On Atkinson, Trollope, and Death

By Robin Bates | Published: December 23, 2024
Novelist Anthony Trollope


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Monday

I’m a newcomer to the fiction of Kate Atkinson, whose novels I’ve just discovered. Among the pleasures I get from reading this author of period pieces and unconventional crime novels is her use of literary allusions. There’s a certain satisfaction in being able to identify the passages she sprinkles liberally through her books.

She does something special with these allusions in A God in Ruins, a sequel of sorts to Life after Life. In both novels she follows the fortunes of the Todd family, including favorite child Teddy. Teddy grows up to become a revered bomber pilot during World War II, miraculously surviving when his plane is shot down over Berlin. He is interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, then returns to live a quiet life as nature writer and reporter for a rural newspaper. In the end, he relives his harrowing war experiences as he is expiring of old age in a nursing home.

What I find special in God in Ruins is how Atkinson uses past literature to capture Teddy’s death. There is, first of all, her call out to Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, which first Teddy and then his granddaughter turn to in his last days and hours. Then she begins citing fragments from many poems, using them as T.S. Eliot uses scraps of literature to make sense of a senseless world (and what seems more senseless to us than our death?). “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot writes in Waste Land.

First to Trollope, which Teddy’s beloved granddaughter Bertie reads to him in his final hours. Julia and I did the same with my mother. While we didn’t read Trollope, we perhaps should have given that he was my mother’s favorite novelist.

If Atkinson gives prominence to Trollope in God in Ruins, it’s perhaps because his depictions of  multigenerational families in rural England, who are sometimes described lovingly and sometimes satirized, provide a model for her own writing. The first reference to Trollope occurs when Teddy learns that he is being interviewed by “the warden” of a nursing home he doesn’t want to retire to, which prompts him to think of The Warden, the first of the Chronicles of Barsetshire series. While warden Septimus Harding, a lovely character, bears no resemblance to the warden in the nursing home, his decency and kindness have a lot in common with Teddy.

Later in God in Ruins, we find Teddy turning to Trollope after a bout of pneumonia. His daughter Viola discovers “that he’d been reading the first chapter of Barchester Towers [the second book in the series] over and over again, looping round and coming to it fresh each time.”

Is it sad or is it wonderful that the book is constantly refreshed?

Then, in the final hours of Teddy’s life, we learn that granddaughter Bertie

had brought a copy of the Last Chronicle of Barset with her and sat by Teddy’s bedside reading to him. She knew it was one of his favorite books and she supposed it didn’t matter much whether or not he could understand the words because it might be soothing for him to read the familiar rhythms of Trollope’s prose.

Could Atkinson be thinking of the passage in Last Chronicle when Harding’s daughters are sitting by his own deathbed:

During the whole of the morning Mrs. Arabin and Mrs. Grantly were with their father, and during the greater part of the day there was absolute silence in the room. He seemed to sleep; and they, though they knew that in truth he was not sleeping, feared to disturb him by a word.

And a little later:

“It is so sweet to have you both here,” he said, when he had been lying silent for nearly an hour after the child had gone. Then they got up, and came and stood close to him. “There is nothing left for me to wish, my dears;—nothing”…

There was no violence of sorrow in the house that night; but there were aching hearts, and one heart so sore that it seemed that no cure for its anguish could ever reach it. “He has always been with me,” Mrs. Arabin said to her husband, as he strove to console her. “It was not that I loved him better than Susan, but I have felt so much more of his loving tenderness. The sweetness of his voice has been in my ears almost daily since I was born.”

When my mother was dying, she didn’t share any last words, but I found myself thinking about all that she was, all that she had done, and all she had meant to those who loved her. And I thought of her deep love of literature, which gave her special resonance in how she saw the world and interacted with it.

I’ll have more on how Atkinson uses literature to negotiate the byways of death in tomorrow’s post.

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Meek and Mild Mary? Think Again

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2024
Pontormo, Visitation

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Sunday

For our Advent Study, our church read Mary of Nazareth: The Mother of Jesus as Remembered by the Earliest Christians by Christopher Bryan, who used to teach at the School of Theology here in Sewanee. Bryan takes issue with those who see Mary as meek and mild.

After all, this is a woman who was willing to question an angel before going along with the plan and who undertook a 175 kilometer journey to consult with her cousin Elizabeth (who was carrying the future John the Baptist) when she herself was newly pregnant. Her “Magnificat,” meanwhile, has inspired the Liberation Theology movement. Here’s her declaration, which is also today’s Gospel reading:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

This, as one liberation theologian cited by Bryan, observes,

is a concrete manner in which to live the gospel: inspired by the Holy Spirit, and in solidarity with all people before the Lord. In this sense the Magnificat is a pattern for every prayer, every praise of God; at the same time it is one of the New Testament texts with the most strongly political and liberating content. It calls on us to take the words totally concretely and to fight against oppression in order to take seriously the Lord of history.

Bryan isn’t the only one to challenge the characterization of Mary as “meek and mild.” As Denise Levertov observes in  “Annunciation,”

                               No one mentions
courage.

       The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
         God waited.

She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

And further on:

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’
Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
                                                       raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
                                  consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
                               and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
              courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

Bryan observes that Mary not only obeys and is faithful but is “eager and diligent” in pursuing the meaning of her pregnancy, which is why she journeys to see Elizabeth. “Nowhere in Israel’s entire Scripture and records of God’s servants,” he adds, “is there an acceptance quite so powerful and unqualified as this.”

He also quotes C.S. Lewis, who notes that in Mary we find “a fierceness, even a touch of Deborah, mixed with the sweetness in the Magnificat to which most painted Madonnas do little justice.” Theologian Ann Loades, meanwhile, points out,

A woman who will quiz an archangel, give her (rapturous? enthusiastic?) assent, or agreement to the divine spirit working within her, risk scandal and single parenthood is, one might think, something of a risk-taker, and by no means a model of submission, subordination and passivity.”

“Mary, bravest of all humans.”

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An Owl Poem for Winter Solstice

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2024
Great-horned owl


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Friday

Here’s a Mary Oliver poem to mark the winter solstice, which occurs tomorrow. For the poet, connecting with nature is always an ecstatic experience. She’s not interested in naming and analyzing the natural world but instead simply losing herself in it. 

Or as she puts it, “I love this world, but not for its answers.”

Snowy Night
By Mary Oliver

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

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The Green Knight and Plague Fears

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2024
Julek Heller, illus. from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight


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Thursday

This past week I gave a Sunday Forum talk at our church on how (I believe) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a response to the Black Plague. Since we ourselves suffered from a plague recently (albeit one far less deadly), I find it valuable to explore how literature comes to our aid at such moments.

The Black Plague, also known as the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague, was one of history’s greatest natural disasters, killing an estimated 40-60% of the European population when it struck in 1348-50. It was followed up by a second plague in 1361-62, this time killing 20% of the survivors. This means that the anonymous author of Sir Gawain, which we think appeared around 1375, would have had either firsthand or secondhand experience with the plague.

Yet despite going through this hellish nightmare, he managed to compose an Arthurian romance with a compelling story, memorable characters, gorgeous nature imagery, and a wondrous sense of humor. His aim, as I see it, was to reconnect his audience with the natural world, about which they had understandably become leery. He realized that the defense mechanisms that society had set up to guard against this natural disaster had hollowed people out. For instance, there was a rise of flagellant movements and of pogroms massacring Jews. People came to view God as a savage punisher rather than a savior, and many rejected this world in favor of the next one.

There was also a surge of interest in England’s pagan past, especially in the Green Man, a Celtic fertility god. Indeed, Christianity had never entirely displaced this deity, which can be found carved into medieval churches all over England. The phenomenon of a culture turning to old gods because the new god can’t save them is something we find also in Beowulf, written 500 years earlier. In response to nightly troll attacks—or to an internal violence problem that the society can’t solve—the Beowulf poet reports,

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offerings to idols, swore oaths
that the killer of souls [Satan] might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way, 
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts 
they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge
of good deeds and bad, the Lord God,
Head of the Heavens and High King of the World,
was unknown to them.

The poet feels the need at this point to offer a comment. “Oh cursed is he,” he writes,

who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul
in the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help;
he has nowhere to turn. But blessed is he
who after death can approach the Lord
and find friendship in the Father’s embrace.

It’s understandable why people would become suspicious, both of Christianity and of nature and nature’s delights. Given how nature had betrayed them, why should they ever trust it again? But when we deny our connection with nature and with our bodies, we end up in a sterile space. This is where Camelot appears to be in a poem.

