“The New Testament” (translated by David Bentley Hart)

This is a very different translation to the New Testament than the King James version. Hart states, up front, “To be honest, I have come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most of them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance for understanding how the texts’ authors thought.” He continues, “This is not a literary translation of the New Testament, much less a rendering for liturgical use…. I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation.” On the background of the times, Hart adds, “When one truly ventures into the world of the first Christians, one enters a company of “radicals” (for want of a better word), an association of men and women guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence in values almost absolutely inverse to the recognized social, political, economic, and religious truths not only of their own age, but of almost every age of human culture…. The New Testament knows very little of common sense. The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism…. Everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgment that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent.”

“Waverley” by Walter Scott

Scott’s first novel, after a successful literary start as a poet, is considered the first book in the genre of  historical romance. Set against the backdrop of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the novel details the coming of age of Edward Waverley. Although descended from a British Jacobite noble family, his father, currying favor with the current regime, buys him a commission in the British army and gets him posted to Scotland, where he comes under the sway of a Highland chieftain, Fergus Mac-Ivor, himself raised in exile in France after his father was executed by the Crown. “These stout idle kinsmen of mine account my estate as held in trust for their support; and I must find them beef and ale, while the rogues will do nothing for themselves but practise the broadsword, or wander about the hills, shooting, fishing, hunting, drinking, and making love to lasses of the strath. But what can I do, Captain Waverley? everything will keep after its kind, whether it be a hawk or a Highlander.”

Before long, Waverley, already a hopeless Romantic and a poet, falls in love with Fergus’ sister, Flora. She explains to the eponymous hero, “A Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation, were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. He who wooes her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.”

Waverley, himself, at first has some doubts about the honor of the Jacobite cause, “He felt inexpressible repugnance at the idea of being accessary to the plague of civil war. Whatever were the original rights of the Stuarts, calm reflection told him, that, omitting the question how far James the Second could forfeit those of his posterity, he had, according to the united voice of the whole nation, justly forfeited his own. Since that period, four monarchs had reigned in peace and glory over Britain, sustaining and exalting the character of the nation abroad, and its liberties at home. Reason asked, was it worth while to disturb a government so long settled and established, and to plunge a kingdom into all the miseries of civil war, for replacing upon the throne the descendants of a monarch by whom it had been willfully forfeited?”

After the defeat of the Jacobites by the Duke of Cumberland’s army, Waverley reflects on the doomed nature of the whole quixotic enterprise, “Here fell the last Vich Ian Vohr, on a nameless heath; and in an obscure night-skirmish was quenched that ardent spirit, who thought it little to cut a way for his master to the British throne! Ambition, policy, bravery, all far beyond their sphere, here learned the fate of mortals.” And as another Jacobite “traitor” the Baron of Bradwardine lamented, “But houses and families and men have a’ stood lang eneugh when they have stood till they fall with honour.” Colonel Talbot, a loyal British soldier, though also a friend of the house of Waverley, was less forgiving in his memories of Mac-Ivor, “Justice which demanded some penalty of those who had wrapped the whole nation in fear and in mourning, could not perhaps have selected a fitter victim. He came to the field with the fullest light upon the nature of his attempt. He had studied and understood the subject. His father’s fate could not intimidate him; the lenity of the laws which had restored to him his father’s property and rights could not melt him. That he was brave, generous, and possessed many good qualities, only rendered him the more dangerous; that he was enlightened and accomplished made his crime the less excusable; that he was an enthusiast in a wrong cause only made him the more fit to be its martyr.”

“The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton

This novel hits at the heart. It is a brutal love story set in old world New York, written by an author who imbibed that milieu. “New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure…. You couldn’t have everything, after all.” 

The protagonist, Newland Archer, is a man of this world, who ever-so-gently pushes its boundaries beyond their comported norms, before, most often, scurrying back to the safety of habit. “Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free…. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.”

And yet, Archer was never quite satisfied with what he sensed he was missing out from life. “Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.” His unconsummated love, separated by familial propriety, created the tension that was to become his existence. “He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgements and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency.”

Wharton, unsparingly, takes the measure of the man, “He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in.” Archer, late in life, was also able to take measure of himself, “Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else…. There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and wondered. . . .”

“Fragments” by Heraclitus (translated by Brooks Haxton)

Heraclitus was the heir to the throne of Ephesus in the sixth century B.C. His treatise, described as the first book of philosophy, has been lost to history. What remains are these “fragments,” aphorisms that are often cryptic jewels of wisdom. He writes on knowledge, “Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.” And on the unknown, “Whoever cannot seek/ the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way/ is an impasse.” Sometimes it is hard to tell if he is speaking in metaphor, “Men dig tons of earth/ to find an ounce of gold.”

Heraclitus uses fire as one metaphor for the ever-changing elements of human life. “That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure/ as it burns away.” Also, “As all things change to fire, and fire exhausted/ falls back into things, the crops are sold/ for money spent on food.” Change is another recurring theme. “What was cold soon warms, and warmth soon cools. So moisture dries, and dry things drown.” Perhaps his most famous fragment describes the aspects of a river, “The river/ where you set/ your foot just now/ is gone—/ those waters/ giving way to this, now this.” Some of his fragments sound almost like zen koans, “Under the comb/ the tangle and the straight path/ are the same.” The metaphor of the river recurs, “Just as the river where I step/ is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.”

Heraclitus’ idea of sleep and the dream world is original in its radical subjectivity, “The waking have one world/ in common. Sleepers/ meanwhile turn aside, each/ into a darkness of his own.” He speaks about the gods with a casual reverence, which is hard to tell if it is feigned, “To a god the wisdom/ of the wisest man/ sounds apish. Beauty/ in a human face/ looks apish too. In everything/ we have attained/ the excellence of apes.” However, his reverence for custom, culture, and institutions appear sincere, “People ought to fight/ to keep their law/ as to defend the city’s walls.” However, he was not a fan of democratic mediocrity, “As for the Ephesians, I would have them youths, elders, and all those between, go hang themselves, leaving the city/ in the abler hands of children. With banishment of Hermodoros/ they say, No man should be/ worthier than average. Thus, my fellow citizens declare, whoever would seek/ excellence can find it/ elsewhere among others.”

“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin)

This is one of Murakami’s most straight forward novels. There are no strange dream sequences and no talking cats. His translator makes the claim that it is also Murakami’s most autobiographical work. After all, the protagonist is a small-town boy who is making his way through college in late 1960s Tokyo. He even has a part-time job at a record store. Music, both classical, jazz, and, of course, the Beatles, punctuates much of the plot. It is also a dark work. There are more than a handful of gruesome deaths referenced, most by suicide. In fact, the narrator’s working motto became, “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”

Although a more or less straight bildungsroman, the book is still told with Murakami’s dead-pan flare built into his simple lines, “Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.” In fact, the suicide of his high school best friend would be the defining event of Toru Watanabe’s existence, “Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult.”