Storytelling and Exploration

I really enjoyed this article by Michael Chabon:
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood

Chesterton on Obama's nose

"...just as a boy who has not known much of women is apt too easily to take a woman for the woman, so these practical men, unaccustomed to causes, are always inclined to think that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal. Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man. People say of such a figure, in almost feverish whispers, "He knows his own mind," which is exactly like saying in equally feverish whispers, "He blows his own nose." Human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perisheth"

-G.K. Chesterton in Heretics

Borges on reading

"Few things have happened to me, though many things have I read. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worthy of remembering than the philosophy of Schopenhauer or England's verbal music."

-Jorge Luis Borges

Jim Eliot on the joys of merely being

"Just finished For Whom the Bell Tools. A most intriguing work and one raising some problems for a Christian. Realistic, psychological, compactly detailed, it presents a literary landmark for me in it's style alone. Would that I could get aroused about experiencing God in life as the modern writers are aroused at just experiencing life. They make no comment, draw no conclusions, point no moral, simply state things as they are in simple words in up-to-date settings. Perhaps it is for this very lucidity that they hold such grip on one. Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules? I do not know."

-Journals of Jim Eliot
(Thanks Buff for giving me this, so long ago.)

a way of thinking about things

"What must the world be like, and what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur?"
-Victor Zuckerkandl as quoted in Jermey Begbie's Music, Theology and Time.

I like this way of thinking. Left out is 'What must God be like?'.

You can take this and run with it:

What kind of world is a world where everything has it's own smell?
What must God be like if His images spend lots of time eating, sleeping and working?
What kind of God makes millions of species of beetles?
Etc..

Flannery O'Conner on seeing and writing

"I have a friend who is taking acting classes in New York from a Russian lady who is supposed to be good at teaching actors. My friend wrote me and told me that the first month they didn't speak a line, they only learned to see. Now learning to see is the basis of all arts except music. I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they're any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things."

-Flannery O'Conner in Mystery and Manners

Jonathan Edwards on the fullness of images in the world

"I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as language is of words; and that the multitudes of those things that I have mentioned are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by those things."

-Jonathan Edwards (as quoted in The Supreme Harmony of All )

a rough chronology of obsessions

pirates
reptiles
islands
treeclimbing
treehouses
hardy-boys
treasure hunts
adventure games
computers
starwars
myst
film music
bryce
riven
textures
lord of the rings
dostoevsky
leithart
concept art
matte painting
beauty
drawing
trees
poetry
theology
seeing
worldbuilding
cathedrals
interactive storytelling
cinematography
film-making
books
visual storytelling
truth, beauty and goodness
trinitarian aesthetics
nature/culture
worldbuilding as storytelling

Kierkegaard on reading

"I have been reading Athanasius these days-not only with my eyes, but with my whole body, with my solar plexis."
-Søren Kierkegaard as quoted in Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions

Thoughts on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness #2

If truth and beauty and goodness are ultimately deeply connected; and if we are physical, emotional beings, as well as thinking ones: can we really know any truth without also finding that truth beautiful or ugly? And, on finding so, are we not moved (sometimes literally) to act on it. (to position ourselves or bodies in relation to this newfound beauty or ugliness)

And is our emotional or physical response to reality a separate thing then our intellectual response? Are they not all aspects or dimensions of the same thing?

old thoughts on truth,beauty, and goodness

In the end I think everything spoken that is true will be beautiful and beautifully spoken. In the end everything that is beautiful will become true; all truth, all of reality will become beautiful. Nothing can truly be true without being beautiful. And there will be no false beauty, no unreal beauty, no evil beauty, no ugly truth, and no true evil. For then all evil will be shown as ugly and banished as false. People corrupted by ugliness and evil will be beautified, remade in the perfect image of God. All that is evil will be un-made, unreal and all that is will be true, beautiful and good.

I'm not sure if this is orthodox, but it's interesting thinking about the relationship between truth beauty and goodness.

Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis

"What he thought about everything was implicit in what he said about anything."

-Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis

(BTW, if anyone knows the source of the quote, let me know)

Update:

Will Vaus (who also has written books on Lewis) kindly pointed out that the quote is from a book actually called Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis! Thanks for the letting me know, Mr. Vaus. The only thing better then reading a great author you love, is reading a great author you love write about another great author you love, allowing you to enjoy both simultaneously.

Kierkegaard on being interested in too many things

"The misfortune of my life is perhaps that I am interested in far too many things and not decidedly in some one thing; my interests are not all subordinated to one thing but are all co-ordinated."
-Soren Kierkegaard as quoted in The Prayers of Kierkegaard (this is passage isn't a prayer)

Walker Percy on Art and Science in School

"If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have the achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of school."

-Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos

A.W. Tozer on good books

"The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself. The best writer is one who goes through the world of ideas like a friendly guide who walks beside us through the forest pointing out to us a hundred natural wonders that we had not noticed before.

The writer does most for us who brings to our attention thoughts that lay close to our minds waiting to be acknowledged as our own. Such a man acts as a midwife to assist the birth of ideas that had been gestating long within our souls, but which without his help might not have been born at all.

There are few emotions so satisfying as the joy that comes from the act of recognition when we see and identity our own thoughts. We have all had teachers who sought to educate us by feeding us alien ideas into our minds, ideas which we felt no spiritual or intellectual kinship."

-A.W. Tozer from Man: The Dwelling Place of God