of human invention and ingenuity—the wheel!—and append it to the human anatomy so simply, so naturally, that you would think the human body had been designed for nothing else than wobbling about town on a pair of wheels. Perhaps a million years from now the human species will be born with wheels instead of legs; it would be an improvement. But for now, this spoked, sprocketed, handlebarred, rubber-tired, pedal-pushed apparatus supplies what nature lacks.
Berlin reveals itself to the cyclist, just as Paris reveals itself to the walker and Los Angeles to the freeway driver and Dublin to the drinker. If you want to know what Berlin is, throw away your guidebook, forget about all those tourist sites, and don’t even think about setting foot in one of those brand-new bright red sightseeing buses. If you want to know what Berlin is, all you need is some loose change in your pocket, a scarf around your neck, and a bicycle between your legs.
Blue
The six stained-glass panels of Marc Chagall’s America Windows were presented to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977, in celebration of the bicentennial of the United States.
1
For once you decided to avoid religious subjects. You said: I will show the city just as it is—its streets and parks, its art and culture. So you made a city, brought it forth in light and color, and when it was finished you stood back and looked, and what you saw were angels.
2
You saw the city of Chicago as creation. You saw creation aflame with life, alive with music, and all things—from trees and sun to stones and sidewalks—bright and whirling in a whirling dance.
3
Painter of motion and music, you also paint the silences: the book, the desk, the eyes, the little windows. And in the foreground a familiar face, a hand outstretched, five candles burning.
4
They say human society is only power and control. They say it is, at bottom, a stew of blood and violence and old bones. But your windows tell the truth: the world is music, poetry, dance, a book suspended in the sky, a dove beating her wings.
5
People speak of love. But let none say they have loved till they have loved a thing as you loved the color blue. What is blue? Blue is darkness and light, warmth and cold, night and day, inside and outside, earth and sky, singing and silence. Blue is all and in all, the living glow of interior light in every created thing. Blue is the secret fire of creation.
6
On the first day God separated darkness from light, blue from blue.
7
On the second day God separated the waters above from the waters below, blue from blue.
8
If in the beginning God had created nothing but blue, it would have been enough: all the marvelous varieties of that color would sing God’s glory, shout God’s Name.
9
“There is but one single color that gives meaning to life and art—the color of love” (Chagall).
Books
When I was forced to play team sports as a boy, I would wait in diminishing hope as all the other boys were chosen one by one. In the end there would be two of us left, me and the kid with coke-bottle glasses who couldn’t tie his own shoes and who was known to burst into tears if he ever lost the ball or got knocked down. For agonizing seconds the two hairy-legged captains would size us up, until, finally, one would turn to the other and pronounce the cruel verdict: “You can have them.” (I cannot lie: this happened even when my own best friend was one of the team captains.)
Yes, I know what it is to be unwanted. I suppose that’s why Calvinist theology has always appealed to me, and why I was forever bringing home stray kittens as a boy. It is also why I sympathize with the unwanted book, the book nobody else will buy or read, the book that might have languished in embarrassed silence until the end of the world, unchosen. It is part of Christian belief in the resurrection to assert that nothing is ultimately unwanted, nothing finally lost or forgotten. When the last trump sounds and the sea gives up its dead, whatever was neglected or cast aside will be raised up and kept forever in the presence of the one in whom Memory and Love are joined.
So sometimes when I’m rummaging in the darkest corner of a used bookstore, I will choose a book just because it looks lonely and forgotten. I find myself treating the book with special respect, handling it gently, patiently studying the binding, admiring the typeface, before finally taking it to a special place—a favorite café, or the beach, or the shade of a tree I love—where I can read it slowly and in secret. Like one of those orphaned kittens, I love the book even more because it is rejected by the world. By reading the unwanted book, I give my silent witness to the coming day when all the books will be opened and the last will be first and whatever was forgotten will be remembered in love, world without end.
Boredom
The cultural critic Neil Postman said that we are amusing ourselves to death. Our every waking moment is filled with pleasure, and yet, paradoxically, our lives are afflicted by a strange malaise. Never have we been more entertained; never have we been more bored.
On the whole, Christian theologians have harbored dark thoughts about boredom and have viewed it as a sin. Kierkegaard said that “boredom is the root of all evil,” while Jacques Ellul identified boredom—so “gloomy, dull, and joyless”—as a defining perversion of modern social life. Ellul’s view was close to that of Karl Barth, who similarly described “the signature of modern human beings” as neither serenity nor rebellion, but simply an “utter weariness and boredom.” In Barth’s view, “man is bored with himself,” and as a result “everything has become a burden to him.”
In contrast, the Italian philosopher Giorgo Agamben has offered a more positive assessment of the role of boredom in our lives. Human beings, he says, “cannot be defined by any proper operation,” and so our humanness can never be exhausted by any particular task. Agamben speaks of boredom as our “creative semi-indifference to any task.” This semi-indifference is linked to a theological truth about human beings: we are not reducible to our work; we will always exceed any given task. Or as Agamben puts it, boredom discloses the essence of a “simply living being.” Between our work and our being there lies a gap, and boredom marks that gap (Agamben, Means without End).
The gap between being and work is nowhere better depicted than in Andrew Marvell’s 1653 poem “Bermudas,” which portrays work in a primordial paradise:
Thus sang they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
These unfallen human beings are not singing to keep time in their rowing, but rowing to keep time in their song. They are really working, but they exceed their work, and the labor is a needless embellishment, a fitting but unnecessary improvisation. Or to put it more simply, their real work is praise: the rowing of the oars forms the background rhythm of their song. In Agamben’s terminology, Marvell’s rower could be described as a “being-without-work”—he really works, but his work is superfluous, a celebration rather than a necessity.
But
