My friend Rebecca Adams, who organizes our weekly lectio divina group, this past week shared an excerpt from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Meeting.” The Quaker poet is exploring how best to open oneself to God, and, though he wouldn’t have been familiar with Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to church,” he appears to be making a counter argument.
Dickinson’s poem opens,
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home – With a Bobolink for a Chorister – And an Orchard, for a Dome –
Whittier’s friend, meanwhile, makes a similar arguments against meeting houses and church ritual:
“What part or lot have you,” he said, “In these dull rites of drowsy-head? Is silence worship? Seek it where It soothes with dreams the summer air; Not in this close and rude-benched hall, But where soft lights and shadows fall, And all the slow, sleep-walking hours Glide soundless over grass and flowers! From time and place and form apart, Its holy ground the human heart, Nor ritual-bound nor templeward Walks the free spirit of the Lord!
Whitman’s response is basically that Nature is too populated and too noisy:
Dream not, O friend, because I seek This quiet shelter twice a week, I better deem its pine-laid floor Than breezy hill or sea-sung, shore; But nature is not solitude; She crowds us with her thronging wood; Her many hands reach out to us, Her many tongues are garrulous; Perpetual riddles of surprise She offers to our ears and eyes; She will not leave our senses still, But drags them captive at her will; And, making earth too great for heaven, She hides the Giver in the given.
Then comes the excerpt Rebecca shared, which is a lovely argument, not only for quiet Quaker worship, but for communal worship in general:
And so I find it well to come For deeper rest to this still room, For here the habit of the soul Feels less the outer world’s control; The strength of mutual purpose pleads More earnestly our common needs; And from the silence multiplied By these still forms on either side, The world that time and sense have known Falls off and leaves us God alone.
There are many who argue that they are spiritual but not religious and so reject church attendance altogether. While I’m sympathetic, Whitman makes the case that communal worship offers something special, even when (as can happen in Quaker gatherings) everyone is silent. The “still forms on either side” multiply the silence so that the world of time and sense falls away.
In the end, we are left one on one with the numinous. Which is what, after all, we seek.
John Trumball, The Signing of the Declaration of Independence
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 40th Installment
Tomorrow we celebrate the 250th anniversary of an Enlightenment manifesto that galvanized the world when it came out, including many people that the signers didn’t want to be galvanized (i.e., women, slaves, the wretched refuse of various teeming shores). “The Declaration of Independence” is testimony to the power of rhetoric to shape history, and while it took almost a century and the bloodiest war of the 19th century to include slaves in the ranks of “all men”; another century for them to be guaranteed voting rights in the south; and a century and a half before women could vote, the document spoke to the world’s dreamers. Dreaming has always been one of America’s defining characteristics.
Who knew that this anniversary would feel more like a “celebration of a life” such as one encounters at memorial services? Because the multicultural democratic ideal is not altogether dead, however, perhaps we should see the occasion rather as a renewal of marriage vows. Now that see clearly the threats to the American experiment, we can recommit to defending it with renewed energy.
That’s what another American called for us to do 163 years ago. Then, too, people were wondering whether a nation “dedicated to the the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure.” This July 4th we can resolve that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Not if we have any say in the matter.
In today’s memoir installment, I look at the role that literature played in shaping my identity as an American. As I think back on it, many of the novels and poems I read provided me with an on-going civics lesson.
Some of those works, interestingly enough, deified Abraham Lincoln. This may seem curious in the segregated south, but thanks to Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905) and the 1915 movie based on it (Birth of a Nation), the former Confederate states reappropriated Lincoln for their own purposes. For them, Lincoln was someone who wanted to keep the nation together, not someone who wanted all men to be treated equally. Ignoring the “Emancipation Proclamation,” they contended that if he had not been assassinated, he would have prevented radical Republicans would imposing tyrannical laws on the South, thereby rendering unnecessary the rise of the freedom-loving KKK.
I remember being given a choice, in seventh grade, of memorizing either Walt Whitman’s “Oh, Captain, My Captain” or Rosemary Benét’s poem about Lincoln’s mother. The latter uses a technique common in hagiography where the audience has access to special knowledge unavailable to the speaker. The poem also helped enshrine the populist myth of “log cabin to White House” :
Nancy Hanks by Rosemary Benét
If Nancy Hanks Came back as a ghost, Seeking news Of what she loved most, She’d ask first “Where’s my son? What’s happened to Abe? What’s he done?”
“Poor little Abe, Left all alone Except for Tom, Who’s a rolling stone; He was only nine The year I died. I remember still How hard he cried.”
“Scraping along In a little shack, With hardly a shirt To cover his back, And a prairie wind To blow him down, Or pinching times If he went to town.”
“You wouldn’t know About my son? Did he grow tall? Did he have fun? Did he learn to read? Did he get to town? Do you know his name? Did he get on?”
As school children, we were also familiar with Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Concord Hymn.” For me there was also Lucy Fitch Perkins’s The American Twins of the Revolution—one of her popular twins series—in which we could see children our age acting heroically. Sally and Roger Priestly must keep secret the fact that their father is conveying money to George Washington and then help their mother smuggle the gold out of their house. The book has such passages as the following:
There was every reason for the fears which shook Mrs. Priestly and the children. They had a large sum of money concealed on their persons, money upon which the whole success of their country’s cause might depend. It was suspected by the enemy that the gold was in her possession, concealed in the bag of buckwheat. Already the house had been visited by a spy, who had seen the bag of buckwheat deposited in the storeroom. She had been quick-witted enough to thwart the attempt to enter the house and steal it in the night, and she had cleverly convinced the guard, with Sailor’s help, that she was leaving the house “taking nothing with her.” Yet she had in fact defied the British Commander-in-Chief and disobeyed his orders. If, upon searching the house, they should discover that the money was gone, and that she had eluded them, they would probably pursue her, and if overtaken she could expect no mercy for herself or her children.
Perkins doesn’t see any disconnect between the family’s revolutionary sympathies and the fact that they own slaves, so I can see how the novel was also socializing us into accepting racial hierarchies. (Going through my bookshelves, I see that Perkins also wrote “The Pickaninny Twins,” although I remember nothing about that one.) In other words, I can now see how our patriotism was racially inflected.
Along with the novels and poems, there were also the history books, which helped inculcate in us the American frontier myth. I belonged to the Landmark Book Club, which every month sent me a hardback history book, often about American “heroes” such as George Washington, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and (believe it or not) George Custer. Heroic pioneers were also celebrated in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books.
And then there were the songs we sang, including “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” A civil religion such as that advocated by Jean Jacques Rousseau and promoted by the French Revolution was a fact of life when I was growing up, only it was intertwined with Christianity. To be a good American citizen and to be a Christian were seen as one and the same thing.
The turmoil of the Sixties can in some ways be seen as originating in a sense of betrayal. Racist violence and the Vietnam War were at odds with the idealized image of America we had been raised on. Like many teens and twenty-year-olds, I had a tough time with hypocrisy. I remembered enjoying a scribble I encountered on a bathroom wall:
I’m glad I am an American Because that means I’m free— Free to wish I were a dog And Nixon were a tree.
My sense of betrayal led me to engage in protest marches, get arrested while blockading the Minneapolis induction center, explore Marxism, and a few years later travel to Yugoslavia to see whether “market socialism” was a viable alternative to American capitalism. The idealism of John F. Kennedy—“Ask now what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—appeared to have been forever sullied.
While there were many things I admired in Yugoslavia, especially the respect accorded to the working class, I could also see the flaws. That year actually caused me to fall in love with America again. I realized that all countries that their dark and the light sides. To the conservatives who preached “My country, right or wrong,” the anti-war protesters had countered, “and when wrong, make it right,” and that I came to see as my continuing responsibility as an American.
We live in a country in which our foundational document, based on Enlightenment ideals, was chiefly penned by a slaveholder. Our rebellion against authoritarian rule was conducted in part by people prepared to exterminate native populations. American history, like most national histories, is riddled with contradictions.
This notion was unbearable to me when I was young. With age one learns that nations, like people, are complicated.
