How fragility honors the dead

I’m currently reading and almost finished with Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker. One of the main characters, Blackburn Gant, is a disfigured polio survivor and the titular caretaker of a church graveyard in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn, owing to his occupation, his outsider status in the town, and the events of the novel, has a mind consumed with death, regret, and his quiet duty to render proper respect to the dead in his little patch of ground.

Late in the novel, as the plot builds toward a climactic confrontation, Blackburn walks into town and has this small moment:

“As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.”

A beautiful and evocative passage. Sarah has told me that daffodils, which might surprise you in scattered clusters or even great bright patches in the middle of the woods as you drive through the rural South, often mark the sites of old homeplaces. Ever since she pointed that out I’ve noticed them everywhere, vanished homesteads, without even the usual stone marker of a lonely chimney, and I’ve often felt something of what Blackburn feels here.

At least in the South, businesses that cut tombstones describe themselves as selling monuments. One wonders just how much of our purposeful effort to remember or be remembered—no matter how monumental—will survive while the small, accidental, fragile things with which we’ve marked a loss or even just the passing of time will outlast both them and us.

Great-Uncle Harry

The church at Linton, where Harry Palin’s father served as vicar; ANZAC Cove at Gallipoli; soldiers going over the top at the Somme

This week was another week spent sick, with a sick wife and two sick kids, which was a challenge but also meant a bit more time to read than has been the case lately. Among the most pleasurable books I finished—one of the most enjoyable and moving reads in quite a while—was Great-Uncle Harry, a recently published biography by Monty Python’s Michael Palin.

The Harry of the title is Harry Palin, whom Michael Palin never knew as anything more than a younger son of the family who was lost in the First World War, decades before he was born. An older aunt gave Palin papers and memorabilia many years ago, but it wasn’t until touring the Somme battlefields and noting Harry’s name on a memorial wall that he felt the need to learn more about Harry. This book, after years of travel, consulting the archives of English public schools, tea importers, colonial newspapers, and the British army as well as Harry’s own war diaries, is the remarkable result.

Harry was the youngest child of a bookish English country vicar and his Irish-American wife, and Michael is able, through his thorough exploration of the existing records, to piece together a picture of an amiable but directionless young man. Harry quit school and worked two abortive jobs on tea plantations in India before decamping for New Zealand, where he was working as a farmhand when war broke out in 1914. He joined up in a New Zealand unit and deployed to Egypt before fighting in the sweltering, claustrophobic campaign at Gallipoli and, finally, fatally, at the Somme in France. There he fell in September 1916, the last man killed in a small attack on a crossroads. The location of his death is quiet ploughland today. He has no grave.

That Michael Palin was able to construct even this thorough a picture of an ordinary, undistinguished, and relatively unsuccessful young man more than a century after his death is surprising. Palin draws not only on the archival records I mentioned above—including lackluster performance reviews from the tea planters he worked for—but on broader research into Harry’s context, including the memoirs, both published unpublished, of other men in Harry’s unit, like the experienced sergeant who saw and reported him killed. He was even able to track down descendants of the girl to whom Harry proposed, unsuccessfully, before his final deployment to France.

Even more strikingly, Palin consulted with Peter Jackson, whose documentary They Shall Not Grow Old is one of the finest tributes to the men of this generation. Jackson consulted his extensive and well-catalogued collection of New Zealand First World War photos to find several from Gallipoli that very likely show Harry in action. These appear in the book’s photo inserts, remarkable candids of the young man described, often at the great distance imposed by the kind of records available to Palin, in the book itself.

This level of care and research marks Great-Uncle Harry as a labor of love, and the sense of duty Palin owes to Harry is evident throughout. So too is Palin’s charity and generosity to Harry’s generation, one easily and frequently scoffed at and more and more often impugned, but presented here on its own terms and with great understanding. This is a work not only of recovered memory but of profound pietas.

But Great-Uncle Harry is not only one man’s story. Palin also provides a portrait of Harry’s entire family, paying special attention to Harry’s parents and their unusual love story, as well as Harry’s older and seemingly more respectable siblings, as well as his nieces and nephews—including Michael’s father. If there is any flaw in this well-researched, briskly and engagingly written book, it is that Harry’s parents take up too great a proportion of the story in a book about Harry. But this is a minor criticism, and by the time Harry arrives as one last, late child of this most Victorian couple, one has a clear, strong feeling for his family and the world they live in. And, as we already know Harry’s fate, a note of poignancy enters with him.

That note runs through the remainder of Palin’s book, deepening with each chapter. The result is a uniquely intimate and moving look at a man whose memory time and fate and the sheer numbers slaughtered in the war should have annihilated, but which has been rescued by a generation he never lived to know. “Harry and I,” Palin reflects in his conclusion, “are not so far apart.”

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.

JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Cormac McCarthy, RIP

Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. No one else has captured McCarthy’s blend of the old and modern like the Coen brothers.

I was genuinely grieved to learn of the death of Cormac McCarthy yesterday afternoon. No other writer has accomplished something quite like his body of work, and no other writer’s work has meant quite what his has meant to me.

I discovered him in the summer between my last two years of college. I have a standing rule that I will check out any unfamiliar book or author I hear about more than twice within a certain short amount of time. With McCarthy, I ran across references to his novel Blood Meridian in three places within the same week. I picked it up at the Barnes & Noble in town and that was that.

Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s magnum opus. It is also the worst place to start with his work. It is rich, dense, sprawling, arcane, operatic, a deliberate fusion of old fashioned curlicued prose and modern muscularity and bluntness. The chapters have strange headings summarizing the content and McCarthy does not use quotation marks. And of course there is the much-remarked upon brutality. But because of the allusions that had convinced me to pick Blood Meridian up, that was the one thing I was prepared for. 

I was flummoxed. I knew something great was going on but I struggled to wrap my mind around it. I thought the lack of quotation marks was a risible affectation. And I only barely followed the story. I think I gave it three stars on Amazon.

But it stayed with me. I kept thinking about it. And I bought more of McCarthy’s novels. 

I read through everything except Suttree by the time I graduated, and I reread several of them over the coming years. At last, I reread Blood Meridian last year, and while I want to say that I found it a completely different book, it was I who had changed. Age and maturity and years and years of reading McCarthy and reflecting back on Blood Meridian through his other work and—to throw it into relief—the work of less skilled imitators had prepared me for the novel. I had grown into it. It amazed me all over again.

Blood Meridian was the beginning of a long challenge to my way of writing. It was a bold early demonstration to me of the power of the precisely-chosen verb, of how to use a wide-ranging but carefully controlled vocabulary to create texture (or music, if you prefer), of the necessity of deep research presented as an organic part of the story, seamlessly and without ostentation. 

And the lack of quotation marks that annoyed me so much at first caused me to reconsider even more. McCarthy, I realized, had set himself an artistic limitation by refusing punctuation conveniences. He did not use quotation marks—or semicolons or, unless absolutely necessary, commas—the same way a sonnet writer does not use a fifteenth line. It was a self-imposed boundary that strengthened and liberated his style. It meant, as McCarthy has said himself, that there was less to get in the way. It allows the language to tell the story. Pure words.

From this I learned to avoid leaning on typography to communicate meaning. And so while I have not gone nearly as far as McCarthy in this regard, in my fiction I don't italicize words for emphasis or to establish the rhythm of a person's speech or use elaborate punctuation or typesetting. In a scenario like that of his penultimate novel, The Road—which as a student of the early medieval period I don’t have a hard time imagining—how much of your typographical shenanigans will survive transmission? McCarthy wrote to last. I hope to, too.

So much for style. What Blood Meridian and McCarthy’s work also taught me was to confront the harshness and evil of reality head on. Because of the violence and darkness of his work—most especially Blood Meridian, with its scalphunters and Comanches and hangings and the inscrutable, unstoppable Satanic figure of the Judge—people call him a nihilist. He wasn’t. What McCarthy had was a deeply moral sense of the utter fallenness of the world and an unwillingness to look away.

There is a time and place for the opposite approach, but we need our McCarthys, too, in all their bleakness. Witness this passage from a 1992 interview that I’ve seen circulating since yesterday:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Uplifting? No. But it’s true. All the charge of nihilism means is “McCarthy did not reassure me.” Good. Those “afflicted with this notion,” which is most of us nowadays, need to be unsettled. McCarthy, a master of this kind of prophetic unsettling, showed us how.

Cormac McCarthy, novelist, prophet, and personal hero, RIP.

Tell them...

I think about mortality a lot—possibly too much. This is the elegiac streak that has caused everything from the Iliad and Beowulf to True Grit and The Inheritors to resonate so strongly with me. And one particular aspect of death that I often reflect on is last words, whether famous or not.

Wikipedia has a marvelous collection of last words—hundreds and hundreds of examples. As with all things Wikipedia, especially bulk lists of information, you should certainly check the source of each quotation before you plow ahead with it, but simply reading through them one after another is a powerful opportunity for reflection.

Death catches people at unpredictable times, and a person’s last words have a way of freezing each speaker’s final moment in all its particularity and, often, peculiarity. Tellingly, Wikipedia’s list includes a subheading for “Ironic last words” like the example par excellence of General John Sedgwick. Warned of Confederate sharpshooters during the fighting at Spotsylvania Courthouse, he said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” He was shot in the head moments later.

But I’m particularly interested in the last words of people who knew what was coming, that their time was short. What is that like? I often wonder. The knowledge of their approaching death seems to have sharpened their speech. It is poignant in an almost literal sense. These words fall into several varieties.

A certain kind of poncey literary type seems to go out with a sniffy quip. Thus Lytton Strachey, author of the dishonest and low-minded Eminent Victorians: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” Or, in perhaps the most famous example, the last words of Oscar Wilde. Others offer proto-Oprah pablum, as in the case of William James: “These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Pure treacle. There are others who greet death with defiance, especially among those who were executed, like Breaker Morant (“Shoot straight, you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it.”), or who plead for mercy, or who scorn their killers.

But two other kinds of last words strike me especially deeply. The first are those who, in their final moments, were more concerned for others than themselves. Among these are New Zealand mountaineer Rob Hall, on the phone with his pregnant wife as he froze to death on Mount Everest: “I love you. Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Or Abigail Adams, to her distraught husband: “Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long.” There are many more examples among soldiers killed in battle like Marine Captain Lloyd Williams, who is most famous for coining the phrase “Retreat, hell!” but, upon being gassed at Belleau Wood, told a corpsman, “Don’t bother with me. Take care of my good men.”

These lay dying and tried to tell those around them it would be all right or to look after someone else. I can only pray to have the courage and clarity and simple goodness to emulate them when my time comes.

