“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

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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.

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:

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To call Tolkien the father of fantasy as we know it is to echo what thousands upon thousands of readers and authors already know. He is the originator of a genre that is now one of modern literature's most prolific and profitable. And yet though many fans and haters have opinions about the influence of The Lord of the Rings, fewer and fewer of those opinions seem based on the book itself. The slew of adaptions and inspirations preys on our fear of missing out, to the point where deciding to re-read a text over half a century old feels like a waste of time. Don't we want to enjoy what is popular now? Don't we all know the story of Frodo and the Ring by heart? Why rehash it? If you need a refresher just watch the films. Isn't the book now worthwhile as a piece of literary history or as nostalgia for older readers trying to recapture their childhood sense of wonder, but now made obsolete by authors coming of age in a mature era in which the art form of the fantasy novel has now been iterated and perfected? In short, is The Lord of the Rings really worth reading, and even re-reading, in 2025?

Readers of this blog can guess my answer to these questions, but I'd like to make this essay as complete and unbiased as I can in order to better understand Tolkien's influence on my imagination and the imaginations of millions more readers and potential authors. But first, a disclaimer from the Storyteller himself:

“The Lord of the Rings has been read by many people since it finally appeared in print; and I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meaning of the tale. The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. As a guide I had only my feelings for what is appealing or moving, and for many the guide was inevitably often at fault. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. But even from the points of view of many who have enjoyed my story, there is much that fails to please. It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are by all others specially approved. The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short.” (Forward to the Second Edition, xxiii)

I. What is worth re-reading?

“For despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.” (Gandalf, the Council of Elrond, 269)

The question of whether something is worth reading or re-reading is very simple on the surface, but very mysterious underneath. Fiction is not like an industry or sport, in which progress and achievement can be measured by numbers, and it is even unlike the more tangible arts, in which a sense of scale or speed can overwhelm an audience into that illusion we call greatness. Who can measure a story? Sales might be a meaningful metric insofar as it shows what sorts of stories in what sorts of media people are willing to buy at a given time, but sales say nothing about the work itself. Who can say whether an author has achieved his goal in a story, because who can say what the goal of a story is? There are tales that uplift, tales that admonish, tales that entertain, tales that seek truth, tales that destroy, tales that despair — and all of these effects based on the reader, for two readers very rarely have the same reaction to the same tale and very often disagree with the authors about the tales. So where does that leave us? Why are you reading this essay, dear reader? What are you looking for? All of us, when sitting in front of a page, are left only with our own minds and hearts to guide us. This is why writing, and fiction especially, defies any attempt at measuring 'progress.' So this essay will try very hard to avoid the meaningless question of whether The Lord of the Rings is better than the tales it inspired. Instead, I will try to record my own reactions and impressions to the work itself, hopefully finding some resonant evidence for why I find Tolkien's work some of the most worthwhile reading I have ever done, and why I think re-reading it is important.

But first I have still not answered the question, and indeed those of us who love fiction will often find ourselves avoiding the question of whether it is worthwhile. Our culture has become so obsessed with utility and efficiency that we find ourselves forced to justify our hobbies, and indeed, reading old fantasy novels would seem to be rather inefficient and anti-useful. To spend time in a completely imaginary world very unlike our own, reading about elves and hobbits, would seem to bear very little on 'real' life. But 'seem' is the operative word, because this fantasy novel was written by a real person who drew from his own mind and his own world, who thought very deeply about myths and what they express about the human soul. These tales do not simply fall from the clouds where fantasy reader's heads are accused of being. They were written by people as real as the authors of the dictionary.[^1] Indeed The Lord of the Rings, despite the setting, is in fact a very grounded tale. The dark lord Sauron is not defeated by a protagonist who typifies the Hero's Journey and overcomes adversity to match the strength of evil. No, if anything, the quest to destroy the ring is marked by failure. The Fellowship is broken and Gandalf is slain before the journey is half over. And when Frodo finally reaches the Cracks of Doom he chooses to keep the ring for himself, finally succumbing to the temptation that has burdened him for so long. It is only through the pure grace of chance, working through Gollum, that the ring falls and is destroyed.

Interpretations and analyses of the story like the one above hint at what makes reading fantasy worthwhile: perspective. By contemplating the fate of Gollum and the ring, we can recognize some of the pure chances of grace in our own lives that we might not have noticed before, and wonder at how the councils of the wise and powerful are often confounded, or whether the wise and powerful are actually wise. By immersing ourselves in a world like but unlike our own we can develop an outside perspective on our world and, comparing it with the goods and bads of the fantasy, we can sometimes achieve a clearer picture of our own situation or a problem we are dealing with. This is the “Recovery” of which Tolkien himself speaks in his essay On Fairy-Stories. It is not so much a recovery of energy but a recovery of perspective that allows us to see what has become familiar in our world as new and interesting again. For Tolkien these were the things that “we say we know,” which have become “like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape... we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.” Reading fantasy helps us recover the power of perception that we locked away when we decided that childhood curiosity was meant only for childhood.

Our problem now is that fantasy itself is in need of recovery. When The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published, there was nothing quite like them. While Tolkien was inspired by many sources, namely Beowulf and The Kalevala and Fairy Tales told to him as a child and many others I am sure, no one had ever put a fantasy tale into the form of a novel and took it seriously. The leap from Beowulf to The Lord of the Rings is much larger than The Lord of the Rings to A Song of Ice and Fire. This does not mean that The Lord of the Rings is better simply because it is original, but it does mean that authors writing fantasy today (and the 90s) write in a much different atmosphere than Tolkien did. Our minds are cluttered with tropes and worlds and prophecies and monsters that are not our own, and the form itself — the form of the fantasy novel — resembles more a baroque painting in that it must bewilder and disorient with surprise and dissonance in order to seem original. We have too many colors to paint with, and yet the paintings all look the same. The great dragon of greed and merchandising and art recycling art has circled around and has been devouring itself for generations. It is time to re-read. It is time for Recovery.

Still, I have not answered the question. I have only avoided it and gotten lost in the weeds. The difficulty is that the answer to the question — What is worth re-reading? And why? — is different for every reader. Recovery is a strong reason for me, but for many others it is not. Yet I must be honest and say that refusing to re-read, or not wanting to, sounds to me like not wanting to eat vegetables or wash your face. Even as an avid reader, I feel my attention span constantly ravaged by screens and the pace of postmodern life. Re-reading is not only a way to rebel against postmodern life, it helps me remember myself by reconnecting me to the art that has shaped me. Saying that one needs only read a book once is a bit like saying that once having married the love of your life, you need not make love to them ever again. Or, perhaps, like saying that having eaten a meal once, one need never eat again.

If you prefer barreling through existence without resisting the violent vicissitudes of time; looking in the mirror to check your appearance in the morning but forgetting what you look like by the end of the day; letting the winds of society and the trend machine stamp and unstamp fads on your mind like a sneetch;[^2] succumbing to the attractive lie that an active life belies an active mind when it often belies the opposite; filling time with movement on a screen, in a car, in a bed, on a sidewalk, in a gym, in a kitchen; any movement but the movement of your eyes over the page of a beloved book — if, in short, you believe that the unexamined life is worth living — then by all means do not re-read, or better yet do not read at all. I do not believe that the unexamined life is worth living, hence these haphazard paragraphs. Hence the next section of this essay.

