Epictetus Follow-up

I spoke too soon. In bk. II, ch. 23, Epictetus says that the will can be perverted. And later in the same chapter, he admits that we can enjoy pleasant things, but only as we enjoy an inn on the way home: a lovely, succinct way of putting what I tried for paragraphs to say yesterday. He doesn’t emphasize either point, but they are there.

Given the title of Epictetus’s work, Discourses, the shortness of the chapters, and the frequent bits of implicit dialog, I take it that each chapter was a lesson given to students. Sometimes it seems to me that a student might have actually done the writing, that Epictetus perhaps had a Boswell who had mastered some sort of clay-tablet shorthand and took down the words of his master. Whoever actually wrote the Discourses down, Epictetus made both corrections (at least in my view they’re corrections) in the same chapter, or discourse, so I wonder if he didn’t have some student who thought like me, asked some questions, and urged some admissions from the teacher.

But I don’t mean to criticize Epictetus too much. As I think about yesterday’s post, I’m afraid that’s exactly what I did. The main point I meant to make is that I believe I need his teaching. I want to learn what Paul calls the “secret” of being content in both hunger and abundance. I want to have constant comfort in the firm belief that God works all things together for good for me, even my problem with retina detachment and the plethora of floaters that fill my eyesight like the microbes in the junior-high microscope experiment. And I believe that Epictetus’s teaching can help me get there.

Epictetus may have been a pagan who calls God “Zeus,” but his teaching, as far as it goes, isn’t that far from biblical teaching. The Stoic says that I am perturbed because I put my desire on something outside of my control and then didn’t get it, that I placed my aversion and fear on a circumstance outside of my control and then fell into that very circumstance, and that I should therefore deliberately place my desire and aversion on things under my control. By comparison, the epistleist (Is that a word? Should be.) James says, “You covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.” And I read this in the book of Proverbs this morning: “The desire of the righteous ends only in good; the expectation of the wicked in wrath.” I hope to be righteous and not wicked, so I want to learn from Epictetus’s patient and eloquent teaching to put my expectations and desires on things that won’t cause wrath by falling through, and to treat blessings as inns on the road home. I guess I should also say that I want to desire this patience in such a way that I will be patient with myself when I don’t achieve patience right away!

By the way, when Epictetus used the word “Zeus” (possibly pronounced “dzay-oos”) to refer to God, he may not have had any mythical character in mind. If he had grown up speaking Latin, he would have called God “Deus” (“day-oos”) like any Roman Christian or medieval Christian monk.

A Dose of Stoicism

I can’t buy into Stoicism, but I think American Christianity (or at least my Christianity) needs a dose of Stoic teaching, and I prefer Epictetus’s presentation over that of Marcus Aurelius.

As I’ve been enjoying rereading the Discourses of Epictetus the last few days, I’ve thought a lot about William James saying that cranks and mad people are able to spin out endless sermons on their one beloved theme. Epictetus certainly circles around and around his main point, but he sounds much more sane to me than the lunatics and conspiracy theorists James has in mind. Epictetus’s main point is that we humans aren’t tranquil because we set our will (both desire and aversion) on things out of our control. Taking that statement on its own, it’s hard to disagree. If I just have to get that job, or I just have to inherit that money, or I just have to get that expensive toy, and it doesn’t work out, I’m devastated. If I simply won’t tolerate the heat or my colleague’s annoying habit or another visit from my weird cousin, and then it happens, I’m beside myself. So don’t set your heart on that toy, and don’t think that life will end when the dog days come.

The reason I like Epictetus better than Marcus Aurelius, the much more well known Stoic (which name are you more familiar with?), is simple: he talks about God. One of Stoicism’s teachings is that we should plan to deal with pain caused by things out of our control by remembering that we are a part of a whole and that sometimes the good of the whole requires the sacrifice of one part. For instance (says Epictetus), a foot would never want to be cut off, but the human understands that sometimes a foot needs to be amputated for the life of the whole body. With Epictetus, we’re assured that a wise God has disposed the order of the universe, so we have a Person we can trust when we tell ourselves that we’re a part of a grander design and that our pain is worth “it.” We don’t have to know what “it” is; God knows. But with Marcus, “it” is simply the functioning of the universe, the cosmic balance of a machine that doesn’t care whether we suffer or not.

