"Look Up into the Stars and You're Gone": The Internet, Distraction, and the Vanity of Modern Culture

“When everybody else refrained,
My uncle Johnny did cocaine.
He’s convinced himself right in his brain
That it helps to take away the pain.
Hey Johnny…”
– The Killers, “Uncle Johnny” (2006)







As a result of my “arrest” at the age of fourteen for making “terrorist threats,” I was grounded from the Internet for three years. It was a fine time in my life, right up until the end: I read Lord of the Rings, and Catch-22, and The Christ Clone Trilogy (yeah, don’t be hatin’), and the novels of Frank Peretti and Charles Williams and probably about a dozen other authors. I spent an entire summer typing up a history textbook, ten hours a day for thirty days. I memorized huge portions of the Bible.

I become all the more grateful as I realize I might have been born in the last generation in which such a life was possible. I’m old enough to remember a time before the Internet (and most of our subsequent modern technologies), and thus old enough to remember a time before it had become everything. I remember Newt Gingrich shutting down the government in January 1995 and not feeling the urge to “Tweet” about it. I remember when people still used AOL, and when "lolz" was just something you hit when life slowed down a bit (remember when life slowed down?).

The reason I find myself waxing suddenly so sentimental is because it seems every doctor, professor, counselor, high school history teacher, scientist, politician, and blogger in America has decided that this was the year they were finally going to finish that book they always wanted to write about how the Internet is physically reshaping our brains and destroying the attention span of an entire generation. Anyone looking for a bit of extra Christmas money need only dash off a few hundred pseudo-academic, hastily-researched pages on how—isn’t it the strangest thing?—lately they’ve been finding themselves so easily distracted… —and the publishers will line up at your door. I’ve seen more books about the dangers of Internet usage this year than I have children’s fantasies about magical boarding schools.

First out of the gate this summer was Nicholas Carr, who in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, expanded on a theme he had first discussed in an article for The Atlantic Monthly two years earlier. His was the most controversial, and at this point probably the most incisive; when I opened the pages of the New York Times Book Review four days ago and discovered a review for a newly-published work entitled The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, by David L. Ulin, it was obvious that a certain amount of ennui had set in among the educated classes. “The publishing industry, like every industry, needs product to push,” writes Christopher Beha. “[N]otwithstanding the fact that a truly necessary book is a rare thing. Here is a challenging and confounding truth you won’t find anywhere in Ulin’s pages: There are too many books, and this is part of the problem. David Ulin’s intentions are beyond reproach, but his book is another distraction.”

Ouch. You can almost hear the groans as the book reviewers excitedly tear open their new packages of books to be reviewed, only to find that—alas!—they’re living in the year 2010, and the only people who haven’t been pulled into the Internet are the ones writing books about it. Indeed, the increasingly laborious, increasingly ominous titles of these terrifying tomes have a definitive flavor of Harry Potter about them: One thinks, for example, of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, and Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (exactly what I was planning on titling my first fantasy novel, but my agent insisted it was “too scary”).

This is from the Publisher’s Weekly review of that last book, written by Maggie Jackson: “… Our near-religious allegiance to a constant state of motion and addiction to multitasking are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention—the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress and stunting society’s ability to comprehend what’s relevant and permanent.” All profoundly true; one of the great problems I find in discussions of these books about the stultifying effects of Internet usage is that while everyone seems to recognize the problem, no one seems to have any notion of a solution, and thus most of those doing the discussing are as trapped in the vortex as anyone else. If not more: it can create a certain sense of cognitive dissonance to scroll through a long series of blog posts on diminished attention spans written by someone (Andrew Sullivan, say) who spends twelve to sixteen hours a day blogging.

The last few weeks have produced two widely-discussed essays on the issue, the first one from a serial blogger, the second from a novelist of some repute. The film critic Roger Ebert wrote a blog post on his website entitled All the Lonely People, in which he wonders aloud why the Internet seems to attract all the loneliest sorts of people (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/11/all_the_lonely_people.html). As lucid and witty as Mr. Ebert nearly always is, he can also be profoundly moving:

"Lonely people have a natural affinity for the internet. It's always there waiting, patient, flexible, suitable for every mood. But there are times when the net reminds me of the definition of a bore by Meyer the hairy economist, best friend of Travis McGee: "You know what a bore is, Travis. Someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with companionship."

"What do lonely people desire? Companionship. Love. Recognition. Entertainment. Camaraderie. Distraction. Encouragement. Change. Feedback. Someone once said the fundamental reason we get married is because [we] have a universal human need for a witness. All of these are possibilities. But what all lonely people share is a desire not to be – or at least not to feel – alone…

"When I was a child the mailman came once a day. Now the mail arrives every moment. I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude."


This post created a reaction the likes of which he had never before seen on his blog. Hundreds of people responded to tell him their stories, to explain why they were bound to the Internet, to defend the small, irresistible pleasures of the sixteen-inch life.

What I found more haunting than the post itself, was a particular remark near the top of the comments section. “Almost everybody I know, either personally, second-handedly, or observationally, has turned to the opiates of the current day. Escapist entertainments, the addictions of rage and intolerance, alcohol and drugs and emotionally absent sex, endless political square offs… the void seems to be growing.”

To which Mr. Ebert replied, “Sometimes I feel that in my lifetime I have seen a healthy society ripped to pieces.”

In her review of David Fincher’s new film The Social Network (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why/?pagination=false&printpage=true), British author Zadie Smith distinguishes between what she calls “1.0 people” and “2.0 people.” 1.0 people grew up in the world as it was before texting and blogging and Facebook; to one degree or another, they’re struggling to maintain some measure of depth and three-dimensionality; light doesn’t just pass through them. 2.0 people are always connected, always on the go. It’s as though they’re perpetually late for an appointment, but never seem to know where they’re going.

She ponders the possibility of a world in which the whole Internet will become like Facebook: “Falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous.” “If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out… It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX.”

I remember in the summer of 2005, when we first discovered Facebook, Booth’s dire prognostication that it would take over the world. At the time, Facebook was only accessible by students with access to university email accounts, and numbered hardly more than fifty million people. Today it claims 500 million and growing (even my parents have it), and it recently unveiled a new email service of its own, and I received a notice in my inbox this afternoon informing me that it’s now planning to integrate with Skype. Soon there will no longer be an Internet; there will just be Facebook. (Booth, incidentally, deactivated his account over a year ago, when it finally occurred to him that his prediction had come true).

When I was twelve years old, I gave up watching television altogether so that I could read the novel War and Peace. I never took it up again—except for LOST, and the first few seasons of The Office, which I watched online, it seemed a massive waste of time, a huge, gaping hole in the center of our modern life where heart and thought had dissipated in a void of tired sitcom jokes and deadeningly-stupid advertisements. Yet now I read in the London Daily Mail that the Internet is actually more detrimental to the brains of growing children than television is, because it offers the promise of immediate gratification rather than the ten-minute span of attention required for a show, or the two hours for a movie. Only now, for some reason, does it occur to me that all the reasons for which I grew up hating television are amplified and exacerbated by the lure of the Internet. To me the Internet always seemed a refuge from television—a quiet, sane, controllable retreat from the poisoned world of professional wrestling and maddening suburban jingles. I promised myself long ago, during that luminous summer of Tolstoy in fact, that when I grew up and got married, I would never, ever let a television in my house. Yet the Internet has become vastly more unwieldy, more inexorable, more addictive, more draining—and more indispensable. How do you get rid of something that you can’t do without?

Last week I took the first step. On Thanksgiving Day and the day after I shut myself in the cupboard under our stairs with only a lamp, a blanket, a few books, a package of tortillas, some honey, and a notebook; and I only emerged once a day to shower and stroll about for a few minutes in sunlight. Only when you attempt to undertake something of that magnitude do you begin to feel the pull it has on you. There’s an itch in the heart that I cannot resist. I had tried to sit still, but I couldn’t; I was yanked by invisible chains from one distraction to the next. It didn’t even have to be the Internet; it could have been anything. I would awake in the morning, read three pages of a book, set it down and find another, scan a few lines of a poem, check my blogs, check the news, write a paragraph in my novel, not like it, have to rewrite it five or six times… then I would set my computer on the floor and try to pray. A moment later, I would take up another book—it was irresistible—I couldn’t bear to be alone. That hole was all-consuming—and had ravaged all my inner life. I had an insatiable need to be preoccupied at every moment of the day. “Hell and destruction are never full,” saith the Proverbs; “so the eyes of man are never satisfied” (Prov. 27:20).

When I went into the cupboard, I discovered the key to it all: intense amounts of shame—intense amounts of fear. I was afraid to confront my own failings, and afraid of grace. I was afraid that if I stopped reading and writing and working, even for a moment, I would be bombarded with the unbearable reality of my pitiable condition. My heart was like the Guatemalan sinkhole; I was being drawn to the edge; underneath me yawned a terrible abyss; but I couldn’t look down, it was awful, if once I faced the blackness, and the blankness, and the bleakness of my inner life, the ground would give way and I would plunge headlong into condemnation, scorn, and self-reproach, down, down, down, into the very depths of hell. I realized that everything I said, everything I did, nearly everything I thought about, was an attempt to escape the unthinkable horror of my own existence. I realized there were pains in my past so horrific that I expended virtually all my time and energy in walling myself off altogether, that I might not have to face them. SEARING PAIN—O God, the pain of it goes on forever! I remembered the scene in Pi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulRoQTK5HY) where Max finds the brain in the subway station—it’s his own brain, though he doesn’t know it—and he touches it with a pen, and the pain splits his skull asunder. Leave me alone in the room for an hour, or a day, or a week, with nothing between me and God but the walls of my heart, and the agony of the encounter is likely to drive me insane.

And yet the depth of His presence—the richness of His knowledge—and the comfort of His healing—were my only hope.

There in the cupboard, I thought very long, and (for the first time in a long time), very deeply, about an article I had read that weekend in the New York Times: “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1). It narrates the life of a boy named Sean, who plays four hours of video games on weekdays, and twice that on weekends. “He says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit when given the choice. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus, asserting that in another era he would have been distracted by TV or something else.”

Sean remarks, “Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it.”

There’s a song by the Killers called “Uncle Johnny”, the lyrics of which I borrowed for the epigraph to this entry. Brandon Flowers wrote it about his Uncle Johnny—who, incidentally, loves the song—and who for a long season of his life was devastated by cocaine addiction. As with most Killers songs, however, the song grows and develops with an intensity both musical and lyrical, eventually addressing devils and dilemmas far beyond its stated purpose. Half the song is sung from the perspective of his uncle, half from that of family members who are pleading with him to seek help. “My appetite ain’t got no heart,” sings Johnny: “I said, my appetite ain’t got no heart / Shockin’ people when you feel that pull / Shock and drop ‘em when you know it’s full,” eventually admitting, “I feel a burning in my body core / It’s a yearning that you can’t ignore…”

To which Brandon cries (somewhat sarcastically, I feel), “Hey Johnny, I got faith in you, man, I mean it! It’s gonna be ALL right…” And the whole family sings in unison: “Tell us what’s going on, feels like everything’s wrong / If the future is real, Johnny, you’ve got to heal…”

Yes, Johnny is addicted to drugs—but he’s hardly alone. The things that you love will destroy you.

"The Ocean Ground Against His Utmost Bones"

Let us return once again to the passage I cited in yesterday’s letter from the epilogue of Crime and Punishment:

"He was ill a long time. But it was not the horrors of prison life, not the hard labour, the bad food, the shaven head, or the patched clothes that crushed him. What did he care for all those trials and hardships! He was even glad of the hard work. Physically exhausted, he could at least reckon on a few hours of quiet sleep. And what was the food to him—the thin cabbage soup with beetles floating in it? In the past as a student he had often not had even that. His clothes were warm and suited to his manner of life. He did not even feel the fetters. Was he ashamed of his shaven head and parti-coloured coat? Before whom? Before Sonia? Sonia was afraid of him, how could he be ashamed before her? And yet he was ashamed even before Sonia, whom he tortured because of it with his contemptuous rough manner. But it was not his shaven head and his fetters he was ashamed of: his pride had been stung to the quick. It was wounded pride that made him ill. Oh, how happy he would have been if he could have blamed himself! He could have borne anything then, even
shame and disgrace. But he judged himself severely, and his exasperated conscience found no particularly terrible fault in his past, except a simple blunder which might happen to anyone. He was ashamed just because he, Raskolnikov, had so hopelessly, stupidly come to grief through some decree of blind fate, and must humble himself and submit to ‘the idiocy’ of a sentence, if he were anyhow to be at peace."

I like this paragraph. I like it a lot. Among other devices that might be of benefit, we can observe the transition from physical realities to internal, with the former being a reflection of the latter: the beetles in the soup reflecting in an inexplicable, but nonetheless tangible manner the circumstances of his inner torment.

More to the point, I am struck by the manner in which Dostoevsky manages to prise his way into the head of our beloved protagonist and reveal to us the vibrant, multicolored skein of fears, resentments, and evasions lurking there, without in any way seeming to support Raskalnikov’s emotional state, nor his dark, subversive thoughts. “But he judged himself severely, and his exasperated conscience found no particularly terrible fault in his past, except a simple blunder which might happen to anyone.” The blunder thus referenced is Raskalnikov’s slaying of an old woman with an axe. Might have happened to anyone! It is unfortunate that fate reserved such an uncomfortable circumstance for the hero of this novel, with whom we have been growing more than casually acquainted for the last 700 pages, and who less than anyone else in the book we should like to see thrown into prison for the totally arbitrary occurrence of murdering a woman in cold blood.
“He was ashamed just because he, Raskalnikov, had so hopelessly, stupidly come to grief through some decree of blind fate…” Through the experience of writing my own novel I have discovered that such stray details are never merely a reflection of the character’s current convictions, but are the extenuation of sentiments and paradigms which have been at work within him, normally since the beginning of the novel, and which in one way or another are connected to every single event of the story, and every word he speaks. I would have to write out the previous sentence, three, four, five, or six times to emphasize the reality of it, and its ongoing significance for our present purposes.

And now, at the opposite pole, not the end, but the beginning, of another great Russian novel:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

"Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid and the coachman had given warning."

The line about the various members of the family all feeling they were but loosely connected, more like the inhabitants of a dingy inn than a fellowship of blood, is unnervingly vivid. I remember at the height of my mother’s insanity during the summer of 2006, wildly exclaiming to Booth, “This isn’t a family! This is nothing like a family! It’s just a collection of people who live together under the same roof!” The entirety of the first chapter is delineated in a similar manner. Nothing particularly eventful happens, but the accumulation of small, perceptive details leads in the end to an impression of overwhelming realism. Stepan’s reaction to his wife when she first confronts him with the evidence of his transgression is particularly startling—he smiles. “His face utterly involuntarily… assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.” It is hard to imagine such a person reacting in any other way.

The Loneliness of a Tragic-Minded Chronicler

“I had to close down everything, I had to close down my mind
Too many things could cut me, too many things make me blind
I’ve seen so much in so many places, so many heartaches, so many faces
So many dirty things, you couldn’t even believe…”
– Moby, “Extreme Ways”













Perhaps because it’s nearly fall again, this has been one of the most vividly beautiful visits I’ve had to Southwestern. I love the way the light slants into corners of a darkened room; the high, austere gloominess of the Chapel on a quiet afternoon; that place in between Herman Brown and the McCombs apartments where the light from the moon, and the street lamps, and the stars, all seems to pool into a single place, and the rest of the campus, by extension, is utterly swathed in darkness (an appropriate symbol, I guess). Yet there’s a certain menace to it, also. When I was trekking with Rebecca across the front of the campus this morning after Sunrise Club, I mentioned that she had eight more glorious months to be here, and, being in a particularly cynical and snarky mood these past few days, she muttered hostilely, “I haven’t idealized it yet, like you have.” Yet, in walking round the campus alone this afternoon, and sitting in the library for an hour by myself, and praying in the Chapel, I eventually concluded that the accusation was unjust. I’m not yet so fully removed from this school and the time that I spent here (if indeed that’s even possible for me) that I’ve forgotten how some of the worst years of my life were spent in this place.