Granted, at first glance it doesn’t seem sterile. The poem begins with a sumptuous Christmas feast, complete with music, gift-giving, games, and lots of food. Observing Christians, like pagan cultures celebrating the winter solstice, is an assertion of hope at the darkest time of the year. Nevertheless, Arthur senses that something is missing and declares that the feast cannot begin until

                                                     he had heard first
Of some fair feat or fray some far-borne tale,
Of some marvel of might, that he might trust,By champions of chivalry achieved in arms,
Or some suppliant came seeking some single knight
To join with him in jousting, in jeopardy each
To lay life for life, and leave it to fortune
To afford him on field fair hap or other.

As if in response, a green giant riding a green horse and carrying an axe and a holly branch (as a sign of peace) enters Camelot and challenges the knights to “a Christmas game”: some member of the court is to use his axe to cut off his head, after which he will return the blow. Following a delay that reflects badly on the court, Gawain steps forward and swings the axe. The knight then retrieves his head, which instructs Gawain to meet him at “the green chapel” in a year’s time for completion of the game.

Knowing that he won’t be able to survive the return stroke, Gawain finds himself in the situation of a patient who has received a terminal diagnosis. Given how unreliable life had become at the time of the plague, many must have felt similarly, certain that inevitable death was just around the corner. While the poem then proceeds to depict unhealthy responses to this situation, it also provides us with a positive alternative.

The unhealthy response is to turn our backs on life, pretending that it doesn’t matter whether we live or die. Christians even have an escape hatch, dismissing life as a veil of tears while putting all their hopes in a heavenly hereafter. As he prepares to set off for the green chapel, Gawain shrugs his shoulders as if his upcoming death is no big deal:

There was much secret sorrow suffered that day
That one so good as Gawain must go in such wise
To bear a bitter blow, and his bright sword
                                                    lay by.
                 He said, “Why should I tarry?”
                 And smiled with tranquil eye;
                 “In destinies sad or merry,
                 True men can but try.”

This dismissal of death is one of several instances of denial that we see in the poem. Others include spending much of the year not thinking about what’s going to happen and performing his regular knightly duties as though nothing has changed. It is only when he is a few days away from his rendezvous with death that we see Gawain falling into deep despair.

I’ve written in the past (for instance here) about the many ways the poem shows us a man grappling with mortality and grief. Suffice it to say that, in the course of the poem, the Green Knight gets through to Gawain, showing him that he cares for his life after all. By the end of the work, all of Camelot is wearing green ribbons in honor of Gawain’s encounter. It’s as though heaven-oriented Christianity and earth-oriented paganism have reached an accommodation.

For our purposes, it’s a reminder to love and cherish the earth and our bodies, making the most of the time we have. As Robert Frost puts it in “Birches,” “Earth’s the right place for love./ I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Denying life, the poem makes clear, is a coping strategy driven by fear. Those in the grip of this fear and angry at life’s transience are often those willing to sacrifice the planet.

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Trump as Long John Silver

By Robin Bates | Published: December 17, 2024
Andrew Wyeth, illus. from Treasure Island

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Wednesday

By re-electing a man who attempted a coup, the American electorate has challenged the world view of many of us. Heretofore we thought that, for all America’s flaws, its citizens would see through this gfiting crook, that justice would ultimately prevail, and that democracy would survive, self-correcting if things started going off the rails.

I’m aware that my own optimism is partly due to my privileged background. Other groups, especially African Americans and Native Americans, are less surprised them I am at recent developments. But it’s not only a life of privilege that has shaped my world view. I realize that my childhood reading has also contributed to my belief that all will come out right. Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest captures the vision I grew up with.

We see Cecily’s governess venturing into literary theory following a confession she makes to her pupil that she once wrote a three-volume novel. An impressed Cecily opines, “I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.” To which Prism replies,

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Wilde’s satiric point is that when we turn fiction into didactic moral lessons–which many of those who ban books want–we get a distorted view of life.

