Great Books Archives - Page 13 of 26

How Long?

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted.

That was the prophet Habakkuk. Twenty-five hundred years ago.

Just as before, the cicadas kept on singing their song, dry and hoarse. There was not a breath of wind. Just as before, a fly kept buzzing around the priest’s face. In the world outside there was no change. A man had died, but there was no change.
“So it has come to this….” He shivered as he clutched the bars. “So it has come to this….”
Yet his perplexity did not come from the event that had happened so suddenly. What he could not understand was the stillness of the courtyard, the voice of the cicada, the whirling wings of the flies. A man had died. Yet the outside world went on as if nothing had happened. Could anything be more crazy? Was this martyrdom? Why are you silent? Here this one-eyed man has died—and for you. You ought to know. Why does this stillness continue? This noonday stillness. The sound of the flies—this crazy thing, this cruel business. And you avert your face as though indifferent. This…this I cannot bear.

That was Shusaku Endo. Fifty years ago.

Silence is a Great Book. I am amazed I have only now read it for the first time. It’s a book that I have heard about sporadically for decades, but beyond the crucial moment toward the end of the book, I knew nothing about it. Nobody ever told me that its greatness is much larger than the tough moral decision to which the story leads.

The Big Moment: a Portuguese priest is faced with the decision: apostatize or let other innocent people be tortured. That is one of those decisions you really don’t want to have to make in life. But, framed purely a story leading to that decision, the book seems much smaller than it is.

There is a triumphalist strain of Christianity that makes it seem like becoming a Christian means moving from one spiritual high to another. Sure, we know there are spiritual lows but, gosh, all you need is a retreat or a camp or a really great worship team at church to lift you out of those spiritual lows and set you back on the mountain top. If you have a problem, you pray. Problem solved. If you know someone who is feeling down, you tell them you are praying for them. Problem solved. If the pesky problem just doesn’t go away, pray harder.

But, what if the problem doesn’t go away? This is where it gets sticky for many Christians. What if God is…silent.

And like the sea God was silent. His silence continued.
No, no! I shook my head. If God does not exist, how can man endure the monotony of the sea and its cruel lack of emotion? (But supposing…of course, supposing, I mean.) From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist…
This was a frightening fancy. If he does not exist, how absurd the whole thing becomes.

There is the test of faith. When God is silent, do you still believe God is there?

This test of faith is a tough one for the modern Christian Church, much like it has been for the church in all ages. “The law is paralyzed and justice never goes forth.” What then? Surely God will act, right? Surely justice will prevail, right? Why is God silent?

Habakkuk complains to God about the injustice he sees in his land. God finally answers. The Babylonians roar in and things get much, much worse. What then?

Silence wrestles with this question in unflinching prose.

“You will not meet with greater suffering than this,” said the priest in a voice filled with earnest fervor. “The Lord will not abandon you forever. He it is who washes our wounds; his is the hand that wipes away our blood. The Lord will not be silent forever.”

The protagonist in the novel is constantly tempted with the lie of infertile soil. Japan is just not a place where Christianity can prosper. The Japanese converts don’t really believe; they have corrupted the message. There is no hope for Christianity in Japan. So there is no point even in trying. None at all. Just give up. Look for a different cure. “Love the Lord Your God” is not enough. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not enough. Christians, if they want to do something productive in this land, must find something else to do. There are other problems, you know. It’s not really about love and conversions. It’s about making people’s lives better. Abandon the Christian message of Love and do something tangible, something useful.

That is the counsel of despair. That is the counsel of a loss of faith. It is easy to say you have faith when things are going well. It is easy to say you have faith when God is doing what we want Him to do. But, what do we do when God is silent? What do we do when misery and injustice prevail? Do we still trust God then? Do we still believe that God is sovereign, that He is in control?

“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Why faith, hope and love? Faith that even though God is silent, He is still there. Hope that God will not be silent forever. And love? There it is again. Love. Love God. Love Your Neighbor. “Do this and you will live.”

