The Women by T. C. Boyle

This is a really challenging novel.

For days the ruins smoldered, a thin stench of incineration hanging on the air, a sour smell, as if it were a thousand barrels of vinegar that had gone up and not the heart and soul of the place she’d come to love as if she’d built it herself. That smell would haunt her as she lay beside Frank in the too-narrow bed in the guest quarters, everything shifted now to accommodate the new life, the building life, the night fast with the density of darkness absolute and the blankets binding like tourniquets, and she would drift off to the sourness and awaken to it in the first light of dawn. Even the smell of the morning’s bacon rising out of the confines of the temporary kitchen was overwhelmed by it, the sweetness of the turned earth spoiled, the flowers driven down. She felt sick in the mornings now, sicker than she’d been with Svetlana, but she forced herself out of bed and into the kitchen to negotiate the space with Mrs. Taggertz and make good and certain that Frank’s breakfast was delivered to him in the studio because now more than ever he had to keep up his strength.

This, and many paragraphs like it, and the title, The Women, would make one think that the protagonists and narrators of this novel are the women who circled around this man named Frank, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright. But they are not. Instead of speaking in their voices -- something I think would have made the novel far more interesting -- Boyle decides to drape the narrative in confusing and successive layers of maleness.

In the Introduction to Part One we are introduced to the real narrator of the text we are reading -- a (fictional?) Japanese student of Wright’s named Tadashi Sato, who is laying out this manuscript in an attempt to outline the contours of Wright’s genius and the effect it had (necessarily?) on the women in his life. But Sato is not the only voice we will need to contend with.

There will be complaints, of course -- I can foresee that. This is an imperfect process, what with the interposition of the years, the vagaries of memory, the re-creation of scenes the accuracy of which no one now living can affirm or deny. And too, I’ve had to rely on my co-author and translator (the young Irish American Seamus O’Flaherty, who is husband to my granddaughter, Noriko, and whose as yet unpublished translations of Fukazawa and Shimizu are, I understand, quite novel), many of whose locutions seem, I must confess, rather odd in the final analysis.

Are you following that? This is, evidently, a document written in Japanese by one man, and translated into English by another, with, as we will come to discover, both the author and the translator popping up regularly in a series of footnotes and commentaries as the story unfolds.

And -- on top of that -- the story is told in reverse, with each part taking us backward in time to an earlier and earlier relationship of Wright’s.

It leaves one thinking constantly: What on earth is Boyle trying to accomplish with this? Why hide these women behind some many layers?

From the Introduction to Part Two:

In closing, I should mention that my distinguished collaborator, Seamus O’Flaherty, is, in addition to the aforementioned translations, the author of two novels, The Ladies’ Heat (not what you might think -- its subject is women’s track and field, and Kit and Caboodle (also a surprise -- this work deals with a fictional detective agency established in Okinawa by two Englishmen, Jonas Kit and Malcolm Caboodle, in the years immediately following the conclusion of the second war). At this point, sadly, neither has found a publisher. And yet, as I’m sure you’ll agree, O’Flaherty-San brings a unique artistic perspective to the text here as it unravels backward in time to attempt to define the true essence of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai! -- the guiding light and enduring genius of all working architects, past, present and future.

Here Boyle is just taunting the reader. Are we too stupid to realize that this is not really a novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, nor even a novel about its purported premise: “Was [Wright] the wounded genius or the philanderer and sociopath who abused the trust of practically everyone he knew, especially the women, especially them?” Given many of the reviews I read online about the novel, I would wager that the answer is yes, as most of those try to approach the work as some kind of biography of Wright or some kind of analysis of his genius.

In Part Three Sato comments in a footnote about Daisy Hartnett, a woman he falls in love with and whom Wright eventually banishes from their community at Taliesin, reading a work by Swedish writer Ellen Key.

This is a feminist text, a gloss on Ibsen and his female characters. Women, Ibsen felt -- certain liberated women, at any rate -- were less regimented by society and more a natural force than men. Of course, while we make no claims here to be feminists or sociologists or anything of the like, I can say that Daisy Hartnett was certainly a natural force, and I too much constrained by expectation -- and by Wrieto-San -- to fully grasp it. Oh Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. Where are your creamy white thighs and your butterfly mouth now?

And then, a few paragraphs later, oddly, impossibly it seems to me, from Daisy’s point of view:

The world was in desperate need of Ellen Key -- not simply these pigheaded farmers and their prudish wives, but the world at large. People -- women, especially -- absolutely must learn to think for themselves instead of blindly following the dictates of a patriarchal society that would deny them not only the right to vote but the right to love in their own instinctual way. She had a fleeting fantasy of herself as a sort of Joan of Arc of erotoplastics, wielding a radiant sword and cutting them all down to size, and then, though she was exhausted and the house was as cold as an igloo, she turned back to the book in her lap and there it was, right before her, in Ellen Key’s native tongue: till alska, to love. To love. There was no higher purpose in life, no greater duty -- why couldn’t they understand that?

Indeed. Why can’t they? Sato. Wright. His worshippers. The patriarchal worshippers of genius. Why can’t any of them understand?

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

+ + + 

Another one of those Russian novels written about the time the serfs were emancipated and the changes coming to Russian society.

It’s a story, that much I can follow, but whatever larger points it’s trying to make are lost on me because I’m so far removed from that time and place.

Bazarov is the nihilist in the story, the man who believes in nothing that he can not directly observe, and he dies in the end from an infection he gets from dissecting a corpse. 

Arkady is his devotee who strays from this philosophy, gets married, and lives happily ever after.

What do you think that means?

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Journalism of Willa Cather, Volume 1

In my Googling, I stumbled across The Willa Cather Archive.

The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely-accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings. To that end, we are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content. The Archive is a product of a collaboration between the Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, with additional support from the The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

For a Cather devotee like me, it’s like a candy store. I went to its “Writings” tab and started downloading everything I found there. This volume -- The Journalism of Willa Cather, Volume 1 -- is a collection of those downloaded materials: as many of the items found at https://cather.unl.edu/writings/journalism that would fit into a 3-ring binder. Almost all of it is Cather’s early writing for the Nebraska State Journal as a kind of theater and social critic, starting with her November 5, 1893 "One Way of Putting It" column:

The church was crowded; hundreds of men and women were sitting in front of the minister who stood under the twisted brass chandeliers and spoke of the brotherhood of man. He looked over the well dressed, well educated audience and his interest quickened under the pleasant knowledge that he was being appreciated. His white face flushed and his thin lips trembled with enthusiasm, enthusiasm over the beauty of the women in the audience, the grandeur of the voluntary by Haydn that died from the great moaning pipes of the organ, and over his own eloquence and conscious power. He grew earnest over man’s eternal brotherhood, he spread his hands in eloquent gestures. As he quoted an extract from Browning he took a white hot house rose from the cut glass rose bowl beside him and shook the water gently from its leaves. He laid the fleshy white petals against his nostrils with evident satisfaction, then dropped it again into the water. Rich, melodious words dropped from his tongue, and his voice had in it a sympathetic quiver born of excitement and the grandeur of his subject. At last he closed with five of the grandest lines that Shakespeare ever wrote and sat down among the palms and drew toward him a silver pitcher of ice water, and the thunder of the pipe organ took up the strain and went on preaching of the brotherhood of man.

That’s the very first paragraph, and in it you can see a writer beginning to flex her muscles, trying to capture a scene. And, with the next juxtaposed section, to make a point:

In a bare, barn-like room with a low ceiling and grated windows sit 300 convicts in stripes. Before them stands the little white-haired chaplain speaking in a trembling voice, telling them of the brotherhood of man. They smile indulgently at him, they have their own ideas about fraternalism. He thanks God for the blessing of life, and they wonder if life is a thing to be thankful for. There is a tremor in the old man’s voice as he speaks to them. He is very artful in his discourse; he tells them something to set them laughing first, and dreary, lifeless laughter it is that echoes through the empty cell rooms and dies away in the iron corridor. Then he tells them he is going to leave them, he who has worked among them for ten years. His lips tremble a little but he says bravely:

“You are getting so much better, boys, that they are going to get you a taller chaplain than I, one who can reach further and do more good.”

Even the darkest faces look lovingly at him, and some of the younger men wipe their eyes with their hands. The old chaplain is not as strong for the ordeal as he thought himself, he murmured a few broken words of benediction, and the men marched out with that swinging gait which is peculiar to this brotherhood of crime who are surely God’s younger, less favored sons, not the heirs of promise.

The brotherhood of man -- something evidently better discussed in polite company. 

As I went through these vignettes, I marked those that seemed to touch me in some way, to impart something more than just the flexing descriptions of scene and character.

From December 17, 1893:

It is not a very great while till Christmas now. One begins to feel the restlessness and secrecy in the air, and to smell the cedar and see the holly gleaming in the windows. Almost every one I meet has a bundle and is hurrying home to hide it. The toy shops are filled with people buying things for the children they love. It seems to me that I too must be buying and hiding away something for a child I used to love and I wonder what it shall be. It has been a long time since I have seen her, and I do not even know if they keep Christmas in her country, but I must send her something because I am lonely and think of her, and I wish in some way to get near again to the only love I have ever known which was never darkened by pain or misunderstanding. I must get something and hide it away where no one can see. No matter what it is, she will like it, for she is not like other children. They will grow old and forget and cease to love, but her childhood is eternal. Perhaps it will be only a few flowers, and on Christmas eve, when other people are filling the stockings while the children sleep, I will slip out to you, who are asleep too, and I will put the flowers in the snow over your grave, little one, and perhaps their fragrance will creep down to you somehow, and you will dream of other flowers that I gave you in other days down in our own country where we were both happy, Perhaps, too, since they say the stars shine brighter on Christmas night, perhaps through the frozen earth that shuts you from me, the light of those we used to know and name will reach you, and you will remember, and know that I do not forget.

Wow. Not sure if Cather is writing about a personal loss there, or if she is aping one in order to recognize and honor it as it must have been for others in her community, but wow, it really shows you how well she could write about the empty spaces that are eventually all that remain between people.

And, from January 28, 1894:

If it took Ruskin six months to interpret Turner’s “Garden of the Hesperides,” surely a person who is totally ignorant of the technical laws of art may be allowed several weeks to struggle with the Lansing drop curtain. I have been suffering acutely from that curtain for two long years, and sometimes I have longed for artistic knowledge, that I might understand and appreciate it better, but recently an artist told me that I was enviable because of my ignorance, that art could not help one with that curtain, for the more one knew of other pictures the less they knew of that. I begin to believe his statement, for I have found art books as powerless to help me with the anatomy as classical lexicons are to throw light upon that abominable Latin. “Somnium Fons Vitales.” I wonder how many people have been able to translate it? Lincoln is full of colleges and ought to contain a good deal of classical learning, but the lore of this generation has not got as far as “Vitales.” Most freshmen try to construe that Latin. The world looks very bright to a freshman and he has the fond complacency to try anything from discovering a new element to translating the Iliad in blank verse. He goes to the theater saturated with Horace and he gazes on that mystic sentence and tries to read it. When he fails he is chagrined. He swears that when he is a senior he will translate those words. But when he is a senior he does not look at it any more. By that time he has learned the lesson of his own littleness and his own helplessness. He knows then that genius is something more than eternal patience after all, and that even were he the proverbial patience on a monument he would never write a Hamlet nor discover a new plant nor construe the Latin of the Lansing drop curtain. He does out into the world to live his life and leaves the task to mightier men than he.

What a wonderful example of Cather’s unique voice -- sarcastic and educated.

And there are even peeks at one of Cather’s great themes -- the price that artists must pay in order to create great art. This, from February 11, 1894:

The Gerry Society have been at it again. This time they have stopped Essie Graham, the street waif in “Under the City Lamps,” from acting. The girl is thirteen years old and is fond of acting and in good health, and the manager of “City Lamps” fails to see any reason or reasonableness in the society’s action. It is a pity that the kindhearted Gerry folks do not extend their noble efforts and forbid authors to write and musicians to play before they are fifteen years old. If the society had its way there would be no actors at all in a generation or two. The greatest part of an actress’ education must be completed before she is fifteen. The society claim that it is cruel for a child to be put to the strain of acting every night when she ought to be at home and in bed. Of course it is cruel, most art is cruel, and very few artists have time to sleep much in this world, though we trust they rest very peacefully in the next. It is very kind of the world to try to lighten the burden of genius, but it can’t be done. Genius means relentless labor and passionate excitement from the hour one is born until the hour one dies. It means that a man must live the passions and sorrows of a hundred lives. Great actresses cannot be brought up upon what Kipling calls the “sheltered life-system.” They must have abundant knowledge of good and evil even if they become not at all as gods.

And, from March 25, 1894, a description of how the artistic stakes are raised even higher by the critics who unfortunately define the only landscape on which art can be offered to the masses:

The curse of every school and phase of modern art is the guild of drawing room critics; critics who sneer at the great and powerful, and adore the clever and the dainty. They refuse to read any thing more stimulating than Howells’ parlor farces, and to hear any play more moving than “the Rivals.” This race of critics has declared Ruskin and Wagner and Turner and Modjeska blase and have taken unto themselves new gods in the very airy and fragile shapes of Whistler and Jerome K. Jerome and De Koven and Julia Marlowe. They take the books that look well on their tables; the music that is not too loud for their parlors; the pictures that hang well on their walls; the actresses who most gracefully adorn their receptions, and say, “This is art, and these are artists; everything else is overdrawn, coarse, stagey, unnatural.” It is no new phase of criticism for people with a poverty of emotion and imagination to say that everything more pronounced is overdrawn and unnatural. Whatever they cannot feel they claim is beyond the range of human feeling, and whatever they have not experienced they claim is beyond the limit of human experience. These critics have had a wonderful effect upon the authors and playwrights of the Nineteenth century. A playwright cannot write without presenting emotions any more than a painter can paint without laying colors. The world in which playwrights are born has no emotions; it furnishes its parlors in dull grays and cold blues and has society and guests to match. Following the creed of realism, the playwright can no longer create knights and ladies, but tells of things that are. Artists of every nation have escaped from the chilling atmosphere of their own world, and have gone to the so-called crust of society for types which at least have the all redeeming virtue of sincerity. The greatest play that has been written to amuse society is “Camille;” the greatest book that has been written to instruct it is “Anna Kerenina.” One would think Mephistopheles’ sides would ache with merriment over the satire of it.

I’m not so sure about Mephistopheles’ sides, but my heart both aches and swells with these glimpses into an artist’s mind and sensibility in the very process of their formation.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

A Holiday Break: The Wreath by Sigrid Undset

Books are always the best holiday gift for me. The only thing I like better than the anticipation of reading a long sought after title is the fondness that comes with remembering the discovery of an unexpected treasure.

As I look back on all the books I've profiled here in 2023, the one I'd most like to revisit is The Wreath by Sigrid Undset, which I blogged about only earlier this month. 

Here's how that post began:

This is the first of the three volumes in Undset’s Nobel prize winning novel, Kristin Lavransdatter. I’m not sure how I stumbled into Undset or her work -- I think I might have come across a reference in some biographical information I was reading about Willa Cather -- but however I came across it, I’m really glad I did. In the introduction that accompanied my volume of The Wreath, Tiina Nunnally provides this summary that speaks well to Undset’s power and ability.

Undset’s love of nature so permeated her world view that it became synonymous with the truth she sought to portray in her novels, the truth that her mother had enjoined her to write about. In a speech given during the 1940s she explained what she meant by a “true novel”:

“We often see the word “novel” defined as the opposite of “facts.” And of course those kinds of novels do exist. But even those types of novels do not necessarily have to be the opposite of “truth.” Facts may be true, but they are not truths -- just as wooden crates or fence posts or doors or furniture are not “wood” in the same way that a forest is, since it consists of the living and growing material from which these things are made. … The true novel, if you understand what I mean by that term, must also make use of facts, but above all it must be concerned with the truth that lies behind them -- the wild mountains that are the source of the “tame” cobblestones of the pavement or the artistically hewn stones in a work of sculpture; the living forest which provides timber for the sawmills and pulp for the billions of tons of paper which we use and misuse. Then these facts will be of secondary importance to the author … they are not original; they originate from something else.”

Sigrid Undset had a remarkable ability to see beyond the “facts,” to portray the lives of her characters in realistic fashion and yet with great psychological insight. She herself said that “to be a writer is to be able to live lives that are not one’s own.” In Kristin Lavransdatter, the meticulously researched details of medieval life provide a rich backdrop for the narrative. But for modern readers, the power of the novel lies not so much in the authenticity of detail as in the author’s deep understanding of the passions and torments of the human heart.

There is a lot to like here -- especially in the idea that novels (and Sigrid Undset novels, to be precise) contain truth even though they are, of course, made-up stories about made-up people. And not just any old truth, but deep psychological truths about the passions and torments of the human heart, truths that have the power to speak out across centuries and cultures.

As you enjoy your holiday break, I hope you find some time to curl up with a good book. I know I will.

+ + +

This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Marcus Aurelius and His Times

This may be one of the few books I stole. I remember I was staying in a hotel, had been upgraded to a one-bedroom suite, and several books were placed in a decorative fashion in the parlor. Books placed there more for their non-descript color and appearance than for what information they contained. Books no one would ever actually read. Books like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

I think I had just read something else that had mentioned Marcus Aurelius -- the Roman emperor and philosopher whose philosophy seems to pass in and out of fashion as modern readers and business executives discover and rediscover him -- and my interest was probably peaked. Without guilt, when I left that hotel, the decorative copy of Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was in my luggage and no longer on its dusty shelf.

At least that’s what the outer binding said. On the inside I discovered that the book was more. It’s actually a curated edition, published by the “Classics Club,” including several works. Its actual title page says:

MARCUS AURELIUS

AND HIS TIMES

The Transition from Paganism to Christianity

Comprising

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

Lucian: Hermotimus ~ Icaromenippus

Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho ~ First Apology

Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean (Selections)

With an Introduction by Irwin Edman

Grand. I know next to nothing about all of that so I thought this might be a good introduction to the subject -- how the Roman Stoics slowly (or quickly?) morphed into the early Christian theorists? But I really only found myself dogearing two of the sections.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

The meditations are helpfully organized into numbered paragraphs, each of which seems to contain a particular philosophical or rhetorical point. It was therefore pretty easy to circle those that carried some kind of meaningful message for me.

Part III, No. 10: Cast away then all other things, hold only to these few truths; bear in mind also that every man lives only in the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or uncertain. Short then is the time which any man lives; and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this is handed on by a succession of poor human beings, who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves, much less one who died long ago.

This is Stoicism in its purest form -- life is short, and no one will remember you when you’re gone, so you’d better get focused on what really matters in this life and not what you or others think is coming next. And the way to figure that out? To figure out what really matters in this life? 

Part III, No. 12: If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this.

Reason and fidelity to it in all things. Seek to understand the world around you, and live harmoniously with it through the on-going application of your reasonable faculty of mind.

Part III, No. 14: No longer wander at random. You shall not live to read your own memoirs, or the acts of the ancient Romans and Greeks, or the selections from books which you were reserving for your old age. Hasten then to the goal which you have before you. Throw away vain hopes and come to your own aid, while yet you may, if you care at all for yourself.

After all, no one is going to do it for you. And the world will offer you plenty of distractions.

Part V, No. 28: Are you irritated with one whose arm-pits smell? Are you angry with one whose mouth has a foul odor? What good will your anger do you? He has this mouth, he has these arm-pits. Such emanations must come from such things. “But the man has reason,” you will say, “and he could, if he took pains, discover wherein he offends.” I wish you well of your discovery. Now you too have reason; by your rational faculty, stir up his rational faculty; show him his fault, admonish him. For if he listens, you will cure him, and have no need of anger -- you are not a ranter or a whore.

In all things: accept, then act, then accept again. There is no other way. It is key not to get swept up in the circus that surrounds us.

Part VII, No. 3: A piece of pageantry, a stage play, flocking sheep and herding cows, exercise with spears, bones cast to puppies, crusts tossed into fishponds, the laboring of ants over their burdens, the running about of frightened little mice, puppets dancing on strings -- all are the same. Your duty in the midst of such things is to show good humor and not a proud air; and to understand that a man is worth just as much as the things about which he busies himself.

Distractions exist -- as do difficulties. The point is not to question them -- to get wrapped up in debating them and battling them. The point is to accept -- even and especially the natural -- and to keep focused on your own reason and harmony.

Part VIII, No. 50: A cucumber is bitter -- throw it away. There are briars in the path -- turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things put into the world?” For you will be ridiculed by a man who is acquainted with nature, and you would be ridiculed by a carpenter and a shoemaker if you found fault because you found shavings and cuttings in their workshop from the things which they make. And yet they have places where they can throw these shavings and cuttings, but nature has no external space; now the wondrous part of her art is that though she has circumscribed herself, everything within her which appears to decay and grow old and be useless she changes into herself, and again makes new things from these very same, so that she requires neither substance from without, nor wants a place into which she may cast that which decays. She is content then with her own space, and her own matter and her own art.

This struck me as one of those big ideas. The detritus of creation cannot be hidden by the Creator -- but it is no less necessary and real as the scraps of the carpenter. Nature has leftover bits. Accept them -- and perhaps discard them -- in the same way you would the scraps of shoe leather and rubber soles.

The First Apology of Justin Martyr

It’s amazing to me how little has changed in the arguments of Christian theorists over the literal centuries that they have been making them.

18. Reflect on the end of the kings who came before you, how they died the death common to all men. If that meant only a cessation of consciousness, it would be a boon to the wicked. But since consciousness survives in all who have ever lived, and for some an eternal punishment is laid up, see that you refuse not to be convinced, and believe that what we say here is true.

Souls exist (i.e., consciousness survives death). Asserted. And the proof?

Even your necromancy, and the divinations you practice with immaculate children, and your evokings of departed souls, and of those whom the magi call Dreamsenders and Familiars, and other performances of excerpts in such matters show you that after death souls are in a state of sensation. There are men seized and wrenched about by spirits of the dead, whom we call demoniacs or madman; there are what you consider the oracles of Amphilochus, Dodona, and Pytho, and others.

Because madmen exist. People who jump around as if possessed by demons or dead souls. They prove that souls are real.

That’s one. Here’s another (sort of).

31. … But in the books of their prophets we find Jesus our Christ foretold as coming, born of a virgin, growing up to man’s estate, healing every disease and every sickness, raising the dead, being hated, unrecognized, crucified, dying, rising again, and ascending into heaven, being and being called the Son of God. We find it also predicted that apostles would be sent by Him into every nation to proclaim these tidings, and that among the Gentiles more than among the Jews men would believe on Him. He was predicted first 5,000 years before He appeared and again 3,000 years before, then 2,000, then 1,000, and again 800: for as the generations succeeded one another, prophet after prophet arose.

32-38. (Justin quotes at length passages from the Psalms and the prophets of the Old Testament that seem to predict Christ’s coming, his birth, and his sufferings.)

Unfortunately, some of the essential arguments have been edited out of this particular version I’m reading. It would have been nice to see the prophecies the editor cut out to better determine if they are specific enough to be valid or impressive. Also, even if the prophecies are specific, prophecy itself does not prove that made-up stories are true.

But perhaps the prophecies cited are not as powerful as Justin would want us to believe.

52. Since then we can show that all that has already happened was predicted by the prophets before it occurred, we must believe too that the other things they predicted, that have not yet come to pass, will certainly happen. And as the things already past took place as foretold without anyone realizing it, so shall future things, even though unrecognized and disbelieved, still come to pass.

Because things foretold happened without anyone realizing them? They were unrecognized and disbelieved, therefore they happened? Evidently, even the prophecies that no one recognizes as true are also somehow true.

But what’s more interesting is how far modern Christians have strayed from some of the philosophical underpinnings of their own faith.

12. More than all other men indeed we are your helpers and allies in promoting peace, seeing we hold it impossible for either the wicked or the covetous of the conspirator or the virtuous man to escape the notice of God, and are sure that each man goes to everlasting punishment or to salvation according to the merit of his deeds. And if all men knew this, no one would choose wickedness even in little things, knowing he would go to an everlasting punishment of fire; but he would do his utmost to govern himself and adorn himself with virtue, that he might obtain the good gifts of God and escape punishment. 

Works not faith! 

14. … So we, since our conversion by the Word, keep away from demons, and follow the only unbegotten God through His Son. We who once enjoyed the pleasures of lust now embrace chastity. We who once resorted to magical arts, now dedicate ourselves to the good and unbegotten God. We who prized above all else the acquisition of wealth and possessions, now bring what we have into the common stock, and share with everyone in need.

Communism!

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

God, Please Save Me by Sister Mary Rose McGeady

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

+ + + 

A little book about Covenant House, a shelter for runaway teens. I read it because it was there.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Wreath by Sigrid Undset

This is the first of the three volumes in Undset’s Nobel prize winning novel, Kristin Lavransdatter. I’m not sure how I stumbled into Undset or her work -- I think I might have come across a reference in some biographical information I was reading about Willa Cather -- but however I came across it, I’m really glad I did. In the introduction that accompanied my volume of The Wreath, Tiina Nunnally provides this summary that speaks well to Undset’s power and ability.

Undset’s love of nature so permeated her world view that it became synonymous with the truth she sought to portray in her novels, the truth that her mother had enjoined her to write about. In a speech given during the 1940s she explained what she meant by a “true novel”:

“We often see the word “novel” defined as the opposite of “facts.” And of course those kinds of novels do exist. But even those types of novels do not necessarily have to be the opposite of “truth.” Facts may be true, but they are not truths -- just as wooden crates or fence posts or doors or furniture are not “wood” in the same way that a forest is, since it consists of the living and growing material from which these things are made. … The true novel, if you understand what I mean by that term, must also make use of facts, but above all it must be concerned with the truth that lies behind them -- the wild mountains that are the source of the “tame” cobblestones of the pavement or the artistically hewn stones in a work of sculpture; the living forest which provides timber for the sawmills and pulp for the billions of tons of paper which we use and misuse. Then these facts will be of secondary importance to the author … they are not original; they originate from something else.”

Sigrid Undset had a remarkable ability to see beyond the “facts,” to portray the lives of her characters in realistic fashion and yet with great psychological insight. She herself said that “to be a writer is to be able to live lives that are not one’s own.” In Kristin Lavransdatter, the meticulously researched details of medieval life provide a rich backdrop for the narrative. But for modern readers, the power of the novel lies not so much in the authenticity of detail as in the author’s deep understanding of the passions and torments of the human heart.

There is a lot to like here -- especially in the idea that novels (and Sigrid Undset novels, to be precise) contain truth even though they are, of course, made-up stories about made-up people. And not just any old truth, but deep psychological truths about the passions and torments of the human heart, truths that have the power to speak out across centuries and cultures.

