Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me

Posted on July 8, 2025 by Abigail

Some years back I read a book with the title, And the Wolves Howled: Fragments of Two Lifetimes. The author was Barbro Karlen, a Swedish woman who claims to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank. Anne was the Jewish Dutch girl whose diary, found after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, made her the most famous victim of the Holocaust. The diary was found in the attic of the house in Amsterdam where her family had hidden until an ill-wisher betrayed them to the Nazis. It was translated into many languages and became emblematic of personal resistance to the organized machinery of evil.

Though I’d read Barbro Karlen’s book some years ago, recently I’d felt an urge to read it again. Unable to find my original copy in the overstuffed bookshelves that surround most rooms of our home, I sent for a new copy. It took some time to get here and seems different in certain respects from the edition I had read earlier.

For example, in the (I think mistaken) belief that this will make her account more objective, here the author tells some of her story in the third person. Even her own name is changed. Since, midway through, we find photographs of Karlen from the age of two up to the time of the book’s publication, the author’s identification with the story she tells can’t be overlooked – not even provisionally.

In addition, this account omits one incident from the first version that I thought possibly probative. Her book had come under attack from numerous quarters, including societies formed to commemorate Anne Frank. Meanwhile, for some practical reason, she had gone to see someone (a cousin I think it was) with whom Anne Frank had been close. He now lived in Switzerland. When she knocked on his door, getting ready to explain her presence to whichever stranger might answer her ring, there was the cousin himself standing at the door. Instantly and tearfully they embraced!

Why do I feel so gripped by her story? Well, over a span of years I’d been visited by a sense of having been, in the early 1930’s, a young German-Jewish woman living in hiding from the Nazis. A neighbor had betrayed me along with others. All were loaded into the back of a truck parked in the street outside. The truck was sealed and carbon monoxide was then pumped into it.

One incident from that supposed memory remains vivid. As I exited my body in death, I rose high enough to get a wide view of events on earth. I could see the earth’s curvature, yet take in the human actions far below. And what became visible was the global extensiveness of this murder-the-Jews project. Because of certain weaknesses in the German social fabric, it had first become actionable there. But, as a phenomenon, it was and would be world-wide. Here’s what I thought as I saw this:

This is an outrage.

It should not be tolerated.

I resolve to come back and fight it.

My tools have been the two books I wrote, and probably some of the talks that I’ve given. Of course, I’m not a Nazi-hunter but I have fought it – the murder-the-Jews project – and fought it most earnestly, to the extent that I was able within the frame of ordinary life.

And Barbro Karlen? Personally, I’m inclined to take her at her word, whatever that comes down to in real-life terms. In this life, she’s had to fight calumny and persecution in work situations (where she was a mounted policewoman and dressage competitor) unrelated to any past-life claims.

I can dredge up analogous experiences – in fact quite a tediously long train of them – from personal and professional life. Also, for some years, small incidents would occur that appeared to affirm the reality of the past-life memory that I’ve described. Then, at a certain point, the confirming incidents ceased, so that by now even their colors and contours have faded from memory.

What can we make of such seeming memories? They may reflect sympathetic identification with some sufferer, known or unknown, from a bygone time and place – a past time that it now becomes safe to remember. Such memories, however regarded – veridical or not – strike me as a responsibility.

In the lives we live today, the evil thus remembered should find –

no rationalization or shelter –

no hiding place.

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Death and the Doctors

Posted on July 1, 2025 by Abigail

Readers of this column may recall that I had a near-death experience fairly recently.

Not the good kind, where you meet all the dear ones who’ve gone before you up the golden stairway. Rather, the kind where you get to be near death because the doctors who’ve treated you in successive institutions failed to coordinate their do’s and their don’ts – their combined parting instructions.

As a result, dangerously incompatible remedies got prescribed simultaneously. Within a few days at home, my vital signs had dropped so steeply that the crew on the ambulance were astonished to find me still conscious and able to talk.

