Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Passionate Intensity

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Abigail

In 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem with two lines that came to seem more timely as the century wore on:

The best lack all conviction, while

The worst are full of passionate intensity.

Within little more than a decade, fascism would be on the rise in Spain, Italy, Austria and Germany. And the fit of the two lines with our own time still seems disconcertingly tight.

On the Left, we find the woke-sters. Though they profess to maintain a united front in defense of The Oppressed, along with steadfast opposition to all Oppressors – it seems disconcertingly easy to find oneself expelled from the ranks of the Oppressed and demoted to the despised precincts of Oppressor. The wrong word, a telltale slowness to denounce the latest Enemy of the People (especially if our newest enemy used to be your personal friend) – and poof! You’re out! Down in the muck below! Forgotten! We don’t know you any more!

All the Oppressed who’ve been authenticated have their names on the Approved List. Don’t even think about siding with some perceived victim or sufferer who isn’t posted on the List.

The best way to maintain your standing with the Oppressed is to keep your head down. Once you get noticed, for any reason, good or bad, the dance gets trickier. You could easily get denounced in your turn. Btw, this syndrome hasn’t changed since the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (ca. 1789-1799), the classic account of which is in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Nothing of importance has changed since Hegel first described it in his chapter titled, “Absolute Freedom and Terror.”

Now what does the “passionate intensity” look like on the Right? Those who are found ineligible for membership in the class of the Oppressed, often find themselves choking back anger. They may feel oppressed, but they don’t qualify for that social rank. They don’t want to be socially downranked, shunned, or fired, but whatever they say can be suddenly found out as racist, sexist, transphobic, binary, heteronormative, etcetera etcetera. Even if what they said was meant as a joke, they can still be unmasked. So they can’t be confident of being able to let off steam harmlessly. Further, they may be concerned that their children are being taught values or given verbal signals in school different from those approved at home. Additionally, they can’t be sure that experimental interventions concerning sex identity aren’t being advocated during school hours – those too without parental knowledge or consent.

On the American body politic, what do both the far Left and the far Right have in common? Both of these contending blocs appear to have – in one degree or another – given up on the democratic process. Each is showing a new-found tolerance for authoritarian shortcuts. In these respects, the Left and the Right are starting to look like mirror images of each other.

Back when the Constitution of the United States had just been ratified, Ben Franklin stepped outside the closed doors of the Convention and was asked what had been approved in that assembly. We all know his reply:

A Republic, if you can keep it.

Since those who still want to keep it are surely more than those who want authoritarian shortcuts, why can’t we just assume that our inherited, rights-bearing citizenship is the norm, always has been since the Constitution was first ratified, and leave it at that, without further concern?

In 1945, French philosopher Merleau-Ponty wrote an article on this topic titled, “The War Has Taken Place.” Before World War II, he and his elite classmates had simply assumed that the right of each human being to be treated with dignity and respect for that person’s moral and intellectual freedom was self-evident. But when the Nazis occupied Paris, they erased these rights. To get them back, the rights would need to be fought for. Rights were neither immune from assault nor self-perpetuating.

The lesson that the War taught Merleau-Ponty remains true in our time. The democratic norms don’t defend themselves. They don’t impose themselves. If we want them, we must defend them.

Years ago, when I was a Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, a new college president decided to sideline the college’s award-winning liberal arts curriculum, and put a new set of required courses in its place – all centering round the borough of … uh, Brooklyn! We had students whose parents came from all over the world. And they didn’t come there for their children to study the borough of Brooklyn!

I and a like-minded Professor in the History Department decided to fight this degrading of the courses that would in future be offered to our students. One of our first moves was to call a meeting of concerned faculty for the purpose of assessing the situation and planning effective strategies.

Between us, we divided the calls to be made to colleagues.

We called one colleague after another. Many of those we called told us that they had given up on the college and were planning to take early retirement. Since I’m not a natural politician, I had to reach for any counter-argument I could think of. To one colleague, in desperation, I tried recounting a dream I’d dreamed the night before. Here’s how my dream went:

I was standing in the entrance lobby

of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art

with its magnificent, high-domed ceiling overhead.

But the entrance lobby was cluttered

with moveable stalls marketing trinkets and junk items,

each stall bracketed by tall wooden spires

that interfered with the view of the high-domed ceiling.

In my dream, I exclaimed in distress:

Where will we go, in New York,

to see a noble prospect?

After a moment’s silence, my colleague from another Department (was it English? Art History?) said to me, “Okay, I’ll go to your meeting.”

As things turned out, we actually did win the fight. In the course of it, I met Jerry, who was an ally and advisor, and we fell in love. The story of our victory ran in most of the New York papers as well as the nationally read Chronicle of Higher Education.

What’s the moral? You don’t win ‘em all, but you don’t lose ‘em all either.

But you for sure lose the ones

you fail to fight.

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Interesting Times

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Abigail

There is a well-known curse, supposedly Chinese, that goes: May you live in interesting times! In my childhood I lived in a New York City that snowed in winter. We schoolkids built snowmen and went sledding in the park. Life in the Big City was unexciting, but it felt safe and solid.

