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Archimedes, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, Church Going, Donna Tartt, Ernest Hemingway, Experience, Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Hitch-22, John Updike, Joseph Conrad, Julian Barnes, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, Miguel de Unamuno, Mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philip Larkin, Proof of God, religion, Rudyard Kipling, Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Speak Memory, T.S. Eliot, The Secret History
“Early in my adolescence, trapped within the airtight case for atheism, I made this logical formulation:
1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore, God exists.
The second premise, of course, is the weaker; newspapers and biology lessons daily suggest that it is a horror show, of landslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness… Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good: an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.
During that same adolescence, I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really — not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him. Though signs of belief (churches, public prayers, mottos on coins) existed everywhere, when you moved toward Christianity it disappeared, as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it. I decided I nevertheless would believe. I found a few authors, a very few — Chesterton, Eliot, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth — who helped me believe. Under the shelter that I improvised from their pages I have lived my life. I rarely read them now; my life is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. What I felt, in that basement Sunday school of Grace Lutheran Church in Shillington, was a clumsy attempt to extend a Yes, a blessing, and I accepted that blessing, offering in return only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art…
My writing here about my religion feels forced — done at the behest of others, of hypothetical ‘autobiography’ readers. Done, I believe, in an attempt to comfort some younger reader as once I was comforted by Chesterton and Unamuno… But there seems, my having gone this unfortunately far, still this to say: One believes not merely to dismiss from one’s life a degrading and immobilizing fear of death but to possess that Archimedean point outside the world from which to move the world. The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result — a greedy panicked heart and substance abuse. The world punishes us for taking it too seriously as well as for not taking it seriously enough.”
__________
From John Updike’s magisterial Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.
Well, it’s beautifully written. That’ll be your initial reaction to Self-Consciousness. No, let me rephrase: Wow, it’s beautifully written. Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that “to give the mundane its beautiful due” was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs.
Typically, a writer’s memoir is not really about his or her lived-life. Writers are not boring people, but they often do, when viewed from the outside, lead boring lives. Sure Conrad manned a steamer in the Congo and Kipling was deployed with a battalion in India and Hemingway drank his way through every bullring in Cuba. But that was a century ago. Nowadays, as writing has become largely professionalized, the pulse of a writer’s life has slowed significantly. A writer’s craft is a solitary and silent one, done with a pen and a pad, at the desk, day after day. So his memoir must concern matters beyond the workaday. Just to stick to some covered on this blog: Martin Amis’s memoir is about family; Christopher Hitchens’s is about friendship; Nabokov’s is about education. John Updike’s is about faith (and sex, as he could never avoid the subject).
At the conclusion of one of the finest contemporary novels I’ve read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the young protagonist Richard Papen wonders if he possesses a singular fatal flaw. “I have always mistaken beautiful or intelligent people for good” is his paragraph-long confession paraphrased, an admission which, upon reading, spurred within me a pang of recognition (“I’m busted”). And so too it is with writers. Beautiful prose can hide myriad sins of logic. So it’s essential when reading excerpts like the one above (found on pages 230-235) that you do not fall lazily into the ease of the prose, surrendering the critical faculties that such dense epistemology demands.
There is more to say here, but I will leave it for another day. Perhaps for when I post another section from Self-Consciousness. Still, there are two relevant sources concerning Updike’s final point about seriousness which may add some flavor to the discussion:
From Nothing to Be Frightened, Julian Barnes’s memoir about mortality (see: there’s always one unifying theme).
But if life is viewed as… something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell… On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism. [emphasis mine]
There is also Philip Larkin’s exquisite poem “Church Going,” where the writer wanders into a church and in the final stanza muses on its perennial significance:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious
Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness.
Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 82 this week.
Read on:
mlandersauthor said:
I just read Chesterton’s Thursday, and it was wonderful. I don’t know if you read much Kafka, but I had heard it said that they were opposites of a sort. I find them both enjoyable and definitely saw a very deep resemblance that also reveals opposing worldviews.
http://mlanders.com/2014/03/05/55-classics-review-2-the-man-who-was-thursday-by-g-k-chesterton/
jrbenjamin said:
Opposite in what sense? Unfortunately, I’ve skimmed part of ‘Thursday’ — it’s a good friend’s favorite book — but never gotten around to reading the whole thing. It is well-written, though, from what I could tell. I’ve read ‘The Metamorphosis’, and liked it, but that style of writing and subject matter are a little too much for me.
mlandersauthor said:
Yeah, the Metamorphisis is the only Kafka I’ve gotten into deeply. I enjoy it enough but its pretty stark and bleak to say the least. His short stories read like bizarre nightmares.
Thursday is a very odd book. It starts as a heavily philosophical spy novel and eventually degrades (evolves?) into a Kafka-style bizarro world that ends up a bit like a C.S. Lewis Narnia scene. The only thing missing in the end is Aslan himself.
They are similar because you see both of them very openly and futilely questioning why the universe is so chaotic. They both use bizarro world imagery to display utter confusion and complete exaustion.
In the end, Chesteton’s protagonist realizes he is a very small part of a very large thing which is good and beautiful and fulfilling, while Kafka’s characters as always confirmed in their despair and isolation.
It reminds me of what Sam realizes in LOTR, “There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
It’s really a difference of which you believe to be bigger and encapsulating the other.
tedrey said:
My first thought on reading these paragraphs from Updike was that this is the sort of writing which, when what it says is stripped from how it says it, reveals itself to be based on feelings I do not share, needs I do not pursue, goals I do not value. Then I read the last sentences of your paragraph on The Secret History. Exactly my point.
I enjoy Updike’s prose immensely but (having now reread it thoughtfully) it seems to present a massive set of non sequiturs, at least by the standard of my own feelings, needs, and goals. Caveat lector.
May your presentation of the provocative thoughts of serious minds (among which yours are far from the least) long continue to intrigue, dismay, and delight us.
jrbenjamin said:
Ted, always appreciate hearing your words. And yeah, you’re sort of right.
Your comments bring to mind an exchange I had with Noam Chomsky in High School. I was charged with writing an essay on C.S. Lewis’s reflection that, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience can satisfy, the most plausible explanation is that I was made for another world.” [Paraphrased] Chomsky replied to that quote — again paraphrasing — by saying that, “It is important to note that Lewis is providing information merely about himself. Some may find it useful. Personally, I do not.”
So I understand that this stuff is, to use a banal expression, not for everyone. Regardless, I like the clarity of the thinking, the modesty (even self-effacement), and rhythm of Updike’s prose. As someone who fluctuates on the borders of Fideism, I appreciate his admission that these metaphysical questions do not lend themselves to neat answers. Rather, metaphors (like the Archimedes references) are all we humans have got.
Do you not identify with them because your views are different than Updike’s, or because he expresses your views in a way you find disagreeable?
As always, the comment (and the compliment) are appreciated.
tedrey said:
“Do you not identify with them because your views are different than Updike’s, or because he expresses your views in a way you find disagreeable?”
Definitely not the latter. He’s a very attractive and may-I-say felicitous stylist.
But when he writes “an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories” he gives no reason for believing that except (like Lewis) that *he* feels that way. When he writes “The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result” I consider it far more plausible that these unfortunate effects result from limiting that measure and those results to oneself rather than to the wider society, race, or world;* Updike gives no reason why we have to go “outside” the world to counter hedonism or opportunism; he just says it. About eight things like that in three paragraphs.
*but I myself would need three paragraphs to argue that opinion of mine, an opinion, moreover, that I just now attained to by reading Updike! . . . sigh!
grotmanharry said:
Nice pics
cindybruchman said:
I love John Updike. Sure miss him! Nice post.
elizabethweaver said:
Beautifully written thought-provoking post. That’s for the great quotes and references as well. You might be interested in reading An Altar in the World: a geography of faith by Barbara Brown Taylor. Beautiful contemporary writing on this topic.
John McTavish said:
Thank you for the reflective thoughts on John Updike’s own theologically profound musings. Updike is much on my mind at the moment as I am compiling an article based on reader reflections on his work. Please contact me through the John Updike Society if you wish to participate.
jrbenjamin said:
John, thank you for the compliment. I would love to participate in whatever way you’d need — let me know the best way to contact you. I will look on the JU Society page in the meantime to try to track down your email.
Thanks again,
John
Robertstone said:
Perhaps I should say Angstrom’s awareness of the signs, or, to be a bit more accurate, Updike’s descriptions of Angstrom’s awareness of the signs, rather than the signs themselves.
http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com/2013/12/signs-and-signage-in-updikes-rabbit.html#.UyN2cj9dXxA