Of Several Things

I’ve not written of late for this blog because of the first of two topics I now write about – diminishment, specifically diminished energy for writing and diminished memory which seems to include what I call “brain fog” (more below).  The second topic is about books, the reading and collecting and cherishing of good books.

First, then, diminishment.

It comes in many ways and at different times, but seems especially and inevitably to come with old age.  That’s something many of my readers already know.

Legs going, and eyesight, and hearing.  And memory.  And the aforementioned “brain fog”. 

My doctor, a gerontologist, asked me if I was increasingly confused, and I said no.  True, when I get in the car and start to drive someplace, I am indeed confused about the route.  Whereas previously the route was just there in my mind and imagination.  But brain fog is not confusion.  More like driving in a light fog. 

And the irony of the moment is that such fog makes it difficult to describe it.  But let me try before getting on to books.

Not having “the foggiest idea” strikes me as a cliché from British films, spoken by someone like Michael Caine.  “Sorry, my dear, I haven’t the foggiest idea.”  (When I just googled, I found that it’s also the title of a song by a Velvet something rock group, about whom I’ve not the foggiest idea.)

But brain fog is a real and sometimes serious problem for those with it.  The loss of ability to do something we’ve always done with ease of habit.  I doubt, for instance, that I could now easily plan and deliver a decent, coherent, and hopefully interesting class lecture even though it’s something I did for many years.  (At least I thought that about my lectures; not sure what the students thought.)

As I said, it’s not the same as memory loss but seems quite connected to it.

I regularly have to ask my wife “what’s on the schedule for today?” since, even though I have noted several items on my calendar, I typically haven’t the foggiest notion what those notes mean.

I also associate my brain fog with both an inability to understand items in the daily paper, especially opinion pieces, and also with an increasing loss of interest in such items.  Sure, Trump sucks, but I’m no longer interested in the details of his idiocy and danger.  Same with Israel and Netanyahu (our new Hitler), or Ukraine and Putin (our new Stalin), or health care debates, or even in all the good stuff Bernie Sanders is pushing.

Better stop here about brain fog lest I get further lost in the fog.

So onto books.

I sit in my soi-disant office… (as further evidence of brain fog, I had to look up the meaning of that wonderful French phrase to make sure I was spelling and using it correctly).  I sit here surrounded by piles of books – probably more than 150 (books, not piles).  Indeed, for several years I’ve been trying to give away many of my books – to used booksellers, to the local seminary library, to family and friends.  Though I continue buying books, new and used.

Yet there are books I so cherish that I will never give them away – that shall be my wife or daughter’s burden after I’ve passed on to the great library in the sky.  Many of them I’ve read and hope to reread. Others I very much want to read even knowing that I’ll only get to them in that great library.  

All of my Dostoevsky (especially his magnificent Brother’s Karamazov) and Tolstoi (especially his equally magnificent War and Peace).  I hope to meet them both in that great library and hear them do readings there where I’ll be able to understand their Russian.  And my collection of Chaim Potok, the great American Jewish writer.  And my textbook Philosophies of India which got me through grad school and many years of teaching.  And my abbreviated version of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, as well as John McKenzie’s great Dictionary of the Bible.  And my good German and French dictionaries.  And Richard McBrien’s Encyclopedia of Catholicism.

Then there is everything written (the books and many copied articles) by my beloved mentor William Lynch, SJ.  (Indeed, I hope to sit talking with him for hours over good Scotch whiskey in that great library.)  And more recently everything by William E. Barrett, the great but mostly forgotten American Catholic novelist.

As a brief aside:  when we first moved to Denver in summer 1980, while sitting most afternoons on our front porch, we would be greeted by this elderly gent (always nattily clothed with sport coat, tie, and fedora).  He lived up the block and was on his way to pick up that day’s New York Times.  It wasn’t till years later, after he’d died, that I came to know that he was a significant novelist – as I’ve said, a great but still sadly forgotten Catholic novelist.

I then began to collect and read his works.  Lillies of the Field (which you may recognize because of the good film starring Sidney Poitier) and The Left Hand of God (also made into a decent film starring Humphrey Bogart).  As well as 10 others, concluding with Lady of the Lotus, a curiously beautiful fictional biography of the wife of the Buddha.  (Most know that Siddhartha had a wife because they know that leaving her was part of his great renunciation.)  And a biography of Giovanni Battista Montini’s life before he became Pope Paul VI. 

Barrett is a great intellect, knowledgeable about theology and philosophy as well as the history of many different cultures.   (The Left Hand of God is the fictional story of a wounded military pilot taking on the role of Catholic priest in rural China during Mao’s revolution!)   And he is, in the best sense of the word, a truly imaginative writer, able to evoke a diversity of remarkably realistic characters and love stories as well as beautiful land and cityscapes. 

Google him, then check him out in good libraries and used book sellers.

And then there are various collections of poetry — T. S. Eliot and Auden, and other collections of classical and modern poetry as well as books of poetry written by friends.  Perhaps especially the well-worn textbook 12 Poets (from Shakespeare and Donne to Yeats and, again, Eliot) which I was fortunate to have been assigned while teaching a senior high school course in literature many years ago.  I’m not actually a great reader of poetry, but I cherish these collections since (when occasion arises) they enable me to re-read one of Shakespear’s sonnets or one of Yeats’ compelling poems.  And, yes, the collected poems pf the great British Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins – who reminds us that the world is “charged with God’s grandeur”.

So if I find myself much diminished and brain fogged, I still have the books.  Not for some gnostic retreat into a world of words, but for the words and stories and images which bring me back into the real world.  Through the fog and into so much that is admirable.

Let me, then, end with the idea of admiration.  Despite my diminished state, I have the hopeful joy of announcing that Georgetown University Press – and I have great admiration not only for my own Regis University, but also for that first of Jesuit universities whence my son Peter graduated Phi Beta Kappa (says his dad proudly) – that their press will soon publish a collection of essays by Bill Lynch which I have edited.  It features his never completed “Book of Admiration” to which he gave the accurate and significant subtitle “A Prose Poem on the Forms of Salvation”.  I’ll write more about that when publication is announced.

Finally, the writings of Pope Francis.  I’m currently rereading, for discussion in a zoom group, his Let Us Dream.  It’s a beautiful, thoughtful, compelling, and brief writing about how we might and should respond to times of crisis – written towards the beginning of the Covid crisis, but well aware of those many other continuing crises of war, climate, poverty, migration, and so on.  Take and read.

I love and admire the Spanish words for departures (and endings):  Vaya con Dios, dear reader.  Or in the equivalent French, Adieu.  May your diminishments bring you hope and your books bring you joy.