Will and Ariel Durant, What Do You Really Think?

It took Will and Ariel Durant a lifetime to write The Story of Civilization, and it’s taking me nearly a lifetime to read it. I didn’t start the massive work until I was about 30 and didn’t start reading it in earnest until I was 40, but I had fairly salivated over the prospect since I first saw the set in my church library when I was about 14. The landscape of history has changed, of course, over the course of my decades-long journey; ancient Rome and medieval Paris have very different histories, and the Reformation and the Enlightenment are worlds apart in spite of everything they have in common. But the carriage the Durants provide changes, too. For the ancient times, they convey the reader along the road in a sense of wonder. During medieval times, the rough wagon is driven by a teamster with profound respect for the church he doesn’t agree with. And the highway through the sunny hills of Renaissance art and the birth of modern science is enjoyed in an open-air barouche that rattles along merrily with giddy excitement.

I’ve blessed the Durants with encomiums before (especially while I was reading that very respectful volume about the Middle Ages), and I’ve scolded them a bit, especially when they couldn’t stop talking about Rousseau’s dalliances with women, as if the greatest boon of the Enlightenment’s new-found freedom was the right to air publicly one’s desire to be spanked by strange women. But I’m sticking with them for the entire tour, which will end for me in 2026.

This year, my visit with the Durants (I’ve had enough of the traveling metaphor!) was quite pleasant. Gone are the bloody, depressing theological disputes of the Reformation. Gone are the long chapters about Rousseau and his indulgent chaos. The 390 pages for 2024 covered Goethe, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the art and drama and literature of Johnson’s England, and the Great Man himself: Dr. Johnson. So interesting! So insightful!

But, boy! did I receive a shock when they got to Johnson’s biographer. Apparently, Boswell’s private journals were published in the twentieth century and revealed a man quite different from the respectable, orthodox character he portrays himself to be in the Life. My first reaction was one of bewilderment. Are we talking about the same Boswell?! My second reaction to the revelation of his persistent sexual incontinence centered on acceptance: OK, we all have our skeletons, and I’ve discovered that Boswell wasn’t sinless. I can live with that. My third and final reaction found me arguing on Boswell’s behalf: would Johnson have talked with him, dined with him, traveled with him, shared personal documents with him if the upright, pious persona wasn’t real and sincere?

Now I could have experienced all three of those reactions with little more information than I’ve given you here. But the Durants love a philanderer’s story. Page after page they revel in quoting the confessions in Boswell’s journals and in retelling story after story of affairs and visits with prostitutes. But why? Seriously, what is the significance of James Boswell to the “story of civilization"? The fact that he had a sex drive that overpowered him at times (which is almost the same as simply saying that he was human)? Or his ability and drive to write a monumental book read, loved, and hailed as a classic by students of history for 250 years – a masterpiece that simultaneously begins a literary genre and is unlike any other book in – or ever likely to be in – that genre?

The Durants finish the section on Boswell with this reasonable, charitable, eloquent, and historically relevant statement: “He made amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could not achieve for himself.” And when they finally get around to telling about Dr. Johnson himself (strangely, not in the same chapter), they recap Boswell by saying, “[Boswell’s] sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them when we read again the greatest of all biographies.” But if these two sentences truly represent their final judgment on the man, why dwell so long on those amended defects? Why not take their own advice and forget the sins? I know I’ll be following that advice the next time I read the greatest of all biographies.

Conversations with an Old Friend

I don’t think I’ve ever explained in these posts the significance of C. S. Lewis to me. I first encountered Lewis in a comic-book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that appeared serially in a Sunday School magazine I once subscribed to. I was about twelve years old, and I wasn’t sure I liked the book. I was, however, sure that the title was the worst I’d ever heard!

My deeper contact with the professor occurred when I went to college and saw all the pastel-colored paperbacks from Macmillan on the bookshelves of all my Christian friends. The uniformity of the set appealed to me as much as anything else, and under the confidence that I could in fact judge a book (or set of books) by its cover, I bought a copy of the set for myself: The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and others.

Now to take a step back, while many young products of Christian homes turn sixteen and discover that they don’t believe anymore, I turned sixteen and discovered that my pastor didn’t believe anything. Churches were then divided for me into Those With Pastors Who Believe and Those With Pastors Who Don’t. Somewhat naturally thinking, “What’s the point?” about the second category, I looked for a church from the first to attend. Here were unwavering believers, and I felt more comfortable in that way. But they were also a bit . . . underinfluenced by education. It was a routine occurrence, for instance, for someone reading the Bible aloud to stumble over names and (the inevitable sequel to the tongue twisting) for everyone to join the reader in laughing the problem away breezily.

Everyone but me that is. I couldn’t figure out how people of The Book could laugh about illiteracy. But I remembered that God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and I went on, genuinely admiring their childlike faith while silently ruing their contempt for the medium through which God chose to speak to us.

But to be fair, they couldn’t figure me out, either. They were constantly telling me to get out of my head, quoting Colossians 2:8 at me, and telling me I was too educated and too knowledgeable to lead worship music.

But then I went away to college and met those new friends. These were smart people. They loved and respected education. They had interesting books on their bookshelves. Heck! They had bookshelves! And they loved C. S. Lewis. So I started reading him. And I loved him! I didn’t always agree with his theology, especially when it countered the tenets my friends at the home church drew out of the two dozen verses they knew well, but I admired him because he was intelligent.

After just three semesters I left that university (it’s an ugly story that has to do with a girl – ekkh!) and came back home. And then there I was back at the old church, with the old friends – and my new books. When I asked questions trying to deepen some common facile understanding, my friends continued to look at me as if I were from Mars and kept telling me that things were simpler than I was trying to make them and that I would be Free Indeed if I would only quit thinking. So I learned to stay quiet (well, less vocal), and at times I felt that Lewis was my only friend.

C. S. Lewis was my only friend.

There. I could have said that up front and gone on to talking about recent reading. But I needed to tell that story so that it would make some sense when I said that I’ve had good, edifying conversations with my friend over the decades. I read one of his books, think about things he says, live a Christian life, raise questions, grow in knowledge, and then come back to the same book ten or twenty years later, when I’ve forgotten the details of what he said to me in the first place. And then I find that Lewis responds to some of my new ideas. It’s a slow conversation but a good one.

No doctrine caused me more trouble in the 1970s than prayer. I’ve gone into enough detail for one post, so I’ll just say that (1) I had bad teaching in the 70s that nevertheless seemed unanswerable at the time, (2) I disagreed then with much of what Lewis had to say about prayer, especially in Letters to Malcolm (at last! the real subject of today’s post!), (3) after decades of wrestling, I came up with a better view of prayer (aided by, of all things, a football analogy?!), and (4) Letters to Malcolm made much, much more sense when I reread it last week.

Topics in this fascinating book include reasons for and against prayers written by others, places to pray (a train is good because it has just the right amount of distraction), problems with saying that our prayer changes God’s mind, how big or small an issue should be in order to be brought to God, “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer (is this why I did my own back in the 90s?), people thinking wrongly that it is automatically more spiritual to have transactions “opened with prayer,” determinism, the impossibility of knowing if an occurrence is an answer to my prayer or was just going to happen anyway, the good of anxieties as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (“We are Christians, not Stoics”), demythologization simply being a matter of a new mythology, the difficulty of dropping people from prayer lists as we age (that one sure strikes closer to home now more than it did fifty years ago!), holy places as reminders that every place is holy, and more.

Eventually he starts talking about the problems of prayer for people “in our condition,” i.e. intellectuals who can never take things simply. I don’t know if I thought of myself as one of the people in Lewis’s “condition” when I first read it. I may have thought his intellectual status was a quantum leap above mine with a gap between us as wide and unbridgeable as the river between the rich man and Lazarus. Now, while humbly admitting Lewis’s superiority over me in many facets of the intellectual life, I’m comfortable putting myself in the category of people “in our condition.” I mean, if Malcolm with all of his problems can be part of the in crowd, so can I! (Although I don’t believe there ever was a Malcolm corresponding with Lewis about prayer or any other topic.)

I will talk like a fool, though, and say that, for what I believe was the first time, I knew more than Lewis for one brief, shining moment. He says at one point, “We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?) called ‘ordinate loves.’ ” Yes! I say to my old friend. Of course it’s Augustine!

The Return of Dinny

When I put together this Third Decade reading list, I thought, “I hope I like Galsworthy since I put one novel from The Forsyte Saga on each of the first nine years.” Thankfully, I do indeed like Galsworthy. These books have become a dependable treat each summer.

It’s year 8, so I’m on the eighth book of the series, Flowering Wilderness. I was glad to see Dinny Charwell (pronounced “Cherrell”) return. In the previous book, she raised questions about duty as she continually tried to help everyone, even when she couldn’t help and even when her efforts put her in bodily danger. In this novel, Dinny is the flowering wilderness of the title, a young woman who is figuring out that she might have her own life to live, not just the life of the dutiful phantom her family traditions have placed in her head. In fact, Dinny has realized that she might even make herself happy by marrying Wilfrid.

*sigh* When two people meet and fall in love near the beginning of a novel, you know they’re going to have trouble. It seems that, while traveling in the East, Wilfrid has accepted Islam at the point of a gun, and the story gets back to England just a few days after our lovebirds plight their troth. All of Dinny’s family and all the family’s friends believe that it is now impossible for Dinny to marry Wilfrid; what he has done is simply not acceptable. The catch is that no one involved is actually a Christian believer, so they can’t agree on exactly what is so wrong about Wilfrid’s conversion. Is it wrong because he betrayed an essential myth? Is it because he acted un-English? Is it because he wasn’t courageous enough to accept death?

