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Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say):
Reflections on Literature and Faith, HarperCollins, 2001

Frederick Buechner is one of our finest American authors. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he has written numerous works over the course of his lifetime, including such notables as Godric, The Book of Bebb, Telling Secrets, and The Son of Laughter. In his recent work Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Reflections on Literature and Faith, Buechner interacts with four major writers (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton, and William Shakespeare) and describes their individual struggles to bear the weight of great sadness. Buechner discovers in the words of these "vein-opening writers" a courageous attention to the tragedy of human life. The reader encounters Hopkins' nagging sense of insignificance, Twain's frequent encounters with agonizing loss, young Chesterton's battles with depression and absurdity, and Shakespeare's recognition of the wily character of life under the sun. Honesty must admit the tragedy of it all. And attention to the sadness of others makes us attentive to our own. But Buechner doesn't end the book in existential despair. There's more to be said. As he notes at the end of the book, reflecting on Shakespeare's King Lear:

"What Shakespeare asks of his audience is a suspension not only of disbelief - and belief along with it - but of the inclination to view life as either tragic or comic, or as sometimes one and sometimes the other. Life is continually both at once is what his obedience to time’s sadness led him to say, and what he felt about it and opened his veins to make his audience feel along with him was that it was precisely that quality that constituted the richness of it, and the terror of it, and the heartbreaking beauty of it, which perhaps it took a man facing old age and death, as Shakespeare himself was on the brink of facing them to see. It is also to be noted that in every scene of great suffering he has someone enter from the wings to relieve it . . . he seems to say, maybe life is like a fairy tale notwithstanding, if only in the sense that all disguises are stripped away in the end and all evil spells undone, so that even the Beast becomes beautiful when he discovers that Beauty love him, and even the old king, with Beauty dead in his arms, finally becomes a human being, and the last word, like Albany’s, is a word of mercy."

-- TLT (December 23, 2003)