Book Awards – 2020

This year began with my son and grandkids living with us for a month. It ends with the exlibrismagnis book awards. Between those wonderful extremes, things were mostly pretty crummy. And I’m not even talking about coronavirus or the economy or political news. But. Hey! Book awards!

Mentor Who Is Always Standing in the Spirit at My Elbow: Charles Dickens
This year I read David Copperfield for the fourth time and only now noticed just how many struggling authors populate the pages. I also enjoyed the new film version of DC starring Dev Patel. (I’m still not sure whether I love or hate the postmodern ending of Dora’s story arc.) I read A Christmas Carol aloud to my family for the first time in many years. And I was introduced to some delightful farcical plays by the Great Man, one involving an astrologer who thinks he knows the day and hour at which his daughter will meet her future husband, and another involving mistaken identities in a hotel – complete with a hallway of doors hastily opened and shut by characters who many times narrowly miss seeing each other and ending the confusion. How can anything beat that? Fortunately for other authors, like John Larroquette with the Emmys, the father of David Copperfield long ago asked that he not be considered for an award at these ceremonies.

Best New Read in History: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought
I talked to everyone in my family about something or other in this wonderful history every day I was reading it and for many days afterwards. Every story – Jackson’s Bank, the Mexican War, the invention of the telegraph – was familiar, and yet Howe provided nuances that gave each a new shape.

Best Reread in History: Herodotus, The Histories, book I
Cyrus takes Croesus from the burning stake to ask him about the wisdom of Solon – and then keeps the conquered king around as a political advisor. Why is Cyrus known to us today and Croesus all but forgotten?

Best New Novel: John Galsworthy, White Monkey
The skewering of modernism and consumerism was delicious. But the best part of the book involved a subplot reminiscent of Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” involving the Bickets, who are nothing like Galsworthies.

Best Reread Novel: Frank Norris, The Octopus
TV Series Must Be Made.

Best Theology: Cyprian, Treatise 7
How to show faith and love during a pandemic!

Best Poem: C. S. Lewis, “Dungeon Grates”
No, it wasn’t Coleridge. It was Lewis. And no, it wasn’t one of his Christian poems. It was a dark brood about life as a prison. And yet there are grates . . . .

Book Most Changed on Rereading: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Having read longer versions of some of the stories, The Silmarillion now sounds very much like a summary. But still, the heartache and beauty and goodness and truth of this constructed mythology is unmatched in my experience. This time, I was especially struck by Tolkien’s wisdom in making the Noldor the tribe that rebels against the Valar. The Vanyar stay close to the angelic beings and sing to them constantly. The Teleri don’t even travel all the way to Valinor but stay offshore, just enjoying the light of the Blessed Realm shining through a gap in the mountains. But the Noldor make their home in Valinor and build a city and make jewels. Aren’t the troublemakers always the ones who make a good show but end up thinking they can improve on God’s work?

Best Play: Tom Morton, Speed the Plough
Every character, every scene is funny, and the farcical plot builds smoothly and coherently. How is this play not still known, staged, and loved?

Best Short Story: Dorothy L. Sayers, “Murder in the Morning”
I had come across Montague Egg in Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries before. But to see him and his confident, rhyming sales pitches take the center spotlight was a treat indeed. And, what do you know? Even without the intense efforts of his more famous sleuthing buddy, Monty can also solve murders!

Well, that’s it for 2020. Tomorrow, we’ll all wake up, everything will be better, and I’ll start reading the books for year 5 of my current Reading Plan. May we all have a Happy New Year (and quickly get over the Crummy Old One)!

Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2020

Most years around this time, I’ve shared some thoughts about the words to some of my favorite Christmas carols – which is to say, some of my favorite things in this world. (Click here to see posts from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018.) I thought of devoting this whole post to my strong preference this year for versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” that use the line “Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.” But why focus on muddling at this blessed time? Instead I’ll just say a few words about the O antiphons.

These seven advent antiphons seem to have been around since the time of Boethius. Perhaps from that time, but certainly starting as early as the Middle Ages, they were used to introduce the singing of the Magnificat. (All antiphons were used as introductions, endings, and even interpolations for biblical songs: primarily the psalms, but also for the canticles such as Mary’s song, the “Nunc Dimittis” of Simeon, and so on. They worked much as do the new choruses inserted into old hymns by worship composers of our time.) The seven O antiphons all begin with the word “O” as a marker of address, and are directed to Jesus, Who is called by seven names drawn from various portions of the Bible. Here are the texts:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other,
mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before Thee kings will shut their mouths,
to Thee the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
Thou openest and no one can shut;
Thou shuttest and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which Thou didst fashion from clay.

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

I’m struck this year especially by the multiple layers of meaning in so many of them – multiple meanings of the texts themselves as well as of objects depicted in the texts. In the first antiphon, traditionally sung on December 17, we recognize wisdom as the Word of God, as the order in all created things, as our teacher, and as the prudence that we can fit into our little human heads. A common casual prayer says, “From your lips to God’s ears.” This antiphon prays that what comes from God’s lips will enter our ears.

In “O Adonai,” for December 18, we acknowledge that only the One Who gives the law that convicts us of sin can redeem us from that very sin. The Root of Jesse, addressed on December 19, stands as a sign, but of what? It seems the sign means different things to different readers. It makes some shut their mouths, while it opens the mouths of others. The Key of David shows its multivalence clearly: a key both opens and shuts. But the main prayer for December 20 is for opening, because who prays to be put into prison?

Now on December 21, the darkness of the prisoners is again mentioned. So are we praying here for the ones who have not yet escaped the prison house? Or do the souls who have left prison still dwell in darkness? Yes and yes. And they need both the sun and the morning star.

On December 22, we sing to the “cornerstone making both one.” Hmm. Both what? A cornerstone marks the place where two straight lines join to determine a two-dimensional space. Perhaps God as King of the nations and God as desire of the nations represent two dimensions: truth and mercy have kissed. In any case, we who are made one out of two elements – clay and the spirit that needs saving – desire that King.

Finally, on December 23, we ask Emmanuel – “God with us” – to come to us. If God is with us already, why do we ask Him to come? Because Christ is the true light that perpetually comes into the world. We can never be done welcoming Him.

When Augustus called for his census, everyone apparently had to travel to the traditional city of their ancestors. That requirement explains why there was no room at the inn for Joseph and Mary. All the descendants of David had descended at once on tiny Bethlehem: a whole town full of frustrated heirs to the throne of Israel. So while all the folk who thought they were hot stuff slept snugly in their clean beds, the holy parents went to the barn and laid their new son in the feeding trough for the donkeys. Be a manger. Ask Emmanuel to come to you.

Long Futile Searches Through Chesterton

I’ve made several confessions of mental ineptitude recently. I’ve talked about my inability to stop boring my wife by rehearsing every detail of a history book I’m reading. I’ve admitted my susceptibility to distraction by emotions and by flies. And I’ve exposed my hitherto almost total ignorance on the number of existing sequels to one of my favorite novels.

Today I have to continue the streak by admitting a mistaken notion about one of my favorite authors that has deluded me for years. (The notion deluded me, not the author.) The story starts in 1982 at Baylor University. As a new master’s student, I eagerly checked out the library soon after my arrival in Waco. What led me to G. K. Chesterton, I don’t know. I had heard of him and had possibly read The Everlasting Man at that point. Whatever the reason may have been, in addition to books on music (I fell in love with the works of Donald Tovey at that library), I also checked out a book by GKC called Tremendous Trifles, a collection of weekly essays written for the newspaper.

I was instantly transported! These were the first British essays I had ever read, so I have to say first that I was enthralled by the form of these pieces. No direct context-setting introduction here. No outlining of three main points to be detailed in later paragraphs. Here was the classic British elliptical entrance, and I loved it. But I loved everything else about these essays as well: their clear prose, their logical twists (never actual paradoxes!), their respect for authors I treasured, and their forthright denouncement of modern vacuities that I previously had thought only started causing trouble in the 1960s. (Uggh. I only had learned what the Middle Ages were the winter before I started at Baylor, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t know anything about the history of modernism in thought.)

I read other sets of essays from the Baylor library including Alarms and Discursions. I enjoyed them so much, I actually drew a tick mark in the tables of contents next to the titles of my favorite essays. I’ve passed Waco on I-35 many times since then, and afterwards, I’ve always wished I had stopped, visited the library, and checked to see if my marks were still there. I’ve forgotten most of them and would probably have a lot of fun seeing what I thought especially noteworthy in 1982. Among the gems I do remember very well were “The Glory of Grey,” in which Chesterton praises the variety in the look of overcast days, and “On Cheese,” which began “If all the seas were bread and cheese there would be quite a lot of deforestation in my neighborhood.”

Some ten years later, I discovered that Ignatius Press was publishing the complete works of Chesterton in several volumes and that one could subscribe to the project. The subscription service never worked well, but I ended up with about twenty of the project’s thirty-odd volumes, including all of the essays from The Illustrated London News. I read sporadically in this bookshelfful of prose, but somewhere in the second Ten-Year plan, I started reading one year of essays from the ILN every year. By the end of that reading plan, though, I still hadn’t read any essays that pulled up dusty memories. For the Third Decade, I started reading two years’ worth of the newspaper columns every year (Chesterton wrote for the paper for a very, very long time!) with the vision of finally discovering and rereading “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and finishing all the essays by the end of the decade.

But this year, I looked through the table of contents of the assigned years and still saw no titles that sounded familiar. I picked up the remaining volumes of ILN pieces and searched their ToC’s. I went through all the ones I had already read to see if I had previously found “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and just forgot. But these titles were nowhere to be found. So I did some internet searching and found two disconcerting and embarrassing facts. (1) The collections I had read at Baylor were taken from the Daily News, a paper to which Chesterton contributed before he joined The Illustrated London News. (2) Ignatius Press had no plans ever to republish these earlier essays. So that’s several years, three feet of bookshelf, a lot of dollars, and a lot of reading time spent on an impossible quest. *sigh* The collections I read forty years ago are on Gutenberg, and I’ve changed my Plan to alternate between the familiar chestnuts and the remaining ILN volumes on my shelf. I’m sure I’ll have something to say in these posts about cloudy days and cheese sometime in the next few years.

While I’m confessing, I have to say it isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, and coincidentally, the other incident also involved G. K. Chesterton. A girl I knew in high school (and just after) told me that I would like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. (I think this is where I first heard of Chesterton. So for that, at least, I’m grateful to this girl.) She told me as an example that one involved a man who escaped from a prison using a rat that he trained to carry messages through the sewer opening in his cell. Several years later I finally got around to reading Father Brown. Again, I read a few stories each year for a while and then finally made a big push to the end, enjoying the stories greatly, but wondering when I would at last reach the story about the rat. But that rat never showed his head. It turns out “The Problem of Cell 13” was written by Jacques Futrelle, so naturally it had very little chance of showing up in a collection of stories by Chesterton. Alas, the misleading lead was not the only mistruth that girl told me. And that’s a story you will not see me blogging about in the next few years. Or ever.

Achieving the Grail

Everyone knows King Arthur had something to do with the Quest for the Holy Grail. Any one reading this blog probably knows that Galahad succeeded in the Quest. But what exactly did Galahad do with regard to the Grail in order to succeed? What was the goal of the Quest? To discover it in some forgotten dungeon? To bring it to Camelot? To save it from destruction? To pick it out from among a tableful of grails so Sean Connery can drink from it?

Having just finished Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur for the second time in five years, you’d think I would know the goal of the Quest. But this point isn’t really very clear to me. Malory often uses the phrase “achieving the Quest of the Holy Grail” or simply “achieving the Grail,” but he doesn’t ever explain what the phrase actually means. Part of the problem is that Malory tried to collate all the French stories on Arthur that he could find, even where they contradicted each other. For instance, at one point he reports that King Pelles is the Maimed King. And yet, when Galahad gets to Castle Corbenic, Pelles brings out another king altogether and asks Galahad to heal the grievous wounds in his thighs. So having placed odd mistakes like this one in the crucial story, it isn’t surprising that Malory didn’t give us a crystal clear picture of what the goal of the Quest for the Holy Grail actually was. Maybe the sources just couldn’t be reconciled on the issue.

One interpretation is that the goal of the knights on this Quest was simply to see the Grail. Certainly when Lancelot gets close to the Grail in Corbenic, his only desire is to lay his eyes on the sacred vessel. He pays no heed to the warnings that a sinful man should come no closer, though, and falls down in a stupor that lasts twenty-four days, one day for each year of his sinfulness. When Galahad, righteous enough to get closer than his father, reaches the Grail, he sees a vision of the Crucifixion coming out of it and hears a voice from Heaven telling him that he is witnessing some of the secrets of Jesus. So again, it seems that simply seeing the Grail (or the visions inside it) is the point of the Quest. This theory poses two problems, though. First, the Quest is begun when the Grail appears to the knights of the Round Table in Camelot. So they’ve already seen it. How is seeing it a second time more special than seeing it a first time? Second, even though it eventually takes Galahad a couple of years to find the Grail, it’s in a castle all the time that many knights are familiar with, and it’s seen every day by King Pelles and his daughter Elaine, people whom Lancelot has known for quite some time (in the case of Elaine, known in the biblical sense).

Alternatively, maybe the Quest is simply a matter of following the Grail to the home of the Maimed King (whoever he might be) so that Galahad, the only knight pure enough to perform the miracle, can heal his dolorous wounds with the blood of Christ still lingering on the spear of Longinus, the soldier who pierced his side on the cross, and end the curse on the Waste Land. But then if healing the Maimed King is the true goal, why, when the Grail appears at Arthur’s feast, do all the knights depart on the quest when they all know that Galahad is the only one worthy of handling the holy blade?

The thing is, the tale of the Holy Grail is that rare story actually made better by its plot holes. How do the knights know that the appearance of the Grail is a call to go on a Quest? They just do, and our lack of understanding only speaks to the power of the Grail and the holiness of the Quest. Why do they all leave when they know Galahad is the only one who can achieve the Quest and when they know that the mass departure means the end of the Fellowship of the Round Table? They just do, and the lack of explanation only tells us that had we been there we, too, would simply have understood that a futile search for the mysteries of Christ was worth the loss of everything that was good about Camelot. Why does Galahad take two years to find a castle the location of which is known? He just does, and the geographical mystery makes the reader feel the sacred nature of the Quest since no noble act should be done lightly and quickly.

So Malory may have left these gaps because, as in the case of the identity of the Maimed King, he tried to fit in too many contradictory sources and just left out everything that caused problems. And he might have left mysteries unsolved because he knew the story would then resonate with more awe. But I can mention a third possibility. He may well have skimped on explanation only as a matter of established tradition. Earlier versions of the Grail story have their own prominent lacuna. In some of the prior forms, King Pelles tests the worthiness of each knight who reaches the castle that houses the Holy Grail by telling the knight that he is allowed to ask one question and that it must be the right question. Only Percival, the knight who achieves the Quest in the earliest manifestations of the story, satisfies the Alex Trebek of medieval romance by coming up with the right question. We learn the questions asked by several of the knights who arrive before Percival: How did the Grail get here? Who stabbed the Maimed King? Is that really Christ’s blood on the spear? What am I supposed to do now? Is Elaine seeing anyone? If Monty Python had been in charge of the story at this early date, these lame attempts would have gotten their respective knights rightfully tossed into the canyon. I may have remembered some of those questions incorrectly. But what I haven’t forgotten is that Percival’s question isn’t revealed to us; we only read that he is told that he has asked the right question and proven himself worthy of bearing the spear and healing the Maimed King. Movie critics made a huge deal out of Bill Murray’s inaudible words to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation, as if such a thing had never been done ever before in the history of storytelling. I’m here to declare that Percival’s unreported line, tantalizingly hidden from readers eight hundred years before Sofia Coppola ever knew how to hold (or withhold) a pen, is exactly twenty-one times more interesting than Bill Murray’s whisper.

Now, when I write my own enduring and beloved version of the Arthurian legends (you can read about another of my ideas for this grand project here), I plan on restoring the test of the question. Galahad will be the one who achieves the Quest in my book; the story of Lancelot stumbling into Corbenic and of Pelles knowing that a son of Lancelot’s named Galahad is destined to heal him so that he must cast a spell on his daughter making Elaine look like Gwenevere and enabling her to entice Lancelot to beget the destined child within her is just too weird and wonderful to pass up. Twenty years and many chapters later, it won’t be enough that Galahad has been mystically led by the Holy Grail to the home he doesn’t remember, that Pelles now sees his grandson for the first time since he was a baby, that Elaine sees her son grown into the greatest knight in the world, or that Merlin has created a magical seat at the Round Table that offers in glowing golden gothic letters the message “This Is The Dude You’ve Been Waiting For” when Galahad places his pure rump in it. Pelles will still have to make sure he has the right guy by instructing Galahad to ask one question. And I will have it happen this way because I know the question Galahad asks!

Three Musketeers. I Mean, Four Musketeers. Wait. Five. Yes, Five Musketeers. Or Is It Three After All?

 OK, so here’s the way the Plan went originally:

(1) In 2017, year 1 of the current ten-year schedule, read the unabridged version of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the English translation of which was only available in shortened form in the 1970s.

(2) Year 2, 2018: Reread The Three Musketeers, one of my favorite adventure books from teen years.

(3) Year 4, 2020: Read Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, inexplicably unread by me in the forty-three years since I first read TTM. (At least I thought it was the sequel.)

(4) Year 6, 2022: Read The Man in the Iron Mask, the only other Dumas novel whose name I had routinely seen on lists or sets of classic books throughout my life (Classics Illustrated comic books, Barnes & Noble cheap editions, and so on).

In pursuit of that plan, I looked on Amazon several years ago for a Kindle copy of The Three Musketeers. They offered a set called D’Artagnan and the Musketeers: The Complete Collection for free. (Here and there the edition has a few typos from OCR, but overall this free edition works great.) Another edition is entitled The D’Artagnan Romances. Dumas wrote more books about D’Artagnan? Stuff for the Fourth Decade List! Or so I thought.

So I open the book early in 2018 to begin the adventure, flip through the table of contents, and find to my surprise that The Man in the Iron Mask is the last book in the collection. Iron Mask is a D’Artagnan book? At this point in the post, I first wrote the word “Wonderful” with three exclamation points and decided the interjection did not adequately convey my excitement. Anybody reading this blog knows the joy of starting a sequel, of finding a good novel series, of discovering a favorite character in another of the same author’s works. Add to that familiar joy the excellence of D’Artagnan as a character, the love of a teenage boy for adventure stories, and the sentimentalism of a man old enough to get senior discounts at Flapjack’s Pancake House who is reliving his youth, and you get some idea of my elation.

But then, surprise upon surprise, I look at the ToC more closely and discover that The Man in the Iron Mask is not actually a complete novel but only the third of three parts of a longer work called The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Each part of TVoB:TYL is about as long as The Three Musketeers, so that puts the total word count of The Vicomte at about 700,000: 20% longer than War and Peace, about equal to David Copperfield and Anna Karenina combined.

Now, here are four facts whose conjunction I find highly problematic:
(1) I must read The Man in the Iron Mask because I’ve wanted to since I was 10.
(2) I have to read it in 2022 because I like Plans.
(3) I have to read 460,000 words worth of other non-Plan material before I get to Iron Mask.
(4) I read slowly.

All I can do to solve this crisis is to make some time to fit the rest of the work in. I usually have time to read a handful of books outside the regular schedule each year, so I just made sure this year to save up and see how far ahead of schedule I was near the end of the year. As it turned out, I had enough time for one-third of The Vicomte. (I’ve discovered that I have no problem reading part of the way through a long novel, stopping, and picking it up a year later.)

The first part of The Vicomte of Bragelonne is called The Vicomte of Bragelonne. (Maybe I wouldn’t have been so confused about all this if Dumas had been a better titler.) The book starts ten years after the action of Twenty Years After. Dumas introduces D’Artagnan in that way that authors of sequels sometimes do when they write about the hero at first as “a mysterious man sitting in the dark,” as if the reader has any trouble identifying his favorite character. Very soon Dumas reveals that the nameless creature has a Gascon accent. No one who loves The Three Musketeers can have any doubt at this moment that he is in the presence of the fourth musketeer, Monsieur D’Artagnan.

But then a second mystery man appears! Could it be? It is! Our old friend Athos, who is, outside of Dickens, one of my top three favorite characters ever. He and D’Artagnan go separately and unbeknownst to each other on the same errand of international intrigue and almost ruin it for each other. The tears of joy are hot on my face. About 70% of the way through this first third of the giant novel (I am reminded of Monty Python identifying the lower two-thirds of the nape of the neck), dear old Porthos appears! Then Aramis! I am as giddy as Scrooge in his Christmas Past reliving the appearance of Ali Baba! This is not just a D’Artagnan book. It is a second Three Musketeers sequel! And it is enormous!

Have my surprises come to an end? Is my happiness complete? No, they have not, and, no, it is not. In googling all these confusing titles, I discover – how did I miss this before? – that director Richard Lester and the original cast of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers made a film version of Twenty Years After. Clearly Lester learned how to entitle movies from Dumas himself: his films The Three M’s and The Four M’s together tell the story (oh, so faithfully!) of the novel The Three Musketeers, and the story of Twenty Years After is presented under the title The Return of the Musketeers. Michael York as D’Artagnan? Oliver Reed as Athos? Guess what’s on the top of my Christmas list!

A Long-Awaited Completion

After reading a chapter here and a chapter there for over twenty years, I have at last completed all of William James’s Principles of Psychology. I’m sure his work has been superseded in the 130 years since its publication, but still I felt compelled to continue with it a bit each year until I finished reading it all. James teaches me to think about how I think and seems to know me and several of my weird mental habits quite well. In previous posts, I’ve commented on, among other things, James’s explanation for why I need special help with memorization and how many of the mnemonic tricks I’ve developed myself work, why I struggle to move a single muscle in order to get out of bed some mornings, why walking helps my attention-challenged mind to concentrate on a book, how (on the other hand) my habit of wool gathering while reading is a sign of extraordinary intelligence (I choose to read his observations that way, in any case), and most surprisingly why I’ve had trouble recording from old LPs with skips when I’ve tried to drop the needle at just the right moment.

James self-deprecatingly downplayed the value of his work and suggested a scattered and serpentine order of chapters for his readers. So I followed his plan and then wandered around the book over the next several years picking up all the leftover bits, as well as rereading some of the chapters I read first in the early 90s. So, odd as it seems as a plan for finishing a book with twenty-eight chapters, this year I read chapters VIII, XVII, and XXI.

In chapter VIII, “The Relation of Minds to Other Things,” the Psychologist explains, among other things, the ability of exhausted mothers to sleep soundly and yet to be awakened instantly when the baby cries, and the correspondence of the French verbs connaitre and savoir to two distinct psychological states. In the most fascinating passage of the chapter, he claims that many people have multiple consciences, only one of which has access to the mouth. His evidence comes from observations that certain people, while talking animatedly to someone in front, can be made by someone standing behind to follow simple instructions or to grasp something presented to the hand, and yet say that they don’t remember any of this posterior activity. My wife has very little attention for anything else when she’s talking on the phone. I’m going to sneak up behind her someday when she’s talking, tell her to raise her right arm, and see what happens!

In chapter XVII, “Sensation,” James brings up a point that he has made earlier and that he goes into later in the book as well (things I know from having read the book so out of order): that all sensations automatically have a spatial element. It’s his version of Kant’s tenet that space is a category or form of the mind. (Don’t ask me for a treatise on how the two authors might agree or disagree on this topic!) In a passage that I approach with delicate skepticism, he says that babies at first only have a notion that the objects they hear and see are “out there.” It takes many months and many sensations in order to learn to coordinate the “out theres” into a mental concept of a spatial framework. I don’t know. Are horses that different from humans? Foals can walk when they’re born, and they don’t, to my knowledge, constantly bump into trees as if they don’t know how close the trees are. But James hooks me again when he talks about where we locate sensations of touch. We feel the desktop under the pencil point, he says, and we sense the tap of a cane to be located on the ground, even thought the sensation is really all in our hand. I think he’s right, and I’m now convinced that all sensations carry a sense of “out there” with them.

Chapter XXI, “The Perception of Reality,” is really about belief. James says so many thought-provoking things touching on religion, patriotism, family or tribal identity, the created worlds of fiction and what others might term the suspension of disbelief, mathematics, scientific forces, and mad delusions, that I can’t do them all justice. So I’ll just highlight one point. Belief, he says, involves an emotional layer in the thought. Try saying, “The sky is blue” and then “The sky is red,” in order to begin to feel the difference. (I think I do.) Well, if belief involves an emotion, then you can come to believe proposition X by having that emotion while thinking proposition X. Thus someone can make you believe proposition X if they can instill the right emotion in you when trying to convince you of proposition X. (It all sounds a little crazy until you think about the early days of a romance and things you believe without having copious amounts of evidence.) And now, finally, the “one” point I’m trying to highlight: an idea involving an extreme call to action is often believed precisely because the call to action raises such strong emotions. In some cases, the more absurd the action called for, the easier it is to believe the associated idea.

We think we’re so rational, and reason seems so clear when we’re calmly looking at a neat syllogism. Yet our human connection to reason is so tenuous! As Pascal noted, we take pride in the nobility of our lofty thoughts, and yet what power a little fly has to paralyze our minds by simply landing on our knee. Chapter XVII of James reassured me that I have a grasp on reality. Chapter XXI told me my reality may be the result of emotional manipulation. I’m glad my temperament told me early in life to be wary of people trying to convince my mind while toying with my heart.

Even Mississippi

My poor wife! She’s had to listen to me talking about Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought every day for weeks. There’s a reason this history of the United States from 1815 to 1848 won the Pulitzer Prize. Howe, of course, documents every detail, he explains rather than just describing, he uses copious illustrative quotations, he covers daily life and art and entertainment and science and technology as well as economics and politics and war, and he does it all with elegant, vibrant prose. But the stories he tells! I’d heard these stories in school and read about them since, but not with all these details.

Let’s take the Mexican War for an example. I knew Polk wanted this war and that he wanted Texas and got a lot more. I knew that two war heroes emerged from the fighting, both of whom received the Whig nomination for President, and one of whom won. But I didn’t know that Polk secretly negotiated with a captured Santa Anna, let him go, and told him to get himself made President again and ask for a treaty. I didn’t know that Polk, a Democrat who wanted more territory for the extension of slavery, wanted to win the war decisively enough to get California out of the deal but not so decisively as to create war heroes who would beat him in the upcoming election. (Clearly, he failed in that last goal.) I didn’t know that he relieved his ambassador, Trist, before the conclusion of the treaty because he decided he wanted to dismantle the country of Mexico and take it all. I didn’t know that Trist told the Mexican government that he had been relieved and that they should take his offer anyway rather than becoming absorbed in toto. And I didn’t know that gold was discovered in Sutter’s mill the very week that these negotiations were going on, when Mexico was agreeing to sell California for a pittance.

I’ve often chuckled-slash-tilted-my-head when I’ve read or heard the part of Dr. King’s Dream speech in which he says “even the state of Mississippi.” I’m happy to know that Mississippi recently changed its state flag. Perhaps that’s a sign that Dr. King’s dream is coming a bit nearer to reality. But why did he call out that state in particular? Or maybe my question is, why was Mississippi in special need of being called out? Howe went a long way to explaining that. After large tracts of Mississippi were “bought” from the Indians, white settlers came in a rush to establish new cotton fields. Most of them made their black slaves walk to the new land, and most of these workers had to make the trek in winter, since their owners didn’t want to miss out on any of the growing season. So the white people who came to Mississippi were interested in a quick buck; they had no interest in technological investments or building cities as trade centers. As a result, Mississippi ended up a poor area with few large towns. These settlers also represented the type of slave owner that had no sense of “paternalism” toward their chattel, a sense that led some owners elsewhere in the country, say, to care a bit for the health of their possessed humans or to offer them a modicum of comfort or of education. These dynamics tend to pass from generation to generation, and thus we get Mississippi, perennially low in spending on education, perennially low in median wage, and so rife with racial injustice that Dr. King felt a need to give that state a special place in his speech.

