Needing Resurrection

Those who know me know how much I love to read. I almost always have one or two books going; more often than not, works of fiction. The last two I read were powerful, moving, and a bit depressing.

Manifold Space by Stephen Baxter is the second in a science fiction trilogy that finds those now living on the moon having made contact with an alien race of machine-like creatures. As the novel unfolds over seventy centuries, we are rather small, insignificant creatures who fall victim to other life forms who exploit space for its resources. Of course, over that time we have continued to exploit each other and our planet such that we have rendered it uninhabitable. The book deals with big cosmic and metaphysical questions. Despite our tendency to war and destruction, one is also struck by our ability to sacrifice and survive. Overall, a good read whose science is interesting and the circumstances disturbing.

Most recently, I finished Arturo Perez-Reverte's, The Painter of Battles. It chronicles the dialogue between a war photographer, turned painter, and a Croatian soldier who has shown up announcing that he intends to kill the painter. The painter is engaged in an effort to capture the angles, geometries, and underlying structures of war so that he might make sense of it. He is doing so by painting a large mural that circles the inside of the lighthouse where he has taken up residence. The dialogue between the painter and the soldier engages both in trying to make sense of the madness, brutality, and suffering of war. Through this dialogue large existential questions such as evil and the culpability of the passive witness to the act become the ordinary topics of this dialogue.

I was moved by both books and found in reading them a sense of feeling small, insignificant, and without much hope. This is directly contrary to how I try to be in my daily life, where I seek to embrace the noble and the best that a person or a situation has to offer. In both of these novels, the noble was not readily attainable. After reading them, I felt the need for resurrection, to be uplifted, and the desire to see with new eyes. I was grateful to be so moved.