always preferred the use of whatever natural light was available. She pulled some clothing out from their dresser and a tiny closet, and padded into the bathroom. She washed her face, showered, and brushed her teeth with a firm sense of purpose, preparing herself ardently for a day she knew would require little of her. This was one of the numerous things in her new life that it was taking time to get used to: she was back in her parents’ home, and they ran it. Her mother, of course, had the maintenance of the daily routine firmly in hand. Greta was no longer supporting herself, she had no job, there were no children yet – in fact, she had no particular or specific function in terms of the domestic operation in which she found herself. Yet Greta Brogan was not one to lay around and remain idle. She began every day early, at 6 a.m., as though there was much to be done – she would make herself useful one way or another.
So this was how each day always began in the Heinricks household – her father ranting, holding court in his business suit with his coffee and sometimes his King James Bible as a prop if the matter was of a moral nature and he needed visual reinforcement. Her mother at work already, cooking, grinding coffee beans, washing dishes, clothes, meat, vegetables, anything. Things had almost always been like this – but not quite. Greta could remember a time – was haunted by it, in fact – before her family lived in this house, maybe even before her sisters were born, when they lived in the tiny, ramshackle farmhouse she was born in, and the tone of mornings was different. This would have been in 1906, 1907. She would wake up in her own room in her own bed, frequently shivering in the poorly-heated home and her threadbare blankets, but her ears would be met with a masculine voice accompanied by music. Her parents would be talking and laughing with one another most mornings, her mother preparing a breakfast, her father reading the newspaper, while in the background melodies by Liszt or Beethoven would drift throughout the house warmly from that old Victrola that Heinricks had bought one year for Ilse for Christmas. Greta would come down wrapped in her blanket to sit by the fire in that miniscule living room while her parents spoke to one another and her mother served biscuits with fresh preserves she had made herself …. they had so much less then, Greta seemed to recall, but seemed much more contented than they ever had been later, as her father’s business endeavors became more successful, demanding more and more of his time …. it was an ironic truth that Greta always held inside of herself afterwards.
Now Greta descended the creaking stairs to the kitchen as she heard the water pipes in the house creaking and moaning, indicating that her twin sisters were also beginning to rise. They were still in their last year at the high school, and had to be off by 7:30 at the latest. Greta walked in to find her mother and father both seated at the table with their hands touching cups of coffee, her father gazing out the window at some fixed location in the backyard, her mother looking at the floor. A familiar tension hovered in the room, lingering like a scent. Greta recognized this immediately: a matter of shared concern, but disparate opinions over how it should best be handled. On the table in front of her father was an envelope. She knew who it was from without being able to see the writing on it. Now she understood the tone in her father’s ranting voice earlier that had assaulted her ears as she rose to meet the morning.
‘Good morning,’ Greta said to her parents politely, attempting to partially temper the mood with conviviality and good manners.
‘Good morning, dear,’ said her mother, because that’s how one responded to such things. Her father turned his eyes towards his eldest, saying nothing. Greta saw the heat in them, knew what was coming, but she was ready for it. If one allowed him to, her father could scowl a morning into a fetal position in the corner before it ever got the chance to decide if it was going to be a pleasant day or not. God knew Greta had seen so many days in their house begin this way when she was younger, by virtue of the simple fact that her father was frustrated or angry about something. The trick was not to allow him to sabotage the mood of a day so completely and so early. The way to do it was to take his indignation – whatever the cause – in stride, casually, calmly. This helped put whatever was bothering him into some sort of perspective, and often he would react accordingly, whether he was conscious of it or not, by calming down. As a girl and a young teenager, Greta could not accomplish this herself, but after so many years of watching her mother do it, she learned the same skill, and by her early adulthood, much to her father’s annoyance, she had it down. It was useful enough, sometimes, with her own husband as well. It was one of the numerous ways a wise wife could rescue a whole day from the clutches of a husband’s nervousness or despair, simply by refusing to let a morning be derailed. And yet it was always the women whom the men called hysterical and emotionally unbalanced.
She met her father’s gaze momentarily, but for long enough to show him that she was prepared for whatever it was he might throw at her. She did not know if he was upset about the letter or if the very presence of it had brought him back to a subject that caused him embarrassment and pain. Greta glanced over at her mother again, who had her own eyes now fixated on her husband, waiting to hear whatever he was going to say.
No one said anything more, however, so Greta moved over to the counter and pulled down a white ceramic coffee mug from the cabinet. She picked up the carafe of coffee that her mother set out daily for them all and, moving towards her parents, offered to fill their cups first. Both refused silently: her father with a flash of his withered hand, her mother with a simple shake of the head. Greta returned to the counter and poured into her own cup, leaving some for her younger sisters. Everyone in their household loved coffee, especially the way Ilse made it.
Suddenly Heinricks broke the silence.
‘It’s for you.’
Greta turned and saw that he was holding out the envelope in her direction. It was sealed. She reached up after a moment and took it from him, and put it on the counter next to her.
‘You didn’t open it this time,’ she said evenly. The previous letter to arrive for her from Peter had reached her with its contents already scrutinized, several weeks before. It had led to extended arguments between father and daughter, with occasional intervention by Ilse to dampen the intensity of certain exchanges concerning the moral validity of someone – a father or not – reading someone else’s mail.
‘You can thank your husband for that,’ Heinricks answered, with no small degree of bitterness.
‘He told you not to?’ Greta asked him, surprised.
Heinricks drained his cup and stood, his eyes not moving from his daughter’s, the grooves in the aging skin around them seeing to deepen more from one moment to the next. Standing in front of one another, their eyes nearly met. Ilse watched them from her chair, marveling once again over the fact that her daughter had grown to more or less match her father’s height, rather than her own more diminished stance. Yet it was the way their respective wills, their passions, aligned – and therefore constantly collided – that was far more mysterious and, on certain occasions, jarring to Ilse Heinricks.
‘He found a way to express his point of view,’ he said. He stood before Greta for another moment, and his expression was something close to an accusation. Greta resented this: that he seemed to be ‘blaming’ her for the fact that Walter had expressed a point of view – and she doubted he had done so in a direct, offensive manner – that didn’t suit him. Furthermore, she thought, is he had tried to point out to her father that he shouldn’t open up the letter himself, not only was he not out of line, he was right. She said this much to her father.
After this she watched the familiar blaze flare up one again in the blue eyes that aligned so closely with her own.
‘I don’t much take to people who try to tell me how to run my family life in my own house,’ Heinricks intoned steadily, his tone its own warrant – not loud, only clear and cold. ‘Just as I don’t take to a son of mine not having the guts to tell me himself exactly what the devil he is doing with his life. I much prefer to confront problems directly. But you can damn well be sure that if my own son lacks the courage to keep me informed of his intentions, but can confide in his sister, I am going to find them out any way I can. I have a right to know.’
Greta listened to this, watching him, feeling the pressure of his indignation almost physically, like something or someone pushing on her shoulders. It was a familiar sensation. She thought for a moment, gripping the coffee cup with her slender hands, feeling its warmth.
Then she said, ‘Since you feel that way, why didn’t you open it?’
There was a long silence. Then her father simply said to her, ‘Just tell me what he is doing, if he has told you. Can you manage that?’ And with that, he strode out of the room. Within moments Greta and Ilse heard the front door open and slam shut.
The kitchen was now filled with the ashen light of the dreary morning, and the air seemed to have grown colder. Then twin voices of Greta’s younger sisters, prattling about something relevant only to seventeen-year-olds still in school, carried into the room from above. At any moment one or both of them would burst into the room in all of their quaint ignorance.
‘Heaven save us, but one of you is someday going to strangle the other.’
This was Ilse’s comment, sitting compactly in her chair, looking at her daughter as if she were someone she didn’t know.
Greta chuckled wryly. Some of the tension she had been feeling without realizing it seemed to ease slightly upon hearing her mother speak. But she still felt weight, pressure. Her father was a difficult man to make happy, and a difficult man to go up against in anything. She knew.
‘Walter was right, and he knows it.’
Ilse paused for a moment, and took one more glance out the back window. Greta saw the deep furrows around her eyes and forehead watched her rough, unfeminine hands grip one another on the surface of the table. They did not fidget. They simply lay in wait for whatever job the day would require of them next.
‘Of course he does,’ her mother said. Then she stood up and went to the counter next to her eldest child. Without speaking again she pulled a large iron skillet from one of the lower cabinets and placed it on the range. She turned the dial for the gas, lit the flame with a wooden match, and withdrew a side of bacon from the refrigerator while the iron surface gradually conducted the heat from the blue fire.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 31

