Few contemporary religious poets cause my heart to soar as much as Malcolm Guite. I recently came across a lovely poem he wrote about a small rural church in Hatley St. George in southeast England. His description reminds me of the small churches in Wales that Julia and I visited a few years ago in hamlets where her grandmother’s ancestors had lived.
A photo of the 14th century church shows a clear window above the altar looking out at “a beech tree’s tender green,” which Guite describes as “holy, open space.” “Stand here awhile,” he instructs us, “and drink the silence in.”
The medieval church is dedicated to St. George, whose feast day was ten days ago, and in his notes Guite distinguishes between the patriotism of “nationalist rhetoric” and “aggrandizing imperial history” and the patriotism of loving “the little particularities of my native land” and “the patchwork of little parishes and quiet shires.” Although the church features “shields of forgotten chivalry, and rolls/ Of honor for the young men gunned at Ypres,” Guite is not interested in Henry V’s “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’” to his Agincourt troops. Instead, he bids us think of all the saints and souls
Who stood where you stand, to be blessed like you; Clouds of witness to unclouded light Shining this moment, in this place for you.
Guite senses, as we sensed in those Welsh churches, that such places hold secrets that we would have access to if only we would open ourselves to them. “This empty church,” he writes, “is full,/ Thronging with life and light your eyes have missed.”
The poem was written during the Covid shutdown so the poet may well have death on the mind. If we remain quiet and attentive, he assures us, we may feel the flicker of an angel’s wing and find our hearts flying free at last in prayer.
Hatley St. George; A Poem for St. George’s Day By Malcolm Guite
Stand here a while and drink the silence in. Where clear glass lets in living light to touch And bless your eyes. A beech tree’s tender green Shimmers beyond the window’s lucid arch. You look across an absent sanctuary; No walls or roof, just holy, open space, Leading your gaze out to the fresh-leaved beech God planted here before you first drew breath.
Stand here awhile and drink the silence in. You cannot stand as long and still as these; This ancient beech and still more ancient church. So let them stand, as they have stood, for you. Let them disclose their gifts of time and place, A secret kept for you through all these years. Open your eyes. This empty church is full, Thronging with life and light your eyes have missed.
Stand here awhile and drink the silence in. Shields of forgotten chivalry, and rolls Of honor for the young men gunned at Ypres, And other monuments of our brief lives Stand for the presence here of saints and souls Who stood where you stand, to be blessed like you; Clouds of witness to unclouded light Shining this moment, in this place for you.
Stand here awhile and drink their silence in. Annealed in glass, the twelve Apostles stand And each of them is keeping faith for you. This roof is held aloft, to give you space, By graceful angels praying night and day That you might hear some rumor of their flight That you might feel the flicker of a wing And let your heart fly free at last in prayer.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 32nd Installment
I’m writing this week’s memoir installment on the anniversary of Justin’s death—he drowned on April 30, 2000—so perhaps it’s fitting that I’m at the point where a scholarship we set up in his name went into effect. We established a student exchange with the University of Ljubljana, with Slovenian students living with us for a semester as they took classes. Meanwhile, students enrolled in the St. Mary’s teaching program traveled to Ljubljana to observe and participate in classes. To date, around 30 Slovenians have studied at St. Mary’s.
Our first student was Anamarija Šporčič, a brilliant woman who now teaches Victorian literature at Ljubljana while overseeing English students studying abroad. We wanted the students to have an immersion experience, and the program succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. As the top English students in Slovenia, these students thrived in their classes—many of our faculty fell in love with them—and they also participated in a wide range of extracurricular activities, such as plays, the literary magazine, the hiking club, intramural sports, and other options. Many report to having had “the best experience of their lives” and now see themselves members of our extended family. They call themselves “the Bates Bunch,” and we reconnect with them every time we return.
Justin’s death made this opportunity possible, an instance of something positive growing out of a dark moment. In return, Julia and I have received a gift that we didn’t expect: we see them having the future that Justin was denied as they have become teachers, translators, editors, film reviewers, tour guides, publicists, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs, as well as spouses and parents. While at St. Mary’s they stepped into their strengths, which they put to use when they returned to Slovenia. We learned that life doesn’t end with a death.
Julia and I have been returning to Ljubljana every two years or so, and teaching at the university continues to reaffirm my awareness of literature’s transformative potential. For the rest of today’s installment I share some of the essays that stick out, going back to the first student to live with us (this in the late 1980s, before the scholarship) and on up to a student from my last visit.
Nataša used her year with us to write a superb and very ambitious senior thesis on Toni Morrison’s novels. In it she noted how the Black protagonists must thread their way between the twin evils of assimilation into White society and the narrow isolation of Black separatism. At the time, it alerted me to an important dynamic in Morrison’s fiction that I had missed. Looking back at it now, I realize that it also spoke to a national drama that Nataša would have been facing. Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia but also saw itself as an ethnicity apart. The question, then, was how could it hold on to its individual identity while still being part of a greater whole.
Versions of this drama continued even after Slovenia gained independence in 1991. Again, a student used the time spent with us to write her senior thesis, this time on the Laguna Pueblo novel Ceremony. The student had a Croatian father and Slovenian mother, and while that wasn’t a problem in the 1980s, in the mid-nineties she found herself facing some discrimination over her last name.
In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Tayo explores how his Native American culture must adjust to white society if it is to survive, even as it seeks to hold on to ancient traditions. Tayo himself is mixed race—his mother was knocked up by a white man—and the theme of mixed blood runs through the book, from the hybrid cattle that he is raising to the mixed-race medicine man who heals his PTSD. Betonie, who lives on the border between white and Indian land so that he can overlook both worlds, uses a combination of Indian ceremony and white therapy with Tayo, and what emerges is a healing vision that addresses the illnesses of both besieged Indian and alienated white society.
When the student returned to Slovenia, she was asked to present her findings to the American literature class. The country as well as she herself needed this multicultural vision if it was to flourish as its own nation. As with most countries, there is a rightwing nationalist streak in Slovenia that demonizes “impure” Slovenians, along with immigrants and former fellow Yugoslavians. As we have seen in Hungary, such thinking impoverishes a nation.
Flash forward to 2024 and the Postcolonial Literature class that I taught in my last visit. Half the class were Slovenians, half students from European Union countries who were there thanks to the Erasmus program, designed to promote “transnational learning, mobility, and cooperation.” I had students from Germany, the Netherlands, Macedonia, and Belgium, all of whom were exploring their own dual identities (they were simultaneously citizens of their home countries and members of the EU). I focus here, however, on a Serbian-Slovenian student, whose Serbian surname was causing her problems.
She had chosen to write about Klara and the Sun, a science fiction work by the Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. As I discussed her essay with her, I understood what drew her to the work.
The narrator is Klara, a sophisticated “care robot” that has been engineered for maximum empathy. A family has purchased her to be a friend to their seriously ill daughter, and the question arises whether she could actually replace the daughter should she die. In the end, Klara figures out what the sick girl needs to recover, a sacrifice on her part as she will be disposed of once she is no longer necessary. Nevertheless, she goes ahead with her insight.
Klara reflects back on the experience from a robot graveyard where she has been deposited as she waits for her solar batteries to die:
I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I’m now sure of this…
My student was experiencing some anti-Serbian discrimination but a ready solution awaited her: she was engaged to a Slovenian man, which meant that she could change her name. The novel stepped into her life at the very moment that she was grappling with the issue.
In our conference, she told me that the novel had helped convince her to retain her maiden name, despite the problems it was causing. Perhaps she realized that she could never entirely become Josie—pure Slovenian—no matter how hard she tried and that it was time to step beyond being a constantly yielding robot. I suspect that, while she identified with Klara’s programmed desire to please, she found, in Klara’s reflections, the clarity she needed to stand in her own identity.
As an aside, I wonder if Ishiguro, transplanted to England at age 6, has a similar drama. In Remains of the Day, for instance, a butler is so anxious to be the perfect butler that he cannot challenge his Nazi-sympathizing master and sacrifices his heart in the process. Although a robot, Klara arrives at an acceptance of her separate self that the butler never does, and it was this self-acceptance that inspired my student.
Not every student I had wrestled with hybrid identity so I’ll end with two memorable responses I received from a high school English teacher who was taking a summer class in 1995. She was from the Bela Krajina or White Carniola region of Slovenia, named for its white birch trees. When we read about a young boy swinging on birches in the Robert Frost poem, she revealed that she too had been a “swinger of birches” as a young girl:
One by one he subdued his father’s trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
What had once been just a colorful anecdote took on for me a new reality.
She shared a more tragic story when we discussed Frost’s “Mending Wall.” In the poem, the speaker mocks his neighbor’s rote insistence that “good fences make good neighbors,” even as he helps him repair the old stone wall between his apple trees and the neighbor’s pine trees. Yet my student revealed the wisdom of the saying with her story.
In her childhood, her father got into a dispute with a neighbor over property lines—perhaps involving no more than a meter or two as the farms were small—and the man killed her father with a shovel. Unable to maintain the farm on her own, the mother had to move the family to Ljubljana. I think now of how powerfully the final lines of the poem must have spoken to her lived experience:
I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Although the old-stone savage may move in darkness, folk sayings can carry deep wisdom, arrived at (to borrow from Mary Oliver) “out of pain, and pain, and more pain.”
I suppose, in a way, this entire post has been about boundaries, both acknowledging them and transcending them. This teacher had to cross a boundary as a young girl, from a rural to a city upbringing. While boundaries offer seeming clarity and certainty, they can also work as traps. I think of what David Brooks wrote in the Atlantic article discussed on Wednesday. After discussing the attractions of tradition, he adds,
Traditionalists strike me as the kind of people who would score extremely low on the personality trait called “openness to experience.” They focus overwhelmingly on the secure base and seem to have no interest in daring adventures. They seem to want to lead stationary lives.
We took the kids to Yugoslavia/Slovenia because we wanted to open them up to experience, and they have grown into imaginative explorers with deep curiosity. We set up the Justin Bates Memorial Fellowship because we wanted to open others to the mind-expanding that occurs when one travels abroad. The Franciscan friar who counseled me following Justin’s death offered comfort as he described it as another boundary crossing, this the most challenging of them all. I think of the lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” that
all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move.
“Marooned in a blizzard of lies,” goes the Dave Frishberg song, but perhaps “drowned” would be a better verb to use in the current environment of Trump’s bogus indictments, reconfigured history, unhinged tweets, revenge fantasies, wild threats, and nonstop bullshit.
Perhaps it would be bearable if (1) at least some in the GOP were standing up to him and (2) if he wasn’t using the full force and resources of the federal government to add muscle to the words. As it is, former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted for photographing and sharing a political message spelled out in seashells, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr is threatening ABC’s license after comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a gold-digger quip about Melania Trump, a joke whose origin dates back to Chaucer if not earlier.
Let’s start with the joke as I want to end with a seashell poem that can be applied to the Comey indictment. Pretending to address the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the attendant guests, Kimmel at one point said, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
After a gunman attempted to crash the actual dinner two days later, Melania Trump accused the comedian of hate speech. His “monologue about my family,” she wrote, “isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” Then she added,
People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
Like clockwork, Trump and his minions piled on. The president said Kimmel should be fired while his press secretary, in a classic example of faux outrage, asked, “Who in their right minds says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?”
Setting aside the fact that there’s nothing in Kimmel’s joke that suggests he was rooting for Trump’s murder, the story of a young wife who wants her old husband out of the way shows up in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” where the young wife of an elderly carpenter devises an elaborate plan to sideline him so that she can make love to their student lodger. There’s also “The Merchant’s Tale,” in which elderly January marries 20-year-old May in order to have an heir, only for her to have a fling with young Damian in (wait for this!) a pear tree.
