The iconic photo of Dresden after the bombing raids — the surviving sculpture from the Frauenkirche. It makes an indelible impression -- summarizes the evil of war and (if I read it right) the undefeatable human spirit in one astonishing image. The statue was what was left of the Frauenkirche (the Church of Our Lady). The church was rebuilt, using some of the blackened stone.*
ETERNAL LIFE
Eternal life exists not only in the afterlife
There are souls so immortal they do not depart
So universal that they co-exist in both worlds
Like Moses who we know never died
To this day the sparks of his soul
Show us the way through the dark
So our Lubavicher who did not rest for forty years
Guided us across unfriendly lands and seas
Up late at night he listened to the arrhythmia of our hearts
And applied faith dressing wounds with warm words
For seven hours he stood on weakening legs
Offering blessings along with a dollar banknote
So that everyone would receive charity and kindness
He didn’t die he only lay down to get some rest
His heart did not stop beating in our breasts
As we speak ice is melting from the warmth of his words
And the pearls of his thoughts and not tears glow in our eyes
~ Henryk Grynberg, tr Oriana Ivy
It’s rare to encounter a poem as powerful as this one. I have to think back to the best poems by Yeats for comparison. Even then, it’s not the right comparison. “Eternal Life” stands on its own, a unique poem.
We know it as soon as we read the opening two lines:
Eternal life exists not only in the afterlife
There are souls so immortal they do not depart
And the first example of such a great soul is Moses, a leader like no other:
To this day the sparks of his soul
Show us the way through the dark
But this is actually an elegy for the Lubavicher Rebbe, an inspiring Hasidic leader. The poem doesn’t touch on his politics or the whole controversy of some followers regarding him as the Messiah. This is entirely about his tireless kindness, his loving service to the community.
I am particularly moved by this description:
For seven hours he stood on weakening legs
Offering blessings along with a dollar banknote
So that everyone would receive charity and kindness
It’s so reassuring to be able to trust that others will come to our aid in an hour of need.
Yes, the Rebbe did die in the physical sense — his body wore out and he succumbed to the universal fate. He died in 1994. Before then, he really did a lot of work for the community:
~ “As leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, he took an insular Hasidic group that almost came to an end with the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential movements in religious world Jewry, with an international network of over 3,000 educational and social centers. The institutions he established include kindergartens, schools, drug-rehabilitation centers, care-homes for the disabled and synagogues." ~
But the point of the poem is that he didn’t die — that is, the most important part of him, the spirit of loving service, lives on in those whose lives he touched.
His heart did not stop beating in our breasts
As we speak ice is melting from the warmth of his words
And the pearls of his thoughts and not tears glow in our eyes
*
But the line that struck me right away, that moved me to translate this poem from Polish, was this one:
“There are souls so immortal they do not depart”
— again I thought of Una. I hope everyone has the privilege of meeting a few “souls so immortal they do not depart.” They become our great teachers whose spirit and influence live on within us.
*
“Even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide …” ~ Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavicher Rebbe
*
Mary:
In the discussion of immortality it seems clear the immortals are the great teachers, like the Rebbe, like Bloom, who show us the way, both by example and lesson, to become more human — to learn kindness, wonder, generosity, who show us ourselves and our lives in new ways, pushing the limits of understanding and desire. They give and give, making both us and our lives better, richer, fuller, an adventure and a journey we might not have found without them.
All great artists are such teachers, giving us beauty and endless delight. But these immortals may be anywhere, teaching, inspiring, changing us and the world, tireless and selfless, often humble, demonstrating how riches...knowledge, art, understanding, grow and increase they more you give them away . You become your self most completely when you give yourself away. And you are immortal in each one you have given to. Such a wonderful idea of immortality!! Much more so than the usual humdrum heavens religion serves up.
**
Though it’s unusual for me to use two poems in the opening of a blog, I think that this poem complements Grynberg’s powerful “Eternal Life.”
Ultimately it’s about how much loving service we are willing and able to provide.
SENSE *OR* SENSIBILITY
~ “If you read this book more slowly, you’ll be more likely to notice the way its language and its themes come together, as well as to appreciate its understated, wry comedy. It’s both a profoundly serious and an amusingly comic novel.
Look, for instance, at how the novel introduces Elinor and Marianne’s elder half-brother, John Dashwood, in the first chapter: “He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed.” Reading just the first phrase, you’d expect that what follows the comma would be a compliment. To be “ill-disposed” is to be someone disposed to do ill—to be a bad person. But what follows the clause telling us that John is not a bad young man is another double negative. He’s not bad, unless we think being cold hearted and selfish make a person bad—as, of course, we should!
The way Austen backs us into that assessment of John is not just clever. It’s funny. It’s designed to make us think about how community determines a man’s respectability. By all outward appearances, he’s a “good man.” At the same time, his impulses and feelings are atrocious. To make matters worse, he’s married to a woman who brings out his worst coldhearted, selfish qualities. Together, John and Fanny’s actions (and inactions) produce real evils.
That sly, double-negative, ironic approach to storytelling means the novel’s lessons are often opaque. Austen’s fiction asks readers to consider truths and half-truths, omissions and lies, and generosity and greed. At its core, Sense and Sensibility deals with how individuals make meaningful lives in a world that is often deeply unfair. Its questions are set out by differences in its two sister-heroines’ opinions and styles.
The story also shows how the sisters have an impact on each other’s evolving judgments. Marianne’s lines that she “requires so much” in a man might be seen through Elinor’s eyes. Elinor would surely substitute the word “too” for Marianne’s “so.” Which one of them gets it closer to right, in the world of the novel or beyond it? Perhaps, in love, so much is too much. But perhaps setting one’s sights on so much leads to opportunities for so much more.
*
Readers ought to channel their inner Elinors, as well as their inner Mariannes, to read Sense and Sensibility with greater sense and sensibility. We ought to pause to define these terms, because the words have changed in meaning over the past two centuries. The title’s two nouns are neither synonyms nor antonyms. The meaning of “sense” then was close to what it means in our day—rationality, wisdom, reasonableness. It suggested having well-regulated powers of mind. But “sensibility” in the Romantic era (the late 18th and early 19th centuries) had nothing to do with being sensible or wise. Sensibility signaled emotional sensitivity, sympathy, and susceptibility. It was a power of the senses, of perception or taste, and of the heart. To claim to feel more deeply, or to express stronger feelings, was a very fashionable form of sensibility.
Dozens of studies have been published on what’s called the era’s cult of sensibility. Janet Todd’s Sensibility: An Introduction (1986) remains one of the best places to begin.
Histories of sensibility in literature often start with Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). It seems audiences encountered these novels in order to experience and share the powerful feelings that the stories called up. Whether these books were devoured in contemplative solitude or read aloud among family or friends, the point was to be so moved as to shed tears.
Both men and women were invited to cry with these male characters, but over time, the concept of sensibility became further divided by gender. Men might cultivate admirable sensibility, but women were widely believed to have greater natural or biological access to it. The ramifications of these stereotypes about gender, thinking, and feeling still linger with us.
Sensibility was also a politically controversial concept. Some then argued that more “refined” (or higher-class) people had greater taste, sensitivity, and sensibility. Sensibility could be used to sort out the well-born from the low-born or the well-educated from the uneducated. Whether learned or inborn, the moral qualities of a privileged person were said to heighten his or her ability to recognize and respond to beauty.
Others, however, believed just the opposite. If sensibility were truly about sympathy, then anyone could claim to have it. It could be found in all walks of life. Indeed, recognizing sensibility in all sensitive people—regardless of class, race, gender, or nation—could also prove one’s own worth. If a privileged person could show sympathy for the plight of the sensitive downtrodden and wanted to better the lot of those who shared his fine sensibility, then he could claim to be a superior moral person.
The problem, of course, was that sensibility could be feigned. Many sounded alarms about the dangers of false sensibility, too.
Austen’s fiction suggests that she had definite opinions about, and a healthy skepticism toward, fashionable sensibility. Her distrust of the excesses of sympathy is made especially clear in one humorous conversation in the novel. While walking on a beautiful fall afternoon, Elinor teases Marianne, “It is not every one who has your passion for dead leaves.” It’s both a throwaway joke and an implicit criticism. Do dead leaves deserve sympathy? Are there other things that deserve our passionate concern more than dead leaves?
Elinor’s snarky line implies that Marianne’s powerful feelings may be more excessive and indiscriminate than admirable. But Marianne shoots back at her, with seriousness and self-assurance, “No; my feelings are not often shared, not often understood. But sometimes they are.” Marianne defends the idea that anyone with her kind of fine sensibility is a superior person. To love dead leaves is to show an exquisite appreciation of nature, beauty, and life, from cradle to grave. Elinor’s response suggests she thinks that loving dead leaves is not a sure sign of anything admirable about a person. She would seem to prefer to evaluate people on their intentions, judgments, and behavior rather than on their heightened sensitivities, dramatic empathy, or professed taste.
The sisters’ disagreements over feelings and dead leaves point not just to their individual differences but to their family problems. Marianne follows in the emotional footsteps of her mother, with little regard for moderating her responses. Elinor serves not only as Marianne’s adviser but as her own mother’s counselor. To make matters worse, young Margaret is said to have Marianne’s romantic turn without her sense. (It’s important to note the implication in this line that Marianne, too, has sense.) Elinor’s worries for her mother and sisters are hardly selfish, but they are informed by her own self-interest. She must realize that the choices of one of them could affect all of them. One sister’s damaged reputation, outlandish behavior, or unconventional choices could have an impact on the marriage prospects of the rest. That fact ought to make any female character from this period who worries about finding love—for herself or others—appear the furthest thing from a frivolous person.
This was a culture in deep conflict about the roles of love and money in marriage. Public debates were still being staged in the 1790s, asking whether it was a greater evil to marry for love without money or to marry for money without love. As one satirical source put it, love without money is “like a Hive without Honey.” Another jibed, “If truth may be spoke / ’Tis but a mere joke, / For love without money / Will vanish like smoke.”
Works of fiction usually privileged the love side of the equation. Money would miraculously fall into place by story’s end. Marianne’s ideal man is a figure ripped out of the pages of the day’s improbable novels. Like her fictional heroine, Austen must have considered long and hard what a worthy hero ought to look like in a work of realistic fiction. It was a literary problem, too.
*
Marianne Dashwood looks for entire sympathy of taste and virtues, a two-making-one, a soul mingling. Her man of great feeling delivers his poetic lines of love in tender whispers, with breathy exclamation points.
Marianne also thinks true love happens just once, doubting the heart’s ability to love fully a second time or more. It’s an odd belief for someone who is herself the product of a happy second marriage, as Elinor points out. But their tussle over this question is in keeping with the rest of the novel, because Sense and Sensibility repeatedly asks how its characters, and we, are supposed to place a value on what’s first, second, and even third. It explores not just first and second loves but first-, second-, or third-born children and first, second, and third generations. Siblings in the novel come in distinct pairs and triples. Names double up. The novel asks us to measure, compare, and contrast in ones, twos, or threes. Firsts are often prioritized, but we’re repeatedly prompted to ask whether first is really best.
Although Sense and Sensibility was probably the second full-length novel that Jane Austen began to write (and likely the third she “finished”), it was the one she published first. Begun, according to family legend, as an epistolary novel—a novel told in letters—in the late 1790s, the novel that became Sense and Sensibility would stake Austen’s literary claim. Her first readers had no way of knowing that, because she published it anonymously. She used the phrase “By a Lady,” instead of her name, on the book’s title page. She concealed her identity, but not her gender, from the public.
There remains a great deal of misunderstanding and myth about that move. It was neither an oddity nor a female requirement. Anonymity appears to have been a majority choice among all fiction writers in the period, male and female. More than 60 percent of novels published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were not signed on their title pages. Even the authors who would become the most famous among these novelists—Sir Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, and Mary Shelley—all published their fiction anonymously at first.
They only later signed their real names to their works. It would seem they waited to see whether their books would attract positive notice and fame before revealing their authorship. We tend to assume that Austen, had she lived, would always have preferred anonymity. These examples suggest another possible path. We don’t know what Austen would have chosen to reveal about her authorship had she lived a longer life. We don’t know what she might have chosen to do had she witnessed, as these other authors did, that her novels continued to attract positive attention.
Women writers were responsible for about half of the approximately 1500 works of prose fiction published in Britain in the first two decades of the 19th century. That makes the novel of the time an equal opportunity genre, by the numbers at least. (Women were not so well represented in other genres, which surely made the novel seem more female-dominated by comparison.) As an author, Austen could have chosen to mask her gender, but she must have wanted to be identified as female.
What’s notable is that Austen would directly identify as a “Lady” author on a title page only once. She published Pride and Prejudice (1813) as “By the Author of Sense and Sensibility.” Mansfield Park (1814) was published as by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, still giving her first novel pride of place on the list. Either Austen or her publishers—or both—wanted readers to be able to track her authorship. Her second novel was attached to her first by its name. In linking Sense and Sensibility to Pride and Prejudice, on her second novel’s title page, Austen was creating her own literary brand, as we might put it today.
https://lithub.com/sense-or-sensibility-what-if-jane-austen-had-to-choose/?fbclid=IwAR2zm2q43vDv-zMQG6foRKpovRS3hX909F7YRo3_Ew-CZ9enyh3Ja3fpyQ8
The first edition of Sense and Sensibility, 1811. Note: "By a Lady"*
IMMORTALITY IS THIS LIFE (~ Harold Bloom)
“. . . At eighty-nine, he was writing more quickly and more powerfully than I (his ostensible editor) was able to read and respond to. In one email, he sent me the epilogue in its entirety—not in a Word document, just in the body of the email. It included this line, which I can’t stop rereading.
~ At ninety I have died and been resurrected five or six times. I refer to the many falls and grave illnesses that led to serious and successful surgery. My body—such as it is—is the Resurrection Body. I would interpret this as meaning that immortality is this life and so is redemption. ~
Immortality is this life. So deepen it, live it profoundly. Harold may have been divisive, and he had his blind spots. But he taught us to live with characters, to think the world through writers, to see reality textured by literature: richer, more alive, redeemed. Because of Harold, I consider Falstaff an intimate friend—what he did, how he lived, his gift for presentness.
The memories come rushing back. Listening to Wallace Stevens with Harold on weekends while I was still at Yale. I remember Pindar and Melville—“The Whiteness of the Whale”—and Dickinson and George Eliot. I remember going out to Santa Fe and meeting Cormac McCarthy, and then brokering a call between him and Harold, feeling like I was somehow making literary history.
Being with Harold always felt historic, momentous. The world around him was thick with thoughts and feelings, dense. The people we encounter in writing pierce us, their inner lives give us more life. For those of us who were lucky enough to study with him, Harold let that life out. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t finish his book. It was ready in him, and as he liked to say, quoting Hamlet:
If it be now, tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” ~
*
“Bloom loved Emerson’s (very Freudian) line about how, in the great writers, we recognize our own rejected thoughts—“they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” That’s true of Bloom, too, at his best—both the inspired analyst and the eloquent returner of those rejected thoughts.” ~ from the New Yorker article on Bloom
Oriana:
He was fearless — some would say reckless — with his critical pronouncements. And he ventured into unexpected areas, especially religion. He refused to be intimidated by fads in criticism, especially those imported from France. He always held on to the sense of the human in literature — the source of its power.
