Alan Jacobs

I was a fabulist as a child, and indeed, well into my adolescence. It was perhaps the signal trait of my character. I have a fairly elaborate justification for my habitual lying: it begins with the fact that I was two years younger than my classmates through most of my school years. I had started first grade at age five and then skipped second grade, something that would not be done now because of a greater awareness of the psychological and psychosocial damage such a practice inflicts on a child. But in my now-distant youth, I guess people didn’t know any better. I was also quite small for my age – I didn’t get a growth spurt until I was fourteen, at which point in just a few painful months I went from five feet to six feet tall. Before that, in comparison to the people I spent my days with I was tiny, and that gave them ample opportunities to bully me. The bullying happened day after day and year after year, and it never occurred to me to think that anything could be done about it by an authority figure. So I had to find my own way of addressing the problem, and the strategy I came up with was to become a teller of tales – a fabulist.

On the way to school, I might see a couple of cars barely avoid each other at an intersection; but by the time I got to school that had turned into a violent collision that left dead bodies sprawling out of the open windows of their automobiles. Certainly there would have been blood, perhaps a severed limb or two. All the way to school I would silently elaborate and edit the story, trying to find that sweet spot where the spectacular shakes hands with the believable. After a while lying became more normal to me than telling the truth. After all, what would be the point in telling the truth if you could make up something better? It made life always interesting.

Moreover, I discovered that the better I became at lying, and indeed the more consistently I lied, the more attention I got from my classmates. They wouldn’t be yanking my hair or punching me in the stomach as long as they were waiting to see how the story came out. It took me a very long time to break the habit of lying; it was only after I became a Christian, during my college years, that it dawned on me that this habit might be morally questionable. (Before that I had only considered the possible reputational damage of getting caught in a lie. My category was shame, not guilt.) And I’ve never broken the habit of internal fabrication. I still see ordinary everyday events and instinctively create a more dramatic narrative – I just don’t share that invented reality with other people.

One of the consequences of this history of fabulism, for me, has been an instinctive and unsuppressable skepticism towards stories told by other people. Whenever anyone writes about some extraordinary experience they’ve had – well, I simply don’t believe that it happened. I don’t think about it; I don’t consciously make a judgement. That’s just the immediate response that springs up in me wholly unbidden.

I remember being very surprised to learn that other people were surprised to learn that David Sedaris’s stories are mostly invented. I had never imagined that a single word of them was true. It never occurred to me to believe that he had sung the Oscar Mayer Wiener theme song in the voice of Bille Holiday to his music teacher, or that he had been Crumpet the Elf. Just the other day, I was reading an essay by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, about an accident he had while hiking in the Swiss mountains and I assumed, unreflectively, that he had made up the whole thing, simply because for a long time that’s what I would have done.

I find that this skepticism is most intense – actually rising to the level of conscious disbelief – whenever I encounters writers talking about writing. Oh, how they love to narrate spectacular personal drama: extended periods of profound misery, depression, antisocial behavior, substance abuse, irrational and compulsive actions of a hundred kinds. You listen to their stories, and if you take them seriously, you think nothing could be more dramatic than being a writer. But I am a writer and I don’t believe a word of it.

I don’t think that these people never get drunk, never abuse drugs, never suffer depression. What I cannot believe is that any of this behavior has anything to do with their creative process. I think their writing lives actually go something like this: They set an alarm for a reasonable hour of the morning, they get up and made themselves a cup of coffee, they browse through social media, and then they sat down to write, promising themselves a cinnamon roll or a smoke if they get through 1000 words. And they just do this most days. They’re like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, they can’t write until they drop a lit cigarette into their tumbler of rye to make it undrinkable. That’s how they work, I’m sure. I simply lack the capacity to assent to their more dramatic tales. 

It’s possible, of course, that I’m wrong about all this, that my skepticism is unwarranted. And maybe that’s the price that I pay for being a reformed fabulist. I’ve lost my ability to trust other people’s stories, unless of course, they explicitly own them as fiction. As Sir Philip Sidney wrote more than four hundred years ago, “the poet” – by which he means the teller of tales – “never maketh any Circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true, what he writeth … and therefore though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not.” And in turn is wholly believable.

But all that I told you at the outset about my own career as a fabulist? Every word is true. You believe me – don’t you? 

UPDATE 2023-09-21: “Emotional truths.” 

Thirty years ago, one of the great achievements of Western culture appeared. And we have documentary evidence of its making. (Large version here.)

Ted Gioia: “Taylor Swift, you are the one person who can make this happen. I believe this is your destiny.”

This week I’m teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park and, honestly, I don’t know of any other novel I’d rather teach. A few are equally interesting in the classroom, but none more so. What a great and delightful book.

This seems miraculous: I actually need to wear waterproof shoes today.

Here’s a shortish essay from me on the literature classroom as a place for “the deepening and sharpening of emotional powers.”

A brief post about Auden and Ischia.

A fascinating little fact in this article on declining interest in studying Mandarin: On Duolingo, Korean is more popular than Mandarin.

