Elective Affinities

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Granted this fashion of argument, Eduard replied, you women would be invincible: first sensible, so that one cannot contradict; affectionate, so that one is glad to give in; sensitive, so that one does not want to hurt you; full of premonitions, so that one is frightened.
I am not superstitious, Charlotte replied, and would pay no attention to these obscure stirring if that was all they were; but mostly they are instinctive recollections of the happy or unhappy consequences of our own or other people's past actions. There is nothing of more significance in any situation than the intervention of a third party. I have known friends, brothers and sisters, lovers, married couples, whose relationship has been altogether changed, whose life has been turned upside down, by the chance or intended arrival of another person.

But before long they separated again. The ladies retired to their wing, where they found plenty of entertainment exchanging confidences and criticizing the latest fashions. The men busied themselves with the coaches and horses and were soon horse-trading and horse-exchanging.

Take some subject, some matter, some idea--call it what you will. Take a really firm grip on it. Be clear about it in your own mind in all its parts. It will then be easy, by talking to a group of children, to discover what they already know of it and what they still have to learn. No matter how inappropriate their answers are or however far from the point they wander, so long as your next question draws their minds and thoughts back to the subject in hand, so long as you do not let them draw you away from it, the children are bound in the end to think and understand only what and in the way the teacher wants them to. The greatest mistake a teacher can make is to let his pupils draw him away from the point, is to be incapable of keeping them fixed to the subject he is at that moment treating. Try doing it yourself, and you will find it very interesting.

Charlotte climbed further up and Ottilie carried the child. Charlotte was sunk deep in thought. Even on dry land it was possible to be shipwrecked; to recover from it as quickly as possible was a fine and praiseworthy thing. Life was, after all, only a matter of profit and loss. How many plans went awry! How often one was diverted form one's chosen course! How often we were turned aside from a clearly envisaged goal so as to achieve a higher! The traveller on his way breaks a wheel and is greatly annoyed by it, yet through this unpleasant accident he makes the most agreeable connections and acquaintances, which then go on to influence his entire life. Fate grants us our desires but it does so in its own fashion, so that it can give us something over and above what we desire.

Maybe Elective Affinities is better in German. I must say, as one who particularly admires Goethe's Faust, this little novel did not cut the mustard. Particularly, I would draw your attention to the second quote above. Elective Affinities is full of such cliche statements. You hope, and expect, from such a master as Goethe a knowing and artistic use of archetypes already so worn and abused: he does not deliver. His characters are more than mere cliches, but they partake of them often enough--whether they are women discussing needlework or men slapping their thighs and talking about politics--to make you wonder if the cheap characterization of men and women by society may not be true. I don't believe it is, but Goethe seems to in this one.

Goethe did put the incomprehensibility of love down right, though. That his characters fall in love with whom they do, seems to make no sense until it is seen as not needing to make sense, after which it of course makes complete sense.

Elective Affinities might be called Goethe's ode to 'chemistry', that oft-blamed term that gets blamed for both love and hate and inability to get along as well as perfect connubial bliss. In Goethe, we are attracted to the souls we are, by and like chemical properties, and that stronger bonds lurk that can always pull us away from the bonds we've formed, seemingly without hope. What is love now, will be as much love when you leave it cold for that stronger love--it's just that in the presence of a catalyst, hydrocarbons would rather form carbon dioxide and water than stay as they were.

Though observation isn't really an argument, I'd like to point out that if Goethe's right, we're all screwed. But I don't buy elective affinity in romance, and I'm very suspect of the term 'chemistry' in romance. This might only be because I never liked Chemistry (the subject). As before, I choose insanity.

Rising Up and Rising Down

William T Vollmann
Abridged

In short, satyagraha is correct only if the sacrifice is for something, and only if the oppressor will eventually be moved to cease his aggression should the sacrifice become of sufficient magnitude. If one or both of these conditions remains unmet, then counterviolence is justified.

