“One” is a word for Unity. Wholeness. Perfection. Singularity.
Once you say “Two,” you no longer have that perfection. You have traded in Singularity for Companionship. Fellowship. Relation. One is perfect and alone. But with Two, you can do the tango.
You have sacrificed insular perfection and gained a dyadic relationship.
But note well: Embracing duality opens the door to plurality.
It is inevitable: As soon as you have Two, Three comes marching in behind it, with a whole host of uninvited guests in its train. There is no end to the complexity you will encounter. You need a special symbol, ⚯, just to represent the embarrassing fact that there is no end. A through Ω no longer cover it. You need ⚯ as well.
I did not invent these ideas, Dear Reader. They have been expressed so often, for so long, that we may suspect they are hardwired into the human mind.
Lao Zi, the Daoist sage, may have had such things in mind when he opened his book, Dao De Jing, as follows:
Lao Zi riding an ox. Painting by Zhang Lu (1464-1538). Public Domain.
The way which may be spoken of is not the Unchanging Way.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.
The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. . . .
The Nameless is One; as soon as you name something, you have Two. And from these two, the Nameless and the named, come tumbling the myriad of other things.
Numbers are basic to Christianity as well. Long ago, formalizing a theological framework for the newly-acceptable religion, the bishops at the Council of Nicea asserted that God is one, “the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen.”
But also, Jesus Christ is included, being “begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is . . . consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.”
So that’s two.
The unique twist of this god-talk, from the first chapter of John’s gospel, is that even though God is two—the Father and the Son—yet the two are still one. Some people might call that mystical.
And, as most folks know, two was not enough. They had to make it three by including the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit—a being barely mentioned in the original version of the Nicene Creed but given more detail by the First Council of Constantinople a few decades later. So the One became the Three-in-One—a concept that has survived to this day, though never without challenge from dissenters.
Adoration of the Trinity, painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Father and Son upper center, with the Holy Spirit as a dove flying above them, and myriad beings surrounding them in adoration.
I do not mention all this, Gentle Reader, to start a theology debate. I only mean to point out the power that these simple numbers—one, two, three—have, and have always had, on our thinking.
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Soon, Your New Favorite Writer will be eighty-one years old. Now, there’s a number to conjure with. Eighty-one is nine nines. And nine is magical because it’s three threes. The Trinity trined.
Lao Zi had eighty-one chapters in his little book. One legend says he remained in his mother’s womb for eighty-one years before emerging as a full-grown, wrinkly old philosopher. I do not say this is true. I do say the number “eighty-one” carries a potency in the human mind.
When a person gets to be eighty-one, he will have learned a few things, if he has been paying attention. But all of them—all the myriad things—come out of those first three numbers. They come from unity, duality, and the further possibility of pluralism.
These are depths we cannot plumb. We must be content to deal, in our various ways, with all the ten thousand details. But, doing so, we might be relieved to reflect upon occasion that all these things are just extrapolations of more basic themes.
Dear Reader: This is a reposting of a reflection originally posted June 20, 2020. It is as timely now as it was then. In fact, “timeless” would be a better word. Hope you enjoy it.
“Desiderata” is Latin for “things desired.” Often in difficult times, the thing we most desire is peace.
Max Ehrmann. Fair use.
The prolific, inspirational writer Max Ehrmann (1872-1945) of Terre Haute, Indiana, penned a prose poem that was published as “Desiderata” in 1948. It is the only one of his works to achieve enduring fame, and that only after his death.
For its tone and diction, and because it once appeared in a church publication with the legend, “Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore AD 1692,” it is often assumed to be ancient, maybe even Scriptural in origin. “1692,” however, meant the date of the church’s founding, not of the poem’s writing.
Inspiration
“Desiderata” is neither Biblical nor liturgical nor even very old. But, like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, it stakes a claim to an authenticity of its own. It swept the nation in 1971, when a voice artist named Les Crane released it as a spoken word recording. That was at the height of our nation’s internal turmoil over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. The serene, contemplative tone of the piece may have boosted its popularity.
Today we are again in a time of stress and conflict. Perhaps Mr. Ehrmann’s poem will be of some use to you. At least, it constitutes good advice.
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Love . . . is as perennial as the grass. Photo by Мария Волк on Unsplash.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
Archibald MacLeish was a poet, a playwright, a great figure in American letters. He served as Librarian of Congress during the Second World War and apparently did a bang-up job of it. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—in 1933 and 1953 for books of poetry and in 1959 for a play, J.B.
