 I'm delighted to welcome you all and I'm shortly going to hand over to Paul Baumann, the editor of Commonwealth to make the introduction for tonight's speaker. Before I do, let me just say that there are several people in the audience, two of whom I have already spoken to who are part of the new Commonwealth community groups. If you are one of those people who hasn't yet said hi to me, after tonight's presentation, we'll sit in a corner down here when everyone else has left and chat about how we want to organize ourselves going forward. Of course, if you're in this audience and you have never heard of this thing and you will be interested in participating in it, then by all means stay it's a group of people committed to Commonwealth magazine and its values and its identity who want to talk about the issues that are raised in the journal and beyond. So after Rand has spoken, we will have a couple of microphones and you will be welcome to ask questions, make comments, or indeed challenge anything he has to say. So without more to let me hand over to Paul Baumann who will introduce Rand Cooper. Thank you. Thank you all for coming out tonight. It's a great pleasure to have you here. Paul, thank you again for organizing this series of lectures. Our collaboration with Fairfield means a great deal to Commonwealth. When I asked tonight's speaker for the most pertinent information to use in making this introduction, his advice to me was keep it short. That's usually his advice to me. Curiously, however, he then sent me a 5,000 word autobiographical sketch. Such are the complexities and contradictions not to mention the many accomplishments of my good friend Rand Cooper. Happily, I'm an editor who knows how to separate the wheat from the shaft. Rand grew up in New London, Connecticut, and most tellingly, graduated from Amherst College, a fact he is not likely to let you forget. He has an MA from the Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury. He is the author of a novel, The Last to Go, and a story collection, Big as Life. His fiction has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, Commonwealth, and many other magazines. Rand has been a writer in residence at Amherst, as well as Emerson College. He has for many years, he was for many years, a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. For a decade, he was a contributing editor and travel correspondent for Bon Appetit, intrepidly crossing the globe in search of the perfect meal in the perfect setting. Nice work if you can get it. He just completed a stint as a restaurant reviewer for the Connecticut section of the New York Times. Yes, in addition to his literary talents, he is a foodie. He cooks often. A fact my wife never tires of pointing out to me. Perhaps most annoyingly, Rand speaks German like an Ubermensch, as well as French and Swahili. He picked up Swahili while in Africa on a Watson Fellowship. I could go on, but I must be brief. Most impressive of all, of course, Rand has been an essayist, movie and book reviewer, blogger for Commonwealth for many years, and is now one of our contributing editors. He has also done Yeoman's work as a freelance editor for us. I met Rand at what now seems a lifetime or two ago when we were both teaching at a country day school in New London. Only days after our first meeting, he was hospitalized with a recurrence of malaria that he contracted in Africa. This was painful for him, but seemed rather exotic to me. Who could this adventurer and world traveler be? It turned out that we shared a keen interest in books, in arguing about politics and every other thing, and in basketball. Back in the day, when we were both much taller, we played quite a lot of basketball, and I would occasionally, very occasionally, let him beat me. We both had writerly ambitions, and I have benefited enormously over the years from his advice, his encouragement, and his example. He is a craftsman, a maker of wonderful sentences, and more. The novelist Maureen Howard put it this way, in praising Rand's first book, The Last to Go. The intelligence of this book is central, but the stories come from the place of true fiction, the informed heart. I believe that to be true of all of Rand Cooper's writing. It will certainly be true of his remarks tonight. Please welcome Rand Cooper. Thank you, Paul, and thank you, Paul, and any other Pauls who were here. I do remember the time playing 101 Basketball against Paul Baumann when we were colleagues. He was losing badly. Let's be fits a graduate of Wesleyan when playing in Amherst College, graduate. When his wife and then small children came into the gym, there was a galvanizing and energizing effect upon his abilities, and he subsequently kicked my butt as his wife and small children looked on. It was then that I understood something about marriage. My talk tonight is called Confessions of a Catholic Interloper. I'm going to use the full, at least, 50 minutes that I have, so be prepared to snooze, leave, or endure. I do want to, even though you're a minority in the audience tonight, speak to the students tonight. It's still very vivid to me some ancient experiences that I have of this college. My high school girlfriend, the great sweetheart of my teen years, went here. We went to different colleges in different states, and I came to visit here, and those memories are as vivid to me as yesterday, but I recognize that they were, in fact, fully 40 years ago, in fact, almost to the month. I gaze at students among you across a big gulf of time, strange music, a lingo that demarcates you from people my age, that is, people who use words like lingo, and maybe most of all, your immersion in the digital virtual life, you inhabit a kind of foreign country, and only the fact that I, somewhat belatedly, have a fifth-grade daughter offers me any hope at all of maintaining diplomatic relations with your country in the future. Anyway, tonight I'm going to take you into the foreign country of the past, of my past. I came up with the idea and the title for this talk, Confessions of a Catholic Interloper, when I was recently invited onto a radio program out of Wesleyan called Reasonable Catholic. Maybe some of you have listened to this program. I told the host that first, I didn't think I was a great guest because first I wasn't at all sure I was reasonable, and then, well, I'm not actually Catholic either, I said. Well, I just play one at the magazine. Also, recently my father, who's 88 years old, lives in Tucson, called to tell me that a friend of his had been very excited to read a column I'd written in Commonwealth. Your son must be a very committed Catholic, the friend said. My dad laughed. Last I checked, he told his friend. Rand was a very lapsed congregationalist. So there, I'm finally outed after all these years of fake Catholic. In fact, I've had a long career as a fake Catholic, as an interloper, going back to seventh grade when my parents enrolled me in St. Joseph's School in New London. Little did they know they were starting me on an encounter with Catholicism to last a lifetime. A writer is a kind of spy, and I'm convinced that being dropped into the Catholic world helped make me one. So tonight I want to offer some stories and insights gleaned from my years as an infiltrator, first at a Catholic school, then at a Catholic magazine. I'm going to do this with a mix of storytelling, essay writing, and book reviewing, which is pretty much the trifecta of what I do. I may even, toward the end, do a bit of singing. Fair warning. In the process, I'll use these two concepts, Protestant and Catholic, to sketch some differing ideas about the self