Harry Kane celebrates after England’s World Cup win over the Republic of Congo
Thursday
Like much of the world, I have been enthralled by the World Cup. My favorite game so far has been England vs. the Republic of Congo, with England captain Harry Kane leading his team to a come-from-behind victory with two magnificent goals. The commentators had difficulty praising him enough, with Thierry Henry proposing he be referred to as Sir Harry Kane. They could also have compared him to Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Henry’s nickname is Harry, and in the play’s prologue we learn that a fiery muse is needed to announce the magnificence of this “warlike” king:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars…
Things were looking very grim for England up until the final 20 minutes or so, and I like to think that Kane gave a version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech during the hydration break. “Once more into the breach dear friends,” I imagine him saying, “or close the wall up with our English dead.”
Then he could have punctuated his speech with Henry’s rousing finale:
And you, good yeoman, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture; let us swear That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not; For there is none of you so mean and base, That hath not noble luster in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
The game really is afoot when it comes to soccer, with greyhound-fast players exploiting the tiniest of breaches. And in the end, like Harry at Agincourt, England prevailed.
My librarian friend Valerie Hotchkiss sent me a book that she has been teaching in an online bibliotherapy class, which at one point I visited. Because Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World so directly coincides with my own interests, I share here a passage from the opening letter.
In it, Wolf looks at how she came to study the impact of screens on our brains. I love the passion with which she talks about her early reading experiences.
Excerpted from Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home
What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. In a span of only six millennia reading became the transformative catalyst for intellectual development within individuals and within literature cultures. The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species. There is much at stake in the development of the reading brain and in the quickening changes that now characterize its current, evolving iterations….
[W]hen I was a child learning to read, I did not think about reading. Like Alice, I simply jumped down reading’s hole into Wonderland and disappeared for most of my childhood. When I was a young woman, I did not think about reading. I simply became Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, and Isabel Archer at every opportunity. Sometimes I became men like Alyosha Karamazov, Hans Castorp, and Holden Caulfield. But always I was lifted to places very far from the little town of Eldorado, Illinois, and always I burned with emotions I could never otherwise have imagined.
Even when I was a graduate student of literature, I did not think very much about reading. Rather, I pored over every word, every encrypted meaning in the Duino Elegies by Rilke and novels by George Eliot and John Steinbeck, and felt myself bursting with sharpened perceptions of the world and anxious to fulfill my responsibilities within it.
I failed my first round at the latter miserably and memorably. With all the enthusiasm a young, flimsily prepared teacher can have, I began a Peace Corps-like stint in rural Hawaii along with a small and wonderful group of fellow would-be teachers. There I stood daily before twenty-four unutterably beautiful children. They looked at me with complete confidence, and we looked at each other with total, reciprocated affection. For a while those children and I were oblivious to the fact that I could change the circumstances of their life trajectories if I could help them become literate, unlike many in their families. Then, only then, did I begin to think seriously about what reading means. It changed the direction of my life.
With sudden and complete clarity I saw what would happen if those children could not learn the seemingly simple act of passage into a culture based on literacy. They would never fall down a hole and experience the exquisite joys of immersion in the reading life. They would never discover Dinotopia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, or Pemberley. They would never wrestle through the night with ideas too large to fit within their smaller worlds. They would never experience the great shift that moves from reading about characters like the Lightning Thief and Matilda to believing they could become heroes and heroines themselves. And most important of all, they might never experience the infinite possibilities within their own thoughts that emerge whole cloth from each fresh encounter with worlds outside their own. I realized in a whiplash burst that those children, all mine for one year, might never reach their full potential as human beings if they never learned to read.
From that moment on, I began in earnest to think about reading’s capacity to change the course of an individual life.
I’ve been thinking about the lament, in a Guardian article that came out earlier in the month, that our digital age is ruining our novel reading. “Surrounded by screens,” moans freelance writer Ioan Marc Jones, “I lost my ability to read some of the best books ever written.”
The article got me wondering whether screens are having any impact on my own novel reading since I now move constantly between different forms of electronically delivered fiction, from Kindle to Guttenberg novels on my laptop to Libby novels an on my phone to audiobooks (Libby again). And while I still read two or three novels a week, it’s true that I no longer bury myself in them for hours at a time.
Jones uses his parents to depict the ideal reader:
My parents hail from the literary working class, a subsection of society that believes great works lead to a richer life. Reading for them was an inverted form of class snobbery. My dad could read as well as anyone. He’d prove it on package holidays, sitting on the balcony the entire time, head bowed, cigarette in hand, flicking through the pages of Jane Austen or Herman Melville.
