Between the Lines The Academic Journal of Portsmouth Abbey School
Spring-Summer 2016 portsmouthabbey.org
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editors Without planning and structure, the written word loses its cohesion. Without inspiration and creativity, it loses its vitality. The task, therefore, of the writers featured in this publication, is to maintain the delicate balance of the written word, crafting works of substance and of art. We hope you enjoy the products of their effort.
George Sturges Jenny Yates Johanna Appleton Emmalene Kurtis Sydell Bonin Artwork: Max Bogan Faculty Advisor: Corie McDermott-Fazzino
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contents A Midsummer Night’s Dream Passage Analysis John-Jo Twomey ‘19 4
6 The Ethereal Opposition Kate Kelley ‘17
8 Navy in Newport Emmalene Kurtis ‘17
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Catholicism and the Search for SelfIdentity in Brideshead Revisited
Antonia Ambrose ‘16 27 Speaking Words of Wisdom: “Let it Be” Max Bogan ‘16
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream Passage Analysis John-Joe Twomey ‘15 “Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand And the youth, mistook by me, Pleading for a lover’s fee. Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (Shakespeare 3.2.112-7) Oberon’s servant, Puck, makes an astonishingly meaningful remark after seeing Helena and Lysander, under the effect of the flower’s juice, approaching. Although at first glance Puck’s jesting seems to concern the weakness of human passion, it reveals more about the fairies’ inhumanity than the lovers’ humanity. Unlike Titania, who also falls under the spell of the potion, the lovers exhibit passion long before the potion affects them; only the nature of this passion changes in this passage. The fairies’ distance from their baser passions and instincts manifests itself primarily in the relationship between Oberon and Titania. Although they remain married, and supposedly in love, they act far more selfishly than humans, even going so far as to humiliate and thieve from each other. The fairies represent a stoic philosophy far removed from love and its accompanying madness. Puck’s statement immediately reveals the idiocy of both love and the lovers’ actions, and yet the desire to love remains. Shakespeare directly insults the audience for loving and acting in the same manner as Lysander or Helena. Puck challenges the nature of love, and in the same instance challenges the loving human nature. Shakespeare uses this jibe as a literary device
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to distance the audience from the fairies’ inhumanity, as well as to elicit sympathy. Work Cited: Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square, 2004. Print.
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The Ethereal Opposition Kate Kelley ‘17
Existence necessitates opposition, reality forges contrast. Every aspect of Moby-Dick clearly opposes another: Ishmael’s love and openness with Queequeg counters the lacking relationship with inaccessible Ahab, the frigid post on the crow’s nest stands opposed to the warmth of a house. The unmitigated diversions between life and death underlie all contrast and outline the duality that emerges in Moby-Dick. The definitive distinction between life and death surpasses any other. The Pequod itself represents both; it keeps the crew alive, out of the frigid waters, and lives for the death of whales. The appearance itself, cloaked in the prizes of past expeditions disguise it as its only sworn enemy, “She was appareled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies” (Melville 70). Shrouded in death and teeming with life, the Pequot’s duplicity is matched only by that of the water. The murky medium through which the boat travels brings both life and death. Comparable to the river Styx, the ocean houses the most powerful creatures while also instantaneously capable of burying one in a watery grave. Water cradles the craft, yet augurs inevitable death to those who plunge beneath its 6
depths. The sea commands power over all that enter it, “No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the master less ocean overruns the globe�(Melville 224). The Sea both breeds life and strikes it down with unimaginable ease. The thin line between living and dying is constantly visible in Moby-Dick. Melville utilizes contrast to reveal the dueling natures within every aspect of his masterpiece. The crew traverses the deadly seas, kept just out of death’s reach, by a boat masked in bones. Works Cited: Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, Or, The Whale. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Print.
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Navy In Newport Emmalene Kurtis ‘17 Prior to the departure of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet from Newport in 1973 1, the city bustled with sailors and other Navy personnel along with their families. Following the withdrawal of the Navy from the Newport Naval Station in 1973, the community of Newport suffered intense economic depression and harbored anti-Navy sentiments yet slowly recovered with the will of the citizens of the city and developed the area into what it is known as today. The Newport Navy Base affected Newport in a myriad of ways before the pullout in 1973. The public schools on Aquidneck Island, including Newport, Middletown, and Portsmouth, were considered to be in “impacted areas”, meaning that they received federal funding as the children of government employees attended the public elementary, middle, and high schools. 2 As long as the majority of students were associated with the Department of Defense through their parents, the school systems would receive reimbursement from the federal government. Navy personnel often relocated their families to Newport and subsequently bought
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C. P. B. Jefferys, Newport A Short History. (Newport: Newport Historical Society, 1992), 75. 2 Barbara O’Leary, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 15, 2016.
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much of the residential property in the surrounding areas of Middletown and Newport.3 However, downtown Newport was not a “hot spot” for residential living as it was a stereotypical “rough Navy town”. 4 Many of the businesses along Lower Thames Street and Long Warf in downtown Newport were referred to as “Blood Alley” for the fights that occurred amongst the offduty sailors following a long night of drinking and socializing in the bars.5 Captain James Kurtis, MD, recalls the “broken noses and broken right arms” that would trickle into the Navy Medical Clinic where he was stationed from 1959-1961.6 Every port of call needs two staples: a dock/pier and bars. The bars and strip clubs, or “navy joints”7, were built solely for the sailors stationed at the Newport Navy Base and provided economic stability as they were extremely popular and placed in lucrative locations. The launch site that brought sailors back to their ships at the end of Long Wharf in Newport was crowded with openair bars and loud music overpowered the area.8 The rest of Newport was a “depressing Ghost town” with only two hotels (one including the Viking Hotel which is still in Newport) and no tourism, as the
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James Kurtis, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 18, 2016. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid 7 Barbara O’Leary, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 15, 2016. 8 David Defanti, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 15, 2016.
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Newport Mansions were not open to the public as they were still inhabited. 9 The Newport Navy Base was the primary civilian employer of Aquidneck Island. Almost 26,200 federal civilians worked in Rhode Island and Massachusetts with the majority working on the Base.10In addition to that, the Base home-ported 40 active warships each with more than 300 military personnel, making the number of active duty sailors upwards of 12,000. 11 With roughly 40,000 Navy employees living and working in Newport, the Navy presence overwhelmed the small town. On any given day, pods of 3 or 4 warships were commonly seen in the bay before the pullout.12 This constant sight reminded residents of the power the Navy truly possessed. In the 1970s there were three major communities in Newport: the year-round non-military residents (the smallest population), the summer colony(which grew each following year), and the Navy personnel (the largest population).13 The enormity of the Navy population and influence of
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James Kurtis, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 18, 2016. 10 “Assistance Programs for Displaced Federal Civilian Employees.� (Civil Service Commission Department Of The Navy, United States General Accounting Office Washington, DC, Oct. 18, 1974), i. 11 James Kurtis, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 18, 2016. 12 Rob Lewis and Ryan A. Young. Images of America: Newport Revisited. (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2001), 127. 13 C. P. B. Jefferys, Newport A Short History. (Newport: Newport Historical Society,
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the Navy Base was a major pulling force for companies specializing in manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military such as Raytheon.14 The company moved from Boston to Middletown in the 1960s to assist in the production of underwater technology in partnership with the Navy Base and students from the Naval War College. 15 This move solidified the influence the Navy possessed on Aquidneck Island. Everything changed in 1973. The Shore Establishment Realignment Act of 1973 removed the Naval presence from Newport. 16 It directed, not only the movement of the active fleet from Newport but the closing of the Quonset Point Naval Air Station, a drawdown of facilities at Davisville, and a cutback of personnel and activities. 17 The act also disestablished five previously independent commands and their personnel was absorbed by a new program called the Naval Education and Training Center (NETC). 18 This devastated the Newport Naval Station as it removed and relocated the most important aspect of the base: the military personnel. After 1973, Newport, as a community, was changed forever, both in the social structure of the town and the economy.
1992), 75. 14 David Defanti, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 15, 2016. 15 Ibid. 16 “History,� Naval Station Newport, Accessed May 15, 2016, http://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrma/installations/ns_ newport/about/history.html 17 Ibid. 18
Ibid. 11
Rhode Island indisputably suffered the most in the post-Vietnam military budget. 19 A direct example of this fact can be found in the Shore Establishment Realignment Act of 1973. This was put in place due to a need for a decrease in defense spending budget, a trend due to the Vietnam War winding down. 20 In the weeks leading up to the pullout, Navy officers voiced their alarm on the small number of “things” that seemed to be physically on the base, including: ships, planes, submarines, and other weapons. 21 The sheer shock of the legitimate withdrawal seemed to disturb everyone directly involved, even the Secretary of the Navy at the time, John Chaffee. 22 He is to have said that he had no idea about any of the actions being preformed on the base regarding removal or relocation of anything, personnel or items. 23Not only was Newport extremely small to begin with but the withdrawal of the Atlantic Cruiser and Destroyer Fleet from Newport in 1973 was the “largest proportionate reduction in military activities ever
“Defense Spending After The Cold War and The Rhode Island Economy A Preliminary Report,” (Department of Administration Division Of Planning, Office of Strategic Planning Providence, RI, Jun. 30, 1990.) 4. 20 Shapley, Deborah. “Navy Meeting Drifts on a Sea of Unanswered Questions,” Science 200, no. 4339(April 21, 1978): 282. 21 Ibid. 282. 22 James Kurtis, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 18, 2016. 23 Ibid. 19
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imposed on one state.” 24This was a double whammy, being a devastating loss to any area and also occurring in the smallest state in the country. 25 The sheer loss of personnel on the base was the largest proponent of the economic devastation that Newport suffered from following 1973. The active duty and Department of Defense civilian employment dropped from 42,000 in 1970 to 6,700 in 1974. 26This intense and rapid decline in population, a drop of almost 35,000, living in Newport wreaked havoc on the local economy as the main source of money input disappeared. Retail sales from February of 1973 to February of 1974 there was an approximate decline of 25 percent in Middletown and Newport, a direct consequence of the Navy’s departure.27 Not only did retail sales go down, but the public school systems no longer received federal funding as Aquidneck Island was not considered an impacted area after the Newport Navy Base was
“Defense Spending After The Cold War and The Rhode Island Economy A Preliminary Report,” (Department of Administration Division Of Planning, Office of Strategic Planning Providence, RI, Jun. 30, 1990.) 4. 25 James Kurtis, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 18, 2016. 26 “Defense Spending After The Cold War and The Rhode Island Economy A Preliminary Report,” (Department of Administration Division Of Planning, Office of Strategic Planning Providence, RI, Jun. 30, 1990.) 6. (see Appendix 1) 27 Ibid. 4. 24
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relocated.28The economic strain escalated to such an extant that the superintendents of the Newport, Middletown, and Portsmouth schools appeared before Congress asking for more money as many children of federal employees still went to the public schools on the island. 29 Overall, the Navy exodus resulted in a reduced cash flow into the state of nearly 300 million dollars per year.30 This created an economic depression in the years following the withdrawal in 1973. Socially, the community of Newport despised the Navy as it left. Anti-Navy sentiments were discussed in the papers as well as publicly displayed on lawn signs in front of houses similar to messages from the 1940s reading “No Dogs or Sailors Allowed on Grass”.31 A majority of businesses in Downtown Newport, specifically on “Bloody Alley”, needed to close as the launch sites were no longer used. 32 Property value decreased dramatically and many families moved away to the new location of their military member’s station while other moved away as Newport was not a sustainable place to live anymore. 33
Barbara O’Leary, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 15, 2016. 29 29. Ibid. 30 “Defense Spending After The Cold War and The Rhode Island Economy A Preliminary Report,” (Department of Administration Division Of Planning, Office of Strategic Planning Providence, RI, Jun. 30, 1990.) 4. 31 (See Appendix 2) 32 James Kurtis, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 18, 2016. 33 Ibid. 28
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One aspect of the Base unaffected by the active duty members leaving was the Naval War College. In 1974 both the Naval Station and the Base were disestablished and replaced with the Naval Education and Training Center (NETC). 34 Though there were many fears of the Base financially collapsing in addition to the city of Newport, additions to the training complexes on site compensated for the loss as it would draw more students to learn in Newport. 35 Also, thankfully, while the active military departed, all of the professors and education facilities remained in Newport.36 The War College was not directly affected by the Shore Establishment Realignment Act and still thrived as there was more space for students.37
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Lionel D Wyld, Images of America: The Naval War College, (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 1999.) 35 C. P. B. Jefferys, Newport A Short History. (Newport: Newport Historical Society, 1992), 81. 36 Ibid. 81. 37 James Kurtis, Interview by Emmalene Kurtis, May 18, 2016.
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Appendix:
1. Source: “Defense Spending After The Cold War and The Rhode Island Economy A Preliminary Report.� Department of Administration Division Of Planning, Office of Strategic Planning Providence, RI, Jun. 30, 1990. 5.
2. Source: James Kurtis, personal communications to Emmalene Kurtis, May 16, 2016. (edited)
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Bibliography: “‘Annual Report’ released: Navy impact here still great.” Newport Navalog (Newport, RI), Fri, Feb. 22, 1974. “Assistance Programs for Displaced Federal Civilian Employees.” Civil Service Commission Department Of The Navy, United States General Accounting Office Washington, DC, Oct. 18, 1974. Defanti, David. (Retired Raytheon Employee) Interview by Emmalene Kurtis. Personal Interview. Newport, RI, May 15, 2016. “Defense Spending After The Cold War and The Rhode Island Economy A Preliminary Report.” Department of Administration Division Of Planning, Office of Strategic Planning Providence, RI, Jun. 30, 1990. Foley, Robert P., A. Bruce MacLeish and Pieter N. Roos. Extraordinary Vision: Doris Duke and the Newport Restoration Foundation. Newport: The Newport Restoration Foundation, 2010. “History.” Naval Station Newport. Accessed May 15, 2016. http://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrma/installat ions/ns_newport/about/history.html Jefferys, C. P. B. Newport A Short History. Newport: Newport Historical Society, 1992. Kurtis, James. (Retired Navy Medical Captain stationed at Newport Navy Base) Interview by Emmalene Kurtis. Personal Interview. Portsmouth, RI, May 18, 2016.
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Lewis, Rob, and Ryan A. Young. Images of America: Newport Revisited. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2001. Mansfield, Stephanie. The Richest Girl In The World: The Extravagant Life and Fast Times of Doris Duke. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992. “Navy Ends Repairs Here.” Newport Mercury (Newport, RI), Fri, Oct. 5, 1973. “New Navy command replaces three old units here.” Newport Daily News (Newport, RI), Sat, Mar. 30, 1974. O’Leary, Barbara. (Daughter of Middletown Public Schools Superintendent: Joseph H. Gaudet) Interview by Emmalene Kurtis. Personal Interview. Newport, RI, May 15, 2016.
Santi, Federico. The Newport Naval Training Station: A Postcard History. Atglen: Schiffer Publishing, 2013. Shapley, Deborah. “Navy Meeting Drifts on a Sea of Unanswered Questions.” Science 200, no.4339(April 21, 1978): 282-283. Accessed May 16, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1745997. Wyld, Lionel D. Images of America: The Naval War College. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 1999.
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Catholicism and the Search for Self-Identity in Brideshead Revisited Antonia Ambrose ‘15 In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh builds a model of classic British aristocratic society, but with an ironic and metaphorical twist: the presence of Catholic faith. His characters, as seen through his narrator Charles Ryder’s eyes, all have vastly different personalities, but their faiths drive their relationship to Brideshead and society, determining their eventual end. Catholicism, the Flyte family’s one trait which originally lowers them in the esteem of Charles and their rapidly deteriorating society, ironically enables the family’s members to escape failure and Brideshead itself. Meanwhile, the failed, agnostic Charles remains, mourning both Brideshead’s demise at the hands of a new generation and his previous misunderstanding of the religion that has saved Julia and Sebastian, the two loves of his life. Through detailed characterization, deft first-person narration, and a wide array of metaphors, Waugh asserts the importance of personal faith in Julia and Sebastian’s success in finding self-identity and purposeful transformation and reveals success in faith as a metaphor for success in life, offering an ironic reflection on the negative transformations of his contemporary, non-Catholic British society in and leading up to World War II. Charles first meets the Flyte family through Sebastian, the less favored second son, a selfdescribed “half-heathen” (Waugh 99). Their friendship represents a sort of rebellious experiment for each of them, part of an Oxford lifestyle different from their family’s expectations. For Charles, choosing Sebastian directly rebels against his
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isolated childhood and bourgeois family as represented by his cousin Jasper, who specifically warns him to “Beware of the Anglo-Catholics” (27) while at Oxford. For Sebastian, the joy comes in possessing a friend completely alien to his family’s world and religion, the first thing in his life completely his own. He keeps Charles exclusively in his Oxford world for as long as he can, because, as he tells Charles, “All my life they’ve been taking things away from me” (39). Sebastian spends his life in a series of small rebellions against the power of his mother and religion, her chosen manipulative tool: different schools than his devout brother Brideshead, failure to practice Catholicism while at Oxford, befriending the agnostic, untitled Charles, a healthy relationship with his exiled father, and eventually alcoholism. Yet while Charles can easily escape into the “near heaven” (87) of their friendship, Sebastian cannot find true escape because, in his own words, “it’s very difficult being a Catholic” (95). To Charles’s dismay, Catholicism influences Sebastian deeply despite his avoidance of it and his family. The first book in Brideshead Revisited, set before Sebastian’s fall into alcoholism and departure, is titled “Et in Arcadia Ego,” a memento mori. In the metaphorical Arcadia of their friendship, however, Sebastian’s Catholicism replaces death as the negative presence in Charles’s eyes. Sebastian cannot question the essentials of his faith despite his rebellions against its semblances, responding to Charles’s dismissive agnosticism with “Is it nonsense? I wish it were.” (96). Sebastian’s inner crisis of faith helps to drive the despair of his search to escape, which Charles realizes: “Since Sebastian counted among the intruders his own
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conscience and all claims of human affection, his days in Arcadia were numbered.” (144). This realization leads Charles to hate Catholicism and the machinations of Lady Marchmain, who introduced it into the Flyte family. He tells Sebastian’s older, more devout brother Brideshead this, “It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.” (164). He eagerly takes sides in what he sees as a just war for Sebastian’s freedom, “I’m with you, ‘Sebastian contra mundum’,” (158), without considering that Catholicism might not be what Sebastian needs to escape, but what he needs to escape into, to embrace. Charles’s youthful absolutist hostility against Catholicism and its devotees in the Flyte family -- what he sees as a “deep and impassable division” (102) of beliefs, despite his clear attraction to their world -- prevents him from understanding that the welcoming comfort of Catholicism will save Sebastian from his despair. While both Charles and Sebastian have idealist tendencies that conflict with the cynicism of their changing society, Charles is limited by his stay within British society after Oxford and he continues to share its negativity. Ironically, despite his predicted lifelong unhappiness, Sebastian finds a peace that Charles never does after he leaves England for Morocco. Even more ironically, the religion that Charles believes crushed Sebastian becomes his final recourse. Free from familial pressure and responsibility, Sebastian can separate his religion from his family, and embrace his faith. Cordelia tells Charles after Sebastian’s departure that “I sometimes think that when people wanted to hate God they hated mummy... They can’t really hate God... They have to find something like themselves and pretend
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it’s God and hate that” (255). For Sebastian, this hatred conflicts with his deeper faith, and free from Lady Marchmain, his conflict ends. Charles, however, without a deeper sense of connection to Catholicism, continues to resent it long after Sebastian has faded from his life. Charles next falls in love with Sebastian’s sister, Julia, finding solace in her after the failure of his friendship with Sebastian. Both Charles and Julia have endured unhappiness in their adult lives within their increasingly challenging society, especially Julia: “The years had been more than ‘the sound of lyres and flutes,’ and had saddened her” (274). Unlike Sebastian, who remained tenuously connected to his Catholicism during his conflict with his family, Julia officially left the faith when she married, but still remained within the family circle. At first she bonds with Charles over a shared hostility towards religion as well as their society, telling him “I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us... But we’ve got our happiness in spite of them” (316). But like Sebastian, Julia holds the guilt of her conscience, which makes her recognize that the loss of her faith and her failed first marriage still matter, and this guilt haunts her, forcing her to picture “Mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more cruelly than her own deadly illness.” Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it (330). Charles cannot truly empathize with Julia’s pain because he lacks her deeper connection to Catholicism, and consequently shares none of her guilt about their wasted marriages and lack of purpose. His agnosticism and hostility to faith still limit him even after he sees Sebastian saved by faith: in narration, he describes himself as “unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending
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to be whole” (262). He cannot reach across the divide and share Julia’s struggle, and thus their relationship, like his and Sebastian’s, will end in her leaving him behind. Despite being unable to change them, Charles has learned his incapabilities from his relationship with Sebastian and fears losing Julia to faith as well as their relationship progresses. In his retrospective narrative, he compares this fear of the inevitable to a gathering avalanche, “The snow piling up against the door... till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine” (357). This avalanche begins to gather when Lord Marchmain, the original fallen Catholic of the Flyte family, returns to Brideshead to die. As Julia agitatedly watches her father die and the question of Catholic last rites begins to loom overhead, she begins to return to her family’s positive view of faith in search of comfort. Charles, however, turns to the opposite opinion, having respected Lord Marchmain for his previous rejections of Catholicism and his protection of Sebastian and Julia’s choices to leave the faith. His open hostility returns when the idea of Lord Marchmain reverting to Catholicism arises, angrily telling Julia that if her family and the Catholic Church “Claim him as a death bed penitent... I shall know that everything stupid people say about them is quite true-- that it’s all superstition and trickery” (374). She responds “What’s it got to do with you or me whether my father sees his parish priest?” (376), effectively shutting him out from being a participant in her family’s dealing with her father’s faith and from her own internal decisions about the future of her faith.
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Ironically, the rebirth of Julia’s faith occurs at the moment of her father’s death. After days of debate, she makes the decision to summon the priest, Father Mackay, when necessary, choosing her father’s salvation over Charles’s respect: “Without looking at me [Charles], [she] led him to the door” (389). In doing so, she also opens herself to the redemption that her father is receiving, beginning to face her guilt and return to happiness. Father Mackay tells Charles that “Christ came to call, not the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (388) when Charles attempts to debate the validity of Lord Marchmain’s redemption. At the moment of Lord Marchmain’s last rites, all the Flyte sinners have returned to their faith and repented: Lord Marchmain, Sebastian, and now Julia. Once the climax of her crisis of faith occurs, Julia must resolve the crisis of her failing relationship with Charles, which she does immediately after her father’s death. To fully embrace a future of faith, Julia breaks off her future with Charles, telling him: I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, he more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from his mercy. That is what it would mean: starting a life with you, without him... I saw today there was one thing unforgivable... The bad thing I was on the point of doing, to set up a rival good to God’s. (392-393) In articulating her decision to leave him, Julia also articulates the necessity of faith in finding a fulfilling life. In allowing herself to open up to her faith, Julia opens herself to the possibility of vocation, of purpose, gives herself a potential for happiness and frees herself from the guilt that has
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haunted her. She proves this newfound freedom’s worth when she adapts to a new lifestyle and vocation as Sebastian did, joining Cordelia in nursing once the war begins. In doing so, she successfully escapes the crumbling of Brideshead and her former society, leaving Charles to pick up the pieces. At the conclusion of the narrative, Charles wanders through a Brideshead made desolate by war, now complicit in the destruction of a place he once loved. He has sunk into depression, full of frustration at his life’s lack of purpose and the dislike he feels for the reigning “age of Hooper” (402). He takes refuge in Lady Marchmain’s chapel, physically surrendering to the comfort of faith he has denied himself and ridiculed his entire life. Now, surrounded by his ruined Arcadia and a fully pessimistic society, Charles finally sees the importance of hope, a hope found in Christ that both Julia and Sebastian left him to pursue: “a small red flame... The flame which the old knights saw... It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it... burning anew” (402). This hope, however, has come too late. While Charles still may convert and find some peace, he has already lost both love and success to his agnostic hostility, and has lost all purposeful interest in the only piece of self-identity he has left, the army, declaring that “something within me, long sickening, had quietly died” (6). Charles waited too long to risk taking the leap of faith that gave Julia and Sebastian their only chance at happiness, afraid to adapt, just as his generation stubbornly watched their strength decline until the war and a new more cynical generation overwhelmed them. This constitutes the deepest irony of the many in Brideshead Revisited:
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that agnostic modernism, adored by young idealists like Charles for its prioritization of individualism over traditional institutions, fails to provide him or his like-minded contemporaries with the happiness they sought. Instead, the only real source of meaningful identity and happiness resides in the Catholic Church: one of the oldest and most disliked institutions in British history.
Works Cited: Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. New York, Back Bay Books, 2012. Print.
