Family: Bonhoeffer, Pynchon & Jacobs

These Bonhoeffer quotes resonate with me and my understanding of the world and the path I am on:

It will be the task of our generation, not to 'seek great thing,' but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that this is the only thing we can carry as a 'prize' from the burning building ... We shall have to keep our lives rather than shape them, to hope rather than plan, to hold out rather than march forward ... It will not be difficult for us to renounce our privileges, recognizing the justice of history ...

A quote like this seems understandable, though surprising from someone like Bonhoeffer. He was already a great theologian and now he was part of a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi party.  Could he be more on the cusp of "great things"? Yet, I think he knew all along that the odds were against them ... and even more deeply, that none of it was really up to them and their efforts anyway.

I think its understandable because from our vantage, our time, our country, it is clear that Germany in 1943 was a burning building. But it is in this time and this country that I feel, acutely at times, that I see only chaos ... that I wonder if the building is burning down, or even worse, that it has burned and we are only fooling ourselves in thinking we live in anything but wilderness.

But rather than despair, I want to turn to the smaller things, to struggle to preserve my little soul and the little souls around me ... to struggle to keep my life (rather than choose my destiny) ... to hope rather than plan, to hold out rather than march forward ...

There was a long article in the latest Books and Culture on Thomas Pynchon's new book: Bleeding Edge. I have never read Pynchon, but know he is one of the big modern writers who garners respect from the likes of Harold Bloom, etc. I also know that his themes are quite heavy. Alan Jacobs writes about the "unexpected refuge" which is the subject and conclusion of Bleeding Edge. The setting of this novel is 9/11 and the book explores in various ways the powers and principalities of the world and our attempts to escape. The novel and Jacobs' article concludes in this way:

This compulsion to drop the worldly and massive in favor of our families is what it is—as one character in the book says, turning that stone-dead cliché into a koan, or trying to—and for better or worse. Maybe we ought to be thinking about the principalities and powers, maybe we ought to be thinking about what's real and what isn't real and about the simulacra that displace what had once been real, but in the end, we spend a great deal more time thinking about our families, because we love them—if we have them.

This love, and especially the love of women for their sons and daughters, has not regularly been a part of Pynchon's fiction, but that just means that it emerges here all the more luminously. Such love is stronger than the forces that bring down great buildings, stronger than the forces that weave a vast web to capture hearts and minds, one bit at a time. It is stronger even than the desire to commune with the dead. We all too easily lose sight of this love in the construction of our self-images, and it is easy also to lose it in the fictional and metaphysical games that Pynchon cannot help but play and plays so well, but it is in slyly awed recognition of the greatness of this love that he chooses to end this weird book and, who knows, perhaps his long and magnificent career.