My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2026

Friday

I have a new idea for Friday posts. Since I had so much fun traveling down memory lane for my memoir, I’ve decided to revisit favorite stories, poems, and plays, one per entry, recalling the first time I encountered them. It’s another way of examining how literature has shaped my life.

I got the idea from a Terry Pratchett essay I was reading from the collection of his essays that Neil Gaiman, who knew him well, put together after his untimely death. 

In “Let There Be Dragons,” which was “a speech in defense of fantasy” that he gave at a Booksellers Association Conference dinner, Pratchett talks about his childhood encounter with The Wind in the Willows. “It was the first book which, at the age of ten, I read because I was genuinely interested,” he wrote.

Pratchett acknowledges (but not really) that “it is totally the wrong kind of book for children,” what with it having only one female character (a washerwoman), a classist dismissal (and fear of) the lower class weasels and stoats, and how it avoids talking frankly about the homosexual attraction between Mole and Ratty. In fact Pratchett, if he were to write Wind in the Willows himself, would give the weasels and stoats their own culture and equal status with the others, just as he does with goblins and trolls, and the washerwoman would be elevated to a heroic witch.

Part of the attraction, Pratchett says, was that “it wasn’t parents or teachers who were recommending the book,” and he recalls reading it “from end to end, all in one go. And then I started again from the beginning, because I had not realized that there were stories like this”:

There’s a feeling that I think is only possible to get when you are a child and discover books: it’s a kind of fizz—you want to read everything that’s in print before it evaporates before your eyes.

“Fizz” is probably the right way to describe my own experience with Wind in the Willows. It was my father’s favorite book—I’m holding at this very moment the version that he read to us—and if the 1933 reprint date is any indication, he got the book when he himself was ten. He identified with Ratty, the dreamer poet whose mind will periodically wander off, but I felt more of a kinship with Mole. I experienced his thrill when he emerges from an intense bout of housecleaning and sees the wide, wonderful world for the first time. “Something up above was calling him imperiously,” the author tells us, and so 

he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, “Up we go! Up we go!” till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

The 1930 editions would be the first illustrated by E.H. Shephard, already famous for the Winnie the Pooh books, and I found magical the sight of Mole dancing in the meadow. (The illustration in my book contrasts dramatically with the textual account of the scratching and scrabbling, which descends the page in ever shorter lines until entirely giving out four fifths of the way down, allowing the picture to take over.). The author captures the moment with gorgeous prose:

“This is fine! He said to himself. “This is better than whitewashing!” The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side. 

I remember feeling something similar as a child when I awoke one early May morning, felt the cool breeze coming in at the window, and remembered it was the first day of summer vacation. Perhaps having read this passage added to the wondrousness of moment, framing and confirming it. Of course, many people experience this joy, but literature has a way of intensifying it.

Mole goes on to establish a firm friendship with Ratty, and I recall responding intensively to one moment where, jealous of Ratty’s carefree rowing—Ratty has just told him he needs to practice before trying to do it himself—Mole seizes the oars, pulls vigorously at them, and upsets the boat. While, in his shame, he feels like a “squashy, pulpy lump of misery”—and as a child, I remember feeling this way much of the time, perhaps because my mother worried constantly about how others would judge us—Ratty shrugs it off. Although Mole believes he has ruined everything and abjectly apologizes, Ratty replies,

“That’s all right, bless you!” responded the Rat cheerily. What’s a little wet to a water Rat? I’m more in the water than out of it most days. Don’t you think any more about it.”

This absolution feels like that bestowed by the Green Knight on Gawain, which is my favorite moment in that work as well. In other words, having a friend who cleanses you of your guilt seemed miraculous.

The incident in the boat reminds me of a similar incident that happened around this time. When I would walk home from school with Chris(tine) and John Mayfield, who lived in the apartment above ours, I would envy them for their bicycles. When we reached the big hill separating University Avenue from Alabama Avenue—those who know Sewanee will recognize Mitchell Avenue—I would envy how they flew down the incline and then pumped madly to see how far they could get up the other side. So one evening, without asking, I took John’s bike and set off to fly down the hill myself.

Unfortunately I hit a pothole, badly skinning myself and damaging the bicycle. I remember walking the bike home, crying all the way, mostly out of pain but also because I felt I was being punished for my “theft.” My mother bandaged me up but, somewhat miraculously, no one scolded me or even made mention of my taking the bike. The parents must have talked and figured I’d been punished enough. There was tacit forgiveness.

Children, for all their apparent innocence, have complex inner lives. Our greatest children’s authors acknowledge those lives and couch them within compelling stories.

If I identified so strongly with Mole, it was because I was an effeminate boy—I didn’t fight or play football– and Mole often takes on the more traditional female roles in his relationship with Ratty. I remember one scene where his lack of assertiveness almost turns tragic. While walking through a snowy wilderness with Ratty, he senses that they are close to his underground home—he hasn’t been there since the opening pages—but he can’t communicate his sense of urgency to his friend, who is determinedly plowing on ahead. Finally he breaks down and starts crying.

At that point Ratty does what a true friend does: he realizes he’s been insensitive and rectifies the situation by bolstering Mole, insisting that they find his home and, once there, on finding everything necessary to make a good fire and a feast. What follows is a magical Christmas Eve moment, complete with caroling field mice, and Mole ends the day wonderfully happy:

The weary Mole also was glad to turn in without delay, and soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancor. He was now in just the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in him. He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

I write this post from the house I inherited from my parents—not the apartment complex we shared with the Mayfields, which has been replaced (significantly) by the university library, but one to which I have returned to every Christmas since the 1970s—so I relate to how a home can function as an anchorage. That anchorage, when I was a child, was my family and the books we read together, which I knew I could always count on, even though I also knew I would one day need to leave it behind and enter the larger stage. To be sure, I never left it entirely, despite essaying a career as a journalist for two years, as I became a literature professor like my father. When Julia and I had our own family, we used books to create anchorage for our own sons.

They too left home immediately after college, and while they return only once or twice a year, they know the importance of building such a stable base for their children.

I haven’t mentioned Toad in all this. He was too anarchistic for my liking, and Grahame’s nostalgic reestablishment of the landed gentry and the old class system—under assault from weasel and stoat modernity—is his dream of stability, not mine. (Grahame wrote Wind in the Willows in 1908, six years before the world fell apart as World War I changed England forever.) But I liked the role that Mole played in the reclamation of Toad Hall, which in Toad’s absence has been seized by denizens of the Wild Wood. What follows is a reenactment of Odysseus ridding his house of the suitors (without the killing), and the chapter is entitled, “The Return of Ulysses.”

The attack succeeds largely because Mole, accessing his inner woman and disguising himself as a washerwoman, has informed the stoat guards that hundreds of badgers, rats and toads will attack the hall that night. While Toad chides Mole for blowing their cover, Badger realizes that Mole has given the four companions an important psychological advantage and compliments him with words I imagined being applied to me:

“Mole,” said the Badger in his dry, quiet way, “I perceive you have more sense in your little finger than some other animals have in the whole of their fat bodies. You have managed excellently, and I begin to have great hopes of you. Good Mole! Clever Mole!”

In short, Wind in the Willows understood me as a child, affirmed me, and assured me I was capable of heroic action.

I mention one more way that the book has shown up in my life. My best friend in graduate school Norman Finkelstein, now a noteworthy poet and literary scholar, has written a poem about “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” the episode where Mole and Ratty encounter the great god Pan. It’s my favorite of all Norman’s poems and you can read what I’ve written about it here:

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
By Norman Finkelstein

We little animals living by the river banks
burrowers and swimmers by sandy shores:
was there ever a time when the bird’s song,
giving way in evening to the flight of the bat,
failed to presage a momentary chill,
even on summer days?

The warm folds of forgetfulness
are meant to be comforting:
but how soon they cease to soothe us,
haunted as we shall always be
by the absent music, the departing hand.

Yes, we are full of Panic life;
it flows deep within us, nor are we out of touch
with the powers that watch us survive.
But the banks get crowded
or fall away steeply,
and someone is always getting trampled or drowned.
It’s then that the music, seeming to have gone,
glides through the reeds on its sinuous way.

And though we are not its destination,
neither are we bystanders happening along the path.
We are neither forgotten nor remembered,
but somehow have been included:
we know that for us it always comes to good
and that must be enough. 

The poem gives me insight into Norman, my father, and poets generally, how they are straining to catch notes that are always just out of reach. While I myself am no poet, I am grateful in my deepest core for how they put me in touch with mystery.