Three centuries later the joke was still going strong. In John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), for instance, there is this interchange between Peachum and his daughter Polly, who wants to marry Mac the Knife:
Peachum: And had not you the common view of a gentlewoman in your marriage, Polly? Polly: I don’t know what you mean, sir. Peachum: Of a Jointure, and of being a widow. Polly: But I love him, sir; how then could I have thoughts of parting with him? Peachum: Parting with him! Why, this is the whole scheme and intention of all marriage articles. The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife’s spirits. Where is the woman who would scruple to be a wife, if she had it in her power to be a widow, whenever she pleased? If you have any views of this sort, Polly, I shall think the match not so very unreasonable.
And then there’s Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Ernest (1895), which for all I know is the direct source of Kimmel’s joke:
Lady Bracknell: I’m sorry if we are a little late, Algernon, but I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn’t been there since her poor husband’s death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger.
And a little further on:
Bracknell: I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now. Algernon: I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief. Bracknell: It certainly has changed its color. From what cause I, of course, cannot say.
If the Trumps had a more affectionate marriage or if Melania weren’t so clearly a trophy wife, Kimmel’s joke wouldn’t land. As it is, one can’t imagine the first lady being heartbroken if her husband were to move on.
Imagining a world without Trump was also probably the impulse that led Comey to photograph and share a collection of seashells spelling out “8647.” Apparently “86” is slang for disposing of and has been used for everything from indicating that a menu item is no longer available to bouncing unwelcome guests from a nightclub to murder. Trump, meanwhile, is the 47th president, so there you go.
To be sure, when Joe Biden was president, there was an “8646 Joe Biden” tee-shirt, but no one saw this as anything other than a desire to be rid of him. With former Trump attorney Todd Blanche auditioning to become Attorney General, however, he has opted for the interpretation that will please his boss: Comey must be threatening the president.
Stephens’s “The Shell” captures how one can go spiraling down a dark train of thought following a seemingly innocent encounter:
The Shell By James Stephens
And then I pressed the shell Close to my ear And listened well, And straightway like a bell Came low and clear The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas, Whipped by an icy breeze Upon a shore Wind-swept and desolate. It was a sunless strand that never bore The footprint of a man, Nor felt the weight Since time began Of any human quality or stir Save what the dreary winds and waves incur. And in the hush of waters was the sound Of pebbles rolling round, Forever rolling with a hollow sound. And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go Swish to and fro Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. There was no day, Nor ever came a night Setting the stars alight To wonder at the moon: Was twilight only and the frightened croon, Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind And waves that journeyed blind— And then I loosed my ear … O, it was sweet To hear a cart go jolting down the street.
When Biden was elected president, I remember feeling something akin to such sweetness. Finally life could return to something as normal as a cart jolting down the street. No longer would we have to think about the presidency every day.
Then, of course, Trump was reelected and our lives once again became sunless strands, windswept and desolate.
Columnist David Brooks, about whom I sometimes have mixed feelings, has written a superb article in the recent Atlantic on “why reactionaries are taking over the world.” If history appears to be “running backwards,” he writes, it is because traditionalists speak to needs that progressives too often fail to acknowledge. After presenting both the traditionalist and the progressive cases, he concludes by advocating a way forward that (it so happens) is my primary goal with this blog. No wonder I like the piece.
Before getting to that goal, let’s look at how he sums up the warring factions. First, the progressives:
We used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading—toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness, and liberal democracy. Progress was supposed to lead to the expansion of individual choice in sphere after sphere. Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.
Then there’s the disturbing pushback:
The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.
And:
[F]or the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen. Donald Trump, acting like some 16th-century European prince, has made the presidency his own personal fiefdom. Vladimir Putin borrows ideas from reactionary thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin—an Eastern Orthodox, anti-liberal philosopher who rejects the Enlightenment—to justify his imperial conquest of Ukraine.
Brooks also mentions vaccine skepticism, the emergence of tradwives, and the resurgence of 19th-century-style great-power rivalries, such as that between China and America and between Russia and Europe. Oh, and there’s Trump reinvoking the Monroe Doctrine as he attacks Venezuela and threatens Mexico, Cuba, and Canada.
These traditionalists long for the return to some golden age in the past, although that golden age varies depending on which traditionalist you’re talking to:
For some MAGA dudes, it’s the Roman empire, when men were men. For some theocrats, it’s the Middle Ages, when men were monks. In the U.S., many on the right want to go back to the social mores of the 1950s: men in the workplace, women at home; white people on top; epic levels of church attendance; and wholesome fare such as Oklahoma! and Leave It to Beaver onstage and on television.
After examining some of the leading conservative, theocratic, and fascist intellectuals of the past 200 years, Brooks concludes that traditionalists are drawn to roots, stable attachments, and clear moral order (one thinks of Texas posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms). They also desire protection against the cultural depredations of modernity, which explains why (here he quotes Christopher Lasch) lower middle-class culture is “organized around family, church, and neighborhood” and why it values “the community’s continuity more highly than individual advancement, solidarity more highly than social mobility.”
Traditionalists, Brooks concludes,
are right to say that one of the central problems in America and the West today is that many people have lost that secure base—a stable home and community, solid emotional connections, financial security, a coherent culture, and an understanding that our lives are contained within a shared moral order.
That Brooks would express sympathy for traditionalism didn’t surprise me as I have long seen him as a moderate conservative, someone worried by what he perceives as the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s. What I didn’t expect was his critique:
My problem with the traditionalists is that I don’t agree with them about what a flourishing life looks like. Traditionalists strike me as the kind of people who would score extremely low on the personality trait called “openness to experience.” They focus overwhelmingly on the secure base and seem to have no interest in daring adventures. They seem to want to lead stationary lives.
And:
Traditionalists are trying to live the monist dream—the dream that we can build a society in which all the pieces fit neatly together. But the many and diverse values that humans cherish will never fit neatly together. In every culture, groups argue over which values should have priority in present circumstances. There’s never been a tranquil resting spot, and there never will be.