For I’m finding (if I ever forgot it) that Southwestern means more to me than Worship in the Chapel, and long nights spent with others in communal prayer, and making Micah laugh in the Commons, and scheming with Booth and Alex, and spinning round in circles with Shelley through the faint haze of autumn. It’s also the place—may I capture it well!—where I sat on a bench in the lamplight feeling lonelier than I had ever felt in my life. It’s also the place where I lay in my bed until long after midnight feeling restless and uneasy at the relentless, unblinking condemnation of the bare, white walls of my room. It’s the place where, every night as night set in, I would flee to the library to escape the terror of the emptiness I felt. It’s a place where I trembled and wept.

If nothing else, though, one good thing has come of it: Being here again has given me a much deeper understanding of my novel, and myself. It was during the middle of the summer that I first began to re-envision the overarching structure of the chapters on Southwestern, after reading Dr. Herbert’s book Moby-Dick and Calvinism and the first few books of The Brothers Karamazov. Our venerated Melville-enthusiast-companion contends that the reason his beloved author suffered so much emotional anguish at around the time he was writing his masterpiece was because his understanding of the world had been profoundly disturbed by a reality which was incongruent with its preconceived assertions. Essentially, his parents had raised him in a Unitarian faith which taught that God rewarded the good and rendered judgment on the wicked. For the early Unitarians, of course, prosperity was a sure sign of God’s favor. However, when Allan Melvill became involved in some unscrupulous financial arrangements, ruining the family income, the guilt he incurred on his head was so great that he suffered a panic attack and died of anguish. Now, young Herman could have dealt with this, theologically, by recognizing what might have been obvious to anyone else, then or now, that his father was something less than the paragon of virtue he had previously believed him to be. However, he did not do so; and his failure to do so plunged him into an arresting theological dilemma. God rewards the good with tokens of benevolence and smites the wicked with afflictions; everyone knew that. Yet Melville’s father had been faithful to the Lord in all his dealings, and had died at an early age in the most appalling circumstances. How do you reconcile the indisputable truths of your religious understanding with the evident realities of ordinary life? For Melville, the answer was to do essentially what I did during my freshman year here: to ping-pong back and forth from one particular conviction to its opposite, inviting doubt, and disbelief, and, ultimately, searing psychological disturbance, in the process.

The primary difficulty, as Dr. Herbert explains it, lies in this: A person who has been raised in a particular matrix of belief can never let go of the convictions attendant on it without, in some measure, doing violence to his own psyche, because those convictions form the edifice on which his personality is built, and he removes them at his peril.

Dr. Herbert describes Melville’s struggle with a predestinating God in the most mythical terms: “This dilemma lies at the heart of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael and Captain Ahab come to terms with a whale whose career of wanton destruction suggests a God run amok” (shades of the CCT!). “Melville recognized that the remorseless logic of orthodox Calvinism was not only consistent with itself; it was also consistent with realities of human experience that cannot be explained by the theory that God respects liberal conceptions of human dignity.” All true; there’s an unassailable logic to Calvinism (to say nothing of its apparent support in the Scriptures) which renders it from a rhetorical standpoint virtually inarguable. I suppose this explains, at least in part, why so many right-thinking, deep-thinking people are taken in by it.

It was during my time here at Southwestern that I grappled at close quarters with two mighty, sublime, and potentially treacherous religious frameworks. The first was Calvinism; the second, Jungianism. Looking back on it now, I suppose I fled into Jungianism as a revolt against Calvinism, and against my own apparently inexorable calling as a prophet. In large part, it appears that the liberal revolt against orthodoxy in the early- to mid-nineteenth century was a revolt against Calvinism as well. Unitarianism offered an understanding of Christianity with some basis in the Scriptures, just as Jungianism offered an understanding of my final year of high school, and first year of college, and the general mystical, disturbing, ornately symbolic, literary nature of my life, which fit the facts as comprehensively as Calvinism did. Yet Jungianism, like Unitarianism, proved to be something of a dead end. For one thing, it encouraged me to go around quoting Moby Dick with the same avidity and fervor with which I had once quoted the Scriptures aforetime; for another, I became so lost in aethereal metaphysical abstractions that I nearly lost my mind. This would seem to be the natural consequence of seeking to escape a religious understanding enshrined around an impersonal God who coldly, grimly foreordained the mechanical movements of your brutal and surreal existence. My conception of God as a being who is adamantly, almost forcefully un-relational impelled me into a metaphysical framework where relationship was utterly unnecessary.

I still have respect and sympathy for Jungianism and Calvinism—even agree with them, in fact, in certain essentials—but it appears that my novel will be a takedown of both these systems of belief. Even if that wasn’t what I had intended, the arc of the narrative would render it so. They’ve simply proven too destructive; Calvinism as I understood it came close to annihilating my faith when I first began to grapple with my calling as a prophet and the literary nature of my life. Jungianism, though subtle and more insidious, came closer still.

Yet even so, what I said at the beginning of this entry holds true, and in some inscrutable manner—I know not how, exactly—plays into it all. Southwestern is like a person: sometimes willing, sometimes helpful, sometimes cold and isolating and possessed of terrible moroseness. In the fall, these attributes take on a quality of nigh-unbearable acuteness. Even at my happiest, I still felt lonely here. The place is so spacious, and the people so few; and the scenery so lulling, so deep; you expect at any moment for the shadows in a corner or the crevice of a stony stair to swallow you alive and never let you go. You’re talking to a friend for an hour—say, Shelley on the mall, or Booth, or even Taylor, in the Chapel—and you turn to leave, and in the very instant that you turn away, the darkness deepens, and the immeasurability of loneliness is overwhelming to your senses. It engulfs you like the sea. I refuse to believe that it’s just my own extraordinary sensitivity to mood and lighting; there were many times I was alone in London, yet I never felt so lonely. (I say nothing of Chicago for, as always, the less said the better). This is a place of endless depths. And there are things that lurk here, hidden from the common eye, which lend to its inner richness a most brooding hue.

"Nightfall in Winter that Comes Without a Star"

Near the end of last week I wrote “The Air Loom Gang,” and yesterday morning I completed “The Bower of Delights.” Today I go forth to attempt Chapter 10. I believe it will be primarily engaged with the emotions I was feeling during Christmas in anticipation of the dreaded year to come. In writing the first half of the chapter on Corey’s collapse and Booth’s return to reason at the end of January, I eventually reached a dead end because I realized that I hadn’t yet explained what I was fighting for, nor why the circumstances seemed so dire. They were truly dire. Thus when I wrote “The Bower of Delights” I strove to explain, with logic and clarity and a certain amount of emotional force, how I had come to believe that [[ Meredith ]] and I would be sexually tempted during third trimester, and why it was necessary to prevent this fearful fate. In order to do so, I had to accomplish two things: I had to convey the emotional stakes in a manner that would be understood, and perhaps even deeply felt, by a general audience (thus my assertion that in averting the immediate temptation, I would be preventing the untimely death of my beloved in the distant future), and I had to explain why having sex with [[Meredith]] was a Bad Idea. This last I attempted to tackle in two different ways: by explaining why having sex at all, with anyone, was a Bad Idea for me; and why, in particular, it was wrong to engage in amours with [[Meredith]]—because I knew her motivations for providing those delights would be primarily self-centered, rooted in her insecurities. So even people who disagreed with my understanding of chastity (although I feel I explained it in a fairly presentable, pleasing, and logical manner, I’m aware that many will disdain it from the hardness of their hearts), even those who have qualms about my Christian sense of honor should at least understand and respect that I wished not to prey on the emotional vulnerabilities of someone whom I deeply cared about. And I can feel the momentum of the narrative flowing towards the question of, “Will he be able to do it? Will he be able to show [[Meredith]] her value as a person, and prevent her from encouraging something that would hurt them both?” That momentum will flow into the chapter following, the final “Christmas” chapter, and by the time we return to the time of Booth’s return, I’m hoping it will have formed an avalanche of sorts. (My understanding of what makes a novel powerful is shifting from a focus on its “literary,” and in particular stylistic merit, to its intellectual, spiritual, and emotional force. In all the reviews I read of Inception over the summer, what seemed to move the critics the most was Christopher Nolan’s brilliance at simply explaining difficult, trippy ideas, and his ability to continuously raise the emotional stakes until your whole heart was gripped by the direful spectacle).

In which case, I need to determine what remains to be explained before we reach that point. December 2003 was the point where my life became truly mythological at last, although the act had been in process for a space of several months; where I found myself living in some surreal, epic wasteland where the whole world was in peril and I was responsible for holding back the rising tide of darkness which threatened to devour me, my closest friends, my school, and then, beyond even that, the earth itself. How did it come to this?

In the previous chapters I established that, however it might have been happening, and for whatever purpose, I was living in a story with supernatural dimensions. All my predictions about the beginning of the second trimester, about [[Meredith]], about Priscilla, had now come true. For the moment, I wrote, it was safe to assume that I had been given some kind of prophetic understanding. Near the end of Chapter 8 I elaborated on the reasons why I chose to view these circumstances from within a Christian framework—any other explanation would have been too crazy; would, indeed, have MADE me crazy. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable, considering that I appeared to be dealing with prophecy and demons, to determine that religious explanations must have lain behind the riddles.

But to this point I’ve been holding off that portion of the puzzle which was added (most surreally) by the situation with [[Mortimer]] and [[Petunia]]. Their emergence was the central plotline of the sixth and seventh chapters. When I called [[Mortimer]] to tell him what was happening in Alvin, he reported that the same things were happening to him in [[Toronto]] (several hundred miles north). Indeed, they had been happening for the same length of time. He said that on more than one occasion demons had assaulted his body with the evident intention of possessing it. He said he had been tempted (as I was) to dabble in Finnish magic. He was just as surprised as I was to discover that this was going on elsewhere, with someone he knew very well. When I asked him what it meant, and why this was happening to us, he told me it appeared that the forces of heaven and hell were gathering up their forces for a major battle—possibly the final battle—and that we were being summoned to fight in the conflict ahead.

