In today’s post I cannibalize from several previous posts on Denise Levertov’s poem about Jacob’s dream of a stairway to heaven. Anthropologist Marcel Eliade, in his theory of “the sacred and the profane, talks about those sacred spaces in which the boundary between the earthly and the spiritual is porous. Jacob’s Bethel is one such place. Here’s the account as it appears in the Book of Genesis (28:10-19a):
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the LORD stood beside him and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place– and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel.
My former colleague Dana Greene, in her biography of Levertov, sees the poet exploring basic themes in “The Jacob’s Ladder.” Whereas the angels barely feel the stone steps—and for the poet, the stone steps are a significant detail—a man climbing “must scrape his knees, and bring/ the grip of his hands into play.”Dana writes that, in Levertov’s view, poets have a responsibility to engage with the world and issues of social justice. This means acknowledging both joy and suffering.
Our task, when faced with this reality, is to “strive to make a bridge between them,” an effort in which we invariably “fail or we almost fail.” To allow oneself to be nurtured by joy while resisting being destroyed by suffering, difficult though it may be, is what it means to be fully human. Here’s the poem:
The Jacob’s Ladder
The stairway is not a thing of gleaming strands a radiant evanescence for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and need not touch the stone.
It is of stone. A rosy stone that takes a glowing tone of softness only because behind it the sky is a doubtful, a doubting night gray.
A stairway of sharp angles, solidly built. One sees that the angels must spring down from one step to the next, giving a little lift of the wings:
and a man climbing must scrape his knees, and bring the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him. The poem ascends.
Note that the poem is also about poetry, with the stairway a transcendent poem. It must be built with the tool that we have, which is imperfect language. Rather than directly expressing radiant and evanescent angels, the poet must deal with sharp angles. The doubting night gray of the sky testifies to the challenge he or she faces.
As in many of Levertov’s poems—I think particularly of her poem on Doubting Thomas–we experience the divine only after struggling with doubt. People are not angels and the rocks we use for building may scrape our feet. Nevertheless, just as Jacob, his head pillowed on a rock, sees a stairway to heaven, so does our rock have “a glowing tone of softness.” The poet feels the light brush of angel wings as the poem ascends.
I pick up at least two other poems that Levertov may be alluding to. In “The Altar,” George Herbert talks about the paradox of a hard stone altar being a means of opening his own hard heart to God. (See my post on “The Altar” here.)
A HEART alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame To praise thy name.
The other is Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” which has an image of a ladder. The poet laments the end of his youthful romanticism, which once gave him marvelous poetic images (his circus animals). Now, however, he feels trapped in his own grimy and mundane reality.
Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
The miracle is that, out of this unpromising material, Yeats constructs the ladder that is his poem. For those wrestling with doubts about whether transcendence exists, look to the miraculous existence of poetry and be reassured.
Another Jacob’s Ladder Poem: Lucille Clifton turned to the stairway to heaven story two days after the 9-11 attacks. In it she imagines New York firemen climbing a Jacob’s ladder of their own. By heroically sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others, they achieved their own kind of transcendence.
In writing the poem, Clifton undoubtedly had in mind the slave spiritual “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,” a dream of escaping harsh circumstances:
Thursday, 9/13-01
the firemen ascend like jacob’s ladder into the mouth of history
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 41st Installment
Today I look back at the friendships in my life that have revolved around reading. While most of you will not know the specific individuals I name, you undoubtedly have versions of them in your own lives.
As Jane Austen illustrates in Northanger Abbey, sometimes reading provides powerful ways to bond, and that has been true throughout my life. In third grade my best friend Chris Mayfield introduced me to The Silver Chair, and I recall standing with our arms outstretched and asking Aslan to whisk us off to Narnia, as Eustace and Jill do in the book. A little bit later, the Hardy Boys connected me with Tommy Camp, who had over 30 of them, bought with money from selling vegetables from his family’s garden. Although formulaic and badly written, they allowed us to imagine having adventures as friends (or, to use the author’s word, “chums”). The House on the Cliff was my favorite.
Despite the role that books played in my friendships, however, reading also pulled me away from people, ushering me into what my dissertation advisor Paul Hunter termed, “the loneliness of the long distance reader.” I read while others played Little League, went swimming and caving, and engaged in various group enterprises. What bonding occurred was with my father, who read to us every night. Reading also gave me and my two brothers (later three) a collective identity that set us apart. Being a “Bates boy” meant, above all else, immersion in books.
My best friend in high school was Victor Roggli, just retired from the Duke Medical Faculty, who beat me out for valedictorian and with whom I teamed up for senior literature projects. Teacher Will Solie wanted us to find novel ways to explore the books he assigned, so for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment I set up as a Freudian analyst while Victor, as Raskolnikov, processed the reasons why he murdered the old pawnbroker. (I recall explaining the workings of the id and superego to him as he lay on a couch moaning about his bloody sock.) For Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Victor played the Buddha while I was a pilgrim searching for the path to enlightenment. Solie also had us compile our own reading lists, and Victor inspired me by reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace over spring break.