That was the beginning, their pact to be one family. Gandhi prayed and fasted to keep it so. he failed; mass loving-kindness perishes; but maybe violence, wrong, rivalry and envy can be sublimated into emulation. hence this Spartan definition of the best government: The one in which the largest number of citizens are willing to compete with each other in excellence and without civil discord. But a child stole another child's pretty rock, as he would have done before people came together. A woman liked somebody else's husband. I ask you, Plato: Who is too rich or too poor for that to happen? And you, Spartans: Tell me how she can leave one man for another without civil discord? --A family feared, hence hated, another family's God. A man kept pretty cattle, and he knew that other men wanted him to die so that they could get them. Meanwhile, Julius Caesar's bodyguard was growing ominously large. It was time for government. Unfortunately, it is always time for government.

Martin Luther in the Heidelberg Theses of 1518 had warned that too vivid an apprehension of the beautiful things would give a moral actor confidence--which by the Lutheran definition must be unwarranted--in his own moral capacity. The works of men are all the more deadly when they are done without fear, he wrote, and with pure and evil assurance. (A modern restatement: When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.)

Carry out your program, please, not your ideology.

The gloomy conclusion begins to appear that whenever violence defines my relationship to you, I must be an apple and you an orange, and only dust upon our peeled carcasses can make us one; that because the stakes can be so high (literally, life and death), violent confrontations tend to be predicated on insoluble disagreement.

My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth--cold-blooded enough, you will say, but life cannot evade death. Have you ever shot a cow in the head, slit her throat, cut her hooves off, skinned her, gutted her and quartered her so that you and others can eat? Have you ever been the doctor who must decide which one of ten patients gets the life-support machine? Surely it is better to have a rational and consistent means of doing these things than to do them trying not to think of what one is doing.--Suppose, then, that the calculus can prove that one ought never to kill. --Well and good. We are surely better off for seeing it proved.

As a factory worker, my productive power becomes potentially unlimited. New machines decrease the amount of time it takes me to make something, thereby allowing--that is, requiring--me to make more such items than before, for the same fixed wage. It is as if I suddenly found myself digging not one ditch for my lord but ten. I may expend no more effort than I did in completing a single ditch, and so in a certain sense opaque to Marxism am not exploited at all (or at least I'm not more exploited than I was), but thanks to capital, embodied in the new machine, the gap between my wage and my lord's profit has increased by an order of magnitude. The distinction between absolute and relative poverty suddenly becomes much more important. It is no longer what I make but I myself who am for sale.

Were they just cynical loyalists? Maybe not. Arkhipenkov's persecutors must have been quite sure of themselves, one would think. So they were. As the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, a fellow who is known to have worked in a grain confiscation brigade noted about new people 'raised up' by the Party: 'It's hard to find the right words to express this confidence, but I'll try. It's a feeling of power, might, and serenity that comes from the realization that the mighty Soviet people, a hundred seventy million strong, is behind you.' Joan of Arc, and those who burned her, could have said the same thing, substituting God for the Soviet people. They too were sure that they were right. And perhaps the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers was right, too.

Again and above all, no clay-eater can be blamed for wanting to do something about his hunger.

But what about states' rights? asks Lincoln derisively in his speech. Well, if the citizens of Nebraska can invoke those to keep slaves, then it is certainly within their rights to go to Africa to buy slaves, and we've already made doing that a capital crime! --Not that anybody's yet been hanged for it...--For Lincoln the struggle between state and federal authority can be resolved in only one way; we never hear him argue that the federal government ought not to have the power to regulate slave trading. (Oddly enough, however, when the issue of granting statehood to Utah comes up, he says that there is nothing in the Constitution which allows the government to prohibit polygamy there, which is precisely what the government ultimately does.) Trotsky and Tolstoy speak of natural law; and there does seem to be a natural law that authority enlarges itself indefinitely, whether by frenzied growth in revolution or by incumbency's subtler increase. Given the rights of the self, it seems to me that authority possesses the right to self-aggrandizement only through imminence or incumbency. Most of the time, it grows without right.

An Aztec war hymn runs in part: 'I go forth, I go forth about to destroy, I, Yoatzin; my soul is in the cerulean water.'
Meanwhile Cortes addresses his men at the very beginning of the expedition to New Spain: 'We are engaging in a just and good war which will bring us fame.' Doubtless he prays for his good success every day when he goes to Mass. 'He was devout and given to praying,' recalls his secretary; 'he knew many prayers and psalms by heart.'

Metaphors ought to be left outside both courtroom and battlefield; metaphors and political action (to say nothing of metaphors and violence) make a dangerous mix.

Overreliance on context might lure me into the false assertion that the functionary of an evil regime must be evil--or, more vulgarly still, that the 'objective' nature of that context allows for only a certain moral decision. Trotsky tells us that he was prepared from childhood to be a revolutionary, simply as a result of seeing around him so much injustice. But his parents, who saw the same things, did not become revolutionaries. Context does not determine; it only contextualizes.

The most illuminating way to perceive the shoddiness of your own ideals is to witness someone else practicing them.

Lincoln's victory in the American Civil War was justified certainly by the abolition of slavery it brought about, and arguably by the fact that the South attacked first. But one result of his victory, and the main point for which is was fought--federal control--was not justified.

The letter itself is much shorter than its signature pages. The terrible year of 1992 has dwindled away from these people now; they live on or they have died. This letter accordingly means nothing. Their names mean nothing today as they meant nothing before the evil men and women whose policies locked them fast to the front line of a besieged city. Let them stand in for all the other people whose names have meant nothing to war criminals.

Most of the people I've helped are either in jail or dead, he said.

The same comment/quote made of Europe Central applies to Rising Up and Rising Down as well: How could you not know what goes on in this world?

Did you know that there are parts of Kingston, Jamaica (Trenchtown, Rema, Tivoli) are almost wartorn? Did you know that in 1999 Kosovo residents had to run everywhere for fear of being a sniper's target? Did you know that in 1995 the UN pulled out of Somalia (see page A24 of your local newspaper)? Did you know that Khmer Rouge executed people with pickaxes? I guess the exhaustive list of violence committed by humans would be a violence itself, since so few could be faced with such a condemnation. So I'll stop woefully short.

I am a sheltered person. I have made feeble efforts not to be, but they have amounted to very little. I would not want to unfairly condemn my generation, class, or nation, but I feel that those who partake of these three with me, also partake of my shelter.

How can we not know what goes on in this world?

We may have an obligation to ensure that we do know, at least a little of what goes on in this world, but how can we dare to know what goes on in this world? Who could bear that burden? Both valid questions that together leave me right here.

Vollmann makes a courageous attempt to face the violence in the world and he speaks from experience--true he doesn't speak from the experience of a boy in Rema or a woman in Kosovo, but he did his best to share some of this with them, without mocking the blessings of peace he has been given. You wonder by the end how he isn't dead--if not from all the danger he has placed himself in, than from the sheer horror of what he's researched, witnessed, and been told. My only answer is that even he, a man without faith, still has hope. If Vollmann can have hope, no Christian ever has the excuse of giving hope up.

It's sadly funny that Vollmann had to abridge his seven-volume opus into this so much condensed edition in order for it to get read; it's sad that his seven volume edition probably anoints many a university library shelf like a bottle of forgotten, disliked perfume sitting in the back of a bathroom drawer. But at least in its abridgment it reaches a few more voices with its potency, even if there is less of it.

If you read this post and read Rising Up and Rising Down, it will probably make you feel like a thief, at least a little, for the gifts and blessings and peace you most likely have. Count yourself lucky, if you do feel like such a one, for 'This day you will be with me in paradise'.

Europe Central

William T Vollmann

In the era of total war, coddling musicians might appear to be a weakness. But our apparatchiks knew better. Music inspired harder work and distracted the toilers from dangerous thoughts. Besides, music was all we could offer just now. The Seventh and Seventy-third Armies of the Northern Front, the Eighth, Eleventh and Twenty-seventh Armies of the Northwestern Front--thirty-nine divisions and two brigades in all--they held the line against the Fascists, but they were dwindling by the thousands. (Many had been liquidated by the SS Death's-Head Division.) And those squat, propeller-driven MIG-3s in formation over Leningrad, they weren't ready just yet; first we had to relocate our airplane factories out of Hitler's reach, and then we'd need to so to speak, you know. Where were the T-34 tanks? Wait two years; we had no tank armies yet. That was why loudspeakers chanted from every street corner (Akhmatova was on the radio); that was why even along the White Sea Canal, on whose construction a hundred thousand people died, there'd occasionally been convict orchestras huddled on concrete slabs, their horns drooping down like the beaks of perishing ravens as they played inspirational melodies.

It was Nina's fate to always give, but hurriedly and quick-temperedly, so her gifts were not received with gratitude. He for his part was a generous man without anything to give.

He knew that he could hold on until death. He'd always been brave; he'd endured many discomforts: but this miserable and quite possibly hopeless struggle had stripped away everything but truth: He was ready; he was worthy; he believed fully in himself. How grateful he felt to Coca for believing in him all these years! He had needed her faith; if this beautiful, passionate woman of royal blood stood willing to be his comrade for life, then his rejection by the Navy, his father's dreary career, his own reserve in friendship, could be regarded with the smiling tolerance with which a man remembers the missteps of boyhood. He'd won the prize!

He told the boys the tale of Simple Hans, whose princely brothers despised him for a fool but who won the princess in the end because he saved the ants, ducks and bees from harm, a favor they requited by coming to his aid when he was set humanly impossible magic tasks in the castle of stone effigies: The ants gathered up and counted all the scattered pearls, the ducks dove down to find the lost key, and the bee queen tasted the lips of each sleeping princess to find out which girl was the most charming.

A month later he was summoned back to Prague, to receive another suitcase. He had two hours before his train. (There went his colleagues, marching in a light as straight and grand as the Doric columns of Schinkel's Neue Wache.) This time his footsteps guided him to an antique store's ticking clock, bare-breasted porcelains, fake pearl necklaces and dead women's black gowns. Something for his wife...He allowed himself to imagine how Christian's face would have lit up had he dropped around his neck that eighteenth-century Cross of the Order of the White Eagle which Captain Wirth had forced on him; boys always love militaria, and this was an eight-pointed star of gold, garnished with silver and diamonds! Actually, what he should have done was to sell it and feed his family. Instead, he buried it in the Polish earth, praying softly for its former owner, the grey-green trees going ethereal beyond his tears as they would have done in any rain. Rain of blood, rain of steel, rain on the rich green grass of Auschwitz! Tears and prayers are both supposed to refresh one's soul.

Elena was conscious of him, of course; she knew that he was reading what she was reading; but later on, years later, he suspected that she had been oblivious of his pain; for who are we to think ourselves of such interest to others, even to our spouses, that they can truly read us?

Operation Citadel commenced at 0430 hours on 5.7.43. It concluded on 19.7.43, after seventy thousand of us were dead.

I remember the fairytales that Grandmother Elsa used to tell me that it's necessary to follow without the slightest deviation the advice of the fox, fish, sleepwalker, raven, telephone, ragged dwarf; moreover, this advice grows all the more valid as it disguises itself as nonsense: When stealing the golden horse, saddle him up in the worn tackle, not the jeweled harness which hangs on the other peg. When stealing the Golden Princess, who offers to come with you willingly on condition that you permit her to say goodbye to her parents, you must forbid her precisely this. Be firm; let her weep! In other words, the reward will fall only to him who obeys blindly and faithfully.

When four dozen ebony men in chains appear, you must not reply when they ask who you are. You must allow them first to beat you, then to cut off your head. When T-34s converge on you, you must gaze steadily up at their snouts. Don't yield a single square centimeter to them! IF you follow these orders faithfully, then the talking serpent will change back into a princess for you to marry, and you'll become King of the Golden Castle.

She's too high, too far away. That's how I've felt about each woman in my life. For their part, women have tried to understand me, but what is there to understand? I am nothing more than I am.

A pyramid of flame (to pick a familiar wartime example) possesses a specific shape at any given isntant, adn a general shape over time; we call it a pyramid only for convenience; it's writhing upward, getting nowhere in particular, doomed to subsidence.

All magic spells fail without belief. We enforced belief. In place of ruins we offered the wide white monumentality of Stallinallee, arched, windowed, black and white, fading magnificently into the East.

(In the street he saw a man slip his arm around a woman and that was extremely painful.)

Maybe the only person that an artist can be faithful to is himself. Maybe he's got to betray everybody else. Will you kindly get that martyred look off your face? That's just how it goes. Sometimes I think you're not even conscious of it. A pair of dark eyes comes floating toward you, adn you can't help yourself; you follow them like a sleepwalker--

Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn't marry me.

What's that sound? Have you ever seen the expressionless faces of people in a queue to send parcels to their spouses in prison camps? They mask themselves out of knowledge that the 'organs' are watching. Or perhaps they've developed this habit simply because our Soviet Union is a cold country; one learns to hide oneself simply to, so to speak, stay warm, to, to, to, well. In this opera, however, we're in the ancient times of Russian bear-hunters: Swamps and forest of Russian misery press all around, besieging the walls which jail Katerina. In our time life will be more, so to speak, JOYFUL: The walls will grow higher; the Fifth Symphony will end with hordes of perfidiously bristling bug-legged notes and chords strung on the music paper's barbed wire; Opus 110 will scream like invalids in a burning hospital (by teh way, screaming is also the task of an intellectual in crisis); unfortunately, 'Lady Macbeth' remains trapped in the prerevolutionary era; poor Katerina's on her way to Siberia! But she's happy, she sings Seryosha's name. What is it that those idiots always say about Zoya? Not long but beautifully did she live! Ha, and then those Fascists hanged her! Beautifully, all right! Sometimes I want to spew. And Katerina's just another, you know. They'll want me to compose her in a major key: Not long but JOYFUL. What a...It might have been well for her had she troubled to consider the studied blankness of her fellow prisoners' faces, because then she might ahve found the mockery interred so shallowly beneath the twitching earth of their grey lips--buried alive! Well, that's par for the course in Opus 110.

And from a Polish father, a Jewish mother, how could you not know what goes on in this world? And then what happened to your mother, you, well, that's how it is for all of us. Irinochka, please, please forgive me for my, for, for speaking to you in this monstrous fashion; I know I'm a...Poor child! What a lot of pain I've caused you! And you knew it anyway, didn't you?

Europe Central is the closest thing I've ever found to a novel written in the second person plural. Vollmann writes a novel we live. Focusing on many historical actors--D D Shostakovitch, Roman Karmen, the Soviet general Vlasov, the Nazi general Paulus, the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, the Christian member of the SS Kurt Gerstein, and others--Vollmann tells the story of all the hurting people of central Europe. It's a story that comes at time when we need to hear what we are living. Vollmann tells the story of we because we are at risk of not recognizing our membership in we.

Vollmann puts more flesh and bloody rags on the structure of history than many author's I've read. He takes the history we think we know, and turns it into the stories of people and makes us realize that it isn't like anything we knew. Since the general attitude towards WW2 is pleasant--because we're far enough from it now, because we won it, because it was a white war, because we have to have something to be proud of--we rarely dwell on the atrocity of that bloody period. It's shocking to thick that more gruesome atrocities were being committed seventy years ago in Europe than we hear about in most troubled areas of Africa. From the Holocaust to Stalingrad to Dresden to the Soviets, people proved to be wildly inventive at inflicting fiendish pain on each other. So much for WW2.

Through all of it, there is the nerve-twisting music of Shostakovitch. Shostakovitch might be the central character of Europe Central and what a central character he is: weak, cowardly, stuttering, soft, tormented, adulterous, yet capable of courage for his art, and with the heart of a lover to bring fame to love. The story of Shostakovitch, dreary, sad, tormented, terrified, beautiful, is the story of his times. For a generation that has come into adulthood in the 2000s, it is hard to imagine the awful destruction and poverty and pain that Central Europe spent most of the 20th Century slogging through.

How could we not know what goes on in this world? Well, if we're as insulated as I feel, as insulated as the people I meet seem, as insulated as the media proves, it seems that the answer is quite easily. We are privileged because we can choose to not know what goes on in the world. Exercising this right of ours, do we risk losing our ability to choose? What if we live in chosen ignorance so long we no longer realize the choice? We have access to more information than any generation before us; we have the ability to travel more freely, we have the calm of a country whose land has been at peace for over a century: How could we not know what goes on in this world?

The Wounded Healer

Henri J M Nouwen

A Christian leader is a man of hope whose strength in the final analysis is based neither on self-confidence derived from his personality, nor on specific expectations for the future, but on a promise given to him.

The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift.

When we are impatient, we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, too soon, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated, intuitive knowledge--that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition.

Promises, not concrete successes, are the basis of Christian leadership.

It is an act of discipleship in which we follow the hard road of Christ, who entered death with nothing but bare hope.

For a man of prayer is, in the final analysis, the man who is able to recognize in others the face of the Messiah and make visible what was hidden, make touchable what was unreachable.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that men feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty that the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

Making one's own wounds a source of healing, therefore, does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one's own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which all men share.

A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared. When someone comes with his loneliness to the minister, he can only expect that his loneliness will be understood and felt, so that he no longer has to run away from it but can accept it as an expression of his basic human condition. When a woman suffers the loss of her child, the minister is not called upon to comfort her by telling her that she still has two beautiful healthy children at home; he is challenged to help her realize that the death of her child reveals her own mortal condition, the same human condition which he and others share with her.

The many who call themselves father or allow themselves to be called father, from the Holy Father to the many father abbots, to the thousands of "priest-fathers" trying to hand over some good news, should know that the last one to be listened to is the father. We are facing a generation which has parents but no fathers, a generation in which everyone who claims authority--because he is older, more mature, more intelligent or more powerful--is suspect from the very beginning.

In practically all priestly functions, such as pastoral conversation, preaching, teaching and liturgy, the minister tries to help people to recognize the work of God in themselves.

In this context the pastoral conversation is not merely a skillful use of conversational techniques to manipulate people into the Kingdom of God, but a deep human encounter in which a man is willing to put his own faith and doubt, his own hope and despair, his own light and darkness at the disposal of others who want to find a way through their confusion and touch the solid core of life.

And if priests and ministers of tomorrow think that more skill training is the solution for the problem of Christian leadership for the future generation, they may end up being more frustrated and disappointed than the leaders of today. More training and structure are just as necessary as more bread for the hungry. But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold.

No man can stay alive when nobody is waiting for him. Everyone who returns from a long and difficult trip is looking for someone waiting for him at the station or the airport. Everyone wants to tell his story and share his moments of pain and exhilaration with someone who stayed home, waiting for him to come back.

Thinking about martyrdom can be an escape unless we realize that real martyrdom means a witness that starts with the willingness to cry with those who cry, laugh with those who laugh, and to make one's own painful and joyful experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding.

Many will put their trust in him who went all the way, out of concern for just one of them. The remark, He really cares for us is often illustrated by stories which show that forgetting the many for the one is a sign of true leadership.

I have--found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets who have dared to express the unique in themselves.

Nouwen's concept of Christian leadership, the Wounded Healer, is echoed in Samuel Wells's concept of over-acceptance, and both are rooted in Christ: the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection--which is to say, forgiveness.

Nouwen describes a leader who embraces his own wounds (his own cross), and finds Christ there, most present. By living with our pain and wounds we transform them into the places of our greatest strength. Because these are the places that we can truly meet other people.

Nouwen sidesteps the idea that ministers (Christians in general) need to bring healing to each other; instead, he says that Christians need to reveal the unity of the Body of Christ through the wounds we bear. It is leadership by compassion. Really, it shouldn't work. But the promise is that it will.

The Wounded Healer is a slim little book that outlines what it means to be a Christian leader.

The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

Farley Mowat

I have not previously mentioned that Itchy lacked toilet facilities. The truth is that I had never thought about installing them because, until Claire's coming, they would have been redundant. The bob chains forward, and the bumpkin aft, provided adequate comfort in an open environment. For men.
Having boarded the ship, I went below to light the lamps, leaving Claire the privacy of the dark adn slippery decks. Soon I heard a mammoth splash and rushed on deck with a flashlight to find her small, white face bobbing in the black, oily waters alongside. She was not alone. A few feet away my flashlight beam picked up the grinning gape of a cat that had died hard, and died a long, long time ago. Fortunately, Claire had sense enough to keep her mouth shut. Had she swallowed any of the water of the inner harbor it is possible my story would have ended on a tragic note.
Rescuing her was something of a task because, as she pointed out when she was finally dragged , dripping and furious onto the deck, Nobody can swim with their slacks down around their ankles! In truth, she must have found it a harrowing experience, but when she had been taken up to Paulo's, hot-bathed, fortified with brandy, and given clean clothes, her good nature reasserted itself. In fact, I was so pleased with her that I redesigned the forepeak of the schooner so that there would be a room for a small convenience, Ladies, for the use of.

