Summer Reading

The imagination required for good reading will not come to life without experience of the real thing.

The Fourth of July in Lander, Wyoming, is about parades, barbecues, and fireworks that approximate, say, the shelling of Saipan in 1944. It’s about rodeo. The Fremont Toyota Pioneer Days Rodeo on the evening of the Fourth began by featuring various ways of being hurled from a horse (for example, bareback or saddle bronc riding), and it ended with even more primordial danger. Taking a seat (little mortal that you are) on the back of a massive, potent, enraged bull, whose ton of muscle is explosive with power, who would love to trample and gore you and anyone else within reach, or, on the other hand, sitting in an armchair beneath a lamp, turning the page and reaching carelessly for coffee or wine on the side table—well, not the same. This does not seem like the week to write about summer reading.

But the imagination required for good reading will not come to life without experience of the real thing. In the Odyssey, when Telemachus first approaches the home of the great hero Nestor, a great sacrifice is going on: “the people on the shore of the sea were making sacrifice/of bulls who were all black to the dark-haired Earthshaker.” Nine different settlements provide nine bulls each—81 bulls—in this homage to Poseidon. When I imagine what it would take to ritually slaughter even one of those huge, bucking creatures that it took multiple riders and other men on foot to steer back out of the rodeo arena, the splendor of Homer’s scene comes into focus. When Melville wants to explain the “gentle joyousness” of Moby Dick, he compares the White Whale to “the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns”—power in tranquility. This is imagination at its best, which reveals attention to the wonder of the real world. Like Lander itself, Wyoming Catholic College is very good at the real world, and the most fruitful aspect of this education is the correspondence awakened between world and word.

That correspondence comes in many different forms. Several weeks ago, I recommended Simon Singh’s book, Fermat’s Last Theorem, in part because of its compelling way of showing the relation between mathematics and everyday reality. The book has the narrative drive of a detective novel as it takes its reader into the obsessive work of a mathematician named Andrew Wiles and helps make the scope of his achievement comprehensible to a layman. To explain what the contemporary genius did requires Singh to recapitulate the whole history of mathematical thinking, starting with Pythagoras and ending with Wiles, who solved a problem that had stumped the greatest mathematicians of the past three centuries. Singh’s story revived my interest in a book I’ve had on my shelf for a few years now, Tobias Dantzig’s Number: The Language of Science, which Einstein described as “beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands.” If I make my way through Dantzig, maybe I’ll be ready for the text our students use, Richard Courant’s What Is Mathematics? which Einstein also praised.

I said that Singh “revived my interest” in reading Dantzig, whose book I already had. What exactly is “interest,” if it can come and go, which it certainly does? Interest originally meant a stake in something, an investment. We use the word now for anything that creates that tug of mental desire to know more, to find out things. It’s funny how we admire interest. In fact, interest is contagious. One of my grandsons, a nine-year-old, is interested in World War II, for example, and when he visited, his interest kept him paging through a huge illustrated history of the war, pointing out kinds of tanks and airplanes while I remembered my interest in World War II fighter planes when I was his age (especially, the Spitfire, the Messerschmidt Bf-109, and the P-51 Mustang).

What gets us interested in certain things might be deliberate: a good teacher can get students interested in poetry or botany, for example. Or it might be almost accidental. I am reading Max Hastings’ The Korean War—another book that has been around for years—because of a recent visit to the truly superb National Museum of Military Vehicles an hour from Lander near Dubois. Hastings starts his book with the story of Task Force Smith, the unprepared soldiers who first encountered the Communist invasion from North Korea in 1950—an episode depicted in the museum. Similarly, I’m reading David McCullough’s Great Bridge, because my wife and I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883, on a recent visit to see our son’s new play in New York. The very existence of the bridge evokes an earlier American spirit that had real grandeur, we imagine, instead of endless partisan pettiness.

In those very same years, however, Gen. William T. Sherman, faced with the dismantling of the U.S. Army and a prohibition to use troops to suppress riots, wrote home in 1877, “You had better overhaul all the muskets and pistols in the attic, for a time will soon come when every householder must defend with fire-arms his own castle. This may seem absurd, but to such an ending are we drifting. Also, the country will soon conclude that Congress is a nuisance to be suppressed.” Who would think of Congress as a nuisance, we wonder? Sherman hated politics. Books about Sherman pile up around me (I can turn my head and count seven of them) because he plays a large role in the next book I’m writing.

What about fiction? Last year, I was reading my way slowly through Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, which I greatly admire; this year the big one is a fascinating and huge novel about Burma and India in the colonial 19th and early 20th centuries, The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh. It’s one of those books I can return to, with pleasure, after forays into other fiction. While I’ve been reading it, for example, I have read Michael Connelly’s The Dark Hours, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, and Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing and The Clearing. Anyone who likes detective fiction already knows Michael Connelly’s work because his Harry Bosch series is famous. Mandel’s fictional worlds elide and separate in fascinating ways in her different novels—for example, in Station Eleven, a character dies in a worldwide plague and in The Glass Hotel, the same character pursues her career in a world where the plague never happened. The revelation among these books, for me at least, is Tim Gautreaux. A friend from the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, Dr. Carolyn Watson, recommended his fiction to me, and I happily pass on the high recommendation. I loved both novels for their humane spirit—the surprise of real goodness in a world which knows the whole depth of evil.

Lastly: poetry. One of this year’s WSCT participants sent us The Book of the Passion by the Chilean poet and priest, José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois. So far, I have read only a few pages, but the scope of vision is astonishing. This book-length poem will be my summer meditation. Also, the contemporary Christian poet Christian Wiman has come into focus for me this past month, largely because of gifts from our Commencement speaker, Rusty Reno, and our son Will. In He Held Radical Light, a series of linked essays about art and faith, Wiman writes, “Reluctant writers, reluctant ministers, reluctant teachers—these are the ones whose lives and works can be examples. Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it. ‘The impeded stream is the one that sings’” (Wendell Berry).

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

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