Libro / Compañero: "El ruido de las cosas al caer"

Recientemente, tomé rumbo hacia Baltimore, en Maryland, con propósito de participar en la reunión de la conferencia nacional de los obispos de los Estados Unidos: un viento friolento y desagradable corría alrededor del hotel, y no faltaban reuniones de comités dentro del hotel para hacer correr a los obispos. Me la pasé bien, pero para ser franco, prefiero la casa.

Les voy a contar algo que no tiene nada que ver con nada. Curioso, pero uno a veces hace cosas por naturalidad sin advertir conscientemente sobre la sombra de una razón que pueda iluminar la costumbre. Por casualidad uno puede llegar a un momento provocativo, y se pregunta sobre la costumbre: ¿y por qué hago eso?

En estas reuniones grandes, por ejemplo, siempre traigo un libro para leer: Una novela, o biografía, o historia. No lo traigo sólo en el sentido de cargarlo en la mochila,  sino también en sentido más literal. Cargo el libro en la mano, moviéndome de una reunión a otra, de un comité a otro, todo el día. No quiero darles la impresión que me dedico a leer novelas durante las reuniones; al contrario, llenas de discusiones y conversaciones, las actividades del día aseguran que el libro llegará a mi habitación en la noche con el marcador de páginas ocupando el mismo espacio que había señalado por la mañana. Y me pregunto: ¿porqué haces eso, cargando un libro que bien sabes no vas a poder leer durante el día?

Este año el libro sirviéndome de compañero se intitulaba "El ruido de las cosas al caer" por el autor Colombiano Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Poderoso este autor en su capacidad de involucrar el lector en un camino nuevo dentro de un mundo ajeno, convirtiéndolo al final a un mundo familiar. Crea cuentos humanos, o mejor dicho, capaces de humanizarnos, invitándonos a profundizar la vida actual por medio de una reflexión sobre el camino ya caminado. Memoria y consciencia se abren cuando uno escribe sobre lo que ha vivido. Los rasgos de fragilidad, poder y dignidad humana se desenvuelven por este camino.

El libro propone precisamente eso. Un joven adulto llamado Antonio expone su experiencia como adolescente en Bogotá, Colombia, durante los años más intensos de la violencia narcotraficante. La memoria le surge porque, años después, llega a conocer un hombre malherido por lo que vivió durante esa época. De hecho el conocido (nunca llegó a ser amigo de Antonio) paga con su vida por los efectos siempre presentes de sus decisiones durante esos años. Antonio se obsesiona sobre la historia del conocido asesinado, y por buscar las huellas de su vida pasada, reencuentra las huellas de su propia vida. El pasado de Antonio sigue marcando su presente, no cabe duda, y se da cuenta de que las decisiones que toma hoy marcarán profundamente su futuro y la de su familia.

¿Y porqué cargo una novela en la mano durante las reuniones que llenan mi calendario? Porque el libro y yo estamos viviendo algo en común, y algo íntimo. El libro comparte su voz conmigo mientras esté en proceso de atender a esa voz. Ver el libro, tener el libro a mi lado, me recuerda que es una voz viva, y me habla aún si en ese momento no sigo la narración. Es como atender a una memoria. Es una voz detrás y sobre las voces que oigo en las reuniones. La voz del libro me acompaña en el esfuerzo de escuchar y participar en lo que oigo durante el día. El libro y yo compartimos un diálogo personal mientras estemos viviendo el diálogo público del momento actual. Es como tener a mi lado un amigo, un confidente que trata de ver lo que veo y oír lo que oigo así como yo lo veo y oigo. Al mismo tiempo trato de relacionar lo que veo y oigo con la voz del libro, preguntándome sobre cómo este cuento -- esta memoria, este amigo-- lo viera y oyera.

Qué curioso todo esto. Quizás sea saludable para la mente, quizás no. Pero al contemplar la costumbre, y las relaciones que abarca la sombra de su razón, me conozco a mi mismo un poco mejor.  No por nada decía San Agustín que el auto-conocimiento nos conduce a Dios, autor de la luz que nos ilumina el camino.

 

 

All Saints Day, Seminary Visit, and a Book

All Saints Day is one of my favorite days of the year. And it provides us with a chance to reflect on the beauty of holiness, and the call to follow the footsteps of the Lord with a real and efficacious desire. That is sort of what I preached about, anyway. Below is a link to the audio of the sermon I preached this last November 1, at the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, on the Solemnity of All Saints.

https://www.box.com/s/a6pwb5uhjbiy1bpi5oai

As I am still experimenting with the audio download world, please pardon if I seem a bit clumsy in the handling of the technology. I hope the link works.

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I had a chance to go up to Columbus, Ohio a couple of weeks ago (time passes so quickly). Our seminarians who are studying at the Pontifical College Josephinum are are doing well, and I was able to take a quick picture of the group. I think I just missed the first snow storm of the year, for which I am grateful.  