Once again Galsworthy critiques modernism in a fascinating way. His modern characters are all very comfortable and self-assured as long as they’re attending clubs and running charity drives. But then an event comes along that shows tension between their agnostic beliefs and their vestigial Christian ethics. The intriguing conundrum plays out through strong, elegant prose presenting full-bodied characters speaking to one another in rational and emotional and absolutely essential dialog. By contrast, I’ll end today’s post with a weak, colloquial, superfluous line:

It’s so good!

Orlando Ritornando

A few years ago I published a post called “Full Circle,” in which I explained that a chance mention of Orlando Furioso somewhere in C. S. Lewis (with all my rereading of Lewis, I still haven’t found the passage!) inspired my whole project of reading the classics of great literature. At the time of the post, April of 2011, I had finally made it to the book that started it all. First encountering the colorful scenes, full-blooded characters, and melodious narration of Orlando made me realize that a part of me was made to love this epic book – a part of me I didn’t totally know the existence of before. My return to it is just as delightful if not as self-revelatory.

Thirteen years ago I mentioned many of the fantastic elements I was enjoying. But fantasy alone doesn’t excite me; I need a fantastic world to be filled with characters I can root for or against, not, as Mark Twain said, tedious characters I wish would simply drown. In the last two or three years, I’ve read two classic fantasies with drown-worthy characters (The Well at the World’s End and The Worm Ouroboros), and I didn’t like them – couldn’t wait to get away from them. But The Silmarillion, The Divine Comedy, Many Dimensions, and Orlando Furioso are among my very favorite books. Oh! I should also add The Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: fantasies all and every one a favorite.

So let me concentrate this time on some features of characters in Orlando Furioso that I especially like. First, I couldn’t be happier than I am to see Muslim and Christian knights respecting each other while fighting to the death. Join me in savoring this stanza from book I:

O noble chivalry of knights of yore!
Here were two rivals, of opposed belief,
Who from the blows exchanged were bruised and sore,
Aching from head to foot without relief,
Yet to each other no resentment bore.
Through the dark wood and winding paths, as if
Two friends, they go. Against the charger’s sides
Four spurs are thrust until the road divides.

Well, and then they have a choice to make. What common end could make these fierce enemies ride the same horse? It could only be money, power, or a woman, and they’re both too chivalrous to pursue money or power. Angelica, the maid who ultimately drives Orlando furioso, stands down one of these two branches in the road. She is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (until we meet Dalinda and Olimpia, who are also, each, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World) and she is from China. Angelica, like Helen of Troy (also the MBWitW), is in the end not worth pursuing, but that’s what makes her and the search for her interesting. And can we cheer the sixteenth-century European author for locating ultimate pulchritude in Asia?

Ariosto is progressive in other ways, as well. Rinaldo rescues a woman who has been sentenced to death for having sex with her boyfriend. Rinaldo doesn’t care if she has done the deed or not; he knows it simply isn’t right to punish the girl while the boy goes scot-free. And Bradamante, one of the knights of most prowess and courage, is a woman, doing everything in the field that a man can.

But the poet can be conservative, too, because progressivism and conservatism are not in themselves goals or ideals but merely tools that can and should be used for good. Where a good is threatened, be conservative; where change toward the good is needed, be progressive. Answers aren’t simple, and you need wisdom to know when to preserve and when to reform. And you can’t make things simple again by just deciding that everything used to be good. Hear this wisdom from the preacher of Ecclesiastes: “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.”

OK, enough theory. Where is Ariosto conservative? Where he has Orlando throw the ninth century’s only cannon into the sea, because launching a deadly ball from behind a stone battlement is not chivalrous. (“Aha! I’ve got you!” you say. “Gun control is not conservative!” Yes it is, when what you are trying to conserve is the way weapons used to be.)

So, anyway. Magic, realism, fantasy, heroes, villains, adventure, mystery, intrigue, love, loyalty, betrayal, beautiful poetry, dramatic plots, inspiring philosophy, “dark wood and winding paths,” hippogriffs, and Merlin prophesying from the grave – Orlando Furioso has it all! And I love it!

Two Civil War Biographies

Are these Great Books with a capital G and a capital B? No. Virtually no one will read them in a hundred years. (Sure: some future Ken Stephenson will one day walk through the oldest stacks in the quaint thing called a library, breathe in the delicious, wholesome air of the browned and brittle pages, find these books, and learn from them, so I won’t say absolutely no one will read them a century from now.) They haven’t won Pulitzers (although one has won the American Batllefield Trust Prize). But did these books make me think and rethink about what I understand of American history? Yes.

First, the better-written of the two books: Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South. Only last year, I found out that Longstreet plays an important role in the Lost Cause Myth: the notion that the South didn’t truly care much about slavery and fought a noble, hopeless war for liberty, led by great Christian heroes and stopped only by a godless butcher (according to the myth, Grant) and a crass commercial enterprise that simply made more guns (according to the myth, the United States). Whatever the tenets of this poorly supported historical theory, General James Longstreet certainly cared about slavery and white supremacy during the war: his rallying speech to his troops in front of Richmond warned them that a United States victory would mean abolition and a black-run society. But near the end of the war, he explained several times that he saw inevitable defeat for the Confederacy and determined that he would work to live at peace in the new, slaveless polity. He became a Republican (the liberal, pro-civil-rights party at that time, remember), worked to elect Grant, earned a spot as Customs Controller for New Orleans, and then was tapped to head the Louisiana Militia. When, in September of 1874, thousands of white supremacists gathered on Canal Street and threatened a violent end to Reconstruction and black voting rights, General Longstreet led the militia out to defeat them. The former rebel, now determined to abide by the newly amended Constitution and to recognize the constitutional rights of all citizens, led a militia of black soldiers and white soldiers, a militia in which every man of equal rank received equal pay regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude. A militia in which black soldiers could be and were promoted, all the way to the rank of general. A militia in which regiments were integrated. A militia in which white officers led both black and white soldiers and black officers led both black and white soldiers. Southern Democrats never forgave him.

I see a lot to admire in a man who left a life in which racial hatred and fear could lead him to betray his sacred oath to his country (he was a commissioned U. S. officer when secession started) and adopted a new life in which respect for the law could raise members of the recently enslaved race to positions of high authority. But Jubal Early and his ilk didn’t find Longstreet’s post-war stance admirable, and so they started a campaign against him, a campaign whose ramifications are still felt today, whose tenets I’ve read in history books that have won a Pulitzer. By the time Early got the ball rolling, the Daughters of the Confederacy were publishing materials defending the justness of the Confederate cause and, in their words, praising the “moral and military infallibility” of Robert E. Lee.

So look, there’s controversy about Longstreet. The Lost Cause side says that he disobeyed Lee’s orders at Gettysburg and lost that battle, thus losing the war, betraying his new country (let’s ignore the first betrayal), betraying his race (at least that’s what they said in the 1800s), and betraying his commander (whose military infallibility, I guess, couldn’t overcome one supposedly disobeyed order). Do I really, finally know if he screwed up at Gettysburg? Do I really, finally know that he ended up a good guy? No (although my parentheticals in this paragraph perhaps indicate which way I lean). But when the side that started the defamation program claims moral infallibility for their hero, I’m strongly inclined to believe that they have at least stretched the truth about their nemesis, also.

When I say this isn’t a Great Book, I don’t mean to malign Varon’s writing: her research is detailed, her arguments are nuanced, and her prose is smooth and polished. I’m just saying I don’t predict that her work will last as long as Herodotus’. John A. Carpenter’s Sword and Olive Branch, by comparison, is much less literary but, to me, equally enlightening. It, too, relates the life history of a Civil War general. Its subject also was and has been the subject of a smear campaign whose effectiveness can be gauged by its reverberations in Civil War histories of our time. And its subject also worked for the promotion of the four million new citizens naturalized by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sword and Olive Branch tells the story of Union General Oliver Otis Howard, who watched his corps disintegrate in fifteen minutes at Chancellorsville. For this and for a retreat at Gettysburg (to a more defensible position!), he developed and suffered, as the history books continue to tell us, a bad reputation with the rest of the Army of the Potomac. And yet, when I continue to read accounts of the Civil War, I find him later in a place of high authority acting nobly and effectively under Sherman, without, to my recollection, authors pointing out that his earlier bad reputation may not have been deserved or had at least been atoned for by greater success later in the conflict. Carpenter points all this out, though, and I’m glad to see Howard’s full war record properly celebrated.

But the story gets really good after the war. As the Director of the Freedman’s Bureau, General Howard fought hard to get black citizens housing, jobs, pay, and, above all, education. I knew he founded Howard University, which is why I wanted to read about him. I didn’t know his work with the Bureau actually helped create several other colleges open to blacks (and women!) as well as almost two thousand elementary and preparatory schools. And I didn’t know that Howard by himself achieved in a few days what the government backed by the Army had not been able to do in thirteen years by treating successfully with Cochise (and apparently to Cochise’s satisfaction!) and almost eliminating violence between whites and Apaches in Arizona. I’m not quite finished with the book, and I think things don’t go so well or so honorably with the Nez Perce later. But what I’ve read so far makes Howard fascinating and admirable.

If these two books teach anything, they at least demonstrate that you can’t believe anything just because you read it in black and white. So let me just clarify before I close this too lengthy post that, while I have now read one biography of each general, each biography decidedly tending toward approval of its subject, I haven’t drawn any lines in the sand: I won’t say definitively whether either of the two was a good guy or a bad guy. But I tentatively admire each general while firmly believing that neither was either morally or militarily infallible.

