And then there’s Dickens.

Mr. Blotton had no hesitation in saying, that he had not–he had used the word in its Pickwickian sense. (Hear, hear.) He was bound to acknowledge, that, personally, he entertained the highest regard and esteem for the honourable gentleman; he had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view. (Hear, hear.)

If the humor here is obscure, you may care to note the very helpful footnote in the Penguin edition of the Pickwick Papers:

A notorious parliamentary slanging match between Brougham and Canning in April 1823 was resolved by Brougham’s plea that his accusations had been directed at Canning’s official, not his private, character. Parliamentarians of the 1830s took Dicken’s jibe to heart. In 1838, one MP remarked that this ‘single stroke’ of Dicken’s pen had killed off the old excuse that calumnies ‘were only meant to apply “in a parliamentary sense”‘ (Fraser’s Magazine, October 1838).

 

I’m reading Jane Eyre for the first time.

Fortunately, Alan Jacobs has an anecdote to show I’m not the only one making up for a youth of reading not very interesting books. (In my case, I turned to mystery novels and popular science books from about grades 6 to 12, and college left me too busy to make up for the lost time.)

There’s time.

That is to say, she came upon a world of wonderful books when she was ready for them–when she could receive what they have to offer. ‘I got to read Huckleberry Finn for the first time when I was 35 years old. I read My Antonia for the first time last month. That is a kind of grace. If… I had read Huckleberry Finn at 14, would I have reread it at 35? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been the same transcendent experience as discovering it as an adult.’

(Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 25.)

I’ve never felt this way about Latin.

In his studies, the principles of grammar caused new spiritual thoughts and tastes to arise so abundantly, as to render him incapable of committing anything to memory, and though he strove hard, he could not dispel these thoughts.

-The Autobiography of St. Ignatius

(Grammar, in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, was customarily taught through the Latin Psalms– which is likely the reason for Ignatius’s spiritual thoughts.)

All Things Considered

If a man says, “I am not a Trinitarian,” I understand. But if he says (as a lady once said to me), “I believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense,” I go away dazed. In what other sense could one believe in the Holy Ghost?

-G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered, 89

Unfortunately,

this article is behind a paywall. But if you’re interested in what I’ve been quoting from Rabbi Soloveitchik, you may be interested to know that I’m not the only Catholic who has been reading him recently. A quote:

To lift our gazes to the heights so that we might draw near to the truth of being–this and other exhortations are engaging, and they have inspired me in the past. However, I find myself sobered by Rabbi Soloveitchik. Perhaps the direction of our gaze should be downward as well. Perhaps we should entertain halakhic man’s dream of a law-saturated life. After all, even if we succeed in soaring on the wings of faith and reason, the truths affirmed on high will have no purchase on our lives if we cannot affirm the downward arrow of commandment. We must be able to pray the Lord’s prayer: not only “Thy will be done,” but also “on earth as it is in heaven.”

And thus end the similarities between me and R. R. Reno.

Currently Reading, 29 January 2012

(In the order of when I began)

Tolstoy, War and Peace

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Kenneth Morris, Book of the Three Dragons

Daniel A. Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art

Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Aristotle, The Categories (This is not for fun)

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

And the Recently Finished:

Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” (the latter is just stupid)

Oscar Wilde, “An Ideal Husband”

G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog (Very good)

Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

…and the last of these works has some stern words for me.

If most of us read too fast, most of us also read too many books and are unwisely reluctant to return to something we think we already know.

–Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 128.

 

Soloveitchik on Discipline

Cathartic redemptiveness, in contrast to dignity, cannot be attained through man’s acquisition of control of his environment, but through man’s exercise of control over himself. A redeemed life is ipso facto a disciplined life. While a dignified existence is attained by majestic man who courageously surges forward and confronts mute nature– a lower form of being– in a mood of defiance, redemption is achieved when humble man makes a movement of recoil, and lets himself be confronted and defeated by a Higher and Truer Being.

Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, 34-35.

O’Connor, on Novels

The fact is, people don’t know what they are expected to do with a novel, believing, as so many do, that art must be utilitarian, that it must do something, rather than be something. Their eyes have not been opened to what fiction is, and they are like the blind men who went to visit the elephant– each feels a different part and comes away with a different impression.

Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 123.

Why We Read

I’m thrilled that this review in Books and Culture isn’t behind a paywall. I’ll read pretty much anything Lauren Winner reviews favorably except maybe this (although I probably should).

First, Jacobs is writing about love. This is a book about loving books, written by a man who wants other people to love them, too. And love, even when practiced toward the neighbor who is a book (not to mention the neighbor to whom we recommend books), is of course a theological act. As Jacobs has explained in another book, reading can be a loving encounter; one can learn to read “lovingly, because of and in the name of Jesus Christ, who is the author and guarantor of love.”

Second, Jacobs is writing about attention: “To pick up a book … is to choose a particular form of attention.” Jacobs wants people to recover the ability to practice “deep attention” inside a book—not to read hastily because one is reading what one has to for school, or because one is note-taking for information; not to read distractedly, with half one’s thoughts elsewhere; but to read with sustained focus, to allow one’s self to become absorbed by a book. And the deep attention one cultivates in reading allows one to practice deep attention in other settings, too—at the dinner table, while walking through a city or a forest, when at prayer. This does not mean that reading is instrumental, but simply that it is related to and part and parcel of the cultivation of a faithful way of being in the world.

 

Miss O’Connor Would Not Have Approved…

… of our Relevant Young Adult Fiction.

Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning, but that is a part of the problem with which I am not equipped to deal. The devil of Educationism that possesses us is the kind that can be “cast out only by prayer and fasting.” No one has yet come along strong enough to do it. In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.

Flannery O’Connor, “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 137.

I might note that I know of some today who would ask the student if he cared to learn a second language at all, since it isn’t, after all, “necessary.”