Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

If you are going through a midlife change, or reflect on life at all, you have to read this book. Book reviews are supposed to be brief, but exercising restraint in reviewing David Beck’s “Fragments: Reflections on Life and Faith through the Years” ($15 softcover, $9.99 Kindle US, on Amazon.com), would be inauthentic. Moreover, it would do a disservice to both the excellent form and the spiritual depth of this collection of writings and the treasure it stores for the reader. Fragments, importantly, expresses both significant life elements and events of a man who embodies the existential concern with his own life, but which also mines the Eternal through this individual life to share everlasting treasures we can all store. There is an understated, yet rich and robust, aesthetic sensibility that cannot be overstated.

Mr. Beck habitually weaves a spiritual curiosity together with a particular biographical story in his life, allowing the reader to both identify universal themes while having a personalized “take-away”. As you read the spiritual exploration, which often faces an eternal mystery head-on, he interjects pieces of a historical story that renders the spiritual exploration with a tangible quality that could leave the reader running the gambit of human emotions, including fear, loneliness, helplessness, but also to elation, unrestrained laughter, and anticipation. Although, one is left to question whether the author doesn’t in fact care more for the particular as he does for the universal. Its tone is a delicate combination that oscillates between spiritual longing and a “letting go” that inhabits those few people who really know how to value the present moment. He frequently employs a metaphorical connection between a literal exploration and the stories he tells that inattentive readers will often miss. At the same time, Mr. Beck leaves a kind of fragmented personal legacy that is encapsulated by the opening T.S. Eliot quote: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

Beyond the artistry of his individual pieces, the overall themes of Fragments are a mystical blend of the timely and the timeless. Mr. Beck covers themes of looking backward and forward in his two-part Windshield Reflections (an early version of part 2 appears on this blog), of homecoming, of retiring from academia, teenage angst, and the death of his father, of time (such as in Seasons and Time After Time). If there is one overriding theme that Fragments returns to again and again it is the varied experiences of living in time. When Mr. Beck, as an early twenty-something, agonizes, “Please, God, don’t let this be another phase… There are no more phases. I’ve run out,” he expresses on behalf of THE frustration of every prairie- or mid-west young man who lived in the 1960s and 1970s and confronted the limits of small town life.

The Midwest, boxing, and music: Fragments is embodied literature. The body of it is composed of three primary elements that work together to manifest the deepest spiritual lessons. Personally relevant to me is the extremely realistic backdrop of Midwestern life that gives the writing a life that is tangible and gritty. The wild, chemically affected and lovable characters that are resurrected in Fragments remind one of the cast of characters we late middle-agers all remember, and they grace the pages with a sensible, loving, and mature psychological blend of emotional distance and genuine care. Further, Mr. Beck’s lifelong passion for boxing carries the author’s illustrated value for courage and determination in the face of tragedy. He calls it “a beautiful but brutal sport… that can remind us of our everyday battles.” The way Mr. Beck writes about boxing has even evoked an appreciation of its tragic beauty out of my pacifist bones. Of course, lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer speckle the pages of Mr. Beck’s writing about boxing, and music carries the spiritual messages of the book like our bodies carry our minds – they are inseparable yet complementary – two sides of the same coin. Bob Dylan is closest to his childhood heart – which still beats strongly in his chest. As Mr. Beck writes, “Dylan sung about, well, everything.”

If the reader lets these embodiments grow and mature, the reader will find themselves starting to let go of the timely for a grasp of the timeless. David Beck’s “Fragments: Reflections on Life and Faith throughout the Years,” reminds us that the power of writing is its ability to uncover the working of the Spirit through fragments – so life doesn’t feel so… fragmentary.