How great literature can change your life

Friday

Having written about my son who died, it’s time to write about the two who are still alive. Darien and Toby both have literature-inspired names: Darien’s name I owe to the Keats sonnet “Upon First Reading Chapman’s Homer” and Toby’s comes from a combination of my dissertation subject—the 18^th century Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett—and, even more, from the kindly Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s 18^th century novel Tristram Shandy. 

In that novel, Tristram’s father is convinced that one’s name determines one’s destiny, so I’m putting that theory to the test in today’s post. As the narrator summarizes Walter Shandy’s belief, “His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magic bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct.” As proof, the elder Shandy holds up a couple of Roman generals:

How many Cæsars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicomedus’d into nothing?

In other words, if Julius Caesar became great, it was because he was named Julius Caesar. Duh!

Incidentally, Walter Shandy plans to name his son Trismegistus, the purported author of the ancient Greek work Hermetica. As Walter describes the figure, Trismegistus is “the greatest of all earthly beings—he was the greatest king——the greatest law-giver——the greatest philosopher——and the greatest priest.” Unfortunately, through a series of mishaps, Tristram ends up with the name his father considers to be the very worst:

But, of all the names in the universe, he had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram;—he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world—thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum naturâ, but what was extremely mean and pitiful: So that in the midst of a dispute on the subject, in which, by the bye, he was frequently involved,——he would sometimes break off in a sudden and spirited Epiphonema, or rather Erotesis, raised a third, and sometimes a full fifth above the key of the discourse,——and demand it categorically of his antagonist, Whether he would take upon him to say, he had ever remembered,——whether he had ever read,—or even whether he had ever heard tell of a man, called Tristram, performing anything great or worth recording?—No,—he would say,—Tristram!—The thing is impossible.

I think Toby, who is a huge fan of Tristram Shandy, might be rather tickled if I had named him Tobias Trismegistus Bates, which scans well as an iambic tetrameter. Anyway, I’ll explore whether his first name has shaped his destiny in next Friday’s installment.

For this one, I’ll focus on Darien. I’ve long loved Keats’s poem about his first experience reading The Iliad, which had been translated into English by the 17^th century poet and playwright George Chapman. This Keats compares to an astronomer discovering a new planet and to Balboa being the first European to gaze at the Pacific Ocean:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Setting aside Keats mixing up Cortez with Balboa, this sense that the world constantly offers us new possibilities characterizes Darien’s approach to life. He is constantly seeking to expand himself, something he’s has been doing ever since, as a second son, he tried to do everything his big brother did. He has never let conventional expectations hem him in. 

I remember the time when, as a third grader, he had a manicurist who was living with us paint his fingernails. The other boys at first made fun of him but, by the end of the day, they all wanted their nails painted as well. (“Perhaps they “look’d at each other with a wild surmise.”) Darien is forever finding exciting new opportunities and persuading others to follow him. For himself, he will stay in a job only if it is teaching him new things and will look elsewhere once the learning stops. In the process, he has started three companies, the last of which he sold to the company he works for at the moment. (He’s the Chief Product Officer for a company specializing in restaturant apps.)

Darien was a theater major at St. Mary’s. My favorite of his roles was as Pseudolus in Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum—he had us all in the palm of his hand—and he also wrote, directed, and starred in an autobiographical play for his senior project. At one point after graduation—this when he was married to Betsy, who had been a music major at St. Mary’s and who now is Director of Administration at the History of Washington, D.C. Museum—he did a self-internship in New York City to determine whether he could make it as an actor. While he learned he had the drive and the skills to succeed, he didn’t like how dependent actors were on the decisions of others. Noticing how, despite their high quality, Off Off Broadway productions were often playing to half-emtpy theaters, Darien figured that he could help them market themselves better. He found a job in advertising in Baltimore (where Betsy was getting an advanced degree in Peabody’s music program), learned he was really good at it, and then moved with Betsy to Manhattan in 2008 to set up their marketing company.

The name of that first company makes my point: Discovering Oz. (I had read the boys several of the Oz books when they were growing up.)

Living on beans and rice as the economy around them tanked, they nevertheless stayed afloat, using the money they made servicing Darien’s former business clients to support three small theater companies, which could pay them very little. Their efforts led to packed audiences, and they might have continued only they had our grandson Alban and figured that, to raise a child in Manhattan, they would have to double the size of their company. Instead, Darien accepted a full time job with one of his high-paying clients and moved to the D.C. area, where he and Betsy drew on grandparents to help raise Alban.

Incidentally, Darien is as excited about being a father as he is in everything else. At one point they built a computer and they have assembled together many complex Lego creations. And now Alban, who is an excellent violinist, will be venturing out himself to Duke Ellington, Washington’s arts-oriented high school. His name might be partially Blake-inspired: the poem imagined a future England as “Albion,” a “green and pleasant land” that represented his utopian dream.

I can’t speak in much detail about how literature impacted Darien’s life. He remembers with fondness how I would read to him and his brothers, his most vivid memory involving listening to me read Lord of the Rings by lantern light as we huddled around a wood stove during an ice storm that had knocked out power. Somewhere along the line he read Tom Jones on his own—he loved it as much as I did—and he Moby Dick on New York subways and E.M. Forster’s Passage to India while working in Baltimore. He once mentioned to me that Shakespeare’s Henry V helped him in one of his corporate jobs, and recently he and Toby have been reading novels together–first George Eliot’s Middlemarch and now Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov—so that they can have substantive conversations.

While Darien and Toby were both devastated by Justin’s death, one good thing that came out of it was a deep and abiding friendship. They talk weekly and, for a while, were producing the podcast Stories We Tell Our Robots: How we make our technology and how our technology makes us (29 episodes in all). This allowed them to combine their twin interests in literature and technology, and  I’ve posted on how they applied Oedipus to predictive analytics.

Darien is convinced, from his extensive experience, that a liberal arts education is particularly effective in preparing one for a business career. Liberal arts majors, he once informed me, don’t just come in and wait for others to tell them what to do. Instead, they survey the field and figure out where they can make the best use of their learning and what more they must learn in order to be effective. They’re also very good at rapidly learning new things.

Darien and Toby both have high ethical standards and treat other people with utmost respect. Although Julia and I have contributed to this, literature has also played a role. Not only do poems and novels get one to step into another’s vantage point, thereby fostering empathy, but they reveal to life to be infinitely fascinating. When one travels in “realms of gold,” one sees the richness of humanity.

So returning to Darien’s name, some part of me must have envisioned an adventurer who would enter life with openness, excitement, and wonder. Maybe Walter Shandy is on to something after all.