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Poison Ivy and the Spoon River Citizens

By Robin Bates | Published: August 12, 2026
Ambiguous super villain Poison Ivy

Thursday

I’ve been suffering from a severe case of poison ivy, caused by whacking weeds while wearing a short-sleeved shirt. I’ve always been highly susceptible—I was hospitalized with it once as a child—and both arms currently look like raw meat. After a week of applying every ointment I could find, I finally surrendered and went to my doctor for a shot. 

My next predictable step was finding a poem or two about poison ivy. Google took me back to a speaker in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1914), which I hadn’t read since high school.

It’s very different reading the poems now. Growing up in a town resembling the idealized Mayberry of the Andy Griffith Show, I didn’t see the darker sides of small town life until I was a reporter on two weekly newspapers, once for the Pine City Pioneer (in Minnesota), once for the Winchester Herald Chronicle (in Tennessee). There I witnessed both the best and the worst of people, early signs of MAGA in Minnesota, cockfighting and the KKK in Tennessee.

Masters’s poems appeared as regular installments in the St. Louis literary journal Reedy’s Mirror. They came as as heady shock since many Americans shared my childhood idealization of small towns. When his characters, speaking from the grave, reveal that “real Americans” are just as capable of corrupt double dealing as those who live in cities, the country took notice. So did the town of Lewiston, Illinois, the source of the Spoon River characters, which which banned the collection for decades.

It was as if (thinking of my poison ivy scars), Masters had ripped the scab concealing the pus. A young wife who died in childbirth, for instance, exposes the lie of a happy couple:

Amanda Barker

Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.

Another of the dead complains about his epitaph:

Cassius Hueffer

They have chiseled on my stone the words:
“His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.”
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
“Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life
In the which he was slain.”
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

It makes sense, then, that one of the graveyard residents would mention innocent-looking poison ivy.

Before turning to it, here’s another poem that mentions the plant’s misleading exterior. I stumbled across Martha Lavinia Hoffman’s “Poison Ivy” and was struck by how she admires its “graceful sprays and glossy shoots” and how its strong aerial roots clamber up “the gnarled old tree-trunks.

A Utah, California nature poet living in the second half of the 19th century, Hoffman then shifts gears and delivers her warning: 

Yet beware, and think how often
Earth’s most charming loveliest things.
Hide beneath a fair exterior,
Poisonous sap, or cruel stings,
Touch not, ’tis the poison ivy;
Spurn its festooned haunt with care;
Trust not, ’tis a fair deception,
Hidden guile is lurking there.
Type of many another nature,
False, untrue, yet passing fair.

Back to Spoon River’s Calvin Campbell, a speaker who shares Masters’s view of the town. How is it, he wonders, that the air and soil of the picturesque hillside can produce both the sweet elixirs and colors that become the arbutus (the madronas or strawberry tree) and the poison that becomes poison ivy. But don’t blame Fate or Spoon River, he goes on to say, but rather “the will in you that feeds itself” and makes us dockweed, jimsonweed, dandelion or mullein—which is to say various toxic, invasive, and nuisance weeds.

Given that we have free will, why don’t we draw on the same soil and air to become jasmine or wisteria?

Calvin Campbell

Ye who are kicking against Fate,
Tell me how it is that on this hillside,
Running down to the river,
Which fronts the sun and the south-wind,
This plant draws from the air and soil
Poison and becomes poison ivy?
And this plant draws from the same air and soil
Sweet elixirs and colors and becomes arbutus?
And both flourish?
You may blame Spoon River for what it is,
But whom do you blame for the will in you
That feeds itself and makes you dock-weed,
Jimpson, dandelion or mullen
And which can never use any soil or air
So as to make you jessamine or wistaria?

I don’t blame the woods around me for producing poison ivy, just myself for not being more careful. Meanwhile, I am appalled by those people in life who hide poisonous sap “beneath a fair exterior.”

Aspire to be wisteria.

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We Know Which Portia Casket DJT Would Choose

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2026
Trump’s gilded Oval Office

Wednesday

Yesterday I discussed DJT’s urge to gild everything he sees with gold leaf, including the Oval Office. I should also have mentioned the two bronze “Arts of War” statues located next to the Lincoln Memorial, “Valor” and “Sacrifice,” that the president had covered with 24-karat gold leaf for a mere $5.1 million.

More significant even than the cost is the symbolism. In an article in Architectural Digest on “The Political History of Gilding,” architect and historian Gary Lawrence observes that the wealthy in “the gilded age” (the label was coined by Mark Twain) used gold trim to signal their power. “Gold always represented a person’s status and was often overused in the homes of newly wealthy people,” he notes. “It was also used on exterior viewable things like carriages, horse fittings, and servants’ uniforms.”

Art historian Seem Rao, meanwhile, contends that “Trump’s faux gold work looks classy to someone who doesn’t know the historic markers of wealth.” Borrowed from Europe’s monarchical palaces, the gilding clashes with Washington’s neoclassical style, which was designed to invoke Athenian democracy and the Roman republic. 

When I think of Trump’s love of gold trim, I fantasize about candidates for the presidency being subjected to the Portia test. This is the test in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that suitors must pass if they are to win Portia’s hand. Involving a gold, a silver, and a lead casket, the test has been set up by her now-deceased father to ensure that she gets a worthy husband. One of the three contains her portrait and comes with the promise of marriage

As the Prince of Morocco, the first of her three suitors, sums up the choices, 

The first, of gold, who this inscription bears,
“Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire”;
The second, silver, which this promise carries,
“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves”;
This third, dull lead, with warning all as blunt,
“Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.”
How shall I know if I do choose the right?

Morocco figures that “many men” desire both gold and Portia and so chooses the gold casket. Inside he finds a picture of a skull and the following poem:

All that glisters [glitters] is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.

Second suitor Aragorn figures he is too deserving to be grouped with “many men,” explaining, 

I will not choose what many men desire,
Because I will not jump with common spirits
And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.
…Well, but to my choice:
“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.”
I will assume desert. Give me a key for this,
And instantly unlock my fortunes here.

His reward is a “portrait of a blinking idiot,” which is as much as he deserves.

Protagonist Bassanio rejects the gold and silver caskets, observing that “the outward shows be least themselves” because the world is too often “deceived with ornament”:

In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts…

He concludes,

Therefore, thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee;
Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge
‘Tween man and man: but thou, thou meagre lead,
Which rather threatenest than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence;
And here choose I; joy be the consequence!

Although DJT, thinking himself to be the most deserving, might be tempted for a moment by the silver casket, he would undoubtedly go for “what many men desire,” starting with himself. I feel fairly confident that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris would choose the lead casket as all are capable of setting aside ego for the good of the nation. Indeed, no president in American history would score lower on the Portia test than DJT.

Portia’s description of gold shows up in Gandalf’s letter to Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring, delivered to him by the innkeeper Butterbur. Its purpose is to assure the hobbits about Strider/Aragorn:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

While the poem describes Aragorn, it also describes Frodo, a commoner who grapples with the corrupting desire for power and prevails. 

Both have deep moral roots. Neither is sidetracked by glitter. 

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DJT as a Harpy, Befouling All That Is Good

By Robin Bates | Published: August 10, 2026
Bartolomeo Pinelli, the harpies in the Aeneid

Tuesday

First there was Caesar Augustus, who boasted, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” Then there was Christopher Wren (among others), who after the great fire of 1666 transformed London from a city of wood into a city of stone. Now we have Donald Trump, who found Washington, D.C. a city of classic monuments and is leaving it—well, the word “enshittification” comes to mind. 

Everywhere we look, we see Trump’s ravages, from demolishing the White House East Wing to paving over the Rose Garden so that it resembles his Mar-a-Lago patio to gilding the West Wing so that (in the words of Rick Wilson) it “looks like Liberace and Saddam designed a 19th New Orleans century whorehouse, without the taste and elegance.”

And then there’s the failed renovation of the reflecting pool, which prompted Tim Walz to tweet,

Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell

If Trump were only ruining D.C. architecture, it would be bad enough, but he’s attempting to do the same to the country as a whole, from the Department of Justice and Intelligence services to our national parks to our coastline, waterways, and air quality to our world-class health organizations to our foreign aid efforts (which have saved millions of lives) to our international alliances to American democracy itself. I’ve noted in past posts that a line from Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” comes constantly to mind. Oue Nobel-winning bard says of diamond-mine owner Big Jim, “He took whatever he wanted and he laid it all to waste.”

There’s also a classical image of befouling what is good. In The Aeneid, the hungry Trojans, reeling from the destruction of their city, believe they have found refuge on an island filled with sleek herds and flocks of goats. Just as they are setting up couches “for a savory feast,” however, this happens:  

But instantly, grotesquely whirring down,
The Harpies were upon us from the hills
With deafening beat of wings. They trounced our meat,
Defiling everything they touched with filth,
And gave an obscene squawk amid the stench.
We tried again. In a secluded gorge
Under a cliffside, in thick shade of trees,
We set our tables up, relit our altars.
But the loud horde again, from another quarter,
Came out of hiding, swooped down on the prey
With hooked feet, hunched to feed, and spoiled our feast.

Oliver Wendell Holmes makes memorable use of the harpy image in his poem “Old Ironsides” about plans to turn the proud old warship into scrap metal:

The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

So think of DJT as a harpy, befouling everything he touches with filth. The only difference is that the harpies at least are defending their island from the Trojans. DJT is spoiling our feast simply to show us that he can.

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On Raccoons and Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2026

Monday

One of the things that stood out to me as I was reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was how life in India—at least as described in Kiran Desai’s novel—is constantly interacting with nature. Bandicoots in Goa steal bars of soap, and when one is taking a shower, tree frogs whiz “from wall to ceiling all over the bathroom, joyous in the wet.” Sonia must check her night water glass before drinking because she never knows if a moth will be found therein, and a few mosquitoes always find their way through the netting. Meanwhile, mold blossoms on walls during the monsoon season and leaks in roofs ruin books. Accustomed as many Americans are to sealing themselves off from nature, the difference is noticeable. 

Not that I myself have been feeling all that sealed. For a while we had woodpeckers attacking our house (they were after carpenter bees, we discovered), and squirrels were eating the siding. Periodically, there’s a power outage because squirrels have found a way into power boxes, and a rainy summer has meant that suddenly our kitchen is being invaded by tiny ants. In addition, twice a year hordes of Japanese ladybugs visit our house (I vacuum them up, sometimes forty or fifty at a time), which local farmers have imported to attack aphids.

The animal that is most attracting my attention, however, is a raccoon that has found its way into our supposedly raccoon-proof bird feeders. For years we’ve been feeding nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, five different varieties of woodpeckers, purple finches, grosbeaks, goldfinches, cowbirds, and cardinals, and I was proud that I had found feeders that would frustrate squirrels. Racoons, however, are an entirely different matter.

Demonstrating a combination of cleverness and acrobatic agility, these critters have frustrated every attempt to fend them off. At one point, after I had used wires to keep the feeders out of reach, they broke the wires. It appears that I will have to leave off feeding the birds—all but the hummingbirds—because the raccoons will not be denied. 

A recent Annie Lowrey article in The Atlantic helps me better understand the problem. The raccoons, she explains, 

are intelligent, having long memories and a knack for problem-solving. “If you give them a puzzle and change the rules, they go with it,” Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at UC Berkeley, told me. “They have this creativity.” On top of that, they are dexterous enough to shuck oysters, unscrew jars, unlatch gates, and pick knots.

Unlike other animals, raccoons tolerate close proximity to humans (I’ve noticed this with our raccoon), and in addition to birdseed and suet they love human food. They are also, according to a raccoon biologist interviewed for the article, “incredibly destructive”:

“They’re so smart compared to cats and dogs—wildly, wildly intelligent—and because of that, they are very, very hard to keep entertained.” Captive raccoons require specially designed, large enclosures and “puzzle after puzzle” to work on, she said. “They like textures, they like to pick at things, they like to tear things apart, and it’s fun for them.”

The article notes that, while they are half-domesticated already, they can never be fully domesticated. The idea of a domesticated raccoon made me think of a passage in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The prince is looking for a friend and approaches a fox, who informs him that they can only be friends if it is tamed:

“What does that mean– ‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

The fox then explains how it will benefit from being tamed:

“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”

Now, I am not interested in taming or domesticating this raccoon—I just want it to leave our feeders alone—nor do I think that the relationship we have developed is helping it move on beyond boredom. I now wonder, however, if the elaborate mechanisms I have set up to keep it at bay are a source of entertainment. Maybe it’s not only after the food.

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George Herbert: Joseph Story Prefigures Jesus

By Robin Bates | Published: August 8, 2026
Ottavio Vannini, Joseph and His Brothers

Sunday

Today in church I get to read the story of Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers. When I first read it over, I was startled to discover that the passage as it appears in the New Revised Standard Version says nothing about a coat of many colors, changing it to “a long robe with sleeves.” The other Old Testament option for Episcopal churches today contains a similar shock, changing the “still small voice” through which Elijah hears God to “a sound of sheer silence.” Even if both translations are more accurate, I miss the poetry of the King James Bible.

