CHAPTER 34
Taking a Hiatus from Writing this Summer
“The most essential gift for a
good writer is a
built-in, shockproof shit
detector.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Set your house in perfect order before you
criticize the world,” said professor Peterson in Rule 6 of his 12 Rules for Life, and though I may not
have my metaphorical house in as perfect order as I long for it to be, I work
on myself daily; but I do have house-responsibilities that I have neglected for
years, starting with painting the house which I began last summer but never got
to finish, and some personal health issues to attend to (dental work, losing
some weight, and, despite my heart condition, try to get into better shape).
And I have a stack of books to read for this story; so, I’m going to take a
hiatus from writing this summer and just do some editing, and probably write
the odd musing, because when my oracle calls for a spiritual musing I have to write it because they expand the
horizons of my individual way; and as
for criticizing the world, I’ll leave that for my muse to work through…
Penny
went to work yesterday morning (she’s a Hallmark rep), and after she did her
work at her Collingwood stores, she was nudged to go the Georgian Downs casino in
Innisfil, just south of Barrie. The casino gods were good to her, and she came
home with another win (eight hundred dollars this time) which totally surprised
me, because last week she was also nudged to go to the casino and won enough to
cover the purchase a new mattress and box spring for our spare bedroom that she
kept putting off.
Out of
curiosity, she had gone online to see which stores in Barrie offered the best
deal, and she settled on Mike the
Mattress Guy, which, coincidentally, was on Mapleview Drive on her way to
the Georgian Downs casino in Innisfil.
“Hi Mike,” she said, with a wave her hand on
her way to the casino. “Maybe I’ll see
you on the way back.” Which she did, and they delivered the mattress and
box spring two days later, with no delivery charges; so, it came as another surprise
when she pulled into the driveway yesterday with another I-can’t-believe-it smile
on her face. “I got you some gravity money,” she said, and handed me four
hundred dollars. “Half for you and half for me,” she added, with a beaming
smile. And then she went to the car and came back with a box of books that I
had ordered from Amazon. “I said to myself on the way home, wouldn’t be nice if
O’s books came in today?” she said. “They weren’t supposed to come in till tomorrow,
but I thought I’d check the mail box just to see. Now you have your gravity
money and new books to read. It’s been a good day for the O and Penny Lynn,
wouldn’t you say?”
“Our
little corner of joyful plenitude just keeps getting better and better,” I said,
with a tear in my eye; and I got up and kissed her.
“Gravity
money” is a concept I came up with twenty-some years ago, drawn from my belief
in “The Mathew Principle” (taken from Christ’s Parable of the Sower, Math. 13:
12: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be
given; and he shall have more abundance…”), which can simply be expressed
as like attracts like, or much gathers more, and I make a point
of carrying three or four hundred dollars of gravity money in my wallet, not just
for emergencies, but because I believe in the spiritual law of attraction (The Secret, a best-selling book by
Rhonda Byrne that was also made into a movie, was based on the law of
attraction); and, coincidentally, Penny had just asked me the day before she
was nudged to go to the casino again how my gravity money was holding out, and
I told her that I had to dig into my gravity money the last few times I went
into Midland to pick up my weekend papers and groceries. I had overspent our
weekly grocery money and had to dip into my gravity money; and, as “luck” would
have it, yesterday Penny replenished my gravity money when she came home from
the casino because I was down to forty dollars. Go figure!
Professor
Peterson’s ponderous tome Maps of
Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (over 500 larger-than-normal pages and in
smaller print) had arrived the week before from Amazon.ca, which was where I
had to order it from because Amazon.com did not have it, and I was well into it
already (it’s not the easy read that 12
Rules for Life is and demands close attention), and the box from Amazon.com
that Penny brought home along with her casino winnings contained the books that
I felt compelled to read this summer because I had to digest the authors that
had such a powerful influence on Jordan Peterson’s journey of self-discovery: The Will to Power, by Friedrich
Nietzsche. Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
edited and translated by Walter Kaufman, which included: The Birth of Tragedy, Seventy-five
Aphorisms from Five Volumes, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals;
The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo; Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s novels Demons and The Idiot, plus Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, which included: Notes from Underground, The Gambler, A
Disgraceful Affair; The Eternal Husband, The Double, White Nights, A Gentle
Creature, and The Dream of a
Ridiculous Man; a collection of stories called Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, which included: The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Cossack,; Family
Happiness, The Devil, The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, Father Sergius, Hadji
Murad, and Alyosha the Pot; and
of course, The Gulag Archipelago,
abridged version, authorized by the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; plus a book
strongly recommended by professor Peterson which I did not have in my personal
library on C. G. Jung: The Origins and
History of Consciousness, by Erich Neuman, with a forward by Jung. An
impossible amount of reading for one
summer, but I hope to read what I can just to be true to my mentor’s literary
credo that credits his iceberg theory with leaving out of a story only what the
writer knows from experience, which gives the story it’s emotional impact. As
Hemingway explained his iceberg theory of writing to George Plimpton for the Paris Review, speaking about his novel The Old Man and the Sea:
“I’ve
seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a
school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and
once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that
out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the
knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.” (Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by
Larry W. Phillips, from GEORGE PLIMPTON, “An interview with Ernest
Hemingway, The Paris Review 18,
Spring 1958).
I’ve already
read something by all of these authors (except for Eric Neuman), but not enough
to give my book One Rule to Live By: Be
Good all the literary gravitas that it deserves for maximum emotional
impact on the reader—as if the incredible
story of own journey of self-discovery doesn’t have enough existential (and
metaphysical) density!
But reading
more Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn will deepen my consciousness
of the unbearable anguish of their existential predicament (and Jordan Peterson’s),
which will then be “implied” (as Hemingway believed) in my story One Rule to Live By: Be Good and speak
more impactfully to the resolution of the existential predicament of our crazy modern
world that Jordan Peterson addressed with disarming honesty in his
character-building book 12 Rules for
Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
But if I
don’t finish reading these books before I get back to One Rule to Live By: Be Good (which I seriously doubt), I’ll finish
reading them whenever I can. After all, who’s to say how much gnostic gravitas a
book needs to win a reader’s confidence?
Until the
leaves turn color, then…
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