Shadow of God A Journey Through Memory, Art, And Faith

Sunday, January 6, 2002 --Feast of the Epiphany Today the three Magi, Wise Men, Kings--thank God no longer the "astrologers" of the first New American Bible translation--presented their legendary gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child in Bethlehem two millennia ago, and here I sit to begin writing a book I meant to begin months ago. I care nothing for birthdays or for the symbolism associated with those mounting numbers. Yet recently, on turning fifty, I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction with the prospect of another half century ahead of me. My father, at this milestone, while I was a junior at Princeton, confided to me, "I feel as though my life is almost half over." He added that Jack Hemingway, the eldest son of his most famous author, had remarked, "I've spent the first fifty years of my life being my father's son, and will spend the next fifty being my daughters' father." That story came back to me last year while I was having breakfast at the Ivy Club in Princeton during a visit to my freshman son. Hearing my name mentioned, a girl looked up from her reading and asked with all the eagerness of youth, "Oh, are you Charlie Scribner's father?" I burst into laughter, explaining that for four years at that very table I had been "Charlie Scribner's son" (my father was the real one, a university trustee); and now I come back to be "Charlie's father." Independent identity remains elusive. I told that story at Jack Hemingway's memorial service at the Explorers Club a few weeks later. I felt a kinship with Jack--well beyond the fact that my grandfather and Ernest Hemingway had been best friends, or that my father had been his final publisher. No, it was that I had always felt that Jack's amusing comment was leavened with love for both his father and his children. It was a love I shared with him and with most of fortunate humanity, the love for one's parents and for one's children, and the pride--the good pride, not the deadly sin--that goes with it. But if truth be told, of the two roles I have always felt far more qualified for the first, that of a professional son. It is one I have played for most of my life, and one develops comfort, not to say confidence, with decades of practice. Up until that breakfast, I had been able to prolong that role for more than five years beyond my father's death, in 1995. I am still not ready to retire from it: I like being his son, first and foremost. But in doing so, especially during his final years of illness and then in the flurry of activity that followed--estate, memorials, and the excavation of memories--I had slipped into neglecting two key activities in my life, two keyboards in fact: the piano's and this laptop's. Music has always been my first love. Writing came later, although inescapable through birth, profession, and even surname (originally Scrivener, until the late-eighteenth-century change to Scribner), which means "scribe." Within the past year, I bought three pianos for our new apartment: a baby grand for the living room, an electric one for late-night practice, and finally a new Steinway grand for what I have since dubbed the Music Room. Here I finally face this silent keyboard and the book I now know I must write. Its outlines are dim; the mists have not yet risen as it is late at night, with only twenty-some minutes left in this Feast of the Three Gift Givers. My books on Rubens and Bernini were easy to tackle: I had both their lives and their (illustrated) works as instant structures. But now I have only a theme--if not a title--"The Shadow of God," taken from an inscription my father gave me to post on my study carrel in Princeton's Marquand Library, my senior year, as I faced writing my thesis. Lux Umbra Dei--light is the shadow of God. It seems to fit Epiphany, the feast illumined by the light of that wondrous star and foScribner, Charles, III is the author of 'Shadow of God A Journey Through Memory, Art, And Faith', published 2006 under ISBN 9780385516587 and ISBN 0385516584.