Beautiful books

     

In The Christian Century last October, ten well-established authors were invited to tell readers about a book they would describe as beautiful.

      The article didn’t clarify what was meant by “beautiful,” nor whether the editors were thinking of fiction or non-fiction.

      Those who read the article, probably didn’t mind. They knew the writers well enough to guess how they had approached their task. Who cared? It was a delightful  challenge, and most of us were happy to have a few more good titles to add to our MUST READ lists.

      I should mention that, in his segment, Parker J. Palmer (founder of The Center for Courage and Renewal) helps clarify the word beauty by quoting poet Mary Oliver on the purpose of beauty in the world: “We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.” Palmer suggests we should go out and be beautiful in our own way.

      His book choice is one of the Port William (Kentucky), novels by Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter. He writes: “Hannah’s beauty runs deeper and wider than anything a beauty pageant has ever seen. It’s the beauty of ‘an old woman twice widowed, who has experienced much loss yet has never been defeated’.”

      Obviously, I can’t offer more than a sampling of the responses the Century published in their feature, but I’d like to include one of my favorite Christian writers, Barbara Brown Taylor, who teaches at Piedmont College in Georgia. She names Florida Scott-Maxwell’s book on aging, The Measure of My Days.

      “It is beautiful in the ear,” she says, “with prose that reads more like poetry. It is beautiful in its humanity, doing what the best books do: convincing us there is more to everything than we first imagined.”

      She concludes: “Scott-Maxwell upset my certainty about aging. Forty years later she is still upsetting it, giving me all the permission I need to age ferociously.”

      B.D. McClay, Senior Editor of The Hedgehog Review, University of Virginia, chooses Penelope Fitzgerald’s historical novel about the courtship of the German romantic poet Novalis and Sophie von Kühn, The Blue Flower. 

      McClay welcomes the book’s revelation of the tremendous power of love and yet its insufficiency. She speaks of “the degree to which we can’t ever know what we mean to one another, the amount of unreciprocated light we shed for and on one another.” This, she says, is what makes the book “so beautiful.”

      Cincinnati pediatrician Brian Volck selected George Eliot’s Victorian novel Middlemarch, which he describes as the wisest work of prose fiction he knows.

      It gave him a whole new perspective on current affairs: “Now I pause to sigh, even cry, over the condition of civil society in the United States. The crude, abusive, deceptive, manipulative, wealth-obsessed, egomaniacal, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and fear-driven politics we are suffering from. …”

      Volck concludes: “As the Apostle Paul reminds us, we are members of one another … and we’d do well to work hard to reclaim the well-being of our body politic before it becomes too ugly to be redeemed.”

      A professor of world religions at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Carol Zaleski, has something similar in mind when she writes of her choice: “With fresh news of corruption and abuse served up daily, any book that portrays true innocence—innocence tested, perhaps, but not ruined—seems beautiful.

      “Any book that speaks in praise of innocence without denying the Fall, without sentimentality, without the romanticism that ends in ennui, is something to be treasured.”

Where is such a book to be found?

      Zaleski’s answer: A work by 17th-century cleric Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, which insists that “infant felicity is a possession not wholly lost in adulthood and calling us to a conscious, disciplined recovery of innocent delight.”

      Further research I leave to you!

      Which brings us, with a dab of effrontery, to my choice of a beautiful book: Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
      In the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition, which came out in 2005, her daughter Reeve captured the Morrow spirit perfectly: “Her words offer a chance to breathe and to live more slowly … makes it possible to quiet down and rest in the present, no matter what the circumstances may be … to exist for a while in a different and more peaceful tempo. Above all, it offers an unusual kind of freedom that comes from choosing to remain open … to life itself, whatever it may bring—joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change.”

      Does that sound like Anne Morrow Lindbergh herself?  Of course it does! And these lines from my favorite book confirm it:

      "The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.”

      Anne Morrow continues: “When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.  

      “The waves echo behind me. Patience—Faith— Openness, is what the sea has to teach.  Simplicity— Solitude—Intermittency. But there are other beaches to explore. There are more shells to find. This is only a beginning.“

      Beautiful?

      No question about it.