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Sunday
Julia and I have joined a weekly group that engages in the practice of Lectio Divina, a “traditional monastic practice of scriptural reading, meditation and prayer intended to promote communion with God and to increase the knowledge of God’s word” (Wikipedia). Each week we discuss a Biblical passage and musical selection chosen by the organizer of the group, which includes some very insightful people with extraordinary backgrounds. The sessions so far have been rich and rewarding.
Our first reading three weeks ago provided a perfect introduction. It included the parable of the mustard seed, itself one of Jesus’s most mind-bending stories, but what most caught my eye was a meta moment where Matthew reflects on the practice of using parables itself:
He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’ He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’ Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables’. (Matthew 13:31-35)
The prophet Matthew has in mind is the psalmist:
I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old…(Psalms 78:2).
It’s as though, by watching Jesus pile parable upon parable, Matthew feels the need to comment on the process. Why employ this method rather than express his point straightforwardly?
You know, of course, where I stand on this issue: literature (including stories) gets at truths that escape straight exposition. In fact, I read the whole Bible this way: Genesis does not provide us with a literal account of creation but rather provides us with a story that articulates the wonder of our origins. It also, as great stories do, raises issues that we wrestle with to this day. Religion is better served by leaving Big Bang and DNA theories to scientists and focusing rather on what our existence means.
I think also of Emily Dickinson’s admonition to “tell the truth, but tell it slant.” In her account, desiring to get the truth straight would be like Semele in Greek mythology getting obliterated after seeing Zeus in all his glory:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
Jesus, good teacher that he is, knows that his audiences can’t see everything that he sees and so finds a way to lead them in the right direction. Like any creative storyteller, he uses stories to involve them in the exploratory process. As reader response theorist Wolfgang Iser points out, literature is filled with gaps or indeterminate elements that readers must fill by active participation. Jesus’s auditors would have internalized the parables in a deep way by applying their own experiences to them.
Mark’s reflections remind me of an important lecture that Rob MacSwain, a C.S. Lewis scholar who teaches at Sewanee’s Theological Seminar, gave to our Adult Sunday School. You can read my full account of it here but, to sum up the highlights, it discussed Lewis’s contributions to Anglican theology.
Which at first didn’t seem like much. For one thing, as MacSwain noted in starting out, Anglicans/ Episcopalians don’t do theology.
This would distinguish them from Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Mormons, Moravians, and various other denominations, and looking at Anglicanism’s history one can see why. Fighting over matters of doctrine was a recipe for civil war in Tudor England, which Queen Elizabeth wanted to avoid at all costs. How did one keep Catholics and radical Protestants from cutting each other’s throats? One sidestepped theological battles. As Elizabeth said at one point, “There is only one Christ, Jesus, one faith. All else is a dispute over trifles.”
Theology, which is intent on bringing everything into logical order, often concerns itself with these trifles. MacSwain said that Anglicans are particularly uninterested in systematic theology and in the currently fashionable analytic theology, which is suspicious of metaphor and ambiguity as it strives for the clearest account possible of God and religion.
After having contended that Anglicans don’t “do” theology, however, MacSwain then reversed course and said they in fact engage in it at a very deep level. They just do it through literature. He mentioned figures like John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden before turning to his own focus on C.S. Lewis.
To this list, by the way, I would add Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, John Keble, Gerard Manley Hopkins (who became Catholic but started off Anglican), Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, R.S. Thomas, John Betjeman, Malcolm Guite, Madeleine L’Engle, Richard Wilbur, and Mary Oliver. Some lean more to low church or evangelical Anglicanism, some to high church Anglicanism or even Anglo-Catholicism, but all grapple with spiritual issues in one way or other.
For his part, Lewis sometimes used poetry, sometimes fantasy (the Narnia books), sometimes science fiction (his space trilogy), sometimes other fictional forms (e.g., The Screwtape Letters) to explore issues of faith. Through literature, he and these other authors capture the emotional as well as the intellectual dimensions of spirit. What they lose in philosophical rigor (although literature has its own form of rigor), they gain through fictional immersion.
To sum up, Jesus used parables because stories engage audiences and provide truths in a way that more literal approaches cannot. Touching on buried meanings as they tap into the unconscious, they tell the truth slant. In so doing, they get us closer to God.
Thomas Eakins, The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton
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Friday
In his frequently quoted but often misunderstood “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost predicts that one day in the future he will look back at his life and regret a choice he made. (“I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence…”) While the poem is often read as a triumphant assertion of a choice made—I have heard it quoted in this vein at a couple of valedictory addresses—I read it rather as someone who foresees that he will be so upset at having made that choice that he predicts he will try to rationalize it away: he will convince himself that he took the daring and unconventional path, not the path that most people walk. The fact was, he acknowledges, that there wasn’t that much difference between the two paths, that they were worn more or less the same. (But maybe he’s rationalizing here as well.)
In other words, where he would like to think he will look back with a contented sigh, he fears he will look back with a regretful sigh. The poem, after all, is entitled “The Road Not Taken,” not “The Road Less Traveled.”
Having reached an age (72) where one looks back, especially after having just attended one’s 50th college reunion, I use today’s post to sort through one of my own career regrets. You’ll have to excuse me if I descend into the weeds of my profession—what has bothered me may seem trivial to those in other walks of life. And it may in fact be trivial. Nevertheless, I still need to work through it.
I begin my ruminations with a professor that I mentioned in a PechaKucha talk I gave at the reunion. PechaKucha, of Japanese origin, allows the speaker 20 slides in just under seven minutes to make the presentation (20 seconds per slide, which change automatically so that the speaker can’t drone on). Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my subject, which was how Beowulf helps us negotiate our gun-happy society. If we are to stand up to resentment crazed trolls and to counteract dragon depression, I argued, we need to “be like Beowulf.” The talk outlined the ways how.
The first slide mentioned Phil Niles’s Medieval History I class, which introduced me to the idea that the monsters in Beowulf represented the forces that threatened the stability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society. In the social contract between warrior and king, warriors were to be loyal, giving all their winnings to their king, and kings were to be fair and generous, redistributing those winnings to the warriors. If either side broke that contract—if warriors behaved like resentful trolls or if kings became greedy dragons—society could disintegrate, with death or slavery the end result for all its members.
I vividly remember my essay for the course, which I entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” Understanding came to me at around two or three in the morning in one of Carleton’s all-night study rooms. At that moment I grasped, in a deep way, that literature, including the literary fantasy that I loved, was not just for fun but articulated life and death issues. While I already knew the books I read were of immense importance to me, I now realized they were of immense importance to society as a whole. After all, Beowulf had served as a blueprint to Anglo-Saxon warriors in how to literally survive.
Socially conscious as we all were in those days, what with the Black, Chicano and Indian liberation movements, the anti-war protests, and the feminist revolution all in full sway, this view that my private passion could help change the world hit me with seismic force. I determined that I would become a literature teacher.
Majoring in history rather than in English was not the way to go about this, however. By my junior year, however, I feared that I was too far along in history to make the transition. Furthermore, none of the English courses I was taking spoke to this new-found revelation. Whereas my English professors seemed more interested in confining themselves to the works rather than linking them to anything going on in the world, my history teachers were introducing me to thinkers who argued that ideas could have a transformational impact on the world.
These thinkers included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukacs. In my French courses, meanwhile, I was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who thought the same. I wrote my thesis on the absurdly broad topic (but undergraduates are allowed to go big) of whether the French Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. I concluded that works like Rousseau’s On Inequality and Diderot’s Letter on the Blind had changed the framework in which reality itself is seen. This new reality, I argued, undermined traditional monarchical beliefs.
It helped that, as I was writing my thesis, I was also taking Barry Casper’s “Revolutions in Physics” class (I had put off this science requirement to the very last moment). Casper introduced us to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and I realized later that my thesis was essentially contending that the French Enlightenment had ushered in a significant paradigm shift.
But while my history major was speaking to issues that concerned me deeply, it wasn’t preparing me for graduate English programs. I was turned down by seven of the nine schools I applied to, and I could understand why when I entered Emory University’s English program. After all, my fellow grad students could detect image patterns in the works we studied, which appeared to me as though they were performing magic. How could they see all these things at work beneath the surface?
So did I choose the wrong path by majoring in history rather than English? Actually, fearing that this was indeed a mistake, at the beginning of my junior year I planned to tell my history advisor Carl Weiner—a brilliant if somewhat obstreperous intellectual—that I wanted to change majors. At the last moment, however, I lost my nerve. So some cowardice entered into my decision making.
Then again, I would not have taken Phil Niles’s Medieval History class if I had changed majors, nor all those intellectual history classes. And I would probably have experienced, in further English classes, the same frustrations that had sent me to the history major in the first place.
And despite having taken only six English courses, I was accepted into a good graduate program. It so happens that my Emory mentor had taken me in part because of my history background. J. Paul Hunter, a giant in the field of 18th century British Literature, liked my interdisciplinary interests, and he and I saw eye to eye about the importance of history.
I was also fortunate that Emory’s Victorianist, Jerome Beaty, was interested in the emerging field of reader response theory. When, my first semester, I heard Beaty talk about how readers in 1847 would have responded to Jane Eyre, I felt a shock of recognition. I tracked him down after the talk and got the names of the theorists he was referencing, including the German theorist Hans Robert Jauss.
Jauss argues that great works of literature expand readers’ “horizon of expectations”—a paradigm shift, if you will—which was exactly what I wanted to believe. I wrote an essay that semester in Beaty’s “Dickens’s Early Novels” class about how Dickens challenged and expanded traditional notions of the family in Martin Chuzzlewit—with the effect that the novel was a flop when it came out (it was ahead of its time) but one of Dickens’s most popular novels by the end of his life (third after David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers). Dickens had expanded his readers’ horizons so that they saw his novel with new eyes.
So if you’re keeping track, my decision to major in history turns out not to have been a mistake after all. It got me into a graduate school where people considered history an important part of literary study—this was before New Historicism and so still unusual—and my Emory PhD helped me find what was for me the perfect job: a state school with a mission to introduce a liberal arts education to (among others) first generation college students.
But wait, I’m not done yet with regrets. When, still in grad school, I was discussing a possible dissertation topic with Hunter, I said something to the effect of wanting to study how novels could change lives. But I narrowed my articulation too much. I thought that I needed to study satire, having the impression that satire was more effective at changing lives than other genres. He, hearing this, suggested that I take on the work of an under-appreciated satiric novelist (and former ship surgeon) Tobias Smollett and I dutifully did so.
This in spite of the fact that I can’t stand Smollett, largely because he is such a cranky writer. In fact, fellow novelist Laurence Sterne referred to him as “Smelfungus” for the way he complains all the time. While I dutifully wrote on Smollett, producing an acceptable dissertation (“Smollett’s Struggle for a New Mode of Expression”), I could never return to him later. And as one’s dissertation often serves as the source of one’s early scholarly articles, I cut myself off from that opportunity.
The path I wish I had taken was choosing a topic specifically focusing on reader response issues. All I needed to have done is follow more closely the kind of research Hunter himself was doing. For instance, he had recently written an article I found brilliant entitled “The Loneliness of the Long Distant Reader,” in which he talked about how novels were disrupting social society by introducing a new kind of solitude. Wives, for instance, would sometimes distress their husbands by disappearing for days into Samuel Richardson’s million-word novel Clarissa.
Had I said, “I want to do the kind of research that you did in that article,” I would have written a very different dissertation. I would have dived into 18th century reading journals, letters in which books are mentioned, and other documents and other forms of evidence as to the impact of works. I would have built a career in reader response theory, then in its infancy, instead of jumping between multiple fields.
I also would have become the kind of scholar my father was. More on this in a moment.
Instead, having written a dissertation more from the intellect than from the heart, I turned away from writing literary scholarship altogether (at least for a while) and instead started analyzing films. After all, I could see vividly the impact that cinema had on audiences—why, for instance (to cite my most widely cited article) Citizen Kane shook 1941 viewers to the core. But I could have been doing the same with literature.
In short, I had committed a scholarly no-no: I left a field where I had considerable expertise to branch into something new.
Mentioning my father points to an Oedipal drama at work. Scott Bates, a French professor at the University of the South, was a world authority on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. During a Fulbright year when I was a year old, he had uncovered source material at France’s national library that upended previous interpretations, and he continued to do so for decades afterward. For 15 years, I considered myself somewhat of an impostor because I wasn’t doing something comparable.
I should add that I worshipped my father, seeing in him everything I wanted to be. I was even proud when, in seventh grade, I had to wear glasses because he wore glasses. You see what I mean.
But instead of becoming a recognized scholar, I became what some will regard as a shallow generalist. As a small liberal arts college, St. Mary’s College of Maryland allowed this so that, at any moment, I could be found teaching one of our three survey courses—everything from Beowulf to Margaret Atwood—or one of a bewildering assortment of theme courses. Over the years these included Minority Lit, African American Lit, Post-Colonial Lit, American Fantasy, British Fantasy, Magical Realism, American Film, Film Genre, Great Directors, Theories of the Reader, and The Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami. Although my two favorite courses were in my field (Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy and Jane Austen), ranging as widely as I did was not a recipe for scholarly success.
Where I went deep was in responding to student essays. Figuring that everyone had the potential to undercover meaningful literary insights, I spent hours helping students choose their topics, develop their proposals, and draft and polish their essays (at which point I assigned a grade). After that I met individually with them and then graded their revisions (with the new grade replacing the first).
Even after 35 years, this never got old. I reached the point where I could detect—sometimes from no more than a phrase—the topic that would yield an essay where the student had “something at stake” (the phrase I used in my syllabus). I’ve shared a number of these student reading stories on this blog.
But while I flourished as a teacher, my traditional scholarship was mostly missing. Although I published twenty academic articles and delivered a score of scholarly presentations—enough to earn tenure at my college—my one book is self-published, and my current project, caught in limbo between popular and scholarly, is having difficulty finding a publisher. Instead, I have this blog.
As I look back at this career, my version of Frost’s regretful sigh is that I didn’t produce the work that I thought I was supposed to. And saying that brings back another memory.
Having just visited my old professor Carl Weiner at the reunion—sadly, he’s having health issues—I recalled something he said to me after awarding me honors (but not highest honors) for my senior thesis. In addition to my studies, I had thrown myself into the student newspaper, which I was proud of having edited but which he regarded as a distraction. “If it had not been for that paper,” he told me, “you could have gone so much further.” At the time, I was more taken aback than offended. I could see what he meant.
Could I have gone as far as those of my stellar Carleton classmates who have had brilliant scholarly careers. One of them, I discovered, heads the Emory Philosophy Department while another received a rave review in The New York Review of Books. Reunions can get us to notice roads we haven’t taken.
And yet, to reverse course once again, I have had students tell me that my teaching impacted them in ways that were life-changing, and this blog has reached a wider readership than I ever could have hoped for from scholarly work. It’s not what my father did nor what various of my professors hoped from me. But in the end I have fulfilled my professional mission, which was to put people in contact with literature that bettered their lives. When my old regrets flair up, I can remind myself of this.
And actually, to do justice to our 50th class reunion, what I carried away was a sense, not of expectations unfulfilled, but of lives lived fully and meaningfully. Professional goals seemed less important now that many of us were retired.
In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges gives us an alternative to Frost’s yellow wood. Whereas the speaker in “Road Not Taken” agonizes over a single choice, Borges describes a garden where the choices are infinite. As a character tells the narrator,
The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.
And further on:
Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.
What this image shows me is that I have been too one-dimensional in thinking about my life trajectory. Life indeed has “innumerable futures,” which are too complex to chart. I’m especially struck by the thought that sometimes a path that seems to diverge will then later converge, and that a path that bifurcates into two will then see those two intersect. A history class that I wouldn’t have taken had I majored in English gave me the literary insight that has guided my life. The history major that kept me out of a number of graduate schools got me into one that gave me the thinkers that I needed and helped me land my dream job.
Frost’s poem, which jumps back and forth in time, tells me the same as well. Don’t fixate on a single narrative about a wrong or right decision—don’t spend time regretting that you took this path rather than that one—because the very story you tell yourself about that choosing will change over time.