We do know accidents will happen. Should we call this an accident? Let’s ask Aristotle. He writes that one can judge whether an injurious act was accidental or culpable by the way the perpetrator acts afterward. If there is admission of the harm and an effort to repair its effects so as to prevent repetitions, then we can deem it an accident (“involuntary”). If on the contrary, the doer admits no responsibility, then we should call it deliberate (“voluntary”).

In the case I’ve just mentioned, of my near-fatal emergency, no medical professional, in any position of responsibility, whom I dealt with subsequently, wanted to know what happened! A staff person assigned to interview me tried first to tie the emergency to my hip fracture. When I made clear the irrelevancy of that, she went to another hypothesis. I can’t quite recall what she came up with but it was as unconnected to the sudden free fall of my vital signs as her first suggestion had been. I repeated the likeliest explanation: the failure, on the part of each institution, to coordinate its medical prescriptions and prohibitions with those of the successor institution.

“Oh,” finally she wrote down: “mixed medications.”

Nice going, lady. As if the medications – having a mischievous will of their own – just jumped out of their cabinet and mixed each other up!

The practiced evasions of the woman taking my history tell me that I’m unlikely to be the first patient to suffer the consequences of such culpable sloppiness. And it’s more than likely that some have died from the syndrome.

Among the dead is the father of a friend, whose tale of woe came to my attention just the other day. He’d been under treatment for leukemia but his condition looked to be sufficiently controlled to give him, as the doctors treating him told my friend, another two or three good years.

Unfortunately, he suffered a stroke at one point in the treatment. My friend was told by his doctors that this was a side effect sometimes occurring with chemotherapy. In view of his overall condition, his doctors thought he had a good chance to survive the crisis.

However, his survival depended on his continuing to take a particular medication prescribed for his case. While he was in treatment for the stroke, he did not get that medication. The seeming consequence was that he suffered a second stroke from which he died.

My friend was not just grieved. She was outraged! And she consulted a number of lawyers about what looked to be medical irresponsibility. Could she take legal action?

The lawyers advised her that – although her case was actionable – they were not willing to represent her. They described the lawyers for the medical establishment as knowing how to enlarge on the uncertainties and shrink the factor of careless indifference to the point where she’d be unlikely to prevail in court.

What can we conclude? Is it that people specifically and comprehensively trained in the contemporary healing arts can get away with criminal indifference to their patients when they believe that no one is looking?

In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we are told that

it came to pass, when they were in the field,

that Cain rose up against Abel his brother,

and slew him.

And the Lord said unto Cain,

Where is Abel thy brother?

And he said, I know not:

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Related Content: What I Learned When I Almost Died | Fracture

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Do Evil People Get Better at Evil If They Reincarnate?

Posted on June 24, 2025 by Abigail

My book, A Good Look at Evil, doesn’t describe the best-known bad actors in human history. The cases I deal with are mostly of near-contemporaries. And, when dictators are discussed, it’s usually through their effects on people who executed their orders.

If now I consider some of the best-known modern dictators, it seems that they tended to provide rationales for what they did, namely gather up into their own hands most of the powers of the body politic.

Twentieth-century dictators like Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy or Franco in Spain, each claimed to be acting in support of their people as potential players on the world stage. Their rationales might reference biological race like Hitler, or cultural glories like Mussolini, or faith inmixed with ultra-conservative traditions like Franco.

If we were to visit a still-earlier era, there is Napoleon. He aimed to emulate Roman heroes – a visit to his home in Malmaison shows an obsession with classical motifs – but he did end feudalism where his conquests permitted – and he did that in the name of the French Revolution’s liberté and égalité.

In these cases at least, dictators provided themselves with rationales that went beyond merely personal lust for power. Ostensibly at least, they took power in the name of causes that went beyond themselves.

* * *

But now let’s imagine a would-be tyrant of a different type. Let’s suppose an ambitious person whose motivations are hard to figure out because he comes equipped with experiences gained from a succession of earlier lifetimes spent as one tyrant after another, in life after life.

What might our imaginary person have learned from his earlier experiences? Could it be that, in previous despotic lives, his hold on power was undermined by his clinging to the rationales – whatever they might have been – that he’d found useful in coming to power?

Here’s an example of such self-undermining by a tyrant’s impractical clinging to a previous ideological rationale. In the last year of the Nazi regime, resources badly needed at the battlefront continued to be diverted to carrying out the Holocaust – Hitler’s fanatical project of murdering Jewish men, women and children because they did not fit into his preferred racial categories. This was a striking case of ideology replacing strategic clear-sightedness.

Now picture our imaginary would-be tyrant who’s learned the lessons of his previous tyrannical lives. What lessons would those be? Hey, if power is what you want, keep it unmixed. Don’t dilute it by taking on extra baggage! Keep eyes on the prize! Dump the rationales!

I suppose that most people who go after power are – at least to begin with – responding to some hidden agenda, of which they themselves might be unconscious. Perhaps years ago they wanted to get back at some bully at school. Or a sibling who took the parental love they felt should have been theirs alone. I imagine that most people whose aim in life is power must at least have begun with some underlying aim for which power was merely the means.

Now back to the would-be reincarnated tyrant of our hypothesis. Up to now, we’ve supposed that most people who devoted themselves to amassing power at least began with a hidden agenda – perhaps hidden to themselves as well.

By contrast, our imaginary tyrant who has learned the lessons of his previous incarnations will want nothing but power itself. Since a type like that would be quite unusual, he will not be well understood.

If he were not well understood –

he’d be a lot harder to stop.

The Puzzle of Hannah Arendt

Posted on June 17, 2025 by Abigail

The career of Hannah Arendt is surely one of the oddest on record. Doubt has been cast on claims for which she was best known. Yet her posthumous prestige as a political theorist seems largely unaffected by any refutations of her claims.

For example, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964), she covered the trial of the single Nazi official most directly responsible for implementing the Holocaust. Her report famously concluded that Eichmann “never acted from base motives … never had any inclination to kill anybody [and] “could not have acted otherwise … .” In Arendt’s characterization, Eichmann was a mindless clerk whose chief flaw was that he never thought to question the mechanisms of the bureaucracy that employed him. The poor fellow just forgot to think!

Today, Arendt’s “banal” portrayal of Eichmann has been refuted decisively by Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, a book that came out in 2014. While Eichmann was enjoying his comfortable exile in Argentina, his Nazi comrades, former SS men, recorded his reflections and reminiscences. There Eichmann disclosed the mindset that had motivated him to implement the Holocaust.

“I have no regrets!” he said. “I balk inwardly at saying we did anything wrong. No. I have to tell you quite honestly that if … we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied, and would say good, we have destroyed an enemy … .”

Doesn’t sound banal to me.

For another example, there was Arendt’s defense of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had joined the Nazi party, become Rektor of the University of Freiburg, ousted Jewish students from his classes, and – in an outstanding case of personal betrayal – removed emeritus status from his former mentor, the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who had facilitated Heidegger’s original appointment at Freiburg.

In 1971, Arendt wrote a celebratory piece about her former professor, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” for The New York Review of Books. In it, she explained his Nazi period as a mere “escapade” or “mistake” which her former mentor had “recognized after a short time” as a lapse due to having temporarily quit “the residence of thinking.” Like Eichmann before him, apparently Heidegger too forgot to think!

Was it something like the flu, but strangely affecting cognition? Was it going round Germany in the 1940’s? Did everybody catch it?

It wasn’t the flu. For the time line of Arendt’s dark-and-light relations with Heidegger, her one-time philosophy professor and lifelong lover, see my chapter, ‘Spoiling One’s Story: the Case of Hannah Arendt” in A Good Look at Evil (2016). It’s written under my professional name, Abigail L. Rosenthal.

In the single evening I and some other women philosophers spent with her, I did not find Arendt discerning or accurate with regard to the real-life, present situations, having moral implications, that came up for discussion during our time with her.

With one exception, that concerned her own fate and situation. “How,” I asked her, “did you realize in time that getting out of reach of the Nazi regime was urgent and would be a matter of life and death?”

