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One of the pots I try to keep on my reading stove is nonfiction essay collections. (In general, the various pots for me are fiction, something about music, graphic novels, literary biographies, Christian theology, and Christian living.) During a recent run to Labrynth Books in Princeton, I picked up a fresh stack of essays, including These Precious Days, a recent outing from Ann Patchett.

Patchett probably doesn’t remember me, but back in my mid-20’s she played a key role in reigniting my reading habits: I’d read plenty of books in middle school and high school, but in college and then seminary, the amount of assigned reading was sufficiently heavy that I pretty much kept to the curricula. Eventually, though, I came to realize that as my time in school was drawing to a close, if I was only going to rely on required reading lists for the books I’d consume, what once had been a pretty strong stream of reading in my life would have trickled down to a dripping kitchen sink.

Enter Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, literally the first novel I’d read in over half a decade, and what a luminous one it was. Trust me that this all works, but the main themes of Bel Canto are opera and terrorism—plus it’s a hugely romantic work! Years and years ago, I quoted in a sermon at Liberti Collingswood the beginning of Bel Canto, and even though the passage was rated a mild PG, it was the most amorously charged text I’ve ever read from the pulpit. The teenagers were paying attention that morning. ¡Caliente!

If Bel Canto put Patchett on the map, she’s stayed there by maintaining and building a strong corpus of writings, and after she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, she also became one of the poster children for independent bookstores that were contending against the Barnes & Goliaths of the world.

It’s been a minute since I’ve read any Patchett, but when at Labrynth I saw These Precious Days, it seemed like high time to jump back in. (Ominously to me, however, the cover has front and center a cute painting of a dog. Pet lit is emphatically not a pot on my reading stove. Hopefully I’ll learn as I go deeper into These Precious Days that this canine iconography is a deeply ironic red herring somehow.)

I’ve made it all the way to page 5 of These Precious Days, and every page has been good so far, p. 3 being the best, although p. 1 and p. 5 especially are no slouches, either.

Yes, I’ve only yet read the introduction to These Precious Days, but as I did so last night I was nevertheless intrigued. “Essays Don’t Die” is the title, and in it Patchett describes how whenever she’s in the process of writing a novel, a pressing fear of death overtakes her. She (and apparently other writers, too) worry that if death steals her before a given book is published, all of the characters and stories therein perish with the author. Not so with essays, Patchett claims, since “death has no interest in essays.”

Interesting idea! In Patchett’s telling, essays by virtue of being non-fiction describe events and people that are already there and would persist with or without someone’s writing about them. “Imagination can be killed but facts are infinitely harder to snuff out. . . Time works tirelessly to erase facts––this country works tirelessly––but the facts have a way of popping up, their buoyant truth shining all the more brightly with time,” she observes.

I hope Patchett is right on this count, and in fact I feel confident that she is—although it requires of me the eyes of faith to believe it. In our contemporary, secular mythology, I tend to think that the baseline narratives for most folks is that from silence we were created, and to silence we will return. A mute universe is a brute fact. Eventually, the story goes, our earthly rock will either grow far too hot or far too warm, and the Victrola song of humanity will finally spin down to stillness. No more tales to tell, arias to sing, speeches to deliver, and no ears to hear them. Silence.

Alternatively, the Christian story reminds us that the though the universe may be mute (because inanimate), the Lord over all creation is not. Before anything was made that has been made, there wasn’t crystalline silence but rather a raucous Word. “In the beginning was the Word.” Jesus, the pre-incarnate Messiah and center of the story.

If looking backward brings us Word, so does looking forward, since Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Remember the lyric to the “Gloria Patri,” “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end.” It’s actually a riffable line. The only reason that in Christ we can enjoy a world without end is that Jesus is Word without end.

Keep those stories, and those essays, coming.

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