Better for me to focus on the rich interactions with people that teaching literature has made possible, which is a far more interesting story than that of a hypothetical path not taken.
Further thought: I didn’t mention one further life choice I made which, while it ran counter the path of a traditional literary scholar, added immeasurably to my life. In 1987, inspired by recent Hungarian films, I applied for a Fulbright to go study them, even though I didn’t know any Hungarian. Although I had experienced early academic success with an article on the Czech New Wave, jumping to another country made no scholarly sense. In any event, the Hungary slot was not available so I ended up in Yugoslavia instead, in Slovenia. There I learned that, while Yugoslavia itself had a robust film industry, Slovenia did not so my research plans fell through. From outer appearance, it appeared a bust.
Except that it wasn’t as I developed deep ties with people in the country that have led to some of the happiest moments of Julia’s and my life. In addition, my teaching and my understanding of literature grew immensely from this immersion in another country. I return regularly to teach there and to refresh our many, many friendships. Would I trade all that for a straight line scholar’s path? On reflection, I don’t think I would.
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Thursday
When we visited Dublin in April, Julia and I decided at one point that we’d like to experience traditional Irish fare and found Flanagan’s Bar and Restaurant on O’Connell Street. There we were served a hefty lamp shank with mashed potatoes, root vegetables, and plenty of gravy. It was a dinner that reminded me of those my mother used to cook in my childhood (I was born in 1951) and that I also encountered when I visited my grandmothers, both of whom were of English extraction (one a Jackson, one a Fulcher). The eating experience, in other words, carried me into my past.
Just one of these heavy meals was more than enough, however. Much as I love lamb, we didn’t repeat the experience.
I encountered the same nostalgia, and the same feeling of heaviness, in John Galsworthy’s description in Man of Property of what the Forsytes eat. The “crowning point of a Forsyte feast,” we are told, is “the saddle of mutton” (the quotation marks, which are the author’s, serve to elevate the dish). Warning: just reading the passage is enough to raise one’s cholesterol level or bring on a case of the gout. Here it is:
No Forsyte has given a dinner without providing a saddle of mutton. There is something in its succulent solidity which makes it suitable to people “of a certain position.” It is nourishing and tasty; the sort of thing a man remembers eating. It has a past and a future, like a deposit paid into a bank; and it is something that can be argued about.
The “saddle of mutton” serves a double purpose, functioning also as something to talk about:
Each branch of the family tenaciously held to a particular locality—old Jolyon swearing by Dartmoor, James by Welsh, Swithin by Southdown, Nicholas maintaining that people might sneer, but there was nothing like New Zealand! As for Roger, the “original” of the brothers, he had been obliged to invent a locality of his own, and with an ingenuity worthy of a man who had devised a new profession for his sons, he had discovered a shop where they sold German; on being remonstrated with, he had proved his point by producing a butcher’s bill, which showed that he paid more than any of the others.
The author reflects on the class significance of the dish:
To anyone interested psychologically in Forsytes, this great saddle-of-mutton trait is of prime importance; not only does it illustrate their tenacity, both collectively and as individuals, but it marks them as belonging in fiber and instincts to that great class which believes in nourishment and flavor, and yields to no sentimental craving for beauty.
Those of us who prefer lighter meals will sympathize with the younger Forsyte members, who the authors tells us
would have done without a joint altogether, preferring guinea-fowl, or lobster salad—something which appealed to the imagination, and had less nourishment—but these were females; or, if not, had been corrupted by their wives, or by mothers, who having been forced to eat saddle of mutton throughout their married lives, had passed a secret hostility towards it into the fiber of their sons.
After the Forsyte elders have finished with the saddle of mutton, they proceed on to a Tewkesbury ham. Add in all the sherry, port, champagne and wine that gets drunk and the cigars and cigarettes that get smoked and you wonder how anyone in that class and era survived past middle age.
Not that we had any alcohol or smoking in my grandmother Bates’s house, her family having moved to Evanston because it housed the headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. But heavy, well-done meat dishes with lots of gravy, potatoes, and mushy peas—yes, I remember those dinners well.
Detail from Camuccini, Death of Julius Caesar (1806)
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Wednesday
While there’s much we don’t know about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s coup attempt (or accidental coup or mutiny or armed insurrection or bargaining strategy—there’s no consensus on exactly what the head of the Wagner mercenaries was up to this past weekend), references to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon have been frequent. This gives us an excuse to apply Shakespeare’s play to the events.
Not that Prigozhin has anything in common with Brutus, the “noblest Roman of them all.” That’s because the man is just another corrupt and brutal Russian thug, made rich by Putin before parting ways with his patron. He is more like self-interested Cassius, described by Caesar as having “a lean and hungry look.” (Prigozhin has more of a pudgy and hungry look but you get the point.) Maybe the experience of seeing his troops wiped out galvanized him into action, prompting him into an uncharacteristic bout of truth-telling. Or maybe he was just upset at seeing Putin preparing to take his men and incorporate them into the Russian military.
That being said, if Putin ultimately annihilates him, he may be sorry that he didn’t follow the advice of Shakespeare’s conspirators. While, in his public pronouncements, Prigozhin went out of his way not to name Putin, Cassius is not so delicate. As the Roman senator points out, Caesar may seem to “stride the world like a colossus,” making others seem like “petty men”—but if he is seen as a man like other men, then what is to keep a Cassius or a Brutus from taking his place? Prigozhin, by contrast, never attempted to demythologize Putin.
Cassius also tells Brutus that, if they remain underlings, the fault “is not in our stars but in ourselves.” In other words, we chart our own destinies.
Brutus, meanwhile, talks about making the most of an opportune moment:
If Prigozhin really could have attacked Moscow after having captured Rostov-on-Don, headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, then he would have taken advantage of the high tide. By instead accepting Putin’s deal and retreating to Belarus, he may discover the rest of his life to be bound in shallows and in miseries. More than one commentator has observed that he is now a “dead man walking.”
It’s worth noting that Brutus, to his sorrow, doesn’t fully take his own advice, allowing Marc Antony to go free rather than disposing of him when he has a chance. In a sense, after having crossed their own Rubicon by assassinating Caesar, he and Cassius then retreat back across the river. As a result, they suffer the fate that Putin may be planning for Prigozhin.
Perhaps I do the Wagner leader an injustice—maybe the tide was never as full as it appeared and, rather than losing an advantage, he never had one. But to have had any chance at all, it appeared that he needed to go all in. That he failed to do.
Washington Post’s David Ignatius, in assessing Putin’s survival skills, has invoked a well-known truism: Prigozhin made the mistake of shooting at the king and missing. Ignatius goes on to invoke two other two other Shakespeare figures:
Putin’s vulnerabilities were vividly on display last weekend, but so were his uncanny survival skills. He got inside Prigozhin’s conspiratorial plot and stopped it. The Russian leader is a mysterious figure, far more so than the cartoon versions sketched by his enemies. He is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a villain whose hands drip with the blood of his victims. But he’s also Hamlet, the vain, self-absorbed prince who delayed taking action against his enemies until it was nearly too late.
I wouldn’t call Hamlet vain and self-absorbed, but perhaps Putin is a Hamlet-like waffler. Although that being said, unlike the Danish prince he would never hesitate killing a man just because he seemed to be praying. In fact, he is more like Claudius, with his elaborate plots involving poisonous potions and poison-tipped swords (or a ricin-tipped umbrella in Putin’s case ). But Claudius’s plotting eventually backfires on him, and it appears that Putin’s encouragement of a mercenary force to do his dirty work has done the same.
Further thought: In another Washington Post column, Harvard government professor Graham Allison gives Ukrainian President Zelensky advice that sounds very much like Brutus’s. In this moment of Russian dissension, Ukraine too has a high tide to its advantage and “must take the current when it serves, or lose [its] ventures.” Or as Allison puts it,
The extraordinary coup attempt by a Russian mercenary leader provides Ukraine with an unexpected opportunity to press whatever advantages it has in its war with Moscow. If it does not seize this chance and break the stasis that governs the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, we will enter a very different chapter in this conflict.
This “different chapter,” as Allison sees it, will be a perpetual stalemate rather than Ukraine gaining back its conquered lands. Now or never, in other words.
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Tuesday
Carleton classmate Mike Hazard shared with me this New York Times article about literature that unsettles us. Written by one who has written a biography about Shirley Jackson, whose short story “The Lottery” has long disturbed audiences, the piece argues that literature that disturbs and disrupts often plays a vital role in our lives. On the other hand, Ruth Franklin states that going out of one’s way not to offend is a recipe for bad writing, and she fears that “readers across the political spectrum seem to be losing their appetite for literary discomfort.”
Franklin reports that “The Lottery” discomfited when it first appeared:
Over 150 letters flooded into The New Yorker’s offices, more mail than the magazine had ever before received for a work of fiction. Readers called the story “outrageous,” “gruesome” and “utterly pointless”; some canceled their subscriptions. I spoke to one of those readers more than a decade ago, and she still remembered, some 60 years later, how deeply the story had upset her.
Over the years, the story has been applied to various political situations, sometimes by the left, sometimes the right:
When “The Lottery” was published, three years after the end of World War II and at the start of the Cold War, many readers speculated that, given its apparent themes of conformity and cruelty, it was an allegory for McCarthyism or the Holocaust. Over the years, it has become a reliable reference when discussing some social development or troubling trend. People have heard its echo recently in the policies of Donald Trump’s MAGA populism or in the perceived excesses of the censorious mob. In Harper’s Magazine, the critic Thomas Chatterton Williams used it as a metaphor for cancel culture, which he suggested was a contemporary analogue to stoning. For the humorist Alexandra Petri, it served as the basis for a parody about the absurdities of the U.S. health care system.
This general applicability, Franklin says, derives from the story’s “unsettling open-endedness”:
Jackson deliberately declined to wrap up the ending neatly for her readers, some of whom (in a foreshadowing of the reaction to the finale of The Sopranos) asked whether The New Yorker had accidentally left out an explanatory final paragraph. That’s why it has retained its relevance across the decades: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its unsettling open-endedness. The story works as a mirror to reflect back to its readers their current preoccupations and concerns…
While critical of the right’s book banning efforts, Franklin doesn’t let liberals off the hook. Too many, she says,
have shown a reluctance to tolerate fiction that ruffles their political sensibilities — especially in the world of young adult fiction, where several high-profile writers have canceled or delayed books dealing with subjects that have generated controversy. A few weeks ago, the best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert decided to delay the publication of a new novel set in the mid-twentieth-century Soviet Union after online commenters, citing the conflict in Ukraine, protested that the novel sounded like it cast Russia in a romantic light.
It’s worth noting that discriminating readers have long seen applying ideological litmus tests to literature as problematic, with even figures like Marx and Engels weighing in. Engels once critiqued a socialist novel for its political correctness and said that the goal of literature should be “the portrayal of real conditions.” Speaking of Balzac, a brilliant writer with royalist sympathies, Engels said that he and Marx had “learned more from him than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.”
This is not to say that that all literature disturbs in healthy ways. There are many works that traffic in racist, sexist, and other stereotypes, with the authors going for cheap emotional effects rather than dealing with human complexity. We need to distinguish between these literary efforts (say, Thomas Dixon’s influential The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, to choose an extreme example) and those that disturb through telling truths we don’t want to hear.
I’ve been writing recently how William Faulkner, as disturbing a novelist as one will find, falls in the latter category. Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel that sometimes elicits trigger warnings in college classes for its depiction of a pedophile, discomfits in ways that I think are positive. So does Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, which upset a number feminists when it followed Handmaid’s Tale by showing that women no less than men have a dark side and are capable of great harm. In other words Atwood, who has always avoided the feminist label, was not about to sentimentalize or glorify women for the sake of a political cause. I suspect she would agree with the conclusion of Franklin’s article:
Great writing can entertain, enlighten and even empower, but one of its greatest gifts to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka once wrote. Stories like “The Lottery” create waves in that frozen sea. We stifle and censor them at our peril.
While I fully agree, I also realize that this presents English teachers with a particular challenge. It’s not easy to go up against state restrictions and repressive school boards. Far easier to teach To Kill a Mockingbird, with its sentimentalized depiction of heroic White saviors and grateful Black dependents, than Faulkner’s Light in August or Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. But we must always keep in mind that literature is not tame, an adjective I borrow from Mr. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe. Imagine the following description of Aslan applied to literature:
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
And later:
He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.
Our students can handle literature’s wildness. More to the point, they need it. If schools only teach what they deem to be safe and tame and if publishers only publish the same, they deprive readers of the axe that is critical to our growth as human beings.
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Monday
On this anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade, it is becoming increasingly clear that our highest court is in the grip of rightwing billionaires. To describe what has happened, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D), who keeps a close eye on SCOTUS matters, has invoked an image that he may have borrowed from Sherlock Holmes.
The image was of a spider at the center of a “dark money web.” In a speech before Congress last September, Whitehouse identified the spider as Leonard Leo:
This is the 18th time that I have come to the floor to expose the dark money scheme that has captured and controlled our Supreme Court. Over the last 2 years, I have, over and over, exposed how dark money operatives, working from the shadows, have installed Supreme Court Justices handpicked—handpicked—by the minions of far-right donors. I have exposed the key front groups through which this Court-packing operation is driven and the tactics that the schemers have used to hide the dark money donors who pull its strings. And when you take a close look at the scheme, the little spider that you find at the center of the dark money web behind it is a character named Leonard Leo.
According to Wikipedia, Leo has been vice president and a board member of the Federalist Society, a rightwing legal organization, as well as one who “has been instrumental in building a network of influential conservative legal groups funded mostly by anonymous donors.” He has played a key role in getting the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Kate Riga of The Weekend recently seconded Whitehouse’s accusation and his spider metaphor when she commented on the latest reports of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito hobnobbing with billionaires:
In a perfect encapsulation of today’s right-wing judicial movement, one figure keeps cropping up in these reports: the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo. Like a bespeckled spider, he sits at the center of his web, waiting to dangle a private jet ride or a yacht trip or a ludicrously massive salmon before anyone who has the power and amenability to help craft his world order.
Whitehouse’s speech elaborates on Leo’s machinations:
Leo coordinated the dark money propaganda machine that kept the heat on Senate Republicans to confirm those nominees, and he supported the big donors’ doctrine factories where donor-approved fringe legal doctrines are concocted for the anointed judges to weaponize from the Bench. Look no further than the recent West Virginia v. EPA decision weaponizing the doctrine factory-concocted major questions’ doctrine. And this was no small scheme. The latest estimate from earlier this year is that these big donors put $580 million, more than half a billion dollars, into Leo’s network of Court-capture front groups.
And this:
Last month, ProPublica and the New York Times broke the news that a reclusive, far-right billionaire supercharged Leo’s dark money operation with a $1.6 billion donation to a Leo front group. You heard that right, $1.6 billion into this dark money operation.
The Leonard Leo in the Sherlock Holmes stories is Moriarty. We encounter the spider analogy in the detective’s description of his arch nemesis:
He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defense. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected. This was the organization which I deduced, Watson, and which I devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up.
Read in one way, this description sounds like hysterical paranoia. Crazy conspiracy theorists, after all, are noted for attributing everything bad happening in the world to one individual or organization, say, George Soros or “the deep state.” Since, however, this is Sherlock Holmes, who is famous for solving crimes by finding an underlying pattern to seemingly disparate elements, we accept it. Leonard Leo, meanwhile, is nowhere near as invisible as Moriarty as he uses billionaires’ money to achieve the dream of a reactionary society.
Can he be defeated the way Holmes defeats Moritarty? It takes all of Holmes’s powers to vanquish the fiendish math professor:
But the Professor was fenced round with safeguards so cunningly devised that, do what I would, it seemed impossible to get evidence which would convict in a court of law. You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill. But at last he made a trip—only a little, little trip—but it was more than he could afford when I was so close upon him. I had my chance, and, starting from that point, I have woven my net round him until now it is all ready to close.
