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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Rorty’s bastard children

Charlie Warzel:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!” 

The sentence from this paragraph I want to focus on is this: “The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel.” I think very few people take such posts as gospel. Or at least not in the sense that Warzel means it. 

Warzel errs here in assuming that when people in MAGAworld make declarative statements, and endorse or amplify the declarative statements of others, they do so because they believe those statements to be true. They don’t; nor do they believe or know them to be false. In my judgment, truth and falsehood do not at any point enter the frame of reference — such concepts are non-factors, and it is a category mistake to invoke them. 

In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

And the account I am articulating here is, at least sometimes, openly acknowledged by the leaders of MAGAworld. Think of Steve Bannon’s famous “flood the zone with shit” comment. And when confronted with his long chain of fantastical statements about immigrants in Ohio, J. D. Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Because that’s what we do; that’s how we get what we want. 

The pundits and shitposters and, yes, elected representatives in our government whose real home is MAGAworld are in a strange and perverse way the bastard children of Richard Rorty. When, nearly forty years ago, Rorty rejected “systematic” philosophy for “edifying” philosophy — those terms come from his earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the essay linked to refines that essential distinction — he thereby rejected philosophy that wants to “correspond to the way things really are” for philosophy that builds “solidarity.” Such a philosophy in action “is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.” 

Rorty thought that this model of philosophical language would be a way of building a new, more just, more generous society — would help us “achieve our country.” What he never imagined was a huckster-turned-damagogue who thinks of language — every kind of language, every imaginable use-case — as a way for him to get what he wants and change who he thinks he is, and who by his example teaches tens of millions of Americans to use language for the same purposes. They want to achieve their country too. That is, they have a vision of what the-country-they-call-theirs should be and employ language to affirm and strengthen that vision. What do truth or falsehood have to do with it? Not a damn thing. 

AI Week!

Hey, AI Week at Baylor is coming! And to judge from that webpage, Baylor is the place to be if you want to feel really good about the giant AI companies. But if you want to think about

  • how those companies — especially now that OpenAI is abandoning its nonprofit status — follow in the footsteps of other recent Silicon Valley juggernauts in striving to make every human being on the planet utterly dependent on their services
  • the grossly unethical practice of harvesting and re-using, for profit, the words and sounds and images that human beings have labored their whole lives to make
  • the massive environmental damage that is sure to come from the ever-increasing demands for energy from the AI companies’ enormous server farms

— well, I don’t think those issues are being raised.

Whatever AI might be in some imagined utopian future, AI companies in our present moment extract and exploit — ecologically, ethically, and humanly. This is simply what they do, intrinsically, necessarily — in a perverse sense of the phrase, on principle. A Christian university ought to be saying so, or at the very least should be putting some challenging questions to our new AI overlords. We’re not going to achieve that utopian future without first confronting the largely dystopian present.

Also: I think instead of teaching our students how to use whatever Silicon Valley happens to be selling them we should be teaching them how to tend the digital commons. And the issues about attention and reading I’ve been talking about forever — see for instance this talk from a decade ago — are even more urgent now. But none of this is on Baylor’s radar, as far as I can tell.

Auden’s allusions and my errors

So I’ve done three Auden Critical Editions now, and each time I have experienced much joy in the labor … but also some frustration afterwards when discovering things I missed. It’s not surprising, of course! Auden was staggeringly widely-read and had an exceptionally adhesive mind: almost anything that entered into it was retained and later put to use. The sheer allusiveness is overwhelming. I can’t think of a better example than my recent post on Saturn and Mimas — only by pure accident did I discover the origin of a strange passage in The Age of Anxiety, one that could easily have remained inexplicable forever. And of course I didn’t discover it in time to put it in the book.  

There are many ways to be wrong, some of them more excusable than others. I missed another reference in The Age of Anxiety simply because I am not British, which worries me, because there’s nothing I can do about being a non-Brit. 

But I’m furious with myself that I missed the reference to Pausanias in “Winds” — the first of the “Bucolics,” the sequence with which The Shield of Achilles begins — that Adam Roberts caught. And I’m annoyed that there’s no way to go back and insert it!  

And here’s another one from that same volume, just shared with me by my friend Tim Larsen. The long lyric “Ode to Gaea” concludes with this image: “That tideless bay where children / Play bishop on a golden shore.” As Tim reminded me — I perhaps should say told me, because the story is so vague in my mind that I barely remember the outlines — this is a reference to a famous event in the early life of St. Athanasius: 

Once when Bishop Alexander was celebrating the day of Peter Martyr in Alexandria, he was waiting in a place by the sea after the ceremonies were over for his clergy to gather for a banquet.

There he saw from a distance some boys on the seashore playing a game in which, as they often do, they were mimicking a bishop and the things customarily done in church. Now when he had gazed intently for a while at the boys, he saw that they were performing some of the more secret and sacramental things. He was disturbed and immediately ordered the clergy to be called to him and showed them what he was watching from a distance. Then he commanded them to go and get all the boys and bring them to him.

When they arrived, he asked them what game they were playing and what they had done and how. At first they were afraid, as is usual at that age, and refused, but then they disclosed in due order what they had done, admitting that some catechumens had been baptized by them at the hand of Athanasius, who had played the part of bishop in their childish game. Then he carefully inquired of those who were said to have been baptized what they had been asked and what they had answered, and the same of him who had put the questions, and when he saw that everything was according to the manner of our religion, he conferred with a council of clerics and then ruled, so it is reported, that those on whom water had been poured after the questions had been asked and answered correctly need not repeat the baptism, but those things should be completed which are customarily done by priests.

As for Athanasius and those who had played the part of presbyters and ministers in the game, he called together their parents, and having put them under oath, handed them over to be reared for the church. 

So Rufinus of Aquileia in his church history. As Fred Sanders explains in this post, drawing on the work of Marcia Colish, this story would in the Middle Ages become the key text for some intense debates about what makes for a valid baptism. 

I just wish I had been able to put a note to this effect in my edition. Sigh. 

writing for money

A while back I wrote a post about my financial history as a writer, situations in which I have made money, situations in which I haven’t made money, etc. Phil Christman does his version of that post here, and adds a taxonomy of writers based largely (though not wholly) on the results they get from shakin’ their money-maker. It’s a great post and an example of why Phil’s work is worthy of your support.

At one point he writes: 

When I look at what I do on this newsletter, and then compare it to the amount of worthwhile writing that someone like Alan Jacobs or Adam Roberts gives away for free, I feel like I’m opting to be part of a decivilizing trend by charging people money for what is basically focused blogging.

I have some comments. 

First, there is no one like Adam Roberts. Not remotely. So I’m going to factor him out of this discussion, while strongly recommending his blog, for instance this terrific recent post. But you can support that blog financially if you want. 

The same is true for me, because I have a Buy Me a Coffee page. You can pay for what I write on this blog if you want, and God will surely bless you if you do, but you don’t have to. IIRC, I have suggested to Adam that he’d be a good candidate for Substack, but I don’t know why he hasn’t done it. 

As for me, I haven’t gone to Substack for three reasons: 

  1. I am an enthusiast and advocate for the open web — see that tag at the bottom of this post — and want to write here if I can possibly manage it. 
  2. By any reasonable standard I am well paid. I am a “Distinguished Professor” with an endowed chair, and while my salary wouldn’t go a long way in Cambridge MA or Brooklyn or Palo Alto, it goes pretty far in Waco, Texas. I can afford to make my online writing free. 
  3. What I do, in contrast to Phil’s work on his Substack, is unfocused blogging, and I would feel bad charging directly for it. 

So I’m sticking it out here on the open web. But Phil deserves to get paid for his writing, and it’s not “decivilizing” of him to say so. If the publishing industry were properly functioning Phil would be making a decent living from writing essays and reviews, the way Elizabeth Hardwick and Dwight Macdonald did back in the day. 

However, I will — when I get out of the Slough of Despond I am in — be changing how I write here. The big thing I have learned from emails I’ve received in response to this post is: Even people who really like my writing miss a lot of what I do here. Especially the series I write — like the one on the City of God, the one on Babylon, the one on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers — get very few readers who track them from beginning to end. 

Now, I like writing the series, because they enable me to take my time in thinking through a topic. But if people aren’t reading them, what’s the point? So when I have time to write here again, I’m going to write fewer but longer posts — I won’t post something until I have achieved a complete arc of thought, or nearly so. 

So stay tuned. 

Saturn and Mimas

Adam Roberts’s recent post on images of Saturn gave me a flashback — a sudden return to a moment fifteen years ago when I was working on a critical edition of Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety. One passage especially puzzled me:

For athwart our thinking the threat looms,
Huge and awful as the hump of Saturn
Over modest Mimas.

Well, take a look at this painting by Chelsey Bonestell, titled “Saturn as Seen from Mimas”:

saturn

I think I have found my solution. Bonestell’s painting appeared in the May 29, 1944 issue of Life magazine; Auden began writing The Age of Anxiety a month or so later. Surely Bonestell’s painting remained fixed in his mind. I can’t imagine what else could account for so strange a passage.

administrivia

I haven’t been writing here much lately. I’ve been busy with teaching, of course, but that I’m used to. No, I have been absent from the blog because of an avalanche of administrivia — forms to fill out, mandatory Zoom meetings, online “trainings.” 

  • There are trainings about Title IX. 
  • There are trainings about racism. 
  • There are trainings about mental health and mental illness. 
  • I have to read and sign forms relating to students who need “accommodation” for various struggles. (As I have previously noted, about these matters my own knowledge is neither solicited nor welcomed.) 
  • I have to sit through a 90-minute Zoom meeting on how to book travel. 
  • “The purpose of this short class is to help all Baylor’s faculty and staff understand their rights, responsibilities, and necessary actions with both the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).” 
  • “This is your second reminder that your OAI Disclosure Profile is awaiting an update. You are required to complete this update to confirm that you have disclosed a complete and accurate list of your outside activities and interests as dictated by institutional policy. Follow the link included in this email to log in and complete a Disclosure Profile update.” 
  • “As part of the Business Transformation Initiative, Business Offices have been established within each division. To ensure continuous improvement in the services provided, feedback is needed from individuals who regularly interact with Financial Administrators and Financial Managers in their respective Business Offices.” 
  • “The Committee on Committees has identified appointments for the 2024-2025 academic year, and your appointments are listed below. Thank you for your willingness to serve on University Committees.” 
  • I must serve on a Working Group meant to articulate an approach to technology that’s consistent with Baylor’s new Strategic Plan. 

This is a partial list. Obligations of this kind increase every year, and the only general goal I can discern is the gradual transformation of an academic position into a bullshit job. But whatever the purpose, such tasks make writing in-term nearly impossible. 

parochialism

I’ve seen a great many essays of this kind over the decades. I’m no longer surprised by them — I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused — but we shouldn’t forget that the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing. Manvir Singh thinks Christianity is dead (murdered by “the natural sciences”) — someone should tell the world’s two billion Christians — and that suspicion of our moral self-justification began with Nietzsche — someone should tell St. Paul. But for Singh, ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Manvir Singh.” 

three further thoughts on re-enchantment

One: The world of economic commodification and the enchanted world are not mutually exclusive, as Hope Mirrlees’s great novel Lud-in-the-Mist demonstrates

Two: Jesus’s conquest of the Powers begins by his exposing them for what they are, which is to say, with demystification. In is in this sense that, as Thomas Pynchon implicitly argues throughout his fiction, in our cultural era first theology is suspicion

Three: G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, in “The Oracle of the Dog”:

“The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,” said the priest. “All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk, you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumors and conversational catch-words; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.” He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking almost as if he were alone. “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery and a pig is a mascot and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words: ‘He was made Man.’”  

summary judgment

Every now and then I check back with Google Gemini and ChatGPT to see how they’re doing — and especially how they handle tasks my students might ask them to do. This morning it occurred to me that some of my first-years who are supposed to be reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors might fall behind and ask for some chatbot help. So I asked the chatbots for summaries of the book. 

Gemini’s response will be of particular interest to those who have read the novel: 

Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors is a classic detective novel featuring the renowned Lord Peter Wimsey and his resourceful valet, Bunter. Set in the picturesque English countryside, the story revolves around the enigmatic death of a parish vicar and the discovery of a unique bell with nine tails.

