The ramp went down; the sound was like a furnace
Blasting my chest; we pushed into the water
Joined in will and fear. The air bloomed
With sour bullets. They sank their roots in me
As if I were a rotted corpse. I fell,
And I was drowning in a sea of blood.
Then, two hands bore me up the beach, they jabbed
My arm with morphine, and I did not see his face.
At the reunions, all the strangers who
Were brothers on that day would strip their sleeves,
And I would ask my question, but he’s dead,
Or else we’re both anonymous, forever.
I see him now in everyone, as if
Absorbed into the body of the remnant.

Have Mercy on the Children Who Were Chosen

Have mercy on the children who were chosen;
For what was given can be given back.
Have mercy on the family of spare parts
Assembled by a judge with stamp and pen.

We look with longing on the accidents:
On fumbling teenagers who lose their heads,
On babies kept in panic and despair,
On fate; on flesh and blood with flesh and blood.

See also: “With complete disregard for his own safety”.

More poetry on Mostly Aesthetics: American Independence in Verse; Interviews With Vampires.

A different version of “Omaha Beach” appeared at The Society for Classical Poets.

“Have Mercy on the Children Who Were Chosen” originally appeared in Poems for Persons of Interest; thanks to and .

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Bertrand Russell was once asked how he would justify his atheism, if he found himself before the pearly gates. “Not enough evidence, God!,” was his answer. It’s a common thought: if God exists, why hasn’t he compelled all but the most stiff-necked among us to believe in him, with more miracles, and more awesome revelations attesting to his mighty power? The is the “problem of divine hiddenness.”

One answer, discussed by Peter van Inwagen, denies that God wants us to believe he exists—or anyway, holds that it’s “at best misleading” to say that that’s what God wants. Hence, if God’s methods are poor methods for achieving that goal, that’s no indictment. Van Inwagen elaborates, with an analogy:

I want my wife to believe in my existence. Well if I say this I say something true, but it’s not a thing I would ever say outside a philosophical example. What I want is for my wife and me to stand in a certain complex set of relations that as a matter of fact have her believing in my existence as an essential component or logical consequence. If my marriage were destroyed...she’d probably still believe in my existence, but that by itself would be of no value to me. And God does not place any particular value on anyone’s believing in his existence—not simpliciter, not by itself. What he values is a complex of which belief in his existence is a logical consequence.

“Certain complex set of relations”—that’s a very van Inwagen phrase, and the complex in question is complex indeed, but it includes, and this is why the marriage example is so fitting, loving God. The kind of things God might do, to encourage us to love him, and believe in him “as a logical consequence,” are quite different from the kinds of things he might do, to secure belief without love.

An illustration of these points may be found in William Alston’s account of coming to the faith. Alston’s story, he notes, is

conspicuous for the absence of any presentation of arguments, any account of trains of reasoning leading up to an intellectual assent to this or that doctrine.

This, despite the fact that Alston is a professional philosopher, in whom one might expect “trains of reasoning” to be a core part of any change in view, especially one as momentous as this. Becoming Christian, for him, was not a movement of the mind. But what then was it, and what brought it about?

He finds it hard to articulate, blandly report that

Something happened, which I still find it difficult to put my finger on.

One preliminary was his acquiring the intellectual courage to dismiss skeptical debunkings of religious belief. The Freudians had said that religion was irrational wish-fulfillment, fit only for children. And Alston had been in this grip of this. But then he stepped back: wish-fulfillment is one possible explanation of religious belief, yes, but not the only one; such belief could also be a rational response to “a transcendent dimension of reality”; and why should he ignore that possibility “from fear of being branded as childish in some quarters?” Interestingly, he reports no further mulling this over, before psychoanalytic theories lost their power. He looked the adversary in the face, and the question “answered itself as soon as it was posed.”

But more important was his “opening himself up where he was closed.” This is a good image, but of what? Paul’s letter to the Romans talks of “the love of God” being “poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit,” and maybe that was what Alston “opened himself” to, but he could hardly have thought of it that way, before he believed. Instead he describes allowing himself to be “drawn into a community, into a way of life”: the practices of the church he was attending. No contradiction there, but it may still seem backwards: should not faith start, somehow, with God? Maybe yes and maybe no, but for Alston the “way of life” did produce actual belief:

I found God as a reality in my life through finding a community of faith and being drawn into it.

Alston uses another metaphor to explain this process: it was like “learning to hear things in music that one had been missing,” an interesting echo of something Roger White wrote about possible paths to faith. Attending church in the hope of coming to believe in God might seem an irrational way to influence your beliefs—even if you end up believing the truth. But there may be facts which are best, or even only, known by way of “going through the motions” appropriate to knowing them, before you have that knowledge. This may not work, and there may be nothing to know:

I don’t understand much about art, especially contemporary visual art...to me it mostly looks like a bunch of crap...[But] I have often wondered if there is something that I’m missing out on...I have tried to take on the artistic viewpoint in much the way that Pascal recommends attending Mass. I’ve gone to art galleries and stared at canvases covered with buckets of splattered paint, hoping to turn into one of those people who finds them profound.

Nothing happened in that case, but, Roger says, it was not a mistake to try. Maybe today’s art is bunk, but in other cases “utterly irresponsible belief manipulation can result in enlightenment.” Middle-aged and in his fifties, William Alston, through his church attendance but before his full conversion, now

found myself, incredibly, with a quite different orientation to the people around me. I began, for the first time in my life, to get a glimmer of what love means.

Returning to the hiddenness of God, maybe indirect routes to belief in him, of the sort Alston reports, are common and for some people even necessary, because they are so well-suited to produce belief in the company of love.

See also: On “Fear of Religion.”

Sources:

• Peter van Inwagen, The Hiddenness of God.

• William Alston, A Philosopher’s Way Back to the Faith.

• Roger White, You just believe that because....

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The bass guitar line of David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” wiggles and leaps with uncontained joy. It’s a happy piece of music. The word “happy” is most at home applied to people, as in “Jones is a happy guy,” but here it has been spread beyond its home use. Such meaning spread is attested elsewhere. We say that someone is wearing a happy expression on their face, or that their crumpled posture makes for a sad slouch. Here “happy” and “sad” have been spread to their effects: a happy expression is one characteristic of people who are feeling happy; it is an expression which is a natural one for someone showing their happiness in their face to wear. Similarly, a sad slouch is a natural one for someone showing their sadness in their posture to pose in.

Can emotion terms, when applied to music, get their meaning by a similar mechanism? Focus on melodies, which “move through musical space,” some ascending step-wise from C to G, some leaping down from G to B. Appearance Emotionalism says that a happy melody is one that moves in a way that is a natural way for someone showing their happiness in their behavior to move. Same for anger, sadness, and so on.

Variation 1 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially in Glenn Gould’s 1956 recording, is joyful, exuberant. Appearance Emotionalism says it moves in a way a person full of joy would move, if they showed their joy in their motion. I’ve always found this explanation convincing. In the first half the melody runs, climbs, leaps, and zig-zags effortlessly, before racing home.

I said that in “happy expression on their face” the meaning of “happy” had been spread to an effect, but that’s misleading. I can wear a happy face without its being an effect of my feeling happy, and not every face that is an effect of my happiness, is a happy face. My happiness might cause me to frown, if I am trying to hide it; and, as everyone who lives among humans knows, one can put on a happy face even when all inside is darkness and turmoil.

Nevertheless, if understood in a looser, or generic, sense, it is true that happy expressions are caused by happy feelings. A happy expression is a natural one for someone showing their happiness in their face to wear. If someone is wearing such an expression because they are showing their happiness in their face, then, in that case, the expression is caused by their happiness.

The philosopher Alan Tormey, in a book on expression, wrote that

there is a surface to expressive behavior that may become detached. The child who pretends, the actor who portrays, the mime who imitates, and the hypocrite who feigns, all attempt, in different ways, to strip the surface of expressive behavior from the character it normally reveals.

Emotion adjectives can be used to describe those surfaces, even when they have become detached from the inner feelings that, in normal cases, cause them.

Could Appearance Emotionalism be right? One might worry about idiosyncratic modes of expression. Imagine a community that carefully trains its members to show their happiness in a very slow step-step-skip gait. To them, walking that way when happy is second-nature; it requires no thought or deliberation. The first time we see it we are baffled, but after living among them for a few years we “see happiness” in this walk just as much as you ever saw it in a smile. Must Appearance Emotionalism then say, falsely, that a melody that moves through musical space in that step-step-skip motion is a happy one?

I’m not sure that community is so much as possible; nor, if it is, that the implication is false. What emotions are in a piece of music, may be relative to the ways of expressing emotion familiar to the listener, or the composer. But Appearance Emotionalism need not even grant that much. In its original form, it says that a happy melody must share a natural way for showing happiness: one that is built in to human nature. Learned means of showing are, therefore, excluded.

A harder objection is that no melody in fact moves in a way in which a human can move. Whatever exactly “musical space” is, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” does not move through it, in just the way any person moves through physical space. But then Appearance Emotionalism entails that no piece of music is happy, the wrong result.

The theory may be saved by the distinction, between more and less precise ways of doing something. If I raise my hand, I do so in some perfectly precise way: at a rate, for example, of two inches per second. You might raise your hand, and do so a bit faster—a slightly different way. But ways can be less precise, and there is a less precise way of raising that our hand-raisings share. I raised mine slowly; so did you.

Similarly, maybe no human can move in the precise way that the melody of “Twinkle Twinkle” moves, not least because they move through different spaces, which themselves are quite different (musical space is not continuous). Still, “Twinkle Twinkle” begins with a leap, and I can also begin my afternoon jaunt with a leap.

Stephen Davies, one of the main defenders of Appearance Emotionalism and the man who gave it that name, mentions Saint Bernards.

Saint Bernards have sad faces. Certainly, that’s not because they are natural faces for dogs to wear when sad: Saint Bernards are not beset by an epidemic of sorrow. So, if Appearance Emotionalism is right, they must be natural faces for humans showing their sadness in their face to wear. But how can that be? No one ever mistakes a Saint Bernard for a human. The answer (again) is the distinction between more and less precise ways. No human wears their face in the precise way a Saint Bernard does; physiology makes that impossible. But there is a less precise way of wearing one’s face—which includes a certain droopiness to one’s features—that humans and Saint Bernards can both exemplify.

An earlier version of this essay was published in April, 2023.

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1. Jesus fasted forty days in the desert, and was tempted by Satan. Paradise Regained is John Milton’s re-telling of those temptations, with expansions and inventions. In Milton’s version, Jesus is openly unmoved by the temptations, he is absolutely immune: fitting, theologically, but it makes Paradise Regained a dramatic poem with very little drama. The original, in the Gospel of Luke, is short, curt, more mysterious and more interesting.

2. Two moments do draw attention. First, in Book III, after several failures, Satan turns to praise, attempting an indirect temptation to worldly glory:

I see thou know’st what is of use to know,
What best to say canst say, to do canst do;
Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words
To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart
Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.

Equipped with such goodness, why does Jesus not go and exercise it?

These godlike virtues wherefore dost thou hide?
Affecting private life, or more obscure
In savage wilderness, wherefore deprive
All earth her wonder at thy acts, thyself
The fame and glory...

Jesus’s reply is surprising, for its dim view of those he’s tasked to save:

For what is glory, but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixed?
And what the people but a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar....

Such misanthropy! Where is man made in God’s image? Where is man made a little lower than the angels?

Also interesting is Satan’s follow-up, he seems to have caught Jesus in a slip:

Think not so slight of glory; therein least
Resembling thy great Father: he seeks glory,
And for his glory all things made...

I expected Jesus to respond that his Father seeks love, not glory (the Greatest Commandment: to “love the Lord you God with all your heart”)—or seeks glory only as an act of love—but he does not. In fact the word “love” appears only once in the poem, and it is Satan who uses it. (He says he is still able to love, “or at least contemplate and admire / What I see excellent.”) Instead, Jesus rebuts Satan thus: God has done so much,

what could he less expect
Than glory and benediction,

and anyway, if men did not “return” glory to God, they

would likeliest render
Contempt instead, dishonour, obloquy.

In sum: glory is better than the alternative. This is not much of a reply? What am I missing?

3. The other interesting moment is the poem’s shift, from Satan’s futile and therefore boring attempts to tempt Jesus, to Satan’s (apparent) confusion over who Jesus is, for there is drama in Satan’s distress at his ignorance:

Since neither wealth, nor honour, arms nor arts,
Kingdom nor empire pleases thee, nor aught
By me proposed in life contemplative,
Or active, tended on by glory, or fame,
What dost thou in this world?

This is the exalted analogue of that hilarious scene in Office Space, where the Bobs, exasperated, ask Tom Smykowski “what would you say...you do here?” And then—Satan’s (false) warning, that if Jesus rejects the easy and certain, but worthless rewards that Satan offers, the greater good he aims for is not guaranteed, the only guarantee is suffering—these may be the most powerful lines in the poem:

if I read aught in heaven,
Or heaven write aught of fate, by what the stars
Voluminous, or single characters,
In their conjunction met, give me to spell,
Sorrows, and labours, opposition, hate
Attends thee, scorns, reproaches, injuries,
Violence and stripes, and lastly cruel death,
A kingdom they portend thee, but what kingdom,
Real or allegoric I discern not.

See also: Book Review: Paradise Lost; Late Milton.

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The nature of evil is a philosophical problem, and what have we come up with? Luke Russell, in Evil: A Very Short Introduction, says an act is evil if it is “extremely harmful for at least one” victim, and a person is evil if he is disposed to perform evil acts. On this view, evil stands to harm, as hot—or scorching—stands to warm. But this can’t be correct, can it? Evil acts don’t just have more of what makes something wrong, they have something extra, right? (Daniel Haybron: “we cannot get from bad to evil by adding any number of ‘verys’”.)

Russell’s theory of evil uses a thin moral range—harm is the central concept—but his discussions of evil use stronger stuff: those who perpetrate evil are moral monsters; they are morally depraved. This list could be extended: being depraved exists in a circle of similar notions, like being perverted, or corrupted. Russell also says that we are rightly horrified by evil. This is easily explained, by the fact that monsters are horrifying—thus their frequent appearances in horror movies. Of course evil does not inspire the same horror as a viewing of Alien: horror comes in many forms. Horror is an intense dread or dismay, and is an apt response to any “monster,” that is, something so deformed as to be alien, or almost so. Since evil is moral monstrosity, it is apt to cause a specifically moral kind of horror.

In any regard, since one could be disposed to perform extremely harmful acts, without being monstrous or depraved—the disposition could have some other ground—Russell’s theory is false.

Other theories try to do more justice to these features of evil, while still corralling evil in the dry idiom of analytic philosophy. One says that a person is evil if they are “insensitive” to factors that count against doing harm, or doing wrong. A perpetrator of genocide to whom his victim’s suffering means nothing, meets this definition. Another theory says that someone is evil if they are “the mirror image of the morally virtuous person,” this perhaps capturing the idea that evil is the opposite of good. Russell dismisses both of these. Against the first, an evil man may be a little bit sensitive to his victim’s suffering—just not sensitive enough to stay his hand. Against the second, the mirror of perfect virtue is perfect vice, so the theory requires an evil person to lack all virtue and goodness—to never love his children, or hope for the preservation of the wild places of the earth. But evil is not so demanding.

Insofar as these theories fail, it’s because they fail to capture the ideas that inspire them. A moral monster’s character is deformed in the extreme; more, it is deformed in virtue of being depraved. Deformity and depravity, while Very Bad Things, do not entail insensitivity to suffering, nor need they make one a “mirror image” of the morally virtuous. Russell emphasizes the variety of psychologies that can issue in evil: sadistic delight in suffering is a sign of evil, but not essential to it; the same goes for malicious intent, or defiance of morality. This makes sense, for there are many ways of being deformed, even in the extreme.

Can we simply say, as I just did, that to be evil is to be a moral monster, deformed by depravity? Maybe there are counterexamples (please send them!), but some will object for another reason. Philosophers have long operated under a demand that notions like “moral monster,” or “depraved,” themselves be defined, using simpler and more securely understood notions, before one could regard the result as a definition of evil. But similar demands have lately been put to rest in other parts of philosophy (I’m thinking of knowledge-first epistemology); maybe this one should be here, as well. This is not to say that the key notions, monstrous and depraved, cannot or need not be further elaborated—just that their elaborations need not take the form of definitions.

Russell’s theory lacks the virtue of truth, but he also claims for it another: neutrality. The theory is expressed in terms accepted by all, and so if it is true, Christians (etc) and atheists alike can agree on who is evil and why.1 I’ve never been drawn to the idea that if God is dead, everything is permitted: without God there could still be good, bad, right, and wrong. But it’s worth wondering whether a neutral theory of evil could be true; and whether, and if so how, secular conceptions of moral monstrosity and depravity could produce a theory of evil all parties could regard as adequate.

See also: Interviews With Vampires, a series of poems about evil.

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Is your work underappreciated? Are you throwing pearls before swine? Take heart:

At the time of Shakespeare’s death few would have supposed that one day he would be thought the greatest of English playwrites. Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson were all more popular and esteemed.

But also remember when Bob Dylan sang,

Well, I rapped upon a house
With the U.S. flag upon display
I said, “Could you help me out
I got some friends down the way”
The man says, “Get out of here
I’ll tear you limb from limb”
I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”
He said, “You’re not him.”

Shakespeare’s contributions to the English language need no review, but even knowing this, I found these lists surprising:

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). [But...]

His real gift was as a phrasemaker [...]: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, ... play fast and loose...be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness...If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception.

One can revere great writers too much, or credit them too little. Alexander Pope was the most misguided Shakespeare/meh partisan. “Edit” means “prepare for publication,” and also “change or correct,” and when Pope edited a set of Shakespeare’s works, he also edited the works themselves:

Where, for instance, Shakespeare wrote about taking arms against a sea of troubles, he [Pope] changed sea to siege to avoid a mixed metaphor.

That’s bold.

2. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, by William Godwin (1st edition, 1793).

Less well-known in many circles than his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, or his daughter Mary Shelley, Godwin was a proto-anarchist:

It were earnestly to be desired that each man was wise enough to govern himself without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government even in its best state is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it as the general peace of human society will permit.

He had a way with words. Some argue that, because we do not protest or revolt against them, we “implicitly consent” to laws and government actions. Godwin retorted,

If I walk quietly to the gallows, this does not imply my consent to be hanged.

He thought promising an indefensible practice. What could justify sticking to your word, when an otherwise morally superior option might come along? That would be

to disarm my future wisdom by my past folly.

On the subject of free speech Godwin was for the free exchange of opinions in the marketplace of ideas, and against the government favoring some ideas over others. Like Milton, Godwin held that

The contest between truth and falsehood is of itself too unequal [that is, in truth’s favor], for the former to stand in need of support from any political ally.

One might doubt that truth has such an advantage, but also hope that the case for free speech does not require it.

This is not a book about death, but Godwin does make this dry observation:

Death has hitherto been the common lot of men, and I expect at some time or other to submit to it.

3. The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff.

I am not one to denigrate the ideals or accomplishments of those who led the American Revolution. But the most famous among them had serious and, to some, unforgivable flaws. Even the best had a full tank of self-love, collecting their papers and reputation and freeze-drying them for future reconstitution and consumption. But Samuel Adams, “the only downwardly mobile of the Founding Fathers,” was content to burn his letters and disappear form history.

Still, Adams had other features that might blunt your admiration. He would not let truth stand in the way of his propaganda campaign for colonial rights and (eventually) independence. When some of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s letters were secretly leaked back home (by Benjamin Franklin no less), they ended up in Adams’ hands, and Adams “turned [these] half a dozen harmless letters into a great crime.” He made out that Hutchinson had urged Great Britain to further abuse Massachusetts, including by way of a military occupation. When Adams was done, “Hutchinson’s reputation lay in tatters”:

never had an American annotator achieved such extravagant results with so shabby a remnant of truth.

Adams’ critics called his committee on correspondence a “proto-terrorist cell”; they might have complained that his belief in the Cause was so firm he was willing to force his compatriots to be free.

Nevertheless, Adams comes off rather well in this book, and may inspire the middle-aged late-bloomer:

Here comes Samuel Adams then, a graying widower, inexpensively and unremarkably dressed, familiar with nearly everyone who crosses his path. He is all loose ends and blighted promise. He has held off his father’s creditors, but his house is in disrepair. He has run the malt business into the ground. Charges of financial impropriety cling to him; a potential prosecution stubbornly follows him around. He could be embarrassed by his brushes with bailiffs but, cheery and congenial, has elected not to be. He has time to talk. Suffused in and affirmed by his faith, he offers up religious wisdom for any occasion. He carries himself with the serenity of someone on intimate terms with another world. He is devoted to his children, whom he arranges to have inoculated this spring against smallpox. He is a favorite of his friends’ children. If you look closely you notice that a quiver has crept into his hands. He appears to be shambling his way to obscurity. His fortunes will not improve but events are about to meet him halfway; the House of Commons is on course to blast him from his aimlessness. Hutchinson would gripe that—having miraculously escaped the wreckage of his tax-collecting—Adam’s improbably ascendancy began now, in 1764. Soon he will preside over Boston by, as one woman deemed it, falsehoods and subterfuges. He is forty-one years old.

From the precipice of obscurity Adams became the man who named the Boston Massacre, organized the Boston Tea Party, and stage-managed public opinion about every major political event in Boston in the lead up to the war.

Adams had a pulsing, Old Testament writing style, much different and far better than his cousin John’s stuffy pretentious latinate prose. Samuel Adams was not a poet, but he was not insensitive to poetry: he’d “carried a couplet” about marriage “in his head ever since his youth”:

Sure is the knot religion ties
And love well-bounded never dies.

Earlier versions of these notes were published in 2023.

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America 250 at Mostly Aesthetics, Part 8: ‘Tis time to part.

In early 1776, Common Sense went viral in the colonies, turning heads and tipping the scales toward independence. At four dozen pages, it’s too long to go viral today, even with a Premium account, but plenty of 280-character segments have the sting to have potential.

The British and the Loyalists saw good in the British form and practice of government. Might the radicals be missing something? Paine demurs: British admiration is “more from national pride than reason,” and their judgment is worthless, for they are like

a man, who is attached to a prostitute:

he is “unfitted to choose or judge of a wife,” and likewise “any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.”

Opponents of independence said that America had flourished under Britain, before the crisis; but

we may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.

What about the French and Indian War? Did not Britain protect us from invasion, and foreign attack? Yes, but from vicious motives:

she did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account.

Do we not owe Britain some loyalty, as our mother country? But that phrase is propaganda, to gain

an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds.

Anyway, some betrayals can never be forgiven:

Your future connection with Britain, whom you can neither love nor honour, will be forced and unnatural, and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will in a little time fall into a relapse more wretched than the first.

Indeed, anyone who can so “love and honor” Britain, has

the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

Delays, and dalliances with reconciliation, only put onto others, the work we should do ourselves:

let us come to a final separation, and not leave the next generation to be cutting throats.

These clips are great, but to feel the full distillation of the pamphlet’s power, it must be filtered and transposed into blank verse. Here it is, for the Fourth of July, 2026.

Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America
Philadelphia, January 1776

In these pages I offer nothing more
Than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.
The struggle for America has now
Become a test of arms; all plans proposed
Before last April are but almanacs
Of years gone by; and reconciliation
Has passed away like an agreeable
Dream. Britain is no mother country. Even brutes
Do not devour their young, nor savages
Make war upon their families. No one
Again can love or serve a power that
Brought fire and sword into his land; no more
Can you forgive the murders of Great Britain
Than can a man forgive the ravisher
Of his wife. Hark and listen, hear the dark
Blood of the slain cry out: ’tis time to part.
O ye that love mankind, who dare oppose
Tyranny, stand forth! Freedom hath been hunted
Round the globe—Europe regards her like
A stranger—England warns her to depart.
O! Receive the fugitive, prepare
This new world an asylum for mankind.

Read more of America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics:

• Part 1: Words and Feelings.

• Part 2: Lincoln as Writer.

• Part 3: The Great American Novel.

• Part 4: Editorial on Harpers Ferry.

• Part 5: Omaha Beach.

• Part 6: Patriotism defended.

• Part 7: America the beautiful.

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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics, part 7: America the beautiful.

Spencer Case claims that patriotism is “partly aesthetic,” in Why it’s OK to be Patriotic (see part I). Just as the lover admires what’s good in his country, he also strives to know, enjoy, and appreciate his country’s beauty. Spencer quotes George Orwell, loving England for its

solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes.

Ah, solid breakfasts! On the cover of Spencer’s book are the flags of many nations, the book is ecumenical, and the examples are literally all over the map—a good thing. So the book does not consider what is beautiful about America. But Spencer is an American patriot, as am I, and here and now is the time and place to shine a light on the beauty of this country. And so, I thought, well, I’ll write up something myself. But it’s hard! Purple mountains, amber waves of grain, yes, yes, but we don’t want the clichés, we want the subtle beauties, a statement of the American aesthetic that only a patriot could produce. So I asked Spencer if he would have a go. I was hoping for a few sentences. Here is what he sent.

What is the American aesthetic? The question sounds like the setup for a joke. It must be as brash as a billboard advertisement, as saccharine as a 64-ounce Big Gulp of Coke Cola, as unoriginal as a cliché line in a Hollywood action movie. That’s what a critic of American aesthetics might say, and there’s some truth to the charge. But what this critic might miss is that the garish exterior encloses an earnest, searching core.

A nation devoted to free enterprise and technological innovation might be expected to make a casualty of beauty. We don’t generally think of the light bulb or the elevator as objects of beauty. But they support novel kinds of beauty. Without them the skylines of Chicago and New York couldn’t exist. And some distinctly American innovations have opened our eyes to otherworldly beauty: the James Webb telescope’s images of the distant cosmos, or the mesmerizing Juno probe photos of Jupiter, revealing a maze of world-sized swirling storms, or the thrill of a Kennedy Space Center launch. Not least, there’s the automobile, not an American invention, but one improved and popularized in America, bringing with it the personal freedom of the road trip.

As with the patriots of other countries, I can’t help reading national values and aesthetics into the landscape of national territory. I’m primarily thinking not of the landmarks, the national parks, the skylines of Chicago and New York, but the liminal spaces between these popular destinations. When I was a graduate student, I drove regularly from Idaho to Colorado. This required crossing Wyoming, which I did between 60 and 70 times over a decade. At first, I found the drive tedious passing through places like Wamsutter and Buford, famous for having a population of exactly one (best of luck in the next mayoral election). And the wind, cold, and hail could be hazardous. But I came to find beauty in it. The landscape was vast and empty. So was the sky. Purple thunderstorms flickering with lightning were diminutive over peaks on the horizon, while the rest of the sky was an unthreatening blue, the summer shrugging off the gloom.

There’s one place I almost always stopped for gas: Little America, which bills itself as the largest truck stop in the world. For what seemed like hundreds of miles in either direction, billboards count down the distance and advertise its 50-cent ice cream cones and amenities. Almost there. Another 50 miles. Now 25. You’re almost there! One Mile Left! The exaggerated pride was mildly infectious, and maybe not insincere. I can’t speak to the water pressure or heat of the showers, but they really did have 50 cent ice cream cones. Quality services, promises kept, a satisfying stop on a journey: isn’t there a beauty to these things? Maybe Little America lives up to its name. Further down I-70, between Laramie and Cheyenne, a rest stop atop a mountain features a giant bust of Abraham Lincoln, surveilling with malice toward none, the unfolding of the union into the twentieth and twenty-first century.

And that century brought artistic innovations as well as technological ones: the syncopated rhythm of jazz, the effervescent phrases of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. Or the dancing of Frankie Manning—the Ambassador of Lindy Hop, a dance itself named for Charles Lindbergh’s ‘hop’ across the Atlantic—who carried that tradition to its most energetic peaks and then transmitted it into new generations. He is a beloved figure among swing enthusiasts and an unsung titan of American culture outside that circle. Spiritual and material strivings are juxtaposed, even intertwined: God and mammon in uneasy alliance, individualistic and sometimes too boastful, but not complacent and certainly not static, like a jazz solo.

