Last week, I gashed myself while cutting firewood, and what then transpired resembled the scene where the White Queen pricks herself with her brooch in Alice through the Looking Glass.
I’m happy to report that the cut itself was not serious. Using the axe as a hatchet to cut kindling, I hit an unexpected knot, which caused the axe to glance off the log and cut the top of my hand just over the bone at the base of my index finger. There was little bleeding and only four stitches were required.
Initially, as the White Queen is explaining to Alice “the effect of living backwards,” we see her bandaging her finger.
Shortly thereafter, she begins to scream:
Alice was just beginning to say ‘There’s a mistake somewhere—,’ when the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. ‘My finger’s bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!’
Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that Alice had to hold both her hands over her ears.
‘What is the matter?’ she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard. ‘Have you pricked your finger?’
‘I haven’t pricked it yet,’ the Queen said, ‘but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!’
Finally, there’s the actual injury:
‘When do you expect to do it?’ Alice asked, feeling very much inclined to laugh.
‘When I fasten my shawl again,’ the poor Queen groaned out: ‘the brooch will come undone directly. Oh, oh!’ As she said the words the brooch flew open, and the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it again.
‘Take care!’ cried Alice. ‘You’re holding it all crooked!’ And she caught at the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the Queen had pricked her finger.
‘That accounts for the bleeding, you see,’ she said to Alice with a smile. ‘Now you understand the way things happen here.’
‘But why don’t you scream now?’ Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.
‘Why, I’ve done all the screaming already,’ said the Queen. ‘What would be the good of having it all over again?’
To recap life in Looking Glass Land, bandage first, scream second, prick yourself third.
My own Looking Glass sequence began with a Christmas gift of special “cooling field towels,” designed for those times when one can’t take a regular shower. My wife’s gift didn’t make sense at the time since, as I am retired, I can take a shower whenever I need one.
Then, two weeks ago, I had a tetanus shot, recommended by my doctor during my annual check-up. “You haven’t had one for a while,” he observed.
At the check-up, I scheduled a follow-up appointment to monitor a new medication. That check-up was scheduled for 9:30 last Thursday.
I cut myself at 8:45.
It so happens that I had forgotten about the follow-up appointment. Julia, after first pouring peroxide into my wound, called our doctor, only to be told that I was already scheduled to see him.
So instead of
–cutting myself; –scheduling an appointment; –getting a tetanus shot; — and dry washing myself,
I followed the White Queen’s example and reversed the order: buy special washing equipment, receive a shot, schedule the doctor, cut myself.
It’s Lewis Carroll’s world. The rest of us are just living in it.
Conservative columnist Bret Stevens, who regularly engages in a New York Times dialogue with liberal columnist Gail Collins, offered up a choice observation about Texas Senator Ted Cruz following the latter’s Cancun vacation trip during the Texas freeze. I’m still trying to untangle it:
Gail, first of all, my heartfelt sympathies and condolences to all of our friends suffering in Texas, and not just because Ted Cruz is one of their senators.
Also, isn’t the whole Cancún Caper such a perfect encapsulation of Cruz’s character? He’s what happens when All the King’s Men meets National Lampoon’s Vacation. He’s Shakespeare’s Richard III as interpreted by Mr. Bean. He is to American statesmanship what Fifty Shades of Grey was to English prose writing, minus the, um, stimulus.
Cruz, trying to imitate Donald Trump, would like to be Willie Stark, the man-of-the-people-turned-autocrat in the Robert Penn Warren classic. Booking a week at the Cancún Ritz-Carton while your constituents suffer through a catastrophic deep freeze, however, sounds more like the opening premise of a catastrophic Chevy Chase road trip. Incidentally, both movie and Cruz feature dog incidents. Cruz left his dog Snowflake behind in their Texas apartment while, in an instance of black humor, the character played by Chase forgets he has tied a dog (a particularly mean dog, foisted on him– along with a senile aunt–by unscrupulous relatives) to the car’s fender. Unlike Snowflake, the dog in the movie doesn’t make it.
Cruz may fancy himself a shrew political manipulator a la Richard III, but a number of people have pointed out that, had he been Trump, he would have brazened out his Cancun vacation. Instead, like an inept Mr. Bean, he first tried to apologize—in the process of which he blamed the trip on his daughters—and then got the news media to show him loading bottled water into someone’s car. To call this a cheap publicity stunt is to give cheap publicity stunts a bad name.
As far as Fifty Shades of Grey goes, it’s true that Cruz has a sadistic streak, so maybe that’s why that particular novel comes to mind. Stevens’s point, however, is that Cruz is as far from a statesman as E. L. James is from a readable author. James, however, at least titillates us whereas Cruz just makes us cringe.
The best line I’ve heard about the Texas senator comes from another conservative, Matthew Dowd. Why do people take an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? Answer: It saves time.
Further thought: Just to give you a taste of a genuine populist, here’s Willie Stark delivering the speech where he turns on the establishment. Stark, who has been drafted to (unbeknownst to him) split what he will call “the hick vote,” withdraws to throw his support behind the other “hick candidate.” If Cruz ever attempted a speech like this, he’d come across as an even bigger fraud that he already is:
“I have a speech here,” he said. “It is a speech about what this state needs. But there’s no use telling you what this state needs. You are the state. You know what you need. Look at your pants. Have they got holes in the knee? Listen to your belly. Did it ever rumble for emptiness? Look at your crop. Did it ever rot in the field because the road was so bad you couldn’t get it to market? Look at your kids. Are they growing up ignorant as you and dirt because there isn’t any school for them?”
Willie paused, and blinked around at the crowd. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to read you any speech. You know what you need better’n I could tell you. But I’m going to tell you a story.”
Willie goes on to explain how he has been duped and then, after he has (accidentally) pushed the establishment representative into the orchestra pit, concludes with his new announcement:
“Let the hog lie, and listen to me, you hicks. Yeah, you’re hicks, too, and they’ve fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me. For that’s what they think we’re for. To fool. Well, this time I’m going to fool somebody. I’m getting out of this race.”
Last July I collected all the essays I had written on Covid into a single post, with the first appearing almost exactly a year ago. This week, as we mark the once-inconceivable 500,000th official Covid death, I update that list. It has all been too tragic for words, but words are what we have.
May 8, 2020 – Some in the GOP have expressed a willingness to write off old people as the cost of doing business during the pandemic. As an old person, I cite Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Mary Oliver in my desire to stay alive. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/choose-life-over-needless-sacrifice/
June 29, 2020 – The spy/scout in M.M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions about the British in 19th century Afghanistan has the same success in warning the British army about impending disaster as our scientists and health care workers have been with Donald Trump. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/our-embattled-health-care-workers/
November 1, 2020 – Because Sophocles’s Philoctetes deals with compassion—or lack of it—for a man who is sick, it’s appropriate that Joe Biden should quote a passage from a Seamus Heaney translation of the play. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/hope-rhymes-with-history/
January 5, 2021 – Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dodd mysteries about World War I and World II capture the drama of living under attack and the particular tragedy of dying in the final days of a war, which is where we currently are with regard to Covid, what with cases declining and a final end in sight. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/the-dangerous-final-months-of-covid/
Charles X, a temporary relief after the tumultuous Napoleonic years
Tuesday
In Les Miserables, which I’m currently listening to, Victor Hugo periodically sets his characters aside to discourse on great historical themes. What he has to say about “the restoration” of the Bourbon monarchy following Waterloo put me in mind of Joe Biden’s election.
This surprised me in that the two situations seem polar opposites. Trump, not Biden, represented an attempt to roll history back to a less egalitarian time, whether it be to when whites or when kings reigned supreme.
Hugo, however, says the reaction to the Napoleonic years was in part a yearning for tranquility. What with the 1789 French Revolution, the 1793 Vendée uprising, the 1793-94 reign of terror, and finally the Napoleonic years (1799-1815), France has seen non-stop drama for a quarter of a century. After Napoleon’s final defeat, Hugo is relieved that France has reached “a halting place.” “Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men,” he writes, “thank God, we have seen enough”:
The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place.
These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition, to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. “What a good little king was he!” We have marched since daybreak, we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.
Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit, what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content.
“The King of Yvetot,” incidentally is a William Makepeace Thackeray poem about a Normandy king who “let all thoughts of glory go,/ And dawdled half his days a-bed.” Prusias, from what I can tell, is chiefly famous for having remained neutral during some of Rome’s wars. Trump, while no Napoleon, left a similar mess behind. Biden appears willing to let all thoughts of glory–or headlines–go in order to clean things up.
The historical contrasts are as illuminating as the parallels. Hugo says that, although France tried to turn the clock back, the energies released by the 1789 revolution—what he calls “accomplished facts”—could not be bottled up. The restored monarchs could no more stop a new, more egalitarian society from emerging than Trump could put a stop to an increasingly diverse and multicultural society. While the kings might think they were “granting” new liberties, it was actually history that was pushing them, just as it pushed Britain’s restored Stuart monarchy following the Puritan republic:
At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men.
This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.
These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded. Princes “grant” them, but in reality, it is the force of things which gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a glimpse of in 1814.
Because of the contradiction between monarchy and changing times, Hugo believes the 1830 “July Revolution” that overthrew the last of the Bourbons was inevitable. As much as the Louis XVIII and Charles X tried to change with the times, they could not change enough. Still, Hugo gives them credit for their peaceful regimes, in which “it was the turn of intelligence of have the word.” They allowed “equality before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions.” As a result, the 1830 revolution was largely peaceful and the Bourbon dynasty left the scene quietly:
This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.
It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with it alongside.
Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of Europe. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The wind ceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, the pure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principles which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until 1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the hands of Providence.
Biden differs from Louis and Charles in that he is working in concert with historical trends rather than against them. (If he didn’t, progressives would pressure him the way the July revolutionists pressured Charles.) As a result, there’s a chance that, in the new quiet, he may become one of the most consequential presidents in American history, taking on the major challenges of the 21st century at a time when we thought American government was broken beyond repair.
That’s not a prediction, by the way, and there’s much that could go wrong. Hugo makes it clear, however, that (1) societies need a halting place following incessant turmoil and (2) it’s better to work with history than against it.
With the Senate voting to acquit and various Republicans making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, does this mean that Donald Trump has once more dodged accountability? While many supporters have paid a price, like John Gay’s Mack the Knife it appears that Trump has once again evaded the noose.
Indeed, the popularity of Macheath may give us insight into Trump’s continuing allure. Given that 18th-century audiences loved watching the impudent rogue repeatedly slip through the law’s clutches and that Frank Sinatra thrilled fans as he swaggered through Brecht’s and Weil’s lyrics (“When the shark bites with his teeth, dear/ Scarlet billows start to spread”), one can see why Trump fans cheered as the president flouted the law, norms, and general civility. The glamorous lawbreaker has long captured the public imagination.
Gay, incidentally, made direct equations between his highway man and the country’s leading statesman, prime minister Robert Walpole. At one point Macheath sings,
Through all the employments of life Each neighbor abuses his brother; Whore and rogue they call husband and wife, All professions be-rogue one another. The priest calls the lawyer a cheat, The lawyer beknaves the Divine, And the statesman because he’s so great, Thinks his trade as honest as mine.
So will Trump continue to get away with his crimes? I think of an observation that Henry Fielding makes in Tom Jones on such matters. “There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers,” he writes,
who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
To be sure, the structure of Fielding’s novel refutes his pessimism in that Tom’s virture in fact wins him both the fair Sophia and a landed estate whereas the villainous Blifil is stripped of his title and reduced to marital fortune hunting and…ppolitics?! For much of history, literarary structure has in fact carried a moral message. Miss Prism articulates this vision in an interchange from The Importance of Being Ernest, which features Wilde’s characteristic topsy-turvy wit:
Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Fielding makes a similar point as he looks back at Greek tragedy, where a god-in-a-machine (deus ex machina) would be lowered on stage at the end of a performance to ensure that justice prevailed:
In this the ancients had a great advantage over the moderns. Their mythology, which was at that time more firmly believed by the vulgar than any religion is at present, gave them always an opportunity of delivering a favorite hero. Their deities were always ready at the writer’s elbow, to execute any of his purposes; and the more extraordinary the invention was, the greater was the surprise and delight of the credulous reader.
Even as Fielding questioned such fantasy interventions, moral accountability continued to be written into the structure of novels throughout the following century, and we find it in the fiction of Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy, pretty much everyone. When an author finally showed virtue ending in unhappiness (Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Ubervilles: A Pure Women), readers were outraged.
If we can’t count on justice for Trump in this world, how about the next? Cynics and atheists like John Wilmot have long dismissed afterlife punishment as mere fantasy wish fulfillment:
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules God’s everlasting fiery jails (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools), With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door, Are senseless stories, idle tales, Dreams, whimseys, and no more.
Dante, of course, gives the most complete accounting of what happens to evildoers after they die. And while Wilmot might dismiss Dante’s vision as senseless stories (Inferno even features the dog), the Florentine is actually a bit more sophisticated. The hell that people suffer after death is just a metaphorical description of the hell their evil visits upon them while they are still alive. I’ve written several times of the perpetual hell in which Trump finds himself: his anger boils him, his greed drags him down, his own fraud gets him to fear the hooks of others, his resentment gnaws away at him perpetually.
But even if we agree that Trump will pay some price, interior if not exterior, that’s scant consolation to those whom he has swindled. Voltaire makes this point in Candide when his protagonist thinks that providence has just intervened to balance the moral ledger:
The French captain soon saw that the captain of the victorious vessel was a Spaniard, and that the other was a Dutch pirate, and the very same one who had robbed Candide. The immense plunder which this villain had amassed, was buried with him in the sea, and out of the whole only one sheep was saved.
“You see,” said Candide to Martin, “that crime is sometimes punished. This rogue of a Dutch skipper has met with the fate he deserved.”
“Yes,” said Martin; “but why should the passengers be doomed also to destruction? God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.”
Needless to say, people have been grappling with these ethical issues since the dawn of human history so there’s no easy reassurance to be had. Just keep in mind that, although life can certainly be unfair, Plato, Buddha, Jesus and others have compellingly argued that heaven is to be found in a virtuous life and hell in a vicious one.
Lent began this past week with Ash Wednesday so here’s Walter Bruggeman’s “Marked by Ashes.” The poet plays with the idea that the season begins mid-work week, which find us “burden[ed] with the tasks of the day.” Beginning with “committees and memos” and “calls and appointments,” he moves on to “failed hopes and broken promises,” “forgotten children and frightened women,” all of which leave a “taste of ash in our mouth.” Given the chain of associations, one can’t help but wonder about the poet’s experiences with office work.
But because it is Wednesday, we are also “halfway home,” so that our “ashness” is counterbalanced with anticipation of Easter victory. We are “half frazzled, half expectant,/ half turned toward you [God], half rather not.” Even as we face up to our ashes-to-ashes mortality, we look forward to “the Easter parade of newness.”
“Come here and Easter our Wednesday with/ mercy and justice and peace and generosity,” the poet calls. This of this as the ultimate hump day poem.
Ruler of the Night, Guarantor of the day… This day — a gift from you. This day — like none other you have ever given, or we have ever received. This Wednesday dazzles us with gift and newness and possibility. This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day, for we are already halfway home halfway back to committees and memos, halfway back to calls and appointments, halfway on to next Sunday, halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant, half turned toward you, half rather not.
This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday, but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes — we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth: of failed hope and broken promises, of forgotten children and frightened women, we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust; we can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.
We are able to ponder our ashness with some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.
On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you — you Easter parade of newness. Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us, Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom; Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth. Come here and Easter our Wednesday with mercy and justice and peace and generosity.
We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.
Gustave Doré, The Adventure with the Windmills (Don Quixote)
Friday
My English professor son Tobias Wilson-Bates pointed out to me that there’s an element of Don Quixote in the response to Texas’s weather problems. As citizens watch the state’s power grid collapse in the face of arctic weather, their Republican governor, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, and other GOP officials are blaming the whole problem on…windmills.
Apparently a New York Congresswoman and Joe Biden’s “Green New Deal” are also to blame. Pay no attention to Texas’ failure to weatherize, modernize, stockpile, and connect with other states’ energy systems.
Since Monday, various Fox News hosts, including Tucker Carlson and Harris Faulkner, have pushed the narrative that the power outages in Texas are actually the result of Green New Deal-style energy policies that aren’t even in place there.
“It seems pretty clear that a reckless reliance on windmills is the cause of this disaster,” Carlson claimed Monday, establishing a talking point that Fox News continued to hammer into the brains of viewers across numerous shows on Tuesday, with Carlson returning to the theme that evening.
Here, meanwhile, is Governor Greg Abbott in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity:
As Hannity agreed with him, Abbott said that “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.”
“Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis,” he continued. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure that we’ll be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.”
I do Don Quixote an injustice by comparing him to these alternative-fact yahoos, but the similarities are illuminating. Quixote is a nobleman whose mind has been turned by the many chivalric romances he’s been reading. Despairing about Spanish decline, he sallies forth on his horse, lance in hand and Sancho Panza at his side, to make Spain great again.
Windmills are a particular grievance:
At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on that plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”
Windmills, as my former student Matt Sargent once informed me in his senior project on Quixote, represented a technological breakthrough in 17th century Spain, providing a source of power undreamt of by earlier generations. That windmills are once again cutting-edge technology is something few would have foreseen even 50 years ago. In any event, like Quixote with the chivalric code, Texas politicos dream of past glory, a time when fossil fuels were king. They will not acknowledge that oil and gas are a leading cause of extreme weather events such as the Texas snowstorm
When you live by such stories, sooner or later reality comes knocking, as it does with Quixote:
A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, “Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me.”
So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante’s fullest gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him; but as he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him.
Even disaster doesn’t shake the faith of those who are completely lost in fantasy, however. When fact-based Sancho points out Quixote’s error, the knight has a theory worthy of a Q-Anon conspiracy:
“God bless me!” said Sancho, “did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head.”
“Hush, friend Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me…
Ultimately, however, the Deep State will be defeated. Or as Quixote declares, “[I]n the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword.”
Further thought: To quote from an earlier post where I compared the GOP to Quixote, I must also stress the difference. Quixote’s mission, as he puts it, is to “defend maidens, to protect widows and to succor the orphans and the needy.” In the other corner there’s the mayor of Colorado City, Texas. As CBS News recently reported,
A Texas mayor resigned after seemingly telling residents to fend for themselves in a Facebook post amid a deadly and record-breaking winter storm that left much of the state without power Tuesday.
As then-mayor of Colorado City, Tim Boyd wrote an insensitive message for people desperate for heat, water and power, saying “only the strong will survive and the weak will [perish.]”
“No one owes you [or] your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this!” he said. “Sink or swim it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout.”
Many of us dream that the GOP will one day look back at its Trumpist fling and express the regrets the Quixote does at the end of his life:
My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading other books that might be a light to my soul. Niece, I feel myself at the point of death, and I would fain meet it in such a way as to show that my life has not been so ill that I should leave behind me the name of a madman; for though I have been one, I would not that the fact should be made plainer at my death.
I’ve been listening to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables as I drive around (it’s 46 disks in all!) and have come across a character who, if he were an actual person alive today, would be a Trump supporter and possibly one of the Capitol Hill insurrectionists. I’ve encountered few literary villains more despicable than Thénardier, a failed innkeeper-turned-bandit who, in one revealing scene, attempts to extort thousands from Jean Valjean, whom he has just captured.
His rant to the bound Valjean is a toxic mixture of resentment, grievance, inflated self-regard, envy, and self-pity. Thénardier magnifies his military successes—he was actually a battlefield scavenger who saved an officer by accident at Waterloo—while regarding the financial success of others as a personal insult. Many of the Capitol Hill insurrectionists appear to have had their own ongoing rants, much of it voiced on social media.
Don’t worry if you can’t follow everything that Thénerdier is talking about, which would require too much plot summary. It’s enough to know that he thinks Valjean is a millionaire philanthropist and that none of his claims are true. Indeed, he exploited “the Lark” to such an appalling extent that Valjean had to rescue her from his clutches:
Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live on all my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything that I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all the wine folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it! …
Thénardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest panted like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble happiness of a feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that it can, at last, harass what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of a dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the head of Goliath, the joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick bull, so nearly dead that he can no longer defend himself, but sufficiently alive to suffer still.
And further on, after Valjean says, “I see you are a villain”:
Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop! it’s true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It’s three days since I have had anything to eat, so I’m a villain! Ah! you folks warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded greatcoats, like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what the engineer Chevalier’s thermometer says about it. We, it is we who are thermometers. We don’t need to go out and look on the quay at the corner of the Tour de l’Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold; we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our hearts, and we say: ‘There is no God!’ And you come to our caverns, yes our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! But we’ll devour you! But we’ll devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister millionnaire: I have been a solid man, I have held a license, I have been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it’s quite possible that you are not!”
Thénardier concludes his rant with his belief that he is entitled to Valjean’s fortune:
I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies! And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let’s have an end of it. I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous lot of money, or I’ll exterminate you, by the thunder of the good God!”
Valjean, like members of Congress, just barely escapes. Thénardier, meanwhile, ends up where many of the Capitol Hill insurrectionists are headed–which is to say, in the hands of the police.
Julia, my wife of 47 years, turns 70 today (I follow in four months), so here’s a Christina Rossetti sonnet to celebrate our relationship. I like how it gets at the way love grows stronger over time. The poet has a friendly debate with her loved one about who loved earliest, who loved deepest, and whose love is most solidly grounded. She concludes that “weights and measures do us both a wrong,” however, because, with time, their loves have become so intertwined as to be indistinguishable:
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’ With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done, For one is both and both are one in love:
Rossetti’s first epigraph, from Dante’s Paradiso, is Dante hoping that his poem about the love that is Paradise, albeit just a little spark, will prompt other poets to do the topic full justice. Petrarch, menwhile, points to how, in the presence of love, all else falls away. In other words, once love has been sparked, we are lost in its immensity and all our previous quibbles fall away.
That’s what it’s been like to be married to this wonderful woman I met in college. The early debates appear utterly irrelevant in the face of “the love which makes us one.:
A great flame follows a little spark. –Dante
All other things, all thought must go, And only Love remains there with you. –Petrarch
I loved you first: but afterwards your love Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove. Which owes the other most? my love was long, And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong; I loved and guessed at you, you construed me And loved me for what might or might not be – Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong. For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’ With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done, For one is both and both are one in love: Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’ Both have the strength and both the length thereof, Both of us, of the love which makes us one.
