The Old and the Novel

The notion of a path or journey to describes one’s life is a bit overused, so I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid such a metaphor. The problem is that I have yet to find one that works as well. No worries: I won’t take up space trying out new ones. Instead, I will let those first two sentences act as my jumping-off point for whatever comes next. After all, that is quite literally what they are.

Truth, meaning, beauty, and faith are subjects I’ve long pondered and written on. Truth has been elusive, I guess, in—I want to say—the last year, but apparently, it goes much further back than that.

Dennis, Jack, Sam, Henry, and I recently watched The Matrix. It was the second go-round for Dennis and me (third for him?), but the first for the three boys. I suppose it has held up quite well over the years, considering what we’ve all gotten used to in the special effects department of movies. More than that, though, The Matrix answered some questions, posed a few new ones, and illuminated dark corners.

Do you ever wonder why you bristle at something? Do you ever try to figure out the reasons for an effect you experience? I have become adroit at this little exercise. Some would say, too much so. There were times when I thought the need to know why would drive me insane, but I seem to have developed a balance, so a nebulous answer often suffices, whereas in the past, I needed specifics.

The world is about to change, as it hasn’t done in millennia. I hope that I am ready to navigate my way through, and I hope that I able to help others deal with it all. I find it nearly impossible to wrap my mind around specifics, but then, I’ve always been better at analyzing the past than visualizing the future.

One of the areas in which the past has taught me to focus my gaze has been in the arena of pride. I have come to understand why it is considered the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. I have come to highly value humility and to look for it in myself and in others. The one thing I’ve not been able to do, apparently, is quash my own pride enough. So, I beat on—at the very least, working to recognize when I fall, working to pick myself up, striving to swallow the urge to demand what I want, what I think I need, the impulse to tell someone else, “You’re doing it wrong.”

All of that leaves me here, right where I am, looking at the landscape around me, continuing to analyze, to assess, to try to open my mouth only when I have something constructive to add to “the conversation,” certainly not to cover yet another glimpse of beauty with dirt and debris. Thank goodness, each day is new, with no mistakes in it, for it were not, I’d be buried beneath my own.

In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, René Girard writes:

There is novelistic genius when what is true about Others becomes true about the hero, in fact, true about the novelist himself. After cursing Others the Oedipus-novelist realizes he himself is guilty. Pride can never reach its own mediator, but the experience of The Past Recaptured [by Marcel Proust] is the death of pride, the birth of humility and thus of truth. When Dostoevsky praises the terrible strength of humility he is speaking of novelistic creation.

Someday, I hope to create a novel, and I hope to do it right.