Ben Camino's Unfortunate Fall:
A Reading List in the Wan Light of Isolation, 2020
Ben Camino is reading a lot these days. He walks, of course. Sometimes even runs. Although an injury and some pleurisy are making that more difficult in the cold, wet air of late-Autumn. So his long meditative walkruns (thus his name, Blessed Road or Good Walk) are a bit shorter, rather like these mid-November days.
He watches sports, too. Well, he watches the highlights after the games are over. He especially likes watching the highlights of the good old days when the Houston Astros were champions, and cheating was something that the Yankees and Dodgers did, only less successfully than the Houston boys. Sorry non-baseball fans.
And, yes, he writes. But lately too much of his time has been spent writing to lawyers and doctors and the people his father warned him about and not enough time writing about the important things. Important things like why "spirituality" is not necessarily a good thing, and why contemporary Christian concepts of "community" are mostly pagan and probably a kind of viral infection to avoid rather than a an ideal to strive after, and, most important, why there are so many of the people his father warned him about. And why bridge building, too, can be over-rated (given the obvious fact that bridges hide trolls and Orwellian pigs).
But hey, you breathe in so you can breathe out, right? Well, OK, I'm not really a student of the respiratory system, so just go along with me on that one. I mean, you rest so you can be active, right? And you eat so you can . . . . Well you know what happens eventually after you eat. And you read, to some degree at least, so you can write. Unless you are one of those people who write without thinking. Journalists and such who write for this "newsfeed" I get on my computer every time I log in. By thinking, I mean reading. So I say, eat some books and see how you do. Even if all you do is writing about what you are reading. Which brings me to this epistle from deep in the . . . books.
This will be probably not be an exhaustive list of what I'm reading, but I'm sure, nonetheless, it will be exhausting for you dear reader. I have a friend who hates it when any writer, especially me, directly addresses his or her "dear reader," dear reader, so I try to do it as often as I can as a way of saying to her, get your own damn blog, person my father warned me about. Also, what exactly do you hate about the nineteenth century? I love the nineteenth century. All I ever wanted to be when I grew up was Wilkie Collins.
My books can be divided up into three categories. No not poetry, biography, and graphic novels. Different categories, dear reader. These, to be precise:
1.) Books I'm reading for the first time (and deciding along the way if they are worth reading at all).
2.) Books I'm reading again (and deciding along the way if they are really what I thought they were the previous time or times).
3.) Books I know well but can't stay away from. With these, I more dive in than read through. Perhaps I dive straight to the underlined or marked passages, perhaps just wherever the book opens, perhaps I start on the page number of what day of the year it is . That would be page 323 for today. "Seek for the sword that was broken: / In Imladris it dwells" (FOTR, 323). Don't get me started on Boromir; I might get weepy. But, in truth, if it's Tolkien, I read straight through (and slowly savor the underlined passages, except the passages of Yodaspeak, which I underline for reasons other than admiration).
My reading list is an eclectic group of books. I know, I know. That's just a fancy way of saying jumbled. And jumbled is just a fancy way of saying mixed up. Of course, another reason I read so many different things is to enrich my vocabulary. What a language we have. Cluster, exacerbate (it's embarrassing the way my sister pronounces that one), crush, wan, eclectic, texture. What a language. Did I mention italicized? I use that a lot if you haven't noticed. The practice, not the word.
Well, here are some of the books I'm reading now, although I'm sure I will run out of space and steam before I mention all of them. I probably won't mention Bonhoeffer, who is always near by. Or the fact that I've always got Wordsworth's The Prelude on the floor next to my bed so I can just dive in and be lulled to sleep by blank verse from a person I like who isn't really telling a story I need to follow. A former friend suggested I should just listen to it on audiobooks. Not until I can find someone who reads it better than I do, dear reader.
