Fencing Bear at Prayer

"The Vicar announced that they had the great good fortune to have in their midst the well-known--indeed, he dared to say, famous Canon Adelbert Holly, one of the most lively and up-to-date of our new dispensation of theologians.  [In the story, it is Christmas Eve, 1968.  The congregation is gathered in St. Cuthbert's Church, Blesford, Yorkshire.]  Canon Holly had agreed to say a few words to mark this joyous occasion.  He would speak on the meaning of the Incarnation in a time of doubt and trouble.  He would speak of things that changed, in order to remain steadfast, and not to fail. "Canon Holly creaked past Daniel's pew end, to take the pulpit.  Daniel smelled his smell, years, months, weeks, days and hours of stale smoke and exhaled tobacco.  Canon Holly, like Daniel, and also like Gideon, had put on his dog-collar.  His white hair was very long, hippy and patriarchal, even angelic.  He began, rather importantly, by saying that he knew...

"All human beings tell their life-stories to themselves, selecting and reinforcing certain memories, casting others into oblivion.  All human beings are interested in causation.  'Because I had a good Latin teacher, who caught my mind with incantatory grammar, I became a theologian, and because I chose Latin, I put aside the sciences of earth, flesh, and space.'  All human beings are interested in pure coincidence, which can act in life as surely as causation, and appear to resemble that, as though both were equally the effects of a divine putting-on.  Most of us know the flutter of the heart which comes when, out of a whole library, we put a random hand on the one necessary book , and--unerringly we should say, but what does that mean ?--open it, at the one necessary page .  In the Arabian Nights , it has been said, a man has his Destiny written on his forehead, and his character, his nature, is that Destiny and nothing else." --A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman ...

One of my most loyal blog readers (who wishes to remain anonymous) sent me this comment on yesterday's post : "It was refreshing to have a fun, positive blog to read--maybe you should concentrate on similar items more often!" To which my not-entirely-charitable knee-jerk response would necessarily be: "I would love to, if only I weren't such an Eeyore and actually felt that happy more often." Okay, okay, I'm not being fair. Because, of course, in part at least, she's right. Maybe if I wrote about happy things more often, I would feel happier more of the time, although, again, of course, that's one of the reasons that I keep this blog: more often than not, it is only in writing about the things that are upsetting me (or, perhaps more accurately, that I am upset about) that I am able to see them in a clearer light and thus feel better. (As, for example, here , when I had a rather different experience taking my puppy for a walk than I did this ...

I don't like the way I write. At least, not as much as I like the way some of my favorite authors--Barbara Newman, Elaine Scarry, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien--do. Somehow the words just never come out the way I want them to; and yet, every time I try to write in some other way, it just seems fake, not my voice at all. I could try writing like my sister , more observationally, less argumentatively, which is not to say that she doesn't make arguments, just that she is not bound as I am to make apologies (like this one) for every claim that she makes. I wish that I could write more like my friend Barbara ; if you know her work, you will know why. She is so subtle and yet so profound in the problems that she sets; you think you are reading something simply about a particular text, and before you know it, the whole structure of medieval religious thinking has been turned inside out and laid bare. Scarry is another matter altogether: she is dense and difficult right from the...