An Excursion to Colombia

I've been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude since yesterday. I kept hoping for some turn for the better, but the slow erosion of greatness by the world just grinds on. Finally I realized what was happening. This is The Sound and the Fury transferred to Colombia, with a touch of The Snopes Trilogy and a smidgeon of Absalom, Absalom!

But this book doesn't seem to be as great as Faulkner. The characters are born the way they die, each generation massively static and the only change coming from a falling off between generations. It is profoundly fatalistic, depressingly so, but not very true to human experience.

Gabriel García Márquez is also not very funny. Perhaps he is in his native language—much of Faulkner's humor is untranslatable—but he seems too sincerely absorbed in beating his dead mule to stop and tell a funny story about little boys shooting at each other or a cuckolded husband accidentally carrying the intruder across country on his back when what he meant was to get at the man's innards with a butcher knife.

This lack of humor may not seem very important, but mankind is terribly ridiculous, so much so that a humorous author with no pretensions at realism (such as P.G. Wodehouse) hits bullseyes while an author ready to deny in the name of realism that man is capable of laughter (such as Thomas Hardy) is only readable when he lands far from where he aimed. In fact, Faulkner's increase in greatness is matched by the increasingly comic (in both senses) nature of his work.

I'm about 3/4s of the way through, and if I stop reading I have to work on a budget. And I don't really want yet another unfinished book on my hands. Yet I've got my computer on my lap and Microsoft Excel is open, so it looks like my fate is decided.

On the root of all evil

Some friends have been talking about how useful Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey is. I like makeovers and I like money, so I figured I might like it. My only debts are school debts (which I prefer to think of as a non-traditional dowry, equivalent to the groom losing twelve camels to a strange pestilence on his wedding day) and a six dollar library fine, but I have been wanting help on making a good budget so I went to Barnes and Noble to look into it. And, lo and behold, the only extant copy is a hardback retailing for 24.99ish. The slap in the face is that all the sequels are in paperback for at least ten dollars less. After gathering the pieces of myself up from around the store (where they'd been strewn by an explosion of indignation to the tune of "How is THIS going to save me money??!!?"), I ended up with a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a latté, and a People magazine. A quick, furtive slink got me out of the store before the realization that I'd spent the same amount of money on something useless could catch up with me.

Charity Bootcamp

With regard to yourself, reality matters, perceptions don't.
With regard to others, their perceptions matter, reality doesn't.

Or said another way,
When attempting to communicate, it is what is received that matters, not what is transmitted.

Memory

[Inspired by "The Judgment of Memory" by Joseph Bottum in March's First Things.]

I'm no longer homesick for home, but in some way that is a loss. It used to be a very deep and real part of me, such that I would feel like I was really one with the land, mountains, and trees. I would wake, aching with longing for those fields edged with snowy pines, only to be greeted by the eternal southern summer which had been thrust upon me by my own choice.

Perhaps my continual revisiting of home in stories is a longing for a place and knowing that I do not have it. The home of my childhood was very different from the home of my early adulthood, the one light, the other dark. But in both I felt a deep resonance between myself and my physical surroundings. Each turn brought me to a granite cliff remembered from early childhood, to the hill where the car ran out of gas on the way to the hospital for my mother to give birth to my older brother, or the apartment where a truck's windshield was shot out the week before we moved in. I loved them because I knew them, and whether or not the situation was primarily good or bad fell by the wayside.

And yet, since leaving I've found that I really love places that used to be the essence of foreign. My feeling for New York City was once best expressed by O'Connor's Judgment Day (oh, for home's early morning slant of light!) But now that I've visited it, I find that I really love it—though I can't quite believe that it likes me. Like Jed Tewksbury in A Place to Come to, I want to be very clear about the situation: I am a redneck gawking at the big city, even if that's not really the case. And so I find myself choosing stories which prove that point, like the neighbor who wore a new pair of jeans for his daughter's wedding rather than going down to Riverfront Park for Handel's Fireworks Concert each summer with my dad.

What I am looking for in the past is my identity in the present: where did I come from and where am I now? And this because I hope that the future holds a place to come to.

Real and False Unity

A few years ago I tried a gluten-free diet, but under the unpleasantness of the diet allowed myself to be convinced that the separation from others was too onerous a burden, both for myself and the others from whom I was separated.

I now realize that this is only so much bunkum. The fact of the matter is that the symbolism of eating together really has nothing to do with what is eaten. Each proverb about breaking bread is matched by one of sitting down at table together. What is important is that all are sitting together and eating—it is no more necessary that each person eat the same kinds of food than it is that each person eat the same amount of food. Strangeness and rejection only enter into the matter when one or the other group refuses either to sit at table or to eat at all when doing so.

Community, family, and togetherness are often taken to mean "sameness." The fact is that the mystery of unity, as achieved on the natural level through eating together or on the supernatural level by eating the Bread of Life together, addresses plurality as found in diversity. This is not a nod to multiculturalism. The Trinity is one and many, diverse but not distinct. There is no discord or loss in the Trinity, even though the three Persons are not exactly the same (just consider the diversity of Processions). Therefore, this desire to impose unity through sameness is not even excused as an understandable response to the discord caused by the fall. A certain amount of diversity of interests, talents, and so on, existed even before the fall ("man and woman He created them") and is a source of great joy. It is the otherness which calls one out of oneself to delight in another. Diversity of gifts causes interdependency, which then allows love to flourish in ways which cannot be discovered without the occasions which dependency brings about. And considered from the perspective of the fall, being imperfect and mortal, and thus dependent on others is in fact the thing which saves creatures from rejecting love through pride. Each time humans favor pride, they fall flat on their faces very quickly, are forced to turn to others, and then Love has another chance.