Theo Verelst Diary Page 78

Theo Verelst Diary Page

Latest: March 13 2001

I've decided after good example to write some diary pages with toughts and events.

Oh, in case anybody fails to understand, I'd like to remind them that these pages are copyrighted, and that everything found here may not be redistributed in any other way then over this direct link without my prior consent. That includes family, christianity, and other cheats. The simple reason is that it may well be that some people have been ill informed because they've spread illegal 'copies' of my materials even with modifications. Apart from my moral judgement, that is illegal, and will be treated as such by me. Make as many references to these pages as you like, make hardcopies, but only of the whole page, including the html-references, and without changing a iota or tittel...

And if not? I won't hesitate to use legal means to correct wrong that may be done otherwise. And I am serious. I usually am. I'm not sure I could get 'attempt to grave emotional assault' out of it, but infrigement on copyright rules is serious enough. And Jesus called upon us to respect the authorities of state, so christians would of course never do such a thing. Lying, imagine that.

Previous Diary Entries

March 13, 2001

A little graphics program output, jpeg converted, neither the scene nor the rendering algorithm, nor the quality are very intentionally how they are, except for lets say a few fundamental and technical reasons.

Adultery, mysteries, the sound of silence, hello ms robertson

We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files, we like you to learn to help yourself, look around you all you see are symphathetic eyes... God bless you please mss roberson, Jesus loves you more than you will know, oh ho oh, oho oh.

A quote from memory, I knew the simon and garfunkel double album live in central park by heart in highschool, I could sing all the songs, which isn't bad in fact, thats good enough song material, textually, melodically, harmonically, certainly rithmycally, dramatically, and their classics that have partially timeless appeal, probably too because of subjects that I at the time wasn't very consciously aware of, though irony and ambiguity are emotions I could very easily discern and understand.

In a sinfull, evil, and in many ways miserable world the kind of song is quite nice even, I think, and at the time I had comparably thoughs, it isn't depressing music, but I liked some other materials as well for some higher spitits ideas, I think I liked supertramp through some kraftwerk music for the purposes, going over hit songs, attractive dance (funk, some disco), various kinds of abba songs, and in fact though somewhat maybe raw or I don't know what exactly I found queen to be in fact satisfactory uplifting in various ways.

Maybe that's amoung the same lines as me finding hendrix (bbc cd II) excellent for around sleeping time on the walkman I had near at the time, though now when some cultural channel luckily sometimes plays it at night I do find it very pleasant to listen to, but not sleep supporting.

'Don't want to end up a cartoon in cartoon grave yard' Is not a good way of indicating what I would incorrect when using such expression as a description of the maybe somewhat depressing character of the central park experience. I guess I'm trying to express things that should make me spent some time and effort formulating them, as to make them good comparisons, vocabulary choice and more litereary polished sentences that form paragraphs and pages. Thats digressing from the subject of this section, so I'll get back to it in the next, because it is a subject in its own respect, of lower contentwise stature than the essences of many errors in life, but important in maybe clarifying good ways and thoughts, maybe even correcting and in edifying to good, respectable and such for those up to it and willing to aim for such even in this world.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god

The greek and John must have though quite something of their word 'logos', in meaning near enough to our word 'word' as far as I know. Without going into the bible passage in John 1, where Christ is described as having been there before the world was founded, and where he is compared with the word that has become flesh, the idea of words being important John the baptist walked around in camelskin or something similar, his appearence wasn't suit and tie equivalent, and philip, or who again was mentioned as evangelist (ministry wise) in new testament, wasn't described as giving shows for money, jesus himself wasn't medicine woman type of husband family man with good and solid long term work environment, a proper and clean home and a decent savings account and tax paying history, peter and paul and others were put in prison at times, john was in exile later in his life, many lives that changed because of that was divine word becoming flesh after having been promised for a long time were not average or such that circumstances were signs in some major worldly sense that most would look for, except maybe effect, renown, power in various ways, and hopefully riches of a real kind.

