#277 / The Parable At The End Of The Book

 

Click Here For The Blog In The Original

 

I have written at least two blog postings focusing on Octavia Butler. She is pictured above. 

On September 17, 2023, I wrote a blog posting about Butler's book, Parable Of The Sower. If you click that link to the title, as just provided, you can read what the publisher says about that book: 

The radically speculative odyssey of a young Black woman in a post-apocalyptic America and the community she cultivates despite the horrors of climate change and social inequality.

On April 17, 2024, my blog posting was titled, "A Terrifying Warning." That blog posting also referenced Parable Of The Sower, and here is a brief excerpt (you can read the blog posting in its entirety, if you'd like to do that, by clicking the link to "A Terrifying Warning"):

As I have said before, Octavia Butler's book, The Parable of the Sower, provides us with a metaphor that we can use to understand, and to react to our real situation. 

We need to "find some friends," bond with them, person to person, in real life, and turn our attention, with those friends we find, to what we need to do, now - what we should do in a world transformed by our actions in the past. 

What should we do? What can we do? What is going to be possible for us - not waiting for someone else to tell us what to do? What do we need to do, in this world in which we now realize we are living, with the boulder rolling down the mountain? 

Find some friends. Give up your old plans, premised on the idea that things have not changed. Things have changed....

Make a new plan, friends! Do some things you haven't done before; do them with the friends you find; do some things you think will help.

Since 2024, the "terrifying warnings" we are receiving have become ever more terrifying. For instance, here is a link to a video showing the deadly flash floods that hit Nepal in August of this year. It would be hard to overstate how truly terrifying that video is.

As you may note from what I have written out, above, the phrase I most closely associate with Butler, and with her wonderful book, Parable Of The Sower, is this one - a phrase I repeat frequently in my daily blog postings: "Find Some Friends." The phrasing of that admonition, by the way, is my phrasing, not Butler's.

Well, I am happy to report that the book club to which my wife belongs has decided to read Parable Of The Sower. The group will discuss the book in one of its upcoming, monthly meetings. My wife, in anticipation, has now read the book (which she hadn't read before), and she commented to me that the ending was "sad." That was her reaction.

I am not a member of my wife's book club, so I won't be in attendance when the group discusses the book. To my mind, though, the end of the book (which closes with the full text of the "Parable Of The Sower," from the Bible) is infinitely hopeful, not "sad," at all.

Here is the parable at the end of Butler's book. See what you think (emphasis added): 

A sower went out to sow his seed:

and as he sowed, some fell by the

way side; and it was trodden down,

and the fowls of the air devoured 

it. And some fell upon a rock; and

as soon as it was sprung up, it

withered away because it lacked

moisture. And some fell among

thorns; and the thorns sprang up

with it, and choked it. And others

fell on good ground, and sprang up,

and bore fruit an hundredfold.  

Find Some Friends, I Say, And Let Us Sow Our Seeds

This is a "Sunday Sermon," I think, fit for the distressing and terrifying times in which we live.

To Subscribe Just Click This Link

 

Image Credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/books/review/the-essential-octavia-butler.html