The Power of Speech to Stir Men's Blood and a God, Like Jazz, Who Doesn't Resolve

I must proceed with an apology for my tardiness. I think my tardiness, perhaps, may be excusable because I'm recovering from a week of comprehensive exams, the last of which was on Saturday. I had to regain at least a little bit of my sanity before even attempting to write anything else for public perusal. You'd thank me. Believe me.


Character that I love from the first rank of literature and why
There are many authors from the so-called A-list that I like, but there is only one character from that list that I love. Truly. Madly. Deeply. Who is the recipient of the most passionate of my literary affections? Marc Antony from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

I don't mean to wax wordy and nostalgic, but it's hard to describe my love for Antony without doing so. I was first introduced to Julius Caesar in 9th grade. You'd think a spacy ingenue like I was would more easily fall for the presentation of the original star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet. But no. I was enraptured by the rhetoric, the classic lines, the unfettered loyalty of Brutus to Rome, the cunning deception of Cassius, the aloof arrogance of Caesar, and above all, the rhetorical genius and linguistic bravura of Marc Antony.


I know that "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" has become both the stuff of legend and, consequently, of parody, but think for a minute exactly what it was that Marc Antony did. Brutus and Co. had just pulled off the most famous assassination in world history, and Brutus had convinced the plebians that it was for their good. Caesar was ambitious and threatened the integrity of Rome, he told them. But my boy Antony took the "ambitious" bit and turned it on its head. Text: Okay, Caesar was "ambitious," and Brutus and Co. are "honorable men." Subtext: How could Caesar be ambitious when he refused the crown three times and left you all of this stuff in his will, and how can the conspirators be honorable in snuffing out a noble life? Who's really "ambitious" here?

Antony took the plebians from being glad that Caesar was dead to weeping for his life in mourning. He took them from praising the conspirators for their deed to wanting to kill them for their deed. Antony claimed: "For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,/ Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech/ To stir men's blood." But that's exactly what he had. And his speech, though manipulative, is captivating in its ability to show the power of words. Mere words.


Author that I love who will never be in the first rank of literature and why
This one was easy for me. Don Miller. Hands down. Though he topped the bestseller list with Blue Like Jazz for weeks on end, he'll never be in the canon of the literature of Western Civilization. Ever. But I adore him. I dream of running into him during a layover at the airport.

At first, I resisted his literary advances. It was during the time that Blue Like Jazz was ubiquitous and I refused to buy into the hype. But years later, out of pure residual curiosity, I bit down on Blue Like Jazz and commenced to devour it. And everything else Don Miller has ever penned.


Not only is his conversational style charming, but his raw, aching honesty about living the Christian life hit deep chords of recognition within me. His laments that Christianity had become a series of checkboxes, his feelings of alienation, his yearning for community and acceptance, and his caution against tearing the poetic out of the spiritual all resonated with me. I'll leave you with the opening lines of the first book of his I'd ever read:

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside Bagdad Theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for 15 minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened."