Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2021‎ (212)

In frantic league, we flailed for ways to end the “sharing” that was dismantling our father’s business and our father. We co

In frantic league, we flailed for ways to end the “sharing” that was dismantling our father’s business and our father. We contemplated a nationwide billboard campaign to remind people of that eternal law, Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?

The days of losing touch are almost gone ………… Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us ………..I picture it like Judgement Day ….We’ll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in Spirit form. We’ll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it’ll seem strange, and pretty soon it’ll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost

So here we are, conniving once again to bump Scotty’s reputation, along with Bosco’s and—let’s be honest—my own and that of everyone else over 60 striving for cultural relevance in a world that seems to happen in a nonexistent “place” that we can’t even find unless our kids (or grandkids!) show it to us. The only route to relevance at our age is through tongue-in cheek nostalgia, but that is not—let me be very clear— our ultimate ambition. Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.

Even so, there are gaps: holes left by eluding separatists bent upon upon hoarding their memories and keeping their secrets. Only Gregory Bouton’s machine—this one, fiction—lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.

I sometimes wonder how biographers do it: make a life, a living life, a glowing life, a coherent life out of all that circum

I sometimes wonder how biographers do it: make a life, a living life, a glowing life, a coherent life out of all that circumstantial, contradictory and missing evidence. They must feel like Julian on campaign with his retinue of diviners. The Etruscans tell him this; the philosophers tell him that; the gods speak, the oracles are silent or obscure; the dreams alarm him this way, his visions propel him that way, the animals’ viscera are ambivalent; the sky says this, the dust storm and the advisory thunderbolt insist otherwise. Where is the truth, where is the way forward? Or maybe consistent narrative is a delusion, as is trying to reconcile conflicting judgements. Maybe you could equally account for someone by a mere list of snagging, indicative facts.

You might think me old-fashioned (but my case is not relevant). You might think Elizabeth Finch equally, if not more, old-fashioned. But if she was, it was not in the normal way, that of embodying a previous generation whose truths had now proved wan and withered. How can I put it? She dealt in truths not from previous generations but previous eras, truths she kept alive but which others had abandoned. … . She was outside of her age in many ways.‘Do not be taken in by time,’ she once said, ‘and imagine that history – and especially intellectual history – is linear.’

‘I am suggesting that we familiarise ourselves with those who oppose us and whom we oppose, whether it be a living or a dead figure, whether it be a religious or political opponent, or even a daily newspaper or weekly magazine.

Her aunt had disparaged the concept of hope with such caustic efficiency that Zorrie had naturally learned to disco

Her aunt had disparaged the concept of hope with such caustic efficiency that Zorrie had naturally learned to discount what had ever been an important part of her nature. If she had done her best to seal up the spring during those early years and then again after Harold’s death, hope had nonetheless often found a way to seep out and surprise her, bow graciously, extend its hand, and ask her to dance. It had done so when she had knocked on the door in Jefferson and found Mr. Thomas with his plums and iced tea and albums standing before her, and it had done so when Gus had decided he liked the way she whistled, and spoke to Bessie about their spare room. Hope had also, certainly, flapped its fair wings for her when a man with a sandwich to share had told her about jobs to be had in Ottawa.

out of this shadow into this sun
running together, the day falls copiously
no shining roof or glittering window
this Palace seems light as a cloud set for a moment in the sky
Our hands touch our bodies burst into fire
And soft green passages and blurry lemon highlights

The crisply chiseled tale of time told by the clocks and watches she had once helped paint faces for came to seem complicit in the agonized unfolding of her grief, so that soon the farm and the surrounding fields and the endless ark of change that enclosed them were the only timepiece whose hour strokes she could abide. Small but sure of purpose within the great mechanism of the seasons, she became a pin on a barrel of wind, a screw in a dial of sunlight, a tooth on an escape wheel of rain. The crops went in, the crops were cared for, the crops came out. The earth rested in its right season, and she with it. If the ache of Harold’s absence descended on her during the quiet months, she would take a rag to it with her mind and rub.

It had become impossible for educated people like us to rest in a worldview that continues unchanged from generation to gene

It had become impossible for educated people like us to rest in a worldview that continues unchanged from generation to generation. That life eternal of humility and prayer, in which nothing was felt as too frightening or shocking, since it was all divinely ordained, and the pageantry of religion offered both drama and mystery, had come to an end with the generation of our parents. But who were we to scorn it? Brought up into a life with little meaning, we had convinced ourselves that meaningful ways of being existed, and we would find them. In reality, this amounted to running this way and that, uncertain of our destination, and looking back enquiringly all the time

‘The terrible thing about the trampled-upon darkies like Virendra is that their claim upon the richness of the world came too late. Just before we entered the endgame of modernity all over the world. Every grand edifice of modernity – growing economies, political institutions, information ecosystems, trust between citizens – is collapsing today, and we all risk being buried alive by the flying debris.’

