Friday Pensées

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Pensées are a collection of thoughts as I look back on the previous week of posts and think forward to new topics I would like to cover. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French Christian mathematician, recorded fragments of ideas he intended to incorporate into a book on apologetics. Pascal died before incorporating these fragments into a book, but his method inspired me. Occasionally, I wish to share my random thoughts in a post, hoping to expand each idea into an essay. I want to do this every Friday as a regular feature. Still, I have learned it isn't good to make promises until I have developed the discipline of a steady rhythm.

The following are this week's thoughts in no particular order.

I am reading Steven J. Keillor's Providence Forms a Nation in the Womb of Time. The book is Keillor's first volume in the three-part, A Providential History of the United States. I intend to produce a review of these books when I have finished reading them. So far, two quotes have stayed with me.

The first quote is from John Winthrop (1587-1649), the Puritan attorney and critical figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He said, "A family is a little commonwealth, and a commonwealth is a great family." 

The second is from John Cotton (1585-1652), the Cambridge-trained Puritan theologian. He encouraged parents to bring their children into the "adult" church services: "Bring them to church and help them to remember something, and tell them the meaning of it...and encourage them, and that will make them delight in it." Church services are to be delightful. 

I envision a book of contemplative essays. I have in mind here a particular genre. I can describe contemplative literature but must compose a definition and taxis. Swiss physician and philosopher Max Picard (1888-1965) wrote two books that have been influential in my thinking: The Flight From God and The World of Silence.

The first essay could be "Why I don't give advice." So far, my reasons for not giving advice are a) you won't take my advice, or b) you will take my advice. Both possibilities are frightening.

We need to ask ourselves why we want the approval of certain people who make a living on iconoclasm. Being a sucker for the "knowing look" can blind us to our faith, family, and values. There is much to unpack here, and it will prove worthwhile.

Having a guide to identifying and appreciating contemplative literature would be valuable. I wish I had one.

Have politicians made you feel stupid yet? But don't worry, it isn't you. The elites have many weapons, and one of them is exaggeration, and I know I am prone to exaggerate myself. Thus, I would like to write an essay on the sin of exaggeration. Why am I so prone to it? 

Looking back on the fun I had writing about G. K. Chesterton last week, I would like to explore something he put in the mouth of Father Brown and ask a question. What did Chesterton mean when he wrote it is bad theology to attack reason?

Considering the improbability of human life, what if billions of people are actually "few." Why are Malthusians so unimaginative that they cannot see that there is enough for everyone everywhere all the time? Life is precious, and it is a miracle.

The movie Men in Black inspired me to think outside the box. Influencers have indoctrinated us to believe that the expanding universe is so enormous that it makes us insignificant. Some are so awed by the size of the cosmos that they have begun to replace trusting God with "trusting the universe” and other such nonsense. The universe does nothing for me. It certainly cannot direct me in any path but that which is dangerous (think rogue asteroids, comets run amok, and supernovas). But what if we are small relative to the universe, but what we call the universe is small itself? What if it is "portable" as a dimension? Sound insane? Stay tuned.

The haunted milk house (3).

One cool, wet summer day, a large cardboard box arrived on the front porch of my family’s two-story farmhouse. It was a repurposed refrigerator carton addressed to my father. It was neither wrapped nor taped, and the top of the box was unsealed and closed with the flaps alternating in the typical way one must close a box without tape. I say it was addressed to my father because the following legend appeared on one side: “To Dr. R. Atchison.” There was no form, but it was evident that the postal service had not made the delivery. Someone brought it directly to the porch and left it there.

I remember the box, but I had no curiosity about its contents. My father always received packages of all sizes, many of them from dental laboratories. The enormous box size was not exciting enough to stir me, and I barely noticed when it was no longer on the porch later that day.

Later that same afternoon, the storm clouds cleared, but the coolness remained. Early evening was festooned with a glorious golden light. After supper, I went out behind the milk house to sit in my brother’s inoperable 1956 Dodge sedan. I wanted to listen to the ball game on my transistor radio because the car battery was dead. I was an A’s fan, and they were playing the hated Yankees, so I was intent on the game but had a devil of a time tuning in the station. The storm was not far away, and the sound from the little box crackled. The station frequency moved along the dial, so I had to adjust the tuning dial constantly.

I remember pushing the dial too far in one direction, and I neither heard the voice of announcer Monte Moore nor the static of the interfering storm. During the crucial interval of silence, I heard what sounded like a bagpipe coming from behind the Dodge and inside the milk house. The roots of my closely cropped hair tingled. “What was that?” I breathed aloud. I snapped off the radio and sat in silence. The night was quiet except for the chirping of a few cicadas and the buzzing of an annoying June bug tumbling over the car’s hood. I listened, but no further sound was forthcoming. After a while, I turned on the radio again, but there was no sound. I turned up the volume but still no sound. My last battery was dead, so that was the end of the ball game. And that was the moment the bagpipe sounded again. “Who is doing that? I asked no one in particular. My family had a habit of needing to assign responsibility for all unpleasant phenomena. It made us feel better, but it had no practical application. “I bet Sean is trying to prank me.”

Until the fall he went to college, my number three brother was always playing practical jokes at my expense. He was nearly six years older than me and had ruined the glory of the first time my parents allowed me to stay at home alone. My parents had gone to the Leavenworth Officers’ Club for dinner and left me, sans older brothers, in charge of the house. Sean was spending the evening at the bowling alley with a couple of his friends and talked them into helping him scare the living daylights out of me. One of his buddies was an overgrown kid with a deep voice. Just after it became dark, the three friends parked their car next door, and two of them crept up to the door while the other took a side window. At a prearranged signal, they began beating on the window and sides of the house while the heavy boy bellowed, “Open up, or we’ll kill you!” I screamed and wet my clothes, so frightened that fluids escaped every orifice. I slid under my parents’ bed, and the miscreants entered the house with my brother’s key. They laughed and bantered about my stupidity so hard, and for so long, I became nauseated and felt constricted like someone with claustrophobia. I escaped to my room and shut the door, but their jolly voices seemed to shake the house until I fell asleep, completely exhausted.

Incidents like my first night alone made me vigilant about my brother’s malevolence. The eerie bagpipe sounds seemed linked to another of Sean’s nefarious plots. I slipped quietly out of the car, closing the door carefully without letting it latch. The entrance to the milkhouse was on the opposite side of the building. I determined to go inside before the twilight turned to complete darkness. I also planned an escape route through the back door of my home, through the kitchen and hallway, and up the stairs to my room. I crept to the milk house door just as the streetlight illuminated the road. It was silent, with no traffic on the street, and it seemed even the nocturnal fauna fell silent. I slowly placed my hand on the door and jumped back. There was no noise; only a grasshopper or katydid had been sitting on the knob. Nevertheless, I had to pause to catch my breath. I started again. Slowly, I turned the handle. The interior of the milk house was dark already. Only the faint light behind me made it possible to see the assorted junk and boxes as ghostly shadows. I thought I would have to go to the house to get a flashlight, and just as I turned my back, I heard the awful wheezing, its volume magnified and coming from a large box just inside the door. I imagined it was something coming after me. I screamed and slammed the door behind me, but just as I did, there was enough light to see the writing on the box: “To Dr. R. Atchison.” It was the box that had been on the front porch earlier! How did it get into the milk house? It was large enough to hold a body or a skeleton. Had a ghost been brought into our outbuilding, or had some already present evil spirit possessed the skeleton? I cannot recall all the irrational threads running through my mind. Still, the ghost possibility seemed credible based on the unearthly groaning that suggested a creature in torment!

I ran in the house’s back door, intending to rush quickly to my bed and bury myself under the covers, when I heard a voice from the living room.

“Say, young man!”

It was my father. He was sitting on the sofa with a cardboard box full of files from the office. He often caught up on his paperwork at night.

“Hear, hear! What a business! Cut that out! You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“I did,” I said, and my voice trailed off as I instantly regretted this confession.

“Don’t you know there’s no such thing as ghosts? At least, that’s what they say.” His reading glasses had slid down his nose, and he had a pencil in his mouth. He was speaking to me while jotting notations on a chart.

“I just imagined something, Dad. But I was scared there for a minute.” I only now noticed I was shaking.

Now he put down the pencil and his glasses and looked at me. I looked back in silence and then got chatty.

“Hey, Dad, did you see that box on the front porch earlier? It was addressed to you.”

He smiled. “I did see it.”

“Did you do anything with it?”

“Let’s see. No. I asked your brother to put it away. It should be in the milk house.”

“Hey, Dad, can you tell me what’s in it?” I thought I was interrogating my father, but he was questioning me. He smirked the family smirk that often preceded a laugh at foolishness.

“Now, Liam, I want you to stay away from that box. I cannot tell you what is in it because it will only frighten you. I must confess it frightens me a little. So, well, unearthly.”

I felt my hair stand on end again. My dad was a dentist but also a man of science. I wanted to avoid imagining what he might keep around the place for study and experimentation. He already kept a skull in his office lab, right next to my favorite drawer with the bottles of mercury.

“I’ll stay away.”

“That’s my boy! Go in, say good night to your mother, and get ready for bed. And say! No coming downstairs tonight, and no sneaking outside through the window! All you need is to break your back falling off the roof!” Ugh! I hated how he could anticipate my boneheadedness.

So I went to bed. Before I dropped off to sleep, I looked out the window at the milk house and shuddered. I pulled the covers over my head.

Morning came. My first conscious thought was whether last night was a dream. Sean dispelled that thought when he stomped into my room.

“The rotten A’s lost again. They are worthless. And Dad wants to see you downstairs before he goes to work. My guess is you are in trouble. Were you fooling around in the milk house last night? Escaped convicts sometimes sleep in there, you know.”

I didn’t hear a thing he said after the word “trouble.” But my conscience was clear. I couldn’t think of anything I had done, but as the youngest, I was often blamed for things I didn’t do. I complained about this, but I never became bitter. I also did many things for which I never got caught. This is the deal in families of four boys. I went downstairs quickly. When Dad was paying attention to me, I didn’t ignore his requests for my presence. I would dawdle the first time my mother called me. I wanted to gauge her seriousness by letting her call several times before I did what she wanted. But Dad was a different matter. I hopped down the stairs and found him sitting at the kitchen table singing, “Buckle Down, Winsocki.” He only sang two songs ever. The other was “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.” I always wondered why he selected one or the other. He seemed limited in his moods and his choice of foods. This morning, he was dishing hot oatmeal into a bowl. Oatmeal was all he knew how to make. His singular presence in the kitchen usually meant my mother wasn’t feeling well.

He looked up and said, “Liam, my boy! Sit down and eat this. There’s some milk and molasses.” I didn’t like either of those things in my porridge, but I enjoyed how this interaction was starting. He was in a good mood.

“What?” He said, “No molasses? It’s one of the finer things in life.” Dad also said chicken backs and the fat cut from steaks were two finer things. He usually reserved this high praise for foods he knew his kids found disgusting.

“When you finish that, I want you to come outside with me for a few minutes” Uh-oh, this is what he usually said when he wanted me to come with him to the office for a fluoride treatment.

Despite the depressing thought of bitter fluids under my tongue, I quickly finished because he was watching me. He took my empty bowl and rinsed it out, wiped his hands on a dishcloth, and beckoned me to follow him outdoors. To my horror, he was leading me to the haunted milk house. He turned and smiled as he came to the door.

“Remember what I told you last night? Well, I changed my mind. I am going to show you what is in that box.”

He turned the knob, reached into the unlit room with his right hand, and slid the box out into the sunlight without entering the outbuilding. As he dragged the container into the open, the groaning sound of a sick bagpipe filled the air. His action surprised me, but I was no longer afraid of the box from that moment. I noticed it didn’t inspire the same fear in the clear morning sunlight.

“I bought this for Griff’s. I thought it would be interesting.” My dad was the co-owner of a fast-food hamburger joint that had been big in the 1960s. He and another man held the local franchise of Griff’s Burger Bar. In our part of the world, it competed with MacDonald’s and Smaks. Griff’s featured fifteen-cent hamburgers and an abstract-jigsaw-puzzle clown named Griffy, who was ubiquitous in their branding strategy.

Dad opened the top of the box and reached inside. The groaning resumed with greater intensity. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he pulled up a head by the hair! I almost fainted from fear. I thought I was right–dad had ordered a dead body. But I recognized the face! It was Santa Claus!

Photo by Luku Muffin on Unsplash

As my father continued to lift the head, a body followed. It was clad in a baggy Santa suit with a coat, trousers, and boots all sewn together. The groaning sound persisted all through this process. When the Santa object was extracted from the box, Dad hugged it to his chest, squeezing all the air out of the jolly old elf. The embrace resulted in a sound that was more scream than groan.

“That sound is irritating,” my father said. “But under the suit is a life-size air bladder with its valve open. Still in the box is an electric air pump that attaches to the bladder. The pump goes off and on. When it’s on, Santa grows to his full height and puts his arms out wide, like this, see?”

My dad scrunched his head down and grabbed his knees. Slowly, he raised his torso and extended his arms until his body was shaped like a cross.

“I’ll bet you were scared by the sound of trapped air escaping occasionally. It sounds a little like bagpipes.” He smiled in an amused way.

I remember that I was relieved, but I had questions. “It’s just a big doll! But why Santa? Will you just put it up at Christmas?” I asked.

“Not exactly. See, Mrs. Gershowicz will sew a red-and-white-striped clown suit like Griffy wears. The beard comes off, and we’ll turn the face into Griffy’s with starry eyes, Rudolph’s nose, and a big smile. On top of his head will be a chef’s hat with his name embroidered on it. So it won’t be Santa anymore; it’ll be a big inflated Griffy doll.”

“Dad, where will you put it?”

“Outside under the car canopy. It’s too noisy to be in the lobby.”

“Dad, Santa is scary. Will Griffy be scary too?”

“N-no,” he began and then stopped. “Well, at least I hope not. The purpose is not to scare people. It’s to get people to think of Griffy and about coming to get hamburgers when they are reminded of him.”

I caught the doubt in my father’s voice. Was this really his idea? I thought he might need a little encouragement. “Dad, I’m scared of clowns–except Griffy. I don’t think kids will be afraid of him.”

My father laughed his funny sneezy laugh, “That’s good to know, Liam, my boy. Just tell your friends there’s nothing to be afraid of. I want Griff’s to be fun and give people a little happiness.”

About a month later, Santa was transformed into Griffy and installed outside the lobby where people ordered food in the days before drive-through windows. About a week or so after that, I again heard the wheezy sound of Griffy coming from the milk house.

He had scared me as Santa in the milk house. He apparently scared children–and adults–in his short tenure as a hamburger icon.

The haunted milk house (2).

The old Milk House had only a tar paper roof, so leaks were a constant problem. My father bought many cans of tar and some kind of silver sealant to fix the roof. The building was never considered valuable enough to shingle or replace the roof. I do not think Dad ever considered that human feet rather than water were responsible for the chronic infiltration that ruined the ceilings and walls.

My brothers and I walked on the roof with frightening regularity. We did not even need a ladder. It was easy to vault onto the roof of the tool shed and then hoist oneself onto the top of the Milk House. The roof was a great place to make myself scarce if my mother required something of me. When I heard her voice, I would lie flat and still on the side, away from the house, until she stopped calling. Because the house was her sole domain, I cannot recall that she ever caught me. She assumed I was somewhere out on the farm or at a neighbor’s house. I had considerable freedom in my youth, although I did not think so then.

I was never injured from a fall off the roof. The scary interior of the structure presented the most danger. 

Water and smoke had tanned the once-white walls, cracked from the entire structure slipping into the deep clay soil. A network of deep crevices covered the whole floor and exposed dirt the builders had poured upon decades before. Meanwhile, refuse of years clogged the floor drains. I imagined others were as terrified as I would be to clear those broad drains for fear of what they might find. Useless and corroded electrical wires hung from disconnected fixtures. No one could remember a time when the lights worked. Two double and two single windows, all cracked and missing panes and glazing provided daylight as long as the yellowed paper shades were up. But the latter did not work, so someone had torn a few rollers from their hardware. The ceiling panels of paperboard were suspended intact upon a suspended wooden gridwork. The panels made a complete set that hid the forgotten attic, but water damage had bowed each of them so that they looked like the underbellies of pregnant sows. Adults warned me never to succumb to the temptation to poke the bellies for fear an ancient witches-brew of stagnant water and bat guano would gush upon my head.

While this house had not stored milk for ages, it was the repository of family cast-offs. My inventory of the remembered contents includes a clothes press, a chicken plucker, paint cans, snow tires, bicycle skeletons, salvaged exterior lumber, and turn-of-the-century armchairs. Nobody cared about the things that we stored here except that they did not care enough to junk them. My dad almost had exclusive rights to the salvage man who hauled away the burn barrels, old cars, farm machinery, and rusted implements that were the never-ending projects of the hobby farmer. Yet the contents of the Milk House were never touched.

Abiding clutter took on a mystical quality that fueled my fear by association because of what surprised me when I entered the building. The floor was sometimes covered with mouse or rat feces, and my job was to sweep it up. I gagged from the smell of dead birds that would get in but could not escape. I learned that mice love to die in old tires. I found their soft, mummified corpses on several occasions when my father asked me to haul out a snow tire. Worse was the dead body of a large gray cat, decomposing in an old, bald white wall. But what could have given me PTSD if I had known what it was in the 1960s was that dratted Great Western Duplex cabinet heater. To me, that stove was the Prime Malevolent Mover of the haunting.

[Next post: The haunting.]

The haunted milk house (1).

It only occurred to me that I grew up on a small farmstead when I was in my sixties. My father was a dentist and entrepreneur who acquired about forty acres near the town’s southern limit. When the city extended the limit a mile farther south, housing developments sprouted around the farm. Still, Dad kept the land intact with fields, woods, and a creek for over thirty years before rising land prices tempted him to develop some of it.

