A Single Step. . .

". . . . once we have arrived at a solution—and in the process of getting there, have paid a fairly high price in terms of anxiety and expectation—our investment in this solution becomes so great that we may prefer to distort reality to fit our solution rather than sacrifice the solution." Paul Watzlawick, How Real is Real?

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk, a writer, and a peace activist who struggled continually with his place in the world. He was torn between committing himself to efforts to end the war in Vietnam and to following his vocation as a monk devoted to the solitary, contemplative life. On the one hand, almost anything he wrote (that made it through the censorship of his superiors) was eagerly published; on the other hand, his growing notoriety encroached upon his time and humility. "The creation of another image of myself—fixation on the idea that I am a 'writer who has arrived'—which I am," he writes in his journal. "But what does it mean? Arrived where?"

His dilemma was not uncommon, but his circumstances were. Here is a man who seems the very embodiment of conflicting opposites. He is gregarious, but seeks silence in order to communicate with his brothers through hand signals. He has spent most of his life running against the grain, yet strives to submit to superiors whom he feels only want his submission for their ego's sake. He loves writing, but comes to loathe the process of being published—the interviews, the book tours, the attention that flatters him and fills him with horror.

His struggle is that of the private man called to a public role, the extension of oneself far out over the abyss in ways that most people are almost unaware of. He receives a note, in the autumn of 1961, from Ethel Kennedy, wife of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, and sister-in-law to the President. He had written to her explicitly objecting to the resumption of nuclear testing. "There is something very unsatisfactory, something not quite true about this whole moral question," he observes. "This idea that it is important to take a 'stand' as an individual. As if by mere gestures and statements one could satisfy conscience. And as if the satisfaction of one's conscience (emphasis on satisfaction) were the great thing. It can become a mere substitute for responsibility and for love." Merton is acutely aware of how vain humankind is, how we pride ourselves on having a tender conscience, only to find that our moral consciousness vanishes like mist when put to the test.

A month later he notes, "I am perhaps at a turning point in my spiritual life: perhaps slowly coming to a point of maturation and the resolution of doubts—and the forgetting of fears." As his resolve grows to  work for the abolition of war and for nuclear disarmament he is aware of how much it will cost him. "Walking into a known and definite battle. . . . It appears that I am one of the few Catholic priests in the country who has come out unequivocally for a completely intransigent fight for the abolition of war, for the use of non-violent means to settle international conflicts."

It is not just the inevitability of conflict over public issues that he is facing, it is the battle within himself, the jihad (in the truest sense of the word) against pride and self-satisfaction that he is steeling himself for. How to be selfless when the very abnegation of self can become a thing of pride? How to resist the image of oneself as a public icon? How to live transparently, to disappear, as Merton says, in spite of one's accomplishments?

Most of us will not have to face such temptations. As someone once said, some people are born to smallness, others have smallness thrust upon them. Yet so many are caught up in the effort to promote themselves that they seem like frantic little dogs chasing their tails, spinning endlessly, a retinue of publicists and media experts on hand to goose them from behind should they tire. You don't have to look far to find the pundits, paid by the word perhaps, who offer their paeans of praise to obvious and  self-evident "truths." The best thing in these situations is to turn off the sound and watch the body language.

But I digress, if every so slightly. There are several issues of moral conflict here. Merton points to one, the temptation to self-righteousness and pride in the midst of doing something that is righteous. Another is how to resist evil without becoming a tool of evil in the process. "By beholding we become changed," runs the text, and William Irwin Thompson, a social philosopher, adds, "We become the thing we hate." The epigram at the beginning of this piece points up another problem. Having arrived at last at a place where we feel confident and assured we'll do anything to remain there—even to flying in the face of changing circumstances and facts. Add all this up and it's enough to paralyze a person.

I remember a protest march held in Washington, DC soon after we invaded Iraq for the second time. An exuberant group of students from Georgetown and George Washington Universities had gathered near the FBI Building to join the march. It was meant to draw thousands to the Mall in order to register our complaint with the war and to speak our minds. I went down to it, arriving as the students were forming up the lines and trying out their cheers. It felt like I was at a football game with the drums, the marching bands, the banners and the self-conscious tribalism. I stood on the sidewalk, a bit lost and at loose ends. It wasn't that I supported the war; it seemed to me another horrific mistake with endless consequences. But on that bright, cool, and comfortable morning in Our Nation's Capitol the march suddenly seemed like a lark, something the whole family could enjoy, a revival service that left one feeling momentarily satisfied but came later to be a bitterness in the memory.  It didn't feel like a sacrifice, a denial of anything precious, the giving up of which might have had some transformative power.

