Spirituality as Quest, Pt. 5 -- Lao-Tzu; Reading a Story, Pt. 9

Our passage from the Word of God today is Joshua 24:26 which reads: "And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak, that was by the sanctuary of the Lord."

Our quote today is from Gao Xingjian. He said: "It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth."

Our first topic for today is "Spirituality as Quest, Part 5 - Lao-Tzu" from the book, "Literature and Spirituality" by Yaw Adu-Gyamfi and Mark Ray Schmidt.

The Tao Te Ching (dou de jing) is a collection of poems attributed to a Chinese sage named Lao-Tzu (or Laozi). Many myths and legends surround this book and author, but it is clear that this book is the foundation of Taoism. Reaching back to perhaps the seventh century BC, this long tradition teaches one to accept the deeper nature of reality, which is beyond words and comprehension. Taoism does not give its followers a god or any specific ethical and social commands as found in the Hebrew, Christian, or Islamic scriptures. The concern of Taoism is to give people a sense of peace by accepting the underlying unity behind the confusing experiences of life. The Tao, or the "way," is beyond words, but it is allegedly the most real and the most important presence in the universe. The Tao is like a great river flowing along, and humans are like specks in the flow. Rather than fight against the movement of the river (the flow of ultimate reality), one needs to accept it and find peace with everything. Taoism also teaches its followers not to strive to understand the Tao, but to be content with ignorance of it.

...

 

Our second topic for today is "Reading a Story, Part 9" from the book, "Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing" by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.

Tale

The name tale (from the Old English talu, "speech") is sometimes applied to any story, whether short or long, true or fictitious. Tale being a more evocative name than story, writers sometimes call their stories "tales" as if to imply something handed down from the past. But defined in a more limited sense, a tale is a story, usually short, that sets forth strange and wonderful events in more or less bare summary, without detailed character-drawing. "Tale" is pretty much synonymous with "yarn," for it implies a story in which the goal is revelation of the marvelous rather than revelation of character. In the English folktale "Jack and the Beanstalk," we take away a more vivid impression of the miraculous beanstalk and the giant who dwells at its top than of Jack's mind or personality. Because such venerable stories were told aloud before someone set them down in writing, the storytellers had to limit themselves to brief descriptions. Probably spoken around a fire or hearth, such a tale tends to be less complicated and less closely detailed than a story written for the printed page, whose reader can linger over it. Still, such tales can be complicated. It is not merely greater length that makes a short story different from a tale or a fable: one mark of a short story is a fully delineated character.

...