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The Shadow of God: A Journey Through Memory, Art, And Faith - Hardcover

Scribner, Charles, III

 
9780385516587: The Shadow of God: A Journey Through Memory, Art, And Faith
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385516584 ISBN 13: 9780385516587
Verlag: Doubleday, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

In a part memoir, part celebration of faith, the author reflects on the influences that have shaped his life and faith, recalling a childhood in a household populated by such family friends as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, his publishing career, and his journey of faith, which was marked by a conversion to Catholicism. 15,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHARLES SCRIBNER III received his BA, MFA, and PhD from Princeton University in Art and Archaeology. He has worked in publishing for nearly thirty years and is a prominent authority on Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, and other artists. He has written biographies on Rubens and Bernini, and articles for Vanity Fair, Art & Antiques and other publications, and has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, Christie’s, and various universities. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

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Sunday, January 6, 2002
--Feast of the Epiphany


Today the three Magi, Wise Men, Kings--thank God no longer the "astrologers" of the first New American Bible translation--presented their legendary gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child in Bethlehem two millennia ago, and here I sit to begin writing a book I meant to begin months ago. I care nothing for birthdays or for the symbolism associated with those mounting numbers. Yet recently, on turning fifty, I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction with the prospect of another half century ahead of me. My father, at this milestone, while I was a junior at Princeton, confided to me, "I feel as though my life is almost half over." He added that Jack Hemingway, the eldest son of his most famous author, had remarked, "I've spent the first fifty years of my life being my father's son, and will spend the next fifty being my daughters' father." That story came back to me last year while I was having breakfast at the Ivy Club in Princeton during a visit to my freshman son. Hearing my name mentioned, a girl looked up from her reading and asked with all the eagerness of youth, "Oh, are you Charlie Scribner's father?" I burst into laughter, explaining that for four years at that very table I had been "Charlie Scribner's son" (my father was the real one, a university trustee); and now I come back to be "Charlie's father." Independent identity remains elusive.

I told that story at Jack Hemingway's memorial service at the Explorers Club a few weeks later. I felt a kinship with Jack--well beyond the fact that my grandfather and Ernest Hemingway had been best friends, or that my father had been his final publisher. No, it was that I had always felt that Jack's amusing comment was leavened with love for both his father and his children. It was a love I shared with him and with most of fortunate humanity, the love for one's parents and for one's children, and the pride--the good pride, not the deadly sin--that goes with it. But if truth be told, of the two roles I have always felt far more qualified for the first, that of a professional son. It is one I have played for most of my life, and one develops comfort, not to say confidence, with decades of practice.

Up until that breakfast, I had been able to prolong that role for more than five years beyond my father's death, in 1995. I am still not ready to retire from it: I like being his son, first and foremost. But in doing so, especially during his final years of illness and then in the flurry of activity that followed--estate, memorials, and the excavation of memories--I had slipped into neglecting two key activities in my life, two keyboards in fact: the piano's and this laptop's.

Music has always been my first love. Writing came later, although inescapable through birth, profession, and even surname (originally Scrivener, until the late-eighteenth-century change to Scribner), which means "scribe." Within the past year, I bought three pianos for our new apartment: a baby grand for the living room, an electric one for late-night practice, and finally a new Steinway grand for what I have since dubbed the Music Room. Here I finally face this silent keyboard and the book I now know I must write. Its outlines are dim; the mists have not yet risen as it is late at night, with only twenty-some minutes left in this Feast of the Three Gift Givers.

My books on Rubens and Bernini were easy to tackle: I had both their lives and their (illustrated) works as instant structures. But now I have only a theme--if not a title--"The Shadow of God," taken from an inscription my father gave me to post on my study carrel in Princeton's Marquand Library, my senior year, as I faced writing my thesis. Lux Umbra Dei--light is the shadow of God. It seems to fit Epiphany, the feast illumined by the light of that wondrous star and following, by a few weeks, that more ancient festival of lights, Hanukkah.

Last evening, during the Epiphany homily, the priest at St. Gertrude's in Bayville, Long Island, noted that this feast is really about taking a risk for faith. The Magi followed their star for a long journey, but with no guarantee that they would achieve their goal; nor even, after they reached the manger and delivered their gifts, that they would be able to return home as planned. We never learn what happened after they received a warning in a dream and returned home "by another route." Were they able to go home again? Were their lives forever changed in other ways?

Tomorrow I shall begin the journey toward the next Epiphany. WQXR has just played the midnight chime. Time to rest until daylight may reveal the path to take.


Monday, January 7, 2002


The workweek having begun, already I find myself breaking a writing habit that served so well in times past--to write early in the morning, then reflect at night and plan the next day's work. That's what it was all about--having a good plan. My father's driving motto--his recipe of marital success, at least in an auto--was "No new routes." (They often lead to getting lost, and spousal consternation.) How did the Magi fare? They went home "by another route": was it a new one? In some ways, it could not have been otherwise. The world was renewed by a baby's birth, but would they have known that? They had left behind the most precious of gifts in a rude hovel. How could that have seemed anything but reckless extravagance?

Perhaps that very extravagance gives this feast its special allure--like a High Mass celebrated with solemn splendor in the simplest surroundings. I should like to visit the Cave of the Nativity someday; it's the very contrast of the royal trappings and the rustic place that gives those paintings of the Magi at Bethlehem their majesty, as in Rubens's at the high altar of King's College Chapel, Cambridge: it's the world upside down, kings paying homage to a poor baby on a straw bed. "Contrast" is too weak a word, "juxtaposition" too technical; the Italians come closer with contrapposto and chiaroscuro--if it were music it might be "divine dissonance"--the convergence of metaphysical opposites.

Walking home tonight from work, I was saddened to see men already beginning to dismantle the base of the great Rockefeller Center tree. Didn't they know that the Christmas season still has six days to go, until next Sunday, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord? At least it still stood and shone with its colored lights, this year all red, white, and blue--a patriotic response to the tragedy of 9/11. Then, along Park and Lexington Avenues, all those sad discarded trees--like Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs"--to be picked up and disposed of in the earliest morning hours. Is there a sadder sight? There was.

Just as I felt melancholy dispersed by the still brightly lit manger outside my parish church, St. Vincent's (those wise and wily Dominicans know better than to close up the stable early), a woman on the corner asked softly for help. I thought she wanted directions, but she asked for a dollar. I was stunned: she was dressed simply, but with a dignity that was reinforced by her voice and manner. She said she lived at the women's shelter across the street, at the Armory. I asked if she knew about the help to be had at St. Agnes Parish, about a mile away. No, she said, she had a place to stay, but she needed some money for another woman in special need, "and it's so hard to ask for money."

I was so struck by the unlikelihood that such a lady would be in such need that I pulled out the largest bill I had and was grateful that she didn't look down at it before she gave a blessing in return. How many epiphanies have yet to be had before the manger, even a...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385516584
ISBN 13 
9780385516587
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
291
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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