The other kind, which often overlaps with the above, are those who use their final moments to send messages—asking someone to tell others something for them. I started paying close attention to this when I noticed a lot of such last words among men killed in the Civil War.

Some of these can seem petty, or at least spiteful. When Union officer George Dashell Bayard succumbed to a mortal wound from a ricocheting cannonball at Fredericksburg in December 1862, he took his final moments to say this: “Tell McClellan that my last regret as a military man is that I did not die serving under him.” That’s General George McClellan, former commander of the Army of the Potomac, whom Lincoln had replaced with General Ambrose Burnside a few months prior. Bayard’s last words were a dig at Burnside. You did this to me. I don’t know what to make of that.

Confederates seem especially concerned with sending a final message. At Gettysburg, Mississippian General William Barksdale was severely wounded leading in an attack on the second day. I’ve seen a few slightly different versions of his final words, but here they are as reported in Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion: “Tell my wife I fought like a man and will die like one.”

Even John Wilkes Booth, a noncombatant, felt something of the same instinct. While his two final words, “Useless, useless,” spoken as he stared at his paralyzed hands, are well-remembered, just before this he told a nearby soldier, “Tell Mother I died for my country.” What might have been moving in a uniformed man on the battlefield feels laughably self-serving in this context—the classic egotism of the assassin. Maybe that’s why the clearer, sharper final words are more famous. They’re more honest.

Perhaps the two most famous Confederate generals, both in delirium on their deathbeds in 1863 and 1870, asked others to tell someone something. Stonewall Jackson, dying of pneumonia, was issuing orders. Just before saying his famous last words, he trailed off with, “Order AP Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks…” And General Lee, seven years later, half a decade after the war, also had AP Hill on his mind just before his most famous final words: “Tell Hill he must come up!”

Colonel Isaac Avery’s dying note

But the two that really get me are lesser-known, ordinary men—a junior officer and a common soldier. Another fatality at Gettysburg, Colonel Isaac Avery of North Carolina, was struck in the neck on July 3 and apparently bled to death. Before he died, he scribbled the following note lefthanded: “Major, Tell my father I died with my face to the enemy.” The note is in the North Carolina state archives.

And then there’s Richard Rowland Kirkland of South Carolina, still remembered as “the Angel of Marye’s Heights.” At Fredericksburg, Sergeant Rowland had voluntarily gathered canteens and taken them over the wall into no-man’s-land to give water to the wounded and dying Yankees scattered all over the open fields below the heights. Less than a year later, at Chickamauga in north Georgia, the situation was reversed, and the recently promoted Lieutenant Rowland was shot leading an attack uphill against dug-in Union infantry. Before he died, he told his men to save themselves and concluded with one request: “Tell my father I died right.”

You feel the weight and meaning of these words instinctively, on the gut level, and yet it is hard to articulate what makes them so powerful.

There are the factors one can describe sociologically—honor, courage, chivalrous masculinity, and all the other things modern scholars write so scornfully about but that meant so much to that generation. There are also what we rather weakly call “human factors”: Thinking of family in one’s final moments, the parallel concern to give them some consolation that their death was a good death, that their memory—all that will be left of them—can be cherished unsullied.

But I think the crucial factor is distance. These men realize they are dying and think of family, and I imagine they have never felt farther away. It’s the particularity of their deaths—the when and where—frozen in their words. Tell them… may be the most terrible and beautiful and revealing phrase in the war.

Johnson's rhino

One of my longtime favorite writers, historian and journalist Paul Johnson, died earlier this month aged 94.

I discovered his work in grad school when I read his notorious volume of character studies, Intellectuals, a searing takedown of destructive know-it-alls from Rousseau onward. My appreciation deepened not long before I got married and began teaching with A History of the American People, a massive narrative account of the origins, founding, and ups and downs of the United States written explicitly as an answer to the mendacious Howard Zinn. These two books demonstrate Johnson’s foremost gifts—polemic and grand narrative, the one with sharp elbows and cutting voice and the other with wide, eager eyes trained on far horizons.

In the first years of my marriage and teaching I enjoyed Johnson’s late-career venture into short biographies of great historical figures: Jesus, Napoleon, Churchill, Darwin, Socrates, Washington, Mozart. I have especially fond memories of Eisenhower: A Life, a little book I smuggled into the warehouse area of the sporting goods store where I worked to read furtively during the rare downtime of the retail Christmas season. My wife and I were expecting our first child and I was supplementing my adjunct paychecks from two colleges and a once-a-week tutoring gig. Stealing away to be with Ike for a page here, two pages there, and in Johnson’s brisk and elegant prose, was a great encouragement amidst the cold, the customers, and all the uncertainties of that time.

But I noticed after I finished Eisenhower that no more Johnson books were forthcoming. I looked off and on for years, checking in on Johnson via Google and hoping always for a newly announced title. I regretfully concluded that he was in decline. His death a few weeks ago makes my memories of those books all the more special.

Of the obits and appreciations published after Johnson’s death one stood out to me: a shambling, unstructured, and therefore endearing reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger. Amidst the anecdotes and interesting tidbits (at Oxford, Johnson studied under AJP Taylor) Nordlinger included a mention of Johnson’s “Rhino Principle,” which Johnson explicated in a 2006 essay for Forbes. Here’s the principle:

Now, the rhino is not a particularly subtle or clever animal. It’s the last of the antediluvian quadrupeds to carry a great weight of body armor. And by all the rules of progressive design and the process of natural selection the rhino ought to have been eliminated. But it hasn't been. Why not? Because the rhino is single-minded. When it perceives an object, it makes a decision—to charge. And it puts everything it’s got into that charge. When the charge is over, the object is either flattened or has gone a long way into cover, whereupon the rhino instantly resumes browsing.

Few people think of learning from a rhino. But I have. And when I hear of an author who cannot finish or get started on a book, I send him (or her) a rhino card. I paint a watercolor of a rhinoceros on the front of a postcard—something I do well, as I’ve practiced it a great many times. And in the space next to the address I write: “Stop fussing about that book. Just charge it. Keep on charging it until it is finished. That’s what the rhino does. Put this card over your desk and remember the Rhino Principle.”

And the crucial point:

Now, the Rhino Principle may not produce the perfect book, but it does produce a book. And once a book is drafted, it can be improved, polished and made satisfactory. But if the Rhino Principle is ignored, there is no book at all.

Like Johnson’s Ike in the chilly shipping area of the Academy Sports warehouse, this was precisely the encouragement and inspiration I needed right now, and I’m grateful to Johnson for it.

To the ranks of the great proverbial possessives out there—Buridan’s ass, Morton’s fork, Hobson’s choice, Chesterton’s fence—let us add Johnson’s rhino.

Paul Johnson, journalist, critic, commentator, controversialist, and guide to the epic sweep of the past, RIP.

EIIR, RIP

We talk quite glibly of “making history” these days. To describe someone as “making history” now is so banal it is beneath cliché. So when a moment of actual, immediate, discernible historical significance comes along we are without words. Or should be.

Queen Elizabeth II is a great loss. While I have never loved someone I don’t actually know, I admired the Queen and deeply respected the qualities everyone rightly comments upon: the dutifulness, the grace, the unstinting work ethic. That she carried on for so long only made these qualities more remarkable. As I noted on Instagram, her entry in the Penguin Monarchs series is perhaps the most appropriately titled volume: Elizabeth II: The Steadfast.

I cannot add much of substance to the outpouring of commemoration and grief of the last week, but since one of goals with this blog is to treat it as a commonplace book, I’ve collected the best things I’ve seen or read to preserve here. Fragments shored against ruin; for myself, at least.

Not only was her seventy years a record in the British monarchy and a monument to continuity, her reign bridged a much greater sweep of history than is immediately obvious. Several factoids that circulated in the days following her death make this point especially well:

• She was the last serving head of state who had served in the military during World War II.

• When she succeeded her father George VI, the Queen’s first Prime Minister was Winston Churchill, then serving his second term as PM. Two days before she died she met with Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister. Truss was born in 1975, Churchill in 1874.

• Her seventy-year reign accounts for 30% of the entire existence of the United States.

For yet more perspective, the President of the United States upon her succession was Harry Truman, who wrote the following to her upon learning of the death of her father:

The tragedy of this dispensation is made even more poignant by the fact that you were far from home when so worthy a life came to its peaceful close.

We pray that the God of all comfort will sustain you and keep you and that the King of Kings, under whose ruling hand all nations live, will give you fortitude and courage, strength and wisdom to fulfill the responsibilities thrust upon you as you assume your place in the long line of British sovereigns.

You can read the rest here. I’d say Truman’s prayer was answered.

On a lighter note, watch this short reminiscence from Richard Griffin, one of the Queen’s former bodyguards, of meeting some hikers in the Highlands near Balmoral. This is probably my favorite story about her.

Following the announcement of her death, this passage from one of CS Lewis’s letters made the rounds and captures something beautiful and stirring from the beginning of her reign seventy years ago. Writing of Elizabeth’s coronation ceremonies to a friend in Washington, DC (correspondence collected as Letters to an American Lady), Lewis said:

You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it)—awe—pity—pathos—mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.” Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour.

Exactly right, and the point of “the sacramental side.” As Lewis writes elsewhere, it is right to be not a little awed by it: “The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite.”

Relatedly, Lewis has an answer to those people who have decided that now is the time to sound off with their deeply considered and highly original objections to monarchy and tradition, in a line I’ve quoted here before:

[A] man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, of film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

De te fabula narratur.

Relatedly, read Capel Lofft, a name familiar to anyone who listens to The Rest is History, on the Queen’s old-fashioned virtues in the face of modern emotional incontinence and exhibitionism; Sebastian Milbank, who quotes part of that CS Lewis passage above, on what the Queen and the monarchy preserve; Carl Trueman on the Queen’s devout faith; and Theodore Dalrymple on the deeper lesson of the grief people feel at the passing of so worthy and virtuous a person.

All of those are good pieces, but the one that inspired this commonplace miscellany was this succinct post from Alan Jacobs, who summarizes much of what I feel and would say about the life and example of Elizabeth II, though in far fewer words than I would be capable of:

The late Queen Elizabeth II played the hand she was dealt about as well as it could possibly have been played, and this required her to exercise virtues that few of our public figures today even know exist: dutifulness; reliability; silence; dignity; fidelity; devotion to God, family, and nation. We shall not look upon her like again; her death marks the end of a certain world. Its excellences, as well as its shortcomings, are worthy of our remembrance.

Hear hear.

And, finally, to give the Queen herself the last word, consider this passage from her 1957 Christmas message, the first ever to be televised:

That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.

But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.

At this critical moment in our history we will certainly lose the trust and respect of the world if we just abandon those fundamental principles which guided the men and women who built the greatness of this country and Commonwealth.

Today we need a special kind of courage, not the kind needed in battle but a kind which makes us stand up for everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.

It has always been easy to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult.

You can watch the whole thing here.

Queen Elizabeth II, champion of duty, goodness, and faith in a changing world bent on discarding such vestiges of the past, RIP.

On historical imagination

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt

As the summer semester wrapped up I came across this piece by James Hankins at Law & Liberty, a critique of American Birthright, a set of proposed standards and reforms for social studies education put together by the conservative-leaning Civics Alliance. Though sympathetic to the proposal’s good intentions and goals, Hankins finds that American Birthright is “not . . . beyond criticism.”

Let me note that this is, as far as I can recall, the first I have heard of the Civics Alliance and this project, so I can’t comment on that. But Hankins made some interesting and more broadly applicable points regarding the teaching of history in the modern academic environment.

First, on a neglected question—what is history for?

As an intellectual historian of the premodern world, what struck me the most, as I read through statement after earnest statement on the aims of social studies pedagogy, was the almost complete lack of interest today in what was always the chief rationale for writing and reading history from the time of Herodotus until the blessed advent of the Educational Testing Service in 1947. State departments of education, the National Council for Social Studies, and even the Civics Alliance speak of acquiring reading and writing skills; learning how interpretation is based on sources; learning how to summarize, analyze, and criticize historical accounts; how to gather evidence and evaluate it; how to assess historians’ arguments; how to ask questions, form hypotheses, and test them. All of these are immensely valuable skills, to be sure, but they sidestep the traditional goal of history in the premodern world: acquiring the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom—Aristotle’s phronesis. It’s worth asking why this is the case. After all, practical wisdom is the virtue we most need if our civic life is ever to be restored.

The disadvantage is that prudential judgements cannot be machine graded. This poses, first, a practical problem in that standardized testing is the great bronze image before which education bows down today—ignore it at your peril—and, second, a philosophical and ethical one in that teaching to an exam that tests only unambiguous right-wrong answers undermines the very purpose, “the traditional goal . . . in the premodern world,” of learning about the past: “the best [test] questions, to be ‘objective,’ have to be stripped of implicit moral judgements, contingencies, or imponderables—the very stuff of phronesis.”

Hankins offers a concrete example that couldn’t have been better calculated to get my attention:

Hence the Civics Alliance wants your child to know what year Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania, who won at Gettysburg, and what Lincoln said after the battle. You can test for that. Progressive pedagogy will want your child to evaluate five different interpretations of why Lee invaded Pennsylvania and identify their ideological motivations. You can test for that too, though it’s easier to insert ideological messaging into the questions (for progressives, a feature, not a bug). A teacher concerned with phronesis, by contrast, will put you in command of the Army of Northern Virginia in the summer of 1863 and ask you whether, without benefit of hindsight, you would have invaded Pennsylvania and why. But your answer won’t be right or wrong; it will be wise or foolish. It can’t be machine-graded. It won’t produce metrics the Department of Education or ambitious parents can use to evaluate your teachers and your school. A wise answer won’t help you get into Harvard.

What Hankins reveals here is the place of imagination in historical study—imagining what it was like. This is “the inside of history,” as Chesterton put it, in a phrase that might as well be one of the mottos of this blog.

Imagination is severely underrated as a component of historical study—largely owing to the discipline’s scientific pretensions since at least the late 19th century—but that imagination should have a role should be clear, since history began as a literary exercise, was written almost exclusively as narrative, and, among Greek and Roman historians, written with a literal audience in mind. (The big difference between your textbook and ancient historians, I tell my students, is that ancient historians read their work to a live audience and were thus obliged to be interesting.) The fathers of history wrote so that their audience could put themselves in the shoes of the people they wrote about.

Hankins’s insistence on phronesis and wisdom is also crucial, as these virtues are impossible without imagination. A certain kind of killjoy uses “imagination” (perhaps overactive, vivid, or simply big) as a putdown, but we all intuitively recognize imagination’s practical, prudential value when we criticize someone as “unimaginative.” We recognize this not merely as a lack of appreciation for movies or fiction, but as a moral weakness.

To put my point in negative form, unimaginative people can be many things, but they are never wise.

But I’m finally putting these thoughts into some kind of coherent form because of David McCullough. McCullough died Sunday aged 89, a great loss to readers and lovers of history. I haven’t read nearly as many of his books as I’d like, but I have, God willing, years to fix that, and I regret that we’ll have no more from him.

So it was with great interest that I read a blog post by Samuel James entitled “What David McCullough can teach us,” which several of y’all sent my way this week. Let me commend the whole post to you. It’s excellent. But I want to highlight one paragraph that will tie my ramblings together, and that helped me think through yet more concretely some of what Hankins set in motion.

James contrasts McCullough’s work with the modish Jesus and John Wayne, purportedly an historical exposé of the role toxic masculinity has played in the rise of evangelicalism (I’m old enough to remember when the real culprit was The Corporations), and the exvangelical crowd’s biggest hit in the last couple of years. In this book, James writes, its author “wanted me to see the subjects of her history the way she sees them, not as how they saw themselves. How they interpreted their lives and beliefs was of little consequence. How the generations after them interpreted them was everything. This is the kind of history that gets people angry and eager to deconstruct whatever they sense is tainted by moral failure.”

