In his list of “26 Villains of 2026” (“ranked by how much harm they’ve done and/or are poised to do to the people of this country and the world”), blogger Greg Olear mentioned a Tolkien allusion from this past year that I missed. Apparently former employees of Palantir believe that their company, which “develops data integration and analytics platforms enabling government agencies, militaries, and corporations to combine and analyze data from multiple sources” (Wikipedia), has taken on the negative aspects of Tolkien’s crystal ball, after which the company is named. They headlined their open letter of May 5, 2025, “The Scouring of the Shire: a letter from concerned Palantir alumni to the tech workers of Silicon Valley.”
In case you need reminding, the palantír has been devised by men of old to allow people to (in Gandalf’s words) “see far off, and to converse in thought with one another.” The letter cites one reference to the sphere that appears in Tolkien’s unpublished writings:
The palantíri were no doubt never matters of common use or common knowledge…They were kept in guarded rooms, high in strong towers, where only kings and rulers, and their appointed wardens, had access to them, and they were never consulted, nor exhibited, publicly.
Unfortunately Sauron has gained control of the palantíri and adjusted their algorithms to fit his ends. Therefore, other owners—Saruman and Steward of Gondor Denethor—don’t realize that the reality presented to them by the stone is in fact being manipulated by the dark lord. It is this unethical manipulation that Palantir’s former employees fear.
The “scouring of the shire” is a reference to the hobbits returning home and freeing their countrymen from the grip of Saruman and his quislings. Frodo and company reverse the Shire’s descent into a tyrannical and industrial hellhole and restore it to pastoral innocence and democratic governance. Sam will go on to be elected mayor for multiple terms.
Palantir’s alums fear that the forces of darkness are taking over our own shire. Their letter opens,
When J.R.R. Tolkien passed, he left the story of the palantíri, the all-seeing stones of Middle Earth, unfinished. In a sense, the story is still being written.
The myth of the powerful seeing stones warned of great dangers when wielded by those without wisdom or a moral compass, as they could be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. Similarly, Palantir Technologies’ platform grants immense power to its users, helping control the data, decisions, and outcomes that determine the future of governments, businesses, and institutions — and by extension, all of us.
Early Palantirians understood the ethical weight of building these technologies. A Code of Conduct was crafted to uphold democracy, preserve the spirit of free scientific inquiry, and ensure responsible AI development. Guardrails were set to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuses of power. These principles have now been violated, and are rapidly being dismantled at Palantir Technologies and across Silicon Valley.
It’s a grim irony that Tolkien fan Peter Thiel has missed the author’s central point, which is that power corrupts. In fact, these technofascists (as some are calling them) have begun espousing positions embraced by Adolph Hitler, the original model for Sauron. A profile on Thiel and his company elaborates:
Palantir . . . combines machine learning with military spending, data-driven “intelligence” with naked violence. This is most clear in its longstanding collaboration with ICE, which is now carrying out notorious immigration raids at the behest of the Trump administration. “On the factory floor, in the operating room, on the battlefield,” states a recent Palantir recruitment ad placed across US college campuses, “we build to dominate.”
Palantir’s alumni, shaken by Elon Musk’s looting of the government’s sensitive data, address the turn their former company has taken:
Palantir’s leadership has abandoned its founding ideals. Public statements have grown hostile to diversity, equity, and inclusion, principles that — despite corporate misuse — remain essential for critiquing power and ensuring ethical applications of technology. Instead, executives now employ inflammatory language, sow confusion, and invite controversy — going as far as threatening critics with violence.
Meanwhile, democracy faces escalating threats: biometric data collection on immigrant children, journalists being targeted, science programs defunded, and key U.S. allies, like Ukraine, sidelined. Trump’s administration has sought to greatly expand executive powers while alluding to monarchy. Recently, Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, removed distinguished military leaders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for discriminatory reasons, replacing them with unqualified loyalists. Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a “revolution” led by oligarchs. We must resist this trend.
It’s worth reflecting for a moment on the popularity of Lord of the Rings amongst the Thiels of the world. Since Thiel is also a fan of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, I wonder if John Rogers’s biting observation about the two works needs amending:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Does Tolkien’s trilogy also lead to a stunted and socially crippled adulthood? It is true that Tolkien has created a black and white universe where there is little tolerance for other races (hobbits, dwarfs and elves excepted) where a king must return to restore order. Through fantasy one can leave one’s messy world behind, which is what both Thiel and Musk—also a Tolkien fan—dream of with their techno-utopias.
But fantasy doesn’t have to work in this way. Terry Pratchett’s multicultural disc world series can be seen as a Tolkien corrective as goblins, trolls, werewolves, vampires, witches, dwarfs, humans, leprechauns, and (most dangerous of all) elves must figure out how to peacefully co-exist. But that difference being noted, Pratchett fully endorses Tokien’s warning about power corrupting. In Thud!, for instance, we see how “the summoning dark” threatens to twist even a good man like Commander Vimes.
Does Thiel remember how, standing on Mount Doom, Frodo lacks the power to resist his own dark impulses—and that he is saved only by a moment of grace and a past act of mercy? It’s a Christian vision, coming out of the author’s deep Catholic faith. Thiel may claim to be a follower of Christ, but his Christianity is antithetical to Tolkien’s.
This past November my English professor son alerted me to a thoughtful essay on “The Claims of Close Reading” by Johanna Winant. As humanities programs at West Virginia University were being hollowed out, she turned to her classes for refuge. “Where everything else everywhere else felt exhausted,” she writes,
the classroom was overflowing, plentiful. It was a space for analytic thinking, longform attention, clear expression, cooperative conversation—democratic society and a richer life. All we needed was a poem, a few hours each week, and trust in what we could do, in what we did do, together.
And then the clincher:
This task was very simple as well as very hard. In every course, at every level, every semester—in every single class, multiple times every week—I taught close reading.
According to Winant, close reading is currently having a moment. For an explanation, she connects “the renewed focus on our fundamental methodology” to “the austerity that has been inflicted on the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis led universities to freeze hiring, with conditions only continuing to erode since then with still more retrenchment and some institutions’ destructive embrace of AI.”
I don’t entirely follow her reasoning here, unless she sees withdrawing into literary works as something akin to monks withdrawing to monasteries as barbarians ravage the surrounding countryside. In any event, that’s how she used the discipline. “My students,” she writes, “showed me how simple and how hard it can be to notice, to point to a detail that’s really on the page and small enough to fit under your finger.”
So as not to appear entirely insular, Winant says that close reading has led to her students developing important life skills:
My students offered arguments, but they also showed me what making an argument offered them. One, who went on to be a nurse, told me that she writes notes for doctors the way we made arguments in class—interpreting and connecting symptoms, then making a claim with stakes—and they always do what she says. Another student told me that she filed a police report about an assault by writing her account as an argument, moving from noticing to claiming, so she would be understood and believed.
As a history major at Carleton College (1969-73), I didn’t encounter the phrase “close reading” until I enrolled in Emory’s English PhD program, and at first I was amazed at what my fellow students could do. Their ability to detect underlying image patterns in a work appeared like pulling rabbits out of a hat. I realized I would need to master this practice and in fact did so.
I’ve written about how I had majored in history rather than English because of the way New Criticism dismissed from consideration historical context, author biographies, and reader perspectives. How could those be irrelevant when the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War were dominating my life? In grad school, then, my challenge became to reconcile the different approaches.
I concluded that, while the words on the page had to be the starting point of any conversation about literature, that conversation could then go in multiple directions. What did those words tell us about an author attempting to make sense of the world or a society undergoing significant upheaval? What did it mean that different readers and different time periods could take those exact words and interpret them differently? The fact that text-focused New Criticism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction would ultimately give way to New Historicism indicates that I was far from the only scholar searching for alternatives.
Nevertheless, although my own thinking has taken a decidedly utilitarian direction, close reading is still at the core of my practice. I contend that, if one begins by playing close attention to the text, powerful and potentially life-changing insights emerge. As my book Better Living through Literature is filled with examples, both my own and those of my students, I’ll only mention one here.
When I realized, after losing my oldest son, that Beowulf has powerful insights into the grieving process, I subjected the work to close reading. I saw the hero’s underwater contest with Grendel’s Mother as a meticulous psychological description of someone responding to debilitating grief, with no detail offered up by the text as too small to overlook. It was important to me that the lake was frozen on the surface but hot underneath—an image of repressed rage—and that one must dive directly into the anguish rather than shy away from it. (We learn that a deer fleeing from hounds would rather be torn apart on the shore than enter the dark waters.) It’s important as well that Beowulf’s normal ways of battling monsters don’t work on Grendel’s Mother, that he must draw on a primal power (a sword forged by giants before the flood) if he is not to be buried under the weight of his grief or succumb to the knife that the monster is stabbing at his heart.
In short, I went into the work convinced that a close reading would provide me with the guidance I needed. I came to see my own grieving process as a necessary journey that would take me through dark realms before I could see daylight again. As a result, I resolved to follow the grieving wherever it led rather than fight it.
Perhaps New Criticism lionizing the text to the exclusion of all else was a necessary stage if we were to take the words on the page as seriously as we would come to. Perhaps the same defense can be offered up for Deconstruction’s “il n’y pas hors-texte”(there is nothing outside the text). But once sufficient attention was being paid, we could go further than New Critics and deconstructionists were willing to go. In the world beyond the text, we could make our close attention pay off in tangible ways.
My advice to literature teachers, then, is to communicate a “why” when one is teaching close reading. The implied answer when I was in college—a beautiful work is so amazing that surely you want to see and understand its complexity—wasn’t enough for me (although it was for others). But I’m not offering up literature’s functionality as the ultimate answer. Those interested in practicality often prefer more direct routes than literature, which while it tells the truth tells it slant. For me, the magic lies in the balance between the delight we take in beauty and its practical application. Thinkers have been negotiating this balance for millennia, including Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Percy Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Bertolt Brecht, W.E.B. Du Bois, Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and countless others.
Above all, I should mention John Stuart Mill, the great utilitarian who, as president of St. Andrew’s University, required all students to take literature classes and who may be the individual most responsible for Winant and me getting to teach close reading in the first place. “Who does not,” he said to the faculty and students who gathered for his inauguration, “feel himself a better man after a course of Dante, or of Wordsworth, or, I will add, of Lucretius or the Georgics, or after brooding over Gray’s “Elegy [Written in a Country Churchyard]” or Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty?” Such a course of study, he contended, lifts us above “the miserable smallness of mere self” and “brings home to us all those aspects of life which take hold of our nature on its unselfish side, and lead us to identify our joy and grief with the good or ill of the system of which we form a part.”
Imagine providing young people with the opportunity to find refuge from the world’s slings and arrows while simultaneously furnishing them with tools for better handling them.
Our mad king’s obsession with Greenland has led me to a fascinating 18th century poem by William Cowper. “Greenland under the Influence of the Moravians” caught my eye in part because my wife grew up Moravian and in fact has stories of her ancestors carrying the faith into arctic lands.
In the case of her great-great-great-great grandfather Michael Miksch, however, the locale was northern Russia rather than Greenland. The egalitarian and communitarian faith of the Moravians appealed to many small communities, but Miksch was arrested as a suspected Swedish spy. He was released when he and his fellow Moravians saved their captors after they fell through the ice.
Michael would later turn his attention westward and ended up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His descendants would move on to Gnadenhutten, Ohio (where a few years before a white militia group had massacred two Moravian missionaries and 125 Native American converts) and then to Grace Hill, Iowa, where Julia grew up.
Cowper, who became an evangelical Christian and an ardent opponent of slavery, appears to see the faith of the Moravians as purer and truer than that which flourishes in more temperate climes. (Cowper describes such “false religion” as accompanied by “the pride of lettered ignorance” that “binds in chains of error our accomplished minds.”) By contrast, the simple Moravian beliefs—which included genuine interest in the Inuits—are brighter beams that “shoot into your darkest caves the day/ From which our nicer [more delicate] optics turn away.”
Moravian missions flourished in Greenland until late in the 18th century, when the monopolistic practices of the Danish General Trade Company made imports prohibitively expensive.
In his poem Cowper focuses on Greenland’s harsh climate: “But Winter, armed with terrors here unknown,/ Sits absolute on his unshaken throne.” So American can’t be satisfied with its “soft airs and genial moisture [that] feed and cheer/ Field, fruit, and flower, and every creature here”? It must have frozen wastes as well?
It doesn’t take Moravians to shine the light of truth on Trump’s nakedly imperialistic designs.
Greenland under the Influence of the Moravians By William Cowper
Fired with a zeal peculiar, they defy The rage and rigor of a polar sky, And plant successfully sweet Sharon’s rose On icy plains and in eternal snows. Oh, blest within the enclosure of your rocks, Nor herds have ye to boast, nor bleating flocks; No fertilizing streams your fields divide, That show reversed the villas on their side; No groves have ye; no cheerful sound of bird, Or voice of turtle, in your land is heard; Nor grateful eglantine regales the smell Of those that walk at evening where ye dwell; But Winter, armed with terrors here unknown, Sits absolute on his unshaken throne; Piles up his stores amidst the frozen waste, And bids the mountains he has built stand fast; Beckons the legions of his storms away From happier scenes, to make your land a prey, Proclaims the soil a conquest he has won, And scorns to share it with the distant sun. Yet Truth is yours, remote, unenvied isle! And Peace, the genuine offspring of her smile; The pride of lettered ignorance, that binds In chains of error our accomplished minds, That decks with all the splendor of the true A false religion, is unknown to you. Nature, indeed, vouchsafes for our delight The sweet vicissitudes of day and night; Soft airs and genial moisture feed and cheer Field, fruit, and flower, and every creature here: But brighter beams than his who fires the skies Have risen at length on your admiring eyes, That shoot into your darkest caves the day From which our nicer optics turn away.
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Monday – Martin Luther King Day
One shift we have witnessed under the Trump administrations is white liberals finally awakening to a reality that people of color have long known: when the powers that be assume authoritarian powers, Constitutional rights and equal treatment under the law are illusions. That reality was slammed home through the ICE shooting of Nicole Renee Good and the Justice Department’s laughable cover-up.
Martin Luther King used non-violent resistance to win the public over to his side during the Civil Rights movement, and Minneapolis protesters are taking a page from his tactics. Meanwhile, reenacting the role of Bull Connor and others, ICE is doing all it can to goad people into giving Trump an excuse to send in the military.
In “Bullet Points,” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown uses bitter sarcasm to cast doubt on police explanations for Black deaths. Thanks to cell phone witnesses, the broader public is finally coming around to his view. For all its grim humor, the poem ends on a heartbreaking personal note: the life of the victim is ultimately about tears of the bereft.
Bullet Points By Jericho Brown
I will not shoot myself In the head, and I will not shoot myself In the back, and I will not hang myself With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it In a police car while handcuffed Or in the jail cell of a town I only know the name of Because I have to drive through it to get home. Yes, I may be at risk, but I promise you, I trust the maggots Who live beneath the floorboards Of my house to do what they must To any carcass more than I trust An officer of the law of the land To shut my eyes like a man Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet So clean my mother could have used it To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will do it the same way most Americans do, I promise you: cigarette smoke Or a piece of meat on which I choke Or so broke I freeze In one of these winters we keep Calling worst. I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter that we’ve been taught, Greater than the settlement A city can play a mother to stop crying, And more beautiful than the new bullet Fished from the folds of my brain.
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Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading, about the marriage in Cana, has led me to a fascinating lyric by Canadian poet Marjorie Pickthall (1883-1922). “The Bridegroom of Cana” tells the story from the point of view of the groom at the wedding, although “bridegroom” points two ways in that Jesus is sometimes called the bridegroom of the church.
It’s a strange poem in that the bridegroom appears to be having, if not second thoughts, at least a sense that consummation will not live up to the anticipation. In the first stanza he wishes his spouse to veil her eyes “lest in their light my life withdrawn/ Dies…as a star in the day,/ As a dream in the dawn.” His mention of two olive leaves “sighing apart” suggests that the reality cannot live up to the dream, and in fact he goes on to say, “Sweet, I have waked from a dream of thee.” Then he proceeds to talk about “the golden lure of this love [growing] dim.” When he says that her “lips are bright as the edge of a sword,” it’s not clear that this is a good thing.
What changes is the presence of Jesus at the wedding. Suddenly (if I am interpreting correctly) something more has entered the marriage ceremony, and that something more is Love. “Love, I looked awhile in His face/ And was still,” the speaker says.
So now, after these early bridegroom jitters, the speaker has a vision of a new foundation for his marriage, described powerfully in the final three stanzas. I particularly like the image of thrushes in a field while a third bird, a lark, pours down music from above:
Down in the fields the thrushes sing And the lark is lost in the light above, Lost in the infinite, glowing whole, As I in thy soul, As I in thy soul.
I note, as an aside Percy Shelley’s description of the lark’s music in “To a Skylark”:
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
In this case, Jesus is that blithe spirit, and the union of higher and lower continues on:
Turn to me, trust to me, mirror me As the star in the pool, as the cloud in the sea.
And:
Hush my harp, for the day is begun, And the lifting, shimmering flight of the swallow Breaks in a curve on the brink of morn, Over the sycamores, over the corn, Cling to me, cleave to me, prison me As the mote in the flame, as the shell in the sea…
Here’s the poem:
The Bridegroom of Cana By Marjorie Pickthall
“There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee. . . . And both Jesus was called, and His disciples, to the marriage.”
VEIL thine eyes, O belovéd, my spouse, Turn them away, Lest in their light my life withdrawn Dies as a star, as a star in the day, As a dream in the dawn.
Slenderly hang the olive leaves Sighing apart; The rose and silver doves in the eaves With a murmur of music bind our house. Honey and wine in thy words are stored, Thy lips are bright as the edge of a sword That hath found my heart, That hath found my heart.
Sweet, I have waked from a dream of thee,– And of Him. He who came when the songs were done. From the net of thy smiles my heart went free And the golden lure of thy love grew dim. I turned to them asking, “Who is He, Royal and sad, who comes to the feast And sits Him down in the place of the least?” And they said, “He is Jesus, the carpenter’s son.”
Hear how my harp on a single string Murmurs of love. Down in the fields the thrushes sing And the lark is lost in the light above, Lost in the infinite, glowing whole, As I in thy soul, As I in thy soul.
Love, I am fain for thy glowing grace As the pool for the star, as the rain for the rill. Turn to me, trust to me, mirror me As the star in the pool, as the cloud in the sea. Love, I looked awhile in His face And was still.
The shaft of the dawn strikes clear and sharp; Hush, my harp. Hush my harp, for the day is begun, And the lifting, shimmering flight of the swallow Breaks in a curve on the brink of morn, Over the sycamores, over the corn, Cling to me, cleave to me, prison me As the mote in the flame, as the shell in the sea, For the winds of the dawn say, “Follow, follow Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter’s son.”
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Friday
Now that I’ve recovered from a severe case of the flu, I return to my Friday memoir writing. My good fortune, after receiving my PhD from Emory in 1981, was finding a position at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in St. Mary’s City. Despite its name, St. Mary’s is neither a women’s nor a Catholic school but the state’s liberal arts college, set up with the vision of offering a small liberal arts college experience to students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford one. As such, it spoke to my own deepest ideals.
My first year at St. Mary’s (1981-82) was a tremendously exciting time. The school had hired 17 new faculty, many in the arts and humanities, and many of us had small children. We had potluck gatherings and talked incessantly about literature, critical theory, child rearing, and the state of the college. (Our first year our president resigned for having an affair with—wait for it—the Dean of Academic Affairs!) Finances were tight as Julia wasn’t working and I was being paid an Instructor’s salary ($14,500, even though I was an Assistant Professor) so that, to save on gas, we had to apportion out our trips to town. But because of our community of like-minded souls and an exciting intellectual environment, it was a happy time.
One of the great joys of having children is getting to revisit one’s favorite childhood books, and I began sharing old classics, along with new arrivals, as soon as I could. Like my parents, we chose not to have a television so that we could focus on reading, and every night when they were old enough, Justin, Darien, and Toby got a chapter each, along with a poem. I read them the Pooh books, Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, The Jungle Books, the Narnia books, Gulliver’s Travels, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the Alice books, many of E. Nesbit’s novels, Miss Masham’s Repose, Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Garden, The Princess and Curdie books, The Rescuers and all the sequels, and (among the new arrivals) Lloyd Alexander’s Taran books, Brian Jacques’s Redwall series, The Rats of N.I.M.H., and on and on. As a result, the boys have grown up to be voracious readers, and Toby, after reading Redwall to his kids, has just asked us to send him the Taran books.
Meanwhile, I was learning what every new teacher learns, which is that we were the exceptions in the courses we took, not the rule—which in my case meant that my students did not enter my classes with my own level of enthusiasm. I also came to my teaching with what I came to call a F.O.G.S. mentality, which is Fresh Outta Graduate School. I still can’t believe how much I asked of my students that first year. In a satire class I had them read Alexander’s Pope’s very challenging poem Epistle to Arbuthnot. I also assigned a novel a week in a Victorian literature class and had them grapple with George Lukacs’s daunting Theory of the Novel in a senior seminar. Imagine being assigned the following:
The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality….[T]he novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness.
Somehow the students survived while I adjusted my teaching to reach the students I had, not the students I imagined having.
Like all colleges, St. Mary’s had its ups and its downs in the 36 years I spent there, but I never lost faith in its mission, and always I was determined to provide each student with an educational experience tailored to his or her personal needs. To truly make this change, however, a more profound shift was needed on my part.
In my past memoir writing I’ve talked about how many of the essays I was assigned in college felt unreal (or “reified,” to use Lukacs’s term for forms empty of meaningful content). I knew that some of the essays I was receiving, even while they might appear perfectly competent, seemed no more than an empty exercise akin to jumping through hoops. I remember one essay, for instance, where a student analyzed the name symbolism in Death of a Salesman (Willie Loman as “low man”). The student didn’t care, nor did I. So how could I teach in a way that would elicit explorations where something seemed at stake.
When I received a Fulbright to teach at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Yugoslavia for my sabbatical year, I set as one of my goals figuring out how to get meaningful essays. While I knew that, for myself, it was important to figure out whether and how the literature I loved could make the world a better place, my students weren’t as keyed into historical developments as I had been (the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War protests). I realized I had to find ways to apply the literature we were reading to their personal concerns.
I’ll save the story of Yugoslavia and the friendships I developed there for a future post. I’ll just note here that the reduced teaching responsibilities and absence of committee responsibilities give me an immense amount of extra time to focus on teacher development. I also had time to read, and I plunged into the English Department’s impressive library, including novels by Margaret Drabble, Sarah Maitland, Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot), Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), John Updike (Rabbit Is Rich), Louise Erdrich (Tracks), Gloria Naylor (Women of Brewster Place), Patrick White, Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), and others.
What is noteworthy about a number of these works—especially those by Drabble, Maitland, and Barnes—is that they were non-political melodramas. As such, they expanded my own emotional range. This would prove invaluable for when I returned to the States and started thinking about other things my students could get out of the works they were reading.
Essentially, I shifted to a much more psychological approach to teaching. For instance, in my Intro to Lit classes I would ask my students to describe memorable reading experience of a poem, story, or play that they could remember—between three and five—and figure out who they at the time that explained why they had the experience that they did. This showed them that literature had played a deeper role in their lives than they perhaps realized. For the rest of the course, I encouraged them to view each work as potentially having a similar impact. Their final essay was to be on the work that moved the needle the most.
In my book I describe the assignment and also give numerous examples of students reporting on life-changing reading experiences. I can confidently say that I addressed the reification issue satisfactorily.
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Thursday
The final two books in Philip Pullman’s Lyra Silvertongue’s hexalogy (or second trilogy, if you’d rather) are about Lyra and her daemon searching for her lost imagination. To fully appreciate the import of that search, it’s useful to look back at the importance that the west has attached to the imagination since the 18th century. That’s when various philosophers, social scientists, political activists, and above all poets came to believe that the human Imagination could transform the world. As I wrote in my book,
It’s hard to overstate the importance placed on the Imagination at this time. “Seldom in Western culture,” writes James Engell in his landmark study The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism, “has one idea excited so many leading minds for such a stretch of time. It became the impelling force in artistic and intellectual life…” Applied to everything from William Wordsworth’s “meanest flower that blows” (“Intimations of Immortality”) to Percy Shelley’s “light whose smile kindles the universe” (Adonais), the Imagination came to be seen as the key that would unlock the secrets of creation. In his essay “Poetry and the Imagination,” American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that poetry “is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist…”
I noted in Tuesday’s post there are various forces in Lyra’s world that are threatening the imagination, from money-obsessed capitalism to narrow church orthodoxy to various reductive schools of philosophy (soulless science, flippant skepticism, nihilistic existentialism). Pullman counters with the creatures of his rich fantasy world, which unite to keep the portals of the imagination open.
The key portal in one in a faraway eastern desert through which a special rose oil in obtained. Incapable of being grown in Lyra’s world or of being synthesized by chemical companies, the oil has a special property: if you let a drop fall on your eye, you can see the Dust (consciousness) that is at the foundation of creation:
I saw the appearance of a nimbus or halo around the dealer, consisting of sparkling granules of light, each smaller than a grain of flour. And between him and his daemon, who was a sparrow, there was a constant stream of such grains of light, back and forth, in both directions. As I watched, I became convinced that I was seeing something profound and true, which I would never afterwards be able to deny.
So what profound truth is Pullman’s fantasy revealing to us? In his epitaph to The Secret Commonwealth (Book #5) he quotes William Blake—“Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth”—and in the course of Commonwealth and The Rose Field he makes clear that fantasy is more than just fantasy. To do this, he draws on poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria for a distinction between “fancy” and “imagination.”
“Fancy,” as Coleridge saw it, just organizes materials already before us, say the way a metaphor does. As Lyra puts it at one point, “Taking real things and changing them a bit. That’s exactly what liars do.”
Imagination, on the other hand, takes existing objects and transforms them in such a way that they correspond to a deeper truth. In Coleridge’s words, it “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.” Lyra attempts to distinguish between the two in a debate with an angel. While the angel thinks that “fancy” and “imagination” both happen only in the mind, Lyra sees imagination as having a reality beyond:
Lyra: “I know that whatever the imagination is, it isn’t just inventing things. Making things up and pretending they’re real is not enough.”
“It is enough for the great poets. For the storytellers and the artists of every kind. They take things as they are, things in the world, and play with them and change them about and make something new. Is that an activity to condemn as trivial?”
“That’s what you think poets and storytellers do?”
“Why, yes. What else?”
“But that’s what I did when I told lies,”she said. “I used to be a famous liar. I took things that were partly true and I made up other things out of them. But they were lies. I knew they weren’t true as I told them. You can’t mean that the imagination is the same thing as telling lies?”
While the angel refuses to acknowledge a difference, Lyra makes another attempt to distinguish the two in the next book, when she is closer to understanding what she is searching for. This time she is talking with her friend and mentor Malcolm, who asks her,
“What did you feel was missing?”
“A…certainty about the world. A sort of sense that fundamentally it was true and reliable and just there. A sense that we belonged there too. Belonged in the physical world. Whatever that sense was, I’d had it once, and I didn’t have it anymore.”
“Maybe ‘imagination’ was the wrong word.”
“No, it was exactly the right world. People who think imagination is just making things up, they’re just wrong. Even angels are wrong. Imagination is seeing things properly, real things, seeing them fully in all their contexts with all their connections in place, all the things they mean around them…
And a little later:
“[The angel] said that the imagination was just our minds making things up, bits of fantasy jumbled together, like a dream. But she was wrong. . . . What Pan said, the thing he said I’d lost—he was right. It’s something fundamental. And I had lost it. . . . They think that things can only be true or not true. But what you learn when you play, or tell stories, or in a dream, is that things can be both true and not true…like when someone says, ‘Art is nothing more than pretty patterns.’ But the truth is that it’s pretty patterns as well as lots of other things. And what that means…Well, what it means is that we must keep the windows open. Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it—we need it.”
“Good so far. Go on.”
“Welll…” she felt unsure, and also that she was trembling the edge of a discovery. “I think the Rose Field, the truth about things, isn’t just out there, it’s in here as well. And the imagination isn’t just in here, it’s out theretoo…The Rose Field needs what we have as much as we need what it has. What matters is that it must be free to flow through all the worlds.
Lyra’s separated daemon, meanwhile, is coming to similar conclusions:
[The imagination] wasn’t just something you could bolt on like a spare part. It was something far more deeply interfused…He knew all the poetry that Lyra did, of course, and loved it just as much, and that phrase came to hi unbidden and at first unrecognized, from a time when she’d been reading in a whisper and he’d been lying with his head against hers. It was like them: deeply interfused. Something had left her, and it had left him.
Pam is thinking here of a passage from Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” It goes right to the heart of the matter:
And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Thinking along the same lines, Lyra at one point speculates, “Maybe the imagination is a sort of wind that blows through all the worlds.” Imagination as wind is a metaphor that is adopted by multiple Romantic poets, most notably Coleridge and Percy Shelley, and it helps us see how Pullman plays with Lyra’s name. In the early books she is a notorious “liar,” but she develops into a “lyre.”
With the wind image, think of her as an Aeolian harp, which Coleridge and Shelley both saw as an image for the artist: while it is acted upon by nature, at the same time it transforms nature into art. In “Ode to the West Wind” Shelley asks, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” and in “The Aeolian Harp” Coleridge writes,
And that simplest Lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caressed, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land…
So Lyra is an artistic lyre, responsible for seeing into the life of things (to borrow again from Tintern Abbey). When she says, “the truth about things, isn’t just out there, it’s in here as well. And the imagination isn’t just in here, it’s out there too,” she is echoing Wordsworth’s description of the poet as one who half perceives, half creates. By the book’s end, her artistry will be used to reopen the portal to the imagination that the world has attempted to destroy.
Before turning to that, however, let’s look at one other way that Pullman uses to articulate this other world, along with the internal crisis that Lyra and Pan are experiencing.
At one point in the book, Pam and Malcolm are in the kingdom of the gryphons, where they have been joined by a representative of the witches. These various mythological creatures are assessing the danger that orthodox religion, mechanistic philosophy, capitalism, and modernity generally are posing to their existence. It is a version of the danger that Wordsworth articulates in his sonnet, “The World Is Too Much with Us.” Whereas once we looked out at nature and saw pagan gods, now we waste our powers with getting and spending:
Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Like Proteus and Triton, these mythical creatures of the air are fighting for their own existence. A witch describes the threat her people have been noticing:
Winds are wilder than they used to be, or else they fail altogether. The air is tainted and stale. Freshness has left the atmosphere, by small degrees at first, so small as to be hardly noticeable, but it is getting worse. Sunsets are lurid with colors never seen before; birds migrate at strange seasons, or die in their thousands from diseases unknown to our healers.
The change, she adds, is “impalpable and silent. It drifts in invisible clouds and can’t be described or fought or destroyed.” She, the gryphons, and Malcolm conclude that their task is “to protect the openings between the worlds, whose closure and destruction is causing so much damage.”
One way of thinking about them is as members of “an inner kingdom.” As Pam puts it,
I have learned that the wisdom of the gryphons distinguishes between an outer kingdom and an inner kingdom. The outer kingdom is the world we can travel through and measure and make maps of, and gryphons and witches and humans alike can share and understand it. The inner kingdom comprises everything to the distance of the furthest star, and includes the mysteries of the heart and the mind.
Another term Pullman uses for this inner kingdom is “the Secret Commonwealth,” and as one of Lyra’s mentors informs her, you can’t see the Commonwealth directly:
You gotta think about it the same way as if you want to see it. You got to look at it sideways. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out of the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time. If you want to see them jacky lanterns [bog spirits], the absolute worst way is to go out on the marsh with a searchlight. You take a bloody great light, and all the will o’ the wykeses and the little sparkers, they’d stay right underwater. And if you want to think about them, it don’t do no good making lists and classifying and analyzing. You’ll just get a lot o’ dead rubbish what means nothing. The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories’ll do.
While the witches and the gryphons make for an impressive alliance, as in Lord of the Rings the ultimate responsibility falls upon a single individual. Lyra’s challenge, however, is the great Romantic crisis, which is how to access her lost imagination. Without it, she cannot create the stories she needs to connect with the Secret Commonwealth, the inner kingdom, the Rose Field, her spirit demon. She is thus like Wordsworth in Intimations of Immortality or Coleridge in “Kubla Khan.”“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Wordsworth cries out in agony while Kubla Khan stares in horror at “a lifeless ocean” and “caves of ice.”
One wonders whether, in the course of finishing his series, Pullman went through his own crisis, losing confidence in his own creations. Is that why he missed his deadline by two or three years? Did he ever feel rudderless, as though he had lost his own spirit guide? In any event, I have a sense that he might be describing his own writing process at the of Rose Field when he has Lyra attempting to undo the destruction that the orthodox church has visited upon the portal.
The church’s military officers have used dynamite to destroy the openings so that only tiny fragments remain. Lyra’s barely adequate tool is the needle that was once housed in the golden compass. It has the same cutting capacity as Will’s “subtle knife” from the second book but is far less malleable. Meanwhile, the openings are dancing around:
And the holes, the tears and the gashes left by the explosion, were so small—maybe she wouldn’t be able to put the needle into one, even if she could see it…
And
There was one of the little torn gaps—a bit larger than most of them—and light was moving behind it, but such a small thing, no wider than the tip of a fingernail before it was filed. And no, she’d lost it again; but yes, there it was…She tried to line it up with things behind it, the edge of a group of trees, the windscreen of that red bulldozer further down, the corner of a stone wall around a distant field across the lake…
Is this what it is like for novelists as they try to capture the vision that floats on the periphery of their minds? Fortunately for Lyra, she hears the distant voice of Pan. She may be opposed by all the forces of the modern world, but she has this interior guide:
Bracing herself against the trunk of the toppled willow, she reached out, supporting her wrist with the other hand, and placed the needle point precisely into the tiny gap. It slipped away—but that was because her other hand, still hurting from the assault by the soldiers in the train, was painful to keep in that position. She let it hang before lifting it up again, and she heard herself uttering a long low moan of weariness and pain, but shut it down and gritted her teeth and lifted the needle once again, found the spot at once, and cut down as far as she could reach.
And the air opened, and there was her own world, and Pantalaimon tumbled through and into her arms.
Lyra has accomplished what Pullman has accomplished with his luminous fantasies, providing us with a portal through which we can pass from our own world into one populated by daemons, gryphons, witches, sorcerers, alchemists, angels, specters, and countless other rare beasts and unique adventures (to borrow from Auden).
I’ll let Ionides, a one-time math professor and Lyra’s desert guide, sum up what her quest has achieved. “Without imagination,” he says, “you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less.”
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Wednesday
You’re getting a lot on Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy this week because, after years of waiting for the final installment, I was finally about to finish the series and am still vibrating. Tomorrow I will be posting an essay on the author’s connection with high Romanticism, a knowledge of which helps us appreciate the depth of his project.
For today, however, I want to apply an insight from The Rose Field to the white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups that are attempting to take over America and the Muslim clerics that, in Iran, have long held sway. Both are characterized by an intolerance for anyone who looks, thinks, or worships differently than they do, so much so that they are willing to brutalize, imprison, and kill anyone who fails to buckle under. It has been much, much worse in Iran than here, of course, but we can see in Iran’s history where our own rightwing would like to take us.
A similar madness has seized the world in which Lyra operates so that an autocratic church—a blend of intolerant Calvinism and Opus Dei Catholicism—wishes to shut down portals to other worlds. In doing so, it makes common cause with “the Men from the Mountains,” who are Islamic terrorists characterizing themselves as “the clean wind of God.” While nominally at odds with Christianity, they share the church’s suspicion of the portals. If these reactionary forces have their way, they will create closed systems, the ultimate goal of ideological purists.
Lyra invokes a mathematical principle to expose the flaw in their vision:
“In any system, there are things you know are true, but you can’t prove that they are if you only use arguments from inside the system…”
“Gödel’s theorem. How does that fit in?”
“Well, if that’s true, then that means If you find a system that seems perfect and complete, where you can prove everything—then you’re wrong. You’re not looking properly.”
A healthy system, she goes on to say, requires gaps:
We need the holes where one world opens up to another. A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it. We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation.
Other worlds, she continues
are necessary, and so are all the windows and doors and openings, to let the wind blow through all the world…That’s why all the authorities want to block up the openings, and that’s why we must fight to the death to stop them.
Immigration, multiculturalism, liberal engagement with the world—these are all ways of opening ourselves to that wind. It’s that or suffocate.
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Tuesday
My Christmas present this year was Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field, the last volume of his Book of Dust trilogy (which in turn followed the His Dark Materials (or Golden Compass) trilogy. Pullman fans like myself have been anxiously awaiting this book for a while, given that it was supposed to have appeared in 2022. Indeed, I would have stood in a bookstore line at midnight, like a Harry Potter fan, if that’s what it took to speed things up. Anyway, I’ve now read the Lyra Silvertongue’s story arc in its entirety, which has given me a clearer sense of Pullman’s project. Major spoilers ahead.
In the first trilogy, Pullman appears to be working through his beef with organized religion in general and with fundamentalist Calvinists and Opus Dei Catholics in particular. The Magisterium is a cross between Calvin’s Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition’s Counter Reformation. More generally, however, Pullman objects to those religions that demand that their members be mindless followers, allowing the church to dictate their thinking.
Key to his vision is “dust,” which appears, when all is said and done, to be consciousness. Since consciousness is associated with original sin (the tree of good and evil), the church regards it as evil. And because this dust is not detected on human beings until they become adults, it is associated with puberty and sexuality and declared sinful.
Integral to this drama are the animal daemons, the most captivating element in Pullman’s fantasy. These function as some combination of animal spirit guide and the anima/animus side of ourselves that (according to Carl Jung) we must open ourselves to and accept if we are to find completeness. The daemons of children can be a variety of animals but, once their human has entered puberty, they settle upon a single form, a way of signaling that the basic structure of the individual has become more or less fixed. As they are thus connected with the end of childhood experience, Mrs. Coulter in Golden Compass seeks to render children perpetually innocent by separating them from their daemons, a gruesome experiment resulting in death for some, zombi existences for others.
In his second trilogy, Pullman widens his focus. His critique of repressive orthodox religion hasn’t ended—in fact, Magisterium has joined forces with fundamentalist Islamists, who share some of the same goals—but now he is interested in threats to the imagination as well as to independent thought. Thus we are introduced to three other villains: soulless materialism, empty skepticism, and predatory capitalism. The Magisterium finds ways to co-opt or make use of the first two, even though it has radically different goals. It doesn’t appear to have fully registered the threat represented by the third, however, which threatens to dissolve everything.
Let’s step back for a second. By attacking both religious orthodoxy and various forms of godless materialism, Pullman shows that he believes spiritual forces to be at work in the universe. Orthodox religion, unfortunately, cares more for power than in connecting people with those forces. As bad as the Magisterium is, however, at least it doesn’t threaten people’s daemons, which skepticism, blinkered science, and global capitalism do.
Let’s look at each of these three in turn. Simon Talbot is the radical skeptic or Berkeleyan idealist who sees everything as a construct and nothing as real. (There are deconstructionists who think this way.) In his essay “On the Non-Existence of Daemons,” he contends,
From our earliest childhoods we are encouraged to pretend that there exists an entity outside our bodies which is nevertheless part of ourselves. These wispy playmates are the finest device our minds have yet developed to instantiate the insubstantial. Every social pressure confirms us in our belief in them: habits and customs grow like stalagmites to fix the soft fur, the big brown eyes, the merry tricks in a behavioral cavern of stone.
And all the multitudinous forms this delusion takes are nothing more than random mutations of cells in the brain.
Although Talbot himself has a daemon—a blue macaw—it seems perpetually nervous and we never see them interacting.
As an aside, I note that one of the funnier lines in the novel is when Talbot, who has been spying for the Magisterium, realizes that he is functioning as their tool or useful idiot:
He stood and shook hands, and Talbot gathered his cloak and his briefcase and left, obscurely humiliated, although he wasn’t sure how; but his philosophy soon made that feeling disappear.
If Talbot is slippery, able to bend his rhetoric in whatever way will serve him, materialist philosopher Gottfried Brande is rigid and entrenched. In his mind, daemons are irrational delusions that only the weak-minded believe in. When Pan attempts to initiate a conversation with him, he closes his eyes and ears and thinks he is being attacked by ghosts (even though he doesn’t believe in ghosts either). His own daemon, meanwhile, is a large dog tormented with misery, as is the case with any creature that is thoroughly neglected.
The daemons of the industrialists and capitalists in the book, meanwhile, are in zombie states. Essentially they are ignored by their humans, who deny their own complex humanity as they tear apart beauty, custom, and tradition on their way to maximizing profits. Their daemons, unable to converse with them or with anyone else, essentially shrivel up.
Lyra’s daemon Pan, who has settled into the form of a pine marten, sees her human falling under the spell of both skepticism and soulless materialism, schools of thought that she encounters as a student at Oxford. In the process, Lyra loses the ability to imagine, which she had as a child. Pan therefore separates from her—an agony to both of them—in order to find where her imagination has gone. Put another way, if Lyra is to be healthy and whole, she must reconnect with this side of herself that she has lost. And she must do so in a world that is increasingly hostile to the imagination.
I’ll do a deeper dive into the imagination in a post later this week. Suffice it to say that Pullman draws on the great Romantic poets to articulate its power—I pick up allusions to Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats in the course of the novel—and that he sees it the way that 18th and 19th centuries saw it, a force that could change history. If Lyra is to save the world a second time (the first time her embrace of sexuality and sensuality saves both the living and the dead from orthodoxy), she will need to prevent religious fundamentalism, soulless materialism, empty intellectualism, and predatory capitalism from destroying the portals through which the imagination works.
It is through these portals that come Pullman’s own marvelous creations, so in a sense he is making a case for the urgency of his own fantasy. A genre that some dismiss as fanciful and others as ungodly (he contends) in actuality reveals a deep and urgent truth: we must have the rich products of the imagination if we are not to end up a dry, desiccated husks living meaningless lives. At the end of the novel, when the Magisterium appears to have closed the final portal, Lyra as artist finds a way to open it back up.
In the act of doing so, Lyra finally reconnects with Pan in a moment of ecstatic joy. This is what it feels to overcome inner alienation and step into the real and full self. Just as she provides us with one model of wholeness at the end of the first trilogy, so she provides us with another model of wholeness in the second.
