Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, authoritarianism expert and Ukraine advocate, alerted me to the continuing importance of poetry in that country’s battle against Russia’s genocidal intentions. After all, as he points out, genocide
is not only about killing people, but about eliminating a culture, making it untenable by destroying the institutions that transmit it. Thus Russia burns books, steals museum artifacts, and bombs archives, libraries, and publishing houses. Russia deliberately destroyed the publishing houses in Kharkiv, including where one of my own books was being printed.
To achieve this end, Vladimir Putin appears to be willing to pour out the blood of his armies like water (to quote Queen Jadis in C.S. Lewis’s Magician’s Nephew). Snyder says that what Putin wants, as his missiles target civilians and civilian architecture in the northern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, is “to instill a certain view of life. Nothing good ever happens. Be afraid at all times. Undertake nothing new yourselves. Give up.”
It may be true, as Irish poet Seamus Heaney once observed, that “no lyric has ever stopped a tank,” but poetry can push back against cultural genocide. It is therefore heartening that Ukrainian writers, including writers serving in the armed forces, have been productive. Snyder mentions the “extraordinary” Karkhiv poet and novelist, Serhiy Zhadan, whom I highlight today. In “Take Only What Is Most Important,” Zhadan captures the refugee experience:
Take Only What Is Most Important By Serhiy Zhadan Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps
Take only what is most important. Take the letters. Take only what you can carry. Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver, Take the wooden crucifix and the golden replicas.
Take some bread, the vegetables from the garden, then leave. We will never return again. We will never see our city again. Take the letters, all of them, every last piece of bad news.
We will never see our corner store again. We will never drink from that dry well again. We will never see familiar faces again. We are refugees. We’ll run all night.
We will run past fields of sunflowers. We will run from dogs, rest with cows. We’ll scoop up water with our bare hands, sit waiting in camps, annoying the dragons of war.
You will not return and friends will never come back. There will be no smoky kitchens, no usual jobs, There will be no dreamy lights in sleepy towns, no green valleys, no suburban wastelands.
The sun will be a smudge on the window of a cheap train, rushing past cholera pits covered with lime. There will be blood on women’s heels, tired guards on borderlands covered with snow,
a postman with empty bags shot down, a priest with a hapless smile hung by his ribs, the quiet of a cemetery, the noise of a command post, and unedited lists of the dead,
so long that there won’t be enough time to check them for your own name.
The name on that list may be you, Zhadan tells his readers–which is another way of saying that we Ukrainians are all in this together. It’s a sentiment like that expressed by John Donne: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
By naming their plight, Zhadan gives people a sense of unified identity. They need not give in to solitary despair.
I recently came across an article in The Week about “27 of America’s most unexpectedly banned books.” “Unexpectedly” is a particularly apt adverb since, for many of the books, one would be hard-pressed to anticipate the objections.
That being said, however, I think many works of quality challenge readers to think outside of conventional boundaries—which means that there are few works of literature that won’t offend someone somewhere.
The article looks at censorship figures of the 2023-24 year. Apparently in the first half of that year, banning campaigns
eclipsed the entirety of the previous school year, according to the latest from the American Library Association. In the first six months of this school year, 4,349 books were banned, leading to more bans in fall 2023 than in the whole 2022-2023 school year.
I’ve written in the past about the banning of Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” so won’t touch on those. Here are the other books mentioned in the article that caught me by surprise:
–Edgar Rice Burroughs’sTarzan was banned in 1961 because there was “no evidence that Tarzan and Jane had married before they started cohabiting in the treetops.”
–the article believes that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was banned because (as a 1969 column in Ladies Home Journal opined), the book was “psychologically damaging for 3- and 4-year-olds.” Actually, I think certain people were unwilling to acknowledge child anger. The genius of Sendak’s book, I believe, is that it provides kids a healthy outlet for their tumultuous feelings—and also gives them a way to move past those feelings and reconcile with their parents.
