What I'm Reading Now

I suspect that this post will be of limited interest to anybody but, um, me--but maybe the topic will serve as a springboard to broader ramblings. I just finished "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (subtitled "A Study in Human Nature"), which is a series of lectures delivered by William James in England (I think) around 1902. Basically, he is analyzing religious experience--people's individual, private, widely varying experiences of the divine--and asking the question: "Is there anything in this religion thing?" He believes that there definitely is. Not in organized religion, whose political will to power/survival he blames for many of the atrocities that besmirch the name of "religion," but in the "purer," more "original" experiences of saints and musts and holy madmen/women from which religion's baser forms are derived.
He is a "pragmatist," in that he looks first at religion's effects on the lives of the religious-- and at their effect, in turn, upon the world. If, he says throughout the book, we discover that religiosity is fruitful for life in a positive way, then metaphysical speculation about what form exactly God should take (a six-armed goddess, an invisible force, many gods) is irrelevant. That is, if religion "works," then "how" it works is a secondary consideration.

But he does end up by considering this, too, and concludes that there is, indeed, something like God, which is somehow connected with our subconscious minds, and that prayer (or any act of active communion with that Something) can connect us to and imbue us with positive, powerful, healing, creative energies that we can use in our lives. He bases this on the numerous cases he has examined (many of which are excerpted in the book) of individuals who claim to have had a personal experience of God (in whatever form).

James is a tremendously enjoyable writer, and the case studies he includes are fascinating to read. His writing style (in this book at least) is warm, colorful, engaging, natural, informal, and often very funny. He also offers a devastating (and incredibly prescient) critique of what has recently come to be known as the "intelligent design" theory--pointing out that the human mind has a tendency to arrange reality into patterns--noticing and remembering only those elements of reality that organize themselves neatly. If you gave me a pile of beans, he says, I could take them away one by one until only a neat grid of beans remained on the table, and I could tell you that the pattern had been concealed there from the beginning. He points out that, in reality, there is infinitely more chaos in the world than order.

But he does not deny anybody the right (or the necessity) to experience religion according to their nature and abilities. Quite the opposite, in fact--James suggests that the variety of religious experience is in accordance with the variety of human nature: happy-go-lucky natures tending toward a Disney-fied kind of religion (which he calls "the religion of healthy-mindedness") and more dour, and according to James, deeper natures tending toward a more problematized, complex, graver view of God (he calls this type of nature "the sick soul," and accords it more respect than the "healthy minded" nature--pointing out that the "sick soul" is keenly aware of both the beauties and the horrors of the world, and must somehow reconcile them. I must confess to taking a certain narcissistic pleasure in the fact that I am definitely of the psychological type James describes in this lecture. Go Hamlet!). In both cases, also, there is the matter of degree/intensity of religious experience, and both "types," James points out, have their destructive and productive extremes.

Sometimes when reading this book I found myself scoffing at ideas that seemed antiquated or just silly--like when the author explains that alcohol and...it was either nitrous oxide or ether...put the human mind into a semi-mystical state of connectedness with a higher, unifying power. Also, I generally found it hard to swallow his belief that the religious state creates positive, healing energy in people's lives. But then again, I am definitely to some extent a product of the materialist scientific schools James criticizes as being blind to any aspect of reality that is not right in front of their noses. He says that religious experiences, and for that matter "God" (in its many forms) are FACTS, in that people have experienced and can describe them, and that the limiting of the definition of "fact" to things that are objectively visible, cold, and dead, is a mistake. Facts, he says, do not have to be objective.

A great book--I will definitely be dealing with the ideas in it for a long time to come.

Now that I've finally finished it--it took me a couple of months (what with school and doing absolutely nothing every day after coming home from school except reading blogs and playing "Super Mario Bros")--I'm starting Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" (God I love that title...). It is AWESOME (If I may be permitted to revert to middle-school Valley Girl for a sec). I'm just 50 pages in and am already in utter awe at the man's explosive use of the English language--like Pynchon self-limited to the use of black, white, and red. It is beautiful and violent and breathtaking--poetic and vulgar--the Western raised to epic, universal status. I'm even starting to like the quotation mark-less dialogue. The only thing that kinda sticks in my craw (though I might end up liking it, too) is McCarthy's constant use of weird, archaic terminology I've never heard before--architectural terms, names of now-defunct tools--I don't know where he learned all of it. I don't think anybody else has ever heard of a "guyrope" or a "vernier sight" or a "tang." On the one hand, it's cool--it lends the book atmosphere--authenticity. On the other hand, I have no idea what the hell half these things are and it would sort of disrupt the aesthetic pleasure of reading the book to go running for a dictionary of Western vernacular every five minutes. Happily, McCarthy obviously just doesn't give a shit: an essential characteristic of every great artist.

It would be hilarious to write a book "designed by committee"--that is, on the premise that you, the writer, had taken into consideration the individual critical opinions of hundreds (or thousands) of readers, and tried to please all of them. It is hard to imagine what such a book would look like. Actually, this is how most Hollywood movies are made...

I've been meaning to read McCarthy for a while now. A guy I used to live with in Santa Fe ten years ago was reading “Blood Meridian” and got me interested in it. Then my mom bought me The Border Trilogy but, for some reason I found it too dense to get into the two times I tried. I'll definitely be trying again. Then, recently, the New York Times polled a couple hundred writers and thinkers about the "best 25 American books of the 20th century." While many of them agreed that this was a ridiculous and impossible task, they did manage to vote, and "Blood Meridian" was way up on the list. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" was number one. I remember reading it in high school at the behest of my then girlfriend, and liking it--but I haven't read it since. Also high on the list were Phillip Roth's "American Pastoral" and "The Human Stain"--both of which are on my Summer reading list.

I have two other reading projects going on simultaneously: 1) The Great Religious Books of the West and 2) American Studies.

1) I started this project sometime last Fall--the idea being to read the New Testament (which I had never read cover to cover), the Qu'aran, and The Tanakh (a.k.a. the Jewish Bible, or the Old Testament with the books in the pre-Christianized order and maybe plus or minus a text or two). I read the NT and maybe 150 pages of the Qu'aran and had to drop it for school-related reading (Orwell's 1984). I will definitely be getting back to it...

2) I picked up a number of non-fiction books, mostly collections of essays, that fall under the heading of "American Studies," an academic discipline whose existence I have recently learned of, and in which I'm very interested. Interestingly, one of the books, by Louis Menand, begins with an essay entitled something like "the meaning of William James' nervous breakdown."

I'll be taking these books with me to Turkey. Between studying Turkish on CD-Rom, reading them, visiting with people, and traveling when my folks and grandmother get there, it looks like I'll be keeping busy, which, for me, is a very good thing.