One of my favorite authors died on Tuesday. Chaim Potok was 73. I loved his work because he understood the necessity and pain of the struggle to break free of one's parochial religious tendencies in order to find meaning in the world.

LA Times

"Milton's admirer's [are] divided into roughly two camps. One tradition, running from Addison to C.S. Lewis, held that Paradise Lost is a great poem because its justification of God is largely successful. A rival tradition, running from William Blake to William Empson, held that the poem is great because it expresses unconscious hostility toward God. Blake famously wrote that Milton was 'a true poet of the Devil's party without knowing it.' Many have dismissed this comment as incorrigibly eccentric, but Blake and his successors hold one advantage over their critical adversaries. They can point for support to Milton's political career. Milton, like Satan, was a rebel in a civil war [against Charles II].

Why then did he choose a poetic subject that seems to concede everything to the Royalist cause? C.S. Lewis, writing in 1942, argued that the problem disappears when we consider one simple truth: Charles Stuart is not God. Milton's entire case against the divine right of kings is that divine right arrogates a dominion that belongs to God alone. Earthly kings like Charles Stuart merely play at being God; God does not play at being himself. It follows that what would be tyranny in Charles Stuart is perfect justice in God. Lewis' argument works in theory, but many readers of Paradise Lost still find Satan's rhetoric of rebellion to be seductive in practice."


-----John K. Leonard, The New York Review of Books, review of "How Milton Works" by Stanley Fish

This is to serve as an apology to John Cordova, ex-sous chef of the world famous Hobbit restaurant. He did not steal or misplace, or run over with his car, my copy of Pete Yorn's album, Music for the Morning After. It is a regretable fact of my nature that I have a strong tendancy to blame those close to me when I lose things. This instance is no exception to that rule. I found the CD under my car seat today.

With that said, I now take back all the nasty things I've said about John; that he's a clepto, that there's a reason why I never have any whiskey in my cupboard, etc.

Forgive me.

"I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anyone else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Leon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible---a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth---but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part time novelist, Christian, pig.. . . ..That is who I am."

-----Frederick Buechner, from the preface to "The Alphabet of Grace" (originally delivered as The William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard University, 1969)

"Trying to get another start, I circled back to general resolutions I had made to myself about getting old. I kept returning to my seventieth birthday, seventy seemingly being what man has been given as his biblical allotment on earth. I sat in my study making clear to myself, possibly even with gestures, my homespun anti-shuffleboard philosophy of what to do when I was old enough to be scripturally dead. I wanted this possible life extension to be hard as always, but also new, something not done before, like writing stories. That would be sure to be hard, and to make stories fresh I would have to find a new way of looking at things I had known nearly all my life, such as scholarship and the woods. If you think vividly enough about your general resolutions, sometimes your consience will furnish the particulars to exemplify them. . . ."


-----Norman Maclean, "Young Men and Fire"

I bet no one knew I worked at MIT and played the French Horn.

My Website

My Grandpa sent me a newspaper clipping today regarding my Great Aunt Jeanne's death. Jeanne was the head of the Glendale School board, as well as a devoted mother, widow and grandmother. For the last 30 or so years, she hosted the Bentley family Christmas party at her house in La Canada . . .(we're talking over 100 Bentley's in one little house). She also had cancer. But her constant joy and love never waivered. She never left her job or forgot about her family. She was an inspiration to us all.

In the newspaper clipping my grandpa sent, one of Jeanne's long time associates, Pam Ellis, said something pretty amazing. She said, "I will always remember and ask myself, 'what would Jeanne do?' because she will be the rod against which I will always measure my decisions."

You can't do much better than that.

Well done Jeanne. We will miss you.

Times Article

"Dostoyevsky shows us that pride and humility are really one. If you are proud, you almost certainly feel humbler than someone else in the world, because pride is an anxiety, not a consolation. And if you are humble, you almost certainly feel better than someone else in the world, because humility is an acheivement, not a freedom. Pride, one might say, is the sin of humble people, and humility is the punishment of proud people; and each reversal represents a kind of self-punishment. Thus Fyodor Karamazov enters the dining room ready to abase himself because he disdains everyone else. This sort of logic is hard to find, at least as an explicit psychology, in novelists before Dostoyevsky. One has instead to consult the religious weepers and gnashers---Ignatius of Loyola, or Kierkegaard---to encounter anything like it."

"Thus the many pairings, or doublings, in which one character revolves around another, and each is murderously dependent on the other. . . .In Fyodor's case---and perhaps it is always the case with any colossal egotism---other people appear to have become himself. He dislikes his neighbor because of something that he, Fyodor, did to him: 'I once played a most shameless, nasty trick on him, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.' Clearly Fyodor longs---however buried the original religious sentiment---to punish himself, because he hates himself. But since other people have merged with him, he punishes himself by punishing other people, and hates himself by hating other people.
And this leads to a Sisyphean repetition of behavior. Self-punishment of this twisted kind means being condemned to re-enact scandal after scandal without cease, because each self-punishment has become indistinguishable from sinning. The sin itself has become the punishment for that sin, and each sin, being another act of outrage, just opens the wound again."

"But Dostoyevsky's novel enshrines, in its very form, a further argument. It is that Ivan's ideas cannot be refuted by other ideas. In debate, in 'dialogism,' there is no way of defeating or even of matching Ivan, and Alyosha does not really try. At the end of Ivan's legend, he simply kisses his brother. The only way in which we can refute Ivan's ideas, the book seems to say, is by maintaining that Christ is not an idea. Socialism is an idea, because it is 'reasonable'; atheism, too. But Christianity, so profoundly unreasonable---what Kierkegaard called 'lunacy'---is not an idea. The painful part is that the only realm in which Christ is not an idea, in which he is pure knowledge, is in heaven. On earth, we are all fallen, and we fall before ideas, we have only ideas, and Christ can always be kicked around the ideational playground."


-----James Wood, "The Gambler," from The New Republic

Wood Article