Hieronymous Bosch, The Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1500-10)
Friday
Reader Brendan Murry has alerted me to a Garrett Epps Atlantic article that uses C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters to critique Attorney General William Barr’s advocacy for an all-powerful presidency. As indicated by both his words and his actions, Barr believes that the executive branch should take precedence over the legislative and judicial branches. Epps sees him in league with Lewis’s Devil.
The University of Baltimore law professor says that Barr wants Trump to have dictatorial powers with no accountability:
At [the government’s] center is one individual, the president. Congress cannot call a president to account by effective oversight, nor can it require a president’s subordinates to explain their decisions…The courts cannot step in when the president uses his authority to circumvent or negate the constitutional authority of Congress. And the courts cannot examine whether his actions comport with statutes—statutes he is bound by oath to “faithfully execute.”
What this means, in practical terms, is that the president is not accountable to anyone at all. There are not three co-equal branches; there is a president who is the source of authority and two subsidiary agencies, called “Congress” and “the courts,” which exist to facilitate presidential decisions. The president is not above the law; the president is the law.
For those of us who grew up believing in constitutional checks and balances—well, Barr thinks we’re wrong. Applying a Lewis dichotomy, Epps says the attorney general chooses force over principle. America’s principles include a vision of men and women as equal before the law and having an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Barr, on the other hand, believes that people like him should be able to impose their vision on others. Forget about celebrating America in all its racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.
In Screwtape, the Devil teaches a lesser demon how to corrupt humankind. The key, he says in Letter VII, is getting people to abandon God and worship materialist “Forces”:
If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’—then the end of the war [against God] will be in sight.
Epps writes,
That image—of those who worship force while denying spirit—has haunted me ever since; it epitomizes the dilemma of a human society in moral free fall because it has, without knowing it, abandoned belief in its own pretended first principles.
In the age of Donald Trump, we are seeing a legal incarnation of Screwtape—the lawless legalist who worships the law as force but denies the existence of its spirit.
Epps ends his article with a dire warning:
Like Screwtape’s materialist magician, Barr, the lawless legalist, embodies force without spirit; constitutionalism without liberty; democratic form without self-government. For two generations, he and people like him have been working to bring this vision to reality. They are on the verge of victory.
That Barr sees himself as religious, caricaturing progressives as godless secularists wreaking moral havoc, doesn’t negate Epps’s point. In fact, later in Letter VII Lewis anticipates how some will misuse God to achieve material ends. His observation applies to those rightwing faith leaders, along with former Texas governor Rick Perry, who regard Trump as God’s anointed:
Let [man] begin by treating [his political agenda] as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause,” in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of [his agenda]…Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours.
Then, in a dig that shows where such evangelical Trump fanatics as Jerry Falwell, Jr., Patty White, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham may be headed, the devil tells his interlocutor,
I could show you a pretty cageful down here.
The Rev. William Barber refers to such Christians as heretics because of how they ignore Christ’s admonition to support the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. Religion aside, however, it’s enough that they are perverting the Constitution to impose their will upon the rest of us.
Mike Hazard, a Carleton hall mate my freshman year, is allowing me to share this year’s Thanksgiving poem. It appears in his collection The World Is Not Altogether Bad, a series of portraits of people on society’s margins. We meet Vietnam vets, alcoholics, dementia patients, cancer patients, and homeless people, as well as friends and family. Given the subject matter, one might expect the book to be depressing, but in fact each life blossoms under Mike’s treatment.
In “Blessed for Life,” the speaker picks up a random
hitchhiker, not unlike how he picks up subjects for his collection. He never
knows what lies in store when he makes a new acquaintance. In this case, he
receives a Thanksgiving gift that he will carry with him for the rest of his
life.
The man, who needs a ride for a Dorothy Day center for the homeless, looks and sounds like an Old Testament prophet. He is “jazzed, jazzed” about a Thanksgiving feast at the Dorothy Day Center for the homeless, which leads to a heartfelt declaration: “This world is not altogether bad.”
Grim though life may appear at times, his understated words hit with the force of divine revelation. The poet sees heartfelt gratitude in its purest form. He feels “blessed for life.”
Blessed for Life
A wild-looking man I don’t know from Adam begged a ride from the PO to the Dorothy Day Center. He’s jazzed, jazzed about a Thanksgiving feast With a shock of hair like a thundercloud, he looks like an old Testament prophet. He got out and paused next to the window. Standing so I can’t see his face, I was blessed for life when a rich voice said, “This world is not altogether bad.”
