January 24, 2007
Stories
Nobelist writer Jane Smiley came to our town last evening and charmed us all by talking about, of all things, writing. She said 9/11 shut down her muses so emphatically that she took up reading, instead. She started with Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” and read another 129 books following, all in the chronological order of when they were written, before she started writing again. His accounting of the Black Death had a lot of influence on her subsequent mindset to the written page.
The effect of all this was that her work became the rewriting of some of the books she had read, changing the date, the place, the names of the characters, and plunging on ahead. Showing that this is what many of the great writers have done, she then recounted a cycle of who followed whom followed whom followed whom until it began to seem as if there may well have been only one book somewhere back in time plunging through different “carnations” that accounted for all the libraries on earth.
I wondered if maybe the Bible is that kind of book. It includes just about every cycle and saga and fix a person could get caught up or get into in trying to follow their bliss together and with all the kinds of literature such a spiritually biographical whirlwind could ever produce. We do an injustice to the people who inform it, that is, shape its life, when we take their tale to be any more infallible than ours. To be sure, they were inspired to tell us where they’d been and what they’d done and Whom they’d followed, and we trust they were candid about it, but not any more so than are we when we so set our hearts and minds. God’s the same for them and for us, allowing herself to be filtered through our being and becoming to one another like she does, every life a novel, a story told as it goes, facing the changes like the prayer says with serenity, courage, and wisdom, all figuring in our personal scheme of things.
It took 9/11 for Ms Smiley to slow down and read thusly to inform her story-telling. And what a majestic way she’s come to do it. Maybe there’s enough day-by-day chaos somewhere in the world to slow us down to read. We don’t have to start with Boccaccio. Adam and Eve and Moses and Isaiah will do for openers. And then we can go on to John Baptist and Jesus and those ragtag disciples, discover again how that story came out, and then start refreshing and telling our own.
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