Photo by Derek Story on Unsplash

A few outbuildings dotted the land. Our pre-Great-War two-story house was near the main road, a bricked section of a historic military highway. This nineteenth-century road connected two frontier forts. A bridge spanned the creek a few meters south of a corner of Dad’s land. The bridge crossed the water five miles south of the parade ground flagpole. Thus, the name of the stream was Five Mile Creek. Flanking our home was a tool shed and a clay-construction-block structure we called the Milk House. An old green tarpaper barn stood on a knoll above the floodplain, halfway between the farmhouse and the creek. A few abandoned nineteenth-century structures also stood across the stream to the east. These forsaken buildings will be the subject of a future post. Some of my most vivid childhood memories on the farm concerned the Milk House.

I never remember my family storing milk in the Milk House. Since the farm was independent for almost a century, I assume some ancient farmer milked a small dairy herd in the barn and moved the cans to the cool clay block milk storage house. Then, he or some other previous owner repurposed the latter structure. I do not remember the presence of any dairy accouterments, such as a separator, so I cannot speculate whether it was more than a temporary holding place.

A vast wood stove that the Great Western Manufacturing Company fabricated early in the twentieth century dominated the interior of the house. I was a bit afraid of this monster that had never burned a stick of wood in my lifetime. Its retirement allowed it to host birds, bats, mice, and wasps in its belly and chimney, giving a fine reason for my desire to avoid it.

[Next post: Surprising secrets of the Milk House.]

Adages: Friends have all things in common.

Some people choose a meaningful word to meditate upon for each new year. This year, my wife’s word was “Gather.” The word inspires and motivates her to think and act in ways that bring people together. It is a laser focus for productivity and generosity. However, I have never been able to rally around a single word. I crave adages. An adage is a traditional saying expressing a shared experience or observation. One of the first adages came from my father and encouraged me to write down what I wanted to remember: The dullest pencil point is sharper than the keenest mind. I have become a curator for a limited edition collection of adages. 

Photo by Desiré Kranenburg on Unsplash

One of the outstanding achievements of Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was his magisterial work The Adages, a remarkable attempt to collect all the extant proverbs of ancient Greek and Roman culture. As a historian, I have repeatedly opened his book and marveled at his scholarship and erudition. Interestingly, he was the first to make his living by writing printed books. One proverb in particular has always stood out as the most memorable, and it is first in the collection: Friends have all things in common. This latter is a proverb of Pythagoras that Plato quotes in Phaedrus. Whatever the Greek philosophers meant by this is not as important as what Erasmus made of it concerning his cultural situation. It was what Erasmus thought it meant and how he used it that influenced my philosophy of life in a way that has brought both the joy of simplicity and the deserved ridicule from my wonderful friends.

As a Renaissance humanist, Erasmus dedicated himself to convincing sixteenth-century rulers to adopt a “philosophy of Christ” that considered warfare, the traditional medieval solution to solving problems between countries, irrational. Erasmus says that if these bellicose princes were motivated by enlightened friendship, they would want to share their wisdom with anyone who might benefit from it. Friendship, as Plato inferred, is the real basis of satisfying community. Wisdom is its bread. What a contrast to the unenlightened ruler who constantly flexes his military muscles, perhaps dreaming of empire and glory, but dies without a true friend in the world! One should freely offer life’s most precious gifts rather than withhold them out of revenge, mistrust, or greed.

I have believed for years that Erasmus was on to something. 

Still, the prevailing view of those around me (even some friends and family) is that this philosophy is naïve at best. Something like Erasmus’ ideal was termed availability by French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). The latter meant by this a readiness to offer the good things I have for others at a moment’s notice based on a just demand of their claims upon me. Like the apostles Peter and John in the New Testament, I may not have silver and gold, but what I have is available to the one who has a need. One might object, “Isn’t that a dangerous proposition? Won’t someone take advantage of you and leave you with nothing?” Of course, there is a risk to living with an open hand. Others have taken advantage of me: another scholar stole my research and conclusions and published them, and my car was vandalized in England by neighbors of the family with whom I lodged. A friend of a member of my family stole my truck. Damage was done to my reputation by someone I made a generous loan–which he never repaid. Colleagues I trusted betrayed me to save their own jobs. But most of the time, I have made friends using whatever assets I had–mainly money. I didn’t buy friends; I used wealth for the sake of friendship: a cup of coffee at a morning meeting, a clever card to delight another, a proffered feast to rival that of the praiseworthy Babette. Jesus spoke of this sort of thing when he said, “Make friends for yourselves using the mammon of unrighteousness.”

Using wealth to make friends is not as absurd as it might seem. It is both fun and a relief. I often tip servers above the prevailing rate, and I most enjoy it when I can reach hilarious levels. I lend my books, dishes, and tools without obsessing continually on the date of their return. I got rid of my watch partly so I could be less concerned about spending time with people and leisurely enjoying their company. My life on the internet has been an open book. I invite a wide swath of humanity to ask me questions, read my lack of wisdom, and copy and paste whatever they find helpful. I do this, as Erasmus suggests, for the sake of friendship. It is not because I trust my would-be friends but because I trust in divine justice and eternal advocacy. You see, I own nothing. It all belongs to God. I am not arguing against private property; I am simply offering a sketch of the conscience of a fool.

Erasmus essentially said the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans embodied in their proverbs was public domain, a wealth shared by all. We can share this because the people of the past who passed on their traditions are friendly toward us, giving us the best of what they had: wisdom to live well. What a surprise to me to discover that living well is not a matter of how much I accumulate but how lightly I hold even what little I possess.

There is another Erasmean phrase I meditate upon. I think of Erasmus when I play it in my mind because he was a bibliophile. All Books are Neighbors. It should have been in Erasmus’ collection, but has a more modern provenance. What does “All Books are Neighbors” mean anyway? It sounds like an adage, but as far as I can tell, there is nothing like it anywhere in Erasmus’ venerable collection. And while at this time, a Google search of the phrase will unearth a few results, it cannot be attributed to me. I was having coffee with a friend early one morning at the Black Dog in Kansas City when a friend uttered those four words. At first, I thought I had misheard because a barista let forth a piercing jet of steam simultaneously, so I asked him to repeat himself. He said, “All books are neighbors.” He had never heard the saying until recently when a speaker used it.

Since the speaker he heard was the first person to use it, as far as I knew, the context of the speech would help give context to what I am no doubt sure my reader recognizes as an ambiguous phrase by now. The context was that the convention of language means that one can find common ground shared by any two or more books: assumptions, understandings of the audience, and meaningfulness. Marx and Smith, King and Christie, Calvin, and Kerouac, in print, all these very different authors are neighbors, and they engage in a dialogue that only makes sense if there is commonality. The commonality is so commonplace that readers don’t give a fig about their shared assumptions and move their attention to the margins of dissonance. When I heard this, I had to think whether this was true, but I decided I didn’t give a fig either. Nor was I convinced that this was the best original context. The adage was so elegant, but the context was oddly strained. It violated Occam’s Razor and all other sharp instruments of critical analysis. So I don’t think it can mean all books are neighbors to each other.

While books may be our favorite artifacts of human existence, they do not physically breathe or have the relationship capacity. We personify books in relationship to the real beings who create them. I prefer to understand the adage to mean that we cherish the written word to know we are not alone (think C. S. Lewis) and that we have access to the artifact that, as the product of human creativity, reminds, amuses, entertains, and angers us. In short, books inspire us to be human.

I have thus admitted that I adopted (stole?) this adage and invested my meaning to it as wantonly as any petty proof texter. But let us dialogue. What do you think it means? Please comment. I promise that most future posts will contain more stories than dialectic.

Assuming we accept my meaning of the adage, I chose it for this post to suggest that books, stories, history, and reading are the focus of my work. I am using an adage to inspire my idea of wanting to be more consistent with my blog as an expression of art (kitsch?) and not as a cash cow and to share my thoughts and receive feedback from my friends who are willing to take time to read. I hope my thoughts and stories entertain and inspire any who “take up and read.” That last allusion is to St. Augustine of Hippo, so you see it is true. All books are neighbors!

Telescopes of stone.

One of my singular delights rarely indulged in, is to read a design magazine unhurriedly on a Saturday morning. I roll up the magazine in one hand, my sans-handle cup filled with coffee in the other, reclined in my frightful La-Z-Boy with the early morning light streaming in through windows and skylights. This scene is a significant part of my recipe for creative thought.

When I followed my formula one morning, I relished the pages of an October 2009 issue of Dwell magazine. I turned a page, and my attention was arrested by what I took to be a picture of the vaulted ceiling that dominates the interior of the York Minster in England. Light streaming in from triptych stained-glass windows illuminated the webbed canopy. The image that caught my attention graced the cover of a book of photographs of Romanesque and Gothic cathedral vaults, and the picture accompanied a short review. The illustration drew me into the copy, and I found the real nugget of gold in the anonymous article.

