One hurdle in studying Eastern religions is having to unlearn all of the bad research of the European Theosophists and authors like Hesse, who took inOne hurdle in studying Eastern religions is having to unlearn all of the bad research of the European Theosophists and authors like Hesse, who took in foreign phrases and concepts and conflated them with well-established Christian spiritual notions. I was often reminded of this while reading a used copy of this book, in which some naive former soul had left marginalia every few pages declaring that The Dream of Brahma was 'just like in Christianity' or some equally precocious notion....more
Kipling's is one of those imaginations which, slipping here and there, seems to plant the seeds for numerous books and genres yet to be devised. He wrKipling's is one of those imaginations which, slipping here and there, seems to plant the seeds for numerous books and genres yet to be devised. He writes to pique, slowly twisting out his stories and drawing the reader along unexpected and unrecognized roads. Each tale might set the mind on a new and unusual tack, and hence, more than anything, Kipling is an author for authors: an author whose imagination is contagious.
His stories always center around the foreign mystery of his native-born India, but more than that, of the intersection of dry, Anglican Protestantism and vibrant, deadly, magical Hindu tradition. The Greeks long ago borrowed from the Indian mystics the ideas of the soul, of atomism, and asceticism, and since then, the West has adopted holy meditation, the scourge of the flesh, and the One God who is Many.
Kipling's cultural crossroads is not a new conflation, but a reintroduction of an old acquaintanceship. Many of his earlier stories present a kind of deniable magic: a magic which is only magical because it is unfamiliar, and which later finds a perfectly reasonable explanation. It is not hard to imagine such overgrown superstitions on the parts of the British, whose magical roots have been long straitlaced and sublimated, excepting ghost stories at Christmas.
In 'My Own True Ghost Story', we find a Britain who is obsessed with finding magic in India, and who comes to find it only because he looks for it everywhere. Kipling's works are full of such reversals of expectation, where it is not the 'alien magic of India' at fault, but the alien India which a foreigner wishes were true.
In his introduction, Neil Gaiman mentions the stigma of Colonialism that follows Kipling to this day. Kipling was representing the point of view of a ruling class descended from a foreign culture, but he is hardly dismissive of Indian culture or its traditions. Indeed, he does not try to make anything absurd out of Indian culture, nor does he try to represent it from the inside.
Though many may be content to declare him a racist and a colonialist because he was of the race of conquerors, that stance forgets that every nation has been conquered and sublimated by a series of various cultures, and that this should not invalidate the conquering culture any more than it invalidates the conquered culture. Even North America's native people wiped out a previous aboriginal population in staking their claim.
Gaiman is also one of the authors who shows a clear line of inspiration back to Kipling. The concept of his novel 'American Gods' is completely laid out in Kipling's 'The Bridge-Builders'. Likewise, one can find the roots of Gaiman and Pratchett's 'Good Omens' in Kipling's 'The Appeal', which also forms a background for C.S. Lewis' 'Screwtape Letters'. All three show the afterlife in terms of a purely British bureaucracy: polite and convoluted. Kipling also provides a scaffold for Gaiman's favorite: 'awkward fellow in an incomprehensible underbelly of horrifying magic'.
Yet these are not the only threads to be traced through Kipling. 'A Matter of Fact' is a proto-lovecraftian horror tale, if there ever was one, from the carefully-paced, skewed tone to the confessional style to the incomprehensible sea creatures and the alienating realization that the truth often has no place in the world of man.
The collection also includes a pair of science fiction tales, which are not Kipling's best work. The first, especially, is difficult to follow. His retro-future is barely comprehensible today, and he has made the most common mistake of the unskilled sci fi author: he explains too much. He spends much more time on describing his unusual, convoluted technologies than on imagining the sort of world they would produce.
The second, 'As Easy as ABC: A Tale of 2150 AD ', spends more time on plot, politics, and character, and if one makes it through the overwrought sections, one can see a prototype of 1984. The political tack of the story tries to tackle fascism versus democracy decades before it became a reality. While he does not have Verne's eye for the social impact of technology, he did succeed in making a remarkably forward-looking tale.
He also dabbles in metaphysical and psychic connections, trying to divine the nature of consciousness. In 'The Finest Story in the World', he presents a case of previous lives as the lively backdrop for a true Author's Story. The narrator obsesses with writing, talent, inspiration, and the eternally looming specter of Lost Perfection in a way which threatens to pull out the heart of any aspiring writer by its strings.
