photo by ryan_franklin_az

So anyway, I was looking for a copy of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, hoping it would be available online.  (He wrote it in 318 A.D., but you never know, Disney might have bought the copyright.)  The copy I found has a very good introduction by T.S. Eliot, which is what this post is about.  The whole thing is worth reading (it’s not too long), but here’s the part that jumped out at me:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it. … None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.

I’ve always known we should read old books, but never known exactly why.  I resisted reading them because, frankly, many are deadly boring.  Especially fiction—classic fiction just doesn’t have the characterization and dialogue of the modern fiction I enjoy.  But Eliot explains very well why we should make the effort to read the old books anyway.  It’s a way to see reality through the eyes of someone who doesn’t see it through the same filters that we do.  A way to learn things that are hidden from us by our contemporary assumptions.

It’s easy for us to see some of the filters of the past.  Slavery would be an obvious example.  To civilized people today, slavery is so obviously wrong that we can’t even imagine debating it.  We can even see that it doesn’t make economic sense.  But to most people throughout history (and still in some parts of the world today) it was assumed to be a fact of life.  If your tribe won a war, you got to make slaves of the losers.  If your tribe lost, you became a slave—if you looked like you were worth feeding.  Plenty of people didn’t like it—especially the slaves, of course—but few people seriously thought it could be eliminated in entire nations.  They couldn’t see past that filter.

So, what are the filters or assumptions that we have today, that we can’t see?  By definition, I guess we can’t answer that question; if we could, we wouldn’t be blind to them.  But I think by reading old books, as Eliot says, and trying to see ourselves through the eyes of another time, we might be able to get a glimpse of those filters from the outside.

If I had to guess, I’d say one of our assumptions might be the importance and inherent goodness of personal freedom, especially economic and political freedom.  In modern Western society, we pretty much believe that unless you’re directly hurting someone, you should be allowed to do whatever you want to do.  There are exceptions, of course—gun control, recent laws against politically incorrect speech, and a few others.  But for the most part, we think people should be free to say whatever they want, live and travel wherever they want, worship however they want, work wherever and at whatever job they want, buy or sell whatever they want, eat whatever they want, read/watch whatever they want, marry/live/sleep with whomever they want, choose whatever leaders they want, and so on.

Now, I’m not saying these freedoms are wrong.  I’m just saying that we don’t even argue the concept of freedom anymore.  We take for granted the basic idea that it’s good for individuals to be as free as possible, as long as they don’t step on someone else’s toes.  That would have been a very strange notion to most of our ancestors.  That’s not because they hadn’t considered such freedom a possibility, but they saw it as an option with pros and cons in a way that we don’t.  They likely would have looked at our drug use, illegitimacy rate, and full prisons and said, “Hmm, I think you guys could use a little less freedom.”

That’s my first guess: freedom as an inherent good.  Maybe I’ll be able to come up with some others after I read more old books.

“I know nothing of that,” retorted Brinn.  “I know only that she attempted Ceer’s life.”

Without warning, Covenant broke into a shout.  “I don’t care!”  He spat vehemence at Brinn as if it were being physically torn out of him.  “Linden saved me!  She saved all of us!  Do you think that was easy?  I’m not going to turn my back on her, just because she did something I don’t understand!”

“Ur-Lord—” Brinn began.

“No!”  Covenant’s passion carried so many implications of power that it shocked the deck under Linden’s feet.  “You’ve gone too far already!”  His chest heaved with the effort he made to control himself.  “In Andelain—with the Dead—Elena talked about her.  She said, ‘Care for her, beloved, so that in the end she may heal us all.’  Elena,” he insisted.  “The High Lord.  She loved me, and it killed her.  But never mind that.  I won’t have her treated this way.”  His voice shredded under the strain of self-containment.  “Maybe you don’t trust her.”  His half-fist jabbed possibilities of fire around him.  “Maybe you don’t trust me.”  He could not keep himself from yelling.  “But you are by God going to leave her alone!”

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

In this middle book of the second Covenant trilogy, Covenant decides his only hope is to create a new Staff of Law, to give him a way to heal the land without unleashing his increasingly erratic power.  So with Linden, Sunder, and Hollian, he heads east out of the Land, hoping to retrace the steps of Berek Halfhand, the legendary hero who created the first Staff from a limb of the One Tree.

