More Than Can Be Weighed, Measured, or Counted
I am a fan of epigraphs—short fragments of others’ words and thoughts that precede and set a direction for one’s own. I use them in my own writing whenever I can. As with a draft of a novel I sent off yesterday, one that has taken a circuitous and as yet uncompleted pilgrimage toward possible publication. I blessed it with four or five epigraphs to wish the story well and on its way.
But this morning, I discovered a sentence (rediscovered actually, for I had read and marked it months ago) that now I wish I had added to the group. Perhaps I will save it for the next novel, which of course may never come into existence.
I found the sentence in an article by Marc Barnes in First Things (Feb 2019). He quotes the following from the Talmud: “Blessing is found neither in a matter that is weighed, nor in a matter that is measured, nor in a matter that is counted.”
“Blessing is found neither in a matter that is weighed, nor in a matter that is measured, nor in a matter that is counted.”
That understanding resonates well with a recurring theme in my own work—fiction and nonfiction (and in these blog posts): the belief that science is a great gift to humankind, and greatly to be praised, but that it explores primarily the fringes of reality, not its heart and core. In brief, naturalistic materialism is a parched understanding of reality.
The troubled narrator of this novel I just sent off makes a distinction between complexity and profundity. (If you want to learn what that distinction is, you will have to join the dozens of folks who may eventually read it.) I think (and may have already said in these posts) that science deals with complexity, the humanities with profundity. And God is author of both.