I’m feeling quite royally uninspired right now … tired from a wakeful night, and still getting over a nasty cold that knocked me sideways. Trying to be disciplined about blogging and thinking the topic will come to me? So it’s Tuesday night, I’m listening to a new mix I made for a friend and getting ready to try to go to bed early.
Have been listening to Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope while I drive. The man is an elegant writer and an inspired orator. He pleases me by reading his own work. There are few things I’m struck by, listening to this book.
One is how little I know about American history. How astonishing and pathetic is it that I got through AP History at Exeter and did not know that social security began during the Great Depression ? Yowee. I’m ashamed. Tomorrow is my first Spanish class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, maybe next up will be an American History class.
Second, Obama writes at length about religion. He speaks about the way that the religious right has tightened its grip on the Republican party, and as I as listening I found myself thinking about the vague unease I feel about evangelical religion. What’s this about? I’ve blogged before about my concurrent envy of people whose faith is a strong backbone in their lives. But as Obama goes on to talk about his own coming to faith, I realized what my concern is. He talks about how science and critical thinking are fundamentally the practice of the possible. And then about how religion is, at its core, adherence to believing in the impossible. He explains how he finally realized he could believe in a higher power, a greater good, God, without abandoning his commitment to the realities of this world. I think this is at the crux of what I struggle with. I am, somehow, suspicious of people who can suspend reality in order to believe – but at the same time, in my core, there is a kernel of stubborn refusal to say that there isn’t a God. I don’t know that I have a real point here (shocker!) but listening to Obama talk about religion helped crystallize some of the contradictory impulses it brings up in me.
In other news, I am reading Love in the Time of Cholera and absolutely adoring it. Marquez’s writing is masterful and I wish I could read it in the original since I know translations inevitably lose something. Somehow I suspect that Spanish 1 tomorrow won’t be enough to get me there!
