THE PERIPATETIC READER

THE PERIPATETIC READER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 22, 2008

“The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness but in the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.”

Henry Fielding (1707 –1754), English Novelist, author of “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews”

One wonders at my age how many more periods of quadrennial insanity of presidential campaigns he will endure before he returns to his maker.

Were I to make a scholarly study of the many I have experienced in my lifetime, I believe I could put transparencies one on top of the other of the promises made never kept once elected, the candidates so similar and devoid of contrast as to be mirror images of each other, not to mention the insufferable passion and blind guile of those for and against these candidates in the run up to the election as to miss the entertaining folly, and not to put too small a turn on it, but also the incredible waste of energy, capital, intellect, spirit and truth in the process, all in the name of democracy that is hardly democratic when a half billion dollars is used creating the subliminal cacaphony of blitzing television ads.

Hitting the low ball into the dirt is par for the course, but this is not new. It has been going on long before a place called the United States of America existed, indeed, before the Western Hemisphere was discovered. I suppose you could go back to the time man first walked upright.

I’m a self- confessed peripatetic reader. Although no scholar, as a respite from my writing, I may on occasion wander into a subject, and find myself reading on it in no certain sequence and find myself amazed, surprised, disappointed, confused, but generally entertained for the attention.

When author Garry Wills was here in town, for example, and gave a brief talk on his then new book, WHAT PAUL MEANT, meaning St. Paul of course, I attended at The Tampa Tribune's auditorium.

I had called ahead and asked if I could bring my books by the author to be autographed. The person setting up the author's appearance, co-owner of the Inkwood Bookstore, said, “Yes, by all means.” I brought a whole bag of books, twelve in all, which of course held up the signing line a bit.

No surprise, as he signed the books, he looked to see if I had read them. I’ve done the same. We did get into a little conversation as he was signing “Explaining America: The Federalist” (1981), “Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence” (1978), “A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government” (1999), “Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders” (1994), “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” (1992 – winner of Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction), “Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home” (1987), “Confessions of a Conservative” (1979), “John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity” (1997), “Under God: Religion and American Politics” (1990), “Papal Sin: Structure of Deceit” (2000), “Saint Augustine’s Memory” (2002), “Saint Augustine” (1999), “Why I Am A Catholic” (2002).

Since then, I've read the author's “Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power” (2003), “What Jesus Meant” (2006) and “What Paul Meant” (2007).

I found author Wills shy and introspective as I expected he might be. How else could he be so productive?

Wills was discovered in the pages of “The New York Review,” where he is a constant contributor with impressively researched articles.

As he signed and I talked, I mentioned in passing that I met Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Portugal, and had had a brief conversation with him.

It was 1957, and I was a white hat sailor in the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean. I mentioned to Wills that I told the bishop I had read several of his books.

Bishop Sheen looked at me suspiciously. I felt as if I was being profiled as an enlisted man or a cut below a reader much less one that read challenging books in theology and philosophy. When he asked me what I had read, I ticked off half a dozen titles while doing a slow burn.

“It is amazing,” I said to Wills, “how ordinary extraordinary people can be.”

Wills didn’t disappoint. This prize winning author, a cerebral man, Northwestern University professor, and ex-priest-to-be fed me a non sequitur: “Wasn’t it amazing how short he (Bishop Sheen) was?” I wanted to say, I thought he was a giant, having been one of my heroes but I said nothing. Wills was obviously obsessed with height, physical height, when he was a giant in his own right as well.

Of late, people see me at McDonald’s reading these books on Jesus and Paul, Peter, Paul and Mary, and most recently, Barbara Thiering’s controversial bestseller of “Jesus The Man,” and they look at me as if I’m some kind of religious nut when I’m not religious at all. I’m an idea guy, and what better place for ideas than this.

Thiering attempts to debunk almost everything sacred to a Christian, especially a Roman Catholic: the Virgin birth; the Immaculate Conception, the miracles, Jesus dying on the Cross, the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, not to mention Peter and Timothy. She also attacks the Ascension of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven and the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus.

She has Jesus dying at age 70 somewhere in France leaving his progeny. It is a captivating story with the book now transformed into a television drama in Australia. She claims her research covers twenty years of digging into the history of Jesus. Even so, most of it remains highly speculative because that is the nature of the story. Faith not fact drives its efficacy and survival.

What surprised me is that I could read her book and not take offense because the historic Jesus is magnificently attractive and compelling. A half century ago, I was not so accommodating. My acculuration as an Irish Roman Catholic was too much of a barrier to cross.

Yet, reading occasionally allowed some light to penetrate my darkness. For example, when I was a young man and read Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamasov,” I came to encounter his "Grand Inquisitor." I wasn’t prepared for that either, but now I am writing a novel that has a touch of that confluence.

If you have read this book, you know that after fifteen hundred years, Christ returns to earth in Seville, where the Spanish Inquisition reigns supreme. Jesus has a conversation with the Grand Inquisitor, who accuses Jesus of getting it all wrong. This compelling scene has lived on in the annals of literature since first published in 1880.

Suffice it to say the conversation between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor revolves around freedom and evil with the Grand Inquisitor stating human beings would prefer death to freedom because they cannot handle free will, and fall through the cracks running from responsibility while remaining slaves to authority. Sound familiar?

This is more evidence that the more we change the less we change and the more we remain the same.

Dostoyevsky is a compelling author, I think, more so than Tolstoy, but that is my bias. Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, wrote about himself, but Tolstoy wanted to be loved, while Dostoyevsky was comfortable showing all sides of his contemptible personality. There is a message for the serious writer here.

My first introduction to Dostoyevsky was when “Notes From The Underground” became required reading in a core course in college. The author got into my blood. His passion was palpable. Over the years reading him, several biographies on him, as well as several of his books, I realized how this man, so full of man’s weaknesses demonstrated man’s greatest strengths, and then had the talent to crystalize that essence.

Dostoyevsky had a passion for Christianity of the Russian Orthodox variety, and knew scripture well. I’ve been reading scholars of late, principally Bart D. Ehrman, and I find much of what we take to be real about the New Testament, for example, is a kind of catch can of authors, including the four Gospel writers, who may or may not have written what is considered true and holy for several reasons.

First, because virtually no original manuscripts of any works have survived, secondly the versions that are extant were copied and recopied, ad infinitum, largely by illiterate copiers, and finally, the bias of the times was preserved by changing the content and context if ever so slightly to protect or to present more favorably this or that person, or situation, including Jesus.

“Legends,” which we now know from the Internet, ideas and claims that are essentially if not totally bogus, were with us some 2,000 or 3,000 years ago if not longer.

Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” (2005) and “Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend” (2006) are spirited journeys into the nebulous world of the past by the chair of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina.

You get a sense in reading these books of how human and real the principals are, and how little has changed in the human drama and its folly and vicissitudes over the centuries. It gives you a new perspective on how intimate the human family, how grand and self-punishing it has always been, and how little it has changed through the centuries.

It is easy to forget that most of the stories we remember from the New Testament were lived as if the last days, which had a bearing on what was written and the impact expected.

Scientists tell us the sun will eventually lose its candlepower, move towards the earth, dry up all the water, merge with the earth, and become a baren planet without life as several others in our solar system, but that is a few billion years off.

Those that read me know I take some pride in being an outsider, a marginal person, a person who embraces the freedom the Grand Inquisitor says we fear.

It may seem strange at first light that outsiders would pass the candle from one generation to the other, and not insiders, but it has always been so. Outsiders are not caught up in the here and now, or in its possessions or notice but embrace horizons not yet seen.

Jesus was a rebel, an outsider, and was accused of being a low life for preferring people said to be the dregs of society rather than breaking bread with the privileged few. Paul was an outsider in the same sense.

It is interesting that Paul, the architect of Christianity, and not Jesus, has been excoriated by the best among us for ages.

Thomas Jefferson said Judas gave Jesus’ body over to death and Paul buried his spirit. Jefferson claimed Paul substituted his half-baked high-flown dark theology for the simple words of Jesus. William Short, a friend of Jefferson’s, saw Paul the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.

