To Blur a Line

Dear Eugene,

They are set to announce tomorrow this year's winner of Nobel prize in literature.  What is your guess?  Your wish?  I know you have one.  A few?

Nobel Lit is notoriously hard to predict, all book lovers know.  I did pretty well, picking Alice Munro and Bob Dylan in the previous years and got lucky.  My wife can attest I am not making this up.

This year?  My prediction is: either Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or someone one has never heard of from a country one will likely never visit.  My reason?  The former is a perennial favorite, the latter to compensate for last year's populist choice.

Enough dumb fun.  Art is not a race--what is the finishing line to cross?  The Nobel committee has an agenda; as long as we know that, the dumb fun will remain clean.  If the purpose of giving out the prize is nothing more than for the world to hear a prophetic voice, then I am all for it.

With that purpose in mind, I have three prophetic voices to nominate to the committee: Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Frederick Buechner.  I know only Ms. Robinson has a remote chance to win, but please surprise me.  All three write with a power that is not of this world but for this world.  Heaven and earth intertwine.

I shall do my reading now.  I've been writing too much lately, writing not enough.

Here I pray with Frederick Buechner's words, for you, for me, and for this world:

"The place God calls us to is the place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet...

 Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens...

 Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus."

As writers we have no finishing line to cross.  We have a dividing line to blur.

Amen.  Alex

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading