Books that have "Stayed with me"

          Due to some inspiration by friends/acquaintances on Facebook, as well as by a longstanding desire to be able to look back at the history of my own thinking, I'm compiling a list of books that have 'stayed with me.' I've also included short blurbs for my own reading pleasure (or horror) five years from now. Skip or read at your own risk. Below is a list of twelve of those books/poems/authors/ideas. If this gains any popular tracking, I'll probably continue the list on into the 40s or 50s. I'll probably finish it even if nobody gives a rip. Keep in mind that his is not a top "X" list. These are listed in no particular order, and any of the other 40/50 might have made it here.

Also, some (or all) of the quotes might not be accurate. They're from memory. Forgive the punctuation, word swaps, and such.

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

"Why must holy places be dark places" has haunted me since I first read it. It  captures (ed) both my desire for religious answers to be true and my trouble of determining whether their (demanding) claims can possibly be true. Orual whispers this question to herself over and over, and so do I; and truthfully, I'm not sure Lewis' "till we have faces" answer is altogether satisfying. Among others, I now call this the "hiddenness of God" problem and find it curious that, at the very least, faith of God's presence/existence is a necessary condition for religious living. While this seems like a tautology, it's odd to me that it should be that way. Why would God, the gods, or 'transcendence' choose (assuming it has something like agency) to be hidden given the possibility that humanity might have been better served simply by having tangible, non-faith-oriented access to it? Does Christ-as-God's physical presence solve this problem perpetually through the epochs of human history? How could it? Is the Holy Spirit as readily available to all men as Evangelicalism suggests? I'm skeptical. What does it mean to have a personal relationship with God that lacks emotive and social reciprocation, not to mention physical contact: three human traits that a God as Wholly Other cannot, by definition, entertain? These are all hard questions.

"Hamlet" by Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
"The undiscovered country from who's born no traveler returns puzzles the will and rather makes us bear those ills we have than fly to ones we know not of. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." Anyone who takes religion seriously, especially some of its heavier claims about the afterlife, has to recon with this quote. It's the singular reason I have, as an agnostic concerning the afterlife, never considered suicide a viable option, no matter how oppressive my despair. As a poet, no one can deny the avalanche of Shakespeare's creative genius. As a human, no one can deny that Hamlet is a challenging work. "What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause," crosses my mind at least once a week. 

"Ash Wednesday" a poem by T. S. Eliot
"Because I do not hope to turn again/Because I do not hope." My sophomore year of college sent me into years of Christian doubt that corresponded with years of existential despair. The first time I read this poem came pari passu with one of my existential and intellectual swings that favored the claims of the Christian faith. I knew immediately that it would stay with me for a long time. In truth, this poem is largely responsible for the birth of the book of poetry I am about half way finished writing.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
 "Instead of dialectics their was life." In the months preceding and following the first time I read Crime and Punishment, I endured the longest fit of intense despair that I can remember. Those were the months that I began smoking regularly, that insomnia first limited my sleep to 3 or 4 hours a night, and that I became emotionally and socially reclusive. Raskolnikov's  words were my own, and it was therapeutic to read him. To this day, I think any admiration I have for  those who do not share the same need to parse the meaning of everything stems from the day I read that line. One might go so far as to say that I chose and continue to choose to surround myself with people who focus on life instead of dialectics largely because of Dostoevsky.

Confessions by St. Augustine

"Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee." Can I honestly say that any other phrase has haunted me so much? It's doubtful. For many years and for many very good reasons I used to think that Augustine was faultless on this front. For all his theo/historio-centric exaggerations concerning sexual behavior, Augustine's Neo-Platonic God-as-the-Good move here seemed beyond criticism. The equation was simple: devote your attention entirely to God and you will be contented and existentially fulfilled. But in spite of my fervent devotion, I never once found that loving God solely or primarily, (or lesser loves as a means of loving him--as Augustine's egoism would have us do) fulfilled me. On the contrary, I found that it was not a relationship (whatever that means) with God that calmed me; in its own way, it haunted me. I found that I expected too much of God. In other words, while I still maintain that God (or whatever) can fulfill part of the human need at any given time, and can possibly do so on a permanent, even eternal, basis, I do not buy into the picture that says transcendence fulfills every need, or even the most essential chunk of it at any given time. What's essential at any given time, I imagine, is relative to each individual. Resting in God, in other words, does not strike me as a necessary condition for human happiness; in truth, I think this is an oversimplification. Changing the object of our love and desire to God only guarantees that there is an object; it doesn't guarantee that the object is fulfilling enough. Searching for God or for meaning in him is still searching. Discontentment with one's relationship to God is still discontentment. God may very well fill the 'God shaped hole,' (which may not even be true keeping in mind the Buddhist monk), but how could he fill anything else other than by usurpation? And does he succeed in usurping in every case? I don't think so. He is useless, for example, with respect to hunger and food. I can pray until I pass out, even have an intense religious experience, but I'll probably be passing out because I need food, not God. Doesn't his Wholly Other status interfere with any legitimate sense of something like the desire for a lover and the actual lover? Call one's relationship with God a lover's tryst, there's no tryst in any number of essential ways. God-as-primary love does not omit, usurp, or even necessary have anything to do with other desires and objects. But this is the trouble: these desires and object can be just as haunting, just as causal to loneliness and discontentment, as something like the despair resulting from that 'God-shaped-hole.'

Even still, I maintain and continue to hold to Augustine's revision of Stoic passions and pre-passions as outlined in The Confessions. There are well-ordered and inordinate passions. In Confessions, Augustine deals most heavily with this theme in his conversations about his weeping over the death of Dido, Nebridius, Ambrose, and Monica. While I don' t think he comes to a clear conclusion concerning when it is and when it is not appropriate to weep, I think he is right that one ought to order their passions. Of course, he Christinizes this Stoic claim, but for me it was the first time I encountered the whole idea.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Quentin's father gave him a wrist-watch saying, "I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. It is rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience, which can fit your individual needs no more than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not so that you may remember time, but so that you may forget it now and then, for a moment, and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools." I have read the first half of The Sound and the Fury twenty times, and have never finished it. Truthfully, I have never cared much for the story, only for Quentin's soliloquies. This is true in general of fiction for me (save for fantasy fiction). The first and only time that I have had an hallucination (that resulted largely from despair related stress) came at around the same time I read this book. On the days I felt most like an atheist, Faulkner was my voice. 

To this day I think that Faulkner should not be analyzed too much. He's a fiction writer with a poet's talents and should be treated as such. The only way to know him is to quote him:

"It was a long while before the last stroke ceased vibrating. It stayed in the air, more felt than heard for a long time. Like all the bells that ever rang, still ringing in the long and dying light rays and Jesus and St. Francis talking about his sister. Because if it were just to hell. If that were all of it, finished. If things just finished themselves, no one else there but her and me. If we could have just done something so dreadful they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said father it was I not Dalton Aimes. And when he put Dalton Aimes, Dalton Aimes, Dalton Aimes. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn't. That's why I didn't. He would be there and she would and I would. I said if we could have just done something so dreadful and father said that's sad too. People cannot do anything that dreadful. They cannot do anything very dreadful at all. They cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today, and I said you can shirk all things and he said 'Ah, can you.' And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind. Like a roof of wind, and after a long while they cannot distinguish even the bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. It's not when you realize that nothing can help you; religion, pride, anything. It's when you realize you don't need any aide."

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
I maintain that this is probably one of the most important books I have ever read. "Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul" I open its pages to be re-reminded of the importance of magic, of the fact that things could have been otherwise, and of the fact that everything good, whether great and or inconsequential, is a gift and a miracle. From Chesterton and no one else I learned the attitude, art, and practice of gratitude. Tigers could very well have grown from trees. That apples are silver in fairy stories is only a reminder of the first time I realized that they could be green on earth. Every moment is has a silver apple, and as such every moment has its miracle. 

