slow reads

Not quite quiet

Mistaking the glue stick for ChapStick wasn’t all bad.

Someone on Amazon wrote that the title How to Think Like Shakespeare is misleading. And it’s true that, after reading the book, I’m no better prepared to write a good play or sonnet. But the title — with its subtitle Lessons from a Renaissance Education — makes for an effective opening in a classical argument. Aristotle taught us to focus on specifics, particularly in our openings, and Scott Newstok’s opening closeup is Shakespeare. I can’t fault Newstok for ultimately giving me much more than Shakespeare.

Newstok’s quotes end up being both ancient and modern, sacred and profane (that helpful and outdated distinction), variable and constant. The variable part is the use he makes of quotes, which is unique as far as I know. He quotes not only to support his arguments but also to release the dead’s phrasing into living space. He quotes, I might say, as a farmer plows. The reader may as well be walking along a Vermont road on a bright, spring morning, smelling the turned-up soil.

Here’s a plug I pulled up this morning:

A methodical man, John Shade usually copied out his daily quota of completed lines at midnight but even if he recopied them again later, as I suspect he sometimes did, he marked his card or cards not with the date of his final adjustments, but with that of his Corrected Draft or first Fair Copy. I mean, he preserved the date of actual creation rather than that of second or third thoughts. There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.

No, that’s Nabokov. But Newstok is, in a different way, as playful as Pale Fire:

What is good fit? Bad fit is easy to recognize, whether someone’s not fit for a task or out of shape (or both). In Cymbeline, the cloddish Cloten presumes that because the garments of another character “fit” him, Why should his mistress, who was made by him that made the tailor, not be fit too? The illustration to this chapter [and you’ll love the often-Renaissance-era illustrations] depicts a mis-fit man, his boots on his hands and his gloves on his feet. The world is turned upside down, with the cart before the horse, and the cat had the dire disaster / To be worried by the mouse.

Newstok doesn’t get in the way of his source material, signified by italics and superscribed footnote numbers. Instead, he conjures his sources in the act of his own writing.

What’s constant in How to Think Like Shakespeare is the constancy of the dead. To hear the dead yet speak so well and for so long — and about a matter that concerns all of us, our individual and collective education — moves me. Newstok’s arguments bring the past to bear on many aspects of a good, lifelong education suggested by the chapter titles (e.g., “Of Ends,” “Of Craft,” “Of Conversation”). The arguments fuel and extend my imaginary debates with my district’s administration. I bought a copy of How to Think Like Shakespeare for my department head, my chief ally in my own slow fight for the longer view.

So if I’m no more prepared to write like Shakespeare (and if that’s the test of thinking more like him), then at least I’m more emboldened to write like myself. Newstok, an accomplished English professor and editor, has a better ear than I: I like listening to his sentences whether they come adorned and unadorned with quotes. I am a hoarder in line with Newstok, though I’m focused on mostly political and religious theorists. My commonplace entries aren’t as common as Newstok’s, but my dead can speak, too, in their own way and in their own time — perhaps in some future they see more clearly than I do (“They can tell you, being dead,” to quote Eliot), thanks to the past.

Despite my more finicky interests, many of my favorite writers — political, philosophical, and (of course) literary — are present. Newstok quotes Hannah Arendt in his prologue (appropriately titled “What’s Past Is Prologue”), and she returns among some excellent back matter (“Kinsmen of the Shelf”) with the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jenny Odell. In a footnote in “Of Attention,” Newstok produces an unprinted work by Richard Sennett that I’ve now read and read, salted and stored. Just the names of the quoted suggest that the field of education is universal and therefore personal, too serious a matter to be entrusted to grim and narrow experts.

These footnotes, where you’ll find many such blessings, are half the fun and occasionally almost half the page. If you’re a quote nut — and I think you will be if you poke around in this book — you’ll be pleased that Newstok cites them in footnotes and not endnotes (an improvement over Pale Fire).

Newstok has given me a hundred more books to read. But his approach to reading and learning is so vivid and slow that nothing in me regrets it.

