Eucatastrophe Reader

Truths I Never Told You

Truths I Never Told You REVIEW

In Kelly Rimmer’s novel Truths I Never Told You, three generations of mothers can be seen struggling with some hereditary difficulty with post-partum depression. Through the use of story, the novel explores the manifestations of this debilitating experience and clarifies the difference between what it means to be “tired” at the onset of a new caregiving responsibility and what it means to really have a chemical/hormonal affliction. The novel also explores the role that men, medication, and mercy can play in dealing with the challenges. Perhaps more than anything, the novel explores the dangerous game we all play when we keep secrets too long.

Beth Walsh, the main character, and her husband, Hunter, have long wanted a child. When they finally get pregnant and Beth gives birth to her son Noah, she comes to believe that there is something wrong with her as she struggles to deal with an overwhelming sense of failure, fatigue, and frustration. Why doesn’t motherhood come naturally, she wonders? Why does it feel like she is doing everything in wet cement?

When Beth’s father has to be relocated to a memory care unit, Beth begins the process of cleaning out his attic and in that process, she discovers some letter left by a Beth’s mother, a woman she thinks died in a car accident when she was an infant. She is about to discover that this was not the case. Grace’s mother died in another way and as the story unfolds, we are allowed a glimpse into the life of Grace’s mother and how she had to deal with the same affliction Beth has, but in a world before she had the same choices that Beth has. In telling the story of Grace, we are also introduced to Grace’s mother, another woman from an even earlier period who delt with the scourge of post-partum depression herself. All of these characters saw their condition as a flaw in their own characters and try their best to conceal their experiences from their communities of care lest they be judged as somehow “unfit” mothers.

Rimmer’s novel, while seeking to entertain, makes every effort to educate in the process. By building a plot-line with three generations of an apparently genetic condition, she seeks to remove any feelings of guilt associated with the condition. None of these women choose to respond as they do to the role of mother. They all wish they were not afflicted. They all struggle with a feeling of shame that somehow their condition is evidence of some lack of virtue. Over the course of the novel, Beth, a therapist by training, goes to a therapist and we get a therapeutic window into the treatment of this form of depression. We also get to see the mistakes and the contributions that family members make as they all seek to help Beth with her symptoms. Following out the history’s of Beth’s mother, Beth’s aunt Marianne, and Beth’s grandmother (the story bounces back and forth between the 1950’s and the 1990’s) allows the reader to follow the trajectory of evolution with respect to psychology, neurobiology, policy, and issues of mental health

The title of the novel, the Truths I Never Told You, could refer to any number of the characters. There are truth’s that Beth does not tell her family. There are truths that Beth’s father never told her. There are truths that Beth’s mother Grace never told her husband, Patrick. There are truths that Beth’s aunt Marianne tried to hide from the police, from her sister’s children, and from Beth’s father, Patrick. There are truths that Patrick never told the police once he learned them. There are truths that Beth’s grandmother kept from her daughter Grace, Beth’s mom. There are truths that Beth hides from her therapist. There are truths that the author hides from the reader for almost the entire novel.

I would add that there are some truths that the author hides from the reader throughout and that she never brings up.

But I will let the reader discover those if they wish.

Question for Comment: How have secrets protected people from harm in your own life? How have they done damage eventually? And what is the relationship between shame and secrets in your own experience? Has life taught you to keep more secrets or less over time?   

"But your heart Is crammed with arrogancy, spleen, and pride.”

Shakespeare Henry VIII Review

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is the last of a series of Shakespearean plays about England’s violent and troubled monarchy. It may be that the birth of Queen Elizabeth is the culminating moment of the play and the series. Seen in one light, the playwright makes the case that Providence always leads to the will of God being done in the interests of “God’s people” (i.e. in Shakespeare’s case, England). If the reign of Elizabeth was good (and objectively, for England, it was pretty good and it was certainly a marked improvement over the seemingly endless violent coups that are represented in the previous plays about England’s kings) then the story behind how she came to her thrown can all be made sense of as an outworking of Divine Providence. And that is one angle that the author of this play takes.

And yet there is another angle that the play presents to us. That angle involves exposing just how ruthless and wicked all those “rich men (and women) north of Richmond” are in their cut-throat attempts to acquire and maintain power. The play tells that story as a conclusion to a 400-year narrative told in King John, Richard II, Henry IV part one, Henry IV part two, Henry V, Henry VI part one, Henry V part two, Henry VI part three, and Richard III. If God is at work bringing about the divine reign of the blessed Queen Elizabeth, the human depravity that supplies the gears is anything but pretty. The play is a continued reminder that playing for great power is a high-risk enterprise that offers high rewards at high stakes and almost inevitably, costs a person their conscience before it costs them their lives.

As I was reading the play, I was reminded of the song that the Biblical character Hannah composed and sang in the introduction to the story of the Israelite monarchy (Book of I Samuel).

“Do not keep talking so proudly
    or let your mouth speak such arrogance,
for the Lord is a God who knows,
    and by him deeds are weighed.

 “The bows of the warriors are broken,
    but those who stumbled are armed with strength.
 Those who were full hire themselves out for food,
    but those who were hungry are hungry no more.
She who was barren has borne seven children,
    but she who has had many sons pines away.

 “The Lord brings death and makes alive;
    he brings down to the grave and raises up.
The Lord sends poverty and wealth;
    he humbles and he exalts.
 He raises the poor from the dust
    and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes
    and has them inherit a throne of honor.

“For the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s;
    on them he has set the world.
 He will guard the feet of his faithful servants,
    but the wicked will be silenced in the place of darkness.

“It is not by strength that one prevails;
    those who oppose the Lord will be broken.
The Most High will thunder from heaven;
    the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.

“He will give strength to his king
    and exalt the horn of his anointed.”

Several powerful characters in the play are brought low from the lofty heights of power and each gives Shakespeare a chance to reflect on the meaning of Fate’s fickleness in the courts of power. “I have touched the highest point of all my greatness,” says the powerful Cardinal Wolsey as he is discovered as an ambitious fraud and sent packing, his material possessions and power confiscated by the king,

“And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening
And no man see me more.”

Buckingham too was earlier brought down by the conniving of the powerful Cardinal. He goes to his execution reflecting on the fall that ends his life:

“The last hour
Of my long weary life is come upon me.
Farewell. And when you would say something that is sad,
Speak how I fell” (2.1.152–56).

And so also Queen Katherine bemoans her misfortune when Henry divorces her for Anne Bollen.

“Shipwracked upon a kingdom where no pity,
No friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me,
Almost no grave allowed me, like the lily
That once was mistress of the field and flourished,
I’ll hang my head and perish.”

 [All of the above quotes were culled from Barbara Mowat’s excellent review of the play “A Modern Perspective: Henry VIII” in the Folger Shakespeare Library].

We should note that at the end of the play, Anne Bollen (Boleyn) and Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury are at the height of their powers, but the original audience would have been aware (as should we) of the fact that they too were about to descend that rollercoaster of Fate’s demise. Henry had a way of, Stalin-like, feeding his loyal minions (and wives) into the maw of executions.

Barbara Mowat also notes a third narrative filter that can be seen playing a role in the structure of the story. That third layer is (in my way of seeing it) an illustration of the Machiavellian corruption that exists at the highest levels of any power pyramid. Life at the top is dog-eat dog (and was for even Jesus’ disciples at the end of his ministry). There is bribery, treachery, exploitation, manipulation. There is bitter competition, incessant conniving, faction building, back-stabbing, flattery, and lies. Almost every one of substance in the play, has learned to obtain power by sucking up to the king in crucial moments. Those that are particularly good at it, know how to feign tears when they grovel.

Seen in a modern context, the play is full of Ukrainian bribes, impeachments, indictments of political enemies, leaks, influence peddling, FARA violations, secret email accounts, shell companies, lust, sex scandals, hush money, stonewalling, investigations, alimony payments, riots, intelligence agency intrigue, and even an “abandoned laptop from hell” story.

Barbara Mowat calls this “the political ladder scheme.” She notes the irony that the original title of the play was All is True.

The message to the original hearers may well be spoken through the mouth of the innocent young Anne Boleyn:

Verily,
I swear, ’tis better to be lowly born
And range with humble livers in content
Than to be perked up in a glist’ring grief
And wear a golden sorrow.

Or as Solomon, that ancient product of an illicit affair and political intrigue once put it in his book of Proverbs:

“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”

Though as we shall soon see, when Henry VIII makes his queen’s stunningly good-looking maid, Anne an “offer she can’t refuse,” she doesn’t. In Anne Boleyn, we see the great temptation that all of the play’s villains and victims succumb to: They begin in innocence but, Lucifer-like,  are soon enamored of power, right up until it is taken from them, and they wish they could undue their original surrender to ambition. It would have been better if they had never gotten close enough to power to think it in their grasp.

“All is true” says Mowat,

“Anne is a traveler on Fortune’s wheel; Anne has been placed by Providence in Henry’s eye to bring joy to the English nation; Anne is a woman who betrays her mistress for money and power. The three readings of her story—as of the stories of Wolsey, Katherine, and others—are built into the very structure of the play. . . . In watching the play, as in watching events in the world around us, we see the story now from one angle, now from another. Again, as in observing events in our world, we never know for certain who is telling ‘the truth.’”

I find it interesting that in the prologue, the narrator of the play speaks directly to the audience and asserts that the play will not make everyone happy. Indeed, says the narrator, the audience is asked to imagine the characters this play is based on and their lives and to “see how soon this mightiness meets misery”:

“And if you can be merry then, Ill say
A man may weep upon his wedding day.”

“Tis ten to one this play can never please,” the narrator concludes at the end. Noting that pretty much every main character in the play was a scumbag though all are gifted at asserting their innocence, save the one (Queen Katherine) who was just about the only person with sustained integrity in the whole story. Katherine is a rarity in the History plays of Shakespeare. An honest soul who cares about justice and is suspicious of con men and connivers and their innuendo and intrigue. Ironic that she was not English (Katherine was the daughter of the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabela).

It is quite fascinating to compare what the powerful people in this play say about themselves and what those who know them well say about them. I have already noted that Cardinal Wolsey portrays himself as a humble patriotic and loyal man of God.

Here is what those who know Cardinal Wolsey says about him:

Norfolk describes Wolsey as vengeful.

“You know his nature,
That he’s revengeful, and I know his sword
 Hath a sharp edge; it’s long, and ’t may be said
 It reaches far, and where ’twill not extend,
 Thither he darts it.”

Buckingham tells us that Wolsey is corrupt and treasonous:

 “But this top-proud fellow—
 Whom from the flow of gall I name not, but
 From sincere motions—by intelligence,
 And proofs as clear as founts in July when
 We see each grain of gravel, I do know
To be corrupt and treasonous.”

Wolsey is a boot-licking suck-up with an insatiable appetite for power we discover. We are told that he is adept at bribery. We are told that he was the author of a program of confiscatory taxation but when the king orders the tax rates lowered, Wolsey quickly tells those announcing the policy to the people that the tax cut was his idea. “Let it be noised That through our intercession this revokement and pardon comes,” he says to the heralds of the new policy. One of Wolsey’s critics notes that as soon as someone gains some favor or power in the king’s court, Wolsey has that man appointed to some distant embassy. He does not tolerate competition for the power he seeks.

“And generally: whoever the King favors,
 The Card’nal instantly will find employment,
 And far enough from court too.”

Two aristocrats reflecting on Wolsey’s ambitious aims refer to him as an “imperious man” who will “work us all from princes into pages.”

Queen Katherine says of the oily Wolsey,

“You sign your place and calling, in full seeming,
 With meekness and humility, but your heart
 Is crammed with arrogancy, spleen, and pride.”

“All hoods make not monks,” Katherine astutely notes of all the powerful clergy she knows, including Wolsey. “Holy men I thought you,” she says of Wolsey and his fellow cleric, “Upon my soul, two reverend cardinal virtues;  But cardinal sins and hollow hearts I fear you.”

“Would I had never trod this English earth
Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it!
 You have angels’ faces, but heaven knows your hearts.”

Wolsey asserts that he has never been anything but a saint and that he had nothing to do with the King’s decision to divorce Katherine (Though he did put on a party for the king that he stocked with “hotties” – Anne Boleyn among them). He is a creep. Until the very moment when he realizes that his goose is cooked - at which point in time he has a “come to Jesus” moment (or feigns one).

This is the eulogy said over the demise of Cardinal Wolsey

“He was a man
 Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
 Himself with princes; one that by suggestion
 Tied all the kingdom. Simony was fair play.
 His own opinion was his law. I’ th’ presence
 He would say untruths, and be ever double
 Both in his words and meaning. He was never,
 But where he meant to ruin, pitiful.
His promises were, as he then was, mighty,
 But his performance, as he is now, nothing.”

As the play concludes, the avaricious Cardinal Wolsey has been utterly replaced by Cranmer, the Arch bishop of Canterbury, a man who we suspect knew to come down theologically on the side of Henry’s divorce (Wolsey had double-dealed in that regard, hoping to be Pope himself at some point). Cranmer is someone who knew just exactly how to plant evidence of Wolsey’s corruption directly into the kings hands without anyone knowing who did it (the audience is only led to suspect).   

“Heaven will one day open the King’s eyes that so long have slept upon him,” says one of the ambitious onlookers who fear Wolsey, calling Wolsey, “This bold bad man.” And eventually, “heaven” answers that prayer and Wolsey falls. “A long farewell to all my greatness!” he sighs,

“This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely”
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
 And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
 Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth.”

And thus does the next ambitious man in line step up to the top rung of the ladder as though somehow his unique skills will save him from the same fate.

Shakespeare can only hope that the reign of Elizabeth will prove somehow to be different. “Perhaps,” we can almost hear him saying in the concluding epitaph to the integrity of Katherine, “maybe things will be different when women rule for most certainly, the men have proven themselves incapable?”

Question for Comment: Do you think having a woman for President would allow our country to clean up its rather disappointing act of late? Why or why not?

“scissor-poke cowardice and reservation in the eyes”

Walden on Wheels REVIEW

Chapter One: Cart-Pusher

1. How would you compare Ken Ilgunas’ experience of getting into college debt compare with your own experience? How does he find himself, as he says on page 9, “trapped in school”?
2. What non-monetary benefits does Ken Ilgunas feel himself receiving from his education in this chapter and what does this have to say about the purpose of college in your mind?
3. Ilgunas speaks to the matter of freedom in this chapter. What does freedom mean to him? How does he suffer as he feels that it is being lost and how does he strike out to regain it? Is his approach a logical one in your mind? Why or why not? Note his comment on pages 12 and 13, “I became afflicted with a burning restlessness that stirred up irrational, impractical dreams and coaxed out strange, subconscious voices.”
4. In concluding the chapter, Ilgunas says that we are nothing but our stories. – “an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping narrative.” If you sat down like Ilgunas does, to write the narrative of your experiences, could it be made into an interesting readable book?

Chapter Two: Cheechako

1. “Climbing this mountain was my chance to start over,” Ilgunas writes of Blue Cloud on page 25. He says that that one climb took on mythic proportions. How does this event determine much of what follows in the book?
2. Would you describe Ken Ilgunas as foolhardy or adventurous? Or both? Why?

Chapter Three: Applicant

1. “By 2009, 17.4 million college graduates had jobs that didn’t even require a degree.” As Ken tries to figure out how to pay his college debt in this environment, how does he envision his alternate futures in “career world” and as an adventurer? Page 38. Do you think his perceptions are accurate or skewed?What does the view after college look like to you at this moment?
2. Do you think Ken Ilgunas makes a wise or a foolish decision after he graduates? How does one know when to surrender and when to persist in a dream anyway?

Chapter Four: Tour Guide

1. What is Ken Ilgunas’ attitude towards work (page 46) and how does it compare with Jack Reakoff’s? Do you think either or both attitudes are healthy or unhealthy?
2. Ken manages to reduce his financial burdens by shifting some of them to his mother (though he intends to pay her back and begins to). How did you determine when to accept help and when not to? This is a question Ilgunas will come back to later in the book by the way.

Chapter Five: Garbage Picker

1. Ken’s gets excited about Bob Abrames proposal to travel in a canoe through Canada. Have you ever experienced a similar excitement about a task or job or adventure?
2. Ken’s description of working as a garbage picker doesn’t sound all that appealing. What has been your worst job thus far? How does that job fit into your narrative? Your story?

Chapter Six: Night Cook

1. Ken starts chapter six by describing some of the people who live and work in Coldfoot Alaska during the winters. His ability to draw caricatures of people is one evidence of his ability to write. Have you ever tried to describe people that you work with? Are they interesting enough to write about?
2. “Everyone else seemed to be decomposing,” Ilgunas says of people he works with. How are people in Coldfoot affected by the weather and climate where they live? How does where you live matter as much or more than what you do?
3. “My life was so monotonous, so goaless, so pathless. What was my purpose? To service truckers who worked for the oil industry?” p. 70 What does Ken’s estimation of his life in Alaska say about the relative importance of WHERE you are over WHAT you do?
4. Ilgunas says that he felt anger when he first saw the stars in Alaska. “It was as if I had just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like. . .. what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view?” What is the most amazing thing you have ever seen in nature? Why is experiencing such things valuable to human beings?
5. Why does Ilgunas say that people often WANT to have their freedom taken away?

Chapter Seven: Maintenance Worker

1. Thoreau made me feel like I’d been a sane man wrongly assigned to live in a madhouse.” (p. 78) Like Thoreau, Ilgunas discovered that he is better off when he is “doing without.” I wonder if you would agree with him or with Thoreau? Make reference to some passages from Thoreau’s Walden in your response.
2. Both Thoreau and Ilgunas like to calculate their accounts. What can be learned from the figures that they use to represent their personal economies. When you look at your own budget, how are you different or like them? What do these numbers say about you?
3. “James Suburban left me speechless. It was a mockery of conformity , an affront to conventional wisdom, a symbol of his complete lack of regard for the rules and norms and standards of our age.” Have you ever met someone who inspired you somehow?  How do you explain why different people inspire us in different ways?
4. How does Ilgunas deal with rejections letters (0 for 35 he says on page 86). How do you deal with rejection?

Chapter Eight: Hitchiker

1. What does Ilgunas mean when he says that he wants to “scissor-poke cowardice and reservation in the eyes” on page 96? And “It was time to find out for myself” on page 97? How does this compare to Thoreau’s passage in walden where he says that he wanted to “live deliberately”?

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

2. How does Ilgunas characterize the people he meets hitchhiking? What does he mean when he writes on page 104, “I walked a tightwire above a net of compassion, stretched out by the hands of strangers”? What do you think of his estimation of people’s character? Is it naïve or accurate or overly pessimistic? Have you ever questioned just how much an appropriate amount of trust one should have in strangers is.

Chapter Nine: Voyageur

1. “Life was good and simple” Ilgunas says of his experience as a voyageur. He finds himself “daily shedding the traces of his century.” Perhaps you have noticed that at every step of this book, the author is getting more adept at doing without. Is this a skill you should like to encourage in yourself? Or is it a coping mechanism for the lazy and undisciplined?
2. Ilgunas talks on page 116 about how the “coming of age” adventure has been abridged from a young person’s life experience, leaving no bridge, no moment of real freedom in between school and career.” What do you think would make a good post-highschool pre-college adventure?
3. At the end of this chapter, Ilgunas tells us about “standing up” for himself in a way he had never done before. Can you think of a similar experience in your life?