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Speaking Words of Wisdom: “Let it Be” Max Bogan ‘16 Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, is set in a world waiting for salvation. All eyes look for the (sometimes metaphorical) second coming of Christ. Of light, of civilization, of knowledge, technology, and power. Instead, the world is subjected to the second coming of the Apocalypse. Miller introduces contrasting perspectives, ideologies, and values across a broad range of time and a diverse cast of characters. But in the end, all the wisdom of the world and the collective memory of the human race aren’t enough to save mankind from making the same decision in the 3100’s as it made in the 1900’s: mutually assured destruction. A Canticle for Leibowitz demonstrates that, no matter what state of technological development we achieve, humans themselves must change, or die. It is not enough to just be better at doing what we have already done; we must actively pursue new ways of thinking in order to survive. The characters that most represent the human condition, and who ultimately suffer the most, are also those characters most tied to the past and to human history. Brother Francis, his insatiable desire for discovery and knowledge repaid with an arrow through the skull; the Old Jew, waiting to taste death, and crushed by the burden of the sins of his people; even the Poet, at first presented as an eccentric and frivolous character, is revealed as a symbol of human fickleness and capriciousness with the allegory of his removable eye. None escape punishment.
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The very first scene of A Canticle for Leibowitz is set in a desert, both literal and metaphorical. The barren wasteland Brother Francis resides in, devoid of light and most life, cannot be separated from the similar state of humanity, nor can Brother Francis’ story be examined out of context. Who else sought knowledge above all else, and met a terrible fate while simultaneously dooming future generations (many centuries down the line)? Nobody and nothing in A Canticle for Leibowitz escapes the trap of time, but for Brother Francis, that time was the fifteen long years he dedicated to Leibowitz’s memory. Unable to let those years go, he returns to the forest with the ransom money (Miller 107), where he is killed and eaten by forest-dwelling mutants. For Brother Francis, discovery of the past did not kill him; worship of the past – his veneration of a saint long dead, and his desire to get back the faith he showed with years of his life – did. The Poet is another character killed for his efforts. Though his death is told from his own perspective, for the most part we see the Poet only as a plot point in a larger scheme. As Thon Taddeo remarks (Miller 186), the poet resembles a court jester, and just as King Lear’s fool, the Poet has little substantive character value, and is more prone to spout cryptic but ultimately insightful nonsensesounding prophecy than to reveal endearing (or even redeeming) personal qualities. Though the character seems free and impulsive, the Poet is an incredibly calculated presence. The Poet plays a dual role in Fiat Lux. He is a representative of all of humanity – morally questionable, generally annoying, and killed in the crossfire of politicking bodies (in this case, church and state). His most direct link to humanity is his
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longest running joke: the glass eye, which the brothers of Leibowitz call “the Poet’s conscience” (Miller 205). When they eye was in, he was prone to temperance, and might refuse a drink of wine however much he desired it. When he wanted to ignore a displeasing reality, or feign ignorance, he’d take out his “conscience,” and enjoy his vices guiltfree. The metaphor is explicitly applied to Thon Taddeo (Miller 205), in his willingness to overlook his problematic cousin Hannegan, but the joke is universal; everybody’s conscience is removable to a degree, the Poet is just willing to admit it. The Poet’s disposition mirrors human inconstancy and error, but his fate also parallels the fate of humanity at the end of Fiat Voluntas Tua. Poets are storytellers, students of legends and histories. They live, breath, and capitalize on woe and misery – the universal language of the human experience. And the Poet is portrayed as wise to that fact. He’s jaded and cynical, he doesn’t play by the rules. But for all his superior attitude and his initial indifference to a massacre, he just can’t stop himself from trying. He does the stupid thing – tries to play the hero (Miller 220) – as humans have done for millennia because their gut tells them maybe it will be different this time. The Poet painted himself objective and indifferent, thought himself shrewder than most, and more ready than most to do what it takes to survive. But so did the leaders of every nation that launched a nuclear missile, and it didn’t save them either. One of the most enigmatic and longsuffering characters in the book is the Old Jew, Benjamin Eleazar. Thirty-two centuries old by his own count, the Old Jew may or may not be the Pilgrim, and/or Lazarus, the street tramp. Miller leaves us to