This book is unique of the first six in that it’s the only one where the characters leave the Land.  It really opens up the story, as Covenant and Linden encounter Giants and sail with them and encounter other beings and places which were only legends in the earlier books: the Elohim, beings of enormous power with their own agenda for Covenant’s ring; The Bhrathair and the Sandgorgons, poised against each other for survival in the desert; the Nicor, sea creatures so large humans are beneath their notice; the merewives of the deep, whose siren song is more powerful than any man’s will; and many others.

Along the way, they are beset by Ravers trying to push Covenant’s power beyond his control.  When Covenant is unable to defend himself, Linden has to find her own sources of power, without succumbing to her own demons.

The Giants are one of the best parts of the book.  In the first trilogy, Foamfollower had a huge impact on Covenant and the way the story turned out, but he didn’t appear that long overall.  Here, we get a shipful of Giants, in their element upon the sea.  The First of the Search, a warrior whose loyalty is absolute; Pitchwife, her deformed husband whose humor keeps the Quest from despair; Seadreamer, the mute Giant whose visions both drive the Quest and doom it; and his brother Honninscrave, the ship’s master, who is tortured by being unable to help his brother as his crisis looms.

Linden continues to find her way and begins to realize that maybe she’s not as evil as she thought, that maybe she can even do good in the world.  She and Covenant get to share some happiness on the way to the One Tree, and it gives the book some refreshingly light moments.

In the end, the Quest has to return to the Land, as Covenant’s Dead told him in Andelain.  They’ve lost some things and gained others, and Covenant has come to terms with the responsibility he left the Land to escape.  Linden…well, she keeps growing within herself and gaining strength, convinced that eventually she will have to accept Covenant’s power—or combat him for it.

That’s certainly the case with From a Buick 8, where much of the creepiness comes from the unknown and unknowable. When an old Buick Roadmaster—or a sort of model of one—is abandoned at a rural Pennsylvania gas station, a group of state troopers take charge of it and do their best to contain the dangers it represents. Over many years, they gradually discover that the Buick is some sort of a conduit to and from another place, drawing in and spewing out things that may not actually be evil but which sure feel like it.

A nice touch is that the story is told to the son of one of the state troopers who originally discovered the car, and several of the troopers take turns telling the story, offering different perspectives. There’s no one hero, and in fact nothing really heroic happens, which is one of the main points of the book: In real life, problems that come along aren’t always fought and defeated like they are in the movies. Sometimes they’re simply contained or dealt with, and life goes on as best it can. Not exactly a climactic concept to base a plot on, but it works well here.

Despite what I said earlier, there are a couple of unpleasantly gory scenes reminiscent of more typical horror novels of King’s like Carrie, so don’t read this book if you’re very sensitive to that sort of thing.

I only recently discovered Leonard’s books, after reading quite a few by other authors in the same genre (what I think of as “tough guys who do what needs to be done without whining about it”), like Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, John Sandford, and Ed McBain. Leonard seems to tend toward the “edgier” end of the spectrum, with plenty of truly unsavory bad guys and heroes with plenty of flaws themselves. The world of these books is a seedy place, where very few people put anything else ahead of their own immediate gratification.

This book, and its protagonist,named Stick, are better than most. Stick, recently released after serving seven years on an armed robbery charge, has enough doubts to make him seem more real than the unreasonably confident James Bond types. He seems to want to go straight, but honestly isn’t sure how that’s done. (His first impulse, when trying to figure out how to go visit his little girl, is to steal a car.) He ends up (mostly) doing the right thing because the bad guys are so stupid and offensive, not because that’s how he plans it. It’s a good mix that makes him a likable character and more memorable than most in the genre, who are easily forgotten when one puts the book down.

The other characters are also well-drawn and easy to keep track of–something that’s important in pulp novels a reader can devour in a long afternoon. Chucky, Moke, Barry, and Nestor are all complete individuals; sometimes a bit over the top (or a lot in Chucky’s case), but always interesting. The women are fairly one-dimensional, which is typical in these books that are clearly written for men.

This is my first review, so I may decide on a different scoring system eventually, but for now I’m giving this one 3.5 out of 5 points. That’s pretty good for this kind of book: an adventure/thriller that’s only trying to be a fun, engaging read, and not trying to make any big points or do a ton of character development. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the authors I mentioned above; but if you think Bond movies are macho and violent, take a pass on this one.

(Whatever scale I use, I’ll use it all. This won’t be like the Olympics, where even the guy who falls down gets a 9.3 on a 10-point scale. Whenever possible, I’ll include a link to buy the book, which will pay me a few cents if you use it, so feel free to do so!)