Richard

A few weeks after Richard’s wife died, he offered me a pair of her shoes. He pulled a box out of a crumpled Macy’s bag and handed it to me.

"Her feet swelled up when she was sick, so she never wore them," he said. "I bought them for her, but they wouldn’t fit. What size do you wear?"

Sitting down on the sofa in my apartment manager’s apartment, I lifted the lid, only to find shoes that I knew immediately I would never wear. They were my grandmother’s shoes—practical canoes for walking and living, with a medium-brown tone and modest metal decoration at the toe—and completely off limits for at least another 35 years in my mind. The shoes were marked size eight.

"I’m usually size seven," I said, instead of the seven-and-a-half that is the truth. Richard didn’t seem to have heard and motioned for me to try them on. He watched me slip into Helen’s shoes and stand. They were on the big side, but functional. I thought about just taking them—that was the decent thing to do. That’s what he wanted.

I’d run into Richard on my way out the door that morning, and he’d given me a ride to the metro station. It was cold, and he was pretty much insisting. I hadn’t really talked to him since the day a few weeks back, when we crossed paths at the mailboxes and I asked him how things were going.

"Fine," he’d answered, then paused. "My wife died." I’d had no idea and didn’t know what to say.

In the car, his eyes started to fill with just a few blocks to go.

"You can say what you want, but I do miss her," he told me. "We have a queen-size bed, and I still sleep on my side. I don’t want to take her space."

I wish I’d accepted the shoes that day. After declining them, I was next offered several of Helen’s suit jackets from the closet, and there was no way I could feign a need for those.

"I bet Macy’s would take the shoes back, since they’re brand new," I said. He explained he’d tried that too late, and such a return was no longer an option because the shoes had been on clearance.

As I prepared to go, Richard picked up a bright conference brochure and handed it to me. He’d just seen the much-loved/despised Joel Olsteen, friend of Richard’s pastor at Faith Church St. Louis, speak the other day. It was just great, he said. I nodded, again not knowing what to say. He struggled to tell me something, but couldn’t quite get it out.

"I go every week," Richard said. "If you ever want to come … I’m not bothering you, I’m just, like I say, I go ever week . The kids come running up to me after. They call me the candy man."

Richard reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of wrapped strawberry candies, the kind with the chewy middle. They're one of my favorites, I told him, and I took one.

"Take more," he said.

I declined again, popping the first in my mouth, and shifted toward the door.

"Thanks, Richard. I’ll see you around. You take care."

The next weekend, Richard buzzed. When I opened my door, he held out a whole bag of the candies, and I gladly accepted it.

I live in a different apartment building now. So I don’t see Richard often, though occasionally I spy him sitting out on the stoop a half-block down as I pass by the old street on my walk home from work. We wave.

"Manners may prevail"

I've Emily on the brain this weekend:

Abraham to kill him/
Was distinctly told -
Isaac was an Urchin -
Abraham was old -
Not a hesitation -
Abraham complied -
Flattered by Obeisance
Tyranny demurred -
Isaac – to his Children
Lived to tell the tale -
Moral – with a Mastiff
Manners may prevail.

Poem #1332

The dark side of the talents parable

What follows is something I wrote a while ago but was reminded of this week. It gets at one of the main issues that led me to distrust the God described (at certain points) in the Bible.

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In the 25th chapter of Matthew, Jesus likens the coming kingdom to a master who goes on a long journey, leaving his property in the hands of three servants. The first receives five “talents” (units of money), the second gets two talents, and the third is given one, “each according to his ability.” There are no explicit instructions about what’s to be done with these allotments, but the first two servants get to work “at once,” Jesus says in the story, each of them doubling the original amount by their successful stewardship of the master’s property.

“But the man who had received the one talent,” Jesus says, “went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.”

When the master returns to “settle accounts,” the first two servants get rave reviews: “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” The contrast with his response to the third servant could not be more stark.

"I knew that you were a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed,” the servant begins. “So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you."

His confession is an honest one, giving a straightforward account of his actions. But he’s done for: "His master replied, 'You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents … throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'"

The master’s reprimand is troubling in its focus on the stupidity of the servant, who is roundly dismissed as a wicked, slothful fool, and who receives no meaningful response to his admitted fears of the master’s tactics.