Eduard von Gebhardt, Portrait of an Old Man (1913)
Wednesday
I once had an exuberant friend, stage actress Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, who declared that each decade of her life was better than the one before. Her sixties were better than her fifties, she said, and her seventies better than her sixties. To be sure, she stopped saying this once she reached her nineties—she lived to be 98—which would mean that, in her eyes, she reached her peak in her eighties. Still, she made a compelling case for the joys of aging.
I thought about Maurine while reading a recent New Yorker article by Arthur Krystal, who is skeptical of such claims. Krystal takes aim at the spate of books claiming that our senior years are a time “to celebrate ourselves and the wonderful things to come: traveling, volunteering, canoodling, acquiring new skills, and so on.” He pays special attention to “five chatty accounts meant to reassure us that getting old just means that we have to work harder at staying young.” In Krystal’s contrarian view, it’s still better to be young.
Literature for Krystal has more authority than the various sociologists, psychologists, and self-help gurus he mentions. I use today’s post to dig into the literary works he mentions.
Looking at recent fiction, Krystal notes the
sheer number of novels that are being produced:
Now that we’re living longer, we have the time to write books about living longer—so many, in fact, that the Canadian critic Constance Rooke, in 1992, coined the term “Vollendungsroman,” a somewhat awkward complement to “Bildungsroman,” to describe novels about the end of life, such as Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, and Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird.” Since then, plenty of elderly protagonists have shown up in novels by Louis Begley (About Schmidt), Sue Miller (The Distinguished Guest), Saul Bellow (Ravelstein), Philip Roth (Everyman), and Margaret Drabble (The Dark Flood Rises).
“The library on old age,” Krystal observes wryly, “has grown so voluminous that the fifty million Americans over the age of sixty-five could spend the rest of their lives reading such books, even as lusty retirees and power-lifting septuagenarians turn out new ones.”
Krystal doesn’t attempt to synthesize the
vision of aging that arises from these novels other than to say that “there are
as many ways to grow old as there are people going about it.” If one is to go
by the classic authors that he cites, however, aging is a grimmer process than
the recent flood of self-help books indicates.
To be sure, there are exceptions, one of
which is Walt Whitman:
YOUTH, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination, Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
And of course, there’s Tennyson’s
well-known “Ulysses,” although Krystal points out that it was written when the
author was “a mere twenty-four”:
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.
Krystal finds many more grim versions of aging, including Gulliver’s Travels’ Struldbrugs, some of whom are born immortal. Sounding like one of those old age enthusiasts that Krystal targets, Gulliver initially sees this as a blessing:
I cried out, as in a rapture, “Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal! Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages! but happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent struldbrugs, who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!”
Gulliver figures that the Struldbrugs will have the wisdom to provide the best counsel. This perspective, incidentally, is shared by Plato, who according to Krystal “thought philosophy best suited to men of more mature years.”
Gulliver, however, in then informed that immortality is a nightmare:
When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions.
This sounds more like
Aristotle’s vision of the elderly. Krystal notes that Ars Rhetorica “contains long passages denouncing old men as miserly,
cowardly, cynical, loquacious, and temperamentally chilly.”
Other literary characters that offer up unflattering images of old age include:
–January from Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, who
marries May and, for such a violation of the natural order, is predictably
cuckolded. (The same occurs to the old carpenter in The Miller’s Tale.)
–Tennyson’s Tithonous, once beautiful but, like the Struldbrugs, now aging without any hope of death. Tennyson writes:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground…
…I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream…
–old people as described by the misanthropic Jaques in As You Like It:
The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
–Yeats’s old man in “Sailing to Byzantium,” who sadly acknowledges that “this is no country for old men” as he watches the young in one another’s arms. In the course of the poem he describes himself as
a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick,
and containing a heart that is
sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal...
Krystal quotes poet Louise Bogan’s observation that “[a]t first we want life to be romantic; later, to be bearable; finally, to be understandable,” but only to challenge that final goal. “I have my doubts about whether the piling on of years really does add to our understanding of life,” he says, and then quotes King Lear’s second daughter:
Doesn’t Regan say of her raging royal father, “Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself”? The years may broaden experience and tint perspective, but is wisdom or contentment certain to follow?
To accentuate the point, he quotes the poet author of Ecclesiastes:
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. . . . The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise? This too is meaningless.
To all these overvaluations of old age, Krystal
answers with depressing biological facts and the following dash of cold water:
Sure, there’s life in the old boy yet, but certain restrictions apply. The body—tired, aching, shrinking—now quite often embarrasses us. Many older men have to pee right after they pee, and many older women pee whenever they sneeze. [Clinical psychologist Mary] Pipher [author of Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age] and company might simply say “Gesundheit” and urge us on. Life, they insist, doesn’t necessarily get worse after seventy or eighty. But it does, you know.
Given how well-read Krystal is, I’m amazed that he doesn’t mention Samuel Johnson, either Rasselas or The Vanity of Human Wishes. Both systematically deconstruct the prospect of elderly happiness. In Rasselas the youthful protagonists seek out an old man and are disabused of the notion that they have anything positive to look forward to:
As they walked along the banks of the Nile, delighted with the beams of the moon quivering on the water, they saw at a small distance an old man whom the Prince had often heard in the assembly of the sages. “Yonder,” said he, “is one whose years have calmed his passions, but not clouded his reason. Let us close the disquisitions of the night by inquiring what are his sentiments of his own state, that we may know whether youth alone is to struggle with vexation, and whether any better hope remains for the latter part of life.”
…
“Sir,” said the Princess, “an evening walk must give to a man of learning like you pleasures which ignorance and youth can hardly conceive. You know the qualities and the causes of all that you behold—the laws by which the river flows, the periods in which the planets perform their revolutions. Everything must supply you with contemplation, and renew the consciousness of your own dignity.”
“Lady,” answered he, “let the gay and the vigorous expect pleasure in their excursions: it is enough that age can attain ease. To me the world has lost its novelty. I look round, and see what I remember to have seen in happier days. I rest against a tree, and consider that in the same shade I once disputed upon the annual overflow of the Nile with a friend who is now silent in the grave. I cast my eyes upwards, fix them on the changing moon, and think with pain on the vicissitudes of life. I have ceased to take much delight in physical truth; for what have I to do with those things which I am soon to leave?”
“You may at least recreate yourself,” said Imlac, “with the recollection of an honorable and useful life, and enjoy the praise which all agree to give you.”
“Praise,” said the sage with a sigh, “is to an old man an empty sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honors of her husband. I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of much importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself. Youth is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude, there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they may yet take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts unfinished. My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I compose myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts from hopes and cares which, though reason knows them to be vain, still try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with serene humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay, and hope to possess in a better state that happiness which here I could not find, and that virtue which here I have not attained.”
He arose and went away, leaving his audience not much elated with the hope of long life.
Vanity of Human Wishes offers more of the same. If you wish to grow old, you will either get (1) days filled with pain or, (2) days filled with the death of friends and loved ones, not to mention a fading of life’s joys. On the one hand, “Unnumber’d maladies his joints invade, /Lay siege to life and press the dire blockade.” On the other,
New sorrow rises as the day returns, A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns. Now kindred Merit fills the sable bier, Now lacerated Friendship claims a tear. Year chases year, decay pursues decay, Still drops some joy from with’ring life away...
Take your choice.
Krystal’s article is very Johnsonian only
Johnson takes an axe to youth as well to aging. In fact, give up on ever
achieving happiness in the material world, the great cham informs us. The final
chapter of Rasselas is entitled, “Conclusion, in which nothing is
concluded.”
Given that Krystal wants to rip off our rose-colored glasses and show aging for what it really is, he would stand to benefit from the concluding advice of Johnson’s Vanity. Look to heaven, Johnson tells us, because only there will you find “the celestial wisdom that calms the mind, /And makes the happiness she does not find.”
George Orwell made an appearance yesterday when a judge ruled that White House employees cannot blow off Congress. You probably can guess which line from Animal Farm the judge cited.
A federal judge ruled Monday that President Trump does not have the power to block former White House Counsel Don McGahn from showing up for compelled testimony in front of Congress.
In a 120-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of Washington ruled: “Executive branch officials are not absolutely immune from compulsory congressional process — no matter how many times the Executive branch has asserted as much over the years — even if the President expressly directs such officials’ non-compliance.”
The judge said that “no one is above the law.”
Judge Jackson accused the Department of Justice of obstructing Congressional oversight, thereby “transgress[ing] core constitutional truths.” The right to absolute immunity, she ruled, “simply does not exist,” “simply has no basis in law,” is “a fiction,” and “substantially harms the national interest.”
Footnote 11 reads, “For a similar vantage point [to the DOJ’s claim], see the circumstances described by George Orwell in the acclaimed book Animal Farm.” Judge Jackson then spells out the passage she has in mind: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
The quote, it’s worth recalling, appears after the pigs have been chipping away at the Constitution. The novel’s version of absolute immunity suddenly appears on the barn wall:
Benjamin felt a nose nuzzling at his shoulder. He looked round. It was Clover. Her old eyes looked dimmer than ever. Without saying anything, she tugged gently at his mane and led him round to the end of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written. For a minute or two they stood gazing at the tatted wall with its white lettering.
