Reviews for Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages

The average rating for Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-19 00:00:00 Sean Shank Somewhere during the course of reading this book it struck me that words are the core of N. Scott Momaday's being. He might, in a Daoist sense, suggest that they are his being. He might even suggest that words might be all of our being. He extends this notion in a sentence that could have been written by the Daoist Chinese poet Li Po (Li Bai) "Existence itself is illusory; we inhabit a dream in the mind of God." If he read what I just wrote, Scott Momaday might laugh and say, "Joseph, the wine you drank last night is still talking." (Scott Momaday and I are not at all adverse to wine.) This is a book in three parts. The first part is Momaday's thoughts on storytelling and writing and the importance of stories. Momaday essays that "Stories ... are statements which concern the human condition. To the extent that the human condition involves moral considerations, stories have moral implications. ... In the oral tradition stories are told not merely to entertain or to instruct; they are told to be believed. Stories are not subject to the imposition of such questions as true or false, fact or fiction. Stories are realities lived and believed. They are true." Momaday's words make me think, they challenge my own narrow worldview, they take me outside of my worldview, and they help me appreciate the worldview of other people and other cultures. But, more than that, his writing makes me conscious of history and more aware that I am a product of my own history and places. I carry the past with me and I am part of a continuum. Perhaps more importantly, Momaday knows -- as did his Chinese intellectual forbearers -- that I am not the center of that history, I am a small part of it. He quotes Yvor Winters, his mentor and friend, "Unless we understand the history which produced us, we are determined by that history, we may be determined in any event, but the understanding gives us a chance." Momaday is also, like Confucius, a transmitter of stories. Like Confucius, he transmits the wisdom of the sages who came before him, among other things, the wisdom of the Native American tradition. This incantation from the Iroquois serves to illustrate: You have no right to trouble me, Depart, I am becoming stronger; You are now departing from me, You who would devour me; I am becoming stronger, stronger. Mighty medicine is now within me, You cannot now subdue me--- I am becoming stronger, I am stronger, stronger, stronger. Momaday has a clear spiritual dimension. This shows up in another part of the book which might be said to be a travelogue. Momaday takes us to sacred places. It is a given that many of those places are sacred to Native Americans, but we also go to Chartres and even Zagorsk, which he calls "the heart of Russian Orthodoxy." The Trinity Monastery there inspires him and his recounting of how he was treated there makes the place real and Russian. His journey also takes him to St. Peters' cathedral in Regensburg, Germany. His description of this place contrasts starkly with Trinity Monastery. The final part of the book is, fittingly, stories. I'm not going to spoil the fun. But, I will say, I loved the stories especially the one called "An element of piety." It is about his daughters, a black lab, a priest, a blessing and himself. The story is told in a style that is - for lack of better words - 'tongue in cheek.' As the book ended, Momaday took me back to my Daoist friends with this: "And now I wonder what does it mean that, after these years I should speak of the octopus? It may be that I saved its life, but I know very little about the life of an octopus, and I shall not presume to say what salvation is worth to either of us. Only, just now, as a strange loneliness, it occurs to me that this creature has for some years now, been of some small consequence in the life of my mind. And I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, there, deep within its own sphere of instinct, the octopus dreams of me." That passage sent me to find another passage from Chuang Tzu: "Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou." * *Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. Trans Burton Watson. P. 45

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-14 00:00:00 Diana Hall Sorry to be done with this one; perhaps I'm not. Two themes pervade the work: language and place. Where I live. There are too many other things that demand my time today for me to give this review the attention it deserves. I'll come back another day.