George Bernard Shaw saw Paul as a monstrous imposition upon the soul of Jesus, while Nietzsche called Paul “the anti-Christ.” Yet, Paul was the best writer, most eloquent of the many followers of the Man from Nazareth.

When you are not a scholar but a peripatetic reader, like I am, in search of common ideas that hold us as one, you are given a sense of connection with your culture, its verities and dissemblers, and realize if the expurgated version of the Bible created by Jefferson were our true heritage it would be an amazingly dull world from which we all have sprung.

Take the whole hierarchical structure of society, first enjoined by the Roman Church. This is an invention of neither Jesus nor Paul, but those that followed. There were no priests or bishops, in fact, no church at all, as Jesus and Paul were both laymen. There were gatherings of people held together by a common spirit. That all changed as the Catholic papal hierarchy was created with the nonsense claim of infallibility of popes in manners of faith and morals, which in turn would lead to a similar sin with the “Divine Right of Kings.”

Those who would lead have always found a way to use human weakness to assume rights, power, control and importance. They insist that people have a preference for evil to freedom, reasoning that they have to have leaders assume leadership with an elaborate infrastructure to corral them into obedience and sensibility.

What at first blush may seem incredulous in this modern age of thinking man is not. No matter how many alphabet letters (BA, BS, MBA, Ph.D., et al.) after one’s name chances are one falls in line quiescently to some authority and its demands.

You will find that stimulated brains don't necessarily put a fire in the belly or steel in the spine.

Alas, it gives perspective when you read the sins of the great, who play celebrated roles and wear grand robes of pomp and circumstance to accord their station and dignity. Most people are surprised when those of such elevated status commit the most egregious sins. Dante had fun with this in his “Inferno,” and so it has been, and yet we have somehow survived as the human race.

A respite from soul searching came the other day when I was reading about CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

CERN is located in a suburb of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border and has been since 1954. It is more than 100 meters underground and covers several square miles, a veritable city with gigantic particle accelerators being manned by nearly 3,000 workers and 8,000 scientists and engineers from some 500 universities and 80 nationalities.

Here scientists have confirmed the “Big Bang,” which is evidence that the universe had a beginning and is constantly expanding.

Complemented by astronomers who have given CERN data indicating that our solar system is at least 13.5 billion years old, these scientists pursue the source of energy of that beginning using quantum mechanics of colliding atoms. In the process, they have encountered extra dimensions beyond our comprehension, and even the speed of light exceeding Einstein’s constant.

When you consider the fact that these people have been working quietly for more than half a century relatively unnoticed, making significant scientific discoveries, it gives you pause. Not everything is for show. CERN has also its company of Nobel Laureates.

Of perhaps special interest is the World Wide Web (www.com), or the Internet, which began as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1989.

My first introduction to this world was through college physics of a much more primitive nature a half century ago. This has been updated in an informal way through the reading of such books as those of James Gleick: “Chaos: Making a New Science” (1987), “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything” (1999) and “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” (1992).

Science and scientists when they don’t gloat, don’t become celebrity personalities, when they stick to the mission are more than engaging, they are almost surreal, and not because they are less human, but because they are more so.

CERN is chasing the origin of the “Big Bang” and possible “dark matter” associated with it, on a course, strange as it may seem, which ties in with all this religion that sometimes seems nebulous if not nefarious, and that is the “God thing.”

It was, after all, Georges Lemaitre, an astrophysicist, civil engineer, army officer, and Belgium priest who first proposed the “Big Bang” theory in 1927. In doing so, he claimed the universe was expanding. Countless scientists since have confirmed his hypothesis.

On the other hand, Sir Frederick Hoyle, an astronomer, mathematician, astrophysicist, and English science fiction writer, claimed that the universe had no beginning and no end, and was governed by infinity. He was the leading proponent of steady-state cosmology, and died still resisting all the evidence to the contrary.

