Read an Excerpt
On Second Thought
Essays Out of My Life
By DONALD W. SHRIVER JR. Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2010 Donald W. Shriver, Jr.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-212-5
CHAPTER 1
Companions of the Mind: Books
* * *
We read to know that we are not alone.
—CS. Lewis
There are today, in the living world, only two systems capable of unlimited heredity, that is, of transmitting an indefinitely large number of different messages: these are the genetic system and human language.
—Maynard Smith
Data on human debts to things long past abound in the news. Astronomers tell us that every chemical in our bodies originated in that star-forming explosion, the Big Bang, or soon thereafter. Biologists say that our personal DNA links us with our most ancient ancestors from Africa, who lived perhaps fifty-million years ago. We would not be here if—ages ago—algae, green plants, and our lungs had not developed their symbiotic exchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide. "The human person is composed of stardust, fossil Stardust."
No human will ever total all the mysteries of our emergence from these deep pasts. But these scientific discoveries have showered us with reasons to be grateful, in every moment of our lives, for our cosmic debts. From the beginning, did "it" have us in mind? I am no warrior in the current battle over "intelligent design," but as a believer in the Creator I have to welcome the language of astrophysicist Marek Demianski: "Somebody had to tune it very precisely." Similarly, Freeman J. Dyson adds: "... it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming."
As for a daily, more immediate reminder of our human debts to the past, however, nothing quite compares to the ink-tracks on this printed page. By inventing language and then writing, as Loren Eiseley said, our forbears communicate with us through the doors of their tombs. Like us, they believed that they were entrusted with messages which had to be passed on to another generation. There is something wonderful and awesome about these words that our ancestors spoke and passed on to us. Though dead, they yet speak. They speak in words that we daily use. They invented these meaningful sounds. They gave it all to us to use as our minds and tongues find fitting.
It is natural for anyone who has luxuriated in a career in education to ponder these verbal debts. The two apartments in which all my New York years have been spent are each a hundred years old. I often say a silent "thank you" to the hands of the carpenters, the stone masons, the painters, and the architects who built these rooms. They are all dead, but their hands are here in the walls. I do not have to wait until Labor Day to be thankful for them. Furniture makers still live in the chairs in which I daily sit. They have furnished much comfort for my sitting and sleeping. In a like manner, on the walls sit the furniture of my mind: several thousand books intimately related to my intellectual and spiritual biography. When I stare up at those shelves and ponder the time scale of their origins, I implicitly acknowledge about 5,000 years of human effort to speak to unknowable descendants like myself. By loving books, I also acknowledge the gifts of ancient manuscript copiers and printing presses. If money is congealed work, books are congealed mind. They testify to what my neighbors of the past have thought, done, and yearned for.
There is a somber side to the sheer existence of some of those shelved books. Some would not be there without the determination of the authors to resist forces bent on making sure that I would never get to read them. I think of a man named Baruch, who was secretary to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. When the king of Judah found Jeremiah's writing a threat to kingly power and prestige, he had the papyri burned, leaf by leaf. At that, the prophet and Baruch wrote it all down again, plus "many similar words" (Jeremiah 36:32). How this repeat-version survived the subsequent imprisonment of Jeremiah and his exile to Egypt, we do not know. But anonymous others did preserve the second edition; otherwise, we would not have the Book of Jeremiah. We owe the survival of the book to determined political resisters.
Political powers who burn books set a precedent for burning people. Across the street from the former University of Berlin, there now rests in the pavement a transparent square of glass covering a below ground arrangement of white, empty book shelves. This is the spot where, on May 10, 1933, Hitler's police supervised the burning of hundreds of books from that university's libraries deemed unfit for the eyes of good Germans. Students and faculty joined in the bonfire. Around the perimeter of that little square is now engraved a line from the nineteenth century German poet, Heinrich Heine: "Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." So it would be in Nazi Germany.
Science and common wisdom teach us that, without the companionship of other living beings, none of us would live physically for long. For the mind and spirit, many of us would not live for long without books. Consider Robert Sobukwe, leader of the Pan-African Congress in the 1950s, and eloquent opponent of South Africa's apartheid regime. He was so eloquent, in fact, that the white parliament voted annually to continue confining him to a little cottage on Robben Island and to deny him material for reading and all conversation with other humans. Sobukwe finally went mad. We know from American prison records that, continued for years, solitary confinement leads to insanity. Some would call it "nonviolent" punishment. In fact, it is torture. To be sure, in these days of electric media, not every literate person has my high regard for books. A young computer-savvy friend once walked into our apartment and, looking up at that wall covered with books, exclaimed, "Soon we will have no need of books." To say that to a scholar of my age is like saying: "Electronics will eliminate the food you have been eating all these years. We have other means of nourishment. Learn to use them."
