Getting It Perfect

Last year was the centenary of the birth of Russell Kirk, so with my typical lag-time I was reading about him and found that he loved ghost stories, and that his fiction may have generated more royalties for him than his influential books on conservatism. So I checked into the Dallas Public Library and checked out Kirk’s 1962 thriller, Old House of Fear.
    The copy the library delivered up to me is an early hardcover printing. It has been around for half a century, obviously much read. I found it gripping, just the sort of book, I thought, that my late wife, Susan, would have loved: well-written, clean, full of twists and local lore (here, an old Scottish island), a quite unexpected love-story, and a haunting yet satisfactory ending.
    Since Susan is no longer here for me to pester about this, may I recommend it to you? Eerdmans has reprinted it, I see, in a paperback edition. It has a certain theological interest. And you might find a decent old copy in your own municipal library.
    One question it raises is the reality of ghosts, spirits, old haunting things. They appear, or are feared, in various points in the action, and yet the weird phenomena turn out to be explainable in other, more normal ways. Another question is the reality, as it were, of evil, and here the book is more ambiguous. The chief villain, who seems to be able to perform such acts as making furniture float in air, is someone, the heroine thinks, who once was good and is haunted by his memory of the tortures and killings he has perpetrated in his life. Nonetheless, he is truly bad and, it seems, irredeemably so. When he dies, his body is simply gone—never found, never washing ashore.
    A similar thing happens to the villain in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters: she drowns and there is no body. Evil is a rejection of reality—and at the end, there is nothing there.
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    So I’m reading this old book with great enjoyment, and then I find a penciled mark on a page. This is the only writing in the book. I do not like it when I find writing in library books—it seems to me a betrayal of trust for a reader to impose upon future readers his thoughts and underlinings and so on. So I was prepared to growl and pass on.
    But this penciled comment was actually a correction of grammar. It was a place where the text had “whomever” but should have had “whoever.” And the reason for the “whoever” was also indicated.
    At once I felt admiration for this public servant who had improved the text, correctly so. It was a shock to see that Kirk, or his publisher, had fallen into a rather sophisticated yet real grammatical error. Yet, apart from that one word, the entire text seemed to be perfect.
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    In the books that I own I tend to mark errors (as well as, since they are my own books, making a lot of other comments). An eminent theologian confuses Paul and John: I note it. A translator supplies a biblical reference for Augustine, but to “Cor.” rather than “1 Cor.” You can see I can be rather tedious.
    If only we could get everything right! O, the desire for perfection!
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    It haunts me. In Up with Authority, I refer to a sort of geometrical inversion that Dante performs in his Paradiso as a “slight of hand.” Where is the “e”? That wrong word (I went back to check this) was in every draft of mine, in every review by the copy-editor—I had a score of opportunities to notice it, as did others, yet none of us did. Now it’s in print.
    But a friend said: It’s only a slight error!
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    When I was a young man someone explained Navaho rugs to me. There’s always an imperfection deliberately left in them, I was told, so that the spirits won’t be trapped therein. Might Russell Kirk like the thought that there was an imperfection in his book that takes us so close to evil and uncanniness?
    And I am reminded, only Christ is perfect, his only is the perfect word.
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    Out & About. This Sunday, April 7, my “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will meet to discuss Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the short novel that amazingly got into print in the USSR in the 1960s, during a brief thaw, and that depicts human resilience in the midst of the horrendous conditions of a Soviet concentration camp. If you read the book you are welcome to our conversation from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas.
    I will be preaching next on Maundy Thursday and at the Easter Vigil at Incarnation.

 

Collateral Beauty

She says something like, “Don’t forget to notice the collateral beauty.” She is a stranger who has come up to a grieving mother in a hospital corridor. The mother’s daughter is dying. It’s deeply tragic, but this stranger (a messenger? an angel? one doesn’t know) does not in any way deny the awfulness of it. Nonetheless, she says we should be sure to see, even in the midst of tragedy, the beauty that’s there.

The film came out a few years ago; I was watching it on DVD, thanks to my public library. Despite having a great cast (Smith, Murrin, et al.), the film did poorly in the theaters. It came out at Christmastime, and is itself set at Christmas—perhaps people didn’t want to think about dying children at Christmas? (On the other hand, when you think about Jesus in the manger, are you not thinking about a child who will die? Father Mead used to say, with concise wisdom: “no Easter, no Christmas.”)

The critics panned it. Indeed, I don’t know what to think about its ending. It wasn’t sappy or sentimental, it didn’t fail that way; neither was it brutal or despairing. It was a surprise to me, a big surprise, but not clearly a fitting surprise. Good plots, Aristotle says, develop surprisingly yet fittingly.

Still I recommend it, “Collateral Beauty,” the film. You’ll love the actors playing actors. You’ll love the winter snow and the city lights at night. You’ll appreciate the hard honesty of much of the dialogue. You’ll marvel at the despair and dysfunction of the bereaved father—marvel and sympathize: that’s not me, but I can imagine, if certain things had happened in my life, that could have been me. And you won’t forget to look for the collateral beauty around us.

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This, I think, is rather like the book of Job. Talk about tragedy! Talk about catastrophe! Talk about a situation where there is nothing good that might come out of it to make it all right! Job could well say with scorn that God did not look down from heaven and say, “Job’s children, they’re wonderful people; I’ll send a tornado to kill them so that they can be with me.”

No: Job says it’s awful and God is responsible. He seems to be saying something true, but he doesn’t know the whole of it. So God invites him to some (shall we say) “reality therapy,” a walk on the wild side of things. Job sees how dangerous the cosmos is, and how tiny he is. He is only dust and ashes. But still, he sees, dust and ashes can be precious. That’s beautiful. That’s the collateral beauty.

And what we don’t want to miss is the final scene: human communion, people helping people, the meal at his home, his friends, the gifts, the comfort with which they strengthen each other. We speak sometimes of collateral damage, bad things and evil things in the world. Without denying their reality, the book of Job and perhaps this film suggest a different focus. There is something else to be seen, something of love, something of the author of love.

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Out & About. Sunday, Feb. 10, I’ll lead a discussion on Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. If you haven’t read this, it is at once powerful and simple, full of frontier American faith and questions of morals and tradition and family and friends. The seminar, part of the Good Books & Good Talk series, meets from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation in Dallas; anyone who reads the book is welcome to the conversation.

 

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: