Fire and Knowledge

The Sparrow (1996) by Mary Doria Russell, 408 pages.

Summary: After intercepting alien radio waves, Jesuit scientists are sent to the planet Rakhat on an anthropological mission of contact. They travel on an outfitted asteroid and arrive many years later. While learning about the sentient species and their cultures, things go terribly wrong. Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the mission, and he doesn’t want to explain why.

It’s an interesting, easy, disturbing read. The friendships that are formed by the main characters make the reader long for similar companionship in life. The priests are shown as real people with real struggles (though perhaps a little too much so).

The most weighty questions addressed are the existence, goodness, and plan of an omnipotent and compassionate God. Is everything that happens the plan of God? Fr. Sandoz, after much doubt and wrestling, comes to believes this. And as he comes into the culmination of God’s plan, he is spiritually broken when it turns out to be his worst possible nightmare.

Anne, the doctor, also struggles with the age-old question of theodicy. For example, after a teammate dies, she says:

“Why is it that God gets all the credit for all the good stuff, but it’s the doctor’s fault when [death] happens? When the patient comes through, it’s always ‘Thank God,’ and when the patient dies, it’s always blaming the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer … novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.” (198)

I’d cautiously recommend this book. The vulgarity can get annoying and feel forced, but the book is challenging and perspective changing. It made me wrestle through theodicy along with the characters. If there is a loving God, why is there so much suffering? “Perhaps we can’t understand the answers,” says Fr. Marc Robichaus in his eulogy for Alan Pace,

“because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.” (201)

And yet, we press on.

The Intellectual Devotional seems like a great way to learn something new each day from a different discipline. Here’s the blurb:

Millions of Americans keep bedside books of prayer and meditative reflection—collections of daily passages to stimulate spiritual thought and advancement. The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same—a collection of 365 lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. Each nugget of wisdom is drawn from one of seven fields of knowledge: History, Literature, Philosophy, Mathematics & Science, Religion, Visual Arts, and Music.

[Huck’s voice] is not Mark Twain’s voice. It is the voice, we can only say, of a great genius named Huckleberry Finn, who inhabited a somewhat lesser genius named Mark Twain, who inhabited a frustrated businessman named Samuel Clemens.

–Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 73.

Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Yes, the whole thing.

“It was great,” said the peculiar Indiana native, who, despite owning a television set and having an active social life, read every single page of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee….

Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.

“It’d be nice to read it again at some point,” Meyer continued, as if that were a perfectly natural thing to say.

–The Onion, “Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book,” January 19, 2008.

When asked about Amazon’s Kindle, Steve Jobs replied:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore…. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

He’s wrong according to his own statistic. If 40% of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year, 60% read one or more books. Everyone I know reads a little, and many read multiple books a month. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has sold 117 million copies and it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s a lot of books for people who don’t read. And if “the whole conception is flawed,” why is the Kindle out of stock? It seems reality has the audacity to disagree with Steve Jobs.

So it wouldn’t surprise me if Steve changes his tune in a few years and releases an elegant e-reader. I hope somebody does, because it doesn’t exist yet.

Christianaudio.com has some Wendell Berry fiction available for download (not cheap, unfortunately).

Kindle is Amazon’s attempt to make an e-reader that someone would want to crawl in bed with. It’s a nice try, but it’s incredibly ugly and clunky looking. They should have worked with the Apple designers, because that thing looks straight out of 1985.

When there is a beautiful leather-bound e-book reader that is intuitive, DRM-free, doesn’t have dozens of buttons, lets me underline words, write in the margins, and doesn’t look like a technological dinosaur, let me know.

Update: I like John Gruber’s conclusion:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Internet Explorer is not a browser—it’s a reader. People spend about 20 percent of the time browsing for information and 80 percent reading or consuming it. The transition has already happened. And we haven’t noticed.

–Ben Hill, as quoted in Newsweek, “The Future of Reading” (Nov 17, 2007)