A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, February 11, 2010

What I'm Reading

The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong 

Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capabilities of mind and heart. This will be one of the major themes of this book. (p. xiii)
This makes religion sound like yoga or dieting or vowing to read ten pages of Proust every day: one of those worthwhile pastimes that one resolves to take up on New Year's Day, and not the central and most powerful guide to life. But that's okay. It's a definition that I, being something of a spiritual lazybones, rather like. 

[The] rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. (p. xv) 
And related partly because each is an alarmed reaction to the other.  

If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. (p. 8) 
Yes, and art has gained the upper hand. Sometimes religion's attempts to construct meaning only produce more "relentless pain and injustice." A recognition of this, and of the fact that humans -- not god(s) -- "have created religions," has caused many of us to turn for consolation to the arts and not to religion. 

The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. (p. 9)

Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, a "stepping outside" of the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. (p. 10) 
Which explains why religions have traditionally been hostile to most of these other outlets.     
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