So I left, walking slowly back against the crowd to Union Station and a Metro ride back home. I will tell you what I was thinking: I was recalling a line in Merton's journal, "Non-violent action, not mere passivity." That was years ago now, but the line is still with me. I think of it not in the imperative, "Do this! Don't do that," but in the indicative mood, "Look here. . . Consider this."


It's the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step.

The Mark of Cain

"Though hatred is a convenient instrument for mobilizing a community for defense, it does not, in the long run, come cheap. We pay for it by losing all or many of the values we have set out to defend." Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

How strange it is to realize that on a day filled with sweetness and light in one corner of the global village in another corner men are desperately fighting face to face, gun against fist. A man in a corner coffee shop sits down with a newspaper and a latte while far away another man starts in terror at the sound of gunfire and helicopters. One glances later at his watch and gathers his things to go, the other sees the light fading around him as he clutches the earth.

Osama bin Laden is dead, shot in the face by Navy SEALS and CIA agents in a daring raid deep inside Pakistan. America's number one enemy, a man whose single-minded hatred for all things Western—and especially American—cost the lives of thousands and will continue to burn up lives for years to come. Here in Washington, DC, many people cheered at the news, danced outside the White House, and generally carried on as if their football team had spiked the division rivals in the Superbowl. The Daily Beast, heir to the remains of Newsweek, and current arbiter of What's Happening Now, published a poll for the occasion which gave Obama no bounce at all for ordering Osama's death. Details of the raid were predictably confusing but the public called for more. Many decried the decision of the White House not to release photos of the deceased and Sean Hannity huffed about the burial at sea of bin Laden's body. If one looked closely in the evening sky at the end of that day the glowing contrails of a conspiracy theory could be seen drifting at high altitudes.

The raid was contrasted to the disastrous attempt of the Carter administration to spring the American hostages from Tehran and favorably compared to the Israeli raid on Entebbe to grab their own and split in a hail of gunfire without the loss of innocent life.  What a difference 10 years makes: American intelligence in the field concerning WMD and Saddam's whereabouts back then could not be trusted. But this raid reveals an unusual patience on the part of the Americans, almost British in its willingness to gather details, observe patterns, slowly, slowly close the net, and then strike. So it is with relief but not celebration that this death can be understood. Of course, as common sense would dictate and some voices have already cautioned, this is not the end of Bush's 'War on Terror.' As Churchill said, "It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

A 'War on Terror' might play well in a headline but it makes no sense on many levels. Can you imagine a war without terror? Do abstract concepts galvanize troops, launch Predators, fatten the wallets of the bomb merchants, and stiffen the spines of the weakest politicians? Yes, actually, they do. Words like 'freedom,' 'the American way of life,' 'honor,' and 'sacrifice,' are tossed around, hammered into steel and concrete, emblazoned on jackets, license plates, baseball caps, and T-shirts. We use them up, these words, drain the life out of them, freeze-dry them into slogans, and sprinkle them like fairy dust when the situation gets serious, just in case anyone should mistake victory for tragedy or object to living with delusions.

In a strikingly different context, Reynolds Price noted that, "Despite such a likably humane doctrine as what might be called the universality of the human heart in all times and places, it remains beyond doubt that human beings alive on the same day in the same city block—not to speak of different countries and centuries—will witness, reflect on, and respond to equal stimuli in ways as divergent as an infant's and a leopard's." Thus, while some cheer at the death of a hated enemy others may take the occasion to think on the brevity of life, on the tenuous grasp we have on the weight and measure of our own times, and to regard with sorrow the ferocious drive within us to blot out our complicit guilt. "If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us," says Ernest Becker, "it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play, by means of which evil is redeemed." And so it goes.

The Religion of Money

"The acts of consumption define the spirit of the age, and it would need a library of many volumes to catalogue the texts of extravagance." Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America

Nothing I could say about money will sound anything but resentful to the true worshiper of American capitalism. Such is our reverence for both money and the means of free market acquisition that we feel compelled to offer a weak disclaimer, "Now, I've got nothing against people making a profit for all their hard work. . ." before we go on to register our doubts. But money is the means of establishing value in American society to an extent that takes one's breath away. Everything can be monetized, everything—and it seems—everybody, is for sale.

