Forma Issue #11

COLUMNS FEATURES

Issue 11 • Summer 2019 24 LISTENING TO CARMEN WHILE THE WEST IS DYING

Editors’ Letter MAKING TIME FOR CONTEMPLATION

by the Editors

Cultural Currency THE PERSISTENCE OF THE AURA

by Michial Farmer

Interview

JOHN WILSON ON THE FREEDOM OF THE BOOK REVIEW

by David Kern

Book Reviews

A.E. STALLINGS WRITES WHAT SHE LIKES

by Sean Johnson

CHRISTIAN WIMAN ’S COMPLICATED POETIC VISION

by Christian Leithart

BENJAMIN DREYER ’S STYLE—CLEAN AND SIMPLE—FOR ANYONE

by David Kern

From the Classroom

HANDMADE HUMANITY: WHAT AGE-OLD WOODWORKING TECHNIQUES CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE CLASSROOM

by Austin Hoffman

by Garrett Soucy

LISTENING FOR THE MYSTERY: POET MAURICE MANNING ON THE WONDER OF LANGUAGE, THE VALUE OF FORM, & THE LEGACY HE HOPES TO LEAVE

by David Kern

THE ABOLITION OF MIND: THE ANTI-CLASSICAL INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE

by Robert Kirkendall

BLIND FROM BIRTH: OEDIPUS & THE HEALING MIRACLES OF CHRIST

by Joshua Gibbs

Poetry

JOSHUA STURGILL—42

MICHIAL FARMER—62

CONTRIBUTORS

MICHIAL FARMER is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. His poems have appeared in St. Katherine Review, Relief, and Curator

JOSHUA GIBBS teaches Great Books at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He is a columnist at the CiRCE Institute and the author of How to Be Unlucky and Something They Will Not Forget.

AUSTIN HOFFMAN is the Assistant Headmaster at Charis Classical Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, where he also teaches humanities and Latin. He leads worship at First Baptist Church of Watertown.

SEAN JOHNSON teaches humanities at Trinitas Christian School in Pensacola, Florida. He is the Reviews Editor at FORMA Journal

DAVID KERN is Strategic Coordinator and Director of Multimedia for the CiRCE Institute. He is the producer and host of The Close Reads Podcast Network and Editor-in-Chief at FORMA Journal

CHRISTIAN LEITHART is an adjunct professor at Samford University. He writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama.

MAURICE MANNING is an American poet and professor. He lives, writes, and teaches in Kentucky.

GARRETT SOUCY lives in Maine where he is the pastor of Christ the King Church. His writing has appeared in Modern Reformation, Second Nature Journal, Portland Magazine, and elsewhere.

JOSHUA STURGILL is a poet and lecturer. He is the author of the poetry collection As Far As I Can Tell

HEIDI WHITE teaches at Collegium Study Center in Colorado Springs. She is a regular contributor at The Close Reads Podcast Network, the host of the FORMA podcast, and the Managing Editor of FORMA Journal

JOHN WILSON is an editor, critic, and essayist. He was Editor-inChief at Books & Culture and Editor-at-Large at Christianity Toda y.

Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute

Editor in Chief: David Kern

Managing Editor: Heidi White

Art Director: Graeme Pitman

Poetry Editor: Christine Perrin

Associate Editors: Emily Andrews, Sean Johnson

Senior Editors: Jamie Cain, Matt Bianco

Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews, Noah Perrin

Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2019. For a digital version, and for additional content, please go to formajournal.com.

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FORMA Journal

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The CiRCE Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that exists to promote and support classical education in the school and in the home. We seek to identify the ancient principles of learning, to communicate them enthusiastically, and to apply them vigorously in today’s educational settings through curricula development, teacher training, events, an online academy, and a content-laden website. Learn more at circeinstitute.com

Making Time for Contemplation

Every thoughtful reader longs for time to savor words and ideas. But unhurried time is rare. We are busy people, bouncing from one task to another, sometimes because it is necessary, but often because we are pursuing some phantom fulfillment, something to occupy our time. Quiet contemplation isn’t easy. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, “we are distracted from distraction by distraction.”

If you are anything like us, you may have hoped that the long days of summer would provide more time for thoughtful, contemplative reading. Maybe you planned to luxuriate in a long Russian masterpiece or a collection of your favorite poetry. Maybe you hoped to finally sink into a lesser-known Shakespeare play or a long-neglected anthology of pithy essays. Alas, if you’re anything like us, you probably came up a bit short on that goal.

In a way, our goal here at FORMA is make this more do able by offering bite-sized (but delicious) contemplations, if you will. We are not producing Russian masterpieces, but we are eager to contribute worthwhile substance for your seasonal reading habits. In this late-summer issue, our friend Joshua Gibbs weaves connections between Oedipus and Our Lord, the great poet Maurice Manning speaks about the mystery of writing poetry, longtime book critic John Wilson explains what makes a great book review, and professor Robert Kirkendall takes a look at one of the world’s largest educational organizations. Plus, you’ll find original poetry, book reviews, essays, and more. We are confident that this issue provides prudent and engaging inquiry into the relationship between classical thought and contemporary culture that warrants your delighted perusal over iced tea on the porch.

Enjoy,

The Editors

Cultural Currency

The Persistence of the Aura

by Michial Farmer

In a 1939 essay called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin identified two modes of aesthetic value: cult value and exhibition value. Cult value, dominant in Western aesthetics, is connected to art’s history in religious ritual and relies on what Benjamin calls the work’s aura, a word that refers to the irreplaceability of the work and thus to the impression of holiness that gathers around it. The work of art maintains this aura by being difficult to access—not difficult hermeneutically but physically, the way that most great paintings are kept behind the walls of museums or private collectors. Until quite recently, if you wanted to see the Mona Lisa, you had to visit the Louvre, and if you wanted to hear Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, you had to wait for your local orchestra to perform it and then buy a ticket to the orchestra hall.

As the title of his essay suggests, Benjamin is interested in the peculiarly modern phenomenon of the mass reproduction: the print of the painting, the recording of the symphony, the plastic figurine of the sculpture. These re-

productions don’t have cult value because they’re not kept behind walls. Instead, their value is exhibitive—it comes from their ability to be seen by an enormous number of people. The result is the decay of the aura:

To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from an unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

Benjamin is overjoyed about this attack on aura. Giving art a cult value leads to fascism, as he sees it, and art spread out among the masses and denuded of its aura might spur them on to revolution. (It’s for this reason that he praises film, which has no original and can be accessed only through reproduction.) The age of mechanical reproduction will, he believes, kill off the work of art’s fascistic aura once and for all, and we’ll all be better off for it.

Benjamin’s essay is prescient in so many ways—he predicts, for example, a melding of reader and author that describes Twitter perfectly—that it’s striking how wrong

he is about the future of the aura. We live in his world, to be sure: Computer technology, and especially the internet, have taken mechanical (or perhaps post-mechanical) reproduction further than he possibly could have imagined. In seconds, I can see a high-definition image of any painting in the Louvre or hear thirty different performances of any Mahler symphony. Art is radically democratic in the twenty-first century and yet the aura that Benjamin thought would be destroyed by mechanical reproduction has not, in fact, been destroyed.

To see the persistence of the aura, all a person has to do is visit an art museum that has a famous work in it. I first noticed this phenomenon while visiting the Art Institute of Chicago. As a fan of the American painter Edward Hopper, I was excited to see his most famous painting, Nighthawks, in person. But I couldn’t, because, as I soon learned, there’s a near constant wall of tourists surrounding that painting, such that it almost requires physical force to see it up close. It’s clear that, whatever else might be going on, Nighthawks has retained something of its aura; people continue, at least in part, to ascribe cult value to it, even though all of us could quite easily look at the painting to our heart’s content on the Art Institute’s website. But looking at it isn’t the point. Among the stranger phenomena I’ve observed at museums is that visitors often take selfies in front of famous paintings, as one might take a selfie with an actor. Certainly this demonstrates the persistence of the aura— Benjamin notes that Hollywood studios try to shift the aura from the film to the celebrities who star in it—but it also demonstrates a peculiar use of auratic works, one that Benjamin doesn’t discuss.

I find Walker Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, helpful in understanding it. Protagonist Binx Bolling finds himself interested in something he calls “certification”:

“Nowadays, when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

In other words, whatever damage the age of mechanical reproduction has done to the work of art, it has radically sundered the human soul. Our access to everything at once—first through radio, television, and film, and later through the internet—has severed our relationship with the world around us such that we no longer even

live in that world. To live everywhere at once is to live in a vast uncertified Anywhere. If I can spend an afternoon on Google Maps’ street view, virtually strolling through the various neighborhoods of Paris and Manhattan (and I have, more than once), there’s a real sense in which I’ve uprooted myself from my comparatively bland real neighborhood. But if my neighborhood were handed back to me in an auratic work, I could live in it, at least until I’m once again inundated with other places.

I suspect that all of us feel more or less instinctively that famous works of art are real; that’s another way of saying that they are auratic. Meanwhile, the modern world makes us feel increasingly less real. If the world around us begins to disappear, we begin to disappear alongside it—an unpleasant situation. Thus the tourist, in the presence of something she knows to be real—Nighthawks or the Chrysler Building or the street from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or whatever else—takes a picture of herself in its vicinity, certifying that she, like it, really exists. Far from destroying the work’s aura, as Benjamin predicted, mechanical and post-mechanical reproduction reinforce it: We’re aware that Nighthawks is real because we’ve seen so many reproductions of it, and our own reproduction makes it even stronger by attempting to hitch ourselves to it.

Our attraction to the aura of the work of art is even odder because Benjamin was largely correct about mechanical reproduction’s effect on human beings. Cult value, he argues, requires concentration, or perhaps contemplation. When we concentrate on a work of art, it absorbs us, perhaps fascistically. Benjamin likes film and other reproductions specifically because they foster distraction instead, which allows us to absorb the work of art and thus restores the power to the masses, where it belongs:

Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasingly noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

I scarcely need to argue that we’re living in an age of distraction; Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows did so convincingly nearly a decade ago, and our cultural obsession with “productivity hacks” reinforces his diagnosis. We’re

less able to concentrate than previous generations, whether on books, paintings, or even films. (How often do you look at your phone while you watch a movie at home? And incidentally, if you’re uncomfortable doing so in the theater, you might think, as Benjamin does not, that the film has a certain sort of aura.) But Benjamin was again wrong about the effects in at least two ways: Firstly, since our distraction is driven and controlled by mass and social media, it’s made us better consumers, not better revolutionaries; and secondly, it’s done quite little to destroy the aura of the work of art, as the crowd gathering around Nighthawks reminds us. But our relationship to that aura has changed. While there’s no shortage of visitors to contemplate works of art— typically less-famous ones, since no crowd gets between the viewer and these works—I can’t help but think that the quality of our contemplation has dropped off. Certainly I’ve never seen a twenty-first-century Stendhal faint at the beauty of a painting. And in fact, much of our engagement with auras involves no contemplation at all. I was amused, during a recent trip to London’s National Gallery, to see a young tourist notice Monet’s famous Water Lily Pond, bound over to it, hastily snap a picture on his phone, and bound away in a single fluid motion. No contemplation will ever be involved. I’m sure that picture has been uploaded to Facebook with a mass of other pictures from his vacation and that everyone who looks at the album will scroll past it to look at pictures of things they haven’t seen a hundred times.

And yet he took the picture. I watched him: When he saw the painting there on the wall of Room 41, he was drawn to it. If the aura were dead, he wouldn’t have been; he probably wouldn’t have come to the museum at all. Seeing it, he had to prove that he’d been in the same room with it, even though, from my vantage-point, he didn’t care about it at all as a painting. It’s as if Benjamin were right that mechanical reproduction has destroyed our willingness to contemplate art, but wrong that it has thereby destroyed its aura. The work of art, rich with cult value, continues to call to us, though we no longer know how to respond.

Benjamin distrusted the aura because of what he saw as its tendency toward fascism. I’m not sure he could have foreseen what would become of our relationship with the world eighty years later—the increasing hold had on us by multinational technology corporations who have hijacked distraction and mechanical reproduction for their own purpose which, while not fascist exactly, certainly verge on totalitarian. With these circumstances in mind, the persistence of the aura is a positive sign even for the sort of revolution Benjamin is hoping for: As long as we are drawn to the aura of the work of art, we haven’t yet been totally distracted into submission to consumer imperatives, and there remains hope that we will see beyond the pinball machine they’ve encouraged us to live inside.

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The Freedom of the Book Review

John Wilson on the job of the book critic and the importance of miscellany in the good reading life

By David Kern

As the longtime editor of Books & Culture, the now defunct bimonthly review that engaged the contemporary world from a Christian perspective, John Wilson emerged as one of the preeminent voices in Christian cultural criticism. His ability to engage with a wide range of subjects, combined with his thoughtful, careful approach to reading and editing, made Books & Culture the most important Christian literary review of the last twenty-five years. Under his tutelage a generation of emerging reviewers were given a platform to explore the considerable way in which books (of all kinds) are transformative cultural artifacts.

Today, Wilson—whose writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Review, and First Things, where he still maintains a column—lives in Wheaton, IL, with his wife. We spoke with him about his life as a book critic, what he believes makes for a good review, and why miscellany is key to a quality reading life.

I was in high school. I couldn’t have articulated clearly then what so delighted me about this protean form, but I think that from the start I was responding to the same elements that delight me today, as I’m about to turn seventy-one. In part I was drawn by the appeal of miscellany. I wrote about this for Comment magazine in the Fall 2011 issue, under the title “Magazine as Microcosm,” in which I talked about some of the reviews in a single issue of the Times Literary Supplement (Jan. 10, 2010), chosen at random and offering “an unpredictable and never-to-be-repeated juxtaposition of subjects.” Good reviewers typically share this zest for miscellany and assume that their readers will share it too. They don’t try to “sell” their subject—the “sacred” in modern India, a dictionary of Hinduism, animal suffering, fiction by a nineteenth-century Portuguese novelist, a history of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, new fiction by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and the American novelist Richard Powers, David Hempton’s Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt, or whatever it might be—but rather assume a curious reader whom they seek to inform and entertain, and now and then to provoke.

You have been involved in the world of book-reviewing for a long time now, as a writer and as an editor. Has your sense of what makes a good book review changed much over the years?

Yes and no. When I first started reading book reviews,

Many people, I’ve discovered over the years, have a narrow conception of what a book review can do or should do. This reaches its nadir in the perception of a review as essentially a “book report,” hence (supposedly) boring. But what attracted me from the beginning (though, again, I couldn’t have said so at the time)

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Photograph by Gary Gnidovic

was the enormous freedom the form allows! A good review can be “impersonal” or “personal.” It can be focused almost entirely on the book (or books) at hand or use the book under review primarily as a point of departure. There are very few “rules,” in fact, though this or that editor, this or that publication, may impose all sorts of constraints. That freedom appealed to me enormously (it still does), and I enjoyed seeing how many different ways a review could be done, and done well.

So when you were running Books & Culture did you have to work hard to enable a culture of thought in which that sense of freedom was felt by your contributors?

It wasn’t hard at all, especially once we had several issues out, so that anyone who actually read the mag could get a clear sense of what we were doing. (Strange but true: Throughout the twenty-one-year history of B&C, I routinely received pitches from people who had obviously not read the magazine. Most of these were for free-standing essays as opposed to reviewish pieces, our bread and butter. We did publish such essays, but only in small numbers.) The magazine brought together writers and readers with wide-ranging interests and the conviction that a robust faith should not be narrow or defensive.

In your own work as a book-reviewer do you find that you have to be conscious of crafting reviews that meet this standard or does it come naturally? That is, do you see it as something you are continually practicing? Something you’re reaching for?

It comes naturally, but you have to keep working at it—and that’s part of the fun. I can give you a recent example. I’ve thought a lot lately about the problem of “gush” in reviewing. When there’s so much hyperbolic praise floating around, how do you single out a genuinely exceptional book in a way that will hold the attention of good readers weary of the relentless oversell? That was the problem that preoccupied me when I was writing about H. S. Cross’ excellent novel Grievous (FSG) for National Review this summer.

With that in mind, I wonder: Is it harder to control the “gush” for a book you really like or the harshness for a book you think has major problems?

Ha! It’s not so much a matter of “controlling” gush (just say no); it’s rather a matter of finding a way to single out a really good book at a time when people

are acclaiming “masterpieces” right and left, cheapening the conversation. I don’t often review books that I think are terrible, or that are entirely uncongenial to me, but a reviewer who’s never critical—sometimes sharply so—is letting the side down.

But having said that, I’m reminded of another widespread misconception: that reviews are all about “evaluation,” the reviewer—from his or her lofty perch— saying “five stars” or “two stars” or whatever. There’s so much more to it. I read tons of reviews in part because I enjoy learning in an entirely unsystematic way. (Here we go back to the appeal of miscellany.) Hence I’ve enjoyed and profited from countless reviews of books that I’ll never read.

That misconception of which you speak has, of course, infiltrated the very way people read in general. The Good Reads-ification of the reading life, if you will. We are constantly thinking in terms of questions like: What am I going to rank this book? How many stars am I going to give it? Where is it going to show up on my year-end list? And then, of course, what is that going to reveal or say about me to all my Goodreads followers or friends—or whatever we call those people. These may perfectly reasonable questions, helpful ones even, but I can’t help wondering if they’re fundamentally distracting from what a reading life ought to be about. So I wonder: Would you say that such an approach to reading has made the quest for miscellany more difficult, and the life of the reviewer less rewarding?

You’ve described the phenomenon so perfectly, you’ve left me feeling terribly depressed. Add to that the shrinkage of venues that actually pay for reviews, and I feel even worse. But then I remember Orwell’s hilariously dour essay, “Confessions of a Reviewer,” written at a time when “literary culture” was comparatively thriving, and (oddly enough) I start to feel better. Like the book itself, the book review really is a wonderful invention. And the appeal of miscellany, if not universal, has deep roots in human nature.

Ah, that’s very interesting. Do you mean that we are instinctively inclined to look for it?

In that 2011 piece for Comment that came up at the start of our conversation, I mentioned that our word “magazine” comes from an Arabic word meaning “storehouse.” Some storehouses hold just one thing, but a lot of them hold many things. “What do you have in your garage, your attic, your dorm-room closet, the

back seat of your car, or those other catchalls for this or that? In our garage [which, between 2011 and now, was converted into a library], you’d find bug spray, badminton gear, bicycles, and boxes of books (many boxes of books), along with charcoal for the barbecue, old letters, and large bags of birdseed for the feeder (secured under tight lids to foil invaders), among other things. Seen in one aspect, the world is just like that, except that there’s much more stuff. Everything, in fact.” So magazines in general and review sections in particular give us taste of the whole shebang. Reality is miscellaneous.

It seems to me, though, that the job of the review section is to assess that miscellany. So as an editor of a review section, how do you balance the sense that you need to assess the quality of what you’re looking for, with the desire to follow your bliss, so to speak. There’s a lot to sort out here. First, and once again, an over-emphasis on one function of reviewing: assessment. That’s an important part of what reviews (and review editors) do, but only a part. There’s no question, of course, of merely “following your bliss” in deciding, let’s say, what books will be covered in this week’s or this month’s issue or next Monday’s postings online. Whoever is making those decisions, whether the editors of the New York Times Books Review in conclave or the book editor (singular) of a weekly or a small print quarterly or the editorial team of a web-only site, there will be many more books worthy of consideration than there are available review-slots. How then do you decide what to cover?

That’s a question I was asked hundreds of times during the twenty-plus years I was editing Books & Culture, and before that I dealt with it in a slightly different form when I was working for a reference publisher and (among things) editing Magill’s Literary Annual, which covered each year (in two bound volumes) two hundred books published in the previous calendar year. There’s no simple answer. I started by talking about an economy of abundance as opposed to an economy of scarcity. You can’t endlessly wring your hands over what you’re unable to cover. Better to relish the wild variety in what you are able to cover, always suggestive of much more. My own preference is for a wide range in subjects, a wide range in reviewing style and viewpoint. As a reader, I like to be surprised; I don’t like a narrow predictability.

Given the reality that there is limited time and limited space (even for an online publication), did you feel any special pressure as you chose what books to cover—and how to cover them?

No. Again, think in terms of an economy of abundance. This isn’t Panglossian prattle. There are several stacks of recent and fairly recent new arrivals within a few feet of me as I’m typing just now. Every single book in those stacks could legitimately be reviewed. I do my best to spread the word by various means (Twitter included). But what gets in any given review section will be a small slice of what could be there. It would be possible to brood endlessly about that. But it’s also possible to reflect on the sheer abundance surrounding us (contrary to many popular narratives).

Speaking of which—what effect do you think reviews actually have on the buying habits of readers? And to what degree should reviewers be attentive to their corresponding influence (or lack thereof)?

It probably depends to some extent on the reviewer, and the reader. In 1975, I read Hugh Kenner’s review of Walker Percy’s book The Message in the Bottle. After roughly forty-five years, I can still remember how the review began. (Kenner, among his many gifts, was one of the best reviewers I’ve encountered in my lifetime.) Before I even finished the review, I knew I wanted to read Percy’s book as soon as possible. I called Vroman’s, by far the best bookstore in Pasadena (where I’d been working just recently), but they hadn’t received it yet. So I called B. Dalton’s in Hollywood. Yes, they had a copy. I asked them to hold it for me, and Wendy and I drove from Pasadena to Hollywood.

On the way back, Wendy needed to stop at Kmart and pick up a couple of things. I started reading the book sitting in the Kmart parking lot. You may remember the amazing first essay, “The Delta Factor,” which opens with a series of questions. “Why is man so sad in the twentieth century?” And so on. By the time I’d read a couple of pages, there were tears in my eyes—not because I was sad, but because the book was so good.

But as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, I’ve profited from reading countless reviews of books that I will never purchase or check out from the library, books that I will never read.

Have you read David Epstein’s new book, Range, by any chance?

No, I haven’t. Tell me about it.

Well in some ways it’s an apology for what you’re espousing in the reading life. The subtitle is “Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” and it makes the case that our cultural inclination to “rush to develop

students [well—everyone, really] in a narrow specialty area, while failing to sharpen the tools of thinking” more broadly is problematic. The best readers (and certainly good reviewers), I hear you saying, are, like great jazz musicians, improvisers. They’re capable of creatively interpreting a wide variety of sounds. It takes a long time to acquire a familiarity with a catalogue of sounds to interpret—a lifetime even—but that pursuit is part of the craft. Much like the art of reading. As an art, it’s more than just a set of skills (or questions to ask).

That’s interesting. I don’t think I buy the bit about generalists necessarily “triumphing,” but I love what you say about “improvising” and about certain lifelong practices and habits of mind. There really is a payoff in the long haul—as long as one has one’s “faculties,” at least!

Well that brings me to my final question: As a longtime reviewer who spends a lot of hours in a lot of books, do you have any recommendations for habits or skills or techniques, so to speak, for helping someone read more closely and remember more?

I don’t think I have anything golden along those lines, but here are a couple of practices (not in the least original or striking, not rising to the level of “techniques”). When I’m reading a book for review, whether fiction or nonfiction, I always have a lot of Post-its handy. (I have a horror of writing on the pages of a book; many good readers would scoff at this notion, I know.) I also use Post-its when I’m reading a novelist that I periodically re-read, sometimes simply to mark a striking sentence, other times for jotting brief notes. When I’m reviewing a book of fiction, or simply reading a novel, say, for the first time, I almost always immediately re-read it, assuming it’s a book I have enjoyed. The first reading is unique. In the follow-up, I try to get a deeper sense of the way the book works. Reading nonfiction is different, and of course “nonfiction” comes in many flavors. But there’s a characteristic excitement, early on, when you begin to grasp the “argument” of the book. Good writers have a way of allowing you to share in the sense of discovery they felt when they were first understanding what it was they wanted to say. You’re getting that experience in a radically compressed form, and it can be intoxicating.

On Writing about Writing about Books

JUST AS THERE ARE PEOPLE passionately, sometimes fanatically, devoted to opera, or baseball, or Euro-crime shows available for streaming (our eldest daughter, Anna, introduced me to Homicide Unit Istanbul, a German series set in Turkey), there are also people for whom book reviews and the entire ambience in which they play a part (the “literary scene,” let’s call it, with an expansive definition of “literary”) are of inexhaustible interest. These people (I am one of them) not only read or skim reviews endlessly; they also seek out interesting writing about reviewing by people who have been in the business in one way or another—Anthony Powell, for instance.

Powell (1905-2000) was not only a superb novelist, best-known for his twelve-book cycle A Dance to the Music of Time, but also an exceptionally good reviewer and literary editor. In his memoirs (Vol. 3, Faces in My Time; Vol. 4, The Strangers All Are Gone), he recalls his stints at the TLS (presiding over reviews of fiction) and Punch (as literary editor). These passages will be ambrosia to readers such as I’ve just described, offering along with mordantly funny details some acute observations on reviewing in general. I love this passage from Faces in My Time (p. 208): “Within the bounds of allowing freedom for severe criticism—certainly never to be averted if needed—there is much to be said for Rilke’s opinion that all works of art should be approached in a spirit of sympathy. For those so disposed, nothing is easier than making knockabout fun of, say, Hamlet or the Sistine Chapel, and little is to be gained by giving reviewers books they are bound to dislike on sight.”

I should add that on the following page, Powell relates an instance in which, “having earlier cavilled at [Sartre’s novel] The Age of Reason, I took on (somewhat contravening Rilke’s principle of sympathy) The Reprieve [a book in the same sequence of novels by Sartre].” This leads unexpectedly to a case exemplifying Britain’s notorious libel law, which might have come from the pages of Powell’s own fiction.

—John Wilson

“Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.”

A.E. Stallings Writes What She Likes

By Sean Johnson

In as much as “temporary” and “mortal” are synonyms, impermanence is the crux of the human condition. I suspect this is why we struggle to know what to do with the past. It might be the most fixed and permanent thing we can fathom—the past—excepting God and the things belonging to his nature. So, when we drag this or that up out of the past we mistake a permanent thing for a static thing and present it pinned on a board like an insect fresh from the kill jar. It often comes down to us austere, even regal, but alien and unlike us or our lived experiences. All the more so when the subject at hand is judicial complaints and farming advice from a prickly eighth-century-BC Greek. A.E. Stallings has done the unlikely, then, by conjuring a recognizable Hesiod out of the ancient past in her recent translation of Works and Days (Penguin Classics).

Trained as a classicist and now working as a poet, Stallings experienced Hesiod first through the lens of the scholar, and then through that of the artist.

In her introduction to the translation, she notes:

When I first read Hesiod, as a student, and in translation, the main impression I came away with was that he was a crabbed old farmer, a misogynist, an archaism, a mythologist with none of the verve of Homer, a wheezy dispenser of old saws. He now fascinates me as a complex figure, more misanthrope than misogynist, an original thinker and proto-philosopher, with an unexpected streak of generosity, lyricism and even (most surprisingly to me this time around) a wry sense of humour. As I put it to a classicist friend who had a similar reaction rereading him, “Hesiod is a mensch.”

Scholarship and poetry embody two distinct modes of knowing that are often pitted against one another, but they could both benefit from a little friendly collaboration, and Stallings is uniquely situated to bring it about. Her mensch-Hesiod comes through just as she describes him, not because she has remade him, but because she has rediscovered him under age-old dust. Hesiod helps himself in this arena by being what Stallings calls “the first poet personality in Western literature” (xxxiv). Homer is all but unknown to us, for all of the verve and scope of his poetry. Hesiod, by contrast,

—A.E. Stallings, “After a Greek Proverb”

is “recognizable and familiar as a poet.” He speaks freely about his vocation (though he classifies poets among an otherwise low class of laborers that includes beggars). He even gives his own personal bio, complete with bona fides: “ . . . I crossed to Chalcis once / For the funeral games established by the sons / Of Amphidamas, great of heart. I won, you hear, / With a hymn, and took the tripod by the ear.” Better, but not unlike what you might read under an artsy headshot on the back flap of a dust jacket today. As much as Hesiod does to recommend himself to a modern reader, though, his chutzpah is not what makes this translation a success.

Stallings herself renders Hesiod dynamically through her gift of analogy. Full of lofty pronouncements, Hesiod can sound “at times like an outraged Old Testament prophet,” but in Greek his is a middle style. Stallings avoids elevating his voice too much by finding in him an analogue with our own middle-style prophet, Robert Frost. Frost’s “Good fences make good neighbors” comes easily to mind when one reads of Hesiod’s own concern for the neighborly bond and errant livestock: “Who has a trusty neighbor, you’ll allow, / Has a share in something precious. Nary a cow / Would be lost, but for bad neighbors . . . ” (346-8). Frost’s unassuming, but sometimes archaic diction proves an ideal vehicle for Hesiod’s voice.

Stallings also discovers a more basic likeness between Hesiod’s time and our own. She has lived in Greece since the late nineties and was surprised to find Hesiod’s language regarding financial corruption, debt, and legal gridlock resurfacing in the daily news as the country’s economic crisis worsened. While working on the translation project, she even took to describing Hesiod to friends and neighbors as a contemporary poet, “one living out in the boondocks of Boeotia, agitated about the corrupt government, in a lawsuit with his wastrel of a brother. Greeks would nod their heads in recognition.” It is with no small twinge of anxious recognition that I read Hesiod’s description of his own era in his famous catalogue of the Five Ages of Man. Man has descended from his first age of Gold, the poet claims, when humans lived like gods—“free from every evil you could number, / And when death came, it stole on them like slumber”— through those of Silver, Bronze, and a fourth, Earthen race of Homeric heroes and demi-gods. But all of that has come to an end, and Hesiod bemoans his unlucky date of birth.

Would I were not among the Fifth. I’m torn: Would I be better dead or not yet born?—

For this age is an Iron Age indeed—

Suffering never ceases for our breed:

This race, when babes are born already grey At the temples, and when father in no way Shall share a bond with sons, nor sons with father, Nor guest with host, nor comrades with each other, Nor brother love his brother as before; Soon men won’t honour parents any more But will heap insults on old age—they’ll learn About the payback of the gods in turn

He goes on to predict that as awe and reverence depart from these men of iron, the gods will also turn their backs, taking their justice with them. Stallings has found, in Hesiod, the right poet for our own age.

A final analogy—and one that Stallings may draw less consciously—is the one between Hesiod and his translator. Just months after publishing her translation of Works and Days, Like (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), her latest collection of original poetry, was released. Its mixture of subject matter both contemporary and ancient hints at more than a little Hesiodic spirit. In the twilight of virtue and neighborly love, Hesiod expresses fretfulness over the next generation:

I would not be an honest man, not now, Nor wish it for my son—when I see how

It’s evil to be honest in a land

Where crooks and schemers have the upper hand.

Stallings echoes and deepens the sentiment in “Empathy,” anxiously juxtaposing the plight of modern refugee children with her own maternal instincts:

My love, I’m grateful tonight

Our listing bed isn’t a raft Precariously adrift

As we dodge the coast guard light, . . .

I’m glad that our six-year-old daughter, Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

She even indulges in the occasional “old saw” (“Whatever the gods forbid, it’s sure someone will do,” or “If news is good, you cannot hurry it; / If news is bad, it tracks you down.”).

Of course, Hesiod is famously hard on women, often generalizing them as vain and opportunistic—“Don’t let a woman mystify your mind / With sweet talk and the sway of her behind— / She’s just after your barn.” Stallings finds time to push back against his bristly proverbs with a disarming wit that pokes at the old salt without sacrificing respect for him. In “Half of an Epic Simile Not Found in Hesiod,” her self-conscious narrator pleads (convinc-

ingly) the unapparent profundity of a blonde dye “To brighten up her outlook and her spirits.” She also advocates sympathetically for Pandora, whom Hesiod introduces into Western literature as a curse upon men for her opening the jar of troubles. “It was the Iron Age. The men had been drinking,” she contends in “Pandora,” shifting some culpability to Prometheus and Epimetheus, “those two surly brethren, Hindsight and Forethought,” at least one of whom should’ve seen it coming. In “Ajar,” she reimagines the whole tale. “Yes, out like black-winged birds, the woes flew and ran riot, / But I say that the woes were words, and the only thing left was quiet.” There again we see the hint of comparison, the suggestion of an analogy between the poet, with her anxious burden of words, and the subject she has imagined into clearer existence. As the title suggests, Like is frequently a meditation on the relationships at the heart of analogy itself. Stallings is one of the most gifted formalists working today, and in her brilliant titular poem “Like, the Sestina,” she plays comfortably with the form (usually an exacting arrangement of six rotating end words) and shows off the befuddling semantical range of an overused term by ending every line with “like”:

“ . . . Whatever. I’m all like . . . ” Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alike Flounder, agape, gesticulating like A foreign film sans subtitles . . .

“Like,” the essence of analogy, loses its meaning. As it is, our impoverished speech is a patchwork of filler struggling to support the analogy and metaphor by which we make sense of the world beyond ourselves. Even fully functioning metaphors communicate more than similarity, though, and Stallings also studies the contrasts implicit in any comparison. “Scissors” emphasizes the otherness of the analogue (“Even in solitude, a pair . . . / Open, shut; give and take, / All dichotomy in their wake.”) while “Dyeing the Easter Eggs” details the pain of noticing the

otherness of one’s closest analogues (“I am the children’s blonde American mother, / . . . But they have icon eyes, and they are Greek.”). And “The Last Carousel” hints at likeness and otherness in the self:

The horses have seen better days go by With the one eye that peers Out on the orbiting world. The other eye

Has always looked inward, to where the moving parts Are hidden by a column of gilt-edged tarnished mirrors. Why are we pierced through the heart

By their poles of polished brass?

In “The Erstwhile Archivist,” Stallings seems to argue that poets must always be translating analogically. She describes summer work as a nineteen-year-old archivist, sorting and filing thousands of photographic negatives filled with ghastly inversions of their original subjects. “But those were just the revenants, / The brittle shades of love, / I lifted the X-rays to the light / In a pale latex glove.” The means of preserving those photo-negative images left them intact but unreal, “each groom / Arrayed in tailored light, each grey-haired / Bride in weeds of gloom.” Only when the archivist develops into a poet and holds up the mirror of analogy can those images be seen as they were meant to be seen, pulled out of the past in full and living color. In the collection’s lengthy centerpiece, “Lost and Found,” this act is subsumed under the broader task of remembering, “for all the arts that be, / Sciences too, are born of memory.”

If Works and Days is a sustained exercise in remembering to life one ancient personality, Like is a collage of similar achievements, albeit abbreviated ones. “Battle of Plataea: Aftermath” imagines individual reactions to the Greek victory over the Persians recorded by Herodotus in book nine of his Histories. Spartan warriors, guards down, share a laugh as they compare their foul, fish-smelling

"Though Stallings’ work is full of recognizable contemporary scenes, from the marital strain of a broken washing machine to a mother plotting genocide as she combs lice from a child’s hair, many of her critics are puzzled by the volume of classical subjects. At every turn, her work embodies the truth these critics may be missing."

rations of black broth with the sumptuous feast the Persian generals had been preparing to eat when battle broke out: “Behold! They came to rob us of our fare!” A Greek captive among the Persian concubines swells with the joy of liberation (“I stepped with golden sandals through the gore, the lady that I was, and not the whore”), while one of Xerxes’ “Immortals” expresses his apathy for the cause: “We were caught up in doom, as fish or sparrows, / grateful like other men to die but once.” Where these personalities once were not (or, if they were, were names and dates only) now they live in Stallings’ language. She does the same for the suitors killed by Odysseus:

Just as an illegal haul of undersized mullet

Is heaved out of the overfished Aegean

(Many-sounding, white-maned, dark as wine)

And dumped out hugger-mugger on the shingle

Just so the bodies of the suitors lay . . .

In the paparazzi-flash of solar flare

Dead to the future generations, grieving

For the lost current, for the swim of things.

While these figures begin with some measure of known personality through Homer’s telling, Stallings again leverages analogy to understand them in a different light. Their dumb wickedness is parsed more vividly through comparison with the netted fish, not thinking for themselves,

merely doing evil (as they might have done good) because it was the nearest and strongest current ready at hand to tow them along.

Stallings’ confidence in analogy allows her to weave together tone and emotion that might seem incongruous in most circumstances. Few would have guessed, for instance, that a strained couple’s dreary examination of their disappointing relationship in “Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda” might be expressed most poignantly through grammatical puns (“The mood made him tense . . . It made him sad, it made him livid: / How she construed from the imperfect past / A future less vivid.”).

Though Stallings’ work is full of recognizable contemporary scenes, from the marital strain of a broken washing machine to a mother plotting genocide as she combs lice from a child’s hair, many of her critics are puzzled by the volume of classical subjects. At every turn, Like embodies the truth these critics may be missing. Analogy is at the heart of all human knowing, but the most limiting comparisons are those we make with the personal and immediate. Stallings seems to eschew the old command to “write what you know” and spends equal time writing what she likes. And that may be a deeper wisdom. It may be that, in the end, you can know whatever you like.

Like: Poems | Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux | $24 Works and Days | Penguin Classics | $9

Empire of Letters: Writing in Roman Literature and Thought from Lucretius to Ovid | Oxford University Press | $74

The Roman poet Lucretius’ work “De rerum natura” (“On the Nature of Things”), is the oldest known natural philosophy poem in Latin. An Epicurean, Lucretius wanted to explain the fundamental nature of the cosmos by atomic matter alone. To do so, he turned to a linguistic metaphor. Atoms, Lucretius wrote, are like letters. Indeed, both atoms and letters are called “elementa” in Latin. Just as we can manipulate letters to create meaning—the Latin word for wood, “lignum,” becomes the word for fire, “ignes,” by altering a few letters—so we can manipulate the natural world (wood becomes fire by adding heat). Readers of Lucretius steep themselves in “the combinatory potential of nature and language,” writes Stephanie Frampton, Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, in Empire of Letters, her new book on the art of writing in the Roman world. Conventional wisdom among scholars of ancient literature holds that the poetic tradition in antiquity was primarily oral and thus Roman writing was essentially an afterthought, but Dr. Frampton challenges that perception, arguing that Lucretius and other Roman writers demonstrate that ancient forms of writing profoundly shaped Roman ways of thinking and acting. Empire of Letters is a book-lover’s book. From Lucretius’ famous elemental metaphor to wax tablet technology to the trials and tribulations of Roman letter-writing, Dr. Frampton argues that writing, and the tools of writing, helped shape the Roman world. For those of us who love the Roman literary tradition, Empire of Letters immerses us in the grit and gravel of Lucretius’ and Virgil’s tools of the trade, giving the thoughtful, classically-minded reader the delightful opportunity to feel the papyrus and smell the wax.

—Heidi White

Christian Wiman's Complicated Poetic Vision

By Christian Leithart

Modern poets are not known for speaking clearly, so holding a book of modern poetry to a standard of clarity may be missing the point. But Christian Wiman’s latest book attempts more than a typical volume. In He Held Radical Light, Wiman, the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction and a teacher of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, attempts to explain the fraught relationship between poetry (art) and theology (faith). His conclusion is that reality is “perceived truly only when the truth of its elusiveness is part of that perception.” Poetry fits into the equation by demonstrating that elusive truth. It does not, however, demonstrate it clearly, and Wiman does his best in this book to reproduce poetry’s unclear logic.

In that regard, He Held Radical Light is a little too successful. The truths Wiman means to elucidate and the errors he aims to explode are mixed together so

thoroughly that it’s almost impossible to separate them. In the space of a single page, Wiman says something profound and then saws off his own tree branch. After making intriguing remarks on the value of reluctance in pursuing a calling, he tops them off with: “Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance one has found it.” (Presumably, the proverb does not apply to itself.) An incisive comment about the discrepancy between form and content in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Snow-Storm” is followed by this: “Whether the revelation happened in nature or in language doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it happened in time.” Wiman moves on without explaining. It’s like being guided through a museum by a blind man. Occasionally, he gestures at a masterpiece; sometimes, it’s a blank wall. Mostly, we just wander.

The best sections of the book deal with the “art” half of “the faith of art.” Wiman’s decade as the editor of Poetry magazine put him in close contact with a lot of fellow poets, and the little anecdotes he relates are endearing: the bear-sized A.R. Ammons abandoning his own poetry reading ten minutes in (“You can’t possibly be enjoying this”); Mary Oliver picking a dead pigeon off the Chicago sidewalk and carrying it in the pocket of her hunting jacket for the rest of the day; Richard Wilbur in a taxi quietly meditating on the blessings of

fifty years of marriage; Robert Lowell, haunted Catholic, hugging Seamus Heaney and whispering in the Irishman’s ear, “I’ll pray for you.”

Wiman also writes well about the challenges poets (and all artists) face. For example, there is the mismatch between craft and conviction that plagues many modern poets—Ammons, Oliver, Frank Bidart, Jack Gilbert, to name a few. Poetry requires order and elicits meaning, yet many modern poets spurn order and deny ultimate meaning. Poetry gives readers a sense of the sublime, even a glimmer of transcendence, yet many modern poets disavow all references to transcendence. Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” is a spine-chilling hymn of woe, yet it is a complete and beautiful poem. Wiman comments, “If you’re in complete despair, I don’t think you find yourself writing a poem, especially not a Bach-like marvel of music and counterpointed language like this one.” The modern poet is uncomfortable with his own calling. Wiman’s insight into this problem is penetrating, partly because he has experienced this discomfort firsthand. Sooner or later, every poet realizes that his work will not last, no matter how much of his soul he pours into it. Great art is passed over every day, and fame and success are fleeting. “I thought of nothing but writing a poem that would live forever,” Wiman says, and found himself blocked at every turn. The desire—the need—to escape “devouring time” and create something that will last can drive an artist to despair. Nothing lasts.

Even if poetry did last, Wiman argues that it would not be sufficient to rescue us from despair. In a discussion with Wiman on Philip Larkin, fellow poet C.K. Williams remarked that Larkin despaired because he didn’t see his art as a “personally redemptive activity.” Wiman bristled:

The real issue, for anyone who suffers the silences of God and seeks real redemption, is that art is not enough. Those spots of time are not enough to hang a life on. At some point you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with your own efforts, for at some point—whether because of disease or despair, exhaustion or loss—you will have no efforts left to make.

Amen. But as insightful as he is about art, Wiman is clumsy when it comes to faith. Though Wiman does not share his peers’ denial of transcendence, he is as skittish about it as any of them. He feels that poetry brushes up against the same massive, invisible object that extended grace to him, but he is unwilling or unable to name it.

To name it, after all, would be to shrink it down to his size. For him, the word “God” is an abyss, bright or dark depending on the day. You must not speak too strongly about God. If you do, whatever you say will miss the mark.

Grace came to Wiman unexpectedly, from outside, at the lowest point in his life. Indeed, it came in the midst of despair. In many respects, grace resembled beauty (unexpected, external, touched by pain) and the two became intertwined, with poetry being Wiman’s access to both. His failure to produce lasting beauty itself became a kind of grace because it showed him how helpless he was. Beauty resisted his efforts, and thereby saved him. Art cannot save, except by frustrating the artist. “Our only savior,” he says, “is failure.”

Though there is wisdom here—in the vein of Augustine, Dante, George MacDonald, and others—Wiman clings to this experience with a certainty that taints every other possible insight. He has lashed himself to failed poetry like a man to a sinking lifeboat. The truth is that the Word is near to us. God is certainly more than our imagining, but He is not less. Jesus was here, on Earth, bodily, and His Spirit is with us now. I don’t think that’s good news to Wiman’s ears. For him, such a bald, triumphant statement spells death for poetry.

Ultimately, Wiman’s faith is in poetry, and poetry, for him, means avoiding easy answers. Yet, in his murky philosophy, all answers are by definition too easy to be true. The only truth is that truth is too big to know. To quote A.R. Ammons once more: “I desire the ease of wisdom, but have been unwilling to surrender the madness of poetry.” For Wiman, wisdom and madness are not opposites, but two sides of the same poetic page.

He Held Radical Light | Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux | $23

Style Clean and Simple For Anyone

By David Kern

The dust jacket for Benjamin Dreyer’s new book, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, refers to Dreyer as “one of Twitter’s leading language gurus” which feels ironic in an on-the-nose sort of way, as if whoever penned that particular bit of ad-copy isn’t sure whether they want to sell books to people who would buy them because of Twitter. It’s a bit of sardonic cheekiness that is in keeping with the tone of Dreyer’s wonderful book.

Dreyer, who is vice president, executive managing editor, and copy chief of Random House, offers both rules and principles for good writing. But more than simply a grammar handbook, Dreyer’s English is an apology for style. It’s a book about the issues that every writer runs into; but, more importantly, it’s a book about the nature of writing—of all human communication. And in that, it’s a deeply contemporary book with a strangely ancient heart.

Dreyer offers solutions for the tricky business of foreign languages, fiction and characterization, and the grammar of numbers. He defends the “en” dash (as a matter of fact, he spends nine strangely entertaining pages on hypens and dashes), supports those who begin sentences with “but” or “and” (mercifully), clarifies a slew

of words many of us mix-up regularly (“confusables,” he calls them), and provides history’s most enjoyable page of writing about the subjunctive mood. But above all, he’s obsessed with clarity. His arguments for (or against) certain usages are neither random nor based purely on preference (although Dreyer isn’t shy on making his opinions known). They are always in service of a greater cause. Clear sentences, clear phrases, clear ideas. That’s this book’s raison d’etre.

Oh, and, bless him, Dreyer is an ardent supporter of the Oxford comma, which he prefers to call the “series comma” since, after all, the derivation of the “Oxford” attribution “verges on urbane legendarianism.” Dreyer’s English is full of that sort of thing.

At long last we have a replacement for Strunk and White’s disappointingly mundane but widely endorsed, The Elements of Style, a book which reads like John Dewey joined an eighth-grade English class. Dreyer’s book is unpretentious in its approach but hilariously, wonderfully pretentious in its very ontology. It’s great fun and slightly irreverent while also standing in awe at the wonder of language. It’s a book for nerds and scholars and students and people who like funny stories and one-liners and anyone who fancies themselves smart enough to write a thing for anyone about anything. Truth is, it’s something of a page turner, right up to the last word, at which point it becomes the most readable reference book on your shelf.. Dreyer’s English | Random House | $25

It is a cold Tuesday afternoon along the coast of Maine. As we exit the restaurant the sky is darker than a normal lunch-hour sky. A snow storm is moving in. By the time we leave the theater, it will be darker still and the roads will be slow-going. A local cinema simulcasts the Saturday Met Opera in HD and once a month they rebroadcast the recorded version. I’m attending the Tuesday encore of Bizet’s Carmen with three of my daughters, a retired Navy captain, and two gap year students from our church. One daughter has asked me what she should expect.

“Well . . . it’s the story of a woman who is convinced that love is the highest good.”

“Uh huh. That’s good.”

“The problem is that whenever Carmen says she loves, it actually means she wants.”

“Oh.”

“So, her world ends up being one in which her own desire is the highest good.”

“Oooh. Yup,” says the eight-year-old, assuredly, as if she knows this girl by another name.

We file in and find our seats amongst the company of daytime moviegoers. I’m expecting to enjoy the slower pieces. I’m planning on persevering through a hackneyed overstatement of the sex symbol as feminine power. I’m even ready to roll my eyes but not

walk out when metamodern intrusions appear. What I am not expecting is to be struck by the image of my own generation in the mirror of Carmen’s passion. But this is what happens.

It would not be unfair to expect a rebellious opera from 1875 to have lost some of its steam. To begin with, it’s not as though Bizet sets the bar inaccessibly high for all that opera could achieve. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, in which Bizet is privileged with meeting Beethoven. When asked what the master thought of Carmen, Beethoven encouraged Bizet that he was most assuredly onto something, so long as he didn’t try his hand at serious music.

Isn’t Carmen tired by now? Might the nineteenth-century femme fatale be far too safe to elicit provocation from viewers this deep into the sexual revolution? There are manifold questions one must ask when assessing any work of art. One of the greatest tests is perpetuity. Carmen, whatever else she may be, is far from an anachronism. On the contrary; she hides her age remarkably well. She was seen at the 1929 Easter Parade, flaunting “torches of freedom.” She sang the opening hymn at Woodstock. And here in our day, one might see her at any time donning a Rocawear hoodie and posting her creed on Instagram: “Do What Thou Wilt.” She’s not tired. She’s still working. Carmen is an ageless icon. The clay from which Bizet fashioned Carmen has been worked and

reworked into new sirenic manifestations of every generation. And this clay which Bizet inherited is ancient, dug from the ground just outside the eastern edge of Eden. Bizet and his seemingly timeless creation would have us believe that love is the pursuit of satisfying an insatiable and elusive will.

“Habanera,” one of the famed arias of Carmen, ends with these lines:

You think you’re free, it holds you fast. Love! Love! Love! Love! Love is a gypsy’s child, it has never, ever, known a law; love me not, then I love you; if I love you, you’d best beware!

We have heard this reasoning before: In order for love to be love, it must not be restrained. On the contrary, it must be free to control you. The sacred Scriptures, however, tell a different story. Love, according to the Bible, must be restrained.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NKJV)

If it is true, then, that love is to be restrained if it be love, if it is to seek the other over seeking the self, how much more ought sexual appetite be restrained? Despite English speakers often conflating love with hunger, the Bible pairs love with fasting, or a hunger for something greater than hunger. Scripture, according to its divine logic, contextualizes sexual appetite in the framework of covenantal love. Sex follows love; it does not lead it. Love follows covenant; it does not eschew it. To divorce sex from covenantal love and to divorce love from restraint is to stockpile manna. The rot is in direct relation to the removal of restraint. Hear the words of the American Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson:

A sexually anarchic society cannot be a free society. For no society can endure mere shapelessness; when the objective foundation of community is systematically violated the society must and will hold itself together by arbitrary force. Nor is this analysis an exercise in theoretical reasoning; it merely points out what is visibly happening in late-twentieth-century Western societies.

Decades later, this statement remains inviolable. When a society abandons the regulation of sexual appetite, it inevitably engenders political violence. We are not merely talking about politics. We are talking about love. There are two important notions that emerge from this conversation: Firstly, the politics of sex are about a great deal more than legal ways of pursuing pleasure in the polis; and secondly, how we understand love will always frame the way we critique the cultural view of sex and violence. Jesus Himself joins these themes: “If you love Me, you will keep my commandments.”

Furthermore, Jenson argues, the relationship of the American male and criminality has licentiousness as its matchmaker. A society that abandons all sexual regulation does so in blatant disdain for the family, which is a blatant disdain for society, since the family is the societal building block. And since families come about from sexual unions, there is no way to promote sexual anarchy without effacing the family. Free “love” foments political aggression. Free love means liberated rage. Bonhoeffer’s categorical distinctions come to mind, that what many mean when they say free is actually cheap.

There is a reason the anti-theistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche celebrated Carmen. He himself was a man bent on seeing selfishness understood as a virtue. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes:

Suppose nothing else were “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other “reality” besides the reality of our drives—for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the question whether this “given” would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world? In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it.

So, according to the dark thinker, the only way of understanding reality is to follow your own desires and passions, wherever they take you. But according to this same blind guide, the place to which they take you should be understood as true reality. One only need read history in order to discover where this took Nietzsche: to the glorious reality of a syphilis-ridden death bed of insanity. Carmen, as well, would rather self-destruct in her pursuit of triumphant will than accommodate self-sacrifice. Her willingness at the end of the opera to stay and be murdered rather than acquiesce to having done anything wrong may usher her into the purest forms of Nietzschean reality, but it is not true reality, and neither is it good

or beautiful. It is a reality which should elicit repentance, not admiration.

For a long time, Nietzsche idolized the German composer Richard Wagner before he broke off their relationship for what Nietzsche interpreted as Wagner’s pathetic return to the safe-as-milk skirts of Christianity. Whether it is true that Wagner returned to the one true faith is a debated point, but to the narcissist, any hint of the sin of repentance is unpardonable. And just like that, Wagner was out. The movement was looking for a new soundtrack and Nietzsche was confident that he had found it in Bizet. He wrote to his sister upon the occasion of his twentieth viewing of the work and praised the composer’s decision to have Don José unapologetically admit that he had murdered Carmen. Nietzsche says, “Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it distinguishes one work of art from among a thousand others. For, as a rule, artists are no better than the rest of the world, they are even worse—they misunderstand love.”

And, according to our diseased dreamer, how is it that artists and others so frequently misunderstand love? They believe it to be selfless. The great triumph, the philosopher goes on to say, is that love is actually selfishness. When a person finally understands this, in Nietzsche’s jaundiced mind, they can, at last, be productive.

We know that Nietzsche was not a lone gunman. Bizet, as well, believed religion to be a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak. According to him, it was a cloak for ambition, injustice, and vice. When an attempt was made to commission the French composer for a religious piece, he declined with the explanation that in order to work with a clear conscience, he couldn’t promote lies. He believed that religion wasn’t anything a bit of science and politics couldn’t fix over time.

Every generation must encounter the apparent points of friction between perceived reality and Christian truths. Near the end of the opera, Don José has returned to his first love, Christianity. But in the final moments before the murder, Don José realizes that the power of what he calls love is so great that in order to be “true,” one must abandon all restraint and all selflessness. In Sir Richard Eyre’s production, this is shown when Don José tears his giant wooden cross from around his neck and throws it to the ground. He begs Carmen to give him what he wants. He cannot bear the refusal to see his passionate desires satisfied. The rejection is a kind of death, or worse, it is a kind of evil. He is willing to give anything for it. He will abandon his faith. He will despise Micaëla. Carmen must satisfy Don José’s hunger. It is wickedness to deny him. Because of his view of love, he is

willing to become a murderer for her—indeed, he will become the murderer of her, but she must give him what he asks because the restraint of his sexual appetite, he believes, is killing him. Here we see Jensen’s concept that unrestrained sexuality inevitably leads to violence. The casting off of restraints begins to multiply.

Carmen’s response shows us the dilemma. Just as Don José would die in order to have Carmen, she would die in order to not have to return to him. For her, to fulfill his desire would be to restrain her own desires. Herein lies Bizet’s problem. Indeed, herein lies the quandary of every hedonist. It is a politic for a dream world, not the real world, despite Nietzsche’s optimistic promises that passionate pursuit of selfishness is the only path to truth.

It is shocking to see the subversive power of the Cross make its way into such narratives. When the artist is an unbeliever, Christians are tempted to think the Gospel only exists in the negative. God, however, is not only Lord of the living but also of the dead. It is not only in the shadows, or in the absence of what is good, that the Gospel can shine forth. Here, amongst the railings of Carmen and Bizet and Nietzsche, we see the light of Christ make its way through the scoffers, even on their own lips. It is not only in the testimony of their desolate cries, but even bound around their necks in the moments of attempted repentance and in the curses of all that they would trade for one more round of gratification. Our hearts should break. We ought to be able to hear the anthems of the zeitgeist and weep at the prospect that these sirens might get the very things they demand. Destruction. Death. Collapse. There is a wasteland on the far side of illegitimate pleasure. Don José tears the cross of Christ from around his neck in an attempt to leverage another night with a whore.

We can imagine Carmen’s high school guidance counselor encouraging her to pursue what is true for her. Behold, the woman.

This heartbreakingly perennial barter is the center of countless moments in human creativity. It is not solely on the minds of Christians, but on the minds of rebels as well. Speaking of Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus, art critic Hans Rookmaker says, “Here is a man who has sold his soul to the devil; when hell is very near, he cries out, ‘See see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament. One drop would save my soul, half a drop, ah my Christ.’ He does not repent and is not saved, but he knew, though an unbeliever, where redemption was to be found. And Marlowe was not a Christian; and he knew.”

The opera closes in the folds of a dying day. Escamillo, the toreador, has won Carmen’s momentary affections. Although her love appears new, it is with aged foreboding that Escamillo enters the arena alone, allowing Carmen to linger outside with Don José. As the reunion with her former lover begins to devolve, violence is inevitable. After the pleading and the slighting, she and Don José are slumped in her blood outside the arena. Inside, the crowd applauds as her lover lowers the mountainous body of a bull to the ground in death. It is here that one thinks of the bull, the great symbol of Europe, being brought to an end at the hands of celebrity fueled by sexual anarchy, reveling in the victory of unfaithfulness. Europe, whose etymology denotes a state of being “wide-eyed” or “woke,” has always been a microcosm of the West. It was most assuredly not the intention of Bizet to warn us of the inevitable demise that awaits the nations who glut themselves on willful desire. Bizet was no moralist; neither was Carmen. Nevertheless, there lies the slain bull. Carmen’s blood is soaking the same ground. The fact that the death of both creatures is tied to the same man should not be overlooked. The popular interpretation is to memorialize Carmen as a heroine of unmatched fortitude. Her willingness to die rather than

be faithful is praised the world over as an act of truest morality. She is a disciple of Nietzsche, and Nietzschean disciples still crown her lord of all. If reality is meaningless apart from narcissistic drive, then it is conversely meaningful when one performs selfishly. The particulars of selfishness are incidental. In this thinking, the true is merely an outworking of the real. We can imagine Carmen’s high school guidance counselor encouraging her to pursue what is true for her. Behold, the woman. It is for this reason that Kurt Cobain and others are lauded as being true artists, though his magnum opus may have been self-destruction. In his song “Scentless Apprentice,” Cobain alludes to suicide as a declarative victory of the individual will to rebel against God. “You can’t fire me because I quit. Throw me in the fire and I won’t throw a fit.” He really meant it.

What we are shown in this endless stream of hedonistic heroism is the true meaning of reality. Only a confused person believes suicide to be greater than faithfulness. Only a deranged mind would pit covenant against love. The path of self-indulgence will always lead to psychological unrest. If you seek after happiness you will end up hungry. Happy, rather, is the one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness. That person will be filled.

It is dark when we finally exit the building. The storm has made good on its threats. Under the light of the theater’s marquee the snow is descending, flake by flake, covering the mud and slush on the sidewalk. A mantle falling from the sky. “Brilliant,” declares a woman behind us about the weather or the opera. It is unclear. The hard black earth covered in the jeweled white of winter is beautiful, but with spring so close it is expiation for which the heart is longing. It is the sun’s adornment for which the winter-worn soul is yearning and all the healing that is hidden in His wings.

Classes

The house is old.

Built before the Civil War, it’s a classic southern farmhouse: white, with tall narrow windows and a large front porch, reached via three handmade stone steps. The yellow front door, peeking from behind the screen, offers a pop of color, while two hanging swings and two wooden rockers, one on either side, balance the entryway like a neighborly chiasm. It’s the kind of house today’s au currant bungalows might imitate. But Maurice Manning’s Kentucky farmhouse is original in the truest sense.

Manning bought the house nearly two decades ago and restored it himself, making it livable according to his then-bachelor standards. Today, however, he shares it with his family—wife, Amanda, a screenwriter, painter, and children’s book author; daughter, Lillian, three years old and a delightful chat; and two aging lab mixes, strays that appeared over the years. Their home is full of books (stored on handmade shelves and stacked every-which-way) and artwork (much of it by Amanda) and toy trains and dolls. End tables and coffee tables are buried under books and magazines and newspapers, and virtually every window-adjacent surface hosts a plant. There’s an old wood-burning stove and the stone of an ancient fireplace and a great cushioned deep-red recliner, perfect for lounging with a book or a manuscript that needs to be edited. It’s the sort of home in which you would hope to find a poet. In recent years, the Mannings added a kitchen and a bedroom to the back of the house, a more modern space that is nonetheless as welcoming and cozy as the rest of the place.

Manning has written each collections of his poetry in this home—the seventh of which, Railsplitter, is due out in October—and it’s no surprise that a poet who takes so much pride in the place that he’s from also takes great pride in the place where he lives.

Just as their home is a creative, living monument to a simpler (although not simplistic) way of life, the

The poet’s home in rural Kentucky.

The Art of Poetry

Everything changes—even alone as I am in this strange eternity, my mind is restless, and yet I also live with a kind of peace. To say I also live, even though I’m dead, is funny—I have to humor myself down here— or up here, whatever adverb designates this realm. Let’s call it the real of the voice in the mind, and as the mind changes, so must the voice. But the voice eventually ceases to be distinct and therefore becomes itself. I don’t know how that happens. It just becomes a common voice, a voice that anyone hearing it would know. Ideally the voice will say something worth saying, or better, say something without having to say it.

Poetry speaks about the unspeakable. It’s a clanking wagon-full of paradox pulled by a horse across a vast land in utter darkness, and the voice, without a body, guides the horse. Nothing about this arrangement seems to bother the horse. Pulling the squeaking wagon-full of paradox through the darkness, with a voice delivering a grunt or a doubtful line or a metaphor to continue on, is all the horse has known.

I suppose the horse is older than the voice. He’s been coming from and going to Forever forever. But the mind behind the voice, while often at some repose as I have said, is also restless, thinking the next new thought or thinking nothing, to say something about it in a manner some would deem beautiful.

—from Railsplitter, printed here with permission of Copper Canyon Press

rest of their twenty-acre farm is similarly curated. That is not to say that they’ve tamed the ground they live on. Far from it. Instead, Manning and his family have shaped their land’s wildness into a dreamscape. It’s a poet’s playground. Manning has mowed nearly three mile’s worth of paths into the wooded acreage, including little coves for contemplation and rest, complete with large flat rocks for seating. He’s preserved the centuries-old stone wall that borders the property and an old tobacco barn which sits across the driveway. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in using the land so much as delighting in it. He’s not a farmer in the usual sense of the word (although he does garden), but he does engage in conservation and husbandry.

Manning’s commitment to preservation is further revealed in Railspitter, that forthcoming collection, which Copper Canyon will be releasing this fall. A series of poems from the point-of-view of Abraham Lincoln after he has been assassinated, it seems consumed with legend and legacy, memory and tradition. Manning’s Lincoln is, unsurprisingly, a melancholy ghost, burdened not just by the facts of his death, but by the meaning of his death, and by the drama of the times in which he lived his life and the story he left behind. There’s joy in these lines, but there’s also regret and sadness, and, occasionally, shame. Railsplitter is a collection about remembering and being remembered. In the wrong poet’s hands it might have descended into cynicism or sentimentality, and the fact that it works is proof that Manning is one of our best living poets.

Recently, Manning spoke with FORMA about his approach to writing poetry, the legacy he wants to leave behind, and the mystery that is a poem. We sat on that welcoming front porch while the birds sang and the old lab enjoyed the shade, and talked about the way the poet plays.

beans in water and cook them that way. That’s called shucky beans. So I started trying to connect these little things together and I got the first couple of lines and they were, “I’ll tell you one thing you can do if you have an old screen door with the slap gone out of it is lay it across a pair of sawhorses and spread your shucky beans on the screen and let the sun take it from there.” As I usually do, I organized all of that into four-beat lines.

Do you vary from that meter? It seemed like you did quite a bit in Railsplitter.

Oh yeah, that book is metrically diverse. I’ve got couplets of five/four beats alternating and four/three and sonnets and villanelle and rhyme-royale—all kinds of different forms.

So is there something instinctive in terms of form-variation? How do you know that a form is right for what you’re working on?

So when you have an idea, the seed of a poem, is that more often an opening line or an image or a concept, as in Railsplitter?

Well, over the last few days I have been thinking about the sound of a screen door slapping against its frame. It’s a very particular sound, especially an old wooden-frame screen door. So that was an image, a sound image, that I wanted to think about. And I let it percolate. Eventually, I remembered an old tradition in which people would lie old screen doors across a pair of sawhorses and then set beans from gardens on the screen door to dry and dehydrate for storage. Months later they would soak the dried

It depends. The sonnet is a form that lends itself to lyric poetry, a poem that isn’t necessarily managing the passage of time. It isn’t one event following another event— it’s more contemplative traditionally. Obviously, through the years, poets have used sonnets for varying purposes. It’s a very adaptable form. But for my book The Gone and the Going Away, I invented a little form of six lines. I typically write narrative poetry but I was working with a student and was encouraging her to embrace lyric poetry and I realized I was speaking out of turn because I was much more of a narrative poet. So I decided if I’m going to talk to my students about lyric poetry I’ve got to start writing some lyric poems myself, and I realized that the form usually has to be short. So I thought, “What can I do with the poem that’s thirty words long?” And I invented this little stanza of six lines, five words per line; lines one, three, and five begin iambically; two, four, and six begin trochaically. And then I tried to maximize the rhyme not in any particular scheme but just to rhyme as often as possible. I wrote maybe forty of those poems. This is something that I’ve realized about form: Once you have a form that you are comfortable working with, the form itself is generative. You know, for example, that the next line has to begin with the trochaic foot so it guides you to the next phrase. The parameters of the next phrase (at least) are already established.

So do you recommend that younger poets identify a couple of forms that appeal to them and internalize those forms so that they guide their work? Or do you think that they ought to be working more broadly? In recent years I’ve tended to steer students toward tra-

ditional forms. The simplest is blank verse, writing in four/five-beat lines without intentional rhyme. I suggest blank verse or metrical lines to students because it means that they’re writing with their ear rather than only their mind. I think it helps them appreciate that poetry has an oral character. Not that I’m opposed to an interior sort of metaphysical poetry. I’m not at all. But I think the poetic tradition, going back thousands of years, has an oral quality and an aural quality. In the old days people sat around reciting verse. And if the lines didn’t have rhythm, then the recitation was probably going to be flat.

So the music of the verse is a guide for the relationship between the poet and the reader?

It can be. I’m writing to give the reader something to listen to, for sure. And hopefully there’s something beyond that, something to ponder.

To linger over.

Yes. It’s just the way I’m wired. I’m a person who listens and that’s long been my habit. I much prefer listening to the sounds in the world than talking or making my own sounds. And I prefer sensing the rhythms of the natural world. Right now the katydids are chirping to their particular rhythm. And I love feeling that in the world. It

exists in its rhythm and its sense of sound. Whenever I want to make my own sounds with words, that is what I draw from.

Earlier you mentioned the old wooden screen door slamming against the wooden frame. You mentioned this kind of aural image might be the beginning of your poem. Are you looking for words that represent that sound (as in onomatopoeia) or are you trying to figure out what the meaning in that sound is? What does the sound represent?

Well the word that appears in this particular poem more than once is “slap.” So that’s the onomatopoeia language that I associate with the sound of the screen door slapping against the wooden frame. It might not be the most accurate word—“thwack” comes to mind, or “spank.” “Clap” might work. All of those words are Anglo-Saxon and so they are bodily vocabulary. And this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent years. The language of a poem can tie it to the world, so I’ve been interested in utilizing words that have a sonic character. And it so happens that most of those words that have a sonic character come to us from Anglo-Saxon and Germanic roots. You have to get your mouth physically involved in pronouncing those languages, whereas Romance lan-

Maurice Manning's galley of Railsplitter, marked with notes for the final manuscript, and sitting on his writing desk.

guages are much softer sounding. The words that we use in English that come from Latin and Greek tend to be softer. And they tend to refer to our interior states, our moods, our feelings, our ideas. Words like “spank,” “clap,” “punch,” “hammer,” “thwack,” “hack,” and “chop” are heavy on the consonants, and to pronounce the word you have to vocalize them very purposefully.

There’s a sort of poetry in the word itself. Yes. And the poetry that I tend to respond to and the poetry that I’ve wanted to try writing myself certainly is interested in interior states and moods and contemplation. But I want to use that hard worldly language to get hold of a particular mood or a contemplative point. It’s ironic that we can get to our deepest sense of passion and grief and love using “unpretty” language.

Consider William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow,” which I often cite to my students. “So much depends / upon . . . ” That’s almost throw away language. There’s nothing poetic about those words. There’s nothing sonically appealing about that phrase. But then the poem continues, “a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” The poem really just kind blossoms once you get to the “red wheelbarrow” (Anglo-Saxon words), “glazed,” (Anglo-Saxon),

“with rain water.” Suddenly the poem solidifies and the language reflects that. And the verb there, ”glazed,“ makes the entire poem. It causes the reader to see the image and it informs the reader that it has been raining but it is not raining anymore and for the wheelbarrow to have a glazed appearance suggests that the sun has come out or the rain has stopped. It’s a very economical use of language.

That is a poem in which the lines are broken in very specific ways. When you’re not working in some much more strict metrical form how do you decide where your lines are going to end? Well, I cannot not write in meter.

It doesn’t feel right?

It doesn’t feel right. It’s just my way, it’s the instinct that I follow. I can’t write free verse. I certainly admire free verse, but I think that it’s actually really hard to do well because you don’t want to abandon rhythm. But if you’re not leaning on meter then you’ve got to draw your rhythm from somewhere else. And, as I often say to students (which is kind of ridiculous because I’m in the position of recommending something that I don’t do myself), the tension in free verse comes between the syntax

Manning lives and works on twenty acres in rural Kentucky, where he has mowed nearly three miles of maze into his wooded property for walking.

and enjambment and/or line break. You want the line to be its own thing. And then if it continues to the next line, you want that continuation to be a little bit of a surprise.

So the relationship between the syntax and the enjambment: Is that something you would say is not as important in most metrical verse? Or maybe the form puts fewer demands on the relationship? It happens in metrical verse but it is, at least in my experience, more accidental.

It’s not the purpose. You’re giving precedence to the meter.

Right. Whereas because, in free verse, you have no meter you have to give precedence to that relationship between syntax and enjambment. I think so. Again it’s not what I do so I’m out on a limb talking about it.

So you have this line or this image and then are you going to sit on it for awhile—for example, this screen door. Do you write it down right away? Do you begin working on it? Is there a specific pattern that you follow once you have that image?

It depends. Sometimes something will sort of pop into mind with a bit of an urgency and I get to my notebook as quickly as I can.

So you’re not necessarily one of those people who says, “If I forget about it later, it didn’t matter”?

If something is going to matter, I keep it in mind, so far. My mental faculties are not diminished, yet. It’s sort of like a stray dog. Something will kind of hang around and if it’s going to become a poem it keeps coming around and gets friendlier.

And then you start petting it, then you feed it. Then I’m on the hook.

How do you know when a poem is done? You’re finishing up a collection right now and you’ve been editing and revising it. But how do you know a poem has been kept around long enough and that you have got to set it free now?

Well Yeats said a poem is never finished. He famously revised poems well after they were originally published. I don’t have that attachment. A poem feels finished the way you finish a meal. “Okay, that’s enough. I’m full.”

Do you mean that you feel full of the poem or the poem itself feels full?

The poem feels full itself.

Like it’s a guest that you’ve fed and who sits back from the table.

Yes. I write and revise simultaneously, up to a point. I will always go back and revise when I’m trying to put a book together or send something out to publish. And some poems just have their own character. There was a poem that I worked on for five or six years before it felt right. For a long time I knew it wasn’t right. And some of that was just organizing the dramatic material because I often work with narrative. There’s a character or there’s an event. There’s an action that has to be presented in a plausible dramatic way and getting all of that balanced and focused and with a line running through it to hold it together. Those are the things that I’m thinking about as I’m writing and then I’m able, usually, to see “okay, well this piece is not connected well with that piece,” so I revise as I go and make the connection a little better. Then there’ll be times when I know there’s a gap, there’s something missing.

Like there’s an idea that incomplete?

Yes, exactly. And I’ll go back and add. This might be days, weeks, months down the line.

So, in the new book you talk (or your character does) about the idea of creating something that will last long after you’re gone. This is an idea that your version of Lincoln returns to. As a poet is that something you’re thinking about? Is that something you set out to do, that is the goal of your work?

I do think about it, increasingly. That’s something that I value, that I observed when I was growing up. It is a value that I somehow understood early on and it’s certainly something that I’ve had reinforced by Wendell Berry. I remember one day when I was a student at the University of Kentucky I stopped by his office and I said, “What have you been up to?” And he said, “Well I’ve been planting walnut trees.” He had planted something like two hundred trees. And he said, “Yeah I hope to pay for my great-grandchildren’s college education.” And he might not live to see his great-grandchildren become college age. That really impressed me. And so here we plant as many trees as we can. I’m a member of an organization called Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation. We go down to abandoned strip mine sites and plant trees by the thousands. And we’re planting saplings, two feet tall, and most of us won’t be alive in fifty years but those trees will be mature and they stand a chance of living two or three hundred years. And to know that you’ve done something in the world that will make a difference

after you’re gone is a very gratifying thing.

Do you view writing a poem like planting a tree? Yes. It has that quality, especially with the gravity of having a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter born when I was forty-nine and my wife was forty-six. The gravity of knowing that she might not know me when she’s an adult. I might not be here. But she may know me through the things that I’ve written. I think a lot about that.

Do you feel like you have to reveal something about yourself in the work?

If anything it’s a manner, a way of regarding the world and what’s in the world. How we ought to belong to the world. I think about that a lot, especially in our present age when so much of human experience seems to be about not belonging, about being individuals. I don’t think that’s the way we’re supposed to be. I think we’re supposed to live with a sense of belonging to this world and being stewards of it. And the only way we can become real individuals is by recognizing what we’re connected to and what we belong to: to each other, to the trees, to the rivers, to the air. You know. Not jobs, or bank account, or possessions.

In “John Brown’s Baby Had a Cold” in the new book, the character of Abraham Lincoln writes about the idea of poetry “being in the air” in 1859 and 1860. I was taken by that line, that image. Do you think that is always true? Is poetry always in the air and it’s your vocation to harness or discover or reveal it, or was it specific to his time and his imagination?

I’ve come to believe that the poem belongs to the world. I increasingly don’t think of myself as the person who’s creating a poem. I think of myself as the person who has the task of finding the poem that’s already there and giving it a form that makes it available to others. Or of giving it a form that isolates it, if briefly, for me to understand.

Is that the job of every poet? Is that what being a poet is, in your opinion?

I can’t make a claim for others. It’s the way I approach it.

Would you call that vocation? Do you see that as your vocation?

Yes, I do. It’s taken me years to accept that and to characterize it in such terms. Early on I was concerned with learning the craft, and eventually the craft became intuitive enough that I began to think less consciously about it. And then you can have a different perspective on what you’re doing. I don’t want to sound overly mystical about this, but there’s an element where I don’t feel like I’m in charge of doing this. I feel like it’s already there and I am the person picking the beans or shucking the corn.

We were out in your woods earlier talking about how you pick black raspberries with a bucket as you walk along the paths . . .

Yes. They’re there. I’m not responsible for them. But I can pick them.

So if we’re following this rabbit trail, so to speak, is it too much to say that maybe each blackberry is like a line or an idea that takes you somewhere? Or is the blackberry the completed poem itself?

Well I think it can be both. The raspberry or the blackberry could be the individual poem or it could be the line, or symbolic of the line, or symbolic of the whole poem.

Maybe I’m just hungry, maybe the poem is the blackberry cobbler. You write on sketchbooks it appears. Do you have specific pens you like to use?

This is a pen that was given to me by the late Claudia Emerson, who was a very dear friend of mine, a wonderful poet who died way too young. We were at the Sewanee’s Writers’ Conference in the summer of 2014. And she and I were sitting beside each other while someone was giv-

A stone wall on the Manning property that is likely more than 200 years old.

ing a lecture and I was taking notes and I had some kind of cheap drug store pen and she nudged me and said, “Don’t you think you should use a more serious writing instrument?” I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “You need to have a real ink pen to do what you do. Take it seriously.” And I thought “Wow, she’s right about that.” And it triggered this bizarre memory of when I was a little boy and I couldn’t read or write. I was staying with my great-grandmother, which I often did at the time, and she had an old chest of drawers that had one drawer that was basically junk, and she had an old dried up fountain pen in there. And I used to take it out and take the cap off and scratch around on paper pretending to write. I liked the sound of the nib scratching the paper. And as soon as Claudia told me that I needed a serious writing instrument I suddenly remembered that little thing that I did when I was three or four. When that grandmother died I got that fountain pen and I kept it somewhere. So after the Sewanee conference in 2014, Claudia sent me this pen that I have now. And I thought, “Wow that looks very

familiar.” So I went to my mother’s house where I still have some belongings and I rummaged around and I found the pen that had been my great-grandmother’s and its the exact same pen. Same brand.

Wow. Who makes it?

Pelikan. And it’s even the same color. Turquoise, pearl, and black tip. Black cap. It was eerie—the pen that had been my great-grandmother’s and is at least eighty years old. So there’s this real continuity symbolized by this gift from my friend Claudia.

When I interviewed Wendell Berry a couple years ago he talked about how he writes longhand on a yellow legal pad with a pencil. For him there’s value in actually writing it physically as opposed to doing so on a typewriter (let alone a computer).

Yes. I like to have my hands on. I happen to prefer unlined paper of a certain thickness because it is more tactile. It just makes the experience of writing lines of poetry more bodily. I can hear the lines.

Manning on his porch.

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Poetry Joshua Sturgill

Joshua Alan Sturgill is a 2018 graduate of the St. John’s College masters program in Far Eastern Classics, and currently divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Wichita, Kansas. His long association with Eighth Day Books has led to speaking and writing engagements on poetry, art history, metaphysics and religious traditions. His first poetry collection, As Far As I Can Tell (Darkly Bright Press, 2018), garnered wide-spread acclaim. A second collection is being prepared for publication in early 2020. Joshua is a tonsured reader in the Orthodox Church.

WHERE I ATE STILLNESS

The stars are scattered Shards of Adam’s bones burning in bright anticipation. I touch the cold of their grief, taste the ancient past with my eyes a cloud of salt. In memory, I taste

my Father’s House, and Eden where I was born. Eden, where I had no need for memory

where I ate stillness. My labor there was being. The seraphim were stars.

But now the stars are ash of Adam’s bones.

Adam, my father: the sky is your altar. You are the relics and the celebrant.

You keep a lonely liturgy intoned above us. Its litanies are sparks and lines, suggested in a language we no longer speak but understand.

POSEIDON IS DEFEATED

When Hippolytus confronts Poseidon’s monster at the shore, and there his horses, terrified, conduct him violently among sea-sharpened stones— see how his horses lead him

mingled with the fragments of his chariot, until they reach the temple steps of Artemis, where, from his desiccated skin, his psyche rises like the vapor of her temple fires.

And by his prayers and by her power, the goddess of the hunt receives him as a sacrifice. She gathers him in her embrace —lifted out beyond the reach of rage,

and all his vows of chaste devotion he can now fulfill within the fields of Elysium, her hearth and hunting grounds. Considering these stories, I see

that at my death the Curse, the cause of death, will die—not only curses which pursue me from the sea of mortal life, but the age-long Curse which I have loved and harbored

now, so near, so intimate that death may be the only separation.

Poetry Joshua Sturgill

The crises facing schools today are legion. In the onslaught of disaffected teachers, undisciplined students, and rabid popular opinion, educators are seeking new systems, new orders, that might turn the tide. But the persistent temptation is to depend on power, wealth, and bureaucracy for what are fundamentally moral, relational, and philosophical problems, foregoing C.S. Lewis’ classic thesis in The Abolition of Man: Good education is based in natural law. Teachers should impart what Plato’s Republic calls philosophy (love of wisdom) through philomathy (love of learning), both of which trickle down from adherence to the objective laws of nature. To teach well, a teacher should be free to devote to the truth of her subject, and free to initiate students into that truth. This requires, first, a conviction that objective truths do, indeed, exist and are, in fact, discoverable. If schools are not free, not open to these realities, they tend to become idea-factories producing students who are no more than ideological employees. If we hope to curb this trend, Lewis’ Abolition of Man offers an essential grounding for education not in man-made systems, but in reality.

The importance of Lewis’ remedy is evident in a controversy among educators over the International Baccalaureate (IB), a system of globalized education standards for primary and secondary school. Its conception dates to 1948, when Geneva-based diplomats theorized about using education for world peace. The formal program was launched from Geneva in 1968. The name has changed several times, but its current title became International Baccalaureate in 2007. According to IB’s website, the key intellectuals influencing its philosophy (a brand of constructivism) are John Dewey, A.S. Niel, Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner. In the 1970s IB began to hold international conferences and opened international “World Schools” throughout the 1980s that eventually gave rise to regional headquarters. Sometime between 1996 and 1998, as its global reach continued to swell, it developed a more specifically global framework, mission, and curriculum with the assistance of UNESCO. To this day, IB shares its global headquarters in Geneva with UNESCO-IBO (International Bureau of Education), a sister global educational program with nearly identical mission and aims (UNESCO-IBO and IB share a postal address and office building in Geneva).

Public and private schools can become IB World Schools, involving hefty initial and ongoing fees which, according to Debra K. Niwa in “IB Unraveled.” After large fees for a “feasibility study,” “trial implementation,” and “authorization visit,” including fees for training teachers and administrators, annual fees kick in, which still do not account for all the

expenses of travel, new staff positions, and materials. Niwa shows that these annual fees often increase each year, and says the total cost can reach “generous six-digit” amounts. She offers an example in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) in Arizona, which had spent $939,000 after only two years of implementation and with only one IB school location in its district. Niwa goes on to make a very concrete case, with substantial evidence, that the results of these expenditures do not include increased student performance, and concludes that IB is highly unnecessary.

The annual fees are paid for each constituent school and each program offered at that school. IB offers Primary Years, Middle Years, and Diploma Programmes, the last for high schoolers, and a career certificate. The Diploma Programmes is somewhat comparable to the Advanced Placement (AP) system. Close to 2,000 universities and colleges worldwide now accept IB credits, 951 of which are US schools. A North America Regional office was opened in New York in 1975, and a D.C.-based global center opened in 2010.

In a 2004 Washington Times article the director of International Baccalaureate North America, Bradley W. Richardson, is quoted saying that the ties between IB, UNESCO, and the UN are “historic and collegial,” and that IB is a non-governmental organization with advisory status under UNESCO, which means it works closely with UNESCO to strategize holistically about global initiatives. Since Catholic and mainline Protestant schools have been adopting

To teach well, a teacher should be free to devote to the truth of her subject, and free to initiate students into that truth. This requires, first, a conviction that objective truths do, indeed, exist and are, in fact, discoverable. If schools are not free, not open to these realities, they tend to become idea-factories producing students who are no more than ideological employees.

IB in increasing numbers, some have raised questions about moral proximity. IB’s “historic and collegial ties” to the UN places it in close cooperation with population control initiatives, including massive expansion of abortion, contraception, and forced sterilization. IB is also an NGO of UNESCO, infamous for global “sex education” initiatives. Another NGO of UNESCO, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), embraces similar “education” initiatives. It is reasonable to suggest that all of these international bodies have a keen interest in collaborating over “education” strategies.

Some IB schools and employees try to deny the existence of any relationship between IB and the UN and UNESCO. However, its institutional and ideological ties are unambiguous. In 1996, the UN developed its “Sustainable Development” plan in a document titled “Agenda 21.” Besides detailed plans for curing global ecology, the document states in article 36.3, “Education is critical for promoting sustainable development, . . . [for] changing people’s attitudes, . . . [and to] deal with the dynamics of both the physical/biological and socio-economic environment and human (which may include spiritual) development. . . . [Sustainable development] should be integrated in all disciplines.” Partnership with governmental and non-governmental educational organizations is described as necessary in order to actuate the ideals of global peace, sustainable development, and the changing of “attitudes.” Education is emphasized as a means for indoctrinating children and communities into a global political agenda.

IB’s own documentation shares these commitments. The IB Mission Statement is as follows:

The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to

develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

Many have expressed concern about the whiff of moral relativism in the final clause. However, the problems lie deeper. German scholar Theodore Haecker, in his introduction to Virgil, Father of the West, argues that the primary problem of modernism is not individualism but a “fashionable modern type-building attitude toward man,” atomizing man into “social groups” or human labels that forego “the universal Man, the true idea of Man, the idea of the true man and mankind.” The modernist, denying “ordo as the final spiritual nature of the universe” descends into a “monstrous Babelish confusion” setting up “hypnotic limitations,” isolating humans into silos of types with distinct perspectives and beliefs that are theoretically unalterable based on material considerations of race, place, or culture. But the type-builders paradoxically presume to understand all types from within their own meta-type, claiming to have found a fundamental unity among mankind—which the premise of type-building denies—solely based in their own bureaucratic schemes. IB operates from this multiculturalist “type-building” vantage under which all perspectives may be mystically “right” and also unified.

IB also aims to develop children who will “help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.” This is not just a rhetorical nicety; it is language explicitly adapted from global political initiatives and internationalist slogans. It is propaganda for the Sustainable Development project. In other words, IB hopes to raise up employees for the structures promising global peace and prosperity.

An IB document titled “What is an IB Education” states, “The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally-minded people who recognize their com-

mon humanity and shared guardianship of the planet.” Entirely central to the organization’s “aim” are the same hallmarks of the UN’s global environmentalist-culturalist absolutism. The document goes on to describe the importance of developing “international-mindedness,” which includes becoming self-aware of one’s own perspectives and appreciative of others. By adopting “international-mindedness,” IB students will “gain the understanding necessary to make progress toward a more peaceful and sustainable world,” helping the student see that his or her own “language, culture, or worldview is just one of many.” This mindset includes “action and bringing about meaningful change.” This is the language of the activist, politician, and bureaucrat, not the teacher. Such action and change would require authoritative sources to determine the right action and the right change, which, for IB, are obviously its global affiliates who have already outlined a detailed plan of globalized norms for “action” and “change.”

This is confirmed by the former director-general from Geneva, George Walker. In the same Washington Times article citing Richardson, Walker is quoted saying the program’s aim is to change the values of children from narrow, parochial national terms to a “global” perspective. In a document outlining the background of IB, titled “Education weaves together the strands of peace,” Walker opines, “International education offers people a state of mind; international-mindedness. . . . We’re living on a planet that is becoming exhausted. People everywhere aspire to [Western] standards of living, and at the same time, they want to maintain [valuable] cultural differences.” Walker has lofty ambitions, but his impressive rhetoric is out of step with the actual nature of the recipients of education: Children are in need of formation of mind, not change of mind.

IB’s emphasis on changing the minds of children to understand that others, “with their differences, can also be right” abstracts students from familial, local, and national contexts, fundamentally disrespecting the ways that parents and teachers may wish to educate their own children about objective truths that transcend globalist power and rhetoric. IB’s documentation outlines an explicit rejection of “traditional” teaching methods in favor of a “progressive” pedagogical ethic: for instance, from “memorization” to “critical thinking,” “same content for all” to “student choice,” “hermetic subjects” to “transdisciplinarity,” “national perspective” to “multiple perspectives.” This is the fancy rhetoric of the constructivist fad in education which, at its extreme, only destabilizes the process of learning and neglects human nature by elevating the student’s experience over the teacher’s knowledge and wisdom. Leaving aside the

teacher as an authoritative agent for student cooperation with the natural law, education is left with gaping holes that are filled by the ideologies of those in power.

That IB’s global political ideology informs the content of its curriculum is evident in a capstone course and essay for Diploma Programme students, “Theory of Knowledge.” The IB website says this is an opportunity for “students to reflect on the nature of knowledge, and on how we know what we claim to know.” Another noble ideal; but it is hard to imagine a high school senior who is not only ready to take an epistemology course but also to develop his own working epistemology. Most teens I know have already formed their own iron-clad epistemology and are typically very unwilling to give it up for the foreseeable future.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say teens are prepared to develop epistemic theories. “Theory of Knowledge” (TOK) is mandatory for all Diploma Programme (DP) students and is “central to the educational philosophy of the DP.” It is graded, as are other major assessments throughout the curriculum, by IB employees in Wales. It is composed “entirely of questions,” the “most central” of which is “How do we know?” Other “questions” include, “What counts as evidence for X?” “How do we judge which is the best model of Y?” and “What does theory Z mean in the real world?” The aim of this exercise is for students to “gain greater awareness of their personal and ideological assumptions, as well as develop an appreciation for the diversity and richness of cultural perspectives.” This is clarified as developing awareness of the “interpretive nature of knowledge, including personal ideological biases.” The TOK is meant to give students and teachers the “opportunity” to reflect on diversity, consider the cultures of self and others, and “recognize the need to act responsibly in an increasingly interconnected and uncertain world.” These are all fine ideals that, realistically, do occur when the student is in the presence of a knowledgeable, thoughtful, and intellectually-inclined teacher. But IB is not just unnecessary for good education; the emphasis on action in an “uncertain world” exposes the globalist gospel of IB: The young are saved from parochialism and called on a mission of global activism, navigating the world’s complexities through IB’s own authoritative euangelion of “international-mindedness.”

The 2013 course companion textbook for “Theory of Knowledge” confirms that IB views itself as the moral authority for proposing and inculcating appropriate political action. It reads not like an informative textbook, but like a training manual for international diplomats, as if the student is preparing for global mission. This content is troubling from a purely academic point

of view. Contemporary sociological and cultural theorists are often cited, and a recurring theme is that one’s native culture represents a “fabric of meaning” that involves an absorption of the “assumptions and values of [the] group.” Haecker’s assessment of modernist “typing” is apt here, since IB presumes to have achieved some transcendent “fabric of meaning” by which to judge all other fabrics and meanings.

A section on “Meta-ethics” makes it clear that IB theoretically asserts no absolute norm for objective knowledge in ethics, or any field, for that matter: “Ethical absolutism . . . argues that there is such a thing as right and wrong applicable universally. Its weakness is that, in reality, there appear to be no moral judgments accepted by every society worldwide.” It contrasts these weaknesses to the other “extreme” of relativism, implying relativism as superior because it provides “flexibility” and “challenges traditional codes of morality to be open to change.” The book does acknowledge the strength of “absolutism” as reflecting norms for behavior that are not based in observation of how humans actually behave but how they ought to behave—however, it concludes in a Hegelian flourish, suggesting that the “two extremes” of absolutism and relativism generate positive intellectual flux. Interestingly, after acknowledging that some level of “generalizations” do provide the foundation of human rights, the book cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its proof text. The UN is the only unquestioned authoritative source on ethics.

Most poignant, however, is the textbook’s presumption to pontificate on “faith” and “religious knowledge” in chapters with the same respective titles. The kind of faith undergirding “religious knowledge” is declared to be a rejection of the need for “justification” and is defined as “subjective” and not “objective” since it lacks “evidence, testing, or reasoning.” It does affirm the equal importance of objectivity and subjectivity in arriving at a belief, but does not clarify any standards for right judgment. The clear message to a young teenage mind is that faith-claims lack any grounding in reality. The textbook adopts a position of skeptical neutrality in favor of a global politesse aimed at teaching one not about the religious perspectives themselves but about how to engage those who do have such perspectives. The reader should be reasonable enough to have no faith but might need to diplomatically guide those who do. The chapter ends by describing how “murderous destruction,” division, and bigotry have all been caused by faith.

Then, the chapter turns to discounting any real grounding for rational claims to religious knowledge. It lists straw-man forms of the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments for God’s existence, followed by

“counter-arguments” that are surprisingly erroneous:

Ontological argument, countered: Anything can be argued to exist in this way.

Cosmological argument, countered: 1. If the First Cause is itself infinite, why not accept the idea of infinity in an infinite regress of causes? 2. What caused the First Cause? Why stop the chain of causation there?

Teleological argument, countered: 1. If there were a Designer, it does not have to be the Christian God, or even a single deity. 2. Complexity could have an alternative explanation (e.g. chance, evolution).

The authors have not done their homework. None of these “refutations” show meaningful engagement with the arguments themselves, and none actually respond accurately to premises. For example, they missed entirely that the ontological argument is about the existence of God, not of everything else—God’s existence is qualitatively different than that of creatures, for whom existence is non-essential to being. By the very terms of the ontological argument, not everything can be argued about in this way except for God, whose essence is to exist.

The chapter goes on to discount the persuasiveness of these “reasoned arguments” as explainable based on predispositions and psychology: “It is likely that this kind of argument is persuasive primarily to those who believe in God already, and not to those whose religions have no Supreme Being or to those who do not have religious beliefs.” Unlike a global ethic of human rights, the book argues that the “justifications” for religion lack objective evidence and thus “cannot be demonstrated in a way to convince everyone, using material evidence accessible to the senses, or reasoning from universally agreed premises.” Because not everyone agrees, there can be no objective demonstration that would compel belief. Religious belief is relegated to psychology and affective sentiments of cultural enclaves, while IB implicitly asserts itself as the supreme alternative for sorting and determining what are “universally agreed premises.” The chapter ends with a description of how religious convictions have tended to villainize others because of their differences, believing “with passionate conviction that they alone have knowledge that is true and pure, and that others are a defilement and threat.” Yet IB is positioning itself as compelling enough to expect a kind of religious belief in its cultural dogmas.

The primary dogma is “international-mindedness” wherein all differences are seen and understood from a panoptic perch, fostering an integration of mankind in

which all can be right, at peace, and eco-friendly. The book cites the 1993 “Declaration toward a global ethic” drafted by the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which explains that the “fundamental crisis” of our world is that of “global economy, ecology, and politics.” The lack of a “grand vision” keeps mankind tangled and paralyzed. This document triangulates what IB, UNESCO, and the UN are working for: “better mutual understanding, as well as socially beneficial, peace-fostering, Earth-friendly ways of life.” Littered with colored boxes highlighting international documents and agreements like this one, the “Theory of Knowledge” textbook contains blatant propaganda for the “grand vision” of world peace cast by the UN et al. Certainly, the modern heritage of international human rights language is important. But it is strange to find in a high school textbook presuming to be about epistemology. In a technical sense, it is indoctrination into sentiments and global activism, not transmission of knowledge.

TOK has its own questionable epistemological theories (or, shall we say, priorities) and lacks actual philosophy or engagement with religious arguments. It is a collection of sentimental aspirations spiced with the worst of modern sociology. It is a manual for how to live the diplomatic life of its own creators, not an academic introduction to epistemology. What we see here is not an exposè of some grand conspiracy, but simply bad education.

A close reading of The Abolition of Man elucidates these educational problems. Lewis opens with a critique of another textbook for primary school in which the authors claim that language has no objective value but merely expresses the emotional state of the speaker. Lewis, to the contrary, asserts that for the bulk of human history, teachers have agreed that “certain emotional reactions could be either congruous or incongruous” to the universe. There is an objective correspondence between reality and emotion, wherein “objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, our contempt.” He cites St. Augustine’s idea of virtue as ordo amoris, “the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it.” He cites Aristotle on the aim of education to “make the pupil like and dislike what he aught,” and this is the “first principle in ethics,” and reviews similar concepts in Plato and Hinduism.

Lewis, famously, goes on to borrow the Chinese word Tao to describe this objective, universal moral reality that everything is ordered to and thus is the ultimate measure for educators, whose task is to form students in accord with reality. The Tao “is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the

kind of things we are,” a concept foundational to every major civilization in history.

For IB, the only Tao becomes imitation of the human agents behind the system itself—the diplomatic bureaucrats who promote their own agenda for human society. IB brings up questions but fails to give students a philosophical, moral, or emotional foundation that will lead them to desire Reason, which Lewis calls a harmony of “our approvals and disapprovals” with “objective value [and] order.” Lewis is proposing the need for a transcendent Absolute in education:

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least stay shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.

Without the Tao, educators have no ground to stand on and nothing to teach. They may as well let the students run the show. Without the Tao, IB has nothing to stand on except itself, its own fiat, and the whims of globalized government. Lewis, importantly, clarifies that he is not appealing to religion or faith but to natural reason and philosophy—something the writers of the TOK textbook simply fail to do in their clever conglomeration of sociology, contemporary cultural theory, and international diplomacy.

Lewis ends The Abolition of Man with a harrowing assessment of what education looks like without the Tao: in essence, men conquering other men (global bureaucratic imperialism), masquerading as men conquering nature (environmentalism). Education is left prone to powerful Machiavellians whom he calls “man-moulders” or “Conditioners,” the rich and powerful who see education as the

For IB, the only Tao becomes imitation of the human agents behind the system itself—the diplomatic bureaucrats who promote their own agenda for human society.

means for socially conditioning children into their own image. Lewis’ tirade about the Conditioners sounds eerily like a denouncement of the International Baccalaureate:

The man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique. . . . Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgments of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. . . . [They] chose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the human race . . . Thus at first they may look upon themselves as servants and guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a “duty,” [which becomes] the result of certain processes which they can now control.

Teachers are either duty-bound by conscience to form students in moral accord with the way the universe actually is, or they become slaves to a bureaucratic authority that claims to redefine what actually is, however sincerely. Francis Thompson’s famous line from his poem “The Heart” makes the problem clear: “Our towns are copied fragments from our breast; / And all man’s Babylons strive but to impart / The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.”

For education to flourish, the teacher must be fundamentally free to use conscience as a mode for under-

standing and transferring the Tao, the objective moral nature of things, as applicable to her discipline. In turn, students are either shaped as human beings in accord with their highest potential as it is dictated by human nature and reality, or they become cogs in a complicated machine run by ideological mechanists. Lewis concludes The Abolition of Man with this assessment:

The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. . . . It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

Without an Absolute in education that transcends the pet projects of educators, all that is left is slavery to the absolutes constructed by the avaricious, albeit sincere, hearts of the powerful who lord an image of themselves over their pupils. If education does not have the natural law as master, its master becomes powerful men who, as T.S. Eliot has it, “try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” These systems do not end well; but the poor of the earth inherit the kingdom that is theirs by right—that which is not an artificial machination of a bureaucratic puppet-master, but that which is truly good for children, families, and society, that which is based in reality, in the natural law, accessible to all, conducive to God-given reason.

want to talk about Oedipus, but my interest in the king is so personal, I must begin by relating a short passage from my own life. Much like Ecclesiastes or The Little Prince, Oedipus the King bears such profound witness to universal and transcendent truth, no man’s answer to the play is exactly like another’s. My account of Sophocles’ play and yours will have as little in common, let us say, as St. Matthew’s Gospel and St. John’s.

Christmas Blues. Many years ago, during a particularly harrowing Christmas break, I and the woman I was dating passed an afternoon sharing stories of old crushes, sad stories, and different jobs we once had. Our relationship was exceedingly tenuous, and I do not recall now whether the afternoon in question occurred just a day before we broke up or a day after, during which I ultimately talked her back into something like love. Regardless, at some point, she told me the following story:

Once, I got a job at a law firm. I just answered the phone and filled in appointments. On my second day, one of the partners asked me where I lived and I told him. He said, “So you drive by the post office on your way home?” And I said, “Yes.” He handed me this big manila envelope. It was already addressed and the postage was already paid. He said, “Can you drop this off at the post office on your way home? You don’t even need to get out of your car. You just put it in the out-of-town mailbox at the drive-through.” So I said, “Sure.” That evening, after work, I put the envelope under the front seat of my car and drove home. I didn’t mail it. The next day, I came to work and the same man asked me, “Did you mail the envelope?” and I said, “Yes.” That afternoon, he came to me again and handed me another envelope just like the first one. He asked me if I could mail it for him and I said, “Sure.” After work, I put the envelope under the driver’s seat with the other one and I drove home. He came to me the next day and asked if I had mailed it. I said I had. He gave me a third envelope that afternoon, same instructions. I agreed to it. I put the third envelope under the driver’s seat with the other two. I drove home. I didn’t mail it. The next day, I didn’t go in to work. I never went in again.

Having mulled this story over in silence for a moment, I could not hold back the most obvious question, so I asked, just a little fearfully, “So, why didn’t you send the

envelopes?” Perhaps I have never really gotten over her response.

I don’t know.

Having told this story many times over the years, I know that some listeners respond by laughing, others shake their heads confusedly, but very few return to me that sentiment I think most appropriate to the denouement, which is unqualified horror. The longer I tell the story, the more I think it an encounter with the purely arbitrary, by which I mean the uncanny, irrational chaos out of which God created the cosmos. At the same time, the longer I reflect on the feeble and incapacitated state of my own soul, the more I regard her response and think, “Yes, I understand.”

Stupidity and Horror. In the last hundred years or so, Oedipus has largely been reduced to the Freudian cartoon character who murders his father and beds his mother. He is nearly as cliché a figure of horror literature as Frankenstein’s monster, who has, over the last fifty years, become little more than an avatar of Halloween. While Frankenstein is rightly considered the first modern work of horror, it was Sophocles who sowed the seeds of the genre more than twenty centuries before Mary Shelley was born.

A horror story is, above all, a tale of sexual perversion and human ignorance, and, while a great deal has been written in the last thirty years on the role of sexual perversion in horror stories, little has been said of human ignorance. In a drama like Jane Eyre or Sense and Sensibility, the reader and the characters negotiate the plot with a comparable level of information. By the ninth or tenth chapter of either the aforementioned novels, the reader knows as much about the world as the heroine, and, while the reader may have a few suspicions about what will come next, those suspicions are vague and uncertain. On the other hand, the typical horror story always places the reader or viewer a good twenty paces ahead of the characters, who seem to act with a baffling and vexing ignorance. If the audience has not frustratedly shouted, “How could you be so stupid?” at least once during a horror story, it is no true horror story. A gloss of horror films over the last forty years finds a staggeringly high incidence of the stock female character who watches half a dozen of her friends get slaughtered over the course of a week, then—while all alone in a large house after dark, dressed only in a nightgown, brushing her teeth—hears a strange sound come from down the hall and then, armed only with an Oral B, naively approaches the dark, asking,

“Is someone there?” Horror stories involve artificially stupid human beings, thus granting the viewer or reader an angelic perspective of man. We invent loopholes for our sins, act against our better judgment, though we know everyone in the great cloud of witnesses is watching, shaking their heads. Those witnesses know we have no excuse, despite what we say. We heap up judgement for ourselves and the angels look on in dismay. As a man drives to the home of his mistress, his children asleep at home and his wife under the impression he has duties at work, the angels and martyrs and saints look on, clutching the air, saying, “How could anyone be so stupid?”

Should the example of slasher films prove too contemporary for certain readers, consider the final act of Frankenstein, in which the monster angrily promises his creator, “I will be with you on your wedding night,” after his creator destroys the monster’s bride. His creator, Victor Frankenstein, takes this as a threat against his own person and not his fiancée. When the night in question finally arrives, Victor leaves his bride unprotected to go search for his enemy, who he expects will shortly come to engage him in mortal combat, and while he prowls the halls of the hotel, the monster attends to Victor’s young wife, surprises her, then effortlessly slaughters her. I have yet to teach the book to a class wherein the average student was not baffled and vexed at how Victor could misread the obvious intent of the monster’s threats. In like manner, Oedipus the King baffles and vexes.

Our Man. In brief, the young Oedipus flees Corinth after hearing he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. While in a self-imposed exile, Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx and liberates the city of Thebes, which had formerly been held captive by the mythic monster. Upon entering the city which he has lately freed, Oedipus hears that the old king of the city has recently been murdered. As the deliverer of the city, the Theban people are insistent Oedipus become the new king. Jocasta, the newly widowed queen of Thebes, consents to the marriage, the two have several children, and the years pass happily until a plague besets the city. The action of the play begins just at the point the people of Thebes are becoming anxious about the plague, for the women are barren and the

beasts are starving.

What follows the exposition is a mix of Agatha Christie mystery and kitschy courtroom drama. A second read of the play reveals dozens of double entendres and ironies of nearly post-modern severity. As the mystery unveils itself, of course, we learn that in fleeing Corinth for Thebes, Oedipus was actually moving toward the mother and father he thought he was escaping, for the man and woman who raised him were not actually his parents. The audience unravels the mystery of Oedipus’ identity well before Oedipus does, and thus a good portion of the play passes with the audience clawing and hissing, “How can he not know?” for Oedipus seems positively blind to the plain truth before him.

However, if the truth ought to be obvious to Oedipus, it should be all the more obvious to Jocasta, his queen and mother. Upon Oedipus’ birth, Jocasta was warned the child was fated to someday kill his father and marry his mother, so the king pinned the infant’s ankles together, entrusted him to a servant, and instructed the servant to abandon the child in the mountains, where he would soon die of exposure. As something of a hypochondriac, I cannot understand why Jocasta would not demand proof the child was dead, for I am driven to distraction by trivial fears that I have left the stove on or the front door unlocked and sometimes drive many miles back home just to check on the position of a few small, harmless knobs. How exactly Jocasta could fear the prophesy enough to murder her child to avoid it, yet not double check that the proposed murder was successful, is beyond me. Rather, having never seen the dead body of her ill-fated son, we may imagine Jocasta lived in a contained, occasionally-ignorable, though genuine fear for many years.

At the time Jocasta heard the prophesy against her son, she was already married to Laius, and had she wanted to fight the prophesy with greater fervor, she might have sworn to never marry again. Nonetheless, when Oedipus delivered Thebes some twenty-five or thirty years later, Jocasta wed a man who was quite obviously born at the same time as her son and who bore a scar on his ankles consistent with the injury Laius inflicted on Oedipus shortly before abandoning him. While it is fair to think Oedipus ignorant of his true relationship to Jocasta, it is not reasonable to think Jocasta similarly unaware. While

she never makes such a confession in the play, we have reason to believe Jocasta knew who Oedipus was when they married.

At the time King Laius was murdered, his wife Jocasta had no other children, which spelled political calamity for Thebes. It is the slaughter of Laius which summons the Sphinx to the gates of Thebes, and we might imagine the Sphinx appearing outside the city shortly after the one survivor from the massacre of King Laius’ party reports his death to the Thebans. Seen one way, the Sphinx is a protector of the city, for Thebes is weak without a king and susceptible to foreign invasion. At the same time, the protector of the city is also the scourge of the city, for neither can anyone from Thebes leave, and thus the murder of Laius leads to the existential ostracization of the city. Creon, the brother of the queen, promises that any man who can deliver Thebes of the Sphinx will be made king, and while Oedipus has no way of knowing this when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, he was certainly made aware of it when he presented himself at the city gates, for he was the first outsider to come to the city after the Sphinx besieged it. Oedipus enters Thebes as a conquering hero, a messiah whose wisdom has saved the state. Had Creon not offered the throne to whoever solved the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus was nonetheless the people’s favorite and we may imagine his marriage to the queen was widely celebrated with genuine enthusiasm and relief.

What exactly is Jocasta to do? The man who has saved the city and hailed as a popular hero was born at about the same time as her own son, bears scars consistent with the wounds given to her own infant son and must certainly bear a resemblance to both Jocasta and her late husband. Besides this, while Jocasta was yet married to Laius, it was prophesied that she would marry again and that when she did, her son would be the groom. On the day she married Oedipus, Jocasta was certain enough that Oedipus was her son that she did not seek out the full truth of the matter. When Oedipus pushes for a full investigation into his own identity, Jocasta gives us some clue to her thoughts on the day of her wedding (lines 1164-1168, translated by Ian Johnston):

It’s best to live haphazardly, as best one can. Do not worry you will wed your mother. It’s true that in their dreams a lot of men have slept with their own mothers, but someone who ignores all this bears life more easily.

Other translations substitute “haphazardly” with “unthinkingly.” Perhaps Jocasta tells herself, “I have found no conclusive evidence Oedipus is my son,” though she is sufficiently worried to willingly avoid an encounter with

any evidence at all. But she cannot tell herself, “It is better not to know,” for she does know. In fact, Jocasta does not actually avoid evidence that Oedipus is her son. She simply doesn’t need any more evidence than she already has.

On the other hand, Oedipus knows nothing.

Oedipus is a murderer, but he is also a naif. However, this is not the Theban people’s impression of the great riddle-solver, and given his insults of Teiresias, we may also believe that Oedipus has always had a rather high opinion of his own wits. Still, Jocasta regards Oedipus as a child. Her first lines in the play (770-775) are a soft, but scolding rebuke of Creon and Oedipus, who are “arguing in such a silly way.” She instructs Oedipus to “go in the house, and you, Creon, return to yours,” just like a mother separating rival siblings.

Oedipus knows nothing, and thus on the day he arrived in Thebes as the conquering hero—son or not—he was a convenient solution to a political crisis.

Taken together, Jocasta and Oedipus bookend two apparently different ways of life: knowing and not-knowing. But Sophocles does not actually believe there is any real difference between the two.

When Oedipus is on the cusp of figuring out his own identity, Jocasta flees his presence and strangles herself to death within their palace. When Oedipus finally discovers he was Jocasta’s son, he blinds himself with brooches from her gown. Oedipus does not simply maim his sense of sight, but gouges out his eyeballs (1522-1526):

he raised his hand and struck, not once, but many times, right in the sockets. With every blow blood spurted from his eyes down on his beard, and not in single drops, but showers of dark blood spattered like hail.

Oedipus gouges out his eyes because they had never done him any good. Seeing is the king of the senses, the sense most associated with judgment and knowledge. Oedipus cannot tell himself, “If only I had known who Jocasta was!” for he has also discerned that Jocasta knew all along. Knowing and not-knowing both lead to the same impious and polluted end. There is some higher knowledge, some divine knowledge, and human beings simply have no access to it. While Oedipus styled himself as one who knew, he was blind all along. While Jocasta knows, she also strangles herself to death, and strangulation was the penalty for not knowing the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle. Both the maiming of Oedipus and the suicide of Jocasta collapse knowing and not-knowing into the same foul heap. The man who knows has no advantage over the man who does not know. All is vanity.

Come, Desire of Nations. Sophocles expressed the futility of earthly knowledge with such lucidity that St. John the Theologian had to repay him, and so the figure of Oedipus appears in the fourth gospel to be healed by Christ. Oedipus is the man born blind. An ancient tradition carries on to this day that the man born blind, whose healing is described in John 9, did not simply have no function or use of his eyes, but that he had no eyes at all. The reason for this tradition is quite obvious upon brief reflection. How would anyone know he was blind from birth, for newborns cannot announce their blindness? If the man had been born with eyes, yet his eyes had no function, no one would know until the child was old enough to speak for himself. The only way for anyone to know he could not see from birth is if, from birth, he had no instruments with which to see.

And yet the man is not referred to as “the man with no eyes.” In referring to him as “the man born blind,” St. John confers a double meaning on the man’s malady. The man who has “no eyes” has an odd medical condition, but the man “born blind” has a spiritual condition, as well, for blindness is just as much a problem for those with eyes. When Oedipus gouges out his own eyes, he is complaining to Apollo that all men are born blind, for there is no knowledge on earth which can save man from damnation. All earthly knowledge is vapor.

The apostles understand the Oedipal likeness of the man born blind and so they inquire into the nature of the Oedipal curse. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Or, rather, was Oedipus to blame for what he did? Or was his blindness the fault of Laius, who conceived a child against the commands of Apollo? So far as Oedipus is concerned, though, Christ finds fault neither with the son nor his father, for it was a demon who told Laius not to be fruitful and multiply. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” replies Jesus, a spectacular claim we are slow to believe, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” The story of Oedipus prods and provokes the coming of a real deliverer. Oedipus Rex is a contentious prayer, a glum manifestation of “the desire of nations,” as the prophet Haggai puts it. When men can freely com-

mune with the gods again, we will escape the Scylla of knowledge and the Charybdis of ignorance. Oedipus Rex is prophetic, not because Sophocles could see the future, for prophesy is not mere fortune telling. Rather, prophesies are the deepest and truest yearnings of the human spirit.

The man born blind referred to in St. John’s Gospel thus suffers a double malady, for he is both spiritually and physically blind, as was Oedipus at the end of his life. The story of his healing recalls the double restoration of another blind man, recorded in the eighth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel:

They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see men; they look like trees walking around.” Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

The story confuses many, for it seems at first blush as though Christ’s first attempt to heal the man is ineffective, but it is impious to think such things. Rather, the double healing of the Bethsaida blind man references the double healing of the Capernaum paralytic lowered through the roof to Christ (Mark 2). In this instance, Christ knows the paralytic’s friends want him to walk again, but the Lord instead says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Then, having intuited the outrage of the teachers of the law that he should say such a thing, Christ heals the paralytic’s body. For both the Capernaum paralytic and the Bethsaida blind man, Christ heals the soul first, then the body. When the Bethsaida blind man sees men “like trees walking around,” his spiritual sight is perfectly clear, for he does not see men as they are. He sees the telos of men, the purpose of men. He sees men so conjoined to their trees—their crosses—that the two cannot be perceived apart from one another. This is the higher

The story of Oedipus prods and provokes the coming of a real deliverer. It is a contentious prayer, a glum manifestation of “the desire of nations" . . . It is prophetic, not because Sophocles could see the future, for prophesy is not mere fortune telling. Rather, prophesies are the deepest and truest yearnings of the human spirit.

wisdom Oedipus thought unreachable. The three-legged man prophesied in the Sphinx’s riddle is not a man holding a cane. The third leg is the horizontal beam of the cross which is driven in the ground. Here is man’s true nature revealed.

Horror Revisited. When I catch my children in the middle of something I have expressly told them never to do, I ask, “What are you doing?” When I discover they have done something forbidden after the fact, I ask, “Why did you do that?” When they answer, they do not look me in the eye, but look away, as befits arrival at a stunning conclusion. They say:

I don’t know.

Over the years, I have encountered a certain kind of parent who, upon asking, “Why did you do that?” expects from a child an answer like, “Because I am a sinner,” however, I do not consider, “I don’t know” to be an excuse or a cop out, for I have absolutely no idea why I sin, either. The motive behind a crime is never the reason the crime was committed, for sin is irrational. Inasmuch as crime is sin, a motive is simply the last plausible thing a man recalls the demons saying before slipping into the formless black hole of evil. I have been confess

sins more times than I can count. I have delivered impassioned soliloquies to the audience of my soul, commanding myself to “remember the feeling of shame, embarrassment, and horror which beset you every time you do this.” I do not forget these soliloquies when I cave to temptation, for sin is based neither on ignorance nor on knowledge. Sin is arbitrary. Sin is real madness. I, too, have all manner of unmailed manila envelopes under the front seat of my car.

Christmas Blues Revisited. At some point in our conversation, I mentioned to my girlfriend that I had passed several years of high school infatuated with someone who, as it turned out, we both knew. The woman I was dating was, in nearly every way imaginable, the antithesis of the girl in question. She responded in surprised disbelief. Imagine what Iseult the Fair would say of Iseult of the White Hands. When Christmas break was nearly over, yet another argument ended when I was told, with great bitterness, that I ought to have been pursuing the White Hands all along. “I’m sorry I’m not perfect like her,” she said. By the end of February, our charade was ended.

Three years later, I married Iseult of the White Hands. One can never say where and when true prophesy will

Poetry Michial Farmer

Michial Farmer is one-third of The Christian Humanist Podcast and the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017). His essays have appeared in Pop Matters, Front Porch Republic, and America Magazine, and his poems in St. Katherine Review, Relief, and Curator, among other places. He is currently working on translations of the plays of the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Victoria.

APOSTLIB

Months afterward, she had, Burned into her lenses, A patina of light Shaped like his wings, so that She could compose her song, And her fidelity, From his afterimage.

In our age, the machine technician has supplanted the master woodworker. As a result, furniture is no longer crafted; it is produced. Even the materials are glued together from dust and scraps—pale imitations of nature. New equipment has created additional hazards such as the silent swirl of choking dust or the cyclone of metal teeth that would happily devour fingers—one slip pours a bloody libation to the goddess Safety. While modern methods may promote speed, objectivity, and replicable results, they can minimize human aspects of the craft: attention to detail, individual skill, or creative problem solving. Seeking to avoid dangers and regain sanity, some modern-day carpenters have sacrificed the machine’s efficiency for a new traditional approach, adopting the hand-powered tools and techniques of bygone eras. Similarly, classical education returns to ancient books and pedagogy in order to cultivate the human aspects of teaching.

Before ever touching a tool, a new traditional woodworker examines his material. Using hand tools forces the craftsman to slow down and read the wood’s poetry. The timber matters, for every tree has a story. Its grain is its history, and its growth rings reflect every storm,

Handmade Humanity

By Austin Hoffman

Idrought, and rain drop. He examines the grain carefully, noting its direction, its reversals and swirls. He may run his fingers along the plank, feeling for undulations and variations. He sights down the length of each board, checking for the tell-tale signs of twist, cup, and bow. The wood is so dynamic that, even severed from its roots, it seems alive. He might straighten it today, only to find it bent or twisted by humidity the next day.

Likewise, good teachers know and love not only their subjects but also their students. Understanding particular pupils, rather than a Platonic “pupilness,” demands time and a conscious effort to stop and see. The boy who spends ten minutes describing the bait and tackle used on his fishing trip may test attention and care, but he is worth both. Children are unique souls whose growth rings develop in real time, shaped by many people and circumstances. Their unwillingness to volunteer answers in class may be caused by interrogations at home after quizzes and presentations. Their test anxiety might be aggravated by their family’s financial instability. Students are complex beings who cannot fragment their lives across home, church, and school. The teacher who works to know his students honors their dignity as humans.

When shaping the wood, the carpenter adapts technique to material because he has learned the language

What age-old woodworking techniques can teach us about the class-

of his tools. He orients the plane’s every stroke with the grain of the wood. The sound and feel of the cutting saw give immediate feedback, influencing countless micro-adjustments. Chisels speak through the acute crack of splitting tenons or the dull thunk of time-to-sharpen. Because sawtooth geometry and blade angles are often adjusted to a particular task and wood species, working by hand teaches an experiential know-how. This kind of understanding only comes from “carrying the cat by the tail.” No two boards are alike, and no action can be perfectly replicated. The human process of inspecting a plank, navigating twisted grain, and adjusting technique is lost when every piece is milled indifferently by machine.

Understanding pedagogy as a human interaction allows teachers to adjust their methods to blank stares, uncomprehending comments, and distracting jokes amid the sincere inquiries. They follow bunny trails and avoid rabbit holes. Educators should learn which examples will bore or distract. Teachers constantly decipher student feedback to discern when to instruct and when to awaken. They then take ideas and incarnate them into the world of the student using inspiring language and relevant types. There is no Socratic discussion script or reproducible process; only wisdom practiced in real time. The organic interaction between master, pedagogy, and student is an apprenticeship not an assembly line.

Unfortunately, crafting furniture by hand is slower than rounding up Kindergartners from recess. The steady swish of the plane removes tissue-thin shavings. Ripping 8/4 maple turns arms to noodles and conjures the phantasm of an industrial table saw. Although pushing harder will not cut short the sawyer’s tribulation, what is sacrificed in time is restored in the human process. Orbital sanding only scuffs the card scraper’s glasssmooth finish, and machines can’t reproduce the uneven

symmetry of hand-cut dovetails. There is a wonderful economy in leaving secondary surfaces rough, and joy in feeling the scalloped underside of a dining table. The dimensions may not be engineered within .001 inch tolerance, but furniture isn’t made for robots.

Ends determine means, and cultivating wisdom and virtue is a human end requiring humane methods. Impatience clamors for a more efficient way to graduate mature students. Reusable literature quizzes are easy, while marking essays and giving personalized feedback is time consuming. The four choices on machine-graded, multiple-guess tests boast faster results, exact percentages, and objective standards, but mere technology cannot fabricate virtue. Instead, a teacher may engage the slow process of presenting myths and types—incarnations of the ideal or Tao—restoring the primacy of wisdom over content. Practicing dialectic cultivates moral reasoning through rambling discussions with more turns than the spinning-teacups ride. True education prepares students for a good life rather than job-readiness.

We face perennial temptations to dismiss hand-tool methods and to shelve classical books and pedagogy, but some still seek to preserve these traditions. Rather than representing a nostalgic longing for the past, these old ways work with the grain of our nature. Classic techniques—in the workshop and the classroom—can help preserve our humanity (and sanity). Trees aren’t manmade; they have growth rings, splinters, and knots that a craftsman must account for. Likewise, our slow labor of paideia involves fellow human beings, made in God’s image. Prioritizing intangible wisdom over the reproducible dignifies teacher and student alike as human beings. Both working by hand and teaching virtue are inefficient and immeasurable, but tradition recognizes their value. After all, no one passes down an IKEA rocking chair.

Ends determine means, and cultivating wisdom and virtue is a human end requiring humane methods.

Back Page Books

Selections from the editors

Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, by Josef Pieper

In this slim volume, the beloved German philosopher Joseph Pieper invites readers to contemplate beauty. Comprised of five essays that explore the aesthetic and moral virtues of leisure, music, sculpture, and poetry, Only the Lover Sings is Pieper at his most succinct and profound. Perhaps the greatest Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century, Pieper argues that art is inherently an endeavor rooted in love and that our capacity for delight is what propels us to the fullest expression of our humanity.

An avid defender of joy, Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings is a series of meditations on how beauty and celebration can mend our fractured souls. —Heidi White, managing

editor

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

This book, published in 2016 by Amor Towles, is delightful. Count Rostov is a young nobleman when the Bolsheviks seize power. Shortly thereafter, Rostov is put under indefinite house arrest at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. We spend years with this remarkable character as he behaves with humanity and nobility, enlivening his potentially monochromatic life and exposing the comic in the everyday. Towles’ elegant and playful use of the English language combined with his deft knowledge of history and Russian literature make it a captivating and satisfying read. Although A Gentleman in Moscow was written by an American, it feels as Russian as Rostov himself.

—Emily Callihan, copy editor

What I Saw in America, by G.K. Chesterton

Foreigners visiting America and then publishing their impressions of the country is a time-honored literary tradition, but few have done so with the frank friendship of G.K. Chesterton in What I Saw in America. The fruit of his 1921 voyage to our shores, this collection of essays documents the frequent bewilderment, occasional exasperation (at our preference for hotels over inns, and the general inhumanity of Prohibition), and deep affinity (especially with the rural, “medieval” Midwesterner) that Chesterton felt when he was here. He does not always see us as we wish to be seen, but he looks with charity, sees clearly, and helps us see truths about ourselves as only a friend could—all with his own trademark disarming humor. —Sean Johnson, associate editor

Strays, by Remy Wilkins

“Remy Wilkins was born on one side of the Mississippi River and lives on the other.” This first half of a brief dust jacket bio was enough to pique my interest in Remy Wilkins’ debut YA novel, Strays. Abandoned by his mother for the summer, Wilkins’ protagonist, Rodney, is drawn into a world where demons are (literally) coming out of the woodwork and he must discover whether Uncle Ray is dotty, deluded, or dabbling in demonic destruction. Wilkins’ imaginative dive into the ethereal world of celestial beings, deliniation of redemptive paths, and discovery of the power of a name are grounded by a sense of a real and specific place, by bunnies, bees, and baseball. You can feel the heavy humidity of the Alabama woods and the cool relief of the air rising off the river. Marrying the metaphysical and the mundane realities of a small Alabama town, Wilkins offers an engaging first effort for any young reader or family. —Brandon LeBlanc, sales director