Seven more books that changed my life: 7QT VI, seriatim.

s I am work­ing on some posts that are tak­ing a very long time to write, and since my last post on books turned out to be very pop­u­lar, I thought I would fol­low it up with a sequel—though this will end up being the only such. This list was much hard­er to come up with than the pre­vi­ous one. When you’re talk­ing about books that changed your life, that’s a strict stan­dard; and a total of fourteen—even after half a life­time of reading—is dif­fi­cult to con­ceive. But here the oth­er sev­en are.

THE ORDER OF OUR DAYS
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

There were any num­ber of books that helped make me Catholic, but The Book of Com­mon Prayer was one of only two (the oth­er is lat­er on this list) that hurled me in that direc­tion.

I came to this Epis­co­pal prayer book by chance when I saw it at Bor­ders. Since I remem­bered it being men­tioned in A Prayer for Owen Meany, I decid­ed to pick it up and give it a chance. It made a pow­er­ful impact on me, because I had no idea what litur­gi­cal prayer or litur­gi­cal wor­ship were. That might sound odd com­ing from some­one who was raised Unit­ed Methodist, because John Wes­ley in fact revised the Angli­can prayer book for use in his new denom­i­na­tion. The Unit­ed Methodists are litur­gi­cal, but you can spend years there and nev­er fig­ure that out. They are qui­et about it.

Thus when I opened the Book of Com­mon Prayer I had no idea what I was look­ing at or how to read it. But once I fig­ured it out, the impact was imme­di­ate and pow­er­ful: the idea of order­ing one’s days and years on a rhythm of prayer that is fixed, and changes through the hours and sea­sons, but returns to the same place. It fit with yearn­ings I did not know I had.

So I would argue with myself, for years, thus: “If only I could find a church to belong to that is litur­gi­cal but not crazy-lib­er­al like the Epis­co­palians. Where do I find that?”

“Well, there’s the Catholic Church.”

“No!  No, no, no; I can’t do that.”

Yes.  I could.

TO BE SANE IS MORE DRAMATIC THAN TO BE MAD
ORTHODOXY, BY G.K. CHESTERTON

I did not know G.K. Chester­ton as a Catholic; I knew him only as a lit­er­ary crit­ic whose books on Charles Dick­ens I first read when I was in grad­u­ate school and writ­ing my M.A. the­sis. Then I dis­cov­ered Ortho­doxy and was stu­pe­fied by the kind of writer who, in a book defend­ing Chris­tian­i­ty, could up with chap­ter titles like “In Defence of Every­thing Else,” “The Mani­ac,” and “The Ethics of Elfland.”

There is no way to sum­ma­rize this book, because there is no way to sum­ma­rize one of its sen­tences. G.K. Chester­ton can write the kind of pithy sen­tence that is large while it is small, and true while it is a para­dox, and refresh­ing­ly sane while it clears up con­fu­sion and makes the truth sound sim­ple and obvi­ous. Here, for exam­ple, is Chester­ton on why the mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tion of free­dom as anar­chy is wrong:

Anar­chism adjures us to be bold cre­ative artists, and care for no laws or lim­its. But it is impos­si­ble to be an artist and not care for laws or lim­its. Art is lim­i­ta­tion; the essence of every pic­ture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold cre­ative way, you hold your­self free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you find you are not free to draw a giraffe.  The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of lim­its. You can free things from alien or acci­den­tal laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the bur­den of his hump: you may be free­ing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a dem­a­gogue, encour­ag­ing tri­an­gles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a tri­an­gle breaks out of its three sides, his life comes to a lam­en­ta­ble end. … [I]f tri­an­gles were ever loved, they were loved for being tri­an­gu­lar.