I did find it odd that [[Mortimer]] and I were both experiencing the same apparent supernatural phenomena, but found his reasoning fallacious. Granted, it only made sense that if we were being singled out for attack with such severity, and at the same time manifesting the power of God to a parallel degree, then something was in preparation. But to deduce from thence that we would be figures of import in a major spiritual conflict, let alone the end-times conflict, was a step too far. At least that was my feeling until [[Petunia]] wrote her letter explaining that she had been having these experiences as well, and that her visions had revealed that she was destined to marry, and then murder, the Antichrist himself.

So what was I supposed to think? That we were entering a time of global tribulation, that the people close to me would be among its chief participants, had been affirmed now by my own unusual experiences and those of two other people, none of whom at first had known about the others. Yet, at the same time, it just couldn’t be true… it was absurd, unthinkable… it was an age-old deception adapting itself with insidious force to the circumstances of our times. There are few more susceptible temptations for a radical, eschatologically-minded young Christian than to believe that he’s being called to participate, to fight, in the events of Revelation. It’s inconceivable to us that we would have to live and die and fade away from history into the all-devouring oblivion of time like the great mass of common men. There is a potent exhilaration in believing that we stand on the wheel of the world at the end of time; that ours it is to break the seals and bring about the end. Yet if that was all we were experiencing now, then why was there such a prevalent sense that this was happening, and why it had been affirmed with so many miracles and oracles and visions? What was all this madness? What did it portend?

That was my central dilemma, abetted and bolstered, as we have before proven, by the inexorable iron of a single irresistible idea. It’s likely that I shall attempt to tackle that dynamic again on some level. Yet what I really want to do with this chapter, above and beyond all other considerations attendant on it, is to create metaphor on the level of myth. It ought to be fundamentally focused on my tumultuous emotional state during the weeks immediately prior to the beginning of 2004, and it ought to convey those emotions through clear, vivid images. And it seems to me that in order to do this, I need to speak simultaneously from two contrasting points of view: one, that I see myself being pulled with potent, ineradicable force towards something I can scarce comprehend, still less resist; two, that the end of the world is coming, but that before the dusk falls on the earth, it will fall on my school, and my personal sense of a battle awaiting me when I return in January—a battle to prevent [[Meredith]] from destroying herself and me, a battle to save Corey, a battle to keep the whole school from edging downward into darkness. In all my previous assaults on this chapter it seems to me that I’ve written primarily from the first place, when the second is the strongest, and most entertaining, but even the second is incomplete without the other, and the tension created between them is what lends this section of the story weight and depth and substance.

As a consequence, the reality that lies around this chapter ought to be something akin to the sense you feel in the middle of The Two Towers, at around the point where Elrond and Galadriel have given their expository speeches, and the two hobbits (Pippin and Merry) witness the march of the Ents to Helm’s Deep. (It certainly helps, of course, that [[Mortimer]] and [[Petunia]] both speak like Tolkien, now and through the rest of our adventures).

* * *

"If Aragorn survives this war, you will still be parted. If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true, he will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality. Whether by the sword or by the slow decay of time, Aragorn will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of his passing. He will come to death, an image of the splendor of the kings of men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.

"But you, my daughter… you will linger on, in darkness and in doubt. As nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell, bound to your grief, beneath the fading trees, until all the world is changed and all the long years of your life are utterly spent."

"The power of the enemy is growing. Sauron will use his puppet Saruman to launch an assault on the peoples of Middle Earth. Isengard has been unleashed. His eye now turns to Gondor, the last free kingdom of men. His war on this country will come swiftly. He senses the Ring is close.

"The strength of the Ring-bearer is fading. In his heart, Frodo begins to understand—the quest will claim his life. You know this; you have foreseen it. It is the risk we all took.

"In the gathering dark, the will of the Ring grows strong. It works hard now to find its way back into the hands of Men—Men, who are so easily seduced by its power. The young captain of Gondor has but to extend his hand, take the Ring for his own, and the world will fall. It is close now, so close to achieving its goals. For Sauron will have dominion over all life on this earth, even unto the ending of the world.

"The time of the Elves is over. Do we leave Middle Earth to its fate? Do we let them stand alone?"

"The Bower of Delights"

I finished the first draft of Chapter 9! It treats of chastity and honor.

Chapter 8: The Air Loom Gang (Complete)

“The intense concentration of self in the middle of such an immensity, my God! Who can tell it?”
– Melville, Moby-Dick
(Ch. 93, “The Castaway”)








In my study of abnormal psychology I had encountered the strange case of a man named James Tilley Mathews, the first schizophrenic on record and a resident of the Bedlam asylum in London in the early part of the nineteenth century. Such was the clarity of his mind and strength of his belief in the delusions he espoused that a team of medical practitioners examined him and found no evidence of insanity (a diagnosis apparently bolstered by the fact that the stories which could be verified one way or the other—for example, his claim that he had been involved in the drafting of a secret peace treaty between Britain and France and thrown in jail to die by the prime minister—were invariably proven true).

Mathews believed he was privy to the machinations of a vast criminal conspiracy, centered in London but with tentacles spread throughout the British Isles, that was actively working to arrange a war between the major European powers with the ultimate goal of destroying the West. At the heart of this ruthless organization stood a small but nefarious band of Dickensian villains, four men and three women, who were stationed for many years in an apartment hard by London Wall. Among them were Bill, or “the King,” the leader of the band and foremost operator of the Air Loom Machine; Jack the Schoolmaster, so-called because he continuously recorded the gang’s doings in shorthand (merrier than the King, he was fond of remarking, “I’m here to see fair play!”); the Middle Man, an engineer and manufacturer of air looms; Augusta, a small, reedy woman with sharp features, who, though sunny and amiable to outward view, was savagely and incontestably temperamental when she failed to get her way; and Charlotte, a ruddy brunette, a “steady, persevering sort of person” who sometimes felt herself to be a prisoner, and lived in a state of perpetual remorse .

