It's 18 minutes after 3 Monday morning. Forty minutes ago, I felt a single drop of water hit my shoulder when I stood up in my bedroom to investigate the tap...tap...tap coming from just above the ceiling while a thunderstorm sounded outside.
Thunderstorms generally don't bother me, even though I believe they will get worse and more frequent with climate change. I like living on the third floor of my well-constructed building that is probably no more than 40 years old, because no one is walking over my head, my heating bill is probably less in winter, there is a vaulted ceiling in my livingroom, and it feels like living in a treehouse. The main view of the world from my apartment is a large sliding glass door just off my livingroom which looks out past my balcony to the upper branches of large pine trees. If the wind ever reaches my balcony enough to make the wind chimes sound or the rain fiercely enough to splash it, I know it is worse beyond the stand of pines. A flowering tree, standing between my balcony and the parking lot, is left untrimmed to the point where its blossom-laden branches hang down very nearly to the roof of my parked car.
I've always liked "living up under the eaves" and have done so when I could. In 1967, my family bought an old Dutch Colonial house with an absurdly large 3rd-floor attic, which my dad and I finished into an apartment for me. In graduate school, the professor I worked for occupied a large corner office on the top floor of the University of Memphis's Patterson Hall, and when I entered the office each morning, I looked out the windows directly into leafy tree branches. When I was 10, I remember being awake at 3 one morning with one of my brothers, and we sat at the attic windows of my paternal grandparents' house, listening to the pigeons cooing just outside, in the nest they had built under the eaves.
This morning, alas, the outside world is no longer merely a show and the fourth wall has been breached. The tap...tap I heard some time ago was like a small, sinister footstep in the dark, though fortunately it didn't end with a visit from Samara Morgan. After I noticed water stains in a corner of my bedroom ceiling a few weeks ago following heavy rains, the property manager asked me to wait a week or two until we had had no rain, after which he would have the roof repaired above my ceiling. This was supposed to have been done a couple of weeks ago, and a man came to the apartment Friday and put a new piece of sheetrock in the damaged corner of my ceiling.
Well it looks like he'll probably have to do so again. I can't see any fresh stains, but there must be water in the attic space between the ceiling and the roof.
The last time anything like this happened to me was nearly 40 years ago, when I occupied the upper floor of a house that had probably been built before the First World War. I had just moved in a few days before and was awakened by the sound of water spilling outside my bedroom door but inside the house. Rushing out into the hall, I saw a stream pouring down from the attic, splashing water and plaster flakes all over a box of books. I thought I remembered it hitting my copy of the Greek New Testament, but I found it just now and couldn't see any water stains.
I say that was the last time, but a variation happened about 9 years ago in the building where I lived before moving here, a place a little older and not so well maintained. A fire broke out in a nearby apartment, and smoke came pouring through the air vents into mine. No fire came to my apartment, but a fireman had to enter and punch a hole in my dining room ceiling with his fire axe, to make sure there was no fire in the attic. After he left, I taped a garbage bag over the hole until it could be repaired. To this day, some of my books and papers remain a dingy gray, left that way by the smoke.
Those episodes were unpleasant but not completely unexpected, but this is not "supposed" to happen. A friend lives in the African nation of Chad and looks out through her screen door to find herself being observed by a curious goat who has wandered by, but in the richest country in the world, we are supposed to be sealed, sanitized, waterproofed, and warrantied. With a thunderstorm raging outside, I have a computer desk, too large and heavy to move, laden with snaking wires and cables, and I don't expect the least danger or inconvenience from the elements to my HP color printer-copier-scanner, my Dell computer, my Acer monitor, my DSL modem, or my Logitech web cam. My expected mode of life is 90 years and a world away from the expectation of my paternal grandfather when a boy, waking up on a winter morning just 85 miles east of here and brushing the snow off his blanket that had come through the roof in the night, or of my paternal grandmother, unable to sleep because of the hideous din of rain and hail on the tin roof of the farmhouse she and her family occupied in a field in St. Francis County, Arkansas.
Actually, something like this still does happen to my mother and stepfather, who live in a very large and attractive house downtown overlooking the river, for which they were willing to pay a handsome price a few years ago, thinking it had been well built. It seems now that that wasn't strictly true, and if they experience leaks, the water may drip on polished hardwood and tasteful antiques and works of art, which is certainly worse than anything happening here!
What can the roofers have thought they were doing a couple of weeks ago? I assume they actually did climb to the top of my building and didn't somehow place fresh shingles above the wrong apartment by mistake, so why is a tenant reduced to listening watchfully in the dark at 3:30 a.m., wondering if a corner of his ceiling is about to give way and pour a muddy mixture from the storm outside into his room, ruining the fragile tangle of wires that connects him to e-mail, news updates from The New York Times and The Washington Post, FaceBook, Amazon.com, Netflix, and his online banking?
And that, really, is the thing that causes the most worry in 2010. My maternal grandparents were related by marriage to a family in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who, 80 years ago, left their house on purpose every year in anticipation of the spring flooding of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers and later returned to clean out the mud and snakes from their house's lower storey. Within the last 10 years, when the neighbor of a former colleague of mine died in rural Tennessee, the hearse could not get to the home of the deceased to pick up the remains because of flooding, and the neighbors had to improvise their own way to get the body to where it needed to be. Two months ago, one of my colleagues at work had neighbors camping out in her house in Nashville and her entire neighborhood was cut off from the rest of the city by flooding. She could not reach her office, but she remained connected to the outside world because her cellphone service included a data plan.
And when I get right down to it, that's why I keep listening for the dripping sound to resume: the risk that a breach of the fragile fabric that keeps out the elements may throw me back to a time when I didn't have the choices that now make me feel deprived if they are closed off. On one of the eight bookcases in my apartment is a two-volume life of St. Paul published in 1858 that I have owned since 1977 but not read, as well as a four-volume edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson that my parents bought for me in a garage sale in 1967; I actually have read through that one, but, like Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible, it bears rereading throughout one's life. My entire dining room table and my coffee table are piled high with books and magazines, and if the Internet went the way of the Hummer, I would still have plenty to do.
But not the same choice. Now, if I awake to a noise in the night, I can immediately publish a reflection about it that at least two people are likely to read, both in other states and one of whom I haven't seen in 40 years or, if I wish, I can enter a message board and explain to someone in England or Australia why Hitler was not a Christian, despite their wish to believe it so. I can listen to Orlando Gibbons via Radio at AOL or click on a scene from Citizen Kane posted to YouTube. If I lose all those choices, even for a few days, it's no more than irksome, but I'd still as soon avoid it. Now, turning to my e-mail in-box, I see the daily headlines from the Times, informing me that governors have expressed grave concerns about immigration, as well as another Times notice that assures me that there is a "boatload of water fun" to be had at Clearwater and St. Petersburg, Florida. Meanwhile, the dripping has resumed 4 feet above my shoulder, steadier now and more insistent.
© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label Bible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bible. Show all posts
Monday, July 12, 2010
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
No Rime for the Ancient Naturalist
Why did Darwin lose his taste for poetry late in life?
That may seem like a strange question in our day when, for many of us, the chief experience of poetry was memorizing Paul Revere's Ride and reciting it in grade school. Darwin, of course, born 200 years ago, grew up in a culture where daily exposure to the poetic cadences of the King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was standard, where acquaintance with the works of Shakespeare and Dryden was expected of any educated man and the poetry of Lord Byron was fashionable. Former President John Adams, in his 80s when Darwin was a child, reread the complete works of Shakespeare every year; just 35 years ago, veteran journalist Arthur Krock recited Thackeray's whimsical Ballad of Buillabaisse for a young visitor, having read it once 50 years previously.
One expects the senses and appetites to diminish with age, but hopefully, never the taste for art, music, or poetry. One need not argue that Darwin's scientific interests were a bar to appreciation of the Muse; it was on the voyage of the Beagle that he took along a volume of Milton and read through Paradise Lost.
Yet in his old age, Darwin penned this forlorn confession in a letter to his wife, Emma:
Of course he was 30 when he made his voyage. This loss of aesthetic enjoyment apparently became part of the Darwin legend, especially after the publication of some of his private correspondence, to the point where his son, William, felt compelled to deny it at a Darwin Centennial gathering in 1909.
Unacquainted with any but the bare outline of Darwin's life and career, I knew none of this—the early appreciation of poetry and its subsequent loss—until I read today that Darwin's great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel, had published a poetic biography of her distinguished ancestor; the review, in that noted journal of the arts, The Economist, was favorable, though I was keeping my fingers crossed, imagining filiopietistic hagiography buttressed with bad verse (how many rhymes are there for fossil?).
Fortunately, it seems I was wrong, if this excerpt from her book is typical:
Whatever her other accomplishments, Padel is certainly a poet.
But what of her poor great-great grandfather? The religious critic has no trouble seeing, in Darwin's loss, a just requital of his supposed offense against faith; the man whose works imply denial of Divine creation ends by seeing part of his own humanity wither away.