She Beckoned To Me With A Wreath of Gold

And that’s just what we find in The Wreath. It takes place in Norway in the 1300s, but its opening part is almost magical in its ability to both stay rooted in that world and to root young Kristin Lavransdattar in our hearts. Here, she has wandered away from her traveling party, following a horse named Guldsvein and a group of other horses out into the wider countryside and away from the protective oversight of her father, Lavrans, and his people.

All around grew such a profusion of the finest pink tufts of flowers called valerian; they were much redder and more beautiful here next to the mountain stream than back home near the river. Then Kristin picked some blossoms and carefully bound them together with blades of grass until she had the loveliest, pinkest, and most tightly woven wreath. The child pressed it down on her hair and ran over to the pool to see how she looked, now that she was adorned like a grown-up maiden about to go off to a dance.

It is the titular wreath -- in actuality and in allegory -- representing innocence, and worn in her culture by virgins of noble birth. And, at the moment she dons it, and begins to admire and imagine herself…

She bent over the water and saw her own dark image rise up from the depths and become clearer as it came closer. Then she saw in the mirror of the stream that someone was standing among the birches on the other side and leaning towards her. Abruptly she straightened up into a kneeling position and looked across the water. At first she thought she saw only the rock face and the trees clustered at its base. But suddenly she discerned a face among the leaves -- there was a woman over there, with a pale face and flowing, flaxen hair. Her big light-gray eyes and her flaring, pale-pink nostrils reminded Kristin of Guldsvein’s. She was wearing something shiny and leaf-green, and branches and twigs hid her figure up to her full breasts, which were covered with brooches and gleaming necklaces.

Kristin stared at the vision. Then the woman raised her hand and showed her a wreath of golden flowers and beckoned to her with it.

A second wreath of flowers, not pink but gold, in the hands of this strange woman of the wilderness, beckoning to the pure and innocent girl.

Behind her, Kristin heard Guldsvein whinny loudly with fear. She turned her head. The stallion reared up, gave a resounding shriek, and then whirled around and set off up the hillside, making the ground thunder. The other horses followed. They rushed straight up the scree, so that rocks plummeted down with a crash, and branches and roots snapped and cracked.

Then Kristin screamed as loud as she could. “Father!” she shrieked. “Father!” She sprang to her feet and ran up the slope after the horses, not daring to look back over her shoulder. She clambered up the scree, tripped on the hem of her dress, and slid down, then climbed up again, scrabbling onward with bleeding hands, crawling on scraped and bruised knees, calling to Guldsvein in between her shouts to her father -- while the sweat poured out of her whole body, running like water into her eyes, and her heart pounded as if it would hammer a hole through her chest; sobs of terror rose in her throat.

“Oh, Father, Father!”

She is terrified -- terrified of something she doesn’t but which Guldsvein instinctively understands to be dangerous -- and her instinct is to return to the protection of her father, the man who rules their small community and her life.

Then she heard his voice somewhere above her. She saw him coming in great leaps down the slope of the scree -- the bright, sunwhite scree. Alpine birches and aspens stood motionless along the slope, their leaves glittering with little glints of silver. The mountain meadow was so quiet and so bright, but her father came bounding toward her, calling her name, and Kristin sank down, realizing that she was now saved.

“Sancta Maria!” Lavrans knelt down next to his daughter and pulled her to him. He was pale and there was a strange look to his mouth that frightened Kristin even more; not until she saw his face did she realize the extent of her peril.

“Child, child…” He lifted up her bloody hands, looked at them, noticed the wreath on her bare head, and touched it. “What’s this? How did you get here, little Kristin?”

“I followed Guldsvein,” she sobbed against his chest. “I was so afraid because you were all asleep, but then Guldsvein came. And then there was someone who waved to me from down by the stream…”

“Who waved? Was it a man?”

“No, it was a woman. She beckoned to me with a wreath of gold -- I think it was a dwarf maiden, Father.”

A dwarf maiden. A mythic creature of her folklore. Something she has been taught to fear. What else, who else could it have been?

“Jesus Christus,” said Lavrans softly, making the sign of the cross over the child and himself.

He helped her up the slope until they came to the grassy hillside; then he lifted her up and carried her. She clung to his neck and sobbed; she couldn’t stop, no matter how much he hushed her.

Soon they reached the men and Isrid, who clasped her hands together when she heard what had happened.

“Oh, that must have been the elf maiden -- I tell you, she must have wanted to lure this pretty child into the mountain.”

“Be quiet,” said Lavrans harshly. “We shouldn’t have talked about such things the way we did here in the forest. You never know who’s under the stones, listening to every word.”

He pulled out the golden chain with the reliquary cross from inside his shirt and hung it around Kristin’s neck, placing it against her bare skin.

“All of you must guard your tongues well,” he told them. “For Ragnfrid must never hear that the child was exposed to such danger.”

Ragnfrid is Lavrans’s wife and Kristin’s mother and, like Lavrans, she would know the kind of danger that Kristin was actually in, and it had nothing to do with dwarves or elf maidens. The woman Kristin saw was Aashild Gautesdatter, whom Wikipedia describes as “a wise woman skilled in magic and the healing arts.” Allegorically, she is Mother Nature, someone free to follow her own will, and she will become one of the poles -- opposite the structured role demanded by Kristin’s father and faith -- that will shape the rest of Kristin’s story in The Wreath.

