Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" and Pathologies of Religion

I had read Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor a few years ago. I remember at the time I thought that the story had some insights into modern religious pathologies, but I would have to do a closer read and possibly some research to explore that thought further. Since my list of "backburner" projects has only grown since then, I'm giving this one up and simply presenting some passages I had marked and some accompanying thoughts.

The novel uses racist anti-black slurs frequently, as did the author in real life. None of these appears in the quotes for this blog entry.

My titles in bold. Quotes are from an online, full-text edition.

Quotes from Mary Shelley's "The Last Man"

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) is most famous for Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. A friend suggested her 1826 novel The Last Man was especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you can ignore the Victorian-era obsession with facial characteristics and the casual assumptions of European, in particular British, superiority to the rest of the world, the novel does have some excellent, thought-provoking passages.

Quotations are lifted from the Romantic Circles website page on the novel. The narrator is Lionel Varney, the sole survivor of a plague and its resulting chaos. I've added my thoughts in bold.

Quotes from Edwidge Danticat's "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work"

I've gathered some quotes from Edwidge Danticat's collection of essays entitled Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. p. 10

Favorite Quotes: "The Conference of the Birds" by Farid Attar

Image of folio from Metropolitan
Museum of Art

Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis translated from Persian into English Farid Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr (منطق الطير). The title they chose is The Conference of the Birds. The National Endowment for the Humanities included it in its Muslim Journeys Bookshelf.

There are several translations, and the copy I read included a prologue and an epilogue, which is a revised edition of the first Darbandi & Davis published translation. The ISBN is 9780140444346, and the length is 278 pages. I thought the prologue & epilogue were valuable.

To call Darbandi & Davis translators is quite a misnomer. Their rhyming couplets are so much more than translating.

I also read a picture book version by Rabiah/Alexis York Lumbard, which I hope to write a separate blog entry about.

Favorite Quotes from "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption" by Bryan Stevenson

This entry contains some quotes from Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Stevenson is one of the founders of the Equal Justice Initiative. His work is profiled in a documentary and a soon-to-be released feature film.

Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person's humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own. p. 12

I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity -- seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions. p. 17

Favorite Quotes: Günter Grass, "The Tin Drum"

Günter Grass received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, and his most famous book is Die Blechtrommel, translated into English as The Tin Drum. The June 4, 2007 New Yorker published his account of his participation as a teenager in the German Nazi war effort. Because he had not disclosed these matters publicly, despite his reputation as a critic of post-war Germany's attempts to forget its fascism and its crimes and their popularity, he received much criticism.

I read the 1961 Ralph Manheim translation, but some of these quotes are from the Breon Mitchell 2009 translation. Click to enlarge images.

Favorite Quotes: Dorothy Day, "The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography"

The best source for information on Dorothy Day is the Catholic Worker website.

These quotes are from the 1981 HarperCollins paperback of the 1952 book.

Some of her description of her mentor, Peter Maurin:

Peter made you feel a sense of his mission as soon as you met him. He did not begin by tearing down, or by painting so intense a picture of misery and injustice that you burned to change the world. Instead, he aroused in you a sense of your own capacities for work, for accomplishment. He made you feel that you and all men had great and generous hearts with which to love God. If you once recognized this fact in yourself you would expect and find it in others. [p. 171]

Favorite Quotes: Carlos Ruiz Zafón on War in "The Shadow of the Wind"

Lucia Graves translated Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento as The Shadow of the Wind.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind. (p. 428)

I don't know Spanish, but I think I've found the passage in the original text:

Favorite Quote: F Scott Fitzgerald, "The Last Tycoon" - "learned tolerance, kindness, forebearance, and even affection like lessons"

F. Scott Fitzgerald never finished the novel The Last Tycoon. Elia Kazan directed a 1976 movie based on the novel. Amazon produced one season of a series based on the novel.

From p. 97, a description of  "Hollywood studio manager Monroe Stahr, clearly based on Irving Thalberg (head of the film company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), whom Fitzgerald had encountered several times." (Wikipedia)

Like many brilliant men, he had grown up dead cold. Beginning at about twelve, probably, with the total rejection common to those of extraordinary mental powers, the "See here: this is all wrong -- a mess -- all a lie -- and a sham --," he swept it all away, everything, as men of his type do; and then instead of being a son-of-a-bitch as most of them are, he looked around at the barrenness that was left and said to himself, "This will never do." And so he had learned tolerance, kindness, forebearance, and even affection like lessons. (emphasis in original)

Favorite Quote: Oscar Wilde: The Rich & Idle Preach the Values of Thrift & Labor

From Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray:

[Lord Henry Wotton] pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had he gone to his aunt's, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that!

The full text is available online.

Ernest Hemingway's Warning About Those Who Come to Divert You From the Path of Significance

In the last chapter of Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway warns people doing significant things to avoid seduction by the popular, rich and powerful:

The rich have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes a little deaf, sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affable and hesitant ahead of them. The pilot fish talks like this: “Well I don't know. No of course not really. But I like them. I like them both. Yes, by God, Hem; I do like them. I see what you mean but I do like them truly and there’s something damned fine about her.” (He gives her name and pronounces it lovingly.) “No, Hem, don't be silly and don't be difficult. I like them truly. Both of them I swear it. You’ll like him (using his baby-talk nickname) when you know him. I like them both, truly.”

Quotes from Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man"

Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man is the best English language novel I've read, IMO. How I've considered myself well-read this long without having read it is to my shame. I consider it a decolonization novel for black people of the United States (and hence for all other marginalized groups here). The unnamed narrator goes through a Ulysses-like odyssey in search of personal power and individual and collective liberation, growing and learning through each betrayal and cul-de-sac.

