What Remains?

May 12, 2024 Leave a comment

Watching protesting students align themselves with the terrorist group Hamas and their Palestinian pawns, one wonders what legacy they are building for themselves. Are they – the combine of victim-oppressor social justice warriors – really acting for the greater good with their pro-Hamas and antisemitic chants? Whose interests are they serving? Will they later regret their actions and associations, or will their self-deception and moral distortion continue on the rest of their lives?

Looking back over one’s life work, one’s ruling passion, and reconciling that with what one’s dedicated service contributed to forms the basis of two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels: An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day.

Two men – a Japanese artist in the first novel and an English butler in the second – aspired to reach the highest level in their professions. Both men were attuned to honor and dignity. Both men wanted to attach themselves to a greater worldly-good. But their singular focus, their self-constrained temporal bandwidth, shut out all else until later in life (the time period in the novels). They come to see that what they gave their singleness of mind and efforts to turned out to be not just heartbreaking and reputation damaging but devastating to the greater good.

Both men come across as guarded in their retelling of events and observations in diary-like fashion, as if they didn’t want to be too harsh on themselves. By their unreliable narration we wonder if there’s more under the surface. As things come to the fore, we learn there is a tension between how each saw the world and how the world really was. And this becomes cause for a conflicted life and one of guilt, deflection, and regret about past myopia and former associations.

Each man talks as if “you” were like them – as someone living in the same neighborhood in post-war Japan and as a butler in England. The world doesn’t extend beyond their interests. There are those – daughters, an old friend, a journalist, a housemaid, local towns folk -who try to draw them out.

The artist Masuji Ono’s narration occurs after the end of WWII in 1945 (Oct. 1948 June 1950), when Japan is rebuilding her cities after defeat. We learn that Ono is a retired printmaker who lost his wife Michiko and son Kenji during the war. His beautiful home was seriously damaged by the war as was his reputation.

The elderly Ono spends his time gardening, working on the house, with his visiting daughters and his grandson and going out at night to drink in a quiet lantern-lit bar, a remnant of the pleasure district – the “floating world” of pleasure, entertainment and drink that had at one time given him much pleasure. It’s where he escapes from his dark past.

Ono recalls his early printmaking days and his rise to be a master printmaker surrounded by adoring students in the bar. We learn of his desire to go beyond just making beautiful art. He wanted to serve a higher purpose. We come to learn of Ono’s dark past – his direct involvement in Imperialist Japan’s military rise and his work as a government propagandist.

Ono reassesses events from his past throughout the novel. He reconsiders his role in those events and his guilt. His reputation proceeds him as he enters into marriage negotiations for his daughter Noriko. He also assesses how Japan is changing since the war. He questions some of the change:

“Something has changed in the character of the younger generation in a way I do not fully understand, and certain aspects of this change are undeniably disturbing.”

“Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn’t mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something.”

Does Ono admit he was wrong to be a propagandist in the deadliest military conflict in history? Does he come to terms with the mistakes he made in the course of his life? Does he attain satisfaction and dignity when all is said and done?

~~

Mr. Stevens’ narration occurs during a six-day road trip in the summer of 1956. He goes to visit Mrs. Benn, nee Kenton, in the sea-side town of Weymouth, England. During this time, he reminisces about his days as head butler at Darlington Hall after WWI and leading up to WWII.

Mr. Stevens is a prim and proper Jeeves-like butler who speaks in a measured and precise way. He values professionalism and dignity above all else.

“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost . . . They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit. . . It is, as I say, a matter of “dignity.”

Mr. Stevens’ devotion and dedicated service is focused on a man he holds in high esteem: Lord Darlington. “A gentleman through and through” and “I for one will never doubt that a desire to see “justice in this world” lay at the heart of all his actions” and “All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile” says Stevens.

High level meetings are held at Darlington Hall after WWI. Lord Darlington lobbies leaders from England, France and America to go financially easy on Germany.

Lord Darlington, an old-fashioned English gentleman, is much like Mr. Stevens. He can’t imagine a world different from his own. He never understands the true agenda of the Nazis even as the fascists he invites to Darlington Hall seek to turn him against the Jews. Lord Darlington, “A gentleman through and through”, becomes an appeaser and Nazi sympathizer in the name of honor, fairness, friendship, and gentlemanly conduct.

The devoted Stevens views Lord Darlington as a man who had good intentions but was led astray by manipulative diplomats. “I for one will never doubt that a desire to see ‘justice in this world’ lay at the heart of all his actions.”

The devoted Stevens goes with the flow:

“How can one possibly be held to blame in any sense because, say, the passage of time has shown that Lord Darlington’s efforts were misguided, even foolish? Throughout the years I served him, it was he and he alone who weighed up evidence and judged it best to proceed in the way he did, while I simply confined myself, quite properly, to affairs within my own professional realm. And as far as I am concerned, I carried out my duties to the best of my abilities, indeed to a standard which many may consider ‘first rate’.”

The devoted Stevens extrapolates his efforts:

“A ‘great’ butler can only be, surely, one who can point to his years of service and say that he has applied his talents to serving a great gentleman – and through the latter, to serving humanity.”

Miss Kenton, the lead housemaid at Darlington Hall, is like Stevens. She takes great pride in her work. But unlike Stevens, she has emotional latitude and an independent streak. She is intelligent, headstrong, and stubborn. She disagrees not only with Stevens at time but also with the decisions made by Lord Darlington. 

Though she finds Mr. Steven infuriating – “Why, Mr. Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?” – it gradually becomes clear that Miss Kenton is in love with him. But after many years, she leaves Darlington Hall. Frustrated at Mr. Stevens’ buttoned up emotional state and lack of response Miss Kenton goes off with Mr. Benn, a footman of the house.

Years later, Stevens receives a letter from Miss Kenton. He reads it over and over believing that she might return to her post at Darlington Hall under a new owner. The letter indicates that her marriage to Mr. Benn might not be working out. Stevens’ hopes are up but well-regulated.

His new employer, a wealthy American named Mr. Farraday, tells Stevens to take some time off. He offers Stevens his car for a road trip. And off Stevens goes to see Miss Kenton.

On his way, Stevens comes into contact with several working-class characters. They challenge Stevens’ ideas about dignity. One man opines that dignity is about democracy and standing up for one’s beliefs – in other words, being attentive to what’s going on in the world and being outspoken. This, of course, is in contrast to Stevens’ conception of dignity as being about suppressing one’s own feelings in pursuit of professionalism.

What happens when Stevens reaches Weymouth and meets Mrs. Benn?

What does hindsight look like to Stevens? Does it look like not worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Does it look like a simple butler trying to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy and sacrificing much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, that in itself, whatever the outcome, is cause for pride and contentment?

Does Stevens, as he reflects on things at the end of the day, realize the mistake he made in his lockstep devotion to Lord Darlington? Does he take the blinders off? And, does he understand the effects of his obsessive devotion to professionalism and dignity on his personal life?

Stevens gives his thoughts on the latter to a man sitting next to him on the pier as they watch the sun going down and the pier lights come on:

“The fact is, of course,’ I said after a while, ‘I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now – well – I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.”

I return to my opening questions. Whose interests were they serving? Will they later regret their actions and associations or does willful blindness and self-deception remain?

“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

~~~~~

This post wasn’t meant to provide a complete summary of Kazuo Ishiguro’s two novels. There is a whole lot going on in each that I haven’t touched on. They are very well written human-interest stories. The Remains of the Day won The Booker Prize.

Rather, I saw parallels between the decisions youth are making today, with all ardor, for deadly causes and the experiences and feelings of the artist Masuji Ono and the butler Stevens.

I’ve read both novels. I saw the Remains of the Day before reading the book. This Merchant Ivory film is one of my favorites (There is no murder and mayhem, no car chases, no heavy breathing, no queer theory or CRT, and no Disney twaddle.)

The cast is top-notch. I recommend reading the book before viewing the movie and listening to the podcast below (spoiler alert!).

The movie, of course, is edited way down to try and give the essence of Ishiguro’s novel. But reading the text first will provide the depth and richness of the characters and much more detail of their situations.

The Booker at the Oscars: The Remains of the Day from The Booker Prize Podcast | Podcast Episode on Podbay

Filed under Literature Tagged with , , , , , ,

Polly Want a Crisis?

April 14, 2024 Leave a comment

If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us. But the stark reality is that the anointed ones have learned that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and that a manufactured crisis affords the anointed the opportunity to wield total power for its own sake.

“When the anointed say that there is a crisis this means that something must be done —and it must be done simply because the anointed want it done.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy

The fourth anniversary of “15 days to slow the spread” has come and gone. But the harm inflicted upon our lives and our country during the COVID “crisis” has not. More “public health” strategies are being developed to tyrannize us into “wellness” (See the WHO treaty below.) We will be made to follow “the science” even into hell if it suits the anointed ones.

We (the remnant) somehow lived through the “something must be done” ill-treatment by means of the public health anointed: Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, and others of the anointed ilk.

And somehow, we lived through the abrogation of our freedom by the anointed ones. We came out the other side of the social experiment with the knowledge that the anointed ones conceived the abuse done to us and will do it again. What we had to endure mentally at the hands of the anointed arch-COVIDians was horrible: their fearmongering, their lies, their scientism, their silencing of contrary evidence, and their absurd mandates – clearly a test of wills as common sense was not considered “the science.”

The introduction of the anointed anxiety-soothing shot – the SOMA serum – has had devastating implications on the health and livelihoods. Many have suffered the loss of loved ones with an “unexpected death”, the loss of livelihood, and the loss of health. It has only been recently reported that the anointed of the CDC intentionally HID more than a quarter of a million adverse effects reports for the COVID-19 “vaccines.”

We continue to be subjected (via the anointed one’s talking heads) to the badgering about a (non-existent) climate “crisis.” We are told to do away with gasoline-powered vehicles and natural gas ranges and with all thought of fossil fuels as an energy source. We are told to become completely dependent on weather-dependent turbines and solar panels, and on hydropower and on their “climate science” directives for the energy to power a modern industrial economy.

(See my post Earth Day – Don’t Re-Greta Green Energy | Kingdom Venturers where I wrote about the exploitation of children and poor countries to secure the minerals needed for millions of electronic products e.g., rechargeable lithium batteries, sold year after year. The anointed ones have hearts of darkness.

“. . . cobalt, mined by the Congolese (and the Uyghurs in China), is a coveted substance in man’s conquest of earth. And we find, if we dare to look, that Green Energy-based colonialism is no different than the ivory-based colonialism talked about in [Joseph Conrad’s] Heart of Darkness.”)

The anointed of the World Economic Forum (WEF) had included “Climate-related risks” as “the biggest future threat facing the world.” The WEF have since moved on to “misinformation and disinformation” as the biggest risk near-term risk (to their narratives), followed by extreme weather events, social polarization and armed conflict.

Citing soaring energy and food prices resulting in inflationary pressures and a cost-of-living crisis, social unrest, conflicts, carbon emissions and future pandemics, the anointed of the WEF have created a new word for the cascading and connected crises they envision: Polycrisis.

For, the anointed of the WEF must make alarming predictions and announce sweeping solutions to create a demand for their services. These “Teflon prophets” (Thomas Sowell) predict that there will be future social, economic, or environmental problems in the absence of their anointed intervention.

It will be noted by those with an expanded personal bandwidth (informed common sense), that the cost-of-living crisis has been caused by the massive deficit spending and reckless energy policies of the anointed ones in our government. They also know that the shutdown of our economy during COVID was caused by the public health anointed ones. Wars are caused by the anointed ones. Carbon emissions have not risen to any threatening level except in the “acceptable” papers the anointed present to the WEF and the UN.

The WEF will not let their Polycrisis go to waste. They are conspiring to centrally plan the world because “something must be done” and done “for our own good.” Did anyone ask you about wanting a Great Reset?

Public health anointed ones are setting up for the next medical “crisis”. The World Health Organization (WHO) wants complete sovereignty (To call the shots!) over our health . . . and anything it calls a “crisis”. A “crisis” would include the climate, the water supply, gun ownership, how food is produced – basically, anything they can claim is an existential threat to humanity.

For these anointed ones to have complete say and sway over us, they must make an end run around to subvert our own physical sovereignty and the sovereignty of the U.S.

Dr. Meryl Nass: ‘We’re undergoing a soft coup’

Dr. Meryl Nass explains how the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty will enable the WHO “to take over jurisdiction of everything in the world by saying that climate change, animals, plants, water systems [and] ecosystems are all central to health”. In addition to that, it will remove human rights protections, enforce censorship and digital passports, require governments to push a single “official” narrative, and enable the WHO to declare “pandemics” on a whim.

In a nutshell, the WHO is all in for whatever it takes to promote disease-related pharmaceutical interventions, including surveillance, digital health passports, tracing, the ability to impose lockdowns, and mandating vaccines, even experimental ones like the mRNA COVID-19 shots. (Emphasis mine.)

More on this here: Short Videos – Sovereignty Coalition

“The COVID-19 mandates and resulting lockdowns taught us that, given the chance, governments worldwide will seek to control citizens if a pandemic emergency is declared. The World Health Organization (WHO) closed its negotiations on May 27 with the production of an accord consisting of two treaties that could meaningfully impinge on our sovereignty as Americans. The proposed WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty threatens to give unprecedented power in real or maybe even perceived “public health emergencies of international concern.” -Wendi Strauch Mahoney

The WHO Accord: Global Governance is a Real Threat to American Sovereignty | uncoverdc.com | uncoverdc.com

If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us.

Coming May 2024!!!!!!!!!

Global Health Project – Protecting the Health & Future for All Humans – The Global Health Project

You may be clutching your pearls and saying “I don’t know what to think or do.” Does Polly want a crisis so that Polly can find out what to think and do from the anointed ones?

Take Action Now!!!!! At this link: “Not Now” on the Surrender of Our Sovereignty to the WHO | AlignAct

Listen. We can’t change the past. But we can continue to learn from it and work to prevent it from happening again, so the next “crisis” doesn’t represent the death of our Constitution, our livelihood, and our freedom.

For what has happened During COVID, we must demand answers. We must demand accountability. We must demand that those who perpetrated this be tried and, as appropriate, fined and sent to prison.

The takeover of our lives “for your own good” by the anointed ones must stop now.

I am not vaxxed and not because of some partisan influence or misinformation as the Leftist media is wont to claim. I took the time to read and understand the science from various sources and I knew my own almost seventy-year old body.

I did not comply during the COVID “crisis”. I did not come to love Big Brother. I raised my voice and held strong. (See my posts since March 2020). Unfortunately, many swallowed the slogans and were like sheep led to the mRNA slaughter.

All I want from the government or any authority is information to make my own decisions. I do not want, unless authorized by me, to have decisions made for me. (One might say that a transmissible disease warrants strict compliance to “health standards” or someone might die. But there would be no evidence of such transmission, only speculation and finger pointing.)

The United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the First and Second Amendments are the Supreme Law of the Land – not the WEF, not the WHO, and not a warrantless FISA.

The eclipse came and went but the tax man cometh again and again to overshadow our lives. April 15th – the day when the work of our hands is conscripted into the service of the oligarchical ruling class.

Characteristics of the anointed one’s Big Brother approach:

Increasing depression, despondency, mental illness, and suicides.

Ugliness in tone, in art and architecture – beauty is deemed subversive.

Truth, facts and language are manipulated (Newspeak).

There is a militant focus on “misinformation and disinformation” (Ministry of Truth).

History is destroyed (doublethink).

Constant surveillance.

Systematic brainwashing (Ministry of Love). 

There is obsession with population control and control of population.

If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us.

~~~~~

There are those who see themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the general public and therefore superior to Democracy and its laws created by elected representatives.

Ad hoc justice, not established rule of law, is one product of their superior ways as is remaking society with inegalitarian means to create equal outcomes. Promoting the hatred of whites to promote blacks is another product of their superior ways.

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla had this to say about America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution:

“This dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension . . .

“Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them . . .

“That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses . . .

“The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.”

~~~~~

Anointed ones run our cities:

The Democratic-run city of Denver, Colorado, plans to defund its police department to pay for illegal immigrants.

Denver’s police department will be hit with an $8.4 million reduction — about 1.9% of its total operating budget, the city confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Blue City Plans To Defund Its Police Force To Pay For Illegal Immigrants | (dailycallernewsfoundation.org)

The anointed ones who run our cities into the ground want to create new hell holes:

Hamster cages for humans, the 15-minute cities, are on city planner agendas. Soy boys and girls can walk around the city and look at their screens without a worry – “the idea is that every need is fulfilled within a 15-minute walk or short bike ride.”

~~~~~

“Democracy!” is in crisis, according to the anointed ones on the Left: Trump is on the ballot and might be elected! Anointed talking heads want to tell you what to think and do about it: “Whatever you do, Don’t Think. Accept what is said about Trump and “Democracy!””

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.
—Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

(Replace “liberty” with the Left’s “crisis of Democracy!” and you will understand what they are after.)

Tucker Carlson: For the Third Time in Three Consecutive Cycles, Secretive Federal Agencies are Trying to Rig Our Presidential Election – This Is What They Call ‘Democracy’ (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

~~~~~

You won’t get the common sense found in the words and writings of Thomas Sowell from the anointed ones.

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society (youtube.com)

Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.

“…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

The vision of the anointed — with Thomas Sowell (1995) | THINK TANK (youtube.com)

Thomas Sowell and a Conflict of Visions (youtube.com)

Original air date: October 12, 1995

~~~~~~

Were you assigned George Orwell’s 1984 in school? I wonder if it’s being assigned in schools today.

We are living in an age that is increasingly characterized by the eerily prophetic 1984. Authoritarianism and coercion. The censoring of speech. The mandates. The propaganda. Utopia for the brotherhood elite. Dystopia for the rest.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orwell’s dystopian novel where the state rewrites history, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – and Big Brother is watching you

Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Nineteen Eighty-Four

~~~

Novel Conversations: “1984” by George Orwell

 1984 follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of ‘the Party’, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and its ominous ruler, Big Brother. Orwell effectively explores the themes of mass media control, government surveillance, how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and lives in such a way that no one can escape it.

“1984” by George Orwell

“1984” by George Orwell | Evergreen Podcasts

~~~~~~

Mike Johnson Is Fighting to Protect the Government Spy Program Used on Trump (youtube.com)

Filed under 2024 Current Events, 2024 Election, cultural Marxism, Economic World Forum, Health, Political Commentary, Progressivism, propaganda, social commentary, totalitarianism, WEF, WHO Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Lines of Others

March 24, 2024 Leave a comment

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”

Simone Weil

Last year I spent several months with the Oblonskys, the Shcherbatskys, the Karenins, the Vronskys, the Levins, and a host of others. I did this, not as a foreign exchange student living in Russia, but as a mind traveler using the “guise of fiction” by a writer of genius.

Reading the 742 pages of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) was a way for me to experience humanity in another time and place.

In community with them, I saw how they lived. I saw what they saw. I heard what they said and thought. I learned what transpired from what they had said, thought and done. During my time with them, I became aware of the inner personality of each person and recognized matters of love and of good and evil that are timeless.

I watched Anna change from a warm and appealing person at the beginning of my stay into a small, spiteful, and self-absorbed woman at the end – all because of her vain imaginings about love and about how the world and those around her were thought to be. With ongoing self-deception, she came to think in terms of extremes and therefore made herself believe she understood everything and everyone in totality: it’s all the same and life was a Darwinian struggle for survival.

Looking back at my time with Anna, I see her narcissism, a personality disorder impacting many today, as a shrunken one-size-fits-me “temporal bandwidth” (see below). I learned a lesson from her toxic attitude: life is not about me.

Stiva, Anna’s hedonist brother, was consistently evil in an absence-of-good way. He forgets, neglects, and fails to act. He’s put his own household into chaos. He lives entirely in the present without regard for the effect he has on his family and future generations.

Dolly, Stivas’s wife, was a consistently good woman who showed self-giving love. She raised children married to such a husband.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, over time, matured. He came to understand love as he watched his wife Kitty. And I witnessed Levin’s spiritual journey to faith in God.

A similar mind traveler experience occurred when I spent months in Russia with The Brothers Karamazov – Dmitri, Ivan and Alexei and their father Fyodor Pavlovich and his illegitimate son, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov. Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova, Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva, Ilyusha, and Father Zosima, the Elder also lived nearby. Quite a cast of characters when you get to know them and quite a legacy of behavior and thought they provide.

In Chekhov’s world of short stories, I shared in the experiences of many. I laughed, cried and saw myself in the everydayness of those I met along the way.

Why read 1800s novels Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov and learn about people with weird names when I could have spent that time watching Yellowstone and taking in a C&W vibe?  Why did I read Love in the Time of Cholera when I could have watched another car chase scene or another mindless comedy? Why did I read Death in the Andes when I could have watched a detective series. Why did I read My Antonia or Heart of Darkness or King Lear, for that matter, when I could have been on social media amusing myself? Why did I read anything outside my context as a Christian? Isn’t there some self-help personal growth book that will give a perspective on the world so I don’t have to venture out of a theological “safe space”?

 I’ll give an answer a foreign exchange student would give for wanting an out-of-context experience:

“To interact with people from different cultures and to gain a deeper appreciation of their values, beliefs, and customs. To become more empathetic and understanding toward others, even those who are very different from me. To gain a better understanding of the diverse world we live in and develop a more open-minded perspective.”

Why read great literature from the past?

To rewire my brain from a competitive judgmental either/or reactionary mindset to a more deliberative way of thinking. To train my brain to think before leaping to conclusions. To employ such reading as a dopamine-hit buffer.

To gain the wisdom of those before me.

To grow faith and love. Imagination is required for faith. Imagination is cultivated by reading the unknown. Reading requires attentiveness. Love is attentiveness

To keep in mind that the prodigal son went looking for the Now thinking that anything could be better than what came before. He found the Now and it affirmed him to be a hungry desperate slave who longed to be fed what he fed the pigs (Luke 15:11-32).

To see another point of view and how it was arrived at.

To be a humanities archeologist. Everything came before Now. And up until broadcast media came around, all we had were the lines of others – words, music, and art.

To not be a reed in the wind. To cultivate “Temporal bandwidth” – “temporal bandwidth is “the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”” – Alan Jacobs, To survive our high-speed society, cultivate ‘temporal bandwidth’

To not live as a presentist, as someone whose temporal bandwidth has narrowed to the instant something is posted on social media.

To imagine the future using what I learned from the past. For example, I read Solzhenitsyn to understand what it’s like to live under communism.

(If your temporal bandwidth is expanded even somewhat and you are not “amusing yourself with lies”, you see what was plotted before happening now. Joe Biden, along with abetting Globalist Progressives, is implementing the Cloward-Piven Strategy first developed in 1966. That strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by swarming the country with mass migration, overloading the government bureaucracy, creating a crushing national debt, have chaos ensue, take control in the chaos, and implement Socialism and Communism through Government Force.

To wit, beside the ongoing invasion of the U.S., our nation is incurring massive debt. There is the ongoing silencing of dissent by the DOJ, FBI, and social media cohorts. There is a push to impose digital IDs and digital currency along with WHO oversight to control us. The misanthropic handling of our lives should be a clarion signal to you that communist totalitarianism is coming!)

Books are safe spaces. But if you believe that words are violence (Toni Morrison in her Nobel prize address: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence”) then you’ll stay in your “safe place” and refuse to be “breaking bread with the dead” (or listen to opposing views) where one can be an interlocuter and ask why and not just assume things and express rage.

I see going to a “safe space” as the closing in of one’s “temporal bandwidth” much like what Anna Karenina did. It has the exact opposite of a fortifying effect as one is made tenuous, anxious, and very susceptible to narcissism and Groupthink. (Ironically, that is also the effect of DEI.)

Here are two quotes from someone who championed the idea of Great Books, Allan Bloom that apply to what’s been said:

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.


Why read the realist fiction of writers such as Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others? To break bread with the dead and step out of my context into the lines of others.

Alan Jacobs, the Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture encourages what I call “mind travel” to the past in his book Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Readers Guide for a More Tranquil Mind.

What the book’s publisher said:

W. H. Auden once wrote that “art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present—and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our “personal density.”

Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought—plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs’s answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know.

 . . .

By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.

In his web article To survive our high-speed society, cultivate ‘temporal bandwidth’, Alan Jacobs writes with regard to bolstering “personal density” (as derived in Mondaugen’s Law, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow):

. . . benefit of reflecting on the past is awareness of the ways that actions in one moment reverberate into the future. You see that some decisions that seemed trivial when they were made proved immensely important, while others which seemed world-transforming quickly sank into insignificance. The “tenuous” self, sensitive only to the needs of This Instant, always believes – often incorrectly – that the present is infinitely consequential.

The title of this post is a reference to the 2006 movie The Lives of Others. The plot involves the 1984 monitoring of East Berlin residents by Stasi agents of the East German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler is told to conduct surveillance on playwright George Dreyman and his girlfriend, actress Christa-Maria Sieland. As Wiesler listens in from his attic post, he finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives. You’ll have to watch the movie to see if he is changed by listening to the lives and lines of others and becomes a “good man”.

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Of course, the lines of others must include classical music, a rich and diverse soundscape. The soundscape of Now is constant noise.

Fauré: Elegy (Benjamin Zander – Interpretation Class) – YouTube

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Reading for a More Tranquil Mind

Cherie Harder speaks with Alan Jacobs about the benefits of reading old books. Jacobs makes the compelling claim–using a phrase from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow–that spending our time and attention on writers from the past can increase our “personal density.”

Reading for a More Tranquil Mind

Episode 36 | Reading for a More Tranquil Mind | The Trinity Forum (ttf.org)

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What if we viewed reading as not just a personal hobby or a pleasurable indulgence but as a spiritual practice that deepens our faith?

Reading as a Spiritual Practice (youtube.com)

Episode 75 | Reading as a Spiritual Practice with Jessica Hooten Wilson | The Trinity Forum (ttf.org)

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Gary Saul Morson, a Dostoyevsky scholar, writes in a Plough article about Fyodor Dostoevsky and introduces a graphic novel adaptation of “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov.

Here is an excerpt:

In Dostoyevsky’s time, numerous schools of thought, ranging from English utilitarianism to Russian populism and socialism, maintained that they had discovered the indubitable solution to moral and social questions.

This way of thinking appalled Dostoyevsky. With his profound grasp of psychology, he regarded the materialists’ view of human nature as hopelessly simplistic. Deeply suspicious of what intellectuals would do if they ever gained the power they sought, he described in greater detail than any other nineteenth-century thinker what we have come to call totalitarianism. Even in its less terrifying forms, rule by supposedly benevolent experts was, he thought, more dangerous than people understood.

 . . .

For Dostoyevsky, the Christian view of life, which most intellectuals regarded as primitive, offered a far more sophisticated understanding than materialist alternatives. . .. he regarded it as a profound mistake to rely only on technological solutions to social problems, a perspective that, if anything, needs to be challenged all the more strongly today. Man does not live by iPhone alone.

For more on The Brothers Karamazov see Jacob Howland’s article in The New Criterion: A realist in the higher sense | The New Criterion

The Grand InquisitorDownload

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Screen Captured or The Negative Effects of Social Media

JON HAIDT  AND ZACH RAUSCH answer the question . . .

Why does it feel like everything has been going haywire since the early 2010s, and what role does digital technology play in causing this social and epistemic chaos?

 . . . with their article What we’ve learned about Gen Z’s mental health crisis (afterbabel.com) and the included research-based articles:

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic. Here’s the Evidence. By Jon Haidt

Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of them Work. By Jean Twenge 

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere. By Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest. By Jon Haidt

Why I am Increasingly Worried About Boys, Too. By Jon Haidt

Play Deprivation is a Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis. By Peter Gray

Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear for Gen Alpha. By Freya India, and see also Do You Know Where Your Kids Go Every Day? By Rikki Schlott.

The Case for Phone-Free Schools. By Jon Haidt

Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus. By Jon Haidt

A recommendation: NO smartphones for your children until at least 16 years of age. They can use a simple flip phone till then.

New book:

The Anxious Generation: HOW THE GREAT REWIRING OF CHILDHOOD IS CAUSING AN EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS by Jonathan HaidtHOW THE GREAT REWIRING OF CHILDHOOD IS CAUSING AN EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS

By Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness: Haidt, Jonathan: 9780593655030: Amazon.com: Books

~~~~~

Filed under Literature Tagged with , , , , ,

Watercolors

March 17, 2024 1 Comment

A short story . . .

On a cold and damp March afternoon, Maeve met with funeral director Finn Joyce to discuss final arrangements. The appointment was set up after she responded to a mailer asking if it “would give you peace of mind to plan in advance so that your family would not have to make the arrangements themselves” and after reading an article about “Unexpected Deaths in The US Are Rising at an Alarming Rate.”

Director Finn, a tall thin man with dark auburn hair, pale skin, soft hands and a whisky voice, greeted Maeve and showed her to the Arrangement Room. There, he offered her coffee and water.

Finn began their conversation by pointing to a photograph on his desk: “My wife Fiona and I have lived in the area and have operated this funeral home for twenty-five years. Fiona works with families of the deceased to arrange details of the funeral and the obituary wording. She also does the makeup and . . .”

Maeve broke in. “I was here for Eileen Delaney’s funeral. She was a friend of mine.”

“By the number who attended the funeral, she was well-loved. How long had you known her?”

“We worked together at the Evercrest Nursing Home for some thirty-five years.”

“I know the place. I been called there many times. Do you still work there?”

“Yes. I’ve taken over Eileen’s responsibilities.”

“Ah, well then, maybe I’ll see you there. My wife helped Eileen’s husband with the funeral arrangements and wrote the obituary with the help of her husband and family. We have a list of services that we can offer you and we can talk about your last wishes.” He handed her a brochure.

“We prepare obituaries, arrange clergy services and pallbearers, coordinate with the cemetery or crematory . . .” Finn stopped when he saw that Maeve wasn’t paying attention. She was looking over his shoulder at something on the wall.

“That watercolor. I know it.” Maeve said.

Finn turned around. “My wife bought it at an art show here in town. I love how the light filters through the trees.”

“That’s Summer at Blossom Grove.”

“You know the artist?” Finn got up from his chair and looked at the corner of the painting. “You know M. Monahan? Wait. Is that you?” He looked at the application on his desk. “Well Maeve, you’re quite an artist.”

Maeve blushed. “I painted the same scene at four times of the year. I wanted to show the greening and flowering and the fading and falling of leaves and the limbs in winter.”

“You know, Maeve, people have brought watercolor portraits of the deceased to the wakes here. The portraits are a beautiful memorial. They have a graceful ethereal quality to them. I provide an easel next to the casket for the portrait.”

“I paint them. I paint portraits of the people in the home. When they pass, I give the portrait to the family. I got the idea when I attended my Irish grandfather’s funeral. Family and friends came to look at his dead body the night before he was buried. They drank and shared stories about his life. When a person dies at the home, the funeral home is called and the deceased is abruptly taken away. With my portraits, I give the family a corporeal reminder so they can share stories about the person’s life.”

“The portraits are well done. You’ve must have been doing this for a long time.”

“Thank you. Yes. I started as an oil painter years ago when I worked as an ER nurse. I wanted to depict the actual strangeness of the real world I encountered every day with surrealism, in a Frida Kahlo kind of way. But over time, the work and my life were becoming too dark. So, I decided to make a change and work in a nursing home where there is a less tragic and more of a long-suffering realism. And, that’s when I became a watercolor portraitist. I like the medium. Watercolors have a life and a flow of their own when you brush them on the paper. You let go and see what happens. They are kind of unruly to a certain degree as are the subjects I paint.”

“From the comments I overhear at the wake, you certainly capture the essence of the person,” Finn remarked.

He went on to explain his services and then invited Maeve to the display room where several different caskets were showcased. He then showed her the Reposing Room where the prepared body rests until the funeral takes place. He went on to show her a Reception Room where memorial services are held.

“There will be a wake in this room tomorrow. A tragic story,” Finn shared. “A 46-year-old man – a husband and father and founder of an investment firm – was killed in a car-jacking. The newspaper said the killer got away.”

“How terrible. The sudden loss of a husband and father must be devastating for that family.”

“Yes, it has been. I met with his wife this morning. She is having a hard time . . . How does one reckon with the out-of-the-blue senselessness of what happened?”

At that moment, Fiona walked up and introduced herself to Maeve. She recognized Maeve from the art show and praised her work. She then mentioned to Finn that a call had come in. She gave him the name and location.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” Finn said. “Feel free to call if there are any questions. Maeve offered her hand. Finn took her hand and put his hand on hers.

“Sorry to share that with you. I am deeply saddened by what happened. After all my years as a mortician, I have never become accustomed to such unforeseen tragedy. And, sadly, there will be no watercolor portrait to place by the casket tomorrow.”

Maeve nodded her understanding and then thanked Finn and went on her way.

~~~

The next morning, after working a night shift at Evercrest and then making a stop, Maeve drove home to Valley Mobile Home Park and found two cars parked out front of her mobile home. She parked next to her trailer, grabbed the mail from the mail box, and then ran to the door and walked in. Sitting at the kitchen table were her younger sisters Molly and Morren and her niece Maisie. Duffy, Molly’s Pomeranian, began barking wildly when she walked in. Maeve put her purse and the mail on the counter and looked at all three.

“Who died and why is Duffy carrying on like that?” Maeve asked, taking off her rain coat. The three women sitting before her reminded her of nesting dolls – Molly the largest of the three and Maisie the smallest.

“Duffy doesn’t like that black cross running down your face.” Molly replied.

“It’s raining.” Maeve grabbed a napkin form the table and began dabbing her face.

“And Duffy doesn’t like that guy next store.” Morren added.

“My neighbor?” Maeve asked. “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s a disgusting creature, Molly blurted. “Those tattoos, that yellow skin, his scarred-up face and watery eyes. He looks like a carny who runs the Tilt-A -Whirl. He was out in front of his trailer and gave us a nasty look when we got out of the car.”

“Well,” Maeve asked the group, “was Duffy barking at him and did you give him a nasty look when you saw him?”

Molly sighed loudly. The other two just looked at their hands.

“I don’t know him, “Maeve said. “He stays to himself. There’s something sad about the guy – like he’s had a hard time of it.”

“Maybe so. He is what he is,” remarked Morren.

“We’re here to check on you,” Molly declared.

“Check on me?” Maeve laughed. She poured coffee for herself and the others and sat down.

“Yeah, Moreen and I are wondering why you’ve been so quiet lately.”

“I’ve had things on my mind. Last things things. Do something about Duffy.” Maeve replied.

Molly had Duffy come up on her lap.

“Is that why you went to church this morning?” Morren asked.

Maeve looked at the three of them. “I thought I should become a familiar face around there. I want to be recognized by the gate keepers when I go the way of all the earth.”

“I see that you’ve been reading the obits,” Molly held up the open newspaper.

“My co-worker Eileen died suddenly. Cardiac arrest. I wanted to see what they wrote about her,” replied Maeve.

Molly looked through the obit page. “Let’s see what it says . . .

“Eileen Delaney passed away on . . . at her home aged 68. She will be greatly missed by her family who adored her, friends who loved her, and many people whose lives she impacted in such a beautiful way at Evercrest Nursing Home. Eileen was along-time member of such and such Church. Eileen was born . . . married William Patrick Delaney. . . celebrated a beautiful 42-year marriage. Bill passed away . . . Eileen greatly missed him. She and Bill had many adventures together . . . traveling to Europe and Caribbean and Alaskan cruises. Ballroom dancing and hiking were their favorite pastimes. They are survived by two children . . . three grandchildren. Sadly missed by brothers . . . brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, relatives and a wide circle of friends. Eileen stayed active throughout her life . . . she was a member of the American Needlepoint Guild. Eileen Delaney’s’ family invites you to join them in celebrating her life. Please attend with your best Eileen stories. The funeral service and burial will be held . . .

“How long have you been working at that nursing home,” Morren asked Maeve.

 “About thirty-five years. Since the divorce.”

“Maeve, you could’ve gone on to get your doctorate in nursing like me,” Molly said. “Then you could write papers, have them peer reviewed, and published in journals. You would be recognized for your work, make better money, and move out of this trailer park.”

“Recognized?” Maeve replied. “I see myself doing what I’m doing. I don’t see myself doing anything else or living anywhere else.”

“Maybe not. But do you hate life? Morren badgered. “I mean, c’mon, you haven’t remarried and you haven’t gone anywhere and now you’re thinking about death. What about life?”

 Maisie spoke up. “Aunt Maeve, do you have a bucket list?”

“A bucket list?” Maeve got up and walked over to the kitchen window and looked out. She was surprised to see her neighbor looking back at her from his kitchen window. How strange, she thought.

“Yeah, you know, things you want to do before you die.” Molly said.

“I had an appointment with a funeral director yesterday to talk about funeral arrangements,” Maeve pointed at her sisters, “so you two won’t have to bother with them – and I have an appointment with Father Flannery tomorrow after work to talk about the art of dying.” Maeve took the Joyce Funeral Home brochure out of her purse and placed it on the table.

“What brought on all this morbidity Maeve?” Molly prodded. “Is it because you are with the dying five six days a week? What about living a little?”

“It’s not morbid to plan one’s death. And besides,” Maeve smiled, “I am thinking outside the box.”

“Not too would be a grave mistake,” Molly came back.

“The funeral director blamed the cost of living as driving up the cost of dying. He said I could pay now or pay later with a payable-on-death bank account accessed by my family.” Maeve sat down and waited for a reaction.

Morren looked at Molly and then at Maisie. She wasn’t sure if that was a joke.

Maisie laughed. “Now I know where I get my weird sense of humor. Aunt Maeve, I meant doing things like travel. You could. . . go see the world, see the pyramids.”

“You want me to go look at tombs? No, thanks. And no, I don’t have a list like that.”

“You could go to Barcelona or Rome and meet some dashing foreigner and be swept off your feet.” Molly urged.

“You know,” Maeve replied. “I listen to the stories of seniors in the home. Their stories are better than romance novels and what’s on TV. The things they’ve seen and done . . . you’d be surprised.”

“I just want to see you broaden your horizons,” Morren pleaded. “You have work. You have a hobby. But with all that that the world has to offer, why not live a little.”

Molly looked at her watch. “Well, Maevy, we came to check on you. My TV program starts in twenty minutes. We better get going. If you suddenly decide to take off to parts unknown let us know.”

Maeve picked up the coffee cups and put them in the sink. She saw her neighbor again standing in the window. But this time he had a gun in his mouth. Maeve yelled “Oh God!” and ran out the door. Molly, Morren and Maisie ran to the kitchen window.

“What’s that creature doing?” Molly scoffed. “If he offed himself there would be one less freak in the world.”