What do we do when God is silent? Well, read Silence. And Habakkuk:

I will take my stand at my watchpost
and station myself on the tower,
and look out to see what he will say to me,
and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

How to Read Henry James

A few years back I decided I needed to understand Henry James. I’d read a few of his books and stories, and was always underwhelmed. Very underwhelmed.

Yet, he is constantly mentioned as one the Great American Writers. The Library of America alone has a zillion Henry James volumes. I figured that maybe I was missing something.

I had two colleagues in the English Department who love James, so I decided to run an experiment. I wrote them both, told them I was trying to learn to appreciate James and asked them both to suggest one of his books. The suggestions. The Portrait of a Lady and “The Aspern Papers.”

After reading The Portrait of a Lady, here was my summary:

A Henry James novel is like an exquisitely crafted object, something made so perfectly that you can look at the object and admire the craftsmanship because the craftsmanship is so perfectly visible and obvious no matter how you look at the object. But, the object itself, though perfectly, and I mean perfectly, crafted, is not Beautiful. At all. There is nothing in the object which would attract a second glance unless one likes to look at craftsmanship for the sake of craftsmanship.

It is perfectly put together, perfectly written. Every character is perfectly described. The plot twists are perfectly foreshadowed and revealed. The characters act perfectly in accordance with their perfectly crafted natures. There are a perfect number of main characters and secondary characters. The novel has a perfect ending, which is only ambiguous if you haven’t been paying enough attention to the perfectly crafted characters, but if you realize that all these clockwork characters will continue to function like perfect timepieces, then you know exactly what comes next. And in the midst of all that perfection, the story is terribly dull. The characters have no blood in them. There is never a moment when the novel grabs you by the lapel and forces you to care. It is a perfectly detached novel. It is there, it is perfect, and yet it is lifeless.

I sent those remarks along to my two colleagues; the subsequent discussion was intriguing. Neither of them agreed that the novel is detached or bloodless. They pointed to examples in the book of momentous decisions. I agreed there were decisions, but the whole novel was akin to working through a geometry proof. Perhaps Henry James and Euclid belong on the same shelf?

One of them mentioned T.S. Eliot remark about James: “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” I had heard that remark before, and always assumed it was a funny insult, but suddenly I realized it was meant as high praise.

After ruminating a bit, I discovered that I was reading Henry James all wrong. I read him looking for ideas to set my mind wandering. I was looking for meaning. But, there are no ideas in Henry James. There is, instead, description. Minute description. Perfect description.

Then, I realized the timing of Henry James in the historical sweep of Western Civilization was exactly right. Back in the late 17th century, Newton revolutionized thought by showing how the entire universe operated on precise mathematical formulas. Gravity and the motions of the planets in the solar system followed the same mathematical rules.

A century later, along came Adam Smith who starts describing societal interactions in ways that society too looked like it might be following mathematical rules. Society is far more organized than it appears. The realization comes not from one person planning out how everything will act. It is like there are these underlying rules that govern how we all interact with one another. Economics and the Social Sciences develop, bringing something like mathematical rigor to the study of human interaction.

Then along comes Darwin and the development of species suddenly also looked like it was following some underlying structure. Species evolve in a system which follows a set of rules.

So now we have the universe, society, and even biology looking like they are mechanical processes. Compare that world to the world of a thousand years earlier where everything is mysterious and magical. We have turned the entire physical world, everything we can see, into a giant machine.

Fortunately our minds are still free, right? Along comes Henry James. In novels so perfect, so exquisitely fine-tuned, we find characters so perfectly crafted that we could never distinguish them from real people. And those perfect characters act in ways that are so perfectly ordained. These characters could never act in any other way. Obviously she marries him; she never really could have done otherwise.

The genius of Henry James, the thing that makes his novels enjoyable and well worth reading, is the very perfection I originally thought was so bloodless. The fact that everyone acts like they too are just machines is the idea. It is not an idea that arises somewhere in the course of the story; it is the idea that precedes the writing of it, that gives the story its purpose. The whole novel is working out that idea in a world so perfectly crafted that it is indistinguishable from reality. Why does this particular person act in this particular way?

Henry James is showing us that we are all particular people acting in particular ways. We are machines and we are carried along by our natures to act in the ways we act. You can step back and admire the machine that is you, but you cannot change the machine that is you. Consider your reaction to that last sentence. Could you have had a different reaction?

Figuring out whether Henry James is right or not is another entry in the long discussion over the nature of Free Will.

The occasion for writing this up was that a couple of former students formed an online reading group and read The Portrait of a Lady. I sent them the above to see what they thought. They both thought that it wasn’t quite right. The characters were not perfectly realistic, and they both actually cared about the heroine, Isabel, at the outset of the novel.

As we were discussing all this, one of them remarked, “He’s actively trying to make fiction into art.” Coming from her, that was not a compliment. It actually turned out to be a better way of expressing what I was groping for above.

Think of a Henry James novel like a painting. James cares a lot about the craft of writing a novel; he has great skill in using the tools of his trade. He is creating a work of art designed to be admired by all. He does this by crafting these characters that are actually smaller than life.

What makes them smaller is that he takes their interior lives and warps them so that they can be spread out across the page. But, people are more complicated than that. James is trying to craft the magic lantern which will throw the nerves in patterns on a screen. (The Eliot reference is not mine—it came up in the discussion.) If it is impossible to pull off that feat, if it is impossible to actually captre what goes on in our heads, then James necessarily fails.

So, is The Portrait of a Lady a Great Book? Neither of my former students think so. But they are both convinced that Great Books are in a different category, a higher category, than Great Paintings.

Maybe I am just in a charitable mood (I often get accused of that), but I think it has a legitimate claim to Greatness for exactly the reason that it ultimately fails to achieve its aim. The attempt to turn the novel into a painting is certainly an idea worth considering, and James does a better job of that than anyone. It is thus a really interesting vehicle to ask questions about things like whether we have free will or whether our interior monologues can be translated into a linear narrative. You can step back and admire the artistry, and then ask whether the artistry itself teaches us something about life.

However, much of the question of James’ greatness hinges on whether or not a great painting belongs in the same discussion as a Great Book. Can we say that the Mona Lisa is as Great as Oliver Twist? Or does the latter have more Greatness simply because it is a book? A question for another day.

Related Posts:
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw “Faith and Uncertainty”
Glaspey, Terry 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know “Places to Go”

The Weight of this Sad Time

Can it get any worse?

How long has it been since you asked that question? An hour, a day, a week, a year? Personal tragedy. Family tragedy. Friend tragedy. National tragedy. International tragedy. They pile up at times and you ask if it could possibly get any worse.

The Answer: Yes. Yes, it can.

Cf. King Lear. Things also just keep getting worse and worse in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes I’ld use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever
I know when one is dead and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth.
[…]
And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!

And then Lear dies.

What? Were you expecting a cheerful rumination on one of the greatest tragedies of all time?

Edgar can help.

O gods! Who is ‘t can say “I am at the worst”?
I am worse than e’er I was.
And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say “This is the worst.”

See! It’s not so bad. It could be worse!

Tragedies are, by definition watching a fall, but the descent in King Lear is precipitous and unrelenting. There is the personal fall of Lear, but there is also the fall of his friends and the ultimately his entire kingdom. Before one crisis has even hit its crescendo, the next one is already nearing its peak. Dealing with one personal tragedy or national crisis at a time is hard. Overlay them, and it is quite literally overwhelming.

You know this. At times, you have felt it.

Curiously, however, the final lines of King Lear (spoken by either Albany or Edgar depending on whether you are reading the Quarto or the Folio version of the play) are oddly hopeful.

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

We that are young, you and I and everyone who has lived after Lear, shall never see so much. We shall never live so long. Ah, the optimism of youth.

The spirit of those final lines lives on. Think about the last big national tragedy—it makes no difference when you read this, just pick whichever tragedy is in the news. How often have you heard people wondering “How could this happen? After all that we have accomplished, how can we have this problem?”

Why is it a surprise when tragedy hits? I undestand the surprise of personal tragedy; you know horrible things happen to people, you are a person, but even still, there was no reason to expect that particular horrible thing to happen to you.

That being said, however, why is it a surprise when we read about tragedies happening in in the world? People are genuinely surprised every time something bad happens. We know bad things happened to people in the past. But, we really do believe “we that are young/Shall never see so much.” We really have internalized a triumphalist narrative that major tragedies are in the past.

We live in a fallen world. We often forget that. There is no surprise that bad things happen. Tragedy should not shock us. Some tragedies, like Lear’s, are brought about by our own actions. But, many tragedies, perhaps most, are, like those of Gloucester and Kent and Edgar and Albany and Cordelia, brought about by others. We try to stand firm in a fallen world, and the world collapses around us.

The question is thus not whether tragedy will hit. The question is how do we respond? Lear is a warning. Lean into the tragedy, rail against the tragedy, refuse to acknowledge the tragedy and the result is madness and despair. Speak not what you feel, but what you ought to say, and the result is blindness and banishment.

The alternative? Remember City of God. As Augustine explains at length (at long length), we should not be surprised about tragedy in the City of Man. Since Cain slew his brother in the field, the City of Man has been nothing but an unrelenting demise. The City of Man is doomed. The tragedies you see today are simply part of the death spiral. They were preceded by other tragedies and they will be followed by fresh tragedies. The City of Man offers no hope.

But, the City of Man is not the whole story. The City of God is a story of hope. The City of God runs parallel to the City of Man, offering beauty and joy. The surprise is not that there is tragedy. The surprise is that there is love and hope.

Why does this matter so much? In a time of national tragedy there is a very real temptation to anger and despair. You know this because you have felt it. As King Lear so perceptively demonstrates, that way lies madness. Instead, try loving your neighbor today. You may not feel like loving your neighbor when it seems like the world is burning down, but that is the perfect time to do so. That small act of love you perform today will benefit not only your neighbor. Showing love today will remind you that the City of God wins in the end, that this world contains something so much bigger than tragedy. This world contains Beauty and Truth. That truth shall set you free.

River of Life

“All there is to thinking,” he said, “is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”

A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean

A rough sketch of this story is that it is about a father and his two sons who really like to go fly fishing. I mean they really, really, really like to go fly fishing. Lots of fly fishing. Lots and lots of descriptions of fly fishing. Lots of details about how to go fly fishing.

I’ve never been fly fishing and quite honestly it doesn’t interest me, mostly because I think I would be really bad at it.

Then there was the movie. Starring Robert Redford! And Brad Pitt! I saw it. It was OK. The scenery was nice. Won an Academy Award for Cinematography, so yes, it is a very pretty movie.

It is safe to say that A River Runs Through It was nowhere near my “Maybe I should read that book” list.

Then along comes a really smart bookish student and she tells me A River Runs Through It is her favorite book. I was surprised; I’ve never even heard anyone mention the book since the early 90s when the movie came out. Weeks later she mentioned again how great the book is. Another few weeks and she mentions she rereads the book frequently. Now I am intrigued. When you are talking with an interesting student with an exceptionally high ability to read and discuss Great Books and she tells you she rereads a book frequently, well, you go read it.

She was right. It is a very good book. The movie did the book a huge disservice; the movie makes it seem like one of those books with an over-the-top soap-opera-like plot. But, the novel is not plot-driven at all. This is one of those ruminative novels, where you just go along at the pace of fly fisherman standing in a river casting and recasting before strolling down to the next spot and pausing again to cast and recast. The plot (such as it is) is mixed with musings about life and nature and, yes, fly fishing. I still have no interest in going fly fishing (now I know I would be really bad at it), but at least I can now appreciate the beauty of the sport.

The lesson of the book:

It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.
The fisherman even has a phrase to describe what he does when he studies the patterns of a river. He says he is “reading the water,” and perhaps to tell his stories he has to do much the same thing. Then one of his biggest problems is to guess where and at what time of day life lies ready to be taken as a joke. And to guess whether it is going to be a little or a big joke.
For all of us, though, it is much easier to read the waters of tragedy.

