3/08/2004 10:28:00 AM|||Andrew|||Monday Recommendations

I'm going to recommend two books to you today. First, J.D. Salinger's excellent volume, Franny and Zooey. It's actually quite possibly one of my favorite books of all time. All I can say is, if you've read Catcher in the Rye and liked it, this is far, far better. Not that I'm knocking Catcher, but is just can't compare. Let me give you two excerpt from Zooey, the second story in the book:

"The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. As a counterbalance, then, we begin with that everfresh and exciting odium: the author's formal introduction. The one I have in mind not only is wordy and earnest beyond my wildest dreams but is, to boot, rather excruciatingly personal. If, with the right kind of luck, it comes off, it should be comparable in effect to a compulsory guided tour through the engine room, with myself, as guide, leading the way in an old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit."

I swear, I go giddy with delight whenever I read this and similar passages. Only a genius like Salinger can pull this stuff off. It's marvelous. But another, more content-informing quote by one of his characters, Zooey:

"When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer--you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass's heart. I'm being serious now, God damn it. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer."

This, contained in the several page long passage in which the nature of Jesus in the Bible is discussed, to my delight. To find out what, exactly the Jesus Prayer is, read the book. :p If you live in College Station, ask me and I'll be glad to loan it to you.


The next book I want to recommend is, happily, public domain now. So you can go read Fear and Trembling by Kiekegaard here. In it, Kierkegaard ponders, waxes poetic, and analyzes the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, found in Genesis 22. Since the entire text is online, I have no excuse to inflict you with quotes, so go read this short section so I can talk about it. Interestingly enough, I read this book in one of my philosophy classes one time and someone there was upset, shocked even, that Kierkegaard would take such "liberties" with the text as he does in the section I just linked. Of course, Kiekegaard isn't saying that these things happened, he is trying to show how someone might try to understand Abraham's actions. And I wonder, because we do know so little about his motivations from the Biblical text. It's interesting at least to see how one might interpret it. Of course, then, the rest of Fear is really about Kierkegaard trying to understand the story for himself. Again, it's worth a read. |||107877051698041703|||