What Made Roger Federer Special

By Robin Bates | Published: September 27, 2022
Roger Federer at Wimbledon

Wednesday

So Father Time finally caught up with the incomparable Roger Federer, who last week played one last match before retiring. Although others have surpassed Federer records that once appeared unsurpassable, no one has ever played as beautifully as the Swiss tennis player, and I suspect no one ever will. Novelist Davis Foster Wallace once wrote an article entitled “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” and he didn’t overstate the case.

In recent years I have written posts about Federer and the aging process, posts that cited Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, and even Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In these I compared him, respectively, to a man dying of sepsis, an aging epic hero setting off on one last voyage, and an aged suitor (Gremio) who doesn’t stand a chance against a younger rival. In one post, written in pain over an early Federer loss, I cited Arizona poet Richard Shelton’s “Requiem for Sonora”:

I am older and uglier
and full of the knowledge
that I do not belong to beauty
and beauty does not belong to me
I have learned to accept
whatever men choose to give me
or whatever they choose to withhold
but oh my desert
yours is the only death I cannot bear

And yet, I had no reason to complain as Federer delighted us for far longer than we could have reasonably expected. What’s important is that, win or lose, he did it all with grace. In the words of Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” somehow he could “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” (In a post on the poem I mention a a video of him reading alternate couplets from the poem with his great archrival Rafael Nadal .)

Rather than share one of my more recent Federer posts, I reach back to reprint the essay I wrote thirteen years ago when he won—for the first and only time—the French Open. In it, with the help of tennis writer Peter Bodo, I compare Federer with the 17th century Cavalier poets as I try to get at that special something that caused Federer to stand out.

Reprinted from June 12, 2009

As a tennis player and fan of Roger Federer, I am still vibrating over his having won the French Open this past Sunday. After his archrival Rafael Nadal went down in an early match to Swede Robin Soderling, all the pressure was on Federer to win the one grand slam event that has eluded him.  He barely avoided defeat in the two matches leading up to the final.

In the quarterfinals match, he was one missed shot away from losing in three sets to the German Tommy Haas (who would have gone on to serve out the set), saving a break of his service by hitting a wondrously angled crosscourt forehand for a winner. Against the overpowering game of Argentine Juan Martin Del Potro, he found enough variety to eke out a five-set victory after twice being down a set. By the finals, he had rediscovered the game that made him unbeatable in 2006 and 2007 (or unbeatable by anyone other than Nadal on clay) and won easily.

Early in Federer’s career I resisted his lure because I was an Andre Agassi fan and also had hopes for Andy Roddick. But ultimately I fell in love with the most beautiful style of tennis I had ever seen. (I speak as someone who started watching tennis the year that Rod Laver won his second grand slam.) Seemingly without effort, Federer has the ability to turn a backhand defensive shot into an attack weapon that sends his opponent scurrying. His serve is amazing in its precision, as is his forehand down the line, and he has recently added a remarkable drop shot that he uses against players who, like Nadal, play deep behind the baseline. Federer is poetry in motion.

I was struck by Peter Bodo’s article on the Tennis Magazine website that puts Federer in a conversation that includes a couple of actual poets.  Bodo is trying to put his finger on what distinguishes Federer and concludes that it is his ability to make difficult things look easy. Bodo applies the Italian concept of sprezzatura to Federer, which he says he learned about from Mark Kingwell’s book on flyfishing, Catch and Release.

Kingwell defines sprezzatura as follows:

“Grace” doesn’t quite capture its extension, though that’s part of it. Nor ‘elegance’ either, though again it is partly right. Vitality and lightness are implied, but sprezzatura is more than gaiety. It’s that exhibition of relaxed competence, almost of insouciance, in amateur pursuit of one’s goal. . .

Bodo invokes Kingwell’s definition as he contrasts Federer with other tennis greats:

He frequently seems to think, act, and express sentiments nothing like those of a host of iconic tennis players whose qualities were often trumpeted as germane to their station: the bullishness of [Guillermo] Vilas, the toughness of Ivan Lendl, the fire of a John McEnroe, the explosive power of a Pete Sampras, that subtle communication of menace that informed the glowering visage of Pancho Gonzalez, or the scary, almost rodent-like bloodlust of Jimmy Connors. But all pale alongside the easy, it’s-no-big-deal domination with which Federer rules.

So where do poets come into the conversation? One poem that comes to my mind is W.B. Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” where the poet talks about how a poem should seem effortless, even though much effort goes into it:

I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

That’s how Federer’s game looked. But drawing on Kingwell’s book, Bodo reaches back to an earlier era, making Federer appear somewhat as a throwback. Noting that the quality of sprezzatura is no longer prized as much as it was in previous eras, Kingwell finds the quality within Cavalier poets Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace:

Puritanical critics tend to regard sprezzatura as a suspect quality, a polish in manners that indicates overrefinement or even feyness, the transparent self-justification of the fop. But such judgments ignore the real edge that must remain beneath the polish. Castiglione’s elegant courtiers or the dandy Cavalier poets of (Izaak) Walton’s own time were anything but fey. They were brave, wily, and often dangerous men – men who served with distinction in battles and intrigues. . ..Only a clod could fail to be impressed by the combination of poetry and military distinction observable in Richard Lovelace or Sir John Suckling. And yet, what military man today would dare admit he read poetry, let along composed it? On the others side, from what poet could we expect to see a display of manly vigor, except perhaps in the vulgar form of drunken brawling at a book launch. There may be such men out there – I really hope there are – but no one could reasonably argue that they form our currently dominant notion of masculine accomplishment.

Actually, I did know one such military man: three-star marine general Robert Hogaboom, famous for directing the ship-to-shore invasion of Iwo Jima during World War II, retired to the town where I live, which allowed me to witness his refined artistic sensibilities. But Kingwell’s point is well taken since Hogaboom too seemed a throwback to an earlier era. 

At any rate, Lovelace and Suckling were both warriors fighting in the doomed cause of King Charles I. Suckling, after a failed attempt to free the king’s minister from execution, fled to France and died bankrupt a year later. Lovelace was twice imprisoned for fighting for the king and is most well known for a couple of poems he composed in his cell. You may know them:

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

And the last stanzas from “To Althea, from Prison”:

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage.

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Suckling, meanwhile, is famous for such poems as the one below, which finds a comic new take on the image of the languishing lover that was a staple of Renaissance love poetry. Don’t be put off by the explosive punch line at the end. Although it is an instance of a man venting about female rejection, Suckling is also making fun of the speaker: the poet claims to be able to dispense dispassionate and common sense advice, only in the end of lose his cool:

Song
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee, why so pale?

What so dull and mute, young sinner?
Prithee, why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing do’t?
Prithee, why so mute?

Quit, quit, for shame; this will not move,
This cannot take her.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her.

Whether or not one agrees with the political sympathies (or the sexual politics) of the Cavalier poets, they remind us of the value of keeping things light when life gets serious. Today we live in an earnest and often Puritanical culture (Suckling and Lovelace were fighting against the Puritans) and spend a lot of time and energy getting bent out of shape. While these poets risked their lives for a cause, they do not come across as humorless enthusiasts. Suckling makes light of rejection and Loveless of imprisonment as they model an alternative way of responding to crisis.

So the next time you feel the pull of a passionate intensity, whether it involves a sacred cause or politics or sports or some other aspect of life, pick up a Suckling or Lovelace poem. They will help you regain perspective. And while it is still possible, watch Roger Federer dancing elegantly, fending off cannon shots that muscle-bound young men fire his way. You’ll find life a little easier to bear.

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Read to Resist Fascism

By Robin Bates | Published: September 26, 2022
Jessie Wilcox Smith

Tuesday

Oops, I just realized that I missed Banned Book Week, thinking that it was this week rather than last. With the alarming rise of book bans nationwide, however, every day is a good day to push back against the forces of illiberalism so here goes.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce has alerted me to Pen America’s survey of banned books. Pierce sums up their findings as follows:

From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles. The 1,648 titles are by 1,261 different authors, 290 illustrators, and 18 translators, impacting the literary, scholarly, and creative work of 1,553 people altogether. Bans occurred in 138 school districts in 32 states. These districts represent 5,049 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students.

Pen America breaks down the titles into the following groupings:

–674 titles (41 percent) explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ+ (this includes a specific subset of titles for transgender characters or stories—145 titles, or 9 percent);

–659 titles (40 percent) contain protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color;

–338 titles (21 percent) directly address issues of race and racism;

–357 titles (22 percent) contain sexual content of varying kinds, including novels with some level of description of sexual experiences of teenagers, stories about teen pregnancy, sexual assault and abortion as well as informational books about puberty, sex, or relationships;

–161 titles (10 percent) have themes related to rights and activism;

–141 titles (9 percent) are either biography, autobiography, or memoir; and

–64 titles (4 percent) include characters and stories that reflect religious minorities, such as Jewish, Muslim and other faith traditions.

PEN also looks at the forces that are driving the banning:

[A]t least 50 groups [are] involved in pushing for book bans across the country operating at the national, state or local levels. Of those 50 groups, eight have local or regional chapters that, between them, number at least 300 in total; some of these operate predominantly through social media. Most of these groups (including chapters) appear to have formed since 2021 (73 percent, or 262). These parent and community groups have played a role in at least half of the book bans enacted across the country during the 2021–22 school year. At least 20 percent of the book bans enacted in the 2021-22 school year could be directly linked to the actions of these groups, with many more likely influenced by them; in an additional approximately 30 percent of bans, there is some evidence of the groups’ likely influence, including the use of common language or tactics.

Finally, it fingers some of the particular groups that are leading the push:

Of the national groups, Moms for Liberty, formed in 2021, has spread most broadly, with over 200 local chapters identified on their website. Other national groups with branches include US Parents Involved in Education (50 chapters), No Left Turn in Education (25), MassResistance (16), Parents’ Rights in Education (12), Mary in the Library (9), County Citizens Defending Freedom USA (5), and Power2Parent (5)…While some of these groups have existed for years, the overwhelming majority are of recent origin: more than 70 percent (including chapters) were formed since 2021.

Predictably, the groups love to drop the phrases “grooming” and “critical race theory.” As Pierce sees it, their attacks are ultimately attacks on imagination itself because “imagination inevitably leads to curiosity, and curiosity inevitably leads to people asking the question most fundamental to democracy—“What the hell are you people doing?”

Speaking of imagination, I recommend a short, illustrated Neil Gaiman essay lauding the role of libraries in fostering the imagination. Now we know who to thank for the imagination that brought us such works as the Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and others. “Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading, and Daydreaming” appears in the Guardian (you can find it here without a paywall). Here are some of the highlights:

–I suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m making a plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

–People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literature children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

— I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. It’s tosh, it’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.

— You’re finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this: The world doesn’t have to be like this! Things can be different.

— Fiction builds empathy. Fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

— I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up, and met the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them. Looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders.

— They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and they would talk to me about the books I was reading. They would find me other books. They would help. They treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

— Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education, about entertainment, about making safe spaces and about access to information.

— I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens. As Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before digital books showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old. There were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

— Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand. They are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.

— Books are the way that the dead communicate with us. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, the way that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.

— We have an obligation to read for pleasure. If others see us reading, we show that reading is a good thing. We have an obligation to support libraries. To protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries, you are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. As Ray Bradbury said, “Without libraries, we have no future and no past.”

— Fiction is the lie that tells the truth. We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

— Albert Einstein was once asked how we could make our children intelligent. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

— I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine and understand.

Do I hear an Amen!

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Russia’s Falstaffian Mobilization

By Robin Bates | Published: September 25, 2022
Hogarth, Falstaff Examining His Recruits

Monday

Professor of Strategic Studies Phillips P. O’Brien, whose tweets on the Russo-Ukrainian War I’ve been following, yesterday described Russia’s mass mobilization as “the worst mobilization process in modern history.” Even as Russians with money and connections flee the country, ethnic minorities are seeing their communities raided for young men. There has been some resistance, and one can find video footage of villagers fighting against the police as their sons are loaded onto buses. Apparently some that are being conscripted (this according to the Washington Post) are “elderly, sick, disabled or otherwise unfit or exempt from military service.”

We might call the mobilization Falstaffian in that it brings to mind Falstaff’s corrupt enlistment of troops in Henry IV, Parts I & II.

Because of his close connection with Prince Hal, Falstaff has been given the power to press men into service to fight against the rebels. Exhibiting a corruption that would be familiar to the Russian army, Falstaff confesses to “misus[ing] the king’s press damnably.” Since in England at the time, as in modern day Russia, one could buy oneself out of service, Falstaff drafts men from wealthy families, who then pay him to be excused:

If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet. I have misused the king’s press damnably. I have got, in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers, three hundred and odd pounds. I press me none but good householders, yeoman’s sons…; such a commodity of warm slaves, as had as lieve hear the devil as a drum; such as fear the report of a caliver [handgun] worse than a struck fowl or a hurt wild-duck. I pressed me none but such toasts-and-butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins’ heads, and they have bought out their services…

Falstaff pockets the money and then proceeds to fill his ranks with those who can’t afford his fees. From what we’re hearing of Russia’s mobilization, some of the new draftees don’t sound much better than Falstaff’s recruits. Certainly they have no training for the kind of war they are about to enter:

…and now my whole charge consists of ancients, corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies, slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s dogs licked his sores [see yesterday’s post for this reference]; and such as indeed were never soldiers, but discarded unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and ostlers trade-fallen, the cankers of a calm world and a
long peace, ten times more dishonorable ragged than an old faced ancient: and such have I, to fill up the rooms of them that have bought out their services, that you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows.

Prince Hal is taken aback when he encounters Falstaff’s troop, remarking, “I did never see such pitiful rascals.” Falstaff’s reply is existentially profound. When it comes to dying, he says, they’ll do as well as anyone:

Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

We have more recruiting scenes in Henry IV, Part II, and in this play they have names and personalities. Falstaff must choose two from amongst Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble and Bullcalf. Mouldy and Bullcalf, although more fit, escape through bribes. (They are the two figures on the right in Hogarth’s painting above; you can see them delivering the money into Falstaff’s hand.) Falstaff’s chooses Shadow and effeminate Feeble because he thinks they will prove better at escape:

And this same half-faced fellow, Shadow; give me this man: he presents no mark to the enemy; the foeman may with as great aim level at the edge of a penknife. And for a retreat; how swiftly will this Feeble the woman’s tailor run off! O, give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones. 

The current version of “food for powder” is “cannon fodder,” a future I’ve heard predicted numerous times for Russia’s new draftees. With virtually no training or logistical support, and some being assigned rusty AK-47s and bolt-action rifles used by the USSR in World War II, they will prove no match for the better armed, better led, and better motivated Ukrainians. It may well be that they should model themselves on Shadow and Feeble if they want to avoid swelling Russia’s casualty figures, which the Pentagon has estimated number between 70-80,000.

O’Brien says that the Russians are still thinking of World War II, when, in the end, sheer numbers of Soviets overwhelmed the Germans. This, however, is not that kind of war. He also figures that the 300,000 reservists that Russia is calling up “won’t matter that much.”

Fortunately for Prince Hal, he does not need Falstaff’s men, winning glory on his own. But that too is not this kind of war.

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I Am Lazarus, Come Back from the Dead

By Robin Bates | Published: September 24, 2022
Flemish School, Dives and Lazarus

Spiritual Sunday

Today’s Gospel reading is the story of the rich man and Lazarus receiving their afterlife rewards in, respectively, Hell and Heaven. I am reposting an essay, slightly amended, that I wrote six years ago about T.S. Eliot’s use of the parable in Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. As I note in the piece, for years I had the wrong Lazarus in mind when I read the poem. The allusion made more sense once I got it right.

Reposted from Sept. 24, 2016

I’ve have only just realized that the “Lazarus” mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is not Mary and Martha’s brother, the man whom Jesus brings back from the dead. Rather, he is the Lazarus mentioned in today’s Gospel reading about the rich man in hell.

This is not news to Eliot scholars, but it certainly has me looking at Prufrock in a slightly different light. I now regard the speaker as even more hopeless than I did before. Here’s the passage from Luke (16: 19-31):

Jesus said, “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, `Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, `Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ He said, `Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house– for I have five brothers– that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, `They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, `No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, `If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

In Eliot’s poem, Prufrock is frustrated that his upper-class society cannot see its emptiness. As someone who experiences this emptiness only too keenly, he imagines himself returning—as the rich man wants Lazarus to return—to wake these rich people up. Here’s the relevant stanza:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worthwhile,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
               That is not it, at all.”

Note that Prufrock is already talking himself out of causing a scene. The Biblical passage gives him an excuse for his inactivity. After all, Abraham tells the rich man that a Lazarus visit wouldn’t do any good anyway. “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

The idea of squeezing “the universe into a ball/To roll it towards some overwhelming question,” incidentally, is an allusion to Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” In that poem, written in the vein of such carpé diem poems as Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make the Most of Time,” the speaker is assuring his mistress that, “if there were world enough and time,” then of course he would be content to court her slowly. But because time is flying by—because “always at my back I hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”—they need to get down to immediate business. Or as the speaker puts it,

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Prufrock, however, is not the type to tear his pleasures with rough strife or, as he says elsewhere, force a moment to its crisis. In fact, he will go on to compare himself, not to Prince Hamlet (who after initial hesitation swings into action) but to the “easy tool” Polonius. So he’s certainly not going to put himself up there with Moses and the prophets.

Prufrock’s very decision to quote this Biblical passage means that he has already decided that his words won’t do any good. That’s why he can so easily imagine the woman putting him down. He has given up before he’s even started.

In his later Christian poetry, Eliot will focus on leaving the society of the rich man and attaining the faith of Lazarus. It’s as though, through poems like Prufrock, “The Hollow Men,” “Gerontion,” and The Waste Land, he is coming face to face with the sterility of a world without faith. Once he realizes that there is nothing to be gained from such a world, he turns his eyes towards Lazarus with the angels.

Further note: Having just taught Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage (from The Brothers Karamazov) in my “Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami” seminar, I can’t help but hear the Inquisitor responding to Jesus with the critique, “You can’t ask people to follow Your hard road without providing them with miracles to help them. Lazarus coming back from the dead would be a miracle and would aid those who are not as strong as You. Instead, you demand that they rely only on faith, just as you will later say to Doubting Thomas, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ You may appear to be kind and caring, Jesus, but your program is too harsh for humanity.”

As someone who is optimistic about human potential, I want to counter that Jesus was right to have faith in us and that we are indeed capable of rising to the occasion. After all, hasn’t Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit as an advocate with the Father to help us.  Ivan Karamazov, however, forces me to question whether this is just an article of faith. Can I back it up with empirical evidence?

Correction: Reader William McKeachie sent in a slight correction. Jesus told his disciples that he would be their advocate with the Father in heaven and would communicate with them through the Holy Spirit. In other words, they are not as dependent on their own resources as Ivan claims. Ivan is operating through a secular humanist model and discounting the power of divine love. When we open ourselves to God’s love, much that seemed hard becomes suddenly easy.

The brilliance of Brothers Karamazov lies partly in the Ivan-Alyosha debate. By telling the story at one point about the suffering undergone by various children, Ivan serves as a corrective to facile faith. The novel ends, however, with the beauty and strength of Alyosha’s vision. Ivan, meanwhile, goes mad.

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The Light You Seek Hides in Your Belly

By Robin Bates | Published: September 22, 2022
Illustration of a New Moon

Friday – Preparing for Rosh Hashanah

Judaism’s celebration of the Jewish new year—which is to say, the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve—begins on Sunday. The Ten Days of Repentance, beginning with Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur, are a time for reflecting on our lives, mending our ways, and seeking the forgiveness of those we have wronged.

Jewish poet Marge Piercy has written one of the best Rosh Hashanah poems that I know. On this particular Rosh Hashanah, Piercy notes, the moon is dark, which gives her a powerful image to work with. This moon is a “black zero of beginning,” a chance to “void yourself of injuries, insults, incursions,” and in our hollowness we “hunger,” like the moon, to be full.

The days of repentance provide Jews with a chance to begin anew, to set out with a clean slate and a firm foundation. “Go with empty hands,” the poet tells us, “to those you have hurt and make amends.” The old moon may have died, but that only means that it is early, not late. Now is the time of growth, “a time to/ turn inward to face yourself, the hidden twin of/ all you must grow to be.”

And if we forgive—forgive the dead year that has come up short and forgive ourselves for the same—then what we truly desire will “push through our fingers.” As with the dark moon, our inner light awaits, and if we open ourselves to it, it will come streaming from our eyes. Like the moon, we “will wax in new goodness.”

Head of the Year
by Marge Piercy

The moon is dark tonight, a new
moon for a new year. It is
hollow and hungers to be full.
It is the black zero of beginning.

Now you must void yourself
of injuries, insults, incursions.
Go with empty hands to those
you have hurt and make amends.

It is not too late. It is early
and about to grow. Now
is the time to do what you
know you must and have feared
to begin. Your face is dark
too as you turn inward to face
yourself, the hidden twin of
all you must grow to be.

Forgive the dead year. Forgive
yourself. What will be wants
to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides
in your belly. The light you
crave longs to stream from
your eyes. You are the moon
that will wax in new goodness.

Further thought: The moon imagery reminds me of the opening interchange between Theseus and Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream. The two are to be married on a night with a new moon, and Theseus complains that waiting an extra four days for the old moon to die is like a young man waiting for someone to pass so that he can step into his inheritance. “How slow this old moon wanes,” he laments.

In a beautiful image, however, Hippolyta tells Theseus to anticipate the new moon:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

That new bow will propel them into married life. And as Piercy sees it, into “all you must grow to be.”

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Fiona as Coleridge’s Mad Lutanist

By Robin Bates | Published: September 21, 2022
Hurricane Fiona devastates Puerto Rico with 130 mph winds

Thursday

Because of how Hurricane Fiona has hammered Puerto Rico, I’m reposting a slightly altered version of the 2017 essay I wrote about Hurricane Maria, the previous hurricane to devastate the island.

Reposted from Oct. 8, 2017

 If you get a chance, check out “It’s Almost Like Praying,” the powerful Lin-Manuel Miranda song performed by Puerto Rican artists (and others) designed to uplift the spirits of the storm-ravaged island and to raise money for the relief effort. It brought tears to my eyes and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” to my mind.

That’s because the poem, which describes a storm, turns hopeful at the end, asking, “May this storm be but a mountain-birth.” Though the poem is about a lady loved by the unhappily married Coleridge, it speaks to all who have been through a hellish night but sense the prospect of a new dawn before them.

Miranda too starts his song with a love affair–that of Tony and Maria in West Side Story–and builds it from there. He is in love with the island where he spent summers with his grandparents, and, by end, Maria has transformed from destructive storm to the Santa Maria, the blessed virgin.

Miranda has discussed how the hurricane burdened the name with conflicting associations: why did something so destructive carry Mary’s name? He quickly got permission to use the Leonard Bernstein song “Maria” (“it’s almost like praying, Maria”) and wrote lyrics that listed all the different sections of Puerto Rico to let them know they hadn’t been forgotten. Then he gathered together noteworthy Puerto Rican and other Latino/a singers in a display of unity and support.

For his part, Coleridge opens “Dejection” by quoting the tragic ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. Spence knows that the king has all but ordered his death by sending him out into a deadly storm—he recognizes the signs—but his loyalty is such that he ventures out anyway. He is like those Puerto Ricans who could have left the island but chose to stay:

Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, 
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm. 

To be sure, Coleridge’s storm is far weaker. Nevertheless, when the raving wind hits the poet’s wind harp (his “lute”), the result is something that Puerto Rico’s inhabitants will recognize: “a scream of agony by torture lengthened out.” The storm is a “mad lutanist,” a fitting image for for the “viper thoughts” that batter Coleridge’s mind:

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, 
                Reality’s dark dream! 
I turn from you, and listen to the wind, 
         Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream 
Of agony by torture lengthened out 
That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav’st without, 
         Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, 
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, 
Or lonely house, long held the witches’ home, 
         Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, 
Mad Lutanist! 

Coleridge, however, goes on to make a point that might comfort the island inhabitants. Nature doesn’t get the last word, he says; our souls do. In his vision, our inner luminescence shines forth to envelope the world: “We receive but what we give,/ And in our life alone does Nature live.” While the world itself is inanimate and cold, when our souls send forth “a light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud enveloping the earth,” then is this earth transfigured. It is up to us to determine whether Nature is to be seen as a wedding garment or a shroud.

O Lady! we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does Nature live: 
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! 
         And would we aught behold, of higher worth, 
Than that inanimate cold world allowed 
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, 
         Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth 
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 
                Enveloping the Earth— 
And from the soul itself must there be sent 
         A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, 
Of all sweet sounds the life and element! 

From his earlier dejection, Coleridge has talked himself into a more peaceful state, and he wishes this peace upon his lady friend. Let’s say that he is all of us worrying about Puerto Rico and wishing her this same peace. “Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,” he says, and “May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,/ Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!”

If we do indeed shift into this more positive mindset, then the storm will not be an ending but “a mountain-birth.” May the morrow be far different than today, the poet prays:

               With light heart may she rise, 
                Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,
          Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; 
To her may all things live, from pole to pole, 
Their life the eddying of her living soul!
          O simple spirit, guided from above, 
Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, 
Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

And may Puerto Rico rises with a light heart. May joy lift her spirit and joy attune her voice.

It’s almost like praying.

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Ukraine Must Unite Athena with Poseidon

By Robin Bates | Published: September 20, 2022
René-Antoine Houasse, Poseidon and Athena Fighting over Athens

Wednesday

Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian whose book On Tyranny is essential reading for anyone interested in the rise of authoritarianism, has a great article in the latest Foreign Policy on the necessity of Ukraine resisting Russia. Had Czechoslovakia in 1937 responded to Hitler as Ukraine has responded to Putin—and had it received the kind of military aid that Ukraine is now receiving—Hitler would have been thwarted and World War II averted, Snyder believes. I report on the article here because of Snyder’s literary references.

Snyder straightforwardly sets forth in the first paragraph what is at stake in the Russo-Ukrainian War:

Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy. A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete. Should Russia continue its illegal blockade of the Black Sea, it could starve Africans and Asians, who depend on Ukrainian grain, precipitating a durable international crisis that will make it all but impossible to deal with common threats such as climate change. A Russian victory would strengthen fascists and other tyrants, as well as nihilists who see politics as nothing more than a spectacle designed by oligarchs to distract ordinary citizens from the destruction of the world. This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.

To undergird his point, Snyder then turns to the Greek myth where Athena and Poseidon contend to be the patron god of Athens. Snyder turns to the ancient Greeks because (1) the idea of democracy originated in 5th century Athens and (2) Athens once had sea ports in what is modern day Ukraine. For Snyder, the contention between Athena and Poseidon is that between a vision of democracy as “tranquility, a life of thoughtful deliberation and consumption” and a vision of democracy as armed struggle. Although the first is more essential, Snyder says, both are necessary, a point that the story makes clear. First, Athena:

According to the Athenian legend of [democracy’s] origin, the deities Poseidon and Athena offered gifts to the citizens to win the status of patron. Poseidon, the god of the sea, struck the ground with his trident, causing the earth to tremble and saltwater to spring forth. He was offering Athenians the power of the sea and strength in war, but they blanched at the taste of brine. Then Athena planted an olive seed, which sprouted into an olive tree. It offered shade for contemplation, olives for eating, and oil for cooking. Athena’s gift was deemed superior, and the city took her name and patronage.

Athena is not enough, however, as Ukraine knows only too well. The city therefore finds a place for Poseidon as well:

Yet Athens had to win wars to survive. The most famous defense of democracy, the funeral oration of Pericles, is about the harmony of risk and freedom. Po­­seidon had a point about war: sometimes the trident must be brought down. He was also making a case for interdependence. Prosperity, and sometimes survival, depends on sea trade. How, after all, could a small city-state such as Athens afford to devote its limited soil to olives? Ancient Athenians were nourished by grain brought from the north coast of the Black Sea, grown in the black earth of what is now southern Ukraine.

Snyder proceeds to analyze Putin’s fascism—how it resembles Hitler’s and Mussolini’s—and then draws an interesting analogy (interesting to literature enthusiasts, anyway) between literary criticism and literature. I especially like what he says about literature providing us with a solid foundation from which to act:

The defense of Putin’s regime has been offered by people operating as literary critics, ever disassembling and dissembling. Ukrainian resistance, embodied by President Volodymyr Zelensky, has been more like literature: careful attention to art, no doubt, but for the purpose of articulating values. If all one has is literary criticism, one accepts that everything melts into air and concedes the values that make democratic politics possible. But when one has literature, one experiences a certain solidity, a sense that embodying values is more interesting and more courageous than dismissing or mocking them.

Creation comes before critique and outlasts it; action is better than ridicule. As Pericles put it, “We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands.”

Yes, literature is all about hearts and real life. While I think Snyder may be overly negative about literary criticism—the best lit crit comes from the heart and is grounded in the same values as literature—I get his point. He’s drawing a distinction between the cynical Putin and the grounded Zelensky.

