Suffering Through a Book

The initial reason I didn't like The End of Suffering by Scott Cairns was his bad writing. I didn't expect this, as he is a poet. It's possible he's a bad poet. I think poets ought to be even more careful about their words than most people, not wasting them. But some would-be poets might just love words so much that they lavish them on the page indiscriminately.

Cairns wastes words in several ways. He uses way too many, painfully hemming and hawing around, seemingly unable to write simple declarative sentences. Every page is padded with  phrases such as "In any case, all of this is to say...," "I am supposing," and "It may be fair to say." In reading some of these sentences aloud to my daughter I couldn't keep from laughing. My favorite is "I am thinking..." as an introduction to many of Cairns' ideas. Doesn't Paraclete Press have editors?

Even if I were a professional with an editor to look over my work, I would re-read it several times myself, with hopes of noticing that I had used another unnecessary phrase, "it seems to me" twice on one page, and the word "notoriously" twice on another. By the way, the text on these pages fills the space of a small postcard, and the whole book is barely over 100 pages, making for high percentage of poorly written content--and, adding to my annoyance, a poor return on the $15 I spent on it.

His word usage is odd, if not downright misleading. Example: "In appalling condescension, [Christ] remains Emmanuel, God with us." I'm sorry, but appalling is not the word to describe God's loving attitude toward us, as its meaning is "to fill or overcome with horror, consternation, or fear; dismay." This is not poetic license, but rather abuse, of a good, strong word.

When I read the next example my suspicion continued to grow that Cairns had little wisdom to impart: "I have begun to discover how perplexity is not such a bad disposition to cultivate, considering." Perplexed means confused, Scott! How on earth does one cultivate a confused state of mind? For a start, write sloppily.

This misuse of individual words is another way that Cairns wastes them. Perhaps the worst case I found is also an indicator that the author doesn't know what he is talking about. Why would he use the word tweaking in the following passage, a word that means the making of a "slight adjustment" or a "gentle pinch" ?

     Life Himself, of course, has already accomplished an absolute trumping of death; we need only to notice, and by our noticing thereafter to participate in His continuing triumph.
    That said, our ability to participate in this recovery appears to be dependent upon our tweaking our own, dissipated persons, and healing a concurrent rift in our own, discretely fragmented selves....

I'm sorry I had to put you through such a long passage just to make an example. Typing that out makes me wonder even harder if what we have here is not a word usage problem, but a theological problem. I admit that I am not skilled at spiritual warfare, but noticing and tweaking are not actions that have been recommended to me as effective by those who are.

Cairns seems ambivalent about people who have already written about suffering. What led me to buy his book after a brief perusal were the many references to good writers and poets, such as Alexander Schmemann and Emily Dickinson. This quote from Simone Weil is featured prominently on the inside cover: "The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it."

That quote helps explain what the author intends to do in the book, to talk about the purpose, not the cessation, of suffering, to use one meaning of the word end. In the prologue he writes:

     Given affliction's generous availability, and given the wide, but so far unsatisfying, range of apologia that the nagging enigma of our human suffering has provoked over the years, I thought I might press ahead for a more satisfying glimpse of why it is we suffer, and why it is that some of us--even among the apparently innocent--appear to suffer far more than others.
     At the very least, I would like to come up with a less specious way of talking about it.

He goes on to disparage the "disturbing pieties" and "commonplace yammerings" that humans offer to one another in affliction, and to say that "my own faltering faith has come to demand a somewhat more satisfying take on this ubiquitous business of affliction."

I have neglected to say much about how the book fulfills that goal, because, when I was nearing the end, it dawned on me that I hadn't got any clear idea of his take on suffering. I had alternated between underlining passages of bad writing and marking pithy quotes from other writers. But as to the purpose of suffering, the communication was lost in a fog of often puzzling statements about various aspects of the Christian life.

More than one literary person has told me that if you want to be a good writer, you must read good books, a lot of them. We assume that Cairns read the authors he quotes, but he doesn't exclude them from his condemnation of the "range of apologia" as specious. I wish he had demanded satisfaction from someone more qualified than himself to accomplish the task. But wait--I see from the passage quoted above that he was only looking to provide a satisfying glimpse. That explains it. For any further reading I do on the subject, I might consult his references.

Forgive me for going on and on about such a little book. Better books don't seem to require so much effort to write about, and my inability to give a brief and pithy review shows my own lack of skill. At least, I got some reading and writing practice out of the suffering I endured.