Her Inheritance of Health and Beauty and Love

Kristin Lavransdatter -- Lavrans’s daughter, named so in the convention of her place and time -- will come to question the cross that Lavrans protectively places around her young neck, question it and the world it is supposed to represent. Not because she wants to do evil, but because, like Aashild Gautesdatter, she feels an inner truth that seems to speak with more force than the convoluted myths that frame the path set out for her. Here, she is speaking with a monk visiting her village, Brother Edvin, who is busy painting religious pictures for their church.

In another painting the Virgin Mary sat with the Christ child on her knee. He had put one hand up under his mother’s chin, and he was holding an apple in the other. With them stood Saint Sunniva and Saint Kristina. They were leaning gracefully from the hips, their faces a lovely pink and white, and they had golden hair and wore golden crowns.

Brother Edin gripped his right wrist with his left hand as he painted leaves and roses in their crowns.

“It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”

“And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and impotent. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”

“But weren’t they inside the caves?” asked Kristin. “Saint Sunniva and the Selje men? Isn’t that true?”

Kristin is trying to understand the myths that she has been taught in their literal form -- that Saint Kristina was actually swallowed by a dragon, and that Saint Sunniva and an entourage of men were found buried in a mountain cave. And how does Brother Edvin respond to this rational examination?

The monk squinted at her and smiled again.

“It’s both true and not true. It seemed to be true for the people who found the holy bodies. And it seemed true to Sunniva and the Selje men, because they were humble and believed that the world is stronger than all sinful people. They did not imagine that they might be stronger than the world because they did not love it. But if they had only known, they could have taken all the mountains and flung them out into the sea like tiny pebbles. No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”

“But what if a person doesn’t fear and love God?” asked Kristin in horror.

The monk put his hand on her golden hair, gently tilted her head back, and looked into her face. His eyes were blue and open wide.

“There is no one, Kristin, who does not love and fear God. But it’s because our hearts are divided between love for God and fear of the Devil, and love for this world and this flesh, that we are miserable in life and death. For if a man knew no yearning for God and God’s being, then he would thrive in Hell, and we alone would not understand that he had found his heart’s desire. Then the fire would not burn him if he did not long for coolness, and he would not feel the pain of the serpent’s bite if he did not long for peace.”

Kristin looked up into his face; she understood nothing of what he said.

With riddles. Brother Edvin responds with mysteries and riddles that defy rational examination.

Brother Edvin continued, “It was because of God’s mercy toward us that He saw how our hearts were split, and He came down to live among us, in order to taste, in fleshly form, the temptations of the Devil when he entices us with power and glory, and the menace of the world when it offers us blows and contempt and the wounds of sharp nails in our hands and feet. In this manner He showed us the way and allowed us to see His love.”

The monk looked down into the child’s strained and somber face. Then he laughed a little and said in an entirely different tone of voice, “Do you know who was the first one to realize that Our Lord had allowed Himself to be born? It was the rooster. He saw the star and then he said -- and all the animals could speak Latin back then -- he cried, ‘Christus natus est!’”

Brother Edvin crowed out the last words, sounding so much like a rooster that Kristin ended up howling with laughter. And it felt so good to laugh, because all the strange things that he had just been talking about had settled upon her like a burden of solemnity.

You can see Kristin trying to square the circle of the nonsense that Edvin offers her, but even Edvin realizes that it is hopeless and has to revert to the silliest stories he tells the youngest children to help them believe.

But Kristin is not a young child. She is growing into a young woman and she is wrestling with the emotions and passions that are beginning to manifest within her heart. She doesn’t want the life that has been prescribed for her -- prescribed by her parents and most of all by her father -- to wed as they bid or to enter the convent and take her vows of chastity. At one point her younger sister, Ulvhild, who has been crippled by a childhood accident, falls and hurts herself, and in her love and sympathy for her sister Kristin has a moment of clarity.

She placed Ulvhild on the bed which the sisters had shared ever since Kristin had grown too old to sleep with her parents. Then she took off her own shoes and lay down next to the little one. She lay there and listened for the bell long after it had stopped ringing and the child was asleep.

It had occurred to her, as the bell began to peal, while she sat with Ulvhild’s little bloodied face in her hands that perhaps this was an omen for her. If she would take her sister’s place -- if she would promise herself to the service of God and the Virgin Mary -- then maybe God would grant the child renewed vigor and good health. 

Kristin remembered Brother Edvin saying that these days parents offered to God only the crippled and lame children or those for whom they could not arrange good marriages. She knew her parents were pious people, and yet she had never heard them say anything except that she would marry. But when they realized that Ulvhild would be ill all her days, they at once proposed that she should enter a convent.

But Kristin didn’t want to do it; she resisted the idea that God would perform a miracle for Ulvhild if she became a nun. She clung to Sira Eirik’s words that so few miracles occurred nowadays. And yet she had the feeling this evening that it was as Brother Edvin had said -- that if someone had enough faith, then he could indeed work miracles. But she did not want that kind of faith; she did not love God and His Mother and the saints in that way. She would never love them in that way. She loved the world and longed for the world.

Kristin pressed her lips to Ulvhild’s soft, silky hair. The child slept soundly, but the elder sister sat up, restless, and then lay down again. Her heart was bleeding with sorrow and shame, but she knew that she could not believe in miracles because she was unwilling to give up her inheritance of health and beauty and love.

It is a momentous decision, choosing the world and its pleasures over fidelity to God, and by cultural extension, her community, family, and father.

