Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 13

you don’t have to be there

Charlie Warzel: 

To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).

Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.” 

The title of Warzel’s article is “Beyond Doomscrolling,” but it’s really about things you can do, useful apps you can download, in addition to doomscrolling. 

When Musk started dismantling Twitter, I thought it might be an opportunity for people to discover that “irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information” is not in fact “irresistible” — it can be resisted. (Also, you could delete “in moments of disaster” from that sentence: infoconsumption doesn’t go up all that much in times of crisis because so many people are doing it every day — though, perhaps, redescribing every day as a crisis or a disaster to justify their habit.) 

People: you don’t have to “watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem.” Nobody is making you. And it doesn’t do you any good to watch. 

But when Twitter became intolerable people decamped first for Mastodon and then Threads and then Bluesky, or went all-in on Instagram. The Twitter habit, it seems, will long survive Twitter. 

I know I’ve said this many times before, but once more for the late arrivals: 

I read news once a week, mainly when the Economist arrives in my mailbox on Monday. If you live in a bigger city than Waco, Texas you’ll get it earlier, but a day or two one way or the other does not matter in the least. The sites and writers I want to read more regularly I subscribe to in my RSS reader, and that includes a handful of Bluesky and micro.blog accounts. Except in very rare circumstances, I don’t visit bsky.app or micro.blog directly. I don’t have a Twitter account any more, I haven’t had a Facebook account since 2007, and I only visit Instagram once every couple of weeks to see what some friends are up to. (I devoutly wish they were somewhere other than Instagram, but I’m not the boss of them.)Likewise, RSS is how I read the reporters and columnists I especially value. I read Ross Douthat and David Brooks and Ruth Graham, but I never visit the NYT home page. Ditto with the Atlantic and several other periodicals: read the people you know you want to read and ignore the rest. There aren’t many worthwhile things on the internet that I can’t get via RSS, and for those I rely on email newsletters. 

So: in the morning I go through my RSS feeds and newsletters, and then when I’ve read everything I want to read I’m done. Maybe I check back later in the day, maybe not — I have things to do. 

Now, having established these habits, when I read a piece like Warzel’s I think: Why do people live this way? I’d rather pull out my fingernails with a pair of pliers. And I bet if any of you, dear readers, would ditch the doomscrolling habit for three months you’d never go back — you’d wonder why anyone would ever go back. 

priorities

Faculty in my college today got an email announcing a new program “designed to encourage Baylor University faculty to reduce the educational costs for their students by using library content, open educational resources (OER), or other low- or zero-cost materials. In particular, it is intended to encourage instructor experimentation in high-quality low- and no-cost learning materials for their students, especially through the use of OER.” Admirable!

But in the same email we also learned that Baylor has bought a subscription to yet another AI product: “Scopus AI is an intuitive and intelligent search tool powered by generative AI (GenAI) that enhances your understanding and enriches your insights with unprecedented speed and clarity.” And who among us has not wanted their insights to be more clearly and speedily enriched?

But wait, there’s more! Baylor has also purchased a subscription to “Leganto, a resource management tool that enables instructors to add course materials in Canvas for students to access.” The advantage for instructors, we’re told, is that we can “track student engagement with course materials.”

Here’s a suggestion: Maybe if Baylor would choose not to invest in more ed-tech/AI snake oil, and decline to further a student-surveillance regime, we could include textbooks and other “learning materials” in the current tuition cost. My guess is that we could do so and have money left over.

cui bono?

In my first post of this series, I called attention to an issue raised by Christopher Lasch: “The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.”

But why do parents so cooperate? Lasch thinks it’s largely a matter of limiting conflict in the home, but I think something more important is at work: parents have internalized the logic of metaphysical capitalism and its implicit contractualism — its view that only what the individual chooses is legitimate for that individual — and are terrified of being tyrannical or even to be perceived as tyrants. Parents have bought into the illusion that if they do not direct and guide their children, then their children will make free individual choices — and then, if things go wrong, at least they won’t be able to blame Mom and Dad. 

