Great Books Archives - Page 8 of 26

Art of the Quip

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel…for good reason. Literary genius is not necessarily adept at all forms.

Here is a parlor game: which authors wrote excellent novels, short stories, plays, essays, and poems? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone. Or, make the game easier by aiming at 4 out of 5. Or would it have to be 3 out of 5 to get any entrants?

Wilde’s forte was “The Quip.” He was a manufacturer of one-liners; indeed his only rivals in that form might be Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. Accounts of his performances, and that is the right word, at dinner parties were the stuff of legends.

Alas, “The Quip” is not a very marketable literary form. It can easily, however, be incorporated into a play, and Wilde wrote a few good plays. But, if you a Master of Quips, how do you write a novel? The first step is to write yourself into the novel. You can give yourself another name, and if you are going to do that, might as well make yourself a Lord! Therein lies the real secret of The Picture of Dorian Gray; it would be more accurately entitled Admiring the Quips of Lord Henry Wotten. So much of the novel is simply setting up excuses for Lord Henry Wotten to make clever remarks in the presence of dull-witted figures.

There is, of course a plot, but the whole of the plot is easily summarized. Dorian Gray, young and beautiful, has his portrait painted. He then notices that as he commits immoral acts, the effects of that immorality show up on the portrait instead of on his own visage. Knowing that he can stay young and beautiful no matter how depraved he acts, he indulges himself. It’s not hard to imagine the effects.

A story like that can generate a great deal of discussion about virtue. This is a book well worth reading. But, taken as a whole, it is really obvious that the things about the plot which might attract our attention are not the reason Wilde wrote the book. Lord Henry Wotten and his endless quips occupy a vast amount of space, but are terribly unrelated to the story of Dorian Gray. Indeed, the connection between the two is that Wotten exhibits what can best be described as a dispassionate lust for the young and beautiful Dorian. (Inserting Freudian psychoanalysis of Wilde is child’s play.)

What did Wilde think he was doing with this novel? There is a rather bizarre Preface to the novel. It begins “The artist is the creator of beautiful things” and it is not a leap of faith to think Wilde is talking about himself in that line. He has created a beautiful thing, this book you are about to read. But, the Preface ends with the line “All art is quite useless.”

The last line is puzzling. Is it an indication that Wilde realizes how utterly useless he is, that all those clever quips amount to nothing? Not exactly, the immediately preceding sentence is “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”

Bernulf Clegg (presumably named after Saint Bernulf!) was puzzled enough about that last line to write Wilde and ask what it meant. In reply, Wilde sent an extraordinary letter. Here it is in its entirety.

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

If Wilde is right, what then? You read The Picture of Dorian Gray and your sole response is to admire it. But what exactly would you admire? The cleverness of Wilde’s stand in? Do you have toward this book the same sort of crypto-erotic joy that Wilde feels toward Gray? Put the whole work of a pedestal, don’t overthink it, just worship the creator? That is not the sort of response this novel engenders.

Look again at the letter above, though, and replace “Art” with “Quip.” It is a perfect description. Quips create a mood, are sterile, are not to be pondered, and have no use at all beyond the momentary pleasure of hearing them. The real point of The Picture of Dorian Gray is to provide the platform for elevating Wilde’s Quips into High Art.

Another fun parlor game is to decide on who was the most conceited figure in history. Lots of candidates. My favorite is Dante, who meets Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil in the Inferno and notes, “And then they showed me greater horn still,/ for they made me one of their company,/ so that I became the sixth amidst such wisdom.” (Hollanders’ translation) But, then again, maybe this isn’t so conceited. Dante is obviously superior to Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and I don’t think may people would rate him below either Homer or Virgil. Maybe Dante is being modest there.

Wilde, however, is not in that pantheon. He said a very many clever things. (Asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare, he replied “I have nothing to declare but my genius.”) A surfeit of quips deserves our admiration. We can even go as far as to say that a great quip is a work of art. But, to compare a quip by Wilde to a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dickens or a poem by Eliot is, quite literally, laughable.

The Art (and Cure) of Love

“Should anyone here in Rome lack finesse at love-making let him
Try me—read my book, and results are guaranteed!
Technique is the secret.”

How many books have been written for which that could be the back-cover blurb?

Technique which is guaranteed to bring good results! Now, you ae thinking that is just hyperbole, but the author is happy to double down.

The first thing to get in your head is that every single
Girl can be caught—and that you’ll catch her if
You set your toils right.

Could you ask for a better example of e problems of the modern age than this? Reducing that ancient art of courtship to a matter of applying the proper technique to attain a realizable goal? All peppered with that cheesy tone of “You can do this! We can Help!” Home Depot meets Jane Austen. The decadence of the 21^st century.

Then again, the book wasn’t written in the 21^st century. Is was written two thousand years ago. Ovid, The Art of Love (Peter Green translation). Some things really do never change.

I heard about the book from a student I know who had been reading it in her Latin course. It was, she told me, incredibly funny. So, I bought it. She was right—it is extremely funny. (Also amusing: I bought it with funds from a research account I have at the school. The title of Peter Green’s Ovid translation in which the work is found is, most unfortunately, The Erotic Poems. I had to think twice about whether I really wanted to send in the receipt for this book for reimbursement. Ovid would laugh at my conundrum.)

What makes the book so amusing? First off, Ovid’s unrelenting fishing for praise. “And when you’ve brought down your/ Amazon, write on the trophy Ovid was my guide.” “As once the young men, so now let my girl-disciples/ Inscribe their trophies: Ovid was my guide.”

To what end was Ovid their guide? There are three parts to the poem. Ovid first tells men how to woo the girl of their dreams. Having won her, part 2 is devoted to how to keep the girl of your dreams. But, then Ovid pulls a fast one on the young men he has been advising, and in part 3 tells women how to thwart the lovers of the first two parts and find the man of their dreams.

It is all a lot of work. “Love is a species of warfare/ slack troopers, go elsewhere!/ It takes more than cowards to guard/ these standards. Night-duty in winter, long route-marches, every/ Hardship, all forms of suffering: these await/ The recruit who expects a soft option.”

Of course, you already knew all this. The most amazing thing about Ovid is not that he has an amusing way to give advice on love, but how familiar all that advice sounds. You can pick just about any part at random and set it to music and never know it wasn’t a pop song written in 2020. Indeed, these lyrics would be far better than those in many a contemporary pop song.

Not up for all this work at love? Fear not, Ovid has you covered. Positioned immediately following The Art of Love is another Ovid masterpiece: Cures for Love.

Attend to my precepts, then, you disappointed gallants,
All those whom their loves have utterly betrayed.
Let him who taught you to love now teach you love’s cure—
Take succor from the hand that struck the wound!

The trick? Well, the best option is to never let love start growing. But, if you fail at that, Rule Number One is: No Leisure! Keep busy. And the best way to do that: farming! No leisure there—always something to do down on the farm. Also hunting! And if that doesn’t work, travel!

Now you may not be able to head to the country to farm or to distant lands, but fear not, Ovid is not out of advice. Start dwelling on the flaws of your beloved! Magnify the deformities; encourage the object of your love to engage in activities which expose all those deficiencies.

It turns out curing love is at least as much work as indulging in love.

Why read Ovid? In an age in which we can all use more opportunities to smile and chuckle at life, Ovid is right there ready to be your guide. Love is indeed a mysterious and amusing thing; who can explain it? If you are young, read Ovid to help put your wooing into perceptive. If you are old, read Ovid to remember and perhaps even rekindle those flames of love. Read Ovid because he is wise, not in the advice he gives, but in reminding us that all of life is not serious, that some parts of life are meant to be treated with a lighthearted raillery.

The Logic of Bureaucracy

Back in my US History class in 8^th grade, my teacher (Mr. Boxdorfer) made one of those odd, throw-away remarks which I am certain that nobody else who was in that room remembered even a day later. Yet, it not only deeply troubled me at the time, it stuck with me all these years, and has had a curious effect on my life.

We were talking about the Civil War, and the teacher mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He then noted that this was a book that everyone still heard about in school, but hardly anyone actually read. I was puzzled; if people had heard about the book and knew it was important, why hadn’t they read it? I toyed with the idea of getting my mom to drop me off at the Tyler Mall some afternoon so I could do a survey asking people if they had heard of the book and if they had read it. (I really could not imagine my teacher was right.) I think that remark is the source of the vague guilt I feel about all the books that people know about that I have not yet read.

Catch-22 is even further out on the Uncle Tom’s Cabin scale. The title is now a common phrase, but I am not sure everyone knows it is the title of a book, let alone has read the book. (Indeed, there are undoubtedly people who now think it is just the title of a series on hulu.)

The book is certainly highly praised. From the back cover: “To my mind, there have been two great American novels in the past fifty years. Catch-22 is one.” That was Stephen King. Norman Mailer called it “the rock and roll of novels,” which is presumably praise, though I have no idea what it means.

It’s a World War II story. A bomber squad on a small island in the Mediterranean. The plot? Uh… Good luck with that one. The book is episodic—42 chapters’ worth of episodes. The episodes are not in chronological order. But, that makes no real difference; the point of the book is not to watch a plot unfold. What is the point? Well, let’s take an example.

Yossarian, the closest thing to a protagonist in the book, is an American bombardier. Clevinger is another American at the base.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”
[…]
“Who’s they?” He [Clevinger] wanted to know. “Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?”
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?”
“Because…” Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration.
Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all.

Multiply that over 500 pages and you have Catch-22. That is not really an exaggeration. It is easy to imagine a 50 page version of Catch-22 which would convey the entire message of the book. It really wouldn’t matter which 50 pages you excerpted. So, another way to think about Catch-22 is that it is ten nearly identical 50 page novels strung together.

It’s a rather funny novel, but it is the same joke over and over and over and over. The same stylistic tricks (“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”). The same basic punchline. Reading the book from beginning to end is thus a bit of a chore. Is it worth it? If you had asked me that question two weeks ago, I would have said, “No. Just pick a few chapters and enjoy.” But, after discussing the book at a conference I was just at, I realized that answer was wrong. It is, indeed a book you should read.

Why the change of mind? Over the course of a couple of days, talking about the book (and other books) with a dozen people, assorted episodes from the book were brought up on a regular basis. What fascinated me was that the same episode was never brought up twice. While reading through the book it seemed like the same joke over and over, when people would bring up a particular episode, it was always obvious that the episode brought up was indeed the perfect one to illustrate a particular idea. Instead of being exactly the same joke over and over, it is a set of slight variations of the same joke, and the variation is important. Catch-22 is really a thesaurus; you use it to find the equivalent of the mot juste, the perfect word.

What is the general theme? Bureaucracies are crazy. Once you enter the world of the bureaucracy, nothing makes sense anymore. It is a bewildering array of incoherent and internally contradictory rules and action. Bureaucracies are full of bureaucrats, people who are using the vast bureaucracy to attain smaller, individual goals which may or may not aid the larger goals the bureaucracy is supposed to be working toward.

In other words, Catch-22 has an obvious sequel: Dilbert. It’s the same thing. Dilbert also endlessly mocks the bureaucracy by repeating the same basic joke over and over. Imagine reading straight through 500 pages of Dilbert cartoons, and you have the same basic experience as reading Catch-22. The difference is Dilbert is doled out one strip at a time. I suspect if you read one chapter at a time of Catch-22 spread out over 42 weeks, you’d get exactly the same joy from it that you get from reading Dilbert. (You do enjoy reading Dilbert, right?)

So, if you would like to join me is the Sisyphean quest to read all the books you have heard about, I am happy to recommend Catch-22 as a good place to start.

Check Your Temper

“I beg of you, before you utterly
destroy us and exterminate our family,
check your temper.”

That is Chrysothemis talking to her sister in Sophocles’ Electra. (Grene translation)

Is it good advice?

Electra has a problem. Her father, Agamemnon, was murdered by her mother, Clytemnestra, and her mother’s lover, Aegisthus. How should she respond? The whole play is watching Electra try to sort out that question. She is angry and wants revenge on her mother. But, is that really the right way to go here?

Chrysothemis provides the first contrast. If your mother murders your father, on whose side do you stand? Your living mother’s or your dead father’s? What is to be gained by siding with your father? You do have the rest of your life to lead; alienating your mother, the queen, is hardly the way to go. Right?

Then Clytemnestra herself provides the next part of the puzzle. Her husband Agamemnon had murdered their oldest daughter in order to help his brother get back his wayward wife. He sacrificed their daughter on an altar. Now ask yourself, can you really forgive Agamemnon for that? Why would Electra side with the murderer of her oldest sister? Why would Electra expect her mother to just welcome her father back home?

And then, a messenger shows up with the shocking news shows that Electra’s brother, Orestes, has died. (Don’t worry, he isn’t really dead…but Electra believes the report.) Orestes was Electra’s hope for getting revenge. And now he and all her hopes of vengeance are dead.

Put that all together and you have the recipe for showing that Electra needs to set aside her grievances and get on with life. She doesn’t have to swap birthday cards with her mom, but she can at least show enough restraint to get married off to some nice guy from elsewhere in Greece and have a few kids of her own and do her best to make sure none of them are murdered by her husband.

But Electra does not do that. She cannot. The crimes are too great for her to set them all aside. So, when Orestes does show up, she plots with him to kill their mother and her (the mother’s) lover.

The question: When are the crimes so great that the right response is to revolt? I think we can all agree that we should suffer the many minor wrongs in life. Someone annoys you in line at the grocery store and the right response is not to slaughter them at the register. You let it go. But, are there things which are too egregious to ignore? Electra thought so. The American colonists also certainly thought so:

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States….We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States

So far, so good. Both the Declaration of Independence and Electra are dealing with crimes which cannot be overlooked. Revolution in the one case and matricide in the other are perfectly reasonable responses to those atrocities.

Should we use these things as role models for our own lives? Here is where Electra becomes an interesting play. The arguments in favor of forbearance are strong, but Electra is not persuaded. It is entirely possible throughout all of this to have much sympathy for Electra. She is wounded, deeply, and all these rational reasons to ignore those wounds may well not convince you any more than they convince Electra.

The play does not end with Electra deciding to conspire with her brother to exact vengeance, however. It ends with the murders. And when Aegisthus is being murdered, we get this exchange:

Aegisthus: This is my end then. Let me say one word.
Electra: Not one, not one word more,
I beg you, brother. Do not draw out the talking.
When men are in the middle of trouble, when one
is on the point of death, how can time matter?
Kill him as quickly as you can. And killing
throw him out to find such burial as suit him
out of our sights. This is the only thing
that can bring me redemption from
all my past sufferings.

To fully appreciate how shocking what Electra just said is, recall that Sophocles was also the author of Antigone. In that play, Antigone is the heroine, arguing against the cruel villain Creon, who left her brother’s body unburied in the fields where the dogs would eat it. In Antigone, we are meant to be shocked that Creon would be so awful as to leave bodies unburied, a horrible violation of Greek norms. In The Iliad, for example, in the midst of a decade long battle, the warring armies take breaks from the fighting so both sides can recover the dead and properly bury them.

Yet, here is Electra, that person with whom you might have been sympathizing, becoming a cruel monster.

Is that what happens when revenge and revolt sit deeply in your heart? Is that what happens when you lose perspective and decide that the wrongs exceed the bounds of tolerance? Is the temptation to become as bad as the villain the inevitable result of succumbing to temptation of revenge? Electra doesn’t answer those questions, but it does a wonderful job raising them.

Little Odious Vermin

“But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

This saith the King of Brobdingnag in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

That is not a very flattering thing to say about humans. The evidence?

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”

And, that is not the worst thing said about humanity in Gulliver’s Travels.

In the popular imagination, Gulliver’s Travels is a kid’s story about a man who stumbles upon a land of really small people, the Lilliputians. It’s a tale of many charming moments watching little people tie Gulliver down with a zillion little ropes or Gulliver eating whole miniature sheep in a single bite. There is even a cartoon version from 1939 with a benevolent Gulliver and endless little people acting in ways that would make a 4 year old laugh. That cutesy version of the story is surely why my 5^th grade teacher told me I should read the book. It is safe to say that I had absolutely no idea what was going on when I tried to read it, though I was surprised to find out the tiny people are only the first part of the book. In the second part, Gulliver ends up in a place with Giant people. I don’t think I got to the crazy scientists of the third part or the horses in the fourth.

Far from a book for children, Gulliver’s Travels is one of the most vicious attacks on humanity ever penned. It gets called a satire a lot, but that raises an interesting question about satire. Is satire amusing? Parts 1 through 3 of this book have some amusing bits, but by part 4, it is just plain vicious. Is that still “satire”?

The book ends with Gulliver unable to stand even the sight and smell of people. Gulliver is rescued and brought home by one of the nicest people you will find in literature, Don Pedro, a truly benevolent Good Samaritan. Gulliver cannot tolerate being in his presence. Gulliver gets home after years of exile and cannot bear to be near his wife and finds it revolting that he actually fathered children. Gulliver is not the misanthrope with a heart of gold or with some amusing peccadillos. By the end of the novel, Gulliver has learned to hate people, all people. If you buy the argument of the book, you might just hate them too.

It is a brilliantly seductive argument. The book does not start out in total misanthropic rantings. In the first episode, we look at all the antics of the little people, running around fighting about how high heels should be or which end of the eggs should be cracked. So silly, these little people and their pathetic little attempts to feel important. If the book ended there, it would have been a pleasant enough tale, letting us bask in the glory of knowing that while others worry about silly little things like whether it is bread or flesh, we are enlightened enough to know that much of what passes for human strife is over small things. It is fun to look down on the rest of humanity as being a bit silly and misguided.

Then we get to book two, and we lose our comfortable condescension. Now Gulliver, and by extension all of us, are the little people, and everything we do, not just those debates about eggs or bread, is awful and full of vile passions and motives. That is the source of the quotations that opened these reflections. It is hard to argue that history is not “a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”

But it is not all bad, obviously. We have done some good, right? Look at science! It is amazing what we have accomplished through science. And then we get to Book 3, and we meet the society of scientists, both physical scientists and social scientists.

Those to whom the king had entrusted me, observing how ill I was clad, ordered a tailor to come next morning, and take measure for a suit of clothes. This operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with a rule and compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all which he entered upon paper; and in six days brought my clothes very ill made, and quite out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation. But my comfort was, that I observed such accidents very frequent, and little regarded.

The social scientists are no better in their attempts at designing the perfect society. It is all just a heap of absurdities.

Had the book ended there, Gulliver’s Travels would have been a remarkably thought-provoking book. Book 4 is where it turns into a work of pure genius. Gulliver finds himself in a land where horses are the enlightened, cultured beings. The humans, called Yahoos, are truly the most revolting animals you can imagine. There is no redeeming quality in the Yahoos; even the wise and benevolent horses start wondering if it would not be better to just exterminate the Yahoos. Gulliver, speaking up in defense of these creatures who are biologically akin to him, suggests that killing all the Yahoos is unnecessary since the same end result could be achieved by castrating all of them. Yep. That is Gulliver rising to the defense of humanity.

As Gulliver’s host observes, the human society from which Gulliver came is comprised of “a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us…”

There is no cheerful ending to the travels, no moment of heart-warming reconciliation and a desire to do better. Just pure unadulterated misanthropy.

Is this book true? Therein lies the first challenge. Reading through the book is one long exercise of thinking that while humans are bad, they could be worse, only to get a few pages further along and realize they are in fact worse. It’s almost like humans bear the unbearable stamp of original sin.

The bigger challenge is what to do if you accept that this portrait of humanity is even reasonably accurate. Gulliver becomes a raving misanthrope. Is that the only option? Is it even possible to look humanity square in the face and say “Even though you are vile, I will love you anyway”? Let’s hope so.

Who Then is Free?

When I was growing up, I heard a lot about the advantages of living as a free people in a free society.

Freedom is Good. Who would argue with that? Who would argue for the benefits of being a slave or a prisoner or under the thumb of a tyrannical government?

Curiously, however, the one question which was never raised in my youth was what “freedom” meant. Or as Horace asks in his second Satire, “Who then is free?”

It seems like an easy question in the dialogue. The slave, Davus, asks that question of his master, Horace. Softball question, right? Obviously Horace, the master, is free and Davus, the slave is not. But, in five quick pages, that answer is shredded.

Who then is free? The wise man, who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty nor death nor bonds affright, who bravely defies his passions, and scorns ambition, who in himself is a whole, smoothed and rounded, so that nothing from outside can rest on the polished surface, and against whom Fortune in her onset is ever maimed.

If you were like that, you truly would be free. Davus then asks Horace (and implicitly you, Dear Reader): “Of those traits can you recognize any one as your own?”

That is a devastating question. As Davus proceeds to show, his master is very much the slave of his passions, constantly afraid of losing his comfort or his mistress or his fine food. Davus notes, “You cannot yourself bear to be in your own company, you cannot employ your leisure aright, you shun yourself, a runaway and a vagabond, seeking now with wine, and now with sleep, to baffle Care.”

Things haven’t changed at all, have they? Here is Josef Pieper, a couple of thousand years after Davus: “Leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself, when he acquiesces in his own being, where the essence of acedia is the refusal to acquiesce in one’s own being.” We are so busy, so filled with the worries of the world, we suffer from acedia, sloth, because we are not in control of our own lives. Pieper again:

No, the contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one’s living; it is man’s happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God—which is to say love. Love that certainly brings a particular freshness and readiness to work along with it, but that no one with the least experience could conceivably confuse with the tense activity of the fanatical “worker.”

This portrait of the person who is free is jarring to the modern ear. We think of the freedom which could be bought by wealth, the ability to buy whatever you want, but do possessions bring security? Do people with extensive security systems around their houses sleep free of the fear that caused them to install the security system in the first place? The correlation with the defense mechanisms we all put up against the world is obvious: how free are you when you live a life constantly worried that people will find out what you are really like?

Who then is free? A pair of literary examples is illustrative. Take Game of Thrones. (Did you see that coming? If so, you are officially a GoT nerd.) Davos Seaworth is nothing other than the stand-in for Horace’s Davus. He is a man who is completely at home with himself, despite being totally subservient to the ruler of the moment. Who is more free: Davos or Stannis? Not even a contest. [Curiously, my quick Google search did not reveal any places mentioning what is surely the source of Davos’ name. Is it possible that the type of people who make Game of Thrones fan pages do not read much Horace??]

An even better example from literature: Jeeves. Indeed, it would be harder to imagine a more perfect representation of the free man. Jeeves is a servant, a gentleman’s gentleman, but this is quite easily the best summary of his character I have ever seen: “The wise man, who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty nor death nor bonds affright, who bravely defies his passions, and scorns ambition, who in himself is a whole, smoothed and rounded, so that nothing from outside can rest on the polished surface, and against whom Fortune in her onset is ever maimed.” Absolutely perfect.

Want a role model for living a free life? Want to get rid of your anxieties and the passions to which you are a slave. Well, read more Wodehouse! Study Jeeves.

In doing so, in thinking deeply about your life and the needless anxieties and passions which enslave you, you will of course be following the advice of another, who noted, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” If you want to be free, if you want to be like Davus or Davos or Jeeves, it is hard to think of a better place to start than this:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.