“I have implicitly trusted you, for, until this unhappy morning, not a doubt of you entered my mind. Now you stand unmasked before me, and bitterly painful is the revelation; not so much on the score of interest, as you may suppose, but because one I esteemed has fallen so utterly low in my regard.” – The Planter’s Daughter: A Tale of Louisiana by Eliza Ann Dupuy, 1858
“It dropped so low in my regard I heard it hit the ground, And go to pieces on the stones At bottom of my mind;
Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less Than I reviled myself For entertaining plated wares Upon my silver shelf. ” – Emily Dickinson
This poem appears to argue (contra Neoplatonism) that the identity of the soul does not disappear in Eternity:
“Two lengths has every day, Its absolute extent — And area superior By hope or heaven lent. Eternity will be Velocity, or pause, At fundamental signals From fundamental laws. To die, is not to go — On doom’s consummate chart No territory new is staked, Remain thou as thou art. ” – Emily Dickinson
In some versions of the poem, the fourth line has “By Hope or Horror.” Both hope and horror alter the way in which subjective “felt” time is perceived.
“They say that ‘time assuages,’ — Time never did assuage; An actual suffering strengthens, As sinews do, with age. Time is a test of trouble, But not a remedy. If such it prove, it prove too There was no malady. ” – Emily Dickinson
“We are one, but we are many, and from all the lands of Earth we come. We have a dream, and sing with one voice. I am, you are, we are Australian.”
I love the multicultural land I was fortunate enough to be born into. However, I’m also glad that the glue that holds us together is a political, educational, and legal system inherited from Britain. In honour of that, although I don’t have a drop of English blood in me, I’m happy to keep the Union Jack on our flag.
And I’m even happier to see the Southern Cross waving in the breeze, although we share that with some other nations too.
“Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison... God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” – Hebrews 11:36,40
“This world is not conclusion; A sequel stands beyond, Invisible, as music, But positive, as sound. It beckons and it baffles; Philosophies don’t know, And through a riddle, at the last, Sagacity must go. To guess it puzzles scholars; To gain it, men have shown Contempt of generations, And crucifixion known. ” – Emily Dickinson
The book is a detective thriller set in Russia in 1876, a decade after Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. The main character is a Moscow policeman who stumbles on an international conspiracy, being promoted into the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery (III отделение), the predecessor of the Okhrana, in the course of his not entirely successful efforts to thwart the fiendish plot. The action is set in Moscow, St Petersburg, and London.
I enjoyed this book, because I love historical detective fiction as a genre. Within the genre, I think I prefer the novels of C. J. Sansom and, even more, the superb The Name of the Rose. This may be because the translator didn’t quite do Akunin justice.
“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. ” – Emily Dickinson
“I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.” – Emily Dickinson
The book is, in part, an homage to the detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and others. In that capacity, the book itself includes the solution of a minor mystery. It is also littered with references to my favourite Sayers novel, Gaudy Night (including a similar romance), with a good dash of P. G. Wodehouse thrown in (and, of course, some Jerome K. Jerome, from whom the title is taken).
The “contemp” characters are wonderfully Victorian: “‘Oh, I do love country churchyards... They’re so delightfully rustic,’ Tossie said and hove into view, flags flying. ‘Not at all like our dreadful modern cemeteries.’ She stopped to admire a tombstone that had nearly fallen over... ‘I think it’s wonderfully unspoilt. Just like a poem. Don’t you, Mr. St. Trewes?’” (ch. 6, p. 107)
The underlying theme of the novel, however, is divine providence. As one character (an Oxford professor) says (ch. 15, p. 256): “Through art, through history, we may glimpse the Grand Design. But only for a fleeting moment. ‘For His works are unsearchable and His ways past finding out.’” Everyone has their part to play in that Grand Design, although in the novel, as in life, the characters struggle to discover what their part may be.