Of course, electronics can also transform the books on my shelves into digital books. These electronic books have many advantages. Travelers can take with them dozens of books in that little pocket-sized box. The hard-of-seeing can magnify the print. Moreover, as long as one copy of any book still exists on earth, it can be recovered for millions of new readers as is seldom possible for books dubbed "out of print." Not yet possessing an electronic book, I shall probably buy one. I think I will first test it by seeing if it will permit me to buy a copy of my 1965 book, The Unsilent South.
My guess is that Marshall McLuhan was close to the historic dynamics of a human thirst for communication when he noted that technologies pileup on each other. They complement more than destroy. Telephone lines morph into the internet, film cameras into digitals, slow mail into email, newspapers into websites. But none of these inventions dispense with the more ancient arts of spoken and written language. Nor do any of our new gadgets have our permission to ignore the biological gifts and limitations of human eyes, ears, and hands. An electronic device for reading a book online while we ride the bus must still fit our hands and suit our eyes. Conceivably, by installing computerized systems in our brains, we might someday have behind our eyes, so to speak, all the information stored in our brains that before we secured from books. We might come to resemble the Borg in Star Trek. But mere information is not history, narrative, and wisdom. Furthermore, pursuing one's own interests across an infinite number of websites is not the same as a long adventure of thought that lies in our hands when we first open some author's book. We may discover that it is intellectual trash or that it is treasure. Read, digested, and cherished, the latter are our nominations for great books. As objects on our shelves, they can become icons. Like the lares and penates of old Roman households, they may take up only a little corner space. But they remind the household of its ultimate concerns. They sit in that space surrounded by a glow from the minds of their readers. To pick up one such book is often to pause as it rests in one's hand, a pause of respect, gratitude, and love.
Linear thought is not the only service that books render to one's mind, but they are solid protections against the illusion, fostered by news bits and sound bites, that the condensed version of any communication will suffice "for all practical purposes." A certain professor assigned Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to her English class, and one student shrugged, "Don't need to read it. I already know the story." This response deserves a reply that distinguishes truth from information. Shakespeare-on-the-page and Shakespeare-on-the-stage mean to become Shakespeare-in-the-mind of an audience. Via poetry and drama, the playwright invites new generations to join the agony and ecstasy of human loves and hates. Like any good play, a great book draws the reader into a performance. At age eighteen and a recent draftee, in a summer off-duty evening in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I visited the post library and picked off the shelf The Dialogues of Plato. Turning to "The Apology of Socrates," I looked in vain to discover what Socrates had to "apologize" for. Instead, I learned a new use of the word and joined one of those critical dialogues of human history: is there any cause, any truth, worth dying for? On that evening in a military library, with sun streaming through the windows, a man about to be wrongly executed by his city state touched my spirit as he had already touched millions of others worldwide. It was my first real introduction to the intellectual and spiritual world of the Greeks.
I can now celebrate dozens of such encounters with my human predecessors in the books that they left behind. My feelings about them linger. Psychologists know that feelings can persist long after one forgets their particulars. (Why do I remember the beams of sun streaming through the windows of that library? It has something to do with the warmth of inner illumination.)
The iconic quality of some books deserves attention. There are a number of well-thumbed books on my shelf that can easily be replaced with newer durable editions. But I will never throw those frayed pages into the fire. Someone else will have to do it. Those books ignited spiritual-mental flames in me. On occasion I reach up and touch worn volumes of Dickens, Tolstoy, Eiseley, Polanyi, Bernanos, Buber, Wiesel—not to speak of several yards of my favorite theologians. I cherish these volumes with whiffs of recollection of the summer months when I first read some of them. I have forgotten some characters in Dickens' Bleak House and Tolstoy's War and Peace, but I re-experience some of the feelings they left in me every time I pause to note those books on my shelves.
As for the theologians: I have a special set of feelings for one ragged paperback, now fifty years old. It was printed on paper familiar to anyone who remembers the poor quality of paper used during World War II and immediately thereafter. In fact the paper on which these pages were originally written was poorer quality yet: newsprint and toilet paper, some of it. The book is Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Like many readers of his works worldwide, it was my doorway to the mind and spirit of one of the great Christians of the twentieth century. The book consists mostly of letters which he wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge, then in the German army in Italy. Both participated in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. For that, Bonhoeffer paid with his life; Bethge almost did so.
Obviously we cherish the physical form of some books because we have learned to cherish their contents. Of no book is that more likely than the ones which some community of readers has named "sacred scripture." Nobody among faithful Jews, Christians, and Muslims likes to see their sacred texts thrown into the trash can. Most have rules for careful burning of the old frayed things. For believers and their life-world, these books are no ordinary things.
A yard of Bible translations occupy my shelves, along with many yards of books written about that Bible. Without an acquaintance with the Bible, Bonhoeffer would not have written his letters as he did, nor ordered his life in some deep conformity with the book's message. I will not pause here to justify the belief that in this book a careful reader can hear the Word of God in words that "will not pass away." I have always admired the answer of the evangelist D.L. Moody to the question, "Why do you know that the Bible is inspired?" His simple reply: "Because it inspires me." Were I to converse with such a questioner at length, I would want to amplify that testimony. Skeptics might be surprised at a primary theme of my amplifying: "Because it is the most human and humanizing book I have ever read."
Another story from political prisoners in the 1940s sticks in my memory. A cellmate asked his companion why he read the Bible so much when there were other books at hand. The answer: "Because it doesn't tell lies about human beings." In a very straightforward sense, the Bible narrates true stories of humans-good and humans-bad in a mixture that makes it easy for any reader to sense kinship with these characters of old. Whether flavored with myth or credible historical fact, the stories are populated with real, believable people. On the myth side, the first three chapters of Genesis were surely conceived as dramatic portrayals of our human experience of each other and ourselves. Genesis 1–3 echoes something vital and beautiful, tragic and painful, in gifts once ours and now lost in our histories with each other. The Genesis story is "timeless" in the sense that it goes on all the time. We overreach our limitations, yet we resent them while knowing that we must observe them. We yield to the overreach and become partners in crime—Adam and Eve's. Then we blame each other in the chatter that infects human conversation when we are afraid of truth. Why all our concern for the naked human body? Somehow we have been persuaded not to uncover too much of ourselves.... So go the "somehow" myths of Genesis, telling truth about ourselves in poetic drama.
In the later, more historical Hebrew and Christian biblical narratives, the actors are also a mixed lot. All of them, much like us: conversing from time to time in stammering ways with the Creator, stumbling into what it means to experience the presence of the Almighty, stumbling into repetitions of the folly of an Adam and Eve. Abraham tells a lie to protect himself against a wily Egyptian ruler; Isaac plays favorites with his sons; one of Isaac's sons tells lies galore to his future father-in-law; and in a blatant mixture of jealousy and prestige-hunger, that family—the twelve sons of Jacob—lays groundwork for their descendants' descent into civil war. In this story, every home on earth gets alerted to the danger of idolizing "family values."
Echoes of this realism suffuse the Hebrew Bible, and nowhere louder than in the domestic-political relations of the greatest of their kings—David. He lusts after a beautiful woman, makes her pregnant, then has her husband murdered. So it goes: the Bible busily keeps its readers safe from idealizing humans, even the best of us, keeping true to the faith that the Creator of this planet and all the stars is active in it all to bring something good to pass. Do not despair of this mixture of good and evil; there is promise in this thing. There is treasure in this cracked human vessel. You, your ancestors, and your descendants are objects of a love more powerful than you can imagine.
Of course the Bible does imagine it. We read the book and catch glimpses of what it imagines, a glimpse encased in such human pain as Hosea's in relation to his adulterous wife, a Roman government's greatest-ever mistake in executing Jesus of Nazareth, and the guilty misery of disciples who stood by letting it happen without saying a word. It does take considerable faith to consider this book, full of such people, as the Word of God. If there is light here, it comes to us by penetrating our own shadows.
People of faith who read the Bible in faith are companions of D. L. Moody. More profoundly—so goes the orthodox view of biblical inspiration—they are companions of the Spirit of the One who cares for us up close. This Bible, says the doctrine, becomes the Word of God only insofar as the Spirit "guides you into all the truth" (John 16:13). This is the real promise in Bible-reading. It makes this book very special indeed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Second Thought by DONALD W. SHRIVER JR.. Copyright © 2010 Donald W. Shriver, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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