Life Advice Archives - James E Hartley

Live Like Charles Primrose

One of my (many) fascinations is books which were once upon a time extremely popular but are rarely mentioned, let alone read, in the modern age.

The puzzle is in the pair of questions:
1. Why was the book so popular?
2. Why has nobody heard of it today?

Consider, for example, a novel from 1766 which (according to the ever helpful Wikipedia) is mentioned in all of the following works:
Alcott, Little Women
Austen, Emma
Bronte, The Professor
Bronte, Villette
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens, David Copperfield
Eliot, Middlemarch
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Schopenhauer, “The Art of Being Right”
Shelley, Frankenstein
Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard

That is a rather impressive list of books and authors, all of whom mention this novel, presumably assuming the reader will recognize the tale.

The novel is The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith. Its publication history is odd. Samuel Johnson (yes, that Samuel Johnson) helped Goldsmith avoid being arrested for the failure to pay rent by discovering the manuscript in the author’s room and selling it to a publisher on Goldsmith’s behalf.

The novel itself is the story of Charles Primrose, the titular vicar, and his family. The plot is easily related. Primrose begins the novel in a great position with a happy family and wonderful prospects. Then chapter by chapter his life gets worse and worse. It’s all just one depressing occurrence after another. Before long, you start a chapter thinking “What fresh horror is about to happen?” And then the horror comes. Primrose is Job, watching his world crash around him.

Until the end of the novel, which can only be described as Dickensian. It has a happy ending (just like the story of Job), but the circumstances bringing about the happy ending are so insanely improbable and the happiness is so over-the-top, it really does feel like Dickens at his best when he marginally makes everything better for our oppressed hero.

So, you don’t read the story for its plot. You read it because of the way Primrose deals with his misfortune. The world is crashing around him, but Primrose jus refuse to lose heart. You can’t help but smile about this guy who just refuses to acknowledge how terrible his life has been. You root for him, even knowing that the next chapter will bring more misfortune. He is just so cluelessly living in his own world.

Ah, but that world he lives in has something to teach us. We know about the real world full of misfortune and misery. But what is it like to live in Primrose’s world? What does Primrose want to tell us?

There is a chapter near the end, shortly before things suddenly turn around for the better, when Primrose speaks to those around him. I was going to just put in the highlights of his talk, but it isn’t that long, and since you, Dear Reader, will probably not pick up the book anyway, here is the entirety of the punchline:

My friends, my children, and fellow sufferers, when I reflect on the distribution of good and evil here below, I find that much has been given man to enjoy, yet still more to suffer. Though we should examine the whole world, we shall not find one man so happy as to have nothing left to wish for; but we daily see thousands who by suicide shew us they have nothing left to hope. In this life then it appears that we cannot be entirely blest; but yet we may be completely miserable!

Why man should thus feel pain, why our wretchedness should be requisite in the formation of universal felicity, why, when all other systems are made perfect by the perfection of their subordinate parts, the great system should require for its perfection, parts that are not only subordinate to others, but imperfect in themselves? These are questions that never can be explained, and might be useless if known. On this subject providence has thought fit to elude our curiosity, satisfied with granting us motives to consolation.

In this situation, man has called in the friendly assistance of philosophy, and heaven seeing the incapacity of that to console him, has given him the aid of religion. The consolations of philosophy are very amusing, but often fallacious. It tells us that life is filled with comforts, if we will but enjoy them; and on the other hand, that though we unavoidably have miseries here, life is short, and they will soon be over. Thus do these consolations destroy each other; for if life is a place of comfort, its shortness must be misery, and if it be long, our griefs are protracted. Thus philosophy is weak; but religion comforts in an higher strain. Man is here, it tells us, fitting up his mind, and preparing it for another abode. When the good man leaves the body and is all a glorious mind, he will find he has been making himself a heaven of happiness here, while the wretch that has been maimed and contaminated by his vices, shrinks from his body with terror, and finds that he has anticipated the vengeance of heaven. To religion then we must hold in every circumstance of life for our truest comfort; for if already we are happy, it is a pleasure to think that we can make that happiness unending, and if we are miserable, it is very consoling to think that there is a place of rest. Thus to the fortunate religion holds out a continuance of bliss, to the wretched a change from pain.

But though religion is very kind to all men, it has promised peculiar rewards to the unhappy; the sick, the naked, the houseless, the heavy-laden, and the prisoner, have ever most frequent promises in our sacred law. The author of our religion every where professes himself the wretch’s friend, and unlike the false ones of this world, bestows all his caresses upon the forlorn. The unthinking have censured this as partiality, as a preference without merit to deserve it. But they never reflect that it is not in the power even of heaven itself to make the offer of unceasing felicity as great a gift to the happy as to the miserable. To the first eternity is but a single blessing, since at most it but encreases what they already possess. To the latter it is a double advantage; for it diminishes their pain here, and rewards them with heavenly bliss hereafter.

But providence is in another respect kinder to the poor than the rich; for as it thus makes the life after death more desirable, so it smooths the passage there. The wretched have had a long familiarity with every face of terror. The man of sorrow lays himself quietly down, without possessions to regret, and but few ties to stop his departure: he feels only nature’s pang in the final separation, and this is no way greater than he has often fainted under before; for after a certain degree of pain, every new breach that death opens in the constitution, nature kindly covers with insensibility.

Thus providence has given the wretched two advantages over the happy, in this life, greater felicity in dying, and in heaven all that superiority of pleasure which arises from contrasted enjoyment. And this superiority, my friends, is no small advantage, and seems to be one of the pleasures of the poor man in the parable; for though he was already in heaven, and felt all the raptures it could give, yet it was mentioned as an addition to his happiness, that he had once been wretched and now was comforted, that he had known what it was to be miserable, and now felt what it was to be happy.

Thus, my friends, you see religion does what philosophy could never do: it shews the equal dealings of heaven to the happy and the unhappy, and levels all human enjoyments to nearly the same standard. It gives to both rich and poor the same happiness hereafter, and equal hopes to aspire after it; but if the rich have the advantage of enjoying pleasure here, the poor have the endless satisfaction of knowing what it was once to be miserable, when crowned with endless felicity hereafter; and even though this should be called a small advantage, yet being an eternal one, it must make up by duration what the temporal happiness of the great may have exceeded by intenseness.

These are therefore the consolations which the wretched have peculiar to themselves, and in which they are above the rest of mankind; in other respects they are below them. They who would know the miseries of the poor must see life and endure it. To declaim on the temporal advantages they enjoy, is only repeating what none either believe or practise. The men who have the necessaries of living are not poor, and they who want them must be miserable. Yes, my friends, we must be miserable. No vain efforts of a refined imagination can sooth the wants of nature, can give elastic sweetness to the dank vapour of a dungeon, or ease to the throbbings of a broken heart. Let the philosopher from his couch of softness tell us that we can resist all these. Alas! the effort by which we resist them is still the greatest pain! Death is slight, and any man may sustain it; but torments are dreadful, and these no man can endure.

To us then, my friends, the promises of happiness in heaven should be peculiarly dear; for if our reward be in this life alone, we are then indeed of all men the most miserable. When I look round these gloomy walls, made to terrify, as well as to confine us; this light that only serves to shew the horrors of the place, those shackles that tyranny has imposed, or crime made necessary; when I survey these emaciated looks, and hear those groans, O my friends, what a glorious exchange would heaven be for these. To fly through regions unconfined as air, to bask in the sunshine of eternal bliss, to carrol over endless hymns of praise, to have no master to threaten or insult us, but the form of goodness himself for ever in our eyes, when I think of these things, death becomes the messenger of very glad tidings; when I think of these things, his sharpest arrow becomes the staff of my support; when I think of these things, what is there in life worth having; when I think of these things, what is there that should not be spurned away: kings in their palaces should groan for such advantages; but we, humbled as we are, should yearn for them.

And shall these things be ours? Ours they will certainly be if we but try for them; and what is a comfort, we are shut out from many temptations that would retard our pursuit. Only let us try for them, and they will certainly be ours, and what is still a comfort, shortly too; for if we look back on past life, it appears but a very short span, and whatever we may think of the rest of life, it will yet be found of less duration; as we grow older, the days seem to grow shorter, and our intimacy with time, ever lessens the perception of his stay. Then let us take comfort now, for we shall soon be at our journey’s end; we shall soon lay down the heavy burthen laid by heaven upon us, and though death, the only friend of the wretched, for a little while mocks the weary traveller with the view, and like his horizon, still flies before him; yet the time will certainly and shortly come, when we shall cease from our toil; when the luxurious great ones of the world shall no more tread us to the earth; when we shall think with pleasure on our sufferings below; when we shall be surrounded with all our friends, or such as deserved our friendship; when our bliss shall be unutterable, and still, to crown all, unending.

Not a bad message, that. When misfortune hits, live like Charles Primrose!

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Should We Still Require Shakespeare?

“‘A department of English,’ he said, ‘cannot exist without requiring, for its majors, at least one semester-long course in the study of Shakespeare. To require any less would be irresponsible; it is a dumbing down.’”

That quotation is from The Shakespeare Requirement, Julia Schumacher’s novel about the lives of college professors.

This is Schumacher’s second novel in a trilogy; one of my former students gave me a copy of it. In one of life’s odd coincidences, another student once gave me the first novel in Schumacher’s trilogy, Dear Committee Members. Apparently I must somehow give off the vibe to my students that I would appreciate snarky satirical accounts of the faculty and administrators at a college. Go figure.

The quick review of the novel: it’s amusing, but not as funny as the first one. Well worth reading if you like books that really show that it is impossible to write a parody of a college, because reality is always more absurd than the events in the novel which were created to be outrageously absurd. (You can, by the way, easily read the second novel in this trilogy without reading the first.)

It’s not the novel itself, though, that is inducing ruminations. It is the idea of a Shakespeare requirement.

First, let’s be absolutely clear that Shakespeare is the GOAT. As T.S. Eliot said, “Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third.” (Eliot is the third, but he could hardly say that about himself.) Nonetheless, Shakespeare is as good as it gets. If you want to read great literature, you have to read Shakespeare. In order to understand anything written after 1600, you have to read Shakespeare. He is fun to read. He is intellectually stimulating. You can read anything he wrote dozens of times and still learn from it. I really really really do believe that Shakespeare is incredible.

But…what about assigning Shakespeare to students?

At the collegiate level, a Shakespeare requirement makes enormous sense. It is depressing to imagine talking with someone who majored in English in college, but does not know Shakespeare well. It would be like meeting an economist who skipped supply and demand graphs or an astronomer who didn’t bother leaning about stars. If you major in English in college, you really should need to read and study Shakespeare.

It’s the earlier levels of education that are disturbing me. Until I started thinking about requiring Shakespeare in the wake of reading Schumacher’s book, I was firmly in the “Obviously any decent high school education includes Shakespeare” camp.

I am having second thoughts. I would be quite pleased, by the way, if you, Dear Reader would convince me that I should not be having second thoughts.

Here is where I am getting stuck. Since I regularly teach students who are graduating from high school, I have been getting increasingly alarmed in recent years. (Covid has only amplified this trend.) Many high school graduates, even those attending college, can’t read. Well, technically, they can read in the sense of knowing how to move the eye across the page and recognize English words. But, they cannot read in the sense of engaging in the physical act of reading and having comprehension of what they just read. They cannot sit down with a book, any book, for 30 minutes and just read it. Particularly because they tend to read on electronic devices, their attention wanders away long before they have finished reading a chapter, let alone a whole play.

Many people have noted this decline in the ability to read among the graduates of the nation’s high schools. It is a real problem. I have no idea how to solve that problem, and I have yet to see anyone offer a viable solution that does not require intensive one-on-one teaching. (Homeschoolers, in other words, probably have an easier time solving this problem…but even there, the problem is increasing.)

So, here is the question which is gnawing at me. Imagine a 16 year old who would have an impossible time sitting down to read Austen or Dickens or Hemingway or any of the myriad of other writers of English prose who present no real structural problems for reading. Their prose is fluid; the stories are great. But, imagine a student who can’t keep enough attention to read with comprehension novels like Pride and Prejudice or Oliver Twist or The Old Man and the Sea. Now give that 16 year old student a copy of Hamlet. What happens?

The idea of assigning Shakespeare hinges on the presupposition that the students know how to read well. But, if students graduating from high school and going off to reasonably select liberal arts colleges cannot read well, then does it make sense to assume they can read Shakespeare?

Then, as I thought about it, the problem got even worse. The whole point of assigning Shakespeare is to show students how amazing he is, how he opens up whole vistas on the world. Shakespeare is one of those authors who will linger with you for your whole life, constantly teaching you. But, if your first experience with Shakespeare is simple torture because you are incapable of reading him, then will you ever pick up a copy of a Shakespeare play again?

I meet people like this all the time. They read Shakespeare in high school and hated reading Shakespeare in high school and so they have never been tempted even once in their life to read Shakespeare again. Imagine you had a room full of 16 years olds and you knew in advance that every single one of them would have that experience, would you still assign Macbeth? To what end?

In other words, as I have been thinking about it, I am no longer convinced there is a value added in making high school students (let alone junior high students) read Shakespeare before they have learned to read other Great Books. If I was designing a curriculum for a high school English class now, there is a whole set of authors I would assign long before we even thought about reading Shakespeare. If you have to teach students how to read, then surely you have to start with Great Books which are not written in Elizabethan verse.

As I contemplated junking the Shakespeare requirement in high school, however, a chill went down my spine. I imagined replacing Shakespeare with more Fitzgerald, Ellison, Poe, Steinbeck, or George Eliot—a reading list of Great Books slowly showing how amazing it is to read these deep works. But, then I remembered that these other authors are no longer the staples of a high school curriculum. Instead, the preference these days is books written in the last few years.

The Shakespeare requirement, in other words, is standing in for a requirement to read something written in another era, something that has stood the test of time. By setting up Shakespeare as an immovable idol, schools are still requiring that at least once students will be exposed to a book that is larger than our modern fixations. Remove Shakespeare and he isn’t necessarily replaced by something Great. He may be replaced by the latest trendy novel. Once the Shakespeare requirement goes, does anything written more than a couple decades ago still get assigned?

So, what do we do about the Shakespeare requirement? Should he still be assigned in schools? I am truly stuck on this question.

