People have raised up an entire mythology around Revelations and endowed it with all sorts of meaning it never had. It was intended for a very small, specific audience — seven specific churches at a specific moment in history — and only those few could truly understand its message. But it was so beautifully written, all those wonderfully cryptic predictions and wildly creative images. It took on a life of its own.

First came the true believers, then the curious scholars, then the agenda-mongers, and then the flood of those who ably regurgitate the religion but are secretly baffled by the book itself. They loudly pledge their allegiance because they desperately fear being “left behind.”

I closed IJ at about pg 400. I am not this book’s intended audience. My soggy moment of epiphany, if you’re interested:
http://tinyurl.com/npcjm2

the post wasn’t very well developed but you can’t hit a home run every time. chill out.

As is well known in Europe (and I suppose states-side too), Sartre threw a monkey-wrench into the confraternity of his disciples by spending more and more time with his personal secretary, Benny Lévy, who was in the process of converting back to Judaism, and in the same stroke in fascinating the old, blind French philosopher way beyond what the usual Sartriens could stomach. It’s as if this former Egyptian who left his native country, first for Belgium then for France, where he became a Maoist revolutionary before putting an end to that around 1973, and to whom Giscard offered French citizenship after Georges Pompidou had refused years earlier.

The interior monologues in IJ are superb, and will remain a challenge for years to come: how to separate who is speaking, which voice from which world, the underworld or this one? I can’t help but compare this interior dialogue with the dialogue of the last years of Sartre’s life, when he jettisoned much of his existentialist philsophy, and the sum total of everything he had to say about the Jews, by way of listening up to an inner voice echoed in the still strong accented voice of his secretary become friend.

So why do I bring this up? to suggest, simply, that the question is not one of belief or of atheism. Many of Benny Lévy’s friends complained that it was hard for them to follow him into the labrinth of Talmudt-Torah, since they could not share his experience of conversion, his return to his original Jewish being. to this Lévy answered: bullshit. the question has nothing to do with belief. But everything to do with observence and study. Belief or disbelief are simple klipa: the rind or shell or glass around the pulse of the heart.

Sartre was fascinated to see this authoriatarian revolutionary who for so long had suffered from a kind of inner exile (close to the solipsism that DFW struggled with throughout his adult life) that did not stop him from being an effective leader and charismatic figure in the political struggles of France and Germany in the early 70s, slowly but surely come full circle to an appreciation of the power of the letter to maintain an exteriority with respect to the 1003 mind games we all play.

A parting shot. No study has been published (to my knowledge) concerning the reactions of Protestants, Catholics and Jews to the viral growth of the entertainment industries in the twentieth century.

Another parting shot. We know now what the bottom is in AA. There is an equivalent in the Jewish tradition. The Maharal of Prague puts it with customary concision: There is no redemption (guéoula) that does not begin with Galout: exil, or bottoming out. I agree with Greg Carlisle: it’s high time we stopped arguing and set ourselves to work.

I simply (I am simple, I’ll admit) thought it was an elaborate explanation for why we need to trust DFW and read the book. It recalls some of the earlier discussions on whether an author is omnipotent or not.

Anyway, interesting, especially since I have read the bible, whereas I only saw Hamlet, the movie, and if it weren’t for another book I read in between IJ passages, I would have forgotten who Poor Yorick was.

I am not an English major, or a liberal arts major of any kind, and I rarely get the references literature is supposed to be saturated with, so I appreciate these posts, stretch or not.

I kind of feel, in general, that the guides have lost interest in the book – they all seem to be behind the reading schedule and sort of lackluster in the effort they put into their posts, not to mention the fact that I think a couple of them don’t even like the book. Meanwhile, a bunch of blogs have sprung up (Infinite Tasks, Infinite Zombies, Infinite Detox, etc) that are way more fulfilling to read. I think the service that the guides gave us was setting up this project and website and initially spurring discussion, but beyond that, I feel that the heart of it has been passed into more thoughtful, thorough hands.

So – at least this post was written by someone who thought it worthwhile to form connections between IJ and another text about the story of life/humanity (albeit fictional as well).

I just don’t buy it. Marathe isn’t tempting Steeply out there. As someone stated before, a lot of these connections sound like something written in middle school or high school just before its due.

The Bible is a huge, sprawling work put together from segments centuries apart, written by multiple authors. And when you’re dealing with topics as broadly as in the Bible, you’re inevitably going to find traces of these things in modern works.

Damn. Now I’m going to have to reread that segment. As if I have all the time in the world to read IJ or something…

This statement of aesthetics sounds a lot like Tolstoy (another one of those guys way-too-smart to be religious in “What is Art?” which DFW references in his intro to BAE 2007*. In that essay he (DFW) also argues against those who delete “all parts of reality that do not fit the narrow aperture of, say for instance, those cretinous fundamentalists who insist that creationism should be taught alongside science in public schools, or those sneering materialists who insist that all serious Christians are as cretinous as the fundamentalists” (xxiii).

To argue that religion (not to speak of spiritual crisis) and intellect are incompatible is adolescent, and simply incorrect. See Tolstoy, CS Lewis, TS Eliot. There are many contemporary examples, too: the writer Mary Gordon, Anne Lamott, Garry Wills. Etc.