The Perfect Problem

"I am in correspondence, as I speak, with a man I have not met who has read a great deal of what I wrote, and yet what he says, which is kindly and wisely expressed, I have a sense that I am seeing myself from an angle I do not recognize and, obviously, from which I need to learn something. And a great part of the task of mutual discussion between the great communities of religious faith in the world is the challenge, which must perhaps come before anything else, to see ourselves through one another’s eyes."

By NT Wright, "Acts for Everyone"

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Dear Alex,

Two sentences, long and longing for your judgement, stand side by side to judge you by how you see its speaker in the unwinding of his passage above.

Take his quote above as a sampling of judgement - 9 commas in swing of expressions hinged by 2 periods. His alphabets and gaps, punctuations and connotations, tinker and twist in your thoughts towards the ending clause:

“... to see ourselves through one another’s eyes.”

Is that his point, if we may be crude to judge poetry with a one liner?

NT Wright, one of your favorite authors, has “a peculiar, poetic tongue to speak the unspeakable”. For a year more, I have been reading his books almost nightly but I still can’t quite follow his flow of language on page.

He speaks plainly, poetic and profound his tongue, opening his words and himself to your judgement so you can judge yourself.

And tonight I begin to see why I have been scrambling to stick with his sentences. I have a personal problem with his last clause above.

Reading requires sober judgement. Of all sorts through ports and portals of perception. Do you want? Have you the time and silence? Are you willing? These are close-ended questions with yes/no reply as a vow to your beloved or vocation or the start of your morning and evening and here now to a book, a page, a line from another in line for your one liner of critique.

I have never been on a boat cruise before. I think I would like it - a voyage through the waves on sea and faces on board, line after line of music and musing. Even a contagion cannot budge my judgement of cruising.

So I shall cruise to re-aligning Wright’s words and customize it: to see you in their eyes, his eyes, His eyes.

Reading is cruising to see what you do not want or plan to see - your problem printed in rigid perfection and clarity, your face popping out of black and white headlines on sapphire or Gorilla Glass or chipped screen, you and all of you judging and being judged upon one sentence, one glance, one life at a time, yours, ours.

Yours, Kate