Jayber Crow

Wendell Berry

If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. To love the world as much even as I could love it would be suffering also, for I would fail. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.

But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray “thy will be done” after you see what it means?

And we missed Uncle Othy. We were always needing him to help with something or tell us something, but we missed him just for his own sake too. We needed to hear him say, “Hurry along with them biscuits, Cordie, for I got things that needs a-seeing to,” or, “If you can’t do it, son, quit and get out of the way. Don’t send a boy to do a man’s work.”

I confess that I heard this with a sense of guilt, for by the time Troy began to say such thing I had bought the Zephyr and had succumbed to something of the same impatience. My wonderful machine sometimes altered my mind so that I, lately a pedestrian myself, fiercely resented all such impediments on the road. Even at my sedate top speed of forty miles an hour, I hated anything that required me to slow down. My mind raged and fumed and I cursed aloud at farmers driving their stock across the road, at indecisive possums, at children on bicycles. Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop. Hadn’t I been there and didn’t I know it? And so, self-accused, having begun by resenting the insult to Athey, I ended by yielding Troy a little laugh and a nod of understanding, which shamed me and did not make me like him any better.

Wendell Berry's writing is like a small boy driving nails; it consists of many misses in which the thumb often suffers, but with the occasional swing that rings so true the nail cannot help but be driven home.

The Greek Passion

Nikos Kazantzakis

Manolios placed his hand on the knee of priest Fotis, who, absorbed in his meditations, said nothing.
How ought we to love God, Father? He asked in a whisper.
By loving men, my son.
And how ought we to love men?
By trying to guide them along the right path.
And what is the right path?
The one that rises.

Why do you stay here, you who say you love Me, why do you stay here, nice and quiet and with your arms folded, resting? You eat, you drink, you read at your ease the words which I have spoken, you weep at the story of My crucifixion, and then you go to bed and sleep. Aren’t you ashamed? Is that how you love Me? Do you call that love? Get up!

My heart’s got to overflow! If man’s heart doesn’t overflow either with love or with anger, nothing gets done in the world, you can take it form me!

Woe to the Lycovrissi who eats his fill without thinking of the children on the Sarakina. Every human body starving on our land is tied round the neck of each one of us and drags us down to Hell.

God distributes wealth in accordance with hidden laws which are His own. The justice of God is one thing, that of men another. God has made the rich and the poor. Woe to him who dares disturb the order; he is infringing the will of God! Impertinent Manolios, I repent of having given you permission to speak.

All the souls in the world, priest Fotis took him up, are hung round the neck of each man. So don’t make distinction between ‘yours’ and ‘mine’, Father.

Yes, we’re afraid, too, replied Yannakos, but we pretend to be brave, there you are! How can I explain it to you when it’s all muddled up in my head? Look here: I pretend to be brave and my heart beats like mad. But little by little—it’s curious!—by dint of pretending to be brave, I get there! See what I mean, old man? What have your books got to say about it? To tell you the truth, I don’t understand too well! I’m an ass!

We’re not complaining, priest Fotis answered, rising. That’s what it means to be a man: to suffer, undergo injustices and struggle without giving ground! We shall not give ground, Michelis. Tomorrow I’ll go to the town and struggle.

The face they’ve got to act the Apostles! He kept saying. I’m better than they, savage though I am. Because I’ve suffered, I have, more than them, in my house and out of my house and in myself. It’s when I’m alone I weep; they weep when everyone can see. I know what love is, the sort that makes the whole village laugh at me; when they lose anyone, they’re happy and joke about it. They’re disgusting; plague upon them! One’s got his donkey, t’other his café, t’other his rich father and his Mariori. I’ve got nothing. There’s times I’d like to set fire to my shop, chuck my wife and children out and kill the woman I love. Well, which of us is Judas? Them, that have all they want, them, the satisfied, or me?

Listen, he shouted, try your nonsense on others; don’t do what you did last time, don’t ape the saints, d’you hear? Otherwise the Devil’s going to get you. Understand? A poor innocent like you, rob, kill, set fire to things? Try it on others, I tell you: you won’t fool me, my dear, see? Even if the Devil were in it, I wouldn’t believe you!

I'm learning that Kazantzakis' books are all the same. This would be a bigger problem if they weren't as good as they are. But it still lessens his standing a little. But if he is a man who was listening to what his pen was saying, he shouldn't care too much about his standing.

His brand of Christianity is the Christianity of zealots. I don't agree with some pieces of it; I wonder if he doesn't border on blasphemy sometimes when he trumpets the glory of God and His creation. But surely it's no less blasphemous than the dusty pallor and boredom with which the majority of us treat God and His creation.

His stories are stories of miracles and wars. There is no smallness in them. The good is a force so strong and righteous it feels sickly (probably because humans cannot do justice to the virtue he is trying to capture) and his evil seems so unreasonable as to be quite simple. The moments when he gives us his evil characters doing something good are some of the most powerful in the book.

But, as with St. Francis and Zorba I have to admit that I have learned good things that will become a part of who I am. Take the road that rises.

A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov

Many people start life expecting to end up as Alexander the Great or Lord Byron, then spend their whole lives as minor civil servants.

