Now, you cannot ask a man to meet a ghost, because ghosts are not to be counted on.

{Robert Boursnel, "Self-Portrait with Spirits" (1902)}

From a 1958 lecture, "Experience and Fiction," by Shirley Jackson

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor--most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren't careful--if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.

Shakespeare's ghosts have distracted me for a few days from my efforts to convince every single one of you to go to your nearest used bookseller and buy a copy of D. J. Enright's The Oxford Book of the Supernatural, from which I've taken Shirley Jackson's dead-on assessment of shaky skeptics. I've also drawn today's headline from the book; it appears in Oliver St John Gogarty's As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1936) in a description of a haunted evening with the Yeatses, during which Yeats, unflappable, makes the following 2 a.m. demands of a ghost:

1. You must desist from frightening the children in their early sleep.
2. You must cease to moan about the chimneys.
3. You must walk the house no more.
4. You must not move furniture or horrify those who sleep near by.
5. You must name yourself to me.

That doesn't leave a ghost much scope for activity. I suppose he could blow on Yeats's tea and make it cool extra-quickly.

Though Yeats may be the poet best-known for trafficking with spirits, he's not alone by any means. John Donne appears in Enright's collection via a story of a dark vision featured in Izaak Walton's early biography. Having made a trip to Europe despite his (yet again) pregnant wife's "divining soul bod[ing] her some ill in his absence," Donne is found by his patron Sir Robert,

in such ecstasy, and so altered as to his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him; insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr Donne to declare what had befallen him in the short time of his absence. To which Mr Donne was not able to make a present answer: but, after a long and perplexed pause, did at last say, "I have seen a dreadful vision since I last saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms this I have seen since I saw you." To which Sir Robert replied, "Sure, sir, you have slept since last I saw you." To which Mr. Donne's reply was, " I cannot be surer that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you: and I am as sure, that at her second appearing she stopped, and looked me in the face, and vanished."

The vision proves at least partially true: Donne soon learns that the child was stillborn and his wife, though alive, is very ill.

Then there is the poet who is a ghost, as Enright presents Harold Owen recounting in the third volume of his memoir, Journey from Obscurity (1965). On a naval ship during World War I, he enters his cabin to find his brother Wilfred--who should have been at the Western Front--sitting in Harold's chair:

I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: "Wilfred, how did you get here?" He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt no fear--I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. . . . . I loved having him there: I could not, and did not want to try to understand how he had got there. I was content to accept him, that he was here with me was sufficient. . . . I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. . . .

I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these and overpowering sense of emptiness and loss. . . . Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.

From now on, any time I read about World War I and the swathe it cut through a whole generation I'll remember the sense of deep, ultimately frustrated longing in that passage; whatever hopes or fears in Harold Owen generated that vision, they are of a piece with those that drove the postwar efforts by Conan Doyle and others to search out a spirit world that might reveal some trace of their lost loved ones. So many millions of young men were gone, and the desire on this side of the veil for any contact at all was so powerful that the bereaved of World War I would surely have agreed with this passage that Enright quotes from Margaret Oliphant's A Belaguered City (1879):

Why should it be a matter of wonder that the dead should come back? The wonder is that they do not. Ah! that is the wonder. How one can go away who loves you, and never return, nor speak, nor send any message--that is the miracle: not that the heavens should bend down and the gates of Paradise roll back, and those who have left us return. All my life it has been a marvel to me how they could be kept away.

For as often as we hear stories of ghosts who need something from us, in fact it is we who need them--need them not to forget, not to stop caring for us. It's no wonder that such a strong desire sometimes generates a response, whatever questions we might harbor about its reality.

The Last Novel

No time for real posting today, so I'll stick to a simple question: how does any blogger who reads David Markson's The Last Novel (2007) resist posting the whole damned thing?

Early in the novel, Markson defines it succinctly as

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.

--though that does nothing to answer inescapable questions about whether it really is a novel, because it consists almost entirely of page after page of two- or three-line notes from the lives of writers and artists, their syntax given a convoluted arrangement reminiscent of index entries.

But that larger question will have to wait until I have more time and thought available. For now, I'll just share some of the irresistible biographical nuggets that Markson provides, seemingly the fruit of a lifetime of magpie work in biography and literary history. The range of subjects is wide enough that any dedicated reader will learn something about his favorites, and several regular subjects of this blog make appearances. Thomas Hardy, for example:

Andrew Lang's indignation over a mild blasphemy in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
A gentleman who turned Christian for half an hour, Hardy dismissed him as.

Then there's this guy:

So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.
Said John Donne's very publisher about the first edition of his verse.

But I need to wrap this up and head off to the office, so I'll close with this one, which seems like a good thought with which to start one's day:

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Said Cyril Connolly.

A Pair of Herberts

{Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, by Isaac Oliver}

John Stubbs's John Donne: The Restless Self, about which I've written before, includes a brief sketch of Sir Edward Herbert, brother of Donne's fellow poet George Herbert and son of Donne's friend Magadalen Herbert, that I think you'll enjoy.

Though sickly in his youth, by adulthood Sir Edward

had grown into the complete Renaissance man--swordsman, scholar, poet and courtier, the last a role he sniffed at with the right kind of elegant disdain.

He quickly became known for his overdeveloped sense of honor--and his perpetual readiness to avenge perceived slights with violence. Say Stubbs,

He once chased a French cavalier across the countryside for playfully running off with a lady's ribbon, then took it as a personal affront when the rattled Frenchman tried returning the trifle without admitting first that he had been made to give it back.

In an incident with shades of some other scenes of inappropriately glimpsed nudity that I've written about before, Herbert inadvertently (he claimed) wandered into the bedchamber of a Lady Ayres one day and "sawe her through the Courtaines lying upon her bed," pining away at a miniature of him. Sir John Ayres, hearing of this, accused Sir Edward of "whoring" with his wife--and, accompanied by a group of swordsmen, set upon him in London one night.

Sir Edward presumably was glad at the chance to fight, and maybe even was glad to be outnumbered five-to-one. What better way to prove his honor? Stubbs gives us the blow-by-blow:

Ayres and his team were instantly repelled and quickly appalled. Herbert broke his sword with the first stroke, but still fought all of them off with just the stump of the blade. A friendly passer-by, Sir Henry Carew, decently pulled a dagger from Herbert's ribs so that he could go and knock Ayres down for a third time. With the hirelings vanquished and the jealous husband on the ground, Herbert straddled him, hacking furiously: "when kneeling on the Ground and bestriding him I struck at him in fowre seurall places and did almost cut off his left hand," he reported.

But even that wasn't enough for Herbert. Healing quickly from his injuries,

he offered to meet Ayres at a time of his choosing to finish the affair like gentlemen.

{George Herbert, by Robert White (1674)}

Oddly enough, Sir Edward's brother George is a relatively serene figure. He spent much of his life, apparently contentedly, as a country priest, and his poetry, Stubbs notes,

is the unique record of someone finding sufficiency in life as a soul, and a soul, moreover, that could genuinely get on with God.

Even a nonbeliever like me can discern the quiet confidence underlying Herbert's rushing tumble of metaphor in this poem:

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earht;
Engine against th' Almighty, sinners' tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days' world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

And then there's Herbert's argument for straightforward truths, cleanly expressed, in "Jordan":

Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves?
Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.

What an odd house the Herberts' must have been, to have produced both Sir Edward, with his prickly honor that perpetually needed to be defended, and the clear-eyed, confident belief of George. So far, I've not been able to learn anything about their other eight siblings, but it does make me wonder just what they were like.

On a huge hill, cragg'd and steep, Truth stands

I've written before about John Donne's "Meditation XVII," and about how Donne's most famous line, "No man is an island," from that Meditation, is a far more interesting thought when considered as part of the passage that surrounds it:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Similarly, John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006) adds interest and nuance to Donne's work by putting it in the context of a skilled reconstruction of his life. Though Donne is often viewed as a complicated, even paradoxical man--a writer of erotic love poems, raised a Catholic, who later became one of the foremost ministers of the Church of England--Stubbs does a convincing job of drawing a line of emotional and spiritual consistency throughout a life of outward change.

