Reviews and News:
Tocqueville’s letters to America: “Tocqueville’s political philosophy is inadequately delineated if deduced solely from his major published works. This was especially true of his thoughts about America. Tocqueville visited the United States just once, for nine months from the spring of 1831. Despite repeated invitations from many friends, he never returned. Nor did he publish much about America after 1840. This has led some scholars to conclude that he largely forgot about his western sojourn after that date. That is not true. Others have even suggested that he lost faith in democracy’s most characteristic creation. Again, nothing could be further from the case. To the contrary, he thought a very great deal about that “beacon of liberty” (his words) right up until his death. He also wrote a lot about it. But he did so almost entirely in the form of letters to American friends.”
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Theodore Roosevelt was many things, but he was no conservative.
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The value of art: “Plato was right to worry about the potentially stultifying effects of art. But art need not be a fantasy-satisfying diversion from reality. As Aristotle, Freud, and Collingwood suggest, it can be instead a reality-revealing educator of desire. By offering symbolic substitutes for what are otherwise rogue reality-obscuring drives or desires, it has the potential to clarify our perception and eliminate our deepest motivational conflicts. Good art effects a clarification or purification (‘catharsis’) of our emotions; a sublimation of desire; is ‘medicine’ for a ‘corrupt consciousness’.”
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Æthelred, the “ill-prepared” Anglo-Saxon king: “The state of Æthelred’s government has been the subject of a handful of critical histories, all of which Roach uses with skill and sensitivity. But he’s right in complaining that Æthelred the man is sometimes lost in the pages of these studies…Roach’s own book, unfailingly measured and clear in its appraisals, represents an enormous step forward in cracking the barnacles of posthumous disdain off of this much-maligned man.”
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The pilgrim routes of the British Isles: “Of all the sites, listed in this book, St. Andrews’s Way in Scotland is the most authentic of the medieval pilgrimage routes. The 1,000-year-old route was relaunched in 2012 with markers denoting the original path medieval pilgrims took. It is 115km (71 miles) long, a route from St. Andrews to Edinburgh spanning approximately four day’s journey. St. Andrew’s was built upon a more ancient Christian site that dates back to the eighth century. Various stories indicate the relics of St. Andrew were brought to the site between the fourth and eighth century. The Cathedral was founded in 1162 and completed in 1318. Pilgrimage was so popular to St. Andrews during the Middle Ages that pilgrims were kept in holding areas before being processed to the relics, and even the town was laid out to accommodate pilgrim traffic.”
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The anti-geneticist: Trofim Lysenko “challenged many of the foundational ideas of genetics as they were then understood and accepted in the international scientific community, including the idea that genes were the main carriers of inheritance. Instead, he preached a doctrine that the traits an organism acquires during its lifetime can be passed on to its offspring.” Was he right?
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Essay of the Day:
In Commonweal, Matthew Boudway discusses the morality of Cormac McCarthy’s misfits:
“Critics have often described Cormac McCarthy as a writer beyond good and evil: his characters may appeal to moral ideas, they concede, but McCarthy himself gives it to us straight, describing a massacre or a rape the same way he might describe a meteor shower—with care and precision, but without judgment. The same flat and ruthless light seems to fall on every scene of his novels, and this indiscriminate attention can be disorienting. It is like the desert sun as McCarthy describes it in a famous passage in Blood Meridian: ‘In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence…. [I]n the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.’
“But the critics are wrong. Beneath the neuter austerity of McCarthy’s prose, a keen moral imagination is at work, one that finds hints of communion—of ‘unguessed kinships’—in unexpected places, including some any sane person would avoid. If Graham Greene’s fiction haunts the seamier quarters of purgatory, McCarthy’s often harrows hell with a disconcerting zeal.
“Born in 1933, McCarthy attended Catholic schools and served as an altar boy in Knoxville, Tennessee. His books, especially those set in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, are full of Catholic language and imagery. Yet he is rarely mentioned in lists of contemporary Catholic writers—lists that often include other cradle Catholics who no longer practice the faith. Perhaps his stories strike the list-makers as too bleak to have anything to do with Christianity. His work is often moving but rarely consoling. Faith, hope, and love get a hearing, but despair and bitterness often seem to prevail.
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“In a lecture on Blood Meridian available online, Amy Hungerford of Yale University argues that it is essentially an amoral book that only plays with the empty forms and symbols of morality. She acknowledges that there are indications in the novel that the kid is less depraved than the other scalp hunters and even that he undergoes some kind of moral development as the story proceeds. But Hungerford concludes that all these hints are finally just an authorial trick because ‘every time the kid shows mercy, he shows mercy to one of his own gang and we know what the gang goes on to do. They simply go on killing more people. So, the allegiance that he seems to show with suffering, the mercy, is so selective that it can’t be called such.’
“There are two problems with this argument. First, Hungerford’s description of the story is somewhat misleading. While most examples of the kid’s expressions of mercy do involve his fellow scalp hunters, there’s at least one memorable episode in which he tries to help a person his old gang would have ignored or killed. Wandering alone, he finds a company of penitents butchered in the desert and an old Mexican woman kneeling nearby, her eyes cast down. ‘He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place, some party of her country people who would welcome her and that she should join them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.’
“As it turns out, the woman is already dead. ‘He reached into the little cove and touched her arm. She moved slightly, her whole body, light and rigid. She weighed nothing. She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years.’ Still, this episode shows that the kid is capable of kindness to a stranger with whom he has nothing in common; and, coming as it does very late in the story after all the kid’s experiences with the Glanton Gang, it also suggests real moral development. It is hard for the reader—hard for this reader anyway—to imagine the young tough we encounter at the beginning of the novel exhibiting this sort of tenderness and compassion.
“But the larger problem with Hungerford’s claim is its dubious ethical premise, which is that unless a person is merciful to everyone, he or she cannot be truly merciful to anyone. It’s all or nothing; and, in the kid’s case, it clearly isn’t all. The obvious reply to this is that much of the real virtue we observe in the world, as well as in literature, belongs to people who are deeply flawed. There is sometimes honor among thieves—or, if not honor, then perhaps courage or kindness.”
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Image of the Day: Moon in mountain shadow
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Poem: Ben Doersch, “We Say Goodbye”
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