The coat, given to Joseph because his father loves him best, is only one of the reasons his brothers determine to kill him before choosing instead to sell him into slavery. The other is Joseph’s dream, later to be borne out, that his brothers will one day bow down before him. Below are the passages that indicate the father’s preference and what the brothers do:

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him….

So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, “Let us not take his life.” Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him” —that he might rescue him out of their hand and restore him to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it. 

Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers agreed. When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.

In his almost-sonnet “Joseph’s Coat” (almost because one line doesn’t rhyme), George Herbert identifies with Joseph, seeing his own illnesses casting him into a metaphorical pit. This is hitting hard at the moment as one of my dearest friends is currently fighting for his life with a severe heart condition, complicated by a MRSA infection. His lovely wife is asking us all to pray. As she texted me recently, “I keep saying over & over again, ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart & lean not upon your own understanding.’”

This is where Herbert arrives as well. As he sees it, the Joseph story prefigures the Jesus story, with a loving father losing his son to humanity but with that son returning unexpectedly to save us all. That is why the poet can say, “Wounded I sing, tormented I indite [write],/ Thrown down I fall into a bed, and rest.” Because he trusts in God he is able to write, “Sorrow hath chang’d its note: such is his will/ Who changeth all things, as him pleaseth best.”

Scholars have noted that Herbert could have easily found a word to rhyme with “indite,” such as “right” or “might.” “Will,” however, has a richer resonance for Herbert. Perhaps he’s thinking of Jesus at Gethsemane: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” By breaking with the rhyme expectation, Herbert calls attention to his choice. “Right” and “might” emphasize God’s power while “will” shows the power more responsive to our needs.

God could have ended his life before this, Herbert goes on to say, but “he hath spoil’d the race, and giv’n to anguish/ One of Joy’s coats.” It is as if, in his sickness, the poet has received the coat of many colors from his loving father and that coat is Joy. With it, he experiences relief, knowing that God is with him. If he has been granted life a little longer, it is so that he can linger and languish in God’s love. Whereas once his joys were turned to weeping, now his grief modulates into song.

Joseph’s Coat

Wounded I sing, tormented I indite,
Thrown down I fall into a bed, and rest:
Sorrow hath chang’d its note: such is his will
Who changeth all things, as him pleaseth best.
For well he knows, if but one grief and smart
Among my many had his full career,
Sure it would carry with it ev’n my heart,
And both would run until they found a bier
To fetch the body; both being due to grief.
But he hath spoil’d the race; and giv’n to anguish
One of Joy’s coats, ‘ticing it with relief
To linger in me, and together languish.
I live to shew his power, who once did bring
My joys to weep, and now my griefs to sing.

I dedicate today’s post to my friend and his wife. I love and feel for you both.

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Dr. Seuss and Escalating AI

By Robin Bates | Published: August 7, 2026
Dr. Seuss, illus. from Butter Battle Book

Friday

My English professor son, who like many in academe is grappling with AI, has found the right book to capture one pressing issue: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book.

Alongside an illustration from the book, Tobias Wilson-Bates posted on Bluesky,

The solution to AI cheating in the classroom cannot be buying into deeply flawed AI detection tools marketed by the same companies selling the AI being used for cheating in the first place.

The situation reminds me of an even more disturbing one imagined by Margaret Atwood in her dystopia Oryx and Crake. In it giant, unregulated pharmaceutical companies release deadly viruses into the population, which can only be cured by drugs they themselves are selling. Buy the drug or die. 

The Seuss illustration provided by Toby is of two weapons of war in an ongoing war between the Yooks and the Zooks. The Yook weapon hurls rocks while the Zook weapon catches them.

The rivalry stems from disagreements over which side of the toast should be buttered. As “Grandpa,” a former member of the Zook-Watching Border Patrol, explains to his grandson,

“But we Yooks, as you know,
when we breakfast or sup,
spread our bread,” Grandpa said,
“with the butter side up.
That’s the right, honest way!”
Grandpa gritted his teeth.
“So you can’t trust a Zook
who spreads bread underneath!
Every Zook must be watched!
He has kinks in his soul!”

Those familiar with Gulliver’s Travels may see an echo here of the Big Endians and Small Endians, who fight endless wars over which is the proper way to break an egg. Swift has in mind the bloody rivalries between Catholics and Protestants. According to Wikipedia, Seuss also drew inspiration from the Pope-related battles in medieval Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, where one side was accustomed to cutting their apples horizontally and the other vertically.

