What To Make of a Diminished Biles

Simone Biles

Friday

Of the many stories in the 2021 Olympics, perhaps none caught the attention of American audiences more than that of Simone Biles. The incomparable gymnast who was expected to sweep the gold medals found herself beset by the “twisties,” a condition where a gymnast loses air awareness during a routine. Although a shadow of her former self, however, Biles was still able to come back and win a bronze medal on the balance beam.

The final line from Robert Frost’s poem “The Oven-Bird” comes to mind: What are we to make of a diminished thing?

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Yes, Simone Biles 2021 is to Simone Biles 2016 (and Simone Biles 2017, 18, 19, and 20) as mid-summer is to spring. One to ten, to use Frost’s scoring system. The highway dust is over all.

Or as Frost puts it in another poem that makes reference to Adam and Eve’s fall,

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 this case, gold sank to bronze.

Yet there is something deeply moving about the oven-bird as he reminds us of our mortality. Percy Shelley writes, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” and as Biles fell and stumbled, she somehow became more real. I therefore found myself thinking also about Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea tetralogy, where she grapples with falls from perfection.

First I thought of Ged, the apprentice wizard in Wizard of Earthsea. Recognized early as a wizard with much potential, Ged is enrolled in a wizarding school. While there, however, he is baited into a dangerous wizarding contest—he opens a portal to the world of the dead—and almost dies. The chief wizard of the school sacrifices his own life to give Ged his, but afterwards the wizardry that came so easily and naturally to Ged must be learned the hard way.

I thought of Ged’s labored progress as I saw Biles struggle to win a bronze medal, foregoing the fabled dismount that bears her name for a safer move. For his part, when Ged finally returns to his classes, he is no longer the star:

The boys he had led and lorded over were all ahead of him now, because of the months he had lost, and that spring and summer he studied with lads younger than himself. Nor did he shine among them, for the words of any spell, even the simplest illusion-charm, came halting from his tongue, and his hands faltered at their craft.

Eventually Ged does regain some of his powers—and an Olympic bronze medal is nothing to be sneezed at—but it’s not the same:

Thenceforth he studied the high arts and enchantments, passing beyond arts of illusion to the works of real magery, learning what he must know to earn his wizard’s staff. The trouble he had had in speaking spells wore off over the months, and skill returned into his hands: yet he was never so quick to learn as he had been, having learned a long hard lesson from fear.

The darkness that Ged has unleashed into the world is his own shadow side, and I wonder if Biles has been striving for ever new heights of excellence to keep her own darkness at bay. Biles hinted at the scars left by the sexual abuse of the gymnastics medical coordinator Larry Nassar, now in prison. Ged, fleeing from his darkness, is able to come to terms with it only when he faces up to it and calls it by its name, which is his own. At that moment it loses its power over him. Perhaps Biles needs to do the same.

As to what exactly this would entail, perhaps Tenar in the next book of the tetralogy offers a model. In Tombs of Atuan Tenar, not unlike some gymnasts, is taken from her family at an early age and brought up to be the high priestess of an ancient religion known as the Powers of the Earth. Yet even as she is worshipped, she is the virtual puppet of the priestesses who, like USA Gymnastics, run the show. If Tenar is to be her own person and live her own life, she must break free of them, which she does with the help of Ged.

Which means that she is longer a worshipped princess. To be sure, she could live an aristocratic life in the port city of Havnor, but she instead chooses to go into the country, where she marries a farmer and has children. Her life there is simple but she achieves a depth that would not have been possible as a princess.

I’m not saying that Biles should do exactly the same although some kind of retreat seems advisable. But as with both Ged and Tenar, we see new potential in her as a result of her travails. Like tennis player Naomi Osaka, she is learning to speak to issues of mental health, which run rampant within the athletic community. She is holding USA Gymnastics to account so that future gymnasts will not be subjected to abuse, and she proved to be a good teammate, getting out of her teammates’ way so that they could shine on their own.

There are other ways to be a wizard and a priestess. What initially seemed to be a diminished thing can still dazzle.

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Beowulf Would Favor Vaccine Mandate

Thursday

Right now the United States is wrestling with whether schools, businesses, sporting organizations, and other public entities should require its workers to be vaccinated and for people using their services to show proof of vaccination. Certain Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’s Greg Abbott, putting Trumpian politics over health, are trying to make it illegal to do so. In a particularly crazy move, DeSantis is forbidding those petri dishes known as cruise ships to require vaccination.

So what would Beowulf do?

I found myself asking that question after reading an illuminating column by political journalist John Stoehr of the Editorial Board on mandates and the authoritarian personality. Those liberals who fear rightwing blowback against vaccine mandates, Stoehr says, don’t understand authoritarians. While uninterested in reasoned dialogue, they do respect forceful action:

Some among us, liberals mostly, appear to believe that a federally enforced vaccine mandate would backfire. This is not unreasonable. After all, the authoritarian holdouts who are prolonging the covid pandemic in this country tell us time and again they will resist getting vaccinated because their individual rights and freedom demand it.

But a national mandate, or a patchwork of state and local mandates, as is usually the case in the United States, will have the opposite effect. I have no doubt about it. The authoritarians among us certainly seem exceptionally strong. After all, they are willing to die before “giving in.” In fact, they are exceptionally frail and weak. They will cave almost instantly under the weight of the authority of government and civil society.

In other words, if you believe that vaccine mandates and vaccine passports will stop the spread of Covid, forcefully call for them. Otherwise, you’re fighting a losing battle.

