I have good news to report of a personal nature: Quoir, a boutique literary agency that produces interesting books on spiritual matters and classical texts, has agreed to publish the book I’ve been working on for the past 15 years. Or rather, the book I’ve been working on all my life, although I just started writing it in the early part of the century.
Longtime readers of this blog will have some inkling of what it’s about since I’ve periodically foisted chapter rough drafts upon you all. If I get a polished manuscript to Quoir before the end of the year—which will be no problem—they think it could appear by next summer or fall.
The publishers asked whether I am open to changing the title, which I certainly am. I’ve been experimenting with several and would love your opinion of the following (and feel free to send in other possibilities):
–Better Living through Literature: How Books Shape Our Lives and (Sometimes) Change History –Better Living through Beowulf: How Great Books Can Change Your Life –Unacknowledged Legislators: How Poets Change Our Lives
*Percy Shelley once declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” which is where this title comes from.
Because publishers (for good reasons) like authors to have “elevator descriptions” (can you interest someone in your book during the brief course of an elevator ride?), I came up with the following:
–the book surveys what the great thinkers, from Plato to contemporary neuroscience, have said about literature’s power to change lives (and sometimes history);
–at the heart of the book are scores of stories about literature having done so;
–the book’s purpose is to show general readers, including teachers and students, the marvelous ways that poems, stories and plays have changed and can change their own lives.
As I edit the book line by line, I’m getting a better sense of the scope of the project. I’m realizing that the literally thousands of hours I’ve spent guiding students to substantive interactions with works of literature have given me a unique perspective on the questions I address. I can confidently say that not once, with the hundreds of students I have taught, have I failed honor a response to a literary work.
Rather, I have always worked from the premise that literature could unlock something precious in even the most recalcitrant reader, and I have thrown all my efforts into making that happen. In return, the students have rewarded me with endlessly fascinating stories. I mention some of them in the book, as in the following passage:
I’ve recounted my own story of using Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird to negotiate my way through race hatred in the 1960s; of my former marine student using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to work through his Afghanistan War experiences; of a student lacrosse student deciding to change his college behavior after identifying with the young man in Rime of the Ancient Mariner;of a student raised by Alabama fundamentalists using Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to sort through her conflicted feelings about religion and secular humanism. Teachers in any class in the nation can elicit such stories once their students realize, in Wayne Booth’s framing [in The Company They Keep], that books are friends who will encourage them to practice “ways of living that are more profound, more sensitive, more intense, and in a curious way more fully generous than [they are] likely to meet anywhere else in the world.”
The practice I got from understanding student responses, I then applied to the thinkers I feature in the book. I feel that I know, in a deep way, why Plato objected to certain passages in Homer, why Aristotle featured Oedipus in the Poetics, why Sidney was passionate about The Aeneid (that one’s easy), why Jane Austen preferred Sir Charles Grandison to Tom Jones, why Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality saved John Stuart Mill, why Engels was a Balzac fan, why Freud got so much out of Oedipus, why Jane Eyre was the book for 1970’s feminists, and so on.
There are no other books like mine, with the exception of Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, to which I devote a chapter. I love Booth’s notion of books as friends, which he elaborates on by applying Aristotle’s writing on friendship. But Booth has his eyes on an academic audience whereas I am aiming at a general one.
The reason why our books are unique is because we don’t try to generalize how books change people. We know that each reader has his or her own individual reading experiences so that impact has to be assessed one reader at a time. Scholars like problems they can solve, and with literary impact, there are too many variables. The best one can do is show a range of possibilities and then hand them over to each individual reader to figure out how he or she has been changed.
That, as you’ve probably noticed, is how this blog works. After 13+ years of writing daily essays about instances where literature has changed readers, I’ve collected a lot of examples. It would be virtually impossible, however, to synthesize them all into one compact theory. Such a theory does not and cannot exist.
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Monday
When a gunman killed 18 and wounded 13 in Lewiston, Maine two weeks ago, the words of Beowulf’s King Hrothgar came (as they always do) to mind: “Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned.” Time and again, in response to mass killings, I’ve identified with the king who watches helplessly as resentment-crazed monsters unleash mayhem in his great hall.
As I always note, our monsters generally come from within our own ranks. The Danes, as the region’s superpower, have nothing to fear from foreign enemies, but local unrest is another matter. I’ve sometimes speculated that the Beowulf poet had multiple models for Grendel. Perhaps, after a night of heavy drinking, one Anglo-Saxon warrior responded to an insult by burying his sword in another. Perhaps PTSD was involved. The Grendel troll is an archetype of the violence that possesses a man, causing him to go on a murderous rampage.
There may have been some of that warrior violence in the Lewiston case, with Grendel taking over a veteran with mental health issues and triggered by rightwing media. In Anglo-Saxon England, one such killing would invariably lead to follow-up revenge killings. Blood feuds—for which Grendel’s Mother serves as the archetype—could go on for generations and were beyond the power of even the strongest king to stop.
I sometimes wonder if we not only have a Grendel problem but a Hrothgar problem in America today. Like Hrothgar, who comes across as weak for not being able to protect his people, Joe Biden is viewed unfavorably by many. Although by objective measurements he has performed admirably as president, polls have him running neck and neck with a man who staged a coup (!).
To be sure, seasoned political observers tell us it’s way too early to worry. But the talk of potential catastrophe in the next election is reminiscent of the worries that the Danes have about Hrothgar’s successor. Although he has two young sons, Hrothgar talks about making Beowulf his heir. What worries him is his ambitious nephew Hrothulf, who will become regent if the king dies before his sons have grown up.
Talk of succession uncertainties are new to the Danes since they have had four successful kings in a row, an impressive run of success for these turbulent times. Succession uncertainties are unfamiliar to us as well since, until 2020, we had over 200 years of peaceful presidential transition (Civil War excepted). And even in 2020 the rightful winner became president. But the fact that the issue comes up in Hrothgar’s court means there’s a problem.
In fact, as we know from other stories, Hrothgar’s nephew Hrothulf will attempt a coup once Hrothgar dies, killing the older son and trying but failing to kill the younger. He will storm the Capitol Heorot Hall, which will burn down, before he himself is killed by the remaining heir.
Biden’s reelection shouldn’t be in doubt. After all, he brought us out of the pandemic in remarkable fashion, and he has had the economy humming ever since. He’s also a decent and compassionate man who stands up against bullies. He is like Beowulf in his even temper and his insistence on compromise over confrontation. He also insists on following rules. (Beowulf doesn’t make illicit power grabs, even when he is invited to do so.)
Also like Beowulf when he is a young man, Biden has been underestimated in the past, which is why his current accomplishments seem even more impressive to those of us who are fans. Here’s how the young Beowulf is described:
Thus Beowulf bore himself with valour; he was formidable in battle yet behaved with honour and took no advantage; never cut down a comrade who was drunk, kept his temper and, warrior that he was, watched and controlled his God-sent strength and his outstanding natural powers. He had been poorly regarded for a long time, was taken by the Geats for less than he was worth: and their lord too had never much esteemed him in the mead-hall. They firmly believed that he lacked force, that the prince was a weakling; but presently every affront to his deserving was reversed.
“Never cut down a comrade who was drunk”—now there’s something to put on your resumé!
That Biden lacks force, that he is a weakling, that he is a doddering octogenarian, is accepted as gospel by many Republicans and even some Democrats. I suspect much of that comes from the fact that there’s currently so much turmoil, even though most of the turmoil is generated by Trump and MAGA.
Where Biden differs from Beowulf is that he doesn’t have the youth’s charisma, which shows up when Beowulf first enters Hrothgar’s court and faces down one of the king’s contentious counselors. Beowulf is never hesitant to boast, which is how he commands loyalty from his followers. Consider the following, where he silences Unferth.:
Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked. However it occurred, my sword had killed nine sea-monsters. Such night-dangers and hard ordeals I have never heard of nor of a man more desolate in surging waves. But worn out as I was, I survived, came through with my life.
Men will follow someone with this confidence and braggadocio into jaws of death.
Biden doesn’t impress with his public performances the way that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and, yes, Donald Trump did. Instead, he is a skilled administrator, as Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton would have been had they won their elections. While that is more than fine with me—I want competent leaders, not empty suits who show up well on television– it could also explain his low poll numbers. Hrothgar at one point tells Beowulf that he is “strong in body and mature in mind, impressive in speech,” and only “mature in mind” currently describes Biden.
So while I think that what Hrothgar says of Beowulf is also true of Biden—“the seafaring Geats won’t find a man worthier of acclaim as their king and defender than you”—I see why even some Democrats have doubts.
But to regain perspective, let’s look at Biden’s probable opponent in 2024. The president often says, “Don’t compare me with the almighty. Compare me with the alternative,” and the alternative in Beowulf is King Heremod. Heremod has more than a little in common with Donald Trump:
His rise in the world brought little joy to the Danish people, only death and destruction. He vented his rage on men he caroused with, killed his own comrades, a pariah king who cut himself off from his own kind, even though Almighty God had made him eminent and powerful and marked him from the start for a happy life. But a change happened, he grew bloodthirsty, gave no more rings to honour the Danes. He suffered in the end for having plagued his people for so long: his life lost happiness.