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

The author wistfully observes that these kinds of buildings hold our fascination because they can and will never be built again because we cannot afford it, and because, well…”We don’t know how.” This observation was juxtaposed with the following paragraph, which I thought was an incredibly eloquent statement that deserves deeper consideration:

“These buildings, some nearly a millennium old, are charged with the grandeur of God, as though the architects, suddenly doubting that it could be read in nature, decided to codify it in stone (Dwell, Oct. 2009, 42).”

First, the author observes that (I assume) the human designers and executors charge the buildings with the grandeur of God. The conscious exercise of the architects and builders was to create and fill a space that attempted to communicate the awesomeness of God. They succeeded because they drew the eyes of those who entered this sacred space upward. Second, the author says that the designers were impelled to intention because people missed this awe in the commonplace that nature has become. In the cathedral of nature, the earth from which they derived their sustenance drew the eyes of peasants downward. The designers had a priestly duty to mediate the grand attributes of God to a less imaginative but hopefully impressionable generation. When others missed the obvious presence of God, those who knew him intimately struggled to construct a grand telescope of stone and mortar, as it were, so that they could see him if they would only look. Ironically, the author suggests we will never see their kind again.

A few pages earlier is an interview with contemporary designer Philippe Starck, who seems obsessed with liars, thieves, and bad religion. Suppose the redactor’s selectivity is an indication. In that case, Starck blames a great deal on being brought up, at least, with religious education while acknowledging that it helped make him what he is. From his self-righteous mistrust, he has fashioned a world of whimsy that includes a dream to kill (repurpose?) materiality and that he believes justifies his existence (“…I do believe we all have to try to deserve to exist.” So some don’t deserve to exist? What do we do with them (me?)? Ibid., 40) with fifteen iPods and sleep his only apparent comforts. I found the interview confusing and contradictory and wondered what wonders Starck was mediating to a suffering humanity. He needs mediation, but the dunderheads who misrepresented the God of the universe inoculated him against the best antidote to materiality. He grew up in an epoch that forgot how to build telescopes.

Instead, I can imagine microscopes being offered to Starck by well-meaning (but equally confused) emergents who would praise his art, cluck their sympathies for his mistreatment at the hands of the religious, and join him in his anti-materiality crusade without ever holding out a vision of the greater story of the God of nature and the vault. Microscopes beneath the canopy of space are plentiful, cheap, and boring.

The anonymous book reviewer uncovered an insight that we must meditate upon vis-à-vis the mediatorial designers of cathedrals: we will never see their kind again. No more telescopes of stone, mortar, and glass. Too costly. We don’t know how. Rigidity failed. The anemic identification practices of the emergent will yield no more dialogue with wanderers than his modernist forbears experienced in the last century. So, at last, I come to the question inspired by the insightful sentence: Who (rather than what) will be charged with the grandeur of God in such a way that the eyes of others will be drawn upward?

Chesterton Sesquicentennial: Confronting minds that don’t move.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English novelist and critic trained in commercial art who discovered he could write--his finest gift. He is best known today for his Father Brown stories about a mousy priest who solved deep mysteries and was generally more than he seemed to be. But Chesterton was adept at other genres and protagonists. He remains an influential proponent of the Christian worldview eighty-seven years after his death, and his critiques of science and the arts are as fresh today as when they were formulated in the lost world of pre-World War II England.

He is one of my favorite authors from one of my favorite cycles of history. I find it takes great effort not to like him. 

I read G. K. Chesterton’s All Things Considered several years ago. While I enjoy his razor-sharp wit and (get this) his plethora of memorable aphorisms, I am always a bit shocked at how narrow his understanding of the Puritans was. I notice his prejudice not only because I have studied the Puritans for years but because I am one of them, or as Chesterton would be forced to say of me, “He is a Zulu.” Before you conclude that I am comparing apples and oranges or mad, please read the book of Chesterton that I will mention. One of his stories will make my murky allusion clear.

“I must say you were rather severe upon eminent men of science such as we.”

“Bosh,” answered Grant. “I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a new sort of religion and an uncommonly nasty one.”

Chesterton’s characterization of Puritanism was undoubtedly popular in his era, but it is unfair to my co-religionists. For example, I am not sure one can be both a Rump separatist and one who wishes to purify the English church simultaneously, though Chesterton assumes it. In several essays, he takes his straw killjoys to the woodshed for a whuppin’. But I leave discussing his views of Cromwellian times for another time. I can easily forgive him for his confounded views about seventeenth-century history because he writes darn entertaining stories with biting social critique. I approve.

An anti-Sherlock protagonist.

My collection's most prized work is The Club of Queer Trades, published years before the Great War, when Chesterton was thirty-one. Mad sleuth Basil Grant is my second favorite detective–even above Hercule Poirot. I am an avid reader of books from the Golden Age of the mystery genre. I especially crave the locked-room mysteries. In these, a murder occurs in a way that looks like the victim could only have committed suicide. Windows and doors are all locked from the inside. Readers in the pre-World War II era ate these locked room mysteries up. And I can understand why. Fans wanted to work out the solution before the sleuth revealed the answer. I dig this form of cozy murder, but sadly, I believe readers came to value mindless entertainment, except that murder in a locked room as a regular feature of mystery asked too much suspension of disbelief, even for entertainment hounds. Unfortunately, Basil Grant, Chesterton’s mad former judge detective who is an anti-Sherlock, only appears in this brief volume of six loosely connected stories with no locked rooms but plenty of improbable situations that apparently involve crimes. 

Here is my favorite descriptive extract from the book. I offer it in honor of Chesterton’s upcoming 150th birthday (May 29, 2024). I love these paragraphs because they have brought forth rivers of imagination flowing through my mind. The story’s narrator, Charles “Gully” Swinburne, AKA “Cherub,” and Basil Grant meet one day on a late Victorian London double-decker omnibus and engage in a conversation while the city rushes by:

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earth–the top of a tolerably deserted tram car. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that there was order, but that civilization only showed its morbidity and order only its monotony. No one would say in going through a criminal slum, “I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals.” But here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums. Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway engineers and philanthropists–two dingy classes of men united by their common contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were the churches of dim and erratic sects. Agapemonites or Irvingites. here, above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines and hospitals and all the real mores of civilization. But though one never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not see–anything really great, central, of the first class, (p. 28) anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable, our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie around the Thames and the City, in which, nevertheless, a real possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.” – (“The painful fall of a great reputation,” in Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. The club of queer trades. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1987, pp. 27-28)

In what sense is talking on the top of a hill a great experience? Is it the solitude or the prospect of all that surrounds the hill? And so, how does talking on the top of a bus exceed that experience and vault us into the category of a fairy tale? Literary critics have argued about the proper definition of fairy tales for at least a century. In what sense does the narrator mean this experience is a fairy tale? Is it being a part of Basil’s mad world, or is it something sublime and indeed transcendent? Do you see? This is what Chesterton does to me. Even in his madcap prose, he evokes his love for England and metaphysics. The commercial artist turned literati paints his scene and then folds his philosophy in through the protagonist. Consider a scene from the Basil Grant story, “Seclusion of the Old Lady.” Two Oxford students have an old lady locked up in a room, apparently against her will. Basil’s brother, with Basil tagging along, attempts to free her, but Basil engages the students in a discussion about evolution and then agrees to accompany them to their living quarters. At the students’ flat, one of the students says, “I must say, Mr. Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science such as we. I’ve half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor poet.”

“Bosh,” answered Grant. “I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a new sort of religion and an uncommonly nasty one…[the] Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.”

Chesterton hastens us to the denouement of a delightful story and injects his hatred for scientism at the same time. Few can do this as well.

As I said before, Basil is my second favorite solver of mysteries. My favorite sleuth is Dr. Gideon Fell from a series of Golden Age mysteries by American-English author John Dickson Carr. Carr based the character, Dr. Fell, on his favorite author. Perhaps you already guessed who that might be. Yep. G. K. Chesterton.

I suspect Chesterton enjoyed writing the Club of Queer Trades as much as his fans are delighted by reading it. As a historian, a curator of stories, I am inspired to cast a bit of G. K. fairy dust on a story of my own entitled. “Minds Don’t Move.” I have mentioned madness quite a bit in this post. I think we all enjoy the freedom of madness, and I am about to invite you to join me in a bit of lunacy of my own. As you listen to this experiment, I encourage you not to think too deeply about it. Just enjoy the listening.

“Minds Don’t Move,” inspired by G. K. Chesterton.

Drained from incessant grilling by the army of reporters during the news conference, Mr. Slight was escorted out of the building and across the street by four older men in expensive, dark suits. Feeling a light drizzle on his face, Mr. Slight glanced at the lowering gray skies and heard the quick splash of his loafers on the pavement. His companions led him to a highly polished black door atop a stoop with three well-worn concrete steps. The sole bearded man in the group opened the door for Mr. Slight and invited him to enter the building first with a wave of his hand.

Beyond the door was a square anteroom, a dark hallway with sconces and rich oak panels. Directly opposite the entrance was an enormous double door of oak. Somehow, the bearded man stepped to the front again and opened the doors with both hands, and this time, Mr. Slight followed into a room that glowed a rich red from the largest fireplace Mr. Slight had ever seen, and it contained a blazing fire of alarming proportions.

The bearded man addressed Mr. Slight: “Please, make yourself comfortable and sit wherever you like.” He and his companions left the room by a side door.

Mr. Slight thought this simple instruction was easier said than done. Every couch and chair in the room, save one, had a tweed-coated occupant engaged in conversation, cradling a brandy snifter or both. The room smelled of cigars, though it was strangely free of smoke. The one available chair was a red leather wingback near the giant blaze. Beside the chair was a side table with a carafe of red liquid and a black lacquered cigar box. On the other side of the table was an identical wingback chair with a completely bald man sitting in it. In his right hand was an unlit cigar, and he balanced a partially full snifter of brandy on the cushion between his legs. To achieve this balancing act, only his toes touched the floor and were turned so that he appeared pigeon-toed. Smiling, he waved the cigar toward the empty seat in a summoning gesture.

“Please sit down,” said the bald man. “And welcome to the Curmudgeon Club. My name is Eggith. I am a retired professor of philosophy.”

“Thank you, Professor Eggith,” replied Mr. Slight with a smile that matched his name.

“I watched your press conference. You handled yourself well.” Eggith broke into a friendly smile as he said this.

“What, did I utter no nonsequiturs?” asked Mr. Slight.

“Oh dear, I am afraid I haven’t looked for those since my undergraduate days. After all, we philosophers are human beings and must live in the real world. Most talk is chatter to me, but when I must, I will form a general impression of an oration in the form of its principle–if it has one.” Eggith laughed though the joke was lost on Mr. Slight.

“Very interesting,” said Mr. Slight. “How would you frame your general impression of the press interview?”

Eggith narrowed his eyes and looked away thoughtfully. “Well, hmm. Yes, yes. Here it is…”

Eggith paused for more than ten seconds and then dramatically turned to Mr. Slight and looked him directly in the eyes. Mr. Slight could see his jaw muscles twitching. Eggith opened his mouth.

“Minds don’t move,” Eggith said triumphantly.

Mr. Slight nodded his head slowly as if he understood this obscure comment. “Yes, yes, I think I see what you mean.” But he didn’t. This was sheer nonsense, and he wondered if Eggith was a bit cracked. He suppressed a laugh at the thought.

“But then,” said Mr. Slight. “Before we get too hasty, You need to tell me whether the sense in which you used the word ‘move’ is intransitive or reflexive.” This was more nonsense, made up for effect. It hit the mark: Eggith nodded vigorously as if he understood. “He’s cracked,” thought Slight. Thus, Slight pressed his case further. “If I say that I think minds are active, what then?”

Eggith’s features became completely screwed around on his face. Starting with his ears, his entire chameleon-like countenance reddened until his head looked like a great tomato with white eyebrows. He stood to his feet more violently than abruptly. Mr. Slight’s sight was drawn to Eggith’s hands. He noticed that they were unnaturally small, and now he clenched them tightly into little balls so that his arms looked like two enormous tweed matchsticks. He thrust his arms forward so they were suddenly extended straight before him. “So here is our angry philosopher,” thought Mr. Slight. “Insane with the continually buried pain and resentment of being unloved, if not abused.” These musings were interrupted by an outburst from Eggith that ended his flourishing of contortions.

“No! Minds are filtered receptors of the One Mind!” bellowed Eggith, and he turned on his heel and fled the room. Sixty or more astonished eyes crowned silent, gaping mouths as the heavy oak doors crashed behind him. Mr. Slight’s greedy eyes were on the cigar box as he lifted the polished lid.

“Well,” he whispered. “This dream is over.”

(Happy birthday, Gilbert Keith Chesterton.)

Availability as healthy curiosity.

This revised and updated article originally appeared in Mars Hill Review 3 Fall 1995: pages 42-49. It is the final essay in a series of three, considering curiosity as an antidote to the narcissism that increasingly plagues our nation, communities, and families.

In the last post, I defined curiosity as a subjective quality of people eager to learn. We also identified several unhealthy kinds of curiosity that give the word a bad name—for example, sticking our noses into someone’s private world in a pushy, inquisitive way. Or curiosity that is obsessed with oneself. Either the self-serving, vigilant curiosity that characterizes the narcissist in our world, or at least the person who has read too many self-help books or YouTube videos on some aspect of themselves or their problems. And these folks can easily ask us for advice, too. And while we should all be very cautious about offering advice at any time, don’t you want to say, “Hey, stop reading!” or “Stop watching videos” for at least a year!

But we also saw there is a healthy kind of curiosity. Curiosity about natural laws has characterized great scientists and inventors. Curiosity about God has captured all sorts of seekers throughout the centuries. It is this kind of curiosity that I wish to display, mainly as it is directed healthily toward others. My wife has become curious about the community habits of sparrows. She loves watching their joy as they crowd into the bird feeder. She has done a bit of research about them because she observed some traits that humans can learn from. I told a story about an interview I helped to conduct for a non-profit organization looking for a certain kind of employee and how one of our interviewees displayed a detrimental lack of curiosity about what we were looking for. But we also said his reaction was a fairly common one. Toward the end, we talked about how, in relationships, we have these moments when we can grow as people through curiosity. We had to prepare for those moments because we can easily miss them. I also promised we would hear from a Danish philosopher who would suggest that the opposite of employing curiosity in the silence of the teachable moment or the moment of creative tension is to fill the air with a word salad--improvising words to fill the terrifying silence that occurs when we realize we don’t know something, like what is happening right now or what to do next--in other words it is possible to chatter away, faking it until we make it perhaps, and thus leaving no room for presence, and the curiosity that is needed to have a healthy relationship with another person.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) said that when individuals chatter to fill the silence, they refuse to engage in the creative tension of relationships, which can bring about good change. In fact, by chattering rather than being silent in curiosity, the applicant siphoned away the essential meaning of the Christian organization to which he applied, which is to be an organization that listens to God.

Availability

Offering presence to invite curiosity is not for the faint of heart. The person who makes themself available pays dearly often..

What does it mean to chatter, according to Kierkegaard? We know what it means when someone chatters. They ramble on in a way that merely fills space and avoids staying on topic or getting to the point. He said chattering “dissolves the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain silent can speak and act essentially{1}.” There is a rare opportunity in a momentary disruption when caught off-guard, and a previously undetected opportunity to mature or become more human presents itself. Fearing silence because we cannot control what might follow, we fill the air with words. Any words will do. A new expression captures the essence of the useless filler: word salad. A word salad is a perfect metaphor for chatter. There is no point in word salads; they are bulk that fill

us up so that we have no room for the beautiful or substantial. Curiosity is our silence to release control and receive what God and those who serve his purposes offer us in the opportune moments of life.

Presence: Inviting Curiosity

Several times, I have mentioned that there is an unhealthy curiosity that is closer to voyeurism. Indeed, I wonder if curiosity without a relationship is voyeurism: I withhold myself from you but gawk at you. Conversely, I think curiosity accompanied by relationship is presence. By presence, I do not mean mere physical proximity or coexistence with someone else; I mean that my being is brought fully into the moment with another person. All my attention is at the disposal of the one with whom I share that moment. All words that refine the idea of presence seem weak. Most amateur meditators use mindfulness to speak of awareness of their body and its functions. No offense intended, but mindfulness is not enough. Availability is a more comprehensive word. It means I am ready for whatever I discover at this moment. I am committed and at the disposal of whoever shares this moment with me. Enjoying God’s incomparable presence places me at his disposal: “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” Curiosity toward others is more than a pursuit of personal satisfaction. It involves a risk that includes my willingness to serve without distraction. I will suspend my self-serving agenda and attend to you when with you. I cannot demand that others do the same for me, but I long for someone to be interested in at least a small way in how I feel and what I have done. Christian psychologist and counselor Dr. Larry Crabb called that a “taste of heaven.” It is a corollary of the Golden Rule that if curiosity is what I want, then that is what I can give, albeit in a sample form.

The unusual experience of receiving such curiosity is so infrequently experienced in this fallen world that the reaction to offered presence is instructive. Such presence is like a knock on the door of one’s soul. Suppose one answers the knock with reciprocal curiosity. In that case, there is communion, a sweet taste of the fellowship for which God created us. In the case of the job applicant, the knock was unanswered-just as it often is in the counseling office, at the dinner table, in the church auditorium. The panelist was beneficially present by reporting her experience with the applicant. The applicant may have been startled by this presence, either because it was hateful to him in its exposure of something he thought to hide or because he has lived life ignorant of presence, thinking it is just sharing physical proximity. Twentieth-century French philosopher Gabriel Marcel said that the goal of offering presence is to bring about an encounter:

Encounter can only be accomplished at the level of presence. Suppose it is to be an authentic encounter. In that case, it cannot be limited to coexistence at a particular point in a particular moment. Such coexistence is only a matter of “being there.” There is a genuine encounter only if there is being with. {2}

Mere coexistence in a relationship occurs when one is physically in a room but does not participate creatively with the other. The word participate is meaningful here because to participate with others, to be present, we must cross the artificial barriers we have erected between ourselves and others.