I’m in the final stages of editing my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, and I’m finding myself thinking often about Ischia, the island in the Bay of Naples where he lived when he wrote most of the poems in the volume. The more time I spend with those poems the more I am struck by the role the island — its geography, history, and culture — played in shaping them. I’ve never been there, and while I’m not the kind of guy to have a travel “bucket list,” I’m thinking that I need to find a way to visit. And after all, I think it’s fair to say that the island is not without its own charm, regardless of Auden. 

I often think about this Brent Simmons post on “Mac-assed Mac apps” — especially when I’m using apps that fit that description. Case in point: Transmit. I use it almost every day, and it’s a joy to use, in part because it’s an app than which a more Mac-assed cannot be conceived.

Sometimes I actually have to do scholarship.

The palatial Granada Theatre in Chicago, from a book about America’s lost architectural treasures. Full-size photo here.

I wrote up a kind of summation of my posts on the desperate-times-require-desperate-measures Christians.

When you blog for a long time, as I have done, you inevitably repeat yourself. Sometimes this is conscious and intentional, as you work to develop themes: I have listed some of the main themes of this blog here. At other times you just forget that you’ve said something before. 

But there’s a third kind of repetition: the kind that arises when similar events prompt you to respond in similar ways. This has a good side and a bad side. If you do respond to these related provocations consistently, that suggests a certain stability of outlook; you’re not just blown about by the winds of mood or whim, you have a genuine point of view. On the other hand, you could’ve just saved yourself some time and effort by citing one of your earlier posts on the subject. “I refer the honorable gentlemen to the reply I gave some months ago.” 

I just realized recently how often I have responded in very similar ways to the desperate-times-demand-desperate-measures Christians, the ones who believe that our current circumstances are so horrific that we have to throw out our historic practices and habits out the window. To cite just one common topic of recent years: There are a great many Christians who say that Tim Keller’s approach to evangelism and apologetics might have been okay Back In The Day — you know, fifteen years ago, in a previous geological era — but simply won’t work in our current Negative World. I have of course questioned the Negative World thesis — I’ll return to that in a moment — but more than that I have insisted that such people are making a category error: the question to ask is not whether this or that approach works, but rather whether it’s faithful, whether it’s obedient to Jesus. As I said in that post, 

To think only in terms of what is effective or strategic is to fight on the Devil’s home ground. As Screwtape said to Wormwood about the junior tempter’s patient: “He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” Christians who evaluate Keller not by asking whether his message is faithful to Jesus’s message but rather by asking whether it’s suited for this moment are inadvertently following Screwtape’s advice. 

And in another, closely related, post, I called attention to this challenging statement from George Macdonald: “Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, Do it, or once abstained because He said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.” 

That is what counts, whether this is a Negative World or a Positive World or any other kind of world. Our obligations remain the same in every world. What we need is to stop trying to read the tea-leaves of politics and instead learn to be idiots. 

Obedience is both difficult and boring; and the boring part is especially challenging in our neophilic age, in which we cannot readily perceive the renewing power of repetition. It’s no wonder that people would rather think about plans and strategies than to strive to practice obedience. But “strategic thinking” is the classic excuse for disobedience. 

Finally, I have consistently found it useful (or sometimes just fun) to see the various stances I’ve described here as exemplified by characters from The Lord of the Rings, e.g.: 

• Denethor: the evangelist of despair who’d rather blow everything up than be faithful through hard times; 
• Boromir: one who thinks that if he could just seize the reins of power then everything would be great, because he is committed to all the Right Things and therefore couldn’t possibly rule badly or tyrannically;  
• Faramir: one who has immersed himself in ancient lore and by so doing has learned humility and mercy;  
• Aragorn: one who understands that we must judge between “good and ill” today as we have ever judged; they don’t change their character, nor is the need for discernment ever abrogated; 
• Gandalf: one who is content to be a steward rather than a ruler, and to strive to give to the next generation “clean earth to till.” 

Okay, thus endeth the summing up. Now whenever these issues come up again in the future, I will try to remember to link to this post, rather than write a new one that makes the same points.

It’s a great blessing to me that my parish church does Choral Evensong on Sunday evenings, and tonight our women’s choir sang a glorious setting of Ubi caritas et amor by Roxanna Panufnik. You can listen to a performance of that piece here.

Bertrand Russell, in his Autobiography: “As an undergraduate I was persuaded that the dons were a wholly unnecessary part of the university. I derived no benefits from lectures, and I made a vow to myself that when in due course I became a lecturer I would not suppose that lecturing did any good. I have kept this vow.”

Not everyone is interested in the Oxyrhynchus papyri — IYKYK — but for those who are, this article by Candida Moss is an excellent summary of recent work by my friend and colleague Jeff Fish and his collaborators. Also: commentary by Brent Nongbri.

When Paul Schrader was asked to do a Criterion Collection Top 10, he gave a great response: “As a longtime cinephile I’m familiar with most of the Criterion catalogue. Rather than select ten favorites I’ll choose ten films that I was able to see because of Criterion, films I previously did not know about or were not available.”