Donne lived in the chaotic period between two of the greatest upheavals of English history (Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church and the English Civil War) and watching him tack back and forth as needed to navigate the political, social, and religious difficulties of the era is fascinating. A Catholic in a Protestant society, he converted when it became necessary--and, Stubbs argues convincingly, found a way (in his deep-rooted ecumenicalism) to fully embrace the change. Exiled from society due to his elopement with the daughter of his first patron, he assiduously courted friends and connections until he was restored to the court's good graces. Eventually, as his prospects of landing a government position (which he badly needed to feed his large family) dimmed, he completed his journey from his Catholic upbringing by heeding King Charles's suggestion that he become a minister. From then on, Donne put all of his intellectual and emotional powers at the Church of England's disposal, developing a more somber and strongly moral tone and becoming in the process one of the most-loved writers in the Christian tradition.

Through all of these changes, however, Stubbs argues, Donne continued to be driven by the same search for truth that can be seen in his earliest satires and even his love poetry, which each in their way aim to strip away hypocrisy to reveal underlying realities and desires. Stubbs returns regularly to the following passage from Donne's "Satire III":

On a huge hill,
Cragg'd, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe,
And what the hills suddenness resists, winne so;
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.

Stubbs isn't always able to convince, of course. It seems important to accept that Donne was often simply having to make the best of a bad situation--his sycophantic letters to his court patrons, in particular, come across as full of the very lies the younger Donne would have enjoyed puncturing in verse.

The portrait of Donne we're left with is appealing nonetheless: a man refusing to be defeated by any setback and unwilling to ever settle for a received idea, instead perpetually sifting, considering, and reconsidering. That very process animates the best of Donne's metaphysical verse, as he strings thought upon thought, forever pushing for a deeper understanding; it's even present, in a different form, in his lighter work, where he subjects image and metaphor to that same sort of intellectual pressure. I also find Donne congenial because even in his later years, he appears never to have denied his possibly embarrassing past of love affairs and youthful abandon--in other words, to the Christian eye, sin; rather, he seems to have accepted that the God he knew knew him also, both his sins and his goodness, and would accept him as a whole.

Reading about Donne's life, I couldn't help thinking about a couple of fascinating what-ifs. At one point, Donne was angling for a secretarial position with a colonial expedition to Virginia, which leads me to marvel at the thought of Donne's poetic impressions of the American wilderness and the hardships of colonial life. (Peter Ackroyd wrote a novel about the same idea as applied to John Milton, whom he sends to Massachusetts with the Pilgrims--anyone read it?) There's also the question of what side Donne would have taken in the Civil War had he lived another couple of decades. It's hard to imagine him not disdaining the Puritans' harsh intolerance, but at the same time it's impossible to know what he would have made of the Church's increasing crackdown on Puritanism in the years leading up to the war. Which way would Donne the mutable survivor have jumped?

From what we can't know, I'll return to what we do know: the poetry. Which Donne I like best depends on my mood, on whether I feel like following his wanders through metaphor to a truth about humanity or to a simple tryst. Tonight, because it's a lovely summer evening, I'll choose the love poetry to close, one of my favorites because of its ingenious conception, from which Donne wrings every drop of meaning.

The Flea

Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
Me it suck'd first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled bee;
Confesse it, this cannot be said
A sinne, or shame, or losse of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoyes before it wooe,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than wee would doe.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
When we almost, nay more than maryed are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloysterd in these living walls of Jet.
Though use make thee apt to kill me,
Let not to this, selfe murder added bee,
And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three.

Cruell and sodaine, has thou since
Purpled thy naile, in blood of innocence?
In what could this flea guilty bee,
Except in that drop which it suckt from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and saist that thou
Find'st not thyself, nor mee the weaker now;
'Tis true, then learne how false, feares bee;
Just so much honor, when thou yeeld'st to mee,
Will wast, as this flea's death tooke life from thee.

Trollope goes digital, Borges goes ghostly, Donne goes on a peace mission

Not a lot of time tonight, so all I've got for you is a collection of odds and ends.

1 In all the writing about Trollope I've been doing this summer, I've neglected to mention Penguin's great new Trollope site, created with the help of the Trollope Society. It's everything such a site should be--especially for a writer as prolific as Trollope--giving a brief synopsis of each novel and major character, information about his Barset and Palliser sequences, and biographical information about Trollope. A particularly nice touch are the eye-catching (though slightly too contemporary?) cartoon renderings of Trollope's characters. But surely Phineas Finn didn't really look as horrid as this?

I also learned from the site that Trollope thought that the ending of Phineas Finn was a bit abrupt and unsatisfying, as did I. In his Autobiography, Trollope admitted:

It is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to it I had made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return.

If I may be allowed to absurdly mix eras and forms: the ending reminded me of the end of Don Knotts's great comedy The Love God?, wherein Knotts's character ends up not with the vivacious career woman (and bombshell) he's been seeing, but with the lovely young lady from his hometown who has been patiently waiting--and who is as dull as paste. It makes sense for the ethical arc of the story, but it's impossible to believe and makes no damn sense on any other level.

2 I learned about the Trollope site through the ReadySteadyBook blog, where I was involved in the following exchange after blogger Mark Thwaite ended his post by asking if he should give Trollope a try:

Stephen Mitchelmore: No!

Mark Thwaite: Sage, succinct advice as ever, sir!

Levi Stahl: I totally disagree with Stephen Mitchelmore: Yes!

The Palliser novels provide insight into politics, strongly drawn characters--including several fully realized, sympathetic portrayals of strong-willed women--and a drawn-out, sensitive depiction of a marriage of two very different partners who despite their differences (and the strictures placed on them by society) are essentially equals.

Trollope doesn't have the humor of Dickens, the godlike sympathy and understanding of Tolstoy, the fire of Dostoevsky, or the piercing aphoristic insight of George Eliot, but his attention to his characters and the realities of their world make him well worth reading.

Stephen Mitchelmore: But Levi, we do share the same reasons!

3 In With Borges, which I wrote about the other day, Alberto Manguel mentions that he's just one of many people who, over the years, served as readers for the blind master. I imagine them reuniting once a year in a secret library, an invisible college of readers conjuring the Borges who is not in the library, the lost Borges, the one who, in "Borges and I," writes:

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause--mechanically now, perhaps--to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.

At the end of a long evening of wine and talk, during which they've tricked him into lowering his guard, the Borges they conjure is swiftly trapped between two covers and filed away in an obscure, rarely visited section of this already obscure library.

As the years mount, and death slowly winnows the circle of readers, the Borges they conjure becomes less solid; what was at their first meeting a gargantuan reference book becomes, by their last, perhaps a single line of poetry.

4 After writing about Borges's admonition to his nephew ("If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear."), I thought that Borges might have enjoyed my favorite Victor Borge joke, which I heard him deliver to a young whippersnapper on the Jack Benny Show:

Borge: How old are you?

Whippersnapper: I'm six!

Borge: Shame on you! When I was your age, I was twice that old!

5 Having written recently about the Thirty Years War, I was surprised to learn yesterday from John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2007) that Donne served as chaplain to the delegation that King James sent to Frederick and Ferdinand, the chief warring parties, in 1619. The mission, however, was doomed from the start, as it had been

entirely seeded and nurtured by a Spanish subterfuge. Spain's great aim in the Bohemian crisis was to keep England from sending military and financial aid to the Protestant rebels: the neutrality desired by the Spanish was assured by massaging King James's diplomatic ego. The great Machiavellian Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, reassured his masters that "the vanity of the present King of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be obtained by his means, so that his authority may be increased."

Actually that's the sense I get of the whole war: if you were involved, you were probably being double-crossed.

For his part, Donne in the years to come would be a strong voice against English involvement in the war, despite anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish public sentiment. Donne surely took up that position at least in part because it was the position of the King, in whose good graces Donne needed to stay--but it's also not hard to trace that preference to Donne's youthful memories of the horrors of war and his seeming general distaste for sectarianism and the violence it often entailed.

6 Finally, it seems fitting to follow Donne, the poet of love in secular and religious guises, to a couple of fun throwaway lines from Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game (1961):

I lighted her cigarette. She was poised and cool but not at all subtle. She leaned forward to take the light and to give me a look at large breasts harnessed by a lacy black bra. Eve learned that one the day they got dressed and moved out of Eden. It has been just as effective ever since.