Participation is made concrete and meaningful through curiosity. In the case of the interview, the panelist creatively participated in presence with the applicant rather than merely choosing to coexist. Coexistence would have taken the form of essential questions, such as “What is your experience?” or “How would you do such and such?” The panelist’s presence, however, went to more meaningful places in the applicant’s existence by seeking to understand his experience at that moment. This seeking is curiosity. The panelist might easily have said, “At this moment, your interview is telling us something about you that perhaps you want to hide from us but cannot. And if you cannot hide this here and now, what must you be like toward your wife and family, who must endure your pose when you are not seeking to impress them at all?” This curiosity about how their closest relationship might experience them is presence because it fully engages with another in the moment by refusing to ignore the obvious. It is creative because it allows one to deceive oneself no longer. When the pose of competence to manage one’s life fails, one can only depend on God. Curiosity flourishes when we see presence as a gift bridging the gap loneliness creates. Still, it dies when placed on the cold hearth of self-protection.

You may be thinking about the same thing I have always struggled with about this presence, which is more like readiness or availability. Won’t people take advantage of me if I put myself at their disposal? What will become of time for me? Those are fair questions.

Curiosity and the Battle for the Soul

The offering of the gift of presence to another so that they might have an opportunity to respond with curiosity is the vocation of fearless warriors. But people mistake the gentle knocking of a relationship for an enemy’s attack rather than a friend’s wounds. Being present for another calls for courage and perseverance because one is engaged in the battle for a soul.

No one battles more for my soul by offering presence and inviting curiosity than my wife. When I told my wife the story of my delayed flight and my profound loneliness, a knowing smile passed kindly over her face. The lack of curiosity I received from my travel companions was like the lack of interest I demonstrated toward my wife when she knocked on the door of my soul. Often, she has lovingly highlighted the obvious in my life, only to be kept (as have others) at arm’s length. Rather than respond with curiosity, I have often sought to eradicate the silence of tension between us by insistent defensiveness: “I’m not like that at all...You misunderstood me...let me explain my position.” I never raise my voice; with calm logic and lengthy explanations, I bludgeon the very one who does battle for me. Safe behind the door of my soul, I often answer the knock of a relationship with an angry snarl.

No, offering presence to invite curiosity is not for the faint of heart. The person who makes themself available pays dearly often. I remember the quip of a middle-aged woman as we sat in the airport terminal, so far from home and one another: “This is hell,” she said. How I shared that sentiment!

I realized I longed for someone to answer my knock with a healthy curiosity on that plane in Manchester. I tasted my own medicine; I experienced what it felt like to live in a world where few answer the knock of freely offered relationships. How great is the love of God that he would send the Creator himself to a people without curiosity? How wonderful is the One who would dare to intrude on our defensive indifference and pay such a price to offer a relationship to us?

Jesus said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…”

{1} Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 97.

{2} Gabriel Marcel, “Reply to Gene Reeves,” The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel ( LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1984), 273-274.

What is curiosity?

This revised and updated article appeared in Mars Hill Review 3 Fall 1995: pages 42-49. It is the second in a series of essays considering curiosity as an antidote to the narcissism that increasingly plagues our nation, communities, and families.

In my last article, I told a story about being stuck in an airplane with about 350 other passengers in a foreign country for a whole day while the mechanics worked on the engine. Basically, we had plenty of time to get to know one another, or rather, I had plenty of time to interview fellow passengers and exercise my curiosity. The point was that I felt lonely, and no one seemed interested in my life, but when I got home, I realized I got a taste of my own medicine. I am rarely curious about others and devote much more energy to ensuring people know about me. This epiphany amounted to something like The Golden Rule of Curiosity: I realized that if we want people to be interested in us, we should be interested and present for them. But isn’t this a contradiction, or at least wrong advice? After all, where did curiosity get me on that airplane? Lonely.

Lack of Curiosity

I wondered why he hadn’t even thought to ask what the panelist meant when she called him stiff and machine-like. Was he not interested in how we experienced him? Since it was our job to offer honest feedback and fill the position, our observations presented a rare opportunity for him to see himself as others saw him.

But bear with me. As I thought about the airplane, I realized that while curiosity seemed absent in my fellow passengers, my curiosity was somehow all wrong. And guess what--and you probably are way ahead of me on this--there are illegitimate curiosities. I suspect that the notion of curiosity suffers from a bad reputation. In fact, I know from talking about this for over thirty years that at least some people haven’t thought of curiosity as a virtue.

Differing kinds of curiosity

“Curiosity killed the cat,” according to the old saw. Still, I suspect this timeworn phrase does not influence our lack of curiosity about others. I have chosen to use the word curious to describe an attitude that accompanies meaningful engagement in the lives of others. To understand this, we must consider definitions of curiosity.

Curiosity is a subjective quality of persons whereby they are eager to learn. As with the proverbial cat, this eagerness can have the wrong connotation of putting our noses into a matter for which we have no invitation. It is none of our business; entering it imposes ourselves violently upon others. In this case, curiosity is more akin to voyeurism. This pushy inquisitiveness is the enjoyment of something best left a secret to the one seeking information. I can illustrate improper inquisitiveness using another conversation during the flight delay: I had asked one of my fellow passengers some long-forgotten mundane question. In answering, he mentioned in passing that he had gone through a divorce. The comment was not an invitation for me to probe but rather represented information that helped him to answer my question. The events leading to his divorce are essential to deeply understanding this man’s life. Still, he did not invite me to engage with him at that level. I did not even know his name. We both understood that this was not fair game for discussion. When we talked, I felt no natural curiosity, and there was no reason to probe further at this incipient and probably final stage of our brief relationship. His straightforward answer to an innocent question served my limited curiosity.

Further, there can be a curiosity about oneself that is unhealthy. People are so curious about themselves that their obsessions make them narcissistic and overly dependent. I am sure some narcissists on that plane reveled in the attention. I encountered some people that day who were outwardly arrogant and dismissive, who acted as if they were entitled to attention and in a special category in which the rules of propriety did not apply to them. You’ll recognize a narcissist because they will not let you have your own story. They see people as inconvenient and ghostly characters in their story. 

There is a curiosity that displays good qualities. Curiosity about natural laws has characterized great scientists and inventors. Curiosity about God has captured seekers of all kinds throughout the centuries. It is this kind of curiosity that I wish to display, mainly as it is directed healthily toward others. I did not mention curiosity toward myself first because I believe we will ask the appropriate questions about ourselves when we begin with a healthy curiosity about God and others.

Curiosity in the moment of creative tension

A mission agency director once asked me to help decide on a personnel matter for a Christian organization. A man was under consideration for a people-oriented position in the mission, and it was my task to meet with him and several other people on a panel to determine if he was suitable for the job. The man applying for the opening began our meeting with a polite but lengthy speech about his qualifications. After he finished talking, one of my fellow panelists commented to the man that he seemed very “stiff and machine-like” in presenting his accomplishments and that this was not appropriate for the position he sought. She pointed out that the applicant was a good man, but based on his presentation, he did not seem to be the kind of individual who could work well with people. With a surprised look, the man said he thought the panelist was wrong and proceeded to make another speech about his qualifications. He had not calculated this kind of interruption.

I brought him back to the original question when he finished his second speech. I told him that his lack of curiosity about the other panelist’s comment may have revealed something about his qualifications for the job. I wondered why he hadn’t even thought to ask what the panelist meant when she called him stiff and machine-like. Was he not interested in how we experienced him? Since it was our job to offer honest feedback and fill the position, our observations presented a rare opportunity for him to see himself as others saw him.

The applicant now showed a late interest in his robotic performance. Whether he was genuinely interested in feedback for future reference or “playing the interview game” by giving the answer he thought we wanted to hear, I do not know. But he had the opportunity to be healthily curious about himself by being curious about the perception of others. No matter how he chose to capitalize on his uncomfortable experience, I think it was very instructive because it brought about a moment of tension--some call this a teachable moment or the moment of truth that must be reckoned with. Yogi Berra said, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The moment of tension is the fork in the road that I must take, given the opportunity, if I want my life to be better than it is. I could go the wrong way. But I can’t avoid or deny the moment.

