Passing

Dear Eugene,

Last night a perennial question in the literary world was settled: Whether Philip Roth will ever win the Nobel.

That needs not be asked any more; Roth passed away last night.

I have a feeling he would have chosen to hold on if not for the Nobel being cancelled this year.  (They don't give the Prize to a dead man.  How thoughtful.)  But to wait till next fall to be disappointed all over again?  Nah, f*** it.  His words.

Yes, the time that Roth could have won the Nobel has come but passed him by and there is no second round.  He knows.  He writes about that's how life is.  He whines.  Like a baby.  But he must admit it's the most fitting punchline to his sick joke of a life.

I was saddened when I heard the news this morning, though I've expected it long time coming.  He's always been writing about sickness and dying anyway.  Like, dead already, dude.  I can hear him laugh.

I feel like writing two long pieces about Roth.  One titled: Why Everyone Should Read Roth.  The other: Why No One Should Read Roth.  He wrote himself into a corner and found no way out of it.  But what brilliant petty little corner he found himself in.

This morning before I heard the news I had this thought: The Truth that is Jesus has creative energy, always.  Truth sets us free.  It frees us to re-think even what creativity means, and to re-act to and re-enact its life-giving force.

I took this picture yesterday.  I didn't know I was doing it for the news today.


Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. TimMay 28, 2018 at 3:47 PM

    A lot of sharp in that photo (and in your recent posts). Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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