Beowulf’s victory over Grendel appears to bear Stoehr out. I’ve written many times (for instance, here) how Grendel is the archetype of resentment or grievance, a malcontent who feels he is not being given his due. Many of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were Grendels whose rage, from the outside, appeared impressive. Here’s Grendel storming the Danes’ major government building and seeking out his own Mike Pences and Nancy Pelosis:

Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping,
a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors
quartered together. And his glee was demonic,
picture the mayhem: before morning
he would rip life from limb and devour them,
feed on their flesh.

As the Danish and Geat warriors discover, when you flail away against Grendel with passionate swords, he just appears stronger. After all, you are admitting to him that you find him powerful:

Time and again,
Beowulf’s wariors worked to defend
their lord’s life, laying about them
as best they could with their ancestral blades.
Stalwart in action, they kept striking out
on every side, seeking to cut
straight to the soul. When they joined the struggle
there was something they could not have known at the tie,
that no blade on earth, no blacksmith’s art
could ever damage their demon opponent.
He had conjured the harm from the cutting edge
of every weapon.

What does work, however, is a cool head, firm resolve, and a strong grip. Beowulf defeats Grendel by reaching out and grabbing the monster by the hand. Recognizing steely determination, Grendel transforms from bully into coward. Panicking, he ultimately tears himself free of his own arm, thereby sustaining a mortal wound, and runs home to his mother. He literally falls apart.

I think of Grendel’s defeat as I watch a number of the January 6 insurrectionists in court. Their once defiant words have yielded to whining about jail and the harshness of American justice. Many are now blaming Donald Trump for having misled them.

In the poem we see a similar response from the Danish warrior Unferth, a human Grendel, who confronts Beowulf when he first strides into the Danish hall. Like an Obama birther, Unferth is furious at the attention this upstart is receiving:

                                 Beowulf’s coming,
his sea-braving, made him sick with envy:
 he could not brook or abide the fact
 that anyone else alive under heaven
 might enjoy greater regard than he did…

Unferth, however, folds like a cheap suit when Beowulf, confident in himself and his mission, points out his failures:

The fact is, Unferth, if you were truly
as keen and courageous as you claim to be
Grendel would never have got away with
such unchecked atrocity, attacks on your king,
havoc in Heorot and horrors everywhere.
But he knows he need never be in dread
Of your blade making mizzle of his blood
Or of vengeance arriving ever from this quarter—
From the Victory-Shieldings, the shoulderers of the spear.
He knows he can trample down you Danes
to his heart’s content, humiliate and murder
without fear of reprisal.

We might note that these Republican governors are also allowing Covid to trample us down to its heart’s content, without fear of reprisal. Beowulf then makes a promise that he goes on to keep:

But he will find me different.
I will show him how Geats shape to kill
in the heat of battle. Then whoever wants to
may go bravely to mead, when morning light,
scarfed in sun-dazzle, shines forth from the south
and bring another daybreak to the world.

If Stoehr is right and we were to bring Beowulf fortitude to Covid, everyone with any kind of authority would be mandating vaccinations where they can and requiring vaccination passports for schools, work places, and anywhere else where people congregate. The Unferths will complain but, if Stoehr and the Beowulf poet are correct, they will capitulate. And they’ll have the added bonus of not contracting a deadly disease.

And all of American society will go bravely to mead—which is to say, to bars—and enjoy the sun-dazzle after a long night of Covid darkness. Are we ready for this?

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The Poetry of Hummingbirds

Wednesday

The ruby throated hummingbirds have been flocking to our feeders recently, sometimes looking like a swarm of large insects. It’s a riveting sight and reminds me somewhat of the angels hovering around the celestial rose that Dante witnesses in Paradise. Here’s his description:

                                        Meanwhile
That other host, that soar aloft to gaze
And celebrate his glory, whom they love,
Hover’d around; and, like a troop of bees,
Amid the vernal sweets alighting now,
Now, clustering, where their fragrant labour glows,
Flew downward to the mighty flow’r, or rose
From the redundant petals, streaming back
Unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy.
Faces had they of flame, and wings of gold;
The rest was whiter than the driven snow.
And as they flitted down into the flower,
From range to range, fanning their plumy loins,
Whisper’d the peace and ardor, which they won
From that soft winnowing.  Shadow none, the vast
Interposition of such numerous flight
Cast, from above, upon the flower, or view
Obstructed aught.  For, through the universe,
Wherever merited, celestial light
Glides freely, and no obstacle prevents.

Unlike the angels, however, the hummingbirds don’t whisper as they fan their plumy loins. Rather, their wings beat the air at an average of 53 beats a second, making a kind of drilling sound. It can be somewhat unnerving when I go out to refill the feeders, and for this unsettling aspect of hummingbirds, D. H. Lawence has the poem for us.

Lawrence gets a lot right about the beauty of hummingbirds—how they race down avenues and how they appear to be “a little bit chipped off in brilliance” (great assonance in that line). Given their frenetic activity, the world seems to slow down around them, which Lawrence captures through the contrast between “whizzing” and “slow, succulent stems.” But then he shifts to a nightmare vision. Here’s the poem:

I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chirped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers then,
In the world where humming-birds flashed ahead of creation
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the telescope of time,
Luckily for us.

I am put in mind of Daphne du Maurier’s story “The Birds,” later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, which has such passages as the following:

They kept coming at him from the air, silent save for the beating wings. The terrible, fluttering wings. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. Nothing else mattered. He must keep them from his eyes. They had not learned yet how to cling to a shoulder, how to rip clothing, how to dive in mass upon the head, upon the body. But with each dive, with each attack, they became bolder. And they had no thought for themselves. When they dived low and missed, they crashed, bruised and broken, on the ground. As Nat ran he stumbled, kicking their spent bodies in front of him.

