Jesus
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not "perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” (John 3:16-17)
Martin Buber
“In the relation to God, unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one. For those who enter into the absolute relationship, nothing particular retains any importance—neither things nor beings, neither earth nor heaven—but everything is included in the relationship. For entering into the pure relationship does not involve ignoring everything but seeing everything in the You, not renouncing the world but placing it upon its proper ground. Looking away from the world is no help toward God; staring at the world is no help either; but whoever beholds the world in him stands in his presences…” (from
I and Thou)
C.S. Lewis
“When I attempted a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light… For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can, no one cares. Now, a scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable Something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in the universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, the bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.” (from
The Weight of Glory)
Terrence Malick
Badlands (1972)
Days of Heaven (1978)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
The New World (2005)
Martin Heidegger
“Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance—as this being of truth in the work and as work—is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object.” (from “The Origin of the Work of Art.”)
Saint Paul
“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (I Corinthians 13:12)
Marshall McLuhan
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.” (from
The Medium is the Massage)
Sufjan Stevens
And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
(from “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s long dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it, He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” (from
The Great Gatsby)
Yasujiro Ozu
Tokyo Story (1953)
George Steiner
“All representations, even the most abstract, infer a rendezvous with intelligibility or, at the least, with a strangeness attenuated, qualified by observance and willed form. Apprehension (the meeting with the other) signifies both fear and perception. The continuum between both, the modulation from one to the other, lie at the source of poetry and the arts.” (from
Real Presences)
Paul Tillich
“What is the nature of a being that is able to produce art? Man is finite. He is, as one could say, mixed of being and nonbeing. Once he was not. Now he is and some time he will not be. He is not by himself, but thrown into existence and he will be thrown out of existence and cease to be for himself. He is delivered to the flux of time which runs from the past to the future through the ever-moving point which is called the present. He is aware of the infinite. He is aware that he belongs to it. But he is also aware that he is excluded from it… Out of the anxiety, and the double awareness that we are finite and that we belong to infinity from which we are excluded, the urge arises to express the essential unity of that which we are in symbols which are religious and artistic.” (from
On Art and Architecture)
Dorothy Sayers
“Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians’ truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements.” (from
The Mind of the Maker)
Over the Rhine
What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be.
Lord knows we've learned the hard way all about healthy apathy.
And I use these words pretty loosely.
There's so much more to life than words.
(from “Latter Days”)
Soren Kierkegaard
“He will grant thee a hiding place within Him, and once hidden in Him he will hide thy sins. For He is the friend of sinners... He does not merely stand still, open His arms and say, 'Come hither'; no, he stands there and waits, as the father of the lost son waited, rather He does not stand and wait, he goes forth to seek, as the shepherd sought the lost sheep, as the woman sought the lost coin. He goes--yet no, he has gone, but infinitely farther than any shepherd or any woman, He went, in sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.” (from
Training in Christianity)
Richard Linklater
Before Sunrise (1995)
Waking Life (2001)
Before Sunset (2004)
George MacDonald
“In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them.” (from
The Voice of Job)
Emily Dickinson
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth –
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity
John Steinbeck
“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.” (from
East of Eden)
Bob Dylan
He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see her anywhere.
He told himself he didn't care,
pushed the window open wide,
Felt an emptiness inside
to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.
(from “Simple Twist of Fate”)
Walker Percy
“What is the malaise? You ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.” (from
The Moviegoer)
Sofia Coppola
Virgin Suicides (2000)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Kathleen Norris
“Church is to be participated in and not consumed. The point is not what one gets out of it, but the worship of God; the service takes place both because of and despite the needs, strengths, and frailties of the people present. How else could it be?” (from
Dakota)
Marilynne Robinson
“Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!” (from
Gilead)
N.T. Wright
“Preaching the gospel means announcing Jesus as Lord of the world; and, unless we are prepared to contradict ourselves with every breath we take, we cannot make that announcement without seeking to bring that lordship to bear over every aspect of the world.” (from
What Saint Paul Really Said).
David Bazan
It's weird to think of all the things
That have not been keeping up with the times
It's ten o' clock the sun is down
Just begun to set the western hills on fire
I hear that you don't change
How do you expect to keep up with the trends
You won't survive the information age
Unless you plan to change the truth to accommodate the brilliance of man
The brilliance of man
(from “Letter From a Concerned Follower”)
G.K. Chesterton
“Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impression and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvelous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy.” (from
The Everlasting Man)
Gus Van Sant
Elephant (2003)
Paranoid Park (2008)
Solomon
"I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor--it is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him. That which is has been already and that which will be has already been, for God seeks what has passed by." (Ecclesiastes 3:10-15).
Jack Kerouac
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” (from
On the Road)
St. Augustine
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee..."
Martin Luther
“Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen."
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
The Son (2002)
The Child (2005)
;
The Search 
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David Foster Wallace, eat your heart out…
See here:
http://periphery.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/refusniks-for-jesus/
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Hey!
Season 1 of the OC was great!
As i said before: this article has some genuine insights and will likely be helpful to some folks. But ironic appreciation in youth culture can’t be rightfully understood apart from the dynamics of economic class and the the aspiration to middle-class respectability. Irony functions as a means of sublimating anxieties related to economic inequality without directly engaging questions of class. You don’t really get into that. Thus, your pun on Richard Florida is left curiously unfulfilled.
Your article reminded me of something called the “New Sincerity” which I was introduced to by The Sound of Young America’s Jesse Thorn. The link below is his explanation of it.
In light of the CS Lewis quote you mention especially, I think Christianity offers a very broad foundation for recognizing the awesomeness of life around us.
http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2006/02/manifesto-for-new-sincerity.html
Hi, Brett, this is Jenny, I do still intermittently drop by, and I just wanted to say that I think this article is FANTASTIC. I think you really hit the nail on the head in terms of the causes of the phenomenon in our culture; it’s a defense mechanism against people who claim in all earnestness to know the sacred, the sure, or the sacred things with surety.
It seems me to be not only a reaction against the ways in which these people fail – when earnestness isn’t enough, when intentions and/or religious fervor are misguided or accidentally white, dorky, or simple – but also against what seems to be the biggest no-no of all: any kind comfort, contentment, or happiness in an unhappy world.
While we (as Christians or otherwise) obviously shouldn’t be totally comfortable and content with anything on this earth, fundamentally because it really is “less than perfect”, I think that ironic culture also largely resents people who feel like they’ve got it “figured out” to any even minor level simply because they think they’ve got it “figured out”.
Granted, there have been a lot of unhelpfully self-satisfied people down through the ages, in both Christian and white-middle-class Full House circles, but it seems like a lot of the superiority of the ironic class is directed towards people who think they’ve got anything happily figured out when no one can possibly grasp the significance of the whole world, or even state the meaning of life clearly. Consequently, the ironic class loses the ability to distinguish between people who think they’ve got “everything figured out” a demeaning, belittling way, and people who think they have “some things figured out” – like the basic truths of Christianity – and are struggling towards a fuller understanding of that happiness, somewhat confusedly. Along the way, they label being “simple” or “naive” a worse crime than being “prideful”, “bitter”, or worst of all – “childlike”. The kingdom of irony is definitely not made up of such as these.
I think that this is one of the real dangers of the culture – the idea that we should reject any kind of contentment, happiness, or innocent enjoyment just because not all the chips are down, not all the tangles are combed out, and we’re not five years old. There’s a powerful mixture of jealousy and superiority that goes along with viewing someone who is both happier and more clueless than you, and I think this is, in large part, what the ironic culture seeks out when it chooses its targets.
It’s tempting to be snide about the fatuousness of people who get excited about riding in the cool youth group van or singing the dorky praise songs, and to get fatuous in our own snideness, as though we think that somehow being less happy ought to make us superior, de facto. It seems like that’s the point at which the logic of the ironic culture breaks – when you realize that its conclusion is that the less happy is, in point, superior.
And while it is true that we shouldn’t ever be totally “happy” with riding in a church van or happy at all with the idea that we’ve got it all figured out and the world is simple, it also seems true that any mentality that rejects innocence and happiness per se is on the fast track to ruin.
Actually, the whole time I was writing this, I had a quote from Evelyn Waugh in my head that I couldn’t quite remember in which he says that all our hatred of the simple, innocent, and uninformed is jealousy. It’s something that I agree with and disagree with quite violently; I think I disagree with it in a way that means it must be true.
At any rate, I didn’t find it, but I did find a passel of other Waugh quotes that seemed to address the same subject:
“Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”
— Evelyn Waugh
…I don’t know if you’ve read much Waugh, but he was definitely one of the most superior ironists and satirists of his generation, and as I flipped through a webpage of his quotes – mostly from Brideshead Revisited – I was suddenly struck how this bitter irony isn’t all that new – in some ways, it seems to fit most strongly with the ‘smart set’ after WW1, addressed as ‘the Clevers’ by C.S. Lewis in his _Pilgrim’s Regress_.
It seems that the loss of belief in anything in our generation has had an effect not wholly unlike the losses the culture suffered in World War 1. Not perfectly like, but in some ways, strong enough to note.
Jennifer Anne –
I think your response is spot-on. One question: throughout your comment, you link innocence and happiness. Is it at all possible to de-couple them? To imagine a childlike disposition, an innocent orientation to the world, into which an awareness of pain / imperfection / injustice / suffering is nevertheless folded? To imagine a person who is, say, innocent but perceptive? Innocent yet uncomfortable, unhappy?
That would take the force out of the defense of irony implicit in your comment. (Though we should make a distinction between literary irony and the puerile irony of everyday conversations and attitudes. I’m quite happy to give up the latter, nervous about a gag-order on the former.)
I think a next step in this theo-ethical exploration of irony would be to look at the New Testament call to innocence, to construct a biblical / theological definition of “innocence” (could we perhaps see it as a cognitive and spiritual ability rather than as a marker of inexperience and cluelessness?).
Irony doesn’t just rip the scales off clueless eyes: it hurts our ability to get genuinely excited about *anything*, and I think it damages our ability to take each other seriously.
Oh, definitely, but thanks for making the point! I don’t really think you have to look much further than Alyosha Karamazov for a spotless example, or, really, any of the ‘holy fools’ of the Russian literary tradition, or most of the greatest and most alarming saints – Saint Francis jumps to mind quickly. :)
I was quoting Evelyn Waugh in my follow-up – I also think his character Cordelia from _Brideshead Revisited_ is supposed to fulfill this role in an explicit way, in contrast to the other characters. She can border on inexperience and cluelessness at points, but in the end, I think the reader is supposed to get over their initial disdain and realize that they are the ones left inexperienced and clueless in their cynicism. I don’t know if you’ve read that – I can never figure out whether it’s obscure or not!
I think this is really the position that Christians are *supposed* to occupy on this planet, pure in our own moral actions and yet saddened by the destruction around us. Unfortunately, I think that sin obviously keeps us from reaching this lofty goal, so, ironically, flipping those words around – to ‘not innocent, but happy’ – is a good way of describing people who are on the journey towards this end, working out their salvation in fear, trembling, and a struggle to regain innocence lost – but with ultimate hope, and thus, at base, happiness. I think that writers like Lewis, Chesterton, and others who emphasized both measuring the brokenness of human actions and their wonder urge this viewpoint in their nonfiction.
>>(could we perhaps see it as a cognitive and spiritual ability rather than as a marker of inexperience and cluelessness?)
Oh man, my favorite Chesterton essay in the entire world is all about this; it’s called “A Piece of Chalk”, and in it, he urges his audience to look at the color white – standing for purity, which is basically the same thing as innocence – not as an *absence* of other colors or blemises (INexperience, clueLESSness), but as a positive flaming virtue and state of mind. I don’t know if this thing likes HTML or not, but here’s the link: A Piece of Chalk.
I was just re-reading my comment (stupid time to proofread, Jenny) and realized that it’s hard to say ‘innocent and yet unhappy about the evil around’ without sounding like I’m calling for self-righteous condescension. Bummer.
It’s actually funny how people who embody that mentality, come to think of it – innocent but deeply aware of unhappiness in the world around them – are some of the people who seem upon description the worst. What an annoying and self-satisfied, or at least boringly unflawed and unrealistic character Alyosha Karamazov is when you describe him – in some ways, even moreso his mentor Father Zosima – and yet, in the end, they are some of the most memorable and transcendent personalities in all of our literary canon.
The discussion above is great, Jenny & Periphery.
2 comments: I think we should notice the social location of earnestness and irony. In Brett’s article, the earnestness that the ironic class reacts against happens at the level of the Cold War, mass advertising, cultural phenomena like rising divorce rates. In some of the defense of irony from Purdy and related discussion, irony is a defense against individual pride, taking one’s self to seriously. Without resources other than snarky irony, resources that build constructively at levels other than how seriously we take ourselves, will the ironic class enjoy itself, see the world better, but effectively cede the field to those still willing to be earnest and dangerous (think earnest writers of legal briefs endorsing torture)?
Second: maybe the rise of irony makes ours an especially exciting time for Christians. To be earnest/innocent in a Christian way in the midst of the ironic class requires the virtue of courage. Staring down the snark with a Biblical, theologically thought out innocence would be a courageous action and engaging calling.
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Awesome article!!!