Summer reading list

Just in case any of my future students are reading this, and have not yet jotted out their list for free reading, I have some ideas.

I'm sure it may have occurred to them that the time for "free reading" is rapidly drawing to a close, because September is coming despite the perpetual-summer-feeling of this heat wave.

In my homiletics class we will have some Aristotle to read, along with St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great. I always like to look at the beautiful rhetoric of St. Gregory's Farewell Oration. My goal is to enable each student to persuade, clearly, the hearers to believe a single-sentence proposition -- a proposition that emerges from living Tradition.

Well, enough of the commercial for homiletics.

Here is a nice reading list, gentlemen, in the unlikely event that you have not compiled a better list already.

1.  Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard Weaver. Many cheap used copies are available. This book shows you how to be a conservative without being right-wing.

2.  A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (recently deceased). More beautiful modern English cannot be had.

3.  "The bear," in Go Down Moses, by William Faulkner. Possibly the best short story ever.

4.  Let Dons Delight, by Ronald Knox. I have the only copy in the Western Hemisphere, it seems. It just came in today from England: I waited three months for a used, bowed copy. This is one of the books that makes me despair of the publishing industry. I look at the stacks of landfill deposits in my Barnes and Nobles store, which is stocked like Alice's Restaurant, and can find everything that I want, provided that my wants fall within the bell-shaped curve: but I could never find this particular volume. I had to go to some odd English bookfinder to poke about in dusty stacks. A perspicacious bookworm found a 1958 volume that was discarded by one of the London libraries: the little crown octavo is bowed in the spine from poor storage and carries a scent of distant mildew. But these difficulties do not eclipse the gentle Christian satire of which Knox is the magister, who remains peerless. I wish more would write like him.

5.  Maximus the Confessor, translated by Andrew Louth, and Irenaeus of Lyons, translated by Robert Grant. I quite enjoy and admire this Routledge series of decent patristic translation. I know we don't do this in Orthodoxy, but it would be nice if we had some sort of secret fraternal society of Sts. Maximus and Irenaeus, with coder rings and everything, where over a pint we could talk either of gnostic currencies or nature, will and the five reconciliations. Something like what Charles Williams dreamt up at the end of The Descent of the Dove: a group that, for him, would meet on Corpus Christi.

6.  The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by Gerald Basil Edwards. Some people have asked me to include, for the sake of pastoral and parochial understanding, the books of "Fr. Timothy" or Marilynne Robinson's very fine Gilead in this place on the list. But I prefer Ebenezer, and I would rather a young Orthodox cleric wrestle with this account of little history on the Channel island.

I read fiction more in the evening, when my concentration flags. You already know I like Tolkien, but I'll take Dorothy Sayers, too, and Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd for a draught of pastoral. There are also Borges' spooky little stories, Kirk's ghost stories, and Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces -- which must win the prize for best title of all time.

I am breaking an old rule, which prohibits the reading of novels written within the last five years. In this exception, I am now reading Emily Alone, by my fellow Pittsburgher Stewart O'Nan. It's about an old widow whose children have moved away from her deeply personal Pittsburgh neighborhood (we have many of these in the Burgh, and they are all distinct), which is changing from her memories. She has many of the same memories I have.

I contiue to believe, as I will always, that poetry is necessary for human nature, and for communion with nature and other persons. It must be read out loud. One cannot apprehend poetry without sound. At night, when I cannot even read fiction, I will take down Muir and Eliot, Frost and Hardy, even Whitman, Auden, Robinson, Wilbur.

I would like, really like, to see a poet who writes poetry that unifies, or at least anneals, Orthodoxy and what I think is American beauty. There are good Orthodox poets today -- don't get me wrong (I think, in particular, of Scott Cairns). But I would like to see someone sing (how do you like that irony?) of the eucharistic vision of this land's genius, expunged of the industrial hectoring that smirches Whitman and Sandburg.

Frankly, I wonder whether Orthodox Americans are so boorish as a lot because they have not trained their minds on beautiful vision. They have not read enough of the Fathers, for sure, but perhaps a little Frost, a smidgeon of Auden, a little work on understanding a poem ... and a little less of cold media that forcefeeds inanity? If one looks at the seething mass of opinions, one wonders whether they can even be rated as heresy as much as mere distemper. One also wonders whether this boorishness might be healed, yes, by doctrine first, but just as much by the liberal arts.

Poetry demands harder work than philosophy. Its prizes are openhearted.

I cannot say that I more easily understand poetry the older I get -- at least, I don't think so -- but I find that I like it better. It seems that in this created world, that which is human is most durable, potentially beautiful and good. Poetry seems to find this out.

