Death Exposes Our Conflicted Humanity

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2022
André Malraux, author of Man’s Fate

Tuesday

Yesterday I wrote about the conflicting feelings that tore at my heart following the death of my mother this past Saturday. There was numbness and sadness, to be sure, but there was also relief and even joy—relief that she was no longer suffering and joy that Julia and I, so long immersed in her illness, can now go out and engage in activities and travel. And then there was guilt over those feelings of joy.

The most intense literary version of these contradictory feelings may appear in Andre Malraux’s 1933 novel La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate). Set during a communist insurrection against Chinese premier Chaing Kai-shek, the novel includes a character who has very conflicted emotions about the deaths of his wife and his sick child. While he cares for them deeply, they also prevent him from throwing himself whole-heartedly into the insurrection.

At one point Hemmelrich, who runs a phonograph shop, refuses to participate in an assassination attempt on the premier because of concern for his family. Then, when the attempt fails, he blames himself for its failure. It so happens that the authorities still see him as an accomplice and blow up his shop, killing his wife and son. At that point he experiences a “profound joy of liberation.” By “tearing from him everything he still possessed,” Malraux writes, destiny had freed Hemmelrich.

His first feeling is apparent indifference, which is not from hardness of heart but from shock. We often use denial at first to cushion us against a blow we fear will tear us apart:

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.

More difficult to understand is the joy and the satisfaction that follow:

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. With horror and satisfaction he felt it rumble within him like a subterranean river, grow nearer; the corpses were there, his feet which were stuck to the floor were glued by their blood, nothing could be more of a mockery than their murders—especially that of the sick child: he seemed even more innocent than the dead woman…

Malraux elaborates on the reason for the emotions:

[B]ut now, 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 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 known; he abandoned himself to this frightful intoxication with entire consent. “One can kill with love. With love, by God!” he repeated, striking the counter with his fist—against the universe, perhaps…

Then comes a welter of conflicting feelings:

He wanted to laugh, to weep, to find relief from the awful pressure on his chest. . . . Nothing stirred, and the immense indifference of the world settled, together with the unwavering light, upon the records, the dead, the blood.

After locking up his store in a useless but symbolic act, he strides forward into the future, no longer held back by his former responsibilities:

His shoulders thrust forward, he pushed ahead like a barge-tower towards a dim country of which he knew only that one killed there, pulling with his shoulders and with his brain the weight of all his dead who, at last!, no longer prevented him from advancing.

And finally:

His hands trembling, his teeth chattering, carried away by his terrible liberty, he was back at the Post in ten minutes. (emphasis mine)

I can’t say that my emotions were this intense after my mother died. After all, she had lived a good, long life, and there is something fitting about someone fading away at 96. That’s why, in such cases, we gather “not to mourn a death but to celebrate a life.” But I must confess to having felt something along these lines when I was watching divers search for the body of my son 22 years ago, after he died in a freak drowning accident.

Paramount among my emotions was denial—I felt sorry for whoever it was who had lost a child in that water, even though a deep part of me knew that it had to be Justin. But I must confess to having also experienced a certain relief—relief that I wouldn’t have to worry about what Justin would do with his life after college, relief that I would be spared Justin’s infatuation (although I was pretty sure it was temporary) with Christian fundamentalism.

Was I horrible person? Is Himmelrich a horrible person? I don’t think so in either case. Rather, I think that the mind, faced with unimaginable horror, looks around for every possible rationalization and coping mechanism. We get mad at the lost one because his or her death is tearing us apart. We rationalize that the death could be a good thing because we can’t face up to the prospect of an event that has no bright spot, no silver lining. The mind, in other words, rends itself because the love goes so deep.

In Himmelrich’s case, tragedy resolves itself in a kind of death song: his love is transmuted into murderous revenge. In my case, I needed those ways of distancing myself from the death in the early moments so that I could fully open myself to my grief when I saw the body.

When I did, all the anger at Justin dissipated, as did my attempts to rationalize. Instead, I saw him as the baby I had once carried in my arms, and I touched his cold body and sang him a lullaby he had loved as a little child.

The 12th century Jewish poet Judah Halvi has written, “’Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch,” and it’s fearful because love renders us vulnerable and exposed. In our fear, we lash out in ways that may make us appear callous and insensitive. Our lashing out, however, actually reveals just the opposite.

I look forward to celebrating my mother’s life in an August 20 memorial service. And while I have never gotten over Justin’s death, the tragedy has—to quote Langston Hughes’s “The Trumpet Player”—mellowed to a golden note.

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Mixed Feelings about a Death

By Robin Bates | Published: July 17, 2022
Illus. of Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Monday

What strange thoughts will slide into our heads following the death of someone we love. I was relieved when my 96-year-old mother passed away in Saturday’s early hours. Although it was what we wanted and what she said she wanted, yet I was torn about feeling glad.

I thought of the ending of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the relief that the family experiences when their son, who has transformed into a giant cockroach (“large vermin” in certain translations), finally passes away. Their lives have been upended by the event and, with his passing, they can finally move on with their lives. Here’s how the story ends:

After that, the three of them left the flat together, which was something they had not done for months, and took the tram out to the open country outside the town. They had the tram, filled with warm sunshine, all to themselves. Leant back comfortably on their seats, they discussed their prospects and found that on closer examination they were not at all bad—until then they had never asked each other about their work but all three had jobs which were very good and held particularly good promise for the future. The greatest improvement for the time being, of course, would be achieved quite easily by moving house; what they needed now was a flat that was smaller and cheaper than the current one which had been chosen by Gregor, one that was in a better location and, most of all, more practical. All the time, Grete was becoming livelier. With all the worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but, while they were talking, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady. They became quieter. Just from each other’s glance and almost without knowing it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for her. And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the first to get up and stretch out her young body.

That last image—of Grete getting up and stretching her young body—rings so true. Not that Julia and I are young (we’re 71), but suddenly the world seems to be opening up again. For over a year, our lives have rotated entirely around her and now we can think about going out to eat and attending events together. (Yesterday was the first time Julia and I didn’t have to attend church in shifts.) I recently and hesitantly accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Ljubljana for the month of November and now I can do so without worrying. We can visit Wales and Ireland to further Julia’s roots quest. As with the Samsa family, a world of possibilities opens up.

But it’s all on account of someone I deeply loved dying. You see the conflict.

Of course, Kafka being Kafka, it’s more problematic in the story: the family has locked Gregor in his room so he’ll die sooner. Their relief has a dark side to it that mine does not.

Still, I can’t entirely let it go.

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Twilight, Evening Bell, After That the Dark

By Robin Bates | Published: July 16, 2022
Joseph Turner, Fishermen at Sea

 Spiritual Sunday

My mother died at home early Saturday morning, waiting until Julia and I had fallen asleep to go. Before then, as she lay seemingly oblivious to all around her, we spent several hours reading poems to her (including Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods”) and playing classical music. I also recounted for her many of her favorite memories, giving her life a narrative arc.

When we finally realized that she was dead, we felt that we had done all we could to make her passing a peaceful experience. There was no “moaning of the bar.”

The line is taken from Alfred Tennyson’s moving poem “Crossing the Bar,” in which he imagines his own death and tells us how he wants his mourners to respond. I particularly love the line “too full for sound and foam” because that’s how I felt as I gazed down at my mother’s form. There was a welling up of deep emotion, as though a slow-building but powerful tide, coming from “the boundless deep,” was finally washing over and “bear[ing] me far.” No loud crashing waves.

The poem’s nautical imagery applies both to Tennyson and to those who, standing on the bar, watch his ship moving into unknown waters. The language has a clarity that is missing from the intricate struggles of “In Memoriam,” written decades before in an attempt to reconcile himself to the death of his beloved Arthur Hallam. Composed when he himself was approaching death, “Crossing the Bar” uses spare imagery and simple diction to focus on the final moment.

Tennyson may be speaking from conviction or he may be saying what he hopes for. For my part, I was hoping that my mother would hear, and respond to, that “one clear call” in her final hours. Maybe she did and that’s why she set sail when we left her alone.

Twilight and evening bell,
  And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
  When I embark…

Bon voyage, maman.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
  And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
  When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
  Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
  Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
  And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
  When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
  The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
  When I have cross’d the bar.

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The Final Carriage Ride

By Robin Bates | Published: July 14, 2022
Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi , Unknown Woman

Friday

As I sit listening to the steady breathing of my dying mother, my mind searches around for poetry that can frame the moment and, through framing, offer consolation. My mother has had moments of panic and moments of confusion over the past couple of days, but mostly she has been adrift in a half world between waking and sleeping. The relatively little pain she has experienced has been addressed by morphine.

Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” has never spoken to me as powerfully as it does right now. That’s because I imagine the speaker to be my mother, taking a leisurely trip to “Eternity.” Born in 1925 in upper Peoria society, my mother was very much a lady, and there is something ladylike about the carriage ride described in the poem. My mother always showed the kind of respect to other people that the speaker and coachman Death show each other.

I imagine my mother approaching what appears “a Swelling of the Ground” and suddenly realizing that it is not a house but the next stage. She is alone but not alone. For her, there is no rage against the dying of the light, no Faustian melodramatics, no boisterous boast “Death, thou shalt die.” Instead, there is a slight chill and some understated surprise.

All very civil. Like my mother.

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –

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Sir Gawain and Classroom Silences

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2022
Antoni Gispert Pérez, detail from Execution of Torrijos

Thursday

The other day I came across an amusing website that featured classical paintings that are being used as comic memes. My favorite, above, makes use of Antonio Gisbert Pérez’s painting The Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888), about the death of the Spanish revolutionary by the forces of Ferdinand VII in 1831.

My favorite literary example of embarrassing silences occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. More on that in a moment.

As a student, I found classroom silences excruciating and would sometimes just blurt something out to break them up. I remember twice being called out for that, the second time by someone who would go on to become famous. Future Minnesota senator and legendary progressive Paul Wellstone, whose Introduction to Government class I took at Carleton College in 1970, once shouted at me, “Will you please just shut up!” when I gabbed on. (The other professor, who had shouted, “Bullshit!”, later explained to me that he was taking out his frustrations at the class on me, given that I was one of the higher performing students. So maybe Wellstone was feeling similarly frustrated.) In any event, classroom silences can seem like highly charged affairs.

Once, in a teaching workshop, the faculty participants were asked how long a silence the average teacher will tolerate before he or she jumps in with an answer. We guessed five or ten seconds but thought perhaps longer. The actual answer: between .7 and 1.5 seconds.

In other words, everyone finds agonizing those moments that often follow a teacher’s question. Which brings me to the 14th century romance. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an imposing giant “hurtles” into Camelot and, appearing to overlook the man sitting in the throne, asks, “Where is the captain of this crowd.” His disrespect for Arthur could not be made more plain:

This horseman hurtles in, and the hall enters;
Riding to the high dais, reeked he no danger;
Not a greeting he gave as the guests he o’erlooked,
Nor wasted his words, but “Where is,” he said,
“The captain of this crowd? Keenly I wish
To see that sire with sight, and to himself say
                          my say.”
          He swaggered all about
          To scan the host so gay;
He halted, as if in doubt
          Who in that hall held sway.

If they were up to the challenge, all the knights would be up on their feet shouting to avenge the insult. Instead, behaving like Uvalde policemen called to a school shooting, “stone-still they sat in a swooning silence”:

There were stares on all sides as the stranger spoke,
For much did they marvel what it might mean
That a horseman and a horse should have such a hue,
Grow green as the grass, and greener, it seemed,
Than green fused on gold more glorious by far.
All the onlookers eyed him, and edged nearer,
And awaited in wonder what he would do,
For many sights had they seen, but such a one never,
So that phantom and faerie the folk there deemed it,
Therefore chary of answer was many a champion bold,
And stunned at his strong words stone-still they sat
In a swooning silence in the stately hall.
As all were slipped into sleep, so slackened their speech
                              apace.

In the so-called “bob and wheel” that ends the stanza, the poet’s sarcasm is exquisite. Surely, it’s not dread that accounts for their silence. No, it’s got to be a matter of courtesy that they are handing all responsibility over to Arthur:

          Not all, I think, for dread,
          But some of courteous grace
          Let him who was their head
          Be spokesman in that place.

In other words, the knights are all thinking, “I’m sure glad someone else is in charge here.”

Nor does it get any better when the Green Giant informs Camelot that he’s there to challenge them to a beheading game: first a knight will cut off his head, after which he will return the blow. The silence which follows probably lasts longer than 1.5 seconds:

If he astonished them at first, stiller were then
All that household in hall, the high and the low…

This allows the Green Knight to pile up the insults:

“What, is this Arthur’s house,” said that horseman then,
“Whose fame is so fair in far realms and wide?
Where is now your arrogance and your awesome deeds,
Your valor and your victories and your vaunting words?
Now are the revel and renown of the Round Table
Overwhelmed with a word of one man’s speech,
For all cower and quake, and no cut felt!”
With this he laughs so loud that the lord grieved;
The blood for sheer shame shot to his face, and pride.

With none of his men willing to stand up for him, Arthur steps forward to take the axe—at which point Gawain saves Camelot’s honor by himself volunteering.

Speaking up in class shouldn’t be as hard as volunteering to take an axe blow (or facing a firing squad), but it may sometimes feel that way. A good teacher, however, will find ways to put the silence to good use. Sometimes excellent discussions are birthed by a pregnant pause.

Or in Camelot’s case, the knights will learn a little humility.

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In the Face of Death, the Small Things

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2022

Wednesday

I’m grappling with the fact that we may be in the final days of my mother’s life. Hospice tells us that she is likely to die in two to four weeks, and though that seems pessimistic to me, given positive vital signs, it’s true that she is eating and drinking very little. I, who have always looked to the future, am having to learn how to embrace the preciousness of the now. It’s a difficult adjustment.

It helps me somewhat that a comparable situation is described in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, a book I used to teach in a 20th Century English-Language Literature survey. There we see a couple engaged in an impossible and forbidden love affair, given that he is an Untouchable and she a member of the merchant class.

Ammu and Veltha know that their affair cannot last. They are violating a taboo that is thousands of years old and inexorable. As Roy explains, the love story she tells

really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much.

Later, as we see the love relationship bloom, we are told,

Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they knew already that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.

The way they handle things is the way I am determined to spend my remaining time with my mother. They focus on “the Small Things”:

Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.

They laughed at ant-bites on each other’s bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding off the ends of leaves, at overturned beetles that couldn’t right themselves. At the pair of small fish that always sought Velutha out in the river and bit him. At a particularly devout praying mantis.

One small thing that particularly draws their attention is a spider that covers its body with bits of rubbish. This they come to call Chappu Thamburan or Lord Rubbish. “Without admitting it to each other or themselves,” Roy writes,

they linked their fates, their futures (their Love, their Madess, their Hope, the Infinnate Joy), to his. They checked on him every night (with growing panic as time went by) to see if he had survived the day. They fretted over his frailty. His smallness. The adequacy of his camouflage. His seemingly self-destructive pride.  They grew to love his eclectic taste. His shambling dignity.

Roy explains that they chose him because

they knew that they had to put their faith in fragility. Stick to Smallness. Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other.

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow.

They knew that things could change in a day. They were right about that.

Their ending, when it happens, is tragic and foreseen.

Death is even more inexorable than the Love Laws broken by Ammu and Verutha. One day in the near future, my mother will not have a tomorrow.

In the meantime, we can worship the God of Small Things.

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GOP Operatives as Dorian Gray

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2022
Hatfield as Dorian Gray

Tuesday

Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I thought about that quotation recently when reading accounts of Mark Leibovich’s Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission and

Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell, two recent books by men intimately acquainted with Republican politicians.

According to Miller, a former GOP consultant-turned-Democrat, cynicism accounts for why many Republicans operatives stuck it out with Trump, even though they knew better. According to Jonathan Chait’s review, Miller contends that most GOP operatives  fail to “summon the imagination and moral courage to break free from their career path and social identity.” As a result, they rationalize away “the cavernous gap between the means of campaigning and the ends of governing.”  Any means, including voter suppression and the threat of violence, are acceptable if they result in winning.

While Chait acknowledges that some cynicism is inevitable in politics, the GOP has taken cynicism to a whole new level:

One would expect any seasoned political operative to exhibit some level of detachment from their field given that the work inevitably requires sanding down complex truths into slogans and taglines. But Miller reveals that he and his colleagues considered the whole enterprise fundamentally bullshit. Nearly to a person, they thought of politics as a game, and they considered the absence of ethics a mark of sophistication.

Miller shows how the pervasive cynicism among his party’s political class produced the conditions for its capitulation to Trump. The most evident form the cynicism took was ginning up popular rage to hide the GOP’s central policy goals, which as always are lowering taxes and removing regulations on business. For his part, Leibowicz points out that Trump outplayed the establishment cynics by ascending to new levels of cynicism. In Thank You for Your Servitude he observes, “The perverse beauty of Trump was that he could be weirdly forthcoming about how full of sh– he was.”

Pushing against the tide have been those few Republicans courageous enough to stand up for American ideals, most recently Cassidy Hutchinson,  the aide to Trump’s Chief of Staff who recently testified before the House January 6 Committee. Hutchinson is the exception rather than the rule, however, and cannot alone save the party from itself. Unfortunately, Chait gloomily contends, what we mostly have is “a soft pink wall of timorous apparatchiks.” That these people are not monsters, he observes, should make us even more afraid. That’s because they are “achingly human” in their untrustworthiness. It is “their humanness,” he writes, “that renders them so terrifyingly weak and vulnerable in the face of evil.”

Wilde explores such cynicism in Picture of Dorian Gray through the figures of Lord Henry Wotton and his protegé Dorian. For them, the game is not politics but beauty, but as with GOP politics, it is divorced from the human heart. The characters scoff at sentimentality and earnest belief, choosing instead to congratulate themselves on their exquisite taste. They know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Here’s Sir Wooten, for instance, talking about Sybil Vane, who has just committed suicide after Dorian has rebuffed her. He looks at the aesthetics of her death, not at the humanity:

She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare’s plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.

When everything is a game, then nothing is real—that is, until people get hurt. Or in Dorian’s case, when he has a moment of self-reckoning, gazing upon a lifetime of denying his humanity. Will Trump and Trump’s enablers ever reach such a moment? Will they gaze in horror in the shape their souls have taken in the course of their careers? Or have they been so hollowed out that anything genuine and true is forever beyond their grasp?

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Is Twitter Headed for Bleak House?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2022
Court of Chancery in Bleak House

Monday

If you’ve been following news about Twitter recently, you will know that multi-billionaire Elon Musk is trying to pull out of his deal to buy the social media giant. I’m relieved since he had planned to reinstate Donald Trump’s ability to promote falsehoods—the former president’s lies about Covid and a stolen election may have been the most damaging—but otherwise I haven’t paid the story all that much attention. What caught my eye was the following statement by Twitter’s Board of Directors chair, which suggests that the man hasn’t read his Charles Dickens:

Bret Taylor, chairman of the Twitter board of directors, wrote that the social media platform is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

According to a Deadline article on the development,

Elon Musk’s attempt to terminate his Twitter acquisition will likely force the social network into a protracted legal battle and send its stock price diving — thrusting a new level of chaos upon the firm after months of public disputes have battered its reputation and employee morale.

Twitter’s board said that it was confident the company would prevail in court, but analysts warn — and employees fear — that Musk’s letter sets the stage for a turbulent period, which could carry new financial risks for the company and its workers.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought of Bleak House the moment we heard that Twitter was counting on a Court of Chancery to set everything right. I know the institution has evolved since Dickens’s time, but there’s still the potential that something like the following will happen:

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was “in it,” for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, “or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers”—a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.

Although Jarndyce and Jarndyce is settled at the end of the novel, it’s only because the money runs out. Musk and Twitter may not run out of money, but many lawyers stand to get rich while the suit is underway.

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Jean Valjean, Good Samaritan

By Robin Bates | Published: July 9, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

As the story of the Good Samaritan is today’s Gospel reading, I turn to one of literature’s great Good Samaritan figures. I’m thinking of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, whose selfless rescue of Marius—he carries the wounded man through the sewers of Paris in an epic journey—grips the reader as few stories do. The fact that Marius, as Jean Valjean sees it, robbing him of his beloved Cosette makes the Good Samaritan parallel all the stronger. He has reasons to dislike the young man but saves him anyway.

For a reminder, here’s the original story:

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37)

Rather than focus on Jean Valjean, however, I want to figure on another Good Samaritan figure, the bishop who teaches him Jesus’s message in the first place. Jean Valjean, who has spent years as a galley slave for stealing food for his hungry family, has stolen silver tableware from a kindly bishop. The bishop has taken him in when no one else would, leaving the ex-con bewildered at the prelate’s subsequent actions. Jean Valjean has just been captured by the police and brought before him:

“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver—”

“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake.”

“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”

“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the gendarmes.

“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them.”

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”

Then, turning to the gendarmes:—

“You may retire, gentlemen.”

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—

“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

After a momentary lapse, which gets him into trouble again, Jean Valjean devotes the rest of his life to becoming a honest man. He becomes a beneficent factory owner, a beloved guardian to orphaned Cosette, and a savior to Javert, the policeman who has been relentlessly pursuing him. (Unfortunately, this act of pure Christian benevolence so upends Javert’s traditional view of world that, rather than having a Pauline road-to-Damascus conversion, the inspector commits suicide.) And then there’s the rescue of Marius.

Jesus’s radical vision of love, in other words, can have profound effects, rippling out into a world that desperately needs it. When we embrace it, we no longer belong to evil but to good.

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