Book Awards – 2023

One year ago today, I said that I was especially looking forward to Hugo’s Nôtre-Dame de Paris (about the hunchback), poetry and essays of Matthew Arnold, and a return to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Did these books reward or disappoint? Find out as you read the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2023!

Author of My Favorite Book: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. This year, I gave myself four Dickens assignments. The first task was the second half of Dickens’s works for the stage, including the play that served in his head as the prototype for my favorite book. They were all fine, but it was clear that these pieces were meant to be performed by the Great Man himself and his friends. I also read many of the non-Christmas short stories and have to say that Dickens was consistently best in short fiction when treating of ghosts. In my latest reading of Hard Times, I discovered that imagining the members of Monty Python playing the (morally) worst characters made this most somber of the novels much more enjoyable. Finally, I reread for perhaps the seventh time (in addition to having read some exquisite chapters more like twenty times) the book that taught me what good fiction looks like. A Tale of Two Cities always inspires me and never disappoints, no matter what cynical critics say about Charles and Lucie.

Best New Read in History: David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear
First let me make honorable mention of Will and Ariel Durant, whose history of western civilization took a big turn upwards this year now that I’m away from their favorite historical incidents, about which they have praise too effusive for my taste. (By contrast, their effusive praise for Mozart this year was not and could never have been too much for my taste.) Now for the winner: I learned many things about the Depression and World War II from Kennedy, but the education all started with a good argument that Herbert Hoover was actually relatively progressive and kept the economic disaster from being, if you can imagine it, even worse. He also confirmed for me, after forty years, my mom’s assertion that people in rural Missouri (like herself) were so poor, they didn’t notice any change during the Depression.

Best New Read in Fiction: Victor Hugo, Nôtre-Dame de Paris
The year started with Verne’s wonderful Children of Captain Grant, which kept me enthralled for most of two weeks and made me think fondly of my childhood crush on Hayley Mills (who enthralled me for far more than two weeks). But Hugo’s magnificent novel in which a hunchback becomes a hero and a cathedral becomes a character made me laugh out loud with joy more than once on my morning walks and stuck in my thoughts all the way to December. (Note from Jan. 1, 2024: Rereading this paragraph in the morning, I realize that my reference to Hayley Mills was far too opaque. Miss Mills starred in, among other movies, Disney’s In Search of the Castaways, which was based on The Children of Captain Grant.)

Most Disappointing Read: Matthew Arnold, Poetry
I found Arnold’s language beautiful and his encouragement to live our best, cultured lives uplifting until it became clear that he wanted to educate the masses and give them a chance to live their best lives only because he saw others’ ignorance merely as an annoying impediment to his personal comfort.

Best Poetry: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, books V and VI
I got a little uncomfortable at times with the allegorical hints that people in the working classes shouldn’t get ideas of moving up, but I may have read implications that weren’t really lying between Spenser's lines. Otherwise, the knights demonstrating through their magical adventures the virtues of Justice and Courtesy were encouraging, and the constantly lilting meter made the lessons eminently palatable.

Best New Read in Drama: Molière, Festin de pierre
I knew the basic story of the Stone Guest from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Molière’s original is hilarious and morally instructive all at the same time.

Best New Read in Religion: Leo the Great, Christmas Sermons
Leo strongly urges that Christmas is not a celebration of the sun and tells worshipers not to turn and bow to the sun as they come into church. ( I guess that was still a problem in the fifth century!) And yet, while he tells people not to worship creation, he doesn’t tell Christians to despise creation either: “And so, dearly beloved, we do not bid or advise you to despise God’s works or to think there is anything opposed to your Faith in what the good God has made good, but to use every kind of creature and the whole furniture of this world reasonably and moderately.” May we all so do.

Best Offroading: William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, chapters 6-14
Book that Caused Me to Shake My Head the Most Often: same as above
OK, I’m cheating with this award. Shirer’s “first draft of history” wasn’t on this year’s reading list, but it is on next year’s. It’s so long, though, I knew that I had to get a running start, so I read five chapters last year, nine chapters this year. These horrible events happened in the civilized world in my parents’ lifetimes. Chilling, Just chilling. Politics should be discussed face-to-face, not in a blog about literature, so I won’t say too much, only that more than once I read about a horrid scheme of Himmler’s right around the time I read of a similar policy being enacted this year in a certain southeastern state. Oh, OK, I’ll go ahead and get controversial and say that I highly disapprove of inciting violence in an attempt to take national power and then lying about it. You know: the way Hitler did.

Best Reread: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
As I said last year when Pride and Prejudice won this award, maybe this is just a given.

Let's see. What 2024 reading am I most anticipating? Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Grimms' Tales, a biography of Gen. Longstreet, Charles Williams's Many Dimensions (an old favorite), the rest of Shirer's Third Reich, and, of course, Dickens (Great Expectations and Pickwick Papers this year). To find out how these hopes pan out, stay tuned. 

May your New Year be filled with an abundance of good books that entertain, teach, and inspire you!

Coherent yet Mind-Boggling

I read the Mabinogion this month in preparation for starting Stephen Lawhead’s Arthurian books this coming year. The Mabinogion is a loose collection of fantasy and adventure stories (now defined as that set of stories translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in the nineteenth century) from twelfth-century Wales. Some of the stories mention King Arthur, whose historical inspiration may well have lived there, and a few of them make their way into Arthurian legend through adaptation by Chrétien de Troyes and other medieval French authors.

From descriptions I had read, I was expecting something haphazard and broken like lists of knights and short sketches or fragments of stories: the stuff that will be read only by diehard Arthurian connoisseurs who want to read all the background legends. I couldn’t have been more wrong. These are full-fledged stories, each with a beginning, middle, and end, full of romance, adventure, intrigue, and unexplained magic (people with no hitherto discernible supernatural traits, for instance, suddenly changing form, as if mystical metamorphosis is simply a common fact of life). Here’s a sample summary of one story, “The Lady of the Fountain”:

King Arthur takes a nap while Sir Kynon tells a story about himself: he sets out to find proof that he is the best knight. On his journey, a man at a castle tells him to look for a giant black man with one foot and one eye in the middle of his forehead. The giant, having been found, tells Kynon to look for a fountain with a bowl and a slab. He finds the fountain, fills the bowl and pours it on the slab. Thunder claps, and hailstones fall in such a violent way as to strip all the trees and kill all the animals. An earl rides out, knocks Kynon off his horse (who has been protected by his shield), scolds Kynon for killing all his livestock, and leads the horse away. Sir Owain decides to try copying this adventure. He has the same experience, complete with ELE hailstorm, but Owain kills the earl when he comes out to scold him. Riding toward the now-dead earl’s castle, he is trapped in the portcullis. A girl gives him a ring of invisibility to wear. When the guards come to raise the gate and nab their prisoner, Owain slips out unseen and makes his way to the girl’s room where he says he is in love with the lady he has just seen in the courtyard. The girl says the woman is the widow, and she then goes to tell the widow that if she knows what's good for her, she'll marry a knight from Arthur's court; of course she means Owain. Owain marries the widow and stays three years, "protecting the fountain" (but actually just extorting travelers), then asks to leave for three months in order to visit with Arthur. But Owain stays at Caerlleon (Arthur’s Welsh home) for three years, after which his wife comes and throws her wedding ring at him. Duly chastised, Owain returns to his earldom and his wife. After this he has a couple other adventures that tidy up loose ends, including convincing the black giant that he has been nothing but a tyrant terrifying travelers; the giant decides to be nice!

Now that story is tightly constructed and perfectly coherent, and yet it’s mind-boggling. In reading stories of errant knights for some sixty years now, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that in order to answer any given whim or question that pops into one’s head, one gets on a horse and travels aimlessly, certain that the answer will eventually present itself somewhere along the winding path. And I’ve grown used to the idea that a knight looking for the key place in his quest, even though it’s located in physical space in a perfectly normal way, simply cannot locate it unless he finds someone who knows someone who knows how to find the place. But what kind of magic is this that causes water poured on a slab to bring on the Hailstorm of Death? And if you have the Hailstorm of Death Slab on your land, why do you wait until some clueless knight pours water on it instead of guarding it as if your livestock had some value? Why, given that there’s a girl who gives you a magic ring and invites you to her room for safety, do you opt for the woman you glimpse for a second along the way? And, given that you have opted for the woman in the courtyard, why in the world do you tell the girl? How exactly does Owain protect the fountain? And how does he go from robber baron to moral police over other robber barons?

My first response to all these questions is simply to say, “I love it!” The combination of these surprising choices and this weird magic makes for a fantasy world that is just extremely attractive to me. I could read about this world for the rest of my life (which, of course, is exactly what I plan to do by continuing to enjoy various versions of the Matter of Britain).

But my second response is that the weirdness of the “The Lady of the Fountain” isn’t really all that weird. The Arthurian world is, mutatis mutandis, our world. (I’m so pleased with myself that I found an opportunity to use that Latin phrase!) I often find that answers remain stubbornly hidden when I sit still looking for them in my mind, and then just come to me unbidden when I’m on the move. And I usually can’t complete the most obvious task the first time without guidance from others. I haven’t seen a bowl of water cause a lethal storm, but I have known a plane ticket found in a glove box to cause a marital separation, and I’ve known two poorly chosen words in a joke to cause a separation between good friends. And who can predict when Cupid’s arrow will strike or how a rejected lover will react?

I’m so glad I was wrong about the Mabinogion!

No Thoroughfare

First off, the complete works of an author as prolific as Dickens, all compiled into a single file, can be enough to crash a Kindle or Kindle app! But how else am I going to read Dickens’s plays? I actually do have a hard copy, but they’re in a little edition from the nineteenth century; the red leather is so brittle and flaky, patches of rust-colored dust cover clothes, furniture, and floor after even a short glance inside. So finicky Kindle version it is.

Secondly (second off?), these complete works collections available for $0.99 are fairly unreliable. Dickens wrote a play called No Thoroughfare in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, and then teamed with his friend again to write a prose version of the story, but my “complete” works file contains only the prose version and yet groups it with the plays. (Who knows? Maybe the dramatic version is in there somewhere under the wrong title and grouped with speeches or poetry.)

Thirdly, I thought I had read the prose No Thoroughfare previously, but, as I went through it in recent days, I didn’t remember any of the story and was quite surprised to find that the “story” is actually longer than any of Dickens’s Christmas books. Maybe I just forgot it all, but maybe I hadn’t really read it before. In any case, I thought I was going to enjoy another one-sitting play but ended up reading a novella that took about three days.

I don’t know if I would recommend No Thoroughfare to anyone other than someone like me who just enjoys reading everything Dickens wrote. Its story of an adopted orphan trying to find his birth mother may resonate with readers today. But the book also contains a character who implicitly trusts the owner of a business because, well, you know, because entrepreneurs are naturally honest and hard-working. I believe Dickens when he says that people like this or the Cheerybles from Nicholas Nickleby truly existed and were known by him personally, but I understand that this kind of character doesn’t sit well with a culture that has lived through Bernie Madoff. It also involves a melodramatic fight scene on an Alpine cliff above a melting ice promontory and not just one or two but three wild Dickensian coincidences that are all essential to the workings of the plot. (One character continues to say, “The world is small,” as if the author knew he had to sell even nineteenth-century readers on the possibility of these freakish conjunctions.) Altogether, it’s just not what most people want to read now.

But I liked it.

Read Your Notes!

My wife and I love to watch The Amazing Race. In this show, a ten-time Emmy winner for Best Competition Series, teams travel around the globe and perform challenges that might involve learning a location’s traditional dance, participating in a local business like food delivery or denture fitting (!), or matching portraits of historic figures with living models appropriately dressed and coifed. It’s an inspiring travelogue with the added bonus of human interest and competition.

But occasionally during an episode, the viewer’s almost continuous sense of awe is interrupted by frustration as a team heads out on a challenge without picking up the required equipment or hails a tuk-tuk when the clue explicitly says to proceed on foot to the next destination. The most frequently uttered phrase on the lips of the Amazing Race afficionado: READ YOUR CLUE!

I recently finished Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion for the third time in my life. I remembered (incorrectly, it turns out) not understanding it before and amazed myself at how much I was able to absorb in this book by the most abstruse of my favorite authors. But today I read what I wrote eleven years ago after my previous encounter with the book. I appeared to understand even more then and recorded some very smart, very helpful observations. Why didn’t I review what I had written before rereading the book? Chapter 15 would have made so much more sense!

Hmmm. Am I going to share any of those smart, helpful ideas with you, reader? No. Today’s post is only about admitting my intellectual frailty and publicly scolding myself to READ YOUR NOTES!

Suffering

Well, we’ve finished our move. I lost the book I was going to read during the five days it took to travel across the country. Then we had unpacking to do. Then I hurt my back unpacking. So I’ve struggled in the last month to keep up even with reading – which gets interesting on heavy muscle relaxers! Finding opportunities to write for the blog has been almost impossible. It’s actually the end of November as I write this post, but I’m predating it to line up a little better with what I actually read when.

A few years ago while I was visiting the site of the tragedy that made for the bloodiest day in the history of the United States, a park ranger at Antietam National Battlefield recommended Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering. Prof. Faust discusses many aspects of death during and after the Civil War: what soldiers thought of impending death, how they brought themselves to kill, what burials were like, how families mourned, how people on the home front struggled to “realize” (we might say “assimilate”) the death of a beloved father, husband, brother, or son, and how the government took on the duty of accounting for every deceased veteran.

Most interesting to me was the notion of the “good death” so prevalent then in the United States – north and south. Families depended on a loved one’s last words in order to get assurance of the dearly departed’s destiny in the afterlife. Being willing to die, expressing faith, and telling the family that they will all one day reunite on the other side were all good signs that brought endless comfort to the mourning family. Young men were so eager to provide their families with this assurance, they often wrote down their own “last” words before a battle after having a feeling they considered a premonition of death. Following the sudden death of a soldier who had not prepared in this way, comrades often did the best they could to write to the homes of their late messmates with whatever information they had that could be taken as indication of a good death.

So much death, so well written about; the book was bound to be profoundly moving. Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. Ranger!

(And could you tell the interpretive ranger at Andrew Johnson National Historic Site that Johnson is consistently ranked by historians near the bottom among other Presidents for a good reason, and that he is not to be ranked “somewhere in the middle”? The President who allowed Black Codes to flourish and virtual slavery to return after the Civil War is certainly not the equal of Coolidge, who balanced the budget after the First World War; Jackson, who kept the country together during Calhoun’s treacherous nullification movement; or Grant, who took down the first Klan.)

Moving Wrap-Up

You thought I was promising that this post would be moving? That I was going to jerk tears from your eyes by announcing the wrap-up of the blog? Or the wrap-up of my life?

Nope. It’s a moving post in that we’ve been packing and moving from one end of the country to the other. I’ve barely kept up with my book plan.  Note-taking has mostly fallen by the wayside, and I certainly haven’t had time to arrange my thoughts into a form suitable for public consumption. But I didn’t want to let October go by without a post. So here’s a quick summary of the last six weeks or so.

