Another night when I woke up with sharp pain, leaving me wide awake. The same thing happened two days ago. Tuesday was bad, never quite losing the burning, needle pricking pain.
No church that morning, none yesterday, and probably none today. If I can stay awake to 6:30, then it is off to liturgy.
Then I have a follow-up visit to the eye doctor. Glaucoma may be in my future.
It helps when I have responsibilities with other people. I made it to Liturgy on Sunday because someone was giving me a ride. I worked on “No Ordinary Word” in fits and starts, getting around spells of lethargy.
Monday? More work on “No Ordinary Word", then I got it finished and got off to sleep late. When else did I do? Not that I can recall.
Tuesday, I had a lunch meeting. Like I said, the pain had flared up. Then the PO showed up with the old one. The one was doing his glum, chunk routine. The new guy seems friendly but also nervous, as if he is lost and seeking directions. Perhaps, they came as a duo as some sort of training exercise. What bothered me most was the inane questions might make me miss my bus. I had already missed two.
The new guy seems to have fastened on my Friday group sessions with a passion. He asked this time and last about treatment. I have already told him what the guy running the sessions told all of us - it is not therapy. Also, I omitted that what is going on is a repetition of the same program. I am now going into the second iteration of the lectures. (And I still need to get caught up with my notes from those sessions).
He did ask what I was writing, so I assume he may be the first to read this blog. I sent him to the stories on this blog. (Please check them out yourself; they are on the left hand side of your screen).
Long after he left, it came to me that he kept using the word “treatment” I should have asked treatment for what. Next time.
Leaves are coming out; it is Spring.
Tuesday morning, Muncie downtown in the Spring sunshine from the MITS station.
I had lunch at The Dumpling House; instead of going to get groceries at Payless, I caught the bus to the second bookstore on my itinerary. Only The Book Center was not at its location in the White River Plaza. Although the pain was still present, I decided to walk back to Tillotson. This gave me a chance to look at the river in the West Side Park.
But for the building across the river (and the park to the north), you might think civilization was not close at hand.
I worked on a few posts.
KH and I talked on the phone as I rode the bus. He has not had time to look at “No Ordinary Word”, but he has a real life.
The place where the writers group meets; I helped plant these locust trees in the Summer of 1982.
I read two more sections from “Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town”, and they were well-received. Somewhat shocked and a little embarrassed by how effusive everyone was. I am beginning to think the thing only works with Hoosiers.
Afterward, I walked back down to White Owl:
I bought the two books for which I lacked cash on Tuesday, plus a copy of Midnight's Children.
Learning something new about Mounds State Park in Anderson: This Eerie Abandoned Village In Indiana Is Hiding In A State Park
Indianapolis Monthly has a Hoosierist - which I am still checking out.
I do not like linking to things behind a paywall, as is Adam Gropnik's St. Paul Remade Human History. How Did He Do It? (The New Yorker), but I found it rather engrossing.
This revisionist view of Paul has reached a climax with Nina E. Livesey’s recent book, “The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context” (Cambridge). Despite its dry title, the book argues, astonishingly, that Paul’s epistles, indeed “Paul” himself, are inventions of the second century—that they actually were written largely by the crucial yet easily overlooked figure of the heretical editor Marcion and then backdated. Livesey, a professor emerita at the University of Oklahoma, is recognized as a significant Pauline scholar, and her book is closely argued, formidably annotated, and beautifully provocative. In her view, no first-century evidence exists for Paul, just as little exists for Jesus. More important, Paul’s preoccupations with the politics of circumcision, and with Jewish ritual generally, seem to fit badly within a first-century, pre-Jewish War context. Back then, with the Temple still intact, those things were not controversial. The preoccupations make far better sense in a second-century context, when a wave of anti-Jewish suspicion filled the Empire, particularly after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-35 C.E., the last great Jewish uprising against Rome, which ended in catastrophic defeat, mass death, and the refounding of Jerusalem as a pagan city. No one cared about condemning circumcision in 50 C.E.; everyone did a century later.
