Speak What We Feel (2004)
(Not What We Ought To Say)
Reflections on Literature and Life
Book Description
In Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say), Frederick Buechner considers the lives of four writers whose works have profoundly influenced his own.
Insightful and penetrating, the author’s eye roves over the biographies of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton, and William Shakespeare. Offering profound reflections on their writings, Buechner mines prose, poetry, and script for fundamental truths about failure, faith, passion, pain, and the enduring and transforming power of the imagination.
Woven throughout these close readings, Buechner quietly considers his own life alongside the lives, personal revelations, and hidden confessions that he uncovers in works such as Hopkins’s sonnets, Huckleberry Finn, The Man Who Was Thursday, and King Lear. In these meditations, Buechner reveals much about how each text has shaped and inspired his own story, the stories he has told, and the manner in which he has chosen to tell them:
There is sadness too in thinking how much more I might have done with my life than just writing, especially considering that I was ordained not only to preach good news to the poor, but to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the imprisoned, and raise the dead. If I make it as far as St. Peter's gate, the most I will be able to plead is my thirty-two books, and if that is not enough, I am lost. My faith has never been threatened as agonizingly as Chesterton's or Hopkins', or simply abandoned like Mark Twain's, or held in such perilous tension with unfaith as Shakespeare's. I have never looked into the abyss, for which I am thankful. But I wish such faith as I have had been brighter and gladder. I wish I had done more with it. I wish I had been braver and bolder. I wish I had been a saint. This, in short, is the weight of my own sad times, and listening to these four voices speaking out from under the burden of theirs has been to find not just a kind of temporary release, but a kind of unexpected encouragement. Take heart, I heard them say, even at the unlikeliest moments. Fear not. Be alive. Be merciful. Be human. And most unlikely of all: Even when you can't believe, even if you don't believe at all, even if you shy away at the sound of his name, be Christ.
Reviews
"Hopkins and Twain? Chesterton and Shakespeare? Buechner takes these four writers, never mentioned in the same breath, and shows us a hidden affinity among them, in the process allowing us to see them as we never have before. Speak What We Feel is a book of uncanny insight."
— John Wilson, author
"I look to Frederick Buechner as a mentor in literature and faith, and this book marvelously combines both."
— Philip Yancey, author
"A hauntingly terrifying and beautiful book about the depths of human existence."
— Dallas Willard, philosopher
"Serves to illuminate a path through the ambiguities and complexities of human life."
— Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
"[Reverberates] with particular poignancy...speak[s] honestly and eloquently."
— Presbyterian Outlook
