By Scott Graber
It is early, crisp and cool, and I have just finished “Winter Solstice” by Elin Hilderbrand (Little Brown, 2017, 297 pages).
Hilderbrand is prolific and popular and like John Grissom, or our own departed Pat Conroy — whatever she writes is widely anticipated and usually consumed in one, well-into-the-night binge read.
Hilderbrand writes fiction that is usually set on Nantucket Island, which is 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. This 14-mile-long by 3.5-mile-wide island is the creation of the rich and famous.
Nantucket is multi-million dollar homes nestled into 20-foot-high dunes. It has a quaint, cobblestoned downtown where one can find Hermes, Dior, Swatch, and Vuitton. It is fantastically expensive bistros that offer bits of artistically arranged tuna; and it is open air, sandy-floored beach bars that provide small bowls of clam chowder at $16 a pop.
And there is no writer who can describe these Rolex-chronometered, Oakley-sunglassed, Italian-loafered mandarins — or what these pork-belly-trading residents are thinking at any given moment — better than Elin Hilderbrand.
And what these folks are thinking — or what they are saying after a very few moments of thought — is even more interesting than what they wear and what they consume. They are monied — caught up in their greed and astounding self-centeredness — but also caught up in a desperate desire for a meaningful life.
All of which brings me to Paul Tillich and his book, “The Courage To Be,” published in 1952 and largely forgotten.
Tillich, a philosopher/theologian who taught at Yale, gave a series of lectures when America and its post-war prosperity were a rising tide — Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen giving voice to this ascendant culture.
This was also a time of “a marked increase in church attendance and an epidemic of church building programs across the county, which Time magazine called America’s religious ‘edifice complex.’” (Peter Gomes’ Introduction to “CourageTo Be.”)
In his lectures Tillich said that in spite of the apparent religiosity, and prosperity, and the notion that God had designated the people in this country “Masters of the Universe,” there were still lingering anxieties making our otherwise happy, hustling lives miserable.
The first of these anxieties was the belief we were going to die and, notwithstanding the desperate church building then underway, that there was nothing on the other side of that curtain.
And if this was the case, what was the point of doing something meaningful with one’s life? Tillich then, in his Terry Foundation Lectures, moved past “fear of death,” describing “guilt” and “fate” as rounding out the three “anxieties” that bedeviled our society in the 50s.
Finally Tillich described a self-affirmation process wherein a person could develop the “courage” to look at these confounding complexities and, perhaps, embrace the notion that there is a “God above God.”
“Tillich argued that he was not doing away with God and yielding to modernities of secular atheism … but only with a particular perception of God that could no longer be supported by honest intellectual inquiry of the modern world.” (Introduction to “Courage”)
Hilderbrand’s “Winter Solstice” centers on the slow death of Kelley Quinn — former trader in commodities — who is passing his last days in bed all the while listening to “The Mistress” by Danielle Steel. There is also a “going away party” planned for him that will be attended by his current and former wives and all of his children.
The children are adults — having grown-up on Nantucket — nurtured on smoked oysters, mussels in coconut curry broth and “scallops topped with black, glistening clumps of caviar.”
The daughters arrive in their Jimmy Choo stilettos; the male issue in their hand-tooled leather loafers; and everyone has some kind of tasteful bangle on their wrist — perhaps its a Patek Philipp 18-carat-gold watch. Notwithstanding the jewelry, these children have had a tough go of it — divorces and even jail time.
One would normally think that their father, Kelley, would have some passing thoughts on where he is bound — heaven, hell, oblivion. One would think that the dying patriarch might have read Paul Tillich back in his college days and now wonders if the old theologian was onto something with his “God above God” lectures in 1952.
But Kelley Quinn is not interested in whether there is a God; or where he’s bound; he is heavily invested in Danielle Steel having moved on to “Dangerous Games.”
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