My morning’s mantra

“Into an unslumming or unslummed slum customarily come new increments of poor or ignorant immigrants from time to time.” – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

The suburb of God

“Ye are the light of the world. A suburb that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” — Matthew 5:14

“For unto you is born this day in the suburb of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” — Luke 2:11

“By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a suburb which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” — Hebrews 11:8-11

“And I John saw the holy suburb, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” — Revelation 21:2

Two-ness

The storms that started south of Roanoke continued until soon after the big thunderclap around 2:00 this morning. We had been asleep for about four hours at Betty’s when it woke me up.

Nashville got seven inches of rain. Columbia got less, but enough wind to knock down power lines. Some of them and their poles occupied the right lane of a road we took from the spur to Betty’s. Police were blocking off lots of flooded roads.

What a walk! This morning I played the student of the vernacular landscape, a term John Stilgoe credits to John Brinckerhoff Jackson to mean the landscape “made and used by most people most of the time.”¹ Stilgoe says anyone can do it:

“Unorganized, unafraid of mishap and getting lost, often appearing ignorant especially in front of locals, the few do what anyone can do—move along slowly, look, listen, think, and try to learn later about what turned up.”²

Or maybe it’s not so easy. Austen Allen quotes Stilgoe: “With care, inquirers can understand the landscape conjurings of others, but only rarely can they escape, even momentarily, the contemporary mindset.”³

Homogeneity is democracy’s cul-de-sac. It’s the dead end of the French Revolution with its concept of “le peuple,” which, as Hannah Arendt points out, carries “the connotation of a multiheaded monster, a mass that moves as one body and acts as though possessed by one will . . .”⁴

“It never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them.” — Julius in Teju Cole’s Open City

White space is rarely public space in the United States. But much Black space is public space. “Let me be clear from the outset. We didn’t do this neighborhood to ourselves.” — Jean Luck Godard in John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon.

Sarah Daleiden wonders if “a Black landscape” is “a place that supports neighbors to focus on the civic so we can walk toward freedom from racism and the inequities and trauma it can trigger and produce in any of us.”⁵

Black landscapes can’t afford homogeneity. “All Americans can learn from people who have had to look at themselves with a two-ness,” Walter Hood says, reflecting on Du Bois’s famous term. “People should see that they themselves, and landscapes, have multiplicities: we should be moving through space that constantly reminds us that women are equal, that we owe responsibility to natives who were here beforehand, that Black hands built our landscape.”⁶

Landscape, as much as anything, “signifies how we personally come to something, to a place.”⁷

[Thank you, Bethany, for Black Landscapes Matter, edited by Walter Hood and Grace Mitchell Tada, University of Virginia Press, 2020.]

Stilgoe, John R. What Is Landscape? (p. 211). MIT Press. Kindle Edition. ↩
Id. at 213. ↩
Allen, Austen. “Site of the Unseen: The Racial Gaming of American Landscapes.” Black Landscapes Matter, Walter Hood and Grace Mitchell Tada, Eds., Virginia, 2020, page 102. ↩
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Penguin Classics, Penguin Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, page 84. ↩
Daleiden, Sara. “The Beerline Trail: Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” Black Landscapes Matter, Walter Hood and Grace Mitchell Tada, Eds., Virginia, 2020, page 154. ↩
Walter Hood. Afterword. Black Landscapes Matter, Walter Hood and Grace Mitchell Tada, Eds., Virginia, 2020, page 175. ↩
Allen, supra, page 129. ↩

Shakespeare

If you visit our kitchen, you’d see a small painting that accompanies what purports to be a quotation from Shakespeare. But it’s not Shakespeare; it’s a modern sentiment that the Internet has put in Shakespeare’s mouth.

My dear friend who painted it believes the words are Shakespeare’s, just as I believe the words in Deuteronomy, written during an Israelite monarchy centuries after the fact, are Moses’s.

A kangaroo court

Dear Sen. Warner,

I know the public documents, videotape, and proffered evidence at the former president’s trial yesterday was damning, but it hardly registered with half of our country. What would still register — miraculously, perhaps, at this late stage of our national unraveling — is courtroom testimony. Take the Constitution seriously concerning the court you have become. Call many, many witnesses; compile oral as well as documentary evidence, and argue from that. Subpoena rioters and police officers. Subpoena the former president’s former insiders. Subpoena “hearts and flowers” witnesses. Let the trial go on for months if necessary. Nothing else will make the nation understand that you are taking the events during and leading up to January 6 seriously, and nothing else will make it understand why.

Courtroom testimony and a through trial would, I think, slowly drive a wedge between the irreconcilable believers of the former president and the sensible but cowed members of his party. On the other hand, mere opening statements, closing arguments, and proffered facts from unnamed sources reported in newspapers that Republicans entirely discount — no matter how compelling you believe those proffers to be — are leaving you open to the justified claim that you have constituted yourselves into a kangaroo court.

Democratic officeholders often ridicule their Republican colleagues for their fearful adherence to the will of the former president’s base. However, calling witnesses may also upset many in your own base, who want much of President Biden’s agenda passed immediately. But nothing on President Biden’s agenda, as important as the first few weeks in office are to a new president, is worth the potential price of the republic.

Defend the republic the way the Constitution designed that defense for cases like the one at bar — by an actual trial, the more important of which sometimes take weeks and months. Real trials compel sworn testimony. Do your duty by the Constitution. Call many witnesses.

What I read this year

Here’s what I read this year, alphabetized by last name:

Genesis, translated by Robert Alter
Exodus, translated by Robert Alter
Leviticus, translated by Robert Alter
Jonah, translated by Robert Alter
On Revolution by Hanna Arendt (third read)
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson (second read)
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
The Great Influenza by John M. Barry
The Italian Renaissance by Kenneth R. Bartlett (lecture series)
Frederick Douglas: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
The God We Never Knew by Marcus J. Borg
St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes what We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer l. Eberhardt
Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison
Sovereignty: God, State, and Self by Jean Bethke Elshtain
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
The Limits of History by Constantin Fasolt
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner
Radical Prayer: Love in Action by Matthew Fox (lecture series) (second listen)
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism by Onur Ulas Ince
The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas by Peter Kreeft (lecture series)
The Platonic Tradition by Peter Kreeft
Change the Story: Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth by David C. Lorten
One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic: A History of the Church in the Middle Ages by Thomas F. Madden (lecture series)
The Principles of Representative Government by Bernard Manin
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer
The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian (fifth read)
The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O’Brian (fifth read)
The Thirteen-Gun Salute by Patrick O’Brian (fifth read)
The Letter of Marque by Patrick O’Brian (fifth read)
The Far Side of the World by Patrick O’Brian (fifth read)
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (two reads)
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker
Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times by David S. Reynolds
God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution, and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C.S. Pierce by Andrew Robinson
Traces of the Trinity: Signs, Sacraments, and Sharing God’s Life by Andrew Robinson
An Introduction to Greek Philosophy by David Roochnik (lecture series)
College (Un)Bound by Jeffrey J. Selingo
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (fourth and fifth reads)
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson
Phenomenology: The Basics by Dan Zahavi

Transcendent matters

From today’s New York Times:

A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Congress could not sue to enforce its subpoenas of executive branch officials, handing a major victory to President Trump and dealing a severe blow to the power of Congress to conduct oversight.

In a ruling that could have far-reaching consequences for executive branch secrecy powers long after Mr. Trump leaves office, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissed a lawsuit brought by the House Judiciary Committee against Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II.

On Mr. Trump’s instructions, Mr. McGahn defied a House subpoena seeking to force him to testify about Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation. The House sued him, seeking a judicial order that he show up to testify, and won in district court in November.

But two of the three appeals court judges ruled on Friday that the Constitution gave the House no standing to file any such lawsuit in what they characterized as a political dispute with the executive branch. If their decision stands, its reasoning would shut the door to judicial recourse whenever a president directs a subordinate not to cooperate with congressional oversight investigations.

“The committee now seeks to invoke this court’s jurisdiction to enforce its subpoena,” wrote Judge Thomas B. Griffith. The Justice Department, “on behalf of McGahn, responds that Article III of the Constitution forbids federal courts from resolving this kind of interbranch information dispute.”

“We agree and dismiss this case,” he wrote.

From The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship by Ernst Fraenkel (1940):

More than 300 years ago a similar demand was made in England. King James I, in his famous message to the Star Chamber (June 20, 1616), declared that in political questions the decision rested with the Crown and not with the Courts.