Chapter Ten: Corpmember

1. In this chapter Ken Ilgunas describes his relationships with the girls he meets in Mississippi as an Americorp worker. How does his description of falling in love with someone compare to your own experiences? How does Ilgunas explain himself to himself and does he seem to be as good at observing his internal self as he is at observing nature and character in other people?
2. The psychologist, Carl Jung suggests that what we look for in a romantic partner is often the part of ourselves that we are too repressed to let out. How might this be illustrated in Ken’s description of Sami? If we were to ask Sami to write about her attraction to Ken, what might she say?
3. How does Ken’s friend Josh’s experiences at Westwood College contribute to the theme of the book (p. 135) You might want to read pages 159=161 as well.

Chapter Eleven: Son

1. How does Ken respond to Sami’s news and what does that tell you about him at this point in his life?
2. How does Ken imagine parenting and how does the responsibility of parenting fit into that all-important “narrative” that he enjoys telling? Could this book have been written if Ken had become a parent at this point?
3. On page 142 AND 143, Ken Ilgunas explains why the relationship with sami is “unsustainable.” When relationships break up, there is usually an “initiator” and it is not unusual for them to begin laying the groundwork for their exit before informing their partner (as Ilgunas does here.” Does he seem like a noble person to you? Or does he come across as someone who “uses people”?
4. On page 145, Ken inventories his feelings about huis parents’ lives. This is often an important exercise in the individuation process as we figure out how we want our lives to be different. “I wanted to work but I wanted to be free” he says. To what extent are these two things mutually exclusive.
5. On page 149 and 150, Ilgunas tries to understand the allure of video games in the modern world. Would you agree or disagree with his observations?

Chapter Twelve: Ranger

1. “Let the intrepid few have wild places where they might be stunned by the extraordinary, and let the sedentary many have such places too. “ What is Ilgunas’ argument for making some National Parks inaccessible to any but the dedicated? Compare Ilgunas’ views of nature in the National life to the conservationist, John Muir. You can easily find a few of his writings online.
2. “Why did they hire me?” When Ken starts his job as a park ranger, he can’t believe he could be so fortunate. Why do you suspect he was hired given what you know about him thus far?
3. “Dwelling in me also was an unmotivated suburbanite, a lazy couch potato, a sometimes alcoholic, loser. If I put myself in a comfortable situation, my lesser self would take over …” (p. 162) Is this a criticism of most people’s lives? Does it seem arrogant or realistic in your experience.
4. “What had our relationship been? IT was about to fall to the ground in a cloud of dust like a demolished building. It was a young cottonwood about to be charred and splintered by an errant lightning bolt. It was a wild river doomed to be damned. … it wasn’t supposed to last forever. It was simply a means of getting from one point to another, of helping us get from our past selves to our future selves. And like the hitchhike, we’d take from it, learn from it, say goodbye to it, be the better for it and think back on it fondly. Devestated and completely unsure about what I was doing, I kissed her forehead and left the café.”  (p. 163)
   
   We can have a tendency to make a declaration about our experience of something as though our perception of it is the experience itself. One wonders reading this if Sami’s narrative and Kens would diverge about what is happening here. But it provides an opportunity to think about your own approach to ending relationships that you form in life. What advice from your experience would you have given to Ken Ilgunas at this point in his story?

Chapter Thirteen: Package Handler

1. Ken begins this chapter talking about his friend Josh’s job at Westwood College. When we take jobs, we generally have some impact on them. But they also have an impact on us. What impact does your job have on you?
2. “If I didn’t do it now, I might never,” Ken says of applying to graduate school after he pays off his debt. What do you think of doing when you think like that?
3. On page 171, Ilgunas prepares for an interview. What can you learn from him about the achievement of goals? This can include more ideas than simply his approach to college interviews?
4. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of attempting to graduate from college or graduate schools debt free?

Chapter Fourteen:  Purchase

1. “When you have got nothing, I guess you have got nothing to lose.” Time for a reality check. Ken Ilgunas has just paid off his debt with money that he made from the American Park Service – money that the park service has solely because millions of people are working and paying in taxes to the National Treasury. He lives without health insurance and soon, the new President will be driving a health care reform process that has, as a central tenant the idea that young people like Ken must be forced to pay a fine if they do not provide for their own insurance. His decision to live in a van will mean that he will not be contributing property taxes for the local school system. His hot water and electricity will be funded by other students at Duke. Is he being admirably frugal here or is here merely externalizing his costs to others? Feel free to take a position.

Chapter Fifteen: Renovation

1. Vandwelling is an entire lifestyle choice as we will soon learn. Does it appeal to you? Why or why not?
2. Ken Ilgunas explains why he decides to become a van dweller on page 191. It reminds one very much of Thoreau’s explanation for why he lived in a cabin by Walden (thus the title of the book). Does his defense of his lifestyle strike you as compelling? Or is there something about the insecurity of it all (as he describes in the introduction) that more than offsets the benefits?
3. “While I had hoped to sneak my way around college tuition,” Ilgunas says on page 192, “ I’d met warty mustachioed border patrolmen on all the conventional roads to an affordable education.” What alternative routes to affordable education have you tried and thought about trying?
4. Have you ever created a detailed budget like Ken does on page 199? How might it help you?

Chapter Sixteen: Acclimatization

1. “In order to graduate debt free, I’d have to lie. There was no way around it.” This is as good a place as any to talk about Ethics. What is your take on Ilgunas’ argument here. How might his logic be applied by others in different ways and this an argument against doing what he is doing? Or understandable. (Note for instance how he feels about Westwood College lying to potential students for money.)
2. “I preferred to remain useless at everything” Ilgunas says of his decision to pursue a liberal arts degree on page 211. “I didn’t want a ‘marketable skill – I could learn one later if I wished.” For Ilgunas “figuring stuff out,” is a priority. What are the best and worst arguments for taking liberal arts programs and classes so far as you can imagine them?

Chapter Seventeen: Adaptation

1. I am a member of the “careerless generation,” Ilgunas says on page 221, “the screwed generation.” “We are the first generation in a while who will less well-off and less well off than their parents.” Is this your estimation of the situation and if so, how do you explain it and feel about it?
2. Ilgunas turns down his mother’s offer to send him money on page 222. Why? What is your estimate of his decision? Would you turn down parental help if you had it?
3. Ilgunas concludes the chapter by saying that he was only one accident or injury away from bankruptcy. These ar typically the sorts of people that predatory lenders look for because such people must charge at high interest rates when emergencies happen. Ken Ilgunas mentions that his mother tried to convince him to put some of his debt payment into savings. Debate the wisdom of her advise. Does Ken’s approach only work because he is fortunate enough not to have an accident or illness?

Chapter Eighteen: My First Guest

1. On page 236, Ilgunas addresses the issue of loneliness (something he had to live with in exchange for his frugal lifestyle and obsession with freedom). “I found that Icould not due without people the way that I could ddo without luxuries” he writes. Has he made assumptions about himself that have not turned out to be so? And if so, what does he do about it?
2. “I met students everywhere,” Ilgunas says on page 241, “who had devoted half their twenties to something they had little passion for. Eventually, they would be hyperspecialized and would only be qualified for work that didn’t at all fit their true interests or character.” Is this something likely to happen to you and if so, it as bad for your life as Ilgunas suggests? He defines smart as knowing and being willing to follow your passions. What is your estimate of that determiner of intelligence?
3. Thorough made a habit of critiquing the lives of farmers in Concord. Ilgunas begins to criticize the career choices of some of his fellow students at Duke. He sees them as “squandering their lives.” Is this fair? Explain.

Chapter Nineteen: Solitude

1. Loneliness, no doubt caused anquish,” Ilgunas writes, “but over time, solitude gave me something I never would have expected: a culture of my own.” “Why should I listen to society? Society was insane.” What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a culture of your own?

Chapter Twenty: Ranger

1. “I was happy to have suffered. I was happy to have been miserable. I was happy to have been alone. And I knew that I would soon be happy to have been scared half to death by that bear.” “Comedy is tragedy plus distance” someone has said. What is the process by which you turn your suffering into happiness?
2. Ilgunas insists that “you have to become you.” That there is no happiness outside doing so. What does that advice mean to you?

Chapter Twenty-One: Pilgrim

1. Ilgunas tells us that he eventually decided to make his van experiment public in an article in Salon magazine (a contact provided him by one of his teachers). You can find his article here:
   
   http://www.salon.com/2009/12/07/living_in_a_van/
   
   What would you write an article about if you had the chance?
2. On page 281 of the book, Ilgunas begins to self-reflect on his obsession with frugality and independence. Is he, in your opinion learning to compromise and is this a good thing?

Chapter Twenty-Two: Graduate

1. “James Joyce said, ‘When the soul of man is born, there are nets thrown at it to hold it back from flight.’” What are some of the nets that have been thrown at you?
2. Why does Ilgunas say that he leaves Duke feeling wealthy even though he is almost twenty five and has almost no savings, no possessions, no assets, and no job?
3. “Go for it.” What would “it” be for you?

“As you from crimes would pardoned be Let your indulgence set me free.”

The Tempest REVIEW

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a play that I arrived late to. Not literally. I simply have only read it recently and I saw it for the first time at Middlebury college’s Bread Loaf (Thanks to my dear friend, Hilary who got me tickets).

The theme of the play seems to revolve around the subject of power and freedom. All of the characters seem to illustrate just how addictive the ability to use coercive power to control others can be and just how much humans dislike having coercive power used on them. The play demonstrates the lengths that humans will go to get power and the lengths that they will go to obtain freedom when they are exploited by powerful people. The play is full of contentious master-slave relationships.

The main character, Prospero, was the Duke of Milan. But he handed over all the responsibilities of his position to his brother so that he could pursue his studies in the magical arts. It becomes clear that Prospero was interested in obtaining even more power than his political title gave him. He wanted some sort of cultish power as well. He is deeply bitter about his brother taking that political power from him (as though anyone would actually want the responsibilities of such a position without the advantages of it!).

Prospero’s brother, Antonio demonstrates how much power means to him when he strikes a deal with Alonzo, the King of Naples. In exchange for Alonzo’s help evicting Prospero and Prospero’s three-year-old daughter, Miranda from the city, Antonio is willing to have Milan pay tribute to Naples. In short, he makes himself a servant in order to be a master. Later in the play, he tells Sebastian that his “brothers’ servants were once his fellows” but “now they are my men.” Clearly, he relishes the change.

There is also a clear master-slave relationship between Prospero and the inhabitants of the island to which he and Miranda are shipwrecked. When Prospero arrives, he finds the island inhabited by Caliban, the deformed son of the witch who used to dominate the Island. Prospero offers to be a patron of Caliban for some time, teaching Caliban language in return for Caliban’s intimate knowledge of the island. But then Prospero reduces Caliban to a slave, making him haul wood and other such menial tasks. Prospero’s ability to use his dark art magic to inflict pain and suffering on Caliban for any scintilla of disobedience reveals just what a tyrant Prospero is (and may always have been) when he is disposed to be.

Prospero also retains a heavy-handed control over the sprite, Ariel. Ariel had been a servant of the witch, Sycorax. When Ariel refused to do Sycorax’s evil bidding, Sycorax put Ariel in an oak tree and inflicted suffering on her there for twelve years. Caliban frees her when the witch dies and constantly reminds Ariel that she must needs serve him as a result. Prospero has the ability to put her back in the tree for another twelve years and reminds her constantly that he will do so if she does not follow his every command. But unlike his relationship with Caliban, Prospero promises that he will reward Ariel for her service by liberating her someday when he no longer needs her services. Interestingly, later in the play, Caliban reveals that all the beings on the island who must abide by Prospero’s tyranny secretly “hate him.” We much include Ariel in that group I suppose.

There are other characters in the play who also demonstrate just how tempting power is to humans and how distasteful it is to them to be placed in subservience to others. King Alonzo’s brother, Sebastian, at one point in time in the play is on the verge of murdering his own brother in order to obtain his brother’s throne. Antonio, the usurping brother of Prospero encourages Sebastian to commit the murder, seeking to liberate himself from the fealty he promised to Alonzo as a means of acquiring Milan in the first place.   

The play opens with a scene on a ship in the middle of a storm that Prospero has sent to shipwreck his enemies and even on the ship, one senses the tension between the sailors and the aristocrats they carry on board. The aristocrats resent any hint of insurrection or disrespect exhibited by the crew of plebians and the sailors resent the interference of the meddling aristocrats trying to tell them how to handle the boat. The whole play revolves around the bitterness and resentment created when humans are made to serve other humans by means of coercive power. Coercive power is something we seem to love when we have it at our disposal and can weaponize it against those below us and yet, the same coercive power is something we hate when those in the hierarchy above us use it on us.

Characters seethe with resentments. Prospero calls his brother “the ivy which had sucked my verdure out.” Prospero will, from time to time, simply use his magic to make people do what he wants. At one point, he nonchalantly puts his teenage daughter, Miranda to sleep when he wants to talk to Ariel  privately, saying to Miranda, “I know you cannot choose.” Ariel, who we later come to understand, deeply resents her loss of freedom, still refers to Prospero as “great master” and “grave sir.” “I come to answer thy best pleasure,” she says to him, “to swim, to dive into the fire ….” One suspects that she is obsequious on the surface, but seething on the inside. Prospero responds to any hint of complaint on the part of Ariel with a dismissive “How now, moody!” and asks her if she would like to be returned to her tree.

[The more we see of Prospero’s use of his magical powers, the better we understand why it might have been that Antonio wanted to be rid of him].

Prospero treats Caliban even worse than he treats Miranda and Ariel. He describes Caliban as a “freckled whelp” and “hag-born, not honored with a human shape . . . got by the devil himself.” “A dull thing whom I now keep in service” he says of Caliban. Prospero threatens him with bee and sea urchin stings and cramps if he so much as expresses an iota of resistance. Prospero refers to Caliban as “the most lying slave whom stripes may move, not kindness.” Later he calls Caliban his “abhorred slave which any print of goodness will not take.” “Thy vile race,” he says to Caliban, “had that in it which good natures could not abide to be with …”

And as Prospero’s tyranny over Caliban is the most severe and absolute of all tyrannies in the play, Caliban’s rage is the most virulent and destructive. We get the sense that the use of coercive power will always instill resentment reciprocal to the coerciveness. What is interesting is that Prospero cannot see the relationship between his resentment towards his brother’s theft of Milan, and Caliban’s resentment of Prospero’s theft of the island. Having power to inflict subservience, Prospero has no need for the kind of reflection that might provide him insight into Caliban’s actual nature. His daughter has the capacity for empathy, but he does not.

“Among the oppressed, are many who would like to oppress,” Napoleon once said.

 All of this sounds pretty bleak, but there is a ray of hope for humanity to be found on this enchanted island as well. Three of the characters serve as counterweights to the general theme of the corruptive influence of power on the human psyche.

The first of the three characters who remains immune from the love of power is Gonzalo, an honest old counselor to Prospero who helped to save his life when Antonio conspired to be rid of his brother. Gonzalo is a bit of a hippie and something of a John Lennon among all the wretched power-besotted aristocrats. Gonzalo has a cheery disposition and betrays a “60’s-like” optimism about life. You might say that he looks at the world through rose-colored glasses. As he surveys the island, he thinks about what a utopia it might be if we all “imagined” a world without power and control. “A new golden age” he calls it.

I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things.
For no kind of traffic
Would I admit. No name of magistrate.
Letters should not be known.
Riches, poverty, And use of service—none.
Contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard—none.
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil.
No occupation. All men idle, all.
And women too, but innocent and pure.
No sovereignty—

Translated into modern English this sounds like this:

“In my commonwealth I’d do everything in the opposite way from what's normal. I wouldn’t allow any business. There would be no judges. There would be no school or learning. No riches, poverty, or servants. None of that. No contracts, inheritance, privately owned land, farming, or vineyards. None of that. There’d be no metal-work, no grinding of corn, no wine-making, or making of olive oil. There'd be no work. Men would do nothing at all. Women too, except those things that are innocent and pure. There’d be no kingship—"

“The later end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning,” says Antonio sarcastically in response at this juncture in Gonzalo’s pontificating. “Long live Gonzalo!”

To Gonzalo, all exercises of power involving one human being given coercive power over another are corrosive and destructive to human happiness.

The last two characters that must be considered in this analysis of the play and power are Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, and Alonzo’s son, Ferdinand. These two love-struck teenagers demonstrate how powerful love is in counteracting the alure of power. For, as we observe Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love, we see two people whose current is running in the opposite direction. Their love actually turns them into each other’s servants and makes them delighted to be so. “The mistress I serve … makes my labors pleasures,” Ferdinand says when Prospero makes him haul wood like he has Caliban for so many years. And Miranda, so in love and so capable of empathy, offers to carry the wood for him. Ferdinand refuses. He will have none of it, having no wish to be served by her. “The very instant I saw you, did my heart fly to your service,” he tells her, and “there resides to make me a slave to it and for your sake am I this patient log-man.”

Miranda reciprocates, offering to marry him and even if he refuses, she says, “I’ll be your servant whether you will or no.”

“I’ll be your husband,” Ferdinand responds, “as the enslaved ever wished for liberty” [modern translation]. In other words, he suggests that when you are in love, you actually want to serve the other person with the same intensity that you do not want to serve the person who applies coercive power to you.

It may well be that watching Ferdinand and Miranda’s teenage love affair is what brings Prospero back to his senses. For as the play concludes, he is ready to bury his magic books, dispose of his magic cape, foreswear all his use of magic spells, and release all of his subjects -  his brother Antonio, the king of Naples, Ariel and even Caliban himself. At the very end, he sets the powerful Ariel at liberty, and gives Caliban back his island. And then, in the last couplet of the play, Prospero asks the audience to “set him free.”

“As you from crimes would pardoned be
Let your indulgence set me free.”

For no one wants to live out their lives as some extension of another’s will and power.

One last note with respect to the theme of power. Shakespeare also has something to say about the relationship between power and empathy. The play demonstrates the danger of combining power with emotional callousness. One might contrast Miranda’s empathy with the lack of empathy we see in Prospero and Antonio. When the play begins, Miranda stands on some cliff looking at the shipwreck and feels herself shipwrecked to see it. She pleads with her father to relent if he is the cause of the storm. “Oh, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer!” she says. Their cries, “did knock against my heart!”

“Poor souls, they perished. Had I been any god of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth …”

 Prospero’s response betrays a chilly Stoicism. “Tell your piteous heart there’s no harm done.”

Later in the play, Sebastian asks Antonio if he feels any guilt about supplanting his brother in such a nefarious way. “You did supplant your brother Prospero,” Sebastian queries.

“And look how well my garments sit upon me,” replies Antonio. “Much feater than before.” “I feel not this deity in my bosom,” he adds, speaking of his non-existent guilt. “Twenty consciences that stand twixt me and Milan, candied be they and melt ere they molest!”

Thus does Shakespeare draw our attention to just how dangerous power can be when divorced from compassion. It may well be that Prospero’s decision at the end of the play to divest himself of power and to make room for compassion is crucial to Shakespeare's message. Towards the end of the play, Prospero’s charms have all worked to dreadful effect and all of his former enemies have been practically driven mad. Ariel informs Prospero of their wretchedness.

They cannot budge till your release. The King,
His brother, and yours abide all three distracted,
And the remainder mourning over them,
Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly
Him that you termed, sir, the good old Lord Gonzalo.
His tears runs down his beard like winter’s drops
From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works ’em
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.

Prospero replies, “Dost thou think so, spirit?” to which Ariel continues.

“Mine would, sir, were I human.”

This proves to be a pivotal moment for Prospero realizes just how little room there has been for empathy in his life.

“And mine shall,” he tells Ariel.

“Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part.”

Prospero seems to recognize that this sacrifice will involve some period of pain and withdrawal. It is as though his relationship with power has become an addiction to him. He speaks of retiring to Milan where “every third thought shall be my grave.” His surrender of power will not be easy. “Release me from my bands,” he says in a tremendous use of irony. The great and mighty Prospero – so capable of incarcerating and subduing Ariel, Caliban, and his enemies has, by his very use of power, incarcerated himself and must himself plea for deliverance.

Question for Comment: What is your relationship to power when you have it over others or when others have it over you? How do power and love co-exist in your relationships? Or can they? What do you think of Gonzalo’s utopian society – free of all sovereignty? Would we be happier living in such a place? Why or why not?

"I won’t defend it, not being an imbecile!”

In the First Circle REVIEW

“War gives stupidity legitimate power over intelligence.” 

“In the literature they studied, the world was full of everything but what you saw with your own eyes all around you.” 

“But the charge brought against a man and his actual offense did not necessarily coincide; if he was towheaded, you could accuse him of blackheadedness—and give him just as long a sentence.” 

“There, under the bedboards in the Butyrki Prison, the robot for the first time in his life began to wonder—which, as everybody knows, is bad for robots.” 

“He had confessed—so obviously he was guilty! The summa summarum of Stalinist justice!”  

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel explores just what effect an unrestrained and unrestrainable  totalitarian government can do to the humanity of millions of people, one individual person at a time. For this reason, it can be a difficult novel to follow, for it endeavors to trace the lines of totalitarianism’s impact upon dozens of different lives. We are given a glimpse into the damage done to the lives those on the top of the system, those managing the system, those coopted by the system, and those being exploited or abused by the system. No one goes unscathed. As a keen observer who lived through the catastrophe of Stalinism, Solzhenitsyn’s “dark gift” is his ability to expose that system and its destructiveness in minute detail and in a white-hot light, not only as a disaster for an entire community collectively, but as a disaster for each soul subjected to it personally. Totalitarianism destroyed people in very unique and personal ways.  

In Solzhenitsyn’s short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he provides access into the lives of political prisoners in one of Stalin’s many Siberian gulags. In the First Circle, the same author focuses his gaze on Stalin’s sharashkas, places where highly capable engineers and men and women of talent were sentenced to go and work for no wages on projects of interest to the totalitarian regime. In this particular case, prisoner-engineers are working on ways to increase Stalin’s ability to spy on and imprison Soviet citizens. The title, In the First Circle, is a reference to the outer circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno – the place where Dante Alegre relegated ancient and noble, but unbaptized, philosophers and humanists.

“Maybe I’m dreaming? I feel as though I am in heaven!” says one of the prisoners in The First Circle, comparing the sharashka to the harsher conditions of the gulags.  “No, my dear sir, you are still in hell,” his colleague responds, 

“Only you’ve ascended to its highest and best circle—the first. You were asking what a sharashka is. You could say it was invented by Dante. He was at his wits’ end as to where to put the ancient sages. It was his Christian duty to consign those heathens to hell. But a Renaissance conscience couldn’t reconcile itself to lumping those luminaries in with the rest of the sinners and condemning them to physical torment. So, Dante imagined a special place for them in hell.” 

What becomes clear from the many different biographical stories embedded in this novel is that whatever the quest for some cosmic justice that Karl Marx had hatched with his Communist Manifesto, it had been transformed into a soul destroying anti-humanistic juggernaut of injustice by the time Stalin had co-opted it. What one can learn from the whole debacle is that it may always be a mistake to give a government totalitarian power simply because *they say* they will make your world perfect if you do. Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his indictment. “Professors get forty grams of the best butter, engineers twenty,” one of his characters says, “From each according to his ability, to each according to what is available.”

We can start at the very top. In one of his chapters, Solzhenitsyn brings us right into the world of comrade Stalin himself. Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of Stalin are full of an acerbic wit detailing the cult of personality that Stalin built in the guise of social justice. “This man’s name burned on the parched lips of prisoners of war and the swollen gums of convicts,” Solzhenitsyn writes,

“It had replaced the previous names of a multitude of cities and squares, streets and avenues, palaces, universities, schools, sanatoriums, mountain ranges, ship canals, factories, mines, state farms, collective farms, warships, icebreakers, fishing boats, cooperative cobblers’ shops, nurseries—and a group of Moscow journalists had even suggested renaming the Volga and the moon after him.”

Solzhenitsyn lays the wood to the monstrosity of ego that was Joseph Stalin:  

“His infallible knowledge of men had enabled the celebrant to collect a good team of authors for his biography. But however thorough they are, however they slave at it, no one else can write about your deeds, your leadership, your qualities as cleverly, with as much feeling, and as truthfully as you can yourself. So, Stalin sometimes had to summon this or that member of the team for a leisurely talk in order to inspect their manuscript, gently indicating where they had gone wrong and suggesting improvements in the wording. As a result, the book was now a great success. This second edition had come out in five million copies. For such a huge country? Not nearly enough. The third edition must be boosted to ten million, or twenty. It must be on sale in factories, schools, collective farms. It should be distributed to them directly, according to the number of employees.”  

“Nobody knew as well as Stalin did how much his people needed this book. His people could not be left without continual instruction and edification. His people must not be kept in uncertainty. The Revolution had left them orphaned and godless, and that was dangerous. Stalin had spent twenty years doing his best to correct that situation. This explained the millions of portraits throughout the country (it was not Stalin himself who needed them; he was modest), the constant thunderous repetition of his glorious name, the unfailing mention of him in every article. The Leader himself had absolutely no need of all this; it no longer gave him any pleasure; he had grown sick of it long ago; it was his subjects who needed it, the simple Soviet people. As many portraits, as many repetitions of his name as possible. But he himself must appear seldom and say little …” 

We can imagine Stalin building his own “Truth Social” or creating a “Disinformation Board” to protect his image. Earlier in the book, Solzhenitsyn writes of the portraits of Stalin that would be found in offices all over the Soviet Union.

“Even in the offices of simple investigators he was portrayed much larger than life, and in Abakumov’s office, the Leader of Mankind had been painted by a member of the school of Kremlin realists on a canvas five meters high, full length from his shoes to his marshal’s cap, ablaze with all his decorations, which in real life he never wore, most of them conferred on himself by himself …”

Listen to Solzhenitsyn’s indictment of Stalin as a prototype of personality cults before and since.  

“It is rightly said that we reach maturity at forty. Only then do we finally understand how to live and how to behave. Only then did Stalin become aware of his greatest strength: the power of the unspoken verdict. Your mind is made up, but the person whose head depends on your decision must not learn it too soon. Time enough for that when his head rolls! Another strength was his habit of disbelieving what others said and attaching no importance to his own words. Say not what you mean to do (you may not know it until the moment comes) but what puts the other person at ease. A third rule for the strong man is never to forgive anyone who betrays you, and if your teeth are in someone’s throat, never to let go, though the sun rises in the west and portents appear in the heavens. A fourth rule for the strong man is not to rely on theory. Theory never helped anyone; you can always produce some sort of theoretical justification after the event. What you must always keep in mind is what fellow traveler you need for the present and at which milestone you must part company.”

And this:  

“What made Stalin terrifying was that any slip in dealing with him was like mishandling a detonator: You would do it only once in your life; there was no chance to correct it. What made Stalin terrifying was that he never listened to excuses; he did not even make accusations. One end of his mustache twitched slightly, and sentence was passed somewhere inside there, but the condemned man was not informed of it; he went peacefully on his way, was arrested that night and shot before morning.”

Everything that happens to the lives of the dozens of people in the novel (and the millions of people that those people represent) is a consequence of this decision to elevate this single person to a position of unregulated authority. Trickledown misery. Why do human beings continue to think that authoritarianism will ever wind up working out any differently? In The First Circle, a step below Stalin in the chain of command is the character Abakumov. Once a month, he is required to report to Stalin about issues of state security. Despite his power and status and its attendant benefits, Abukumov lives in abject fear, constantly kicking himself for having risen so high that every benefit he enjoys is granted him at the price an equivalent terror.  

“But once a month the Autocrat [Stalin] liked to sample in the flesh the man to whom he entrusted the defense of the world’s most advanced social order. Those interviews, an hour at a time, were the heavy price which Abakumov paid for all his power, all his high-and-mightiness. He lived, he enjoyed life, only from one interview to the next. When the appointed time came, his heart died within him; his ears turned to ice; he handed over his briefcase not knowing whether he would ever get it back; he bowed his bull head at Stalin’s office door, uncertain whether he would be able to raise it in an hour’s time." 

A step below Abakumov is the character Innokenty Velodin, a Soviet diplomat who lives with all the benefits of his lofty position but who therefore lives in a constant state of moral crisis. Having access to the world outside of Stalin’s web of propaganda, Innokenty becomes painfully aware of how this empire he represents is an empire of lies and injustice. The novel begins as he struggles over a simple moral question: Should he tell the Americans that their nuclear secrets are about to be handed over by American spies to Stalin? Does he have a moral obligation to, as the German dissident, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, stop “bandaging the wounds of those ground under the wheels of injustice,” and “drive a spoke into the wheel itself”?  

Several characters in the novel come to moments of enlightenment where they realize that they have been conscripted into a cult of injustice. Innokenty is one of them. His “come to Jesus” moment is initiated by reading old letters written by his own mother.

 “He almost forgot that he was reading and seemed to hear clearly his mother’s frail voice. “What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”

 Solzhenitsyn documents what it is like to stop being a sheep and start being a human when describing the conversion of people like Innokenty Velodin. “The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life,” we are told,  

“Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.” 

Conscience, it appears, will almost always be the first casualty of accepting totalitarianism.

One of the novel’s characters that evokes the most pathos is the political prisoner, Lev Rubin. Rubin is a rather pathetic case because, in spite of the fact that he has been unjustly incarcerated in this sharashka  - and forced to work for nothing, he continues to believe that his status as a prisoner is a mere unintended and unfortunate accident. He still believes in the justice of the communist cause and makes it his mission to “convert” skeptics among the prisoners he works alongside. His idealism results in his obtuse blindness to what is actually going on in his own life and in the lives of his peers.

“As usual, they asked Rubin for the latest news. But he would have felt awkward offering a review of the past month. He could not let himself become a neutral purveyor of information, could not give up hope of reeducating these people. All he could do was to select for them, as he did for History (and, without realizing it, for himself), only those current events that confirmed that the high road had been accurately predicted, ignoring those that seemed likely to divert it into a quagmire.” 

Truth and self-awareness, like conscience, are also the first casualties of totalitarianism. Rubin is always ready to defend the system that has been so unjust to him. “And anyway, you aren’t fair to the Bolsheviks,” he says in one political argument,  

“You’ve never taken the trouble to read their most important books. They show the greatest respect and concern for world culture. They stand for an end to the tyranny of man over man, for the empire of reason. Above all, they are for equality! Imagine it: universal, total, absolute equality. No one will be more privileged than anyone else. No one will enjoy special advantages, either in income or in position. What could be more attractive than a society like that? Isn’t it worth making sacrifices for?” 

Rubin judges the communists by what they say they will do; not by what they actually do. Rubin is that epitome of humans – the man who cannot see what is right in front of him because of the ideology that lays between his eyes and his critical faculties. Rubin is a true communist, a man who believes that he will write a document that outlines a plan for creating a moral foundation under this government – a government that is so obviously founded upon a complete and utter contempt for morality altogether. Solzhenitsyn provides a window into the idealism of the naïve Rubin in the following paragraph by letting us into Rubin’s thought processes.

“Yes, the foundations of morality had been sapped, and people, especially the younger generation, were losing their feel for what was right and noble. Societies, like fish, go rotten from the head. Who was there to set an example for the young? In older societies, people knew that a moral code needs safeguards: a church and a priest with authority. What Polish peasant woman even now takes any serious step in life without consulting her parish priest? As things were, the preservation of moral standards was perhaps much more important to the land of the Soviets than the Volga-Don Canal or the Angara Hydroelectric Station. What could be done about it? His ‘Proposal for the Establishment of Civic Places of Worship,’ already completed in first draft, was Rubin’s contribution.”

 The only “civic places of worship” that would have stood a chance of governmental support in Stalinist Russia would have had a portrait of Stalin over the alter. But Rubin cannot see that. Nerzhin both pitties and respects him.  Gleb Nerzhin is another character (modelled on Solzhenitsyn himself) a mathematician who has been put into the sharashka for actually seeing what Rubin is in denial about. Solzhenitsyn supplies us with this bit of background.  

“Nerzhin was one of us, a Soviet man, only he had spent his whole youth poring over books, reading himself silly, and had got it into his muddled head that Stalin had distorted Leninism. No sooner had Nerzhin recorded this conclusion on a scrap of paper than he was arrested.” 

Nerzhin is a man who, like millions of others, had fought in a patriotic war for his country against a Nazi government that threatened its existence. As a reward for being captured and then repatriated, he was prosecuted for being a German spy and sent to work in the camps. Solzhenitsyn observes that the Stalinists state had thus used the pretext of “defending the communist state” and the pursuit of some Quixotic cosmic justice to create a class of people who did the work for nothing and another class of people who did nothing for work but watch the imprisoned workers. Stalin did something thought impossible. He brought slavery back to a world that thought such a thing was banished. “Strictly speaking he was not capable of work but only of management,” the author describes one apparatchik.  

“In accordance with the Constitution, free personnel had a great variety of rights, among them the right to work. This right, however, was limited by the eight-hour day and by the fact that their labor created no added value, consisting solely in watching prisoners. Whereas the prisoners, though deprived of all other rights, had an ampler right to work—up to twelve hours a day.”  

In Stalinist Russia, Nerzhin notes, compliance is a virtue while competence is often a handicap (if it is expressed without compliance). “His whole career had worked out in such a way that thinking had always brought setbacks,” we read of the earlier mentioned bureaucrat, Abukumov, who realizes that “zealous subordination had always brought gain.” “Abakumov,” the novel records, “therefore tried to avoid mental exertion as far as possible.” “Russia, taking off for the first time toward a freedom never before seen,” Solzhenitsyn asserts, “immediately came to an abrupt stop and plunged into the worst of tyrannies. No one has ever managed it at the first attempt.” This is a society where people at the top can kill you for telling them the truth or for lying to them and so you tell the truth or tell lies based on which grants more prospective survival value to you in that very moment. Nadya, Nerzhin’s wife is used as a representative of what a system based on constant lies and lying does to people.   

“She [Nadya] used to be so cheerful! But five years of lying leaves its mark. Five years of continually wearing a mask that cramps and pinches your face, hardens your voice, and numbs your thought.” 

Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his warnings to the West through this novel. His is a rather conservative perspective crying like a voice in the wilderness, “Do not ignore what the framers of your Constitution knew about humans and power.” “There are no unexplored countries on the planet Philosophy,” his character Nerzhin says, “I turn the pages of the wise men of old, and I find my own most recent thoughts.” “Once the bell stops ringing, once the tuneful sounds fade, you can never call them back,” one of the characters says of Stalin’s destruction of the Orthodox church, “But all the music is in them. Do you understand?”  Solzhenitsyn insists that in a totalitarian state, there will always be people worse off and better off than you but neither group will be free. One gets inequality in human society. Period. Full stop. The question is, “will it be inequality with or without freedom?” Those are the only two choices. The best that the system of sharashkas offered these thousands of people of merit was a temporary reprieve from frostbite, hunger, and deprivation. Toward the end of the novel, as the investigation into Innokenty’s betrayal narrows down the potential sources, Stalin’s “justice department” expresses its utter disregard for justice.  “Arrest every one of the bastards,” the man in charge of the investigation says of the half dozen possible suspects, “Why beat your brains out over it? What are seven people? Ours is a big country; we won’t run out of population!” And on the outskirts of Moscow, a prison enslaves some of the most brilliant of Russian engineers and mathematicians and innovators giving them almost nothing besides an impoverished existence separated from their families as a reward.  

“Suburban Muscovites or strollers in Ostankino Park could have no idea how many remarkable lives, thwarted ambitions, aborted passions . . . and secrets of state were crammed together in a red-hot, smoldering mass in that isolated old building on the edge of town.” 

Having fulfilled their purpose, the engineers that have provided the tools for Stalin’s police state to apprehend even more dissenters, the prisoners of the sharashka, are shipped off to Siberia in food trucks that reporters from the West do not realize are actually prison transports. While “the news anchor’s histrionic voice boomed out from loudspeakers, . . . Gleb’s fellow citizens huddled together on the pavement like trusting sheep” Solzhenitsyn writes of what happened to him and his country. But, Lev Rubin insists that the totalitarianism that so ruthlessly oppresses everyone is only a temporary thing and not the thing itself.  

“Look, my friend,” said Rubin more gently, “look at it in historical perspective.”
“To hell with your perspective!” says Nerzhin,

“I want to live now, not ‘in the long term’! I know what you’re going to say! It’s just a matter of bureaucratic distortions; this is a transitional period, a temporary state of-affairs—but this transitional order of yours makes my life impossible; it tramples my soul underfoot; that’s what your transitional system does, and I won’t defend it, not being an imbecile!” 

At one point in time, a debate erupts between the prisoners about the sacrifices that they are all making. On one side are the idealists led by Lev Rubin. On the other side are the realists led by Gleb Nerzhin and a prisoner by the name of Sologdin. The argument centers on whether or not the whole idea of equality is a chimera and a ruse, justifying an inequality greater than nature itself allows for. Here is what that debate sounds like:  

“Nerzhin defended himself. “Don’t blame me, friends! Look, when I was growing up there were red banners flapping overhead, with ‘Equality’ in golden letters! ‘Equality.’ Since when, of course—”“Oh no, not equality again!” Sologdin growled.“What have you got against equality?” Abramson looked indignant.“Nothing, except that it doesn’t exist in the natural world! People are not ‘born equal’; that’s a myth invented by those idiots . . . those . . . those know-italls” (you had to guess that he meant the Encyclopedists). “They had not the least understanding of heredity. People are born unequal spiritually, unequal in willpower, unequal in ability.”“Unequal in possessions, unequal in social status.” Abramson took up the tale, mimicking Sologdin. “Well, where did you ever see equality of possessions? Where did you ever manage to create it?” Sologdin was getting heated. “There never was such a thing, and there never will be! It’s unattainable except by beggars and saints!” 

Lev Rubin tries to get Nerzhin to surrender his skepticism. Nerzhin tries to get Lev Rubin to surrender his idealism.  

“’When you enter the classless society, your hatred will still prevent you from recognizing it.’ Rubin challenges. “But right now—is it classless now?” Nerzhin responds angrily. ‘Give me a straight answer just this once! Just for once, don’t dodge the question. Is there or is there not a new class, a ruling class?’How difficult Rubin found it to answer that very question! He could see for himself that there was such a class. And that if it entrenched itself, it would deprive the Revolution of all sense and meaning. But no shadow of weakness, no hint of uncertainty, troubled the lofty brow of this true believer.‘It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that this is a transitional bureaucratic group, and that as the state withers away—' Rubin interjects.‘Wither away?’ Sologdin yelled. ‘Those people? Voluntarily? They won’t go away till they’re slung out by the scruffs of their necks!’” 

Solzhenitsyn seeks to ring alarm bells with this novel. To awaken people from whatever dull stupor has caused them to hand their brains over to the will of people like Stalin. His voice, spoken below in the experience of Innokenty Volodon is the voice of Socrates, of Martin Luther, of Immanuel Kant, of Frederick Douglas, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King and a small host of prophets throughout history who have said to us, “Buy the truth and sell it not” (Proverbs 23:23)  

“He found, though, that even reading was a special skill, not just a matter of running your eyes along the lines. He discovered that he was a savage, reared in the caves of social science, clad in the skins of class warfare. His whole education had trained him to take certain books on trust and reject others unread. From boyhood he had been sheltered from erroneous books and had read only those that were warranted sound, so that he had got into the habit of believing every word, of submitting without question to the author’s will. When he began to read authors who contradicted one another, his resistance was low, and he could not help surrendering to whichever of them he had read last. What he found most difficult of all was to lay down his book and think for himself.” 