He speaks quickly, affectedly, and is one of those people who have a fine sentiment ready for every occasion in life, but lack all sense of beauty and make a solemn display of uncommon emotions, exalted passions and exceptional sufferings. Their greatest pleasure in life is to create an effect, and romantic provincial ladies find them madly attractive. When they get older, they settle down as country squires or take to drink, or occasionally both. They often have many good qualities, but they never have a scrap of poetry in them.

The princess, I fancy, is one of those women who want to be amused, and two dull minutes with you will finish you for good. Your silence must rouse her curiosity, your conversation must leave her wanting more. You've got to play on her feelings all the time. She'll scorn public opinion a dozen times for your sake and call it a sacrifice, but she'll get her own back by giving you hell, and then calmly declare that she can't stand you. If you don't get the upper hand, her first kiss won't give you the right to expect a second. She'll play with you till she's tired of it, then a couple of years later she'll marry some brute out of duty to Mama and persuade herself she's unhappy because it was not heaven's will to unite her with the only man she ever loved (you, that is) on account of his private's greatcoat, though under that thick grey coat there beat an ardent, noble heart...

Werner is a remarkable man in many ways. Like most doctors, he's a sceptic and a materialist, but he's also a poet of the true sort--always a poet in what he does and often, too, in what he says, though he's never written a line of verse in his life. He's studied all the living chords of the human heart in the way other people might study the sinews of a dead body. He's never managed to apply his knowledge, though, just as a first-rate anatomist sometimes has no idea how to cure a fever. As a rule Werner laughs at his patients behind their backs, but I once saw him in tears over a dying soldier. Werner was poor and dreamed of millions, but he would never lift a finger for the sake of money. He once told me he would rather do a favour to an enemy than a friend. The latter would mean selling his charity, while his enemy would hate him the more for his generosity

I love enemies, though not in the Christian way. Being always on the alert, catching their every glance, the hidden meaning of every word, guessing their next step, confounding their plans, pretending to be taken in and then with one fell blow wrecking the whole elaborate fabric of their cunning schemes--that's what I call living!

There's no one so susceptible to the power of the past as I am. Every memory of past joy or sorrow stabs at my heart and strikes the same old chords. It's silly the way I'm made: I forget nothing--absolutely nothing.

After all, I'm writing this journal for myself, and anything I care to put in it will one day be a precious memory for me.

When I reached home, I got on my horse and galloped out into the steppe. I love galloping through long grass on a fiery horse, with the desert wind in my face. I gulp the scented air and peer into the blue distance, trying to make out the hazy shapes that show up more distinctly every minute. Whatever sorrow weights on the heart, whatever anxiety troubles the mind, it vanishes in a moment. You feel peace at heart, and the troubled mind is cleared by bodily fatigue. There's no woman whose eyes I wouldn't forget when I see the blue sky and the wooded mountains, lit by the southern sun, or hear the roar of a cascading torrent.

What if it does? If I die, I die. It will be small loss to the world, and I've had about enough of it myself. I'm like a man yawning at a ball who doesn't go home to bed because his carriage hasn't come. but when it arrives--farewell!

Lermontov wrote Hero in the late 1830s. He might as well have written it late in the first decade of the 2000s. He said, "The Hero of our Time is certianly a portrait, but not of a single person. It is a portrait of the vices of our whole generation in their ultimate development." And to be honest, I can't say that Pechorin is really that different from the people you meet today. To be sure, most people would rebel and recoil if I applied the thoughts in the quotes above to them, but that doesn't stop them from having those thoughts in the safely insulated chambers of their minds, where they can rename and re-costume all the most despicable attitudes and actions and make them like beautiful wax figures. I would hazard that most of my generation has sizable wax doll collections in their consciences. We should pray we never face any fire, otherwise our moral sensibilities will melt and we might see ourselves for what we really are: Heroes of our Time.

Truth to tell, it still grieves me that she never once remembered me as she lay dying, though i think I loved her like a father. Well, God forgive her...and afterall, who am I that people should think of me when they're dying?

The Nigger of the Narcissus

Joseph Conrad

Crazy, am I? I am more ready to die than any of you, officers incloosive - there! As long as she swims I will cook! I will get you coffee.

His obstinate non-recognition of the only certitude whose approach we could watch from day to day was as disquieting as the failure of some law of nature. He was so utterly wrong about himself that one could not but suspect him of having access to some source of supernatural knowledge. He was absurd to the point of inspiration. He was unique, and as fascinating as only something inhuman could be; he seemed to shout his denials already from beyond the awful border. He was becoming immaterial like an apparition; his cheekbones rose, the forehead slanted more; the face was all hollows, patches of shade; and the fleshless head resembled a disinterred black skull, fitted with two restless globes of silver in the sockets of eyes.

Singleton stood at the door with his face to the light and his back to the darkness. And alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself, who should have come there into this place as quiet as a sepulcher to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler. Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike impulses and his man's passions already dead within his tattooed breast. The men who could understand his silence were gone - those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and impatient and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery - but knew not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men - but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home - and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea.

Surely there is some of what it means to be a man here.