The British Airways route map came as an early intimation of how, while I was still trying to root myself in a little village, the world had come to be densely interconnected; and how, in this increasingly mixed and irregular realm, the catalogue of available identities had thickened.

Until I met you and your friends and relatives, I hadn’t been able to see your background of global nomadism clearly. Aseem had gone on about the early twenty-first-century globalised man (not woman: did women feature at all, I now wonder, in his vision of a larger emancipation?), but I hadn’t myself noticed the fact that going away for a tiny minority of the world’s population was not an undesirable but an unavoidable solution to an intolerable existence; it was a chosen way of life, a compulsive movement through a world made safe for them by class and education, in which the failings of no society clung to them for too long.

I was always … struck by how, placidly celebrating their good fortune in London, these beneficiaries of global capitalism seemed to have assumed multicultural existence to be the norm; how with such dreamy benevolence they had imagined the future to consist of enlarged freedoms for more and more people.

He was Mo-Maw’s youngest son, but he was also her confidant, her lady’s maid, and errand boy. He was her one flattering mirror, and her teenage diary, her electric blanket, her doormat. He was her best pal, the dog she hardly walked and her greatest romance. He was her cheer on a dreich morning, the only laughter in her audience. …[he] was her mother’s minor moon, her warmest sun, and at the exact same time, a tiny satellite that she had forgotten about. He would orbit her for an eternity, even as she, and then he, broke into bits.

“It’s strange how the discovery of an ancient girl in Siberia and viruses we’ve never encountered before can both redefine what we know about being

“It’s strange how the discovery of an ancient girl in Siberia and viruses we’ve never encountered before can both redefine what we know about being human and at the same time threaten our humanity”

I think the one-sidedness of grief is what allows people, our characters to shape that emotion into distinct experience. The grief isn’t just a product of something that happened to the character but it becomes the character and informs how a character moves through a story.. ….. A grieving character may run away, confront the loss, imagine another life, pour themselves into work, or maybe find solace in someone who is also grieving. One-sided? Sure. If we consider one-sided as allowing those that have suffered a loss to use their grief to create dialogues with aspects of themselves and the dead. And I think whether or not those shadows reciprocate (and coming to terms with some answer) is part of process of healing (and often the end of a story) ….. But to what extent is order and foresight at play during the grieving process? I can’t blame my characters for their trajectories in the same way that I can’t blame myself for a story not arriving at the destination that I had in mind. So, I think it’s more of a collection of pathways of grief with each path being just as worthy as the other. There are no right or wrong ways to deal with a loss. The addition of magic just makes certain pathways that would otherwise go unnoticed more distinct and visible

This is the great challenge for anyone in the workplace: facing difficult decisions and stress with the added uncertainty of how to incorporate your faith into your work life. Joseph captures the inner struggle of choosing what is right versus choosing what is convenient. He teaches us how to work through the moral complexities and dilemmas which we face each day in the workplace. He shows us how to channel our passion for justice with practical and pragmatic actions that impact the world through working with others. His example encourages us to stand up for and speak out on behalf of those who are voiceless—the marginalized and the rejected members of our society.

The portraits of Joseph’s life speak to us all, with easel after easel demonstrating something of relevance to our everyday context and lives. We are looking not at a spiritual giant or a hero of the faith as mentioned in the Hebrews hall of fame, but at a simple businessperson who had encountered the God who spoke for the most ordinary of people.

Affluence can be easily stewarded with generosity in giving or tithing. It is influence that is more difficult to steward.

We need to be the ones in our time to speak, as Joseph of Arimathea did in his, against the prevailing ethos of popular opinion. The passion for freedom and the passion for justice run closely together; in order to be free, we must be just. We must be principled people, quick to obey God’s truths. Joseph of Arimathea broke out of the council’s parochial paradigm. He could see a much bigger picture. In this person of Jesus, there was the Messiah.

Joseph, alone after the council meeting where he defended Jesus’ innocence, forever surrendered the title of admirer of Jesus and exchanged it for the title of follower.

That is often the case when we think that others have the responsibility to speak up or to take action. We think there are others more equipped and in better standing who are better able than we are to fix what is broken. There are others. But this is where things go wrong. We need to learn from Joseph that there are times when it is right to act, irrespective of whether others have a better standing and more responsibility to act.

Like Joseph, … we face the problem of holding together seemingly opposite desires; we want what is best and safest for us, but we also want what is best for others. In business, that’s the conflict between the desire to maximize profit and the understanding of whether that is good for all the stakeholders. I’ve found in situations like this it is best to hold together the tension, but to be clear on what that tension is and to work through the issues both prayerfully but also importantly analytically. But also, it is important to talk through the conflicting thoughts with others so that you can arrive at a consensus or at least some degree of clarity. I find it helpful to name the issue, clarify the pros and cons of the problem, press the envelope, and test the assumptions on my own and with others. Then, and only then, act.

