Profoundly Common, Commonly Profound.

Thoughts on thinking about good books.

One Idahoan summer night I was sitting in the lounge of a little old American mansion, thinking solemn and sophisticated and thoughtful thoughts, when a startling conversation came darting through the warm air, bouncing off the bookshelves, and eventually lodging itself between my ears. For some wild reason my host had begun praising rock and roll, and the shock of it has stuck with me for months.

We were a small crowd of Christian men gathered by a shared enjoyment of leather armchairs and deep conversations and deeper bookshelves. Certainly one can understand my shock. We ought to have been talking about guilt and redemption in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or perhaps Genesis B’s insightful interpretation of the Fall of man. Depending on the strength of the whiskey, a hot debate on the validity of ‘mathematical cosmic determinism’ may have been in order. But it sounds as if I were mocking these. In truth, such conversations warm my heart and tickle my ears. If you doubt this (you desperate skeptic, you) rest assured that I found myself bravely arguing over that misshapen creature, mathematical cosmic determinism, a week later. That thrill would rival a Fleetwood Mac concert. But, do pardon me, I’ve almost given away my point.

So we see there is an apparent contradiction between bookshelves and rock and roll. To expand it a bit, it is difficult to imagine where Dostoevsky and The Doors would meet. Yet finding this meeting point may actually help us better understand Dostoevsky, and perhaps even the bookshelf. I suppose one could argue the tension lies between grand and lofty ideals on one side, and common vulgarity on the other. The problem arrives when we try to figure out which goes where. Of course there is the obvious sorting. Literature is the high and idealistic, rock and roll is the low and vulgar; yet it needn’t be so. ‘People are strange when you’re a stranger’ is a maxim worthy of the thickest of philosophy books and the shiniest of ivory towers, and it is the first line of a song by The Doors thoughtfully called People Are Strange. On the other end, I dare the reader to name a single thing more vulgar than a broke, insane axe-murderer in nineteenth century Russia. How on earth shall we think about this, then? Well, both works are united in the fact that they were indeed made on earth, and so they must both deal with earthy things, vulgar and profound; and I daresay those two aren’t as separated as we might think. We ought to poke the works of high literature with this particular stick.

Of course, it is simply a matter of realistic idealism; of idealistic realism, if we must speak clearly. By this nonsense I mean to say that great pieces of literature are not so elevated and untouchable as we often believe. Their ideals are earthy, and earthiness is full of ideals. Dostoevsky’s themes of marred consciences and grand redemptions are profound, yet they are themes plucked from God’s creation, and thus themes belonging to the common bloke (for the common bloke, you must know, is a member of creation). Dostoevsky thus belongs in the streets, in the pubs. He belongs in arguments at bars and jokes at dinner-tables. He ought to be flung about like a ragdoll into any situation we can think of, with no worry for getting him dirty or cut or bruised. We must pay our great works of literature the high human honour of not taking them too seriously. I am not saying they are worthless; I am saying the precise opposite. I am saying they are so valuable and reverent among the created things because they are manifestly of the created things. They are marvellously common. Let us treat them as such.

See if you can’t get some use out of the whole Western canon in your conversations, your emails, your love-poetry, your manufacturing job, if you can help it. We would be disgracing poor old Dostoevsky if we kept him locked up in the academic classrooms. Certainly, he belongs in the classrooms too. I will by no means disrespect the classrooms. I do in fact love academia (my own application to a particular Christian liberal arts college may betray this surely unexpected secret), yet that is precisely why I believe we should, in a sense, take the academic classrooms, along with everything that is typically associated with them, into the streets. I love the academic classrooms too much to leave them locked up in the academies.

The result of all this bombastic hoo-hah is that we may consider the old Russian novelist to be friendly enough with The Doors. It may be said that rock and roll (at least the good stuff) is the art of the average bloke, and the embodiment of unseriousness. It is the music of work-sites and street-fights; common things. We will do well to see that high literature likewise has a place in construction projects and punch-ons, for high literature is in essence common literature. It is supremely common. It speaks of such brightly common things as wedding scandals in Italy, things as plainly and daily perceived as the war between the City of God and the City of Man. It as is as common as a leather armchair and a bookshelf, and therefore it is supremely profound.

---

---

Thumbnail: Rembrandt, Scholar In His Study