Weekend Reading

Thanks to some friends who are starving for grace though they are unaware of their hunger, I have started reading a wonderful, interesting and charming collection of short stories by Mark Helprin titled, "The Pacific and Other Stories." While Helprin is a devout Jewish-American, his stories are some of the most Christian I have read in awhile.

Here is one excerpt from the opening story about an accomplished Italian impressario who represents the leading soprano of the world, Rosanna Cadorna, at Italy's most prestigious opera house, La Scala. He is disenchanted with the fame and indulgence that have emptied his life of purpose since he discovered Cadorna several decades ago. I believe this small excerpt gives a hopeful perspective of the post-modernist age we are in today, and provides a winsome argument for how humans are to live holistically, with both heart and mind:


I am not a well educated man except that I have educated myself, and, because I have educated myself, what I say will not stand up, for lack of recognized authority. This in turn leaves me free to say what I will, in the hope that, like those small forces that do not threaten empires and are thus not fully pursued, the things in which I believe can survive in some high and forgotten place until the power of empire subsides.

And although I know that few will listen to or credit this, I think we are in a lost age, in which holiness and charity have been traded for the victory and penetration of knowledge, though all the knowledge in the world has not brought us any further than where we can go without it even in the outermost halls of grace. I believe that more is to be known and apprehended from the beauty of a face than in delving, no matter how deep, simply into how things work, no matter how marvelous that may be. The greatest substance of the world is immaterial, the province of the heart, and its study cannot be forced or reasoned. Merely to touch upon the edge of things in parsing their mechanics is to forswear their fullness, for the entry to this fulness lies not in science but in art. I cannot prove this, for it cannot be proven, but I claim, assert, and have seen it.