in its relation to existence and to other selves, and offer up some thoughts upon what I'm calling American loneliness. That's an actually an unpublished subtitle of my talk, Thoughts on American Loneliness. So let me first describe briefly for you the Protestantism that I lapsed from, as my father said. He himself grew up in Philadelphia, in a white, working class, totally Protestant, totally Republican neighborhood, if you can add all that up. His parents were Episcopalians, but in his career he became a surgeon, and his religion turned out to be science and upward mobility to forms of materialism. Like religious faith itself, atheism can come upon you suddenly as a revelation, or gradually while you're not paying attention, or maybe even trying to avoid it. My father was that latter kind of atheist. When I was a kid, he was looking to recuse himself from church going, because it conflicted with his commitment to Sunday morning tennis. But to do so as quietly as possible in the one hope that my mother might not notice. This all blew up one memorable Sunday when I was 10. We were coming out of church, my mother and my sister were walking ahead of us on the sidewalk as my dad and I lagged behind. I torn off my clip on tie, unbuttoned my strangulating dress shirt, and was reveling in that post-church feeling of liberation. Maybe I could sense that my father felt likewise. Dad, I asked him, do you like going to church? What do you really think of it? He glanced ahead. Don't tell your mother this, he confided. But I think it's a crock. Mom! I yelled, racing up the sidewalk. Dad says church is a crock. For me, religion to me was our church, second congregational. Let me evoke it for you. A graceful stone building on a big green lawn. It was lovely, but severely under occupied. Like the baseball stadium of a chronically losing team, the small congregation scattered in the front seats, the bleachers empty. Religion meant the museum-like somnolence of Sunday service. My mother nudging me when I fidgeted too much and discreetly handing me a mint to pacify me. It was the clink of the communion shot glasses filled with grape juice. No communal slurping from a shared chalice, but individual Protestant portions, neat and hygienic, rattling in the deacons' tray. For me, it was 100 minutes of boredom where the only action whatsoever was waiting to place my offering envelope with my dollar bill that my mother had given me inside into the velvet bottom collection bowl. I'd wile away the time by wondering if the words doxology and doxand might be related, or by trying to count the little carved crenellations and the oak paneling above the choir pews. Everyone around me, meanwhile, was lost in some strange private zone, surfacing to mumble a half-hearted prayer or sing a half-hearted hymn, then subsiding again as our minister, Mr. McLeod, droned on about our obligation to help those less fortunate. Religion above all was a private thing, individual and inward. My mother's faith was focused on her own obscure spiritual yearnings and on the pastor's sermon, which she expected to be moved by. And later, in fact, she turned into quite a church shopper, always on the lookout for a more inspired minister. Oh, I'm through with him, she'd say, when we came home from college and asked how it was going in her latest church. The church as community not only didn't interest her, it vaguely repelled her. Years later, we joked that what our mom truly longed for, her dream congregation was the church of leave me the hell alone. And in fact, our congregational church was pretty close to that. It wasn't in our neighborhood. We had to drive across town. There was almost no overlap between the people my parents went to church with and the people they socialized with. The notion of church and pastor shopping reveals the modern and very American impulse to treat religion as a consumer good, something to compare, select, change or discard. Our Protestantism was a belief, yes, but one you could try on like a jacket. If you didn't like it, you pondered and made your choice. There was a certain self-destructing aspect of Protestantism built into the very core of the faith was a mechanism for rejecting the faith. That mechanism came into play in the deal I cut with my mother over confirmation. I'd take the weaker class with Reverend McLeod, but the final decision to be confirmed or not was up to me. This resulted in the crass absurdity of a 13 year old American kid informing this learned and authentically reverend man, a graduate of Harvard School of Divinity, a man who had studied theology at Tübingen, home of Hegel and Hülderlin, of this kid getting up in that man's face and saying, no thanks. I don't buy it. I don't think it's true. Now the appropriate response would well have been, who cares what you think? The church doesn't care. I don't particularly care and I'm certain God does not care. But Mr. McLeod couldn't say that not just because he was polite, although he was, but because as I said his brand of Christianity had that decisional aspect built into it fundamentally. So goodbye to the green lawn and the graceful stone building. Goodbye to the pastoral voice echoing its drowsy invocation to do good as our small nuclear family passed through untouched, a lark, another Sunday outing. The water indicates breaks in the structure. In the middle of this my parents up and decided to send me to St. Joseph's School. No religious reason. They just didn't think the public schools were doing a very good job. I was coasting. I needed some rigor. Well, it was a huge shock to my system. An over-indulged smart boy from an upwardly mobile Protestant family colliding with the world of early 1970s small city Catholicism. The shock began right on day one with a point of style. St. Joseph's was my first experience of a school uniform. White shirt, dress slacks, plaid black watch plaid tie. Any individualizing was limited to your accessories. I was something of a clothes horse and I'd absorbed some highly unfortunate trends of the early 1970s. Specifically, I had a coat inspired by the wardrobe of a flamboyant Pittsburgh Steelers running back of the day, Frenchie Fuqua, who derived his style from popular black spoiltation movies like Shaft. My prize coat was a fake fur coat, big and shaggy, sort of wooly mammoth-like. And so I showed up for my first day at Catholic School where I knew no one looking like a downtown pimp. No sooner had I hit the hallway at St. Joseph's than the principal, Father Dempsey, took me aside. It's very impressive, your coat, but it might make it a wee bit harder for you to fit in. Okay, I ditched the coat and the platform shoes too, but the fitting in part I soon found out wasn't going to happen anyway. As I discovered, St. Joe's was the opposite of the Green Lawn in almost every respect. The school was a dark and ancient brick building where nothing had been improved for decades. The grounds were a half-acre prison yard of fenced-in black top, not a single blade of grass anywhere. There was a hole in the chain link fence where, if the teacher wasn't watching, you could escape at lunch, then hustle up to the block to the pizza place, ocean pizza, cram down an Italian sub, and make it back by the bell. This routine wasn't really about the sandwich. It was about the transgression. The schoolyard pastime was a rough tackling game that began with one boy standing in the center of the black top, facing a line of 30 or so others. At a shout of go, that line raced over to the other side, and the one boy in the middle tackled someone, one person. The next time, those two tackled two more, and so on, until at the end, a few last crossers faced a mob of gang tacklers. The game, officially not allowed, but played daily, was brutal, with all sorts of vendettas enacted in the pile-ups. Girls, those merciless arbiters of manliness, stood watching on the sideline. You had to be tough, or at least act tough, but I couldn't. I was secretly sensitive, and my memories from St. Joe's are smothered, are full of smothered, shamed bursts of my crying. My grades were too good. I had a baby face. I wouldn't and couldn't fight. The girl I had a crush on was also a good student, and when I walked her home, tough boys followed us, murmuring crude suggestions. The school was staffed by lay teachers and nuns. Nuns were completely new to me. The only nun I knew was Sally Field, the flying nun. Well, the Nuns at St. Joe's were not only flying, some were barely moving, like Sister Catherine Mary, who sat stock still in the world's tiniest library, a converted maintenance closet. She was so old and moved so infrequently, she was rumored among students to be dead and embalmed. Religion class was taught by Sister Thomasina, a baffling experience to me. Every day began with the Pledge of Allegiance, and then the Hail Mary recited in rapid succession as if they were cheers for the same team, reflecting the motto carved in stone in the front of the school in big letters for God and country. St. Joe's brooked no iconoclasm. We were sternly warned not to listen to the rock opera Jesus Christ superstar, which I loved. Academically, the school wasn't exactly achievement minded. When I wrote a long term paper on the Attica State Prison Uprising, which happened that year, my social studies teacher, Mr. Farina, took me aside and accused me of plagiarizing. More hot secret tears from me. Sister Susan, my kindly homeroom teacher, kept me after class one day and tried to probe my unhappiness. Was everything okay at home? Did I need any help? I sat there exploding with misery, staring at the clock on the wall and wishing I could be anywhere else. The clocks at St. Joseph's were antiquated models, those square clocks with Roman numerals that ticked off the minutes each minute discreetly. I was fascinated by those clocks. How could time, which was continuous, be broken down into stackable, tick-tockable building blocks? Wasn't time round anyway and not square? This kind of thing makes an impression on a future writer, and every time I've written about St. Joe's in stories or essays, I've included those clocks. I'll read a few paragraphs from a story I wrote a number of years ago called Heroes of 1974. It was published in the Iowa Review. Here, the adult narrator is recalling being called to the principal's office because of some troublemaking offense. By the way, whenever I wrote about St. Joseph's, I used a different saint, St. Crispin, who was both more interesting to me and also would camouflage the school. And I typically turned myself into a tough troublemaking kind of kid for what it's worth. Here's the passage. One afternoon, I was summoned down to Father Connolly. He kept his office in a tiny room, crammed with books and diplomas, electric candles, and Jesus dreamily agonizing on his cross. Father Connolly talked to you through the steeple of his fingertips, pressed together in front of his mouth. I was entering a stage of life, he told me, where I would need to be mature. Star athletes were mature. Jesus had been mature, which was why he accepted his father's will, even though he didn't like it. And our school's patron, St. Crispin, he was mature, giving up all his possessions to make shoes for the poor. He wanted to help others, which is what mature people did. I stared at the wall clock. The school's clocks were ancient relics that talked off the minutes mechanically, and I avoided his gaze. Father Connolly went on talking. Maturity, he pointed out, didn't mean you had to be a shrinking violet. Take St. Crispin, he said. The Romans tortured him. They pulled out his fingernails. He leaned forward. They boiled a cauldron of fat and tar and dunked him in. Can you imagine that? This story didn't make sense to me. If God was so all-mature in everything, I said, then why didn't he help Crispin? Ah, but he did. Father Connolly smiled. In fact, he gave him a great gift. He made him a soldier for goodness. And that was his question for me, Father Connolly said. Clearly, from my behavior, I wanted to be a soldier. But what for? This wasn't the kind of question you answered. I sat there on the clock, the big hand trembled as if it might actually move backward, then clicked ahead. So this passage conveys to me, looking back at it, some of the impression that Catholic school made on me. Early adolescence is a time when a person begins to tangle with the imponderables, mortality and time, our consciousness, our purpose. For me, the very harshness and even the decrepitude of St. Joe's, conduced to thinking along those lines. The school exerted a powerful and even oppressive sense of time, of how minutes pile up into hours, then to days, months, years and lifetimes, and belong beyond that to the collective lifetime of history, and then finally to whatever mystery lay beyond that. One's individual existence, my individual existence, was being placed in a different perspective from what I was used to, with different attitudes toward authority, achievement and individuality. There was an eye fixed on the eternal and a premium placed on obedience and sacrifice, a certain invocation of cruelty in pursuit of encouraging goodness. Being Catholic at any rate was certainly not about expressing yourself, whether with a fur coat or with your personal views on God. And so St. Joe's delivered the message that Reverend Mr. McLeod could not. Who cared what you thought about God? Better focus on what God might be thinking about you. In some ways, the school seemed the least religious place on earth. It was not exactly suffused with sacramental energy. I recall the day Sister Thomasina had classmates list saints to adopt as confirmation names, and Steve Stefano and Albert Annabellini listed St. Popeye and St. Bozo. Instant ticket to Father Dempsey's office. And worse, I'm sure, when they got home. At St. Joe's, a great deal of correction was ladled out, and yet recidivism was high. The focus was never on our personal development, with concerned parents called in to confer, rather daily life at school, woven tapestry of crime and punishment, sin and penance, two complementary strands, two necessary halves of a basic deal. Kids, of course, see the world in terms of individual personalities and not abstractions, but obviously class and ethnicity lay behind some of my problems fitting in. I lived in the doctors, lawyers, accountants part of town, while other kids at St. Joe's lived in the welders, policemen, coaches part. Most had grandparents born in other countries who spoke other languages, parents who accepted no back talk and took the mantra of God and country seriously. Unlike my parents, they saw church as the very center of the neighborhood, the center of their lives. I didn't understand any of this yet, but Catholicism and the church had been instrumental in their effort to claw a toehold in the slippery rock of American life. And it was an accomplishment still recent enough for many of them that they could hardly accept that it could ever be optional, let alone dismissed as a crock. Faith, religion, the church, so were not propositions to be pondered, not an idea, but an identity. In the end, a bureaucratic fluke shook me loose from that world. The archdiocese had built this sparkly new high school, but it was over-enrolled and non-Catholics were bumped to the end of the waiting list. And so on a warm spring day in 1973, I visited the one private school in our area, a small modern building ensconced amid birch trees and beautiful gardens on a serene college campus for an entrance exam. My mother brought me and as we came in, I saw a pretty young woman sitting on the lawn outside school reading a book. She smiled as we went in. The receptionist informed me when I asked that this woman was in fact a student at the school. Seniors were allowed to take their study hall outside. I recall being astonished and wondering, why doesn't she just run away? The thought shows how far I had drifted in a way at St. Joe's and why private school would be a kind of homecoming. It wasn't going to be about the hard rituals of the playground or the downplaying of accomplishment and certainly not about Jesus on a cross or being a soldier for goodness. There wasn't going to be any God and not much country either. School from now on was going to be about me and not the authority over me, but the authority in me. Rand did extremely well on our admissions test, came a note from the head of school on my acceptance letter, and I remember my glow of pleasure. St. Joe's had made me feel as if my talents, whatever they might be, were irrelevant, even vaguely suspect. No one was going to be impressed by me because, well, impressing people was not the point. It wasn't the point of being human, of being a member of a family, of a school, of a country, or of being Catholic. Catholic and Protestant, it's easy enough to translate these impressions as I've been putting them out to you into concepts with hierarchy and community on one hand, meritocracy and individuality on the other. What I know is that St. Joe's remains important to me in memory, in large part for the obstacles that it put in my way. It restrained and even rebuked me, and in the process showed me things about the making of me as a particular kind of American. I was unhappy at the school, that's for sure, but unhappiness at that age and for an embryonic writer in particular is a gift to your own future, a rich text to be interpreted years later. In that sense, I was just unhappy enough at St. Joe's to make those two of the best years of my life. I'll deal more briefly, I promise, with the years I spent working for Commonwealth. The magazine is a compliment, perhaps even in some ways a counterweight, to the kind of Catholicism I encountered at parochial school. While Commonwealth keeps one foot in the world of local parish life, its other foot is planted in realities that are the opposite of parochial. For half a century, the magazine's efforts and its identity have been deeply intertwined with the liberalizing mission of the Second Vatican Council. It's a wide-ranging journal of culture and politics as well as religion. It's Catholic, my grandmother used to love this distinction, Catholic with a small C. Oh, she was an Episcopalian. She didn't want to be identified with Catholics. I never really understood that. So it's Catholic with a small C. For 20 years, I've been fortunate to do a very wide range of things at this wide-ranging journal, writing about books and movies, producing essays and columns on topics ranging from the perils of assisted suicide to the history of the music box. I have some advice for you students who are here to keep in mind, whatever you end up doing once your formal education is over, you'll be happiest if it provides not only a livelihood and an option for service, but also a means of in fact continuing your education. Commonwealth has done that for me. It's given me a grounding in a particular set of subjects, from just war theory to the history of antisemitism to the intricacies of our healthcare system. We have one writer in particular who writes brilliantly about that, concepts that are useful to any citizen. The staff at Commonwealth inspires me again and again with a kind of double idealism, the idealism of faith itself, but also on a day-to-day basis of taking ideas seriously, living as if ideas matter. College students may take this assumption for granted, but believe me, life will test it. A semi-secret thing I've done at Commonwealth, alluded to you by Paul Baumann for years, is edit many of the articles in the magazine. So now I get to out Paul Baumann. Let posterity know that, like an anonymous brushman in the Atelier of Rubens or some other famed master, I have actually performed many of the editing jobs commonly attributed to the great Paul Baumann. Many of those editing jobs involve taking on arcane academic topics and trying to and translating them in effect for a non-academic audience. I'll be delicate here as I may be among your teachers, superb scholars, immensely knowledgeable about their subjects, but I will say that they at times have sent me a wander through some pretty dense thickets of prose. Paul Baumann knows that I must read one typical sentence, chosen entirely at random, from an essay by an accomplished university theologian. Not here, not anywhere near here. Maybe not even on this comment. Here's the sentence. Even if the development of a strain of theology taking a pessimistic view of human nature damaged by original sin, as well as a supernaturalism replacing apocalyptic that could lead to passivity in the face of human poverty and disease, did not lead Catholics to think about human poverty and human emancipation that now seem a secure part of Catholic tradition, still the philosophical approach reinstituted by Thomas Aquinas and reaffirmed by the later tradition made it possible for Catholic teaching to accommodate and even sponsor scientific discoveries. Is it blasphemous to remark that such sentences remind the editor that we humans are in fact fallen? In this sense, the first draft of an essay for common will is often profoundly Catholic. Another part of what I've been blessed to do is delve into the work of contemporary fiction writers, including those writers who take on questions of faith. And tonight I want to finish up by recommending two of them. One Protestant, one Catholic, suitably enough, whose writings address some of the themes I've been hinting at here. The first is the late novelist and critic John Updike. Updike is best known, although he wrote many, many books for frighteningly many books. He's best known for four novels chronicling the life and times of a basketball playing alter ego named Harry Angstrom, also known as rabbit. Religious themes both in Updike's writing and in Harry Angstrom's life cluster around three significant impulses, praise for the created world, awe at the mystery of human consciousness, and dread and disbelief at the prospect of personal extinction. Updike does a very artful job of steering Harry, who's not educated, through theological dilemmas. There's a memorable scene, I think it's in Rabbit Run, the first novel, of him golfing with his pastor. And while the pastor is lecturing Harry on his many moral failings, he's in the process of leaving his wife, it's Harry that Updike turns into an avatar of authentic religious feeling. And he does this, as some of you will recall, by having Rabbit hit one perfect golf shot. And then voice his thrilled belief that such perfection on earth necessarily implies the existence of a creator, presumably a golf friendly one, above. It's classic John Updike, wittily using a very mundane staple of suburban life to cue up a spiritual ecstasy. And in fact, this golfing argument from design reveals a spiritual logic that is everywhere in Updike's fiction, namely that the existence of God in a sort of perceptual