Are You Serious?
There's an insightful piece in today's New York Times Book Review about the difficulty of writing about God and belief. It makes the point that:
...it's hard to give an account of your religious beliefs without sounding mawkish. William James understood this. Though he claimed to admire the pious, in The Varieties of Religious Experience he distanced himself from them with an occasional twinkle of irony.
That is what I struggle with most on this site. Irony, properly handled, is what separates the men from the boys aesthetically. By properly handled, I mean the irony of Shakespeare and Cervantes down through Proust--the irony that simultaneously sees humanity as in God's image and as fallible--as opposed to the wiseass, hipster notion of simply saying what one means by saying something other than what one means--the irony that was supposed to have died last September.
It is very difficult to express oneself genuinely and earnestlessy without committing all manner of aesthetic sins. And aesthetics, like manners, matter. The problem I have with so much "new age" writing on God and spirituality (aside from the inability to recognize and account for the limitations imposed by reality) is the egregious writing. Quite simply, genuine contact with the divine could never be expressed in such awful prose. Read a good translation of Isaiah or the Quran to hear what human contact with the divine might sound like.
Among younger artists, there has been a trend toward earnestness with irony, probably best expressed in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. They're rich, challenging works that reward as much attention as you can give them and convey profound emotion. As hokey as it sounds, I feel like they're the voice of my generation, and their approximate tone is what I aspire to.
12:25:58 PM 
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