“All that was left to him, Nerzhin decided, was to be himself,” Solzhenitsyn tells us of his own journey (through the character of Nerzhin) to a life of dissent and eventually exile. And in so doing, he tells us exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson told Americans 200 years ago in his essay, Self Reliance..  

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” 

There is much more to be gleaned from this novel than has been represented above. It took over 30 hours to listen to it. There were many more characters whose lives are used as a foil for examining totalitarian government. There is a line in the novel where Solzhenitsyn observes that real people living real lives are always more complicated than fictional people in novels. It may well be that the complexity of this novel’s character arcs, while prohibitive to most readers, is essential to his point in the end. There is great danger in trying to over-simplify life, to reduce it to absolute black and white so as to be understood completely by the lazy. “All questions having to do with society are answered by analysis of the class situation,” the characters in this novel had been educated to believe. They would have been taught that everything works in a dialectic. There are exploiters and the exploited. Nothing between. What I call “the prison of two alternatives.”  

“In Lenin’s time, if you’d said, ‘Who is not with us is not necessarily against us,’ or something of that sort, you would have been expelled from the Party that very minute. Well . . . that was the Dialectic for you.” 

Totalitarianism thrives on the criminalization of nuance. There is a reason why the framers of the American Constitution made freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly the cornerstone of American rights. And there is a reason we should protect it as though our lives depended on it for as Solzhenitsyn asks in the novel, “If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?”

 Question for Comment: Is the offer of a perfect world in exchange for a life without or with less freedom ever to be trusted? Or is the defense of freedom simply a rationalization for a desire to freely exploit others with impunity?

The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan

The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan

William Jennings Bryan was a three-time candidate for the President of the United States who never won. In 1896 and in 1900, he was defeated by William McKinley. In 1908, he was defeated by Theodore Roosevelt’s former vice President, Howard Taft. He later served as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State.

Bryan was often referred to as “The Great Commoner” and pursued politics with a expressly populist campaign style. According to Karl Rove, author of The Triumph of William McKinley, a book about the 1896 Presidential election, McKinley was able to win by countering Bryan’s frenetic populist message and campaign style with money, organization, and strategy.

When McKinley was advised to go out on the road and campaign like Bryan was, McKinley astutely concluded that he could never “out-populist” Bryan who was seemingly born to be a “train-stop to train stop” politician. Rove relates that McKinley countered the argument for going on a nation-wide train campaign by saying that if he took a first-class train, Bryan would take a standard fare train and if McKinley took a common fair train, Bryan would ride in the baggage car, and if McKinley rode in a baggage car, Bryan would ride outside on an open air flatbed car like a hobo (my paraphrase).

Rather than compete with Bryan for every single person’s vote, McKinley strategically invited hundreds of different demographic groups to his home in Canton, Ohio. He would meet with them in very prepared and scripted exchanges and then feed them meals and send them on their way to represent him to their communities back home. Bryan made about 600 speeches all over the U.S. while McKinley paid for people to come to him and outspent Bryan 2:1.

Bryan’s autobiography reveals a politician who absorbed the Christianity of his Baptist father and Methodist mother, and Presbyterian youth group and eventually transformed religious sentiment into a political life dedicated to representing a distinctly evangelical worldview full of contradictions. He opposed imperialism in the strongest of terms and yet built his campaigns on a bedrock of Southern support in an age when the South was anything but “Christian” in its treatment of Black people. Bryan represented the poor as though they were Jesus crucified, insinuating that the interests of business were a modern day evil. It is not difficult to hear some of Bernie Sanders’ anti-corporatism in Bryan’s jeremiads against Wall Street.

In an address delivered at a banquet given in Chicago October 7, 1908, Bryan tried to explain that he was not against business. He was simply opposed to the sort of business that devalued human beings.

“There are many differences between the natural man and the corporate man. There is a difference in the purpose of creation. God made man and placed him upon His footstool to carry out a divine decree; man created the corporation as a money making machine. When God made man He did not make the tallest man much taller than the shortest; and He did not make the strongest man much stronger than the weakest; but when the law creates the corporate person that person may be an hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a million times stronger than the God-made man. When God made man He set a limit to his existence, so that if he was a bad man he could not be bad long; but when the corporation was created the limit on age was raised, and it sometimes projects itself through generation after generation."

"When God made man He gave to mankind a soul and warned him that in the next world he would be held accountable for the deeds done in the flesh; but when man created the corporation he could not endow that corporation with a soul, so that if it escapes punishment here it need not fear the hereafter. And this man-made giant has been put forth to compete with the God-made man. We must assume that man in creating the corporation had in view the welfare of society, and the people who create must retain the power to restrict and to control. We can never become so enthusiastic over the corporation, over its usefulness, over its possibilities, as to forget the God-made man who was here first and who still remains a factor to be considered."

"I take it, then, that I can assume that all who are interested in commerce, and interested in the corporation as a means of developing commerce, will recognize the necessity of making competition between the natural man and the fictitious person approximately equal so that the natural man may not be trodden under foot.”

In response to the Republican insistence that America had a global destiny and a duty to acquire the Philippines, Bryan was adamantly opposed and on Biblical grounds. “Shame upon a logic which locks up the petty offender and enthrones grand larceny,” he said.

“Have the people returned to the worship of the golden calf? Have they made unto themselves a new commandment consistent with the spirit of conquest and the lust for empire? Is ‘Thou shalt not steal upon a small scale’ to be substituted for the Law of Moses?”

Bryan countered Theodore Roosevelt’s vigorous defense of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority with a heavy dose of multi-cultural American nationalism. In a speech delivered in 1899 in opposition to American imperialistic ambitions in the Philippines, Bryan faced the cheerleaders of Anglo-Saxon destiny head on.

“Much has been said of late about Anglo-Saxon civilization. Far be it from me to detract from the service rendered to the world by the sturdy race whose language we speak. The union of the Angle and the Saxon formed a new and valuable type, but the process of race evolution was not completed when the Angle and the Saxon met. A still later type has appeared which is superior to any which has existed heretofore; and with this new type will come a higher civilization than any which has preceded it. Great has been the Greek, the Latin, the Slav. the Celt, the Teuton and the Anglo-Saxon, but greater than any of these is the American, in whom are blended the virtues of them all."

"Civil and religious liberty, universal education and the right to participate, directly or through representatives chosen by himself, in all the affairs of government—these give to the American citizen an opportunity and an inspiration which can be found nowhere else."

"Standing upon the vantage ground already gained the American people can aspire to a grander destiny than has opened before any other race."

"Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights, American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others."

"Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to take care of himself, American civilization, proclaiming the equality of all before the law, will teach him that his own highest good requires the observance of the commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

"Anglo-Saxon civilization has, by force of arms, applied the art of government to other races for the benefit of Anglo-Saxons; American civilization will, by the influence of example, excite in other races a desire for self-government and a determination to secure it."

"Anglo-Saxon civilization has carried its flag to every clime and defended it with forts and garrisons. American civilization will imprint its flag upon the hearts of all who long for freedom."

“To American civilization, all hail!
   “Time’s noblest offspring is the last!”

Americans voted for Theodore Roosevelt’s Social Darwinism and expansionism (“While Congress dithered, I acted” Roosevelt would say of his decision to take Panama). Within twenty years however, the world would see that Bryan was right on the battlefields of Europe, as an entire generation paid the price for Rooseveltian hubris, War-loving pride, and arrogance.

William Jennings Bryan is often remembered as the doddering old defender of anti-science in the play Inherit the Wind. Reading the speech that Bryan had intended to give as a closing argument to the Scopes Trial, may show him in a different light. One has to understand that he was responding to the argument for evolution as it was being presented in Hunter’s Civic Biology, the textbook that John Scopes was using in Dayton Tennessee, a book that states things like the following:

“Improvement of Man. - If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment….”

Under a section on eugenics, the book details certain types of people as “parasites”

“Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites."

"The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.”

Here is a selection of the book that may provide some context to what Bryan will have to say about the teaching of evolution in Tennessee:

“The Races of Man. – At the present time there exists upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

And there is this lovely little sentence about how the Greeks took an island from the Italians

“They drove the Italian natives back into the distant hills, for the white man’s burden even then included the taking of the desirable things that were being wasted by the incompetent natives …”

It is in this context that Bryan’s warnings about the teaching of evolution (as it was then being taught) in public schools should be seen. Bryan will argue that he is not anti-science. He certainly is not opposed to John Scopes’ right to free speech. He simply objects to Scopes using a paid position as a public school teacher to promulgate a potentially dangerous political ideology in the guise of science.

The following is an excerpt from Bryan’s argument.
http://www2.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/wjb-last/wjb-last.htm

“Our fifth indictment of the evolutionary hypothesis is that, if taken seriously and made the basis of a philosophy of life, it would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw. The Christians who have allowed themselves to be deceived into believing that evolution is a beneficient, or even a rational process have been associating with those who either do not understand its implications or dare not avow their knowledge of these implications. Let me give you some authority on this subject. I will begin with Darwin, the high priest of evolution, to whom all evolutionists bow.

On pages 149 and 150, in "The Descent of Man," ' already referred to, he says:

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick: we institute poor laws and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to thedegeneration of a domestic race; but, excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

"The aid which we felt impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. * * * We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak serving and propagating their kind."

Darwin reveals the barbarous sentiment that runs through evolution and dwarfs the moral nature of those who become obsessed with it. Let us analyze the quotation just given. Darwin speaks with approval of the savage custom of eliminating the weak so that only the strong will survive, and complains that "we civilized men do our utmost to check the process of elimination." How inhuman such a doctrine as this! He thinks it injurious to "build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick" or to care for the poor. Even the medical men come in for criticism because they "exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment." And then note his hostility to vaccination because it has "preserved thousands who, from a weak constitution would, but for vaccination, have succumbed to smallpox!" All of the sympathetic activities of civilized society are condemned because they enable "the weak members to propagate their kind." Then he drags mankind down to the level of the brute and compares the freedom given to man unfavorably with the restraint that we put on barnyard beasts.

The second paragraph of the above quotation shows that his kindly heart rebelled against the cruelty of his own doctrine. He says that we "feel impelled to give to the helpless," although he traces it to a sympathy which he thinks is developed by evolution; he even admits that we could not check this sympathy "even at the urging of hard reason, withough deterioration of the noblest part of our nature." "We must therefore bear" what he regards as "the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind." Could any doctrine be more destructive of civilization? And what a commentary on evolution! He wants us to believe that evolution develops a human sympathy that finally becomes so tender that it repudiates the law that created it and thus invites a return to a level where the extinguishing of pity and sympathy will permit the brutal instincts to again do their progressive (?) work!

"Evolution is a Bloody Business"

Let no one think that this acceptance of barbarism as the basic principle of evolution died with Darwin. Within three years a book has appeared whose author is even more frankly brutal than Darwin. The book is entitled "The New Decalogue of Science" and has attracted wide attention. One of our most reputable magazines has recently printed an article by him defining the religion of a scientist. In his preface he acknowledges indebtedness to twenty-one prominent scientists and educators, neatly all of them "doctors" and "professors." One of them, who has recently been elevated to the head of a great state university, read the manuscript over twice "and made many invaluable suggestions." The author describes Nietzsche, who, according to Mr. Darrow, made a murderer out of Babe Leopold. as "the bravest soul since Jesus." He admits that Nietzsche was "gloriously wrong," not certainly, but "perhaps," "in many details of technical knowledge," but he affirms that "Nietzsche was gloriously right in his fearless questioning of the universe and of his own soul."

In another place, the author says, most of our morals today are jungle products," and then he affirms that "it would be safer, biologically, if they were more so now." After these two samples of his views you will not be surprised when I read you the following (see page 34).

"Evolution is a bloody business, but civilization tries to make it a pink tea. Barbarism is the only process by which man has ever organically progressed, and civilization is the only process by which he has ever organically declined. Civilization is the most dangerous enterprise upon which man ever set out. For when you take man out of the bloody brutal but beneficent hand of natural selection you place him at once in the soft, perfumed, daintily gloved but far more dangerous hand of artificial selection. And unless you call science to your aid and make this artificial selection as efficient as the rude methods of nature you bungle the whole task."

This aspect of evolution may amaze some of the ministers who have not been admitted to the inner circle of the iconoclasts whose theories menace all the ideals of civilized society. Do these ministers know that "evolution is a bloody business"? Do they know that "civilization is the only process by which man has ever organically declined"? Do they know that the bloody, brutal hand of natural selection is "beneficient," and that the artificial selection found in civilization is "dangerous"? What shall we think of the distinguished educators and scientists who read the manuscript before publication and did not protest against this pagan doctrine?

Quotes an English Author

To show that this is a world-wide matter, I now quote from a book issued from the press in 1918, seven years ago. The title of the book is "The Science of Power," and its author, Benjamin Kidd, being an Englishman, could not have any national prejudice against Darwin. On Pages 46 and 47 we find Kidd's interpretation of evolution:

"Darwin's presentation of the evolution of the world as the product of natural selection in never-ceasing war was a product, that is to say, of a struggle in which the individual efficient in the fight for his own interests was always the winning type - touched the profoundest depths of the psychology of the West. The idea seemed to present the whole order of progress in the world as the result of a purely mechanical and materialistic process resting on force. In so doing it was a conception which reached the springs of that heredity born of the unmeasured ages of conquest out of which the Western mind has come. Within half a century the 'Origin of Species' had become the bible of the doctrine of the omnipotence of force."

Kidd goes so far as to charge that "Nietzsche's teaching represented the interpretation of the popular Darwinism delivered with the fury and intensity of genius." And Nietzsche, be it remembered, denounced Christianity as the "doctrine of the degenerate," and democracy as "the refuge of weaklings."

Kidd says that Nietzsche gave Germany the doctrine of Darwin's efficient animal in the voice of his superman, and that Bernhardi and the military textbooks in due time gave Germany the doctrine of the superman translated into the national policy of the superstate aiming at world power. (Page 67.)

And what else but the spirit of evolution can account for the popularity of the selfish doctrine, "each one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost," that threatens the very existence of the doctrine of brotherhood.

In 1900 - twenty-five years ago - while an international peace congress was in session in Paris, the following editorial appeared in L' Univers:

"The spirit of peace has fled the earth because evolution has taken possession of it. The plea for peace in past years has been inspired by faith in the divine nature and the divine origin of man; men were then looked upon as children of apes - what matters it whether they are slaughtered or not?"

In his conclusion, Bryan asserts the danger of a science unregulated by morality.

"Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo. In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane--the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times a bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings, alone, can solve the problems that vex heart and perplex the world...."

Clarence Darrow would respond to Bryan’s argument by saying that Bryan was blowing everything out of proportion to suggest that evolution was a dangerous idea. Yes, he acknowledged that Leopold had read too much Nietzsche and had committed a murder that he probably would not have if he had not been exposed to Nietzsche's ideas, but that this was an isolated incident. “The building of railroads has cost many lives,” Darrow wrote.

“but they aided humanity. Each year automobiles kill more persons than are killed by homicides; but that is no reason they should be abandoned pack and parcel,”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond in that same year that Darrow was writing his rebuttal, Adolf Hitler was busy re-organizing the Nazi Party in an attempt to bring about a non-violent take-over of the German government. His plan called for an efficient and total implementation of the ideas hinted at in Hunter’s Civic Biology.   

Question for Comment: So many of William Jennings Bryan’s arguments are still relevant today. Who should have the last say when potentially dangerous ideas are proposed for school curricula? What should the basis of American foreign policy be? What should be the limits of corporate power?  What role should science and religion play in the culture? What does it mean to have a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”?

The Age of Opportunity

The Age of Opportunity REVIEW

This book would make a good user’s manual to the teenage brain. I would recommend it if you are a school teacher, a principal, a college Human Growth & Development instructor, a parent, a grandparent, a person working in juvenile justice, or, drum roll please, a teenager yourself. It seems like everyone would stand to benefit from an understanding of the neurological and hormonal causes for phenomena that human beings have observed in their young for thousands of years.

A character in one of Shakespeare’s plays puts it this way:

“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting—Hark you now. Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?”

One of the great benefits of reading this book is that you learn how to celebrate the adolescent brain rather than just complain about it. The adolescent brain, you come to realize, is a brain that has made logical compromises in the pursuit of legitimate ends. There are benefits to its features that make it worth the problems it causes. And if teenagers wrote books about the adult brain (maybe they should), they should write it in such a way that it was made clear that the advantages of the adult brain were “dearly bought” and maybe not worth the price.

Steinberg begins the book by making a claim central to his argument. The adolescent brain is doing what it is doing for a reason, and it should be celebrated for doing it so well. It is not simply a “crippled brain.” It is developing on a schedule. “Studies are showing that adolescence is a second period of heightened brain plasticity,” Steinberg writes,

“just like the first three years of life. This makes adolescence a really vulnerable time—because the brain can be damaged by harmful experiences—but it also makes it a time of tremendous opportunity.”

Thus, the title of the book.

What is important to note however is that different parts of the brain will be more “plastic” at different points in life and that the adolescent brain is not developing all over again. It is making its way toward a goal and developing in ways new to the organism that sustains it.  The author writes:

“There is a time lag between the activation of brain systems that excite our emotions and impulses and the maturation of brain systems that allow us to check these feelings and urgings—it’s like driving a car with a sensitive gas pedal and bad brakes.”

Imagine for a moment going to buy a new car and the dealer says to you, “This car is a fantastic car. You are going to love it. But you should know that it is brand new and will need a little time to get fully synced up. Don’t be surprised if the accelerator is a little more sensitive to pressure than you are used to. And do not be surprised if the brakes are a little less responsive than you are used to. Those features will balance out in time.”

Would you buy that car? Would you let your teenager drive it?

That is essentially what Dr. Steinberg is saying is going on with your teenager (if you have one) or your students (if you have them) or yourself (if you are still a teen). The author argues that the adolescent brain is just more primed for experiences. It responds more intensely to things, to love, to rejection, to thrills, to losses, to food, to touch, to all of life’s epicurean pleasures, including drugs, alcohol, and risk-taking. Consider from your own experience if this is true:

“As a result, the adolescent brain is chemically primed to encode memories more deeply. The [emotion bump] doesn't exist because more emotional events take place in adolescence, but because ordinary events trigger stronger emotions”

The adolescent brain is going to be as aware of its environment as it is ever going to be for the rest of its life. It makes sense that this is so because it is literally preparing itself for the environment that it is soon going to have to come to terms with and live in. It is for this reason that putting adolescents in direct contact with dysfunctional environments is particularly damaging because it is literally furiously in the process of sculpting itself to adapt to that environment. Steinberg expresses this profound idea in the following paragraph:

“Plasticity opens the brain's windows to the outside world, but open windows can let in pollen, noise, and mosquitoes just as easily as ocean breezes, birdsong, and the fragrance of flowers. When these windows are open especially wide, as they are in infancy and adolescence, we must be especially attentive to what comes in through them.”

The ironic thing is that you actually have more plasticity as an infant and adolescent than you will have as an adult. This is the consequence of what maturing actual does in a human brain. It starts with almost unlimited connections and then begins to “prune.” Becoming an adult does not happen because you are gaining neural connections exponentially. It happens because you begin to remove connections that are irrelevant to the circumstances in which you live. “At one year Of age,” Steinberg informs us,

“there are about twice as many connections between neurons as there are in the adult brain. Pruning makes the brain function more effectively, the way that thinning a tree allows the remaining branches to grow stronger. It's part of a more extensive process through which the circuitry of the brain is remodeled through which connections between neurons are created, strengthened, weakened, or eliminated.”

The more that an adolescent brain can come in contact with the environment that it will be functioning in as an adult, the better chance it has of sculpting the perfect brain for that environment. [“Why then, I find myself asking, do we put teenagers in buildings hermetically sealed from the “real world”?] The science on this seems to be clear:

“The developing brain is chemically predisposed to be modified by experiences, like clay when it is still soft, whereas the adult brain is predisposed to resist modification--like clay once it is hardened."

Would this not suggest that maybe we should be mentoring students out in the world as they confront real world problems rather than secluding them in safe-zones where the real world can barely be seen out the windows? Is this an argument for homeschooling? Or for some other paradigm worth inventing? “We learn how to regulate ourselves by being regulated,”

Steinberg explains the process by which that clay “hardens” by digging a little deeper into the structures of neurons as they develop. Early in their development, they carry electrical charges that have the ability to “leap” in a wide variety of directions, like a copper wire carrying electricity without any plastic covering. Over time, those neurons are encased in myelin (the plastic in the wire illustration) and that myelin covering reduces the amount of random connection making and enforces the strengths of desired pathways (lets call them a bat swing, a tune played on a piano, or a paintbrush stroke). As the young person decides what language they will speak, what skills they will need, what patterns of behavior will work to their advantage in life, the myelin surrounding neural pathways begins to work in favor of the desired learning being done by thickening and thus begins to “discourage” random “creativity.” “The amount of myelin in the brain increases well into our late forties,” says Steinberg, “insulating more and more brain circuits as we mature. “Axons retract, spines die off, and as a result, synapses start to disappear, often to the point that the circuit finally ceases to exist. This process is called ‘synaptic pruning.’”

“Ahhh,” says the mature grown-up. “That is what is wrong with the teenage brain.” Too much distractability. Not enough focus.”

“To the contrary,” says the teenager, “that is what is wrong with you old people. You are stuck in ruts!”  

Steinberg neither puts the adolescent brain on a pedestal nor condemns it. It is what it is, and it has a long history of becoming what it is, and we are not going to change it by offering a few classes on executive function as though just knowing what your brain is doing is going to keep it from doing what it is doing. And yet, the author is not fatalistic. There are wise courses of action to take and unwise courses of action to take. He encourages working with the developing brain, not trying to subject it to torture like some cognitive version of Chinese foot-binding or Victorian era corset wearing.

 Here are some recommendations.

First, don’t ignore the adolescent brain’s strengths or its weaknesses if you are someone who has some responsibility for helping teenagers mature. Make yourself familiar with the processes going on within and work with them, not against them. [This appeals to my inner Daoist]. “We learn how to regulate ourselves by being regulated,” he writes.

Second, recognize that the adolescent brain needs challenges to grow and develop. It does that developmental process no good to lock it up and protect it from the environment just as it does it no good to pretend that it does not need protection for its vulnerabilities. External regulation is essential as the adolescent brain learns to make use of its own “brakes.” “The slight mismatch between what we can do and what we push ourselves to do,” Steinberg writes,

“is what stimulates brain development. If the mismatch isn’t there or if it’s so great as to be overwhelming, development won’t occur.”

“In other words, it is important to be exposed to novelty and challenge when the brain is plastic not only because this is how we acquire and strengthen skills, but because this is how the brain maintains its ability to profit from future enriching experiences.”

“We know that brain plasticity in adulthood is facilitated by a mismatch between what the environment demands of the brain and what the brain can do. The less often we put ourselves in novel situations, the less frequently we encounter these mismatches. When this happens, and when the need to learn new things becomes less and less pressing, the brain begins to lose some of its malleability.”

Hear that. If challenges are made too easy or if the challenges are all artificial and disconnected from the real world in which teenagers live, “development won’t occur.” That is a tragedy and a tragedy that is compounded by the fact that the brain will literally activate that myelin hardening process when it begins to believe that the days of new experiences are over. The following paragraph has stunning implications for the way that we educate our teenagers:  

“When we leave adolescence and stop seeking out new experiences, our brains shut down the final period of extensive plasticity. . . . Once we have what we need to survive on our own, it doesn't make any sense to remain malleable enough to be potentially harmed by unfavorable experiences.”

In other words, the worse thing we can do to a developing teenage brain is put it in an environment that causes that brain to think, “There is nothing new of any significance to learn.” At that moment, the cascade of “closing” the window begins, possibly for good.

Third, the author stresses that the learning of adolescents is inevitably affected by social forces. And this is not accidental or insignificant. The adolescent brain is wired for intensity of experience and seeks them out voraciously. But experiments demonstrate that the power and attractiveness of experiential rewards are magnified in the presence of other peers. An adult might look at a certain risk and say “The reward for that risk is not worth it.” And there conclusions about that estimate will not be affected by whether or not their friends are with them. But an adolescent will look at that exact same risk and reward combination and they will respond to the reward because it feels bigger than it does to the adult. As if that is not “bad enough” that reward will seem even sweeter if other adolescents are in the room … or even if they are in some other room.

“Things that feel good, feel better in adolescence,” Steinberg writes, “and things that feel bad, feel worse.”

“Compared to children or adults, it is easier to get adolescents to gamble even when their odds of winning are small or uncertain . . . Adolescents are just as likely as adults to know what's risky and what isn't, and no worse than adults at estimating whether doing something risky will lead to a bad consequence. . . . As this research shows, teenagers are fully capable of identifying risks; they're just drawn more strongly to rewards.”

Read on …

“Official statistics provide plenty of confirmation for our personal recollections: the presence of a group of teenage passengers in a car when a teenager is behind the wheel more than quadruples the chance of a crash and the risks of a crash increase sharply with each additional teen who is in the car.”

“Even when we make it impossible for teenagers to communicate with each other—that is, impossible to pressure each other into taking risks—simply knowing that their friends are nearby makes them take more chances.”

“In other words, it's not necessarily overt peer pressure that leads adolescents to do more reckless things with their friends. It's that being around friends when you are a teenager makes everything feel so good that you become even more sensitive to rewards than you ordinarily are, which leads you to take chances you would not ordinarily take.”

Why this is so is a matter of some conjecture but maybe the author puts his finger on it when he writes: “It hurts to be rejected at any age, but it's actually more painful during adolescence than at any other time.”

Ironically, Steinberg has more positive things to say about the adolescent brain than he has to say about the way adults in our present culture design systems to screw up those brains even more. “I don't harbor any delusions about the use of scientific evidence to inform policymaking, though,” he opines, “Policymakers and advocacy groups use science the way that drunks use lampposts – for support, not illumination.”

Eventually, we all do begin to “grow up” and for good or bad, “get with the program.” A few teenagers will remain teenagers as long as they can. Some will become rock stars or will film themselves for money like the producers of the TV show, “Jackass.” A few will remind us, Peter Pan like, that childhood and adolescence is to be preferred to adulthood and self-regulatory behavior in cubicle jobs. Maybe this is something of a service? I loved the illustration the author gave of a children’s soccer game where 22 kids run around the field within spitting distance of each other, an unorganized human stampede of randomness that follows the ball wherever it goes. I imagined coaching kids like that and trying to help them understand their “positions” on the field and the structures of intelligent play. This is, to some extent what we do when we raise young people to become responsible adults.

And yet, God, don’t those little kids have fun!”

Question for Comment: If there were some drug that would allow your brain to return to it adolescent form for a year, would you take it? Why or why not?

"While the other instruments played for everyone, the violin played for her alone.”

Life in a Time of Cholera REVIEW

The Center of It

The times you’re gone
I carry on
The times you’re here
I covet
Yet either day or night, I find you
At the center of it.

And when you’re near
I like it
But when you're felt
I love it
No matter what circumference,
You’re at the center of it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel Love in a Time of Cholera provides us with an epic story of star-crossed lovers whose relationship unfolds over a lifetime. Spoiler alert. For fifty years of their relationship, they never speak to one another alone. I know. Painful, right? In so many ways, the novel is a retelling of the themes in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s 18^th Century novel Julie: The New Heloise, where a young man of deep romantic proclivities has the misfortune to latch on to someone who eventually decides to follow her “enlightened” father’s “sensible side” rather than her own Rumi-esque intuitive romantic side. It is interesting to compare the two main characters, Florentino and Fermina's, experience of "centering” and “de-centering."

Early on in their relationship, Fermina recognizes that she has become the focus of Florentino’s blazing white-hot attention.

“She also knew that he was one of the musicians in the choir, and although she never dared raise her eyes to look at him during Mass, she had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone, the violin played for her alone.”

But she is cautious and reticent to reciprocate in any way that one might regard “in kind.” He is a place-marker for her. A “possibility” if some other planet does not come along before she is twenty-one (for her, the drop-dead date for finding a partner) to pull her into her life’s orbit.   

A number of passages suggest that Florentino never manages to "evict her" from the center of his relational life after she “ghosts him” (to use a modern parlance) for Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the city’s “most eligible bachelor.” These passages also suggests that Fermina really never put him at the center of her life in the first place (at least not until she is well into her old age). Here are a few select quotes from the novel that suggest just how central Fermina is to Florentino even after she sets him clearly outside the circle of her affections and even concern.

"But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line."

“Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. He did not have to keep a running tally, drawing a line for each day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not happen to remind him of her.”

“Florentino Ariza never had another opportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chance encounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and nine months and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.”

“That was always the case: any event, good or bad, had some relationship to her."

“The truth is that he was never the same again. Winning back Fermina Daza was the sole purpose of his life, and he was so certain of achieving it sooner or later that he convinced Transito Ariza to continue with the restoration of the house so that it would be ready to receive her whenever the miracle took place.”

“In truth, he always behaved as if he were the eternal husband of Fermina Daza, an unfaithful husband but a tenacious one . . .”

Even when Florentino is introduced to the world of other women on a riverboat one night, he discovers that Fermina is not a disposable concern for him. 

“He saw them [including the woman he slept with] round the corner of the store, followed by the mules carrying their trunks, their hatboxes, and the baby's cage, and soon afterward he saw them ascend along the edge of the precipice like a line of ants and disappear from his life. Then he felt alone in the world, and the memory of Fermina Daza, lying in ambush in recent days, dealt him a mortal blow.”

“Never again would he abandon the city of Fermina Daza.”

As the author puts it, Florentino Ariza longed “to enjoy his martyrdom.”

Fermina, on the other hand, prefers stability to passion and is willing to call the first, even sans the second, “love.” Like Julie in Rousseau's Julie, the New Heloise, she selects that candidate who is "the most stable and offers the most stability" willing to take a risk on the presence of something with heat in it. She decides, much in line with her father’s perspective, that a woman should marry for love’s benefits, not for love.

“One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it.”

“That afternoon, while her father was taking his siesta, she sent [Florentino] Gala Placidia with a two-line letter: ‘Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.’"

“Poor man!”

Fermina seems to be conscious that some motive other than romantic love motivates Dr. Urbino in his advances. “Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say that he experienced no emotion when he met the woman with whom he would live until the day of his death,” Gabriele Garcia Marquez tells us. At one point Marquez reveals a secret about Fermina that not even she knows until she is many years a widow: “She did not admit it because she never would have admitted that Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had ever happened to her in her life.”

It is as the author has declared himself in no uncertain terms, the champion of his romantic protagonist and a detractor of his female lead. His assertion here is somewhat staggering really. HE is suggesting that until you meet a person who rocks your world,” nothing of significance has happened to you and by logical inference, if you do not have that person in your life right now, you are not really alive. That is an assertion worthy of some reflection!

Florentino, unable or unwilling to decenter Fermina from the sun-like role she plays in his emotional solar system, can only visualize a life where her new husband eventually dies so that Fermina, repentant, reciprocates his love and centers him as he has always centered her. He cannot imagine a world where this does not happen. Listen to him grieve on the day that Fermina and Dr. Juvenal Urbino marry.

“He knew that she was to have an elaborate wedding, and then the being who loved her most, who would love her forever, would not even have the right to die for her. Jealousy, which until that time had been drowned in weeping, took possession of his soul. He prayed to God that the lightning of divine justice would strike Fermina Daza as she was about to give her vow of love and obedience to a man who wanted her for his wife only as a social adornment, and he went into rapture at the vision of the bride, his bride or no one's, lying face up on the flagstones of the Cathedral, her orange blossoms laden with the dew of death, and the foaming torrent of her veil covering the funerary marbles of the fourteen bishops who were buried in front of the main altar. Once his revenge was consummated, however, he repented of his own wickedness, and then he saw Fermina Daza rising from the ground, her spirit intact, distant but alive, because it was not possible for him to imagine the world without her. He did not sleep again, and if at times he sat down to pick at food, it was in the hope that Fermina Daza would be at the table or, conversely, to deny her the homage of fasting for her sake. At times his solace was the certainty that during the intoxication of her wedding celebration, even during the feverish nights of her honeymoon, Fermina Daza would suffer one moment, one at least but one in any event, when the phantom of the sweetheart she had scorned, humiliated, and insulted would appear in her thoughts, and all her happiness would be destroyed.”

Much later, Florentino meets Dr. Urbino and discovers that the man is not necessarily evil just because he “stole his girl.” This only makes it unfortunate that he has to die. “Florentino Ariza could not endure the pangs of grief at the thought that this admirable man would have to die in order for him to be happy,” Marquez writes.

For a brief time, Florentino tries to insulate himself from his loss by putting geographical distance between him and Fermina Urbino. The attempt is only marginally successful though, for wherever Florentino goes, memories of Fermina follow. When Florentino soon gives up his attempt at escaping his attachment’s tractor beam, he returns to the city of Fermina Daza and he makes an intentional choice to keep her at the center of his relational universe.

“The bay was calm at daybreak. Above the floating mist Florentino Ariza saw the dome of the Cathedral, gilded by the first light of dawn, he saw the dovecotes on the flat roofs, and orienting himself by them, he located the balcony of the palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, where he supposed that the lady of his misfortune was still dozing, her head on the shoulder of her satiated husband. That idea broke his heart, but he did nothing to suppress it; on the contrary, he took pleasure in his pain. The sun was beginning to grow hot as the mail sloop made its way through the labyrinth of sailing ships that lay at anchor where the countless odors from the public market and the decaying matter on the bottom of the bay blended into one pestilential stench. The schooner from Riohacha had just arrived, and gangs of stevedores in water up to their waists lifted the passengers over the side and carried them to shore. Florentino Ariza was the first to jump on land from the mail sloop, and from that time on he no longer detected the fetid reek of the bay in the city, but was aware only of the personal fragrance of Fermina Daza. Everything smelled of her.”

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love,” Florentino’s father had once written in a letter found in a box in the attic. This seems to be such a profound distillation of Florentino’s philosophy and central nervous system that Florentino believes that it is a line he must have written himself. We might say that Florentino’s life is the result of believing his father. We could say the same of Fermina, for though she defies her father for a time, in the end, she does exactly what her father wants, and marries exactly the man that her father would have (and did) arrange for her. Fermina does what Rousseau’s Julie does: She “falls in line with a parental desire for stability” rather than “falling in love with an self-identified love interest.” “No one ever thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations could have any reason not to be happy,” the author notes when describing how the world would have described Fermina and Juvenal’s marriage.

“During those unfortunate years no one could have imagined anyone happier than they or a marriage more harmonious than theirs.”

 Marquez describes Fermina’s decision-making process thus:

“But when she had to face the decision of marrying Juvenal Urbino, she succumbed, in a major crisis, when she realized that she had no valid reasons for preferring him after she had rejected Florentino Ariza without valid reasons. In fact, she loved him as little as she had loved the other one, but knew much less about him, and his letters did not have the fervor of the other one's, nor had he given her so many moving proofs of his determination. The truth is that Juvenal Urbino's suit had never been undertaken in the name of love, and it was curious, to say the least, that a militant Catholic like him would offer her only worldly goods: security, order, happiness, contiguous numbers that, once they were added together, might resemble love, almost be love. But they were not love, and these doubts increased her confusion, because she was also not convinced that love was really what she most needed to live.”

“In any case, the principal factor operating against Dr. Juvenal Urbino was his more than suspect resemblance to the ideal man that Lorenzo Daza [Fermina’s opportunistic and materialistic father] had so wanted for his daughter. It was impossible not to see him as the creature of a paternal plot, even if in reality he was not, but Fermina Daza became convinced that he was from the time she saw him come to her house for a second, unsolicited medical call.”

Fermina Daza decides to put a stable provider at the center of her emotional universe and she crosses her fingers hoping that he will perhaps be more than that. In doing so, she determines, without double-checking, that Florentino could not be a “stable provider” and downgrades his romantic excesses to mere “illusion” anyway. For certainly, her father identifies Florentino’s passionate love in their first conversation and holds it the cheapest of all assets. Fermina marries Juvenal Urbino because he is the best candidate she has been taught to think she has at a time she has been taught to think she must select one.

“But that is what she did at a crucial moment in her life, giving no importance whatsoever to the handsomeness of her suitor, or his legendary wealth, or his youthful glory, or any of his numerous virtues; rather, she was stunned by the fear of an opportunity slipping away, and by the imminence of her twenty-first birthday, which was her private time limit for surrendering to fate. That one moment was enough for her to make the decision that was foreseen in the laws of God and man: until death do you part. Then all her doubts vanished, and she could accomplish without remorse what reason indicated as the most decent thing to do: with no tears, she wiped away the memory of Florentino Ariza, she erased him completely, and in the space that he had occupied in her memory she allowed a field of poppies to bloom. All that she permitted herself was one final sigh that was deeper than usual: "Poor man!"”

Perhaps what Fermina does is what so many people do when they get down to selecting a partner. They mistake the presence of some singular strength or asset for the possession of all necessary strengths and assets. Fermina finds that with all his charm and panache and confidence and intelligence and impeccable pedigree and occupational status and good looks, and education and social capital, Dr. Juvenal Urbino is deeply flawed. “The most fearful doubts began, however, when she returned from her honeymoon,” we read,

“As soon as they opened the trunks, unpacked the furniture, and emptied the eleven chests she had brought in order to take possession as lady and mistress of the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, she realized with mortal vertigo that she was a prisoner in the wrong house and, even worse, with a man who was not.”

“She suspected too late that behind his professional authority and worldly charm, the man she had married was a hopeless weakling: a poor devil made bold by the social weight of his family names.”

“The only possible bond was something as improbable and fickle as love, if there was any, and in their case there was none when they married, and when they were on the verge of inventing it, fate had done nothing more than confront them with reality.”

Later, Fermina describes her marital home as a “deluxe prison sentence.” This negative appraisal is what is most interesting to me about Fermina Daza’s estimation of her life’s great decision. It appears that she, like Rousseau’s Julie, has an emotional regret about choosing the wrong man for her heart, but not what I would call an existential regret. That is, despite whatever she loses in this Faustian arrangement, she believes that she “made the right call.” In the end, this is hard for me to understand. In the very opening pages of the novel we hear her subsequent life described as,

“A clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. On the contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.”

“Perhaps it was exemplary.” Does she believe that? Did Rouseeau’s Julie? Does anyone? Does anyone really want to live out their lives in a “transactional” business deal rather than a mutually satisfying romance? Listen to Fermina lament that which she has convinced herself of needing is actually all one really needs.

“She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young, in the Park of the Evangels. Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. In society she came to be the woman most loved, most catered to, and by the same token most feared, but in nothing was she more demanding or less forgiving than in the management of her house. She always felt as if her life had been lent to her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service.”