Comments

[Magda Andronache]

Let Dons Delight: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015000625031
via worldcat.org

I look forward to adding these titles to my reading list.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Thank you, Maqda, for this link. I did not know this service existed. Permit me this opportunity to advertise, again, the fact that this is Knox's best work, and that Knox is quite simply the best -- in not a few categories.

[Jasper Horace]

Where is Flannery O'Connor? Orhan Pamuk?

[Fr. Jonathan]

Not on this list, obviously, mainly because my copies are still languishing on your bookshelf.

[David]

I have tried to write poetry. More importantly I have tried to find some tutoring in the art. Few people read and still fewer write, and of them none seeks an apprentice. I have never found Scott Cairns poetry of interest, but his reputation is existent so I've inquired on a couple of occasions. He, apparently, does not answer emails (he wouldn't be the only Orthodox semi-known person who has taken up this particular asceticism). I shall have to continue on in self-tutelage. Perhaps when I am old, I'll write something worth reading, as you properly say, aloud.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Poetry is and should be difficult. Some people say that the making of poems should be even more difficult than is usually thought, mainly because there is so much free verse but so little blank verse (and other verse with meter).

One of the reasons why I like Wilbur so much is because he is one of the few contemporary greats who writes metrically.

I admire Mr. Cairns' offerings to a point. I give him palms for courage, at the very least. One must acknowledge that he gave up a post at Seattle Pacific for Erato's sake. My niece goes there now, and I regret that she didn't get to study under him.

But he's so very subjective, making poems out of intrapsychic phenomena, mining stuff of the material world for metaphorical material. I'm not sure if this is what is intended for symbolism. That is why I could not endorse him as an Orthodox American poet, in the manner I described above.

David, I suggest that you keep reading good poetry out loud for the sound and sense, even Scott's, even the Bard's, but especially Eliot's and Auden's.

[Ryan]

My gateway to Christianity, and ultimately Orthodoxy, was William Blake (and Milton too). One thing that impressed me was that most of the great Orthodox theologians were great poets too. Unfortunately many hymns suffer more than necessary in English translation because not all of our translators understand how poetry should sound.

[Fr. Jonathan]

English is a hard language to translate into (pardon the dangling preposition). The main reason is that the lack of syntactical endings removes a whole category of possible rhymes.

Take, for example, the near impossibility of translating, intact, Dante's terza rima scheme into English. Dorothy Sayers attempted this and died in the attempt (her friend Barbara Reynolds completed the task). The success of this attempt was mixed, at best.

Sayers' translation was my first, so I grew accustomed to some of this superior intellect's awkward phrases, that had been contrived roughly to fit the scheme. I much prefer the translation by Anthony Esolen.

English is also difficult because of its mongrel nature. It seems as though everyone has contributed their stuff to the English language, and I like this: but this does not help the translator.

Nothing helps the translator much: in fact, he or she should be ready for the acrimony of sophomore intellectuals -- and there is no counting this sorry crew. The translator even has scary warning poems thrown at him.

Here's an example from Osip Mandelstam (translated by the worthy Christian Wiman):

Forget it. Don't tempt yourself with tongues
Whose blood is not your own.
Better to bite a light bulb, eat an urn.

Ah yes. "Better to bite a light bulb" -- an effective metaphor, I think.

The problem is that in Orthodoxy, one just cannot "forget it." Translation must be done.

I just wish that liturgical translators would read a lot more Homer and Pindar in the original speech.

[David]

Yes, poetry read aloud is the only proper preparation for writing. Thank you for that.

[ScottCairnsPoet]

In any case, καλό ταξίδι, my brothers. Good journey. Hope you find the sort of work you imagine, or, better yet, that you'll find the occasion to write it. I and many others, will be pleased to read it, though some one or two may see your work as an opportunity to wish for something else.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Well, Ευχαριστώ. Actually, you're the one traveling, so bon voyage.

I do not qualify my recommendation of your good work: it stands openhanded and without reserve. Poetry is hard, made more difficult by attempts that think the work is easy.

You are not in that easy camp. Without sounding too unctuous, I would say you've achieved a tone that outstrips anything original one might read in these pages. Neither tendentious nor tedious, belabored nor beleaguered, your sticherij manage to articulate depth of spirit in simple speech and direct (to refer, somewhat, to Barzun).

With seeming ease, Mr. Cairns, you speak of hard things.

And that is a good thing.

[ScottCairnsPoet]

Ευχαριστώ, πάρα πολύ! Ευλογείτε, Father Jonathan.

[Steve Hayes]

There is a Synchroblog on summer reading today.

http://synchroblog.wordpress.com/

Perhaps you could submit this post. The concept of "Summer Reading" was meaningless to me until a read it, but it's too late to rewrite my own contribution now. Just give your name, URL of the post and post title in a comment on the blog at the link above.