In 1962, when I was a freshman at Knox College, Mr. MacLeish came to our school to give a speech. At the given hour—11 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, as I recall—I came to Alumni Hall, our massive, neo-romanesque theater, clutching my softback copy of the published script of J.B., which the college bookstore had stocked by the gross to prepare for the playwright’s visit.
Climbing the front stairs and entering the small second-story lobby, I spied the literary lion in a tweed coat and dark vest, chatting with my English composition professor, Michael Crowell.
“Mister Sommers!” Crowell boomed. “Come and meet Archibald MacLeish.”
I stepped up and shook hands with the great man. He was trim and natty, with close-cropped gray hair, a hawklike nose, and dark, intense eyes.
He looked five times more awake than I.
I burbled a word or two and held out my book to him. He smiled, uncapped a huge silver fountain pen, and signed the title page in black ink. I thanked him and made a quick escape. I found a seat in the theater, and in due course he made his speech. I don’t remember what he said. Probably something about literature.
That I can no longer locate my autographed copy of J.B. may give you a reasonable estimate of the durability of literary fame.
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I actually did read that play, J.B. It was supposed to be a modern American version of the biblical Book of Job. Not to throw shade on an undeniably fine poet and library leader, nor to quibble with the judgment of a bona fide Pulitzer Prize jury, nonetheless I recall feeling underwhelmed. It seemed to me the best parts of the play were long passages quoted directly from the Bible; the parts that had been rendered into a contemporary American setting were rather mundane by comparison with the scripture from which they sprang.
These recollections bring us, in a deplorably roundabout manner, to the Book of Job, one of the great works of world literature. Have you read it? It’s easy to find in any standard Bible, tucked right between Esther and Psalms.
It is a stark fable, a story of undeserved suffering and a seemingly callous God. It holds believers accountable for their faith in a way that no conventional tale could.
Job, the central character, is subjected to immense suffering and loss for no reason he can discern. Instead of giving him an explanation, God re-asserts his Almightiness and draws attention to Job’s creaturehood.
Three Friends Visit Job by Wanda Korzeniowska (Polish, 1874-1939). Public Domain.
In what screenwriting guru Robert McKee would label “an education plot,” Job’s inner landscape is changed—not by anything resembling justice in ordinary human terms but by the simple knowledge that God offers no rational choice except humility.
It’s a thoroughly Jewish answer to the problem of evil. If you feel the resolution of the story unsatisfying, you can hear the unseen narrator’s voice whispering: “Vell, vot did you expect?”
In today’s world, we see evil and injustice seemingly everywhere. The good are punished while the evil prosper. It seems, at times, unbearable.
One almost hates to mention in this regard: It was ever thus.
There is nothing new about evil. It still stinks.
We can fight it, but we won’t always win.
As in the days of the Old Testament, we can either cast aspersions at God or admit that the universe God has made is one altogether beyond our imaginations, where justice may have to be measured by divine standards rather than human.
Archibald MacLeish, wherever you are—I invite you to put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Those Germans. They always know what they’re talking about, even if nobody else does.
Those Germans. Carl Burckardt, Die jungen Deutschen. Public Domain.
From the language that brought you Weltschmerz, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit, and Fahrvergnügen, comes our old friend, Schadenfreude—taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others.
Volksvagen’s “Fahrvergnügen” ad. Fair use.
Right now, however, I’m focused on loyalty, and I’d like to commission the German language, if possible, to give us a word meaning nostalgia for the old loyalties of yore, now lost in our benighted era.
In May 2024 Your New Favorite Writer posted a piece, “A Time Travelogue,” and a man wrote this week to thank me for it.
The original post was a visit to the now-distant past, to the time when I was a boy in Streator, Illinois. I happened to mention “the Onized Club”; my correspondent happened to be Googling last week for “Onized.” That was, as investigators say on TV, the nexus.
Onized jacket. Fair use.
The Onized Club was a company-sponsored club for the thousands who worked for Owens-Illinois Glass Company and their families. Owens was far the largest employer in Streator. The word “onized” was a transform of the words “Owens-Illinois” and “organized.” By going to work for Owens you became onized. People were proud of this club, which gave them various benefits—especially, wearing spiffy “Onized” fan gear around town.
