The Iron Curtain

A lot of people ask the question: If God really loves us and cares about us, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? The common answer given is that the only way that we can truly exhibit our love for God is if it is genuine, and genuine love for God is a result of freedom of choice. Evil and suffering come from the choice of separating ourselves from God--our source of life and happiness. That's a great answer, but now, I have an additional response to add to the argument: if God hadn't given us freedom of choice, we essentially would be living under an eternal communist government! How incredibly awful would that be!?!

For more information, I highly recommend the book The Iron Curtain by Harry and Bonaro Overstreet, a book published in 1963 when Communism was still in place in our world. The authors thoroughly explain the rise of Communism, the ways of life under its power, and the reasons why Communism would eventually fall. They call readers to look to the Iron Curtain as an example of artificial freedoms and encourage the world to not be sucked in by Communist propaganda.

This is the key statement which instigated this post:

If...the people who are ruled by the Party have "unbounded love" for it and recognize how right it is in all its policies, why must they be denied the chance to make free choices and comparisons? Why has the refugee tide, from 1917 to the present, been almost exclusively away from Communism's domain? Why has Khrushchev needed to make it a capital offense for anyone to try to leave the Soviet Union without permission; or, once out, to try to avoid returning to it? (page 198)

For further examples of Communism, read The Giver. I don't know if that's what the author was getting at, but after learning what I have about Communism, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the false utopia around which her book revolves.

The Mobile Library Series

If you liked "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and the character of Arthur Dent in particular, you should read The Mobile Library Series by Ian Sansom. The Mobile Library's main character, Israel Armstrong, BA (Hons), is similar in his hapless attempts to control his less than desirable job as a mobile librarian northern Ireland, and entirely likable, if a bit of a sad sack. I like him really, because I relate to his unrealistic expectations of life, which are mostly heavily influenced by the books he's read. I think we could be friends.

In the first book of the series, "The Case of the Missing Books," Israel arrives in Ireland, expecting to be made head librarian of the local library, only to find it has been closed and all the books supposedly transferred to a large mobile library van. Only all the books are not on the van, or the old library building, but missing. As the new head librarian, it is up to Israel to find the books. Here's a bit from the second chapter.

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Israel Joseph Armstrong, BA, (Hons), had arrived in Northern Ireland on the overnight ferry from Stranraer. In his rich imagination, Israel's crossing to Ireland was a kind of pilgrimage, an act of necessity and homage, similar to the crossings made by generations of his own family who had made the reverse journey from Ireland to England, and from Russian and Poland, from famines and pogroms and persecution to the New World, or at least to Bethnal and then Golders Green and eventually further out to the Home Counties, and to Essex, and similar also to the fateful trip made by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood on board the Champlain....

He'd read far too many books, that was Israel's trouble. Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer's afternoon. He'd been a bookish child, right from the off, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realizing or noticing, who enjoyed books without his parents' insistence, who raced through non-fiction at an early age, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide-ranging vocabulary and just about no earthly good to anyone at all.

His expectations were sky-high and his grasp of reality was minimal.

[The ferry crossing was making him ill]; this was not how his new life and new career in Ireland were supposed to begin. His new life in Ireland was supposed to be overflowing with blarney and craic. He was supposed to be excited and ready, trembling on the verge of a great adventure. But instead, Israel was trembling on the verge of being sick again, and the journey had given him a terrible, terrible headache.

Thought Food

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

 

--CS Lewis

Duty and Desire

"Who would not choose red and gold over  black and a silly old wig?" Trenholme offered. "Wickham knows, as does any man, that the ladies go faint with admiration over a uniform. Is that not true, Miss Avery?" he quizzed.

Miss Avery colored alarmingly as the attention of the table centered upon her. She looked helplessly at her brother, whose only encouragement was an irritated frown. "A u-uniform is n-nice," she stuttered miserably.

"Nice? Bella!" Manning's withering tone caused Darcy to wince while the others became fascinated with their silver service or wineglasses. "Good Lord, speak up and stop st---!"

"But she has spoken, my lord, and much to the point!" Lady Felicia smiled gently into the swimming eyes of the very young lady. "A uniform is nice." She faced the others, arching one brow. "It makes a plain man smart; a dull man intelligent; and a timid man brave with merely putting it on-- at least, in his own estimation!"A chorus of masculine denials mixed with chuckles raised the spirits of the hapless Miss Avery.

"And what will a uniform do for a more talented man, Lady Felicia?" asked Lady Sayre. "I vow, it is more than 'nice' work then."

"Oh, my dear Lady Sayre." Lady Felicia looked to her hostess. "It is well known that a uniform makes a smart man dashing; an intelligent man a genius; and a brave man a hero in no more time than it takes his batman to brush it and ease him into it." A new howl went up from the gentlemen, and the ladies were forced to resort to their fans. Darcy smiled approvingly. Her rescue of Miss Avery by the turning of Manning's embarrassing treatment of his sister into a clever conceit was well and compassionately done.

-- Pamela Aidan, Duty and Desire (the second book of her Darcy series), p. 122-123

The Faerie Queene

This is the summary my Renaissance Lit class was given for Cantos 7 and 8 from Book 3. Don't they make you want to read it?

"These cantos treat the adventures of the true and false Florimells. Always in flight, Florimell narrowly escapes a series of disasters. The son of a witch in whose cottage she takes refuge is smitten with passion for her; when she escapes in the night the witch sends a hyena 'that feeds on women's flesh' to capture or kill her. To escape him she leaps into the boat of an aged fisherman who promptly tries to rape her; she is saved by the god Proteus, who carries her off to his bower in the sea and presses his suit to her continually, in every shape and guise. Meantime, to save her pining son from death, the witch creates for him a false Florimell made of snow but he loses her quickly to the braggart knight Braggadochio, who himself loses her to a stranger knight. Meanwhile, Sir Satyrane (1.6) tames the hyena and rescues the Squire of Dames (a knight whose name reflects his promiscuity) from the giantess Argante, a figure of unnatural lust in female form. These two knights meet up wiht a third, Paridell, and all seek shelter from a sudden thunderstorm in Malbecco's castle."

I'm not making this up. Honestly.

My Girlfriend

I got a new girlfriend, though I don't like girls.
I haven't much money, but I buy her pearls.

I'm always embarrassed, but I give her flowers,
and talk on the phone every evening for hours.

We go to the movies, and she gets to pick.
She wants to hold hands, though it makes me feel sick.

She likes when I smell good, so I take a bath.
I do what she asks me, and she does my math.

--Kenn Nesbitt

Anna Karenina

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

-- W.B. Yeats

Thus begins the introduction to my very favorite translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The quote is, in my opinion, an apt one. Most people who have studied this particular work are of the opinion that Tolstoy wrote himself into it as Levin, a man who has every reason to be happy yet finds himself deeply, perhaps even suicidally, unhappy. This struggle is, of course, the mirror image of Anna herself, the woman who has many reasons to be unhappy yet is happy until she meets a man (not her husband) who has fallen for her.

This novel is a beautiful one, and if you have not taken the time to familiarize yourself with the Russian classics, this is a great beginning. Don't worry; as the back cover says, this translation is "neither musty, nor overly modernized, nor primly recast as a Victorian landscape" (Caryl Emerson).

So, basically, what I'm saying is: "Read it. Read it now."

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