Happy Easter! I meant to post something on Easter, but I was too busy celebrating.
See, there were two things I decided to do for Lent:
1. try to understand people, especially the ones I dislike
2. go to church every Sunday
The second was easy, the first not so much. On the one hand, now I am far more likely to look at other people and try to see where they're coming from. And this makes me more forgiving. On the other hand, it doesn't work perfectly. There are some people I can forgive a little but still dislike a lot. And on the little-known third hand, I should not actually have to understand people in order to forgive them. I should just be forgiving. But I won't beat myself up over that last point because conditional forgiveness is better than nothing.
I also had to face the fact that I'm polite but not nice. I worry too much about making a good impression on people and not enough about actually improving their lives. More often than not, those two go hand-in-hand, which is why I never thought about it before.
Anyway, the problem with those first two Lent things is, they're what I'm supposed to be doing year-round anyway. I intend to keep up with the first, and I intend to do better with the second, but it takes an hour and a half to get to church, so I'd be lying if I said I planned to go every Sunday. Maybe every other Sunday.
Since the first two weren't really sacrifices, exactly, I decided that the third thing would be to read the whole Bible. In order to do this, I had to give up other books. Even at that, I did not read the whole Bible, just most of it, and I skipped around a bit. But I seriously, seriously missed just being able to read whatever. To make matters worse, I was in the middle of a novel when Lent started.
So you can probably guess what I've been doing since Easter.
Incidentally, the Bible thing might have been a bit counter-productive, since I came away from it with no understanding whatsoever of fundamentalists. It is not actually physically possible to take everything the Bible says literally.
But that, my friends, is a problem for next Lent. I'm going to go finish Middlemarch.*
* One of the characters in Middlemarch objects to dog ownership. I am not sure how I feel about that.
If I weren't who's to say
14 years ago
9 comments:
You put down Middlemarch? I had no idea of the greatness of your sacrifice. Seriously. Speaking of forgiving, there is a character in that book I would have trouble forgiving.
Did becoming more forgiving improve your relationships with people? Logic tells me it would.
Your task was to understand people. I think, if you think about it, you can understand fundamentalists. It's fundamentalism that makes no sense. So, you're in the clear. How did you approach the Bible? Was it Genesis forward or did you skip around?
So many questions!
And Happy Easter to you, too.
Which one? I can think of at least four that would be difficult.
It wasn't that hard to put down Middlemarch, since I had already seen the miniseries, so I know what happens to everyone.
You know what? Becoming more forgiving did not really improve my relationships with people. I was already nice to people I disliked or was holding some grudge against. It's the next step, actually wishing them well, that is hard for me.
I was sort of kidding about fundamentalists. I think it comes from a desire for everything in the world to make sense. I am not unsympathetic to that.
Well, in addition to not finishing, I cheated a bit. I had already read the first part of the Old Testament, so I picked up from where I left off there (Ezra). I finished the historical books and decided to skip between wisdom books and prophetic books for the following three weeks. I didn't get very far through the prophetic books.
I read gospels on Sundays and I spent the last two weeks reading the other parts of the New Testament.
Casaubon is the one I would have trouble forgiving even though he is slightly sympathetic.
Well, he's one of the four I was thinking of, but trying to control things from beyond the grave is more sad than anything else.
You read more novels from that time, so you probably have an easier time judging his actions by those conventions, whereas from my perspective it doesn't seem like that big a deal.
The others I have problems with are Bulstrode (he's the villain, so fair enough), Rosamond (if you're going to be THAT materialistic, do a better job choosing a husband...or just don't be that materialistic), and Fred (don't mess up kids' apprenticeships!).
Well, Fred is not actually hard to forgive. The characters in the book must agree with me, since they keep lending him money.
My tried and true method for reading the entire Bible, cover to cover (which I've done a couple of times, so I'm not just talking out of my ass here): from one to four chapters a night, until you finish. Feel free to skim (very quickly) all the chapters listing the enumeration of tribes, and who begat whom, and also the exact specifications for building the Temple, unless you're trying for a scale model.
The thing about modern miniseries of Victorian novels is that the Victorians like plot machinations more than we do, and we like explicit sex more than they did, so miniseries tend to streamline the plot and make the sexual points more obvious. So there might be some surprises there. I guess you're not as strict about knowing the plot as you were during our little Anna Karenina incident?
The last time I read Middlemarch, I actually found myself quite sympathetic to Causabon, who does after all know lots of stuff about Dagon and other fish gods, and kind of irritated with Dorothea -- she seemed too much like the sort of academic-world liberal who thinks her vague idealism and optimism are enough to change the world.
I meant to say that Causabon knows "lots of cool stuff" about Dagon etc.; maybe the remark made sense even if I didn't date myself with my choice of modifiers.
Well, note that I still haven't read Anna Karenina.
I am not afraid to admit that Dorothea got on my nerves during the miniseries. She seemed too good, and therefore boring. I couldn't figure out why all the male characters kept falling in love with her.
In the book, I find her interesting. She's still supposed to be a sympathetic character, but she comes off as much more flawed and a couple of the narrator's comments about her made me laugh out loud. I got the sense that Eliot found her irritating sometimes, or at least knew that the readers would.
Please tell me that your not having read Anna Karenina is just happenstance and has nothing to do with me.
I think Eliot does a really great balancing job with Dorothea, and it's not Eliot's fault that every place I've lived (the Bay Area and Boston) is world HQ for the irritating version of that personality.
One of my favorite moments in that book is when the narrator stops and says, "But there are two people in this marriage" and then gives Causabon's point of view. Lots of writers wouldn't have done that, or even seen that he had a defensible point of view.
My not reading Anna Karenina has more to do with having read War and Peace. I didn't care for it, so it's hard to motivate myself to pick up Tolstoy again.
They win, by the way.
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