I majored in history rather than English at Carleton College and so didn’t engage in the English students’ intense group study sessions as they prepared for comprehensives. Although I did meet Julia through her poetry group, it wasn’t until graduate school that literature became again for me a collective endeavor.
Emory’s graduate teaching assistants had a lounge in which we shared teaching ideas and studied together for the Master’s exam. We had a white board on which we played such literary games as “which author and which character in literature would you most like to have as a partner.” (I believe I chose Aphra Behn and Dorothea Brooke.) Once we compiled a list of “graduate student qualifiers,” which was a rhetorical move that we likened to a wolf rolling over and defusing the aggression of a rival by showing the white of its belly. Fearing that we would trigger aggression in our graduate school professors if we too definitively asserted a claim, our qualifiers included “one could argue” or “it is not beyond the realm of possibility to speculate.”
My closest friend in those years was Norman Finkelstein (the poet, not the pro-Palestinian activist), who was the star of the department. We were both interested in how literature could change the world and read together various Marxist thinkers, especially members of the Frankfurt School, to arrive at theories as to how this could happen. The dense prose of authors such as Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, and Lyndon LaRouche proved challenging, but because we saw ourselves on a mission, we plunged in, working through the ideas. Although our intellectual interests would later diverge—I went in a more utilitarian direction while Norm became interested in Jewish mystical traditions–our years together created a permanent bond.
For a while, St. Mary’s College of Maryland felt like a continuation of graduate school. I was part of an unusually large group of new faculty, and we were excited by the idea of teaching at a public liberal arts college, with its vision of making a liberal arts education accessible to first generation college students. My best friend in those early years was Hans Lofgren, our literary theory and 19th American Literature specialist, and together we plunged into the work of Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton, two of the leading literary Marxists theorists of the day. We set up weekly study sessions—no mean feat as our teaching duties were heavy—and Hans helped me bring rigor to my thinking. Hans was invaluable in helping me write my first major academic article.
My heart was broken when Hans was denied tenure—he wasn’t yet the well-published scholar he would later become at the University of Gothenberg in his native Sweden—and I never fully recovered my initial idealism about St. Mary’s.
Alan and Jackie Paskow were also hugely influential colleagues, Alan in philosophy and Jackie in German and French. Alan was interested in the phenomenology of art, which is to say, the impact that art (in his case, literature and painting) has on how we perceive and interact with the world. How is it, he asks in his book The Paradoxes of Art, that fictional characters such as Hamlet and Anna Karenina matter to us and emotionally affect us. I too was exploring these questions, albeit from the perspective of reading outcomes.
We talked of these matters when Alan was dying of cancer at 70. I remember watching sunsets with him on his dock and sharing with him Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If the poem has particularly vivid images of nature’s cycle of life and death, it is because the protagonist knows he only has a year to live, and Alan talked about the experience of seeing each season for the last time.
At Alan’s request, about 15 or so of his fellow faculty gathered for monthly salons (as we called them) to talk about art, the meaning of life, and other existential matters. Alan was reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as his final reading project, and he shared his thoughts. We were aware at the time how extraordinary these gatherings were. Like Socrates, Alan turned his death into a teaching opportunity.
Alan’s wife Jackie, meanwhile, was one of several female colleagues—Andrea Hammer was another–who introduced me to feminist literary theory, and we read Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. From Jackie and Andrea I learned that works that I thought I knew can appear different to women readers.
Andrea also introduced our department to “process writing,” which moved us out of the old rhetorical approaches to writing (where one started with forms, say, a comparison-contrast essay) and instead focuses on the steps, often non-linear, that produce writing. Between new ways of seeing literature and new ways of teaching, these were heady times.
Other faculty friendships opened up later. One was with my favorite tennis partner, Bjorn Krondorfer in the Religious Studies department, who introduced me to Bibliodrama. I learned that participants interacting as different characters or sometimes even objects can open up new Biblical interpretations. Twice Bjorn and I tried out the method on literature, once with Hilda Doolittle’s “There is a spell in every seashell,” once with Andre Dubus’s novella Adultery. We shared the results in an English Education article.
Another close friend was David Finkelman, who taught the “Abnormal Psychology” classes for the psych department. The way that David lived for his students was inspiring, and twice we team-taught a course we called “Madness in Literature.” Every week we featured a work dealing with a different disorder (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden for schizophrenia, Syliva Plath’s Ariel for bipolarity, Lolita for pedophilia, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony for PTSD), and I was impressed with the succinct way that David summed up the major features of each condition. We learned that, for all its scientific aspirations, psychology benefits from humanistic approaches as well.
David would later marry one of Julia’s and my closest friends, head of the Education Department Lois Stover. As an expert in Young Adult Literature, Lois opened my eyes to the importance of young adult novels in helping teenagers sort through their pressing concerns. And not only teenagers: Lois gave me Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia after Justin died, which comforted me.
If these friends had all remained in the St. Mary’s area, we would probably have retired there, but most of us scattered. Lovely though St. Mary’s City is, there is no there there (as Gertrude Stein would say)—just an archaeological dig, the college, two churches, and various housing developments—prompting us to move to Mayberry-like Sewanee, Tennessee. Sewanee is what AARP calls a NORC or Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, and we have been making new friends while here.
One important literary friendship has been with John Gatta, who occupied the office next to mine when I was teaching introductory courses for Sewanee. An expert in early American literature, including the Puritans and environmentally conscious authors such as Henry David Thoreau, John is interested in ecocriticism and ecotheology, and we have supported each other’s books.
We also set up a faculty discussion group that has been meeting weekly. First set in motion by our desire to understand better Dante’s Divine Comedy—we found another retired faculty member who could lead us in our exploration—we had so much fun that we decided to branch out. Other English faculty and retired faculty joined our group, and so far we have discussed (in addition to Dante) The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Hamlet, King Lear, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, Paradise Lost, Absolom and Architophel, Rape of the Lock, various Wordsworth and Coleridge poems, Walden, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, The Glass Menagerie, and other works that I’m blanking on at the moment.
One important friend I haven’t yet mentioned, although Julia and I met her in college, was fellow history major Rachel Kranz. Blessed (and, in her eyes, sometimes cursed) by a genius level IQ, Rachel would go on to work for Minnesota Public Radio, aid in the unionization of Columbia University’s work force, and become a superb ghost writer, while also writing a novel and directing Off-Off Broadway plays, some of them her own. Rachel was my news editor on the Carletonian, and we also studied together the challenging works of Marxist political theory assigned us by Carl Weiner. A brilliant editor, Rachel helped me flesh out key ideas in my dissertation and then to shape my first major film article. Later, Rachel gave me invaluable feedback on my book How Beowulf Can Save America.
Although we became estranged for a short while, I remember traveling to New York to renew our friendship and reading a draft of her novel Leaps of Faith on the subway. I was so enthralled that I almost missed my stop, and I provided reader reactions to both this novel (published by Farrar Straus) and the next (The Long Waves). The latter unfortunately never saw the light of day as Rachel died of ovarian cancer.
Over the years, I spent hours and hours on the phone as Rachel used me to process the things going on in her life. Like me, Rachel saw novels and drama as essential to the health of our society (Bertolt Brecht was her favorite author), and we talked constantly about their social import. We didn’t always agree—for instance, she was more critical of Jane Austen’s use of the marriage plot than I was—but always I knew that she would uncover depths upon depths.
Years ago, when I saw Barbara Streisand in the movie The Way We Were, I thought of Rachel. Their intelligence, political commitment, and passion are similar, and Rachel had the same impact on writers and actors that the Streisand character has on screenwriter played by Robert Redford.
Rachel’s death hit me like a hammer blow. I was with her in a Bronx hospital the week before she died—in fact, I picked up a serious infection in the hospital, which led to pericarditis and myocarditis—and saw her, even at this late stage, trying to generate an idea for a book series. She was such a force that no one could believe it when she finally passed on.
In The Long Waves, which was 90% completed, there’s a psychic (Rachel had some psychic abilities) who carries the weight of America’s past colonial sins on his shoulders. Warren is heir to a wealthy Connecticut family who traces his strange aversion to sugar—it makes him violently ill—to his family’s Jamaican sugar plantations. Like Warren, Rachel felt acutely the weight of the world’s past injustices, and one reason why she had difficulty finishing her novel is because she could never reconcile herself with her inability to do more. Her “big baggy monster” of a novel (as Henry James would describe it) insisted on exploring every crime of humanity it came across.
At her memorial service, I read the final paragraph of the novel, which dazzles me the way the end of Great Gatsby dazzles. Warren is suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of the whole as all the themes of the novel come together:
And it comes so suddenly, it’s like the crack of a whip, that surge of energy that almost knocks me down. The machines that made their dresses, and the men who made the machines. The trees cut down to make the drums, and the axe that swung against each tree. The blood that flows like money, the money that dazzles like light. You’ll never be free of it, he says, and I say, I know. And piece by piece the world comes to life around me—It burns, it burns, this living world—useless, amputated, angry, bereft, joyous, pulsing, here—
All of Rachel’s righteous anger and all of her delight in life are bound up in those words.
I conclude with a friend who was instrumental in the book I published two years ago, just as Rachel was a key aid in previous publications. I met Rebecca Adams thanks to a friend I met through this blog, and at a time when I lost my way on my book, she saw its promise and offered to help. It’s hard to imagine the book having been completed without her. In addition, Rebecca guides a group of us in a weekly lectio divina session, where we discuss Biblical passages and explore various life issues.
Tennyson’s Ulysses at one point says, “I am part of all that I have met.” The converse is true with me: all that I have met are part of me. Each of these friendships has opened up incomparable richness. Or as Ulysses puts it,
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move.
I write today about a well-researched and very disturbing Atlantic article by Rose Horowitz that provocatively announces, “The End of Reading Is here: Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.”