The American philosopher William James (1842-1910) wrote an essay with the title, “What Makes a Life Significant?” In it, he tells of a week he spent at “a center for the arts and education in upstate New York.” Everyone attending this center was wonderfully well behaved. All kinds of instructive and edifying activities were offered for every age group. “And yet” James writes, “what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: ‘Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as …[he cites a well-known massacre] to set the balance straight again.’”

Speaking of real-life’s brutalities, this morning I spoke by Skype to an English friend and philosophic colleague. We were talking about the tidal wave of anti-semitism in universities and other cultivated circles over there. Possibly a bit worse than here in America. By this time, it’s no longer half-concealed or merely implied. On the other hand, if you’re Jewish, you can still get by socially if you can be heard loudly scourging “racist” Israel. You know the drill: “Zionism is racism.”

Jews are a people – not a race. You can convert to Judaism, which you can’t do to a race different from your own. Adolf Hitler employed pseudo-Darwinian evolutionary language to classify different groups along a Nazi scale of higher to lower. Jews, however, Hitler put in a category of his own devising: he deemed Jews a toxic “race,” one that had to be entirely eliminated from planet earth, deliberately and systematically.

When in November of 1975, the UN passed a resolution which claimed that “Zionism is Racism,” it echoed Hitler’s system of classification. First, it made Jews into a race. Then it transformed Israel’s purpose – which was first of all to provide a national home for the victims of the longest hatred in recorded history, a hatred which, most recently under the Nazis, had taken the form of denominating Jews a toxic race – by terming that very refuge “racist”!

Incidentally, not only are Jews not a race, but Israel’s May, 1948 Declaration of Independence includes, as one of its constituted purposes, to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex ….”

Anyway, I wondered what was psychologically accomplished by the rampant anti-semitism of which my English colleague was speaking. I had in mind my personal experience of a friend or two who had turned anti-semitic. In the case of such former friends, I’d been able to predict that this turn would happen, at least a month or two before it actually did happen. There would be some event or challenge in the person’s life – not involving Jews – which would be construed as insurmountable. The person would take that defeat or unresolved issue and erase it from chronological memory. As a result, there would be a hole in the person’s remembered timeline. Antisemitism would come in to fill the hole. After all, anti-semitism is the hatred of the people who continuously remember their history and, in the Hebrew Bible, have given the world the formative record of that history.

Is there, I asked my English friend, any equivalent erasure in current English experience? Here is what he conjectured. When the English defeated Napoleon, they enjoyed a hundred years of peace, safety and cultural flourishing. World War I ended that and devastated the youth of England. It killed, maimed, drained, and demoralized a generation. Dreading another war, many resisted as long as they could the war that Hitler would nevertheless bring down on them. When that war was finally over, they had no more heart for further tests of will or valor. They can’t fight the jihadis. They can’t fight Russia or China.

Civilizations have cycles of birth, growth, maturity and decay. At present, the English don’t seem preponderantly to feel that they have another cycle in them. So, to fill the void, they join the jackal-baying around a Jewish state that can and will defend itself to its last breath.

So after all, and like it or not,

we live in interesting times.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical God, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged academic bureaucracy, American philosopher, anti-semitism and loss of cultural self-respect, anti-semitism as replacement for personal defeat, anti-semitism in England, anti-semitism in higher education, anti-Zionism and Western cultural demoralization, anti-Zionism as loss of cultural self-defense, antigenocide turned on its head, Battle of Trafalgar, Bernard Harrison's Blaming the Jews, Big City childhood, British nineteenth-century cultural flourishing, building snowmen, Chautauqua movement, Chinese proverb, civilizational cycles, dark romanticism, demoralized generation, edifying educational retreat, English philosopher, going along to get along, Hebrew Bible as Jewish memory, Hitler’s anti-Judaism, Hitler’s genocide, Hitler’s racial classifications, ideal world vs real world, interesting times, Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence, Israel’s will to survive, Jews as remembering their history, Jews not a race, Jews recording their history, Jews seen as a race, memory gap, moral balance, New York City childhood, overt vs implied anti-semitism, philosophic colleague, predictability of anti-semitism, safe and solid childhood, seeing what you expect, sledding in the park, suppressing chronological memory, the English defeat Napoleon, the makings of an anti-semite, too much of a good thing, transatlantic conversation, UN anti-zionism, uplifting vacation, wholesome group activities, wholesome uplift vs wicked world, William James, William James’ What Makes a Life Significant?, World War I demoralizes England, World War II and British cultural exhaustion | Leave a comment

The Stroke of Lightning

Posted on July 16, 2024 by Abigail

One time I asked the Swiss-French philosopher Jeanne Hersch what she thought the French model for romantic love was. Her response was instant: C’est Tristan.

That twelfth-century tale, which exists in many versions, goes like this: Tristan, a Cornish knight, is assigned by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to conduct Iseult, designated bride of the king, to the court of her bridegroom. During their sea voyage, Tristan and Iseult drink a liquor that, unbeknownst to either, has the power to instill a mutually indissoluble passion. Their clandestine meetings and eventual death (his at the hand of the betrayed King Mark, hers of grief) follow inexorably thereafter.

