Card on Nibley

Meridian has a nice retrospective on Hugh Nibley by Orson Scott Card. It turns out that Card knew several of the Nibley kids as friends while he was a high school student, and he often visited the Nibley home, which he describes as follows:

Families are either open or closed -- and the Nibley home was as open as any family I have ever known. There was no pretense, though of course there was privacy. No one was trying to impress anybody.

Card had several informal conversations with Nibley while visiting -- a real rush for the teenage visitor, who appears to be one of Nibley's more unlikely disciples. He writes that Nibley

was also willing to listen, even to a callow kid like me, and seemed to feel no need to put anyone down, no matter how idiotic their comments. At the same time, he would offer helpful information to relieve truly painful ignorance, but when I was so corrected, I never felt that I had been reprimanded or humiliated.

Nibley seems to have had the power of energizing those around him, a "touch of the master's hand" sort of thing. But that his influence extends as wide as the work of Orson Scott Card is something of a surprise. Card says that the first Nibley book he read was "An Approach to the Book of Mormon," also the first Nibley book I read and one which likewise made a lasting impression on me.

Card says some very kind things about Nibley in the course of his essay, comments that are based on his visits with Nibley as a teenage visitor in his home rather than on professional interactions that are the basis for most of the other reflections on Nibley I've seen published recently. Card's comments are worth reading -- and they are, as always, enjoyably well written.

Comments

[Nathan]

I don't follow why you would find Nibley's influence on Card "unlikely" and "something of a surprise." Care to elaborate?

[Dave]

Nathan, it is generally Mormon Studies folks who trace their interest to an encounter with Nibley. It is unexpected to see a fiction writer have a similar encounter. This is interesting because one might see Card's use of Book of Mormon motifs in some of his fiction as rooted in his encounter with Nibley's unique Book of Mormon writings, as opposed to the casual reading of the Book of Mormon that the average Mormon (and the average Mormon writer) would be working from.

In simpler terms, it lends some depth to Card's perspective. Makes me want to dig up the household copy of "Speaker for the Dead" and read it.

[Nathan]

Ah. If you read much of Card's nonfiction (especially when he talks about the role of community), you can see some interesting meshes with Nibley's views on the social aspect of the gospel.