“What’s aunt Maeve doing?” asked Maisie.

Maeve was standing in the rain between the two mobile homes in her blue nurse scrubs. She was saying something to her neighbor but his window was closed. He kept shaking his head. Maeve pleaded with him, “Open your window! Open your window!” Finally, with one hand, he pulled up the kitchen window.

“Talk to me, “Maeve begged, “I’m listening.”

The man took a swig of something and then wiped his mouth with his arm.

“Lady, my best girl died in January been together for fifteen years she was on dialysis my dog Biscuit hell I think some of those mean kids around here ran off with her I lost my job at the steel mill I’m about to lose my trailer.” The man held up a piece of paper. “I find myself in the impossible position of being who I am right here and now.”

“I’m listening,” Maeve replied.

“What are you looking at?” The man jerked his head angrily toward Maeve’s kitchen window where Molly, Morren and Maisie were watching. He waved his gun at the window and the three women disappeared from it. Molly called the police.

“I’m here . . . for you,” Maeve pleaded with her neighbor. “I don’t know your name. What’s your name?

“Esau.”

“Esau, don’t die like this.”

“Is there a better way to go about it?

“You could die holding someone’s hand. Can I call Father Flannery?”

“What’s he gonna do throw holy water on me and make it all better hell I was baptized as a little tiny baby and look at me now I done some stupid things in my life but I paid all my debts I am good people labeled not good enough to attend my own daughter’s wedding can you picture that?

“Yes! I can paint you,” Maeve offered.

Esau laughed. “Paint me?”

“Yes. I paint portraits.”

“Lady don’t you see I’m already painted.” The man pulled off his tee shirt. “My cross hain’t bleeding like yours is I got this in Nam.” The man pointed the gun at the cross tattoo. “I got a lot of things in Nam that’ll change a man forever.” He put the gun back in his mouth.

Maeve dabbed her face with her sleeve. Overhead, the sky was growing darker. A sudden crack of thunder and its rumbling off had Duffy howling. Large drops of rain were falling.

“I’ll paint a portrait of you, right now Esau. So your children can remember you.” Maeve said this to buy more time.

“Lady, they want nothing to do with me.” Esau scowled.

“They never will if you shoot yourself,” Maeve replied.

He took another swig from the bottle. “You’ll stand in the rain and you’ll paint me?”

“Yes! Or inside if you’ll let me in.” Maeve replied. “Do you have family?”

“Yessss I havvvvve family,” the man howled. “My best girl has family but you know NO ONE wants to see you until you’re dead.” He put the gun back in his mouth.

“I can call them. Hold on. I can paint your portrait for them. Hold on Esau,” Maeve yelled. “I’ll get my phone and paints.”

As Maeve turned to run back inside, she heard a loud pop. Esau was gone from the window.

Moments later, heavy downpours arrived.

©Lena Johnson, Kingdom Venturers, 2024, All Rights Reserved

~~~

Filed under Death, FICTION, Short Story, short story, Writing Tagged with , , , , ,

Thrown Off Balance

March 10, 2024 Leave a comment

One of the greatest disciples of the twentieth century was neither a priest, nor a religious, nor a married person. She was a celibate, single woman who spent the last 13 years of her life battling lupus while writing some of the best fiction the world has ever known—all while living on a 544-acre dairy farm in Milledgeville, Ga. with her mother, her books, and forty-four peacocks. Her name was Flannery O’Connor.

-Fr. Damian Ference, The Vocation of Flannery O’Connor

Writing that may be dismissed as jarring, acerbic, and too controversial by people who are loathe to sit in the same room with someone who won’t validate their narrative – whether Progressive or Christian – are the short stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964). She didn’t compile fluff for people to sit with the comfortable.

“She believed that story-telling ought to help modern men and women see “things as they are,” cutting through the fog of a culture that tells us that everything can be just the way we’d like it to be.”  -George Weigel, Flannery O’Connor and Catholic realism

O’Connor’s stories are typically set in the rural American South. Her sardonic Southern Gothic style employed the grotesque, the transgressive, and wild, comical and deeply-flawed characters who are often alienated from God and often in violent situations. Because of these traits, her stories may be dismissed by some readers – they do not sense a clear-cut Gospel message in her work or a comforting message.

Faith, for O’Connor, was not something easy or comforting. It involved a struggle with doubt within the seeming randomness and cruelty of life. She understood that struggle as maturing her faith.

In a letter to Lousie Abbot, O’Connor wrote

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

O’Connor wrote about the world as she found it in the Protestant South and etched her Catholic worldview into her stories. She professed: “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.” 

Her signature short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, embodies this. You might recognize yourself and what’s at work in your life upon reading it.

The title of the story is the title of a well-known song of O’Connor’s day, sung by Bessie Smith. But the story doesn’t reference a woman’s hard time with men as the song does. The story would have us look at what it means to be a “good man”. Everyone has their own definition of what it means to be good, as do two characters in the story – the grandmother and the Misfit.

The grandmother values her Southern upbringing and mannerisms. For a road trip, the grandmother is all fancied up, white gloves and all, as is the habit of Southern women. The grandmother thinks goodness is being polite, nice, respectful, and agreeing with her views on things. This is brought out in her conversation with Red Sam, a character as fatuous as the grandmother. He delivers the title’s line that comes across as a cliché dismissive of the real world’s Misfit-type violence.

The escaped-convict Misfit, also steeped in Southern tradition, views the world through an amoral nihilist filter. He is unconcerned with traditional morality or even the value of other people’s lives. He shows up in a big black hearse-like vehicle. By a turn of events, generated by the manipulative grandmother and her cat, they meet. The grandmother, “good” in a decent person sense of good does not appreciate what she is up against. Will she finally grasp what makes a “good man?”

The family members, who shout and argue until someone gives in and behave in petty selfish ways without much reflection or moral thought find themselves in a less-than-good situation. What happens to them?

What does the Misfit say about punishment, the law, and about Jesus and the resurrection?

And what does the story show about the activity of and need for grace and the state of the human condition that refuses it?

I have purposefully not given you a summary of A Good Man is Hard to Find. Reading it first and then listening to podcasts would be the best introduction to her work.

Why do I read Flannery O’Connor?

Her unsentimental gimlet-eyed Kafkaesque realism speaks to me as a writer in our distorted and moronic times.

“Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” ― Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor. Photo: Joe McTyre

Her stories move mystical concepts down from a theological mountain into the hands of her characters – the misfits, freaks, and outsiders who reckon with them or don’t. Her ‘parables’ hit home more than all the logical sermons I’ve heard on grace, salvation, goodness, punishment, forgiveness, and moral decay.

And, like Jesus, she’s “thrown everything off balance.”

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A Good Man Is Hard To FindDownload
The Great Books Podcast: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ Flannery O’Connor

The Great Books Podcast: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ Flannery O’Connor | National Review

A Good Man is Hard to Find BONUS episode

A Good Man is Hard to Find BONUS episode (1517.org)

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Bishop Barron Presents | Ethan and Maya Hawke – Understanding Flannery (youtube.com)

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Further on Flannery:

Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in Rare 1959 Audio | Open Culture

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — HCC Learning Web (hccs.edu)

How Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy Helped to Invent the South – By Nick Ripatrazone | The Marginalia Review of Books

The Complete Stories (archive.org)

Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in Rare 1959 Audio | Open Culture

Flannery | American Masters | PBS

The Vocation of Flannery O’Connor – Word on Fire

Flannery O’Connor Reads “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1959) (youtube.com)

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(Cormac McCarthy (1933 – 2023) had a several influences including O’Connor. Georgia-born O’Connor wrote in Southern Gothic mode and Tennessee-born McCarthy in Appalachian Gothic mode.  Both, with grim-humor, created grotesque characters and nihilistic settings – O’Conner to reveal the possibility of divine grace and lapsed Catholic McCarthy to wonder about the meaning of life. Both writers use violence in their stories. McCarthy to the extreme (Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men.)

Flannery O’Connor on Why the Grotesque Appeals to Us, Plus a Rare Recording of Her Reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”:

In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider.

All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.

Filed under Christianity, Flannery O'Connor, Writers Tagged with , , , , , ,

Not Wanting to Look Away – A Life of War Zone Witness and Writing

February 25, 2024 Leave a comment

The first time I heard about novelist, war correspondent, activist, pacifist, letter writer, and third wife of Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, was during a documentary about Hemingway. I became intrigued by the pluck of this woman, as I am about Maria Agnesi and Rose E. Livingston.

1944. To witness the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy during World War II, Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship (locked herself in a bathroom) and masqueraded as a medic. She impersonated a stretcher bearer.

All night she labored, with blisters on her hands, her mind and heart seared with images of pain and death she would never forget. Later she would learn that every one of the hundreds of credentialed journalists, including her husband, sat poised behind her in the Channel with binoculars, never making it to shore. Hemingway’s story soon appeared in Collier’s alongside hers, with top billing and more dazzle, but the truth had already been written on the sand. There were 160,000 men on that beach and one woman. Gellhorn.

– PAULA MCLAIN writing about The Extraordinary Life of Martha Gellhorn, the Woman Ernest Hemingway Tried to Erase ~A maverick war correspondent, Hemingway’s third wife was the only woman at D-Day and saw the liberation of Dachau. Her husband wanted her home in his bed.

Gellhorn’s reporting from the front lines of every major international conflict in six decades distinguishes her as one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. Her war coverage spanned from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the Vietnam War.

Martha would go to great lengths to get a good story. During the Second World War she rode with British pilots on night raids over Germany.  She was one of the first journalists to report on Dachau once it was liberated by the Allies. She paid her own way to go to Viet Nam and cover the war.  

I followed the war wherever I could reach it. I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the woman’s angle. –  Martha Gellhorn

From Martha Gellhorn: ‘A Twentieth Century Life’ : NPR:

Caroline Moorehead, author of Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life, says Gellhorn remained undaunted for most of her 90 years. “I think she was fearless but she knew what it was like to be frightened,” a toughness she got from her upbringing, Moorehead says.

Gellhorn covered wars in a different way than other journalists. “She didn’t write about battles and she didn’t know about military tactics,” Moorehead says. “What she was really interested in was describing what war does to civilians, does to ordinary people.”

Background

Gellhorn was born in Missouri in 1908. Her independent and determined nature along with the desire to champion the cause of the oppressed was formed in her by the examples of her father and mother. George Gellhorn, a German-born Jew, was a reputable gynecologist and social reformer in St. Louis. Edna Fischel Gellhorn championed women’s suffrage, child welfare laws, and free health clinics. Both parents were reformers, advocating for the disenfranchised.

Gellhorn was an activist early on. At age 7, she participated in “The Golden Lane,” a rally for women’s suffrage at the Democratic Party’s 1916 national convention in St. Louis. (Source)

She later attended Bryn Mawr College, a women’s liberal arts school. Her first published articles appeared in The New Republic. “In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years, where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris, but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency.” (Source)

 In the fall of 1934 Martha would go on to work for FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration). There, she documented the lives of the unemployed, the hungry, and the homeless during the Great Depression, alongside photographer Dorothea Lange. Gellhorn became close to Eleanor Roosevelt during that time.

Gellhorn’s began her journalist career during the Spanish Civil War. She arrived in Madrid in 1937 to cover the conflict for Collier’s Weekly. There she met Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain as a correspondent. They married in 1940. The marriage lasted five years. Gellhorn left Hemingway. The breakup was due to Hemingway’s unhappiness about Gellhorn’s’ absence when she was on assignment and his drinking and infidelity.

From Paula McLain, author of a biographical novel about Martha Gellhorn titled Love and Ruin :

She saw herself as a champion of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and worked hard, all her life, to give voice to the voiceless. She never wanted to be famous, and was enraged to know that the larger world knew her mostly through her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, which lasted from 1940-1945. “Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life,” she noted ruefully in an interview, pointing out that she’d been her own woman and writer before meeting him, and would go on being just that. She in fact went on to publish for nearly fifty years after leaving him, writing a total of five novels, fourteen novellas, two short story collections and three books of essays.

While many consider Hemingway a better fiction writer, many consider Gellhorn a better journalist. Two of Gellhorn’s writings – an article and a letter – show how she analyzed what she witnessed in terms of what man is capable of doing to man. Her writing, biting and eye-opening, reveals her conscience.

Given the evil of ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrats and judges and the globalist tyranny that would make slaves of us all and the toxic air of nihilism, Gellhorn’s writing should serve as a warning to us all.

The Article

Martha Gellhorn was present at the Trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, as was Hannah Arendt, who wrote the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Gellhorn, in a February 1962 The Atlantic article titled Eichmann and the Private Conscience, writes “on some of the facts and some of the lessons to be learned from this Trial, which is unique in the history of the world”. The following quotes about Eichmann are from that article:

This is a sane man, and a sane man is capable of unrepentant, unlimited, planned evil. He was the genius bureaucrat, he was the powerful frozen mind which directed a gigantic organization; he is the perfect model of inhumanness; but he was not alone. Eager thousands obeyed him. Everyone could not have his special talents; many people were needed to smash a baby’s head against the pavement before the mother’s eyes, to urge a sick old man to rest and shoot him in the back of the head; there was endless work for willing hands. How many more like these exist everywhere? What produced them — all sane, all inhuman?

We consider this man, and everything he stands for, with justified fear. We belong to the same species. Is the human race able — at any time, anywhere — to spew up others like him? Why not? Adolf Eichmann is the most dire warning to us all. He is a warning to guard our souls; to refuse utterly and forever to give allegiance without question, to obey orders silently, to scream slogans. He is a warning that the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world. (Emphasis mine.)

…

In a single sentence, Eichmann divided the world into the powers of light and darkness. He chose the doctrine of darkness, as did the majority of his countrymen, as did thousands throughout Europe — men with slave minds, pig-greedy for power: the Vichy police, the Iron Guard, big and little Quislings everywhere. He stated their creed in one line: “The question of conscience is a matter for the head of the state, the sovereign.”

Gellhorn’s Letter Writing

“She wrote several a day, often describing the same episodes to different people, sending letters by boat, sometimes adding to them over days until they stretched to 50 pages. Letters were, as her friend Bill Buford put it in his introduction to Gellhorn’s book, Travels With Myself and Another, her main form of social life. . ..  Gellhorn’s friend George Brennan once suggested to her that letters were her ‘real genre, and it is where you yourself come through most genuinely and convincingly’.” (Source) (We have lost touch with hand-written humanness – our own and others – with email and texting.)

While Gellhorn’s wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century, her personal letters are their equal: as vivid and fascinating as anything she ever published.

Gellhorn’s correspondence from 1930 to 1996–chronicling friendships with figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H. G. Wells, as well as her tempestuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway–paint a vivid picture of the twentieth century as she lived it. (Source)

Gellhorn’s connection to Leonard Bernstein:

“While traveling in Israel in 1949, Gellhorn met Leonard Bernstein by chance in a “scruffy bar” in Tel Aviv. A few months later, Bernstein turned up unannounced (with a grand piano in tow, no less!), in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she was living and proposed he move in with her for a while. She convinced him to rent a house up the road instead. One night, he persuaded her to try marijuana with him for the first time, having heard from local musicians that it “helped the music flow.” They were both sick all night, with “appalling nightmares.” While never romantic, the two remained close friends and confidants for decades.” (Source)

Gellhorn’s wrote to Bernstein after viewing West Side Story. She was affected by Cool, the most disturbing number (relentless unresolved tritones) of the musical.

“But what stays in my mind, as the very picture of terror, is the scene in the drug store, when the Jets sing a song called “Keep Cool, Man.” I think I have never heard or seen anything more frightening. (It goes without saying that I think the music so brilliant I have no words to use for it.) I found that a sort of indicator of madness: the mad obsession with nothing, the nerves insanely and constantly stretched–with no way to rest, no place to go; the emptiness of the undirected minds, whose only occupation could be violence and a terrible macabre play-acting. If a man can be nothing, he can pretend to be a hoodlum and feel like a somebody. I couldn’t breathe, watching and hearing that; it looks to me like doom, as much as these repeated H-bomb tests, with the atmosphere of the world steadily more and more irrevocably poisoned. I think that drug store and the H-bomb tests are of the same family.

“What now baffles me is that all the reviews, and everyone who has seen the show, has not talked of this and this only: the mirror held up to nature, and what nature. I do not feel anything to be exaggerated or falsified; we accept that art renders beautiful, and refines the shapeless raw material of life. The music and the dancing, the plan, the allegory of the story do that; but nature is there, in strength; and surely this musical tragedy is a warning. . ..” (Emphasis mine.)

The complete letter is here: Notes and Letters — West Side Story

Though I’ve not read of any religious practice in Gellhorn’s life and though her hard-drinking way of life is not something I would recommend – New York Times writer Rick Lyman described Gellhorn as “a cocky, raspy-voiced, chain-smoking maverick”; Gellhorn was a self-made woman who took cyanide to end her life at 90 – still, there is much to commend about Martha Gellhorn: her devotion to humanity and the eyewitness conscience-driven writing of her dauntless war zone life.

Gellhorn, who had a distrust of politicians, documented what the politicians’ war did to civilians. “I followed the war wherever I could reach it,” said Gellhorn. Hers was the Samaritan’s attitude of not wanting to look away. “I wrote very fast, as I had to,” she says, “afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place.” 

Paula McLain, Gellhorn’s biographer, writes that Gellhorn saw herself as a champion of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and worked hard, all her life, to give voice to the voiceless

Gellhorn said of herself “The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

Gellhorn’s reporting was widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women.

There is a hard, shining, almost cruel honesty to Gellhorn’s work that brings back shellshocked Barcelona, Helsinki, Canton and Bastogne – the prelude and crashing symphony of World War II – with almost unbearable vividness.

–The Guardian, reviewing Gellhorn’s book The Face of War

In a journalism career that spanned 60 years, Gellhorn’s particular brand of nerve was rare as radium. Fear seemed to activate rather than suppress her, and it taught her courage in the face of injustice instead of despair. Sharpened by rage and wielded in the service of others, her voice became a sword. I’m not sure I have encountered its equal, even today. We could use an army of such voices, in fact. And precisely now. – Paula McLain (Emphasis mine.)

~~~~~

Martha Gellhorn Quotes:

“Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience – war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.”

“I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else’s life.” (Regarding her marriage to Hemingway.)

“Stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.”

“From the earliest wars of men to our last heart-breaking worldwide effort, all we could do was kill ourselves. Now we are able to kill the future.”

“In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.”

“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

“War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.”

“On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.”

“Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved…stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men.”

“Democracy is dying. It’s a disease called cowardice.” (From a 1938 letter.)

~~~~~

Janet Somerville, author of Yours, for Probably Always, talks about novelist, war correspondent, activist, and iconoclast Martha Gellhorn.

Janet Somerville on Martha Gellhorn | The Hemingway Society

Janet Somerville on Martha Gellhorn | The Hemingway Society

~~~~~

A different war, a different correspondent:

Exposing abuse and corruption can be a thankless job. Powerful figures doing wrong often deny and attack those exposing them. And their supporters often join suit—attacking the messenger, rather than holding their leader accountable. . . why continue reporting, advocating, and shining a light when doing so comes at such a high personal cost?

Why Not Quit – Julie Roys

Why Not Quit? | The Roys Report (julieroys.com)

~~~~~

More on Martha:

1981, Martha Gellhorn Unedited Interview, War correspondent, Ernest Hemingway, Spanish Civil War (youtube.com)

Martha Gellhorn. ‘Face to Face’ interview with Jeremy Isaacs. 1995. – YouTube

The Face Of War: Gellhorn, Martha: 9780871132116: Books – Amazon.ca

Married to Her Writing | The National Endowment for the Humanities (neh.gov)

Get to Know Martha Gellhorn – Paula McLain

Gellhorn at war | Books | The Guardian

Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway) | EH@JFK | JFK Library

Martha Gellhorn: Writer, Warrior, Witness (historynet.com)

Martha Gellhorn: The World’s Greatest War Correspondent (youtube.com)

Martha Gellhorn’s Career as a War Correspondent and Marriage to Ernest Hemingway (townandcountrymag.com)

Martha Gellhorn, War Correspondent, Novelist, & Memoirist (literaryladiesguide.com)

Great Lives – Martha Gellhorn – BBC Sounds

Martha Gellhorn: Eyewitness to War | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (nationalww2museum.org)

A Line from Linda: Martha Gellhorn’s “Eichmann and the Private Conscience”

Leonard Bernstein Asked About Hemingway, So Martha Gellhorn Set the Record Straight (thedailybeast.com)

Filed under journalism, war, Women of Note Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Nothing More Than Alright

February 11, 2024 Leave a comment

A short story . . .

My father, on the nights when my mother goes to bridge club, makes creamed chipped beef with peas on toast for supper. He told me one time that in the military it’s called “shit on a shingle” or SOS for short. He makes me eat it even though I can’t stomach peas or the dried beef or the gravy and I’m not a soldier. Tonight again, my mother is at bridge club and I’m sitting here with SOS.

After looking at my plate for a long time, I move the peas out of the gravy, off the toast and onto the plate with my knife. I’m hoping I won’t have to eat them. The kitchen phone rings and I jump to answer it. My best friend Janey wants to know if I want to go with her and her boyfriend Nick to watch West Side Story at the Sky-Hi Drive-In. I say I sure do and hang up. My father doesn’t want me on the phone during supper.

The peas are cold and clammy now and I say I they’re cold and clammy and I can’t eat them. My father tilts his head down and tells me to eat them. I want to say no but I need his okay to go to the movie. So, I stab some peas with my fork and swirl them in the flour gravy and then I eat the green-grey mush with a bite of toast. I gag. I drink some milk and wash it down. My father lifts his head and says “alright”. I clear the dishes and wash them. I’ve done what he wanted, so now I can ask him about Friday night. But I wait until he’s sitting in front of the TV.

An hour later, my father is in the basement watching TV. I sit with him and ask about his movie. He says troops have been ordered to risk their lives and retake a hill that’s not important in the battle. I ask him why. He says it shows the enemy their resolve to continue to fight if an agreement is not reached in negotiations.

A Marlboro commercial comes on and I ask him about Friday night. He wants to know about the movie. I tell him it’s a musical about people fighting, dancing and falling in love and he says “Okay. Ask your mother when she come home from playing bridge.”

My mother finally gets home and I tell her about Friday night. She says she knows the movie. “Saw it with a friend when it came out in ’61,” she says. She knows Janey and Nick and she says it’s okay with her that I go.

Saturday night Nick’s car pulls into the driveway. He honks the horn and I yell “They’re here”. My father yells from the basement “Have a good time honey. Call if there is a problem.” Mom, on the phone with someone, yells for me to come straight home after the movie. I yell back “I will.”

I get in the back seat of Nick’s Chevy and we drive off – but not in the direction of the Sky-Hi. I ask where we’re going. Janey turns to me and says that Nick asked his friend Tom to come along. He had nothing to do, Nick says. I immediately panic. I wonder if I look alright.

I have a face full of pimples and a bony nose that’s too big for my face. I wonder if I used enough concealer. The green top I’m wearing is wrinkled. It was at the bottom of my closet. And the jeans I’m wearing are worn thin. I was expecting to sit in the dark and watch a movie with Nick and Janey.

We pull up to a ranch house on the other side of town. Nick honks the horn. A skinny blonde-haired guy walks out the front door and down the front walk. “Here’s Tom,” Janey says.

Tom gets in the back seat. Janey introduces Tom. I don’t know him from school. I give him a quick smile and then give Janey a stare. She just winks back at me. She knows I don’t have a boyfriend.

Tom is neatly dressed. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, khaki pants and loafers. His boxy glasses make him look like a bookworm. In junior high school he’d be called “a climber” and Nick “a greaser.”

The Twin Theater Sky-Hi Drive In is on the west end of our town. On the way we listen to the AM radio. A Chicago station plays Born to Be Wild and I Will Always Think About You. Tom and I sit quietly in the back. I suck in my lips and look out my window. The cloudy sky looks like flour gravy.

We arrive at Sky-Hi and pay for our tickets. Nick drives over to a center spot in the East Theater. Nick and Tom say they’re going to the concession stand. They ask what we want. Janey and I ask for Cokes and popcorn. I hand Nick some money and they head off. The guys return after twenty minutes just as the coming attractions start. I roll down my window and Tom hands me the Coke and popcorn. I say thank you. He gets into the back seat on the other side of the car.

Janey’s been sitting next to Nick the whole time he’s been driving. Now Nick puts his arm around Janey’s shoulder and they snuggle together. Janey asks “are you guys okay back there?” I say I have to move over to see the screen. I look at Tom and he gives me a nod that says it’s okay. I scooch over to the middle of the back seat and put my legs to the left side of the floor hump. “That’s better,” I say.

Finally, the movie begins. There’s an overture and then the Jets sing about being a Jet and beating up other gangs. The Jets and the Sharks want to fight each other for control of the streets. But first they go to a dance. It’s a musical, so I guess it doesn’t have to make sense.

At the dance, Tony of the Jets meets Maria, Bernardo’s sister. Bernardo is the head of the Puerto Rican Shark gang. Tony and Maria fall in love at first sight. Nobody is happy about that except Tony and Maria. Tony’s half in half out about the gang stuff but he’s all in on Maria. He wants to run away with her.

Tony and Maria start singing Tonight and I stop eating popcorn. I put my hand down on the car seat so I can lean forward and hear what’s coming from the speaker. My little finger touches Tom’s little finger. He takes my hand into his. We stay this way, looking at the movie and holding hands, until the movie ends and headlights turn on.

It’s past midnight when we leave Sky-HI. Nick says he’ll drive me home first. I go back and sit behind Nick. Tom looks out his window. Everyone is quiet. Nick turns on the radio. Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing comes on. I suck in my lips and look out my window. On the way home I see a car with one headlight and say “perdiddle.”  Janey and Nick kiss.

At home I get out of the car and say thanks to Janey and Nick and goodnight to Tom. Tom says good night looking at Nick and Janey.

I go inside and hear the TV on in the basement. I walk down the hallway to my bedroom. My mother is sitting in her bed reading her magazines. She sees me and asks “Susan, how was it?” I poke my head into the room and tell her it was alright.

“Just alright? Nothing more?” she asks.

“Nothing more than alright” I say.

“Okay,” she says. “Now go to bed. It’s late. Tomorrow’s another day.”

As I walk away she reminds me that she has bridge club again tomorrow night. I say okay.

In my room I take the ticket stub out of my jeans pocket. I find a pen and write on the back of the stub West Side Story Tom. I pull my keepsake box out from under the bed and put the ticket stub inside along with the Valentine cards from third grade and my second-place medals from clarinet solo contests and some poems I wrote. I close the box and put it back.

I go to bed thinking about the movie and Tom and peas on my plate.

©Jennifer Ann Johnson, Kingdom Venturers, 2024, All Rights Reserved

Filed under Short Story, short story, Valentines Day, Writing Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Somewhere in the Lost World of Love

February 4, 2024 Leave a comment

Love. Is it die-cut like the Valentine cards of grade school? Is it cliché like pop music? Is it a potion we constantly thirst for? Is it intoxication and under its influence we are not in our right minds? Is love passion? Sentimental? Carnal? Absolute? “What do any of us really know about love?” 

The last question is raised during a conversation between two couples. Their dialog and the juxtaposition of the couple’s ideas about love are found in Raymond Carver’s 1981 short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver has us listen in.

We learn from narrator Nick that he and his wife Laura are spending the afternoon at Mel and Terri’s home. Both couples live in Albuquerque, but as Nick says and the ‘love’ dialog relates, they “were all from somewhere else”.

Nick tells us that Mel McGinnis is a forty-five-year-old cardiologist who, before medical school, spent five years in seminary. Terri is his second wife. We later learn that Mel was married before to Majorie and has two children. His movements are usually precise when he hasn’t been drinking. 

Terri, we learn, was previously in an abusive relationship with a guy named Ed. He would beat her and drag her around the room by her ankles, all the while professing his love for her.

Mel and Terri have been married for four years.

Nick tells us about Laura and their relationship: she’s a legal secretary who’s thirty-five and three years younger than he is. He says they’re in love, they like each other and enjoy each other’s company. “She’s easy to be with.” They’ve been married for eighteen months. 

Beside the four adults, sunlight and gin figure in the story.

As the story begins, the four are sitting around a kitchen table. Sunlight fills the room. Gin and tonic water are being passed around. The subject of love comes up.

(I get the sense that the older couple have argued a lot about what love is and now want to air it all again in front of the younger couple. It seems they have things they want to get off their chest. Is that why the cheap gin is being passed around? Are Nick and Laura in place to be the arbiters of who’s right and who’s wrong?)

The heart doctor Mel, based on “the most important years of his life” in seminary, thinks that “real love was nothing less than spiritual love”.  (This signals that love’s definition may not be solid.)

Terri believes that Ed, the man who tried to kill her, loved her. She asks “What do you do with love like that? Mel responds that Ed’s treatment could not be called love.

Terri then makes excuses for Ed’s behavior – “People are different”. She defends him – “he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me.”

We begin to notice a growing tension between Mel and Terri. (There has been tension in their marriage about Ed and Marjorie before this.)

Mel relates that Ed threatened to kill him. Mel reaches for more gin and becomes antagonistic himself. He calls Terri a romantic for wanting brutal reminders of Ed’s love. Then he smiles at her hoping she won’t get mad. Terri responds to Mel, not with a rejection of his or of Ed’s behavior, but with what might have been her leave-the-door-open enabling response to Ed after one of his physical attacks: “Now he wants to make up.” Her past relationship reveals the continuous nature of Terri’s emotional deficit.

(Does Mel know how to land verbal blows on Terri like Ed did physically?)

Mel tries to soften the blow by calling Terri “honey” and by saying again that what Ed did wasn’t love. He then asks Nick and Laura what they think.

Nick says he doesn’t know the man or the situation to make a decision. Laura says the same and adds “who can judge anyone else’s situation?” Nick touches her hand and she smiles.

Nick picks up her “warm” hand, looks at the polished and manicured nails and then holds her hand. With this display of affection, Nick shows his love and respect for Laura, the opposite of the emotional and physical abuse Terri suffered at the hands of Ed.

Mel posits that his kind of love is absolute and nonviolent. (Then again, emotional abuse doesn’t kill or leave physical bruises.)

Terri and Mel describe Ed’s two attempts at suicide. Terri talks with sympathy for the guy. “Poor Ed” she says. Mel won’t have any of it: “He was dangerous.” Mel says they were constantly threatened by Ed. They lived like fugitives, he says. Mel bought a gun.

Terri stands by her illusion that Ed loved her – just not the same way that Mel loves her.

They go to relate that Ed’s first suicide attempt -drinking rat poison – was “bungled”. This puts him in the hospital. Ed recovers. The second attempt is a shot in the mouth in a hotel room. Mel and Terri fight over whether she will sit at his hospital bedside. She ends up there.

Mel reiterates that Ed was dangerous. Terri admits they were afraid of Ed. Mel wants nothing to do with Ed’s kind of love. Terri, on the other hand, reiterates that Ed loved her – in an odd way perhaps but he was willing to die for it. He does die.

Mel grabs another bottle of gin.

Laura says that she and Nick know what love is. She bumps Nick’s knee for his response. He makes a show of kissing Laura’s hand. The two bump knees under the table. Nick strokes Laura’s thigh.

Terri teases them, saying that things will be different after the honeymoon period of their relationship. Then, with a glass of gin in hand, she says “only kidding”. Mel opens a new bottle of gin and proposes a toast “to true love.”

The glow of the afternoon sun and of young love in the room makes them feel warm and playful, like kids up to something.

Matters-of-the-heart Mel wants to tell them “what real love is”. He goes on about what happens to the love between couples who break up. After all, he once loved his ex-wife, Marjorie, and Terri once loved Ed. Nick and Laura were also both married to other people before they met each other.

He pours himself more gin and wipes the “love is” slate clean with “What do any of us really know about love?” He – the gin Mel – talks about physical love, attraction, carnal love, sentimental love, and memory of past love. Terri wonders if Mel is drunk. Mel says he’s just talking. Laura tries to cheer Mel by saying she and Nick love him. Mel responds saying he loves them too. He picks up his glass of gin.

Mel now gets around to his example of love, an example that he says should shame anyone who thinks they know what they are talking about when they talk about love. Terri asks him to not talk drunk. (Is Mel, focused only on himself and his gin, becoming a slurring, stammering and cursing drunk?) He tells her to shut up.

Mel begins his story of an old couple in a major car wreck brought on by a kid. Terri looks over at Nick and Laura for their reaction. Nick thinks Terri looks anxious. Mel hands the bottle of gin around the table.

Mel was on call that night. He details the extensive wounds. The couple is barely alive. After saying that seat belts saved the lives of the couple, he then makes a joke of it. Terri responds affirmatively to Mel and they kiss.

Mel goes on about the old couple. Despite their serious injuries, he says, they had “incredible reserves” – they had a 50/50 chance of making it.

Mel wants everyone to drink up the cheap gin and then go to dinner. He talks about a place he knows. Terri says they haven’t eaten there yet. The heart doctor’s coherence dissipates with each drink.

He says he likes food and that he’d be a chef if he had to do things all over again. Then he says he wants to come back in another life as a medieval knight. Knights, he says, were safe in armor and they had their ladies. As he talks, Mel uses the word “vessels”. Terri corrects him with “vassals”. Mel dismisses her correction with some profanity and false modesty.

Nick counters the heart doctors fantasy by saying that knights could suffer a heart attack in the hot armor and they could fall of a horse and not get back up because it is heavy.  

Mel responds to Nick and Terri, acknowledging it would be terrible to be a knight, that some “vassal” would spear him in the name of love. More profanity. More gin.

Laura wants Mel to return to old couple story. The sunlight in the room is thinning. (And so is “love’s” illumination.)

Terri gets on Mel’s nerves with something she said jokingly. Mel hits on Laura saying he could easily fall in love with her if Terri and Nick weren’t in the picture. He’d carry her off knight-like. (Terri and Nick, of course, are sitting right there.)

Mel, with more vulgarity, finally returns to his anecdote. The old couple are covered head to toe in casts and bandages with little eye, nose and mouth holes. The husband is depressed, but not about his extensive injuries. He’s depressed because he cannot see his wife through his little eye holes. Mel is clearly blown away by this kind of love. He asks the other three if they see what he’s talking about. They just stare at him.

Sunlight is leaving the room. Nick acknowledges that they were all “a little drunk”.

Mel wants everyone to finish off the gin and then go eat. Terri says he’s depressed, needs a pill. Mel wants to call his kids, who live with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend.  Teri cautions Mel about taking to Marjorie – it’ll make him more depressed.

Terris says that Marjorie, because she isn’t remarried, is bankrupting them. Mel, who says he once loved Marjorie, fantasizes about Majorie dying after being stung by a swarm of bees, as she’s allergic to bees. Mel then shows with his hands on Terri’s neck how it would happen to “vicious” Marjorie.

Mel decides against phoning his children and mentions about going out to eat again. Nick is OK with eating or drinking more. Laura is hungry. Terri mentions putting out cheese and crackers put she never gets up to do this. Mel spills his glass of gin on the table – “Gin’s gone”. Terri wonders what’s next.

As the story ends, daylight (illumination) is gone from the kitchen. The four are ‘in the dark’ about what love really is. The conversation is also gone after Mel’s futile attempts to talk about love in any satisfying way and the inability of two characters to move on from the past and with two characters wondering what’s next.

The only sound Nick hears is the sound of human hearts beating (somewhere in the Lost World of Love).

~~~~

This story, though not of “Christian” genre, certainly would resonate with many readers. Do you relate to anyone in the story?

Terri understood Ed’s abusive and suicidal behavior as him being passionate about love. Mel, the heart doctor and would-be knight, showed himself idealistic and ignorant about the realities of the ‘heart’ and not loving towards Terri. Nick and Laura revealed the affection and passion of the heady first days of romance love. The old couple possessed an enduring love for each other after many years of marriage.

Why would I, as a Christian, gravitate to a ‘worldly’ author like Raymond Carver, especially when his stories are filled with alcohol? One reason is that I recognize myself in many of his stories. I see elements of myself at various stages of my life in each of the characters above. I could pretend to see myself otherwise, as I think some Christians do.

Another reason is that Carver writes about working class people. He doesn’t write down to people. His writes stories of domestic American life with its passions, fears, foibles, and fantasies. He writes with realism about human nature, revealing the old self that I must recognize in myself to put away.

I find his writing sobering, as in his story Where I’m Calling From.

~~~~~

RARE: Raymond Carver Reads “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (youtube.com)

what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love-carver-by-raymond-carver-1Download

~~~~~

Men need sex. And it’s their wives’ job to give it to them—unconditionally, whenever they want it, or these husbands will come under Satanic attack.

Stunningly, that’s the message contained in many Christian marriage books. Yet, research shows that instead of increasing intimacy in marriages, messages like these are promoting abuse.

In this edition of The Roys Report, featuring a talk from our recent Restore Conference, author Sheila Wray Gregoire provides eye-opening insights based on her and her team’s extensive research on evangelicalism and sex.

How Christian Teachings on Sex Enable Abuse | The Roys Report (julieroys.com)

How Christian Teachings on Sex Enable Abuse | The Roys Report

Filed under Literature, Raymond Carver, Valentines Day Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Where Have All the Bookstores Gone…?

August 5, 2011 Leave a comment

With the closing of the Borders book stores I am fearful that others will follow. I need my tactile book-in-hand fix.  Amazon doesn’t do it for me and neither do the one-dimensional Nooks or E-books. I need the book cover to flirt with me, the inside jacket to draw me in and the inky scent of words to intoxicate me. I always give a book a once-over during the courting process.

For many years now I have regularly shopped for books at my local Barnes & Noble. When I enter the store at 9:00 am every Saturday morning I love to see all the books before me waiting like a massive orchestra for its conductor. I greet each section and then the libretto starts.

On these days you would find me browsing, investigating, brooding and dilly-dallying to my heart’s content. I like the fact that there is nothing ‘E’ about my visit. It is up front and personal.  Mano y mano. I need to wrestle with the pages.

 My Barnes & Noble store stocks DVDs and Music CDs as well as a large assortment of books to choose from. If they shut this store I may need to go on life support due to a binding withdrawal.

http://www.wttw.com/chicagotonight/video/TVss9Rp4wAN0Gy7wtrOnEmDmT4JKKusY/

Filed under FICTION, Literature, Non-fiction, Short Story Tagged with , , ,

Nobel Prize in Literature 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa

December 8, 2010 Leave a comment

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist.  Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.  When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better.  We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.” [emphasis mine]

Quote from:

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Lecture, given December 7th, 2010.

Filed under Literature Tagged with , , , , ,

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