Mutt's Output Taking a Beating

Looking at the blog history I can see it's been over two months now since I have posted in this journal. Unfortunately, right now I am having trouble keeping pace with not only the journal but with working on the novel itself at the level I hoped, but it's no surprise, and to some extent I expected to be working slowly right now. This is due to a series of rapid-fire changes of great magnitude in my personal life, including the departure from one full-time job, the initiation of another in another state, and the process of searching for a home. Later on, God willing, my family and I will have purchased said home and will be enduring the long and painful moving process, from New Jersey into Pennsylvania. All this adds up to a serious hiatus in any kind of steady effort on the novel I am attempting to write, and my main fear is losing momentum or not being able to recover my pace after all of these major life changes have taken place and are in the past. I am attempting to revisit the novel from time to time, either to work on the writing a little bit here and there or review portions that I have already written. Right now, I am working on the third chapter of the novel, which I originally thought was only part of the way completed in draft. But as I will explain below, I have been considering some structural changes that may make this chapter a shorter one, which means I may be able to get Chapter 3 done sooner and be able to move on to a fourth chapter.

Chapter 3 Almost Complete?

I began writing Chapter 3 in early Deceember of the immediate past year. I did manage to get a handful of 'scenes' completed before my progress hit a snag, or a series of snags, mentioned above. Somewhere I may have mentioned an early tentative title for the chapter, but I think it has changed since then, and I can now reveal with relative certainty, at least for the moment, that the chapter's title is "A Secret Revealed, Letter from Texas". My early plan for the chapter was to fit in many major sequences that carried on the storyline on several fronts. But as I worked on the first few scenes, it started to dawn on me that I was possibly trying to cram too much into one chapter and that I might need to break up what I had originally envisioned for chapter 3 into Chapters 3 and 4. The downside to that approach is that because there is a lot I want to write about in these chapters, enough to divide them into two, the story will remain fixed around the first half of the 1920s for two more chapters before moving ahead in time to 1927 or so, probably in Chapter 5. My concern is that I want to make my way eventually through not only the rest of the 1920s, but also the 1930s and early 40s before the novel is done, and I don't want to take too much time getting there. Also I don't want the story to seem 'bunched up' in the 20s to begin with, only to give the appearance of impatience later on by rushing through the subsequent years more rapidly. Nonetheless, I do feel that there are important scenes and ideas that I want to flesh out at this stage that will require more than one chapter. Hence the decision to split Chapter 3 into Chapters 3 and 4. I don't know if any of this makes sense to anyone else, but it does to me.

Hints on Chapter 3 and Even More Nebulous Hints on Chapter 4

What will happen in Chapters 3 and 4? I can give a better picture of Chapter 3 right now, obviously, but I don't want to give too much away. And Chapter 4 is sort of loosely forming in my mind but would be subject to a lot of changes as I begin writing it later on. Having said all that, here are some hints on what will go down in the story. In Chapter 3 we are brought forward to November 1924, immediately after the presidential election and also the gubernatorial election in Indiana. In a frightening development, the Ku Klux Klan's hand-picked candidate, Edward Jackson, has won the governor's seat. The Klan is at the height of its power in Indiana and many other places. Walter Brogan feels increased internal pressure to do something or tell someone about his personal encounter with the Klan on his wedding night as revealed in Chapter 1. Then an instrusion at his workplace of a more subtle nature compels him into revealing his secret for the first time, but to a party the reader might not necessarily expect. A new character is introduced here. Meanwhile, the Heinricks family is dealing with the startling revelation that their son/brother Peter has taken himself off the career path his father has envisioned and is pursuing a risky career opportunity in the Texas oil fields. This is the area of Texas that later on will become what was known as 'The Black Giant".

In Chapter 4, Walter Brogan, having confided his story to a trusted party, begins to contemplate cources of action. Greta Brogan adjusts more to life back under her parents' roof and will have a run-in with her old suitor turned lawyer, Myron Devreaux, who is trying to position himself for a grab for political power at a young age. Finally, we will see Walter Brogan consult his father-in-law for advice on the whole Klan matter, and the counsel he receives will be something of a surprise to him and, perhaps, to the reader.

All will be revealed as the story progresses - unfortunately, that progress will probably continue to be hampered by the instrusions of 'real life' - but I am determined to keep the novel alive and moving forward, however slowly. Stay tuned!

Literaturubersicht (or, Some Thoughts on German Literature from a Totally Unqualified, but Interested, Consumer)

Literaturubersicht means "literature survey" in German. And yes, I did have to look it up.

What the heck is this post all about? It's simple really. It just so happens (if you look at the right hand column, you'll see) that, as sheer chance would have it, Mutt and I both happen to be reading novels from German writers at the same time. (For the record, some may think that we consult each other first about what we're reading, or try to synchronize it somehow... and though we are definitely book-dorks enough to do that, we usually don't. Each of us are on our own separate reading trajectories, and rarely if ever consciously try to have them intersect. Occasionally it does happen on its own though, obviously.) Anyway, we got to talking about German writers -- which ones are important to read for anyone interesting in world literature, what they might be getting at, what the common themes are, etc. -- and I thought it might make an interesting topic for a post, even though I (as my title indicates) have actually not read much of it.

The most famous and celebrated German writer of our time is unquestionably the Nobel laureate Gunter Grass. Mutt is reading one of his lesser-known novels right now, Local Anaesthetic. I'll let him comment on that particular book if he'd like to, maybe in response to this post or in his own posting. But it sounds on a general level like another surreal-type novel in which Grass uses symbolism and fantasy to explore the political and cultural confusion in post-Nazi Germany. Mutt and I have talked about Grass' work before, after I picked up a used copof his short novel The Meeting at Telgte for him and he promptly burned through it. I think way back when this blog first started he posted about it, if memory serves. And since we're both very interesting in world literature in general and the work of Nobel laureates in particular, we've also talked about a few more books of his, most notably the novel he is most famous for, The Tin Drum. I have both of these books on my shelves and plan to read them at some point before I exit the stage...

But for my own right, I thought it might be interesting, before reading Grass, to go back and read some of the significant works of German literature from earlier periods, in part so that I would know something of the books that must have had at least some influence on the great Nobel laureate's body of work. I've explored literature from other countries and cultures before, but curiously, not the German one. I say "curiously" because I myself am half-German, and while I've read plenty of literature and other writing from Ireland (the other half), I know almost nothing about German creative writing. This seems like sort of a gaping and conspicuous hole in my own reading, and it's one I aim to patch up. As part of that effort, I decided to try my hand at another German Nobel laureate, Thomas Mann, and am currently working my way through one of his recognized masterpieces (he has a few of them, depending on who you ask!), The Magic Mountain.

A few years ago I read a book that was about educating oneself through the reading of classics (for the record, the book was Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind). One of the points Wise Bauer made in that book, that has stayed with me ever since, was the importance of reading chronologically. In other words, she thinks that, if you want to read the classics in order to educate yourself, it's best to start with the ancient writers, such as the Greek and Roman playwrights and poets, and work your way up the timeline. The reason for this is pretty simple and makes a lot of sense: picking up on a theme she learned from the noted literary critic Mortimer Adler, Wise Bauer points out that all truly great writers are aware of the literary tradition that precedes them, and in most cases they are reacting in some way to it, or are conscious of it enough to allude to it directly and indirectly in their own work. And you can't fully understand a work of a writer unless you know something of the work that inspired him, or her. Anyone can read and get a lot out of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, but imagine how much more informed one's reading of it would be if they were at least somewhat familiar with the writings of his own literary hero (both within and outside of the epic poem!), Virgil? For one obvious thing, it might clear up that nagging question that most modern readers are confronted with from pretty much the second canto on: why is Virgil his guide? Anyway, this is a digression... but the point is, reading the classics is in some sense, or should be (according to this view), a cumulative enterprise -- each period's work informs the next, even as it comments on the previous one.

