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Among the many glorious memories that people carry away from the 2026 Winter Olympics, one in particular has a literary connection. Thanks to their prowess in speed skating, the Dutch tied with Italy for third in gold medals. With seven silver and three bronze, the Netherlands earned 20 medals overall for their most successful Winter Olympics ever. In Olympic history, the Dutch have won 146 speed skating medals, 70 more than the second place United States.
Which brings me Mary Mapes Dodge’s 1865 novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, a book that I enjoyed as a child but haven’t thought about since.
The story focuses on the Brinker family, which has fallen on hard times after the father falls from a dike and experiences a brain injury. Spurned by the community for their bad luck, Hans and sister Gretel dream of winning a mile-long skating race and, with it, a pair of silver skates. It’s a heart-warming story that NBC would be sure to play up if the two were racing in the Olympics.
The story features multiple instances of heroic self-sacrifice. Hans works to buy a good pair of skates for his sister—the two wouldn’t stand a chance on their homemade wooden skates—and then gives up the dream of buying his own skates in order to pay a cranky doctor to perform brain surgery on his father. When the doctor, softened by Hans’s sacrifice, performs the surgery for free, Hans then performs a second sacrifice, donating a shoe string to his good friend Peter, who has experienced an equipment failure at a critical moment. Gretel and Peter go on to win their respective races.
Just as we saw family and friends rejoicing as skaters flashed across the line, so do we see the same excitement in the novel. Feel free to revisit your favorite Olympics moments as you read the accounts. First, here’s Gretel:
They are winged Mercuries. Who is first? Not Rychie, Katrinka, Annie, nor Hilda, nor the girl in yellow, but Gretel—Gretel, the fleetest sprite of a girl that ever skated. She was but playing in the earlier races, NOW she is in earnest, or rather, something within her has determined to win. That lithe little form makes no effort, but it cannot stop—not until the goal is passed!
In vain the crier lifts his voice. He cannot be heard. He has no news to tell—it is already ringing through the crowd. GRETEL HAS WON THE SILVER SKATES!
Like a bird she has flown over the ice, like a bird she looks about her in a timid, startled way. She longs to dart to the sheltered nook where her father and mother stand. But Hans is beside her—the girls are crowding round. Hilda’s kind, joyous voice breathes in her ear. From that hour, none will despise her. Goose girl or not, Gretel stands acknowledged queen of the skaters!
And now for Peter:
They are winged Mercuries, every one of them. What mad errand are they on? Ah, I know. They are hunting Peter van Holp. He is some fleet-footed runaway from Olympus. Mercury and his troop of winged cousins are in full chase. They will catch him! Now Carl is the runaway. The pursuit grows furious–Ben is foremost!
The chase turns in a cloud of mist. It is coming this way. Who is hunted now? Mercury himself. It is Peter, Peter van Holp; fly, Peter–Hans is watching you. He is sending all his fleetness, all his strength into your feet. Your mother and sister are pale with eagerness. Hilda is trembling and dares not look up. Fly, Peter! The crowd has not gone deranged, it is only cheering. The pursuers are close upon you! Touch the white column! It beckons–it is reeling before you–it–
“Huzza! Huzza! Peter has won the silver skates!”
“Peter van Holp!” shouted the crier. But who heard him? “Peter van Holp!” shouted a hundred voices, for he was the favorite boy of the place. “Huzza! Huzza!”
We witnessed many such moments over the past two weeks. Huzza! Huzza!
The season of Lent began this past Wednesday with Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance in which Christian worshippers are often marked on their foreheads with an ashen cross as the priest says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
In 2015, perhaps thinking of the climate change that is causing out-of-control wildfires and of the deliberate burning of large sections of the Amazonian rain forests, Malcolm Guite composed the following sonnet. As he explained at the time,
As I set about the traditional task of burning the remnants of last Palm Sunday’s palm crosses in order to make the ash which would bless and sign our repentance on Ash Wednesday, I was suddenly struck by the way both the fire and the ash were signs not only of our personal mortality and our need for repentance and renewal but also signs of the wider destruction our sinfulness inflicts upon God’s world and on our fellow creatures, on the whole web of life into which God has woven us and for which He also cares.
Here’s his poem:
Ash Wednesday By Malcolm Guite
Receive this cross of ash upon your brow, Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday’s cross. The forests of the world are burning now And you make late repentance for the loss. But all the trees of God would clap their hands The very stones themselves would shout and sing If you could covenant to love these lands And recognize in Christ their Lord and king.
He sees the slow destruction of those trees, He weeps to see the ancient places burn, And still you make what purchases you please, And still to dust and ashes you return. But Hope could rise from ashes even now Beginning with this sign upon your brow.
Guite moves from trees to stones, the latter referred to in the account of Palm Sunday. When Jesus was rebuked for his followers singing his praises as he entered Jerusalem, he replied, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
The image of trees rejoicing also appears in a moving poem written by Julia Bates, my wife. After the ashes were applied and the words spoken in this past Wednesday service, Julia said she suddenly found herself—in an “instantaneous gestalt”–identifying with the dust motes that danced in the air around her–which in turn prompted her to wonder at the miracle of creation. How, she asks, did this dust
Learn to speak To have a heartbeat To think a verse of a Song?
The thinking process continued on, Julia reports. Did dust then create a god in order
To teach us how to Gather ourselves To stand close enough To touch
After reflecting whether this dust also creates a god to regulate its destructive urges, the poem asks again what it takes to keep us, like dust motes, from simply blowing away. Are we bound together by heavenly chords/ “cords of love.” And from there she wonders whether we follow the example of trees, which learned the anchor of roots long before us.
Whether trees or humans, the sap rises within. Does the wind come at their bidding, she asks, as they/we “pound out the heartbeat of bird song”?
Daughter of Ashes By Julia Bates
Daughter, you come from dust And to dust you shall return The priest, a woman in white With black stole Thumbs a circle on my forehead And then a cross
Suddenly I am a column of dust And around me all are transformed Into dervishes of sparkling motes Fragile, whimsical, barely separate One from another
And how, I ask in wonder, Did this dust Learn to speak To have a heartbeat To think a verse of a Song
Did we create a god To teach us how to Gather ourselves To stand close enough To touch
And the fear that if we Mistake the law Murder one another The wrath will descend
Perhaps that anger is Our anger That destruction The might in our own Right hand
Can we go back to harmony Can we listen for chords To make cords of love To hold us here Floating When we might just Blow away
The option To hug To put down roots Like the trees who Learned that anchor long before Us Do trees pray How do they learn the rules Of mutual survival
As the spring sun Launches urges of sap Ever upwards How can those trunks Keep from dancing
Or is that how the wind comes At their bidding To toss their branches Like the long hair Of young women And young men As they pound Out the heartbeat Of bird song
Years ago I read a memoir written by Eliza Scott, my great grandmother, which included accounts of the novels that had been important to her when she was growing up in Barton, England. It has meant so much to me that I have been writing my own A Life Lived in Literature. The latest installment appears every Friday.
nIn 1995 I experienced my 15 minutes of fame when I was invited to participate in Slovenia’s 50th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. This time Julia and I had both received grants to visit the country—a Fulbright for me, an international studies grant for Julia to study Slovenia’s high school graduation exams—and we were able to reconnect with former colleagues and friends.
As far as the year went, Slovenia following its break with Yugoslavia was not dramatically different from what it had been seven years before: while there were fewer regulations and more freedom of movement across borders, it remained the beautiful country it had been in 1987-88. The boys attended international programs that were embedded within the Slovenian school system, with Justin attending Gimnazija Bežigrad for high school and Darien and Toby Danila Kumar for elementary. The education was excellent and the fees reasonable and, to offset some of Justin’s tuition, I taught a senior poetry class to four international students at Bežigrad.
At the University of Ljubljana I met some extraordinary students and colleagues and gained new literary insights. Uroš Mozetič, who taught the British Modernists, alerted me the gender challenges of translating English into Slovenian. (When Auden writes, “Lay your sleeping head, my love/ Faithful on my faithless arm,” a Slovenian translator must indicate the gender of the loved one—for Auden, it would have been a man—while in English it can remain ambiguous.) I had the talented Cvetka Sokolov in a literary theory class—Cvetka has become a noted author of children’s and young adult fiction—and also Nada Grošelj, today one of Slovenia’s premier translators. (Nada taught herself English at a young age so that she could read Lord of the Rings.) Igor Maver opened my eyes to the dynamics of Slovenian-Australian immigrant fiction (which are also to be found in American immigrant fiction). I could go on and on.
Meanwhile, I was still reading to the boys at home, and because we had to rely on whatever was available at a local library, some of the readings were eclectic. For instance, we read Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and, for years afterward, it became family practice to dramatically pronounce, at the most unexpected moments, the protagonist’s name, which inspires awe and dread in his enemies:
“Who are you? We are seven here.”
The rider dropped his sombrero and made a rapid movement, singular in that it left him somewhat crouched, arms bent and stiff, with the big black gun-sheaths swung round to the fore.
“Lassiter!”
It was Venters’s wondering, thrilling cry that bridged the fateful connection between the rider’s singular position and the dreaded name.
Here’s another line that has stayed with us, although this one involves a movie. We took a special trip to Paris and, on the bus, watched a videotape of Orca: The Killer Whale, a Moby Dick imitation and Jaws wannabe that is so awful as to be memorable. Among the dreadful lines is one that has become legendary in the Bates household. Umilak, the stereotypical wise old native guide, dismisses the whale expert who is counseling the Ahab-like sea captain with, “She knows it from university, I know it from my ancestors.” Almost as bad, and again delivered in oracular fashion, is, “He is not gone, he hides and waits in a sea cave.”
Along with Zane Grey, I remember reading to the boys E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet. We also tried out, but rejected as boring, Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age.
The boys made friends with their schoolmates, who were from all over the world (it helped that English was the lingua franca). I especially remember students from Poland and Kenya. Justin also became the ace pitcher on Ljubljana’s top youth baseball team, which did wonders for his confidence.
William Boyd, the African American student who had joined us in 1987 and sung in Yugoslavia’s major concert halls, again flew over (this time the government was less suspicious) and used the year to decide whether he would go into the ministry like his father. (By the end of the year, he decided in the affirmative, and he would succeed his father at Baltimore’s New Elizabeth Baptist Church.) Once again he was a singing sensation, performing at one point in the Christmas Eve service in the cathedral on Ljubljana’s central square. His reputation was such that a Slovenian playwright wrote him into an avant garde play, having him descend as an extraterrestrial being singing in a strange language. Unfortunately, the incense that accompanied the scene messed with Williams’s breathing so that he had to dial things down.
But the highlight of the year for me was reading Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain, My Captain” to a national television audience to cap off Slovenia’s 50th year celebration of Victory in Europe Day (May 8, 1945). I was one of six readers from allied nations. We wore handmade suits that had been specially tailored for us and stood on a platform 20 feet in the air with the word “ZMAGA”—”Victory”—in large letters behind us.
It was an elaborate affair, held on the square in front of the National Assembly Building. Prior to our reading, we had watched as Slovenian concentration camp survivors paraded around the square, followed by the country’s famous Lipizzaner horses (dating back to when Slovenia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Alpinist climbers scaled the surrounding buildings, the Slovenian national orchestra performed on the front steps, parachutists descended from airplanes, and beauty pageant winners holding ceremonial horns looked down from the rooftops. Although the Slovenes were ostensibly celebrating the day when Germany declared unconditional surrender in 1945, the affair was even more about celebrating Slovenia’s independence from Yugoslavia four years before.
What impressed me most, however, was that the Slovenes chose to cap the event with poetry. The readings were from Russia (Vladimir Mayakovsky), France (“Liberté by Paul Eluard), the United Kingdom (Shakespeare’s Henry V speech “Once more into the breach, dear friends”), a poem by Spain’s Garcia Lorca (killed by the fascists), Whitman, and a Slovenian poem read by a teenager representing the future.
The Shakespeare was actually read by a Scot, who expressed some ambivalence about the speech given how Scots are caricatured in the play. The Eluard was read by a French Canadian who didn’t know why she had been chosen. (I figured that, since Canada was also an ally, it was two for the price of one.)
For my part, I was at first unsure why a tragic poem like “Oh Captain,” which mourns the death of Lincoln, would be the choice to celebrate a victory, unless it was to commemorate the 28,000 Slovenians that died fighting the fascists (who built a fence enclosing Ljubljana during the war). The organizers then explained that Jimmy Carter had given the poem to Yugoslavia following the death of its president Josip Tito, a wonderful use for a great poem. I belted out the words (or lip synced them, having previously been recorded) as the Slovenian air force flew overhead and the Slovenian television audience sat riveted. Or not.
To capture this wonderful year, allow me to reference a film. In After Life, by the Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, people who have died end up in a netherworld until they can settle on a memory from their lives in which to spend eternity. Some people’s suggestions are rejected (say, a ride on a Disney roller coaster) and some people can’t make up their minds (in which case they remain in this limbo until they can). Then the scene is staged and the person passes on. The film prompts one to think of one’s own best moment, and my moment comes from this year in Slovenia.
We had a large king-sized bed in our apartment and sometimes, on a Sunday morning, the five of us would gather in it as I read aloud. I remember thinking at the time it was a perfect moment. So yes, if I had to choose, this is how I would spend eternity.
Tobias Wilson-Bates, English, Georgia Gwinnett College
Thursday
I invoke a father’s privilege today to tout the Substack blog authored by Tobias Wilson-Bates, my English professor son, who has begun posting short reflections on literary passages that tickle his fancy. As he states in his introductory post,
Not sure if anyone will read this, but I want to be in the practice of reading poetry each day and finding a few lines to chew on. Would be delighted if others wanted to read a few words as well.
Toby has dazzled me for years with his penetrating literary observations. I still remember a response he had to Beowulf when he was in high school. He had asked me to give him something I assigned to my students, so I presented him with the Anglo-Saxon epic and then gaped in astonishment as he mapped out the power dynamics between the brash young Geat warrior and the revered Danish king Hrothgar. Toby rightly grasped that it’s somewhat humiliating for the king to have Beowulf bail him out, which is why Hrothgar attempts to restore the balance by pointing out that Beowulf is repaying a debt incurred by his father.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, however, since Toby has always been psychologically acute. I recall once when my oldest son Justin was complaining about being bullied on the school bus, to which seven-year-old Toby commented, “Maybe he’s insecure.” Justin blinked, looked up in surprise, and said, “You’re right!”
This acuity makes Toby an amazing father since he’s able to grasp the different makeup of each of his four children and to respond appropriately. Combine this with his ready wit, which for years the Twitter and then the Bluesky communities have enjoyed (see below), and one can understand why he is a popular teacher.
He is on sabbatical this semester at Georgia Gwinnett College, finishing up a book on Victorian time machine literature. The project has him writing about (hang on for this) changing notions of time; a history of clocks; the relationship between universal time (necessitated by train schedules) and universal education; the origins of calculus (Toby, tongue in cheek but also seriously, insists one can’t really understand calculus unless one has read Paradise Lost); Victorian ghost stories (Toby notes that Scrooge’s time travel ghosts show up as though they are carrying pocket watches); Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances (which Toby regards as time machines); battles over the international date line; and I don’t know what else.
But I wrote today’s post to alert you to his Substack blog, so here are a few samples to whet your appetite. About an Elizabeth Barrett Browning love poem (which at first glance appears sappy sentimental), he grapples with what young people refer to a “cringe,” which is “something that is embarrassing, awkward, or uncool, often causing discomfort or secondhand embarrassment” (Merriam-Webster). Toby says that Barrett Browning reminds us that “cringe” can actually be good. “Too many layers of irony, satire, or layers of self-protection,” he says, “are often the very dynamic that love poems seek to address.”
About John Milton’s Lycidas, written to mourn a friend who has drowned, Toby writes
I am particularly struck by the phrasing of “pastures new” (Milton’s classic Yoda-speak inversion) that carries the double meaning of both moving to pastures that are different than today’s for the sheep, but also that even if he returned to these same pastures they would be changed, and that is very much the feeling of the day after losing a loved one.
My favorite post so far has been his reflection on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a poem I remember reading to him when he was in grade school. (Toby says it’s his favorite 19th century poem and in contention for his favorite poem period.) I love the way that he compares Rossetti’s sensuous inventory of fruits to a similar inventory in Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol. Here’s the passage he selects from Rossetti:
Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries;— All ripe together In summer weather,— Morns that pass by, Fair eves that fly; Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy.”
Toby says that the passage brings to mind the Ghost of Christmas Present, whose “warm flowing abundance” contrasts with Scrooge’s “pinching coldness”:
Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
Toby observes,
Rossetti, like Dickens here, seems to take such pleasure in the sensational immersion in desire and the ecstasy of visual consumption. And, also like Dickens, foregrounds that pleasure with ghastly circumstances (ghosts and goblins). The result, to me, is like when two unexpected flavors mix to produce something entirely unique or when two voices sing together in a way you have never heard before.
Toby then takes Victorian John Ruskin’s critique of the poem as an occasion to critique artificial intelligence. Ruskin considered the poem unpublishable for being “so full of quaintnesses and offenses” and wrote to Rossetti’s brother Daniel Gabriel that his sister “should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of meter until she can write as the public like.” To which Toby responds,
I think about these kinds of exchanges a lot these days as we are bombarded with machine-generated prose and content that emerges as aggregate syntheses of what has already been processed by ever-expanding data centers. If we write and read and watch only ever as optimized versions of what “the public like,” then do we eliminate the possibility of being spooked and dazzled by a luscious list of food we didn’t even know we could possibly experience?
I recently came across an interpretation of William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” that is getting me to rethink the poem. While I’ve written about liberals who believe that the Trumpian rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem as a bad thing (for instance, here and here), I didn’t consider that Yeats might actually be welcoming it as a necessary corrective to populist movements. According to political commentator Noah Berlatsky, whose Everything Is Horrible blog I read regularly, Yeats was an authoritarian who disliked liberal democracy, and his poem “is a lot closer to fascist propaganda than to any sort of antifascist statement.”
For a refresher, here’s the poem:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Berlatsky says that Yeats here is channeling Christian apocalyptic thinking, which he has merged with “his own quasi-mystical notions about historical epochs or ‘gyres’—notions which he interpolated and bastardized from Nietzsche.” The spinning gyres that cannot (like the falcon) be called back are Christian and pagan (Celtic) morality. Looking back at the chaos of World War I, the influenza pandemic, and Irish civil unrest (he could also add the Bolshevik Revolution), Berlatsky says that Yeats “anticipates a reversal of the moral order—a shuffling off of the Christian status quo of mercy and love, and a birth of a harsher, more brutal status quo, ‘blank and pitiless as the sun.’”
Contrary to antifascist readings of the poem, Yeats thinks that “blank and pitiless” is necessary, as least as far as the unwashed masses are concerned. Put in our own terms, Yeats has more in common with those tech billionaires who fantasize about elite control rather than with Trump’s MAGA followers, who think that he cares about their material welfare. While a supporter of Irish nationalism, Yeats had an elitist nationalism in mind:
[A]s an Anglo-Irish intellectual, he feared the rise of a Catholic state, which he associated with what he saw as a debased and ignorant public linked to the “filthy modern tide” of capitalism and mass culture. In order to stem this danger, he embraced the fascist Irish Blueshirt movement, explaining that “I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles.” He composed a marching song for the Blueshirts that included the line, “What’s equality? Muck in the yard!”
In another poem (“Under Ben Bulben”), Yeats uses the phrase, “base born products of base beds.” If he eventually broke with the Blueshirts, Berlatsky writes, it’s because they weren’t aristocratic and elitist enough:
When Yeats says “the best lack all intensity” he’s talking about people like himself—intellectuals, but also white men of elevated social standing, including the aristocracy and the wealthy. And “the worst” who are “full of passionate intensity” are the lower classes—those who should know their place, but have now slipped their hood and gone flying every which way.
Thus (and you hear this from some people who rationalize Trump’s crude brutality), what is needed is someone who will crack heads. Yeats, Berlatsky says,
is imagining the (fascist) backlash to left uprising—a fascist backlash which is frightening and bleak, but which is also in its way exhilarating. The reason that the final lines of the poem are so indelible and so often quoted is because they encourage you to (at least ambivalently) identify with the force of apocalypse—to embrace the coming reversal of morals as a perhaps regrettable, but nonetheless necessary rebuke to the rabble, the communists, the anarchists, the Catholics. Fascism will restore order and grandeur. The price might be high, but Yeats made it clear in his writings that he was willing to see it paid.
Berlatsky then turns to apocalyptic fantasies in general, which he notes often lean fascist as they generally involve “predictions of inevitable doom” from the point of view of one who knows. In that perspective there is an “implicit (or explicit) denigration of those who don’t.”
He therefore prefers antifascist apocalypse stories like N.K. Jemisin’s Broke Earth Trilogy (he could also have mentioned Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood), which “insist on portraying the choices not of rulers, but of those targeted for violence, discrimination, and death.” Antifascism, he notes,
requires solidarity, which means you can’t pump yourself up by preening as you contemplate everyone else’s death. And, relatedly, it requires a commitment to, and an assertion of, agency—not for one poet or one king or one prophet, but for everyone.
Because “The Second Coming” makes our encounter with Trump feel mythic, liberals who cite the poem mistakenly believe it’s helpful in our battle. Bertlasky, however, points out that Trump isn’t a myth but rather “a boring, grimy truth.” Since granting him world-historical inevitability “is just another fascist lie,” we shouldn’t look to the poem for antifascist insight or inspiration.
While I myself have used “The Second Coming” in this way, I’ve never had illusions about Yeats’s politics. Not only him but a number of the leading writers of this period (Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce) were attracted to fascism. This does not mean that we should reject their works, however. I think of how Marxist Terry Eagleton values them for the insights they provide into their time. “In the absence of genuinely revolutionary art,” he writes, “only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature.”
To take an example closer to our own time, while Trump-supporting playwright David Mamet has appalling political views, his play Glengarry Glen Ross is a brilliant depiction of the emptiness of dog-eat-dog capitalism. The man David Mamet celebrates the brutal bro culture that his play exposes.
If nothing else, then, “The Second Coming” helps us understand why so many on the right are willing to countenance the violence we are witnessing in our cities and why some Christian nationalists view Trump as a Christ-like figure: our president appeals to a fantasy that he is a rough beast who will sweep away all uncertainty—no lack of conviction there—and usher in a new age.
The question is whether Trump’s opponents can respond with powerful myths of their own. Or are they just hoping to take electoral advantage of the disillusion that will set in once people realize, as they eventually realized with Mussolini and Hitler, the pain that invariably accompanies fascistic second comings?
How deep does their commitment go? Fortunately the people of Minnesota, who have been embodying the ideals found in “the Declaration of Independence, “the Gettysburg Address,” Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, are showing them the way.
Pam Bondi testifying before the House Judiciary Committee
Tuesday
If there was ever any doubt that the Department of Justice is working as Donald Trump’s private law firm, with Attorney General Pam Bondi as his consigliere, that was put to rest with Bondi’s recent appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.
Queried about unexplained redactions in the Epstein files, along with why millions of pages have still not been released, Bondi responded with evasions and name calling. At one point she said, “The Dow is over fifty thousand right now, the S. & P. at almost seven thousand, and the Nasdaq smashing records, Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about. The non-response triggered a storm of comic responses, my favorite being: “Landlord: “You’re a week late on rent.” Me: “The DOW just hit 50,000!”
Bondi also attacked her interrogators, declaring to Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer. Not even a lawyer,” and accusing Republican Tom Massie of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. At one point she said, “You all should be apologizing. You sit here, and you attack the President, and I am not going to have it.”
For his part, Raskin pointed out how slavishly she follows Trump’s wishes. “Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza and you deliver every time,” he observed. “Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement.”
Thinking of Bondi as a consigliere invokes the image of Tom Hagen in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, brilliantly played by Robert Duvall in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie. (Note: I see that Duvall just died at 95.) When discussing with a movie studio head about a role for the godfather’s godson Johnny Fontane, Hagen makes clear that there is only one man that he works for:
[The studio head] studied Hagen’s card. “I never heard of you,” he said. “I know most of the big lawyers in New York, but just who the hell are you?’
“I have one of those dignified corporate practices,” Hagen said dryly. “I just handle this one account.”
While she may resemble Hagen in fealty to her boss, however, Bondi would have done well to follow his negotiation strategies. When the studio head begins slinging insults, Hagen doesn’t pull a Bondi, choosing instead to remain calm:
The abuse itself bothered him not at all. Hagen had learned the art of negotiation from the Don himself. “Never get angry,” the Don had instructed. “Never make a threat. Reason with people.” The word “reason” sounded so much better in Italian, ragione, to rejoin. The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek.
Of course, it’s easy to remain calm when you know your next move will be beheading the man’s $600,000 horse. And then there’s death, the trump card that the Don always carries with him:
Hagen had seen the Don sit at a negotiating table for eight hours, swallowing insults, trying to persuade a notorious and megalomaniac strong-arm man to mend his ways. At the end of the eight hours Don Corleone had thrown up his hands in a helpless gesture and said to the other men at the table, “But no one can reason with this fellow,” and had stalked out of the meeting room. The strong-arm man had turned white with fear. Emissaries were sent to bring the Don back into the room. An agreement was reached but two months later the strong-arm was shot to death in his favorite barbershop.
Nor is the Godfather always so patient, as we see in a passage that gives us one of the most memorable lines from the novel. Michael recounts the story to girlfriend Kay:
“When Johnny was beginning to become popular, he had a problem with his boss, a bandleader. Johnny wanted to leave the band, but this man wouldn’t let him. So Johnny asked my father to help. My father went to see the bandleader and offered him $10,000 to let Johnny go. He said no. The next day my father went to see him with [strongman] Luca Brasi. One hour later, the bandleader let Johnny go. For $1,000.”
Kay looked confused. “How did he do that?”
“My father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Luca held a gun to his head and my father told him that if he didn’t agree to let Johnny go, Luca would blow his brains out.”
I suppose Bondi attempted a version of this hardball tactic when she told Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that the Trump administration would withdraw the ICE forces that were terrorizing his state if he turned over the state’s voter rolls. The rolls, of course, had nothing to do with the stated reasons for ICE being in the state.
Trump has been more successful in swaying Republican legislators. The man who sicced a violent mob on the Capitol and whose fans have issued death threats, attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband in his home, murdered Democratic legislators, planted pipe bombs, and shot up houses of worship has reduced them to versions of the bandleader. Perhaps they should be calling him not Donald Trump but Don Trump.
My quarrel with Puzo’s book is that he glamorizes Don Corleone’s violence. It plays to a fantasy that is at the core of Trump’s psyche and that he has successfully sold for decades: that he can offer deals others can’t refuse. If Bondi has gone all in on consigliere loyalty, it’s because she feels he can deliver.
That’s why she was stunned when the people of Minnesota refused her deal. And baffled as to why members of the Judiciary Committee are not sold on her boss’s greatness.
While this is a picture of a planned submersion, an old Minnesota tradition called Ice Out Day involved parking a clunker on the ice and placing bets on which day it would break through
Monday
I share today literary allusions associated with ICE’s apparent withdrawal from Minnesota following the courageous resistance of its citizens. The first two are courtesy of an interview that MS Now’s Chris Hayes had with Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.
The first one involved Frey saying, “We’ve got a saying among mayors, and that’s good mayors copy and great mayors steal. I have certainly taken great ideas from other mayors and utilized them in Minneapolis for the betterment of our community.”
The quote itself has been stolen from T.S. Eliot, who once wrote that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” It so happens that Eliot himself stole the quote from literary scholar W.H. Davenport Adams, who in defense of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “thefts” wrote that “great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” An instance of an Eliot theft in The Waste Land (one of dozens) is “But at my back in a cold blast I hear/ The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.” The allusion is to Andrew Marvell’s line (in “To His Coy Mistress”), “But always at my back I hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
Eliot argued that he wasn’t plagiarizing because readers would recognize the source and regard his “theft” as a riff and an homage. In any event, Eliot’s primary purpose is writing a good poem, just as Frey’s is enacting good policy. I don’t know whether the recently elected Freye will become a great mayor, but I know that he learned important lessons from watching ICE operate in Los Angeles and Chicago. Let us hope that other American mayors steal from Minneapolis’s example if ICE invades their cities.
Frey also made a powerful allusion to Lord of the Rings when he said,
I’ve heard from some, whether elected officials of business executives that, well, hey, if we just keep our head down, we don’t want to attract the eye of Sauron or whatever. I don’t know if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it. You know, don’t bow your head in despair. Pick your head up. Kick your shoulders back.
Here’s the passage Freye has in mind:
But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.
Then the Eye began to rove, searching this way and that; and Frodo knew with certainty and horror that among the many things that it sought he himself was one. But he also knew that it could not see him—not yet, not unless he willed it.
The hobbits initially think that they can live in blissful ignorance of what is transpiring in the rest of Middle Earth. That, however, is wish-fulfillment. The only way that Frodo and Sam defeat Sauron is by, well, picking their heads up, kicking their shoulders back, and walking directly into Mordor. It’s not unlike Minnesotans directly confronting ICE.
In the same Chris Hayes show, he shared an interview he had with one of these brave Minnesota citizens, who referenced a tradition I first learned about from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Here’s what Hayes was told:
We’re going to outlast them. We not going to get tired. They’re going to get tired and they’re going to leave. And the county is going to get tired of ice, of using people like this. There’s a saying around here, when does the ice go out? It’s when does the ice melt off the lakes? It’s called Ice Out Day. You know people will park old cars on a lake, or they used to, and make bets on when the car would sink. You know how to wait till ice out. And people around here, we’re going to outlast ice, and we’re going to be here when ice is out.
In Gaiman’s fantasy novel, a northern German sprite or kobold is economically protecting an idyllic town in exchange for a yearly sacrifice of one of its young people. He hides the sacrifices in old clunkers that sink to the bottom of the lake on Ice Out Day.
The town, which reminds one of Mayberry in the Andy Griffith Show, is what the right fantasizes about: it’s homogenous, white, and prosperous. All that is required is sacrificing its future.
When they figure out what is happening, the protagonist (Shadow) and the town’s police chief find the cost to be too high and defeat the kobold. The town will now experience all the aches and pains of modernity but also the multicultural excitement that has always been a deep part of what makes America America. Maybe Somali refugees take up residence there.
I have one more item tangentially related to the right wing’s antagonism toward Americans and immigrants of color. Last week I imagined the trees that walked onto Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show as the Ents invading a tyrant’s domain. A reader wrote in to mention another invading forest. Macbeth thinks that he is home free when the witches tell him,
Donald shall never vanquish’d be until Bad Bunny to the Super Bowl Shall come against him, Declaring love a greater force than hate And unity the wished for goal of all.
Between Minnesotans caring for their neighbors and Bad Bunny invoking foundational American ideals to millions, there’s a glimmer of hope on our horizon.
As today is Transfiguration Sunday, I have been revisiting John Gatta’s illuminating study The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation. As the Sewanee English professor sees it, the vision of Christ being transfigured so that “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white” is not just an account of how the disciples became aware that God was present in Jesus and within themselves. The story also makes clear that God is present within the unfolding process of all creation. In other words, God is not limited to human beings.
Before moving to this third area, however, let’s revisit Matthew’s account of the transfiguration and look at its implications for humanity. Here’s Matthew:
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. (Matthew 17:1-8)
Gatta writes that what we learn from this account is that
God wills to make us new, to enlarge our capacity for glory, without destroying the uniqueness of our old personality. Our original human nature is to be fulfilled, not annihilated, even though we know ourselves to be inherently flawed, sinful, and downright quirky creatures.
One of literature’s most powerful depictions of a transfigured human occurs in Dante’s Paradise:
While ascending from earth at noon of the vernal equinox, the pilgrim-narrator in the opening canto of Paradise undergoes an inward transformation when he gazes at his beloved Beatrice who, in turn, reflects the radiance of the sun. He finds himself momentarily elevated (Italian trasumanar) above his normal human nature. Then by the 23rd canto, when he reaches the eighth heaven of the fixed stars, he is able to behold the divine substance of Christ streaming forth its radiance amid the Church Triumphant, much as it had on the mount of Transfiguration.
Gatta cites a passage from “The Transfiguration” by Scottish writer Edwin Muir that seeks to capture what the disciples experienced:
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness, But that even they, though sour and travel stained, Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance, And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined As in a morning field. Was it a vision? Or did we see that day the unseeable One glory of the everlasting world Perpetually at work, though never seen Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere And nowhere?
Transfiguration of Christ and Creation, however, is most interested in how the process extends beyond the human realm: Christ is a cosmic symbol of how God is present in everything. Dante says as much when his pilgrim sees “not only the beauty of Beatrice transfigured beyond human telling, but also the universe itself, all substances and accidents, enfolded into one.”
Gatta wants to move us past the tired debates over the Genesis creation story, which fundamentalists use to disavow Darwinian evolution. God didn’t just create the universe and then step back, Gatta counters. There is “a continuously evolving transformation of matter and energy, a dynamic immediacy, rather than a one-time leap from nothingness situated in the distant past.” He says that, by virtue of the Incarnation, “God became not only human but material, allied to the physical world.” God, in short, is in everything, including the evolutionary process.
Gatta turns to one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems to capture this truth. The poem is an account of reforestation:
Slowly, slowly, they return To the small woodland let alone: Great trees, outspreading and upright, Apostles of the living light.
Patient as stars, they build in air Tier after tier a timbered choir, Stout beams upholding weightless grace Of song, a blessing on this place.
They stand in waiting all around, Uprisings of their native ground, Downcomings of the distant light; They are the advent they await.
Receiving sun and giving shade, Their life’s a benefaction made, And is a benediction said Over the living and the dead.
In fall their brightened leaves, released, Fly down the wind, and we are pleased To walk on radiance, amazed. O light come down to earth, be praised!
Gatta writes that “great trees, despite their seemingingly inert solidity, support vital processes involving light and energy, microorgqnisms, motile fluids, and the exchange of atmospheric gasses.” The dynamics of “this physical synergism,” he contends, “corresponds to a divine economy of grace and transformation.”
The line “to walk on radiance, amazed,” Gatta notes, leads to the poem’s closing benediction: “O light come down to earth, be praised.” Thus, he concludes, “the multilayered metamorphosis enacted through and within these ‘great trees’ parallels the transformation of human awareness described through the course of Berry’s poem.”
To return to Matthew’s account, what we see by virtue of God entering Christ and being witnessed by the disciples is the emblematic story of how divinity works in the world. Through Jesus we learned that there is no ultimate separation between the world of spirit and the world of matter, that they are inextricably intertwined. When, gazing at great trees, we get a sense of the divine, we are connecting with the Godhead within all of us.
As tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, I devote today’s memoir installment to my marriage to Julia, now in its 53rd year. Like many such marriages, it has had its ups and its downs, during which time literature has often played a key role.
For this week’s poem in the Mountain Messenger, I shared W. S. Merwin’s poem “Here Together,” even though it pivots around a verb that I have long abhorred. That “cling” now seems the right word shows me how my marriage has evolved:
These days I can see us clinging to each other as we are swept along by the current I am clinging to you to keep you from being swept away and you are clinging to me we see the shores blurring past as we hold each other in the rushing current the daylight rushes unheard far above us how long will we be swept along in the daylight how long will we cling together in the night and where will it carry us together
While we don’t normally see “clingy” as positive—it suggests an over-dependence and a reaction to fear rather than a positive affirmation—it now strikes me as a positive description of two people who have been through a lot for a long time and who are now propping each other up as they enter their final years. (Julia and I both turn 75 this year, which some say is transitioning from young old age to middle old age.)
I didn’t want to see ourselves in a clinging relationship when we started out, however. One can see this in a portion of our marriage ceremony, which was influenced by Karl Marx’s dialectic and D. H. Lawrence’s fixation (influenced by Walt Whitman) on the tension between wanting to be self-sufficient and wanting to be part of a greater whole. The stars image is taken from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”:
Minister: The marriage bond is a bond between two individuals. It does not entail a merging of one into the other, for in merging the individuality is lost. Congregation: There must be a tension of difference. Without the tension, there can be no growth. Minister: From the tension, this man and this woman will grow to new awarenesses and reach new syntheses. Marriage can be beautiful because it provides a unified form in which to search. Congregation: Marriage is like a sonnet. As a fixed form, it endows a heightened beauty on the infinite number of variations within. Minister: The bond is the attraction between two stars revolving around each other, caught in each other’s orbit but resisting an incorporation which would burn brightly but die quickly. Congregation: “Love is the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.”
I also acknowledge that I wrote the wedding ceremony in part to rationalize marriage, which in 1973 seemed an outdated institution. So if you detect a slight undertone of defensiveness—or at least, of overexplaining—you’re not wrong.
But I knew I wanted a relationship with Julia, even though—and partly, because—we were so different. She had grown up on a small farm in southeast Iowa and felt that she was entering foreign terrain when she left the state to attend Carleton College. I, on the other hand, was swimming in the water that I had known my entire life.
Often one is drawn to one’s partner because one wants to grow into the undeveloped parts of oneself that the other represents. This was certainly our case. To the extent that she aspired to the world of the intellect and wanted to marry a man comfortable with ideas who could recite poetry (I had reeled off the opening lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Golden Echo and the Leaden Echo” in our first encounter), I was attractive to her. On the other hand, as an airy intellectual, I was drawn to how Julia was immersed in what struck me as a real life (milking cows, killing chickens, baling hay). She had a solidity and maturity to her that I felt that I lacked and that, in fact, made her much admired at Carleton. For instance, she was one of the few juniors chosen to be a resident assistant on her hall floor, and her teaching mentor (Harriet Sheridan) said she was one of the most mature students she had ever encountered.
Julia also was much more comfortable with physicality than I was. My family didn’t hug or even like to touch each other when I was growing up, and I will be forever grateful to Julia for helping me push past that taboo.
But of course, whatever draws one to the other person can also become a source of conflict. That’s because growing into the potential that the other person represents—and that a deep part of you knows is essential to your growth–is hard and sometimes painful. Better to fall back on what is familiar. It’s not just that Julia sometimes thought I should be more of the rugged man that her farmer father was (I didn’t know how to fix things) and I thought she should be more of the supportive faculty wife that my mother was, although that was part of it. It’s that she resented my success in the academic world, which she thought she wanted to join even though part of her found it a bit arid. I meanwhile didn’t fully appreciate her need to be grounded in social relationships, including a church community. I bring this up to understand those moments of tension that have arisen in our relationship.
To draw a literary parallel, Darcy needs Elizabeth’s liveliness and sense of humor if he is to escape the smug, self-satisfied, and suffocating world of Catherine de Bourg while she needs his steadiness and community commitment if she is not to grow into the detached satirist that her father is. But if their marriage is to live up to its potential, hard work and a departure from familiar patterns of behavior will be necessary. Darcy will need to learn “to laugh at himself,” as Elizabeth puts it, and she will need to take life more seriously. Her father’s philosophy—”For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”—will not fully serve her when she is patroness of a village.
When tensions arose in our marriage, Julia would become outwardly angry while I would retreat into cold silence (fire and ice, to borrow from Robert Frost). Eventually we dealt with the issues by undergoing family therapy, where we learned that we both had anger suppression issues, which we were passing along to our kids. Although it’s embarrassing to admit, we were also aided by Lifespring, a cultish program that nevertheless featured powerful relationship and leadership exercises that I’ve found to be of use. Somehow we survived the bumps and the marriage grew stronger.
Having acknowledged the differences that led to our disputes, I add that we never stopped admiring and seeking to grow into the undeveloped side of ourselves that had led us into marriage in the first place. Our marriage was strong enough to raise three spectacular men and to survive the death of one of them. We also supported each other in our careers so that, in the end, we were both doing what we most wanted to do. To this day I admire tremendously Julia’s commitment to sustaining community, and Better Living through Beowulf owes much to her as I have sought to understand how literature can aid in this effort. For her part, she came to appreciate my academic work. We sometimes marvel at how calm our lives have become now that we no longer trigger each other.
I was in high school when I first encountered and admired Ezra Pound’s “The Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” little knowing that it would prove predictive. The difference is that it takes the speaker only a year to overcome feelings of separateness and fully bond with her husband while it has taken Julia and me a lifetime to reach something comparable:
At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever, and forever.
In the poem, the couple hate to be separated, and while they are technically teenagers while we are septuagenarians, I experience something similar when Julia and I are apart:
At sixteen you departed You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away!
The vision of marriage that I had on our wedding day—“two stars revolving around each other, caught in each other’s orbit but resisting an incorporation which would burn brightly but die quickly”—appears to have come about. We balance our individual interests (tennis and writing for me, community service and various writing, memory, and sewing projects for her) with collective interests (church, politics, travel). And yes, as we face various medical challenges, we cling to each other to keep from being swept away. “In sickness and in health, til death us do part” has taken on special resonance.
I find strangely comforting the vision of our dust being mingled forever and forever and forever.