She replied that she’d read the Nazi materials, whatever there was to read at that time, and knew that theirs was an element different from the norm of German political reflection. She was educated enough to know what the norm looked like and that this was abnormal.

So it seems that,

when it came to her own life or death

evil was not banal.

Find A Good Look at Evil here.

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What I Learned When I Almost Died

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Abigail

A funny thing happened when Jerry and I were about to give talks to a group at the Princeton School of Theology. On our way to another building, where the meeting was to be held, I stepped forward on what appeared to be the surface of a veranda continuous with the indoor floor. Unfortunately what I believed to be continuous was actually an unmarked step, discontinuous with the concrete veranda below it. Utterly unprepared and landing hard, I knew I’d broken something.

What was broken turned out to be a hip, fortunately mended by a surgeon at the Princeton facility to which an ambulance quickly drove me. After a few days for recovery from the surgery, they moved me to a fine Rehab facility closer to home. Some days later, I was released and allowed to return home. So far, all seemed to be in place and my recovery set to continue safely on course.

But that wasn’t actually what happened. Rather, each institution, which had its own must-take medications and must-not-take prohibitions, failed to communicate properly with the next institution, and all failed to coordinate the remaining instructions that were to be followed by me once I was back home.

In consequence, my body was flooded by remedies some of which should have been discontinued, while at the same time suffering the absence of other remedies that should have begun.

My vital numbers went into free fall. Death would certainly have followed had the ambulance crew not quickly applied their life-saving remedies.

So it was with that history – near death by mistake – that I spent some days in one wing of Intensive Care at our local hospital. What iatrogenic conditions had to be treated there are matters that we need not review here. Suffice it to say that I’m back home now, and lucky to be back in the Land of the Living.

The story is unusual, at least I hope it is, but there is an even stranger story running alongside it.

I am happier now than I was before all this happened!

How on earth can that be? Do I have any explanation? Well, here is what I come up with, putting together recent clues that I’ve uncovered.

Yesterday, I was looking for the draft of an essay that I’d been sketching prior to the successive hospitalizations of May. Having no clear recollection of where I’d put it, I was thumbing through my recent journals, thinking I might have penned the draft in one of them.

A byproduct of that search was the view it gave me of my state of mind prior to the injuries and treatments of May. I saw how I’d been thinking in March and April, before all this happened. Much to my surprise, my journal pages record a state of mind filled with anxieties and minor discontents. Puzzled, I tried to see or figure out why those journal entries disclosed such a discontented tone. A tone quite foreign to the one I would strike at present.

Here’s my explanation, as near as I can reconstruct it. Let’s go back about 25 years, to the time when I first fell in love with Jerry. To me that experience was like breaking through an opaque skylight to the blue sky far far above it. A sky much higher than any I’d been prepared to experience.

How did I handle that experience? After I’d plumbed it enough to see that it was quite real, my present conjecture is that I must have pulled the lower curtain-of-sky back over it, to conceal it. Why would I have done that? I must have feared that such a degree of openness would also have left me vulnerable to attacks or other negative experiences of unpredictable kinds. As a result, I may have also closed myself off, at least in some degree, to the clear joy I felt when I first fell in love with Jerry.

I must have done all this unconsciously – especially since it sounds like a real dumb move to have made. But the unconscious is not necessarily the sharpest of one’s mental faculties.

Anyway, the fracture plus near-death encounter had to be suffered without cover-ups or evasions of any kind. The combined experiences were too dangerous for evasions.

As a result, and it’s the last thing I would have expected, they gave me –

no hiding place from joy.

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Book Matters

Posted on June 3, 2025 by Abigail

Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard

“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Daniel Deronda

George Eliot (1876)

This is an English novel from the days before Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx substituted their own reductionist theories for the day-to-day reality from which real-life stories arise for most of us. It’s likely that the highly abstract worldviews traceable to these four dominant cultural figures have affected novels in such a way as to render them less interesting and less instructive. Instead of illustrating our lives, since the twentieth century, novels have tended to illustrate simplistic modern theories about what it is to be a human being. They’ve made us seem duller than we really are.

Daniel Deronda is a novel containing two stories with parallel plotlines. In the first, Gwendolen Harleth, a young English beauty whom many young men of her privileged class would have wanted to marry, suddenly finds her family fortune gone. Unwise investments now threaten Gwendolen, her widowed mother and step sisters with poverty and devasting loss of status.

Faced with a choice between that fate and marrying Henleigh Grandcourt — a wealthy, high-status suitor in whom she finds magnetic personal force but a buried past that includes an unmarried woman by whom he’s already had several children — Gwendolen chooses to marry her way out of her own social and economic downfall. Another, less selfish consideration: Grandcourt can provide for her mother and step-sisters.

In view of the available alternatives, it seems a wholly understandable decision on Gwendolen’s part. (In those far-off days, single women didn’t get jobs in publishing, social work, corporate life or whatever.). The trouble with the option she chose is that Grandcourt, her new husband, turns out to be a monster. A man of hidden, deliberate cruelty and insatiable appetite for achieving complete control and domination over his wife. And in those days, husbands had almost unlimited legal and social power. In real-life terms, Gwendolen has become defenseless.

The second plotline concerns Daniel Deronda. The title character is a handsome, thoughtful, generous-hearted young man who happens to be perched uneasily on the edge of an advantageous stratum of English society. But Deronda’s situation includes one clear disadvantage. He’s been brought up by a kindly, well-born Englishman who is not his father. He’s never been told who his real parents are or were. What is more, he senses an odd prohibition on his asking.

As the novel unfolds, Deronda is out rowing one evening and by chance comes upon a lovely young woman in the throes of attempting to drown herself. He saves her and takes Mira to a good family who can provide shelter and emotional sustenance while she sorts out her life. The desperate act was her attempt to prevent an unscrupulous father from in effect selling his daughter as mistress to a well-heeled man of the world.

Mira turns out to be Jewish which, in the England of those days, was deemed socially contemptible.

Thus the drama is set up. What will happen to Gwendolen? What will the fate of Mira be? And what is the real story behind Daniel Deronda?

The paperback edition that I have bears the date 1979 and includes an introduction by the then well-known cultural commentator Irving Howe.

From Howe’s introduction, I learn that fashionable critics from George Eliot’s day to Howe’s all agreed that the Gwendolen part of the story was a novelistic success while the Mira-Deronda plotline failed.

In my own judgment, Howe’s fashionable critics were dead wrong. Both story lines are wonderfully well done. It’s my view that Daniel Deronda is a masterpiece. It repays slow and careful reading.

Every sentence in the novel is an education.

Now if all these well-regarded critics had merely held that the two plotlines don’t blend together harmoniously, theirs would count as a credible criticism. I wouldn’t agree, but we could have an interesting back-and-forth over that objection.

But if they all regret that George Eliot didn’t drop the Jewish part, to me that suggests another … uh … concern. Perhaps best not to look at that one too closely!

***

In fact, “the Jewish part” had a political destiny rare among novels. Daniel Deronda was translated into many languages. The book was read all over the world. Leaders of the Zionist movement read it within the year of its publication. They included Theodore Herzl, convener of the first Zionist congress, and Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, modernizer of Hebrew as a contemporary language.

In the words of British historian Paul Johnson, Daniel Deronda was “the most influential novel of the nineteenth century.”

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged book matters, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda | 2 Comments

The Ring of Gyges

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Abigail

There is a story that Plato tells in The Republic, his dialogue on political justice. Here’s how it goes.

It starts with a man named Gyges. Everyone considered him to be a normal fellow. There was nothing odd about him. One day, as it happened, Gyges found a ring that, when he wore it, rendered him invisible. Gyges wasted none of the time opened up by this opportunity. By day he was our good old unassuming Gyges. By night however, or whenever he put on the ring, he could and would steal, rape and murder at will!

The story of Gyges enables Socrates (standing in for Plato) to pose the question:

Is the just man happier?

And would he be happier even if there were no social advantages to be gained by acting justly? Would he be happier even if only social disadvantages followed from acting justly?