“My sight is failing,” she said finally. “Even when I was young I could not have read what was written there. But it appears to me that that wall looks different. Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?”
For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran:
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
What follows illustrates why the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry has been necessary. When rules are broken, the new order becomes normalized if we do not stand firm. Notice what no longer “seem[s] strange” once the animals of Animal Farm become used to it:
After that it did not seem strange when next day the pigs who were supervising the work of the farm all carried whips in their trotters. It did not seem strange to learn that the pigs had bought themselves a wireless set, were arranging to install a telephone, and had taken out subscriptions to John Bull, Tit-Bits, and the Daily Mirror. It did not seem strange when Napoleon was seen strolling in the farmhouse garden with a pipe in his mouth–no, not even when the pigs took Mr. Jones’s clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on, Napoleon himself appearing in a black coat, ratcatcher breeches, and leather leggings, while his favorite sow appeared in the watered silk dress which Mrs. Jones had been used to wearing on Sundays.
In her ruling, Judge Jackson said what should not need to be said:
Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings. This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control. Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
No doubt you thought these truths were self-evident. In moments of constitutional crisis, we find ourselves revisiting the visions of the founders.
In Friday’s NCTE talk, I quoted Neil Gaiman’s well-known observation about fairy tales and dragons. Learning that it was inspired by G.K. Chesterton, I have tracked down the original passage and reflect upon it today.
Neil Gaiman’s quote applies
nicely to works like Beowulf and The Odyssey as well as to fairy
tales:
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Chesterton wrote:
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Chesterton’s observation,
appearing in a collection of informal essays called Tremendous Trifles (1909), comes to the defense of fairy tales:
[A] lady has written me an earnest letter saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even if they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy tales, because it frightens them.
Anticipating Bruno Bettleheim, who in The Uses of Enchantment lacerated Disney for sugarcoating the Grimm Brothers, Chesterton says that children have darker imaginations than the letter writer is willing to admit. He continues,
You might just as well say that it is cruel to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry. All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul.
Where does the fear come from? From the world, which is “a very alarming place.” There’s some racism in Chesterton’s subsequent argument but his observation about children is sound:
The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it—because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey.
Then we get the observation that Gaiman embraces:
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
Attacking overly rational agnostics as well as fussy ladies, Chesterton says that a child needs fantasy heroes:
At the four corners of a child’s bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone.
The attacks on fantasy literature that Chesterton encountered in 1909 didn’t disappear as the century wore on. To cite one example, some parents attacked Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are when it appeared it frankly acknowledged child anger. Yet the book remains a consistent children’s favorite, in large part because Max masters the monsters. Essentially, he gives therapeutic vent to his anger, after which he can reconcile with his loving mother, who has a warm meal waiting for him.
In Chesterton’s framing, the story assures him that seemingly limitless dark emotions in fact have a limit. And can be conquered.
Altdorfer, Christ on the Cross between the Two Thieves (1526)
Spiritual Sunday
For reasons that some of my readers will know (and I hope will inform me), today’s New Testament reading involves the crucifixion, even though we are half a year from Easter. It features the story of the two thieves.
Perhaps it’s included now to make the point that salvation is spiritual rather than earthly. That seems to have been the theme in recent readings, including last week’s about the true temple being built of God’s love, not “beautiful stones” (see my post on the George Herbert poem about the passage). In any event, it gives me an excuse to share two fine poems.
Here’s the passage:
When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. The people stood by, watching Jesus on the cross; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:33-43)
Both poems focus on “the bad thief.” Harriet Monroe’s “The Thief on the Cross” (1905) ends with an intriguing question. Imagining that the bad thief goes to hell rather than heaven, she wonders how the conversation during Jesus’s descent into hell would have gone. She leaves the answer open::
Three
crosses rose on Calvary against the iron sky,
Each with its living burden, each with its human cry.
And all the ages watched there, and there were you and I.
One bore the God incarnate, reviled by man's disdain,
Who through the woe he suffered for our eternal gain
With joy of infinite loving assuaged his infinite pain.
On one the thief repentant conquered his cruel doom,
Who called at last on Christ and saw his glory through the gloom.
For him after the torment souls of the blest made room.
And one the unrepentant bore, who his harsh fate defied.
To him, the child of darkness, all mercy was denied;
Nailed by his brothers on the cross, he cursed his God and died.
Ah, Christ, who met in Paradise him who had eyes to see,
Didst thou not greet the other in hell's black agony ?
And if he knew thy face, Lord, what did he say to thee?
As I read heaven and hell,
they are states we undergo when we are still alive. The one thief dies in a
hellish state, the other gets a glimpse of “infinite loving.” He sees Christ’s “glory
through the gloom.”
Put another way, in the two thieves we see two different ways of living and dying. The “child of darkness” sees nothing but “hell’s black agony” while the “thief repentant conquer[s] his cruel doom.” We can spend our last hours desperately clutching life or we can open ourselves to a deeper vision.
John O’Donnell’s more recent poem points out that we all have more than a little of “The Bad Thief” in us. “Admit it: you’d have done the same,” he tells us.
In other words, the line between the “one redeemed” and the “one condemned” is very thin. We all waver between our belief in love and our panic over mortality. Only a scribbling “hack” makes the choice sound easy.
We’d had to wait while someone went for nails.
The soldiers stood around us, eating dates.
I’d seen him once before, and heard the stories,
though how on earth he’d ended up like this,
with the two of us for company, I don’t know.
A wind that smelt of hyssop-leaves. When I offered him
my hand one big bruiser clanked his sword.
“Word is,” I whispered, “you could save us all.
Well, now’s your chance!” Admit it: you’d have done
the same. But he just sighed: “Too late for me,
though not for you.” His pale hand small in mine
as they came towards us with the hammer. One
redeemed, and one condemned, some hack scribbled later.
But what was there between us in the end?
As I read “Bad Thief,” the compassionate line that ends “The Coward,” Eve Merriam’s poem about a deserter, comes to mind: “Coward, take my coward’s hand.” This in turn provides the answer to Monroe’s concluding question: Jesus greets us in our agony and extends to us his infinite compassion.
I share today the talk I am giving at 12:30 at the National Council of Teachers of English conference, held in Baltimore. The session is titled “Becoming Readers: Reading to Renew, Repurpose, and Resist” and is described as follows:
Presenters will explore ways students can unleash the radical energies of both older and newer texts and put them to work in their lives. Presenters will offer ways to spark student interest in literary texts through a rhetorical approach that examines the complex social worlds and identities that shape acts of communication, including students’ own experiences, interests, and purposes. Attendees will return to their classrooms ready to engage students in literature as a framework for responding to the world in which they live.
Delivered at NCTE, Nov. 22, 2019, Baltimore
For the past ten years, I have authored a blog, Better Living through Beowulf, in an attempt to address a theoretical problem that those who study literary impact know well: readers respond to works so idiosyncratically and unpredictably that generalizations prove difficult.
Not that theorists have refrained from generalizing. Plato, to
cite a famous example, thought he knew how the Odyssey would impact
young Athenian men: the sumptuous eating scenes would render them dissolute and
Achilles’s lament about dying young would render them cowardly. Therefore, he
banished Homer from his ideal republic.
Perhaps there were some young men who responded this way but there were undoubtedly others who did not. Today we would demand empirical evidence.
Faced with problems of determining literary impact, I set up my blog project to track how works were impacting my own life. If I didn’t feel confident generalizing about audiences as a whole, I could at least record my own idiosyncratic and unpredictable responses, providing a steady stream of anecdotes about literature’s multiple effects. Perhaps an aggregate of responses would provide insights as no single overarching theory could.
Therefore, in a Montaigne-type exercise, I have been charting on a daily basis how I use literature to negotiate whatever issues I find to be pressing at the moment. The “Beowulf” in my blog’s title, incidentally, functions as a synecdoche or stand-in for literature. The blog could just as accurately be titled “Better Living through Literature.”
That being said, Beowulf makes frequent appearances on my blog, surpassed only by Paradise Lost, a few Shakespeare plays and Austen novels, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Alice books. That’s because, when violence has erupted in our midst, the 8th century epic understands what we are experiencing. When mass shootings dominate the headlines, Beowulf conveys to students literature’s urgency.
I tell my classes that literature provides them with an essential toolkit for articulating and handling our most pressing problems, including violence and the threat of violence. The greatest literature provides us with the deepest understanding and points the way to the most effective road forward.
Regarding Beowulf, I tell them that its greatness lies in its profound grasp of violence, both the forms violence takes and how we can fight back.
Then I follow up with a Neil Gaiman variation of a G.K. Chesterton
quote:
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
When we discuss Beowulf, therefore, we look closely at
both the epic’s insights into monstrous violence and the steps Beowulf takes to
counter that violence. More on that in a moment.
I take a quick detour, however, into another work that first alerted me to literature’s ability to address the issue of endemic violence. I was teaching Paradise Lost the day after the Virginia Tech shooting, which impacted my Maryland students profoundly. We were struck by Satan’s explanation for why he destroys:
Nor hope to be myself less miserable By what I seek, but others to make such As I, though thereby worse to me redound: For only in destroying I find ease To my relentless thoughts… --Satan in Paradise Lost, Book IX, ll. 126-30
Other works over the past ten years that have helped me understand terrorist outrages have been Conrad’s Lord Jim and Secret Agent, Macbeth, Crime and Punishment, Catch-22, Stephen King’s IT, Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood, and Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” Beowulf, however, shows up more than any other work.
In Beowulf, I argue, the monsters represents three
different kinds of anger, with each manifesting itself in a different kind of
violence:
In class discussions, we use these categories to classify the various instances of violence we read about in the news or encounter in our lives.
The monsters being archetypes, they show up in the poem’s human characters. Most of the warriors are associated with one of the three angers. Here are the principle ones:
Grendel’s Resentful Rage: Unferth Hrothulf (who kills Hrothgar’s son after the king’s death)
Example of such rage:
Beowulf’s coming, his sea-braving, made him [Unferth] sick with envy: he could not brook or abide the fact that anyone else alive under heaven might enjoy greater regard than he did… --Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney, ll. 501-05
GM’s Murderous Grieving: Hengest (who kills Finn)
Example of such rage:
Hengest stayed, lived out that whole resentful, blood-sullen winter with Finn, homesick and helpless. No ring-whorled prow could up then and away on the sea. Wind and water raged with storms, wave and shingle were shackled in ice… . . . The wildness in them had to brim over. The hall ran red with blood of enemies. --Beowulf (trans. Heaney), ll. 1128-34, 1150-52
Dragon Depression: Heremod (“pariah king,” contrasted with Sigemund) Hrothgar (when grieving for Aeschere) The Last Veteran (the Dragon occupies his barrow) Hrethel (dies of grief for his son) The aging Beowulf
Example of such rage:
[The last veteran] mourned as he moved about the world, deserted and alone, lamenting his unhappiness day and night, until death’s flood brimmed up in his heart. --Beowulf (trans. Heaney), ll. 2267-70
Since, per Gaiman, learning that dragons can be killed is the most important lesson, my students and I look at what it takes for Beowulf to defeat each of the monsters. Then we apply the lessons to our own lives. Here they are boiled down to their essence:
To Defeat Grendel’s Resentful Rage: Stand firm with a forceful presence
To Defeat the Murderous Grief of Grendel’s Mother: Invoke deeply held values
To Defeat Debilitating Dragon Depression: Support each other in a communal effort
To be sure, standing strong will not stop a resentment-crazed killer with an AK-47, but one will find many recordings on twitter of people standing up to racist bullies. While the angry energy of others can seem overwhelming, Beowulf shows us we have weapons to resist.
In conclusion, studying the nature of each of Beowulf’s monsters and what it takes to defeat them provides insights that students can apply to their own lives. Literature classes become a training ground for life.
Trump Republicans are making much over Democrats’ use of “quid pro quo,” “bribe,” and “extortion.” Their supposed indecision exposes their impeachment as unserious.
Haven’t they heard of synonyms, one is tempted to ask. After all, offering someone “something for something”—to translate the Latin—is the very definition of a bribe. Lawyers, reflecting the Latin roots of their profession, like to use “quid pro quo,” but bribery makes more sense in this instance since it is one of the infractions listed in the Constitution as impeachable. My only quibble is that extortion is probably a more accurate description of what we’ve been witnessing.
To illustrate the distinction, I turn to Mario Puzo’s Godfather. In the novel’s most famous line, Don Corleone speaks of making an offer that can’t be refused. Such an offer is a bribe only if the other party can in fact refuse it. If he or she can’t, it’s extortion.
The line appears only once in the novel, when the godfather promises the Frank Sinatra figure to get him the movie role he covets:
Johnny Fontane could not altogether believe that the Don had such power. But his Godfather had never said such and such a thing could be done without having it done. “This guy is a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover,” Johnny said. “You can’t even raise your voice to him.”
“He’s a businessman,” the Don said blandly. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Initially, the Godfather’s Consiglieri (Tom Hegen) offers an end to the studio’s problems with a labor union and with a coke-addicted actor. These are bribes. When the bribe is refused, the producer then receives the bloody head of his prize stallion—which is to say, a threat of violence that knows no bounds. This is extortion.
