What I've Been Reading

Hey everyone, as you may know I've recently embarked on a new academic pursuit at Seattle Pacific University in order to receive a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. As a result, I've been reading pretty avidly over the last month or two, and thought I would share some of these titles with you, which have been so edifying. 

First of all, The Divine Comedy by Dante. Dante was a Florentine noble who was eventually exiled from the city by certain political enemies. While in exile, he penned one of the most impressive pieces of imaginative, religious poetry to date. Dante takes his readers on a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, along the way being guided by his pagan mentor, Virgil, and eventually the heavenly "Beatrice," a woman Dante met and fell in love with (though they never married) while on earth. While the Inferno was difficult to get through, both because of its content and the array of figures Dante is always alluding to, things get brighter and more hopeful going into Purgatory. Once we arrive at Paradise, Dante's verse unfolds into almost constant praise and wonder. There was no doubt in my in my mind when I finished the poem that joy is the theme Dante was going for in his writing. I found myself circling all the times the word is mentioned, along with its variety of synonyms: delight, rejoice, gladness, revel, blessedness, etc. In Paradise, everyone is radically oriented towards God, while remaining intensely themselves. C.S. Lewis must have been greatly influenced by Dante when he wrote his own heavenly tale The Great Divorce. Conversely, everyone in Hell is radically absorbed in themselves, always set on erasing the "other" for their own comfort and esteem. As the Yale Dante expert Peter Hawkins writes, "Self-involvement is essentially what Dante understands sin to be–a destructive narcissism whose impulse is to erase the Other to secure one's own 'divine right.'" (Dante: A Brief Introduction, p. 53). Sadly, these individuals miss out on what they were made for: joy. From Hawkins again: "For what Dante has given the tradition is a notion that joy is at the heart of reality, even at the heart of God. Smiling, moreover, is the hallmark gesture of Dante's poem and a sign of his distinctiveness as both poet and theologian" (p. 123). Here's a few lines from Paradiso to illustrate what he's talking about: 

The King through whom this kingdom finds content

in so much love and so much joyousness

that no desire would dare to ask for more, 

creating every mind in His glad sight, 

bestows His grace diversely, at His pleasure–

and here the fact alone must be enough. 

                                                -Paradiso, Canto 32, ll. 61-66. 

After reading Dante, I picked up Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I had read this dystopian book in junior high but had forgotten how good Bradbury really is. In this bleak but fast paced world, books of antiquity are burned and forgotten. No one reads anymore–everyone is plugged into their radios, glued to their TVs, until even violence becomes entertainment. Pleasure and entertainment trump meaning and relationships. 

After that, I read Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop, a beautiful, poetic meditation on the life of a French bishop sent to the newly colonized New Mexico to tend to the Catholic dioceses in the region. What spoke to me most in the novel was the depiction of the Native Americans, so tied to land, culture, history, and culture, and the conflict this poses with the Bishop's Christianity. They respect the sacredness of the land while white colonizers seek to "master" nature with civilization and technology. In the end, the book focuses on the impact one man's life can have on so many others. 

In line with Fahrenheit 451, I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I would be shocked if Bradbury wasn't radically influenced by this book. Written in 1932, Huxley gives us a world where human beings are artificially grown and conditioned into castes, erasing the need for family and obliterating any notion of free will. In this world, "everyone belongs to everyone else," thus encouraging rampant promiscuity. In addition, because comfort and pleasure are the goals, and the means by which the State authorities seek to control people, people take a drug called soma, which takes away any uncomfortable feelings like sadness, fear, or rejection. The catch of the novel comes around when a young man from New Mexico, the "Savage" is brought back to utopian London for display. The Savage, unlike the civilized, has a mother and a father and still operates within a worldview of fidelity, love, and respect. He affirms the need for the spiritual. As you can imagine, he is not well understood by the pleasure-absorbed masses. At the end of the book, one of the leaders of this utopian world, Mustapha Mond, tells the Savage, "The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist." 

Eventually, the Savage replies, "But I don't want comfort. I want God. I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin." Huxley was indeed prophetic of our own age, but more than that he saw what a great temptation it can be to remain forever infantile and childish, never maturing into a responsible, free being. 

That's all for now. I plan on moving on to some Virginia Woolf, Kathleen Norris, and Oscar Wilde next. Thanks for reading!