As you can see, their romance is not explainable in terms of psychology, sociology, or sophisticated studies in compatibility. The lovers have no power to turn it aside. It hits them like a stroke of lightning, or, in French, le coup de foudre.

In the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri is said to have greeted his Beatrice only once, on a street in Florence. He had no chance to say a word to her. One look sufficed and he produced his Divine Comedy. That’s Dante’s three-part poetic depiction of his imagined journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven – where he pictures himself coming face to face with Beatrice at last. Again, without psychology or compatibility studies.

When I first saw lovers walking hand in hand down the streets of Paris, neither I nor the other American girls on Fulbright grants had ever seen anything like it. The couples acted as if they adored each other. Their erotic openness was astonishing to us. No American girl would have given the game away so frontally. At the same time, the dance of the lovers seemed choreographed. They had a way of walking, of exchanging languorous glances and looking away again, that appeared fresh but at the same time traditional. The couples had not invented the dance. The culture provided the model. They had merely stepped into it.

Even the French love songs of the day underscored the dance steps, though they added a cool warning: lovers are all the same, while they love – for as long as they love! It seemed that modern French youth accepted the Tristan template without question but modified it in one respect: romantic love was all-consuming but temporary. The modern lovers would outlive their love. The coup de foudre, the stroke of lightning, was still a law unto itself – but now only while it lasted!

When I met Jerry, I had pretty much worked out my life as a modern woman. I loved teaching philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. I lived in a nice studio apartment in the nice neighborhood where I’d grown up. The museums – the Carnegie, the National Academy of Design, the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick were all reachable on foot. Since I was divorced, nobody could say that I’d been afraid to try marriage. To me it seemed that nothing in the whole world could upset such a well-balanced apple cart.

Jerry came into my life when the academic organization he headed helped me and a few other concerned professors save what was then the college’s award-winning core curriculum. I was so busy with saving the college that I had no time to notice the fact that, simultaneously, I was falling in love. A lot of people who knew me noticed it. But I didn’t.

After we won the college fight, Jerry and I met for dinner and I did notice the spark between us. Later we spent an afternoon together at the Metropolitan Museum, sharing personal histories in a carefully objective style. By then, I did notice that something unusual might be going on. And right away, I took such protective measures as were open to a person with my training in philosophy.

I decided to bracket what phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called “the natural attitude” of personal involvement or commitment. Keeping any personal stakes within brackets, one looks at the phenomena in one’s own consciousness noncommittally – as appearances merely.

It didn’t work! Much to my astonishment, the opposite happened. I had the sensation of falling down a bottomless well. Mentally I tried climbing back up the sides of the well, but it was no use. I just slid down again!

Seeing that my predicament was as serious as it was surprising, I resolved to consult professorial friends in other departments who might have light to shed on this subjective happening. I tried colleagues in Psychology, Sociology and certain cross-cultural niches. Every one of these profs assured me that what I’d experienced was an abnormal state, but one familiar to experts in their disciplines. It was, they assured me, an enjoyable but temporary species of madness. However, not to worry. Recovery might take a few months, but then I would snap out of it.

I have no doubt that they meant well. And I am sure their advice would have fit a number of such cases. However, I didn’t believe them. Neither did Jerry who, on his side, hadn’t previously believed in romantic love and was also consulting books by the experts.

Neither Jerry nor I tried to fit our open-eyed experience into the categories wielded by experts. We both took our romantic love seriously enough to trust it. It wasn’t a symptom of madness. To both of us, it looked like …

sanity in depth.

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Biblical God, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, Industrial Revolution, institutional power, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, public facade, public intellectual, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged academic attitudes, blinded by love, bracketing personal involvement, bracketing the natural attitude, cynicism as pretense, dance of the lovers, Dante Alighieri, Dante and Beatrice, Dante's romantic love, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Edmund Husserl, encoded Gnostic stories, explaining away romance, falling in love, falling in love unawares, feminism as anti-romantic, fitting romantic love into categories, French choreography of romance, French culture and the coup de foudre, French model of romantic love, gender imbalance, good life as a balance between extremes, honoring womanly hopes, independent woman, insincere hopelessness, Jeanne Hersch, lawbreaking for the sake of a better world, le coup de foudre, libertine Gnosticism, lovers in Paris, medieval romance, modern woman, nihilism as pretense, nonviolent resistance, noticing the romantic spark, objective self-examination, objective self-knowledge, ontology of romantic love, outliving one's love, outliving romantic love, personal histories, Phenomenology, pretended maturity, professional woman, reductive explanations for romantic love, resistance and non-resistance, romance and self protection, romance as novelistic, romance tales as encoded Gnostic tracts, romantic approach of French vs. American women, Romantic Love, romantic love and psychology, romantic love and the experts, romantic love and theoretical explanations, romantic love as a law onto itself, romantic love as sanity in depth, romantic love as temporary, romantic love treated as abnormal, romantic love treated as madness, romantic love vs. seduction, saving the liberal arts, studying romance, taking romantic love seriously, the strategy of being a woman, the stroke of lightning, the Tristan template, the world has no room for romance, Tristan and Iseult, true love, trusting romantic love, Upper East Side, well-balanced life, woman philosopher | 1 Comment

Bless Me Also Father

Posted on July 9, 2024 by Abigail

In my grandfather’s Manhattan apartment overlooking Riverside Drive, the family would collect for the annual Passover celebration. Round the table were his sons and their wives, his younger daughter, my mother, along with my father, my sister and me. His elder daughter, my Aunt Myriam, lived with her family in Jerusalem.