Was her husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, capable of the kind of passion that Fermina might have wanted along with all the stability? She bet on a belief that the man could eventually become something he was not. Was this a mistake? It is only years after her husband dies (in his 70’s) that Fermina Daza begins to reconsider just what it is that human beings really need and do not need.

“However, when she thought he [Florentino] was completely erased from her memory, he reappeared where she least expected him, a phantom of her nostalgia. It was during the first glimmering of old age, when she began to feel that something irreparable had occurred in her life whenever she heard thunder before the rain."

This may well be the sound of Doc’s “lower self” in Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday incanting. “Lonely. Lonely.”

Was Dr. Urbino capable of the sort of irrational passion that Fermina’s heart, in spite of her father’s assertions to the contrary, needed? As it turns out, it appears that Dr. Urbino was capable of actually falling hopelessly in love. Just not with Fermina. Dr. Urbino had been raised by a mother who could see no reason for anyone to have passions. At one point Fermina had told her about a dream that she (Fermina) had had about a naked man running through the city spreading ashes, and her mother-in-law had told her that "a decent woman cannot have that kind of dream." Her son’s emotional and sensual life is never nurtured or developed we suspect, and it is not until later in his life that it comes out of the closet with a vengeance.

“Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.”

This may well be what Fermina finds so devastating about her husband’s affair with a black woman later in his life. For from that dalliance, she must have learned that she could have had both stability and passion. And if she had stuck with Florentino, she would have.

Gabriel Marquez’s novel asks many profound questions about love, marriage, and life. How does one know when they reject one person for another that they are doing the right thing? Maybe in the concluding paragraphs of the novel we get a clue. As Florentino and the widowed Fermina decide to spend the rest of their lives on a river boat together, they reflect on what they have – they have enough romance sufficient for their desires and enough stability sufficient for their needs. And that, it may well be, was always what any of us needs.

“Neither one could imagine being in any other home but the cabin, or eating in any other way but on the ship, or living any other life, for that would be alien to them forever. It was, indeed, like dying.”

Perhaps we know what we need by paying attention to all parts of ourselves. Perhaps we know when we have the love that we need when we realize that not having exactly that person in that life feels like dying.

Question for Comment: Have you ever felt like dying without someone? Have you ever gotten over it?

"As if whatever is not their truth, must be falsehood."

Mists of Avalon V

In the Hebrew Bible, we read a story in the book of Joshua about the people of Israel taking possession of their “Promised Land.” Moses has led them out from slavery in Egypt and forty years later, they stand on the borders of Canaan, ready to cross the Jordan and begin their new life as a settled community atop the ruins of a people and culture that they intend to dispossess. When they arrive at the present day site of Shechem, Joshua places half the people on Mt. Gerazim and half on Mount Ebal and has them recite the blessings and cursings of the law as laid down in Deuteronomy. First among the commandments is the command to have “no other gods before me.”

Soon after, a debate emerges in the religious faith of the community. Are they to have no other gods that matter more than their God? Or no other gods at all? In keeping with the ideas of the time, it seemed foolish to many to ignore the gods who had been, for time immemorial, living upon and influencing the life of the land they had just occupied. These Hebrews were also inclined to take into consideration some of the gods of Egypt whose powers they clearly saw at work in the land of Egypt. Many see the need to pay necessary allegiance to the gods who resided in the land of Canaan. They had their own God (Yahweh) to be sure, for had not Yahweh delivered them from bondage in Egypt? But should he not be simply their principle divine benefactor in a world of many divine benefactors? Not long after that occupation as recorded in Joshua, they have a rather eclectic assortment of deities that they are in the habit of appeasing.

Joshua eventually calls them all together and holds them to account:

In Joshua 24, the people are assembled again at Shechem and Joshua recounts the great deeds that the Lord their God had performed in their service. He concludes his narrative with a demand that they put away their accessory gods. Their response is, to summarize, “We plan to serve Yahweh always. No need to worry about that. But to discard all other gods would be the height of foolishness.” Here is how the argument goes.

“’Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.  But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’”

Then the people answered, ‘Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods!  It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our parents up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey and among all the nations through which we traveled.  And the Lord drove out before us all the nations, including the Amorites, who lived in the land. We too will serve the Lord, because he is our God.’

Joshua said to the people, ‘You are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins.  If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you.’

But the people said to Joshua, ‘No! We will serve the Lord.’
Then Joshua said, ‘You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen to serve the Lord.’
‘Yes, we are witnesses,’ they replied.
 ‘Now then,’ said Joshua, ‘throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.’
And the people said to Joshua, ‘We will serve the Lord our God and obey him.’

Notice that they do not say anything about discarding the foreign gods. They intend to remain loyal to all potential divine powers. Spiritually, they are committed to “diversifying their investments.” The argument is a simple one when it is all boiled down to gravy: Is it in a person’s best interest to put all their eggs in one spiritual basket, or is there something to be gained by selecting from a menu of several alternatives?

In Mists of Avalon, Book Four, this theological debate comes to the forefront and there are several positions that reveal themselves. There are those among the Christians who believe that all spiritual powers other than the Christian God are demonic in origin and evil in nature, but they believe that people are allowed to believe wrong if they wish to. And then there are others who would eliminate any and all competitive options. There are those among the pagans who believe the same of the Christian God presented by Father Patricus and his ilk. There are pagans who follow their pagan deities and traditions and who pay homage to the Goddess but who see no harm in letting the Christians believe as they choose and sometimes, they adopt some of the Christian rites and rituals. There are those Christians who lean into their Christian faith but find nothing of great harm in letting the people who wish to remain pagans remain so. There are some characters who think that both paganism and Christianity are suspect and they believe in neither. There are some who believe that they are two names for the same thing.

 Arthur, who holds the final power to effectively promote one religion and suppress the other, is someone raised in Avalon (paganism) who has been made king by Christians. Over the course of his reign, he moves in the direction of his wife’s orthodox and fundamentalist faith but he maintains that it is his duty to protect Avalon and the Druids and religious liberty generally. The Merlin is willing to serve as an adviser in Arthur’s Christian court in spite of the fact that he remains a Druid committed to the work of the Goddess. Morgaine exemplifies one who believes that one should stay true to their pagan beliefs even in Camelot and that if the time comes where this is not possible, they should retreat to Avalon to retain their integrity. She eventually executes the Merlin for being a traitor to Avalon. Morgause is generally a skeptic towards all religious institutions but favors the one that gives her the most power or freedom. Lancelot is an agnostic until later in life when he has a holy experience of the grail, unsure of whether his experience flows from Christian or pagan wells, content in the possibility that it could be either or both. Multiple minor characters find themselves in between these extremes or off their map altogether.

Arthur’s queen is always found on the side of the Christian fundamentalists, insisting that the sacred groves of paganism be cut down. And then, she finds herself barren and calls up her local Lady of the Lake, Morgaine for a spell. Sigh. But periodic inconsistencies are a vice everyone in the novel allows themselves from time to time. Almost no one remains an absolutist other than Viviane and Patricius whose positions at the heads of their respective religions incentivize them to be absolutists.   

Sometimes the main characters are forced by some expediency to pretend that they are one thing when they are really another. Consider this exchange between Gwen and Morgaine:  

“’But if the young people now are turning back to heathen ways, then we must do something—perhaps, even, cut down the grove.’

‘If you do, I shall do murder,’ Morgaine thought, but schooled her voice to gentleness and reason. ‘That would be wrong. The oaks give pig food and food for the country people—even here we have had to use acorn flour in a bad season. And the grove has been there for hundreds of years—the trees are sacred—‘”

Arthur tries to reason with his wife’s intolerance from time to time, but to no avail. All the influence goes one way.

“[Arthur] said dryly, ‘The Merlin of Britain is one of my councilors and has always been so, Gwen. Those who look to Avalon are always my subjects too. It is written: Other sheep have I which are not of this fold. . . .’
‘A blasphemous jest,’ Gwenhwyfar observed, making her voice gentler, ‘and hardly suitable for the eve of Pentecost—‘”

 “It would be a sad day if it should be lost forever,” Arthur says of Avalon, the island home base of paganism.

“As it is sad for the peasant folk to lose their own festivals . . . town folk, perhaps, have no need of the old rites. Oh yes, I know, there is only one name under Heaven by which we may be saved, but perhaps those who live in such close kinship with the earth need something more than salvation. . . .”

Gwen would be delighted to see Avalon go the way of Atlantis.

“’Avalon, that accursed place!’ She wished it would sink into the sea like the lost land of Ys in the old tale, and never be heard of again!”

Arthur is content having men of virtue serve as his companions. Their religion is of no particular concern to him.

“’I have always wanted my Companions to be men dedicated to the right,’ said Arthur. ‘I do not demand that they be godly men, Galahad, but I have hoped they would be good men.’”

The mind of Arthur’s wife is not elastic enough for this kind of sophistry. As Marion Zimmer Bradley puts it, “If Gwenhwyfar were not so fanatically, mindlessly Christian, she would have loved Morgaine well.”

Galahad is the sort of Christian that does not care to eliminate anyone else’s faith but he will be happy to see erroneous faiths die out. He hopes that Arthur will live a long life and have a long reign but he looks forward to the demise of pagan believers in the long run.

“May that time be far—surely, my lord, you will live many, many years—and by then all those old folk who still believe they must give allegiance to the pagan ways will have gone.”

Periodically, the members of these different camps dispute one another.

“The sacred groves still stand, and in them, the old ways are done as they have been done from the beginning of the world,” says Morgaine’s paramour, Accolon.

“We do not anger the Goddess by denying her worship, lest she turn upon her people and blight the harvests and darken the very sun that gives us life.”

Galahad is startled by this statement.

“But this is a Christian land! Have no priests come to you to show you that the evil old Gods among whom the Devil had sway have no more power now? Bishop Patricius has told me that all the sacred groves have been cut down!”

‘Not so,’ said Accolon, ‘nor will be while my father lives, or I after him.’

Morgaine opened her mouth to speak, but Gwenhwyfar saw Accolon lay his hand on her wrist. She smiled at him and said nothing. It was Gwydion who said, ‘Nor yet in Avalon, while the Goddess lives. Kings come and kings go, but the Goddess shall endure forever.’ What pity, Gwenhwyfar thought, that this handsome young man should be a pagan! Well, Galahad is a good and pious Christian knight, who will make a Christian king!

Morgause represents the universal skeptic in many ways. She finds Christian sacraments particularly boring but she disagrees with Morgaine’s refusal to at least pretend to hold to the faith of the dominant powers. She knows where her bread is buttered.

“Morgause put a plump hand over her mouth, smothering a yawn. However often she attended Christian ceremonies, she never thought about them; they were not even as interesting as the rites at Avalon where she had spent her childhood, but she had thought, since she was fourteen or so, that all Gods and all religions were games which men and women played with their minds. None of them had anything to do with real life. Nevertheless, when she was at Pentecost, she dutifully attended mass, to please Gwenhwyfar—the woman was her hostess, and the High Queen, after all, and a close relative—and now, with the rest of the royal family, she went forward to receive the holy bread. Morgaine, attentive at her side, was the only one in the King’s household who did not approach the communion table; Morgause thought lazily that Morgaine was a very great fool. Not only did she alienate the common people, but the more pious among the King’s household called Morgaine witch and sorceress, and worse things, among themselves. And, after all, what difference did it make? One religious lie was as good as another, was it not?”

Arthur’s son Gwydion challenges the right of any King or Queen to “presume to declare one truth for all of mankind throughout the world?”

“Call you that presumption?” Gwenhwyfar immediately responds, “It is the one truth, and a day must come when all men everywhere will acknowledge it.” King Uriens find’s this a reprehensible excess. This leads to contention between he and Gwenhwfar.

“’I tremble for my people that you say so,’ said King Uriens. ‘I have pledged myself to protect the sacred groves, and my son after me.’
‘Why, I thought you a Christian, my lord of North Wales—‘
‘And so I am,’ said Uriens, ‘but I will not speak ill of another’s God.’
‘But there are no such Gods,’ Gwenhwyfar began.
Morgaine opened her mouth to speak, but Arthur said, ‘Enough of this, enough—I did not bid you here to discuss theology!’”

The Queen can not let her absolutism rest though. “A day will come when all false Gods shall vanish and all pagan symbols shall be put to the service of the one true God and his Christ,” she says. Morgaine gives her a piece of her mind:

 “’I did not speak to you, you canting fool,’ said Morgaine furiously, ‘and that day will come over my corpse! You Christians have saints and martyrs—do you think Avalon will have none?’”

 “My dear sister,” Arthur says pleadingly, “I beg of you, do not quarrel with me about the name by which we call our Gods. You yourself have said to me that all the Gods are the One God.” He says to his son, “Oh—times I believe one thing, times another, like all men. It does not matter what I believe.” He holds loosely to anything that might threaten to disturb his ability to govern a diverse population.

Sometimes, characters soften their stances and acknowledge that much of their contentiousness is the consequence of leadership, and not the original vice of those they lead. “It was not Gwenhwyfar herself that she hated,” Morgaine admits, “it was the priests who had so much influence over her.” And yet, it is difficult for her to extend grace to those who slavishly follow Gwen’s tribe even deeper into absolutism.“Gwenhwyfar’s ladies were the kind of pious idiots with whom Gwenhwyfar always surrounded herself,” Morgaine mopes.

The Merlin Kevin is asked why it is that there has to be just one way of seeing the world.

“’Why should we all meet in one afterlife? Why should there not be many paths, the Saxons to follow their own, we to follow ours, the followers of the Christ to worship him if they choose, without restraining the worship of others. . . .’

Kevin shook his head. ‘My dear, I do not know. There seems to be a deep change in the way men now look at the world, as if one truth should drive out another—as if whatever is not their truth, must be falsehood.’”

Kevin is among that tribe of “Unitarians” who thinks that people make too much of the peculiarities of their respective faiths. “It is the sword of the Gods,” Kevin says of his pagan faith and the sword Excalibur,

“And all the Gods are one. I would rather have Excalibur in the world where men may follow it, than hidden away in Avalon. So long as they follow it, what difference does it make which Gods they call on in doing so? . . . ‘I know not what to call myself now,’ said Kevin quietly, ‘save perhaps servant of those who serve the Gods, who are all One.’”

Sometimes, characters do evolve from their original positions to be sure. Morgaine, for example, holds views towards her Goddess that are similar to the views of ISIS toward Allah. But in time, she begins to realize that one should always consider the possibility that the founders of religions are not always fans of their own followers.

“In those days they [Christians] came in numbers to Avalon to escape the harsh and shrivelling winds of persecution and bigotry. [Father] Patricius had set up new forms of worship, a view of the world wherein there was no room for the real beauty and mystery of the things of nature. From these Christians who came to us to escape the bigotry of their own kind I learned something, at last, of the Nazarene, the carpenter’s son who had attained Godhead in his own life and preached a rule of tolerance; and so I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.”

Morgaine just resents the way that the Christians abscond and appropriate with the sacred objects of other faiths into their own and then do not acknowledge the origins of their power.   

“They would use the Holy Regalia of the Goddess to summon the Presence . . . which is One . . . but they would do it in the narrow name of that Christ who calls all Gods demons, unless they invoke in his name!”

“Now, using the ancient things of the Goddess, they would invoke their own narrow God; yet instead of the pure water of the holy earth, coming from the clear crystal spring of the Goddess, they have defiled her chalice with wine! But never again will they be profaned by priests of a narrow God who would deny all other truths. . . .”

Sometimes, characters find themselves caught in a trap of their own logic regarding their faith systems. “If some priests are bad men,” said Nimue, “I find it not wholly beyond reason that some Druids might be good ones.”

“There must, thought Gwenhwyfar, be some error in that reasoning, but she could not make it out.”

At one point, Lancelet and Morgaine get into a conversation about the relative merits of Morgaine’s paganism and Patricius’ Christianity.

“’If [Arthur] survives the quest of the Grail—or if he should abandon it—still his rule will be circled about by the priests, and through all the land there will be only one God and only one religion.’ Morgaine says.

‘Would that be such a tragedy, Morgaine?’ Lancelet asked quietly. ‘All through this land, the Christian God is bringing a spiritual rebirth here—is that an evil thing, when mankind has forgotten the Mysteries?’

‘They have not forgotten the Mysteries,’ she said, ‘they have found them too difficult. They want a God who will care for them, who will not demand that they struggle for enlightenment, but who will accept them just as they are, with all their sins, and take away their sins with repentance. It is not so, it will never be so, but perhaps it is the only way the unenlightened can bear to think of their Gods.’

 Lancelet smiled bitterly. ‘Perhaps a religion which demands that every man must work through lifetime after lifetime for his own salvation is too much for mankind. They want not to wait for God’s justice, but to see it now. And that is the lure which this new breed of priests has promised them.’
Morgaine knew that he spoke truth, and bowed her head in anguish.”

This perhaps is the clearest statement of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s own critique of Christianity. That it is a religion for lazy people who want to live in paradise without making themselves worthy of it? Though clearly, Morgaine is no saint herself.

As the novel draws to a close, both Avalon and Camelot begin to disappear, as if the places where ideas are born and thrive disappear as the ideas that had their origin in them stop being believed. The paganism of Avalon and the syncratic tolerance of Camelot are both eventually displaced by a disbelief in all that is sacred. And so both Camelot and Avalon recede into the mists, inhabited only by ideological monastics who accept that they can no longer have any influence in the world outside them.

In the last chapter, Morgaine visits the Christian church at Glastonbury where ostensibly, pagan worship has been completely obliterated. But what she finds there startles her, for instead of the worship of the goddess being banished forever, she finds that Morgaine’s ancient paganism has simply taken root in the vocabulary and forms of the new faith. The grail of the goddess has become the chalice of the Christian communion.

“In her dream she went, as she had never done in any Christian church, to the altar rail for the sharing of their bread and wine, and Lancelet bent and set the cup to her lips and she drank. And then it seemed to her that he knelt in his turn, and he said to her, ‘Take this cup, you who have served the Goddess. For all the Gods are one God, and we are all One, who serve the One.’ And as she took the cup in her hands to set it to his lips in her turn, priestess to priest, he was young and beautiful as he had been years ago. And she saw that the cup in her hands was the Grail.”

Morgaine finds herself sitting with the nuns and seeing them as sisters in a faith older than either her own paganism or Christianity.

“Never did I think I would stand side by side with one of these Christian nuns, joining with her in prayer. But then she remembered what Lancelet had said in her dream. Take this cup, you who have served the Goddess. For all the Gods are One . . .”

The sacred well of Avalon has now simply become the sacred well of the chalice. Though the nuns do not know it is the same, Morgaine realizes that it is.

“‘Come up to the cloister with me, sister,’ said the nun, smiling and laying a hand on her arm. ‘You must be hungry and weary.’ Morgaine went with her to the gates of their cloister, but would not go in. ‘I am not hungry,” she said, ‘but if I might have a drink of water—‘
‘Of course.’

The woman in black beckoned, and a young girl came and brought a pitcher of water, which she poured into a cup. And she said, as Morgaine lifted it to her lips, ‘We drink only the water of the chalice well—it is a holy place, you know.’ It was like Viviane’s voice in her ears: The priestesses drink only the water of the Sacred Well.’

As she rose, the girl said, ‘If you wish, Mother, I will promise to come here and say a prayer every Sunday for your kinswoman.’ For some absurd reason, Morgaine felt that tears were coming to her eyes. ‘Prayer is always a good thing. I am grateful to you, daughter.’

‘And you, in your convent, wherever it may be, you must pray for us too,’ said the girl simply, taking Morgaine’s hand as she rose. ‘Here, Mother, let me brush the dirt from your gown. Now you must come and see our chapel.’ For a moment Morgaine was inclined to protest. She had sworn when last she left Arthur’s court that she would never again enter any Christian church; but this girl was so much like one of her own young priestesses that she would not profane the name by which the girl knew her God. She let the girl lead her inside the church.

Morgaine followed the young girl into the small side chapel. There were flowers here, armfuls of apple blossom, before a statue of a veiled woman crowned with a halo of light; and in her arms she bore a child. Morgaine drew a shaking breath and bowed her head before the Goddess. The girl said, ‘Here we have the Mother of Christ, Mary the Sinless. God is so great and terrible I am always afraid before his altar, but here in the chapel of Mary, we who are her avowed virgins may come to her as our Mother, too.’

‘But Brigid is not a Christian saint,’ Morgine thought, ‘even if Patricius thinks so. That is the Goddess as she is worshipped in Ireland. And I know it, and even if they think otherwise, these women know the power of the Immortal. Exile her as they may, she will prevail. The Goddess will never withdraw herself from mankind.’

And Morgaine bowed her head and whispered the first sincere prayer she had ever spoken in any Christian church.

‘Mother,’ she whispered, ‘forgive me. I thought I must do what I now see you can do for yourself. The Goddess is within us, yes, but now I know that you are in the world too, now and always, just as you are in Avalon and in the hearts of all men and women. Be in me too now, and guide me, and tell me when I need only let you do your will. . . .’”

In the end, Morgaine concludes that one need not draw Joshua’s distinction between Baal and Yahweh.

“She need only step through the mists here, and be in Avalon.”

Question for Comment: Would the world benefit from a process of synchronizing religions? Or is it better served in a world where they all compete? A question of capitalism applied to religion I guess.

“Doc could not interpret the black voice of his guts.”

Sweet Thursday REVIEW

“There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn’t necessarily a lie even if it didn’t necessarily happen.”

Steinbeck’s third novel in the Cannery Row trilogy serves up another dose of his particular brand of moral relativism. Steinbeck is a promoter of what I might call “intention ethics.” Characters can be guilty of any number of conventional violations of religious or social codes and still be regarded as saints so long as their intentions are good intentions (and they usually are). It is more important to Steinbeck to know why a person lies than to know that they do lie for example. If one is to judge Fauna, the owner of the Bear Flag (the local brothel), it is important to know how well she cares for “her girls” than to know how their business model measures up against Mosaic law. The main characters in Sweet Thursday have little regard for conventional moral codes but they exhibit what are, to Steinbeck, virtue.  In the moral ledgers of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flats, vices and virtues are things to be balanced. The following conversation early in the novel sets the tone.

There was never a friend like Lee Chong," Mack said brokenly.
  "Yes, he was wise and good," said Doc.
  "And tricky," said Mack.
  "And smart," said Doc.
  "He took care of a lot of people," said Mack.
  "And he took a few," said Doc.

 They volleyed Lee Chong back and forth, and their memories built virtues that would have surprised him, and cleverness and beauty too. While one told a fine tale of that mercantile Chinaman the other waited impatiently to top the story. Out of their memories there emerged a being scarcely human, a dragon of goodness and an angel of guile. In such a way are the gods created.”

Steinbeck’s Almighty would be a being whose virtues outweighed his vices, not one that had none of the later. Where a character has more vices than virtues as is the case with Joseph and Mary (that is one name for those of you who have not read the novel), even then, Steinbeck has a capacity for winking at the shortfall. Somehow, a person with few vices can be a good person so long as they are interesting. Of Joseph and Mary, Steinbeck writes:

“Somewhere he felt there was a profession illegal enough to satisfy him morally and yet safe enough not to outrage his instinctive knowledge of the law of averages. You might have said he was well launched on his career when, suddenly, puberty smote him, and for a number of years his activities took a different direction.”

Steinbeck’s characters do not twist themselves into pretzels to be upstanding members of some local Baptist Church. They are, “at ease with themselves.”

“Doc's natural admiration and desire for women had always been satisfied by women themselves. He had few responsibilities except to be a kindly, generous, and amused man. And these he did not find difficult. All in all, he had always been a fulfilled and contented man. A specimen so rare aroused yearning in other men, for how few men like their work, their lives--how very few men like themselves. Doc liked himself, not in an adulatory sense, but just as he would have liked anyone else. Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”

You can see this moral relativity at work in the boys’ decision to have a raffle to raise money for Doc’s telescope. The raffle is completely and shamelessly rigged in such a way that the boys do not lose their accommodations (“The Palace Flophouse is the prize”).

“To Doc’s friends, Mack and the boys mentioned the rigging of the lottery, but to strangers—who cared? It was a perfect example of the collective goodness and generosity of a community.”

Fauna and the boys of the Palace flophouse and the Bear Flag brothel don’t scold anyone for scratching their itches, either sexual or alcoholic. The social codes of the respectable proletariat are less than nothing to them. Consider how Fauna talks to Doc as she is explaining why Suzie is a liability for a brothel .

“Doc,” said Fauna, “I knocked around and I seen all kinds. I tell you, if you got a streak of lady in you it spoils you for anything else. Now you never come over to the Bear Flag. You play the field. I personally think that costs you more but I ain’t one to mess in the way people want to live.”

“I don’t think I’m following you,” said Doc.
“Okay, I’ll lay out the deck. When you’re making a play for one of them babes, them amateurs, you got to do quite a lot of talking before you make the sack—ain’t that right?”
Doc smiled ruefully. “Right,” he said.
“Well, do you always mean every word of it?”
Doc pinched his lower lip. “Why—why—I guess right at the moment I do.”
“But afterward?”
“Afterward, if I were to think about it—”
“That’s what I mean,” said Fauna. “So if you happen to tell a little teensy-beensy bit of baloney you don’t blow your brains out.”
“You’d do well in the analysis business,” said Doc.”

Her characters are not people of stiff moral backbone so much as people with flexible moral cartilage. For Steinbeck, righteousness is not to be found in the observed deed but in the hidden intent. “What hidden, hoarded longings there are in all of us!” he writes,

“Behind the broken nose and baleful eye may be a gentle courtier; behind the postures and symbols and myths of Joe Elegant there may be the hunger to be a man. If one could be, for only an evening, whatever in the world one wished, what would it be? What secret would come out?”

Perhaps the best illustration of this morality of intention rather than the morality of compliance or the morality of consequence is the character of Hazel in Sweet Thursday. Hazel is a character of extremely limited intelligence but great heart. In Hazel’s quest to help solve his loneliness problem, he sets out to find out what Doc needs and to make it possible for Doc and Suzie to close the “couple gap” (my words) that divides them. When Suzie explains in not so many words that Doc simply does not need her and that the only thing that might make it possible for them to form a pair would be if Doc got sick or broke a bone, Hazel has a dark night of the soul but determines to break Doc’s arm. Steinbeck describes the scene of Hazel’s anguish in terms that draw close parallels to Jesus struggling with his decision to go to the cross in the Garden of Gethsemane. The chapter is entitled “Lama Sabathani” the words Jesus used on the cross to ask his Father why he had been forsaken.

“Under the black cypress tree Hazel writhed on the ground. From between his clenched teeth came little whimpers. As the night drew on and the moon went down, leaving blackness, so desolation fell on Hazel, so that he cried out against the agony of his greatness as that Other did, feeling forsaken.

Hour after hour the struggle went on, and only about three o’clock in the morning was Hazel saturated. Then he accepted it as he had accepted the poisoned presidency of the United States. He was calm, for there was no escape. If anyone had seen him it would have been a dull man who did not find him beautiful.

Hazel picked his chosen instrument from the ground—an indoor-ball bat. He crept like a night-colored cat out of the black shadow of the cypress tree.

In less than three minutes he returned. He lay on his stomach under the tree and wept.”

So, Hazel goes up to Doc’s house, finds him sleeping, and hits him in the arm with a baseball bat. And, as if on cue, every one of Doc’s friends sees what Hazel has done as an act of benevolent grace. They understand what Hazel’s intents were. They judge him by his innocent intention. And how can love be wrong that loves with good intent?

And here, dear reader, I should like to pivot and turn our focus to Doc for he is the central protagonist of Sweet Thursday. Doc has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, has an IQ of 185, and is far-and-away the smartest and most functional character in the novel. He is the owner of Western Biologicals, a company that he staffs singlehandedly, dedicated to the collection and sale of bio-organisms for research. He makes a good living. He enjoys his drink and periodic women, and he is the financial and spiritual “center” of the community. When Doc has a problem, everyone in Tortilla Flat feels it and feels despondent. “As goes Doc, so goes the village,” you might say.

And Doc has a problem. His problem, as Steinbeck describes it, arrives with a phase transition in his own psychological life. He used to be satisfied with his intellectual work and his life’s amenities but now he is not.

"Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away--you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch--and your mind says, ‘Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?’ All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. ‘What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?’ And now we're coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: ‘What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?’ And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt, it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.”

Suddenly, Doc is no longer satisfied with having been useful to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. Suddenly, his “lowest self” wants “warmth.”

“Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas, when it happened, it was one day hooked on to the tail of another.”

Doc feels his gnawing lack but cannot label it.

“But now the worm of discontent was gnawing at him. Maybe it was the beginning of Doc's middle age that caused it--glands slackening their flow, skin losing its bloom, taste buds weakening, eyes not so penetrating, and hearing dulled a little. Or it might have been the new emptiness of Cannery Row--the silent machines, the rusting metal. Deep in himself Doc felt a failure. But he was a reasonably realistic man. He had his eyes examined, his teeth X-rayed. Dr. Horace Dormody went over him and discovered no secret focus of infection to cause the restlessness. And so, Doc threw himself into his work, hoping, the way a man will, to smother the unease with weariness. He collected, preserved, injected, until his stock shelves were crowded again. New generations of cotton rats crawled on the wire netting of the cages, and four new rattlesnakes abandoned themselves to a life of captivity and ease.”

But something has changed. Doc discovers what the Rolling Stone discovered; “He can’t get no sat-is-fac-tion.” The “bottom voice” will no longer be silent.

“But the discontent was still there. The pains that came to Doc were like a stir of uneasiness or the flick of a skipped heartbeat. Whisky lost its sharp delight and the first long pull of beer from a frosty glass was not the joy it had been. He stopped listening in the middle of an extended story. He was not genuinely glad to see a friend. And sometimes, starting to turn over a big rock in the Great Tide Pool--a rock under which he knew there would be a community of frantic animals--he would drop the rock back in place and stand, hands on hips, looking off to sea, where the round clouds piled up white with pink and black edges. And he would be thinking, ‘What am I thinking? What do I want? Where do I want to go?’ There would be wonder in him, and a little impatience, as though he stood outside and looked in on himself through a glass shell. And he would be conscious of a tone within himself, or several tones, as though he heard music distantly.

Or it might be this way. In the late night, Doc might be working at his old and battered microscope, delicately arranging plankton on a slide, moving them with a thread of glass. And there would be three voices singing in him, all singing together. The top voice of his thinking mind would sing, ‘What lovely little particles, neither plant nor animal but somehow both--the reservoir of all the life in the world, the base supply of food for everyone. If all of these should die, every other living thing might well die as a consequence.’ The lower voice of his feeling mind would be singing, ‘What are you looking for, little man? Is it yourself you're trying to identify? Are you looking at little things to avoid big things?’ And the third voice, which came from his marrow, would sing, ‘Lonesome! Lonesome! What good is it? Who benefits? Thought is the evasion of feeling. You're only walling up the leaking loneliness.’

Sometimes he would leave his work and walk out to the lighthouse to watch the white flail of light strike at the horizons. Once there, of course, his mind would go back to the plankton, and he would think, ‘It's a protein food of course. If I could find a way to release this food directly to humans, why, nobody in the world would have to go hungry again.’ And the bottom voice would sing, ‘Lonesome, lonesome! You're trying to buy your way in.’

The lowest voice has the fewest words, but they pack a punch. In them is the echo of the first divine word of complaint ever uttered in the Western religious tradition: “It is not good for the man to be alone.”

Everyone in Cannery Row detects the shift

“Doc thought he was alone in his discontent, but he was not. Everyone on the Row observed him and worried about him. Mack and the boys worried about him. And Mack said to Fauna, ‘Doc acts like a guy that needs a dame.’

‘He can have the courtesy of the house anytime,’ said Fauna.
‘I don't mean that,’ said Mack. ‘He needs a dame around. He needs a dame to fight with. Why, that can keep a guy so goddam busy defending himself he ain't got no time to blame himself.’
Fauna regarded marriage with a benevolent eye. Not only was it a desirable social condition, but it sent her some of her best customers.
‘Well, let's marry him off,’ said Fauna.
‘Oh no,’ said Mack. ‘I wouldn't go that far. My God! Not Doc!’

Doc, one step ahead of them, tries to apply the ‘dame solution.’ for that has been his modus operandi here-to-for. ‘Doc tried to solve his problem in the ancient way,’ writes Steinbeck,

“He took a long, leisurely trip to La Jolla, four hundred miles south. He traveled in the old manner, with lots of beer and a young lady companion whose interest in invertebrate zoology Doc thought might be flexible--and it was.”

But as it turns out, what Doc needs, what the lowest self in Doc’s fertile mind needs, is not some new “skank.” He is about to find out the difference between “Eve” and a barnacle. Doc has absolutely no interest his travel mate. Steinbeck puts it this way:

“He recited no poetry to her. The subject of her eyes, her feelings, her skin, her thought, did not come up. Instead Doc told her about octopi--a subject that would have fascinated her two days before.”

“There’s no need for giving the girl a name,” Steinbeck writes as he and Doc dismiss what she has to offer his need as irrelevant. “She never came back to Western Biological. Her interest in science blinked out like a candle.”

“The girl said good-by and went away, and Doc did not know she was gone. For that matter he did not know she had been with him.”

Doc now plans to meet his emotional longing with an intellectual poultice. He will author a paper. “I’m going to call my paper ‘Symptoms in Some Cephalopods Approximating Apoplexy,’ He states. And then he commences to experience an unrelenting case of writers block, brought on by a full scale rebellion of “the lower self.”

“He read what he had written; dull, desiccated, he thought. Why should I presume that an animal so far removed from the human—perhaps I’m fooling myself. The middle voice sang subtly, ‘Looking for yourself in the water—searching, little man, among the hydroids for your soul—looking for contentment in vanity. Are you better than Mack that you should use the secret priestly words of science to cover the fact that you have nothing to say?’”

“And the bottom voice mourned, ‘Lonesome! Lonesome! Let me up into the light and warmth. Lonesome!’”

It is at this point that all the citizens of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flats recognize that Doc, their local genius, the pride of their lives and mainstay of their existence in many ways, is in serious trouble.

“What was Doc’s trouble? Even he didn’t know. He was deeply, grievingly unhappy. For hours on end he sat at his desk with a yellow pad before him and his needle-sharp pencils lined up. Sometimes his wastebasket was full of crushed, scribbled pages, and at others not even a doodle went down. Then he would move to the aquarium and stare into it. And his voices howled and cried and moaned. ‘Write!’ said his top voice, and ‘Search!’ sang his middle voice, and his lowest voice sighed, ‘Lonesome! Lonesome!’ He did not go down without a struggle. He resurrected old love affairs, he swam deep in music, he read The Sorrows of Werther, but the voices would not leave him. The beckoning yellow pages became his enemies. One by one the octopi died in the aquarium. He had worn thin the excuse of his lack of a proper microscope. When the last octopus died he leaped on this as his excuse. When his friends visited him, he would explain, “You see, I can’t go on without specimens, and I can’t get any more until the spring tides. As soon as I have specimens and a new microscope, I can whip the paper right off.”

His friends sensed his pain and caught it, and carried it away with them. They knew the time was coming when they would have to do something.”

“When trouble came to Doc it was everybody’s trouble.” Steinbeck gives us a window into the ever-gathering internal storm.

“His middle voice argued, “Maybe you don’t believe any of it. Why can’t you laugh at yourself? You could once. You’re trapped in a cage of self-importance.”

“Lonesome!” the low voice cried in his guts. “No one to receive from you or give to you. No one warm enough and dear enough.”

Doc wanted desperately to go back to his old life—the hopeless wish of a man wanting to be a little boy, forgetting the pain of little boys.”

He is like a man whose last shell has molted and his new shell has yet to arrive. His posse begins to speculate that Doc needs more than a “dame.” He might – horrors! – need a wife. “I got a theory, if you ain’t too pie-eyed to listen,” says Mack, the leader of the boys.

“When he had them quiet he went on, ‘When you hear my theory you might get kind of violent. I want you to sleep on it before you talk. I think Doc needs a wife.’”

“What!”

“Well, hell, he don’t have to marry her,” said Mack. “You know what I mean…” If the absinthe had not given them tolerance, he might have had a series of fights right then. “Kindly do not interrupt,” he said. “I will now review the dame situation in the U.S. You take a look at divorces and the reasons for them, and you can only think one thing: the only guy that shouldn’t have nothing to do with picking out a wife is the guy that’s going to marry her. That’s a fact. It’s a fact that if he’s left alone, a guy practically always marries the wrong kind of dame.”

“Play it safe and don’t marry nobody,” said Whitey No. 2.
“There’s some guys can’t operate that way,” said Mack.
“Are you suggesting we turn Doc, our true friend, in?”
“I asked you not to shoot off your face until you slept on it,” said Mack with dignity.
Hazel tugged at his sleeve. “Ain’t you joking, Mack?”
“No,” said Mack, “I ain’t joking.”
“If anything bad come to Doc, you know what I’d do to you?” Hazel asked.
“Yes,” said Mack. “I think I do—and I think I’d have it coming.”

Meanwhile Doc, squirms in his loneliness like one of his octopi stranded in a receding tidepool.

“He set his chin. ‘I will get the spring tides at La Jolla,’ he said to himself. ‘I will get a new microscope.’ And the very lowest voice whispered, ‘Somewhere there’s warmth.’”

Enter that warmth, in the person of Suzy, a recent addition to the team at the Bear Flag brothel, who comes with no degrees, no money, no skills to speak of, and little aptitude for the “work” she has applied to do. What she does have is something that Doc cannot ignore, an unquenchable courageous integrity (outside of the brothel thing which, as we have discussed, Steinbeck is not morally opposed to) and an inability to prevaricate.  

“Say, Doc, you got a funny business—bugs and all like that.”
“There are funnier businesses,” he said sharply.”She stiffened. “Meaning my business? You don’t like my business, huh?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. There it is. But it does seem to me a kind of sad substitute for love—a kind of lonesome substitute.”
Suzy put her hands on her hips. “And what’ve you got, mister? Bugs, snakes? Look at this dump! It stinks. Floor ain’t been clean in years. You ain’t got a decent suit of clothes. You probably can’t remember your last hot meal. You sit here breeding bugs—for Chrissake! What do you think that’s a substitute for?”
In the old days Doc would have been amused, but now his guard was down and he caught her anger like a disease. “I do what I want,” he said. “I live the way I want. I’m free—do you get that? I’m free and I do what I want.”
“You ain’t got nothing,” Suzy said. “Bugs and snakes and a dirty house. I bet some dame threw you over. That’s what you’re substituting for. Got a wife? No! Got a girl? No!”
Doc found himself shouting, “I don’t want a wife. I have all the women I want!”
“Woman and women is two different things,” said Suzy. “Guy knows all about women he don’t know nothing about a woman.”
Doc said, “This guy is happy that way.”
“Now you’re happy!” said Suzy. “You’re a pushover! If no dame’s got you it’s because no dame wants you. Who the hell would want to live with bugs and snakes in a joint like this?”
“Who’d want to go to bed with anybody that’s got three bucks?” said Doc cruelly.
Suzy said icily, “A smart guy. A real smart guy. He’s got what he wants. Seems to me I heard you’re writing a great big goddam highfalutin paper.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows about it. Everybody’s laughing at you behind your back—and you know why? Because everybody knows you’re kidding yourself. You ain’t never going to write that paper because you can’t write that paper. You’re just sitting here like a kid playing wish games.”
She saw her words go home as surely as though she had watched arrows drive into his chest, and misery and shame overwhelmed her. “I wish I didn’t say that,” she spoke softly. “I wish to God I never said that.”
“It might be true,” said Doc quietly. “Maybe you put your finger on the truth.”