Because Bruce Schulman keeps putting off the completion of his volume of the Oxford History of the United States, I had to go out of chronological order this year. I jumped from 1896 to 1939 and read David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. This history of the Great Depression and World War II was excellent: one of the best offerings of the series. If I want to nitpick, I’d say that writing about a period with two “all-time biggest” events left Kennedy little time to talk about movies, literature, radio, schools, sports, etc. I do remember one interesting but brief note about clothing: that is, that skirts themselves became more interesting and brief during the war because of cloth shortages.

On one level, you could say that Trollope’s The American Senator is really about the English characters in the book. The Senator is only there to learn English customs, gather evidence to prove that American customs are superior in every way, and to give a speech in England trying to show its residents how misguided they are in all things. As an observer, he acts outside the main plot(s) and provides a bit of comic relief. But then Trollope did name the book for the Senator. Maybe the author was in a critical mood and thought his compatriots needed a fresh perspective. I also recently read three short stories by Trollope, all involving less-than-proficient writers submitting their creations to magazine editors. Funny and touching.

I loved reading C. S. Lewis’s letters, but I can’t recall many details right now. I know he told several people writing for advice on living as a Christian that they shouldn’t worry at all if their feelings aren’t in line. I’ll try to ignore my feelings about forgetting so much.

I wouldn’t call Zane Grey’s Lone Star Ranger great literature. I think I could call it an exciting adventure if it were cut down by about 20%. But I like Grey’s books because he’s taught me interesting things about the views of Americans at that time concerning the way men and women should act out their gender roles in order to keep America strong. Having just read a detailed account of the Depression, I can’t agree with Grey that city life is an easy life that makes people weak. But I’m in sympathy with him when he says that living in the rugged conditions of the West develops strength. I’m moving to a city in the West. I wonder if Grey would approve.

Maid in Waiting, Maid in Wanting

Maid in Waiting, the seventh novel of Galsworthy’s Forsyte Chronicles, actually turns the focus from the Forsytes onto the Charwells (pronounced and spelled throughout the book “Cherrell”). At first the book felt really different from the earlier installments in the series, not only because of the turnover in the roster of characters, but because I didn’t see the pointed critique of modernity I’ve come to expect from Galsworthy. The dialog actually reminded me more of Dostoevsky, with the characters persistently discussing reasons for and against belief in God. Most characters remain close to a position maintaining that God exists but that, if the horrid reality of insanity is any indication, He must lack all mercy and active care for humanity. This anxious crisis of faith is a central feature of modernity rather than a critique.

But on the second to last day of reading, I got it. The critique begins with portrayals of duty. Living with what appears to be a remote, uncaring God, the Cherrells find daily motivation in a family sense of duty. The protagonist, a young woman named Dinny, helps out a neighbor whose husband has just come home after years in an insane asylum, even putting herself at great risk of bodily harm to do so. Several uncles help Dinny’s brother, who has been accused of murdering a man in Bolivia and stands to be extradited. And Uncle Hilary, a clergyman introduced in the previous novel, constantly helps out poor members of his parish, often serving as a character witness in the trials that come their way so regularly.

But is duty actually duty, a moral imperative based on foundational truth? Or is it a case of humanity doing not God’s work but humankind’s work, taking up God’s slack, so to speak, and attempting at least to do something where He appears to do nothing? Dinny’s brother, Hubert, says that his generation has “seen through things,” by which he means “religion and marriage and treaties . . . and ideals of every kind.” But, he continues, if everyone just tries to grab pleasure, then by competing everyone will make certain that no one gets any pleasure. “All institutions . . . are simply forms of consideration for others necessary to secure consideration for self.” So people have to keep to the traditions; Hubert thinks the traditions merely help people achieve their own selfish ends, but some characters say the respect for tradition is important “for decency’s sake.” Maybe the cynical Hubert is right. But if decency is indispensable, and dutiful service to tradition is all that keeps decency propped up, the habits of the virtuous landed gentry like the Cherrells show the way humanity must live.

And yet Dinny’s dutiful actions don’t actually seem instrumental to achieving her desired ends (even if those ends are met through other channels, perhaps because of Galsworthy’s own traditional sense of the need for closure in a plot). Sir Lawrence says, “Has it ever struck you, Dinny, that history is nothing but the story of how people have taken things into their own hands, and got themselves or others into and out of trouble over it?” There it is. The modern assumption, that God either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care, in conjunction with an inescapable sense of right and wrong, leaves virtuous people depending on their own human resources to fix everything. Wipe the dust off your hands, Modernity; you’ve got the universe figured out! Except . . . except that history shows that these all-too-human attempts to right all wrongs ultimately fail.

A final, unrelated note. At one point in Maid in Waiting, a missing person is found to have fallen down a well. Galsworthy here calls on tradition in another way by copying very closely a scene from Dickens’s Hard Times!

Almost Exactly What I Was Hoping For

I've wanted to read a biography of the oddity known as "Stonewall" Jackson for a long time. S. C. Gwynne's Rebel Yell was almost exactly what I was hoping for in that it examined a fascinating and historically significant man with a bewildering combination of strong characteristics. I got a gripping story told in abundant detail: here was the tactical brilliance, the Christian piety, the weird quirks, the strict discipline, the hypochondria, the slave-owning, the stated tenderness toward blacks, and the burning desire for the Confederacy to stage a no-prisoners war of city-razing and slaughter. And it was all told in clear and elegant prose.

But although I enjoyed this long walk down a weird, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying path, I did find some irritating stones in my shoe now and then.

Gwynne ends his book with some quotations of praise for Jackson from northerners, including Union soldiers who fought against him. Yeah, that's weird. Americans didn't wake up after V-J day to find newspapers touting the courage of Admiral Yamamoto. We didn't read after Osama bin Laden was killed about his brilliance. And yet Union newspapers, in the days just after Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's death, praised him for his military genius, his bravery, and his Christian and moral convictions. That's super-interesting, and I'm glad Gwynne reported it. But I also felt, after having read the whole book, that the author included this material partly to justify his own admiration for Jackson.

OK, admiring the admirable in your flawed subject is just fine for a biographer. But, as I see it, Gwynne stepped over a line a few times. Consider his statement that Jackson never broke a law. First of all, Gwynne himself tells elsewhere of Jackson breaking the law in holding a Sunday School for slaves. But secondly, can we really say that a person can join a movement that declares its political independence from its mother country and then seize a military installation of that mother country without breaking a law? Isn't the point of rebellion that the rebels have decided they have to break the law and fight to the point that they won't be punished for breaking that law? We must indeed all hang together or most assuredly we shall hang separately, right?

One of the northern admirers Gwynne quotes near the end said he hoped Jackson's admirable traits could be laid against his betrayal of his country. That's an interesting sentiment to ponder. But it's the only hint in the whole book that Jackson's stand with the seceded states was a betrayal. Gwynne says that, at the crucial moment in April 1865, Jackson saw his loyalty to his state as higher than that to the United States. Come on! Surely at this point in our history, any responsible biography of Jackson (or of any of several of his similarly situated colleagues) needs to point out, at least, that as an officer in the United States Army, he had taken a solemn oath to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, to bear allegiance to her, and to obey the President. We shouldn't have to expect to read an author telling us with a yawn, "Oh well, he just decided that it was more important to be an enemy than to fulfill his oath to defend the United States from enemies."

But this attitude of treating treason as too insignificant to mention only came to the surface briefly a handful of times. Aside from that, this book was exactly what I was hoping for.

Half of The Brothers Karamazov

It’s hard to know what to write about this most profound of novels. What could I possibly say that could add anything to what Dostoevsky has said? If you don’t read the book, anything I try to tell you wouldn’t matter. If you do read it, you don’t need me to point out to you that Ivan’s question about children’s suffering is devastating or that Alyosha’s summary life of his mentor in the monastery is inspirational. You’d notice without any help from me! So I’ll just say a couple of brief things about my reading experience.

