It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
— V. S. Naipaul, born in 1932
“[We’ll] take upon’s the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies.”
“I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright . . .”
Likewise, I hear Traherne and Herbert. In his review of Cheever’s final book, Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982), Guy Davenport writes: “Cheever the optimist with a wicked smile and sheer joy at the shamelessness of his incurable brightness [italics added] insists that things right themselves and turn out all right, or as all right as we can expect, given the nature of our folly.”
Here is the next paragraph in Cheever’s journal: “I dream of a better prose style, freed of expedients, more thoughtful, working closer to the emotions by both direction and indirection, feeling and intelligence. A pleasant dream, and I feels like myself.”
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Thomas Gunn’s Letters - In 1998, to Clive Wilmer:
“I have been reading Oblomov, as it is about someone like me, terminally lazy and unproductive.”
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“Genius seems to thrive,” Davenport writes, “on inadequacy. Melville had almost as little education as Mark Twain. His spelling was that of a dyslexic child. His wife and his sister Augusta copied—and respelled—his manuscripts for the printer. His knowledge of literature was an ongoing lifelong self-education. His reading of Milton and Shakespeare (once he’d found an edition with type large enough for his weak eyes) gave Moby-Dick its magnificent, flexible prose
Died: Frederick Buechner, Popular Christian ‘Writer’s Writer’ and ‘Minister’s Minister’
The answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”
See also: A Shelf Called Remember: How Frederick Buechner Built Up My Faith.
When I started reading, what caught my attention was a serious Christian who seemed to see what I could feel but couldn’t really articulate: that life is a mystery, a mystery that’s a plotline, a plotline that connects us with the story of Jesus.
These stories, he wrote, “meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that even by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives, we know who he is and who we are and who we are not.”: Frederick Buechner, Popular Christian ‘Writer’s Writer’ and ‘Minister’s Minister’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”
See also: A Shelf Called Remember: How Frederick Buechner Built Up My Faith.
When I started reading, what caught my attention was a serious Christian who seemed to see what I could feel but couldn’t really articulate: that life is a mystery, a mystery that’s a plotline, a plotline that connects us with the story of Jesus.
These stories, he wrote, “meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that even by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives, we know who he is and who we are and who we are not.”
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