Recently two people who wouldn’t seem to have much in common—my 26-year-old brother and my one-year-old son—have both had me thinking about wonder and fear, and how their experiences of those two things are similar to each other’s, and different from my own.
My brother Ryan is traveling right now, halfway through a backpacking trip that will last through to the early summer. Before he left, he took a Saturday morning bus down to Philadelphia to say goodbye. I waited for him on the front stoop of my apartment building, with my son James perched on my hip. We spotted him when he was still a block away and even at a distance I could tell Ryan was grinning; as the youngest sibling in our family, he had always been the one left behind, but now it was his turn to skip away.
Each morning I wake early to the sound of James crying down the hall. Like my brother abroad, the world is a strange place to him and he’s often scared. I bring him into the bed where he nurses with my wife; then it’s up for breakfast and the official start of the day. I’ve lately become an expert with our toaster; the bread always comes out just right. I eat my cereal while James munches on his diced banana, sometimes smearing the fruit across the table, sometimes putting it into his mouth.
Over the last few weeks James has learned to “cruise,” that is to walk side-shuffle by holding onto the edge of a couch or by pressing himself against a wall. It was while watching him try to bridge the short gap between our bureau and our bed that I first thought about how his days are like my brother’s. The previous evening Ryan had sent an email about a harrowing bus ride he’d just taken into the Himalayan foothills north of Delhi. He said that when he’d looked out his window, there was a sheer thousand foot drop where the road was supposed to have been. I imagine James, if he had the words, would describe his days in much the same way.
In the afternoon James and I take a long walk. When I first moved to Philadelphia four years ago, I was running a lot and I liked the idea of trying never to follow the same route twice. Now James and I trace the same path everyday: 20 blocks east to the river on Pine, 20 blocks back west on Spruce. I like being able to anticipate the topography of the sidewalk, to steer the stroller around the same loose patch of bricks that I avoided yesterday, and to know by the cloud cover whether the children at the nursery school we pass along the way will be playing indoors or out.
Even amid such routine, I still have moments of wanderlust. Every now and again a whiff of burning trash will awaken the physical memory of being alone in La Paz when I was twenty. Or something about the way a woman pokes her head out of a third floor window will remind me of what it felt like to watch the sun go down in Darjeeling. I feel myself drawn towards the airport in such moments, but not in a serious way. There’s James to take care of, and my wife who’d be surprised if I didn’t come home. But more than that, I know that the exhilaration I felt when I woke up in Delhi for the first time isn’t open to me anymore. This is something that I think James, who no longer pays attention to a blue plastic flower he couldn’t get enough of a month ago, understands too.
Of the many misconceptions I had about what it would be like to grow older, two stand out above the rest. The first concerns freedom which I thought about in the same way I thought about candy: I couldn’t imagine how in both cases more was not always better. It would have been impossible to convince myself ten years ago that the small orbit of my current days would feel as satisfying as it does. This I think is the kind of knowledge that is hardest to communicate across generational lines, that in the future you won’t desire the same things you desire right now.
The second misconception is about fear. Watching James, and thinking about how we interact, it’s easy to see why as a child I assumed that the world would becomes less scary as I grew older. He is terrified of being left alone in his crib and I come take him out; a siren sounds outside, and he clings to my leg. His days are filled with at least equal parts wonder and fear, and from that perspective, it must seem as though I command the world.
But I don’t of course. Though my fears are less broadly distributed than they used to be, they are perhaps more deeply felt. I can go days and sometimes even whole weeks without feeling afraid of anything, but then in a moment at night I’ll understand that my wife and I are not promised to fall asleep beside each other forever, and that James, who cruises around the living room each morning, will have to learn the most important things in life on his own.
[Image credit: Abnel Gonzalez]
I think the Republicans losing the House and the Senate is the best thing that could happen to the religious book market. People are more likely to be fired up about religion when they're worried it's losing its influence.
I think that with the Christian right and their extreme values having so much influence over the last few years, people have finally gotten fed up with it. Americans don't like extremes; the election and lagging sales in religious publishing proves that. Like the Republicans being thoroughly humiliated at the polls, I think the extreme right should take this as a wake-up call.
I have almost no knowledge of this book category, but I wonder how much of the decline is in books with a political orientation and how much is the broadly spritual/philosophical category. I guess I question whether you can say there is a tie between "th e type of Christianity that yields these sort of books" (by which I assume you mean the hard right evangelicals) and the sales of the religous category. From what I have seen the religious world is more heterogenous than not.
I would imagine that the decline in sales would reflect more on the internal discussions in the various religous communities, rather than an indication of the overall influence of religion.
Tripp, in my experience, in the religion category by and large the only books that sell enough to be worth mentioning in this context in the first place are conservative Christian books and "new age" or Eastern religion books, i.e. the ones that Friedman calls "spiritual." Zondervan, meanwhile, is decidedly conservative Christian.
Perhaps I'm overstating things here, but I do find this trend interesting, and the singling out of Bible sales as being weak is particularly fascinating.
Basically, I'm very interested in the idea that book sales are pointing to a broader cultural trend that hasn't really been acknowledged yet by the media (assuming it is indeed happening.) Usually, the media is all over these sorts of trends but not this one yet. (Although the atheism book thing is somewhat related.)
Well fair enough then.