On the gods, their agents, and their doings, part two

From Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "The Spider Thread" (1918), collected in Rashamon and Seventeen Other Stories

And now, children, let me tell you a story about Lord Buddha Shakyamuni.

It begins one day as He was strolling alone in Paradise by the banks of the Lotus Pond. The blossoms on the pond were like perfect white pearls, and from their golden centers wafted forth a never-ending fragrance wonderful beyond description. I think it must have been morning in paradise.

From Virgil's Aeneid, Book Four, Robert Fagles's translation (2006)

"I . . . you have done me
so many kindnesses, and you could count them all.
I shall never deny what you deserve, my queen,
never regret my memories of Dido, now while I
can recall myself and draw the breath of life.
. . . .
And now the messenger of the gods--I swear it,
by your life and mine--dispatched by Jove himself,
has brought me firm commands through the racing winds.
With my own eyes I saw him, clear, in broad daylight,
moving through your gates. With my own ears I drank
his message in. Come, stop inflaming us
both with your appeals. I set sail for Italy--
all against my will."

Deuteronomy 4:27-31,

And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples and you shall be left men few in number among the nations where the Lord will drive you. And you shall worship there their gods that are human handiwork, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. And you shall search for the Lord your God from there, and you shall find him when you seek Him with all your heart and with all your being. When you are in straits and all these things find you in time to come, you shall turn back to the Lord your God and heed His voice. For the Lord your God is a merciful god. He will not let you go and will not destroy you and will not forget your fathers’ covenant that He swore to them.

From Justin Marozzi’s Tamerlane (2004)

When reports reached the Turk of this lightning manoeuvre, he was “seized with panic as though it were the day of resurrection and bit his hands with grief and remorse and roared and howled and burning with the fire of anger was almost suffocated and abandoned rest and sleep.”

From Pearl S. Buck's Imperial Woman (1956)

Since snow had not fallen in the late winter when the wheatfields needed snow as fertilizer, the gods must be persuaded by three days of public reproach, the priests carrying the gods out from their pleasant temples to survey the dry and frozen fields.

From Garry Wills’s What Jesus Meant (2006)

The angel has to reassure [Mary]: “Have no fear, Mary, this is because you have found favor with God.” Did she know already how dangerous is such favor? God’s chosen people are commonly chosen to suffer. Of Jesus in particular, John Henry Newman wrote: “All who came near him more or less suffered by approaching him, just as if pain and trouble went out of him, as some precious virtue for the good of their souls.”

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

“That’s right,” Malloy said. “But listen. A guy named Spinoza wrote a sentence once. He said: Because a man loves God he must not expect God to love him in return. Theres a lot in that, in lots of ways. I don’t use passive resistance for what I expect it will get me. I dont expect it to pay me back any more than it ever has. That isn’t the point. If that was the point, I’d of given it up years ago as a flop.”

From Garry Wills’s What Jesus Meant (2006)

Jesus’ followers have the obligation that rests on all men and women to seek justice based on the dignity of every human being. That is the goal of politics, of “the things that belong to Caesar.” But heaven’s reign makes deeper and broader demands, the demands not only of justice but of love.

From John Mortimer’s Quite Honestly (2006)

“How did God come into it?”

“Well, he didn’t really. Not when Robert was a vicar. In those days he seemed to take God for granted. But as soon as he became a bishop—I don’t know, I suppose because it was a step up and Robert felt responsible for God and treated him more as an equal. Anyway, he began to find fault with him or question anything he did. Of course, it’s got a lot worse since President Bush. He can’t understand how God would have anything to do with the man.”

America in the King Years

As I wrote just last week, I'm not usually inclined to recommend books generally, to all readers, instead hedging my recommendations with caveats and explanations, rooting everything fully in my own sensibility. Part of what I enjoy about reading good critics--James Wood and Michael Dirda, for example--is learning, over time, what they like and dislike and where their tastes and mine overlap; learning their sensibilities means both that I gain some appreciation for books I might otherwise not have noticed or liked and that I learn when and how far to trust their recommendations.

I've also written on this blog about how personal reading decisions are, how people read for different reasons and in different ways. I don't really believe that people should be reading a certain type of book in a certain way or that reading those books will make you a better person. Will serious reading of Tolstoy make you think deeply about how people live their lives? Sure, but so, in a different way, will reading Watership Down. If I had a book-related motto, it would be read what you want to read; take those minutes or hours to simply be, separate from the world and concentrating deeply on something that requires your active participation, your collaboration, your bringing to bear your lifetime of thoughts and experience Do that, and I'll call it good.

So if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll realize how unusual it is that I'm saying the following: Every American who wants to understand this country should read Taylor Branch's America in the King Years. I read the first volume, Parting the Waters (1988) last January and it was so utterly involving that I had to take a break. I spent my Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday this year reading the second volume, Pillar of Fire (1997), and I'm going to have to take another break before I tackle the similarly acclaimed third volume, At Canaan's Edge (2006).

In the first two books, Branch performs the seemingly superhuman feat of covering every aspect of the civil rights movement from 1955-1963, with all its successes and failures, dramatic moments and dull meetings, charismatic leaders and brave followers--and making it spellbinding. The cast of characters is tremendous; King himself, at the center through the first volume, by the second volume is only the most important voice of many, disappearing from the narrative for pages at a time. Branch gives us real insight into countless figures, including the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Lyndon Johnson, Bayard Rustin, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, Adam Clayton Powell, James Bevel, John Doar, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Without ever sacrificing the tone of a serious historian, Branch makes moments of high drama such as James Meredith's integration of Ole Miss as gripping as any thriller, and he's equally good at explaining the intricate political maneuvering, both high- and low-level, that underlay every bit of forward progress. Somehow, he makes it easy to keep track of the movement's proliferation of acronym-named organizations and their leaders, as well as dozens of different protest actions in cities across the United States. There truly is never a dull moment.

Branch accomplishes both of what I see as the historian's highest goals, fully bringing the period and its people to life and making clear the very real possibility that these events, many of them completely familiar to us by now, could easily have happened in a different way, or not at all. The two goals are deeply interconnected: placing us so firmly in the time constantly (if indirectly) reminds us that progress is not inexorable and that history is the product of individual decisions, in this case often ones of jaw-dropping bravery at great personal cost. It's a stunning achievement, and it makes America in the King Years the best history writing I've ever read, hands down.

At the same time, by bringing to life the complexity underlying the simplistic national narrative of progress in civil rights, Branch points the way to an understanding of the following forty years of politics, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush, from the crumbling of the Solid South to the continuing (but nearly finished) realignment of the Republicans and Democrats into Southern vs. Northern, Rural vs. Urban, lily-White vs. multi-racial parties. If I were to teach a class in contemporary politics (for which I'd be astonishingly unqualified), I'd start my syllabus with this trilogy, Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), and Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes (1970); from them alone, I think even a novice student of American history could gain a working understanding of how we've ended up where we are as a nation.

But start with Taylor Branch. It will make you think in complicated ways about race, rights, American history, personal responsibility, bravery, non-violence, organization, power, and an uncountable host of other topics. In other words, I guarantee it will be worth your time.

Conversation: A Declining Art?, Part Two

Part one, which is full of praise for the first two-thirds of the book, is here.

In the last third of Conversation: A Declining Art , Stephen Miller attempts to track what he perceives as the decline of conversation in twentieth-century America. He begins with a flat and fairly perfunctory consideration of the laconic hero in twentieth-century American literature and film. But while he points to Hemingway and John Wayne in order to demonstrate that the strong, silent type was the American ideal in this period, he ignores substantial contrary evidence, everything from screwball comedies to the golden age of radio to Dorothy Parker.

He uses evidence selectively like that throughout the closing chapters. The worst is when Miller attempts to blame the most recent downturn in the quality and place of conversation in American life on fifties and sixties counterculture. He considers Easy Rider at length, then spends more time than anyone ought to spend these days on Norman Mailer. His critique boils down to this: neither privileging visceral experience nor doing drugs makes for good conversation. That’s not news (Garry Wills, for one, manages a much more interesting and nuanced critique of those aspects of sixties youth culture, in passing, in Nixon Agonistes), and by using that as the crux of his argument Miller takes ignores the fact that the late sixties were also a time of contentious private and public discussions about how society should be structured. Serious conversations, in groups large and small, were central to that reconsideration.

Then we get pages and pages on possibly the most over-analyzed subject since Madonna, talk shows, and suddenly we’re back to “conversation avoidance mechanisms.” I’ll spare you the details; as I said before, anyone who willfully misrepresents the purpose of an iPod as a barrier to conversation has no authority to speak on the subject.

But once Miller gets to the present, the details are less important. The real reason his arguments about conversation’s decline fail is that he's writing about our era, and I think he’s flat-out wrong. I live in a world of great conversation. No, I don’t want to talk to strangers on planes, or on the L (though I'm a shameless eavesdropper), and I don’t spend time chatting with strangers in coffeehouses or bars. But within my circle of friends and family, conversation is the basis of our relationship. When my friends get together, we talk. We cook and talk, we eat dinner and talk, we have drinks and talk. We tell stories, discuss work and family life, talk politics. When we go to baseball games—or when we watch the playoffs at my house throughout October—we analyze the game, gossip about the players, and chat. Even when we watch a TV show, it’s frequently a group event, and we talk and talk about the show afterwards. I don’t think we’re that unusual.

One of my favorite adult memories is of a night in January of 2005 when my parents were in town and we invited half a dozen friends to dinner. Dinner turned into an hours-long conversation, running well past bedtime, about our perplexity over George Bush’s reelection. My parents brought a downstate, rural perspective; most of their neighbors had voted for Bush. My friends and I came at the question as residents of the city that had given Kerry his largest plurality. The conversation was impassioned, serious, and interesting. It was a real attempt, by all of us, to understand something we feared was inexplicable. I think we all experienced the exhilaration that Hazlitt describes following a good talk, “feelings lighter and more ethereal than I have at any other time.”

And, while there are plenty of times when I am an awkward conversationalist, I have friends whose conversational facility, with everyone and in every situation, regularly amazes me. This description by Hazlitt of his friend, painter James Northcote, could easily apply to my friend Becky:

He lends his ear to an observation as if you have brought him a piece of news and enters into it with as much avidity and earnestness as if it interested himself personally. . . . His thoughts bubble up and sparkle like heads on old wine. The fund of anecdote, the collection of curious particulars, is enough to set up any common retailer of jests that dines out every day; but these are not strung together like a row of galley-slaves, but are always introduced to illustrate some argument or bring out some fine distinction of character.

I greatly admire, deeply envy, and hopelessly aspire to her talents as a conversationalist. And I have many other friends like her.

Maybe Miller doesn’t have such friends. Maybe he’s stuck in an academic environment, where talk, as in the novels of Barbara Pym or Ivy Compton-Burnett, can be more combat than conversation. Maybe he is paying too much attention to young people and teenagers—as, it seems, do many cultural commentators—forgetting that, while they’re certainly different from us adults, they’ll also soon, as adults, be different from what they are now. They might turn out to be able to have good conversations, even with a curmudgeon like Miller.

I’m not saying the state of conversation in America is perfect, but just as the golden age was never that golden, the fallen present is certainly brighter than Miller makes it out to be. If he’s ever in town, I’ll gladly introduce him to people who, I hope, will make him see my side. I’ll gladly make the martinis and sit back and listen.

Garry Wills on what Jesus meant

The most recent book I read by Garry Wills, his 1970 Nixon Agonistes, managed, in vividly portraying Nixon and his rise, to prefigure the next thirty-five years of the conservative movement. Not that Nixon Agonistes is a prophetic book; rather, it is a ferociously smart and clear-headed book, one that by completely understanding its historical moment shows us the seeds that Nixon and his supporters are sowing.

Wills’s brief new book, What Jesus Meant is not, properly, a response to that movement. Rather, as he puts it in the Introduction, it is a devotional book, the writings of a thoughtful believer who has spent long hours with the gospels. But in these times of hyper-politicized religion, any honest attempt to explain what Jesus meant will necessarily call out the contemporary conservative Christian movement for perverting the teachings of the man it claims to follow. As a non-believer compelled by Jesus, yet repelled by many of those who claim to act in his name, I found it fascinating.

Opening this way, however, is not quite being fair to the book; rather, it’s taking the marketing plan for the book at face value. Arguments about contemporary politics are simply a necessary side effect of Wills’s true focus: what Jesus is reported to have said and done, and what that means for believers. The search for the historical Jesus is not for him. While there may be historical and cultural lessons to be learned through such endeavors—why and how certain stories gained or lost prominence in the century or so during which the gospels were written—such considerations do little for faith itself. “The only Jesus we have,” Wills writes, “is the Jesus of faith. If you reject the faith, there is no reason to trust anything the gospels say.”

Those teachings, he demonstrates, are simple yet utterly radical. Jesus’ vision is, first of all, radically egalitarian. There are to be no distinctions between people on the basis of position, wealth, ethnicity, gender, or even piety. There are to be no priests, no division among the faithful: “Do not be called rabbi, for one is your teacher, and all of you are brethren” (Matthew 23:8). Everyone is equal before God. Such is clear to anyone who reads the gospels attentively, but Wills adds his deep knowledge of the period and the Bible itself, providing context for Jesus’ radicalism and the challenges it posed for the religious and secular powers of the time.

Then there is Jesus’ nonviolence: “I say to all who can hear me: Love your foes, help those who hate you, praise those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who punches your cheek, offer the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39). As Wills says, “Tremendous ingenuity has been expended to compromise these uncompromising words.” Violence is never acceptable: Jesus forbids Peter to draw his sword to defend him, and if violence to protect God himself is not acceptable, when would it be? All violence is violence against Jesus. Love is at all times the only answer.

That leads us to one of Wills’s recurrent points: Jesus viewed himself as sent by God to bring a new reign, based on love, a reign not rooted in earthly power or politics, but utterly separate from them, God’s love made manifest not just in Jesus, but, ultimately, in all of creation. Jesus did not have a political program or plan, and he cannot legitimately be conscripted in support of one:

Many would like to make the reign of Jesus belong to this political order. If they want the state to be politically Christian, they are not following Jesus, who says that his reign is not of that order. If, on the other hand, they ask the state simply to profess religion of some sort (not specifically Christian), then some other religions may be conscripted for that purpose, but that of Jesus will not be among them. His reign is not of that order. If people want to do battle for God, they cannot claim that Jesus has called them to this task, since he told Pilate that his ministers would not do that.

Such an assertion, of course, must lead Wills back to politics. He notes that both left and right have attempted to make use of Jesus, but, as the conservatives lately have been the ones to take upon themselves the mantle of Jesus, they come in for far more pointed denunciations. I see no way anyone could read this book and still believe that Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps—or George Bush or Benedict XVI—are truly following Jesus.

Such perversions—and even honest misunderstandings—of Jesus’ message are endemic, their very ubiquity a demonstration of how unsettling his teachings are. Even his apostles, the people who knew him best, are frequently shown in the gospels simply not getting it. They continue to think in terms of hierarchies and purity, us and them:

John said, “Master, we found a man casting out devils in your name, but we stopped him since he was not of our party." But Jesus answered him: ‘Do not stop him, since anyone who does not oppose you supports you’” (Luke 9:49-50).

From such failures of understanding grow, in later centuries, organized churches, the priesthood, excommunication, the Inquisition, religious war, even George Bush’s flat reversal: “You're either with us or against us.”

Where Wills and I differ, ultimately, is on the role of these teachings for one who does not believe. For him, Jesus’ singularity—and his importance—is rooted in his actuality as the son of God, in his death and resurrection:

If that is unbelievable to anyone, then why should that person bother with him? The flat cutout figure they are left with is not a more profound philosopher than Plato, a better storyteller than Mark Twain, or a more bitingly ascetical figure than Epictetus. If his claims are no higher than theirs, then those claims amount to nothing.

I disagree. For me, even if Jesus’ claims about a life beyond are spurious, even if he was nothing but a man—a man whose humanity shines vividly, interwoven with his uncanny strangeness, throughout the gospels—his message is no less strong. Though Wills emphasizes that Jesus was not telling us how to organize and manage this world—he was not, in other words, giving us a political program—that does not negate the force of his teachings in this world. There is no reason that the absence of a world beyond this one need necessarily make an attempt to live radically by love any less important.

Jesus’ followers believed in the resurrection, and that is why his message was preserved. But with that message before us, nonbelievers, too, can see how our lives fall short and can attempt to live with more love for others. Is that taking only a portion of Jesus’ message, while leaving out the more important part? Wills might argue so, and I can see his point: his analysis makes clear that Jesus's teachings about this world were always seen as a preparation for the world of God's reign. Would this message be more powerful if I believed in Jesus' divinity? I'm sure it would.

But I don’t see how lack of belief makes the portion one does take—that one should love unconditionally—any less compelling, any less useful, any less awe-inspiring. It may not be a political program. It may be unworkable on this earth, even on an individual level. But it remains a useful guide.

Even the following passage, which is predicated on the idea of an eventual day of judgment, when all are rewarded or punished, loses no power for me if severed from the idea of a divinity or an afterlife:

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me."

Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?"

The King will reply, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25: 35-46).

When we deny anyone, we deny everyone. When we aid anyone, we aid everone. Such is always our duty, regardless of belief. Absence of punishment or reward does nothing to mitigate our failure. We will fail, but that must not prevent us from trying.