Seuss’s Yook-Zook rivalry is a reference to the decades-long U.S.-Soviet Union arms race, with Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense shield being the latest entry in that contest. I recall a 1960s column by political satirist Art Buchwald about missiles, anti-missiles, anti-anti-missiles, and anti-anti-anti-missiles in which one of these projectiles, becoming confused, shoots itself down.

So the AI that enables students to write papers that are not their own will be countered by AI that detects them doing so. Next we can anticipate programs that will evade detection systems, followed by programs designed to expose the evaders. The developers, meanwhile, make money each step of the way.

My son believes that we can’t look for technological fixes to this technological development and is increasingly having his students do much of their writing in class. For his part, my tennis partner and Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross has his creative writing classes write about work published in the Review, to which AI has been denied access.

Butter Battle imagines a different outcome, with each side developing technology so powerful that it will end all human life, the Bitsy Big-Boy-Boomeroo. As the two escalating forces approach each other, we get this warning in the book’s open conclusion:

 “Grandpa! I shouted. “Be careful!
Oh, gee!
Who’s going to drop it?
Will you . . . ? Or will he . . . ?
“Be patient,” said Grandpa. “We’ll see.
We will see . . . “

Will AI end learning as we know it? Will the massive AI centers swallow up all our personal information, even as they empty our aquifers and dramatically increase carbon pollution, thereby hastening climate change? Will AI change what it means to be human? We’ll see, we will see.

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On Pompeii, Hiroshima, and an Uncertain Future

By Robin Bates | Published: August 5, 2026
Pompeii imagined

Thursday

On this day 81 years ago, the United States destroyed Hiroshima and then, three days later, Nagasaki.  For years it seemed only a matter of time before other populations would be decimated as the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and (unofficially) Israel acquired the weapon.

Despite scares in the early 1960s and then again in the early 1980s, the world has been fortunate to escape a repeat. While we can’t be entirely sure that Trump will back down from his April threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” even he appears unwilling to go this far. For its part, Iran may figure that it doesn’t need nuclear weaponry now that it knows it can hold the world hostage by closing down the Strait of Hormuz.

To ward off complacency, however, we need artists reminding us of humanity’s ability to usher in the apocalypse by one push of a button. One of my favorite Hirsoshima poems is by Richard Tillinghast, whom I vaguely remember as a child when he was a student at Sewanee. It was written in August of 1962 as the Soviet Union was moving missiles into Cuba. triggering what would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. My father included it in his anthology Poems of War Resistance, published during the Vietnam War in 1969.

In the poem the poet is visiting Pompeii, which experienced its own apocalyptic annihilation in 79 A.D.  Looking out through the ruined portico of the Jupiter temple at blackberry vines as he thinks of Hiroshima, he perceives “a semblance of cycle”:

…in the wreck of the past,
In the dead fusion of marble and lava, the seed
Of new greenness begins.

The promise of this greenness, however, is mocked by a world that is threatened with nuclear warheads. Hope dies on the vine, as it were, with the poet reporting,

But the berries sour on my mouth.
Hot wind and cinder sun have frayed
The vines and wizened the sweetness of the berries’ growth…

The poem ends with an ominous allusion to Yeats’s rough beast stalking towards Jerusalem. In “The Second Coming,” we are waked from stony sleep while in Tillinghast’s poem, “all of Europe seems/To drowse here, dazed in the sun towards death.” There also may be an allusion to Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first test explosion: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Of as Tillinghast puts it, 

A new sun blots Vesuvius—
Of earth and sky, the old but the new destroyer.

When Trump recently promised Saudi Arabia nuclear technology in exchange for family favors, he threatened to undo the efforts of both Democratic and Republican administrations to reverse nuclear proliferation. “Ruins of the human mind,” the poet writes, “are tangled with stunted fruit of the future.”

It’s a grim warning but a necessary one.

A Poem on the Nuclear War, from Pompeii
By Richard Tillinghast

The August blackberries harden and sour.
Their vines rattle at a breath of volcanic dust
Through the portico of Jupiter Sator.

Plucked juicy from broken stone, the fruits suggest
A semblance of cycle. The principle could not be
More apparent; in the wreck of the past,

In the dead fusion of marble and lava, the seed
Of new greenness begins. But the berries sour on my mouth.
Hot wind and cinder sun have frayed

The vines and wizened the sweetness of the berries’ growth
Not only Pompeii, but all of Europe seems
To drowse here, dazed in the sun towards death.

