A Chinese missionary based in Ghana preached at church today; a very kindly man with inspiring, enlightening stories to share. I think if I were ever to go on a mission trip, the school he’s set up would be a likely destination.

Am now musing over how the fragrance of my God fills the empty spaces of my soul, when I actually allow Him in (why don’t I do it more often? why am I so concerned with boring, barren entertainments?), and how the all-compassing, all-forgiving, all-consuming nature of His grace means that there is nothing that I should refuse Him, nothing whose loss I should grieve unto death for apart from Him.

There’s probably something disingenuous about finding this delicious reading, in lieu of actually reading something delicious (say, a book), but here are some folks rueing the fact that reading ain’t what it used to be:

• A little night reading
  “I have become conscious of how severely my reading has degraded, how deformed my capacity for sustained focus has become. I keep nearly a dozen books on my desk, in various states of examination, and all too often pick one up in the wee hours only to find that, three pages in, I have no real memory of the words that have just passed before my eyes.”
• The new rules of engagement
  “This weekend I realized how much my reading habits have come to resemble my Internet-surfing. I skip from book to book, dipping in, skimming and grazing, as if each book were an article I was reading online. If the book isn’t amazing, I rarely get past the first quarter — let alone finish it. Of course, at least once in a while, I’m abandoning the book out of shrewish old age. I have less patience for terrible books than I used to. But most of the time, I have to admit, it’s not the books that are bad, it’s me: I’ve become a terrible reader.”
• The lost art of reading
  “For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” primarily at night — a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I’m reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.”

Here’s another sort of reading that I can’t resist — anything about personal libraries:

• My Turkish library by Orhan Pamuk
  ”At the heart of my library is my father’s library. When I was seventeen or eighteen and began to devote most of my time to reading, I devoured the volumes my father kept in our sitting room as well as the ones I found in Istanbul’s bookshops. These were the days when, if I read a book from my father’s library and liked it, I would take it into my room and place it among my own books. My father, who was pleased to see his son reading, was also glad to see some of his books migrating to my library, and whenever he saw one of his old books on my bookshelf, he would tease me by saying, ‘Aha, I see this volume has been promoted to the upper echelons!’“
• Unpacking my library
  ”So now the arduous task of refilling the books begins. First, we need to douse the whole collection to protect against silverfish (also at Mrs. TEV’s insistence). Then I need to incorporate new additions to my library into the boxes packed more than a year ago, and figure out exactly how to order the whole thing. (The previous arrangement could politely be described as half-assed, though I could always find anything.)
  “Finally, the actual placement on the shelves, which is always delayed by the very pleasant act of browsing through beloved titles. I wrote about personal libraries and their legacies a few months ago, and I’m even more mindful of this now that my daughter has been born.”

And finally, the always appealing and never quite edifying genre of writers on writing (the basic point is that there are as many writing styles as there are writers!):

• How to write a great novel
  “Behind the scenes, many of these writers say they struggle with the daily work of writing, clocking thousands of solitary hours staring at blank pages and computer screens. Most agree on common hurdles: procrastination, writer’s block, the terror of failure that looms over a new project and the attention-sucking power of the Internet.”
• Writers’ rooms by The Guardian (hot TFT fave!)
  “Portraits of the spaces where authors create”

On the occasion of Barack Obama’s presidential election victory one long year ago, I would like to present the following evidence meriting his receipt of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize:

Exhibit A

‘Every day, Barack Obama gets up and is brave,’ she said. ‘I can be brave.’

Exhibit B

Michelle Obama: speaking joy to power

Exhibit C

A young black boy, no more than eight years old, walked up to this man, who was at least eighty. The boy offered the man a sticker, probably an “I Voted” sticker, but I couldn’t see. The man took the sticker and paused. Silently, he looked down at the boy, who was looking back up at the man. The man put his hand gently on the boy’s head, and I saw his eyes glisten.

I didn’t ask the man for a quote. I didn’t need to. I walked over by myself, behind the community center, and I sat down on a bench next to the track, and wept.

Exhibit D

More than conquerors

Ergo, anyone who inspires such acts of courage, joy, love and hope deserves a prize for peace.

Emmerich reveals fear of fatwa axed 2012 scene | Film | guardian.co.uk.

He blew up the Empire State Building and the White House in Independence Day, sent a giant monster careering through the heart of Manhattan in Godzilla and destroyed the famous Hollywood sign in The Day After Tomorrow. But it seems there are places even Roland Emmerich will not go – the German film-maker has revealed he abandoned plans to obliterate Islam’s holiest site on the big screen for fear of attracting a fatwa. …

But Emmerich acolytes need not fear that the film-maker is pulling his punches on 2012, which arrives in UK cinemas on 13 November. The movie depicts a global doomsday event supposedly predicted by the Mayans more than a thousand years ago – in order to highlight his opposition to organised religion, the director decided to use CGI to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro instead. For good measure, he also blew up the Sistine chapel and St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, plus, on a secular note, the White House (again).

Well, this strikes me as a little bit more than ironic, veering straight towards the ridiculous:

1. Emmerich is against organised religion (what’s the opposite of that?), but uses an organised religion to show his opposition. (Make that an extinct organised religion that indulged in ritualistic rape and the sacrifice of many.)

2. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter to a follower of Christ whether a ‘holy site’ is destroyed or not. It’s the enduring historical record and the divine revelation of its implications that define ‘Christianity’. So basically Emmerich picks on the ‘religion’ whose leader taught his disciples not to hurt jerks. Handy.

3. I don’t feel vitriolic about the guy though — this is just a bit of an eye-roll. I just can’t shake off the feeling that he’s fighting the wrong guy.

I amaze myself sometimes, when I get, shall we say, motivated about something.

Exhibit A: The notes I took religiously after every driving lesson back in 2002. Read and weep! Or learn! Now, I don’t think the notes led directly to me passing the test the first time round, even though I’d stalled the car (smoothed over that one by flashing an apologetic smile … either that or being the first examinee in the early morning really helps to numb the examiner’s senses). (And certainly the grace of God was in there somewhere, everywhere, because I wasn’t even tested on the slope!) Perhaps this other thing I did during driving lessons helped …

Exhibit B: I wore the exact same pair of shoes every single driving lesson (oh, and I took lessons only in the daytime, cos the test would only be in the daytime), and of course, during the driving test. Let’s just say I was single-minded. But to get the big picture of why I would use the phrase “amaze myself” on myself …

Exhibit C: The reason why I decided to get a driving license wasn’t that I yearned for the freedom of a stick shift and the open road. Nor that everyone else in the family could drive, making me think I should shoulder a bit of that burden of chauffeuring the loved ones around — certainly one of the great pleasures of driving. And I definitely didn’t seek a Class 3 license to be more “employable”, though I have since chalked up experience behind a funny assortment of vehicles, from 4WD to sedan to MPV. Dear reader, the reason why the inclination to drive even arose in me was because of a newspaper article about Jay Chou getting his driving license aged 21. Yes, the embarrassing truth is out. I wanted to get a driving license at the same age (um, we’re the same age), cos I thought here’s something that he has done, that I can do too. Note: not the same as saying anything he can do, I can do better …

Where was I? Oh, yeah, so now you know. I need to be “inspired” to get off my arse and get with the programme … do the life stuff.

(I’m also amazed at the memories I’ve got stored up on hard disk. Highly recommend having a Mac accompany you through the phases of your life, with the tangibly intangible data being all hermity crab, moving from shell to shell, as long as it’s Mac-shaped. Hee hee.)