ECCLESIASTES and SONG OF SONGS (bookin’ through the bible 9) – guest column by Timothy Mills
The Wise King’s Fans
Guest column by Timothy Mills at Friendly Humanist
I have the good fortune to cover two of the most humanist books of the Bible: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, both traditionally attributed to wise King Solomon. Ecclesiastes is a philosophical reflection communicating an old man’s existential angst; Song of Songs is an erotic exchange between two lovers.
My wife, Deena, put it this way: “Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes before he went on Prozac and Song of Songs after he went on Viagra.”
Let’s look a little deeper.
Ecclesiastes
Identifying King Solomon as the author of Ecclesiastes “is no more than a conventional literary device; the author commends his thoughts to the public under the name of the greatest sage in Israel.”1 I’ll follow David Plotz and the folks at Humanistic Texts in simply calling the author Koheleth (“teacher, leader of the assembly”), the original Hebrew word
which translates to Greek as
Hence “Ecclesiastes”.
The main theme of the book is Koheleth saying of many things “This is vanity”2, and his repeated declarations that “All is vanity”3. That’s 12 near-identical phrases, plus the odd use of the word “vanity” elsewhere in Ecclesiastes. The slightly punchier NIV translation uses the word “meaningless” here. The New King James version offers “Absurdity, Frustration, Futility, Nonsense” as further alternatives in a footnote. When we look at the original Hebrew, we find that “The roots of the word hebel
indicate vapor, fog, steam, breeze or breath…. they all describe something that is transitory, ephemeral, impermanent.”
Aha! “Vanity”, “meaningless”, and the others are editorial extrapolations by early translators. Now we see the original sense more clearly: Everything is ephemeral; Everything is transitory. This is a difficult fact of life faced by humanists and others who do not believe in an eternal afterlife.
No discussion of Ecclesiastes would be complete without mentioning the first eight verses of chapter 3. You’ve probably already heard them – here’s the start:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
And so on. Some of the lines are questionable (“a time to kill”, “a time to hate”, “a time for war”), but the overall sentiment is reassuring – even to a humanist. Farmers must accept the seasons as they come; living creatures must accept the cycles of life. Naturally, these lines are popular for funeral readings.
The lines that follow, however, say that God ordains the time to do each thing. Is it possible to read the first eight verses without the taint of divine predestiny?
Here’s another recurring theme in this philosophical retrospective on a wise man’s life: we are told six times that the really good things in life are eating, drinking, and enjoying your work and its fruits4. Rather than simply calling this shallow hedonism, we could reasonably interpret it – especially the “enjoying your work” bit – as promoting human flourishing. Humanist philosophers and religious skeptics such as Socrates and Paul Kurtz express similar sentiments, coining words like eudaimonia and eupraxsophy to express the idea. Combine this with what we learn from his repeated use of the word “ephemeral”, and it’s easy to think of Koheleth as an early existential humanist. Cool.5
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Unfortunately, a later editor felt that such religion-free morality was not appropriate for the Jewish scriptures, and added these two verses: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgement, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ec 12:13-14)
Twelve chapters of telling us that there is no ultimate good, nothing lasts forever, and the greatest worldly good is human well-being, and then we get the old obedience mantra that we first met in the Garden of Eden, as if it is the natural conclusion to draw from what went before. This complete U-turn suggests to non-believers and believers alike that the God-fearing stuff was tacked on some time after Koheleth composed the main body of the book.
My recommendation: do as they do at Humanistic Texts. Lop off the unnecessary addendum, and take this as a good work of humanist philosophy, poetically-presented.
Song of Songs
Now, let’s see what we can make of Solomon’s other masterpiece, Song of Songs. Reading through from Ecclesiastes into the Song, you have to agree that either these two books were written by different people, or Deena was right that there was a severe shift in the author’s pharmaceutical habits between books.
In fact, the Song is probably no more Solomon’s work than Ecclesiastes was. As its Wikipedia page notes, “It was common practice in ancient times for an anonymous writer seeking recognition for his work to write eponymously in the name of someone more famous.”
What about the content? The Song is packed with a wide variety of romantic and erotic images. It is clearly an exchange between two lovers, with some comments thrown in by others. It is not always obvious who is speaking where, though the NIV and NJB translations try to suggest divisions, with headings like “Lover” for the man, “Beloved” for the woman, and “Friends” for other speakers.6
The man compares his lover to a mare; her eyes are doves; her lips taste like honey.7 She says his eyes, too, are like doves; he is like a gazelle or young stag. His skin is golden, his hair is dark and wavy, his legs are like marble.8 So far so good – modern poems and songs contain similar (sometimes identical) imagery.
But not all of the metaphors are so familiar, nor so complimentary to modern eyes.
Hair like a flock of goats”? From a distance, perhaps a big flock of goats flowing down a slope could evoke cascading hair. Teeth like a flock of shorn ewes”? From the context (“all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved”), we must presume he’s telling us she has all her teeth, and maybe that they’re white. Fair enough if you’re living with bronze-age dentistry, but don’t try it in a Valentine’s Day card these days!9
I’m afraid I don’t know exotic fruit well enough to speculate about cheeks like pomegranates, and I’m completely lost when it comes to a neck like the tower of David with a thousand warriors’ shields hanging on it. Breasts like twin fawns may sound cosy and pleasant, though my knowledge of infant ungulates suggests they’re rather scrawny and leggy rather than round and bosom-like.10
With all that, you can’t blame the translators for trying in small ways to translate the imagery to contemporary romantic themes. The rose mentioned in 2:1
is a crocus in the original Hebrew.
There’s other imagery – gardens, locked gates, myrrh – but you get the idea. I’ve left the sexiest metaphors for you to find and enjoy on your own (or, preferably, with a companion).
We now have some idea what images the ancient Jews considered sensual or erotic. We can also infer that the author of this book found sex to be fun.
Which it is! Sex is a delight, physiologically and socially. Humans are adapted to wanting and enjoying sex. It is wired into us as a way of reinforcing pair bonding and maximizing our reproductive chances.
It is also at the root of what we value most: human life. The ancestors of every human on the planet (every animal of any kind, and most plants, for that matter) have been reproducing sexually for about 2.5 billion years. No sex would mean no life as we know it.
The author of the Song didn’t know just how long the history of sex is, but he almost certainly knew that sex leads to children. Even that, however, is not mentioned in the Song – and rightly so. When desire is upon us, it is not the consequences of sex that consume our minds, nor the historical precedents, nor its role in abstract moral philosophy.
It is the act itself. The raw, physical union of two people. This is what caresses the minds of lovers, what tempts and lures and pleases.
And this is what the Song is all about. It is about the fire that awakens in adolescence and, properly honoured and nurtured, doesn’t die until we do.
“Solomon’s” books
In Ecclesiastes we have a work of non-theistic moral philosophy, and in Song of Songs we have an erotic cavort through the poetic metaphors of a pastoral culture. The authors of both were big enough fans of Solomon, the wise king, that they credited their books to him. Both made it into the central canons of the Jewish and later the Christian scriptures. And both books, for the most part, convey secular humanist sentiments. What a pleasant reprieve to find, in a collection of bad science, repressive laws, and unlikely miracles, the odd book of humanist-friendly wisdom and joie de vivre.
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Footnotes
1From the commentary in print version of the New Jerusalem Bible – see also Wikipedia’s entry on Ecclesiastes.
2Ec 2:15, Ec 2:19, Ec 2:21, Ec 2:23, Ec 2:26, Ec 4:4, Ec 4:8, Ec 5:10, Ec 7:6
3Ec 1:2, Ec 3:19, Ec 11:8
4Ec 2:24, Ec 3:12-13, Ec 3:22, Ec 5:18, Ec 8:15, Ec 11:8
5This is leaving aside, of course, Koheleth’s brief lapses into nihilism (Ec 7:1-4) and misogyny (Ec 7:28).
6The feminist in me would love to rant about the linguistic sexism implicit in these translations that give the male the active label “Lover” and the woman the passive label “Beloved”, but I have too little space to make it more than a footnote.