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speculate, but regardless of age, the Old Jew takes on the burden of millennia. In his hilltop discussion with Dom Paulo, Benjamin reveals the strange psychosis that has plagued him all his long life. The Old Jew ties himself inextricably to the rest of his people, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. He sees his own person as inseparable from the population of Jews before him (Miller 157), and thus cannot separate responsibility for his own actions from culpability for every sin of his people since the fall of Eden. His identity is so dependent on the past, and on his heritage that he can’t stand to live in the present reality. He feels the pain of every Jew ever persecuted, the guilt of every sin any Jew committed, and he can’t forget, and he can’t forgive. Whether he lived with “the burden of a people and its past” (Miller 158) for eighty years or three thousand, as Dom Paulo reflects, it’s too much. Nobody could reasonably survive the trappings of humanity like that. Each of these characters is doomed by an inability to let go. These characters aim to be like the past, but better. They want the knowledge of past ages, but without the annoying little things that so easily accompany vast knowledge – arrogance, responsibility, guilt. Most focal characters in A Canticle for Leibowitz want so badly to be the improved version of humanity, that they justify making the same decisions over and over again, trying to follow humanity’s path to greatness, but hoping against hope that they’ll clear the last hurdle and somehow be the golden race, with all the benefits of past society but none of the consequences. This sort of romanticized nostalgia for civilization made great again, and then greater,
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blatantly ignores the reality of history, and therein lies the folly. The nuclear powers of the century 3700 – the Asian Coalition (Miller 227) and the Atlantic Confederacy (Miller 254) – are only the end results of centuries of humans struggling just to get back out of the new Dark Ages to the perceived ideal they knew before the Fallout: super-civilized, medically and technologically advanced, yes. But also primed for nuclear holocaust. Dom Zerchi, the presiding abbot of the ancient Leibowitz-ian monastery in Fiat Voluntas Tua, is actually incredibly aware of this cycle of humanity (Miller 245). “Playing the Pheonix,” as Zerchi puts it, humanity burns brightly for a while before being consumed by its own energy and reduced to ashes. He is one of the few characters in the book that realizes that more drastic changes are needed to break the cycle of hopeful progress and all-destroying ambition. To save the Order of Saint Leibowitz, he is prepared to uproot it entirely from the complex they have occupied for six centuries (Miller 246), and at the end of the book, the Order is the only known group of people to survive the second destruction of humanity on Earth. The only other glimpse we get of a possible survivor is Mrs. Grales/Rachel (Miller 308). The twisted relationship between Mrs. Grales and Rachel could be anything from an act of God to a freak accident of radiation, but what we do know is that Rachel is an innocent, religiously and otherwise. We don’t know the extent or severity of Mrs. Grales’ sins. But somehow – by the justice of heaven or the power or science – Rachel and Mrs. Grales are separate people, with separate fates and quite possibly separate souls. Rachel is untouched by whatever murky human sin Mrs. Grales carries with
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her, and in Zerchi’s opinion, she is something more than human; something unfamiliar and unrecognizable to the fallen world he and the rest of us live in (Miller 309). Rachel is an entirely different category of creature from Homo sapiens sapiens. She is a fresh start, square one. Zerchi sees her as an unfallen human being, a pre-serpent Eve (Miller 312). She is new to the world, and ignorant of the human race – she doesn’t even know how to interact in a traditionally human manner. She will not suffer the same Phoenix complex that afflicted humanity for so long. Rachel is pure. She is untainted by a recollection of the past, by prejudice or grudges. She is the antithesis of the political superpowers whose wars and greed brought about the end of the world twice. She represents a world in which ego, inequality, and mindless hate are not cultivated for the sake of productivity, as they are in the real world, and in Miller’s post-Fallout world, and she not only survives the explosion that killed Zerchi (the most change-oriented character in the book), but seems unharmed by it. She seems, in fact, to be vivacious, curious, and ready to learn and progress. The possible survivors of humanity’s broken-record-syndrome are a creature with the psychological maturity of an infant, but the moral potential of Mary herself, and a group of monks determined to leave behind not just a war, but their home planet in search of a new community that can really learn from the mistakes of Earth. It’s a pretty bleak picture, but if those survivors are so willing to avoid Fallout Round Three that they will literally leave the known world behind, then perhaps Miller is leaving us with a scrap of hope of different decisions and a smarter humanity, selected not by
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nature but by necessity. The iota of hope is hardly enough to ease our discomfort at the alarmingly relevant political and social issues that pervade the science-“fiction” world of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but it’s more than the shark got in the end.
Works Cited: Miller, Walter M. A Canticle for Leibowitz. New York: Bantam Books, 1961. Print.
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