“Thank you” would die on your lips
If you knew,
What pride and ambition and hate
I have had to fight in myself,
To earn it.[^1]

March has ended and I am not quite sure where it went. Did I write? Yes I did. Did I make music? Yes I did. Did I do either of those things as well or as much as I had planned? No. If there are 'creatives' out there whose output is steady and controlled, I am certainly not one of them. I have worked hard to develop 'bare minimum habits' that help me maintain some consistency, but on top of those habits my output has always been stormy. Sometimes it overflows, sometimes it dries up, and I have to dig a deep well with my fingernails to find anything. Lately the music well has been much more productive than the writing well (at least in terms of fiction). I do not think this is unnatural in the sense that humans are not machines, but it would be nice to have an even keel. Ultimately though, I can rest because I believe that my life is Not My Own, and there is freedom in that. I just have to remember it, and endure it.

Writing

I wish I could banish the guilt I feel when I think of how little progress I have made on the book. I did write a pretty long essay, but for some reason I just can't shake a sense of failure when I don't work on the book. E.B. White once likened the impulse to write something as having a storm cloud over one's head until the thing is written, and I resonate with that very much. I suppose I should stop feeling guilty and just recognize that these works that seem to appear over my head are just manifestations of the creative process; but I push back on that phrasing “just manifestations of the creative process,” because I feel that it cheapens the work. I will say that the Manliness essay was a cloud that had been hanging over me for years, and it felt good to finally dispel it. Writing is a fascinating process. Control over it (for me) is both a responsibility and an illusion.

Music

I have been playing and practicing quite a lot. I bought a new acoustic guitar, which I have 'needed' for a while. The neck on my old one is somewhat rough, which means it taught me a lot about proper technique and finger position, but come showtime was really limiting and nerve-racking. The new one, an Orangewood, is very nice for the price, and I am liking it more every day as I break it in. I almost immediately started recording (semi-officially) the Lit Songs album with it. I think I have gotten good enough with my microphones and production process that I can make very nice sounding demos, complete with drums! The challenge is really just finding time when the house is quiet (which is not often, with two young kids). I mostly record at night instead of playing video games, which is good, but also I need to sleep. I need to pace myself.

Reading

I read a lot for the podcast, namely Piranesi and That Hideous Strength and Borges (still editing those recordings). For fun, I have picked up Robinson Crusoe and The Divine Comedy. I have enjoyed That Hideous Strength and Robinson Crusoe the most out of those.

I have also decided to try and revive my Latin. For language learning, my main goal is usually just to be able to read. To that end I have been reading 死神永生 (Death's End) by 《刘慈欣》(Liu Cixin) for over about a year. I try to read one page a day, writing down words I don't know, then adding them to Pleco's flashcard function. I do think my comprehension is improving, but it is still far from where I want it to be. For Latin, I am restarting Gustatio Linguae Latinae. My wife is a Latin teacher, so I've got a pretty good motivational head start, and it has really been a lot of fun.

It is really amazing to me how video games have the power to inoculate so many of my life-giving impulses. I think it is because video games offer a facsimile of what they promise: skill building (learning a musical instrument), exploration (reading about a new place), immersion (learning a new language and reading primary sources), self-expression (writing). Please note, I do not think video games are evil, it is just that they can be easily abused out of all moderation. I have also been fasting from breakfast to dinner for Holy Week, and it has helped me realize just how many impulses for consumption I have, and how little I deny them. Those little snacks and cookies and glasses of milk add up, even though they are not harmful in themselves. And it seems to me that the modern adulthood our culture strives for is less about self control, and more about working ourselves into the ground for a life that doesn't require it. So many of the things we buy are for pure convenience and organization, so that we don't have to think or be responsible. AI is no different in this regard, and the commercials for it emphasize the fact that it can automate tasks that we have already striven to automate, so that we will just become Dostoevsky's “General Humans” or C.S. Lewis's “Men Without Chests.”

Well, until next time.

[1]: If I do not cite a poetry source, you can assume that I wrote it.

#update #April #2026

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

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“What is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”

— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.

When I was in college I decided to start a faith-based discussion group for men, about well, being a man. For some strange reason, I felt that it had to be very early in the morning, because getting up early was manly. In my campus-wide emails I also resorted to tasteless jokes about going out to chop down trees and break rocks with heads. Whatever this says about my social development is less relevant than the question that I was attempting to answer, however foolishly, with that group and those jokes: What does it mean to be a man?

This is a question that has tortured me since my adolescence, and tortures me still. Whether this essay will provide any relief remains to be seen. My small group, unsurprisingly, was not very popular, even with my Christian friends. Not many undergraduate guys were willing to get up for a discussion group that started at 6:30am on Friday mornings; or if they were willing, the flesh was weak. This does not mean that the group was a failure, because I had one regular attendee who I was able to talk quite deeply with, and I still think about him today. I was also told by a few people that they would have attended if it was at a less inconvenient time. This showed me that I was not the only one tortured by the question.

So, what does it mean to be a man? We will find out together, dear reader, whether I am any better equipped to answer this question than I was over a decade ago. But first I must define exactly what is meant by it. We could try to answer it by taking a survey of the men in our lives, and saying, “These examples show what it is to be a man.” But despite confounding us with wildly different conclusions, this method also reveals to us our bias. I think that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, have already taken a survey of the men in our lives, and the results have made us uneasy. That the question occurs to us reveals an insecurity about manhood that cannot be assuaged by the simple truth that no men are perfect. We would not be asking if there wasn't something resembling a real crisis. What I believe we really mean to ask is, “What does it mean to be a good man?”

In order to save myself and my readers a great deal of confusion and time, I will confine myself to defining “good manhood” in the context of two relationships that a man forms in his life. The first is a man's relationship to society, and the second is a man's relationship to women. I must also point out that my perspective as a straight, white, Christian man shapes this conversation, because in these great gray social topics, it is only our own examined experience that counts, as flawed and subjective as it is. If you would like to discount the application of the following words because of that, go right ahead, this is just one man's attempt to deconstruct and redeem his gender, and keep it interesting.

I must also note that these two relationships leave a great deal of territory open and unexplored. This openness of the question is partly why it is so torturous. The feeling a man gets, when he surveys his life and the lives of the men around him, is that we have all been pushed out into a roiling sea with no map. If we have been given compasses, they all point in different directions, because postmodern society, in destroying (perhaps rightly) the traditional framework of manhood, has not troubled itself to supply a replacement. If we take data about social outcomes and measures of happiness as a compass, we may end up 'better' in life, but we will have no way to describe why it is, in fact, 'better' to be socially and economically stable and happy about it. And we must be very careful to know what we mean when we talk about social and economic success. Is that stable job with a good income, in fact, ethical? Is the stability it provides in allowing you to give a comfortable life to your family worth more than the lives that the corporation or company you work for may or may not be destroying? If you do have an ethical job, are you hacking at the leaves of evil or the root of it? Does it pay well? Are you sacrificing your own well-being and time with your family to be a justice hero? Why are teachers paid less than lawyers? Are you involved in the lives of your kids? Is that involvement positive or negative? What about your wife or partner? Do you still cherish and value them? Do they love you? When was the last time you looked at porn? How wrong did it feel? Even if you have never looked, when was the last time you fantasized about another partner? If you are not the breadwinner, do you do your share of chores? If you do, does your partner have to remind you to do them? Do you do them well? Could you sleep easy at night if you were not the breadwinner? If you are a bachelor, do you clean your room? Can you cook? Do you care? When was the last time you volunteered for charity? Why is that relevant? Does anyone take me seriously? What makes life worth living? Do you feel lost yet?

This spiral of rhetorical questions is an example of the spiraling questions that torture me as a result of the first question. It feels almost impossible to say anything definitive, because any of the positive statements I might derive from the men that I admire—”Real men are patient.” “Real men are humble.” “Real men restrain their violence.” “Real men use their strength for the good of others.” “Real men sacrifice themselves for others.“—can also be applied to women. Is there anything gendered about patience and humility and strength and sacrifice? Indeed, if we take an honest look at the roles women have been forced to play throughout history, a patient and honest man should be somewhat overawed by the patience and humility and strength and sacrificial love of women. And even if we admit that men are, in general, physically stronger than women; how does that help us? Please do not misunderstand me. I believe that there are key differences between men and women, but I do not believe they are as easily defined as I once did. I do, in fact, do chores differently than my wife. One can tell the difference between how I fold laundry and how she folds laundry. But those differences are irrelevant. What is relevant is that so far from men and women changing, it is our society that is constantly shifting and changing around us, so that we must define ourselves in the face of the claims it makes. Society is the “atmosphere” of which Virginia Woolf speaks in Three Guineas:

“Odour then—or shall we call it 'atmosphere'?—is a very important element in professional life; in spite of the fact that like other important elements it is impalpable. It can escape the noses of examiners in examination rooms, yet penetrate boards and divisions and affect the senses of those within [...] It is true that women civil servants deserve to paid as much as men; but it is also true that they are not paid as much as men. The discrepancy is due to atmosphere” (Woolf 95).

For Virginia Woolf in 1938, atmosphere was denoted by the resistance that women faced when trying to enter the the professional spheres from which they had traditionally been denied access. As a straight white man in 2026, I cannot fully understand that atmosphere, but I will be bold enough to say that the bewilderment I tried to illustrate with so many rhetorical questions is how I perceive the atmosphere that men live in now. It is perhaps not as potentially damaging to the mind and body as the atmosphere that people of other genders live in, but that is not for me to say, and I do not think a competition about who has it worse would be productive. All metaphors have limits. We would do well to keep those limits in mind as we move from this long, confused preamble, to the body of the essay.

Man Vs. Violence: The Iron Giant

The Iron Giant is a 1999 animated film about a robot who crash lands off the coast of Maine during the Cold War. The Giant suffers damage to the head, and is diverted from its original purpose of destruction. The principal human character, a boy named Hogarth, discovers the Giant near his house and befriends him, but the military comes to investigate the crash landing, and Hogarth finds himself trying to hide the giant.

We are given two men (other than the Giant and the general) to compare in this movie. Dean, a beatnik junkyard sculpture artist; and Kent Mansley, the government agent investigating the crash. Hogarth's father died before the start of the movie, so it can be said that he is searching for a father figure. He is also living in an atmosphere of fear. The students are 'educated' in class with a film that superimposes a mushroom cloud over a peaceful town. “Suddenly,” the narrator says. “Without warning, ATOMIC HOLOCAUST.” From Kent, the rude, take-charge, slugger/bucko/chief/champ, we are shown the 'manly' response to fear of the Unknown Other. He says, “Who built it? The Russians? The Chinese? Martians? Canadians?! I DON'T CARE! All I know is we didn't build it, and that's reason enough to assume the worst and blow it to kingdom come!” This quote reveals that Mansley's fear, masquerading as bravado (he steals cars and ogles women and threatens to separate Hogarth from his mother in the name of national security), is based on the fear of losing power. This is the familiar demon that drives competition among men and the basis of that buzz-phrase, 'toxic masculinity.' Whether based on the violence of our ancient past or not, I have observed that, in general, boys are groomed to train in violence. And if not violence, some skill or specialization that can be used to gain or defend power. This, I believe, is why so many video games (most of which, in the early days, were made by men), involve fighting and big boobs. Why were atomic bombs built? To defend power. What justifies cruelty in conquest and racist policies? The defense of power. Viewed from this perspective, it is no surprise to me that white men have been the main perpetrators of the toxic male defense of power, because they have been the principal beneficiaries of that power. This is what I believe is driving the cruelty of Trump's politics, as well as the complicity that allowed him to get where he is.

James Baldwin once pointed out that the majority is not the group that is most numerous, it is the group that has the most influence [^1]. In other words, white men are afraid because our influence is eroding, and our cruel and cowardly politicians are desperately trying to hold onto it. When I watched this movie with my wife, she commented that Kent Mansley is a little unbelievable. After all, he disobeys direct orders after the general realizes that the Iron Giant only reacts to violence, and orders a nuclear strike on his own location. But having observed men throughout my life, and having observed the self-destructive impulses in myself, I can easily (sadly) imagine a Mansley. “I can do anything I want, whenever I want,” says Kent. This is the unspoken belief that drives the actions of even the most gentle of men. The fear of losing the license to do whatever a man wants is what leads to complicit passivity and self destruction. It is only by confronting and defeating this fear, over and over, that a man can walk the path to true manhood.

I must also take time to point out that so many of the movies and video games and books that we imagine to be found in man caves are full of heroes who are defined by their ability to commit violence. Heroes like John Wayne, John Wick, John McClane, John 117 and all the other non-Johns that are really various incarnations of Odysseus would not be in our media if they didn't have some violence to commit. The noblest of them use their violence to protect the innocent, and there is certainly nobility in putting oneself in harm's way, but it bears pointing out that it would not be necessary for them to do so if men were not so violent in the first place. Haley Bennet's character in Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent Seven would not have to say “These men are here to help us,” if there were not already hundreds of men there to kill and rape them. I like watching Denzel Washington dish out justice as much as the next guy, but we must not lose sight of why that dishing out of justice feels so cathartic, and where it might lead us. In fact we can see where it has gotten us. The cowards who find their way to power spend trillions of our tax money on instruments of murder and death that they can drop on people from three thousand miles away. They are not putting their lives on the line when they can buy a Rolex and pretend to be James Bond. And so far from having a just cause like Sam Chisolm's, their cause has mostly been money. Perhaps, because I cannot muster enough empathy to understand their actions, the root cause of it is a Mansley-like terror that the great stolen horde they are sitting on could one day be stolen back, and they are willing to do anything to keep it all to themselves. What a pathetic way to spend one's life. What a pathetic failure of manhood, which ought to be marked by a willingness to sacrifice power for the beloved community.

The other man we are given to examine is Dean. He owns the town junkyard, is something of an artist, listens to jazz, drinks espresso, stays up late, has a cool bathrobe, lets Hogarth and the Iron Giant hide out at his place. He's cool, man. Dean is a counterpoint to Mansley, and as a white man on the lower echelons of privilege, he is able to show a better reaction to the threat of violence and the loss of power. When Hogarth spills his insecurities after drinking Dean's espresso, Dean responds with decent advice, “Who cares what those creeps think, you know? They don't decide who you are, you do. You are who you choose to be.” This advice is more relevant to the Iron Giant's journey, but it also reveals the all-important fault in the Mansley way of life, which is that a man does have a choice. As Steinbeck so gloriously represented in East of Eden, “Thou mayest” is the antidote to sick fear and cowardice. Yes, confronting the fear of losing power means confronting the fear of death, but we must all face death whether we want to or not. “Ultimately,” wrote Martin Luther King, “One's sense of manhood must come from within him.”[^2]. But Dean is not the most heroic representation of this confrontation because he is not the hero of this movie, the Iron Giant is.

When we first meet the Iron Giant he is devouring a power line near Hogarth's home. Hogarth is home alone because his mom has to work late, and hearing the noise, the boy picks up his BB Gun and goes to investigate the noise. The Giant gets tangled in the lines and seems to be in pain. Hogarth starts to run away but decides to help him by flipping a lever to turn off the power station. In the scuffle, Hogarth drops his gun and the Giant stomps on it before passing out and waking up. This crushing of the gun is symbolic for the Iron Giant, because the Iron Giant, quite literally, was supposed to be a gun. He comes from an alien planet and later in the movie he decimates the US forces with futuristic weaponry. But because he was damaged, and because of his relationship with Hogarth, the Iron Giant realizes that he can choose who he wants to be. Perhaps the most affecting scene that explicitly confronts violence is the scene in which Hogarth and the Iron Giant meet a deer in the woods. The Giant is moved by the deer's beauty, but a few moments later we hear a gunshot, and the deer is dead. Two hunters come and are terrified by the Iron Giant. One of them drops his gun as he runs away. Hogarth explains that the deer is dead, that he was killed by a gun. Later that night Hogarth and the Giant have a heart to heart about death:

HOGARTH: I know you feel bad about the deer. But it's not your fault. Things die. It's part of life. It's bad to kill. But it's not bad to die.
IRON GIANT: You die?
HOGARTH: Well... yes, someday.
IRON GIANT: I die?
HOGARTH: I don't know. You're made of metal...but you have feelings. And you think about things. And that means you have a soul. And souls don't die.
IRON GIANT: Soul?
HOGARTH: Mom says it's something inside of all good things... and that it goes on forever and ever.

It is the Iron Giant who is confronted with the choice between violence or death. His programming tells him to destroy, and he is ultimately the strongest 'man' in the world of the movie. He could, if he chose, completely conquer the world. But Hogarth convinces him to reject his violence. The climax of the movie then builds, as Mansley disobeys orders and tells the ship to launch the nuke, and the Iron Giant chooses to collide with it in the air in order to save the town.

Shortly before this climax, Hogarth and the Iron Giant are playing in the junkyard. Hogarth is pretending that the Iron Giant is Atomo (a robot sent to destroy earth). Hogarth uses a toy gun and it activates the Giant's weapons, and he fires a laser. Dean saves Hogarth and yells at the Iron Giant, calling him a “big gun.” The Giant tries to refuse, but he is scared of hurting Hogarth and runs away. We cut to two boys on a roof on the lookout for the giant metal man. The railing breaks and they fall. The Iron Giant makes a diving catch to save them in the middle of town. When Hogarth and Dean find him, the Giant smiles and says, “I am not a gun.”

I cannot tell you exactly why this line stuck in my mind for so long after watching the Iron Giant for the first time as an adult, but I think I can now. As I envision what happens immediately after the Iron Giant says this (he is shot in the back by a tank), I feel as though I am watching a vision of what it feels like to be a man with good intentions. The world, as much as we would wish it were not so, does not exist to validate our dreams and best hopes. The world of men is mostly indifferent and randomly hostile. Moved by my better angels, I have made declarations of intent, only to be shot in the back and induced to reach for my weapons (for me, some plan to be profitable and the comfort of video games or worse). This is the same note that resonates with me when I watch Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, in which a guitar player (a mariachi) is induced to pick up a guitar case full of weapons instead of his instrument. Goodness and beauty do not simply come about, they are fought and sacrificed for. They are missed by fateful decisions which rely on safety and the lie that the highest good we can do for our families is make them comfortable and happy. They are sacrificed for in the middle of the night, in the most mundane ways, by giving up what you and the world once thought was glorious. Normal guys like me don't get to go out by blowing up a nuke (I hope?), and one of the hardest struggles I have faced (embarrassingly), is admitting just how much I want the glory of doing something as impressive and heroic and easy to praise—and giving that up for goods that are far greater than glory.

We are off the rails now, blown apart in the pieces of my life experience, much like the Iron Giant at the end of the movie. But now, let's try to bring those pieces back together. It is time to turn to Jane Austen and Mr. Darcy.

Man Vs. Woman: Mr. Darcy

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”

— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Ch 27.

If we are confused by a man's relationship to society, there would seem to be little hope that we can find ourselves in his relationship to woman. What topic has been written about, dreamed about, sung about, lied about, more? But enough excuses. Why, of all people, are we turning to Jane Austen? Perhaps it is because outsiders are sometimes the most suited to bring insight to a muddy relationship. Perhaps because Mr. Darcy is famous. He, by the most warped of all consensuses (memes), is an ideal man. Why? It is because Mr. Darcy, when confronted with evidence of his pride, takes proactive steps to fix himself and his harmful actions.

When we first meet Mr. Darcy there is no doubt of his pride. He snubs Elizabeth at a ball and passes the evening rather grumpily (Ch 3). Darcy is described as “haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and his manners, though well-bred, were not inviting” (Ch 4). Through a series of misunderstandings, Elizabeth comes to despise Mr. Darcy almost as much as if he were her worst enemy. She hears and readily believes rumors that he disowned his innocent god-brother, she is disgusted by his cold and haughty manner in their social interactions, and she is utterly shocked when he proposes to her. It is important to note that Elizabeth's family, though not poor, is in need of a male heir because the father's estate is entailed. His five daughters, none of whom are allowed to inherit the estate, will be destitute if he dies without a male heir, and he and his wife are now too old to consider trying again. Since Mr. Darcy is exceedingly rich, many a woman in Elizabeth's position might have sacrificed her happiness for her family. But she is our heroine, and she is also somewhat prejudiced:

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense” (Ch 24).

She refuses him outright. Indeed, even a woman prepared to sacrifice her happiness would be put off by the way Darcy presents his proposal. “His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgement had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.” It is in spite of his better judgement that he proposes; in separating the kind (and also rich) Mr. Bingley from Elizabeth's sister, he “has been kinder to his friend than himself”; he asks (not unjustly, for Elizabeth's mother and younger sisters are quite ridiculous) if he should be expected to rejoice in the hope of relations “so decidedly beneath” his own.

There are not many readers who do not sympathize with Elizabeth when she refuses Darcy, but when we learn from Darcy's letter the truth about his god-brother (a prodigal who tries to seduce Darcy's teenage sister for the fortune), things get more complicated. Add to this the fact that Darcy's behavior is not so rude as it seems to our culture. Darcy, like Elizabeth, is surrounded by rather ridiculous and haughty acquaintances (except for Mr. Bingley). And his grumpiness might be caused by a perception of just how preposterous British aristocratic society was. As a very rich man, he would probably have been treated with a great deal of flattery and sycophantic adoration (typified by the attentions of Ms. Bingley). His attraction to Elizabeth seems to be based on her willingness to converse with him honestly and intellectually (and her “fine eyes”). I say seems because Austen, like Shakespeare, leaves a great deal of interpretation up to the reader. To me, it seems that Elizabeth engages him on subjects that he has never been able to talk about with anyone else (Ch 11). This kind of intimacy is “dangerous” because it is the type of intimacy on which true connubial felicity is founded. But at the time of his proposal he is still too proud not to assume that Elizabeth would be happy to say yes. Her refusal exposes himself, to himself. And he is probably saying, at the same time Elizabeth is saying, “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (Ch 36).

