Category: The Writing Life

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What does “all books are neighbors” mean?

Someone recently asked me about the title of this weblog. What does “All Books are Neighbors” mean anyway? It sounds like an adage, but as far as I can tell there is nothing like it anywhere in Erasmus’ venerable collection (At some time I hope to expand on Erasmus’ first–and perhaps my favorite–adage: “Friends have all things in common”). And while at this time a Google search of the phrase will unearth few results, it cannot be attributed to me. I was having coffee with a friend early one morning at the Black Cow when a friend uttered those four words. imageAt first I thought I had misheard because a barista let forth a piercing jet of steam at the same time, so I asked him to repeat himself. He said, “All books are neighbors.” He had never heard the saying before either, but had recently heard a speaker use it.

Since the speaker was the first person to use it as far as I knew, I suppose the context of the speech would be helpful in giving context to what I am no doubt sure by now my reader recognizes as an ambiguous phrase. The context was that the convention of language means that one can find common ground shared by any two or more books: assumptions, understandings of the audience, and meaningfulness. Marx and Smith, King and Christie, Calvin and Kerouac, in print all these very different authors are neighbors and they engage in a dialogue that only makes sense if there is commonality. The commonality is so commonplace that readers don’t give a fig about their common assumptions and move their attention to the margins of dissonance. Now when I heard this I had to think through whether this was true or not, but I decided I didn’t give a fig either. Nor was I convinced that this was the best original context. The adage was so elegant, but the context was, well, oddly strained. It violated Occam’s Razor and all other sharp instruments of critical analysis. So I don’t think it can mean all books are neighbors to each other.

While books are our favorite artifacts of human existence (aren’t they?), they do not literally breathe or have the capacity ot relationship. Books are personified in relationship to the real beings who create them. I prefer to understand the adage to mean that we cherish the written word both to know we are not alone and that we have access to the artifact that, as the product of human creativity, reminds, amuses, entertains, angers–in short inspires us to be human.

I have thus admitted that I adopted (stole?) this adage and invested my own meaning to it as wantonly as any petty proof texter. But let us dialogue. What do you think it means? Please comment. I promise that most future posts will contain more story than dialectic.

Assuming we accept my meaning of the adage then, I chose it for this blog to suggest that books, stories, and reading will be the focus of my writing. I am using it to inspire my ideal of wanting to be more consistent with my blog as an expression of art (kitsch?) and not as a cash cow, and to share my thoughts and receive feedback from my friends who are willing to take time to read. I hope they entertain and inspire any who take up and read. That last allusion is to St. Augustine of Hippo, so you see all books are neighbors!

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My Baseball Retrospective

I was born in a small town in Kansas when Ike was President and the Brooklyn Dodgers were the baseball champions of the world. My dad enjoyed the ’55 Series because he loved underdogs, but especially because he hated the New York Yankees. The Yankees always seemed to win and to dominate the other teams in the American League, of which my dad was a fan. Specifically, he followed the fortunes of the Athletics, who often lost their best players to the Yankees. When I was old enough, he would take me and my three older brothers with him to watch twi-night or weekend double-headers at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium, usually when the A’s were playing the dreaded team from the Bronx. I enjoyed the games so much, and being with my father in the crowd surrounded by smells of stale cigar smoke and beer, I never realized how bad a team the A’s really were. I never noticed that they were at the bottom of the standings year after year.

Nevertheless, I loved the A’s and everything about them, and often thought I would have died for them. I loved their red, white, and blue uniforms, and later their Kelly green and gold jumpers with white kangaroo leather shoes. I loved the pennant porch beyond the right field fence where sheep grazed and a battery of foghorns stood ready to announce home runs and show the way to rare Athletics’ victories in the gathering gloom. I loved the idiotic mule that served as the team’s mascot, the absurd sheep that grazed in right field, and the annoying mechanical rabbit that delivered fresh baseballs to the home plate umpire. Never mind that the audacious owner, Charles O. Finley, broke my heart when he moved the Athletics to California. It was because of the A’s–and my Uncle Henry–that I came to love the game of baseball.

On warm summer nights at home while it was still light I would tune my transistor radio to the ball game and grab my outfielder’s glove. Then I would listen to the crackling play-by-play while I bounced a golf ball, swiped from my brother’s leather bag, on the cement patio until it sailed high into the air so that I could attempt to catch it. Sometimes I tried to emulate what Monte Moore, voice of the Athletics, was describing. Usually I pretended I was making sometimes graceful, sometimes spectacular catches of fly balls to the delight of thousands of fans in a packed stadium. When my brother found out what I was doing he would complain to my mother and I would have to give the ball back. Sometimes he would even tease me for playing my silly game with the golf ball. When that happened, I was too embarrassed to defend myself by saying I was honing my baseball skills. I would remind myself that there was someone in my family I was sure would understand my mania for baseball. Uncle Henry was a living legend in the family because he had played minor league baseball. I was comforted by the knowledge that heunderstood, and he would never tease me about serious matters like baseball.

