It’s not a great leap from GK Chesterton’s “Charles Dickens” to Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”. At least, it presents itself that way to me. Chesterton sees the core of Dickens’s character and achievement in an essential optimism, some of which is inidvidual and some of which is inherited from the post-revolutionary optimism of his times, the mood that engendered the great reforms of Britain’s political system in the 1830s. Chesterton himself writes as though sending an epistle from inside the dark, oppressive regime of the Enemy, a brooding systemic pessimism. Those of you familiar with McCarthy see where I’m going.
I think of my years in Ethiopia, when I would awkwardly try to explain the America that I knew. The America they knew from afar was a place of shining optimism and possibility. I told them my America was a place of sadness and grief. We were a people who were haunted by our crimes and history and politics. We were violent, and we were haunted by fear. I told them I had travelled a lot, and I had never encountered a people as sad as the Americans.
My impression may be wrong-headed, but it does explain a lot. Look at the Republican party. It’s the party of distraction. Imagine a person avoiding all feelings of guilt or remorse, and you might have a recognizable profile. It’s not Trump; he is relatively soulless and incapable of remorse. That’s why he serves as a good fantasy figure for Republicans. No, it’s the Republican voter.
Fantasy is the party’s product now. It offers no policy. It offers no ideas for governance. It offers a cult’s creed and world view for people who want escape into addictive rages and grandiose futurescapes. QAnon – the fever dream of a porno merchant – was tailormade for the modern dystopic Republican Party.
This is the dark side of democracy. When people are bored by or distracted from the business of self-governance, then proto-fascists enter with their opiate dreams for sale. Oddly enough, the country does continue to run, like the auto whose driver has fainted, even when the people of a democracy have fall into weird reveries, even when they vote for parties according to the cults they represent, rather than the policies they will implement.
I think McCarthy would agree that the country is a sad place. His book, “Blood Meridian” seems a kind of shorthand compilation of all the crimes and perversions that have made American history what it is. His characters are animated by something very different than idealism. All of them, that is to say, except the weird archon, Judge Holden.
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Sunday, January 24, 2021
I started this month’s rambling lit rants with an objective in mind, which was simply to discuss my December reading, particularly the two books that fired my imagination most. One was “Julian”, and the other was “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy. Combining Vidal and McCarthy was not easy. As I commented somewhere on social media, the combination made for a case of indigestion. That’s all right. We pay a price gladly for our indulgences and feasts in times like these.
I’ve commented at length about “Julian”, but have neglected Mr McCarthy. And I will have to delay my comments on “Blood Meridian” once more because I can’t stop thinking about GK Chesterton’s introductory chapter in “Charles Dickens”. No one will mind. It’s somehow fitting – (the vague evasion in ‘somehow’ very McCarthy-like) – that I suspend McCarthy this way, between two wide horizons, the one left behind in December and the one ahead, undefined and ever-receding.
There’s something so appealing about Chesterton’s thought process that I can’t quite let it go. Chesterton suggests that Dickens is misunderstood. Dickens had lost much of his popularity in the several generations preceding Chesterton’s book, and GK tries to explain it by applying his theory about the essential optimism of the times following the French Revolution. The gloomy Realists and Post-Romantics of the second half of the century found Dickens’s exuberance jarring.
He goes further. To write fiction is to exaggerate, he claims. The character of the exaggeration will seem naturalistic or unrealistic depending simply on the author’s choice of qualities to exaggerate. Dicken’s characters seemed comical and enjoyable to his peers and grotesque to later generations, simply because joy became a less ‘natural’ quality to exaggerate in contrast with sorrow. There is something very rational in this idea, and it might even be true. GK goes on to predict that Dickens’s comeback will depend on a revival of his values. It may well have been that Dickens’s popularity did rebound, say, in the post-war years of the 50s and 60s. I don’t know enough to comment. But it does seem likely to me that his status now rides high whatever the mood.
I think this little exposition appeals to me as an older parent of young children, tending, when left alone, toward the darker moods of autumn, and then amazed and heartened by the bright hues of spring that my little girls bring into the room with them.
I can also identify as a writer of farce. He hints at a notion that I had been entertaining myself when he comments that “exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow,” and when he likens Dickens’s impulse to farce with Shakespeare’s. “We understand a devout occultism, an evil occultism, a tragic occultism, but a farcical occultism is beyond us.” There is definitely something to all this, and my intuition that it was so led me into researching the Commedia dell’Arte and the roots of Renaissance farce in medieval passion plays and troubadours.
Sunday, January 17, 2021
I always liked Mr Gilbert Keith Chesterton. GK seemed like a genial spirit among his jaded Edwardian and interwar contemporaries, who were busy exploring the bleaker corners of modernism. He was a professed Catholic and a prolific author. He wrote about his faith, and he seemed an unshakeable voice of optimism. That’s not something to be dismissed too lightly, as I think we can agree upon during these dark days of lockdowns and rogue presidents.
I picked up his book on Dickens second-hand a while ago, and with a moment free for pleasure, I dove into it this weekend. Right away, I was transported … no further than the mind of GK Chesterton.
I enjoy the magisterial pace of the writing of this era, probably a Victorian hangover from when writers were paid by the word and when readers had lots of time on their hands. He doesn’t start with Dickens at all but with an obscure question of the definition of terms. “Much of our modern difficulty,” he writes, and immediately finds a place for his favourite subject in the first sentence of a book about Dickens “in religion [of course] and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word ‘indefinable’ with the word ‘vague’.” This is how he starts the book! I was laughing already. I can really enjoy this kind of writing, when it’s done with some panache, this high flight over the subject at hand, among clouds of rhetoric.
He sets up one faux controversy to lead us to another: why are there no modern ‘greats’, when we can all agree that there were a complete set of them in the nineteenth century? It surprised absolutely no one, I imagine, that he answered the question with a moral comparison between the two epochs, claiming that among the generation or two after the French Revolution, there was a passionate belief in equality and an exhilarating atmosphere of possibility.
Fine, the pragmatic reader is thinking, happy to yield on all points, all founded on precious little but fine-sounding abstractions, just to get to the first concrete detail about Charles Dickens. I can fairly hear the grinding of teeth among my contemporaries launching into this book. No one has patience for this style anymore. I’m marketing a book now. I know very well that we have no liberty to start a book this way in our day and age. It’s our loss, like our impatience with small talk. “It’s so false,” we say dismissively, revealing more about our brittle mental architectures than about age-old conventions.
What GK is doing, of course, is setting the stage for a meditation of who Dickens was and what he did, providing historical context and a mood, and doing so in a relatively economical way, if you think about it. The light, absurd, and unanswerable questions GK starts with are just riddles to tease the mind gently into a perspective, like leading a guest to the window with the fairest view. I read GK’s introduction, and I’ve taken on board a sense of the zeitgeist of his times rather comfortably. I’m ready for the entrance of the ‘great’ man.
Thursday, January 14, 2021
I took a minute on the Metro to read from the book I had packed, handy because it was small, a memoir-style travel book by John Banville called “Prague Pictures”. I hadn’t gotten far before I came to an interesting comment on scene-setting in stories.
Banville was reflecting on a description of Prague he had penned before he had ever seen the city. Some time later, he was visiting the city and comparing his description to the real thing. “Yes, I had got it right,” he writes, “to a startling degree. Why was I not pleased? In part because, standing there surveying my handiwork, I was struck yet again by the essential fraudulence of fiction. … It is all a sleight of the imagination, a vast synecdoche.”
I have to assume that Banville isn’t entirely serious here. It’s a light observation, perhaps meant to compliment Prague on its beauty, even as he seems to slight it. Maybe it’s a show of humility, though it reads rather as an indictment of the profession.
“Conjure a winter morning,” he says, “a river and a castle and a traveller disembarking with a book under his arm, and for the space of a page or two an implied world comes to creaky life.”
I’ve had occasion to have similar thoughts: a few brush strokes go a long way in setting a scene. It’s part of the magic of fiction. I’m not quite so dismissive of the technique, though. I don’t claim to do it well myself, but I do believe there’s an art to it.
The implication that scene-setting is easy and formulaic is problematic. For one thing, that assessment drops the reader out of any calculation. You may well be jaded about a writer speaking to him or herself, but that isn’t the case in a published work. When the author sets a scene, s/he connects with existing conceptions of a place and ‘place’ in general. It’s a complex data set that adds up to ‘place’, and all we can hope to do is activate a few evocative points – a vivid colour, shape, scent, sound, quality to the air, etc.
Some of his readers will be have been to Prague, some will not. The ones who haven’t will have a romantic image of it that may be more vivid than the memory of those who have been. Those who have been will have had different experiences. For some American readers, the same data points might evoke Ghent as easily as Prague. But the image awakened is theirs. Does this automatically mean that the author was lazy?
Finally, I have to question Banville’s rather summary judgement of success: “I had got it right to a startling degree.” I’m not sure what that means. He got the river and castle in the right place? He had captured in writing exactly the feeling that he himself was now experiencing? How is that a measure of the reader’s experience?
I wouldn’t want to go too far in the defence of artistry. Laziness in success is a virtue, after all. But this account of it doesn’t add up.
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Travelogue 962 – January 13
Grace, Anyway
Grace is an interesting concept, anyway. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea, the divine parent’s kiss on the brow, as it were. Taken out of its controversial context in Christian church history and theological history, it’s a beautiful notion.
Dipping a toe into that embroiled church history, you see that grace plays a defining role. It’s the concept that stands in the middle of most historical doctrinal disputes. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t it bizarre, for example, that reformers broke from the Catholic Church, declaring ‘faith alone’, only to agree in quick order that most of humanity was damned before they were born? That the thread leading there should have originated in a notion as liberal as grace seems odd.
Having children encourages you to meditate on ideas like grace. You wonder at the gift of life and are overwhelmed by parental love. You see the spark of life and the innocence in a baby’s eyes, and you forgive yourself for indulging in sentimental ideas about souls and God. The baby and the love she inspires are gifts. If there is a God, then He/She/It is the giver.
My child has built her small models of dragons from the pieces of her magnet set. She tells a story about these dragons, how we found their eggs outside in the bushes and brought them home. The eggs hatched and now we have to take care of the babies. “But wasn’t this the mama dragon?” I ask. “This is the mama dragon,” my girl assures me, sensing no contradictions.
Baby weaves her stories quite spontaneously, and, though the subject is fantasy, the voice is authentic. How can she do that? It must relate to the innocence I’ve mentioned, the gift of grace. She is the live witness to the events of the story. There is nothing false about her vision nor the description of it. Therefore, it’s true in an essential way.
If I invented a dragon story, I would be weighing plot choices and weighing words, and therefore, aware of a shadow version that might be just as ‘true’, introducing a note of falseness. “It’s just a story,” we tell our kids when they’re scared. But the distinction is false in the eyes of grace. Grace is generous.
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
There are certainly some oddballs in this movement to ‘Stop the Steal’. Apparently, Senator Josh Hawley, the eager beaver who started the rush of conservative senators to challenge the states’ electors in Congress last week, thinks it all started with Pelagius in the fourth century. Pelagius was a monk who led a popular Christian ascetic movement in Rome. Pelagius blamed the moral state of most Christians on an exaggerated idea of the power of grace. He taught that it was good works that won salvation. The monk was authoritatively denounced and abused by the church hierarchy, including luminaries like Augustine and Jerome. And, of course, by every good Protestant since Luther.
Exhibit A in Hawley’s indictment of the liberals’ corrupt Pelagianism is the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. When Justice Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” he was channelling the fourth-century monk and leading us all to perdition.
Yes, there are some odd ducks leading this Parler incel rebellion. This Yale Law School grad who raises a fist to the hillbillies, this awkward adolescent trying too hard to sound hip, this poster boy of bad judgement, this uncharitable pastor to the Proud Boys, our strutting prophet from Missouri, Josh, he is not shy about announcing who is damned and where democracy must be clipped and tailored to meet God’s requirements.
William Barr is quoted as saying, while he was the U.S. Attorney General, that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.” In other words, for a fallen people like liberal America, democracy is no longer an option.
Monday, January 11, 2021
Ultimately, I’d rather spend five hundred pages with Vidal’s Julian than with Gibbon’s. The novel is great entertainment. Vidal’s elegant style, of questionable value in understanding the real Julian, is valuable on its own merits. It’s a novel; it’s a piece of art.
How faithful do we need to be to the spirit of history? In the case of entertainment, we post-moderns have decided: not very. We stray far further from source material than Vidal did, some six decades after “Julian” was published. The farther we go, the more we make excuses. Now our histories are speculative. Our fantasies are written to stimulate thought: what would it be like to be (for example) Julian? Notice I didn’t say ‘would have been like’. We’re not asking what it was like for him, but what it would be like (for us) to be him.
In between family programs on Netflix, during long bathroom breaks, I’ve been indulging in the old Robert Downey Jr. version of Sherlock Holmes. These movies diverge significantly from the Conan Doyle canon and from traditional portrayals of Holmes. (The movies pre-date the Cumberbatch Holmes.) I realize that Sherlock Holmes is no historical figure, but he’s a fictional character with historical significance. Why we loved the new film versions of Sherlock was analogous to why we liked the Vidal version of Julian. We got to dress up and play act.
I’m guessing that a hundred years ago the primary enjoyment people derived from Holmes as a character was amazement. That was probably the first response to superheroes in post-war pop culture. “Imagine if there were someone like that!” Things changed, and amazement wasn’t enough. We wanted to be amazing. “Imagine if I could do that!” And when we needed to play the part of our heroes, the narrative style changed. We needed psychological access, and we needed fantasy adventures that were manufactured in contemporary, recognizable formats and settings. Holmes’ London became a steampunk theme park, glowing, larger than life, sinister.
Entertainment’s approach to history, ransacking the cupboards on a long and boring weekend, is essentially an act of cannibalism. We’re mincing up the human experience for a tasty snack. It’s no harsh indictment to say so; I’m a remorseless consumer of all of it. But I do think it pays to be self-aware. As much as we’d like to tell ourselves that, say, Steampunk Sherlock is a kind of thought experiment that challenges us to see narratives and characters in new ways, and so on … no; it’s brain candy for the culture cannibal.
We need to think once in a while about how culture candy contributes to tooth decay; how people raised on a diet of superhero cosplay grow up to see vandalizing the Capitol building as the moral equivalent of revolution. Dressing up makes it real. The drama justifies itself, and all damage is collateral. Think of the dummies who were shocked they were tear-gassed on January 6. This is my Experience, they bluster.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
The thing is, there is no neutral voice. That’s especially true in historical fiction. An author may decide on his or her own voice as the most neutral platform for story-telling, but it’s never thoroughly neutral. Every vernacular communicates its own place and values. There is at the core of Vidal’s Julian an east coast boarding school alum, wry and earnest in equal measures, jaded, smart and ineffectual. This accent starts to shed authenticity as the character matures, becomes powerful, and becomes successful, successful not as an intellectual, but as a general and politician.
Finally, Vidal’s voice finds its biggest obstacle when it comes to religion. Julian may have become the patron saint of anticlerical liberals, but he was far from being one himself. Being anti-Christian did not make him anti-religion. Vidal does address this in his book, largely in marginal notes by his philosopher characters. But the characterization begins to break down, just when Julian grows into the character that history knows best, the Apostate. I believe it’s the effect of the voice, seeming such a natural fit in earlier passages but becoming more restrictive. The fact is, if the Apostate is the most popular version of Julian, he is also the most difficult Julian for moderns to understand. He was a product of his times, a believer in magic and omens and gods who required blood sacrifice.
In crafting a more ‘authentic’ voice for Julian, I think we would be forced to strike a pose less likeable. This was a man bound by and feeling deep sympathy for tradition, hierarchy and authority – and the Roman principle of auctoritas, – and a man who became a very effective wielder of power. We’re already miles from Vidal’s Julian as genial genius.
Examining narrative voice begs an interesting question about the motivation for historical fiction. Is it (1) to live out the events and bear witness? Or is it (2) to inhabit the consciousness of a historical figure? If ‘inhabitation’ sounds creepy, let’s reframe it as a privileged moment with the historical celebrity, breaking bread with someone fascinating, conversing with them, gaining a glimpse into their thinking? Vidal’s voice is appropriate for the latter task, but at the expense of the former task, bearing witness. Vidal did his research. His account of events can generally be trusted, but I’m not sure we have gained much more understanding about those events than we could have had from Gibbon. What we gained was the chance to dress up and play act.
Saturday, January 09, 2021
“On 22 May, 337, Constantine died at Nicomedia, to his apparent surprise, since he had just taken the water cure at Helenopolis and all the omens suggested a long life.” This is Vidal’s Julian, early in the faux memoir that comprises most of Vidal’s novel. If it sounds like the kind of light and cutting commentary you might have overheard at a New York cocktail party in the 60s, well, there is a reason for that. It sounds an awful lot like the author himself. Vidal was always one for delicious ironies, like the Christian emperor disappointed in his pagan omens.
One of the challenges in writing historical fiction is choosing the right voice. Do you make an effort to sound ‘authentic’? And how would you then define ‘authentic’? The attempt to sound, in this case, like a fourth-century Roman (Greek is closer to the mark) might have been more distracting than helpful. And it would have been only partially effective in any case. It would be hard enough to sound like, say, a contemporary French person while writing in English, let alone to sound like an ancient man speaking an ancient language. And how do we ‘sound like’ another culture in prose? I don’t think we awkwardly imitate an accent or sprinkle the text with anachronisms. I think we try to echo the cadences of thought. It’s highly unlikely that Julian would ever have framed the observation about Constantine’s death in just that way, in Vidal’s casual elegance. And it’s far less likely that it would have seen its way to the written page (parchment), particularly in a diary-like record of an emperor’s feelings.
Vidal made a choice. He wanted an accessible story, and an accessible character. The language is familiar, in a kind of affirmation that people haven’t changed that much, that we can imagine the experience of this remarkable historical figure. It works well through the narration of Julian’s youth, when he was, in essence a student and philosopher. We sense the innocence, the earnestness, and the erudition. (Of course, Julian was meant to be writing the story as a mature man, already emperor of the Romans, but the trick works.)
It’s when Julian is elevated to Caesar and sent to Gaul that we begin to perceive a few false notes. This is why I wonder if Vidal lost track of his original goal in telling the story. The project of writing a novel is a long one, and I don’t think it’s at all uncommon that authors evolve in their thinking as the story itself evolves, subtly changing course. Vidal, for example, may have begun the novel in anticipation of Julian’s showdown with the Christians, only to be distracted by the prince’s personal journey.
Friday, January 08, 2021
“It’s a political playbook based on one assumption: impunity.” I’m quoting this morning’s Guardian, specifically an article about the history of right-wing insurrection and violence since Charlottesville and leading into Wednesday’s debacle. The quote sums up my primary concern after the terror attack on the Capitol. Are there going to be consequences this time?
It’s been widely noted how differently the right-wing mob were treated than the BLM protesters who demonstrated in Washington not so long ago. There have been plenty of photos of that occasion posted on social media, lines of armoured police forces arrayed in front of federal properties. By contrast, the security forces were rather chummy with the Trump mob, posing for selfies with these hillbillies, and standing at ease along security lines. Until the assault began.
We’ve seen the video by now of Trump’s call to action on Wednesday, urging the idiots to march on the Capitol and promising he would be there with them. A few hours later, he was posting video telling them to desist and that “We love you. You’re very special.” Further, we find out (via an AOC tweet) that the D.C. Council’s first request for National Guard support on Wednesday afternoon was denied.
When are people finally to be held accountable? We finally have some consensus that this was domestic terrorism. People like Rep. Gaetz would like to convince … well, somebody, that it was actually Antifa posing as Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol building. But there are 50+ insurrectionists in prison. Will they come to trial? Then we will find out. Will Trump be prosecuted?
Another AOC tweet addressed Senator Hawley: “You fist-pumped insurrectionists and baselessly attacked our elections.” Why aren’t people like Hawley being questioned as accessories to treason? When do we get serious about threats from the right? For far too long, moderates and liberals have cringed, hoping this movement would fade away, muttering to themselves that they knew better. Why is the notion of confronting the right so frightening? Do they feel themselves complicit in some way?
Thursday, January 07, 2021
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), a Philadelphia native, noted that between the mob that stormed the Capitol on Wednesday and the Republicans holding up the certification of Biden’s win, it was sometimes difficult for him to tell whether “the sun is rising or setting” on democracy. - Washington Post, January 6
So a handful of Americans politicians with no higher principle than ambition place their hopes in the mob, and the Trumpist mob delivers in the way that mobs do, irrationally and destructively. They give us all a show that is shameful and, for four people, lethal. If it weren’t tragic, it would be laughable: all that noise just to run riot around a public building and, by the way, disrupt a meeting that was the last chance for their allies in Congress.
