Hurricane Ida and Murakami’s 1Q84

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2021
Hurricane Ida hits the New York subway

Wednesday

Last week, as I was watching news reports of Hurricane Ida hammering the east coast, one image in particular caught my attention: New York’s subway system filling with water. In Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84, a supernatural squall, triggered by the anger of “the Little People” (more on them in a moment) submerges a Tokyo subway station. Hang on while I apply the novel to the current climate crisis.

Aomame, a female fitness instructor who assassinates men who batter women, has just killed the cult leader of a fanatical sect who rapes little girls. Because the leader is the conduit for dark supernatural forces, embodied in a mysterious group of dwarfs, those dwarfs erupt in one last spasm of anger. Their target is the subway station where Aomame has stored her getaway bag. She is on her way there when she hears about the torrential downpour:

“Wasn’t that thunder something?” the driver said. “And the rain was incredible.”

And further on:

I hear the water in the streets overflowed and ran down into the Akasaka-Mitsuke subway station onto the tracks. It was because the rain all fell in one small area. They stopped the Ginza Line and the Marunouchi Line. I heard it on the radio news.

Aomame realizes that the Little People are trying to thwart her plans to escape. She barely manages to get her bag and get to her safe house before the cult is on her track.

The Little People, we learn, are behind the rage that leads men to batter women—and indeed, they are behind the deaths of Aomame’s two closest female friends. Once the cult loses their leader, they also lose touch with the Little People, which drives their search. As the leader explains to Aomame before she kills him, “the organization that I have created will never leave you alone…[T]hey will track you down and punish you severely. That is the kind of system that we have created: close-knit, violent, and irreversible.”

Murakami undoubtedly is basing the organization on Aleph, a Japanese doomsday cult and terrorist organization that carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995. In Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Murakami interviewed members of the cult and came to see them as expressions of a deep frustration with Japan’s materialistic society.

With the election of Donald Trump, America saw the rise of the largest cult in its history, and the fact that this cult is denying climate change, even as we witness increasing numbers of extreme weather events (including Hurricane Ida), makes Murakami’s novel relevant to our current situation. Although America has become more enlightened in certain areas—we elected a Black president, our scientists came up with a Covid cure, we can track the impact of our hydrocarbons—it has also become prey to dangerous conspiracy theories. As the leader explains about such a dichotomy,

Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow. Karl Jung said this about “the shadow” in one of his books: “It is as evil as we are positive…the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive….The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacy to be perfect, , the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil.

And further:

We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago—from a time before good and evil even existed, when people’s minds were still benighted.

But the leader then gives us reason to hope:

But the important thing is that, whether they are good or evil, light or shadow, whenever they begin to exert their power, a compensatory force comes into being.

In the case of 1Q84, the final compensatory force is Aomame’s love for Tengo, the novel’s other protagonist, as well the child they will have together. The cult wants that child, sensing it can be the new conduit for the voices, but Aomame and Tengo’s relationship proves to be more powerful than the forces of destruction.

So what will it be for our environment? Will the rage of the Little People prevail? Or will love, for each other and for the earth, win out?

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Atwood & Austen on Abortion in Texas

By Robin Bates | Published: September 6, 2021
A Polish protestor protests new Poland abortion ban

Tuesday

I still can’t believe the Supreme Court is allowing Texas to take away women’s abortion rights while encouraging its citizens to become bounty hunters, with $10,000 injury payments awaiting anyone who successfully snitches on anyone having, or aiding someone having, an abortion after six weeks. Many have been alluding to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in recent weeks, to which I add passages from George Orwell’s 1984 and, believe it or not, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. I’ll let Austen fans figure out the passage I have in mind as I turn to the more obvious passages first.

In The Handmaid’s Tale citizens, as in Texas, are deputized to carry out “justice,” such as when the handmaids must tear apart an alleged rapist with their bare hands (the man is actually a freedom fighter). Abortionists in Gilead, meanwhile, are hanged, even if they performed the operation when abortion was still legal. Even more relevant to the Texas situation, however, is the way Gilead turns neighbors into spies.

