The Fifty-Minute Hour

I recently bought a used paperback copy of The Fifty-Minute Hour, Robert Lindner's bestselling 1954 study of some of his most interesting psychoanalytic cases. The book caught my eye because my father, who died almost eight years ago, would talk about this book when I was a child. Seeing the title brought a vivid rush of memories.

We never owned the book, but I remember my father's great enthusiasm for it, although I was never sure if he'd actually read it. One of my father's great hallmarks, especially in his younger days, was his sense of wonder. He would open the conversation with: "Did you know, that when a psychiatrist charges you for an hour of therapy, you really only get 50 minutes?" He would then go on to explain that the psychiatrist needed time to clear his mind between sessions. This would lead to the Lindner book, and the essay that most fascinated him.

In that essay, his most famous, Lindner describes being confronted with a patient who is convinced he is traveling to other planets. As my father told the story, Lindner finally acknowledged the man was telling the truth because of the enormous level of detail he supplied. Once Lindner believed him, the man was cured. All he needed was to be believed; then he admitted his story was fabricated.

I bought the book to make visceral a memory: it was a way to hold my father. I also wanted to test my memory--did the book match up to my memory of my father's telling of it? Did his telling match up to the book? Two levels of memory were to be interrogated: mine and his.

I girded myself to dislike the book. After all, it was written in the 1950s and therefore sure to be the work of a sexist, racist and domineering white man. However, I was pleasantly surprised and had my own stereotypes challenged: Lindner comes across as a very humane individual, with a genuine liking of other people and a system of ethics rooted in deeper soil than the fashions of his decade.

For instance, he takes time out in the essay about the space traveler to blast lobotomies: "No, I could not ... consign him to the new kind of vegetable kingdom being created by so many of my well-intentioned but mistaken colleagues." (p. 189)He understood that many of his patients were more sinned against than sinning and didn't flinch from the horrors of poverty or orphanages.

However, he was a man of his time in his belief in the wonders of technology. His book reads sometimes like a Rod Serling narrative, perhaps the opening to the Twilight Zone: "Very likely the day is not too distant when the remarkable animal we call man will be … concerned solely with the command and care of appliances that do his work." (xiv) Perhaps this wonder and embrace of technology derives from the lives he witnessed: Most of his cases date from the 1940s, and involve people born shortly before the First World War. The harshness of the lives many led in a pre-New Deal world is immense and the book unwittingly testifies to an enormous social change over the course of a century.

I most enjoyed this read, which was an easy but yet informative. It also confirmed my memories--my memory of my father's memory of the space traveller was (almost--I won't spoil the book) correct.

As a Baltimoron, I was delighted that Lindner had his practice in Baltimore, in a building overlooking Mt. Vernon Place.

However, when I tried to find out more about him, I discovered that what's on the web is scanty, especially for a person who was both a best-selling author (he also wrote Rebel without a Cause) and a serious scholar. I could find very little. He died suddenly of a heart attack at age 41, two years after this book was published. I spoke about him to the Earlham School of Religion reference librarian, Jennie Kiffmeyer. She also poked around and could find very little--the 1940s, 50s and 60s, she said, represent a dip in Internet information as much of that era has not yet been well digitized. She was planning to look in the physical reader's guides. I imagine Lindner must have been profiled in big spreads somewhere: Perhaps the Baltimore Sun magazine or Esquire? It's a mystery and there's nothing like sleuthing.

I did find Internet discussions of the identity of the planet hopping man. One popular idea is that he is Cordwainer Smith (see http://www.ulmus.net/ace/csmith/behindjetcouch.html) , who published the sci-fi work Norstrilla.

So, to finish, every once in awhile we discover books that put us in touch with the past in more ways than one. Has this happened to you?

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

During the Christmas holidays, I read The Man Who Loved Books Too Much:The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett. The book centers on John Gilkey, a petty thief and con artist who steals rare books, and his nemesis, Ken Sanders, a rare book dealer who makes it his mission to catch Gilkey. The book brings the reader inside--at least to the peripheries of the inside--of the world of rare books.

For Gilkey, the appeal of rare books, which bit him hard, resided in his conviction that they lent him a patina of class and education . To own a library of rare books was to be Somebody, perhaps even an English country gentleman. Since the San Francisco-based Gilkey had no money, he used stolen credit cards, outright theft and bad checks to finance his purchases, as a result revolving in and out of prison as he pursued his collecting.

After spending much time with Gilkey, Bartlett backpedals swiftly away from him, fearful of being manipulated, and anxious, perhaps over-anxious, to identify herself with the "decent" people in the book, the defrauded booksellers. The moral issues Gilkey present disturb her, and Barltett is concerned not to be complicit with Gilkey's self-presentation as a populist bibliophile entitled to expensive books. Her strategy, however, is possibly counter-productive, for in her haste to stampede to the "good" people, she leaves the reader to defend Gilkey. Better to have told the story and trusted the reader to pull out the moral: that a life of petty fraud is difficult and tawdry; that books used merely to enhance status are no different from any other consumer good, be it a high-end car or designer clothes, and no less likely to provide more than an ephemeral fix.

Gilkey is a sleazy character, yet the nature of his self justification is not unique. His arguments are: Rare books are overpriced; the average person should have a shot at them; the only way the average person can have a shot at such books is to steal them. I've heard--actually more before the economic crash than after--variations of that theme fairly often from individuals who were highly compensated by the standards of our society and living with little or no chance of suffering the least want, and yet who complained of being underpaid and deserving more. Who do they compare themselves too? Wall Street CEOs, of course. The mind-boggling pay and bonus scales of the few leave some of the rest feeling entitled to more--and sometimes with the mentality, like Gilkey, that they should get more any way they can. Add to that the sense that many of the rich at the top of the heap accumulated their vast fortunes immorally, and the "why not me?" mentality becomes easier to justify. If the game is rigged, you take what you can. The point is, for all Bartlett's black and white morality, Gilkey, while sordid, didn't seem to me to be particularly "other" in his thinking. Neither are he (nor the people who compare themselves to CEOS) entirely wrong in an innate sense the pie is not divided fairly in this culture.

Gilkey seemed fairly typical too in that he fell into the common belief that ownership is everything. However, while the rich, by definition, will always be able to buy things the rest of us can't, another form of wealth we can all take joy in is appreciating beautiful and rare objects without having to own them. This is what museums--and behind museums, the belief in a civic, public, shared space in society--are all about.

Finally, we get to the Quaker testimony of equality, and excerpts from a book I am reading in my Conflict Resolution class called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. No matter how, wealthy a society, if disparities between rich and poor grow too wide, trust evaporates and the differences between people, not their commonalities, become accentuated. This makes the poor more desperate and alienated and the rich more anxious and stressed. While Gilkey is not entitled to rare books, all of us as a society would arguably do better if people like Gilkey had more access to society's fruits.

A good novel

I recently read Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada. This novel about life in Nazi Germany was written in 1947, but apparently not translated into English until very recently. It's based on the true story of a working class couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who became so frustrated with Nazism that they started dropping postcards denouncing Hitler all over Berlin. This seems a fairly innocuous action in a country with free speech, but in Nazi Germany it was a death-penalty crime--and the couple knew it.

The couple eluded police and Gestapo detection for two years.

The book is gripping and a page turner. It's well-written, even in translation (there are some word choice oddities however) and puts you inside the world of the characters with great immediacy. The story, of course, is compelling.

More importantly, for all the books I've read recently on everyday life in Nazi Germany for a paper on Bonhoeffer, nothing captures the experience of living in a totalitarian regime like literature. Novels such as this one and George Orwell's 1984 bring totalitarianism to life in a way no amount of delving into Gestapo archives, compiling lists of facts and figures, or discussing repressive legislation and Nazi social programs can do. As a person who loves and values both history and literature, I am happily reminded of how well the two complement each other. We can't fully understand literature if we read it in a vacuum; likewise, we can't fully grasp a historical period without entering it imaginatively--often best led by someone who witnessed the era and can transform that witness into art.

I also very much appreciated the novel's depiction of most of the women characters as strong, independent, resourceful women. More often than not, it's the women holding things together, from households to earning income. This corroborates the histories I read, where, despite Nazi propaganda about sending women back to the home, women tended to be employed in large numbers, both because they worked for less money than men and were more docile. Of course, once World War II began, the government depended on women's labor to fill in for the men at war. Whatever the reason, I very much appreciated Fallada not reducing his females to sex objects or stereotypes.

There's also nothing like literature to communicate the "total" in totalitarian: the people in the book live in a world of black and white. Either you are entirely loyal to the system in every way or you are a traitor. There was almost no gradation, no "I'm Ok with this part of National Socialism, but against that." As a Quaker, I am struck that there was no conscientious objector status: you either went to war when you were called or you were given the death penalty. People apparently pulled strings all the time to be kept from the front, but the concept of objecting on the basis of conscience was not tolerated. The idea of having an inner life that differed from political policy was not tolerated. It's difficult to imagine what it would be like to live in such a world, but the novel goes a long way towards filling that gap.

What are you Reading?

One of the joys of a holiday is the chance to read.

I've been reading some novels this holiday season:

In contemporary fiction:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
The Lovely Bones
The Financial Life of Poets

Classics:

Tristram Shandy (Roger and I are reading this aloud in the car while traveling. We both read it in grad school, but that was long ago ...
The Scarlet Letter (Again, it's been a loooong time.)

The Jane Austen world:

I'm always reading Jane Austen's novels and as way of secondary sources:
Jill Heydt-Steveson's breakthrough book, Unbecoming Conjunctions
James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen, written in 1870. I am leading a discussion of the Memoir every Wednesday on three lists: Austen-L, Janeites and WomenWritersThroughtheAges.
I also recently read my cyber-friend Diana Birchall's novel Mrs. Darcy' Dilemma, a light-hearted sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

General non-fiction:

Amish Grace (A little before the holidays, but close enough.)
Alice Seybold's memoir, Lucky.
Another book that I read six weeks to two months ago, but which is still weighing on my mind, is Middletown in Transition, a sociological study of Muncie, Indiana in the mid 1930s.

Have you read any good books lately? Any of the above books?

Two book reviews

In the October issue of Friends Journal, I reviewed Scot McKnight's The Blue Parakeet, which discusses strategies for Bible reading. In the current issue, which is the books issue, you can, if interested, read my review of the Diaries of Dorothy Day.

Childhood Influences: Dorothy Day

On my other blog--donnajanenancyemily-- I am doing a series on Childhood Influences. Here is what I wrote about Dorothy Day:

Late in life, Dorothy Day, the Roman Catholic social activist, ruminated on the powerful influence of some of the books she read as a child. If we want evidence that childhood books have a profound bearing on who we become, Day is exhibit A.

Day writes about being influenced by Queechy and Wide, Wide World, two novels by Susan Bogert Warner (aka Elizabeth Wetherell) written around 1850. I have not read these novels, but http://merrigold.livejournal.com/1342.html offers the following description of Queechy:

"Like her wildly popular first novel, "The Wide Wide World", "Queechy" focuses on the development of a female character from childhood to marriage. Fleda is by nature a girl "of velvet softness; of delicate, downcast beauty; of flitting but abundant smiles, and of even too many and ready tears". It is religion that enables this soft and delicate character to exert all her strength and face adversity, achieving "patient continuance in well-doing". When those around her are found incapable of providing moral, emotional, or practical support, it is Fleda who finds unknown physical and emotional strength. When all others fail you, says Warner, rely on the promises of God, and persevere.

Fleda's experience is in some part, Susan Warner's. In 1834 Susan and Anna Warner moved to Constitution Island with their father, Henry Warner. They intended to live on the island only during the summer but reverses in Henry Warner's fortune forced them to sell their home in New York City. Even after their writing became popular, the sisters continued to live on the island, doing their own gardening and cooking, sometimes spending winters on the mainland at friends' houses. The sisters promoted the somewhat radical idea that young ladies could actually do their own physical work such as gardening -- Fleda finds pleasure in her garden as well as hard work. The Warner sisters were also known for their deep commitment to religious teachings. The beauty of the natural world, and religion, are beloved by Fleda in "Queechy".

The above is almost a blueprint of Day's life: She became a convert to Christianity (in her case, Roman Catholicism), went to live among the poor and strove every day to be patient and help build a world where it was "easier for people to be good." Like Fleda, she was the pillar of strength in her community. She relied on God. She persevered. As in the real life story of the Warners, Day bought a house on an island--Staten Island--and traveled between it and New York City (and other places). Like Fleda, Day embraced physical labor and found it nurtured the soul. She loved the beauty of the natural world and religion.

Day also read Sinclair Lewis's The Jungle with fascination as a child at a time her family was living in Chicago, and as result of the book, would roam the poorer neighborhoods of South Chicago. The poverty did not repel her. In fact, she was drawn to smells: baking bread and garlic, flowers. This prepared her for living among the poor in the lower East side of New York.

In Day's early reading, we find stunning support for the theory that childhood reading helps form who we become as adults.

I have two questions: what books from childhood can you look back at and see that, unwittingly, had a disproportionate influence on the rest of your life? In what ways? Second, if the early books we read have a disproportionate impact on the "tabula rasa" of young minds, should we be concerned about what's out there? Or can we trust that the influence of the less substantial books will fade away?

Timeless or culture bound: The Memory Keeper?

I'm at the beach reading a novel called "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" by Kim Edwards. I found it on the bookshelf in our rental house.

It's a beautifully, lyrically written book that reminds me of Virginia Woolf, but I am bothered by the way it imposes a "post 1980" sensibility on the years 1964 and 1965. (The book is divided into sections that represent different years: 1964, 1965, 1970, ending in 1989. I am just finishing the section "1965." The book was apparently published in 2005.)

Here is the plot in brief: The beautiful young wife of a doctor goes into labor on a snowy evening with their first baby. Because a heavy snowstorm is so unusual in Lexington, Kentucky, where they live, the medical clinic is deserted when they get there. The doctor calls his nurse, a 30 yesr-old "spinster" who is in love with him. She comes and helps deliver the baby. The wife is "gassed" at crucial moments, so goes in and out of consciousness.

The couple has twins rather than a single child. The first child to come out, their son, is perfectly typical, but the second, surprise child, a daughter, obviously has Down Syndrome. The doctor is horrified. His wife is unconscious. The doctor, wanting to spare his wife grief, quickly hands the baby girl over to his nurse with an address for a home for the "feebleminded" and tells her to drop the baby there. He then tells his wife, who is aware of having pushed out a second infant, that the baby girl died.

So far so good. The details are believable and vivid (though I imagine in 1964 the doctor and nurse would have seen nothing wrong in calling the baby a "mongoloid"). But here is where things begin to go awry. The young wife, starting in the clinic, wants to have had the chance to hold the "dead" baby. The author, thank the heavens, doesn't use the word "closure," but you know that's what the wife wants: closure. She feels cheated and upset that she didn't get to hold the baby and that there's no acknowledgement of the baby's death. She even goes as far, at the urging of her hippie sister, Bree, to put a notice in the paper advertising a memorial service for the dead baby. The existence of the "dead" baby also puts a rift in her relationship with her husband.

Ok. The wife is having a perfectly normal post-1980 response to a death. But I grew up in the 1960s, and this kind of response bears no relationship to anything I remember from that very different culture.

I remember two death incidences from my elementary school years. In the first, when I was in the fourth grade, my third grade friend Eileen--my other friend Aimee and I would walk home from school with her-- developed leukemia. We didn't know that leukemia was 100 percent fatal at that time and parents didn't tell us. We did know that Eileen was sick, because she had radiation treatments and her hair fell out. She would wear a light blue silk scarf, ala Jackie Kennedy, tied under her chin. She was a very sweet, cheerful girl.

Not long after the radiation ended, she died. We were a bit shocked. I heard from Aimee, whose family was close with Eileen's, that under advice from their doctor, the family was getting rid of any reminder of Eileen. They had another daughter and they were going to seal up the hole around Eileen by pretending she had never existed. This way they would not grieve. It seemed a bit sad to me that they would erase Eileen, but it made a certain amount of sense: Eileen couldn't come back and why should the family suffer?

The second instance was my classmate Richard's dog. His very cute Yorkshire terrier was a kind of class mascot, who'd been with us through fourth, fifth and finally sixth grade at our new school. He was so adorable that sometimes when he followed Richard to school, the teacher would let him run around the classroom for a few minutes before shooing him out.

In the sixth grade, the dog got run over by a car and killed. Our teacher informed us of this, along with the information that Richard, who was out of school for the day, was going with his parents immediately to get a replacement Yorkshire terrier who'd be "just like" the former dog. By having no gap between dogs, he wouldn't grieve. We were admonished to treat the new dog as if it were the old dog to "help" Richard. This was 1970. To my 11 year old mind, you couldn't just replace a dog, and other kids must have raised that question, because our teacher insisted all the more vehemently that dogs were indeed interchangeable. After a day, Richard wouldn't know the difference.

A larger cultural representation of this attitude was expressed in an original Star Trek episode. Captain Kirk is so stricken with grief over the death of a young woman that Spock offers him the ultimate 1960s mercy: a Vulcan mind meld that erases the memory. There's no sense at all that Kirk's grieving is healthy or necessary.

Of course, to our 21st-century sensibilities, these responses to death are shocking. At the time, they were presented as very modern, clinical, cutting edge, clean, rational and enlightened, a way to avoid wallowing in the morbid preoccupations of the death that characterized the past. Mourning was uncomfortable. It could be dispensed with by using logic and forethought.

We know now that you can't simply will grief out of your life. We can't just forget. Mourning, holding a dead baby, memorial services for dead babies and miscarried infants, public and family remembances of the departed, are cherished cultural ideals.

But in 1964? No. People soldiered on. Although this thing called the "1960s" was happening, especially from 1967 on, and women were wearing miniskirts and college students were protesting the war, none of this was more than superficial to the culture of the Baltimore suburb where I lived. We went on as we always had. Family secrets stayed in the closet. Avoiding shame was more important than finding closure. The 1960s women I knew would not have advertised the death of an infant because gossip and blame or pity would have been more likely than encouragement and support or empathy. (Remember "Diary of a Mad Housewife?" In this early 70s movie, the woman, after outlining her utterly barren and horrendous life, is excoriated by her "support group" for not being happy with a well-to-do husband, a Park Avenue apartment and two children.)

I wonder why imposing contemporary cultural norms on the past bothers me so much? I suppose on one level it's simply the falseness, the "that's not the way it happened" feeling. But I also think that by exploring how people used to respond, by going deeper than getting the superficial facts of car makes and clothing styles down, we learn more about ourselves. We learn that our attitudes and our responses are not necessarily universal or given. We understand that at different times and in different cultures, cultural norms we take for granted might not have been accepted or allowed. In a spiritual sense, we can learn gratitude for what we have that other's didn't, such as the ability to mourn openly, and can better evaluate what may seem eternal in our culture as perhaps very transitory.

What do you think?

On Leadership

I am currently interested in the question of what makes a good leader. I cringe at the idea of separating people into categories of "leader" and "follower," as I believe everyone is called at times to lead and to follow and that much damage has been done by insisting that certain groups of people were born to be either leaders or followers. But given that all or most people have leadership abilities, when people are, in fact leading, what attributes do they possess that make them good at what they do?

The Abbess a month or so ago mentioned several books on leadership. One was by MaryKate Morse, but I can't think of its name. Any other books to recommend?

Gone with the Wind

The New York Times ran a review of a new book about Gone With the Wind, called “Frankly my Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited,” by Molly Haskell --www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/White-t.html -- that defends the novel and its film incarnation.

I think it’s true that women from my mother’s generation --like my mother -- avidly admired Scarlett for her spirit and her “masculine” ability to fight the odds and survive. They admired her willingness to flout the rules and do what she wanted, which must have been deeply vicariously satisfying in times of greater social constraint. They also, I have to say, admired her willingness to push aside loving, nurturing motherhood as central to her existence in favor of a more robust engagement with the wider world. They also appreciated her sharp tongue and her willingness to tell people what she thought. In a word, Scarlett was a rebel. At the same time, she was a narcissistic rebel without a shred of interest in generalized do gooding: Whether it was to dance a reel or accept a new hat, she rebelled to make life better for herself.

So yes, I would say that for a generation of women (at least some) who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, Scarlett represented a deep, rich well of water from which they could drink, an (unconventionally) beautiful girl-woman who was the vicarious fulfillment of their fantasies.

However ... fairly recently, I watched the movie with a group of students, some of whom had never seen it before. Some of the girls were taken with Scarlett’s spirit of survival. I was struck, however, with how much this was a film about the Depression, not the Civil War. Of course this book, published in 1936 and made into a movie in 1939, became a blockbuster. It replayed for people, at a safe distance, their own recent experience of devastating financial upheaval. After all, the war, despite a few powerful, dramatic scenes, is largely peripheral or a plot device -- this is a movie about survival when the economic rug has been violently pulled out from under you.

On this latest viewing, I was also struck by how much Mammy is the moral center of the drama. She has a common sense, decency and grace that none of the other characters can attain. Certainly not Scarlett, with her vanity, star persona, unscrupulousness, hot temper and overwhelming, greedy sense of entitlement. Certainly not Melanie, damaged as she is by the ideology of honor and the Old South, willing to condone Ku Klux Klan murders to uphold a flawed social order, starry-eyed about motherhood to the point she dies in the attempt to have a second child. Certainly not Ashley, with his longing for the happy slave days on the plantation, his self-absorption, his misguided sense of nobility, his weakness, nor Rhett, with his cruel streak and tragic fantasy that he can bend reality to suit the whims of his young daughter.

But Mammy. She survives without the calculating, clawing manipulations of Scarlett, somehow always serene, always the same. The war may have changed Scarlett, and it might have turned both Ashley and Melanie into self-righteous killers, but it flows around Mammy, leaving her as unscathed as a rock. She remains who she is. She sees people for what they are -- and remains filled with compassion for them. She’s not damaged by lofty notions or an overblown sense of self and destiny. She has fewer highfalutin' ideals than the others, and yet does more day-to-day good than anyone else in the film. The moral high point of the movie may be when she calls Rhett and Scarlett mules in horse clothing ... and when, nevertheless, she accepts from Rhett the gift of red taffeta petticoat. She takes it freely: Mammy is one character you know can never be bought. She is the one character, even more so than Melanie, who does nothing but good for other people. Without her, where would any of them be?

I think we miss seeing Mammy as the moral center, the exemplar, the model of the good in the film, because she’s a slave/former slave and because we take her to be a stock character providing a combination of nurture and comic relief. We see her as acted upon rather than acting. But nobody, in the end, acts upon Mammy except in the most superficial ways. She’s deeply, deeply centered, her depths unknowable. She has the stillness of a Quaker. You know from all her actions that she cares more about people than about things and can always be trusted. Going from slave to free hardly ruffles her, because, you know, whatever her legal status, that she owns she her own soul.

Mammy is played in order to comfort whites that blacks are there for them and want nothing more than to care for them. But Mammy should disturb us. She’s an ever present critique of the damaging and childish histrionics of the main characters. They misunderstand her as they rely on her. She represents something completely different. She is where the real survival occurs, quiet, without drawing attention to itself, unseen but in plain sight, doing what needs to be done.

Frankly my Dear also mentioned the perpetual adolescence of Scarlett. That’s a contrast to Mammy, who is perpetually the adult, perpetually wise, more of a mother to Scarlett than the ephemeral, and ultimately useless Ellen. But it also bring to mind the childlike quality of Bella, the protagonist of the bestselling Twilight series vampire books (I just read this book and was somewhat horrified). What is it about childlike characters that attracts us?

What we long for

Following is a beautiful description of nature in Paul Hawkin's book Blessed Unrest. It describes Kitlope, upriver east of Kitimat in British Columbia:

“I felt as though I had been thrust into a painting by the Hudson River School, a preternatural, romantic dreamscape ... But here it was, the real thing, glaciers, rainbows, and all. The five species of Pacific salmon ... underfoot were fodder for the grizzlies and black bears denning in the old-growth spruce and cedar forests. In the glacier-fed waters, river otters peered curiously. wolf packs roamed at night, mountain goats capered on alpine croppings, blubbery seals feasted on easy pickings a hundred miles from the sea, and eagles nested in evenly spaced sequences along every spawning tributary.” p. 41.

What I love about this passage is the way it shows the abundance in God's creation. This scene describes plenty, and paints a picture of how God meant this world to be. It raised in me a longing to see Kitlope. It made me feel sad over what we've done to our world. It reminded me that the world of scarcity we seem to live in is not the only reality and different from God's plan for us or for the rest of the animals and plants in creation. I couldn't help but contrast it to Hawkin's (and other's) depictions of polluted slums in Third World cities, where the water is toxic and most of the plant and animal life has been killed.

But what I most want to hang on to is an outlook that hopes for all things, that doesn't settle for the fallen world around us as the way things have to be. I can imagine a time in the not too distant future, perhaps my grandchildren's generation, when something as basic as having free or nearly-free water will seem like a dream. A few generations beyond that, a world of free, abundant water might seem like a "fairy story" that idealists had made up. Or in a society of increasing single parenthood, two-parent families as the norm might become scoffed at as impossible. Yet I grew up during a time when (albeit imperfectly) it was quite common. So I want to remember that the simple things we long for are not fantasies but possibilities and part what God has promised we can have in this world.

How to Change the World?

During the Thanksgiving holiday, I read a novel called My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru, which was on the New York Times notable book list for 2008. Now I'm reading Paul Hawken's nonfiction work, Blessed Unrest. The two books are about changing the world and are instructive to read back to back. How do we change the world?

My Revolutions is based loosely on a group in Britain called the Angry Brigade which, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, worked through bombings and acts of civil disobedienceto bring down the English government and its systems of domination and oppression. The Angry Brigrade wants to lead a political "movement" that will attract the "masses." In the fictionalized account, we see the action through the eyes of Chris Carver, a college student who falls into the radical group partly out of a desire to change the system but largely because he is infatuated with the astringently beautiful Anna, one of the group's leaders. Of course, he has to hide this regressive "bourgeois" desire for individualized, romantic love.

In the book, we watch the group do good things, such as occupying empty housing in London and refurbishing it for the homeless. But we also see the group slide into increased isolation, fanaticism, narcissism and violence. The group looks towards models such as Lenin and the Russian Revolution and Mao and the Chinese Revolution. Like many 20th century radicals, the members are motivated by "isms" such as communism, and by a desire for ideoligical purity. They think big, wanting to lead massive change all at once. In the end, as we know, they fail, and England remains much as it always has, a mixed economy with democratic elections and a titular monarchy. The book becomes an indictment of ideological fanaticism, self-delusion and violence.

In contrast, Blessed Unrest follows a different kind of "movement," which can hardly be called a movement: the organic, unorganized rise of more than a million small groups worldwide that are concerned about environmentalism and social justice. These groups follow a different model from the grand isms of the 20th century: they are pragmatic rather than ideological and they work often, though not always, for small, local changes. They are fluid, grouping and regrouping at will, and operate largely below the radar of the media.

The book's author, Paul Hawken, tends narrowly to identify Christianity, which he puts on the side of transnational systems of domination and oppression, with its worst fundamentalist forms. This secular viewpoint is a weakness and a blind spot in an otherwise splendid book.As I read about groups working in different ways to affirm one principle: the sanctity of life, human life primarily, but also animal life, I saw these groups as manifesting Jesus's message of loving God and loving one's neighbor as the most important values.

I saw Jesus' lessons flowing out of the actions of these small groups in many ways:

1. Pragmistism: Jesus came down on the side of pragmatic gestures. For example, he defends Mary Magdalene for her gesture of spontaneous love in breaking an expensive vial of perfume over him. He understood the ideoligical purity is soul killing while actions from the heart are soul expanding. Also, as just one other example, Jesus' valorized the debt-forgiving "crooked" steward who used common sense to help himself and his neighbors.

2. Working quietly: Jeus talked about being yeast and salt invisibly working its way through the culture to bring around small, incremental changes that add up to big change. Not only did he use these metaphors, he enacted a refusal to fall into the traditional patterns of "big" military "change" by refusing to lead a military uprising at the end of his life.

3. Standing for peace: Jesus' way was not violent. Even the overturning of the money lenders' tables in the Temple, his most aggressive act, didn't take any lives and apparently injured nobody permanently. This is a huge rachteting down of the violence of the ancient world and a contrast to Bibilcal leaders such as Moses, David and Ezekiel, who all killed. It's definitely a contrast to the carnage of the Roman Empire.

4. Valuing the little people: Do I need to say anything? Blessed are the meek, the poor, the broken spirited ...

5. Upside-down kingdom thinking: These groups seem to share a strong sense that the powers that oppress the world value the wrong things: that their wisdom is foolishness and that what they despise are the most precious gifts in the universe.

I wonder how many of the groups Hawkins describes, if not overtly Christian, arise out of Christian roots. Since I became a convert 17 years ago, I have fallen into a network of small groups that I never knew existed in my secular days. Just about everyone I know in the Christian/Quaker world is working for the kind of change Hawkin is talking about in the way he is talking about: small and grassroots. I think of Bill and his Consistent Life work, Peggy and her Abbess work, the raw milk network I've fallen into, the Patapsco Friends Meeting prison ministry, the peace work done by Stillwater meeting, Olney Friends School's commitment ... the list goes on. I'd be interested in hearing about what I've left out.

Do Not Waste the Creation

"He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster." Proverbs 18:9

"Do rightly, justly, truly, holy, equally to all people in all things ... and there ye are servicable in your generation, laboring in the thing that is good, which doth not spoil, nor destroy, nor waste the creation upon lusts." George Fox, from Mind the Heavenly Treasure, entry for Dec. 4.

"Nor waste the creation upon lusts ..." I don't know that Fox meant creation as earth, but in today's context it sounds like an environmental statement. What would the world be like today if we didn't waste creation upon lusts (or maximizing profits)?

Fox's statement also joins a sense of not wasting creation, or environmentalism, with social justice: "do rightly ... to all people in all things." This same conjoining of environmentalism and social justice happens to be a theme of a wonderful book I'm reading called "Blessed Unrest" by Paul Hawken. Has anybody read it? In the book, (I have only read the intro and part of the first chapter) Hawken, an environmentalist, talks about all the small groups he knows of (he and his cohorts estimate at least a million such groups worldwide) that are working quietly, often unnoticed, to bring about change in the world. It's exciting to think about, and I will blog more about the book later.

Sacred Compass 7: leadings and individualism

I enjoyed J. Brent Bill's Sacred Compass: The Way of Spiritual Discernment, which is an accessible and readable introduction to the Quaker concept of leadings. Leadings are the persistent pushings, nudgings and guidance of God in our lives, bringing us to places where we can do his work in the world in ways we might not have imagined.

As Brent pointed out in an e-mail, the book is aimed at non-Quaker Christians, since for most Quakers, the book's concepts will be familiar. However, probably even most Quaker readers will find new insights or ideas in the book to ponder. For instance, as I think about either employment, going back to do graduate work, and the overarching question of "what to do with the rest of my life," I find myself, as a result of the book, paying much more attention to how my body physically feels when I contemplate one course or another.

Fundamentally, however, I wonder if the way we understand the concept of leadings in contemporary society is too focused on the self. In a graduate course I took once, the professor, an Episcopal priest, believed that Quakers spend too much time on self-examination and on hair-splitting matters of faith and belief. He contrasted Quakerism with the Anglican tradition, in which people corporately affirm their faith through liturgy and then essentially go about their business, not having to scrutinize every action. Anglicans, he said, believe the liturgy and communion put them right with God. He recommended a book called The Doubting Disease, which he believed spoke to a neurosis of overanalysis and second guessing inherent in Quaker theology.

Clearly, as a Quaker, I come down on the side of self scrutiny. However, I also understand that a corporate liturgy can act as antidote to obsessive concern over individual conscience. I also believe that endless parsing of one's thoughts and beliefs can create paralysis. I have seen this in some Quakers. My theory is that overanalysis, coupled with the empiricist ideology of the educated classes has led to some of the "non-theism" in liberal Quakerism. I believe some Quakers get so caught up in parsing whether or not they "believe" in God with unshakeable certainty every second of every day, that they fall into nontheism. Or they are so consumed in knowing exactly what God is (which we can't know) that they back into nontheism.

That being said, I believe it's also a mistake to see weekly recitation of a liturgy and drinking and eating a bit of wine and wafer alone as the key to putting ourselves right with God. By themselves, these are empty rituals that can create in us an illusion of safety-- or a "pass" not to examine our lives-- unless they are the outward signs of an inward transformation. In other words, like a good Quaker, I believe outward change follows from inward change. Actually, it works both ways, that inward transformation leads to a life that is outwardly changed and also that willingly adopting new outward habits and behaviors can cause inward change. However, I would put the preponderance of weight on the power of inward transformation to effect change. Thus I would put more of my effort into self examination and changing my heart before changing my behavior, knowing the changed behavior would follow a transformed heart.


A good companion piece to Sacred Compass is Blackaby's Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God. While acknowledging that we are all individuals who can't follow someone else's "success with God formula," Blackaby emphasizes that following God is not primarily about "me." Following where God is leading is seeing where God is at work around me and joining God in that work. This shifts the emphasis way from "me" as at the center of the universe to me as a worker in God's universe. I move toward the center of that universe as I join with God's work. I don't have to have a particular plan for me (which is what Brent also says) but I do have a responsibility to discern where God is and to work there.

So what do you think? What is the relationship of the inward self to the outward self? Do Quakers (and others) suffer from "the doubting disease?"

Sacred Compass 6: Helping others and following God

At the end of the Sacred Compass, J. Brent Bill's book about discerning and following the will of God, he urges us to help others on their journeys of discernment. In good Quaker tradition, Brent shows that we need to use our wisdom not to tell people what to do but to help them discover for themselves what God is calling them to do. When we help others discern their leadings from God, we have to carefully listen to our own leadings. If God is telling us insistently to say something to another person, we should do it, even if it makes us uncomfortable. But more often, we need to follow the leading that tells us to keep our mouths shut and listen deeply.

Brent discusses Quaker clearness committees as a way to help discernment. Normally, a person seeking clarity about a leading will call a clearness committee, composed of a few trusted people, who will listen to what the person has to say and ask questions that help the person explore the leading more fully. The idea is not to tell the person what to do, but to support the discernment process.

In the last chapter, Brent talks about obeying God. At its core, following a leading is obeying God, even when you don't understand why you are being asked to do so. Following leadings means trusting the voice of God in your life even when it doesn't make sense.

I struggled for a time with the idea that loving God means more than "having a good feeling" toward God. When I recognized that loving God means obeying God, I recoiled. Obedience was a word I associated with following orders blindly and acquiescing to structures of power because you have no choice. Obedience in my mind was what led to death camps and to people violating their moral precepts to "follow orders." I also associated it with capitulating to the will of a charismatic but twisted leader.

As I continued to read the Bible, however, I discovered that obeying God means something completely different. As usual, Jesus is subverting the language and ways of the world. In the 13th through 17th chapters of the gospel of John the obedience that Jesus stresses is not the same as the world's obedience. Jesus' obedience is surrounded by and saturated with love. It's a free choice: you don't have to obey, but you choose to do so because of the great love and trust you have. You follow because you want to. The closest analogy, as many have pointed out, is a human love relationship. We follow our beloveds to places outside our comfort zone because we want we to be near them and we want to please them. We may not want to do the particular tasks in question, but being close to the beloved is so important, so beneficial and so treasured that anything we do for the beloved is worth the price.

Sacred Compass: Getting Lost and Getting Surprised

(I started to title this post "Losses and surprises," then realized that losses can be quite different from getting lost.)

Near the end of Sacred Compass, Brent has two chapters on what we might call the darker side of leadings. In the chapter "The Dark Path," he discusses what happens when we feel lost and alone, with no idea where our spiritual compass wants us to head.

This is not necessarily bad, Brent says, and certainly not unsual. A period of seeming "lostness" can be part of the journey. It can grab our attention and cause us to scrutinize our lives more closely. It also can be the result of living in a fallen world, where many terrible things happen that are outside of our control. A sense of being lost also can lead us back to God and hope in his provision.

We can also be surprised when our leadings take us into unexpected places, as Brent describes the chapter "West of Eden." These surprises, Brent says, can tranform us and help us learn to trust more fully in God. Mary, for example, was surprised when an angel told her she was to bear God's child. That was not her expectation at all. But she trusted and was transformed.

All of this underscores that when we follow leadings, we are ceding control of our lives to God. We are not leading. God is leading. That means we open ourselves to hardships we might have avoided but also to blessings we might not have imagined. I know that in my life, there have been moments when, although I heard an inner voice saying, be patient, wait, hold steady, don't act, I've felt that no, I can't wait, I need help now, I have to take matters into my own hands, now is the moment to panick. That's always been a mistake, and I now more faithfully heed the inner guide.

Sacred Compass 4: From Brent Bill

Yesterday, I e-mailed J. Brent Bill about his book, Sacred Compass, because I feared being too critical and wanted to hear his point of view. If he were a superstar author or someone whose work I had profound problems with, I would simply state my issues. However, as Bill is a fellow Quaker, and I am more or less on the same page with him when it comes to leadings, I thought I would hear would he had to stay.

Here's part of what he wrote:

"I worried about that some folks might read it [Sacred Compass] as a "step-by-step" book and that was certainly not my intention. As I say in the beginning, this is no 1-2-3 steps to finding God's will. What I was trying to offer were the various ways we can use to uncover our leadings (journaling, walking, cleaning house, etc) which is why I invited so many friends to participate in sharing their ways of getting close to God and listening to the Spirit. Such as my friend Marcella's dancing. A way that would not have occured to me -- nor probably speak much to me. But it does to this delightful Quaker woman and helps her greatly.

I worried a lot about outlining the steps of sensing, waiting, and acting -- but then tried to stress it was not truly linear. That these are all stages that often intwine and weave into a pattern of discernment -- while we act, we sense and wait. And so on. My intention was to show that there are things we can all do in the various stages/movements of discernment and some will speak to us differently than they would other people. Writing works much better for me than dancing like Marcella would. And I suspect that the reverse is true -- though I know she journals as well."

There is a fundamental rhetorical problem in writing about leadings. They tend to be non-linear, not logical and unpredictable. In fact, they jar us into labeling them leadings BECAUSE of their seeming oddness. If God is telling us to eat breakfast in the morning (which he probably is), we won't see that as a leading, because it's normal, it's what we would do anyway. However, if we had an overwhelming feeling that instead of eating breakfast, we should go stand in the middle of the road and hold up a sign saying "Love God," we would probably identify that as a leading because it is such a bizarre and uncomfortable thought.

Yet books, especially explanatory books, are by their nature linear and logical. Their goal is to impart clarity and order, not confusion and chaos.

So how to capture the essence of a leading? Spiritual biography is one way. You can follow a narrative and watch one person's story unfold, thus seeing how a leading works itself out. The problem with that form is its particularity. You're left to yourself to draw conclusions. One person's experience of a leading may be so particular that you can't draw general principles from it. Or it may miss a piece of the overall leading puzzle.

Another way is for the writer to strain to create a language to convey difficult concepts (for example, when Thomas Kelly refers to Jesus as the "hound from heaven" in Testament of Devotion, he's using unconventional terminology to convey his experience), but that can lose people in the process, especially people at the beginning of a journey.

Of course, the answer is that we need to read in multiple genres to get a full sense of what a leading is. Brent's book, he said, is aimed at non-Quakers, and is a good introduction to a way of understanding God's work in the world that may not be familar to people from other faith traditions.

I want to go a little bit afield and ask what spiritual writings have most moved you or what type of writing works best for you?

Sacred Compass 3: Testing our leadings

Many years ago I saw a newsmagazine program about a young tent revival preacher. During the interview, he stated that God was telling him to raise donations so he could go the Bahamas in February.

It's hard not to laugh at such a "leading." (A leading is a Quaker term for what we believe God is telling us to do.) "God wanting me to go to the Bahamas in February" sounds just a tad like using God to justify our own self-indulgence.

In chapter 3 of Sacred Compass, J. Brent Bill discusses this all-important question: how do we know if our leadings are the voice of God or own desires masquerading as God's will? How do we tell the difference?

In what he calls "sensing lab experiments," Bill offers a series of questions to test our leadings: is the leading clear (can you put it into words)?, is it compelling (can you not not do it?), does it fit your life, will it change you, and does it come from God's love? As you ask these questions, you sift through your thoughts to try to get rid of what comes from ego or self-will. Part of sifting is waiting.

Interestingly, Bill writes that we can sift with our bodies as well as our minds. If what God leads us to do will be holy, then what does holiness look like, smell like, sound like, taste like? Is our leading congruent with that?

A fundamental problem with Bill's book is that while he's doing the good work of trying to draw a rational box around leadings and lead us through a step-by-step process of discernment, leadings have a wild, unpredictable quality that defies logic. Sometimes leadings don't "fit our lives." Sometimes they will seem, on the surface, to hurt people in our lives. Often I know a leading is a leading simply because it's not comfortable for me, but is a persistent thought that won't go away even though I keep trying to dismiss it because it doesn't "make sense." Thus, I found the best of Bill's queries on leadings to be "does it come from God's love?" Anything that arises from love of God or love of others is probably pretty close to a leading.

Unsaid, but so important in discerning if leadings are from God is the spiritual preparation work --prayer, listening for God in the silence, participating in and building spiritual community--that allows us to "hear" more clearly if a voice in our heads is from God. I have been with people who insist that what is clearly self-will is God's will. (I am sure I have been that person too.) Usually, in my experience, people who insist that self-will is a leading haven't done the spiritual work to discern the difference. This gets us back to waiting ... often what we call waiting is simply building up our spiritual muscles.

Finally, as Bill points out, we test a leading by acting on it. We live in a confused, messed-up world. In the end, we step out on faith.

I have followed leadings in my life, sometimes without knowing I was doing so, and marvelous things have happened that I could never have predicted. My life has been changed and enriched in ways that have left me amazed. In my darkest moments of doubt, I can lean into the real, lived experiences I have had of God's presence in my life (I suppose there is the off chance that is all "coincidence," but it's my rational mind that rejects that) and invariably my faith floods back. Do you have similar experiences of following God's leadings?

Can you suggest a good book?

I've found that the world divides between those who love works of fiction and those who gravitate towards works of fact. I'm in the group that especially enjoys a good novel, either literary or mystery.

Currently, however, I don't have any work of fiction to read, though I have a pile of nonfiction. I've been drawn to contemporary fiction recently (anything written in the last 20-30 years) yet am surrounded by bookshelves filled with classics. I love those books: Portrait of Lady, Tom Jones, Middlemarch, etc., but I don't feel a desire to reread them right now.

I'm looking for suggestions. What works of contemporary fiction would you recommend?

Obama as Mr. Darcy?

OK, this happened days ago and the world has so moved on, to Paris Hilton for President and beyond. But I'm ... still that slow pace! ... and STILL thinking about Maureen Dowd's editorial in the NY Times comparing Obama to Mr. Darcy.

So wrong. Obama's a smooth speaking charismatic. Mr. Darcy was always stiff and reserved, shy and uncertain, hiding behind his wealth and status, not out of arrogance or hard-heartedness but because he felt a little awkward and fearful. Endearing that someone with all his wealth, privileges of being male, rank, etc. could still feel insecure. Endearing that he could need the intangible sparkle that Elizabeth Bennett brought to the relationship. Endearing that he was probably a more decent human being that others of his ilk.

However, I AM flattered that Dowd compared "we the American people" to Elizabeth Bennett. Who could be cooler than EB? She glides through all company with equal aplomb, never (or seldom) at a loss for words, never at a loss for wit, never without a sense of who she is. Who wouldn't want to be Elizabeth Bennett? She's the best.

But I show my prejudice. So let me pose the question: who's your favorite Austen character?

Plain Secrets: Faith Practices

The chapter "The Lot Falls," in Joe Mackall's Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish, gives us a window into the workings of the Amish faith among the Swartzentruber Amish.

Sam Shetler, Mackall's Amish friend and neighbor, is chosen to be a minister. His church district has one bishop, two ministers and a deacon. As a minister, Samuel will preach and look out for the material welfare of the community.

Unlike most faiths, where a person hears a call and goes for specific ministerial training, Swartzentruber Amish ministers are called by the community (and God), work without specific training, as well as without pay or any diminution of their other duties. Most men (and it's always men) hope to be spared this heavy burden, Mackall said.

Samuel is called to become a minister at one of the church's twice yearly communions. Communions occur two weeks after a meeting of the entire baptized church body but only if the entire church body is in unity. During the pre-Communion meeting every individual in the church, male or female, publicly reaffirms his or her commitment to the church rules, known as the Ordnung. If a person has a problem with the Ordnung, he or she is supposed to air it at the meeting. Communion can't occur until any problems are resolved. Sometimes the resolution is for a group to break off and form a new Amish group with a different Ordnung.

To find a new minister, as the Swartzentruber Amish do at one pre-Communion meeting, everybody, male or female, votes. This happens the following way: a current minister stands at an open window. Everyone files by, one by one, and speaks the name of the man they'd like to become minister. A scribe writes all the names down. Any man who gets more than two votes moves on to stage two.

In stage two, the chosen men stand before the church community. In Samuel's case, he stands with seven other men. Eight hymnals are spread out in a table. In one, a "lot" is placed, a slip of paper saying "you are chosen." The books are moved all around on the table so that nobody knows which one holds the paper. Each man picks up a book. The one who chooses the book with the paper in it becomes the minister. In this case, it's Samuel.

Mackall describes other aspects of Amish faith: humility, a literal belief in aspects of the Bible, such as the creation story and the Virgin birth, that are treated more skeptically in other parts of Christendom, a need to live in a community submitting itself to Christ, adult baptism, every individual having a voice in the election of leaders and in the life of the church, staying apart from the "wicked" wider world "that the devil has planted," a peace testimony that says that violence belongs to governments and is outside of the "perfection of Christ" and a refusal to swear oaths.

For Quakers reading this, much of the above "theology," articulated in the mid-16th century, will seem familiar. There's no doubt that Quakers were influenced by much of this anabaptist understanding. Humility (which I think the Quakers would refer to as simplicity) is a part of Quakerism, as is the peace testimony and the refusal to swear oaths. Like the Amish, our leaders are unpaid and many people shy away from the burden of that responsibility. Like the Amish, Quakers must be "gathered," with every single person in unity, before true "communion" can occur. (I'm oversimplifying, but trying to show the connections.) Essentially, in the Amish willingness to give everyone a say in the community, we can see the seeds of the more radical equality of the Quakers. When I write articles about the terrible frustration experienced, say, by women in the Roman Catholic church, who have absolutely no say in who gets into leadership in the church hierarchy, I can appreciate how valuable it is for a woman to have a vote for a minister or the right to stand up and challenge the Ordnung. While Amish women may seem oppressed to the outside world, I know Roman Catholic women who would give almost anything to have privileges of an Amish woman transferred to the RC church.

On the other hand, I also understand the second class citizenship of the women that Mackall describes (how seldom women, for example, actually challenge the Ordnung, a silence or acquiescence which Mackall attributes to social indoctrination) and I better perceive how Quakers were able to take female equality before God to the next level by allowing women to take any position in the community.

Quakers, though they have had periods of withdrawal, value engagement with the "wicked" world as a way to correct present evils, though a compelling argument can be made that they have paid a high price through becoming much more conformed to that world. Many modern-day Quakers have split from the Amish in a move from Christ-centered community. I also see differences in the peace testimony: I would say the Quakers are less likely to accede to the proposition that wars are for governments and more likely to oppose all war, all the time. On the other hand, I wonder if we as a group practice day-to-day non-violence to the same extent as the Amish. I am also impressed that in an Amish minister, spiritual and material concerns have equal weight: the Amish minister is responsible for the physical needs as well as the soul of his community. I believe that Jesus meant for us to have this kind of caring for each other. Mackall, like others, is moved when he sees this caring in practice, such as during a barn raising.

Mackall admits he doesn't really "get" the faith that drives Samuel and other Amish, and while he describes their faith well, it is clear to me as a Quaker that Mackall truly doesn't "get" it. But something in him is drawn to Samuel because Samuel's life, as the Quakers would say, is a "pattern" of faithful living. For instance, when Mackall's Uncle Bob, who suffered brain damage as a child, dies, Mackall instinctively turns to Samuel's spiritual strength.

Mackall is angry that a doctor "screwed up" an operation that left Uncle Bob mentally impaired. How does a God that would let this happen square with Samuel's faith?

"God made Uncle Bob that way because everyone who knew him needed him to be exactly the way he was," Samuel says.

Mackall remembers what a friendly and open-hearted person Uncle Bob was. More than 500 people came to his funeral "sob[bing] for a man with a victimized brain and a damaged heart." Mackall drops an intellectual debate over the nature of God and simply let's Samuel's words soak in. "God made Uncle Bob that way because everyone who knew him needed him to be exactly the way he was." He feels less angry. He understands that Samuel is not trying to evangelize, but is saying what he truly believes.

"I was comforted by his words," Mackall writes. "Instead of fighting usual intellectual battles with myself or with Samuel, I simply gave myself to the moment, allowing Samuel's philosophy to be mine as long as I stayed on the farm."

What do you think? Or as the Quakers would put it: What canst thou say?