McCullough, on the other hand,

doesn’t do this. McCullough clearly has positive feelings about John Adams, George Washington, Harry Truman, etc. But these are not hagiographies. One of the most memorable parts of John Adams is the way that McCullough fleshes out Adams’s penchant for vanity and insecurity. This shows up throughout Adams’ life and in his presidency, including, crucially, the ill-chosen Alien and Sedition Acts (that all but dismantled his friendship with Thomas Jefferson). McCullough is up front and lucid about how Adams’ personal flaws came out in his relationships and his policy. But McCullough is also extremely careful about letting Adams, and especially Abigail, live these flaws out themselves. We come away feeling as if we know about Adams’ vanity the way we know about the vanity of a close friend or even a spouse: that particular way we process the failings and flaws of people we nonetheless believe in. To reach this point with a subject of a biography is not just a wonderful reading experience. It’s an exercise that strengthens a Christian’s moral imagination.

I can’t put it better than that.

David McCullough, writer and historian, a model for the engagement of the heart and the strengthening of the imagination in a discipline of the mind, RIP.

Jon Daker, RIP

I learned yesterday that a genuine internet legend died this week, aged 82. His name was Jon Daker.

Jon Daker was the accidental star of one of the first real viral videos, a two-minute public access TV segment in which he sang in a recital organized by an elderly piano teacher at his church. I discovered this video in college, in the days before YouTube, embedded with other segments from the same broadcast on an already ancient website that I believe is now defunct. There were probably about fifteen or twenty minutes total preserved from that recital, including some standup comedy, choral numbers, and other soloists, and while many of these were funny or awkward, Daker’s was far and away the funniest of them all—one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

It’s an accidental comedy masterpiece, growing continuously funnier from start to finish. Daker awkwardly introduces himself, he misses his first cue and rushes to catch up, he visibly forgets the lyrics to his second number, he tries to recover with a little gesture and movement at the mic only to end up humming his way to the final lines of the song, and all the while Mrs Unsicker, the piano teacher, sits playing away at her upright piano like a machine. Daker’s portion of the show is only a minute and a half long, but he wraps those ninety seconds up with an iron-jawed stoicism and an obvious sense of relief.

I’ve watched this clip every so often for close to twenty years, and it never, ever stops being funny.

But why? Part of it is the obvious—it’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, he forgets the words, he clearly doesn’t know what to do with his face. His utterly rigid body language screams his keen, moment by moment awareness of how badly it’s going, and that with the pianist pounding through his two songs like an automaton heedless of his calamity there is no stopping. Then there are subtler things—the perfect comedy timing of his name, misspelled, popping up onscreen after his introduction and in perfect time with Mrs Unsicker’s first chord; or the truly daft pairing of Charles Wesley with Dean Martin. The more you watch it the more you see.

But for me, the laughter—and I laugh till I cry—is also a laugh of recognition. It’s sympathetic, even affectionate. I see in Daker’s ninety seconds of gawping, humming, halting Sprechgesang my own worst case scenario for public performance. I flop sweat for him as he nears the end of his set. It’s the laughter you share with your buddy who completely blew his lines in the Christmas cantata, grateful it wasn’t you but glad you can laugh him through the embarrassment. Because in that situation Daker is me, right down to the eyebrows.

That is, he would be me—if I had the guts and humility to volunteer for a solo on television, accompanied by a lady from my church.

Which brings me to this piece by Jonathan Aigner, which I ran across—in keeping with the spirit of Jon Daker—completely by accident this morning, thus learning that Daker had died. Aigner’s tribute to Daker is a genuinely sweet and surprising piece, not least because of the details it offers about the real man behind the viral video. But this passage in particular struck me:

You see, in a world plagued by sin and evil, in which churches increasingly have no room for church musicians without commercial appeal, Jon Daker represents hope, joy, and faith. Here is a regular guy who has managed to lift the spirits of millions thanks to his love of singing and a willingness to crash and burn with dignity.

In my classes I have often lamented to my students that for all the pop music on the radio and store PA systems, we actually live in a less musical world than our ancestors, who had songs for everything and celebrated, mourned, worshiped, mocked, marched into battle, or simply began their daily chores by bursting into song. Think of the last time you heard someone singing in public for no apparent reason, I tell them, and consider how odd you almost certainly found it. That was the norm even within living memory. Now, unless one has the polish of a professional (and digitally assisted) singer, you’ll be hooted into silence.

But there’s a deeper point here, and an explicitly religious one. Aigner links to an earlier post of his in praise of church choirs, in which he invoked Daker with both obvious affection and in service of a great point:

There’s no way John would make it onto any praise team anywhere. He’s not cool enough, young enough, or stylish enough, and his tendency toward performance anxiety doesn’t help, either. But, you know what? John obviously loves to sing, and I’m guessing his service in the Chancel Choir at First United Methodist Church is diligent and earnest. We already know he can match pitch (and sing in diverse styles), and having sought out the services of Mrs. Reva Cooper Unsicker, he must be quite teachable. For those qualities, he would be more than welcome in most church choirs. He could sing in my choir any day, although I probably wouldn’t let him do “Amora” too, okay?

Seriously, there seems to be a trend in contemporary worship culture that says unless you look a certain way, dress a certain way, have the right personality, fit into the targeted age bracket, or meet some other predetermined “coolness” factor, you cannot lead in corporate worship. This is wrong. Worship leadership should resemble the radical diversity of Christ’s Kingdom, and a choir facilitates this quite well.

And that, in its turn, brought to mind CS Lewis and Uncle Screwtape. In Letter 2 of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s elder devil mentors his nephew, a tempter in training, with reflections on how to distract his “patient,” the human man subject to temptation, with the embarrassing reality of church:

When he [the patient] goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

The one-word name for this temptation, of course, is pride. To which I have to say, Mea culpa—I’ve been guilty of precisely what Screwtape describes here. But this beautiful imperfection, this “radical diversity” that Aigner describes, is the real and joyous face of the church, and I’m willing to bet, based on the way Jon Daker put himself out there, willingly entering into a situation I certainly never would for the sake of the people he knew best, that pride did not enter into his character much. He’s a man we do well not to laugh at, but with.

The world needs more Jon Dakers, and not just because of the laughs. As Aigner fittingly concludes in his piece, “may his memory outlast the internet.” RIP.

Watch the original—first uploaded to YouTube in the summer of 2006!—here or embedded above. For an extra layer of comedy, here’s a version with very literal subtitles. Be sure to read all of Aigner’s memorial post for Daker at Patheos here, and take a moment to read Daker’s obituary in the Peoria Journal Star here.

Norm Macdonald on subversion, suffering, and art

Comedian Norm Macdonald died of cancer earlier this week aged 61. Yesterday I came across this long, wide-ranging, and surprisingly poignant interview with him by a writer at Vulture in 2018. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a couple insightful moments on matters I care a lot about.

Art and subversion

From a discussion of Bob Dylan, who began to “say things” with his music rather than simply sing love songs, Macdonald and the interviewer move into a discussion of satire, parody, and political messaging in comedy:

Macdonald: Comedy has a specific thing about it. I don’t really like satire. I think it’s very minor; I think parody is very major comedy. Like, Nabokov to me is the highest form of parody. But that stupid Jonathan Swift thing that everybody talks about—I read that. It sucked.

Vulture: Gulliver’s Travels?

Macdonald: Yeah, it’s horrible. So I don’t like satire that much, and also these guys [contemporary talk-show hosts] are nightclub comics. They’re not Bob Dylan. They’re just guys, and they get talk shows and suddenly they’re telling me how I shouldn’t be sad because of the Manchester bombing and I can escape the horrors of life because they’re going to interview someone from Two Broke Girls or whatever the fuck they do. When I was a kid, if I’d heard Red Skelton talking about the government I would’ve thought, This is fucking weird. To me, it hurts the comedy any time anything real creeps into it. I know people have different thoughts. I keep hearing how great Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and Mort Sahl are. People have their own taste, but to me, all three of those people are just shit. They’re not comedians in my mind.

There’s a digression about a particular stand-up comic—including Macdonald, true to form, making a phone call in the middle of the interview—before they return to the idea of artists trying to get a message out:

Vulture: I guess my larger question is if you think this shift in the kind of attention paid to comedy, and the work that’s held up as a result, is a bad turn for comedy as a whole or if you just think this is not for me?

Macdonald: It’s hard for me to say . . . but anybody that tells me that stand-up is no good—I take that personally because I’m a stand-up. But I understand these people are trying to be heard and, you know, I was guilty of having that stupid idea that Drew Michael already did. I probably wouldn’t have done it anyway.

Vulture: Why not?

“Because stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first.”

— Norm Macdonald

Macdonald: Because stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it—the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion. If you get to 30 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 70 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd.

Vulture: And you see the kind of subversion we’re talking about as a form of intellectual grandstanding?

Macdonald: Certainly. And for stand-up, a lot of it is bragging.

Too much art today tries to subvert its own form without first mastering it, and thereby earning the right to poke at the form. You could say such an artist is sawing off the branch he’s sitting on, but that cliché assumes there’s already a tree there. These artists are sawing off limbs that were never growing from trees. Per Macdonald, a great deal of this trend is down to political messaging and intellectual pretension.

(The classic example of subversion done right is Picasso, who could actually paint but made conscious artistic decisions to depart from more realistic representational traditions. Also: Monty Python, who as a group knew the Arthurian legend backwards and forwards when they set out to spoof it.)

Art and self-revelation

I mentioned that the interview is poignant, because Macdonald mentions cancer as the kind of suffering that self-consciously self-revelatory, soul-baring comedians and performers think makes them authentic. “They seem to think they’re singular in their story when their story is the most common story that could possibly be, which is suffering and pain.” Simply feeling pain and talking about it is not art, Macdonald suggests. Art requires more.

Questioned on this by the interviewer, who notes Macdonald’s admiration for Canadian writer Alice Munro, Macdonald replies: “But Alice Munro doesn’t wallow in self-pity.” An important difference. “Munro finds beauty in what she writes, and that’s what every artist does because life sucks, you know?”

And then the other passage of Macdonald’s comments that I really appreciated:

“I guess there came a time . . . when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art.”

— Norm Macdonald

I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art. And I still believe that, because comedy is a vulgar art; it’s an art that’s just beginning to take form because it’s so young. But I can look at other art forms and see how postmodernism has destroyed them, and now threatens to destroy stand-up. It’s the height of narcissism to write meta-comedy, because people aren’t interested in comedy. They’re interested in going home after shoveling shit all day and then seeing some fool perform. That’s not to say that comedy can’t make a greater point, because it can. But it can’t make a greater point by screeching to a stop in the middle of the comedy show, making a point, and then going back to the jokes. You’ve got to craft the point into the joke. I always bristle when people say, “The comedian is the modern-day philosopher.” There are modern-day philosophers.