It’s a psychological, political and philosophical question. It goes to the truth about us. What are we? Are we like Gyges, only good when people are looking? Or is there some more uplifting truth about you and me?

Well, let me share some of my own recent experiences as a relatively helpless patient with a hip fracture. My experiences might furnish relevant evidence.

As my previous column, “Fracture,” made clear, not everything turned out sweetness and light. Take for example the day I was scheduled to be discharged from Rehab and released to go home. The people who normally attended me were not supervised on that day, nor were they going to be evaluated. So far as that institution was concerned, my assigned helpers were on their own.

The supervising nurse looked in once pro forma but did nothing supervisory. The nurse (or nurse’s assistant) who was left alone with me told me that – since I was now sufficiently recovered to go home – I should stand at the bathroom sink and get myself just as cleaned as I wished.

Now I could no more stand at the sink and do that safely than I could walk on the ceiling. If I’d had the stupidity to try, I’d most likely have tumbled to the tiled floor and got another fracture. But clearly the nurse did not think I would try. She was just hoping to discourage me from taking any more of her valuable time.

When, nevertheless, I insisted on her taking me to the bathroom sink, she did provide a wheelchair. But unprecedentedly, zero supervision or presence. Nor, when I had got myself washed, rinsed and dried, did she return within a reasonable time to wheel me back to my room. The call button was back in my room, so I had no effective way to summon her. Finally I started shouting, at which point she did return.

Likewise, the previously courteous people who attended me to Jerry’s car were, on that last day, barely civil.

Nobody was watching. So the question, posed by the Ring of Gyges legend, is still, what is the truth about human nature? Are we really like Gyges, when we believe that nobody can see us?

Possibly, but on the other hand, there may be another way of posing that question. The other day, Jerry was telling me about a book by Sandra D. Mitchell titled, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism. She’s a philosopher of biology whose own specialty is social insects. Ants, it seems, have extremely complex role assignments within their nest. Their intricate social structure enables the colony as a whole simultaneously to meet quite distinct functional obligations.

Higher up the evolutionary ladder, primates and human infants show empathy and demands for fairness that don’t have to be taught. This is so at least among human babies confined together and aware of each other.

So it might be that people who behave selfishly or unkindly when they think nobody can see them are not so much showing humanity’s true colors as showing something else:

We are essentially social animals –

most truly ourselves

when we know that we are seen.

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Fracture

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Abigail

Into each life some fractures must come. And they’re not all metaphorical.

Mine came like this. It was Friday May 2nd. Jerry and I were due to speak at a Theology Without Walls group. We were standing in the foyer of an old Administrative building on the picturesque grounds of the Princeton School of Theology. It being time to get over to the building where we were to give our papers, I stepped out the front door to what appeared to be a veranda continuous with the indoor floor level but was in fact an unmarked step with no banister about five inches above the concrete veranda below.

Crash.

I knew when I hit the concrete that this was gonna be trouble. The ambulance took me to a fine Princeton hospital. Within a day or two the providentially gifted surgeon had replaced a broken whatever in the hip joint with a titanium one. There were a few days of on-site recovery in the post-operative phase. Then a long ride to a Rehab facility not too far from where we live. Since I’ve been pronounced a star patient (everybody has to be good at something) I was out of there after a little more than a week and home for the long slog back to full functioning.

Now for the high points, for good and evil. Mostly the care at the Rehab facility was kind, caring and competent. One exception stood out. I take eye drops for a condition clearly unconnected to my hip fracture. The drops were part of the stuff Jerry had brought me from home. One kind has to be taken morning and evening; the other kind in the evening only. The drops are taken to ward off an unlikely but irreversible condition: blindness.

The evening after my admission to the Rehab, I rang for the nurse to bring the eye drops. And rang. And rang. Suddenly (and up to that point exceptionally) my inner voice kicked in. Call it what you will, that inner prompt, but for me it’s generally authoritative. What it said was: get in fighting mode. You’re gonna have to fight. She doesn’t want to bring the drops and doesn’t care about the possible consequences to you.