I had difficulty deciding on a translation, but I decided to go with Constance Garnett, partly because her translation is cheap on Kindle, but also because I had read that she keeps Russian turns of phrase more than others. The book is strange enough to read with its Russian customs and Russian outlook; adding Russian conversational cadences only makes it weirder. But part of the reason for reading the book is to appreciate the perspective of the author in his time and place, so I prefer this experience to one in which the dialog has been translated so all the nineteenth-century Russians sound like twenty-first-century Americans. I know one way or another I’m reading Russian characters speaking English. But in my head, I want them to speak English with a Russian accent.

Mortimer Adler divided up The Brothers Karamazov over two years in the original reading plan included with the Britannica Great Works set. So that’s the way I read it the first time. I had never done such a thing before, but I was amazed at how well I picked up the characters when taking up the book again after several months. I started thinking about Star Wars stories appearing in installments, about Dickens books originally coming out in serial form over the course of twenty months, and about Cervantes publishing the conclusion to Don Quixote only after a hiatus of ten-years, and it occurred to me that splitting up the reading of a book over years isn’t as odd as it seems at first. Maybe I’m just jealous of my wife, who can sit down and read a whole book in a day. Anyway, I’ve split Karamazov up again. I just read half of it this month and then put it aside for the next book on this year’s list. I’ll finish it sometime early-ish next year.

Speaking of Being Expected to Know History . . .

In my last post, I noted that Winston Churchill expects readers of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples already to know the outline of the history he recounts so that he can spend most of his effort putting his own spin on it. I opened my next book only to find this dynamic even more applicable: Charles Williams clearly expects his readers to know the history of Christendom and of Europe before taking on his The Descent of the Dove.

The passage that most clearly shows this assumption comes near the end, where Williams introduces one important personage, without naming him, simply as "the most famous man in all Europe," a man who cried "Ecrasez l'Infame." Now, I recognized Voltaire in the description. But I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t read about Voltaire and this motto only last year in the Durants' history. Did any of my readers recognize the man by the description?

Williams is hard to read in other ways as well. He had a peculiar view of the Church and of the world and described them constantly in terms of “coinherence and exchange.” And he wrote as if we all knew what he meant by those terms. (Blogspot’s editor doesn’t know the word “coinherence”!) And he has a fondness for identifying biblical personages (including the Persons of the Trinity) by foreign forms of their names. Page 1 of The Descent of the Dove includes this intriguing passage: “The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the descent of the Paraclete.” I like it, but after reading two-hundred pages of this kind of writing, I can’t say I truly understood more than about 75% of it.

What I did understand, though, I found inspirational – the last point especially. Belief is not exactly knowledge, and the Church flirts with pride and hatred when she treats people who don’t believe in Christ as if they don’t know as much as she does. (And every denomination within the Church runs the same dangers with regard to their attitudes towards Christians who don’t believe exactly the same.) What Christendom needs in order to be again “close to the Descent of the Dove,” he says, is to “feel intensely within itself the three strange energies which we call contrition and humility and doctrine.” I am called to be humble and contrite, as are all other Christians; what makes me think that we are not called corporately to feel, express, and act on communal humility and contrition?

By the way, why don’t Americans know about the most famous man in eighteenth-century Europe and his crusade? Is it that we – No, let me correct that. Is it that the historians of our grandparents’ time decided that the most important fact about eighteenth-century Europe is that this country made a break from it, so that we Americans wouldn’t have to worry about the need for Voltaire’s crusade? Or do we think that we don’t need to learn about Europe’s past problems because we have found the proper solution to all Europe’s problems in our missiles and aircraft carriers?

*sigh* We will be close to the Descent of the Dove only when we feel contrition and humility.

Studying History or Studying Churchill?

I’ve spent so many decades trying to learn history by reading history books! I’ve come to see that the goal of my lifetime project is a bit like trying to learn what other countries are like by reading travel books. But no travel book is a substitute for travel. No book about Italy can tell you as much about the land and its people as a visit to a to a grocery store in an Italian town. I’ll go farther: no picture of the Eiffel Tower can show you what it’s really like as much as an hour sipping coffee at a café on the sidewalks of Paris with the Tower in view.

Without a time machine, though, I can’t actually visit history to “really” learn it. But I’ve come to realize that by reading not books about history but books from history, I come as close as possible to visiting history. Spread out over this third decade of planned reading, I’ve been rereading Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. I first read the multi-volume work forty years ago trying to learn the history of England (learning the history of other English-speaking nations was less urgent to me at the time) and was frustrated by how unclear some of it was. On my second experience with the series, the books are clearer, but only because I know better the history that the Great Briton narrates.

So now I understand Churchill better. Because Churchill had a reason for telling this history. Writing in England in the 1930s, he could assume that his audience had learned the salient facts in school. (O tempora! O mores!) His purpose was not to restate those facts but to synthesize them and teach a lesson about the greatness of that history of slowly growing justice and to convince his country and, more importantly, the United States that they had to join forces in order to stop the evils spreading across Europe and Asia. So of course he’s going to rush past philosophies and social movements, perhaps mentioning some of them but never explaining them, and concentrate on battles. It’s not a history; it’s a view of history. Since I need no convincing about the need for my country to help stop Hitler, what I get most out of these books is Churchill’s view.

And what a view! Britain took India “almost by mistake” and never intended to create an empire? Wow! The Battle of New Orleans created the “evil” myth that the War of 1812 had been a second war of independence? This from the leader of a country that once impressed our citizens while at sea and expected those Americans to fight Britain’s war. Maybe Churchill wanted to show that Americans and Britons worked “together” to stop Napoleon and hoped the story would inspire us to work together again to stop another tyrant trying to take over Europe?

Despite howlers like these, I’m enjoying the books and I’m glad I’m rereading them. In some ways they’re worse now (my naive younger self may have believed him forty years ago when he said India came under British rule by an innocent series of mistakes), but in other ways they’re better, too, and somehow better because they’re sometimes worse, because now my purpose is to learn Churchill, virtues and flaws together. Anyway, here’s the moral of my story: read novels and poetry and philosophy and theology from England’s history in order to learn the history. Or read a dry textbook. Then read Churchill.

Tremendous Trifles

You can read here and here about my tortuous forty-year journey to find the Chesterton articles I so wanted to reread. Today, I’ll just quickly get into it and say that over the last week, I reread one of the books I originally read during my happy time at Baylor University, and that in that book I came across the passage that made me fall in love with Chesterton forever.

Tremendous Trifles is a wonderful title! The alliterative moniker might rightly be seen to refer to the newspaper columns reprinted within. But GKC explains in an introduction that the title actually refers to the commonplace things all around us, heavy with significance, but ignored in our jaded familiarity. A piece of chalk when used to draw a simple figure on a piece of brown paper becomes an angelic herald proclaiming goodness and purity in the world, and the very ground in southern England, overlooked and downtrodden, becomes a piece of chalk! The forgotten remains of train tickets in Chesterton’s pockets become philosophical treatises. A toy theatre provides – literally – a small window on the world, and every child who has looked through a telescope made of a loose fist knows how a small window makes the world look magical. A toy seller becomes Father Christmas.

But Chesterton makes some important observations about . . . well . . . um . . . about observation itself. For instance, he says we must never give up the amateur jury, because justice should rightly depend on convincing people for whom courts and procedures and crimes are novelties, not jaded professionals who see these things everyday and don’t understand them as unusual. Later he claims that the destination of every trip is home and that the only way to appreciate home is to go away from it and come back; otherwise you can't see what is ordinary in your home but foreign in other places.