Joseph and Nicodemus show us that it isn’t good enough merely to be followers of Jesus Christ; we must also get our hands dirty doing the work that He calls us to. I have learned over the years that people watch the way I act more than they listen to what I have to say. My identity as a follower of Christ has been seen in the way I have conducted myself in practical settings: from the boardroom to the team meeting to the way I speak to my colleagues. It’s in our practical acts that people can read and see Jesus. For many people, they will read our lives before they ever read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

Our culture is set up for individualism and isolation. We wear AirPods to the gym, we communicate via WhatsApp and text message. We put on our noise cancelling earphones just to get a break from the sheer volume of information being thrown at us on a daily basis. It’s the only way we can cope with the exposure we experience. But something powerful happens when we enter into partnership with others that will never happen in isolation. In isolation you see your reflection, but in partnership you see yourself and the world through the eyes of others. Partnership expands your perspective while helping you achieve your goals faster.

Resurrection light is not just for the people who get all the air time. It’s not just for the Peters and the Pauls. It’s for the hidden figures, the people of the small print, those who feel marginalized as if they are but footnotes to the story of others. Those who, like Joseph, now perceive the world as God intended it to be—redeemed. They have a perspective that reveals their new position in Christ. They see broken things with the potential to be restored. They can see the potential for stagnation and decay to be healed. The power of the Spirit energizes us to engage with such phenomena and to bring change and transformation to our communities.

Her face had changed since the times

Her face had changed since the times I had seen her last. She had always been youthful, so much so that I realised this was tied very closely to my image of her. Yet during the trip, I would look at her profile, her face when it was tired or resting, and realise that she was now a grandmother. Then, just as quickly, I would forget this again, seeing only the same image of her as I had throughout my childhood, which was strangely fixed, only to have this broken again some days later.

As we walked, she asked me about my work. I didn’t answer at first, and then I said that in many of the old paintings, one could discover what was called a pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over. ….I said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.

Inside, everything was done with a certain formality, a certain sense of weight and precision, as if to create a floating world.

There is a reason why I wrote this book for the lay audience, why I chose to focus primarily on people, not machinery, why I hope it will be “user friendly”. And that is because there are no cyber silver bullets: it is going to take people ot hack our way out of this mess. The technical community will argue I have overgeneralized and over simplified, and indeed, some of the issues and solutions are highly technical and best left to them. But I would also argue that many are not techincla at all, that we wach have a role to play, and that the longer we keep everyday people in the dark, the more we relinquish control of the problem to those with the least incentive to actually solve it

On the one hand, retaining a zero day vulnerability undercuts our collective cybersecurity. On the other, disclosing a zero-day so vendors can patch it undercuts intelligence agencies’ ability to conduct [their own] digital espionage, the military’s ability to carry out offensive cyberattacks and law enforcements to investigate crimes …………. “In the 1970s and 1980s Russia was using technology we did not. We were using technology that they didn’t. If we found a hole in their systems, we exploited it. Period. But now it’s not so cut and dried. We’ve all migrated to the same technology. You can no longer cut a hole in something without picking a hole in security for everyone.

I began to think of myself as expelled, an exile …. My father’s letter about not returning [due to the danger and terrible events of the revolution

I began to think of myself as expelled, an exile …. My father’s letter about not returning [due to the danger and terrible events of the revolution] stunned me . Where was I to go if not return? …. For the first time since arriving in England, I began to think of myself as an alien. I realised I had been thinking of myself as someone in the middle part of a journey, between coming and going, fulfilling an undertaking before returning home, but I began to fear that my journey was over, that I would live all my life in England, a stranger in the middle of nowhere.