Here we go. Group #s refer to my list above. Grades are purely subjective, but should be taken as gospel truth unless you want to fall into a ditch someday, as I'm praying happens to the rest of the people my father warned me about.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954. Group 3 -- A+
I have no idea how many times I have read this. My most personal paperback copy is old, dog-eared, and full of notes and markings. Partly because I love it so. Partly because I teach it sometimes and/or write about it. That doesn't mean I think it's all equally brilliant. Sometimes Tolkien lapses into Yodaspeak. Sometimes, as in the brilliant Council of Elrond section, I think some of the members of the council must have been reduced to facepalming all through the "this is the doom that we must deem" talk (or is it the deem that we must doom?). Still, it's an amazing book. I'm almost done with it, sadly. Galadriel is saying goodbye to everyone and sounding all ominous (what a language!), although not nearly as weird as the Galadriel dreamed up by Peter Jackson and Cate Blanchett. As far as I'm concerned, they may as well have been George Lucas and Jar Jar Binks. And yes, I think it is far and away the best of the three (or best two of the six, if you must), so I have read it many more times than the rest of LOTR.
Virgil, The Aeneid, 19 B.C. (incomplete). Group 3 -- A+
I used to teach this wonderful epic but World Literature got too crowded to do both this and the Odyssey and Antigone, so with great pain, I gouged this out of my syllabus. Of course, I don't teach anything anymore, at least not officially, not at present. But I would happily lead a reading/discussion group of this baby, as long as everyone else would just shut up and let me say smart things. Augustine hated the Aeneid after his conversion. Which is to say, Augustine loved this before his conversion. I think he was a dullard (lovely word) to think so and say so. It was precisely the passionate response he had once upon a time to the heartbreaking Dido story in the Aeneid that he desired his readers to have to the heartbreaking Augustine story in the Confessions. THIS IS WHERE HE LEARNED HOW TO BREAK OUR HEARTS! I'm reading Robert Fitzgerald's translation. I've also read Fagles, Mandelbaum, and maybe another one back in the dark ages. Let me give you a tip, though. Fitzgerald has a sort of introduction to the Aeneid which he, peevishly (mmmmmm, that's the sound of me savoring language) puts at the end in what he calls a "Postscript" (403-417 in the Vintage Classics Edition). Read that. Read any translation that you want (or at least one of the three I mentioned), but. read. this. postscript. Just to know what it was like in the late 20th century before there were TED talks to read the thought of a fine scholar who was also a fine poet who wrote the finest "lecture" that you will ever read. Unless you insist, like the people my father warned me about, that TED talks all need to be about YOU and your obviously wrong ideas about what you need. If, on the other hand, your concern is near literary perfection, then you might like, wait, wait -- no, you might cherish Fitzgerald's postcript/preface. He concludes, fully confident I think, that his own intellect and imagination has captured the shimmer of deeply felt and deeply educated human consciousness: "At the core of it [The Aeneid] is respect for the human effort to build, to sustain a generous polity -- against heavy odds. Mordantly and sadly it suggests what the effort may cost, how the effort may fail. But as a poem it is carried onward victoriously by its own music" (417)." Mmmmmm.
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoot & Leaves, 2003. Group 1 -- A.
I said this list was eclectic, alright? If you are an editor, if you are a writer, if you are a reader, heck if you are literate, how can you not resort to rhetorical questions like "how can you not love this book?"? [My two question marks are a Trussian problem to be savored, I hope]. It is wicked funny and oh-so-knowing about what it knows well. And, best of all, it's about punctuation. It's been sitting around on my shelf for a long time, and, for some dumb reason I never read it. Probably because I thought it was just a joke book. The title is the punch line of a great joke, after all. Lynne Truss (I hope that's her real name) is a great example of a popular writer who is brainy, witty, and sometimes dazzlingly funny. And the quotations she has collected supposedly to make her points but, frankly, just to riff on are worth the time alone I spent drinking coffee on the sunlit porch one Saturday afternoon. A secret: I am obliged to love anyone who loves punctuation. And I will fight to the death her right to say things like this: "The comma has so many jobs as a "separator" that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory 'woof' to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom. Commas, if you don't whistle at them to calm down, are unstoppably enthusiastic at this job" (American edition, 79). As is Lynne Truss. I love this book inordinately. Almost as much as I love the word inordinately.
Timothy Radcliffe OP, What is the Point of Being a Christian, 2006. Group 1 -- C.
