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Another Shot at Understanding: Learning About Islam

Posted by :James Howden On : August 6, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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One of the good Doctor’s opening salvos was this. Imagine if what others knew about Christianity began and ended with Hitler. He was nominally a Christian. His troops stormed into the Sudetenland with the words “God is with us” engraved on their belts…For this, Dr. Lawson argued, is precisely the skewed perspective of Islam that too many of us have swallowed with our supper-hour newscasts. Bombings = Islam. Islam = opposition to progress. Islam = two thirds of the Axis of Evil. (Oh, the curse of speechmaking!)

Lawson is a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, and our little family had run away on this weekend of thought and refreshment largely to hear him speak. He wanted us to think about revolution, one of the main casualties of which, no matter how praiseworthy are its aims and programs, is history. And among the histories we may think we know (but emphatically don’t) is that of Islam.

Dr. Lawson argues, for example, that “Europe was precisely defined  (geographically and otherwise) by its defensive and offensive resistance to Islam”. In large measure, this is why Europe was so dark in the Dark Ages, whereas northern Africa and western Asia shone with Muslim civilization. Islam predominated in Spain, for example, for 800 years, more than three times the duration of the United States of America. In addition to co-existing amicably with Jewish and Christian communities, Islamic cities like Cordoba (and, not incidentally, Baghdad) were centres of arts and architecture, medicine, science and commerce.

The European Renaissance can be traced to its eventual increased openness to the scholarly, artistic and other resources of the Islamic culture that surrounded it. Avicenna – the Latinized name of the Persian Ibn-Sina, a gifted astronomer, physician, poet, mathematician and philosopher – was an 11th-century Muslim that Lawson terms “one of the four or five greatest geniuses of world civilization”. We know Leonardo, but we are ignorant of those that preceded and made him possible.

Our tour guide of Islamic culture and contribution debunked the standard criticisms of Muslims: their treatment of women and of apostates, their so-called “conversion by the sword”, their relative cultural decline in recent centuries, the much-muttered but sorely misunderstood concept of jihád. Lawson also emphasized the deep-rooted garrison mentality of the European heritage, in which a more powerful and more advanced Islamic civilization was feared and demonized as the “barbarians at the gates”. Those bogeyman whispers can still be heard in our contemporary public discourse.

Lawson, while not himself a Muslim, argued passionately in defence of Islam. One of the silver linings of the West’s forced encounter with Islam is that understanding is slowly growing. Muslim and other educated voices are raising the image of the Faith of Muhammad around the world. Dr. Lawson pointed out a remarkable irony: members of the Bahá’í community, branded as heretics and victims of persecution in some Muslim countries, are called upon to understand and defend all that is noble and good in Islam.

There was much more, brilliant and fascinating. (And oddly reassuring. This stuff CAN be understood. Okay!) I’ll offer more snippets another day.

When All Else Fails…

Posted by :James Howden On : August 3, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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If all else fails, lower your expectations!

For a long time, I hated this advice. It came directly from the dark, satanic mills of despair and cynicism. It was an excuse for uselessness. But no more!

In somewhat the same way as some black Americans have re-appropriated the n-word (but without the lingering odour of disgust), or that some gays have embraced their “queer” status (but without the perverse acceptance of marginalization, be it ever so giddy), I am reclaiming this phrase as a healing medicine. Where once it signified the jaded “whatever” of the terminally disappointed, for me it now means something like “do your best to make the world better, but don’t break yourself against the walls”.

The “if all else fails” part is key. To start by giving ourselves only basement-level hopes is crippling and just plain sad. On the other hand, for those of us who chronically expect the near-impossible of others and especially ourselves – not only being all things to all people but trying to be everything we might ever be all at one time – lowering expectations is a balm and a consolation. It doesn’t mean failure and it’s not about giving up on growth. It’s more a case of putting into regular, sustainable practice a less feverish intensity. (Oh, my goodness: it’s about moderation. What a concept!)

And it only took me a couple of decades to figure it out. I’m not very good at it yet, but I fully expect to master it immediately. (Or maybe next week, latest.)

Cohen is Our Man

Posted by :James Howden On : August 1, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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There was a packed house at the ByTowne last night for the new Leonard Cohen documentary. Many grey and greying heads were in the line snaking along Rideau and down Nelson Street – the man is 71 – but our friendly invitation had snared four university types. For me, it was perfect. It was youth by proximity. We were with bright young people, and I was able to make up slightly for a mis-spent adolescence where I wasn’t nearly hip enough to “get” the Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Neil Young that Mr. Hill was playing in English class. (I preferred, as he put it, “group noise”. If you couldn’t do basketball warmup drills to it, I wasn’t too interested.) Youth by retroactivity…

I’m Your Man is not a great documentary, but it does feature a great man. Cohen “had an unfair advantage, in a way,” reports Nick Cave. “He can actually write.” This Aussie-centric tribute to the Man and his Words drove one of my dates (the doer/dancer I’m married to) nuts, though. It was everything she has come to scorn  about musicians. Many of the performers were self-absorbed and fairly inarticulate. (Bono and the Edge from U2, and of course Mr. C. himself, were sparkling exceptions, at least to the charge of verbal clumsiness.) Many seemed marginally talented and were jarring to watch (especially if your taste runs to Judy Garland and The Sound of Music.) And there was certainly a surfeit of clanging camera angles and other visual tricks apparently designed to help us forget that we were watching talking head interviews and some B-list concert performers.

Although he, like several other tribute-bearers, found it (annoyingly!) necessary to have the song lyrics in front of him, Rufus Wainwright takes a star turn here, particularly with his version of “Hallelujah”, which he had by heart.. His sister Martha does less well, threatening to swallow the microphone while she flails, and eating way too many of those beautifully crafted words; Kate (their Mom) and Anna McGarrigle made my young friends squirm with a “weird sisters from Macbeth” sort of vibe. (I like ‘em, though. Maybe it’s nostalgia.) But aside from these visiting Canucks (and fellow Montrealers), the performers in this Australian concert were well under my radar. Several were a little hard to watch, the prince being an androgynous and quite spastic singer called Antony. (When I closed my eyes, though, his unusual voice was quite compelling in a Roy Orbison-esque way. His stage presence was Joe Cocker, only less graceful. Very odd.)

The obscurity and limitations of some of the concert participants were pierced by some lovely performances, especially of “Anthem” by two women (unknown to me) who know and deliver that marvellous song. There were also segments that seemed to come from another film altogether: a sweet little (lip-synched?) performance of “I’m Your Man” by Leonard Cohen with U2 in New York, and quickie hallway testimonials from the Edge and Bono. Huge fans both, they teetered constantly on the cliff of outright worship, particularly Edge with his comments about Leonard “coming down from the mountain carrying the tablets of stone”. They placed his career in a broad and intelligent context, though, and their reverence was nicely cut by Cohen’s own self-deprecation and humour. For only one example, he reads to the interviewer (presumably the director, Lian Lunson) his recent introduction to the Chinese version of his 1960s novel Beautiful Losers, and this address to his readers is a triumph of humility, respect, gentle engagement and rich humour.

If you’re already a fan, I’m Your Man will probably work for you, too. And if you’re open to a little weirdness in your musical life, this might be a fine introduction to the work of Leonard Cohen. It’s worth the two hours, though surveys show that only half the people in my marriage would agree.

[I wrote on another Cohen interview, and songwriting honours for him, here.]

I Hardly Knew Ye, Reverend

Posted by :James Howden On : July 16, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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I likely should have been more familiar with William Sloane Coffin. (I even missed his death this year, an important passage in American life.) I’m old enough, for one thing, although his greatest public attention came when I was still defining student activism, say, as careening on crutches around Mrs. Whitelaw’s class. As a quote-scavenging young teacher, though, I came to appreciate Coffin jewels like these, even when I was fuzzy about who the author actually was: Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat and Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and then defends them in the name of morality. The dude could write.

The July edition of Harper’s Magazine has its “national correspondent” and beloved former editor Lewis Lapham coming from burying Reverend Coffin to praise his greatness in a piece called “Class Act”. (It takes one to know one.) He begins this way: “Among the voices of conscience speaking truth to power during the raucous decade of the 1960s, none was more impassioned or as often heard as that of William Sloane Coffin Jr., the once-upon-a-time chaplain of Yale University who died on April 12…” For Lapham and many others, the funeral had been a chance to meditate upon the silence of a great voice, noting that “the fact of his death prompted the latter-day custodians of liberal opinion…to wonder…where was Bill Coffin now that he was so sorely missed?” One eulogist said of Coffin, “There burned in his heart a sacred rage”; another called him “a first white man to stand with blacks…a patrician who was tribune of the nobodies…a critical thinker with a simple faith…”

How often do we hear of someone straddling those apparent paradoxes now? (Or ever?) Sacred rage. A thinker with faith. A child of wealth who went on to “tell the rich of the midnight sighing of the poor”, as Bahá’u’lláh once put it. And, perhaps most remarkably, a man of religion for whom the Gospels were a call not to moralize or to maintain a comfortable pew, but rather a call to generosity, compassion and social justice. Lapham quotes from Coffin’s first message as Yale’s chaplain to the incoming freshman class: The Lord forbids our using our education merely to buy our way into middle-class security. WOW. This was in 1959, friends. 1959.

Lapham loves words, and he adores those strung together by William Sloane Coffin:

The young, bent upon becoming wealthy and thinking they are fulfilling themselves, are in fact limiting themselves….To love effectively, we must act collectively….Love measures our stature: the more we love the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself….People are to be loved and things are to be used [not the other way ‘round]….Nationalism, at the expense of another nation, is just as wicked as racism at the expense of another race….Hell is truth seen too late…

Mr. Lapham — and it’ll be a black-armband day when he leaves us — closes by recommending a little book called Credo, William Sloane Coffin’s collection of the lessons of his life and the meaning of democracy. I’m buying.

Living in the Car

Posted by :James Howden On : July 12, 2006
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In 1992, it was 54 minutes, and by ’98 it was nearly an hour. And last year, according to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian worker spent 63 minutes a day, or nearly 12 full DAYS across a working year, commuting to and from work. In Toronto, of course, it was decidedly longer: two full weeks for the typical worker bee. (Imagine Los Angeles.) In other words, StatsCan observes, we spend nearly as much time commuting as we do on vacation. Yoicks!

I can still hear Freddie Mercury after all these years, and it’s not “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “I’m in love with my car / Got a feel for my automobile…” I think it’s a pretty dysfunctional romance, for the most part. I’m often amused, for example (when I’m not irritated), by people’s mournful complaints about gasoline prices. (Cripes, I gotta pay nearly as much for gas as I do for soda pop or plasticized water!) But if it’s so bad, why aren’t more people seriously re-thinking their driving habits? Smart cars are still figures of fun and even scorn, and SUVs are not only filling the roads but, as my 6-year-old pointed out to me today, they’re starting to look like Hummers. (An obvious case of grill envy.) I’ve become convinced that many of the most bland and problematic aspects of our cities and ‘burbs come from putting the needs of cars foremost in how we plan them, though that might be a rant for another day. I’m in love with my car, indeed.

I’ve mainly managed to avoid commuting for most of my life, not because of any particular environmental virtue but mainly because I don’t love driving. (Bi-Weekly Bugle: Guy Cred Erodes With Surprise Confession.) I do it well, I can drive for long distances if necessary, but for fun? To blow off steam? (Dangerous, that.) To clear my head? Not interested, thanks, so whenever I could, I have located myself in the community if not down the block from my workplace. Here in Ottawa, my work for the Governor General involved 15 minutes on bus or bike, 25 by sneaker. For the past few months, I’ve just stumbled from bedroom to study, fired up the scribbling machine and I’m off. The 63-second commute, both ways. (The view is nearly as dazzling as the lunchtime banter.)

EcoWoman, on the other hand, pedals out of our driveway ten months an Ottawa year and spends her 63 commuter minutes pumping those lovely legs, taking in the riverside sights and listening to CBC Radio. My lady’s doing it right, say I, and in this town, she’s no Mad Biker Pedalling in the Wilderness, though Ottawa has no shortage of gridlock. Every once in a while, I find myself on the Queensway (or on the 401 over the top of Toronto) during hell hours and think, And folks do this every day? Sheesh.      

Slowed by a Brick in the Road

Posted by :James Howden On : July 8, 2006
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I’m not accustomed to being this current in my reading, especially with something other than the occasional sports page, but yesterday I launched into the summer ’06 edition of Brick, a literary journal published in Canada. (While it’s still summer. Imagine.) It is far from alone in deserving (and needing) a wider readership, and in bringing something just a little loftier to minds ready for more than stock quotations and Red Sox scores; that is to say, to most educated adults. The rewards are many.

Here are two of them. First, I read the transcript of a radio interview I’d heard last spring with Leonard Cohen. Five of his songs were being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame; he was humble, charming, intelligent. (I wrote about it here in an earlier entry.) It was a pleasure to stumble upon such a rare treat again.

Second, I was introduced to literature’s Mr. Roth, not the American novelist Philip but the Austrian writer Joseph, a little-known figure that scholar and translator Michael Hofmann has made it his life’s work to know and love and advocate. “My Life with Roth” gives scant detail about its subject – surprisingly few traces remain, though he lived until 1939 – but recounts Hofmann’s rather random discovery of Roth and the ten subsequent translations he has done of his novels and letters. He had already convinced me to scribble down The Radetzky March on my burgeoning list of Books I Will Get To Someday, but Hofmann sealed the deal by concluding his essay with the following selection from Roth’s greatest novel. Like much great writing, it is more true now than when it was written. It pierces our nearly omnipresent conviction that efficiency and sheer pace are the hallmarks of our cultural greatness. He echoes Gandhi’s famous dictum that “there is more to life than increasing its speed”. Roth wrote,

In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.

 This was my ouch for the day.

(You’re welcome.)

BHL III: The American Odyssey Continued

Posted by :James Howden On : July 4, 2006
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Yes, continued, as did (and does) my asynchronous meandering through stale-dated magazines. I’m an Atlantic subscriber, and I can’t keep up. Well, I don’t, at any rate. But I have completed the July/August issue (from 2005), which I went back to because it contained the third instalment of the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy’s study tour of the United States, “In the Footsteps of Toqueville”. Great stuff, and of a nearly timeless quality that makes it more interesting and more useful than any number of contemporary news bites. (I wrote about the first two instalments here and here.)

I’ll try not to go on and on, but I probably will. BHL’s observations are quirky and smart and engagingly written. He’s good. He returns, as his 19th-century countryman repeatedly did, to American prisons. He muses on questions like public versus for-profit incarceration of criminals and the death penalty. Consider this image from his visit with the only woman on death row, having passed by her “’girlfriends’…the hundred or so women, almost all of them black, in the ‘segregation’ section you need to go through to get to her cell – genuine raging beasts, all dressed in the same brightly coloured jumpers, and shouting behind their bars that they haven’t done anything, that they can’t bear it anymore, that they want to be allowed to exercise, that they screw visitors, that I should go to hell.” The travelogue resumes.

He tours the “obscene nether side” of American puritanism at the Chicken Ranch, a legal Nevada brothel in the boondocks that services Las Vegas customers. A flight over the Grand Canyon yields the “two theories” of its creation, and gives the bemused Parisian a close-up view of modern creationism and “intelligent design”. (He finds it alarming, the “most cunning and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver [sic, American spelling] of the American right in years…” Lévy is not generally so dogmatic in his views, and for the most part is quite refreshingly non-partisan. For example, when he goes to Salt Lake City, he is fascinated by the Latter-Day Saints’ spectacular obsession with genealogy, based on their belief in retroactive baptism of the dead. “I hesitate between two sentiments. One is a certain respect owed to this relentless interest in one’s ancestors, this homage made to the dead….But then there’s also the idea that these Mormons…have found the absolute weapon. How can you possibly fight a church that reigns not just over the living but also over the dead?”

Midwestern miners and social security; U.S. Air Force cadets (motto: Integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do), conversations with whom impel BHL to vow that he will “think twice before allowing myself to talk glibly, like too many of my fellow citizens, about the imperial American military…[or] the imperial calling of the country itself”; the wealthy, white, Arizona “city of the old” that puts him in mind of “casinos, military installations, and internment camps for the Japanese”; his frustrated efforts to interview the campaigning John Kerry, and his impressions once he finally does (“a European at heart”); liberal-minded college students in the heart of Texas (he was surprised); the bizarre carnival of the Great Western Gun Show and its “morbid flirtation with horror”; the Kennedy mystique in Dallas (“What kind of cliché makes you cry? What is a myth you no longer believe in but that still functions?”); the Memphis national convention of the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal movement that forces him to weigh the “ostentatious display and calculating stagecraft” against “this joy, this fervor, this spirit of communion which I haven’t yet seen in any white church”: these are the people and things he has seen through those public intellectual eyes.

Lévy concludes with a mournful description of the storm-drenched opening of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. Clinton himself is a bit frail after his surgery, and the Democrats after the Kerry defeat. It rains and rains. “It’s not an apotheosis; it’s a debacle…[a] lugubrious ballet…His famous legacy suddenly seems altered by the reflected light of this gloomy, twilit, graceless day…this eclipse…this disaster.” This entry has no proper ending, and neither does the article. Sometime this summer, I’ll get to Part IV. This is me walking along with some good and intriguing writing (don’t you think?).

“To Be of Use”: A Good Poem

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2006
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Yes, a good poem for May Day or any day. It’s by an American poet named Marge Piercy, and it appears in a collection called, get ready for it, Good Poems. It was put together by Garrison Keillor, he of the Lake Wobegon tales and The Prairie Home Companion radio show. (A hint as to my current standing as a Man of the People: I’m more excited by the upcoming movie version of the Companion than by any number of Mission Impossible or Superman sequels. Guess it depends which People we’re talkin’ about…) It’s a hymn to simple honest work, and a testimony to the importance of feeling useful in the world. A poem a day keeps the brain at play.

To be of use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows 
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. 
They seem to become natives of that element, 
the black sleek heads of seals 
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, 
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge to the task,
who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters 
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud. 
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. 
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. 

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry 
and a person for work that is real.

A Sunday Morning Voice From Israel

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2006
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I think of myself as a relatively literate person – spend enough time around gymnasiums and ball fields, and a guy who reads can get this impression – but apparently I’m no Eleanor Wachtel. I’d never even heard of David Grossman, the (apparently) quite wonderful Israeli novelist, but Michael Enright and The Sunday Edition brought him into my kitchen yesterday morning.

There’d been an April series of interviews and discussions recorded in Israel, most of which I hadn’t heard. The culminating interview was yesterday’s 25 minutes or so (ah, the pleasures of commercial-free radio!) between Enright and Mr. Grossman, a sympathetic and thoughtful commentator on the eternal (in my life, at least) Middle East Problem. Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan have, in the western popular mind, pluralized this Problem, but it always comes back to roost in Palestine, the Holy Land (aren’t they all?), the Greater Israel of the extreme Zionists. And in the centre, the modern state of Israel and the territories it occupies or otherwise influences and warns. The Jewish Question remains, though it has been re-cast in their reclamation of an ancestral homeland in the years since 1948.

“We are a story,” says Grossman of the Jewish people, an enormously polarized one that he wishes was just a bit less compelling. Extremes make for good fiction, but they make ordinary life tenuous and painful. A little moderation might be nice, he thinks: “[Jews] are idealized or demonized, but these are simply the two faces of dehumanization. I just want a solid existence, a place to be, and for us to live an enjoyable life.” (The same is true of Aboriginal people everywhere, including those occupying land near my home town of Caledonia.) Most Israelis want only the same thing. But unlike Grossman, most Israelis have no idea how their Palestinian neighbours live, and they may not want to. (Digressing again, I’d say the same is true of many Caledonians.) “Most,” he told the CBC’s Michael Enright, “cannot rise above the fear that they have for each other. This fear is almost mythological.” (If I were to digress again, I would say something about a similar fear in and around a small Ontario town. But I’m too disciplined for that.)

Contemporary Israel’s fear is a recent innovation, though the ignorance of conditions in the West Bank is of long standing. “For the first 21 years of the occupation,” says Grossman, “there was no hatred from Israelis toward Palestinian. They were inconsequential; they were almost as children.” And the Israeli media tended to act not as a lens but as a buffer, insulating Israelis from the reality of military occupation. At least, that is, until Grossman wrote a series of late-‘80s articles about living in occupied territory, a series that eventually became the novelist’s best-known work, a non-fiction sensation in Israel called The Yellow Wind. (It is a must-read, already on order from my local library. Are libraries not the greatest institutions ever? I’ll probably go overdue on this book, and I’ll be happier to pay the fine than you were to read another digression.)

The Yellow Wind reminded Israelis that they are occupiers, a dysfunctional dynamic that can only distort both peoples. Grossman is not engaging in knee-jerk national self-loathing – “we are not the only bad guys here; Israel is not surrounded by the Salvation Army” – but I think he paints a most intelligent, humane and, as far as I can tell, fair portrait of conditions in Palestine. He spoke very strongly yesterday about the great wall that Israel is building to insulate itself from Palestinian guerrilla attacks: “A wall will not stop Palestinian misery and poverty…You cannot impose a border upon your neighbours. A wall is against dialogue. We must acknowledge the harm we have done to each other. We must pay a maturity tax.”

I’m glad Mr. Grossman came into my house. His is a weary but stubbornly hopeful voice, one that deserves a wider hearing and more of my attention. Coming soon to a bedside table near me.

It’s Where You Find It

Posted by :James Howden On : April 27, 2006
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So here’s a sports take with literary flavour (or perhaps just a slightly bitter aftertaste. Fear not, my brave ones!) I find that I’m relearning lessons I thought I’d mastered in the more sweat-soaked phases of my life. I’m listening to this advice, directed to those who think they might have something to say in print. It’s all about the drive, but it takes an interesting road in talking about it.

“Most writers must learn to make a pact with dullness. Not boredom, or lack of imagination or passion, but dullness of routine. Keep your daily appointment with the computer screen and keep your ass on the chair until you’ve reached your daily quota. However rich your inner life may be, seek also the dullard within.” David Carpenter’s credo, the foundation of his life in letters (he’s a short story writer and novelist, among other things), is a call I can understand. It says to any writer – this writer – that the idea of waiting around for Inspiration to come one’s way, that the idea of waiting at all for good things to somehow find us, is not only silly but actually takes the legs out from under any ambition or project.

As a long-time athlete and coach, I thought I knew this. No pain, no Spain was a jock mantra in the buildup to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. I used to make my basketball teams read a mossy but nonetheless wonderful hymn to athletes by the early-20th century sports journalist Grantland Rice. It was a poem (a jock poem!) called “How to Be a Champion”, and it ended like this:

You wonder how they do it and you look to see the knack,
You watch the foot in action, or the shoulder, or the back,
But when you spot the answer where the higher glamours lurk…
That the most of it is practice, and the rest of it is work.

You have to put in the hours. You hope that Inspiration will seep into the cracks of all your efforts, but you don’t wait for the tap at the window. You go out and find her. You take that daily constitutional. You do your reps. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re hoisting jumpshot after jumpshot, pumping iron, working on your chord changes or getting your daily pages done.

I’m listening to Grantland Rice. (You know GR. This is his, too: “For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks not that you won or lost / But how you played the Game.” One of the great things we ever got from sport, say I.) I like Carpenter’s dullard within, too. But this is wisdom that goes far deeper than our centuries, thoughts much older than the NBA or the Olympics or even that great hitter, Willie Shakespeare. There is an ancient Arab proverb which says, “He who seeketh out a thing with zeal shall find it.” And one of the only verses from the Qur’án that I know from memory speaks with the Creator’s almighty and encouraging voice: “Whoso maketh efforts for Us, in Our ways will We assuredly guide him.” Now, that’s inspiration. (So’s my mother. Happy 86th, Mum.)