'The Brushwood Boy' deals with another obsession of the writer: the despair that there will never really be an audience who can comprehend you. Eventually, the tale collapses neatly into a paranormal love story, but its implications stretch far beyond its conclusion. 'Wireless' takes a technological tack in the question of whether there might be a universal source of human inspiration.
He also writes many more standard English Ghost stories, usually regarding mental breakdown and obsession, as in the 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' or 'Sleipner, Late Thurinda'. Perhaps the most powerful of these is the seemingly innocuous 'They', which subtly and slowly builds a mood of thick unease without resorting to any tricks or shocks.
There are also the tales of a world which suddenly turns, growing stranger that the protagonist could have imagined, but without resorting to magic or the uncanny. Such stories as 'The City of Dreadful Night', 'Bubbling Well Road', 'The Strange Ride of Morrowby Jukes', and 'The Tomb of his Ancestors' ask us to accept a world which seems eminently possible, if unlikely. It is these stories that most stretch our horizons by asking us to imagine something which requires not a leap of faith, but merely a coincidence of remarkable circumstances or an unusual world view.
Kipling also has chance to show the humorists' pen in the Fish Story 'The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau' and in the uproarious farce "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat', which rises in ever steeper climaxes of unimagined consequences until it begins to shake the high seat (and low comedy) of Wodehouse himself.
There are many other tales besides, from Fairy Stories to original Mythology (which Kipling fully realized in his lovely 'Just so Stories'), adventures, and even a mystery. Kipling's great wealth of production and imagination is daunting, but we may at least take comfort in the fact that his soaring wit is not the kind that overawes and dumbs us, but the sort which sets our mouths to laugh and call, and our minds to dance and twitter, or to fall suddenly into unknown and unrecognized depths in just the place we thought we knew the best.
He may lack the poetic turn of Conrad, the drive of Verne, or the harrowing of James, but neither could they lay claim to the far-ranging vivacity of that ingenuity that is, and remains, Kipling's.
I can't very well list Peake as my favorite author on the Titus books alone, spectacular as they are. While those books may provide a frantically laboI can't very well list Peake as my favorite author on the Titus books alone, spectacular as they are. While those books may provide a frantically laborious definition of 'idiomatic' (if not merely 'eccentric'), Peake is more than simply Gormenghast.
There is his art, his (somewhat abortive) poetic career, and his minimal forays into drama, adventure, war reporting--and here, light farce. Published the same year as Lucky Jim, Peake provides us with another English vision of strange and liminal folk,--except his island is not the metaphorical isolation of academia, but the literal geography of Sark, where Peake relocated his family after The War.
Unlike Amis, Peake's satire falls much more broadly, often striking his protagonist as readily as any other target. As with his Titus books, there is a restlessness inherent in the fact that Peake never turns his hand, and so the reader is always left looking for purpose and direction. Just when you think you've pegged him, Peake tends to swerve.
The book meanders ridiculously, taking its time to arrive at the conflict. Until we reach the driving theme, the book is somewhat slow-going. It does not proceed ponderously, like the Titus books, but there is a measured pace which requires that the reader take the time to let things unfold.
In theme, it roughly resembles Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, which so shook up American religion twenty years before. Like Gantry, Pye is our swell-headed yet carnivorously charming proselytizer and self-promoter, but trades big-top evangelism for the good old C of E, and so his religious notions take a more chummy, upright bent.
While Lewis contents himself with exposing the ungainly, cruel man behind the pulpit quacksalver, Peake paints no such plain indictment. Peake lampoons not only his self-righteous hero, nor just religion, but the very physical and spiritual life at the root of any discussion of belief (or the lack thereof).
Peake doesn't fall hard on one side or the other, but gives us equally wonderful and absurd arguments for (and against) both at once. A reader looking to be instructed or justified will spend all of their time searching. Peake makes it clear that he doesn't have the answers, but he does provide a good number of questions, and each is arm-in-arm with chortles.
There is no preachy author surrogate here, nor the comeuppance of a fable. Yet this lack of direction sometimes injures the work. While Gormenghast moves about these difficult questions slowly, giving a reader a clear view before drifting on grandly, Pye alights quickly and then it's on to the next. There is little evidence of Peake's mastery of language and style, though a keen eye will see 'Pye' as a sleek and straightforward counterpoint to Gormenghast's wrought and grandiose.
Both books move slowly, and both are grounded in their settings. Gormenghast's measured pace is that of the ancient castle: the gait of a museum-goer turning always upon some new and unexpected wonder of yore. Pye's is more akin to it's dreary, peculiar island: a walk along the shore, where some sights will pique the eye, but will more often leave the mind roaming than rapt.
