Expecting Rain
Our writers pick their favourite holiday reads
This week, Orpheus Lives! asked our writers to pick their favourite holiday reads. I hope you enjoy and wish you all a happy and leisurely summer. OL.
The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard
Ah, despair. We all suffer from this sickness, don’t we. Don’t tell me otherwise. Okay. When the symptom last flared up, did you tranquilise yourself with triviality? You know what I mean. In fact, you’re half-tempted to do so already, aren’t you. Well, hold on. What if that feeling of anguish was actually the spiritual self – your true self – crying out to become itself? Remember when you last despaired, when you really despaired over yourself. Perhaps in your despair, you despairingly wished to become someone else. A famous musician perhaps. Well, I’ve been there, my friend. Anything to rid yourself of the despair of being yourself, right. Or, perhaps, in despair, you actually wanted to become yourself. But in striving to create some better, less despairing version of yourself, you avoided becoming yourself, didn’t you. Oh, you poor soul. Don’t you know that refusing to become oneself is a sin? But don’t worry. This is only the “rising fever in the sickness of the self”. The closer you come to absolute despair, the closer you come to the remedy. The realisation that, as Christ said in Matthew, “for man nothing is possible, but for God all things are possible”. Only then can you be cured. But be warned, my friend. To have faith is to suspend all rationality, “to lose one’s mind so as to win God”. Some souls are perhaps best left asleep.
Ezekiel David
Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Joseph Pieper
Does one work in order to have leisure or does one have leisure in order to work? This is not a trivial question. Rather, as Joseph Pieper reminds us, it takes us to the very heart of the western philosophical tradition. For the Greeks, leisure was not just a time for rest and recuperation, but rather a time when the highest aspirations of humanity might be fully expressed. A time, as Plato wrote in The Laws, for “sacrificing, singing and dancing”. Philosophy, art, religion. They are all impossible without leisure. Joseph Pieper – a populariser of the writings of Thomas Aquinas – wrote this little gem of a book amid the ruins of the Second World War when totalitarian societies valorised the indomitable “worker”. But today Mammon’s tentacles have penetrated every aspect of our lives. No moment is spared the noisome buzz of applications nor the demand we consume or be consumed. Yet have no fear, comrades. Pieper’s book is the most leisurely of invitations to the feast of life.
Nathaniel Edgars
The Gospel According to Luke, Luke Brierley
“Mystery”, said Luis Bunuel, “is the essential element to every work of art”. To modern readers, the word “mystery” suggests the unanswerable, the unexplainable. Yet the Greek word mystērion, from which it it derived, means a “secret rite”. In the ancient mystery religions such rites included processions, sacrifices, and songs. The mystery was, in other words, something into which the participant was initiated. Orpheus was, according to Plato, well-versed in the hieros logos or “sacred mysteries”, which also means “holy word”. As was Socrates. In Mark’s gospel, moreover, Christ is presented as a keeper of sacred mysteries who deliberately conceals meaning from the uninitiated: “Unto you”, he tells the Twelve, “it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables”. Like the teachings of the ancient mystery religions, the book I have chosen has two meanings: one exoteric, one esoteric. It is perfectly possible to understand, even enjoy it, without penetrating its stranger, hidden meanings. Yet among the glowing reviews, one critic came closest to the truth when she remarked that “it shines a light upon the paper-thin veil that separates imagination from reality”.
Luke Brierley
The Gnostics, Jacques Laccarière
“In their eyes”, writes Jacques Laccarière in his introduction to The Gnostics, “the evil which taints the whole of creation and alienates man in body, mind, and soul, deprives him of the awareness necessary for his own salvation. Man, the shadow of man, possesses only a shadow of consciousness”. So begins this strange, poetic meditation on the gnostics of 2nd century Egypt who vanished as surely as the dunes of the desert. The gnostics, as Laccariére reminds us, believed the night sky a dark veil through “which appear, here and there, through chinks, faults and gaps, the glittering fires of another world”. This is a cosmic Jerusalem, the home of our true heavenly father out of whom the material world is but the “sediment of a lost heaven”. How lonely, for the gnostic, to believe the world was created by an evil demi-urge and paradise, a prison camp. How courageous to fight a lonely crusade against reality itself! But the gnostics were not nihilists. No. They believed each one of us contains within ourselves a divine spark – a fragment of the true heavenly father – full understanding of which is to achieve gnosis or “self-knowledge”. In other words, to achieve salvation.
Ana Seferiades
The Rainbow, DH Lawrence
After an obscenity trial in 1915, over 1,000 copies of The Rainbow were piled up and burned by the hangman outside the Royal Exchange in London. Lawrence spent the rest of his life in exile from England on what he called a “savage pilgrimage” before tuberculosis killed him at forty-four. Intended as a “kind of Bible for the English people”, The Rainbow, his masterpiece, tells the story of three generations of a Nottingham farming family, the Brangwens. In the beginning, we find the men of the family in prelapsarian “blood-intimacy” with the natural world before the coming of industrialism. The book ends with the story of Ursula, Lawrence’s greatest portrait, whose despair over the horrors of modernity lead her to a shattering revelation of “a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven”. The work of a “passionately religious man”, the book is a spiritual awakening.
Orpheus Lives
In case you missed it.
Why the Greek hero Orpheus lives.
Nathaniel Edgars searches for the meaning of duende, that mysterious force no philosopher has explained, at a Romani festival in France.
Ezekiel David’s debut contribution, the parable of “The Worm”.
Orpheus Lives! interviewed debut novelist Luke Brierley.
A meditation on the enduring power of friendship.