I was in the midst of some mild blog meditations about ancient Rome, centred around Gore Vidal’s novel about the Roman Emperor Julian. It seems appropriate that I’m focussed on Rome while Washington burns. A comparison is often drawn between ancient Rome and America. I’m not so sure it’s the best comparison. But the mind likes handy metaphors for doom. We want to interpret Roman history in linear Gibbonesque terms, a steady decline, starting as a moral crisis and becoming manifest in a collapse of civilization. That’s how the myth of the fall of Rome goes, anyway.
If we were to pursue that juxtaposition, America with Rome, and I were to place contemporary America on Rome’s timeline, it wouldn’t be at the fall of either Republic or Empire. I’d place it somewhere in the period of unrest between the Gracchi Brothers and Caesar, and probably earlier than later. There is still faith in the Republic, as the quick restoration of order yesterday and the general revulsion inspired the riot demonstrate. It took quite a while for the series of convulsions shaking the Roman Republic to bring it down altogether. There’s ample time for that. But I don’t think this analogy is the best.
I would choose a different epoch of political history for comparison, the hundred years or so after the French Revolution. Every generation brought revolution somewhere in Europe. If you look at France, there were changes in regime every generation, and those changes followed no clear pattern of evolution or decline. And if we take revolutionary France as our historical twin, then we get as a bonus the Parisian mob to spice up any tense situation; though, in fact, the Parisian mob leaned more left than right; though, in fact, last night’s mob was made up almost entirely of out-of-towners. It was a bold move, Trump’s attempt to resurrect the mob as a political tool. Trump’s successor as the new sleazy right-wing populist may make better use of the mob than he could. Let’s pray (work) for peace instead.
Finally, I have a hard time buying into a ‘rising or setting sun’ paradigm in American history. It’s a different world than the one in which the outsized Roman Empire fought off smaller nations hungry for territory, year after year, on every front. It’s perhaps a wilder world now; nobody has the luxury of a long and decadent decline.
Monday, January 04, 2021
“A dinosaur has a face,” my daughter tells me. We’re sitting together on the mat with her magnet set. She’s asked me to help her construct a mama dinosaur. My job seems to stay out of the way and admire her work. Each piece she tries, she explains to me. Why did she choose a mama dinosaur, I ask. Her answer is a story about the mama and her eggs.
All day long, tirelessly, the girls are telling stories. They imagine themselves as characters in stories. They construct fairy tales around their toys. Some of their inventions are wonderful. I think I’m a writer; I read and write stories every day. Even as a teacher, I’m thinking in narratives: lesson planning is a type of story-telling. Nothing matches the joy the girls bring to stories. They are close to the fountain of human invention. It’s refreshing.
My December reading was an odd combination of stories. Both were long novels that were more or less historical fiction – more in one case and less in another. One was “Julian” by Gore Vidal, a novel I’ve read at least once before. It’s the story of the fourth-century Roman Emperor who might have halted or slowed the conversion of the empire to Christianity if he’d lived long enough. This turns out to be the least interesting thing about him (as one’s religion often is).
The novel is presented in memoir form, with (fictional) commentary by philosophers who had been called to Julian’s court. Vidal’s style is so fluent and beautiful, the book is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Having been through the story before and having done quite a bit of writing in the interim, I read more critically this time. I’ve come to some interesting conclusions.
I noticed I was losing momentum as the story made its way toward a climax. We know what is going to happen: the emperor will lose his fight and his life. This should be where the story gallops ahead with full momentum. Instead, it lags. I find the character of Julian becoming less convincing and less engaging. Where I should be compelled toward dread, I’m becoming apathetic.
Either Vidal misjudged his reason for writing about this character, or he misjudged his plan of attack. I think it might be a bit of both. I use the term ‘plan of attack’ consciously. The truth is that Julian’s biggest surprise asset, and perhaps also his downfall, were his unexpected skills in waging war. I’m reminded of Julius Caesar, whose story I was reading in the fall. (I’m not the only one who saw a similarity – the Gauls saw Julian as a second Julius.) How Vidal’s novel would have benefitted from an injection of Caesar’s own narrative style!
Our (and probably Vidal’s) initial attraction to the figure of Julian is his minor role in the story of Christianity’s conquest of the empire. But we find ourselves appreciating him for altogether different reasons. He was the doomed prince who overcame his fate. He was the neglected boy who became a formidable general. He was the philosophy student who became a world leader.
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
And then, unexpectedly, you encounter a calm graciousness to this anarchic world. I awoke yesterday morning sick again with this autumnal malaise that seems to be my Dutch karma, a kind of Stuyvesant’s Revenge, a zombie cold-bug that never dies. I felt miserable. Nevertheless, I suited up for my morning errands. The family depended on me, after all.
I was moving slowly, unlocking my bike and wiping off the wet seat, feeling like an old man, and very gingerly swinging a leg over. I saw that one of my downstairs neighbours was watching with some amusement. He’s a Brit, and so I knew we could chat easily, without the usual awkwardness that attends small talk with Dutchies. I asked whether he would rather be in England for the holidays. He replied, “Oh, I left England for a reason.” And so the conversation went, sharing observations about our home countries and our holiday plans. He took an interest in the child’s seat on my bike; he has a young one about the age to start riding on his bicycle. All in all, it was a nice break in the routine.
When a few people deferred to me in the line at the Arab bakery, and even smiled, I knew something was up. There was some kind angel overseeing my morning. I smiled back gratefully. In the grocery store, the kids stocking the shelves courteously made way for me. From overhead, we enjoyed Adele singing something sentimental. I smiled at the continued British theme, and I even noticed something like a warmth in my heart as I listened to the song. I lingered as I held up item by item in front of the scanner, as I placed each item in my bag. I’m easily affected by small signs of kindness and grace. I wanted to soak it in, knowing it was a special and temporary dispensation.
Back home, the girls were just getting up. It was a holiday. They were in a sunny mood, and they wanted hugs. They each wanted to show me what they had built with their new magnet sets. Little Ren says, ‘Come look, Vader’. This way of addressing me is a habit she picked up from her big sister, who one day decided we were ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’. This was a cute phase, and one that Little Ren quickly adopted, though in a Dutch voice. She took my hand and led me.
It’s been a tough year. The headlines don’t offer much hope. Wouldn’t it be nice to see some congenitally mean figure like Mitch McConnell show sudden warmth, pause one morning to reflect on the fragility of nature, for example, or express just one small impulse, however hesitant, to be generous to another member of the human race? The cold cosmos shows more empathy, commiserating with me in a whispering voice on a dark morning, knowing somehow that my battery was low. And that is not to trivialize the kindnesses of my neighbours, of my family. Maybe these kindnesses are the dark matter that will hold the world together in the face of ignorance and evil.
Monday, December 28, 2020
I don’t suppose I’m the only who feels as though he is staggering toward the finish of this awful year, depleted of the hope that should inform these final steps toward the moment of renewal.
I reflect on the degradation of hope in America, a country founded in hope. I compare the years when my parents were raising young children, when the nation was illuminated with optimism (delusional, maybe, but heartfelt). There were no shadows, only sunshine. I am forced to compare those years to these dim ones in which I am forced to raise my small children.
The story of our moment has roots in the golden days of our fathers, of course, but the overt signs of decay are as old as the millennium, perhaps starting with 9/11 and accelerating through the false spring ten years later, when we realized that not all hope was well-founded, becoming a juggernaut with the advent of the Brexiteers and Trump, and finally igniting in combustible handwriting on midnight’s walls describing inevitable climate change and deadly contagions. It’s solstice now, and we ought to be gazing into our hearths in reflection and repentance, but there’s a man standing in his pyjamas outside in the snow, shouting that he will never recant. We despair that these rantings will be the death of peace; we will never have the silence we need to sum things up. We would like to choose our last impressions.
And so it is we welcome a Biden administration with exhaustion, with lack of conviction, perhaps through no fault of Biden’s or his team’s or his supporters’, but simply because we have been herded through an alley of shadows and beaten with sticks. When hope is a weak candle flame, the only people laughing are the rich and the desperate. Everyone else is at pains to produce a sincere smile.
Monday, December 21, 2020
Making it to the solstice was a rough journey, like most of 2020 was; much like the final approach to a clean oasis, only to find it surrounded by briar patches.
Tough as it is, we do arrive. Time makes sure of that, scratched as we may be by the thorns of pandemic lockdowns and government incompetence everywhere. We do arrive at that magic moment when the sun changes directions, halts its southern migration and turns its face back toward its neglected subjects in the north. Days will grow longer again. Discredited science tells us that. Our cumulative experience of shared winters also tells us that, if we would rather not heed those traitorous scientists who are continuously trying to slip microchips into our brains.
The holiday break and the latest lockdown almost arrived simultaneously. The ‘almost’ is operative here. In fact, the lockdown began three days before the end of term, and students found themselves having to present to teachers online. Part of the curriculum this term was oral presentations, and they were due to be graded on posture and body language, among other things. Now they were suddenly forced to address us sitting at a computer. It was awkward, and of course I failed everyone. (Not really.)
The whole year has been like this, and it has been exhausting. Education has been ad hoc and improvisational at every step, where creativity was lacking then simple blind tenaciousness sufficing, the students handled like lab rats whom we alternately isolated to keep safe and then herded together in order to be socialized and to give them their proper college experience. They seem rattled to me, encouragingly goofy at times, but their insouciance blunted by uncertainty.
Hope is a feathered thing, ready to soar into the winter storm, if necessary. It hasn’t abandoned even Donald Trump, hunkered down in his lonely luxury, tweeting inanities and eating ice cream, so why should it abandon the rest of us? Even as a new, fast-spreading strain of COVID appears in Britain, scaring us in our sleep, we look to the lengthening day, and then to the new year, (and then to the new president?) for new inspiration. Mundane life in lockdown is fuelled by rumour and hope. The day is reborn!
Saturday, December 19, 2020
It’s been forty years since John Lennon was shot and killed in Central Park. That’s as long as he lived. And that’s a sobering ratio. To give it some perspective, it’s been seventy years since Edgar Rice Burroughs died, at an age of a few years over seventy. Remember him, the creator of Tarzan? That’s a nice reminder of the power of Time.
Paul McCartney has also been in the news, just having released his ‘III’ album. I was reminded in a sentimental little piece written about McCartney that I found posted on Facebook of his touching little tribute to Lennon, found on his 1982 album, ‘Tug of War’. The tune was called ‘Here Today’. ‘If you were here today,’ he sings to his friend and song-writing partner.
There’s that little formula that I find so tragic, the theoretical ‘would’. ‘What would you say?’ McCartney asks. What would John Lennon say now, literally a lifetime later? From these innocent and sad speculations spring our insubstantial ghosts, our hauntings. I’ve been re-reading Gore Vidal’s novel about the Emperor Julian. What would Julian say, if he were here today? He would probably recommend we sacrifice a bull beside the Reflecting Pool in Washington.
These two icons, Lennon and McCartney, have cast long shadows over my life and thoughts. The good kind of shadow, the kind you trace on the sidewalk and measure yourself against. I remember a dream I had some time near the end of my youth, an image of a kind of personal Mount Rushmore. The faces were those of Lennon, Kerouac and Hemingway. That was years ago. I much prefer other authors now. I prefer McCartney to Lennon. It’s hard to shake those youthful icons, though, and there’s little reason to.
I idolized my brothers with a similar fervour. They were much older than I; they would remember the Beatles as a living artefact of their youth. The band was history by the time I was old enough to appreciate them. But as a teen, I idly projected the personae of the songwriters onto my brothers. John was the soulful and private Paul, and Michael was the iconoclastic John. It was the kind of emotional echoing that helps a teen place himself in a confusing world. The charismatic songwriters provided many of us with powerful archetypes in that era, archetypes almost divorced from reality, but not entirely.
I wonder what inspirational figures will fire the imaginations of my girls. They’re too young to attach to Greta. I’ve certainly lost track of the current slate of pop stars. I wish for them the same sort of love and inspiration I experienced with my heroes. And, inevitably, the same heartbreak, I suppose, if they live out the long lifespans that I want for them.
Thursday, December 10, 2020
Travelogue 950 – December 10
The Way Seems Long
I finally understand. For parents, this season is a competitive test of endurance. In Holland, we basically have two Christmas seasons, one for the kids at the beginning of December and one centred around the common date of the 25th. In addition, this family has one kid’s birthday in between those two Christmases and an anniversary at the end of November. This season – I see it now – is an Olympic event. It requires discipline and concentration. Frivolities must be pushed aside. The early years, when the children were young, were training for the more serious competition. One gauges one’s failures in the eyes of teachers and other parents, and one makes adjustments for the coming years.
I wake early, and I stretch. I do some breathing exercises. In the pre-dawn darkness, I turn on my desk lamp, and I read through strategy. I review gift lists and party schedules. One must have gifts not only for one’s own children, but for children’s classmates (in case of birthdays,) for children of adults in your network (in case of parties,) and gifts for one’s spouse, to keep morale up. There are holiday costumes; children have their picture days. One must review Christmas card schedules, for production or purchase of those cards, for inscription with signatures and cute notes, and then for posting. Cards should make it in time, not only for Christmas, but so that those who might be made to feel guilty are able to post something back. Conversely, some slack must be allowed in the schedule for our own surprises and miscalculations, people we’d forgotten about, people whose street addresses suddenly turn up, or those who unexpectedly re-emerge on stage after the first scene, so to speak, of the holiday variety show.
I see it clearly now. We are entering our athletic prime. We have performed all right this year, certainly better than last year. Objectively, there’s plenty of room for improvement. The next few years will be critical for our parenting career.
The timing of Little Ren’s birthday has seemed particularly cruel this year. She turned four, and in the Netherlands that means she starts school. Children are integrated into classes mid-year, whenever they have their fourth birthday. That means that, just as the temperatures are dropping, we are forced to figure out how to get two children to school in the morning. On the surface, that sounds simple. We’re already taking one, after all. But that one child was riding in my one child’s seat on the back of my bicycle.
We don’t have full daylight till nine in the morning, if you can call December light ‘full’ in any way. In fact, winter mornings leave one feeling uneasy and eventually disappointed. One glances into the sky, sensing something wrong. Even the sunny days are dim in some intangible way. Most mornings now, we pedal away from home with the bike light on, a tiny lamp that illuminates very little in the murky hour before dawn. The air is misty, and Baby Jos shrinks into her big jacket. The way seems long.
Saturday, December 05, 2020
Travelogue 949 – December 5
My Gift from Sinterklaas
It’s Sinterklaas, the day that Dutch children wake up to discover gifts that have been left for them in the night by the generous old saint. Me, I woke up early for an appointment to get a COVID test. I’ve had a cough and cold for weeks now, and the doctor won’t see me unless I get this test. I don’t think I have the virus, but it doesn’t hurt to be safe, anyway. The test is free, and easy to set up in my efficient new country. I made the appointment online, choosing a site I could reach on my bicycle.
Fortunately, there was no rain. In fact, the sun entered into a blue field of sky as I pedalled toward Schiedam. I had to marvel how far south the sun rises in December. There were a few clouds, scattered along the western horizon, but far less than we’ve seen all week. December came to us under heavy cloud cover. Mornings have been dark and wet. It’s been hard to tell exactly when dawn turns day. The light has been dim and watery, and everything glistened.
The testing centre in Schiedam is set in a warehouse district, long streets with anonymous buildings. One of these grim buildings has been taken over by the health service. Masked attendants guide cars one way and bikes another. Walking paths are delineated in green tape, and every few paces there is a station manned by young people with cheerful dispositions. They check identity. They pass you a labelled vial with a long stick. They assign you to a testing station. They bid you blow your nose and then hand you back the tissue in a plastic bag. They seat you. Finally, the nurse comes, clothed in protective gear from head to toe.