The panelist’s observation of the applicant’s stiffness provided an opportunity for his personal growth by introducing creative tension. Moments of creative tension are often accompanied by silence. If we aren’t afraid of silence, it can serve as a backdrop against which personal issues become apparent. In this case, the applicant must have felt he had lost control of the interview when a panelist raised a disruptive observation about his stiffness. Silence followed momentarily because the applicant encountered a vacuum he felt constrained to fill. He should have replaced the void of silence with curiosity that further engaged the observer for the applicant’s benefit. For example, he could have demonstrated curiosity by asking what the panelist meant. Instead, he filled the vacuum with defensive chatter. The moment of opportunity was lost because he stuffed the crack of silence with the putty of droned self-explanation, a defensive self-justification. This defense included the cavalier undervaluing of the panelist’s feelings, which the applicant inappropriately judged “wrong.” The dismissal of the panelist’s feelings exposed a defensive attitude on the part of the applicant.

But I need to be prepared for a moment like this. It’s like you won’t see angels if you are not looking for them. I mention angels here because I happen to believe in angels. I know many people who believe in angels but don’t expect to see them. They aren’t prepared with the needed category when an encouraging and life-changing moment occurs. So, I think believers should expect to be served by angels, and in the same way, all of us should expect to have moments to employ curiosity. [SILENCE] I hope you can feel a moment of silence after that last sentence. This is a chance to be curious about this history professor who believes in angels! Don’t dismiss me as crazy, but you may ask about it.

Next time: We will conclude this brief series on curiosity by talking about its opposite: “chatter.” Yes, chatter! We’ll hear from a Danish philosopher about chatter, the bane of curiosity, and a French philosopher about presence, the lubricant of curiosity. But read on because it may not be what you think. Our Gallic friend doesn’t go for the current hipster notion of “mindfulness.” We need to use curiosity to be available to others. 

Do you want to become more of a good kind of curious? Do you want to be ready when you reach the fork in the road? I sure do. Join me next time.

Suffering from a lack of curiosity.

This revised and updated article appeared in Mars Hill Review 3 Fall 1995: pages 42-49. It is the first in a series of essays considering curiosity as an antidote to the narcissism that increasingly plagues our nation, communities, and families.

I suffer from a lack of curiosity about others and myself. I yearn for others to be curious about me. I wonder how much of the rich textures of life I miss by not being appropriately curious about others.

Photo by Toni Koraza on Unsplash

I was traveling from Britain in 1995 when a faulty cargo bay door delayed my flight to Atlanta by twenty-four hours. The flight crew should have explained the nature and length of the delay to me or the other 350 passengers. They didn’t, so we spent most of the day on a roller coaster of heightened and dashed expectations in the Manchester airport, at some moments believing our departure was imminent, but eventually ending up in a local hotel for the night.

The inconvenience of a delayed flight provides an opportunity rare in the regular world of air travel. Those who were otherwise perfect strangers became sharers in a common unpleasant experience. As the day wore on, I became acquainted with about ten fellow travelers. Indeed, our group became a clique bound by our anger, frustration, and disappointment at postponed reunions and, for some, lost income.

Anger toward an airline does not usually knit a group into lasting relationships. But I developed an interest in a number of the members of my “group.” To me, they were fascinating. One shy man was an international skydiving champion. I almost had to drag this information out of him. Others who overheard soon became as intrigued with him as I was, and he showed us the gold medal from his most recent competition. Another man was the self-confident head of a successful trucking company in a western state. As an immigrant, he thrilled me with how he came to the United States with nothing and built a fortune through hard work and determination. I met a kind and generous man who made his living writing about antebellum life in the South. As he freely offered his recently acquired Yorkshire chocolates and a pleasant smile, he seemed to embody the graciousness of a lifestyle from the vanished days about which he was an expert. A furious young woman was a southern debutante returning from her first trip to Europe on her own (a rite of passage for high society women, as she explained). She betrayed her inner fear with neither apology nor embarrassment as she gave us quite a detailed account of what her father would do to the airline as punishment for treating his “little girl” this way. A half-dozen other stories were just as intriguing as these; The mixture of personalities was as delicious as an Agatha Christie mystery. All we needed to complete the scene was an inexplicable murder, with Hercule Poirot fingering the culprit before we disembarked.

There was no murder, thank goodness, but the shared experience of a delayed flight became a time of loneliness despite my attempts to engage fellow passengers. Though I discovered many fascinating (and not a few disturbing) things about my comrades, they seemed to learn nothing about me. Many times in my life, I have refused to disclose myself to others, but this was not one of them. Far from home, I longed to share something about myself with these people. Still, no one was interested enough to ask me anything. I do not recall being bitter about this. Still, several times in my increasing loneliness, I almost began to talk about myself anyway, without invitation. However, I resisted the temptation and waited for the invitation that never came. Not only did none of my fellow passengers know my name, they didn’t know that I was a university professor or that I had an interest in writing helpful articles.

The jet finally got off the ground and landed in Georgia a whole day late. I remember leaving the plane and my companions with a strange sense of relief. It had felt like hard work to learn so much about the lives of others who shared a common stressful experience with me and yet wait in vain for them to ask me something about myself. It felt like waiting alone in a room for a knock that never came.

The joy of reuniting with my loved ones dissipated my loneliness. My family and friends seemed genuinely interested in my travels and my ordeal. But this contrast caused me to realize how greatly I suffer from a lack of curiosity about others and myself. I yearn for others to be curious about me. I wonder how much of the rich textures of life I miss by not being appropriately curious about others.

Help! I’m 66 and I can’t tie my shoes!

My feet have been a constant source of hardship to me. I walk with duck feet, and the history of my tootsies is littered with ingrown toenails, athlete’s foot, and new-shoe blisters. But one of the chief causes of shame and embarrassment is my struggle with lace-up footwear. So there it is: I don’t know how to tie my shoes to stay tied.

When my parents sent me to a country school, I was five years and ten months old. In those days, there was no kindergarten in Kansas, so I went directly into the first grade. The school building had four classrooms, a small gymnasium with no seating, and a kitchen. Eight grade levels gathered in the diminutive cinder block school, where four middle-aged women taught and administered the programs.

Mrs. Johnston was the first person I ever called teacher. I am sure most of my days in school that first year were happy, but I only seem to remember the trauma. These troubled scenes were only the first of my life archive titled “Teachers I Have Known.” We were expected to learn to tie our shoes. Why my parents did not teach me this lingers as a great mystery. Just as it must be understood that Marley was as dead as a doornail, so my listener must be certain of the fact that I went to this school with laced shoes that I could not tie myself. I also believe that most of my young colleagues were in the same circumstance. That we were an ignorant herd of fall risks is intelligence that will cause something wonderful to come of my shoe story.

I imagine that Mrs. Johnston had a checklist of objectives that each child could reach. Wisely, I think, learning to tie one’s shoes was at the top of the list. Imagine the time it would take to make sure each child kept her shoes tied. Imagine the falls, the scrapes, the bloodshed, and the tears. Nellie Johnston was a woman of imagination, albeit a limited one, as you will see.

The teacher had prepared a pile of rectangular cardboard sheets, each with a whimsical drawing of a shoe. These two-dimensional models had a hole punched where the shoe eyelets should appear and real red cotton laces woven in the traditional criss-cross shape. Each child was given one of these cardboard shoes with the idea that each could follow the teacher’s instructions as she guided their little fingers from the front of the classroom. My problem was she had provided one “shoe” too few, and I was the odd one out. I raised my hand, and she never called on me. I was still raising my hand when she began the lesson. I had never gone to school before, so I was new to hand-raising. I am sure only I remember what happened next sixty years on, but the scene remains vivid. I felt panic internally–I was five years old–and kept raising my hand. She finally saw me and turned to me with a rubicund face and hissed through her teeth, “Liam, we do not allow disruptions in this room. You will take a seat in the back of the room. Now young man!” I felt tears welling up just below the surface as I slinked to the back of the room. The incident prevented me from learning to tie my shoes with the other children. It also cost me relational capital that I never recovered for the six years I attended that school.

Someone may say, “Why didn’t you tell your parents about the incident or ask them for help tying your shoes?” That is a fair question. I have had many years to reflect on the incident to answer this post de facto question. I was the youngest of four boys in a home with high achieving parents one generation removed from immigration. I was too ashamed to tell my parents that I was disruptive and did not learn the first lesson in tying my shoes. I determined to figure out how to secure them myself in a way that made sense to one who was a neophyte in every way. I developed a method that failed every day until well into my adult life. In fact, not until I reviewed YouTube videos on the subject did I finally learn to tie my shoes. Because of muscle memory, I still feel the temptation to revert to the old comfortable yet broken way.

What a picture this is of the life of despair! My determination to go my own way rather than ask for the help I clearly needed makes me wonder about many similar issues. How much time I wasted because of a simple thing like loosely granny-knot-tied shoes! How clearly do the angry faces of other sojourners fuel our determination to never be shamed again? This is a story of victimization, but how many forgotten moments have I thoughtlessly controlled–like my teacher? What did I pass on that burned a moment of shame in the memories of others? Kyrie Eleison!

A Personal History of Coffee

About making and enjoying delicious coffee, especially for those who think they are too old to learn.

Do you want to love it? We all have coffee memories, whether we enjoy it or not. Photo by Nani Williams on Unsplash.

Almost everyone has a coffee journey, even if one cannot stand to drink it. The fascination began with watching adults huddle with steaming cups. They seemed oblivious to loud and misbehaving children all around. Some parents rewarded curiosity with sniffs of just-opened cans and steamy brews. Many recall revulsion at their first sip. Then came college all-nighters, and later, the moment when one drank one's first good cup of coffee. The Dictionary of the French Academy once declared that history is ‘the account of acts, of events, of matters worth remembering.’. If this is true (alas, it isn’t), then remembering coffee encounters shows the beverage’s historical significance. Who remembers their first green beans, potatoes, or orange juice? For that matter, who can give a full narrative of their tea drinking? You get the point. Coffee, like Kinsella’s baseball, marks the years.

My earliest coffee memory comes from my maternal grandmother’s kitchen. Josephine was a little brunette German-American lady who loved her home. It was a good thing she did, having borne eleven children. She kept a clean house for my grandfather, Jess, a career staff sergeant, but the kitchen was the heart. Officers admired Josephine’s cooking. The gallant Edmund Gruber visited often during the years he ‘rolled along’ up the ranks. My mother remembered sitting on the piano bench as a young girl with Gruber. He played Stille Nacht while the adults passed around cigarettes and cups of my grandmother’s excellent coffee.

General Edmund Gruber (1879-1941) may have had his ancestor Franz’s musical talent. He wrote the ‘5th Artillery Regimental Song,’ which we know as ‘The Caissons Go Rolling Along.’ My mother once told me that John Philip Sousa was an ‘odious man.’ It seems Sousa had stolen some credit for “Caissons” without giving her hero, Gruber, proper credit (or royalties). Even worse, in the 1950s, the words and title were changed to ‘The Army Goes Rolling Along.’

My memories of grandma’s kitchen included a ubiquitous metal percolator. It was right next to a brace of jade-colored Fire King coffee cups and my grandpa’s bottle of Tabasco. Warmed by the aromatic steam of the percolator, I liked to stand with my elbows on the counter. I stared at the perking coffee squirting into the glass cap for what seemed like hours. I imagined it was playing the Maxwell House Coffee song.

The 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of percolators. My mother had a fashionable stovetop Corningware Cornflower coffee maker. She also had a clear Pyrex percolator, which later came into my possession. It seemed like the coffee was always on, although my Irish father never drank it. Dad preferred tea and took many opportunities to accuse the beverage as unhealthful. As a dentist, he had periodontal evidence against it that never quite convinced me. But the medical man usually concluded by saying, “it will stunt your growth!” I have to admit that this final argument made me uneasy, but lost its luster when I went away to college.

I also made a curious discovery in a kitchen cupboard as a child. Inside a couple of nested stock pots was a small octagonal aluminum object that I thought was a syrup dispenser. When I asked my mother what it was, she said, “oh, it’s a little percolator that the Italians use. Your Aunt Maria gave it to me.” My Italian Aunt Maria lived in Omaha. This Moka Pot was anything but a mere percolator.

After this first encounter, it took me more than thirty years to actually try the Moka Pot as a brewing method. Some day, I will argue for its virtues for daily use. I will do so by first recounting its history and then showing how to use the pot to make a delicious cup of coffee. Until then, svegliati e annusa il caffè!

A close shave: Two pandemic-inspired projects.

Closeness or Comfort? Old age makes this an easy decision. Photo by Supply on Unsplash.

The pandemic of 2020 was the last straw. It pushed me to do two things I have resisted doing. The first is to buy an electric shaver because I am giving up closeness for convenience. I could have given up and grown a beard (I still might). The second is to start this blog I call the Mossbunker Review.

When I was a young man, there were many things about my father and other older men that puzzled me. I found the solution to one of the greatest of those mysteries when I began to have wrinkles of my own. It is nothing profound. It has to do with why so many older men who are otherwise Luddites use Remingtons and Norelcos.

My father taught me how to shave using a double-edged safety razor (DESR). While one can still buy these steel instruments on Amazon, they look barbarous (no pun intended). They are no match for the sleek plastic razors now supplied by Harry’s or Gillette. The DESR made close shaving possible without a barber by encasing a disposable blade with two thin, sharp sides. The metal case protected the skin from all but the very edge. Armed with my DESR, a styptic pencil (for cuts), and a roll of toilet paper (also for wounds), my late adolescent years became easier. My post-shave face was soft as a baby’s bottom. Except for the cuts. But my father was not doing as he taught me. He was massaging his face with floating rotary heads. And while he shed less blood than me, his face was more like 0000 sandpaper than an infant’s bum. I began to think he was a wimp. No pain, no gain.

But I was wrong. I discovered my mistake when I passed fifty and began to get wrinkles and things like skin tags. I was never warned about the latter. I wielded my safety razor as one with five decades of experience, but my skill could not match the hazards of old age. Repeated strokes would not remove the growth from the corners of my mouth and the soul patch area under my lip. The little blond soldiers would not go down regardless of how hard I pressed. The area on my upper lip right against my nose was utterly unreachable. Even fresh razors ripped open the raised parts of my skin--without cutting the stubble.

No wonder my father, grandfather, uncles, and father-in-law all graduated to Norelco. I have fought a good fight, but now I am turning on the electricity. What’s that got to do with the decision to begin this blog? Not much. I have stories I have to tell. Being a perfectionist, I put off sharing them till I could make the telling soft as a baby’s bottom. But there were cuts and blood along the way. And other things to do. I read books about writing to avoid telling them, and I wrote pieces to please other people for the same reason. I also designed other websites and wrote half a dozen other sporadic weblogs.

So I am making a new beginning, again. I am turning on the electricity, and I hope the outcome will be as sharp as it once was. Thank you for witnessing my journey.

Long before praising a pig, E. B. White wrote a sonnet to a racehorse.

Some nag! Before earning fame as a porcine rescuer, Andy White made a few bob lauding a Derby winner. (Photo by Whitney Combs on Unsplash)

E. B. “Andy” White (1899-1985) was a renowned writer for The New Yorker magazine from the 1920s and into the 1980s. We know him as the author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Elements of Style. Andy graduated at the top of his class at Cornell in journalism, but could not land a job in New York in his field. So he bided his time tapping out poems, short stories, and letters on his Corona typewriter. Andy kept working, hoping that he could launch a career as a writer.

He finally found a job doing publicity work for the American Legion News Service in 1921 but hated the job. Never one to keep set hours, White felt that the situation did not give him time to develop as a writer with his own voice. He gave up PR when he realized that the best writers despised public relations workers. Professional writers thought of Publicity as an overpaid occupation. White saw that a career in PR caused one to lose his soul when the company forced him to spout the party line.

Early in 1922, White drew $400 out of savings and bought a Ford Model T roadster. He persuaded his friend, Cornell dropout Howard Cushman, to quit his dreary job in the city. White proposed the two make a road trip west--across the United States. Unable to afford travel, they decided to take their precious Corona typewriters instead. They would write stories and travelogues for their daily bread. If that failed, any odd job would do to secure the next sack of groceries and tank of gas.

I now claim the distinction of being the only person that ever wrote a sonnet to a racehorse and got away with it. - E. B. White

There was another difficulty that might not occur to us. The network of highways that we associate with modern American culture did not yet exist. There were no paved roads between Minneapolis and Spokane--a distance of 1400 miles. Seattle was the goal. They drove across the North Dakota prairie in wheel ruts some called a highway. The Ford ambled along, surrounded by tall grasses that obscured the driver’s side view. The most “developed” states had concrete roads that were more like one-lane sidewalks. When two automobiles encountered one another head-on, one had to yield. To allow the other car to pass meant pulling over to a dirt track that ran parallel to the paved road.

That they ever drove the prairie parkway is remarkable. The travelers ran out of funds regularly long before they made it to Minneapolis.

White and Cushman drove into Lexington, Kentucky, to fulfill a youthful longing. They thought one had not lived until one had bet on a horse race. They each had $2 to wager. Cushman’s safe strategy was to bet on the favorite. White was more intuitive and chose his horse based on his fondness for its name: Auntie Mae. A 12-1 underdog, the laconic and bedraggled Auntie Mae looked utterly out of place in the field. Andy’s long-shot somehow prevailed, while Howard’s didn’t even place. White won the enormous sum of $24.

White learned about the dangers of overweening beginner’s luck the hard way. He and Cushman decided to drive to Louisville and take in the 1922 Kentucky Derby. This time each invested six dollars using White’s fail-safe system. At the end of the day, White had sixty cents left, and Cushman lost the entire wad. What to do? Pull out the trusty Corona. White composed a sonnet in praise of Morvich, the winning horse that had broken their hearts. He drove straight to the office of the Louisville Herald and sold the sonnet to the editor for five dollars. The next morning Andy’s poem appeared on the front page. They had recouped their losses.

White sounded a triumphant note in a letter to his girlfriend, Alice. He wrote, “I now claim the distinction of being the only person that ever wrote a sonnet to a racehorse and got away with it.”