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto
I think that Otto oversimplifies, is exceedingly unclear, and that he is basically wrong about everything that he says. That is, except for a few things: 1) there is probably an evolution to religious belief and Christianity is, if not the best option, one of the better options due almost entirely to the body of religious theory pouring and evolving out of it. 2) religious experiences are very likely sui generis in the sense of interacting with something from the spiritual realm. It's an academic book intended to be read academically, but it's practical, personal implications should not be ignored. They have been important to me. Otto has been effective in moving me toward developing a robust account of the history of religious growth. He has also catered to my belief that while we should listen carefully to tradition, we should also carefully criticize it.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Truth and beauty or comfort and stability. This tetra-distinction infiltrated every aspect of my life during college. Which set of values does one go for, and by which criteria do I measure my actions? Huxley taught me that for every choice, I necessarily chose between truth and beauty or comfort and stability. Though I no longer take this distinction as seriously as I used to (it's partially incoherent), it has been a useful heuristic in decision making and still occasionally makes its way into day-to-day life. When you choose to convert from one religion to the next, for example, you are probably choosing truth and beauty over comfort and stability. Contrary-wise, when you choose to remain in your current religious status, without room for evolution, you are probably choosing comfort and stability. These value sets played a role in my departure from Evangelicalism several years ago. I could not choose comfort and stability over what appeared (es) to me to be the truth. They play a part in me oscillating between Christianity and agnosticism today.

"Ode to a Nightengale" by John Keats
The bastard wrote the best poem ever written at the age of 23. I'm nearly 28, and for all I know I've already peaked. Nothing to even publish. I have read this poem more times than I can remember, and have wept nearly half of those times. I have not read it in years because I no longer need to. Every word is eternally etched in my memory. "Darkling, I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful death." I mention it in this list because it has functioned as a prayer, as therapy, as a stimulant, as a catalyst, as a horror, a picture, etc. over and over many times in my life. I have quoted it to myself on mountain tops and in foreign countries, on the toilet and driving a car. It has meant something to me in the way your favorite sweater means something to you. It was there through many life stages. It both represents and informs my experience.

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
I still think it's the best story I have ever read, and I refuse to read it ever again (though I'll watch the movies) for exactly that reason. My fascination and wonder faculty would no longer be primary, and I would spend too much time analyzing Rowling: what she did right and what she did wrong. This story has 'stayed with me' in the sense that if I ever write a fantasy, I want strong elements of it to be like Harry Potter. I want to entertain myself and my readers, and I want my readers to love my characters as if they knew them and would miss them if they were gone.

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

I am Jamesian through and through. I have read this book more than I have read any other book save, perhaps, Augustine's Confessions. Whatever pragmatic bents I have are largely influenced by James, and to the degree that I am an agnostic, I am probably exactly the type of pluralistic agnostic James would want. Truth is, I want to be like James when I grow up. His perceptibility, writing style, humility, and genius are all qualities I admire and agree with. In many ways, he was my first teacher. It was in reading James that I realized that there was no major ethical gap between Christianity and other weltanchauungs. What gaps there were, were determined by the dogma informing how one measures what is ethical and what is not. This blew my mind as a 22 year old. I was told that Christians were better people when, in fact, they were just better at being Christians than other people.

It was also here that I began to take seriously both phenomenology as a philosophical discipline and a religious studies discipline. My thesis took root in James before it took root in Heidegger and Otto. I believe now as I did from the start that the best source for determining what religious experiences are all about is the people who have the experiences.

I also learned to take Buddhism seriously, Islam seriously, atheism seriously, agnosticism seriously, etc. etc. I realized that we're all just trying to figure it out, and that it's scary and confusing, and that all the dogmatism with which I was raised was just someone's way of circumventing those fears and confusions. Kudos to them, of course; they sleep well at night. There's is the example par excellence of 'ignorance is bliss.' While I am far removed from all of these revelations (that was nearly six years ago), they continue to play a role in my life.