Lit in the Year after Justin’s Death

By Robin Bates | Published: March 27, 2026
Illus. from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, Installment #27

During the year following Justin’s death, I lived as though in a different reality. On the one hand it felt as though I was in a continuous fog so that my normal way of seeing things was blurred. On the other, just as certain sounds are sharper in a fog, so was it the case here. I became acutely aware of the preciousness of life and also of the suffering of others, especially of certain students.

In the early days, I noticed that people were sending me poems. I especially recall a colleague in Psychology sending me W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which describes a Breughel painting about the fall of Icarus. Because no one in the painting notices the tragedy, which is occurring in the lower corner of the painting, Auden makes the point that we are blind to tragedies going on around us. “How well they understood suffering, the old masters,” he observes in the opening line.

I remember thinking that it was a curious poem to receive since, as far as I could tell, the entire community was focused on our suffering, at least for a little while. My suffering didn’t feel overlooked or ignored, although I appreciated my colleague’s concern. More to the point, I realized that people seldom say exactly the right thing in such instances. Often, they greeted me awkwardly or even, fearing a blunder, avoided me altogether. When I walked across campus, I would sometimes see them ducking behind bushes, fearful that they would respond insensitively.

I didn’t take this amiss, however, but rather regarded their behavior as arising from their care for me. They felt inadequate in the face of death, which was only to be expected.

Justin died on April 30—the day before final exams—so I had the summer to reflect on what had happened. As one must do something, I returned to my book. Last week I recounted the role Beowulf played in my grieving process, but Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was almost as important. After all, it is about a man grappling with death, although in this case the death will be his own. Once Sir Gawain keeps his rendezvous with the Green Knight and receives the return axe blow, that should be it.

As I interpret the poem, it is about the ways we cope with death. Gawain thinks that, in his Christianity and his code of chivalric knighthood, he has the answer: all he has to do is remain indifferent about his life, putting his faith instead in the Christian afterlife and the courage expected of Camelot. His coping mechanism of not caring whether he lives or dies—or at least telling himself that he doesn’t care—is taken as a direct affront by the poem’s pagan fertility deities, the Green Knight and Morgan Le Faye. Their aim is to prove to Gawain (and, by extension, to Christian England) that he cares for his life after all.

In the end, to their satisfaction and to Gawain’s shame, they prove that he does. In a set of trials, Gawain encounters gruesome images of death (from three hunts) along with sweet enticements of life. The three hunts represent three different ways of responding to death: ignoring it and being caught unawares (the deer), fighting it (the boar), and attempting to escape it (the fox). Meanwhile, in parallel hunts, the lady of the castle attempts to seduce Gawain and, in the end, gets him to accept a gift from her. This elaborate plot was composed by someone who had either first or secondhand experience with one of history’s greatest natural disasters, the black plague of 1348-50, which killed a third of Europe. That the poet concludes with Gawain learning to appreciate life after having been self-protectively closed down spoke directly to my own grieving.

I remember looking out the window of my study at the woods bordering our back yard and being awestruck, in my own season of death, by how life kept on relentlessly asserting itself. It was a prodigal summer (to borrow from Barbara Kingsolver), and the grass, dandelions, buttercups, catbrier, small shrubs, and tree foliage never stopped. In the pain of losing Justin, I had closed myself off from this daily miracle, and the Green Knight was determined that I reconnect.

In addition to the works I was examining for my book, I searched for elegies that spoke to my condition. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy on a Country Churchyard,” John Milton’s “Lycidas,” A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and Percy Shelley’s Adonais didn’t do much for me, although I would choose a stanza from Shelley’s poem for Justin’s gravestone. Lamenting the death of Keats, Shelley writes,

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

Tennyson’s In Memoriam, on the other hand, struck deep. The longest of the great elegies, the poem was written over a 17-year-period by the poet as he mourned the untimely death of his closest friend and soulmate Arthur Hallam. (Hallam was 22 when he died, Justin 21.) Once I discovered it, I became mesmerized. Each day, when I returned home from the college, I would open my copy randomly, reading four or five of the 130 sections. The poem was apparently of great comfort to Queen Victoria when she lost Prince Albert and it was of great comfort to me. Tennyson is frustrated by the inadequacy of language to express all he feels, which was my situation as well. I related to:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
        To put in words the grief I feel;
        For words, like nature, half reveal
    And half conceal the Soul within.

    But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
        A use in measur’d language lies;
        The sad mechanic exercise
    Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

    In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
        Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
        But that large grief which these enfold
    Is given in outline and no more.

And:

Behold! we know not anything;
        I can but trust that good shall fall
        At last–far off–at last, to all,
    And every winter change to spring.

    So runs my dream: but what am I?
        An infant crying in the night:
        An infant crying for the light:
    And with no language but a cry.

My teaching, meanwhile, took on a new urgency. I became attuned to students who were going through bad times and invited them to explore sorrows when they were triggered by a poem or a story. Sometimes responses came from entirely unexpected places, such as when an athlete was moved by Henry Vaughan’s “Silence and Stealth of Days” because he, like the poet, had lost a brother. Vaughan compares his brother to a lamp in a mine to which he seeks to return, only to find the extinguished snuff: 

Silence, and stealth of days! ’tis now
Since thou art gone,
Twelve hundred hours, and not a brow
But clouds hang on.
As he that in some cave’s thick damp
Lockt from the light,
Fixeth a solitary lamp,
To brave the night…
I search, and rack my soul to see
Those beams again,
But nothing but the snuff to me
Appeareth plain…

Towards the end of the year I read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, written following the death of his wife Joy Davidman, and learned about “the second death,” which is the death of the death. In a way, the continued pain keeps the loved one present, so when that goes, the absent one seems even more absent. I remember feeling deeply depressed a week before the one-year-anniversary, which I afterwards attributed to fearing that the pain would end on that day.

The continuing pain had also meant picking up on vibrations previously unnoticed. I remember relating to a passage from Lloyd Alexander’s Black Cauldron, which I had read to the boys. In it, the protagonist has inherited a magical talisman that enhances his senses:

As Melynlas cantered over the frosty ground, Taran caught sight of a glittering, dew-covered web on a hawthorn branch and of the spider busily repairing it. Taran was aware, strangely, of vast activities along the forest trail. Squirrels prepared their winter hoard; ants labored in their earthen castles. He could see them clearly, not so much with his eyes but in a way he had never known before.

The air itself bore special scents. There was a ripple, sharp and clear, like cold wine. Taran knew, without stopping to think, that a north wind had just begun to rise.

Taran describes the experience like this:

“All I know is that I feel differently somehow. I can see things I never saw before—or smell or taste them. I can’t say exactly what it is. It’s strange, and awesome in a way. And very beautiful sometimes. There are things that I know…” Taran shook his head. “And I don’t even know how I know them.”

After the death of the second death, when I didn’t think of Justin continually and my emotional life returned to normal, I sometimes felt like Taran when he must give up the ring. Life felt flatter. Then again, listening to my students’ stories and to others who had lost loved ones restored some of the three-dimensionality.

I had earned a sabbatical for the next year and had originally planned to apply for another Fulbright to Slovenia. Toby, however, had a strong friendship group and didn’t want to leave. Given all the trauma we had been through, we allowed him to decide. More about him and his brother Darien in the next two posts.

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026) 
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026) 
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)

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The Courage of a Tennessee Librarian

By Robin Bates | Published: March 25, 2026
Luanne James, Director, Rutherford County Libraries (TN)

Thursday

Last October, Sewanee’s Friends of the Library, which I chair, held a “Banned Book Week” event where we invited author Christina Soontornvat and librarian Keri Lambert to discuss rightwing book banning attempts. Soontornvat is a founding member of Authors against Book Bans while Lambert is involved with the Rutherford County Library Alliance, which recently received the Tennessee Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award. 

Rutherford County, which is Tennessee’s third largest county and only an hour up the road from me, is again in the news, thanks to a heroic stance taken by its director. Luanne James is refusing to comply with her reactionary board’s 8-3 directive to relocate over a hundred LGBTQ+ children’s titles to the adult section. She has also revealed that the board chair made several private demands that were unethical and in some instances illegal, including obtaining personal data from library patrons and violating FOIA laws.

“Unhappy is the land that needs heroes,” Brecht has Galileo say in his play about the scientist, and our own unhappy times have led James to put her job on the line. Here’s her inspiring letter:

Good afternoon everyone.

As the Director of the Rutherford County Library System (RCLS), I am professionally and ethically bound to uphold the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Public libraries serve as vital repositories of diverse ideas, both popular and unpopular. Restricting access to these materials through subjective relocation or removal constitutes a violation of the community’s right to information and a direct infringement on the principles of free speech. Our libraries are funded by and for the citizens; therefore, the right to access information—free from government interference—is a protected hallmark of our democracy.

The 8-3 vote by the Library Board on March 16th to relocate over 100+ LGBTQIA children’s titles to the adult section is a clear act of viewpoint discrimination. Furthermore, the vote to move the books was done without following the library’s established Request for Reconsideration policy.

My duty to protect public access is not merely a personal opinion; it is a core tenet of the American Library Association’s Code of Ethics. As an arm of the county government, the Board cannot legally limit the public’s access to materials owned by the people based on the content of the ideas expressed within them.

Therefore, I will not comply with the Board’s decision to relocate these books. Doing so would violate the First Amendment right of all citizens of Rutherford County and myself. Consequently, I would compromise my professional obligation to oppose government-mandated viewpoint discrimination.

I want you to know that I am more than willing to discuss this decision with members of the Board at any time. I trust you understand my position expressed in this letter. As the Director of RCLS, I must uphold the obligations owed to the citizens of Rutherford County, and in particular the duty owed by the public library to its patrons, to allow access to views expressed by authors to benefit the public’s right to read and access protected speech.

Sincerely,
Luanne James

I’ve been thinking about what I wrote in 2012 about heroism in How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage. In the years since, I’ve worried that, even though our monsters continue to operate as I described, what I wrote about heroism was overly optimistic. I wrote the book in the year leading up to Obama’s reelection to a second term, but if I’d foreseen Trump in our future, I perhaps would have replaced “defeating” with “resisting.” I underestimated the rightwing reaction to liberalism’s advances.

Nevertheless, what I had to say about the reserves that Boewulf draws on to defeat Grendel’s Mother is still relevant.  As I explained on Friday, I see the troll as the archetype of destructive grieving and, as such, far more difficult to defeat than her son’s raging resentment. People can grieve over the death of an ideal as much as of an individual, and the grieving that we are witnessing amongst portions of America is over the death of white, patriarchal, heterosexual, Christian America, often associated with the 1950s. The rage burns so hot that people are willing to cheer the burn-it-all-down governance of Donald Trump, even when they themselves are victimized. We see such rage expressed in the Finn episode:

                              The wildness in them
had to brim over.
                                    The hall ran red
with blood of enemies.

The anger against liberals, feminists, LGBTQIA folk, and others can appear daunting, threatening to swallow us up as Grendel’s Mother threatens to swallow up Beowulf in her underwater sea cave. He discovers, however, that he has resources within he didn’t know he had. In the poem, aid comes in the form of a giant sword dating back to the golden age before the flood. Luanne James, the citizens of Minnesota, and all those others resisting Trump’s grievance-driven authoritarianism have their own sword to turn to. As I write in my book, 

Our higher ideal, expressed in The Declaration of Independence, is bigger than our individual grievances and will fortify us, just as, in his darkest moment, Beowulf’s great sword fortifies him.  Those who came before, like the warrior giants who forged that weapon, can infuse us with their spirit and inspire us to push through our pain. Wielding the sword means acknowledging and claiming that we stand on the shoulders of those who have come before. We are fighting the good fight, one that the founding fathers began and that Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, and a host of others continued, each working to ensure that America honors its promise.

When James cites the First Amendment and declares that “the right to access information—free from government interference—is a protected hallmark of our democracy,” she is tapping into the power of the sword.

There’s another important element in this battle, however, which calls for communal rather than individual action. At the end of his life, Beowulf at first thinks he must go it alone against the latest monster and is in danger of yielding to dragon despair. He triumphs only after his nephew Wiglaf comes to his assistance.

Luanne James, we learn from the write-up on her, “felt more able to speak up in this way” thanks to the “fiercely proactive” Rutherford County Library Alliance. This Saturday, millions of Americans will experience the power of standing together as they protest Trump’s authoritarian rule in the third No Kings protest. As I write in my book,

Always we must remember that, while the battle seems daunting, it is less so when we work in concert with others. There are few activities more exhilarating than joining with a group of fellow citizens to build a better society. The dragon’s hoard has wealth sufficient for all of us if we marshal up the collective will to liberate it.

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An Optimist Revises Yeats’s “Second Coming”

By Robin Bates | Published: March 24, 2026

Wednesday

For a little midweek levity—we all need some these days, right?—here’s a revision of Yeats’s well-known but arguably fascist poem, forwarded to me by my son. It’s like the revision I shared recently of Philip Larkins’s “This Be the Verse.” While (needless to say) it’s far inferior to the original and does not stand on its own, it does raise the question whether Yeats was a tad hysterical with his apocalyptic vision.

Everything’s Fine 🙂 
By “the domestic mammoth” (on tumblr)

Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure, 
The falcon heeds the calling falconer; 
Things hang together, and the center holds; 
Mere symmetry is ordering the world, 
The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence proceeds; 
The best have strong convictions, while the worst 
Are full of resignation and are sad.

Surely no revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming’s far away. 
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
When an indifference borne of stable comfort 
Leaves my sight clear: somewhere in sands of the desert 
A lion with lion body and the head of a lion, 
A gaze calm and leonine, as is usual, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it 
Reel shadows of the normal desert birds. 
What a nice lion, right? And now I know 
That twenty centuries have gone along 
And things were bad sometimes, and things were good, 
And if a lion slouches toward Bethlehem, 
That’s ’cause it’s native to the Levant.

After this was posted, someone responded with a changed version of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say.” By just changing four or five words, the respondent removed the “ick” factor. I’ve expressed my ambivalence toward Williams’s poem in the past (here) so it was fun to read this version.

I acknowledge that, like the Yeats parody, it lacks the punch of the original. We are not witnessing a Lewis Carroll, whose parodies made great poems out of mediocre ones. In addition to sparking thought, however, these ones can get us to appreciate more what Yeats and Williams accomplished.

I have not eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

that you said
you were
saving 
for breakfast

enjoy them
they look delicious
so sweet 
and so cold

I guess thoughtful partners are not as fascinating as jerks.

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The Goddess Nemesis at Work in Iran

By Robin Bates | Published: March 23, 2026
Pierre-Paul Prod’hon, Justice and Nemesis Pursuing Crime

Tuesday

Retired General Mark Hertling, surveying Trump’s Iranian nightmare, has invoked an ancient Greek historian and a Greek goddess to explain the chaos. Herodotus, he writes in the Bulwark ,

believed the greatest danger to powerful nations was not external enemies but hubris—the arrogance that comes from believing success makes one invulnerable. That hubris always summoned Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, who then punished arrogant heroes and leaders.

I hadn’t heard of Nemesis as a goddess until Hertling’s piece, but I see that she shows up in The Theogony (c. 750-700 BCE), which is Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods. Nemesis is the daughter of Night, who herself is born of Chaos and who is also the mother of “hateful Doom, black Destiny and Death/ And Sleep and Dreams,” along with Disgrace, “painful Woe,” and the three fates. Hesiod concludes,

And then did deadly Night
Give birth to Nemesis, who is a blight
To mortals…

Wikipedia tells us that, while Nemesis was originally a distributor of fortune (“neither good nor bad, simply in due proportion to each according to what was deserved”), she came to be associated with “the resentment caused by any disturbance of this right proportion, the sense of justice that could not allow it to pass unpunished.” 

I was unaware of Nemesis as a goddess because the references to her in Greek and Roman literature are so fleeting. She is mentioned in Sophocles’s  Electra, where Orestes and Electra enact justice on their father’s murderers (their mother and her lover), and again in Ovid’s  Metamorphoses, where under the name Rhamnusia she transforms the gorgeous young Narcissus into a flower that gazes perpetually upon its watery reflection. “Thus, though he should love, let him not enjoy what he loves!” pray the mountain nymphs whom Narcissus is spurning, and Ovid informs us that Rhamnusia/Nemesis “assented to a prayer so reasonable.” 

Given that Trump is the quintessential narcissist, it’s appropriate that Nemesis would trap him in the lonely hell of self. Ovid does a good job of capturing the emptiness of self-obsession:

While he is drinking, being attracted with the reflection of his own form, seen in the water, he falls in love with a thing that has no substance; and he thinks that to be a body, which is but a shadow.

And further on:

In his ignorance, he covets himself; and he that approves, is himself the thing approved. While he pursues he is pursued, and at the same moment he inflames and burns. How often does he give vain kisses to the deceitful spring; how often does he thrust his arms, catching at the neck he sees, into the middle of the water, and yet he does not catch himself in them. He knows not what he sees, but what he sees, by it is he inflamed; and the same mistake that deceives his eyes, provokes them. Why, credulous youth, dost thou vainly catch at the flying image? What thou art seeking is nowhere; what thou art in love with, turn but away and thou shalt lose it; what thou seest, the same is but the shadow of a reflected form; it has nothing of its own.

It sounds like Trump seeing himself in the buildings he names after himself and in the awards he arranges to have bestowed upon him. Nemesis is indeed at work on him, making his life a misery to himself and, with the Iran debacle, punishing him for his arrogance. Unfortunately, Trump also embodies the arrogance of the country that elected him twice, and he is taking us all down with him. Multiple commentators are observing that this is how empires fall.

With its military might, America thought it could intervene in Korea, multiple Central American countries, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Venezuela, and now Iran (I could also include various CIA-sponsored coups). In retrospect, it’s striking that Nemesis took so long to show up.

Then again, given how much blood we’ve shed and how much treasure we’ve squandered over the past 75 years, maybe she’s been with us all along.

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Catch-22 and DJT’s Iran “Excursion”

By Robin Bates | Published: March 22, 2026

Monday

So let me see if I’ve got this right: Donald Trump, only belatedly realizing that his war of choice against Iran would send oil prices skyrocketing in an election year, has decided to allow Iran to sell oil sitting in tankers to bring prices down. He is also lifting the oil sanctions placed on Russia because of its Ukraine invasion, even as Russia helps Iran locate and fire at American targets. We are, in short, in a Milo Minderbinder moment.

Minderbinder is the amoral capitalist in Catch-22 who will make deals with any side that will pay him money, including Germany. When Yossarian protests, “Can’t you understand that we’re fighting a war? People are dying,” Minderbinder shakes his head “with weary forbearance”:

 “[T]he Germans are not our enemies,” he declared. “Oh I know what you’re going to say. Sure, we’re at war with them. But the Germans are also members in good standing of the syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders. Maybe they did start the war, and maybe they are killing millions of people, but they pay their bills a lot more promptly than some allies of ours I could name. 

At one point, Minderbinder’s own version of Trump simultaneously attacking Iran while allowing it to sell its oil involves contracting with the Americans to bomb a German bridge and contracting with the Germans to defend the same bridge:

Milo’s planes were a familiar sight. They had freedom of passage everywhere, and one day Milo contracted with the American military authorities to bomb the German-held highway bridge at Orvieto and with the German military authorities to defend the highway bridge at Orvieto with antiaircraft fire against his own attack. His fee for attacking the bridge for America was the total cost of the operation plus six per cent and his fee from Germany for defending the bridge was the same cost-plus-six agreement augmented by a merit bonus of a thousand dollars for every American plane he shot down.  

In this instance, Minderbinder doesn’t have to do anything given that

there seemed to be no point in using the resources of the syndicate to bomb and defend the bridge, inasmuch as both governments had ample men and material right there to do so and were perfectly happy to contribute them, and in the end Milo realized a fantastic profit from both halves of his project for doing nothing more than signing his name twice.

Minderbinder’s profit-making isn’t always so harmless, however, as when the Germans pay him to bomb his American comrades:

[O]ne night, after a sumptuous evening meal, all Milo’s fighters and bombers took off, joined in formation directly overhead and began dropping bombs on the group. He had landed another contract with the Germans, this time to bomb his own outfit. Milo’s planes separated in a well coordinated attack and bombed the fuel stocks and the ordnance dump, the repair hangars and the B-25 bombers resting on the lollipop-shaped hardstands at the field. His crews spared the landing strip and the mess halls so that they could land safely when their work was done and enjoy a hot snack before retiring. They bombed with their landing lights on, since no one was shooting back. They bombed all four squadrons, the officers’ club and the Group Headquarters building. Men bolted from their tents in sheer terror and did not know in which direction to turn. Wounded soon lay screaming everywhere. A cluster of fragmentation bombs exploded in the yard of the officers’ club and punched jagged holes in the side of the wooden building and in the bellies and backs of a row of lieutenants and captains standing at the bar. They doubled over in agony and dropped. The rest of the officers fled toward the two exits in panic and jammed up the doorways like a dense, howling dam of human flesh as they shrank from going farther.

I don’t know how many of the American casualties (now well over 200) can be chalked up to information passed from the Russians to the Iranians, but I can imagine Minderbinder giving a response similar to the one Trump gave to Fox reporter Peter Doocy when asked about the matter: “I have a lot of respect for you; you’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time.”

Of course, even as Trump plunges the world into the worst oil crisis since 1973, he is attacking renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. While this is proving a boon to Big Oil, the beneficiaries are not Americans but the companies since oil prices are determined globally. Oh, and Trump of course gets a cut.

The Trump family is finding other ways to profit from the war as well. Don Jr. and Eric, for instance, have been investing heavily in the drones that the U.S. military may start using in Iran. As Associated Press reports, 

Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out. Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.

There is also evidence that, on the world betting markets, insider information on when and where Trump will strike has netted bettors large sums. The Independent reports, 

Now there are suspicions that other insiders used the Iran strikes to get rich. Six accounts on Polymarket reportedly won approximately $1.2 million by predicting the U.S. would launch a strike on Iran on February 28, according to CoinDesk.

Apparently this occurred as well with the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president:

It’s not the first-time gamblers have made major money by betting on Trump’s military actions. When the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, an individual with a relatively new account pumped $30,000 into a bet that Maduro would be ousted. Hours later, the Trump administration captured Maduro, earning the gambler more than $436,000.

I won’t even get into the president’s son-in-law’s conflicts of interest as he seeks billions in investment from Arab countries as he works as Trump’s special envoy to the middle east. Let’s just say that Heller understands such corruption well:

Milo had been earning many distinctions for himself. He had flown fearlessly into danger and criticism by selling petroleum and ball bearings to Germany at good prices in order to make a good profit and help maintain a balance of power between the contending forces. His nerve under fire was graceful and infinite. With a devotion to purpose above and beyond the line of duty, he had then raised the price of food in his mess halls so high that all officers and enlisted men had to turn over all their pay to him in order to eat. Their alternative—there was an alternative, of course, since Milo detested coercion and was a vocal champion of freedom of choice—was to starve. When he encountered a wave of enemy resistance to this attack, he stuck to his position without regard for his safety or reputation and gallantly invoked the law of supply and demand. And when someone somewhere said no, Milo gave ground grudgingly, valiantly defending, even in retreat, the historic right of free men to pay as much as they had to for the things they needed in order to survive.

Although it appears, in this instance, that Minderbinder will finally be called to account, he proves as slippery as our president. “Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen,” Heller reports, “and, as a result, his stock had never been higher.” Has Trump’s stock risen with his supporters for all the ways he has monetized the presidency, from (unconstitutional) foreign emoluments to crypto schemes to pardons-for-sale to bribes from tech and media companies to various forms of merchandising to God knows what else? Does MAGA just regard him as a successful businessman?

My wife’s stepfather, an Iowa farmer, was with the air force during the World War II Italian campaign, so when I first met him I asked him whether he had read Catch-22. Although some people see the novel as comic over-the-top satire, his reverend response was, “That book is so true!”

It also continues to be unnervingly relevant.

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Clifton: the dead shall rise again

By Robin Bates | Published: March 21, 2026
Jacob Lawrence, Genesis Creation Story III: And God Said

Sunday

I share today Lucille Clifton’s response to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. For those who find the miracle hard to believe, Clifton tells her own resurrection story. “whoever say dust must be dust,” she writes, “don’t see the trees/ smell rain/ remember Africa.”

The poem appears in the “come jesus” section of good news about the earth. The poems in this 1972 collection tap into the energy of the Black militancy, the anti-war movement, and the environmental awakening, although I think the “come jesus” poems arise out of Clifton’s Baptist upbringing. A poet of celebration, Clifton preaches an uplifting message to the descendants of slaves. When she says, “even the dead shall rise,” she is thinking of the resilience of African Americans, who keep coming in spite of the forces that attempt to keep them down.

the raising of lazarus
By Lucille Clifton

the dead shall rise again
whoever say
dust must be dust
don’t see the trees
smell rain
remember Africa
everything that goes 
can come
stand up
even the dead shall rise

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Using Lit to Grapple with a Death

By Robin Bates | Published: March 21, 2026
André Malraux, author of La Condition Humaine

Friday

I’ve written so many times about the accidental drowning death of my son Justin—most thoroughly in Better Living through Literature—that I won’t repeat what I’ve said. Instead, I use today’s “a life lived in literature” installment to reflect back on aspects I haven’t touched on before, some of which are unbearably painful but which may provide solace for those who have experienced similar tragedies.

When I was writing my book chapter on the death, I realized I was following in the footsteps of someone who had also turned to literature in his darkest moment. When Dante is “lost in a dark wood”—which is to say, experiencing unbearable depression, brought on both by his exile from his beloved Florence and a deep crisis of faith—he turned to a literary work that would serve as the springboard for The Divine Comedy. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante saw the protagonist visiting the underworld to determine his next steps, and that journey became the model for Dante’s own journey through Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. After describing the suffering experienced by those who have turned their backs on God, Dante concludes with an ecstatic vision of those who open their hearts to “the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.”

While I didn’t think of Dante at the time at the time of Justin’s death, I was writing a book on how classic works could transform lives. One of these works was Beowulf, and as I reeled from the tragedy, I found myself using the 8th century Anglo-Saxon epic to deal with my own dark wood. I too discovered that an underworld journey gave me something to hold on to, that being Beowulf’s journey to the underwater cave of Grendel’s Mother. 

I had already identified that journey as a grappling with grief, and now I had my own grief to deal with. To be specific, the revenge attack by Grendel’s Mother has killed Hrothgar’s best friend Aeschere, and the king, in his grief, is in danger of giving up all hope and withdrawing from the world. (Other kings in the poem follow this path, essentially becoming human dragons.) Beowulf, who represents healthy ways of overcoming threats to society, faces grief fully rather than avoiding it, diving into the monster-infested waters and entering the heart of the emotion.

As I reread the passage, I saw myself on grief’s journey and felt a small degree of comfort in finding that my situation had been articulated. Suddenly I wasn’t just dealing with amorphous confusion. Nietzsche has written that “man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose,” and I felt something similar: better to be grappling with something I could imagine having a shape than a shapeless void. If grief is a heroic journey that is thrust on one, then its challenges can be recognized and fought and perhaps even be overcome. I resolved to open myself to this journey, allowing it to take me wherever it would. And if, at the heart of the grief, I could find a Beowulfian sword that I could wield—better that than being swallowed utterly– I would wield that sword. The sword, I would come to conclude, was my commitment to my family, my college colleagues and students, and my community, all of which demanded that I stay strong.

Poetry, in short, gave me narratives and images through which to process the turmoil I was experiencing. Occasionally it even offered me more, as when I realized I was in danger of becoming a Beowulfian dragon, withdrawing into my study/cave and developing a hard exterior. 

There were two moments that were so painful that I haven’t talked about them until now but which, again, literature helped me negotiate.  When I was sitting on the bluff overlooking the St. Mary’s River and watching divers search for Justin’s body, some part of my brain said something so abhorrent that I wondered what it said about me. Before I reveal it, some context is necessary.

About a year before he died Justin , who was engaged in intense spiritual search, had started exploring whether the certainty he sought lay in a narrow fundamentalism. The church he found was highly judgmental, condemning to hell any who did not practice Christianity the way that it did, and Justin for a while was entranced by the power this seemed to give him: he could use it as a means of rebelling against his parents and as a way of irritating our second son. Now, I don’t think that Justin would have stayed with this church for long. He was too generous a soul to remain exclusionary. Indeed, by the end of the year I saw signs that he was starting to modulate his beliefs. But for several months he was (not to mince words) an asshole.

Nevertheless, whenever I saw him around campus, I would give him a hug. Though he had become a prickly tree, I figured I could duck under the branches that poked me and make connection with the core of his being. Still, dealing with him at this phase in his life was not easy. 

The thought that crossed my mind as I sat on the bluff was, “If that is Justin’s body in the water, then at least I won’t have to deal with his fundamentalism anymore.”

Why would I focus on that rather than on the pain of loss? A literary instance of character in a similar situation would eventually help me answer that question. When I was in high school, my father gave me André Malraux’s violent 1933 novel La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate), which is about Chinese communists fighting against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in a doomed 1927 insurrection. One of the sympathizers is a Belgian phonograph seller named Hemmelrich, who doesn’t join in the fighting in part because he is timid, in part because he has a sick child at home. Instead, he offers his shop as a meeting place for the insurrectionists. When the Kuomintang blows it up, killing his family, he has conflicting emotions:

The shop had been “cleaned” with grenades, like a trench. The woman was slumped against the counter, almost crouching, her whole chest the color of a wound. In a corner, a child’s arm; the hand, thus isolated, appeared even smaller. “If only they are dead!” thought Hemmelrich. He was especially afraid of having to stand by and watch a slow death, powerless, only able to suffer, as usual…

A few moments later, standing amidst the carnage, he examines his feelings:

He knew he was suffering, but a halo of indifference surrounded his grief, the indifference which follows upon an illness or a blow in the head. No grief would have surprised him: on the whole, fate this time had dealt him a better blow than usual. Death did not astonish him: it was no worse than life. The thing that appalled him was the thought that behind this door there had been as much suffering as there was blood. This time, however, destiny had played badly: by tearing from him everything he still possessed, it freed him.

It is the appalling idea that death offers a kind of freedom that I recognized in my own case. Malraux continues on:

He entered the shop again, shut the door. In spite of the catastrophe, of the sensation of having the ground give way under his feet, leaving nothing but empty space, he could not banish from his mind the atrocious, weighty, profound joy of liberation….[N]ow he was no longer impotent. Now, he too could kill. It came to him suddenly that life was not the only mode of contact between human beings, that it was not even the best, that he could know them, love them, possess them more completely in vengeance than in life. Again he became aware of his shoe-soles, stuck to the floor, and tottered: muscles were not aided by thought. But an intense exaltation was overwhelming him, the most powerful that he had ever know; he abandoned himself to this frightful intoxication with entire consent.

Obviously, my situation was different: I certainly was never intoxicated and there was no element of revenge. Nevertheless, examining the passage provides insight. Part of Himmelrich’s response, and my own, can be chalked up to shock. The mind scrambles to protect itself against the full horror of the moment, and if something positive can be found, then the mind decides the impact will be less. In his case, he now has permission to fully engage in the revolution. Death has ripped away all restraints.

It also alerts him to how powerless he had felt in the face of his sick child’s suffering. When the boy was alive, he felt guilty for resenting him and now all that is gone. In fact, he thinks he can express his love without reservation through revenge. Little wonder that he feels liberated and exhilarated. Death, like the grenades, has “cleaned” everything up. It will take time for the shock to lessen and for him to fully feel the loss.

So maybe I thought what I did in a flash of anger at how Justin’s death was tearing me apart: if I could love him less, if I found a way to distance myself from him, then maybe I wouldn’t be in such agony. As it was, I couldn’t handle the full shock all at once.

My thought was only momentary and gave way to others more socially acceptable. Another thought also bound up with powerlessness, however, stayed with me far longer. The year before he died, we had had to withdraw Justin from Grinnell because Julia had lost her job. (St. Mary’s, by contrast, was affordable because he received tuition remission.) For three years I was plagued by guilt for having brought him back to Maryland. If we had figured out a way to send him back to Grinnell, I thought incessantly, he would still be alive.

A Lucille Clifton poem gave me insight and ultimately relief, which seems somewhat appropriate since she had mentored Justin in a class—I remember her coaching him through intense distress that, sensitive soul that he was, he was experiencing about racism–and also came to my house to offer condolences after he died. Her “poem with a rhyme in it” addresses guilt, specifically Black guilt. It is addressed to “black people”:

black people we live in the land
of ones who have cut off their own
two hands
and cannot pick up the strings
connecting them to their lives
who cannot touch     whose things
have turned into planets more dangerous
than mars
but i have listened this long dark night
to the stars
black people and though the ground
be bitter as salt
they say it is not our fault

When first reading the poem, I wondered why African Americans would need reassurance on this matter. Given America’s horrific history of racism, why must she tell them (and tell herself) that their “bitter as salt” lives are not their fault. I came to realize, however, that as painful as guilt is, acknowledging one’s powerlessness is even more painful. With guilt we feel that we could have achieved a different outcome if only we had behaved differently. If we are powerless, however, there’s nothing we could have done.

Clifton’s final line—“[the stars] say it is not our fault”—I found immensely consoling. Even if we had sent Justin back to Grinnell, bad things could still have happened. After all, young people die in Iowa as well as in Maryland. What had tormented me, I came to realize, was my powerlessness in the face of death. I couldn’t bear to think of myself as stripped of all agency.

Literature cannot answer all the existential questions posed by death but it at least gives us a foothold on that treacherous rock face. Without literature, I would have thrashed around even more blindly than I did following Justin’s drowning.

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026)
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026)

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Sad Thoughts in Early Spring

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2026
John Constable, The Cornfield (1826)

Thursday

As tomorrow is the official first day of spring, here’s a blog post by my son on William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring.” Tobias Wilson-Bates is an English professor at George Gwinnett College who recently started the practice of “reading poetry each day and finding a few lines to chew on.” (I’ve reported on his blog here.) Toby is an extraordinarily sensitive reader, and I always learn something from these literary excursions. To date he’s written short posts on John Keats, Oscar Wilde, John Milton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Lucille Clifton, Percy Shelley, and this one on Wordsworth. You can find his posts here. I’ve included the entire poem at the end of the post.

Toby has fallen off in the last couple of weeks because he’s frantically trying to complete his book on Victorian time machines before his semester-long sabbatical runs out. Here’s what he has to say about Wordsworth’s spring poem.

By Tobias Wilson-Bates at PhD Hurt Brain 

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

One of the poems and lines that I return to most frequently is Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” (1798). Especially these days as the news and social media is inundated with nearly unthinkable acts of cruelty at seemingly every scale internationally and domestically. I won’t enumerate them here although they quickly multiply in my head because I assume that the feeling is all too familiar to anyone reading this. 

Do we not have reason to lament “what man has made of man”?

However, I think the poem is saying something more and different from simply “what the fuck??” because Wordworth builds to this last statement each time he makes it. 

First, a personified female Nature links the poet’s soul to his body, and, presumably, gives that body the capacity to feel and grieve atrocity/cruelty. Then it sets such acts in motion for the poet to experience them. It is not merely that man has done terrible things to man, but that to be man seems to be made for such cruelty. 

The opening stanza really platforms the odd left turn of the poem’s direction:

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

The poetic narrator seems to be in a pretty sweet situation! Listening to a thousand blended notes while reclined in a grove?! (yes, please!), but nonetheless follows a natural progression from “sweet mood” and “pleasant thoughts” to “sad thoughts.”

At that point we are off to the races at considering how shit everything has turned out. I say this in part because I feel this pattern mirrors in some ways the experience of modern social media. Connected to people in a sometimes awe-inspiring international community of thinkers (a thousand blended ones perhaps), we nonetheless often default to communal grief and anger. 

I have no particular judgment on the matter as good or bad. I think it’s important to recognize the suffering of vulnerable people and the cruelty of the powerful, but I also find participating in it at times unbearable because it’s just too hard to live for long in that torrent of sadness. As with so much of Wordsworth, I am left with a kind of ambivalence at the Wordsworthian narrator, who often appears to offer a coherent criticism, only to retreat from view when the poem’s themes become too tangled to offer a full politics (which is, I think, what ultimately soured Percy Shelley on Wordsworth’s Romanticism). 

I will continue chewing on this poem for the rest of my life. Perhaps I will come to some more coherent conclusions.

Lines Written in Early Spring
By William Wordsworth

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

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The Taming of the Electorate

By Robin Bates | Published: March 17, 2026
Taylor and Burton in The Taming of the Shrew

Wednesday

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My friend Glenda Funk, former high school English teacher extraordinaire, recently compared Trump’s reordering of reality to Petruchio’s gaslighting in Taming of the Shrew, and I’m only sorry that I didn’t think of this myself. Glenda recalled Shakespeare’s comedy after seeing Trump confuse his current press secretary (“Kkkaroline Leavitt,” as Glenda calls her) with his former one (Kellyanne Conway). Rather than correct him, Leavitt goes along with it, just as Trump’s cabinet secretaries wear, without open complaint, Trump’s gift of ill-fitting new shoes. 

Petruchio, of course, gaslights the shrewish Kate in order to tame her, and by the end of the play she is so submissive that she chastises other women for not catering to their husbands’ whimsical demands. “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign,” she tells them.

Petruchio not only gaslights but also employs starvation, sleep deprivation (“Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not”), and humiliation, which is to say tactics used by torturers to break down their prisoners.  Then, in the passage Glenda quotes, he assaults her hold on reality itself:

PETRUCHIO Come on, i’ God’s name; once more toward our father’s.
Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
KATHARINA The moon! the sun: it is not moonlight now.
PETRUCHIO I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
KATHARINA I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
PETRUCHIO Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house.
Go on, and fetch our horses back again.
Evermore cross’d and cross’d; nothing but cross’d!

Kate’s surrender comes shortly after:

HORTENSIO Say as he says, or we shall never go.
KATHARINA Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please:
An if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.
PETRUCHIO I say it is the moon.
KATHARINA I know it is the moon.
PETRUCHIO Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun.
KATHARINA Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun:
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is;
And so it shall be so for Katharina.

A couple of other tests follow in which Kate is forced to humiliate herself. Petruchio then wins a dick measuring contest with the other newly married husbands in the play by demonstrating that he has the most control over his wife.

Glenda applies the play to Trump’s cabinet officials, but we are all at risk. In the face of the Trump administration’s incessant lying, there’s a temptation to throw up our hands and say, “Whatever.” Insist enough that the sun is the moon—or that the 2020 election was stolen—and sooner or later a certain portion of the electorate goes along. Or how about this:

–I say it is a war.
–I know it is a war.
–Nay, then you lie: it is a mere excursion.
–Then, God be bless’d it is a blessed excursion.
But war it is not when you say it is not;
And excursion changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is;
And so it shall be so for MAGA.

Let me now apply the play in a manner that makes it even more relevant to our time. To set this up, I turn to a brilliant commentary this past weekend by MS NOW’s Ali Velshi. It has to do with how the Heritage Foundation (remember Project 2025?) and the fascist right is going after independent women: 

Do not underestimate the determination of this movement or its hostility toward liberal values and the expansion of democratic rights for groups that they see as outsiders. And they see women as outsiders. Their latest document, Saving America by Saving the Family, a foundation for the next 250 years.

“You got to give it to these people,” he adds sarcastically. “They think big.”

While the purported goal of the fascist right is to reverse the country’s declining birth rate, Velshi says their proposed solutions reveal their real agenda. Since one can’t force women to physically have babies—although banning abortion and restricting birth control can help with that—Velshi says that, instead, 

You cut off opportunities outside the home. You make the public sphere hostile to women’s independence. You create a system where the only viable path left for women is dependence on a man for survival.

He then cites conservative economist Scott Yenner of Heritage, who calls universities “citadels of our gynecocracy” (a society run by women) and believes that women should be pushed out of “male” jobs. The following Yenner quote, from a speech delivered at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, now has me thinking of Kate:

Such medicated, quarrelsome and meddlesome women gain their meaning through their seeming participation in the global project. They are agents of the new world, but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the western world, from the Greens in Germany to the Democratic Party in America.

And if our ideal woman is a childless media scold or a barren bureaucratic apparatchik, there is no question whether we can have a future. We can’t. There is a question of whether we deserve one.

So the problem is medicated, quarrelsome, meddlesome scolds. Time for some Petruchian discipline.

Taming of the Shrew has long been for me the most troubling Shakespeare play, more so even than Merchant of Venice. A few years back I saw a production of the latter at the Staunton, Virginia Shakespeare Theater and realized it can be staged to capture the ugliness of Jew baiting. I’m not sure, however, that Taming captures the ugliness of sexism. Shakespeare, who otherwise is brilliant at honoring the full humanity of his characters—even Shylock–seems to have a bit too much fun in seeing Kate cut down to size.

I have seen feminist productions suggesting that Kate Petruchio’s accomplice—sometimes they exchange a secret wink as her husbands strips his male companions of their gold—but I’ve never found this convincing. Rather, Kate appears to be fulfilling the Heritage wet dream of a tradwife in her closing speech:

I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?…
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

I do remember thinking—this when I listened to the play on records as a 12-year-old–that the men in the play are nothing to write home about. It’s as though, through Kate’s words, we are given an idealized portrayal of manhood, only to be presented with strutting and preening Pete Hegseths. 

When your whole sense of self-respect is reliant on dominating women, you come across as pathetic rather than strong. Riffing off of Hamlet, one could say, “Frailty, thy name is male ego.”

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