Inspired by them, Jones too was once such a reader. In his late teens and early twenties, he says, he worked his way through the great works, especially falling in love with Middlemarch. (“I was a smart lad, prone to bad decisions, unsure of my place in the world. It is perhaps no surprise that I identified with Dorothea.”) Later he moved on to such contemporary authors as Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, Roddy Doyle, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Jones experienced his moment of self-doubt when he encountered the Guardian’s list of “the 100 greatest novels” (here’s my post about the list) and set out to read the 32 he hadn’t read. Suddenly he found himself impatient where once he had been engrossed. Dickens no longer captivated him, and he describes Our Mutual Friend as “complicated, the prose as heavy as the 900-page book.” With Dracula he struggled “with the glaring absurdity of the epistolary format.” Tristram Shandy, meanwhile, he found to be “inexcusable,” with the language “verbose,” the language “indecipherable,” and the detours “infuriating.”
I should note, in Sterne’s defense, that he anticipated that readers would balk at his detours. We know this from his over-the-top praise of authorial digressions.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;——they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones I would have chosen over (or at least placed along side of) Tristram Shandy, also anticipates readers chafing at his self-reflective introductory chapters. “There may be no parts in this prodigious work,” he writes,
which will give the reader less pleasure in the perusing, than those which have given the author the greatest pains in composing. Among these probably may be reckoned those initial essays which we have prefixed to the historical matter contained in every book; and which we have determined to be essentially necessary to this kind of writing, of which we have set ourselves at the head.
To eliminate these introductory chapters, however, would be like (to use a parallel I applied when teaching Tom Jones) removing the framing device from the movie Princess Bride: suddenly we would get a love story without the wonderful cosmopolitan irony.
Novel reading can be compared to the slow food movement: the point is savoring the work as you go along, not simply filling your stomach with plot. Sterne, Dickens, and Fielding are all inviting us into a friendship that will grow over time. Having just listened to an audiobook of Our Mutual Friend, I found nothing at all heavy about it—but that was because I took my time. The same was true with Fanny Burney’s 900-page Cecilia, which I recently read for the first time. Each evening I would read twenty or thirty pages and, by the end, could understand why Jane Austen was a fan.
Another way to think of this is that authors are charismatic cult leaders, using their individual style to reprogram our minds. But we have to be willing participants in this reprogramming—we must suspend our disbelief—in order to experience what they are offering us. It can be a gradual process.
Jones comes to this realization in the course of writing his article. For instance, he quotes a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, who
advocates the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: “Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.” Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and plenty of others initially appeared in that format. Self-serialising slows us down, lets us linger on the text, and creates suspense. “Read one chapter per session and you’ll be better placed to appreciate the detail of these Victorian worlds – and their cliffhangers.”
A number of writers have observed that reading is like a muscle, which must be exercised over time. To this, Jones adds that good reading
begets better reading. In The Novel: A BiographyThe Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt writes: “Reading is a cumulative act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.” The more you read, the richer the reading.
After getting those muscles working again, Jones reports returning to his early love of Dickens
I’ve adopted the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: I cover only a few chapters at a time and put the book down, with a thud, even if I want to continue. I am taking Our Mutual Friend slowly, without rushing towards a self-inflicted finish line. The digressions still bore me, but I’m learning to appreciate the arguments, the flurries (at least the good ones). I’m slowly getting used to the longer sentences, the shifts in register, the complicated syntax. My love of classics is creeping back.
While I’ve never lost this love, it’s true that the presence of electronic texts volleying and thundering to the left and right of me have disrupted my reading. Writing a literary essay a day has also eaten into my reading time. A few chapters in my down times, however, still offer up immense rewards.
Last year I wrote the following post about how Donald Trump isn’t entirely managing to escape accountability, although his punishment has been more existential than judicial and doesn’t help the rest of us.
Reprinted from January 14, 2025
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has just announced that Donald Trump, had he not been just reelected president, would have been prosecuted for the January 6 coup attempt. One of Donald Trump’s special powers has been his ability to escape accountability, which he has accomplished by abusing the law in the manner of his mentor Roy Cohn, stacking the Supreme Court, and playing a special brand of resentment politics. So are we to conclude that he has gotten away with everything?