Yes, I’m glad I’m a large creature when I venture out amongst them. And that they hold off from attacking me.

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Can We Be Beowulf Strong?

Tuesday

Tomorrow I will be giving the following talk to the Chautauqua series at the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly. The talk is entitled “When Grendel Invades Your Safe Spaces–What Would Beowulf Do?”

For years, when I would teach the 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, I would present my students with the following hypothetical. Imagine, I said, that you’re the most powerful nation around and you have built an immense governmental building that signals your strength to all the world. And yet, despite that military might, you cannot prevent the White House or the Capitol Building from being attacked. That’s because the attacks come not from without but from within.

The situation is summed up in the immortal words of the comic strip character Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” If you can imagine that situation, I told my students, you will be able to understand Danish king Hrothgar’s despair at Grendel’s attacks.

I didn’t foresee that my hypothetical would become real and that an angry mob of Americans would one day overrun the U.S. Capitol. But I did know that we live in a violent country and a violent world that regularly witness what should be safe spaces invaded by violence, whether they be schools, churches, synagogues, recreation centers, night clubs, movie theaters, outdoor concert venues, summer camps, seaside walks, the list goes on and on. There’s a reason, in other words, why readers continue to gravitate to Beowulf, one of the world’s greatest literary explorations of anger and violence.

To cite a few examples of its continuing appeal, in 2000 a new translation by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney became a surprising bestseller, making it onto the New York Times list. Since then there have been 10 more translations, including one by Tolkien—released by his estate—and one much-commended version for millennials by Maria Dahvana Headley, which opens with the word “Bro.” There have also been two movies.

Before I delve into the poem’s profound insights into internal violence and what can be done about it, here’s some history. The poem was probably composed in Mercia or Northumbria, perhaps as early as the 7th century, perhaps as late as the 10th—which is to say, well after the Romans have withdrawn from England, after the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes from Northern Europe had taken over, but either before, during, or after the Viking raids. We can’t be more precise than that. The poem itself is set in Scandinavia—there are allusions to events that occurred in the 6th century—and in some ways it’s a celebration of past glory. They don’t make heroes like they used to, the poet essentially tells us.

The societies of the time were tribal—nothing like the feudal states or the nation states that would emerge later—and they made their living largely by farming, trading, and raiding, whether for wealth or for slaves. The more powerful of the tribes could exact tribute from the others. The basic social contract, which is repeated over and over in Beowulf, is that warriors should be loyal to their king and that kings should be generous with their warriors. When both sides kept their part of the contract, all went well. But if warriors were not loyal or if kings hoarded rather than shared the wealth, there was trouble.

The poem may have been composed orally and then transcribed later by monks. There is debate over whether its Christian elements were added later or were part of the original composition, but in any event the Biblical allusions are all to the Old Testament, which would have resonated more with a warrior culture than the New Testament. After lingering in obscurity for centuries, the poem was rediscovered by the Victorians, who were looking for instances of past British greatness, and then brought to general attention by Oxford scholar and linguist J.R.R. Tolkien in an essay entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Since then, Beowulf has become an integral part of every British literature survey and is now considered one of the world’s great epics.

Plot-wise, the epic is anchored in three battles with monsters. A young warrior from Geatland shows up in the powerful Danish court promising to rid it of a troll that, for the past ten years, has plagued the great hall of Heorot, rendering it unusable. After Beowulf kills Grendel, the hall endures a second attack from Grendel’s vengeful mother, who kills the king’s best friend. Beowulf travels to her underwater lair and slays her, after which, richly rewarded, he returns to Geatland. Eventually he becomes king and has a long and prosperous reign, only to encounter a dragon in his later years. Roused by the theft of a goblet from its hoard, the dragon has burned down Beowulf’s hall. Despite his age, Beowulf insists on fighting the monster by himself. Although he receives a mortal wound, with the aid of his nephew Wiglaf Beowulf succeeds in killing the dragon before he dies.

Between Beowulf’s encounters, we meet numerous other characters and hear stories of past battles.

So why are so many of us drawn to the poem? As I said, I think it’s because it helps us understand the violent outbursts that periodically roil our own society. Fortunately for us, the poem also shows ways in which the anger and the violence can be countered. Beowulf diagnoses our problems and presents us with workable solutions. When I ask, “What would Beowulf do?” this is what I have in mind.

As I see it, each of the monsters represents a different kind of rage, which means it takes a different kind of action to defeat it. Furthermore, each of the monsters has multiple human equivalents within the poem. We encounter human versions of the two trolls and of the dragon in the various warriors and kings who are presented to us, with the trolls being archetypes of warriors who have gone bad, the dragons of failed kings. Bad warriors and failed kings threaten the very foundations the society, and the stakes are considerable. If your society falls apart, you are prey to attacks from other societies, with death or enslavement a very likely outcome for everyone.

The three rages are (1) Grendel’s resentment or sense of grievance, (2) GM’s grieving, vengeful anger, and (3) the dragon’s sullen depression. If the first two can be regarded as hot angers, the third can be seen as a cold anger, but cold is no less devastating than hot. “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” as Robert Frost puts it. In fact, in some ways hot anger and cold anger are different sides of the same coin. Grendel’s Mother lashes out before retreating to her underwater cave while the dragon, hunkered down for decades, can suddenly emerge to burn down everything around.

The poem’s first monster is the troll Grendel, archetype of the resentful warrior who feels as though life is treating him unfairly and that he’s not being given his due. Perhaps such a warrior, upon seeing the king present more rings to his fellows, lashed out, maybe in a drunken brawl, maybe in other ways. The poem shows him stewing in his resentment:

Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance.  It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet . . .

I promised you human versions of the monsters and here’s one. The Danish warrior Unferth, who is seated at a place of honor before King Hrothgar, feels instantly jealous of Beowulf when the young warrior shows up to rid the hall of its monster:

Beowulf’s coming,
his sea-braving, made him [Unferth] sick with envy:
 he could not brook or abide the fact
 that anyone else alive under heaven
 might enjoy greater regard than he did…

Unferth, we later learn, has been guilty of shedding the blood of kinsmen. In Anglo-Saxon society, the potential of violence from one’s fellows or even relatives is always present.

Resentment burns so hot and makes one so miserable that one feels compelled to share the misery. Here’s Grendel taking his resentment out on others:

Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping,
a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors
quartered together. And his glee was demonic,
picture the mayhem: before morning
he would rip life from limb and devour them,
feed on their flesh.

Whenever I read these lines, I always think of the resentment-crazed Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, who is angry that he must be second to God: “For only in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts.” 

Our second monster, Grendel’s Mother, is the rage we feel when we lose someone or something dear to our hearts. Again, when the hurt goes deep, we may feel driven to lash out so that others feel our pain. In Anglo-Saxon society, with its perpetual outbreaks of violence, a killing could trigger a blood feud that would go on for generations.

For a human version of Grendel’s mother, here is Hengest. Forced to live for months in close proximity with the warrior king Finn—each has killed someone dear to the other—Hengest’s suppressed anger finally boils over:

               The wildness in them
had to brim over.
               The hall ran red
 with blood of enemies.

It’s noteworthy that’s Grendel’s Mother, in her revenge, kills not Beowulf but the king’s best friend, leaving him in despair. Feeling paralyzed at the prospect of perpetual violence, Hrothgar cries out, “Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned.”

Hrothgar at this moment is in danger of becoming a depressed and sullen king and we encounter a number of such figures in the course of the poem. In other words, he is in danger of becoming a dragon, the poem’s third monster. We encounter a dragon king in Heremod, described by Hrothgar as follows:

His rise in the world brought little joy
to the Danish people, only death and destruction.
He vented his rage on men he caroused with,
killed his own comrades, a pariah king
who cut himself off from his own kind
even though Almighty God had made him
eminent and powerful and marked him from the start
for a happy life.  But a change happened,
he grew bloodthirsty, gave no more rings
to honor the Danes.  He suffered in the end
for having plagued his people for so long:
His life lost happiness.

Each of these monsters must be countered in a particular way. Fighting the resentment-crazed Grendel requires a strong sense of self. Grendel can’t be defeated by more of the same—he lashes out in his pain so to lash out in return, to slash at him with swords, won’t work. The poem tells us that he’s invulnerable to such a response.

Instead, he must be confronted with a forceful assertion of will. When Grendel next attacks the hall, Beowulf grasps him by the arm and, under the power of that grip, Grendel panics, pulling himself free of his arm so that he sustains a mortal wound. To risk a bad pun, he disarms himself or falls apart.

But a strong arm and a strong will, while they may work against the rage of resentment, don’t work with the rage that comes from grieving, which goes deeper. For that, Beowulf must reach deep, entering grieving’s underwater cave. As he descends through the waters, the monster stabs at his chest armor, which protects his heart, and almost manages to penetrate. Beowulf triumphs only because he finds a great sword, forged by giants from the golden age before the flood, to prevail.

Another way of putting this is that he has the resources within him to respond. If he failed to dig deeply, however, he could become like one of the Geat kings, Hrethel, who sinks into deep depression after one of his sons accidentally kills another. Hrethel, as it happens, crawls into his bed and never emerges again. Beowulf could become so overwhelmed by grief that he would never emerge from the underwater cave. We may all know people who have been so swallowed up.

As he represents the heroic solution to grieving anger, however, Beowulf rises to the occasion. I sometimes ask my students, what is your giant sword, the thing you rely on when everything else fails you? Do you have a bedrock place where you can stand? Sometimes they say friends or family or faith. For Beowulf, I think it is the warrior ethos (thus the sword). For America, it may be the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

The dragon represents a different kind of challenge. The dragon is related to an ancient civilization that has died out. We learn about a figure known as “the last veteran” who sees all around him crumble. In his depression, he builds a funeral barrow for himself and retreats into it with all society’s treasure.

[The last veteran] mourned as he moved about the world,
 deserted and alone, lamenting his unhappiness
 day and night, until death’s flood
 brimmed up in his heart.

It is into this barrow that the dragon moves and makes his home. Put another way, the barrow is the last veteran’s heart. He has become a dragon.

Beowulf encounters the dragon as an old man after he has been king for 50 years. Although his reign has been spectacularly successful, we see him looking back over his life and remembering nothing but a long string of meaningless deaths. In an attempt to prove himself one last time, he insists on fighting the dragon by himself. But fighting depression by oneself can itself be dragon behavior. Only the intervention of Beowulf’s nephew, who resists dragon fire to come to his assistance, allows him to defeat the beast. Put another way, only by working together, not by going it alone, can we defeat the monster depression.

To sum up:

Grendel – Resentful Rage
Grendel’s Mother – Murderous Grieving (hot rage)
The Dragon – Depression (cold rage)

To Defeat Grendel’s Resentful Rage:
Stand firm with a forceful presence

To Defeat the Murderous Grief of Grendel’s Mother:
Invoke deeply held values

To Defeat Debilitating Dragon Depression:
Support each other in a communal effort

These monsters have always been with us, and we see versions of them regularly in the world’s outbreaks of internal violence. I think of Grendel when I see many of the lone wolf mass slayings, whether in the United States, Norway, Paris, or elsewhere. I think of Grendel’s mother when we see long-time feuding between Israelis and Palestinians or Sunnis and Shias or Tutsis and Hutus. I think of dragons whenever we see grim autocrats hoarding power and wealth. With each of these monsters, we can imagine turning to some version of Beowulf’s actions for a productive response. Victories are not assured but the poem can keep one from despair.

Having looked at the general problem of internal violence, however, I want to take this talk in a slightly different direction—which is that the poem can also be seen as a description of what happens when powerful nations become smug and complacent. If that’s the case, then it’s possible that the poem casts useful light on the United States at this point in its historical trajectory.

While I’m no political scientist, I think we can recognize ourselves in the arc of Danish history that Beowulf presents us with. There are five stages to this arc:

1. Humble beginnings

2. Spectacular rise

3. A smug sense of entitlement and complacency

4.  Internal dissension

5. Dissolution

Before continuing on, I relate something a Chinese student attending the college where I used to teach once wrote in a composition class back in 1981: “In the brief but glorious history of the United States…” The sentiment startled me because, while I had never thought about it before, it rang true. Here was someone from a country 5000 years old looking at a country that had only recently celebrated its 200th birthday.

Even if America’s glorious history has been brief, it’s still longer than the four-generation dynasty described in Beowulf. The poem begins by lauding Shield Sheafson, a foundling who, on the basis of his prowess and other gifts, rises to become a powerful king. He is succeeded by Beow, who is generous and “well-regarded,” and by Beow’s son Halfdane, a “fighter prince” who “held sway for as long as he lived.” He in turn is succeeded by Hrothgar, who until Grendel strikes appears to be carrying on the tradition of his great grandfather Shield Sheafson. The poem tells us,

Friends and kinsmen flocked to [Hrothgar’s] ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army.

As leader of most powerful nation around, Hrothgar looks to memorialize his nation:

So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old—
but not the common land or people’s lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there,
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls. Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.

Unlike a certain ex-president, Hrothgar also pays the contractors who have done the work:

Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table.

The mead-hall is more than a place to dispense rings to faithful followers. It’s also a warning to other countries not to mess with the Danes. And indeed, as Denmark is the reigning superpower in the region, no one dares to. The danger, rather, will come from within.

In the immediate case, it’s Grendel, who as I’ve argued represents internal dissension. In fact, we learn, partly from the text and partly from other sources, that even with Grendel dead the great hall of Heorot will not last much longer. Hrothgar has two young son and, when he dies, there will be a succession battle as his nephew, named regent, will seize the throne, killing one of the sons. In the ensuing civil strife, the great hall of Heorot will burn to the ground. In other words, the orderly succession that we have seen at the beginning of the poem—and which until 2020 was the pride of American democracy—will end.

Seeing the situation in this light, we can find parallels between the resentment-crazed Grendel who storms Heorot and increasing American partisanship, including the January 6 attack on the Capitol. For all his power, Hrothgar is helpless. The one silver lining is that Grendel at least cannot touch the king’s throne, with the poet telling us “the throne itself, the treasure-seat,/ he was kept from approaching.” America has got to hope that, whatever the challenges, its underlying democratic principles will hold.

King Hrothgar all but describes how great empires rise and fall in a speech that is meant as a cautionary tale to Beowulf, who is feeling good after defeating the Grendels. In stage #1 of his warning, Hrothgar notes how life feels in the early going, when the king and his kingdom are riding high:

It is a great wonder
how Almighty God in His magnificence
favors our race with rank and scope
and the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide.
Sometimes He allows the mind of a man
of distinguished birth to follow its bent,
grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth
and forts to command in his own country.
He permits him to lord it in many lands . . .

The first sign of trouble comes when the king starts to take all these gifts as his due. He thinks he is rich because “the whole world conforms to his will,” not because he has inherited a situation built by people “with rank and scope and the gift of wisdom.” In America’s case, we might say that we have been living comfortably in a society, and an infrastructure, built by earlier generations:

. . . until the man in his unthinkingness
forgets that it will ever end for him.
He indulges his desires; illness and old age
mean nothing to him; his mind is untroubled
by envy or malice or the thought of enemies
with their hate-honed swords. The whole world
conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst . . .

Arrogance, and with it discontent, continue to grow. The passage notes the imperceptible gradualness of the change.  Instead of seeing himself joined with the country in a common enterprise, the king gradually finds himself resenting others. The “devious promptings of the demon start” as he imagines other people eyeing “his” possessions:

. . . until an element of overweening
enters him and takes hold
while the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses,
grown too distracted.  A killer stalks him,
an archer who draws a deadly bow.
And then the man is hit in the heart,
the arrow flies beneath his defenses,
the devious promptings of the demon start.
His old possessions seem paltry to him now.
He covets and resents; dishonors custom
and bestows no gold; and because of good things
he ignores the shape of things to come.

In the end, Hrothgar says, the king will reap what he has sown:

Then finally the end arrives
when the body he was lent collapses and falls
prey to its death; ancestral possessions
and the goods he hoarded are inherited by another…

This warning will reappear multiple times in the course of the poem. For instance, the “last veteran,” seeing his once glorious nation having become a shadow of its former self, buries himself (along with all his country’s treasure) in a funeral barrow.

“Nor may webbed mail
range far and wide on the warlord’s back
beside his mustered troops. No trembling harp,
no tuned timber, no tumbling hawk
swerving through the hall, no swift horse
pawing the courtyard. Pillage and slaughter
have emptied the earth of entire peoples.”
And so he mourned as he moved about the world,
deserted and alone, lamenting his unhappiness
Day and night, until death’s flood
Brimmed up in his heart.
                           Then an old harrower of the dark
Happened to find the hoard open,
The burning one who hunts out barrows,
The slick-skinned dragon, threatening the night sky
With streamers of fire.

Think of the funeral barrow as a dead monument to past greatness. If a great nation becomes a mausoleum, the dragon moves in. Put another way, depression and stasis overtake a society that is incapable of moving into the future. Instead, the dragon spirit hoards the wealth it has accumulated, refusing to share, and if anyone threatens to redistribute that wealth—say, if someone ventures into the dragon’s cave and takes even a single cup—it erupts in anger. At other times, it just hunkers down in its cave.

This is the dragon that Beowulf encounters at the end of his life. The question is whether he will be able to defeat the dragon and redistribute the treasure or whether he and his society will all go down together. This is the challenge for the United States as well: Either we will become increasingly mean-spirited and dragon-like, lamenting the end of past greatness without striding heroically into the future. Or we will make America great again, we will build back better, showing that the American way is still resilient and is still capable of leading the world against the challenges confronting it.

I honestly don’t know if, in our case, Beowulf will be able to defeat the monsters of resentment, grieving, and depression. We can take heart from his last words to his nephew Wiglaf, however:

Order my troop to construct a barrow
on a headland on the coast, after my pyre has cooled.
It will loom in the horizon at Hronesness
and be a reminder among my people–
so that in coming times crews under sail
will call it Beowulf’s barrow, as they steer
ships across the wide and shrouded waters

We ourselves are trying to steer our way across wide and shrouded waters at the moment. Our challenge is to be Beowulf strong.

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Ibsen for Character Formation

Monday

I am pleased to report that the issues with my blog have been resolved (all hail to GoDaddy!) and I am catching up on back posts. I’m currently listening to Virginia Woolf’s Voyage Out, one of the few novels of hers I have not read, and am particularly enjoying Rachel, a young woman and accomplished pianist who has been cut off from the world. I especially like watching her growth through literature.

Rachel’s mother having died, she has been alternating between an isolated life with two maiden aunts and an equally isolated life onboard ship with her father, who owns a shipping company. Fortunately, she meets up with Helen Ambrose on the boat, who invites her to stay with her at a resort on the South American coast and who introduces her to books:

Among the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her niece should she stay was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private—a room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress as well as a sanctuary. Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the age of twenty-four. Her judgment was correct, and when she shut the door Rachel entered an enchanted place, where the poets sang and things fell into their right proportions.

The plays of Heinrik Ibsen especially fascinate her. From a reference to Nora, it appears that she has just been reading The Doll’s House, about a wife who rebels against being treated like a child. The other book mentioned is George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossroads, which according to Wikipedia is about “an intelligent and forceful woman trapped in a miserable marriage.” One can see why Rachel becomes thoughtful:

Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes were concentrated almost sternly upon the page, and from her breathing, which was slow but repressed, it could be seen that her whole body was constrained by the working of her mind. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

“What I want to know,” she said aloud, “is this: What is the truth? What’s the truth of it all?” She was speaking partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read. The landscape outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear, but although there were men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid, for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it—an heroic statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating the view.

Helen, who is a sensitive soul, figures that substantive identity exploration is underway:

Ibsen’s plays always left [Rachel] in that condition. She acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen’s amusement; and then it would be Meredith’s turn and she became Diana of the Crossways. But Helen was aware that it was not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the human being. When Rachel became tired of the rigidity of her pose on the back of the chair, she turned round, slid comfortably down into it, and gazed out over the furniture through the window opposite which opened on the garden. (Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she went on thinking of things that the book suggested to her, of women and life.)

Helen, like a good teacher when the pupil is eager to learn, knows enough to stay out of the way:

During the three months she had been here she had made up considerably, as Helen meant she should, for time spent in interminable walks round sheltered gardens, and the household gossip of her aunts. But Mrs. Ambrose would have been the first to disclaim any influence, or indeed any belief that to influence was within her power. She saw her less shy, and less serious, which was all to the good, and the violent leaps and the interminable mazes which had led to that result were usually not even guessed at by her. Talk was the medicine she trusted to, talk about everything, talk that was free, unguarded, and as candid as a habit of talking with men made natural in her own case.

Woolf also notes that Helen does not want Rachel to become an angel of the house (or a Nora), sacrificing her own needs so that men will find her amiable:

Nor did she encourage those habits of unselfishness and amiability founded upon insincerity which are put at so high a value in mixed households of men and women. She desired that Rachel should think, and for this reason offered books and discouraged too entire a dependence upon Bach and Beethoven and Wagner.

Whereas Helen’s tastes run more to social drama, however, Rachel appears more drawn to psychodrama. Again, Helen knows enough to stay out of the way:

But when Mrs. Ambrose would have suggested Defoe, Maupassant, or some spacious chronicle of family life, Rachel chose modern books, books in shiny yellow covers, books with a great deal of gilding on the back, which were tokens in her aunt’s eyes of harsh wrangling and disputes about facts which had no such importance as the moderns claimed for them. But she did not interfere. Rachel read what she chose, reading with the curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like tables or chairs. In this way she came to conclusions, which had to be remodeled according to the adventures of the day, and were indeed recast as liberally as anyone could desire, leaving always a small grain of belief behind them.

Literature’s power to influence character should never be underestimated. When I complete the novel, I’ll report on how Rachel turns out.

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Here in the Sun I Sit Alone

Van Gogh, The Pink Trees (1888)

Spiritual Sunday

Robert Francis’s “Nothing Is Far” is a gem, a poet attempting to capture the sense of wonder he feels in the presence of even the simplest of natural objects. While there is no grand epiphany such as one encounters in the Scriptures, he still senses more than meets the eye. A common stone can still reveal/ Something not stone, not seen, yet real,” he observes.

The poem reminds me Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to church.” After describing her trip to the orchard, which functions as her church, Dickinson concludes, “So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –/I’m going, all along.” In other words, heaven is here at hand so don’t think of it as something towards which one journeys.

Similarly, don’t think that God is absent in a bird, a tree, a stone. Nothing was God that is not here.

Nothing Is Far
By Robert Francis

Though I have never caught the word
Of God from any calling bird,
I hear all that the ancients heard.

Though I have seen no deity
Enter or leave a twilit tree,
I see all that the seers see.

A common stone can still reveal
Something not stone, not seen, yet real.
What may a common stone conceal?

Nothing is far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here.

Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.
Here in the sun I sit alone
Between the known and the unknown.

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Dante, Shakespeare, and GOP Betrayal

Engraver Cornelis Galle the Elder after a drawing by Cigoli

Friday

When in yesterday’s post I compared the events of January 6 with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I omitted one of the most important scenes. An Editorial Board column by political scientist John Stoehr reminded me of it.

Watching the testimony of the four Capitol Police officers, Stoehr noted that they were most distressed by GOP betrayal:

The painful part, a sentiment expressed by each of them, came later when they realized everything they believed in—duty, sacrifice, loyalty and honor—meant nothing to these Republicans. Over and over, testimony kept returning to a variation on a familiar theme: betrayal.

Again, Officer Fanone: “My law enforcement career prepared me to cope. … Being an officer, you know your life is at risk whenever you walk out the door, even if you don’t expect otherwise law-abiding citizens to take up arms against you. But nothing, truly nothing, has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny the events of that day, and in doing so betray their oath of office.” 

The most painful moment in Julius Caesar is when Caesar realizes that a man he thought was his friend is amongst those killing him. “Et tu, Brute! Then fall, Caesar,” he cries.

The betrayal is so shocking that, in his own response to the historical event, Dante places Brutus is the lowest circle of hell, along with fellow conspirator Cassius and Judas Iscariot. The frozen environment captures the coldness of their hearts, and their being devoured by three-headed Satan—one mouth for each—shows the extent to which evil has engulfed their souls:

Each mouth devoured a sinner clenched within.
Frayed by the fangs like flax beneath a brake;
Three at a time he tortured them for sin.

But all the bites the one in front might take
Were nothing to the claws that flayed his hide
And sometimes stripped his back to the last flake.

“That wretch up there whom keenest pangs divide
Is Judas called Iscariot,” said my lord,
“His head within, his jerking legs outside;
this side the Centre: 7.30 a.m. at the Antipodes

As for the pair whose heads hang hitherward:
From the black mouth the limbs of Brutus sprawl—
See how he writhes and utters never a word;

And strong-thewed Cassius is his fellow-thrall.

Shakespeare is kinder to Brutus than Dante is, seeing him more as one misled by Cassius than evil. Furthermore, Brutus has pangs of conscience, if that’s how we are to read the visitation of Caesar’s ghost.

I wouldn’t put those Republicans who have betrayed their oath of office in Hell’s lowest circle, although it’s worth noting that Dante’s punishments are always self-inflicted. Brutus is there because he has denied his God-bestowed humanity to an extreme degree, and there are Republicans denying the suffering undergone by the Capitol police. Trump may assure them that they will face no accountability for lying, but lying rebounds upon the liars, hollowing them out. A price is paid, whether or not they are ever held to account by earthly authorities.

In Dante’s vision, one avoids Inferno and achieves Purgatory if one recants. We’ll see if any of those GOP members currently intent on denying the events of January 6 face change their tune.

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Jan. 6 Reenacted “Julius Caesar”

Vincenzo Camuccini, Death of Julius Caesar

Thursday

A Congressional investigation into the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol is now underway, and as I watched the Capitol police give their testimony— and watched GOP members of Congress continue to cower before Donald Trump—I found myself thinking of what Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says about courage and cowardice.

More on that in a moment. First, however, I note that Julius Caesar lines up remarkably closely to Trump’s coup attempt, even though in this case the play is less black and white. Trump simply wanted supporters to pressure Vice-President Mike Pence and GOP Republicans to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, even though the election was clean. In Julius Caesar, by contrast, the senators claim they are forestalling a potential coup but their motives are unclear. Nor is Caesar portrayed as a tyrant. In any event, the assassination proves to be a catastrophic mistake, what with the subsequent mob violence and civil war. By the end of the play, conspirators Cassius and Brutus commit suicide and the Roman republic for which they sacrificed themselves comes to an end.

In the play, we see ingratitude such as that shown by the GOP towards the Capitol police. Cassius recalls a moment when he saved Caesar from drowning, only to be put down by Caesar in later interactions. The two were engaged in a swimming contest:

But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried ‘Help me, Cassius, or I sink!’
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar. And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body,
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.

I think of the Republican congressman who refused to shake hands with a Capitol policeman who had protected him, and of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reversing course and defending Trump’s participation in the events. Because McCarthy needs Trump’s support to become a god—or at least Speaker of the House—he is prepared to grovel to get it

Cassius is more like the rinsurrectionists than the police, however. Like the former, he is driven more by a sense of grievance than by genuine concern about the republic’s survival. Brutus is the nobler one, prepared to give up his life for a higher ideal. Likewise, the police are seeking only justice and an acknowledgement of their sacrifice– neither of which the GOP appears prepared to grant.

Instead, Republicans are engaged in a Marc Antony-style dance with truth. Everyone knows the opening to Antony’s famous speech, which captures our attention with its lofty “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” The speech itself, however, is a tour-de-force in bad faith argumentation. Antony has had to promise that he will only deliver a funeral elegy for Caesar, nothing more, but he behaves instead like those Trump supporters who find ways to hint at election fraud without actually saying anything that could make them legally liable for perjury. For that matter, Trump himself stirred people up to attack the Capitol without ever saying so directly, thereby retaining plausible deniability.  

Antony claims that he is on the podium “not to praise Caesar but to bury him.” Through skillful use of sarcasm, innuendo, and populist rhetoric, however he manages to both praise Caesar and cast aspersions against the conspirators. (Marc Antony claiming to be a populist is a joke.) Through his rhetorical skills, he succeeds is stirring up a murderous pro-Caesar mob that goes after the conspirators and anyone they associate with them, including an innocent poet who shares a name with one of the senators. Antony gains the upper hand and Brutus and Cassius must flee for their lives.

As I say, the parallels are inexact. The January 6 insurrectionists would certainly like to see themselves as high-minded republicans, as did the founding fathers that some of them cite. Given that their claims of Biden’s tyranny are fraudulent, however, the true saviors of the republic must be seen as those Capitol police. After all, their bravery made possible Congress voting to certify the election results, which it did later that night.

Also heroic are Lyn Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who have braved their party’s ire and agreed to participate in the House investigation of January 6. About them, we can say what Caesar himself says of courage and cowardice:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

It’s possible that their courage will cost them reelection, but at least they won’t have engaged in the reversals, distraction tactics, and moral equivocations of their colleagues. In other words, they will have tasted death but once, not through a series of small, self-inflicted soul lacerations. Cheney and Kinzinger are the true small-r republicans while the others are RINOs (republicans in name only).

At the end of Julius Caesar Marc Antony, who can now afford to be magnanimous as all his opponents are dead, delivers a eulogy to Brutus. The man who once mockingly and sarcastically called Brutus “an honorable man” now says that he alone of the plotters acted out of higher ideals:

This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’

If Trumpism triumphs and Cheney and Kinzinger go down to defeat, will Republicans try to reclaim the moral high ground by delivering such eulogies? We’ve seen that no act of hypocrisy is beyond them.

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Poetry Complements the Intellectual Life

Robert Haydon, William Wordsworth

Wednesday

I have been reading the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, considered by many to be the greatest 19th century English philosopher, in which he discusses how Wordsworth came to his aid at a dark hour. It sounds as if he was caught in the grip of pure intellect and that Wordsworth showed him how to reconnect with his emotions.

I remember once using literature in a similar reconnection process, although my case was not as dire.

A proponent of utilitarianism, a very philosophical approach to social policy which advocates judging acts by their utility—how can one attain the greatest good for the greatest number?—Mill was raised by a philosopher father. As a result, he was immersed in what he calls “intellectual culture.” At a certain point, this proved to be not enough and he was plunged into depression:

During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit…. Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later period of the same mental malady:

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Mill turned to poetry in a search for answers. His first choice proved to be no help:

In the worst period of my depression, I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet’s state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras. 

 Wordsworth was a different matter:

In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth’s poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.

Wordsworth’s nature descriptions in themselves were not what Mill needed, however. As he notes, Sir Walter Scott does a better job describing nature. Wordsworth, however, links nature to the emotions:

What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure…. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.

It’s important that Mill could see in Wordsworth someone going through his own struggles. Consider the opening of Intimations of Immortality:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

In the course of the poem, however, Wordsworth manages to work his way back to joy. I suspect it is this which gives Mill hope in his own case:

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s immortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I promised my own story so here it is. Having been raised, like Mill, by a father who was both intensely intellectual and emotionally reserved, I tried to be rational in my every endeavor. I felt thoroughly comfortable with the fiction of Jane Austen but shied away from more emotional authors. My research field, after all, was the British 18th century, about which Esther in Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar says, “I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.”

I don’t know about the smug but I put a high premium on reason. As Mill discovered, however, life can seem awfully arid under such an onslaught.

Feeling that something was missing, I spent my first sabbatical year exploring how I could make teaching literature more meaningful, both to my students and to myself. As I was in Ljubljana on a Fulbright at the time, I took advantage of the English Department’s excellent collection and started reading authors who plunge one into the emotional life of their characters. I remember especially immersing myself in English novelist Margaret Drabble’s melodramas, reading one work after another as though my life depended on it.  They were enough like the reserved Jane Austen to make me feel comfortable but different enough to explore the emotions displayed.

Mill is careful to note that he “never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement.” In other words, he remained true to his utilitarian vision, just as I never ceased to value the intellect. But he learned, as I did, that it must be “joined” with emotions. As he puts it,

The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.

He found the answer in poetry. As have I.

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