Mathews was determined to expose the secrets of this dastardly assembly to the world at large. However, he was prevented from doing so by means of the extraordinary machine that they operated. This machine was an air loom, a convoluted series of tubes and valves which could “assail” its victims with a warping fluid from a thousand feet away. The assailments were varied, but invariably effective. “Fluid-locking” held the tongue in check, preventing speech; “cutting soul from sense,” a chemical means of severing the mind and heart, dissociated memory and intellect; “kite-ing” lifted an irrelevant, ridiculous idea into the brain and made it hang there, like a kite borne high on the wind, to the exclusion of thoughts more purposeful and sane; “lengthening the brain” distorted any normal thoughts the brain might have and warped them into primal, agonizing forms; and “lobster-cracking” was a sudden, spontaneous assault on the entire nervous system, likely to result in death.

For years the “Air Loom Gang” had forestalled Mr. Mathews’ diligent attempts at exposure by “assailing” him with gruesome acts malign and shiny metal wands, which, being waved, would instantly transport them out of sight.

In my attempts to unravel what was happening at Alvin High School, and what had now grown, apparently, to incorporate at least one other person elsewhere (that I knew of), I had asked myself, “What if the religious explanation for this is the wrong one?” In other words, “What if there’s an explanation lying somewhere between ‘whacky coincidence’ and ‘cosmic warfare’ that I haven’t even thought of?” This, at least, was Booth’s initial opinion. While he found it odd, as I did, that events were stacking up in such a linear, literary manner, and for that reason thought it unlikely that this was all but a fevered coinage of my brain—especially not now that others were involved who could attest to having undergone experiences similar to mine—he was hesitant to frame the unexplainable in terms of my Judeo-Christian understanding.

“The universe is really vast,” he told me, in his probing, forthright manner. “And it has a lot of dimensions. I’m not saying that ‘weird’ things can’t happen, I just don’t think that we should confine our interpretations to something written by a small group of people living in the first century. Do you see how narrow that is?”

I conceded his point—it was certainly narrow. The problem was, if not coincidence, if not a case of mass psychosis, what other explanation was there but religious? I could lower the barriers of my epistemology only so far—then, after a certain point, I was living in Rapture Ready world, a perverse, illimitable, unguarded universe with no constraints, no rules, reasonless and void, where the explanation was as likely to be a wolf in a granny costume, or a group of baton-waving British conspirators, as anything else. It could be the Leviathan! It could be Zarathustra. It could be anything at all. I preferred not to live in that world. I would rather my novels remained my novels, not my whole existence. In short, the limitations on my reason, undergirded by religious (and specifically Christian) understanding, were what kept me sane. If I should lose that—if I drifted out into the boundless waste of all-permitting chaos—if I lost my sense of possibility and finitude—then I was utterly, completely lost.

Thus in a sense, I agreed with Booth, but not in the way that he intended. He was right, the universe is vast—too vast, I felt, to wander through it wantonly unguided, all alone. The narrowness of my worldview was among its chief attractions—as who should suggest to a shepherd that he “broaden” the borders of his sheepfold by removing its gates? There was a certain kind of safety in restriction. I tried to look at it as Booth suggested, but I simply couldn’t do it—it was frightening—and, after earnestly attempting for a time, eventually gave up in despair.

History and the Jews (an Excerpt from Chapter 2)

What effect those classes might have had on others, I do not know; what effect on me, can scarcely tell. Most notably, it bred in my heart an undying fascination with the Jewish people, and a deep reserve of sorrow for the sufferings that they have undergone. As I studied the founding of the state of Israel for a class project at the end of the spring trimester, I was struck by the absurdity and injustice of the fact that the Jews had been maligned, mistreated, and murdered unceasingly in nearly every place they dwelt—ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, northern Africa, Spain, France, Germany, Russia—by Romans, Christians, Europeans ancient, medieval, and modern, the present-day Arabs (who had launched a war to exterminate them on the day of Israel’s founding, but with no more success than the others)—a line of persecution stretching back almost 4,000 years to the time of their fathers. I was perplexed by their ability, not only to survive, but even to thrive in such conditions, hated, tormented, bereft of a home, and made to wander to and fro in the earth. “Athens, Sparta, and Rome have perished,” wrote the French philosopher Rousseau, “and their people have vanished from the earth; Zion, though destroyed, has not lost her children. They mingle with all nations but are not lost among them.” Yet now, after 2,000 years, they were living once again in their ancestral homeland, had revived, and were speaking, their ancestral language (Hebrew), and were practicing their ancestral religion, the very scriptures of which had promised their return a full five hundred years before the Romans even drove them out! What was the parting of the sea compared to this?

Any overarching philosophy of history is incomplete which fails sufficiently to answer these two questions: Why are the Jews so hated? and, how do they survive? Mr. Blankenship may have felt forbidden by the code of his profession to assert his own opinions, but he vaguely gestured us from time to time in the direction of an answer. He told us the story of how Frederick the Great, the emperor of Prussia (and perhaps one of his favorite historical figures), challenged his physician to cite one clear, definitive, incontrovertible proof of the existence of God. “The Jews,” his physician replied, with no hesitation. “The Jews.”

