To Fight Authoritarianism, Think Sisyphus

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

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Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Before Vaccines: Home Burials

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

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Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You don’t know how to ask it.’ 

                                              ‘Help me, then.’ 

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

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

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

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

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Poets Talking Poetry over a Beer

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

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Monday

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

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

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

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

Poet #1 argues that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which elicits the response,

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

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

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

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

Poetry for Supper
By R.S. Thomas

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

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

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

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

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

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Pullman and Dante on the Afterlife

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

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Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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History’s Arc Bends Towards Kafka

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2023

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Friday

Yesterday, in honor of the late Czech author Milan Kundera, I looked back at past posts about his insights into the nature of authoritarianism. Moving out of politics, today I allude to an essay where I mentioned his reflections on how courtship has changed and then reprint a post where I quote at length from his reflections on The Art of the Novel.

In response to a fine New Yorker piece on “How Dating During a Pandemic Is Like Being in a Jane Austen Novel,” I wrote, “In a world where everything is built for speed and convenience, the slowness of Jane Austen’s relationships is part of their attraction.” That in turn prompted me to recall passages in Kundera’s novel Slowness, including the following on what we have lost:

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.” A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.”

Kundera contends that our emphasis on speed changes the very nature of sexuality:

The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe.

Whether or not this is true, Kundera’s counsel to live life more slowly and (to use Thoreau’s favorite word) deliberately is worth taking seriously.

In my post “History’s Arc Bends Towards Kafka,” meanwhile, I summed up Kundera’s view that fiction is always a step ahead of philosophy. Here’s the essay.

Reprinted from Oct. 21, 2010

Literature provides a special way of knowing, a way different than, say, philosophy. But it’s hard to prove this because we need to use the language of rational philosophy to make literature’s case. Once we have done so, philosophy can seem more effective than literature. After all, it tells us things straight up, without resorting to stories, images and symbols.

Because of this contradictory situation, there were literary scholars in the 1970’s and 1980’s who claimed that literature was just second-rate philosophy.  Or as Czech novelist Milan Kundera himself wrote in 1983, “I’m . . . fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends.”

But philosophy can’t convey the same kind of experiential knowing that literature does. Literature takes us inside knowing and, because of this, we come to see the world in new ways. In his Art of the Novel, Kundera gives a succinct and rather dazzling account of how, over the centuries, the novel has been taking up questions that philosophy wasn’t getting around to. I lay out the outlines of his argument here to stimulate your thinking and to get you thinking in new ways about the authors he mentions.

Kundera starts by challenging those philosophers who think that modern thought began with Descartes separating out body from soul. He then takes on the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger, who claims (in Being and Time) that he was addressing existential themes that had been neglected by earlier European philosophy. Kundera says that the issues Heidegger wrestles with

had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the novel. . . . . In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine “what happens inside,” to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man’s rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera.

Kundera then goes on to elaborate on some of these authors:

To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires courage.

What does Cervantes’ great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote’s hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both seek at the novel’s core not an inquiry but a moral position . . . .

Don Quixote set off into a world that opened wide before him. He could go out freely and come home as he pleased. The early European novels are journeys through an apparently unlimited world. . . .

[I]n Balzac the distant horizon has disappeared like a landscape behind those modern structures, the social institutions: the police, the law, the world of money and crime, the army, the State. In Balzac’s world, time no longer idles happily by as it does for Cervantes . . . It has set forth on the train called History. The train is easy to board, hard to leave. But it isn’t at all fearsome yet, it even has its appeal; it promises adventure to every passenger, and with it fame and fortune.

Later still, for Emma Bovary, the horizon shrinks to the point of seeming a barrier. Adventure lies beyond it, and the longing becomes intolerable. Within the monotony of the quotidian, dreams and daydreams take on importance. The lost infinity of the outside world is replaced by the infinity of the soul. The great illusion of the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual—one of Europe’s finest illusions—blossoms forth.

But the dream of the soul’s infinity loses its magic when History (or what remains of it: the suprahuman force of an omnipotent society) takes hold of man. History no longer promises him fame and fortune; it barely promises him a land-surveyor’s job. In the face of the Court or the Castle, what can K. do? Not much. Can’t he at least dream as Emma Bovary used to do? No, the situation’s trap is too terrible, and like a vacuum cleaner it sucks up all his thoughts and feelings: all he can think of is his trial, his surveying job. The infinity of the soul—if it ever existed—has become a nearly useless appendage.

One word of warning: whenever writers set forth such a tight history of the novel, you can be sure that they are framing the tradition in a way that accounts for their own fictional trajectory. Kundera, writing in communist Czechoslovakia, feels that the wide open picaresque and digressive landscapes of the 17th and 18th centuries have steadily been closing down until they culminate in a Kafakesque world that looks a lot like the state repression he has been living in. A different author would trace a different history.

But that being said, Kundera’s observations are still wonderful for how they get us to reflect upon the interaction between novels and great movements of historical consciousness. In Kundera’s view the novel isn’t just an entertainment genre that rides on the waves of history. It is an integral contributor to history.  As readers read and begin to see the historical forces that are unfolding, history comes to know itself.

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Kundera Understood Authoritarianism

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2023
Milan Kundera

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Thursday

When I heard that Milan Kundera had died, I looked for past blogs on the Czech author and found several dealing with his reflections upon the nature of authoritarian governance. Kundera, of course, had witnessed close-up the Soviet oppression of his country, and his observations apply as well to Donald Trump and the MAGA right.

In his novel Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for instance, he talks about how authoritarian governments rely on people forgetting, which they help along by manufacturing their own set of facts. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Kundera writes at one point, and his novel opens with a memorable  scene.

In it, Kundera notes about how a famous photograph of Czechoslovak leaders—“Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums”—was later doctored to remove one who had fallen into disfavor. It was as though he had never existed.

During the 2016 presidential campaign Esquire columnist Charles Pierce applied Kundera’s observation to Donald Trump, and we saw it grow truer once he became president. Here’s what Pierce said at the time:

The 2016 presidential campaign—and the success of Donald Trump on the Republican side—has been a triumph of how easily memory can lose the struggle against forgetting and, therefore, how easily society can lose the struggle against power. There is so much that we have forgotten in this country. We’ve forgotten, over and over again, how easily we can be stampeded into action that is contrary to the national interest and to our own individual self-interest. We have forgotten McCarthy and Nixon. We have forgotten how easily we can be lied to. We have forgotten the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs and the sale of missiles to the mullahs. And along comes someone like Trump, and he tells us that forgetting is our actual power and that memory is the enemy.

Along with describing how authoritarians attempt to erase history, Kundera in his novels shows us how intoxicatingly light we can feel when we forget. That helps explain the title of Kundera’s best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it is the point of an extended parable in Book of Laughter and Forgetting where a character thinks that she has escaped her history by reaching an island inhabited by children. No longer, she thinks, will her memories weigh her down.

Children are innocent because they have no history. At first Tamina is joyous as she engages in ring dances with the children.  But these children also lack morals and a sense of responsibility. As a result, the parable takes a dark turn when, showing themselves capable of anything, they rape her.

In that post, written in May 2016, I wrote,

At the moment, too many voters are acting like children. As a result, we now see a racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, xenophobic quasi-fascist as the presidential candidate of one of our two major parties.

We all know what happened next, of course, culminating in January 6 insurrectionists seeing an attack on the Capitol as a joy ride. Kundera’s reflections on the polarity of lightness and heaviness in Unbearable Lightness helps explain some of Trump’s popularity.

Kundera doesn’t at first say that either light or heavy is better:

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground.  But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.  The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

Serious governing means taking on heavy burdens. On the other hand, denying that there are serious problems that must be confronted or thinking you can invent a reality that is more to your liking can leave you feeling lighter than air. If you can automatically dismiss those experts who claim that climate change is a problem or that pandemics require a complex response, then life seems a lot easier.

This airy feeling, I suspect, is what buoys up many MAGA Republicans these days. They just add passionate intensity to the mix to convince themselves that it’s serious and substantive.

Kundera notes that the philosopher Parmenides probed the heaviness/ lightness polarity in ancient Greece. But whereas he saw lightness as positive and weight as negative, Kundera is not so sure. In Lightness of Being, he contrasts three defectors from Soviet-controlled Czechsolovakia. Two of them, finding life in the United States too light, return home whereas Sabina embraces America. Or rather, the surface of America. Kundera writes.

Sabina continued to receive letters from her sad village correspondent till the end of her life. Many of them would remain unread, because she took less and less interest in her native land.

The old man died, and Sabina moved to California.  Farther west, farther away from the country where she had been born.

She had no trouble selling her paintings, and liked America.  But only on the surface.  Everything beneath the surface was alien to her.  Down below, there was no grandpa or uncle.  She was afraid of shutting herself into a grave and sinking into American earth.

And so one day she composed a will in which she requested that her dead body be cremated and its ashes thrown to the wind.  Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of weight.  She wanted to die under the sign of lightness.  She would be lighter than air.  As Parmenides would put it, the negative would change into the positive.

Sure, being dead feels lighter than being alive. And blaming someone else for making difficult decisions feels lighter than taking them on yourself. I think of another work in which the heaviness of responsibility is contrasted with the lightness of avoidance. In Jean Paul Sartre’s The Flies, a reworking of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Electra blames her brother for having dragged her into killing their mother for her murder of the king:

Thief! I had so little, so very little to call mine; only a few weak dreams, a morsel of peace. And now you’ve taken my all; you’ve robbed a pauper of her mite! You were my brother, the head of our house, and it was your duty to protect me. But no, you needs must drag me into carnage…

To which Orestes, an existentialist speaking on the importance of acting freely and responsibiy, replies,

We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.

I’m not saying the heaviness is always better than lightness. But “the eternal lightness of being,” as Kundera knew only too well from his experience with authoritarianism, comes with a price.

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Happiness Is Living in Inwardness

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2023
Albert Bartholomé, Woman Reading Book

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Wednesday

My recent posts have dealt with such grim subjects—anti-abortion and anti-vax ideologues unnecessarily putting lives at risk—that I shift to a more uplifting poem today. Happiness, something we all presumably want, is available right here at home, Mary Sarton tells us.  It is is “woven out of the peace of hours/ And strikes its roots deep in the house alone.”

This peace has both an inner and an outer dimension. It looks out through the windows at the mountains. And, because “the walls are kind,” for people who “have lived in inwardness/ The air is charged with blessing and does bless.”

THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
by May Sarton

I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
      Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.

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Anti-Vaxxers Ignore the Past

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2023
Munch, The Sick Child

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Tuesday

I’ve recently been immersing myself in 19th century novels and am struck by the frequent mentions of death by disease. Perhaps such deaths were more prominently featured than in previous centuries because the Victorians sensed, thanks to the scientific revolution, that the future held answers. And if that were the case, illness was no longer all in the hands of God but had a human dimension, which is what novels specialize in.

Victorian optimism has in fact been borne out as we no longer fatalistically resign ourselves to death by the plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, smallpox, measles, polio, and other once dreaded diseases. I think of a passage from Mary Oliver’s visit to a dying friend at “University Hospital, Boston” where she reflects back upon those Civil War doctors who

did what they could, longing
for tools still unimagined, medicines still unfound,
wisdoms still unguessed at…

Yes, they longed—as previous centuries had not—because medical science gave them reason to believe cures were possible. For her part, Oliver longs for yet one more tool or medicine that will save her friend.

Could these doctors have predicted that future Americans, having benefited from “these wisdoms still unguessed at,” would then want to reject them? With Robert Kennedy, Jr., of all people, demonizing these wise men and women, it behooves us to acknowledge all that we have achieved. Reading novels where characters die of illnesses is one way to remind ourselves why we don’t want to go back.

I single out Kennedy because he appears to be running against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination and is polling somewhere between eight and twenty-one percent. In a New Yorker article/interview, editor David Remnick notes that Kennedy “is roiling with conspiracy theories: S.S.R.I.s like Prozac might be the reason for school shootings, vaccines cause autism.” Remnick says that Kennedy’s 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci accuses Fauci, who was vital in ending the A.I.D.s epidemic and who played a major role in fighting Covid, of helping carry out “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.”