But there is an even harsher magic at work in the master’s rebuke, and that is that the master fully acknowledges himself to be a hard man, reaping where he has not sown, and seems, if anything, a little proud of the trait. Jesus does not address the ethical issues that the master’s cruelty raises. That appears to beside the point in the story.

And what is that point? This is not one of the parables that Jesus goes on to unpack for his baffled disciples, but here’s my guess: that it makes you worthless and lazy and even evil not to buckle down and please and obey, in anticipation of reward. (Ouch.) Hesitations, questions, doubts—these distract and destroy.

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I wrote that at a point when my own hesitations, questions, and doubts had finally overwhelmed me past the point of return. The lighter side of the parable still stands--the value of putting to use the things we possess, the skills we have. But words are powerful, and as someone who was instructed to take the words of scripture to heart and to take them to be authoritative, I took to heart not only the master's commendations but also his insistence that he harvests where he has not sown and gathers where he has not scattered seed. And I found I could no longer worship such a master with any confidence or sincerity whatsoever.

Cloud of an essay excerpt

I think these word cloud things are pretty cool. Just tried it out on a couple pages of one of my essays ...

The Net is Not Our Only Love: Thoughts on Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows"

Are we losing our contemplative minds by being online?

That’s the central, disconcerting question that author Nicholas Carr asks and then answers with a measured yes in his new book The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing Our Brains (Norton, 2010). In The Shallows, Carr follows up on a concern he first voiced in his 2008 essay in The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

The book bolsters Carr’s original argument nicely, backing up anxieties about the human intellect with results of recent neurological studies as well as piles of alarming anecdotal evidence. And, considering it’s a book that so bemoans twenty-first-century attention spans, Carr’s volume manages to maintain reader interest surprisingly well throughout. It’s an enjoyable, engrossing read from an unassuming wordsmith who willingly offers himself as a sort of worst-of-gadget-sinners figure while launching into his troubling cultural diagnosis.

“I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple minutes,” Carr testifies early on in the book. “Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data-processing machine, a human HAL.”

Who among the wired masses cannot relate to this confession? Who among us has not silently relished seeing a handful of unread messages appear in the inbox and felt compelled to catch up on Twitter and Facebook feeds at almost embarrassing rates of frequency during the day? And yet, as illuminating and informative and relatable as his material is, Carr’s interpretations often wax too apocalyptic to be very believable, overreaching in terms of what it all portends for humanity.

Carr strikes this less convincing note when he writes that while it's “possible” to think deeply while online, deep thinking is “not the type of thinking the technology encourages or rewards.” Instead, Carr goes on to say, the medium tends to transform us into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.” Really? Is this truly what we are being reduced to? The online habits of those I have known and lived and worked with bear little resemblance to such descriptions of mindless frenzy.

Perhaps at certain cynical moments images of something akin to lab rats cross our minds as we glance at strangers texting in an airport or watch Droid commercials glamorizing automated efficiency. (I must admit that it was with a kind of otherizing disgust that I passed an Apple store overflowing with a flock of iPhoners the other day, and yesterday when the soulless Kindle commercial aired yet again, the one with the two people seated on the sterile-looking beach, I wanted to shake the ad’s producers for so thoroughly collapsing the magic of the literary world into a bland image of escapism.) But when I consider people more carefully and the technologies and gadgets we employ more closely, I’m generally unable to subscribe to this doomsday vision of where humanity is headed, nor place such primary blame for societal trajectories on the prevalence of digital connectivity. Carr suggests that not only may the digital age of distraction rob our brains of the ability to think deeply but, even more troubling, the ability to empathize with others and have compassion. And while I share his concern over perceived threats to these important qualities, I do not view the latest technologies as the major enemy of them.

Carr and other critics of technology help keep us alert to our penchant for the latest tools and toys. Societal and individual reflection on such matters is valuable and necessary, and The Shallows is a worthwhile contribution to those efforts. What I appreciate most about the book is its pairing of literary and historical figures with the more technical aspects of his argument. Unexpectedly relevant excursions into minds ranging from Socrates to Kubrick and from Nietzsche to Erasmus make it impossible to brush Carr off lightly. He’s clearly done a great deal of deep reading and meditative thinking (however diminished he believes his capacity to do so).

