“Music, ‘Arabian nights,’ and Darwin”

It is sometimes the small, unexpected details that catch my eye when I am reading history or biography.  So it was when I was reading part of Gertrude Himmelfarb's book Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution.  I have read a number of books about the response to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.  But my attention was caught by what the British novelist George Eliot wrote in her diary on the evening of the very day Darwin's revolutionary book was published.  Describing how she had occupied herself that very evening, Eliot wrote:  "music, 'Arabian nights,' and Darwin."  What a combination of evening activities and reading before turning into bed!

George Eliot

George Eliot (a woman who wrote under that pseudonym) is most known for her somewhat psychological novels.  But she was also part of a movement of intellectuals who could no longer find credible the church's theological descriptions of the world.  To many such intellectuals, the church's theological concepts could no longer illuminate life.

When I was in college, I read an English translation made by George Eliot of Feuerbach's difficult book The Essence of Christianity, which was part of those 19th-century struggles. Feuerbach maintained that statements about God were actually just projections of human beings' own ideal image of themselves.

However, when I think of George Eliot's writings, what comes to mind are not those difficult religious struggles of the 19th century, but instead a coincidental conjunction I once experienced between Nature and Eliot's novel Silus Marner.

My high-school English class was reading together part of the novel in class.  Our English class was held in one of the wood, portable buildings that had been set up because the student body had grown larger than the main brick building.  Most students did not like having a class in one of those wood "shacks," but I did.  I liked the way the shacks (without air-conditioning) had windows on both sides of the classroom, thus allowing more air and sunlight to flow in.

On the particular day I remember, we were reading a passage in which the outcast Silus Marner experiences what seems to him a miracle.  While he is in a catatonic state, a small child with radiant golden hair crawls into his house through the open door, thus seeming to Silus to appear suddenly when he awakes.  He feels as if he has been graced with a gift from God upon seeing the child, which seemed to have a wonderful glow about it.

Although I knew the scene was contrived, the beauty of that scene seemed to stand out even more brightly to me because, as we read it, I was so aware of the sunlight right there at that moment, shining beautifully into our classroom.

~~~

Have you read a novel or story in which a scene was uncannily real to you?  Why?

(The painting of Eliot is in the public domain

because its copyright has expired.)

Desert – Spelled with One “s”

The first time I ever entered a desert, there was snow on the ground.  Needless to say, I was surprised.  Probably like many other people, I had associated deserts with the near absence of rain.  I had even heard about a book entitled The Land of Little Rain, which is an early example of American nature writing about a desert region.  Admittedly, what I encountered on my trip was not rainfall but snow.  However, the precipitation's being frozen made it even more surprising because I had also associated deserts with high temperatures.  Nor could high altitude account for the snow, because we were very close to sea level.  My surprise was even greater because I had lived for many years in a southern U.S. city where it snowed only once every ten years -- and I had come even further south to get to the desert.

The next surprise after the snow was that the desert's ground was not sand, but instead more like a gravel parking lot.  My third surprise was how fascinating were the variety of plants -- much more than cacti!  And I was struck by the desert's open vastness.

As I've thought about it, I've decided it is appropriate that I should have been disconcerted by the desert. Deserts, after all, were not designed to meet our human needs, nor even perhaps our expectations.  That is why in the Bible, the desert, or the wilderness, stands as a reminder that God neither created everything for humans, nor does God do everything for the sake of humans. Nevertheless, wilderness is seen as having its own value to God apart from any utilitarian value to humans.  As one verse puts it, " [God] has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain... on the desert, which is empty of human life."  (Job 38:25-26, NRSV).

Although the desert's being a counter to human-centeredness has been the primary lesson spiritual writers have taken from wilderness, there is also a more subtle lesson there.  That lesson comes from how severe landscapes are somehow able to bring forth a kind of growth in us as well, a kind of growth that lush settings cannot induce.  The contemporary Christian writer Kathleen Norris, in reflecting upon another type of sparse landscape wrote:  "A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky.... [W]hat seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state."

This "opening" effect seems to occur in part because the vastness and quietness of the desert can evoke a stillness within us when we are on such landscapes.  A quiet reverence.  The opening of something new within us can also occur as we become more aware.  Each creosote bush or small juniper tree surprisingly sprouting in a terrain that at first seemed barren can make us more attentive.  Deserts may be short on rain, but they have their own world of life, both plant and animal.  Deserts may be short on precipitation, but they have had for humans many lessons to tell.

~~~

Have you ever taken a vacation to a desert?  If so, which one?  What impressed you most about it?

(The Norris quotation is from

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris, © 1993.)