My family lived in a two-story farm house on forty acres just south of the city limits. Though our property was much larger than a typical lot, we lived on a street in a neighborhood in which the homes sat on smaller parcels of land with houses large enough to accommodate families with children. So I grew up with the best of both the city and country worlds: I had plenty of open space with woods, fields, and a creek that snaked through our land, but I also played with loads of kids my age who lived down the street. With my early love of baseball and my secret desire to become a major league player, it was only a matter of time until I realized that we had enough land to build a baseball field on which all the neighborhood kids could play. The time came between my fifth- and sixth-grade years… (to be continued?)

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Telescopes of Stone

One of my singular delights, rarely indulged in, is to read a design magazine unhurriedly on a Saturday morning. The magazine is rolled in one hand, my sans-handle cup filled with coffee in the other, reclined in my frightful La-Z-Boy with the early morning light streaming in through windows and skylights. This scene is a major part of my recipe for creative thought.

When I followed my recipe this morning I was relishing the pages of an October 2009 issue of Dwell magazine. I turned a page and my attention was arrested by what I took to be a picture of the vaulted ceiling that dominates the interior of the York Minster in England. The webbed ceiling was illuminated by light streaming in from triptych stained-glass windows. The picture that caught my attention was taken from the cover of a book of photographs of the vaults of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, and the picture accompanied a short review. The illustration drew me into the copy, and I found the real nugget of gold in the anonymous article.

The author wistfully observes that these kinds of buildings hold our fascination because they can and will never be built again because we cannot afford it, and because, well…”We don’t know how.” This observation was juxtaposed with the next paragraph, which I thought was an incredibly eloquent statement that deserves deeper consideration:

“These buildings, some nearly a millennium old, are charged with the grandeur of God, as though the architects, suddenly doubting that it could be read in nature, decided to codify it in stone (Dwell, Oct. 2009, 42).”

First, the author observes that the buildings are charged with the grandeur of God. The conscious exercise of the architects and builders was to create and fill a space that attempted to communicate the awesomeness of God. They succeeded as the eyes of those who entered this sacred space were drawn upward. Second, the author says that the designers were impelled to intention because this awe was being missed in the commonplace that nature has become. In the cathedral of nature the eyes of peasants had been directed to the earth from which they drew their sustenance. The designers had a priestly duty to mediate the grand attributes of God to a less imaginative, but hopefully impressionable generation. When others missed the obvious presence of God, those who knew him intimately struggled to construct a grand telescope of stone and mortar, as it were, so that they could see him if they would only look. Ironically, the author suggests we will never see their ilk again.

A few pages earlier is an interview with contemporary designer Phiippe Starck, who is apparently obsessed with liars, thieves, and bad religion. If the redactor’s selectivity is any indication, Starck blames a great deal on being brought up, at least, with religious education while acknowledging at the same time it helped make him what he is. From his apparently self-righteous mistrust he has fashioned a world of whimsy that includes a dream to kill (repurpose?) materiality and that he believes justifies his existence (“…I do believe we all have to try to deserve to exist.” So some don’t deserve to exist? What do we do with them (me?)? Ibid., 40) with fifteen iPods and sleep his only apparent comforts. I found the interview confusing and contradictory and wondered what wonders Starck was mediating to a suffering humanity? He needs mediation himself but he was apparently inoculated against the best antidote to materiality by the dunderheads who misrepresented the God of the universe. He grew up in an epoch that forgot how to build telescopes.

Instead, I can imagine microscopes being offered to Starck by well-meaning emergent (but equally confused) dunderheads who would praise his art, cluck their sympathies for his mistreatment at the hands of the religious, and join him in his anti-materiality crusade without ever holding out a vision of the greater story of the God of nature and of the vault. Microscopes beneath the canopy of space are plentiful, cheap, and boring.

The anonymous book reviewer uncovered an insight that must be meditated upon vis-à-vis the mediatorial designers of cathedrals: we will never see their kind again. No more telescopes of stone, mortar, and glass. Too costly. We don’t know how. Rigidity failed. The anemic identification practices of the emergent will yield no more dialogue with wanderers than his modernist forbears experienced in the last century. So at last I come to the question inspired by the insightful sentence: who (rather than what) will be charged with the grandeur of God in such a way that the eyes of others will be drawn upward?