Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Wednesday August 5, 2009

Leaving a legacy

By Jim Taylor

A flood of tributes
        After the death of novelist John Updike last January, John McTavish, a retired United Church minister and Updike fan, collected some of the tributes and eulogies lavished upon the writer.
        They came from other authors, like Erica Jong and John Irving; from editors who had worked with Updike; from classmates; from relatives; from people who had never met him but had their lives changed by reading his books…
        One such tribute came from British journalist Bryan Appleyard. His comments (edited slightly) bring into focus the difference between being newsworthy and being significant.
        “I know there’s been a lot written about Updike,” Appleyard wrote. “But if Barrack Obama or Tony Blair had died, the coverage would have been Updike squared if not cubed. Yet the death of an age’s great artist is surely infinitely more important than that of one of its politicians.
        “Do you know, for example, who was prime minister when Charles Dickens published Bleak House? Of course, you don’t. (It was the Earl of Aberdeen — who he?). At the time, Forgotten Aberdeen, as we must now call him, would have seemed much more important than the publication of a mere novel. Not now. Bleak House stands like a rock and poor old Forgotten doesn’t stand at all.
        “That’s the point — except for a few rare exceptions, all politicians are of their time and nothing more. History diminishes them by turning them into pawns of its hindsight narratives. But, for centuries, Updike will be read and discussed. Our strutting, fretting leaders will, along with us, have vanished.”

Words that live on
        No doubt Appleyard recalled the speech Shakespeare wrote for Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle; life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”
        Maybe so. But the author of those words is still heard, more than 400 years later.
        Now that’s a legacy!
=====================================
Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
        Please tell your friends about these columns. To send comments, to subscribe or to unsubscribe, or to request permission to reprint, write [email protected] Be sure to include Soft Edges or Sharp Edges in the subject line, so my spam filter doesn’t delete your message. =====================================

Your Turn



Last week’s column that took forest fires as a launching point for a discussion on moderation and avoidance of extremes brought some sympathy notes. Robert Caughill, for example, commented, “My heart goes out to all the people who been affected by the devastation caused by the fires.” Then he added, “You could use the rain we have been getting in southern Ontario”
        Lloyd Strickland, who was in the North Thompson six years ago when that valley went up in flames, wrote, “My wife and I were in Vernon on Wednesday the 22^nd of July. The fire plume was indeed fearsome, and it ‘kindled’ a gut-deep memory of our being isolated by the McLure fire in 2003. Thankfully Terrace Mt fire seems under control.”
        Since Lloyd wrote that, the Terrace Mountain fire has roared out of control once more. I came home from a week’s hiking southwest of Banff last Saturday night. As I came over the hill towards our house, I was confronted by a wall of flame over a kilometer long directly across the lake from us. We’ve had ash and charcoal landing on our deck continually since then. Fortunately, the lake is about 1.5 kilometres wide at this point – it would be hard to have a better firebreak protecting us.

=====================================

About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

=====================================

*****************************************