Off the shelf

We finished Saving Private Ryan last night, and although perhaps the stoic in me wants to say that it pulls the heartstrings a little too hard, I did love the ending. And in a year or two, I'll let the boys watch it and hope that they remember to "earn it." We all owe our existence to the sacrifices of others. Only sometimes that is hard to remember when we're making our own.

So today the kids are watching a more age appropriate but probably time wasting film: G Force. Dad's on duty, and I'm reading blogs. I meant this to be something of a book review blog, so here are some quotes from what I'm reading lately:

From Katherine Paterson's The Invisible Child:
In "In Search of Wonder" she talks about books providing children a source to wonder at nature - human and the natural world, at language, and at the mystery of meaning. She writes: "If knowledge without a sense of reverence is dangerous, morality divorced from wonder leads either to chilling legalism or priggish sentimentality . . . When I write a book I am not setting out to teach virture I am trying to tell a story, I am trying to draw my reader into the mystery of human life in this world. I am trying to share my own sense of wonder that although I have not always been in this world and will not continue in it for too many more years, I am here now, sharing in the mystery of the universe, thinking, feeling, tasting, smelling,seeing, hearing, shouting, singing, speaking, laughing, crying, living, and dying."

She goes on to say we need to share with children the wonder of death as well as the wonder of birth. So someday we'll let the boys watch this movie, but now maybe The Fighting Sullivans is what we should look for.

I liked this too: "Meaning in a story reflects our belief that there is meaning in the universe, that no matter the disorder that frames our lives, in the center -- in the place that reveals who we are -- there is order."

I remember loving Paterson's books as a preteen. After rereading Bridge to Terabithia as an adult, I hesitated to recommend it to my kids, but after reading this collection of essays, I agree with what she is about. She says in "The Invisible Child" that people criticize her work for being hopeless or having unlovable characters, which hurts her because she loves her characters. "It is my hope, of course, that children will find these characters to be real children like themselves -- that they will be able to see themselves in them and then as they come to love and forgive these people on the page to be able to forgive and love their own deepest selves. . . . We do well to be suspicious of love that comes too easily."

Likewise, Flannery O'Connor rails against writing uplifting, moral stories, that reflect the prosperity of America and the joy of life in "The Fiction Writer and His Country" in Mystery and Manners. (I'm going to try to revisit Southern lit while I'm here, although O'C also rejects labelling regional writers. "Most readers these days must be sufficiently sick of hearing about Southern writers and Southern writing and what so many reviewers insist upon calling the 'Southern school'. . . . The writers of the editorial in question suggest that our anguish is a result of our isolation from the rest of the country. ... The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough . . . The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them." Even more, I imagine, would she cringe at being included with the ya-ya sisterhoods and sweet potato pie queens and all their knock-offs that lack even the sense of being "Christ-haunted.")



Back to the comparison with Paterson: "My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. . . Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, adn for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause."

And like Paterson, O'C refuses to write the uplifting fiction the "tired reader" wants. "There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration."

Which brings me back to last night's film and reminds me of the tragedy described by Pentimento. Real darkness is out there. But still we hope for light. And keep trying to earn it despite recurring failures.