About time that I finally post to the 25 books archive. My only excuse, in honor of my first post, is that the devil made me delay. The Screwtape Letters is a correspondence between two devils, which C.S. Lewis claims he happened across during his various journeys and musings.
What it is in actuality, is a reverse indoctrination to Lewis' particular brand of Christianity. It was a book that had long sat neglected upon my shelf and was finally read as a stealthy addition to my British Literature curriculum. Ahh, the pleasure of a, in many ways, former Roman Catholic exploring his religious foundations and the very reasons religion can be abandoned with public school children. Separation of Church and State my foot!
As Screwtape, the primary narrator, instructed his nephew Wormwood on the various excellent ways of corrupting a patient (any one of us), I was surprised by how often my own excuses and reasons for abandoning a christian god came flowing from the mouths of devils. Suggested as the perfect methods of corruption over and again were distraction, a skewed perspective on reality, and an overconfidence in human intelligence and understanding.
Reading Cappy's reflection on The Unbearable Lightness of Being I am reminded of another of Screwtape's corrosive ways. The devil says that it is acceptable for us to read, even extensively, the thoughts of past philosophers, as long as we regard them as something to be classified, placed coldly in reference to their own time and place, but never regarded as a possible truth. Though in the case of Cappy's introduction, Screwtape would smile widely, even better than not viewing a reading a personally relevant is to view the works of the past or of the mind as an allergen, something to be given a wide berth.
Beyond the war against religion and religious thought, the subtext of the reading is that most dangerous (if you are a devil or a suspicious former Catholic) reality: god never gives up on us. No matter how far we may wander into darker territory, Lewis reminds us that all we need to do to throw off Screwtape and his treacherous ways is recognize the god who has been invisibly by our side all along and follow him home.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
My sister, Catherine, refuses to read even Book I of Plato's Republic - and this despite my frequent proddings and protestations. Though I have never asked why not, I suspect that she, like a great many of her generation and all other generations, considers herself allergic to Philosophy. It's as though she should not dare read it for fear of bursting into hives or her throat swelling up so much as to suffocate her. Such perceived maladies have sworn too many off of "the love of wisdom."
And so we leave it up to folks like Milan Kundera to trick people into studying Philosophy against their will - dressing the ages-old discipline up as a play, a short story, or, as in this case, as a novel.
Kundera's quarry is a question of reality. What is "the real?" Is it the moments we call "light," when responsibility and concern seem to melt away as we, freed from burdens, rise slowly above the troubled world below? Or is the real world "heavy?" Are we not our truest, best, most authentic selves when life puts the screws to us and we are almost literally pushed by our burdens closer to the world on which we stand? The Philosopher calls this line of questioning "Ontology," the study of a thing's nature or origins, and she could ponder it for hours at a clip - and be ecstatic doing so.
The Philosopher wouldn't move copy, though. To do that, you have to write a story, and it's best if the story is about love. That's essentially what Kundera has done. He's written a tale of couples - Tomas and Tereza along with Franz and Sabina - and tracks the arc of their affairs through countless miscommunications, messy crossings, and an exceedingly long litany of infidelities. The couples do love each other - the author almost pulls muscles to communicate this in the face of so much evidence to the contrary - but so often one lovers affection fails to match the needs and expectations of the other. Tomas, for example, loves Tereza as though she were a gift sent to him down the river in a basket, like Moses to Pharaoh's daughter. What he doesn't seem to understand, though, is that Tereza considers sex intrinsically linked to love and struggles with Tomas' sharing a bed with so many mistresses.
Due to so much wanton sex and crushed feelings, it would be easy for The Unbearable Lightness of Being to devolve into little more than a cheap romance novel. Lucky for Kundera that love also happens to be a tried and true method of investigating and weighing philosophical truths. (Even the staid Plato wrote Symposium.) His interest in these underlying themes of lightness and weight is what saves the book from being tawdry. And it begs the reader to wonder aloud about what it is that makes them real.
We are a sneaky bunch, we Philosopher Kings. And here you thought we never left our ivory towers.
And so we leave it up to folks like Milan Kundera to trick people into studying Philosophy against their will - dressing the ages-old discipline up as a play, a short story, or, as in this case, as a novel.
Kundera's quarry is a question of reality. What is "the real?" Is it the moments we call "light," when responsibility and concern seem to melt away as we, freed from burdens, rise slowly above the troubled world below? Or is the real world "heavy?" Are we not our truest, best, most authentic selves when life puts the screws to us and we are almost literally pushed by our burdens closer to the world on which we stand? The Philosopher calls this line of questioning "Ontology," the study of a thing's nature or origins, and she could ponder it for hours at a clip - and be ecstatic doing so.
The Philosopher wouldn't move copy, though. To do that, you have to write a story, and it's best if the story is about love. That's essentially what Kundera has done. He's written a tale of couples - Tomas and Tereza along with Franz and Sabina - and tracks the arc of their affairs through countless miscommunications, messy crossings, and an exceedingly long litany of infidelities. The couples do love each other - the author almost pulls muscles to communicate this in the face of so much evidence to the contrary - but so often one lovers affection fails to match the needs and expectations of the other. Tomas, for example, loves Tereza as though she were a gift sent to him down the river in a basket, like Moses to Pharaoh's daughter. What he doesn't seem to understand, though, is that Tereza considers sex intrinsically linked to love and struggles with Tomas' sharing a bed with so many mistresses.
Due to so much wanton sex and crushed feelings, it would be easy for The Unbearable Lightness of Being to devolve into little more than a cheap romance novel. Lucky for Kundera that love also happens to be a tried and true method of investigating and weighing philosophical truths. (Even the staid Plato wrote Symposium.) His interest in these underlying themes of lightness and weight is what saves the book from being tawdry. And it begs the reader to wonder aloud about what it is that makes them real.
We are a sneaky bunch, we Philosopher Kings. And here you thought we never left our ivory towers.
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