We should not be surprised. Einstein was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, which is the foundation of exploration in science today, yet he rejected it in his later years. Scientists like all of us are vulnerable to missteps and miscalculations as well as vanity.

Speaking of vanity, you that read me know that vanity and I are on good speaking terms.

Most recently, I got a taste of my own medicine when I was watching a performance of Michael Moore on C-Span as he spoke at the University of Michigan.

Moore is a curmudgeon who looks like an overweight Leprechaun as he attacks our Sacred Cows. He was putting me to sleep until he mentioned someone that I have discussed in one of my recent missives, Edward Bellamy, author of “Looking Backward” (1888).

He mentioned this utopian novel in similar context to mine, that is, that the social structure worked a lot better when we didn’t have all these “leaders” muddying up the pot. Moore was referring to the financial crisis, among other things, driven by sins of omission and commission by people who make a lot of money but are plague with bad decisions, which gets in the way of workers that do from doing their jobs.

It reminded me of the Catholic Church and its College of Cardinals. I smiled and said to Beautiful Betty, “Well, there is some hope for Moore, bleeding heart liberal that he is; he can read.” She rolled her eyes, and went back to making dinner.

Incidentally, Edward Bellamy’s brother, Francis, gave us “The Pledge of Allegiance.” Moore pointed out that his pledge was much simpler, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Republic for which it stands,” with no mention of “under God,” or any of the other stuff.

Moore suggested that it should be, “I pledge allegiance to the people of the Republic and to all the people of the World.” Like writer of scripture, writers in other endeavors over time keep changing the message and not necessarily improving it.

Then I read in the Sunday Parade magazine (October 19, 2008) that historian Jon Meacham has an article on “5 Ideas for our Next President.”

The article resonated with me as I’ve written rather extensively about President Andrew Jackson’s leadership, and so it was nice to see it emphasized in this entertaining Sunday supplement. Mecham’s five points follow with my elaboration:

(1) Find people who tell it like it is.

Jackson never looked for such people. He was such people;

(2) Turn weaknesses into strengths.

Jackson literally had no formal education, had been a soldier since the Revolutionary War, and nearly died in it as a boy of fourteen, showing singular bravery, and an instinct for survival.

He distrusted people with education, anyone from the East, or anyone who put on airs. He took pride in never having read a book, and told anyone who would listen he had no time for couth.

Thomas Jefferson considered him a buffoon, but the man created an “Age of Jackson,” and gave birth to the imperial presidency;

(3) Speak to the electorate.

How he did that, indeed! He ignored Congress and his Cabinet, and spoke to and courted the electorate, so much so that he was accused of creating the “spoils system.”

The White House was open to the people, who after a weekend, often left the place with stained carpets, cigarette burns in the furniture and discarded food. It was the source of his power so that he could take on the Eastern Establishment, mainly the banks, which he dissolved, and created a Federal System that he could control to their mortification;

(4) Keep church and state separate.

He did this with a vengeance. He didn’t trust the clergy, didn’t take to sanctimonious types, liked his liquor and pipe, as did his pipe smoking wife. She died before he was inaugurated;

(5) Always have a backup plan (or two).

Jackson was of Protestant Scotch Irish stock and believed in asking forgiveness rather than permission.

He made his reputation by the “Battle of New Orleans” and built on it by invading Florida without permission and sacking both the British and Spanish.

He was called “Old Hickory” because he was as hard as hickory, and called the bluff of Southern States when they threatened succession from the Union.

He was a generation before Lincoln but would have been an amazing general for him had their two careers coincided.

Jackson had a nimble mind and could read his enemies like a book, and counted on them not to be able to read him. He was a schemer more than a planner, and had several backup schemes when one would fail.

He was never derailed by failure but learned from it, and used it to seed his next move. It was why he constantly confounded and finessed his enemies. He needed enemies to orchestrate his combative spirit, and if he didn’t have them, he would have had to create them to function.


It is a strange feeling being a writer such as I am with only an audience of one, but working themes common to so many others. There is a message somewhere in there, but like the source of “dark matter,” I swear I don’t know what it is.