The illusion of free choice? Yes, absolutely. Here let me quote someone I’ve cited before on this subject, Christine Emba: 

This story idealized detachment, “liberation” from mutual care, ensuring that relationships never came before career goals. It looked like bringing a capitalist mindset into our interactions, making it normal to use, discard, and objectify other people. And as they often do, our rapacious markets and short-term desires won out.

But:

Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns. 

If you look at those stories I’ve cited in earlier posts about people who are cutting off their parents, you might ask: Who is encouraging them to do so? And the answer is: therapists who profit from family alienation. Similarly, when young people experience, or think they are experiencing, what we’re taught to call “gender dysphoria,” who is encouraging them to pursue some major change? Often counselors at their schools, who have pressed for the power to hide such information from parents (though there is pushback against that policy). 

So: Cui bono? As Lasch said, the schools and the “helping professions.” By encouraging young people to sever, or at least weaken, family ties, they create psychological and moral fragility that they step in to remedy, in exchange for money or power or both. And neither group has to deal with the long-term consequences of their interventions. 

But we need a broader view. Counselors and therapists are not independent agents any more than the children themselves are. As Jacob Siegel has written, they are part of a much larger movement, the “whole of society” approach to social change: 

Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”

In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them — creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control. 

This is an old idea. It’s not clear that Siegel knows it, but in his essay he’s resurrecting an idea once common among Marxist social theorists: the “ideological state apparatus,” a term coined by Louis Althusser. The state implicitly or explicitly recruits other elements of society, elements that work on the level of ideology rather than physical coercion or law, to accomplish its ends. 

Similarly, as Agustina Paglayan has argued in her disturbing new book Raised To Obey, 

Breaking with the tradition of leaving the upbringing of children entirely to parents, local communities, and churches, central governments in the nineteenth century began to intervene directly in the education of children, establishing rules about educational content, teacher training, and school inspections, and mandating children to attend state-regulated schools. Second, these state-regulated primary education systems expanded in size and eventually reached the entire population. While in the early twentieth century only a handful of countries had universal access to primary education, today this is the norm virtually everywhere. What prompted the expansion of primary education systems, and why did states become involved in regulating them? […] 

Looking at history teaches us that central governments in Western societies took an interest in primary education first and foremost to secure social order within their territory. Fear of internal conflict, crime, anarchy, and the breakdown of social order, coupled with the perception that traditional policy tools such as repression, redistribution, and moral instruction by the Church were increasingly insufficient to prevent violence, led governments to develop a national primary education system. Central governments went to great lengths to place the masses in primary schools under their control out of concern that the “unruly,” “savage”, and “morally flawed” masses posed a grave danger to social order and, with that, to ruling elites’ power. The state would not survive, education reformers argued, unless it successfully transformed these so-called savages into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws. 

This impulse on the part of the state — to “secure social order,” or what people in power choose to designate as “social order” — has not changed, but the number of institutions that it can recruit as its “apparatuses” and their power over children have only increased over time, especially in our age of maximally extensive cybernetic communications systems. (Cybernetic because the mechanisms of coercion become ever more precise via feedback.) 

And the more utopian the dreams of the state, the more desperate it will be to eliminate all alternative sites of influence — beginning with the family. Indeed, the sidelining or destruction of the family is a key feature of all utopian schemes, going all the way back to the fifth book of Plato’s Republic. To utopians and statists — and all utopians are statists, though all statists are not utopians — the family is the first enemy, because the family is by their standards inevitably an anarchic force. 

Cui bono? When the family is weakened and children are cut adrift (morally and intellectually, if not physically) from their parents, the therapists benefit, the pharmaceutical industry benefits, the medical-industrial complex benefits, the social-media companies benefit, the employers benefit — but, in our current system, all of this is to say that the primary beneficiary is the state, especially any state with a competent “whole of society” approach to achieving its ends. 