The self knowledge that intimacy with another can prompt is one of the greatest benefits of marriage. It is also one of the greatest destroyers of marriage, for if either partner is not prepared to change and admit their own faults, they will drift away because the other partner will be a reminder of that fault that they wish to run from. What makes Darcy remarkable as a male literary figure is that he allows this encounter to change him. When Elizabeth meets him later by chance, on a trip with her aunt and uncle, his manners are remarkably warm. He is friendly and deferential to people “decidedly beneath” his own station. He invites her uncle to fish, and leaves Elizabeth (who also allows intimacy to change her) somewhat astonished. “It cannot be for me, it cannot be for my sake that his manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not work such a change as this. It is impossible that he should love me” (Ch 43). Then comes the climax, in which Elizabeth's flirty younger sister elopes with Darcy's awful god-brother, and Darcy saves her by a significant sacrifice, a sacrifice which he wishes to remain secret and for which he expects nothing from Elizabeth.

Mr. Darcy is legendary because he shows very simply just what love for a woman can mean for a man:

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit... Such I was, from eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased” (Ch 58).

So far from being an unrealistic ideal (except for the money), he is a picture of how men really ought to act (accounting for differences of culture and personality) towards a woman. While it is true that two partners in a healthy relationship ought to give, it is very important that love be given without expectation or record keeping. Elizabeth, indeed, is also changed and allows her love to forgive and honor Darcy without compromising her ideals. This is, I think, really what that most misquoted of Apostles meant when he wrote “submit to one another,”[^3] for 'submission,' perhaps not the best translation of the Greek word, is one of the highest forms of love. Just as two partners in a dance must yield even as they propel and support each other, so must lovers.

Man Vs. Himself: Sacrifice and Active Love

“I can give her everything, but not my male independence.”[^4]

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

Where does this leave us? What conclusions can we draw? What does it mean to be a good man? The only theme I can draw from our survey of The Iron Giant and Pride and Prejudice is the theme of sacrifice. The Iron Giant sacrifices himself and his violent purpose to save Hogarth and the town, and Mr. Darcy sacrifices his pride to properly love Elizabeth. This is an ancient theme, that might not bear repeating if it were not so necessary to repeat. We have come a long way, and part of the crisis of manhood that we can all smell is, I think, the subconscious terror that men feel when they sense that the foundations of society that once upheld their Power and their Pride are crumbling. Perhaps now that there is less power and pride to give up (though we still have a long way to go), it is the concept of manhood itself that must be sacrificed.

When I was in high school, I was a big fan of the original NCIS with Mark Harmon's Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Gibbs, though not exactly macho, is nonetheless something of a man's man. He catches criminals, works on boats in his basement, and only drinks black coffee. There was something about the image of him that I wanted to emulate, so when I started drinking coffee I drank it black. Did I like it? Quite honestly, not really, but I stuck with it and still drink it black today. This is the power of 'atmosphere,' it quite literally changed my taste buds. How much more powerful can it be, then, when we consider issues more important than taste. What can this atmosphere do to how a man treats women, where he goes to work, who he seeks friendships with, and what he values? Atmosphere, in shaping these things, has the power to shape almost the entire course of a man's life. But only if we let it.

When I say that the concept of manhood must be sacrificed, I do not mean that all concept of gender ought to be thrown out. There are physiological differences that we ignore at our own peril, but these differences have nothing to do with what we wear or where we work or how much we can bench press or who cooks dinner or who does the laundry or what sort of movies we watch. So much of what has been spoken of as 'manhood' throughout my entire life has been entirely cultural. When I say that the concept of manhood must be sacrificed, I mean that a man ought to do things simply because they are the right thing to do and not because they validate a meaningless social vanity.[^5] This means that I ought to care for my family as best as I am able because I love them and it is my duty as a parent. This means that I should place the needs of my wife's body over the needs of my own. This means that not being the primary breadwinner should not be a source of shame. I have struggled for years with my self esteem as a stay at home parent because I did not realize how much I wanted a career until I didn't have one. All I can say is that because the culture I move in accepts Moms into the role of homemaker more readily, I have found myself between worlds, and I would be lying if I said I did not have to face my envy and strangle it far more frequently than I would wish. Every friend and acquaintance I have talked to concludes that being a stay at home Dad is really noble and practical for our situation, and indeed this is a conclusion I have come to over and over, but knowledge and true belief are two different things. Knowing that the air is bad does not help you breathe in it. This is why I say the concept of manhood has to be sacrificed. This does not mean trading in your truck for a minivan, but asking yourself, every time you must move in the atmosphere of culture, why am I doing this? Do I really want this thing? Do I really enjoy this activity? Is my sense of self worth coming from outside of me, or from within?

In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf points out the ridiculous outfits and baubles that the military (and then a strictly male) world uses to distinguish itself: “Your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers.” She also does not fail to include the academic world, with its robes and wigs and titles, and illustrates the vanity of men by providing a counterexample: “A woman who advertised her motherhood by a tuft of horsehair on the left shoulder would scarcely, you will agree, be a venerable object.” She then concludes that the best way for women entering professional life to discourage war (a major topic of her essay), is to “refuse all such distinctions and all such uniforms for ourselves.” In a similar way, I believe that the path to true manhood is the refusal of meaningless distinctions and uniforms. Whether they be video game skins, medals, watches, clothes, trucks, social media statuses, likes, competitions, hobbies, Strava times, podcast views, church leadership positions, or Magic decks. In short, any thing, even any good thing, that a man can use to give them self the appearance of good needs to be examined and held with an open palm.

The second, and perhaps more practical application, is the importance of rejecting passivity. The Iron Giant restrains his violence, but he chooses to expose himself in order to save the kids and the town. Mr. Darcy, rather than letting things run their course, actively fixes his mistakes without prompting from anywhere but his own conscience. I believe that cowardly passivity has been the cause of more evil than any other sin. Where was Adam when Eve was with the snake? Structures of oppression have been allowed to persist because millions of men have silently watched and gone with the flow. Only when the current deposits them in a stagnant pool, and they realize that their cowardice might be exposed, does the bottomless terror grip their stomachs and propel them to desperate cruelty. To be a man is to sacrifice vain desires and to love actively. As a father, I believe it is my duty to seek out my kids, engage them, and teach them the values that are important to know before they ask. This is to be done with love, gentleness, and full respect for their humanity and agency. If they do not have the skills or the moral fortitude to engage with the world by the time they graduate high school, I bear a great deal of the blame. To be a man is to prevent disasters before they happen, and not expect a medal for it. In my role as a husband, I am to seek out my wife not for comfort or validation, but to love and honor and woo her as a woman “worthy of being pleased.” As a citizen, it is my duty to engage with society and act for its benefit instead of trying to squeeze everything I can from it. These concepts of sacrifice and active love can be applied to friendships and family. Indeed they must be applied by the man to his own life, because no one else can do it for him. It is, tragically, much easier written than done, requiring constant humility and grace. For me, this involves a great deal of prayer and grit, in order to pick myself up and keep trying when I fail over and over and over. But it must be done if a man is to reclaim a sense of manhood that comes from within, and by living and breathing out that sense of self, change the atmosphere that has stifled all genders for so long.

Footnotes

[1] “Now, what I have been trying to suggest in all this is that the only useful definition of the word “majority” does not refer to numbers , and it does not refer to power. It refers to influence.” You will notice that I use influence and power somewhat synonymously. I believe Baldwin was trying to make the distinction that whoever is “in power” (elected or un-elected officials) is not necessarily the one with the influence. For the scope of my essay, I think that my point has been made. Majority does not have to do with numbers or even representation, but with who can influence the decisions of those in power.

[2] “I think the aura of paramilitarism among the black militant groups speaks much more of fear than it does of confidence. I know, in my own experience, that I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that, as a teacher of philosophy of nonviolence, I couldn't keep a gun, I came face to face with the question of death and I dealt with it. And from that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Ultimately, one's sense of manhood must come from within him.“

[3] Ephesians 5:21: “...submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.“

[4] This line is thought by Vronsky, the man that Anna leaves her husband for, when Anna is starting to become jealous. Vronsky is unable to give up his “male independence” to be a truly devoted partner.

#essay #JaneAusten #TheIronGiant #VirginiaWoolf #JamesBaldwin

Well if you read to the end, thank you so much! I have been meaning to write this essay for years, but wasn't quite ready for it. It feels to good to get it out. If you liked it, and would like to be notified when I write more, please subscribe to my newsletter:

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Bibliography

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Act II, Scene 2.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Hogarth Press, Mecklenburgh Square, London, 1943. Accessed on Internet Archive.

The Iron Giant. Directed by Brad Bird, Warner Bros. Feature Animation, 1999.

Baldwin, James. “In Search of a Majority: An Address.” Nobody Knows My Name. Collected Essays. Library of America, New York, NY, 1998.

The Magnificent Seven. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, 2016.

Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. Penguin Group, New York, NY, 2002.

King, Martin Luther Jr. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. “A Testament of Hope.” Harper Collins, 1986. Page 323.

El Mariachi. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Los Hooligans Productions, 1993.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Arcturus Publishing Limited, London, 2011.

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Part Six, Chapter 25. Penguin Group. New York, NY. 2000.

NCIS. Created by Donald P. Bellisario and Don McGill. Bellisarius Productions, CBS Studios, 2003-present.

— Richard Wright in Native Son.

“Many a man thinks he is making something when he's only changing things around. But God let Moses make.”

— Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men.

Well I am ten days late and I don't have much of an excuse. I am somewhat behind in my novel writing, which has been sporadic, so I tend to put all my other writing off until I put time in on the novel. In this case I am just choosing to get this update done instead of doing something else. For me, that is really the only way anything gets done. I do not have a normal work day. I have a full time home gig that doesn't really allow days off, or any breaks at all. To say more would be to wallow in a bit too much bitterness, I think. Really I am thankful to be able to do this. The typing of this is something like talk therapy. You should only be worried if you stop hearing from me.

Writing

I put out a sonnet which you can read on this website. I am making sporadic progress on the novel. I draft with pen and paper, typing pages in—(really re-writing them)—to the computer as I go. I have a fair few pages that have been sitting in my journal that I need to get into my hard drives (I do not believe in the cloud, but I do believe in backups), before they fall into a lake or a fire or something. I started writing a song (I guess I am pretty much always writing one, I just don't get around to recording them because of the aforementioned job and my other work). And I am working on another essay.

Music

I am currently on vacation, and decided to bring my acoustic and work through a fingerstyle guitar course I bought awhile ago. It is by Jamie Dupuis and it has been immensely helpful. As a self taught guitarist, I never really had anyone tell me what scales/chord/shapes/picking patterns etc. I should learn, and this course is really filling in all the gaps. You should click on that link and listen to his harp guitar songs.

Reading

Last month and part of this month I read Richard Wright and James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. Richard Wright's Native Son was something of a shocker. I knew there would be murder but it happened so fast that it just sort of swept me up like a thriller. I read it, then read Baldwin's essay, Everybody's Protest Novel, which mentions Wright's Native Son. It was very cool, and (to nobody's surprise) I found myself agreeing with Baldwin. I like to give myself little reading quests like this. If I could attempt to extract a nugget of wisdom, it would be to point out the fact the Native Son is told from the point of view of the murderer (like Crime and Punishment, which I am sure Richard Wright had to have read at some point, but it is not Crime and Punishment that concerns me). In other “thriller” novels I have read that are written by white folks like myself, the identity of the killer is held until very last, often by withholding essential information and only dropping impossibly unrelated clues from which you could never make a connection (looking at you Agatha Christie!). If I could theorize a bit about this, I think that maybe from a white person's point of view, especially if they have the privilege of never even coming close to something like murder, they would probably have no idea why anyone would want to go and do something like that to them. So the identity of the killer is really a mystery for the white man or woman, but for the black man or woman (especially before the Civil Rights Act) who has had to watch their kids and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers get murdered, the identity of the killer is so painfully obvious and so blindingly white.

Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston is a beautiful collection of folktales and hoodoo lore. There are stories, sermons, curses, blessings, rhymes, songs, all told with a deft pen and a fun-loving voice. A real change from Wright and Baldwin. Reading her dialectic and following the stories feels to me something like reading Shakespeare. And the fact that she is collecting these “lies” from poor blacks in Florida and New Orleans is a fact that might rankle your stereotypical Shakespeare fan, or not, I don't know what your stereotypical Shakespeare fan is like. There is a lie she collects at the end of Chapter V where 'Ole Massa' (A slaveowner) has a slave named John. Ole Massa's kids go out in a boat and almost drown, but John saves them, so Ole Massa promises to set John free by the end of the year. Well the year comes around and Ole Massa sets him free, but he keeps calling after John, “John, Oh John! De children loves you. And I love you. De Missy like you.” And John hollers back, “Yassuh,” but he keeps walking. And Ole Massa hollers this too, “But' member youse a n—er, tho!” And Hurston ends it (or she faithfully records the ending this way):

“Ole Massa kept callin' 'im and his voice was pitiful. But John kept right on steppin' to Canada. He answered Ole Massa every time he called 'im, but he consumed on wid his bag.”

If that does not say the un-sayable, then I do not know what to say.

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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Generation after generation, Vice and virtue breed with one another, Until hate is easy, and love is maudlin. And hearts, like flies over muck, do hover. O that one could sever this sullied past From we whose hearts are stained and sunk by it. That which we are told to put first, comes last, In the order of crude survivalists. Love is preached and praised, but rarely practiced. Art is punished unless profitable. More valued are the words, about them, lisped. So we cannot bear to leave the bubble. In your own reflection find your own way To marry past and present with today.

#poetry #sonnet

Thank you for reading! Sonnets are my way of coping with stress, I guess. Gives me something to think about while my daughter is playing with puzzles at the library, and keeps me from scrolling on my phone. I hope you like it. If I get more I think I will post them here sooner rather than later. What else is a blog for?

