I just noticed the total number of posts I have published to this blog. Just over three hundred in almost two years, and that's including posts that were comprised of pictures only, or excuses about why I wasn't posting. I guess you could say (and I probably have already) that it is emblematic of my stage in life. Parker is almost three. Isaac is a week away from turning seven months old. It's a good stage, but it keeps me from writing--almost anything.
I finished Walker Percy's Signposts in a Strange Land two or three days ago. It's a collection of his essays on numerous topics, and it was great. I have to comment that I probably wouldn't have gotten through the entire thing if it weren't for an obligation to certain friends who were reading it too--but I think that's the neat thing about reading in community: exposure to books you might not choose to read on your own, the opportunity to ask questions and discuss matters of interest with others who share a similar (though never identical) reading experience, and the chance to push forward with something you know is worthwhile even when the reading isn't clearly motivating in and of itself. I remember our friend John K. saying that you have to read things you don't understand before you can begin to understand them. The Walker Percy wasn't the easiest reading, and I probably understood maybe 30% of it, but I'm already planning for the time when I can read it again, knowing that next time I will understand more of it.
Right now I am working my way through Paul Elie's The Life you Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. I'm having a rough time with it. He is writing the stories of four people: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. It's been hard for me so far because I have only been able to read it in snatches, he intertwines these four histories according to a pattern that hasn't emerged for me, and because so far he has focused mainly on Day and Merton, while O'Connor and Percy are the ones I really care about. I suppose that Elie's emphasis is less literary than I had expected. I'm also uncomfortable with the socialism/communism that was so important to Day, so that has presented some difficulty too. It is also true that my memory has become so bad that I have difficulty picking up Merton's story in the midst of Day's.
The most recent item that has interested me about Percy is his connection with Mark van Doren. It's silly that, having read nothing by van Doren, my interest is engaged because of the portrayal of his character in a movie, Quiz Show.
I'm also reading, at last, and absolutely, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It seems particularly appropriate now because my brother, Andrew, is currently on the road. Not like Kerouac, but still, he is out there. Other more compelling reasons to read it: a passing interest in the beat poets that I never pursued, the recent Mark Helprin nove (Freddy and Fredericka) evoking Kerouac in passages, and more importantly, the recommendation of a cousin, who once described his religion on Facebook as Christian Buddhism.
After writing all of the preceding this morning, I also picked up The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, by Robert Scholes, while feeding the baby. I couldn't help myself. There it has sat on my bedstand for a couple of months, and Facebook says that I am reading it. I wanted to pick it up and see which essay I was on. Unfortunately I've only barely made it to the second, and of that I hardly remember what I have read. I do remember one thing however. I remember Scholes contention that professors should still be intensely concerned with truth, and yet according to my memory I don't know what he means by that. I don't remember his discussion of truth comporting with my own understanding of it.
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You have readers.
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