More Than This

Artemis Fowl has the encyclopedic, bland and blatantly British narrator of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the "just kidding he's not dead" moments of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, the blatant disregard for mythology of My Little Pony, the "boy without parents" license of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, the amoral cast of Snatch, the awkward hints at teenage romance of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and the crude mixing of technology and fantasy found only in The Santa Clause II.

Finally, A Response

Despite all that, I read all 300 pages and probably would read the second book if it was placed in front of me. Why? Because it's entertaining. It's the same reason I'll watch a show like "Everybody Loves Raymond." I'm not going to learn anything from it, I'll laugh out loud once, and I'll forget it the moment it's over and never watch it again.

I guess that's the difference between a good book and a great book. A good book is worth reading once; a great book is worth reading once a year for the rest of your life.

The girl who recommended Artemis Fowl to me also happened to get the speaking prompt "If we lived in the world of Fahrenheit 451 and you could save one book what would it be?" and she absolutely couldn't pick one book. She had to have the entire Artemis Fowl series, the entire Percy Jackson series, and the entire Eragon series. But I wonder if she's ever read any of them more than once.

I know that most eighth graders haven't read any book more than once, but would she ever want to pick up Artemis Fowl again for any reason other than nostalgia?

I guess this is, in a way, my answer to Pat's comments from the post "Shot In The Dark." I really do think there are distractions, or at least "lesser goods." I really do think that Artemis Fowl is almost completely devoid of an accurate or enlightening portrayal of humanity. While (I hope) most people reading this post haven't read Artemis Fowl, it seems to me to be just one aspect of the mask of popular culture, and sometimes I think there's nought beyond (that Moby Dick reference is for Mike).

Whatever entertainment someone gets out of Artemis Fowl, High School Musical, or the music of The Pussycat Dolls, could be better obtained from Huckleberry Finn, Fiddler on the Roof, or Dave Matthews, and with it would come brilliant insight into our human nature.

Obviously, no form of cultural outlet will find us staring into the face of God, but some books are just better than others. Better in that they address subjects that concern our humanity (I addressed this in "Same Old Thing" earlier this week).

But what about the rest of our lives, when we aren't reading, watching or listening? Well, I think Pat is right there. It's all about what you're called to. I'm beginning to think we all have four vocations: a personal, a political, a professional, and a spiritual.

Marriage is a beautiful thing to which not all of us will be privileged, but we all have a relational calling. Being a leader among men is a burden to which not everyone is called, but we all have a role to play in the life of our polis (city). Everyone has a role to play professionally, but not everyone will see the work of their hands become a tangible change in the world. Everyone is called to find the final and ultimate source of Truth and find their place in His universe, but not everyone is born to be a theologian.

However, no one is called to polygamy, no one is called to be a tyrant, no one is called to make pornographic films, and no one is called to be a subverter of truth, but you all know that.

And who am I to judge? A human being. It's everyone job to not only discern right from wrong, but more wrong from less wrong. I absolutely believe in degrees (all puns...), but only because I believe in an absolute truth, toward which we can all draw closer, and from which we cannot absolutely turn away.



Oh, and just so you know, no one is called to watch CSI, but that's another post.

Same Old Thing

“What has been is what will be,
and what has been done
is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been,
in the ages before us.”
- Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

Every day I begin my English classes with a famous quotation. Lately, we've been looking at what figures like Oscar Wilde, Goethe, C.S. Lewis, and Thoreau have to say about originality.

“Most people,” Wilde says, “are other people, their thoughts are the opinions of others, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation,” and most of my students are inclined to agree. They've already been primed with Goethe (“all truly wise thoughts have been thoughts a thousand times already”) and Lewis on the subject, and I think I've fairly convinced them that the themes of human literature and thought are few: love for country, brother, nature, woman, and God, hatred of oppressors, enemies, death, and decay, and desire for immortality, honor, and self-knowledge.

While the list isn't exhaustive, it is startlingly close to being so. No work that is founded on a so-called “unique” idea will ever be great, principally because the great ideas have all been ideas “a thousand times already.”

Of course, it's obvious that Wilde isn't really on the same side of this debate as Lewis or Goethe. While he too admits that there is very little about mankind and our thoughts that can be called revolutionary or unique, this thought isn't the comfort for him that it is for Lewis; rather, it seems to actually disgust him. I'd be tempted to accuse Wilde of a “poor me” attitude, and of entertaining the misconception that he was the first and only homosexual writer to aspire to greatness, but I know he was better-read than that.

Personally, I think more people's passions should be a quotation. My personal passion would probably come from Ecclesiastes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or the work of Emily Dickinson. Mimicry, in fact, is one of the best habits we can acquire: whether it be of our national heroes, of the saints, of great authors or thinkers, or even of Christ himself, we need models.

My students' final and most desperate plea toward original thinking went something like this: “What about politicians? Shouldn't they be original thinkers? The problems they have to deal with are all new. The oil crisis, atomic warfare, terrorism, the internet- it's all new.”

After reminding them of the striking resemblance that JFK's “Inaugural Address,” which we recently read in class, bears to Barrack Obama's speech at the DNC a couple weeks ago, I told them this:

“Heaven help us if the people running this country are original thinkers. My ideas, even my best ones, have only been churning around in my head for five or six years, yours have only had two or three years. At best, an original thinker has had a decade or two of rolling over the same thoughts. Shakespeare has had over three hundred years, Lincoln over a hundred, Homer over three thousand. If I were to teach you only from my own thoughts, I would have exhausted them about two and a half weeks ago. None of us has a long enough lifetime to comprehend the great truths. Heaven help us if we tried.”

Tomorrow I'm going to use the above quotation from Ecclesiastes, we'll see how they respond.

Let me know what you think.