Author Archives: cleithart

I am alive and have two legs. This state of affairs will hopefully continue for quite some time.

A Man Chips Away

In looking for commonplace books available online for free, I came across a volume by H. Rider Haggard in which he chronicles his first year of farming the family plot of land. No great agricultural insights will be unearthed in his book, Haggard admits. He is really interested in the experience of learning to farm.

I would like to do the same thing on my blog. I rarely post updates about my writing because it feels like Monday morning quarterbacking. Why write about writing when writing itself needs to be done? I have a deathly fear of being one of those people who talk rather than do. But, thinking about it, I realize that, in my case, a little bit of self-reflection could be a kind of tonic that may actually strengthen my writing constitution.

All that to say, I have been chipping away at a middle-grade novel set in Philadelphia that I call “FB” for short. (I haven’t thought up a title I’m happy with.) I’ve finished a complete first draft of FB, which, though a horrendous, mutant mess, does have good bones. My main challenge over the next few months will be moving through that manuscript chapter by chapter, nipping and tucking. The task daunts me. But there are moments when I forget to be daunted and enjoy myself.

A Man Visits Sick Heart River

On Sunday, my father preached a wonderful sermon at TPC. One of his best, I think. He spoke of Christ’s loneliness on the cross, and afterward, a parishioner asked him if he knew of any artistic representations of that kind of loneliness. We have gory images in art, so we can imagine Jesus’s pain. But do we anything that communicates his abandonment?

Some suggestions were thrown out: Harry entering the forest at the end of Deathly Hallows; the film version of Endo’s Silence; part of The Power and the Glory. I mentioned Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, which is a real bummer of a book. My dad brought up a John Buchan novel called Sick Heart River, which he had read years ago. It’s about a man who goes out into the Canadian wilderness to die. Google didn’t give us much information, until I discovered that the book was published in the US under a different name: Mountain Meadow.

I’ve been collecting books that have been released from Samford’s library. They put them on a little red roller shelf that sits in the lobby with a sign taped to it that says “FREE BOOKS.” One of the many volumes I’ve schlepped back to my office over the past few months is Mountain Meadow. When I picked it up, I knew nothing about it except that it was written by John Buchan. Now I know it is good enough for my father to remember it after twenty years.

Here are some photos of the object of my good fortune.

A Man Honors His Father and Mother

We are called to honor this very long gallery of ancestors in its fullness, not just our fathers and mothers. How can we “honor” this chain of begetting and being begotten that disappears into pre-history, and earlier still, the chain of creation’s fecundity in producing and being produced?

Environmentalism is partially a response to the claim that we have evolved from the Earth. If the Earth produced us, then we ought to worship Her.

The quote above is from a First Things piece by Remi Brague, which is thought-provoking – even if many of the thoughts are along the lines of “what nonsense!” I’m sure Brague would dispute my interpretation of his question, since he’s a Christian, but it does help me understand the reverence with which some evolutionists speak of Nature.

A Man Pursues Holiness

I have just finished reading J. C. Ryle’s fat book Holiness. Ryle’s style is a shade pompous for my taste, but he does pack a lot of richness in these pages. Here are a few quotes that leapt out at me.

A religion which costs nothing is worth nothing.

I wish to be as broad as the Bible, neither less nor more.

On sin:

Dim or indistinct views of sin are the origin of most of the errors, heresies, and false doctrines of the present day.

The more real grace men have in their hearts, the deeper is their sense of sin.

On death & resurrection:

Nothing, I am convinced, will astonish us so much, when we awake in the resurrection day, as the view we shall have of sin, and the retrospect we shall take of our own countless shortcomings and defects.

Most men hope to go to heaven when they die; but few, it may be feared, take the trouble to consider whether they would enjoy heaven if they got there. Heaven is essentially a holy place; its inhabitants are all holy; its occupations are all holy. To be really happy in heaven, it is clear and plain that we must be somewhat trained and made ready for heaven while we are on earth.

Death works no change. The grave makes no alteration. Each will rise again with the same character in which he breathed his last. Where will our place be if we are strangers to holiness now?

Nothing, surely, is so likely to prepare us for that heaven where Christ’s personal presence will be all, and that glory where we shall meet Christ face to face, as to realize communion with Christ, as an actual living person here on earth. There is all the difference in the world between an idea and a person.

Of all the things that will surprise us in the resurrection morning, this I believe will surprise us most: that we did not love Christ more before we died.

A Man Makes Nothing Happen

Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” This has been interpreted by many to mean that poetry is really a frivolous enterprise, something you’d only engage in for fun. There’s something to that interpretation. After all, Auden said elsewhere that he thought of himself as “God’s fool,” good for entertainment only—an important but very much extraneous job.

Alan Jacobs has a slightly more nuanced view. In a talk he gave here in Birmingham last fall, he said the emphasis should be on the second word: “makes.” Poetry makes nothing happen, Jacobs explained, but it can prompt a lot. It’s a carrot and perhaps a stick, but not the horse itself.

Like generations of upstarts before me, I’m here to suggest yet another interpretation, one that hopefully complements Jacobs’ rather than refuting it. Mine is based on a pun that Auden was probably familiar with: the similarity of the words “nothing” and “noting” (that is, paying attention). As countless highschool students have been told, the title of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing carries both of these meanings. The play is about eavesdropping, miscommunication — noting — and, ultimately, a big fuss over nothing at all. (Yet it’s still amazing and wondrous. How do you do that, Bill?)

If we read Auden’s line as “poetry makes noting happen,” we hear him say that, though poetry doesn’t do much, it does make people pay attention. This wouldn’t be the first time Auden pointed out such a thing. In his Horae Canonicae, he spoke of “that eye on the object look” that artists display. Artistry means paying attention, for the artist as well as for the audience.

Does it work in the context of the poem? Here’s the second part of Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” from which the line is taken:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

It seems to me that both meanings make sense here: poetry does not force anything, does not fix anything. But it does survive as “a way of happening, a mouth.” Though it may not do much, it creates an opening. And open spaces can draw the eye.

A Man Failed to Predict Best Actor

Back when I wrote reviews for Film Fisher, I had to pick which actors to “tag” in any particular film. The first review I wrote was for Short Term 12. When I posted it, I mulled over who I should tag. As the star, Brie Larson was an obvious choice — her career since has justified that instinct. Keith Stanfield (a.k.a, Lakeith Stanfield) got some big moments in the movie, so I put him in there, too, as well as Kaitlyn Dever, who hasn’t gone on to do much of note.

If you scan the credits for Short Term 12, you’ll find one big name I left off my list. I say “big” because he just won the Oscar for Best Actor.

Yeah, it’s Rami Malek. Whups.

A Man is a List of Books to Read

Megan Whalen Turner, author of the excellent Queen’s Thief series, included a list of recommended books at the end of one of her novels. It’s easy, she says, to find lists of new books for young readers, harder to find lists of old. Her recommendations address that imbalance. I’m a sucker for recommendations and for lists of books, so I’ve reproduced MWT’s work here:

  1. The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff
  2. Warrior Scarlet, Rosemary Sutcliff
  3. Blood Feud, Rosemary Sutcliff
  4. Knight’s Fee, Rosemary Sutcliff
  5. Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rudyard Kipling
  6. The Enchanted Castle, E. Nesbit
  7. The Story of the Treasure Seekers, E. Nesbit
  8. The Railway Children, E. Nesbit
  9. Half Magic, Edward Eager (a favorite)
  10. Magic By the Lake, Edward Eager
  11. Seven Day Magic, Edward Eager
  12. Knight’s Castle, Edward Eager
  13. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken (another favorite)
  14. Black Hearts in Battersea, Joan Aiken
  15. Midnight is a Place, Joan Aiken
  16. Go Saddle the Sea, Joan Aiken
  17. The Green Knowe series, L. M. Boston
  18. The Return of the Twelves, Pauline Clarke
  19. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Time, Jane Louise Curry
  20. The Perilous Guard, Elizabeth Marie Pope
  21. The Sherwood Ring, Elizabeth Marie Pope
  22. The Changes trilogy, Peter Dickinson
  23. The Princess and Curdie, George MacDonald
  24. The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald
  25. Moccasin Trail, Eloise Jarvis McGraw
  26. Little Britches, Ralph Moody
  27. Minnow on the Say, Philippa Pearce
  28. Tom’s Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce
  29. The Ides of April, Mary Ray
  30. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
  31. Three on the Run, Nina Bawden
  32. Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne
  33. Playing Beatrice Bow, Ruth Park
  34. The Crime of Martin Coverly, Leonard Wibberly
  35. A Chance Child, Jill Patton Walsh