writing in the dust

I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t anymore. That’s not to say I don’t listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I’m no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make it a point to listen to my ears. Also, I’ve rediscovered the pleasures of looking at the art work on record jackets. Thumbnail images are pretty weak substitutes. In fact, they suck.

But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn’t aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version. Hidden inside the sleeve of a new record, like a Cracker Jack prize, is a little card with a code on it that let’s you download the digital files of the songs, often in a lossless format, from the record company. So I no longer have to choose between the superior sound and packaging of vinyl and the superior mobility of digital. When I’m near my turntable, I spin the platter. When I’m not, I fire up the MP3s.

Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow.

Homeless in this world, not yet at home in the next, we human beings are wanderers between two worlds. But precisely as wanderers we are also children of God in Christ. The mystery of our life is God’s mystery. Moved by him, we must sigh, be ashamed of ourselves, be shocked, and die. Moved by him, we may be joyful and courageous, hope and live. He is the origin. Therefore we persist in the movement, and we call, “Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

We need not expect that life leads to sitting and possessing — in no sense, at no moment. We cannot remain standing; we may not; and we ought not even once wish to do so. Whatever awaits us on our way is under no circumstances our goal. Even the most important, the beautiful, the tragic moments of our lives, are only stations on the way, nothing more. Saying farewell: that is the great rule of this life. Woe to us if we reject this rule, if we want to remain standing, calling a halt, and attaching ourselves to a particular station. There is nothing left for us but to acknowledge this saying farewell, becoming obedient to it. “Here we have no lasting city.

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women’s relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.

A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust. This was an unprecedented development. In all earlier times, women’s direct intervention in public discussion had been very limited. Men monopolised every medium in which male and female qualities were prescribed and reinforced – fiction, drama, poetry, sermons, journalism and so on. But from the later 17th century onwards, women emerged for the first time as a permanent part of the world of letters. As playwrights, poets, novelists and philosophers, women influenced male authors, looked to one another, and addressed themselves directly to the public. And in much female writing about sexual relations, the bottom line was, as the teenage poet Sarah Fyge explained in 1686, that men were always trying “to make a prey” of chaste women. Male bluster about female lust was but to make women “the scapegoat” – it was men who constantly pressured and ensnared women, who were insatiable in their thirst for new conquests, and shameless in their commission. As the feminist Mary Astell put it bitterly in 1700, “‘Tis no great matter to them if women, who were born to be their slaves, be now and then ruined for their entertainment”. No woman could ever “be too much upon her guard”.

… She hardly knew how to explain to a person considerably more musical than herself the effect it had on her to hear a piece played imperfectly. It made audible the difficulty in the music; it made audible the demands made on the performer. It was moving in a fashion that a perfect performance never quite seemed to be.

I more and more find the precious part of each day to be the thirty or forty minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible. All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories that the world is telling about itself. I am more and more skeptical about these stories. As I take time to immerse myself in the story that the Bible tells, my vision is cleared and I see things in another way. I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God’s story.

The problem, perhaps, is that a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap. Being a master politician in a mass democracy, in this sense, is a bit like being a brilliant filmmaker who’s somehow also a great economist, or a Nobel-winning scientist who writes best-selling novels on the side.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it’s because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph – luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

In the case of literature, so much of what’s on the page is you really making an effort to put it there. So people can give you the credit for what you’ve written down and praise you for writing that sentence.

But in the case of photography, although it also takes a lot of preparation and work, it can give the illusion of chance, of magic: How did you make it happen? How did you happen to be there?

Q: What is your only comfort in life and death?

A: That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by His Holy Spirit He also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him.