Serious Discussion-Stress and Psych Disorders — Page 2

Hawthrone was Puritan congregationalist New England. That's a whole different story!

The best writers always are, aren't they, PJ?

Oh, Cookie, I know he was a Puritan and he was certainly more focused on guilt than Dickens, but the values of Puritanical society in the US have remarkable ties to the social restrictions of English society. I'd just say the puritanical religious strangehold has remained stronger in the US than in England and Europe in general, where a more secular view of values has taken hold as opposed to the "grasp onto 1700s values and hold on for dear life" attitude that the US has embraced.
Clearly, I need to go restudy some historical backgrounds and societal influences on some of ym favorites. But that's why I'm happy to have this thread up here. I want to challenge what I think I know about certain subjects and learn new things about subjects unknown to me!

I, personally, love the Quakers. then, viewed as such a curious and differently odd religion, today they're pretty amazingly progressive. Sad, then, that they didn't really have much of an impact on society in the US or in its art.
Thanks for pulling in a lot of the historical aspects of these writers, Cookie. I can't do it off the top of my head without preparation or some serious Googling at the very least!

Total off tangent...

The Quakers were beautiful woodcraftsmen. Such simplicity but well designed pieces. Not to mention, the interiors of some of their prayer houses were beautiful. If you've seen the last revival of "Carousel" on Broadway (at Lincoln Center), Bob Crowley's vision of heaven was based on a Quaker prayer house interior. That deep cobalt blue...

The blessings (or curse, depending on how you look at it) of just being able to remember random things...

Cookie, that kind of tangent is MOST welcome here and DEFINITELY on topic. I really envision this thread as meandering in and around the topic and, since Quakers came up within the literary discussion, it's a worthwhile departure.
I didn't see Carousel and so I don't know Crowley's design, but I do love when a designer goes with a very unique and, perhaps, personal theme to bring a scene to life.
I actually met some modern Quakers. Great people.

I could be persuaded to give him another shot, but my initial exposure was on a decidedly "antagonistic" level.

It is exactly that attention to the minutia that I love about Tolkien, the idea that no one could possibly want to know who was king of Gondor during the 300th year of the second age, but he tells you anyway.
The idea that the characters individual moments are the important pieces and that they are overlayed onto an epic story, yet it is the moments that are important, not the epic, is the genius of the story. Of course the same attention to details in Melville bores me to tears.

I have a deep affinity for the Quakers, both in their current incarnation, and thier oft misunderstood (paricularly here in Seminary) historical journey.

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Have you read London's Martin Eden, bway?

Unfortunately, I have to go again, but I love the thread.
I'm shiver with anticipation, both about catching up again later, and tomorrow's topic.

I tried that with "Bartelby," it was a miserable experience.

I am very fond of being educated, and I hate not knowing something, so I may go find a Hawthorne to devour and change my mind with.

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Peng, seriously, pick up something small. Just try to focus on the themes he writes on. I'll admit his style is VERY difficult (as are most writers from that time) but you might, if not find love, then find some form of appreciation for what he was doing.

And now I have to go, too, a hot chocolate date awaits me! But I look forward to this as well and hope some of our other best and brightest minds are getting ready to join in on the discussion or find a great new topic for tomorrow!

I agree about Dickens's verbosity. Though there are times when I really admire his style of prose, there's just so much detail that it's difficult to get through. I loved Great Expectations, but I found that the wordiness and five-page scene descriptions interfered with my enjoyment of A Tale of Two Cities. Those are the only Dickens novels that I've read.

I REALLY need to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I checked out Love in the Time of Cholera from the library and started it, but it was due back before I'd really gotten into it. This is why I much prefer buying books.

I was sort of wondering today what my favorite authors, though they have wildly divergent styles, have in common that I enjoy them so much. I had a brilliant English teacher who was totally baffled by the fact that on one hand I adore Jane Austen, and on the other I'm drawn to authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton. I suppose all have the social commentary angle, though it's done more humorously by Austen and cynically by the others. Or maybe Austen's just a fluke, because reflecting on it now I'm most interested in stories that depict the darker side of human nature (and, honestly, I'm a hopeless sucker for angst).

I notice that the one prevading undercurrent of my favorites is the same, an abiding skepticism about existence (yet never quite cynical) backed up with biting social commentary.

Or intensly personal tales of depression and madness. I love those.

Also on the "Fantasy" subject has anyone read much Stanislaw Lem?
The Cyberaid short stories about two robots trading tails on the pitfalls of existence and nature of God, is a major favorite of mine, in the genre.

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The themes of fantasy, religion and imagination which are woven throughout this thread remind me of a recent New Yorker article about CS Lewis. I share with you an excerpt from the article which is of particular interest to me and involves many of these topics:

It was through the intervention of the secretive and personally troubled Tolkien, however, that Lewis finally made the turn toward orthodox Christianity. In company with another friend, they took a long, and now famous, walk, on an autumn night in 1931, pacing and arguing from early evening to early morning. Tolkien was a genuinely eccentric character—in college, the inventor of Lothlorien played the part of the humorless pedant—who had been ready to convert Lewis for several years. Lewis was certainly ripe to be converted. The liberal humanism in which he had been raised as a thinker had come to seem far too narrowly Philistine and materialist to account for the intimations of transcendence that came to him on country walks and in pages of poetry. Tolkien, seizing on this vulnerability, said that the obvious-seeming distinction that Lewis made between myth and fact—between intimations of timeless joy and belief in a historically based religion—was a false one. Language, and the consciousness it reflected, was intrinsically magical. One had to become religious to save the magic, not to be saved from it. (It was, ironically, the same spirit in which the children of the nineteen-sixties felt that the liberal humanism in which they had been raised failed to account for the intensities of another kind of trip—and that led them, too, to magic, and to Lewis and Tolkien.) All existence, Tolkien insisted on that night ramble, was intrinsically mythical; the stars were the fires of gods if you chose to see them that way, just as the world was the stories you made up from it. If you were drawn to myth at all, as Lewis was, then you ought to accept the Christian myth just as you accepted the lovely Northern ones. By the end of the walk, Lewis was, or was about to become, a churchgoer.

I continue to read, re-read, study, discuss and think about the work of C.S. Lewis. This thread is a gift!

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Updated On: 1/19/06 at 10:35 PM

What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences simpler than usual. He never tried to engineer an entertainment for kids. He wrote, instead, a real book for a circle of readers, and the result is a fairy tale that includes everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in mystical English landscape.

The trouble, many feel, was that though he could encompass his obsessions and he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, it is felt, diminishes as the religious part intensifies.

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Updated On: 1/19/06 at 10:55 PM