“Happiness was never important.
The problem is that we don't know
what we really want.
What makes us happy is not to get what we want,
but to dream about it.
Happiness is for opportunists.
So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction
is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself.”
~ Slavoj Žižek
That’s one approach to it. I agree with Žižek about the ultimate unimportance of happiness. A more fruitful approach is to think not in terms of personal happiness, but of usefulness. We need to touch the lives of others, to be of use to them. Was the Lubavicher Rebbe happy? Was Jonas Salk, or any other person who’s made a great contribution to humanity?
Happiness can’t be entirely discounted — especially, as Žižek points out, our dreams about it — but it doesn’t seem relevant in the larger context. It makes more sense to think in terms of how to be useful.
*
THE GLASS FLOOR
~ “America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.
Most accounts of this trend focus on the breakdown of upward mobility: It’s getting harder for the poor to become rich. But equally important is the decline of downward mobility: The rich, regardless of their intelligence, are becoming more likely to stay that way.
“There’s a lot of talent being wasted because it’s not able to rise, but there’s also a lot of relatively untalented people who aren’t falling and end up occupying positions they shouldn’t,” said Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution researcher and the author of “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It.″
According to research carried out by Reeves and others, the likelihood of the rich passing their status down to their children — “stickiness,” in economist-speak — has surpassed the likelihood of poor children remaining poor.
“If we were becoming less of a class-bound society, stickiness at the top should have gone down,” Reeves said. “But the evidence shows that it’s gone up.”
This phenomenon — Reeves calls it “the glass floor” — has taken on a new political urgency. Over the last two years, Donald Trump has put his family members in charge of child care policy and Middle East peace. Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian board membership has highlighted how corporations and foreign governments seek to influence elected officials through their children.
But billionaire heirs are only a tiny part of the problem. Over the last 30 years, nearly every institution of social mobility, from education to work to government spending, has been systematically tilted toward the wealthy. Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung.
“The sense that there’s a self-sustaining and self-dealing group at the top isn’t wrong,” Reeves said. “When you create a ‘meritocratic’ selection process where the production of merit is increasingly skewed by parental income, you end up with a hereditary meritocracy.”
The rich, in other words, are not sending their best. And the more institutions they control, the more of their kids will be running the country.
Elite Entrenchment Goes Far Beyond The Ivy League
Last month, a Duke University study revealed that 43% of white Harvard students were not admitted on merit. They were ALDCs: recruited athletes, legacies, students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. The “dean’s interest list” is a roster of applicants with ties to wealthy donors.
The study — and the racial discrimination lawsuit that forced Harvard to reveal its admissions data — demonstrated the extent to which elite universities concentrate the privilege of their already-privileged students. To pick just a few representative statistics, children from the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League schools than the poorest 20%. Harvard’s class of 2022 includes more legacy students than African American students.
The more important engine of elite entrenchment is the group of selective colleges that sit one rung lower in the rankings [than the Ivy-League colleges]. More than half the children of the top 0.1% of income earners attend these schools, compared with fewer than 1 in 50 poor children.
Over the last 20 years, selective universities have become just as dominated by the wealthy as the elite colleges — while receiving a fraction of the attention. Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California, for example, admit higher percentages of legacy students than Princeton. Thirty-eight colleges — including upper-crust mainstays Colgate and Tufts — admit more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. At Washington University in St. Louis, the worst offender, the ratio is 3-to-1.
“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions,” Reeves said. “They end up serving the children of today’s elite rather than preparing tomorrow’s elite.”
Public colleges are subject to the same trend. In 2017, University of Georgia students had a median family income of $129,800. Two-thirds of the students at the University of Michigan came from the richest fifth of the income distribution; just 1 in 30 came from the poorest fifth.
“This is what inherited wealth looks like for the top 20%,” Reeves said. “You don’t save your money and give it to your kids as a bequest. You spend it on your kids so they don’t need the bequest. It’s an upfront investment.”
But as universities tilt their admissions toward the wealthy, Reeves said, they aren’t just leaving talented low-income students behind. They’re also lifting mediocre rich students up. A 2005 study found that wealthy middle-schoolers with the lowest standardized test scores were more likely to graduate from college than poor middle-schoolers with the highest scores. Students with average SAT results are nearly six times more likely to be admitted to top-tier universities if their parents are alumni. One of Reeves’ studies found that 43% of the members of upper-class households had skills and intelligence that predicted lower incomes.
“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to demonstrate their skills. Less-talented kids, on the other hand, have to rely on credentials that make them seem intelligent — high SAT scores, top-tier diplomas and corporate internships.
As elites take over selective colleges, invest more in test-prep courses and reserve entry-level jobs for their peers, they will continue to monopolize these credentials for themselves.
Elites Are Becoming More Insular
The U.S. economy produces fewer secure, well-paying jobs than it used to. Most American industries are consolidating into a few dominant players. Technology, globalization and outsourcing have pushed entry-level and support roles out to low-wage workers.
This leaves a growing number of Americans competing for a shrinking number of jobs. And all the evidence indicates that corporations are reserving them for people who are already wealthy.
In 2016, researchers sent hundreds of résumés to high-end law firms. They were identical in degrees and grade-point averages, but researchers tweaked the extracurricular activities to make some candidates seem rich (sailing, classical music) and others seem poor (track and field, country music). At the end of the study, upper-class men had been invited to 12 times more interviews.
Other studies have found similar class-based sorting practices in elite professions. In a 2012 survey, more than half the hiring managers in corporate law and finance firms said “cultural fit” was their No. 1 criterion for assessing candidates in job interviews. Some human resources managers screened out qualified candidates who had the “wrong” extracurricular activities. Others admitted to throwing out applicants without elite college credentials.
And then there’s the nepotism. According to a 2011 study, 70% of boys born into the top 1% of income earners ended up working at their father’s company at some point in their lives, a larger percentage than other income brackets. In 2006, researchers found that nearly one-third of new CEOs were hired through a family connection.
Though it may be understandable for wealthy parents to use their power to insulate their children from downward mobility, the broader effect of this trend could be severe.
According to Reeves, dozens of studies have estimated the negative effects of failing to tap into the talents of low-income students. Far fewer, however, have considered the drag on the gross domestic product caused by unintelligent CEOs and Ivy League HR staffers hiring people just like themselves.
“No one is in favor of downward mobility,” Reeves said. “But if there isn’t enough circulation of elites at the top of their professions, you’re going to get stagnation.”
“There’s a fixed number of people who will be upper class in the future, and elites have the tools to make sure that their children are among them,” Fishkin said. “But the more power they have and the more they’re worth, the more damaging it will be to everyone else.” ~
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-glass-floor-is-keeping-americas-richest-idiots-at-the-top_n_5d9fb1c9e4b06ddfc516e076?utm_source=main_fb&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&utm_medium=facebook&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063&fbclid=IwAR3zOsN_yyDy6UERFwSSdat2MNFjEM-_kL_sn9vRC0inUh5XxncbJtNGcM4
Mary:
The increasing rigidity in our society, the increasing difficulty, even impossibility, of upward social mobility, the elite insularity of the mega-rich, and their stranglehold on power, keeping it all within their own ranks, and own families, is dangerous and frightening. Such a huge and impenetrable divide, maintained within a closed circle will not only lead to the incapable and mediocre leading the way to stagnation, or/and creating an unstable situation that devolves into violence and chaos.
Somehow from the earliest times I remember I hated the rich. Am not sure where this came from, but I felt no one who was rich could possibly be a good person or be trusted in any way. And I insisted on college, though my parents thought I couldn't go because we had no money for it. But back then, in the late 60's, there were actually a lot of scholarships and grants available as well as student loans. Most importantly, college was a fraction of what it costs now ... where the costs are so great the money owed on student loans can burden students for most of the rest of their lives, forcing their way into decisions about housing, marriage and parenthood. So a higher education, once a step on the ladder up to social and economic success, has become less possible for most, and just another bastion of the wealthy powers that be.
And I think at the heart of my dislike for the wealthy was a sense of their uselessness: that they made nothing but money, and used nothing but time. They didn’t really work, just inherited, and that inheritance often included a job they were completely unprepared for and could not do.
*
“What is truly frightening is not that a Hitler could exist, but that so many people seemed to be secretly waiting for him.” ~ Volker Ullrich, Hitler's biographer
Oriana:
The relevance of this today needs no comment.
John Guzlowski:
There’s a good BBC documentary on Netflix called The Charisma of Hitler. It tries to understand his incredible popularity. There are people who felt he was sent by God. Just as some people feel Trump is an agent of God.
Trump’s sins? A lot of God’s messengers were bad men. Check out Saul Paul.
Oriana:
The Fundamentalists remain unmoved, no matter how close the president resembles the Anti-Christ. But the more basic problem is the yearning for the “strong man” — as long as he is “one of us,” of course.
*
And here is something related to that — how people cling to their entrenched views, but can perhaps learn to be more accepting of others.
CONTACT HYPOTHESIS AND REDUCTION IN PREJUDICE
~ “Curious things start to happen to people when they listen generously. At the most superficial level, one hears things that he or she might not like. But one also hears the sincerity of people’s convictions, the authenticity of their experiences, and the nuance of their narratives. Being open is transformative because, almost inevitably, one finds that the stories they’ve been told about what people believe oversimplify reality.
. . . when people are presented with information that contradicts a belief they hold, they’ll often become more rather than less certain of their conviction. During my career, only one student has ever reported to me a significant, lasting change in their attitudes.
But teachers aren’t in the classroom to proselytize and changing minds isn’t the point of an experience like this course. When I talk to the students after the semester, they almost all sound a similar theme. Caleb Wright, who’s from Chapel Hill says, “The value is that you can staunchly disagree with someone, but also humanize the person.” Adds Gaby, “It was more to learn about each other than to change people’s minds.”
The point, in other words, is to combat “othering.”
“People don’t change their minds, they just change their opinion about the other side,” says Ravi Iyer, a social psychologist who, with Jonathan Haidt and Matt Motyl, founded Civil Politics, a nonprofit aimed at bridging moral divisions. “The evidence is imperfect,” Iyer says, “but all of the imperfect evidence is telling a similar story.”
That story is known as the contact hypothesis—a well-supported theory in social psychology that contact between members of different groups is likely to reduce mutual prejudice. After the course ends, Gaby tells me that her high school classmates and neighbors would say terrible things about immigrants—“If you’re here ‘illegally,’ you should die,” but would moderate their positions when they spoke directly to her or her father. “People are so disconnected from their words,” she said. “When you challenge them, at least a little fear breaks down.”
During a discussion of gun policy in a course called “Conservatism,” Jackson told his classmates that school shootings were extreme events, and that it was “pointless to make policy to combat this.” At this point, “a woman started bawling and saying she couldn’t believe I was OK with the murder of children,” Jackson recalled. “Everything doesn’t need to be personal,” he added. “But it’s much easier to fight a villain than a person who’s reasonable.”
We teach people that it’s impolite to discuss religion and politics in public. It’s wrong. We need to teach people how to discuss religion and politics. The first step is simple. “Get them to commit to be together,” says Rhonda Fitzgerald, managing director of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, “and tell them their job is to listen to each other. That’s what success is in this space.” ~
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/13/america-cultural-divide-red-state-blue-state-228111?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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CASPAR FRIEDRICH’S ICONIC “WANDERER”
~ "In Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1818), a man wearing a dark green overcoat and boots overlooks a cloudy landscape, steadying himself with a cane. Mounted on a dark, craggy rock face, the figure stands at the center of distant, converging planes. Art historian Joseph Koerner, a professor at Harvard University, notes that the midpoint of the painting rests at the man’s chest. “The heart is the center of the universe,” he says.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is the quintessential Romantic artwork. The aesthetic began as a reaction against the Enlightenment values (logic, rationality, order) that partially contributed to the bloody, monarch-toppling French Revolution of 1789. Throughout Europe, writers, artists, and musicians turned to emotion, imagination, and the sublime for inspiration. Nature—wild, unbridled, and far more powerful than 19th century Europeans—became a major subject. In particular, the period exalted individuals and their strong emotions. Friedrich exemplified these qualities as he placed one man, gazing at a vast and unknowable territory, in the middle of his canvas.
Friedrich was born in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania (now northeastern Germany), in 1774. Before he was 20 years old, his mother, two sisters, and a brother had all died. He was known, even then, for his melancholic and ironic personality, a seriousness reflected in his painting. Friedrich began studying art at the University of Greifswald in 1790, and then at the renowned Academy of Copenhagen in 1794. There, he studied with the well-established Danish portrait painter Jens Juel. In 1798, Friedrich moved to Dresden, though he took frequent journeys to inspire his landscape practice.
In 1808, Friedrich courted controversy when he completed one such landscape, Cross in the Mountains (1807–08), which he painted as an altarpiece. Featuring the crucifixion at the top of a mountain, with three beams of light reaching into the moody, high-contrast sky, the work posits that nature—which takes up more of the frame than Christ himself—was itself divine.
Scholars initially believed the work was a commission. In fact, Friedrich conceived of the piece as a tribute to King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden (a plan quashed when the monarch was deposed in 1808). It was eventually acquired by an aristocratic family living in a Bohemian castle in Tetschen (in the modern-day Czech Republic), and the painting became known as the Tetschen Altar.
In 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer and began a family (the couple eventually had three children). The same year, he painted the artwork that’s now nearly synonymous with his name. To construct the composition, Friedrich traveled to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains southeast of Dresden, sketching individual rocks and natural forms with intense detail. Back in his studio, he cobbled these together to create a new, imaginary landscape.
Between the viewer and the foggy distance, Friedrich painted a Rückenfigur, or a figure seen from behind. As Julian Jason Haladyn explains in his 2016 essay “Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’: Paradox of the Modern Subject,” the subject serves as a surrogate for the viewer. “We look to this human presence as a means of determining the general scale of the scene,” he writes, “and, more specifically, of relating our physical bodies to the spatial parameters of the painted world.” Here, the brushy sky becomes nearly abstract.
The artist’s legacy suffered when Hitler and the Nazis claimed Friedrich as their ideological forebear in the 1930s. They connected his rapture for the German landscape with their slogan of “Blood and Soil,” which similarly romanticized national territory. This association turned off future scholars to Friedrich’s work for decades.
Finally, in the mid-1970s, scholar Robert Rosenblum attempted to connect the work of Friedrich and his peers (John Constable, Turner) with that of the Abstract Expressionists. He even gave a 1975 book the title Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Friedrich to Rothko; the work connected the two artists, as one reviewer wrote, via their search for “a unity of the self with the universe.” Famed critic Hilton Kramer, never one to mince words, called the idea “the sheerest hokum—brilliant hokum, amusing hokum, but hokum all the same.” And so, provocative as ever, Friedrich was back at the center of art historical discourse.
Scholars have been unable to definitively identify the model for the Rückenfigur, although Koerner has reached a probable conclusion. He believes that Friedrich painted a high-ranking forestry official named Colonel Friedrich Gotthard von Brincken, and that his clothing distinguishes him as a volunteer ranger for King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia’s war against Napoleon. “Von Brincken was probably killed in action in 1813 or 1814, which would make the 1818 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog a patriotic epitaph,” Koerner wrote in the 1990 book Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. The work, he surmises, subtly celebrates a defeat over the French, illustrating a larger story about Prussian unification and German nationalism.
The painting offers thrills for contemporary viewers (it has been in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, since 1970), no matter what knowledge they bring to the experience. “Even if you haven’t studied the art, you feel it,” Koerner says about the particular magic of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. “You feel that those summits that you see in the fog are not just figments of an artist’s imagination. They’re not made in the studio. Each of these peaks and valleys, each rock, each tree, has been observed and then refigured and restaged in the painting.” Two hundred years after Friedrich painted the work, the dreamy contours of the natural world—and man’s dramatized, awed relationship to it—still transfix, translated via oils and canvas.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-unraveling-mysteries-caspar-david-friedrichs-wanderer
Caspar Friedrich: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818*
MENTAL BOMB SHELTERS
~ “At eighty I believe I am a far more cheerful person than I was at twenty or thirty. I most definitely would not want to be a teenager again. Youth may be glorious, but it is also painful to endure…
I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it. (Picasso once said: “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”) By this time I had lost many illusions, but fortunately not my enthusiasm, nor the joy of living, nor my unquenchable curiosity.
I have very few friends or acquaintances my own age or near it. Though I am usually ill at ease in the company of elderly people I have the greatest respect and admiration for two very old men who seem to remain eternally young and creative. I mean [the Catalan cellist and conductor] Pablo Casals and Pablo Picasso, both over ninety now. Such youthful nonagenarians put the young to shame. Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.” ~ Henry Miller
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-measure-of-a-life-well-lived-henry-miller-on-growing-old-the-perils-of-success-and-the-secret-of?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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HUNTING FOR THE WILD ANCESTORS OF OUR CROPS
~ “In the 1920s and 1930s, when a great deal more of the earth’s primary forest still stood, Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov traveled the world to better understand why some areas of the earth are so lush with diversity. Born into a merchant family in Moscow, he grew up listening to his father’s stories of life in a poor rural village where crop failures and rationing were common. Vavilov remembered these lessons. Driven to improve the security of the world’s crops, he attended the Moscow Agricultural Institute and began an adventurous series of world travels to map the planet’s food crops. As his career advanced, he took a post in Leningrad where he led the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He worked to improve wheat and corn crops and pioneered the identification of wild ancestors of crops in order to combine their genes with domesticated relatives, tracing crops to a small number of special areas.
Vavilov realized that some areas of the planet, particularly mountainous areas, contained a vast diversity of niches, little bio-regions sometimes no larger than a valley or cliff face. Evolution ensured that plants and animals would adapt to each of these niches, making certain a wondrous diversity would thrive. In his honor, we sometimes call the most biodiverse regions of the globe Vavilov Zones. On each trip abroad, he collected seeds from a new region of the globe, creating the largest collection of plant genetic material ever assembled. Vavilov’s success rested on his ability to take a team of researchers into remote regions and quickly and thoroughly gather material in adverse conditions. He lived by his favorite motto: “Life is short: we must hurry.”
In 1929, Vavilov centered his efforts on the apple. Today, apples are the third most popular fruit on earth, behind the mango and the banana, and they play an important symbolic role in almost every culture and religion. Yet until Vavilov strolled into what is now Almaty, Kazakhstan, near the foothills of the Tian Shan, the apple’s origin was lost. The town’s name translates as “where the apples are,” and even today on the nearby foothills of the Mountains of Heaven, thickets of apple trees hang heavily with wild fruit. Vavilov recognized the region as the birthplace of the apple, adding that knowledge to his growing understanding of where the world’s crops each originated. Vavilov found wondrous apple trees a hundred feet tall, and dwarf ones standing waist high. Some of the apples were as big as cantaloupes, others no bigger than cherries. Many were inedible, but some were absolute wonders. Several tasted of anise, a flavor I’ve yet to encounter in a commercial apple.
All of these apples are offspring of Malus sieversii, the parent tree of the apple. Like pears, each apple seed grows an entirely new cultivar. Vavilov traced the modern apple to a sprawling tangle of forest, and in that tangle he documented the ancestors of 150 other food crops.
The Tian Shan could be the source of the Eden story. This is because no other region has spawned so many major crops. Ultimately, Vavilov described 12 such centers of biodiversity, tracing our food crops to these key areas. There is one in South Asia. There is one in Ethiopia, one in the spine of South America and one in India. The wild ancestors in these zones gave us our most important crops, and most of these regions, including the Tian Shan, are threatened today. The Soviets cut up to 80 percent of the wild fruit forests down for wood, and though the losses have slowed in recent times, they still continue as the region develops. The last of the wild forests are now preserved in Ile-Alatau National Park, a place I would dearly love to visit so that I might eat an apple that tastes of anise. These forests in eastern Kazakhstan are so important that the USDA has collected over 100,000 seeds from the region.