The takedown of Greg Mortenson, lately of Three Cups of Tea fame, is a case in point. Just when you thought you had a hero of significant proportions, he turns out to have jiggered the accounts in literary, philanthropic, and managerial ledgers. The ascension of Donald Trump to the Republican flavor-of-the- month club for the presidency in 2012 is yet another example of what money can buy. Buffoonery takes on a kind of burnished luster when accompanied by a gazillion dollars. It says something exceedingly tragicomic about the state of American democracy when a person is considered by many to be qualified for the highest office in the republic simply because he cuts the sharpest deals in Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

Don't worry, this won't be another screed about the barbarians at the gates and a rant against the philistines who populate the halls of Congress and Wall Street. After all, they paid dearly to be where they are. Who are we to deny them the fruits of their labors?

Money and the worship of it has been much on my mind these past months as I have prepared for and conducted a class entitled "Religion and Money." To an extent I would not have thought possible while growing up in the 60s in California, I have immersed myself lately in the works of John Kenneth Galbraith, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, R. H. Tawney, John Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Andrew Carnegie and others. Advice has been taken from Jacob Needleman (Money and the Meaning of Life), Jim Wallis (Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street), Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, The Big Short, and The Next Next Thing), as well as Kevin Phillips (American Theocracy) and Craig Gay (Cash Values: Money and the Erosion of Meaning in Today's Society). The last two were the assigned textbooks for the course.

Early in the course I made a simple assignment—to keep a money monitor log, just for one day. The idea was that the students would track throughout the day every time they made a purchase, thought about making a purchase, or otherwise found themselves thinking about money. The results were surprising. Some came back with a short list of purchases, misunderstanding that I wanted them to reflect upon, not simply catalogue, their dealings with money. When they returned with a narrative it was clear that the exercise had opened their eyes. They spoke of realizing how much they spent on lunch at work, how much a tank of gas for the truck cost, or the prioritizing of bills at the end of the month. They marveled at how much it cost for a family lunch out or Easter outfits for the children. They worried about the bills for their education, rejoiced that they had money for tithes and offerings at church, and vowed to cut out the glass of wine at dinner. In ways both revealing and unsettling they found that in their own private state Money held all the offices, advertised all the goods, told the stories, and conjured up the language.

It's not that we were surprised at how much things cost these days. As gas tops $5.00 a gallon in the District of Columbia you realize that the legislators don't drive themselves to work, and even if they noticed the prices without being advised by their constituents, it wouldn't be in their interests to fuss about it. No, what became clear to us is the pervasiveness of what theologian Craig Gay calls the 'Money Metric' system, that which is closer to us than the DNA in our cells. It objectifies everything, quantifies all values, reduces relationships to a cost/benefit analysis, and flattens the curve of experience to a line graph of projections. It is the pesticide devised to sabotage all unhappiness that travels up the food chain to accumulate in our guts. It was also clear that extracting religion from this pecuniary life-cycle might also kill the patient.

Mainline denominations are on the endangered species lists as their spiritual forests are being clear-cut by the evangelical megachurches. At this rate, one estimate shows the Presbyterians will be extinct by 2050, to be recalled only by those who compile the statistics on vanishing fauna. Where once vast herds of Methodists roamed out West, now there are the Willow Creeks, the Saddlebacks, and other purposefully driven spiritual centers catering to thousands of religious consumers. What makes the difference? The relentless marketing, advertising, and branding of the message of liberation from worry and the sweet reward of success the American way, blessed by Him from Whom all blessings flow.

In the midst of all this there are many, no doubt, who yet feel the stirrings of true godliness. Who would have the arrogance or hubris to claim that God's spirit simply cannot be present in a gathering of 10,000 in a church with an annual budget in the millions? And while poverty is no ticket to transcendent spirituality neither is mass-produced religion a guarantee of spiritual success. American religion, by necessity in this country, is a business, its assets protected by the Constitution, but its daily bread provided by those under no obligation to stay, a voluntary association of consumers used to having their wants catered to in the marketplace.

