Living Wittily

Parties, photos and our literary DNA

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.

Internet browsing versus love of books

I know. The post title is a set up. There aren't only two alternatives. But I suspect that out there most people opt for one or the other as the default route to information.

Of course surfing the web and reading a good book aren't mutually exclusive. But I still think Susan Hill's observation comes as a dunt in the ribs to those of us too easily lured along the labyrinthine paths of that endlessly seductive land called Worldwideweb.

"Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted.

Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready meals  and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition." 

Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing, page 2.

Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 - I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify - and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 - £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan - but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

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!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 - but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want - I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check - so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing - and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price - as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

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.

The Bodleian Library, Gregory the Great and Regula Pastoralis

The best gifts come as a complete surprise. Even better if it's something you never even thought might come your way. At the recent gathering of UK Baptist College Principals in Oxford we had scheduled time for a visit to the Bodleian. For those who know him, you will know that Sean Winter equates the Bodleian Library with heaven proleptically anticipated. Now he's never said so in these words, but you can see words like that in his eyes when he's talking about his visits there!

Well our guide who was one of the senior members of staff, took us to a secure room where several items had been brought from special collections for us to view, and even touch. Two of those items were breathtakingly important, and left me deeply moved, and consciously privileged to be able to see them, touch them and hear them described for the treasures they are.

The first complete English book, the translation into Anglo Saxon of Gregory's "Pastoral care" by Alfred the Great, dates back more than 1100 years. And I was standing beside it, touched it, and sensed the benign weight of history in those thick parchment pages, written with painstaking care, with stylus and ink, by whatever lights were available once the sun went down. And on page after page, the glosses of successive scribes who came after, explaining, correcting, commenting. The illustration shows all this activity - though conveys little of the mystery and holy labour that was invested in translating, copying, annotating. Standing there gazing at such a gift, the miracle of Amazon, Google books and e-books begins to seem ordinary, even vulgar. Here is a book reeking of holiness, born of the hunger for sacred knowledge distilled as pastoral wisdom, celebrating the passionate patience of the scribe content to toil, reminding us that it is the faithful resolute conservation of words rightly spoken and faithfully written, that enables us to express the depths of human questing and longing for God, for love, and for the love of God.

I'll tell you about the other one later in the week.

A second hand bookshop where clutter is an art form

Most times when I visit Glasgow University Library I make time to go to Voltaire and Rousseau's. They are a second hand bookshop 5 minutes from the library. The proprietor, Joseph McGonnigle, I've known (as Joe), since 1971.

The University Library has thousands of books, arranged neatly on shelves, catalogued and cared for. Voltaire and Rousseau's, which is the size of a small supermarket, also has thousands of books, some on shelves, and nearly as many on the floor. They are piled at times three deep up to three or four feet high. Looking down the book aisles is like looking at one of those 1950's disaster movies with special effects showing the aftermath of a San Francisco earthquake, with skyscrapers leaning crazily in all directions and threatening a domino effect collapse in the event of an aftershock. So first time visitors should probably do the basic health and safety training, wear a hard hat and luminous yellow waistcoat, and stay near the exit point. Och only kidding - it isn't as bad as that - but it is impressively chaotic, as you can see. The glorious photo was taken by J Malky, see more here. .

The books are in a rough kind of categorised arrangement. As you come in the door, Theology is at the far right hand corner, poetry is middle left, philosophy is middle aisle half way down, and Scottish stuff faces you as you go in the door. Roughly speaking, in general terms, on a good day, when due allowances are made, you can find the section you're looking for.

Today I came back with some spoils. Because whatever else, this is a shop where bargains are still found, and those odd "never thought I'd get my hands on this", kind of books can be discovered, even if not where you thought it might be. Of course one person's gold is another person's dross. But here's what an hour's digging produced.

The Confessions of the Church of Scotland. Their Evolution and History, C. G. M'Crie. (Edinburgh 1907) £3.50. One of my heroes is the Rev James Morison of Kilmarnock who along with John McLeod Campbell, did so much, at enormous personal cost and spiritual sifting, to compel the Scottish churches to rethink and restate the doctrine of the atonement in terms less thirled to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. In these Thomas Chalmers Lectures M'Crie is an eloquent and sympathetic guide to the post Reformation spiritual history of Scotland.

Only One Way Left, G. F. MacLeod (Iona Community, 1954) £1.20. Aye, George Macleod knew how to tell a story too, especially the story of the Kirk and its need for constant renewal, reformation and reconstruction. These 8 Lectures were the Cunningham Lectures and they contain much of Macleod's pastoral and liturgical theology, written with outspoken passion. They are fuelled by fearless intellectual fire that energised a ministry of preaching, imagined communal renewal and informed half a century of theologically principled protest against nuclear weapons.

Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, P. T. Forsyth. (London: Independent Press, 1964) £0.60 pence. I know Jason. Surely Jim already has this book. Yes but this is a clean copy and anyway it cost me more to park my car for an hour! And nobody gets to walk away from a P T Forsyth book because they grudge the cost of an hour's parking! I'm off at meetings in Birmingham and Oxford later in May - this cheaply priced preacher's tonic will provide the spiritual verve needed to recover both energy and equilibrium. Forsyth's lectures on preaching, like so much of his work, helps me find again "the soul's magnetic North".

A Gathered Church. The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930, Donald Davie, (London: RKP, 1978). £2.50. Davie is a poet I first encountered as the maverick literary critic who took seriously the poetic achievement of classic hymns by Watts and Wesley. In his volume Purity of Diction in English Verse, he opened my eyes to the lucidity and leanness of Augustan English, and showed how well it serves the theological and rhetorical purposes of Watts and Wesley.

He also edited the Oxford Book of Christian Poetry, and had no embarassment including hymns from Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, John Newton, and James Montgomery. The introduction to the volume is one of the best apologia's in print for the hymn as poem, and an enthusiastic rebuttal of all those literary snobs who look down their noses at hymns, especially evangelical hymns. Though what Davie would have made of the modern praise song is quite another matter, and whether many of them will ever be anthologisable (new word?), I doubt. Deeply and pessimistically, I don't think so.

But to lift the heart again after that brief moan - Total cost for the four books £7.80. Worth wearing a hard hat for, eh?  

Confessions of a Bibliophile - judicious selection isn't an excuse

Samuel Butler advised "Never read anything until not to have read it has bothered you for some time." There's a lot of time invested in reading a book, and the longer the book the longer the time it takes. Which argues a need for judicious selection, and good reasons for reading long books - of which more later.

We used to visit a small bookshop on the south Deeside Road. It was a wee room of a wee cottage which was part of the Camphill Community. Compared to the urban sprawl that was the interior of the book megastores on Union Street, the Camphill Bookshop was rural, quaint, small, quirky and I doubt I ever went in without finding something different, interesting, worth reading.

The contrast between a bookshop with a stock of around 3,000 books, and a megastore with hundreds of thousands can be measured in serveral ways. Bestsellers piled feet high, promoted titles on tables at eye level, 3 for 2 offers laid across your path as you walk in. The attempt to be a comprehensive book supermarket, means aisles of travel literature from Tiree to Thailand and body mind and spirt stuff where these two extremes have their equivalent in the geography of new age esoterica; the ephemeral bestsellers get front of shop priority and classics require to be looked for, walls of crime and sci-fi, more walls of IT manuals and self-help handbooks - I find the places exhausting, frustrating, and finding the book I want is like looking for a known face in an overpopulated foreign city without a streetmap and only a tourist level vocabulary

Then there's the Camphill Bookshop. No big franchise money there to reduce prices, promote bestsellers, demand huge discounts from publishers. A judicious selection of books (remember the phrase used earlier), loosely defined as 'good books'. By which the proprietor meant books that enrich the mind, enlighten curiosity about human life and achievement, touch those places of ethical and theological importance that illumine and deepen human experience. I never bought there a book I didn't read, and they didn't have many brieze-block volumes.

Which brings me back to long books. Consider. This summer two books on Paul will be published with a combined page total of 2,723 pages (1347 plus 1376). The first is by J D G Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, the second volume of his "Christianity in the Making" three volume project.

