St. Maximos' Hut

I recently finished reading Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, which has been a goal of mine for a number of years. It is a difficult-to-describe book, and one very strongly based in the culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One key aspect -- and one reason the book is hard to read -- is that time and space are shifting in unpredictable ways throughout the book and shifting in different ways for different characters. For example, a house may face one vista on one day and another on a different day, but only one character will notice the change. Or a period of time that for one person seems like a few hours will seem like a few days to someone else.

Needless to say, a book like that causes one to reflect on the theory of relativity. One of the most fascinating insights from that theory (the clearest exposition, to my mind, is still Bertrand Russell's ABC of Relativity from the 1920s) is that all of us are living in slightly different worlds. Delany takes this insight to an extreme in Dahlgren and uses it to advantage by illustrating that people have a choice of accepting and forgiving behavior that seems odd or condemning it. As Christians, we are exhorted to forgive each other and we are also encouraged to behave in ways that are inexplicable to other people. While Dahlgren is far from a Christian tract, and far from a single-themed book, it was a pleasant surprise to find this particular idea in it.