Even in a less orthodox context, I can imagine Coleridge casting a Darwin-like figure as a ruthless hunter whose scientific inquiry, like a crossbow, transfixes and kills the creatures he studies, making everything dead and dry in proportion to his knowledge.
I don't know what happened. I would like to think that, like the man utterly convinced of a fact that consumes and shapes his entire being, as described in Emerson's essay on Character, he came to need nothing else but this knowledge that changed everything—yet he describes himself as having suffered a loss. I would like to think that, like the yogis who achieve the state of nirvikalpa samadhi, described as an entrance into unitary consciousness from which the adept never returns, he reached a point where any works of the imagination seemed feeble and derivative compared to the reality that he had come to know intimately through his studies.
But Darwin himself describes his state as unhappy, and in any case, all this is uninformed speculation on my part.
I am certain that if rejection of religious faith leads to desertion by the Muse, we would have a hard time accounting for the poetic power of A.E. Housman, whose unbelief was, if anything, even more definite than Darwin's own. I have read no biographies of Darwin and have nothing but the evidence of his own words; if we must take them at face value, I am sorry for what happened to him but grateful for the unrelenting pursuit of the truth; as Dobzhanksy said of natural selection, "Nothing in biology makes sense without it."
© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.
That may seem like a strange question in our day when, for many of us, the chief experience of poetry was memorizing Paul Revere's Ride and reciting it in grade school. Darwin, of course, born 200 years ago, grew up in a culture where daily exposure to the poetic cadences of the King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was standard, where acquaintance with the works of Shakespeare and Dryden was expected of any educated man and the poetry of Lord Byron was fashionable. Former President John Adams, in his 80s when Darwin was a child, reread the complete works of Shakespeare every year; just 35 years ago, veteran journalist Arthur Krock recited Thackeray's whimsical Ballad of Buillabaisse for a young visitor, having read it once 50 years previously.
One expects the senses and appetites to diminish with age, but hopefully, never the taste for art, music, or poetry. One need not argue that Darwin's scientific interests were a bar to appreciation of the Muse; it was on the voyage of the Beagle that he took along a volume of Milton and read through Paradise Lost.
Yet in his old age, Darwin penned this forlorn confession in a letter to his wife, Emma:
Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare…. Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Of course he was 30 when he made his voyage. This loss of aesthetic enjoyment apparently became part of the Darwin legend, especially after the publication of some of his private correspondence, to the point where his son, William, felt compelled to deny it at a Darwin Centennial gathering in 1909.
Unacquainted with any but the bare outline of Darwin's life and career, I knew none of this—the early appreciation of poetry and its subsequent loss—until I read today that Darwin's great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel, had published a poetic biography of her distinguished ancestor; the review, in that noted journal of the arts, The Economist, was favorable, though I was keeping my fingers crossed, imagining filiopietistic hagiography buttressed with bad verse (how many rhymes are there for fossil?).
Fortunately, it seems I was wrong, if this excerpt from her book is typical:
The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.
Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst
and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this
means he's better; and working on a haul of lumpen light.
Polyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods.
'So low in the scale of nature, so exquisite in their forms!
You wonder at so much beauty - created,
apparently, for such little purpose!' They lower his creel
to blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white
as a gun-flash, over the blown heart of sapphire.
Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen,
tossing on lazuline steel.
Whatever her other accomplishments, Padel is certainly a poet.
But what of her poor great-great grandfather? The religious critic has no trouble seeing, in Darwin's loss, a just requital of his supposed offense against faith; the man whose works imply denial of Divine creation ends by seeing part of his own humanity wither away.
Even in a less orthodox context, I can imagine Coleridge casting a Darwin-like figure as a ruthless hunter whose scientific inquiry, like a crossbow, transfixes and kills the creatures he studies, making everything dead and dry in proportion to his knowledge.
I don't know what happened. I would like to think that, like the man utterly convinced of a fact that consumes and shapes his entire being, as described in Emerson's essay on Character, he came to need nothing else but this knowledge that changed everything—yet he describes himself as having suffered a loss. I would like to think that, like the yogis who achieve the state of nirvikalpa samadhi, described as an entrance into unitary consciousness from which the adept never returns, he reached a point where any works of the imagination seemed feeble and derivative compared to the reality that he had come to know intimately through his studies.
But Darwin himself describes his state as unhappy, and in any case, all this is uninformed speculation on my part.
I am certain that if rejection of religious faith leads to desertion by the Muse, we would have a hard time accounting for the poetic power of A.E. Housman, whose unbelief was, if anything, even more definite than Darwin's own. I have read no biographies of Darwin and have nothing but the evidence of his own words; if we must take them at face value, I am sorry for what happened to him but grateful for the unrelenting pursuit of the truth; as Dobzhanksy said of natural selection, "Nothing in biology makes sense without it."
© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
No nail clippers? Admit them.
Several dozen climate activists entered a secured area of Stansted Airport, near London, a couple of days ago at 3 a.m., and chained themselves to fences, delaying the opening of a nearby runway for 3 hours, which disrupted dozens of flights. They had used an old fire engine, and security officers apparently waved them through. As The Economist commented:
A similar confusion seems to affect discussions of gay marriage, calling to mind nothing so much as the warning about "Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel." Conservative Christians present themselves as protecting marriage, while they drive the divorce rate higher than among any other segment of the population. Gay men, meanwhile, argue for their right to enter into an arrangement that, whatever else it means, is supposed to stand for lifelong monogamy, a tendency that, for gay men, seems in notoriously short supply. As gay activist Mark Simpson candidly acknowledges, with true British understatement, "Gay and straight long-term relationships are generally not the same. How many heterosexual marriages are open, for example?"
Exactly. (I don't know whether lesbian couples in general are more committed or not, and let's admit, at once, with readers of the Boi from Troy gay blog, that the roving eye is mostly a male trait for straights and gays alike; quite enough peccadilloes are chargeable to Bill Clinton without suspecting him of wanting to hit on Elton John.)
Of course there are exceptions to everything, and committed and responsible couples may be found anywhere, but my gut reaction in hearing gay men, at least, demand the right to enter legally recognized lifelong monogamous relationships has been akin to what I would feel hearing peace demonstrators demand ROTC scholarships.
The question, as at Stansted, is whether there is a runway to protect and where it lies, and the issue seems to turn on the word "marriage." Frankly, it reminds me of the time, at age 8, when I told my father quite seriously that I intended to write to President Kennedy to protest the fact that the word "day" referred both to the 24-hour period and the hours of sunlight; I objected to the ambiguity and wanted a law passed to clarify it.
Dislike of gays and their practices is not exclusively an Evangelical Christian issue, of course; my Pakistani Muslim cabdriver in Vancouver a few years ago conceded that gays were welcome to frolic together (he expressed it more colorfully) but not in his cab or on public beaches. In any case, conservative Christians argue that the Bible and Christian tradition condemn homosexuality, and they do, but we are not a theocracy and not all religious violations can result in legal prohibitions, or else blasphemy would be a crime. Newsweek devotes a a sensitive and reasonable article in this week's issue to "The Christian Case for Gay Marriage," which is rather like arguing the Vegan case for roast beef; there is none. After making many categorically sound points about the dangers of literalism in Biblical interpretation, the otherwise perceptive reporter duly goes off the rails with a quote from Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, who argues for gay marriage on the grounds that "The Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."
Well, no, it's not, and Brueggemann's mistake is characteristic of those, to paraphrase Mencken, haunted by the fear that the Bible might actually mean what it says; who would prefer to interpret it as a vague and permissive general benevolence toward all. The promise of redemption in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures is, indeed, inclusive, but always on condition of meeting stated requirements, and same-sex intimacy doesn't make the cut. Brueggemann is certainly in tune with the spirit of this age, but not of the apostolic one; see, for instance, the following, from St. Basil the Great: "He who is guilty of unseemliness with males will be under discipline for the same time as adulterers" (Letters 217:62 [A.D. 367]); or this, from St. John Chrysostom:
The whole appeal to religion is not a little strange to begin with; as I mentioned in my first post, I'm at a point in my life where I have no religious belief at all, but unwillingness to assent to the claim that a Disembodied Spirit spoke the planets into existence need not deprive one of the ability to see Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for what they are: systems of belief and ritual based on the perceived need to cleanse the impurity of mankind and propitiate the inexorable righteousness of a Creator. Those elements of religion may be decidedly inconvenient, but they cannot be cut out for convenience or, if they are, the name "Christian" should be abandoned as well.
Having said that, again, we aren't living in John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony, and whatever legal protections and financial advantages may accrue to couples in legally recognized relationships can't be denied in an enlightened state worthy of the name, to otherwise law-abiding, consenting adults on grounds ultimately traceable to religious objections, any more than a Catholic should be formally barred from the Presidency. Gays, like polygamists, may have to bypass the word "marriage" for tactical reasons, but their detractors have similarly got to become more clearsighted about the difference between their personal morals and public policy.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
It's no good stopping passengers carrying a pair of nail scissors in their hand luggage if you haven't got effective control of your runway, where the scope for disruption—and worse—is enormous.