Among the grandchildren old enough to talk, I was the youngest. That meant it fell to me to chant the four questions in Hebrew (“why is this night different – in the first, the second, the third and the fourth particular way – from all other nights?”).

One part of the ceremony, meant to create a sense of fun, has the youngest hide one piece of the unleavened flatbread (matzah) that’s eaten in place of leavened bread during the Passover week. It’s unleavened in commemoration of the Israelites’ departure from Egypt in haste such that they had no time to wait for bread to rise. At the Passover commemoration dinner, the hidden matzah is found and returned of course, but only after a round of mock bargaining, with the youngest wanting a present in reward for coming up with it.

The “bargaining” is supposed to be fun. But, rightly or wrongly, round that table I was believed to be the favorite grandchild. Under the shadow of that shared, unspoken belief, suddenly the mock bargaining turned acrimonious, to the point where I fled the table in tears. I remember Aunt Myriam’s daughter Naomi, then in New York, a lovely eighteen-year old sabra (native born Israeli), going over to console me and incidentally get me back to the table.

It was the last Passover my grandfather would be well enough to conduct, and a sad reminder of the perennial fight for the blessing.

The pen name of my grandfather, Rav Tsair (the Young Rabbi), is on a street in Tel Aviv. His work is still studied in Jewish seminaries. He bore a striking physical resemblance to God, as years later I sometimes said jokingly. I mean “God” as represented in such Christian works of art as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. That figure – the one with the flying white beard and the creation-making forefinger.

In my childhood one time, my sister and I were seated on the wine-colored rug at his feet, talking about how you can’t tell in advance which events you will or won’t remember. When we shared our thought with our grandfather, he leaned down, pointing his ever-so-consequential finger in our small faces and said performatively –

You will remember this moment all your life –

all your life you will remember it!

Of course, we did.

And speaking of early days, when did human history begin? For those Christians who take the Bible seriously, it began when Eve succumbed to the serpent’s coaxing, ate the only fruit in the entire Garden of Eden that God had ruled off limits, Adam followed suit, and they both got booted out of the Garden. Henceforth to work, to suffer in childbed, to die. In the Christian view, no redemption was available for what they did – the Original Sin – till God incarnated as a man and suffered a painful death. Thus the debt was paid that we, given our limited human resources, could not possibly pay.

The Jewish story goes rather differently. Eden or no Eden, we never lose the ability to do the right thing. (Or the wrong thing for that matter, whether inside or outside the Garden.) The Eden story has analytic value. It models what human life is not. It’s not inconsequential. It’s not paradisaically trivial. Our lives unfold in the world of action, where every action makes a difference.

So what is the act that sets the stage for history from the outset and from that point going forward? Adam and Eve get themselves two sons, Abel and Cain. Abel knows how to behave with God. His “sacrifice is accepted.” Cain by contrast doesn’t know how. His sacrifice doesn’t make the cut. More serious still, Cain won’t try to figure it out.

Instead, Cain murders Abel. What could be more natural and understandable? All the same, he didn’t have to do it! So the “voice of [his] brother’s blood cries out” to God “from the ground.”

The motif of sibling rivalry – of fratricide actual or intended – threads its way all through Genesis, the first Book of the Hebrew Bible. The one where the major themes are laid out.

Now let’s look up from the Book of Genesis and ask how else one could account for the tidal wave of malicious hatred of Jews that’s now flooding our planet? Isn’t there an undertone, a muttering voice in the midst of it that says,

Surely God will like me better –

now that I have no rivals because

I’ve murdered Abel?

Myself, I don’t actually think it’s a winning strategy for getting to be God’s favorite. However, once people get wound up that way, it’s difficult to disengage the mechanism. Best not to wind it up in the first place.

Bulletin from History

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What Is Truth?

Posted on July 2, 2024 by Abigail

The question, famously put to Jesus by Pontius Pilate, was prompted by Jesus’ self-report that he had come to bear witness to the truth.

Without capitalizing “Truth,” so that it acquires other-worldly sound-and-light effects – isn’t bearing witness to the truth just what we’re all called to do? Maybe not full time and exclusively, but at least when a question of truth or falsehood comes up?

Such a platitude might seem so obvious that putting it in writing or saying it out loud verges on bad style. But the objection from purveyors of intellectual influence today goes the other way. Nowadays, it’s considered good style to deny that truth (or “truth” in scare quotes) has anything to do with the life of the mind.

Since we came back from California last week, I’ve been somewhat under the weather, so Jerry got me a present, Theory of the Novel, a book on a topic in which earlier I’d expressed an interest. It’s by Guido Mazzoni, a professor of Philology and Literary Criticism at the University of Siena in Italy. One of the ecstatic blurbs on the back cover calls it “a magnificent theorization of the novel as a phenomenon of literary and cultural history … .”