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I finally finished a  very fine book called "La isla de la pasión," by Laura Restrepo. It is highly to be recommended. I have always enjoyed history, particularly the history of Mexico, and this book is a lightly novelized version of a historical event that happened around the time of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. A small squad of soldiers, together with their families, were sent by the aging president of Mexico, Don Porfirio Díaz, to defend a small barren island in the Pacific Ocean called Clipperton. While on the island, the tumultuous events of the Revolution occur in Mexico and the small band of defenders is left and largely forgotten. Children are born on the Island, and life takes on a kind of routine. Yet, after hurricane and disease strike, the little band is faced with tragedy and perhaps even hallucinations. There are some moving scenes described by the author, scenes of heroism and of honor.

At one point an American ship reaches the forgotten island, and the captain offers the commanding officer of the island a passage off the island. So much has happened that Arnaud, the commander of the small Mexican force, does not know about: the pending outbreak of World War I, the successive overthrows of governments in Mexico. Informed by the American captain of these events, Arnaud must make a decision, whether to leave his post, or to stay until further orders are recieved from Mexico City. He knows well, of course, that Mexico City for the most part does not even remember that he and his family and his forces are on the island. He makes a decision. The truly heroic figure in the novel is Captain Arnaud's wife, Alicia. Her strength and courage and devotion to her family make the story a profoundly moving excursion.  Read the book to find out what happens!

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A World Undone

I am slowly reading a one volume history of World War One, entitled A World Undone. It is written by G.L. Meyer, and I am finding it very informative. I am also reading the second book of the Hunger Games, called "Catching Fire" by Suzanne Collins. I have found the Hunger Games to be a moving and provocative narrative. In a recent sermon to some high school students at Juan Diego Academy, I described the Hunger Games as set in what the world would have looked like if Mordor had won the battle for the Ring. It is an ugly world, with dark and extravagant extremes. Power and entertainment dominate the landscape of human relations. Death is a game, and the powerful control the society by combining fear and violent entertainment. Young people are placed in the middle of this macabre dance of socially sponsored death and games. But the young can be heroic, and Katniss the heroin of the tale, restores by her humanity in an inhuman situation, a genuine sense that things need not go the way of blood and power. Beauty is possible in a soul.

I am also reading the Son of Neptune, Rick Riordan's second volume in the Heroes of Olympus series. Designed for a younger set of readers than The Hunger Gmes, it is a series I have enjoyed thus far (one of my nieces urged me to read the Percy Jackon series, which is how I got hooked). Still, like the Hunger Games, the plots of the Percy Jackson series move because there is a threat that the world is set to destruction because of sinister and chaotic forces. And young people respond heroically to hold things together. What? You ask, the bishop spends his time reading childrens books? Well, I read lots of things, mostly at airports and on airplanes. It's good to know what young people are reading, and to learn a little from authors who seem to be in touch with what their fears and hopes are. Reading these two series you might be justified in thinking that many young people fear a world on the verge of falling apart, or governed by chaotic forces of death and control. You might even call it a fear of A World Undone. You might also find that many young people yearn for a nobler more heroic way to live a human life. 

I am also reading La isla de la Pasion, by Laura Restrepo. Before you jump to conclusions about what the title might suggest about content, let me say it is really a historical novel set on the island of Clipperton, out in the Pacific Ocean. When Clipperton was discovered by the Spanish explorers a couple of hundred of years before it was named La Isla de la Pasión. The island is the setting for a small crew of Mexican soldiers and their commander, and his wife. They are sent at the end of the Porfiriato to defend the island from a real or imagined threat of French invasion. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Calico Joe

Sitting off to the lower right of my active reading table, is a book I picked up fairly recently. By John Grisham, the book is entitled "Calico Joe,” a graciously told baseball story. I like baseball books. Some of the most enjoyable novels I have read have had a baseball backdrop. Something about the sport lends itself like no other to a rhythmic narrative that punctuates the pace of life. Like the game itself, novels set in the context of baseball games fall naturally into a pattern of action, followed by leisurely interludes of memory, observation, and commentary.

“Calico Joe” is fitted into a fictionally reconfigured 1973 baseball season. It is about a man named Paul, whose father was a major league pitcher and whose hero, Calico Joe, was a rookie-phenomenon in 1973. It is also about the boy Paul who grows up to become the man, and who tells the story. Now, I was about the age of the boy Paul during the baseball season of 1973, and the story’s accents about that time, seen through the eyes of an 11 year old, turned my eye to a part of the memory I had not visited in a while. To me, that fact alone was worth the price of admission to the story. But there is much more.