What if a boyfriend, for instance, after helping his girlfriend get an abortion, breaks up with her? If the break-up is contentious, might he turn her in? What about friends who drift apart? Or neighbors you think you can trust? Given the market incentives ($10,000 plus court expenses), how deep does loyalty go? And what will this do to communities?

In Handmaid’s Tale, protagonist Offred doesn’t know if she can trust Nick, the friendly chauffeur who works for her owner:

He looks at me, and sees me looking [at him smoking]. He has a French face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases around the mouth where he smiles. He takes a final puff of the cigarette, lets it drop to the driveway, and steps on it. He begins to whistle. Then he winks.

I drop my head and turn so that the white wings hide my face, and keep walking. He’s just taken a risk, but for what? What if I were to report him?

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

Perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do.

Perhaps he is an Eye.

Then there is Ofglen, a fellow handmaiden:

We aren’t allowed to go [to town] except in twos. This is supposed to be for our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy and I am hers.

It so happens that both the chauffeur and Ofglen can be trusted, but Offred initially has no way of knowing that. Making a mistake could get her imprisoned or killed. At least in Texas, it’s only $10,000 plus court expenses.

In 1984, sometimes family members turn one in, which we can well imagine happening in our polarized society where families sometimes fracture over politics. What if your sibling–or your children–think they are doing God’s will by betraying you?

The children…were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

This is the potential situation that the Supreme Court left in place, undoubtedly because at least five members (and maybe Roberts as well) want to see abortion outlawed. Their politics, not the law, prevailed. After all, would these conservative justices have allowed a state law to stand if vigilante citizens were incentivized to take to court anyone who owned a gun?

And now to Jane Austen. In Northanger Abbey’s most curious passage, Henry Tilney reprimands Catherine Morland for suspecting his father of having killed or imprisoned his mother. Because Catherine has been overly influenced by the gothic novels she is reading, Tilney brings her down to earth by pointing out that England has a neighborhood spy system that would prevent the general from having gotten away with any such thing:

If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?

We may not think ourselves as living in a country surrounded by voluntary spies but Texas is apparently trying to get us there. Suddenly, our laws are conniving at such a situation, which neither our education nor our sense of the probable has prepared us for.

Another literary allusion: Singer Bette Midler just tweeted out an Aristophanes reference for the occasion:

I suggest that all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress.

In Lysistrata, the ploy brings together inveterate enemies Athens and Sparta. It’s worth a shot.

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A Day of Rest for the Working Class

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2021
Thomas Hart Benton

Labor Day

In observance of Labor Day, here’s a poem by that bounciest of poets, Robert Service. Although it’s a bit of a caricature of the working man, I like the way he talks of rest. Labor Day, after all, celebrates the workers by giving them a special day off. And they don’t even have to die to earn it.

Song of the Wage Slave

When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,
I hope that it won’t be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say.
And I hope that it won’t be heaven, with some of the parsons I’ve met —
All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget.
Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands;
Master, I’ve done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands —
Wrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich;
I’ve done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch.
I have used the strength Thou hast given, Thou knowest I did not shirk;
Threescore years of labor — Thine be the long day’s work.
And now, Big Master, I’m broken and bent and twisted and scarred,
But I’ve held my job, and Thou knowest, and Thou wilt not judge me hard.
Thou knowest my sins are many, and often I’ve played the fool —
Whiskey and cards and women, they made me the devil’s tool.
I was just like a child with money; I flung it away with a curse,
Feasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a harlot’s purse;
Then back to the woods repentant, back to the mill or the mine,
I, the worker of workers, everything in my line.
Everything hard but headwork (I’d no more brains than a kid),
A brute with brute strength to labor, doing as I was bid;
Living in camps with men-folk, a lonely and loveless life;
Never knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife.
A brute with brute strength to labor, and they were so far above —
Yet I’d gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of Love.
I, with the strength of two men, savage and shy and wild —
Yet how I’d ha’ treasured a woman, and the sweet, warm kiss of a child!
Well, ’tis Thy world, and Thou knowest. I blaspheme and my ways be rude;
But I’ve lived my life as I found it, and I’ve done my best to be good;
I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes,
Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes;
Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams;
Down in the ditch building o’er me palaces fairer than dreams;
Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen,
Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men.
Master, I’ve filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands;
Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.
Master, I’ve done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,
And the long, long shift is over … Master, I’ve earned it — Rest.

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Flow As You Feel the Surge in Your Body

By Robin Bates | Published: September 4, 2021
Three Gorges of Yangstze River

Spiritual Sunday

I love this poem by Arthur Sze, a Chinese American poet whose family immigrated to America in the 1930s fleeing the Japanese and stayed. Thus the memories of the Yangtze River are family memories, not his own. The poem in some ways works as a riddle only the riddle is the mystery of life, which means an answer can never be pinned down.

But we know that, if we do not pluck the apple from the tree, it will die on the branch. We must go searching, even if we never find this mysterious “it.” Sze doesn’t call it “God” because that word is too heavy and seems too definite, even though God is never definite. What he knows is that it’s in the capillaries of our lungs, “in a corpseburning on the Ganges,/ in rain splashing on banana leaves.”

The ever flowing river, like ever flowing life, captures its spirit. So does the ever spinning top, describing a cone as it gathers together past, present, future. Look for it “in the smell of an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.” Plato may inform us that the apple we know is only a shadow of the ideal form, but given that we can only know that apple that we see, taste, smell, and hold in our hand, that’s were we must go to find mystery.

The Unnamable River
By Arthur Sze

1
Is it in the anthracite face of a coal miner,
crystallized in the veins and lungs of a steel          
worker, pulverized in the grimy hands of a railroad engineer?
Is it in a child naming a star, coconuts washing
ashore, dormant in a volcano along the Rio Grande?

You can travel the four thousand miles of the Nile
to its source and never find it.
You can climb the five highest peaks of the Himalayas
and never recognize it.
You can gaze though the largest telescope
and never see it.

But it’s in the capillaries of your lungs.
It’s in the space as you slice open a lemon.
It’s in a corpse burning on the Ganges,
in rain splashing on banana leaves.

Perhaps you have to know you are about to die
to hunger for it. Perhaps you have to go
alone in the jungle armed with a spear
to truly see it. Perhaps you have to
have pneumonia to sense its crush.

But it’s also in the scissor hands of a clock.
It’s in the precessing motion of a top
when a torque makes the axis of rotation describe a cone:
and the cone spinning on a point gathers
past, present, future.

2
In a crude theory of perception, the apple you
see is supposed to be a copy of the actual apple,
but who can step out of his body to compare the two?
Who can step out of his life and feel
the Milky Way flow out of his hands? 

An unpicked apple dies on a branch:
that is all we know of it.
It turns black and hard, a corpse on the Ganges.
Then go ahead and map out three thousand mile of the Yantze;
walk each inch, feel its surge and
flow as you feel the surge and flow in your own body.

And the spinning cone of a precessing top
is a form of existence that gathers and spins death and life into one.
It is in the duration of words, but beyond words—
river river river, river river.
The coal miner may not know he has it.
The steel worker may not know he has it.
The railroad engineer may not know he has it.
But it is there. It is in the smell
of an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.

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Condemned to Read Dickens, Austen

By Robin Bates | Published: September 2, 2021
Cornelis Dusart, Seated Man Reading, Facing Right

Friday

I’m intrigued by a judgement handed down by a British judge recently against a college student who downloaded close to 70,000 white supremacist documents and bomb-making instructions. Ben John, a 21-year-old who formerly attended Leicester’s De Montfort University, will avoid a prison sentence if he reads works by Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and Hardy. Apparently Judge Timothy Spencer is requiring him to return to court every four months to be tested on his reading.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the judge, after making John promise not to research any more righwing material, asked him,

 “Have you read Dickens? Austen? Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.