This book wearied me. Perhaps in 2006, when it came out, this book didn't sound as such an obvious attempt to resist the dogmatic turn in Catholic life and thought taken with the ascendency of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, to the throne of Peter. I was probably tempted to read this book (or try to do so) by the fact that Radcliffe has some pretty high recommendations and, yes, he was an Oxford Dominican, from Blackfriars. But oh my. He is all over the place, and shifty as hell. I can't tell for sure what he believes about a great number of things which one assumes might be important to a Christian moral thinker. Unless all we care about is "the journey." Of course, the process of the thinking is important, but, again, Radcliffe continually points us to the narrative, to the encounter, to conversation, to . . . . something other than "the point" (see . . . his title). So much so, that I began pretty early to wonder if he thought there was any point to point to other than the process. But, I've read enough people for whom moral thinking is all journey and no dogma to know that they eventually can get pretty damn dogmatic about that. He travels the world, talking to all kinds of people, who believe all kinds of things, and . . . . Well, I'm not sure what comes next, exactly. We need to "resist" the powers that keep us from honest conversation. Good. But, at the same time, disagreement with someone else (which I assume is necessary and oftentimes a moral good, even a moral necessity) always seems to be characterized as some kind of hardening of the spiritual arteries. Oh, friends, let's not argue, let's just build bridges, shall we? And then boom: we are back to another quote from William Blake or Emily Dickinson (both of whom I love by the way, just not when I'm still waiting to find out what "the point of being a Christian" is). I suppose the problem I have can be seen most clearly in the third paragraph of his conclusion in which Radcliffe satirizes his younger, naïve self as incessantly asking his Dominican superiors about the truths of the faith, and they wanted, instead to talk about football. This bothered him then. But that was his mistake, apparently. Now, he realizes what wise Buddhas (not his word) they were since "our statements about God are only understandable in the context of lives that are pointed to God." Fine, I say. Have we pointed yet? Have we got the point? When are we going to point? Are we ready for those statements about God? If not, when will be "pointed to God" enough to make them? Sorry to belabor the point. I find this doubletalk wearying. I guess I already said that. In truth, though, by the very next paragraph he appears to have figured things out and is ready to speak about some of those hitherto unspeakable propositions: "the challenge for the Church is to become the sort of community that speaks convincingly about God, which is to say a place of mercy and mutual delight, of joy and freedom." Hmmmmm (not to be confused with the Mmmmmm of savoring). Add justice, and holiness, and discipline, and good, hard, clear thinking about what mercy, mutual delight, joy, and freedom really mean, and I'll take you seriously. Otherwise, sounds like Woodstock.
Martin Buber, I and Thou, 1923 (English trans. 1937). Group 3 -- A+
I know I sound like a hypocrite because if Radcliffe is vague, Buber is sometimes incomprehensible. The difference is that Buber is a philosopher and a non-Christian. He is, in fact, a Jewish existentialist philosopher who popularized the work of the Eastern European Hasidim in the West. And he makes a contribution to a long philosophical discussion about the individual consciousness or ego and its relation to . . . everything else. His work is often more of an poem than discourse. It is often baffling and, to me, frustrating. Until it isn't. Or even when it is, you realize that you are reading something that shook up the way we understood personhood. And it can, at least it did with me, shake up the way I saw my own personhood. In short, Descartes was half right which means he was half wrong. And when you are half wrong about ultimate things, you might be completely wrong. I am "I" in the fullest sense not so much when I think and objectify and categorize a tree, another human, even a numinous experience as an "It," but when I come into relation with a field of wheat, a child, or a divine presence as "Thou." It's way better than I have described. And more baffling (mmmmmm). I can understand why some people can't read this book. On the other hand, it could be the source of so many potential tattoos if you'd give it a chance and if your tattoo artist could figure out how to illustrate things like: "All real living is meeting" and "In the beginning is relation."
The Kennedy Wit, edited by Bill Adler, 1964. Group 1 -- B.
I had seen this book sitting on a shelf somewhere in my house for a couple of decades or so (haha) and finally realized sometime in October, that I might need it to survive. I devoured it. Laughed occasionally, smiled often, and tried to remember the last time a president or even a presidential candidate or even a vice-presidential candidate actually said something witty, which I define as something smart with wings. The closest I could come was Lloyd Bentsen's retort to Dan Quayle (in another century) -- "Senator, I knew John Kennedy and you are no John Kennedy." Not really very good, but relevant to this book. Let me just say this about that -- I don't require a witty president; we have other, more pressing, issues to face. BUT, I do require witty humans. So, in that way, I miss "the Kennedy wit." By the way, "Let me just say this about that" is the go to phrase in my awesome impression of John Kennedy. The secret is adding an uhhh before the just, turning the s into an sh, and stretching that into two syllables. So: Let me uhhh jusht shay thish about thay-ut. Go ahead, try it. It has a kind of Gerard Manley Hopkins lilt to it if you get it right.