An interesting idea. Your life is not a book after all. You are just part of a giant river. The river runs through it. The river didn’t start at the beginning of your life and it doesn’t end when you die. It just runs through your life. Even the stories of your life don’t really have beginnings and ends; the river runs through all those stories too. You pause in that river, fish a bit and then move along to the next stop in the river. The river doesn’t really care when and where you stop; it’s all the same to the river.

Thinking about life that way, thinking about your specific life that way, why is it easier to read the waters of tragedy? This is a really interesting answer to a question I have long pondered. Life is full of tragedy and comedy, but we notice the tragedy more than the comedy. Why?

Tragedies seem to have beginnings, sharp moments when tragedy hits. If you step back, you can see that tragedy is just part of a longer river, but the moment the tragedy hits is abrupt and noticeable. On a river, you notice the waterfall or the place where the water goes crashing through jagged rocks. It is exactly the same river that existed a mile up when it was broad and flat and seemed quite lazy. But, you notice the disruption. You notice when tragedy hits. You don’t notice when it doesn’t.

The same thing is true when you think about lives other than your own. When you think about the people you know, you notice when tragedy hits their lives too. There is that moment when tragedy hits; what do you want to do? You want to help. You desperately want to help. But, you can’t. The narrator is talking with his father about this:

He spoke in the abstract, but he had spent his life fitting abstractions to listeners so that listeners would have no trouble fitting his abstractions to the particulars of their lives.
“You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,” he said. “By help, I don’t mean a courtesy like serving choke-cherry jelly or giving money.”
“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.”
“So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, “Sorry, we are just out of that part.”
I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn’t have to be anything that big.”

Therein lies the difficulty. Someone, say a student, walks into your life and she really needs help. The tragedy is obvious. And what do you have to offer?

“That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?”

I don’t know the answer to that question. This is, without a doubt, the hardest question I face in my job. What, if anything, is needed? Is it even possible to help someone move through the waters of tragedy into the calm part of the river on the other side?

The river runs through it. It runs through my life and yours. It just keeps moving. Tragedy is not the story of life; it is just a rough patch of water in the river. But, sometimes, it is hard to step back and see the river whole.

Is It OK to Laugh?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is unquestionably a Masterpiece.

One measure of how great it is: Neil Gaiman wrote an issue of Sandman that took the play, morphed it into something that worked seamlessly into the world of Dream, and then that issue of a comic book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story of the year.

(After this happened, the organization that gives out the award immediately changed the rules of the award to prohibit comic books from ever winning again. It is apparently embarrassing that a comic book can win a Best Short Story of the Year Award.)

Gaiman had the advantage here of being able to start with one of Shakespeare’s finest plays. (He did the same thing with The Tempest later on in Sandman, by the way. Quite clever. But that is a digression.) I suspect it would be hard to find anyone who would doubt the greatness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But, is it funny? Be careful before you answer.

Consider the lion. As you will recall, within the play a bunch of rustic workmen decide to put on a play for the wedding celebration of the Duke of Athens. In the play, one of the characters, Snug, will play a lion. Snug is a joiner, a job which involves joining (hence the name!) pieces of wood together to make furniture. He isn’t terribly bright, but he can roar. Bottum (a weaver) thinks he would be better at roaring:

Snug: Have you the lion’s part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.
Quince: You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.
Bottum: Let me play the lion too. I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar that I will make the Duke say “Let him roar again. Let him roar again!”
Quince: An you should do it too terribly, you would fright the Duchess and the ladies that they would shriek, and that were enough to hang us all.
All: That would hang us, every mother’s son.

They obviously need to ensure a mild roaring. Later on, the workmen are still a bit concerned about frightening the ladies.

Snout: Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion?
Starveling: I fear it, I promise you.
Bottum: Masters, you ought to consider with yourself, to bring in (God shield us!) a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing. For there is not a more fearful wildfowl than your lion living, and we ought to look to ’t.
Snout: Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion.
Bottum: Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck, and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect: “Ladies,” or “Fair ladies, I would wish you,” or “I would request you,” or “I would entreat you not to fear, not to tremble! My life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing. I am a man as other men are.” And there indeed let him name his name and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.
Quince: Well, it shall be so.

And then when they finally put on the play, Snug does indeed make sure nobody is frightened.

You ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fear
The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,
May now perchance both quake and tremble here,
When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.
Then know that I, as Snug the joiner, am
A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam;
For if I should as lion come in strife
Into this place, ’twere pity on my life

After which the nobility provide commentary mocking the whole enterprise.

Now, think about this particular thread of the play. Did you find it amusing? Shakespeare clearly wanted you to find it amusing. In the past, people laughed heartily at the joke. But did you find it amusing?

It is not hard to start listing the sins of that passage if you use the criteria beloved by the modern Campus Scolds. First, it is misogynistic and perpetuates gender stereotypes. Then it reinforces classism and the distinctions between the upper and lower classes. Third, it reinforces the idea that the lower classes serve only to amuse the upper classes. Fourth it demonstrates the inequality of wealth. Fifth, it roundly mocks the less educated. Need I go on?

So, is it funny?

While discussing this play with a couple of students, we got to talking about exactly this question. All three of us thought the whole lion thread was funny. Very funny. But, where is that line between being funny and being offensive?

Consider the following situation. Mount Holyoke has a couple of annual events where students give brief presentations on “What I did for my summer internship” and “What I did for my senior thesis.” The college spends a lot of energy in promoting these events. You can spend all day listening to undergraduates give 10 minutes spiels on their work. Nice idea I suppose, but truth be told, the day is pure torture. Don’t get me wrong. I love Mount Holyoke students. But, very few of them actually give riveting 10 minute talks on their senior thesis or their summer job.

Now, consider an event where the presentations at these events are mocked. Imagine a skit called “Senior Symposium” which was a full ten minutes of a really bad presentation in which every stereotypical feature of a bad presentation is featured. Could that be funny?

Then imagine that the presentation is not just a generic bad presentation, but actually specifically the kinds of things that students actually do at Senior Symposium? It cuts a bit closer to home. Is it still funny?

Then, imagine mocking a particular presentation. One of the students with whom I was talking wrote a senior thesis on the how the American Communist Party’s views on women changed over the course if its existence. Imagine mocking a presentation on that particular thesis at length. Is it still funny?

Somewhere along that spectrum, you probably drew a line. But, where? And does everyone draw the line at the same place? Of course not.

A sticky problem. Is it Ok to laugh at something if you know someone somewhere might take offense? One answer is “No.” That answer kills comedy. Try coming up with a joke that has no chance of ever offending anyone. Not just people you know, but anyone anywhere. Not just people you think are “reasonable” who “can take a joke” but even “unreasonable” people. Not just people you like, but even people you don’t like. Not just people today, but people in the future too. Good luck.

The problem is that it is literally impossible to draw the line here. So, either we have zero humor in the world or…what? If we don’t rule out the whole idea of humor, then what do we do? Shakespeare, ever the clever one, has an answer at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The mischievous Puck walks out, looks at the audience and says:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;

There is an intriguing option. If you are offended, just pretend it was all a dream. Pardon others. It is not a perfectly satisfying answer, obviously. But, it does point us in the right direction. Have a little grace with others. The alternative is the death of laughter.

P.S. The thesis mentioned above about Communists and women is actually really good. It deservedly won all three major college awards for which it was eligible. It is also quite honestly without a doubt the best work ever written on the relationship between women and the American Communist Party. (That is a low bar, to be sure.) The conclusion I drew from the thesis is that Communists are really pathetic, have no deep principles, and just make up their views on an issue in order to constantly sound hip and avant-garde. The student didn’t particularly like the conclusion I drew, however, so maybe there is another possible conclusion which can be drawn from the thesis. If anyone wants to read the thesis, let me know. Of course, I expect precisely zero people to ask me for a copy. This is a thesis, after all, about Communist women in the mid-20^th century, a topic which interests precisely nobody. Don’t pretend you think it is interesting—remember—you won’t even ask me for a copy! I will get a mock-angry e-mail from this student now. I will laugh.

Fighting Vainly the Old Ennui

Back when I was enrolled in the obligatory American literature class in high school, we read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

It bored me to tears. I had no idea why I was reading a whole bunch of boring conversations between boring people.

Now, it is only fair to note that when I was in high school, my literary tastes were unrefined. Well, that is putting it mildly; I had no taste. So, my high school reaction to books is generally not even remotely accurate. But, in this case, I was actually not too far off. This novel really is a record of a bunch of boring conversations between boring people. That, as my older self realizes, is exactly the point.

A bunch of Americans living in Paris after War War I spend all their time roaming around bars, pretending to both work and sleep when they aren’t at the bar. They drink a lot. They talk about drinking even more which apparently makes them thirsty so they have another drink. They swap meaningless gossip. They trade insults, which every now and then results in a drunken brawl. They pout when things don’t go their way, which since they have no way, is all the time. There is, of course, a girl. Everyone likes Brett. So, they fight over her too. She doesn’t mind much. One might suspect she encourages it. Then, because they are bored, one day they all head down to Spain to, you know, drink and have more boring conversations.

There are two things that break up this pattern. First, there is the closest thing to a genuine love story in the whole novel. The narrator, Jake, and the girl, Brett, love one another. They have loved one another for years. Yet, they cannot run off into the sunset and live happily ever after. Why not? Jake’s war injury. The nature of this injury is never explicitly stated, so I suspect I totally missed it in high school. It’s hard to imagine we actually talked about it in class. Jake, you see, is impotent. Symbolism Alert!

I’d love to rewind and go back to see those discussions in my high school class which read this book. Did we really skip over the single most important detail in this novel, the detail which makes the book something other than boring people having boring conversations? Or did we discuss it, and somehow I forgot all about what must have been the most risqué conversation we ever had in an actual class in my high school? I have no idea.

Then we get to the other part of the novel which rises above all those deliberately boring conversations. Bull-fighting. While in Spain, our something-less-than-merry band goes to watch the bullfighting. Brett, in particular, is enraptured by the bull-fighting, and in particular the young bull-fighter so attractive that he is guaranteed to make every young heart swoon.

When Hemingway comes to write about the bulls, the prose noticeably shifts. Instead of the lazy, boring conversations of the bar, we get vivacious descriptions of bulls charging. The bulls are full of life, surging and thrusting their horns. The bullfighters do a delicate dance of teasing the bull just enough to get it to charge but then at the last minute dancing away, frustrating the bull, so the bull charges again with even greater fervor only to be frustrated again and again and again as the tension builds and builds and builds. In the end, the bull is slain by the bullfighter and falls limply to the ground. Yeah, if you don’t blush when reading Hemingway’s descriptions of the bullfights you aren’t paying attention. As Brett becomes increasingly excited, as Jake watches the bullfights with a sense of longing, if you don’t notice what is happening, you really aren’t paying attention. Way beyond symbolism alert.

We had that disturbed emotional feeling that comes after a bull-fight, and that feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight.

I found that quote, by the way, simply by opening the book to a random page in the section about Spain. I had no idea what was going on in this book when I read it in high school. None.

Which raises the question: why do people assume that every Great Book is equally good to use in high school English classes? In what world is The Sun Also Rises the best book to give to an 11^th grade class? Even if you want to use Hemingway in high school, this is not the book to use. The Old Man and the Sea works vastly better with high school students. It has themes a 16 year old could appreciate. What 16 year old needs to reflect on the impotence of middle age when dreams have died and there is no life to sustain a day-to-day existence? What 17 year old needs a primer on the power of, ahem, bull-fighting to recapture a lost youth?

The Sun Also Rises and the Sun Goes Down. One generation ends and another begins. What abides? The old ennui. Decades after Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, the King of Cool, sang about it. Decades after Sinatra, Kurt Cobain sang about it. Decades after Cobain, you are reading a blog post about a book about bored people having boring conversations. The Earth abides. Hemingway and the Preacher have spoken.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.