It is a time of stopped time, when ruins
Of the human mind are tangled with stunted fruit
Of the future. A new sun blots Vesuvius—
Of earth and sky, the old but the new destroyer.

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Recognize Anyone in García Márquez’s Dictator?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 4, 2026

Wednesday

A Gabriel García Márquez passage shared by someone on Bluesky has sent me back to a novel I haven’t read since the 1980s but that suddenly seems disturbingly relevant. The dictator in Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) may be based on a compilation of South and Central American strongmen (Venezuela’s Juan Vincente Gómez, Haiti’s François Duvalier, Colombia’s Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo), but it disturbingly brings our own wannabe dictator to mind. Although DJT has not cooked up the body of one of his generals as a meal for those around him—not literally, at any rate— the general’s imprisoning 2000 innocent children lest they expose his fraudulent lottery scheme is closer to our reality than I would have thought possible ten years ago. (He then sinks them in a concrete barge.)

As a practitioner of magical realism, García Márquez can invent scenarios that, despite being fantastical, ring true. The dictator has been in power for 100 years, and with sentences that go on for pages, the novel reads like an unending fever dream—which is how Americans like me are experiencing DJT.  In debt to a United States that is propping up his regime, the unnamed dictator at one point must sell the Caribbean Sea, which the United States then imports to Arizona, leaving behind a desert waste. How different is this to Trump selling our national parks and coastlines to oil companies, which in turn are hastening catastrophic climate change. The America in Autumn of the Patriarch, meanwhile, reminds us of how our president salivates over Greenland, Venezuela and Cuba. 

As consolation for the loss of the sea, America provides Marquez’s dictator with large fans, which mimic the absent trade winds. As one review of the novel notes, “The ruler can counterfeit weather, but he cannot restore the world his power has emptied. The landscape becomes an inventory of political theft rather than a neutral setting.”

I turn to the novel’s last two pages, which capture the hollowness of absolute power. As with previous posts in which I have compared Trump to literary figures (especially to Lear), I must caution that García Márquez’s general is more complex and reflective than Trump so that he has some insight into the source of his sadness. Nevertheless, like Trump he thrashes around in unhappiness and lashes out in anger.

Also like Trump, the general has never known love, which he tries to compensate for by accumulating power and basking in the adulation of adoring crowds and of sycophants that use him while assuring him he will never die. In the following passage, I think the image of being the victim of his own sect may refer to his dependence on the cult he has fostered, which in its worship denies him his humanity (an “infinite holocaust”). The “little glass ball” may be an allusion to the snow globe of Citizen Kane, another character who never finds love: 

…he had learned of his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands [fortune tellers] and in the invisible code of the [Tarot] cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power, he had made himself victim of his own sect to be immolated on the flames of that infinite holocaust, he had fed on fallacy and crime, he had flourished in impiety and dishonor and he had put himself above his feverish avarice and his congenital fear [of death] only to keep up until the end of time the little glass ball in his hand without knowing that it was an endless vice the satiety of which generated its own appetite until the end of all times general sir, he had known since his beginnings that they deceived him in order to please him, that they collected from him by fawning on him, that they recruited by force of arms the dense crowds along his route with shouts of jubilation and venal signs of eternal life to the magnificent one who is more ancient than his age, but he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth [my emphasis], he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his power, that he was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to decipher the seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting  even too late that the one livable life was one of show, …

As opposed to a life of show that is his only option, the rest of us live real lives. And even though this life may have aging (yellow leaves), misfortune, and death, there are also “ungraspable instants of happiness” and real love:

…the one [life] we saw from this side which wasn’t his general sir, this poor people’s side with the trail of yellow leaves of our uncountable years of misfortune and our ungraspable instants of happiness, where love was contaminated by the seeds of death but was all love, general sir… 

Back to the general, who has been reduced to the tiny glimpses people get of him:

…where you yourself were only an uncertain vision of pitiful eyes through the dusty peepholes of the window of a train, only the tremor of some taciturn lips, the fugitive wave of a velvet glove on the no man’s hand of an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn’t any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever…

As this man flies through “the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death’s hooded cassock,” he is, for one final time, cut off from human joy. In this case, it is joy over his death and jubilation over a return to freedom:

…a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.

It’s a reminder that our present reality, whether through death or election cycle, will also come to an end. Perhaps accompanied by rockets of jubilation and bells of glory. 

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