Belief vs. practice

Sunday, January 26, 2020

I was driving my rental car back to the airport from a gig yesterday and I caught an interesting interview with religion scholar Elaine Pagels (author of Why Religion?) on Fresh Air.

“You know, Terry, I think that belief is overrated.” she said.

Talking about religions as if they were about belief takes an image that’s basically forged in Christian tradition and applies it to Judaism, applies it to Buddhism or Hinduism. And in other traditions, belief is not so much the center as practice — saying the prayers, saying the Shama or going to worship, participating with others in certain acts, prayer.

She then spoke about her own spiritual practices:

I go to an Episcopal church often. I love the music. The person who’s the priest there is a man of spiritual depth, which I deeply appreciate. I go to yoga almost every day. That’s a physical and also contemplative practice. Meditate sometimes. I walk in the woods, see my friends… I’m enormously susceptible to what you spoke of before — the music, the rituals, the traditions, the prayers that I find there and also, too, those that we create. I wrote about also creating rituals, and many people do that. Many artists do that. And what many artists do is, feels to me, very closely akin to what I’m talking about.

Related reading: “We are verbs, not nouns”

“All stories begin with ‘Once upon a time,’” begins E.H. Gombrich in his 1936 history book for children, A Little History of the World. “And that’s just what this story is all about: what happened, once upon a time.”

He then asks his young readers to picture the past as an infinity mirror:

Behind every ‘Once upon a time’ there is always another. Have you ever tried standing between two mirrors? You should. You will see a great long line of shiny mirrors, each one smaller than the one before, stretching away into the distance, getting fainter and fainter, so that you never see the last. But even when you can’t see them any more, the mirrors still go on. They are there, and you know it. And that’s how it is with ‘Once upon a time’. We can’t see where it ends.

At the end of the book, he enlists the aid of another another visual metaphor: a river.

“Imagine time as a river, and that we are flying high above it in an airplane.” He briefly describes all the events that have led to our current moment. “Now let us quickly drop down in our plane towards the river.”

From close up, we can see it is a real river, with rippling waves like the sea. A strong wind is blowing and there are little crests of foam on the waves. Look carefully at the millions of shimmering white bubbles rising and then vanishing with each wave. Over and over again, new bubbles come to the surface and then vanish in time with the waves. For a brief instant they are lifted on the wave’s crest and then they sink down and are seen no more. We are like that. Each one of us no more than a tiny glimmering thing, a sparkling droplet on the waves of time which flow past beneath us into an unknown, misty future. We leap up, look around us and, before we know it, we vanish again. We can hardly be seen in the great river of time. New drops keep rising to the surface. And what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that great multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave.

Compare these visual metaphors to the one that begins Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, another history book for young readers, published a decade and a half before Gombrich’s:

Related reading: Visit the children’s section

This age we’re living in

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Books I wrote that I can’t read

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

It is strange to look at a pile of books that you wrote that you can’t read. People often ask me about the quality of the foreign editions or complain about a translation and I have to admit them that even though the books have my name on them, I had absolutely nothing to do with any of them. Like, nothing. I wrote them, sure, but I can’t vouch for what’s in them! Who knows?!? Translation is weird. (Especially for a hick American who only speaks English.)

And yet, I’m so grateful to my translators and foreign publishers. Every time a new translation comes in the mail it’s a little thrill. For example, look at the gigantic Russian editions in hardcover! So fun. (I’ve lost count of the number of languages. Several are not shown in these pictures — including the foreign editions of Keep Going.) Getting your words in the world is a crazy thing. I wish I could be in all the places my books have been…

Look up

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Last week I read about Richard F. Shepard, a writer and editor at the New York Times who took interns and new reporters at the paper on epic tours of New York, teaching them how to investigate and navigate the city.

He said you can’t really figure out the city unless you travel on foot. Here’s what he wrote in his book, Going Out In New York: A Guide for the Curious:

There is no one real New York. It is more of a collage of bits and pieces, each with its own character, often absolutely contradictory to all others and yet purely New York… The only way to savor these varied panoramas is to stroll through; you can see them by car but you can only feel them on foot.

He also said you have to look up:

Look up, he said. Look especially at second-floor windows above storefronts. That, he liked to say, is where a lot of absorbing action takes place. Why would a perambulating soul wish to miss any of it?

Filed under: walking.