Baseball is beautiful to watch, with its manicured fields, its clean, chalked lines stretching out, in principle, to infinity to define and embrace time and space, all providing a paradise-like field on which to play a free and fair game (tip of the hat to Bart Giamatti, may he rest in peace). But, as in all things human, there is pain and sorrow between the chalked lines, just as there is grace and beauty. “Calico Joe” has to do with a boy who must make peace as a man with the smashed hopes, the sorrow and the pain that enveloped his childhood. He must re-visit the troubling memory of his father’s self-absorption, and his child-like admiration of a player, Calico Joe, who in addition to being a figure of heroic proportions, was not his father.

There are pitches in the game, and there are pitches in life. Some seem uniquely aimed to ruin things forever, and some can make it possible to get to a better place. You need a special kind of eye to see either kind of pitch coming. The theme is simple, perennial, human: in the end, which pitch prevails?

I recommend the book because it is gently and elegantly told, spare in its use of literary ornament, yet capable of pulling you into a serious reflection about what it means to forgive someone. The story-teller does not provide you with a light-hearted path to this reflection on forgiveness, but he does show you what is humanly possible when the truth is brought to light. You cannot re-write the past, nor can you bury it, really; neither of these opens life to a curative path. You can, though, have the courage to face things as they are, and —like a kid who still remembers how to hope for a good pitch—you can take a chance that anger and resentment can give way to something better.

And because baseball is always a graceful game, whenever a story explores what is humanly possible in the environs of a baseball park, it explores, even if clandestinely, what is at the same time gracefully possible.

Books

I like to read. And I like to talk about books. I am not, though, a very disciplined reader. Some people flip television channels impatiently when a commercial comes on, I pick up a new book, depending on my frame of mind. This used to drive my spiritual director in the seminary crazy. He always told me I would read more efficiently if I focused on one at a time. (I was not willfully disobedient to him, just woefully lacking in will with regard to this point.)

I also think one of the most important gifts we can give to our children in the community is a love of books, and of reading. It is a way of traveling through time and place without ever having to get on an airplane. Believe me, I get on enough airplanes as it is, anytime I can go somewhere without having to go somewhere, I am like a kid at Christmas. There are of course good books, and bad books; disappointing books and surprisingly good books. Some books are good for the soul, some are not. Some books ornament the soul with a richer sense of the wonder of things. Some drag you down into a not very happy sense of the pain in things. I hesitate to recommend books unless I know a person fairly well. Why? Because a book is a world you enter into, but it is also a world that enters into you. Once it is in your memory, it is near impossible to erase at least its residual effects. The books by the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón (La sombra del viento, El juego del angel, El prisionero del cielo) sort of poke around that particular power in books. I am not sure if I fully agree with what his poking around this topic implies, but then, I am not sure I fully grasp what his books imply. I do know I enjoyed reading them. But my point is that we should be careful when we introduce something like a book into the memory of another; strive to make it something that builds up the goodness of a person, and not pull out the worst in people. You sort of have to know someone at least somewhat to know whether it will be worth their while to read a particular book. Everybody should read the Confessions of Saint Augustine at least once in their life.

People do ask me from time to time what I have read recently, and I usually list a few I have either just finished or just started, or that are still lingering in my mind even though I finished them a while back. Because of my lack of discipline, after a while, I do get confused about when I read a particular book and what I was thinking when I read it. The different books I read at any given time usually complement each other. That is not necessarily by design, it just sort of happens.  This blog, I thought, might provide me with a little discipline, in that every once in a while I can describe what I am reading, and invite anyone to comment if they want to.

I just finished the fifth book in the Las aventuras del Capitán Alatriste series by Arturo Perez-Reverte. It is entitled El caballero del jubón amarillo. The whole series is widely translated into many languages, and the English is easily available. If you like adventure stories, set in historically detailed 17^th Century Spain, during the reign of Felipe IV, this one is for you. But, be warned, the author methodically moves you to appreciate the paradox of a man, at once heroic and loyal, yet profoundly sad to not to be able to hope anymore in the final triumph of what is noble and heroic. The tired hero knows what he is supposed to do, he is just not sure anymore why he should be doing it. A personal sense of honor moves him, but even that powerful motive seems to be losing its efficacy. Set in olden days, the themes of the books are contemporary, if you take as a contemporary cultural preoccupation (as I do) the struggle to live honorably in a world where people think nothing can be trusted anymore. The stories have their brutal moments. Me parece que el autor sigue en la línea de sus otras obras, investigando las expresiones del heroísmo, y sus raíces, mientras muestra la figura de un héroe cansado. Este cansancio heroico es tema contemporáneo en el sentido que nuestra cultura todavía siente el impulso para grandes sacrificios para el bien, pero falta de confianza en las instituciones que tradicionalmente inspiran los sacrificios. Obviously, I enjoy this series, otherwise why am I about to start the sixth book in it?

I am almost done with Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries. It is a finely instructive book. When I am done, I might say more about why this book, and others by Charles Taylor are important to know about.

More on these sorts of topics as time allows. In the meantime, read when you can!