In his original Atlantic piece, Carr concludes with references to the movie 2001, artificial intelligence and the suggestion that we are fast becoming “pancake people” with little depth—all working memory, few longterm cognitive powers on which to draw. It’s a frightening conclusion to consider, but also an unlikely and unnecessary one—at least if we continue to love more than just the Internet. And our day-to-day acitivities, commitments and lives suggest that indeed we do.

"What if reading were proved to be more beneficial than exercise?"

This question was one of many good ones asked by author Francine Prose during her address at the 3rd International Humanities Medal event at Wash U tonight. Here are a few more of her remarks that really got me thinking ...


"It's neither the responsibility, nor the purpose, of art to make us better people." That responsibility, Prose said, is "each one of ours," as human beings.


"[Art] can help us understand better what it is to be a human being," and there is "something humanizing about the intimacy" between artist and viewer/reader.


Art can protect us -- it is "the driftwood that humans cling to, as we always have, when we worry that we are drowning."


She referenced Emily Dickinson more than once, particularly in regard to what we mean when we say that something is beautiful or true. I got a copy of Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them. Can't wait to read her.

Terrors

I have nothing like Dickinson's excuse for my absence--"a terror since September"--but nevertheless I've neglected my blog since the end of August. I've been thinking a lot about troubling things, particularly the consequences of community, the concept of hell, and war as waged by the country that has my allegiance. (Nothing too major, right?)

For a while now, at least since the "Staging War" literature course I took a year and a half ago in Wyoming, I've been well on my way to a pacifist stance. An understanding of violence as perhaps our greatest failure of imagination as human beings certainly makes any war pretty difficult to support. Perhaps many just-war-theory types feel the same way, except for some exceptions in certain circumstances. But I don't think I'll end up in the just war camp (even though I'm all for the good arguments against the invasion of Iraq etc based on such theory).

It's strange to write this down, even though I've obsessed and obsessed over it. There's the fear of being, and sounding, naive. "I just am not okay with ever killing someone. War is bad. The end." There's also the inherent element of hypocrisy--I continue to live as a citizen of the United States and in effect contribute to (even benefit from?) our never-ending occupations in the Middle East.

But there's something else, too, something bigger: the realization that if the majority of Americans came to agree with me, and we really did rethink the utility of violence, there would likely be some very terrible consequences. We would be left vulnerable, open to attack. Many of us would lose our lives. I get it. I get that it would totally suck and that my being okay with such an outcome might be a little extreme. When I consider the alternatives, though, I'm pretty convinced that a pacifist approach is the most reasonable and ethical among the available options.

I wonder if this makes me a coward. Weak. Willing to let the bad guys win. I don't know. But I do know that it's not because I'd be afraid to fire a weapon, or to die. It's because, as Chris Hedges writes, "a soldier who is able to see the humanity of the enemy makes a troubled and ineffective killer." It's because a world like ours, where violence and suffering have become so necessary, isn't a world I care to perpetuate. And it's probably because I can't get Susan Sontag out of my head (Regarding the Pain of Others).

On a more positive note, it's also because of flashes of true imagination that suggest war is not the only way. Flashes like this one, from the interview (with the author) at the back of God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse Mediated by H. L. Hix:

"Bush turns up the volume on his rhetoric depending on who he's talking to, or turns it down, and so does bin Laden. He's also made peace overtures: look, the instant that you stop occupying the lands that we consider sacred, we stop shooting you. In any kind of a dialogue--third graders having a fist fight, or two of the most powerful people on the planet leading others into battle with thousands and thousands of lives as stake--in any kind of dialogue you can either withhold trust from the other person until the other person fulfills your preconditions for attributing trust, or you can insist on trust as a condition of conversation, and grant the trust and cling to it insistently. I can hear someone saying now, we tried to trust him but they flew planes into our buildings, and the other side then makes analogous accusations about different events, so if there's going to be dialogue instead of shooting, somebody has to say, okay I believe that you are a human being who wishes to live and wishes for those you love to have happy and robust lives, and I am going to act as if that is the case no matter what you do. It seems to me that that's a healthier approach."

I for one am up for us trying that approach -- "I believe that you are a human being ... and I am going to act as if that is the case no matter what you do."