Saturday, October 26, 2019

HOW FIVE SECONDS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE; ANXIETY AND INFLUENCE: HAROLD BLOOM; PLEASANTLY DEMENTED; EMERSON: “SECOND BEST”; BOWLING ALONE: BOOKS THAT EXPLAIN OUR WORLD

Dali: Geryon, the monster of fraud (from the illustrations to Dante's Inferno)

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PEOPLE LIKE US
for James Wright


There are more like us. All over the world


There are confused people, who can’t remember

The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

Who love God but can’t remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It’s


All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man


Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief

Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,


And hear great poems lovingly spoken

By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.

~ Robert Bly


**


Oriana:


Let’s re-read that last stanza:


You can wander into the wrong classroom,


And hear great poems lovingly spoken

By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.

Only a great lover of poetry could have written this: 


And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.

It's no small matter: finding your soul, becoming a defender of greatness (Harold Bloom was on a crusade for greatness), and finally, as I read it, not being afraid even of death, having lived your life in communion with greatness.

Some may say that that's overreaching. But you can wander into the wrong classroom and happen to hear a statement that can deeply affect your life. You can be passing between two rows of stacks in a library, and a book may suddenly fall at your feet — and what’s more, open itself on the pages that you need to read. Mystical as that sounds, I’m simply describing one of my experiences. 

Was Jung right? Are there no accidents? I’m not prepared to go there — and I don’t think there is a clear answer. If we’ve lived long enough, we’ve witnessed and perhaps personally experienced some purely destructive accidents, the sheer perversity of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jungians might then plead a broader perspective. Theists would posit the Divine Plan. Statisticians could invoke probabilities and “rare events.” 


A rule in statistics states that “rare events” do not happen. Your best predictive strategy is to bet on the average. And yet, and yet . . . If we live long enough, we'll discover that rare events do happen. That doesn't contradict the law of cause and effect. It's rather that we can never disentangle all the complexities. Instead, let’s rejoice if something good happens unexpectedly — grace or coincidence, it doesn’t matter.

I say: three cheers for the “positive accidents” that Bly celebrates in “People Like Us,” one of his most popular poems. It’s not quite a classic, but it deserves to be. 


Billy Collins would likely try too hard for humor here, possibly asking if you’d rather win a metaphysics debate or receive a nice discount on something you never needed in the first place. But Bly chooses to be completely serious, even if it means straining the reader’s credulity. True, there may be people who wake up and, for a while at least, can’t remember the name of their dog, but the other examples are of huge matters. The probability is low, but not zero. And that’s all that matters. We are delighted to learn about a house saved from fire and the thief who turns away from a life of crime — all due to some trivial mistake or twist of affairs.
 

How else could we carry on if not for our irrational optimism, our stubborn faith in rare events? Otherwise, life is too overwhelming and too terrible. Instead, let’s raise a toast: To Life!
the dove orchid, Habenaria radiata

Lilith:

I love the Robert Bly poem. It brought me back to my days of being an English graduate student, and I certainly may have stumbled into the wrong classroom and heard the wrong professor reciting a poem. 

 
Oriana:

Wrong classroom or the right one . . . Those were in some ways the glory days — we were learning and discovering, roaming through the wonderland of campuses. It’s such a special world of its own, and such special years.

Adam Zagajewski, who’s traveled and lived both in the US and Europe for many years, observed that there is America and then “there are the islands — the universities.” At their best, those are the Isles of Paradise.

Milosz too commented on American vs European universities, calling the European ones stingy and the American ones lavish. There is indeed a certain feeling of luxury about an American campus — it’s like a grand country estate.

*
MISREADING HAROLD BLOOM: THE ANXIETY AND INFLUENCE OF A CRITIC

 
~ “Sometimes all you remember of a teacher is a voice — “a way of happening, a mouth.” I never met Harold Bloom, but like many of his readers, I thought I knew his voice very well. Bloom, who died on Monday, wrote like a teacher; his every utterance projected pedagogically, and I always assumed he wrote much as he talked in class. This quality had great appeal but wasn’t an unmixed blessing on the page. He wrote ceaselessly, torrentially, and as he churned away he easily became vatic, windy, merely reckless where he had once been adventurous. Late Bloom repeated and recirculated his favored obsessions, cross-referencing himself in ecstasies of unearned fulfillment.

He was easy to parody; I praised and derided Bloom at different times, and once succumbed to the mischievous parody itch, as surely generations of his students had, too: “Only Don Quixote can rival the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, and even Emerson at his strongest— stronger, here, even than his belated rival, Nietzsche — is not quite a match for his ultimate precursor, J’s Yahweh, though I concede that the greatest Jewish genius after Jesus, Sigmund Freud, would not have agreed with my heretical opinion.”

So he wrote too much, and wrote too fast. But the powerful writer is easy to parody because of a certain strangeness and consistency (think of Cormac McCarthy, whom Bloom so championed); in this sense, Bloom was a wonderfully particular stylist. My teasing version is, perhaps, just frustrated admiration. You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-involvement— the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature — had been there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early work. There is a way in which Bloom was always speaking his own private language, and gradually publicizing that privacy on his own odd terms. Maybe that’s what strong critics do.