The family may not be a “haven in a heartless world,” but even beset as it is it can become a site of resistance — and it ought to be, if we have any hope of rearing children who have not had the humanity extracted from them and replaced by the implicit conviction that everything worth having can be bought in the marketplace. 

contractualism

If you look at three earlier posts in this series –

First, The Mill on the Floss and George Eliot’s own family experiencesNext, the Das family in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of DayThen, Robert Hayden’s poems about his own upbringing

— you’ll see that they concern (in Robert Frost’s words) “what to make of a diminished thing” when the thing that has suffered diminishment is one’s family.

Two features link these three accounts.

The first is that each situation arises from the assumption that — to borrow and adapt a famous distinction originally made by Henry James Sumner Maine — family is a function of status rather than contract. That is, you do not enter into a breakable contractual agreement to be a blood relation of someone else; that relationship is a status that you inherit.

The second is the demonstration in each account of the effects of forgiveness — the healing that arises when people, even people who have been hurt in multiple ways, even people who may rightly claim to be victimized by their family members, forgive them.

Now, let’s be clear about some key points:

It would be wrong, I think, for me or you to demand of any greatly wounded persons that they immediately forgive those who have trespassed against them. As a Christian, I believe that forgiveness is indeed what we are all commanded to offer, but for the broken to get to a place where the extension of forgiveness is even a possibility may take some considerable time. Praying for such people is a much more effective strategy than making demands upon them, and is more compassionate also.Forgiveness and reconciliation are different concepts and different experiences. In the Christian account, forgiveness comes first, but reconciliation can only happen when those who have been offered forgiveness repent. (Those who nailed Jesus to the cross had not repented when he pleaded with the Father to forgive them.) I wrote about that process here. In short: the extension of forgiveness is not the end of a journey but the beginning of one, and the person who forgives can never know in advance how the other party will respond — and can never control that response.One consistent theme in the best accounts of forgiveness is the good it does for the forgiver, regardless of what it might mean to the forgiven. In Clear Light of Day, Bim seems to expand and enrich her love her of family first for her own sake, so that she might help to offload the “stupendous caravan of sin” that she is bearing. Many of the complexities surrounding forgiveness are explored in the current issue of Comment — I highly recommend the entire issue. 

Okay, with those points duly made, I resume.

One result of the rise of what I call metaphysical capitalism is the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen. And there is another important element to this way of thinking: if all legitimate relations are contractual, then any legitimate relation may be canceled by any party if that party deems that other parties to the contract are not meeting its terms.

But what if this redefining of all relations in contractual terms is wrong? And what if it is not just ethically suspect but also in some deep sense inhuman? This is the point that Roger Scruton makes in his final book, which happens to concern Wagner’s Parsifal but often extends its commentary to more general points. Thus:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

(Note, by the way, that Scruton is including erotic love alongside family membership as something unchosen. Many years ago I wrote on that theme here. I’ll come back to marriage — and possibly friendship, which in its strongest forms is also unchosen, in later posts, but for now I’m only talking about mothers, fathers, children.)

Scruton makes two important points here. The first is that “the ties that we never contracted” often cannot be “rectified,” that is, put right. They remain wounded, damaged in some way — as I say above, diminished. But such diminishment is no reason to abandon them, because — and this is Scruton’s second point — such ties matter to us “far more than our deals and bargains.” (Note, perhaps to be developed later: To say that they matter more to us does not mean that we consciously prefer them.)

If Scruton is right, and I think he is, then a development I have mentioned in earlier posts on this topic, the growing move of younger people towards cutting their parents wholly out of their lives, is based on a fundamental misreading of what it means to be human. That development — which you can read about here, here, and here — is unlikely for most of its adherents to achieve the “liberation” and “empowerment” they seek. Instead, they are likely to discover that that by trying to sever themselves from “a diminished thing” that have actually diminished themselves.