The novel begins with the mysterious disappearance of Reverend Clement Dimmock, the rector of Fenchurch St. Paul’s.When his body is found in a nearby churchyard, the circumstances surrounding his death raise suspicions. The local police are baffled, and the case is handed over to Lord Peter Wimsey, who is known for his keen intellect and unconventional methods.

Wimsey arrives at Fenchurch St. Paul’s and quickly becomes intrigued by the peculiar bell that the vicar had been researching. The bell, known as “Great Tom,” is a relic of significant historical importance and has been the subject of much local folklore. Wimsey discovers that the bell has nine tails, a rare and unusual feature that seems to hold a special significance for the vicar.

As Wimsey delves deeper into the case, he uncovers a web of secrets and hidden connections. He learns about the bell’s history, its association with a local legend, and the potential motives of several individuals who might have had a reason to harm the vicar.

One of the key characters in the novel is Harriet Vane, a writer and Wimsey’s love interest. She becomes involved in the case when she is accused of being the vicar’s mistress. Vane’s innocence is at stake, and Wimsey must prove her alibi while also solving the murder mystery.

The investigation takes Wimsey to various locations, from the quiet village of Fenchurch St. Paul’s to the bustling city of London. He interviews suspects, examines evidence, and unravels the complex puzzle that surrounds the vicar’s death.

Along the way, Wimsey encounters a colorful cast of characters, including a mischievous young boy named Basil, a mysterious stranger named Colonel Mustard, and a jealous rival named Dr. Fell. Each character adds a unique layer to the story and contributes to the overall suspense and intrigue.

The climax of the novel comes when Wimsey finally uncovers the truth behind the vicar’s murder. The solution is both unexpected and satisfying, revealing a hidden motive and a connection to the bell’s history. The culprit is brought to justice, and Harriet Vane is exonerated. 

Just for the record: there is no one in the novel named Clement Dimmock, Basil, Dr. Fell, or (alas) Colonel Mustard — an interesting import, that one. No vicar is killed. Harriet Vane does not appear in this novel. And there is most definitely not a bell with nine tails. Etc. 

When I told Gemini that that summary was inaccurate, I got this:

You’re absolutely right. I apologize for the oversight. It seems I provided a summary of a different Dorothy Sayers novel, likely Gaudy Night.

“Likely”? Well, no, Gaudy Night is not involved at any point. But please proceed.

Here’s a corrected summary of The Nine Tailors: Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors is a classic detective novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and his resourceful valet, Bunter. Set in the picturesque English countryside, the story revolves around the mysterious death of a parish vicar and the discovery of a unique bell with nine tails. The novel begins with the discovery of the body of Reverend Clement Dimmock, the rector of Fenchurch St. Paul’s. The circumstances surrounding his death —

Okay, you can stop there.

The ChatGPT summary is much more accurate, but it has its own hallucinations:

Shortly after the New Year celebrations, tragedy strikes the village. The body of an unknown man is discovered in the grave of Mrs. Wilbraham, a recently deceased woman. The body appears to have been hastily buried there after her coffin was moved to a different graveyard. The man’s face is unrecognizable, and he has no identifying papers. Lord Peter is called upon to investigate.

Through initial inquiries, Wimsey learns that Mrs. Wilbraham had been involved in a notorious jewel robbery years ago. She had been entrusted with some stolen emeralds by a man named Deacon, a criminal who disappeared after the robbery. Mrs. Wilbraham’s husband, Sir Henry Thorpe, had been a key figure in trying to recover the stolen jewels. Over time, however, the jewels were lost, and Deacon was never found.

No, that’s not Mrs. Wilbraham in the grave, it’s a woman named Thorpe, as ought to be clear from the fact that her husband is Sir Henry Thorpe. Nor was there any movement of a coffin to a different graveyard. Also, Mrs. Wilbraham is the person from whom the jewels were stolen, not an accomplice of the thief. 

It’s kind of fun to read these things and imagine the alternate-universe novels Sayers might have written. The Wimsey-Mustard Papers, Volume One

DALL·E 2024-09-26 08.13.57 - A detailed photograph of two characters_ Lord Peter Wimsey and Colonel Mustard, in a classic British manor house setting. Lord Peter Wimsey is an aris.

what Milton isn’t

This is an excellent essay by Mark Edmundson, so of course I am going to write about the part I disagree with: 

I like to teach a class on Milton and Whitman. I do so from a political vantage, seeing Whitman as an archetypal progressive, a breaker of boundaries, an opener of new roads. Milton, by contrast, is an archconservative, someone who brilliantly dramatizes the allure of order, degree, and hierarchy. Few students have trouble entertaining Whitmanian values. What 20-year-old isn’t attracted to freedom? But with Milton, matters change. He believes that people can be happy only when they are installed in a hierarchy. We should revere what is above us and care for what is below. Milton’s views of hierarchy implicate religious, political, and family life. Reading these two poets side by side offers plenty of illuminating conflicts. 

The problem with this account is that, while Milton indeed believed in “order, degree, and hierarchy,” he thought it essential to ask which order, which model of degree, which system of hierarchy a society embodies. Because he thought his own society had radically misconceived such matters, Milton was not an “archconservative,” but rather was a political revolutionary who advocated for and then defended the violent overthrow of the monarchy, and then worked for a decade in the new anti-monarchical government. Moreover, his theology was very much his own; though he never repudiated the Church of England and is buried in one of its churches, he could not have been ordained in it, and probably not in any other church either. 

Whitman was a far more conventional figure than Milton. Though his poems were thought by some obscene, this was only by implication and suggestion, and in Whitman’s lifetime Leaves of Grass became a famous and celebrated work, despite its sensuality and its formal innovations. Whitman’s devotion to America and American exceptionalism was intense — he was a patriotic poet to a high degree, and famously the most eloquent celebrant in his time of Abraham Lincoln. 

I am perhaps overstressing the point — in many respects Whitman was a new thing in the world. But what I am trying to suggest is that our categories of “conservative” and “progressive” do not map very neatly onto periods other than our own. 

Some essays of mine that treat the issues Edmundson raises: 

Jacobs’s First Law

Here it is:

People who know nothing about a subject are radically vulnerable to those who know less than nothing. 

 — those knowing less than nothing being people who have strongly held but baseless opinions. This law of the universe raises its head almost every time some American journalist or tweeter or YouTuber makes an argument based on a claim about our history. Some fatuous statement becomes a mantra for people who lack (a) the knowledge to test the claim and (b) the initiative to acquire the knowledge. 

POS, not POSSE

(I thought about a non posse non peccare joke here, but it was too hard. Just want to go on the record about that.)

Here the always-excellent Mandy Brown writes about her recent experience with the POSSE model of writing on the web: Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Write on your blog or your micro.blog and forward your posts, as it were, to the social media platforms.

Will it be weird, to write this way? Probably. I’m tossing the same words into (currently) three totally different networks, each with their own affect and moods and characters of the day. I’m keeping my distance, such that I likely won’t hear the replies (at least, not with any timeliness) or see the ripples my words make, should they make any at all. But maybe we need more weird — not in the very recent sense of the word, but in the sense of prophesy or potential, a spell or charm, the magic, the wild, the wyrd — that which is becoming, rather than that which has already passed us by.

I completely respect what Brown is doing here, but my own view is that the way to find the wyrd is through a slightly different method: POS, not POSSE. Skip the syndication.

I think often about some comments by Louis C.K., of all people, that Austin Kleon posted on his Tumblr a long time ago:

You have your number. It’s very dangerous to be liked by more people than should like you. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for you. There’s gonna be a shock down the road for them, or you’re gonna dilute yourself and take yourself to a place where you can’t live with who you are. I think that you make an honest account of who you are and you live with the results. The results will be appropriate to who you are.

And I would add that it’s unhealthy to be read by more people than should read you. In my last sustained period on Twitter, six or seven years ago I guess, when I was still promoting my published writings, I remember often — quite often — getting replies or quote-tweets from people who had no idea what I was saying but wanted to comment on it in a way that corroborated or reinforced their sense of themselves, their social self-presentation, a social self-presentation that typically took the form of performative partisan self-righteousness. Most of them hadn’t read my work, of course; they had only seen a tweet (by me or by someone else) about something I had published. But even when they read it they didn’t understand: my ideas came from a place so distant from their intellectual and personal formation that those ideas were unintelligible to them. But still they commented. 

That’s when I realized that sometimes it’s good to reduce the size of your audience — to make your work a little harder to find. That was the standpoint from which I was operating when Breaking Bread for the Dead came out, which didn’t help its sales! (Sorry, Penguin Press.) And I’ve continued along that path. When I write, I’m not looking for hooks to current events — for me, that’s now a reason not to write about something. I don’t promote my writing on social media, and I don’t ask anyone else to do so either. I’ve become the writerly version of the family in The Quiet Place, trying not to attract the attention of the uncomprehending and incomprehensible aliens.

Well, sort of. I don’t think of all my online readers as malicious invasive predators. But there are a lot of people out there in social-media world who hear everything but see and understand nothing. I’ll just tip-toe out of their range, thank you very much.

So: POS, not POSSE. I’m not syndicating because I don’t want to expand my audience. I’m just writing here on my own site (blog.ayjay.org and social.ayjay.org) and if you find me here, that’s great. Just be careful who you tell about me, okay?

repairers

Via Jeff Bilbro, I see this useful reflection by Bonnie Kristian on what a Christian “vision for repair” might look like. Kristian points out that repair has become a theme among thoughtful evangelicals in recent years, and following her links … okay, let me be honest here: I was wondering whether anyone had noticed that this is a theme I wrote about often and at some length for a couple of years, starting with this post. (For more entries, click the tag on that post or this one.) And nope: not one reference to my work. 

I wonder about this! I don’t have analytics enabled on this site (and never will) so I don’t know how many readers I have — if I have 17 readers, then it’s no surprise that I haven’t been cited. If I have a good many more than that, then two possibilities seem likely: 

(a) I’ve gotten some people thinking along these lines who wouldn’t have been thinking about it otherwise, but they forgot they got it from me — which is something that happens on the internet all the time. For instance, I often link to something without remembering to cite the person who alerted me to it, or indeed without remembering that anyone alerted me to it. It’s the way of the internet, and if you’re going to write on the internet you have to expect it. 

(b) All those other people are simply riding the same wave I was riding — following, perhaps, some of the same writers I cite in that original Invitation & Repair post. 

I would like to know which of these three options is the true one. I am not craving credit, I’m really not, I promise! (You should believe me if and only if you think I have sufficient self-knowledge to be trusted on this point.) But if you’re a writer it’s always useful to know whether you’re making a difference or are simply part of a trend that would go on just the same without you.  

build beautiful

If you search for “why don’t we build beautiful buildings any more” or any similar combination of terms you’ll get a great many articles, essays, blog posts, and YouTube videos on the subject. (Ross Douthat’s column is an especially good one.) Most of them agree with the question’s premise, but there are some who don’t, some who say that modern architecture doesn’t reject beauty so much as offer an alternative kind of beauty. Okay. But I’d suggest a little experiment.

1. Look at any 20th- or 21st-century building that you admire.

2. Look at the octagon tower of Ely Cathedral:

Octagon Tower looking up.

Octagon Angels.

Octagon Angels panorama.

Click each image for a larger version. 

two quotations on humility

David French:

Pope Francis wasn’t watering down the Christian faith; he was expressing existential humility. He was unwilling to state, definitively, the mind of God and to pass judgment on the souls of others. His words were surprising not because they were heretical in any way, but rather because existential humility contradicts the fundamentalist spirit of much of contemporary American Christianity. His words were less a declaration of truth than an invitation to introspection, a call to examine your conscience. 

G. K. Chesterton

But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether. 

Addendum: If there’s one thing I’m sure Pope Francis’s comment was not, it’s “a call to examine your conscience” — conscience doesn’t seem relevant to his comment in any way. But what was he saying when he said “Religions are seen as paths trying to reach God. I will use an analogy: They are like different languages that express the divine”?

He could have meant “All religions are people made in the image of God searching for the God who made them, so we Catholics, who have received the full deposit of True Faith, should respect others who search.”

He could also have meant “All religions are people made in the image of God searching for the God who made them, and none of us can know whether our way is closer than anyone else’s way, so we can but hope that God will be kind to us all.”

The former statement is consistent with Jesus’s claim that “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” The latter statement can only mean that Jesus is a way but not the only way nor even necessarily the best way. 