Stepping stones

Earlier in the week, I mentioned John Aubrey in a post, and, thinking of him as I flipped between a biography of John Donne and a book of memories of Thomas Hardy, I began to wonder if I could get from Donne to Hardy through a game of literary stepping stones. The answer, I'm sure, is yes--but the real question is whether we can do so with a lazy game of stepping stones, on a Friday night, with just the resources at hand?

Well, no. But who knows what we might learn along the way? If you're willing to give it a try, to the bookshelves, and may we stay dry!

We start with Donne, who died in 1630 while the Dean of St. Paul's, where he is memorialized with a statue of himself in his shroud that he had carved late in life; Anthony Powell says the older Donne "looks a trifle like Lord Olivier as Lear." John Aubrey, only four years old when Donne died, doesn't profile him in Brief Lives, but the book is full of his contemporaries, and Donne turns up several times. One of those contemporaries is Donne's friend John Hoskyns, a lawyer and poet in his own right. According to Aubrey:

His verses on the fart in the Parliament house are printed in some of the Drolleries. He had a booke of Poemes, neatly written by one of his Clerkes, bigger then Dr. Donne's Poemes, which his sonn Benet lent to he knowes not who, about 1653, and could never heare of it since.

Of Hoskyns we also learn that he

Was wont to say that all those that came to London were either Carrion or Crowes.

Hoskyns doesn't really move us forward, though. I only included him because, well, how could I not share the story of his wastrel son and the misplaced book? Instead, in the nature of stepping stones, we drop back a step, as Aubrey leads us to Isaak Walton, Donne's first biographer, who used to feed Aubrey anecdotes about Ben Jonson. I suppose we could have reached Walton directly from Donne--but isn't any path that travels through Brief Lives more fun than the direct route?

With Walton, because of my relatively limited acquaintance with writers of the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we ought to have our first splash between stones--but just before we fall, I change the rules! No longer do we need to rely on personal acquaintance--and thus here is James Boswell reaching out a hand to help us over the gap!

In his Life of Johnson Boswell records the following conversation:

He talked of Isaac Walton's Lives, which was one of his most favorite books. Dr. Donne's Life, he said, was the most perfect of them. He observed, that 'it was wonderful that Walton, who was in a very low situation in life, should have been familiarly received by so many great men, and that at a time when the ranks of society were kept more separate than they are now." . . . BOSWELL. "No quality will get a man more friends than a disposition to admire the qualities of others. I do not mean flattery, but a sincere admiration." JOHNSON. "Nay, Sir, flattery pleases very generally."

Surely Boswell, one of literature's great flatterers, took those words to heart.

Boswell was of course much more than a flatterer; his skills as a biographer allow us to make another big jump, now to the nineteenth century, to Thomas Babington Macaulay, who called him "the first of biographers. He has no second." Macaulay leads us to Trollope, who wrote in a letter to G. S. Rusden in 1879 that

An historian is bound to be true. Who can say otherwise? But amongst historians who is so often read as Macaulay,--who is inaccurate, but whose style is charming? What so readable as Herodotus, who tells us tales? What so unreadable as Allison who tells us facts? Men now very seldom are laborious readers. You must charm or you have no chance.

To be fair, we really ought to splash down again here, as the only link I find between Trollope and Hardy is the slimmest of threads, a line in a letter from a young Hardy to his sister Mary, that Barchester Towers "is considered the best of Trollope's." And if I'm going to allow as tenuous a connection as that, I might as well cut right back to Donne directly, as Claire Tomalin notes in her biography of Hardy that his friend Edmund Gosse sent him an edition of Donne's poems, for which Hardy offered "1000 thanks."

Oh, but I've shown so little regard for the rules so far that I'm no longer sure even gravity applies, and we float through the air, dry as can be, to the point I wanted to reach all along, safe on shore in Dorset, where we meet Hardy at his home. He's entertaining Princeton professor Henry Van Dyke in 1909, and as recounted by Van Dyke (and collected in the absolutely fascinating new book, Thomas Hardy Remembered), Hardy tells Van Dyke that Tess was his favorite character:

"Yes," he said gravely, "I love her best of all."

"Why, then, did you kill her? Was there no other way to end the book"

"There was no other way," he replied, still more gravely. "I did not kill her. It was fated."

That does sound like Hardy, doesn't it? If there's one active force you can feel behind all of his novels, it's an inexorable and dangerous fate.

Hardy at least would have understood how we made it over all those yawning gaps and got from Donne to him: clearly, it was fated.

Scott Horton

A crowded schedule of work and friends will make for light posting this week, so I'm taking this chance to direct you to one of the best and most important blogs I read. Scott Horton, an international human rights lawyer, used to send a daily e-mail roundup of news, drawn from the major international dailies, and commentary, drawn from his impressive knowledge of history, philosophy, and law. Recently, Harper's brought him under its umbrella, and Horton converted the daily e-mail to a blog. The historical depth--and passionate belief in the duty we all bear to preserve human rights--that Horton brings to his coverage of the news clarifies and locates the stories better than any other commentator I read; when Horton writes about daily events, he reveals how the whole of Anglo-American legal history, with its glorious victories and ignominious setbacks, lies behind and brings us to the present moment. Put it in your google reader; it's the best fifteen minutes a day you could spend on a blog.

When I look to ground my view that every individual deserves equal protection under law, that every human deserves to be protected against violence, coercion, and outrages against their person, I return to, of course, the Constitution. But when I take it one step further, when I think of our responsibility as individuals and as a society, to ensure these rights, I also return, in a way that their authors would most likely not have approved, to the Bible and to John Donne. Even stripped of their specifically religious content, Matthew 25 and Donne's Meditation XVII carry powerful reflections on our interconnectedness and our inherent duty to one another as free, thinking beings.

Matthew 25:34-46

34 "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 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, 36 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.'

37"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

40"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.'

41"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

44"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

45"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

46"Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

I think you can understand the force of this injunction without believing in any divinity or eternal reward. The same for Donne's Meditation XVII, which reminds us more directly that we are all connected:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Though the part of Meditation XVII that everyone knows is "No man is an island," I find myself much more drawn to Donne's following thoughts. The realization that no man can stand alone could, after all, be a simple acceptance of need, born out of self-interest. It's only when Donne reaches, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind," that we reach a truly disinterested understanding of common humanity, a radical openness to the separate reality of others and their claims on us.

"I am involved in mankind," affirmatively stated, almost as if it is a choice, an obligation assumed rather than required. For Donne, that obligation is assumed because we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. For this nonbeliever, the interconnectedness Donne sees needs no supernatural foundation to have active force; acknowledgment of our common humanity is sufficient to make a moral imperative of the avoidance of heedless violence, torture, and precipitate war--and the bringing to justice of those who advocate such abominations. Common humanity demands that we insure unbroken continuance of the long line of history and thought that have wrought the idea that all are equal under law, and that we abhor and punish those who, acting in our very names, try to subvert that founding ideal.

For your Saturday

Posting may be light the next week or so, because we have family in town and work has been taking up an inordinate amount of my other time and thought.

But I feel I need to start the weekend off with something.

First, from a letter of October 25, 1918, from Violet Trefusis to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, reproduced in Sackville-West's son, Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage (1978)

Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a sufragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.

Let's follow that with words from someone else who felt the pull of strong passions his whole life, but who directed much of it towards god, John Donne.

A Hymn to God the Father

I
Wilt though forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.

II
Wilt though forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou has done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

III
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by they self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.

Donne and his struggles with desire were an influence on the poetry of Lord Rochester, who, however saw no reason to check his desires, living as he did without a belief in any higher power or eternal reward.

And, finally, in case you're trying, as your weekend beckons, between a quiet evening of reading and a raucous night on the town, I'll close with some Thomas à Kempis. Being an unbeliever myself, I think his words are unlikely to save you from damnation, but their peace might save you from a hangover.

From The Imitation of Christ (1420-27)

The man who has not diligently practiced holy repentance is not worthy of heavenly consolations. If you want to experience this repentance in your heart, go to your room and shut out the din of the world, as it is written: commune with your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Retire to your room and there you will preserve what you usually lose by leaving it.

If you keep to your room you will find delight in it, but if you only visit it, it becomes irksome and annoying. If, at the time of your conversion, you had accustomed yourself to stay in your room and remain there, it would now be your good friend and a source of great pleasure to you.

As a keep-to-my room sort, all I would add to Thomas's prescription is a martini and, of course, a good book. Enjoy your weekend.