[Bubba's Book Club: ISSUE 15 - December, 2010]

After a nearly one year hiatus, Neil Peart has updated the Bubba's Book Club section of his website where he reviews and recommends books that he's been reading. In this - his 15th installment since the launch of his site - Neil reviews just 2 books: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon and The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Neil introduces the 2 reviews with the following bit of prose:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

This beautiful truth is attributed to Philo of Alexandria, among others, but I favor Philo for the quote. Philo was a Jewish philosopher who lived in Egypt under the Romans at the time of Christ, which seems the right time and place to have offered such generous advice.

That such deep wisdom is still rarely followed, after 2,000 years, is a shame, and you have to wonder, “Why didn’t we ever learn anything from these ancient sages?” The easy answer is that humans are weak-willed and self-centered—yet it remains strange to me that we often resist clear “goodness” (generosity to the unfortunate, say) so coldly, but devote ourselves unstintingly, selflessly, to following meaningless rituals and customs. Observe a holy holiday without fail, yes—but commit a random act of kindness? Not so likely.

Philo would agree; we’ve still got a lot of work to do on the concept of being kind, and at appreciating the hard battles others must fight every day.

Still, Philo’s spirit remains in the best of us, and since his time, certain novelists have exemplified that generosity in their art. They present their characters with similar compassion, and invite their readers to experience the “hard battles” of others for themselves, in a way that no other artform can achieve. Paintings, films, photography, music—all can arouse emotions and present moments of truth, but reading engages one’s inner eye, one’s imagination, like no other medium, and is the only way that other lives are truly embraced, taken into one’s own life.

Authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Nadine Gordimer, and Saul Bellow—just to name a prominent few—have given us this generous spirit in their novels. Their characters are felt, and felt for, but not judged.

Here are two modern examples of that magnanimity—greatness of spirit.

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