Nun’s Story
Speedy recovery to the President, First Lady and Hope Hicks. I stopped believing in prayer, God influencing human affairs, decades ago, but boy was I tempted when I heard the news this morning.
Speaking of deity, I just finished a faith-based novella, The Song of the Scaffold by Gertrud von Le Fort, a German baroness who died at 95 in 1971. I learned that French revolutionaries killed not only aristocrats during the Reign of Terror, 1793-’94, but priests and nuns as well. 16,594 executions were carried out throughout France, 10,000 died in prison. Le Fort focuses on a group of Carmelite nuns who went to the guillotine singing a hymn. 32 were killed, including three lay sisters and two servants. All were canonized. The tale is told from the perspective of an aristocrat writing a letter to a friend. One of the main female characters is rejected by the order before the execution, a timid soul who suffers irrational fears. A great deal of the narrative is devoted to her life. I believe she is fictional. The other names don’t match up with those on the Wiki page of the event, either. Obviously, poetic license was taken. I occasionally had trouble discerning who the author was speaking about, which might be attributed to an overuse of pronouns or my own haste or inattentiveness. Outside of the learning of something new, the book is not particularly compelling or convincing in the matter of faith, but that may simply reflect my skepticism of traditional religion. As someone who loves life despite its travails, I don’t consider docile martyrdom a good thing. I would rather the victims had ridiculed the bloodthirsty mob before they were killed. As happens whenever I watch WWII films that focus on Nazis, I ask what I would have done at the time. It’s so easy to condemn from the outside. The novella’s theme can be summed up in a line from the penultimate paragraph: “No, the purely human is not enough.” Earlier, there is this bit of wisdom: “… atheism is cruder stuff in the coarse hands of the mob than on the subtle lips of aristocrats!” Published in 1932, the title actually translates to “Last to the Scaffold,” in reference to the leader of the nuns — at least according to the narrative. The name is different at Wiki. 121 pages, it reads like a lot less. 32 users at Amazon have rated The Song of the Scaffold, forging to a consensus of 4.4 on a scale of five. I’ll go with three. Le Fort had 18 books published.
Here are economic numbers from an article at foxbusiness.com: The September non-farm payroll report showed the addition of 661,000 jobs, falling short of the 800,000 estimate, down from the 1.37 million jobs that were added in August. The unemployment rate ticked down to 7.9% from 8.4%. Private payrolls added 877,000 jobs, while the government shed 216,000 jobs (the latter is too good to be true). August’s jobs report was revised higher, as the economy added 1.489 million jobs, up from a prior reading of 1.371 million. May the trend continue.
My thanks to the two women who bought five books in Russian between them, and to the one who purchased Gunmetal Gray by Mark Greaney; and to Herbie, who had nice things to say about Class of ’67. He is honored to have a small part in it. I asked how he would rate the intensity of the violence on a scale of ten. He said four. The Lady Eve had said nine.
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