The judge told John to return January 4 to

“tell me what you have read and I will test you on it. I will test you and if I think you are [lying to] me you will suffer.”

He then told John’s barrister, Harry Bentley: “He has by the skin of his teeth avoided imprisonment.”

 I have mixed feelings about this. First of all, given that John is a white supremacist, wouldn’t he benefit more from reading writers of color. How about Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Or Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia? Or Candice Cartie-Williams’s Queenie. All show the humanity of non-white Brits.

The judge, however, is coming out of the Matthew Arnold-F. R. Leavis tradition that the classics are the means to preserve civilization against the barbarians at the gates. Believing that John appears all too eager to join these barbarians, the judge is hoping to give him a counter tradition. Maybe he’s hoping that John will transform, like Sydney Carton, from a disaffected cynic into a selfless citizen. Maybe he’s hoping that he’ll become as civil as Elizabeth and Jane Bennet. How Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedyTwelfth Night figures in I have no idea unless anything by Shakespeare is meant to be civilizing.

Still, I worry about these particular suggestions. What if John sees the French revolutionaries in Tale of Two Cities as the UK’s people of color and himself as the heroic Sydney Caron, self-pityingly willing to martyr himself for what he sees as the greater good (which is to say, a white England). And what if he see immigrants and others destroying the Britain of Jane Austen, with its ordered class society presided over by refined gentry. The nostalgia for an idealized rural England free of foreign taint is one of the things that drives English fascists.

It has me wondering whether this judge would have handed down the same sentence to a British Muslim who downloaded jihadi pamphlets and bomb-making information. I won’t pre-judge him because I don’t know, but at the very least he can imagine this defendant as sharing a world view that is like his own. In his mind, John’s problem is that he hasn’t been socialized by the proper literature.

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Crane’s Reenactment of War’s Horrors

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2021
Attributed to Matthew Brady, Confederate soldier at St. Petersburg

Thursday

In his speeches about withdrawing from Afghanistan, Joe Biden has been making the point that we have outsourced our fighting, along with the suffering and the dying, to a tiny minority of Americans. While evading the pain of war ourselves, we have been all too ready to let others take it on. This reality, along with the fact that the Afghan War was endless and unwinnable, lay behind the president’s decision to withdraw.

As I am one of those many Americans who knows virtually nothing about what service members undergo on the battlefield, I figured I should look into the matter. Fiction conveys such experiences far better than factual accounts so I turned to a novel that I have always intended to read, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.

I emerged from it with my eyes newly awakened to the horrors of war. Which I suspect was Crane’s intent.

Like many readers, I assumed as I read that Crane had seen action in the American Civil War. It so happens, however, that he was born five years after hostilities ended, in 1871. Such is the power of the imagination, however, that the author has convincingly entered the mind of a union soldier, getting us to feel the range of emotions that accompany live combat.

So that you can also experience those emotions, here are a few passages that stood out. In the first, the youth (as Crane calls him) encounters his first enemy corpse:

Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.

The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.

In a later scene, the youth surveys a field of corpses:

Under foot there were a few ghastly forms motionless. They lay twisted in fantastic contortions. Arms were bent and heads were turned in incredible ways. It seemed that the dead men must have fallen from some great height to get into such positions. They looked to be dumped out upon the ground from the sky.

And then there’s the moment when he is overtaken by battle frenzy and becomes a wild animal:

His fingers twined nervously about his rifle. He wished that it was an engine of annihilating power. He felt that he and his companions were being taunted and derided from sincere convictions that they were poor and puny. His knowledge of his inability to take vengeance for it made his rage into a dark and stormy specter, that possessed him and made him dream of abominable cruelties. The tormentors were flies sucking insolently at his blood, and he thought that he would have given his life for a revenge of seeing their faces in pitiful plights.

The winds of battle had swept all about the regiment, until the one rifle, instantly followed by others, flashed in its front. A moment later the regiment roared forth its sudden and valiant retort. A dense wall of smoke settled down. It was furiously slit and slashed by the knifelike fire from the rifles.

To the youth the fighters resembled animals tossed for a death struggle into a dark pit. There was a sensation that he and his fellows, at bay, were pushing back, always pushing fierce onslaughts of creatures who were slippery. Their beams of crimson seemed to get no purchase upon the bodies of their foes; the latter seemed to evade them with ease, and come through, between, around, and about with unopposed skill.

When, in a dream, it occurred to the youth that his rifle was an impotent stick, he lost sense of everything but his hate, his desire to smash into pulp the glittering smile of victory which he could feel upon the faces of his enemies.

And here his company witnesses a wounded comrade:

When their eyes first encountered him there was a sudden halt, as if they feared to go near. He was thrashing about in the grass, twisting his shuddering body into many strange postures. He was screaming loudly. This instant’s hesitation seemed to fill him with a tremendous, fantastic contempt, and he damned them in shrieked sentences.

Crane was a pioneer of literary naturalism, where the author depicts reality in minute detail and without moral judgment. To regain our human perspective, we as readers must wade in and provide the commentary ourselves.

When the book begins, the youth harbors dreams of glory. That dreaming is no more by the end of the three-day battle. “He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war,” Crane tells us. “He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks–an existence of soft and eternal peace.”

Wars must sometimes be fought, but leaders should first read books like The Red Badge of Courage in order to fully appreciate what they are asking of their citizens. They might wrestle more with their decision were they more aware of what is in store.

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Letting Others Clean Up Afghan Mess

By Robin Bates | Published: August 31, 2021
Edgerton, Mulligan as Tom and Daisy Buchanan

Wednesday

Here’s my understanding of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan: he believes American political leaders, military leaders, war hawks, foreign policy experts, military contractors, and others have been screwing up for 20 years and he didn’t want to follow their lead any longer. He called them on it in part because, as the father of a war vet himself, he didn’t want any more U.S. soldiers paying the price for the screw-up. He didn’t see any way to a clean withdrawal, which he regarded as a fairy tale in line with all the other fairy tales so-called experts have been touting about Afghanistan, and he preferred a messy withdrawal to no withdrawal at all.

In yesterday’s resolute speech, I almost expected him to quote the famous passage from The Great Gatsby:

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

Applying this particular mess to the Afghan War, our foreign policy establishment have been Daisy and Tom. As Daisy, they have been mowing down Myrtle Wilsons in the name of nation building. Now, as Tom, they are trying to persuade us that Joe Biden is the real culprit. Tom hints to Myrtle’s distraught husband that Gatsby is actually the one responsible for his wife’s death, thereby prompting him to gun down Gatsby, who was no more than an innocent witness. After all, if Gatsby can be pinned with the crime—if our Toms can persuade the American public to blame the man in the White House—then the Buchanans get to escape all accountability.

In blaming Gatsby and affirming his own innocence, Tom sounds perfectly reasonable. Nick observes,

There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.

When foreign policy experts tell you that Biden blew the withdrawal, don’t believe them until they have acknowledged the full complexity of the situation, including the fact that all those fighters that Trump released from imprisonment were prepared to start fighting Americans again if America didn’t withdraw from the country. Anything else is just Monday morning quarterbacking mixed with a fair amount of buck passing.

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him,” Nick says, “but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.” 

Further thought: Washington Post liberal columnist Paul Waldman lists five self-serving fictions that Americans tell themselves about their military interventions, fictions that have are no more true that Tom Buchanan’s lie about Gatsby. There are:

–U.S. wars are just and noble, undertaken for all the right reasons

–People in other countries appreciate that our motives are good.

–Our anger is righteous and deserved; anyone else’s is not

–If we don’t demonstrate “strength” and “resolve” there will be more terrorism

–The tools we use to force other countries to bend to our will, including but not limited to military power, are effective

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How Novels Aided the World War I Effort

By Robin Bates | Published: August 30, 2021

Tuesday

Reader and friend Valerie Hotchkiss, and of last month Oberlin’s new librarian, alerted me to an article about librarians providing aid and comfort to wounded soldiers in World War I. While the soldiers often gravitated to predictable works—”Periods of Zane Greyism will be followed by feverish cravings for ‘Tarzanry,’” one librarian reported—librarians were startled by the popularity of romance novels.

The article in Lady Science reports,

In a paper delivered before peers at the ALA conference in 1918, hospital librarian Miriam Carey examined the appeal of love stories to men who suffered from homesickness in particular. “What does a home-sick man choose for his reading?” she wondered. “Probably what he secretly craves is an old-fashioned love story and the librarian always takes a few with her although,” she noted, “at the outset she did not expect to find much call for such books.” Carey was not alone in expressing surprise at the request for love stories. “Yesterday a man said, ‘Give me a real love story,’” one librarian reported. “All the men laughed, but when I went to their beds, most of them said, ‘I want one like that other fellow asked for.’”

The desire for love stories actually worried some of the librarians, who saw it undermining the masculinity that believed was required to fight:

Carey theorized that her patients’ desire for love stories stemmed from the tendency of illness to feminize. “Human nature is very much the same everywhere,” she noted, “and the man who is sick is more like his mother than his father.” This may suggest that in gravitating to romances the patient desired the comfort of women and femininity.

Carey reassured people that “this state of mind is, however, fleeting” and that “the home-sick man will be wanting western yarns and other former favorites very soon.”

Another way to read this preference, however, is that love seemed the most important thing at the moment. Certainly more important than an egotistical triumph over another man.

I’m interested in some of the other books requested. According to the librarians of the time, these included “Ivanhoe, Waverly, and Oliver Twist alongside O. Henry, Conan Doyle, and other ‘red-blooded fiction-detective stories and adventure stories.’” Some of these, I suspect, have less to do with being red-blooded than being familiar, a reminder of more innocent times. Oliver Twist is hardly a macho story.

Interested in healing the sick, the doctors proved to be forward thinking in their belief that literature could play a significant role. Apparently there are many American Library Association publicity photos of “hospital librarians on daily rounds dispensing literary cures to patients’ bedsides.” The article says that “they believed fiction offered great therapeutic value” and that “sometimes stories are better than doctors.”

And yet librarians also discovered the limitations of bibliotherapy, at least when compared to other forms of treatment. As I know well from my own experience, one never knows which books will elicit which reactions. As one librarian wrote at the time,

a novel with a happy ending is not necessarily a stimulant to the depressed patient, who may be tempted to contrast his own wretched state with that of the happy hero. Nor is every tragedy a depressant. A serious book may prove to be better reading for a nervous patient than something in a lighter vein – he may get new courage and a firm resolve to be master of his fate and by reading of another’s struggle against adverse circumstances.”

This is why we need to read many books. We may not be able to predict ahead of time which work each of us needs, but the more we read, the more we are likely to find just the right book for us.

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Summer’s Over, Back to School

By Robin Bates | Published: August 29, 2021
E. H. Shepard, illus. from House on Pooh Corner

Monday

My mother, in her weekly literature column for the local newspaper, had the inspired idea to include a couple of passages from The House at Pooh Corner to mark the beginning of the school year. I borrow her idea here.

In the first passage, the animals are in an uproar because a mysterious sign has appeared on Christopher Robin’s door. No one know how Christopher Robin is spending his mornings, but the notice soon has them looking for a “Spotted or Herbaceous Backson”:

GON OUT
                            BACKSON
                            BISY
                            BACKSON
                                      C. R.

Eeyore knows, however, that Christopher Robin is off at school, and he himself is trying to become educated, as he explains to Piglet:

Eeyore had three sticks on the ground, and was  looking  at  them.  Two  of  the sticks  were touching at one end, but not at the other, and the third stick was laid across them. Piglet thought  that  perhaps it was a Trap of some kind.

“Oh, Eeyore,” he began again, “I just–“
        “Is  that  little  Piglet?”  said Eeyore, still looking hard at his sticks.
        “Yes, Eeyore, and I–“
        “Do you know what this is?”
        “No,” said Piglet.
        “It’s an A.”
        “Oh,” said Piglet.
        “Not O–A,” said Eeyore severely. “Can’t you hear,  or do you think you have more education than Christopher Robin?”
        “Yes,” said Piglet. “No,” said Piglet very quickly. And he came closer still.
        “Christopher  Robin  said  it  was  an  A,  and an A it is–until somebody treads on it,” Eeyore added sternly.

Eeyore’s moment of triumph, which proves to be short-ived, occurs when he is able to inform Rabbit of Christopher Robin’s whereabouts:

What  does  Christopher  Robin  do in the mornings? He learns. He becomes Educated. He instigorates–I think  that  is the  word  he  mentioned,  but  I may be referring to something else–he instigorates Knowledge. In my small way I also,  if  I have  the  word  right,  am–am  doing  what he does.

The triumph, as I say, is short-lived when Eeyore discovers that Rabbit is already educated:

“That, for instance, is?”
        “An A,” said Rabbit, “but not a very good one. Well,  I must get back and tell the others.”
        Eeyore  looked  at his sticks and then he looked at Piglet.
        “What did Rabbit say it was?” he asked.
        “An A,” said Piglet.
        “Did you tell him?”
        “No, Eeyore, I didn’t. I expect he just knew.”
        “He knew? You mean this A thing is a thing  Rabbit knew?”
        “Yes, Eeyore. He’s clever, Rabbit is.”
        “Clever!”  said  Eeyore  scornfully,  putting a foot heavily on his three sticks. “Education!” said Eeyore bitterly, jumping on his six sticks. “What is Learning?” asked Eeyore as he kicked his twelve sticks into the air. “A thing Rabbit knows! Ha!”

So much for education.

The other passage occurs at the end of the book, where we see Milne, through Christopher Robin and Pooh, dreaming of an endless summer that isn’t interrupted by schooling. It reminds me of the Wordsworth poem “The Tables Turned”:

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

In the Pooh passage, Christopher Robin tells his faithful companion that what he likes doing best “is nothing.” They are sitting in an enchanted wood, which Christopher Robin knows is enchanted because it resists the tyranny of mathematics:

       “How do you do Nothing?”  asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
        “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it ‘What  are  you  going  to  do,  Christopher Robin?’ and you say ‘Oh, nothing,’ and then you go and do it.”
        “Oh, I see,” said Pooh.
        “This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now.”
        “Oh, I see,” said Pooh again.
        “It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
        “Oh!” said Pooh.
        They walked on, thinking of This and That, and by-and-by they came to an enchanted place on the very top of the Forest called Galleons Lap, which is sixty-something trees in a circle; and Christopher Robin knew that it was enchanted because nobody  had ever been able to count whether it was sixty-three or sixty-four, not even when he  tied a piece of string round each tree after he had  counted it. Being enchanted, its floor was not like the floor the Forest, gorse and bracken and heather, but close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green. It was the only place in the Forest where you could sit down carelessly, without getting up again almost at once and looking for somewhere else. Sitting there they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them in Galleons Lap.
        Suddenly Christopher Robin began to tell Pooh about some of the things: People called Kings and Queens and something called Factors, and a place called Europe, and an island in  the middle of the sea where no ships came, and how you make a Suction Pump (if you want to), and when Knights were Knighted, and what comes from  Brazil. And Pooh, his back against one of the sixty-something trees and his paws folded in front of him, said “Oh!” and “I didn’t know,” and thought how wonderful it would be to have a Real Brain which could tell you things. And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.

This is also Milne wishing that childhood wouldn’t stop. Schooling, in this vision, represents an end to innocence. For the author of the Pooh stories, at this moment it is enough to have a heart that watches and receives.

I’ll note that my father, who raised me on Pooh and had a Milne-like longing for innocence, never read the final chapter to me. He found it too sad.

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