Really, what I should have done is log every book I read on the jail tablet during my 10 1/2 months at the Backwards Correctional Center. But fate being what it is, my court date was moved up six weeks and I was transferred to the rehab house on short notice. Fortunately, as mentioned, I did bring my journals with me to court and they have subsequently served to seed this blog. Other property I had hoped to retrieve — more notes on scripture and literature, the few cards I received in the mail plus some stockpiled toiletries — were sacrificed to the vultures of incarceration.

Had I kept a record of the 50+ books I read in my bunk, I’d have a better bibliography to draw on and share with you; that said, I do think I’ve done a pretty good job of transcribing some of the better chapters and verses into these posts so far, especially in entries categorized under “Sage Pages” and “Words to Go.”

I’ve already reported that the lion’s share of my literary adventures were from the so-called ‘Gilded Age’ — covering the late 1800s to early 1900s and saddling the Victorian and Edwardian eras. An ample portion of these tomes were by British authors and many plots centered around WWI themes of battle-worn strife, espionage stealth and post-war acclimations. In “Worrisome Hats” we talked about author Coningsby Dawson, his military service and subsequent memoir The Glory of the Trenches (which I just discovered on The Gutenberg Project website, click here to read).

Thankfully I did journal an exquisite passage from another novel of that era, All Roads Lead to Calvary (1919) by Jerome K. Jerome, best known for his 1889 comedic tale Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of The Dog). The title of Calvary alludes to Christ’s final journey through Jerusalem to the hill of his crucifixion (also known as Via Dolorosa.) The novel’s plot tells of a scholarly English woman who gives up a career in journalism to drive an ambulance near the war’s front lines.

(Ironic personal side note: My grandfather was also a WW1 ambulance driver in France, having just graduated from Princeton University, where one of his classmates was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Concurrently, Ernest Hemingway served as a Red Cross driver in Italy, where he was wounded by an enemy mortar shell yet still carried to safety an Italian officer and was later awarded the Croce de Guerra medal of valor. Hemingway drew on this experience for facets of his novel A Farewell to Arms. Fitzgerald — whose brief stateside service ended with 1918’s armistice — later poached our last name for characters in one of his most forgettable short stories.)

But all roads (in this post anyway) do lead back to Calvary, so today we’ll close with this aforementioned quote from the book’s protagonist, Ms. Joan Allway, in which she waxes existentially:

“She thought his mistake lay in regarding man’s happiness as more important to him that his self-development. It was not what we got out of civilization but what we put into that was our gain. Its luxuries and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us. But the pursuit of them was good. It called forth thought and effort, sharpened our wits, strengthened our brains. Primitive man, content with his necessities, would never have produced genius. Art, literature, science would have been stillborn.”

I’ll leave you, dear reader, to muse on where God and man meet in those words. All replies welcome in the box below.