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Tag Archives: Ecclesiastes

There Is a Season

07 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Chris Hedges, Christian, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Ecclesiastes, King James Bible, New King James Bible, Peter Hitchens, religion, script, Scripture, the Bible, Time

Ireland 2005 2352

To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born,
And a time to die;
A time to plant,
And a time to pluck what is planted;
A time to kill,
And a time to heal;
A time to break down,
And a time to build up;
A time to weep,
And a time to laugh;
A time to mourn,
And a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones,
And a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace,
And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain,
And a time to lose;
A time to keep,
And a time to throw away;
A time to tear,
And a time to sew;
A time to keep silence,
And a time to speak;
A time to love,
And a time to hate;
A time of war,
And a time of peace.

What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives, and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor—it is the gift of God.

__________

From the book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, verses 1 through 13.

As the New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges says, “…reading Ecclesiastes is like reading Beckett.”

This is from the New King James translation, the only version of the Good Book that I’ll pick up. Peter Hitchens defended the KJV (over other versions) like this:

Peter Hitchens London David LeveneBy David Levene15/10/12The King James Bible Versus the Sid James Bible

“…We have now had two generations brought up to believe that nobody and nothing has the right to tell them what to do, or to restrict or restrain themselves – especially in what they regard as their private life.

And they can tell within minutes of encountering the Authorised Version of the Bible, that it is their enemy’s weapon. This is because it is not simply a translation, but a poetic translation, written to be read out loud to country people in large buildings without loudspeakers, to be remembered, to lodge in the mind and to disturb the temporal with the haunting sound of the eternal. In this it is very effective…

As for ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘ye’, these remind the reader or listener that they are in a poetic and eternal context, not reading Harry Potter or listening to the radio news.”

Read his brother’s similar and equally spirited defense of the NKJV below:

Charles Bridge, Prague

New Bibles for a New Babel

“To seek restlessly to update The Bible or make it ‘relevant’ is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.

‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter?”

The picture above was taken on Inch Beach in Ireland.

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One Thing You Can’t Imagine

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Adam and Eve, cognition, Ecclesiastes, Edward Young, evolution, Genesis, Goethe, Immortaility: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, Immortality, Jorge Luis Borges, Martin Heidegger, Michel de Montaigne, Mortality, Mortality Paradox, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Cave, W. B. Yeats

Stephen Cave“What sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization…

We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. ‘Man has created death,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. ‘Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,’ wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.

This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die— mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, ‘death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.’ No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.

But the second idea— and the other half of the Mortality Paradox— tells us quite the opposite: that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there— the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.

We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,’ wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that ‘at bottom no one believes in his own death . . . [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.’ Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: ‘All men think all men mortal, but themselves.’

This applies no matter how far into the future we attempt to look: whether one or one thousand years from now, we cannot help but be present in what we see. There is no limit to just how far into the future we can project; it is not as if our imagination stops at a million years, or a billion. And so, to quote the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, God— or nature—‘has set eternity in the hearts of men.’ In our own minds, we are part of the very fabric of the universe, ineradicable, here forever. The great German writer Goethe is reported to have concluded that ‘in this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.’ We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.”

__________

From Stephen Cave’s book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.

I started reading this book late last night and got through about a third of it before falling asleep and into dreams about it. I’m convinced there is something very significant about this sort of software glitch in the human mind — this firewall that stands between us and the full picture of our own individual extinctions. (I’ve heard some people defiantly claim exception to Freud’s rule, but I’ve never found a convincing explanation as to what it looks like or how it’s conceptually possible.)

A fact that Cave doesn’t mention is that the second part of the Mortality Paradox applies even in our sleep. Strangely, even when our conscious minds are shut off and shut out from external sensory stimuli, we still cannot picture our own demise (you wake up at the moment you die in dreams). François de La Rochefoucauld coined a memorable epigram: “no man can look at the sun or his own death with a steady eye.” And it seems that’s true also when we’re asleep — when the sun is set.

Many poets have nodded to this strange feature of human cognition — that even when our conscious mind is shut off (like in REM sleep), we cannot die.

Ernest Dowson imagined our lives unfolding out of “a misty dream… within a dream” (isn’t that the plot of a Chris Nolan movie?)

Oscar Wilde complained, “reality is a dream that keeps me from sleeping”; a sentiment that sends a smirk to my face while on the bus most Monday mornings.

James Joyce — through his protagonist Stephen Dedalus — reflected soberly, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

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Ecclesiastes; Eliot

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bible, Ecclesiastes, King James Bible, King Solomon, Life, T.S. Eliot, The Rock, vanity

Ranch Brush

It would appear, in keeping up with this blog, that I mean to place (or post) everything on an equal plane. After all, each of these collections of words are published on the same site, in a similar format, with a parallel description, and are then replaced — in the next day or so — by something mirroring that style.

But there is a hierarchy, and among the pantheon of passages that I set down here, there are very few that actually rise to the level of the openings of the Book of Ecclesiastes and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Sterns Eliot’s “The Rock”. As it turns out, T.S. Eliot is essentially echoing the words of Ecclesiastes. Yet that fact does, nicely enough, only serve to bolster the messages of each, which seem to crystallize several descriptors of human life: brevity, transience, vanity.

(It’s worth recalling that King Solomon, the wealthiest and wisest man in Jerusalem, is the speaker in Ecclesiastes.)

Ecclesiastes 1-2:17

1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

3 What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.
5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose.
6 The wind goes toward the south,
And turns around to the north;
The wind whirls about continually,
And comes again on its circuit.
7 All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again.
8 All things are full of labor;
Man cannot express it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after.

12 I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. 14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.

15 What is crooked cannot be made straight,
And what is lacking cannot be numbered.

16 I communed with my heart, saying, “Look, I have attained greatness, and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge.” 17 And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind.

18 For in much wisdom is much grief,
And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

1 I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure”; but surely, this also was vanity. 2 I said of laughter—“Madness!”; and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” 3 I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine, while guiding my heart with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives.

4 I made my works great, I built myself houses, and planted myself vineyards. 5 I made myself gardens and orchards, and I planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. 6 I made myself water pools from which to water the growing trees of the grove. 7 I acquired male and female servants, and had servants born in my house. Yes, I had greater possessions of herds and flocks than all who were in Jerusalem before me. 8 I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the special treasures of kings and of the provinces. I acquired male and female singers, the delights of the sons of men, and musical instruments of all kinds.

9 So I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me.

10 Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them.
I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure,
For my heart rejoiced in all my labor;
And this was my reward from all my labor.
11 Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done
And on the labor in which I had toiled;
And indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind.
There was no profit under the sun.

12 Then I turned myself to consider wisdom and madness and folly;
For what can the man do who succeeds the king?—
Only what he has already done.
13 Then I saw that wisdom excels folly
As light excels darkness.
14 The wise man’s eyes are in his head,
But the fool walks in darkness.
Yet I myself perceived
That the same event happens to them all.

15 So I said in my heart,
“As it happens to the fool,
It also happens to me,
And why was I then more wise?”
Then I said in my heart,
“This also is vanity.”
16 For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever,
Since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come.
And how does a wise man die?
As the fool!

17 Therefore I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was distressing to me, for all is vanity and grasping for the wind.

Ireland

The opening of Eliot’s “The Rock”

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

Ireland

__________

The openings of the Book of Ecclesiastes and T. S. Eliot’s “The Rock”. Like “High Country Weather,” which I posted about this Sunday, these two passages can almost be repeated as mantras.

For better or for worse, I map my Dad’s psyche and personal history onto that of Solomon in Ecclesiastes. It’s a long and somewhat convoluted story to explain why my mind would approach my father’s personal history in this way, but much of it probably has to do with his improbable achievements (as well as the sheer range of experiences and endeavors which have made up the fabric of his life). Most sons admire their fathers, sure, but I can promise you my dad is different.

As always, Ecclesiastes is posted in the real crème de la crème of Bibilical translations, The New King James. Go donate your Living Bible to charity and throw away your copy of The Message; God doesn’t speak in the same jargon as the Kardashians.

The first photo was taken several days ago at my ranch; the other photos were taken in Ireland, several years ago.

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New Bibles for a New Babel

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Photography, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Ecclesiastes, George Orwell, Job, King James Bible, Philipians, Saint Paul, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Bible

Charles Bridge, Prague

“Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as ‘England’ itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the ‘Authorized’ or ‘King James’ version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. ‘The powers that be,’ it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, ‘are ordained of God.’ This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child’; ‘Eat, drink, and be merry’; ‘From strength to strength’; ‘Grind the faces of the poor’; ‘salt of the earth’; ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose…

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it [The Bible] or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: ‘Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.’

Charles Bridge, PragueAt my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative ‘ifs’ and its closing advice—always italicized in my mind since first I heard it—to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts. I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s ‘Contemporary English Version,’ which I picked up at an evangelical ‘Promise Keepers’ rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: ‘Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.’

Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me. There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of ‘my friends’ for ‘brethren,’ but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose. When the Church of England effectively dropped King James, in the 1960s, and issued what would become the ‘New English Bible,’ T. S. Eliot commented that the result was astonishing ‘in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.’ (Not surprising from the author of For Lancelot Andrewes.) This has been true of every other stilted, patronizing, literal-minded attempt to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose…”

Charles Bridge, Prague

__________

From Christopher Hitchens’s essay about the beauty of the King James Bible and the triviality of so many modern Biblical translations. When the King Saved God: a recommended read for anyone with an interest in Christianity, literature, history, words, language, or the church.

The photographs were taken on the Charles Bridge in Prague.

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