Letters were, in any case, a genre more than an epistolary act: most collections of antique letters, Livesey points out, were unmailed and literary, written to enlarge a theme, not persuade a recipient. The proliferation of letters in the New Testament is also typical of second-century literary activity; letters written as rhetorical models, using the epistolary form as an intimate vehicle for argument, are everywhere in the later period. So Livesey thinks that Paul’s letters make much better sense as a literary performance, too, if keyed to second-century Greek concerns and practices. This dramatic redating also contextualizes those odd interpolations—the Jew-hating sentences make more sense if written after the Bar Kokhba revolt—and, indeed, the broader question of how, exactly, there could have been so many practicing churches for Paul to correspond and commune with so soon after the establishment of the Jesus cult.
All days of fulfillment in religious history are, in any case, Great Disappointments, since the thing expected—Nirvana, the Apocalypse, the New Jerusalem—never does happen. Sooner or later, we trust the disappointment more than the dream. The original “Jewish” Church, which flares out like a glorious firework in the last, apocalyptic book of the Bible, Revelation, faded away in time, and Paul’s universal Church grew and eventually triumphed.
***
An oddity of modern life is that, just as humanists have made us newly alert to the irreducible power of stories, people of faith, who already possess the advantage of strong stories, reach for spurious “science” to underwrite them. Hence the appeals to a “fine-tuned universe,” as if divine order were proved by the fact that the cosmos had to meet an exquisitely narrow set of conditions to yield conscious human beings. In truth, this is the same argument, beloved of parents, that the whole point of the universe was to produce one particular child. Consider the chain of contingencies that had to align, and the child’s existence can feel like a miracle. In a sense, it is. Yet the pattern is blessed only in retrospect. We were always going to find ourselves in a universe compatible with our existence, because there is no other place in which we could be aware that we existed. And, if we are not cold or conscienceless, the universe that contains us cannot be wholly cold or conscienceless, either. It includes warmth because it includes us. Our values are human-made, but that does not make them unreal.
Was Paul’s effect on history, incalculably large, good or bad on the whole? Edward Gibbon argued that Paul carried a “Jewish” intolerance into a pagan world that, for all its cruelties, was broadly pluralistic in matters of worship. Yet Paul also offered a universalism so urgently moving that it remains powerful today. That may be as close as judgment gets for a figure of his scale. We turn to philosophers and essayists, from Socrates to Richard Rorty, for inquiry and self-doubt. We turn to apostles and prophets, from Paul to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for the broader conviction that faith really can move mountains, and then for the still bolder thought that even moving mountains is not enough if love is absent. “All or Nothing at All,” Sinatra’s greatest epistle, revised across his life as the purposes of his music changed, might have served as a theme for that Capra bio-pic. It is bad advice for a lover. But it is good advice for a believer, since such intensity of commitment is, in the old-fashioned sense, awesome. St. Paul, whenever exactly he lived or whatever precisely he said, was nothing if not all in.
I do not remember subscribing to the Substack Literary Fancy, but that did not keep me from reading 5 “Boring” Classics That Are Actually Unhinged (Once You Know What's Really Happening). I never found any of them boring (okay, Middlemarch was more like Long March, but I do not recall being bored.), but your mileage may vary. See, I never had to read any of them in school.
There is also Part 2: 8 More “Boring” Classics That Are Actually Unhinged to which I have the same comments (except I had to read Ethan Frome on college - but I liked it) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (which left me blah) and Jude the Obscure, which I have not read.
I also took a look at The 40 Famous Classics You're Allowed to Skip (And Why Everyone Secretly Agrees). Yeah, I agree with some and disagree with a few more. I am literally scared of Finnegan's Wake and The Faerie Queen. Surprised by how many I have read.
A piece about one of the great places to eat in Muncie: The Downtown Farmstand: Overcoming the 2019 Pandemic (Ball State Daily).
Donald Trump continues to prove himself an incompetent blowhard and coward.
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