Seeking a Divine Inspiration: Part II

The Sound of Thunder is available as an e-book at The Open Road site or at Amazon. Ross Douthat, a conservative writer for the NY Times started his article Can the left be Happy with the epiphany of Ta-Nehisi Coates – reading books about the ravages and aftermath of World War II by the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder – realizing that he didn’t believe in God.

That's a lot not to believe in, but he continues with a phrase oft-quoted:
I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t even believe in an arc. … I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.

Douthat continues: ''In his crisis of faith, his refusal of optimism, you see the question that has hung over left-wing culture throughout a period in which [left-wing culture's belief in the organization of the cosmos had] influence over many American institutions has markedly increased: The secularization of left-wing politics has made the kind of Christian-inflected cosmic optimism irrelevant ...''

Douthat continues:
Christianity of the American social gospel tradition, which influenced New Deal liberalism and infused the civil rights movement, and the Marxist conviction that … historical development would eventually bring about a secular utopia – trust the science (of socialism)!

Coates wrote in the same 2013 essay:
Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us.
Douthat concludes: a good portion of America today … comforted by neither God nor history, [hopes] vaguely that therapy can take their place.

Really! Therapy? Is that meant to be the replacement the left uses for drugs and alcohol that the masses on the right apply to the despair for their personal lives? It sounds like everyone could use some personal help.

There are still mysteries in the world, wrapped in god-like flames from which we need protection to survive. For example, on a recent day, a solar eclipse crossed the country, dragging the attention of millions of Americans through its path of totality. Even with the solar corona a halo around the moon-sun hybrid, the standard news never mentioned the astonishing temperature of that corona, millions of degrees Fahrenheit, and its relation to the Earth's dynamic magnetic field. By contrast, the Sun's surface is only 10K Fahrenheit. The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and, in 2021, became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona. Why care?, except notice we do.

We can see it, and the magnetic fields it carries can cause massive disruptions to all the electric lines on Earth. TC's assumption that all the mysteries of the world had been revealed in God long ago had her musing at the frivolity of people wanting to go to the moon. She assumed people needed only to have faith and an active contempt for evil. So sayeth TC – and Marjorie Taylor Greene in phrases from TC's Your Sins and Mine. That was all that remained; so shut up and pray against the enemies that TC would name.

Yet! TC knew something was missing from this story.

For example, Jesus, with his magnetic personality, and mysterious mission. Jesus found his apostles. He was also (miraculously?) blessed with two non-apostles (unofficial, anyway), Luke and Paul, who spent their lives understanding how Jesus saw God's way of shielding us from His unfiltered energies as their existence brought forth the largesse he promised.

A great division came to the Mediterranean/Mideastern world within a few hundred years. The power of the heathen stories … wherein what happened here and what happened there might only be explicably expressed as a battle between two god-like creatures expressing their wills in human form. This was told by ancient poets, Homer in particular, in this form:
I've got a feeling for these stories/ I really love 'em/ tell 'em like they're real.
They are the treasures that I would bring you/ from long ago; Forgotten Times.
They can bring back the pain and heartache/ the awful fear of being all alone/
In an ancient world that doesn't care/ far from us now/ Forgotten Times.

Building on his deep knowledge of the Old Testament, Jesus found a way to convey that God could/did care for all his creatures (often) coherently. Especially, Jesus was here to express how that could be even if there were still mysteries.
We need not feel all alone in an ancient world that doesn't care.

TC, at that point, never studied God nor Jesus , but she wanted to connect to them. She sought to be a conduit for interpreting a god-like quality to humans through genius, an ineffable quality indicated neither through pure intellect nor personality nor necessarily marked by social or physical attractiveness, though both can help.

She longed for adulation and interpreted liberals as withholding it from her. What she got instead was begrudging regard for her sales. Her early conspiracies were clad as story-telling devices, many based on supernatural and meteorological phenomena. Her history was that of a conspiracy theorist, as many of her readers recognized, wrought by evil people during times that were as scary as these. Though published at the end of the 1950s, SOT's villains in TC's eyes mixed government (especially what FDR did for alleviating the depression) and the IRS, and those god-damn liberals/socialists/communists whom she claimed were behind the two world wars.

She seemed to realize she wasn't likely to change literary critic's feelings about her writings. (As Peggy reported, she hated the NY Times with a passion she reserved only for the IRS.) Her judgment about people counted among those who bought into her vision of what mattered. Who were these people?

Genius is not the usual topic of conservatives. Certainly not in the arts. Here though, she parades common JBS themes from the '50s – with a black protagonist claiming the South, with its lynchings, did not cause the pain that came from the North with its hypocrisy towards blacks. TC actually exclaims that Southerners had more love in them for black people than did Northerners. That's TC proclaiming about love, hmmmm! She has in SOT one model of real love: people falling in-love instantly on first sight, often many years before there is any possibility of fulfillment, and never varying. She does it twice in SOT. Indeed, she did the same scene in Dynasty of Death between Amy Dumphill and Ernest Bouchard. She wasn't one for cheap sentiment, but she regarded these particular romances as written in the stars, as she tended to regard almost all personality characteristics.

TC also wanted credit for herself for being a genius of a sort. But what kind? She had little charm in person: no range of personality and certainly no softness of expression in voice or demeanor. She wasn't likely to create a great heroine. While Aspasia in Glory and the Lightning was astonishing, that was Aspasia, the subject of at least five novels before TC's. Creating a genius was not out of the question, but SOT did no such thing: applying and un-applying the word to six individuals, all but one in the same family, with rather prosaic descriptions which elicited no sparks of genius. We had to take her word in her convoluted plot about one strong person holding together those weaklings.

The wisdom she tried to stuff into her characters sounded like TC's strident anger toward intellectuals, liberals, socialists, progressives, most of whose attributes she blamed on trivialities that she made up. Whose greatest crimes seemed to be caring about others, others TC declared undeserving.

The only background that she owned, Scotch-Irish-Catholic suited only the deep South. Though she lived most of her days in rust-belt America, and wherever her modest education led her, it brought her no epiphanies. Especially since her characters stay within one family while simultaneously being designed to signal many types.

What she needed! A genre she could imbue with her own identity. What did she want to say?
That she knew about some great person others did not in the way she did; a certifiable genius; one who undoubtedly touched humanity, to whom she was privy in ways that belonged to no others.
She chose St. Luke, as she had apparently hoped for some time to do. Maybe she could only get editorial approval once her novelistic success made it impossible for publishers to disagree.

How did she interpret Luke? Was his life a version or a yin/yang variant of Christ's? Did TC ever stop to talk to her audience rather than preach to them? Was her legacy legible: tracible to insight on how Jesus struck his listeners beyond her word emulations of his aura as visualized by Byzantines. Yes, Sean Hannity was inspired, and others wanted (hell, yearned) to be too. But were they? Then, Why did she only leave a finger-pointing at Luke's contributions to the acts of the apostles without making pointed insights?

As in the first newsletter on this topic, I return to the Holy Spirit?

When you thank heaven for a special meal or having equanimity on a given day, to whom do you address your sincere feelings that you owe this to something outside yourself: God or Jesus? Some say all things flow from God, so … Others say that they more easily connect to whatever is out there by starting – and sticking – with Jesus. In more recent times, consider Simone Weil, Reinhold Niebuhr, Benedict Spinoza, and St. Thomas Aquinas;... Each considered the god-like in the human spirit, and with Jesus much in mind, wondered how that expressed itself in Human history. Dear and Glorious Physician is TC doing exactly that starting with St. Luke.

Subsequent newsletters – as I continue the story of Peggy and TC in Part II: Seeking a Divine Inspiration – I will consider how successful a change TC made in going in this direction. While there is more to be made of Luke than she did, she took a great career step in following this path.

I got encouraging feedback on my mentioning Giants in the Earth in my previous newsletter. It plays into my (still unfinished) theme because Rølvaag grew up on the powerful Norse sagas of the transition between pagan and Christian times. It also speaks of the personalities that made their way onto the great American prairies, part of my answer to Ross Douthat about the mysteries in human personalities.

Giants in the Earth

is a novel by Norwegian-American author Ole Edvart Rølvaag. First published in Norwegian in two volumes in 1924 and 1925, it was published in English in 1927, translated by Rølvaag and author Lincoln Colcord. From Wikipedia Giants in the Earth was turned into an opera of the same name by Douglas Moore and Arnold Sundgaard. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1951. There has never been a more heart-felt avowal to what a foreigner coming to America might have sacrificed to this vision.

Especially the last scene, with the hero, Per Hansa, found at the end of his trek into a snowstorm to satisfy the whims of his mentally crumbling wife, overwhelmed by the roar of the prairie winds. Per Hansa, seeking help against those giant forces, dead, is found propped up against a haystack looking west to the vast US frontier. A dash of reality helps make a case about that which humans must contend. Yet, look at the effort Rølvaag put into bringing his story to the public. He never aimed at a novel every year.


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Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell