Take Five Moments

by Paul Dry

Readers remember books in different ways. I look for vivid moments. A recollected scene can help me bring back the depth and layering of much of the book. You might wonder what I think a moment is. I see it as a span of fixed engagement that we apprehend as a whole, take in as a nearly duration-less experience, and often remember as a visual image. In Homeric Moments, Eva Brann writes that such moments possess "summary significance."

I’d like to take a moment of your time (actually five moments) to quote passages from five of our books and to tell you why each captured me — or in one case won the approval of a young adult reader. For me these moments are exemplary and a shared possession.

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From The Parnas:

Pardo did not know what to say because, unbelievably, he was not afraid, no longer afraid after a lifetime of possession by fear. The direct confrontation with the carriers of evil had dissolved all fear. He was no longer afraid, for God was with him, and as the end was approaching, God was about to reveal to him the secret of his past fears.

The Nazi paused for a few seconds, waiting for an answer, and since he did not get one, said, "We are about to kill you, Jew. Think hard with the last thoughts of which you are still capable; think hard about everybody you can, and tell me: Can you think of anyone who, at this moment, is worse off than you?"

"Yes," said Pardo, at once. "You." (pages 121–122)

In 1944, Giuseppe Pardo was the parnas, that is, the leader of the congregation of the synagogue in Pisa. At the final moment of his life, the parnas no longer fears either the imagined attacks of dogs or the actual imminent fatal blows from the Nazi soldiers. Why has he stopped being afraid after years of living with irrational fear? Silvano Arieti does not answer the question but suggests how he has thought about it and how we might.

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From The Trivium:

The utilitarian artist produces utilities that serve the wants of humanity; the fine artist, if he is of the highest order, produces a work that is "a thing of beauty and a joy forever" and that has the power to elevate the human spirit. In the exercise of both the utilitarian and the fine arts, although the action begins in the agent, it goes out from the agent and ends in the object produced and usually has a commercial value; and therefore the artist is paid for the work. In the exercise of the liberal arts, however, the action begins in the agent and ends in the agent, who is perfected by the action; consequently, the liberal artist, far from being paid for his hard work, of which he receives the sole and full benefit, usually pays a teacher to give needed instruction and guidance in the practice of the liberal arts. The intransitive character of the liberal arts may be better understood from the following analogy.

ANALOGY: The intransitive character of the liberal arts:

The carpenter planes the wood.
The rose blooms.

The action of a transitive verb (like planes) begins in the agent but "goes across" and ends in the object (the wood). The action of an intransitive verb (like blooms) begins in the agent and ends in the agent (the rose, which is perfected by blooming). (pages 4–5)

In the first chapter of The Trivium, Sister Miriam Joseph defines the liberal arts, then differentiates them from the fine arts and the utilitarian arts (such as carpentry, masonry, printing, editing, etc.). She instills in her readers a desire to be "perfected" (fulfilled or completed) by the study of the liberal arts. And, in passing, she memorably distinguishes a transitive verb from an intransitive one!

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From Homeric Moments:

So Odysseus is close to the singer’s art, but he is no fame singer or people enchanter. "Seek the light as quickly as possible and learn these things so that you may later tell your wife," says his mother in Hades, and his wife alone will hear them, for the people of Scheria, the Enclosed Coast, hardly constitute the public.

For this personal, perhaps new, poetry, without Muse, accompaniment, or the intention of fame, Odysseus coins a new word, used in the Odyssey only by Odysseus for the telling of the odyssey: mythologein, "to-give-an-account-in-story-form." Odysseus, the poet of the odyssey, is the first original Mythologist, the teller of his soul’s own tale, embedded in the Musical epic of the poet of the Odyssey. (page 177)

Here Eva Brann writes about Odysseus’ telling of his travels (his odyssey—lower case "o") to the Phaeacians on their island of Scheria, which means, she tells us, "Enclosed Coast." While Homer at the opening of the epic invokes the muse to aid him in his effort to sing his tale of the Odyssey, Odysseus simply tells his version of his travels to those gathered in the court of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians. Brann invites us to consider how the Odyssey differs from Odysseus’ telling of his odyssey. As Odysseus tells his soul’s own tale, we are listening to one of the first stories that transform inner experience into a meaningful public account. We are near the origins of human self-explanation.

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From One Is One:

Seeing it [the Holy Land] all there before him across the valley in the cruel midday sunlight, under a brazen sky, a few grey olive-trees here and there, a flock of sheep on the road below the city walls; seeing it as he supposed that Christ must so often have seen it, Stephen felt that it was the most wonderful sight of his life, and he suddenly remembered Brother Ernulf who had had to imagine this scene for himself, and he wished that the old monk, grumbling and testy, might have been there with him to see it. In that memorable moment of his life it was not Sir Pagan, whom he had so much loved, whom Stephen would have had there to share the moment with him, but crabbed old Ernulf of Peterborough for whom he had never felt any affection, but who had taught him how to paint. (page 201)

Amy Corenswet, our sixteen-year-old summer intern and the daughter of our editor John Corenswet, picked this passage "because it relays to me the whole idea of the book: Stephen loves learning to fight and the idea of being a knight, but his true passion, no matter who he is with, is art. It is also the moment when the reader knows Stephen will end up becoming an artist no matter what he thinks at this point."

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From Cries in the New Wilderness:

"Such is the strange ideological sickness of a mind that takes the part for the Whole. Every ideology is a sort of tangent to the circle of life rather than an arc of that circle; arbitrarily taking some one point as its origin, it promotes that point as the 'key point,' the 'foundation,' and proceeds to erect upon it a staggering superstructure—staggering more and more perilously, the further it goes off on its tangent. Thus it turns out that some one nation, or one class, or one theory, or one technological or medical scheme must reform, save, regenerate, and beatify the whole world. An ideology is a stratagem by which one of the parts captures the Whole. This is why every ideology is a cross between the partisan and the totalitarian: it begins with a party and ends with totalitarianism, and in this metamorphosis lies its whole aim and essence." (page 216)

Cries in the New Wilderness combines comedy and depth. A fiction with the appearance of a sociological study, it purports to be the secret work of one Raisa Gibaydulina, who has documented the new religious sects that are sprouting in the Soviet Union during what turns out to be its twilight years. The book also includes the record of her own (fictitious) spiritual quest in the service of "scientific atheism." Why is Cries important? The paragraph above comes from the book’s Afterword, written in the voice of the author, Mikhail Epstein. He surveys the work of his fictitious heroine and the religious ideas of her new sectarians.

Whether we look at fanciful new sects or ancient religions or all-encompassing ideologies or creeds — Epstein includes here scientific atheism — we repeatedly meet people eager to assert, sometimes murderously, that their partial perspective is the whole and only view. Wacky and deep, Cries in the New Wilderness illuminates the nature and dangers of this predilection to make the part the whole.

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If any of these moments have caught your interest, I hope you will buy and read the books from which the passages are taken, and that you will consider trying other books we’ve published. They deliver, too. Paul Dry Books depends on readers like you (and readers like your friends) — open and skeptical, in search of depth while enjoying the allure of a well-wrought surface, and pleased when a book awakens, delights, and educates them.