back-engineering way can be inferred from our own inexhaustible need to express wonder at the world around us, and for a writer by his ability to describe it. Updike writes in his memoir called Self-Consciousness, imitation is praise, description expresses love. The four Rabbit novels are crammed to bursting with the trivia of American life over the decades. We learn, for instance, that the ingredients of a TV dinner include sistine and gum Arabic, that consumer reports rates the 10-cup krups coffee maker above the 12-cup brawn, or brawn, as it should be said, that the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback of the mid-1970s was Ron Jaworski and on and on. Plenty of critics blasted Updike for lavishing exquisite prose on such unimportant stuff, and it's a cogent criticism. However, the critic James Wood, British critic and novelist, perceptively called Updike's plush attention to detail a form of, in his formulation, nostalgia for the present. Updike understood that, in a sense, all life is being left behind at every minute as we pass through our allotted stay on earth. The self, he wrote in Self-Consciousness, is a window on the world that we can't bear to think of shutting. And that's why the Rabbit novels are packed so full. They're the efforts of someone desperate to get as much in as he can before that window on the world snaps shut. It's not sistine or gum Arabic that Updike was enraptured by. It's the action of Rabbit's daily consciousness in registering these things. But what kind of religious faith does this add up to? For Updike, as his biographer Adam Bagley in a book that came out last year noted, looking, seeing, and noting on paper were acts of worship. At a conference on Christianity and literature, Updike commented that realism forms an homage to the God of creation. Even, he said, in those many works of mine where religion plays no overt role, mundane events are considered religiously as worthy of reverence and detailed evocation. Updike died eight years ago of lung cancer. The last, and it came upon him, the diagnosis very quickly. He died within three months of his diagnosis. The last story that he wrote and it was published as he was dying ends by evoking one of those mundane events in just the reverent way that he is describing. It's called the full glass. It's his last story. Updike's protagonist, his alter ego, is a man of 80 and he's standing at the mirror at the end of the day. He's holding a glass of water in one hand. He's got a bunch of his pills that he takes every night and seeing all these pills that are barely keeping him going and makes him brood about death. But then he drinks the water, takes the pills and he finds that drinking the water brings what he calls a sensation of bliss, linking his mind to the child that he was many decades ago and to two places in his small town where he had had his thirst slaked, a country spring where he drank using a tin dipper and the water fountain at a local gas station. Here's how Updike closes the story by evoking that memory. The water was cold tasting brightly of tin but not as cold as that which bubbled up in a corner of that small town garage. The cement floor black with grease and the ceiling obscured by the sliding door tracks and suspended wood frames holding rubber tires fresh from Akron. The rubber overhead had a smell that cleared your head the way a bite of licorice did and the virgin treads had the sharp cut of metal type or newly iron clothes. That icy water held an ingredient that made me a boy of nine or ten eager for the next moment of life, one brimming moment after another. To me and Updike is probably my favorite writer, his vision was a radiant one but it's ultimately a lonely one too. You take your own cart to market he wrote in a bit of advice in a letter to his young grandson and and this too was his vision as an artist but making a religion of individual consciousness is an inherently isolating and self-limiting enterprise. Updike was an avid reader of Proust and in his view Proust's central message was that and I'm using Updike's words here the transformation of experience by memory into something ineffably precious is the one transcendent meaning each life rests from death, the one transcendent meaning. It's as if Updike linked the very existence of God to the miracle of individual perception and to memory. He was raised a Lutheran and he remained an intermittent churchgoer in adulthood but his emphasis was never on the life to come it was always on the life already lived as he wrote in the last poem he published he wrote two weeks before he died perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life. I treasure the poems and I highly recommend them that Updike wrote during those weeks as he was dying. I find them majestically courageous to be able to write fully formed sonnets with intricately worked out rhyme schemes when you know you're going to die in weeks is an artistic monument to courage but from a Christian point of view they do exude a tinge of the heretical as if God himself were dying and the world ceasing to cease to exist because Updike is leaving it. Years before he had confessed that my mind sends up silent screams at the thought of all future eons at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. He viewed the end of individual consciousness as a pure and total catastrophe and his heroic effort of describing it as it approached in the lead up to his death created some of the most crushingly poignant writing you'll find anywhere in American literature at least modern American literature even as it conveyed the heavy burdens such a view places on the self and gives us the unsettling and sometimes strange process of a man mourning his own loss all the days of my life Updike wrote in that last poem three weeks before he died my life my life forever for the Catholic alternative I want to recommend two terrific novels by Alice McDermott who gave this lecture when any of you here when she gave this lecture few years ago one of my favorite writers she's a writer of many amazements her fiction explores irish catholic life in and around new york city in the 20th century i want to recommend two books the first is at weddings and wakes it's published early 90s and it's set in 1960 and it studies a family through the eyes of three children brought on weekly visits in from long island to their grandmother's apartment in brooklyn they sit through long afternoons of their mother and and her three sisters they're their three aunts pouring out decades of pent up hopes and disappointments it's a detailed tableau of what's been called lace curtain irish unhappiness excuse me McDermott is quietly experimental she's a realist but she's interestingly and quietly experimental in the way she structures her novels and that's what i want to pay a little bit of attention to at weddings and wakes is maybe the only novel i know that's told from a third person plural point of view a narrative built on such phrases as the children saw or perhaps one of the children thought or to the younger girl it seemed that the kids individual identities we are suppressed we barely learn their names we get only a glimpse of their later adult lives this gap between the extravagant detail of McDermott's prose and the very sparse individuation of the point of view characters it's a it's a recurring hallmark of her approach as a novelist here and in a number of other novels her realism is as lavishly descriptive of uptikes but the underpinnings of selfhood are quite different almost opposite in weddings and wakes it doesn't really matter the individual consciousness who's seeing this what matters is the this for us reading the novel is like being carried to a window on the shoulder of anonymous porters we peer through to a world where wedding party bands play galway bay as galway bay as men tell stories of gentleman jimmy walker or a voice calls out sweet jesus don't mention parnel a world where children are taught the lives of the saints by nuns with names like sister illuminata McDermott can continued this bittersweet ethnography of irish catholic life with her 2007 novel charming billy a great great novel which covers three days in 1983 following the funeral of billy lynch world war two vet and lifelong resident of queens through group reminiscences we get to know who billy was an alcoholic an incurable romantic who enjoys charming old older ladies who comes a baby by murmuring lines of yates writes notes on napkins to hand the priest priest calls his best friend at 2 a.m. to rail drunkenly against the passing of all things McDermott pulls off a rousing and tender rendition of that stock irish figure the poetic rogue in love with his sorrows the plot goes back to world war two and a lost love that helps explain billy's unhappiness but what i want to draw attention to again is how McDermott tells the tale once again her narrator stays in the background her identity blurry at times McDermott sits all her characters around the table and there are many of them and quotes them or she'll create a group monologue that reads on the page almost like an unedited transcript there's a huge supporting cast in the novel and you may find yourself flipping back through pages to check which daniel lynch it is that you're listening to because there are two of them or wondering exactly how you got on to this story of billy's cousin's mother's great great auntie eileen it all becomes a little bit overwhelming and it does so in a way that's carefully calculated to reflect back on us the readers as if the welter of names and stories and our resistance to it reveals our own attenuated capacity for family life McDermott reminds us how crowded that life was in billy's world the sprawling extended family and the surrounding structures of neighborhood church of irishness itself this is the world of the cradle catholic and in a common wheel essay McDermott wrote about this topic she described it as a system of unshakable associations that make up a thick catholicism i was reminded of this thick texture when i interviewed film director martin scorsese a few months ago a great gig that common wheel lined up for me and for the magazine scores so have any of you seen scorsese's new film silence it sort of came and went very quickly especially as a film for such a major director but those of you who saw it know that it's it's a film that a theological film in that it takes on questions of faith very explicitly but that's not scorsese fans will know generally how he he does catholicism although he has have had a few films that are explicitly religious in theological sense more often especially in his early and autobiographical movies it's what's in the background like like a cross glimpsed on a rooftop in mean streets and i asked him about that he said yeah that's a shot of my old neighborhood meaning the lower east side of manhattan which was very different when he grew up there in the 40s and 50s or high harvey kytel's characters quick outrage when the girl he's making out with uses a devotional candle as a romantic mood heightener you can't do that with religious candles the opening scene of scorsese's very first movie who's that knocking at my door shows in a sort of sort of somber uh birgman-esque way an italian woman if any of you have seen it you might not know that's actually played by scorsese's mother who's preparing a sausage pie like a huge calzone and serving it to her children in silent sacramental somberness i asked him about that of course that was our family's feast of the immaculate conception he was very happy to tell me every year december 8 there are other kinds of catholicism of course and other kinds of catholic artists i think of flannery o'connor who said that the catholic novel often fails because it tries to make a culture out of the church and the church is not a culture yet the kind of catholicism i've been describing is a culture and a community in the fullest sense as such it offers protection from that abiding american power of loneliness a theme in our culture tracing back to pioneer days the frontier and the open spaces the long journeys across the ocean american loneliness is not merely a production of geography of course but of ideology the ideology of individualism that drenches and drives so much of american life including of course american creativity american genius it's no accident that this theme has preoccupied sociologists over the last half century or so the lonely crowd bowling alone loneliness as a way of life there's a whole genre devoted to assessing the power of american life to isolate and atomize and juxtaposing that to the contrary potential never more evident than in urban urban immigrant life of traditional although not reserved exclusively to it of traditional communities where the power of shared and assigned identity is strong for me in this context after updike whom i love reading mcdermot is a kind of relief it's a relief from the burden of individual consciousness as the be all and end all relax a little bit let your friends and family do some work in mcdermot you don't take your own cart to market friends and families neighbors and priests they do all those witnesses who gather together in her novel to convey the substance and adjudicate the value of billy's life and death after his consciousness has been erased to be sure mcdermot's novels possess their own kind of loneliness i am rounding the corner to the finish line and it lies in the fate of american catholicism as it morphs and moves beyond the kind of cradle catholicism i've been describing what happens then charming billy actually turns out to be told by the daughter of billy's cousin but you'd never know it because she's a ghostly presence never named we get only the skimpiest hints at her own life a college graduate married living in seattle of all places with her child and husband a reader might legitimately wonder why not simply dispense with her all together why bring the narrator in as a character at all if you're not going to fill her out these are the questions writers always think about when they read other people's novels like what are you doing with that narrator why is that narrator here that way why is that narrator either not not this or this i think there's a reason for the anonymity of the narrators that mcdermot heaps pudding in front of us third generation irish americans they stand looking back through a kind of one-way window of assimilation at the world of a kind of irish catholicism that they've left behind for better and for worse this was the life of ethnic and religious community loud close-knit restrictive mcdermot's point of view characters have left this behind in charming billy the narrator makes only a couple of comments about herself she says i married matt and we headed off to seattle lives of our own we said charming billy suggests ambivalence about the tradeoffs that come with a life of one's own things are gained mobility personal and intellectual freedoms educational professional status but a lot gets lost gets lost to shrug off the burdens of group identity is also to shrug off ferocious attachments and mcdermot's novels express doubt about whether anything as vivid and nourishing will take its place the grand struggle to rest yourself from the group delivers her ghostly narrators to a central american paradox that getting a life of your own escaping a world where everyone owns you brings actually a diminished sense of who you are it makes you freer but more lonely in faith terms it maybe puts you one step further on the path toward that church of leave me the hell alone i know i've gone way long but since i do one lecture every decade i have to make it last a decade i'm gonna close with a final and i hope humorous last outing of myself paul balman will attest that despite my sojourns in catholic land i've retained something of the wasp world view both my wife and i grew up in tidy little wasp families both of us with fathers who themselves were only children mothers with one sibling each in other words we had no relatives and we ourselves have eaked out exactly one child our daughter larkin whom we named more over after the nae plus ultra of waspy british poets philip larkin so over the years we've been perfectly positioned to enjoy the hilarious mockery of the catholic protestant divide and i'm taking my cultural references way low delivered in the old montipython movie the meaning of life those of my generation how many of you seen this movie yes some of you are already chuckling a little bit you remember the scene in which a pinched self-righteous and lonely protestant couple somewhere in great britain i think between the wars watch out their window at a row house across the street where an endless parade of children pour forth from the home of their catholic neighbors all siblings in an impossibly giant catholic family singing that well-known traditional catholic song every sperm is sacred every sperm is great when a sperm gets wasted god gets quite irate the hateful protestant husband watching this with contempt and self-congratulation says to his wife we're protestants and proud of it we don't believe in all that pappas clap crap we take precautions that's what being protestants all about this then was my tiny family's protestant heritage or so i thought imagine my surprise last year when i undertook some genealogical research into the cooper family part of taking my 88 year old father back for a visit to that philadelphia neighborhood he left so long ago we'd always thought that the coopers came over from england in revolutionary era times but here's what i discovered when i went onto ancestry dot com and now i sound like a commercial but i love ancestry dot com my great great grandfather warden cooper my grandfather's grandfather in other words came over as a boy in 1846 not from england but from ireland he married jane also from ireland and the two of them then proceeded to have not one not three not five or seven or nine but sixteen children all quickly put to work as carters weavers and spinners in the textile mills of philadelphia 16 children one one woman one couple is it possible that my ancestors were irish catholics doesn't the muddy python skit say so in any case whatever it was irish Protestantism Catholicism it was very thick i'm guessing there was plenty of god in that huge cooper family and i know that there was a lot of country too as the census reveals in the names the list of names of children that include george washington cooper and abraham lincoln cooper and so i am in the end truly at least an honorary catholic what can i say except that this is the glory of america it sweeps you far afield and then it closes a circle when you least expect it such wild plot twists make particularly suitable to us americans the message of another epic religious farce in a different montipython film always look on the bright side of life thank you for your patience so we have a little time that we would love to hear from you your comments your questions yes sir thank you based on the novel by ando my other question is are you familiar with that japanese writer to recommend any of his other novels i i maybe i should be embarrassed to say that the only novel of shizaku and know that i've read is silence uh have you read it so there's another novel that the name maybe someone else will will know the name of it that occupies itself much more directly and explicitly with the life of jesus um and and i i can't recall the name of it but i i haven't read it he was for me one of those many names that you know you're familiar with but you've never read anything by him and to me that list is appallingly large and uh so so for me the the occasion of the scorsese interview was was the means of of reading that novel which which i i found pretty fascinating i don't know what you thought about it but um yeah yeah the book you're thinking of is actually called the life of jesus thanks it's not really a novel it's a nonfiction book it's an effort to represent jesus as a gentle person for the japanese culture yeah and and and also i assume it take he was he was abidingly preoccupied by the difficulty by the difficult mesh between christianity and and japanese culture and i think that that book the life of jesus takes that up the silence takes that up pretty directly but i think the life of jesus takes takes that up exclusively that's that's really what that book is yeah thanks paul it's excellent to have people here who fill in the huge blanks for you are you good to see you yes it's been a while is this thing on yes it is okay i i just can't resist popping up a softball for you whether the response to be humorous or serious but in the context of group identity religious group identity ethnic identity how do you view the question that people bat around now is the pope catholic uh before i defer i'm thinking about your question in so many levels because it's obviously the punchline of you know many many a joking conversation i mean listen we all have our own uh whether we're faithful or not our own political biases default positions that are going to make us more or less hospitable you know frankly this is this is to to not only to each president as he or she well as he comes along but you know to each pope so how does the change from uh uh you know from benedict to francis does that make you feel instinctively like yeah i like it the pope of course is catholic um paul bowman and others can can fill you in with more detail about the very lively skirmishes that go on in some ways about your your question you know beneath the often pacific surface of what we all think about the pope i love the pope um but not because i'm obliged to i'm not catholic uh but because uh to me everything that he says uh the emphasis on on pat he his emphasis on pastoral care seems among other things a way of both sidestepping and diffusing uh sort of what the equivalent of catholic culture war arguments that often rage uselessly you know from from my point of view so i feel like his political sentiments are probably in step with mine but even if that's not true um he's insistently addressing issues through the lens of love charity and um and and and in a slightly different level pastoral care which is both seems spot-on but also a kind of canny way of sidestepping in flam some inflammatory issues i don't know if that makes sense to you but that's that's as far as i get with a take on that but i'm sure paul bowman might be able to add something more do you want to add something more you see why i like working for him uh so i have a question rand i was very interested in the way you were distinguishing between you know the Protestant writer like up dike and the catholic writer like um aas McDermott and you know it occurred to me that the the the up dike as a as a sort of quintessential Protestant