But here is one thing I know. If you, Dear Reader, are thinking that we should not get rid of the Shakespeare requirement, then ask yourself which Shakespeare play you most recently read for pleasure and how long ago that was. (For me: Henry VI, part 2, last week.) Shakespeare really is amazing, and instead of worrying about whether he should be required reading in high school, perhaps I should spend more time reading him and talking about how amazing he is.

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Be Like Francis

“St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not.”

That is G.K. Chesterton doing that thing Chesterton loves to do. He takes something we all know (Francis of Assisi loved nature) and argues that what we all know isn’t true. He spends a whole book, cleverly titled St. Francis of Assisi, convincing us that we really need to think more deeply about Francis.

The stories about Francis are extraordinary. He is endlessly fascinating because of all the seemingly very odd things he would constantly do. In a giant protest against his father, he strips off all his clothes and wanders off into the countryside. What does he wear? Nothing more than a brown tunic tied with a rope. He owned nothing. Why? If you own things, then you have to hire guards and have laws to protect them, but if you don’t own anything, you’ve got nothing to lose. So, he would wander around and talk to all the beggars and lepers. People would see Francis roaming is his little brown tunic and they’d give him a coat when it got cold. It gets cold up in the mountains. Francis with his new coat would see a beggar who didn’t have a coat, and immediately give away his coat.

And that isn’t even the craziest story. One day he’s wandering down the road with a bunch of his followers and he sees the birds and says, “Oh, I need to go preach to the birds.” So he did. He gave a sermon to a bunch of birds. The story notes that not a single bird left during his sermon because they were all so enamored with hearing him preach to him. Francis looked out at all the animals and they were all like his brothers and sisters. There’s also the great story of Brother Wolf. There was a town in Italy in which a wolf was marauding and killing people. Francis went out, found the wolf, made the sign of the cross, and called the wolf to him. He then brought the wolf down to the village and told the villagers that Brother Wolf here was just hungry. That’s why he was eating people. It wasn’t malice. If people would just feed Brother Wolf, then Brother Wolf would stop killing people. It was great and they all lived happily ever after.

We look at Francis and say, “This guy is crazy.” On the one hand, it’s impressive. He is a fun guy to read about. But do you want to go live like that? Do you really want to just drop everything and go wandering around talking to Brother Wolf and preaching to birds and having no possessions and not worrying if you meet a robber in the road because you’ve got nothing to steal? Is that what you want to do?

How do we make sense of Francis? That is where Chesterton comes in:

St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not….In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man….He did not call nature his mother; he called a particular donkey his brother or a particular sparrow his sister.

There’s the key to thinking about Francis. He walks out and he doesn’t see trees. He sees that tree right there. That one oak tree, that one maple tree. Francis realizes something amazing about that maple tree. That maple tree right there is totally unlike every other maple tree that was ever created. God didn’t make maple trees. He made Brother Maple right there. He made that one particular rhododendron, Sister Rhododendron right there, and Sister Rhododendron is unlike every other plant that ever existed, a unique and amazing plant. Francis realizes that just like God created him as a unique individual person, God also created that sparrow as a unique and individual sparrow. St. Francis wasn’t preaching to the birds. He was preaching to Sam and Sally Sparrow. He was preaching to Robin Red Fellow. He was preaching to actual particular living entities.

You walk down the street and you see the trees and the bushes they just blow by because you’re not thinking of them and saying “Wow! That bush is amazing. Look at this one bush. Look at how amazing it is.” You think about animals and they are also just there. Except, of course, your pet. Your pet has a name. Your dog, your cat, your goldfish, is unique. If somebody were to come along and say, “Your dog is just like every other dog,” you know that person is wrong. Your dog isn’t like every other dog. Your dog is a special dog. It’s an amazing dog. It’s got a personality. You know what else you do? You talk to your dog, you tell your dog stories, you laugh at your dog. You think your dog is cute. You think your pet is an amazing little creature. You are so happy that this amazing little creature is living with you. You might even be thankful to God for your dog or your goldfish. What Francis realized was every plant you see and every animal you see is just like your pet. They’re all unique, they’re all individual, and they are all amazing.

It’s not just all the plants and animals. What else is unique and amazing? People are unique and amazing. Chesterton again:

I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for the men….He only saw the image of God multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man was always a man and did not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honored all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the Sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document.

Imagine if every person you saw, not just the people you know or the people in your family, but literally every single person you saw, prompted you to exclaim, “Wow! There is a unique creation of God. That person is amazing.” Moreover, Brother Oak is amazing. And Brother Wolf is amazing. Imagine going through amazed at every part of creation, not just creation as a whole, not just the broad categories as a whole, but every single entity from the person you see to the birds to the trees to the rocks. God, in his infinite abilities, made that rock right there, not just the subspecies rock. It’s shaped different than every other rock. It’s in a different location. It’s got a story different than every other rock out there. That’s what Francis saw when he looked out at the world. He saw all of these individual things and they excited him and every day was amazing.

To experience the joy that Francis felt every day, the first step is to look out at Brother Oak and go talk to Brother Oak. Ask Brother Oak, “How are things today? Does the sun feel good today?” Ask Sister Lowly Worm, “How’s the soil?” Then you could tell Sister Worm all about your day or about Jesus. Let the worm tell you how great it is to dig today. You learn something about God by thinking about that worm as an individual created by God.

Imagine going through your life like that, surprised and in awe at everything you see. God created every plant, every animal, every person, every rock. Imagine seeing every one of them as another glimpse of God. Another little representation of God right there. If you could do that, imagine the joy you would feel all the time. What do you need to feel all that joy? Absolutely nothing. Just need to look around and it’s all there. Suddenly you realize if you had that kind of joy all the time, why do you need all the stuff you own? St. Francis wasn’t depriving himself; he just found the magnificent joy all around him.

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Hope in a Kingdom Far and Clear

“As these images sorted themselves into events (i.e. became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, reflections, and ‘gas.’ I was now enamoured of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer.”

“On that side (as Author) I wrote fairy tales because the fairy tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.”

That is C.S. Lewis in his 1956 essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.”

Fairy Tales went out of style when Realistic Novels became all the rage. One of the charms of reading essays by Lewis and Tolkien is seeing them defending the genre. As Tolkien famously noted, the fairy tale only seemed like a subset of children’s literature because adults had abandoned the genre; the fairy tale is much like the old arm chair tossed into the nursery. There is nothing in particular about the fairy tale that makes it the natural medium for children’s literature.

Fast forward a half-century, and there is no doubt their argument won. Well, sort of won. Fantasy and Science Fiction are both all the rage in ways that would have surprised both Tolkien and Lewis. But, such stories still live in a sort of academic ghetto—serious novelists can glance in that direction, but they better not settle there.

The Fairy Tale, though, is still an elusive genre. When does a story merit that title? Are The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings fairy tales or not? Probably not the way most people think of the fairy tale. The Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson definitely wrote fairy tales which can be enjoyed by children and adults. There are plenty of children’s books that would count as a modern day fairy tale, but a good set of them offer little other than nostalgia for the older reader. The Wind and the Willows is probably the best example of an early-20th century fairy tale.

And then there is A Kingdom Far and Clear by Mark Helprin. I don’t know of another book that even competes in the category of modern day fairy tale suited for both kids and adults.

The book is a trio of related novellas: Swan Lake, A City in Winter, The Veil of Snows. Three different narrators, each telling a stand-alone story which is linked to the other two in chronological fashion. The overall story is, not surprising given the first part’s title, a variation on the tale of Swan Lake, a notable fairy tale in its own right. But, this is far more than just a retelling of that tale.

Somewhere in Eastern Europe is a fair land, beautifully described, in which the rightful rulers have been displaced by a cruel Usurper. The daughter of the rightful rulers vanished, and this is the story of how she discovered her true identity and sought to claim her rightful throne. In other words, you don’t read this book for the plot; you’ve read and seen that plot a million times.

It’s the manner of telling that makes this book great. Let’s look at an example from the middle of the book. The narrator of this portion is the true heiress to the throne, and this is the first time she is in the presence of the usurper.

Do not dismiss those who stand above you, for very seldom are they there by chance. Most often their power is genuine, their evil a power in itself, and their visage impressive. The usurper’s face was many times the size of mine, and seemed even larger than it was. His smile was fixed, revealing huge teeth and immense incisors. He looked if he might eat you, like a wild animal, and the plains of his cheeks resembled a battle helmet. Upon these plains were the scars of crossbow bolts, arrows, and knives, their presence a testament to his invulnerability.

You could see in his eyes that, if indeed he had a soul, it was someplace else, but that he was enjoying the dinner nonetheless, even if he enjoyed it not at all. He lived for absolute power, and his possession of it was confirmed in ceremony after ceremony, dinner after dinner, by the strength of his armies and the slavish obedience of his flacks. I had seen the selections. My own family had been among the first. This and my destiny kept me the model of girlish grace, smiling and light on my feet as I held my post. I turned my eyes from the usurper, determined to meet them one day, close and clear, in the presence of death. And from this, I took a certain joy.

At a literary level, that is a great example of the prose style of the book. It is a book that simply begs to be read aloud on a snowy evening in a mellifluous voice. The book dictates being read at a leisurely pace as the images erupt. (It is also worth noting that the book is filled with gorgeous full page illustrations by Chris van Allsburg.)

This is very much at tale of Good and Evil. That is not the same thing as saying it a tale of the triumph of good over evil. Evil most definitely has the upper hand in this story. The tone is brilliantly crafted in a way that while there is much beauty, there is no doubt that there is a veil of darkness cast over that beauty. And yet, hope endures. Even to the very last pages, when it is genuinely uncertain whether evil will triumph in the end, hope endures.

Indeed, the endurance of hope is the most important lesson of this fairy tale. There is no reason to have hope. There is zero reason to expect that the usurper will be overthrown. The true heiress to the throne has no power, no allies, no base of support. She enters the usurper’s impossibly vast castle by becoming a lowly servant so far down in the pecking order that she has no prospects. And yet, hope peeks through the darkness. There is no reason to have hope, there is never a reason to have hope, but the reader’s hope endures.

Never give up hope. That is the message of this fairy tale. Has there ever been a time when that lesson was more necessary? (Yes, it has been equally necessary at many times in many places.) What makes this fairy tale so great is that the disappointments just keep coming; every time spirits lift because maybe this is the beginning of the end for the usurper, a twist of fate reasserts the status quo. This fairy tale actually teaches hope in the face of disappointment.

It is a beautiful book, highly recommended. I have enjoyed it since I first read it a decade ago. It lingers in the imagination, constantly reminding you to never despair. A nice little Fairy Tale, in other words.

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Dreams: Chesterton, Gaiman, and Lewis

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep”

Shakespeare’s Prospero declares that in The Tempest. Figuring out exactly what it means is the task of a lifetime. So, we won’t do that, today.

But, what are dreams?

G.K. Chesterton’s The Coloured Lands is a collection of some of his early work. Stories, poems, musings, and doodles, all with that Chestertonian air of paradox embedded within. The book defies summary. Think of it as the flotsam and jetsam of a fertile imagination.

When Chesterton turns to the subject of dreams, in an essay cleverly entitled “Dreams,” we get five pages of reflection which one could spend many hours unpacking.

But, before we get to Chesterton, the biggest shock of this essay has to do with Neil Gaiman. In the substory The Doll’s House of Gaiman’s unbelievably amazing Sandman, none other than Gilbert Chesterton shows up to play a rather important role. Now Chesterton was one of Gaiman’s first loves in the literary realm (along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien). What made Chesterton so important for Gaiman was this:

I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

That is a wonderful description of Chesterton. But, it does not explain how he showed up in The Sandman. And suddenly reading The Coloured Lands, I know exactly how that happened.

[Note for those who have read Gaiman: throughout Chesterton’s book, there are assorted drawings, having nothing to do with the story right before or after. Just assorted doodles. The drawing on the facing page to the start of the essay on Dreams is a picture of Cain killing Abel!]

Chesterton begins the essay:

There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that “last night he dreamed a dream,” we are quite certain from the perfect and decorative character of the dream that he made it up at breakfast. The dream is so reasonable that it is quite impossible.

Why impossible? After all, we constantly read tales of perfectly comprehensible dreams, inevitably with some obvious moral attached or easily attachable. Chesterton:

Dreams like these are (with occasional exceptions) practically unknown in the lawless kingdoms of the night. A dream is scarcely ever rounded to express faultlessly some faultless ideas.…Dreams have a kind of hellish ingenuity and energy in the pursuit of the inappropriate; the most omniscient and cunning artist never took so much trouble or achieved such success in finding exactly the word that was right or exactly the action that was significant, as this midnight lord of misrule can do in finding exactly the word that is wrong and exactly the action that is meaningless.

That is, if you think about your own dreams, exactly right. They really never make sense unless you iron out all the weird wrinkles. But the weird wrinkles are what makes it a dream. Dreams are weird…and terrifying.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis captures the difference between what we imagine when we think about dreams and what Dreams actually are. Sailing into a pitch black realm, the crew takes on board a man who was screaming for help. Once on board, the rescued man screams out:

“Fly! Fly! About with our ship and fly! Row, row, row for your lives away from this accursed shore…This is the Island where Dreams come True.”
“That’s the island I’ve been looking for this long time,” said one of the sailors. “I reckon I’d find I was married to Nancy if we landed here.”
“And I’d find Tom alive again,” said another.
“Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”

When you think about it, Descartes’ question of how you know you are not dreaming right now is really easy to answer. I know I am not dreaming right now because the world in which I am currently existing is perfectly comprehensible. I am typing on a computer in my office and I am not going to find myself in the next second standing on a rural road right after a parade next to an abandoned parking lot realizing my truck was stolen. And I am really certain that I won’t decide that because my truck was stolenI will instantly go to a junk dealer’s storefront to sell the following two items: 1) a baseball from some playoff game involving the Red Sox, signed by the entire team (I’ve never even seen such a baseball) and 2) a Hummel figurine of a little girl holding a flower (the exact one that my mother had). If you can’t see any connection between having your truck stolen and because of that selling two rather odd items to a junk dealer, that is the point. This is the sort of thing that happens in a dream…well not a dream, the last dream I can remember from a few nights ago.

The Lord of Dreams, that midnight lord of misrule, has a very odd sense of what constitutes continuity.

From this starting observation, Chesterton proceeds to consider the relationship of Dreams to Art. As he notes, “at first sight it would seem that the lord of dreams was the eternal opponent of art.” Dreams lack the cohesion necessary to be a work of art. They lack elegance and beauty.

But, Chesterton goes on to argue that first impression is wrong. The incoherence of dreams, that wild and unpredictable nature of them, is telling us something about Life. It is not telling us that Life is wild and unpredictable; we already know that from our hours of being awake. The wildness and unpredictability of the land of dreams is of a different kind than that which we see in the daytime.

So, what are dreams doing? And this is where Chesterton starts giggling with delight off behind the scenes of his essay. This is what Gaiman internalized when he set out to craft the tale of Dream.

There is one unity which we do find in dreams. It binds together all their brutal inconsequence and all their moonstruck anti-climaxes. It makes the unimaginable nocturnal farce which begins with a saint choosing parasols and ends with a policeman shelling peas, as rounded and single a harmony as some poet’s roundel upon a passion flower. This unity is the absolute unity of emotion. If we wish to experience pure and naked feeling we can never experience it so really as in that unreal land. There the passions seem to live an outlawed and abstract existence, unconnected with any facts or persons.

You wake from a dream in a cold sweat terrified like you are never terrified when awake; you awake with a sense of overwhelming peace and happiness; you awake with a terrible feeling of loss; you awake with a massive worry that you forgot to study for the test or you are late. All of these emotions are so strong at that moment of waking that either a) you are relieved to realize the bad emotions were generated by things that are not real, or b) you have that crushing disappointment that the good emotions were based on an unconscious fancy and you want more than anything to return to that dream world.

What is Life? Chesterton notes that is not merely what you read in a newspaper or see under a microscope. “Life dwells alone in our very heart of hearts, life is one and virgin and unconquered, and sometimes in the watches of the night speaks in its own terrible harmony.” That is how Chesterton concludes the essay. What does that mean? I am not entirely sure what it means, but I am pretty sure it is correct.

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Swag and Temptation

“I used ta do a little but a little wouldn’t do
So the little got more and more”

So Saith Axl Rose in the Guns N’ Roses Anthem “Mr. Brownstone”

(For those of you Dear Readers who know neither Guns N’ Roses nor drug slang, it is a song about heroin addiction.)

If it were not for the intolerance of chronology to have the Order of Time broken, those lines from a 1987 song would have been an excellent epigraph in Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel, Swag.

The set-up: Frank Ryan, a car salesman, partners with Ernest Stickley, Jr. (Stick, for short), an itinerant car thief, to embark upon a foolproof spree of armed robbery. Foolproof, I tell you. No danger at all. None.

It’s all laid out in Chapters 2 and 3. An utterly brilliantly constructed pair of chapters in which Frank explains the method to Stick. According to the ever authoritative Library of America, Leonard’s original title for the book was The Frank and Ernest Method, which is both a much better title and, as the publisher obviously noted, a title which would have doomed the book to poor sales. If you were browsing a bookstore in 1976, Swag catches your attention much more than The Frank and Ernest Method. Swag is 1970s cool. Frank and Earnest is something your parents said.

Despite the change in the title, it is the Method that is the key actor in this book. You see, Frank has been studying, really studying, things and he has this foolproof method and all he needs is a partner. Stick is a bit skeptical, naturally enough—if you are sitting in a bar with a car salesman telling you that he has cracked the Code of Crime, you too are skeptical. But, Frank explains: “Statistics show—man, I’m not just saying it, statistics show—armed robbery pays the most for the least amount of risk.”

Well, if statistics show it, how can you be skeptical?

You see most people involved in crime, well they don’t think things through. They get greedy and take unnecessary risks. But Frank, he knows better. “‘I can see how two guys who know what they’re doing and’re businesslike about it’—he paused, grinning a little—‘who’re frank with each other and earnest about their work, can pull down three to five grand a week.’”

Price comparison note: $3-5 grand a week in 1976 is roughly $15,000 to $25,000 in 2022. A week. Do this for a year and you make a million give or take a couple hundred grand. And it’s foolproof. Totally foolproof, I tell you.

All you have to do is follow The Rules! Frank has Ten Rules for success. As you can tell, Frank has been attending a lot of those business seminars on how to be successful in business without really trying. Take those well-established principles of success (based on statistics!) and apply them to armed robbery, and how can you go wrong?

Admit it, you want to know The Rules. You are thinking about rushing out to buy this book just to discover the rules. It’s even easy to buy the book—just click on the picture of the book cover above and it will take you right to the Amazon web page for the book and you can order it and in a day or two, you too will know The Rules!

Or you can just keep reading this here review—though, truth be told, if you do click on that link and buy the book, you will enjoy it; it is a really fun book.

What are Frank’s “ten rules for success and happiness”? The All Caps is in the original, presumably because this is, you know, really important:

1. ALWAYS BE POLITE ON THE JOB. SAY PLEASE AND THANK YOU.
2. NEVER SAY MORE THAN NECESSARY.
3. NEVER CALL YOUR PARTNER BY NAME—UNLESS YOU USE A MADE-UP NAME.
4. DRESS WELL. NEVER LOOK SUSPICIOUS OR LIKE A BUM.
5. NEVER USE YOUR OWN CAR. (DETAILS TO COME.)
6. NEVER COUNT THE TAKE IN THE CAR.
7. NEVER FLASH MONEY IN A BAR OR WITH WOMEN.
8. NEVER GO BACK TO AN OLD BAR OR HANGOUT ONCE YOU HAVE MOVED UP.
9. NEVER TELL ANYONE YOUR BUSINESS. NEVER TELL A JUNKIE EVEN YOUR NAME.
10. NEVER ASSOCIATE WITH PEOPLE KNOWN TO BE IN CRIME.

There you have it. Follow those rules and you can’t go wrong.

When you look down that list, it doesn’t seem all that hard. Rules 1 and 4 are about how you look and act. Rules 2 and 3 remove the possibility of revealing information during the crime. Rule 5 also limits the possibility of someone identifying you. Rule 6 means you are focusing on getting away. Rules 7 through 10 just prevent you from getting entangled with someone who will reveal your identify to the police.

There is nothing in that set of rules which seems like it would be terribly hard to follow. This is the genius of the book. The Rules would work. You won’t get caught following those rules. The only thing stopping you from getting that equivalent of a million dollars a year is that you have some strange aversion to pointing a gun at somebody and demanding they give you all the cash in the safe or cash register or wherever it is. Presumably, that is not an easy aversion to overcome…I suppose that should say “Fortunately, that is not an easy aversion for most people to overcome.”

The reason that Swag is such an interesting novel is that by the end of chapter 3, you have seen this foolproof method for crime. Of course it could go wrong if you got really unlucky, but if you are careful, no problem at all. And yet, you, the Reader, have no doubt at all that things are not going to go well for Frank and Stick.

What’s the problem? Suppose you overcome your aversion to armed robbery and you start off following Frank’s rules, but then you realize that if you just bend one of those rules a bit, just a teensy little bit, you could easily increase your income. Say you drop the rule about saying “Please” and “Thank You.” That won’t hurt, will it? And you’ll get a higher income.

Oh, and rule 9 surely doesn’t apply to people you trust. And rule 5 only applies if anyone can see your car. And rule 10 obviously doesn’t apply to people in crime who are cautious and don’t get caught. And Rule….

Swag is a marvelous examination of human nature. Why do people do terrible things? It happens all the time. You see or hear of someone who is really mired in a horrible situation because of what they have done. The drug addict is the classic case. How does one become a heroin addict? It is rare for someone to wake up one fine morning and exclaim, “I think I want to be a junkie.” But, it is easy to imagine someone saying, “I’ll try heroin, just this once. Just a little bit. Nothing too crazy.” And then that little bit become a little bit more and then a little bit more and the end is not pretty.

This pattern of behavior is familiar to everyone. Drug and alcohol abuse, stealing from your employer, bribery or other forms of political corruption, they all start the same way: “Just a little bit.” We condemn such behavior.

We also routinely do the same thing ourselves. We don’t mean to be bad, but every now and then, being a little bit mean to someone, well, that’s OK, right? Sure I should help my neighbor (or my spouse), but just this one time, I’ll pretend I don’t notice my neighbor (or my spouse) could use some help. Just this one little lie, a white lie, honestly, just a little lie. I’ll just cut this small corner at work, just a tiny one. I can put off my work just for a minute to check Twitter, just for a minute. Oh, and Facebook too. And obviously Instagram. And Pinterest. And this nifty game. It’s not like I am deciding to avoid doing the things I should be doing. “I used ta do a little but a little wouldn’t do. So the little got more and more.”

Why do we do this? It is not hard to think of things you have done in the last week which cause you to wonder why you didn’t have more self-control. Why does temptation work so well? Why can’t Frank and Stick and you and I resist the temptation to just do a little bit more of that thing we know in our reflective moments we really should not be doing.

When we talk about the stamp of original sin which corrupts our very souls, we often instantly imagine the evidence of people who do really terrible things. But, terrible people doing terrible things may not be the best evidence of original sin at all.

Why does temptation seem to only run one way? I am constantly tempted to be a little bit worse than I am. Just a little. But, do I have a corresponding temptation to be a little bit better? I used to be a little bit good and then I got tempted to be a little bit better and then a bit better and then next thing you know I find out I am acting in really virtuous ways and I have no idea how I got here? Hmm. Behaving better than I used to behave seems like work. Behaving worse than I used to behave is really easy.

That is the reason to read a book like Swag. Even if you are not looking for a manual on how to become a more effective armed robber, imagining that you are is a useful exercise. How quickly would you go down the inevitable road that Frank and Stick travel? Could you resist the urge to bend those really easy rules? How often do you bend the really easy rules you make for your own life?

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