Discovered Wikibooks today. Very cool — it’s free, open-content textbooks on a variety of subjects. (I’m reading up on patch theory for my work on Beyond.)

It’s quote time. I finished The Problem of Pain last night, and there’s a lot of good stuff. The book is (obviously) about pain: if God is good, then why do bad things happen? What’s the purpose of pain? And it does an excellent job of answering those questions.

Anyway, page numbers refer to my Signature Classics (HarperSanFrancisco) edition, and I’ve included the chapter numbers in case you have a different edition. Here we go:

If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. (Chapter 1, p. 3)

[God’s] Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. (Chapter 2, p. 18)

When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning. (Chapter 3, p. 30)

Lewis then talks about what he calls the “intolerable” compliment:

Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life — the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child — he will take endless trouble — and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. (Chapter 3, p. 34-35)

On love:

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; his ‘feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails’. Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all. (Chapter 3, p. 39)

This is great:

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. (Chapter 3, p. 46)

And regarding God and happiness (you’ll want to read this one in context):

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows — the only food that any possible universe ever can grow — then we must starve eternally. (Chapter 3, p. 47)

In the next chapter he talks about human wickedness:

A God who did not regard this [incredibly mean and ugly action, referring to wickedness] with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God — it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink. (Chapter 4, p. 51)

Later on:

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms. (Chapter 6, p. 88)

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (Chapter 6, p. 91)

You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward. But what is that to the purpose? When I think of pain — of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that knock a man’s heart out at one blow, of pains that seem already intolerable and then are suddenly increased, of infuriating scorpion-stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement a man who seemed half dead with his previous tortures — it ‘quite o’ercrows my spirit’. If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it. (Chapter 6, p. 105)

My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contendedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over — I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless. (Chapter 6, p. 107)

Indignation at others’ sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humanity from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead. (Chapter 6, p. 108)

A merciful man aims at his neighbour’s good and so does ‘God’s will’, consciously co-operating with ‘the simple good’. A cruel man oppresses his neighbour, and so does simple evil. But in doing such evil, he is used by God, without his own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good — so that the first man serves God as a son, and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. (Chapter 7, p. 111)

The bit about pain being “sterilised or disinfected evil” on p. 117 of Chapter 7 is quite interesting. I’ll let you find it yourself.

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’…. Hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity. (Chapter 8, p. 128-129)

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. (Chapter 8, p. 130)

The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you — you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith…. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. (Chapter 9, p. 151-152)

If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. (Chapter 9, p. 155)

And finally, my favorite part of the book:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ (Chapter 9, p. 151)

From C.S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism:

What then is the good of … occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? … The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own. … In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

(from Intellectuelle)

A few days ago I started reading Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress. The cliffhangers pulled me along to page 70 or so, and then I had somewhere to go and had to put it down. And yet the whole time I was reading it, I felt…false. I don’t know how else to describe it. The only reason I kept reading was the addictive quality of the cliffhangers, along with the subject matter (cryptography and the NSA), which I find very interesting.

I haven’t picked it up since. Why? I’ve thought about it and it wasn’t anything like my reason for putting down The Da Vinci Code. The only answer that really makes sense to me is that I’ve lost my taste for thrillers, at least Dan Brown style. Perhaps it’s that I don’t like to hand control over to a book, and with a thriller you do that to some small degree. (I could be wrong here, but it does feel like a small loss of self-control, like I have to keep reading.)

Well, well, well. I now expect a handful of e-mails telling me why Digital Fortress is so good and why I ought to reconsider. But I really have no interest left in reading Dan Brown books, or even thrillers in general. There are still so many other books to read, good books that leave me feeling great and not hollow. Take War and Peace, for example, or Getting Things Done or Alice in Wonderland or The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

No, I’m not necessarily saying that thrillers are bad. Sure, it’s possible, but I don’t really think that’s the case. But I do know that I’ve lost my taste for them. To each his own.