Ulti­mate­ly, Chester­ton has an unmatched abil­i­ty to make san­i­ty joy­ful and excit­ing and not dull; for, as he under­stands, “to be sane is more dra­mat­ic than to be mad.”  Ortho­doxy is a book that returns us to san­i­ty in a delight­ful, sim­ple, and ele­gant­ly log­i­cal way. And although he makes his writ­ing sound effort­less­ly nat­ur­al and self-evi­dent, it is hard­er to write, or to think, like Chester­ton than it appears.

NO SOUL THAT SERIOUSLY AND CONSTANTLY DESIRES JOY WILL EVER MISS IT
THE GREAT DIVORCE, BY C.S. LEWIS

This is the book that con­vinced me more than any­thing else of the free­dom of the will, and I speak as some­one who has always stren­u­ous­ly believed in the free­dom of the will. I was nev­er a Calvin­ist, and even dur­ing the sin­gle year I was a Luther­an “the bondage of the will” struck me as absurd.

Lewis’s beliefs, which are spo­ken in this nov­el by George Mac­Don­ald, are supe­ri­or to Calvin­ism: “All who are in Hell choose it. With­out that self-choice, there can be no Hell.”

Lewis dares to write a book in which peo­ple choose Hell time after time, even as they know with­out doubt what they are choos­ing; the read­er pities them, but his joy nev­er wanes. How does Lewis pull that off? Per­haps it is because he tells us (or, rather, Mac­Don­ald does) why our joy must not wane. In the book, the fic­tion­al Lewis asks Mac­Don­ald why the final damna­tion of souls does not ruin the joy of those who are saved.

[I]t must be one way or the oth­er. Either the day must come when joy pre­vails and all the mak­ers of mis­ery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the mak­ers of mis­ery can destroy in oth­ers the hap­pi­ness they reject for them­selves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no sal­va­tion which leaves even one crea­ture in the dark out­side. [Is this “no soul left behind”?] But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the uni­verse.

The rea­son why peo­ple choose Hell, Mac­Don­ald says, is that “there is always some­thing else that they pre­fer to joy.” But for those who do desire joy, “seri­ous­ly and con­stant­ly,” they will nev­er miss out on it. If all of Heav­en is grace, then grace is choice.

THE LOVE THAT MOVES THE SUN AND THE OTHER STARS
THE DIVINE COMEDY, BY DANTE

I had nev­er before heard of such a thing as “the Beatif­ic Vision” when I first read this book for a col­lege course in medieval lit­er­a­ture. I grew up in a “Jesus loves me” Protes­tantism; in my view, Jesus lov­ing me was the supreme joy. The joy that comes by behold­ing the image of God nev­er crossed my mind. So The Divine Com­e­dy intro­duced me to the con­cept that the Beatif­ic Vision was in fact the end of all desire, and the ful­fill­ment of all real desire.

You could say that this is a poem about a midlife cri­sis; or that it is about a jour­ney; or that it is no more than a gra­tu­itous descrip­tion of the strange pains of Hell and all the popes that Dante put there. But Dan­te’s real sub­ject is the desire that can only be ful­filled by God. As it hap­pened, I was in the throes of unre­quit­ed love at the time I read the book. To be remind­ed that God is our true long­ing, and high­er than Beat­rice, was help­ful to me at that young and naive age.

We were only required to read the Infer­no and the Par­adiso for class. Dur­ing win­ter break, I read the Pur­ga­to­rio on my own. I found Pur­ga­to­ry to be an inter­est­ing fan­ta­sy. …

PLEASE LET ME NOT FORGET HOW TO READ AND WRITE
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON, BY DANIEL KEYES

I first read this hear­break­ing nov­el in sixth grade. It is the sto­ry of a retard­ed man who has an oper­a­tion that turns him into a genius, but which also, in the end, caus­es him to regress to his orig­i­nal con­di­tion.

I used to teach this nov­el, and it is always inter­est­ing to hear dif­fer­ent peo­ple’s opin­ions of what it is about. I used to think it was about how much books and learn­ing and ideas and intel­li­gence mat­ter. And it is. But I think now that it is main­ly about how the human per­son mat­ters, what­ev­er its bur­dens. You can get into inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions with a col­lege Eng­lish class about whether it was eth­i­cal for Char­ly Gor­don’s intel­li­gence to be arti­fi­cial­ly increased. But does the ethics change because he lost his intel­li­gence at the end? Or would it have been okay if there had been a way for Char­ly to remain a genius? What­ev­er your answer to that ques­tion, Keyes is quite clear that Char­ly has the same val­ue whether he’s retard­ed or a genius.

The tragedy of this sto­ry is in Char­ly’s being able to see the process of regress from its start, and then to grasp, with all he has in him, to hold on to the life of the mind. I have watched peo­ple I love acquire demen­tia, and there is a point when they know what’s hap­pen­ing to them. I fear it more than any­thing else. But in read­ing this great sto­ry, I know that even should we lose the thing we val­ue and love the most in our­selves, we are still our­selves.

LOVE THAT ENLARGES US BEYOND MEASURE
THE CLOISTER WALK, BY KATHLEEN NORRIS

This won­der­ful book was a nat­ur­al com­pan­ion to The Book of Com­mon Prayer in hurl­ing me head­long toward the Catholic Church. The best and most prov­i­den­tial thing about it was that it came into my life at the same time as the prayer book.

Kath­leen Nor­ris writes about a year in her life as a Bene­dic­tine oblate. If the life of an oblate—who embraces the monas­tic charism and rhythm of dai­ly prayer in a sec­u­lar world—appealed to me, it was because I was learn­ing to love litur­gy through the prayer book; and it was also because my spir­i­tu­al long­ings were mov­ing in the direc­tion of some­thing deep­er, and with greater integri­ty. (By “integri­ty,” I don’t mean “virtue” or “hon­esty,” but “being com­plete­ly inte­grat­ed.”) The Clois­ter Walk not only made these things attrac­tive and desir­able, but it showed me a path where­by they could be achieved. So not only am I now a Catholic, but I am also a Bene­dic­tine oblate in my novice year, and I owe that to this book.

Nor­ris has integri­ty because she yearns for some­thing deep­er than the world alone can pro­vide, yet she does not aban­don the world. She dis­cov­ers that monas­ti­cism is not sep­a­ra­tion from the world, but the path by which the world is to be salt­ed. Thus the world, in this book, is rich and full of light pre­cise­ly because Nor­ris goes into an inter­nal desert of con­tem­pla­tion and prayer.

YOU MUST NOT FORGET ANYTHING
PATRIMONY, BY PHILIP ROTH

It is the rare and won­drous book that will make me cry. Though Pat­ri­mo­ny is by the nov­el­ist Philip Roth, it is not a nov­el; it is a true sto­ry about Mr. Roth watch­ing his father fight the brain tumor that, in the end, will kill him. Along the way, as he cares for his dying father, he con­sid­ers the “pat­ri­mo­ny” that he has been left.

The emo­tions in the book are under­stat­ed, and the book is often fun­ny, but at the end Mr. Roth turns seri­ous and con­sid­ers his anx­i­eties and night­mares, par­tic­u­lar­ly as he wres­tles with the “unseem­ly” fact that he wrote part of the book while his father was still alive and dying. He wres­tles with his sense that he can nev­er live up to the grandeur of what his father was to him. “I would live peren­ni­al­ly as his lit­tle son,” he writes at the end, “with the con­science of a lit­tle son, just as he would remain alive there not only as my father, but as the father, sit­ting in judg­ment on what­ev­er I do.”

This book has helped me to bet­ter under­stand my rela­tion­ship with my own father, and my feel­ing that I will nev­er live up to the mea­sure of who he is and has been to me.

The only pat­ri­mo­ny, of fathers or sons or writ­ers, is that “you must not for­get any­thing.”

 

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Con­ver­sion Diary.