And I, for my own part, averred; yet even my faith in this hypothesis was shaken when we reached our study of the Nazi holocaust. The danger inherent in a religious understanding of the continued existence of the Jewish race is that it threatens to ignore, or lightly brush over, the question of why they are hated—and, more than this, what madness must dwell in the minds of their adversaries that makes them so determined, so efficient, and so inconceivably cruel that, given the choice between merely killing them outright (say with guns or gas), or leading them the long way to slaughter through tortures and torments, so many have sacrificed simplicity for sadism. It is a form of evil so targeted, so pervasive, and so malicious as to seem supernatural. Many millions of men have been slain throughout history; but few have been slain like the Jews. We learned of a young Jewish couple that was murdered attempting to escape Auschwitz in the uniforms of SS officers; the man was hung, yet the woman, sentenced to be burned alive in the crematoria, slit her own wrists on the way to execution rather than submit to such a grisly fate. We analyzed the fate of the Jews of Jedawbne, Poland, seven hundred of whom were hunted down and executed by their neighbors before the Germans arrived. The Jews were rounded up and forced into a barn; the barn was burned while, just outside the door, the townsfolk made merry on instruments to drown the accusation of their screams. Jews were experimentally frozen, blinded, injected with all manner of diseases, whipped, starved, and amputated without the benefit of anesthesia. Children were murdered by the thousands. And, as it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war, the administrators in charge of the death camps redoubled their efforts—in Auschwitz on a single day in the summer of 1944, 9,000 were slain, and the graves eventually proved too small to hold the growing piles of the dead.

For a single supreme, interminable moment, it appeared that Satan was triumphant. Never had the world’s Jewish population been in greater danger. If the war had gone the other way, if Britain had been lost, or Hitler not repulsed in northern Africa and on the eastern steppes, it would have been their end. Over time, it came to seem that this had been the point, and all the military carnage but a sideshow to distract the major powers from his true intent—the systemic annihilation of every living Jew. We learned that the Grand Mufti of Palestine had conspired with the Nazis for the elimination of all those living in the Middle east and Northern Africa, and would undoubtedly have done so had the Deutches Reich prevailed there. “Arabs!” he declared in a radio broadcast on March 1, 1944, “rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them.”

Yet the menace of those days had been obscured by the glazing over of time. It is difficult to explain to a person wholly unacquainted with the subject the nature of the evil which once confronted, and at one point threatened to destroy, the human race; it is too shocking, too monstrous to believe—like something in a fairy-tale or myth. Carl Jung wrote that in the twentieth century, for the first time in history, evil became a tangibly-existing force, an individual, distinct entity—“darker than death or night” —whose titanic, tyrannical power and malignity satanic threatened the fundamentally-modern belief that progress was inevitable, and good would always triumph . “We have discovered that evil too is a progressive force,” wrote the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, “and that the modern world provides unlimited prospects for its development.” There had been evils aplenty in history, but few so starkly hellish, so infernal, as the evils of the century past. To put it more simply, we were living in the days of myth and miracle, and, for the most part, knew it not.

Then again, seen in another light, perhaps we had always been.

For, above all else, it was Mr. Blankenship’s contention—a contention that, in time, had become the shared conviction of the most devoted of his students—that history cannot be understood at all without some comprehension of its abnormality. Day by day, and hour by hour, he fought to combat the exhaustless, almost universally pervasive idea that history is nothing but a tedious and unbroken record of financial exchanges and meaningless, bloody disputes over bits of barren land. No, in Mr. Blankenship’s classes, history was grand, surreal, vivid, violent, and shocking—but the one thing it had never been, would never be, was dull. History for Mr. Blankenship was neither Marxist nor mundane. It was only this way of seeing that could begin to make sense of the inconceivable atrocities and evident miracles of history. We learned how, in an event later known as “the Defenestration of Prague,” two Catholic regents (and a “pleading secretary”) were thrown out a window in Bohemia, plummeting fifty feet and landing, soiled but otherwise unharmed, in a bed of manure. It was this event which inaugurated the Thirty Years’ War. We studied the improbable military career of Frederick the Great, who warred against the might of all Europe, won a long series of apparently providential victories in battle, though all the while heavily outnumbered and under-supplied, and whose capital was only spared humiliating desolation when, as the continental forces closed in on the city, his arch-rival, the empress of Russia, suddenly died, and her successor, Czar Peter III, immediately declared his undying allegiance to the Prussian emperor. Thus, against all reason, at the very moment of destruction, Frederick won the war.

Of these and other inexplicable, unfathomable turns is history composed.

Mr. Blankenship had a lecture on time that he liked to deliver whenever he discerned apathy gaining a foothold in the classroom. He stood up at the lectern in the center of the room and said the one word, “Now.” When the echo of the word had finished sounding in our ears, he noted that even before he had finished uttering the “ow” part of the word, the “n” had fled into the past.

There are two lessons to be gleaned from this. The first is that the past and present aren’t as separate as we sometimes like to think. The present is already seeping away into memory, but history is ongoing, and it happens all around us.

The second lesson is this: Given the limitless absurdities we’ve catalogued in history, and life’s near-infinite capacity to surprise us, the one thing we should never, ever do is to declare something too unbelievable to be true.