(I see that Mississippi is 51st in the country for median wage in 2020, behind all other states and the District of Columbia. The state is now 46th in number of dollars spent per pupil on education. They’ve moved up recently. So, yes, there’s hope, even for Mississippi.)

I could go on and on. The railroads. The canals. The telegraph. The elections. Debates on internal improvements. Debates over paper money and a national bank. Jackson’s appeal as a man of “natural” talent and his supporters’ suspicion of training, education, and expertise. The rise of voluntary associations. The beginnings of abolitionism. On the other hand, Calhoun’s conversion to a states’-rights-er and the rise of the claim that slavery was a “positive good.” The rise of women’s participation in politics. Every story was a bit familiar and yet full of nuance and new detail that made sense not only of that period but of ours as well. Howe may very well soon find himself in possession of an exlibrismagnis book award to go with his Pulitzer!
 

Poetry by Young C. S. Lewis

This year’s literary itinerary included stops at two volumes of poetry by America’s favorite Anglican, C. S. Lewis. The first, Spirits in Bondage, was composed before Lewis became a Christian and includes railings against a God the young man didn’t believe in. The other is a book of poems from Lewis’s Christian years, collected by Walter Hooper, secretary to Lewis late in his life and curator of his literary estate. Having read Lewis’s own accounts of his atheistic years, I expected to enjoy the later poems more, but my expectations were wrong.

Perhaps Spirits in Bondage presents less mature work than the later book. It’s still more advanced than any poetry I might have written. Perhaps it occasionally cries out blasphemous doubts. What Christian hasn’t struggled with doubt and left the battle with the limp of Jacob? I loved these poems because here I found deep questions, stirring emotions, and vivid images expressed by the Lewis I know and love. It’s all here: the scholarship, the dry clip of twentieth-century language moistened with the elegance of earlier eras, the piercing psychological insights, the intelligent arguments, and the humility that suggests the author would gladly sit over a pint with any reader and enjoy a conversation that wouldn’t leave the lesser one embarrassed by the chasm of intellectual ability that separated the two.

The young atheist’s poems, though, also lifted me with passages about desires for and visions of moral standards, about life after death, and about eternal peace. The same collection that contains these lines:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.

also contains these:

When glory I have built in dreams
Along some fiery sunset gleams,
And my dead sin and foolishness
Grow one with Nature’s whole distress, [i.e., when I go the way of all flesh]
To perfect being I shall win,
And where I end will Life begin.

At this point in his life, the future Christian apologist sees God as an inevitable fly in the ointment of the eternal life of “perfect being” he foresees in those lines above. Consider this passage:

For in that house I know a little, silent room
Where Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom
To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast –
Yet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.

That atheist would later in his life bless the Hound of Heaven that drove him to that silent room, and he would explain that among the tools He wielded in order to “win at last” was the special sensation Lewis called “joy,” the phenomenon he first experienced as a child looking at his brother’s toy garden. His description of it in these poems is perhaps even better than his more familiar prose account in Surprised by Joy:

But only the strange power
Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour
Can build a bridge of light or sound or form
To lead you out of all this strife and storm;
When of some beauty we are grown a part
Till from its very glory’s midmost heart
Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light
Into our souls. All things are seen aright
. . . . . . .
The miracle is done
And for one little moment we are one
With the eternal stream of loveliness
That flows so calm, aloft from all distress
Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire
Making us faint with overstrong desire
To sport and swim for ever in its deep.

I don’t like the impersonal you in the fourth line of this excerpt. And I think the poem loses power by constantly affirming that the experience is something that happens to “us” rather than just describing what happens to the author. But I love reading this poem, knowing what God eventually made of these astonishing moments in this astonishing life. Lewis called the piece “Dungeon Grates,” showing that he knew that the materialistic world he moved in was only a narrow prison and that the surrounding world of the eternal stream of loveliness was a wide land of freedom. In fact, doesn’t the book’s title, Spirits in Bondage, indicate a belief in the existence of a spiritual liberty? Lewis eventually entered that liberty. May he continue to go further up and further in.

Questions for the Durants

 Will and Ariel Durant spent over forty years of their lives together traveling the world, visiting art museums, reading old books, and writing an eleven-volume history of western civilization (with one volume covering the East) that won a Pulitzer Prize. Sounds perfect to me. Some years my reading in this epic saga has been thrilling and inspiring (the high middle ages, for example). In other years, they’ve left me saddened by humanity’s evil, shown even in the pursuit of the ultimate good (religious wars during the Reformation, for example). This year, when I read the end of The Age of Louis XIV and the beginning of The Age of Voltaire, I just felt instructed. I wonder how much the cool emotional reaction simply has to do with the pandemic situation. For many years, I read Durant at lunch on welcome breaks from work; now reading is just one of several activities I engage in while sitting at home. Whatever the reason, my experience this year is more purely intellectual than usual, and I’m left with some questions for the Durants.

(1) You say that the theme of your multi-volume work is the emancipation of (European) thought, government, and social structures from superstition into a freedom of reason and conscience. Thank you, first of all, for spending so many wonderful pages on the development of religion in the west, and especially of Christianity. For people who celebrate its future humiliation, you certainly lavish elegant and fair praise on the Church of middle ages and show where reason did take its place in theological discourse. Would you be willing to concede that the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution, more than just freeing Europe from the Church, also freed the Church itself from a superstition or two and brought it to more reasonable stances?

(2) Thank you for including Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the Enlightenment rather than calling them, in typical fashion, British forerunners of a properly French movement. You say that the early eighteenth century, after the influence of these great opponents of superstition and the weakening of the Church, was the most corrupt era in English history but that it also saw the rise of public charities like the foundling hospital and the public workhouses. (And, by the way, thank you for acknowledging the charitable aspect of the workhouses in spite of the unredeemed Scrooge’s famous attitude toward them.) Might you concede that the Church, with all its flaws, must prior to this time have had a positive effect on English society by limiting drunkenness, providing honest, healthy work for unwed women, caring for the poor, and other virtuous programs, and that the charitable societies and institutions begun in this period were primarily the work of Christians? In other words, is it possible that the road from blind faith to reason does not necessarily follow a steady ascent?

(3) When I was about 20, I read Francis Schaeffer say that if I were to study David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in college, the professor would skip the part called “The Conclusion to this Book.” Several years later, I did indeed study that philosophical work, and the instructor did indeed skip the “Conclusion.” Thank you, Durants, for not only including the Conclusion in your discussion of the book but taking Hume at his word that the name of the section refers not just to its position at the end of the book but to its presentation of the main point of the argument. During the bulk of the Treatise, Hume shows the reader by logical argument that I have no reason to trust my senses and thus no reason to believe in the objective existence of the world around me, of laws or of cause and effect, or even of my own mind. But in the Conclusion, he says that he dines with a friend and plays backgammon and then cannot believe his own reasoning. Therefore, he says, reason cannot lead us to truth. I don’t think the sudden shift was just a weaselly dodge, an insincere blanket of comfort thrown over the cold bed of extreme skepticism so readers wouldn’t hate him, and I’m glad you agree. But, I ask, since Kant (not to mention all those professors Schaeffer and I knew) ignored the Conclusion, wouldn’t you say that Hume’s primary influence on philosophy lay in the bleak skeptical tail and not the sentimental dog?

I think the Durants would concede all my points. I believe that moral humanism described their own conscientious view of the Way the World Is. But I don’t think the emergence of the rational, modern world they so valued really was the theme of their lives’ work. No, as historians they were too honest to shoehorn their subject into their one story. I think their true purpose was simply to tell a sweeping tale of troubled humanity’s attempts to negotiate existence, to weep at and learn from our too frequent, execrable failures, and to celebrate our best achievements.

Trollope’s Understanding of Human Variety

OK, what am I supposed to write about when I open Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now in 2020 and read about a very rich man who decides to enter politics. At least, everyone believes Mr Augustus Melmotte is richer than Croesus, although he never actually pays for houses and the contractors who improve them. But no one believes in Mr Melmotte more than Mr Melmotte himself. When the newspapers disagree on their suspicions, the contradiction is taken by Mr Melmotte’s followers as a sign not only that the papers are lying but that their champion is as pure as snow. He makes some gestures toward blocks of Christians in order to court their vote. He’s fascinated with the leader of China. Really! What am I supposed to write about?

Well, I won’t write about it. Instead, I’ll focus on Trollope’s amazing ability to write well about all sorts and conditions of characters. Poor and rich. Female and male. Rural and Urban. Virtuous and vicious. Pious and profane. Indigent and opulent. Common and aristocratic. Somber and hilarious. Trollope portrays them all so well!

My first experiences with the great postal clerk turned novelist were all set in small towns and rural estates. The old porter in Orley Farm, the dissenting minister in The Vicar of Bullhampton, and Mr Harding, the title character in The Warden – all are such wholesome, charming characters, and their stories evoke fully dimensional, five-senses pictures of a simpler time when being a good Christian was, if not easier, at least a more straightforward proposition. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world when these characters are in the scene.

But then in the fifth number of the Barsetshire Series, Trollope introduces us to the marvelous Johnny Eames, who finds himself engaged to two girls at once. Yes, Johnny is deeply flawed, though he remains sympathetic. But my point is that this kind of scrape doesn’t happen in a rural English village; no, Johnny takes the story to London. The subsequent series, centering on the Palliser family and Parliamentary politics, takes place mostly in London, and here, life is not so straightforward. Political activity leads to financial scandal, lies in the newspapers, gun violence, bitter resentment by lonely wives, and much, much more. The salt of the earth is so hard to find on the streets of the city, the creator of the angelic Mr Harding finds himself in later books giving outright deplorable characters the starring roles at times.

It seems Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now upon returning to England after an absence of two years and noticing a decline in public morality. Instead of beginning with a good girl in the village who takes an entire novel to reconcile herself (or not!) to the idea of moving “above her station” by marrying the local baronet, Trollope starts off this tale with Lady Carbury. Lady Carbury is a widow with a definite preference for one of her two children and is also an author who flirts with newspaper editors in order to persuade them to write positive reviews of her terrible books. But Trollope is just as familiar with and faithful to this narcissist as he is with (and to) the altruistic Doctor Thorne from Barsetshire. TWWLN is Trollope’s longest novel, and in its many hundreds of pages, he finds the time to unfold two love pentagons. Pentagons. And yet our author treats the whole cornucopia of motives, intrigues, doubts, insincerities, jealousies, and deceptions involved in these complicated webs with as much understanding as he brings to the wholesome courting of a good country girl by the village vicar.

Some people wonder how Shakespeare became so proficient at portraying both royals and ruffians. (I don’t suppose it could have anything to do with being a member of a dramatic troupe that both ate at dives and performed for a certain queen?) Their doubts sometimes reach the level of claiming that the Bard’s plays actually came from the pen of Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere. Trollope’s achievement in displaying the broad spectrum of human character seems just as monumental as Shakespeare’s, and yet no one that I’m aware of has ever proposed a theory that his novels were actually written by Benjamin Disraeli.

Annie Dillard and Seeing

 If passing people say anything when they see me reading while I walk, it’s usually to ask me how I’m capable of such bizarre behavior or to tell me I have a gift or some such thing. But every once in a while, someone asks, “Why aren’t you enjoying the beautiful day?” Really?! Just outright judgment? One woman pointed to the trees above us as she asked the question; I took her gesture to mean that the proper way for civilized humans to fulfill the categorical imperative known as “enjoying the day” is to stare constantly at the leaves. I am enjoying the day when I walk. I’m out experiencing the light, the temperature, the fresh air, the exercise, and the endorphin rush. And I do look up from my book from time to time to catch a tree or a bird or a squirrel or a weed or a rock. Or a curb. After all, the idea of walking while reading for the ADD brain is that it limits the booming shouts of the periphery for attention; it doesn’t eliminate them altogether.

These days, my morning constitutional usually involves a stroll along the parkway skirting the north border of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. And I feel really good about concentrating on a book while walking along at the feet of grandeur and not, you know, guilty at all or anything. Lately, I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which – and I find I’m not alone in this at all – reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden. And when she talks about taking a stroll every morning to the creek to look at frogs and fish and insects and grass and wildflowers, I keep looking at her book while walking by my lovely mountain stream, and I suppress the irony without any difficulty at all. Because the conflict only pops up in my mind two or three times every sentence.

But then I remember that Thoreau’s heir entitled one early chapter, “Seeing,” and I have to confess that the guilt catches up to me. (I’ve never been one to run very fast from that particular huntsman.) She talks about relearning to interpret what she sees in order to catch things that ordinary people miss. I, on the other hand, don’t see any eggsacs on tree trunks; I don’t usually even see the tree trunks. She describes the experiences of people born blind who receive sight through medical procedures and then outlines her own attempts to see the flat patches of color the newly sighted report. The patches at the corner of my eye may technically seem flat, but only because they’re at the corner of my eye and not in the center of my vision. No, I spend my time walking along the woods with my nose in a book – a book that tells me to point my nose at the woods.

OK, Guilt, fair enough. But now let me present my defense, paltry though it may seem (at first). As Dillard explains it, the point is not to let the previous training of your eyes dictate what your mind engages with. She even mentions mystics who teach the ADD in all of us to acknowledge the constant distracting chatter of the senses and mind and to look “above” the noise with both active commitment and passive receptiveness. Well, while I walk, I engage with the mountains in my own way. I take in the colors of the leaves, the sound of the water rushing over rocks, and the feeling of the negative ions producing extra seratonin, and I make these the foundation above which I look with intention. And these mornings, what I see above that horizon are Dillard’s ideas.

Does Galsworthy Sell Out?

 John Galsworthy’s novels are sometimes known collectively as The Forsyte Saga. But properly, the title only applies the first three of the stories about the Forsytes and their descendants. Galsworthy wrote a trilogy of trilogies; the second he entitled A Modern Comedy, and the third, End of the Chapter. The mad plan for my third decade of planned reading includes reading one of the installments in this grand series each year for the first nine years. So, this being year 4 in the plan, I just started the second set of three: A Modern Comedy. And since I had passed to a new act in the drama, I looked up some information just to get some context, see when books 4 to 6 were written, and garner some spoilers on what generation I might read about these next three years.

I was sorry to find in multiple places that critics thought the quality of the books declines at this point. I didn’t agree; after a slow first few chapters, I enjoyed book 4, The White Monkey, as much as or more than any of the preceding offerings. I was especially surprised to find that the critics’ problem centered on the character of Soames Forsyte. It seems that the consensus – did my feeble research really uncover widespread, well recognized consensus? I wouldn’t count on it – that the consensus is that Soames changes from being loathsome to inciting our sympathy, and it appears that they condemn Galsworthy for giving up his critique of the rich and turning conservative. And, as my tenth-grade English teacher taught me to do, I have three paragraph-long responses.

First, I didn’t read the first three books as critical of the rich per se. It seems clear to me that what Galsworthy opposes is not wealth but a certain relationship to beauty. For a Forsyte, all beautiful things are nothing more than commodities. Whether the beauty in question is found in a painting, a literary movement, an author, a wife, or a daughter, the Forsytes can only see the practical side of it. Soames has some legitimate critical skills when it comes to artworks; he recognizes a beautiful painting when he sees it. But he isn’t attracted to the beauty itself; he only sees an investment, never understanding that the price only goes up if somewhere along the line someone actually likes the picture. Authors are prizes to be collected and shown off at dinner parties. A Forsyte isn’t attracted to a beautiful woman as a woman, only to her beauty as an achievement and mark of success. It’s a fascinating, tragic, and sadly common trait, and I’ve known Forsytes who weren’t particularly rich. So I reject the premise that Galsworthy abandoned his critique of wealth, because I find my stubbornly logical mind can’t think that a man can abandon a position he has never held.

Second, doesn’t finding the sympathetic in Soames just make the character more human and the author more humane? Yes, Soames became more sympathetic in The White Monkey. But I saw that as a strength, not a weakness. And I mean a strength in the art of the book, not just a strength in Soames. Isn’t Othello better as it is, with the Moor’s tragic regrets at the end, than it would be if he just killed his wife and then got hauled off in a rage? And it’s not like Soames Forsyte is suddenly a good guy. But he is a deeper and more interesting character now. I have to add that Galsworthy’s decisions challenge to me to search for the human depth in the Forsytes I know, an exercise that would be good for me.

Finally, how can any book that tells the story of the Bickets be conservative? If Galsworthy is sympathetic to Soames, he’s absolutely in love with the Bickets, and the Bickets are anything but rich. Mr Bicket works in the distribution room of a publishing house and steals books in order to help pay for his sick wife’s care. (Brilliant! The purloined volumes of poetry have only monetary value for Bicket, yet how much his attitude differs from that of a Forsyte!) He’s caught and loses his job, but he can’t bear to tell his wife that he was fired and does his best to assure her that selling balloons on a street corner actually represents an improvement in their condition. But Mrs Bicket has a secret herself. After she recovers, she makes some money by posing for a painter in, well, in a way that she doesn’t wish to admit to her husband. I won’t say more about the plot details of this story that reminded me so much of “The Gift of the Magi” except to say that its climax includes the line, “Never mind, as long as you’re fond of me.” But, again, how can Galsworthy be accused of hard-hearted conservatism when he so movingly reveals the plight of this couple destitute in everything but love?

And, by the way, are Dr. Johnson and Kipling bad writers just because they’re conservative?

In any case, that’s what I think about the idea that Galsworthy sells out around book 4. Of course, I’m not trained in literary criticism. I’m just a guy who reads to learn as well as to be entertained and who finds that John Galsworthy, in the manner of a prophet, made his world better by pointing out its faults.

From the Mouths of Babes

For the last few years, I’ve (on very sporadic occasions) been looking for good recent Christian fiction. Now, I will confess that in my mind the desire generally takes the form of a question: Where are the C. S. Lewises of today? I say I confess it because it’s a ridiculous question. Why don’t I ask where the Dante of today is? The Shakespeare of today? Writers of this caliber don’t, to borrow a phrase from a cliche about a different subject, exactly grow on trees. Part of what makes C. S. Lewis “C. S. Lewis” is that there wasn’t one before and wasn’t one afterwards. So my search as defined by that question is futile.

But if I mean that I wish to find an author who expresses a Christian view in fiction of an eloquent prose while exploring human mysteries and philosophical conundrums without claiming to answer all questions with shallowly quoted Bible verses, I have some hope of finding satisfaction. (Now, I trust that any Christian reading this ridiculously niche blog will know what I mean. But just in case, I’ll say that if one of my children were to die, I believe that the friend who cried with me would be displaying a more Christian response than the one who told me that God works all things together for good for those who love Him and then sat silently with dry eyes.) Every time I look through the internet’s tragically small number of lists of good recent Christian fiction, the recommendation that seems to come up most is Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. Now I know why.

Enger starts the book with a miracle. I’m sorry for the slow start on this post, but I have to interrupt myself for a bit more background on what I’m looking for. I believe that the Christian novelist faces an almost insurmountable hurdle merely from the definitions of the terms. How can a Christian outlook be shown without at least the implication that miracles are possible? And yet, how can a humanly contrived story be good if miracles solve all the problems? Enger’s solution is one of the two main factors that led me to love his book. By putting the miracles up front, he doesn’t escape any writer’s obligation to resolve conflicts without recourse to a deus ex machina. The miracles don’t answer any questions; they only raise them.

Reuben’s father walks on air one evening (without knowing it: his eyes are closed in prayer), but God doesn’t heal Reuben’s asthma. A miracle clears up some adult acne in one scene, but God allows an incident of sexual assault, a kidnapping, and a cold-blooded killing. Now isn’t this just like the Christian life? Every Christian eventually has to grapple with the question of why God doesn’t give us miraculous relief from the problems that seem most important to us. Why hasn’t God healed my hand? Why didn’t God make certain coworkers nicer to me? Why hasn’t God kept all our family holidays happy and argument-free?

Now I’ll tell you what I really think. I think God puts us here as an author populates a world with characters: in order to have stories to tell. Without sexual assault, kidnapping, and killing, Enger has no story to tell. And without weird fingers and colleagues who kept me sleepless at night worrying about their lawlessness and relatives who turned holiday celebrations into obligations, I would have no story worth telling, no life history that will one day bring glory to God in a way unique to my experience. Isn’t the point of my adversity not what God does to get me out of it but what I do in response to it? How else am I supposed to comfort others with the comfort I’ve experienced in the midst of hardship if I haven’t had hardship? How am I supposed to count it all joy when trials come my way if none come my way? (You see, I can quote the Bible, too. But the next time I have a trial, don’t tell me glibly to “count it all joy” or you may find yourself in need of comfort!) The structure of Enger’s story makes it very clear that Reuben’s dad’s bit of levitation isn’t anywhere near as important in the long run as what Reuben and his family do in response to bloodshed.

My second favorite aspect of the book takes much less time to explain. Enger pulls off an excellent trick in prose style. Reuben tells his story in first person and frequently says that he’s not a writer. His nine-year-old sister, Swede, he claims, is the real wordsmith, and he includes several extensive quotations from her overwrought, cliched, sing-songy epic poem about an outlaw in the Wild West. It’s hard to imitate bad writing. I’ve tried, and it always comes out too egregious. But Enger hits the bulls-eye with Swede. The poem is thoroughly entertaining and absolutely essential; it develops Swede’s character (develops it, in fact, both in her world and in ours), and Reuben’s admiration for it reveals parts of his. But it’s not good. As bad as his sister’s poem might be, though, Reuben believes he lacks her level of talent. And he isn’t totally wrong. It’s not that Reuben indulges in false modesty or has a fluency that he just can’t see in his own work; his grammatical stumbles and sometimes flat descriptions are right there on the page for us to see. And yet, in the end, this fellow who consistently can’t find the right words without seeking inspiration in a child’s purple doggerel ends up speaking powerfully. I’d say the effect is something like Huck Finn only different. But you really have to read the book to understand what I mean. I don’t have the words to describe it.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

I love J. R. R. Tolkien. And I join others similarly enamored in saying that the only problem with The Lord of the Rings is that it isn’t long enough. So I extend my deepest admiration and thanks to his son Christopher for devoting his life to working through the good professor’s mountains of notes and palimpsested drafts in order to give us more of Middle Earth. The Silmarillion is my second favorite book, so for that alone I owe Christopher Tolkien a huge debt of gratitude.

I don’t need everything he’s published in the last forty years, though; the two volumes of Lost Tales, which promised to give me a longer Silmarillion, only confused me by the variant stories and names. And I don’t begin to want to read the most recent additions to “The History of Middle Earth” providing early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. But the world is a better place after the publication of the extended version of the tragic saga of The Children of Hurin. And what Tolkien fan wouldn’t treasure the fragments of The Lost Road, in which the medieval Saxon Ælfwine discovers the Straight Road leading to the Blessed Realm (hidden from mortals after the Valar made the world round at the fall of Númenor) and writings that show the connections between Sindarin and Old English? I’m blessed just to know that Elendil = Ælfwine = Alvin = elf friend.

This month I reread the first of Christopher’s collections of fragments and drafts after The Silmarillion: the Unfinished Tales. It was published in 1991, long before Christopher started numbering his volumes with roman numerals as if they were Super Bowls or Chicago albums. It had been, as the math tells me, twenty-nine years since I read the book, and I had forgotten almost everything. The memory that stood out the most clearly was mostly inaccurate. But I was in a the bliss of Valinor all over again as I reread it.

First of the many highlights in the book, I have to mention the extended version of Gandalf’s explanation for why he sent a hobbit with dwarves to kill Smaug, and what exactly any of it had to do with defeating Sauron. The little story was Tolkien’s means of retrofitting The Hobbit, which he wrote before he had ever conceived of the importance of the ring Bilbo obtains from Gollum, let alone imagining the Lord of said Ring, into the narrative logic of the great trilogy. Did he ever mean to publish the fragment, or was it only for his own satisfaction?

The book also contains such gems as an essay on the background of the Wizards, which reveals some of the reason Radagast the Brown had so little to do with anything everyone else saw as important. There’s also a geographical description of the island of Númenor and a story about the origin of the palantiri. Confusing but fascinating were the many versions of the tale of Galadriel. Apparently, Tolkien tried late in his life to work out the details of a story in which Galadriel’s struggles with conformity were revealed. Whether she merely refused to cooperate with the elves at the end of the First Age or actually committed some perfidy, Tolkien developed the idea that she had lived for centuries afterwards with guilt and shame and self-doubt. The touching scenario, in any of the five or six versions offered, explains so much about the scene with Frodo at the scrying pool! The story of Aldarion and Erendis is beautifully melancholy, but what I remembered as the central image of Erendis staring hopelessly out to sea doesn’t happen until the last sentence of the last editorial endnote. (Women should not marry sailors – or musicians.)

But this time, for me, the best part of Unfinished Tales was the extended story of Tuor. This hero gets far fewer pages in The Silmarillion than his cousin Turin, but I think his story is even better. Tuor befriends Ulmo, the Vala of the Waters, and is led by swans to find a magic shield. He’s given a divine task of warning Turgon. He lives incognito with bandits for a while. Maybe it’s all the ways in which Tolkien draws from the Arthurian legends here that attracts me so much. Sadly, though, this Unfinished Tale ends just when Tuor gets to the hidden city of Gondolin. (The description of the hidden path’s seven successive gates is by itself enough to sell me on this truncated story.)

But, like discovering the warming appearance of Eärendil in a cold evening sky, I now find that Christopher Tolkien, still hard at work, has only two years ago published a polished version of the complete tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin. I’ll start hinting to my family now that I will be as happy as a hobbit with a full larder if I could start reading that book on December 25.

From the Baptizer of Imagination

Somewhere George MacDonald made the excellent observation that all mirrors are magic mirrors. Who hasn’t looked in one and thought of the reversed human image inside as the living being who sees you as the reflection? Or tried to imagine crossing the glass and moving into the unseen flip-flop world around the corner or through the door that limits your sight of Mirrorland? Knowing MacDonald’s line about magic mirrors, I sensed good things to come when his Lilith started with a magic mirror in the garret.

MacDonald wrote many “realistic” novels (well, as realistic as Victorian literature gets with all its coincidences and hidden identities and long-thought-dead spouses suddenly reappearing) and several fantasies. I prefer the novels but enjoy the riddles of his fantasies. And Lilith is chock-full of riddles. When Mr. Vane (I couldn’t help thinking of Bunyan when I discovered the protagonist’s name) ends up in a parallel world where ravens read books that are fake decorations in our world and where all the best people are perpetually asleep, the reader has to start thinking. Sometimes you have to think about when to stop thinking and just enjoy for a while since things get so bizarre. What could be called the weirdest riddles are the easiest to understand when reading Christian literature: people have to die to truly live and aren’t themselves until they give up themselves. If you still don’t understand those riddles (and does even the most faithful Christian truly understand?), at least you recognize that they come straight from the Savior’s parables.

It’s the other, more routine puzzles that make the story so murky. It’s the mystery land where our rules don’t work. It’s the string of elements that seem like connected symbols but without obvious connections or clear symbolic reference. For instance, Vane hears rumors of people with fairy-tale names: one is called the Cat Lady. Then he encounters a lot of cats, some of the domestic variety and some of the leopardous. (Hah! I just added a sixth member to the very select list of common-ish English words ending in -dous.) Then some of the larger cats change into princesses. But neither of them is the Cat Lady. I think. Other shrouded vales of mystery abound. The reader slowly meets the various characters he hears about early on and learns their names, but still without knowing who’s good and who’s bad. The characters eventually seem to fall into two camps, each of which calls the other bad. But how to decide whether Mr. Vane is choosing correctly between them or asking the right questions? It’s like a blown-up version of the two-doors-liar-and-truthteller riddle.

And yet it’s fun to be confused by this book. Today I thought about sewing while reading Lilith. My mind often wanders while reading; I’m the kind of reader who can suddenly realize that the words of a whole page have each passed under my eyes without any meaning registering on my mind because I’ve been thinking of something else the whole time. William James calls the habit a mark of genius, and I choose to agree. Usually the mental sidetracks are inspired directly by the topics in the book. But the sewing thread (see what I did there with the word “thread”?) came up because of the way I have to read Lilith. Like a backstitch (I don’t really know anything about sewing; I think it’s a backstitch), I have to go forward a bit and then back to search for what I missed, then forward again until I realize I’ve gone too far again and have to scramble back to tighten up that hem.  

One thing stood out clear as crystal right away, though. The land behind the mirror’s glass has no rivers, no ponds, and no tears. But once Lilith – Adam’s first wife according to the Talmud, and the monarch of the fairy land in MacDonald’s book – has learned to cry, the waters cascading from her eyes meet waters springing up from below the surface, and rivers start to flow. MacDonald gets to make a pretty point about remorse and repentance with this fantastic image. But the moment also struck me as the clear inspiration for Lewis’s coming of spring in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a moment brought about at the end of the reign of the White Witch, who, says the narrator, is descended from Lilith, the first wife of Adam.

Glory! Glory, Hallelujah!

Elsewhere in these posts I’ve praised Mark Noll for his excellent work in tracing the history of Christianity in the American colonies and the early United States. Many Christians I’ve known in my life believe that this country was founded as a Christian nation, that God willed and established its theocratic constitution, and that any deviation from that foundation is a theological, moral, legal, and civic violation. They might also say that my disagreement with them indicates my lesser faith or spirituality. Some of the “history” books they recommended to me (many years ago – I’ve quit having the discussion with them since then) made arguments like this: since Columbus’s primary motive in traveling was to Christianize this continent, since he was absolutely consistent in his Christian treatment of the natives, and since his mission so obviously legally binds all future development of white civilization in North America, this country is a Christian theocracy, and anyone who sees it differently is absolutely wrong. To say that each of those premises is highly problematic would be an understatement. But where was the actual history that refutes such nonsense? Real historians are, alas!, so rarely interested in the subject of religion, it took me a long time to find the answer. The Search for Christian America by Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden proved to be the book I was looking for. Three years ago, I read even more on the subject in Noll’s America’s God. Among the scores of head-turning points Noll makes in that masterpiece is the one whose logic is very straightforward once one looks at it: if the United States was from 1776 a Christian nation, then why did so many Christians in the early 1800s try to make it a Christian nation?

This month I read Steven E. Woodworth’s While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers. I had seen the book highly praised both in the circle of Christian scholarship and by general historians of the Civil War. So my expectations were high. Wow! Did I hit a giant road bump when I read early on that “Americans” (all of them, apparently) saw their country as Christian from the time of Winthrop’s city on a hill until the Civil War. There’s the old, weird notion again. Woodworth himself knows better, because he admits that less than half of the population at the time of the Civil War was Christian, but he never addresses that contradiction. Another disappointing problem plagued the first two or three chapters. Woodworth wanted to tell the gospel in describing the most prominent religion among the soldiers, but his overzealousness leads him (1) to ignore some minority religious views (Catholicism, Judaism, etc.), which I would love to have read more about, and (2) to judge the truth of various forms of Protestantism. He says, for instance, that many fell into the “errors” of Calvinism on “subtle” issues. Does Woodworth really believe he has all the subtle doctrines straight, dogmas Christians have debated without conclusion for five hundred years, and that his audience will just accept his positions on the issues as authoritative? I was so discouraged at first!

But then he got to the main section of the book, which presented a chronological history of the war and chapters delving more deeply into special topics, and I suddenly saw why everyone else liked the book so much. The chapters on southern Christians’ justification of their cause, on the work and dubious benefit of army chaplains, and on the good and universally admired work of the missionaries of the Christian Commission are very good. The abundance of quotations from letters and diaries suits his purpose and theme perfectly. The chapter on the revival in 1862 and 1863 is especially good. Many Christians feared the army experience would coarsen men and lower moral standards, and many young Christians wrote home to their mothers and wives about the disturbances of profanity and the temptations to playing cards. But religious interest among these men roughing it for four years away from the softening influences of their nineteenth-century women actually grew, and revivals took place spontaneously throughout the northern and southern armies.

Ronald White presents a tantalizing hint of the spiritual lives of the Civil War armies in Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, a book about Lincoln’s second inaugural address that is so good, its author almost convinces me that it is history’s greatest speech. But after reading Woodworth’s book, I see a deep new dimension to the fierce combatants who, as Lincoln said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God.

I Can’t Believe It

I was going to start this post by saying, “I can’t believe I’m actually writing about Edgar Rice Burroughs in a blog purportedly about Great Literature.” Then I did a quick search in the list of authors in the right column of this page and found that a new opening was warranted. So now I officially begin the post by saying this: “I can’t believe I’m posting about Edgar Rice Burroughs for the second time.” But a couple of things about Tarzan the Terrible have brought me to it.

At this moment in our history, I felt especially guilty about reading a book about Africa by a racist. As a white guy, I may only get myself into trouble here, but I’ll venture to say that Burroughs’s racism isn’t a hate-filled strain that, for instance, sees the native Africans as worthy victims of Tarzan’s homicidal rage; the ape-man’s creator lets Germans play that role. No, his racism is a more paternalistic type that says, “Bless their hearts, they do surprisingly well given that they have so little to work with.” Burroughs probably found justification for his views in Darwin; he talks about evolution frequently to explain differences in character (he loves calling criminals evolutionary reversions). In any case, I’m happy to say that the racist ideas totally surprised me when I started rereading the Tarzan books. Maybe because Burroughs is such a terrible scientist, they just didn’t make sense to me when I was 12 and so didn’t lodge in my memory.

But while I didn’t remember the racism in Tarzan the Terrible, I did remember it as perhaps the best of the Tarzan books I read as an adolescent. Tarzan’s obviously an appealing character to begin with; he’s like a superhero with a secret identity except that both identities have superpowers. Like all a young adult’s favorite literary heroes, Tarzan discovers a secret that makes him special and gives him strength: the boy raised by apes is also an English lord. So any book where Tarzan has to negotiate both worlds is interesting, and in Tarzan the Terrible, the ape-man uses all his jungle skills to survive and rescue Jane so he can give her the peaceful domestic life she wants and deserves. (I should say that Jane can throw a punch and doesn’t always need saving!)

Tarzan the Terrible also scores points for using one of Burroughs’s favorite devices: an isolated world where human evolution has taken a unique path. In this case, the people have prehensile tails and opposable big toes and use these appendages to travel networks of pegs on cliff walls. To which the twelve-year-old in me says, “COOOOOL!” But even more, this world comes complete with a map and (drum roll . . . ) a language. So of course a kid is going to love it: reading the book brings not only entertainment but a sense of accomplishment. “I know a new language now! I know how to say ho-don (white man), waz-don (black man), ja-don (lion man), jad-ben-lul (the big lake), jad-bal-lul (the golden lake), jad-bal-ja (the golden lion), jad-pele-ul-jad-ben-otho (the valley of the great god), and other useful, everyday phrases.” Naturally I responded by determining to construct my own language and to write a Tarzan book entirely in that language. I started with an alphabet, which went quickly. But as soon as I got to whole words, I suddenly realized this was more than a two-day job. I had the same feeling I got when I was five twenty minutes after starting my tunnel to China in the back yard.

I look at Tarzan the Terrible’s language now as nothing more than a clumsy glossary. I readily admit that I still had fun relearning the glossary! But, really now. The syntax is exactly the same as English? [Time travel from later in the year: I have just finished Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She says she believed when she was a child that foreign languages were like codes, so that chapeau doesn’t just mean the piece of clothing that goes on the head but actually stands for the English word hat. That’s exactly what Burroughs does!] This weak stub of a language doesn’t even have a single verb. But Burroughs does hint at one juicy detail of the language of Pal-ul-don, and it’s the one thing I remembered the clearest from fifty years ago. In a tantalizing footnote, Burroughs reports that he simplified the grammar of the “actual” language in presenting it to his readers and gave just one example of its redacted eccentricity. The plural of a noun, he explains, is formed by repeating the initial consonant of a word. If kor means “gorge,” then “gorges” is indicated in this language as k-kor. D-don = men, j-ja = lions, etc.

This footnote lit a warm spark in me. When I started learning Spanish in school, I was especially attracted to the places where its syntax and grammar differed from English. (The plural of sombrero is sombreros? Boring! Me gusta for “I like”? Fantastic!) I even started to think of English constructions as weird. Tolkien fanned that linguistic flame, and I’m upset that he didn’t leave more detailed notes about the grammar of Sindarin and Quenya.

I still toy with my own devised language but haven’t made it very far. Every few years I think about it again, but then I can't make any significant progress because I’m too invested in making things as different from English as possible. If, for instance, I’m deciding how to say in my language, “I fell in the river,” I want “river” to be the subject. But then I don’t know what to do with the verb. One thing I do know: I will never use this language to write a Tarzan book.

Dr. Johnson and Coronavirus

Many years ago, my students all told me about the latest, absolutely true conspiracy theory: that playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz revealed connections so tight as to prove positively that Roger Waters had this bizarre format of hybrid entertainment in mind when he put the album together. It did no good to tell these kids that there wasn’t even such a thing as a VCR in 1973 and that one couldn’t just decide to watch a movie privately and then do it. The best evidence I saw for this very unlikely theory was the iconic prism on the cover of the album, its white light’s explosion into color being reminiscent of the film changing from sepia tone to color after Dorothy lands in Oz. I have a great deal I could say about this weird topic, but since this is a blog about literature, not film or music, I’ll just briefly note that the correspondences between film and album seemed wholly random and extremely interpretive to me when I tried it. (The scarecrow on the yellow brick road = the lunatic on the grass???) The explanation for what seemed convincing to America’s youth that year: both the movie and the music are full of iconic, suggestive images, and some coincidences are bound to occur. Since my students refused to believe me (heavens to murgatroyd, how dare they!), I proved it by watching Casablanca while listening to Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and finding ten times as many links, most of them really clear and a couple of them downright eerie. I wrote up my findings and got them published by a nationally syndicated column that appeared in hundreds of newspapers. Totally true.

What in the world do movies and Elton John have to do with James Boswell and Samuel Johnson going out for steak in eighteenth-century London? Well, when you read a book about people who converse on everything imaginable, you’re bound to come across commentary on situations relevant to your current circumstances. The coincidences are bound to happen even if they’re unpredictable in their detail. I might never have foreseen when I picked the book up this year that Dr. Johnson would tell me about living through a pandemic in the twenty-first century, but he did.

After that long tale, here finally is the diminutive dog. Or rather pair of miniature dogs. First is a note from 1772.

When one of his friends [says Boswell of his illustrious mentor] endeavoured to maintain that a country gentleman might contrive to pass his life very agreeably, “Sir (said he [i.e. Dr. Johnson],) you cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time, contriving not to have tedious hours.” This observation, however, is equally applicable to gentlemen who live in cities, and are of no profession.

Now I am a man permitted to lay out my own time. Between retirement and quarantine and a wife with many of her own interests, I have almost complete charge of my daily schedule. And I have many interests and hobbies and projects to occupy the spaces on that schedule. And yet . . . . And yet I cannot arrange away the tedious hours. I fiddle with things to put off the activity I’m most excited about. I read five pages and then get up to get a drink before I read another half dozen. I’ve had trouble finding the energy to write this post (which goes a long way to explaining the circuitous exordium). Oh, yes. Dr. Johnson knew the days of coronavirus.

And now the second little wagged dog, from 1774. The Scotsman Boswell writes: “I mentioned [to Dr. Johnson] a peculiar satisfaction which I experienced in celebrating the festival of Easter in St. Paul's cathedral; that to my fancy it appeared like going up to Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover.” Dr. Johnson responds in a letter:

You must remember, that your image of worshipping once a year in a certain place, in imitation of the Jews, is but a comparison; and simile non est idem; if the annual resort to Jerusalem was a duty to the Jews, it was a duty because it was commanded; and you have no such command, therefore no such duty. It may be dangerous to receive too readily, and indulge too fondly, opinions, from which, perhaps, no pious mind is wholly disengaged, of local sanctity and local devotion. . . . I am now writing, and you, when you read this, are reading under the Eye of Omnipresence.

Do I know that God readily accepts the worship I offer him from my home? Yes. Do I know that the CDC, the rector of my church, and my own sense of safe behavior tell me to worship at home? Again, yes. And yet I would have liked to celebrate Easter at my church with my friends and would have felt that worship to be more genuine. We are beings of soul and body offering spiritual worship in phsyical places and with material means. Like Spider-man with one web on a standing building and another web on a runaway train, we strain to stay connected to both worlds and can’t help but make mistakes and then make more mistakes in wondering about the first mistakes. (Don’t ask me whether the runaway train represents spirit or body!)

OK, here’s my much better theory of a piece of recent art being inspired by The Wizard of Oz. In First Man, as Armstrong and Aldrin open the door of the LEM to reveal the surface of the new world they’ve just landed on, the grainy handheld cinematography gives way to steady, crystalline high-def images. You can’t tell me the filmmakers weren’t thinking of the changing film technique as Dorothy opens the door of Auntie Em’s cabin. If you’re having trouble scheduling away the tedious hours, may I recommend watching both movies?

Because They Are Hard

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Was President Kennedy a fan of Isaac Asimov? One of Asimov’s constant themes in his robot-and-empire-and-Foundation series is that going into space is good for humanity only if they do it the hard way. Is there an easy way, you ask? Well, in Asimov’s world there is: use robots to do it. They prepare the place, do all the construction, make the new home cushy. Then humans show up and just enjoy and turn soft and live long lives of four-hundred self-absorbed years. It’s a good thing the robots know better, and they arrange to make space travel difficult.

Retirement definitely highlights the question whether hard work is necessary for our well-being. Not that things have been particularly easy since I retired what with death and divorce among those close to me and illness and injury and quarantining affecting me directly. (How do I get through my reading assignments without being able to sit in a Wendy’s or a Chipotle for lunch most days?!) But money isn’t a problem. And I don’t have to deal with students complaining to the Dean when I give them a well-deserved D or problems with administrators who change the D to a C (or an A if they’re especially brazen or a P if they’re particularly cowardly). These are good things, right? In Heaven, there are no complaints about D’s and in fact no D’s awarded. And Heaven is the goal. Right?

And yet I find myself setting myself difficult tasks. I try to program a game just beyond my coding abilities. I try to learn some Japanese and some calculus. I work on a fourth ten-year reading plan. I’m not necessarily succeeding at these tasks, but I think I feel better failing at something hard than I would succeeding at something easy, like reading nothing but Agatha Christie (a definite temptation). Maybe I need to program a robot who will tell me when to do something difficult and when to do something easy. How hard could that be?

Through ripping tales of adventure and intrigue and philosophical debate among robots and humans, Asimov will get you thinking about such things as the human need for difficulty, what privacy means, whether emotions are merely mechanical, why beings with free will tend to act with statistical regularity, and other worthy conundrums. If you want to read his books in in-world chronological order (Asimov wrote three main series of novels and then spent the last years of his life writing books to fill in the gaps and tie the series together), here’s the list. Even if you don’t want to read them in order, here’s the list. I’ve arranged the titles into ten divisions for, I don’t know, maybe a ten-year reading plan.

(1) The End of Eternity, The Complete Robot (includes the I, Robot stories and more)
(2) Caves of Steel, Naked Sun
(3) Robots of Dawn
(4) Robots and Empire
(5) Stars Like Dust, Currents of Space, Pebble in the Sky
(6) Prelude to Foundation
(7) Forward the Foundation, Foundation
(8) Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation
(9) Foundation’s Edge
(10) Foundation and Earth
 

Grant’s Fine Lines of Thought

Our current President makes all Presidential biographies about himself. He challenges and flouts so many of the customs and norms of the American President, I can’t help thinking about him when I read about any other chief executive. Each episode in our history provides a study by contrast.

A week ago, I finished Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which I have since seen cited twice (once on television). Numerous sources ascribe to it the phrase “a masterpiece of the genre.” Now, Grant said very little about his Presidency in his memoirs. Perhaps he wanted to dwell on events that went better for him, like failed businesses. But in his observations about the country, he frequently provides an interesting contrast to the successor who currently occupies the Oval Office.

For instance, Forty-Five likes to talk about traitors. Well, Grant dealt with actual traitors: people who violated their oaths of office and military duty and took up arms against their country. Grant never lets the Confederacy have its way with semantics; he always refers to its “government” in quotation marks. But what does a republic do when it achieves victory over a rebellious army? How does a government "for the people" treat 5.5 million of those people who for four years have been loyal to a rebellious “government” once that rebellion has been quelled? Grant believed that the victory he did so much to bring about made immediate compatriots of these former enemies and abettors to enemies. He couldn’t rejoice over Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. “I felt like anything,” he says, “rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

In this remarkable observation, Grant walks straightly (and soberly!) along a fine line in which he both praises his fellow Americans for traits he can admire and blames them for taking up an execrable cause. (And by the way, Grant says from the beginning of his account of the war that that inexcusable cause was slavery. No side-stepping the elephant and talking about states’ rights. Grant, having been sentient during the 1850s knew the cause of the Civil War.) I believe he was right in everything that I know he said and felt and did at that surrender, but it took subtlety of thinking, the ability to see both sides of an argument in the best light possible and then to choose on principles, the wisdom to understand that a human being is a mixed bag. I know these are difficult virtues to achieve, but they are too shockingly rare these days. No one can find praise for those who, they believe, take up poor causes. And no one upholding any cause can hear critique of that cause without taking it as a personal attack. We no longer understand the difference between opponents and enemies.

Grant has only a few words to say about his disastrous predecessor as President, Andrew Johnson, and those are to say that Johnson did the wrong thing in trying to punish fellow Americans from the South for having taken up the wrong cause. Grant virtually said, “We need a uniter, not a divider.” I’ve heard too many times in the last twenty years – from friends variously embracing all portions of the political spectrum – that they wish they didn’t live in the same country with those who oppose them politically. This attitude seems to me so completely un-American that I’m tempted to agree with it just long enough to get rid of those who hold it. But, trying not to be a walking oxymoron, I don’t. Part of our country’s ideal is precisely the ability to live in community with people who differ from us politically. We take recourse to the ballot box, we challenge what we see as injustice through the courts, we lift our voices in the street, we post signs in our yard. But we don’t shoot our political rivals, we don’t jail our political rivals, we don’t force our political rivals to leave the country, and we don’t abandon the nation to our political rivals. Yes, it’s an ideal very, very imperfectly realized. But the ideal says that we must shake our rival’s hand (when not in the midst of a pandemic!) and vow to remember that we agree on something really quite astonishing and weird in the history of this weird, old world: laws and debate and free elections cut way down on killing. So now let’s apply those laws fairly, debate honestly, and make our elections equally accessible to all eligible voters.

I started off thinking I would talk about Grant’s other fine lines of subtle thought, but I’ve ranted on the first one for too long. Science fiction next. That couldn’t possibly get political, right?