James E Hartley

Cheap Repentance

“Repent and believe in the gospel.”

Jesus says that at the outset of the gospel of Mark. This has become one of those “church phrases,” often used in Christian circles and everyone nods and knows exactly what it means.

Well, everyone knows exactly what it means until you start asking what exactly it means.

Consider the word “repent.” As I have heard in numberless sermons, it means turning away from your past sins, expressing sorrow for those past sins, asking for forgiveness for those sins you committed in the past, vowing never again to do those sins, and so on. So far, so good.

Then, there is the three step process: Repent, accept forgiveness, move on. Periodically, you need to repeat the process (after all, you will sin again). Every now and then you pause, think about how bad you have been, and then be glad you are forgiven, and move on.

Enter Augustine:

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

Now that is repentance.

Here is what fascinates me. I have read that paragraph from Augustine many times over the years. I’ve read it aloud many time in classes discussing the book. Last week, I read it in a reading group when we were talking about repentance. Everyone agrees that Augustine is really repenting here.

But, is that a good model for repentance? Because, as one student put it, it is a bit over the top.

Now add in the fact that the great sin for which he was repenting was stealing some pears off a tree. Does that ridiculously trivial sin require that much repentance?

Then add in the fact that this passage was not written the day after he stole the pears, or a week later or a month later—it was written 30 years later. Does he still need to repent for a three decade old event in his life, an episode of youthful indiscretion?

Suddenly the word “repent” becomes rather difficult to define. If what Augustine is doing is an example of true repentance, then that thing I and everyone else I know has been doing for years barely qualifies. We could even call what we have all been doing “Cheap Repentance.” Sure, many times I have thought “I wish I had not done that. Sorry, God!” And then I moved on as if nothing had happened. Augustine and I are playing in different ballparks here.

But, wait, there is more. Augustine is not only repenting of the pear stealing episode. There is also this:

Yet, for an infant of that age, could it be reckoned good to use tears in trying to obtain what it would have been harmful to get, to be vehemently indignant at the refusals of free and older people and of parents or many other people of good sense who would not yield to my whims, and to attempt to strike them and to do as much injury as possible? There is never an obligation to be obedient to orders which it would be pernicious to obey. So the feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant’s mind.

Yep. Augustine repents of the sin of being selfish when he was an infant. Do I need to do that too? (Suffice it to say, the students in the discussion had a hard time believing that they needed to repent of the sins of being a selfish toddler.)

The first instinct is to simply dismiss all this as Augustine using his autobiography to foolishly wallow in his own guilt. Indeed, he tipped us off in the title: the book is Confessions. He is, therefore, confessing his sins.

But, the focus of the book is not his sin; the focus of the book isn’t even Augustine. He doesn’t want you thinking about him at all; he wants you to be thinking about God. The entire book points toward God, not Augustine.

The direction the book points is the key. Augustine is confessing all these sins to point our attention to the God who forgives all these sins. Augustine wants to convince you that he is not good, that he is really wicked. “Don’t admire me,” Augustine says. “Admire God.”

So that makes sense of the tone of the book. But, what do I do about repentance? If what Augustine is doing is a model of repentance, then why don’t I repent like that? Why do we in the church talk about repentance like it is a simple thing; you do it and then you accept the forgiveness of God? You confess your sin, say a few quick prayers, and then we are all done here.

Do I really have to examine the depths of the depravity of my heart all the time, thinking about the sins I committed not just in the last week, but over my whole lifetime, and repenting of them even today?

Reading Augustine, it is hard to believe in the lazy cheap repentance we find so appealing, that it is easy to repent and get the nice thrill of forgiveness. On the other hand, though, continually repenting of the sins of my infancy seems so tiresome. When do I get to stop repenting?

Augustine says, “Never.”

Augustine’s answer is surely right. We cheapen repentance when we make it easy.

This is undoubtedly why, sitting in a room of thoughtful students, constantly probing to come up with a definition of repentance, repentance comes off as such a trivial thing. Everyone knows it isn’t a trivial thing. But, the rhetoric surrounding repentance in the modern age sure makes it sound like a trivial thing. Every person in the room had a definition of repentance they learned at some point; every definition collapsed under scrutiny; the notions of repentance could not stand the weight of sin.

We need a stronger definition of what it means to repent. Why? Because until I really come to grips with how much I need to repent and how little I actually feel compelled to repent, I can never really understand the depth of God’s love and forgiveness. When we cheapen repentance, we cheapen grace.

The Personal is Not Political

“The personal is political” is easily one of the most pernicious claims made in the history of political thought.

Rather impressively, it simultaneously degrades both political thought and personal life.

Are you defined by your politics?

Sadly, far too many people go off to college and are taught that their fundamental identity as a person is nothing more than the set of political beliefs they espouse. It is quite tragic.

Philip Roth explores this matter in the novel I Married a Communist. Nathan Zuckerman (Roth’s alter ego in 9 of his novels) and Murray Ringold reminisce about Murray’s younger brother and Nathan’s youthful idol, Ira, the communist of the title.

At one point, Zuckerman expresses astonishment at what he is learning from Murray:

Murray, laughing, said, “That a man has a lot of sides that are unbelievable is, I thought, the subject of your books. About a man, as your fiction tells it, everything is believable.

That sometimes we learn surprising things about people is well known. We are surprised at the particular instances, but not at the general phenomena. Obviously, people are complex and obviously we don’t know everything about anyone. So, why is this novel of discovery worth reading?

The earliest events discussed in this novel involve teenage Nathan discovering the world of politics via a book praising Thomas Paine for demanding the compete transformation of the world. He has a conversation with Murray and Ira, in which he is told that the genius of Paine “was to articulate the cause in English. The revolution was totally improvised, total disorganized. Isn’t that the sense you get from this book Nathan? Well, these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose.”

That may be the most perfect description of the allure of developing an absolutist political self. Nathan is attracted to Ira and Ira’s communism not because of the beliefs themselves, but because of the language in which they are expressed. The language itself is stirring and new. It is exciting. It is like an entry into an adult world where childish ideas are thrown off and the world is complex and full of evil and good and there are all these magic phrases which can be used to signal that you are on the side of the righteous.

It isn’t, in other words, the ideas themselves that excite youth; it is the language expressing the ideas themselves.

When someone is first being educated and his head is becoming transformed into an arsenal armed with books, when he is young and impudent and leaping with joy to discover all the intelligence tucked away on this planet, he is apt to exaggerate the importance of the churning new reality and to deprecate as unimportant everything else.

So, what happens after that first encounter? That is exactly what this book traces. Zuckerman gets bored with the language. It takes a few years, but eventually, hearing the rhetoric repeated endlessly, the lack of any new language, becomes so boring that Zuckerman wanders off (to write a scandalous novel, as we find out in Zuckerman Unbound).

Becoming bored wasn’t the only option. Ira’s political mentor O’Day is a True Believer to the end, sacrificing everything, all of life’s comforts for the cause.

Ira tries to straddle the worlds of zealotry and comfortable living, and, well, it doesn’t work out.

Therein lies the problem. What is the proper place for one’s political beliefs? Zuckerman wanders off looking for a new language to excite him; O’Day sacrifices everything for his beliefs; Ira fails to balance the zeal of his communist political beliefs and living a normal bourgeois life with his famous wife, Eve. None of these options seem desirable.

Murray stands in for another option; keep politics in its proper place. Murray’s political beliefs seem to be vaguely leftist, probably what was once called a fellow traveler. He gets hauled before a McCarthyite committee, refuse to denounce his brother, and loses his job as a high school teacher. But, he cheerfully spends a few years as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, before being reinstated to his job as a teacher. He is married to a great wife, has a great kid, meets Zuckerman again to have the conversation in this book when he is in his eighties taking a class on Shakespeare, and then dies quietly two months later. A good life all in all.

The difference between Murray and all the other options in this book is simply that he does not let his political life control him. While Zuckerman is bouncing from one enthusiasm to the next, Murray was just going through life, observing the political scene, having strong opinions about it (he really doesn’t like Nixon), but never confusing his political beliefs with who he is.

At the end, Zuckerman seems to realize that Murray is implicitly right. Wandering out, staring at the night sky, what does he see?

Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. There are no longer mistakes for Eve or Ira to make. There is no betrayal. There is no idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience nor its absence. There are no mothers and daughters, no fathers and stepfathers. There are no actors. There is no class struggle. There is no discrimination or lynching or Jim Crowe, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice. There are no utopias….What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain…is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand.
The stars are indispensable.

Perspective matters. This is one of the missing lessons in the modern college. It is one of the missing lessons in the world of news and social media.

I have had strong political beliefs since I was in high school. I too was wooed by the beat of the rhetoric of all these ideas and I too once thought that the political battles of the moment were life and death battles. While my political beliefs have not moderated, I have come to realize that while politics is fun and interesting and generates those incredibly marvelous debates, it really should be kept in its place.

A pleasant cup of coffee with your kid or cocktail hour with your spouse or an impassioned debate about sports with your friends, these things matter. None of these things is worth sacrificing on the altar of politics.

I Married a Communist is a curious warning tale. It is in some ways a bitter book in which Roth settles scores with his ex-wife. But Roth is too great of an artist to let the bitterness dwarf the message. Our hearts long for peace. That peace is not going to be found by constantly seeking to praise or condemn Caesar.

The American National Quality?

“She had the American national quality—she had ‘faculty’ in a supreme degree.”

The “she” is the titular character in Henry James’ short story “Mrs. Temperly” (included in the Library of America’s Complete Stories 1884-1891).

Like every work by James, the story is calculated to describe with exquisite precision how life works. Our protagonist, Raymond, is in love with Mrs. Temperly’s daughter, Dora, and wants to marry her. Without ever saying to either Raymond or Dora that the marriage should not happen, Mrs. Temperly ensures it will not. That is the story.

Mrs. Temperly does indeed have faculty in a supreme degree.

What does that mean? “Faculty” is not a word used much these days to describe a person. Do I know anyone with faculty in a supreme degree? I don’t think so. I have certainly never described anyone that way. I have never even herd someone described that was before. I suspect neither have you.

More than that, I was not even sure what exactly it would mean to say someone had faculty in a supreme degree.

The Oxford English Dictionary comes to the rescue, which begins by pointing to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, which defines the term most succinctly as “The power of doing any thing.”

Ah. Mrs. Temperly certainly has faculty in a supreme degree. It is, without a doubt her defining characteristic. She sets forth what she wants to do, and then arranges for it to happen, seemingly without effort, not just inhibiting a marriage, but every other thing she wants to do.

Chance for her is a lighthearted joke: “Oh, a chance! what do you call by that fine name?”

Is Mrs. Temperly realistic? Since she is in a Henry James short story, she certainly meant to be realistic. But is it possible to have such a high degree of faculty? Is it possible to arrange one’s world so perfectly, so neatly, that nothing is left to chance, and things will work out exactly as you would have them work?

Even more interestingly, if you were to meet someone with a supreme degree of faculty, would you like that person? Would you want to be friends with someone like that? Would you hire someone like that?

Probably not. You, being a person with a lower degree of faculty, will become merely another set piece in that other person‘s perfectly arranged life.

Raymond does not make out too well in his interactions with the woman of supreme faculty. He has ideas of his own, he is unhappy with the status quo, but he ends up living out his life in exactly the way Mrs. Temperly would choose without her ever needing to cajole or force him to do anything at all.

Having faculty seems like a good thing. I would like to have faculty.

But, others having faculty may not be such a good thing for you. What if your plans are not the same as the plans of the person with faculty? “I am sorry you have ideas that make you unhappy,” Mrs. Temperly tells Raymond. “I guess you are the only person here who hasn’t enjoyed himself to-night.”

Part of me wants to just dismiss the whole idea of a supreme degree of faculty as an oddity in a Henry James story. Surely not every character in Henry James is someone I can actually imagine meeting. But, James won’t let us dismiss the term so easily. It is, he said, “the American national quality.” That is intriguing.

James is setting up Mrs. Temperly as the personification of America in the drawing rooms of France in the late 1800s.

She “was an optimist for others as well as for herself, which doubtless had a great deal to do…with the headway she made in a society tired of its own pessimism.”

Not a bad description of America in the late 1800s compared to European continent in the midst of centuries of perpetual struggle.

Over a century later, is it still true? Curiously, James’ story may provide insight into the divisions currently deepening in American society. One the one side, we have those who see America as the land of Faculty, that optimism that the good old USA can do any thing. On the other side, there is a society tired of its own pessimism. When the former enters into the land of the latter, what happens?

Henry James is a prophet.

Solitude, Silence, and Prayer

“Arsenius prayed again: ‘Lord, lead me in the way of salvation’ and again he heard a voice saying, ‘Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, for these are the sources of sinlessness.’”

From that story, Henri Nouwen devises the plan for a Christian Life, explained in The Way of the Heart.

It is a three step program. Solitude, Silence, Prayer. But, right now you are imagining a pleasant mountain retreat for a weekend of relaxation with no TV and a few prayer times in the woods. That is not at all what Nouwen means. This Solitude, Silence, and Prayer is Hard Work.

Start with Solitude.

In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me—naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, private, broken—nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something.

A “nothingness so dreadful.” Think about that. Nouwen insists, “We have, indeed, to fashion our own desert where we can withdraw every day…” Every day an encounter with nothingness. By yourself.

Then silence. No words. He is really serious about that too.

Silence is the way to make solitude a reality. The Desert Fathers praise silence as the safest way to God. “I have often repented of having spoken,” Arsenius said, “but never of having remained silent.”

We need, for example, silent preaching in our churches. Silent counseling. Organize silent meetings.

Then prayer. But not a wordy prayer. That uses the intellect. Instead, we need prayers of the heart. Use simple, short (maybe one word) prayers uttered over and over until it takes over your whole being and you are indeed silently praying without ceasing.

Nouwen is not gently suggesting these things. He in insisting on them. You need to do these things. Now. And tomorrow…and tomorrow and tomorrow. When you do so, you will hit elevated spirituality, like the Desert Fathers of old. And one day, you will arrive. How will you know when that is? Nouwen closes the book thus: “by the time people feel that just seeing us is ministry, words such as these will no longer be necessary.”

Where to begin with discussing this maddening little tome? How about here, from the section on silence?

This might sound too unworldly to us, but let us at least recognize how often we come out of a conversation, a discussion, a social gathering, or a business meeting with a bad taste in our mouth. How seldom have long talks proved to be good and fruitful? Would not many if not most of the words we use be better left unspoken? We speak about the events of the world, but how often do we really change them for the better? We speak about people and their ways, but how often do our words do them or us any good? We speak about our ideas and feelings as if everyone were interested in them, but how often do we really feel understood? We speak a great deal about God and religion, but how often does it bring us or others real insight? Words often leave us with a sense of inner defeat. They can even create a sense of numbness and a feeling of being bogged down in swampy ground. Often they leave us in a slight depression, or in a fog that clouds the window of our mind.

Yougottabekiddingme. Really, this has to be a joke, right? Does Nouwen really have zero idea about the joys found in conversation?

That problem generalizes all over the place. A solitude with no books is not only better than a solitude with books, the latter doesn’t even qualify as solitude? Silence should be our default state? Prayer using the intellect doesn’t even qualify as prayer?

Sure, I am perhaps the wrong audience for this book. I live my whole life in words. I read; I talk with people; I write; I give speeches and lectures and sermons. Words, words, words. What exactly is my life with no words?

But, before I hasten to simply toss Nouwen out the window, it is also worth noting that it would have been trivially easy for Nouwen to recast his book into something with which I would completely agree.

Solitude? Yes, we are completely bombarded every day with an endless array of stimuli. The cell phone alone is a constant interruption in our lives. We do need time away from all this. We need time to concentrate and in the modern world, you cannot concentrate unless you get away from the endless screaming of distractions.

Silence? Absolutely necessary for understanding God. Wittgenstein noted this at the end of the Tractatus. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The rest is silence. We necessarily hit a wall when trying to use words to contemplate God. He is beyond our comprehension. Sometimes we need silence, not words, just to experience things that are beyond words.

Prayer? Absolutely praying without ceasing can only be attained by losing the idea that the only form of prayer is running through a list of prayer requests. Learning to commune with God is crucial. We need those groanings too deep for words that Paul describes in his letter to the Romans (8:26). That is real prayer.

In other words, I have absolutely zero disagreement with Nouwen about the ends he wants to attain. We are too busy, our lives are too cluttered and noisy, we compartmentalize prayer. We need a better view of what this relationship with God can be. The ultimate end is to draw closer to God. Nouwen completely agrees with this end.

But, Nouwen is horribly confusing ends and means in this book. If in my solitude I draw closer to God by reading the Four Quartets and letting my mind wander over the ideas therein and in his solitude Nouwen draws closer to God by wrestling with nothingness and demons trying to drag him out the door, then is that a problem? Is it really a problem that maybe, just maybe, Henri Nouwen and I have different means to the same end?

The problem here is much bigger than the annoyance I felt when reading Nouwen’s book. The book is typical of a much larger confusion in the church as a whole. People in the church are constantly confusing means and ends. I have often met people who felt an immense shame that they were not following the Official Rules of How to Draw Closer to God.

Is it possible that maybe, just maybe, not all of us are the same? The confusion of means and ends has created much harm in the church. Far too many Christians have become convinced that the rituals, the solitude done just the right way and the silence done exactly this way and the prayer exactly in this form is the secret to leading a Christian life.

But, all these rules are exactly what Paul condemns in his letter to the Galatians. If we need a list of rules to follow, “if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (2:21). When we in the church create these rules for others to follow, we are getting in the way of people actually discovering God.

So, if you would benefit from the solitude, silence, and prayer in the manner advocated by Nouwen then you should seek every opportunity to use these means. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the practices Nouwen describes. For some, perhaps many, they will be enormously beneficial.

But, means are not ends, and the failure to properly distinguish those two things, the temptation to blur the line between them, causes much harm.

What About Rome?

The biggest question about some books is why they are not better known.

Montesquieu is an extremely important and well known political philosopher, whose (long) book The Spirit of Laws is a landmark in political theory.

The Roman Empire is a perennially interesting topic to both scholars and general readers.

So, imagine if Montesquieu wrote a book about the Roman Empire. That book would surely be a runaway bestseller, right?

He did write that book. And nobody has heard of it.

Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.

OK, the title is lousy and way too wordy. But that can’t explain why nobody has heard of this book.

So, it must not be a very good book. Boring, uninteresting, tedious, uninsightful, something. Right?

Nope. It is actually an easy to read and interesting book. If you are interested in Rome or Montesquieu or political philosophy, you’ll enjoy it. It is not as deep and detailed as The Spirit of Laws, but it hits on the same themes and it is vastly more readable.

Indeed, one way to think of this book is that it is solving a problem political philosophers surely face all the time. Imagine you are writing a book advancing a new theory on how to think about and organize political society. Somewhere along the way, people are going to start asking you, “How does your theory fit with the history of Rome?”

Why will that question about the history of Rome arise? Because Rome has everything. In its 1000 year run, everything that could happen, happened. If you have a theory about political orders, you don’t want Rome standing there as a giant counter-example. So you better figure out how your theory fits Rome.

That is what Montesquieu’s Rome book reads like. You imagine him hammering away at The Spirit of Laws and people keep asking him about Rome, so he starts a notebook on “Thoughts on Rome,” and eventually that notebook gets to be book-length, so he publishes it as a stand-alone book. I have no idea if that is how this book actually originated, but it sure reads that way.

What does he say in the book? We can divide his argument into three parts: Why did Rome rise? What made it so Great? Why did it Decline?

The rise: “always striving and meeting obstacles, Rome…practiced the virtues which were to be so fatal to the world.” The Romans had courage and valor and a determination to win. And so they built the most impressive army in the word, marched into town after town, and assimilated them. They were the Borg. “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.” (Surprisingly, Montesquieu does not make the comparison to the Borg. Go figure.) “In short no nation ever prepared for war with so much prudence, or waged it with so much audacity.”

It was a slow way of conquering. They vanquished a people and were content to weaken it. They imposed conditions on it which undermined it insensibly. If it revolted, it was reduced still further, and it became a subject people without anyone being able to say when its subjection began…
It is the folly of conquerors to want to give their laws and customs to all peoples. This serves no purpose, for people are capable of obeying in any form of government.
But since Rome imposed no general laws, the various peoples had no dangerous ties among themselves. They constituted a body only by virtue of a common obedience, and, without being compatriots, they were all Romans.

This leads directly to why Rome was so great. “The government of Rome was admirable. From its birth, abuses of power could always be corrected by its constitution, whether by means of the spirit of the people, the strength of the senate, or the authority of certain magistrates.”

As Montesquieu describes the features of the Roman government which enabled it to be great, you can imagine the Founding Fathers reading this book and thinking, “This is what we should do.” Separation of powers, faction against faction moderating both, well-regulated militias, not seeking monsters to destroy, a federalist system allowing different cultures or religions to exist in different parts of the republic…the list goes on and on. Montesquieu was the second most cited authority by the Founding Fathers (after, of course, the Bible). I always assumed that meant they just spent a lot of time with The Spirt of Laws, but it is hard to believe they were not all well versed in this book too.

So, what went wrong? First we should note the oddity of speaking as if the collapse of the Great Roman Republic somehow means that the Roman Republic failed. Suppose you came up with a scheme of government and I came along and said, “Sure, you could do that, and it will work for a bit, but it is going to miserably fail in the year 2520.” Would that make you think the proposal was a failure?

Montesquieu thinks the failure was inevitable; the greatness of Rome caused the collapse of Rome. (Again, after a 500 year rise, the “collapse” took another 500 years to complete…) As the people got wealthier in the Roman Republic, they became comfortable, and as they become comfortable, they were less interested in the hard work of being a good citizen.

The people of Rome, who were called plebs, did not hate the worst emperors. After they had lost their power, and were no longer occupied with war, they had become the vilest of all peoples. They regarded commerce and the arts as things fit for slaves, and the distributions of grain that they received made them neglect the land. They had become accustomed to games and spectacles. When they no longer had tribunes to listen to or magistrates to elect, these useless things became necessities, and idleness increased their taste for them. Thus Caligula, Nero, Commodus, and Caracalla were lamented by the people because of their very madness, for they wildly loved what the people loved, and contributed with all their power and even their persons to the people’s pleasures. For them these rulers were prodigal of all the riches of the empire, and when these were exhausted, the people—looking on untroubled while all the great families were being despoiled—enjoyed the fruits of the tyranny. And their joy was pure, for they found security in their own baseness. Such princes naturally hated good men: they knew they were not approved of by them. Indignant at meeting contradiction or silence from an austere citizen, intoxicated by the plaudits of the populace, they succeeded in imagining that their government produced public felicity, and that only ill-intentioned men could censure it.

Go ahead and admit it: when you read that you thought about contemporary American society.

At the end of the constitutional convention in 1787, James McHenry related the following: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic,’ replied the Doctor, ‘if you can keep it.’”

If you can keep it. That is why Montesquieu’s book should be vastly better known than it is. Not only is it a work of a giant in political philosophy, not only is it a work about the endlessly fascinating Roman Empire, it wrestles with the question that should occupy the mind of every citizen. Can we keep it?

A Failed Life?

From the first page of John Williams’ Stoner, we know this is the tale of a failure.

Not a Grand Failure whose failures are in any way noteworthy. Just the routine kind of failure where nothing in life ever really works out very well and then after death nobody ever thinks about the person again.

Lest you be worried that this review contains spoilers, this is all on the first page of the story of William Stoner.

He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses…An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers

Before thinking about the interesting idea underneath this novel, a word about the prose style. In the passage above, did you catch the almost unbearable sense of a vague sadness? Not the sharp sadness of a tragedy, but the sort of resigned unrelenting sadness about a thing which you really don’t want to think about too much because then you will get really sad? The sadness that comes when the brief fleeting thought goes through your mind, and you ignore the thought, but that sense of sadness remains like the faint odor of a perfume which triggers some subconscious reminder of something which you know would be unbearably sad if you could just remember where you smelled that odor before.

The whole book has exactly that tone. It is remarkable. Unrelentingly, the prose carries that vague sense of loss. I have no idea how Williams pulled that off. This is either a master at work or an author knows no other tone because his whole life has that sense about it.

But, the story. William Stoner grows up on a farm, goes to college, becomes a professor of English, marries, has a kid and an affair, publishes a book nobody reads, gives a bunch of lectures nobody remembers, has an argument with a colleague about something relatively unimportant, and eventually dies.

William Stoner, in other words, is a failure. Nothing he does ever really succeeds. He fails at being a scholar, a teacher, a colleague and a mentor. He fails at being a husband and a father and a lover. He fails at being a son, and a son-in-law, and a friend, and a student.

And yet, despite all that failure, when looking back at his life, the only conclusion that can be drawn is this: William Stoner led a good life.

On his deathbed, on the last page of the novel, Stoner reflects

What did you expect? he thought again.
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

What had his life been? At every moment in the book, faced with a decision, Stoner did exactly what he thought he needed to do. He muddled through life, doing the best he could.

The decisions he makes never really turn out all that well. The problems at work could easily have been avoided, but Stoner felt the need to do the right thing even though he knows full well the stakes are small and the personal consequences are potentially large. The signs that his marriage would be a failure were obvious even to Stoner before he was married, but he had made the decision, so he stuck with it.

His life is periodically punctuated by happiness. At times in his life, he actually teaches well. He is for a time a good father. His affair brings him fleeting joy. None of those moments of happiness last.

And yet, what did you expect?

The question of what you expected is the key. This book is the antidote to the message we send the young all the time about what they should expect their lives to be. We tell them over and over to go out and do great things and change the world. We teach them that Love is this enormous emotional high lasting forever and that work is always fulfilling.

And then, the young go through life and discover that most of life is not a psychological high. Few people really do change the world. Few people really are the best in their profession. Few people really are the perfect spouse or parent.

And in this way, we have set up the young to suffer from crushing disappointment later in life. What do they do when they realize they will not be the success they imagined they would be back when they were young? What do they do when reality intrudes into the dream and says there is no castle on the hill, no happily ever after? They feel like failures.

Shame on us for teaching that lesson. William Stoner’s life is not a failure. It looks like a failure because we have collectively told him it is a failure. But, it was a life well-lived. He did his part faithfully. He tried to make good decisions. He lived with the consequences of his decisions without complaining. He never said that life was unfair.

Stoner endures. The dude abides. When did we stop thinking that such a thing was the very definition of a successful life?