Ernest H. Shepard, illus. from “In Which Eeyore Has a Birthday”
Friday
William Kristol, a conservative who is appalled at how the Republican Party has been trumpified, recently tweeted out an Eeyore passage as he gazed at how his former allies continue to enable the president. Their failure to confirm Joe Biden’s victory, perhaps because they are waiting to see if Trump can pull off yet another miraculous escape, threatens democracy itself.
Whatever the GOP’s reasons, Eeyore’s judgment is spot on:
Eeyore, the old grey Donkey, stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water. “Pathetic,” he said. “That’s what it is. Pathetic.”
Eeyore is upset that no one has remembered his birthday. By undermining the presidential transition, Republicans are dampening Democratic celebrations. Perhaps they want to make sure that, when Biden finally ascends to office, his presidency will amount to no more than an empty pot and a burst balloon.
Further thought: Credit where credit is due. Mitt Romney recently tweeted,
Having failed to make a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the eletion. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.
Nebraska’s Ben Sasse has also called out Trump. But the fact that the rest of the Republican Senate is either silent or–like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz–actually repeating Trump’s charges of voter fraud is…pathetic.
Domenico di Michelino, Dante and the Three Kingdoms (detail, 1465)
Thursday
John Reishman in my Dante discussion group made an excellent point this past Tuesday as we were discussing Canto X of Purgatorio: as the poet sees it, art is essential if we are to grasp sacred truths. Religious doctrine and moral reasoning, while important, are not enough.
As one who believes that literature is essential for better living, I perked right up. John, who is a Victorianist, noted that 19th century art critic John Ruskin also saw art as having a moral mission.
In Canto X, Dante and Virgil have just passed through the gates of Purgatory and are confronted by an imposing zigzag path up a tall mountain:
“Now here,” the master said, “we must observe
Some little caution, hugging now this wall,
Now that, upon the far side of the curve.”
These labors made our steps so slow and small
That the diminished moon from out the sky
Back to her restful bed had time to fall
Before we’d threaded through that needle’s eye.
But when we had come up and out to where
The hill’s face was set back, there he and I
Stood still, I weary, both quite unaware
Which way to turn us, on a level place
Bare as a desert track, and lonelier.
The knowledge that he is on the road to salvation is not enough. As with Percy Shelley’s traveler, “the lone and level sands stretch far away” so that the poet who once found himself lost in a dark wood again finds himself floundering. If he is fully to grasp and internalize his quest, he needs help, and that help comes from art—in this case, sculpture:
Now, while we stood up there, and ere we went One step, I saw how that rock-bastion Which, rising sheer, showed no means of ascent,
Was pure white marble, and had carved thereon Sculptures so rare, that Polyclete—nay, more-- Nature might blush there, being so outdone.
The first sculpture, which surpasses the artistry of even the legendary Greek sculptor Polykleitos, is of the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary. It is so realistic that Dante imagines he hears it speaking:
The angel that to earth came down and bore The edict of the age-long wept-for peace Which broke the long ban and unbarred Heaven’s door,
Appeared to us, with such a lively ease Carved, and so gracious there in act to move, It seemed not one of your dumb images;
You’d swear an Ave from his lips breathed off, For she was shown here too, who turned the key to unlock the treasure of the most high love;
And in her mien those words stood plain to see: Ecce ancilla Dei [Behold the handmaid of God], stamped by art Express as any seal on wax could be.
Subsequent sculptures of David dancing before the recovered Arc of the Covenant and the Emperor Trajan putting off a battle to aid a distressed widow reinforce the joy that is welling up in Dante. In fact, he is so enthralled with the art that Virgil must remind him of the journey ahead:
The image of the great humilities Still held me thralled—a sight beyond compare And for the Craftsman’s sake, beyond all price,
When, “Look!” the poet murmured, “over there Comes on, but very slowly quite a throng; They will direct us to the upward stair.”
Group participant John Gatta, a musician as well as English professor, noted that music also plays an important role in the pilgrim’s spiritual journey. When Dante passes through Purgatory’s gates, for instance, he hears “Te Deum Laudamus—God, we praise you—“sweetly interwound with music”:
Methought a voic sang, like some chorister’s, Te Deum laudamus, sweetly interwound
With music; and its image in my ears Left such impression as one often catches From songs sung to an organ, when one hears
The words sometimes and sometimes not, by snatches.
Of course, The Divine Comedy itself takes us on a powerful journey, from the hells in which we entomb ourselves to the joys that an open heart will bring. Never modest, Dante informs us what his own art is capable of. The moment occurs immediately after he passes through Purgatory’s gates:
Like one consoled, released from the dull pressure Of doubt, who changes all his former fright, When the glad truth is told him, into pleasure,
So my face changed; and when he saw me quite Carefree, my leader moved and so did I, Up by the rampart, onward toward the height.
Look, Reader, how my theme would scale the sky! Marvel not, therefore, if with greater art I seek to buttress what I build so high.
When I was teaching, I would tell my students that there are three stages for getting the most out of literature: immersion, reflection, and action. There’s an emotional connection, an intellectual connection, and then, hopefully, an incorporation of the work into one’s active being. The throng that Virgil points to are people weighed down with stones, their sins from life. Art in the form of a literary metaphor names the condition and the way forward, but these souls and Dante himself must work to bring it about. Virgil points out,
Don’t you see
That we are worms, whose insignificance Lives but to form the angelic butterly That flits to judgement naked of defense?
Why do you let pretension soar so high, Being as it were but larvae—grubs that lack The finished form that shall be by and by.
No single poem, essay or formulation can do justice to the myriad ways that literature, and art in general, deepens our souls and makes us better people. I fell in love with the blog form when I realized that, with each daily post, I could touch on a tiny aspect of the process at work. Dante’s Canto X reminds me that I am in good company.
I’m repurposing an essay I wrote two years ago applying Tale of Two Cities to the Trump family. Then I wrote about Jared and Ivanka celebrating in the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem at the same time that Israeli soldiers were killing over 50 unarmed demonstrators in Gaza while wounding many more. Now we’re watching the president tweet obsessively about non-existent voter fraud while ignoring the 10 million Covid cases and quarter of a million Covid deaths in his country. As with Dickens’s self-absorbed marquis, Trump sees Covid victims as an unfortunate bump that interfered with his gilded chariot ride.
And what a wild ride the past four years have been. Dicken talks of how the marquis to watch the crowds scatter before his stagecoach:
With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way.
Covid interrupted Trump’s ride in a way that even impeachment failed to do. The novel’s equivalent interruption is a dead child. While Trump didn’t cause the Covid pandemic, his failure to address the pandemic has led the kind of desperation we see in the child’s father:
At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.
But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry, and there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.
A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”
“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?”
“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis—it is a pity—yes.”
The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”
Not once has Trump taken responsibility for his handling of the pandemic, which is always someone else’s fault. Same with the marquis:
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up…
The skinflint Trump wouldn’t have even thrown out a gold coin, but other than that, like the marquis he all but blames Covid victims for his own misfortune. They messed up his campaign, just as the child victim may have hurt the horses.
Trump once famously aid, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” He might just as well have said, “Let them eat cake.”
Having explored Joe Biden’s love for Seamus Heaney and James Joyce, I now turn my attention to vice president-elect Kamala Harris’s favorite books. When queried by bookriot.com, she listed
Richard Wright, Native Son Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Native Son is also Clarence Thomas’s favorite novel (see my essay on that here), which provides insight into the deep anger that lies behind many of his Supreme Court opinions. Bigger Thomas is an angry black man who, from the first, made relatively moderate African Americans like James Baldwin nervous. After all, isn’t Wright just confirming white stereotypes about savage black men?
Clarence Thomas has directed his own anger against liberals, whose affirmative action programs he believes have emasculated them. (That he himself clearly benefited from such programs is one reason he’s angry.) The justice’s views may explain why Trump saw his numbers rise amongst black men (albeit slightly), despite his racism. Perhaps his toxic masculinity drew kindred souls in various minority communities.
But why would a black woman be drawn to Native Son? Perhaps Wright helps Harris better understand her Jamaican father. Maybe it gets at her own anger at American racism, even though she has channeled that anger very differently than Clarence Thomas. While Harris, like Obama, has had to hide much of her anger, it surfaced when she went after Biden for his tolerance of racists and racist measures in an early debate.
Harris’s appreciation of The Kite Runner is easier to understand. Although her mother is from Hindu India rather than Muslim Afghanistan, religious caste systems operate in both countries, and the novel can be applied to America’s own racial caste system. The father in Kite Runner is an open-minded man who tries to teach his son Amir tolerance, treating their lower-class servant and his son as equals. Caste pressure causes Amir to betray his playmate Hassan at a critical moment, however.
As a child who was bused to desegregate mostly white Oakland schools, Harris had a front row view of racism and perhaps suffered from comparable betrayals. At the same time, her parents would have been like Amir’s father, embracing the vision that people can reach across centuries-old barriers.
In other words, the novel may be among Harris’s favorites because it allowed her to sort through some of America’s most vexed issues. She may also have liked how the book concludes with a determination to right past wrongs. A grown-up Amir, now living in America, cannot undo what he did to Hassan, but he can save Hasan’s son from a miserable existence.
I have written several times (for instance, here) about why Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is Barack Obama’s favorite novel, speaking to the way that the mixed-race “Barry” claimed and found purpose in his black identity. Might the mixed-race Kamala have gone through as similar identity quest? Is that why she attended Howard University and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha?
Incidentally, Morrison being a Howard graduate herself may enter into Harris’s choice. I find it interesting, however, that Harris names Song of Solomon rather than, say, Bluest Eye, Sula, or Tar Baby, all of which feature female protagonists. Sula especially involves two female identities, “good girl” Nel and “bad girl” Sula, that could have spoken to assertive Kamala. But Song of Solomon is the novel most concerned with roots.
If Song of Solomon helps Harris grapple with her father’s legacy, Joy Luck Club addresses her mother’s. A classic immigrant novel in which each generation has difficulty understanding the one that came before or after, Joy Luck may have helped illuminate Harris’s battles with her own immigrant mother. After all, Harris would fully identity as American while her mother would be balancing her old world and new world identities. All the mother-daughter conflicts in Joy Luck Club boil down to their life trajectories.
For those born in America to trace their mothers’ stories is to understand the origins of these conflicts. I imagine Harris coming to appreciate her mother more after reading Tan’s novel. Perhaps she even quizzed her mother about her own Indian grandmother. In any event, one can see why she would have found the novel memorable.
And what about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which Harris presumably read as a child? Perhaps she identified with Lucy, who has a vision of a new world when no one else will believe her. Lucy sticks to her guns, despite male bullying, and fearlessly embarks on an adventure to save her new friend Mr. Tumnus.
Perhaps when Harris read the novel, she regarded her mother as a bit of a cold witch (and then came to appreciate her more after reading Joy Luck Club). This, however, is just speculation.
Given the problems faced by assertive women, I imagine Harris’s relationship to the white witch would have been ambivalent. C. S. Lewis created a number of emasculating enchantresses (there’s also Jadis in Magician’s Nephew and the Lady of the Green Kirtle in Silver Chair), and Trump’s own male insecurities have led him to regard Harris (and Hillary Clinton as well) as “a monster” and “nasty.” Perhaps Harris first got a glimpse of female power in the White Witch and later learned to claim it as positive in Joy Luck Club.
In any event, it’s a great relief to have a president and vice president who are thoughtful readers. If America’s soul is to be restored, it needs soulful leaders.
On Friday, I wrote that Joe Biden’s love for Irish poet Seamus Heaney reveals a man who is compassionate and interested in struggling human beings. Biden’s reported love for James Joyce’s Ulysses is harder to explain.
Part of me doesn’t believe it. Unless the Irish-American Biden chose the novel out of national pride—some regard Ulysses as the greatest work of the 20th century—the day in the life of a tortured Catholic-educated intellectual who finds a father figure in a cuckolded Jewish ad salesman doesn’t seem the kind of drama that would move the president-elect.
On second thought, however, in some ways Biden played Leopold Bloom to Barack Obama’s Stephen Daedalus, a (relatively) young man who has written of “dreams from my father.” The chemistry between Obama and Biden is not unlike the moving connection between Daedalus and Bloom, the latter (like Biden) having lost a child.
Biden’s love for Joyce’s Dubliners makes more sense to me. In his portrayal of Dubliners in their daily life, Joyce captures the nitty gritty of small lives, their successes and failures, their dreams and disillusionment. Biden has a genuine interest in the American people.
I can imagine Biden relating to Gabriel in “The Dead,”the nephew who presides over his maiden aunts’ annual dance. A bit old-fashioned, Gabriel puts on a wonderful public face, carving the goose and each year delivering a nostalgic speech honoring his aunts. Everyone looks to him to take charge:
At the moment Aunt Kate came toddling out of the supper-room, almost wringing her hands in despair.
“Where is Gabriel?” she cried. “Where on earth is Gabriel? There’s everyone waiting in there, stage to let, and nobody to carve the goose!”
“Here I am, Aunt Kate!” cried Gabriel, with sudden animation, “ready to carve a flock of geese, if necessary.”…
Gabriel took his seat boldly at the head of the table and, having looked to the edge of the carver, plunged his fork firmly into the goose. He felt quite at ease now for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table.
Gabriel’s outer confidence, however, masks inner insecurities, especially his fear that he can’t feel as deeply as his wife. Does Biden ever worry, deep down, that the empathy he radiates to millions keeps him from responding as deeply as he’d like to individuals?
Given that his love of Heaney and Joyce suggest depth of soul, then Biden can’t help but have Gabriel’s doubts. Like Gabriel, however, he doesn’t let them paralyze him but pushes through. Joyce’s Dublin is a better place for having Gabriel in it, and the same can be said of Biden in America.
In the flight of migrating Canadian geese, Robert Penn Warren sees a metaphor for our own lives, although the geese appear to have a clearer sense of their story than the poet. “At least, they know/ When the hour comes for the great wing-beat,” he writes. In their nature they know “the path of pathlessness, with all the joy/ Of destiny fulfilling its own name.” Even when one of them unexpectedly dies, downed by a lead pellet, the rest “recover control” and “take the last glide for a far glint of water.”
The poet, who knows not “why I am here,” nevertheless feels lifted up by the birds. In the “tingling process of transformation” he imagines he is one of them, entering into the “sounding vacuum of passage.” His heart “impacted with a fierce impulse/To unwordable utterance,” he directs his flight “toward sunset, at a great height.”
We know how long we have been traveling and how far–“time and distance”–but not why. Or at least, our logical selves do not know. Yet perhaps, like the geese, some deep part of ourselves is guiding us, some fierce impulse.
Heart of Autumn
Wind finds the northwest gap, fall comes. Today, under gray cloud-scud and over gray Wind-flicker of forest, in perfect formation, wild geese Head for a land of warm water, the boom, the lead pellet.
Some crumple in air, fall. Some stagger, recover control, Then take the last glide for a far glint of water. None Knows what has happened. Now, today, watching How tirelessly V upon V arrows the season’s logic.
Do I know my own story? At least, they know When the hour comes for the great wind-beat. Sky-strider, Star-strider–they rise, and the imperial utterance, Which cries out for distance, quivers in the wheeling sky.
That much they know, and in their nature know The path of pathlessness, with all the joy Of destiny fulfilling its own name. I have known time and distance, but not why I am here.
Path of logic, path of folly, all The same–and I stand, my face lifted now skyward, Hearing the high beat, my arms outstretched in the tingling Process of transformation, and soon tough legs,
With folded feet, trail in the sounding vacuum of passage, And my heart is impacted with a fierce impulse To unwordable utterance– Toward sunset, at a great height.
The literature we love tells us a lot about who we are, which is why I’m fascinated by the favorite books of our elected leaders. I’ve written a number of columns about bookworm Barack Obama’s favorites, especially, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, but it’s been harder to discover Joe Biden’s. Seamus Heaney’s poetry is up there, as I have noted (here and here), and he has also mentioned (of all things) James Joyce’s Ulysses. Someone has mentioned his fondness for Joyce’s Dubliners, which makes more sense to me, but I’ll explore the Joyce connection in a later post.
For the moment, I turn my attention to an illuminating Guardian article by Jonathan Jones that seeks to make sense of Biden’s fondness for Heaney. Jones appreciates how Biden draws on the poet to imagine reconciliation in the face of America’s political polarization and observes that Heaney understands hate. At one point Heaney references Dante’s Ugolino episode to capture that murderous passions that tore Northern Ireland apart:
It is for this call for reconciliation that Biden summons Heaney’s wise ghost. And that is a frightening insight into how serious the president-elect thinks the US’s crisis is, despite the celebrations this weekend. For Heaney wrote brilliantly about hate. It was part of his democratic genius to be able to put himself in other poets’ voices, to empathize with other passions, making him a wonderful translator. Some of his greatest lines are in Ugolino, his version of one of the most grisly encounters in Dante’s Inferno. In the frozen lake near the bottom of hell, Dante sees:
two soldered in a frozen hole On top of other, one’s skull capping the other’s, Gnawing at him where the neck and head Are grafted to the sweet fruit of the brain, Like a famine victim on a loaf of bread.
The biter is Ugolino, his prey Archbishop Roger, who walled him up in a dungeon with his young sons to starve to death. Ugolino tells how, as his little boys died, they urged him to feed on their own flesh. Blind from hunger, he succumbed. Now he gets his revenge on Roger for all eternity, but he, too, is in hell. It is a terrible image of the cycle of hatred and revenge that gripped Northern Ireland in 1979, when this poem appeared in Heaney’s book, Field Work.
While Heaney could have been pulled into that cycle, he used poetry to hold on to his humanity. As Jones observes,
It wasn’t easy for Heaney to preach reconciliation. The profundity of his poems about the Troubles lies precisely in his ability to understand that Ugolinesque urge to gnaw on your enemy’s skull.
Jones contrasts Heaney with the antisemitic TS Eliot, the Mussolini-supporting Ezra Pound, and the petty racist Philip Larkin:
Heaney was that truly rare thing: a great imaginative artist who was also a wise and noble human being.
And the greatest thing about him was his voice – so conversational, so slowly seductive, somehow as easy to listen to as a talker at the bar while he takes you to hell and back. It comes across in every line. I heard him read when I was a student, shyly sought his autograph, and the rare richness of that voice has never left me.
Biden too, Jones says, is “patient, reasonable, and full of unmistakable human compassion”:
There is a depth in Biden’s response to Heaney that clearly goes beyond mere political convenience. He has suffered terrible losses in his life and perhaps he finds particular solace in this poet who voyages into the underworld and speaks with the departed. This appreciation of one of the wisest and subtlest of poets marks out Biden as a truly rare politician.
In these dark times, America may have elected just the right person.
My son Toby Wilson-Bates alerted me to how literature lovers have been having a field day on Twitter over the Rudy Giuliani press conference held at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company to proclaim voter fraud. Why Giuliani held it there is a mystery. Some think that his advance team booked the wrong venue, intending to choose the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, but Toby’s theory is that Donald Trump is too cheap to spring for anything expensive.
In any event, literary tweeters have been incorporating “Four Seasons Total Landscaping” into famous poems and first lines ever since. I’m sharing some of the better ones below, and to give you a chance to test your literary knowledge, I have included the original passages and their authors at the end.
Comedian Peter Sagal:
Four seasons total landscaping, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul. Four seasons total landscaping: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of four steps down the palate to tap, at four, on the teeth. Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Toby:
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowe–, no, schedule the press conference, no, uh– “Hello. Four Seasons Total Landscaping?”
Toby again:
so much depends
upon
total
landscaping
near the dildo
store
beside the yellow
hose
Tweeter Celese Ng went up with a whole series, including:
I have scheduled the press conference that was at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping
and which you were probably saving for the Four Seasons Hotel
Forgive me It is hilarious so sweet and so cold
riverrun, past Four Seasons Total Landscaping
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Son, he said, Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without Four Seasons Total Landscaping,” grumbled Jo.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Tweeter Erika Kyrgios:
It was a bright cold day at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Blogger @pluiedautomne has a particularly good one given that the landscaping store is situated next to a crematorium:
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from Four Seasons Total Landscaping: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”
I award the prize for my favorite to Natalie Luhrs:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Four Seasons Total Landscaping to be born?
It’s unclear how seriously we should take Trump’s temper tantrum over losing, but laughter seems a healthy response.
Original Passages
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee, Ta.–Nabokov, Lolita
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.—Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
--William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow"
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
--William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s–Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.—Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.—Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.—Alcott, Little Women
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.—Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.—Samuel Beckett, Murphy
I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.—Kerouac, On the Road
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.—Orwell, 1984
MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.—Camus, The Stranger
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? —Yeats, “The Second Coming”
In July, 1974 (according to Wikipedia), Dr. Seuss went through a copy of Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, scratching out the name of the eponymous protagonist each time is appeared and writing in “Richard M. Nixon.” Two months later Nixon resigned.
Seuss’s amendments seemed so natural that, for the longest time, I thought the author had written the book with Nixon in mind. It’s certainly possible since the book was published in 1972, when Nixon was running for reelection, but my theory is probably far-fetched. Marvin resembles more the bratty kid next door who won’t ever leave, a Denice the Menace sort.
With that being acknowledged, however, the text will speak to millions if read in light of our just concluded election. Just go, Go, GO, Mr. Trump!
Incidentally, the book has a happy ending. “The time had come. So…Marvin went.” The national and the world breathlessly await the moment.
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go. Go. GO!
I don't care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Marvin K. Mooney,
Will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But please go. Please!
I don't care.
You can go by bike.
You can go on a Zike-Bike
if you like.
If you like you can go
in an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, DO!
Marvin K. Mooney,
I don't care how.
Marvin K. Mooney,
will you please GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
if you wish.
If you wish you may go
by lion's tail.
Or stamp yourself and go by mail.
Marvin K. Mooney!
Don't you know
the time has come
to go, Go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please, Marvin K.!
You might like going
in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon
or broomstick.
OR
You can go by camel
in a bureau drawer.
You can go by Bumble-Boat
or jet.
I don't care how you go.
Just get!
Get yourself a Ga-Zoom.
You can go with BOOM!
Marvin, Marvin, Marvin!
Will you leave this room!
Marvin K. Mooney!
I don't care HOW.
Marvin K. Mooney!
Will you please GO NOW!
I said GO and GO
I meant
The time had come.
SO...
Marvin WENT.
