Tag: Memoir

Dave Barry—Still a Clown after All these Years

Dave Barry, true to form, made fun of himself and almost everything else in his memoir. I’ve enjoyed Barry’s writing on and off over the years as I’ve come across it. This book, like many of his columns, had me bursting out with laughter. For that reason alone it was worth reading.

The more serious sections were handled with adequate solemnity, but Barry’s brand of irreverence, as funny as it is, seems inadequate to face up to the realities of the world. The ability to make everything into a joke cuts both ways, of course. It helps one get through tough times with humour and wit, but it also encourages a habit of mind and heart that ultimately undermines one’s ability to take seriously what in fact is serious.

C.S. Lewis is helpful here, lest I be accused of simply being a fun-hating curmudgeon. In the Screwtape Letters, he helpfully distinguishes between four types of laughter: joy, fun, the joke proper, and flippancy. The first two are good and harmless. Barry’s humour contains a fair amount of rejoicing in sheer fun, and this is all to the good. The joke proper relies “on [a] sudden perception of incongruity,” and this is Barry’s bread and butter. Much of the time, it is simply clever and a good deal of fun, but Lewis warns that this type of humour is especially apt to be used to destroy the healthy human instinct towards shame (Brené Brown will just have to deal with it; I’m going with Lewis on this one). Barry certainly deploys jokes in this way, though not nearly as much as so many of the most popular comedians.

The last type of laughter, flippancy, is described memorably in the following lines: “Only a clever
human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it…. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”

As much as I enjoyed the book, I did feel this kind of flippancy to be at work in Barry’s writing, and it is the part of it I enjoyed least. Perhaps it is an occupational hazard when one is in the business of comedy. The other thought that came to me was that Barry’s type of humour is particularly situated in the baby boomer generation’s experience of the world. This is not a criticism, only an observation. And it seems to me that it’s unlikely to appear again in any subsequent generation.

I grabbed the (audio)book because I wanted something light and enjoyable to listen to on my commutes that wasn’t a current events podcast riling me up about the latest unbelievable political outrage. It certainly met and exceeded my hopes for such a light and enjoyable read. If that’s what you’re looking for, Dave Barry’s memoir may be just the ticket.

The Long Way Home – A Review of Ashley Lande’s ‘The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever’

Here is a book that tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. And yet, there is a lot of darkness to get through before the dawn breaks. The raw honesty of Lande’s story, the power of her effervescent prose, and the drastic nature of her conversion are just some of the elements that make this book difficult to put down and impossible to forget.

For anyone interested in psychedelics, especially those drawn to spiritual illumination via that route, this book is for you. Lande speaks the language, has been down that road, done that, got the t-shirt. And she found something far, far better, in the very last place she thought to look. If I have any complaints about the book, it’s that the conversion comes late in the narrative and then the book ends a bit too abruptly, even if those last two chapters among the most moving things I’ve ever read. Before reaching the back cover, I wanted to learn a bit more about how Christ had transformed different aspects of her life and relationships that had been explored in previous chapters.

There is some debate both inside and outside the church regarding the use of psychedelics. One of the common complaints from psychedelic enthusiasts is that Christians forbid psychedelics out of some blind dogma. But rather than seeing it as a silly religious bias to avoid psychedelics, perhaps it would be better to see two different sources of very ancient spiritual wisdom. One, the Judeo-Christian heritage, teaches us that there is danger in such things, and that practices such as the ingesting of psychoactive substances put us in contact with a world of spirits that is not our assigned place. And yet Christianity fully validates that longing for a connection to the spiritual. The Scriptures make clear that this God-given hunger for the transcendent is meant to be satisfied by God himself, through Christ his Son, as mediated by the Holy Spirit.

The other ancient source of spiritual wisdom comes from those traditions who have for millennia partaken of psychoactive substances to connect with the spirit world and transcend one’s embodied consciousness. To some degree they can deliver on that promise. People can and do make contact with personal spiritual forces, and aside from the thrill of that experience, there is the added buzz that comes from knowing something that so much of society seems oblivious to. These practices make no personal moral demands. There are no ten commandments, no golden rule, no ultimate moral Judge. This makes it particularly compatible with the moral relativism of our age. Lastly, there is no creed or structure of authority like in a church, which resonates with our current cultural suspicion of authority and institutions.

We in the West are now firmly post-Christian. As we cast about for a solution to the spiritual malaise afflicting us, the last place we will tend to look is the place we think we have just been: Christianity. Haven’t we just decided we’re done with those old superstitions? So a journey to the island paradise of paganism, earth religion, eastern philosophy, or psychedelics seems to be just the thing we need for our starved souls in our disenchanted world. But we perhaps forget (or have never learned) that the best of paganism was fulfilled and transcended by Christianity, as G.K. Chesterton chronicled in his book ‘The Everlasting Man’.

For Ashley Lande, and perhaps for many others now journeying through the twists and turns of psychedelia and new age spirituality, the way home spiritually seems to include going round the whole world before arriving back and finding in Christ the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.