I did not look back. When a man has made a really monumental asp of himself, he should never, never look back.

Mowat has a wonderful wit, and writes humor with a flair that avoids triviality (mostly). Every time the boat seems to need a miracle for it to float any more, Mowat denies you the cute miracle, everything's alright miracle but also manages to avoid ending the story. Instead he presents a tribute to how much a foolish human can take and how much fun it is to laugh at man getting ground under the heel of the elements--this post's date notes its proximity to the earthquake in Haiti of 1.12.2010--we like to laugh at how little nature makes us feel, when we aren't crying. Although man's sometimes unfair struggle against nature figures as a prominent source of humor in Mowat's The Boat Who Wouldn't Float, I don't think someone reading it in the aftermath of such an event as Haiti's quake would feel it tasteless.

But in the spirit of unfairness that lands a 7.0 magnitude earthquake under one of the poorest nations on earth, I'll change the subject, and talk about something else I want to talk about.

Mowat's treatment of women in The Boat Who Wouldn't Float is rather odd. I haven't read any of his other work, so I don't know if it is peculiar to this novel or not, but I find him at curious odds with himself when it comes to women. It should be said first though, that The Boat Who Wouldn't Float is not a novel of women. What few women characters there are tend to be pretty flat (only on the page of course, in other ways otherwise). He introduces the main female character, Clair a little more than halfway through. Clair is rarely quoted by the narrator as most other (male) characters are, and because of her seeming silence she looms in the back of the narrative like some overbearing specter. I'm no feminist, but I couldn't help feeling that Mowat did Clair a great disservice. What kind of character doesn't exist so prominently? Sometimes you wonder if Mowat has forgotten poor Clair, but then she resurfaces again and stuns you with the revelation that she's been there all along. How is this possible? How can so much happen, so many pages be filled, and this character be with us through it all, but unknown to us? The reader feels betrayed. Especially since Clair, when she does appear, appears to be such a real winner.

Mowat's Clair might be the perfect woman, if Mowat could have made her something more than a cardboard cutout that he looks at every once in a while. As the above quote will convey, she takes the worst of scenarios and only needs a bit of the stiff stuff to be her cheery self again. Every time Mowat comes to a particularly dangerous crossing in his suicidal and depressed little boat, he promptly puts Clair ashore at the nearest port so that she can meet him on the other side. She never seems to say anything about this. I can see that she is a less experienced sailor than Mowat and that she probably had no desire to go drown herself, but the strange silence in which all this occurs feels weird.

By this point you may wonder what I'm driving at. Is it a case of too good to be true? Does Mowat try to paint the picture of a woman who'll have adventures with him and live the rough life with him and let him be a knight in shining armor when he wants and does he simply fail to pull it off because it's so much like what he dreams of? I don't think so. It seemed to me more that Mowat didn't notice that he wasn't actually creating a character, but was creating a pin-up poster of a girl who he could roll up and store in a waterproof tube when Itchy's cabin was especially leaky. Most likely, Mowat suffered as most writers with an inability to write the other sex. But something more is missing: the romance Mowat paints in the last fifty pages of the book, isn't a romance at all, it's a fantasy--the difference being that a fantasy is only ever about one person.

Think about this if you are having dreams of flying down to Haiti to help out.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Lynne Truss

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. "Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's."
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.

What would Ms Truss think of my blog? I make a point of removing almost all quotation marks, as well as much of the punctuation from posted pieces. Oh dear. While Ms Truss's "Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" is clear, helpful, and perhaps even warranted, I found myself thinking that she might have missed something: namely that people miss things. Many of the cases of intolerable punctuation she cites seem to me to be lapses of thought rather than the absence of knowledge. To be sure, the case she cites in the quotation above is not likely to be such an instance, but in general I felt that many times punctuation is misused it stems from trying to think too fast and not rereading what has been written rather than ignorance of the rules. Ms Truss even acknowledges this in a few instances but says there can be no excuse. Perhaps she is right. After all, this is our language and we, in speaking, surely shoulder the responsibility of changing it. For that, Eats, Shoots & Leaves ought to be commended. And she does appreciate the beauty of punctuation done well, which is something that I admire. However, there is a point after which priggishness of her sort tears beauty apart rather than helping others admire it.