The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys

Spring 1941 in England- Gwen Davis is a gardener who volunteers to reclaim the gardens at an estate outside London as a war effort.  She finds a hidden garden, really three gardens, and she realizes the first time she finds them that she is the first person to find them since they were abandoned, and that she was meant to find them.  

she is in charge of a group of Land Girls, while soldiers under the command of Captain Raley reside in the house, awaiting orders to go into combat.  Jane is a frail young woman whose fiance is missing in action.  All three of these characters are dealing with loss, as are all the other characters, who do chalk drawings of their past on the blackout curtains. The lost garden consists of three parts, Longing, Faith, and Loss.  Gwen sets out to find who created this garden, who is the white figure that keeps stealing chickens, and who are the people everyone has left behind. She herself is mourning a mother who never loved her, as well as the author Virginia Woolf ( I really must read To The Lighthouse)!,

This is a beautifully constructed novel, only 182 pages long. Humphreys manages to pack a lot of information and images into such a short novel that you feel it was much longer.  As the book jacket says, it is "word perfect".

I especially enjoyed how she related Virginia Woolf to the story: she is certain she followed her one evening on a busy London street, and nowWoolf has died without Gwen ever speaking to her.  But, upon hearing Jane read To The Lighthouse to her friend David as he knits a sweater for his fiance back home, Gwen realizes that she has shared her life with Woolf: the book is the shared intimacy.(page 156)

"There is VW, dipping her pen in ink, looking up from the page with Lily on the lawn, to the view outside her window.  Here am I, looking across the room to the the summer dark beating against these mullioned panes.  There is Jane reading the words aloud to a young soldier sitting beside her.  It is a place we have arrived at, this book.  The characters fixed on the page.  The author who is only ever writing the book, not gardening or walking or talking, and while the reader is reading, the author is always here, writing.  The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.  And this is what you're doing, being in the book, entering it as one enters a room, and sees there, through the French doors to the garden, Lily Briscoe painting on the lawn."

The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong traces the beginnings of the Bible from the earliest books of the Old Testament, tales of the gods Yaweh and Elohim, describes the many influences that helped form the sacred texts of the Old and New Testaments, and how the 66 books of the Bible were created, interpreted, and developed into the Holy Book. She also describes the multiple ways in which the Bible has been interpreted over the years, from the ancient reformers who didn't use scripture to conserve their traditions, but to evoke radical change, to the fundamentalists of today who see the Bible as heralding the last days of the world.

What did I learn?  Well, to start with, I read the book quickly once, then again more slowly and more intensively.  The subtitle describes Armstrong's book as a "biography", and that it is.  I decided just to take note of certain things which I found most meaningful to my understanding.

1.  The two times the temple of Israel was destroyed was integral to the development of (a) The Torah when Israel was in exile in Babylon in 586 BC, and (b) the advent of Christianity and the gospels when the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 CE.

2. Augustine(c580-662) was the first "born-again" Christian, upon picking up the Bible and reading it.  He, although responsible for much of the dogma of the RC Church, also emphasized the need for charity" the Bible was about love, charity was the central principle of Torah and everything else was commentary.

3. The Puritans' arrival in the New World can be seen as an Exodus, similar to the Israelites leaving Egypt.  They even called the New World "New Canaan".  But the New World also had its slaves:

"although Americans were committed to liberation and freedom, for 200 years there was an enslaved Israel in their midst."

4. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a monk who, after seeing the whole Bible for the first time, became fascinated with the book, saw it as integral to faith,  believed Christ was the central figure of the Bible,became the first "born-again" Christian, challenged the church on the Pope's power to forgive sins, translated the Bible into German, and basically, I think, developed the form of worship used today- scripture, songs, hymns, etc.

5. Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Sephardic Jew who became the pioneer of the historical-critical method :

"the manifest contradictions in the Bible proved that it could not be of divine origin; the idea of revelation was a delusion; and there was no super-natural deity- what we called 'God' who simply nature itself".  He was excommunicated, and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion!

6/ The issue of  the Bible vs science in creation, the Scopes trial, the contest deciding on the side of rational thought, only made the fundamentalists more vehemently literal in their interpretation of Scripture, and moved them to the far right of the political spectrum, where they have remained.

The Bible is: a subversive document, a spiritual activity, a commentary on the Golden Rule.

KEY TERMS TO REMEMBER:

Apologia:  a rational explanation

Dogma: term used by Greek-speaking Christians to describe the hidden, ineffable traditions of the Church, which could only be understood mystically and expressed symbolically.

Exegesis: the art of interpreting and explaining the biblical text.

Gnostic: a redeeming "knowledge"

Hermeneutics: the art of interpretation, especially of scripture.

Midrash: exegesis; interpretation, with connotations of investigation, quest.

Shekhinah: the divine presence on earth.

Talmud: "teaching study"

Torah: "law"

The Manticore by Robertson Davies

This is the second novel in the Deptford Trilogy, and David Staunton, Boy Staunton's son, is the leading character.  David has gone to Europe for psycho-analysis from a German psychiatrist: he was the character in the first novel who called out in the presentation by the magician/ illusionist Eisingrim "Who killed Boy Staunton?" and realized that it was his very soul that had called out. The analysis takes up the major part of the novel, and I did find it rather slow-going, despite the fact that events of the first novel were re-told from David's point of view, which certainly was insightful. 

The Manticore is depicted on the cover: it shows a man's face. a lion's body, and a "bite" in the tail, being held by a chain to a woman dressed in white.  Apparently all these images depict the various parts of a person's makeup: the anima, the devil's advocate, the Shadow.  Pretty psychological stuff, and in rather a lot of detail.

Will I go on to read World of Wonders?  Let's see....