In a piece about watching prisoners coming off a train, Chesterton offers a sane definition of a sane person: one who can have tragedy in the heart and comedy in the head. But an even saner remark comes a little later in a complaint about sentimentalists who say torture is a relic of barbarism. Weak, wrong-headed attack! The plough, the fishing net, the horn, and civilization itself are relics of barbarism. The problem with torture, he says, is not that it is a relic of barbarism. “In actuality it is simply a relic of sin.” I’d almost forgotten the moment and the effect, but reading that sentence again after forty years, ending with that powerful three-letter word, brought it back in all its details. I even remember the exact place I was standing in our Waco student apartment when I fell in love.

Recommendations

It’s hard for me to fit in a new book. Once upon a time, I had so many books to read, I made a ten-year schedule. Then another. And then another. Right now I’m honing my fourth ten-year reading plan. When someone recommends a book, when am I supposed to read it? Often I just don’t.

But what if one of the books I read makes a recommendation? Lewis’s Surprised by Joy has added several things to my list. (In fact, I had to remind myself after rereading it the last time that this spiritual and intellectual autobiography was the inspiration for my whole reading project thirty years ago.) Seven years ago I read a history of Victorian literature that showed me there was a whole lot more to the era than Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot; I devote a large portion of my Fourth Decade plan to Ainsworth, Kingsley, Oliphant, Gaskell, and others of the time.

Boswell and Dr. Johnson, of course, incessantly talk about literature, much of which I want to add somewhere in the plan. A couple of times in Boswell’s classic, he recommends Edward Young’s Night Thoughts – recommends it highly. He calls it “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced” and says that its lessons are “solemnly and poetically displayed in such imagery and language, as cannot fail to exalt, animate, and soothe the truly pious.” I noted his effusive praise during my second ten years of planned reading and put the book on my third yen-year plan. And this month, its time finally came round!

I had a lot of trouble understanding the opaque grammar of this lengthy poem at first. After many pages I came to realize that Latin influenced Young constantly. Many sentences and clauses leave the verb “is” implied. Many compound sentences using the same verb in each clause omit it from the first clause (where a more modern elegant form would omit it from the second clause). With these two notes in mind, the poem became much clearer, and reading became smoother.

Young had lost his wife, step-daughter, and step-son-in-law and wrote Night Thoughts in answer to an infidel called “Lorenzo” in defense of faith in the light of tragic death. He offers views of death as nothing to be feared, proofs of immortality, expositions of Christian faith in a future state of both individual self and the world, an answer to the person who wants to be a “worldly” man, and much more. Altogether, Night Thoughts offers a thorough philosophical guide to the Christian who wants to think rightly about ultimate concerns.

I noticed in the poem three passages that certainly must have influenced Lewis: one gives an argument of immortality from desire (all the physical desires of my soul – hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc. – find their object existing in the real world, so I may believe, based on my desire for ultimate happiness, that that object also actually exists), another outlines the benefits of pain, and the last, in a survey of the planets, asks, “And had your Eden an abstemious Eve?”

Fortunately, as regards my future reading plans, Night Thoughts is not like Lewis in one key feature. Where Lewis continually makes reference to books I want to read (or reread), Young recommends only one book: the Bible.

Shaksper

In my continued determination to write briefly after some computer troubles this month, I head this post with one of the shortest of the Bard’s signature spellings.

I don’t remember what made me add 3 Henry VI to my reading list this year, but I’m glad I did. This one is slow and tediously expositional at first. But once Richard of York (the future Richard III) gets involved, it becomes good and almost essential as a prequel to the really good play. And, yeah, Richard III is really good. This is one of the ones I plan to read every few years. I sometimes wonder ahead of time if it’s really worth the time to revisit some old dusty drama yet again. But Richard III never disappoints. Was the real Richard this evil? Did he really order the deaths of the two princes in the Tower? I don’t know. Let’s just say the play is not about the historical personage but is about the character that Shakespeare made out of the historical personage. However near or far the two lie in relation to one another, Shakespeare’s Richard is horrifyingly fascinating.

Hamlet never disappoints, either. The poor prince berates himself so much through the first four acts for trying to accomplish his deadly mission of revenge through nothing more than clever talk and “mad” wordplay. Then at the end of Act IV, after he sees Fortinbras head off to Poland ready to kill, he shouts, “O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” The reader might think the line shows that Hamlet is now truly determined to obey his ghostly father’s commands. And yet he still does nothing until he finds that he has been stabbed with a poisoned dagger and has only a few minutes to live. Anyone who believes faith is dead without works and yet lives with unwilling flesh can’t help but find awe in the mirror Hamlet holds up.

Short

My apologies for the time between the last post and now. I had computer troubles. *uggh* Note to self: Next time go to James at TCS IT first!

So to help catch up on reporting about my reading, I’ll keep it brief today with some short notes about Dickens’s short fiction. My plan was to read everything under the rubric “Other [i.e. non-Christmas] Short Fiction” in a giant Kindle collection that claims to present the complete works of Dickens. Some stories included in this section were excerpts from the novels, but, having read all the novels several times each, I skipped those stories. “A Thousand and One Humbugs” is a satirical send-up of the Parliament of the day. Not knowing enough about enough of the politicians involved, I gave it up after a few pages.

I did, though, read and thoroughly enjoy “Hunted Down,” the best story in the section. I can hardly give any details at all without unfairly spoiling the story since it’s a murder mystery. But I can say that an insurance adjuster serves as the detective, that a disguise in the plot made me think that Conan Doyle must have known and enjoyed this story, and that the point about the validity of first impressions rings true although it may have been surprising at the time.

“George Silverman’s Explanation” is told by a man raised by oppressive parents very strict in their misguided version of Christianity. Upon hearing Jesus say, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ ” one might begin to obey by reading this excellent and heart-breaking story.

Who Was the Emperor?

OK. First off, I want to make this post the only thing you will ever read about the Holy Roman Empire that doesn’t tell you what Voltaire said.

Secondly, I have to admit that I gave up on a book, something I’ve only done a handful of times in all my life. It’s not like Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe is a classic of great literature, so I don’t feel too guilty, just a little lopsided in a mild-OCD way. Wilson claims up front that he didn’t arrange his 600-page book chronologically but thematically, with a timeline at the end. So when he says that such-and-such an event hadn’t happened since Otto II without having told the reader about Otto II or provided any contextual dates, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Could any reader know?

I’d rather have a story with an appendix of interpretation than a thematically ordered history with an appendix of dates. Of course, I’d really rather have something like a narrative with explanation and interpretation folded in all along the way. But it seems that’s too much to hope for in a history of the HRE. The other longish book I saw on Amazon claimed the same thematically driven organization. So I just settled for the Very Short Introduction to . . .  from the Oxford series (this one by Joachim Whaley). These little guides are also not anything like great literature, but every one I’ve tried has done a good job of laying down a foundation of understanding about some difficult topic.

The big question on this topic is always, “What was the Holy Roman Empire?” I’ve come to the oxymoronically temporary conclusion that the question is perennial because it’s simply the wrong question. The better question is, “Who was the Holy Roman Emperor, and what did he think the Empire was?” The Empire was at least an ideal whose chance of realization definitely started in 800 and definitely ended in 1806, but apart from that, it doesn’t seem to have been much of anything. There were many years in the Empire’s history in which no emperor was crowned. The Emperor never had a central army or the ability to raise taxes. Starting in the fourteenth century, the electorate was codified as one set of seven (later eight, and then nine) German leaders who wanted the prestige and stability of an emperor. So the Emperor represented seven out of millions, but to what extent did this elected figurehead preside over and unify the territories of these princes, not to speak of the hundred-fifty or so towns, duchies, and bishoprics that got no vote? At times over the years, some groups of towns and territories within the Empire, most famously the Hanseatic League, formed mutual defense and economic pacts, leaving other parts of the Empire out. The Empire fought a civil war in the seventeenth century that lasted thirty years. In the eighteenth century, various pieces of the kingdom sided at different times with France against “the Empire” and yet remained within the Empire. And in Napoleon’s time, several of the Empire’s territories voted to become part of France.

