Spencer Doerr, a Sewanee student who is one of my tennis hitting partners, recently earned his pilot’s license. Sewanee has a tiny airport and Spencer, in addition to taking flying lessons, has started a flying club (the Flying Tigers). I was honored to be his first official passenger and marveled, as I looked down, at the stunning beauty of the Southern Cumberland Plateau.
I shared with Spencer what Toni Morrison writes about flight in Song of Solomon. He loved the passages, which he said capture his passion. The first occurs in the opening pages. Milkman is born on the same day that a man makes an abortive attempt to fly from a bell tower, which somehow links the two:
Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings must have left their mark, because when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier–that only birds and airplanes could fly–he lost all interest in himself. To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull…
The second flight passage occurs when Milkman and his best friend Guitarare discussing peacocks. Milkman at this stage is a bit of a peacock himself and must learn to jettison his self-absorption and his materialist values:
“How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?” Milkman asked.
“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.”
Milkman is with his aunt Pilate when she is shot by Guitar, who has gone crazy with race hatred. One of Morrison’s greatest characters, Pilate is not weighed down with ego, which Milkman has finally learned to appreciate:
Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. ‘There must be another one like you,’ he whispered to her. ‘There’s got to be at least one more woman like you.
And finally, in one of the finest last sentences in American fiction, Milkman learns the secret of one of his slave ancestors. Shalimar, so legend has it, was one of the mythical slaves who flew back to Africa. In this magical realist novel, flight is a metaphor for being so in touch with who you are and where you come from that anything seems possible. In this instance, Milkman leaps from a precipice to close with his Guitar, who has been trying to shoot him as well. In this moment of completion, where he transcends division, who can say for sure that he’s not flying?
For now he knew what Shalimar knew. If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
I can believe that part of the United States still celebrate Christopher Columbus, even though we now know that he was a horrible, horrible man. Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko lets us know what the people he “discovered” think of him.
First, though, here’s Wikipedia’s account of some of his crimes against humanity on his third voyage:
Columbus’s colonists bought and sold slaves. Columbus executed Spanish colonists for minor crimes, and used dismemberment as punishment. Columbus and the colonists enslaved the indigenous people, including children. Natives were beaten, raped, and tortured for the location of imagined gold. Thousands committed suicide rather than face the oppression.
In February 1495, Columbus took over 1,500 Arawaks, some of whom had rebelled. About 500 of them were shipped to Spain as slaves, with about 40% dying en route.
Oh, and it wasn’t just the natives and those of us looking back who condemn Columbus. Jesuit priest Bartolome de las Casas was horrified, and his reports horrified Europe.
The Silko passage is from an account of a witches convention. There’s a contest about who can be the biggest, baddest witch, but rather than boiling babies or something comparable, the winner simply tells the story of the colonial conquest. First, there’s the lead-in:
The important thing was this witch didn’t show off any dark thunder charcoals or red ant-hill beads. This one just told them to listen: “What I have is a story.”
At first they all laughed but this witch said Okay go ahead laugh if you want to but as I tell the story it will begin to happen.
I pick up midway through the story:
The wind will blow them across the ocean thousands of them in giant boats swarming like larva out of a crushed ant hill.
They will carry objects which can shoot death faster than the eye can see.
They will kill the things they fear all the animals the people will starve.
They will poison the water they will spin the water away and there will be drought the people will starve.
They will fear what they find They will fear the people They kill what they fear.
It goes on a bit longer in this vein. Even veteran witches can’t imagine anything this horrible:
So the other witches said “Okay you win; you take the prize, but what you said just now
‘it isn’t so funny It doesn’t sound so good. We are doing okay without it we can get along without that kind of thing. Take it back. Call that story back.”
But the witch just shook its head at the others in their stinking animal skins, fur and feathers. It’s already turned loose. It’s already coming. It can’t be called back
Carl Borromaus Andreas Ruthart, Adam Naming the Animals
Spiritual Sunday
Last week’s Old Testament/Hebrew Bible reading was Adam naming the animals. If I’d been alert, I would have shared John Hollander’s “Adam’s Task,” which imagines Adam entranced by the poetic excitement that comes with inventing new words. So I’m running the poem this week.
The poem reminds me a little of Lewis Carroll, who in one of his greatest poems comes up with his own series of new animal names: “jabberwocky,” “toves,” “borogroves,” “mome raths,” “Jubjub bird,” and “Bandersnatch.” Not to mention adjectives like “brillig,” “slithy,” “mimsy,” “vorpal,” “frumious,” “manxome,“ “uffish,” and “beamish.” And verbs like “gyre,” “gimble,” “whiffle,” “burble,” and “galumph.”
But back to the Hollander poem. I like the way that Adam will float a name and then elaborate on it: “thou, glurd; thou spotted Glurd” (emphasis mine). Or how he’ll be stumbling towards ways to distinguish different members of a species and then just give up: “Thou; thou; thou—three types of grawl.” And sometimes he builds up real momentum and gets lost in the excitement so that, by the end, he wants to embrace all of creation: “Thou, flisket, thou, kabasch; thou, comma-/Eared mashawok; thou, all; thou, all.” When he mentions in the next line “a fire of becoming,” it’s as though he’s marveling at the creative powers of language as much as at the animals themselves.
I’m not entirely sure what Hollander means, in stanza two, by the contrast between “gay, first work” and “sunk to the primitive.” Is “primitive” a way of describing what occurs when the name and the animal have become joined so that we just take them for granted so that the excitement is gone. Is it what Robert Frost is telling us in “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
In “Adam’s Task,” the naming is hard work but, like any activity we love, it doesn’t feel like work. The fourth stanza is challenging but, as I read it, Hollander is indicating that naming is like burning away—perhaps like burning away the impurities in a crucible so that one gets to the essence. And when he inverts our expectations with “serious as play,” I think of children, whose job it is to play because in playing they develop vital life skills. If we could see all work in this light, measuring (which is hard) but humming along as we do so, we could recapture some of Adam’s excitement.
Having reflected on the process, Adam then goes back to the excitement of naming, ending in a flurry of new labels. The problem that stumped him earlier with the grawls he has now solved with the wherrets: he’ll just call one greater and the other lesser. (By the way, I just learned there’s a lesser spotted eagle to go along with the greater spotted eagle.) Then, feeling all the satisfaction of a job well done, he ends the poem abruptly. “Naming’s over. Day is done.”
Our challenge in this life is recapturing Adam’s excitement as we gaze out at God’s creation. Poetry helps us do so.
Adam’s Task
“And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. . . “ – Gen. 2:20
Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted Glurd; thou, whitestap, lurching through The high-grown brush; thou, pliant-footed, Implex; thou, awagabu.
Every burrower, each flier Came for the name he had to give: Gay, first work, ever to be prior, Not yet sunk to primitive.
Thou, verdle; thou, McFleery’s pomma; Thou; thou; thou — three types of grawl; Thou, flisket, thou, kabasch; thou, comma- Eared mashawok; thou, all; thou, all.
Were, in a fire of becoming, Laboring to be burned away, Then work, half-measuring, half-humming, Would be as serious as play.
Thou, pambler; thou, rivarn; thou, greater Wherret, and thou, lesser one; Thou, sproal; thou, zant; thou, lily-eater. Naming’s over. Day is done.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, one of the smartest political commentators I know, doesn’t use the word “evil” lightly, so I was startled to hear him direct it against Fox News last night. For the occasion, I also have a good fox poem.
Hayes is thinking how figures like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity are persuading their viewers not to get vaccinated, even though (1) they themselves have been vaccinated, and (2) they work for a company that has very strict anti-Covid policies, requiring its employees either to be vaccinated or to be tested every day. That is more than even President Biden is demanding of large businesses.
In other words, they’re lying while the people who swallow their lies are dying. Fox doesn’t care that America’s death toll has surpassed 700,000. Its business model requires that viewers stay riled up at all times, regardless of the human cost.
In Jean de la Fontaine’s “The Crow and the Fox,” Master Fox knows just how to flatter Mr. Crow to get his cheese. Tell him you want to hear his beautiful voice and the morsel will drop in your lap. And so it happens.
Fox News flatters its viewers by assuring them they are much smarter that so-called experts (beginning with Dr. Fauci) and don’t need to listen to anybody. Sound off with your beautiful opinions about Covid, they tell people, even though those opinions are as mellifluous as a crow’s caw. Then Fox picks up the cheese.
In the poem, however, the Fox confesses to the trick. “Learn that each flatterer/ Lives at the cost of those who heed,” he tells the Crow. In real life, Fox just uses the same trick over and over.
And Crow falls for it every time.
The Fox and the Crow By Jean de la Fontaine
At the top of a tree perched Master Crow; In his beak he was holding a cheese. Drawn by the smell, Master Fox spoke, below. The words, more or less, were these: “Hey, now, Sir Crow! Good day, good day! How very handsome you do look, how grandly distingué! No lie, if those songs you sing Match the plumage of your wing, You’re the phoenix of these woods, our choice.” Hearing this, the Crow was all rapture and wonder. To show off his handsome voice, He opened beak wide and let go of his plunder. The Fox snapped it up and then said, “My Good Sir, Learn that each flatterer Lives at the cost of those who heed. This lesson is well worth the cheese, indeed.” The Crow, ashamed and sick, Swore, a bit late, not to fall again for that trick.
Additional Note: When I was an eighth grader attending a French school in Paris, I was required to memorize this poem and still remember it to this day. For those of you who know French, I run it below:
Le Corbeau et le Renard
Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché, Tenait en son bec un fromage. Maître Renard, par l’odeur alléché, Lui tint à peu près ce langage: “Hé! bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau. Que vous êtes joli! que vous me semblez beau! Sans mentir, si votre ramage Se rapporte à votre plumage, Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ces bois.” A ces mots le Corbeau ne se sent pas de joie; Et pour montrer sa belle voix, Il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie. Le renard s’en saisit, et dit: “Mon bon Monsieur, Apprenez que tout flatteur Vit aux dépens de celui qui l’écoute: Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute.” Le Corbeau, honteux et confus, Jura, mais un peu tard, qu’on ne n’y prendrait plus
In our Faculty Dante-Virgil-Dryden-soon-to-be-Pope Discussion Group—which I think I’ll just start calling our Faculty Discussion Group—I’ve been leading our exploration of Dryden’s Absalom and Architophel. Considered one of the world great political satires, it’s proving to be eerily prescient of Trumpism’s attacks on American democracy. Hold on while I explain.
Written in 1681, the poem deals with the attempt by the forerunners of the Whig party to exclude Charles II’s brother from succeeding to the throne after Charles died. Because James was Catholic, the Earl of Shaftesbury wanted to bypass him and have the throne descend to his illegitimate son, the solidly Anglican Duke of Monmouth. Requiring political chaos to pull this off (at least in the poem), the character representing Shaftesbury (Architophel) attempts to take advantage of an allegorical version of the “Popish Plot,” a supposed plan to assassinate Charles that was actually the fantasy of the unscrupulous Titus Oates. The accusation had as much truth as Donald Trump’s claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, but because enough people took it seriously, at least 22 Catholics were executed, some of them horribly.
Shaftesbury was not allied with Oates but sought to take advantage of the ferment to push the Exclusionary Bill—a bill excluding James from succession—through Parliament. In the poem, Architophel/Shaftesbury says at one point, “the people have a right supreme/To make their kings; for kings are made for them.” Charles, correctly viewing this as an affront to the divine right of kings, fought it.
Charles won the battle in the short run as Parliament voted down the Exclusionary Bill. (In the movie Libertine, poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is depicted as persuading the House of Lords to reject the bill.) James succeeded him to the throne and subsequently put down Monmouth’s rebellion, but Shaftesbury’s views prevailed in the end. James shortly thereafter was ousted in the Glorious Revolution and his Anglican daughter Mary, along with her husband William of Orange, came to the throne. England finally got the constitutional monarchy that Dryden feared and Shaftesbury fought for.
The poem is set up as an allegory, purportedly about the Bible’s King David and his rebellious son Absalom, with David standing in for Charles and Absalom for Monmouth. As Dryden tells the story, Architophel/Shaftesbury persuades Absalom to stand up against his father’s desires.
It so happens that I’m more with Architophel than David/Charles when it comes to the politics, preferring a constitutional monarchy to the vision of the king as divinely appointed. But put that aside. Dryden understands how demagogues take advantage of political unrest, and that’s where the poem lines up with our current situation.
Think of Trump first as Titus Oates—Corah in the poem—a radical priest who fabricated evidence to whip up anti-Catholic hysteria. In Trump’s case, it’s anti-immigrant and racist hysteria. Dryden pours on the sarcasm when describing Corah/Oates, and I like the following passage since Trump too likes to boast about his own prodigious memory. The passage also raises a question people have had about Trump: is he lying if he actually believes his wild stories (“exceeding man’s belief”)? Dryden says that, when Corah/Oates’s grasp of facts breaks down (“where the witness failed”) he just gives himself over to the visionary spirit:
His memory, miraculously great, Could plots, exceeding man’s belief, repeat; Which therefore cannot be accounted lies, For human wit could never such devise. Some future truths are mingled in his book; But where the witness failed the prophet spoke: Some things like visionary flight appear; The spirit caught him up, — the Lord knows where, And gave him his rabbinical degree, Unknown to foreign university.
Maybe Trump gets his “alternative facts” from Trump University.
In any event, the result of Corah/Oates’s anti-Catholicism is the same as Trump’s racism and Islamophobia. Suddenly hate speech and racist violence, dormant in America for years, are breaking out again. Here’s how Dryden describes the process:
For as, when raging fevers boil the blood, The standing lake soon floats into a flood, And every hostile humour, which before Slept quiet in its channels, bubbles o’er; So several factions, from this first ferment, Work up to foam, and threat the government.
January 6 was the foaming result of Trump’s lies and a dire threat to the government. We’re increasingly discovering that the event was a planned attempt to pressure Republican legislators and Vice-President Mike Pence not to certify the election. Had Pence refused to do so (and the pressure on him was intense), the House of Representatives would have chosen the president–one vote for each state—giving the Republicans an edge. As it was, for the first time in American history most legislators in the losing candidate’s party voted not to certify the result, even though Biden was the clear winner.
Architophel is like those Republicans who, while distancing themselves from Trumpist violence, nevertheless seek to take advantage of it. In the GOP’s case, they are using Trump’s “big lie”about a stolen election to push voter suppression measures and replace bureaucrats responsible for overseeing elections with Trumpists. Dryden’s description of Architophel’s coalition is not a bad description of today’s pro-Trump GOP:
So several factions, from this first ferment, Work up to foam, and threat the government. Some by their friends, more by themselves thought wise, Opposed the power to which they could not rise; Some had in courts been great, and, thrown from thence, Like fiends, were hardened in impenitence; Some, by their monarch’s fatal mercy, grown From pardoned rebels kinsmen to the throne, Were raised in power and public office high; Strong bands, if bands ungrateful men could tie.
The “fatal mercy” is a reference to Charles pardoning many of those who overthrew his father. If the Democrats and the Justice Department don’t hold people responsible for January 6, they will be seen as Architophel sees Charles, his mildness as a weakness. As it is, many Trumpists view Joe Biden as a doddering old man. (In Trump, by contrast, they see “manly force.”) Here’s Architophel seducing Absalom to rebellion:
Not that your father’s mildness I contemn; But manly force becomes the diadem. ‘Tis true, he grants the people all they crave; And more, perhaps, than subjects ought to have;
…
But when should people strive their bonds to break, If not when kings are negligent, or weak?
Dryden then goes on to lecture those who want to set up their own kings. While I don’t agree with Dryden’s monarchical views here, if one replaces “king” with Constitution, I’m on board. If you abandon foundational principles (“give away” your “native sway”), then you are “left defenseless to the sword/ Of each unbounded, arbitrary lord”:
What shall we think? Can people give away, Both for themselves and sons, their native sway? Then they are left defenseless to the sword Of each unbounded, arbitrary lord…
And:
For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might? Nor is the people’s judgment always true: The most may err as grossly as the few;
And then, in a passage which gets at how GOP legislators are in thrall to the Trump base, Dryden says that the Sanhedrims (the Jewish assembly/Parliament) may be infected by the anti-king sentiment—or as I’m applying it, anti-democracy sentiment:
Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. If they may give and take whene’er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead’s images, But government itself, at length must fall To nature’s state, where all have right to all.
“Nature’s state” is a reference to Thomas Hobbes’s nightmare vision of a society without laws in Leviathan, where he writes, “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
I noted in a recent post that President Biden reminded me of David/Charles when, upset that persuasion was no longer working with vaccinations, started mandating them for the federal work force and large businesses. In Dryden’s poem, David/Charles is tired of indulging Absalom/Monmouth and finally lays down the law. “For lawful power is still superior found,” he says, “When long driven back, at length it stands the ground.”
Dryden looks to heaven to affirm David/Charles’s claim, which is how those who believe in the divine right of kings see it. In our case, all we have is the Constitution and the laws of the land. Let us desperately hope that their “peals of thunder” will indeed shake the firmament:
He said; the Almighty, nodding, gave consent, And peals of thunder shook the firmament. Henceforth a series of new time began, The mighty years in long procession ran; Once more the godlike David was restored, And willing nations knew their lawful lord.
May our nation, red states as well as blue, hold fast to representative democracy. Otherwise we’ll end up with an unbounded, arbitrary lord.
I hope readers will forgive me for today’s post, which feels like cheating. I have received a promising nibble on the book I’ve been writing, excerpts of which I’ve shared with you from time to time. An editor, after seeing a description and then interviewing me via zoom, has been working with me to produce a formal proposal. Since I’ve been working on that, I didn’t have time to write today’s essay, so you’re getting part of the proposal instead. I’ll let you know how it all goes.
Incidentally, you can tell by the spelling that the publisher is British.Wish me luck.
Book proposal for Better Living through Literature: A 2,500-Year-Old-Debate
Synopsis
Better Living through Literature aims to take readers through a fascinating survey of conversations that have been occurring since the time of Plato about literature’s life-changing power. Written in a witty, engaging and conversational style, the book highlights some of history’s great literary battles and controversies that are still relevant today. Starting with Plato’s and Aristotle’s arguments over Homer and the Greek tragedians, it includes chapters on (among other thinkers) Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Shelley’s defences of poetry; Marx and Freud’s reliance on literature; Du Bois’s concern about ‘art as propaganda’; feminism’s attacks on ‘the marriage plot’; and the culture wars of the 1990s. It then applies the theories by examining the impact that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has had on readers, and by looking at Jane Austen’s warnings about the negative effects of popular literature.
At the core of the book are accounts of how literature has made better the lives of both the featured theorists and everyday readers. Discussions of what Sophocles meant to Aristotle, Virgil to Sidney, Balzac to Marx and Engels, and Wordsworth to John Stuart Mill differentiate this book from other surveys of literature’s great theorists. Readers, meanwhile, will relate to stories of how people like them have found personal meaning in the classics. At the book’s core are three sets of paired questions:
– Can great literature in fact change individuals’ lives? – If so, does it change them for the better or can it also change them for the worse? – Can great literature change not only individuals but history itself? – If so, is great literature necessarily progressive or can it have a conservative or even reactionary impact? – Is there a difference between the effects of great literature and so-called popular or pop lit? – If so, is great literature good for us and pop lit less good, if not outright bad?
While Better Living ultimately concludes that great literature, unlike most popular literature, can in fact change individual lives and history for the better, multiple examples and a survey of debates through the ages are necessary to fully appreciate how it does so.
The Outline
General Introduction
The introduction makes the case for studying literature from the perspective of how it has changed lives, and it surveys thinkers throughout history who have theorized about how it does so. I explain the selection process for choosing these particular thinkers and explore why literature’s behavior-changing potential has been understudied (the main reasons being because reading experiences vary from person to person and are hard to measure). Despite the variety, however, certain patterns emerge when one studies multiple thinkers and examines multiple examples.
Part One
1. ‘Hardwired for Story’ looks at the role stories have played in human evolution and how they register, according to scientific studies, upon the human brain.
– Prehistory: Telling Stories to Ensure Species Success – Psychological Studies: Literature’s Impact upon the Brain
2. ‘The Debate Begins’ looks at the debate between Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle about whether literature is good or bad for us and how they, along with the Roman poet Horace, set the terms for many of the later discussions about literature’s impact.
– Plato: Poetry, a Threat to Justice and Virtue – Aristotle: Poetry, Truer Than History – Horace: Instructing While Delighting
3. ‘Literature as a Force for Moral Transformation’ looks at how Sir Philip Sidney in the sixteenth century and Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth see literature having an impact on public morality, sometimes positive, sometimes (as Johnson argues in his attack on novels like Tom Jones) negative.
– Sir Philip Sidney: Poetry as a Guide to Virtue – Samuel Johnson: Shakespeare as a Faithful Mirror of Manners and Life
3. ‘Literature as a Force for Social Transformation’ looks at the society-changing potential that the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold saw in the creative Imagination and then examines the role literature played in shaping the social and psychological theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
– Romantics v. Utilitarians: Connecting through the Poetic Imagination – Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetry as a Force for Liberation – Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Literature as a Portrayal of Real Conditions – Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung: Literature as a Blueprint for Self-Mastery – Matthew Arnold: Poetry as Civilization’s Saviour – Hans Robert Jauss: Literature That Expands Horizons
4. ‘Literature as Activist Handbook’ looks at how twentieth-century political activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Frantz Fanon, the Frankfurt School and Rachel Blau DuPlessis conceived of literature in the struggle for human liberation, introducing and problematizing [AQ: clarify – what or who is introducing and problematizing these issues?] issues of race, class, colonialism, and gender.
– W. E. B. Du Bois: Literature’s Hidden Biases – Bertolt Brecht: Art as a Hammer to Shape Reality – Frantz Fanon: Post-Colonial Literature, a Form of Combat – The Frankfurt School: Great Literature Challenges One-Dimensional Society – Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Literary Endings: Marriage or Death
5. ‘Literature as Training Ground for Citizenship’ looks at the role English teachers play in socialization, explains (but does not defend) the critiques of multiculturalism by cultural conservatives, and lays out the cases made by literary theorist Wayne Booth and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how great literature helps readers negotiate the challenges posed by today’s world.
– Terry Eagleton: Literature and Classroom Socialization – Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch: Literature as Essential Being – Wayne Booth: The Best Books Build Character – Martha Nussbaum: Literature, Indispensable to Democracy
Part Two
The second, much shorter half of the book contains two follow-up chapters where the theory is applied at length. It also has a chapter aimed directly at the reader.
6. ‘Has Jane Eyre Made the World a Better Place?’ looks at the impact that Brontë’s novel had both upon early readers and upon the 1970s feminist movement. I also contrast Jane Eyre with Stephenie Meyers’s pop gothic and teen sensation Twilight (2005–8).
7. ‘Jane Austen on Pop Lit: Enjoy but Be Wary’ begins with a general discussion of the issues surrounding popular literature, touches on three such novels that have had an outsized impact (Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and then examines Austen’s warnings about lesser lit.
8. ‘Assessing Literature’s Personal Impact’ walks readers through a process of active reflection, showing them how they can systematically assess the impact that intense reading experiences have had on their own lives.
Conclusion
The final chapter pulls together the questions the book has been exploring and, with the elaborations and complications that the various thinkers have contributed to the discussion, concludes that (1) yes, great literature has changed individual lives; (2) yes, it has at times impacted history itself; and (3) yes, great literature is better for us than popular literature.
It was perfect October walking weather in Sewanee yesterday so here’s a John Cowper Powys poem for how to take full advantage of such hikes. Piece of advice #1: Focus on your surroundings and do not let your mind drift to “thoughts unmeet.”
In fact, if you’re a poet, it’s your job to “give speech to stones and wood.”
If you don’t, Powys tells us, the silent trees above your head and the silent pathway at your feet will shame you:
“Alas!” they seem to say “have we In speechless patience travailed long Only at last to bring forth thee, A creature void of speech or song?”
So don’t let mind fill with trivial notions. Stay present:
Wood and Stone
THE silent trees above my head The silent pathway at my feet Shame me when here I dare to tread Accompanied by thoughts unmeet.
“Alas!” they seem to say ” have we In speechless patience travailed long Only at last to bring forth thee, A creature void of speech or song ?
“Only in thee can Nature know Herself, find utterance and a tongue To tell her rapture and her woe, And yet of her thou hast not sung.
Thy mind with trivial notions rife Beholds the pomp of night and day, The winds and clouds and seas at strife, Uncaring, and hath naught to say.”
O Man, with destiny so great, With years so few to make it good, Such fooling in the eyes of fate May well give speech to stones and wood!
I looked up Powys and discovered that he is a descendant of 18th century Romantic poet William Cowper. Perhaps Powys is inspired by how his ancestor gave speech to stones and wood in his poem The Task:
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep, And skirted thick with intertexture firm Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink, E’er since a truant boy I passed my bounds To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames.
This incidentally is only one of several walks that Cowper describes in his poem. Cowper was Jane Austen’s favorite poet, a clear forerunner of William Wordsworth, and someone well worth reading.
Flemish artist unknown, A Young Woman on Her Death Bed (1621)
Monday
The United States hit 700,000 Covid deaths over the weekend and it’s as though we hardly noticed, even as our local county hospital—like hospitals across the American south—fills up with unvaccinated Tennesseans. In this pandemic of those who refuse to get a shot, it appears as though certain Americans have “mastered the art of losing” their fellow human beings, to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The One Art.”
I do not count myself amongst them. No fatalist, I am doing all I can to protect myself, my wife, and my 96-year-old mother. I would rage against either of them dying or against getting critically sick myself. But as I look out and see that only 36% of the eligible people in our county are fully vaccinated—and that only 24% of those in adjoining Grundy County are—I can’t help but think resignation has set in. As the speaker says in the poem, if you learn to accept losing something every day, soon you can resign yourself to losing even loved ones. “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/ I love),” she writes, “I shan’t have lied” (about achieving mastery). In other words, one can write off dead people the way one writes off lost keys.
The poem sounds more like someone dealing with forgetting rather than with death—maybe the onset of Alzheimer’s or the alcoholism that Bishop suffered from. But it partially works in our case. At the end of the poem, the poet must forcefully remind herself to “Write it!”–in other words, interrupt the sweetly flowing rhythm and rhyme of losing and acknowledge that what she’s witnessing actually is a disaster. Because she has allowed losing to creep up on her, she has become numb to the catastrophe that’s staring her in the face.
700,000 deaths and counting is what disaster looks like. The only way to shrug that off—to master the art of losing—is to deny your humanity.
The One Art Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Nicholas Maes, Jesus Blessing the Children (1652-53)
Spiritual Sunday
Our rector Rob Lamborn recently explained to us that we are not to read anything warm and fuzzy into Jesus embracing little children. There’s a reason why, in this week’s lesson, the disciples speak sternly to people bringing their children to Jesus. Children at that time were essentially nobodies until they grew older.
Jesus, therefore, turns conventional wisdom on its head when he says,
“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
It was not until the 18th century and the Romantic revolution that people began to see children as special conduits to the divine, as Wordsworth does in Intimations of Immortality. He thinks back to his younger days, remembering,
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.
And later:
Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home…
Before Wordsworth and Rousseau, however, children were pretty much seen as they had been in Jesus’s day, which was as imperfect adults. Perhaps it was because of high infant mortality, perhaps because children couldn’t contribute much to society until they were older. In any event, a little boy or girl was not regarded (to quote again from Intimations) as a “Mighty prophet” and a “Seer Bless’d” “on whom those truths do rest,/Which we are toiling all our lives to find.”
That’s why I was so struck by Henry Vaughan’s “Retreat,” written in the mid-17th century–which is to say, a century ahead of its time. It’s as though the poet, reflecting upon Jesus’s words, has rethought his childhood and come to see it very differently than did his contemporaries.
Anticipating Wordsworth, Vaughan feels like he is closer to God because he has just walked “a mile or two from my first love.” (Wordsworth talks of children sporting on the shore and hearing “the mighty waters roaring evermore.”) Also, like Wordsworth, he talks of how his younger self can see a glimpse of the divine in “some gilded cloud or flower.” Encountering sin as he grows older, he observes, “Some men a forward motion love;/ But I by backward steps would move.” And also, “O, how I long to travel back/ And tread again that ancient track!”
Or as Jesus puts it, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
Retreat
Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short space, Could see a glimpse of His bright face; When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. O, how I long to travel back, And tread again that ancient track! That I might once more reach that plain Where first I left my glorious train, From whence th’ enlightened spirit sees That shady city of palm trees. But, ah! my soul with too much stay Is drunk, and staggers in the way. Some men a forward motion love; But I by backward steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn, In that state I came, return.
