Fire and Knowledge

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 188 pages.

The other night I started The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. I read for a few pages and struggled to pay attention. My thoughts wandered. There was nothing there to hook me. It was boring. I put it down.

The next day I started The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I was hooked by the second page. I stayed up late to finish it.

The book is about Sam Spade, a detective agent in San Francisco. Spade is hired by multiple people to find a statue falcon and results in murder, double-crossing, and betrayal. You know, all that good stuff. It is said to be one of the best detective mysteries written, but I don’t read enough of them to know. I do know it was very good.

It’s not a profound book. It doesn’t deal with many “great ideas.” It’s not going to change your life, but it will be a great experience.

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.

[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.

I recently read yet another Christian complaint about Harry Potter. The critic’s thesis was that Joanna Rowling is a “contemporary transgressive artist par excellence,” who holds lightly to the canons of Judeo-Christian morality and of traditional children’s literature in the west, the Potter tales being a catalog of rule-breaking, disobedience, lying, vengeance-taking, and whatnot, its final installation containing the revelation of the Snape-Dumbledore murder-suicide pact that insinuates euthanasia into the minds of children–not to mention that all of this is done in a pagan context by witches and wizards, no less.

My reaction was–yes–but did he miss something? Like the Point of it All?

One wonders just what kind of literature a person like this can read…. Christians are apparently supposed to be people for whom everything is a monochromatic moral tale, and who operate on the maxim that people are what they read. But this is only true of fools, and one cannot account for the actions or opinions of fools.

–S. M. Hutchens, “The Helpful Discovery of Dirt in Potter’s Field“

Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.

–Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?“

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

[Clevinger] knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

–Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1955), p. 77

For some of us, books are important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded…

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994), 15.

See also:

• Recommended Reading
• The Reading Interviews (series)
• Surrounded By Loneliness (essay)
• Inhabiting a larger world through reading (quote from C.S. Lewis)