*
 
There were several Blooms, or perhaps we should think of a pistil and its petals. At the center of these selves was the teacher who gave his celebrated classes at Yale for nearly fifty years. From this core of private reading and public sharing came a flaming variety of performances: the early champion of Romanticism, at a time (the late nineteen-fifties) when English departments, still in thrall to the scrupulous meanness of T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism, were reluctant to take romantically “religious” poets like Shelley and Blake very seriously; the Freudian theorist who speculated powerfully about how writers struggle with their predecessors; the critic who (along with Robert Alter and Frank Kermode) changed the way that literary studies appraised the Bible; and the mainstream popularizer, a well-paid exhorter with some residual insight, who issued books such as “The Western Canon,” “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages,” and “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.”

 
The early work, including “Poetry and Repression” and “The Anxiety of Influence,” customized a lexicon of somewhat forbidding rhetorical terms—clinamen, askesis, agon—which Bloom then employed with joyously irresponsible confidence, like some English aristocrat who insists on using his mangled French everywhere he goes, and at high volume, too. The technical language fell away as he wrote his more popular books, such as “The Western Canon” and “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” but the structures of thought that underlay that rhetoric did not. I’m reminded of one of his loveliest formulations, his insight that Shakespeare’s great soliloquists change and develop by “overhearing themselves.” Bloom can be faulted for not changing and developing, for not overhearing himself attentively enough. But we, the audience, were lucky enough to get the chance to listen in on his declamations.

Take the Freudian “map of misreading” that Bloom drew and then lovingly embroidered over the decades. Like most good inventions, it is simple, easy to use, and above all, obviously true. This is why everyone still uses the term “anxiety of influence,” and knows what the phrase means, without having to have read a word of Bloom. Writers learn to write by reading and adapting their predecessors; the true originals are very rare, which is why critics talk so much about “traditions” and “influence.” Literary studies, when Bloom was coming of age, tended to advance a rather smoothly linear notion of inheritance and invention: writers took what they needed from their great precursors and discarded the rest. You can detect the traces of the predecessor in the inheritor, even if the inheritor disowns any knowledge of the inheritance. That was about the Freudian limit of the New Criticism.

Bloom went much further: he was interested in precisely those traces. In Bloom’s scheme, literature is like a quarreling family, and the critic becomes the Freudian analyst who can sort out the mutilated patterns of stress and resistance. To come after a great poet, like Arnold coming after Wordsworth and Keats, is a source of anxiety. The younger poet deals with this anxiety by “strongly misreading” the more powerful predecessor, so as to be able to swerve away from his massive and obstructive presence. The weak misreader is the poet who gives in to that anxiety of influence. But all poets, strong or weak, are misreaders of their predecessors, because there is no easy, disinterested way to read one’s ancestors, just as there is no easy, disinterested way to be a child of one’s parents. As many have charged, the theory works best within a patriarchal canon. But you could, for instance, make a perfectly Bloomian case that Virginia Woolf’s refusal to grant any greatness to her precursor, George Eliot, in “A Room of One’s Own” —a book in which Jane Austen and Emily Brontë are the only writers praised as having written as themselves, as entirely free women—represents a massive psychic and literary swerve around the dominating presence of that great Victorian whom Woolf both admired and had to surpass.

And who was Bloom strongly misreading? If we were doing a Bloomian reading of Bloom, we might notice his intense hostility to T. S. Eliot, and we might notice that Eliot, in his essay, from 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” had elaborated a theory about the relation of new writers to their predecessors. Eliot argued that when a new work of art is created, the tradition that preceded it is forced to shift a bit: “something . . . happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.” 

 
Both Bloom and Eliot see tradition as a kind of family. Eliot sees how we push around our ancestors; Bloom sees how our ancestors push us around. In this sense, Bloom was haunted by the New Criticism within which he grew up, which is why the word “strong” wobbles so much in his work. Bloom uses it Freudianly, to mean a writer’s ability to wrestle with the father figure. But he also seems to use the word to mean something like aesthetic power, where “strong” just means “great”: Shakespeare is a “strong misreader” of Marlowe because . . . he was a greater poet. Indeed, as Bloom got older, and as he wrote more generally for wider audiences, “strong” became a rather lazy description for writers he approved of. At such moments, the old value system of the New Criticism (in which, say, Shakespeare was just deemed a “greater” writer than Milton, or Wordsworth was declared ineffably “finer” than Shelley) could be heard speaking through Bloom’s Freudian terminology.

So was Bloom a weak misreader of Eliot and the New Criticism, or a strong one? What will last of his work? Surely the anxiety of influence really does enrich our sense of how literary inheritance functions. Its permanence seems assured. But Bloom’s Freudian turn can also be seen as part of a larger movement in literary criticism. Despite his assertion that he had nothing to do with deconstruction (the most famous export of Yale’s English department in the seventies and eighties), despite his tiresome denunciations of feminism and theory and “political correctness,” there’s a natural alliance between Bloom’s way of reading and deconstruction, both modes scouring texts for the secrets they cannot successfully repress. And Bloom’s work on religion (his book “The American Religion,” from 1992, is inspired and insane), and on the Hebrew Bible has had a wide and decisive influence. 

