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The Shelter of this Red Rock

“During those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself.”

Death Comes for the Archbishop does not have a surprise ending. It has long been my favorite Willa Cather novel. Having just been to Santa Fe, it seemed like a good time to reread it.

A note on the location. Willa Cather is a novelist who immediately evokes a location; she seems like a novelist of a place. That place is the Great Plains. My Antonia, O Pioneers! and many other novels and stories conjure up images of life in the cornfields of Nebraska. So, what is this novel set in New Mexico doing in her oeuvre?

Thinking about the idea of a frontier, it is not really that much of a change. Father Latour, a Roman Catholic Bishop, takes up office in New Mexico shortly after it stopped being a part of Old Mexico. The scene is indeed every bit as much a frontier as the Great Plains had been before. America is marching west, and both My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop chronicle the early movers.

There is, however something striking about the change in location. This is a novel that could only have been written about the location in which the novel is set. I never noticed this before visiting the area, but having been there, suddenly passages like this take on a clarity I would have never imagined:

In all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left,—piles of architecture that were like mountains. The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,—that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.

That is indeed exactly not only what it looks like, but what it feels like. Then in the next paragraph, Cather adds this, ostensibly just a continuation of the description of the landscape in the previous paragraph, but really a description of the novel itself:

This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is an episodic story; chapter by chapter, we drop in on events in the bishop’s career and his relationship with a priest who works with him. At one level, it is just an achingly beautiful tale of two priests in a sparsely populated land. But, these set pieces do indeed sit just on the verge of being brought together, and as you look at each piece in turn, you notice the similarity—they all have the appearance of great antiquity.

First we have the fact that this is a story about Catholic priests in New Mexico. These are not Protestant missionaries, cattle ranchers, homesteaders, or any other product of the past 500 years. Catholic priests, tracing their lineage back 1800 years. The novel begins in what seems like an odd way; this novel about New Mexico begins in Rome; the origin of this story is the old world. Both of the priests in the story were born in France, again reminding us of the old. The land may seem new, but the religion is old.

Second, as Father Latour moves into the area, he is not founding a church; the church is there before him, brought in by the Spaniards long before. Many of the problems Latour faces in the early part of the novel are shaking off the legacy of the Spanish past, finding ways to correct the bad habits from the past while preserving what was good.

As the novel stretches on, the delving into the past gets deeper as we slowly realize that the legacies of those who were there before the Spanish arrived linger on in tribal cultures. Latour literally finds himself in the deep prehistorical past, where people build fires in mysterious hidden caves to keep the Great Serpent at bay. Priests of a religion older than Catholicism have their own mysteries, and those mysteries have been passed down generation to generation since before recorded time began.

There is still one more level down. The land itself. That country which is still waiting to be made into a landscape. Those ageless piles of rocks who barely note our passing there.

Slowly the realization dawns. This seemed like a novel about the frontier, a novel in which the questions are about the future. But the real frontier here is not between the present and the unknowable future; the frontier is between the present and the past. The future will take care of itself. It is the Past we are leaving when we die; the Past is what remains.

He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.

We are obsessed with the future. We think about the past as a litany of errors, things that need to be changed to make the future even better. Or the past is the place for which one is nostalgic, things that have vanished and we wish had been preserved. In either case, the past is there to be used.

The Past, however cannot be used. It does not care how you want to use it. It does not change because we want it to change. It neither gets better nor worse as we dream about it. The past can neither be altered nor preserved. The Past is there, complete and inviolable. That is the message of Death Comes for the Archbishop. An enterprising young Catholic priest comes to the Past, hoping to build a future upon it and slowly discovers the Past laughs at us. Its legacies run deep. We are all products of that past, and we cannot escape it. You may hate the fact that some things in the past persist; you may hate that fact that some things in the Past went away; but the one thing you cannot do is change the facts about the Past.

The trader told him he might make good Catholics among the Indians, but he would never separate them from their own beliefs. “Their priests have their own kind of mysteries. I don’t know how much of it is real and how much is made up. I remember something that happened when I was a little fellow. One night a Pecos girl, with her baby in her arms, ran into the kitchen here and begged my mother to hide her until after the festival, for she’d seen signs between the caciques, and was sure they were going to feed her baby to the snake. Whether it was true or not, she certainly believed it, poor thing, and Mother let her stay. It made a great impression on me at the time.”

Thinking of the Past like that is humbling. We can’t change the Past. It is immune to our judgments, good or bad. Death comes for the Archbishop. Death comes for you, for me. The Past Abides, and it cares not if we admire or condemn it for doing so.

The Joy of Cymbeline

“The play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogue, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names, and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.”

That is Samuel Johnson discussing William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a bit of criticism which would be impossible to do anything other than relish. Lytton Strachey remarked that the play was written by a man “half bored to death.” How about George Bernard Shaw’s evaluation: “for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of though by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.”

I am glad to report, however, that Johnson, Strachey, and Shaw are wrong. Cymbeline is a fun play. Indeed, after reading it, I was surprised when I started reading commentaries on it; so many critics seem to miss what makes the play fun.

Imagine someone sitting down with the collected works of Shakespeare and deciding to write a giant over-the-top parody of the complete works of Shakespeare. Then, imagine that the parody is written in language as good as anything Shakespeare himself would write. It is hard to imagine someone pulling off that feat. But, it happened. Shakespeare wrote it himself. Cymbeline.

To summarize the plot is nearly impossible, which is fitting because it contains within it the plots of multiple plays. So, start with the genre. Is the play a tragedy a comedy or a history? In the First Folio, it was listed as a tragedy, which makes sense because it is a lot like Romeo and Juliet and Othello and Macbeth. But, later on it was lumped in with the comedies which makes sense because it is a lot like Twelfth Night and As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. Then again, Cymbeline was the British King at the time of Julius Caesar and this is a play about rules of succession and colonization and political infighting and actual battle scenes, so it really belongs with the Histories as a prequel to the Richard plays and the Henry plays.

You can instead look at a bunch of individual scenes and characters. Which play is this from: a conniving guy tries to make a husband doubt the faithfulness of his wife by convincing him that his wife has been unfaithful? Is the conniving guy Iago (Othello) or Iachimo (Cymbeline)? Or which is the play in which the young love-struck woman takes poison which causes her to fall into such a deep sleep that people think she is dead? Romeo and Juliet or Cymbeline? Or how about the play where the young woman leaves court and goes off into the forest where she finds a court in exile? As You Like It or Cymbeline? Or how about that play that ends with a seemingly endless series of revelations that people are not who everyone else thought they were? Pick your favorite comedy or Cymbeline? Cross-dressing? Check. Dream sequences? Check. Prophecies? Check. Plots within plots? Check. Seriously, pick a feature of Shakespeare, and it is somewhere in Cymbeline.

When I realized what was going on about halfway through the play (the Iachimo/Iago comparison was really hard to miss), I realized that this was just a play in which Shakespeare was having fun. I checked my instinct by asking Izzy Baird, whose claim to fame includes having read all of Shakespeare’s plays before her 23^rd birthday. Her reply: “I like that interpretation. The start of Cymbeline is what happens if King Lear married Lady Macbeth, the middle of the play is a weird mashup of Merry Wives and Julius Caesar, and the resolution is completely Twelfth Night.” Just so.

Now, imagine my shock when I looked at the professional critics and their disdain for this play. How did they miss the fun? Yes, the scenes in Britain are set in the age of Julius Caesar, but the scenes in Italy sure seem like they are taking place right down the street from Shylock making a deal with Antonio. That isn’t a failing; that’s funny.

Harold Bloom comes closest to getting it: “Cymbeline is a pungent self-parody on Shakespeare’s part: we revisit King Lear, Othello, The Comedy of Errors, and dozens of other plays, but we see them now through a distorting lens.” Aha! I thought. Exactly right…well except for the “pungent” bit. Even after realizing it is a parody, Bloom decides it is a failed play: “No other play by Shakespeare…shows the playwright so alienated from his own art as Cymbeline does.” Or this: “Shakespeare is his own worst enemy in Cymbeline: he is weary of making plays.” Does Bloom really think Cymbeline is “aesthetic self-wounding”? Yes he does.

What is happening here? Are serious Shakespeare scholars really so obsessed with thinking of everything in lofty terms that they are unable to recognize when something is just plain fun? Shakespeare just did the equivalent of writing a literary Airplane! and the critics forget to laugh and just sit up in their boxes shaking their heads at this guy who has lost his powers. You can hear the relief of the critics when The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest come along; maybe this guy isn’t washed up after all.

One of the serious blights on the academic landscape these days is this obsession with being serious. What happened to fun? What happened to the idea that you can show the heights of brilliance by being able to laugh? Of course we want Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but isn’t there space for Douglas Adams too? The Godfather and Citizen Kane are amazing, but does that mean we can’t appreciate at This is Spinal Tap? Doesn’t it make Shakespeare even more amazing that he can write both Hamlet and Cymbeline?

So, give me your discussions of comic books and Great Books. Give me your comparisons of Taylor Swift and T. S. Eliot. Give me your 500 pages of bad puns masquerading as a novel. Never forget that life is bursting with joy and if we can’t all pause to revel in the fun of Cymbeline, then we are missing out on a big part of the reason we are all here. God’s mirth is a beauty to behold and it shows itself in all these improbable ways.

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Dante’s Road Trip: Inferno

O Supreme Wisdom, what great art you show
In Heaven, on earth, and in the evil world
And what true justice does your power dispense!

O Dante, what great art you show
In Paradise, Purgatory and the Inferno
And what true delight does your power dispense!

T. S. Eliot once noted that “Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third.” It is hard to argue with him. There have been more commentaries written on Dante’s Divine Comedy than on any other book except the Bible. That is one of the things I love about it; it makes no difference how many times you have read it, there are always new things to discover. It is literally impossible to understand all the references and intricacies.

And yet, the whole thing is told in a remarkably simple manner. This is a road trip through the Inferno, Purgatory, and finally Paradise; our faithful narrator, Dante, simply tells us about the things he sees and the conversations he has. Fittingly, the conversations in the Inferno are all about the miserable lives led by miserable people; the conversations in Paradise, however, are all lofty philosophical and theological discussions.

By all accounts, Dante’s Italian is beautiful, an easy-reading colloquial style, done in a remarkable rhyme scheme, all of which is difficult to replicate well in English. There are 100 chapters (called Cantos); 33 for each part, plus an initial Canto to set the whole thing up. Lots of people have tried, and some of them have done an amazing job, trying to keep the rhyme pattern. But, my preferred translation is Robert and Jean Hollander’s. They abandon the attempt to keep the rhyme and instead try to preserve the easy-going nature of Dante’s verse.

We begin to see the artistry of the Divine Comedy at the outset. Dante is lost in a dark wood and meets three beasts before Virgil shows up and tells Dante to follow him. The commentaries are filled with attempts to figure out what the three beasts represent. If you like giant puzzles, you can spend time reading all the notes in whatever version you have. Or, you can decide to just go along for the ride; the story works perfectly well if you see the three beasts, notice they are scary and stop Dante from his journey, and thus make him willing to trust to a guide. In other words, the story of the Divine Comedy is perfectly enjoyable even if you have no idea who all the people are and what all the assorted things represent. You don’t need to look at a single editorial note to enjoy the work. Just imagine you are hearing a guy telling an amazing tale, and don’t sweat the details.

As we get into the Inferno, we, like Dante, are initially overwhelmed with the visceral terrors—Dante faints before even crossing into the Inferno, and then he faints repeatedly in the early cantos. But as Dante (and the reader) go along and the shape of the afterlife comes into focus, his (and our) perspective changes. By the end, he is ripping out the hair of a sinner; he does not show an ounce of sympathy for Ugolino.

The first clue to thinking about the Inferno as a whole comes in the third canto: we find out that the souls are eager to cross into the Inferno (3.124). Why eagerness and not dread? It is a sign that we think about Hell in the wrong way. We imagine Hell as a place of eternal punishment, a place to be avoided. But the souls here are eager to get to their final destination. Why?

Look at the punishments. People generally say that the punishments fit the crimes, but that is missing something important. They are less punishments in our usual way of thinking and more the simple revelation of the nature of the sin. Dante is saying: if you think the punishment sounds bad then you should realize that the sin is exactly like the punishment. The punishments in the Inferno don’t fit the sin—they are the sin.

The first group Dante meets, the neutrals, show the shape of what is to come. In life, the neutrals followed no set path, just running about aimlessly with no internal pricks of conscience— and here they are running around after an aimless, directionless banner pricked only on the outside by wasps and flies. In other words, in death, the souls get to spend eternity doing what they chose to do on earth.

The wrathful are forever fighting in the muck. The people who said there was no afterlife spend eternity in tombs. Murderers are standing in a lake of blood. Diviners want to see into things that cannot normally be seen, so their bodies are unnaturally twisted as they try to see what cannot be seen. And on and on. It is indeed great art…which Dante cleverly pretends comes from God and not Dante himself.

Then as you look at the Inferno compared to Purgatory and Paradise, you notice there is a structural similarity. Each realm has three main parts, which get divided into 7 subparts. Then there are two more levels which are like, but not identical, to the three main parts, so that brings us to nine levels. Finally, there is a 10^th level which is unlike the other nine.

Surprisingly, the internal structure of the Inferno is not from Christian theology. It is straight out of Aristotle. Dante tips this off when he notes that the souls entering the Inferno are those who have “lost the good of the intellect.” It is not just faith that shapes this afterlife; it is also Reason. After all, Virgil, not one of the saints, is Dante’s guide.

In the Inferno, the three divisions are the sins of Incontinence, Violence, and Fraud, ranked in that order of seriousness by Aristotle. Incontinence has four circles (Lust; Gluttony; Avarice and Prodigality; and Anger and Sullenness); Violence is a single circle with three parts; Fraud is two circles (Simple Fraud and Treachery, with the former having ten parts and the latter four parts). That gives seven circles. Then add the circles of Limbo and Heresy, both of which are a lack of belief, the former because of ignorance of the truth, the latter because of denial of the truth; note that these sins do not fit into Aristotle’s structure because they are specifically Christian sins. The 10^th circle, unlike the others is the Neutrals, who neither believed nor didn’t believe.

For modern readers, murder is surprisingly high up; even in the realm of violence, it is the least serious of the types; violence against God and violence against self are worse than violence against others. Lust is at the highest level in the Inferno proper. The worst sin, the one at the very pit of Hell? Treachery against rightful lords.

Not only is the macrostructure fascinating, the individual levels also are. One of my favorite bits is in Canto 4, the circle of Limbo containing those who never had the opportunity to know about God. Dante meets the Great Poets there: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. When not being a tour guide, Virgil resides in this level, so the other Great Poets come over to chat. Then Dante relates this:

After they conversed a while,
They turned to me with signs of greeting,
And my master smiled at this.

And then they showed me greater honor still,
For they made me one of their company,
So that I became the sixth amidst such wisdom.

Thus we went onward to the light,
Speaking of things that here are best unsaid,
Just as it was fitting to express them there.

Yep. Dante just ranked himself as one of the six greatest poets of all time. Talk about having a high opinion of yourself! But, then, it dawns on the reader…Dante is actually better than the other five great poets. Even more amazing, Dante put himself among the greatest of all time on the basis of…what? His previous work is OK, but not even in the class of Homer and Virgil. The very work in which he asserts his greatness is the work on which his greatness is based. He knew he was writing something extraordinary. And despite the fact that we might want to say he was being a bit too prideful, it is hard to say his opinion of himself was too high. Indeed, by ranking himself with those other poets, he was lowering himself.

Canto Five is a perfect illustration of why there are so many commentaries on the Inferno; it is brilliant. In the circle of lust, Dante meets Francesca, who gives a speech designed to solicit Dante’s (and thus the reader’s) sympathy. She makes a case for why we should feel bad for her. Do we pity her? Remember, she is in the place where the souls have lost the good of the intellect. The whole speech is designed to play on your emotions, not your intellect. Dante falls into her trap; he swoons. Dante, like the reader, has not yet come to understand the nature of the Inferno; he still feels pity for these souls.

Francesca’s speech is a very clever riff on Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine’s job was a teacher of rhetoric; Francesca’s speech is a perfect example of classical rhetoric in both form and substance. Augustine realized the superficiality of classical rhetoric; Francesca embraces it, which proves Augustine’s point. Augustine notes his huge struggle with the sin of lust; Francesca embraces her lustful desires. Augustine’s conversion came when he was reading Paul—the dramatic moment is when puts down the book and reads no further; Francesca, reading a book with her lover, copies Augustine’s line about putting down the book and reading no further, but instead of converting, embraces her lust.

Then there are some incredibly fun parts. Dante and Virgil encounter a locked gate with some fallen angels who refuse to let them pass. So an angel from heaven shows up to help out. The angel comes down into hell with an attitude that this is some tiresome bit of nonsense that he just wants to get over as quickly as possible. Absolutely brilliant. While Dante and the readers are obsessed with all the details of the Inferno, the angel can’t be bothered to even say “Hi” to Dante after making a trip there just to open some doors for him. The angel just trudges in, waves open the gates, yells at the fallen angels, and then strides off.

Then there is the bit where Dante shows sheer audacity by inventing a whole story about Virgil going through the Inferno before, but presenting it as if it is a story all the readers would already know. He also repeatedly has bits which slyly mock Virgil. Dante is subtly asserting that his tale is so much better than Virgil’s. And remember, when Dante wrote this, everyone knew The Aeneid was the best thing ever written.

When we meet Ulysses is the circle of False Counsellors, he tells a tale of a journey he convinced his crew to take, sailing out into the ocean until they came in sight of a great mountain. A great storm then came up and everyone drowns. We find out in Purgatory, that the mountain on the other side of the world is Purgatory, which you have to climb to get to heaven. So, Ulysses, in effect, is counseling his crew to set off on their own, unaided by God, to get to Purgatory and climb to heaven. The whole of the Divine Comedy is an argument that you can’t do that; at the outset, Dante was lost in the dark wood and he tried to climb a hill on his own. He failed. But at the behest of a heavenly soul, Virgil will lead Dante along the proper path, and Dante will then come back to tell us all.

As you travel through the Inferno, the message become quite clear:

Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.
Who is more impious than one who thinks
That God brings passion to his judgement?

The Inferno is reasonable and just. If you don’t want to deal with God, if you want to live your life in sin, then congratulations, you can spend all eternity doing exactly what you wanted to do.

The Inferno ends with a Great Trivia Question: name the three worst sinners in the history of the world, the ones who will be eternally chewed up by one of Satan’s three heads. If you have never read the Inferno, don’t Google the answer. Just read the story. You will be very very glad you did.

The Black Dwarf Reviewed by the Author

“’Pass on your way,’ reiterated the object of their curiosity; ‘the breath of your human bodies poisons the air around me, the sound of your human voices goes through my ears like sharp bodkins.’”

That is how we meet the star of Walter Scott’s The Black Dwarf. It is one of the dwarf’s less misanthropic utterances. He has a dark heart indeed.

Walter Scott is curiously neglected these days, having once been more popular that Jane Austen. His earliest works are tales of Scotland around the time of its unification with England. Scott published the novels anonymously. The first novel was Waverly, and the next few were published as coming from “the author of Waverly,” so the whole run of Scottish novels is now dubbed the Waverly Novels. The Black Dwarf was Scott’s first attempt to pretend it was by a different author, but apparently everyone knew it was by the same author and lots of people suspected said author was Scott.

The authorial background here is interesting because of one of those marvelous things that could only happen once upon a time. Most of the reviews of The Black Dwarf were negative. Two of the harshest were published anonymously; it turns out Scott himself wrote those two reviews. Try to imagine that happening today.

The novel is indeed quite weak compared to what we know Scott was capable of doing. The misanthropic Scottish dwarf is amusing, but the relatively short novel has the dwarf surrounded by too many undeveloped characters. The bulk of the story sets up a mystery of wondering who this dwarf is and why he hates people so much, and then the whole mystery is explained in a hurried two pages by a character who just so happens to know the entire back story and suddenly decides it is a good time to relate it. It is like a condensed version of that chapter in Agatha Christie where Poirot revels the solution to the mystery, except this time there were absolutely no clues beforehand which gave even a hint of a suggestion about the solution to the mystery. Then the novel ends.

Is the book worth reading? Sure, if you love reading Walter Scott, it has that charm that you love so much. But if you haven’t read Scott before, this is not the place to begin.

So, let turn back to Scott’s own reviews, because they are a marvel to read.

The first was in Critical Review in December 1816. Given that we now know who wrote the review, it begins rather humorously with a discussion of how the novel was obviously by the same author as the Waverly novels, but all those rumors that were often repeated and just as often refuted that the author was Walter Scott were just pointless musings. He then notes that the story in The Black Dwarf is thoroughly unsatisfying first because of the absurd number of characters in such a short novel and then by the overuse of the Scottish dialect.

[The] author becomes a little careless as he gains confidence by approbation; and for merely English readers, too much of the Scottish dialect is introduced into the speeches. It is sometimes employed, however, with admirable effect; according to the character of the individual who speaks, it seems to add characteristic ferocity to the ruffian, or simplicity to the innocence of youth, and tenderness to effusions of love. On other occasions it not a little lightens the comic effect of rustic humor.

That is actually not a bad summary of the Scottish dialogue. Scott uses that trick often in the Waverly novels to good effect. But there are sections of The Black Dwarf which descend to the being nearly impenetrable for both Scott’s contemporaries and a 21^st century American reader. A little Scottish brogue goes a long way.

This review closes with another criticism of the book, which Scott deftly converts into an intriguing comment on English letters.

While exhibiting the manners, the author has endeavored also to employ something of the language of the times: he describes, but he has now and then gone too far back into antiquity, and has brought forward words that had even then been long obsolete. The error was, however on the right side, and it would be advantageous, if, instead of the prevailing fashion of importing French terms, we resorted more to the wells of undefiled English, afforded by our elder writers.

That was the nicer of the two anonymous reviews Scott wrote about his own book. The second was published in Quarterly Review in January 1817.

The summary: “It contains some striking scenes, but it is even more than usually deficient in the requisite of a luminous and interesting narrative” and “the narrative is the worst part of The Black Dwarf.”

Such is the brief abstract of a tale of which the narrative is unusually artificial. Neither hero nor heroine exact interest of any sort, being just that sort of pattern people whom nobody cares a farthing about. The explanation of the dwarf’s real circumstances in character, too long delayed from an obvious wish to protract the mystery, is at length huddled up so hastily that, for our parts, we cannot say we are able to comprehend more of the motives of this principle personage then that he was a mad man, and acted like one—an easy and summary mode of settling all difficulties. As for the hurry and military bustle of the conclusion, it is only worthy of the farce of the Miller and his Men, or any other modern melodrama, ending with a front crowded with soldiers and scene-shifters, and a back scene in a state of conflagration.

Again, Scott is not wrong in his assessment.

(There is a fascinating edited volume waiting to be created: Anonymous reviews written by the author of the book.)

As noted above, it is truly strange to me that Scott is so much out of favor. His best books are still in print with professional publishers. But, as far as I can tell, the only editions of The Black Dwarf in print right now are the fly-by-night print-on-demand versions in which you roll the dice and hope they are actually proofread and not sloppy OCR scans of a library book. Why doesn’t, say, Oxford World Classics or Penguin have the complete works of Scott? Obviously they don’t think there is a demand for it. And so, unfortunately, Dear Reader if you want to read the tale of a Misanthropic Scottish Dwarf, unless your mother once gave you a beautiful late 19^th century set of the complete works of Scott, your best bet is a free Kindle version.

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Becoming a Link in a Chain

You will never write anything that is of even remotely the same caliber as what Shakespeare or Austen or Dickens wrote. You just are not that good.

Is that an insult?

I also will never write even a single paragraph which could bear comparison to anything in Shakespeare. Is your instinct to tell me I shouldn’t think that about myself?

One of the strange byproducts of all of us being raised and told we can be whatever we want to be is that we get a warped idea of greatness. Pick a random kid you know and ask yourself, is it really true that if for this kid to be greater than Shakespeare, all that is necessary is the desire to be so? It is true that the kid could be a writer; but is it also then true that the kid could become a great writer, a writer of prose so divine that it makes you weep with joy to read it?

Enter Plato’s Ion. The dialogue (rather short) is between Socrates (surprise!) and Ion, a professional rhapsode. Now that is a career which has died out. A rhapsode was a person in ancient Greece who recited the Greats, particularly Homer. (By the way, when we tell kids they can be whatever they want, does that mean they can become professional rhapsodes? Can you make a career doing dramatic recitations of Homer?)

Ion is, at least in his own telling, the greatest interpreter of Homer alive, delivering prize-winning recitations of The Odyssey and The Iliad. People laugh at the funny parts and weep at the sad parts and Ion merrily collects his payment. The question which puzzles Ion is why he is so amazing when it comes to Homer, but bored to death whenever anyone is discussing, say, Hesiod. Why doesn’t the ability to deliver the best possible interpretation of Homer translate into the ability to do the same thing with Hesiod?

Socrates explains:

The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. (Jowett translation)

The image there is perfect. Homer composed his immortal works not through the art of crafting great tales but because he was inspired from on high by the Muses. You can’t teach someone to write something as great as The Odyssey; such a work comes to the poet from the outside, from the gods or God. Then along comes Ion. Ion also cannot be taught to do what he does so very well. Instead, like a link in a chain, he attaches himself to Homer and the magnetic power emanating from the Muses, flows through Homer into Ion and Ion exhibits the magnificence of the Divine Inspiration. Homer is merely an interpreter of the divine muse. Ion is an interpreter of the interpreter. And, we, lower links on the chain are attracted to the divine message through the magnetic force flowing through Homer to Ion to Socrates to Plato to us.

You will never be as great as Homer. But you could be as great as Ion. Is that an insult?

Imagine for a moment an educational system which worked like that. Instead of a rhetoric of trying to turn every kid into a miniature Homer or Shakespeare or Newton, we instead say “None of you are that good. But you can be an excellent link in a chain passing along the excitement of a Homer or Shakespeare or Newton.”

The first objection is surely that we may be crushing the next Shakespeare. But, can the next Shakespeare be crushed that way? If Genius comes from a communication with the Divine Muses, then the idea that the educational system can either create or destroy Genius is pure hubris. No matter how well I teach, I cannot create the next Eliot, nor would my failures stop Eliot from becoming Eliot.

Instead of telling every student they can be great and that the options in life are greatness or failure, why not say this: “You should aspire to be great and you should know you will fail. But, you can become a link in the chain of greatness; by considering what makes Shakespeare a greater writer than you, you can learn to pass along the Divine Joy of Shakespeare to others.” Ion is a great rhapsode not because he composed verses equivalent to those of Homer, but because he did not do that. Instead, he discovered the inspiration flowing through Homer and passed that along to others. To do this, he had to immerse himself in Homer and because he did that, others were able to see through him the Beauty from on high which an inspired Homer passed along in verse.

We have lost this idea that being a part of a chain is a High Calling. We tell students to be great and when the fail, they become the equivalent of middle management, soulless drones moving paper around. Ask yourself this: who is the divinely inspired artist that everyone who meets you learns to see the amazing insights that artist provided? Jane Austen needs her own Ions, and truth be told, Austen’s Ions are everywhere and you cannot meet one without thinking you really should go reread Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. But where are the Ions for Plato? Dickens? Newton? Euclid? Locke? Augustine? Dante?

Imagine a world in which everyone you knew was taught in school to find a link in a chain attached to a Divine Muse, to find one of the many Greatest of the Greats, and then to attach to that chain and pass along the magnetic force flowing through that artist. Imagine if we celebrated the idea of those who become the links in the chain, those who inspired us to learn just a bit more about plants or Virgil.

The world is an amazing place, full of beauty and insight. We settle all too often for an education which lacks all trace of that divine inspiration. Which is the better high school Physics class: The one in which a bored teacher marches through a boring textbook, but at least covers all the parts, or the one in which the teacher inspired by Galileo’s The Divine Messenger spends the whole year passing along the excitement of planetary movements, drawing students in by the sheer magnetism passing through Galileo to their teacher to them? The latter class covers far less material, but conveys the beauty of physics. The former class is the one taught in just about every school out there.

A year ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who is a teacher in high school who was having a difficult time getting his class of high school seniors to share his enthusiasm for The Brothers Karamazov. I had no solution at that time for the problem, but I think Ion points out why my imagination failed. I struggled with trying to figure out how to get high schoolers excited by Dostoevsky by imagining what would have happened if I had been assigned that book by my high school teachers. I would have hated it; they would have sucked the life out of the book.

But, now I realize the problem is not the book, but the whole way my high school classes were conducted. Now I imagine having this teacher who wrote me and who loves the book spending a semester doing nothing but sharing his love of the book. Every day is a fresh excitement as he reads out passages and captures the tension of the book. I imagine being asked to imagine what it would be like to have Alyosha or Ivan or Dmitri as a brother or to live in that monastery or to actually meet Father Ferapont. Imagine if every day in class was just swimming in that world with a teacher who was excited to show us the marvels. I think I would have loved this book in that high school class.

So is it possible that our attempts to cover everything in high school have crushed the ability to see the magnetism flowing from on high? What if the goal of school was to have every student find some link to the Muses and simply attach themselves to that link and let the magnetism flow through. What if instead of telling everyone that they can be the next Shakespeare or Newton, we just told them to find a Shakespeare or Newton and enjoy?

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How to Build a Happy Family

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy it its own way.”

I’ve never seen a study of this, but I suspect that is one of the top five most recognizable opening lines in literature. Anna Karenina could indeed be retitled: “Tolstoy’s reflection on what makes us happy.”

Come to think of it, though, maybe it is more properly Tolstoy’s views on what makes us unhappy. The difference between those two ways of thinking of the matter is rather large. Is your default state being happy and then it is things which occur or decisions you make which make you unhappy? Or is the baseline unhappy, and the question is how to become happy? Are the happy families or the unhappy families the ones worth studying? Which is the norm and which is the deviation from the norm?

It isn’t clear if there are any happy families in Tolstoy. Are Levin and Kitty a happy family? Good question for a collegiate paper topic; I have no idea how to answer it.

Thinking on that, though, raised another question—one which I was surprised had never occurred to me before now. Is a happy family a family in which all the members in it are happy? Or is it something different? In other words, can you have a happy family if some or all of the members of the family are individually unhappy? Conversely, can you have a family in which all the members of the family are individually happy, yet the family is unhappy? Is the family more than its parts? Is the happiness of the family equal to the average happiness of the members or to the minimum level of happiness of its members or something else entirely? I don’t know how to answer those questions either.

Maybe the problem gets simpler if we just think about how to attain individual happiness. But then we run into the Vronsky problem:

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is in the realization of desires. (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (of course—why use any other?))

The eternal error people make. You have a desire. You think the fulfillment of that desire will make you happy. The desire is fulfilled. You are still not happy. So you try again. This process has been dubbed the hedonic treadmill, which is a great term. You are walking toward happiness, but since you are on a treadmill, you never get any closer to your goal.

But Tolstoy goes one step further in the analysis of this condition:

He soon felt arise in his soul a desire for desires, an anguish. Independently of his will, he began to grasp at every fleeting caprice, taking it for a desire and a goal.

This image of a soul desiring things to desire fascinates me. What if the soul is doing that at an unconscious level; what if you don’t even notice your desire for desires? All you would notice is a constant stream of desires popping into your conscious mind. Some of those desires are easily attained—“I really want to reread Anna Karenina.” Some are harder to attain—“I really want the Raiders to win the Super Bowl.” But, all these desires carry with them the promise that if attained, you will be happy.

Why then do all those things not bring lasting happiness? If your soul is just casting up desires to fulfill its own need for desires, then of course fulfilling those desires will not bring happiness. It just causes the soul to desire another set of desires. There is something deeper missing here, something which will bring happiness, something for which the soul is longing that is being masked by the steady stream of desires passing into the conscious mind.

We can hold that thought for another day. Let’s go back to the family. What makes a happy family? Well if you imagine all the members of a family are copies of Vronsky, then they are all individually chasing after these desires created by the soul’s desire to have desires. Each person wants to be happy, each person believes that a happy family will make them individually happy. But will it? If you live in a happy family, are you happy? If your desire for a happy family is realized, is it too only a grain of the mountain of happiness which you expected?

It would seem that the happiness of the family is not a stable state. If the members of a family all find their desire for a happy family is realized, then as soon as that happens, each member of the family recognizes that the realization of the desire for a happy family did not make them individually happy, and thus the happy family suddenly consists of people who are individually unhappy. It seems unreasonable to say that a family in which every person is unhappy is a happy family. The family is thus unhappy. Each family is unique in its unhappiness because each individual unhappiness is unique. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

How then can there be any happy families? If the happy family is doomed to become instantly unhappy, is there even such a thing as a happy family? Can we imagine a family in which all of the members of the family have individually realized not merely a grain in the mountain of happiness, but the whole mountain of happiness? Can we imagine a family in which each member of the family upon realizing that the happy family goal has been reached, no longer has a soul questing to desire new desires? It is hard to imagine that is a possibility.

The solution to the quandary must be in the way we think about what it means to be happy. If I think happiness is the fulfillment of my desires (the eternal error), then there is indeed no possibility of a happy family. But what if that way of conceiving the matter is the mistake?

What if a happy family is one in which every member of the family believes that the happiness of the family itself is the important thing, that the happiness of the individual is irrelevant? I no longer ask if I am happy; I ask if my family is happy. I no longer have a category in my mind of my own happiness. Set aside for a moment whether you think such a thing is possible for you or anyone else. Just imagine a family in which everyone thought like that. Is that a happy family? It sure seems like it would be. And, curiously, a family like that, in which each member is only thinking about the happiness of the family and not their own individual happiness, would indeed look just like every other happy family. In all those happy families, people wake up and only do what is best for others in the family.

Now that I am considering this, I think this is what Levin is groping for in the long rumination at the very end of the novel. The need to replace love of self with love of your neighbor. That is what would make a happy family. Why are families unhappy? Because we all have an impossible time replacing love of self with love of neighbor. It would almost take a Divine Love, a Love Supreme, to be able to do that.

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