Skip to main content

Beach reading

I remember sitting on a beach with friends in Normandy.  One was reading a primer on the philosophy of religion, one was reading Karl Barth, another was reading a weighty tome on the future of Christian Democracy in Europe. I was reading Dostoyevsky - the Devils - which I subsequently threw across the room in a momentary frustration at the endless, spiraling emoting! Only Margaret appeared to be 'holiday sane' -she was reading Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth'!

I was thinking on this as I pack for summer vacation in Montenegro. Somehow taking my new acquired 'kindle' feels like cheating. I do not have to sit down carefully thinking what to bring - except, of course, I am taking 'real' books as well.

I am continuing to work my way through the works of Neil M Gunn - the next novel is 'The Key of the Chest'. I am haunted by his work with their blend of realistic evocation of Highland life, woven with the complexities of particular character, shot through with the possibilities of spiritual illumination.

The second novel is the 'Jewel in the Crown' - the first of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet - his masterly exploration of the last days of empire in India. It is a wonderfully complex set of novels. I read it first when living in Nizhny Novgorod, reading all four books in quick succession. They evoke two cultures in a complex dance of love and hate and have a series of characters strikingly memorable including one of the most compelling delineations of evil in literature.

Matthew Crawford's philosophically and practically informed exploration of the nature of work comes next - well-reviewed and I heard him on Start the Week, pricking interest; and, in a related space, Wendell Berry's 'The Gift of Good Land'.

This was the first of Berry's that I read and embarked on one of the richest reading experiences available with a contemporary author. Essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet and farmer, he is my candidate for the sanest person alive - and one whose work has been a continuous source of illumination. Two moments reverberate in my mind, both from novels: an image of what it means to be a parent, a continuous caring trepidation and an image of our family connection: a room through which we pass is present, shared time, and death carries us to other rooms of a shared house.

Didier Maleuvre's 'The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing' is a cultural history of a particular set of ways of being and looking and what they have meant. It is one of those books that promises much and which I am instinctively drawn but who knows whether it will deliver! The holiday wild card...

But then there is the sea, sun, sand...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev