I wanted to dislike the writings of Christian Bobin, really I did. He's a poet, it's claimed, and if there is one thing I am extremely sceptical about it is poets who don't write poems but prose. All great poetry is driven by form and when form is absent, despite modernist and zeitgeist claims to the contrary, what we have is prose. As I say, I wanted to dislike Bobin's writings, but I found I couldn't: he is a true poet, although he writes in prose, and his work is massively interesting from both literary and theological points of view. And, as a sidebar, from a specifically Quaker perspective too, for Bobin has much to say about many Quaker central concerns, and especially silence and plumbing its depths. Contra GK Chesterton, a Catholic, for example, who claimed that "gratitude is the highest form of thought", for Bobin "Silence is the highest form of thought" and he explores it in an original and unique way, although apparently without trying to. Indeed, otiose seems a word made for him. Here is one of his comments on silence, which gives a flavour of his style: "Yesterday, thanks to a quick movement, I caught a bit of Christ's tunic. It was a patch of silence".
mangabudy there I go: doing a very un-Bobin like thing - contrasting and comparing. One joy of Bobin's work is that he doesn't seem to be arguing with anyone; instead he is moving through life and picking up one stone after another, examining each in turn, giving it its due consideration and attention, and then moving on. These stones can be objects, they can be flowers or nature or living things (trees are models of acceptance for Bobin), or they can be his father's Alzheimer's or the death of the love of his life. There is a sense of rumination and getting to the heart of things; and alongside this, there goes a dismissal of contemporary illusions and delusions. Bobin is someone not taken in by the modern world: "It is because each of us strives at any cost to suffer as little as possible that life is hellish." Whoa! - surely, anyone with a spiritual notion in their smallest finger would see how that more or less defines and condemns Western spirituality: people want a religion that fits their preferences rather than a religion that is true, or more exactly that accords with the Tao, or the nature of reality. We in the modern world find that we are not comfortable with Christ or with death and so we relegate both to a backroom of the mind and lock its door; and yes, we find we rarely get there to examine its contents. The joy of Bobin's work is that he does this for us: death, especially, haunts his pages: "I was born into a world starting to close its ears to any talk of death: it has had its way, not realising that it had thus barred itself from hearing any talk of grace".