Writers Who Have Most Influenced You
Nick Tamen
Shipmate
in Heaven
As “A Rant on Hymns and Hymn Books” in Hell peters out, @ChastMastr has risen to the challenge of proudly letting his Clive Staples Lewis freak flag fly. ChastMastr is never hesitant to express his love and admiration for C.S. Lewis, and it got to me thinking: If you had to name one (or at most, three) writers who have been most influential in your understanding of faith or philosophy or approach to life and its meaning (or lack thereof), who would you name?
Comments
I’m thinking—I know who the automatic responses might be, but I’m pondering if my initial thoughts are the correct ones.
Besides, I wanted to get the question out there without any answers. I will come back to it.
Even he.
Side 2 of Aqualung particularly.
I highly approve of naming musicians and music.
Alright, @The_Riv, I’ll go with:
J.R.R. Tolkien
Frederick Buechner
Anne Lamott
J R R Tolkien
Richard Adams
Terry Pratchett
come to mind as writers I first read at a formative age.
That said, I often find myself thinking that female protagonists are more interesting than male protagonists and I suspect that's because of Lucy from Narnia and Titty from Arthur Ransome.
There are other writers that influenced how I think about religion, that I read later in life: Hans Kung, C S Lewis, J V Taylor (the bishop), Nicholas Lash, Chesterton, Auden, Rowan Williams, Charles Taylor (the philosopher). Some of those, the later, I find more rereadable than the earlier.
T.S.Eliot - Four Quartets
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Shakespeare - Hamlet
but in the case of Shakespeare, all the mature plays.
(oh, and Jane Austen, Keats, Charles Williams, Betjeman, Larkin, ..., all very unsurprising)
If folks would share the impact writers have had on them, this thread could be more than lists.
And I know many of us could list a number of writers who’ve influenced us, but the qualifier “most” was used with purpose.
Good point.
I was slightly tongue in cheek with Ian Anderson, as in reality I don't think any writers have much influenced me in the way described in the OP and of which I am conscious.
But I did love
O people what have you done?
Locked him in your golden cage
Made him bow to your religion
Him resurrected from the grave.
Or
And the bloody church of England
In chains of history
Demands your earthly presence
At the vicarage for tea
Not profound or owt but resonant.
If Jesus saves he'd better save himself from the gory glory seekers who use his name in death
I think I mentioned this before but people just ripped the piss.
Charles Morgan, a taste shared with the Principal of my university college and hence indirectly responsible for my being offered a place there.
Freda White, responsible for my life-long love of S W France.
“Everything can be taken from a [hu]man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
(*not the painter, though he might be high on another list)
Well that’s six. I’ll try to narrow it down…
“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
For learning how to think: Tolstoy
For hilarity: Gerald Durrell
Happy to declare that CS Lewis left me cold
I loved reading other folk's lists of books, but I take the point. Ok, for me:
Robert H. Thoulness, 'Straight and Crooked thinking'. This made me into a scientist.
Karl Popper, 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery'. A wonderful help in experimental design and interpretation.
Douglas Hofstader, 'Godel Escher, Bach. Started me exploring philosophy seriously.
Richard Foster. Helped nurture in me the desire to be a more compassionate Christian.
The book I comfort read a lot is, 'Wind in the Willows'. Does it influence me? Well, it makes me happier and easier to live with!
Barbara Softly - Ponder and William (proto- Calvin and Hobbes)
As I remember it (however unreliably), a book that opened up my imagination and so gave me a reason for wanting to read.
Skipping ahead chronologically, the next two writers that came to mind:
Norman Hunter - Professor Branestawm (and others)
S A Wakefield - Bottersnikes and Gumbles
Inventive scenarios and characters that made me laugh, and still stick in my mind.
Laurie Lee influenced me as a feckless youth as I thought it would be possible to 'walk out one midsummer morning' as it were without giving much - if any - thought as to what I'd do for a living.
James Joyce influenced me too as I sat stunned and silent after reading the closing paragraph of 'The Dead' in Dubliners and epiphanously thought I needed to write, or at least study literature.
The dole-queue beckoned from that moment but I have done both to some extent and lived to tell the tale.
Others whose 'influence' I feel is there but in ways I find hard to pin down include Mervyn Peake, WB Yeats, Seamus Heaney, T S Eliot, JG Farrell, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, RS Thomas ...
Plenty of female poets too, Carol Anne Duffy Jo Shapcott, Lavinia Greenlaw.
But then I could go on and it could end up as a list of people whose work I've read and admired.
Eliot's Four Quartets have to be at the top of the list. I read Dylan Thomas's 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' as part of my wife's elegy and ended with that short section from Eliot which ends with 'the life of significant soil.'
T.H. White, in particular The Sword in the Stone, was another significant worldview influence.
Partly the endless fascination of the world, and partly that juxtaposition of the preoccupation with violence and the conviction that might should not be right. (Mistress Masham's Repose has some of the same sense).
Mary C. Grey, in particular in Redeeming the Dream, first convinced me to take Christianity seriously; and Walter Wink's Powers trilogy really started me with a vocabulary I could use.
Ask me tomorrow and I'll have a different list!
Just reading it and letting the text speak to me, rather than what some commentary or pi-jaw tells me it would like me to find there, has over my, now, fairly long lifetime, had more influence than anything else.
The only other works that I can think of that I'd say have been of themselves, significantly influential, are,
- The Way of the Pilgrim, both volumes - I have only read the R.M. French translation, and
- indirectly, as nobody reads it for itself as an inspirational text, St Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises.
It's still quite early in the day so I doubt he means 'pissed.' (In the UK sense of the term)
Herbert W. Armstrong
Brian McLaren via Rob Bell
Pi is slang for self righteous, or was when I was at school in the 80s/90s
It’s a bit Molesworth - abbreviation of pious I always assumed
Ah. Always felt that's one of those irregular verbs - I am principled, you are self-righteous, he is an insufferable smug git.
Speaking of Jethro Tull, there's a line in one of their songs
Your wise men don't know
how it feels to be thick as a
brick
Profound!
Tull were at their best in their early jazz-rock phase and, arguably, also later on in their folk-rock phase.
Their full-on Prog albums are their weakest I think.
But all that aside, because I'm a nosey git, I'm interested to hear how the influence of writers, whether rock lyricists, poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists or scientists, historians or whatever else, has influenced how Shipmates behave.
I didn't walk around Spain busking with a fiddle after I'd read Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning but it did cloud my mind with a kind of romantic fecklessness for a few years until reality bit.
I didn't starve in a garret writing Modernist novels after I read Joyce.
But it did make me want to take literary things seriously.
I would say that I'd been 'touched' and 'changed' in some way by reading Shakespeare and seeing his plays performed - and even struggling to perform some parts myself in amateur dramatics. The same with reading poetry and trying to write it myself.
But these things are difficult to assess. The influence must be there, but how does it emerge or work out in practice?
The same applies to the words of scripture or various liturgical forms too, of course, whether the words of popular choruses or Common Worship, The Book of Common Prayer or the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom or whatever else.
tangent: Is there a reason some posters don’t use the quote function?
/tangent
@MaryLouise, that Buechner quote is a prime example of why he’s been an influence on me. His reflective writing has both colored how I see the world and how I think about the world.
Same with Anne Lamott. I’ll follow your example and provide a quote from Everything Single Thing I Know, as of Today, part of which used to be my signature line on the Old Ship:
I frequently come back to “All truth is paradox.” And if I’m honest, Buechner’s and Lamott’s resonance with me is likely enhanced by the fact that they both are (or were, in Buechner’s case, as he died two years ago) Presbyterians, so with them I start from a common language and perspective, as it were.
As for Tolkien, I’ve probably read LOTR as many times as I’ve read the Bible, more times for some parts of the Bible; I read it at least every other year. I’ve always found fiction to be a more profound vehicle for glimpsing “truth” than non-fiction, and I think Tolkien is a master at conveying truth through his writing. Every time I read it, I find something I hadn’t noticed or picked up on before. Tolkien in particular shaped the way I view the beauty of the physical world. And like @Dafyd said, his take on wisdom and foolishness is a very deep well, as is his take that we all have propensity for great good and for great evil.
Second on this list is the American poet Robert Frost. There was a time when every American school student was exposed to his work, so I read him there, but my mother used to read him to us when we were very young, and I suppose my attachment to him is sentimental as much as anything. I do appreciate the local, seasonal sensibility of his poems. Frost is an outdoorsy poet of the land. I think he encouraged me to take notice. Here are a few of my favorites:
October
My November Guest
Good Hours
Still pondering a third (because there are. a number of candidates left, but for now I'll pencil-in Tolkien. (In truth I would have preferred a longer list -- 5 or 10! -- I'm not a huge fan of Very Short Lists, or G.O.A.T. claims.)
Unfortunately, given that I am 53, my plan to emulate him by drinking and shagging myself into the ground* by the time I'm 40 has gang a bit agley.
*OK, so it was probably heart trouble, but the popular version is far more romantic.
He makes Charles Dickens look like Hemingway.
You should try Sir Walter Scott...
Hey, it’s the Ship, and this isn’t a game where not following the rules impedes game play. As the guy who said in the OP, “If you had to name one (or at most, three) writers,” feel free to ignore the number.
(Though as I also said upthread, the “most” in “most influenced” was used on purpose, knowing that we all probably have a long-list of writers who influenced in some way. But hey, knock yourself out
Thanks - I've read LOTR three times so far, and while engrossing, I'd be hard-pressed to identify any way in which I'd found it influencing.