More than one observer of the American culture has said that Money is the religion of America and the key to its deepest anxieties. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1840s that Americans have a desperate fear of 'sinking in the world' that results in a kind of ADHD in which they "clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and lose grip as they hurry after some new delight."

Jesus said 'the poor you have with you always.' While not disputing that, we could add that 'the monetizers you have with you always, even to the end of the world.' There will always be those, the majority most probably, who see no value in that which cannot be reduced to utility, that which has value that cannot be calculated, projected, and sold. Craig Gay's recommendation is to sidestep the Money Metric system by regarding life and everything in it as a gift. Lewis Lapham, slightly more irreverent but no less to the mark, notes that the most subversive doctrine in America today comes to us from the ancient Greeks and the early Christians as the virtue of temperance and says, 'I've got enough, I don't think I'll buy anything more this week.'

The Courage to Be Grateful

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
— Czeslaw Milosz

Easter weekend and Earth Day, a fortunate conjunction—maybe in the turning world it happens frequently, maybe I am just now sensitive to it, but every year at this time I think about the Christ dropping down to hell on Friday afternoon and climbing back up—so far to go!—on a Sunday morning.

There are those texts—what are we to make of them?—in which he harrows Hell, sternly admonishes the inhabitants and then rises, stooping as he steps out into the garden that morning. What did he feel? Relief? Wonder? Or did he take it as any other day, perhaps brushing away the clutching grasp of an awful nightmare, a slight furrow to his brow as he sets about his business? The Gospels are laconic in their recitation, as if any concession to wonder, magic, the supernatural, was to create a distortion field around the Savior. And how long was it before someone called him that to his face?

I've always been intrigued by the story of the two on their way home to Emmaus that weekend. Somewhere, T. S. Eliot writes of a third, flickering at their peripheral vision: "Who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you/Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded. . . ." They ask him to stay, to eat with them, he demurs but then gives in. When he spreads his hands to bless the food they see the marks in his palms and thus he vanishes from their sight. So much to ask him and ask of him, perhaps he was like a man emerging from a cave, blinking and tearing up from the searing gaze of the sun. Perhaps every sense was heightened and rubbed raw; above all, he needed solitude, but had precious little time. There were demands, longings, fear overcome by joy, the joy of those deeply in debt whose necks had been in the noose not twenty-four hours ago and now felt the gasp of clean air bursting through their lungs as the Christ appears before them in the secret room, and no one had moved fast enough to open the locked, bolted, and barred door. And the Christ kicks free the chair jammed up against the doorknob, spins it around, and sits down with a wink. "Let's go fishing," he says.

Against all odds there is good news. The news is so good it cannot be believed, so improbable that they look to one other hesitantly to see who will be the first to look him in the face. "Who is the third who walks always beside you?"

What if the Christ were to emerge this season, walking out from behind some dark Satanic mill or more likely, out of Wall Street in the early morning. Would he seek a green place before he trod the highways and byways? "Do not touch me," he murmured to Mary, "for I have not yet ascended to the Father." Was it an embrace he needed? a strong handshake between men and then off to the blue world again?

Earth Day, when we find the courage to be grateful for all we have been given, all that has been entrusted to us, all that we have so despitefully abused and yet continues to sustain us. The phrase is Thomas Merton's from a journal entry in the sixties. He is rejoicing in the fruition of a ten-year dream, a little hermitage built up on a hill behind the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He can barely contain himself as he swings through the moonlight and the dewy grass to read and pray alone before the sun comes up. To not feel guilty, he thinks, to not feel guilty for all he has been given and enjoys in this moment. To find the courage to be grateful.

A Method for Deep Reading

Many students find it difficult to study reading assignments in depth. Part of it is simply not knowing how to get the essentials from a text. I've been experimenting with a simple method I call GSSW: Gather, Sort, Shrink, and Wrap.

In the Gather phase we read through looking for ideas that seem to stand out or lead to other ideas. In the Sort phase we cluster the ideas into chunks, building a grouping that segues into the next stage, the Shrink phase. In this one we reduce the pile of important ideas to several essentials that can be expressed, in our own words, in a sentence for each. Then in the Wrap phase we summarize and prepare to "ship" the essentials out, perhaps in a form such as a flow chart, a concept map, an if-then diagram, or a simple, clear, and visual Keynote or PowerPoint presentation.

