August and September Reading List

Austen to Junger: Ball room to battlefield

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I have never read Jane Austen before this summer. When I was a kid…maybe 11, I saw my older sister enjoy Austen (and the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice) and the 11 year old me formed the opinion that Austen was for girls. Of course, having never read Jane Austen myself, I was free to caricature her novels as tea and crumpet time in which lace-laden ladies crushed crumpets by the carton amidst drawing room intrigues.

Over the years, my position on Austen turned into a schtick…a parlor trick that never failed to offend my well-read interlocutors in conversation. How could I be relatively sane and well-read but such a neanderthal about Jane Austen? (My other favorite schtick is to fail to worship C.S. Lewis. If you haven’t tried this at a party, give it a go. I’ll bet you get audible gasps and the actual clutching of pearls if you disclose that you don’t really find him impressive…or even interesting.) The bottom line is that for years I have insisted that I never would read Jane Austen, and until now I never did.

In the end, I think it’s appropriate that it was one of my teenage daughters that set the trap which resulted in me reading (and enjoying) Pride and Prejudice this summer. It went like this:

At the beginning of the summer I sat down with my older kids to work with them on setting some goals for their summer. We worked through a variety of categories: intellectual, spiritual, practical (craft or skill), financial, physical, etc. For the intellectual goal I invited them to pick one of the books that they were planning to read that summer and I would also read it and then discuss it with them.

Knowing my schtick about Austen, my older daughter seized the opportunity and said she'd like to read Pride and Prejudice. I realized immediately that she had out maneuvered me…that Austen was worthy, perhaps even ideal, summer reading for someone her age and that in order to preserve the integrity of the “goals” system I had proposed for the summer, I would need to read it with her.

Well, I'm glad I did. This is a book full of rich observations about the relations between human character, custom, and desire. Through the drama of a season of marriages in a family with several daughters we witness some characters learn and grow while others are immune to learning. We see several imperfect families work at being together and loving one another. A fact the book's conclusion does not soften is that though disruption in families caused by individual faults can mend with time, they do so just like in bodies, leaving scars as grave as the fault and marking the spot. And like a limb that is broken and never set, if the fault is unrecognized, it will degrade both the form and function of the body.

Of course, this laboring in imperfection is a favorite theme of Adam's Curse and at the heart of how it is to be human. In Pride and Prejudice we see valiant efforts to ameliorate imperfect conditions. We also see how those efforts to protect whom we love, serve those we ought, and defend against the ignoble can backfire. But Austen is no postmodern. The noblest characters in the story dignify all around them even when social inertia threatens to drag all into the muck.

The book is rich with some of the highest qualities in literature and is a very rewarding read.

The Habsburg Way by Eduard Habsburg

Eduard Habsburg (Archduke Eduard of Austria) is the Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See and this book presents “seven rules for turbulent times” drawn from the long history of the Habsburg family. Here are the rules:

1. Get married (and have lots of children)

2. Be Catholic (and practice your faith)

3. Believe in the empire (and in subsidiarity)

4. Stand for law and justice (and for your subjects)

5. Know who you are (and live accordingly)

6. Be brave in battle (and have a great general)

7. Die well ( and have a memorable funeral)

To my eye, this is a book of common sense - but of the sort many might feel sheepish or otherwise insecure about. The fact that the Archduke's common sense rules will strike many as reactionary is as good an argument for the necessity of the book as any. It will likely be most helpful to those who are part of a family but who, in our age of amnesia, have forgotten how to be a family. In fact, one way to state the general thrust of the book is that it urges families to be better at being families.

How? Know and love your own. Celebrate the marriages within a family and influence family members to make good marriages - ones that strengthen the family and contribute to its culture. Hold family members accountable and reserve your highest sense of responsibility for your kin. Celebrate the births, baptisms, and funerals. Do not allow the administrivia of the political order in which we live to overshadow the true festivity that should grace our lives. For example, births are more than certificates and deaths more than estate taxes. Governments come and go, but families abide and grow. Defend your own fiercely and with cunning.

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger

This is a small novel by the great Ernst Junger, author of The Forest Passage and Storm of Steel. Junger was one of the innumerable young men caught in the vast nets of war that enveloped the twentieth century.

Do you know the Robinson Jeffers poem “The Purse Seine?” He describes watching the progress of the twentieth century like watching fishermen haul in nets of helpless humanity:

"We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we
    have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival,
    insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is
    closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The
    inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers–or revolution, and the
    new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls–or anarchy, the mass-disasters.

                         These things are Progress;"

Junger was indeed caught in the nets of war and he survived them. I’ve written in a poem called “Uriah’s America” about my own experience in the military threatening to tint the rest of life with a hue of aftermath. This is a consequence, I think, of a certain kind of raw, peak experience when young. I have something of the sense when reading Junger that the war was only ever just below the surface.

The Marble Cliffs has a dreamy feel. We don’t come to know the protagonists very well and the book does not aspire to realism or verisimilitude. Nevertheless, it is not fantastical. The drama occurs in an invented place that could be a real place. It’s climate, geography, local politics, and recent history are recognizable as the kinds of things that one might actually experience somewhere.

The action? A people living traditionally in a beautiful place experience the misstep, stumble, trip, then total fall into war. The dreamy feel of the text keeps the degeneration into war and brutality in view, but just barely, as though in our, or really the main characters’, peripheral vision. This, I suspect, is intentional and probably captures what it will be like for an unsuspecting and complacent civilization to disintegrate into war.

The disorder that we witness unfolding in the novel is all familiar—recognizable in the structures and leadership of our own country and times. Junger aptly unveils the typical cycle of operations: we foment wars so that we can fight them; we sow disease so we can go through the motions of performative medicine.