On doing hard things

I posted this on facebook once upon a time, and got a very positive response.  When I needed to find it recently to send it to someone who I thought it would help, I realized just how hard it is to find old posts on facebook, so I'm posting it here where it will be easier to retrieve.

THOUGHTS ON MARRIAGE, MISSIONS, AND DOING HARD THINGS. It's been wonderful over the past few weeks to observe a couple of recently called Latter-day Saint missionaries get ready to leave for the MTC this month, to be with them in the Temple, as they entered into covenants which will help them stay true as they journey to Billings Montana and Tokyo Japan, to teach people of Christ. I've been remembering how hard the first few weeks in the field, after the MTC, were for me, as I discovered the reality of the day-to-day grind I had, unknowingly, apparently dedicated myself to perform. I stayed the course through that challenging and miserable time, not because I wanted to, and not on the strength of my testimony or love for the Savior, but for the lowliest of all possible reasons: the sheer embarrassment I would have felt in giving up and coming home.

I am so grateful for that embarrassment. It kept me on my mission long enough to make it to the days when I was excited to wake up in the morning, and grateful to be there. It never got completely easy, but it got quite a bit easier, and often very joyous, after that initial rough patch, and one or two more along the way, and I experienced things during the last year of my mission I wouldn't give up for anything in this world.

I've had occasion in the past few years to sometimes chat and try to counsel with people who were going through a difficult time period in their marriage, sometimes in the very early months of their marriage, when they are discovering that life is not a Disney movie or a pop song, and they had to decide why they got married, and if they were willing to stick through some inevitable initial difficulties, in order to build a life that would not necessarily always be easy, but could be meaningful and joyous.

I have come to believe that a respect for the institution of marriage, as such, and a general understanding that staying married is simply "what married people are expected to do" kept many members of my parents' generation married, through initial hard times, allowing them to eventually flourish, and their stable union to eventually be a blessing to their children, raised with a sense that the world is a safe and secure place. But we have lost that mentality in our modern world. Indeed, we stigmatize that era, the 1950s, as a time of mindless conformity by men in grey flannel suits, instead of remembering that the adults of the 1950s had lived through WWI, the great depression, and WWII, and might just have some wisdom a later generation missed as it lived through a somewhat easier youth, experiencing the dawn of videogames and multiplexes.

I am sure that our no-fault divorce laws and our no-stigma divorce culture have been a great blessing in the lives of many people who might otherwise have been trapped in a dysfunctional relationship, but I think that, overall, we are a poorer world for having lost the sense that marriage is intended to be a commitment, and quickly abandoning commitments when we learn they aren't as fun as we had hoped, is to be avoided, perhaps even shunned as sometimes dishonorable. I'm not criticizing any one who has been divorced or come home early from a mission or given up on any other dream or goal. There are numerous perfectly valid and strong and legitimate reasons for all such decisions, and I have no right, nor ability, to judge anyone else's life. I'm just saying that perhaps we have lost something in our instant gratification society in recent years, that, had it not been lost, might have kept some people married, or kept some people in college, or kept some people on their own personal mission, whatever that mission may have been, long enough to get past the tough parts and get to the good parts.

I'm not sure what that lost thing was. Perhaps the WWII generation, to motivate their sacrifices, needed to be indoctrinated into putting as high a premium on honor and duty as we have been indoctrinated to put on happiness and success. Or perhaps it had to do with higher percentages of Americans attending church during previous times, where, through the message of Christ's life and selfless death, they would have imbibed the idea that a life lived purely for one's own personal satisfaction and happiness, will, paradoxically, not be nearly as fulfilling or meaningful as a life in which sometimes we do things that we don't want to do, or don't bring us instant gratification and immediate happiness, but that we feel we are supposed to do. I really don't know.

But as I've had these things on my mind lately, I came across this quote from one of my favorite writers, a staunch Roman Catholic who spoke as one having authority to an earlier generation, which I think teaches a lost principle that is applicable to all faiths, and should be remembered at the beginning of missions, marriages, and before embarking on numerous other commitments as well:

"[I]n everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the sea bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender. In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead. . . . [This is what justifies] the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault, or, at least, an ignominy . . . . Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage. . . . Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because it is essentially discouraging." G.K. Chesterton.

My New Year's Resolution

In an attempt to infuse my life with more spirituality, I'm going to blog my way through the scriptures, to make sure I'm actually meaningfully pondering what I read:

http://blogthebofm.blogspot.com/

Books Read in 2016

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Penguin Random House Crown/Achetype 2012).  Audible. 4 stars out of 5. 
A book that criticizes some of the modern trends I find most maddening, and also vindicates my entire way of being.  What's not to like? Key Quote: "Any time people come together in a meeting, we're not necessarily getting the best ideas; we're just getting the ideas of the best talkers."

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Barnes and Noble Softcover Classics edition.  2 stars out of 5.
An evil fable.  I was surprised how little plot there was. If you know the main idea, which almost everyone does, there's really little need to read the book, which doesn't offer much story beyond that main idea.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Trade Paperback 60th Anniversary Edition. 4 stars out of 5.
A re-read of an old favorite.  It's interesting how at different ages and different times in my life the same story seems to mean different things to me.  In this reading, the book really didn't seem to be about the dangers of totalitarianism or censorship, but about the dangers of mass media, and living a life of complacent acceptance of things we would really rather not accept.

Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 1955) Kindle.  5 stars out of 5.
The best biography of C.S. Lewis is his own memoir of his conversion from Atheism to Christianity. Key quotes: "A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.  There are traps everywhere . . . .  God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous." "The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."

Tour of the Jungfrau Region.  A Two Week Trek in the Berner Oberland by Kev Reynolds (Cicerone Press 2012)  5 Stars out of 5.
A book for dreaming.

Walking in the Bernese Oberland.  Over 100 Walking Routes by Kev Reynolds (Cicerone Press 2015).  4 stars out of 5.  
The book which taught me to seek out Oeschinensee, a locals favorite known to few tourists, where we spent my personal favorite hours of our Swiss vacation.  Key quotes: "With the classic trio of Eiger, Moench and Jungfrau as its most iconic symbol, the Bernese Oberland hosts some of the best-known mountains in the Alps.  Rising out of lush green meadows they tower above chalets bright with geraniums and petunias; a stark contrast of snow, ice and rock against a kaleidoscope of flower shrub and pasture; an awesome backdrop to an Alpine wonderland." "Every corner of the Berner Oberland range has its own touch of magic."

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic 2016).  Hardcover.  3 stars out of 5. 
An enjoyable Potter-world take on the classic Butterfly Effect time travel plot device (the best version of which is still to be found in Ray Bradbury's classic short story "A Sound of Thunder.").  As a book, it's a fun way to spend a couple of hours, but not likely to pass the test of time in the same way as the novels.  I suspect it's better as a play and would like to see it someday.

Flashpoint, by Geoff Johns, Andy Kubert, and Sandra Hope. Paperback Edition Graphic Novel (DC Comics 2011).  3 stars out of 5. 
Another take on the butterfly effect story.  In some ways better, and in some ways less so, than Rowling's version.

The Life of Greece, by Will Durant (Simon & Schuster 1939) Audible Edition (Narrated by Stephan Rudnicki).  5 stars out of 5.  
To be ignorant of "Greek thought and life, and of the arts in which the Greeks expressed their thought and sentiment," is, in the words of Charles Eliot Norton, to remain "ignorant of the best intellectual and moral achievements" of the race of man.  If this is true, then it is truly tragic that Americans no longer know what we should about ancient Greece and its key personalities, because the ruthlessly utilitarian nature of our educational reforms for the past century have cut us off from our heritage as the heirs of Western Civilization.  Reading this book is one way I have tried to remedy this deficit in my education, and to restore that which was stolen from me by John Dewey.
The book is magnificent, not just for the history it covers, but for the way that Will Durant has with words, and for his aphoristic asides on the inevitable patterns of history ("A nation is born stoic and dies epicurean." "It is as difficult to begin a civilization without robbery as it is to maintain it without slaves." "Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.")
The Audible Version, read by narrator Stephan Rudnicki, one of my favorites, who also reads several of Audible's versions of Orson Scott Card's books, is amazing.  The book led me to believe this: There are no new or modern ideas.  Every idea I have ever heard or read, about philosophy, literature, parody, satire, humor, art, science, medicine, atheism, politics, social science, economics, etc., can it seems be found, in its original and nascent form, in the writings of some ancient Greek.  Nor are there any original ways for a society to commit suicide.  Every version of societal decay and dissolution and fall from prosperity and prominence has been reenacted hundreds of times before in the various epochs of the hundreds of city-states of ancient Greece.  All that is wrong with America today might be remedied if we knew enough about this history to heed its warnings.  But we don't.  So we won't.
Key quotes: which in this book prove the enduring nature of the repeating patterns of history. "Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece.  Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, are all Greek words for cultural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks."
"All of the problems that disturb us today --the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the emancipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural supports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West -- all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own."
"Individualism in the end destroys the group, but in the interim it stimulates personality, mental exploration, and artistic creation.  Greek democracy was corrupt and incompetent, and had to die.  But when it was dead men realized how beautiful its heyday had been; and all later generations of antiquity looked back to the centuries of Pericles and Plato as the zenith of Greece, and of all history."
"Historians divide the past into epochs, years, and events, as thought divides the world into groups, individuals, and things; but history, like nature, knows only continuity amid change: . . .  history makes no leaps."
"Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal."
"Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.  Hence the road to power in Greek commercial cities was simple: to attack the aristocracy, defend the poor, and come to an understanding with the middle classes."
"Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.  That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, were the first to achieve this recognition and this freedom in both philosophy and government is the secret of their accomplishment, and of their importance in history."
"Science and philosophy, in the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom is a harbinger of death."
"No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself."

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro (Simon & Schuster 2010).  Trade Paperback Edition.  3 Stars out of 5.  
I remember walking into a music store in Provo Utah shortly after it was revealed that Milli Vanilli were not really singing on their CDs.  Scratched and destroyed CDs of their music were hanging from the rafters, donated by outraged one-time fans.  I found this perplexing.  I was not a fan of Milli Vanilli, but if I had been, would the music I liked somehow become less likeable, the tunes less hummable, the hooks less engaging, because Milli Vanilli didn't sing them?  Somebody wrote that music.  Someone sat down and played the tunes, or at least programmed a synthesizer to do so.  And somebody went into a recording studio somewhere and sang the songs.  If you were a fan, wouldn't the proper response to the discovery of the fraud be to keep listening to the music, while demanding to know who really crafted this music, so you could buy that anonymous person's next, no-longer anonymous, CD? If scholarship decides that Rembrandt didn't paint one of his famous works, but a student probably did so, why does the painting's value decrease?  If the painting was at one time highly regarded, isn't the painting itself still worthy of appreciation on its own merits, for whatever artistic talent it displays, regardless of whose talent was thereby displayed?
Most of those who dispute the judgment of history that Shakespeare wrote his own plays do so on the grounds that the plays are so well-written that the man from Stratford was not possibly sufficiently educated or experienced in the ways of court to have done so.  But I wonder, if a majority of scholars were ever to decide that Shakespeare didn't write the words, what would happen to the reputation of the plays themselves? Would they suffer in popularity and eventually be forgotten, like so many other works from that same time period?  This book, alas, does not address that question.
It does, however, address another question which I find equally intriguing: the psychology of conspiracy theorists, who, I have often noted, tend to know far more about their own theories than they do about the official history (and the evidence for the same) which they are challenging.  This is as true of moon-landing deniers and JFK-was-killed-by-the-CIA claimants as it is of Shakespearean authorship question devotees.
The book gives us a historical blow-by-blow of the rise and fall of the Bacon partisans and then the Oxford partisans, and their attempts to win legitimacy for their theories that Shakespeare's plays were written by someone else.  It's a fascinating story, that says more about the philosophical movements of the eras in question ("Higher Criticism" of biblical studies in the Bacon era, and Freudian psychology in the Oxford) than it does about who wrote Shakespeare.
The author does eventually get to that question, in a final chapter which (Spoiler Alert) argues that only Shakespeare could have written Shakespeare (although he collaborated with other playwrights, a common practice at the time, on at least one early play and two or three later ones).  The main evidence for Shakespeare's authorship, in addition to the historically impossible hurdles to alternative theories, seems to be (at least in Shapiro's telling) that his plays were so clearly written with specific members of his company in mind, whose physical characteristics and acting ability (as well as language and singing talents) would need to have been intimately known to the author of the plays, ruling out anyone who wasn't a member of the company, at the time the plays were written and first produced. This theory is backed up by Shakespeare's habit of sometimes mistakenly writing the name of the intended actor for whom the part was written, in lieu of the character, a mistake which sometimes was repeated in early published versions of his works. This renders fairly ridiculous the manner in which Oxford partisans breezily overcome the fact that he died before many of Shakespeare's plays were ever staged, by contending that they were written before Oxford's death, and stored up to be staged later. Ridiculous: the actors who appeared in the plays match the members of the company when they were produced, and many of the parts were clearly written with particular members of the company (active at that specific time) in mind.
A fun book, the last 75 pages or so is all you really need to read if you want to know the basic arguments in favor of the case that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.  

Presence, by Amy Cuddy Audible. 3 stars out of 5. There are some good motivational ideas here, in a book which is a great follow-up to Quiet.  The science of power-posing is, of course, the type of thing which will inevitably be debunked by some new study which fails to replicate Cuddy's results.  But hey, if it works for any particular reader: why not?  There's a reason they test new medicines against a placebo, and we all need whatever placebos help us get through the day more effectively.  Maybe it's even real stuff. Couldn't hurt.  And it makes a strange kind of logical sense.

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright (Vintage Books 2006) Trade Paperback 5 Stars out of 5.  Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt always asks his first-time guests two questions: (i) Was Alger Hiss guilty of being a spy? (Yes-see Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers); (ii) Have you read The Looming Tower? Well, now that I have read this 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner, if I ever go on Hugh's show I'll be able to answer both questions correctly.

The book tells a vitally important story, in a masterfully engaging, fascinating, and compelling style.  It is a book which all Americans living in the post 9/11 world really have a duty to read.  Nevertheless, I didn't get around to it for a long, long time after it was published, and now I regret it.  Here is the history of the men whose writings and ideas created the radical Islamic movement that emerged in the post WWII era, and eventually swept far too much of the Near-East from 1990 to 2000, and lives with us still in the form of ISIS.  The conditions that allowed for this movement to emerge and be successful are many and varied, and all of them need to be better understood.  But mostly, this is a book that will make you angry at the inevitable inefficiencies of big government, as it describes the bureaucratic red tape and intra-agency rivalries that kept anyone in the government from connecting the dots, all of which dots were possessed by our government, but not known to any one person. Again and again, in the final pages of the book, we learn that the FBI asked the CIA for information, which the CIA had but would not reveal, and which would have allowed the FBI, based on the information they already had, to investigate and apprehend the hijackers in time to halt their plans.  Hollywood likes to portray the CIA as dangerous because of its terrible power: a ruthless, omniscient, omnipotent force which can tap into security cameras the world over to hunt down and assassinate its internal enemies including anyone seen talking to Jason Bourne, oh my!  If only.  To anyone reading this book or Legacy of Ashes, it soon becomes very clear that just the opposite is true: the security services of the U.S. Government are, more often than not, dangerous because of their typical bureaucratic governmental incompetence, not because of their efficiency.

Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, by Corey Olsen (First Mariner Books, 2013).  Trade Paperback. 3 stars out of 5. I loved the Hobbit when I first read it in the 5th grade, as an assignment from the director of a children's play version I was acting in, for the Las Vegas Rainbow Company.  I played Fili. But then I read the Lord of the Rings at some point after 6th Grade and I was never able to get all that excited about The Hobbit again. This book helped to remedy that, pointing out some of the literary and mythological techniques and ideas that Tolkien is playing with in this sometimes whimsical and sometimes grim children's story.  Highly worth reading for any true fan of Middle Earth.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  J.K. Rowling Audible CD. 4 stars out of 5.  Many of my fondest memories involve driving with our children to, around, and back home from a Southern California vacation, while listening to Jim Dale narrate a Harry Potter book on CD or audio-cassette. There's only two children left to take on such trips now, but since we were going to the new Harry Potter World at Universal Studios, this was the perfect book to listen to while we were underway, and to finish up while commuting after we got back.  I'm pretty sure this is my favorite of the 7 volumes. In the final book, Rowling stumbles a bit in her first attempt to write a classic fantasy quest story. But this penultimate book is the last one set at a Hogwarts, a place Rowling has gotten better and better at writing about since the first book. So she is in her top Bildungsroman form here, and she knows just how to exploit the natural opportunities for humor that would present themselves amongst a group experiencing not only wizardry but also adolescence.  Additionally, we finally get the background information we need, both to better understand the earlier volumes (especially book 2), and to set up the basic problem of the final book, while leaving just enough mysteries unsolved for a final resolution at the right time.  But mostly, I love all the trips into the Pensieve, and all the bits that involve both the fake and the real utilization of Felix Felicis.

After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981 (Third Edition 2007) Kindle 5 stars out of 5.  Like a lot of political and social conservatives, I spend some of my time wondering what exactly caused the modern world to be so screwed up.  This book offers an answer: when mankind stopped believing in humanity's telos, i.e., the revealed (from a religious viewpoint) or rationally discernible (from an Aristotelian viewpoint) purpose of a human being, and of a human community, it lost, along with it, any rationally justifiable basis for traditional morality. This was demonstrated, argues the author, by the ultimate failure of the many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers who attempted to create a rationally defensible basis for morality in a post-telos world. If we wish the world to be restored to a place where human beings can flourish, we need to reject Nietzsche, recapture the Aristotelian viewpoint, and the communal projects, that were available to earlier eras.  There are some amazing insights in this book, about our modern misuse of moral terminology we no longer understand in its proper context; about the triumph of emotivism in modern political arguments; about Nietzsche and King Kamehameha II and Jane Austen, and about the pros and cons of earlier eras of Western Civilization.  The nuances of the book should have been harder to follow than they were, as the author's arguments depend on a knowledge of philosophy and history which I have never obtained (thanks again John Dewey).  But the writing is clear and explicit enough to allow the basic premises to be followed, even when the syllogisms take several paragraphs, or chapters, to come together.  Might just be the most important book of the 20th Century.  Absolutely fascinating.

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Currently reading:

Seven Men, by Eric Metaxas