I wanted to dislike Christian Bobin’s writing, I really did. He’s a poet, he says, and if there’s one thing I’m extremely skeptical about, it’s poets who don’t write poetry but prose. All great poetry is driven by form and when form is absent, despite modernist and zeitgeist claims to the contrary, what we have is prose. As I say, I wanted to dislike Bobin’s writings, but I found that he couldn’t: he is a true poet, although he writes in prose, and his work is enormously interesting both from a literary and theological point of view. And, as an aside, also from a specifically Quaker perspective, as Bobin has much to say about many central Quaker concerns, and especially about silence and exploring its depths. Against GK Chesterton, a Catholic, for example, who stated that “gratitude is the highest form of thought”, for Bobin “silence is the highest form of thought” and explores it in an original and unique way, although apparently without pretend . In fact, otiosis seems like a made up word for him. Here is one of his comments on silence, which gives an idea of his style: “Yesterday, thanks to a quick movement, I caught a piece of Christ’s robe. It was a piece of silence.”
But here I go: doing something very little like Bobin: contrasting and comparing. One joy of Bobin’s job is that he doesn’t seem to be arguing with anyone; instead, he is moving through life and picking up stone after stone, examining each one in turn, giving them due consideration and attention, and then moving on. These stones can be objects, they can be flowers or nature or living beings (trees are models of acceptance for Bobin), or they can be his father’s Alzheimer’s or the death of the love of his life. There is a sense of rumination and getting to the heart of things; and along with this, goes a rejection of contemporary illusions and delusions. Bobin is someone who is not fooled by the modern world: “It is because each of us strives at all costs to suffer as little as possible that life is hell.” wow! – surely, anyone with a spiritual notion in their little finger would see how that more or less defines and condemns western spirituality: people want a religion that suits their preferences rather than a religion that is true, or more accurately that agrees with the Tao, or the nature of reality. We in the modern world find that we are not comfortable with Christ or with death and so we relegate both to a back room of the mind and close their door; and yes, we found that we rarely got there to examine its contents. The joy of Bobin’s work is that it does this for us: death, especially, lurks in its pages: “I was born into a world that was beginning to shut its ears to any talk of death: it has gotten away with it, realizing that he had thus prevented himself from hearing about grace”.
That should not surprise us: the title, the Eighth Day, is curious. The closest we come to an explanation is: “What is strange, in fact, is that grace still comes to us, when we do everything possible to make ourselves unreachable. The strange thing is that, thanks to a wait, a look or a laugh – sometimes we access that eighth day of the week, which neither dawns nor dies in the context of time”. As I understand it, the Eighth Day is the same as ‘on the third day’: it is the Sunday on which Christ rose from the dead. On the sixth day the world was created, and Christ was crucified, and on the seventh day God rested, as did Christ in the grave; but on the Eighth day the resurrection signified a new creation, a new order, and one that is independent of time and death. This, then, is what Bobin’s work constantly leans towards and alludes to: the magic of that Eighth Day that is now strangely accessible to us but in glimpses. As he puts it, “the unique concept of a presence that would never again be lacking to us, of a beauty that would never again be subject to the outrages of evening, evil and death.” Bobin helps us to locate that presence and also to celebrate its joy.
A notable aspect of Bobin’s writing is his aphoristic style; he is pre-eminently quotable because his language is so concise and loaded with meaning. Let me close by sharing three wonderful observations of his writing.
“I like to put my hand on the trunk of a tree I pass, not to make sure that the tree exists, of that I have no doubt, but that I exist.” This reminds me of one of CS Lewis’ wonderful insights where he reminds us that when Christ appears to his disciples after the resurrection and they are huddled in a locked room, he appears to go through the wall; this is not because Christ is insubstantial and phantasmagorical; it is that the wall is insubstantial compared to the reality of Christ! Things are not what they seem, but the other way around. What, ultimately, is really real?
“One gram of light counterbalances kilograms of darkness.” Here we have such a hopeful and enlightening insight; there is no doubt that Bobin feels the full weight of darkness and evil in the world, and has a somewhat melancholic disposition himself; yet through it all, even small amounts of light are so powerful and such antidotes to darkness and evil. I see this as an encouragement for weapons; fight the good fight because each contribution carries more power than we can ever imagine.
Finally, and perhaps most poetically, of writing itself, Bobin declares, “Writing is like drawing a door on a wall too high to scale, and then opening it.” That, surely, is a cool image; it speaks of the counterintuitive fact that all true writers understand. Essentially, one does not write to say what he wants to say, but to discover what he really knows. Interestingly, the meaning does not seem to exist previously in the mind, but rather is created through the very act of writing. I am sure that if you had space and time here, one might want to reflect on the ‘Word made flesh’ and how, in some way, human creativity reflects, is the image of the divine process.
Suffice it to say that I have become a huge fan of Bobin. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is even remotely interested in the spiritual journey, which of course is also one of healing. This book will make up for constant reading and many times rereading in terms of the ideas and suggestions it contains. And like true poetry, it will live in your mind, if not haunt you.
And one last quick note: I’m not qualified to comment on how well the French original of this book has been translated into English in terms of accuracy and nuance, but I can say that I suspect the translation is excellent as far as one reads it. English is so clear and powerful and effective, and I can only imagine that stems from fidelity to the intent of the source; so full marks for Pauline Matarasso.