It was a company town. During the years when glass jars and bottles were being displaced for many uses by cheaper plastic or coated-paper containers, every quart of milk sold in Streator carried the legend: “See What You Buy—Buy in Glass!” Those who were onized naturally wanted to keep their high-paying jobs. They were grateful to the company. They were glad to be in the club.
The man who wrote me had been commissioned to do a project of some kind for the Streator Onized Credit Union. Puzzled by the term “onized,” he Googled it to find out what it meant and, voilà! found my blog post, which enlightened him on the origin of the term.
BUT HERE’S THE TWIST: As he continued reading, he “became nostalgic for a time I never knew when the richest among us funded the public good. A time when companies cared about their employees enough to spin up a credit union to make sure they had access to banking. A time when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways. . . . [Y]our article reminded me of what life could be like and for a moment, I was there – imagining I was Onized and cheering for my team.”
Aw, gosh—now I’m all choked up.
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But wait a minute, Dear Reader. Hold your horses.
My new friend seems nostalgic for a time he never knew, “when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways.” Hence the need for a new German word. Perhaps Loyalitätsnostalgie—nostalgia for (an era of) loyalty.
The thing is: I have lived in both eras, and I’m not sure they’re all that different.
Don’t get me wrong. I venerate the ’50s and ’60s as a wonderful time—a golden era, with all sorts of good things that have been abandoned in our heedless rush for modernity. (Or, these days, postmodernity.)
But that’s partly because memory dwells on the good stuff. At least, my memory does.
A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. One remains useful; the other, not so much. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.
We all look back to the early years of our lives as the standard against which we measure all things. That’s why old duffers who have not touched an M-16 rifle or used a P-38 can opener in sixty years wear baseball caps with patches representing their old units and blubber unashamed tears when they meet fellow vets. It’s not because the service was so wonderful—it often wasn’t—but it was the capstone or climax to the early years of a person’s life, the passageway to adulthood. Often enough, as adults, we look backward to the more exciting and heady days of youth.
So what about it, Gentle Reader? Has the two-way tug of loyalty between employer and employee gone the way of the Great Auk? Does it live only in the past?
I don’t think so. To begin with, it’s not clear that all rich people, or all large corporations (the two categories are not identical) were stalwart stewards of the public good in old times. Second, for every splashy billionaire we see in today’s media behaving like an ass, there is a quieter billionaire out in the hinterlands working patiently for a better world. We have a good example right here in Wisconsin: Judith Faulkner, creator and sole owner of Epic Systems, Inc.—who, besides having invented a very beneficial medical software, is methodically working to give away 99 percent of her net worth to worthy causes during her lifetime. There must be many other examples.
I know there are a lot of lesser companies in small towns across the nation, delivering great goods and services with workforces who are proud of what they are doing and of the company in whose employ they do it.
Loyalty will always be with us. It’s the glue that holds our society together. It works so well because it is a two-way street. Smart bosses go to extraordinary lengths to get and keep good employees, and those employees work not only for their bosses but for their communities.
Relationships of mutual loyalty not only abound in the business world, they also make schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and all kinds of nonprofits work.
Those who do not live within a web of loyal relationships would be well advised to keep seeking. Such relationships are out there for the having. When you find an employer, a partner, or an institution worth giving your loyalty to, make sure you respond in kind.
Then you’ll truly know the joys of Beziehungsglück (relationship happiness).
“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE REST OF YOU. I AM STRUGGLING WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD. ANY WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT?”
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Yes, Kimberly, try these:
God is not finished with us yet.
It’s easy to get discouraged when we are fed a constant stream of the most outlandish and outrageous things happening somewhere, anywhere, in our tired old world.
But everything that’s happening now has happened before, over and over again.
There was a gag in the Fifties that went like this:
They told me, “Cheer up, things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough . . . things got worse!
In times like these, I feather my own nest; I tend to my knitting; I weed my garden. These are all metaphors, Kimberly. I don’t actually do those particular activities.
The point is, I show up every day. I take people one by one. I try to respond to their needs as I can discern them—especially each person’s need to be treated with dignity and respect.
I hear folks’ concerns, but when those concerns are political—usually informed by media reports of matters far from our daily lives—I safeguard them in File 13 and redirect the conversation.
An old Chinese poem, perhaps the oldest extant Chinese poem, says:
I focus on the here-and-now and on my own responses, which ultimately are the only things within my control. Yes, I can control my own thoughts, words, and deeds.
Some may think me cold-blooded, but I simply do not get urges of the heart that compel me to act out of character. My heart, if I have one, is not that kind of heart.
Calm, philosophical detachment may be impossible if you have another kind of heart. If so, all I can say is you are in for a lot of woe that I have managed to avoid over the past eighty years.
Despite my distance from the flames of passion—or because of it—I am active, upbeat, and productive in my actual life. I meet each day with a certain zest, untroubled by a whole world of troubles, confident the sun will rise again tomorrow.
In a recent workshop, novelist Barbara M. Britton said, “What are your three favorite movies? What do they have in common? Those are apt to be the themes and topics you hold dearest as a writer.”
In the last analysis, It’s a Wonderful Life is all about home and family. Public Domain photo.
That impressed me, because it’s true.
How does it apply to Your New Favorite Writer? My three all-time favorites are sentimental Christmas movies.
I like many kinds of films. I’m tickled by screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or The Gods Must Be Crazy. I like great political satires such as Romanov and Juliet, Dr. Strangelove, or The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. I’m bolstered by writing, directing, and acting brilliance as displayed in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, or any film by the late, great Hitchcock.
But the three I would choose to answer Barbara’s question are: Meet Me In St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life, and We’re No Angels. The first is a cozy domestic drama, the second a stark morality play with an Everyman hero, and the third a blackish comedy in which the stock villain gets a hilarious comeuppance.
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So, what do these three flicks have in common? And what does that say about the subject matters and themes in my own writing?
“Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Judy Garland comforts Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis. Screen grab, fair use.
These films are old. Meet Me In St. Louis came out in 1944, It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946, and We’re No Angels in 1955. I like people and things that are my age. This backwards look is my brand, if I have a brand. The fiction I write tends to be historical. Most of the posts here relate, one way or another, to times past. I like to explore the days of yore because I think that all treasures worth having, all the secrets of life, reside there.
Why Christmas movies, in particular? I happen to be a Christian and attach theological meaning to Christmas. To me, it seems Christmas is when our Creator showed how much he cares for us by taking on all the burdens of our creaturehood. The birth of Jesus is the event that starts the reconciliation of God and man. That theme strikes a deep chord in my heart.
In these films, the characters—ordinary folks like you and me, not rich and powerful people—have their lives, their homes, and their families restored to how they should be. In a deep sense, this is a kind of homecoming.
One of the chief plot lines of literature is that of someone returning home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, E.T., Dorothy Gale—all are bound on homeward journeys. In the films I love most, the characters have not necessarily left home, but their homes are threatening to leave them.
The Smith family of St. Louis, the Baileys of Bedford Falls, and the Ducotel family in the French Caribbean colony of Cayenne all face crises in which their homes are about to disappear, leaving them suspended, as memoirist Dinty W. Moore might say, “between panic and desire.”
The purpose of the plot is to break open a new dispensation, a new state of affairs in which the characters can find their way home. A path is opened. In each case, this shifting paradigm of reality comes as a mental transformation.
Three of Santa’s helpers drop in on a distraught family, just in time for Christmas. Aldo Ray, Humphrey Bogare, and Peter Ustinov in We’re No Angels. Fair use.
In St. Louis, Alonzo Smith suddenly realizes that success is not counted in dollars or prestige, but in his family’s happiness. In Bedford Falls, George Bailey is awakened, through Divine Intervention, to the fact that all these years he has not been wasting his time in meaningless sacrifice but investing in the currency of abiding love. In Cayenne, the inward epiphany comes not to the family whose home is saved but to the trio of criminals who enact that salvation. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the revelation, as long as the audience gets to experience it.
So I guess the cat is out of the bag. I like stories that bring people home, bring them in from the cold, reunite families, and restore harmony in local communities.
In The Price of Passage, I wrote about people displaced from their homes—Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves. They prove Thomas Wolfe’s assertion that you can’t go home again. They are called to rise above their loss of home and create new spaces where they and their offspring will eventually find their harbor.
In Izzy Strikes Gold!, I focused on a 12-year-old boy being jolted from his comfort zone by family circumstances. Will Izzy have to leave home? If so, will he find a new home? Those are the dramatic questions addressed.
My current manuscript follows two brothers who can’t coexist at home with each other; their mutual resentment is too great. War intervenes and poses the question whether the brothers will ever be able to find each other again and re-establish their family relationship. I don’t know that answer because I haven’t read the book yet.
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What is the point of all this rumination? Simply to help me find and become more aware of the central themes in my writing. Ideas that reside close to the writer’s heart make for authenticity in his voice. So these are the kinds of things a guy likes to know.
See you next week, Dear Reader, when it will be about Something Completely Different.
Visit of the Wise Men, from an 1894 Sunday School lesson, by lithographers Harris, Jones & Co. of Providence. Public Domain.
Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve. On Thursday morning, as Santa’s sleighbells jingle away to the North, the Big Day itself will arrive.
This will be my eightieth Christmas on Earth.
The first few of those eighty are lost in the mists of time, permanently and perpetually outside my experience. But I recall clearly the next several after that. I remember times of gathering and feasts of togetherness.
After the workday—most folks used to put in a whole day on December 24—Mom and Dad piled us into the car and we drove in darkness over the hundred miles from the city of Streator to the little town of Knoxville on the Illinois prairie, to gather with family.
1936 Plymouth, from an old postcard. Fair use.
The car was a 1936 Plymouth or a 1939 Chevrolet—both of them relics from an old-time gangster movie—or, later, our first modern car, a 1954 Plymouth. I sat in the back seat with my sister Cynda. We all four sang Christmas carols all the way down the road. Over the river—both Illinois and Spoon—and near some woods but mostly through plateaus of snow-dusted corn stubble, to Grandmother’s house we went.
It was all about gathering. Being together.
The “-gether” part of “together” is really the same word as “gather.” From Old English gaderian, meaning to unite or join.
We gathered together with Grandma and Grandpa, with Uncle Dick and Aunt Jane and Cousin Rick, with Uncle Garrett and Aunt Edith and Cousins Steve and Betsy, with Aunt Jo and Uncle Earl, with Aunt Jean and her boyfriend Richard Henderson, with Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda; with Grandma’s sister Aunt Bertha and her husband Uncle Harry Young; with Dad’s parents, my Grandma and Grandpa Sommers, who had no other children left in the Midwest and so joined the LaFollette mélange; and sometimes we would even see Grandma LaFollette’s brother Uncle Roy Dredge and his wife, Aunt Eva.
Eighteen of us including the unpictured photographer, who is probably Aunt Bertha, plus General George C. Marshall on the cover of Life to prove it’s Christmas 1950. Your New Favorite Writer is the boy at lower left, chin on hands.
That made twenty to twenty-five of us all celebrating Christmas in Grandma’s house. Gathered. Together. And the best part was: we all knew each other. We knew one another very well. We were kin. There’s hardly a better way of understanding love than gathering at Christmas.
“Fear not,” says the prophet Isaiah, “for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.”
It’s a grand vision of gathering together, members of one tribe, one kindred.
That’s what we did on those long-ago Christmases. Our tribe came together, at least those of us who could. We came from east and west and north and south and called one another by name.
I did not know this fact at the time, but I know it now: It was not the toys that mattered most, nor the turkey and dressing and pie and cake. It was the coming together of the people. The spindly tree, illuminated by strings of gaudy colored lights over which Uncle Dick and Uncle Garrett and Uncle Earl had slaved for hours on the living room floor getting all the bulbs to light up at once, was the totem pole, the magnet that gathered the kin.
Rice pudding with lingonberries. Fair use.
In my wife’s family it was much the same, only with a Swedish accent, because her mother’s folk were all Swedes, first- and second-generation Swedish Americans. So they had warm glögg with almonds and raisins in the bottoms of the cups; rice pudding with lingonberries; meatballs and gravy; limpa rye bread and dopp-i-gryta, the dipping of bread in fatty broth. But mostly with them, it was the people coming together, even if they were all Swedes except my wife’s father, who was Norsk.
The decades bring forth change. Families are smaller now. Folks tend to be more spread out, east and west, north and south. In our house this Christmas we will have Jo and me, my sister Cynda and her husband Steve, our daughter Katie and her children Elsie and Tristan (teenagers!). Plus Katie’s friend Valerie. Eight, all told. Still, it’s a coming together, a gathering.
Most of us will attend our church’s Christmas Eve service. It’s a Congregational church, meaning the local congregation governs itself autonomously. Such a church is said to be a gathered church, that is, one formed by a process of kindred souls simply gathering together. And indeed it’s more like a family than like a formal institution. We’ll read the Scriptures and sing the carols and burn up a few candles in the process. But the main thing is, we’ll gather together.
We have within us the seeds of hate and the seeds of love. When we gather together around the Christmas tree or the communion table, we nurture the seeds of love and starve the other ones.
Two greatly different realities are available to us in this world. I prefer the gathered one.
May you gather this season with whomever you have to gather with. And treasure the time, the place, and the gathering. It’s the best Christmas gift.
For decades, she flew flatwise across the vertical top of our yearly Christmas tree—be it pine, balsam, or spruce.
Some people place a star on their tree—to represent the Star of Bethlehem, I suppose. Others place an angel. Most of the angels, like the stars, are built in vertical format, the better to occupy the top of the tree, which is usually a single evergreen spear, jutting toward the ceiling.
But our poor little angel, I’ve never known her name, was made in such a way she could only lie horizontally. We hung her from the vertical top branch, but she lay sprawled across its middle, resisting all upward tendency.
There is something to be said for the horizontal. When Your New Favorite Writer studied the photographic arts, he learned that horizontal lines and shapes suggest calm, tranquility, rest, repose. If you want to show strength, go for the vertical. For drama, diagonal lines and swirly shapes are great. But horizontal composition speaks of peace.
We stopped buying cut trees at some point a few years ago—maybe the forty-dollar point. Instead, we trimmed our potted Norfolk Island pine for Christmas.
The Norfolk pine lives outdoors in spring, summer, and fall. At the end of all that warmth, we huff and puff and carry the big tub with its delicate little tree indoors. Originating on Norfolk Island, it would never survive a Wisconsin winter.
Norfolk Island, in case you’re wondering, is nowhere near the same-named city in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Rather, it’s an external territory of Australia, located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Its namesake pine, Araucaria heterophylla in case you’re interested, is not a true pine but a closer relative of the hoop pine and the monkey-puzzle tree. In other words, a subtropical specimen.
It’s a pretty, willowy plant with short-bristled branches that droop as they get longer. You can’t hang heavy ornaments on it, or the branches will droop more than they already do.
Our little angel, a real lightweight, qualifies for the top of the Norfolk pine. We used to hang her on the upward-pointing spear, just as we did with our cut trees in prior years.
This year, however, is different. The Norfolk pine grew too tall to be brought in through the door. My wife, anticipating this problem, cut off its top in the spring. The little tree, in a touching burst of cooperation, grew replacement branches horizontally. So now, instead of a vertical spike on top, we have a horizontal bed of interlocking branches.
Just the right place for our little angel’s true vocation, which rhymes with fiesta.
Something about that seems to fit the peace message of the season.
Sleep well, sweet angel; and flights of pine boughs loft thee to thy rest.
Being the second part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”
As mentioned last week, I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:
Engage the reader immediately.
Do not drown the reader in information.
Introduce important characters and plots early.
Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.
Shape early action toward later plot points.
This week, let’s look at the first Big Idea: Engage the reader immediately.
Engagement
Sometimes the very first sentence is memorable and therefore remarkable.
Marley was dead: to begin with. —A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
It was love at first sight. —Catch-22, by Joesph Heller
Call me Ishmael. —Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
More commonly, the first sentence is simply the most direct way to start a brief passage, perhaps a page or two, that leads us into a compelling story.
It used to be common practice to start a story slowly and indirectly. Thus, Miguel de Cervantes:
Picasso’s 1955 rendering of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
In a village in la Mancha, whose name I do not care to remember, an hidalgo lived not long ago, one of those who keeps a lance on the rack, an old leather shield, skinny nag and swift greyhound. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and rashers of bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, some squab added on Sundays—these consumed three-fourths of his income. The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. . . .
Leisurely, you might say.
Booth Tarkington
Or how about this opening, from Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a popular middle-grade novel in the Misty Eons, when Your New Favorite Writer was a lad:
Version 1.0.0
Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog.
A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him . . . .
This kind of opening has gone out of fashion, under the dual impetus of cinematic experiences and the mad pace of modern society.
Lucy Sanna
These days, the Done Thing is to start in medias res. In plain English, start in the middle of things. For example:
The rain came again, harder this time. Charlotte pulled her knit hat tight, pushed up the collar of her gray wool coat, and stared through the chicken wire at the rabbits. Kate’s prize rabbits.
She entered the pen and chose a plump one, furry and warm in her cold hands. Its heart thumped like a tiny sewing machine. Charlotte brought it into the dim barn and stroked its fur until it calmed, trusting. She hesitated a moment—stealing from my own daughter—then picked up the butcher knife.
When she cut the jugular, the sewing machine stopped. . . . —from The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna
By adopting a deep third-person limited viewpoint and starting the story in the middle of traumatic action, the author engages the reader at a visceral level while also sketching salient traits of the main character—who is, in this case, both cold-blooded and conscience-stricken at the same time.
The technique of starting in medias res may even be used to involve the audience in action that is no part of the story—as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. The initial sequence, with Bond electrocuting an antagonist in a bathtub, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Doesn’t matter: The audience is still recovering from the unseemly frying when we cut to a cool and collected Bond entering the office and flirting with Miss Moneypenny.
Alternative Methods
There’s no actual Law, Dear Reader, that says you have to start your story in medias res. I do recommend, however, that you start in medias somethingus. For example, here is the way British author J.R.R. Tolkien began his fantasy classic The Hobbit:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it – and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
J.R.R. Tolkien, ca. 1925.
This is masterful technique. Bear in mind, Gentle Reader, that in 1937, when Tolkien sprung this book on an unsuspecting world, nobody had ever heard of a hobbit. It was a brand-new concept.
In fact, most of his readers probably bought the book because the title intrigued them and they wanted to find out what a hobbit was.
So, in his first sentence, Tolkien mentions both a hole in the ground and a hobbit. And then, in the second sentence, he begins to tell the reader about the hole!
“No, no, Mister author! Tell us about the hobbit! We want to know about the hobbit. Never mind the hole.”
But Tolkien procoeeds unperturbed through a long paragraph about the arrangement, layout, and furnishings of the hole. At last he moves on to a little trove of information about hobbits in general, and about the family to which this particular hobbit belongs. And little by little, we find out all we need to know about the hobbit: He is risk-averse, and he’s about to have an adventure.
At this point, Gracious Reader, what choice do you have but to read the rest of the book?
The Hook
It’s what we sometimes call a hook. The hook is that we know Bilbo Baggins is constitutionally averse to adventure, yet the author assures us he is about to have an adventure, like it or not. And the author goes one step further, challenging us to figure out whether the hobbit “gained anything in the end.”
A reader would have to be made of stone to resist that hook.
The hook in the prior example, Wisconsin author Lucy Sanna’s brilliant historical novel The Cherry Harvest, is somewhat different. We are drawn into Charlotte’s world in a very close and compelling way. We experience with her the slaying of a rabbit, along with the guilt that accompanies it. We understand, through the author’s skill at narration, that Charlotte has been forced into this dire situation. The rest of the novel is about the larger situation Charlotte faces and how she handles it.
A Whiff of Death
Besides the general advice to begin in medias res or in medias somethingus, I have one other little suggestion for engaging the reader immediately: Contrive to place a whiff of death somewhere on the first or second page.
Why is that a good idea? We would rather read a story with life-or-death consequences than one with less serious outcomes. We not only need, as Donald Maass suggests, “conflict on every page”; that conflict must have high stakes. Life or death. Nothing less. Otherwise, why are we reading this book?
It may be that the chronology of your story does not allow for an actual death, or even a close brush with death, in the first pages. Never mind. It is enough to include a sentence or phrase that reminds the reader there is such a thing as death. That will be enough.
Lucy Sanna in The Cherry Harvest shows us the actual death of a small animal, foreshadowing very real risks of human death for the human characters in the novel. In Tolkien’s case, it does not suit his purpose to have a death occur in the first pages. But he does use the word “adventure,” which is a code word for “serious risk of death.”
That’s enough. Just something, that’s all you need.
Next week: How to avoid drowning the reader in information.
Dear Reader: My apologies for postponing “Way Out West, Part V” for the second week in a row. It’s just that something came up. Next week, back to what passes for normal around here.
Charlie Kirk and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. 15 July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.
I came home from an appointment Wednesday afternoon, and my wife asked from the kitchen if I’d heard somebody had been shot—I didn’t quite catch the name.
“Who?”
“Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It’s been on TV.”
“Oh. Charlie Kirk was shot. I’m very sorry to hear that. Who is Charlie Kirk?”
She pointed toward the livingroom, where the television spewed forth the stew of messy details and somber speculation that it always serves up at times like these. It announced in due course that Mr. Kirk had died from the single bullet he received in his throat.
It turns out Charlie Kirk was a conservative political activist, a debater in the political arena, a Trump acolyte, the organizer and head of a huge student movement called Turning Point USA—in all, a Very Big Deal.
I suppose that’s why people, adrift in the rip currents of our era, have been treating his death as a Very Big Deal. The airwaves abound with post-mortem speculations and virtue-freighted posturings. The social media, too.
Charlie Kirk’s fans certainly knew who he was. His critics likewise were very much aware of him. Perhaps I was the only person in America to whom he was not a household name, but then, I’m often accused of not paying attention. It’s really just that I pay attention to other things.
My wife pointed out to me that Kirk’s death cannot be dismissed as unremarkable, having played out amid a crowd of thousands. Kirk was killed at a political event while delivering a political message. The assassin meant the slaying as a political statement.
Before the echoes of the gunshot faded, all sorts of people, speaking or writing in public media, began testifying that the central meaning of this event is political.
Some say, “A man speaking his mind peacefully has been silenced. This is a threat to our First Amendment right of free speech.”
Some say, “His views were reprehensible. He deserved what he got.”
Some say, “When will we learn? We must re-establish civility in our public life.”
Some, like the governor of Utah, see this moment as a possible inflection point—an opportunity to change course as our nation struggles with divisive ideologies.
All these diverse voices place the problem and the solution in the realm of politics.
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I think it goes deeper.
A man took a high-velocity bullet in his throat. His lifeblood poured out and his life was ended. His wife was widowed, his children left fatherless. The act was done by a man in the grip of powerful emotions he could not, or did not, control. His rage was murderous; he took it out in violence.
The ancient human drama of killer and killed is the primary meaning of this event. The beliefs and polemical effectiveness of the victim, the beliefs and operational effectiveness of the assassin, are secondary.
Our dogged insistence that the main meaning is political keeps us from seeing the real problem.
It leads our spokespeople to say fatuous things time and again, things that we know are not true, are meant only to assuage our sense of hopelessness. “We’ve got to understand the killer’s motive, so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
Really? How has that been working out?
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We in our oh-so-enlightened society are loath to admit the flawed nature of human beings. It used to be called Original Sin, back when we believed in sin. But to believe in sin, you have to believe in God, for sin is a crime not only against one’s fellow man but against God. And we have no room for God.
Instead, we assume we are naturally good, or at least neutral, beings. We do evil only because we are influenced by a negative environment. If only We—that is, Society—learned how to take the right approach, We could eliminate crime and violence. We need to educate people better.
If only Charlie Kirk had embraced a more enlightened political viewpoint, he would not have invited his own destruction.
If only the shooter had understood the First Amendment, he would not have sought to win his argument through violence.
If only we all took lessons in tact and diplomacy, this kind of existential conflict would be avoided.
What a mighty opinion we have of our human powers!
If any of us are grown-ups, we should know by now that none of these things are true; that our powers and our understanding are limited; that even our internal will to do good is apt to falter in the face of felt needs and fears.
Think of all the people you know. Surely you know someone who embodies, in one person, both saint and sinner: the best kind of person and the worst kind of person, inseparable and unaware.
Not many of us are prepared to take the thought further and examine ourselves for signs of this saint/sinner dichotomy. Maybe we’re afraid of what we’d find.
My point is, we are mixed beings, both good and evil in one sweet package. Education will take us only so far. We need firm guidelines, if only to protect society. And because even those boundaries will never completely rein in our waywardness, we also need forgiveness.
There is a Stoic in me who says, “Do not expect much of people. We are weak reeds, unreliable stanchions. When people deliver goodness, be agreeably surprised. When they deliver badness, do not condemn but look to yourself and straighten out your own inner being.”
There is also a Christian in me who says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am only human.”
What Society needs is not some miraculous, altogether unattainable, political accommodation. People have been wrangling over divergent interests since the dawn of history. We haven’t got it all worked out yet, and we never will.
What Society needs is humility. We need, for starters, the simple recognition that Man is not perfectible. We need some firm guidelines enforced socially, and we need a spiritual basis for hope.
For me, it’s enough to trust that God has the answers, which must remain to me mysterious. I can live with that, but then I’m old.