“Encroach not upon the prerogative of the Crown. If there fall out a question that concerns my prerogative or mystery of State, deal not with it till you consult with the King or his Council or both; for they are transcendent matters . . . As for the absolute prerogative of the Crown, that is no subject for the tongue of a lawyer, nor is it lawful to be disputed. It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do . . . so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a King can do, or say that a King cannot do this or that.”

The straightforwardness of this message has scarcely been surpassed by any spokesman of the Third Reich. (36)

Have you never read?

They were indignant and asked him, ‘Do you hear what they are saying?’ Jesus answered, ‘I do. Have you never read the text, “You have made children and babes at the breast sound your praise aloud”?’ – Matthew 21:15 – 16, REB

What haven’t I read this year? This year I never read Rhinoceros. I’ve thought about it — not about reading it, I mean.

But this year I read Matthew Fox’s account of reading Thomas Merton reading Rhinoceros. Within minutes of reading it, I ordered Merton‘s Raids of the Unspeakable. I have now read Thomas Merton reading Rhinoceros for myself.

They [the Samaritans] told the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard him ourselves.’ – John 4:42, REB

While we read John’s account of the Samaritans’ account.

Jesus wasn’t suggesting — he wasn’t even understood then and there, I don’t think, as suggesting – that his fellow rabbis had not read this or any the other texts he referred to. He was, though, implicitly challenging their notion of reading. Reading a book is no accomplishment, much less a credential.

Reading, in fact, may reduce me. In Bachelard’s poetics, for instance, “the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.”¹ I’m becoming my authors’ mirrors.

Maybe my writers are like the Old Testament’s heroes of faith, of whom the writer of Hebrews says, “only with us should they reach perfection” (Hebrews 11:40, REB). Is that what they see in me, and is that why they published? Are they watching me now?

And have you never read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler — the novelist Silas Flannery watching through a spyglass a woman in a deck chair who is, in turn, reading his book?

Paul’s best stuff, he said, were his readers: “you are our epistles, known and read of all men.” Many writers are busy revising me.

To feel how impossible it is to finish a book, one must be read at least as much as one reads. John Climacus taught me that: “When you find satisfaction or compunction in a certain word of your prayer, stop at that point.”

So while reading a book may not be an accomplishment, reading a book may also be no small accomplishment. As Flannery says, “it is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.” But this nonwritten stays nonwritten. It surfaces only through “the uncertainties of spellings, the occasional lapses, oversights, unchecked leaps of the word and the pen.”² Do you hear what they are saying?

If you’ve finished If on a Winter’s Night, of course, you never finished ten books.

I’ve never actually read Climacus. Henri Nouwen quotes him, though, in a short book on meditation that I’ve read a dozen times, the last a dozen years ago.³

I won’t list most of the books I read from this year. But here are the books that were bad enough for me to finish:

1 Samuel translated by Robert Alter
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination by Joyce Appleby
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
On Revolution by Hannah Arendt (3rd & 4th readings)
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (2nd reading)
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger
The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habernas by Lawrence Cahoone (2nd) (lecture series)
Metahuman by Deepak Chopra
The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark
Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (3rd & 4th readings)
Absalom, Abaslom! by William Faulkner (3rd reading)
The Wild Palms by William Faulkner (2nd reading)
Churches in the Modern State by John Neville Figgis
Radical Prayer: Love in Action by Matthew Fox (lecture series)
Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? by Robert Kuttner
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2nd & 3rd readings)
The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of Western Political Thought by Eric Nelson
The Prince by Niccolio Machiavelli (2nd reading)
Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian (5th reading)
The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian (5th reading)
H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian (5th reading)
The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian (5th reading)
The Maritius Command by Patrick O’Brian (5th reading)
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian (5th reading)
Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian (5th reading)
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Centuryby J. G. A. Pocock
Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation by Richard Rohr
Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down by Laura A. Sandefer
The Grammarians by Kathleen Schine
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (2nd reading)
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (37th reading)
The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution by Ganesh Sitaraman
Prayer and Worship by Douglas Steere (4th reading)
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
Writing Across contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing by Kathleen Blake Yancey
Medical Medium: Liver Rescue by Anthony William

This coming year, I’ll be thinking about Rhinoceros a lot.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 11. ↩
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 178. ↩
Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, 81. ↩