As I write this article, I am sitting on our sandy colored canvas couch with skin that is still blistery from my morning shower. The smell of dark, rich coffee grounds still wafts through our apartment as I sit and ponder. My bare feet are pressed against the wood floor and I can still taste the saccharine, coffee creamer. The soft hum of the air conditioner is the only white noise as I am left alone between these four, white concrete walls. The 19" television reflects my faceless silhouette and a blurry replica of the rest of my surroundings. While gazing at the monitor, I have an epiphany of sorts. The television screen's depiction of my whereabouts is profoundly accurate. Modern homes remove us from the physical landscape and place us in a kind of non-descript location. In fact, I do not even know what the weather is like outside.
I write all this to communicate one important truth I believe we often forget: life is sensory. We live in a multi-dimensional world where we are immersed in sights, sounds, noises, and smells. In our modern society, we can often feel detached from the world around us. Great books help us to connect with the physical world by taking us to both places we have been and haven't been and allowing us to see what we didn't see before. In particular, great literature books help us do this. That is why I am encouraging you to read great literary books and not just theological ones. You will find great jewels if you do. And occassionally you come upon a diamond like this one in Willa Cather's My Antonia:
There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
How wonderful it is to lose oneself in something entire! It is the goal of life and the pinnacle of man's enjoyment to be dissolved into something complete and great. What a message that our culture needs to hear today: the end of self-discovery is misery but the end of self-forgetfulness is joy! However, it is not the "sun and air, or goodness and knowledge" that we are called to lose ourselves in but the creator of sun, air, goodness, and knowledge! How close Cather was and yet, tragically, how far away.
Thus, I encourage you, as a discerning reader, to expand your diet of books. You might be surprised at what you find. Soli deo gloria!
1 comment:
Good post. Reminds me of "The Pleasure of God in His Creation" from Piper's The Pleasures of God (77ff).
Post a Comment