The young man assigned to me had a sense of humour. That’s always a nice quality in a torturer. He advanced with his swabs, and I was suitably humiliated for the sin of debility. I gagged, and I cried. He forgave me, and he sent me away, to wander like a lost soul along the forlorn paths outlined on the cold concrete floor of the sanitized warehouse. I emerged into the frigid morning air, redeemed by my suffering. I raced home in hopes I would be there before the girls ran downstairs to find their gifts.
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Travelogue 948 – November 26
Thanksgiving
This is my Thanksgiving. There’s no turkey, but there’s family. There’s no table full of treats; there’s no football; but there’s the comfort of being inside together on a gloomy fall day. We have our cosy evening routine together, quiet and humble.
On American Thanksgiving, family should be together. On Thanksgiving, we should share what we’re grateful for. For my part, I ponder gratitude very often. I know that’s different than being grateful. But it is an intriguing moral quality. Today it seems to me it’s an exercise in contrast. The Pilgrims faced a harsh world, but they took a moment to recognize what they had. At least, that’s the narrative we’ve inherited. If we hold a place in the calendar for thanksgiving, do we still see a harsh world out there?
The world’s been a little harsh on me. Not the starving-in-a-New-England-winter variety of harsh, just the coughing and sniffling variety, but still, it doesn’t seem fair that I battle this same cold every November. Every time I get out of bed and start working, I suffer a slow relapse. This drags on for weeks.
That’s what we do. We’re the species that picks ourselves up, dusts ourselves off, and starts all over again. That’s our virtue, Darwinian resilience and survival. The headlines are a wonderful portrait of it, a country enduring Trump’s criminal pathology and selfishness for two more months in the fragile hope of a new day; a world surviving wave after wave of COVID and finding the strength to problem-solve and to think about each other. This is a very functional form of gratitude. It’s an exercise of solace and of generosity. It’s taking a risk on a world might not turn out to be a horrible place.
Gratitude is more than recognizing the generosity of others, or the generosity of Nature or God. Gratitude is generosity itself. Grateful people give. Grateful people are gracious. They aren’t preoccupied by what they are owed or what they deserve.
Graciousness is humble. In 2000, I was disappointed in Al Gore for conceding as early as he did. I see things in a different light today. I see a generous spirit, someone that didn’t give up to despair. Many, many of us have graciously admitted our powerlessness in the face of COVID-19. We have listened to each other, tried to take care of each other. Where we failed, we picked ourselves up again. We spared a thought for our neighbours and family. And we struggled over better responses where we could have despaired and blamed others (China? God? Soros and Gates?), when we could have donned the sackcloth and wailed.
That’s it. That’s our Thanksgiving: looking to tomorrow with a humble faith that there’s some good there waiting.
Monday, November 23, 2020
Travelogue 947 – November 23
In the Shoe
We had no choice but to admit Sinterklaas into our house this year. Baby Jos came home from school one day determined to receive the man … and his gifts. On the fourteenth, Sinterklaas made his entry into the Netherlands. This is what he does every year; he travels from Spain in mid-November to set up his seasonal base here.
It was a sign of the times that we couldn’t leave our houses to greet Sinterklaas. Last year, Baby’s school left the school on an expedition to greet him at the harbour. We received a short video from one of the parents who had attended, the kids cheering along the wharf as Sinterklaas waved from his small barge. It was an occasion that Baby spoke about for a long time afterward and, indeed, still remembers vividly.
This year, Sinterklaas’s arrival was streamed. Of course, we couldn’t figure out the link. We watched on the telly. By the time we got the right channel open, Sinterklaas had already arrived, and he sat in state at the head of some staircase in the Hague, cheerfully receiving delegations from around the Netherlands. His assistants, the clownish ‘Piets’, gathered the gifts and took them inside. Each delegation had some characteristic gift, cheese or baked goods from their region, and many offered performances by some children. Sinterklaas was a good sport, not at all tired from his journey and enjoying all the visitors in the long caravan.
Sinterklaas is not Santa, the Dutch will tell you. And they’re right, though the two figures have similar historical roots. Sinterklaas doesn’t live at the North Pole. He comes earlier to relax in the Netherlands. He is a more public figure. He enjoys crowds. He has his ‘Piets’ to take care of him wherever they go. And he is less covert about his mission. We greet him into the Netherlands in the light of day, and he leads a parade.
I’ve been surprised and very entertained by Baby’s enthusiasm for Sinterklaas. She’s a believer! She draws pictures of him. She has coloured a beautiful picture of him arriving in his steamboat. After the old man’s ‘intocht’, or entry into the country, she set one of her shoes inside the front door and explained to us that Sinterklaas would be bringing gifts. This is the Dutch tradition, a gift every morning in the children’s shoes. Of course, no one had explained to us was that the gifts don’t start immediately, but closer to the holiday of Sinterklaas, which is the 5th of December. So now our girls have been receiving gifts every morning for more than a week already, and we have to keep going until the 5th! Sly girl.
Their excitement is so infectious that I don’t mind the hassle of stocking up on gifts. They run to look in their shoes first thing every morning. There’s something so powerful in the delight of a child.