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The Puritans by Arlo Bates

A >> Arlo Bates >> The Puritans




"My dear Maurice," she said, after she had come to call him by that
name, "let me give you a caution. The most fanatical belief is less
evil than dogmatic denial. If you are really the agnostic you claim to
be, your very confession that the truth is too great for human grasp
binds you to respect the unknown."

"But one cannot respect dogmas," he objected.

"We were not speaking of dogmas," she responded with sweet and
dignified earnestness, "but of the mystery of life and the great
unknown that incloses it. The great fault and danger of this age is
that it is all for breaking down. It reforms abuses and improves away
old errors; but it seems to forget the need of providing something to
take the place of what it clears away. Men can no more live without a
belief than without air."

"But it is hard to have patience with what one sees to be false."

"What one believes to be false, you mean. It isn't easy to have
patience with those who hold to theories that we've laid by; but surely
it is impossible not to respect the spirit in which any honest soul
sincerely believes."

"Yes," Maurice assented, somewhat doubtfully; "but it is so hard to
have patience with creeds that are entirely outworn."

The old lady smiled and shook her head.

"Again I have to say 'which seem to you outworn.' A creed is never
really outworn so long as a single man sincerely believes in it.
However, you may have as little patience as you like with them if you
will only remember that after all the creed itself is nothing, while
the attitude of the mind to truth is everything. If you respect
conviction, that is all I ask."

Mrs. Staggchase at another time had also an ethical word for him.
Maurice was deeply moved by the fact that Philip had gone into the
Catholic church and entered a monastery at Montreal. Like his friend,
Ashe had left the Clergy House as soon as he had come to the decision
to which his doubts led. He had seen Maurice, and had talked to him
unreservedly of his faith and of his plans. It was idle to attempt to
move him; and it was after bidding the proselyte good-by that Maurice
was talking of him to Mrs. Staggchase, and lamenting what occurred.

"My dear fellow," she observed in her faintly satirical manner, "I know
that I'm growing old, because whereas my convictions used to be all
right and my actions all wrong, now my actions are right enough, but my
convictions have all evaporated. Mr. Ashe is still young enough to need
convictions, and the more rigid they are the more contented he'll be."

"But with his training, to turn out in this way," responded Maurice.
"It's amazing. Think of a New England Puritan turned Catholic!"

"On the contrary, it is the most natural thing in the world. His
Puritan training is what has made him a Catholic."

Maurice thought a moment in silence.

"I suppose," he said at length, "that in this age there are only two
things possible for a thinking man. One must go over to Rome and rest
on authority, or choose to use his reason, and be an agnostic."

Mrs. Staggchase regarded him with a smile which made him flush a
little.

"'No doubt but ye are the people,'" she quoted, "'wisdom shall die with
you.' Yet I have known persons really of intellectual respectability
who haven't found it necessary to do either."

He was too wise to answer her. He remembered that it was time to keep
an appointment with Berenice, and he smiled with the air of one too
happy to be ruffled.

"I suppose," he remarked, as he rose to go, "that if I would give you
the chance you would easily prove that Phil and I both are merely
Puritans more or less disguised!"

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A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.

Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel's grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", typed over and over again.

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as "a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King", has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.

"The idea has probably been marinating for years, because I loved the movie and the Stephen King book," said Buehler. "I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays."

He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film. "I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?'" he said. "I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film, became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie, and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.

He's included a spoof review from the blog OverThinkingIt.com on the book's back jacket, which compares it to "the best of Beckett" in its "lack of forward momentum", and considers the struggles of the author, "heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence". "It's that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power," the review says. "Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that's like dismissing a Pollack canvas as mere splatters of paint."

So far, Buehler says that around 1,000 people have viewed the book, for sale on Blurb.com for $8.95 in paperback, or $22.95 in hardback, and he's sold "a few" copies, with sales now starting to pick up steam. "A few people have asked me to sign it - they're looking it as a piece of art rather than a funny thing to give to a Kubrick fan," he said. "If you're not a Kubrick or King fan, you might not even get it."

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