Now I don't think most people have the time or inclination to adhere to such a rigorous programme strictly (unless they're in some kind of formal classics program or something), and I know I certainly don't... in one sense it takes the fun out of "reading all over the map," a favorite pastime of Mutt's and mine... but the concept has stayed with me, and I have found myself trying to go back and read some of the earlier works first, or, if I know I'm interested in reading a MAJOR classic and want to understand it better, I might go and read some of the books that might have influenced its author first. Case in point: one of the reasons I wanted to read Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is that I know it was an important work for, and was very much in the mind of, Cervantes during the composition of Don Quixote de la Mancha (which of course in itself is a hugely influencial work... see the accumulation?).

It may seem like I'm veering way off-topic here, but stay with me... this is the thinking that, in part, went into my picking up Mann's weighty philosophical novel. (Another reason, again speaking of writers influencing writers influencing readers, is that I knew it was a favorite book of Walker Percy's, who is in turn a favorite of mine... whew! this gets you dizzy after a while...) I knew I was interested in reading Grass, and also the work of another modern German writer and Nobel Prize-winner (Heinrich Boll), but I just felt I had no real understanding at all of, for the lack of a better way to put it, the German literary soul.

So it gets me to thinking, what are some of the other indispensable works of German literature that any halfway-serious student of world literature could not avoid reading? A few obvious choices jumped into my mind at this question, but only a scant few: the works of Goethe (most notably Faust, but also The Sorrows of Young Werther and maybe some of his poetry as well), Thomas Mann of course, the famous playwright Berthold Brecht, and of course everyone's favorite God-denying, half-insane intellectual, Frederich Nietzche. Around the time I started thinking about this, Mutt had lent me an issue of The New Yorker, and in it there was an article by the noted Czech writer Milan Kundera in which he, in speaking of world literature, points out that Franz Kafka identified himself also as a German writer, even though he was from another country altogether (obviously he wrote in the German tongue). I thought that was an interesting bit of information, but it also struck me how knowing that would have to color and shape one's understanding of Kafka's mysterious and magnificent work.

After thinking about it a little more, I realized that there were other German works and writers that would seem to be indispensable in any survey of the literary works emerging from that culture. Hermann Hesse would have to be added to the list, although I think (I haven't confirmed it) that he was of Swiss origin... but certainly books like Siddhartha and Steppenwolf have to be considered modern classics of the German language. And then there are the philosophers (yes, Nietzche ought to be in this category too, but some of his works border on philosophic literature -- Thus Spake Zarathustra, for example, or even Ecce Homo, his memoir-of-sorts) -- Germany is so well-known for its philosophical, analytical mind that it would be virtually impossible to exclude the writings of the Schopenhauer, Kant and Heidegger, among others. (I know for a fact that Mann's writings were profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer.)

And of course, there is one other towering giant of German literature, someone whose shadow looms hugely and profoundly over the landscape of modern poetry: Rainer Maria Rilke. Other than maybe Goethe, I think one would be hard-pressed to name a better candidate for the title of "greatest German poet." Forget "German" -- I think Rilke is among the greatest poets the world has ever produced!

I would love to one day be able to say that I have read at least something from every one of these authors mentioned... to do so would be to gain some kind of knowledge of German literary culture, which, when you look at the big picture, is among the most profound and creative humankind has produced. It would also, possibly, help me to understand something about my own soul/heritage!

Mutt and I were reflecting on the interesting fact that each culture seems to have something unique and fascinating to contribute to world literature, and that while of course themes repeat and overlap, there is a certain spirit and mood in, say, Icelandic or Russian or African literature that you simply will not find elsewhere. And each culture is wrestling with its own particular demons (Mutt knows, mostly through reading Grass, something about Germany's ghosts and goblins!), which is fascinating also. I think about how my life and my knowledge/awareness of the range and scope of human experience (so much greater than the limited scope of my own will ever be) would be enhanced and enriched through the literature of foreign cultures, and it makes me want to plunder the Alexandrian library of the world, and partake of its riches before they too blow away as ashes in the wind.