The second, The Deliverance of God. An Apocalyptic Reading of Jusrification in Paul, is by Douglas Campbell. This is a massive restatement of Pauline soteriology in the light of current controversy and development in New Testament history and theology in which the main protagonists are people like Dunn, N T Wright, Francis Watson. Years ago, after reading The Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and Unity and Diversity in the New Testament,  I formed the habit of reading James Dunn's books when they come out, as key indicators of the best NT scholarship. N T Wright's bigger books likewise. Over the years their books have kept getting bigger! And in addition to the two books mentioned above, the next major work from N T Wright in his six volume "New Testament and the People of God" series, will also be on Paul. If it's the same size as his first three it will be a modest 700 pages, half the size of those other two noted above!

Samuel Butler advised "Never read anything until not to have read it has bothered you for some time." So - an experiement in judicious selection - how long before I begin to be bothered...........hmmmm.

Desideratum: The English Poems of George Herbert

desideratum. Noun
- something desired as a necessity; 
- essential, necessary, requisite
- anything indispensable;
"food and shelter are necessities of life"; "the essentials of the good life"

This book has for some time been a desideratum. Too expensive for me to justify the expense.

Given to me for my birthday from Sheila. One more of those accumulated kindnesses that strengthens marriage "like seasoned timber",(1). Each kindness a sacrament of friendship, making grace as undeserved favour less incredible, because so often encountered in the generous being-thereness of those special others in our everyday life.

(1) Checking the reference in my new book :))  the phrase is from Herbert's "Vertue", line 14. The note on the line says "wood matured and tested (through the trial of the seasons)". Just so!    (pages 316, 319) 

Confessions of a bibliophile - culpable carelessness

This is a real confession. A genuine mea culpa. Of all the stupid, reprehensible, careless demonstrations of absent minded irresponsibility....

Realised this morning that I left my book on the Easyjet plane from Bristol.

Wouldn't mind if it was a pulp fiction time filler. But it was the Denise Levertov interviews, and I had annotated it and marked the good bits!

Going to trust in miracles, providence and people's good will and phone them to see if it's been handed in by some cabin cleaning crew with literary sympathies and a high functioning work-ethic.

If not will I buy it again???  Hmmmmm.

But drat it....

Libraries as Storehouses of History

  Two or three weeks ago I reminisced about libraries I have loved! Recent visits to various places sparked a further chain of memories. I still remember an April evening sitting in the Carluke library (near 40 years ago!) reading an outline of European History to get a handle on the Benevolent Despots. The sunset streaming through the glass sided windows, the place virtually to myself, as an 18 year old about to sit Higher History having studied at night class, there seemed nothing more important than sorting out the policies of Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great of Russia, and the other guy from Prussia. (The photo is from the current Carluke Library website!)

By the time I got the Highers, and was offered a place in the Glasgow MA course, books had simply become an essential fact of my life, and one of its indispensable nutrients. But of course there are books, and then there are books. The first book I bought at University was for the Moral Philosophy class – it was Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, a masterpiece of political realism that anticipated the excesses of contemporary democratic decay such as cynicism and truth-bending, power mongering and self-serving, and suggesting legal and contractual restraints to channel and constrain political power. Actually, not all that far from the allegorical connections to be discerned in Watership Down, the odd Western, and the rise and decline of the Benevolent Despots!

During my time at Glasgow in the 1970’s, theology and philosophy were on Floor 6 of the University Library. I still remember that first encounter with hundreds of metres of books, set out in shelves, under subjects, every volume findable if you could use the new technology of microfiche and translate Dewey System into the kind of mapping code that took you to the very volume. Here were more books than all the other libraries I’d known, all put together. I spent a whole evening handling, browsing and reading bits of the multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Philosophy; reference books have always drawn me like iron filings to a magnet. The idea of an encyclopaedia, a repository of authoritative knowledge, isn’t very popular now, in the post-modern climate of suspicion about overarching frameworks of knowledge. Did anyone else love and wade through the Children’s Encyclopaedia of Arthur Mee?

