The Financial Beanpole

ALTOONA, WI -- Ya know, if the banks won't start lending to the businesses who are pleading for capital, and even though we've given those banks an obscene amount of money to do just that, maybe the Federal Government should start doing the lending that the banks should be doing. They're going to buy toxic assets, bad loans, and security instruments no one understands. Why not just start making some good loans, the kind that American businesses need right now.

With a basic understanding of human nature and a guess at the psychology of the business person, I bet that the banks will develop Lender's Envy, seeing the U.S. start making profitable lending transactions, and start doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Sure, all that high finance is far more complex than a schmo like me could fathom. But is human nature any different on Wall Street? Actually, It's probably even more so.

All In all, I think we could recoup our $787 Billion, and then some. Who's in favor of some health care and elementary school funding?!!!

Speaking of John Updike...

From the Editor's Desk

***EDITOR'S NOTE: This post was published just moments before the Editorial Board heard of the passing of John Updike, 76, whose work is discussed herein. This post is therefore dedicated to the memory of John Updike. See "John Updike, Lyrical Writer of the Ordinary," NYTimes.com 1/27/09.

The Editorial Staff is quite enamored with the 2006 collection of essays written by Cynthia Ozick, author of Quarrel & Quandary, Fame & Folly, Metaphor & Memory, and Art & Ardor. The collection at hand, published by Houghton Mifflin Co., is pertinently titled The Din in the Head.

One essay in particular caught our attention, "John Updike: Eros and God." Here are a few excerpts:

The everyday seizes [John] Updike's tireless gaze--babies, adolescents, couples, sometimes in stasis, as in genre painting, sometimes kinetic, like the swoop of a thought. ...

What is notable, and curious, in Updike is that his sexual scenes seem as distanced and skeptical as a lapsed seminarian's meticulously recited breviary, while his God-seeking passages send out orgasmic shudders, whether of exaltation or distress. In "The Deacon," a decaying old wooden church--rotted wiring, warped boards, leaky ceiling, worn hymnals, superannuated remnants of congregants--is nevertheless instinct with holy ardor, and with a kind of intergalactic holiness. ...

His is not a social faith. Though [the short story] "Lifeguard" closes with an exhortation to "be joyful," the Kierkegaardian singleness of the God-possessed, quivering among the darker stars, predominates. This singleness, this historyless aloneness, turns up in the essayist apercus and musings and final exhalations that thread through both plot and plotlessness, alongside the vernacular, between, so to speak, the acts. The acts are tremendously variegated; in the spacious precincts of eight hundred and more pages, human faces teem, landscapes and interiors are elegiacally documented, a thousand three-dimensional objects cast realistic shadows, time is phosphorescent, moods coagulate and dissolve. Updike owns the omnivorous faculty of seeing the telltale flame in every mundane gesture.

For us here at the Journal, such a description of talented writing, itself talented writing, makes us wish to be talented writers.

(For more on the book, see The Din in the Head at Amazon.com)

The Wealth of the Stone

Here is a story handed down through the years by wise folks...

It is said that one day a monk came in from the desert and reached the outskirts of a village at dusk. He had just settled down under a tree for the night, when a young man of the village came running up to him. The villager cried out to the monk, "The stone! The stone! Give me the precious stone!"

"What stone?" asked the monk.

"Last night, the angel of the Lord appeared to me in a dream," said the villager, "and he told me that if I went to the outskirts of the village at dusk, I would find a monk sleeping under a tree, a monk who would give me a precious stone that would make me rich forever!"

The monk rummaged through his satchel and pulled out a stone. "Perhaps he meant this one," said the monk, as he handed the stone to the villager. "I found it along a mountain path some days ago. You may certainly have it."

The young man gazed at the stone in wonder. It was a diamond, perhaps the largest diamond in the whole world, the size of a large rutabaga. He took the diamond and walked slowly back to his village.

All night he tossed about in bed, unable to sleep. The next day, as the sun began to rise in the eastern sky, he returned to the tree at the outskirts of the village and woke the sleeping monk.

And he begged him, "Please, give me the wealth you have that makes you able to give this diamond away so easily."

adapted from Anthony de Mello, Selected Writings, ed. William Dych, S.J. (Orbis Books 1999) 55-56. For more information about Anthony de Mello, go to http://www.demello.org/.