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On Finding Portly with Pan
One of the books I read again and again is Kenneth Grahame’s *The Wind in the Willows*. Here Grahame gives us the scene wherein Rat and Mole find at last the fat little otter child Portly sleeping peacefully at the feet of the great Pan himself. There is elsewhere beautiful writing to be found among children’s classics. There is no writing more beautiful than this.
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible color, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”
“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”
Not as a stranger
I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.
Four out of five books I read these days are books I’ve read before. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany, a novel cut to the measure of the Samuel Johnson maxim just posted and a story as involving on the fourth read as it was on the first some twenty years ago.
Why so much rereading, and all of it satisfying? For reasons having to do with the lyric power of that line from the epic of Job, that opening anthem of the Burial Office of the Book of Common Prayer. To read again words that fortify, words to live with is, as the poet L. E. Sissman said, to “return not as a pilgrim but as a familiar, almost a friend.” To put the same thing in a lapidary way and without being the least bit lugubrious about it, I reread books for the same reason I keep coming back to church; because I know I’m going to die. Sissman continues:
A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.
On Memorial Day, we pay public tribute to those who lost their lives fighting for our country. But how do we live with the memory of the dead the rest of the year? The Civil War killed more soldiers than all other wars from the Revolution to Korea combined. In her 2008 book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War — one of the best books you will read this year — historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes about the impacts of these unprecedented levels of death on 19th-century Americans. In this interview with Back Story with the American History Guys, Faust, the President of Harvard University, talks about how the Civil War altered the American way of dying. [Book tip thanks to Billy Shand.]
Augustine's Confessions
When my son Evan took a course at Wheaton called “Classics of Western Literature” he asked me what I thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I said I had met Beatrice, actually, and it turns out that her name is Victoria. The way he and his roommate kept their room, I added, would remind his mother of Dante’s description of hell. He smiled and changed the subject, saying he had also read again Augustine’s Confessions — he’d read it in high school — a book which he knows to bring up is to get me started.
We live in confessional times. Secrets once deliberated behind closed doors, sins once examined between priest and penitent, crimes once addressed by blind justice — all have become fodder for newspaper features, radio shows and TV news and programming. Victim and offender alike think nothing of appearing together on Dr. Phil or Oprah or 60 Minutes.
The guiding premise seems to be that if people tell their story — with enough anger, passion and candid details — they forget the past; they will have justified themselves before and/or absolved themselves of whatever burden they’ve laid at the public’s feet. Even a Christian is encouraged, above everything else, to tell his or her own story, as if its very uniqueness commands priority over the story of the faith.
By its very title, St. Augustine’s Confessions ought to attract a wide audience, promising as it does to be a tell-all book of the same genre as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Many of us who opened it first as adolescents scanned through it quickly in hopes of discovering salacious revelations and lurid stories of low life in pagan antiquity. Little did we realize how much we mirrored the young Augustine by these very expectations!
The Confessions ought to be a handbook for the would-be storyteller, but it isn’t. Not that there isn’t a story contained therein: Precocious army brat from a small town, gifted student with a penchant for public speaking, academic forever exploring different life-styles. But given the stories that now assault us, Augustine’s is pretty mild stuff regarded simply as story. The stolen pears pitched at pigs, his fondness for Latin literature, even his mistress (more like a common-law wife) from whom he parts — these hardly seem to us the black-as-night sins which Augustine depicts them to be. Comparatively, the outlines of Augustine’s story differ not all that much from those of many a clever graduate student pursuing a tenured-track job at a small college.
But Augustine’s purpose in sitting down in 397 A. D. to pen his Confessions was not primarily to confess his story — at least not to start, not at the beginning of the Confessions Book One wherein our hero is introduced. We need to flip ahead to Book 10, the point past which most bookmarks never venture. Read quickly, Book 10 offers us a dry, philosophical tract on human memory. Studied closely, it provides us with the wondrous key by which to comprehend Augustine’s overall purpose.
For Augustine, memory is much more than the simple ability to recount past events. Memory is best pictured by several different metaphors: the abyss of human consciousness, a vast warehouse from which we can call up a variety of past impressions, even the stomach of the mind. Augustine tells us, “I find in memory what I have to say and produce it from that source.” Memory is a land to be entered, explored and inhabited.
But, most important, memory provides Augustine with a ladder and road to God. In exploring the mystery of what we remember, Augustine exclaims, “As I raise above memory, where am I to find you? My true good and gentle source of reassurance, where shall I find you? If I find you outside my memory, I am not mindful of you. And how shall I find you if I am not mindful of you?”
As Augustine recounts his story, what is most significant are not his individual, sinful deeds, as important as these may be. What is most significant is that these deeds come to assume a shape in the telling. And this very shape comes to witness to God’s gracious existence. God may not be contained in his memory but, by reviewing his memory and rehearsing his life, Augustine discovers himself moving toward the mystery of God.
What is radical, then, about Augustine’s Confessions is not the story he confesses. Augustine did not write to catalogue his sins; that is, to tell all. Others in Late Antiquity wrote “confessions” — life stories about their moral progress from Point A to B to C. They were often more graphic in their depictions of sin than Augustine. What gives the Confessions its radical power is that Augustine is concerned not to move neatly from Point A to Point B, from tempestuous sin to placid redemption; instead he rejoices to remember everything, to remember correctly before God’s eye. Light and darkness, sin and redemption, immortality and corruption become wondrously juxtaposed before God’s gaze. Thus, Augustine can immediately follow a vivid account of his mother’s almost beatific vision at Ostia with a dark account of her stroke and death. The woman whose mind was lifted to the very frontiers of heaven is the very same woman who “explained her thoughts in such words as she could speak, then fell silent as the pain of her sickness became worse.” His writing that recounts her dying and death give us some of the most heartbreaking sentences in any literature.
The Confessions is not a seamy exposé addressed to a prurient audience; from beginning to end, it is a prayer addressed to God — a prayer for the Holy Spirit. And in being found by the Holy Spirit, Augustine discovers a truth at which every saint seems finally to arrive: Unlike the New Age pabulum which passes for spirituality, the Christian life is not a matter of forgetting, of moving smoothly onward and upward, of letting the inner child blurt out past mistakes in order to become the master of your own story. The Christian life is a matter of being able to discover and confess, confess to God, that in Christ we are enabled to remember all things; and that all things, good and bad, come to possess, through Christ, their glorious unity, even a sacrifice of praise offered to the Most High.
John Miller interviews Sarah Ruden
- MILLER: Would the Aeneid be better if Virgil had finished it?
- RUDEN: It’s hard to imagine how a finished work would have been better. The remaining twelve books, according to later sources, were going to be about the war ending and the Julian dynasty becoming established. But this existing story is cool for ending where it does. An essential thing about a classic is that it is just handed to us to struggle with, like life. It serves our freedom and dignity by allowing us to make up our minds about most of the meaning.
- The most esteemed Greek tragedies end almost this way, right after the climax. You might get a summary of what has happened, but you don’t get everything tidied up. Critics from Aristotle onward have disliked an author barging in as a fixer. The deus ex machina is the oldest manifestation of this attitude. It declares, “I, the author, am telling you what fate is like and what the gods are like, and assuring you that virtue and suffering will always be rewarded, in spite of what the myth and your own experience tell you.”
- It’s not clear that Virgil would have produced a Roman version of this, but I bet it would have been tempting to give the second half more ideological force than the first half had. This is the endemic disease of sequels, which I first noticed in reading Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. Little Women was interesting — tragic, full of disappointment and stupidity and compromise; it was believable. In the sequel, a lot of mawkish puppets were acting out Alcott’s father’s educational theories. It’s not just a phenomenon of the movies, but goes clear from the later Euripides to the later Tarzan episodes, where Jane and Boy create a mid-fifties suburban jungle treehouse.
- MILLER: Why should people even bother with Virgil today? Isn’t he just a dead white male?
- RUDEN: Well, I have an intense and intimate relationship with literature. I look in an author for some of the things I look for in a friend or a lover. Most of the authors I choose are dead and white, which makes sense. They are privileged. Their own grievance is small enough to be put aside, so that they can take in what’s happening around them. Who wants to live with somebody who can’t do this?
- Put more bluntly, why would I live with someone who treats me like a moron, as if I can be entertained and instructed, and asked to give something meaningful in return, by someone with nothing in her brain but the mean things done to her or her ancestors?
- Virgil would have been stumped to be told that someday a woman would translate him, but he respected me much more than race-gender-class authors do, by respecting the complexity of the world, which is a respect for all possibility. Worrying about him being dead, white, and male is like worrying about the gender, color, and mortality of the Labrador who pulls me out of a lake and saves my life. For me, having something to think about is life.
- MILLER: What’s the point of learning a dead language such as Latin? Isn’t it more useful to study Spanish or Chinese?
- RUDEN: I picture the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who squeaks, “But I’m not dead yet!” and “I’m feeling better!” and “I think I’ll go for a walk now!” to keep from getting loaded onto the cart with all the actual corpses. Only a deliberate whap on the head kills him.
- Who says this language is dead? Is literature dead? Is the West dead? Check in early next year, when my book on Paul of Tarsus comes out, and see how reading the “dead” language of Koinē Greek can challenge what is actually dead in us.
These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers… . [H]e serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.
News regarding the oldest part of Oxford University’s Bodleian library, called Duke Humfrey’s Library. The university’s Health and Safety Officer has taken away all the stepladders. “Laurence Benson, the library’s director of administration and finance, said: ‘The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location — where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the Health and Safety office.’”
So the books will be kept where they have been safely consulted for more than four centuries but due to someone looking after the health and safety of bibliophiles, a third of the books in the library will never again be consulted, safely or otherwise. “Of all tyrannies,” said C. S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Social Constructionism: The Self As So Much Sausage
Isaac Babel’s fate illustrates a key tenet of Soviet ideology, perhaps the single most important one. I have in mind the doctrine that there is no such thing as human nature or individual selfhood. As thinkers from John Locke to Margaret Mead and today’s many “social constructionists” like to say, people are simply whatever they are conditioned to be. In his 1921 treatise, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology, Bukharin claimed that
if we examine each individual … we shall find that at bottom he is filled with the influences of his environment, as the skin of a sausage is filled with sausage meat… . The individual himself is a collection of concentrated social influences, united in a small unit.
And that is all he is.
It follows that selfhood cannot be violated. Individual rights do not exist because individuals do not exist. Human nature places no limit on social engineering because human nature does not exist in the first place. Brent concludes:
The endpoint of Bukharin’s logic is that everyone is a nonperson… . Inwardness and all that comes with it, selfhood, consciousness and conscience were nothing but the illusions of a long history of Western metaphysics. What remains after the illusions of the bourgeois sausage, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” universal justice, or truth are scraped away? Power alone and its terror, a fury that in Lenin’s words can express itself and “therefore must.” … The physical destruction of individuals had long been preceded by their philosophical negation.
Marxism-Leninism claims to be materialist, but, in fact, it is governed by ideas. It is the idea of social constructionism — certainly not empirical reality — that led Stalin and so many since to treat people as the wholly redesignable products of their environment, as so much sausage.
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Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion, reviewing Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent.