I don’t know enough about Kennedy to know about the various ways he himself has benefited from modern medicine, from his mother’s delivery onward—reportedly he had his own children vaccinated—but crusaders like him don’t pay attention to science’s benefits. Instead, for reasons of their own, they focus their attention on this or that cure, perhaps to boost their profiles or scratch some paranoid itch. I think of them as parasites, getting free rides on the herd immunities society has achieved and using that freedom to attack the host. It’s a syndrome not unheard of in people who have lived lives of privilege.

What we do know is that, if they are influential, they can end up with blood on their hands. For instance, a Kennedy-founded organization, Children’s Health Defense, spread misinformation in Samoa about a measles vaccine that contributed to an outbreak that killed over 50 babies and toddlers. And perhaps 200,000 fewer Americans would have died if people like Kennedy had supported rather than attacked Covid vaccines.

But rather than cite statistics, which can feel lifeless, here are some passages from 19th century novels that remind us what life used to be like. I’ve also included passages from an 18th century and a 20th century novel so that we can add the bubonic plague and polio to the mix. To lighten this otherwise grim subject, I’ve turned this into a quiz, identifying the works only at the end of the post. Can you identify them?

Bubonic Plague

While the bed was airing the mother undressed the young woman, and just as she was laid down in the bed, she, looking upon her body with a candle, immediately discovered the fatal tokens on the inside of her thighs. Her mother, not being able to contain herself, threw down her candle and shrieked out in such a frightful manner that it was enough to place horror upon the stoutest heart in the world; nor was it one scream or one cry, but the fright having seized her spirits, she—fainted first, then recovered, then ran all over the house, up the stairs and down the stairs, like one distracted, and indeed really was distracted, and continued screeching and crying out for several hours void of all sense, or at least government of her senses, and, as I was told, never came thoroughly to herself again. As to the young maiden, she was a dead corpse from that moment, for the gangrene which occasions the spots had spread [over] her whole body, and she died in less than two hours. But still the mother continued crying out, not knowing anything more of her child, several hours after she was dead. It is so long ago that I am not certain, but I think the mother never recovered, but died in two or three weeks after.

Typhus

Miss Temple’s whole attention was absorbed by the patients: she lived in the sickroom, never quitting it except to snatch a few hours’ rest at night. The teachers were fully occupied with packing up and making other necessary preparations for the departure of those girls who were fortunate enough to have friends and relations able and willing to remove them from the seat of contagion. Many, already smitten, went home only to die: some died at the school, and were buried quietly and quickly, the nature of the malady forbidding delay.

Cholera

After that appalling things happened, and the mysteriousness of the morning was explained to Mary. The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The Ayah had been taken ill in the night, and it was because she had just died that the servants had wailed in the huts. Before the next day three other servants were dead and others had run away in terror. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.

Childbirth

As Oliver gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words, “Let me see the child, and die.”…

The surgeon deposited it in her arms. She imprinted her cold white lips passionately on its forehead; passed her hands over her face; gazed wildly round; shuddered; fell back—and died. They chafed her breast, hands, and temples; but the blood had stopped forever. They talked of hope and comfort. They had been strangers too long.

Tuberculosis

There were tears in many eyes, but not in Carol’s. The loving heart had quietly ceased to beat, and the “wee birdie” in the great house had flown to its “home nest.” Carol had fallen asleep!

Scarlet Fever
With tears and prayers and tender hands, Mother and sisters made her ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again, seeing with grateful eyes the beautiful serenity that soon replaced the pathetic patience that had wrung their hearts so long, and feeling with reverent joy that to their darling death was a benignant angel, not a phantom full of dread.

When morning came, for the first time in many months the fire was out, Jo’s place was empty, and the room was very still. But a bird sang blithely on a budding bough, close by, the snowdrops blossomed freshly at the window, and the spring sunshine streamed in like a benediction over the placid face upon the pillow, a face so full of painless peace that those who loved it best smiled through their tears, and thanked God that Beth was well at last.

Smallpox
“It’s turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?”

“It is coming fast, Jo.”

Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end.

“Jo, my poor fellow!”

“I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I’m a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of your hand.”

“Jo, can you say what I say?”

“I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.”

“Our Father.”

“Our Father! Yes, that’s wery good, sir.”

“Which art in heaven.”

“Art in heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?”

“It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!”

“Hallowed be—thy—”

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Polio

[Bucky] could hear a siren in the distance. He heard sirens off and on, day and night now . . . These were the sirens of ambulances going to get polio victims and transport them to the hospital, sirens stridently screaming, “Out of the way—a life is at stake!” Several city hospitals had recently run out of iron lungs, and patients in need of them were being taken to Belleville, Kearny, and Elizabeth until a new shipment of the respirator tanks reached Newark.

In Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe talks about quacks, those forerunners of people pushing Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, who

had the folly to trust to their own medicines, which they must needs be conscious to themselves were good for nothing, and who rather ought, like other sorts of thieves, to have run away, sensible of their guilt, from the justice that they could not but expect should punish them as they knew they had deserved.

To them and to all anti-vaxxers—including those responsible for the children in Samoa and all the unnecessary Covid victims— I repeat Dickens’s outrage:

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Answer Key

Bubonic Plague – Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year
Typhus – Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Cholera – Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Childbirth – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Tuberculosis – Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Birds’ Christmas Carol
Scarlet Fever – Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Smallpox – Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Polio – Philip Roth, Nemesis

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Soames: Sacrifice Mother, Not Baby

By Robin Bates | Published: July 9, 2023
Lewis, Batarda as Soames Forsyte and Annette

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Monday

Two weeks ago, as I was (1) reading the first volume of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and (2) reflecting upon the first-year anniversary of the anti-abortion Dobbs decision, I noted that Soames Forsyte’s belief that he possesses his first wife (Irene) is characteristic of many so-called right-to-lifers: they are more interested in power over women than in the fate of the unborn. After all, they lose all interest in the children once they are born, at least if those children are poor and require social services.

An episode in In Chancery, the second volume of Forsyte Saga, actually bears out this point by presenting Soames with an abortion decision. Soames by the end of the novel has finally given up his attempts to reassert his control over his “property”—Irene prefers to live in poverty rather than return to him—and, following a divorce, has remarried Anette, a pretty French woman. After all, without a wife he can’t get a son to whom he would pass on his wealth and name. He finds his plans balked a second time, however, when Annette faces a birth crisis: the doctor tells Soames that, if she doesn’t get a late term birth abortion (although he doesn’t use the phrase), she could die.

Compounding the dilemma is the fact that, regardless of what happens, Annette will never be able to have children again. Here’s the doctor:

“This is the position, Mr. Forsyte. I can make pretty certain of her life if I operate, but the baby will be born dead. If I don’t operate, the baby will most probably be born alive, but it’s a great risk for the mother—a great risk. In either case I don’t think she can ever have another child. In her state she obviously can’t decide for herself, and we can’t wait for her mother. It’s for you to make the decision, while I’m getting what’s necessary. I shall be back within the hour.”

Although I’d like to think that most of us would put the mother’s life first, we’re learning from increasing numbers of cases in post-Dobbs America—at least in its red states—that this is no longer case. There are mothers experiencing versions of Annette’s situation, their health sacrificed because doctors are not allowed to perform previously allowed abortions.

And in fact, Soames makes a red state call. We can foresee this in his mental wrestling. Notice the use of the word “perhaps,” which Galsworthy italicizes:

On the one hand life, nearly certain, of his young wife, death quite certain, of his child; and—no more children afterwards! On the other, death perhaps of his wife, nearly certain life for the child; and—no more children afterwards! Which to choose?

Soames’s thoughts on the matter, while they start with what is best for Annette, always circle back to what’s best for himself. He’s even vaguely aware of this:

What would she wish—to take the risk. “I know she wants the child,” he thought. “If it’s born dead, and no more chance afterwards—it’ll upset her terribly. No more chance! All for nothing! Married life with her for years and years without a child. Nothing to steady her! She’s too young. Nothing to look forward to, for her—for me! For me!” He struck his hands against his chest! Why couldn’t he think without bringing himself in—get out of himself and see what he ought to do?

And further on:

He looked at his watch. In half an hour the doctor would be back. He must decide! If against the operation and she died, how face her mother and the doctor afterwards? How face his own conscience? It was his child that she was having. If for the operation—then he condemned them both to childlessness. And for what else had he married her but to have a lawful heir?

In the end, he decides to gamble with his wife’s life, rationalizing, “Annette can’t die; it’s not possible. She’s strong!”

When he communicates this decision to the doctor– “She’s strong, we’ll take the risk”—the doctor replies, “It’s on your shoulders; with my own wife, I couldn’t.”

The tortured rationalizing continues even after the die has been cast. If the situation were reversed, he thinks, Annette wouldn’t hesitate to choose the child over him:

If it were his own life, would he be taking that risk? “But she’d take the risk of losing me,” he thought, “sooner than lose her child! She doesn’t really love me!” What could one expect—a girl and French? The one thing really vital to them both, vital to their marriage and their futures, was a child!

As it turns out, the gamble proves successful and both mother and child survive. Galsworthy adds one further ironic twist, however. Soames desperately wants a boy but the child—the only one he’ll ever have—turns out to be a girl. Furthermore, the doctor informs him that had he gotten what he really wanted, his wife would have died. Which is to say, a boy would have killed her:

“I congratulate you,” he heard the doctor say; “it was touch and go.”

Soames let fall the hand which was covering his face.

“Thanks,” he said; “thanks very much. What is it?”

“Daughter—luckily; a son would have killed her—the head.”

At this point, the only agony that Soames considers is not his wife’s but his own:

Relief unspeakable, and yet—a daughter! It seemed to him unfair. To have taken that risk—to have been through this agony—and what agony!—for a daughter! 

I am reminded of those GOP legislators who are angry when confronted with horror stories stemming from their anti-abortion votes. To cite one instance that is back in the news, when a nine-year-old Ohio rape victim had to go to Indiana for an abortion, Ohio legislators (this according to an NBC report) “appeared to be grappling with how to respond — from confusion to blaming the media.” Note their own tortured responses:

Many expressed shock that it was even biologically possible for the 10-year-old child to become pregnant. Some said they were torn “morally” about whether abortions should be allowed in cases of incest or rape, as in the Ohio case. And others tried to turn the conversation to the undocumented immigrant who prosecutors allege raped the girl. [Update: It’s no longer “alleged”—last week the man plead guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

“I’m amazed a 10-year-old got pregnant. … You really wrestle with that. That’s a tough one,” Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, said Thursday.

Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., said, “I can’t imagine being 10 years old” and pregnant, adding: “I don’t think I was even able to have children when I was 10 years old. … It’s just awful. It’s awful all the way around.”

Said Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas: “I’m a pro-life guy, OK? And God’s in charge on this. … We’re all God’s children. This is a tough call, and I don’t know if I know that answer right now, because now you’ve got another baby involved: She’s pregnant. … She’s a baby.”

Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, head of the House Judiciary Committee, was one of those blaming the media and trying to refocus the story on the rapist’s immigration status.

Notice how none of these legislators took responsibility. Soames, for all his flaws, at least is willing to acknowledge, “I may have her death on my hands,”—although he then spoils the moment by backtracking: “No! it was unfair—monstrous, to put it that way!” So, in the end, the Man of Property arrives at the same point as today’s anti-abortion GOP. It is more important for them to control a woman’s body than to allow her to choose what she judges best for herself. Possession trumps even the prospect of death.

For his part, Galsworthy gives us an alternative vision as to what is possible. Soames’s first cousin Jolyon Forsyte, an admirable man who has fallen in love with Soames’s first wife Irene and who is loved in return, reflects upon the Forsyte obsession to possess:

Could he trust himself? Did Nature permit a Forsyte not to make a slave of what he adored? Could beauty be confided to him?…“We are a breed of spoilers!” thought Jolyon, “close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us.”

He resolves to be a different kind of Forsyte, saying to himself, “Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never—never her cage!”

And further on:

“Let me,” he thought, “ah! let me only know how not to grasp and destroy!”

America has a choice: to cage these women or respect them. We know where the graspers and destroyers stand.

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