Oh, I thought. Okay. Forget about your Miss Nice Guy appearances. Hang in and fight for the eye drops you need. They aren’t optional.

When Nurse Cruella finally came in, she was just as my inner guidance had anticipated. First, she accused me of inconsistency in having failed to ask for the drops directly after emerging from surgery. Then she accused me of inconsistency in not having asked for the twice-a-day drops earlier, that is, in the morning, as well as now, in the evening.

I rejoined that you don’t have your wits about you when emerging from surgery and only after an interval can you recall other medical needs unrelated to the fracture.

Since meanness is contagious – especially if it appears to carry authority – her nurse’s aid now piped up to say that I had wanted these drops hourly!

“That’s not true,” I said promptly. “That’s a lie.”

I did report the incident when I finally met with the official whose business it was to hear such things and Nurse Cruella was taken off my case.

Sometimes in life you have to fight for yourself and it’s a blessing if – at least – you can.

One other incident, of quite the opposite kind, stands out in my mind. By the last evening at the Rehab, one of my two kinds of eye drops had run out. The staff would be required to go through all kinds of rigmarole before its replacement could be authorized. I knew that blindness was a remote possibility, absent the drops, but the thought of it was certainly disquieting.

At that point, a nurse came in with another announcement. The Monday after my Friday discharge tomorrow from the Rehab, I’d be expected at the surgery in Princeton to have a piece of attached equipment removed and be evaluated by the surgeon. Immediately, I wrote down the relevant information (time and address) in my notebook at hand. Then I thought to write it in another place as well, on a note I could store in my purse.

The nurse got my purse down from the closet and brought it over to my bed. I opened the purse and put the additional copy of the needed information inside. Then I noticed it.

An unopened bottle of the very eye drops that had just run out. Had I not thought to safeguard the surgeon’s address and time of appointment with a second copy for my purse, I would never have found it in time!

It’s hard to convey in words what this wordless event meant to me. For the agnostic, of course, it would have gone down as a lucky coincidence. But for me it had the staggering effect of a miracle. Not the kind that requires suspension of any known laws of nature.

Just a startling sense of

the Providential surround.

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Encore Marie Antoinette

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Abigail

Marie Antoinette at age 12 by Martin van Meytens, circa 1767-1768 and Sketch of Marie Antoinette on the way to the Guillotine, Jacques-Louis David, October 16, 1793

This week, Abbie revisits the unforgettable story of Marie Antoinette. First shared in an earlier column, Encore Marie Antoinette reflects on what made the Queen of France so captivating—and so condemned. Was she a symbol, a scapegoat, or simply herself?

***

Encore Marie Antoinette

Last night, I read to its sad finale Stefan Zweig’s can’t-be-more-definitive biography of Marie Antoinette, the unluckiest Queen of France. She got a passing mention in “My Inner French Girl,” not a very respectful notice, but now she haunts me with the feeling I did not do justice to her story.

I said that she loved life’s pleasures, knew the art of pleasing, and went far toward putting the budget of France in the red. I neglected to add that 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 Absolute Freedom and Terror, action, alienation, art, autonomy, chivalry, class, courtship, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, ethics, evil, faith, fashion, femininity, freedom, friendship, gender balance, guilt and innocence, history, history of ideas, identity, ideology, institutional power, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, masculinity, memoir, motherhood, nineteenth-century, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, political, political movements, power, psychology, relationships, roles, seduction, sexuality, social conventions, spirituality, suffering, the problematic of woman, war, Zeitgeist | Tagged "Affair of the Necklace", "Liberty at the Barricades", biography, captive, chivalry, Count Axel von Fersen, couples, crowned heads of Europe, Dauphin, deficits, Delacroix, escape, French Revolution, grifter, guillotine, hero, impotence, Louis XVI, love affair, luck, Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, misogyny, mob, monarchy, pleasure, prison, public opinion, queen, Queen of France, Rococo, royalty, scandal, sexual dysfunction, Stefan Zweig, symbol, teamwork, The Night of Varennes, tumbril, voyeurism, world historical figure | Leave a comment

The Owl of Minerva Takes Flight

Posted on May 6, 2025 by Abigail

This week, Abbie brings back a reader favorite. First shared in an earlier column, The Owl of Minerva Takes Flight explores what it means to understand history only in hindsight, and what we might see when we try.