Stoicism, even Epictetus’s version, has its problems. For one thing, in saying that the will, misplaced on things outside our control, is really what causes anxiety and disappointment, Epictetus firmly believes that the will is under our control. I believe, on the other hand, that the human will is perverted and that sometimes “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” Still, the Christian has the direction of the Holy Spirit to renew the will daily, so the advice to learn to will what actually happens (Epictetus’s formula) is not far from the Christian doctrine that we should conform our will to God’s will.

A stickier problem for the Christian trying to learn from Epictetus is that he says we ought to be tranquil. With the corrections I’ve pointed out, I can agree in his analysis of what causes disturbance and in his instruction on how not to be upset, but should we always follow those instructions? The Christian answer is complex. Paul says, quite Stoically, that he has learned to be content in all circumstances. But was he always tranquil? He tells us to “be angry and do not sin,” and he yelled at Ananias, “God shall strike you, you whitewashed wall!” As I read it, he had a controlled purpose for his outburst, but was he content?

Well, Paul may have made mistakes, you say. But the Christian can’t impute sin to Jesus, and Jesus wasn’t always tranquil. The Lord wept over the death of Lazarus, mourned for Jerusalem and longed to protect her as a hen protects her chicks, and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Clearly He was not always tranquil. I like it that the Bible doesn’t give easy answers to this question of whether to be tranquil or to use passion to good purpose; a Christian must use wisdom to discern what the answer is from moment to moment. And for a Christian, “using wisdom” doesn’t mean we can ever come up with a table or flowchart to meet every situation, a Talmud of rules within rules that determine the wise response to every circumstance. Since Christ has been made our wisdom, living in wisdom means that we must have an ongoing relationship with Christ and follow his leading in every situation.

A last problem I need to correct. Epictetus, in his insistence that our problem is that we set our will on things out of our control, says that I must view external things as none of my concern. Actually, not even Epictetus believes himself here. He says in other places that we must behave so as to fulfill the promise in our God-given design, which means we should act rationally and in harmony with society and the world. So it seems that some external things, the people in my community for instance, are indeed my concern. I believe the healthy way to think is to see that every created thing that surrounds me is of concern to me (“All things are yours, and you are Christ’s”) while remembering that it is at best only partially under my control. It’s not the mere delight or aversion in an external thing that ruins tranquility but the desire to control. I can’t stop a mass murder, especially one that’s already taken place and is being reported, but I can grieve. I can’t control the appearance of snow, but I can rejoice when it comes down.

When I was a kid, I once told my dad that I wished I could pick up the birds I saw in the yard, not to harm them or keep them, but just to enjoy them more. He told me that God didn’t make things that way, that He made birds to fly away from people because not every human had my innocent intentions. Fifty-five years later, I have a bird feeder outside my office window. No bird is there right now, and I have almost no control over when they do come – no control at all once I remember to fill the feeder. But every bird that comes is a blessing that I should thank God for. What I need to learn from Epictetus is not that the birds aren’t my concern or that I shouldn’t set my will on seeing a bird outside my window, but that birds aren’t mine to hold and that I shouldn’t set my heart on possessing one.

OK. OK. I could buy a parakeet. Here’s a better example. We live in the Smoky Mountains, and we have security cameras on our house, not to detect the nonexistent thieves, but to take video of black bears that stroll down our driveway and come to our porch. We’re very excited every time we hear the Ding! on our phones. Sometimes we run to the front window in time to see the bear leaving. We might get three bears in a week, and we might have to wait ten months between visits. But every appearance of these beautiful creatures is a thrill and a blessing. It makes no sense and does no good to be upset and disappointed on a day when we don’t see a bear. I have no will to possess one (although I do download the videos sometimes!) and only a facetious desire to scratch one behind its ears. Enjoy, but don’t set your heart on controlling or possessing.

Now here’s the hard part. Can I learn to treat painful things the same way I treat blessings like birds and bears? If it isn’t under my control, accept it, respond to it appropriately, but don’t be unwound over it. Don’t fear it before it comes; fearing it won’t stop it from happening. Don’t brood over it and constantly regret it after it comes; brooding won’t make either the memory or the scars go away. Believe that God has things under control and that my pain is worth it, and trust Him enough to know that I don’t even have to know what “it” is, because He does.

In Search of In Search of the Castaways

One primary goal of my Third Decade Reading Plan (these plans have played such prominent roles in the last twenty-eight years of my life, I can’t help thinking of them as capitalized) was and is to put away heady, adult things like German philosophy and to replace those parts of the plan with adventure novels that would help me relive my avid adolescent reading experiences. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne all lie in the bull’s-eye of that target.

Most of the books by Verne on my current ten-year list I had already read by checking them out from Florissant Valley Public Library in the 1970s, but I had never read The Children of Captain Grant until the first two weeks of this year. And yet this book did more to revive my teenage enthusiasm than any book has for years. The whole story of finding a mysterious, mostly dissolved note in a bottle, following the southern 37th parallel around the entire globe in search of Captain Harry Grant, picking up an eccentric scientist by accident (can't we call nineteenth-century fictional geographers scientists?), and taking along the kids on a dangerous adventure, was just right. This book felt even more like the beloved Verne of my memories than Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea did, and that was a book I actually read before and remembered.

The first third, in which the party crosses the Andes and Patagonia, was the most appealing to my inner twelve-year-old with its blizzards and earthquakes and landslides and rescues by condor. (!) The second third, which involves the crossing of Victoria, Australia, had more geographical description than adventure, although the party’s lives lay in grave danger for a chapter or two near the end. All the fun returned, though, in the final third, which saw the party captured by cannibals in New Zealand.

OK, I’ll deal with this briefly. Although the narrative presentation of the Maori felt at times  uncomfortably racially disrespectful, Verne clearly, explicitly tried to treat these people in a Christian way that afforded them dignity. When he has to lay such foundations as correcting some of his characters in their belief that the native New Zealanders aren’t even human, we can’t expect him to be as progressive as a woke, twenty-first-century college student. And I always try to remember that our descendants will find the literature of today annoyingly hidebound in our own unexamined prejudices. Verne tried, and I give him credit for that. But I could understand it if a Maori found the book offensive.

I first wrote down the title In Search of the Castaways on my Plan for this year. But just before year 1 started, when I was trying to find a good translation of Off on a Comet, I discovered two important and amazing facts. (1) In Search of the Castaways was originally known as The Children of Captain Grant. (2) Most translations of Verne, including all the ones I had borrowed from Florissant Valley Public Library, were abridged. I searched last year for a good translation of this book for almost as long as Captain Grant’s children searched for their father. I even wrote to an author who, I learned, had finished a translation and was looking for a publisher. (He understandably didn’t want to share his work with me.) I ended up reading a translation freely available online, the work of D. A. Sample. Sample doesn’t know French well and used Google Translate to get started on the passages that had been left out of most English versions. But, with some scattered yet notable grammatical mistakes and typos, the translation is actually quite good. And in the online medium, Sample was able to format clearly by color the restored passages. It’s amazing what kinds of things earlier translators left out! The most astonishing was a beautiful description of the constellations and nebulas visible from the southern hemisphere. Who wouldn’t want to read that? I have less patience with these literary butchers than I have with Verne in his flawed but good-hearted treatment of the Maori.

Please Let There Be an Arras!

Before Shakespeare, there was Christopher Marlowe. The always-correct Wikipedia says (at least it said it last week) that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy were the first popular plays (ca. 1582) on the London public stage, both showing the power and suitability of blank verse for drama.

I can see why Tamburlaine had such an immediate and fateful effect. Marlowe’s pair of plays, about the fourteenth-century founder of the Asian Timurid Empire, flows in straightforward meter with a strong simplicity of vocabulary that I found very easy to understand even today. You don’t get any of Shakespeare’s neologisms or extended metaphors, but you do get powerful drama. Part I (i.e. the first play) tells of Tamburlaine’s rise as he conquers kingdom after kingdom, sometimes through military superiority, sometimes through stratagem, and sometimes merely by presenting himself to his opponents, who apparently all agreed on his almost superhuman beauty and dignity. Part II, a better drama with a dash of poetic flare along with all the clear expository dialog, tells of the mighty emperor’s downfall. Why does success seem like such an imcomplete story? Whatever the explanation, Part I’s meteoric rise would offer little satisfaction without the tragic descent of Part II.