The “little, little trip” in Alito’s case was a luxury fishing vacation with rightwing billionaires. Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican Harlan Crow. The question is whether these trips will be trips in the Holmes sense—which is to say, revelations that lead to serious change, such as expanding the court or applying term limits. Such changes will not happen, of course, unless Democrats control both Congress and the presidency, but the behavior of rightwing justices has been so egregious and the rulings so out of line with the American public that Democrats are more likely to act if they ever get the chance.
It’s either that or Watson taking up his pen with heavy heart to record democracy’s obituary.
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Sunday
My wife and I renew our wedding vows today, with Julia observing that “in sickness and in health” looks different at 72 than it did at 22. While I won’t be bringing poetry into this ceremony as I did into our wedding—today’s affirmation has just been folded into the Episcopal Church’s regular service—the occasion calls for a poem here. I’ve struggled with which one to use, however.
Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife” came to mind as a poem I’ve loved ever since I encountered it in high school. In it, we see a shy young woman—she’s 14 when she gets married to “My Lord you”—grow into her marriage. Unable at first to even look at her husband so that she keeps her eyes affixed to the garden wall, she evolves to desiring that “my dust to be mingled with yours/ Forever and forever, and forever.”
She’s still a teenager in the poem, however. I wanted a longer lasting relationship.
I found one in W. B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” written to his muse Maud Gonne. Fantasizing that she will miss him some day, he claims that he is the only man “who loved the pilgrim soul in you/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” But I passed up this poem as well since, of course, they are not together.
Of course, there’s Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.” A popular favorite at weddings with its declaration that “Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,” the lyrics works as a test of those early aspirations. Read early in life, it expresses a hope, read late, an assessment: Has loved indeed proved to have been “an ever-fixed mark/ That look[ed] on tempests and [was] never shaken”?
I have chosen two poems with speakers who, having themselves experienced long-term marriages, describe the impact of life’s storms on the relationship. Looking back at 40 years, Stanley Kunitz defiantly dares the tempest to do its worst: “So let the battered old willow/ thrash against the windowpanes/ and the house timbers creak.”
Whence comes this assurance? Comparing his marriage to the crickets he hears around him while gardening, he declares that brave music has poured from this “small machine,” which even after all these years is driven by “desire, desire, desire” and “the longing for the dance.” Although we have but one season and the winds are scattering our leaves, nevertheless his wife has the ability to invoke his essential core. “Touch me, remind me who I am.”
Touch Me By Stanley Kunitz
Summer is late, my heart. Words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost in two scatter like leaves this night of whistling wind and rain. It is my heart that’s late, it is my song that’s flown. Outdoors all afternoon under a gunmetal sky staking my garden down, I kneeled to the crickets trilling underfoot as if about to burst from their crusty shells; and like a child again marveled to hear so clear and brave a music pour from such a small machine. What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life. One season only, and it’s done. So let the battered old willow thrash against the windowpanes and the house timbers creak. Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
If Kunitz feels like a house battered by a tempest-tossed willow, then U.A. Fanthorpe in “Atlas” lists what keeps the house from falling apart. A number of unglamorous but essential details uphold “the permanently rickety elaborate structures of living.”
By invoking Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders, Fanthorpe finds something mythical in the “kind of love called maintenance.” This aspect of marriage may not get acknowledged in the early years, but after fifty one learns to appreciate someone who
knows what time and weather are doing To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring; Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers My need for gloss and grouting…
The poet’s partner is his Atlas. As Julia is mine and I hers.
Atlas By U.A. Fanthorpe
There is a kind of love called maintenance Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;
Which answers letters; which knows the way The money goes; which deals with dentists
And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains, And postcards to the lonely; which upholds
The permanently rickety elaborate Structures of living, which is Atlas.
And maintenance is the sensible side of love, Which knows what time and weather are doing To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring; Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps My suspect edifice upright in air, As Atlas did the sky.
Soames Forsyte (Lewis) decorates his wife Irene (McKee)
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Friday
After having immersed myself in Victorian upper-class melodrama with Antony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, I now find myself reliving the Edwardian age with John Galsworthy’s Man of Property, the first book in the Forsyte Saga. I do so as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, and having that in mind has rendered certain passages in the book particularly horrifying.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has essentially told women that their pregnant bodies are the property of the state, not of themselves. (Some on the right even want to deprive women of the right to prevent pregnancy.) I agree with those who accuse the right, despite their “right to life” claims, of being far less interested in children than in controlling women’s bodies. After all, they lose all interest in caring for the children of poor mothers once they are born.
In short, they look upon women the way that Soames Forsyte looks upon his wife.
The Forsyte identity is based on owning property, and there are constant discussions in the novel of buying and selling plots of land. Sometimes, as with Nicholas Forsyte, family members do so with the money of their wives:
He himself had married a good deal of money, of which, it being then the golden age before the Married Women’s Property Act, he had mercifully been enabled to make a successful use.
In Soames’s case, property consists of more than inert things. In the passage that appalled me, we learn that he regards his beautiful wife as one of his possessions.
He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her…Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing!
Soames at one point is frustrated that he does not own his wife the way he owns his dining-room table:
Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.
“Out of his other property,” the passage goes on to say, “out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.
