1. Still in Maine, but about to head home. The next three days will be travel, one way or another.

2. Spending a week by the sea was a fascinating experience; to look out to the very edge of the world, to watch the tides rise and fall, to hear the waves crashing against the rocks. One cannot say that one has actually seen the ocean by just visiting for a few hours; one must watch as the sea rises and falls and rises again over the course of the day, one must step into the surf and feel the power of the waves before one begins to have an idea of what the name ‘Ocean’ means.

3. We today have a very poor idea of the gods. Not God – though Him as well – but the gods. We tend to think of them as being more or less just superheroes: people who arbitrarily live forever and have certain other powers beyond normal man. “Just really powerful wizards who outsource their magic,” as The Order of the Stick put it.

No, a god is a creature of age, power, majesty, and beauty on a grander scale from man. The gods are not just bigger and better people, they fundamentally higher and mightier beings than man.

If you want to know what a god is like, don’t think of Superman; think of the Ocean.

4. Dealing with the gods is not like dealing with extremely powerful people (despite what the myths might lead us to think); it is more like dealing with elemental forces of nature.

Dealing with God, however, is like dealing with a Man, because that is what it in fact is. That is the miracle of Bethlehem.

5. Summer vacation is almost over. Two weeks or so and classes begin again, with me tackling high schoolers. All my summer reading is done, though I’ll need to go back over it and work out some discussion questions.

6. Life in a Jar, about Irena Sendler, a Varsovian (Warsaw) woman who saved children during the holocaust, was probably the worst book of the summer, topping even A Separate Peace. The true story is impressive enough, and the look at the Warsaw ghetto was fascinatingly horrific, but it was very poorly written, with clunky sentences, poor scene flow, and awful pacing. The first third focuses on three teenagers in Kansas who discover Sendler’s story as part of a history project, then the second third shows Sendler in Warsaw during the war, and the last third has them meeting her. The idea of alternating between the two isn’t awful, but neither time period is very well done, and there isn’t enough of a dramatic through line to the Kansas stories.

That and both are incredibly repetitive, with the three girls being told over and over how very, very important their work is, and how the play they wrote is so moving and important to see, and there is similar repetition in Warsaw scenes. Not that Sendler’s actions weren’t heroic, but let the heroics speak for themselves; stop shoving the audience’s face in it. It is a mark of bad writing to try to force an audience’s feelings in this way: to say “it was so tragic!” or “it was so heroic!” or “it was so horrifying!” over and over, as if you don’t trust the audience to understand it.

If you want a really good true story about a heroic woman during the Holocaust that avoids all these issues, check out The Hiding Place instead.

7. To be frank, I didn’t find Irena Sendler to be a very likable character outside of her heroics. Maybe it was just the bad writing, but she came across as self-righteous, arrogant, and unpleasantly feminist. That, and her message of “there are only good people and bad people; no other distinctions matter” was, to say the least, not nearly as uplifting as the author seems to have thought it was.

That would be fine if, a la Schindler, the idea was that a deeply flawed human being might prove herself in a crisis when seemingly better people failed. But, no, the author doesn’t seem to have perceived of this as a character flaw, but quite the reverse.

By contrast, Corrie Ten Boom of The Hiding Place made for a much more palatable heroine; resolutely moral, but flawed even to the point of humour and recognizably a very ordinary woman in an extraordinary time. The fact that her interactions with her fellow countrymen trying to survive the occupation, or her fellow prisoners are mostly positive, where Irena’s are presented as mostly critical or else too lacking in detail to make an impression.

You could say that it’s unfair to make these judgments about real people who did real, undeniably heroic work. Except that these are books we’re talking about;. I’m not passing judgment on the women themselves, but on how they come across as literary characters.