OK. After several requests and not a few demands - here's the picture - Sheila and I routinely out for a night....! Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the whole me - which included multicoloured trousers, pink gloves, luminous striped socks and lurid lime green plastic shoes. That one might yet be emailed to me, in which case, for a small fee.......
Must be a new lease of life. Or we've suddenly become socially in demand. Whatever, we are just back from another party in Aberdeen. Not fancy dress this time - a significant birthday of a good friend. But we are back in Aberdeen later this week for a 90th birthday party.
Three parties in 12 days. And each of them special because the person whose life is being celebrated is special and integral not only to our lives but to that sense of who we are, that derives from the giftedness of those relationships that define, enrich and impinge on our lives in many welcome ways. I believe deeply that we are persons in relation, and that individuality only matters when it is encompassed within the shared lives of those who move in and out and within our lives. Who these people are, how we met them, what led to the formation of such enduring connections of love, affection and friendship is part of the mystery of human relatedness, but also part of the graced gift that each person is who troubles to think any one of us worth getting to know.
So not much time for reading you'd think. True enough, but wee corners of time still found here and there. I've just finished Susan Hill's book about a year's reading of only the books already in her home. Along the way she dishes out wisdom and advice, opinion and prejudice, gossip and mini-memoirs - the book is a delight. And there are still a couple of quotes worth inserting here. The last one did get a couple of gentle correctives from Rick and Jason - you can see my comment response on Jason's blog here. Anyway, here's Ms Hill saying what I've long suspected - that the books we read deeply become part of who we are:
"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?....What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."
Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing (London: Profile Books, 2009), 201-2.
Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.
I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well - and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.
The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago - "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback - but not the second. Tough!
For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate - but only very slightly.
Posted at 05:46 AM in Bible Commentaries, Book Reviews, Confessions of a Bibliophile | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)