And further on:
His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body—if indeed he could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If anyone had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want…
In a telling episode, one of the Forsyte aunts expresses puzzlement over a sermon about soul-owning. It sounds as though the minister has resorted to subtle irony to tweak his property-obsessed congregants (perhaps to be more direct would put his salary in jeopardy), but he only confuses them:
Only last Sunday dear Mr. Scoles, had been so witty in his sermon, so sarcastic, “For what,” he had said, “shall it profit a man if he gain his own soul, but lose all his property?” That, he had said, was the motto of the middle-class; now, what had he meant by that? Of course, it might be what middle-class people believed—she didn’t know; what did Soames think?
Scoles has deliberately inverted Jesus’s rhetorical question, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” But his sermon doesn’t lead to any soul searching amongst the Forsytes.
Significantly, at this point Soames overhears his wife, in another conversation, quoting the inscription that greets sinners in Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The appropriate circle of hell for Soames would be the fourth, where groups of the avaricious incessantly push great bags of money against other groups.
Irene, who in a moment of weakness and poverty accepted Soames’s marriage offer, now finds herself trapped in this world. She is, as Galsworthy notes, “one of those women—not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race—born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living.” Ultimately, therefore, she must defy convention and break free. As Galsworthy observes in his preface, she is “a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.”
I have strayed somewhat from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision but the relevance still holds. The extreme right wants to return to a time when, as in Edwardian England, men were patriarchs who controlled their wives. If abortion is now playing a major role in American politics—preventing a red wave in 2022 and perhaps ensuring the election of a Democratic president in 2024—it is because American Irenes are refusing to let the Soameses of the world dictate their lives and their choices.
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Monday
A couple of months ago I came across an illuminating article wondering how Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky would respond to the Ukraine invasion. Although Dostoevsky became a believer in Russian exceptionalism, University of Kansas Russian professor Ani Kokobobo is fairly sure he, along with Tolstoy, would be appalled at Russia’s behavior. She writes,
Seeing the rubble of a theater in Mariupol, hearing of Mariupol citizens starving because of Russian airstrikes, I wonder what Dostoevsky – who specifically focused his piercing moral eye on the question of the suffering of children in his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov – would say in response to the Russian army’s bombing a theater where children were sheltering. The word “children” was spelled out on the pavement outside the theater in large type so it could be seen from the sky. There was no misunderstanding of who was there.
Ivan Karamazov explores acts of barbarity targeting children in the “Rebellion” chapter. Confronted with unmerited suffering, he challenges the Christian vision of divine harmony. Because, as he sees it, belief in a divine plan prompts us to pass over horrors, he declares, “I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering.”
Ivan’s account of child torture gives us some insight into Russian war crimes. After describing Turkish soldiers cutting fetuses out of women’s bellies and catching babies on their bayonets, he moves on to Russian atrocities. At one point he tells a story about abusive parents:
This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans!
Ivan accompanies his report with a psychological analysis of sadism:
It’s just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain…
In her article Kokobobo also mentions Crime and Punishment, pointing out how Doestoevsky explains the toll of murder on the murderer—how, “when someone takes a life, they kill part of themselves.” How can someone who has read such a book, she wonders, “possibly accept Putin’s vision of Russia?” She feels sure that Dostoevsky, “Russia’s greatest metaphysical rebel,” would have “recoiled and rebelled against Russian violence in Ukraine.”
She says the same about Tolstoy, noting that, in his last work (Hadji Murat), he scrutinizes Russia’s colonial exploits in North Caucasus. There he shows “how senseless Russian violence toward a Chechen village caused instant hatred of Russians.”
In War and Peace, meanwhile,
Tolstoy contends that the morale of the Russian military is the key to victory. The battles most likely to succeed are defensive ones, in which soldiers understand why they are fighting and what they are fighting to protect: their home.
The novel has episodes which are only too applicable to current Russian and Ukrainian families who have lost members. There of vivid descriptions of
young Russian soldiers coming into direct confrontation with the instruments of death and destruction on the battlefield. They disappear into the crowd of their battalion, but even a single loss is devastating for the families awaiting their safe return.
And then there’s Anna Karenina. Kokobobo explains that the last part originally wasn’t published
because it criticized Russia’s actions in the Russo-Turkish war. Tolstoy’s alter ego in that novel, Konstantin Levin, calls the Russian intervention in the war “murder” and thinks it is inappropriate that Russian people are dragged into it.
“The people sacrifice and are always prepared to sacrifice themselves for their soul, not for murder,” he says.
And then there’s Tolstoy’s passage from his 1900 essay “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” It captures only too well Russia’s current situation:
The misery of nations is caused not by particular persons, but by the particular order of Society under which the people are so bound up together that they find themselves all in the power of a few men, or more often in the power of one single man: a man so perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers more or less from a mania of self-aggrandizement.
One thinks of the close to million Russians that have fled their country since the invasion began when one hears about how Tolstoy helped a Russian Christian sect (the Doukhobors) Tolstoy avoid conscription. The proceeds from his 1899 novel Resurrection, a powerful exploration of prison life, went to help them emigrate to Canada rather than fight in the Russian army.
Kokobobo notes that the imprisoned opposition figure Alexei Navalny, whom Putin has imprisoned, quoted Tolstoy in a twitter message to his followers:
Act clearly, as Leo Tolstoy, one of our great writers, whose quote I ended my speech with, bequeathed: “War is a product of despotism. Those who want to fight war must only fight despotism.”
The article concludes by quoting Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, who, addressing Russian supporters of the invasion, wrote, “I’ve read your f—ing literature. But looks like Putin did not, and you have forgotten.”
Even the greatest literature, sadly, cannot prevent atrocities. Nevertheless, it provides a moral compass that societies can turn to when the going gets rough.