Being younger, I wasn't intuitively attracted to 'Jesus Christ, superstar', though I had friends mentioning it, I think mainly because of a combination of calvinist type of thinking, and not seeing the need for the subjects being brought forward in the way they were. Unmature I wouldn't say is the right angle, I didn't share the views that are the basis of certain types of thinking that have their raison d'etre in other lives than mine.

I did like to listen also to ernie ford music, and I guess I liked the idea of movies that examplyfied or were about lives and emotional developments that did work at least reasonably, instead of being like the greek tragedy idea, however reasonable that may in terms of reality check for many. Music and movie and book wise I didn't at all find anything worth while in certain types of christian wanted or superficial simplicity, or obvious and seemingly accepted motivation structures. A lot worse than the discontentments in many other materials, they would be, major yucky. Later, I did read and see and listen to materials from what I considered or assumed to be of christian signature, though not that much of it was satisfactory in the limitation.

There was something in the expressive and content power of a book on the live of Jimmy Swaggart (a preaching /piano player/singer, nephew of jerry lee lewis) I read at the time, that did give me the idea I read something at least in certain ways relevant and satisfactory, story and person wise. Atmosphere wise not the same as the albums I later had (live from nashville, and a studio album, the name of jesus or some other title I don't remember). In many materials I read for the purpose of I guess some satisfaction maybe edification or other effect, I didn't realy find what I was looking for, as far as artforms or recorded utterances or stories go.

After rendering more relative the meaning of the wrapping, it is not unimportant that words with meaning are expressed right. There seems to be reason for humadn beings that words may indeed be so important that such an supernormal concept as the son of god amoung man is compared to the word becoming flesh and tabernaceling amoung us.

I find it satisfactory regularly to read material that is well stated and of sufficient strenght, sense, or depth. Why that is probably cannot be expressed as one line and certainly not as a straight one, but integrating over a relatively long time compared to a man's lifetime, I'm sure it is of general and lasting value.

Have a look at this, I quite from new york review of books, the url to read the whole article is here (look in the archives with words from the title for instance, I'm not sure Ican put the cgi url in, it might change):

Nobody’s Perfect
ANDREW O’HAGAN font size="-1">Conversations with Wilder
by Cameron Crowe
373 pages, $35.00 (hardcover)
published by Knopf

The world is full of rooms where young men bow before the masters of their profession. The rooms have changed, and so have some of the professions, but can there be anything new in the way unfledged ambition will dance attendance upon geriatric pride? In 1777, James Boswell interviewed David Hume as the great philosopher lay dying in his Edinburgh drawing room. It was the literary journalistic scoop of the eighteenth century: Boswell in fine feather, deploying every ounce of his ruby-cheeked audacity to shame and to flatter the old man into Christianity as the light went from his eyes. In the event Hume hunkered down with his infidelity, but in every respect the meeting is a classic: a gifted, breathless youngster, puffing his hero to the point of exhaustion, and on from there to the edge of the grave.

Such occasions can be pretty theatrical. Amid the flurry of genuflection and counterpuffery, grand lessons are being learned by the fresh of face, while, on the other side, a grizzled memory is placed at the service of an enlarged posterity. Yet the truly great encounters of this kind show the younger party in both cringing and attacking mode: a genteel male usurpation is quickly part of the picture. “I believe that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew I knew less than any person he had ever met before,” wrote Mark Twain after an hour or so with a young Rudyard Kipling. There’s nothing so wonderfully gross as a young man in love with the possibilities of himself; still, the complications of awe might be among the more stable features of a young writer’s self-regard. “All I can say,” said John Berryman on meeting Yeats, “is that my mouth was dry and my heart was in my mouth.”

In some of these encounters a mock-heroic passing of the torch will be discernible, as well as a mock-private dismantling of the anxieties of influence. To say the least, it’s an odd dynamic. The young man likes to think he’s contemplating a version of himself at the end of a long and distinguished career, and the old wizard, more often than not, will find himself as much petrified as pleased, looking into the avid, devouring face of the future. At any rate, imitation is a meager sauce to the former fashion plate: a true master of his profession would sooner consider himself inimitable, and be feared not only for the density of his reputation but for the few tricks remaining up his sleeve.

Billy Wilder is ninety-one years old. A few years ago he began to be visited in his Beverly Hills office by Cameron Crowe, one of the newer breed of Hollywood directors, best known for Jerry Maguire, a likable, Oscar-winning comedy starring Tom Cruise. It soon emerges, in the book resulting from these meetings, that Wilder and the young director are united by a sense of the wonder of the movies, and by and by they come to isolate a definition of good style. Along the way Wilder is a happy king, a man of achievements and disappointments, a gruff potentate, a Lear, a guru of light touches and Hollywood anecdotes. Crowe meanwhile is a plausible rookie, a hungry mind, a Fool, a lapdog with a laptop, and the Next Big Thing. The two men slightly—and not in any sense unfunnily—fall in love with each other.

“How would Lubitsch do it?” says a sign that hangs on the door of Wilder’s office. And perhaps it would take Wilder’s great mentor himself, the German director Ernst Lubitsch—from whom lovely, humane jokes could always escape, as light and combustible as the hydrogen in the Hindenburg—to truly appreciate the perfect absurdity of Crowe’s attempt to conduct one of his interviews at Wilder’s home, during the course of which the venerable Wilder’s arms and legs are being manipulated by a trusted physical therapist. Billy Wilder’s wife, Audrey, is also present in the room. Crowe writes it up as if it were a script:

I shake hands with Dr. Marks. Marks is clearly ambivalent about sharing his time with Wilder. These physical-therapy appointments are far from drudgery for either doctor or patient, and I soon find out why. While Jeff Marks works Billy out in the bedroom, they use the time to compare their weekly football picks. My presence has thrown the whole rhythm off. But I too am reluctant to surrender my time with Wilder…. Silently, we agree to work together.

March 26, 1998

American Apostle
ROBERT STONE

God and the American Writer
by Alfred Kazin
272 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)
published by Knopf

1.

During the 1997 Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto, Alfred Kazin delivered a talk in a theater at a sumptuous lakeside shopping center on the role of religion in American letters. The lecture was drawn substantially from his introduction to the volume under review.

As Mr. Kazin was concluding his remarks on American writers and their uneasy relations with the numinous, a listener in the row behind me, whom I knew to be Canadian, remarked with bitter humor to his companion: “Why do they have this thing about themselves and God?”

At that point the Holy Spirit descended upon me and I was moved to reply. But it was Toronto and the festival-goer and I had not been introduced and I uttered not a word in spite of my holy excitement. My eye had fallen on him earlier though. The previous evening he had asked a question of a reader that had entailed his use of the phrase “American consumerist culture.”

I might, in the grip of Divine Inspiration, have pointed out to him that the throngs in the mall outside—the fall-fashionable ladies and gents, the handsome families and shoplifting teenagers, seemed to need no wicked example borne across the lake to encourage their apparent avidity for Ojibway-inspired pole lamps, frozen latté, or glass grayling mobiles—all of which they seemed to be snapping up with a wholesomely Canadian inclination toward worldly possessions.

Toronto is such a problem to those of us from God’s Country. It’s clean. Everything works. Crime is discouraged, the subway routes are comprehensible. It’s impossible not to wonder: Where did we go wrong? So I held my peace in the theater, instead of bearing witness as the power of Almighty God inclined, instead of demanding an explanation of the man’s question.

Could he not know, after all, that the Lord had led Americans, alone among the world’s peoples, out of bondage to proud, sinful, popishly anointed kings, from the vain mummery of prelates and the usurpation of posturing noblemen arrayed in office, drawling and strutting as though their pedigrees transcended the limits of their dark conception inter faeces et urinam? These fawners, parading with baubles, heathen honors, and jeweled crosses to adorn their little lives between the stink of the nappy and the stench of the shroud? That to humble them, we, uniquely, had been raised up, appointed a City on a Hill, a light unto the nations?

