25 Years Ago Today

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

This is the summer to be asking yourself the question about where you were forty years ago today when Sgt. Pepper cued up his guitar and taught his band to play. Rolling Stone has published at least two commemorative issues about the Summer of Love in 2007, and more is surely yet to come in other places.

For me, the answer to that question is easy: I was making love and music, not war. I was protesting in the streets and arguing with my Southern-reared and military-bred father about civil rights and Vietnam. My hair was as long as I thought the future was in those days. Peace, love, and rock and roll really did seem to be the foundations of the cosmos, and I couldn’t imagine a world not ruled by them.

Fifteen years later, the world had indeed changed. I still held some high ideals—now I was writing letters for students requesting the status of conscientious objector rather than being a CO myself—but life had begun to intrude in rude ways. All this came back to me as I was packing my house in Pennsylvania in order to move out to Chicago. I’ve already packed and moved all my books, but I still had a desk full of old letters, journals, and essays waiting to be perused and thrown out or treasured and moved to a new place. Reading through these letters and journals took me on a journey back to those days, of course, and I wondered what I was doing in 1982. I had just begun a Ph.D. program and was working part-time, living with my future wife, and wondering about my future.

In one of my drawers, I found three little notebooks in which I had recorded journal entries and reading lists. The journals contain sporadic entries from 1979 to 1985. I had to laugh a bit at some of my writing; it is self-conscious and sometimes shallow. Of course, what I took for deep at the time now rings as pretty shallow. I seemed to write about freedom a good deal, and I struggled with moral and theological questions. There are entries about mundane affairs—my happiness at being asked to be a professor’s grader my final year of seminary and my thoughts about my upcoming independent studies. There are entries about my latest love and my reflections on the nature of love and loss. I even found a few songs I had forgotten I had written.

What struck me the most, though, were the summer reading lists I found. In 1982, I had Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth at the top of my list, followed by 24 titles that ranged from theology, science, and literary criticism to classic fiction. At the start of the summer, I wanted to read (re-read since I read them in college) Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov, and Pride and Prejudice. I had also set myself to read Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? See, I still had some high ideals! What really happened that summer? I read through Herman Hesse's ouevre and desultorily moved through Sylvia Plath’s Journals. I read Nathaniel West’s other novels—I had already devoured Miss Lonelyhearts—and Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction. I didn't get any theology read, but I did marvel at Lewis Thomas’ wonderful little book, The Lives of a Cell, which set me off on a lifetime of reading natural history.

In the summer of 1983, I tried to divide my list into topics: theology, literature, literary criticism, and general. I got through Gissing's Odd Women and Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and got Lost in the Cosmos with Walker Percy.

I’ve tried over the years to make a reading list to guide my reading over the summer months or over the course of a year, but as much fun as I have making the lists, I never be able to stick  much to them. This summer, I’ve written here about much of what I have read. I just finished Gunter Grass’ memoir, Peeling the Onion, and will write on it here soon. I’m grazing my way through that wonderful little memoir by Ruth Reichel, Tender at the Bone, and will move soon to its “sequel,” Comfort Me With Apples.

Discovering those old journals and reading lists reminds me just how much reading guides my life and how deeply that books mark the paths I trod. Whether I actually read all the books that I have set out to read on my summer lists, I know that eventually I’ll pick them up to explore their treasures.

By the way, in my cleaning, I did find a twentieth anniversary issue of Rolling Stone magazine; one more piece to read now this summer.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it