Although I am familiar with Roald Dahl and his work, I have never read him, not even as a child. I don’t know why, but there it is.
Anyway, I mention him because I happened to watch a couple of Wes Anderson’s film adaptations of some Dahl short stories the other day and became immediately fascinated with the depictions of how he wrote.
Discovering authors’ writing processes has always been a hobby for me. I love learning about the rituals, superstitions, tools, times, and places that writers believe help them in their craft. Dahl was not a disappointment in this regard.
He wrote on average four hours a day in a small “writing hut” in his backyard. Inside, he sat nestled in an armchair with a custom-built writing board perched on his lap and used four sharpened pencils to record his ideas and make corrections. Dahl describes the details of his writing process in the short clip below.
Anyway, I mention him because I happened to watch a couple of Wes Anderson’s film adaptations of some Dahl short stories the other day and became immediately fascinated with the depictions of how he wrote.
Discovering authors’ writing processes has always been a hobby for me. I love learning about the rituals, superstitions, tools, times, and places that writers believe help them in their craft. Dahl was not a disappointment in this regard.
He wrote on average four hours a day in a small “writing hut” in his backyard. Inside, he sat nestled in an armchair with a custom-built writing board perched on his lap and used four sharpened pencils to record his ideas and make corrections. Dahl describes the details of his writing process in the short clip below.
After watching the Anderson film adaptations, I did some superficial research into Dahl’s life and quickly discovered that he was born in Cardiff, Wales. The son of Norwegian immigrants, he was baptized into and raised in the Church of Norway but was also influenced by the Anglicanism of the boarding schools he attended as a child. His boarding school experiences eventually lulled him toward agnosticism because he could not square the behavior of religious figures and leaders with the ideals and virtues they preached. In his autobiography, Dahl notes:
I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither forgiveness nor mercy in flogging some small boy that had broken the rules… Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?…It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God.
Following a series of personal tragedies, including the death of one of his daughters, Dahl’s doubts about religion and God eventually became outright rejection of both. Dahl claimed that although he “desperately wanted to believe in Christianity,” he could not reconcile the tragedy he had experienced with a loving Christian God. He pinpointed his loss of faith to a consultation he had had with the Archbishop of Canterbury following his daughter’s death:
I sat there wondering if this great and famous churchman really knew what he was talking about and whether he knew anything at all about God or heaven, and if he didn't, then who in the world did? And from that moment on, my darlings, I'm afraid I began to wonder whether there really was a God or not.
Dahl became an atheist shortly afterward and, as far as I know, remained one until his death. One can only hope he chose to accept Jesus’s offer of salvation after his mortal life ended.
Dahl’s loss of faith inspired me to reflect on my own supposed Christian upbringing, my time in Catholic schools, and my own involvement in the Catholic Church, and I found that many of my experiences mirrored Dahl’s, particularly as they concern the hypocrisy and vacuity of what calls itself the clergy these days.
Although I have not experienced the intense personal tragedy of losing a child, I sympathized with Dahl’s sorrow, as well as the skepticism and anger that eventually made him lose his faith. I recalled the many times I nearly turned my back on God for some of the same reasons Dahl had and was immediately reminded of some of the things that had “saved” me.
The most significant understanding that kept me from slipping into atheism was the sincere comprehension that mortal life was inevitably tragic. It’s not just that no one gets out alive (in the mortal sense), it’s also that no one gets out unscarred.
No amount of innocence or blessed, good living will spare anyone from the inherent suffering and entropy of this world, and I suppose this is the straw that broke Dahl’s back when it came to his faith. He could not, apparently, square the traditional/conventional definition of an all-loving, benevolent omni-God with the world’s suffering and entropy—the same sort of “handing God back His ticket” that shifted and firmly kept Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov in the atheist camp.
I must admit that I struggled with this reconciliation for a long time, too. The thing that “saved” me from becoming another Ivan Karamazov was the recognition that the assumption of a benevolent, loving God was true; however, the assumption of the all-powerful, all-knowing omni-God was not.
The work of Jesus was necessary to save us from the unideal reality of mortal life, and the unideal reality of mortal life exists precisely because God the Creator/God the Creator is not the omni-God asserted by Christianity. Our experience of mortal life, with its suffering, entropy, death, and tragedy, is the best that God the Creator could do and can do. Jesus offers a solution to this tragedy, but the tragedy must be lived for the solution to be accepted.
This was no easy step to take. After all, history is full of centuries of Christians suffering through all sorts of unspeakable tragedies, including the early loss of children, which, until quite recently, was practically a given for the vast majority of Christian families.
This immediately raises the question of why traditional assumptions about God and the world appeared to work for Christians in the past. Conventional answers to such a question tend to orbit around notions that Christians of the past were more Christian, in the sense that they were more God and church-centered in their consciousnesses because they were uncorrupted by modernity, implying that the only hope for Christians resided in shedding the corruptions of modernity and returning to the mode of consciousness that had kept our ancestors safely in the fold and on God’s side.
As much as I understand such longings, I don’t believe such retroversion is possible. I often attend Mass at my local church, but I would be lying if I told you it did much for me religiously or spiritually. I sense there are many Christians like me out there.For better or for worse, modernity happened and, contrary to traditionalist arguments to the contrary, it is now an integral part of us. Concerning modernity, I don’t believe modernity to be a purely external force. Instead, I regard it as part of the enormous shift in human consciousness that occurred some centuries ago.
A big part of this shift is the increasing awareness that conventional assumptions about God the Creator do not and cannot line up with the suffering and entropy we experience in mortal life. Unfortunately, in terms of real faith, many recent and contemporary Christians have responded to this irreconciliation by handing back their tickets to God.
A truly tragic development, especially when one considers that one can exchange the ticket for a transfer that could allow one to retain their faith, perhaps even deepen it.
I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither forgiveness nor mercy in flogging some small boy that had broken the rules… Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?…It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God.
Following a series of personal tragedies, including the death of one of his daughters, Dahl’s doubts about religion and God eventually became outright rejection of both. Dahl claimed that although he “desperately wanted to believe in Christianity,” he could not reconcile the tragedy he had experienced with a loving Christian God. He pinpointed his loss of faith to a consultation he had had with the Archbishop of Canterbury following his daughter’s death:
I sat there wondering if this great and famous churchman really knew what he was talking about and whether he knew anything at all about God or heaven, and if he didn't, then who in the world did? And from that moment on, my darlings, I'm afraid I began to wonder whether there really was a God or not.
Dahl became an atheist shortly afterward and, as far as I know, remained one until his death. One can only hope he chose to accept Jesus’s offer of salvation after his mortal life ended.
Dahl’s loss of faith inspired me to reflect on my own supposed Christian upbringing, my time in Catholic schools, and my own involvement in the Catholic Church, and I found that many of my experiences mirrored Dahl’s, particularly as they concern the hypocrisy and vacuity of what calls itself the clergy these days.
Although I have not experienced the intense personal tragedy of losing a child, I sympathized with Dahl’s sorrow, as well as the skepticism and anger that eventually made him lose his faith. I recalled the many times I nearly turned my back on God for some of the same reasons Dahl had and was immediately reminded of some of the things that had “saved” me.
The most significant understanding that kept me from slipping into atheism was the sincere comprehension that mortal life was inevitably tragic. It’s not just that no one gets out alive (in the mortal sense), it’s also that no one gets out unscarred.
No amount of innocence or blessed, good living will spare anyone from the inherent suffering and entropy of this world, and I suppose this is the straw that broke Dahl’s back when it came to his faith. He could not, apparently, square the traditional/conventional definition of an all-loving, benevolent omni-God with the world’s suffering and entropy—the same sort of “handing God back His ticket” that shifted and firmly kept Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov in the atheist camp.
I must admit that I struggled with this reconciliation for a long time, too. The thing that “saved” me from becoming another Ivan Karamazov was the recognition that the assumption of a benevolent, loving God was true; however, the assumption of the all-powerful, all-knowing omni-God was not.
The work of Jesus was necessary to save us from the unideal reality of mortal life, and the unideal reality of mortal life exists precisely because God the Creator/God the Creator is not the omni-God asserted by Christianity. Our experience of mortal life, with its suffering, entropy, death, and tragedy, is the best that God the Creator could do and can do. Jesus offers a solution to this tragedy, but the tragedy must be lived for the solution to be accepted.
This was no easy step to take. After all, history is full of centuries of Christians suffering through all sorts of unspeakable tragedies, including the early loss of children, which, until quite recently, was practically a given for the vast majority of Christian families.
This immediately raises the question of why traditional assumptions about God and the world appeared to work for Christians in the past. Conventional answers to such a question tend to orbit around notions that Christians of the past were more Christian, in the sense that they were more God and church-centered in their consciousnesses because they were uncorrupted by modernity, implying that the only hope for Christians resided in shedding the corruptions of modernity and returning to the mode of consciousness that had kept our ancestors safely in the fold and on God’s side.
As much as I understand such longings, I don’t believe such retroversion is possible. I often attend Mass at my local church, but I would be lying if I told you it did much for me religiously or spiritually. I sense there are many Christians like me out there.For better or for worse, modernity happened and, contrary to traditionalist arguments to the contrary, it is now an integral part of us. Concerning modernity, I don’t believe modernity to be a purely external force. Instead, I regard it as part of the enormous shift in human consciousness that occurred some centuries ago.
A big part of this shift is the increasing awareness that conventional assumptions about God the Creator do not and cannot line up with the suffering and entropy we experience in mortal life. Unfortunately, in terms of real faith, many recent and contemporary Christians have responded to this irreconciliation by handing back their tickets to God.
A truly tragic development, especially when one considers that one can exchange the ticket for a transfer that could allow one to retain their faith, perhaps even deepen it.
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