Goines On: Birthday books

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Goines was at first bewildered by the heft of The New Yale Book of Quotations that his son gave him for his 80^th birthday, along with a paperback volume of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Stephen Mitchell, who his son knew was Goines’ favorite.
    Upon extracting the Yale book from its thick fabric bag (which Goines assumed the publisher had clothed it in), Goines said he thought it must weigh two to three pounds. “Five,” said his son.

12 Years Ago Today: The wisdom to know the difference

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 15, 2008, without an image.]

A cousin wrote me yesterday that she’d meant to call some of our relatives in Arkansas to see whether they were okay in the wake of Hurricane Ike, but that “like always” she’d put it off and not done so. I told her that either our relatives are okay or they aren’t, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
    Her reply surprised me:

Message from Jehovah

Handwritten note left under my door by Jevonda in September:

This is Jevonda!
    Believe it or not....

Email to Jevonda:

Dear Jevonda! I would so like to have been here yesterday!
    When I first saw your note, I read it as saying

This is Jehovah!
    Believe it or not....

and half expected the next words to be: "God exists!" and to discover that someone here was funning me. How relieved I was to make out instead, "I came to see Karrie and dropped by to see you too"!

Email from Jevonda yesterday:

I'm so embarrassed that I am just now responding to you! I forwarded your message from my work account to my personal account back in September and then totally forgot that I needed to respond. Please forgive.
    It's funny how you interpreted my note to you. Perhaps God really is trying to send you a message!

Email to Jevonda:

Well, Jevonda, if you are embarrassed, I was afraid that my Jehovah misreading might have offended you. I'm relieved that apparently not. Thanks for your nice reply that "Perhaps God really is trying to send you a message!" Indeed, I agree to the extent that if "God" existed and did such things, then it might indeed have been such a message.
    I've been reading around the edges of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, and I was surprised to learn that her first few books (she says in the Introduction) were fairly "Dawkinsesque" (disbelieving; that's a reference to the currently perhaps best-known atheist, biologist Richard Dawkins). But she still denies the existence of God in the various primitive guises by which he is known through the Abrahamaic scriptures, thinking of "God," apparently, as literally "Nothing" in the sense that "God is not a thing."
    I'm curiously prompted by what she writes to ask myself whether there is a role in my life for this sort of "God"? For religion? I suspect that "this sort of God" is just a tautological wisp from some such Paul Tillichian pronouncement as "God is whatever our ultimate concern is." That is, if I have an "ultimate concern"—which anyone would seem to have to have—then that is my "God." (I was fortunate to hear Tillich lecture at Yale, by the way, and also Reinhold Niebuhr; how exciting that was for this questing philosophy major!)
    I'm not sure that acknowledging that I therefore "have God in my life" is going to make that much difference. At least, it might make me a little less of a burr under the saddles of others and render me more socially acceptable to the religious.