Pandemic

The Weekly Wrap: March 9-15

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The Dangerous Power of Books

I’ve been thinking a good deal about an article published in Aeon this week, “Dark Books.” Tara Isabella Burton argues that books can unmake or make us. They can disturb or uplift, oppress or liberate.

But how do they do this? It comes down to what happens in the act of reading. When we read, we open our minds, our psyches, ourselves to another. We “drop our guard” to some degree to enter the world of another, and permit them to enter ours.

By and large, we bibliophiles argue for the good of books. The article observes this was not always so. There was a time when commentators warned against novel reading. And sometimes books are freighted with messages oppressive to women, minorities, or others.

I do make choices of what I will and won’t read because of the power of books. It’s not that I cannot think critically about books. It’s just that I realize that, sometimes, the mental images formed by a book can persist. I left off reading one science fiction series because of the graphic descriptions of gruesome violence. I do not read highly sexualized or pornographic material because I want to honor my marriage.

I am not one to say what others should or should not read. I think adults should make their own decisions in this regard and parents with their own children (but not for others). But I believe we may be naive at times about the books (and other media) we let into our lives and how these influence us. Words are powerful things, for good or ill.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Here’s the article I’ve been discussing, “Dark Books.” I was challenged by Burton’s concluding words: “Only by respecting the potential of books to destroy us – terrifying as it might be – can we have an authentic faith in their ability to put us back together again.”

Marilynne Robinson believes Max Weber mischaracterized John Calvin. She has written about Calvin in essays and he comes up in her novels. “The Sum of Our Wisdom” reflects her efforts to recover Calvin for our age.

Some of us are trying to forget the pandemic and others of us are trying to make sense of how it changed us, and our lives. Lily Myers, an Atlantic contributing writer, reviews a number of pandemic novels in “The Novel I’m Searching For.” She previews the article with this statement: “Five years after the pandemic, I’m holding out for a story that doesn’t just describe our experience, but transforms it.”

The New York Times released its non-fiction and fiction spring previews this week. I thought the “21 Nonfiction Books to Read This Spring” had some interesting books, including Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain!

Finally, “Who is better, Dickens or Shakespeare?” The Guardian asked nine writers. To me it seems an apple and oranges comparison.

Quote of the Week

I post many quotes. This one gave me pause:

“People will assign irrational importance to almost anything in quotes on top of a pleasant image”

This comes from Colin Fletcher, a backpacker and travel writer born March 14, 1922.

Miscellaneous Musings

I’m debating whether to buy a copy of Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Meta exec. She has been enjoined by a court to not promote the book due to her severance agreement with Meta. So far, they have not stopped sales of the book. Although I’m not sure what the book could tell me to cause me to have a lower opinion of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

In the grand scheme of things this is a blip, but I’m a Louise Penny fan and was deeply saddened to hear the Canadian author has cancelled her US book tour, including an appearance at the Kennedy Center. She discusses her decision in this CBC story.

Simone Weil in Waiting for God has a wonderful essay on “attention” which she believes is central to the life of prayer. She argues in the essay that practice of all forms of attention, including geometry proofs (!) train us in spiritual attention. Her choice of geometry is interesting, given her inferiority about her geometry skills in comparison to her mathematician brother Andre!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Wallace Stegner, Remembering Laughter

Tuesday: Quentin J. Schultze, Communicating for Life

Wednesday: Frances M. Young, Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute

Thursday: J.R.R. Tolkien, Beren and Luthien

Friday: Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for March 9-15, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: Station Eleven

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Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel. New York: Knopf, 2014.

Summary: An account of the end of civilization as we know it after a catastrophic pandemic, and how survivors sought to keep beauty and the memory of what was alive as they struggled against destructive forces to rebuild human society.

Arthur Leander, an accomplished actor who burned through marriages, is on stage in the middle of performing King Lear when his own heart gives out and he dies on stage, despite the effort of a medic in training, Jeevan. Watching is a young child actor, Kirsten Raymonde, who often talked to Arthur. A kind woman takes her aside, noticing an unusual graphic novel of a settlement of survivors on a watery planet, Station Eleven, a gift from Arthur that Kirsten carries for the next twenty years.

That night, as the snow fell on Toronto, was the beginning of the end of civilization. Jeevan’s friend Hua, working at a hospital, calls, urging Jeevan to leave immediately. The hospital is full of flu cases, many but not all from a plane from Russia. Before long, every last one is dead, and all who came in contact are sick, including Hua. None will live. In days, nearly everyone around the world dies. The media goes dead, then the internet, and finally utilities. Planes are grounded. Permanently. Cars run out of gas. Only about one in two hundred and fifty survive.

Emily St. John Mandel, in Station Eleven, imagines a post-pandemic, post-civilization world. Yes, it is a world of predators. Kirsten, a survivor has two knives tattooed on her wrist, the lives taken by her knives. She doesn’t remember her first year, and doesn’t want to. But there are also those who seek to hold on to remnants of beauty. She is part of the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors on a circuit up and down Michigan, performing great music and the works of Shakespeare.

Some towns reconstitute themselves. And some become dangerous. One, St Deborah by the Water, has been taken over by The Prophet and his cult, a Jonestown-type scenario. The Traveling Symphony escapes, along with a child who stows away to escape becoming another of The Prophet’s brides. This sets up a climactic confrontation.

The story goes back and forth tracing the lives of the people connected to Arthur and that night in Toronto, both before and after the pandemic. We meet Clark, a gay actor friend of Arthur’s, one of the survivors living at the Severn City Airport, where flights had been grounded, turning it into its own community. He becomes a curator of The Museum of Civilization, with artifacts from laptops and smartphones to newspapers, all from the time before the pandemic. There was a former wife of Arthur there as well, with their child, Tyler, who has a disturbing habit of quoting apocalyptic passages from the Bible. They eventually leave. Jeevan eventually walks a thousand miles from Toronto to a settlement in what was Virginia.

And there is Miranda Carroll, the artist of Station Eleven. We learn her story, how she met and married author and wrote and drew Station Eleven, giving Arthur two copies shortly before his death…and hers.

Beyond imagining what a world nearly wiped out by a pandemic might be like (a prescient book, written six years before 2020), Mandel explores the powerful longing to cling to the good and the beautiful, and to human community, even when all else falls apart. She reminds us that the complex thing we call civilization is actually a thin veneer, easily stripped away. The question is, what then remains? When the veneer falls away, will there be brutes or beauties?

And what stories will shape us, and how will we read them? There were two copies of Station Eleven. Kirsten had one, and it profoundly shaped her imagination. We learn that the other copy also shaped an imagination, but quite differently. We’re reminded not only of the power of story but also that no two people read a story in the same way.

One final caveat. Don’t do what I did and read the opening chapters of the book the day before returning home on a plane full of people. Those who have read Station Eleven will understand.

Review: Sea of Tranquility

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Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel. New York: Knopf, 2022.

Summary: Incidents of a strange hiccup in time over several centuries all have elements in common, including the appear of Gaspery-Jacques Roberts in various guises.

A distortion of reality, a kind of darkness, the sound of a violin, the hum of a train, and a whoosh recur in a number of places over several centuries, as does the appearance of a mysterious figure, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts.

He appears as a substitute priest to Edwin St. John St. Andrew, exiled to Canada in 1912 on remittances for careless remarks about colonialism. This after Edwin wanders in a forest near the village of Caiette, and witnesses this strange anomaly.

In 2020, Mirella visits a sound and light performance created by her friend Paul. During the performance, there is a video with the same phenomena. A person by the name of Gaspery-Jacques Roberts questions him about the anomaly afterwards. Mirella, trying to connect with a lost mutual friend, Vincent, through Paul recognizes Roberts as a man she saw in an underpass as a child.

In 2203, Olive is on a book tour on earth for her novel, Marienbad, the story of a pandemic, even as reports of a spreading pandemic trouble her and leave her counting the days until she is reunited with her children on the moon. But first, she must have an interview with a journalist interested in a passage where she recounts the same distortion of reality, the violin, the sound of the train, the woosh of a spacecraft taking off. And you guessed it–his name is Gaspery-Jacques Roberts.

It is 2401, and we learn at last about Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, who grew up in Colony 2 on the moon, the Night City, because of the failure of the dome projection system. He is named after a minor character in Olive’s book, Marienbad. After taking a hotel detective job in Colony 1 with the help of his childhood friend Talia, he enlists in The Time Institute after hearing his sister Zoey discuss the case of their investigation of the anomaly in Marienbad and at other points in time. It becomes his assignment, against the counsel of his sister, to go back in time and investigate.

But there are risks. The greatest is to change the timeline. The primary concern are changes that impinge on the Time Institute itself. And the classic dilemma of time travel stories arises–do you let bad things happen to people when you know what will happen to them? Do you do so even when you may be exiled in time, not allowed to return to your own?

The plot is probably not terribly original as time travel stories go. The novel recapitulates the pandemic story we’ve all lived (“We knew it was coming“). But the writing is gorgeous and spare and the relationship between Gaspery, his sister, and Talia particularly well-drawn. Each vignette is brief, sometimes broken into several chapters, moving first forward, and then back in time until we encounter the violinist in the railway station…

Review: Breaking Ground

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Breaking Ground, Anne Snyder and Susannah Black. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing 2021.

Summary: A collection of essays written through four seasons beginning in the summer of 2020 on what it might take to restore common ground for the common good in a society deeply divided by the pandemic, race, economic, and political divisions.

The summer of 2020 came in the depths of the pandemic, punctuated by the police-involved death of George Floyd, painfully caught live on camera, resulting in massive demonstrations and disorder in many cities. Two magazine editors, Anne Snyder of Comment, a Canadian-based magazine, and Susannah Black, at the Bruderhof sponsored publication, Plough Quarterly came together to invite a number of Christian thinkers engaged in public square discourse to write articles that attempted to analyze what was happening in our society, draw upon the past, and think imaginatively about the future, renewal, and the role followers of Christ might play in fostering a hopeful future drawing together a fragmented body of Christ and wider society.

The collection brings together an impressive list of thinkers whose essays were written over the four seasons beginning in the summer of 2020 through the spring of 2021. Some of the better known contributors include Mark Noll, N.T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Wear, Jeffrey Bilbro, Doug Sikkema, Amy Julia Becker, Oliver O’Donovan, Peter Wehner, and Jonathan Haidt. All told, there are nearly fifty essays in this collection.

The discussion ranges from Mark Noll’s analysis of epidemics past to essays exploring the breakdown of public trust to an interview between Cherie Harder of The Trinity Forum and Marilynne Robinson ranging from Calvin to the common good. Michael Wear, an adviser in the Obama White House surveys our political landscape and profiles Joseph Lowery, one of the last survivors of the Civil Rights movement, who walked with King under the shadow of death, and our call to walk with Jesus even as we engage all the perils of the political in this time. Oliver O’Donovan explores politics and political service.

The essays talk about the importance of place, the local, and the spiritual practices that sustain us. Amy Julia Becker talks about how congregations like hers may fight racism at the local level. Anthony M Barr contributed some of the clearest thinking on the nature of policing and police reform that could be a starting point for many local conversations. Irena Dragas Jansen offers one of the more interesting essays describing what our country looks like through the eyes of a new citizen. Katherine Boyle, an entrepreneur describes the death of Silicon Valley–the eco-disasters, the hopelessness that claims more lives than COVID, the failure of the tech world to save us, and yet the way of being it has promoted as Silicon Valley becomes everywhere.

Aryana Petrosky Roberts describes coming home to the political conflicts in her own family, the inability to hear one another and the breakthrough of praying together, inviting Jesus into the political mess. Stuart McAlpine takes us deeper into prayer, into the prayers of repentance and lament we desperately need to engage and are so hard for us. Michael Lamb explores the implications of Joe Biden’s call for an Augustinian Concord in his inaugural address.

The book includes interview transcripts, some of the best from interviews with Cherie Harder of The Trinity Forum, one of the organizations that joined the Breaking Ground project. One of the very best of these was with Jonathan Haidt and Peter Wehner on “Arguments of the Sake of Heaven.” They explore our contemporary epistemic crisis and polarization, recall the passion of the Inklings for truth that led to vociferous argument, and what is required to foster good arguments in our public squares. Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson combine to contribute an essay on the call of the American church to own its own responsibility for our nation’s racial history–our love of gain and our failure to make recompense for slavery’s injuries. Charles C. Camosy explores the horror of our nursing homes which the pandemic revealed and the challenge of an ethic of life that includes dignified elder care.

Amid the serious and important conversations, Tara Isabella Burton’s “On Good Parties” comes as a ray of light. Tara loves parties and sees good ones as “a practice for living.” They teach us how to love well and see ourselves as part of a community, they celebrate events in our real lives and the appreciation of one another. She made me look forward to good parties once again.

Even with all that I’ve written here, I’ve but skimmed the surface of all the good and imaginative thinking in this collection. I’m impressed with the wide array of people from police officers to theologians who contribute to this collection. But isn’t this what is needed in our communities across the land–for a coming together of a wide array of people who care about the rents in our social fabric who talk and listen and pray and think and imagine what could be?

I would not only commend this book but at least three of the organizations mentioned here whose publications and initiatives are worth attending to and supporting as we seek to pursue Christ for the glory of God and the common good:

Comment Magazine

Plough Quarterly

The Trinity Forum

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.