Indeed. She put her finger right on the truth. Like a nail gun.

Fauna later asks if Suzy would like her to help her “trap” Doc and Suzy declines, much as she finds that she cares for him. Indeed, Doc’s willingness to let her be a mirror of truth for him impresses. “No,” said Suzy,“I wouldn’t sandbag no guy. Especially Doc.” “Everybody sandbags everybody,” Fauna, replies. “Let’s don’t sandbag Doc,” Suzy insists trying to draw the conversation to a close.

“I don’t want to lay no bear trap for him, Fauna.”

"Fauna was smiling to herself. She said, 'I guess a man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, and then steps in it. You just set still, Suzy girl. Don’t do nothing. Nobody can’t say you trapped him if you don’t do nothing.'”

And sure enough, when we return to Steinbeck’s “Doc narrative,” we find “the varmint” setting, baiting, and stepping in his own trap. Fauna simply determines that she will not him take an excess of time getting to the truth he is too “smart” to see. Steinbeck writes of her devious plan,

“There will be those who will consider that Fauna took too much upon herself in engineering a marriage without the knowledge or collusion of either party, and such skeptics will be perfectly right. But it was Fauna’s conviction, born out of long experience, that most people, one, did not know what they wanted; two, did not know how to go about getting it; and three, didn’t know when they had it.

Fauna was one of those rare people who not only have convictions but are quite willing to take responsibility for them. She knew that Doc and Suzy should be together. And since they were too confused, or thoughtless, or shy to bring about that happy state, Fauna was prepared to do it for them. Her critics will cry, ‘Suppose she is wrong! Maybe this association has no chance of success.’ And Fauna’s answer to this, if she had heard it, would have been, ‘They ain’t doing so good now. It might work. What they got to lose? And when you look at it, what chance has anybody got? Doc put on a tie, didn’t he? And if I’m wrong it’s my fault. Sure, they’ll fight now and then. Who don’t? But maybe they’ll get something too. What’s the odds for anybody?’

And if it was suggested that people should have the right to choose for themselves after thinking it over, she would have replied, ‘Who thinks? I can think because I ain’t part of it.’

And if she had been accused of being a busybody she would have said, ‘Damn right! Done it all my life!’ You couldn’t win an argument with Fauna because she would agree with you and then go right on as she had planned. She had taken up astrology because she found that people who won’t take advice from a wise and informed friend will blindly follow the orders of the planets—which, by all reports, are fairly remote and aloof. Doc would refuse astrology, so he had to be sandbagged. Fauna expected no thanks. She had given that up long ago. Doc could not interpret the black voice of his guts, but it sounded loud in Fauna’s ears. She knew his loneliness. When she was with him, that low voice drowned out all the others.”

In the end, Doc is trying to respond to a need for water (connection) with an excess of condiments (intellectual work). One of Doc’s friends has it about right,

“There’s a lack of fulfillment in you. I think you have violated something or withheld something from yourself—almost as though you were eating plenty but no Vitamin A. You aren’t hungry, but you’re starving. That’s what I think.”

“I can’t imagine anything I lack,” replies Doc oblivious to his “lower voice” still. “I have freedom, comfort, and the work I like. What have I missed?”

“Well, last night, in every conversation, a girl named Suzy crept in—” says Old Jay.

Eventually, Doc learns what Fauna knows. As Steinbeck puts it, “The low voice of Doc’s guts burst through at last.”

“I’m lonely,” he said. He said it as a simple matter of fact, and he said it in wonder.”

Doc’s lower voice will no longer let him rest. “Low min”d all of a sudden expresses himself with complete sentences.

“Do you know any man and woman—no matter how close—who don’t have good and bad? Let me out! Or, by God, I’ll set my claws in you and I’ll tear at you for all your life! Let me out, I say! Feel this, this red burning? That’s rage. Will you let it out or will it fester here until it makes you sick and crazy? Look at the time.”

There is more to the story than I am telling here but, eventually, all that will be required is for Hazel to break the sleeping Doc’s arm with a baseball bat, for Suzy to come over and ask if he needs some help, and for Doc to say, “I need you all right. I’d be lost without you.”

“Brother,” says Suzy, “You got yourself a girl!” “

And thus is Hazel’s mission accomplished and John Steinbeck’s story concluded.

Doc asks Suzy if she can drive to La Jolla. She says, “Yes of course,” and asks for two hours to get ready. Two hours that she uses to get the boys to teach her how to drive.

Lies, after all, are not wrong, if the liar and her friends all have good intentions.

Question for Comment: Steinbeck’s story Sweet Thursday suggests that there isn’t always a logical reason for how we go about settling upon a solution to our deepest longings for connection.

Here is the sound of Doc’s reasoning mind telling him that Suzy is a mistake:

“I’m supposed to have this wild free brain without conventional barriers. And what did I do? I balanced a nasty ledger. I weighed education, experience, background, even probable bloodlines. Some of the worst people I ever knew had the best of all those. Well, there it is. Saying it has made it even clearer.”

“Middle mind had its way. Doc thought, Let’s look at this. Here is a man with work to do. The girl—what is she? Let’s suppose every good thing should come of a relationship with her. It still would be no good. There is no possible way for this girl and me to be successful—no way under the sun. Not only is she illiterate, but she has a violent temper. She has all of the convictions of the uninformed. She is sure of things she has not investigated, not only sure for herself, but sure for everyone. In two months, she will become a prude. Then where will freedom go? Your thinking will be like tennis against a bad player. Let’s stop this nonsense! Forget it! You can’t have it and you don’t want it.”

“Let me put it this way: there is nothing I can do. They say of an amputee that he remembers his leg. Well, I remember this girl. I am not whole without her. I am not alive without her. When she was with me I was more alive than I have ever been, and not only when she was pleasant either. Even when we were fighting I was whole. At the time I didn’t realize how important it was, but I do now. I am not a dope. I know that if I should win her I’ll have many horrible times. Over and over, I’ll wish I’d never seen her. But I also know that if I fail I’ll never be a whole man. I’ll live a gray half-life, and I’ll mourn for my lost girl every hour of the rest of my life. As thoughtful reptiles you will wonder, ‘Why not wait? Look further! There are better fish in the sea!’ But you are not involved. Let me tell you that to me not only are there no better fish, there are no other fish in the sea at all. The sea is lonely without this fish. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

“Let me face this clearly, please! I need her to save myself. I can be whole only with Suzy.”

“He stood up and he did not feel silly anymore and his mission was not ridiculous. ‘So long,’ he said to the rattlesnakes. ‘Wish me luck!’”

Is Doc making a good decision here?

“They must learn not to think shame of holy things!”

The Mists of Avalon IV Book Three

There are a number of angles that would be interesting to take in this exploration of book three of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. [See other previous posts in the past few weeks]. Among them is the interesting way that both the “pagans” (what I call those who prioritize nature and the Goddess and mystic rites and intuitive approaches to knowledge and the feminine in life generally) and the Christians (those who prioritize order and law and sacred text and church hierarchy and the masculine in life generally) feel insecure about the presence of the other and wish to use political power to maintain their cultural hegemony.

There are those on the side of the church who would like to see Arthur use his power as high king to diminish the influence of the pagans and restrict their rights and ability to publicly argue their perspective. Similarly, there are those in pagan Avalon that see their entire religious world view threatened by Arthur’s trending adoption of hard-line Christian fundamentalism. They have a long-term plan to raise Arthur’s son Mordred (Gwydion) to be a Druid who can eventually wrest control from the Christians and put Avalon back on the ascendency in the throne of Britain. Recall that Arthur was made king with the endorsement of both sides. He wears the “Holy Regalia” of Avalon and wields “Excalibur,” the sword bequeathed to him by the Lady of the Lake, but he also has been endorsed by the church leaders and bishops and thus rules as a “Christian King.”

Arthur has the benefit of both sides in his halls of council. He relies on both the Merlin Father Patricius for example. He also has the advice of moderates on both sides. There are people like Lancelot who remain pragmatistic, seeing the similarities and complementarian possibilities for Christian and pagan perspectives to live in harmony. Keven the Bard (pagan-light) can often share a similar disposition to synchronistic thinking. At times, champions of the pagan movement can see advantages of the other side and sometimes they can see the flaws in their own positions. Similarly, even people like Gwenhyfar, who is staunchly Christian will doubt her own authorities. She is not above being tempted by Morgaine’s magical powers, especially with reference to solving her own infertility problems. Surely, Morgaine has a charm for that.

In other words, the conflict between pagan and Christian has the same spectrum of players that we see in contemporary cultural conflicts. There are people who are hard-line “never-compromisers.” There are “In-betweeners.” There are loyal agnostics and agnostic loyalists. And there, sitting in the middle, in the seat of power – Arthur. And next to him is a queen who can move him in one direction or the other. Who could doubt that if Arthur had married Morgaine rather then Gwenhyfar. this story would have played out differently. As I may have mentioned in my last post about MoA, Gwenhyfar is to Arthur and Christianity what Jezabel was to King Ahab and Judaism. Mists of Avalon would tend to look at someone like Jezabel favorably.

My respect for Marion Zimmer Bradley is growing. When I first started this novel, it seemed to me that she had not created a “fair fight” between the paganism that she obviously favored and the Christianity that she obviously did not. But over time, I can see that she allows her pagans to be less than saints and she does allow some of her Christians to be decent blokes. Neither of their religions render them immune to vices or virtues.

For example, here are a few of the vices of some of her pagans. There is Morgause who we are told has a bit of problem with child abuse. She explains that when she beat her step-son, Gwydion, “it only made him more defiant, unless she was prepared to beat him insensible;” “And once,’ she continues, “losing her temper, she had frightened herself with how hard she had struck the harmless child.”

We can also see that there are political fundamentalists on the Pagan side who are just as ruthless in their quest for political power as a means to furthering their spiritual kingdoms as the Christians are.  “It is the appointed time, Gwydion.” Vivian says to Arthur’s son, born of Arthur’s sister Morgaine,

“You are Druid-born, and of two royal lines. You are to be given the ancient teachings and the secret wisdom in Avalon, that one day you may bear the dragon.”

“It is what lives in their dreams and imagination that we must control for Avalon,” Viviane says to Morgaine of her intention to control religious speech and dominate the public square.

“Or this struggle with Christ will be lost and their souls lie in slavery to a false faith! The symbol of the dragon should be always before them, that mankind seek to accomplish, not to think of sin and do penance!”

Viviane sees Christianity as an existential threat to Britain, Christian and pagan. “Would you have it that I should sit by and see Avalon go further into the mists, even as the fairy country?” Viviane says.

“I am saying, Lady,” the Merlin, Kevin replies,

“That it may even now be too late to prevent it—Avalon will always be there for all men to find if they can seek the way thither, throughout all the ages past the ages. If they cannot find the way to Avalon, it is a sign, perhaps, that they are not ready.”

“Still,” said Viviane sternly in response, “I shall keep Avalon within the world, or die in attempting it!” “—We will have no king turned apostate and tyrant, forcing that god of slaves and sin and shame down the throats of our people!”

“If we set him [Gwydion] on Uther’s throne, we can bring him [Arthur] down if we must, and all the more readily if there is one of the old royal line of Avalon, a son of the Goddess, to take his place. Arthur is a good king, I would be reluctant to make such threats; but if I must, I will—the Goddess orders my actions.”

“The Goddess orders my actions.” Or as the crusaders put it, “Deus Volt” [“God Wills it!”] or as Muslim terrorists are wont to say as they crash planes of innocent passengers into buildings, “Allahu Aqbar!” One might hear the sound of Irish Catholics or Protestants. or members of Al Q’aida or ISIS, or Adolf Hitler in that statement. In Mein Kampf, Hitler states,

“Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

How far would Viviane go to keep Avalon relevant if not dominant in the world? Would infanticide be a step too far? It would not.

“The one thing we can be certain of is that [Queen] Gwenhyfar shall remain barren,” she asserts, understanding that if Gwenhyfar has a son by Arthur, Britain might be lost to Christian kings forever.  

“Should she conceive again, there are spells to make certain she carries not the child to birth, or past the first few weeks. As for Arthur’s heir . . .’ She paused, and looked at Gwydion, still sitting like a sleepy child, his head resting on Niniane’s lap. ‘There sits a son of the royal line of Avalon—and son to the Great Dragon.’”

At one point in the novel, Viviane says implacably, “They must learn not to think shame of holy things!”

And yet she could use a medicinal “weapon” against an unborn child that a mother desperately wants! For her, that “must” is a political imperative. Not far from how Balin the “Christian” feels when he says, “I beg you, my Lord King, let me strike down all these wizards and sorcerers in the name of the Christ who hates them all—”

Not all Pagan’s would be willing to go this far. Certainly Kevin the bard would not. Be he can still betray the same sort of disdain for Christians that some Christians reserve for him. “Though even Taliesin shares his chamber with the bishop— I do not admire his taste,” Kevin says of Merlin, “I would sooner be housed in the stable with the other donkeys!” Morgaine is not above curling her lip at the extremism of her rivals on the other side of the ideological fence. “Gwenhyfar is overpious,” Morgaine murmurs at one point, “and felt her lip cruel in disdain.”

While someone like Viviane can offer a back-handed compliment to someone like Arthur who she regards as a good king, even if he is compromised, so also, even someone as devoutly Christian as Gwenhyfar can see that Morgaine the priestess of Avalon is a good person. “How could any woman be so good when she worshipped devils and refused Christ?” she asks herself of Morgaine.

Pagans (as well as Christians) in the story can be rather harsh with any member of their own side who adopts any of the accoutrements of the other side’s faith. Morgaine at one point, criticizes Keven the Merlin of adopting too friendly a posture towards Arthur’s Christian Court. She excoriates him for “slippery sloping” himself into assimilation by not standing up to every Christian policy. “Next you will say you have become a Christian!” she scolds Kevin, “Why wear you not beads and a crucifix?”

“Do you truly think it would make such a great difference, Morgaine, if I did so?” Kevin responds.

In previous posts, I have highlighted Marion Zimmer Bradley’s critique of the brand of Christianity she deems offensive. My theme here is her willingness to allow her Pagan characters to make moral mistakes as well. Their belief in the Goddess does not render them immune to their humanity in other words.  Take for example this passage in book three of the novel where Morgaine basically concocts a “date rape drug” to give to Lancelot.

“But first Morgaine would give him this potion which would put him at the mercy of the rut in him, so that he would not stop when he found he held not an experienced woman and his paramour, but a shrinking virgin. . . . For a moment Morgaine stopped to pity Elaine, because what she was cold-bloodedly arranging was certainly something like rape.”

“For a moment she thought she should seek out Elaine, try to prepare her, encourage her to think of this as the priestesses were taught to think of it: a great force of nature, clean and sinless, to be welcomed as a current of life, sweeping the participant into the torrent . . . but Elaine would think that even worse sin.”

And the Goddess approves of this?

And then there is this thinly veiled endorsement of drug use.  

“They looked like a couple of dried seeds, but they were the tiny mushrooms which grew so rarely near Avalon. They were no use as food, and most folk thought them poison, for they would cause vomiting and purging and a bloody flux; but taken sparingly, fasting, they could open the gates to the Sight . . . this was a gift more precious than gold.”

No doubt many true pagans will not see this as anything unsavory. I guess I prefer to come by my “sight” naturally.

The pagans of the Mists of Avalon believe that their world view is perishing. They see the need to defend it and to resurrect it (“the lost cause”). Avalon stands in for a symbol for a way of seeing the world that “is vanishing into the mists” (in this novel, literally). Soon, no one will be able to find it. No doubt, some people today think the same way about their country, their faith, their sense of morality, or their ethnic identity. They fear that unless something is done soon, an ancient and revered way of life will disappear under the avalanche of something terribly inferior. No sacrifice to keep that from happening would be too great.

“Then all the more must we move quickly, to bring Arthur down and set a king on the throne of Britain who will restore Avalon to the world and the Goddess. . . .”

“’If Avalon dies,, said Niniane, ’then Britain is without her heart and will die, for the Goddess has withdrawn her soul from all the land.’”

Just as Marion Zimmer Bradley creates characters who see the ideology of their pagan opponents as manifestations of immaturity or evil, so also do the pagans regard the doctrines of the Christians in an equally patronizing way.

“No doubt, thought Morgaine, he [Arthur] was telling the exact truth as he saw it. How could he be so good and wise a king, and have so little imagination? Or was this the secret of his kingship, that he held to simple truths and sought for no more? Was this why the Christian faith had lured him, that it was so simple, with a few simple laws?”

Through the central heroes of the story Viviane, Morgaine, Kevin, Taliesen the Merlin, Arthur, and Lancelot, Marion Zimmer Bradley has given us a picture of any divided community where there is an ideological majority and a minority – where sides are pitted against one another in a Darwinian struggle for survival and the battle is won and lost in skirmishes over control of  for the education of children, the struggle for control of political power, and the ever contested battlefield of the public imagination. Lancelet may be the story’s true heroic character for he believes in loyalty, in friendship, in integrity, in bravery, in fidelity to oaths, in justice, and basically in the symbol of Camelot. Were Lancelet to obtain power, we could see him working as a conciliatory force of mediation (even as Arthur tries to do but is inhibited from doing by his commitment to Gwenhyfar). At some point in book three, Lancelet makes this rather stunning confession of pragmatism: “’It is what happens in the soul of the man,’ said Lancelet,

“Not whether it is Christian or pagan or Druid. If Gareth faces the mystery in his heart, and it makes him a better man in his soul, does it matter whence it comes, from the Goddess or from Christ or from that Name the Druids may not speak—or from the very goodness within himself?”

It makes you wonder if both sides would not make a Better Britain if they could all agree with Viviane, “not to think shame of Holy things” (either yours or someone else’s). It makes you wonder if we might not live in a better world if both sides could stop periodically and ask tough questions of their own sides. For example, at one point, Morgaine is thinking about how screwed up all the romantic connections she is familiar with are – people winding up with people other than the ones they love and what-not. “it is just like the God of the Christians to make such blunders—he does not like lovers,” she says. And then adds as an afterthought, “Or is it the Goddess who jests cruelly with us?”

Conversely, at one point, after Gwenhyfar has been raped by the evil Maelgwn, she starts to question the veracity of her trust in her Christian world view. “Perhaps it is all a great lie of the priests,” she speculates momentarily “so that they may tell mankind what to do, what not to do, what to believe, give orders even to the King.”

The entire story hinges on the ability of the central pragmatists (mediators and moderators and synchronizers) to withstand the pressures of the extremes:

“’He [Arthur] must swear again to honor his oath to Avalon, or you must get the sword from him again,’ said Niniane, ‘and you are the only person living to whom this task might be entrusted. Excalibur, the sword of the Holy Regalia, must not remain in the hands of one who follows Christ.’“

Extremists. They will be the death of us all.

Question for Comment: What is your relationship to extremism now that I have told you mine? How much compromise do you allow yourself and others and how do you determine where those lines will be?