II. Recovering The Lord of the Rings

No one answered. The noon-bell rang. Still no one spoke. Frodo glanced at all the faces, but they were not turned to him. All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if deep in thought. A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. “I will take the ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.” (The Council of Elrond, 270)

While I am generally cynical about business and the way business profits off of art, this cynicism does not extend to the art itself. Tolkien's legacy is not in danger because his legacy is in his words. The problem is that we don't seem to be reading them. I do not think it is an inaccurate generalization to say that most fans of The Lord of the Rings have watched the movies more times than they have read the books. This is because movies are shorter, more accessible, and demand less of the imagination. In itself, this fact is not bad, but the movies are not an accurate adaption. No adaption is accurate. Even when plot is identical, the difference in medium demands change. What is exciting on the page is often exasperating and tedious on the screen, and vice versa. I am not however concerned with the success, artistic or commercial, of the films. I am concerned with their effect on the imaginations of me and my generation. Entertaining as the movies are, I don't think anyone has truly estimated the blitzing effect they have produced on our minds. One example is the council of Elrond. Be honest with yourself, if you hadn't read the small excerpt quoted above, how would you have remembered Frodo volunteering to take the ring? Was he speaking into silence, or shouting into discord? I am not too proud to admit that before re-reading I would have remembered it as the latter because that is what happened in the movie. I may have questioned whether it really happened that way in the book, but the point is that I would not have been able to tell for certain what was true to the book and what was not.

Mis-remembering the Council is one small example of why Tolkien's words are in need of Recovery. Some of my earliest memories of storytelling are my teachers reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as I ate pretzels and sipped tea during snack time. I can still remember the room with the lacquered floorboards and my teacher sitting like a troll on the rocking chair. Then at recess I, along with my friends, would kill untold numbers of orcs and goblins on the school property, sometimes creeping invisibly as Bilbo, sometimes blazing like the star of Elendil as Aragorn, sometimes as our own characters. Then, when Peter Jackson's trilogy released, it blitzed my imagination and my friends imaginations and probably our parents imaginations and very probably the imaginations of our cats and dogs. My mind's eye accepted the form of the films and never recovered. I abandoned Aragorn and my own creations for Orlando Bloom's impossibly cool Legolas. The shadowy, mysterious Balrog of my imagination now solidified into the fiery creation of the movie. More than twenty years after the release of Peter Jackson's trilogy, it is still difficult for me to imagine the Fellowship without seeing Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood and Sean Astin and Viggo and Orlando and Rhys-Davies and Monaghan and Boyd, or to remember the Council of Elrond without also remembering that one does not simply walk into Mordor. I do not think this is an uncommon experience. Lord of the Rings memes are now common parlance, and all fans (and even non-fans) acknowledge it as the father of the fantasy that is now popular and profitable, which would lead one to think that we all remember it very well. We don't, unless we re-read it.

“Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity,” wrote Dallas Willard, and The Lord of the Rings has proved his words true. I was genuinely worried when I started re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring, whether I would be able to recover a pure experience of the book, and my fears were justified. In beloved movie scenes, such as Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday, my imagination would slip into the images of the film like a wagon wheel on a well-worn track. Only by reading paragraphs repeatedly and straining to focus on the words, was I able to recover a quality of imagination that was truly engaging with the page instead of re-calling the movie. By 'quality,' I do not mean quality as in hierarchy, but quality as in description. Reading induced imagination differs from film induced imagination. The language of the screen, as James Baldwin once wrote, “is the language of our dreams.” The images float in front of us like fairy dust, intoxicating and wonderful in their manifestation, so that even terrible performances can create a mesmerizing spell. Yet when we try to describe them apart from the screen, they feel hollow. We cannot properly convey the experience, though they burn in our imaginations like the sun in our retinas. Reading, on the other hand, is an experience created and maintained entirely by the reader. The words are simply the medium of transmission. While film must rely on illusion and trickery, so that a reveal of its conceit can break the spell, books have the conceit written right on the cover: “by so-and-so.” This analogy cannot carry us any further than this: The quality of imagination created by film is dreamlike, the quality of imagination created by reading is memorylike.

There is a sense, when reading, and especially so when reading The Lord of the Rings, that we have lived the story rather than dreamed it. I was relieved to discover, after getting back into the book, that I was able to recover this sense apart from my retina-burned movie memories. The images from the film became as two dimensional as actual film on a reel, and I could push it out of the way to reveal the actual world (the world of Tolkien's original words), that the film was shot on. This took work, but it became easier as I read. First, because there are a great deal of scenes that are not adapted by the movies; Second, because the human mind is plastic and adaptable. Just as the Hobbits learned to tighten their belts and go without elevenses, so my mind learned to go without the film.

But what, specifically, are we recovering? I have chosen three examples to share. Before I do, I want to clarify that while these recoveries inevitably make comparisons to the films, they do not make value judgements about the films. I like the movies, but at the end of it all, I do not like them as much as I love the books.

The first recovery is the recovery of the Hobbits as mature characters. In the films the Hobbits are played more as naive children, with Merry and Pippin relegated almost exclusively to comic relief. There are moments of maturity, but they are singular. This is most stark in the hobbits' flight from the Shire. While the film captures the terror of the ringwraiths, there is little time left over for the hobbits to be themselves, and the medium's demand for levity and bombast leaves Merry and Pippin stealing carrots and lettuces (an occupation, in the book, for infant hobbits), and all four tumbling down slopes like cartoon characters. Frodo's flight in print, by contrast, is well planned. He disguises it by moving out of Bag End, a plan advised by Gandalf rather than commanded, and a plan in which Merry and Pippin are instrumental (rather than playful tag-alongs). They don't sneak through farmer Maggot's fields, they ask him permission, and he ends up giving them a ride to the ferry. The ringwraiths, or Dark Riders, as they are called, creep more steadily out of shadow to become the terrifying figures they are. Their reveal is less dramatic in print, and would have been lackluster on screen if it was “faithfully” adapted, but on the page it allows them to take shape in the reader's mind as a more mysterious and gradually discovered threat. This not only allows the effect to be more like memory and less like dream, it also allows the hobbits to maintain a level of maturity as they make decisions about where to sleep and how much food to bring. They seem more like adults coming to grips with a rising crisis, and less like children chased by nightmares. This effect holds true throughout the rest of the story. Sam and Frodo never fight or bicker like they do in the third film. Pippin's mistake in Moria is less directly connected with the attraction of the goblins and the Balrog, and Gandalf forgives him after the infamous “fool of a Took!” The main point is not that the hobbits are not mischievous and uneducated about the ways of the world, but that they are not treated like children. The hobbits are small but not young.

The second recovery is the recovery of Tolkien's poetry and whimsy. Indeed, a modern reader gets the impression that The Lord of the Rings, besides being an epic story, is really a trick played by Tolkien to insert a fraction of the thousands of lines of poetry that he wrote about Middle Earth. It is difficult to go more than two chapters without running into a poem or a song. Some find it charming and enriching, others find it tedious and silly. No matter the effect, it is important to understand that Tolkien came from a background that venerated epic poems: Beowulf, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost. For Tolkien and his contemporaries the epic poem was the ultimate art form. Writing a novel was something of a cop out. In this context the vast amount of poetry in The Lord of the Rings makes more sense, as does the great depth of background content that has since been published by Tolkien's son. Middle Earth was not just a convenient place to write a bestselling fantasy novel, it was an escape, a world that Tolkien could inhabit when he was in the trenches or at home or anywhere he longed for self expression beyond the mortal world. It is this longing and love for language that gave us elvish, and lends The Lord of the Rings a solid denseness that subsequent fantasies seem to lack. In another fantasy book, Sam's elvish words outside the lair of Shelob would just be a pretty sounding con language, but in The Two Towers they are words with real meaning and real etymology. Like real words, there is a sense that they have been formed by sweat and blood, so that, though the reader cannot possibly understand them, they shine from the page almost as brightly as Galadriel's vial itself:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel

o menel palan-diriel

le nallon sí di'nguruthos!

A tiro nin, Fanuilos!

(The Choices of Master Samwise, 729)[^4]

Of all the missed opportunities of the films, to me the most glaring is the comparative lack of poetry and song. There are a few renditions, to which we are all in debt to Billy Boyd and Viggo Mortensen and Enya, and Howard Shore's soundtrack is something of a miracle — but there is still so much more that could have been. Admittedly, there are probably many more musical adaptions of which I am unaware, but it would have been beautiful to see the passion and production of the films brought to bear on more of what is in the pages. Thankfully the poetry can be recovered by re-reading the pages, along with the imaginative whimsy that goes hand in hand with it.

By imaginative whimsy I do not simply mean charm, I mean the whimsy of imagination that takes hold of a writer when they are writing fantasy. Little things, such as the water outside Lothlorien that washes the weariness of travel from Frodo's feet as he wades through it; or when Legolas hears the lament of the stones of Hollin; or how the doors to Denethor seem to open by themselves. It is almost as if Tolkien, in trying to paint the tree of The Lord of the Rings, could not help adding more and more leaves.[^3] This is a phenomenon that anyone who sits down to write fiction, especially fantasy fiction, can relate to. No sooner do we finish tying up the loose ends created by a flight of fancy than our imagination wants to invent another. Good fantasy seems to lie in the balance of tension between this force of whimsy, which is really responsible for almost all delightful storytelling, and a stubborn commitment to ground that whimsy to truth (or what is true to human experience). By re-reading, we can recover the tension between these two pillars of storytelling, one of which has been knocked over by the films.

III. The Last Recovery

“Alas! There are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,” said Gandalf.

“I fear it may be so with mine,” said Frodo. “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?”

Gandalf did not answer.

(Homeward Bound, 289)

The last recovery that I would like to mention is the recovery of the proper ending of the book. If you have made it this far in the essay (thank you!), you may have been screaming at me about the omitted scenes from the films that we can recover, like Tom Bombadil and Quickbeam et al. I have passed over many of these for the sake of length (and so that other readers may recover them for themselves), and because I wanted to focus, mainly, on the differences that the media effect on our imagination — a comparison that requires us to dwell on scenes that occur in both media — but this omitted chapter (and what it adds to the ending) is so important to me that I have saved it for last. It is the recovery of the Scouring of the Shire.

When the hobbits return to the Shire, after parting with many a dear friend, they are not welcomed. Instead, they find their homes in disarray, and the Shire under terror of Big People. The four hobbits, rather than call their very powerful friends for help, are able to mobilize the Shire and overthrow their oppressors. Whether it was part of Tolkien's originally planned arc, or inspired by his experience as a veteran of a wold war, or both, is besides the point. Tolkien, in spite of his belief in a happy ending (or eucatastrophe, as he calls it in On Fairy-Stories), nevertheless grounds his own happy ending in a realistic and harrowing anti-climax. This makes the happiness more real, and again, less dreamlike. It reflects a worldview that hopes for the eternal and recognizes that no matter what fantasies might be fulfilled in life and story, they will never wholly be fulfilled until the next life. Having reached for the Lord of the Rings out of a longing for more than this life, both Tolkien and the reader are left still longing.

This longing for and recognition of what even the most finely wrought treasures of life and story can never give us is, perhaps, what is most in need of Recovery. For there is an inherent assumption in the label of fantasy that the fantasy is the fulfillment of our most secret and wildest desires. This is corroborated by the way we use the word “fantasy”, sexual or otherwise. If something is a fantasy, there is a sense that we will never be able to fulfill it, yet this is what makes us desire it. The ending of The Lord of the Rings, the originator of the Fantasy genre, in setting our gaze beyond the farthest shore, points the reader towards the fountainhead of longing that created it. It is at that fountainhead where our fantasies will finally be fulfilled, for in re-reading The Lord of the Rings this reader discovered that it was not the story that was in need of recovery, but himself. I needed to recover my memories and the source of the impulse that gave birth to The Lord of the Rings — the impulse for life beyond what we can see. A life beyond Middle Earth. A life that comes after the Last Recovery.

Footnotes

[1] In fact Tolkien himself contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary. Read more here

[2] In Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches, the Sneetches with stars on their bellies exclude the ones who don't. When a sly conman produces a machine to stamp stars on those with plain bellies, the star bellies decide they want plain, and the conman produces a star-off machine. The sneetches go round and round, stamping stars and unstamping them, until the conman has taken all their money.

[3] Like Niggle, in Tolkien's short story, Leaf by Niggle. Niggle is a painter who never finishes the large painting of a tree that he is working on because he is always adding leaves to it.

[4] Translation according to Wikipedia:

“O Elbereth Starkindler

from heaven gazing far

to thee I cry here beneath the shadow of death!

O look towards me, Everwhite!”

Works Cited

J R R Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

J R R Tolkien. The Tolkien Reader. New York, Ballantine Books, 2001. “On Fairy-Stories.” p. 77. “Leaf by Niggle.”

Seuss, Dr. The Sneetches and Other Stories. London, Harpercollins Children’s Books, 2017.

Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy : Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. New York, Harperone, 2018.

Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. Edited by Toni Morrison, New York, Library Of America, 1998, p. 504. The Devil Finds Work Chapter 1.

#essay #Tolkien #fantasy #lotr

Well this was a doozy. It feels good to finally get it done. Thank you ever so much for reading if you have made it this far. If you got anything out of it, please consider subscribing, and/or sending a kind word or cup of coffee my way:

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My earliest memories of Charlotte's Web come from the animated film, which I saw as a child. I remember Wilbur crying as the baby spiders went ballooning away. I was almost as delighted as Wilbur was when he discovered that three of them were going to stay with him, when I read it years later and discovered this terrific, radiant, humble, masterpiece of a book. Chapter XI: The Miracle is perhaps one of my favorite chapters in all of fiction. Not surprisingly, I was also moved by White's depiction of Charlotte as a wordsmith. So in the spirit of his Elements of Style, (an essential book for me, in learning and re-learning how to write), I decided to make a list of some writing lessons I learned from E.B. White in Charlotte's Web, and from Charlotte A. Cavatica herself.

1. Learn how to use dialogue.

“Where's Papa going with that ax?” Said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

— page 1

The first sentence of Charlotte's Web is a perfect example of the imaginative power of dialogue. E.B. White could have started by describing the Arable's farm, or kitchen, or barn, (all of which might have been more picturesque or dramatic) but he starts with dialogue. This initiates the reader's imagination without bewildering it — forcing them to imagine a speaker who has a Papa, and that that Papa has an ax — so that when we learn who Fern is in the attribution, we are already in line with her perspective. Notice that our mind is not filled with miscellaneous details about Fern's appearance or the color of the house or what she had for breakfast. The first sentence perfectly pulls our imagination into the scene precisely because it is only dialogue. There is no extraneous noise, only the words of Fern in the kitchen. Our imagination supplies the rest.

2. Learn how to use detail.

“Below the apple orchard, at the end of a path, was the dump where Mr. Zuckerman threw all sorts of trash and stuff that nobody wanted any more. Here, in a small clearing hidden by young alders and wild raspberry bushes, was an astonishing pile of old bottles and empty tin cans and dirty rags and bits of metal and broken bottles and broken hinges and broken springs and dead batteries and last month's magazine and old discarded dishmops and tattered overalls and rusty spikes and leaky pails and forgotten stoppers and useless junk of all kinds, including a wrong-size crank for a broken ice-cream freezer.”

— page 97

Learning when and how to use detail is perhaps the second most difficult skill to learn in writing fiction, second only to learning when and how to use dialogue. If you overwhelm the reader with detail they will get exhausted quickly, and your book will end up with far too many pages. But detail is how you build worlds and scenes and characters. E.B. White, in Charlotte's Web, likes to use lists like the one above, that are as entertaining as they are effective. They work because his descriptions are so sparse elsewhere. You will, if you look, find hardly a detail describing the appearance of any human, but we have no trouble imagining their faces.

Writers whose imaginations have been, for better or worse, shaped by film and television, might find it difficult to learn the skill of selecting details because television is a medium defined by extraneous detail. A filmmaker cannot choose not to describe the color of the room that their subjects are standing in, but a writer can choose not to describe the room at all. This is why detail is the glory and shame of fiction, and E.B. White teaches how to use it well. This list at the dump does not just describe the dump. It gives us insight into years of life on the farm, and it does so in a mere two sentences.

3. Learn when to break form.

Mr. Zuckerman had the best swing in the county. It was a single long piece of heavy rope tied to the beam over the north doorway. At the bottom end of the rope was a fat knot to sit on. It was arranged so that you could swing without being pushed. You climbed a ladder to the hayloft. Then, holding the rope you stood at the edge and looked down, and were scared and dizzy. Then you straddled the knot, so that it acted as a seat. Then you got up all your nerve, took a deep breath, and jumped...

— page 68-69

In this passage E.B. White describes what it is like to swing on the best swing in the county, and quite possibly the world. Note how he transitions seamlessly to the second person: “It was arranged so that you.“

The second person point of view is the least popular point of view in fiction because it is so intimate and yet so alienating, because no one likes to be told what to feel or think. To use the second person point of view in a children's novel that up to this point has been entirely third-person omniscient would seem unwise, but E.B. White is a good writer, and good writers know when to break the form of their work for brief but powerful effect. I will remember this paragraph for the rest of my life.

4. Learn how to repeat yourself.

”...We have received a sign, Edith — a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm. There is a large spider's web in the doorway of the barn cellar, right over the pigpen, and when Lurvy went to feed the pig this morning, he noticed the web because it was foggy, and you know how a spider's web looks very distinct in a fog. And right spang in the middle of the web there were the words 'Some Pig.' The words were woven right into the web. They were actually part of the web, Edith. I know, because I have been down there and seen them. It says, 'Some Pig,' just as clear as clear can be. There can be no mistake about it. A miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig.”

— page 80

This technique is the subtle cousin of the famous “set up and pay off,” but it is just as essential. Great writing will often echo itself. In this speech from Mr. Zuckerman, E.B. White is echoing his own beautiful description of the miracle, which he opened the chapter with. Then throughout the chapter, as more and more people come to read the words on the web over and over and gaze at Wilbur over and over, so too does the reader read the words over and over and gaze at Wilbur and Charlotte over and over. The scene has the effect on our mind that a real miracle experienced in person might have. We examine it from all angles and marvel on it repeatedly.

No book is read just once. We re-read it in snippets and phrases as it echoes in our minds. When a good writer discovers a truly great miracle, whether it be a scene or a thought or a climax, they know to iterate on it and connect it with fine threads to the rest of the story (usually by extensive editing and re-writing) — So that the central miracle is woven throughout the story with threads of words much like the threads of a spider's web, so that the echo in the mind of the reader is all the louder.

5. Say what is True.

”... I love blood,” said Charlotte, and her pleasant, thin voice grew even thinner and more pleasant.

“Don't say that!” groaned Wilbur. “Please don't say things like that!”

“Why not? It's true, and I have to say what is true. I am not entirely happy about my diet of flies and bugs, but it's the way I'm made. A spider has to pick up a living somehow or other, and I happen to be a trapper. I just naturally build a web and trap flies and other insects. My mother was a trapper before me. Her mother was a trapper before her. All our family have been trappers. Way back for thousands of years we spiders have been laying for flies and bugs.”

“It's a miserable inheritance,” said Wilbur, gloomily. He was sad because his new friend was so bloodthirsty.

“Yes, it is,” agreed Charlotte. “but I can't help it. I don't know how the first spider in the early days of the world happened to think up this fancy idea of spinning a web, but she did, and it was clever of her too. And since then, all of us spiders have had to work the same trick. It's not a bad pitch, on the whole.”

— page 39

Writing fiction is a strange and barbaric occupation, full of so many fogs and pitfalls, that a writer will inevitably fall prey to all manner of schemes and compromises. Whether it be writing for praise, writing to follow a trend, writing to indulge a fetish, writing to show off, writing for fame, writing to change culture, writing to please a lover, writing to please a crowd, writing to eviscerate an enemy, writing to sound clever... So subtly attached to the human condition are the ways to go wrong, that even a conscientious and well-intentioned writer quickly gets lost. So what do we do?

Maybe the answer is not to answer at all, but simply trust our ancient instincts and do. No one told the first storyteller how to tell a story. They simply told it, and writing even a bad book of fiction is so very hard that anyone who writes without passion is quickly discouraged. Just as Charlotte does not question her miserable inheritance, we should not question ours. Writers of fiction inevitably feed on the people and events that get stuck in their webs. The “trick” is to trap those thoughts and stories and feelings that are true, wrap them up, and study them: Sometimes devouring them to sate immediate hunger, sometimes saving them for a special occasion, sometimes knowing when to let one go. A spider is not taught how to spin a web, or where. If they must learn they learn by spinning, and writers learn by writing.

This does not mean that a writer should shun all criticism and advice. Sometimes, you will know when, you will need help. This may come in the form of a nuts and bolts book like The Elements of Style, or it may come from another work of fiction, or the perspective of a trusted beta reader, or, as it did for Charlotte, a soap advertisement. The key is to know what helps your pursuit of truth and what does not. You are and always will remain the ultimate authority on your writing. When Templeton brings Charlotte words like “Crunchy” and “Pre-Shrunk,” she knows that they are not what she needs and she rejects them, because they are not true.

But how can a work of fiction, which is categorically untrue, be true? The confusion comes because we do not have enough words for Truth. Facts are true or untrue, but they are not true in the way people are true or untrue. And sometimes a true fact, far from illuminating the subject, obscures the full truth. If Wilbur were fried up into bacon, it is certainly true that he would be crunchy, but Charlotte sees beyond Wilbur's appearance and traditionally sanctioned doom. She, “loyal and true to the very end,” sees that his soul is radiant and that she could take this truth buried within Wilbur and make him and the world grow into that truth until it bears fruit — and she does so by writing what is True.

6. Be a true friend.

“Why did you do all this for me?” he asked. “I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.”

“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.”

— page 164

Writers are bloodthirsty, like spiders. We feed on our experience and the experiences of our friends and family and anyone else we catch in our web, for meaning and inspiration. Not one of us can say exactly why. Heaven knows it is hard enough, and heaven knows it makes a writer's life something of a mess. But in struggling to be a true friend a writer learns to be humble. They learn their own weaknesses and strengths. They learn empathy. A humble writer is more likely to seek to improve their writing, and not plateau forever at a half developed style. A writer who knows their strengths and weaknesses is less likely to write thinly disguised self-insert characters with very little diversity. An empathetic writer is more likely to allow their characters to make real decisions and say real dialogue, instead of treating them like wooden chess pieces in the service of an idea or a plot or a turn of phrase.

7. Your magnum opus is for you.

“What is that nifty little thing? Did you make it?”

“I did indeed,” replied Charlotte in a weak voice.

“Is it a plaything?”

“Plaything? I should think not. It is my egg sac, my magnum opus.”

“I don't know what a magnum opus is,” said Wilbur.

“That's Latin,” explained Charlotte. “It means 'great work.' This egg sac is my great work — the finest thing I have ever made.”

— page 144

So much has been made of writing that I believe it is almost impossible for a writer to sit at a keyboard for an hour without dreaming of bestseller lists and legacies at least ten times unless they are exceptionally humble, or never plan to publish. I remember reading over some of my earliest work and being utterly crushed because it did not resemble the work of my heroes, and if I am honest with myself that pride has never truly gone away. I have just accepted that it is not important. What is important, in writing, is honesty, truth, and love.

The difficulty is that it is the readers, not the writers, who ultimately decide whether the books have any merit — and which books will go down in history as “great”. This greatness is so alluring that many of us end up stuck in its web, but we must remember that it is an illusion. It is an illusion that could bleed us dry if we are not careful. It is a sticky half-art: A story that we tell about stories because we will never be able to satisfactorily articulate what great stories mean to us; just as we will never be able to fully articulate deep and faithful love in words alone.

Charlotte's magnum opus, which contains five hundred and fourteen future spiders, can teach us a better path to greatness. Writing, by the nature of its birth, is always written first for the writer. Always write to satisfy yourself first. To take your writing, and then twist it and conform it either for a trendy profit or for hero worship, would be like trampling on your own offspring. How dangerous and powerful the winds of culture are, and how selfish and pathetic our egos, that writing an honest word meets so much resistance. It would seem that honest and good writing is as fragile and powerful a miracle as a humble spider's web.

#essay

Text taken from Scholastic Inc version of Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, original text © 1952.

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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Content warning: This essay contains discussion of rape.

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, after Tess tells her new husband that she is not a virgin and he rejects her, Thomas Hardy describes a scene in which the husband sleepwalks, carrying Tess through a field, over a river, to an abandoned stone coffin outside of a run down Abbey. He lays her in the coffin and falls to the ground asleep. Then Tess sits up in the coffin. This scene is one of Hardy's “moments of vision,” a moment that Virginia Woolf described as a passage in which both author and reader seem “to be suddenly and without their own consent lifted up and swept onwards.” It is perhaps vain to attempt to discern the meaning of this passage. Hardy himself, who stated in the explanatory note of the novel that “novels are impressions, not arguments,” might deplore such an effort — but I am the reader, and as Woolf also wrote about reading him, “it is for the reader, steeped in the impression, to supply the comment.” ¹

In order to probe the deeper meaning, it is first necessary to trace Hardy's steps as he carries Tess to that coffin. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a novel about a pure woman whose purity is abused and mocked by an unjust world until it tramples her for sport. Even at the beginning of the novel when she is still a young country girl with little experience, Tess is the moral center of her family. When she comes home and discovers that her father has gone to drink a few hours before he is to take a load of beehives on an overnight journey by horse, it is Tess who rebukes her mother for letting him go. Joan Durbeyfield, convicted by her daughter's rebuke, goes to fetch the father but ends up staying at the bar, and Tess is forced to fetch both parents and help carry her drunk father home. At this as in many later points in the story, Tess's purity is abused by society and “Nature's holy plan” — Her father is too drunk to wake, and Tess is forced to make the journey with her brother. They both fall asleep, the horse is killed in an accident, and Tess is pushed by her family and her own guilt to call on a wealthy family that has assumed the name of the Durbeyfields' long dead relatives, the D'Urbervilles. This is the inciting incident of the novel, and it is here the theme is introduced in earnest. Who is made to pay for the dissipation and pride of the family's father? It's purest member.

When Tess arrives at the D'Urberville estate she exclaims “I thought we were an old family, but this is all new!” In fact the D'Urbervilles that Tess is induced to claim kin with have falsely assumed the D'Urberville name. A rich merchant looking to settle down and blend in as a county man in the South of England had used his fortune to fabricate a family tree that connected him to the ancient family line. Here again we see that society values money and appearance more than true integrity. Tess, a true descendant of the D'Urbervilles by blood, reaps no benefit, while the sham descendants enjoy all the good standing and honor. It is at this point that we are introduced to Alec D'Urberville, most generously described as a well-to-do degenerate. Struck by Tess's “luxuriance of aspect” and innocent nature, he engineers her hiring and constantly stalks and teases her without her consent. He takes advantage of his position as a privileged man and her employer to coerce Tess, and one night when Tess is very tired and vulnerable, he rapes her.

This crucial event is not narrated in detail. Hardy is purposely vague. Whether or not this is because he had to satisfy a publisher's or an artist's prerogative is not relevant. There is more than enough to infer what happens: Hardy asks why her guardian angel is absent, why Alec is allowed to trace such a course pattern on Tess's skin, and reckons that this could have been a retribution for Tess's ancestors who may have “dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time.” In spite of this some readers may still be tempted to ask whether it was actually a rape. After all, Tess did not kick and scream or cry out. But all doubts can be extinguished with a single question: Did Tess consent to sex? No. She never even consented to a flirtatious word. The closest we get to the moment is an exchange with Alec in which Tess says, “I didn't understand your meaning until too late.” Alec replies that that's what every woman says, to which Tess answers, “Did it ever strike you that what every woman says some women may feel?” Through Alec, Hardy shows just how little society values the word of the woman compared to that of the man, and though I sit here typing this essay over a century later I am sad to say that scant progress has been made in this regard.

When she realizes she is pregnant Tess resolves to return home. Once again, Tess's purity is abused by society because she does not accept Alec's professions of love or offers of money. The pregnancy would compromise her position at the D'Urberville estate, and more importantly it would not be right. She does not love Alec and she never did. To accept his “love” now would be to lie, so she leaves to have the child. While she waits Tess takes long walks in the woods, and on these walks Hardy comments that “she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.” Nature recognizes Tess's purity, even if society does not.

After she has the baby Tess is able to feel something of the purity that Hardy sees in her. She takes a job threshing, and realizes that her lot as a mother is not so distressing; what makes it distressing is society's view of her. But then the baby falls ill, and here perhaps more than anywhere else, Tess's purity is made to burn through the pages against society's corruption. Tess's father refuses to send for the parson on account of the “smudge which Tess had set” upon his nobility. He locks the door, and Tess is left to pass the night with her dying infant. Tess is frantic not just for her child's life but for his soul. He has not been baptized, and the girl-mother's head runs wild with the tortures the baby might suffer in hell according to the doctrines taught in the church of her time — so she baptizes him.

In this scene Tess is transfigured into a saint. This is another moment of vision, one in which Hardy almost seems to forget that Tess is a fictional character and not a real human being. He describes the airy note which Tess's voice took on “when her heart was in her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.” Her face has a touch of dignity which is “almost regal”, and to her siblings, whom Tess awakens to witness and affirm the baptism with their little “Amens”, she does not look like “Sissy”, but “a being large, towering and awful, a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.” Yet in the morning the well-named infant Sorrow is dead, and Tess goes to ask the parson about his soul. She asks whether the baptism is just the same to God, and the parson says it is, but when asked if it would secure a Christian burial he cannot “for certain reasons.” Once again society refuses to recognize Tess's purity, and she is forced to bury her baby with criminals and drunkards. Only Hardy continues to gaze at Tess where society turns away: after the burial she erects a homemade cross and brings flowers in a marmalade jar.

Wanting to leave home and start a new life, Tess jumps at an offer to work on a dairy farm distant enough from home that no one would know of her past. It goes well, and Tess passes what is probably the happiest summer of her life. She makes friends with the other milkmaids, learns the trade well, and enjoys belonging to the community at Talbothay's dairy. She also falls in love with Angel Clare, a gentle and philosophical man who turns out to be as fulfilling as a sack of wet sandwiches. Tess vows not to love him, but she cannot prevent the attraction, and she is thwarted again and again in her attempts both to tell Angel about her past and to ward off his affection for her. Just after they are married, Angel tells Tess about his sexual encounter with an older woman of the world. Tess is almost happy to forgive him as she tells him about Alec, but the double standard strikes her again, and Angel does not forgive her. Like the rest of society he sees Tess only for what she is not, forgetting that “the defective can be more than the entire.”

Angel's subconscious is not so easily duped, and after the two go to sleep he wakes and carries Tess from her bed into the night. He calls her his darling, laments her death, and kisses her before he lays her in the coffin. Whether or not Hardy intended it, this moment of vision is a metaphor for the entire novel. Hardy, lamenting Tess's fate, nevertheless carries her tenderly throughout the pages of the book, showering her with affection and attention even as society casts her off, so that after she is dead in the coffin she sits up in the mind of the reader and lives on. Perhaps Hardy himself, like Angel, did it in a state of unconscious compassion. Either way the effect is achieved unmistakably.

I first read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in High School for an AP Literature class. It was my first experience with Thomas Hardy and I forgot nearly every detail of the plot, but I never forgot Tess herself. Hardy left her impression on my memory, so much so that when I saw a copy at a used book sale over five years later I decided to buy it, and years after that I suggested to my wife that she should read it because “I remember kind of liking it.” Now, having re-read it as an older man without the joy-killing obligation of having to read for class, I have realized that my memory is proof of my thesis. Hardy killed Tess in the novel, but she sat up in the coffin and lived on in my mind.

In the novel society abuses and tries to pretend Tess does not exist, but I never forgot her. Her far reaching personality imbues the pages with a “burning sensibility.” I can see her, cheeks red with cold as she trudges over the snow to a miserable job, smiling ironically with Marion and blowing a kiss to her feckless husband in the direction she imagines him to be; or wandering among “lonely hills and dales,” “her flexuous figure” mingling with nature as she ponders her lot; or milking dexterously with the other maids as flies buzz and the cow's chew and slap their tails. To borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf, she has taken on a “more than mortal size” in my memory. Hardy, in carrying Tess to her doom, has drawn an inverted relationship between Tess's standing in society and her standing with the reader. As society crushes her lower and lower, her memory rises higher and higher, so that she is soon as high as the black flag of the tower that announces her death. And so carried in the reader's mind, after she is dead and the book is closed, she then sits up.

¹ Both quotes are from an essay Virginia Woolf published shortly after Thomas Hardy's death, titled The Novels of Thomas Hardy.

#essay #nonfiction #thomashardy #virginiawoolf #tessofthedurbervilles

First, thank you for reading! To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, I greatly regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hands, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

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“She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle.” — To the Lighthouse (84)

On page 84 of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes how Lily Briscoe, squeezed by social pressure during dinner at the Ramsey's house, remembers “all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure,” that she can improve her painting by “moving the tree to the middle.” She then picks up a salt shaker and puts it down “so as to remind herself to move the tree.”

These are two rather mundane sentences. They do not evoke strong emotion and they do not have particular significance in the immediate context. But Virginia Woolf weaves them into the text, using the movement of the salt shaker to remind both Briscoe and the reader twenty pages later that to “move the tree to the middle,” does not simply mean improving one's painting; it also means finding purpose and value outside of society's expectations (for Lily it is to marry). Then, when Lily comes back to the Ramsey's many years and pages later, after Mrs. Ramsey's death, the reader and Lily are taken back to that flash of inspiration at dinner with a simple phrase: “Move the tree to the middle, she had said (102).”

For those who have not tried to write compelling prose, this example may seem underwhelming. But as with many masterstrokes, “moving the tree to the middle” can be appreciated by imagining what you might have done instead. Even if you had lit on the idea of moving the tree to symbolize Lily's commitment to her art, would you have been brave and innovative enough to recall it twenty pages later, not with simple exposition that a reader cannot miss, but with a glance “at the salt cellar on the pattern”? This use of the word “salt” enhances the tree idiom. It is a word you can taste. It draws the reader into Lily Briscoe's mind and lived experience. This is immersion. This is how Virginia Woolf rewards the reader for journeying into the human soul with her.

This is just one example of the many recurring motifs in To the Lighthouse that Woolf weaves together as she tosses the reader on the waves of her characters' lives. There is Cam and James' “fight against tyranny (163, 184),” Tansley's refrain in Lily Briscoe's mind that women “can't paint, can't write (86, 158),” “Heaven (153, 171),” and many more. They illuminate the pages like the steady turning of the lighthouse itself, stroked both with subtlety and boldness in the way that only a master who knows when to break the rules can. She mixes metaphors. Her punctuation breaks convention. She puts an entire chapter in parentheses, and reduces another to a single sentence. This is a book published in 1927 that is bolder and yet more restrained than 99% of modern literature in its form and subject. Virginia Woolf is not only an important female writer, she is a master wordsmith of the English language.

Poe once wrote that originality “demands... negation.” In Virginia Woolf's prose there is a great energy and fierceness, but also great precision. Conversations at dinner can whirl into sailors fighting a gale so as not to fall to “the floor of the sea (84)”, “Heaven [can] never be sufficiently praised (153)!” for an awkward conversation saved by “the blessed island of good boots,” and an adolescent son at tension with his father vows to take a knife and strike him “to the heart (184).” In isolation these excerpts are melodramatic, but they are so well-timed amid the deep exploration of her characters' thoughts, that Woolf succeeds in painting the giddy heights and abyssal lows of the human experience. Rather than overwhelm the reader with her extreme metaphors, Woolf exercises restraint and drops them at just the right time like the final blow of a hammer. It is hard reading that demands much from the reader, but it is also some of the most rewarding that I have encountered. The experience is best described by Woolf herself in an essay about the love of reading:

“It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that.

For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.”

“How One Should Read a Book” by Virginia Woolf

When I consider that she received no formal higher education, that she suffered from manic depression, that she developed a love of reading and writing from her family's library, I cannot help but see Lily Briscoe's struggle as Woolf's own. How many men in Woolf's life whispered to her that women “can't paint, can't write?” How many times, sitting with the pen in her hand, did she struggle to hold onto her vision as “the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child (19)?” This is not to romanticize the tortured artist, it is to empathize. Writing serious art is hard enough without external resistance. I can only imagine what Woolf faced, and my heart breaks for the premature loss of her life and the unfinished works she left behind. It is not because of an artist's afflictions that great art is made, it is in spite of them. And it is in spite of the Charles Tansleys, in spite of the demons and the dreadful passages through the dark, in spite of her critics and her own exacting standards, in spite of “the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually (161)”, that Virginia Woolf has had her vision and succeeds in painting it by “moving the tree to the middle.” To read To the Lighthouse is to be immersed in a magnificent portrait of “daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark (161).”

I read this book shortly after graduating from college, and I am glad I did. Had I read it younger, I am not sure I could have appreciated it, because it is challenging reading for even serious readers. I have since read The Waves, and Mrs. Dalloway, and some of her essays, and I have never been disappointed. Her prose puts me in a rapture. Before I read To the Lighthouse I had not thought this type of writing even possible. It shocked me, like jumping into a cold ocean, but once I acclimated I found that the currents, though strong and forceful, were also gentle and purposeful. They never took me farther than was necessary or let me linger still for too long. This careful refinement of pace and passion is present in all the work that I have read by Woolf, and it is perhaps at its most perfect in To the Lighthouse.

If creating art is an expression of love, then a writer could be a lover, and “there might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed and compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays (192).”

Virginia Woolf was such a lover.

#nonfiction #essay #virginiawoolf #tothelighthouse

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. NY, NY, Harcourt Inc, 1981.

Woolf, Virginia. “Virginia Woolf: ‘How Should One Read a Book?’” The Yale Review, The Yale Review, 1 Sept. 1926, yalereview.org/article/virginia-woolf-essay-how-should-read-book.

—

Thank you for reading! My name is Hunter Dansin. I am a writer, musician, and coder living with and loving my growing family. My first book, Dawn Must Follow Night, is the first book in an original fantasy series that confronts darkness within and without.

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— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

My hometown has had an emotional controversy about retiring an Indian mascot. It is a controversy that Twitter says should not exist in 2022, and I feel the same sense of embarrassed denial while writing about it that a man must feel when he gets into a public altercation. This cannot be happening to me, can it?

But it is, and I have the luxury of seeing it from a distance. I no longer live in the town where I spent most of my childhood. I have been to China and lived in different states for five years. One might think this distance would also grant me the luxury of a clear perspective from which I might do what a writer from the Washington Post claims to do: “distill observations of family, politics and culture into moments of clarity and insight.”

Whether or not she can, I cannot. Because even if my home only exists in my memory, it still exists in the same way that a part of me will always be walking on those cracked sidewalks long after they have been paved. This new Cambridge is one that I hear about from family and the Washington Post, and it disorients me. The racist baggage is something that I think I always knew was there, but like Neil Gifford, the CCSD board member, I agree that it's “not who we are.”

In fact most people I knew and now know in Cambridge are not racists or bigots. Whether or not that is because, like me before college, they never had the opportunity to be, I do not know. I thought I was colorblind until I left home, and had to confront diversity without a screen between me and the people that did not look like me. It hurt because I had to wrestle with those gut reactions implanted by years of unchallenged microaggressions. I had to pick apart my identity and discard the rotten parts, some of which were very close to my core. This is what Cambridge seems to be going through, and the school mascot is for many close to the core of the town.

I cannot understand this because I was never proud to be “an Indian.” I was proud to play sports for Cambridge, but I knew that a mascot was just a superficial symbol. The mascot itself was consumed by the significance of what it represented, which to me at the time was the school and the people on my team. My memories are evidence for why the Indian mascot is a failure.

Supporters say that the mascot honors Native Americans and prevents erasure of indigenous peoples from history, but it does the opposite. The mascot has no place in my memory because I cared more about what it represented than what it was supposed to represent. It prevented me from thinking below the surface of the history of Indigenous Peoples in Cambridge, and I believe it has done the same for the whole town. I was not taught a single thing about Indigenous Peoples beyond what was on the New York State Regents. There were no ceremonies. There was no unit in Social Studies about the families in Cambridge. There was no monument or plaque prominent enough for me to remember. I cannot tell you the indigenous name for the land under Cambridge, NY and this shames me.

It might have been different in the past that the supporters remember, but in the present the mascot is a failure. It failed because wearing a stock photo on a grass stained jersey is not real honor. It is an excuse that allows us to forget. A mascot freezes the image of the American Indian in time and makes them a caricature that existed right around John Wayne and died right around Andrew Jackson and makes invisible the Indigenous Peoples who trace their heritage back, not to find one twenty-fourth of a symbol for their imagined 'connection to the land,' but to find “signs that a man could love his fate, that winter in the blood is one sad thing.”*

Tom Wolfe was right, but he did not realize that memory is more than a closet. Memory makes us who we are. Memory convinces us to strive for more. Memory protects us and sometimes betrays us, but we can no more repudiate it than we can a parent. Cambridge to me is winning a game ball coated with that sweet dark red American dust-sand of the baseball field, and riding over quiet hills billowed by manure-sweet wind, and imagining myself the commander of Gondor's armies in my friend's backyard next to the library, and climbing the iron artillery cannon wishing that I could jump in the barrel and fire myself up into the sky.

That is the town I remember, but I have seen the PROTECT THE PRIDE EDUCATION RESPECT TRADITION signs and they embarrass me, but a sign cannot describe a town just as Myers and Briggs cannot fully describe a person. A person is full of dissenting and often ugly emotions that can rage out when their buttons are pushed — but it is not the whole of them. I wish I could condemn “the keepers” and feel that clean happiness that comes with believing one's ideology is standing on the righteous side of the picket line, but I cannot because I remember my town in more colors than black and orange.

It is a shame that I am only now attempting to fill in my memories of Cambridge with the history of the Indigenous Peoples who were there before because the school could have started me earlier. It would be an even greater shame if the adults forgot about the kids and continued to bicker over what to put on a T-Shirt, because the kids are more important. Their memories will be stained, and so will the memory of the people as old as the land whose tongue we refused to learn and whose memories we refused to listen to. In this country that careens toward the future like an alcoholic to the next bottle with no regard for the wake of broken people and glass in her wake, replacing the mascot should not be rejected as an infringement. It should be welcomed as an opportunity to remember lives instead of totems.

#essay #opinion #nonfiction #news

References

Cohen, Kate. “Opinion | a New York School District Confronts Hatred in Its Yearbook — If Not Its Mascot Name.” Washington Post, 16 June 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/16/cambridge-ny-yearbook-mascot-racism/.

*Welch, James. Riding the Earthboy 40. The World Publishing Company, 1971, p. 17. “In My Lifetime.”

Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley; in Search of America, Steinbeck Centennial Edition. Penguin Group, 2002 (1962). p. 157.

First, thank you for reading! To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, I greatly regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hands, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world. If you subscribe I promise I will not gum up your inbox.

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It's a sad tale, it's a tragedy

It's a sad song

But we sing it anyway“

— Road to Hell (Reprise)

Hermes stands over a defeated Orpheus. The boy watches his lover sink back into the Underworld. He was only a few steps away from life but he doubted and looked back, breaking his contract with Hades. Eurydice must now remain in hell, and Orpheus can never go back. It's a sad song that turns out the same every time, so why sing it?

Hadestown is a musical written by Anaïs Mitchell in 2006. She recorded a concept album and the show eventually made it to Broadway in 2019. It is based on the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I love it.

I am not a connoisseur of musical theater. Not until Hamilton did I really start to appreciate the medium, and it was only because of my wife that I discovered Hadestown (she teaches Latin). At first I thought it was interesting, not quite as smart or complex as Hamilton, but still good. Yet as I listened repeatedly (mainly because the music is phenomenal) the story started to sink its hooks in me.

There are a lot of worthy themes in Hadestown: faith, trust, love, fear... But the one I want to talk about, the one that is stuck in my mind, is hope that sings in the face of failure.

Orpheus the Naive?

“And this poor boy, he wore his heart out on his sleeve

You might say he was naive to the ways of the world.“

— Anyway the Wind Blows

Orpheus is a bit of a sap, and he is often played for laughs. Hades comes back for Persephone early, plunging the world into a dark winter. Then Orpheus comes along singing about bringing the world “back into tune.” His hope sticks out like an unwelcome gust of fresh air in a world where the wind is always foul.

This outlook is contrasted with the outlook of Eurydice, his lover, who as Hermes says “was no stranger to the world.” She is a “hungry young girl” who drifts from town to town when the wind changes. She runs from everywhere and everyone she's ever met because her experience has taught her that “everybody is a fair weather friend.” She, and everyone else in the world of men, can't imagine a better world because this dark one is the only one they've ever known.

In “Wedding Song”, Eurydice tests Orpheus not on his love for her but his ability to provide. She asks about the wedding bands, the table and the bed. It is only after Orpheus sings his song and grows a flower with it, thereby providing proof that he can do what he says he can, that she starts to accept him.

Hermes summarizes it this way:

“When she fell she fell in spite of herself In love with Orpheus“

— All I've Ever Known

It is difficult to judge either Eurydice or Orpheus. His naivety about the world leads him to neglect her by focusing on his song, and her worldliness leads her to betray him by accepting Hades's offer. Perhaps they were destined for a tragedy.

The Failure

Orpheus finishes his song, but by the time he does Eurydice is already dead. Hermes gives him a hard time, but when it is clear that Orpheus will go “to the end of time” to get Eurydice back, Hermes explains that there is another way to get to Hades without a ticket.

Orpheus makes an impossible journey into the Underworld. He crosses the river Styx and sings his song to make the stones of Hades' wall weep and let him in. He arrives in Hadestown and finds Eurydice, but he also finds the King of the Underworld.

Hades is not at all pleased that a poor boy with a lyre was able to cross his borders, but he is also bemused. He invites Orpheus to sing him a song before banishing him to the graveyard. Orpheus steps to the microphone and sings. He sings about Hades and his love for Persephone. He sings about the love that turns the seasons, and he sings to Hades the melody that the King used to woo Persephone.

Against all odds the song works. Hades's heart is softened and Orpheus is given a chance to leave the Underworld, but there is a test. Eurydice must walk behind Orpheus, and if he looks back she remains in the Underworld forever.

But Orpheus fails.

Why?

Hadestown could have addressed or rewrote Orpheus's failure and made it easier to swallow. The myth is ambiguous and Mitchell was already taking liberties with it, but she chose to dwell on the moment. The audience is forced to sit with the tragedy as Eurydice sinks back down, but why?

There was plenty of room for re-writing. In some versions of the myth Orpheus dies at the hands of Maenads. The musical could have continued, seeing Orpheus reuniting with Eurydice in the Underworld. There are echoes of this in the closing moments, where we hear Eurydice's voice and the coming of spring, but Orpheus's failure is the end of the plot. We are reminded throughout the last song that “It's a sad song,” and lest we forget that, Hermes reminds us that we are not here to “correct” the myth:

“Don't ask why, brother, don't ask how

He could have come so close

The song was written long ago

And that it is how it goes“

— Road to Hell (Reprise)

So why are we here? Hermes does not provide a direct answer, instead referencing the hope that Orpheus had for changing the world “in spite of the way that it is.” He asks us if we can see it, hear it and feel that hope “like a train.”

There are hints that Orpheus, in spite of losing Eurydice, was able to make spring come again and “bring the world back into tune.” But he does not get his love, and the last line of the musical brings us back to the beginning “We're gonna sing it again.”

A better place to find the reason that Hadestown dwells on tragedy is in the epilogue, which is usually sung by Persephone and company after the audience is done clapping and getting ready to leave. She asks us to “raise a cup” for Orpheus, and goes on to explain why they are singing.

“Some birds sing when the sun shines bright

Our praise is not for them

But the ones who sing in the dead of night

We raise our cups to them

...

Some flowers bloom where the green grass grows

Our praise is not for them

But the ones who bloom in the bitter snow

We raise our cups to them

...

To Orpheus and all of us

Goodnight, brothers, goodnight“

— We Raise Our Cups

Failure and tragedy are inevitable. They strike whether we expect them or want them to. Hadestown, rather than shy from tragedy or try to correct it, uses the myth to dive into the mixed feelings of loss, pain, guilt and shattered hope that swirl when tragedy strikes. And it ends with a celebration of the human spirit that keeps singing anyway.

#nonfiction #essay #Hadestown #failure

First, thank you for reading! To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, it is a great regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world. I promise I will not gum up your inbox.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

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So God said to Jonah, “Are you really so very angry about the little plant?” And he said, “I am as angry as I could possibly be!” The Lord said, “You were upset about this little plant, something for which you did not work, nor did you do anything to make it grow. It grew up overnight and died the next day.”

— Jonah 4:9-10 NET

“I hate politics.”

“Politics are more polarized than ever.”

“America is divided.”

“I hate elections.”

“The government is corrupt.”

I have heard these ideas expressed every election year. It is true that 2020 is exceptional, but in reality every election is exceptional. Who can calculate all the factors and people that swirl in our country for four years? The United States government has endured civil war, depressions and even pandemics, and its people have endured far more.

Most Americans I know are simply trying to live, but a few I know are so concerned about the shade of the government that they are angry enough to die. True, despair is easier to slip into and dwell in now. We can surround ourselves with bad news that we will never be able to do anything about. We have the ability to ignore all who disagree and let the facts be interpreted for us.

It is tempting, isn't it? I can create a world where my assumptions are never challenged and my opinions are always right. It pleases my pride to overwhelm myself with evidence that the other side is wrong. I have access to the truly true secret knowledge that “they” REALLY don't want you to know. All I have to do is tap some shiny glass, but the other side of the glass isn't real.

What do you believe in? Where is your hope? How much does the president mean to you? How much does he really effect you? When do you interact with the government? Do you really think that electing one person can solve all your problems? Can you be distilled into a binary choice? How many lives are you willing to sacrifice to be proven right? What have you done to make this country and this government? What do you owe it? What does it owe you? What is the government responsible for? What should it be responsible for?

These questions have been stewing since 2016. The only one I can answer definitively is the first one, but Jonah and his plant have helped clarify how I value politics:

I believe that America's system of checks and balances is a brilliant idea. I think it is about as good as we can do on earth. I am thankful to live in the United States, but I did not plant it or make it grow. I did not help write the Constitution or sign the Declaration of Independence. All I have done is live here. American government and its relative stability has been a shade over my head, and like Jonah I was once very delighted with it.

The shade seemed to wither in 2016 (though for others it might have seemed to strengthen), but now on the eve of an election I am reminded that my hope is eternal and that this world will pass away. I voted and I care very much who wins, but I do not care about it more than you or my family or Jesus. I want to devote myself to good policies over parties and to people over politics because the people of America are far more influential than the president.

#nonfiction #essay #uspol #Jesus