To accept that being human means that I am bound to my family even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolutely had it with them, is the beginning of something. But only the beginning. The people you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Boundaries must be set, then re-negotiated, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the family members you have most offended will do the same for you.

ancestry

As I’ve often noted, it’s been a regular experience for me, over the decades, to have to tell people that I’m not Jewish. My surname is common among Jews (though it’s not exclusively Jewish), people say I look Jewish, and, as the political scientist Alan Wolfe once told me, “You sure talk like a Jew.” My paternal grandfather’s name was Elisha Jacobs, for heaven’s sake.

These exchanges happened so frequently that, while I’m not really interested in genealogy, I couldn’t help wondering whether I might be Jewish after all, whether somewhere a few generations back my ancestors were the American South equivalent of conversos. So it was probably inevitable that I would at some point start fooling around on family-genealogy sites and, when the option became available, submit my saliva to a DNA-testing service. 

Of course, neither of those options is highly reliable. So I tried two DNA-testing services and explored several genealogy sites, and got essentially the same answers. That doesn’t mean that the answers are right, of course; but the account is plausible and not without evidence. 

Basically, I’m English. Very English. Two-thirds to three-quarters English, with almost all of the rest being French. Now, the genealogy sites get far less reliable as you go further back, but for what it’s worth, they suggest that the French elements of my ancestry come in around the time of the Norman Conquest — after that it’s England all the way. The names are Harrison, Brown, Browning, Woodruff, Hale, Hill, Comer, … and, um, Jacobs. 

And they also suggest that almost all my ancestors come from the same general part of England: the West Midlands and nearby counties. Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Bedfordshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire. A small handful from Devon and Somerset. Mercia and Wessex — the realm of Alfred the Great! 

Perhaps this accounts for my strong attraction to authors from the same region: Shakespeare of course, but more important to me Tolkien, George Eliot, the Gawain poet. Those are the writers who make my chromosomes tingle. 

Well, it’s fun to think so. 

One other thing, from the part of the story that’s better-attested: My oldest American ancestors are all from Virginia. Then they start moving down the coast, to the Carolinas and then Georgia; a few to Tennessee. Only in the past hundred years do they come to Alabama. And there’s not one Yankee among them: I appear to have no American ancestors from above the Mason-Dixon line. When I went to grad school at UVA I was returning to my roots — some of my (probable) ancestors were actually from Albemarle County — but when I moved to Illinois and then to Texas I betrayed my people. I shall weep for this. 

the angers of that house

One of the most famous and widely anthologized American poems of the twentieth century is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Whenever I read it I always note one curious phrase, a gentle and generous evasion: “slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house.” The evasion, of course, is this: Houses are not angry.  

The man we know as Robert Hayden was born in Detroit in 1913 and named Asa Bundy Sheffey. His parents, Asa and Ruth Sheffey, separated soon after his birth, or maybe even before — evidence about his early years is sketchy — and left him in the care of neighbors, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who renamed him Robert Earl Hayden. Later in life he would learn that they never formally adopted him. It appears that William and Sue Ellen fought constantly — Hayden believed that his foster mother had never ceased to love her first husband, to whom she had borne three children, and that was one of the points of conflict — but he was not exempt from their rages. As an adult he said, simply, that they “didn’t know how to handle children.” This was generous: He once said, more bluntly, “Worse than the poverty were the conflicts, the quarreling, the tensions that kept us most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity. We had a terrible love-hate relationship with one another, and dreadful things happened I can never forget.” And: “I was often abused and often hurt physically.” 

That abuse is depicted in his shattering poem “The Whipping.” The poem begins in the third person, as we see a terrified small boy being chased around the yard by a large woman bearing a stick: “She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling / boy till the stick breaks / in her hand” … but then, as the boy curls himself into a ball of ineffectual self-protection, shifts into the first person, depicting “My head gripped in bony vise / of knees,” and then what that boy, the poet, the teller of his own misery, saw: “the face that I / no longer knew or loved.” 

Hayden’s bookish introversion — evident from early on, and intensified by extremely poor eyesight that made sports and games impossible for him — was incomprehensible to his foster father and, it seems, also to his natural father when he briefly met with that man at age twelve. He found refuge only in books, and especially in the poetry he read and, later, wrote. His foster parents apparently came to understand that a life of learning was his only real option, and supported his study at Detroit City College. From there he went on to graduate study at the University of Michigan, where he fell under the influence, and experienced the encouragement of, a professor who taught there for only a short time: W. H. Auden. 

It is noteworthy that when he recollects the terrors and miseries of his upbringing in verse — however he may have spoken of them in other venues — Hayden always seeks some reconciling vision, some expansive comprehension. He concludes “The Whipping” by showing us not the boy but the one who whipped him: 

And the woman leans muttering against 
a tree, exhausted, purged — 
avenged in part for lifelong hidings 
she has had to bear. 

And whatever his foster father did to him — surely things as bad as his foster mother did — in “Those Winter Sundays” he chooses not to ignore “the chronic angers” of his family but to displace them to the house itself, relieving his foster parents of the burden of them, so that he can remember more clearly something that was also true: that his father faithfully performed some, at least, of “love’s austere and lonely offices.” 

It’s a generosity of spirit greater than anyone could ever demand; greater than we could ever expect. But all the more awe-inspiring for that. 

Sources: 

The brief bio at poets.org  Edward Hirsch, “A Reckoning and a Testimonial: On Robert Hayden’s ‘The Whipping’”Brian Short, “Robert Hayden: Ascent and Repose” 

Albion

English cities, towns, and villages I have visited — and by “visited” I mean staying for some hours at least, not just passing through. I’m saving Wales and Scotland for another (much shorter) list.  

Ambleside Bath Berwick-upon-Tweed (Higher) Bockhampton Boscastle Bournemouth Bristol Bury St. Edmunds Cambridge (including Grantchester, Trumpington, etc.) Canterbury Carlisle Chalfont St. Giles Chawton Chipping Norton CoventryDorchester Dover Durham Duxford Ely Exeter FairfordGlastonbury Gloucester Grasmere Harrogate Haworth HelmsleyKeswick London (everything within the reach of the Tube — I’m not going to list Greenwich or Kilburn or Highgate, etc.) Newcastle Oxford (including Binsey, Wolvercote, etc.) Reading Rochester Salisbury Stratford-upon-Avon Tintagel Wells Winchester Windermere York 

Interesting that I’ve managed to avoid the big cities with the exception of London. If I could visit one place in England that I haven’t yet visited, it would be the Norfolk Broads. Or maybe the Yorkshire Dales. 

“gentle parenting”

Marilyn Simon: 

In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

Forgiveness is the precursor to redemption, a transformation that happens on the inside. A child becomes an individual moral agent only through the transformative process of parental punishment and forgiveness. It is an act of faith on behalf of the parent which calls out the inner goodness of a child while punishing the badness. Faith in the good is precisely what calls out this punishment. Somehow this doesn’t quite work if one holds goodness as the granted condition of the child, for then there is no faith required, no moment of uncertainty that is the ground of trust. There is no view of the child as an autonomous moral agent, and thus it offers no space for a child to grow.

by the clear light of day

I began this series by reflecting, in a general way, on what conservatism is. Then I wrote about Christopher Lasch’s ideas about the family. I turned from that to a reflection on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and the author’s experiences that shaped and formed that powerfully tragic book. Now I want to meditate on another novel about family — about the forces arrayed against it, and the force that it is.

Whenever people talk about neglected masterpieces, the first book that comes to my mind, always, is Anita Desai’s 1980 novel Clear Light of Day. What follows will reveal some key elements of the plot, but I don’t think knowing these things will spoil anyone’s experience of this deep, rich, generously meditative book. It’s the kind of book that gets better with re-reading.

