Month: November 2010 Page 1 of 2

In the early 1990s, I had the privilege of driving Dr. James Montgomery Boice, then pastor of Philadalphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, from Bradenton, Florida, after a speaking engagement at our church, to the train station in Tampa, where he was to catch a train (he was weary of flying) back to Philadelphia.

On that ride, Dr. Boice revealed to me that he was then beginning to read again Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume history The Story of Civilization. I was impressed by his desire to be well rounded and in his curiosity in all things.

So when I heard of Susan Wise Bauer’s similar but more compact four-volume history, I decided to jump in. (I have finished The History of the Ancient World and am in the middle of The History of the Medieval World.)

I’m glad that I have done so, and from the vantage point of 1400 pages in, I feel that I’m in a position of making an observation or two.

First, I’m impressed. Knowing something of how hard it is to write, and how difficult it can be to sustain one’s productive interest in a project of this magnitude over a prolonged period of time, I cannot imagine how tough it is for her to keep at this project for so long. Add to this the fact that she is not an historian, but a professor of English, I am more amazed at her ability to grasp and wrestle to the ground such massive amounts of information.

Secondly, she tells this story with as much passion and interest and personality as she can muster. The narrative is punctuated with wry observations about the myriad characters involved. She is able, for example, to see through and expose with a wink a king’s supposed ‘holy’ purpose when it is clearly a raw grab for power.

Thirdly, her purpose is incredibly noble. She is not trying to write a typical Euro-centric ‘world’ history, but a true history of the whole world, giving the stories of China and India and Japan and the Islamic states, and one imagines in the future, those of Africa and South and North America, equal coverage.

The problem I find is that the task is just so monumental that I’m sure that it is impossible to do.

Compressing such massive amounts of information into a mere four volumes of 900-1000 pages each results in a narrative that moves from one battle to another, one political play for power to another military victory, from one region to another. Sprinkled within are occasional glimpses of life, and now and again the pace slows to give the back story to contemporary events (such as the intriguing explication of the different claims of Sunni and Shia Muslims). But overall, something of the human in the story is lost.

I’m thinking that part of the problem is my own. My knowledge of, say, the ninth century, is so insipid that the parade of names and places leaves me as dazed as a first reading of the prophecy of Isaiah must to the person new to the Bible.

But I can’t help but think that the issue is bigger than that. That it is impossible when one moves further and further away and condenses an era into fewer and fewer pages to write much more than about tectonic shifts in power. Lost is the detail that makes the living of life human.

I have calculated that if one were to shrink the earth to the size of a bowling ball, that the resulting sphere would be, if possible, smoother than a bowling ball. That is, all the detail and contrast which make the earth wonderful to observe would be gone. All that would be left to describe would be surface detail. For the most part, that is how I feel in reading these books. They are well done. But the scope is too large.

Somewhere, a family this morning is sitting down to a breakfast of waffles and sausage, perhaps celebrating the return of a son or daughter from military service or mourning the loss of a family patriarch. Elsewhere, a young man is plotting the means of telling his girl of his undying love and desire to marry her. And still elsewhere, a child is going to sleep hungry, struggling with his family to find the food to eat in an impoverished land.

All over this drama goes on and has gone on, but none of it is visible to the writer of a general history. And the further we are removed from these stories, the more sterile a history MUST become. When one pulls back further and further, one is left with little but battles and wars and usurpations and power struggles. And no matter how well that history is written – and this one is written well – the end result can be tedious.

Perhaps I’m not James Montgomery Boice after all.

I don’t know enough to make this statement, but I’ll make it anyway, the first of several inflated claims to follow:

When the baby boom generation was young, we wrote and filmed tales about the young. The novel The Catcher in the Rye and the movie Rebel without a Cause come to mind. Now that that generation has aged, we seem to be thinking a great deal more about, well, aging and the Terminal Event. The movies Something’s Gotta Give and Solitary Man come to mind, as do the recent and well celebrated novels Gilead,  Olive Kitteridge, and this recent Pulitzer winner, Tinkers. Our generation may not be invincible after all.

Tinkers, like every work mentioned above, focuses upon a life in relationship with those around it. The central life here is that of one George Crosby, a teacher, guidance counselor, and through the end of his life, a successful ‘horologist’ – an expert in the workings and repair of old clocks. We are introduced to George on his death bed, as he variously hallucinates and remembers, and drifts in and out of connection with those who have gathered to be present with him as he dies, those whom he can no longer recognize.

The story is told with soul and depth and poetic art. We enter a dying man’s hallucinations and experience an epileptic seizure first hand. And we watch George Crosby’s minister grandfather go slowly insane. This is a dying man with a troubled and unhappy past. With similarities to Olive and to Gilead, this is the telling of the tale of lives lived and looked back upon. The characters all are non-heroic, such heroism as there is being nothing more than the ability to survive in this broken and unhappy world. I am left with a series of impressions, of poetic images, many of which feel real, but at the same time sober and disquieting.

To say more would require a re-read and further reflection, and even then I’m not sure I would be able to put my finger on the point of it all, if there is one. One character in Tinkers is technically a ‘tinker’ (“…a person who travels from place to place mending metal utensils as a way of making a living.”) and another ‘tinkers’ with clocks. At some level, though, I get the impression that included among this group of ‘tinkerers’ may actually be the creator, who is doing a damn poor job of getting his world to run properly.

There is an obscurity here that makes the reading slow rolling, and keeps me, for all the beautifully phrased run-on sentences, from wanting to return. I’m loathe to be critical beyond that. However, let me digress a moment.

I believe in the authority of aesthetic elders. I believe that we should bow before the breadth of knowledge and depth of insight of those who really KNOW a thing before we presume to pronounce a judgment on it. I must leave, for example, the judgment between ‘good’ jazz and ‘bad’ jazz to others, and yet at the same time accept on the authority of those who know music that jazz itself is something worth listening to and knowing.

So in this spirit I do defer to my literary elders, those who guided the author, Paul Harding, through the writing workshops and measured his work against others on the Pulitzer committee. I accept their judgment that this is a very good book.

But still, I protest when a non-linear narrative forces me, the reader, to become a detective patching together a meaningful story out of seemingly random flashbacks, hallucinations, recollections, and quotes from an 18th century book on horology. This style may be good, but I’m not a fan.

The trend toward the elimination of quotation marks and the inconsistent and often changing point of view makes the reading a more difficult and less enjoyable task. Why, I wonder, would an author want to make his reader work harder, unless, as I gathered from a Cormac McCarthy interview with Oprah Winfrey, such authors assume that if we are too stupid to figure it out we ought to just stick to Go, Dog. Go!
.

Okay. I’m over-reacting.

But I am puzzled by the intentionally obscure considered as art. I sometimes wonder if there is an arrogance infiltrating the literary elite which excludes plebeians like me.

Upon reflection, the book has grown in my favor. But slowly. I know that good art is often characterized by a certain measure of ambiguity allowing understanding at multiple depths. So perhaps – no promises – perhaps I’ll return to Tinkers some day, and puzzle again over what makes it tick.