Favorite Quotes - Sinclair Lewis, "It Can't Happen Here"

Harold Finch from CBS's "Person of Interest"
reading It Can't Happen Here

The first Sinclair Lewis novel I read (heard on CDs, actually) was Dodsworth. Some satirical passages were entertaining, but I never felt like I learned/felt/thought anything profound. Frederic Rich's Christian Nation quoted from Lewis's book It Can't Happen Here, so I decided to read it. Overall, it's a vigorous defense of Liberalism from Fascism and Communism, yet it does allow room for criticism of Liberalism. I'm excerpting some lengthy passages from the book, the text of which is available for free online. I've prefaced each passage with a header. So just like al-Imam al-Bukhari, my thoughts are in the headings and the passages I've chosen to excerpt.

The University of California system produced a reading guide which looks really interesting. Also, Donald Trump's campaign has sparked new interest in the novel.

For more thoughts on fascism, read Umberto Eco's essay on Ur-Fascism. Also, check out my other blog entries tagged fascism.

Messiah to the Ants - Quote from Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms"

I listened to a recording of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. The narrator was Alexander Adams. This passage is near the end and contains spoilers.

Feminism in Caleb Carr's "The Angel of Darkness"

I read Caleb Carr's The Alienist for a book club, and I'm almost done with its sequel, The Angel of Darkness. It has some great material to help people understand some aspects of feminism. One of the characters, Sara Howard, explains to Stevie, the novel's narrator and a street kid in the care of her colleague, why society's attitude towards women (misogyny) may explain the behavior of the murder suspect, Elspeth Hunter, they are investigating and people's attitudes towards her. The passage begins on page 437 and continues for a few pages.

Favorite Quote: The Attorney-General in Charles Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities"

The full text of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities is available online. I listened to an unabridged performance. The book should also be in your local library.

Imagine Sam Waterston of Law & Order, who as Manhattan's District Attorney wanted perps to do hard time for jaywalking, playing the role of Attorney-General prosecuting Charles Darnay for treason against the "serene, illustrious, excellent and so forth, prince, our Lord the King!"

U.K. Christian Theologian Keith Ward on Laws Prohibiting Blasphemy

Leonard Levy, in his book Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, quotes Keith Ward as a person who, in the wake of the persecution of Salman Rushdie, changed his opinion from support of the United Kingdom's blasphemy laws to their rejection. I acquired the source document to understand Ward's views in more depth.

David McRaney on the Stereotype Threat - Another Way in Which We Are Not So Smart

David McRaney's book You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself presents phenomena which, in our modern view of the supremacy of reason and free will, should not impact humans' behavior. One is the stereotype threat (Chapter 42, pp. 232-3):

"Psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson conducted a study in 1995 where they had white and black Americans take the Graduate Record Examination. The GRE is a standardized test usd by many colleges to determine whether or not to accept graduate students. ... Steel and Aronson told half of their subjects they were testing for intelligence, which they hypothesized would add an extra level of stress the other half wouldn't feel. When they got back the results, the white students performed about the same whether or not they were told it was a test of how smart they were. The black students, though, primed by the strereotype threat, performed worse in the group who believed the test would reveal their true intelligence. According to Steel and Aronson, the social stigma of being an African-American messed with their minds. Attempting to fight the stereotype, they had unwelcome thoughts walking around and making noise in their brains while they solved word problems and figured fractions. The white students, free from those fears, had more mind space in which to work. This same sort of experiment has been repeated with gender, nationality, and all sorts of conditions. Psychologists call it the stereotype threat. When you fear you will confirm a negative stereotype, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy not because the stereotype is true, but because you can't stop worrying that you could become an example proving it."

Quote: Chris Hedges on Friendship and Comradeship in "War is Force that Gives Us Meaning"

In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges (Twitter) explains why the bonds among soldiers are likely comradeship, not friendship.

There are few individual relationships – the only possible way to form friendships – in war. There are not the demands on us that there are in friendships. Veterans try to regain such feelings, but they fall short. Gray wrote that the “essential difference between comradeship and friendship consists, it seems to me, in a heightened awareness of the self in friendship and in the suppression of self-awareness in comradeship.”

Comrades seek to lose their identities in the relationship. Friends do not. “On the contrary, “Gray wrote, “friends find themselves in each other and thereby gain greater self-knowledge and self-possession. They discover in their own breasts, as a consequence of their friendship, hitherto unknown potentialities for joy and understanding.”

The struggle to remain friends, the struggle to explore the often painful recess of two hearts, to reach the deepest parts of another’s being, to integrate our own emotions and desires with the needs of the friend, are challenged by the collective rush of war. There are fewer demands if we join the crowd and give our emotions over to the communal crusade.

The only solace comes from simple acts of kindness. They are the tiny, flickering candles in a cavern of darkness that sustain our common humanity.

Find the book in your local library.

Quotes from Dune by Frank Herbert

United States National Public Radio's Science Friday Book Club in 2014 read Dune by Frank Herbert.

Readers were asked to record their favorite quotes and submit it to the show. The whole series is incredible. Here are a few quotes I recorded. You can listen to the ones NPR selected from all listeners.

The text is available on line at archive.org. But buy the book. Also, check out the Calvin and Mu'addib Tumblr.

Prescience

The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed — at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw. And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action — the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand — moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern. The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences . The countless consequences — lines fanned out from this cave, and along most of these consequence-lines he saw his own dead body with blood flowing from a gaping knife wound.

 Kynes's Father on the Masses and the Leavings

"Arrakis is a one-crop planet," his father said. "One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings. It's the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected."

Keynes's Last Thought

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error . Even the hawks could appreciate these facts.