Disappointment and Hope

Rarely have I found the first part of a book so good only to be deeply disappointed by the rest. I was looking forward to Owen Wister’s The Virginian, having heard that it was the first western (i.e. cowboy) novel; I was ready to find Wister an unjustly forgotten American author like Kenneth Roberts. And my first couple of says with the book confirmed my prognosis. Wister offers poetic descriptions of the West and keen observations of the characters: for instance, it’s a surprise to the first-person narrator that one cowboy can call another a son of a — (Wister uses the dash!) and have it received as a term of endearment. He also establishes a classic cowboy trope in 1902 when an enemy calls the Virginian an SoB. The Virginian pulls out his pistol, lays it on the table, and says, “Smile when you call me that.” The saloon gets quiet for a couple of seconds until everyone sees that no violence will ensue. Then the mingled noise of music, cards, and revelry returns. How many times have we seen that scene in movies and on television!

But things turned sour on the third day. First, Wister says that Equality means an equal chance for everyone to show how unequal he is. And then, of course, he has to try to redefine Christianity: “As soon as you treat men as your brothers, they are ready to acknowledge you – if you deserve it – as their superior. That’s the whole bottom of Christianity.” And there’s a very distasteful scene in which the manly Virginian humiliates a missionary by seeming to go along with his program, wrestling with his sin nature all of one night, only to laugh at him in the morning and go about his way, displaying true Christianity by showing how superior he is. That’s Wister’s disgusting idea of a hero. From then on the book just gets boring, with the cowboy getting moony about a girl, and continued trouble with the predictable villain. Oh, and there’s an attack from Indians who are called “peaceful” (with the quotation marks).

But now, just today, the day before I finish this novel, I was starting to think that maybe I had let some moments I disagreed with spoil a book I could have been enjoying if I hadn’t read in protest. (As to why I read books I don’t like “in protest,” that’s the topic for another post, I suppose.) But then the Virginian gave his girlfriend a lesson in civics, as if she hadn’t learned in school that the power of government by courts comes from the people. But, of course, women can’t be expected to retain, let alone, understand such things. That’s why we don’t let them vote! Then the narrator gave the reader, in a condescending tone, a lesson that one might do evil in order to achieve good, giving the example that one might correctly trespass in order to stop a murder, as if we readers don’t know that. And this was in defense of cowboys lynching cattle thieves, supposedly because the corrupt courts give them no other choice: as if killing a man to prevent thieving is just like trespassing to prevent killing a man. Then the final showdown with villain is set up, and Wister pulls back his flimsy curtain with one sentence: “It is only the great mediocrity that goes to law in these personal matters.” So much for Christianity boiling down to treating men as brothers. So much for respecting the authority of any court. We’re back to democracy meaning an arena where the best can win over the lesser. And apparently men always prove superior to women, and white men always prove superior to Indians. Seems to me I’ve read about some lies the white man told the Indian. But never mind that. It’s the Indians who lie so much they are only described as quote-peaceful-endquote. And remember: all this superiority is true Christianity. Wow! The Virginian just fell deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling pit today.

But I’ll be done with it tomorrow. And I know I have some much better reading coming up. Soon I’ll be starting to reread Orlando Furioso, the book that started my whole reading project. There’s also some Anthony Trollope coming up later this year and, in November or December, one of my very favorite books: Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions. (The novel is so much better than the title!) I also have high hopes for Grimm’s Tales and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Consequently, you can hope for some happier posts in the next few months.

Seeds of a Comedic Masterpiece

I had originally intended the last post to refer to both tragedy and comedy in its title and to cover two related observations concerning The Pickwick Papers. But when I got to four good paragraphs on the tragic topic, I decided to split things up and look behind the comedic mask in a second post. Here is that second post; I can’t imagine that it will run as many as four paragraphs.

I begin my second paragraph by saying that several aspects of The Pickwick Papers seem to have found their way later into A Christmas Carol. You can’t read Dickens’s first novel – or even read much about it – without realizing that the embedded story of Gabriel Grub, a misanthropic sexton who has a change of heart one Christmas Eve when he is abducted by goblins, is the odd little tune that six years later served as cantus firmus for the gloriously polyphonic and much, much, much better Christmas Carol. But other things in Pickwick remind me of A Christmas Carol, too. There’s the Christmas dinner at Mr. Wardle’s with the games and the kissing under the mistletoe, which sounds quite reminiscent of nephew Fred’s party at which the rapidly reforming Scrooge played at Twenty Questions and Topper and the plump sister in the lace tucker “were so very confidential together behind the curtains.” And there are certain turns of phrase here and there that crop up again in the Christmas novella, too, especially in the first few paragraphs of Scrooge’s tale. A fellow in debtor’s prison asks Mr. Pickwick, “Why didn’t you say at first that you was willing to come down handsome?” I suppose the last phrase (meaning to be generous, especially in buying a round of drinks) was common in Dickens’s time, but it jumped out at me as I remembered that snow and sleet “often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge never did.” The teller of one of the stories-within-the-story in Pickwick says early on, “There is nothing at all extraordinary in this story, unless you distinctly understand at the beginning, that he [the story’s central character] was not by any means of a marvelous or romantic turn.” No person having read A Christmas Carol a dozen times (in other words, a mere beginner) can read those words and not think of these: “There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Hmm. That paragraph got a little bloated. I’d better finish quickly. And I will do so by offering a theory. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol after his first relative failure, Martin Chuzzlewit. He was in a funk and needed a new project, something wonderful and irresistible, to get both his readers and his mojo back. I believe he went back to Pickwick to think about the work that made him so popular to begin with (if offices had had water coolers in 1837, everyone would have stood around them talking about the adventures of Mr. Pickwick), realized that the story of Gabriel Grub would really shine after a good makeover, and in his rereading of that first novel caught a few choice constructions that could bear reusing. Remember, those phrases are all on the first page of A Christmas Carol, as if he were then still working to infuse inspiration into the new work. And now I have to wrap it all up or else I’ll find myself in a fourth paragraph. So I’ll bid adieu today with a recommendation of the movie The Man Who Invented Christmas. Everything in this dramatization of Dickens’s composing A Christmas Carol (other than the obviously fantastical scenes) is historically accurate. Except for the idea that he didn’t know, as he was writing, how Scrooge’s story would end. That bit of poetic license works fine in the movie, but we know that the real Dickens knew exactly where Scrooge was going from the very beginning: Gabriel Grub, after all, ended up a renewed man.

Tragic Relief

The first time I read The Pickwick Papers, I was surprised by all the inserted short stories. They annoyed me, too; I wanted to know more about the antics of the Pickwick Club, but every few chapters, some character would offer to tell a legend, and I kept having to work my way through dreary stories about ghosts and criminals. I’m pretty sure the copy I read included an introduction that told me the stories were dreary and annoying, and I let myself be impressionable. The second time I read the book, the tangential stories weren’t surprising anymore, but I think they still annoyed me.

But I just finished reading Pickwick for the third time, and I’m happy to say not only that I enjoyed the embedded stories – ghosts and criminals are good subjects for short stories, after all! – but that I found them almost necessary. I think that introduction that I read forty years ago said the book wasn’t really a novel but rather a hodgepodge or scrapbook of disconnected stories and comic vignettes. In other words, that Pickwick wasn’t cohesive or unified. Well, it certainly is a novel, with or without the stories, but now that I see their purpose, they seem part of a cohesive structure, as well.

We all know about comic relief. The clowns in Shakespeare’s tragedies provide familiar examples. Well, I think these stories of murderers and hopeless characters provide tragic relief to the ridiculous adventures of Pickwick and his companions. The Food Network’s Duff Goldman is always telling contestants on baking championships to use acid or even umami in desserts to balance the sweetness. Maybe 700 pages of unrelieved comedy would get cloying for the reader. Or maybe even a hundred pages of it did for the author. Maybe Dickens tasted his Pickwickian batter and decided his cake needed some acid to balance the sugar, whipped egg whites, and sprinkles that the humor of Pickwick served up.

Besides contributing to an alternating structure of dark and light, several of the stories have themes that work their way into the outer plot, too. Someone tells a Christmas ghost story, for instance, and then Mr. Pickwick and his friends attend a Christmas dinner. Another inserted story tells the tragic tale of a man who goes to debtor’s prison, sees the family he can’t provide for perish one by one, and then is released and wreaks awful vengeance on the creditor who had shown him no mercy. Several chapters later, Mr. Pickwick himself goes to debtor’s prison. Both presentations show the horrors of debtor’s prison and helped abolish the institution in Britain. But the episode of Mr. Pickwick’s sojourn behind the hopeless walls includes some silliness from himself, Sam Weller, Mrs. Bardell, and others, so the story within the story and its unrelentingly lurid tale of despair and revenge provides a necessary part of the message by working on different emotions.

I wish I hadn’t read that introduction all those years ago. But I’m glad I read The Pickwick Papers for a third time and finally got the bitter taste out of my dessert experience.

Like Children

Today I have just a couple of last notes on The Brothers Karamazov. The internet helped me out on the first one, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t see this one sooner. Dostoevsky’s novel about the dysfunctional family and all their very grown-up vices includes long sections about neighborhood boys. These boys talk about pets and get in trouble at school and do a lot of things that don’t seem to have much to do with the question of who killed Fyodor Pavlovich or which lover Grushenka will settle on. But, as the wisdom of the web points out to me, they are children, and Ivan’s great question has to do with the suffering of children. Clearly Dostoevsky intended for the reader to make some connections.

Although I’ll have to continue to ponder this issue, two points of contact have come to mind. First, the children may be innocent, but they are not sinless. The Bible supports the distinction in its twin teachings that children are born in sin (see for example Ps. 51:5) and that nevertheless they do not have the ability to distinguish good and evil (see for instance Deut. 1:39). The neighborhood boys display both notions pretty clearly, so we may be expected (or invited?) to learn that Ivan’s question may assume a purity that children simply do not have.

Second, the ending section in which little Ilyusha dies (if you haven’t read the lengthy book, you’ll forget I said that before you reach the end!) shows that the suffering of children, like any human suffering, can bring about great good. I understand that suffering itself is bad; otherwise God would not promise to do away with it in the future kingdom. But if I willingly submit myself to the pain of exercise, dieting, waiting for the purchase of a toy, or visiting the dentist, all for the sake of a greater good, I can begin to see that God might view the death of Ilyusha – who is happy to be going to Heaven, after all – as an acceptable cost for the salvation of several other boys. Could I have made a world in which this were so? Well, that’s Ivan’s great question, and I have to say that I, as currently constituted, definitely could not. But then God has baked it in to me that I shouldn’t kill a child. Still, if I accept that the government has a right to incarcerate, say, an armed robber for ten years while I have no right to lock someone in a shed for even a day, I must admit the possibility that while I have no right to kill a person as the result of a philosophical calculation, God does have not just the power but the right to take human life.

I promised a couple of last notes about Karamazov, and my first one became so involved it turned itself into three paragraphs with two enumerated subsections. My second final note is much shorter. Dostoevsky knew and loved the works of Dickens. He especially liked David Copperfield and often called himself and his wife Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. I haven’t read about any special affinity of Dostoevsky for A Christmas Carol, but Alexei’s plea to the boys never to forget the kindness and courage of the departed Ilyusha is so extremely reminiscent of Bob Cratchit’s tearful family enjoinder during Christmas Future, I can’t believe Dostoevsky didn’t intend his scene as a case of flattering plagiarism.

(Really, Blogspot Editor? You don't know the word "enjoinder"?)

Poetic Feete

I had what was for me an unusual experience last year: I read a few hundred pages of Shelby Foote’s history of the American Civil War and didn’t enjoy what I read. The work is massive, and I had read it one-and-two-thirds times, a few hundred pages a year for at least fifteen years, and I had never had a disappointing experience before, even in my previous encounter with the passage that I reread last year. But I loved my reading in Foote this year, so I'm glad to see that last year was just a temporary aberration. The problem may have lain in my circumstances: rushing to pack and move, concerned about selling the house, etc. It may have had to do with Foote’s attempt to downplay Nathan Bedford Forrest’s massacre at Fort Pillow. I didn’t know as much about Forrest the first time I read Foote’s account, but at this time in my life, I really don’t need to hear any defense of the murder of captured black soldiers by the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard. Sure, it was an atrocity, Foote says, but no worse than other atrocities committed during the four-year bloodbath of war. I don’t buy it. That war is too full of stories of strangely humane behavior by the combatants between and after battles. Capturing enemy soldiers, disarming them, and then shooting them was not standard practice (except when the captured were black and the capturers were Confederate), and Forrest's act deserves not the slightest amount of extenuation.

I enjoy reading about the Civil War mostly, I think, because of the surprising events that happen when a supposedly civil, supposedly educated, supposedly noble, supposedly pious country descends into violent conflict. I found a lot of amazing characters and stories in the passage I read this year. Here were Admiral Farragut damning the torpedoes in Mobile Bay, Jubal Early attacking Washington, Lincoln standing above the fortifications to watch the action, and the anonymous soldier telling him to “get down, you fool!” Here were the incredible and tragic stupidity of the botched action at the Petersburg crater, Sherman’s march to the sea, Hood’s decision not to defend Georgia against Sherman’s advance and instead to go on the offensive to his destruction in Tennessee, and the inspiring example of a completed, accepted presidential election held during a civil war.

A note on the Petersburg Crater: I had read that thousands of Union troops marched, ran, or fell into the crater caused by an underground explosion and then that Confederate survivors began to fire at the packed, disoriented “attackers” as if, they said, at a turkey shoot. Thousands! I had imagined a stadium-sized crater! So I was surprised and – should I say? – disappointed when I visited Petersburg and saw a hole just a few feet deep that seemed like it could have held no more than five hundred men. I read in the park’s brochure that erosion and plant growth over the years had made the crater shallower and less ominous, so I supposed that I was seeing only a fraction of the original. But Foote says the crater covered about a quarter of an acre. When I read that a couple of weeks ago, I looked across the street at two houses and, remembering that a typical neighborhood plot contained an eighth of an acre, thought, “Those two yards make up about a quarter of an acre, and that was about the size of the crater I saw.” Online just now, I read that the depression measured about 170' by 60'. Yeah, about the size of two house lots. So maybe what I saw was the whole thing after all. But thousands of men? Could thousands of men stand in two neighborhood yards? Maybe I have grossly underestimated the meaning of the word “crowded” in the accounts of the crater.

I also want to read about the Civil War because it tells me like no other story just how stupid and stubborn and cruel humans can be. I remember decades ago reading Bruce Catton say that he thought about these stories every time he heard some “fathead” talk about the glories of war. In my Foote assignment this year, I read of Gen. Sherman saying, “War is cruelty. You cannot refine it.” And I read of a Union soldier in Georgia, seeing the boys and old men they had just shot down, who said, “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”

After the election, Lincoln delivered an inspiring speech to some well-wishers serenading him on the lawn of the White House. In the middle of his remarks, he said, “Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.” Is he wrong? Do we not have today weak and strong, silly and wise, bad and good Americans trying to direct our future? In our endeavor, we must, as Lincoln said, learn wisdom from the past, and we must all try to make things right without seeking revenge. With malice toward none, with charity for all, folks. Every American should say these words ten times every morning and before every political utterance on social media.

By the way, Lincoln said his speech was “not very graceful.” You should read the whole thing and see what this wise, eloquent leader considered ungraceful. It will take you less time than it took to read this post. Just look up “Lincoln response to a serenade November 10, 1864.”

Why Did I Think Pickwick Wasn’t a Favorite?

Ten years ago, when I drew up my current ten-year Reading Plan, I decided that since I had read and reread all of Dickens’s novels, I could just stick with my favorites this time around. So I picked ten for the new schedule, one for each year: A Tale of Two Cities was there, of course, along with other obvious choices (obvious for me, anyway) like David Copperfield and Dombey and Son. The Pickwick Papers didn’t make that initial cut, but at some point I had a space on one ten-item list of miscellany and decided to throw Pickwick in. So I’m reading it now and wondering, How did I not think this was a favorite?

First of all, it's making me laugh out loud over and over. Its humor is silly, but I’m no snob. Mr. Winkle, for instance, brags about being a sportsman but scares all of his friends on their first hunt when he doesn’t know how to carry his gun without pointing it at parts of his friends or himself. That’s no highbrow joke; it’s the kind of humorous story one would tell about a family member again and again over the years. But I laugh at tried-and-true family jokes, and I laugh at this one. The humor in this first novel often reminds me that Dickens is firmly in the English comic tradition that spawned Monty Python; Mr. Jingle’s habit of stringing short phrases together without forming sentences, for instance, may have had a direct influence on Eric Idle’s “Say no more” character (Mr. Jingle lacks the bawdy inuendoes). I laugh at the Ministry of Silly Walks, and I laugh at Mr. Pickwick getting pushed in a wheelbarrow.

Then it’s so memorable. Before I started, I thought, “OK, this is the one where the hero is considered a great social scientist when he actually can’t tell a road sign from an ancient carving, where there’s a nice Christmas dinner, and where Pickwick goes to debtor’s prison.” That was about all I remembered at the moment. But after just a few pages, twenty more details and characters from the rest of the book came rushing to mind: the fat boy who says, “I wants to make your flesh creep”; Mr. Pickwick getting thrown over a wall and standing in the rain; Tony Weller spelling his name in court (trust me, it’s funny); and more. If I remember that much from it, I must have enjoyed it before.

In an old post on these pages called “Dombey Redux,” I list my favorite comic characters from the Dickens canon. At the end I say, “I know I’m forgetting someone obvious and important.” At last I can say that that obvious and important omission is Sam Weller. G. K. Chesterton says somewhere that Dickens became Dickens when he first put Sam Weller on a page. Sam’s most famous humorous trait is a form of speech known in the dictionary as a Wellerism, in which he says what he would naturally say and then claims his utterance as a quotation from someone in a different situation altogether. “Out vith it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden.” “That’s what I call a self-evident proposition, as the dog’s-meat man said, when the housemaid told him he warn’t a gentleman.” It doesn’t seem that the respectable Mr. Pickwick would hire such a volubly volatile servant, but to his credit and to our delight, he does. Like Holmes’s Dr. Watson, Sam is unexceptionally loyal and ready to lend a little muscle when a dangerous situation calls for it, and his sometimes embarrassing banter can usually be repressed with a quick, “Not now, Sam.”

Dickens hasn’t quite mastered his distinct art of naming characters yet. Mr. Winkle, Mr. Wardle, Mr. Jingle, and Mr. Trundle, all introduced in the first few chapters, offer a potentially confusing sameness barely broken by the arrival of Mrs. Bardell. But Pickwick is a great name, as are the names of Mrs. Bardell’s lawyers: Dodson and Fogg. Either of those names on its own would have far less than half the impact of the pair; together, the names of Dodson and Fogg give us a quintessentially Dickensian moniker for a law office.

But much of the mature Dickens is here, if in slightly less than polished form: the humor, the sentiment, the love for Christmas, and the pathos (more of that in a future post). One element that pervades Pickwick that doesn’t make much of a showing in later books is all the playful kissing between couples not married or even engaged. The frequency of kissing in Pickwick might be explained by the concurrence of Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth and the serial publication of the novel. Its relative absence in later books might be explained by the author’s grave nuptial disappointment.

Profoundly Short

I only have a few minutes today, and I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov, so I’m about to do a silly thing. I’m going to attempt to give my answer to Ivan Karamazov’s profound question in just a few words.

Ivan seems to waver on whether he believes in God. At one point he says that he believes in God but rejects his world. His greatest concern is the torture of children. Why would God make a world in which children can be tortured? I couldn’t make such a world, he tells his pious brother Alyosha; I couldn’t make a world with all its beauties and goodness and gratification at the cost of a single little girl being tortured. And then he asks, could you?

Hypothetical questions like this always include one big problem. Someone asks me, if you had just hit 63 home runs in a season and the Yankees offered you a contract, would you take it? I don’t know! I would have to be such a different person with such a different physical constitution and such a different history, I don’t know if my St. Louisian aversion to the Yankees would still hold. Ivan seems to be asking me, If you were God, could you create such a world? My first answer is, how could I possibly know? If I were God, I’d have a radically different mind, and I can’t imagine how that mind works.

But Ivan might actually be asking, Could you as a human being bring about a wonderful situation with happiness for millions if it meant the torture of one child? I don’t know if Alyosha in particular could, but I do know that, sadly, in millions of instances, a human being has tried to buy the happiness of just one person (that human’s self) at the cost of torturing a child. We do this, not God. We commit all the horrible atrocities Ivan mentions and much worse. We beat children senseless because they interrupt our drunken stupor. We drop napalm on Vietnamese children. We starve coal miners’ children to make CEO’s richer. We shoot children in schools. We drop fire bombs and atomic bombs on children in cities.

Ivan Karamazov asks, Could you do this, humanity? Humanity, if it’s honest, can only reply, Yes, Ivan, we do this all the time. The only sensible next step is not to blame God for what we with willing hearts do routinely, but to ask for his forgiveness and restoration and life.

Alyosha’s answer is shorter and simpler. He gets up and kisses his brother and walks away.

Electric Shivers

This year’s allotment of Shakespeare included four plays and fifteen sonnets. I continue to think that the plays I read over and over (about half the canonical list) are worth revisiting. By contrast, the sonnets more and more seem to include a handful of standouts and 140-something that I can ignore for the rest of my life.

About King Lear and Richard II, I will only say that I went into them this year as usual, thinking that they wouldn’t hold my interest so much this time, and I came out of them as usual, happy that they had each riveted my attention for five full acts.

Yes, Much Ado About Nothing is about nothing (it says it right in the title!), but it’s so good! Benedick and Beatrice are hilarious as they insult each other in lieu of admitting their mutual love. Their friends’ gentle trickery works quickly, with hardly any drama or farcical confusion, and the reader is glad that the pair don’t have to suffer any more than they already have. The Bard gives Claudio and Hero more of an actual plot: Don John arranges cruel deceptions in order to ruin their wedding. The dialog may briefly give a reason for his nastiness somewhere, but it seems to me he causes pain just because he’s a jerk. That wedding scene is intense, extremely so for a comedy. But remember that it’s all a big fuss about nothing. As soon as Don John’s schemes are revealed, Claudio and Hero are reunited.

The show-stealer, though, has nothing to do with young couples who eventually get married. Dogberry, a very English constable in a supposedly Italian setting, is surely the inspiration for every pompous but confused representative of the law that comes after him, from Oliver Twist’s Mr. Bumble to Mayberry’s Barney Fife. His malapropisms (Wikipedia says they can be called dogberryisms!) mostly take the form of substituting prefixes in Latinate words: “Dost thou not suspect my place?” for instance, in place of “Dost thou not respect my place?” In an aside about nothing, I will mention that they made me think this time about Slip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys movies. (Ah! Saturday afternoon TV in the ‘70s!) More to the point, they’re funny! And his pretentious repetitions are funny! “Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths.” Wonderful! But the best joke of all is his way of insisting that all the culprits’ untruths and insults be put into the record accurately: when the sexton, who’s taking it all down, leaves for a moment, one rogue calls Dogberry an ass, upon which Dogberry exclaims, “O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass, though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”

Now, when I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream right after Much Ado, I noticed that Bottom calls himself an ass, actually becomes an ass, and indulges in malapropisms. This is the same character, I thought! I’ll bet they were played by the same actor! So I looked it up, and sure enough, Dogberry was expressly written for William Kempe, whom Britannica calls “one of the most famous clowns of the Elizabethan era,” and scholars suspect that he also played Bottom. I will now send electric shivers through the world of Shakespeare scholarship by announcing with 99.2% certainty that, whether Kempe played Bottom or not, Shakespeare must have written the part with Kempe in mind. When that news becomes a well known truism, please remember that you read it here first.

Oh, Dear!

Or as Nicky from the Great British Bake Off 2023 would say, “Oh, dearie me!” Fourteen years ago, I started this project of reporting publicly on my reading. In 2017 I decided that the internet was, for me, no place to hold political discussions. But I keep reading political things! What do I do?

I heard about Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in an article by a writer who finds parallels between the events in the novel and the dangers he associates with a certain current figure in U. S. politics. I, too, see this figure as potentially dangerous. So I read the book. In this novel, the fictional Buzz Windrip is elected President of the United States in 1936 by grievance-feuled voters. (The book was written in 1935, so Lewis didn’t know yet how the U. S. would vote in their upcoming referendum on how Roosevelt was handling the Depression.)  In his campaign, Windrip has outlined his agenda, which includes banning all immigration, keeping most women at home, barring minorities from higher-paying jobs, and giving all legislative and judicial power to the President, Congress being reduced to an advisory board and the Supreme Court stripped of its veto power. He challenges election results in an election he won. After inauguration, he immediately claims emergency powers and begins to enact his authoritarian program. The Supreme Court can’t stop the coup because Windrip has placed them and all his other political enemies under house arrest. With his new, unchallenged authority, Windrip abandons any plans for helping the hungry and unemployed, creates a police state, and essentially turns the government into a crime mob.

For most of the details, Lewis merely translates steps in Hitler’s rise to events in his alternate America. Windrip has his own militia groups, for instance, outlaws all other parties, and makes every news outlet a purveyor of Windrippian propaganda. But the goal of the dictator’s totalitarianism is the very American goal of making money by taking money rather than the very German (or at least Prussian) goal of leading a military juggernaut.

Lewis doesn’t prove anything. Stories aren’t about proving things. But he immerses the reader in a situation that seems plausible. (I suppose I’m only saying that he fulfills the function of a novelist.) I’ll admit that I thought of stopping halfway through; Lewis had made his point, it seemed, and the middle’s long, dry litany of tawdry, unilateral revolution – Windrip did away with states and appointed his cronies to oversee new districts; he redesigned the executive departments and appointed toady X to newly created office Y, where he enacted policy Z; and so on – lacked the vivid, conversation-driven scenes of the first few chapters. But I’m glad I stuck with it. The journalist Doremus Jessup returns to the fore in the last third of the book, and his struggles with the conflict between the duties of resistance and of family safety provide a moving, suspenseful build to the climax.

The U. S. survives in Lewis’s dystopian daydream. But only barely.

Yes and No

Among the special treats on this year’s reading list is a book I had looked forward to for decades: Peter Abelard’s Yes and No. Most people who read Abelard want to read his correspondence with Heloise. I was much more interested in the work that laid the foundation for the University of Paris. Abelard taught his lessons in odd corners of the cathedral of Notre Dame, and scores of students came and – bless them! – voluntarily paid Abelard for his services. And from these meetings arose the concept of Education in France.

What I thought I understood about the book was this: That Abelard wished to explore certain questions of Christian doctrine in search of authoritative answers. That he had compiled great numbers of quotations from the Bible as well as from Fathers and Doctors of the Church that purported to answers these questions. (Or rather that he had challenged his students to find all these passages.) That the authorities cited routinely differed in their answers, so that each question could, with support, be answered both “yes” and “no.” And that Abelard got in trouble for leaving his students in a muddle about essential tenets of the Christian faith and for never saying, “But of course the real answer to question X is this.” Now having read the book, I have to say my preconceptions were slightly wrong.

First of all, the only thing Abelard actually wrote in the volume is an introduction in which he provides several reasons for seemingly contradictory language in the Church's authoritative writings: ambiguity of words, false writings with a saint's name attached, corruption in text, statements later retracted by the writer, misunderstanding on the part of later readers of when an authority is quoting or speaking in the voice of a heretic, taking opinion for fact, and everyday use of speech that departs from literal truth (e.g., “this cup is empty”). We should not accuse the saints of lying, he says, but only Scripture can be said not to depart from truth. Even the saints themselves (especially Augustine) tell readers not to follow the statements they make in which they have erred. So Abelard prefaces the long litanies of conflicting quotations with a statement that none of the problems the reader is about to face mean that the Christian faith is a sham or that the Bible is not true or that the saints all just made things up.

Secondly, the core doctrines of the Christian faith are never questioned. None of the 158 questions touch, for instance, anything in the Nicene Creed. Abelard never sows doubt about the existence of God, his role as Creator, his existence in three persons, the divinity of Christ or of the Holy Spirit, the virgin birth, the actual death and resurrection of the Lord, or the efficacy of that death and resurrection toward salvation. Many of the early questions have to do with understanding the Trinity and the inadequacy of language to describe the Three-in-One. Is God triple, he asks? Well, as the title says, yes and no. Other early questions regard God’s foreknowledge, exactly how Christ took on humanity, etc. Starting somewhere around 40% of the way in, the questions begin to concern such questions as when the angels were created, whether Mary doubted Gabriel, the order of post-Resurrection appearances, which apostles had wives, which evangelist corresponds with which animal face on the cherubim, whether one baptismal immersion is enough, if James the Just was the son of Joseph, whether intinction is a suitable form for receiving communion, when and if one can remarry, whether Cain is damned, which sin is the second most serious, etc. I must admit that he does address whether baptism is necessary for salvation, whether infants have sin, whether works justify, the true presence of Christ on the altar, and whether grace comes before our good will or not, but I think most Christian students will have to admit that the answer to each of these questions is complex and cannot be summed up in a single word: yes or no.

Now I’m not a twelfth-century Parisian, so I don’t know how it came across at the time, and I wasn’t in Notre Dame to hear Abelard’s oral presentation of his lessons, so I don’t know what subtle nuances of meaning he may have supplied. But reading through Yes and No, I didn't get the impression that Abelard was thumbing his nose at doctrine or denying the truth of Christianity. However, the overall effect of the relentless verbal tennis does make it seem as if he thought the Church placed too much stock in authority, especially in proof texts taken out of context. Question: Did (and does) the Church depend too much on proof texts taken out of context? The answer is not “yes and no.”

Miss Engler’s List

During my last two or three years of high school (way back in the ‘70s of the previous millennium), if we had a substitute in English class, it was usually Miss Engler. Oh, Miss Engler! She always seemed so happy to be there with us, so we were always happy to have her there. She knew her English grammar, spelling, punctuation, and rhetoric, too, and was always able to help us with whatever topic we were studying at the time. She never got a chance to help us with literature assignments, of course, because we didn’t read literature in those days; the educators had written better things for us to read – more educational things.

But Miss Engler found her chance to shape our reading lives. One day she came in with her usual smile and a pile of mimeographed sheets. The eager anticipation of the whole class palpably filled the atmosphere in the room. It didn’t much matter what was written on the mimeographs, as long as we got to smell them while they were still warm! “I have something for you,” she said, still smiling, and handed out not one page but four. The underlined title on the first page, A BOOK LIST, created its own kind of copy, no less pleasant than a warm mimeograph: it placed a replica of Miss Engler’s smile on my face.

An introductory paragraph explained the organization of the list into four groups:

• “Group I: those ‘classics’ which are recommended to be read at the first opportunity.” I forgive Miss Engler for her use of the passive voice; I knew what she meant. At last someone was telling me what I ought to read! What was school for if not for this? This first part of the list included Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, Moby Dick, and much more. Famous works of Dickens were there, because, of course, Dickens’s novels should be read at the first opportunity!

• “Group II: those books which include the more important modern writers or the works that the student has no doubt already read in the early stages of high school.” OK, Miss Engler looks less than perfect again; books don’t “include” writers. But look how clever she was! She gently presented us with the expectation (“no doubt” you’ve already read these) along with a kindly escape hatch: any book I hadn’t already read might be by one of “the more important modern writers,” leaving me with no cause to fear that I had disappointed Miss Engler! The “more modern writers” included Graham Greene, J. D. Salinger, and Robert Sherwood. The books I had “no doubt” read included the adventure novels of Cooper, Verne, and Stevenson. Don’t ask me why these two categories belong together; I’ve never figured it out. But there must be an explanation for the combination, because Miss Engler saw it.

• “Group III: those works on a difficulty and interest level which require greater maturity on the part of the student.” Good! A list for the future. Here are Balzac and Dostoevsky and Henry James and James Joyce and all their difficult and mature friends.

• “Group IV: those standard works which have become the basis of our literary culture and should be read at least in part.” In part?! Come on, Miss Engler! This is the best group in the list! Beowulf, Antigone, City of God, The Life of Johnson, Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, Paradise Lost, The Republic! This is the light reading that I enjoy over and over!

I’m as certain as I am about any fact of human behavior for which I have no statistics that I am the only student who still reads, marks, and digests Miss Engler’s list. The group with the highest percentage of underlined titles on my tattered copy is Group IV. Samuel Butler’s Erehwon is one of the few works in that last quarter not marked yet, but it’s on my plan. The section with the lowest percentage is Group III; I guess I’m still not mature enough. But The Son of the Middle Border and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, both from Group III, are on my reading schedule, so I’m still making progress even on this sublist. (I must admit, though, that I think I will never get around to François Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle.)

Now that I have my own ten-year schedules, I don’t check Miss Engler’s list often. But I got it out just a few weeks ago and underlined quite a few titles from the last four or five years: The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Good Earth, The End of the Affair, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, Culture and Anarchy, and a few others. And it makes me happy to know that I have a definite plan to mark several more particular titles from A BOOK LIST over the next twelve years or so.

The last time I saw Miss Engler, I myself was substituting at my old high school. I had brought a book, as usual, to read while the classes did their work, and in a divinely appointed encounter, I passed her in the hallway as I was filled with the glow of having just read the last chapter of one of the perfections of literature. “Miss Engler!” I called to her, misty eyed, across the busy streams of criss-crossing students. “I just finished David Copperfield!” And there was that smile again.

Experiencing the Past

I’ve written about Edward Rutherfurd’s multi-generational novels a few times before. They can’t be considered classics or Great Books with a capital G and a capital B. But they get me thinking about history and large themes, and so, on the whole, I’ve enjoyed reading them and rereading them. The first of his books that I read was Sarum, which centers on the U.K. area around Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. I’m rereading it now and don’t like it quite as much this time, and I’m not sure why. I reread London a couple of years ago and loved it. Perhaps my problem lies in the fact that I’m listening to all 50 hours of Sarum in the car, an experience which has taken months. Perhaps it’s simply a consequence of it being Rutherfurd’s first book, before he learned how not to lose the character trees in the historical forest.

But I liked Sarum enough the first time to read several of his other offerings, and I do remember what tickled my fancy so much fifteen or twenty years ago: I’m a sucker for novels that give a sense of a sweep of history, with characters having to deal with, in this case, Saxon invaders, the Plague, the reign of Bloody Mary, and other people and events I’ve read about in histories. C. S. Lewis tells us that what he calls a myth is the only way of getting the reader inside a world so as to feel what it’s like to see things, do things, and believe things beyond our ability to experience. Think about the difference between reading a clinical description of love and the experience of being in love. Huge, right? The shelves are full of descriptions of historical settings, but, without time machines, how can we experience any of those times with an intensity the lover feels? Through stories we can. I can read a history of the Wars of the Roses, but what was it like to live at the time, with neighbors and family taking different sides? Through Rutherfurd’s fictional account of the Wilsons and Shockleys of Salisbury, I can get a taste.

I also enjoy little mentions of things like the source of the name Charing Cross or Shakespeare visiting the town with a group of players. But herein lies the problem. Sometimes in Sarum there are too many mere mentions and not enough storytelling. And sometime the storytelling takes the form of dry narrative exposition rather than that of an interaction of characters. Take the chapter I’m in now, which covers the eighteenth century. We’re told at the beginning that Samuel Shockley lost all of his money in the South Sea Bubble, but then the details of the investments and the crash are all given in past-perfect narrative; we learn practically nothing about Samuel and don’t get inside the story of the ruin by seeing how it affected an individual. (When a novel presents me with more than a couple of sentences in a row in past-perfect tense, I start to get bored. Why is the book telling me about a previous event from the outside instead of placing me in the middle of it?) A little later in the chapter we learn (in the past perfect again) that Thomas Arne has written “Rule, Britannia”; but what was it like to sing that anthem? We learn narratively that the characters read Pope and Johnson and Voltaire, but we don’t experience a scene in which characters talk about this contemporary literature. Did they like it? Agree with it? Understand it? Without the experience, the mention of these authors just seems like name dropping.

OK. So much for me trying to change The Way Novels Are Written. Even if Sarum might have too much exposition, the parts that tell stories about characters do exactly what I want historical fiction to do. The chapter on the first century, for instance, gets me a sense of the experience, like no other book I remember, of what it felt like to live in a Roman outpost town. The chapter about the fifth century sets me down in the middle of a civilization that has a Roman legacy but that has largely accepted Christianity, although the Roman-British Christians in question debate the legitimacy of the theology of Pelagius. And debate it they do. Here Rutherfurd doesn’t just inform us that Pelagius had ideas and Augustine had other ideas; he gives us believable conversations between characters that show how diverging doctrine affected relationships. So maybe the novel isn’t a Great Book with a capital G and a capital B. But experiencing the life of a fifth-century citizen of Roman Britannia is kind of lower-case great.

Pede Poena Claudo

I'd never read it before, so it was wonderful finally to experience the original novel called The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after knowing the story from so many versions, adaptations, spoofs, and cultural riffs. Stevenson is famous for a reason, and his eloquent narrative stays interesting, suspenseful, and insightful. The mystery of the story is maintained in a brilliant way, too: we first get the public story from the perspective of a lawyer acquainted with Jekyll, and then we get the inner explanation in a narrative written by Jekyll himself. Nobody needs for me to approve this book, but it's, oh! so good!

The details of the story are extra good, too. Jekyll's original purpose was to give his base desires (unstated in the narration, but promiscuous sex is implied) unlimited rein with the ability to hide back in the safe persona of the respectable doctor, and he concocts a potion to bring out the unrestrained Mr Hyde. But (1) Jekyll begins to feel remorse when Hyde turns violent, and (2) Hyde starts turning up spontaneously and a draught is now needed to get Dr Jekyll back. So sins indulged acquire power and return with a force that we cannot escape. In biblical terms, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. In Aristotelian terms, vices and virtues are habits and become, when strengthened enough, second nature.

As a bonus, I read a Stevenson short story called “The Body-Snatcher.” Here a pair of men have a business involving grave-robbing for the purpose of providing bodies for anatomy classes, but one night one of the partners kills a man in order to increase the company's stock on hand. The very last word of the story introduces a supernatural element. The effect is shocking, both for the characters and for the reader realizing that the genre of literature he's reading has just changed at the last second. But that single word again offers the moral that “sins follow after,” or as the narration puts it, quoting Horace, punishment comes "pede claudo": on limping foot, i.e. slowly but surely.

Will the Real Silas Lapham Please Stand Up?

I need to write a post soon about Miss Engler’s list of books. Miss Engler was a substitute teacher in Hazelwood schools in the 1970s. One day she handed out a mimeographed list of books she thought young people should read. I’m 99.9% sure that I’m the only student who ever paid any attention to that list, but it served as my canon for a couple of decades – replacing the list of titles adapted for Classics Illustrated! I must admit that my ragged copy still has several titles not underlined. Amazingly, though, after fifty years, I ticked off two more books from Miss Engler’s list in just the last few weeks: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. More about Jekyll and Hyde next time.

Silas Lapham was apparently a widely known, widely read American novel in the 1880s. Today, I’m sure few people have heard of it. (It did not appear in Classics Illustrated.) It’s a mystery to me why Howells and this novel aren’t more widely known. Miss Engler, you and I may be the only ones who remember!

Howells wanted to be and was considered a novelist of Realism. If you want to know more about that movement, read The Rise of Silas Lapham, not only for the benefit of the example but also because the characters outline the tenets of Realism by talking about novels and they way they ought to be. Some characters in the story have been reading a novel in which one girl leaves her attraction to a young fellow unfulfilled in deference to another girl (her sister, maybe?), and the Laphams and their friends complain that this novel they’re reading gets overly romantic and overly emotional by setting up the first girl as a heroine because she willingly suffers. I don’t know if the book the characters read was a real book, but Howells determines to show us the realistic way this plot should be depicted: the Lapham daughters find themselves both attracted to the same eligible bachelor, and one feels that her happiness is less important than her sister’s pain. Yes, these things happen, Howells tells us, but no one earns a halo. Far from being a case of heroism, the self-sacrificing Lapham sister causes a problem for the whole family, and a minister explains to her that her choice is causing three people to suffer, not just one. She eventually relents but meets a new obstacle in The Fall of Silas Lapham. (Of course, it had to happen!)

I don’t know if Howells would have appreciated my reaction to that part of the plot. He thought overly emotional novels were unrealistic and therefore inferior, but I found this story very interesting precisely because of the complex emotions of the characters involved. I definitely see that the lens he applied to life differed from that of previous generations of writers, and in the portions less about the daughters and more about their father’s paint business, the novel reminded me of Babbitt. But this is still a Babbitt of the Victorian era without the cynicism and sense of loss of Sinclair Lewis’s time. I’m sure that 140 years of perspective helps make this clearer to me than it might have been to Howells.

One thing I’m not at all clear on, though, is the nature of Lapham’s business dilemmas. I looked up reviews after finishing the book hoping someone would explain to me his options near the end of the book as he was deciding what to do with his paint venture once his fortunes began to drop. I got no help understanding the peculiar terms and practices of mergers in nineteenth-century America, but I was surprised to discover that many readers think Lapham struggles morally during this crisis. On the contrary, I saw him as an extremely moral man whose struggles involved something more interesting (in my view) than a choice between being honest and making more money: Lapham’s biggest problem has to do with balancing his ethical business choices and his duty to take his wife’s views into account. It doesn’t look to me like a crisis of morality but a crisis of epistemology: Lapham will certainly do the right thing, but how can he be sure that his understanding points to the ethical path more unerringly than his wife’s does? If you read this book, let me know what you think!

I Auden to Make a Bad Pun on This Poet’s Name

For the second post in a row, I begin to write with trepidation, with concern that I am Not Up To The Task. I just completed reading a few hundred pages of Auden’s poetry; I enjoyed it, and I want to say something about it in these posts. But I see my stats, and I know that my piece on Shelley’s “A Summer Evening Churchyard” is one of my most popular posts. I hope that people come to it – and I imagine that some people even recommend it – because it helps them read the poem. I definitely know that if my 25-year-old self could have read that post, he would have been grateful.

But I’m not sure I know how to help anyone read Auden. I’m constantly doubtful of my ability to help anyone walking with me on the dusty American road toward the enjoyment of poetry. (The roads to that goal in England are all lush and lined with hedgerows and thorn trees and other delights that make learning poetry easier and more fun, I’m sure.) but with Auden, the task seems doubly daunting. His poetry is cryptic, the meter is sometimes loose, and the language isn’t filled with the rhymes and the grammatical inversions and the luscious archaic words that immediately signify Poetry to my slow brain. At first I didn’t like not knowing what Auden was talking about:

    How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
            Tombs of the sorceror shatter
        And their guardian megalopods
            Come after you pitter-patter?

Huh?

But then I started thinking of the poems as songs. “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold.” “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night.” “When no one else would come, Shilo, you always came.” “Koo koo ja-joob.” I like all those lyrics without fully understanding them. Shifting my thinking freed me to enjoy watching Auden write the way he wanted to write about the things he liked writing about without always having to understand.

And it’s not like I didn’t understand anything. Auden’s overriding themes seem to me to be (1) that all the noble and loving actions we see in the world are done by sinners, and (2) that every event that seems important to us – an act of love, a great journey. a death – makes no difference to the stars, to the birds, or even to the loving, sinning fellow who lives a couple of blocks away. I get it, and I agree with it, and, whaddayaknow, reading a few hundred pages of difficult poetry saying this gets the message through with a depth that cannot come across in any easier way.

Now I want to have a go at talking through a poem a bit, but the poem I chose doesn’t really fit those themes. In fact, “We Too Had Known Golden Hours,” one of the last poems I read in my Auden frenzy of the last two weeks, gave me a new perspective on everything else I had read by Auden.

    We, too, had known golden hours
    When body and soul were in tune,
    Had danced with our true loves
    By the light of a full moon,
    And sat with the wise and good
    As tongues grew witty and gay
    Over some noble dish
    Out of Escoffier;
    Had felt the intrusive glory
    Which tears reserve apart,
    And would in the old grand manner
    Have sung from a resonant heart.
    But, pawed-at and gossiped-over
    By the promiscuous crowd,
    Concocted by editors
    Into spells to befuddle the crowd,
    All words like Peace and Love,
    All sane affirmative speech,
    Had been soiled, profaned, debased
    To a horrid mechanical screech.
    No civil style survived
    That pandaemonioum
    But the wry, the sotto-voce,
    Ironic and monochrome:
    And where should we find shelter
    For joy or mere content
    When little was left standing
    But the suburb of dissent?

Auden began his career in the late 1920s. As a general trend, intellectuals and artists in this modern period, disillusioned by the war of the trenches and worldwide economic depression, broke from the sentimentality and belief in progress that characterized much of nineteenth-century western culture. Painted representations of the human figure, those of women especially, became angular and ugly. Composers presented listeners with successions of unresolved dissonances. Authors rejected traditional forms of morality and searched in their stories for ways to survive in a world that had been, they supposed, proven meaningless. I don’t condemn these artistic movements; I merely point out that they greatly emphasized the ugly, the empty, the aimless, the relative, the confusing, the painful, and the broken side of life.

But Auden says in 1950, after over twenty years of publishing his modern poetry, that he has experienced absolute goodness, truth, and beauty in his life but didn’t always feel free to report it. Faulkner would never tell us that a “body and soul were in tune” (a nice musical metaphor, by the way, that goes back at least two thousand years). Stravinsky never wrote a ballet in which true lovers “danced . . . by the light of a full moon.” Picasso’s people were never “wise and good.” O’Neill eschewed dialog that was “witty and gay.” But Auden says that these things happened to him. He says he felt an “intrusive glory,” i.e. a light from beyond, i.e. transcendent goodness. And he says that these beautiful moments broke down his normal human reserve and prompted him to “sing from a resonant heart.” That word “resonant” suggests again a tuning, a synchronicity of the human soul with the transcendent glory.

So why have his poems up until this time always emphasized that any love or goodness comes from a severely flawed human being and radiates to meet a universally indifferent world? Because “crowds” and “editors” (the public and the profession) have made all language about absolute goodness sound cheap. He has been forced to write in the idiom that his readers will accept. He cannot be good-hearted, only “wry”; he cannot be sincere, only “ironic”; he cannot shine the intrusive glory through a prism and show its colors but must instead stick with the “monochrome” grays of modernism. Ultimately he feels stuck in the “suburb of dissent,” and, after learning of his friendship with Charles Williams, I can’t help thinking that the City his peers excluded him from is Williams’s City of “exchange and coinherence”, the sacred community of harmony, wisdom, and glory.

I was planning to say something about diction and meter and figures of speech, but I’ve said too much already. I’ll just end by noting that I have recently found that Google searches no longer find my posts. I found the link for the post about Williams and the City by using a Bing search.

Saluting John Wemmick

For weeks now, I’ve been intending to write today’s post as a companion to the post of November 23, 2010, in which I salute one of my favorite comic characters from the Dickens cornucopia of great comic characters. But I just reread “Saluting Captain Cuttle” and have amazed myself at – please allow me a slight, immodest indulgence – how well I did in writing it. Truly to write a parallel piece, I would again today have to seek for the right poietic frame of mind and hope for it to appear. Were I in fact in the right poietic frame of mind, I would phrase it this way: I would say that I must needs call upon the Muses and humbly take whatever boon they decide to grant me. Indeed, I believe I have used the word “poietic” instead of “creative” in order to encourage their generosity.

Alas, I am only in a slightly elevated blogging frame of mind, and will simply have to do my workmanlike best. But salute John Wemmick I must, so here we go!

First of all, there are two Mr. Wemmicks; that is, Mr. Wemmick has two sides or aspects to him. “Walworth is one place, and this office is another,” he says when Pip asks him for personal advice. John Wemmick, clerk of the law office of Mr. Jaggers, adopts his employer’s legal morality and sees clients as neither good nor evil but merely as defendants who deserve the strongest case that can be made in court and then receive either favorable or unfavorable verdicts. He scolds potential witnesses for even suggesting that they might bend the truth but cares not at all whether what they say straightforwardly be truth or lie so long as it is defensible in itself and beneficial to the client’s case. He visits former clients in prison, not apparently in the enactment of Christian virtue, but rather in hopes of receiving small presentations of “portable property” from the condemned. He wears several rings obtained in this way and one cameo brooch. He admires the casts of the death masks of two former clients whose faces have been distorted as a result of hanging, smiling on the sculptures as if they were tokens of departed friends. He tells Pip he would be better to throw his money off a bridge than give it to a friend in need because at least then he would know where it had gone.

Why he befriends Pip, we are not told. But clearly even the office Wemmick sees that Pip, in spite of his failings, has potential. It might be that he can sense that Pip has a heart for his fellow man, especially the downtrodden. (Perhaps he has heard in some way of little Pip’s kindness to the convict among the graves one Christmas morning several years ago. But that would be a coincidence, and Dickens never indulges in coincidences, does he?) Whatever the reason, befriend Pip he does, and asks him to dine with him at his home in Walworth.

On their way to the Walworth home, office John Wemmick begins to fade, and smiles begin to show on Wemmick’s odd face that appear warmer than the smiles directed toward the death heads. He talks about ways in which he can assist Pip in giving financial aid to his friend anonymously. When they arrive at the Walworth home, Wemmick delights in showing Pip how to lower the drawbridge that crosses the small ditch that surrounds the property, a ditch that could be leapt easily with a single step. Pip notices crenellations on the house and a cannon on a tower. Walworth Wemmick has fully arrived and gives Pip a tour of his “castle garden.” Before they go inside, Wemmick asks Pip if he has any objection to an Aged Parent. Pip of course saying he has none, they step in to find the Aged Parent stoking the fire. John addresses him as “Aged Parent” and “Aged P.” Walworth Wemmick’s delight begins to mount as five o’clock approaches, at which time he climbs the tower and fires the cannon. The Aged P cries out exultingly, “He’s fired! I heerd him!” I don’t know if there is a more hilarious, eccentric, or beautiful portrait of love in all of Dickens’s works than this of a hard-nosed law clerk who leaves the office behind him and builds a castle in the suburbs just so he can fire a cannon and give his deaf father the joy of hearing something once a day.

John Wemmick has a wooden face. His mouth is so straight and stiff, Dickens constantly makes references to its being a “post-office,” by which I suppose he means a mail slot. When I read about Wemmick, I try to think of the little door on the mailbox that allows you to put letters in without being able to reach your hand in to take any out, but I usually end up departing from the author’s metaphor and picturing Wemmick as a nutcracker. He has a lady caller named Miss Skiffins (perfect name) who also has a wooden face. One imagines the couple someday begetting a whole mantleful of little nutcrackers. Before they are married, John makes repeated slow and deliberate attempts to put his arm around Miss Skiffins’s waist, each attempt thwarted by Miss Skiffins's removing his arm, equally slowly and deliberately, and placing it on the table. I’ve given too much away already, so I won’t tell you how John delivers his wedding invitation to Pip, but it is priceless.

John Wemmick, I, too, had a job I tried (but usually failed) to leave behind each night. I don’t have a castle, but I have a few castles in the air, and on every one, I fire a cannon to salute you!

With a Title Like Great Expectations, How Could You Think It Would End Happily?

Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I’m usually in the middle of reading a Dickens novel on his birthday, and 2024 is no exception: I’m currently enjoying Great Expectations for, I think, the fourth time. My wife likes several of Dickens’s novels but hate Great Expectations. For many people, this is the Dickens book they had to read in some English class, and so they hate it. But I can’t help it; I love it!

For my wife, I think that everything about Miss Havisham is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed, and I suspect that the same is true for a lot of other people. To be fair to my wife, who isn’t here to defend herself and doesn’t have her own blog, she might simply say that Miss Havisham is too unpleasant to read about. So let me respond to the other, totally hypothetical people who hold that she is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed. To begin with, many things in Victorian literature seem overdone: a crazy wife kept secretly in an attic comes to mind. But I believe that Victorians lived more dramatically than we do, that angry women truly stomped their feet and that orating men posed and used lofty language that often got away from them. And that some jilted women lived as recluses. Check this recent-ish article claiming that one particular jilted recluse may indeed have been the real-life inspiration for Miss Havisham. 

But I should also point out that Miss Havisham is a character in a book, with every right to memorable excess. And after all, she’s no more over-the-top than Scrooge or the hunchback of Notre Dame or Captain Nemo, and every bit as absolutely unforgettable. And she’s there for a purpose. We all know people who hold on perpetually to anger directed at some given person. And we see in the house in which Miss Havisham lives the representation of the life that results from her never-ending grudge: no sunlight ever enters, and spiders cover the uneaten wedding cake. She serves as the physical representation of the soul that Pip could shape for himself if he continues forever his determination to be a gentleman and his rejection of his brother-in-law, who is by his admission the kindest man he ever knew.

Dickens was, to put it mildly, in a bad mood when he wrote Great Expectations. His marriage had just fallen apart (remember the spiders and the wedding cake?), and he was in no frame of mind to write a book with a happy ending. You know that The Man Who Invented Christmas is off his usual game within the first few chapters of GE, when the family dinner that gets ruined – by tar-water in the brandy and by the sudden intrusion of a band of soldiers – is a Christmas dinner. And the book goes on gloomily from there. Dickens wrote this novel in first-person narrative, with Pip admitting in his confessional account the deepest flaws of any Dickens hero. And, in Dickens’s original ending, Pip enjoys nothing of the typical Victorian hero’s happy ending: he doesn’t get the money, and he doesn’t get the girl. (Dickens's friend John Forster convinced him that his public would feel cheated by a tragic resolution, and so our author rewrote the last page before publication. If you read this book be sure to read the original ending: it’s the only one that makes any sense.)

And yet, he was still Charles Dickens, and the Ghost of Christmas Present couldn’t keep his horn of good will from sprinkling cheer here and there on the pages of Great Expectations. One early breakthrough has the irrepressible Joe Gargery forgiving an escaped convict for stealing food from his house. “God knows you’re welcome to it,” says Joe. “We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.” At this the convict represses a sob. Generosity, forgiveness, and repentance. What could be more beautiful and uplifting?

Then there’s the hilariously ludicrous Mr. Wopsle, who reads in church as if he is acting Shakespeare and later acts Shakespeare as if he were a ten-year-old in a bad school pageant. And there’s Herbert Pocket, who stays cheery, identifies himself as an insurer of international trade even though he hasn’t been able to find the capital to start the business, loves his Clara with all the letters of the alphabet, and proves to be a faithful, helpful friend to Pip in his darkest hours. And then there’s . . .

Oh, but the best will have to wait for another post.

Augustine’s Careful Method

I’m just finishing books XI-XV, the culmination of Augustine’s On the Trinity. I had in mind some things to say in today’s post, but then, just now, I read what I wrote three years ago on this blog about books VI-X, and my plan for today’s post almost completely changed. For one thing, I think I did a pretty good job in 2021, and I’m glad I don’t have to say anything more today about things like semiotics, which I had originally planned to do.

(OK, I’ll say one thing about semiotics. Augustine’s various triads – thing in the world, image of that thing in our eyes, attention that trains the eye on the thing, for instance – and his explanation of the way a sign becomes the signified in a chain – thing in the world, image in the eye of the thing, memory of the image in the eye, present imagination of the memory, thought about the image in the mind’s eye, judgment of that thought, etc. – reminded me a lot of Charles Peirce. But I recently read my notes on my notes about Peirce (yes, another chain of signs) which said that the system was so complex, I couldn’t make sense of my notes. So I’m relieved that I don’t have to go back and try to figure out Peirce just to write something today about Augustine. So now you know why the one thing I want to say about semiotics explains why I don’t want to say anything about semiotics.)

Back to the main thread now. The most interesting thing to me now about my post from three years ago is that I said then that I didn’t buy Augustine’s answer to his question, How can we love the Trinity without understanding the Trinity? I had completely forgotten my dissatisfaction. In the last five books, Augustine methodically moves step by step toward explaining his answer, and, not remembering that he had already given his answer in a previous book, I found it reasonable this time. The prose is dense and difficult to read, even for a guy who likes to read old books. But sometimes methodical explanations require dense prose, and clearly that density is effective, since, having slogged through it, I understand Augustine’s point now, when I didn’t buy it three years ago after he had merely stated it.

Here is Augustine’s point. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God is in three Persons but one Substance: a mindbender, to be sure. But we are to love God, and how can we love anyone or anything we don’t understand? Well, we love other things that we don’t know yet because we see cause to assume a likeness to something that we do know and love. “If your brother is anything like you, I’m sure we’ll be great friends.” So surely we must be able to love the divine Trinity because we know and love something like a trinity that exists in the created world, and the trinity that we know and love is in the mind knowing itself: there we have the mind as known, the mind as knower, and the mind as will that focuses the attention on itself. The three aspects (it is difficult to decide on the noun to use) correspond to the three faculties of the mind: memory, understanding, and will. And all three, while distinct in concept, lie in the one substance of the mind.

Now that’s not just the answer: it is the answer as well as an explanation for it of sorts. But that answer, for me anyway, isn’t really persuasive until one reads Augustine’s careful search through all other possible analogous trinities and his account of the reasons they don’t work.

Reading is such an adventure! I had no idea of the story that would unfold when, ten years ago, I decided to scatter the books of On the Trinity through my ten-year plan and to devote the intervening years to other works by Augustine. Reading can be hard. It’s difficult to find the time, and it gets harder and harder for me to focus with my failing eyes and my wandering attention. But learning feels good, and that’s one reason I do it and a big reason I do it by a geeky, embarrassing schedule.