Freewheeling

"There was a touch of sun in the water that strangely cheered me. I suppose a psychiatrist would say that this was some kind of hydrotherapy – the flowing water freeing me from the caked burden of depression that had formed on my soul. But it wasn’t so much the water flow as the sunny iridescence ... I remember saying to myself, “Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as the running water.” My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel – it was poisoning my life. And next I realised that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery ... I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up. I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August – a handsome, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!”

― Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate in Literature

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Dear Kate,

In the passage above Saul Bellow recalled the moment he found his voice, and the result was "The Adventures of Augie March," a perennial candidate to "the great American novel."

What is the central human struggle?  What do you think, to you?

I wish you didn't miss my tongue in cheek: if there really is a central human struggle, it would not be "to you" only.  What you think about it hardly matters.  The struggle is there, even if you so want to not think about it, to run away from it.  Even if you are to twist it up and unravel your life in an idiosyncratic manner.  We are all unique, derivatively.

Instead of Augie March, we read to each other children's book, such as Paulo Coehlo's "The Alchemist," an enormously popular "novel" that adults pass along to each other, a self-help pamphlet to those who couldn't help themselves but wallow in the drivel: "When you really want something, the universe always conspires in your favour."

To twist it up and unravel with a religious vocabulary: "When you really want Good News, God will always grant you it."  So keep praying.  Keep trusting.  Keep having faith in your faith.  God will come through for you.

Really, "if God be for us, who can be against us?" (Romans 8:31)  The proper context of this scripture is that God works in all things, in a story ongoing, our uniqueness derived from it elements.  Taken out of the historical situation, the proclamation becomes our free license to self-aggrandizement: God should be working for us, and never go against how we think things should work.  So if God fails to prove himself in this manner, we can write him off and out of our story.

Nothing wrong with children's book.  The problem is when we keep insisting it is not.  Instead of being a freewheeling kid in the garden of God, we simply freed ourselves from the wheels and stay in our stalled car.

Yours, Alex