The Hideous Deformity of Sin

In the middle section of the novel the plot unfolds along these lines. I’ll let Wikipedia provide the summary:

Despite being betrothed to a neighboring landowner's son, Simon Darre, Kristin falls in love with Erlend Nikulaussøn, from the estate of Husaby in Trøndelag. Erlend has been excommunicated by the Catholic Church for openly cohabitating with Eline, the wife of a prominent judge; Eline left her elderly husband to live with Erlend, flouting both religious and social law. They have had two children together, Orm and Margret, who have no legal rights since they were born of an adulterous relationship.

Erlend and Kristin begin a passionate romance which is sealed with Erlend's seduction of Kristin and their eventual complicity in Eline's death, both grievous sins in the eyes of Church and State. Lavrans forbids their relationship, but after three years of Kristin's defiance and the death of Ulvhild, he no longer has the strength to oppose Kristin. He consents to her marriage to Erlend. Erlend and Kristin are formally betrothed, but she becomes pregnant before the wedding.

The final part of the novel is aptly titled Lavrans Bjorgulfson, after Kristin’s father, since in it we largely see Kristin from his perspective. It is a perspective, as described above, that is beaten down and nostalgic for the things that were and might have been.

Married off -- that was what had happened to him, practically unconsulted. Friends … he had many, and he had none. War … it had been a joy, but there was no more war; his armor was hanging up in the loft, seldom used. He had become a farmer. But he had had daughters; everything he had done in his life became dear to him because he had done it to provide for those tender young lives that he held in his hands. He remembered Kristin’s tiny two-year-old body on his shoulder, her flaxen soft hair against his cheek. Her little hands holding on to his belt while she pressed her hard, round forehead against his shoulder blades when he went riding with her sitting behind him on the horse.

And now she had those ardent eyes, and she had won the man she wanted. She was sitting up there in the dim light, leaning against the silk pillows of the bed. In the glow of the candle she was all golden -- golden crown and golden shift and golden hair spread over her naked golden arms. Her eyes were no longer shy.

The father moaned with shame.

It is very much like Kristin cannot grow up in Lavrans’s eyes -- she cannot become a woman with her own life and her own desires -- because doing so threatens the world he has constructed, or which, more accurately and more painfully, has been constructed even for him. Undset does masterful work in showing us both perspectives, the willful daughter and the troubled father, and sometimes even more masterfully twists them into the willful father and troubled daughter.

She and Erlend knelt together during the wedding mass, but it was all like a hallucination: the candles, the paintings, the shining vessels, the priests dressed in linen albs and long chasubles. All those people who had known her in the past seemed like dream images as they stood there filling the church in their familiar festive garb. But Herr Bjorn was leaning against a pillar and looking at them with his dead eyes, and she thought that the other dead one must have come back with him, in his arms.

Herr Bjorn is the deceased husband of Aashild Gautesdatter, who is Erlend’s aunt and who is widely believed to have poisoned her late husband. It is with her guidance that Erlend and Kristin similarly calculate the death of Eline so that they can marry.

She tried to look up at the painting of Saint Olav -- he stood there, pink and white and handsome, leaning on his axe, treading his own sinful human form underfoot -- but Herr Bjorn drew her eyes. And next to him she saw Eline Ormsdatter’s dead countenance; she was looking at them with indifference. They had trampled over her in order to get here, and she did not begrudge them that.

She had risen up and cast off all the stones that Kristin had striven so hard to place over the dead. Erlend’s squandered youth, his honor and well-being, the good graces of his friends, the health of his soul -- the dead woman shook them all off. “He wanted me and I wanted him, you wanted him and he wanted you,” said Eline. “I had to pay, and he must pay, and you must pay when your time comes. When the sin is consummated it will give birth to death.”

The dead are mocking Kristin in this scene -- her own conscience manifesting them so that they can serve that purpose.

Kristin felt that she was kneeling with Erlend on a cold stone. He knelt with the red, singed patches on his pale face. She knelt beneath the heavy bridal crown and felt the crushing, oppressive weight in her womb -- the burden of the sin she was carrying. She had played and romped with her sin, measuring it out as if in a child’s game. Holy Virgin -- soon it would be time for it to lie fully formed before her, looking at her with living eyes, revealing to her the brands of her sin, the hideous deformity of sin, striking hatefully with misshapen hands at his mother’s breast. After she had borne her child, after she had seen the marks of sin on him and loved him the way she had loved her sin, then the game would be played to the end.

Kristin thought: What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices and reverberated out over the crowd? Would she then be rid of Eline’s face? Would life appear in the dead man’s eyes? But she clenched her teeth together.

Holy King Olav, I call to you. Among all those in Heaven, I beg you for help, for I know that you loved God’s righteousness above all else. I beseech you to protect the innocent one who is in my womb. Turn God’s anger away from the innocent, turn it toward me. Amen, in the precious name of the Lord.

“My children are innocent,” said Eline, “yet there is no room for them in a land where Christian people live. Your child was conceived out of wedlock just as my children were. You can no more demand justice for your child in the land you have strayed from than I could demand it for mine.”

Holy Olav, I beg for mercy nevertheless, I beg for compassion for my son. Take him under your protection, then I will carry him to your church in my bare feet. I will bring my golden crown to you and place it on your altar, if you will help me. Amen.

Her face was as rigid as stone, she was trying so hard to keep herself calm, but her body trembled and shuddered as she knelt there and was married to Erlend.

There are no right answers here. Indeed, there is almost a kind of capriciousness about what is sin and what is sanctified in this world, and that tension is on full display here as Kristin wrestles with her conscience and the ghosts of lives past and those yet to come. In these final scenes of the novel, again simply the first part of a longer work, one has to wonder if it is the capriciousness itself that will in the end destroy her.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.