I’ve started reading Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and it’s good (though it seems to have a slightly different tone from Alice in Wonderland — I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I like it). The absurdity is very well-done, in a Chestertonian fashion. With things absurd you have to be very careful, because it’s easy to blow it and come out as just stupid. But when it’s done right, it’s hilarious, and it makes you think. I love all the wordplays, by the way. So far there aren’t as many in Looking-Glass as in Wonderland, but that’s okay.

As far as the title of this post goes, we visited Tryst Press (a local fine printing shop here in Provo, though the website appears to be rather out-of-date) on Tuesday for my History of the Book class, and one of the books we got to see was a small edition of “Jabberwocky.” Quite cool. While reading it last night, I got a hankering to make my own edition, illustrated and all. We’ll see… Speaking of which, I’ve got to get started with some Riverglen Press editions. Having my laptop break has been a temporary obstacle, but I think I’ll still be able to make things happen.

Yesterday before General Conference started, I noticed a small blue pamphlet on my bookshelves entitled “The BYU Experience,” which I think I received when I got accepted to BYU. Turns out it’s from a devotional address by President Hinckley back in 1997. After the morning session, I picked it up and started reading. At the end I came across this gem, talking about President Hinckley’s father:

He was a great reader with a wonderful library. He was an excellent speaker and writer. Almost to the time he died, just short of the age of 94, he read and wrote and contemplated the knowledge that had come to him.

I discovered that when he sat on the wall, hours at a time on a warm day, he would reflect on the things he had read from his library.

I think he grew old gracefully and wonderfully. He had his books with the precious treasures they contained of the thoughts of great men and women of all the ages of time. He never ceased to learn. As he sat on the wall he thought deeply of what he had read the night before. He acquired the habit as a student here under Dr. Maeser. It was part of his BYU experience.

At times I almost envy him: time to read and time to ponder. What a blessing.

And as I read that I felt inexplicably compelled to start reading Emerson. I don’t know why Emerson in particular, other than that I’ve been impressed with what I’ve heard about him. And I wasn’t even entirely sure that I had a copy of Emerson — I knew I had Walden by Thoreau, and Thoreau and Emerson seem to occupy roughly the same geographic area in my mind, but they’re obviously not the same person. A quick perusal of my bookshelves produced, to my delight, a Modern Library College edition of Emerson’s essays and other writings.

I began reading Nature, the first item in the anthology, and was taken aback by the depth of thinking and beauty of language. After finishing the first chapter, I skipped back to the table of contents to see what else was tucked away within those pages. The next item (I say item because some were books — like Nature — and some were essays) was “The American Scholar,” an address Emerson gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge in 1837. It was a good read.

He talks a lot about “Man Thinking” as opposed to “mere thinkers,” and he’s got a point. Among the three influences on a scholar that he brings up, the second is “the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed,” and he continues on to say that “books are the best type of the influence of the past.”

And then things took an unexpected turn:

The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, — the act of thought, — is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

It makes sense, of course, and now that I’ve read it and thought over it some more, I agree. I hadn’t expected what felt like an attack on books, but it was an appropriate warning and came at the perfect time. Truth be told, I’ve been so excited to start reading lately that I’ve felt like soaking up everything I read, drinking it in wholesale. But in retrospect that’s the same kind of attitude that TV engenders in us: passive reception. And that’s not “Man Thinking,” but rather automaton or vegetable. Not good. In all that we do, we need to be active thinkers, using the brains God has given us to make the world a better place. And merely absorbing the ideas of others without grappling with them, without making them prove their worth and fight for their plot of land on the terrain of our mind, without confronting them from every angle and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, is emphatically not what I think God intended.

Returning to Emerson:

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.”

The sentence that really hit me in there was this: “When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” That’s incredible, but all too true. It reminds me of Joseph Smith’s statement, “Could you gaze into heaven five minutes, you would know more than you could possibly [on the relations of God and angels in a future state] by reading all that ever was written on the subject.” Reality trumps reading. (But of course I still love books and will continue to read.)