Probably not. He had come of age during the Vietnam War. All the rest would probably have been news to him. He might even, in invincible ignorance of the Word, have rejected it.

Alfred Kazin begins God and the American Writer by stating:

In the beginning at New England our writers were Calvinists, absolutely sure of God and all His purposes. He created man to glorify Him forever. But never sure of his obedience, distrustful of his innate disposition to sin, God kept man forever under His eye. Each claimed to know the other because there was a covenant between them, a contract. Each was eternally watchful of the other, each apparently needed the other. Nothing in the world around a Calvinist counted so much as his dependence on God, his knowledge of God, his standing with God. And God was as eternally occupied with man as man was with God. They were so bound to each other that to the Romantic poets and scientific rationalists who came in with the Age of Reason, God and man seemed born of each other. No wonder that the Puritans in the wilderness, lacking everything but God, were confident to the last that they knew God’s mind.

The people who were soon to distance themselves from primitive New England, to call themselves “Americans” and to expand until they were all over the continent, had to be restless optimists, boosters and boasters always on the go. The writers who stood slightly apart inherited Calvinism with their distrust of human nature.

What Kazin appears to be describing is the origin of an ongoing tension between, on the one part, a populace whose reaction to its Calvinist roots was to cultivate a certain lack of self-awareness and, on the other, its serious writers, whose role as authentic inheritors of the Calvinist tradition of moral introspection was to refuse them that luxury.

Thus “the individual’s high sense of himself so famous in the American character” developed out of a psychological need permanently at odds with a literary culture that would always be pessimistic, conscientiously self-critical, and on the lookout for the depravity inherent in human nature.

Kazin finds a passage incorporating both attitudes, written in the years before the two tendencies separated themselves, in Increase Mather’s “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation.”

Consider…that some of us are under special advantage to understand these mysterious truths of God; that is to say, such of us as are in an exiled condition in this wilderness…. God hath led us into a wilderness, and surely it was not because the Lord hated us but because he loved us that he brought us into this Jeshimon….
Since then we have not quite been so sure. But the tension around the question has provided the best and most honest of American writing with a level of elemental moral concern that can seem naive to readers far removed from it, including many contemporary Americans. In his brief survey of early poets like Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, Kazin detects a self-annihilating mysticism that already seems to be breaking away from nascent Yankee positivism.

Who spake all things from nothing;
And with ease,

wrote Taylor,

Can speak all things to nothing, if he please.

This “’naive’ devotion on the part of God-enraptured solitaries,” Kazin says, “in a society still colonial could not absorb what Alfred North Whitehead called ’the century of genius’—the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century taking place in their old homeland.” The general rate of literacy of the American settlers was among the highest in the world, rivaled only by that of certain bibliolatrous parts of Britain like the Scottish Lowlands. But the necessities of physical survival led to a society whose proficiency at technical improvisation and practical craft soon outstripped its thoughtful and subversive literature in importance.

One of the most profound works of self-examination in American letters is a work not cited by Kazin, though the historian Richard Slotkin celebrates it at length as an “archetype” in his classic Regeneration Through Violence. It is the first, or at least one of the earliest, examples of a dark mythic element in American writing, the captivity narrative. Its author was a woman named Mary Rowlandson; her work was entitled The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed.

The book was first published in 1682 and underwent many printings over the years, both in the colonies and in London. In his examination of Rowlandson’s book, Slotkin draws parallels between it and other Puritan classics like Michael Wigglesworth’s fearsome theological poem Day of Doom and Jonathan Edwards’s similarly terrifying Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The Soveraignty and Goodness of God may be fairly held to stand as the progenitor and prototype of a long line of American poetry and prose. It was America’s first international best seller. Though it is not fiction, it is a work ...