A final image: in 2017, I finally made a trip in which Wyoming was the destination to observe a total solar eclipse whose umbra passed over the Big Sky state. For a few days, the state’s population more than doubled as outsiders flocked in cars, trucks and campers to observe this unauthorized foray of night into day. Something wonderful, even sublime, keeps us looking up to a new frontier.

Spencer Case is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, and a veteran of the US Army. He writes about war ethics, moral realism, and political philosophy, and podcasts at Microdigressions.

Read more of America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics:

• Part 1: Words and Feelings.

• Part 2: Lincoln as Writer.

• Part 3: The Great American Novel.

• Part 4: Editorial on Harpers Ferry.

• Part 5: Omaha Beach.

• Part 6: Patriotism defended.

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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics part 6: patriotism defended

Patriotism gets some side-eye from many, and—in elite clubs and back-room meetings—patriotic Americans get more. But patriotism can be defended, and is given a worthy defense, in Spencer Case’s soon-to-appear book Why It’s OK to be Patriotic. I got a sneak peak, and some access to the man himself. (Spencer is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, at the University of Arizona; his website is spencercasephilosophy.com.)

1. Patriotic love.

Patriotism is “love for one’s country and compatriots as such.” As such: I love my wife, who is my compatriot, but my love for her is not an instance of patriotism. This definition of patriotism is simple, but love itself is confusing, even for the philosopher.

What do you love about America? Some will answer with the values the nation professes: among them, liberty, equality, democracy, justice. But America is not unique in these ideals, nor, some think, does it live up to them better than others. If a patriot learns of a place that does it better, he will love America still, but how can this be? If those values ground your love, shouldn’t you switch your allegiance, if a superior option comes along? Spencer asks,

If patriots simply love abstract values such as democracy or justice, why couldn’t they “trade up” to countries that better instantiate those features?

Certainly if I value flashiness in a car, I’ll buy a flashier model, if I can afford it. But when people move countries, and profess justice as their reason, they are not much regarded as patriots, of the countries they abandoned.

Spencer answers his question by suggesting that what we love, when we love our country for its values, is more specific, than a bare four-item list:

Patriots don’t just love their countries’ values in the abstract; they love particular elaborations of those values—shaped by specific histories, constitutional structures, and cultural inheritances.

America may be unique in its elaborations of its values, even if many countries share the values elaborated. By “elaborations” Spencer means, at least, ways of trading off values when they conflict:

Most democratic countries share overlapping values but weigh them differently when they come into tension. Americans weigh gun ownership rights heavily and allow citizens to “sit it out” during elections, whereas Australia forbids most private gun ownership and requires all citizens to vote. It’s not that the US values freedom and Australia doesn’t, or that Australia values civic participation and the US doesn’t, or that Australia values safety and public order and America doesn’t. Rather, each country has come to different arrangements for how to realize the optimal balance between these values.

Maybe America’s way of trading off values is better than Australia’s (many certainly say so!); or maybe no way is ideal, each country’s way is a mix of good and bad, or is best suited to its ways of living, and there’s no saying which is, abstractly, “better.” Either way, the patriot is safe, from the danger that Australia might have more of what he loves about America.

Spencer also suggests that the threat of “trading up” misunderstands how love responds to the thing loved:

A country’s values...need not be optimal in order for it to be a worthy object of patriotic love.

Even in, per impossible, Australia’s safeguarding of liberty were superior to America’s, America’s is good enough, to justify patriotic love: just as it’s okay to admire a great person, though they be not a god.

This all seems right. But more might be said. In Spencer’s discussion, loving America for its freedom is giving a justification, or a motive, for one’s love. But that is not all it can be, and maybe it need not be even that. Love itself brings an impulse to admire the thing you love, and to attend carefully to its features, with an interest in finding in it features that are admirable. If you love America for its freedom, then you admire America for its freedom, and this admiration is an expression of your love, not a cause or a reason for it. If that’s so, the existence of other free countries need not undercut your love, as freedom is not the basis for it.

2. Is patriotism bad?

Patriotism can be a force for evil, when it causes zealotry, or the demonization of “enemy” countries. Spencer describes the murder of a German immigrant by American citizens during World War I. The mob acted out of anti-German hysteria. It “paraded Prager through the streets of Collinsville, Illinois, barefoot and wrapped in an American flag. The mob forced him to sing patriotic songs,” then lynched him. Prager was not just murdered on the basis of his nationality—horrible enough; he was made a spectacle, in a disgusting display he was made to parrot expressions of American patriotism before his death, a humiliation that was motivated by a dark form of patriotism itself. There are too many examples: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the persecution of “communist sympathizers” during the Cold War.

But a considered judgment about patriotism must weight its bad effects against its good. Those goods may be “mundane,” day-to-day, not headline news, and so easily ignorable; but if they are small by some measure, they are also many, and should not be ignored. Spencer includes among these the facts that

Patriotism fortifies people against temptations to take bribes, cheat in an election, or refuse to accept the results of an election, judicial decision, or other political process when these are unfavorable.

We take these things for granted (maybe less than we used to), but they are the acts of a patriotic people. Spencer mentions one instance of this that was indeed newsworthy:

The Republican politicians who resisted Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, most notably Vice President Mike Pence and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, didn’t seem to be acting out of self-interest alone. Both men were under pressure to go along with the scheme: Pence from a mob that physically threatened him, Raffensperger from anonymous threats he and his wife received, and both men from the president and their electoral base. Patriotism seems to have been an important part of why they ultimately did not succumb to these formidable pressures.

What else is good about patriotism? In general, since patriotism is a kind of love, and surely is “relevantly similar to other forms of love,” then “it, too, should make the world better on the whole.” And while love can be “twisted” or vicious, it’s wrong to to think it cannot be a virtue, or a cause of justice:

The good father isn’t someone who puts his children ahead of morality; rather, he does right by his family because he loves them. Likewise, the patriot is one who puts country ahead of self without putting either before right.

For example,

Those who love their own countries can more easily have empathy for the patriots of other countries. They can understand why it’s so important that their country be treated with dignity on the world stage, and why many react with outrage at perceived slights to their country’s dignity.

Also, love of country (when virtuous) is wanting what’s best for one’s country, and an unjust country is worse for being unjust:

[Patriots] have special reason to be concerned with their country’s moral standing as well as its prosperity.

3. When Patriotism erodes

After the Nazi victories of 1940, France was occupied and by an alien and evil regime. Most of the French (correctly) regarded its rule as illegitimate, and offered the minimum compliance needed to avoid punishment, and no more. Many took opportunities, where they could, to cheat, undermine, and generally oppose that regime, both materially and symbolically. When I studied this recently, the details of what they did, and how they thought, were a disturbing echo of the way many Americans think and act today (maybe different Americans, over the last few presidential terms). This decline is many things, and has many causes, but one thing it is, is an erosion of patriotism, which is a harm to the nation. Spencer’s articulation of this stood out to me:

A flourishing country requires citizens who are willing to sacrifice on its behalf, capable of restraining their passions when the common good demands it, and willing to see their political rivals as compatriots committed to the same shared goods, not enemies. Post-patriotic politics, if it can be called “politics” at all, is a zero-sum struggle for power: every election feels like a coup, every loss like a foreign occupation.

4. Beauty.

Finally, Spencer writes this about patriotism, a thought I’d not considered before:

Patriotism, like other forms of love, is partly aesthetic.

He elaborates,

Countries have distinctive landscapes, ways of speaking, architecture, culinary styles, and artistic traditions that create unique aesthetic experiences and contribute to an overall national character.

Spencer gives a few examples in the book, but none from America, so I asked him to try his hand at a statement of the American aesthetic, that only a patriot (and maybe, only he) could produce. It will appear next, in “Love of Country, II.”

Read more of America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics:

• Part 1: Words and Feelings.

• Part 2: Lincoln as Writer.

• Part 3: The Great American Novel.

• Part 4: Editorial on Harpers Ferry.

• Part 5: Omaha Beach.

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This is my evaluation of Thales’ case for tenure. First a word about our connection. I have interacted with him several times, but always in a professional capacity, engaged in abstract thought while strolling the agora. I have never bathed at his house, nor held the head of the sacrificial heifer while he cut its throat, and the black blood drained away its life. I do not know him well. I believe, therefore, that I can be objective in my assessment.

To cut to the chase, Thales is widely regarded as the wisest man of his age, and the case for tenuring him is strong. Your department is lucky to have him. His most significant contribution is his argument that everything is ultimately made of water. It has made a big splash; in the most recent issue of Miletian Metaphysics well over half the articles are devoted to discussing it. Also worth mentioning is his treatment of the question which is older, night or day? Thales has argued, and I quote, “Night is older, by one day.” Now I myself received tenure for arguing the opposite, in a treatise that so far has over 200 citations on Google Scholar. I have always thought that the “night is older” view was completely indefensible, a sign of a mind deranged by the angry gods. Thales, to his credit, has convinced me that it needs to be taken seriously. His arguments are certainly the best I’ve seen, though they do suffer from serious flaws. My intuition tells me that night is by definition the darkness that follows day; an alleged “first night” is therefore metaphysically impossible. Probably, Thales is confusing epistemic with metaphysical possibility, a bit embarrassing this many years after Saul Kripke’s groundbreaking work. This is what happens when graduate programs abandon the core curriculum. (Note to administrators: philosophers always disagree, so this should not be taken as indicating doubts about his case.) His contributions are all the more impressive given that Thales came to philosophy late, after a career in politics—or else, he is proof that philosophical talent is in-born, and cannot be cultivated in the weak-minded, whatever the more progressive pedagogues in my profession would have you believe.

Some context for the administrators relying on this letter in their deliberations will not be out of place. You have noticed, when reading Thales’ CV, that he has published nothing. Please note that this is not unusual in his field. Many prominent philosophers have written nothing; some superstars have written only a few fragments. Philosophy is young, and does not yet fit the mold of either a “book” discipline or a “journal article” discipline. Think of it more as a “reputation” discipline: if a lot of philosophers think you’re great, that’s all it takes to be great. In fact, as things are, actually publishing something can diminish your standing in the profession, as your stellar “potentially” is transformed into a somewhat lackluster “actuality.” I expect philosophy will grow out of all this by 500 BCE or so, as more refereed journals are established, the publish-or-perish arms-race begins, and philosophers shift from addressing “big questions” to producing narrowly-argued small-moves in the literature, in a boring and repetitive style, that can make it past “referee 2.” Until then people like Thales need to be “grandfathered” in.

It may also be useful to categorize Thales’ research. Philosophers are standardly divided into three kinds, as follows:

some are called natural philosophers because they investigate nature; others are called moralists because they discuss morals; those who occupy themselves in verbal hairsplitting are called dialecticians.

Thales falls into the first group.

If I have one reservation about this case, it is that Thales’ extracurricular activities may interfere with his future research trajectory. His political punditry may have saved Miletus from the Persians, but it surely takes up a great deal of time and energy. His innovations in time-measurement have also been influential; using a 365-day calendar has become industry standard. But that work does not qualify as philosophy, and so cannot be counted in his favor here.

So much for my evaluation of Thales’ research. About his teaching and service I can write less, as I have not been in a position to observe either. I have heard that he is a loner, and may not be an asset to a graduate program that prizes a close and welcoming community. He is also known to report students to the discipline committee, when they email him begging that their B+s be upgraded to As; and to use LLMs to grade student work, while barring his teaching assistants from doing the same.

In your request letter you asked if Thales would receive promotion here. I expect it would be a “slam dunk” case, which is significant, as we are more in need of hairsplitting dialecticians than natural philosophers. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were soon inundated with outside offers. Retention in the face of richer schools’ outrageous salaries should not be hard, as he is known to be independently wealthy from speculating in the olive oil market.

You asked that I compare Thales to his peers, to aid in your evaluation. Is he among the top ten in his field, among whom I am unable to draw further distinctions? Does he remind me of myself, when I was younger, and less experienced? Do I expect the work in his file to be among the very small fraction of today’s philosophy that will still be read in two thousand years’ time? In fact in Thales’ case such comparisons are impossible, as he is the first philosopher.

If I can be of any more assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I may be found, daily, praying for new ideas in the acropolis.1

An earlier version of this essay was published January, 2023.

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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics, Part 5: Omaha Beach

General Eisenhower wrote this to his wife, during the war:

I have never believed in revenge, but I have the strongest possible belief in justice, and the need to impose it on evil-doers.

Everything is always complicated—granted; but this war was a war against evil, and America was fighting for justice, and whatever else is true, that is something Americans may be proud of today.

There is “poetry in the raw” commemorating the Americans who fought in that war, hidden in government-issued documents, especially the awards for heroism and valor, like the Medal of Honor, or the Distinguished Service Cross. These four are from D-Day; there are more.

Stanley Appleby

disembarked from his craft some fifty yards from the beach under a hail of artillery shells and machine gun fire. A large number of casualties were sustained and, but for Technician Fourth Grade Appleby’s prompt and courageous action, would have perished in the surf. With complete disregard for his own safety, he on numerous occasions waded into the surf to lead them ashore and immediately administered aid.

George Bowen,

disregarding his own safety, stopped in his efforts to reach the shore, waded through the mined and fire-swept water to go to a wounded man who was drowning and dragged the man to shore.

Later, some men were wounded trying to take a machine gun nest “high on the slopes of a cliff”; Bowen

crossed an uncharted minefield and moved through vicious enemy fire to within fifteen yards of the enemy’s machine gun nest to render first aid to the stricken men.

Theodore Wilk

voluntarily left his position of safety and advanced boldly to a position from which he placed well-aimed fire upon an enemy pillbox. With utter disregard for his safety, he crawled closer through intense automatic weapons and small arms fire and, while delivering accurate fire which silenced the enemy, he was seriously wounded by sniper fire. Despite his wounds, he refused medical aid and pushed inland with his comrades.

Victor Peterson’s landing craft

was subjected to devastating fire from heavy shore emplacements causing numerous casualties to men on board. Voluntarily and with complete disregard for his own personal safety, Private First Class Peterson plunged into the fire-swept water and, assisted by a comrade, carried a heavy piece of vital communications equipment toward shore. When his companion was instantly killed by machine gun fire, Private First Class Peterson courageously and single-handedly dragged the heavy equipment through the mine-infested water. Midway to the beach, he was mortally wounded. With great determination, he continued forward and safely delivered the equipment upon the beach. Refusing medical attention, he made frequent trips into the water, through heavy artillery, mortar and small arms fire, and rescued wounded comrades until he collapsed upon the beach.

See also: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

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      Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full of the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

“Milk of human kindness” is burned in our brains, because it’s such a delightful surprise: a wild way to think about kindness that’s also just right. A sentence may have many virtues, and too few have any, but this kind of surprise may be the one I prize most. Even better, is the next thought in Lady Macbeth’s speech:

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	Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.

“The illness”: she means ruthlessness, which is a vice, and so indeed an “illness” of the soul or spirit, but how is it that Lady Macbeth, with open eyes, recognizes it as such, while also urging that it “should” attend ambition (not itself a vice), and lamenting that, in her husband, it does not?

The density of great but sideways thoughts is extraordinary in Bob Dylan’s writing. About being washed-up in the 1980’s, he wrote:

The mirror had swung around and I could see the future—an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.

And he said this in a 1966 interview:

All I did was write and sing, paint little pictures on paper, dissolve myself into situations where I was invisible.

In my day job, and for my night work too, I often have to read prose that avoids surprise like a disease. How wonderful, and rejuvenating, then, to be reminded that some writers lives for such moments. Michael Chabon must cultivate a writing environment where they may fruit and bud. His novel The Final Solution is both a warm-hearted and coldly serious book, about the last days of Sherlock Holmes, and also, obliquely, about the Holocaust; but many moments are there just to make you smile. One woman suffered from “gephyrophobia,” the “morbid fear of crossing bridges”:

When a car, bus, or train in which she was riding hung suspended over some river, she would sink deeply into her seat, eyes closed, breath coming through her nostrils in short whistling gusts, moaning softly, holding herself perfectly still with the brimming cup of her fear clutched between her palms as if she dared not spill a drip.

When two characters visit London in July 1944—a month after D-Day—Chabon jolts us by comparing the taking up of arms against evil, with the natural expression of American ebullience:

To Mr. Panicker the thing that chiefly struck him, and had done over the year leading up to 6 June, was the startling Americanness of London: American airmen and sailors, officers, and food soldiers, American military vehicles in the streets, American films in the cinemas, and an atmosphere of loud, raffish swagger, a smell of hair tonic, a cacophony of sprung vowels that might, as Mr. Panicker was prepared to concede, be entirely the product of his own imagination but which nevertheless animated the city for him in a way that he found at once appalling and irresistible, an air of riotous, brutal good humor, as if the invasion of Europe itself, now proceeding in bloody stages across northern France, were only the inevitable exploding forth of a buildup of jazzy slang and the uncontainable urge to buck and wing.

There are moments of surprising beauty:

At the stilling of the centrifuge the porch, the farmstead, this vale in the lee of a hillside, the immense bowl of tedious green country around them seemed to fill with a thick and gummy mass of silence.

But the most powerful and insane parts of the book are Chabon’s attempt to capture the mind and spirit of a man, who gloried above all else in intellect and knowledge...

Some old men finished their lives as little more than the sum total of their memories, others as nothing but a pair of grasping pincers, or a set of bitter axioms proven. It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.

...but is losing both, where a mind reduced to uninterpreted experience might be thought worse than death:

He felt—with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity of inertia—the inevitability of his failure. The conquest of his mind by age was not a mere blunting or slowing down but an erasure, as of a desert capital by a drifting millennium of sand. Time had bleached away the ornate pattern of his intellect, leaving a blank white scrap.

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Brown’s address to the court, after he was sentenced to die, is one of the great American speeches, and I commend it to you:

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here with I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction.

(This poem is part of the series Interviews With Vampires, and part 4 of ‘America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics.’)

Editorial on Harpers Ferry: October 1859

Bankrupt in fortune and in character,
An outlaw and an outcast, bent on murder
And spoliation, John Brown, with his raid,
Has only put ideas into action.
From the stump, Mister Lincoln prophesizes
That our America cannot endure,
And his America is full of souls
Fertile enough with Brown’s insanity
To germinate yet more disturbances.
They pinch and peck, these Black Republicans,
To fray and decompose a government
Woven in glory, won in war by men
Of honor, patriotic men who held
Black men as slaves, and were no less respected
For doing it. They knew, that wisdom lives
In local institutions, worn by time,
Whose iron roots secure the social order,
Whose easy rules promote the common good.
Bold innovation is for fools and madmen:
The rope slides smoothest where the wood is scarred.
In airy clouds, Republican ideals
May spin and sparkle, but their tendency
On hard soil is a hard and ghastly fact,
And now we see revealed their naked object:
To stir the southern slaves into rebellion,
Who, armed, will desolate the southern land
And southern lives, and wash their feet in blood.

American Independence in Verse is on sale until July 4; details here.

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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics, Part 3: The Great American Novel

As a writer, Abraham Lincoln is classical, balanced, controlled...until he sticks in the knife. Unequaled among Americans, he does have a mirror-image, or counterpart, in Herman Melville, who’s style is as Romantic, lop-sided, and ebullient as Lincoln’s is not. Like all doubles, both have sliced their fingers on the sharp edge of evil, and both wink and laugh with us on the page and behind the scenes.

Melville met the already-famous Nathaniel Hawthorne after Moby-Dick had been conceived, and mostly written. The friendship changed both man and novel. In a revision that was more of a transfiguration, Moby-Dick became grandiose, epic, Shakespearian; a before-its-time Modernist story of the human condition, and an allegory of the American nation, set in international waters. Nathaniel Hawthorne was known to be retiring, shy, and quiet, but it seems he was not so around Herman Melville. Melville wrote of him,

in spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black.…You may be witched by his sunlight,—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you;—but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.

Melville wrote Moby-Dick in Western Massachusetts, far from the ocean, but with a view of the state’s tallest mountain from his writing desk:

I look out of my window in the morning when I rise, as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.

He wrote in a kind of manic madness. His family was afraid of him, and afraid to disturb him:

The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.

What did writing this novel take from him? Andrew Delbanco called it Melville’s “vampire book”: each day he bled on the page, he was barely human at the end. Delbanco gets this from Melville himself. In Pierre, Melville’s follow-up, semi-autobiographical, and disastrously-received novel, Pierre works at writing a book “from eight o’clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening”:

Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?

Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalising of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.

Melville’s literary reputation was in decline, even as he was creating “the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer” (Delbanco). Moby-Dick would be poorly received, and forgotten until the 1920s:

Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.

When the book appeared, he wrote to a female acquaintance:

Don’t you buy it—don’t you read it, when it does come out, because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.

See also: Part 1; Part 2.

(Delbanco quotations from Melville: His Work and World.)

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Those of us who choose not to become parents are a bit like Unitarians or nonnative Californians; we tend to arrive at our destination via our own meandering, sometimes agonizing paths.

Since “no two reached that decision in quite the same way,” Daum solicited more than two essays, by child-free writers, in which they would explain their child-free state.

But in fact, with a few exceptions, only three motives are mentioned in the sixteen chapters of this book. First, is never having been gripped by a craving for children of your own:

There was no corresponding baby hunger, at least not in that ready place where all my other hungers were shouting for attention. (Courtney Hodell)

Hunger crowds out other thoughts and desires, and even affects what you see, smell, and taste. To a starving man, any foodstuff is technicolor, and everything else is dingy gray. Conversely, the absence of a hunger goes with a loss of salience, of the thing it is a hunger for:

from the time I was a young girl until well into my thirties, I did not fantasize about having babies, or find others’ babies of much, if any, interest. (Anna Holmes)

Children seemed as far off as false teeth, and interested me about as much. (Michelle Huneven)

So if you don’t have baby fever, have a baby must compete, in the moment, with finish my book, travel the world, or whatever, and tends to lose a fair fight on an open field:

It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility. (Laura Kipnis)

Courtney Hodell worried that her lack of desire was a defect, “pathological.” But from a design standpoint, evolution did not need baby fever to secure its objective, as other appetites—you know which, and none of these authors disavows them—were, in the ancestral environment, enough to guarantee the reproduction of the species. So maybe it’s an example of “evolutionary mismatch,” that those other appetites now rarely have the effects that so-enamored them to natural selection. We must now deliberate about having children, in a way past humans did not. Is this tragedy, comedy, or both?

Kate Christensen, an exception among these writers, does experience “baby lust,” though in the end she never one. She’s as if possessed by an alien spirit, or become an alien herself—almost, one wants to say, struck down and transformed—and her description of her new world is the most affecting moment the book:

Suddenly, I had baby lust: deep, primal, a shockingly animal yearning I’d never experienced before....I fantasized about nursing her, rocking her to sleep, leaping out of bed in the night when she cried.

Where are my children? I felt their absence and loss as if they existed somewhere I couldn’t reach, as if they were stuck forever on the other side of a membrane and I could never have access to them. I felt as if they were real.

The second common motive, is liking or delighting in activities that parenthood makes hard or impossible:

I liked having the kind of life where you didn’t know what was going to come next; the opposite of what life as a mother would be, or so I presumed. (Laura Kipnis)

Try this on. What if I didn’t want to have babies because I loved my job too much to compromise it, or because serious travel makes me feel in relation to the world in an utterly essential way? (Pam Houston)

(That’s so bloodless, “in relation.”) Jeanne Safer also includes “traveling the world” on her list, as well as

sleeping until noon, or going out to dinner or the movies at midnight on occasion.

Of course, becoming a parent might change you, so that you now like “having the kind of life” where your children depend on you for love and care, where meeting those needs seems the most important thing in the world, and how great is a midnight movie really? Pam Houston loved being able to visit Tibet; a friend, who had taken the baby plunge, told her,

when you look into your baby’s eyes, that will become your Tibet.

That’s why the second motive usually arrives with a third, allied to it: the conviction that the activities of parenthood are too hard, and not worthwhile. Most blunt of all are Danielle Henderson and Tim Kreider:

parenting had always struck me as an extreme pain in the ass, a total time suck.

I once described being a parent as like belonging to a cult, “living in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, subject to the whim of a capricious and demented master.”

Courtney Hodell writes that her mother

was everywhere and nowhere, constant but peripheral, the separate acts of care like salt grains dissolved in water.

Later Hodell writes this, about friends and acquaintances who became mothers:

I was staggered by the transformation of these women. Their devotion, their patience...They were going to wipe the face, wipe the bottom, feed, bathe, lull, teach by word, teach by example, read the books, put away the toys, buy the tiny clothes, six months later buy a slightly larger set of clothes, fret about the schools, and on and on; the caring and the worry was never, ever, ever going to stop, not until death. I wasn’t sure I had it in me.

The “staggering transformations” Hodell saw included the acquisition of virtues: devotion, patience. Even if she wasn’t sure she “had it in her,” she regarded those traits as good. But other writers think parenthood changes you for the worse. Rosemary Mahoney thought that motherhood would push her past virtuous devotion to its vicious extreme:

it was precisely that unavoidable, slavish, evolutionary devotion that worried me. I knew I would not be strong enough to resist it. I would become, to my discredit, entirely servile.

(But would it look like slavishiness and servility from the other side?) For Laura Kipnis, it wasn’t the character traits mothers acquired that repelled her, it was the psychic states motherhood caused:

the mothers I met struck me as a strange and unenviable breed: harried, hampered, resentful. I didn’t want to accidentally become one of them.

“Harried, hampered, resentful”: you’ll be like that, if you commit to and pursue any demanding, all-consuming project. Building a cathedral, the workers will “lay the brick, color the glass, install the windows, hoist the beams, and on and on”; in the past, more than one lifetime of effort was required. It is, indeed, hard. But are not these activities, perhaps of little value in isolation, part of a grander project that is worth doing, and is not the final result something wonderful? These writers don’t say yes, and don’t say no; they attend to certain parts, or aspects, of bringing into the world and raising up a new life; they are silent on the larger question.

The strangest essay in the book is by Lionel Shriver. The other writers defend or explain their choice. Shriver does this too, and then does more, telling us the stories of three child-free women she interviewed. Hearing them soured her on their reasons:

Contentment. Happiness. Satisfaction. Fun. There’s nothing, strictly speaking, wrong with these concerns, but they are all of a piece. They fail to take into account that our individual lives are tiny beads in a string. Our beloved present is merely the precarious link between the past and the future—of family, ethnicity, nation, and species. We owe our very contentment...to the ingenuity of our ancestors. Yet it rarely seems to enter the modern “childfree” head that proper payback of that debt might entail handing on the baton of our happy-happy heritage to someone else.

One of Shriver’s interviewees said “I think I am a squanderer of my gifts and my heritage.” (To squander: to waste, to lose through negligence or inaction.)

A debt to those who brought us into the world, and gifted us wonders; the “handing the baton of our heritage to someone else,” as the “proper payback” of that debt; the creation of those “someone else”s as part of that payback—Shriver floats these ideas, and then admits that they do not move her:

There is no generalization in this article, no matter how harsh, that would not apply to me. I care about my own life in the present. I think I should be, but [...] I’m honestly not very fussed about what happens after I die.

Shriver suggests, also, that forgoing parenthood can be a form of pessimism, and a failure to love humankind as one should:

Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy—a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise.

the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now...has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction writers portray when imagining the end of the world.

Most of the essayists set a theme at the outset, and spend the balance of their time developing it. Shriver’s essay is one exception, but more extreme is Tim Kreider’s, which shocks you with the grinding gears of its changes in tone. He first wants you (or anyway me) to hate him:

Raising children is one of many life experiences I’m happy to die without having had, like giving birth, going to war, spending a night in jail, or seeing Forrest Gump.

(Among other things to hate, that Forrest Gump joke is lame.) He thinks life is meaningless, having children doesn’t change this, and that humans rationalize their acts after the fact, but are not moved to those acts by reason:

I don’t believe [parents] choose children any more than naked mole rats decide to start tunneling.

The twist begins when he says his “own upbringing was just fine”—except for the fact that he was “given up for adoption when I was a few days old, which, I’ve since read, can do something of a number on a kid.” Either he can approach the damage adoption did him only obliquely, by joking about it; or, worse, he can apprehend it only from the third-person. Either way, nihilism has mixed with resentment. A few paragraphs later, all the stuff about how he “never understood why anyone else was doing it [having children]” turns out not to be entirely true, but just a phase:

It wasn’t until relatively late in life, when I met people I was biologically related to for the first time, that I had some glimmering of how parents must feel about their children.

When I look over at one of [my half-sisters] next to me in a car or at a party I secretly thrill with a warm, narcotic love. If one of them needed a kidney, I would give her one; if the other needed one, I would with some regret, give her the other.

Even adjusting for hyperbole, the nihilist has some heroism in him. And then, in explaining why he’s afraid of having children, he implies, better than anyone else in the book, how valuable children are:

I’m afraid that if I ever did have children of my own I would love them so painfully it would rip my soul in half, that I would never again have a waking moment free from the terror that something bad might ever happen to them.

Only something sacred could merit a response so extreme.

See also: “In Their Own Image.”

(Below the fold, for premium subscribers: the demands of the writer’s life; binge drinking; childlessness as maverick or normie; and the best essay in the book.)

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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics, Part 2: Lincoln as Writer.

1. The greatest prose stylist America has yet produced, was also our greatest president. They long for this to be no coincidence, the writers among us. Although most famous for his famous speeches, Abraham Lincoln also had ambitions in poetry, and even found time to write a little ditty after the battle of Gettysburg, in the voice of Robert E. Lee:

In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,
	and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went
	forth to sack Phil-del,
The Yankees they got arter us, and
	giv us particular hell,
And we skedaddled back again,
	and didn’t sack Phil-del.

So Lincoln’s poetry was not so good. But he wrote poetic prose more often than you would expect. Those expectations should be low—right?—because, after the 1860 election, everything Lincoln did, and wrote, was about the war, and—inaugurals, annual messages to congress, and Gettysburg Addresses aside—must have been written quickly, without even a typewriter. But look at this 1863 letter to James Conkling. Conkling was for the Union, but against emancipation. Lincoln thought this an inconsistent position, like being for walking, but against moving one’s feet. So, mostly, the letter is legalistic, and argumentative:

The most that can be said, if so much, is that slaves are property. Is there—has there ever been—any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed?

[The emancipation] proclamation, as law, either is valid, or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life.

But near the end Lincoln inserts a wonderful lyric passage. The occasion did not demand this, making it all the more something to admire:

The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great North-West for it. Nor yet wholly to them. Three hundred miles up, they met New-England, Empire, Key-Stone, and Jersey, hewing their way right and left. The Sunny South too, in more colors than one, also lent a hand. On the spot, their part of the history was jotted down in black and white. The job was a great national one; and let none be banned who bore an honorable part in it. And while those who have cleared the great river may well be proud, even that is not all. It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely, and well done, than at Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and on many fields of lesser note. Nor must Uncle Sam’s Web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks. Thanks to all. For the great republic—for the principles it lives by, and keeps alive—for man’s vast future,—thanks to all.

Wherever the ground was a little damp: I love that.

2. Ours is an age unique in its destructive polarization, and in our eagerness to demonize “the other side,” right? Does each side, today, “denounce the other as reptiles,” or as “no better than outlaws”? Will people “grant a hearing to pirates or murderers,” but not to their political opponents? When the people of one side talk, do they regard “an unconditional condemnation” of the other side “as the first thing to be attended to”? Indeed, is such condemnation a kind of visa, or badge, “an indispensable prerequisite...to be admitted or permitted to speak at all”? But this is nothing new, it was the same in 1860—and I was going to suggest, originally, that this could give us some perspective. It took a second draft to realize, that parallels between our era and the Civil War, will not calm the alarm bells in our heads. The similarities include the sad fact, that party factions associate each other with The Enemy, and the enemy with the devil. “In your political contests among yourselves,” Lincoln said, rhetorically, to the “Southern people,” in his Cooper Union address,

each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves.

3. It’s said by some, today, that “all men are created equal,” in the Declaration of Independence, did not mean just that. This is urged as a recent insight of our enlightened times, meant to pierce the wool that blind patriots pull over our eyes. But in fact it’s an old idea, one Lincoln had to fight against, even before he had to fight against armed men: the “principles of Jefferson”

are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still other insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.”

Such “expressions,” Lincoln wrote, “are the van-guard—the miners, and sappers—of returning despotism.” I find this fascinating. It is currently a left- or progressive-coded idea, that “all men are created equal” did not mean all men. But in the lead-up to the civil war, this interpretation was the favorite of the opponents of progress, and part of their defense of slavery. In the letter I’m quoting from, Lincoln goes on to write a sentence—which almost scans as iambic—that could be on the wall of his memorial, if the competition were not so fierce:

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.

See also: Part 1.

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Jim Henson knew from the first that he wanted to work in television. Then, when he was a senior in high school, a job opened at a local station. The ad asked for

youngsters twelve to fourteen years of age who can manipulate marionettes.

Alas, Henson was not someone “who can manipulate marionettes,” nor puppets of any kind, in fact puppets were nothing to him:

When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show...I never played with puppets or had any interest in them.

But if getting into puppetry would get him into TV, Henson was game. Still: if there had been a better-fitting job, there would be no Muppets.

How did Henson sell himself as the best puppeteer on offer? He had one week to prepare. Kids, this was the early 1950s, there were no YouTube tutorials to binge watch. Instead he went to the low-fi internet of the day—the public library—checked out two books, and spent the week reading them. That this was enough, indicates either the weakness of the applicant pool, or the mind-blowing talent Henson had just unlocked.

A year later, Henson and his future wife Jane were producing a five-minute show called Sam and Friends. This is when the first Kermit (not yet the frog) puppet was made. Kermit is a lesson in simplicity:

There was nothing in Kermit outside of the piece of cardboard...and the cloth shape that was his head. He’s one of the simplest kinds of puppet you can make, and he’s very flexible because of that...which gives him a range of expression. A lot of people build very stiff puppets...and you can get very little expression out of a character that you can barely move.

Possibly, Henson’s puppets were different because he hadn’t been trained to build puppets, by the wizened hands of a living puppet-making tradition: he had no “relationship to any other puppeteer.” But why did puppets tend toward the inflexible? Because that flexibility, and the range of expression it made possible, had little value. Only a few kids can sit near the front of a puppet show, and even they might be ten feet back. The rest, even further away, can’t see subtle expressions on a puppet’s face. So there was no point in making them.

But Henson wasn’t putting on a puppet show. This was his key, almost philosophical insight. Nor was he broadcasting a puppet show on television. Instead he was broadcasting a puppet television show. It’s like the difference, that the philosopher Arthur Danto remarks on, between a painting of a beautiful mountain, and a beautiful painting of a mountain (this is in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace). Under an old theory of art, these were the same, because the medium—the paint on the canvas—was meant to be transparent: one was to look “through” the canvas to the scene it represents. When artists realized that “beauty” could apply to a painting, without applying to what it was a painting of: this was a revolution. It was a similar twist, to conceive of a puppet television show, as something other than a puppet show on television.

Puppet shows—in-person—use puppet theaters. The theater serves two purposes. It gives the puppeteer a place to obscure himself from view. It also demarcates the space in which the imagined action of the show is to take place. Outside the confines of the theater, the puppet is a painted piece of felt and wood. Inside the theater, it is a king, a princess, a horse. If one wants to broadcast a puppet show, one asks the puppeteer to set up his theater, and one aims the camera at the set-up. But a puppet television show does not need the theater, because the viewer already has, in his home, the machinery that “demarcates where the imagined action takes place”:

Jim saw that no puppet theater was needed at all...the space between the four sides of the TV screen was his puppet theater.

The special affordances of any technology take time to discover. The first recordings of music were made by simply hanging a microphone and asking the band play, as they did during any live performance. Only later was it realized that one could mix multiple tracks, recorded separately; that one could place the mic closer to the singer’s mouth than any listener’s ear could ever be, and thus make recordings whose sound was impossible to achieve live, without technology that existed only in the future. (This arms race of course continued, for even after live performance with large speakers and multiple microphones became possible, artists—this is the famous story of Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—would find new ways to record unperformable music).

The same, for television. One’s first thought is to point the camera at an act that could be performed and appreciated without a camera. But so much more is possible, if you care only about what the camera sees, and allow whatever kludges are needed to put your vision into that window to remain visible outside the frame. Immersion in the Muppets is impossible, if you’re a live observer on set.

Making this idea work wasn’t a snap. If you’re performing for the camera, you have to know what the camera sees. A human actor can take subtle direction between takes, but a puppeteer, crouched out of the way, hand stuck up in the air, needs more immediate feedback. To solve this problem, Jim Henson invented to use of hidden monitors for the puppeteers. Now they could see the very images the camera was sending out, even while they were performing. (If you were playing Big Bird, you had one of these things strapped to your chest, inside the suit.)

The analog of the close-miking of a singer, is the close shot of the actor—or Muppet. And this is why the extra expressive Muppet faces were a boon, not an irrelevancy. In the age of television, the puppets too needed to be ready for their close-up:

the Muppets could move freely anywhere in the viewing area, even approaching the camera—and the audience—for an intimate close-up, something that could not happen with a traditional puppet theater. This was something brand-new: it was puppetry made expressly for the medium of television.

Those who study innovation say that new ideas often come from ignorant outsiders who haven’t “learned what can’t be done,” and so find a way to do it. Jim Henson drew this moral himself:

...his relative inexperience in both puppetry and television allowed him to look for solutions that might not have occurred to more seasoned performers, even when, as in the case of the television monitor, the solution was lying in plain sight. “Many of the things I’ve done in my life have basically been self-taught...I had never worked with puppets....and even when I began on television, I didn’t really know what I was doing...I think if you study—if you learn too much of what others have done—you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.”

He did not take the same direction, and his strange newness inspired others to join his band of maniacs, and become his close collaborators. Jim Henson seems to have had a kind of Steve Jobs energy, but it did not strike one at first, it happened when he began performing:

Jim seemed so utterly normal...[he and Jane] looked as average and suburban as actors in a Chevrolet commercial.

That was Jerry Juhl’s first impression (Juhl was the first puppeteer hired by Muppets, Inc). But then “Jim opened the box, took out his Muppets one by one, and began to perform”:

The things he brought out of that box seemed to me to be magical presences, like totems, but funnier. An angry creature whose whole body was a rounded triangle; a purple skull named Yorick; a green froglike thing [you know who that was]....Who was this Henson guy?

Psychologists say that we judge whether something is an X—house, car, puppet—not by checking whether it meets some definition, but by evaluating how “close” it is to a “paradigm” or “prototypical” X. Today, the prototypical puppet is a Muppet, but when Henson invented them Muppets were deviant, and it was through him that they moved from margin to center. As Juhl says, continuing the previous quote,

These things weren’t puppets—not as I had ever seen or defined them....This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail.

It was the same when Jim met Frank Oz, another genius who never wanted to be a puppeteer:

He [Jim] was this very quiet, shy guy, who did these absolutely fucking amazing puppets that were totally brand new and fresh, that had never been done before.

It’s sad, in it’s way, how lost to us this discovery is: for us the Muppets are nostalgia, they are warm childhood memories, but then, the Muppets were edgy, dangerous, they were radioactive mutants of entertainment.

Source: Jim Henson by Brian Jay Jones.

See also: Disneyland as Art and Representation.

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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics, Part 1: Words and Feelings.

1. The Battle of Words. Abraham Lincoln never referred to the Confederacy as if it were a separate nation. Instead they were “states in rebellion,” or “the seceded states, so called,” or states “out of their proper practical relation with the Union.” In his Speech on Reconstruction Lincoln bit his thumb at Jefferson Davis, the supposed “President” of the Confederacy, writing

Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man.

Great Britain tried this too, in 1776. After Independence, with the war a year old, the opposing generals had need to communicate, not least about how their men were treated when taken prisoner. The British addressed their letters to “George Washington”—not “General Washington,” not “Commander in Chief.” Washington did not like this, and expressed his dislike the same way my father would, when he was sent jury duty notices: he threw them in the trash, unopened. To address this impasse, James Paterson (a British adjutant general) came to Washington’s camp. Patterson needed to convey to Washington a letter, which Washington needed, even more, to refuse. The result was a formal tiptoe around alpine pride. Paterson pulled out the letter, but “did not directly offer” it to Washington, instead he laid it on the table, to be examined by all parties like a dead skunk. The letter was addressed to

Geo. Washington &c. &c. &c.

Washington, not picking up the letter,

said that a Letter directed to a person in a publick Character should have some Description or Indication of it [that is, of his office] otherwise it would appear a mere private Letter.

The British responded that all of those “&c”s included “General” in their meaning: a reply worthy of an expensive lawyer, or a professional philosopher. Washington would have none of it: “it was true the &c. &c. &c. implied everything,” but also

they also implied any thing.

The British tried harder, and engaged in what today we might call gaslighting: no disrespect was intended, they “regretted the Difficulties which had arisen respecting the Address of the Letters,” they “held his Person & Character in the highest Esteem.” But Washington won this battle, as he would win the war.

2. Emotional Intelligence. “Emotional Intelligence” may not be real, but Benjamin Franklin still had it in spades, as shown by his knowledge of the causes and persistence of affection and resentment. Lord Howe wrote him in 1776 offering pardons to the “rebels,” if they would give up the fight. Franklin took this for what it was, a slap in the face. If it was not meant as such, that just proved the ministry stupid:

Directing Pardons to be offered to the Colonies, who are the very Parties injured, expresses indeed that Opinion of our Ignorance, Baseness, and Insensibility which your uninform’d and proud Nation has long been pleased to entertain of us, but it can have no other Effect than that of increasing our Resentment.

Franklin had long wanted to keep the colonies in the Empire, which in this very letter he calls “that fine and noble China Vase”; such was his reputation as a reconciliationist, that Samuel Adams, leader of the radical faction, never quite trusted him. But Franklin really was all-in on Independence. This was not just his own sentiment, but his sense of the sentiment of the people generally, and Franklin knew why. Referring to the ongoing war, in which colonists had been killed, he wrote that

These atrocious Injuries have extinguished every remaining Spark of Affection for that Parent Country we once held so dear.

Indeed, even if the political elite gave up the fight, and legally the colonies returned to Britain, it would never work out—because of how the British would feel about it. As with any breakup, Things Could Never Be The Same Again:

[even if it] were possible for us to forget and forgive [those injuries], it is not possible for you to forgive the People you have so heavily injured; you can never confide again in those as Fellow Subjects, and permit them to enjoy equal Freedom, to whom you know you have given such just Cause of lasting Enmity. And this must impel you, were we again under your Government, to endeavour the breaking our Spirit by the severest Tyranny.

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Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. When you notice this in middle age you’ll become a little desperate, and you’ll try to rescue what is left and wrestle with its meaning. The poems in The Discarded Life are such an effort.

One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:

The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]

For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were

All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.

While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:

…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,

and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.

Kirsch writes in blank verse, and shows by example that a wide range of rhythms can fit inside the iambic line. These two verses—

And night drives on such unfamiliar streets

Their thin trunks and attenuated fronds

—have strong accents on the third syllable (“trochaic substitutions”) without a prior pause, which primers on iambic pentameter say is a no-no, but is actually fine, and quite expressive.

Because Kirsch’s meter tends to strictness, the deviations make for powerful effects. Here is one, in the fourth line quoted below: after the first Gulf War, a “kid who’d taken French with us” returns to

…tell us how
It felt to sit inside a desert tank,
Waiting for the order to advance:
Hot. If there was something more to say,
He didn’t think we were prepared to hear it.

The pointed brevity of the description—“hot”—is made more pointed, by fronting a headless line (that is, one missing a first, weak syllable).

It can be enough, I believe, to put sights and sounds into poetry, and let the reader decide their significance. When the poet himself tries to articulate an abstract moral, he risks banality. Kirsch takes the risk, and does not bat a thousand. The poems contain their share of trite conclusions, blandly stated:

Good is what we have to seem to be,
Not something anybody ever is.

But they also make their share of observations that are surprising despite being obvious, as when a student at Kirsch’s school dies, and

…Later on,
A patch of garden named for Julian
Was planted in the schoolyard, with a plaque
That meant a little less with every year.

The best-developed metaphors in the book are about smoking:

…I learned to hold a cigarette
With the same fingers that could take a pen
And flick the words like ashes down the page,
Leaving a record of the life consumed.

Another expresses the indifference to the dangers of smoking that is the privilege of youth:

The thought that every cigarette I smoked
Subtracted minutes—eight to ten, I’d heard—
From the tall, toppling stack of time I owned
Could not discourage me […]
To lose all this, and still have more to lose!
Who wouldn’t trade the ash-end of existence
For the controlled burn of a summer night…

To lose all this, and still have more to lose.

The worst poem is number 38, which suggests that children are born only “to gratify [their] parents’ urge to love,” and that it might be better “To leave the child beneath the throne of God, / Unembodied and unhurtable”: an off-putting sentiment. The best is number 16, which suggests that all those duck-and-cover earthquake drills

Were less like preparation than appeasement,
As though the Big One would be satisfied
By all these recognitions of its power
And not be tempted to a demonstration.

A final turn occurs at book’s end, when what has seemed to be an exercise in holding on to the past, is revealed to be the opposite:

Poetry is a method of disposal,
Giving a decent burial in words
To the discarded life I have no use for—
Or else a way to throw it overboard
As the balloon jerks higher toward the sun.

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In Massachusetts, summer means “The Cape.” High demand will cause high prices on Cape Cod, leaving a larger share of the better cape to a fortunate few. There, on Cape Ann, you’ll find the town of Gloucester—“GLAW-ster,” if New-England-ese is not your native tongue (it is not mine). George Clooney has walked these streets, The Perfect Storm was set and shot here, and the Fisherman’s Memorial looks out over the harbor.

Beaches, used book stores, the waves rushing the rocks at Halibut Point: if you squint, you can see the tired coasts of Old England.

Among others, Gloucester inspired Childe Hassam (see American Impressionist); his paintings of Gloucester are among his best.

I tried my hand, as well, at a memorial to Gloucester.

Gloucester Harbor

Gloucester harbor freshen up
Summer’s here with baseball bats
And naive tourists wearing flats
Gloucester harbor freshen up.

Gloucester harbor wave your flags
Schooners sailing past the lights
Kids with trumpets flying kites
Gloucester harbor wave your flags.

Gloucester harbor pour a drink
Boston’s dry and Salem’s cursed
The wilted artists all dispersed
Gloucester harbor pour a drink.

Gloucester harbor hunker down
Shake your fist, grit your teeth
Nor’easter’s coming, lay a wreath
Gloucester harbor hunker down.

Gloucester harbor sing for us
Faded mermaids, peeling paint
Let loose the ropes, sailors faint
Gloucester harbor sing for us.

Gloucester harbor pray for us
Low-slung clouds, gentle waves
Forgotten sailors, empty graves
Gloucester harbor pray for us.

Gloucester harbor strengthen us
We the heirs to all you lost
Stripped and robbed and tempest-tossed
Gloucester harbor strengthen us.

American Independence in Verse is available anywhere books are sold.

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