The bad news is that my laptop died yesterday. The good news is that this may end up giving me more time to read. I finished Alice in Wonderland a few days ago, and I’m still making my way through Jane Eyre, War and Peace and Getting Things Done. And for school I’m enjoying every page of Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. Mmm. Oh, and I’ve started reading The Problem of Pain. Now I’m off to the library to see if the computer is telling the truth when it says that there’s a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on the shelves (admittedly an older 1989 edition, but I doubt it’s changed that much between editions).

We’ve been reading Miracles in the C.S. Lewis Society, and although the first few chapters ended up almost devoid of markings, the chapters since then have seen a fair amount of scribbles. Here are some of the quotes I liked:

In chapter 8, Lewis says:

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t…. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born…. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.

And in chapter 9:

To say that God has created her [Nature] is not to say that she is unreal, but precisely that she is real. Would you make God less creative than Shakespeare or Dickens? What He creates is created in the round: it is far more concrete than Falstaff or Sam Weller.

And in chapter 11:

The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, more transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque. Confusion between Spirit and soul (or ‘ghost’) has here done much harm. Ghosts must be pictured, if we are to picture them at all, as shadowy and tenuous, for ghosts are half-men, one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have flesh. But Spirit, if pictured at all, must be pictured in the very opposite way. Neither God nor even the gods are ’shadowy’ in traditional imagination: even the human dead, when glorified in Christ, cease to be ‘ghosts’ and become ’saints’. The difference of atmosphere which even now surrounds the words ‘I saw a ghost’ and the words ‘I saw a saint’ — all the pallor and insubstantiality of the one, all the gold and blue of the other — contains more wisdom than whole libraries of ‘religion’. If we must have a mental picture to symbolise Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter.

Reminds me of Joseph Smith’s teaching that “there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified, we shall see that it is all matter.”

Finally, from chapter 14:

For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is (if at this moment the night sky conceals any such). The greater the sin, the greater the mercy: the deeper the death the brighter the rebirth.

Death is, in fact, what some modern people call ‘ambivalent’. It is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered.

At present spirit can retain its foothold against the incessant counter-attacks of Nature (both physiological and psychological) only by perpetual vigilance, and physiological Nature always defeats it in the end. Sooner or later it becomces unable to resist the disintegrating processes at work in the body and death ensues. A little later the Natural organism (for it does not long enjoy its triumph) is similarly conquered by merely physical Nature and returns to the inorganic. But, on the Christian view, this was not always so. The spirit was once not a garrison, maintaining its post with difficulty in a hostile Nature, but was fully ‘at home’ with its organism, like a king in his own country or a rider on his own horse — or better still, as the human part of a Centaur was ‘at home’ with the equine part.

I rather liked the corn-religion part of chapter 14 as well. (I’d describe it, but I’ll leave it to you to read it on your own. That’s half the fun, anyway. ) Eighty pages remain unread and I’m sure there’ll be more quotables to come. We’re reading The Problem of Pain next, by the way.

Today I read about the Reading 2.0 conference, and it’s very interesting stuff. For good summaries of the main talks, see Tim O’Reilly’s notes.

On a somewhat related note, I’m wondering about how worthwhile it is to be able to produce PDFs on-the-fly from a text/HTML/XML source. As far as beauty goes, you could get a decent approximation provided that you made sure it did copyfitting and avoided widows and orphans and so on. And that’s possible. It could never have all the charm of a human-designed book, but I suppose it would do — like the utilitarian perfect binding vs. the far more aesthetic sewn binding.

Why is it that even though I’m a book person, I still find it hard to make time for leisure reading? Schoolwork gets in the way, of course, and I also happen to have a bazillion other projects going on (Riverglen Press does have to do with books, of course, but Beyond doesn’t, and my art/web design projects don’t have anything to do with reading, etc. etc. etc.). But if reading is so important to me, wouldn’t I make it more of a priority? I stole away a few minutes before bed last night to read two or three pages of Jane Eyre (the part where she says genius is self-conscious), and it was good. Reading is so refreshing, especially after spending all day at a computer. (Many hours in front of a monitor make my eyes burn and my brain feel like it got stuck in a dishwasher. Books fix all that, like a beautiful shower of the mind.) Maybe I need to set aside dedicated, sacred reading time each day and make it uninterruptible. Hmm…