Snyder finds an author who is so grounded in Euripides. The name comes up in a discussion of what it takes to preserve democracy. How Zelensky has stood up to Putin, Snyder says, has been critical:

[D]emocracy demands “earnest struggle,” as the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said. Ukrainian resistance to what appeared to be overwhelming force reminded the world that democracy is not about accepting the apparent verdict of history. It is about making history; striving toward human values despite the weight of empire, oligarchy, and propaganda; and, in so doing, revealing previously unseen possibilities.

Then comes the mention of Euripides:

On the surface, Zelensky’s simple truth that “the president is here” was meant to undo Russian propaganda, which was claiming that he had fled the city. But the video, shot in the open air as Kyiv was under attack, was also a recovery of the meaning of freedom of speech, which has been forgotten. The Greek playwright Euripides understood that the purpose of freedom of speech was to speak truth to power. The free speaker clarifies a dangerous world not only with what he says but by the risk he takes when he speaks. By saying “the president is here” as the bombs fell and the assassins approached, Zelensky was “living in truth,” in the words of Vaclav Havel…

Snyder doesn’t mention which Euripides plays he has in mind but I can think of several. There’s young and innocent Neoptolemus in Philoctetes, who turns his back on the cynical Odysseus and instead deals with the exiled Greek archer in good faith. There’s Teiresias in The Bacchae, who calls out the tyrant Pentheus for his crazed rejection of Dionysus.  And Ion in the play by that name, who questions “how the gods can do things which are crimes for humans and how gods can get away with breaking law, which leads to punishment for humans.” (Many of us are asking this same question about our former president.)

Having made the point that democracies rely on such courageous uses of free speech, Snyder expands upon the idea. Asserting one’s values into the world, he says, is “a pre-condition of self-rule:

After 1991, the nihilism of late communism flowed together with the complacent Western idea that democracy was merely the result of impersonal forces. If it turned out that those forces pushed in different directions, for example, toward oligarchy or empire, what was there then to say? But in the tradition of Euripides or Havel or now Zelensky, it is taken for granted that the larger forces are always against the individual, and that citizenship is realized through the responsibility one takes for words and the risks one takes with deeds. Truth is not with power, but a defense against it. That is why freedom of speech is necessary: not to make excuses, not to conform, but to assert values into the world, because so doing is a precondition of self-rule.

Democracy, Snyder goes on to say, “can be made only by people who want to make it and in the name of values they affirm by taking risks for them.”

The article ends with Snyder circling back to Athena and Poseidon:

Athena and Poseidon can be brought together. Athena, after all, was the goddess not only of justice but of just war. Poseidon had in mind not only violence but commerce. Athenians chose Athena as their patron but then built a fountain for Poseidon in the Acropolis—on the very spot, legend has it, where his trident struck. A victory for Ukraine would vindicate and recombine these values: Athena’s of deliberation and prosperity, Poseidon’s of decisiveness and trade. If Ukraine can win back its south, the sea-lanes that fed the ancient Greeks will be reopened, and the world will be enlightened by the Ukrainian example of risk-taking for self-rule. In the end, the olive tree will need the trident. Peace will only follow victory. The world might get an olive branch, but only if the Ukrainians can fight their way back to the sea

Myths, like stories and plays, retain their power to address reality on multiple levels. One doesn’t have to literally believe in the Olympian gods to see the truths their stories offer us.

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Byatt’s Babel Tower and Truth Today

By Robin Bates | Published: September 19, 2022

Tuesday

I recently finished reading A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower at the same time that I was working with fellow Carleton alumni on a “Truth, Education and Democracy” session for our 50th reunion next year. The novel has me reflecting both on my Carleton experience and the liberal arts ideal in general. Allow me to explain.

Byatt’s 1996 novel has several threads, one of which involves excerpts from a novel that a tormented character named Jude Mason has written. In this novel, a group of aristocratic free thinkers, fleeing from the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, retreat into a solitary castle. Cutting off ties with the rest of the world, they determine to live an existence free of social convention and sexual restraint. The name of this novel within Babel Tower is Babbletower, with the word “babble” having arisen from the Biblical city of Babel.

The ringleader of the group is one Culvert, who sounds like Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophes. He regularly gives inspirational lectures outlining the guidelines the group is to live by. Here are the first three of the guiding principles he recommends:

1. The community must strive towards complete freedom for each and every member to live and express himself—or herself—to the utmost.

2. To this end all false distinctions of the corrupt world from which they had fled must be abolished. There must be no masters and no servants, no payment and no debt, but a common consent about the workd to be done, the delights to be enjoyed, the just sharing of these, and the proper remuneration of all from the common fund of goods and talents. Professions must be abolished, along with privileges, all must turn their hands to all tht was possible, as their desires led them, for work desired to be done is work well done, and slave labor is always ill done.