Well, what could be better to relax and perk up the weary traveler? I like novels, particularly 19th-century novels with real story-lines concerning characters with whom you can identify. I even think real life is, or should be, more like a 19th-century novel than is generally admitted today. So any intelligent celebration of the novel will get my attention.

So what’s Mazzoni’s point? I’m only partway through, but I’ll share what I’m getting so far. For him, a novel is not like real life. Hmm. So let’s start the other way. What does he think real life is like? It’s furnished with oscillating, subjective feelings of unbalance, instability, restlessness, need, etc. All these are “passions,” each looking to satisfy itself (unbalance to get balance, restlessness to get calm, and so on) – however briefly. And what’s the Big Story? Is there one? Not really. The aforementioned feeling-ingredients occur and bump along against the “gray, static background of our existence [49].”

Hey girls. I’m already depressed. I don’t care how successful he is. Don’t marry this guy.

Here’s how Mazzoni tells it. The conventions of story-telling require story tellers to proceed along a timeline between “before” and “after.” That’s how we get the illusion of plot. But the so-called illusion rests on an underlying simplification. In reality, we are parts of “an immense surface of cross-references [46]” from which the “before and after” of the narrator plucks out a few bits from the larger causal system, which includes the “force fields in which individuals find themselves enmeshed” and “the power of circumstances [58].”

So Mazzoni thinks that there are stories and story-tellers and that is fine. The only trouble with stories is that they aren’t true. For him, none of them are true. Incidentally, there are no entries for “good” or “evil” in Theory of the Novel’s Index. So the landscape in which he situates his characters is morally flat.

But our actual landscapes are not flat. We are born with purposes and we enlarge, revise, renounce or reconceive our purposes as we test them in experience. Our self-education takes place in the company of formed adults with whose intentions we must contend adaptively, the adults being in their turn influenced by the surround of others – all within the matrix of purposes approved or thwarted in the shared culture or within a complex of overlapping cultures. Our stories take shape as we find out what feasible purposes best reflect who we are – a “who” question that we work out by the sequence of trials and errors that compose our stories.

Meanwhile, the human landscape includes shapes of another kind. Evildoers have a knack for discerning our purposes (our stories), sometimes before we’ve even figured out what stories we are living. Sometimes their bad intentions inadvertently jar us into figuring that out.

So, if I’m right about true stories and the nature of evil, what’s Mazzoni doing in his book?

Sorry to say it but, at least so far,

nothing good.

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My Time-Out Is Over

Posted on June 25, 2024 by Abigail

I’ve had two refuges at the present phase of my life. To both I’ve repaired for weekly shelter from the main lines of my work, its thinking and varied obligations.

So what for me constitutes the Life Obligation from which I’ve welcomed these time-outs? It’s the Jewish Calling. What is that? People, whether Jewish or not, describe it differently, but one time, long ago, I was vouchsafed a clear and unmistakable vision of the thing, as it applies in my own case.

I was standing on a New York subway platform, changing from a West Side train, waiting for an East Side train to take me home from a talk I’d gone uptown to Columbia University to attend. The talk was given by a philosopher who’d been hired in midcareer at the initiative of my father. Since then, he’d become a family friend and as such had spoken at my father’s memorial service.

That being the background, I’d been amazed at the tenor of his presentation at Columbia. It had been salted with anti-Jewish sentiments. The views he expressed were simplistic and ignorant, yet delivered with a faux “childlike” simplicity, as if he’d no suspicion that anything coming from a good-hearted giant like himself could conceivably be taken in ill part.

The subway platform seemed as good a place to pray as any, so I asked, looking up at the cavernous darkness overhead,

Lord, what is a Jew?

The answer, soundless but unmistakable, came to me in these words:

A Jew is someone

who has a passion for God.

I pressed the question:

What sort of God?

The answer was more discursive, so I’ll give it as it came to me – as a kind of explanation. It’s the God who sees us as we live and make our choices on the timeline of our lives: how we decide what to wear in the morning or what to eat, how we form and express opinions, how we meet the specific, concrete challenges from day to day. Not the God of transcendent pole-vaulting above and over our earthly condition. It’s the God who is our Witness, the One who sees who, where, and how we are.

And what, I asked next, is an anti-semite?

An anti-semite is someone

who hates that God.

The definitions I was given that afternoon in the New York subway have proved surprisingly useful. On one occasion, they even gave me advance warning that someone was about to turn anti-semite before the person had given any outward sign of doing so.

Now for an update. No doubt because life on the timeline — the historical life – can be burdensome, I’ve particularly valued opportunities to get vacations from it. For respite, I’ve looked to providers who deal expertly with innocent Nature. In recent days, chief among these have been my acupuncturist and a young woman with a rare skill in interpreting communications from a horse I’m riding. I express a concern personal to me, the horse whisperer walks alongside and, by the horse’s gait or choice of pathway, she transmits what seem like apposite responses. With both of these providers from innocent Nature, the protocol has been that I give voice honestly to whatever’s really been on my mind.

At the last session I had with the acupuncturist before we left for California, I spoke of my concerns about the Israel/Gaza war.

He is usually very tactful so I was surprised to hear him ask me, “Aren’t Jews [essentially] wanderers?”

Of course, the “Wandering Jew” is a myth-figure, a cartoon-like denizen of the anti-semite’s imaginary world. I haven’t read much about this caricature, but I assume the anti-semite’s picture is of a figure who is deprived of a homeland as punishment for the imaginary crime of being a Jew. The wandering would be a punishment – one that Israel-haters are super-eager to impose, of course.

By way of reply to my acupuncturist, I started to fill in the chronology for what I supposed must be an honest mistake about empirical history. The scholarly consensus about dates for the Exodus, the First Temple period, the Second Temple, its destruction, the Bar Kochba rebellion, and so on till Israel’s post-Holocaust 1948 Declaration of Independence and U.N recognition.

Perhaps you will be less surprised than I was to face the wall of resistance – of non-listening and non-hearing – that this otherwise kind and well-intentioned man was putting up as I cited these widely-accepted facts of empirical history, ancient and modern. I don’t think he heard a word I said. Certainly he didn’t take it in.

And the horse-whisperer? She was at pains to tell me of her “neutrality” as between Israeli women who had their babies ripped from their wombs and the jihadi killers of babies. Between innocence and manifest evil – evil that bragged about itself to the whole world – she was proudly “neutral” and wanted to make sure I got the message.

And by the way, what was the message? I had taken Nature to be a refuge from History. But now it’s coming to seem that there is no such refuge.

As the old spiritual has it:

I went to a rock to hide my face,

The rock cried out –

No hiding place –

It’s really too bad. Hiding places have been some of my favorite places.

Related Content: Friends in the Teeth of History

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Book Matters

Posted on June 18, 2024 by Abigail

“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest

By Felix Salten, translated & introduced by Jack Zipes, illustrated by Alenka Sottler.

Bambi was the first book I truly loved when it was read to me as a child. I also loved the animated movie Walt Disney made, based on the book. And I loved deer. In fact, I wanted to be one. Later, when slightly more mature, I scaled my ambitions down to “forest ranger,” where at least I could be around deer.

Deer were my ideal.

The Bambi that my father read to me had been translated from the German by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers became widely known in mid-twentieth-century America, for having been a dedicated communist who later became a devout anti-communist, testifying in court against Alger Hiss, a respected State Department official, who was in fact (as KGB files later disclosed) a secret agent of the Soviet Union.

All that had nothing to do with his early translation of Bambi. From my child’s vantage point, I never found the language stilted or deficient in any way.

So why a new translation, with the title, Original Bambi? In his introduction, translator Jack Zipes provides background and explanation. Felix Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann, in Hungary in 1869, a country then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family was Jewish, his mother a talented actress, his father a businessman with a rabbinic lineage. The family moved to Vienna, where the father’s business aptitude did not surmount a stock market crash and subsequent fall in the family fortunes.

In consequence, Felix was deprived of higher education and had to learn to live by his talent as a writer and his wits. He became part of a bohemian circle of Viennese writers and nobility. For the nobility, Felix would run the clandestine errands that belonged to their typically double or triple lives. In eventual payback, these high-placed friends enabled him to escape Hitler and find asylum in Switzerland where he died peacefully, at war’s end. He never became wealthy, selling Bambi with all its rights before it became the runaway best seller and movie.

The present translator faults Chambers for his deficient command of German, and castigates Disney for sentimentalizing the original book which he takes to have been written for adults. Zipes holds that the hunted animals of the forest are symbolic, representing hunted Jews and other minorities targeted by their human persecutors.

Having just read the retranslated original Bambi, I have to disagree with Zipes, at least in part. Not about the new translation, however. He certainly has done a better job with language than Chambers. It comes startlingly alive in Zipes’ new version, as if changed, sentence by sentence, from black and white to vibrant color.

However, I don’t agree that the book is about persecuted human minorities, presented metaphorically as deer. The animals in this wonderful book are not metaphors. They are the animals they say they are. Forget German, English, or any other human language! These creatures are speaking in their native dialects: be it grasshopper, magpie, owl, hare – or of course, deer.

Human beings may choose or be taken to represent symbolic values. Animals are innocent of such hopes and fears. That’s why they’re enviable. When, as children, we identify with animals, we may be putting up a natural resistance to the human calling.

The Original Bambi revives the child’s eye view. Its animals, Bambi included, are real!

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged book matters, Felix Salten's The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest | 2 Comments

Book Matters

Posted on June 11, 2024 by Abigail

Book Matters

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman

by Stefan Zweig

It’s impossible to write a more definitive biography of Marie Antoinette, the unluckiest Queen of France, than the one by Stefan Zweig. The biography combines the objectivity of a historian, the curiosity of a psychologist, and a novelist’s sympathy for his heroine.

She loved life’s pleasures, knew the art of pleasing, and — because of these personal flaws — went far toward putting the budget of France in the red. She was excoriated in terms that expressed all the hatred that can befall a woman: as a she-wolf, a whore, the emblem of all the vices of her sex, a debauched female, a criminal mother, and on and on. At an earlier phase, anyone at court who won her favor was envied and the public went wild for her when she appeared in Paris.

She had been the toast of the old regime.

She became the she-devil of the new.

Her particular flaws were not uncommon ones, but they went unchecked under the regime of which she was the Queen. The consequences were such as to give her a starring role in the world-historical event that changed the political order of Europe: the French Revolution.

She was unlucky and did not know how to be lucky. The impotence of her bridegroom lasted seven years, by which time the young couple had attracted the voyeuristic attention and coarse humor of the whole nation. Though his condition was eventually corrected by surgery, the psychological effects were lasting. He could not play the man with her, nor with his realm when he had to. Erotically, they never became a couple, nor a good team when external threats swirled around them.

The famous “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” is too bizarre and improbable for me to comprehend, even after I read Zweig’s lucid explanation. She’d been the target of a pair of grifters who pretended that she’d ordered a staggeringly costly piece of jewelry. They implicated high-placed others in their scheme, by prevailing on them to advance the price of the necklace, supposedly on the Queen’s behalf. When the female swindler finally made her escape to England, she targeted Marie Antoinette with lurid pamphlets purporting to expose the Queen’s vices. Marie Antoinette was innocent of all the accusations connected with the necklace, but guilty of having lived so improvidently as to make them plausible to her ever-growing public of detractors.

She had one true love, and it wasn’t Louis XVI. Zweig, who assembles the evidence that this clandestine affair was consummated, argues in her defense that her marriage had been a contract of state between a girl of fifteen and the undeveloped, teenage Dauphin, for which union she had at length produced two children, thereby fulfilling her duties under the contract. Be that as it may, her lover, the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen, adored her to the end, and beyond, as no one else did.

As her fortunes declined, the escape plan engineered by Count Fersen was thwarted at Varennes. She was confined, first to the palace in Paris and finally to a dark and comfortless cell. She had many chances to escape that last ride in the tumbril (the open cart) to the guillotine. She and Louis XVI bungled every one of them. Time was of the essence and they missed their moments almost unerringly.

Her case grew hopeless but she seldom failed to captivate those who were her captors – most especially the humble poor who saw a woman in misfortune – but sometimes even committed revolutionaries. By what were they captivated?

She was not a religious woman. By stages, she lost her reputation, her youth, her beauty. Even her children were taken from her. What then did she keep? She never failed in her invincible belief that she was the queen. It was a belief she shared with those who hated her the most — and with those who tried in vain to save her. Had she not embodied this queen-ness in every molecule of her being, and held fast to it through all the storms of that time, how could there have been so profound a reversal of a nation’s habits of chivalry and scorn as the French Revolution?

The crowned heads of Europe did little or nothing to save her, mourned her execution pro forma, and busied themselves with their king business: realpolitik and the securing of their own necks.

The bodies of the royals were thrown into a mass grave pit, covered in quicklime and, a few years later, no one knew where the Queen of France was buried.

Only one man poured into his memory all the ardor and devotion to which Marie Antoinette believed she had title by virtue of her queenship. To the end of his days, Count Fersen reproached himself for his failure to risk all and ride with her on the unsuccessful flight to Varennes in 1791. Even had the mob torn him to pieces, he reproached himself again and again in his journal: “Why, ah why, did I not die for her on the twentieth of June?” Strangely, on that very date nineteen years later, Fersen was torn to pieces by a Swedish mob, who hated him for many reasons, among them his unrepentant royalism.

It was only decades after the death of Marie Antoinette, when it was finally safe to remember her, that innumerable false memoires and forged letters began to appear, catering to a reborn taste for the unluckiest Queen of France.

By what were they captivated?

She seems to me to embody the predicament of being a woman: loved and hated, admired and scorned, for the very same qualities, forced to be Queen of France, forced to be the target of the French as they overthrew the monarchy. The bare-breasted woman in Delacroix’s painting, “Liberty at the Barricades,” is not a real person. She is a symbol. Marie Antoinette was not a symbol. She was a real person, who was regarded as a symbol, excoriated or adored depending on how one valued the symbol.

Most of us have a symbolic life and a real life. We are what we represent and what we really are. The problematic of our lives is to keep them in a prudent and credible balance. One could say that Marie Antoinette failed to keep that balance.

But perhaps she did not fail.

Perhaps she was a perfect Marie Antoinette.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman | Leave a comment

Micro-Metaphysics

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Abigail

One of the ways of viewing philosophy is that it is the discipline aiming to gain a complete and coherent account of “everything” – a logos of the cosmos. Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins with the claim:

All men [all people]

by nature desire to know.

So what is it that they desire to know? They want to know what’s behind the curtain! What’s really making reality tick! What is the story behind the conventional story they tell us?

There are philosophers who strive to face this question head on, doing their utmost to come up with answers. The term “metaphysics,” though originally a librarian’s designation (meaning the book shelved after the “physics”) has taken on the seductive suggestion that, behind nature (physis) there lie the secret springs of action, still awaiting discovery.

I must say my own curiosity has not run along these lines. If there is a Big Picture, I can’t recall ever yearning to take it in. This may reflect a proper humility about my own capabilities. But I suspect that, had I earnestly longed to see The Big Picture, my body would have produced brain cells sufficient to permit an overview of the evidence. Generally speaking, we can gain the capacity to know what we think we will need to know.