So which did Francis mean? There’s no way to tell for certain unless he issues a clarification — or has he already done that? The following day he said, “the diversity of our cultural and religious identities is a gift from God.” If so, then most if not all evangelism is a rejection of God’s gift — and therefore surely a sin. The only exception might be preaching to atheists, but maybe in Francis’s view atheism is also part of the great “diversity of our cultural and religious identities.” Who knows? 

My view, for what it’s worth, is that Francis hasn’t thought about any of these things very much. He’s just doing what he always does: speaking impromptu, off-the-cuff, saying whatever comes to his mind, a mind which doesn’t really care all that much about the issues at stake. I say that because this has been the hallmark of his pontificate: issuing confusing declarations when speaking informally, either in public or to journalists. He has never taken the trouble to be clear, in either his words or his thoughts. Another way to put the point: He just doesn’t take his job seriously. And at this point, given his age and his evident self-satisfaction, that is unlikely to change. 

my forever lament

Also: Every time I get to the copy-editing stage of a book project I want to write a long angry post about how much I hate Microsoft Word. But I have done it, and other people have done it. Here I am in 2016.

And here’s Charlie Stross back in 2013:

The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc [.docx] files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it’s an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon. 

(Fat chance of that.) And Louis Menand, all the way back in 2003:  

When, in the old days, you hit the wrong key on your typewriter, you got one wrong character. Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?). And you have no idea how you got there; you can spend the rest of the night trying to get out. In the end, you stop the random clicking and dragging and pulling-down and have recourse to the solution of every computer moron: with a sob of relief, you press Ctrl/Alt/Del. (What do Control and Alt mean, by the way? Does anyone still know?) A message appears: “You will lose any unsaved information in all programs that are running.” O.K.? Cancel? End task? End life? The whole reason for rebooting was that you didn’t have access to your information, so how can you save it? You can always pull the plug out of the wall. That usually ends your “session” (a term borrowed — no accident — from psychoanalysis).

I could use some psychoanalysis right about now. 

behind the scenes

In the long slow complicated process that leads to the publication of a book — in this case, my biography of Paradise Lost — I am at the copy-editing stage, and whenever I am at that stage with a book, I remember Lauren Lepow. 

In the publishing world, there are many different kinds of editor — or rather, many different editing tasks, more than one of which any given editor is likely to perform. For instance, an acquisitions editor will probably not just acquire your book but will also be for it a developmental editor, a structural editor, maybe even a line editor — that is, one who goes through the book line by line. The great Robert Gottlieb famously did all of these things, which is why he was just called (and called himself) an editor. No adjectival limitation. 

But one task is almost always given to a person called the copy editor. He or she goes through your text just before it gets to production — that is, just before it is designed, laid out, and typeset — to make sure your spelling is correct, your command of grammar and syntax competent, your quotations and citations (in a scholarly book) appropriate, accurate, and consistent. This is sometimes thought to be a rather mechanical job, so it is often outsourced to freelancers. But some projects place more demands on the copy-editor than others, and for such cases a press dedicated to excellence will have the best in-house copy editor it can find. 

Lauren Lepow — who worked for Princeton University Press from 1991 until illness forced her to retire at the end of 2022, just months before her untimely death — was the copy editor than whom no greater can be conceived. Lauren elevated copy-editing to a high art form. She worked on the first two Auden critical editions I did for PUP, and in both cases I was simply staggered by how much she noticed — she saw every little error, every tiny inconsistency, from one end of the book to the other, and cheerfully corrected it or asked me to do so. (Once she noticed that I had quoted the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in one place and, dozens of pages later, the New Revised Standard Version in another.) She was terrifyingly fast and terrifyingly precise and after that first time working with her I wanted her to copy-edit every book I wrote. 

But that was not possible. I recently wrote to Fred Appel, my (acquisitions, developmental, structural) editor at PUP for the Paradise Lost book, to say how vividly I remember Lauren — even when the copy-editing process is going just fine, as it currently is! — and he replied: 

My colleagues and I miss Lauren Lepow terribly and we still mourn her passing. I was in awe of her ability to cite chapter and verse of the Chicago Manual of Style, and also of her great judgment, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness. I can’t tell you how many PUP authors who had been copyedited by her who then requested her services — in some cases, pleaded for her services — for their second or third books with us. 

I was of course one of those pleaders, back when I wrote my biography of the Book of Common Prayer. But she was then largely occupied with the massive and technically demanding task of copy-editing Auden’s Complete Works, a job she worked on almost up to her retirement. (I am so pleased that she saw that great project through to the end: the final two volumes, the Complete Poetry, appeared in 2022.)  

When I learned that Lauren had died, I wondered whether I had ever thanked her properly for all that she did for me. Searching my email, I discovered that I had: in late 2017, when I was struggling with the production of The Year of Our Lord 1943, I sent her an effusive message of gratitude, to which she replied, “Thank you for your very kind words — the best possible holiday gift!” 

Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything. 

modes of representation

Like many of my posts, this one is a kind of sketch or draft of ideas I want to develop more fully later. 

Last year I wrote a post about maps of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and mentioned in passing that the book’s scenes 

veer from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. 

Bunyan always wants to present us with the most vivid representations possible of the various spiritual conditions within which we might dwell — but he’s an utter pragmatist about what representational mode best serves his purpose at any given moment. 

This is just the sort of thing that Tolkien despised. He was so strict about following what he believed to be the rules of narration — absolute consistency (historical, physical, metaphysical, linguistic) within the frame of the writer’s “secondary world” — in his own stories that he just couldn’t understand other writers who didn’t feel the need. The appearance of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made him apoplectic. Now, to be fair, that’s not CSL’s finest moment; but Tolkien failed to see that while consistency is a virtue in world-building it’s not the only virtue, and certain important effects, as we see from the example of Bunyan’s great story, can be created only by disregarding consistency. 

I’m thinking of these matters because right now I’m teaching Gulliver’s Travels, and Swift offers a master-class in the varying of representational modes. We all know that the book offers a satirical take on certain current events, but note the different ways British society is represented in the different Books. 

Book I is fairly straightforward, especially in Chapter IV: the Lilliputians’ conflict with Blefuscu — the country from which they are separated by a narrow channel — over which end of an egg to crack is a simple (simplistic, I’d say) allegory of the mutual hatred of French Catholics (Big-endians) and English Protestants (Little-endians). Within Lilliput, the “two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves” are (equally obviously) the High and Low Church parties. 

But in Book II, Chapter VI we turn from allegory to realistic narration, as Gulliver eagerly and enthusiastically explains the political, legal, and economic system to the King of Brobdingnag — who, to Gulliver’s surprise and dismay, is not impressed. (“Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with so much justice, recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light.”) 

And then in Book III we’re back to allegory again, allegory indicated largely by anagrams and near-anagrams: Britain, or England, becomes “Tribnia, by the natives called Langden” — this preceding an attack on journalists and other writers. This diatribe, interestingly enough, is by Gulliver himself, and seems to indicate that some of the critiques of British society by the King of Brobdingnag have hit home. They come from Gulliver’s mouth now, though only in disguised form — as though his “laudable partiality to [his] own country” does not allow him to speak too straightforwardly.

And then of course in Book IV we get the apparently Utopian vision of the land of the morally and intellectually excellent Houyhnhnms and the disgusting Yahoos — the former being an allegorical representation of what humans might have been, the latter being a savagely realistic picture of us as we are…. At least, that’s what it looks like at first. Reflection complicates things. The Houyhnhnms’ moral excellence comes at a great cost: they cannot lie, but (per necessitatem) they also cannot imagine, cannot speculate, cannot explore. They can only receive what has been handed down to them by Tradition (it’s immensely significant that they are illiterate). What has been handed down is perfectly right … but the cost, the cost of it is high. 

That’s a story for another day, though. 

My chief point here: Swift’s representational modes are thus always shifting to meet the narrational and satirical needs of the moment. Tolkien wouldn’t have liked it, but it works. It’s a kind of narrational bricolage

a numbers game

First there was the Bacon Number. Then there was the Erdös Number. Then there was the Erdös-Bacon Number

I feel that there ought to be a whole new set of numbers prompted by the remarkable life of Terrence Malick. For instance:

Malick as a young scholar met Martin Heidegger, and Patti Smith is in his movie Song to Song. Heidegger-Smith Number: 2. 

Malick took a class at Harvard from Paul Tillich and later dated Carly Simon. Tillich-Simon Number: 2. 

Malick played basketball with Fidel Castro and is friends with Arvo Pärt. Castro-Pärt Number: 2. 

This could go on for quite a while. Note that I’m not even mentioning movie people. When Malick was studying at the American Film Institute he met Jean Renoir, and it is said (I have not been able to confirm this) that he went to Bolivia to meet Che Guevara and arrived the day after Che was killed — had he come a couple of days earlier he might have a Renoir-Che Number of 2 also. 

one more enchanted evening

The story so far:

I think we’re converging on a shared position — mostly. Brad is less persuaded than I am by the argument that Judaism and Christianity are disenchanting forces in relation to their pagan/animist neighbors, but that’s okay, because I like this very much:

Christianity from the beginning is interested — discursively and performatively — not so much in disenchanting the various purported beings and rituals that populate the all too porous reality of daily human life as it is in dethroning it. Early Christian apologetics and polemics are indeed at pains to unveil the object of pagan sacrifices — as demons, though, not as fictions. The bedrock assumption of exorcism, inasmuch as exorcism encapsulates the entire problematic of enchantment, is that the pagans are absolutely right: the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.

Amen! This leads me to one of my favorite themes, which is Jesus as the conqueror of the Powers. See for instance this post, some of which makes its way into this massive essay on Thomas Pynchon. Closely related is my attempt to sketch out a demonology. Basically, I find the language of “enchantment” less appealing, and less descriptively sound, than the Pauline language of Jesus overmastering the kosmokratoras (the Cosmic Rulers), the archai and exhousai, and bringing them to bow before Him – He who has conquered not through strength but through weakness, not through self-exaltation but through self-emptying. 

An “enchanted cosmos” without Jesus at the absolute center of it is a terrible place to be: you find yourself in the situation of almost all pagans, struggling to navigate a landscape populated by forces that you mainly just hope to evade. As Brad says, “the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.” Escaping their notice is often the best scenario. “How can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man?” Can you bind the strong man? I can’t. Which makes it strange to me how small a part Jesus plays in the current discourse about enchantment, even among people who claim to be Christians. 

Can We Talk! | Ian Frazier:

Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. 

Ian Frazier is great, and this is a fun essay-review, but it’s pretty strange to have Tagalog, a language spoken by a couple of million Americans, lumped in with two “small” — presumably this means “little-spoken” — languages. Tagalog shouldn’t be “unexpected” in any large American city. Heck, I’ve heard it spoken in Waco. 

the Jane Harrison show

Mary Beard:

Harrison’s reputation rested on her public performances, where she stripped away the technicalities and was (as she put it herself in Reminiscences) ‘almost fatally fluent’. Flamboyantly dressed and armed with what were hailed as the most up-to-the-minute visual aids, in the form of stunning lantern slides, she drew vast crowds to her open lectures – on one occasion, so she said, attracting 1600 fans in Glasgow to a presentation on the topic of Athenian tomb sculpture. She even created something of the same atmosphere in her university lectures. ‘The hushed audience would catch the nervous tension of her bearing,’ wrote one of her academic colleagues about her teaching of classical archaeology. ‘Every lecture was a drama.’ Several years ago, some of Harrison’s slides were rediscovered, buried in a cupboard in Newnham. They didn’t quite live up to the hype, but they were exquisitely painted on glass, with key words etched onto them (almost the equivalent of a modern PowerPoint).

This is interesting just as an entry in the history of instructional technology — I am tempted to visit Cambridge just to investigate those slides — but of course I am intrigued because, as I have already mentioned, my work on Dorothy L. Sayers has gotten me deeply interested in the place of women at Oxford and Cambridge in the first decades of the twentieth century. Here’s a telling little item from Mary Beard’s essay: 

One of the most chilling pieces of trivia preserved in the Newnham archive is a copy of a note written to the university librarian by a senior classicist (the otherwise very liberal Henry Jackson) pointing out that he had spotted ‘Miss Harrison’ with a library book in her possession. As women were not allowed to enter, let alone borrow from, the library, he concluded that some male friend must have illicitly borrowed it on her behalf and that an investigation should ensue. Such casual surveillance and such officious, sneaky betrayal seem almost worse than the exclusion in the first place.

Portrait of Jane Harrison by Augustus John

more on enchantment

In response to my recent post, Brad East defines enchantment as:

a true apprehension of reality as it actually is: the fallen but good handiwork of a loving Creator; the recipient of his lasting care and unfailing providence; the medium of astonishing beauty; the impress of his grace; the theater of glory as well as of suffering; the audience of the incarnation; the vehicle for the eventual final epiphany of God become flesh. Here, in this cosmos of the Spirit, truth is discovered and disclosed, communication lies at the heart of things, and the grain of reality is compassion and mercy, not brute violence. The numinous is not psychotic, it is to be expected — if not to be sought, since this world is the haunt not only of angels but also of demons. You and I live our small and out of the way lives as bit parts in the grand drama of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, the triumph of the former secured but not yet manifest. Join which side you will. 

But this is to say that “enchantment” is merely another name for Christianity. If that’s what enchantment means, then of course I am all for it. 

But that’s not what “enchantment” means; it has never meant that. There are ten thousand ways of rejecting the idea of “the world as fundamentally meaningless, chaotic, and godless, and therefore inert or plastic before the constructions and manipulations of rational man,” and Christianity is only one of them. You can also believe that the sun is angry with us and demands sacrifices; that our ancestors hover about us and plead for (or demand) our honor; that witches steal men’s penises; that this amulet wards off evil spirits; that God does not yet exist but is emerging through the dialectical process of history; that you have a lucky number that will enable you to win a pile in Vegas; that you are well on your way to becoming an operating Thetan. And as I keep saying — though to no avail — in relation to many or all of these beliefs Judaism and Christianity are disenchanting

(Also, I didn’t know that Rod had written a book on this subject, or I probably wouldn’t have made my original comment. I think Rod some time ago took a disastrous turn in his thinking, but I wish him well and don’t want to say anything against him. My post was prompted by the new DBH book, Paul Kingsnorth’s many posts on holy wells in Ireland, and a lot of the people Tara Isabella Burton writes about.) 

some enchanted evening

It seems that “enchantment” is having a moment right now — e.g. — and, well, okay, but I’d like to make two points: 

  1. Experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that at the end of history every knee will bow and every tongue confess this. That is to say, Christians who have boarded the Enchantment Train should realize that what it promises is often (if not always) something quite different than what the Christian faith — which is often disenchanting — promises, and demands. 
  2. A related point: As I wrote a decade ago, “The porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The ‘showings’ manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only.” 

You want to live in an enchanted cosmos? Cool. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it

Is the cosmos enchanted? Is it disenchanted? Is it standing on one leg and singing “When Father Painted the Parlor”? (Tom Stoppard reference there.) It’s not something I’m inclined to think about much, because for me — YMMV, and it really and truly may vary, you may be aided enormously by such reflections — it’s just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus. I already have a thousand of those, I don’t need a thousand-and-one. 

There’s a beautiful moment in the Introduction to Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels, when Price is remembering his childhood encounters with the Christian message: 

By then, in the countryside near my parents’ home, I had also undergone solitary apprehensions of a vibrant unity among all visible things and the thing I guessed was hid beneath the visible world — the reachable world of trees, rocks, water, clouds, snakes, foxes, myself, and (beneath them) all I loved and feared. Even that early I sensed the world’s unity as a vast kinship far past the bond of any root I shared with other creatures in evolutionary time, and the Bible stories had begun to engage me steadily in silence and to draw me toward the singular claim at their burning heart — Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived here

Note that in the young Price’s experience, the perception of the “vibrant unity of all visible things” and the guess that some deeper unity lay beneath and beyond it led to something more surprising, challenging, and specific. That “singular claim” that he perceived is all that I place my hope and trust in, and I am disinclined to pursue avenues of reflection that seem to promise metaphysical comfort without reminding me that my life is willed and watched with care by a God — the only God there is — who once lived here. 

the smog of unknowing

Peter Hitchens:

I think [Arthur] Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly. 

Two thoughts about this: 

  1. Hitchens mentions with sadness many cultural productions, major and trivial, that were prominent in his childhood but are unknown by young people today. Is he aware that precisely the same lament could have been, and almost certainly was, made by people thirty or forty years older than him? And yet he does not feel deprived through his ignorance. Time passes. 
  2. You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for. 

re-reading

I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it. 

But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely

I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though.

226 nix gerber 2.Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, “Library” (2007), archival pigment print, 48 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, and Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, Florida. 

Tom

Laura Miller says here that 

Tolkien himself admitted to a correspondent that Tom is “not an important person—to the narrative,” but then, crucially, he added that Tom does represent “something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”

Tolkien resisted explaining Tom … 

Well, not really. If she had kept quoting the letter that she was quoting — a very long April 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison — we’d have seen: 

I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron. 

Which is a very revealing, very helpful, and very “explanatory” comment. 

The Rings of Power really does sound like a terrible show. I haven’t seen a minute of it. 

unshelved

Over the summer the Honors College moved: we have new digs, and my students who lived in the Honors dorms have, after a year away, moved back into a thoroughly renovated space. But many of us have a problem: bookshelves. Or the lack thereof. 

Before the move, we faculty were informed that each office would be provided with two bookcases. When I pointed out that my then-current office had eight bookcases, all of which were full, I was told that, okay, I could have three in my new space. And, I was reminded, there really wasn’t room for any more; the new office isn’t a big one.

(I ended up taking a good many books home, where I don’t really have room for them either … but when I retire all my books will have to fit in our house, so I, and my poor wife, might as well get prepared for the forthcoming challenge.)  

I don’t mind moving into a smaller office. My former one was bigger than I needed, and the new one is better situated and is a pleasant, comfortable space — I’ll be happy there. But when I moved in I was a bit surprised to find that the bookcases — and yeah, it would’ve been hard to fit in any more than three — are thin-industrial-steel things instead of the well-made cherrywood ones I had had in my former office. 

Yesterday I spoke to one of my students who had just moved back into the Honors dorm and discovered that his room had no bookshelves at all. And one of my colleagues had talked to a project manager (the “project” being our move) and was told that in assigning two bookcases to each office they thought they might be buying too many — so many other departments in the university seem not to use books any more. It’s all screens all the time for them. 

Maybe someday soon people taking tours of the university will be brought to the Honors College faculty offices. “And look: professors who still use books. But don’t worry — there aren’t many of them.”  

(View from my office window through the scrim of my blind)

Grahame and the Inklings

Re-reading The Wind in the Willows recently for the first time in many years, I was taken with what I should have noticed long ago: How powerfully influential it was on the Inklings, especially Lewis and Tolkien. I knew of course that they loved it, but it worked its way into their imaginations in ways that I hadn’t really noticed.

For instance, consider this passage from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.

Now look at this from the chapter “Wayfarers All,” in which Rat’s imagination and will are captured by the Adventurer, a seafaring rat from whose influence Mole can only with difficulty tear him away:

Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.

“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,“ he remarked. ”You might have a try at it this evening, instead of — well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down — if it’s only just the rhymes.”

The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.

Consider also the book’s feasts, especially the one that occurs when the near-frozen Rat and Mole stumble upon the house of Mr. Badger:

When at last they were thoroughly toasted, the Badger summoned them to the table, where he had been busy laying a repast. They had felt pretty hungry before, but when they actually saw at last the supper that was spread for them, really it seemed only a question of what they should attack first where all was so attractive, and whether the other things would obligingly wait for them till they had time to give them attention. Conversation was impossible for a long time; and when it was slowly resumed, it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full. The Badger did not mind that sort of thing at all, nor did he take any notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once…. He sat in his armchair at the head of the table, and nodded gravely at intervals as the animals told their story; and he did not seem surprised or shocked at anything, and he never said, “I told you so,” or, “Just what I always said,” or remarked that they ought to have done so-and-so, or ought not to have done something else. The Mole began to feel very friendly towards him.

This is the very pattern for hobbit-feasts, including (in tone) the one in the house at Crickhollow after the four hobbit-friends have escaped the Black Riders and crossed the Brandywine, or (in substance) the one they enjoy when they have been rescued from Old Man Willow and taken to the house of Tom Bombadil. The particular joy of solid plain food and a big fire after great toil and fear is described by Grahame in a way that evidently captured Tolkien’s imagination.

78s

Vanishing Culture: On 78s | Internet Archive Blogs

The cultural record of the 20th century is different from all other periods of human history by the presence of audiovisual recordings. Prior to 1877, there was no way to record the sound of a nursery rhyme being read at bedtime, a musical or theatrical performance, or the world around us. During the ensuing 147 years, formats came and went as technology and preferences changed. Yet for nearly half that time, 78rpm discs were the way we learned about each other and entertained the world. It was a time when the world became a much smaller place. The invention of the automobile and the airplane, the expansion of the railroads, the telephone and radio, to the dawn of the space age, 78s were there. Through 78s, we could hear traditional music from Hawaii long before it was a state. American popular music – jazz, fox trot, big bands, even the Beatles – spread out across the globe, well ahead of Hollywood, and long before television. A thousand people might attend a concert, a theater performance, a speech, or a dramatic reading by Charles Dickens. With the 78, it became possible for those experiences to be shared and repeated, and spread far and wide, not once and done.

The most important technology of sound reproduction so far? 

abolish grades

Abolish Grades (A Modest Proposal) – Yascha Mounk:

The grading system at American universities is an embarrassment. The best solution would be to take the simple, if somewhat brutal, steps to end grade inflation. But if that is not in the cards, then it’s time for universities to admit that the emperor has no clothes. If reestablishing more demanding standards turns out to be impossible, then the second best option may be to put an end to the whole charade.

According to my “modest proposal,” universities would make all of their courses pass-fail, a practice that has already been adopted by some elite law and business schools. Students would still have to submit their assignments and meet the minimum standards that are now expected of them. But they would no longer be able to pretend that they had been recognized for exceptional achievements.

Abolishing grades is much worse than a grading system that makes real distinctions between students. But by the same token, it is much better than the status quo. 

I’ve definitely become an easier grader in the past few years, simply because I’ve been worn down over the decades — I’ve been teaching for forty-two years! — by all the grade-grubbing, attempts to game the system, loophole-searchers, and sad stories about “what my parents will do to me if I don’t get an A.” I could teach until I drop, but the combination of grading and an ever-more-bloated administrative apparatus will eventually drive me into retirement. 

Dr. J’s super-helpful advice to new college students

(I share these tips with all my first-years.)

There are five vital elements. Ready? Here goes:

  1. Wash your hands thoroughly and often. You don’t want to get sick, and you don’t want to make other people sick.
  2. Buy, get used to, and regularly wear earplugs for sleep. A lack of sleep will make you tired and prone to illness — it will catch up with you and make you miserable and dysfunctional. And when you’re living with a bunch of other people, some of them will sometimes keep you awake or wake you up. In such a situation, good earplugs, with noise reduction of 31db or more, will be your best friend. Some people find it uncomfortable to wear earplugs that go deep enough into the ear to make a proper seal, but if you stick with them you’ll get used to them. I can’t overstress how important this is. (There are many good brands, but the ones that are easiest to find are Mack’s and Hearos.)
  3. Have a life beyond school. For Christians, the best thing is to get involved in a local church, or to participate in some kind of social ministry. The key thing is to be around people who aren’t going to school. Serious prayer time, free from distractions, is vital also. These experiences will give you perspective, and when you start to get stressed out, perspective helps a lot.
  4. Work when you work and play when you play. Most college students — and most professors, for that matter — spend a lot of time in a betwixt-and-between headspace, in which they are sorta-working and sorta-playing — chatting with friends either in person or online, having a show on a nearby screen or in their ears, etc. This is a recipe for (a) being forced to pull all-nighters and (b) never having any actual down time. When you need to work, find a place to do that where you will not be interrupted, and turn off your computer’s ecosystem of interruption technologies. You’ll be much more productive and, when you’re done with work, you’ll be able to enjoy playtime.
  5. Don’t make life harder for the people around you. Don’t be the person who distracts other people, or interrupts them, or wakes them up in the middle of the night. Be considerate. Don’t add to the stress of your friends and neighbors.

Dickens and the fairy tale

Charles Dickens:

We must assume that we are not singular in entertaining a very great tenderness for the fairy literature of our childhood. What enchanted us then, and is captivating a million of young fancies now, has, at the same blessed time of life, enchanted vast hosts of men and women who have done their long day’s work and laid their grey heads down to rest. It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force — many such good things have been first nourished in the child’s heart by this powerful aid. It has greatly helped to keep us, in some sense, ever young, by preserving through our worldly ways one slender track not overgrown with weeds, where we may walk with children, sharing their delights.

In his extraordinarily imaginative biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes (p. 527) that this is a pretty good description of what Dickens’s fiction commends: “Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force.” Ackroyd then (and brilliantly, I think) comments that Dickens makes quite explicit the ways in which the experience of Florence Dombey, in Dombey and Son, is that of a fairy tale:

No magic dwelling-place in magic story, shut up in the heart of a thick wood, was ever more solitary and deserted to the fancy, than was her father’s mansion in its grim reality, as it stood lowering on the street: always by night, when lights were shining from neighbouring windows, a blot upon its scanty brightness; always by day, a frown upon its never-smiling face.

There were not two dragon sentries keeping ward before the gate of this above, as in magic legend are usually found on duty over the wronged innocence imprisoned; but besides a glowering visage, with its thin lips parted wickedly, that surveyed all comers from above the archway of the door, there was a monstrous fantasy of rusty iron, curling and twisting like a petrifaction of an arbour over threshold, budding in spikes and corkscrew points, and bearing, one on either side, two ominous extinguishers, that seemed to say, “Who enter here, leave light behind!” There were no talismanic characters engraven on the portal, but the house was now so neglected in appearance, that boys chalked the railings and the pavement — particularly round the corner where the side wall was — and drew ghosts on the stable door; and being sometimes driven off by Mr Towlinson, made portraits of him, in return, with his ears growing out horizontally from under his hat. Noise ceased to be, within the shadow of the roof. The brass band that came into the street once a week, in the morning, never brayed a note in at those windows; but all such company, down to a poor little piping organ of weak intellect, with an imbecile party of automaton dancers, waltzing in and out at folding-doors, fell off from it with one accord, and shunned it as a hopeless place.

The spell upon it was more wasting than the spell that used to set enchanted houses sleeping once upon a time, but left their waking freshness unimpaired.

“But,” Dickens adds, “Florence bloomed there, like the king’s fair daughter in the story” (Ch. XXIII).

And when she finally escapes, to the house of good Captain Cuttle, Dickens gives us this almost heartbreakingly beautiful vision of the peace and concord she finds in that poor old house:

Unlike as they were externally — and there could scarcely be a more decided contrast than between Florence in her delicate youth and beauty, and Captain Cuttle with his knobby face, his great broad weather-beaten person, and his gruff voice — in simple innocence of the world’s ways and the world’s perplexities and dangers, they were nearly on a level. No child could have surpassed Captain Cuttle in inexperience of everything but wind and weather; in simplicity, credulity, and generous trustfulness. Faith, hope, and charity, shared his whole nature among them. An odd sort of romance, perfectly unimaginative, yet perfectly unreal, and subject to no considerations of worldly prudence or practicability, was the only partner they had in his character. As the Captain sat, and smoked, and looked at Florence, God knows what impossible pictures, in which she was the principal figure, presented themselves to his mind. Equally vague and uncertain, though not so sanguine, were her own thoughts of the life before her; and even as her tears made prismatic colours in the light she gazed at, so, through her new and heavy grief, she already saw a rainbow faintly shining in the far-off sky. A wandering princess and a good monster in a storybook might have sat by the fireside, and talked as Captain Cuttle and poor Florence talked — and not have looked very much unlike them. [Ch. XLIX]

Elements of the fairy-tale are scattered through Dickens’s fiction, but it is rare, if not unprecedented, for him to make the connection so explicit.

Also: It is very important to Dickens that fairy tales be preserved and transmitted in all their strangeness, all their oddity, and in everything that might offend. The practice of editing fairy tales to make them more pleasing to the Modern Sensibility appalls him, and rather than explain why he, in the essay linked above, retells the story Cinderella for his “utilitarian age.” Sample passage:

Upon which the old lady touched her with her wand, her rags disappeared, and she was beautifully dressed. Not in the present costume of the female sex, which has been proved to be at once grossly immodest and absurdly inconvenient, but in rich sky-blue satin pantaloons gathered at the ankle, a puce-coloured satin pelisse sprinkled with silver flowers, and a very broad Leghorn hat. The hat was chastely ornamented with a rainbow-coloured ribbon hanging in two bell-pulls down the back; the pantaloons were ornamented with a golden stripe; and the effect of the whole was unspeakably sensible, feminine, and retiring. Lastly, the old lady put on Cinderella’s feet a pair of shoes made of glass: observing that but for the abolition of the duty on that article, it never could have been devoted to such a purpose; the effect of all such taxes being to cramp invention, and embarrass the producer, to the manifest injury of the consumer.

Then:

The arrival of Cinderella at the Monster Gathering produced a great excitement. As a delegate from the United States had just moved that the King do take the chair, as the motion had been seconded and carried unanimously, the King himself could not go forth to receive her. But His Royal Highness the Prince (who was to move the second resolution), went to the door to hand from her carriage. This virtuous Prince, being completely covered from head to foot with Total Abstinence Medals, shone as if he were attired in complete armour; while the inspiring strains of the Peace Brass Band in the gallery (composed of the Lambkin Family, eighteen in number, who cannot be too much encouraged) awakened additional enthusiasm.

And this … remarkable conclusion:

The marriage was solemnized with great rejoicing. When the honeymoon was over, the King retired from public life, and was succeeded by the Prince. Cinderella, being now a queen, applied herself to the government of the country on enlightened, liberal, and free principles. All the people who ate anything she did not eat, or who drank anything she did not drink, were imprisoned for life. All the newspaper offices from which any doctrine proceeded that was not her doctrine, were burnt down. All the public speakers proved to demonstration that if there were any individual on the face of the earth who differed from them in anything, that individual was a designing ruffian and an abandoned monster. She also threw open the right of voting, and of being elected to public offices and of making the laws, to the whole of her sex; who thus came to be always gloriously occupied with public life and whom nobody dared to love. And they all lived happily ever afterwards.

Perpetrate not, Dickens says, such a “fraud upon the fairies.” Let them be their strange selves. And for heaven’s sake don’t give women the vote!

(Well, maybe he doesn’t get everything right. But it’s a brilliant parody nonetheless.)

St. Augustine’s Day

Many years ago I came upon an odd little book, a prayer book compiled in the 1880s by one S. M. Hopkins of Auburn Theological Seminary. Apparently he didn’t like any existing prayer book and so decided to assemble his own. I don’t think anything in the book is original, but, maddeningly, he does not provide the sources for all of his entries; he just says at the beginning that “The sources from which the following forms have been mostly derived are the Greek Liturgies, the Sacramentaries of Gelasius, Leo and Gregory, the Mozarabic Missal, the Monumenta Liturgica from the sixth to the tenth centuries, the Prymer of the Sarum use, and, to some extent, more modern sources.”  

Thanks a lot. 

One of the prayers he includes is a beautiful prayer to commemorate the feast of St. Augustine, which is today: 28 August. Here it is: 

Almighty and most glorious Lord, who dispensest Thy gifts to men as Thou wilt, and callest Thy servants with a holy calling according to Thy purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus our Lord before the foundation of the world; we praise Thee for all those whom Thou hast been pleased to raise up, in all the ages, for the defence of Thy truth, and the upbuilding of Thy kingdom on earth; for Thy holy apostles, for the white-robed martyrs, and confessors of Thy Name, for the Christian fathers and doctors of the Church, who being dead yet speak; and we beseech Thee that we, being compassed about with so great & cloud of witnesses, may lay aside every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset us, and run with patience the race that is set before us, till we arrive by Thy grace at that blessed rest and reward, which awaiteth all Thy faithful servants, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Alas, I haven’t been able to discover where this prayer comes from, perhaps thanks to my ignorance of the Mozarabic Missal and the Monumenta Liturgica. Hopkins’s whole book may be found here.  

beyond the wild wood

Around fifteen years ago I published these thoughts in First Things. I’m reposting here because I am re-reading Grahame’s great book right now and taking my usual comfort and delight from it. 


  • The Annotated Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Annie Gauger. W.W. Norton, 480 pages, $39.95
  • The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Seth Lerer Belknap/Harvard, 288 pages, $35

My history as a reader is an odd one. I began, conventionally enough, with Dr. Seuss, but at some point soon thereafter I decided that I didn’t want to read children’s books anymore. Instead, I wanted to read what my parents and grandmother were reading and refused to look at anything else. So the delights of Charlotte’s Web and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe passed me by, immersed as I was in the Perry Mason mysteries of Erle Stanley Gardner, the space operas of Robert A. Heinlein, and the manly adventures of Louis L’Amour’s Sackett. Between the ages of six and fourteen or so, I fed my imagination with such treats. What that explains about my adult state of mind I leave as an exercise for others to say.

As I got older I encountered the occasional children’s classic — I read the Narnia books and The Hobbit in graduate school, as palate-cleansers after heavy courses of Derrida and Foucault — but it was only when my own son was born that I discovered Beatrix Potter and Goodnight Moon and Stuart Little and (a little later on) Adam of the Road and Farmer Boy and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series. Those were wonderful days: In them, delight masqueraded as duty, for how could I read those books to Wes if I hadn’t read them myself first?

Best of all were those winter evenings when I crawled into bed and grinned a big grin as I picked up our lovely hardcover edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, with illustrations by Michael Hague. Before I cracked it open I knew I would like it, but I really never expected to be transported, as, evening by evening, I was. After the first night (I read only one chapter at a stretch), I wanted the experience to last as long as I could possibly drag it out. It was with a sigh compounded of pleasure and regret and satisfaction in Toad’s successful homecoming that I closed the book. I knew I would read The Wind in the Willows many times, but I could never again read it for the first time.

Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece was published just over a hundred years ago, which accounts for these two new annotated editions. One is edited by Annie Gauger, an independent scholar with an evident devotion to Grahame; this book is the work of a true fan, and I mean by that no denigration whatsoever. The other is edited by Seth Lerer, a professor of English and the author of the superb Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History; his affection for Grahame’s work is palpable, but his tone is rather more detached — properly so, I would say, but then, I am a professor of English myself.

It should come as no surprise that these two editors approach the story of The Wind in the Willows in significantly different ways. Gauger, the fan, holds an essentially Romantic view of authorship, according to which a book is likely to be, as Wordsworth put it, the result of a “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion.” She offers much more biographical detail than Lerer — including many family pictures and transcribed or photographed letters and drawings — and is more prone to see characters and events as transmuted versions of Grahame’s own experiences. This tendency is evident on the first page, as Mole, moved by the new springtime’s “spirit of divine discontent and longing,” suddenly decides he has had enough of spring cleaning: “He suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.” It seems obvious to Hauger that this scene “mirrors Grahame’s longing to escape from his London job as secretary of the Bank of England.”

Well, maybe. Grahame didn’t like his job very much, though he obviously did it well, else he would not have risen so high so quickly: Grahame was named to the post of secretary (the head of the bank) at the remarkably early age of thirty-nine. It was not the career he would have chosen; he preferred to write. But his options were limited. Grahame was born in Edinburgh in 1859, a few weeks before Arthur Conan Doyle was born in the same city. His mother died when he was young and he was effectively abandoned by his alcoholic father, who left the boy to be reared by relatives in Berkshire — in Cookham, specifically, on the Thames, in a landscape young Grahame adored and largely recreated in The Wind in the Willows. His hope was to go up to Oxford, but his guardians lacked the necessary funds, so he was sent at age eighteen to London to work as a clerk. Two years later he moved to the bank and stayed there for the rest of his career.

And he did write: In the 1880s and 1890s he published many brief, light essays on a wide range of subjects and collected them in books that were well regarded; but after his marriage in 1899, and the birth of his son Alastair (called “Mouse”) a year later, the writing largely dried up. This could have been because his literary energies went into the stories he told Mouse — many of them about the misadventures of one Mr. Toad — or because of ill health, which Grahame suffered from chronically. There was also, in 1903, an odd incident at the bank, in which a strange man came in with a pistol and, for reasons never discovered, shot at Grahame repeatedly. Though all the shots missed, Grahame was understandably traumatized and began to come to the office less and less frequently. In 1908, the same year The Wind in the Willows was published, he retired. He was forty-nine.

