Oppenheimer and Metaphysical Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: July 24, 2023

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Tuesday

Back in 2010 I blogged on how Robert Oppenheimer was a fan of the devotional poet George Herbert. I had just read a biography co-written by my Carleton classmate Kai Bird, who turned up this fascinating fact. Now that Kai’s book has been turned into a Christopher Nolan biopic, I’ve learned about another 17th century poet that Oppenheimer liked. Apparently, in settling upon “Trinity” as the code name for the detonation of the first atom bomb, the director of the Manhattan Project was alluding to the John Donne sonnet “Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God.”

[Side note about Kai Bird: When I was news editor of Carleton’s student newspaper, he would send us dispatches about unrest in Pakistan, where he was studying. Running his articles on atrocities directed against what was then East Pakistan, we billed Kai as our “correspondent in Pakistan,” as though we had multiple foreign correspondents.]

In American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai and Martin Sherwin relate a story about a dinner party involving Oppenheimer, theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, and diplomat George Kennan, the architect of the Soviet containment doctrine.  Discovering that Kennan did not know Herbert’s poetry, Oppenheimer apparently introduced him to “The Pulley.”  Here’s the poem:

The Pulley
By George Herbert

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) pour on him all we can:
Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.

As both biography and film make clear, Oppenheimer was a brilliant and conflicted individual. Along with being one of the world’s leading scientists, he was also a Renaissance man, at one point learning Sanskrit and reading the Bhagavad Gita in the original. (This enabled him, after witnessing the first atomic explosion, to quote Krishna, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”)  He had a restless intellect that never stopped.

That’s why he was drawn to the restless Herbert.  “The Pulley” is a poem about what it takes to “pull” us to God, the nature of a pulley being that we must descend to rise.  While Herbert appreciates God’s generous gifts to humans, he can’t understand why he has difficulty opening his heart to God. He even seems to blame God for making him this way.  Why has God given him a restless mind that obstructs his desire to surrender to the divine? Intellectually he knows what he should do, but he can’t love God with all his heart, soul, strength and mind, as Jesus counseled. I sense that he feels like a bird beating itself against a mental cage. 

Herbert laments his restlessness in other poems as well. In “The Collar,” for instance, he describes himself as raving and growing fierce and wild. One can see such restlessness in the Nolan film, which finds powerful images for conveying Oppenheimer’s inner state. While sometimes we see him gazing with wonder at the pulsating universe, at others we see him driven almost mad by the power he sees in exploding stars, where the gravitational pull is so strong that it can swallow light. Sometimes he fears that the chain reaction he is seeking will ignite the atmosphere and end all life on earth.

In Herbert’s case, “The Pulley” ends with consolation. Maybe, the poet figures, he will wear himself out so much that he will fall at last, exhausted, into God’s arms. Maybe then he will find “the peace that passeth all understanding,” to quote from the Anglican liturgy.  If he can’t find peace through his strength, beauty, wisdom, and honor, perhaps he will arrive there through fatigue.

The gifted Oppenheimer understood Herbert’s struggle, even if, as a secular Jew, he didn’t embrace the poet’s vision of atonement with God.  Fully aware that his own brilliance was not leading him to inner peace, he appreciated Herbert for voicing his condition. Perhaps he was soothed by the poet’s vision of final rest.

One encounters similar restlessness in the poem that led to his “Trinity” designation. In “Sonnet XIV” Donne, an intellectual poet if there ever was one, is despairing that his Reason can’t save his heart from being taken over by irrational dark forces:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Oppenheimer may not believe that it is Satan who has captured the citadel of his heart (Donne writes that he is “betroth’d” unto God’s enemy). But the scientist does know that “Reason” is not saving him, meaning that he needs tough love to batter the enemy that is swarming over his defenses. He knows that, to borrow from Bacall’s line to Bogart in the movie The Big Sleep, “Sugar won’t work. It’s been tried.”

One can see the connection he draws between a three-person’d Trinity that batters and the most powerful human-caused explosion the world has ever seen. Did Oppenheimer really desire for the bomb would batter the world with god-like force? Was there some part of him that thrilled when he quoted Krishna’s “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”? Perhaps, momentarily, the answer to both questions is yes. After all, he saw that it would take supreme force, not rational negotiation, to stop the Nazi slaughter of his people. But scientific Reason, of which he was a master and upon which he relied to guide his life, failed to quell his inner turmoil.

I’m not convinced that Oppenheimer is a great film—the director often gets lost in the weeds—but Nolan’s depiction of this turmoil explains why Oppenheimer would have been drawn to 17th century metaphysical poetry. At few times in literary history has Reason been more at war with itself.

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Tony Bennett, WWII, and Race Activism

By Robin Bates | Published: July 23, 2023
Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennett in 1982

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Monday

As I was reading about the life of legendary singer Tony Bennett, who passed away Friday, I had a shock: some of his World War II experiences, along with their aftereffects, sounded a lot like my father’s. Scott Bates died ten years ago and I’m regretting that I can’t ask him about this.

According to a Washington Post article, Bennett was a member of the army regiment that liberated a Landsberg, Germany concentration camp, which was a subcamp for Dachau. Bennett later wrote,

“I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds…[T]hey had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe we were there to help them and not to kill them.”

Although my father didn’t liberate a concentration camp, he did see Dachau three days after the U.S. army freed the prisoners. One of his jobs in the summer of 1945 was to take Germans through the camp to show them what their country had been doing, proving to them that the camps were not just American propaganda.

The Bennett story that most hit home with me, however, was an officer’s reaction when Bennett tried to take a Black friend, an old high school buddy, to a Thanksgiving meal for servicemen. The Post has his story:

The pair got as far as the lobby of the building the Army was using as a mess hall when they were berated by an irate officer. In the segregated military of the day, the two men were not allowed to be seen with each other at a military function, never mind share a meal together.

“This officer took out a razor blade and cut my corporal stripes off my uniform right then and there,” Bennett wrote. “He spit on them and threw them on the floor, and said, ‘Get your ass out of here!’”

Bennett was reassigned from Special Services to Graves Registration, where he dug up the bodies of American soldiers killed in combat for reburial in military cemeteries. The experience “was just as bad as it sounds,” he recalled.

My father, meanwhile, used to tell me about being teamed up with an African American and a white southerner when he was serving as an MP (military police) in Munich.  It was there that he had his first first-hand encounter with southern racism (my father was from Evanston, IL), directed against a man my father liked and respected. Tensions arose amongst the three of them as they carried out their job, and my father refused the alliance that the White man wanted to form against the African American. If anything, the two of them held the southerner at a distance.

According to the Post, Bennett’s war experience shaped both his views on racial equality. In the 1960s he became a civil rights activist and later an outspoken critic of South African apartheid:

In 1965, his friend and singer Harry Belafonte asked him to walk in a civil rights march planned by King in Selma. Bennett accepted without hesitation.

“I kept flashing back to a time twenty years ago when my buddies and I fought our way into Germany,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It felt the same way down in Selma: the white state troopers were really hostile, and they were not shy about showing it.”

My father too became a civil rights activist, working with our local NAACP chapter to integrate Tennessee schools, including instigating a legal action on behalf of his children (I was 11 at the time) directed against the Franklin County Board of Education.

My father and Bennett also shared strong anti-war views. Bennett reports, “My life experiences, ranging from the Battle of the Bulge to marching with Martin Luther King, made me a life-long humanist and pacifist, and reinforced my belief that violence begets violence and that war is the lowest form of human behavior.”

In addition to helping integrate both our county school system and the University of the South at Sewanee, where he taught, my father was also a lifelong member of the War Resisters’ League, several times editing their yearly calendars and producing the anthology Poems of War Resistance.

Reading about Bennett gave me a clearer sense of how the war shaped my father, who in turn shaped my own view of the world. I conclude today’s post with a poem my father wrote about his World War II experience in response to my son Toby (“Mike” in the poem) asking him about those years. I note that my father rejected the appellation “the greatest generation” and his use of quotation marks in the title indicate sarcasm:

“The Greatest Generation”
By Scott Bates

“What was the Second World War like?”
 I am asked by my youngest grandson, Mike,
 Who has just remembered that he has
 To write a paper for his English class
 And hopes his grandfather will tell him a story
 Like Private Ryan, full of guts and glory.
 “That’s easy,” I answer—I am the One
 Who Was There, the Expert, the Veteran–
 (Who has read in the paper, by the way,
 That thousands of vets die every day),
 “It was boring, mostly,” I say, “and very
 Gung-ho.” I think. “It was pretty scary.
 And long. And the longer it got, the more idiotic
 It seemed.” I stop. “It was patriotic.”

How to tell the kid the exciting news
That we survived on sex and booze.
And hated the Army and hated the War
And hoped They knew what we were fighting for . . . .
And I remember my buddy, Mac,
Who got shot up in a tank attack,
And Sturiano, my closest friend . . .

It is still going on. How will it end?

“It was people surrounded by dying men.”

“But what was it like?” asks Mike again.

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Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s Lover

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2023
Rodin, Christ and Mary Magdalene

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Sunday

As yesterday was Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day, I share a Rilke poem about the woman who was both a follower of Jesus and a wealthy patron. Over the centuries, for problematic reasons, Christians have conflated her with the adulterous woman whom Jesus saved from stoning and the sinning woman who bathed Jesus’s feet with tears. There is no question that she was one of the women at Jesus’s tomb, however, and in “The Pieta,” which appeared in Rilke’s Magdalene sequence, he has her cradling the crucified Christ. The poem may have been inspired by Rodin’s “Christ and Mary Magdalene” sculpture, which itself is a play on Michelangelo’s famous sculpture.

In Rilke’s version, the cradling is sensual, not motherly. Magdalene at last gets what she has wanted—to hold Jesus in her arms—but the crucifixion has also robbed her. She wants Jesus for herself exclusively and so bridles at how he has given his love to the whole world. “Your heart is open to the passerby:/ none should have entered there, save only I,” she laments jealously.

Death and sexual passion become bound up together in Rilke’s haunting vision.  The poem is tender, heartbreaking, and perhaps somewhat disturbing.

The Pieta
By Rainer Maria Rilke

So once more, Jesus, I behold your feet,
feet that long since my pitiful hands laid bare,
to wash them,—then they seemed a boy’s, I thought;
how they stood tangled in my covering hair,
like a white wild thing in the briers caught.

For the first time, this night of love, your sweet
and never-cherished limbs are mine to know.
I never warmed them with my body’s heat,—
now I may only watch them, thus brought low.

But look, your hands, your wasted hands, are torn:
Beloved, not by me, with passion’s thorn.
Your heart is open to the passerby:
none should have entered there, save only I.

Now you are tired, your mouth, that tired flower,
has no desire for my mouth of woe.—
When, Jesus, Jesus, O when was our hour?
Strangely together to our doom we go.

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Are Stories a Trap? Not the Great Ones

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2023
Engenio Zampighi, The Storyteller

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Friday

The recent New Yorker has an article—”The Tyranny of the Tale”—on the way that story telling is being sold as “the solution to everything.” Like Peter Brooks in Seduced by Story: The Uses and Abuses of Fiction, about which I’ve written multiple posts, Parul Sehgal notes, while storytelling is often touted as a powerful change agent, often it can work as a cage.

His complaint appears to be that “story supremacists” don’t acknowledge the downside. Instead, he says, they say we must “be spoken to in story” for the sake of “comprehension and care.” By using this tool, these advocates say, we can save “wildlife, water, conservatism, your business, our streets, newspapers, medicine, the movies, San Francisco, and meaning itself.”

Story, Sehgal continues, “has elbowed out everything else, from the lyric to the logical argument.” He draws on various academics that I have written about in the past (Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal) as he surveys the claims:

All sorts of studies are fanned out in defense: we are persuaded more by story than by statistics; we recall facts longer if they are embedded in narrative; stories boost production of cortisol (encouraging attentiveness) and oxytocin (encouraging connection). We are pattern-seeking, meaning-making creatures, who project our narrative needs upon the world.

For Sehgal, this is a problem. For instance, the “unruliness of life” is “ill-served by story and its coercive resolution” because, by forcing reality into our storytelling agendas, we miss much. He cites Plato’s suspicion about story (I’ve also written about this), how it seduces us away from reason. For instance, Sehgal says, story supremacists may stress the importance of religious narratives but, in doing so, they miss the other ways that sacred texts communicate. For instance, “Religious texts were delivered as often in riddles as in parables; much of the Quran is non-narrative.”

And then there’s this:

Classics of ancient literature do not always evince story in a conventional sense: Gilgamesh is woven out of speeches; Beowulf scarcely has a causal plot. For centuries, Scheherazade’s stories, collected as The Arabian Nights were excluded from the canon of Arabic literature precisely because they were stories, classified as khurafa—fantasies that were fit only for women and children, that sat in the shadow of poetry, the revered genre of the time.

It is here where we begin to see the problem with Sehgal’s argument. First, I’ve never once met anyone who said that Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Arabian Nights are not stories, whatever else they might be. The authors he cites approvingly–he mentions Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan, Muriel Spark, and practitioners of the nouveau roman (say, Alain Robbe Grillet)—are all, at one level or another, storytellers. It is in Sehgal’s use of the qualifier “conventional sense” that we can see where he has gone astray: he is conflating all narrative, from great literature to simple “problem presented-problem solved” stories. Just because stories have multiple dimensions to them doesn’t mean they aren’t stories.

Take Beowulf, for instance, which not only contains multiple stories but even features bards telling stories, along with the stories they tell. True, the epic sometimes jumps around and can seem disjointed. For instance, we have the story of the last veteran, then we jump to the dragon moving into his funeral barrow, then we learn that the dragon has been roused to anger upon having had a cup stolen, then we jump to its burning down Beowulf’s hall, then we see Beowulf looking back and seeing his life as one meaningless death after another (with each death presented as a story), then he is fighting the dragon. So okay, this isn’t a straightforward narrative. But the whole coheres when you realize that the storyteller is grappling with the problem of Beowulf getting old and in danger of becoming a dragon. The story, one realizes, is not unlike the story of King Lear, who at one point warns, “Come not between a dragon and his wrath.”

Beowulf is a complex story while the problems with story that Sehgal points to are those associated with predictable, formulaic, and one-dimensional stories. And it’s true that such stories can be very damaging indeed. Demagogues, for instance, have always used stories to get their way. Donald Trump’s story is always a variation of “X is trying to victimize me.” Mein Kampf is Hitler’s life told as a story. Boring and predictable though such stories may be, for narcissists they never get old. But that doesn’t mean they should be lumped in with all stories.

Sehgal also makes the mistake of thinking that only 20th story authors have become suspicious of story. But from the novel’s very beginnings in the 17th century, authors have probed the nature of narrative. Cervantes gives us a hero crazed by story (1605) and then, in the second volume (1615), introduces characters who have read the first volume and are interacting with Quixote and Sancho Panza with that knowledge. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) is essentially a novel about someone reflecting on how to tell his story, and Henry Fielding spends the introductions to the 18 books of Tom Jones (1748) exploring what exactly he as a novelist is up to. And as for straying from straightforward plot, a novel like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) at one point gives us three different price structures for pawning off one’s baby. (Moll selects option #2.)

I also take issue with Sehgal separating story from other ways of conveying truth. Every form of writing, even the most fact-based and scientific, has a story to it. When I was running a summer faculty writing group at my old college, which I did for a number of years, my question to my fellow writers was always, “what’s the story of this piece?” I saw colleagues in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, history, math and other subjects recognize that thinking of their research in terms of storytelling gave them ways of organizing their material. They usually didn’t foreground the story, instead presenting their data points in ways that were appropriate to their field. Still, they found that seeing their project as a narrative was wonderfully clarifying.

It’s true, as Sehgal and Brooks note, that narrative can be abused. This is true of anything that is powerful, including religion, love, marriage, the law, etc. Great stories take us into deep places while shallow stories can do considerable damage.

So the problem is not that story is omnipresent. That has always been true. The problem lies in distinguishing between stories that reveal truth and those that aim to deceive and harm. A literary education helps students tell the difference.

Additional thought: Deepjeet, a longtime reader, responded to this post with the following useful comment:

My opinion is this – storytelling is being used as a panacea to all problems. I work in startups where story telling is being used as a replacement for lousy business models. It’s like Arabian nights where everyday CEO spins a yard to live another day. However the precaution is also in a story – that of the boy who cried wolf many times only to be stranded when he really needed help.

I absolutely love the application of Scheherazade, who in this scenario becomes an incessant spinner of bullshit. This makes me realize that the New Yorker article didn’t go far enough in showing the various ways that storytelling can be abused. But as Deepjeet notes, storytelling can also function as a corrective. Aesop is one of the many storytellers who can hold us to account in such instances. To cite another at random, King Lear shows us the disasters that can befall us when we allow self-indulgent, wish-fulfilling narratives to guide our political decisions.

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Mixed Feelings about “On Raglan Road”

By Robin Bates | Published: July 19, 2023
Patrick Kavanagh, Hilda Moriarty

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Thursday

Have you ever had a poem that first entranced and then, when you looked at it closer, disappointed you? What are we do with powerful images that are morally dubious? I have in mind Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road,” also a popular song. It swept me away when I encountered it on our April trip to Ireland but now really bothers me, in part because the song itself is hypnotic.

“On Raglan Road” is about an aging poet who falls in love with a young woman and then vents his fury when she drops him. Why did he waste his poetic genius on “a creature made of clay,” he wonders.

The poem is based on real people. Kavanagh, when 40, met a 22-year-old medical student, Hilda Moriarty. While she admired his poetry, she didn’t return his romantic feelings and, a year later, married someone younger. Kavanagh used the poem to strike back. Here it is:

On Raglan Road
By Patrick Kavanagh

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

The signs for new love are not propitious and the poet even senses he may even “one day rue” falling for the “snare” of “her dark hair.” Nevertheless, he decides to take the plunge anyway, grandly telling himself that, if grief comes, then let it come. He appears to us less grand by the end of the poem.

When Kavanagh writes, “I said, let grief be a fallen leaf,” I thought of Archibald MacLeish’s line in “Ars Poetica” about how grief can be captured by “an empty doorway and a maple leaf.” As Kavanagh sees it, the risk is worth it because his love feels like the dawning of a new day.

Unfortunately for him, the path they take trippingly is at the edge of a deep ravine where can be seen the “worth of passion’s pledge.” In other words, the ravine is filled with the bodies of people who have discovered, after having had passion pledged to them, that the pledge was worthless. Whether Moriarty ever pledged her love to Kavanagh is up for debate—she says not—but he feels betrayed.

In their brief relationship, he says, he gave her inestimable “gifts of mind” and “poems to say.” Once it was over, however, she made a point of walking the other way whenever she saw him (“on a street where old ghosts meet”), leaving him to his bitter reflections. Or so goes the story in the poem.

Rejection by a love object is an ancient story, one which many poets have voiced. I think, for instance, of Shakespeare’s sonnet 147, which concludes, “For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,/ Who art as Black as hell, as dark as night.” If “Raglan Road” bothers me more than Shakespeare’s dark lady sonnets, it may be on account of Kavanagh’s sleazy innuendo. A Substack essay (author unknown) helps me piece this together.

The essay points out that, by noting that the Queen of Hearts is making tarts, he is hinting that she is a loose woman. This implication is reenforced by the reference to Dublin’s Grafton Street, which apparently had a reputation as a street for female sex-workers. It’s not enough for Kavanagh to express his disappointment; he must slime the woman as well.

It’s worth noting that the tarts allusion was originally even more sexually suggestive, accusing Moriarty of fake or “synthetic” sighs and describing her eyes as “fish-dim.” Before being changed, the line read, “Synthetic sighs and fish-dim eyes, and all death’s loud display.”

Meanwhile the mention in the rewritten line to the poet “not making hay” means, for farmer poet Kavanagh, not doing productive work—which in his case is writing poems. In other words, this siren has seduced him away from his calling and, to add insult to injury, has not properly appreciated the gifts he has bestowed upon her.

The Substack essay helpfully annotates the image of an angel losing his wings. The book of Genesis speaks of the “immortal and spiritual sons of God” becoming mortal men after they took to wife corporeal women:

[T]he sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years (Genesis 6:3-4, King James version).

In short, Kavanagh sees himself as a higher order angel while Moriarty is a mere creature made of clay. Rather than making heavenly music with him, she has clipped his wings. And done it at the dawning of his love, no less.

Now, I agree with Kavanagh that poetry is a heavenly gift, and it’s certainly the case that idealized muses have led to some great poems. One thinks of Fanny Braun for Keats and Maud Gonne for Yeats, with the latter telling the poet that he should be happy she has rejected him because

you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.

Kavanagh’s heartbreak has led to a potentially great poem in this instance. It’s just that I find distasteful his sense of entitlement and his need to smear Hilda Moriarty to make himself feel better. It reduces a grand love into something petty.

Of course, poets are human like the rest of us. It’s just that the best poems about rejected love manage to transcend our smallness. As Gonne points out, poets can use their pain to achieve further insight. In the Shakespeare sonnet I referenced above, for instance, the Bard is exploring and even mocking his own blindness; he’s aware that his furious outburst is as much directed at himself as at the woman and he senses it may even be overdone. Indeed, in other poems to the same lady he acknowledges that he lives in denial (e.g., “When my love tells me she is made of truth,/ I do believe her, though I know she lies”).

I see none of this higher-level processing at work in Kavanagh’s poem. Just hurt feelings and naked resentment.

But I’m open to readers changing my mind.

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To Fight Authoritarianism, Think Sisyphus

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2023
Titian, Sisyphus (1548)

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Wednesday

As Trump daily sounds more like Mussolini and Hitler—and as the GOP and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation sign on to his expressed plans to invest all power in an authoritarian (Republican) president—New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat becomes essential reading. I recommend subscribing to her daily essays (you can get the shorter versions free) for her insights on authoritarianism. In her most recent post, the author of Strongmen talks about the importance of self-care as we push back against Trump’s efforts to turn us into Victor Orban’s Hungary.

Before going further, here (according to a recent New York Times report) is what Americans face:

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

I write about Ben-Ghiat’s latest essay here because she cites an exiled Chinese dissident recommending Sisyphus as a model for how not to burn out while fighting for democracy. The man’s allusion brings to mind Albert Camus’s famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

“I would say my personal hero is Sisyphus,” the exiled Chinese dissident artist Badiucao remarked when I interviewed him in Feb. 2022. Facing continual Chinese government efforts to shut down his shows abroad, he takes inspiration from the Greek mythological figure who was eternally rolling a large stone uphill. “It seems like what I’m doing is always censored and taken down, constantly being threatened. But the very action of an individual who keeps trying in the right direction, has its own value, regardless of the result.”

But because pushing that giant stone day after day is exhausting, Ben Ghiat adds, we need to attend to self-care. That’s because

fighting for democracy is taxing on the body and the spirit. It can be difficult to show up day after day to protest or work on lawsuits, legislation, or voter registration without knowing what the outcome of your efforts will be. This is where hope factors in, as well as the self-regard that comes from knowing you are doing the right thing.

Camus acknowledges the exhausting part but adds that the labor is also what gives our lives meaning. He sums up the story as follows:

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

There are different versions of Sisyphus’s crime, but Camus focuses on one in particular. Sisyphus has persuade Hades to temporarily return him to the world of the living to see to a domestic matter. Instead of immediately returning, however, he decides to stay:

But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

This love of life is important and, according to Camus, never leaves him, even when he is undergoing his incessant toil. Like other existentialists, Camus sees us living in an absurd universe—which is to say, in a godless universe where our suffering and dying make no sense—while Sisyphus is “the absurd hero” who refuses to surrender to this reality (say, by committing suicide). Instead, he looks to himself to find meaning, regardless of the consequences:

He is [the absurd hero], as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.

Camus imagines Sisyphus committing himself wholeheartedly to the task of pushing the rock up the slope:

[O]ne sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

For Camus, the key moment is the descent, which is the hour of consciousness. If one is pushing against an authoritarian regime that appears as immutable as the rock, then it is when the activist is pausing to reflect upon his struggle that “he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”

Camus does not underestimate the challenge. The boundless grief can be “too heavy to bear,” he says before adding, “These are our nights of Gethsemane.” And yet, he contends, “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.”

To elaborate on this point, he shifts to Greek tragedy, especially Oedipus. After he is crushed by the gods in unimaginable ways, the Theban king asserts this freedom. He is no longer the plaything of blind fate because he accepts his condition and acts freely. We see him doing this in both Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus, and it is the sequel play that Camus cites, writing,

[B]lind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Œdipus…thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

Here’s the passage, which occurs when Oedipus is about to be driven from a sacred grove dedicated to the furies:

Oedipus: Daughter, what counsel should we now pursue?
Antigone: We must obey and do as here they do.
Oedipus: Thy hand then!
Antigone: Here, O father, is my hand.

Oedipus’s conclusion that “all is well,” Camus says, is a sacred remark, which echoes in

the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

To cite another example, I think of Agave at the end of Euripides’s The Bacchae. She has just, under Dionysus’s spell, torn her own son apart for having insulted the god. But whereas Dionysus is a one-dimensional presence—“I am a god. And when insulted, the gods do not forgive”—she has the force of suffering humanity. She doesn’t lapse into paralysis but reaches out to both her father and her dead son, saying to the latter,

I wash your wounds.
With this princely shroud I cover your head.
I bind your limbs with love,
flesh of my flesh,
in life as in death,
forever.

Remember that, in today’s post, for the god-decreed rock we are substituting authoritarianism, which activists must incessantly push against. Their reward is discovering that their fate rests in their own hands. As Camus puts it, “All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him.” And he concludes,

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The fight for democracy is enough to fill our hearts. Ben-Ghiat just wants to make sure that, as we walk down that slope, we find ways to restore ourselves before we start pushing again.

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Before Vaccines: Home Burials

By Robin Bates | Published: July 17, 2023
Robert Reid, Her First Born

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Tuesday

Reader Patrick Logan sent in a moving reply to my recent post on how anti-vaxxers should read 19th century novels to learn why vaccines are such a gift. If we are not constantly faced with childhood death as past ages were, its because of scientific advances in combatting disease.

Citing statistics, while important, is not enough. To report that Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vax organization was responsible for the recent measles deaths of over 50 toddlers and children in Samoa, while horrifying, can lack the bite of a poem describing the upheaval a child’s death causes in a family. Patrick suggests we all read Robert Frost’s “Home Burial.”

Patrick reports on a recent visit to the Wolfeboro, NH library where he discovered a book containing gravestone inscriptions from the town’s many cemeteries. There he learns about the Rendall family. Miles Rendall lost his father when he was 5 (in 1824) and then later, after marrying Adeline, he saw four of their children die (in 1864), followed two weeks later by Adeline’s own death. And then two more died. Here’s the list:

Edwin, November 12 – age 7 
Elzira, November 15 – age 5 
Helen, November 18 – age 9 
Arietta, November 22 – age 10 
Within two weeks of Adeline’s death, two more children died: 
Nathan, November 29 – age 2 
James, December 6 – age 1 
Miles later married Mary, who died in 1876. 
Before Mary’s death, she and Miles lost both of their children: 
Albert, 1870 – age 6 months 
Oran, 1867 – age unknown 

Patrick says that these family tragedies hit home because Miles lived on Cotton Valley Road, just a few miles from where his own father’s family lived for more than two hundred years (in Ossipee). Patrick asks,

How does anyone make sense of such loss? I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child, and I’m reluctant to send these lines from perhaps the saddest poem in the English language, Frost’s Home Burial. I’m overwhelmed by Amy’s ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,’ and her husband’s plea, ‘Help me, then.’ There is so much emotion here.

In the poem, Amy is lashing out at her husband for the nonchalant way (or so she perceives it) that he has buried their child. He meanwhile is desperately trying to figure out how to pull her out of a depression that causes her to shy away from him in horror. The following conversation begins after he realizes that she has been looking through a window that frames the family cemetery, including their child’s mound:

‘There are three stones of slate and one of marble, 
Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight 
On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those. 
But I understand: it is not the stones, 
But the child’s mound—’ 

                             ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she cried. 

She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm 
That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs; 
And turned on him with such a daunting look, 
He said twice over before he knew himself: 
‘Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?’ 

‘Not you! Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t need it! 
I must get out of here. I must get air. 
I don’t know rightly whether any man can.’ 

‘Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time. 
Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.’ 
He sat and fixed his chin between his fists. 
‘There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.’ 

‘You don’t know how to ask it.’ 

                                              ‘Help me, then.’ 

In some ways, this is a “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” situation, where each fails to understand the way the other is processing grief. The poem may be autobiographical since Frost wrote it in response to the death of his son Elliott of cholera at the age of four. Frost and Elinor would later lose another child the day after she was born, as well as a 29-year-old daughter due to complications from childbirth. Modern science could well have made a difference in all three cases.

Patrick’s point, in citing the poem, is that each child’s death is an emotional earthquake in the lives of their families—which I, having lost a 21-year-old child, can confirm. That anti-vaxxers are willing to unleash this devastation upon the world should confound us all. They are like spoiled rich kids who, having grown up in a protected environment, think hunger and poverty are no big deal.

Among explanations for such behavior, I like that of Atlantic writer and former Republican Tom Nichols. Because technology (including medical technology) has made our lives easier, he says, we have become bored. We therefore look to “political entrepreneurs” to spice things up with performative politics.

The performances are paying off handsomely for many of these entrepreneurs, including Kennedy. Meanwhile, children die.

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Poets Talking Poetry over a Beer

By Robin Bates | Published: July 16, 2023
R.S. Thomas

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Monday

As this week sees the beginning of Sewanee’s Summer Writers’ Conference, I thought I’d reflect upon an enjoyable R.S. Thomas poem about the writing process. In “Poetry for Supper,” the Welsh writer imagines two poets arguing about whether poetry is more inspiration or perspiration.

It’s a question that people have been debating for at least as long ago as Plato, who in The Ion gets a performer of Homer’s poetry (a rhapsode) to admit that he is more an inspired receiver than a skilled craftsman. (Plato thinks this is bad although Ion seems fine with it.)

We have our own versions of the debate. Thomas Edison once said, when asked about his genius for invention, that “two percent is genius and ninety-eight per cent is hard work.” I’ve also heard (but don’t know the source) that “art is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.” And then there is Yogi Berra’s version: “Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.”

Anyway, in Thomas’s poem the discussion is endless. But it at least gives the two poets a subject to occupy them as they share a beer (“the talk ran/ Noisily by them, glib with prose”). We see one poet taking a Keatsian position, the other a Chaucerian/Yeatsian position.

Poet #1 argues that

verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.

In saying this, he is playing off a Keats observation in an 1818 letter to his friend John Taylor:

The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, seem natural to [the poet], shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it – And this leads me to another axiom – That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Thomas’s poet here, like Thomas himself, is much more earthy than Keats. Still, the sentiment is the same.

The second poet responds by citing Chaucer, asking what the poet “said once about the long toil/ That goes like blood to the poem’s making?” In a fine discussion of the poem, the Guardian’s Carol Rumen speculates that this is a reference to The Parliament of Fowles, where Chaucer writes, “The Lyf so short, the craft so long to Lerne, / Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.” But the poet may also be referring to the story that the Squire tells in Canterbury Tales, where the young man pleads an insufficient grasp of rhetorical figures to do justice to the woman whose beauty he wants to describe:

But to tell you all her beauty,
It lies not in my tongue, nor in my abilities;
I dare not undertake so high a thing.
My English also is insufficient.
He must be an excellent rhetorician
Who knows his figures of speech appropriate to that art,
If he should describe her in every detail.
I am none such, I must speak as I can.

Without such a grasp of the poetic craft, poet #2 argues,

                the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust.

Then comes the reference to Yeats’s “Circus Animals’ Desertion.” The “masterful images” that once came to the poet effortlessly have deserted him in his later years. To create new poems, he figures, he must reach into the recesses of his heart, which he describes as a rag and bone (junk) shop. From there, he must—perhaps painfully—build a ladder up to new poetic creations:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

This is the ladder that Thomas’s Poet #2 references:

            Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.

To which poet #1, returning perhaps to Keats and his naturally shining sun, replies:

You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.

Which elicits the response,

Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.

And so on and on, ending on a note of gentle self-satire. Prose is glib because it thinks it can arrive at definitive answers where there are none to be had. For that matter, perhaps the poets would be spending their time more profitably if they were actually writing poetry rather than talking about how poetry is written.

Then again, it’s a harmless enough diversion from either the hard work of writing poems or the intuitive work of allowing them to flow through one. The fellowship is the real point.

Furthermore, as I can personally testify, talking about literature is endlessly satisfying. Here’s the poem:

Poetry for Supper
By R.S. Thomas

‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’

‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.’

‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’

‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’

So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlor, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

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Pullman and Dante on the Afterlife

By Robin Bates | Published: July 15, 2023
Gustave Doré, Paradiso

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Sunday

This has been an emotional week. Our two sons and their families joined us at Myrtle Beach as we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary, and our stay comes to an end today on the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death (she died July 16, 2022). Thinking of her, I can’t help but ask where she and all those others who I have loved and lost are now. Where is my father Scott and my eldest son Justin? Should I conclude, with John Wilmot, that “after Death nothing is, and nothing, death,/ The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.” Or are they, in some form or another, still participating in the drama of creation.

Literature has grappled with this question time and again throughout history. The version I find most inspiring—and that comes closest to my own beliefs—appears in Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass, the third in the Dark Materials trilogy (after The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife). That vision is itself a reworking of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially Inferno and Paradiso.

To be sure, self-declared atheist that Pullman is, Dante’s Christian belief system doesn’t figure into his afterlife except in a negative way: he, like Dante, has reserved a special place in hell for corrupt church figures. For Pullman, however, church authorities are almost by definition villains, having crafted a hell that serves their selfish purposes. In this he agrees with Wilmot in “A Fragment of Seneca Translated”:

For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God’s everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more.

But Pullman moves beyond Wilmot’s dour materialist vision (“dead, we become the lumber of the world”) to something transcendent. He even gives us a version of the harrowing of hell where supposedly, between the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus visited the afterlife and brought salvation to souls held captive there. In Amber Spyglass, Lyra plays this role, freeing all who want to be freed. The vision she articulates can perhaps be characterized as a Buddhist version of Dante’s cosmic dance.

“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”

Contrast this with the static limbo in which the dead find themselves. Pullman sets it up so that Christ-figure Lyra shows us how “death shall be no more” (to borrow from Donne). In his vision, Pullman is like Dante in seeing the afterlife as a continuation of the life we lived on earth. We can, if we want, make of our lives what Lyra calls the “Republic of Heaven,” which is her version of Jesus’s earthly Kingdom of God (“on earth as it is in heaven”). Alternatively, we can turn our lives into a Satanic hell. Here’s how Lyra defines her Republic:

We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place…. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build… The Republic of Heaven.”

The truly lost souls in Pullman’s afterlife are those religious ideologues who have sacrificed this life to focus on a desired afterlife and who, as a result, cannot see Pullman’s sterile netherworld as anything other than the paradise they envisioned. Plunged into denial because of the cognitive disconnect, they persuade themselves that the harpies are angels and that the caves are realms of light. To do otherwise would mean (to echo another Wilmot line) that all their lives they have been in the wrong. As one figure describes it,

When we were alive, they told us that when we died we’d go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That’s what they said. And that’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.

This character, however, has a Road to Damascus experience, choosing to follow Lyra as Saul/Paul chose to follow Christ:

But now this child has come offering us a way out and I’m going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

One imagines him quoting a passage from Henry Vaughan’s “The World” to those church authorities who insist on remaining behind:

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.

Dante brilliantly shows why it is that lost souls prefer dark night before true light. After all, they get exactly the situation that, while alive, they wished for. To cite examples from Dante’s fifth circle, those who longed to vent their rage on their enemies get to tear their enemies to pieces for all eternity while those sullen ones who inwardly fume get to do so buried in a dark muck. By focusing on their anger, these figures have shut out God’s love.

The harpies, like Dante’s hellish overseers, are projections of their inner darkness. As the harpy No-Name, referencing the Calvinist “Authority” that has ruled the land, puts it,

Thousands of years ago, when the first ghosts came down here, the Authority gave us the power to see the worst in everyone, and we have fed on the worst ever since, till our blood is rank with it and our very hearts are sickened. But still, it was all we had to feed on. It was all we had.

While this moment of self-reflection is promising, No-Name has been so conditioned to her hellish state that at first she can’t accept the pain of hope. As Pullman puts it, the harpies are “hungry and suffused with the lust for misery.” Perhaps concluding that April is the cruelest month, No-Name envisions preying forever on how (if I may use a colloquialism) we are stuck in our shit:

What will we do now? I shall tell you what we will do: from now on, we shall hold nothing back. We shall hurt and defile and tear and rend every ghost that comes through, and we shall send them mad with fear and remorse and self-hatred. This is a wasteland now; we shall make it a hell!”  

Lyra and Will, however, are able to break through to the harpies, who sense deep down there is another possibility. When Will asks No-Name why, in spite of her hateful declarations, she and the other harpies are listening to Lyra, she replies,

Because she spoke the truth. Because it was nourishing. Because it was feeding us. Because we couldn’t help it. Because it was true. Because we had no idea that there was anything but wickedness. Because it brought us news of the world and the sun and the wind and the rain. Because it was true.

We see the joy that comes with accepting this truth in Lyra’s friend Roger, who is tragically killed in the first book:

The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air. . .and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness.

No-Name, meanwhile, transforms into an angel of grace who will guide the dead to the light. Lyra says to her,

“I’m going to call you Gracious Wings. So that’s your name now, and that’s what you’ll be for evermore: Gracious Wings.”
“One day,” said the harpy, “I will see you again, Lyra Silvertongue.”
“And if I know you’re here, I shan’t be afraid,” Lyra said. “Good-bye, Gracious Wings, till I die.”
She embraced the harpy, hugging her tightly and kissing her on both cheeks.

One finds versions of Pullman’s afterlife in other moving poems about death, such as Mary Elizabeth’s Frye’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep”:

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

It can also be found in the inscription that Julia and I put on Justin’s gravestone. It’s from Adonais, Percy Shelley’s elegy to John Keats:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…

Ever since Justin died, I have envisioned him as part of a celestial dance such as is described in Paradiso, which is governed by “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” And if he and my parents and all who I have loved and lost are dancing there, then maybe Julia and I will rejoin them when we die. It is a vision that Will and Lyra articulate when they are forced to separate forever at the end of the trilogy:

I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…

Is this vision true? At the very least, it seems truer to me than Wilmot’s materialist vision that the soul or spirit is snuffed out utterly with our last breath. In the meantime, it is up to us to forge the Republic of Heaven in the here and now.

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