 
Even among the popular hasty writing, the manufactured introductions (all those Chelsea House editions), the endless and undemanding arrangements of his beloved “Western canon”— like someone rather obsessively patting and plumping his cushion, to make his fond seat comfier — there are always stray insights and fugitive jewels to be found. 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.” ~

~ James Wood, The New Yorker, October 16, 2019

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EMERSON’S AFFIRMATION OF A “SECOND BEST”


~ “Though Melville and Henry James thought Emerson knew too little of loss, they were mistaken. The three people he loved best died early: his first wife, Ellen; his brother Charles; his little son Waldo. We all know suffering and evil: Emerson had the wisdom not to let himself be darkened prematurely. Stephen Whicher is the best guide:


“His later thought is characteristically an affirmation of a second best. If a perfect freedom was clearly out of reach, man’s fate as he found it still turned out to allow him adequate means to free himself. The two chief second-best means of freedom that Emerson found were “obedience to his genius” and “the habit of the observer” — Vocation and Intellect.” ~ Harold Bloom


Oriana:


Emerson managed to avoid depression. He turned to his work. If only that kind of wisdom had visited me earlier in life, I dare not contemplate how much useless suffering I would have avoided . . . But it would be ungracious to complain rather than celebrate the fact that the wisdom of turning to productivity visited me at all, no matter how late. 


As for affection rather than passion, I don’t see affection as “second best.” Together with vocation, it’s a secure foundation for contentment. We need not yearn for happiness. It is a great blessing to have contentment. And I wouldn’t call contentment “second best” either.


No, not a portrait of Emerson, but to me a figure of a solitary walker evokes a special kind of gentle contentment.

*

“Good and evil are a great deal more complex 
than a princess and a dragon. Is not the dragon the hero of his own story?” ~ Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus


*

BOOKS THAT TRY TO EXPLAIN WHY OUR WORLD IS IN A BAD SHAPE 

Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels


~ "Democracy for Realists is an eye-opening and sober look at the data on democracy and what makes it effective/ineffective. Hint: people are stupid. Or as my favorite Winston Churchill quotes goes: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” 


We romanticize democracy. We like to blame politicians and bureaucrats and argue that if the people were just more engaged, more educated, had more direct say in their government, things would be better. Unfortunately, the data show pretty much all of this to be untrue. People regularly vote against their own interests, are ignorant of the issues, and even when they are well-informed, they are easily swayed by group identities and emotion. Yes, that includes me and you. 


The best-functioning democracies are those that have large hierarchies built into them separating power from the popular vote. Unfortunately, due to technology and political pressure, those hierarchies have been slowly dismantled over the last 100 years or so. The book is heavily focused on the United States, but I’m sure most liberal, democratic countries will see themselves in this book. Incredibly well-researched. And more than a few very uncomfortable conclusions.

Notable Quotes:


“Well-informed citizens, too, have come in for their share of criticism, since their well-organized ‘ideological’ thinking often turns out to be just a rather mechanical reflection of what their favorite group and party leaders have instructed them to think.”


“Elections do not force successful candidates to reflect the policy preferences of the median voter.”


“When voters got a chicken in every pot at election time, they usually liked the incumbent party’s ideology just fine, whatever it happened to be. But when incomes eroded and unemployment escalated, they became ripe for defection to anyone who promised to bring home the poultry.”


The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff


Haidt and Lukianoff argue with a lot of convincing data that adolescents today are maturing emotionally and psychologically at lower rates and later than ever before. Their main targets are: 


The ballooning dysfunction of school bureaucracies, who are now treating kids as customers rather than students.


The trend of “helicopter parenting,” where paranoid parents are coddling their children, protecting them from everything that is uncomfortable and/or potentially threatening.

The heightened expectations for academic achievement — most childhood development happens through playing with other kids. Kids these days play less than ever before, and when they do play, they are often isolated. Instead, they’re busy doing homework and prepping for college applications, sometimes as young as kindergarten.

And, of course, there’s the obligatory “social media is ruining everything” chapter that we all know and love.

Let kids be kids. Teach them independence. Let them get hurt and figure out their problems themselves. Stop with the homework.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier


Free information sounds great on paper, but it causes all sorts of deep, systemic problems when implemented at scale. For one, it spawns an extremely aggressive and intrusive advertising model. For two, the economics of data collection create a situation where a small number of servers collect all the data and gain terrifying amounts of power…and then inevitably abuse that power (*cough* Facebook). For three, when software eats the world, it generates greater inequality, not less. For four, when all information becomes free, it becomes valueless and meaningless. People feel entitled to start believing whatever they want, since it’s always unclear what information is more valuable than other information. For five–he can keep going… and does.

“At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.”

The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols


With our modern obsessions of freedom and equality and happiness, Nichols argues that we’ve taken these rights and applied them to a domain where they don’t belong: truth. 


People feel “the right” to have their opinions and beliefs respected, even though they are not qualified, have no credentials or offer no expertise. Pundits on TV claim that their beliefs that climate change doesn’t exist, or that vaccinations are harmful, are just as valid — and should be respected just as much — as their scientific counterparts. Nichols’ blame is scattershot. Everything from the usual internet gripes, to cable television, to the grade inflation happening in school, to school bureaucracies treating students as customers rather than students.

Practice some humility. Trust in science. Trust in people who have decades of experience in a field. In many ways, the issue today, above all others, is trust.

“The bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.”

“We are supposed to “agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.”

“When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.”

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam


The title refers to the fact that more Americans bowl than in the past. Yet, there are fewer blowing leagues than ever before. Meaning: more and more, people are spending time alone.

It’s not just bowling leagues that are disappearing. Churches, parent-teacher associations, political activists, neighborhood watches, bridge clubs, veterans organizations. You name a community, and it’s likely disappearing.
When the apocalypse comes, it will look like: People dying alone in their homes, without anyone knowing. 


“Community has warred incessantly with individualism for preeminence in our political hagiology… The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago— silently, without warning— that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.”

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/5-books-that-explain-why-it-seems-the-world-is-so-messed-up?utm_source=pocket-newtab


Mary:

This week's blog discussions led me to think there is something common to several of them, in what amounts to a retreat from the objective and into the subjective. People don't  simply say everyone has their own opinion, they feel all opinions are equally justified, and none need to refer to any actual facts, evidence or demonstrable truths. I'm entitled to my own opinion and so are you, and no one can prove any objective validation or rebuttal to either. In fact, just as in the huge campaign now operating to undermine any sense of what is true , casting doubt on all news as "fake news” — there is an insistence on "alternative facts," that is, an alternative reality tailored to the subjective needs and desires of the individual. Any and Every individual.

So, not only do I have my own precious opinion, I have my own facts and my own reality. And so do you. This is a nightmare scenario. It may be an active strategy in the political mess we are suffering through, but it undermines the very foundation of society. Instead of science we have hype, the spin doctors manipulations unchecked by the need to respect objective measurements, scientific truths, or the demands of reason. Here a rose is not a rose, but whatever the moment requires, for whatever result is desired. Lie and lie and lie, and soon lies look more solid, more real, than any truth. Fact finding and the fact finders are  discounted as simply another possible story, another personal opinion.

Soon it seems nothing can be trusted, everything may be part of someone's conspiracy to remake the world in their own image...give it the shape of their own ambition, their own fears, hatreds, and desires. It is hard not to be infected with the accompanying paranoia — when a good man dies suddenly, hard not to think murder or assassination. There are no limits to remaking reality, no rules, no laws.

This is more than the work of politicians, dictators and demagogues. As noted, children no longer have childhoods the way they used to. Free play has almost disappeared,  replaced by play dates, organized activities for sports or other "enrichment," and early, steady labor at producing the "right" record, and gaining the "best" skills to ensure acceptance into the kind of schools and programs that ensure "success." And if all that fails, hire someone to fake the credentials and secure placement anyway. Knowledge and achievement have themselves been robbed of authenticity, of even the need for authenticity, replaced by hype, scam, all the machinations of the expert con man.

So we have a world where self esteem replaces actual accomplishment...forgetting if everyone wins no one does, because the endeavor itself no longer has any value. We have a world where many prefer gaming to living, spending time and resources in "virtual" worlds as self-created, self-defined "avatars." We have a world where science can be ridiculed and denied because we have a difference of opinion with the facts, and opinions matter more than facts.

Of course this is not all inclusive, but it is pervasive enough to be frightening and threatening, pervasive enough to cause great damage. Damage already seen in the increase in hate crimes and hate speech, in the loss of protective regulations meant to address issues like pollution and climate change, in the abandonment of allies, the cozying up to dictators and enabling of destruction, even genocide of people once our allies.

It can be overwhelming,  and I fear it will all get much worse. It reminds me more of a psychosis than anything else, and I wonder how we can heal this terrible madness.


 
Oriana:

It’s been said many times that Trump is a symptom and not a cause — but I think that to a degree he IS the cause. It’s one thing when the lunatic fringe indulges in conspiracy theories and bizarre beliefs and ideas. It’s much more serious when the head of state blatantly lies and invents his “alternative facts.” When that happens, the whole country is damaged and debased in multiple ways.

It’s the old story of the country collapsing because there is something rotten at the very heart of things — meaning that the king is insane, criminal, or otherwise seriously dysfunctional.

It’s not the first time in history. True, Hitler’s Germany (or Stalin’s Russia) wasn’t the exact image of what’s happening now, but the similarities that exist are quite frightening — for instance, the campaign to discredit the press as creators of fake news and even the enemy of the people — a phrase used especially often in Stalinist Soviet Union. The massive effort to replace reality with some politically expedient untruth is the very essence of authoritarianism, as Hannah Arendt never ceased to warn. 


“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asks during the trial of Jesus — perhaps the most startling question in the entire Bible. Of course there is no absolute answer to that huge question; in our post-Nietzschean, scientific era we recognize that we have only partial truths. But “partial truth” doesn’t mean “no truth.” And ascertainable facts exist: the secret meeting with the Russian ambassador either did or did not take place. Stalin really did sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and at first the two were allies. The Civil War really was about slavery — that’s not just an opinion. We must guard real (evidence-based) as opposed to “alternative facts.” It’s not just that our sanity depends on it. So does democracy and the rule of law.

*
~ “Trump's defense strategy: The FBI is lying. The CIA is lying. The NSA is lying. Half a dozen committees of the US Congress are lying. Career diplomats are lying. His former attorney is lying (from jail). His former campaign manager is lying (from jail). His former national security advisor is lying (under threat of jail). CNN is lying. NBC is lying. CBS is lying. ABC is lying. PBS is lying. FOX News has just joined them in lying. Hundreds of newspapers and radio stations are lying. The Internet is lying. The Ukrainians are lying. The Chinese are lying. The Australians are lying. Nancy Pelosi is lying. Adam Schiff is lying. All of the Democrats are lying. More and more Republicans are lying. All of the pollsters are lying. 


And Donald Trump is the only person telling the truth.” ~ Robert Clark Young
 


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But in spite of all that is wrong with man-made world, there is still the beauty of the natural world: amethyst eyes from Uruguay


 
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THE SHIFTING TIDES OF KKK
 
~ “Ku Klax Klan actually formed after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction period. Then it was entirely contained within the South, mostly in the rural South. It [was] all men. There were violent attacks on people who were engaged, or [wanted] to be engaged, in the Reconstruction state, [including] freed blacks, southern reconstructionists, politicians and northerners who move to the South. That collapses for a variety of reasons in the 1870s.

Then, the Klan is reborn in the teens, but becomes really big in the early 1920s. And that is the second Klan. That is probably the biggest organized outburst of white supremacy in American history, encompassing millions of members or more. ... And that's not in the South, [it's] primarily in the North. It's not marginal. It runs people for office. It has a middle class base. They have an electoral campaign. They are very active in the communities. And they have women's Klans, who are very active and very effective in some of the communities. That dissolves into mostly scandals around the late ‘20s.

Then there's some fascist activity around the wars — pro-German, some Nazi activity in the United States — not sizable, but obviously extremely troubling.

The Klan and white supremacy reemerge in a bigger and more organized way around the desegregation and civil rights movement — again, mostly in the South, and back to that Southern model: vicious, violent, defensive, Jim Crow and white rights in the South.

 
And then it kind of ebbs. After a while, it kind of comes back again in the late '80s and the early 21st Century as another era. And then there's kind of a network of white supremacism that encompasses the Klan, which is more peripheral by this time. Also Neo-Nazi influence is coming as white power skinheads, racist music, and also neo-Nazi groups. The Klans tend to be super nationalist, but these neo-Nazi groups have a big international agenda.

Then the last wave is where we are now, which is the Internet appears. The movement has been in every other era as movement of people in physical space like in meetings, rallies, protests and demonstrations and so forth. It becomes primarily a virtual world, and as you can see, has its own consequences — many consequences. It's much harder to track. And then there are these blurred lines between all these various groups that get jumbled together as the alt-right and people who come from the more traditional neo-Nazi world. We're in a very different world now.

~ That's a long history. You mentioned that, for a variety of reasons, the Klan in the Reconstruction era collapsed. What are some of the factors that contributed to that?

I would say two things that mostly contributed to that ebb over time.

One is the white supremacist world, writ large, is very prone to very serious infighting. Internal schisms are quite profound in collapsing white supremacists, even as an entire movement, over time.

It's almost always power and money. So, for example, the '20s Klan — I say "Klan" but in every era there were multiple Klans, they all have different names, they all have different leaders — they are trying to extract money from their groups, and they are all fighting about money .... and then over power, and who controls the power, because white supremacy groups don't elect their leaders right away. To be a leader just means to grab power and control. So there's a lot of contention in these groups of control.

It's not ideas. Ideas aren't that central. They have these certain key ideas that they promulgated — race and anti-Semitic ideas — but the fine points of ideological discussion don't really occur that much in white supremacist groups, nor do they get people that agitated. It's not like in other kinds of groups, where people might have various versions of ideas, versions of ideologies. [The Klan] just have kind of core beliefs. But they do tend to fight over ideas for money, power and access to the media.

So that's the fighting. The other thing is, in different waves of history, there are prosecutions, either by the police or civil prosecutions that collapse groups and movements. Sometimes, there's kind of a blind eye to white supremacist organizing, but at other times there is really successful either civil or state prosecutions of these groups that do debilitate them.

Certain groups, like the Klan, tend to rise and fall based on the threats to who is in power. The 1870s Klan [was] based on the Southern racial state formed during slavery being threatened by Reconstruction. In the 1920s, the idea was that political power [was] being threatened by this wave of immigrants. The 1920s Klan [was] very anti-Catholic, as well as racist and anti-Semitic. Part of this anti-Catholicism [was] based on the idea that Catholics were going to start controlling politics as well as the police.

Right now, we have an extremely heterogeneous group that we might call white supremacists. So some of them, probably the smallest group, are nationalistic. And probably the larger group are not particularly nationalistic. This is why it's hard to make generalizations. It's not the case that nationalist fervor just finds itself in the white supremacist movement. The person accused of the shooting in Pittsburgh is an example. If you look at [his] writings, they're not nationalistic, they're in fact anti-nationalistic. And that's pretty common with white supremacy today — some of them have this sense that their mission is this pan-Aryan mission. They're fighting global threats to whites and creating a white international defense. So that's not a nationalist project, that's an internationalist project.

And the other reason is there's this idea among white supremacists in the United States that the national government is ZOG — Zionist Occupation Government — and that's a shorthand way of saying that the national government is secretly controlled by an invisible Jewish cabal. So some of them will be amenable to very local government ... they'll embrace, and work with, and even try to seize control of the government at the county level. But generally, national politics are quite anathema for those two general reasons.

People will say the '20s Klan was not as violent as other Klans. But that's really because its violence took a different form. So there, the threat that the Klan manufactured was the threat of being swapped — all the positions of society being taken by the others — so immigrants, Catholics, Jews and so forth. So the violence was things like, for example, I studied deeply the state of Indiana where the Klan was very strong — pushing Catholics school teachers out of their jobs in public schools and getting them fired, running Jewish merchants out of town, creating boycott campaigns, whispering campaigns about somebody's business that would cause it to collapse. So it's a different kind of violence but it's really targeted as expelling from the communities those who are different than the white, native-born Protestants who were the members of the Klan. So it takes different forms in different times. It's not always the violence that we think about now, like shootings.
 

Tthe violence that we see today is not that dissimilar from the violence of the Klan in the '50s and '60s, where there was, kind of, the violence of terrorism. So there's two kinds of violence in white supremacy. There's the "go out and beat up people on the street" violence — that's kind of the skinhead violence. And then there's the sort of strategic violence. You know, the violence that's really meant to send a message to a big audience, so that the message is dispersed and the victims are way beyond the people who are actually injured.
 

You see that in the '50s, '60s in the South, and you see it now.

~ What are the most effective strategies to combat these ideas of white supremacy, or this violence?

I'd say the most effective strategy is to educate people about it, because it really thrives on being hidden and appearing to be something other than it is. I mean, millions of white supremacist groups have often targeted young people, and they do so often in a way that's not clear to the young person that these are white supremacists, they appear to be just your friends and your new social life, like people on the edges who seem exciting. ... And so helping people understand how white supremacists operate in high schools, and the military, and all kinds of sectors of society gives people the resources the understanding to not be pulled into those kinds of worlds.


Twenty years, or even 10 years ago, I would have said it's really effective to sue these groups and bring them down financially, which was what the Southern Poverty Law Center was doing.

[Now,] they don't have property; they operate in a virtual space. So the strategies of combating racial extremism have to change with the changing nature of it.” ~

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/12/08/671999530/what-the-ebbs-and-flows-of-the-kkk-can-tell-us-about-white-supremacy-today


KKK, 1922: a new recruit gets initiated


*
PERHAPS THE BEST AND MOST REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN IDEA

 
Am I naive to still see America as the most revolutionary country in the world? The idea that the many, rather than just the few, can and should enjoy life — that the pursuit of happiness is an un-alienable right — strikes me as particularly American.

Americans take it for granted, as self-evident. It’s not just the rich who have the right to happiness; it’s a universal human right. Believe me, this is NOT self-evident except in the context of the secular (and liberal Protestant) worldview that accepts THIS life as important, that it’s not just a brief and miserable way station before the afterlife, the “true” life.

Coming from a masochistic Catholic background (“Suffering is good for you”; “God sends suffering to those he loves”; “The more you suffer in this life, the shorter the time in Purgatory”), I had great trouble with the notion of the pursuit of happiness. It took me a very long time to learn not to despise it, and finally to accept it for myself.

The most significant modern opponent of this idea is not so much the Catholic church, no longer the dominant cultural force that it once was. It is radical Islam, with its rejection of modernity and this-worldliness. Not surprisingly, the afterlife is very important in radical Islam. The stronger the belief in the afterlife (especially in paradise), the easier it is manipulate people to be willing to die for the faith.

It’s not reason that is the greatest enemy of religion. The greatest enemy of religion is happiness.


 
Oriana:

“Life should be a joy: not a ledger of sins and failures to live up to impossible standards, but an iridescent beauty like a dragonfly.” — to quote myself because why not; I give myself permission to do it once a year, and anyway I need an excuse for posting an image of a dragonfly (in this case in amber, because I love amber too)


*
FIVE SECONDS THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
 
~ "Most of the time when you have stuff that you need to do, you're not going to feel like doing it. And it's a major mistake to sit around and think that you need to be motivated first, and it's an even bigger mistake to think that at some point you will feel like doing it,” Mel Robbins said. She needed a strategy — something that would propel her to take action even when she didn't feel like it.

The Five-Second Rule


So, after stumbling across a television commercial with the image of a rocket launching, Robbins decided she would launch herself out of bed the very next day with the same gusto and determination. When the alarm clock rang, she counted backwards from five just "like NASA when they launch a rocket," she said. 


It worked. 


So she did it the next day and the day after, and pretty soon, Robbins was counting down on every action she didn't really feel like taking. In just five seconds, she was doing things she hadn't felt like doing before. 


It soon became her new rule. 


"Life, and business in particular, is about pushing yourself to do the things that are uncomfortable so that you can achieve the results that you want," Robbins said. "The secret is all about not waiting until you feel like it."

The Significance of Five Seconds


It's estimated that Americans make about 35,000 decisions a day. And most of the time, those decisions are made unconsciously. 


"We like to think we make decisions based on logic, based on what's best for our businesses," Robbins said. "The fact is that 95 percent of the decisions we make are based on the way we feel in the moment." 


What's worse, negative emotions like fear, anger, and uncertainty seem to have strong influence over our decisions. 


Research shows there's a roughly five-second window of time between a thought, an idea, or intuition, and the brain's move to support it — or kill it. 


"It turns out that inside that five-second window, your entire life and business, everything changes if you wake up and take control of that moment right before you're about to make a decision," Robbins said. 


The Science Behind the Hack


So how does a deceptively simple hack create such drastic change? 


Here's how: Rather than defaulting to familiar defense mechanisms, counting backward from five (5-4-3-2-1) forces your brain to stop, focus, and occupy itself with something else. Your brain's no longer being hijacked by fear, doubt, anger, or any other powerful emotion that can lead to bad, knee-jerk decisions. 


It also stimulates the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that's active when you're changing behavior, when you're learning something new, or when you're directing your thoughts. 


"So instead of letting your brain sabotage you, you're using a meta-cognition technique to switch the gears in our mind and make changing easy," Robbins said. 


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-change-your-life-in-5-seconds?utm_source=pocket-newtab




Oriana: 

Try it. It can be amazing. And that chore you've been thinking about and yet not doing for months on end . . . Blast off, and it's done! 

I've noticed that the strategy may fail if the task is in the "no big deal" category. But if it's something that must be done, and you've been procrastinating, try the five-seconds strategy. Soon you too will be saying, "Wow!"

*

ARE FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS A CHOICE?

“I FEAR, WROTE NIETZSCHE, “THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING RID OF GOD BECAUSE WE STILL BELIEVE IN GRAMMAR.” [“TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS”] The grammar of dream interpretation, whether Freudian or Jungian, is a crust of dead theology. We deaden the outer surfaces of our creative response to dreams in order to protect ourselves from the creative power the dreams bring back to us.” ~ Greg Mogenson, “God Is a Trauma.”


Mogenson is referring to the brain’s power to create our subjective reality — a power too often squandered on brooding over the past or fantasizing about the future — the negative and positive inflation of vicarious living, rather than actively creating our life in the present. To quote Mogenson: “The ‘right’ interpretation is the most daring interpretation. Dream interpretation is the space project of an ever-opening consciousness. Interpretations are trajectories, arrows of longing, satellites in the surrendered heaven of man’s creating will.”


Nietzsche both lamented and celebrated the death of god as a tyrant of the soul, an obstacle to soul-making and metaphor-making. “Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead’, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations.”


To Nietzsche religious faith meant “not wanting to know the truth.” Freedom is the opposite of belief. “If there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to ‘believe’ — or a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live — well, they will know it tomorrow.”


But our belief in grammar, though weaker now, still holds and will hold as long as we need to communicate (although I’ve graded hundreds of essays which showed no belief in grammar). I think this is in line with “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged. What you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.


True: we have evolved to see patterns even where there are none, to connect the dots. The belief in cosmic justice is our default setting — it takes skeptical thinking to see randomness and coincidences.


I agree that it takes a cognitive effort to see that much depends on mere chance, though we can make the best of it. And we can still reject an immoral, outdated religion, and venture to find and/or create our own journey.

Oriana:


Do we choose our deepest beliefs? “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged. What you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.”


Or rather, in neural pathways. 


And one of the unchangeable beliefs seems to be that the great majority of people (obviously not Nietzsche’s “free spirits”) must have religion or they couldn’t cope with the adversities of life. I keep wondering if that’s an underestimate of human resilience. At the same time, my recent medical apocalypse showed me how terrible and random life can be, and made me more tolerant of religion. For some, that can indeed be an important emotional factor. Never mind the wishful thinking and so forth — sometimes you find yourself in life’s muddy trenches, not sure you’ll make it, willing to grasp at metaphysical straws.



“PLEASANTLY DEMENTED”


~ “It was a geriatric psychologist in New York, Mitchell Slutzky, who told me about the subset of "pleasantly demented." Most doctors I interviewed hadn't heard the term, but when I put out the word, I received a flood of e-mails from friends and bloggers, saying they had relatives who were pleasantly demented. On the Alzheimer's Association Web site, one woman wrote, "Half the clients in adult day care are pleasantly demented." Shelley Hoon of Boston says her mother's personality changed drastically with Alzheimer's. "I used to call her 'The General'," Hoon says. "She was hard-nosed, never laughed, and if she was angry, you'd dive for cover under the couch." Now, Hoon says, her mother is "totally sweet, laughs and finds pleasure in simple things. I don't know what to make of it."


Barbara Ross of Atlanta told me that when her father became demented, "he said he'd had the most wonderful life and was the luckiest guy in the world." He'd forgotten two acrimonious divorces and that his business had gone bankrupt. "So what is wrong with forgetting that garbage and being happy in the moment?" Ross asked.


Dr. Oliver Sacks, who wrote lyrical books about people with neurological disorders, recounted how Ralph Waldo Emerson was cheerful in his 60s when he began sinking into "soft oblivion." When a friend asked how he was, Emerson is reported to have said, "Quite well. I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well." He could not remember his own work but continued to give lectures by reading his notes, joking that he was "a lecturer who has no idea what he's lecturing about."


I heard several theories about what might cause pleasant dementia. Sacks suggests it may result from, among other factors, deterioration of the frontal lobes, "particularly those systems associated with self-evaluation, scrupulosity and anxiety." Other doctors suspect damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, which deals with logic and analysis, rather than the right hemisphere, which perceives unity and connection. With the left brain wiped out, people might feel expansive joy.


What intrigues me is the similarity between pleasant dementia and the state that spiritual teachers encourage people to cultivate: acceptance, letting go, being fully present now. Dr. Peter Whitehouse, professor of neurology at Case Western Reserve, says he's a Buddhist practitioner and finds it "fascinating to consider what it means to live in the moment, because in many ways that's what dementia brings." He says memory loss has always been part of human experience. "The Egyptians wrote about it. I'm surprised the world's religions haven't taken this on. They've taken on death. Why haven't they taken on the slow deterioration of one's mental abilities?"


There appears to be no ongoing research into what makes one person with dementia become belligerent and another serene. No one is comparing the brain waves of monks in meditation with the brain waves of people with pleasant dementia.


I don't wish to romanticize the state or suggest that anyone aspire to it, because the pleasantly demented aren't functional. My mother doesn't remember where her clothes are or what day it is. Yet her equanimity and cheer seem preferable to the acute physical suffering I've witnessed in other endgames. Years ago, Sacks said in our interview: "At 75, I sort of wonder what the future has in store. If I am going to lose it, I would prefer to lose it in an Emersonian way."


That way was conveyed in Emerson's poem "Terminus," which he wrote at 63 when he felt his mind slipping from him:


TERMINUS

It is time to be old,
To take in sail:—
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: “No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
. . .
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And,—fault of novel germs,—
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,—
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”

As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
“Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What a sanguine injunction, I thought, not only for my mother but for those of us who may follow on that ship. May we sail without fear and may the weather be … pleasant.” ~


https://www.newsweek.com/sara-davidson-pleasant-dementia-and-inner-peace-88517


Lilith:

Thanks for posting about pleasant dementia. In my mother’s final years she became very sweet and pleasant all the time. All her anger had finally left her. I posited that she had lost the bad memories.

When my mother was in pleasant dementia she was like I had never known her. I didn’t know she had the capacity to be sweet and nice.


Oriana:

Oh no! To have to wait that long to discover your mother could be this sweet person. We are all several “selves” inside one person; different selves can become dominant in different situations. Children of “pleasantly demented” parent quite often comment on the positive change. Alas, that person is no longer functional.

But in life in general, I’ve seen a kind of temporary “personality change” many times. We are different with a friend we adore than with an annoying salesman. Change the environment, change the way the person is treated, and watch the fascinating changes. That’s a huge other fascinating topic: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”


Castine Harbor; Hugh Fritz Lane, 1851 (one of my favorite paintings at Timken Art Gallery in Balboa Park, San Diego)

*
Ending on beauty:

EARLY FALL


The first cold morning, 


the first lost tomato 

pulled rotting from the vine, 

the first grey, rainfilled sky —  

sunless as February, 


lonely as April

before spring learns

the secret of love.

~ John Guzlowski




Saturday, October 19, 2019

IMMORTALITY IS THIS LIFE: HAROLD BLOOM; JANE AUSTEN: DID SHE PREFER SENSE OR SENSIBILITY? FRIERICH'S WANDERER; COUNTERCLOCKWISE: THE MIND’S INFLUENCE ON AGING;THE GLASS FLOOR; HUNTING FOR WILD ANCESTORS OF OUR FOOD

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

*


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


 
*
 

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


Oriana:

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. 


*

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.” ~


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-reverse-aging-and-become-whoever-you-want-to-be?utm_source=pocket-newtab

*

“Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.” ~ Mary Ruefle


ending on beauty:
 
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