Greene in Missouri

Remembering how beauty feeds our souls

by Mark Forrester

Mark Forrester is the author of Above, Not Up, a mathematical fantasy novel for teens that released with Bandersnatch Books in November 2024. He teaches at a classical high school in Spokane, Washington. While he has taught literature, history, theology, and science, he particularly enjoys teaching mathematics in the classical mode, and one of his favorite tutorials is exploring the possibilities of a fourth spatial dimension. He currently lives near Spokane with his wife and children. Mark serves as an officer in the Army National Guard and a volunteer firefighter. We’re pleased to welcome him to the Bandersnatch Newsletter today:

We had a few minutes before we left for the range, so I asked my bunkmate to watch my weapon, slipped a small pale envelope under my shirt and into my waistband, and casually walked to the bathroom–the one place off limits to drill sergeants. Once the stall lock was fastened, I could breathe easy and unfold the handwritten letter from Julia, a dear friend back home. This had become a daily ritual for me since I received the letter, so I knew the contents well. What my eyes quickly searched for were not the life updates or the reports on our coworkers’ new quirks, but three block quotations embedded into the text, passages from Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair.

Before leaving for Army Basic Combat Training, Julia and I had swapped book recommendations for the summer; I was to read Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy*, and she The End of the Affair. From her letter, it was clear that she was as taken with Greene’s prose as I was. There’s no way she could have known that the inclusion of those quotations would help sustain me in a manner that the high-calorie mass-produced meals couldn’t. If someone would have asked me how many excerpts Julia had sent me, I would have guessed at least a dozen, but, after digging up the letter buried deep in an unmarked box, I was surprised to find that she only included three. I suppose to a starving man, a few scraps can feel like a feast. One of the texts she included was lifted from Book II, Chapter 1 of the novel:

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Rereading and rereading this passage until I could mentally recite it on a long ruck march or uncomfortable transport in a cattle trailer gave me fodder for meditation, something to think about beyond my pain, my fatigue, my aches; in short it gave me something to focus on that is outside of myself, which is in essence a small act of love. My daily retreats to the bathroom stall to read a few quotations gave me more than a break from the physical demands of training; these small brushes with beauty reminded me briefly of what it means to be human, that there are higher things that we hunger and thirst for, that man does not live on MREs* alone.

These experiences of stealing glimpses into something beautiful intimates a perennial truth, that, beyond our biological needs, we cannot help but desire something immaterial to elevate and transfigure our existence. As a deer pines for running streams, so do we strive to transcend a purely physical existence.

I am grateful for the time I spent in Basic Training for highlighting how much I need beauty in my life, even if it came at the price of being radically cut off from any kind of art for ten weeks, except those snatches of beauty from Greene’s work. What irks me now, however, is that, in the years since I sweated off my sedentary flab in that humid state, I have not felt that hunger with the same level of acuity. I wish I could say that I’ve maintained a healthy diet of art, poetry, music, and literature, but I know that, succumbing to my workaholic demons, I have gone weeks without a minute of rich prose or an iambic line. I have swapped marching in formation for grading tests and papers, marksmanship drills for changing diapers, and the never ending task of cleaning the barracks with the never ending task of sweeping the crumbs from the kitchen floor, and yet I don’t feel like I’m starving.

I suspect that, in an environment not punctuated by obstacle courses and midnight fire guard duty, I am able to numb my hunger with scrolling or mindless streaming. Without a personal drill sergeant to keep me fit, something worse, though still personalized, fills the void to distract me, which brings to mind one of the other quotations from Greene:

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination… I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions. (Book II, Chapter 2)

My natural desire for transcendent beauty can be unwittingly masked, neglected, or forgotten if I’m not careful. If only I could now have a drill sergeant hounding me at all hours, not ordering me to the position of attention or the front-leaning-rest, but to a posture of contemplation. I need something to shake off my personal devil and incline my ear to my better angel who will remind me that I am made to love and be loved, that I am made for beauty, to avoid complacency, to shun screens, and to find meaning in the monotonous and mundane. For now I hope that I’ll be able to maintain the discipline of carving out time for beautiful things even when the tyranny of the urgent demands I be productive, to feast whenever I can on what my soul needs even if it’s only a few excellently written lines, and to make a place to sit down and be quiet* even if it is at times a bathroom stall in Missouri.

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* I would have taken this book with me to Basic Training, but instead took a treatise on mathematics which was promptly confiscated by the cadre as soon as I arrived in Fort Leonard Wood. I imagine the fate would have been the same for A Severe Mercy.

* MRE stands for Meal-Ready-to-Eat. They can be found in military surplus stores if you really want to punish your digestive system.

* Wendell Berry’s poem How To Be A Poet: To Remind Myself opens with the striking words that one should “Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet.” There is a another allusion to this great poem earlier in the text.

Did you know Bandersnatch Books is about to celebrate its 5-year Anniversary? We can’t believe it either! To honor 25 books in 5 years, we’ve got 5 days of special things planned for our #bander5natch celebration. Follow us on Instagram or Facebook and make sure to check back daily next week for ways to enter giveaways, flash sales, and more!

September 15–19, 2025 - The Bandersnatch Books 5-Year Anniversary Celebration!
September 24, 2025 - Release of The Song of the Stone Tiger, a middle grade fantasy novel by Glenn McCarty
October 17–18, 2025 - Bandersnatch at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee
November 2025 - Release of Joe the Fourth and the King’s Crown, a lower middle-grade novel by Mary Barrows
December 2025 - Release of I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry, our illustrated children’s poetry anthology edited by Rachel S. Donahue - Preorder on the Kickstarter Platform

When we heard about what Kirsten Turner was doing with the @21stcenturypackhorselibrarians, we wanted to be a part of it. Through your generosity, we’ve been able to donate books to families who lost home libraries in Helene last fall.

We’re so excited to share @glennmccarty’s THE SONG OF THE STONE TIGER with the Western Carolina community now—a love song to their land, and, as Kirsten says, “A fairy tale for America.”

Also please follow Bandersnatch Books on Instagram or Facebook!

Let me side with the earth
in all her sighing, the stars
in all their singing, with
stray dogs and street artists,
with orphans and widows.
Like Berry,
let me say everything was for
love of the forest I will never
see, the harvest I will never
reap. I pledge my allegiance
to the world to come.
Jen Rose Yokel, Beneath the Flood, “Choosing Sides”