It is a testament to Peake's wryness and sense of character that this light, undecided, often pointless tale comes off as amusing, sweet, and even original. His mildly fantastical religious parable calls to mind both another Brit and another Lewis: Clive Staples, but Peake has writ a religious send-up that is more even-handed and much less bitter.
First the grand fantasy of Gormenghast deflates Tolkien's pretension, then Peake's follow-up highlights the short sight of yet another of the Inklings. Shame I'll never teach Lit, this one has a lot of intriguing cross-pollination....more
It is no wonder that Christians should revere a miracle-working carpenter: I think one must be the son of a god to build an attic before the rest of tIt is no wonder that Christians should revere a miracle-working carpenter: I think one must be the son of a god to build an attic before the rest of the house.
There is no fundamental basis for Lewis' arguments. I was hoping to find something thought-provoking and convincing, but it just felt like the same old ideas Aquinas and Descartes bandied around. These are no longer sufficient in a world of thermodynamics and evolution.
Lewis has some skill and intellect, but the way he meanders about duality, truth, social darwinism, pathetic fallacy, comparative anthropology, and scientific process tends more towards self-justification than any profundity.
Lewis clearly wants to believe, and wants to bolster and justify those beliefs, but he never overcomes a reasonable burden of proof. He puts together the best indications he can find, but they don't add up to much.
Every time Lewis embarked on a thought, it would grow and blossom in intriguing ways until he would simply bunch together the whole bundle, tie it with a bow, label it 'god's handiwork' with a reverent nod, and move on, never reaching an insight. It made me think the allegory in Onan has been widely misread.
The righteousness of his belief contrasts hypocritically with the way he blithely writes off any other belief. To portray everyone else as faulty but still think yourself infallible is not only insulting, but a black mark on any otherwise reasonable mind.
I like Lewis, both his tone and his mind. I wanted to find something compelling in him. I wanted to find something that tied his observations together. I sense Lewis also wanted to find something he could attach himself to. After being alone and afraid in a grand world ripped by World Wars, who wouldn't feel a desperate need for meaning?
And he found one. He found a meaning he could cling to, but only with a tentative grasp. Since it is not a meaning he can communicate, it is not one I can share. He does not find tenacity in reason, but in romanticism, in idealism, in fear, and in a blindness to his own faults, even as he seeks out those of others....more
This send up of religious institutions was so devestating that many religious leaders called for Lewis to be stoned to death for writing it. His bitinThis send up of religious institutions was so devestating that many religious leaders called for Lewis to be stoned to death for writing it. His biting, insightful, and humorous look at religious hypocrisy is as pertinant today as it was when it was first written.
The pure strength of Lewis's prose is refreshing after reading more recent authors. His control and understanding of syntax, grammar, and words maintains a strength and clarity of voice throughout the work. However, he does not sacrifice wit or levity for all his precision.
There are occasions when his passion overcomes him and his critiques fall a little heavy-handed, but these moments are rare and short. He never falls to the sort of surrogate lecturing that many 'political' authors do, and so does not risk boring or underestimating his reader.
He certainly never partakes in the more grievous sin of lecturing the audience as the narrator. Indeed, he rarely makes a point towards his own opinions without undermining it with a little hypocrisy or hubris on the character's part.
The absurdity of Voltaire's satire has nothing on the ridiculous yet believable world created by Lewis. Hyperbole is the haven of the idealist. Realism is more interested in engaging reason than inciting passion, and while Lewis's understated wit never insults his reader's intelligence, it still presents an unsettling and prescient view of power, ignorance, and the masses....more
When I was a kid I used to sleep over at my best friend's house, and since he and his family were practicing Christians, I ended up going to a lot of When I was a kid I used to sleep over at my best friend's house, and since he and his family were practicing Christians, I ended up going to a lot of Sunday services with them. We'd sit and listen to the pastor and sing some songs, and often, we'd go back to his house and talk about what we'd heard.
I remember going with him and his brother to Bible study a few times, where I was always shocked to find that I knew more about the Bible than the kids who were there, who could quote a hundred verses off the top of their heads, which was especially surprising to me, because I really didn't know much about the Bible.
I remember one instance where they were talking about the devil being in their heads, butting doubts and thoughts in there, making them think things they didn't want to think. I interrupted and asked if they remembered last week, when the Pastor had pointed out that nowhere in the Bible does the devil tempt anyone, let alone control their thoughts, except in the story of Job, where Lucifer had to ask God's permission first, and God did the lion's share of the tormenting.
"Am I the only one who actually listens to the pastor?" I asked, confused--they didn't have an answer for me.
It was around this point that my best friend's brother, who was also at the bible study, began to have problems with girls in school. Like most of us, he felt awkward about the new feelings he was having, and was more afraid of women than interested in them. He was a tall, blond, blue-eyed football player and girls liked to hang around him, even asking him out, which made him nervous and confused.
He was a few years younger than us and we'd been there, we knew how he felt. His parents decided to try to help him, and at their pastor's suggestion, they bought him this book.
After getting and reading it, his fear and anxiety around women seemed to increase, so me and my friend grabbed it from the coffee table, sat down in his room, and read it. We were still high school kids ourselves and hadn't had sex, but even then, we felt like this book was written by people who knew less about sex and human relationships than we did.
It's a book full of guilt and paranoia: people can't control themselves, especially women, who can't help but try to seduce you, and it's your duty to avoid them, not to look about them or think about them in sexual ways, not to have those thoughts. The fact that these relationships are expressed in terms of combat shows the level of conflict the authors feel appropriate.
But, of course, almost everyone has those thoughts. They are a natural component of how human beings work--attraction, infatuation, love, sex--these things are real, vital parts of life, secular or Christian. He tried to control his thoughts, to make them go away, but it isn't that easy.
When a person spends hours at school surrounded by other teen boys and girls who have bodies and sexual thoughts, then goes home and reads books about sexual thoughts, it's no wonder that those thoughts will consume them. If someone wandered behind you whispering "don't think about sex" over and over again throughout the day, how would you be able to think about anything else?
And perhaps the biggest problem about this book is that it encourages teens who are confused and uninformed to feel guilty, to feel like it's their job to control their thoughts and if they can't, they are failing not only themselves, but the people they are attracted to. Those sorts of negative obsessions can be very powerful, and it's easy for them to take hold, as they did for my friend's brother.
Now, every time he had a thought about the opposite sex, he was suddenly full of guilt, suddenly telling himself over and over "don't think about sex", and getting even more upset when those thoughts didn't go away--which did not make it easier for him to learn to interact with women. The obsession he had with not thinking about sex just gave those thoughts more power and heightened his emotional response.
My friend and I, on the other hand, even though we were going through the same problem, found that as time went on, things got easier. We learned how to communicate with people, the anxiety lessened as we learned that all the stuff we were confused about, all the stuff we didn't know about sex wasn't that big of a deal. We didn't give into those thoughts--we didn't have sex--but we learned to ignore them, to live with them, and we learned that they didn't have to define us or how we interacted with other people. Sure, it was a struggle sometimes, but we never let that struggle define who we are.
The bottom line is, whether you have a positive obsession with sex or a negative obsession with sex, you're still obsessed, and that isn't healthy. Trying to banish your own thoughts is never going to work, because the when you say "I have to get rid of my sexual thoughts", that is you thinking about your sexual thoughts.
It's a problem my friend's brother deals with to this day. He's a sweet guy, an intelligent guy, and he's not crazy, it's just that the anxiety of this has built up so much in his head for so long from books like this that he never had a chance to learn how to interact with people he's attracted to. He even enrolled in a group that helps people with sex addiction, despite the fact that he is still a virgin and in college, because these thoughts and this guilt still keeps him up at night, and prevent him from meeting or befriending women.
It's fine if people want to be abstinent, or if they want to live as Christians and marry as virgins, but this book is not the path to making peace with yourself and your feelings, it's a book that fosters repression and anxiety. Reading through it, I was struck with how the authors talk about sexual thoughts--it became immediately clear that people who repress their sexuality think about sex far more often than I ever have, even as an atheistic teenage boy, I never thought about sex as much as the examples in this book.
This book is not a representation of real life, or of normal human relationships. It is not a tool to help people come to terms with unwanted thoughts, nor will it help anyone to develop a healthy outlook on life and sexuality, Christian or otherwise. This book is full of nonsense and misinformation, and if you are a young man who already feels anxious about sex and women, this book will help to turn that anxiety into constant, life-long fear....more
When I was a kid I used to sleep over at my best friend's house, and since he and his family were practicing Christians, I ended up going to a lot of When I was a kid I used to sleep over at my best friend's house, and since he and his family were practicing Christians, I ended up going to a lot of Sunday services with them. We'd sit and listen to the pastor and sing some songs, and often, we'd go back to his house and talk about what we'd heard.
I remember going with him and his brother to Bible study a few times, where I was always shocked to find that I knew more about the Bible than the kids who were there, who could quote a hundred verses off the top of their heads, which was especially surprising to me, because I really didn't know much about the Bible.
I remember one instance where they were talking about the devil being in their heads, butting doubts and thoughts in there, making them think things they didn't want to think. I interrupted and asked if they remembered last week, when the Pastor had pointed out that nowhere in the Bible does the devil tempt anyone, let alone control their thoughts, except in the story of Job, where Lucifer had to ask God's permission first, and God did the lion's share of the tormenting.
"Am I the only one who actually listens to the pastor?" I asked, confused--they didn't have an answer for me.
It was around this point that my best friend's brother, who was also at the bible study, began to have problems with girls in school. Like most of us, he felt awkward about the new feelings he was having, and was more afraid of women than interested in them. He was a tall, blond, blue-eyed football player and girls liked to hang around him, even asking him out, which made him nervous and confused.
He was a few years younger than us and we'd been there, we knew how he felt. His parents decided to try to help him, and at their pastor's suggestion, they bought him this book.
After getting and reading it, his fear and anxiety around women seemed to increase, so me and my friend grabbed it from the coffee table, sat down in his room, and read it. We were still high school kids ourselves and hadn't had sex, but even then, we felt like this book was written by people who knew less about sex and human relationships than we did.
It's a book full of guilt and paranoia: people can't control themselves, especially women, who can't help but try to seduce you, and it's your duty to avoid them, not to look about them or think about them in sexual ways, not to have those thoughts. The fact that these relationships are expressed in terms of combat shows the level of conflict the authors feel appropriate.
But, of course, almost everyone has those thoughts. They are a natural component of how human beings work--attraction, infatuation, love, sex--these things are real, vital parts of life, secular or Christian. He tried to control his thoughts, to make them go away, but it isn't that easy.
When a person spends hours at school surrounded by other teen boys and girls who have bodies and sexual thoughts, then goes home and reads books about sexual thoughts, it's no wonder that those thoughts will consume them. If someone wandered behind you whispering "don't think about sex" over and over again throughout the day, how would you be able to think about anything else?
And perhaps the biggest problem about this book is that it encourages teens who are confused and uninformed to feel guilty, to feel like it's their job to control their thoughts and if they can't, they are failing not only themselves, but the people they are attracted to. Those sorts of negative obsessions can be very powerful, and it's easy for them to take hold, as they did for my friend's brother.
Now, every time he had a thought about the opposite sex, he was suddenly full of guilt, suddenly telling himself over and over "don't think about sex", and getting even more upset when those thoughts didn't go away--which did not make it easier for him to learn to interact with women. The obsession he had with not thinking about sex just gave those thoughts more power and heightened his emotional response.
My friend and I, on the other hand, even though we were going through the same problem, found that as time went on, things got easier. We learned how to communicate with people, the anxiety lessened as we learned that all the stuff we were confused about, all the stuff we didn't know about sex wasn't that big of a deal. We didn't give into those thoughts--we didn't have sex--but we learned to ignore them, to live with them, and we learned that they didn't have to define us or how we interacted with other people. Sure, it was a struggle sometimes, but we never let that struggle define who we are.
The bottom line is, whether you have a positive obsession with sex or a negative obsession with sex, you're still obsessed, and that isn't healthy. Trying to banish your own thoughts is never going to work, because the when you say "I have to get rid of my sexual thoughts", that is you thinking about your sexual thoughts.
It's a problem my friend's brother deals with to this day. He's a sweet guy, an intelligent guy, and he's not crazy, it's just that the anxiety of this has built up so much in his head for so long from books like this that he never had a chance to learn how to interact with people he's attracted to. He even enrolled in a group that helps people with sex addiction, despite the fact that he is still a virgin and in college, because these thoughts and this guilt still keeps him up at night, and prevent him from meeting or befriending women.
It's fine if people want to be abstinent, or if they want to live as Christians and marry as virgins, but this book is not the path to making peace with yourself and your feelings, it's a book that fosters repression and anxiety. Reading through it, I was struck with how the authors talk about sexual thoughts--it became immediately clear that people who repress their sexuality think about sex far more often than I ever have, even as an atheistic teenage boy, I never thought about sex as much as the examples in this book.
This book is not a representation of real life, or of normal human relationships. It is not a tool to help people come to terms with unwanted thoughts, nor will it help anyone to develop a healthy outlook on life and sexuality, Christian or otherwise. This book is full of nonsense and misinformation, and if you are a young man who already feels anxious about sex and women, this book will help to turn that anxiety into constant, life-long fear....more
J.G. Keely
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