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– James Baldwin. Essay on Martin Luther King Jr. February 1961.[^1]

I think perhaps the privileged of us, whether racially or financially or geographically, are now staring this truth in the face. Evil is in the world, and we are foundering in it. There are traditions in which we might find the resources to overcome it, but for many the truly American tradition of severing oneself from tradition, has severed us from hope. We might look back and see that things are not so bad as they once were, and that we can fight to make them better. We do not have to look far. Black history month is a good start. I suppose the above quote from my man James Baldwin might seem harsh or pessimistic, but I see a pragmatic hope. For what else can we do with evil, but overcome it with good? It will take (as Baldwin was fond of saying) every ounce of our stamina, but it can be overcome. And I dare say it will be. Go read some Baldwin, some Martin Luther King Jr. Some Hurston. Listen to some Sam Cooke and Don Shirley. Try some new things and suggest things to your friends and make art to help the world feel more human. Call your congressman and senators. Protest. Donate to the people on the frontlines. Go read the words of the Apostle who wrote the words that Baldwin quotes.

Writing

Well things did not go to plan. The pressures of life and the news crushed my resolutions. I have not given up on them, but am trying to forgive myself for failing and moving on. I did work on my novel. I did write an essay. I did make some music. Not as much as I wanted to, but it is better than nothing. I hope to make writing more of a repository of the energy that I have historically wasted on video games and technology. And I am picking up the queries again (apparently the first couple weeks of January is a bad time for it).

If you want to know what querying is like here is a great Peanuts comic:

Music

I got together with a few friends and did a jam session in a local studio space. Was a lot of fun and going to try and do it more often. Also recorded a demo for my Tess song that is not done yet. But I've really got to get on those demos. I have a lot of songs written that I haven't done proper recordings of yet. I've decided to just do a demo album and accept that I can't do professional sound quality from my home. My eventual goal is to get in a studio to get some professional sounding tracks. Hence the jam sessions. But jam sessions are also life giving by themselves.

Reading

I started reading Robinson Crusoe which has been fun. I enjoy Defoe's use of capitalization. Here's an example of when he speaks of the Impulse that causes him to ignore the advice of his father and run away to sea. It seemed “a secret over ruling Decree that hurries us on to be the Instruments of our own Destruction, even tho' it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our Eyes open.”

I also finished Crime and Punishment on my birthday. I was impressed as usual with Dostoevsky. This book engrossed me so violently on my first read that I didn't notice, as I tried to on the second time through, just how well planned and constructed everything is. He is a master of plot and character. Raskolnikov reveals to us (or to me) that murder is not so far from our hearts as we think. There is also a theme about the necessity of Law and a system of punishing those who violate human rights. That suffering can give us an opportunity for redemption. This is perhaps the only story by Dostoevsky that has a 'happy' ending. Here's a quote:

“Perhaps it was just because of the strength of his desires that he had thought himself a man to whom more was permissible than to others.”

[1] Baldwin, James. “Martin Luther King.” Collected Essays. The Library of America, 1998. Page 651.

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

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In Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, after a rich general maltreats the heroine by sending her away from the abbey without ceremony or explanation — the titular abbey at which she had just spent a delightful few weeks with his daughter and son (with whom she was in love) — Jane Austen gives a somewhat brief summary of why the general reversed his behavior towards her and acted so strangely (he found out she wasn't rich and that her connections were not as illustrious as he had assumed). Austen then follows that summary with this paragraph:

“I leave it to my reader's sagacity to determine how much of all this it was possible for Henry [the heroine's lover] to communicate at this time to Catherine, how much of it he could have learnt from his father, in what points his own conjectures might assist him, and what portion must remain to be told in a letter from James [the heroine's brother]. I have divided for their case what they must divide for mine. Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.”

(Austen, 215)

This is not an easy paragraph. I had to pause and think it over for some minutes, especially the line, “I have divided for their case what they must divide for mine.” The more I thought about it, however, the more I was delighted and immersed by the way Austen breaks the fourth wall and invites the reader into the act of imagination. It is immersive because she invites the reader to use the same sort of imagination that a writer uses when imagining a story. “I have divided for their case what they must divide for mine,” she says. Meaning that we must imagine for ourselves the various conversations and snippets of letters that would allow Catherine to piece together everything that Austen has just related about the General's behavior and character.

This is a bold and creative choice, a choice that I don't think many writers today would consider. Especially in today's age, where so much content is designed to be fast and easy in order to hook us, I feel pressure as a writer to trust as little to the reader's sagacity as possible. Most online writing advice tends towards simplicity and clarity. The number of times I have heard friends and acquaintances remark that they just don't really read anymore seems to be going up, and I wonder: What if I use a word they don't know? What if I am not clear enough? What if it's too weird? What if they wrinkle their eyebrows and scroll away? How many readers did I lose in those first two paragraphs? I wonder, and then wonder if I even should wonder, because as a writer I cannot really control or know my readers (despite the often repeated necessity of “knowing your audience,” I think this phrase really doesn't apply to fiction unless you are writing it with the marketing already in mind), because if I underestimate some readers' sagacity I will offend others by condescending to think too much of my own.

There is an important distinction that must be made here, between writing that trusts the reader and writing that is unclear because it is sloppy. As E.B. White once said, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” There is a tendency to rely on absurdity to make stories exciting, and I cannot support throwing words and absurd scenes together simply because they are shocking and entertaining. “When you say something, make sure you have said it.” (White, 79). I am not against whipping lazy writers into shape, but the question I would like to ask is, “What about lazy readers?” Because Jane Austen's style is very clear. We cannot accuse her of muddiness. Yet it is not easy to read even when you account for semantic drift and unfamiliar Britishisms. Even for a well-bred man in the nineteenth century, I dare say that her writing requires thought and adjustment and practice and sometimes a dictionary. In short, it requires sagacity.

Popular unwillingness to read “Literature” is not helped by the prestige of “Great Literature,” far from it. In reading a classic, a reader can't help but feel that this book ought to have some important historical or societal point, and they are made to feel stupid for not “getting it.” Or they start a foreword only to find themselves in the midst of a twenty page dissertation that spoils the entire plot. Or they choose a classic that is not to their taste or too depressing and conclude that all classic novels are hard and depressing. There are certainly some that are difficult, and even the ones that are more or less accessible are going to require some adjustment to a different historical period and a different culture. If the reading muscle has atrophied, it is going to be somewhat painful to exercise it, but I think most of us would be surprised by how fast we can acclimate and learn. And by how delightful and thrilling it is to read contemporary sources instead of preprocessed and filtered accounts. And by how much beauty and relief is buried in a well told account of human tragedy. If you want to really immerse yourself in the French revolution, there is no better way than reading Les Miserables. If you want to journey to a fantasy world of beautiful houses and clever love and intrigue among the wealthy, there is no better way than reading Jane Austen. If you want to mine the depths of the human soul and confront your most forbidden and tragic thoughts with love, there is no better way then Crime and Punishment. And if you don't like something, that's okay. Books are not meant to cater to your every whim. If you don't like something, it is a great opportunity to examine why you react the way you do, which can lead to self knowledge and improvement. Aversion is a great opportunity to form your own opinions and exercise your critical muscle, which will help you in many other situations in life.

But what am I doing? I am not really talking to you, am I. I am talking to myself. I am trying to justify my way of reading and writing, and gratifying my pride. The world is loud. I wonder why I listen to it. Well, reading old books needs reinforcement in this age. Jane Austen was right, and she still is:

“We [novel writers] are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.”

“And what are you reading, Miss — ?”

“Oh! It is only a novel!” Replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference.

”...Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

(Austen, 32).

I cannot help but feel that Jane Austen would not have been published in 2026, or if she did get published she would not have been very successful. An editor would probably say, “This fourth wall breaking breaks the pace and confuses the reader. You've got to cut that all out, or you've got to make it funny, because that's all fourth wall breaking is good for, like Deadpool. And the heroine. She's not got much going on does she? She should have some fatal flaw, like a drug addiction. Oh and why doesn't anybody have sex? This is supposed to be a romance novel isn't it? The general's not evil enough. He's just sort of rude and it doesn't quite make sense why Catherine would suspect him of murder. He should have sex dreams about her. The plot is too realistic it's boring. If you want to have a plot that's boring and realistic you've got to add more sex and existentialism.”

Perhaps this hyperbolic indulgence of bitterness is not helping my chances with readers or editors, but if I could turn it into something productive, I think it shows how very refreshing it is to read Jane Austen in 2026. The passage of time has made her perspective more illuminating than any insert-hot-new-nonfiction-title-here, and more revolutionary than insert-hot-new-fiction-bestseller-title-here. Reading Jane Austen also shows us that the passage of time has not changed some things. For instance, Catherine has a great deal of anxiety about social misunderstandings. We still do that today. Catherine is also the victim of the belligerent opinions of men who refuse to listen to anyone but themselves. That still happens. Class distinctions were definitely more rigid for her, but I don't think money and fame mean as little to us now as we would like to assume. Those same pressures — how nice your clothes are, what sort of car (or carriage) you drive, how you eat and how you speak and what connections you have — these pressures have not gone away, and are not much less potent because we try to pretend they don't exist. The wealthy still hold a disgusting share of the income. People still don't believe in reading novels. We are still in need of voices like Austen who can hold up the mirror to us without bitterness or distorted filters.

If there is one critique I would give to Austen's tirade about novels, it is that novels are very hard to write, and that few are as successful as her own. This is why readers are necessary, and why writers care so much about them. We are not always the best judge of our work, and neither are readers; but in the exchange of stories and feedback we can shape each other. If we can summon the stamina to approach this relationship with love and humility, then we can shape each other for the better. As Austen says, “Let us not desert one another.”

#essay #JaneAusten

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Aucturus Publishing Limited, 2011, 1817.

Strunk, William Jr. & White, E.B. The Elements of Style. Fourth Edition. Allyn & Bacon, 2000, 1979.

Well, this one came out of nowhere. I read Northanger Abbey and just couldn't help myself. I feel it is somewhat indulgent, but I hope if you made it this far that it was enjoyable and not unedifying.

Thank you very much for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”

— Ebenezer Scrooge

Another year has gone, and as I look back I wish I had a Ghost to show me the significant moments. As I learned from Neal Postman in Technopoly, every technology carries an agenda, and our phones, in offering the ability to document every moment, seem to assert that memory is irrelevant; that the human mind is too fallible to be trusted with something as important as what has happened and is happening and will happen. Well, I reject that with every force of my being. For who can tell the self what is happening to it, other than itself? Even (or especially) those of us who believe in an Authority who can supersede the self, must yet work to distinguish between those words the self wishes to hear from the Word and the words the self needs to hear from the Word. Technology ought to be a tool, and nothing more. Those spectres of Ignorance and Want, which have haunted mankind since before Dickens named them in A Christmas Carol, have not been driven away by the information age. So take a cup of kindness (and I mean actual kindness) this year, for old time's sake, and pass it on. God knows we need it.

Writing

Drafting continues on my new novel. I am going to try and up my daily word goal to 500 from 250. I suppose that might seem low, but it's about all I can manage as a full time parent. If I keep to it I should have a book's draft done within a year. I've also had an essay in my head for awhile, so I've got to try and get that out there.

Music

I guess I should set some sort of New Year's goal, so here it is: Record demos for all of my Lit Songs by the end of the year. I've decided to try and get into a studio at some point, but I could probably only get one or two down, especially ones that require a band. But if I accept that my demo recordings aren't going to be studio recordings I think I can get the album done, as a sort of trial run that I can show people. First on the list is the Tess song that I did for Tiny Desk last year. Ugh, 'last year.'

Reading

My wife and I read Pride and Prejudice and it was lovely. It was my first time reading it since seventh grade, so it was very refreshing. It was also refreshing because Jane Austen is, to me, the Shakespeare of novelists. Her style is so drained of frivolity and bitterness that it could almost be accused of vacuity were it not so very essential. There will, of course, be words and constructions that will puzzle a modern reader because of semantic drift, but once you get used to it is is very rewarding, and her books are not long. Like Shakespeare, they continue when you put them down and recur to you throughout your life. I am also jealous that she lived at a time when people communicated with letters. They are the perfect literary device because you can quote them wholesale, and the reader can imagine themselves in the mind of the protagonist who is reading the letter. Instant immersion, even when you close the book, because you, along with Elizabeth, will be thinking about Mr. Darcy's letter as you go about your life.

It really is a lovely story about the value of true connubial felicity, and I think I will be saying more about it in my next essay. So stay tuned. I'll have it by the end of the month? 🤞.

I'll let Elizabeth round this one out:

“The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on either merit or sense.” (130).

Later on, on learning from the past:

“How despicably have I acted! ... I, who have prided myself on my discernment! — I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust! — How humiliating is this discovery! — Yet, how just a humiliation! — Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. — Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.” (193).

To knowing oneself in the Past, Present, and Future.

“What are men to rocks and mountains?” (147).

Works Cited

Burns, Robert. “Auld Lang Syne.” 1788.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Chapman and Hall, 1843.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Aucturus Publishing Limited, 2011 (1813).

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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I met them in the margin of a used book,  next to difficult paragraphs  and subtle thoughts.

A penciled question mark  told me all I wanted to know ?  about their mind.

If I gave this book to a friend, I would have to tell them, “The marks are not mine.

“They are the marks of a mind, grappling, stretching, struggling. In a word: reading.

“Though I will say I admire them for persevering with a book, with which they seem to disagree.

“When was the last time you read a book, whose message grated on you, ! and made you want to shut it?

“In this day in age, we put such stock in the cover in our hands and what it says about us.

“Maybe that is why, they put in those marks instead of giving up.

“In that case, I can't fault them. We do what we must to keep reading, when we know it is good for us.”

I suppose those marks in the margin, on the whole, though distracting, made me read deeper into a book

Which I was wont to accept without protest or criticism. Thank you, friend, ☺

For making my mind sharper. If we ever meet,  I hope to return the favor.

#poetry

I hope you enjoyed this “sequel” to my original short poem In the Margin. I have been reading a book of Robert Frost poems, and have come to really enjoy his deceptively simple dialogue. This was my attempt to adapt the technique, and I hope you liked it.

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— James Baldwin in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”

Well this is the last update of the year. That went fast. Time moves faster and faster as one ages. That is not a very original observation, is it? When I think about where I was last year I suppose I am most definitely in a better place, mainly because I don't have pneumonia, but I guess I have grown a bit as a writer, and a husband and a father and a friend. I feel that I have been tried much more in my personal life than in my artistic life. When I say personal life I do not mean there has been anything especially dramatic, I mean I have been tried in those secret places of my pride, that only those with good marriages or deep relationships discover in themselves. I have been tried, and found wanting, and broken down, and improved. That is, I suppose, evidence that I am walking with Jesus. I have a lot to be thankful for.