To be sure, the article itself has to qualify this claim in one important way, observing that, what with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions, Americans are actually reading “more words than ever before.” The worry is that this “explosion of literary fragments” comes
at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
What follows is a litany of instances of how the decline in long reading has led to decreased thinking capability, just as the advent of AI is eroding writing skills. Skill levels that were once increasing are now on the wane. And although people are still buying books and new bookstores are opening, Horowitz said that those number mask the extent of the crisis:
[O]ptimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture.
Observing that books “used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality” that passed from one generation to the next, now information “moves horizontally, from young person to young person.” The decline of reading, she writes, “didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.”
There are occasional signs of hope in this otherwise depressing article. Reporting that two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day, Horotwitz says that, following such a ban, last year a Dallas school district
saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase. Rex Ovalle, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, told me he’s seen pushback against excerpts; some teachers are adding whole books back into their curriculum. Felton Thomas Jr., the executive director of the Cleveland Public Library, said that its youngest patrons have joined senior citizens in preferring print books to digital copies.
“If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile,” Horowitz writes, “the holdouts lose nothing by trying.”
Horowitz sees herself as someone with a foot in both camps, having been raised in a reading family but having a cellphone and an Instagram account by the time she was in seventh grade. Because I’m a sucker for reading stories, here’s the one that she shares. Her father, like mine, read to her up through seventh grade, and she loved reading The Boxcar Children with her siblings. (It was Narnia and Tolkien for me.) Then, when she reached high school,
I got it in my head that I should read the classics. My teachers kept recommending their favorite books. I wanted to share in their knowledge and understand their references. I slogged through Jane Eyre and fell for Anna Karenina. Although I was alone while reading, I didn’t feel that way. These books contained the wisdom of generations. As James Baldwin said (in a 1963 Life profile, just a week after he appeared on the cover of Time): “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.” I felt like I was part of an unbroken chain of knowledge and culture.
Horowitz acknowledges that the habit slipped in the years that followed—”I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages”—and it’s true that reading is a muscle that must be maintained. I recently recommended reading “like a Victorian,” a few pages every night, as a way to keep that muscle fit.
But before we surrender to Horowitz’s doomsday scenario, it good to remember the literature gets a say in the matter. In a world where we are fed continuously with lies, literature is a no bullshit zone that puts us in connection with truth. Or as Salman Rushdie puts it, the job of contemporary writers is “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
While Horowitz is right to focus on the various setbacks that reading, writing, and literature are experiencing at the moment, the enduring power of truth to stand against the “explosion of reading fragments” cannot be discounted. The various reversals that Horowitz mentions, from declining IQ and test scores to lower tolerance for mental exertion to fewer humanities majors are indeed unfortunate, but if we are currently experiencing some backsliding, it’s good to remember that Enlightenment progress has never progressed in a straight upward line. In the end, people have always returned to literature because nothing else speaks as well to our deepest needs. As I write in my book’s conclusion, people
intuitively recognize that masterworks, whether old classics or new arrivals, have the power to point us towards the individual and social transformation we crave. These works can turn us upside down and inside out as no other form of writing can….The thinkers we have surveyed in this book know literature is more powerful and challenging than … simplistic ways of thinking, as do good literature teachers, librarians and other of literature’s advocates. They know—and you do as well—that a rich life opens before us the moment we pick up a book and immerse ourselves in its words.
In short, while we should take seriously the threats posed to literacy by social media and AI, we shouldn’t overlook the power of literature to push back, which it has been doing for as long as there has been literature. An image that comes to mind when I say this is resurrected Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. While the Witch appears to triumph in the short run, she doesn’t reckon with what Aslan calls “the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.”
If the forces of barbarism couldn’t wipe out the classics over the centuries, there’s no reason to think that Tik-Tok, Instagram, youtube, video games, streaming services, and all those other electronic distractions will be any more successful. Despite Horowitz’s fears that we are entering a postliterate age, literature itself is far from dead.
I began writing today’s post in the hospital where Julia is undergoing carpal tunnel surgery. She was first visited by the surgeon, a grandfatherly sort with a great sense of humor who walked her through the forms she needed to sign. At one point he joked that the paperwork was more complex than the surgery itself.
His remarks resonated as we have been listening to one of Terry Pratchett’s Commander Vimes novels, where police grumbling about paperwork is a running joke. Julia and I didn’t mind because we understand that we live in a litigious society where responsibilities need to be laid out, and the doctor was very clear about where his own accountability lay. “If nerve damage results,” he said at one point, “that’s on me and I’ll come back and work to fix it.”
This was in stark contrast to what we had just heard on a Rachel Maddow report on ICE killings and beatings. (Along with Pratchett, we had been listening to the podcast of Monday night’s show.) Although Maine’s governor and two senators have been calling for a complete and thorough independent investigation of an ICE killing in Biddeford, Maine—a resident with a legal work permit is the victim—the site is not being treated as a crime scene. As a result, independent citizens have been taking it upon themselves to photograph the pools of blood. Meanwhile, after months of delay Minnesota investigators are finally gaining access of the evidence surrounding the killings of Rene Goode and Alex Pretti. ICE has been doing all it can to evade accountable paper work.
In Pratchett’s Fifth Elephant, Commander of the Watch Sam Vines has been called out of the city to conduct a diplomatic mission, and Captain Carrot, his ultra-competent second-in-command, has resigned to go in search of his fellow officer Angua, who is his love interest. This leaves in charge the incompetent Sergeant Colon, who has a vexed relationship to paperwork. We learn this early from a conversation he has with Corporal Nobby Nobbs:
“I can see this is going to get on top of me,” said Colon, as they walked away. “There’s paperwork, too. You know me and paper work, Nobby.”
“You’re a very thorough reader, that’s all, Fred,” said Nobby. “I’ve seen you take ages over just one page. Digesting it magisterially, I thought.”
Colon brightened a little. “Yes, that’s what I do,” he said.
“Even if it’s only the menu down at the Klatchian take-out. I’ve seen you staring at one line for a minute at a time.”
“Well, obviously you can’t let people put one over on you, said Colon, sticking out his chest, or at least sticking it further up.
Despite his supposed thoroughness, Colon is overwhelmed by paperwork when he becomes acting commander. It occurs to him
that maybe Vimes and Carrot between them had developed a way of keeping just ahead of the piles, by knowing what was important and what wasn’t. To Colon, it was all gut-wrenchingly mysterious. There were complaints, and memos, and invitations, and letters requesting “a few minutes of your time” and forms to fill in, and reports to read, and sentences containing words like “iniquitous” and “immediate action” and they tottered in his mind like a great big wave, poised to fall on him.
Pratchett observes that Colon is so far out of his depth that “the fish had lights on their noses.” The author explains,
It wasn’t that he was illiterate, but Fred Colon did need a bit of think and a run-up to tackle anything much longer than a list and he tended to get lost in any word that had more than three syllables. He was, in fact, functionally literate. That is, he thought of reading and writing like he thought about boots—you needed them, but they weren’t supposed to be fun, and you got suspicious about people who got a kick out of them.
Colon is finally able solve his paperwork problem by making a simple connection:
He turned, and his eye caught the huge accusing heap of paperwork in the corner.
And the empty fireplace, too.
That was what officering was all about, wasn’t it? Making decisions!
Unfortunately, the decision that results in a clean desk also leads him to burn the wages chitty, which means that no one gets paid and everyone leaves the force. Railing against paper work is like railing against government regulations: while they can seem onerous, often they serve a function.
Pratchett’s novel has a lot more to say about the impulse to abuse power and about the responsibility of police to resist going over to the dark side. But I’ve been up since 5:30 this morning so I’ll save that for another day.
More Pratchett on paperwork:
Paperwork is also a running joke in Jingo, where it is Vimes struggling with it. I particularly like this passage:
Vimes’s desk was becoming famous. Once there were piles, but they had slipped as piles do, forming this dense compacted layer that was now turning into something like peat. It was said there were plates and unfinished meals somewhere down there. No one wanted to check. Some people said they’d heard movement.
And then there’s this one:
Vimes’s approach to paperwork was not to touch it until someone was shouting, and then at least there would be someone to help him sort through the stacks.
An ESPN commentator has cited the most famous line from Alexander Dumas’s Three Musketeers in excited anticipation of tomorrow’s match between France and Spain, held (of all days!) on France’s national holiday. Although Graham Hunter, who was embedded in the Spanish team, is predicting a Spanish victory, he sees the French as formidable:
Tuesday’s World Cup semifinal, on Bastille Day, will carry the narrative that France’s four musketeers (Michael Olise, Ousmane Dembélé, Desiré Doué, Kylian Mbappé) make coach Didier Deschamps’ team stick-on winners.
Excited by the comradely “vibes” he witnessed in the Spanish camp, however, Hunter then appropriates the Musketeer motto for La Roja:
Their opponents have their own powerful “all for one” mentality that can push them on to New Jersey, and their second World Cup final.
When the motto appears in the novel, D’Artagnan is still an apprentice musketeer, which makes the application all the more appropriate as the French could be seen as having 3+1 Musketeers, given that Doué has been sharing the fourth position with Bradley Barcola. In any event, the four in the novel are about to embark on their most dangerous mission yet.
They have become involved in a high stakes political battle involving the king, the queen, the queen’s British lover, the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, the evil Milady de Winter, and the queen’s handmaid, who has been kidnapped. D’Artagnan has just pulled off a bit of trickery comparable to a Lamine Yamal juke or an Olise pass, following which comes the line everyone knows:
“And now, gentlemen,” said D’Artagnan, without stopping to explain his conduct to Porthos, “All for one, one for all—that is our motto, is it not?”
“And yet—” said Porthos.
“Hold out your hand and swear!” cried Athos and Aramis at once.
Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand, and the four friends repeated with one voice the formula dictated by D’Artagnan:
“All for one, one for all.”
“That’s well! Now let us everyone retire to his own home,” said D’Artagnan, as if he had done nothing but command all his life; “and attention! For from this moment we are at feud with the cardinal.”
For all the fellowship that Hunter finds on the Spanish side, it appears that France similarly sees itself as a team rather than as a group of talented individuals. Fears that France would get in its own way or implode like the 2002 team have been unfounded. Rather than Mbappé’s ego disrupting the team, it appears that he has instead embraced the collective.
The French team’s collectivity has further been strengthened by the racist attacks on its “Black-Blanc-Beur [North African]” makeup, first from a Paraguayan legislator and then from a former Spanish prime minister. (The current Spanish prime minister criticized the comments.) Finally, the team has rallied around coach Didier Deschamps, who lost his mother during the group stages and who has announced he is stepping down at the end of the tournament.
With the blue of the Musketeer doublets vs. the red tabards of the Cardinal’s guards, the novel even anticipates the colors of the semi-finalists. Let what many are calling “the final before the final” begin.
traFew politicians have more openly sold their souls than Lindsey Graham, the one-time maverick senator from South Carolina who became one of Donald Trump’s chief sycophants and who died suddenly yesterday at 71. Yet perhaps to prevent himself from losing his moral bearings altogether, he did remain true to one higher cause, prompting Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum to invoke Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in yesterday’s reflection on the man.
Let’s look first at the betrayal. Although Graham once allied himself with John McCain as one who put principles over partisanship, Apppelbaum writes that
like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experience radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.
Appelbaum first compared Graham to collaborators living under autocratic regimes in a 2020 piece where she conducted an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon. In addition to looking at those who resisted communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and those who didn’t, she examined Republicans who broke with Trump after his January 6 coup attempt (Mitt Romney) and those who joined him (Graham). As she reported at the time,
A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me! ” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.
In that article Appelbaum turned to Czesław Miłosz, the dissident and Nobel-winning Polish poet who defected to the west after observing close up how writers and intellectuals justified collaborating with authoritarian rule. In “The Captive Mind” Milosz noted that careerism could not provide a complete explanation for their capitulation:
To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.”
George Orwell sums up this sense of peace in the concluding paragraph of 1984:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
In the article that appeared yesterday, after noting the many ways that Graham telegraphed his love of Trump, Appelbaum cites the one exception: he supported Urkaine, even though he well knew that Trump sought to curry favor with Vladimir Putin. Appelbaum reports that Graham
made 10 trips to Ukraine; he returned from the last one the day before he died. He repeatedly proposed legislation to sanction Russia, doing so with such frequency that his bill became a kind of joke, the Waiting for Godot of Congress, always proposed and never accepted by a president who did not want to make trouble for his Russian friends.
In Beckett’s absurdist play, Vladimir and Estragon wait fruitlessly for the appearance of one Godot, who may be God or meaning or even just something different. Occasionally they are given glimmers of hope, as when a messenger boy shows up and informs them, “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.” At the end of the play, however, they are once again fruitlessly waiting.
Appelbaum reflects that, absurd though Graham’s hopes were, he may have remained loyal to Ukraine’s struggle because he knew, at some deep level, that “he had betrayed the moral code that he grew up with.” Without this one unbroken commitment (and here I borrow a line from another existentialist parable, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) life would “have been too dark—too dark altogether.”
I suppose this struggle differentiated Graham from those around Trump who, like T.S. Eliot’s hollow men, bend with the wind. It made him slightly more complicated and slightly more interesting.
Although a non-believer, Greg Olear, my favorite blogger, has unexpectedly endorsed the Texas Board of Education’s recent decision requiring high school students to read selected Biblical passages.
To be sure, he qualifies his endorsement, observing that there are
plenty of reasons not to like the BOE decision. Is the Board trying to foist Christianity upon unsuspecting students in Texas? That may well be an ulterior motive. Is this a power grab, a brazen attempt to weld Church and State together? This being Texas, probably yes. Is it fair to mandate passages from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but not the Quran, or other religious texts? I’ll let Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, take that question: “Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”
Olear responds that these are “arguments about politics, not about education—and certainly not about literature.” In a good English course, he writes,
what you’re supposed to do is read texts and then discuss them. It isn’t about right and wrong, per se; it’s about nuance and interpretation and, above all, the development of critical thinking…
Olear points out the rich complexities that can be found in the required Biblical excerpts, which consist of the Garden of Eden story, the Book of Job, and the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that is often read at weddings. The nature of sin, the meaning of unmerited suffering, and the foundational importance of love are great things for high school students to be discussing.
It’s worth noting what the Board of Education leaves out, which is anything from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Was it worried that the Sermon on the Mount or the Parable of the Good Samaritan or the impossibility of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven make Jesus sound like a leftwing radical? Given the rightwing’s assault on social welfare programs, I’d love to see a class dive into the Prodigal Son story. Jesus, like the best teachers, challenges even the most entrenched of assumptions.
Olear makes the point that the literature we encounter in English classes is much richer if we know our Bible, and this has certainly been my experience. To cite one example that startled me, when I was teaching Beowulf, I was amazed that many of my students didn’t know the story of Cain, who the poet tells us is the ancestor of Grendel and his mother. So yes, I’m all for students being introduced to the Bible.
That is, as long as it does not shape their science, history, or political science classes. A biology teacher at my kids’ public high school refused to teach evolution because of her literal reading of Genesis, a shallow interpretation that robs the story of its richness. There will be language arts teachers who use the Biblical readings to proselytize. But most teachers I have encountered respect the works they teach, refusing to subordinate them to narrow political agendas. In any event, Olear appears to believe that the material is so substantive that it will frustrate such efforts.
Incidentally, the list of required readings is quite good. It includes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, The Inferno, and Fahrenheit 451, along with some great poems (“Prufrock,” “If,” “The Raven,” “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Paul Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”); short stories (Trollope’s “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Coine” (!), Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”); and some essays, including Thucydides’s account of Pericles’s funeral oration and Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (whose title itself is a Biblical allusion).
The only real lightweights on the list are Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” and Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan, but maybe they were included to give the Board political cover for including King.
The Bible readings, of course, are getting all the publicity. But as it appears that many Christians these days are not really reading their Bible but just imagining that it confirms their own reactionary agendas, maybe it’s good that students will have a chance to examine it closely.
Further note: I remember how, in my first job, my teaching of Genesis as part of Morehouse College’s Humanities sequence startled one of my students, an 18-year-old preacher. I pointed out that there are two accounts of creation, not one. Those who compiled the Torah had the wisdom or the humility to include both rather than choose one. Amazing revelations await those who engage in close reading.
As one who is rooting for France to win the World Cup, I am terrified of Spain’s Lamine Yamal, who barely seems an adult—in fact, he looks like my youngest grandson, who sees the resemblance and is a fan—yet can do things with the ball that few men can do. While he hasn’t scored in this World Cup, he is drawing multiple defenders, thereby opening up spaces for teammates.
Having beaten Belgium, the next foe is France, which Spain will play on Bastille Day. “I think that if France has anyone to fear, it’s us,” Yamal said after Spain’s recent victory. The Christopher Merrill poem below has me thinking of how Yamal’s attraction lies in part in the almost boyish joy he radiates while playing with the ball.
It also takes me back to one of my own childhood memories. We were living in the Hotel des Nations,, which is close to the city’s Roman arena. I visited it one day around noon and saw six French school boys combining lunch with practice. Five of them were lined up, baguette sandwiches in hand, taking turns juggling a ball. Every once in a while, the boy with the ball would flick it towards the entryway, where a goalie stood. He would field the ball and roll it back to the group, whereupon another boy would begin juggling. Always, as I said, with sandwich in hand.
This was in 1963 and France wasn’t the soccer powerhouse that it has since become. Nor was Paris yet the incubator of many of the world’s greatest players. Of the 1,248 players at this year’s World Cup, apparently 56 (4.3%) were born in Paris, including Kylian Mbappé. (In all, 99 were born in France, with many choosing to play for other nations, including Morocco and the Côte d’Ivoire.) To be sure, the Parisian players don’t come from the Latin Quarter, where the arena is to be found, but from the working class immigrant suburbs. Still, my love of French soccer dates from this early encounter.
Here’s Merrill’s poem, which captures the love between boy and ball and reminds us that it all begins as a child’s game.
A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball Christopher Merrill
after practice: right foot to left foot, stepping forward and back, to right foot and left foot, and left foot up to his thigh, holding it on his thigh as he twists around in a circle, until it rolls down the inside of his leg, like a tickle of sweat, not catching and tapping on the soft side of his foot, and juggling once, twice, three times, hopping on one foot like a jump-roper in the gym, now trapping and holding the ball in midair, balancing it on the instep of his weak left foot, stepping forward and forward and back, then lifting it overhead until it hangs there; and squaring off his body, he keeps the ball aloft with a nudge of his neck, heading it from side to side, softer and softer, like a dying refrain, until the ball, slowing, balances itself on his hairline, the hot sun and sweat filling his eyes as he jiggles this way and that, then flicking it up gently, hunching his shoulders and tilting his head back, he traps it in the hollow of his neck, and bending at the waist, sees his shadow, his dangling T-shirt, the bent blades of brown grass in summer heat; and relaxing, the ball slipping down his back…and missing his foot.
He wheels around, he marches over the ball, as if it were a rock he stumbled into, and pressing his left foot against it, he pushes it against the inside of his right until it pops into the air, is heeled over his head- the rainbow! – and settles on his extended thigh before rolling over his knee and down his shin, so he can juggle it again from his left foot to his right foot – and right foot to left foot to thigh- as he wanders, on the last day of summer, around the empty field.