Jesus himself was a Jewish radical, Brooks points out, one who “turned all the power structures of his society upside down.”
Sounding now like a progressive, Brooks points to how the world has changed for the better thanks to progressive ideas:
I look across the past 70 years—years the traditionalists say are filled with moral rot—and I see an astounding widening of the circle of concern. Segregation and racism have been reduced. Billions of women have a greater chance to gain power and professional success equal to men’s. Colonialism has been repudiated. We’ve seen the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world. America has expanded opportunity beyond white, Protestant men. We’ve even passed laws to reduce cruelty to animals.
Always striving to maintain a balance, however, Brooks presents this with a caution about what we have lost, which is the weakening of the bonds between people and of certain elemental commitments to family, neighborhood, faith, and nation. “As part of this general tendency toward individualism,” he writes, “we have privatized morality, telling people to come up with their own values.”
So what’s the solution? Teach the humanities.
For Westerners, this means making sure that people are familiar with the Bible—after all, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Lincoln were—and that they are conversant with “the body of work we call humanism—the great novels, paintings, poems, dramas, histories, and philosophical tracts by thinkers and artists from all over the globe.” We must, Brooks declares, “pass down these sources of moral wisdom from one generation to the next.”
Now for the passage that had me applauding:
I agree with the traditionalists that tradition is important, but I don’t think of it as something we need to go back to. Rather, I see it as something that each generation pushes forward. And for this, we need a humanistic renaissance. In schools, universities, and culture at large, we need to focus more explicitly on the big questions of life: What is my purpose? How should the next generation live? What role should beauty play in my life? How do I build a friendship? What do I owe my spouse, my community, my nation? We need to use the best that has been thought and said by all of the great civilizations of the Earth, but especially by Western civilization, which is our own particular home, our core resource while we try to stumble toward a better future.
You can see why I love this article. Late in the 1980s, when I was a young professor, I found myself objecting to the either/or we were getting from both the right and the left. On the right, there were people like Lynne Cheney and William Bennett, who argued, “Jane Austen, not Alice Walker.” On the left, meanwhile (I draw on Brooks’s article for this example) there were Stanford students chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture has got to go!” For me (as should be clear from this blog) there has always been room for both Austen and Walker.
And what of politicians like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, who wave around “Western civilization” as a cudgel? A familiarity with the great thinkers and works produced by this civilization quickly dispels any facile claim that they bolster authoritarian talking points.
So yes, teach your children well. Include the classics along with contemporary works in your lesson plan.
Donald Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo have prompted commentators to turn to two historical precedents that have generated fine literary works. Blogger Asha Rangappa of Freedom Academy, detecting Henry VIII and Thomas More dynamics at work, mentions Hillary Mantel’s Booker-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. Atlantic’s Peter Wehner, meanwhile, looks at what T.S. Eliot says about Henry II and Thomas Becket in his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral.
Rangappa focuses on how Henry VIII demanded that his subjects choose him over the Pope, which is not unlike how Trump forces his underlings to choose him over the Constitution:
Henry required his subjects to take these oaths after he divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, a move not condoned nor recognized by the Church. He got around this proscription by basically telling the Pope to take the L and making himself the head of the Church of England, and getting Parliament to pass two acts to ratify his break with the church and legitimize his marriage to Anne. These acts mandated the respective oaths: the Oath of Succession acknowledged Henry’s heirs with Anne Boleyn as legitimate, and the Oath of Supremacy recognized Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England.
When Thomas, who had been a close advisor, refused, Henry accused him of treason and tried and executed him. “Very Trumpy!” Rangappa observes.
Although Vice President J.D. Vance has a forthcoming book trumpeting his conversion to Catholicism—Communion is due out in June–he is proving himself no Thomas More. Or Becket either, to shift to an earlier conflict where a king’s command led to the death of an archbishop. One imagines Trump as Henry II saying some version of, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and of Vance immediately choosing to be one of the murderous knights rather than standing up for his spiritual leader. In Trump forcing Vance to choose himself over the Pope, Rangappa says that it’s hard to tell
whether for Trump this is mainly a loyalty-test-as-humiliation-ritual, or loyalty-test-to-tank-JD’s-chances-to-be-president, or loyalty-test-because-this-will-be-the-ultimate-show-of-subservience…or some combination of all three. Whatever it is, J.D. has passed with flying colors, warning the Pope to “be careful” and to “stick to matters of morality.”
To be sure, Trump hasn’t only sent Vance to take down Leo but has been attempting to be an assassin knight himself. As Wehner in his Atlantic article observes,
No president has ever attacked the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church so directly and so personally. Trump called Leo “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” He attacked the pontiff for opposing his Iran-war policy, labeling him a “very liberal person” who is “catering to the radical left.” He also said Leo owed his papacy to Trump. It’s unusual, to say the least, for a head of state—in this case, of the most powerful nation in the world—to treat the bishop of Rome as a bitter political rival.
Wehner then turns to Eliot’s play. To set up the Becket/Leo vs. Henry/Trump parallels, Wehner says there is “a dramatic, even archetypal quality” to the contrast between the pope and the president. On the one hand, Leo is “a religious man in the deepest sense; the whole of his life has been shaped by religious disciplines and a theological tradition. He is inseparable from his faith.” Trump, on the other hand, “measures success by wealth, by power, by sexual conquest. He admitted that he’s never asked God for forgiveness. He has no ties to any church and is in many ways contemptuous of the core teachings of the Christian faith.”
Unlike many of Trump’s Christian evangelical supporters, who have sold out Jesus for power, Wehner says that Leo
is unwilling to subordinate his faith to politics, or to adjust his commitment to the Gospel in exchange for access to power. A man who served the poor in Peru during the Shining Path insurgency—he stayed when others left—is not particularly fearful of critical posts on Truth Social or of those within his church who might disapprove of his public stand in defense of justice and a Christian ethic. He’s a person with deep moral convictions but who holds them with grace and ease. He comes across as calm, centered, and unhurried. He believes he answers to a higher authority; this allows him to offer a true Christian witness. This is a gift to the whole Church, and to the whole world.
At this point Wehner turns to Murder in the Cathedral, where Elliotwrites, “Even now, in sordid particulars, the eternal design may appear.”
What Eliot means here, Wehner writes,
is that in the midst of a broken, chaotic world, where despair often abounds, there is an eternal design at play, even if we may not quite see it while we’re living through it. Nor is the divine set apart from human suffering. Christians believe that God entered into the suffering and violence of this world, redeeming even the “sordid particulars.”
Wehner adds, however, that this “doesn’t happen on its own.” We need religious leaders who believe, as Leo does, that the church should not be “the master or the servant of the state but the conscience of the state, its guide and critic and never its tool.” Wehner cites political philosopher Glenn Tinder, who in The Political Meaning of Christianity asserts, “Love obligates us to stay in the world where most of our fellow human beings are compelled by circumstances to stay.” A prophetic stance is necessary because it “can show us how to live in temporal society as citizens of an eternal society.”
Wehner concludes that such a prophetic stance has been conspicuously missing for the past decade. In fact, it’s rare at any time. We’re seeing it at present, however, thanks to “a native of the South Side of Chicago, who now resides in Vatican City.”
Added note: According to Wikipeida, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” is from the Burton-O’Toole film. In Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play, on which the film is based, Henry II says, “Will no one rid me of him? A priest! A priest who jeers at me and does me injury.” An 18th century author imagines Henry to have said, “O wretched Man that I am, who shall deliver me from this turbulent priest?” And he may have been inspired by a contemporaneous account, from a man present at Becket’s death, who quoted Henry as saying, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!” The film version has become the one most people quote.
In any event, they all apply only too well to Trump’s sentiments about Leo.
As the Guardian wrote about one of my favorite contemporary novelists recently, the headline provides the prompt for today’s post, even though it made little sense to me: “Haruki Murakami to publish first novel to feature woman as lead character.”
It made little sense since 1Q84, my favorite Murakami novel, has a female protagonist.
To be strictly factual,Aoame, a massage therapist and secret assassin (she assassinates men who abuse women and little girls), is a co-protagonist since she shares the stage with math instructor and novelist Tengo, also a wonderful character. Still, I bonded so deeply with Aoame that I blinked twice when I read in the article that Murakami “has faced criticism for portrayal of women.”
Aoame isn’t an exception. Many of Murakami’s female characters live in my imagination, even when they don’t command center stage. If I look at my three favorite Murakami novels, there’s a dowager who runs a house for battered women in 1Q84 and the psychic Creta Kano and the mixed-up teenager May Kasahara in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. To be sure, Kafka on the Shore doesn’t have any female characters that grab my mind, but there’s the wondrous transgender man Oshima, who calls traditional gendering into question. In fact, all these characters are more interesting than male protagonists Kafka and Wind-Up Bird’s Toru Okada. So no, I don’t think it’s a stretch for Murakami’s latest novel to have a female lead.
I’ve been thinking of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle recently because we have our own wind-up bird in southern Appalachia. The pileated woodpecker has a distinctive call (you can listen to it here) that seems a bit like the bird that Toru describes in the early pages:
There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird. Kumiko [Toru’s wife] gave it the name. We didn’t know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn’t bother the wind-up bird. Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighborhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world.
Later, when Kumiko has run away, Toru meets a teenage neighbor. When she challenges him to come up with a nickname for himself—she considers his name boring—“wind-up bird” pops into his head:
“Wind-up bird?” she asked, looking at me with her mouth open. “What is that?”
“The bird that winds the spring,” I said. “Every morning. In the treetops. It winds the world’s spring. Creeak.”
She went on staring at me.
I sighed. “It just popped into my head,” I said. “And there’s more. The bird comes over by my place every day and goes Creeak in the neighbor’s tree. But nobody ever sees it.”
From that moment on, May refers to Toru only as “Mr. Wind-up Bird.”
The pileated woodpecker is an immensely large and prehistoric looking bird that makes one understand how birds are related to dinosaurs or perhaps are dinosaurs. It too has a loud call, and while I don’t know whether Murakami’s bird is a woodpecker, there’s a woodpecker reference late in the novel. Its distinctive drumming again reminds me of our pileated:
Far off in the woods that surround the pond, a bird cried. I looked up and scanned the area, but there was nothing more to hear. Nothing to see. There was only the dry, hollow sound of a woodpecker drilling a hole in a tree trunk.
Our pileated’s drumming echoes through the woods.
What’s the significance of the wind-up bird? Partly it’s that Toru has been living a mechanical existence, and May’s mocking use of the name helps jolt him out of his sedentary life. On his journey to find his wife, he discovers that she is in the grip of forces, embodied by her evil brother (Noboru Wataya), that are corrupting Japanese society. Holding to a daily routine won’t answer the moment.
In past posts about Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I’ve seen these forces at work in American society as well. Here’s what I wrote in one:
[Murakami] seeks to understand the resurgence of rightwing nationalism in 1990s Japan, the so-called lost decade. While the Japanese rightwing isn’t exactly like America’s—Wataya is an intellectual whereas Trump is just the opposite—Murakami grasps how demagogues tap into a reservoir of repressed rage and turn it to their advantage. Both serve as midwives to what Murakami describes at one point as a “gooey white thing like a lump of fat” that proceeds to possess the host.
That gooey substance at one point I compare to “the bile that flows from those Trump supporters shouting racist, anti-Semitic, or misogynist slurs at a rally or indulging in such sentiments from afar.”
Toru at one point discovers this darkness, this penchant for violence, dwells within himself as well. What saves him is his love for Kumiko and his concern for May. He is willing to face up to the dark side of himself and imagine a future where he cares for others. Empathy and love, in other words, are the keys to defeating Wataya. As his wife writes to him,
At least I still had the power to dream, I knew. My brother couldn’t prevent me from doing that. I was able to sense that you were doing everything in your power to draw nearer to me. Maybe someday you would find me, and hold me, and sweep away the filth that was clinging to me, and take me away from that place forever. Maybe you would smash the curse and set the seal so that the real me would never have to leave again. That was how I was able to keep a tiny flame of hope alive in that cold, dark place with no exit—how I was able to preserve the slightest remnant of my own voice.
But back to the bird. There’s something unearthly in the pileated woodpecker’s cry—and perhaps in Murakami’s bird as well—as though they are attempting to alert us to the danger. If that’s case, then the wind-up bird isn’t only a metaphor for our complacency but also functions as an alarm clock. Its haunting cry is attempting to awaken something deep within us.
From the Ellsmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales
Sunday
Because we have been in the grip of a weeks-long drought, the rain that fell yesterday had our hearts singing. When April showers perce the droghte of March to the roote, then longen folk like me to recite the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
I’ve written a lot about how another 14th century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, represented a healthy correction to death-cult Christianity, which is to say to Christianity that spurns life on earth and focuses entirely on the next world. That many in the 1300 have rejected nature is understandable given that nature attacked Christendom with full force in the years 1346 to 1353, with the Black Death killing up to half the population. Many concluded that God was punishing humankind for its sins, and one saw the rise of flagellants and other body-hating and sex-rejecting groups. People hoped that, by punishing themselves, they could ward off God’s wrath.
SGGK and Canterbury Tales were written a few decades later so memories of the plague were still fresh. Nevertheless, their response is to celebrate the regenerative powers of nature rather than reject it. When spring starts busting out all over, Chaucer tells us, “then longen fok to goon on pilgrimages.”
Some background here on British Christianity’s relationship with nature is useful here. The process of syncretism, in which a new religion incorporates elements of the old, meant that Christianity could not altogether displace the Anglo-Saxons’ cult of Ēostre, a fertility goddess brought over from northern Europe. As a result, for a while Easter was associated with a seasonal holiday, the spring equinox, when the days become longer than the nights. Christmas worked the same, being associated with the winter solstice, the darkest time of year. While this could work for the birth of Christ, however, it was less possible with the resurrection, which was connected with Passover and therefore had a long Jewish history. Eventually Ēostrian Christians had to surrender the equinox, although they did get to name the holiday and keep the symbolism of fertile rabbits and life-producing eggs.
In other words, British Christianity, whether influenced by its contact with the Anglo-Saxon or the Celtic fertility religions, always had a strong connection with nature, and poets could turn to this dimension in the years after the Black Death. The opening lines of Canterbury Tales are dripping with nature imagery as April showers inject flowers with life-generating power. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, drawing on his own Celtic tradition, captures this power when he writes, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age.”
For Chaucer, bodily lust and religious devotion are intermixed so that the same west wind that awakens the birds to their mating rituals also awakens the people of England spiritually. The Canterbury pilgrimage provides the framework for one of the world’s masterpieces, a literary vision so vibrant and so teeming with life in all its variety that it leaves me breathless. My belief is that Chaucer, with such three-dimensional characters as the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Miller, and many others, made Shakespeare possible two centuries later.
I share both the original and a translation below. If you can, start by giving the Middle English version as you’ll discover a richness lacking in the translation. You can listen to Morgan Freeman reading it here.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages), Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Translation When April with its sweet-smelling showers Has pierced the drought of March to the root, And bathed every vein [of the plants] in such liquid By which power the flower is created; When the West Wind also with its sweet breath, In every wood and field has breathed life into The tender new leaves, and the young sun Has run half its course in Aries, And small fowls make melody, Those that sleep all the night with open eyes (So Nature incites them in their hearts), Then folk long to go on pilgrimages, And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores, To distant shrines, known in various lands; And specially from every shire’s end Of England to Canterbury they travel, To seek the holy blessed martyr, Who helped them when they were sick.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 31st installment
I mentioned in last week’s memoir installment that, upon receiving my college’s Teacher of the Year Award (for service), I wondered if I was worthy of it. Might it not just be a sympathy award for my having lost a child. In any event, I returned from my 2001-02 sabbatical determined to earn it.
This resulted in a schedule that, in retrospect, looks crazed. I was Department chair for five years; edited a monthly school supplement called the River Gazette (for which I would eventually write 61 articles and edit the faculty contributions of countless others); ran a monthly book discussion group at the local library and a monthly film series at a local senior center; spearheaded a major curriculum revision effort that ended with the establishment of first-year seminars; and in the summer ran a film series in conjunction with the college’s summer concert series and continued to coordinate the summer faculty writing group. I also served on our church vestry and taught Education for Ministry classes. At home, meanwhile, Julia and I started taking in foreign students. And, oh yes, I was also teaching.
I mention all this, not to impress or to horrify you—horrified would probably be a more appropriate response—but to examine what possessed me. It is true that, with Darien and Toby now both enrolled at St. Mary’s, I had more time on my hands, and college service has a way of filling any vacuum. I think, however, that I was mostly seeking to shore up my community after having lost faith, with Justin’s death, in the stability of the world with Justin’s death. Our college’s mission gave my life meaning–to teach the liberal arts at a public college open to all incomes—and I felt that the success of that mission depended upon faculty and staff stepping up.
I can’t say that literature here played a role other than my having spent much of my life in Victorian and Edwardian fiction, where commitment to community is paramount (Kipling’s wolf pack and E. Nesbit’s Bastable children come immediately to mind). I therefore turn this “Life Lived in Literature” memoir to my teaching, which (as I have mentioned) had taken on a new richness. Attuned as I had become to the challenges my students were facing—many had sorrows of their own–I realized that linking their lives to the profundity of literary masterpieces would enhance their appreciation, deepen them as human beings, and provide them with strategies for moving forward.
In my book Better Living through Literature I talk about how I developed what I call a “sandwich structure” for their essays. If the students wished to, in their introduction they could relate a personal story that was triggered by a work. The second part of the essay—the meat filling, as it were—had to be confined to talking about how the work handled the theme the student had identified (no personal reminiscences allowed here). In the conclusion they were to examine the insights the work has opened up into their experiences and that their experiences had opened up in the work. I didn’t want the personal story to overwhelm literary interpretation so each had its place in the essay.
What emerged were the most powerful essays I have ever received. Students were using Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to explore sexual abuse, Mary Oliver poems to explore depression, Twelfth Night to explore gender exploration, Uncle Tom’s Cabin to explore experiences with racism, Beowulf to explore grief. A student suffering from a non-stop migraine found comfort in Julian of Norwich while a student raised in a fundamentalist Alabama family used Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to recalibrate the relationship between faith and secular learning. (She came to a more balanced understanding than that achieved by either her family or Faustus.)
I mention in my book the senior lacrosse player who identified with the wedding guest in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In his case, he equated the gratuitous killing of the albatross with gratuitous acts of campus vandalism committed by drunken lacrosse players, and he emerged from his essay determined to live his life differently. (After hearing the mariner’s story, the wedding guest becomes “a sadder and a wiser man.”)
Another inspiring story was how Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park impacted a student who had been born prematurely with serious birth defects, including a frozen larynx. Originally pointed towards special ed programs, she was saved by an activist mother, who got her mainstreamed. Against all expectations (except her mother’s) she flourished in school and graduated from St. Mary’s as its valedictorian. If the student loved Austen’s novel, she realized, it’s because the meek Fanny Price, against considerable odds, steps into her own powers by the end. Importantly, Fanny realizes she can’t rely fully on her beloved mentor (Edmund Bertram) but must find her own way, just as my student was realizing that she would have to, upon graduating, leave behind her mother and the school system that had validated her. (I tell the story here, here, here, and here.)
Another great story, which I’ve told multiple times including in my book, happened years later. While it didn’t involve an essay, it shows what literature can unleash in students given the right conditions. Matt was an ex-marine who found himself rethinking his war experiences after reading the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I quote here from my book:
Matt had become an enthusiastic English major after having served two deployments in Afghanistan, where he defused roadside bombs. In a classroom discussion about death, he remarked that he had learned to not care about dying when he was in the service.
While acknowledging that I was in no position to contradict him, I mentioned Gawain thinking he can shrug off his death fears, only to discover by the end of the poem that he can’t. “In destinies sad or merry, / True men can but try,” Gawain initially says, thinking himself calm as he prepares to keep a rendezvous with certain death. By the end of the poem, however, the Green Knight reveals he has set up his challenges to teach Gawain a lesson: he wants the Camelot knight to acknowledge that he cares for his life after all.
As we weren’t reading the poem for the class, Matt went to the campus bookstore, bought a copy, blew off the Jane Eyre reading assignment, and spent half the night reading the fourteenth-century romance. The next day he told me how true the poem was. Even as he and his comrades had joked about death, he said, they were also careful to don their Kevlar vests whenever they went out on a mission. This he compared to Gawain secretly and somewhat dishonorably accepting a life-saving green girdle from the lady of a castle, where he is temporarily residing before journeying to meet the Green Knight. Gawain is ashamed that he wears it, especially after the Green Knight reveals that he knows of its existence. The poem helped Matt re-process his war experience in ways none of us could have predicted.
As every good teacher knows, we learn as much from our students as they learn from us. I suddenly realized, from Matt’s experience, that 14th century England would have been recovering from its own trauma, having endured the Black Plague only two or three decades previously. That someone with first or second-hand experience of Europe’s greatest natural disaster could compose a comic work with vivid images of life is a marvel. At a time when society was understandably succumbing to a life-denying version of Christianity (spurn this world, focus on the afterlife), the poet helped his audience recover a life-affirming connection with nature. After encountering Matt’s response, I understood better the role the poem had played in my own grieving. (I tell that story here.)
I could go on and on. After 2009, I started sharing many of these “reading stories” on my blog (always with the student’s permission, of course), which served the students as well as the broader public. I can honestly say that, most semesters, I received a meaningful final essay—an essay where something was at stake—from every student I taught.
To elicit such work, however, took a tremendous amount of work from both teacher and student. It all began with the weekly thousand-word “free writes” I required for each work. These I would read over quickly, looking for instances where I could see that their interest was particularly piqued. (I compared it to looking for blips on a radar screen.) They would later use these moments of connection to determine the topic of their final essay, for which I would require a proposal, a rough draft, a polished essay (graded), and (if they chose) a revision.
Often the most significant professor-student encounters I have ever had were the required post-essay meeting. As I graded stringently but had a generous revision policy (the revised grade would replace the original), they had extra motivation to revise, and in any event revision became easier given how committed they had become to their topic. For the first time in my life, my teaching and their learning felt absolutely authentic.
During these years (2002-08) I was also involved in a Pew grant about ways to increase environmental awareness in our classes. More on that next week.
There’s an apocryphal exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway about the super wealthy. Fitzgerald supposedly observed, “The rich are different from you and me,” to which Hemingway curtly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” While Hemingway gets in the zinger, however, I want to weigh in on Fitzgerald’s side after reading a disturbing Atlantic article about Amazon head Jeff Bezos. In stories like The Great Gatsby and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Fitzgerald shows that he understood in a profound way how money rewires the existential reality of the rich. Hemingway’s retort fails to acknowledge this.
First, a note on the story. A website devoted to setting the record straight tells what actually took place between the two authors. Hemingway took the line from Fitzgerald’s story “The Rich Boy” and quoted it out of context in an early version of his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Here’s what Hemingway wrote:
The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
Hemingway had to change the name from “Scott Fitzgerald” to “Julian” in the revised story because Fitzgerald was legitimately outraged. Here’s the context for the quote from “Rich Boy,” in which very little romantic awe is expressed:
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
Fitzgerald knew what Noah Hawley discovered when he wrote “What I Learned about Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat.” The creator of the FX series Fargo and Alien: Earth, Hawley learned that (to quote the article’s subtitle) “For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.”
The article is chilling and explains a lot about the behavior of our own billionaires, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Although I first thought of Tom and Daisywhen I read the piece—I wrote about The Great Gatsby last week in relation to our billionaires—“A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” captures even better the essence of what Hawley discovered. I’ll look first at his article and then Fitzgerald’s story.
Hawley notes that figures like Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have left the world of consequences behind. Because they “float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves,” everything becomes effectively free, nothing can ever be lost, failure fails to mean anything, and they come to feel invulnerable.
This feeling of vulnerability, Hawley goes on to say, has “deep psychological ramifications”:
If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.”
Hawley points out how most of us develop moral reasoning. The very fact that our actions have consequences means that we are continually having to accommodate ourselves to reality as it actually is. “When you can buy your way out of any mistake,” Hawley explains, “when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.”
Thus you have such jaw-dropping statements and erratic as the following:
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
This psychological phenomenon also explains the assault on empathy we have been witnessing, especially from Musk:
Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.
“Diamond as Big as the Ritz” dramatizes Hawley’s observations to perfection. John Unger, from a respectable family in the Midwest, attends a fancy prep school out east (St. Midas, fittingly enough) and makes friends with one Percy Washington. Percy invites John out to his place in the Montana Rockies and, on the train ride out there, confides to him that his father “is by far the richest man in the world,” although no one knows this. His wealth lies in the mountain upon which he lives, which is one large diamond.
All this must be kept secret, however, because, if it were known, diamond prices worldwide would collapse, along with the economies based on them. The sense of entitlement that this immense wealth brings with it, along with the measures needed to maintain secrecy, result in the characters exhibiting the same psychological behavior described in the Atlantic article.
First of all, there are the ways that the Washingtons have manipulated things to hide the mountain from government surveyors. Think of this as a version of the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill, which billionaires got Congress to pass, even though health and safety net programs had to be slashed to provide them with their tax breaks. Think also of the way tax laws have been set up to insure that billionaires will pay almost nothing. In “Big as the Ritz,” Percy reveals how billionaire intervention has three times stymied the government from surveying the diamond mountain:
The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State survey; the second time he had the official maps of the United States tinkered with–that held them for fifteen years. The last time was harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up. He had a whole set of surveying instruments made with a slight defection that would allow for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them for the ones that were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he had what looked like a village built up on its banks–so that they’d see it, and think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley.
Hawley’s observation that the wealthy don’t encounter any checks is captured in the Washingtons’ golf course. John learns that it is all greens and contains “no fairway, no rough, no hazards.”
The one thing the Washingtons cannot escape, however, is airplanes, and we start getting a glimpse of how wealth has warped them in the casual way that Percy remarks on the aviators they have in captivity. Elon Musk would be proud in how he’s shut down his empathy:
We’ve got half a dozen anti-aircraft guns and we’ve arranged it so far–but there’ve been a few deaths and a great many prisoners. Not that we mind that, you know, father and I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there’s always the chance that some time we won’t be able to arrange it.
The corruption is on full display in an interchange between Percy’s father and one of the captive pilots:
“Let me ask you a few questions!” he cried. “You pretend to be a fair-minded man.”
“How absurd. How could a man of my position be fair-minded toward you? You might as well speak of a Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak.”
At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen fell, but the tall man continued:
“All right!” he cried. “We’ve argued this out before. You’re not a humanitarian and you’re not fair-minded, but you’re human–at least you say you are–and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place for long enough to think how–how–how–”
“How what?” demanded Washington, coldly.
“–how unnecessary–”
“Not to me.”
“Well–how cruel–”
“We’ve covered that. Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is involved. You’ve been soldiers; you know that. Try another.”
While all this is going on, John and the younger Washington daughter are falling in love and are even fantasizing about marriage. At this point, if not earlier, it begins to dawn on the reader that John himself is not all that safe. In fact, we learn (this when Kismine inadvertently blurts out the truth) that he will be bumped off before the visit ends. John learns that this has happened many times before. I quote at length from their conversation because it captures just how wealth distorts the wealthy. Other people are nothing more playthings, to be used for all the pleasure that can be got out of them and then discarded:
“Do you mean to say that your father had them murdered before they left?”
She nodded.
“In August usually–or early in September. It’s only natural for us to get all the pleasure out of them that we can first.”
“How abominable! How–why, I must be going crazy! Did you really admit that–”
“I did,” interrupted Kismine, shrugging her shoulders. “We can’t very well imprison them like those aviators, where they’d be a continual reproach to us every day. And it’s always been made easier for Jasmine and me, because father had it done sooner than we expected. In that way we avoided any farewell scene–”
“So you murdered them! Uh!” cried John.
“It was done very nicely. They were drugged while they were asleep–and their families were always told that they died of scarlet fever in Butte.”
“But–I fail to understand why you kept on inviting them!”
“I didn’t,” burst out Kismine. “I never invited one. Jasmine did. And they always had a very good time. She’d give them the nicest presents toward the last. I shall probably have visitors too–I’ll harden up to it. We can’t let such an inevitable thing as death stand in the way of enjoying life while we have it. Think of how lonesome it’d be out here if we never had anyone. Why, father and mother have sacrificed some of their best friends just as we have.”
Along with sacrificing invited guests, the elder Washington even thinks he can buy off God. In one surreal scene we see him proffering a huge diamond of incalculable value to the Almighty if only He will swallow up the aviators.
While I assume that our billionaires aren’t directly killing people, they are more than willing to sacrifice the rest of us, along with American democracy, in their quest for ever more wealth. They’re sitting on a diamond as big as the Ritz and it’s still not enough.
And, oh yes, if anyone threatens their wealth, they’ll take everyone down with them. Historian Timothy Snyder wonders if we are currently witnessing “superpower suicide” and, in the story, the Washingtons blow up their mountain, themselves, and the invading aviators who have discovered them. Either they control things or nobody does.
