Romantic Scribbles

Recently I finished Donald Miller’s new book “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”.  Another Miller book “Blue Like Jazz” has been sitting on my shelf for years and I’ve never gotten around to it, but I picked up A Million Miles and once I started reading it was hard to put down.

Miller knows how to craft a story, and I wanting to keep reading to find out where it would go next.  Not sure if it was because I read it so fast (maybe 3-5 days) but occasionally the story metaphor got a little redundant, and I thought perhaps the end of the book was quite as engaging as the first, but all in all it was a really enjoyable book.

Now with my new handy-dandy kindle it’s pretty easy for me to mark passages I like, and so I thought I’d share one I enjoyed:

I asked Bob what was the key to living such a great story, and Bob seemed uncomfortable with the idea he was anything special. But he wanted to answer my question, so he thought about it and said he didn’t think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy. I asked him what he meant by whimsy, and he struggled to define it. He said it’s that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.I asked Bob what was the key to living such a great story, and Bob seemed uncomfortable with the idea he was anything special. But he wanted to answer my question, so he thought about it and said he didn’t think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy. I asked him what he meant by whimsy, and he struggled to define it. He said it’s that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.

I think for some people a magical life or the idea of whimsy in the world is completely foreign.  For me, however, I not only believe in this stuff, but I feel a longing, a desire for it somewhere deep inside.  It’s probably what keeps me looking for worlds inside wardrobes, and dreaming of romantic quests involving rings and wizards.  In any case check out the book and include a little spontaneous whimsy in your day.

A friend of mine posted a blog with some initial thoughts about what’s going on in with America, healthcare, and Christianity.  It can be read here.

An odd thing happened yesterday in my dissertation research.  Charles Taylor was telling the story of some in the Victorian Age that lost their faith, and yet deeply lamented the loss.  On such individual was Matthew Arnold, an important thinker and critic of the late 19th century.  I need/want to learn more about Arnold, but alas time is a precious commodity.

In any case Arnold, whose ideas have in many ways fallen out of favor, was religious in youth, but in later life turned from his faith.  He felt the deep need for something beyond the world he saw, and sought for some sort of “religious” experience in art, literature, and education.  the tale of his loss, and the lament of his loss moved me.  Here is the section that I found moving:

“Arnold’s profound ambivalence, his sense of the impossibility of faith, whose departure has nonetheless left a great void, comes out most forcefully in the ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”.  The speaker feels, for all his powerful sense of sympathy, that he cannot return to the world in which the monastery’s life of prayer played such an important part.

For rigorous teachers seized my youth,

And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,

Show’d me the high, white star of Truth,

There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:

What dost thou in this living tomb?

Forgive me, masters of the mind!

At whose behest I long ago

So much unlearnt, so much resign’d—

I come not here to be your foe!

I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,

To curse and to deny your truth;

Not as their friend, or child, I speak!

But as, on some far northern strand,

Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek

In pity and mournful awe might stand

Before some fallen Runic stone—

For both were faiths, and both are gone.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head,

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

Their faith, my tears, the world deride—

I come to shed them at their side” (A Secular Age, 382-383).