John Gardner, The Art Of Fiction: Notes On Craft For Young Writers

No ignoramus — no writer who has kept himself innocent of education — has ever produced great art. One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one's argument, never understands that the argument is an old one (all great arguments are), never understands the dignity and worth of the people one has cast as one's enemies. Witness John Steinbeck's failure in The Grapes Of Wrath. It should have been one of America's great books. But while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and of the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing of the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to, nor interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil.

James Loney, Captivity: 118 Days In Iraq And The Struggle For A World Without War

The first Remembrance Day was declared by King George V on November 7, 1919. It recalled the Armistice signed the previous year by Allied commander-in-chief Marshal Ferdinand Foch and Germany's Matthias Erzberger in a secret railway carriage hidden in the Compiegne forest. On November 11, 1918, at 11:00 am — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — the First World War was officially over. Twenty million were dead, 21 million wounded. They called it the War To End All Wars.

November 11 is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. Martin is the patron saint of soldiers, cavalry and quartermasters. The US Army Quartermasters Corps established the Order of St. Martin in 1997 to recognize the distinguished service of quartermasters. The website reads: “Saint Martin — the patron saint of the Quartermaster Regiment—was the most popular saint in France during antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It is said that French kings carried his cloak into battle as a spur to victory. Usually pictured on horseback dividing his cloak with the beggar, the image of Saint Martin as a Soldier-Provider offers a fitting symbol for Logistics Warriors charged with SUPPORTING VICTORY now and for all time.” Their website also tells us that Martin's name comes from the Latin Marten Tenens (one who sustains Mars, Mars being the Roman god of war). And that is precisely what quartermasters do — sustain armies by making sure they have everything they need to do their job: gasoline, rations, bullets, boots.

Martin was born in 316 or 317 in the Roman province of Pannonia (now modern-day Hungary). As the son of a senior officer in the Imperial Horse Guard, Martin was forced by law to join the army at the age of fifteen. While on duty at the age of eighteen, he encountered a ragged beggar at the gates of Amiens. Moved with compassion, he cut his cloak with his sword and gave half of it to the beggar. That night he had a dream in which Jesus appeared in the half-cloak he had given away. “Here is Martin,” Jesus said, “the Roman soldier who is not baptized; he has clad me.” Shortly thereafter Martin was baptized.

When Martin was twenty, Julian II ordered him into battle against the Gauls. He refused. “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight,” he told the emperor. (The early Church prohibited the baptized from bearing arms or serving the military under pain of excommunication.) When Julian accused him of being a coward, Martin volunteered to go onto the battlefield unarmed at the head of the column. Julian accepted his offer and threw him into prison. The next day the Gauls sued for peace and the battle never happened. Martin was discharged from the army.

Martin travelled to Poitiers to become a disciple of St. Hilary, the local bishop, and then later joined the monastery at Solesmes. In 371, he was acclaimed Bishop of Tours against his will by the citizens of Tours. As bishop, Martin worked tirelessly for prisoners. A general named Avitianus once arrived in Tours with a cohort he intended to torture and execute the next day. Upon hearing this, Martin went immediately to the house where Avitianus was staying. Arriving in the middle of the night, he threw himself on the threshold and began crying out in a loud voice. An angel is said to have awakened Avitianus, telling him Martin was outside. “Don't even say a word,” he said upon seeing Martin. “I know what your request is. Every prisoner shall be spared.”

In addition, Martin was a staunch opponent of the death penalty. Priscillian of Avila was the leader of a growing heresy that advocated amongst other things, abstinence in marriage. Condemned by the First Council of Saragossa and excommunicated in 380, Priscillian fled to Trier in southwestern Germany. A group of Spanish bishops led by Ithacius wanted Emperor Magnus Maximus to execute him. Although greatly opposed to Priscillian, Martin petitioned the imperial court in Trier to have him removed from the secular jurisdiction of the emperor, arguing this was a church matter over which the secular authority had not power to intervene and excommunication was punishment enough. When Maximus agreed and Martin departed the city, Ithacius persuaded the emperor to follow through with the execution. Priscillian and his followers, beheaded in 385, were the first Christians executed for heresy.

Martin hurried back to Trier as soon as he heard the news in the hope of saving the remaining Priscillianists. Once there, he refused to concelebrate with the bishops who had ordered the executions. Fearing a public scandal, the emperor promised to release the remaining prisoners if Martin shared Communion with Ithacius. Martin reluctantly agreed but then was so overcome with guilt for agreeing to this compromise that he resolved never to attend another bishops' assembly.

It is believed Martin died in 397 at the age of eighty-one. He was buried, at his request, in the Cemetery of the Poor in Tours on November 11.

Irony and paradox. A young man who disobeys a direct order to kill becomes the patron saint of soldiers; a pacifist conscientious objector who leaves the army in disgrace is turned into a warrior icon charged with supporting-victory-now-and-for-all-time. The quartermasters have taken the cloak of St. Martin away from the beggar and wrapped it around the institution of war.

Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis In The Life Of God

There has been something Promethean about the critical labor of turning Christ the Lord back into Jesus of Nazareth, but the transgressive daring of the historical critique must not eclipse the enormity of the original literary offense itself. And that offense, that effrontery, cannot be appreciated unless the God of Israel has first been confronted in all his untamed and terrifying intensity. That of all gods this god should be imagined to have become of all men this man; and that, repudiating everything he had always seemed to be, he should have had himself put to death by the enemy of his chosen people — this is a reversal so stunning that it changes everything back to the beginning. The Rock of Ages cannot die as God; but as God Incarnate, the Rock can be cleft. God, shattered, can descend to death; and when he rises to eternal life, he can lift his human creatures up with him. Victory is postponed in the Christian revision of the Jewish epic no less than in the Jewish original. Yet because that victory is assured, even the poor, even the meek, even the grief-stricken and scorned who in this world must hunger and thirst for justice may count themselves blessed. Theirs, because he made himself one of them, is the kingdom of heaven.

E.L. Doctorow, Creationists

Hemingway is a magnificent artist whose work will outlast Malraux’s because it more clearly honors the literary act for its intrinsic value. But he too has written a political novel expressive of a national myth. His novel as conceived happens to accord perfectly with the American abhorrence for political theorizing, big systematic solutions, and utopian dreams. His aesthetic places the artist’s idea of himself centrally in the American heartland. The notion that we are the self-reliant independent entrepreneurs of ourselves is a national heritage. Working people in the United States, unlike their European counterparts, refuse to identify themselves as a class. They tend to define themselves not by their work but by what they own from their work, or by their ethnic background, or their social activities. For the independent entrepreneur of himself there can be upward mobility, at least across generations, and there is the road—he can hit the road when things go bad, pull up stakes and move on. All this, including the writer’s idea of what he can allow in his art and what he cannot, celebrates our great operative myth of rugged individualism. It is the myth tied to American historical accomplishment. It is a constituent of our freedom. Given a nation of self-reliers, you can make the case for American exceptionalism.

The economic metaphor for this myth is the “free market.” In politics it is a dependable source of a candidate’s appeal. Presidential candidates tend to run as outsiders even though they may come from well-established political dynasties. The current president [George W. Bush] has no patience for the United Nations, wants to go it alone, and has gone to war alone. He advertises himself as the rugged individualist par excellence. Of course, none of this cynical exploitation of a means of our national identity is Hemingway’s responsibility. But it is at least possible that his long-standing popularity with the public and among young writers might be due in part to his service on behalf of a prevailing societal myth. Entrepreneurial self-reliance had come in for some rough treatment from Melville in Moby-Dick, from Dreiser in Sister Carrie, and from Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, but Hemingway found its most romantic face. Distrust of society, a principled loneliness, have been preponderant motifs in our fiction ever since Robert Jordan withdrew from hope for his life and for the antifascist cause and waited for death as he looked out over the barrel of his machine gun on the last page of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

From “Malraux, Hemingway, and the Spanish Civil War,” in Creationists: Essays 1993-2006 by E.L. Doctorow.

Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex

Praying? Well, yes — metaphorically speaking. As you doubtless know if you’re reading this memoir, there is One True Religion; but I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that I was a follower of N’Yar lath-Hotep, or The Sleeper, or any of their nightmarish ilk. My prayers are secular, humanist, and probably futile. It’s one of my character flaws; I was a lot happier when I was an atheist.

Byron Rempel, Truth Is Naked

When the pastor’s daughter was hit by a car and killed, the pastor and his wife were hit even harder by her absence. His wife shut herself in the house, and the pastor found himself unable to help other people in need.

I had a few lingering problems with pastors, the same way I have problems with columnists and politicians and coaches. I thought it very easy to say one thing and do another. I had a deep suspicion of the power of positive thinking since my incident with the wall; it was usually just the crust on the toast. But I had a grudging respect for this pastor, who quit his job and took up long-distance truck driving instead, and whose wife accompanied him on the trips down long and straight highways. He had probably given comfort and advice to his flock before when there was a death in the family, and probably drew from a good stock of reassurances. And when it happened to him and his wife and nobody could give them comfort, they saw they were human. Somehow, I could see the same thing happening to me.

From “Dudley’s Magical Time Traveling Disease,” in Truth Is Naked All Others Pay Cash by Byron Rempel.

Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion Of The Dead

The contract between the living and the dead has traditionally been one of mutual indebtedness. The dead depend on the living to preserve their authority, heed their concerns, and keep them going in their secular afterlives. In return, they (the dead) help us to know ourselves, give form to our lives, organize our social relations, and restrain our destructive impulses. They provide us with the counsel needed to maintain the institutional order, of which they remain the authors, and prevent it from generating into a bestial barbarism.

The dead are our guardians. We give them a future so that they may give us a past. We help them live on so that they may help us go forward.