Let go the wrists of idleness!

"The people who know their God shall stand firm and take action." (Daniel)

It's so difficult for me to adopt an active, leaderlike mindset...even when situations urgently require such an attitude. I have been gifted naturally, in some sense, with the "meek quiet submissive" spirit, and it's difficult for me to recognize that a life of righteous integrity often requires zealous and even aggressive pursuit of what is right. This presbyterian culture in which I have been steeped for my entire life makes it all too easy for me to "cop out" and hide behind my feminine submissiveness (aka, passivity?) when people call on me to take a stand or express an opinion. Being an instinctive pleaser only compounds the difficulty of such situations for me. More and more, however, as I read the Bible and books like Captivating and Lost Women of the Bible, God is revealing to me how important it is for me to actively hound down the truth, and then, firmly rooted in it, live out its implications for my life in whatever capacity God requires...even if that means that I must confront a friend or speak up in a heated conversation. One of the most important lessons that I have learned this past semester is that humility does not excluse righteous passion--and that a spirit of gentleness can all too quickly transform into a spirit of fear. God has liberated me to know Him and walk in His ways, and He sees me and loves me. That knowledge insulates my fearful heart from its nightmares (both real and imagined), while at the same time widening it to embrace a calling that is much greater and more beautiful than anything it has yet imagined.

I'm looking forward to standing firm and taking action in the coming days, weeks, and years.

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond—

Invisible, as Music—

But positive, as Sound—

It beckons, and it baffles—

Philosophy—don't know—

And through a Riddle, at the last—

Sagacity, must go—

To guess it, puzzles scholars—

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown—

Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—

Blushes, if any see—

Plucks at a twig of Evidence—

And asks a Vane, the way—

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—

Strong Hallelujahs roll—

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul—

[emily dickinson]

ADDENDUM:

The previous post is a paper that I wrote for British Novel--one that has been on my heart, really, since Christmas and the fading of some precious beautiful relationships, and my own anguished soul-searching about the impossibility of knowing, really knowing anyone. I remember that while I was in the throes of this crisis, feeling alone, inadequate, and ashamed, I stumbled across Matthew Arnold's The Buried Life in my quote book (an inevitable recourse during such moments). It hardly encouraged me. (Here's an excerpt:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
...Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!)

I read those words, and despaired. I know I sound melodramatic, but if you think really hard about those words, and apply them to your own situation, I think you'll find yourself despairing as well.

Thankfully I have a God who knows my needs. The Holy Spirit guided me to Psalm 139 in my quest for comfort, and there I read these words:

O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying downand are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;it is high; I cannot attain it.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morningand dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me,and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,and the light about me be night,”even the darkness is not dark to you;the night is bright as the day,for darkness is as light with you.
For you formed my inward parts;you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;my soul knows it very well.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.I awake, and I am still with you.
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me!

Someday (this summer?) I want to write more fully about the indescribable comfort of knowing that I have been known by God. Ponder it for yourself! I assure you that only by realizing this, and by seeking to know Him in return through His Word and Spirit, will you ever experience true communion with anyone. And that is not something you want to miss.

A frustrating paradox

Because every reader bears his or her own exclusive cargo of self into the reading experience, individual reader response criticism has arisen as a resolution to the subjective nature of the enterprise. In this form of analysis, evaluation depends upon a particular individual’s reaction to reading a particular piece of literature. By supplementing to it his or her own distinct perspective, the reader deepens the inherent meaning of the text, while simultaneously allowing the text to reshape the original perspective. Every single act of reading contains a dimension inimitable to the isolated event.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse lends itself to a reader response approach to criticism. It enters the individual psyches of several characters, tests their reactions to the reality that encompasses them, and extracts from these separate samples a shared essence. Critiquing this book from an individual reader response approach parallels the thrust of the book itself, which reveals that the selfhood of each character results in singular reactions to identical circumstances. Such an analysis has worth for everybody, in that it appeals to an experience common to all: the struggle to mine reality for meaning and fellowship. Because of this, my response to To the Lighthouse, although exclusive, can still profit others by appealing to the humanity (or, in Christian terms, the image of God) in all of us.

I choose to dwell upon the theme of this text that most impressed me: the paradox of the self, which craves and requires interaction with others, and yet cannot achieve true fellowship because of the very structures created to facilitate it.

Woolf creates a small society to people her novel, and, from the perspective of various individuals, records the efforts of the various members to connect to each other. The movement of the novel is primarily associative, tracing an emotional chain of reaction between the characters that is fashioned out of both verbal and physical communication. Mrs. Ramsay occupies a pivotal role in this mystical chemistry experiment: she is a catalyst for many of the reactions that take place, including those between James and Mr. Ramsay, Lily and Mr. Bankes, and Minta and Paul. Lily depicts “Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand” (Woolf 50). Her life is a battle to connect people, to assert “their common cause against that fluidity out there” (Woolf 97).

