James E Hartley

A Black Hole

“If there were any doubts left about the graphic novel as a serious medium, Black Hole should dispel them.” Independent

“Visually, it’s one of the most stunning graphic novels yet published….Black Hole may be the most Freudian graphic novel you will ever read.” TIME

“The Best Graphic Novel of the Year…One of the Most Stunning Graphic Novels Yet Published.” TIME (again)

“Black Hole is Burns’ masterwork.” The New York Times Book Review

“Surreal and Unnerving…A Remarkable Work” Chicago Sun-Times

I could go on listing the accolades. This book won the Eisner Award, the Harvey Award, and the Ignatz Award—all awards for Best Graphic Novel. Indeed, Black Hole regularly shows up on lists of Best Graphic Novels (aka comic books, more about that anon). It even showed up in the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

I finally read it.

It is…Terrible. Awful. Puerile. Pathetic. Boring. Silly. Pretentious. Nonsense.

I didn’t like it very much.

Black Hole shows that we can nicely divide the reading world. On the one side, there are people who read comic books (sorry, Graphic Novels) who are very embarrassed that their friends look down on them for reading Comic Books and so are desperately looking for something they can point to and exclaim, “See it is as Great as Shakespeare…or at least Dickens…or as good as whatever recent book is getting hailed by the literati!” Alas, there are not many comic books that fit that bill. (Not many is not the same thing as none.) So, if there is something that feels more literary than the normal fare, it instantly gets overhyped. Renaming “comic books” as “graphic novels” happens for exactly this reason. “It’s not a comic book! It is a graphic novel! Novels are intellectually respectable! Graphic Novels are just a type of novel!” (Insert foot stamping.)

On the other side there are people who actually read books without pictures and can tell the difference between Jane Austen and Stephanie Meyers. Black Hole is the Twilight of comic books. An incredibly bad book that the people who read this sort of thing desperately want to pretend is an amazing work of literature.

Don’t get me wrong. The problem with Black Hole is not that it is a comic book. Much to the chagrin of many of the readers of this here blog, I actually like comic books. Art and words can indeed go together nicely. You can tell some interesting stories that way. You can also tell some fun, lightweight tales that way. Superhero comic books, even the schlocky kind, are an amusing manner of whiling away a few minutes.

So why is Black Hole so incredibly bad? It is a pure adolescent sex romp. Ooh look! Teenagers having sex in the woods! Oh, but if they have sex with an infected person they get…The Bug. (Deep metaphorical insight: The Bug is like AIDS! Insert sophisticated knowing nod.) What is The Bug? It is a sexually transmitted disease that causes you to…well, it depends. One person grows a tail. Another gets a second mouth at the bottom of his neck. Another starts shedding her skin like a snake. Some start getting bumps on their bodies. One gets finger webbing. One guy just looks ugly.

Yep, there is your dramatic tension. If you sleep with the girl with the tail, then you will start getting crazy growths on your abdomen. If you sleep with the guy who has two mouths, you’ll end up shedding your skin. Big Moral Dilemma here—what should you do? One might think the lesson is: “Don’t sleep with the girl with tail or the guy with two mouths.” But, no. Teenagers apparently can’t control themselves.

So, all these weird things happen to teenagers and what is anybody doing about it? Well, nothing. Because you see, the teenagers just run off to the woods and hide so no adults know about this problem. Even when one of the diseased guys starts murdering other people, nobody seems to, you know, alert an adult. Even when this happens at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yeah…

How did this book become popular? Well, imagine you are an awkward teenage boy who reads comic books. Suddenly along comes this comic book and it is (insert hushed tones) an alternative comic. “Alternative” is the comic book code word for “There are drawings of naked people in it.” Hehehe. Edgy. Now let’s call it a “graphic novel” and then it is OK if I read this book with drawings of naked people!

Don’t believe me that this is the draw? Here is the start of one of those overwhelming positive reviews (at SyFy):

OK, I’ll admit it: Sometimes, I like my comics sexy. I mean, if you can look at beautiful illustrated naked forms drawn by the most talented of illustrators, why wouldn’t you enrich your eyes? Which is probably why I originally picked up Charles Burns’ semi-sordid-yet-seemingly-seminal Eisner- and Harvey Award-winning graphic novel Black Hole in the first place. The pictures say a thousand sexy words. Albeit strangely, and at times, horrifically.
Or maybe I was drawn to Black Hole … because I never quite grew out of that adolescent stage, as the prior paragraph likely attests….I’m sorry, I grew up watching unmonitored HBO in the ‘80s and that has forever skewed my worldview toward the inappropriate. Not to say Black Hole is inappropriate, per se, but it’s most certainly edgy, and filled with bored teens acting with reckless abandon in the face of a pitiless world.

Now imagine these comic book obsessed teenage boys ten years later reading a comic book that is complete wish fulfillment for their teenage self. Edgy teenage sex with gorgeous girls. And lots of marijuana. Imagine that the nerdy high school boys have grown up and are in their late 20s or early 30s; now they write reviews of comic books and give out awards for Best Graphic Novel. After all, who else would review a comic book? I mean, what self-respecting person would condescend to review these things?

And suddenly it all makes sense. This trashy faux-philosophical story gets rave reviews and wins awards despite the fact that there is not a moment in it that rises above the inane. The best that can be said for the thing is that the story is not told in a linear fashion, so you have to spend at least 10 seconds every now and then realizing that Event A happened after Event B. Then again, in the ten years (yes that is right 10 years!) Burns spent writing this book, he didn’t spend any time on the people (all the characters look and act almost identically) or the writing (yawn), so he had some time to think, “Hey I’ll put these two events in non-chronological order! Sophisticated of me, isn’t it?”

This is the sort of comic book that gives comic books a bad name. People assume that lame superhero comic books are the problem, but they are not. Everyone knows that an unremarkable issue of The Flash will involve nothing more than a guy in a red suit running really fast and punching bad guys. No harm, no foul. The real problem with comic books is that tripe like Black Hole gets praised as a major literary achievement.

Conducting and Lecturing

A question which has puzzled me off and on for decades is what music conductors are doing.

Sure, they wave their hands around a lot. And they get applause both before and after a concert.

But, what exactly are they doing?

Don’t get me wrong. I knew what my music teacher was doing when I was in elementary school band. In practices, she would spend a lot of time trying to convince us we needed to stay on the beat. That is kinda important. But come concert time, she would start us and we would all screech our way through the piece. Maybe we all accidentally ended at the same time once or twice.

But, surely there is a big difference between conducting a bunch of 11 year olds and conducting professionals. Professionals already know how to keep time, right? They know how to read music, right? So, what is the conductor doing?

Enter Mark Wigglesworth, The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters. The key to the answer is in an aside which comes about midway through the book. It is the answer to a trivia question I never even knew was a trivia question, but once you hear it, you realize a lot about music history. What was the “first symphony to need a conductor”? Think about it for a moment. You don’t need a conductor for a soloist piece. You can play a violin quartet no problem without a conductor. When do you start needing a designated person to stand up front waving around a baton?

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the “Eroica” is arguably the first orchestral piece to benefit from constant, albeit extremely subtle, fluctuations of tempo. It is perhaps the first symphony to need a conductor.

The mystery of what conductors do evaporated while reading this book. Truth be told, I am now puzzled why I was ever puzzled. Does a professional Shakespeare troupe need a director? After all, the script is there, all the actors are professionals, what is the point of a director? That is a really silly question. Or, does a professional football team need a coach? After all, one of the players can call the plays and all the players are professionals, so what is the point of a coach? Again a silly question. What is a conductor, then? The musical equivalent of a director or a coach. It’s obvious now that I think about it.

So, is Wigglesworth’s 250 page book worth reading to get such an obvious conclusion? Sort of. The book is definitely overly long—like far too many books, it would be vastly better at two-third’s or maybe even half, its length. But, scattered throughout the book are some rather interesting observations on both music conducting and, much to my surprise, lecturing.

First, the music notes. The best line in the book:

Richard Strauss said that a conductor should only ever conduct the strings, the woodwind should be treated like soloists, and if you so much as look at the brass they will just play too loudly.

The primary job of the conductor is to manage the parts; not only does someone need to set the time for the piece, but the volume of both the orchestra and in particular, the volume of the assorted parts in the orchestra has to be determined by someone. If everyone in the room decided their part was the most important and played loudly, there would just be a cacophony of noise. Someone has to tell the trombones to be softer and the clarinet to play a little louder.

When an orchestra does not sound together, Wigglesworth argues, it is the fault of the conductor being too indecisive. The conductor’s chief role on the night of a concert is to signal to the orchestra that someone is in charge here. That gives the players confidence. It also, interestingly, give the audience confidence. Curiously, the way the audience hears a piece may depend crucially on how the conductor behaves. Imagine a rousing piece of music with a conductor standing still slightly waving one hand to beat time. Imagine a softer quiet piece in which the conductor is gesticulating wildly. Both images would seem so off it would indeed affect how the audience hears the piece of music.

Conductors theoretically could have a massive influence on how a piece sounds. Start Beethoven’s fifth at a very slow pace, and it would seem like a different piece of music.

The interesting question to me is whether or not the universal availability of recordings has led to a more homogeneous approach to performances around the world. The fact that conductors can easily hear “how a piece goes” without having to make any decisions about what the composer might have meant does diminish the potential for a genuinely individual response…

The idea that we are witnessing a homogenization of music is fascinating. Particularly when that fact is coupled with another of Wigglesworth’s observations: there is a distinct variation in the way different nationalities play music.

But put a hundred cosmopolitan players into an orchestra and as a group their national characteristics still reveal themselves with all the stereotypical differences of that particular country’s identity. These are generalizations, but it is hard not to be aware of the work ethic of the Japanese, the suave style of the Italians, the passion of the Hungarians, the efficiency of the Americans, the sophistication of the Swedes, the teamwork of the Dutch, the freedom of the South Americans, the cultural confidence of the Germans, “no-worries” attitude of the Australians, and the more-passionate-than-we-like-to-admit British. Music might be international language but it is one full of many different accents and dialects

Reading that makes me really want to hear a compilation of the same piece of music played by different national orchestras. Someone should put this together as a YouTube video. (You may take on this task, Dear Reader.)

It wasn’t just the observations on music that intrigued me, however. The more shocking discovery was how much being a music conductor is like being a college professor. The parallels were at times uncanny. Here I am merrily reading about music conductors and I run across a passage that makes it sound like I am reading about my job. Simply convert the following from conductors and music to professors and a particular subject, and you have a manual on teaching well.

For example, “The easiest way to give the impression of being at ease with yourself is to be at ease with yourself,” gets at the root of why nervous professors are not good professors.

Or on why I lecture without notes:

Conductors need to share their love for the music with those who are playing it, and it is easy to underestimate how open one has to be to do that. Speaking personally, I find that openness more accessible if I am conducting without a score. For all sorts of reasons, conducting by heart, which is a far healthier way of describing it than “from memory,” forces me to express myself more, and therefore, I hope, better. And if you conduct by heart, it doesn’t really matter whether the score is in front of you or not.
Memory can be a distorting tool. And it is more reliable if your system for learning a score is one of trying to understand it rather than remember it. Once you understand something, it is impossible to forget it. It is also a far more positive, stimulating, and meaningful way to prepare. Because whatever physical control or psychological intuition conductors may have, it is your relationship with the music that lies at the heart of your artistic identity: you are a musician first, a conductor second.

Or this on why I subconsciously wave my hands around constantly when lecturing:

The strength, mobility, and flexibility of our hands are extraordinary. Their vast range of movement offers limitless opportunities for communication, and we subconsciously associate their nerve-rich tactile nature with a great deal of sensory perception….Hands seem to speak a primordial language, with a vocabulary that no one who seeks to be understood ignores.

Or on perfecting the craft of becoming not an average, but a truly great, teacher:

The problem with trying to learn from watching great conductors is that one of the things that makes them great is that they are unique. I cannot think of any two, dead or alive, who are similar either musically, physically, or psychologically, and the moment students start to copy one is the moment they identify themselves as students. It is perhaps more useful to watch those who show you what not to do, and you would probably learn more by attending bad rehearsals.

And, finally, on why teaching is such an amazing job:

It can be incredibly rewarding to help young people unearth more of their ability than they might have realized they had, and it is a privilege to be the one who accompanies them into the kind of emotional discovery that, for example, the first playing of Mahler symphony can unlock. With nothing to lose, with no consciousness of the possibility of failure, they live on the wild side of the music, they embrace the edge, and countenance no compromise. Although they are unaware of it, their innocent wonder at the extraordinary power of music can be a reminder to their conductor of just what a special life it is. The “teacher” gets just as much out of it as a student.

What do conductors do? The same thing college professors do. Make something written in the past come alive and inspire a whole new generation to realize that there is both Beauty and Truth in this world.

Is All Time Redeemable?

Let us begin, once again, by expressing gratitude to the Library of America.

American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels, 1956-58, closes with a book by Fritz Leiber, The Big Time.

I had never heard of this book. It is almost certain at you have not heard of it either. Yet, there it is making the list of the Big Five in the LOA collection.

It is not that it is completely forgotten. Neil Gaiman knows about it:

It’s funny, smart, and resonant, playing out huge themes on a tiny stage, and it demands a great deal of its readers, so it’s no surprise that it was rewarded with the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958, nor that, over fifty years later, it remains relatively unknown.

That is a pretty accurate description. It is definitely a clever story. It is also sadly true that if I had picked up this book in high school, I would have set it right back down after about 10 pages.

The problem? It is virtually unreadable if you expect that you will have any idea what is going on. The book drops you into a universe and the story begins. No background. You just sort of piece together what everyone is talking about as you merrily read along. Lots of little things are never explained. Lots of big things, the sort of things you really want to know, are also never explained. Yet, you do learn exactly enough to make sense of the story even if you have no idea how the universe in which the story is set actually works.

It’s a time travel book. Well, sort of. There actually isn’t any time travel in the book itself. Unless traveling outside time counts. Hmm. It is really hard to explain this universe of this book.

Let’s start again. There are people traveling back and forth through time, changing the past and the future. You’ve read stories like that. In this universe, however, there is the Conservation of Reality. Small changes in the past do not create radical changes in the future. So to make a big change in Time, you have to go back and forth, constantly changing things until the small changes add up to a really noticeable change. Even still, Reality has a way of reasserting itself. OK, so far?

Now imagine two competing forces trying to change history in different ways. That is the Change War.

Now, what are the effect of all these changes? From the first page of the novel:

You don’t know about the Change War, but it’s influencing your lives all the time and maybe you’ve had hints of it without realizing.
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it’s hard to believe they’ll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Change War.

On that basis a fun story is built, all set in a place cleverly named “the Place,” which is like a rest stop for soldiers in the Change War. Well worth the read if you like stories that read like a massive jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the box so you don’t know what the picture is and, alas, lots of the pieces are missing.

Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound too fun. Why read a story like that? For exactly the same reason we read Science Fiction in the first place. It helps us think about reality by exploring the fringes of reality. This book is a pleasant little romp through our sense of time.

Start with Eliot:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

“Burnt Norton” is a perfect expression of the idea that Time is a fixed thing. There is One Past and One Present and One Future. There are no alternative realities. There are no roads in time which are less traveled; there is only the road actually traveled.

One alternative to Eliot’s timescape is probably the normal way to think about time. There is a past which is fixed. We live in the present. Our decisions in the present determine the future. The past is fixed, but the future is unknown. We create the future by our decisions in the present. Make a different decision and the future changes.

The difference between these two ways of thinking about time is related to the question of free will and determinism. Question: Is the next sentence I will type when I finish this one already determined or will I be able to make a decision about what sentence I will type as soon as I finish tying this sentence?

The Big Time offers a third possibility. What if Eliot is not just wrong about the future? What if he is also wrong about the past? What if the past can change just as easily as the future? What if that thing you remembered but found out didn’t happen actually did happen and you are just remembering the way the past used to be? What if when you and your friend are arguing about what actually happened 20 years ago, that both your memories are right, but one of you is just remembering the way the past used to be and one is remembering the way the past is now?

Why is that impossible? If all time is unredeemable, then Eliot is right and the past and the future are fixed. But if the future is alterable, why isn’t the past also alterable? As one of the characters in The Big Time explains it:

It’s about the four orders of life: Plants, Animals, Men and Demons. Plants are energy-binders—they can’t move through space or time, but they can clutch energy and transform it. Animals are space-binders—they can move through space. Man (Terran or ET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a time-binder—he has memory.

Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibility-binders—they can make all of what might be part of what is, and that is their evolutionary function.

Maybe the reason you think Time is bound is the same reason that plants think space is fixed. You haven’t learned how to move through the universe of possible pasts.

I don’t like that conclusion either. But then I like Eliot’s conclusion. All time is unredeemable. Nonetheless, given the choice between a) only the future is unknown and b) both the future and the past are unknown, I am not convinced the latter is less likely than the former. If all time is not unredeemable, all bets are off.

Test: Is the last book you read the same book which the author originally wrote? How do you know?

How Long?

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

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

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

That was Shusaku Endo. Fifty years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence wrestles with this question in unflinching prose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Envy

Envy.

It is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Not one we talk about much, though.

If you want to read a Treatise on the Sin of Envy, try Lex Luther: A Celebration of 75 Years.

OK, maybe a collection of Lex Luther comic books is not the final word on envy. But it is a starting place. After all, do you really want to start our study of envy with Aquinas? You do? OK.

Aquinas defines Envy by quoting Damascene: “Envy is sorrow for another’s good.” That seems like a crisp, clean definition.

Aquinas elaborates:

Since envy is about another’s good name in so far as it diminishes the good name a man desires to have, it follows that a man is envious of those only whom he wishes to rival or surpass in reputation.
But this does not apply to people who are far removed from one another: for no man, unless he be out of his mind, endeavors to rival or surpass in reputation those who are far above him. Thus a commoner does not envy the king, nor does the king envy a commoner whom he is far above. Wherefore a man envies not those who are far removed from him, whether in place, time, or station, but those who are near him, and whom he strives to rival or surpass. For it is against our will that these should be in better repute than we are, and that gives rise to sorrow.

We, like Aquinas, need to pause here for a moment to make sure we are talking about envy, and not things that look like envy. Aquinas notes, quoting Galatians 5:26, that envy in indeed a sin. But, the definition “sorrow for another’s good” encompasses things that are not a sin and thus not properly defined as envy. Aquinas notes four way such a sorrow might come about. (Remember, you are the one who wanted to start with Aquinas. I told you we could start with Lex Luther, but you scoffed at using a comic book to study envy. You did. I heard you.)

First, if the reason you are sorrowing at another’s good is that you believe the other’s good will cause harm to yourself or others, then it is not envy. You are, in other words, perfectly allowed to sorrow when evil triumphs.

Second, you may sorrow over another’s virtue (good) because you lack that virtue and wish you had it. This is zeal, not envy, and it is not a sin.

Third, one reason you may sorrow over another’s good is because the other is not worthy of the good. When an evil person gets lots of material goods, you might feel sorrow. Aristotle dubs this “indignation.” This sort of sorrow is misplaced and thus wrong; one should strive for virtuous, not temporal goods. But, while still wrong, this is not envy.

Fourth, “we grieve over a man’s good, in so far as his good surpasses ours; this is envy properly speaking, and is always sinful, as also the Philosopher states (Rhet. ii, 10), because to do so is to grieve over what should make us rejoice, viz. over our neighbor’s good.”

Now that envy has been defined, Aquinas goes on to explore first whether envy is a mortal sin and second whether envy is a capital vice. I know the suspense is killing you, so I’ll just quickly note the answer to both is “Yes.”

Here is the question: does this taxonomy of envy make you less likely to experience envy? Did it increase your zeal for good? No? Hmm. Maybe an example or two of the way that envy actually can destroy happiness would help. I know just the thing.

Lex Luthor: A Celebration of 75 Years is, like all the other volumes in this series, a really interesting way to see the development of a character. Luthor started out as a two-bit crook involving himself in international affairs. The most notable thing about him as that he had hair. Bright red hair. He also had some bald henchmen in his original story. In a subsequent appearance, an artist made the mistake of thinking the bald guy was Luthor and suddenly Luthor lost his hair. The look of an iconic villain was an artist’s mistake!

It took time for Luthor to acquire a personality, but when he finally did, there was no doubt what constituted the central passion of his life. Luthor is a genius. He is the sort of guy who would win all the awards in school and go on to be a hero of the whole planet. A 1983 story “Luthor Unleashed” shows the potential. Luthor ends up stranded on another planet and helps the people of the planet solve all their problems and he becomes the planet’s hero. (Alas, it does not last. Luthor cannot rid himself of his desire to beat Superman. In the ensuing battle, Luthor accidentally destroys the planet on which he was a hero. Do you feel sorrow for the demise of Luthor?)

Why is Luthor so obsessed with Superman? Luthor has it all. Brains and Brawn. Master inventor. He becomes President of the United States. He can do anything. Why spend his days fighting Superman? “The Gospel According to Lex Luthor” from 2006 has a fascinating conversation between Luthor and Clark Kent:

Luthor: This would never have happened if anyone else on this planet had the wit to see it. The smug self-regard that powers his beaming boyish grin. How does a man like you feel about Superman? Honestly?
Kent: I’m…ah…I’m fine with him. He’s always been friendly around the office.
Luther: And you don’t feel in any way diminished by his very presence on this planet? Strange….Imagine life on this world if some opportunistic alien vermin hadn’t decided to dump its trash here, Kent. That’s all I’ve ever asked anyone to do. Imagine how it was meant to be. We all fall short of that sickening, inhuman perfection, that impossible ideal….
Kent: Is it really all about Superman?

Yes, it is really all about Superman. Luthor is a textbook example of envy. Aquinas: “those who love to be honored are more envious.” Luthor wants to be honored for all that he can do. And yet, standing next to Superman, nobody will ever notice Luthor. That fuels everything Luthor ever does. As long as Superman is around, Luthor will always be at best the second greatest hero on Earth. He is close, oh so close, to being the Greatest. But, he will never get there.

Luthor teaches us that envy is destructive. It may seem like envy is a victimless crime, but it is not. The victim of envy is not necessarily the person who is envied. The victims are all the people who would benefit from the activities of the envier if only the envier could set aside envy and simply do good.

Do the lessons of Lex Luthor generalize? Of course they do. Tom Mayer, my advisor from back in college, once made this observation. Professors and researchers like to pretend they are truly interested in the advancement of knowledge. Imagine you have spent years working on a problem which really interests you and which you think is very important. Just when you are finishing up that project, someone else publishes a paper which addresses exactly the same problem and does a better job than you have done and gets better results that yours. Are you happy at this advance of knowledge?

The cure for envy? Virgil explains it to Dante:

Because your appetites are fixed on things
that, divided, lessen each one’s share,
envy’s bellows pushes breath into your sighs.

But if love for the highest sphere
could turn your longings toward heavenly things,
then fear of sharing would pass from your hearts.

For there above, when more souls speak of ours,
the more of goodness each one owns,
the more of love burning in that cloister.

So, is envy a sin? Does it cause damage to the envier and those whom the envier knows? When Aquinas, Dante, and Lex Luthor comic books all agree, surely we can count that as conclusive, right?

How to Read Henry James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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