I've tried this out in an introductory ethics course in which several essays of moderate complexity are assigned each week. The students paired up for the first two phases of Gather and Sort, and then as a class we took the important ideas and "shrunk" them to the essentials. If we'd had time, each pair could have teamed up with another pair to produce a concept map or a flow chart that would illustrate the development of the argument in the essay.

After this initial tryout the students were cautiously optimistic that the technique could work, even on an individual basis. What had seemed a formidable wall of text became permeable through this technique. To change the metaphor slightly, we saw through the walls to the foundation, beams, and struts that framed the house.

The goal of using this method is that students write an in-class essay, based on the readings, that is exemplary of organized, clear, accurate, and critical thinking.

In Wildness the World Preserved

"A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm and faithfully renders the likeness of the world."  — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

We can divide the world and everything in it into two great piles: that which was created or evolved—it doesn't really matter which at this point—and that which was engineered. The two are threaded together in innumerable ways and cannot be extricated except by the imagination. Yet when we look at the world we see the 'natural' and the human constructs. Concrete, oil, broken glass glinting in the sun, heat radiating off the pavement, a guard rail twisted, two parallel prints where tires bit deeply and then abruptly lifted off—elements we glimpse as we churn by at 60 mph. All this happening on the skin of the earth as it suffers our constant abrasions.

I sometimes try to imagine what these forests and low hills of Maryland must have looked like 200, 500, 1,000 years ago. We are not far from one of the oldest ranges of mountains in North America, the Appalachians, worn down through the millenia to a gentle slope, lying patient as a cat in the sun, and dropping roughly northeast to northwest through the Mid-Atlantic states. Even traversing the landscape atop six inches of tarmac, aggregate, sand, and bedrock, one can sense the vast body of the earth, breathing quietly, flexing now and then, the deep silence of its presence there beneath the furious assault of midday traffic.

By some counts we are losing a species every 20 minutes of every day of every year, year in and year out. But how would we know, encased within our tin boxes on wheels, speaker systems thumping with the imprecations of the latest urban prophet of conspicuous consumption? These particles of information arrive quietly through the research of scientists who pick their way through the Amazon, scour the Outback, jounce over dusty trails in the Southwest, and hover over the Great Barrier Reef. Occasionally, the tip of a message surfaces in the media tide pools to the effect that scientists speculate we have, at best, a decade or slightly more, to turn the effects of global warming around. And then the local anchor will chirp brightly, "So, Candy, what kind of weather have you got for us today?" Candy, just back from the ritual hazing of weatherpersons during hurricane season, assures us that tomorrow we'll be done with all this awful rain and that she's doing her best to gift us with sunshine. But these days scientists must pitch their findings in six words or less, the bulk of their work submerged under the surface of our collective skittishness.

I used to think that if people could just put their stuff down, stop their twitching and gyrating, and just stand silently in the midst of a forest for a few minutes, they'd be blessed into awe and wonder. But for many Nature is an acquired taste and one that they have little patience to savor. We get our minimum daily adult requirement of ecology from advertising these days, corporations having learned the value of 'going green' to increase the net return on investment.

As a teenager, growing up in the foothills above the Napa Valley, I roamed the woods with my friends on the weekends. We came across a simple tragedy one winter Saturday, as we jumped from rock to rock across a foaming creek. A doe had broken a leg as she tried to cross and had apparently drowned in a pool at the base of a cliff. We approached cautiously, thinking she might be alive and not wanting to alarm her. But the body was cold, the eyes blank. We hauled her beyond the rocks to an open space under the dripping trees, and it was then that we discovered she was swollen with pregnancy. We could see the outlines of the fawn in her belly. We decided to open her up. With a hunting knife we carefully slit her from sternum to hindquarters, and there it was: a tiny fawn, perfectly preserved, hooves white and soft like almonds, its long lashes plastered wetly, its fur dappled with patches of white. We gazed at it in silence, feeling perhaps, amidst the thunder of the creek waters and the fog between the trees, that mysteries were there for the seeing.

There was little sentimentality about it; we buried the doe in a shallow grave and covered the spot with branches. We carried the fawn through the woods, clambered up the cliffs above the creek, and eventually found our way to our high school biology teacher's house. He came out at our knock and listened patiently as we excitedly told him the story. Then together we found a box, placed the stiff little body in it, and dug a grave in his backyard. The man never blinked. I think he felt that what we'd learned that afternoon was deeper than anything he could have said in the classroom.

When I look back on it now two things stand out on reflection. One is the utter physicality of the moment: the weight and denseness of the doe's body, the graceful arch of the fawn's neck, those tiny hooves not yet hardened and black. There was the story of a life on our sweet, old Earth, a moment's wavering on a slippery rock, a crack of pain and a brief struggle alone in the forest. The fragility of our existence, any existence, magnified through the lens of adolescent wonder. And the other thing, as fresh now as it was then, is the steady realization that this other world, the one that pulses just out of  sight, is our true home.

The Synchronicity of Reading

"I decided that what I wanted most of all was. . . . to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed, and created by the great minds of the past and present."  

Michael Dirda,  Book by Book

I’ve discovered, over the course of time, that I read in what might seem a haphazard manner. But there is an inner filament that illumines the way I read, a hidden gyroscope I’ve learned to trust. I pick up a book on any subject that piques my curiosity, read the front, read the back, read the introduction and the first page, and begin to settle into the rhythm of the sentences. Before two or three days have passed I know I’ll come across a parallel work or a book that complements what I’m reading. It happens so often that I’m not surprised anymore, although I’m always grateful.

Another part of how I read is that I acquire books to grow into. For example, years ago I bought A.N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral, a spirited yet wistful recounting of the loss of faith among Victorian poets, critics, novelists, and philosophers. I bought it on the strength of Wilson’s biographies of Jesus and C. S. Lewis, and on his reputation as a wry observer of humanity’s spiritual condition. I found I wasn’t ready for it at the time, but I set it aside in the assurance that one day I would be. During one Christmas holiday I read it straight through, discovering therein an inside dialogue with a string of Victorian writers I’d read only in fits and starts. Then I came across a new collection of George Orwell’s essays entitled All Art is Propaganda with the first one being “Charles Dickens.”  Wanting to know more I signed up for a “Victorian to Twentieth Century Literature” class at the university where I worked and was soon immersed in Dickens’ Hard Times, the poetry of Amy Levy and Christina Rossetti, the commentary of Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle, and the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Virginia Woolf.

I’ve had Goethe’s Faust in David Luke’s vivid and earthy translation on my shelves for almost 10 years. Every now and then I’d troll its waters but without dropping anchor. Then one evening I picked up Part One and dove deep. Coming up a day later, ready for Part Two, I was not surprised to find in the mail the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly on the topic of Arts and Letters. Inside was a timeline of the development of the Faust epic, from an account of the life of Theophilus of Adana (c. 538), an Orthodox cleric who sold his soul to the devil, through Christopher Marlowe’s play (1604), Lessing’s scenes from an unpublished play on Faust (1759), Goethe’s masterpiece (1808, 1832), Berlioz’ opera (1846), Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name (1947), and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s film, Dr. Faustus (1967).

Those of a crabbed and literal mind might say that I consciously went searching for links. I’ve thought of it rather as serendipity, a lucky coincidence. But lately I’ve come to regard it as synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence of elements resulting in a new consciousness.

Reading Thoreau’s Walden for the first time in years grafted me into previous readings on the craft of writing, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and thence to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a kind of sociocultural conversation on the ancient ritual of gift-giving and how the creativity of artists and writers continues the forward motion of gifting against the commercialization of art.

Where I end up after one of these treks is a long way from where I begin but it’s a journey with a narrative thread that can be understood if not explained. To the pleasure of reading widely is added the satisfaction of synthesis, the weaving together of contrasting skeins of thought into a harmonious pattern.

Do we conform everything we see into a matrix of convergences? I wonder about this as I scan the horizon of my literary landscape. Do we suffer the fate of the old saying, "If you think like a hammer, everything looks like a nail?" I prefer to think that a loose thread from a book we're immersed in weaves itself into the fabric of another book. Part of the pleasure is the sudden awareness that this connects to that and that leads up to this. Perhaps attention becomes heightened, consciousness not narrowed but thrown wide open, a path through a dark wood suddenly giving way to a golden and towering sky.

“We turn to books in the hope of better understanding our selves and better engaging with the meaning of our experiences,” says Michael Dirda. “They are instruments of self-exploration.”