Musterion, Babuloon he megale, mater te porne

I just saw hineybutt preparing a colporter act while cow was painting her to nails in sitting postiotion in the 'cow and chicken' cartoon. I'm not sure what chicken was up to to prevent having to rule the world, but I found it more fun and refreshing than clinton finding place in a cafe to eat in ny birthtown, however remarkable that may be. It would take half a day bikeride to get there, assuming no punctures, and then what: 'hi I'm so and so, with more than enough education bla bla, I do synthesizer design now, and I'm currently also into bible translation to make sure this world will find only as much damnation and misguidance as it deserves or needs, and I though it might be interesting to make sure that in high leadership places the prayers with the highplaced are also given physical and tangible content to make sure that things don't go all too wrong, or maybe even cvan get better. Oh, and I'm top class computer designer and programmer too as far as I stretch out to be, which is at least of economical relevance, and these combinations at least make me special enough. No so much to visit my birthtown, but since you're here, lets take a strawl at the beach and prevent the great whore adapts to commit adultery in such a way in my place. Or something.

I recently was reminded of the lenghty enough sections on the great whore in revelation, seriously this is strong language and apearently important imagery or comparisons.

"Mystery, babylon the great, mother of harlots and abomincations of the earth" I could quote the whole demichapter or so and not see it as bible proze with some distant and theoretical meaning, and as words, that stands up clear enough, but who is going to call nazism for what it is when it comes up, just like so many other cults. Why do the beatles go off in eastern religeous shit with no appearent reason except maybe wealth, dislike of the world and themselves, lack of power, or excessive riches and incluence and maybe decadence, maybe a similar reason, and maybe the fact that god condemned the world and many deeds and thoughts of its inhabitants because of sin has to do with it, but that is no reason to join bagwan or become spiritual child cuker with some eastern kid being made pathetic. Unless maybe you want free sex, 7 rolls royces, compensation for your own hurt childhood or even worse the doctrines and stupid will of some deamon that promises salvation and eternal bliss, even if that means being god over the whole world.

'I see mystery written all over you forhead', would that have been the reason the scribes rightfully rejected Jesus for not being like them and not accepting their miserable outward religeous, oppressive, hypocrit and sneakish system (all concepts He brings forward himself in quite apt and unambigous language)? No, rather the reverse, although a lot of things at the time weren't clear, and even explicitly not examplified.

Already just that, mystery written on a place where mirroring glasses could even show it to yourself, is a bad thing, it means that someone is delusive, not to be understood on purpose, or even worse, of babylonian character, where such principles are noting compared to the real evil, but with complete and zealous intent used to luer people into a web of lies, a system where their shame and misery and imperffect nakedness are keeping its victims from freedom even to express their most base and relevant emotions and internal whereabouts, and where the subsequent steps built on principles bringing lasting bondage, broken persons, and possible crimes and senseless rules into further and further perdition and damnation.

But of course babylon is great, and the preaching of the mystery inits context of course will not be questioned, and being the mother of the new slaves being sold as whores is one of the aforementioned tricks that the ones making young (or old) ones victims of will be blamed for by as comparison having a millstone around their neck and being thrown in the ocean.

You have to let me keep this secret, so you can keep the secret of your lies and hurt and knowledge that would be dangerous, and then we'l be quite something when the sound of silence is making what is ours the head of so much, and we'll be not desolate and be like a queen, and of course you know all those deamons that so easily find their place in all this are actually the spirits of god and of course they aright to tell you to go straight ahead and make those sacrifices that are so clearly for reasons that only you understand, and have to do with mysteries you alone can realy deal with right, and that are making you almost by definition the greater one, and of course mixing all this up is the right way.

The words in revelation are better, though I dislike the existence of so much miserey in the world, it is satisfactory to see there is something else than the way sof babylon being brought forward clearly and strongly, and at least the essence of the mysteries clearly exposed and countered.