Now what kind of country would the United States be if, say, West Virginia had been able to form an alliance with ISIS and yet stay within the U.S.? What would Italy be if Tuscany and Umbria could form their own army and make a trade pact that excluded Venezia? What would Canada be if Alberta could just vote to become a part of Mexico and then be exactly that, without any further ado?

So the story of the HRE, I think, is really a story of people. It’s the story of Otto I, the first German Emperor; of Henry IV, who made obeisance to the Pope in the snow at Canossa; of Frederick II, the stupor mundi (wonder of the world); of Charles IV, who wrote the Golden Bull enshrining the election process; of Charles V, who cared more about Spain and American colonies than he did about German lands and left his brother to try to handle the Reformation; and of Charles VI, who really only cared about Austria. These fascinating people all had ideas about what the Empire was and tried to make it what they wanted it to be. But if generations of potters continually work at the wheel trying to make and reshape the same vase, is it ever really a vase?

Better Times for Hard Times

Around some twenty-five years ago, I used to see the occasional student walking around campus carrying a copy of Hard Times. Some course at the U of Oklahoma – maybe in English, but more probably in history – required it, and I used to feel sorry for the members of this captive audience since they were, as I saw it, asked to become acquainted with my favorite author through my least favorite of his novels.

The book has its advantages for academia. It’s the shortest of the complete novels (the unfinished Edwin Drood might be a touch smaller), making it much easier to fit into a curriculum than, say, Bleak House. And it gives clear presentations of two important movements in nineteenth-century British history: utilitarianism and labor unions.

But it has its drawbacks, as well. For one thing, the language of the characters is unusually difficult to read, even for Dickens. Either they’re trying to speak philosophically, or they’re trying to outdo one another in piling up politenesses at the beginning of every simple sentence (I hope I do not show too much presumption when I say to one of your upbringing that, and so on), or they’re speaking in a mid-England dialect. Young people reading a novel look to quotation marks for relief; they won’t be happy when that punctuation introduces language actually more complex than that of the narration.

The problems with the language make it difficult for the average young reader of today. But not for me. The feature that bothers me most is that Hard Times is just so dreary! While others keep an eye out for quotation marks, I journey through the sad, bitter parts of a Dickens novel in anticipation of the happy home (Aunt Betsey’s, for instance) or the lovable clown (Captain Cuttle or Dick Swiveller). An element such as these serves as a pole star, centering the story as it whirls around in seeming chaos and providing the moral compass for the reader trying to find the way to rest and resolution. Hard Times has Sissy Jupe, but we hardly get to know her as we do Oliver or David or Pip or Nell in other novels. Sissy has a happy ending, but the narration only reports it rather than portraying it, and we don’t learn any of the important details. Dickens was just too focused in Hard Times, as perhaps the short form allowed him to be, on the villains and the conflicts and the social dysfunctions to give the reader a periodic haven of rest.

I will say, though, that, at least in the chapters before Stephen Blackpool shows up, I read the novel this time with a new enjoyment as I imagined the mind-above-heart father and the ludicrously utilitarian schoolmaster being played by Eric Idle and Graham Chapman. The first fifty pages or so, read in this way, struck me as darkly comic, and I actually laughed several times. I would declare these passages deliciously biting satire, except that the introduction in my Oxford edition assures me that many schools at the time were run in this very way and that Dickens is here doing more recounting than exaggerating.

I still feel sorry for any student who is required to read Hard Times, but at least I’ve found a strategy for myself.

In Jeopardy!

I generally don’t expect people to know that the author of Gargantua is Rabelais. If I were to eat out for lunch today and then go to the Visitor Center in Great Smoky Mountain NP and then to the grocery store, I would guess that not one person out of the hundreds I see would know this information. I wouldn’t expect my neighbors to know it. I wouldn’t have expected any of my students to know it.

But I expect Jeopardy! contestants to know it. And yet in an episode a couple of weeks ago, one clue sought the author of Gargantua, and not one buzzer sounded. I’ll lower my expectations even lower: I don’t expect any Jeopardy! contestants to have read this comic masterpiece. But I expect them to be able to come up with, for instance, any author and title in my Britannica Great Books set. At Father Guido Sarducci’s university, “I say ‘economics,’ you say-a ‘supply and-a demand.’ ” Shouldn’t the traditional canon be in the heads of national-class quizzers and trivia enthusiasts at that level at least? I say ‘Gargantua’ and you say ‘Rabelais’?

It gets even worse. This past week brought the clue that went something like this: “So-and-so tried founding an ideal community based on this work by Plato.”

Crickets.

Honestly?! If you’re going to know about one ancient classic other than the Bible, isn’t it going to be Plato’s Republic? Okay, maybe the Odyssey, but you get my point. The next day, players were asked to identify the literary character who said something about Mr Darcy. Total silence again. Isn’t Pride and Prejudice our culture’s favorite nineteenth-century novel?

Jeopardy! contestants also don’t seem to know the Beatles or Carole King. But that’s a rant for a different blog.

The Spirit of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (i.e. “The Hunchback”) is exactly the kind of book that my reading plan is for. I do read books from the last hundred-thirty years; I just generally like older books better. And the schedule of reading, among other purposes, gets me to make a pact with myself to read a lot of classics I haven’t read before in the hopes of finding new favorites. Notre-Dame is now a favorite. I’ve been walking around laughing while I read it because it’s so good. But, then, I am – you know – a little weird.

If you hear anyone talking about Victor Hugo (admittedly, the chances of this oddity occurring on any given day are quite slim), it will be someone complaining about how long Les Miserables is, especially the chapter on the sewers of Paris. For me that book is not too long at all, and I love the chapter about the sewers! But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone talking about Notre-Dame, the novel. The hunchback seems to have settled into our culture’s consciousness as a character that lives in various films, not on the pages of a book.

The movies, even Disney’s, seem to follow the plot of the novel fairly closely. But there’s so much more than plot here! After all, the book itself is not named for the hunchback, a character with a story that unfolds, but for the church itself, which, with little change from day to day, stands monumentally telling its own stories. Here is a long chapter not about sewers but about the history of the architecture of the church, displaying as it does the Romanesque, medieval, and Renaissance styles in its successive layers. Then there’s a long chapter on what a person alive in 1482 would see from one of the towers of the cathedral. Who needs plot with chapters like these? Next is an amazing chapter about Quasimodo’s activities in the church. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to describe it better than my lame attribution of the adjective “amazing.” But, like poetry that can’t be translated, Victor’s beautiful language is so much a part of the description of the man who lives, breathes, and moves as the spirit of the church, I think the chapter can’t be described; it can only be read. So put it on your ten-year reading plan!

Okay, in a bizarre coincidence, I find that I have heard someone talking about this novel, and I came across the reference again just last night. I was rewatching an episode of Buffy, and in that episode, Willow and Tara, having finished reading the book for class, talk about Quasimodo and Esmerelda while Buffy tries to figure out if Charles Laughton was one of the singing gargoyles. So, yes, the point of the exchange was the joke about the Hunchback movies. But . . . but Willow and Tara with the talking about my new favorite!

Aquinas Returns

After twenty-some years of reading Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, each year’s reading highly anticipated and ultimately revelatory and rewarding, I’ve been disappointed the last couple of years. My first pass through the tome was guided by Mortimer Adler’s schedule, provided with the Britannica Great Books set. My second pass through it, during the first ten-year reading plan that I drew up on my own, got me through all parts of the work but skipped certain sections, leaving something like 15-20% to be completed later.

It seems that I did a good job seventeen years ago in picking out the highlights to read first. Covering the basics of the virtue of justice was super-interesting a few years ago. Now filling in the gaps and reading this year (in a section on sins opposed to justice) about the difference between backbiting and tale-bearing: not so much.

But the experience this year didn’t disappoint as much as it had in other recent years. The ethics of trial advocacy, for instance, really piqued my interest. For example, Aquinas says that a judge must decide according to what is proven by evidence. If he privately knows some piece of evidence to be false, he must use legal means to sift it and try to reject it. If he cannot do this legally, he must judge according to what has been proven by the legal procedure, even if he knows it is wrong. He is bound to try every legal avenue he has to keep an innocent person from suffering capital punishment. I don’t know if you agree with Aquinas’s take on this issue; I like his respect for the system and the rule of law.

Other intriguing points in this section deal with wasting the court’s time and resources in unjust causes. One who accuses falsely, for instance, and fails to prove his case is rightly bound to the punishment he sought for the other party. Accepting that rule in this country might limit the number of frivolous torte cases seeking millions! Similarly, although a losing defendant has a right to appeal (Christians may appeal without concern that they are disrespecting authority), one who loses an appeal should be punished for the appeal itself as well as for the crime or civil injury he has been convicted of.

I’m actually taking a break from Aquinas now for three years. In his place, I’ll read some other medieval theologians: Abelard, Peter Lombard, and Albertus Magnus. In my fourth ten-year plan, though, I’m going to fill in every nook and cranny of the Summa!

(That phrase reminds me of a joke – if it doesn’t exist, it should – about the Dickensian woman who ran a generous soup kitchen frequented by pick-pockets and poor girls looking for day work caring for children: she filled every crook and nanny!)

George MacDonald and Adoption

When I wrote a post last year on George MacDonald’s sermons, I didn’t say anything about his deep feelings about the theological use of the word “adoption.” Early in his life, George MacDonald was told that he was not a child of God but that God could adopt him as a son. MacDonald grew up thinking that this message meant that God had rejected him to the point that He no longer recognized MacDonald as part of his creation. As an adult, he discovered, he tells us, that the Greek word translated “adoption” in the New Testament does not in fact mean adoption. He indicates the textual context of Galatians 4 in which the heir in Paul’s metaphor is in fact the son of the house but is treated as no better than a slave until “adoption,” which must therefore mean full recognition as a son, not chage of status from non-son to son. Tell a child he is not in his right relationship with his heavenly Father, MacDonald says, but don’t tell him God is not his Father.

This year, I read MacDonald’s novel Donal Grant, and partway through I started thinking: MacDonald sees Donal as himself, and Donal must believe that most Christians are wrong to think that God has adopted them. Then, sure enough, Donal says, in words understandably reminiscent of the sermon I read last year, that the word has been mistranslated and that the mistake has done grave harm to many people. I may be overreacting, but it seemed in this novel as if MacDonald were saying that any Christian who understood “adoption” as a valid theological concept was something like an enemy to the Truth, and that stance made it sound like MacDonald was pitting himself not just against a word or a detail but against the vast majority of English-speaking Christians.

I think that some Christians are wrong about some things. I think, for instance, that MacDonald is wrong to see the acceptance of the word “adoption” as a line in the sand. But I hold my disagreements with other Christians in two very important contexts. First, if most Christians disagree with me on some given doctrine, I simply must attenuate my absolute confidence that I am right. You know. Human. Fallible. Etc. Second, if I truly believe that person A is a Christian and I truly believe that A believes the wrong thing about doctrine B, then, if I see an enemy at all, I hold what I see as the wrong view on B as the enemy, not person A. We wrestle not with flesh and blood.

After reading this book, I feel like I’ve “figured out” MacDonald, and, as I just explained, I’m not sure I like what I figured out. I have three more of his novels on my list for this ten-year reading plan, and right now I’m not sure what I’ll do when they come up.

Leo’s Christmas Sermons

Leo the Great was the Bishop of Rome from 440 to 461. During that time, he famously treated with Attila the Hun and convinced him to leave Rome alone for a while. Over the course of his career, less famously, he preached, as I understand it, at least eight sermons on Christmas day, seven of which have survived. (I reach this tentative conclusion since the ones included in the Eerdman’s Library of the Fathers on ccel.org are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8.)

These sermons were exactly what I was hoping they would be and, truth be told, was afraid they might not be. The celebration of the birthday of Christ, says Leo, is a day to celebrate God’s gift of redemption. We so often read “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” to mean that God allowed his Son to be sacrificed on the cross. (I heard that interpretation in yesterday’s sermon at my own local, twenty-first-century church.) But God the Father gave us the Son in one sense at the Incarnation and in another sense on the Holy Night in Bethlehem.

Leo tells us that Christmas is also a time to celebrate the Trinity and Christ’s dual nature in one Person: full divinity and full humanity. No anathemas here as in many theological messages in these early centuries. Paul says that the one preaching the false gospel should be cursed, not the one who believes the false message. I don’t want to pronounce my own anathemas against those who pronounced anathemas. I just wholeheartedly support Leo’s desire to use Christmas Day to preach the true gospel without drawing lines through the Church visible.

He does draw a line, however, between those who worship Christ and those who worship the sun – or who think that Christmas is really only about worshiping the sun as its daily time above ground starts to lengthen. And yet, while Leo tells people not to worship creation, he doesn't tell Christians to despise creation either: “And so, dearly beloved, we do not bid or advise you to despise God's works or to think there is anything opposed to your Faith in what the good God has made good, but to use every kind of creature and the whole furniture of this world reasonably and moderately.” And this seems to me a central part of the Christmas message: that if God was willing to take on flesh and humanity in all its mundane materiality, then that physicality must have been created good. God made the land and the sea and the sun and the moon and the stars and the fish and the birds and the beings that creep on the earth, and He saw that they were good. It must be right to enjoy them as long as, as Augustine says, our love for them is subordinate to our love for God – not just less than, but subordinate, in that enjoying earthly gifts leads to enjoying God.

Some Christians have worn black because they thought they must be modest in appearance in order to be good Christians. I don’t judge their decision about what they must do to quell pride; I just don’t want them to tell the Ghost of Christmas Present he can’t wear green. Some Christians have served God in poverty. I don’t judge their deliberation to conquer the lust for wealth; I just don’t want them telling nephew Fred that he can’t share a joyous Christmas meal and games with family and friends. Some Christians have made worship a solemn and silent thing. I don’t doubt that they have found Christ in the quietude; I just don’t want them telling Bob Cratchit he can’t slide down the ice with some neighborhood boys “in honour of its being Christmas Eve.”

A Show of Hands, Please: How Many of You Have Read Matthew Arnold?

I’d been wanting to read some poetry and prose of Matthew Arnold for a long, long time. He comes up so often in my reading about literary criticism, nineteenth-century literature, and nineteenth-century political history, it seems that every scholar interested in the topics that interest me has read his works, so it seemed absolutely imperative for a person with my reading program to include Matthew Arnold.

But when? There’s so much to read! Here’s the real beauty of the Ten-Year Plan: just put him somewhere and then stick to the schedule. It doesn’t matter if he’s slated to come up in year 1 or in year 7: he’s on the list, so instead of having to think, “When am I ever going to get around to reading Arnold?” I can think, “Arnold’s on my list. I’ll get to him as long as I live that long.” And live that long I have.

I enjoyed everything I read. Sometimes I found it beautiful and instructive and inspiring. At other times it made me think through the reasons I disagree with him. And at other times it just made me glad that I’ve finally read for myself the material that gets referenced so I’ll understand everything else I read. I have a lot of thoughts and only one brief post, so I’m going to resort now to disconnected bullet points.

• Part of Arnold’s view intersects with Stoicism. I struggled just last month with trying to say briefly what tenet of Stoic philosophy appealed to me. Arnold did it in just one perfect quatrain:

And why is it, that still
Man with his lot thus fights? —
‘Tis that he makes this will
The measure of his rights.

• Arnold’s poetic language is beautiful and easy to read. Someone whose observations I quickly passed over (a critic writing for an online encyclopedia? the author of the preface to one of the two collections I read from?) pointed out that the poetry has this fluidity because Arnold's poetic language doesn't include a lot of obscure vocabulary and because he mixes a mostly noninverted syntax with a pleasant ebb and flow in the rhythms. Yes! That!

• The early poems mostly express heartache over a certain Marguerite's refusal to requite his love. Alas! The world doesn't get a lot more fulfilling for Arnold in the coming years, either. In later poems, he has given up on Christian faith, although the rituals and morals of the Church, it seems, remain beautiful and inspiring to him. He wants to lead a moral life, but mostly he wants morality as part of a life fully felt, fully lived. This secular view of life can be – and Arnold's is – inspiring, at least for a while, until he starts scolding other people for not living their lives to the fullest. He doesn't pity the fellow going through his routine at the shop, factory, or farm as much as he gets inspiration by negative example. It’s as if Arnold thinks, Well, at least I’m not like that guy! But even worse, it seems that Arnold’s most fully lived life requires that others around him also live fully, so that their meager lives are really just hindering his, Arnold’s, own best life. That view of his thoughts may be unfair, but it's the way it comes across to me in this first real acquaintance.

• Culture and Anarchy begins by defining culture as a pursuit of perfection in "sweetness and light," i.e. beauty and intellect. And the pursuit isn’t just for one’s self: culture is a moral movement of lifting and perfecting society. Here he sounds less condescending as he desires the masses to be educated in everything that is best in the world. But isn't there an undercurrent of contempt here? Doesn’t he assume that the life of a laborer who raises his children well isn't fulfilling, noble, and beneficial to the world? Could Arnold have learned nothing from a carpenter? Or does “culture” only involve the carpenter learning Homer? But at least he believes that the State should educate the carpenter and his children.

• According to Arnold, the British (and the Americans, I would add) praise liberty almost unconditionally. But, he says, people shouldn’t really be able to do whatever they want: that way lies anarchy! People should not adjust their actions to meet their desires; they should adjust their desires to comport with “reason and the will of God.” That means that they should all learn what’s right. (Oh, dear! There’s Plato’s old problem: believing that people will do the right thing if only someone educates them on right behavior.) And who’s to teach everyone in a society? Not a sect that emphasizes their distinction from everyone else. Not just one political party or one class. Clearly, this education must come from the State, and clearly the State should be led by people who have risen above divisions and who now live by their “better selves,” which always see the common humanity in everyone. Oh! Is that all it takes? I wonder why humanity hasn’t made that happen before!

• I have for decades read over and over that Matthew Arnold defined culture – this thing that, having been taught to everyone, will produce a whole society of people who follow their better selves and act for the good of the common humanity in everyone – as “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Go ahead! Do an internet search of “matthew arnold the best that has.” How many times do you see the phrase as I have worded it? And isn’t it always in quotation marks that promise the reader that the words are Arnold’s own? Yet, I’m here today to tell you that Matthew Arnold never said that phrase! (At least it doesn’t occur in any of the works included in the two readers that I bought and used.) He says, at various times, “the best that is known and thought” (in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”) and “the best that has been thought and known” (in Culture and Anarchy). “Culture is the best that has been thought and said in the world” is a phrase that certainly doesn’t point to the writings of Matthew Arnold himself, because Arnold never “said” it! So maybe all those critics and historians that I had believed to have read Arnold haven’t really read him! Maybe they all just pass along one incorrectly worded quotation hoping that, as with a certain fabulous emperor, only the unworthy will fail to see their marvelous clothes. Maybe I am the only one who now understands that these emperors are naked. (The most outrageous are the ones who pretend to quote the line with “which” instead of “that,” as if using “which” without distinguishing between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses makes one more intellectual!) Maybe I am in fact the greatest living expert on Matthew Arnold because I am the only one who has actually read large swaths of his poetry and Culture and Anarchy!

• As Yoda would say: No, there is another. Forgotten his name you have. But explain Arnold’s poetic fluidity he did. Ye - e - e - es!

A Tale of Two Tales

I don’t know how many times I’ve read A Tale of Two Cities. I don’t even know what it means to have read the book a given number of times. I’ve read it all the way through several times. I’ve read parts of it over and over. I’ve skimmed over it a few times in order to prepare for teaching it in various classes. Who can say what that all adds up to? C. S. Lewis says that there’s a difference between books that one has read and books that one reads. I just finished reading A Tale of Two Cities today, Charles Dickens’s birthday. So in one sense I have read it just now. But in another sense, A Tale of Two Cities is a book that I read, present tense – read repeatedly, read periodically, read continually.

I wrote a lot about this novel on these pages in February and March of 2014. I posted a bit more about it in July of last year. When I started rereading it a few days ago, I wondered what I could possibly put on the blog this time. But then I looked through some of my old notes to myself from 2014 and saw that I told my then-future self to read the story from the Arabian Nights about the Loadstone Rock (Dickens’s spelling). I’m so glad I did!

The story is “The Tale of the Third Calender.” In this tale, Scheherazade keeps her bloodthirsty king entertained for quite a while through several episodes. First, a prince sails too close to a magnetic island, which draws all the nails from the ship, killing everyone but the prince himself, who swims to the loadstone island. Then he is told that he can escape the island but only under strict conditions, which he breaks. Landing on a new island, he discovers a boy being abandoned and learns that the youth has been put there for safekeeping after being told that he was fated to be killed by a man who escaped the Loadstone Rock. The prince of course does indeed kill the boy, quite accidentally, even while trying to protect him. Then (or maybe I’ve reversed the order of the last two episodes) he finds a group of ten men blind in one eye and insists they tell him their story, even if it costs him an eye! They tell him to go to a certain castle with ninety-nine wooden doors and one golden door; he must stay there for forty days and may not enter the room with the golden door. Of course he does it anyway and is taken by a roc, whose whipping tail knocks his eye out.

A Tale of Two Cities also is about a nobleman’s son who brings about death even by trying to do good and is drawn inevitably to his crisis as surely as nails are drawn to a magnet. The last chapter of the second part in fact, is called “Drawn to the Loadstone Rock,” and in that chapter, the nephew and heir of the Marquis d’Evrémonde returns to revolutionary France (crossing the sea, like the Calender!) to help a former servant. He had earlier renounced his title because he didn’t want to contribute more to the misery of the poor, but this makes no difference to the jury eager to make every nobleman “look through the little window” of Sainte Guillotine and feed her unquenchable thirst for ghastly wine. Too bad the Marquis couldn’t tell stories like Scheherazade and repeatedly put off his appointment with the National Razor (which always, according to the popular joke of the time, shaves too close).

I don’t want to give any more away than I have to, but over and over, Dickens and his characters say that the events in the story are absolutely inevitable given the conditions. One result is that A Tale of Two Cities acts as a Loadstone Rock on me and draws me through itself line by beautiful line. I put it aside for now, but I’ll feel the book’s gentle influence often over the next few years until I put myself close enough to be drawn in once again.

Epictetus Follow-up

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

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

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

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

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

A Dose of Stoicism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of In Search of the Castaways

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

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

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

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

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

Please Let There Be an Arras!

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

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

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

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