Trump, like his counselor Steve Bannon and various MAGA extremists, wants to burn everything down, including the Constitution. In his promised quest for retribution, he will become a pariah king, killing (or at least making life difficult for) fellow Americans if he becomes president again. Like Hrothgar’s greedy nephew Hrothulf, he will leave our Heorot Hall in ashes.
Since we have an electoral system, it is up to all of us—not just Joe Biden—to make sure this doesn’t happen.
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All Saints Sunday
Today I share the second half of the Sunday Forum talk I gave last week on “Literary Depictions of the Afterlife.” (You can read the first half here.) I concluded my presentation by looking at Lyra and Will descending into the world of the dead in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spy Glass, the last book in the Golden Compass trilogy(a.ka. the His Dark Materials trilogy).
Pullman is known for his sharp criticisms of institutional Christianity, especially its obsession (as he sees it) with sin and punishment. Indeed, The Golden Compass (book and movie) was somewhat famously attacked by the Vatican for its depiction of the church. In Pullman’s books, the church is a cross between the Catholic Church of the Inquisition and John Calvin’s Geneva church, which notably burned Michael Servetus at the stake in the 16th century.
In his depiction, Pullman may be reacting to the Anglican church he grew up in, where his grandfather was the clergyman. Having grown up in the American version of the Anglican church in the early 1960s (the Episcopalian Church), I am familiar with the self-flagellating, crucifixion-centered message Pullman may have encountered. I remember being terrified by the confessional prayer we recited every Sunday:
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults.
Why, I remember wondering, was God mad at us all the time. What would not sparing look like?
Pullman either recited this confessional, from the 1928 prayer book, or the equally grim 1662 version. I’m not surprised that he describes himself as a “1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist.”
In Pullman’s Golden Compass books, I believe he is trying to shake free of this version of Christianity, including its vision of the afterlife. To do so, he turns to Dante, Virgil and, to a lesser extent, Homer.
In The Amber Spyglass, Lyra and Will enter into the land of the dead so that they can free Lyra’s friend Roger, whom she has unwittingly led to his death. The world is presided over by Virgilian and Dante-esque harpies whose role is to remind the dead of all the things they did wrong in life. (To cite again from the confessional, “There is no health in us.”) As a result of immersing themselves in human self-loathing, they have become repellant creatures. The afterworld, meanwhile, is just a never-ending cave in which the dead exist in perpetuity.
Lyra in many ways functions as a Christ figure—a flawed Christ figure to be sure—who is destined (so the oracles declare) to save the world. This world includes the world of the dead, and in her descent into the afterlife resembles the harrowing of hell, which was Jesus descending “into hell” following the crucifixion and leading many of the Old Testament figures out. Dante talks about this in Inferno.
Leading the dead out is also Lyra’s mission, although there are no restrictions on who can exit. Unlike in Dante, however, she does not lead the dead to Paradiso but back to the physical world. This means, she warns them, that they will lose their separate identities.
As I read her words, let me add that this depiction of what happens to us after we die is the one that speaks the most deeply to me. The daemons she mentions, by the way, are our souls or alter-egos, which in Pullman’s novels take the form of guardian animals:
“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.”
Pullman contrasts this vision of the afterlife with orthodox depictions. A figure who was a Christian martyr but who is now turning her back on church doctrine describes the orthodox version as follows:
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 particular saint embraces Lyra’s alternative:
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.
Perhaps passages like this are why the Vatican condemned Pullman. I’ll add that the condemnation occurred under the rightwing pope Benedict, and I wonder if the same would have happened with Pope Francis given that there’s something Franciscan in Pullman’s vision. I think of the recent Sunday Forum talk that Rev. Jim Pappas gave on St. Francis’s vision of being connected with all of creation (here). Instead of denying the earthly realm and hoping for angels with harps (or whatever), Francis found heaven in nature and in people.
Along these lines, I’ve been reading Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire (2008), which I think might resonate with Pullman. According to authors Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, the Christian church didn’t become sin-obsessed and crucifixion-obsessed until around the year 1000. (They say it began changing with the First Crusade.)
Brock and Parker realized this when, while studying early Christian imagery, they discovered no depictions of Christ on the cross or of life as a vale of tears from which people long to be released. Instead, Christians at this time saw Earth itself as a potential paradise:
To our surprise and delight, we discovered that early Christian paradise was something other than “heaven” or the afterlife. Our modern views of heaven and paradise think of them as a world after death. However, in the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. It was on the earth.
Works of the time bear this out:
[The Spirit of God] was on the earth. Images of it in Rome and Ravenna captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape, the orchards, the clear night skies, and teeming waters of the Mediterranean world, as if they were lit by a power from within. Sparkling mosaics in vivid colors captured the world’s luminosity. The images filled the walls of spaces in which liturgies fostered aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual experiences of life in the present, in a world created as good and delightful.
And one more passage:
Like the breathing of a human body, the images said that God blessed the earth with the breath of Spirit. It permeated the entire cosmos and made paradise the salvation that baptism in the Spirit offered. As the most blessed place imaginable, paradise was also where the departed saints rested from their earthly labors and returned to visit those who loved them. In early Christian understandings, even heaven was a dimension of this life; it was the mysterious abode of God from which blessings flowed upon the earth. Nearby to heaven, the dead rested in their own neighborhood of paradise.
While some Christians in Pullman’s book come around to this vision, others do not. Pullman describes these latter as people who are so fixed on orthodox versions of heaven that they insist that the dark cave is, in fact, an orthodox paradise. Like Dante’s damned souls, they choose their own hell. Here, for instance, is how a thin and pale monk “with dark, zealous eyes” characterizes Lyra’s promise:
This is a bitter message, a sad and cruel joke. Can’t you see the truth? This is not a child. This is an agent of the Evil One himself! The world we lived in was a vale of corruption and tears. Nothing there could satisfy us. But the Almighty has granted us this blessed place for all eternity, this paradise, which to the fallen soul seems bleak and barren, but which the eys of faith see as it is, overflowing with milk and honey and resounding with the sweet hymns of the angelos. This is Heaven, truly! What this evil girl promises is nothing but lies. She wants to lead you to Hell! Go with her at your peril. My companions and I of the true faith will remain here in our blessed paradise, and spend eternity singing the praises of the Almighty, who has given us the judgment to tell the false from the true.
I can imagine Lyra responding to him in the words of the 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, only she would do in in a less self-righteous tone:
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.
The other figures in the underworld, however, ignore the monk and follow the children, with Will cutting a window into the world of the living with a magic knife. Roger, Lyra’s particular friend, is the first to step out:
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.
The harpies, meanwhile–which in addition to Virgil’s and Dante’s harpies are also modeled on the Furies in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy —transform from tormenters into angelic guides. In the final play (The Eumenides) the Furies undergo their own transformation. Originally directed to torment humans for their sins, including Orestes for having killed him mother, they turn into the Eumenides or “gracious ones.” Their new job is to serve as humanity’s protectors.
Similarly, Lyra bestows the name “Gracious Wings” on the harpy leader in Amber Spyglass. From henceforth, the harpies will listen to the stories of the dead and lead them—if they choose to be so led—to mingle with the elements.
But like Dante’s dead, who must choose to open themselves to God’s love, those who have died in Pullman’s afterlife must choose to mingle with God’s creation. If they refuse this vision, the former harpies will not lead them out. Or as the harpy now known as Gracious Wings puts it,
[W]e have a right to refuse to guide them if they lie, or if they hold anything back, or if they have nothing to tell us. If they live in the world, they should see and touch and hear and learn things. We shall make an exception for infants who have not had time to learn anything, but otherwise, if they come down here bringing nothing, we shall not guide them out.
Or put another way, if the dead choose to reside in hell, like the lost souls in Dante’s Inferno they will reside in hell.
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.
The vision can also be found in the inscription that Julia and I put on the gravestone of our eldest son Justin, who died in a freak drowning accident 23 years ago. The passage is 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 Dante’s Paradiso, a dance that is directed 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…
Now that (to borrow a line from Hamlet) is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
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Friday
Sunday is Guy Fawkes Day, which commemorates the moment, in 1606, when radical Catholics were thwarted in their attempt to blow up King James and the British Parliament. The following poem, written in 1870, bouncily reports what happened.
I’ve only read about, never experienced, the November 5 celebrations. Apparently bonfires are lit, upon which are burned effigies of Guy Fawkes, the conspirator assigned to light the match.
The occasion is also known as “Bonfire Night.” Sometimes fireworks are involved. All in all, it’s a good occasion to gather around a fire when the weather is turning cold. Oh, and a good time to sing the following poem, which ends with a cheer.
Remember, remember! The fifth of November, The Gunpowder treason and plot; I know of no reason Why the Gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot! Guy Fawkes and his companions Did the scheme contrive, To blow the King and Parliament All up alive. Threescore barrels, laid below, To prove old England’s overthrow. But, by God’s providence, him they catch, With a dark lantern, lighting a match! A stick and a stake For King James’s sake! If you won’t give me one, I’ll take two, The better for me, And the worse for you. A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope, A penn’orth of cheese to choke him, A pint of beer to wash it down, And a jolly good fire to burn him. Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring! Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King! Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!
Public poems that can be chanted are good for bringing people together.
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Thursday
As today is All Souls’ Day and a time when various cultures are celebrating the Dead of the Dead, I share the first part of a talk I gave this past Sunday on literary depictions of life after death. (I will post the final part of the talk, on Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass, on Sunday.)
We cannot know, of course, if the authors are right about the afterlife, and in any event depictions of post-life realms are more about negotiating the challenges of this world than predicting the next. But by putting those challenges in a death setting, the authors add an extra level of intensity and urgency to our biggest issues. Or put another way, to seriously imagine what, in passing over, we pass over to, leads to profound insights into the great existential questions—the great existence questions—about the meaning of life.
After all, as Samuel Johnson once said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
When I started putting this talk together, I didn’t fully realize how the four works I have in mind are all variations of the same work. It all started with the underworld scene in Homer’s Odyssey, which inspired the underworld scene in Virgil’s Aeneid, which in turn inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy. Meanwhile, one can find traces of Homer, Virgil and Dante in Philip Pullman’s underworld scene in The Amber Spyglass, which is the third book in his Golden Compass fantasy trilogy.
The Odyssey
In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the land of the dead after having spent a year on the island of the sorceress Circe. He does so to figure out what to do next. At this point in his travels, he has encountered considerable hardships. The storms and encounters with hostile islanders have, I believe, made him question whether he really wants to set out to sea again. After all, he has found safe refuge with Circe.
To be sure, he has difficulties with her at first—she tries to turn him and his men into livestock—but since then she has provided him with a comfortable life. In fact, by getting him to temporarily give up his duty to return home, along with its duties of kingship, perhaps she has succeeded after all in transforming him and his men into contented animals. To borrow a line from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” they have become people who do no more than “hoard, and sleep, and feed.”
I frame the drama in this particular way because the prospect of death often gets us to reflect upon our lives, as my wife Julia mentioned in her talk on Louise Penny’s murder mysteries last week. When The Odyssey opens in medias res, we see the gods discussing the hero, who has been stranded on Calypso’s island, this time for seven years, not just one. It is the gods who reaffirm that he has a purpose in life: he must return home to restore order in Ithaka. By this point, of course, he has lost everything—all his boats, all his men, and all his spoils from the Trojan War. On the plus side, he has the option of spending the rest of his life with a beautiful island nymph.
So back to Circe’s island, where he still has a boat. To determine what to do next, he takes her advice to consult with the prophet Teiresias in the land of the dead and travels there. In Hades he encounters a vast array of characters that those who know their Greek mythology will recognize. They cover the full range of human behavior, some having achieved glory, others having committed horrible crimes. After having learned his future from Teiresias—he will encounter more death and heartbreak but will ultimately die quietly in bed surrounded by his community—he converses with various individuals. In the talks with his former war companions Agamemnon and Achilles, I believe, we see the real meaning of the episode.
Before turning to them, however, allow me to mention his encounter with his mother, who has died while he was away. It is a heartbreaking scene and speaks especially powerfully to any of us who have lost someone we have loved. Odysseus’s mother tells him that she has died for “loneliness for you”:
“[O]nly my loneliness for you, Odysseus, for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus, took my own life away.’
I bit my lip, rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her, and tried three times, putting my arms around her, but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable as shadows are, and wavering like a dream. Now this embittered all the pain I bore, and I cried in the darkness:
“O my mother, will you not stay, be still, here in my arms, may we not, in this place of Death, as well, hold one another, touch with love, and taste salt tears’ relief, the twinge of welling tears? Or is this all hallucination, sent against me by the iron queen, Perséphonê, to make me groan again?”
Attempting unsuccessfully to hug a loved one will show up again in The Aeneid and Pullman’s Amber Spyglass.
Back to his battle companions. If I am right that Odysseus is really struggling about whether to leave the island or to stay, Agamemnon and Achilles both give him reasons to reject his duty and choose Circe.
Agamemnon, although he himself has returned safely to Greece, has then been killed by his wife Clytemnestra, which raises doubts that Odysseus himself may have: has his own wife, after 12 years of her husband’s absence, remained faithful? If not, why go home at all? Agamemnon, after describing his own murder in graphic detail, unloads on all women:
There is no being more fell, more bestial than a wife in such an action, and what an action that one planned! The murder of her husband and her lord. Great god, I thought my children and my slaves at least would give me welcome. But that woman, plotting a thing so low, defiled herself and all her sex, all women yet to come, even those few who may be virtuous.
Then he concludes with a piece of misogynistic advice:
Let it be a warning even to you. Indulge a woman never, and never tell her all you know. Some things a man may tell, some he should cover up.
If we see this as an interior dialogue within Odysseus’s own mind, then he would be coming up with reasons not to go home. And although Agamemnon then goes on to say that Penelope is probably an exception to the rule—maybe this is Odysseus reassuring himself—the doubts are there.
Doubts comes from another quarter in Odysseus’s conversation with Achilles. When Odysseus essentially tells him that it’s not so bad being dead because Achilles won so much fame when alive, Achilles shuts him down real fast. First, here’s Odysseus:
But was there ever a man more blest by fortune than you, Akhilleus? Can there ever be? We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime, we Argives did, and here your power is royal among the dead men’s shades. Think, then, Akhilleus: you need not be so pained by death.
In his reply, Achilles essentially accuses Odysseus of being facile. It’s one of my favorite passage in the epic:
Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils. Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
In other words, don’t tell someone who has died that death is not so bad.
Plato, incidentally, found this passage in Homer particularly objectionable. He feared the whole Hades episode would so terrify young men with the grim prospect of death that they would turn cowards on the battlefield.
But there’s a twist. After his bitter words, Achilles asks about his son, and Odysseus’s account of Neoptólemos’s bravery and his success in battle changes the father’s mood:
But I said no more, for he had gone off striding the field of asphodel, the ghost of our great runner, Akhilleus Aiákidês, glorying in what I told him of his son.
In other words, although personal glory may not be enough—the great anti-war poet Wilfred Owen makes a similar point in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”—one’s children can help give one’s life meaning. Given that Odysseus has a son awaiting him at home, this is important for him to hear. It may help convince him to leave, regardless of the dangers that await.
The Aeneid
Virgil’s underworld episode plays much the same role as Homer’s. Aeneas too has been wrestling with whether to continue on to fulfill his destiny—which is to kickstart the Roman Empire—or to settle for a comfortable but forgettable life elsewhere. He first encounters this dilemma with the Carthaginian queen Dido, whose heart he breaks when he leaves her. As in the Odyssey, Zeus—or in this case Jupiter—stands in for duty and purpose, and when he orders Aeneas to fulfill his destiny, the Trojan cannot refuse.
Aeneas encounters the same choice again on the island of Sicily. His father, whom he depends on for guidance, has just died and, to honor him, the troops hold various contests. While they are doing so, however, the women—sick of traveling and desiring to settle down–set fire to the ships. Aeneas and the men barely manage to put out the flames.
It is as this point that Aeneas, who has been asking a lot of his people, decides to visit an Apollonian oracle in Naples, presided over by the Cumaean sibyl. She will serve as his guide through the underworld, just as Virgil serves as Dante’s guide.
Aeneas expands Homer’s vision of Hades. Although Homer implies that it is sectioned off—with places of torment for some and fields of asphodel for others–Virgil goes into much more detail. He is also more interested in using the afterlife as a place where the evil are punished and the good rewarded—so much so that Dante and others saw the pagan Virgil prefiguring a Christian vision. Because he is not Christian, Virgil can’t take Dante through Paradiso, but he does guide him through Inferno and Purgatorio. More on that in a moment.
In Virgil’s hell, we see what (by the poet’s standards) it takes to be a good Roman citizen. What follows is a list of what one should not do:
Here are those who hated their brothers, in life, or struck a parent, or contrived to defraud a client, or who crouched alone over the riches they’d made, without setting any aside for their kin (their crowd is largest), those who were killed for adultery, or pursued civil war, not fearing to break their pledges to their masters: shut in they see their punishment. Don’t ask to know that punishment, or what kind of suffering drowns them. Some roll huge stones, or hang spread-eagled on wheel-spokes: wretched Theseus sits still, and will sit for eternity: Phlegyas, the most unfortunate, warns them all and bears witness in a loud voice among the shades: “Learn justice: be warned, and don’t despise the gods.” Here is one who sold his country for gold, and set up a despotic lord: this one made law and remade it for a price: he entered his daughter’s bed and a forbidden marriage: all of them dared monstrous sin, and did what they dared. Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice of iron, could I tell all the forms of wickedness or spell out the names of every torment.”
The good, by contrast, end up in something resembling a college campus or and idyllic senior center:
[T]hey came to the pleasant places, the delightful grassy turf of the Fortunate Groves, and the homes of the blessed. Here freer air and radiant light clothe the plain, and these have their own sun, and their own stars. Some exercise their bodies in a grassy gymnasium, compete in sports and wrestle on the yellow sand: others tread out the steps of a dance, and sing songs. There Orpheus too, the long-robed priest of Thrace, accompanies their voices with the seven-note scale, playing now with fingers, now with the ivory quill…. Aeneas marvels from a distance at their idle chariots and their weapons: their spears fixed in the ground, and their horses scattered freely browsing over the plain: the pleasure they took in chariots and armor while alive, the care in tending shining horses, follows them below the earth.
Virgil, much more than Homer, focuses on ethical behavior. In his underworld we get a sense of lives well-lived and badly-lived, and Dante will expand on this vision of the afterlife. Meanwhile, Aeneas gets from his dead father the clear and inspirational understanding he needs to continue his mission. Anchises knows the future and is able to spell out the history of Rome’s founding and rise to greatness. When he gets back to Sicily, Aeneas has reconnected with his sense of purpose and his resolve.
The Divine Comedy
The most extensive and famous depiction of life after death is, of course, Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s impossible to do justice to this work in the short time I have so I’ll just talk about it in the framework of my remarks so far, which is that artistic explorations of the afterlife are as much about this life as the next—and that extended explorations of death are ways of grappling with the meaning of our current life.
Dante, at the beginning of the Inferno, describes himself as undergoing what today we might call a mid-life crisis.
MIDWAY upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more…
Initially Dante believes that he just has to be a good Christian, and he turns toward the distant light of Paradise, only to be beset by hostile animals—or, as we might interpret them psychologically, inner doubts and fears. In other words, there’s no cheap grace. Instead, he must confront human darkness, including his own. There’s no way around, only through.
For help, he turns to the author who means the most to him and asks for guidance—which is to say, to Virgil. Dante draws on Aeneas’s journey into the underworld, as Virgil drew on Odysseus’s, to explore his inner turmoil. These doubts begin with what people think they want—sex, money, power, revenge, self-annihilation—and goes on to conclude that, if people have turned their desires into false idols, then they create hells for themselves—not only hell in the afterlife but hell in the here and now.
Put another way, the Inferno is not about how we are going to be punished after we die but how we apply our own punishments to ourselves while still alive. To cite an example, those who are driven by greed Dante describes as incessantly pushing enormous weights.
Here too, I saw a nation of lost souls,
far more than were above: they strained their chests against enormous weights, and with mad howls
rolled them at one another.
Dante observes,
Not all the gold that is or ever was under the sky could buy for one of these exhausted souls the fraction of a pause.
Paradiso, by contrast, is accessible to those who open themselves to God’s love. Again, one doesn’t have to die to experience Paradise. After all, God’s love is always there for us. Dante expresses this idea after catching a glimpse of God:
O grace abounding and allowing me to dare to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light, so deep my vision was consumed in it!
I saw how it contains within its depths all things bound in a single book by love of which creation is the scattered leaves…
Dante sums it up in his famous concluding lines:
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars, My will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
As I say, we’ll see Pullman borrow from both Virgil and Dante in Lyra’s journey to the land of the dead. But that’s the subject of Sunday’s post.
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Wednesday
My friend Rebecca Adams sent me a gorgeous poem to welcome in November. Spring in California, she provocatively contends, begins in November, and “Chaparral Spring” goes on to show how. “Everywhere, rolling brown hills bloom with green,/ A thick new blanket pushing up through dry selvage.”
The reversal continues on throughout the year. In March and April, the chaparral experiences its own version of snow covering “familiar landmarks”—only, instead of snow, it’s orange poppies that
sweep the contours of hills, verges of roads, pool into bright swaths, While blue lupine well into gratitude.
In an explanatory note sent along with the poem, Rebecca says (quoting Wikipedia) that the chaparral is “a shrubland plant community found primarily in California, in southern Oregon and in the northern portion of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. It is shaped by a Mediterranean climate (mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers) and infrequent, high-intensity crown fires.”
Chaparral Spring By Rebecca Adams
In coastal California, in chaparral country, Spring comes first in November With strong winter rains.
Out here, fire’s the first fear. Golden summer fields have tensed to crackling parchment, waiting to explode by any little spark.
Winter’s relief from danger. Winter is spring. Everywhere, rolling brown hills bloom with green, A thick new blanket pushing up through dry selvage.
This green winter coat stays bare late Fall through February Except for some wild sourgrass, A stem with solitary yellow flowers.
But in March and April, the coastland ranges And all the valleys and wooded foothills of the Sierras Finally catch up. Now spring comes on like winter.
We watch for wildflowers like you’d anticipate The first snowfall, thinking how it will cover Familiar landmarks. Suddenly, it breaks:
Orange poppies sweep the contours of hills, verges of roads, pool into bright swaths, While blue lupine well into gratitude.
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Tuesday – Halloween
For Halloween, I share this passage from Virgil’s Aeneid (trans. Robert Fagles). At the entrance of the underworld, Aeneas must muster up all his courage to make his way through a swarm of horrors. If you are one who dresses up for Halloween, you might find some ideas here.
The Trojan leader is on his way to query his recently deceased father about what he should do next. (Answer: Conquer the Latins and kickstart the Roman Empire.) The Cunaean sybil, who presides over Apollo’s oracle in Naples, is his guide. Before reaching the door of the underworld, they must walk through gloomy darkness, just as we did as kids:
On they went, those dim travelers under the lonely night, through gloom and the empty halls of Death’s ghostly realm, like those who walk through woods by a grudging moon’s deceptive light when Jove has plunged the sky in dark and the black night drains all color from the world.
Unlike trick-or-treaters, it is the monsters who are at the door. They are plenty frightening:
There in the entryway, the gorge of hell itself, Grief and the pangs of Conscience make their beds, and fatal pale Disease lives there, and bleak Old Age, Dread and Hunger, seductress to crime, and grinding Poverty, all, terrible shapes to see—and Death and deadly Struggle and Sleep, twin brother of Death, and twisted, wicked Joys and facing them at the threshold, War, rife with death, and the Furies’ iron chambers, and mad, raging Strife whose blood-stained headbands knot her snaky locks.
There in the midst, a giant shadowy elm tree spreads her ancient branching arms, home, they say, to swarms of false dreams, one clinging tight under each leaf. And a throng of monsters too—what brutal forms are stabled at the gates—Centaurs, mongrel Scyllas, part women, part beasts, and hundred-handed Briareus and the savage Hydra of Lerna, that hissing horror, the Chimaera armed with torches—Gorgons, Harpies and triple-bodied Geryon, his great ghost. And here, instantly struck with terror, Aeneas grips his sword and offers its naked edge against them as they come, and if his experienced comrade had not warned him they are mere disembodied creatures, flimsy will-o’-the-wisps that flit like living forms, he would have rushed them all, slashed through empty phantoms with his blade.
You could also choose to go to your Halloween party as Charon, the boatman who takes the dead across the River Styx:
And here the dreaded ferryman guards the flood, grisly in his squalor—Charon . . . his scraggly beard a tangled mat of white, his eyes fixed in a fiery stare, and his grimy rags hang down from his shoulders by a knot. But all on his own he punts his craft with a pole and hoists sail as he ferries the dead souls in his rust-red skiff.
One sees where Dante got his ideas for TheInferno. And why Virgil functions as his guide.
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Monday
It seems as if, overnight, the autumn leaves have started to come down in torrents and for no other reason that it’s time. (In other words, neither wind nor rain have been playing a role.) This gives me an excuse to share a simple but powerful Lucille Clifton poem.
In “the lesson of the falling leaves,” Clifton marvels at how, with little fanfare, leaves let go of the branches. There’s no clinging tightly to safety, and in that easy faith in the future, Clifton finds grace:
the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves
Letting go and venturing out into the unknown is a theme of Clifton’s. It shows up as well in “the blessings of the boats (at st. mary’s)” where she thinks of what it must have been like for English colonists to have set out for America in 1634. (The “blessing of the fleet” is celebrated every year to commemorate their landing in St Mary’s County, Maryland, where both Clifton and I taught for a number of years.) In her blessing, she asks that the sailors be carried out “beyond the face of fear”—and that they venture forth into the unknown with the same confidence as the leaves:
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
I note that, for years, this poem was read at our commencement as we looked over the St. Mary’s River, up which the colonists sailed to establish Maryland’s first colonial capital (St. Mary’s City). This sailing into the unknown also reminds me of the jazz pianist in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” venturing out into the terrifying waters of artistic exploration.
In doing so, Sonny shows his cautious brother that there’s more to life than playing it safe. In the following key passage, Sonny’s jazz ensemble is welcomes him back following a stint in prison for heroin. Creole is group’s leader:
But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water,
Deep water and drowning are not the same thing. And letting go is love.
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Sunday
Sewanee English professor Jennifer Michael has alerted me to the spiritual poetry of Mary Karr, including this lyric on meditation. In it, the poet imagines that “a weightless hand” is guiding her, softly pressing her “in the back’s low hollow,” and that, like a sailboat tacking against the wind, she goes there.
This “there” is the world revealed when the meditator’s third eye, with the aid of eucalyptus, is opened. (Eucalyptus is used in meditation to clear the mind, promote clear thinking and dispel anxiety.) In “the wide vermilion sky” that cradled us before birth, I am reminded of Wordsworth’s own account of birth: “But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home.” As Karr sees it, the sun that pours “its golden sap” is like the resin of primeval forests that captures and preserves ancient insects in timeless amber. We glow, preserved, in God’s love.
Julian of Norwich could say about this “precious insect” what she says about the hazelnut that was the focus of her own meditation: God made it, God loves it, God keeps it.
Meditatio By Mary Karr
In the back’s low hollow sometimes a weightless hand guides me, gentle pressure so I tack soft as a sailboat. (Go there)
Soften the space between your eyes (smudge of eucalyptus), the third eye opens. There’s the wide vermilion sky
that cradled us before birth, and the sun pours its golden sap to preserve me like His precious insect.