7So 1:9; So 1:15, 4:1; So 4:11
8So 5:12; So 2:9, 2:17, 8:14; So 5:11, 14, 15; So 5:11; So 5:15
9So 4:1; So 4:2
10So 4:3; 4:4; 4:5
the hurrier i go
My harried spin through early spring continues, and now I see the blog’s been idling curbside for a full week. Can’t be good for global warming.
Just returned from a terrific trip to DC, where I (along with Nothing author Nica Lalli) spoke to a large and attentive crowd at the Center for Inquiry there. They’re hoping to get a secular parenting program jumpstarted there, and I’m always happy to help such a thing.
February 17 is the first topical webinar — Secular Family, Religious World — and I’m busily finishing the PowerPoint and notes for that one while prepping for the Seminar Tour, which launches in Minneapolis on March 1 before continuing to Raleigh on the 15th and Albuquerque on the 22nd. And the first draft of the second book is due on February 29th.
Not whining. Just freaking out. Not the same.
At any rate, the last thing I can fit in is an intelligent discursion on Leviticus and Deuteronomy for the Meming of Life, so I’m forced to shuffle the order a bit. Later today I’ll post a guest column by the fabulous Timothy Mills on Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. It’s extremely well done, so do check that out.
the best kind of ignorance
Connor (12) came across the word “dogma” in his social studies homework the other day and asked me what it means.
“Hmm, dogma,” I said. “Well, a dogma is a religious belief that a church says must be accepted without question.”
“WHAT?!?!!!”
If I tagged the html correctly on the word above, it’s an inch high and bright red, which is how it came out of his mouth. It made me jump.
“What…what do you mean, What?”
“If you can’t question it,” he said, incredulously, “how can you find out if it’s really true?!”
I was completely taken by surprise. He was literally standing there in slack-jawed disbelief.
My regular readers might be surprised by my surprise. There’s a line I include in all of my talks and many of my articles — something about my children never having heard of unaskable questions. It also occurs in the intro to the “I’m *so* glad you asked” page of the blog, phrased like so:
My hope in creating this page is to capture just a little of the electric thrill I get from being the father of three bighearted and curious kids who’ve never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question.
But when I’ve said my kids have “never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question,” I’ve always meant it a tad…you know…hyperbolically. I meant that they wouldn’t recognize the validity of such an idea. It never occurred to me that my kids — least of all my twelve-year-old — had literally never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question. I mean, come on.
But when I asked him, he assured me that he had never, ever heard someone say a certain question could not even be asked. Ever. My definition of dogma had shattered the best kind of ignorance for my boy. The unaskable question was quite literally a new (and completely asinine) concept to him.
My work is done here.
123 meme
I’ve been tagged by Tim Mills at The Friendly Humanist with the 1-2-3 blogmeme. Because memetics is one of the founding concepts and namesake of this blog (and because it’s quick), I’ll dood it!
The rules are these:
1. Pick up the book nearest you with at least 123 pages. (No cheating!)
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Count the first five sentences.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five other bloggers.
Ladies and gentlemen, the nearest book at the moment is none other than the NIV Study Bible, 10th Anniversary Edition.
*flip flip flip*
Page 123 is in the heart of Exodus. Moses has received the Ten Commandments (and then some); now the question is where to put them. God gives very precise instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant, the table for the bread of the Presence, and the tabernacle (“Make loops of blue material along the edge of the end curtain in one set, and do the same with the end curtain in the other set”). The three sentences I am supposed to quote relate to the building of the table:
Overlay it with pure gold and make a gold molding around it. Also make around it a rim a handbreadth wide and put a gold molding on the rim. Make four gold rings for the table and fasten them to the four corners, where the four legs are.
Words to live by.
(I’ll tag others in a few days.)
Bertrand Russell’s other value
First, for the record: I intend to post on Leviticus and Deuteronomy soon, soon. I am wrestling with the triple difficulty of (1) rolling too many stones up too many different hills at once, (2) dealing with an increasingly severe cold, and (3) feeling repulsed by the books in question every time I open them. I will combine the two into a single entry and be done with it. Soon. Then you’ll get to read Timothy Mills’ truly terrific take on Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. In the meantime…
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Just finished reading The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. A fascinating person, clear thinker, lucid writer, and tremendous influence on me. All nonreligious parents would enjoy and ought to read the first two chapters (Childhood and Adolescence).
My stubbornly naive tendency is to picture such people as Russell gliding through life on a cloud of philosophy, observing the human condition from a higher elevation, untrammeled by the things that so trammel me and my ilk. A good look at Russell’s life cures a chap of this nonsense plenty quick. What a mess! Bertrand Russell was one very trammeled and very human guy.
One passage in particular would have been worth reading the whole book just to get:
Ever since puberty I have believed in the value of two things: kindness and clear thinking. At first these two remained more or less distinct; when I felt triumphant I believed most in clear thinking, and in the opposite mood I believed most in kindness. (vol 2, p. 232)
I touched on this several weeks ago in a post about what Christians generally do better than secularists:
[Freethought groups] fret and fuss over the urgent need for more rationality in the world, completely ignoring more basic human needs like unconditional acceptance. Most people do not go to church for theology—they go for acceptance. They go to be surrounded by people who smile at them and are nice to them, who ask how their kids are and whether that back injury is still hurting.
Freethought groups are not often good at making people feel welcome and unconditionally accepted. Whenever I walk in the door of a new group, either to attend or as a speaker, I mill around and look at the walls for ten minutes before someone says something. It’s a painful ten minutes for anyone, and makes them less likely to return. Get a greeter at the door to welcome new faces in and introduce them around.
Until we recognize why people gather together—and that it isn’t usually “to be a force for rationality”—freethought groups will continue to lag light years behind churches in offering community.
Nonreligious folks are not unkind. Many are the gentlest and kindest people I know. But as a movement, we too seldom recognize the importance of talking once in a while about human emotional needs — until those moments when we are feeling “the opposite of triumphant” and find ourselves, as individuals, looking for a kind word or thought or deed to come our way.
As a parent, I find myself more upset by the unkindnesses my children do — especially to each other — than by any fuzziness of thought. And I find it harder to forgive my own lapses in the former than in the latter.
rule, britannia
I love the UK. The six months I lived there were the best of my life. When I return — and Zeus knows I will — I will hug a lamppost in Charing Cross, and all the Queen’s horses and men will not budge me. Enough intelligence, wit, history, beauty, eccentricity, originality and ennui is packed into those little islands to satisfy my many hungers for the rest of my days.
One reason I find it attractive (not by any means the most significant, but one) is the normalized presence of religious disbelief. For a small taste of how deeply different the British religious situation is, watch this recent PSA by the British Humanist Association. You’ll want to see it more than once to take in all of the information and implications:
Now picture anything remotely like it in the U.S.
incoming!
I’m a tad excited. I got myself a piece of hate mail.
Okay, it’s not really that hateful — just a little irritated, perhaps. So I got myself a piece of irritated mail, then.
But can I just call it hate mail? Because it’s the first one I’ve gotten since the book release that’s even close, the very first, and I was ever-so-ready in the beginning to get a lot of them. I was so ready to be pounced on when Parenting Beyond Belief was released that I pre-wrote answers to six different types of complaints I had anticipated — four for complaining Christians and two for complaining atheists. Spent some serious time on them, I did, and they’re cracking good answers, kill-’em-with-kindness type answers that leave the victim with a goofy, pleasant grin, unsure quite why he can’t feel his extremities anymore and entirely oblivious to the rivulets of steaming scat running down his forehead into his tiny little eyes. That kind of answer.
But the complaints never came. Oh, a little here and there, some of them points well-taken, but not much static to speak of. Almost everyone’s been quite decent about the book, even when they disagree with this or that bit.
Now what kind of crap luck is that?
Then I got this:
To whom it may concern-
The book “Parenting Beyond Belief” is ridiculous. I feel sorry for any child raised by atheist parents. I only hope that you can see that raising a child is the absolute best thing for them.
God Bless —
John R______
See? That’s the worst I’ve received since PBB came out, and it’s not even that bad. Just irritated, and a bit confused in the last sentence.
The angriest letter I ever got followed the lockout debacle/media frenzy to which I alluded in an earlier post, the one at the College of St. Catherine in 2003 when, as a faculty member, I invited a nonreligious scholar to speak on the Catholic campus. That letter (one of dozens at the time) told me I was a “son-of-a-bitch,” instructed me to kiss the college president’s (wait for it!) shoes for feeding my family despite my apparent “intentions to sew [sic] confusion in the minds of students at a Catholic college,” promised me Hell — and ended with “Gods Blessings on you.”
I thought sure PBB would draw more such fire. I was even assured by Lisa Miller at Newsweek that I would be “in the crosshairs of the Religious Right” after the article came out. There’s been a bit of grumbling on websites here and there , but that’s it.
Don’t think I’m really complaining. My word, I’m quite relieved that I haven’t had to waste energy in that direction. But I’m puzzled. Relieved and puzzled. Most of my mail looks more like this, which came in less than an hour after the “God Bless” message:
Dale,
This past year:
I read your book.
Joined a Humanist Group
Told my 12 year old it is OK not to believe
And now the cycle of religion is broken and she is free to focus on life rather than afterlife
Life is good and it’s about time. I’m 50. My parents, brothers, sister and wife are believers but I’ve always had strong but quiet doubt.
Now I’m OK with not pretending anymore and I don’t sit back when I need to stand up for myself. I accept my way as what normal should be and urge family to accept my thinking as I accept theirs.
Thanks,
G___
I hope I never stop being moved by messages like that.
labels
[continued from the open shelf]
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?” Delaney asked.
I swallowed. You’d think that, given my current work, I’d have sat myself down at some point and worked out guidelines for such inevitable moments:
CONTINGENCY 113.e
Requests for Definitions
iii. Term: “humanist”
Subset 2: Age 5-6
Children in this demographic cohort who make a direct request for the definition of “humanist” and/or any of its etymological class members (e.g. humanism, humanistic) are to be referred to Article 6, section D of the Humanist Manifesto, except in Arkansas and Hawaii.
Lacking such a road map, I simply answered her question. In retrospect, to my surprise, I even answered it correctly.
“A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and that even if there is a heaven or a god, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.”
“Awesome!”
I should note that Laney (age 6) uses Awesome! to signify everything from “I find that rather astonishing” to “That’s something I didn’t know before, and now I know it!” The latter meaning was in play here, I think, the word Awesome! signifying a new piece of the world clattering against the bottom of the piggy bank of her receptive mind.
Later that evening, after she’d been read to and sung to and tucked and kissed, I went back to my study to close up for the night. Scattered on and around the recliner she’d been sitting in were The Humanist Anthology, Tristram Shandy, The Kids’ Book of Questions, The World Almanac, The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Simpsons and Philosophy, Cosmos, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. I reloaded the shelves and went to bed.
One week later, during our afterschool snack-chat, Laney informed me excitedly that there are nine different religions in her class.
“Nine, wow! How do you know there are nine?”
“We’re talking about different religions, and Mr. Monroe asked if anybody wanted to say what kind of religion their family believed.”
I was not surprised to hear of some diversity. There are lots of South Asian kids in the class. Compared to the demographic mayonnaise I had pictured North Atlanta to be, I’ve been thrilled with the diversity here. “And there were nine different ones?!”
“Yeah, nine…” She looked at the ceiling and began to rattle them off. “Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Baptiss, Jewish, Chains…” (“Chains” is probably “Jain,” one of the most benign and respectable religious traditions on Earth). She counted on her fingers. “Anyway, I can’t remember all of them.” She suddenly beamed. “And I was the only humanist!”
I paused for a week or so.
I am adamantly opposed to labeling children, or even allowing them to label themselves, with words that imply the informed selection of a complex worldview. Dawkins hits it right on the head when he refers to a long-ago caption on a photo in The Guardian. The photo was of three children in a Nativity play:
They are referred to as “Mandeep, a Sikh child; Aakifah, a Muslim child; and Sarah, a Christian child” — and no one bats an eye. Just imagine if the caption had read “Mandeep, a Monetarist; Aakifah, a Keynesian; and Sarah, a Marxist.” Ridiculous! Yet not one bit less ridiculous than the other.
That incisive analogy is Richard’s greatest contribution to secular parenting. I completely agree, as (I am increasingly convinced) do most nonreligious parents. Once a label is attached, thinking is necessarily colored and shaped by that label. I don’t want my kids to have to think their way out from under a presumptive claim placed on them by one worldview or another. So prior to age twelve, I won’t allow my children to be called “atheists” any more than I’d allow them to be called “Christians”–not even by themselves. (More on the ‘age twelve’ comment in a later post. Remind me when I forget.)
So my first impulse was to give the usual cautionary speech: Now be careful not to stop thinking. There are still too many questions to ask, too much you don’t know. Someday you’ll be able to make up your own mind on this, but it’s not time yet.
I looked at Laney, still beaming proudly through a mouthful of Nilla Wafers. At the time she had learned the meaning of humanist from me, I didn’t know she had said to herself, That’s me. She was obviously delighted to have had something to say when all the other kids were claiming their tribal identities, and clearly had no idea of the dark chain reactions set off in the fundamentalist mind by the word “humanist.”
“So what did Mr. Monroe say?”
“He said that was cool!” And I’m sure he did. He’s a great guy. No evidence of dark chain reactions in him, nor in her classmates.
“And he asked what a humanist believes,” she continues.
“What’d you say?”
“I said a humanist believes the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world.”
If she had called herself a secular humanist, I would have protested. But what is there about believing ‘the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world’ that requires more time and thought and study? Is she impeding her thought process by declaring this — or is this a value, like honesty and empathy, upon which she can build her search for an identity? There are, after all, both religious humanists and secular humanists. Erasmus and Paine, two great heroes of mine, were among the former.
Humanism has no connection to atheism for her. The definition I gave her even included the option of believing in a god and being a humanist. By calling herself a humanist in the broadest terms, she hasn’t bought into complex metaphysics; she’s simply embraced a concept that even a six-year-old can sign on to. And in the process, she introduced her classmates, and her teacher, to a new idea, and associated it with her smiling, eager, proud little face.
So Laney’s done it again — she’s taken my armchair abstractions and turned them inside out, making me realize that not all worldview labels are ridiculous or harmful for kids. Some can even serve as catalysts for the next stage in a child’s process of finding her place in the world. And the next stage, and the next.
photo by Paula Porter
the open shelf
- January 24, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, myths, Parenting
23
Something, well…ambiguous…happened the other day. Actually it was ambiguous at first, but it got more biguous as I thought about it. (Step away from the dictionary.) I wasn’t at all sure what to think about it at first. In the end, I decided it was…good. Really good, in fact.
But before I write about that, I have some setup to do. There are at least two stories embedded in this one. I’ll start with the open shelf policy and hope I remember the point in the end.
Years ago, I recall my mother-in-law describing her father’s book-lined study. He was a Baptist minister, by all accounts a very good man. His daughter was awed by the rows upon rows of spines of books along the walls of that room. I could picture it immediately, the walls of books and the little girl.
It got me wondering how my own kids would remember the books in our house. We have just over a thousand of them — as I was painfully reminded when we moved — including many old beauties. While living in the UK in 2004, I visited 63 used bookstores and acquired 93 books (I know the stats only because I was keeping a diary for an article I was writing about the antiquarian bookstores of London).
The first one I found — the first one — was a beautifully rebound volume of David Hume’s History of England, a second edition from 1796, stuck in amongst murder mysteries in the open market under Waterloo Bridge. It was £10, about $18. (Scroll up to the top photo again — it’s on the top shelf near the middle, bright brown leatherette binding with gold lettering, just to the right of the little red Huxleys.) If that doesn’t addict a person to scouring the bookstores of London, nothing will.