It was such shallow didacticism that Thomas Hardy challenged in his novels, including one in which his “pure woman”—as he provocatively subtitled Tess of the d’Urbervilles—is hanged at the end. I think of what Fielding says at one point in Tom Jones:

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

There’s one work that I read as a child that disturbed me by not altogether fitting the formula and that I am now recalling in the wake of Donald Trump’s comeback. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, one the world’s great adventure tales, involves a grand expedition where Jim Hawkins and his fellow treasure seekers overcome a mutiny and ruthless pirate attacks to attain a treasure. Although their quest is successful, there was one detail that stuck in my throat.

The lead pirate, he who orchestrates the mutiny and who at one point cold-bloodedly breaks a man’s back with his crutch, gets away scot-free.

Long John Silver dominates the book as Donald Trump dominates our political landscape. Throughout the novel he plays a shifting game, in the end double-crossing his own mutineers to curry favor with the winning side. Yet instead of ending up in irons and headed for the gallows, he

was allowed his entire liberty, and in spite of daily rebuffs, seemed to regard himself once more as quite a privileged and friendly dependent. Indeed, it was remarkable how well he bore these slights and with what unwearying politeness he kept on trying to ingratiate himself with all.

And then, he’s gone. The marooned Ben Gunn—he who has led the treasure seekers to the treasure—is still so terrified of Silver that he helps him escape. Think of him as Mitch McConnell, who helped Trump do his own escaping when the Senate was prepared to bar him from ever seeking public office again: 

Ben Gunn was on deck alone, and as soon as we came on board he began, with wonderful contortions, to make us a confession. Silver was gone. The maroon had connived at his escape in a shore boat some hours ago, and he now assured us he had only done so to preserve our lives, which would certainly have been forfeit if “that man with the one leg had stayed aboard.” But this was not all. The sea-cook had not gone empty-handed. He had cut through a bulkhead unobserved and had removed one of the sacks of coin, worth perhaps three or four hundred guineas, to help him on his further wanderings.

I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him.

As a child it bothered me that Silver wasn’t held to account, and I have been similarly shocked at how Trump too gets away with crime after crime. But I understand the relief of everyone on board the ship. After all, this was a man prepared to murder anyone who got in his way.

There’s much discussion about how much damage Trump can do as president, with worst case scenarios involving tearing apart financial regulations, thereby plunging us into another great depression; savaging the environment and hastening climate change; imprisoning millions of immigrants and tearing apart families; implementing a nationwide ban on abortion; and so on.

But above all, Trump wants to turn the presidency into a money-making operation, even more so than before when he was charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates to stay at his golf resorts and taking bribes from autocrats around the world. Large companies are already lining up to give him money and he’s not even president yet. If he discovers that people with money don’t have the same agendas as the ideologues who crafted Project 2025–and sometimes they don’t–then we know which way Trump will go. He won’t hesitate to double-cross former allies it’s to his advantage.

In other words, the lesson I learned from Stevenson’s novel may be a good one: sometimes there are worse things than a bad guy getting away with his crime. If Trump chooses to abscond with 400 guineas rather than kill everyone on board ship, then we have gotten off cheap.

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Birds as Heavenly Messengers

By Robin Bates | Published: December 16, 2024

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Tuesday

As I watch birds cluster around our birdfeeders—recently we had a cardinal and a pair of purple finches join the titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, and goldfinches we are accustomed to—I find myself returning to a magical poem written many years ago by my father. An enthusiastic birder as well as a poet specializing in light verse, Scott Bates combined two of his passions in “The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner.”

Although it seems straightforward enough, the poem is actually about mystical transformation. Multi-colored birds, drawn to a feeder, turn an adjoining cedar into a Christmas tree.   Partaking of a feast that appears miraculously, the birds themselves become a feast for the soul.

The transformation, my father writes, occurs “trysmegistically.” Wikipedia informs us that Hermes Trismegistus was a legendary figure from ancient Greece that originated as a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The wisdom attributed to this figure “combined a knowledge of both the material and the spiritual world, which rendered the writings attributed to him of great relevance to those who were interested in the interrelationship between the material and the divine.”

In ancient times, birds were seen as having the power to move between heaven and earth, just as did messenger-of the-gods Hermes. The winter solstice for pagan cultures and Christmas for Christian cultures are seen as a time when the membrane separating the mystical and the mundane is particularly porous. In the Christmas story, angel (to apply the words of the Edmund Sears Christmas carol) bend “near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” Such is also the case in my father’s poem, where we see angel-like birds “feasting and flying and doing a show/ For watchers on the earth below.”