In Anthony Trollope’s Small House at Allingham, which I’ve just finished, the author addresses this very question. Although young and stylish Crosby has promised to marry the wonderful but penniless Lily Dale, a week later, blinded by the lights of high society, he makes a second marriage proposal, this time to the daughter of a peer. While Lily’s friends and families are infuriated at the way Crosby appears to escape all punishment, Trollope points out that he doesn’t escape at all.
That’s because Crosby is miserable in his mercenary marriage, with a wife that doesn’t love him and an aristocratic family that bullies him. How much more joyous his life would be, he thinks, had he married the loving and caring Lily, despite her lack of money. While Lily’s friends are described as “wretched in thinking that this man was escaping without punishment,” Trollope assures us that he’s suffering “as much as they could desire.” They just don’t realize it:
Those who offend us are generally punished for the offence they give; but we so frequently miss the satisfaction of knowing that we are avenged! It is arranged, apparently, that the injurer shall be punished, but that the person injured shall not gratify his desire for vengeance.
So is Trump being punished in ways we cannot see? After watching Trump attack fire-ravaged California and direct a volley of hate tweets at Jack Smith, television comic Seth Meyers, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, I was struck by just how miserable he is. He appears shackled to those he attacks.
I borrow the image from a recent New Yorker article about Paradise Lost, which notes how Milton’s Satan is tied to his victims. I’ve compared Trump to Satan multiple times—they are both supreme narcissists—and author Merve Emre observes that, for all his success in making humans miserable, Satan never experiences the joy of true freedom. Emre describes Milton’s view of such freedom as follows:
In his 1654 treatise “The Second Defence of the People of England,” Milton wrote, “Know that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave.”
Satan, by contrast, has a debased version of freedom:
By the sun’s blinding rays, we can perceive how depraved Satan’s freedom is. By one hand, he is bound to himself, to his impiety, his recklessness, his envy and pride, his guilt and spite. “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” he laments. By the other hand, he is bound to the Almighty, whom, as the critic John Guillory has observed, Satan imitates. But God’s authority tends toward reason and grace; Satan’s is a poor, perverse copy. His every thought is shaped in reaction to God’s glory. It is as if God had never lifted Satan’s chains.
For his part, Trump is a slave to his resentment. Satan’s line “myself am hell”—which is inspired by Mephistopheles’s line in Doctor Faustus “why this is hell, nor am I out of it”—is Trump’s existential state. When Satan says, “The mind can make a heaven of hell or hell of heaven,” he accurately describes how both he and Trump have made perpetual hells for themselves.
One should note that Marlowe in his turn borrows from Dante to describe Mephistopheles’s condition. As the devil puts it,
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
Dante’s damned have consigned themselves to everlasting torment because they choose their compulsions over God’s love. Some are aware of what they have done, others just blindly writhe. For all the similarities between Satan and Trump, Satan appears more self-aware. Trump seems to be in hell without knowing it, more Grendel in this regard than Satan.
While I believe Trump is suffering, I draw no pleasure from it. That’s because I’m far more concerned about the effects of that suffering: those who are miserable often do all they can to make others miserable. “For only in destroying I find ease/ To my relentless thoughts,” Satan says, providing a profound insight into why Trump behaves as he does.
Domenichino Domenico Zampieri, Abraham Leading Isaac to Sacrifice
Sunday
I’m reposting a past essay on the horrifying Abraham and Isaac story as Julia and I are currently in Washington, D.C. attending the wedding of a close family friend. We will leave before our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, which our president has somehow confused with his own.
Reprinted from June 27, 2020
Is there a more horrifying story in the Bible than that of Abraham and Isaac, today’s Old Testament reading? Other stories feature more bloodshed (Noah’s flood) and raise comparable challenges (God allowing Satan to torment Job), but the intimacy of Abraham’s supposedly God-ordered sacrifice of his son sets it apart.
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, host of The Velveteen Rabbi, imagines Abraham as a faulty interpreter of God’s word. Abraham, she notes, has a mixed history. On the one hand, he is a force for life: he has dug wells and has pushed back against God’s determination to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He also has a violent streak, however, such as when he smashed idols. Barenblat wonders why he doesn’t consult Sarah in this instance. How does he know God’s voice is actually God’s voice?