The book concerns the Das family of Old Delhi. As the story begins, a middle-aged woman named Tara returns to her home city. Long ago she had married and moved away, but her sister Bimla had remained in their childhood home, working as a teacher and caring for their autistic, or intellectually disabled, brother Baba. Their older brother Raja — who has often indeed behaved in a kingly way towards them — is a source of tension, especially for Bim, and the two sisters warily circle around that topic of conversation.

At the outset we see events primarily through the eyes of Tara, who notices that the old house has become decrepit. She soon discovers that Bim is even more aware of this than she is, and is embittered by it — indeed, is embittered by her whole life, which has been devoted solely to the care of others. She had always been responsible for her siblings — watching over Baba, nursing Raja when he suffered from tuberculosis — while Tara had looked for some means of escape from what was to her an oppressive home, an escape which eventually, through marriage, she achieved.

The first section of the book is set in the characters’ present. The second goes back to 1947 and the Partition of India — a complicated time for the family, because Raja, under the influence of their prosperous neighbor Hyder Ali, had converted to Islam. But this conversion only slightly widened the gaps that had already formed from strong differences in temperament. And anyway, the greater source of tension involves their aunt, Mira-masi, who cared for them after the deaths of their parents but gradually descended into madness. That was when Bim first had to become the primary care-giver for the others. The third section of the book goes back to their early childhood, when their parents were still alive, but, obsessed by social life, largely inattentive to the children. (Nothing much changed for the Das children when their parents died.) And the fourth section of the book returns to the present, as the two sisters try to come to terms with their past and with the very different people they have become. This four-part structure is deeply and resonantly indebted to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which also gives the book one of its two epigraphs.

In this final section the point of view shifts to Bim, whose anger comes to a crescendo when she bitterly asks Baba whether he would be willing to leave the only home he has ever known to go live with Raja in Hyderabad (where Raja had moved during the Partition). Bim is simply lashing out, but — she immediately realizes — lashing out at the one person in her life who has no defenses against her. When she sees Baba’s devastated look, she stammers out an apology, and then retreats to her own room in shock at what she has proved capable of.

And lying there in her darkened room, she experiences a revelation. In the shade of her grubby old room

she saw how she loved [Baba], loved Raja and Tara, and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread. They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she was of them, so that the anger or the disappointment she felt in them was only the anger and disappointment she felt at herself. Whatever hurt they felt, she felt. Whatever diminished them, diminished her. What attacked them, attacked her. Nor was there anyone else on earth with whom she was willing to forgive more readily or completely, or defend more instinctively and instantly. She could hardly believe, at that moment, that she would live on after they did or they would continue after she had ended. If such an unimaginable phenomenon could take place, then surely they would remain flawed, damaged for life. The wholeness of the pattern, its perfection, would be gone.

(Here we should remember Eliot’s references throughout the Quartets to “the pattern,” the shifting weave, and ongoing rebalancing, of forces in a human life.)  

Bim’s relevation continues:

Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect, and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies, and did not extend to all equally. She did not feel enough for her dead parents, her understanding of them was incomplete, and she would have to work and labour to acquire it. Her love for Raja had taken too much of a battering … Her love for Baba was too inarticulate, too unthinking: she had not given him enough thought, her concern had not been keen, acute enough. All these would have to be mended, these rents and tears, she would have to mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean. 

Trying to think through what she has experienced, Bim “reache[s] out towards her bookshelf for a book that would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and place them into a composed and concentrated whole after a day of fraying and unraveling.” The book that she takes up is one Raja had long ago urged her to read: an early biography of Aurangzeb.

This is what she reads in it:

Alone he had lived and alone he made ready to die … He wrote to Prince A’zam … ‘Many were around me when I was born. But now I am going alone. I know not why I am or wherefore I came into the world … Life is transient and the lost moment never comes back … When I have lost hope in myself, how can I hope in others? Come what will, I have launched my bark upon the waters …’

To his favourite Kam-Baksh he wrote: ‘Soul of my soul … Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!’