Gurnah’s itinerant characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life emerging; it is an insecure state that can never be resolved. We find a new version of this hiatus in Gurnah’s .. seventh novel, Desertion, where a tragic passion is employed to illuminate the vast cultural differences in colonised East Africa. The long first part is masterfully forged. Set around the turn of the 20th century it describes how Englishman Martin Pearce, collapsing unconscious in the street, is helped by a local merchant and taken through the city’s labyrinths into a world where the culture and religion are alien. But Pearce speaks Arabic, one of the preconditions for closer contact with the family and for him to fall in love with their daughter Rehana. Gurnah knows full well that the era he is portraying is not, as said in the novel, “the age of Pocahontas when a romantic fling with a savage princess could be described as an adventure” and is uninterested in a melodrama about Martin and Rehana’s scandalous life in Mombasa with inevitable separation as a consequence. Instead, he lets the subsequent parts of the novel revolve around a completely different story of forbidden love a half-century later, but just as marked by the cultural barriers that endure. Perhaps nowhere else does Gurnah so clearly articulate his mission as a writer than in the end of the first section, in a meta-fictitious “interruption”, where the grandson of Rehana, surfaces as the narrator of the novel. He is, by his existence, proof that Rehana’s life did not end in catastrophe but had a continuation, and he now says that the story is not about him: “It is about how one story contains many and how they belong not to us but are part of the random currents of our time, and about how stories capture us and entangle us for all time.” Underpinning the novel is Gurnah’s own youth in Zanzibar, where for centuries a number of different languages, cultures and religions have existed side by side but also fought each other for hegemony. Even if his novels are written in an intriguing alliance with an Anglo-Saxon tradition, the cosmopolitan backdrop provides their distinctiveness. Dialogue and the spoken word play an important role, with noticeable elements of Swahili, Arabic, Hindi and German.

In time I drifted into a tolerable alienness. Living day to day, this alienness became a kind of emblem, indeterminate about its origins. Soon I began to say black people and white people, like everyone else, uttering the lie with increasing ease, conceding the sameness of our difference, deferring to a deadening vision of a radicalised world. For by agreeing to be back and white, we also agree to limit the complexity of possibility, we agree to mendacitties that for centuries served and will continue to serve crude hungers for power and pathological self-affirmations ….. In the midst of uproars about wars, and civil rights and apartheid, with the sense of being present while the pressing issues of our world were being argued over and fought for, I was drawn away from the complicated cruelties that were happening at home. They could not be inserted into this conversation, with its pared down polarities and uncluttered certainties, and I was only able to suffer them in silence and guilt while I was on my own.

And on a different note,' said Byobu, who possessed an intractable inclination to complicate topics, multiplying them. He would open parentheses and not always find an opportune time to close them. This unexpected aperture had a propensity for accepting some new thematic offering. Was this a form of charity, not leaving any idea out in the cold, however removed it may be from the topic that was, for everyone else, at hand? The world loves conversations in straight lines and single-minded strides. Intersections divert. Labyrinths confound. Knots are usually despised, since the days of Alexander, when he was yet to be Great. But Byobu doesn't right his rhizomatic prolongations.

He has to be constantly reminded of the words of Pindar: 'in the Argive way / my tale will be told with brevity.' He sympathizes with the Argives, agreeing in essence with this maxim, and he embraces it for the individual units that make up his stories; but when the time comes to unite them, he can't avoid meandering.

The concierge I realized had been standing beside me
Do not be sad he said. You have begun your own journey
not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories

The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring
anyone can make a fine meal

Clearly, he said, someone must finish the story
which was, I believe, to have been
a love story such as silly women tell, meaning
very long, filled with tangents and distractions
meant to disguise the fundamental
tedium of its simplicities. But as, he said
we have changed riders, we may as well change
horses at the same time. Now that the tale is mine,
I prefer that it be a mediation on existence

Life, my sister said
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it

How heavy my mind is
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface

It is normal, I tell myself, to wonder about how things could have been different. If we had stayed in Prague, if I’d allowed myself to love Morena

It is normal, I tell myself, to wonder about how things could have been different. If we had stayed in Prague, if I’d allowed myself to love Morena; if Nick and I had never left home, if my father had lived a little bit longer, if I could have prevented my brother from falling; if the stonemason, at the moment when Jiří came up behind him, had turned just a second before, had later walked home at nightfall and crossed the bridge into Old Town, and, dark and dusty, painted on the sky, had seen the light drifting low, offering itself to his eyes, the sun shrinking down quickly like a coin dropped into a hat.

I’m realizing … that I’ve loved very little, really, through the years. I’ve loved Keaton and his work. I’ve loved the slow, reckless seep of booze—clouding you up inside so you can be a stranger to yourself again. I’ve loved the stories we keep close because we are afraid of ourselves, of our blood, of our own frailty. I’ve loved the tiny worlds my father made— treetops delicate as spun sugar and hills like an infant’s knees beneath a blanket, and a town that he lit with LEDs smaller than dewdrops ……….. And I’ve loved Prague, I realize now. I’ve loved its tattered richness, its constant drizzle of good light—gold during the day, purple beneath the lampposts at night. I’ve loved, in a way, that it didn’t want me—that it drove me back to the things I thought I knew, with its cold and relentless beauty. I’ve always loved Nick too, of course. Perhaps all those other things were just a different form of the love I had for him. Perhaps there wasn’t really room for much else besides him. Perhaps the world will always seem just a little too large or too small, once you’ve shared a womb with someone. Yes, I think that is what we’re up against. That’s our struggle.