Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Mr. Blue
Night had smothered the city, and the city gave up its protest in uncountable millions of bubbles and gasps of light. Below was glittering Manhattan. The east was black. The opaque hilly horizon of the west was razor-edged against a last gleam of cold white light. Destroyers rode the unbridged Hudson; ferries and small craft flecked her with light. The East River lay her dark secretive self…a cool, lamp-spotted, many-bridged stream between the sprawling white conflagrations of Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was terrifyingly beautiful up on the roof, four hundred feet above the gaudy streets, four hundred feet up in the cool dark silences, four hundred feet up nearer the stars….
Mr. Blue put his hands into his trouser pockets and leaned backward, his face toward the heavens, now filling with stars.
“I think,” he whispered half to himself, “my heart would break with all this immensity if I did not know that God Himself once stood beneath it, a young man, as small as I.”
Then, he turned to me slowly.
“Did it ever occur to you that it was Christ Who humanized infinitude, so to speak? When God became man He made you and me and the rest of us pretty important people. He not only redeemed us. He saved us from the terrible burden of infinity.”
Blue rather caught me off my guard. I might have admitted in him a light turn for philosophy. I did not expect any such high-sounding speculation as this. But he was passionately serious. He eyes were glowing in the dark. He threw his hands up toward the stars: “My hands, my feet, my poor little brain, my eyes, my ears, all matter more than the whole sweep of these constellations!” he burst out. “God Himself, the God to Whom this whole universe-specked display is as nothing, God Himself had hands like mine and feet like mine, and eyes, and brain, and ears!….” He looked at me intently. “Without Christ we would be little more than bacteria breeding on a pebble in space, or glints of ideas in a whirling void of abstractions. Because of Him, I can stand here out under this cold immensity and know that my infinitesimal pulse-beats and acts and thoughts are of more importance than this whole show of a universe.”
–Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue, published in 1928
Published in General
Like. Like. Like.
And behold the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent.
Mathew 27:51
No one in my life has brought up this book in oh, half a century. As a pre-teen it was a fascinating look at a maturity I could barely imagine then.
If we didn’t thank God for Peter Robinson, who would we thank?
Peter,
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
There was a time when either at a university or a church or synagogue there were people to guide you in the direction of a human life that was really worth living. Then something happened. A cold arrogance descended upon us. We began to think ourselves better than the time-tested knowledge of our souls that had brought Western Civilization to such heights. We thought that this soul knowledge was just fantasy or superstition. Surely, human science and logic were all that was needed. Soon a World War broke out. Next, a cold-hearted man with a lying slogan was given a sealed train to become an absolute dictator of a failing country. Peace and Bread they cried out. Only there was no peace only bloodshed on a grander scale. The system that he instituted in his failing country was a lie too. It was a fatal conceit invented by those who most disdained the soul knowledge. There was no bread as mass starvation set in. You would think that we would have learned our lesson from this experience alone but it wasn’t so. The arrogance and the horror got worse, not better. People became experts at inventing excuses for the arrogant rejecters of soul knowledge.
Luckily for us all there were still people in the world like Mr. Blue. From his high vantage point, he still grasped what was most important about life and would not let go of it. We must learn from Mr. Blue and others like him. Whether it’s the singularity or some other myth of secular perfection there will always be those who will again try to lead us astray.
We must hold onto our souls and not let go.
Regards,
Jim
This is a beautiful, soulful piece, Peter. No matter one’s particular faith, one has to appreciate the awe and devotion expressed. Thank you.
Badass. Thanks, Peter.
That about sums it up.
Happy Easter, everyone!
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
But we can still thank Peter for sharing that, and I do so now.
As best I can tell, nobody has read the book in something like 50 years–I only came across it as I was going through a pile of books once considered Catholic classics. But, like quite a lot of things that seem to have been forgotten for half a century or so, it’s wonderful.
And I thank God for my friend Gary–and all my friends here at Ricochet.
Outstanding Peter, and as I do not believe in coincidence I am of the belief that your wending your way through those books, stumbling upon this one, chancing to read it, and then understanding that it was right to share, was guided ever so gently by He who can not be found among the dead but is risen.
Seeing God’s hand work everyday in my own life and in the events around me has been one of the greatest gifts that God, through His Spirit had ever given me. I experience real joy when I see it and I feel that joy right now. Thank you Peter, for being His conduit. Great post.
Excellent choice and thank you for posting it.
If we’re talking obscure Catholic novels that deserve rediscovery, here’s another that made a big impression on me back in the JFK-LBJ era, 1952’s Fire in the Rain by William L. Doty, a young priest writing about the work of a young priest.
While looking this up I was amazed to discover that Father Doty worked in St. Luke’s parish in the Bronx, our home parish in my early childhood. I was also amazed how forgotten the book is now.
Graham Greene, A. J. Cronin, George Bernanos: Peter, who else is on that “Catholic Classics” list, please/thank you? Happy Easter Tuesday/Octave! (Thanks, Gary – and same question.) There seemed to be a real flowering of mid-twentieth century lit-by-Catholics or explicitly Catholic lit. Current offerings are either tinted with nostalgia or soaked in cynicism, as I’ve encountered them.
Things I liked about Doty’s “Fire in the Rain”–
It’s rare to have an American priest’s life described with this degree of respect and seriousness. He has no trouble jumping from the questioning and internal monologue of life in a religious order to the mundane, sometimes heartbreaking situations he sees as a city priest. It would have made a good low budget, semi-underground film in black and white. I’m serious. Not a priest as merely some kind of social worker, but yes, an unflinching realism about just how much of inner city life was being propped up by churches. John Cassavetes could have filmed it, and in those days, no one in Hollywood would have said anything about it but “Go to it, John! We just don’t have enough of that kind of thing”.
I’m sure @peterrobinson published this last year and I loved it then. May he publish it every Easter.
Regarding Catholic classics, forgotten or otherwise, @nandapanjandrum: Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, JF Powers, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark; the non-fiction of Ronald Knox and Jacques Maritain.
And Charles Williams, even though he wasn’t Catholic.
Chesterton goes without saying. (Well, nearly).
Thank you, @nickbaldock! I’ve tried Ms. O’Connor; I can’t quite handle her preference for the grotesque. (Her letters and journals have been helpful.) Chesterton, Fr. Knox, and Lewis were my Lenten companions…I’ll enjoy the other suggestions greatly.