Rampant depravity and violence

Fern Ridge Wildlife Area, looking north from near Tern Island (shot with new TG-7 camera)

I finished Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur a couple days ago. Appended to the end is a poem called "Sea"—which I also read and liked—that he composed sitting on the beach over the course of his time at Big Sur. It feels rather Joycean in its wordplay—using French, Spanish and made up words in addition to English. It's pretty cool. Here’s a review of the book, with photos of Mansanto’s (Ferlinghetti’s) cabin and the scary bridge, both of which feature large in the novel.

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Inspired by my journey through The Silmarillion (at 15% now), with its creation story and lists of begats, I have started reading the Old Testament. Even though I was raised in a heavily Bible’d religion, I only ever memorized isolated verses and read key doctrinal chapters and summaries of various Bible stories. I never read the complete Bible. Now, many decades after leaving the church and embracing a much more agnostic (but still admittedly “spiritual”) view of life and the cosmos, I’m curious about what is actually in that ancient patchwork collection of texts.

I’m culturally Christian if not personally a believer, which I suppose makes me even curiouser. And man oh man, just in the book of Genesis, I’ve found some real humdingers! Rampant depravity and violence, much of it committed by supposedly godly people! For example, I didn’t know that Lot’s daughters got him drunk and raped him! And more than one man was killed for basically looking at someone wrong, or saying the wrong thing. I could go on, but I won’t. Basically there’s a lot of crazy shit in just the first book of the OT. I’m well into the book of Exodus now, still tallying murders and deviant behavior.

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One last thought, random and unrelated to literature: when I was growing up in the '60s, we didn’t have supermoons or atmospheric rivers or bomb cyclones. I don’t think we even had El Niño or La Niña yet—not that I recall, anyway. The moon and the weather seem to have acquired marketing departments sometime in the last decade!