Book Review: Nate’s New Age

Michael Hanson’s novel (upper left)
on display at Flyleaf Books
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

A Wild Ride

Reviewed by Moristotle

Like the life of the central character of Michael Hanson’s novel Nate’s New Age, reading it can be a bit of a bumpy ride, especially if you make the mistake I did at the start: trying to read it only a few pages at a sitting. After a couple of weeks of sporadic sittings, of having to thumb back to be reminded who Brenda was, or Max, or Shuly, or Margaret, or Rebecca, or Kimberly, or his therapist Lynn… I finally realized I needed to buckle down and read continually. That worked much better, and I recommend that other readers approach it the same way.

Wait...or hustle?

Thought for the day

Reading Dick and Felix Francis's 2007 novel, Dead Heat, this morning, I found on pages 176-177:

Who was it, I thought, who said, "Things may come to those who wait"?
    ...
    I asked my computer who said the quote. It came back with the answer: Abraham Lincoln. But his full quote was: "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."

I too asked my computer about the quote, and a number of sites have it and attribute it to Lincoln, but none of the ones I found indicate where or when Lincoln wrote or uttered it.

A plumbing company (I don't think it was Joe the Plumber's) recast the first clause in the more New Age or New Testament way: "Good things [emphasis mine] come to those who wait, but only the things left over by those who hustle." (Strict New Agers and fundamental New Testament folks, of course, don't include the second part, intent as they are to sit back and wait for the good things to roll in without any more effort than it takes to be optimistic.)

The intent of Lincoln's statement seems to be to recommend hustling as the way to get the best things, since otherwise you'll get only the things that the hustlers didn't manage to get or didn't want.

Of course, many a hustler comes a cropper. And some waiters come into a fortune. I wonder whether Lincoln said anything about luck? Of course, there's the business of the "Lucky Penny" charm. Was that a Lincoln penny?

The only possible Lincoln quote containing "luck" that I could find through a spot of googling was one site's claim that Lincoln said (or wrote): "The harder I work, the luckier I get." Lincoln really did seem to recommend that we hustle.

The cement that holds true belief

My sister died early Saturday morning, and since then I've listened to various assurances that she has gone home to Jesus, etc. The certainty with which such assurances can be made has reminded me of what it is that really holds a true believer in place. It isn't the true believer's simply believing a proposition is true despite there being no evidence for it (aside, perhaps, from some hearsay about there having been a divine revelation).

No. I think that what really holds the true believer in place is his additionally believing that his very act of believing, if performed with enough faith or intensity, will make the proposition true. In the present case, if he believes with unwavering faith that my sister has indeed gone home to Jesus or whatever, then surely he too will go home, etc.

We've probably all been there. I was there, for example, in 1989, when I truly believed that I was going to win the Publishers Clearinghouse $10,000,000 Sweepstakes. I'd even had a revelation—a personal revelation in the form of a dream. But that wasn't enough to hold me in place. I daily recited "affirmations" that it was (or would be) so. I fervently, intensely believed. I truly believed it.

But it didn't come to pass. Any more than Jesus returned in the lifetimes of his associates who fervently believed that he would. Any more than the world has come to an end on the schedule of any one of various true believers who have predicted it would. Etc.

I said we've probably all been there. The tip-off is the word "affirmations." We've all lived through a period of vocal New Age proselytization, abetted by any number of bestselling books about becoming a big success in life. That is, we've all, whether "religious" or not, been somewhat conditioned to believe that we can make something happen if we only believe it strongly enough.

Magical thinking. At least when it comes to influencing things outside our own nervous system over which we have no control.