David Beckham receives a red card in the 1998 World Cup
Thursday
I thought I could concentrate only on grandchildren and the World Cup this week, avoiding politics altogether, but then he who will not be named pressured FIFA to suspend the Folarin Balogun red card (see my post on the incident here, and, well, so much for that wish. At least the incident, and soccer refereeing in general, has yielded some great humor, including literary jokes from my English professor son.
Driving home to Georgia after visiting us in Tennessee, he and the kids listened to a dramatized version of The Hobbit, leading to this Bluesky tweet (Tobias Wilson-Bates@phdhurtbrain@bsky.social) about soccer’s video review system:
The ref is coming back from the review station and it doesn’t look good. He’s shaking his head and I’m afraid it’s what we predicted. After VAR review “what have I got in my pocket?” is NOT a valid riddle and Bilbo is going to have to concede being eaten.
This was followed up with a Sophocles reference:
The ref is coming back from the sideline and, OH MY GOD, he’s telling Oedipus that Jocasta is his MOTHER! Goodness, VAR saves him from yet another bad call.
There were a couple of good responses, including this from one Antonio Barros:
Such a good VAR intervention! How come the ref Tiresias didn’t not see this? Is he blind?
And this from johnw60.bsky.social:
Deus ex machinvar
After an England player picked up a red card for a studs-up tackle, Toby tweeted:
Really hope England splurged for the retractable red card insurance before the tournament 🤞🤞
The red cards made him think of the Cruciatus or torture curse (a.k.a. the Crucio) in Harry Potter:
Red cards are so wild. The closest thing in professional sports to a magical curse or hex.
Toby then elaborated:
You have crossed the football gods and must now be BANISHED from the land of foot
After commenting on the World Cup games, Toby then considered applying them to his teaching. For instance:
Going to start calling the last ten minutes of class “stoppage time” to get my students more invested in learning
To which Bluesky’s Eric Rauchway responded,
I’m gonna go further and tell them the class will be only forty minutes unless there are any fouls in which case it will be lengthened by stoppage time
Toby again:
Will occasionally drop to the ground grabbing my face for several minutes to keep them on their toes
There was also was this fantasy of a system for calling fouls on students for not paying attention:
“Please refer to the syllabus” = Penalty “We covered this in class” = Yellow Card “Per my last email” = Red Card
And then there’s this from one who has clearly attended many faculty meetings:
Much respect to Messi the middle aged king for knowing you only need to pay attention for the final 10 minutes of the meeting
Humor aside, Toby had the following thoughtful reflection on the tournament, in which chance often determines who wins:
Almost every World Cup the eventual winner needs to win at least one match along the way via penalties which means we’re less determining the best team than some alignment of the team w the best play, best draw, and best penalty luck.
To me this is part of the beauty of the World Cup. It’s rarely a meditation on dominance, and much more often an extended experience of global equality and the randomness of joy and beauty.
Years ago I remember someone remarking that the occasional randomness and element of chance in soccer were one reason why it would never catch on in the United States, where we want to believe we have power over what happens to us. Other cultures are more fatalistic, resigned to the idea that sometimes unfair things happen.
The most spectacular soccer example is Maradona’s “hand of God” goal in a 1986 quarter final victory, but there have been countless other bad or missed calls over the years. While people may never accept what has happened—ask any Brit who was around for the Maradona game—one of the lessons learned is that we can be victimized by things outside our control.
Hmm, now that’s something Sophocles understood.
With video review, it’s as though the world has tried to Americanize the game, letting technology replace human limitations. Now we are seeing goals negated because a player’s toe was offside, and France was awarded its game-winning penalty against Paraguay because VAR picked up a clear foul that the referee missed. FIFA has made it appear that it can remove uncertainty from the game.
But the Balogun red card, which may have been awarded because the foul looked worse in slow motion than it actually was, calls that into question. Rather than removing all doubt, now there are debates over whether the technology has been properly used, with Egypt especially arguing that its goal-of-the-tournament should not have been negated because of a VAR-detected foul at the other end of the field. Things get particularly murky when the technology is used to determine motive: was a player actually tripped in the penalty area or was he deliberately diving?
All of which argues for literature and the humanities, which teach us that that life, including the games we play, can never be reduced to technological engineering. That may frustrate some, but the endless debates that ensue can lead to social bonding as strangers have things to talk about. The great books teach us that human reality is never simple but always shifting, and we leave ourselves vulnerable when we forget that.
Other recent Toby literary tweets:
—Full respect to Brontë and Faulkner, but I’m reading a Wilkie Collins’ novel where FOUR characters have the same name so far and I don’t think he’s done yet
—Middlemarch, written 155 years ago, is in part about the unbearable cultural inertia that blocks simple affordable housing and healthcare reform.
—More things in life need to operate like the Pizza Hut Book-It challenge that used to give kids personal pizzas for reading books.
If I read Brothers Karamazov, I think that should pay my mortgage for the month is all I’m saying
Followed by:
—Since I’m a professor, in a sense it does fairly literally pay my mortgage 🤔 but I think everyone should have access to this option