At a White House dinner, honoring Nobel Prize Winners: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House--with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Speaking on the 1960 campaign trail in Pennsylvania, the year the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series: "I'm glad to be here, because I feel a sense of kinship with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Like my candidacy, they were not given much chance in the spring."
**As predicted, Ben has exhausted himself, despite what undoubtedly to his readers must seem his inexhaustible desire to use words self-referentially, italicizing them by no rule known to editorial offices anywhere on the planet. Here is a list of other books I am in the middle of, just finished, just finishing, or just starting. With brief comments. I may come back and deal with these in more depth. Or I may stay exhausted. That's why you want to read my stuff, because you never knew when it will be the last of my mad ravings against the even madder world.
Karl Rahner, The Mystical Way in Everyday Life (original German publication, 1966; trans. 2010). Group 1. Way better than I expected from this heavyweight of Catholic liberal theology. Key phrase, "everyday life." Pastoral tone.
Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, 2002. Group 1. Botton is an acquired taste, and I haven't yet. He's incredibly well-read, incredibly artsy, and, to me, rather hollow at the core. I also don't love his idiosyncrasies the way I love those of other writers I love. I haven't given up though. I still have to read the chapter "On the Sublime," the one I am most looking forward to reading.
Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race, 2017. Group 1. This book I'm reading slowly. One thing I really like about it is the distance. It's about race of course, but primarily documenting racism in the UK, which is both the same and different than what has been and is racism in other places (most notably, the USA). The historical documentation is rather weak, and that's usually a problem for me in a book which intends to provide a historical argument. On the other hand, as she says, the records are flimsy and more difficult to come by for the things she is trying to document. Another problem, of course, is that some of her discussion points (white feminism, anti-racism) flow directly from her argument yet have been used out of context in ways that may not be just. This is an area I'm thinking about, and to anyone who wants to tell me I'm racist for wanting to think about it further instead of blindly adopting not only the arguments of Eddo - Lodge but also the applications made of her arguments by other less nuanced social critics, welcome to the group of people my father warned me about. Let's build a bridge, shall we?
Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology, 1994. Group 1. A keeper, one that will become a Group 3 book for me. It sort of already has, because I'm dipping in and out of it re-reading favorite parts. I disagree with the author quite often. And he assumes that many of his readers will do so. Yet, I love that he takes animals, humans, and theology very seriously (at least in this book). I'm already predisposed to agree with him about (not) eating animals, about (not practicing) animal experimentation, and about a number of other important issues, but I'm not as ready as he is to see a biblical mandate for many of these same positions. On the other hand, I admire the nuanced theological basis for his positions, even when I disagree. His argument that humans are "the servant species" of creation, the imitators of the suffering God who empties Himself, is compelling and beautiful. I'm much closer to agreeing with his theological vision than I was when I started the book.
Georg Holzherr, OSB (editor and commentator), The Rule of Benedict: An Invitation to the Christian Life, 2005, 2016. Group 3. The authoritative edition of The Rule, with notes and extensive scholarly and spiritual commentary by Holzherr. Most recently published in Latin/German in 2005, translated into English by Mark Thamert, OSB. Required reading.
Alzina Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G. K. Chesterton, 1982. Group 1. For some reason, this is my first reading of Dale's biography of GKC, and it will almost certainly move to Group 3 after I'm done. I love the close attention throughout to Chesterton's political opinions and engagements. Also love her attention to his lifelong friendships with his ideological opponents like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Plus somebody else, Frances White Ewbank, has already marked it up for me. That means something to me and at least one of the Jennifers. Perhaps I will get around to writing about Frances or inviting one of the Jennifers to do so sometime soon. She, too, was an avid, curious, thoughtful reader -- as her underlinings and marginal comments show. Below is a pic of my bedraggled but beloved copy of FOTR.
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