Ideas for blog posts always come in multiples and usually I try to stretch it out to the next day but end up forgetting, so oh well.
I love this and had to share. It's from a book called Jesus for President:
"Perhaps the greatest seduction is not the ANTI-GOD, but the ALMOST-GOD. ... That's what's so dangerous about ideas like FREEDOM, PEACE AND JUSTICE. They are all seductive qualities, close to the heart of God. After all, it's the beautiful things we kill and die for. And it's the beautiful we market, exploit, brand, and counterfeit.
"...Most of the ugliness in the human narrative comes from a distorted quest to possess beauty. COVETING begins with appreciating blessings. MURDER begins with a hunger for justice. LUST begins with a recognition of beauty. GLUTTONY begins when our enjoyment of the delectable gifts of God starts to consume us. IDOLATRY begins when our seeing a reflection of God in something beautiful leads to our thinking that the beautiful image-bearer is worthy of worship."
So I just finished that Ian McEwan book (On Chesil Beach)that I said was total poetry, and yeah, I dunno. It's so well-written, and he gets inside people's heads so well. But man, that guy is like an ace at frustration and hopelessness. It's all exquisitely-written, but so unsettling, ultimately. Atonement was the same way.
Or maybe it's way better than a happy-ending book for spurring people into action. I don't know. It just is one of those things that can leave me with kind of a cloud all day. But at the same time, I kind of think that if I were the kind of person prone to inaction, this kind of book would make me want to change my ways more than one about some bold heroic type. I mean, I might be ruining part of it for anybody that wants to read it, but honestly if you know anything about the author you probably already knew anyway. And I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Ok I just wanted to amend that other post where I was talking about how beautiful it is, which it is, but I don't know.
It's like this one time when I started watching Little Children with Kate Winslet, and got about halfway through and then went to small group and we were talking about the things that can make a couple have distance and have problems, and I was talking about how that movie did a really great job of kind of portraying and underlining the things couples do to themselves and each other. Which it did. And it sounded like I was saying (and I kind of was) that it was a great movie that was well-done and you should go see it. Then I went later and finished it, and wow, kind of a super duper crazy messed-up movie. I guess I'd still say that it was really well-done, but it's not one you want to be on record in small group as having recommended. And then Jenn went and watched it and was like "uh, Abbey? Wth?"
So yeah. I've learned to qualify and disclaimer my premature recommendations.
These are things I want to learn more about and/or read. I should so be in grad school, but who needs the debt when you have a public library/B&N/the internet? It's not like I necessarily want to do anything with an actual degree on paper. And also, there's no way I could pick one single thing to study.
Anyway, for starters:
Native Americans (current/recent socio-political situation)
C.S. Lewis
Iran
Basic auto mechanics/maintenance
French
Cooking international foods
House-buying/investment
Folk/early country music
Photography
The other day when I wrote that post about books, I was trying to find an actual quote from that David Foster Wallace book online because I already took it back to the library. I couldn't find any from that book (I don't think that's one of his more quotable) but I found some other great quotes from books I haven't read yet. Is that posery, quoting from books you haven't read yet? Well some of them were from interviews and stuff too. I loved this one.
"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."
Sounds kind of familiar, I'm pretty sure lots of people have said it before, from like C.S. Lewis to Bob Dylan ("you gotta serve somebody") but I like how it's put here.
Another one made me think of a lot of entertainment review blogs and other blogs I read where (and this kills me) they seriously cannot actually like anything without being called big naive sentimentalists. Their raving reviews sound a lot like this: "this movie was not quite as horrible as I thought it would be" or "So I didn't hate this one, even though I should have because of X and Y higher education that I have" (because more education means less excuses to ever like anything, ever), or whatever. People are getting ridiculous about having to be above every single thing out there or they risk looking like a sucker or a chump or a mindless herd animal. Voltaire has that whole part about how does that make your life richer, never being impressed by anything, or are you cheating yourself out of happiness? Anyway, he says it better than me:
"Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."
Ok next time I'll try not to make a whole post out of borrowed words, but whatever. Better than nothing, right?
