Friday Links
December 22, 2024
The Three Magi by Ioannis Permeniates
What Happens to the Heart in Advent by Jonathan Geltner
Phil Klay: All I Want for Christmas is... Books!
Strange Fiction: John Wilson in Prufrock
Mary McCarthy Revisted: An Orphan’s Questions by Paul Baumann
Some Christmas verse
What Happens to the Heart in Advent by Jonathan Geltner
This is from a 2020 essay in Church Life Journal and well worth the revisit.
The acclaimed Norwegian author Jon Fosse is in the process of publishing a novel, Septology, in a style that he calls “mystical realism” and “slow prose.”[ ] It is a masterpiece of renunciant, Eckhartian negative theology—or, if I may coin the adjective, “Adventine.” So to begin, we need to think about what Advent connotes from the point of view of a writer or any creative artist.
This is where writers and artists start: What is going on in the sky? What do the soil and the woods and fields and streets smell like? Does the wind blow and the sea flow, and is the air cold or warm? What is there to eat and to drink? And who is here by my side? . . .
We gather ourselves together to kindle the light of inward attention, and we gather with others in the world to make warmth and mark that part of life lived in relation by the ceremony of reunion. The repetition of seasonality is so strong a catalyst to memory, and so precarious is our purchase on seemingly linear time, that the answer to the question “Who is here by my side?” may include those who no longer are here with us, but with whom we once shared this time of ingathering.
And Advent is the time of expectation. To really grasp what expectation is, think that we say of a woman who will deliver a child that she is expecting. That is the kind of attention that Advent connotes, the attention of fullness, of pregnancy—and of intense coming labor and change of life. It does this directly in the sense that it is the season leading up to the celebration of the birth of Jesus.
Phil Klay: All I Want for Christmas is... Books!
Who doesn't?! You have to scroll down to get to Phil’s piece, but the others are fun to read as well, so don’t skip them!
Strange Fiction: John Wilson in Prufrock
So many wonderful things brought together in one substack newsletter: Prufrock, Micah Mattix’s not-to-be-missed newsletter with guest poster, the wonderful John Wilson, writing about the our very own, also wonderful, Rhonda Ortiz . . . pure joy!
I mentioned science fiction a moment ago. Has it occurred to you that there’s an affinity between “science fiction” and “historical fiction,” though for some reason it’s rarely mentioned? I’d love to see a good book that considered the two genres side-by-side. Both are exercises in what is sometimes called “world-building.” I was thinking of this while reading a historical novel I mentioned briefly in my column for September, Adrift, by Rhonda Ortiz, the second book in a projected trilogy (the “Molly Chase Series”). Set near the end of the 18th century, it encompasses naval lore, spycraft, domestic routines, romance, and more, in a world that is in many respects as “strange” to us as the far-flung realms of “outer space.” If you think this might be your cup of tea, start with the first book in the trilogy, In Pieces.
Mary McCarthy Revisted: An Orphan’s Questions by Paul Baumann
But there was another, more important aspect of her Catholic education that left a lasting mark on the future novelist. Counterintuitively for a writer who was known for her strict respect for facts and truth, this aspect had to do with Catholicism’s focus on the otherworldly. “Nothing is more boring to a child than the principle of utility,” she writes. “The final usefulness of my Catholic training was to teach me, together with much that proved to be practical, a conception of something prior to and beyond utility (‘Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spring’), an idea of sheer wastefulnesss that is always shocking to non-Catholics…. What I recall with gratitude, was the sense of mystery and wonder.”
Some Christmas verse
A. E. Stallings’s “First Miracle”; Robert Frost’s “Christmas Trees”; Patrick Cavanaugh’s “A Christmas Childhood”; Anthony Esolen on Richard Wilbur’s “A Christmas Hymn.”