3. “It will be found,” Culvert said, “I believe, upon just reflection, that many of the evil distinctions and oppressions in our world come from institutions we have not dared to question. Most of us have already questioned and rejected the religons of our forefathers and compatriots, seeing to what evils they have led, but we have ot sufficiently studied how those unnatural instituions—marriage, the family, the patriarchy, the pedagogic authoritarian relation between teacher and pupil—have also harmed our natural impulses and inclinations

Byatt sets her own Babel Tower in the freewheeling 1960s, when there were intense debates on these issues. Sometimes communes were set up with similar  guidelines. Jude Mason, using his novel Babbletower to explore the world in which he lives, explores the dark side of the Enlightenment. The community, which starts off with embracing free sex and an end to hierarchy, eventually descends into bloodshed and torture. In the 1960s, one can think of Woodstock as the aspirational ideal and mass murderer Charles Manson as freedom gone awry. In the novel-within-the-novel, the tension is between French utopian socialist Charles Fourier and the Marquis de Sade.

Because Jude Mason’s novel describes horrific tortures, including an instrument that is introduced into a woman’s vagina, first to pleasure her and then to cut her to pieces, the novel is taken to court as pornography. One of the witnesses defending the novel draws the Fournier/Sade contrast and argues that, rather than indulging lascivious tastes, the novel is actually examining the complexities of freedom, which many in the 1960s ignored. Here’s the defense attorney questioning philosophy Professor Marie-France Smith, who wants to “produce a dry, scholarly account of what she believes to be the intellectual background of Babbletower.” After outlining Fourier’s ideas, she turns to Sade:

Smith: Fourier really believed that the Terror in the French Revolution might, pushed a little further, have ushered in one desirable further breaking down of rules and conventions—the abolition of marriage, which made almost everyone, in his view, unhappy. “In Harmony,” he wrote, “every mature man and woman must be granted a satisfying minimum of sexual pleasure.”
Attorney: And you see Babbletower as in that tradition?
Smith: The first part, yes. The characters are setting off to found a Nouveau Monde Amoureux, a New World of Love. What happens owes as much to de Sade as to Fourier.
Attorney: Tell us bout de Sade. You take him seriously as a thinker?
Smith: You must. He is important. He represents the line from the Enlightenment philosophers who extol human reason and free will, in its cynical vein. He asks, If we are free to follow our passions, who can prevent us from following our desire to hurt others, to kill, to rape, to torture? Those are, he says, human passions; they are natural. Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, the freethinkers, lead, according to one view, to the guillotine and the Sadeian boudoir. Mr. Mason has understood this. He has shown it.

And further on in the examination:

Smith: The Babbletower community is Fourier’s Nouveau Monde Amoureux. It is also Sade’s Chateau de Silling [the castle in 120 Days of Sodom], where the libertines cut the bridge that connects them to the outer world so as to perform their terrible deeds.

So how does this relate to a class reunion session on “Truth, Education, and Democracy”? Well, the modern college traces many of its ideals and practices to the 18th century Enlightenment. Students retreat from the world—in some schools there are even gates closing them off from the outside world (as in Harvard and Columbia)—so that they can engage in a free and open discussion of ideas. This in turn is held up as a model of how a democracy should function, with people of different perspectives coming together to engage in a collective project. Critical to the enterprise is a willingness to entertain different perspectives.

But colleges and democracies only work if everyone agrees to certain ground rules. If dialogue is not genuine—if one group refuses to listen to another, or even strives to silence another—then the community breaks down. And if there is not an agreed-upon way to arrive at truth and establish facts, whether through logic, reason, or the scientific method, then the institution is put into peril. This is not to say that we will all agree with the conclusions of others, but we must agree about how to conduct the dialogue that leads to conclusions, just as citizens in a democracy must all agree to abide by election rules.

Our group consists of an Emory philosophy professor, an American University law professor, an IUPUI Library Professor, a St. Mary’s College of Maryland English professor (me), and a noted doctor, so all of us are dedicated to the pursuit of truth, each in his own disciplinary way.  One question we are encountering is how much credence to give to those who dismiss truth, facts, and expertise altogether. If educators are censored because they don’t have the proper political views, if facts are determined by whoever shouts the loudest and bullies the best, if Enlightenment reason is attacked when it leads to unpopular and uncomfortable perspectives, then goodbye to truth and all truth-seeking endeavors.

It is always good to be skeptical and self-critical. That’s a vital part of the university project. But skepticism is not the same as anti-intellectualism. There has to be a commitment to the project itself. This commitment must undergird the session we are putting together.

Further thought: When it comes to the question of truth, I myself follow in the tradition of Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Percy Shelley and others in seeing great literature as capturing the deepest truths about human beings. Salman Rushdie has written (in response to the torrent of lies we encounter in the public realm),

[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. 

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What You Missed in School Today

By Robin Bates | Published: September 19, 2022
Albert Anker, The Village School

Monday

 

A question for fellow college teachers: how often have you heard, from a student who missed a class, “Did I miss anything important.” Thomas Wayman has a wonderfully sarcastic set of answers to that question that I’ve shared in the past.

For a different approach, there’s Brad Aaron Modlin’s “What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.” Consider it an exercise in expanding the possibilities of what education can accomplish. It’s a fun way to begin a new week:

What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade
By Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math
equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

Yes, your questions, your longing, and your existence add up to something. Good teachers know this.

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