In those first few weeks at University I took down off the shelves books whose titles I had no way of interpreting since I hadn’t yet encountered the currency of philosophical discourse - metaphysics, epistemology, the categorical imperative, empiricism, theodicy, utilitarianism, - or names like Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Duns Scotus, G W F Hegel. I was both ecstatic and terrified – so many books, most of them crammed with words I hadn’t ever had need of before. Like everybody else today, I surf the internet – but the battery hen approach to knowledge much of the internet represents has never replaced for me its organic free range alternative - the serendipity and random purposefulness of browsing in a library with more books than you can ever read, but with enough time to touch, handle and peruse, and perchance read.

 

Since then I’ve gradually built my own library, housing on its shelves books that are now important clues to my story and character. As a self-confessed, unembarrassed bibliophile, I’ve no difficulty admitting my entire grown up life (and much of my childhood) has presupposed a book budget – by which I mean money to purchase, time to read, space to shelve and freedom to choose. From those childhood days when my sainted Aunt Edith sent a ten bob note (10/- or 50p in today’s money) for birthday with clear instructions to do what I liked with it – which meant books – to now, books have simply been an existential presupposition, an assumed necessity for human flourishing, that without which I could live, but not without near fatal diminishment of soul.

Amongst those I have to thank for endless and now uncountable hours of joy, work, learning, questioning and at times finding, are those librarians of school, university and public libraries, whose choices and suggestions opened up entire worlds of knowing and wanting to know.

George Herbert: Secretary of Praise

Amongst my treasured literary possessions are several carefully sought out, frequently handled, and regularly read editions of The Temple, George Herbert's matchless contribution to Anglican Spirituality. For my 40th birthday I was given a leather bound early Victorian copy by my friend Kate. It was given as a prize for Arithmetic, to Master W L Riddell, in 1864, while a pupil at Mr Crerar's School,13 Forth Street, Edinburgh. It was published by the Edinburgh firm of James NicholI, around the time they started issuing those famous sets of the works of Standard Puritan Divines such as Thomas Goodwin and Richard Sibbes. The book has copper engraved borders within which each poem is placed like a framed word picture - which much of Herberts verses are. In bookseller's parlance, the condition is "used, no marking, previous owner's bookplate (the prize label), finely bound in tooled and gilt leather with signs of some use." Perfect - and it couldn't be in safer, more appreciative hands!

  Nearer my 50th Birthday I uncovered another Victorian edition, maroon cloth, elaborate gilt celtic tooling, and used enough in the past 150 years to make me feel that reading it is an act of recognition, that someone else, numerous someone elses, have enjoyed the look and feel, the smell and heft, as well as the contents of a favourite book. This edition has copper engraved prints(an example here) as well as page borders, good illustrations of how the Victorians imagined seventeenth century English life, and now enjoyed by a 21st century bibliophile. One example of Victorian devotional book illustrative art shows the choir singing 'Let all the world, in every corner sing, My God, and King'. I've  never visited  Bemerton where Herbert was country parson, but later this year, as part of several sabbatical pilgrimages, I'm going looking for Herbert's church of St Andrew's, Bemerton. and Leighton Bromwold. Salisbury Cathedral  which I've never seen is nearby and will be enjoyed as an enduring  expression of  devotion to God through archtecture on the grand scale. But the little church Herbert restored bears witness to a different scale and quality of devotion - in my imagination I see Herbert being as careful about the details and care for restrained beauty of expression in the restoration of God's house as he was about the selection and arrangements of words and images in The Temple.

I remember on a warm June evening, singing that Herbert psalm, 'Let all the world, in every corner sing', in the magnificent setting of Coats Memorial Church, with the choir (who didn't look anything like in the picture above) and a small gathered congregation. I've never forgotten the coincidence of mellow late evening sunlight, the soft authority of the great organ, the harmony of choir and congregation, and the aesthetic beauty of a building that is itself an historical accident. It was built in 1894, when the finest material and the most skilful craftsmen were affordable, when Victorian confidence was still high enough to build without thought to cost, and before the turn of the century move away from large scale gothic towards more functional, modest places of worship. But that night, the glow of late sun-soaked oak, the clear handmade glass, the sanctified spaciousness outwards and upwards from the chancel, allowing light to be shaped and toned by warm sandstone and carved wood, all of which was part of the architect's intention - it all makes for a memory still sharp with the sense of smell, touch and sound. Reading George Herbert's hymn still has the effect of collapsing time into vivid memory of sight and sound.