Writing

I decided to start publishing on Medium again. It is my way of “fighting for my life,” for what Baldwin means, to me, is that a writer who is worried about his career is worried that he will be able to keep doing it, or whether it will always be a hobby. The writer who is worried about his career is worried that writing can be a career at all, and I am certainly worried about that. Querying. Querying. Querying.

I will always be writing, but I do have to provide for my family at some point. Medium is really just a way for me to get exposure. It is where an audience is, and it harms my conscience much less than YouTube (not to mention all the extra work of video production). Write.as will always be the definitive home for my words, and my major essays will always be free, but I will be putting things on Medium because it is the only place where I have ever been paid for my work, and because I do not have the time or emotional energy to find and submit to magazines. It is also, as far as I can tell, funded by real people and not ads. I do have a suspicion that most of those people are also writers, but that is fine with me. If they are writers then they are more likely to read long form content and poetry and the other weird stuff I like to write. I am going to try very hard to stay true to my voice and not adopt the bloggy one sentence paragraph phone friendly sort of style that seems to be in vogue.

He says as he is writing on his blog...

If you'd like to support me over there please feel free: https://medium.com/@hdansin

Music

Started playing guitar again, and while my wrist is not all the way there yet it is getting better day by day. I don't notice it much when I am playing. The most exciting thing for me was working on a soundtrack for a friend's project. It has been really fun to do, and finally gave me the motivation I needed to learn how to do some MIDI stuff with our old keyboard. It is kind of astonishing how many instruments are available for free out there. Really impressed by Decent Sampler and many of the sample packs, particularly Lichen.

Reading

Standouts for me this past month were The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and Nobody Knows my Name by James Baldwin. I had started Anxious Generation in September but finally got around to finishing it. It is a good book that is worth reading, but it was a frustrating read for me because I do not like sociology. I respect it as a worthwhile science, but I also resent the way it turns people into numbers and makes ends of means. Thankfully, I agree with the end of Anxious Generation, and I hope that it will inspire people to finally reject social media and Big Tech as we know it. In the very least, I think it is an important book for any parent to read. I know I will be referring to it and some of the resources he lists, especially Let Grow, for the next couple decades.

James Baldwin has become comfort reading, and more, for me. I was thinking today about “life writers”, writers that we develop deep relationships with over our lives, and Baldwin is definitely one of mine. I'm slowly (maybe not so slowly) reading through his body of work, and it has been a real staff to lean on. He has shown me that one can be both objective and soulful in an essay, that the use of one's personal life (as long as it is presented with unflinching honesty and humility) can be a noble source for both fiction and non-fiction, that I should never be ashamed about the length of my paragraphs or the complexity of my sentences, that race in America goes far deeper and wider than I could've imagined, that we have come a long way, and yet have so far to go. Here is a long quote, just because I love it:

“I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it by trying to become something else. One does not become something else: one becomes nothing. And what is crucial here is that the writer, however unwillingly, always, somewhere, knows this. There is no structure he can build strong enough to keep out this self-knowledge. What has happened, however, time and time again, is that the fantasy structure the writer builds in order to escape his central responsibility operates not as his fortress, but his prison, and he perishes within it. Or: the structure he had built becomes so stifling, so lonely, so false, and acquires such a violent and dangerous life of its own, that he can break out of it only by bringing the entire structure down. With a great crash, inevitably, and on his own head, and on the heads of those closest to him. It is like smashing the windows one second before one asphyxiates; it is like burning down the house in order, at last, to be free of it.”[^2]

Thank you

This marks a year of doing these updates, so if you have kept up with them, thank you. I still have not received any coffees from anyone, but it has been very helpful to give myself some accountability. I think, after a year, I am actually starting to have fun with writing again. My new project is a real departure from my dark, gritty, serious, fantasy series; and it is also fun to have these spaces on the internet. So thank you to Write.as for making a platform with a conscience, and thank you reader for giving me someone to write to.

#update #December2025

[1]: Baldwin, James (1961). Nobody Knows My Name: more notes of a native son. “The Black Boy Meets the White Boy.” 216. https://archive.org/details/nobodyknowsmynam0000unse/page/216/mode/2up

[2]: Baldwin, James (1961). Nobody Knows My Name: more notes of a native son. “The Black Boy Meets the White Boy.” 239. https://archive.org/details/nobodyknowsmynam0000unse/page/238/mode/2up

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm

— My 4th Sonnet

If you follow the blog you might have noticed that I published this sonnet by itself. I think I will do that with other original poetry so that it is not just scattered across these updates. You might see some other sonnets on here.

Writing

Writing is going about as well as it can. I get stuck and push through and get stuck and push through again. I think it is not terrible but I am also not sure if it is great. It is hard to tell in the drafting stage. This one is like stumbling through a jungle for me. But it is fun at times. The hardest thing is staying motivated to do it during my free time between the stresses of life and parenthood.

Music

I have been taking a break from guitar because I want my damn wrist to heal all the way. It has been difficult, because guitar is a creative outlet. I have certainly idolized it recently, but it has been a challenge to reorient myself. I think I will eventually be a better musician for it, and I think it is good to take breaks, since becoming too familiar can sometimes lead you to make ends of your means. But I will be happy when I can play again.

Reading

According to my Bookwyrm (Goodreads but not owned by Amazon), I read The Jungle and Hamlet. You can read my full reviews over there if you like. I will not say much about The Jungle except that it was painful but I am glad I read it. The bleak, relentless forces of greed and ambition that literally grind human beings into sausages in the book were uncomfortably familiar, if less extreme now (but not by a comforting margin). I did not find the solution that Sinclair pushes at the end very convincing, but I do agree that we will always have to fight for fairness and justice. We don't get to choose our political or social moment, but we do get to choose how we respond to it.

Hamlet was Hamlet. If you speak English you owe it to yourself to read it at least once, or go see it, or both. I highly recommend the Folger's Library Editions for the explanatory notes they include:

"Who would fardels* bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."

*Fardels = burdens

— The “To be or not to be” Soliloquoy

Listening

I did a free month of Qobuz so I could listen to some albums that some friends recommended. I still rip CDs and buy digital files to download, which might seem rather old fashioned, but if owning my own music and not being beholden to a corporation for the art I love is old fashioned then that's fine with me. I completely understand the convenience and freedom that Spotify offers, but I'd rather buy one album I love and fully support an artist than listen to a thousand things and give the songs that really mean something to me less than a cent for my listens. No corporation has any meaningful motivation to serve the well-being of its consumers besides conscience, and conscience has proven to be less effective at scale than the bottom line. And if you limit yourself to buying one album (or renting from the library) per month it pays for itself, though it is less convenient.

Since it is Native American Heritage Month I highly recommend listening to Woman in Color by Raye Zaragosa. It is one of my favorite albums ever, and it is really a healing experience to listen to. She manages to approach the pain of her past and present with honesty and hope, and a little punk energy, and her voice is really very lovely and unique. Highlights for me include “They Say,” “The It Girl,” “Change Your Name,” and “Ghosts of Houston Street.” She also has a Tiny Desk Concert that is great.

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm