1.....Heading the list of “books that made a difference” in my life must be the BIBLE, which at age 12 I took to reading eagerly, intensely, daily, without either encouragement or discouragement from my family. Since I was on the lookout for a special food – a food not served at my home or in my school - I was not put off by inedibles and incredibles. And I came upon enough of this food to keep me reading the Bible these almost 80 years. / Where to begin? I suggest at the beginning, the first two chapters of Genesis, two very different stories about how everything began, but not different about who began everything: “the Creator,” whom Darwin honored in the last paragraph of “The Origin of Species” first edition. Next, the Psalms. Next, the Gospel of John.
2.....John Bunyan’s “PILGRIM’S PROGRESS” (1678), an English classic second only to the (1611) King James Version of the Bible, was required reading in America’s public schools when I was little. Like the Bible (indeed, on the model of the Bible, and as a Christian allegory), it stimulates the imagination to aspire, to journey from what is to what can be – to the better, the more than, the beyond. But it’s not escapist literature. It’s conversational clues on how to live here and now toward hereafter, as it’s full title indicates: “The Pilgrim’s Progress [progress!] from This World to That Which is to Come.”
3.....I’ll skip the Greek and Roman classics that were a part of my schooling and have largely disappeared from America's public schools, partly because they were written by old dead white men. When I was 10, a sc-fi novel began to be serialized as a (indeed, the first) comic strip, “BUCK ROGERS.” It’s first appearance in the newspapers was on Jan 7, 1929 (a month before I turned 11). When some few weeks later I became aware of it, I was determined to make a paste-up book of it, and scoured the neighborhood basements until my set was complete up to date. My young imagination was stirred by this alternative technological world, as it had been by the alternative spiritual and moral world of the Bible and Bunyan. / That same year, another alternative-world comic strip began: “Tarzan.”
4....I’ll close with four books in the bibliography of my age-17 (1935) high-school graduation thesis, “The Nazarene”: (1) ”TWELVE TESTS OF CHARACTER" (Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1923); (2) “THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD” (E. Stanley Jones, 1925); (3) “GREAT CHRISTIAN TEACHINGS” (Edwin Lewis, 1933); and “THE LIFE OF OUR LORD” (Charles Dickens, 1934).
5.....But wait! I must add one not so pious – indeed, anti-pious. “THE ADVENTURES OF THE BLACK GIRL IN HER SEARCH FOR GOD” (George Bernard Shaw, 1933). The year of publication, I picked it off the shelf of an epileptic skeptic teacher of mine & was delighted and saddened by it. Through the forest the black girl wanders from one idol (religion) to another, finds each in its turn disappointing, and breathed a sigh of relief when suddenly she comes upon a sun-lit (Enlightenment!) clearing. In my childhood imagining, I had wandered among the religions, and came upon a clearing enlightened by “the Light of the world,” Jesus Christ, whom Charles Dickens (in the title of his life of Jesus) called “our Lord.”
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