Sometime I am reading a book and so enjoy the story that a sense of wonder comes over me. This can cause me to step back from the story itself and admire the skill of the author. How the world and characters created have developed a life of their own that you can become caught up in. There is wonder at the creative imagination that can pull this off. Despite the meta-nature of such analysis while reading a story it does cause you to depart from the story. Just come to appreciate it more at a deeper level. There is a sense of gratitudes for the skills of the author.
The last time I was caught up in such a feeling I stepped back further in my mind and reflected on a related subject. Why is it that I am so seldom caught up in the same sense of wonder regarding creation and grateful for all God has given us? Talk about world-building, God pretty much nailed that. Universe-building, creation-building, if you see something he made it. Contractors complain about substandard building materials and yet God used nothing to create everything.
I have been trying to develop a sense of wonder and gratitude towards God and his creation. Too much of my life has been like the man who walks into an art gallery admiring all the paintings and walks right past the artist who painted them, not even seeing him. Admiring creation, but not the creator. You can’t really artificially create this wonder and gratitude. You have to actually notice the world around you and contemplate the reality. To stop and smell the roses and notice the scent, the actuality of roses, the ground they are planted in, the medium of the air, the light we can see them by, and so on and so forth.
Whenever I read G.K. Chesterton I observe the sense of wonder and gratitude that I desire to emulate. That I see this truth I strive for lived out and expressed.
“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace bef>ore the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
So I admire this in a intellectual sense. Actually living this sense out is another matter. Intellectualizing and not living out my faith is a constant struggle. Still I am thankful for the grace to see my many flaws and can have gratitudes towards even that.
1 comment
Awesome! yes, there is something truly gratitude-inspiring about being both a writer and a scientist, especially one who can plumb the depths via computer science. (Those without such math skills, such as most liberal arts scholars, are deprived of a tool far more powerful than Latin or even Greek. It’s a shame given how five of the seven classic Liberal Arts are tech and NOT lit’ry! But that is another topic, which I ought not bring up on someone else’s blogg. Sorry. Besides, I have been daring to write fiction (and I do not mean in an algorithmic sense, hee hee, a bit of recursive humor there) so I am quite a lit’ry sort of software guy these days. Oh my, it is best to laugh a little once in a while.)
There are three classic citings for this matter, in case you want to get a deeper understanding – until such time as I or some other daring author can find the time to write “A Little Summa on the Story”.
(1) Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Tales” in The Tolkien Reader – which contains the critical term “Sub-creation” which is exactly what you are getting at. We are made in the likeness of a Maker, and so we ALSO make, though in a lower-case sense. (The single best example of this is software development, which is why I can use my own tech skills to write fiction.)
(2) Sayers’ book The Mind of the Maker where she talks about the intellectual work of writing (i.e. fiction) and relates that to the Interior Life of the Most Blessed Trinity… a very daring book.
(3) a paragraph in Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man the chapter “The Escape From Paganism” which begins “To sum up: the sanity of the world was restored and the, soul of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.” (CW2:380)
None of which is to say that one must be Catholic, or even a believer in order to make Stories – nor is the converse true, (There are some perfectly horrid “stories” on bookshelves written by quite serious and otherwise orthodox Catholics.) Yet the closer someone is to grasping the One Story (which is also a True Story in both senses), the better tools one has – and the better insight into that most wonderful Example, written by the best of Authors,
Also since you quoted GKC’s “Notebook” there is one other which always comes to mind in this context: “We must certainly be in a novel; What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.” (Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 62)
As I said in a recent talk, the cool thing about founding a university as I did in my own stories is that I can do something not even Cardinal Newman could do, even with the backing of the Holy Father, and assuming an unlimited budget and otherwise perfect conditions: I can give that school its history.… and this is the sort of thing which is hinted at by the above three references. It is as close as we can come to that divine power of Creation.
And so we must be thankful when we “dip the pen into the ink” even if it is a purely electronic sort of ink.