Only at the end of the novel is one of the main characters able to realise that there was “A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers... And us.” (ch. 28, p. 479)
“Croquet Scene,” by American artist Winslow Homer, 1864
Connie Willis, who is a Christian, also explored a similar theme in Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear, but there the settings were a little darker, recalling Tolkien’s words “so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Ruins of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by fire in the Coventry Blitz (as Connie Willis points out, the reinforcement work described in the novel contributed to its collapse)
In spite of all the chaos and complexity, however, at last “There was a fanfare, the organ launched into ‘The Heavens Are Declaring the Glory of God,’ and the sun came out. The east windows burst into blue and red and purple flame. I looked up. The clerestory was one long unbroken band of gold, like the net at the moment of opening. It filled the cathedral with light, illuminating the silver candlesticks and the children’s cross and the underside of the choir stalls... Illuminating the cathedral itself—a Grand Design made of a thousand thousand details.” (ch. 28, p. 493)
To Say Nothing of the Dog received the Hugo and Locus awards in 1999. I’m giving it a rare five stars.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis: 5 stars
Martyrdom and T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (with those classic lines “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason”)
G. K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross and how one should deal with those with which one strongly disagrees
C. S. Lewis’s retold myth Till We Have Faces and the relationship between humanity and the Divine
Walter M. Miller’s post-apocalyptic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz and human nature
Murder in the Cathedral: the Becket Window, Christ Church, Oxford
I was a little disappointed that Wood confuses the silmarils with the palantíri (p. 29) and misunderstands the nature of science fiction (p. 88), but on the whole this was a good book, and an encouragement to read thoughtfully.
Literature and Theology by Ralph C. Wood: 3½ stars
Over the past few months, I finished the following books (among others – most of the novels I’ve read are not included). Links go to my reviews. Books marked with ♥ (fiction) or ♦ (non-fiction) were particularly good:
This novel contains the stories of four men who appear to be villains (a murderer, a liar, a thief, and a traitor), but in fact are the opposite (and in this they recall Christ). The book is in the spirit of The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, although those stories are (in my view) better. Still, I enjoyed it. The introduction by Martin Gardner in this edition was also interesting.
Someone pointed out the perfect reedpunk (ancient Egyptian steampunk) character. This is, it seems, princess Arsinoe, granddaughter of Ptolemy III, and director of the Computing Centre in Alexandria, 200 BC:
After the early death of her useless uncle, sensible people presumably rule the Greek empire.
Eratosthenes, given the presence of pneumatically powered mechanical computers, develops information theory prior to his death in 194 BC. With the aid of camels, a vast telegraph network is established across the desert:
The telegraph headquarters was, of course, built as a pyramid (click for photo attribution):
Finding God Beyond Harvard by Kelly Monroe Kullberg
I recently read Finding God Beyond Harvard: The Quest for Veritas by Kelly Monroe Kullberg, author of Finding God at Harvard. The book tells this story of her life as a student, and later a chaplain, at Harvard University, and the founding of the Veritas Forum (which seeks “to inspire the shapers of tomorrow’s culture to connect their hardest questions with the person and story of Jesus Christ” – www.veritas.org).
I really liked this honest memoir, especially the story of the author speaking on “The Bible and Feminism” to a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Christian protesters.
I was struck, yet again, by how alien the concept of “truth” is to liberal-arts students (it is, after all, a concept essential to me as a mathematician, as a scientist, and as a Christian), and how hostile the American academy can be to Christianity (as in, for example, the decades-long boarding-up of the Dartmouth Rollins Chapel Windows, with their apostles and quote from Proverbs 4:18), in spite of the academy’s own Christian origins.
Harvard’s original seal
There is not quite enough in the book about a wider context in which the Veritas Forum sits, but this no doubt reflects the author’s initial thinking. There is certainly a lot here for those who work with students to learn from.
Finding God Beyond Harvard by Kelly Monroe Kullberg: 4 stars
