“O believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”
“Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”
What is a “resonant voice”? A resonant voice can only be discerned after you hear a multitude of voices. It is a voice that you ought to hear, that belongs to you, that vibrates on your ear, consoling when you are downtrodden and guiding when you are lost. It is a voice of inexhaustible pleasure and needful wisdom, never stifled by the tyranny of time or the vicissitudes of life. It is a voice that treats your dark inertia, risks your securities, heals your hidden wounds, deepens your faith, awakens your somnolent imagination, expands your imperfect sympathies and shapes your “Final Vocabulary” (Richard Rorty: “All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, somewhat prospectively and somewhat retrospectively, the story of our lives.”)
MY RESONANT VOICES: Books for Life
1. THE BIBLE (English Standard Version, New King James Version). “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps 119:105). “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12).
2. SAINT AUGUSTINE. Confessions, The City of God. The autobiography of Augustine is the biography of every Christian. His prayers and tears are my prayers and tears. He reminds me of a terrible truth, “Without God, what am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?” Consequently, “nothing is nearer to God’s ears than a confessing heart and a life grounded in faith.”
3. SOREN KIERKEGAARD. Complete works. Kierkegaard teaches me how to become a Christian, how to become a “Knight of Faith” as opposed to a “Knight of Infinite Resignation,” how to exercise “faith by virtue of the absurb,” how to behold the prodigious paradoxes of faith.
4. HENRY DAVID THOREAU. Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Thoreau exhorts me to be awake and alive in the world, to shed the superfluities of the spirit.
5. BLAISE PASCAL. Pensees.
6. SIMONE WEIL. Waiting for God, Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots.
7. PLATO. Complete works. Plato acquaints me with the miracle of the dialogical encounter.
8. DANTE. The Divine Comedy. No imagination has ever been fired with greater truths about the destiny of man, the rewards of virtue, and the punishments of vice.
9. DOSTOEVSKY. The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from the Underground, Demons.
10. ROBERT FROST. Complete poems, prose, and plays.
11. SHAKESPEARE. Complete plays.
12. C. S. LEWIS. Essay collection. Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Miracles, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, The Abolition of Man, Four Loves, Surprised by Joy. Christianity has never been more commendable than in the writings of Lewis, whose gifted analogical imagination makes the faith intelligible, challenging and seductive. No one has done a finer job of holding the Fact and Myth of Christianity together. His translation of theology into the vernacular is poetic, even magical.