A similar confusion seems to affect discussions of gay marriage, calling to mind nothing so much as the warning about "Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel." Conservative Christians present themselves as protecting marriage, while they drive the divorce rate higher than among any other segment of the population. Gay men, meanwhile, argue for their right to enter into an arrangement that, whatever else it means, is supposed to stand for lifelong monogamy, a tendency that, for gay men, seems in notoriously short supply. As gay activist Mark Simpson candidly acknowledges, with true British understatement, "Gay and straight long-term relationships are generally not the same. How many heterosexual marriages are open, for example?"
Exactly. (I don't know whether lesbian couples in general are more committed or not, and let's admit, at once, with readers of the Boi from Troy gay blog, that the roving eye is mostly a male trait for straights and gays alike; quite enough peccadilloes are chargeable to Bill Clinton without suspecting him of wanting to hit on Elton John.)
Of course there are exceptions to everything, and committed and responsible couples may be found anywhere, but my gut reaction in hearing gay men, at least, demand the right to enter legally recognized lifelong monogamous relationships has been akin to what I would feel hearing peace demonstrators demand ROTC scholarships.
The question, as at Stansted, is whether there is a runway to protect and where it lies, and the issue seems to turn on the word "marriage." Frankly, it reminds me of the time, at age 8, when I told my father quite seriously that I intended to write to President Kennedy to protest the fact that the word "day" referred both to the 24-hour period and the hours of sunlight; I objected to the ambiguity and wanted a law passed to clarify it.
Dislike of gays and their practices is not exclusively an Evangelical Christian issue, of course; my Pakistani Muslim cabdriver in Vancouver a few years ago conceded that gays were welcome to frolic together (he expressed it more colorfully) but not in his cab or on public beaches. In any case, conservative Christians argue that the Bible and Christian tradition condemn homosexuality, and they do, but we are not a theocracy and not all religious violations can result in legal prohibitions, or else blasphemy would be a crime. Newsweek devotes a a sensitive and reasonable article in this week's issue to "The Christian Case for Gay Marriage," which is rather like arguing the Vegan case for roast beef; there is none. After making many categorically sound points about the dangers of literalism in Biblical interpretation, the otherwise perceptive reporter duly goes off the rails with a quote from Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, who argues for gay marriage on the grounds that "The Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."
Well, no, it's not, and Brueggemann's mistake is characteristic of those, to paraphrase Mencken, haunted by the fear that the Bible might actually mean what it says; who would prefer to interpret it as a vague and permissive general benevolence toward all. The promise of redemption in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures is, indeed, inclusive, but always on condition of meeting stated requirements, and same-sex intimacy doesn't make the cut. Brueggemann is certainly in tune with the spirit of this age, but not of the apostolic one; see, for instance, the following, from St. Basil the Great: "He who is guilty of unseemliness with males will be under discipline for the same time as adulterers" (Letters 217:62 [A.D. 367]); or this, from St. John Chrysostom:
All of these affections [in Rom. 1:26–27] . . . were vile, but chiefly the mad lust after males; for the soul is more the sufferer in sins, and more dishonored than the body in diseases" (Homilies on Romans 4 [A.D. 391]).
"[The men] have done an insult to nature itself. And a yet more disgraceful thing than these is it, when even the women seek after these intercourses, who ought to have more shame than men" (ibid.).
The whole appeal to religion is not a little strange to begin with; as I mentioned in my first post, I'm at a point in my life where I have no religious belief at all, but unwillingness to assent to the claim that a Disembodied Spirit spoke the planets into existence need not deprive one of the ability to see Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for what they are: systems of belief and ritual based on the perceived need to cleanse the impurity of mankind and propitiate the inexorable righteousness of a Creator. Those elements of religion may be decidedly inconvenient, but they cannot be cut out for convenience or, if they are, the name "Christian" should be abandoned as well.
Having said that, again, we aren't living in John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony, and whatever legal protections and financial advantages may accrue to couples in legally recognized relationships can't be denied in an enlightened state worthy of the name, to otherwise law-abiding, consenting adults on grounds ultimately traceable to religious objections, any more than a Catholic should be formally barred from the Presidency. Gays, like polygamists, may have to bypass the word "marriage" for tactical reasons, but their detractors have similarly got to become more clearsighted about the difference between their personal morals and public policy.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
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