So, does Mole’s repudiation of his spring-cleaning duties really mirror Grahame’s longing to escape from his job? The claim would be more convincing if he had written that scene a decade earlier, when he was still working at the bank full-time and striving to reach its highest place. But he had already effectively withdrawn from the workplace by the time he wrote about Mole. Maybe there’s not such a direct route from experience to art, and maybe Grahame was writing about what he said he was writing about: the “divine discontent” that the coming of spring is apt to prompt in any of us — in all of us.

The annotator’s temptation is to believe that every literary effect has an identifiable real-life cause, and Gauger succumbs to that temptation often. Because this book arose in stories told (or written as letters) to young Alastair Grahame, Gauger seeks to make Mouse something like the coauthor of the tale — a thought kindly meant, especially since Mouse was a deeply unhappy child who took his own life at the age of twenty, which utterly crushed his parents — but this is not wholly convincing. There also seems to be a degree of job-justification going on, with many comments exceeding the bounds of usefulness and decorum. Ratty’s brief reference to Mole’s stock of bottled beer — “‘I perceive this to be Old Burton,’ he remarked approvingly” — leads Gauger to two pages of information about the history of English brewing, capped with a recipe for mulled ale. Most distressing, I think, is what follows the narrator’s comment that “Toad listened eagerly, all ears”: “Toads do not have external ears, but they do have internal eardrums behind their eyes.” Oh no. Oh no, no, no.

Gauger’s edition is the most recent in a series of “Annotated” books that W.W. Norton has been publishing for many years. The first, and still the best, was Martin Gardner’s magnificent Annotated Alice (of Wonderland, that is), followed closely by Leslie Klinger’s multivolume Sherlock Holmes series. These are all tall, heavy books, expensively produced, and it’s clear that editorial policy is to risk over-annotation rather than leave anything uncommented on. But the Alice books and the Holmes stories have a density of texture — stemming in the one case from the intellectual playfulness, in the other from social detail — that allows them to bear a great many notes without sinking. The more delicate Wind in the Willows is overwhelmed by such treatment.

It is a pleasure, then, to turn from the Norton edition to the one Seth Lerer has prepared for Harvard. This Wind in the Willows is a little shorter, a little wider, and it opens quite easily on the reader’s lap. The pages have a slight gloss, the typeface is elegant; the margins are pleasingly wide, and the annotations are terse, informative, and properly infrequent. (Lerer, however, is enamored of the Oxford English Dictionary and cites it too often. Though he is doubtless right that in the hundred years since Grahame published his book, some of its language has become “more evocative than meaningful,” do we really require a note on the adverb “paternally”?)

The images are also well chosen, and there are fewer of them than in Gauger’s edition. I don’t know whether it’s really possible to read Gauger’s Wind in the Willows as a story — there’s so much stuff in it that, after turning a page, I often struggled to discern where the tale picks up again — but reading Lerer’s edition is a great pleasure. The notes are there when you need them and are easy to ignore when you don’t. This book is, among other things, a delightful testimony to the bookmaker’s art.

And, as I have already suggested, I prefer Lerer’s approach to the text, which, while not ignoring the biographical connections, is more interested in the literary, historical, and cultural antecedents. Lerer is highly attentive to Grahame’s borrowings of his nature imagery from the Romantic poets. Like C.S. Lewis, he sees the book as deeply evocative of its late-Victorian and Edwardian time and place. (Lewis: “Consider Mr. Badger — that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness, and goodness. The child who has once met Mr. Badger has ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and English social history which it could not get in any other way.”)

In his introduction to the book, Lerer does a fine job of showing how The Wind in the Willows so beautifully balances the Edwardian love of the rural idyll, and its cult of domesticity, with its fascination with new technologies. Ratty’s old boat and Toad’s motorcar receive equal attention. Lerer resists the temptation to over-explain: He knows that there’s a magic in this story for which we have no critical means of accounting. His edition will be the one I return to when the book, as it often does, calls out to me and in its quiet and gracious tones requests my attention.

Now, about Toad’s ears. Let’s leave aside the question of the hearing apparatus of toads and consider, rather, the physiognomy of Toad—Toad of Toad Hall, that is. We should probably first note that the phrase “all ears” is what I believe is called an idiom and could well be applied to any number of creatures who lack actual ears. But there are more significant matters to contemplate. At one point we find Toad “arrayed in goggles, cap, gaiters, and enormous overcoat,… swaggering down the steps, drawing on his gauntleted gloves.” This is instructive. Later in the book Toad famously exchanges prison garb for the clothing of a washerwoman and for a time at least is able to pull off this impersonation. (He is helped in this feat by his “gaoler’s daughter,” a kind girl, and, it might be noted, “he could not help half-regretting that the social gulf between them was so very wide, for she was a comely lass, and evidently admired him very much.”) Another time we are told that “Toad fell on his knees among the coals and, raising his clasped paws in supplication” — Wait, “paws”?

His friends’ appearance is similarly described. They wear dressing gowns and slippers in the evenings: Badger’s “carpet slippers…were too large for him and down at heel,” but Mole possesses a “black velvet smoking-suit” that Ratty much admires. (When Mole, however, first digs out of his house and reaches the sunlit meadow, we see him “jumping off all his four legs at once.”) When Ratty and Mole get lost in the snow and are rescued by their fortuitous discovery of the door to Badger’s house, they are wearing “coats and boots” — we know because Badger invites them to remove those wet things when he welcomes them into his warm snug home.

What problems Grahame has posed for his illustrators! Should they simply draw humans with animal heads, or should Toad’s body be at least somewhat toadlike, Badger’s badgeresque, and so on? Moreover, how big should they be? If you read the text in a literalist spirit, you’ll have to conclude that the creatures shrink and expand according to narrative need and that their appendages turn from paws to hands and back again, depending on the circumstances.

In Michael Hague’s adroit and precise paintings for the 1980 Henry Holt edition, Toad the washerwoman is depicted as about four feet tall — just large enough to pass, maybe — while Mole and Rat as they stand before Pan are the size of real moles and rats. And yet when Hague portrays the four friends together, they’re all the same size. Gauger shows us a painting from a beautiful 1913 edition in which the gifted artist Paul Bransom portrays Toad with the gaoler’s daughter, and he’s just a toad. A little on the large side, but plausibly so. And he’s naked, as toads tend to be. But how could such a creature ever have driven an automobile? And what happened to his goggles?

Perhaps it’s best not to inquire too deeply into such matters, if one does not have to. One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, George Peele, wrote a play in which an old woman, Gammer Madge, starts telling a story: “Once upon a time, there was a king, or a lord, or a duke, that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was; as white as snow and as red as blood: and once upon a time his daughter was stolen away: and he sent all his men to seek out his daughter; and he sent so long, that he sent all his men out of his land.” This prompts one of her listeners to ask, “Who dressed his dinner, then?” But Madge quickly replies, “Nay, either hear my tale, or kiss my tail.”

A just rebuke. God bless Grahame’s illustrators in their impossible task, but for readers the characters’ various species surely telegraph key traits. Mole squints in the sunlight, uneasy and unadept with his big claws in the sunlit world of the river, but eager and growing in boldness. Ratty is wiry, quick, resourceful. Badger is stubborn, of course, set in his ways, but kind, as Lewis remarks, and simply good. Toad leaps about, his eyes bulging, his cheeks puffing — and then collapses on himself, making a heap of self-pity. These are very different creatures, and yet they are dear friends.

And that’s the point. C.S. Lewis is good on this. In The Four Loves he writes, “The quaternion of Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad suggests the amazing heterogeneity possible between those who are bound by Affection,” and in his essay “Membership” he writes, “A trio such as Rat, Mole, and Badger symbolizes the extreme differentiation of persons in harmonious union, which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective.” Toad is omitted from the second sentence because, as I have commented elsewhere, he is too chaotic to be in a state of “harmonious union” with anyone else. His friends know that, and they love him all the same, though often with an exasperated sort of tenderness.

If we must claim that The Wind in the Willows is about something, I would say that it’s mostly about the inter-animating powers of friendship and place. Ratty loves the river, but he loves it more when he can show it to Mole. Ratty has known all along that “there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” but he chants this well-worn fact over and over, dreamily, because in sharing the experience with the novice Mole he finds it coming fully alive to himself once more. Badger’s home is all the more delightful as a refuge from the cold because it is Badger’s home, not just some generic warm spot. Badger’s gruff hospitality allows all sorts of creatures to come and go as they will. And Toad Hall becomes more wonderful than ever when it has been saved from the stoats and weasels, and saved by Toad’s faithful friends. Friends give meaning to a place, and the traits of certain places encourage and strengthen the blessings of friendship.

These are great lessons for anyone to learn, or to remember, at any age. And no book shows us these relations so beautifully as The Wind in the Willows.

The book is frankly an idyll, but, if I may risk the introduction of some disharmony into this meditation, I have to say that there are two distinct tribes of Wind in the Willows lovers: those for whom Toad is what it’s all about, and those for whom the milder adventures of Rat and Mole are the heart of the matter.

In my experience, young children tend to be in the former camp, their parents in the latter. (Grahame himself seems to have been uncertain: He had finished the book without arriving at a title, and as it was being passed around to publishers it was known variously as The Mole and the Water Rat and Mr. Toad.)

As an adult discoverer of Grahame’s riverine world, I must admit that I have always found that the Toad is too much with us. To be sure, his escapades are delightful and delightfully told — but I always find myself thinking, “Can we get back to Mole and Ratty now?” When I read the book the first time to my young son, it was obvious to me that Wes felt just the opposite. I still remember his belly laugh at Toad’s response to his first encounter with an automobile, one that nearly runs him and his friends down: “Toad sat straight down in the middle of the dusty road, his legs stretched out before him, and stared fixedly in the direction of the disappearing motorcar. He breathed short, his face wore a placid satisfied expression, and at intervals he faintly murmured ‘Poop-poop!’”

The Wind in the Willows is surely the most beautifully written of all children’s books — it offers to the willing learner a deep course in the making of sentences — and its finest prose may be found in the famous chapter 7: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” This is when Rat and Mole, searching the river for a lost baby otter named Portly, find themselves drawn by a distant haunting melody to a small island:

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible color, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet — and yet — O, Mole, I am afraid!”

The language here goes right to the brink of over-sweetness — but that is precisely what it must do, as it strives to describe experiences so good, so powerful, that they overtax the human imagination.

In a recent article in the Guardian of London, Rosemary Hill wrote of this scene, “Whether it is the latent homoeroticism of the vision or simply the sudden change of tone that makes the scene so uncomfortable, it is certainly a failure.” Now, when people talk about “latent homoeroticism” in the Iliad, or in the biblical story of David and Jonathan, even if I might read those passages differently, I at least know what they’re talking about, but Rosemary Hill leaves me speechless. Who exactly is hot for whom in this scene? And why does Hill say that the scene itself is uncomfortable, when all the discomfort surely lies with her? The lack of imagination here, the rote recital of contemporary shibboleths, is discouraging.

Yet the encounter with Pan, “the Friend and Helper,” is a strange scene, and it does indeed mark a “sudden change of tone.” The reader does not expect to discover, in the midst of this paean to friendship and domesticity, a glimpse of something far greater than friendship or domesticity — something good beyond Badger’s goodness and yet infinitely more frightening — something numinous. Failure or not, the scene was recognized as central by the book’s first publisher, Methuen: The cover features a gilt engraving of Pan, with Mole and Rat below and to either side of him. (A begoggled Toad looks confidently out at us from the spine. Interestingly, as Lerer points out, Toad stands up straight on two very human legs, while Ratty and Mole are rendered simply as animals.)

The best illustrator of this scene, I think, is Michael Hague. His portrayal stretches across two pages, and the flora surrounding the figures are painstakingly rendered: It is only on a second or third look that one discerns tiny Portly at Pan’s feet. Among the many who have drawn or painted The Wind in the Willows, Hague and Arthur Rackham are best, I think, at the more expansive scenes, and no one does the details of English domesticity as well as Hague. (His illustrations of The Hobbit are notable in this respect as well.) But for Ratty and Mole on the river, or enjoying their sun-illumined picnics, I must have Ernest Shepard, best known as the illustrator of A.A. Milne’s Pooh stories. He catches the joy of the friends, their unadulterated blissful delight in the shape of their little world, as no one else does.

Perhaps there is a reason for that. Kenneth Grahame was an old man when Shepard was commissioned to illustrate his book — indeed he did not live to see the finished product. But when he spoke to Shepard at the outset of the project, he made a simple request. “I love those little people,” he said. “Be kind to them.”

And now, for me, it’s back to a reading of the story that I wish I had known in my childhood. (And yet would I have loved it then?) The river holds more than enough excitement, after all, and so does The Wind in the Willows. When Mole asks Ratty about the Wild Wood, he receives just a few broken, reluctant, uninformative sentences. And when he asks about what might be found on the other side of the Wild Wood, he gets only this quite proper rebuke: “‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please.’” 

a horrid region

A fabulous extended metaphor from Dorothy L. Sayers’s essay on how she learned Latin:

The mighty forest of syntax opened up its glades to exploration, adorned with its three monumental trees — the sturdy accusative and infinitive, the graceful ablative absolute, and the banyan-like and proliferating ut and the subjunctive. Beneath their roots lurked a horrid scrubby tangle of words beginning with u, q and n, and a nasty rabbit-warren of prepositions. There was also a horrid region, beset with pitfalls and mantraps, called Oratio Obliqua, into which one never entered without a shudder, and where, starting off from a simple accusative and infinitive, one tripped over sprawling dependent clauses and bogged one’s self down in the consecution of tenses, till one fell over a steep precipice into a Pluperfect Subjunctive, and was seen no more.​

dark enchantment

Lately I’ve been reading my old friend William Blake — about whom more in due course — and I am struck by the simple fact that in his vast and strange mythology the primeval giant Albion is asleep. As, by and large, are we, his children. Blake perceives our frivolous attachment to merely “corporeal” existence, our materialism, our domestication of God — all the things that make us pray thus

Our Father Augustus Caesar who art in these thy Substantial Astronomical Telescopic Heavens, Holiness to thy Name or Title & reverence to thy Shadow. Thy Kingship come upon Earth first & thence in Heaven. Give us day by day our Real Taxed Substantial Money bought Bread & deliver from the Holy Ghost (so we call Nature) whatever cannot be Taxed, for all is debts & Taxes between Caesar & us & one another. Lead us not to read the Bible but let our Bible be Virgil & Shakspeare & deliver us from Poverty in Jesus that Evil one. For thine is the Kingship (or Allegoric Godship) & the Power or War & the Glory or Law Ages after Ages in thy Descendents, for God is only an Allegory of Kings & nothing Else. Amen. 

— are the consequence of our being asleep. A spell has been cast upon us and we cannot awaken to the depth and richness and strangeness and beauty of what is truly Real. 

C. S. Lewis says something similar in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory”: 

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. 

And Leon Kass, in his marvelous commentary on Genesis, notes that 

Numerous peoples of the ancient Near East — and elsewhere — regarded the heavenly bodies as divine. In the course of Genesis, we shall meet — as alternative and rejected ways of life — the Babylonians, who looked up to the heavens, and the Egyptians, who worshiped the sun and other nature gods. Because every people (and also every person) is defined ultimately by what it (or he or she) admires and reveres, the Bible wastes no time in denying the standing of other peoples’ candidates for the divine. 

What is “striking” about Genesis 1, from the perspective of the cultures that surrounded Israel, is the “demotion of the sun” from divine status to, effectively, a big light in the sky — just another of the things created by YHWH. That is, the primary dialectical strategy of Genesis 1 is disenchantment

Even Max Weber, the man to whom we owe the phrase “disenchantment of the world,” spoke of the resident of disenchanted modernity as being trapped in an “iron cage of rationality” — which sounds rather like the condition of someone under a dark enchantment. I think of “the man in the iron cage” in Pilgrim’s Progress — did Weber know that scene? 

Over the last fifteen years I have often written and taught about the idea of disenchantment, and while I have sometimes notes these points, I do not think I have paid sufficient attention to them. 

Jesus breaks the chains of the captives — even (especially?) when those chains are what Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles.” Our primary need is release from dark enchantments, so that we may see ourselves as we really are and the world as it really is. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” — that is, through the bars of his iron cage. Those bars encircle us in spiritual sleep. We need a Great Awakening. 

In futurity
I prophetic see
That the earth from sleep
(Grave the sentence deep)

Shall arise and seek
For her Maker meek;
And the desert wild
Become a garden mild.


P.S. This post was written and queued up several days before posting, so it is not a response to the new edition of L. M. Sacasas’s outstanding newsletter

Rachmaninoff in Sydney

I recently got a wonderful email from my student Annalise Shero, who is spending what we here in Texas call “summer” in Sydney, Australia. (Which sounds pretty great.) With her permission, I’m sharing her message below.


Last semester in Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century, you told us about Rachmaninoff’s Vespers and played a portion of them in class for us. Since you introduced me to this piece, I would like to tell you a story about it.

This evening, I attended a live performance of the Vespers in the Sydney Town Hall, which had a unique staging. The choir was placed centrally in the cavernous hall, and the audience could sit right around them. Those seats were very expensive, however, and I am currently a Budget Patron of the Arts, and so my seat was not close to the choir at all. In fact, I was barely inside the door, tucked in an alcove.

My seat provided a very interesting visual and auditory subtext to my experience of the evening, especially considering the history of the piece. When the performance began, the lights in my little alcove dimmed completely. I sat in the dark, observing the lights over the choir and most of the audience, yet not included in it. Likewise, the acoustics of the hall and my alcove created auditory distance. I could hear the distance between me and the choir.

I suffered no true loss in quality, the choir was brilliant and beautiful, yet I felt the metaphoric poverty of my seat through the presence and distance of this glory. I felt like Zacchaeus, immensely glad to have as much proximity as I did, and I felt like I was with Simone Weil, reveling in the beauty while among the outsiders.

The choir filed out the side doors, and the small ensemble played a contemplative interlude. Was it over? Perhaps the ending was different than I remembered, ending with gentleness instead of glory. But then! But then!! The doors immediately behind me opened letting in great golden light, and there in the entryway the choir sang the final movement of the Vespers. I was immersed in sound and light. I sobbed.

When the choir concluded, not a soul moved, nor breathed. (I was desperately trying to weep as quietly as possible). We spent several seconds suspended in silence, the sound of the liturgy still sinking into our bones. Then it was as if the applause would never end, and at this point I laughed until I couldn’t breathe all over again.

Mildred Pope

OU SMV 16-001.

That’s a portrait of Mildred Katherine Pope (1872-1956). 

There are periods of history in which, for certain people, all the doors they would most want to pass through are closed, locked, and barred, and nothing can be done about that. Then there are periods when all those doors are wide open. But there are also the periods in between, when the doors are locked but can, just maybe, be unlocked; closed but capable of being opened by those who are bold and resourceful, patient and determined. Indeed, those specially gifted people are the ones who ensure that the doors will be open for those who come after them. 

I’ve been reading about Mildred Pope — who was one such person, and to an exceptional degree — because she was Dorothy Sayers’s tutor at Oxford, and the model for the character of Miss Lydgate in Gaudy Night

Miss Lydgate’s manner was exactly what it had always been. To the innocent and candid eyes of that great scholar, no moral problem seemed ever to present itself. Of a scrupulous personal integrity, she embraced the irregularities of other people in a wide, unquestioning charity. As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognized them when she met them in real life. It was as though a misdemeanor committed by a person she knew was disarmed and disinfected by the contact. So many young people had passed through her hands, and she had found so much good in all of them; it was impossible to think that they could be deliberately wicked, like Richard III or Iago. Unhappy, yes; misguided, yes; exposed to difficult and complicated temptations which Miss Lydgate herself had been mercifully spared, yes. If she heard of a theft, a divorce, even worse things, she would knit puzzled brows and think how utterly wretched the offenders must have been before they could do so dreadful a thing. Only once had Harriet ever heard her speak with unqualified disapproval of anyone she knew, and that was of a former pupil of her own who had written a popular book about Carlyle. “No research at all,” had been Miss Lydgate’s verdict, “and no effort at critical judgment. She has reproduced all the old gossip without troubling to verify anything. Slipshod, showy, and catchpenny. I am really ashamed of her.” And even then she had added: “But I believe, poor thing, she is very hard up.” 

This is a wonderful tribute, but the back story, as it were, of Mildred Pope is a truly remarkable one. Her DNB entry is brief but eye-opening, and much of what I know comes from it. 

She came up to Oxford to study at Somerville in 1891 and stayed for most of her life, first as a librarian, then as a tutor. But though her undergraduate experience had many high points — especially in her performances in field hockey and disputation: she was “renowned for her pace on the wing … and her level-headedness in debate” — her academic career was somewhat rockier, because there was not one scholar at Oxford who could instruct her in the subject she loved: Old French philology. Essentially, her education in the field which she would make her own was achieved through an extended exchange of letters with Paget Toynbee of Cambridge — whose intellectual roots were in Old French but who had become, by the time he knew Mildred Pope, England’s finest scholar of Dante.

Miss Pope (as her students later called her) seems to have been deterred by nothing, taking her First and then going on to study philology at Heidelberg before returning to Somerville. Later she was awarded some sabbatical time to pursue her doctorate at the University of Paris under the guidance of the legendary medievalist and philologist Gaston Paris. She received her doctorate in 1903, though Oxford did not see fit to award her a B.A. until 1920, when other female graduates were so acknowledged — she would receive hers alongside Sayers.  

No matter. When she died the Times of London reported that the establishment and development of the teaching of medieval French at Oxford was almost wholly her doing. Further, “It would be fair to say that Pope effectively invented the discipline of Anglo-Norman studies.” Her recruitment of other dons to the cause of women’s suffrage in the 1910s was severely frowned upon by the university authorities; she was impervious to intimidation. Throughout the Great War she devoted her summers to intense and demanding relief work among refugees and displaced persons in France and Belgium. In 1928 she became the first woman to be appointed Reader at Oxford. 

She was, a historian reported, “the most beloved of all Somerville’s tutors,” and when she left the College in 1934 — to accept a professorship at the University of Manchester — a Gaudy in her honor was held. Sayers was asked to offer a tribute, and she did, calling particular attention to Pope’s “integrity of judgement” and “humility in the face of facts.” Above all, Sayers said, Mildred Pope exemplified “the generosity of a great mind … that will not be contented with the second-hand or second-best.” 

Here’s to the great Mildred Pope. 

metaphysics and history

A follow-up to my recent post on Adam Roberts’s new novel Lake of Darkness. I said in that post that Adam is a metaphysical writer, and that’s something that fascinates me about his fiction. But metaphysics is not my native tongue; I am able to grasp most prominent metaphysical concepts, but not easily, and I don’t employ them comfortably.

One interesting development in Christian theology in recent years has been a resurgence in metaphysical argument after a long period in which theology was governed and directed by an attention to salvation history. David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God has been perhaps the most important and influential book in this regard; I think I see Hart’s influence in the decision by Katherine Sonderegger to begin her systematic theology with The Doctrine of God – God conceived within the conceptual frame of classical metaphysics – before moving on to the specifically Christian understanding of God as Triune. I find this development interesting; but for me personally it is not welcome. I am not a metaphysical thinker but a historical thinker, and in trying to grasp the Christian Gospel, salvation history is where I begin and end. I am strongly more sympathetic with a (Lutheran or Barthian) theology that starts with the Cross and works backward and forward from that. 

So I read a book like Lake of Darkness with delight, but its theological framework is essentially alien to my way of thinking about God. I can appreciate and enjoy – and I do, very much – but as a kind of outsider; again, like someone speaking a laboriously acquired second or third language. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said; for me, it’s “No ideas but in people and events.” And no theology except the Theology of the Cross. 

topological theology

Adam Roberts is a metaphysical novelist, in two senses of the word. First, like the so-called metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, he delights in fabulous conceits, extreme metaphors, analogies pushed to and beyond their apparent limits — “knight’s moves,” he has said in the past. Events or ideas start in one direction, then suddenly veer off into another. 

But Adam is also a novelist who engages metaphysics: the metaphysics of Kant in The Thing Itself (the title tells you what the dominant concept is), that of Hegel in The This (Absolute Spirit, or the Absolute — or Abby) and now that of Gilles Deleuze (the “fold,” most obviously, though perhaps the structurally related concept of the plane of immanence is equally important). 

Consider this: What is the relationship between a black hole and ordinary space? We imagine something, anything drawing closer to the black hole, closer and closer, still in ordinary space, and then it crosses the event horizon, from which it cannot return. We conceive of that something, anything as being outside the black hole but then, having crossed the event horizon, being inside it.

But what if space is folded, and folded in such a way that inside and outside are not stable, perhaps not even relevant, concepts? Or, to put the question a different way, what if space is a Klein bottle

(Take a look, when you have time, at this lovely collection of Klein bottles at London’s Science Museum.) 

A Klein bottle doesn’t have an inside, and because it doesn’t have an inside it doesn’t have an outside either. It cannot be described in those terms. Well, what if the universe is like that

And what if there is a God? 

And what if there is a Satan, the Adversary of God? 

And what if God flings Satan into a black-hole oubliette we might call Hell? 

And what if the event horizon of the black hole is a doorway? 

If we are on one side of the event horizon and Satan is on the other side, are we outside and he inside? Or vice versa? Or, if the universe is a Klein bottle, must we abandon those modes of description altogether and think instead of the topology of Creation, the ways in which Creation is folded, deformed, twisted, bent — but does not have an inside or an outside? 

Think on these questions, try to come up with answers to them, and then ask one more: Where is Satan? 

You are now ready to read Lake of Darkness. Don’t worry: after all, facilis descensus Averno

• 

Okay. Adam Roberts, then, is a metaphysical novelist, but he is also an acute social observer, and the novel raises non-metaphysical questions as well. As I was reading Lake of Darkness, at a certain moment I began to realize that its characters, human beings from the far future, aren’t very smart. Or perhaps I should say that they know very little. One clue: they are familiar with many things from our time, they know of the book Alas in Wonderland, they sing our songs, like “We all live in a yellow sunny scene” and “Hail the Conquer-King Hero Comes.” Why do they get these things slightly wrong? Because they’re illiterate. Very few of them can read or write. Why are they illiterate? Because when they want to know something they just ask an A.I. and the A.I. tells them.  

Artificial Intelligence has built for them utopias to live in (many different ones, because after all one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia) — but, and one key character comes at least partially to understand this, these places are really “infantopias.” Playgrounds for children. The humans of this far future are intellectually what the humans in Wall•E are physically: coddled into placid uselessness. 

Now here comes someone, a man. He carries a walking stick that looks a bit like this:

On the heavy lids of his eyes you can see prominent folds. He says something along these lines: “Please allow me to introduce myself; I’m a man of wealth and taste. And I hate to see human beings reduced to this soporific condition, this infantile paralysis of the mind and spirit. You’ve sat back and allowed your machines to make the crooked places straight and the rough places smooth. With my help, you can reclaim your independence, you can free your mind, you can be once again what you were … made to be. You just need to give me the chance to set things in motion. Oh, it’ll hurt, to be sure; but it’s true what they say: No pain, no gain. And once you taste freedom, trust me: you’ll be hooked.” 

The gentleman has a point, doesn’t he? 

Doesn’t he? 

The Game

By the time he wrote “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” Conan Doyle was growing tired of Sherlock Holmes, and the tiredness shows in the messiness of the story. This was the eighth of ten Holmes stories published in 1893, after seven in 1892 and six in 1891; and the novels A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890) had preceded the short stories. No wonder Conan Doyle was ready to kill Holmes off, as he did in “The Final Problem” — though of course he felt obliged to bring him back later, with less and less success. That’s a story for another day. 

(In his letters he sometimes wrote of Holmes, “I am weary of his name,” but in his memoirs he gave a more decorous explanation: “At last, after I had done two series of [Holmes stories] I saw that I was in danger of having my hand forced, and of being entirely identified with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement. Therefore as a sign of my resolution I determined to end the life of my hero.” Conan Doyle took much greater pride in his historical fiction, for instance The White Company.) 

In the story at hand, Mr. Melas is an interpreter, a “remarkable linguist” who is Greek “by extraction” and who specializes in that language. He tells Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes — about whom more in a moment — about his recent experience of being kidnapped and taken to some unknown location to serve as a translator between his two English captors and a Greek man whom they also hold captive, along with that man’s sister.) The two Englishmen eventually release Melas and give him some money for his trouble, though one of them warns him: “If you speak to a human soul about this — one human soul, mind — well, may God have mercy upon your soul!” 

So when the Holmes brothers hear this story, what do they do? Why, Mycroft places an advertisement — an advertisement based on everything Melas has told him — in all the papers of London, seeking information about the situation. In other words, he ensures that Melas’s captors, who have shown themselves to be ruthless and violent men, and who have made the most dire threats against him, will know everything. Mycroft shows no awareness of this likelihood, while Sherlock merely remarks to Melas, “I should certainly be on my guard if I were you, for of course they must know through these advertisements that you have betrayed them” — and then walks away, leaving Melas to his fate. Moreover, when Sherlock and Mycroft finally decide to take some action, they move in a most leisurely fashion. 

Then, at the end of the story, while the Holmes brothers and Dr. Watson do manage to save Melas, the Greek man dies and his sister is carried away who knows where. Not only do our heroes not find the criminals, they don’t even look for them — they just go back home. Some time later they read a newspaper article that describes the deaths of two Englishmen abroad. These may or may not be the criminals; Holmes doesn’t bother to try to find out. 

So, obviously, Conan Doyle just wasn’t thinking through the details, even some of the most important details, of his own story. He was writing in a hurry and wanting to be done not just with this story but with Sherlock Holmes. And yet …

The invention of Mycroft Holmes is a stroke of genius. This is the first story in which he appears, indeed the first time we learn of any member of Sherlock’s family, and after two novels and twenty stories his introduction gives the reader quite a turn. The idea of another Holmes who has even greater intellectual gifts than Sherlock but absolutely none of Sherlock’s energy is a terrific one. Mycroft is brilliant and fat and lazy, a character interesting in himself — he is the essential predecessor to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe — but even more interesting as a kind of funhouse-mirror version of Sherlock.

(Also, the Diogenes Club, of which Mycroft is a co-founder, sounds awesome.) 

And this contrast in Conan Doyle — between a mind still fizzing with ideas and that same mind sick and tired of the donkey work of working out the details of stories — is, I am convinced, the source and cause of The Game. The Game, which treats Holmes and Watson as real people and Watson’s narratives as faithful accounts of what actually happened, is a way of maintaining delight in Conan Doyle’s imaginative creations while avoiding too much sobering contemplation of his obvious bunglings. 

Thus Ronald Knox, in his essay “The Mystery of Mycroft,” has an excellent explanation for the strange behavior of the Holmes brothers in “The Greek Interpreter”: Mycroft is in cahoots with the two kidnappers. And not just that: “It can hardly be supposed that a man of his attainments would have leagued himself with a couple of garrotters like Latimer and Kemp with any good will. The association can only be explained if we conjecture that both he and they were part of a greater organisation. Enough said, for every student of Holmes literature; the next word that leaps to the mind is Moriarty.” To this Knox adds some interesting reflections on the possibility of Mycroft’s being a kind of double agent, and on how much Sherlock was likely to have known of “his brother’s duplicities.”  

This will strike some of my readers as an odd comparison, but when I think of the Sherlockian Game I think of Jacques Derrida — and particularly of Derrida’s magnificent long essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination. The essay is a detailed reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that begins by noting the long line of critics who have complained that the dialogue is “badly composed.” Some say that Plato wrote it when he was young and didn’t yet know what he was doing; others say that he wrote it as an old man who had lost his intellectual fastball. Okay, says Derrida, but what if we start with a very different assumption? What if we assume that all the eccentricities and apparent shortcomings of the dialogue are in fact cunningly devised stratagems? What would see then? 

The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure, and subtle form is naturally more fertile. It discovers new chords, new concordances; it surprises them in minutely fashioned counterpoint, within a more secret organization of themes, of names, of words. 

Note that Derrida does not argue that the dialogue’s author did in fact know what he was doing. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he cared whether Plato meant or intended all that may be found by the shrewd student of the Phaedrus. He is merely saying that the working assumption that the dialogue is fiendishly complex and wholly coherent is more “fertile” — it “discovers” more, it unearths “a more secret organization.” It’s more fun. Derrida is playing the Platonic Game. 

Academic literary criticism doesn’t do fun these days. It rarely has, of course, but now it has descended fully into an apparently permanent, and permanently dour, secular-Calvinist recitation about structures of oppression — and, when critics lift their heads long enough to notice that students are utterly bored by all this, have no better response than to say Neoliberalism made me do it. I am not sure academic literary criticism can ever come back from its moribund state, but its best chance of doing so would be to try to have some fun. Surprise itself. Play the Game. 

after the Re-Learning

Tom Wolfe in 1987

The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to use an old word. It is already clear that the large cities, thanks to the Relearning, will not even look new. Quite the opposite; the cities of 2007 will look more like the cities of 1927 than the cities of 1987. The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a retrograde mental atmosphere. People of the next century, snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with a ghastly awe upon our time. They will regard the twentieth as the century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself — but also the capacity to escape to the stars on space ships if it blew. But above all they will look back upon the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the amazing confidence, the Promethean hubris, to defy the gods and try to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, god-like extremes. They will look back in awe … without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero. Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their neo-Louis bergeres, content to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century’s Hangover. 

Was Wolfe correct? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. 

courting sickness

Tolkien, letter to his son Christopher, 31 May 1944:

I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet. The honeymoon one (Busman’s H.?) was worse. I was sick. 

The strange thing to me is that Tolkien, having by the time of reading Sayers’s Gaudy Night developed this unparalleled hatred and disgust not just for the book but also for its characters and author, then decided to read the next book in the series. This seems strangely self-punitive, does it not? 

(I also find myself wondering when the sickness set in: the Tolkien says that he followed the adventures of Lord Peter “so far” as Gaudy Night, which is the tenth novel devoted to him. Should we assume that Lord Peter remained “attractive” to Tolkien through the first nine novels? He’s rather vague on this point, but the “by which time” suggests that the loss of attractiveness and increase in loathsomeness was a gradual thing.) 

on deciding not to read a book

I had been thinking of reading Eliza Griswold’s new book Circle of Hope, but then a friend sent me a passage that included these sentences: 

Franklin Graham was different from his father. Billy Graham preached broadly about God; Franklin Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, exemplifying the rightward political and cultural swing among most evangelicals in the late twentieth century. 

Billy Graham “preached broadly about God”? Billy Graham??? That’s not an idea that would survive an encounter with one Billy Graham sermon — any one among thousands, but why not start with this one? Pretty much the only thing Billy Graham did for the whole of his long career was to preach the unique saving power of Jesus. 

(Imagine someone claiming that Charles Darwin wrote broadly about knowledge rather than addressing himself specifically to biology. Imagine also someone writing that and then having it published by a big New York trade house.) 

Here would be a more accurate (if not perfectly accurate) complaint: 

Billy Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, but his emphasis was on Jesus as one’s “personal Lord and Savior,” not on Jesus as the one who began his public ministry by claiming the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That Jesus’s message, rightly understood and heeded, would transform not just my heart but the whole social order is not something we heard from Billy Graham. Now Franklin Graham, along with many other evangelicals, has made a rightward political and cultural swing that has taken him even farther away from the whole message of Jesus — that message being neglected in favor of a Christian nationalism that seeks political power and social control, and is willing to tolerate any behavior or unbelief by politicians who promise such power and control. It’s for very good reason that today’s politically-minded evangelicals want to put the Ten Commandments on the walls of schools rather than the Beatitudes.  

If journalists want to criticize evangelicals, well, evangelicals have done plenty that rightly incurs criticism. But for heaven’s sake, people, take the time to learn something about those you criticize — the most basic, most elementary facts. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then just don’t write about those people. 


UPDATE: I have had good cause to say this many times in many contexts, but it bears repeating: If you’re going to say “It’s different now than it was then,” you need to know as much about then as about now. If you’re going to say “Franklin Graham was different from his father,” you need to know something about his father. If you’re going to say that American society is disintegrating and that we’re at one another’s throats in an unprecedented way, you need to know the actual precedents. If you’re going to say that Christians now live in a “negative world” whereas they once lived in a “positive world,” you need to know something about what it was really like to try to be a faithful Christian, say, sixty years ago. As Dogberry says, comparisons are odorous, and especially when they’re based not on careful study of the available facts but on vague impressions assumed to be infallible.  

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