The dinner party scene illustrates this most clearly. As Mrs. Ramsay approaches the simple act of hosting a meal, she feels that “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (Woolf 83). Throughout the entire dinner scene, she forces people to connect, even against their wills. Bankes must be her guest and sample the Boeuf en Daube. Lily must succumb to Mrs. Ramsay’s pressure and speak kindly to Tansley. At the close of the meal, Paul and Minta enter, engaged as a result of Mrs. Ramsay’s influence. Lily describes her hostess’ powers thus: “She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end…. She put a spell on them all, by wishing” (Woolf 101). Even Mr. Carmichael, the man over whom Mrs. Ramsay exerts the least control, shares a moment of unity with her as they both admire the platter of fruit. “Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit,” Mrs. Ramsay notices, remarking that, although “his way of looking” was “different from hers”, nevertheless “looking together united them” (Woolf 97). At the close of the meal, when her husband begins to recite the poem, she takes delight in the fact that “every one at the table was listening to the voice…with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking” (Woolf 111). From the moment that she enters the scene until the moment she leaves, Mrs. Ramsay unites her guests—achieving, at the very end, a sense that this joint listening, this participation in the lone voice, was natural, and expressive of their own individual selves. Thus far, society and fellowship, communion of souls.

And yet, this unity that Mrs. Ramsay achieves is ultimately both superficial and fleeting. She, the binding force, must conquer her own desire to remain “out of the eddy” of interaction, to sink into herself and find “rest on the floor of the sea” (Woolf 84). Her first address to Mr. Bankes reveals that she really isn’t connecting with him: she pities him out of “one of those misjudgments…that arise from some need of her own rather than of other people’s” (Woolf 84). In the same way, all of the characters interact with each other in order to fulfill their own private needs, or out of a code of behavior that determines the roles that men and women must assume. Tansley speaks in order to “assert himself.” Lily at last succumbs to the pressure to “go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve…his urgent desire to assert himself” (Woolf 91). In so doing, she makes sure that they will never know each other—which, after all, is true fellowship. Thus, in forcing them to connect, Mrs. Ramsay actually ensures that true connection can never take place. Throughout the evening, the characters suppress their true selves in order to interact with each other. In the midst of the conversation, every participant feels that “something [is] lacking,” and worries lest their boredom be exposed (Woolf 94). Mr. Ramsay’s inability to conceal his genuine displeasure at Mr. Carmichael’s second helping of soup bothers his wife. When the candles are lit and “some change” passes through the party that makes them “conscious of making a party together” (Woolf 97), attention nevertheless is given to the “mask-like look of faces by candlelight” (Woolf 98). Mrs. Ramsay contemplates her children with puzzlement, wondering what was “hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask-like faces,” and noting that “they did not join easily” (Woolf 109). The party ends with the triumphant unity of the guests in Mr. Ramsay’s recitation…and then fades into the past. Even such unity as was achieved is only temporary, for it is always necessary “to carry everything a step further” (Woolf 111).

The dinner scene illustrates this paradox of the self. Lily describes the dilemma of living with the Ramsays (and, one might extrapolate, participating in society), as that of being “made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other” (Woolf 102). Lily reflects on the “extreme obscurity of human relationships” with the despairing question, “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy?” (Woolf 171) She expresses the act of relating in these terms: “Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface, and that is what you see us by.” For all of Mrs. Ramsay’s efforts to create fellowship between people, she regards her own life as “something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband” (Woolf 59).

Despite this frustration with the inadequacy of human interactions, the various characters seek each other’s company. The motives for this are, at a first glance, selfish: to fulfill some inner craving, to puzzle out meaning in a life that seems chaotic, or to fashion permanence out of fluidity. Yet these selfish motivations do not take into account that without society the self would perish, because it would have no way to access its potential, no standard against which to measure itself. All the characters in this novel crave fellowship, strive to know and be known by others, even when they feel the futility of such a quest and dislike being forced to compromise their inner self in order to attain even the superficial bonds they create. The entire novel hangs upon this tension, between the private selfhood of each person, and the inescapable necessity of interacting with other private and alien Selves.

How then, Woolf seems to ask, does one live? Out of this tension emerges the task of reconciling our Selves to living in a world that seems indifferent, that will not last…and perhaps, even through the hopeless incoherence of our relationships with other Selves, attaining something meaningful and lasting.

As an individual responding to Woolf’s novel, seeking to express the ways that it has impacted my Self, I engage the world. Accepting that this blundering medium, language, has clouded as much as it has distilled, I yet maintain the importance of striving for community through such arts. I know that without such relationships, without engaging the world and others through art, my Self would die. This knowledge leaves me with a challenge: to pursue integrity relentlessly, so that the relationships that connect my Self with the universe will harbor Truth.

Like Lily Briscoe, I have had my vision.

the quote of the year!

"There is an age of aesthetic accountability that you eventually reach."
-Adam Carter, responding to the question of whether or not shoddy art can be glorifying to God.