–The banning of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, on the other hand, is just weird. According to The Week, it was deemed by a parents group in Kansas to be the work of the devil because it has two talking animals, with the result that it was subsequently barred from classrooms. The group’s central complaint was that “humans are the highest level of God’s creation, as shown by the fact we’re ‘the only creatures that can communicate vocally. Showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God.’”
But if one is going to ban books with animals that can talk with humans (or spell like humans), there go the Freddy the Pig books, the Narnia Books, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, the Paddington books, Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass books, and on and on and on.
–Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach was “banned in Wisconsin in 1999 because of concerns the spider licking its lips could be interpreted as sexual.”
–Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was “banned from shelves because its titular character is, well, a spy. Some schools blocked Louise Fitzhugh’s book from shelves when it came out in the 1960s because of concerns that the 11-year-old child’s penchant for peeping on her neighbors, jotting down her brutally honest observations, and being generally disagreeable could negatively influence kids by setting a bad example.”
I wonder, however, if it is less Harriet’s disagreeable nature that offended censors and more her (possible) lesbian leanings. Perhaps adult readers sensed this. Queer teens certainly did, which helps explain why they were drawn to Harriet.
–And here’s a banned book that, in my recently released Better Living through Literature, I predicted could happen–only to discover that it already has happened. In 1996 schools in Merrimack, New Hampshire pulled Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, determining that its “jolly cross-dressing and fake-same-sex romance” violated the district’s ‘prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction.’” As I write in my book,
Although Shakespeare generally flies under the radar of conservative parents (with the exception of a Florida school district that banned Romeo and Juliet), that’s in part because many teachers fail to unleash his full potential to challenge various assumptions. If they did, the Bard might well join Morrison on banned book lists.
Imagine Twelfth Night: or What You Will (1601-02) being taught in such a way as to foreground its strong gender identity themes, which fascinate young people struggling to make sense of who they are. In the comedy, we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity. If teachers did more to advertise the play as a chance to explore gender identity, inviting students to explore their feelings about each of these characters, they could well generate new excitement amongst students, including some who would otherwise groan over a Shakespeare reading assignment.
–With the rise (thanks to encouragement from Donald Trump) of white supremacy and neo-fascism, I’m thinking that the real reason for banning the graphic novel version of Diary of Anne Frank and Art Spiegelman’s Maus might be more nefarious than the fact that there are naked statues in the one and a picture of a naked woman (a Holocaust victim) in the second. Could there be Holocaust denial at work, just as there has been an attempt to erase African American history from certain southern schools? And if the seeds of fascism have been present in the culture for a while, maybe that’s why the Alabama State Textbook Committee wanted to reject Diary of Anne Frank in 1983, decreeing it to be “a real downer.”
A central thesis of Better Living through Literature is that great literature is constantly threatening to shake the foundations of this belief or that system, so we need never be surprised when people target it. What may be more surprising is how long it has taken certain censors to get around to banning certain books. Some speculate that the pandemic, when parents saw up close what their children were learning, may provide some explanation.
Then again, the cause may lie in how Trumpism has encouraged reactionary bullies to go after teachers and schools. If education is about preparing students for a new and constantly changing world, then anyone who wants us to return to the past is going to be automatically threatened by works that train us to think deeply and critically.
The lesson here is never be complacent or take reading for granted. People have had to fight for literature throughout history, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think we are automatically exempt.
I’m fascinated by Sara Teasdale’s “The Sanctuary,” largely because of the way it invokes, in ten simple lines, a compelling vision of inner peace. And then there’s its concluding punchline, which seems to invert how we normally think of things. It feels Buddhist in the calm way it imagines us interacting with our tumultuous, sorrow-filled world:
The Sanctuary By Sara Teasdale
If I could keep my innermost Me Fearless, aloof and free Of the least breath of love or hate, And not disconsolate At the sick load of sorrow laid on men; If I could keep a sanctuary there Free even of prayer, If I could do this, then, With quiet candor as I grew more wise I could look even at God with grave forgiving eyes.
Rather than being a plaything of strong emotions or feeling weighed down by the sorrows of the world, the poet look to become more wise. It so happens that this desire lines up with one of today’s Old Testament liturgy readings. The passage from Book of Wisdom (a.k.a. The Wisdom of Solomon) itself reads as a poem:
For wisdom is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets; for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail.
She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well. (Wisdom 7:26–8:1)
If God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom, why does Teasdale reject prayer (which is how we talk with God) or say that she can “look even at God with grave forgiving eyes.” I suspect she is actually rejecting how we use prayer to get things God to blame things on. The Biblical passage seems closer to what she has in mind as she contends that Wisdom passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God. If we feel that God has wronged us and needs forgiveness, that’s okay with God because God is the spirit of forgiveness. God wants us to step into that Wisdom that “is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars.” Different people will get there in different ways.
After all, as Dante informs us at the conclusion of Paradiso, we are rolled ever onward by the Love that moves the sun and other stars.
Having long been interested in literary humor—I actually prefer Shakespeare’s comedies to his tragedies—I today apply my knowledge to election jokes and to the phenomenon of laughter. Last month GOP V-P nominee J.D. Vance “joked” that Kamala Harris’s interview with CNN’s Dana Bash was like the meltdown suffered 17 years ago by a Miss Teen America contestant. In response to the Harris interview, Vance posted a clip of 18-year-old Caitlin “Caite” Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, freezing up. To this he added the comment, ““BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”
When told that Upton had been traumatized by the incident to such extent that she considered suicide, Vance refused to apologize or take back his “joke.” Instead, he doubled down, complaining that “politics has gotten way too lame” and “way too boring” and that “you can have some fun while making a good argument to the American people about how you’re going to improve their lives.” He also said,
I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke, but I wish the best for Caitlin. I hope that she’s doing well. And again, what I’d say is, one bad moment shouldn’t define anybody, and the best way to deal with this stuff is to laugh at ourselves.
When I used to teach “Couples Comedy in the British Restoration and 18th Century,” I would have the students read different theories of comedy. The most applicable to Vance’s joke is Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), who saw comedy as a blood sport. Some people laugh, he wrote, when they apprehend “some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.” He observed that these individuals, who are “conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves,” laugh at “the imperfections of other men” in order “to keep themselves in their own favor.”
In other words, people often laugh at others when they are insecure, using humor to bolster their egos. Laughter gives them a way to feel superior.
One instance of such laughter that haunts me to this day is Donald Trump mimicking reporter Serge Kovaleski during the 2016 campaign. Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital condition affecting the joints called arthrogryposis, had disputed Trump’s false claims that thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated the 9-11 attacks. Trump reported that he confronted the reporter, getting him to back down. “Now the poor guy, you gotta see this guy,” Trump told a rally crowd as he pantomimed Kovalesky, stuttering and flailing his arms around. While he later claimed he didn’t know about the reporter’s condition, it was still classic bully behavior. I had a clear picture of what Trump must have been like as a teenager.
Vance’s joke is not so egregious but it is related. He finds it funny that a contestant would freeze up—most of us would feel sorry for the teenager—and by applying the clip to Harris, he gets to feel look down at both women.
Cruel humor seems to be a thing in the GOP. Since Trump amplified the blood libel that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets—a claim that echoes Nazi antisemitic propaganda (although The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Der Stũrmer reported Jews sacrificing Christian children rather than cats and dogs)—the Arizona GOP has been posting billboards playing off the Chick-fil-A ad campaign where cows try to steer consumers towards chicken and away from beef. In this case, however, the message, using the distinctive Chick-Fil-A script, reads, “Eat less kittens. Vote Republican.”
The humor relies on demonizing a vulnerable population. In so doing, it violates one of Jonathan Swift’s central precepts about comic satire, which is that you should never hit down, only up.
Another GOP joke, which Trump shared on social media, shows a picture of Hilary Clinton and Harris together, along with the caption, “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” Harris, it is implied, owes her success to once having once had a relationship with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.
Now, I grant that hardball humor has always been a part of politics. Some have pointed out that what we find funny depends on whose ox is being gored. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” But humor that aims to assert dominance is always problematic.
In my course, I would counterpose Hobbes’s theory with that of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who saw comedy as a means of establishing community. It’s the difference between laughing at and laughing with, between aggressive laughter and empathetic laughter. Kamala Harris’s laughter is empathetic whereas Donald Trump doesn’t so much laugh as sneer. When I see Trump curl his lips as he goes after one of his targets, I think of a line from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones describing the villain Blifil:
“I see, sir, now,” said Blifil, with one of those grinning sneers with which the devil marks his best beloved…
In case you’re interested, I see Hobbesian laughter more at work in the comedies written during the late 17th century Restoration period, by such playwrights as William Wycherley, George Farquhar, and Aphra Behn and poet John Wilmot. Their rambunctious plays feature predatory rakes whom hypocritical society can barely contain. From there my Couples Comedy class would shift to the softer and more sentimental works of the 18th century. Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Tom Jones, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, Fanny Burney’s Evelina, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility are Shaftesburian rather than Hobbesian.
One reason people have been falling in love with Kamala Harris’s laughter is because it’s such a reprieve from Trump’s angry performance art. Her laughter opens its arms to include others, not beat them down.
There haven’t been many times when I’ve seen such a public beatdown as that administered by Kamala Harris Tuesday night in the presidential debate. What the Democratic nominee did to Donald Trump reminded me of Goneril and Regan taking apart King Lear.
There are limitations to the parallel of course. While I’ve compared Trump to Lear multiple times in the past (links to some of those posts appear at the end of this essay), the situation here is very different. After all, Trump did not step down voluntarily from the throne, nor is Harris a resentful inheritor using her newly-gained power to settle decades of stored-up grudges. Harris, in short, is no Goneril or Regan (although Trump probably experienced her as such in the course of the debate).
That being noted, however, by the end of the debate Harris—like Lear’s daughters—had turned her antagonist into a sputtering toddler, throwing out wild accusations to hurt her as he was being hurt. The result was, as David Corn noted in a Mother Jones article, the vice-president made Trump appear “small, vindictive, mean-spirited, and old.” I half expected him, once the debate had ended, to flee the scene and start ranting in a rainstorm, a metaphor for his inner turmoil.
To recap the play, Lear, seeking to retire from kingship without surrendering any of its perks, has divided it between the two daughters who tell him what he wants to hear while disinheriting the daughter who tells him what he needs to hear. Then, expecting to be treated as though he were still king, he and 100 retainers essentially move into Goneril’s basement apartment and start partying it up.
She, in response, begins to systematically strip him of his dignity. First, she instructs her steward Oswald to disrespect him. Then she starts working on him herself: she begs him to reduce the number of retainers while at the same time noting that the request could morph into a command: she has the power to take, to “disquantity” or reduce, the number of his followers. Then, she hits his sore spot, essentially telling him that he should act his age. Instead of carousing with young rowdies, he should befriend companions who are suitable to his time of life.
In short, she makes him feel old, which is one of his deepest fears:
Be then desired, By her that else will take the thing she begs, A little to disquantity your train, And the remainders that shall still depend To be such men as may besort your age, Which know themselves and you.
If her intent is to trigger her father into flying into a rage and walking out, she succeeds. First, however, Lear launches into a brutal misogynistic attack, which is what men will often do when threatened by a woman: he curses Goneril, saying that he hopes her womb will dry up. One can’t imagine a nastier attack:
Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility. Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her.
As Harris has begun to overtake Trump in the polls, he too has turned to sexist attacks, just as he did with Hillary Clinton, Meghan Kelly, and other powerful women. His lowest blow came when he shared a tweet that Harris has “spent her whole damn life down on her knees.” The reference is to a relationship she had many years ago with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, which Harris’s rightwing enemies say is the reason for her rise. Some have worn sweatshirts with the derisive logo, “Joe and the Ho.”
If the purpose of Goneril’s remarks is to drive Lear away, they are successful as he storms off to her sister. Regan, however, is equally adept at triggering her father and tells him that she agrees with her sister that he is old and should behave accordingly:
O sir, you are old. Nature in you stands on the very verge Of his confine. You should be ruled and led By some discretion that discerns your state Better than you yourself.
Between them, the sisters succeed in stripping Lear of every one of his companions, who are important to his identity as a former king. Perhaps it’s as if a president stepped in and took away his predecessor’s security detail in the most humiliating way possible. When Regan insists that Lear reduce his retinue to 25, he turns back to Goneril, who has initially seemed agreeable to having 50. Then the following happens:
LEAR [to Goneril]: I’ll go with thee. Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty, And thou art twice her love. GONERIL: Hear me, my lord. What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five, To follow in a house where twice so many Have a command to tend you? REGAN What need one?
This tag team humiliation in the end has Trump behaving like a little child issuing impotent threats:
No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things— What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the Earth! You think I’ll weep. No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I’ll weep.
For his turn, Trump’s go-to temper tantrum involved the world criminals streaming into America to commit crimes, Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, World War III, America trashed, etc.
The difference between Harris and Goneril and Regan is that she is not operating in a monarchy or a dysfunctional family. She has no reason to cater to an old man’s tyranny. Indeed, by exposing him as a narcissistic tyrant with no impulse control, she is doing us all a favor. The public can see one of the presidential candidates for what he really is.
Political scientist John Stoehr of Editorial Board notes that Harris has done what no one else has proved capable of doing: she has exposed Trump’s ego as glass that can be shattered. Like Goneril and Regan depriving Lear of the followers who are critical to his self-worth, Harris has taken away Trump’s “ability to dominate and control, and to create a spectacle in the process.” Take those away, Stoehr says, and there’s nothing left:
She controlled the man who is said to be uncontrollable. She tamed him. She neutered him. They say he’s a bull in a china shop? Well, last night was nutting season. And she did all this by telling the truth, addressing the American people directly with appeals to democracy, decency, and the rule of law, and using his own insults against him.
She called him weak.
She called him confused and boring.
She suggested he was old.
Most painful of all, for Trump, she seemed to pity him.
Even if Trump manages to win the election, Stoehr contends, he will never recover from this blow.
In Lear’s case, being brought low has a redemptive turn. For the first time in his selfish, lonely life he learns what love is. Tragic though the play is, there is this amazing breakthrough.
I don’t know if Trump is capable of such a discovery. But if Lear is any indication, it will only occur if he suffers a reversal of fortune. If, instead, he is reelected president, expect more of the same.
I recently came across an article that references W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which reminded me that many people turned to it 23 years ago on this day. Auden was writing about something even more momentous, the day that Hitler set off World War II with his invasion of Poland, and the poet floundering as he grasps for hope is one thing that made the poem seem so timely 62 years later. Revisiting how it resurfaced in 2001 is one way of recalling what Americans were feeling after the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked.
First, however, let me explain the recent reference. Tufts history professor David Ekbladh uses Auden’s phrase “low dishonest decade” to make the point that our situation in 2024 may be closer to Auden’s than we think. Just as authoritarianism was on the rise in the 1930s, so we today are also seeing assaults on democratic rule. “To a critical eye,” Edbladh writes, “the world [today] looks less like the structured competition of that Cold War and more like the grinding collapse of world order that took place during the 1930s.” He fears that we too may be heading towards liberal democracy’s demise.
On this happy note, I turn to what people experienced on that September day on 2001. To capture his own feelings, Scott Simon of National Public Radio read for his audience the following excerpts from Auden’s poem:
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night. …
Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. …
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
Poet Eric McHenry, writing about the poem nine days later in Slate, noted that poetry is meant for occasions like this. When we get “nothing but cant from public figures and TV personalities,” he pointed out, “people crave language that’s as precise as their pain.”
Simon quotes the parts of the poem that are the most immediately applicable, leaving out some of the history that Auden invokes. This includes the following passage, which is a reference to the Greek historian who recorded the the catastrophic rise of those demagogues that contributed to the end of Athens’ democratic experiment:
Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
Having just finished watching Trump debating Kamala Harris, I have to say that “elderly rubbish” sounds about right for dictators (or at least this wannabe dictator). And “habit-forming pain” is another way of capturing how we’ve managed to normalize him, the way that an abused women normalizes her husband’s violence.
Another passage that catches McHenry’s attention is Auden’s reference to “blind skyscrapers” that “use their full height to proclaim/ The strength of Collective Man.” To the hijackers, the Twin Towers seemed to signal America flexing its muscles before the world, which is one reason why they chose them. In bringing them down, therefore, they managed to undermine Americans’ easy self-confidence—just as, in recent years, Trump has undermined our easy confidence that the guardrails of our democracy would ultimately save us:
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream. Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong.
In the face of Hitler’s invasion, Auden resolves to “show an affirming flame.” Following 9-11, America too came together (although, granted, not with positive results as George W. Bush used our euphoria over new-found unity to steer us into an insane and unjust war). Today, we can once again refuse to surrender to “negation and despair.” Looking back over last night’s presidential debate, where Harris was clearly on the offense while Trump was in a defensive crouch, there’s hope that (to use one of her expressions) we might finally be turning the page on Trumpism.
Further thought: Auden later disavowed the poem and refused for the longest time to allow anthologies to include it. For instance, in retrospect he thought the line “We must love one another or die”–which he coined when he was desperately looking for solace–was hopelessly naive. After all, we are going to die anyway. But in the poem’s defense, there are different ways of dying and one is forgetting that love is still an option even in the most perilous of times. McHenry makes the good point that Auden is frustrated that language, even the language of poetry, couldn’t do justice to the moment and so turned his back on this attempt.
The frustation is common amongst great poets. As Shakespeare as Theseus say in Midsummer Night’s Dream (he’s being generous about the wretched play the wedding party is watching) that even “the best of this kind are but shadows.” And if Shakespeare, who did in fact write “the best of this kind,” is dissatisfied, what help for the rest of us. But his point is that no artistic creation can live up to vision a poet has in his or her mind. What’s important is that Auden’s poem brought deep comfort to us at a time when we needed deep comfort. At that moment, his dissatisfaction with it was irrelevant.
A Nick Romeo article in the latest New Yorker makes a compelling case that economists should be reading literature. Or at least they should be reading Leo Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” a short story about a peasant-turned-land owner who spends so much energy trying to amass ever more property that he ends up killing himself.
In the end, the amount he needs is a “six feet from head to his heels”—which is to say, enough to bury him in.
Here’s the situation. The man, who starts off as a poor peasant but finds ways to steadily amass wealth and land, comes upon what seems like an incredible deal: for the tiny price of 1000 rubles, he can have as much land as he can cover in a day of walking. But as the chief of the tribe tells him, “there is one condition: If you don’t return on the same day to the spot whence you started, your money is lost.”
You can imagine what happens next. Every time that the man prepares to return to that original spot, he sees another desirable plot that he can’t imagine not having. All of which leads to this:
Pahom looked at the sun, which had reached the earth: one side of it had already disappeared. With all his remaining strength he rushed on, bending his body forward so that his legs could hardly follow fast enough to keep him from falling. Just as he reached the hillock it suddenly grew dark. He looked up–the sun had already set. He gave a cry: “All my labor has been in vain,” thought he, and was about to stop, but he heard the Bashkirs still shouting, and remembered that though to him, from below, the sun seemed to have set, they on the hillock could still see it. He took a long breath and ran up the hillock. It was still light there. He reached the top and saw the cap. Before it sat the Chief laughing and holding his sides. Again Pahom remembered his dream, and he uttered a cry: his legs gave way beneath him, he fell forward and reached the cap with his hands.
“Ah, what a fine fellow!” exclaimed the Chief. “He has gained much land!”
Pahom’s servant came running up and tried to raise him, but he saw that blood was flowing from his mouth. Pahom was dead!
Why is this essential reading for economists? Romeo explains that our view of economics has become so distorted that we’ve all become Pahoms. While economists like Maynard Keynes once believed that “many major topics of economics are inescapably moral and political” and that “a master-economist” must be “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher,” that changed in the 1950s. That’s when Milton Friedman argued that economics could be “an ‘objective’ science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences.” As a result, ethical and political questions were sidelined and economists began deploying “a technocratic, quasi-scientific vocabulary.”
“From this perspective,” Romeo writes, “the moral evaluations of Keynes, Tolstoy, or anyone else are irrelevant.”
I note in passing that something comparable happened to literary criticism in the 1950s. Instead of looking at how, say, literature can enrich and improve our lives, the formalist critics focused on studying texts the way scientists study natural phenomena. Morality and moral impact appeared irrelevant.
The result of stripping morality out of economics has been severe. The “pose of scientific impartiality,” Romeo writes,
allows mainstream economists to smuggle all sorts of dubious claims—that economic growth requires high inequality, that increasing corporate concentration is inevitable, or that people can only be motivated to work by desperation—into policy and discourse. This becomes an excuse for maintaining the status quo, which is presented as the result of inevitable and immutable “laws.” In the famous phrase of Margaret Thatcher, “There is no alternative.”
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Romeoo says that we can marry economics and morality
by adopting economic models and policies that give tangible reality to the otherwise empty platitude that a better world is possible. Initiatives such as participatory budgeting, climate budgeting, job guarantees, employee ownership, true prices, genuine living wages, a public utility-style job market for irregular labor, less dogmatic economics education and new investment-capital models that decrease wealth inequality are all powerful elements of a more just and sustainable economy.
Romeo adds that all of these already exist. “There’s no stronger response to charges of utopianism,” he declares, “than showing models that are already working.”
One of the values of a liberal arts education is that students are required to leave disciplinary silos and make connections across disciplines. Having economics majors read Tolstoy is one way to get them to grapple with the moral dimensions of their specialty, just as having literature majors take economics forces them to grapple with how money works. Everyone benefits.
The current Australian drought may be worst in 800 years
Monday
Although we’re not hearing much about climate change in this year’s election, global warming is not going away. Last week Phoenix extended its record-setting pace of consecutive days over 100ºF (37.78ºC), with the 100th day clocking in at 111ºF (43.89ºC). I am put in mind of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, where we see a group of people journeying out into space because earth has become uninhabitable.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel within a novel, with Doerr having made up a work of fantasy by 2nd century Greek author Antonius Diogenes (who himself is real). Diogenes wrote a novel, The Wonders Beyond Thule, but it is has been lost to time. All we have is a synopsis of it by another writer.
The novel that Doerr imagines Diogenes to have written is a comic account of a man who wants to be transformed into a bird so that he can visit a bird utopia in the clouds—but who, through a series of mishaps, is instead transformed first into a much-abused ass and then into a hunted fish. We see the work survive the fall of Constantinople, make its way to Italy and the Vatican library, get performed by school children in 20th century Idaho, and then bolster a 22nd century girl, who is the sole survivor of a viral outbreak on the spaceship .
For his account of climate change’s impact, Doerr has drawn on Bill McKibben’s book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? In the case of space traveler Konstance, prolonged drought has destroyed her father’s family farm. With nothing else to do as she barrels through space, she begins researching the Diogenes novel to figure out how it got into the hands of her father and through him to her. The ship’s computer, operating like an advanced Siri with access to all the world’s libraries, shows her images of the drought-stricken landscape that her father left behind:
The Earth flies toward her, inverts, the southern hemisphere pivoting as it rushes closer, and she drops from the sky onto a road line with eucalyptus. Bronze hills bake in the distance; white fencing runs down both sides. A trio of faded banners, strung overhead, reads,
DO YOUR PART DEFEAT DAY ZERO YOU CAN DO WITH 10 LITRES A DAY
As the computer takes her to the family homestead, she sees the damage that the drought has wrought: “Only one green year in the past thirteen.” The sight of the ravaged farm helps her better understand her father’s decision to leave:
Her father applied to join the crew when he was twelve, advanced through the application process for a year. At age thirteen—the same age Konstance is now—he would have received the call. Surely he understood that he would never live long enough to reach Beta Oph2? That he would spend the resto of his life inside a machine. Yet he left anyway.
It’s a fantasy to think that space travel will save us from ourselves, as Doerr’s book makes clear. It’s either this world or nothing. Or as Frost puts it, “Earth’s the right place for love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
I won’t spoil the novel by talking about what happens next. What I loved about Cloud Cuckoo Land is the way that a work of literature—and a comic one at that—can have a profound impact throughout the centuries. Doerr’s shows his novel within his novel providing solace to a little girl in the final days of Constantinople, helping her develop a relationship with an Ottoman ox-cart driver (who saves her from slavery), rejuvenating a lonely homosexual living in rural Idaho, keeping up the morale of Idaho school children when they are endangered by an eco-terrorist, and supporting an orphan in outer space.
As an added bonus, Cloud Cuckoo Land is yet another literary warning about the threat posed by climate change, joining such works as Margaret Atwood’s Oryk and Crake trilogy, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.
Further thought: It so happens that as I was writing today’s post, reader Patty R sent me an article about Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, in which appears a passage that applies to Doerr imagining what Diogenes might have written. Thomasina is heartbroken when she learns about all the books that were lost when the fabled library of Alexandria burned down but her tutor offers him some comfort:
Thomasina: Oh Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?”\
Septimus: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, and nineteen from Euripedes, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.
The weather seems to have finally changed, and as I look at the fading flowers on our deck, I think of George Herbert’s description of himself as a nipped blossom hanging discontented.
“Denial” is one of many poems in which the poet laments his inability to experience God’s presence. Although he wears out his knees praying, the poet says, God does not appear to hear him. Instead, like the stricken flower or like an untuned and unstrung instrument that lies forgotten in a corner, Herbert feels abandoned, his breast “full of fear and disorder.”
Among the multiple metaphors he uses for his disconsolate state is a brittle bow that flies asunder when the archer draws it back, with the arrow going who knows where. We’ve all experienced those moments when we cannot focus our mind—“the monkey mind,” some call it– and Herbert reports that some of his “bent thoughts” “would to pleasures go,/ Some to the wars and thunder/ Of alarms.” In other words, sometimes he is distracted by illicit desires, sometimes by various worries.” I can certainly relate.
On Herbert’s use of the bow metaphor, it’s useful to remember that the word “sin,” as used by both the Hebrews and the Greeks, was originally an archery term meaning to miss the mark. The poet’s words are not hitting their mark, although the poet partly accuses God for the problem. Herbert’s devotions cannot pierce God’s silent ears.
Why should God “give dust a tongue” and then refuse to hear the tongue crying out, Herbert wonders despairingly and perhaps even angrily.
Having so vented, however, the poet concludes by assuring us that his untuned, unstrung instrument has been mended and that he can finally be at one with the divine. Perhaps we need to vent a bit before we can get right with God, which is certainly the theme of Herbert’s well-known poem “The Collar.”
In any event, each stanza of “Denial” until the last one has ended on a discordant note, with the final word landing like a wrong note, rhyming with nothing that has come before. The last stanza, however, ends with a rhyming couplet, like a chord resolving itself. God has answered the poet’s request.
Denial By George Herbert
When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent ears, Then was my heart broken, as was my verse; My breast was full of fears And disorder.
My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, Did fly asunder: Each took his way; some would to pleasures go, Some to the wars and thunder Of alarms.
“As good go anywhere,” they say, “As to benumb Both knees and heart, in crying night and day, Come, come, my God, O come! But no hearing.”
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue To cry to thee, And then not hear it crying! All day long My heart was in my knee, But no hearing.
Therefore my soul lay out of sight, Untuned, unstrung: My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipped blossom, hung Discontented.
O cheer and tune my heartless breast, Defer no time; That so thy favors granting my request, They and my mind may chime, And mend my rhyme.