writer doctrine is all it's quite close to the surface of his writing quite close to what the surface of his writing whereas for alice McDermott it's much more got to do with practice or ritual he reminded me i was wondering as you talked about the catholic the the writings of alice McDermott how different the catholic novel is from the jewish novel in that regard you know that they're very much wrapped up in that community cultural thing so the question before you start answering the question is um i don't know if you think about these issues about the catholic novel and the death of the catholic novel and the existence of the catholic novel but do you think maybe those who who who are sort of unhappy about what they think is the demise of the catholic novel are actually looking for something with more doctrine and less practice what do you mean by the last part with more so so would McDermott be a doctrinal no she's very much she's the she's like the jewish she's the practice the the ritual the well the practice of catholicism the culture not so much right the belief system so i think you know if if you were to i mean the the writer who comes to mind to me is flannery o'connor really as as such a useful counterpoint to uh to McDermott not and her i mean i i love alice McDermott in part because one of the things i love when i read a novel is to enter a a a fully imagined rich world of places people and characters now i can organize her uh opposite up dike in the way that i just did as writers they actually share a great deal um because of the way they use descriptive language there's nothing spare really about about either writer i can imagine trying to sort of channel an answer to your question visa by by imagining a catholic a reader unsatisfied with with McDermott there could be a sort of you know what a that's ancient history uh we're we're way beyond that these are these are this is sort of a museum piece kind of fiction it's nice for what it is but it's essentially nostalgic o'connor flannery o'connor's writing would seem to have a much more kind of portable challenge of faith to an actual reader looking to engage that kind of thing um and McDermott doesn't really doesn't really offer that so uh i i would i would put her um you know i i tend not not really to think about where is the catholic novel right now but if if you ask me think about that i think well if someone wants that they have it in a writer who actually wrote 40 years ago um i don't know if you have other kinds of writers you have in mind that you would that you would put in that in that slot well i don't know how guess but no but i mean i think that uh that the the the individuals who are less happy with what they think is the decline of the catholic novel i'm not going to be happy with flannery o'connor because that was 40 years ago right or they are happy with flannery o'connor but where is that kind of novel today they would ask i don't know someone else maybe someone else can talk some names in robinson is maryland excuse me is is she catholic i know her stuff calvin is here but her stuff is very uh i mean at least uh housekeeping was don't you think i mean in terms of uh hitting those anyway it's not calvin but uh but it seems to be well as an as a narrative of of of contemporary life that's informed at some level by questions of faith it's pretty oblique in that novel though isn't it i mean it's possible to read that novel without even engaging that to mention right but ed wheeler who actually has read the has read gilead and uh ed do you want to answer this question because you're you're you're you're very well positioned to answer it no it's just that she takes out take the mic her chief character is a is a minister and but it's also not considered in the contemporary times it's set what in the in the maybe 30 40 years ago even longer but he directly faces the especially in lila dealing with his the situation with his wife who is has a rather strange and unconventional background and he actually preaches a sermon to her in the course of lila and the doctrinal elements come right to the fore quite explicitly that's the only thing i can answer your comment about um being the young Protestant lad at st joseph school put me in mind of thomas merton at the monk poet who had a somewhat similar experience um he was a um Protestant at a french catholic school at the lycee angra in montauban he was he looked forward to recess every day because that's when he would be beaten up and uh when he he graduated from the school there was a sweet irony in the fact that this english lad born in the parodies of a new zealand father and a long island mother won two prizes he won the prize for french literature and the prize for religion and he was the Protestant kid who was english it never left him about a couple of months before he died and was published actually after his death so it was 1969 the novelization of his experience appeared under the title my argument with the gestapo and what he talked about was the cruelty and the tyranny that he tasted in that homogeneous catholic experience now it didn't seem to be in the end overwhelmingly damaging because he became a monk but have you thought of writing either a story or a novel that um produces some element of revenge on the catholic experience or was it entirely entirely as affectionate as you chronicled um that's a great question i'm just thinking about how to answer it um what was the title of the the novelization merton might um i'm not i'm not really in a in a fiction i'm sort of a post fiction writer uh so it's been a while since i've done that for various reasons that really aren't worth going into um i have written in a somewhat more surrogate mode uh elsewhere a little bit about um about these things uh about catholic school you know you you you choose different versions of uh if you're going to write from and about your own experience in a memoiristic way or an essayistic way you you choose different things to look at um so it's something i have thought about yes in fact and and something that i've done something i've done in common well i i wrote a piece years ago uh that received a lot of flak in the magazine uh about some ambiguous interactions i had with the priest there who i who i mentioned here um and it takes a very different track from what i talked about and what i read tonight uh so you know as as for most experiences they're powerful there are contending valences um yeah on on on either side at least i find that do we have uh thank you for that do we have a last question for the evening from somewhere or someone i just want to say to all of you paul thank you for inviting me for this and and it's a week night and i know how the pace of i have a young daughter i know how lives work i know what time people get up and uh i want to thank you all for coming out tonight it's it means a great deal to me actually thank you so thanks to ran just two quick things before you leave uh first there may be those among you a few of you who might be expecting uh an event on saturday morning this week um we have canceled that event so if you were planning to come don't come and if you weren't planning to come you're not missing anything okay uh the other thing is uh just to remind those of you who are here because you're part of the the nascent common wheel community if you stay around you and i will chat for a while about how we're going to organize our little group so thank you all for being here thanks again to rand and thank you paul for being here and thank you to everything to do with common wheels the greatest catholic journal in the world