Skip to main content

Books revealing

With admirable help at the weekend, I find myself in a virtually coherent living room with shelves assembled and slowly organizing books. Reassembling them gives you an opportunity to linger over titles - either remembering the contents or expecting them or both.

Looking at them as a whole, I ponder what is the thread that flows through them - given their immediate eclectic appearance - and the answer to that question I find has to be ' the sacred'. This is not exactly 'religion' (though once in conversation with a Dominican friend I admitted that 'religion [if anything] was 'my thing') because that expresses (to most minds) an organized reality or belief system. 

The best I can do is a bundle of core intuitions bundled with the thread that each person has (to quote George Fox) that which is of God in him or her - and every him or her live in a living world that is an expression of divine grace.

It was Martin Buber who gave thanks that the word 'religion' does not belong to either the Hebrew Bible or tradition. The 'sacred' is (as Buber might say) an existential stance towards what is that hallows it, sees it as holy: the dynamic reflection of transcendence. 'Everything that lives is holy' to quote Blake (notably represented). This exploration is explicitly apparent in the books that thematically are on religion but implicitly virtually everywhere - in the novels of Patrick White, in the poems of Robert Lax or in orientation of the books on art. There is little that is obviously secular - even George Eliot formidably agnostic as she is, remains an articulate describer of the tangent of faith in the direction of lives (and a firm believer in moral realism).

I expect a second strand is the seriousness of the books. There is not much by way of light reading! No detective stories or comic fiction or biographies of celebrities. Am I truly that serious? The answer is no but if my mind wants to 'veg out', it does not read. It goes to the screen and does not watch documentaries!

I find myself playing 'Desert Island Discs' and wondering which volume I would ask to accompany the Bible and Shakespeare. This undoubtedly shifts according to one's mood (and the length of expected stay)! But broadly it oscillates between a desire for the encyclopaedic - so a complete set of the Dictionary of National Biography or Joseph Needham's monumental 'Science and Civilization in China' lest I find myself deprived of sheer text or poetic depth. Here I think it is between Patrick White's 'Riders in the Chariot' whose regular re-reading reveals new depths and whose four principle characters each reveals an aspect of the mystery of being human and becomes a combining picture of wholeness or Edwin Muir's Collected Poems whose unfolding vision is the closest accounting of my seeing of the world: of Eden and the Fall and the long journey back, accompanied by transfiguring light.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more