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Monday
A former colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Jennifer Cognard-Black, is out with a beautiful new anthology entitled Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically. As the book jacket announces, the essays “seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.”
In her introduction, Jennifer and her collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite say that their selections have been guided by four ethical principles. These are protecting and helping others, seeking to do no harm and to limit pain and suffering, respecting rights of choice and self-determination, and furthering justice, “which includes fairness, equitable distribution, and recognition of both need and contribution.” The essays range “from factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and home and community gardens.”
The book opens with a Naomi Shihab Nye poem that beautifully captures the spirit of the writers. By intermixing food with its natural and cultural setting, “Truth Serum” goes to the heart of ethical eating. When one is intentional and mindful in making one’s food choices, Nye tells us, sorrow lifts in small ways.
Truth Serum
We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture. Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence, popped it right in. That frog song wanting nothing but echo? We used that. Stirred it widely. Noticed the clouds while stirring. Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer. Dropped in their names. Added a mint leaf now and then to hearten the broth. Added a note of cheer and worry. Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder? Perfect. And once we had it, had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup, placing the pan on a back burner for keeping, the sorrow lifted in small ways. We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared. We washed that pan.
I think of how Salman Rushdie once described literature as a “no bullshit zone,” an essential antidote to the non-stop lying and gaslighting we get from various political figures. Nye has a place for those lies on her stove: she boils them down “in another pan till they disappeared.”
A recipe that includes night jasmine, frog song, a mint leaf now and then, “a note of cheer and worry,” and an orange butterfly “between the claps of thunder”–and that is watched over by “ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer”–will stand up to a lot of bullshit.
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Sunday
As we move into the summer holidays, here’s a Mary Oliver poem reminding us that learning doesn’t have to stop at the end of the school year. Her mission in life, as she sees it is
to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over
in joy, and acclamation.
Oliver talks about herself as a good scholar, taking lessons from nature’s daily presentations. And those presentations don’t have to be exceptional, fearful, dreadful or “very extravagant.” She can learn all she needs from “the ordinary,/ the common, the very drab.”
The poem reminds me of William Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned,” where the poet tells us to turn from our books and go for a walk in the woods. He informs us,
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
Oliver’s use of “needle in a haystack” is interesting. Normally, we think that looking for such a needle is a hopeless task, but for Oliver, the haystack is a world made of light, meaning that every day she finds something in it that “kills me with delight.” “What I was born for” she essentially tells us, is to participate in the wonder of God’s creation. Prayers are made out of grass.
Mindful
Every day I see or hear something that more or less
kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle
in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for – to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over
in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant – but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help
but grow wise with such teachings as these – the untrimmable light
of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
The phrase “what I was born for” may be taken from, and a response to, a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nature-loving poet that I suspect Oliver admires. The phrase memorably shows up in “Spring and Fall” where Hopkins asks Margaret why she is weeping in the presence of autumn’s leaf fall: “Márgarét, áre you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?” He concludes that she is thinking of her eventual death, observing, “It is the blight man was born for,/ It is Margaret you mourn for.”
Rather than focusing on the blight of death, however, Oliver focuses on “the untrimmable light of the world.” As she sees it, death won’t trim life’s candle because the world is bigger than any individual. Nor did Oliver ever have the experience that Hopkins predicts for Margaret: “Ah! ás the heart grows older/ It will come to such sights colder.” Up to the very end, Oliver described herself as “a bride married to amazement,” a phrase that appears in “When Death Comes”:
When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
And the conclusion:
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
There’s no doubt that Oliver would endorse an old rabbinical saying: “There’s only one question God will ask us when we meet him after death: ‘Did you enjoy my creation?’” As she advises in “In Blackwater Wood,”
To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the times come to let it go, to let it go.
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Friday
In a move that MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace compared to an arsonist returning to the scene of the crime, Donald Trump yesterday journeyed to Washington to address GOP Congress members for the first time since January 6. On that day, many of those now applauding Trump had cowered behind barricaded doors after he sent his supporters rampaging through the Capitol. As Wallace noted, while arsonists may enjoy revisiting their handiwork, normally the victims don’t themselves decide to celebrate the man who set their house on fire.
The GOP’s 180-degree turn—from condemning the attack to supporting Trump as he calls the insurrectionists “warriors” and promises to pardon them—recalls Winston Smith’s turnaround at the end of 1984. It’s always worth revisiting that passage because it reveals the lengths to which people will go to sell out their honor, integrity, dignity and core principles.
After relentless pressure from Big Brother, Winston finally surrenders, and his reward is a profound sense of relief. Orwell invokes Stalin’s notorious show trials, some of which ended with his victims embracing their own deaths, as he writes that Winston
was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
Trump has provided GOP lawmakers with absolution for their previous sin of doubting him (although he will needle them about it from time to time), and for this they are profoundly grateful. The more they fought him, the more his current forgiveness feels like a gift. Whether we call this cult behavior or Stockholm Syndrome or brainwashing, we are witnessing it daily. The novel concludes with Winston drinking gin in a café and gazing up adoringly at Big Brother’s enormous face:
Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Winston at least has an excuse: either he embraces his authoritarian leader or rats chew off his face. What excuse for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Nancy Mace, Mitch McConnell, and all those others who were at the Capitol that day?
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Thursday
Today is my father’s birthday—he died 11 years ago at 90—so in his honor I’m sharing one of his poems. Looking back, I’m so glad that he lived long enough to see the election of Barack Obama and somewhat relieved that he didn’t witness the rise of Donald Trump. He would have had poems for the occasion, however, including today’s poem on oil barons.
The poem appeared in his 1982 collection ABC of Radical Ecology, representing (you guessed it) the letter O. Even though we’re hearing of wonderful developments in the world of renewables—there are apparently days in California now when solar and wind-powered generators produce all the energy needed and then some—Big Oil has not given up the fight. If we increasingly hear about billionaires flocking to Trump, it’s because he making offers like the following:
Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1 billion for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, according to a bombshell new report.
According to the Washington Post, the former US president made his jaw-dropping pitch, which the paper described as “remarkably blunt and transactional,” at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home and club.
In front of more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, he promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution. He would also overturn the Biden administration’s decision in January to pause new natural gas export permits which have been denounced as “climate bombs”.
A follow-up story calculated that Trump’s deal would save the oil industry $110 billion in tax breaks.
This news comes a year after we learned that, as long ago as 1959, oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels was contributing to climate change and yet kept it secret. .
OZ in my father’s poem is ozone, and it’s worth noting that the international effort to protect and rebuild the ozone layer has been one of environmentalism’s more significant victories. (There’s still some ozone depletion but nothing like what we were suffering in the 1980s when this poem was written.) If the world accomplished this, maybe there’s hope yet.
Unless, that is, Trump and the dirty oil men get their way.
O Is a Dirty Oil Man
O look out for the Oil Barons the Omnipotent Outrageous and Obnoxious Owners of the O so delicate O- Zone
Officious Oligarchs of Order and Ordure they would Obliterate OZ for an Ocean of BUZZ business busyness bossiness booziness
Olympian Overbearing Opinionated and Omniversou they are also Obsolte (but they don’t know it yet)
O look out for the Oleaginous Oil-powerful (they think)
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Wednesday
Today I turn 73, a number that has special significance for me since in 1973 I both married Julia and graduated from Carleton. To celebrate, I’m sharing this fun poem on retirement lessons taken from King Lear. Although I retired six years ago, David Wright’s poem applies to aging as well. To love the play (as I do) is to appreciate the poem, especially its humor.
Lear’s problem is that he wants to abandon the cares of being king while surrendering none of a king’s privileges. To engineer this, he has come up with a “still untested pension plan.” An insecure control freak, he also tries to engineer the love of his daughters, which backfires spectacularly.
For the first 13 lines of his poem, Wright suggests things that Lear could do, and not do, to make his post-retirement life better:
“Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear” ByDavid Wright for Richard Pacholski
Avoid storms. And retirement parties. You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will offer, when they really want your office, which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your youngest child the most, regardless. Back to storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass, don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear you over all the thunder.
At this point in the poem, however, Wright changes direction. “But you’re not Lear,” he tells us—or himself—and then suggests a different approach to the storm.
But you’re not Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves the stage in character—we never see the feather, the mirror held to our lips. So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin, the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace your children’s ragged praise and that of friends. Go ahead, take it off, take it all off. Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers into your hair. Bellow at cataracts. If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold beer. So much better than making theories. We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.
Wright is reminding us that we’re all going to die. “No one leaves the stage in character,” he notes, with “the feather, the mirror held to our lips” referring to Lear having to acknowledge Cordelia’s death. The storm that is coming is the final storm so “don’t wait for the skies to crack with sun.”
Rather, learn to love whatever time you have left, even if you are experiencing some version of cataracts and huricanoes blowing, cracking, drenching and drowning with “sulphurous and thought-executing fires” (to quote from Lear’s storm-defying rant). Since Lear’s useless orders to the storm can be seen as an attempt to persuade himself he’s still in control, Wright suggests taking another tack. “Feel the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,” he advises, “the strange, sore comforts of the wind.”
In fact, open yourself fully to old age. Instead of trying to get those around you to tell you exactly what you want to hear, “embrace your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.” In fact, forget about dignity:
Go ahead, take it off, take it all off. Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers into your hair. Bellow at cataracts. If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold beer.
The ”weaving flowers” is what Cordelia reports of her now-insane dad:
Alack, ’tis he! Why, he was met even now As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud, Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckooflowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.
Lear’s tragedy is that, by thinking he could have everything, he lost everything. Maybe that’s what Wright means by “making theories.” So since such planning doesn’t work—and wouldn’t even if Lear were far more careful than he was—then why not let it all hang out? Carl Jung, who feared that the figure of the wise old sage could become stultifying, talked about how an old fool could release new life energies. So did W.B. Yeats in his Crazy Jane poems. Wright may have this in mind when he says, “We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.”
I can assure my loved ones that, having reached 73, I’m not going to start running around naked in the rain and weaving flowers into my hair. But I also have no illusion that I am some fount of wisdom that everyone should revere. I’m just someone stumbling through old age trying to make sense of things. And working to appreciate “the storm’s sweet sting.”
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Tuesday
Here’s a fascinating article that I somehow stumbled upon, maybe through Spoutible (which I now use instead of Twitter). The headline says it all:
100-foot ‘walking tree’ in New Zealand looks like an Ent from Lord of the Rings — and is the lone survivor of a lost forest
The article goes on to elaborate:
An unusual northern rātā tree that looks like it is striding across an empty field has been crowned New Zealand’s Tree of the Year. The giant plant, which looks strikingly similar to an Ent from The Lord of the Rings, is centuries old.
The strange tree, which has been nicknamed the “walking tree” because it looks like it’s striding across a field, is a northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta) — one of New Zealand’s tallest flowering tree species that can live for up to 1,000 years.
After reading the story and looking at the photo, I had to go back and check out exactly how Tolkien’s Ents walk. Here’s what I found:
Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other, and moved them to the edge of the shelf. The rootlike toes grasped the rocks. Then carefully and solemnly, he stalked down from step to step, and reached the floor of the Forest. At once he set off with long deliberate strides through the trees, deeper and deeper into the wood, never far from the stream, climbing steadily up towards the slopes of the mountains. Many of the trees seemed asleep, or as unaware of him as of any other creature that merely passed by; but some quivered, and some raised up their branches above his head as he approached.
And then there’s this detail that caught my attention:
All the while, as he walked, he talked to himself in a long running stream of musical sounds.
This put me in mind of a book written by a biology professor here at Sewanee, David Haskell’s The Songs of the Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. Looking at the different sounds connected with a variety of trees, Haskell describes such communication systems as the following, which involves a balsam fir:
This network of communication also includes leaves. There plant cells not only sniff the air to detect the health of neighbors but also use airborne odors to attract helpful caterpillar-eating insects. Sound plays a role in this communication. When a leaf senses the vibrations of a caterpillar’s moving jaws, those chewing sounds cause the leaf to mount a chemical defense against the insect. Leaf cells therefore integrate chemical and acoustic cues as they sense and respond to their surroundings.
The article mentioning that the rātā is “the lone survivor of a lost forest” leaves us to wonder whether it is searching for the lost Entwives. Treebeard recalls his last encounter with his own love:
Very fair she was still in my eyes, when I had last seen her, though little like the Entmaiden of old. For the Entwives were bent and browned by their labor; their hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people.
Once, he says, the land of the Entwives
blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn. Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honored them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.
That’s what the Ents discovered when they went in search. The passage may owe something to the fields of Flanders, scorched by World War I, which Tolkien witnessed first hand:
We crossed over Anduin and came to their land; but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it. But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that we met which way the Entwives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them. Our sorrow was very great. Yet the wild wood called, and we returned to it. For many years we used to go out every now and again and look for the Entwives, walking far and wide and calling them by their beautiful names. But as time passed we went more seldom and wandered less far. And now the Entwives are only a memory for us, and our beards are long and grey.
So we now know what the Ents look like when they go out searching. The longing for a bygone era brings to mind a line by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen: “Now men will go content with what we spoiled.” But the wilderness that has been lost is, at least, recalled by elves in a song they have written about the Ents and Entwives. Here’s an excerpt:
Ent: When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay; When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day; When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again!
Entwife: When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last; When broken is the barren bough, and light and labor past; I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!
Both: Together we will take the road that leads into the West, And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.’
See this both as a lament for the environment we have destroyed but perhaps, also, as a spur to reforestation efforts.
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Monday
A dear friend who, as an early Covid sufferer, had a near death experience, recently sent me a Scientific American article about NDEs. My friend spent a month on a ventilator and, at a moment when doctors had all but given up on her, she had vision that she can recall vividly to this day. I cite the article here because it draws on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot for a description.
Neuropsychologist Christof Koch notes that there’s uniformity amongst NDE reports:
NDEs are not fancy flights of the imagination. They share broad commonalities—becoming pain-free, seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel and other visual phenomena, detaching from one’s body and floating above it, or even flying off into space (out-of-body experiences). They might include meeting loved ones, living or dead, or spiritual beings such as angels; a Proustian recollection or even review of lifetime memories, both good and bad (“my life flashed in front of my eyes”); or a distorted sense of time and space.
Koch says that NDEs can be both positive and negative:
The former receive all the press and relate to the feeling of an overwhelming presence, something numinous, divine. A jarring disconnect separates the massive trauma to the body and the peacefulness and feeling of oneness with the universe. Yet not all NDEs are blissful—some can be frightening, marked by intense terror, anguish, loneliness and despair.
One can see how narratives of heaven and hell have grown out of NDEs. Indeed, religious people often use them as confirmation. But as a scientist, Koch doesn’t search for metaphysical explanations and notes that there are other experiences—he calls them NDE-lite—that resemble NDEs. One of these involves epileptic fits, also known as complex partial seizures:
These fits partially impair consciousness and often are localized to specific brain regions in one hemisphere. They can be preceded by an aura, which is a specific experience unique to an individual patient that is predictive of an incipient attack. The seizure may be accompanied by changes in the perceived sizes of objects; unusual tastes, smells or bodily feelings; déjà vu; depersonalization; or ecstatic feelings.
Koch says that the last items on the list feature in what are clinically known as Dostoyevsky seizures because the author—who suffered from severe temporal lobe epilepsy—describes them memorably in The Idiot.The novel’s protagonist is the Christ-like Prince Myschkin:
During his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigor and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away forever; these moments were but presentiments. As it were, of the one final second (it was never more than a second) in which the fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible. When his attack was over, and the prince reflected on his symptoms, he used to say to himself: …”What matter thought it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?…I would give my whole life for this one instant.
Koch says that neuroscience is now able to induce these ecstatic feelings, which Dostoevsky described 150 years ago, by
electrically stimulating part of the cortex called the insula in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain. This procedure can help locate the origin of the seizures for possible surgical removal. Patients report bliss, enhanced well-being, and heightened self-awareness or perception of the external world. Exciting the gray matter elsewhere can trigger out-of-body experiences or visual hallucinations. This brute link between abnormal activity patterns—whether induced by the spontaneous disease process or controlled by a surgeon’s electrode—and subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual, origin. The same is likely to be true for NDEs.
Just because science can duplicate the experience does not mean that they don’t have a mystical aspect, however, just as our possession of Richard Dawkins’s “God gene” doesn’t disprove the existence of God. All we know is that the more we delve into the natural world—including the brain—the more amazing it appears, a constant unfolding. Genius authors like Dostoevsky, whose creativity also defies scientific understanding, open up windows into this infinitely complex universe.
Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis, credited literature–especially the plays of William Shakespeare and the ancient Greek tragedians–as having provided him with his most profound discoveries. First literature paves the way, then the scientific mind scrambles to catch up.
Yet another argument for a liberal arts education.
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Sunday
One of my favorite websites is Journey to Jesus, which each week features a sermon on one of the Sunday readings by Dan Clendenin, usually with a poem attached. This week he turns to a Wendell Berry poem in response to the moment in Mark where Jesus’s family thinks he is crazy.
The passage is the following:
The crowd came together again, so that Jesus and his disciples could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”
Jesus smartly replies with a passage that was treasured by Abraham Lincoln–“How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand”—but Clendenin is more interested in the insanity diagnosis. He argues,
It is the world that has gone mad, not Jesus, and he is rightly angered and aggrieved at this — the religious sanctimony, economic exploitation, political oppression, social exclusion, and the like. And when Jesus disrupts this cultural status quo, he is scapegoated as insane.
In other words, if the world is insane, then maybe the insane are sane, a reversal that is at the heart of the 1966 Alan Bates film King of Hearts. It is also the basis of Wendell Berry’s sixteen Mad Farmer poems, in one of which he writes,
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart. The world is a holy vision, had we clarity to see it—a clarity that men depend on men to make.
My favorite of the Mad Farmer poems is also the one that Clendenin features. Like Jesus, the Mad Farmer first shows us how we have lost our way and then presents us with a different way to live. “So friends,” he says in “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” “every day do something that won’t compute.” His list of suggestions includes everything from loving someone “who does not deserve it” to planting sequoias to, in the final line, practicing resurrection.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front By Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion — put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
If you find echoes of Jesus in the Mad Farmer’s manifesto, you’re not seeing things.
Gleeson, Vikander as Levin, Kitty in Anna Karenina
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Friday
I write this post for Julia in honor of our 51st wedding anniversary, which is tomorrow. Last year, for our fiftieth, I looked at poems that describe long marriages. Today I feature my favorite literary couple, Levin and Kitty in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
Although Tolstoy famously opens his novel with the assertion that “happy families are all alike,” there is something special about this happy family.
The scene that moves me the most involves Levin’s dying brother. Levin at first does not want Kitty to accompany him to see the dissolute Nikolay because he doesn’t want her mixing with “the common wench” who is his brother’s mistress. At this point in their recent marriage, Levin paternalistically sees his new wife as a sweet little thing who won’t have much to contribute to a deathbed situation. He is startled when Kitty pushes back, saying she doesn’t care about Nikolay’s mistress. Levin starts off the following interchange:
“Well, for one thing then, because this woman’s there whom you can’t meet.”
“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. I know that my husband’s brother is dying and my husband is going to him, and I go with my husband too….”
“Kitty! Don’t get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter of such importance that I can’t bear to think that you should bring in a feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you’ll be dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow [with your family] a little.”
“There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me,” she said with tears of wounded pride and fury. “I didn’t mean, it wasn’t weakness, it wasn’t … I feel that it’s my duty to be with my husband when he’s in trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt me, you try on purpose not to understand….”
Kitty refuses to be soothed with soft words and is so insistent that Levin finally gives in, even while kicking himself for not showing “more strength of will.”
When they arrive at Nikolay’s apartment, however, Levin discovers that Kitty has strengths he has not dreamed of. While he feels out of his depth in the sick room, Kitty marches right in:
“Kostya! take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.
Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna [Nilolay’s mistress] by now, he went again in to his brother with Kitty.
Kitty, it turns out, makes an instant connection:
Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty went into the sick-room, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh young hand the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.
“We have met, though we were not acquainted, at Soden,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?”
“You would not have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance.
“Yes, I should. What a good thing you let us know! Not a day has passed that Kostya has not mentioned you, and been anxious.”
Kitty is able to scope out the situation because she looks at it through Nicolay’s eyes. “I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here,” she at one point says to him and then, turning to her husband, “We must ask about another room so that we might be nearer.”
Tolstoy contrasts the two and finds Levin wanting. The husband, who lives in his head, feels he should be able to control the situation and consequently feels defeated:
Levin could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see and did not distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelt the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out of the question was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it still more painful for Levin. To be in the sick room was agony to him, not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.
His sweet little wife, by contrast, is thoroughly up to the moment:
But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention.
We see her swing into action:
She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist’s, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sick room, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillowcases, towels, and shirts.
Levin, who has been sent away for medicine, is struck by the results:
Levin found the sick man settled comfortably and everything about him completely changed. The heavy smell was replaced by the smell of aromatic vinegar, which Kitty with pouting lips and puffed-out, rosy cheeks was squirting through a little pipe. There was no dust visible anywhere, a rug was laid by the bedside. On the table stood medicine bottles and decanters tidily arranged, and the linen needed was folded up there, and Kitty’s broderie anglaise. On the other table by the patient’s bed there were candles and drink and powders. The sick man himself, washed and combed, lay in clean sheets on high raised pillows, in a clean night-shirt with a white collar about his astoundingly thin neck, and with a new expression of hope looked fixedly at Kitty.
Sometimes only Kitty can understand what Nikolay needs and takes charge to make sure he gets it:
No one could make out what he said but Kitty; she alone understood. She understood because she was all the while mentally keeping watch on what he needed.
“On the other side,” she said to her husband, “he always sleeps on that side. Turn him over, it’s so disagreeable calling the servants. I’m not strong enough…”
Terrible as it was to Levin to put his arms round that terrible body, to take hold of that under the quilt, of which he preferred to know nothing, under his wife’s influence he made his resolute face that she knew so well, and putting his arms into the bed took hold of the body…While he was turning him over, conscious of the huge emaciated arm about his neck, Kitty swiftly and noiselessly turned the pillow, beat it up and settled in it the sick man’s head, smoothing back his hair, which was sticking again to his moist brow.
To be sure, Kitty cannot save Nikolay’s life as he is past saving. But having proved herself in the face of death, she then discovers she is pregnant, and we have no doubt that she will rise to that occasion no less ably. Levin must radically revise his previous assumptions about his wife.
Fortunately, he has the humility, the intelligence, and the sensitivity to do so. It will be a good marriage.
Reading over this episode, I wonder if Julia and me dealing with my dying mother pushed our own marriage to a higher level. I’ve noticed in myself new levels of tenderness for her since those final weeks and days. Time and time again I saw Julia, like Kitty, intuiting what my mother most needed and building a deep rapport with her in the process. I emerged from the experience with a sense of awe and gratitude, just as, 23 years before, I was amazed as I watched Julia gather and exert her strength over and over in the hours-long delivery of our first son. Repeatedly, this woman who I thought I knew has expanded my horizons beyond what I thought was possible.
People may think they know what a marriage involves, but I’ve been in one for five decades and I’m still discovering wonders.