Vavilov’s personal story is a sad one. He placed science before politics and managed to get into a fight over pea genetics, a rather unlikely crime. Vavilov believed the understanding of genetic trait inheritance developed by Austrian scientist and monk Gregor Mendel was largely correct. However, a former student of Vavilov, Trofim Lysenko, believed that a contrary theory proposed by Soviet scientists was correct. Lysenko became a favorite of Josef Stalin, and Vavilov’s denunciation of Lysenko led to his arrest while he was on an expedition in Ukraine. He was sent to Siberia, where he died of starvation in a gulag at the age of 55. Life is short: we must hurry.
Vavilov’s story doesn’t end there, however. While he was in Serbia, his great seed collection remained in Leningrad a city under German siege for 28 months during the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War). The Soviets had, in a fit of short-sightedness, evacuated the art from the Hermitage but not the quarter million samples of food crop diversity, which were arguably a much more valuable treasure. Vavilov’s old team of scientists understood the importance of the collection and moved them to the basement for protection from the hungry population. Standing guard over a giant buffet of plant matter, nine of the scientists died of starvation before the siege was ended. The seeds lived on, and Vavilov was publicly rehabilitated during the Soviet Union’s period of “de-Stalinization.” He is now hailed as a hero of Soviet science and lauded by scientists worldwide. Lysenko retained his post after the death of Stalin, but he was widely denounced and largely forgotten in his old age. The refusal of Lysenko and his comrades to accept Mendel’s theories contributed to decades of crop shortfalls in the Soviet Union.” ~
https://lithub.com/how-do-we-preserve-the-vanishing-foods-of-the-earth/?fbclid=IwAR0eTOU9jrC9E-0C99-IKvFvypTWHWvcmdiuo_MN0Xr16EubCl--pMGH5ts
I am greatly moved that nine scientists died of starvation while guarding Vavilov’s precious collection of wild seeds. Let’s hope we’ll never again have the need for this kind of dedication.
And what an ultimate irony that Vavilov himself died of starvation, though under different circumstances: in a Siberian gulag.
*
COUNTERCLOCKWISE: HOW THE MIND AFFECTS AGING
~ “In 1978, Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, conducted an important study. She gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. One group was told they were responsible for keeping their plant alive, and that they had autonomy in their daily schedule. The other group was told that staff would care for their plant, and they were not given choices regarding their daily schedule.
After 18 months, twice as many people in the group given responsibility for their plant and schedule were still alive as in the other group. Langer took this as evidence that the current biomedical model, which views the mind and body as separate, was wrong.
In response, she conducted a study to examine further the mind's impact on the body.
In 1981, Langer and a group of graduate students designed the interior of a building to reflect the styles and conditions of the year 1959. Scattered about were a black-and-white TV, old furniture, and magazines and books from the 1950s.
This structure would be home to a group of eight men, all over 70 years of age, for five days. When these men arrived at the building, they were told they should not merely discuss this past era while living there, but act is if they actually were their younger selves, 22 years earlier. "We have good reason to believe if you are successful at this, you will feel as you did in 1959," Langer told them.
From that moment on, the study subjects were treated as if they were in their 50s rather than their 70s. Despite several being stooped and needing canes to walk, they were not aided in taking their belongings up the building's stairs. "Take them up one shirt at a time if you have to," the men were told.
Their days were spent listening to radio shows, watching movies, and discussing sports and other "current events" from the period. They could not bring up any events that had occurred after 1959, and referred to themselves, their families, and their careers as they were in 1959.
The goal of this study was not to get these men to live in the past; rather, it was to trigger their bodies mentally to exhibit the energy and biological responses of much younger persons.
By the end of the five days, these men demonstrated noticeable improvement in hearing, eyesight, memory, dexterity, and appetite. Those who had arrived using canes, and dependent on the help of their children, left the building under their own power, carrying their own suitcases.
By expecting these men to function independently, and by engaging with them as individuals rather than "old people," Langer and her students gave these men "an opportunity to see themselves differently," which affected them biologically.
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We are all actors on a stage.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.
~ William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.vii
You and I — everyone — are all actors. We are all playing roles on different stages in varied contexts. In one situation, you may play the role of a musician, while in other roles you may play a parent, a friend, a lover, a student, or a teacher.
Each situation determines the role you play. However, most people have not consciously designed their circumstances, nor have they consciously determined the roles they will play.
Most people fail to realize that they get to choose their stage, who they will be, and how they will act. They have not decided to write the story of their own lives, but instead have consigned the storytelling to someone or something outside of them.
Rather than seeing their identity as flexible and malleable, most people believe that "this is just the way I am," and see their identity as rigid.
Just because you've played a role in the past doesn't mean you are wedded to that role. If your current context requires something different, dismiss who you've been in the past. Allow yourself to evolve. Quit putting yourself in a box.” ~
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“Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.” ~ Mary Ruefle
How much better is silence;
the coffee cup, the table.
How much better to sit by myself
like the solitary sea-bird
that opens its wings on the stake.
Let me sit here for ever with bare things,
this coffee cup, this knife, this fork,
things in themselves,
myself being myself.
~ Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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