Printoxicated
MamaT is posting all things bookish today, and is leading me into financial temptation. Sometimes I have half a mind to just buy the Ignatius Press catalog and get it over with. But then there's Tan, Sophia, Regnery...I hear even Knopf puts out some interesting titles.
The holiday required reading, but reading is such a tremendously discursive activity, endlessly beguiling, like entering a maze. I got a bad case of whipshaw from trying to read too many things at once. Peony & Steven mentioned Patrick O'Brian's books and I flew hence for a short read.
Then there is the crack-cocaine of reading OPOs (other people's opinions) of figures I admire, i.e. the Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger, Cardinal Newman. Other people's opinions are interesting because they view the subject from a different perspective. A biographer, unless he's writing an encyclopedia entry, can not help but bring his coloring into the picture. Since I know my own coloring, my prejudices, and my baggage, it's fascinating to see how other people view figures because they can look at this person from an angle I simply can not get to. I can read Ratzinger but forever see him only through my prism. But what delight to read of John Allen's view, and not just Allen's view but Allen's collection of other people's views. Suddenly I am reading about Ratzinger from scores of perspectives, from Kung's to the Pope's.
What else to read? Scripture, of course, and Luke 2:14 caught my eye, both for the variability of translations and the fact that here was the proclamation, straight from God, that Jesus is joy: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!". I read Scott Hahn's take on it in the Ignatius Study Bible and then went to the Jerome Biblical Commentary & finally to Bernard Orchard's A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture. Hahn led me to the nearly unbearable beauty of CCC 537: "Let us be buried with Christ by Baptism to rise with him; let us go down with him to be raised with him; and let us rise with him to be glorified with him....Everything that happened to Christ lets us know that, after the bath of water, the Holy Spirit swoops down upon us from high heaven and that, adopted by the Father's voice, we become sons of God."
I caught a bit of the film Mary Poppins, then googled for the theology behind it and read that the author, PL Travers, knew TS Eliot & WB Yeats but was something of a spiritualist (like Yeats). For some reason she reminded me of Isak Dineson and so I spent a pleasant hour with Out of Africa. Some of her sentences sing, like the best poetry, and cry for a highlighter. I moved on to WFB's literary memoir, who can turn a brilliant phrase himself and who even found good things to say about Sisyphus, saying his endless task gave him peace. (And, after all, aren't we all Sisyphus?)
In that last hour of the last day of vacation I desperately fought off sleep, a warrior beneath crashing weight of tome. Time and again the heavy book would fall upon my chest, instantly awakening me. I eventually traded it for a paperback, Groeschel's latest, and somewhere in the Introduction I lost consciousness...
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