Reading this, Bim realizes that she has finally taken the right path: not the path of anger or resentment or the accusation of others, but the path of self-cleansing, which is the only path by which she can “mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean.”

For a long time Bim has simmered with anger over a crassly arrogant letter Raja had written to her. Now she takes it out and tears into pieces. “Having torn it, she felt she had begun the clearing of her own decks, the lightening of her own bark.”

Surely this is also what the newly-married Mary Ann Cross felt when she got a letter from her brother Isaac, not a dictatorial one but a condescending one, a reaching-out that he could have managed at any time in the previous quarter-century but, being a “Rhadamanthine personage,” made a point of refusing. She could have denounced and repiudiated him, and if she had, one could not say that he deserved anything better. But Mary Ann kept what I have called the calculator of Deserving locked away in a drawer. Instead, as we have seen, she wrote,

It was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones…. Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross

Like Bim, she lightens her bark by casting resentment overboard. She achieves what she calls “the wider vision.” It’s an astonishing thing to manage. I don’t really know how people do it. It is a marvelous grace. 

the work itself

Robin Sloan recommends a post by Kyle Chayka on “the new rules of media.” But my immediate question, upon reading it, is: “Rules” for what or for whom? And the answer, when you think for a moment, is clear: Rules for people who want to cut a certain figure in the world, people who want to be independent media creators — people, in short, who want to be influencers. People who don’t really care what they’re influencing others to do or to be as long as they themselves are the ones doing the influencing, and (of course) getting paid for it. 

Perhaps because I’ve been reading and thinking about Dorothy Sayers, for whom the nature and value of work is the essential obsession, I have come to be hyper-aware of the chasm that separates (a) those who desire a certain visible and acknowledged place in the world and (b) those whose desire is to do good work. There’s not one word in Chayka’s post on the quality of what you do; every word is, instead, about commanding an audience. It’s a post full of good advice (probably?) for people who simply and uncomplicatedly crave attention.

(Some of those people crave attention because attention leads to money, but I have a suspicion that more of them are interested in money only as a substantial token of attention. Almost everyone seeking a media career could make more dough in jobs that no one notices.) 

Sayers originally expresses her convictions about the intrinsic value of good work in her detective novels, through the character of Harriet Vane. But the first writing of hers wholly devoted to this question is the play The Zeal of Thy House, which concerns an architect — a real one, William of Sens — who has to learn through great suffering that he does not matter as much as his work: the choir of Canterbury Cathedral. 

(Ginormous version of that photo here.) 

I would submit that it’s not even possible nowadays to think of a media career in terms of the work itself, the value of what one does. And maybe that’s what Robin Sloan is suggesting when, after citing Chayka, he continues: 

Sometimes I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. (Again, think of the Green Knight, waiting on the shelf for four hundred years.) Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a completed book, a coherent album, a season of TV: at least you are TRYING. 

Robin doesn’t present this as a refutation of Chayka, but it clearly represents an alternative point of view, one focused not on the public status of the maker but on the work itself. The maker recedes as the completed thing draws attention to itself. And then the completed thing makes its way into the world, and reshapes the world according to its virtue and power. 

My favorite moment in The Zeal of Thy House comes in an Interlude between the first and second acts. It’s a kind of psalm, and it contains words worthy of remembrance: 

Every carpenter and workmaster that laboureth night and day, and they that give themselves to counterfeit imagery, and watch to finish a work;

The smith also sitting by the anvil, and considering the iron work, he setteth his mind to finish his work, and watcheth to polish it perfectly.

So doth the potter sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number.

All these trust to their hands, and every one is wise in his work.

Without these cannot a city be inhabited, and they shall not dwell where they will nor go up and down;

They shall not be sought for in public council, nor sit high in the congregation; 

But they will maintain the state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their craft.