In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
I am reading:
2666 by Roberto Bolano- The four academics are still chasing the whereabouts of mysterious German author Archimboldi while loving one another and beating up taxi drivers internationally. They’ve managed to make it to Mexico City. The writing in 2666 is good enough that I’m going along with Bolano on the ride.
He believed in redemption. Deep down he may have even believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.
Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2) by Thomas Merton- There’s a quality here in Merton’s entries that fascinates me about some priests/monks/pastors: those who doubt their calling. Many of Merton’s entries in this diary of his first few months at the Abbey of Gethsemani are full of doubt. Understood...he just became a monk but that particular quality was to last the rest of his life.
The “doubters” are the men and women of God that I do trust somewhat (my own agnosticism notwithstanding).
April 20, 1947
It is useless to break your head over the same old details week after week and year after year, pruning the same ten twigs off the top of the tree. Get at the root: union with God. On these days drop everything and hide in yourself to find Him in the silence where He is hidden with you, and listen to what He has to say.
April 27, 1947. Third Sunday After Easter
...How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don’t concern you! The first thing for a contemplative is to mind his own business, and all care of yourself, physically, materially, is no longer your business. It is in the hands of someone else— God.
April 28, 1947
On and off since Easter I have been playing a dandy new game called insomnia. It goes like this. You lie down in bed and listen to everyone else snoring without, however, going to sleep yourself. But the fun doesn’t really begin until you get up and try to keep awake in choir, or walk around the monastery bumping into the walls. Actually, of course, it is a fine form of contemplation, if you try and use it, which consists in taking it as it comes without fuss or uproar.
The Master by Colm Tóibín- I previously enjoyed Tóibín’s take on the House of Atreus, House of Names. But this novel, a fictionalized take on the (mid) life of American novelist Henry James is simply exquisite.
He had never loved the intrigue. Yet he liked knowing secrets, because not to know was to miss almost everything. He himself learned never to disclose anything, and never even to acknowledge the moment when some new information was imparted, to act as though a mere pleasantry had been exchanged. The men and women in the literary salons of Paris moved like players in a game of knowing and not knowing, pretense and disguise. He had learned everything from them.
Autospy by Patricia Cornwell- Read the first chapter. 12 pages. Just so I could say that I read it but it does seem to be off to a promising start, at least.