I’d love nothing more than to bore you by listing the other 92 I found, but I see your cursor twitching toward the scroll bar. The point is that, largely as a result of this fetish of mine, books are all over the place in our house.
In the 1920s, newly-moneyed members of the American middle class signaled their rise out of the working class in a couple of ways. Step one was putting a piano in the parlor. A wide selection of sheet music with elaborate illustrations on their covers would sit on the music rack. Some of these pianos were even played. Most were not.
(I grew up in California next-door to a retired couple. In their living room was a highly-polished parlor grand piano. I often wondered if anyone played it. My question was answered when I realized the framed pictures that covered the piano were also lined up on the closed cover of the keyboard.)
The other way the climbers of the 20s would signal their newfound class (pronounced “cleeeass”) was by filling their bookshelves with the classics (“cleeeassics”) and keeping their tops well-dusted.
Though there are certainly books in our collection we’ll never get to — life, I’m told, ends — ours do get a workout. One message our kids are getting is that books are not for wallpaper, and not for establishing one’s cleeeass. They are invitations to walk around in someone else’s head. And I wanted to be sure my kids knew that invitation was addressed to them as well. So one day, shortly after my mother-in-law’s story, I was taking a book down from a shelf and saw Connor, then about eight, reading one of his own books nearby.
“Hey Con, come here a sec.” He did. I indicated the books on the bookshelves in our living room and asked whose books they were.
“Yours,” he said. “And Mom’s.”
I told him they were actually for our whole family, and that if he was ever curious about any of them, he could take any book off any shelf anytime he wanted and look at it. I showed him which books were old and showed him how to open those carefully, supporting the spine, never flattening the pages. For a couple of days he played along, then lost interest, which was fine. The idea was the thing: he knew that there was in principle no prohibited knowledge.
I told Erin the same thing when she reached that age, with the same result. But a few months ago, though she was only six, I had a hunch it was Delaney’s turn.
Sure enough, she leapt on it. I’ll come upstairs now and find her in the recliner in my study with a book in her lap, leafing through pages, sounding out words and looking for pictures. A few weeks ago it was Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and she was gawking at the snake-festooned head of Medusa, dangling from the outstretched grasp of Perseus. “AWESOME!” she said. And it was.
I’ve found her looking through a leatherbound Bible in German from the 1880s, Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House, and an illustrated Decameron. But as often as not, I don’t know what she’s reading. My study is bisected by a freestanding bookcase. When I’m working at my desk, I can’t see the recliner on the other side, though I can often hear her turning pages, saying “Awesome!” under her breath or (most hilariously) reading entire sentences of Vonnegut aloud. But it’s hard to prepare yourself for the really big moments when they come. And they always do.
“Dad?” said the bookcase.
“Yeah sweetie,” I said without looking up from my desk.
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?”
good questions answered
- January 21, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In PBB
- 2
I received two emails asking about the PBB Online Book Clubs, which begin in six days. Here are the answers:
1. NO, you don’t have to have read the book to be a part of the book clubs!
2. YES, you can register (FREE) and just listen in! You don’t have to participate in the actual Q&A unless you want to.
No more excuses, then! Join us! It’ll be fun and/or interesting. Here’s how it works:
You go to a given web address at the designated time, then call a provided phone number for the audio. The meeting starts with a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation on your computer screen about nonreligious parenting in the U.S., the genesis (sorry) of the book Parenting Beyond Belief, and a quick rundown of the consensus of its contributing writers on best practices for nonreligious parents. Then I’ll open it up for questions. Click on the date of your choice to register:
Sunday, January 27 at noon Eastern
Monday, January 28 at 9:00 pm Eastern [REGISTRATION CLOSED]
Tuesday, January 29 at 9:00 pm Eastern [REGISTRATION CLOSED]
Wednesday, January 30 at 9:00 pm Eastern [REGISTRATION CLOSED]
Thursday, January 31 at 9:00 pm Eastern
Friday, February 1 at 9:00 pm Eastern
Saturday, February 2 at 3:00 pm Eastern [REGISTRATION CLOSED]
