Tag Archives: By the Cover

High Water

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Robert Kegan

These days, there’s so much coming at us from all sides. The noise of media never stops; it comes with a chirp on our phones, with the never-ending ticker tape running across the bottom of the television screen, with flashing billboards that cram two or three ads in the time it takes to drive past them on our morning commutes. Where is the high ground, the safe space that offers rescue and rest from the deafening storm of modern life?

Modern life isn’t providing a multitude of ideas akin to brainstorming. The pace of it is too rapid to be absorbed or digested. The response is to hunker down, to weather it.

So what can we do, how do we aim for more than surviving this modern life? The answers are ancient: breathe. center. cultivate silence.

Will we miss out on some interesting things by doing these things? Absolutely.

Will it save us from drowning in the maelstrom of things tearing us apart? We’ll only know by trying…

[Robert Kegan wrote this book in the 1990’s. His main point: it isn’t enough to be a good person and a skilled, dedicated worker to live a successful life. Modern life demands critical thinking skills never required in past decades. And our society is not fostering those skills.]

What Do You See?

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Not the typical Stephen King...

It could be a dragon’s eye. Maybe a chambered nautilus done in blue brick. A stairwell – an actual well with stairs? The font is strange, with the title on what could be a music staff – the F and T both look like they have musical notes incorporated in their design (the P and E are made of spikes or nails). It could also be the lines you find in first grade, guides for those learning how to write. A boy and a shepherd are walking down the lantern lit stairs. Throw Stephen King’s name writ large on the top, and it’s one of the oddest book covers I’ve ever seen. Stephen King writing a fairy tale?

King is a master of horror, not fairy tales. Then again, if you un-Disneyfy and de-sanitize what passes for fairy tales these days, you’ll find that plenty of horror clings to the traditional versions. Is this cover giving fair warning that what is within might be dangerous? That ran through my mind when I saw it at the Northshire Book Store. And when I brought it home.

I think this cover asks a question: are you brave enough to dare looking inside? Will you open the door and go in? Are you willing to leave your ideas of what is real and what is possible behind?

If I’m honest, a look in the mirror or into the face of another brings up the same questions…am I up for the adventure of a lifetime, full of shadows and blinding light?

Are you?

A Pause, and a Second Look

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I didn’t pick up this book for myself; it was a Christmas gift for my then seventeen year old son, who has created art that fits well in the Modern Art category. Because he said it changed his whole understanding of Art, I read it.

What are you looking at? Add one of the most recognizable modern art images, and it’s hard not go beyond the cover.

The book itself is amazing. Gompertz walks readers through the history and expressions of modern art, making accessible a whole category of work that I’d never given any time or attention to. Now, instead of my eyes sliding over the modern art pieces in a museum as I scurry to the Impressionist gallery, I stop and spend time really looking at them. I give them more than a passing glance because the cover of this book led to the pages inside, led to a pause, and led to a second look. I move beyond my first, fleeting impression.

What are you looking at? What am I looking at? Dangerous, life-altering questions. Because if we stop and ask them, pause for a second look, we might just see what is right in front of us. We might look at that bush long enough to see it burning. We might hear the voice of God. And we might remove our sandals because we know that we walk on holy ground.

If we don’t pause, we’ll miss it. At least for the time being. I suspect that the Holy will continue planting burning bushes and sacred images on our paths until we finally stop and look.

Struck

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Wonder, like lightning, strikes in a way that illuminates. It can destroy the suffocating numbness that can kill the spirit as it dulls the senses. It can even strike so deep that the old way of being in the world is incinerated, allowing a new person to rise from its ashes.

True wonder inspires a heart-thumping awe, not a warm fuzzy awww. Lest we forget the nature of who we are, the cosmos we inhabit, and by whose hand it came into being…

For the title, the image of lightning hitting New York City, and for the ghost of a building in the clouds, Brian Selznick’s Wonder Struck is well worth reading and beholding. The inside is every good as the cover.

[New York: Scholastic Press, 2011[)

By The Cover

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I see thousands of books every week, checked out or returned by hundreds of people. Most don’t grab my attention beyond the perfunctory amount required to get them where they need to be. But a few do. Either the artwork or the titles, occasionally even subtitles, extend an almost irresistible invitation to pause, to venture beyond the cover into the depths of whatever story it guards. All The Light We Cannot See, What Are You Looking At?, Fire & Blood – just to name three.

Why these covers and not others? I suspect it’s as much about my own way of seeing the world as it is the scant number of words on the book covers…

How about you? What titles and images snagged your attention? Let’s take a longer look together…