Now is there adultery in the picture here, or is that maybe pretty much the whole idea? Adultery can happen I guess when there is an idea somewhere of a relation like between a man and a woman where attraction playes a role, and where one would suppose that love exists or can exist. Then adultery is the betrayal of the trust in such a relation, in many possible ways, from physically to spiritually. Marrying another, living a life against someone in such a relation, engaging in other relationships in such a way that such a relationship suffers or is damaged I guess are all forms of adulterous behaviour.

So the nazis can role there tanks over the borders and without much resistance can take over things, wrape your lets say girlfriend, and sell her to the turks as arranged bride, does that make her in these outrageously horrible circumstances an adulterer? I would think in the terms even, bit of course such event would do damage.

I guess I'm looking to cover a broad terrain here, because the subject and the related solid thinking is important, and I don't want misunderstandings that could lead to some wannabe rulers claiming I'm not knowledgeable or capable enough and lead many astray in ways that when they include this subject are more damnable and miserable for many than I'm sure most others.

The sound of silence may be preferable not to think about horrible events and people that have been in the past, but it is not appropriate to let mystery have her works on top of it, guided and praised as queen by all babylonian religions, handing her the cup of such horrible deeds that there will be joy in heaven when that whore mother goes down. And all the kings of this world that have commited adulteries with her (at least against god) would better be aware of it that that happens against gods will, and that they will be damned by her doctrines, as well as the residents of their kingdoms. They might want to steep as miserable as to not fight being taken into islams probably comparable damnation as a reaction.

Lets not do that. Neither a jihad or the original wars between religions are going to bring much good in this world, and even though mankind is bad, there is no need to push bringing about gods eventual judgment over all fake religions and leaders. And if we push to fund who is stronger, I'm sure He is, and that there is no need to research wether that will indeed be provable in practice, maybe He's not always loving enough to let you enjoy the correction. Wanna bet?

I don't.

Not with that at stake, and against certainty instead of odds.

The image after the correct rotation (as on my screen)

With some more primitives.

March 26, 1998
American Apostle ROBERT STONE
God and the American Writer by Alfred Kazin 272 pages, $25.00 (hardcover) published by Knopf 1. During the 1997 Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto, Alfred Kazin delivered a talk in a theater at a sumptuous lakeside shopping center on the role of religion in American letters. The lecture was drawn substantially from his introduction to the volume under review. As Mr. Kazin was concluding his remarks on American writers and their uneasy relations with the numinous, a listener in the row behind me, whom I knew to be Canadian, remarked with bitter humor to his companion: “Why do they have this thing about themselves and God?” At that point the Holy Spirit descended upon me and I was moved to reply. But it was Toronto and the festival-goer and I had not been introduced and I uttered not a word in spite of my holy excitement. My eye had fallen on him earlier though. The previous evening he had asked a question of a reader that had entailed his use of the phrase “American consumerist culture.” I might, in the grip of Divine Inspiration, have pointed out to him that the throngs in the mall outside—the fall-fashionable ladies and gents, the handsome families and shoplifting teenagers, seemed to need no wicked example borne across the lake to encourage their apparent avidity for Ojibway-inspired pole lamps, frozen latté, or glass grayling mobiles—all of which they seemed to be snapping up with a wholesomely Canadian inclination toward worldly possessions. Toronto is such a problem to those of us from God’s Country. It’s clean. Everything works. Crime is discouraged, the subway routes are comprehensible. It’s impossible not to wonder: Where did we go wrong? So I held my peace in the theater, instead of bearing witness as the power of Almighty God inclined, instead of demanding an explanation of the man’s question. Could he not know, after all, that the Lord had led Americans, alone among the world’s peoples, out of bondage to proud, sinful, popishly anointed kings, from the vain mummery of prelates and the usurpation of posturing noblemen arrayed in office, drawling and strutting as though their pedigrees transcended the limits of their dark conception inter faeces et urinam? These fawners, parading with baubles, heathen honors, and jeweled crosses to adorn their little lives between the stink of the nappy and the stench of the shroud? That to humble them, we, uniquely, had been raised up, appointed a City on a Hill, a light unto the nations? Probably not. He had come of age during the Vietnam War. All the rest would probably have been news to him. He might even, in invincible ignorance of the Word, have rejected it. Alfred Kazin begins God and the American Writer by stating: In the beginning at New England our writers were Calvinists, absolutely sure of God and all His purposes. He created man to glorify Him forever. But never sure of his obedience, distrustful of his innate disposition to sin, God kept man forever under His eye. Each claimed to know the other because there was a covenant between them, a contract. Each was eternally watchful of the other, each apparently needed the other. Nothing in the world around a Calvinist counted so much as his dependence on God, his knowledge of God, his standing with God. And God was as eternally occupied with man as man was with God. They were so bound to each other that to the Romantic poets and scientific rationalists who came in with the Age of Reason, God and man seemed born of each other. No wonder that the Puritans in the wilderness, lacking everything but God, were confident to the last that they knew God’s mind. The people who were soon to distance themselves from primitive New England, to call themselves “Americans” and to expand until they were all over the continent, had to be restless optimists, boosters and boasters always on the go. The writers who stood slightly apart inherited Calvinism with their distrust of human nature.
What Kazin appears to be describing is the origin of an ongoing tension between, on the one part, a populace whose reaction to its Calvinist roots was to cultivate a certain lack of self-awareness and, on the other, its serious writers, whose role as authentic inheritors of the Calvinist tradition of moral introspection was to refuse them that luxury. Thus “the individual’s high sense of himself so famous in the American character” developed out of a psychological need permanently at odds with a literary culture that would always be pessimistic, conscientiously self-critical, and on the lookout for the depravity inherent in human nature. Kazin finds a passage incorporating both attitudes, written in the years before the two tendencies separated themselves, in Increase Mather’s “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation.” Consider…that some of us are under special advantage to understand these mysterious truths of God; that is to say, such of us as are in an exiled condition in this wilderness…. God hath led us into a wilderness, and surely it was not because the Lord hated us but because he loved us that he brought us into this Jeshimon…. Since then we have not quite been so sure. But the tension around the question has provided the best and most honest of American writing with a level of elemental moral concern that can seem naive to readers far removed from it, including many contemporary Americans. In his brief survey of early poets like Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, Kazin detects a self-annihilating mysticism that already seems to be breaking away from nascent Yankee positivism. Who spake all things from nothing; And with ease, wrote Taylor, Can speak all things to nothing, if he please. This “’naive’ devotion on the part of God-enraptured solitaries,” Kazin says, “in a society still colonial could not absorb what Alfred North Whitehead called ’the century of genius’—the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century taking place in their old homeland.” The general rate of literacy of the American settlers was among the highest in the world, rivaled only by that of certain bibliolatrous parts of Britain like the Scottish Lowlands. But the necessities of physical survival led to a society whose proficiency at technical improvisation and practical craft soon outstripped its thoughtful and subversive literature in importance. One of the most profound works of self-examination in American letters is a work not cited by Kazin, though the historian Richard Slotkin celebrates it at length as an “archetype” in his classic Regeneration Through Violence. It is the first, or at least one of the earliest, examples of a dark mythic element in American writing, the captivity narrative. Its author was a woman named Mary Rowlandson; her work was entitled The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed. The book was first published in 1682 and underwent many printings over the years, both in the colonies and in London. In his examination of Rowlandson’s book, Slotkin draws parallels between it and other Puritan classics like Michael Wigglesworth’s fearsome theological poem Day of Doom and Jonathan Edwards’s similarly terrifying Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The Soveraignty and Goodness of God may be fairly held to stand as the progenitor and prototype of a long line of American poetry and prose. It was America’s first international best seller. Though it is not fiction, it is a work ...