Barenblat’s Abraham sounds like an abusive parent in the way he suddenly switches from violence to remorse. His terrible punishment is that “God never spoke to him again,” which explains the poem’s title:
Silence (Vayera) By Rachel Barenblat
Abraham failed the test. For Sodom and Gomorrah he argued but when it came to his son no protest crossed his lips.
God was mute with horror. Abraham, smasher of idols and digger of wells was meant to talk back.
Sarah would have been wiser but Abraham avoided her tent, didn’t lay his head in her lap to unburden his secret heart.
In stricken silence God watched as Abraham saddled his ass and took Isaac on their final hike to the place God would show him.
The angel had to call him twice. Abraham’s eyes were red, his voice hoarse he wept like a man pardoned but God never spoke to him again.
Barenblat appears to be calling for humility when it comes to what we think God is telling us. Far too many of us impose our own agendas on God rather than engaging in dialogue with God’s voice. As a result, throughout history God’s will has been invoked in countless acts of horror.
If we genuinely want to hear from God rather than our own egos, we must listen with our minds, our hearts, and our souls. We must also turn to others to help us hear.
Further thought: Last week I shared a Thylias Moss poem that imagined God changing once His divinity took on human form. Put another way, our vision of God becomes more humane as we evolve so that He (and now She) is no longer the avenging punisher that shows up in many of the Old Testament stories. Along these lines, the story of Abraham and Isaac has sometimes been seen as capturing Israel’s evolution from human to animal sacrifice.
Put another way, the bigger we become, the bigger God gets, something Jesus understood in a foundational way. To cite today’s Gospel’s reading,
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple– truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:40-42).
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 39th Installment
This memoir is finally reaching the present so the end is in sight, although I may include a few follow-up posts on particular themes. In today’s installment I go back to my last two years at St. Mary’s, the second of which included a brush with mortality.
In 2016 Julia moved to Sewanee to (1) be with my mother, who was depressed over having lost my father three years earlier and (2) spend half weeks in Georgia with our third granddaughter. Childcare was needed as our daughter-in-law Candice had been hired for a dual position in Film Studies and Asian Studies at the University of North Georgia while our son Tobias was teaching at Georgia Tech.
Living alone was already a challenge, and then in 2017 I contracted a case of myocarditis and pericarditis. If Julia had been in Maryland, she would have insisted that we drive to the emergency room when I started experiencing back pains in the middle of the night, but instead I gritted my teeth and made an appointment with my doctor the following morning.
She thought, as I did, that I had pulled a muscle playing tennis but sent me to the hospital for an EKG to make sure. I barely made the trip there—driving at 15 miles an hour, I was prepared to pull over and call 911—and then had to wait for 90 minutes for the EKG. Once the nurse saw the results, however, everything sped up as the emergency room physicians, fearing I was suffering from a heart attack, bundled me into a helicopter and flew me to a Washington hospital.
It turned out that all I needed was an anti-inflammatory, and I was well enough in the evening to post an essay, a point of pride since I hadn’t missed one since I began the blog three years earlier. (I’d had the presence of mind to bring my laptop with me.) When I recalled the feeling of iron bands squeezing my chest, the image that came to mind was Giles Corey being crushed to death as a suspected witch in The Crucible. As Elizabeth describes the scene,
Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. (With a tender smile for the old man): They say he give them but two words. “More weight,” he says. And died.
I visited many specialists in the following months, and they ultimately traced my episode to an infection picked up in a Bronx hospital when I was visiting a friend dying of ovarian cancer. I’ll write more about Rachel Kranz in a future post on friendship, but given how traumatized I was, I wondered at one point whether Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones offered a credible diagnosis. There we encounter a character who dies from a broken heart:
The doctor went directly to London, where he died soon after of a broken heart; a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bill of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases—viz., that no physician can cure it.
Although I was back again teaching two days later, the anti-inflammatories didn’t catch everything and I would have to another trip to the E.R. At this point I decided that I really should retire—at 67 rather than at 70, as I had planned—and gave notice.
There’s one other literature story connected with emergency room visits. In my final semester, I was teaching, for the first time, an ambitious world literature course on Magic Realism. After having read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Colombia)and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (India), my students were sucking wind. I realized this as I lay on the hospital bed at 3 am and decided then and there to drop Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Germany), replacing it with Laura Esquivel’s much shorter and more accessible Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico). The students were grateful.