What then takes the place of metaphysics in the workings of my curiosity? Certainly not any supine settling for conventional accounts of how the Big Picture works or should be understood. By now it’s getting clearer that the prospect of Big Answers keeps receding. We are still far from knowing how mind and matter interact – whether in ourselves or other species – how causes and freedom can coexist, how moral imperatives are grounded, how facts and values bear on each other, what existed before the cosmogonic Big Bang, and so on and on.

That said, my philosophic curiosity lies elsewhere. Where then? You might call it The Little Picture. For instance: what is happening between two women friends who have not met in a long time and but now get together in a café to talk about the lives they have lived? What’s the proximate context? What are the boundaries and lacunae of the bigger world they are presently mapping for each other? What’s to be feared and hoped for within that world – and why? Remember, they are women! Women have specific fears, regrets and hopes that men do not ordinarily have.

With some, as they converse, the larger terrain will include shared landmarks. Nevertheless, in conversations between women intimates, there will always be terrain left undiscussed. What human possibilities or defeats lie over there? What world-of-desire, or vale-of-desires-forfeited, does the conversational map include – or else leave tactfully out of account?

What did older maps of the-landscape-for-women look like? Do contemporary feminisms deal with the present terrain of troughs and heights or only work with superseded maps? Do current theories take account of actual zones of silence, or merely conceal them under formulaic abstractions?

About facts and values, the cosmogonic preconditions et cetera, I’d like to know, but am not in a breathless hurry. For me, there’s a more urgent question:

What is it about women and men

that we still haven’t figured out?

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A Writer’s Conscience

Posted on May 28, 2024 by Abigail

I just finished reading – actually skimming – what I’m tempted to name as the worst book in the history of the world. It’s a romance novel titled Forever Amber, set in seventeenth century England, which came out originally in 1944, and was banned and denounced from most of the platforms that did that for books in those days.

I’m not for actual censorship of books deemed immoral but, if you ask me, the denouncers were on to something. It’s not the sex scenes. In the bodice busters of those days, consummations ended in three dots and candle lights flickering out. I’ll just say something about the book’s content before I get to my recoil from it.

The Amber of the title starts her story as an innocent but of course beautiful country girl who makes her way to London. As she climbs from Debtor’s prison to the Court of the Restoration king, Charles II, the reader gets a tour of the places and possible predicaments of that period. According to the Forward by Barbara Taylor Bradford, Kathleen Winsor’s novel is the product of “impeccable research that cannot be bettered … .” So we learn what life was like for the castoffs at the bottom rung of society, how one might live through the Great Plague that ravaged London in 1665, and at last we get to canvass the opportunities and pitfalls on offer at the royal Court if a lady happened to be both beautiful and shrewd.

So why do I call it “the worst book” ever? Ordinarily, credible time travel can motivate a reader to start turning pages. Here’s the problem. The book’s heroine, Amber, hasn’t got a moral bone in her entire voluptuous body. Well, isn’t that the whole point of a bodice buster? You don’t go to the ice cream parlor for hardware. Anyway, aren’t the descriptions of seventeenth-century London alone worth the price of the ticket?

No, as it turns out. Actually not. Although intellectual historians and philosophers record the problem – which actually arose in the seventeenth century with the newly discovered power of mathematical physics – of a split between facts and values, in the life experience of real people, back then as now, facts and values coexist inextricably. That is, almost any situation we face will present a choice between better and worse alternatives. We never see Amber weighing alternatives of that kind.

Let me illustrate this weighing of better against worse with a moment from a different book, set in the twentieth century, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of essays by Joan Didion, published in 1968. What Didion wrestles with in one of the essays, “On Keeping a Notebook,” is the question of what has motivated her to jot down observations and reflections in a journal, the way she does. Was it a genuine interest in the people whose sayings and doing she records? Or was she predominantly concerned with herself, the writer?

We are, she writes, “taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. … But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.'”

I pause over this moment of writerly self-excoriation since I would take a different view than Didion’s of the evidences in her journal. A writer by trade and vocation, Didion is self-condemned to be on the lookout for material. Which means that her access to herself – to sincerity – is partly skewed by the call to place even that in the service of her talent. In that service, what gets sacrificed is the curiosity each of us has about who and what we are – and what our purposes are or ought to be. The writer’s thoughts and experiences can’t be all her own. Long past the time when the experiences happen, they remain eligible for the draft: for enlistment as grist for the writer’s mill.

So I would dispute Didion’s dim view of her practice of keeping a notebook. My guess is not that there are egocentric concerns lurking beneath her record of other people’s conduct (which is what she thinks). Instead, I suspect that her record of personal experiences has been, in some degree, sacrificed to her talent. She can’t consecrate that record to its first and best use: self-knowledge.

But note that, in my argument with this writer (who is gone now and was young decades back), we are entertaining the question of what is good or bad – or good for what and bad for what – in the writerly vocation. To ask questions of this sort is to honor human experience. That’s far different from the heedless, headlong caper through socio-erotic opportunities in the pages of Forever Amber.

The scandal of that book is not that liaisons of the period have been to some degree revived for the entertainment of the time traveler. The scandal lies in the record, fictional or not, of a trip through time taken

without the least sign of conscience.

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