***

“The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.” So wrote G. W. F. Hegel, the nineteenth century’s major philosopher of history. By that he meant that any given phase of history can be understood only in retrospect – after it’s over. Minerva was of course the goddess of wisdom and the owl her particularly wise old bird.

Since even Hegel, who claimed to understand history, disclaimed any such power with regard to future – or even present – events, I should certainly not try to discover the secret springs of our current historical phase.

I shouldn’t try, but I can’t help it. I’m curious. Besides, I do think that each of us is living out the story of her own life, and must inevitably be tempted to attach the defining concerns of that personal story to comparable large ones that extend into the story of humanity at the present hour.

So – with some allowances made for how easily I can be mistaken – how does the Big Picture look to me now? Let’s climb aboard the owl and fly around long enough to see the lay of the land.

The owl looks for wisdom, wherever it’s likely to be found. So, shouldn’t we first look at the natural sciences with their present puzzlements? From my bird’s eye view, I’ve been lately getting the impression that previous assumptions, about life happening on our earth as the result of chance combinations of chemicals, can no longer be sustained by those who know how numerous and intricate are the combinations in a single cell – beyond what chance alone could explain.

It now appears that the production of life – of self-replicating creatures that subsequently follow a Darwinian course of natural selection – couldn’t be an accident. Also that the same improbability confronts the biochemists with the later appearance of consciousness. And still later, at the human level, there’s inherent purposiveness which operates in a manner inexplicable just in terms of the principles at work at lower levels of complexity. It’s beginning to look as if nature might be purposive through and through.

Back in high school, we were taught that teleology (the view that purposes inhere in nature itself) had been discredited. Turns out, that’s unlikely to be true. Teleology might be the next big thing! Which would give philosophy, and perhaps theology, some new work to do.

Moving further along the sky lanes, the owl is now trying to get a sense for the present range of human purposes. The aerial view is quite puzzling to the owl. It sees the grey haze of skepticism settling over the humanistic disciplines and diversions of Western Europe as well as the English-speaking world.

Unlike ancient skepticism, the contemporary kind is not just doubt about whether we can know anything with certainty. It gets into deeper levels, raising doubts about whether there are such things as inbuilt desires, for example erotic desires, that derive from our biological natures. So, just as teleology – the view that every species is shot through with natural purposes – is starting to look inescapable in biochemistry and allied fields, natural purposes have fallen quite out of favor in the humanities.

The owl scratches its feathered head.

Let me help the owl. If you wanted to control a human being – without going to the trouble of isolating your target for ceaseless denunciation and coerced confessions – then the thing to do would be to put your victim out of touch with his or her natural desires. Subject a person’s desires to continuous and arbitrarily elastic redefinition – reinforced by the threat of social and professional ostracism – and voila! you can control your targeted person without physical coercion. It’s a means of gaining power at least as effective as the now-outmoded styles of brainwashing described in Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, and later reported in Robert Lifton’s actual account of mind control as practiced on captured American prisoners during the Korean War – and it’s so much cheaper!

Flying further, beyond democracies corroded by erotic manipulation and real tyrannies no longer able to credit their own ideological rationales – and what now do we see happening on our green earth down below?

Some years ago, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book titled The End of History. In it, he argued that no system of political thought remains credible – all others having by now discredited themselves – except for liberal democracy. In that sense, Fukuyama held, we have all entered the unsurpassable, world-historical era of liberal democracy!

Are there any signs that Fukuyama may have been right?

There is Ukraine.

There is a nation where a genuine historical eros animates a whole people to perceive and prefer liberal democratic values. We also see that seemingly skeptical nations, where those values were once harbored and thought through, are suddenly acting as if jerked awake and rousing themselves to support that people’s fight.

In such moments, there is nothing of skepticism.

Only a coming home

to self-recognition.

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Encore Marie Antoinette

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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