Stanley Spencer, Christ in the Wilderness–The Scorpion (1939)
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Ash Wednesday
Today is the first day of Lent, during which time Christians are called to reflect in ways similar to Christ’s 40-day desert meditation. InT. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” (1930), we see the poet’s own meditation, in which he takes the despair expressed in “The Hollow Men” (1925) and other early poems and turns it upside down. Eliot fulfills the purpose of Lent by coming to see his despair, not as the end of hope, but as the starting point of faith.
Such a change does not come easy however, as the struggle for salvation comes only after a momentous struggle. As one C. E. Chaffin writes in a clarifying essay on the poem,
In AW Eliot’s poetic persona has somehow found the courage, through spiritual exhaustion, to seek faith. That faith requires of him complete submission, including the admission that faith must ultimately come from without because the “within” is exhausted.
That makes “Ash Wednesday” a very appropriate Lenten poem. Lent is that season that calls upon us to burn away the dross so that we can find the gold. That is the purpose behind Lenten disciplines.
In today’s post I examine the first section of “Ash Wednesday,” where the poet compares himself to a couple of suffering lovers, the 15th century Italian poet Guido Calvacanti and Shakespeare’s sonneteer. After acknowledging his suffering, Eliot then concludes that such suffering is a good opportunity to pare away distraction and begin to build a relationship with God.
“Because I do not hope to turn again” appears in a Calvacanti poem where a poet who is dying tells his love he will not see her again. “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope,” meanwhile, is from Shakespeare’s sonnet 29, which opens in a state of despair:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least…
Shakespeare’s sonnet dramatically turns around, just as Eliot himself turning around because of his faith in God . The sonnet concludes,
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
As I said, such a shift does not come easy to Eliot. “Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?” he asks at one point and then acknowledges that our former wings have become “merely vans to beat the air.” We can no longer recover the “vanished power of the usual reign.”
But rather than despairing in this powerlessness as he does in “The Hollow Men,” Eliot thanks the suffering for pointing him towards the divine. Once we fully realize that we cannot “turn again” and that the world is transitory and limited—when we have hit rock bottom, in other words—then we can “rejoice, having to construct something/ Upon which to rejoice.”
Eliot sounds Buddhist when he asks God to “teach us to care and not to care,” which I read as a request for instruction in how to be compassionate even as we give up our old desires. Because we thrash around in our discontent, Eliot wants God to “teach us to sit still.” Once we do so, then we can sincerely call out the words of the “Hail Mary” prayer: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
Achieving a state where we can truly listen and pray–that is what Lent is all about.
Ash Wednesday By T. S. Eliot I
Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know again The infirm glory of the positive hour Because I do not think Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us And pray that I may forget These matters that with myself I too much discuss Too much explain Because I do not hope to turn again Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
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Tuesday
Yesterday I explained how Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South is helping me imagine the interior life of my great-grandmother Eliza Scott. Today I apply the novel to the other side of my family and to people I actually knew—my grandfather Bob Strehlow and his son and my uncle Rob Strehlow. I thought of them and their construction company as I read about Gaskell’s account of John Thornton, as cotton mill owner.
The Strehlows helped run a family business—Jobst and Sons—that in its heyday built some of the main buildings in Peoria, Illinois, including much of Bradley University. They did high quality work, and one reason for their success was their good relations with their unionized workforce. One of my brothers, who worked for the company one summer, saw up close the high standards demanded by the union overseers.
I don’t want to be pollyannish about this. Contract negotiations were tough—I sometimes would hear my grandfather complaining about the union—and I’m sure there was fire on both sides. Yet when Jobst and Sons ran into difficulties in the 1990s, I saw the union doing everything it could to help salvage the company. There was self-interest at play, of course—the union members would suffer with the closing of the company—but the letter of endorsement also evinced respect for the management. Unfortunately, union concessions and good will were not enough and, unable to obtain the loans they needed, this 150-year family company went under.
I thought frequently of Jobst and Sons and its relationship with its
workers as I followed Thornton’s progress in North and South. Early in the novel, before he has experienced Margaret’s softening influence, he has an entirely top-down approach to running his company. And to be frank, I recognize some of my relatives’ own self-confidence and imperial manner in an early conversation with Margaret, who has just passed on a worker complaint that “the masters would like their hands to be merely tall, large children—living in the present moment—with a blind unreasoning kind of obedience.” Thornton doesn’t altogether reject the characterization:
Well, in the Platonic year, it may fall out that we are all—men, women, and children—fit for a republic; but give me a constitutional monarchy in our present state of morals and intelligence. In our infancy we require a wise despotism to govern us. Indeed, long past infancy, children and young people are the happiest under the unfailing laws of a discreet firm authority. I agree with Miss Hale so far as to consider our people in the condition of children, while I deny that we, the masters, have anything to do with the making or keeping them so. I maintain that despotism is the best kind of government for them; so that in the hours in which I come in contact with them I must necessarily be an autocrat. I will use my best discretion—from no humbug or philanthropic feeling, of which we have had rather too much in the North—to make wise laws and come to just decisions in the conduct of my business—laws and decisions which work for my own good in the first instance—for theirs in the second; but I will neither be forced to give my reasons, nor flinch from what I have once declared to be my resolution. Let them turn out! I shall suffer as well as they: but in the end they will find I have not bated nor altered one jot.
However, after Margaret introduces Thornton to Higgins—a union worker not afraid to speak his mind but also with a deep integrity—Thornton begins to move to a position not unlike (I believe) that taken by my relatives. Regular talks with Higgins open up a new perspective:
And by-and-bye, he lost all sense of resentment in wonder how it was, or could be, that two men like himself and Higgins, living by the same trade, working in their different ways at the same object, could look upon each other’s position and duties in so strangely different a way. And thence arose that intercourse, which, though it might not have the effect of preventing all future clash of opinion and action, when the occasion arose, would, at any rate, enable both master and man to look upon each other with far more charity and sympathy, and bear with each other more patiently and kindly. Besides this improvement of feeling, both Mr. Thornton and his workmen found out their ignorance as to positive matters of fact, known heretofore to one side, but not to the other.
We see this relationship bear fruit in a meal plan that Thornton envisions. By this time, however, he has learned enough from Higgins to know that he shouldn’t impose the plan without listening to his workers. And they, after first suspiciously rejecting it, suggest a few alterations and then embrace it. Thornton, meanwhile, has enough humility to stay out of their way. Here’s his account:
But it was not till provisions grew so high this winter that I bethought me how, by buying things wholesale, and cooking a good quantity of provisions together, much money might be saved, and much comfort gained. So I spoke to my friend—or my enemy—the man I told you of—and he found fault with every detail of my plan; and in consequence I laid it aside, both as impracticable, and also because if I forced it into operation I should be interfering with the independence of my men; when, suddenly, this Higgins came to me and graciously signified his approval of a scheme so nearly the same as mine, that I might fairly have claimed it; and, moreover, the approval of several of his fellow-workmen, to whom he had spoken. I was a little ‘riled,’ I confess, by his manner, and thought of throwing the whole thing overboard to sink or swim. But it seemed childish to relinquish a plan which I had once thought wise and well-laid, just because I myself did not receive all the honour and consequence due to the originator. So I coolly took the part assigned to me, which is something like that of a steward to a club. I buy in the provisions wholesale, and provide a fitting matron or cook.
The reward is that, eventually, the workers begin asking him to dine with them:
[O]ne day, two or three of the men—my friend Higgins among them—asked me if I would not come in and take a snack. It was a very busy day, but I saw that the men would be hurt if, after making the advance, I didn’t meet them half-way, so I went in, and I never made a better dinner in my life. I told them…how much I enjoyed it; and for some time, whenever that especial dinner recurred in their dietary, I was sure to be met by these men, with a ‘Master, there’s hot-pot for dinner to-day, win yo’ come in?’ If they had not asked me, I would no more have intruded on them than I’d have gone to the mess at the barracks without invitation.
From these interactions he gets insights into the workings of his operation that he would otherwise miss. When his interlocutor wonders whether the workers will hide their opinions in his presence, Thornton tells him that
you are hardly acquainted with our Darkshire fellows, for all you’re a Darkshire man yourself. They have such a sense of humor, and such a racy mode of expression! I am getting really to know some of them now, and they talk pretty freely before me.
This leads him (and Gaskell, for whom he is at this point a spokesperson) to articulate a new kind of relationship between owners and workers. If one is to get buy-in from the workers, one must share with them the reasons for the decisions that get made. To do so, “the individuals of the different classes [must be brought] into actual personal contact.”
Showing a worker “how much his employer may have labored in his study at plans for the benefit of his workpeople,” Thornton goes on to say, “is the very breath of life.” Coming up with “a complete plan” on one’s own, he notes, is like imposing upon them a machine that appears fitted for every emergency: they will never understand “the intense mental labor and forethought required to bring it to such perfection.”
On the other hand, if workers are involved in the planning process, “its success in working [will] come to be desired by all, as all had borne a part in the formation of the plan.” In fact, once all come to have an investment in the plan, they all will
find means and ways of seeing each other, and becoming acquainted with each others’ characters and persons, and even tricks of temper and modes of speech. We should understand each other better, and I’ll venture to say we should like each other more.
Does this mean, asks the member of Parliament who is querying Thornton about this vision, that strikes will be no more? The mill owner won’t go that far:
Not at all. My utmost expectation only goes as far as this—that they may render strikes not the bitter, venomous sources of hatred they have hitherto been. A more hopeful man might imagine that a closer and more genial intercourse between classes might do away with strikes. But I am not a hopeful man.
As Thornton is saying all this, his business is on the verge of bankruptcy. But because of his new management philosophy, he gets the same response from some of his workers that my uncle got from his. He informs Margaret of this:
Suddenly, as if a new idea had struck him, he crossed over to where Margaret was sitting, and began, without preface, as if he knew she had been listening to all that had passed:
“Miss Hale, I had a round-robin from some of my men—I suspect in Higgins’ handwriting—stating their wish to work for me, if ever I was in a position to employ men again on my own behalf. That was good, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Just right. I am glad of it,” said Margaret, looking up straight into his face with her speaking eyes, and then dropping them under his eloquent glance.
This is comparable to Darcy confessing to Elizabeth that she was right in her earlier assessment of him. In fact, North and South owes a lot to Pride and Prejudice—Margaret even accuses Thornton of not being a gentleman in her first rejection of his marriage proposal—and the ultimate outcome is mostly the same. In the earlier novel, however, a landed gentleman looks to a woman with mercantile relations (the Gardeners) to build a vibrant future whereas this time it is the man who is in trade. Meanwhile Margaret, the daughter of a women with gentry background, needs life in a mill town (Milton) to step into her full powers.
Which means that she’s not so much Elizabeth Bennett as Anne Elliot in Persuasion: passing up a chance to return to her ancestral Kellynch Hall as Mr. Elliot’s wife, Anne instead chooses the uncertain role of a sailor’s wife. Oh, and Margaret is also like Jane Eyre in that she suddenly inherits a fortune and uses it to help the man she loves, saving Thornton’s factory.
There’s one other point of connection I have. As a Strehlow, my mother could have married any number of wealthy Peoria denizens, lived on the posh West Moss Avenue (as many of my relatives did), been a member of the country club, and lived the high life. Instead, like Margaret’s mother, she chose an academic man, along with a considerably lower standard of living. In fact, Mr. Hale, with his intellectual integrity and his passion for learning, is a lot like my father. While Mrs. Hale complains incessantly about her comedown in the world, however, my mother saw marrying my father as the best decision of her life.
Follow-up note: My uncle was so traumatized by the bankruptcy that there are three days erased from his memory as he suffered a deep depression. Because of his skill set, however, he went on to have a very successful second career as an engineer consultant. Thornton too (before Margaret loans him her money) is offered some lucrative management jobs. He insists, however, that he will take them only if he can continue his “experiments” in enlightened management-worker relations, which sours his prospects.
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Monday
I have fallen in love with the fiction of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose North and South and Wives and Daughters I recently read for the first time (actually listened to). Since I’ve gone through all of Austen and the Bronte sisters countless times, it’s wonderfully fresh and delightful to be making a new friend. Gaskell addresses challenging social situations that intrigue me and then peoples them with memorable three-dimensional characters. Her heroines especially are marvelous.
There may be another reason for my attraction. Gaskell started publishing her novels shortly before my great-grandmother Eliza Scott was born. Eliza was a great lover of novels, as we know from a memoir she wrote in which she lists a number of her favorites. By imagining Eliza as the heroine in Gaskell’s family dramas, I get insight into how she used novels to narrativize her own life and confront her difficulties.
Not that Eliza mentions Gaskell in her memoir. Given how voracious a reader she was, however, she must have encountered some of her works. Eliza was born in 1857 in Barton while Gaskell’s first novel (Mary Barton) appeared in 1848 and was followed by North and South (1854-55) and Wives and Daughters, (1864-66).
The novels that Eliza mentions in her memoir are
–George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss –Susan Warren’s Wide, Wide World (1850) –Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain and Heir of Redcliffe –Unspecified novels by Charles Dickens and George Macdonald –There’s also (I’m pretty sure) an indirect reference to Jane Eyre.
I’m fascinated by my great-grandmother’s account of how novels gave her comfort at a time of crisis. Here’s how she and her mother used Warren’s novel when her mother was dying:
On my 10th birthday, Mother gave me the Wide, Wide World and as a new baby arrived a few days later, she and I read it together while she was confined to her room. We both thought Ellen cried too much, but I thought she was very wonderful. Mother did not get well and during the summer went to the seashore for a while, Nellie [Eliza’s older sister] coming home from boarding school to help care for the little ones.
The two Gaskell novels I’ve read so far both feature young women who lose their mothers. In them we see the daughter taking care of her father, which was Eliza’s situation as well. In other words, I imagine the heroines as my great-grandmother while also imagining my Eliza processing her life through reading them. For instance, I can see her identifying with the following passage about the death of Margaret Hale’s mother in North and South:
Convulsions came on; and when they ceased, Mrs. Hale was unconscious. Her husband might lie by her shaking the bed with his sobs; her son’s strong arms might lift her tenderly up into a comfortable position; her daughter’s hands might bathe her face; but she knew them not. She would never recognise them again, till they met in Heaven.
Before the morning came all was over.
Then Margaret rose from her trembling and despondency, and became as a strong angel of comfort to her father and brother. …
Margaret sat with her father in the room of the dead. If he had cried, she would have been thankful. But he sate by the bed quite quietly; only, from time to time, he uncovered the face, and stroked it gently, making a kind of soft inarticulate noise, like that of some mother-animal caressing her young. He took no notice of Margaret’s presence. Once or twice she came up to kiss him; and he submitted to it, giving her a little push away when she had done, as if her affection disturbed him from his absorption in the dead. … Margaret’s heart ached within her. She could not think of her own loss in thinking of her father’s case. The night was wearing away, and the day was at hand, when, without a word of preparation, Margaret’s voice broke upon the stillness of the room, with a clearness of sound that startled even herself: “Let not your heart be troubled,” it said; and she went steadily on through all that chapter of unspeakable consolation.
It’s not only the deathbed scenes that Eliza would have been able to relate to. I’ve written in the past about how I’m fairly sure that she drew strength from Jane Eyre when she went against her father’s wishes and left him to become a governess. Here’s the passage from her memoir where she, like Jane, talks about feeling restless:
Father made strenuous objections at first, but I was glad to have the prospect of a change and of earning a little money. I was not needed at home and was restless at having nothing to do.
Gaskell too talks about the inner struggle to remain a dutiful daughter while feeling that one is stagnating at home. Although the following passage occurs after Margaret has lost both her parents, nevertheless she is still the constraint of living with relatives:
When they returned to town, Margaret fulfilled one of her sea-side resolves, and took her life into her own hands. Before they went to Cromer, she had been as docile to her aunt’s laws as if she were still the scared little stranger who cried herself to sleep that first night in the Harley Street nursery. But she had learnt, in those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem for woman, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.
As I say, I don’t know for certain that Eliza Scott read Gaskell’s novels. Still, the novels become significantly more poignant while Eliza becomes more fleshed out when I imagine her as Margaret Hale or (in Wives and Daughters) as Molly Gibson.
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Spiritual Sunday
This being Transfiguration Sunday, I share a magnificent poem by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir about the moment. Today’s lectionary readings include not only the transfiguration of Christ but also of Moses, who experienced his own direct encounter with God on Mount Sinai.
Before turning to the poem, here are the two stories, with the first one probably playing a role in the framing of the second. Moses first:
Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain.
And now Jesus:
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
Muir puts himself in the mind of one of the disciples, using poetry to come as close as he can to the epiphany they experience. As he has the speaker say,
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists As fresh and pure as water from a well, Our hands made new to handle holy things, The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed Till earth and light and water entering there Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
Muir makes a distinction between vision, by which he may mean fantasy or wish fulfillment, and actuality. “Was it a vision,” he asks. Or
did we see that day the unseeable One glory of the everlasting world Perpetually at work, though never seen…
Whatever it was, it has changed the way he sees this world. Suddenly, as though a veil has been dropped, he sees what he calls “the stone clean at the heart” of the world. For instance, he penetrates the soot that covers shepherds’ hovels:
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart As on the starting-day.
Likewise, he looks at refuse heaps and sees no longer garbage but instead “that fine dust that made the world.”
That’s because, as Jesus taught us, “to the pure all things are pure,” and this observation extends to “the lurkers under doorways, murderers, with rags tied round their feet for silence”; “those who hide within the labyrinth of their own loneliness and greatness”; “those entangled in their own devices”; and “the silent and the garrulous liars.” By the end of the poem, this vision has extended even to Judas, who he imagines as a child, the great betrayal “quite undone and never more be done.” “All,” the speaker says, “stepped out of their dungeons and were free.”
The thought reminds me of a passage from Wordworth’s Tintern Abbey:
While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
Muir’s poem mentions Peter’s urge to capture the moment with something permanent. “If it had lasted but another moment,” the speaker opines, “it might have held forever.” But that’s not how God enters the world. One can’t pin down the transfiguration because then it would be something that could be contained.
Instead, Muir turns to images of spring to convey God’s kingdom come to earth. The tormented wood of the cross
will cure its hurt and grow into a tree In a green springing corner of young Eden…
The disciples got an inkling of this on that high mountain. And although they lost sight of that vision during the crucifixion, they rediscovered it with the resurrection and Pentecost. The source of all their seeing was rinsed and cleansed.
The Transfiguration By Edwin Muir
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists As fresh and pure as water from a well, Our hands made new to handle holy things, The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed Till earth and light and water entering there Gave back to us the clear unfallen world. We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness, But that even they, though sour and travel stained, Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance, And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined As in a morning field. Was it a vision? Or did we see that day the unseeable One glory of the everlasting world Perpetually at work, though never seen Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere And nowhere? Was the change in us alone, And the enormous earth still left forlorn, An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world We saw that day made this unreal, for all Was in its place. The painted animals Assembled there in gentle congregations, Or sought apart their leafy oratories, Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together, As if, also for them, the day had come. The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps Were grained with that fine dust that made the world; For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’ And when we went into the town, he with us, The lurkers under doorways, murderers, With rags tied round their feet for silence, came Out of themselves to us and were with us, And those who hide within the labyrinth Of their own loneliness and greatness came, And those entangled in their own devices, The silent and the garrulous liars, all Stepped out of their dungeons and were free. Reality or vision, this we have seen. If it had lasted but another moment It might have held forever! But the world Rolled back into its place, and we are here, And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn, As if it had never stirred; no human voice Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines And blossoms for itself while time runs on.
But he will come again, it’s said, though not Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things, Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas, And all mankind from end to end of the earth Will call him with one voice. In our own time, Some say, or at a time when time is ripe. Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified, Christ the discrucified, his death undone, His agony unmade, his cross dismantled— Glad to be so—and the tormented wood Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree In a green springing corner of young Eden, And Judas damned take his long journey backward From darkness into light and be a child Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal Be quite undone and never more be done.
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Friday
Julia’s birthday is today—we both turn 72 this year—so here’s a love lyric by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Julia and I will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary in June, and I never cease to be amazed at how my tenderness towards her continues to swell.
I especially like Tagore’s vision of love as a primal force that takes shapes that “renew and renew forever.” And how he sees this love our ours merging with “the memories of all loves,” as well as with “the songs of every poet past and forever.”
That’s what poetry does for us: it moves us past our individual selves and connects us, not only with humanity generally, but with the spiritual energies that flow through the universe. However small we may feel at times, we are all of us, in such relationships, participating in something immense.
Unending Love By Rabindranath Tagore
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times… In life after life, in age after age, forever. My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs, That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms, In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain, Its ancient tale of being apart or together. As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge, Clad in the light of a polestar piercing the darkness of time: You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount. At the heart of time, love of one for another. We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell- Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you The love of all man’s days both past and forever: Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life. The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours – And the songs of every poet past and forever.
Nikki Halley announces she’s running for president
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Thursday
“Kim” on Spoutify has just reminded me of a passage from 1984 that describes all too well many of today’s GOP apparatchiks, one of whom has just announced she will be running for president. In the words of Atlantic columnist and former Republican Tom Nichols, the video announcing the candidacy of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley
was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened.
Quoting fellow NeverTrumper and former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, Nichols notes that, just days after the January 6 insurrection, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” And then a few months after that Haley said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” “She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham,” Nichols concludes, “but she’s certainly putting in the effort.”
The reason Nichols singles out Haley for special scorn is because, as a youthful and formerly moderate woman of color, she once seemed to offer the GOP a different path forward. But like so many of these figures—New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik also comes to mind—she has totally thrown in with Big Brother.
That’s what political cult worship does to one: it hollows out your principles (if you ever had any) and renders you stupid. That’s why comparing Haley to Winston Smith’s next door neighbor Tom Parsons is altogether apt. Both have drunk the Kool-Aid:
Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.
The stability—or at least continuance—of Trumpism depends on people like Haley. Like Nichols and Stevens, I don’t believe anything less than continued electoral defeats will bring the GOP back to its senses. Or as Nichols puts it, “no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.”
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Wednesday
I have fallen in love with the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell but find my vision of literature directly challenged by a character in North and South. John Thornton is a mill owner who has hired the father of protagonist Margaret Hale as tutor so that he can catch up on the education that he was deprived of as a child. While this is laudable, he doesn’t see reading the classics as essential, regarding such activity more as a decorative flourish that one adds to one’s life only when one can afford it.
It’s the vision of a character in another book I’ve just finished, Kate Quinn’s light but enjoyable The Rose Code. In that World War II-era thriller about the women who worked at Bletchley Park decoding German war signals, Mab is working her way through the classics to help her escape her impoverished working-class background. There’s a great passage describing her reaction to Rebecca:
I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six, dressed in black satin with a string of pearls,” Mab Churt read aloud. “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said, you silly twit.”
“What are you reading?” her mother asked, flipping through an old magazine.
Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier.” Mab turned a page. She was taking a break from her dog-eared list of “100 Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady”—not that Mab was a lady, or particularly well-read, but she intended to be both. After plowing through number 56, The Return of the Native (ugh, Thomas Hardy), Mab figured she’d earned a dip into something enjoyable like Rebecca. “The heroine’s a drip and the hero’s one of those broody men who bullies you and it’s supposed to be appealing. But I can’t put it down, somehow.” Maybe just the fact that when Mab envisioned herself at thirty-six, she was definitely wearing black satin and pearls. There was also a Labrador lying at her feet, in this dream, and a room lined with books she actually owned, rather than dog-eared copies from the library.
Anyway, back to Gaskell. While mill owner Thorton attended school as a child, he was forced into the work force after his father committed suicide over gambling debts he couldn’t pay. From a shop assistant, Thornton has gradually worked his way up to a position of wealth and prominence. Margaret’s father wants Homer to get some of the credit, but Thornton will have none of it.
Here’s their interchange:
“But you have the rudiments of a good education,” remarked Mr. Hale. “The quick zest with which you are now reading Homer, shows me that you do not come to it as an unknown book: you have read it before, and are only recalling your old knowledge.”
“That is true,—I had blundered along it at school; I dare say, I was even considered a pretty fair classic in those days, though my Latin and Greek have slipt away from me since. But I ask you, what preparation were they for such a life as I had to lead? None at all. Utterly none at all. On the point of education, any man who can read and write starts fair with me in the amount of really useful knowledge that I had at that time.”
“Well! I don’t agree with you. But there I am perhaps somewhat of a pedant. Did not the recollection of the heroic simplicity of the Homeric life nerve you up?”
“Not one bit!” exclaimed Mr. Thornton, laughing. “I was too busy to think about any dead people, with the living pressing alongside of me, neck to neck, in the struggle for bread. :
The conversation occurs immediately after Thornton has laid out his philosophy of life and, as he sees it, his reasons for success: self-denial and refusal to indulge in sensual pleasure. As he puts it,
Now when I feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor merit, nor talent,—but simply the habits of life which taught me to despise indulgences not thoroughly earned,—indeed, never to think twice about them,—I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.
Homer, as it was taught in the British schools at the time, was believed to inculcate in pupils a warrior ethos, so it makes sense that Mr. Hale would seek to connect Greek heroes and enterprising capitalists. But because he is a modest man, the tutor self-deprecatingly withdraws his remark following Thornton’s objection, saying what I would have said in his place:
I dare say, my remark came from the professional feeling of there being nothing like leather.
Yes, we lovers of leather-bound classics can sometimes exaggerate literature’s impact.
That being acknowledged, however, I think Mr. Hale’s mistake is in trying to connect his interpretation of The Iliad with the 19th-century Puritan work ethic, which believed that those who work hard while denying themselves sensual pleasure will emerge the winners. This is not the vision of Homer’s warriors, whose lust for loot and whose view of the gods as fickle is almost the polar opposite of this. I could even imagine Thornton regarding them as negative role models. In any event, he’s not willing to let his tutor use his bookish expertise to define the narrative of his life.
All of which is to say that Homer might have had more of an impact that Thornton lets on or realizes. Perhaps that’s why he’s returned to those works now. But that impact may be different than Mr. Hale thinks.
Follow-up Quotation: Thornton’s mother regards a classical education with even more skepticism than her son does, reminding me of those persons that want to banish the arts from education and focus only on fundamental skills and the STEM disciplines. His mother is explaining why her son had to miss his class the previous evening:
“He told me he could not get leisure to read with you last night, sir. He regretted it, I am sure; he values the hours spent with you.”
“I am sure they are equally agreeable to me,” said Mr. Hale. “It makes me feel young again to see his enjoyment and appreciation of all that is fine in classical literature.”
“I have no doubt that classics are very desirable for people who have leisure. But I confess, it was against my judgment that my son renewed his study of them. The time and place in which he lives, seem to me to require all his energy and attention. Classics may do very well for men who loiter away their lives in the country or in colleges; but Milton men ought to have their thoughts and powers absorbed in the work of to-day. At least, that is my opinion.” This last clause she gave out with “the pride that apes humility.”
“But, surely, if the mind is too long directed to one object only, it will get stiff and rigid, and unable to take in many interests,” said Margaret.
“I do not quite understand what you mean by a mind getting stiff and rigid. Nor do I admire those whirligig characters that are full of this thing to-day, to be utterly forgetful of it in their new interest to-morrow. Having many interests does not suit the life of a Milton manufacturer. It is or ought to be enough for him to have one great desire, and to bring all the purposes of his life to bear on the fulfillment of that.”
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Tuesday – Valentine’s Day
Edna St. Vincent Millay makes an understated—and therefore all the more powerful—argument for love in “Sonnet XXX: Love Is Not All.” Think of it as an inversion of Arthur Maslow’s’s hierarchy of needs since Millay is unwilling to acknowledge that hunger, survival, and relief from pain are more basic than love.
Because, throughout the poem, she seems open to counterarguments, her expressed opinion in the final line that love surpasses all other needs arrives with special force. The overwhelming case against love’s supremacy is defused by the delicate assertion, “I do not think…”
There is conviction and steely determination behind that seemingly tentative statement. Here’s the poem
Love Is Not All By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.
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Monday
With plans to make today’s post about last night’s Super Bowl winner, I was hoping the Eagles would carry the day. Not because I particularly cared for either team but because I had a great poem in mind should they emerge victorious:
The Eagle By Alfred Lord Tennyson
He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Well, the Eagles fell all right, although not in the predatory way that Tennyson envisions. Kansas City won on a last second field goal 38-35.
Unfortunately for me, to choose a work about Native American chiefs would make me complicit in the way the Kansas City moniker caricatures and thereby belittles Indians. I needed something else.
The idea came when I saw the transcendent Patrick Mahomes win a second straight game while all but playing on one leg. I believe he sustained his high ankle sprain against the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC championship game and then reaggravated it late in the first half of the Super Bowl. Nevertheless, he played lights out when he returned in the second half. Especially impressive was a 20-yard scramble late in the fourth quarter, setting his team up for the winning field goal. One could see him wincing after the play.
So what literary characters operate on one leg? Captain Ahab comes to mind except that he ends up in the loss column. Moby Dick, only slightly larger than some of Philadelphia’s defenders, proves too much for him.
So instead I turn to Long John Silver, who walks with the aid of a crutch. One scene in particular will resonate with Philadelphia fans because it reveals Stevenson’s legendary pirate, like Mahomes, to be a stone-cold killer.
Jim, the protagonist and narrator, has discovered that Long John has murderous designs and has corrupted many of the men aboard the ship. Jim slips from a boat that Long John is rowing ashore, hides in the brush, and then witnesses Silver and his confederates murdering some of the honest shipmates. In one case, the murder occurs, as it were, offstage:
Far away out in the marsh there arose, all of a sudden, a sound like the cry of anger, then another on the back of it; and then one horrid, long-drawn scream. The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire…
I imagine that scream emanating from Philadelphia’s defense as Mahomes, as it were, carved them up.
And then there’s the murder that Jim witnesses first hand. Shipmate Tom, who is at that moment confronting Silver, also hears the scream and understands what it portends:
Tom had leaped at the sound, like a horse at the spur, but Silver had not winked an eye. He stood where he was, resting lightly on his crutch, watching his companion like a snake about to spring.
“John!” said the sailor, stretching out his hand.
“Hands off!” cried Silver, leaping back a yard, as it seemed to me, with the speed and security of a trained gymnast.
“Hands off, if you like, John Silver,” said the other. “It’s a black conscience that can make you feared of me. But in heaven’s name, tell me, what was that?”
“That?” returned Silver, smiling away, but warier than ever, his eye a mere pinpoint in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. “That? Oh, I reckon that’ll be Alan.”
And at this point Tom flashed out like a hero.
“Alan!” he cried. “Then rest his soul for a true seaman! And as for you, John Silver, long you’ve been a mate of mine, but you’re mate of mine no more. If I die like a dog, I’ll die in my dooty. You’ve killed Alan, have you? Kill me too, if you can. But I defies you.”
And with that, this brave fellow turned his back directly on the cook and set off walking for the beach.
So that seems that. After all, what harm can we expect from a one-legged man? Unfortunately, as the Eagles learned to their sorrow, quite a lot. Long John too, we learn, is a precision passer:
But he was not destined to go far. With a cry John seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air. It struck poor Tom, point foremost, and with stunning violence, right between the shoulders in the middle of his back. His hands flew up, he gave a sort of gasp, and fell.
Whether he were injured much or little, none could ever tell. Like enough, to judge from the sound, his back was broken on the spot. But he had no time given him to recover. Silver, agile as a monkey even without leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment and had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenseless body. From my place of ambush, I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows.
Jim momentarily loses consciousness from horror, only to awake to see Long John, as it were, receiving the trophy:
When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head. Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a wisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly on the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had been actually done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment since before my eyes.
If you are an Eagles fan, is this what it felt like? You have my deepest sympathy.