I also just read Marlowe’s Edward II. This weak English king seems despicable at first and then pathetic. But my sympathies turned toward him about the same time as his brother Edmund’s did in the play. Edward’s horrible death isn’t explained in the dialog; I think the audience was assumed to know it. (Edward was burned from the inside out with a red-hot poker.) Apparently, if I correctly understood the stage directions, or lack thereof, this death takes place on stage with screaming from the dying king. Gruesome. I would hope that the action was hidden behind an arras as thick as the one that hides Polonius.

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is next. Time to quit writing and start reading!

Book Awards – 2022

The votes have been tabulated (not difficult since I’m the only voting member). A protective barrier has been placed around the presenters’ podium to prevent any unscripted slapping. It looks like we’re ready for the presentation of this year’s Book Awards.

Author of the Most Books Named Little Dorrit: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. My third reading of Little Dorrit magnified its great qualities in my mind and at least found some explanation for a couple of the weaknesses. One theme I thought about this year but didn’t blog about earlier is condescension. Miss Wade resents all kindnesses done to her because they seem like condescension. But Dickens shows the right thinking in other relationships. First, not all kindness is condescension, as Arthur Clennam demonstrates in his kindness to Daniel Doyce. Second, condescension isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Amy rightly “condescends” to poor, witless Maggie: as an orphan with stunted mental growth, Maggie needs someone to talk with her and deal with her at a level she can understand. And are we to be offended that our Lord emptied Himself and became flesh, “abhorring not the virgin’s womb” and humbling Himself by a birth in a stable?

Best New Read in History: Stephen R. Brown, Merchant Kings
Some volumes of the Oxford History of the United States are among the best history books I’ve ever read. But this year’s dreadful The Republic for Which It Stands is not among that august group. Often this award goes to Will and Ariel Durant, whose massive, multi-volume history of western civilization I’ve enjoyed reading for decades. But this year’s pages on the Enlightenment left me wishing for darkness. So with the usual suspects out of contention, this year the award goes to an author whose obscure name I had to look up again just now, and to a book lacking the verbal polish of anything by, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin. But from Merchant Kings I finally got a good, brutally honest exposition of the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company (as well as four other exploratory and exploitative companies from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries) and a clear idea for the first time of the strange and dangerous relationship of each with its mother country. I learned a lot from all the histories I read this year, even the ones that didn’t make me smile, but I learned the most from this slender volume.

Best New Read in Fiction: Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
I don’t remember where I got the tip to read this book. I don’t remember ever seeing this author’s name outside my own reading plan. (Have you ever heard of her?) I understand why the book has been forgotten by society: it’s a twentieth-century book about a devout believer, but it isn’t written in the style of the Christian romances that filled the bookshelves of the late twentieth-century Christian bookstores. So it’s designed to appeal to a small slice of the reading public. Well, I for one am in that slice. It turns out that a twentieth-century Christian doesn’t need to have a crisis of faith in order to have a compelling story. What to do with church bazaars and annoying neighbors can be surprisingly dramatic. And I defy you to predict the charming ending!

Most Disappointing Read: Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization
I’ve already complained about them enough this year, even in today’s post. But this dubious honor is awarded each year, so duty demands that I mention them one last time. Let’s hope I have better things to say about the Durants next year.

Comeback Player of the Year: Alexandre Dumas
In The Man in the Iron Mask, the Musketeers came back again in all their glory . . . only to die. Well, most of them, anyway. I couldn’t be happier about being so sad.

Best New Read in Poetry:
This award was not given this year because of the excessive appearance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s works of dead girls hanging their ghostly hair from heaven and brushing men’s cheeks.

Best New Read in Religion: Augustine, Homilies on I John
Augustine works through grammatical points (“I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven,” means that his readers are little children because they are forgiven), important implications of single words (“We have an advocate” shows that the Apostle also had need of Jesus’ advocacy), and apparent contradictions (Do Christians commit sin or not? I’ll let you read the homilies to find Augustine’s solution for yourself). Augustine was such a good pastor, he continues to feed sheep.

Best New Read in Biography: Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life
It was very difficult for me to decide which was the best written of the biographies I read this year. In the end I gave the award to the biography which most changed my view of the subject. I ended up admiring John Kennedy more than I had, which was no mean feat considering that Dallek also made the President’s flaws look even more despicable than I had imagined!

Best Subject of a Biography: Ron Chernow, Grant
I might actually have learned more from this book than I did from An Unfinished Life since Grant’s considerable accomplishments as President have been underplayed for at least a century. But I have to say that it didn’t so much change my view of this hero as much as it strengthened my view that Grant has been and is still the most underrated of American Presidents. Thank goodness the Dunning School and the Lost Cause are losing their grip on historiography.

Best Reread: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Maybe this is just a given.

Best Book in a Category By Itself: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Capote said that this wasn’t just a new book but a new kind of book: journalistic history written as a novel. His approach gave literary life to the victims of this senseless crime and provided insight to the aberrant minds of the killers. I couldn’t help wondering if his work at all inspired John Douglas when he started the real life BAU in the FBI.

Best Offroading: Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place
I had meant to read this book ever since it was recommended to me fifty years ago. I don’t know what I would have thought then. I’m sorry to say I’m afraid the strict doctrinal bounds of my youth would have led me to disapprove of Corrie Ten Boom’s Christianity. Now I can only see that her faithful love of Jesus led her to sacrifice to unimaginable lengths in an attempt to save Jews from the Nazis. As far as the doctrine goes, the book actually challenged me to reconsider whether I weren’t more right at 16 about some things, especially about how God might lead someone to action. But then, I’ve never been put in a situation where lying to authorities would save a life, or a situation in which I had to judge whether the officers of an invading force had any authority. No book this year made me think and rethink more than this one.

A year ago today, I wrote that I was looking forward to Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, Augustine’s homilies on I John, and even Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. None of these disappointed, and two even won awards. What am I especially eager to read in 2023? Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (about the hunchback), poetry and essays of Matthew Arnold, and a return to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. I’m also hoping for a better experience from the Durants and from the Oxford History of the U. S. as I read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. (Kennedy’s book won a Pulitzer, so I think my hopes will be fulfilled.) May your New Year also be filled with anticipation for an abundance of good books!

Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2022

Several months ago I read all of Chesterton’s columns for the Illustrated London News from 1926. When I posted about that reading at the time, I mentioned that I would come back to it in December, since the series ended with a wonderful piece about old Christmas carols. In this last, beautiful column, Chesterton ascribes three special virtues to old Christmas carols: (1) anachronism, which shows that the events of Christmas and its celebration are continuously present in a spiritual sense throughout history, (2) incongruity, which makes little logical sense but great poetic sense, and (3) lustiness such that people sometimes shout “Ut hoy!” in celebration of Christ’s birth.

Now, I have to think that Chesterton knew many more truly old carols than I do. I don’t know the one, for instance, that contains shouts of “Ut hoy!” But I do know a couple of carols about holly that seem to fit GKC’s description perfectly.

The first carol I’m trolling today is “The Holly Bears a Berry.”

1. Now the holly bears a berry as white as the milk,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who was wrapped up in silk:

Chorus: And Mary she bore Jesus our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly.
Holly! Holly!
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly!

2. Now the holly bears a berry as green as the grass,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died on the cross:

Chorus

3. Now the holly bears a berry as black as the coal,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died for us all:

Chorus

4. Now the holly bears a berry, as blood is it red,
Then trust we our Saviour, who rose from the dead:

Chorus

Anachronism? Not exactly. But I think the mix of tenses in every verse accomplishes the same thing. The holly bears a berry in the present tense now, and Mary bore Jesus in the past tense in, perhaps, 4 B.C. But maybe there is some anachronism in the assignment of the colors. I had to look up the white berry: the berries on my holly bushes are never white. But according to the internet, which might actually be right in this case, a Christian legend says that the berries were white until the time of the crucifixion. I wasn’t familiar with this legend until this morning, but it sounds a lot like the legends printed on cedar signs I used to study in roadside Stuckey’s restaurants. (Talk about anachronism and incongruity!) According to this very important and informative bit of childhood reading, both the dogwood flower and the burro mystically acquired their cross-shaped markings during the original Holy Week. If we accept the legend, this carol sings of the holly as bearing, in the present tense, berries it hasn’t born in two thousand years.

I honestly don’t know that I understood why I have always loved the verses of this carol so much until Chesterton pointed out the vitality of incongruity in this literature. Some songwriter not as wise as the anonymous farmers of Cornwall who shaped this poem over generations – some silly songwriter like me, for instance – would have tried to get the bloody red in the same verse as the cross and the living green in the verse with the Resurrection. How much better the carol is the way it stands! Death in life, life in death.

Lustiness? What could be more “lusty” than stopping the lilting beat in the middle of each stanza to exclaim the word “holly” twice? Have you ever shouted that word before? The next time you find yourself walking through the woods wondering why life isn’t making any sense, I hope you come across a holly bush and get a chance to start the habit.

The other carol today is clearly related to the first. Maybe a fellow in Gloucestershire visited Cornwall, heard “The Holly Bears a Berry,” and tried to bring it home, but forgot parts or tried to improve it. Maybe the geographical journey went the other way. Maybe both carols stand as descendants of some forgotten Ur-carol that connected the holly and the birth of Jesus. However it was, here are the lyrics, as currently known, of “The Holly and the Ivy”:

1. The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

Chorus: Oh! The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir!

2. The holly bears a blossom,
As white as the lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our sweet Saviour.

Chorus

3. The holly bears a berry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to do us sinners good.

Chorus   

4. The holly bears a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.

Chorus

I want to go through Chesterton’s three qualities in reverse order this time. I hate “contemporary” “worship” “songs” that forget sentence structure and just start stringing spiritual sounding phrases together without any verbs. I like verbs. But I love this verbless chorus with all my heart and have since I first sang it in the third-grade Christmas concert at Maude V. Roark Elementary School in Arlington, TX. (Arlington consisted of a couple of neighborhoods of houses, the Hollandale Circle apartments – where my family lived –, Roark school, a Walmart, and Six Flags. That’s all my eight-year-old mind took in, but I honestly don’t think there was much more. I just looked up the school: it closed last year and was demolished! May the echoes of “The Holly and the Ivy” reverberate around the area forever!)

Anyway, back to the chorus of this carol. I don’t care about verbs here. I just want to sing lustilly about four beautiful things! In fact, as I sing this song, I start to wonder if these aren’t my four favorite things in the universe! The running of the deer! Why haven’t I thought to celebrate that before! Oh, glorious!

Now what the deer and the organ have to do with each other or what either has to do with a holly’s berries or blossoms, I don’t know. But the poem works its aesthetic magic as we sing it, and it is clear to our minds that all these things, incongruous at first glance, form one perfect unity of ideas to which nothing could be added, from which nothing could be taken. I used to think there was a slight imperfection in this otherwise integral organism with the mention of the organ, which didn’t exist when Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ. But Chesterton has taught me that the anachronism is part of the point: our means of celebrating and singing dwell in mystical unity with the songs of the angels and the shepherds on the Holy Night.

You know what this world needs? People need to stop “trolling” each other on social media and start trolling ancient yuletide carols!

Really Rapid Wrap-up of Rather Recent Reading

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to write a post. The biggest part of my problem has actually been the reading. I set up my yearly schedule assuming that a history book or biography will come in at around six-hundred pages. But here in the last weeks of the year, when I don’t have much leeway, I opened up this year’s volume in the Oxford History of the United States and found out it was nine-hundred pages long and then started the biography of Grant that I had chosen only to find that it was nine-hundred sixty pages long. These surprises form part of the adventure of e-reading. If I had purchased hard copies of these books, I would have known by their thickness to set aside extra days.

Anyway, I’m packing two months of reading into one post today.

I’ll begin the quick catch-up with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I reread books III and IV this year, and it finally sank in (perhaps because of something I read this year about Richardson’s Clarissa) that Spenser isn’t trying to prove anything about virtues but simply aims to present the reader with examples of each selected virtue and its opposite(s) through the interweaving stories of his knights, damsels, wizards, gods, and monsters. By a multitude of examples, we see in book III, for instance, that a life of charity is simply and obviously better than a life of hatred. I love the language and the stories, and I enjoyed reading the unfinished epic enough to read it again, but only now did I really understand this plan and purpose.

Next up, Trollope’s Castle Richmond. I have to give a bit away, but only as much of the early plot as you might find on the back cover of an edition of the book. Right off the bat, Herbert Fitzgerald becomes engaged to Clara Desmond. When the two kids get engaged at the beginning of the book, you know something is going to go very wrong. It turns out that Herbert's mother was married previously to a cad who abandoned her and then, based on extensive research, seemed to have died. But twenty years or so later, the first husband shows up, arranges a secret meeting with Sir Timothy Fitzgerald, Herbert’s father, and blackmails him. Now, within the accepted norms of the time, this situation makes for an interesting, tense plot. But, wow! Why was this normal at the time? Why is the honor of Herbert’s mother dependent on whether this creep really died or not? (A later twist that I won’t reveal shows how really arbitrary this view is.) Why is Sir Timothy so convinced that his wife is too frail even to hear the news? (Thankfully, Trollope is not convinced of that chauvinistic view at all.) And why can’t they just admit the truth to the public, thus taking away the blackmailer’s power?

Now for Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. The two volumes I've read in the Oxford History of the U. S. that seem to me to be superbly written (Battle Cry of Freedom and What Hath God Wrought) both won the Pulitzer prize for history. The two that I enjoyed without going crazy over (you’ll have to ask my wife about all the strategies she developed in dealing with my daily outpourings of enthusiasm for What Hath God Wrought) were both finalists for the prize (The Glorious Cause and Empire of Liberty). Richard White’s offering, covering 1865-1896, was not a finalist for the prize and I . . . yeah, I think I just have to say that I didn’t like it. So I guess my critical eye for good nonfiction writing, honed over decades of grading papers, is in line with the Pulitzer committee. (My wife can’t figure out why I read nine-hundred pages of a book I didn’t like.) On virtually every page, I came across a sentence whose place in the argument of its paragraph I could not discern. Many times I encountered paragraphs whose occulted relation to the chapter, I could not understand. Much of the information was interesting, but it’s presentation was such a jumble! A typical example: “The United States was still the country Mark Twain took so much pained delight in, and it produced figures hard to imagine until they had actually emerged.” Mark Twain had not been mentioned for many chapters; I don’t know what singular vision of the country Twain had; I don’t know why his delight in the country was pained; I don’t know why the personage about to be introduced, Jacob Coxey, was so hard to imagine; and I can’t conceive why the existence of eccentric people is harder to imagine in a country painfully loved by its leading author. How did the greatest publisher in the world make a deal with this guy?

Jacob Abbott’s King Alfred of England, was the only biography of Alfred the Great I could find at the time. (This isn’t the long one.) I thought I was in big trouble when this nineteenth-century book began with a declaration of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over everyone else in the world. But it eventually settled in and provided me, surprisingly, with exactly what I was looking for: a coherent telling of the life of the great king with careful notes about discrepancies in the chronicles, and arguments about what in all the tales we can believe and what truths we can infer from the parts we can’t believe. I loved seeing that Abbott conducted his most detailed inspection of variants in dealing with the story in which Alfred, hiding out from the momentarily overpowering Danes and disguised as a farm hand, is scolded by the wife of the house for burning some bread. Here’s another thing I’m never going to do (as SNL’s couple of Sammies would say): write an opera about Alfred the Great in which his time at the farm takes up all of Act II.

I end with Ron Chernow’s Grant. (This is the long one.) Both the book and the President deserve longer, more glowing reviews than I have time to give them today. About the author, I’ll just say that his biography of Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the musical and that he went on to be a very active historical adviser during the writing and development of the show. About the President (I already knew so much about him as a general, my main hope in reading this book was to learn more about his years in the White House), I’ll only say this: Voter suppression during his eight years as Chief Executive didn’t just mean requiring a literacy test or purging registration rolls or closing polling places. Thousands of black voters in the South were simply murdered (together with a few white Republicans). And Grant sent in troops to fight against these outrages when the states did nothing.

I’m going through my schedule for 2023 now and checking the length of each potentially hefty book. So I should have fewer days next fall when I have to read in panicked overdrive.