When you hold up critical military funds in exchange for the investigation of a political rival, you’ve moved from bribery to extortion, although the Democrats are still opting for the “b” word. In his testimony yesterday, EU Ambassador and hotelier Gordon Sondland explained how Trump made his will known:
The ambassador testified that the “three amigos” — he, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker — worked with Giuliani on Ukraine matters “at the express direction of the president of the United States.”
Trump would often tell the trio on Ukraine issues: “Talk with Rudy.”
The Godfather doesn’t even need to say, “Talk to Tom Hagen.” People know that his Consiglieri speaks for him. As Sondland made clear, everyone got the message: Vice-President Pence, Secretary of State Pompeo, Chief of Staff Mulvaney, NSC head John Bolton, and various officials. All were “in the loop.”
Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff neatly summed up the most recent Republican talking point at the end of the Sondland hearing: “My colleagues seem to be under the impression that unless the president spoke the words, ‘Ambassador Sondland I am bribing the Ukrainian president,’ that there is no evidence of bribery.” That’s not how evidence works, nor is it how either Don Corleone or Trump operate. They have other ways of getting their point across.
I’ve already written once how Tom Hagen retains plausible deniability while “negotiating” with the film producer, at one point observing, “I’m a lawyer. Would I stick my neck out? Have I uttered one threatening word?” Yet threatening things nevertheless happen: the producer awakes to a bloody nightmare, a coveted White House meeting never takes place, Ukrainian aid is withheld (until the whistleblower report emerges).
Another instance of Hagen at work gives us further insight into the Trump-Giuliani operation. An undertaker, granted a favor on the wedding day of Don Corleone’s daughter, is later expected to tend to the body of Sonny Corleone. Although initially reluctant to become further immersed in the crime family, he is quickly brought around. Not once is an explicit threat used:
He was surprised at the coldness in Hagen’s voice. The Consiglieri had always been a courteous man, though not Italian, but now he was being rudely brusque. “You owe the Don a service,” Hagen said. “He has no doubt, that you will repay him. That you will be happy to have this opportunity. In one hour, not before, perhaps later, he will be at your funeral parlor to ask for your help. Be there to greet him. Don’t have any people who work for you there. Send them home. If you have any objections to this, speak now and I’ll inform Don Corleone. He has other friends who can do him this service.”
Amerigo Bonasera almost cried out in his fright, “How can you think I would refuse the Godfather? Of course I’ll do anything he wishes. I haven’t forgotten my debt. I’ll go to my business immediately, at once.”
We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt. We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the president’s orders.
A major goal was (as Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent reported) to have “President Zelensky to go to a microphone and say investigations, Biden and Clinton.” Worried about Joe Biden in the upcoming election, Trump monitored the situation closely, talking regularly to Sondland. Had it not been for the whistleblower, it might have worked: it appears that the Ukrainian president, frightened for his country if not for himself, was prepared to go along.
Had Trump pulled off his scheme and if Biden were his opponent, the president would have hammered the word “corruption” the way he hammered “e-mails” against Hillary Clinton. Every rally would have the crowd chanting, “Lock him up.” The payoff could have been immense.
And he didn’t have to get his hands dirty or use the word “bribery.” That was Rudy’s job.
Dourif, Lee as Wormtongue, Saruman in Lord of the Rings
Wednesday
Vox Ezra Klein may have said summed it up best, tweeting,
The question at the heart of the impeachment process isn’t “Did Trump do it?” We know he did it. It’s not in dispute. The question at the heart of the impeachment process is “What has gone wrong in the Republican Party that it will defend what Trump did?”
To slightly amend Klein’s second question, Republicans aren’t so much defending Trump’s Ukrainian shakedown as attacking anyone who reveals what the president did. They are playing Wormtongue to Trump’s Saruman.
I compared Trump to Saruman over a year ago, especially in the way the two turn their backs on traditional friends with seeking friendship with autocrats. In Trump’s case, it has been with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Saudi Arabia’s Salman, Turkey’s Erdogan, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the Philippines’ Duterte, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un. In Saruman’s case it’s Sauron. The days of liberal regimes is coming to an end, he tells Gandalf:
“The Elder Days are gone. The Middle Days are passing. The Younger Days are beginning. The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.
“And listen, Gandalf, my old friend and helper! ” he said, coming near and speaking now in a softer voice. “I said we, for we it may be, if you will join with me. A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor. This then is one choice before you. before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow;
It’s one thing for Trump to turn his back on NATO, the European Union, our far eastern allies, and the Kurds. It’s something else again to see the GOP signing on to his agenda. Instead of an independent branch of government, Republicans have become slavish followers, parroting Ukrainian talking points that Trump himself borrowed from Putin. As Lindsay Graham could testify (but won’t), they follow the president’s lead regardless of how much Trump kicks them around. They may not be happy about it but, like Wormtongue in a scene where he and Saruman have been reduced to beggars, they follow his lead:
“Get up, you idiot!” he [Saruman] shouted to the other beggar, who had sat down on the ground; and he struck him with his staff. “Turn about! If these fine folk are going our way, then we will take another. Get on, or I’ll give you no crust for your supper!”
The beggar turned and slouched past whimpering: “Poor old Gríma! Poor old Gríma! Always beaten and cursed. How I hate him! I wish I could leave him!”
“Then leave him!” said Gandalf.
But Wormtongue only shot a glance of his bleared eyes full of terror at Gandalf, and then shuffled quickly past behind Saruman.
Reports are that many GOP legislators would only be too glad to leave Trump if they could do so unscathed. As they see it, however, their career in politics would be over the instant they tried.
So instead they insult the
truthtellers, just as Wormtongue insults Gandalf when he shows up to liberate
the King of Rohan, grouping him with “pickers of bones, meddlers in other men’s
sorrows, carrion-fowl that grow fat on war.” Elsewhere we learn that, like
certain Trump supporters, Wormtongue diplomatically wraps Saruman’s harsh words
“in terms more cunning.”
If Saruman and Wormtongue are Trump and the GOP, then we can
think of Sauron as Putin, employing them as tools to undermine a great nation. This
being the case, we must hope that these impeachment witnesses will have the
same impact as Gandalf when he strides into Theoden’s great hall and helps the
king see the light of day:
“Now Théoden son of Thengel, will you hearken to me?” said Gandalf. Do you ask for help?” He lifted his staff and pointed to a high window. There the darkness seemed to clear, and through the opening could be seen, high and far, a patch of shining sky. “Not all is dark. Take courage, Lord of the Mark; for better help you will not find. No counsel have I to give to those that despair. Yet counsel I could give, and words I could speak to you. Will you hear them? They are not for all ears. I bid you come out before your doors and look abroad. Too long have you sat in shadows and trusted to twisted tales and crooked promptings.”
Slowly Théoden left his chair. A faint light grew in the hall again. The woman hastened to the king’s side, taking his arm, and with faltering steps the old man came down from the dais and paced softly through the hall. Wormtongue remained lying on the floor. They came to the doors and Gandalf knocked.
“Open!” he cried. “The Lord of the Mark comes forth!”
The doors rolled back and a keen air came whistling in. A wind was blowing on the hill. “Send your guards down to the stairs foot,” said Gandalf. “And you, lady, leave him a while with me. I will care for him.”
“Go, Éowyn sister-daughter!” said the old king. “The time for fear is past.”
Will the truth emerge loud and clear? Will America reclaim its once vaunted position as leader of the free world and beacon of hope for the world’s oppressed? Will we one day be able to say the time for fear is past?
Perhaps so, but
it’s hard to imagine the current GOP rising to the occasion. Towards the end of Lord of the Rings, Frodo encounters Wormtongue one more time, this time
in the Shire, and repeats Gandalf’s suggestion that he leave Saruman. For a
moment, he considers the possibility:
“Wormtongue!” called Frodo. “You need not follow him. I know of no evil you have done to me. You can have rest and food here for a while, until you are stronger and can go your own ways.”
Wormtongue halted and looked back at him, half prepared to stay.
His life has become so entangled with Saruman and Saruman’s crimes, however, that he can’t break free. Like Trump, Saruman has a way of permanently sliming those who work for him. In this instance he describes a murder, perhaps capped off with cannibalism, that he got Wormtongue to commit:
“No, Worm is not really nice. You had better leave him to me.”
A look of wild hatred came into Wormtongue’s red eyes. “You told me to; you made me do it,” he hissed.
Saruman laughed. “You do what Sharkey says, always, don’t you, Worm? Well, now he says: follow!” He kicked Wormtongue in the face as he groveled, and turned and made off.
It is only at this point that Wormtongue turns on his
boss, stabbing him with a concealed knife. Might Republican members, pushed to
the limit, also flip? To be sure, Wormtongue pays a price—jittery hobbit
archers shoot him—but he rids the world of a menace. Might legislators sacrifice
electoral prospects for country?
Whatever the case, what Sam says about a post-Saruman Shire
will apply to a post-Trump America:
“I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess,” said Sam gloomily. “And that’ll take a lot of time and work.”
