tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30897652.post443706210797179991..comments2024-03-27T15:44:43.564-08:00Comments on What Do I Know?: "Faith is the most peculiar thing." Thoughts On Finishing Niall Williams' History of the Rain,Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10498066938213558757noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30897652.post-89896902962899353182019-05-21T09:27:11.030-08:002019-05-21T09:27:11.030-08:00Glad you liked the notes. I was impressed by the ...Glad you liked the notes. I was impressed by the book and so were most of the book club last night. It's not a book with a strong plot line in the traditional sense. There's lots of struggle. But Williams has constructed are beautiful study of a community and a family that is both uniquely Irish yet universal. Stevehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10498066938213558757noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30897652.post-48699423332699358132019-05-21T04:38:11.858-08:002019-05-21T04:38:11.858-08:00And by the way, a high point in your lit review to...And by the way, a high point in your lit review today. Well done! I (just about, almost there) want to read the book.Jacob Dugan-Brausehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06287631724339961459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30897652.post-60876562759066883122019-05-20T22:10:55.795-08:002019-05-20T22:10:55.795-08:00Thanks, Steve. (giving this another go)
To know o...Thanks, Steve. (giving this another go)<br /><br />To know one's family is difficult, Steve. So much is bound to rootedness and the lost world of our pasts, both uneasily entered and easily misunderstood.<br /><br />To the work of knowing our father and his father and still another, I am making that effort; yet only last week I discovered a part of my own father's life that left me newly in awe of the man. I was researching WWII National Registration records (for the draft) and I found my father's card. Nothing too unusual – always was a skinny guy – but then, on the margin, in another hand, were two cursive words that instantly bridged his passing.<br /><br />Two words -- Conscientious Objector -- my father.<br /><br />I didn't know. Out of 34.5 million men registered for the draft in WWII, only 77,000 men were CO in this last, good war. My father was studying to become a Lutheran clergyman in my mother’s Augustana Lutheran (Swedish) Church. His mother’s father was a pacifist, a man whose family fled Prussian-annexed Denmark after Bismark’s 1871 Proclamation of the Empire of Germany in Versailles. <br /><br />I have so much respect for my father, close and so work-absent from me. And I continue to find how incredible his mother was in keeping him set in a path to peace while growing up in the violent, father-drinking madness he knew. You could say it all sounds way too Irish.<br /><br />Gene and I are off to the Irish Ambassador's house on my birthday (of all things) to hear readings from a new work by Joseph O’Connor. It’s a connection made while Gene was director of a national Irish service organisation.<br /><br />I’m much closer to my own people-before-me here in the past-lands Williams writes of. I am beginning to unearth stories silenced by a distance we Americans experienced in our own ‘middle passage’. I am as a boy who must know my father's, my mother's, history.<br /><br />Jacob Dugan-Brausehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06287631724339961459noreply@blogger.com