The other works in the course, incidentally, were Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the U.S.) and Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Japan).
I was teaching my “Theories of the Reader” class that last year, using a rough draft of Better Living through Literature as one of my textbooks (along with the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory). I also taught Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, so that the students could see an author battling with a censorious readership, and Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, so that they could study his strategies of deliberate alienation.
The students’ final essays, meanwhile, opened my eyes to various works that had “caused a ruckus” (as I put it), including a fascinating study of why Tennessee parents had objected to a teacher teaching L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. My student learned that the book was far more feminist than she realized, which may explain why the parents objected to the good witches in the book. Baum’s suffragette mother-in-law provided a model for Glinda the Good, and he also saw Dorothy as a tough pioneer woman (which is not how Judy Garland plays her).
When my department asked me what I wanted in a farewell party, I prefaced my wish by telling a joke a German colleague had shared with me. Terrorists have taken over a plane filled with language professors headed for the annual Modern Language Association conference. To show they mean business, they announce they will throw three of them out of the plane—a Brit, a German, and an American—but will first grant each of them a final wish. The Brit asks for a spot of tea, the German asks to a lecture…and the American asks to be thrown from the plane before the German delivers his lecture. Invoking my mother’s German heritage, I said I wanted to deliver a lecture. Which is what I did, speaking for 20 minutes on literature’s life transforming potential.
Although I did some teaching after retirement—intro classes for Sewanee as well as some lifelong learning courses—I spent most of my time working on my book. Once I retired, I was able to work full time on my book, which I completed with the incredible assistance of Rebecca Adams. It is the culmination of my life’s work, and I have given readings at Sewanee, St. Mary’s, and the University of Ljubljana.
By retiring when I did, I missed having to teach remotely or grapple with AI. And I got to spend the Covid year, plus another three, with my mother. Then, once life returned to normal, I went on to head Sewanee’s Friends of the Library; delivered card-playing lectures on Jane Austen (speculation) and Alexander Pope (ombre); ran our church’s Sunday Forum (to which I also contributed numerous literature lectures); started a weekly faculty reading group to study Divine Comedy and other classics; joined (with Julia) a lectio divina group to discuss Biblical passages; joined (again with Julia) a monthly book group to discuss various works of fiction and non-fiction; visited Slovenia three times to teach Shakespeare and post-colonial literature courses (along with other assorted classes); lectured on Beowulf at our 50th Carleton reunion; and wrote countless political posts while participating in multiple anti-Trump marches. Oh, and I play tennis doubles five or six times a week.
In short, retirement is a lot like my life when I was working, only without the meetings and the grading.
While I don’t miss those last two, I do miss the students.
As we travel around the country, Julia and I have been listening to Stanley Kim Robinson’s New York 2140, a work of cli-fi or speculative fiction about climate disaster that should be enough to scare the bejeezus out of all of us.
In it, the world has been hit by two catastrophic sea level rises, known as Pulse One and Pulse Two. As a result, coastal cities all around the world have been inundated. The economic consequences include mass migrations and unimaginable property damage, with New York transformed into a Venice with collapsing buildings. (Venice itself, we can assume, is no more.)
I share today a passage where the author rants (his word) against the short-sightedness of humans. Given my interest in how literature changes lives and (sometimes) history, I note the author’s frustration that his science fiction is not having an impact:
It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of the civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.
Along with the sarcasm directed at science skeptics, Robinson also goes after capitalists preaching “creative destruction”:
But hey. An end is a beginning! Creative destruction, right? Apply more police state and more austerity, clamp down hard, proceed as before Cleaning up the mess, a great investment opportunity! Churn baby churn!
By the end of his rant, the author throws up his hands and returns to his story:
Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!
While literature is impactful, it has a mixed record when it comes to immediate changes in social policy. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, while it may have ushered in food regulation, didn’t directly lead to better working conditions in Chicago’s slaughter houses. Charles Dickens, the author most associated with social reform, didn’t bring a stop to child labor with Oliver Twist, transform the court system with Bleak House, norend laissez faire capitalism with Hard Times.
Literature works best at a leisurely pace, expanding consciousness so that people see new possibilities in how we imagine human relations. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, we need immediate action. A novel like New York 2140 can be used by activists but can’t bring about change on its own.