We watchers, struggling through cold, dark days, live in hope that the world will be mystically transformed. “Peace on the earth, good will to men and women”: that is what midwinter rituals like Christmas are all about.

The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner
By Scott Bates

You can’t exactly call it greed
 When birds at feeders feed and feed
 On endless quantities of seed;

It’s sleeping in the cold all night
 And doing prodigies of flight
 That gives a bird an appetite.

They wait their turns with impatience
 Perched on the cedar by the fence
 Like so many Christmas ornaments,

Cardinal, goldfinch and chickadee,
 Turning it, trismegistically,
 Into an ancient Christmas tree

With angels hurrying to and fro
Feasting and flying and doing a show
For watchers on the earth below.

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Pickwickian Anger at Dems’ Surrender

By Robin Bates | Published: December 15, 2024
Mr. Pickwick’s Trial

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Monday

Like many who fear Donald Trump’s authoritarian desires, I have been appalled at how Democrats are “bending the knee” to him. I feel like I’m Mr. Pickwick from Charles Dickens’s first novel, knowing he’s innocent while his lawyer praises opposing counsel for a job well done.

Actually, it’s worse than that. While Pickwick doesn’t understand England’s adversarial system of justice, it’s a system that at least has rules. Both plaintiff and defendant have the right to counsel, and lawsuits are settled by judges and juries who see it as their responsibility to be impartial as they settle cases. They may rule incorrectly, as occurs with Pickwick, but the idea of fair play underlies the system.

In our case, by contrast, Trump has proved conclusively that he doesn’t believe in fair play. He will throw out the rules when he doesn’t win, and most of the GOP is on board with this: to be a current day member of the GOP, you must ascribe to the “big lie” that Trump won the 2020 election. Indeed, when Republicans lose, they are sometimes prepared to run the same playbook, as we are currently seeing in a North Carolina judges race.

Yet in spite of this, Democrats are blithely behaving as though the threat isn’t there. In an enlightening segment the other night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed to a number of instances where Democrats are surrendering in advance to the incoming Trump administration. These include Joe Biden inviting Trump to the White House for a friendly fireside chat; John Fetterman praising the selection of Elise Stefanik for U.N. ambassador because of her support for Israel; Representative Ro Khanna endorsing Trump’s cost-cutting commission; and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado supporting anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy as Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

Since Hayes’s article came out, we can add Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal praising Elon Musk as a free speech advocate, even after we’ve just seen Musk twist the power of Twitter (now X) to help elect Trump. And there’s also Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is doing all he can to appear conciliatory, as though democracy itself is not threatened.

Schumer could, if he so chose, announce that Democrats will vote against any of Trump’s cabinet picks who refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election—which is to say, anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections. Is loyalty to the Constitution too much to ask of people seeking to lead major government agencies?  

Hayes notes that there’s a “similar vibe from the titans of industry,” what with both Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Washington Post donating a million dollars each to Trump’s inauguration. And now ABC is giving Trump $15 million to settle a frivolous defamation suit.

Pickwick is as appalled at lawyer behavior as Hayes is at Democratic buckling. In his case his landlady, misinterpreting a compliment as a marriage proposal, brings a breach of promise suit against him when he doesn’t follow through. Knowing that he never proposed, Pickwick refuses to pay damages, even after a jury finds him guilty and he is threatened with prison. He is particularly appalled at how his own lawyer sees this as business as usual.

Dodson and Fogg are opposing counsel and, while Pickwick regards them as unscrupulous, his own counsel is impressed with their tactics:

‘By Jove!’ said Perker, taking both hands out of his pockets, and striking the knuckles of his right against the palm of his left, emphatically, ‘those are the cleverest scamps I ever had anything to do with!’

When Pickwick calls them scoundrels, Perker replies, “That’s a matter of opinion, you know, and we won’t dispute about terms; because of course you can’t be expected to view these subjects with a professional eye.”

Given our current political situation, I imagine Democrat politicians saying something similar to those of us who are complaining. Rather than see Trump as an evil man, they regard him as a clever scamp who deserves grudging admiration for having come up with a successful campaign strategy. Forget about all their previous accusations that Trump has been assaulting the Constitution. Looking at the campaign “with a professional eye,” they now see him as having been more successful at the game than they were.

The admiration for Dodson and Fogg continues later in the novel. Perkins and his legal assistant Lowten admire how the landlady’s lawyers throw her into debtor’s prison for her inability to pay their legal fees. It’s a shrewd move as it’s the only way they can get any money out of Pickwick, who out of principle has chosen to go to prison rather than pay the judgment against him. And their tactic works: because he feels compassion for the woman, Pickwick coughs up the money, thereby getting both of them out of prison.

Rather than being appalled at their hardball tactics, Perker and Lowten are impressed:

‘The sharpest practitioners I ever knew, Sir,’ observed Lowten.

‘Sharp!’ echoed Perker. ‘There’s no knowing where to have them.’

‘Very true, Sir, there is not,’ replied Lowten; and then, both master and man pondered for a few seconds, with animated countenances, as if they were reflecting upon one of the most beautiful and ingenious discoveries that the intellect of man had ever made. When they had in some measure recovered from their trance of admiration, [messenger] Job Trotter discharged himself of the rest of his commission. Perker nodded his head thoughtfully, and pulled out his watch.

While Perker and Lowten are lost in admiration, however, Pickwick lets Dodson and Fogg know what he thinks of them:

“You are a couple of mean—’
‘Remember, sir, you pay dearly for this,’ said Fogg.
‘—Rascally, pettifogging robbers!’ continued Mr. Pickwick, taking not the least notice of the threats that were addressed to him.
‘Robbers!’ cried Mr. Pickwick, running to the stairhead, as the two attorneys descended.
‘Robbers!’ shouted Mr. Pickwick, breaking from Lowten and Perker, and thrusting his head out of the staircase window.

While I love Joe Biden and am grateful for all he has done for us, does he now retract his assessment that “America itself is at stake”?  Will he continue to send out signals that this is a presidential transition like any other? Will these other Democrats continue to behave as though Trump isn’t prepared to dismantle the institutions of the republic itself? Chris Hayes says they will pay a price for their early surrender:

The rejection of democracy is still alive and well. Democrats bending the knee to Trump because they agree with him on Israel or cutting government spending is not going to address the problem. My strong belief is that everyone trying to will us toward normalcy by acting like everything is normal is in for a rude awakening.

Or as Pickwick puts it, “Robbers!”

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Advent as a Final Notification

By Robin Bates | Published: December 13, 2024
Adrienne Rich

Sunday

While I don’t think Adrienne Rich’s “Final Notification” was written as an Advent poem–although Rich was raised Episcopalian by her mother, her father was Jewish and she self-identified as a Jew– it works as one. Granted, the poem is deliberately obscure and you are free to disagree. If this were one of my student essays, I would mark “vague referent” every time she uses the word “it.” The poem, however, invites readers to provide their own noun. So imagine, for “it,” substituting “God’s presence,” which entered humanity through the medium of Jesus.

As Rich tells us, “it will take all your thought/ it will take all your heart, / it will take all your breath.” Or in the words of Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

There are, to be sure, other candidates for the pronoun, including “death” and “love.” But they too hint at some form of all-encompassing fulfillment. In any event, the poem points towards final transcendence.

Final Notification
By Adrienne Rich

it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will

The image of an occupied city reminds me of John Donne’s famous “Sonnet 14.” In it, Donne laments that he has allowed Satan to usurp his mind (“I, like an usurp’d town to another due”) and he prays for God to liberate him and occupy the city in turn. “Batter my heart three personed-God,” he begs and then later, “That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”

There’s a nice contrast between a city being occupied and a bed being occupied, the first denoting conquest, the second comfort and safety. Allowing Christ to enter our lives will indeed take our breath away, but it is also what we always wanted. While we may resist surrendering ego, in the end “you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you.”

The “final notification” assures us that becoming one with the divine will become our will.

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Trumpism and Penelope’s Suitors

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2024

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Friday

My faculty group has been discussing The Odyssey and now, thanks to the insights of our brilliant young member Ross Macdonald, I realize it applies to some of our own critical issues. A key theme in the epic is the violation of social norms.

Of the many norms that Donald Trump has violated, none is more critical than the peaceful transfer of power. If candidates don’t concede elections they have lost, the very foundation of democracy is threatened. In Homeric society, meanwhile, there were accepted norms about how to treat strangers: the whole system of intercourse between kingdoms was put at risk if the laws of hospitality were breached. Travelers had to know that they could trade goods and information, not be killed, enslaved or eaten, when they visited other lands.

The Trojan War was fought over an egregious violation of hospitality—Paris eloping with his host’s wife—and in The Odyssey we see some who violate and honor the practice. The Phaeacians load Odysseus down with gifts and the swineherd Eumaeus, even though he does not recognize his king, opens up his table to him. The barbaric cyclops Polyphemus, by contrast, plans to have him for dinner.

The most notable violators, of course, are the suitors, who descend on Odysseus’s household in droves. They are in the process of devouring all of his wealth when he returns to the island.

The suitors are particularly infuriating in how they accuse others of sponging off of Odysseus’s riches, even while they are doing so themselves. They are like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two billionaires charged with cutting the budget: even as they themselves have benefited greatly from Trump’s tax cuts and various federal subsidies, they have set their sights on American entitlements like Social Security and Medicare as well as welfare programs for the poor. In Odyssey, the most obnoxious of the suitors lambastes disguised-as-a-beggar Odysseus. Note that the handout he is begrudging Odysseus belongs not to himself but to Odysseus:

But here Antínoös broke in, shouting:
                                                                    “God!
What evil wind blew in this pest?
                                                                     Get over,
stand in the passage! Nudge my table, will you?
Egyptian whips are sweet
to what you’ll come to here, you nosing rat,
making your pitch to everyone!

In their subsequent interchange, Antínoös heaves a stool at Odysseus, adding to his breach of hospitality decorum. The violation makes the other suitors nervous:

But now the rest were mortified, and someone
spoke from the crowd of young bucks to rebuke him:
“A poor show, that—hitting this famished tramp—
bad business, if he happened to be a god.
You know they go in foreign guise, the gods do,
looking like strangers, turning up
in towns and settlements to keep an eye
on manners, good or bad.”
                                                But at this notion
Antínoös only shrugged.

Two other tightfisted leaches are the beggar Iros and the goatherd Melánthios. Iros, who has a comfortable relationship with the suitors, sees Odysseus as competition while Melánthios, who delivers Odysseus’s goats to feed them, is like one of those Trump supporters who thinks his proximity to power gives him license to insult and deride. Both remind me of those Americans who want government-subsidized programs for themselves but not for others, especially not for African Americans.

Although the conservative red states receive proportionately more of the federal budget than do the blue states—the blue state pay more in, the red states take more out—our Melánthioses swagger around, boasting of their independence. (Perhaps their sense of perpetual grievance comes from their secret knowledge that they are dependent.) Here’s the shepherd berating the swineherd for escorting beggar Odysseus to the hall:

                                               [N]o sooner
had he laid eyes upon the wayfarers
than he began to growl and taunt them both
so grossly that Odysseus’ heart grew hot:

“Here comes one scurvy type leading another!
God pairs them off together, every time.
Swineherd, where are you taking your new pig,
that stinking beggar there, licker of pots?
How many doorposts has he rubbed his back on
whining for garbage, where a noble guest
would rate a cauldron or a sword?

Like our Republican legislators, who insist on work requirements for welfare recipients while dipping into the public pot themselves, Melánthios has a proposition for the beggar:

                                                Hand him
over to me, I’ll make a farmhand of him,
a stall scraper, a fodder carrier! Whey
for drink will put good muscle on his shank!
No chance: he learned his dodges long ago—
no honest sweat. He’d rather tramp the country
begging, to keep his hoggish belly full.

The return of the king means a restoration of the sacred norms, although it cannot be accomplished without violence. In a dramatic entrance, Odysseus lets the suitors know how they have offended the gods before he begins his bloodletting:

You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it
home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,
twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared
bid for my wife while I was still alive.
Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,
contempt for what men say of you hereafter.
Your last hour has come. You die in blood.

Just as the suitors have contempt for the gods, so Trump has contempt for democratic norms and for the Constitution that governs us. But whereas Odysseus resorts to violence, we must rely on our democratic norms to carry us through the next four years. We can expect a fair amount of suitor-like looting ahead of us as Trump attempts to establish his version of Putin’s kleptocracy—he has a number of American oligarchs in tow who are itching to get their hands on more of America’s wealth, starting with tax breaks—but in the past we been able to self-correct.

The way democracy works, we must be our own Odysseus.

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