And, again, Macdonald is making these comments while suffering from cancer.

That’s a real authenticity that places Macdonald in the company of Chadwick Boseman, whose untimely death from colon cancer last year came as a shock. For Macdonald and Boseman, their personal suffering—much less their political views—wasn’t the stuff of art, and they wanted what they presented to their public to be the best they could make it. An admirable and selfless devotion to craft.

Deathbed confessions

I’ll conclude with the excerpt—little more than a quip—that brought the interview to my attention yesterday when Alan Jacobs shared it on his blog:

Vulture: I can imagine being on my deathbed and thinking, Why did I waste so many meals on yogurt?

Macdonald: Absolutely. You know, I think about my deathbed a lot.

Vulture: What do you think about it?

Macdonald: I think I should never have purchased a deathbed in the first place.

Norm Macdonald, RIP.

2020 in books: Roger Scruton

The late Sir Roger Scruton interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge in 2017

Today marks the first anniversary of Sir Roger Scruton’s death. When he died, the foremost voice for a traditional conservatism rooted in virtue, a proper understanding of human nature, and love of home—in traditions and ideas rather than personalities and slogans—died with him.

His death came as a shock to me. I had received an invitation to an event to be held in his honor in 2019 but couldn’t afford to go and passed it up, thinking there would come another chance someday. Now I know there won’t. But what I did have were many of Scruton’s books—some of which I had read, many of which I just hadn’t gotten around to yet. With his passing I decided to set myself a project of reading as many of them as I could in the remainder of 2020.

It turned out to be a good year for it.

The Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour

I called my project “the Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour” both as a wry joke and as a way to draw out the goodbye. Learning of his death was an unwelcome surprise; a “farewell tour,” on the other hand—that would take a while, offering a chance for appreciation. I enjoyed it greatly, and ended the year more grateful than ever for Scruton’s life and work.

I read twelve books as part of the tour. All of them were good, but five were standouts even among the Scruton books I’ve read. I’ve given that top five its own section below. But first, here are the other seven:

Runners up

The Soul of the World—A dense but strongly and beautifully argued case against the scientific reductivism of modern atheism and a careful examination of the many hints of the transcendent that fill our lives—whether art, music, the world around us, or simply living with and knowing other people. This book builds upon his 2010 Gifford lectures, published as The Face of God, and is further refined by On Human Nature.

How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism—The longest of Scruton’s books that I’ve read, this one argues that conservation of the environment is, properly speaking, a conservative issue, and notes the irony of environmentalism’s place among the odd assortment of other modern progressive causes. He offers trenchant critiques of the dogmatism of activists and their search for universally applicable top-down solutions, as exemplified by the bungling environmental measures undertaken by the unaccountable bureaucracy of the EU. Scruton’s view of conservation and the environment, by contrast, is one rooted in what he calls oikophilia, love of home, and piety toward our inheritance. Conservation must be local and meet local needs. Long and detailed but compellingly argued. I shared a passage from this book on the blog back in the spring.

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left—A recently revised edition of his most controversial book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands works through the most important Leftist ideologues of the twentieth century, from the New Left’s roots in pre- and immediately post-War German philosophy through its flowering in first French and then American universities. Scruton is most concerned with what he, borrowing from Orwell, calls “Newspeak,” which is the leftist use of language to conjure or cast spells rather than to describe an independent reality. Dense but rewarding reading, with clear and scathingly written critiques of the ideologies that have birthed the worst of our modern mental confusions. I posted a selection of excerpts on the blog over the summer.

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy—A good short guide to major issues in modern philosophy, written in a friendly conversational style.

The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat—A short, compelling response to September 11. Scruton considers the post-Enlightenment political and social trends of the West that created a world in which non-Westerners, confronted with the rapidly spreading global challenge of secular liberal politics and culture, could find terrorism a viable response, and in which non-Westerners and the West would respond half-heartedly and with incomprehension. A considerably more nuanced assessment than most offered either in the aftermath or since.

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction—One of Scruton’s best and most accessible books, a witty and wide-ranging introduction to the concept of beauty—what it is, how to judge it (and whether we can judge it), why it matters, and what it says about us as human persons. Possibly the best starting point for reading Scruton.

Souls in the Twilight—The first of Scruton’s fiction that I’ve read, a collection of short stories about individuals struggling to find meaning in a world in which all of the old avenues to transcendence—family, community, faith—have disappeared, replaced with nihilism. Bleak but well written, this set of stories sold me on his fiction—I have his novels Notes from Underground and The Disappeared on standby now.

Top five

While I would recommend any of the books in this post, these five were my favorites—the ones I most enjoyed and that gave me the most food for thought, both as I read them and in the months since. Presented in no particular order, my five favorite Scruton books of the farewell tour:

A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism

An excellent collection of essays on a variety of topics of political importance, including marriage, evil, animal rights and vegetarianism, and the obscure bureaucratese of unaccountable government agencies. The best essay in the collection, and one especially relevant to our moment, is “The Totalitarian Temptation,” a critique of totalitarian government, an examination of its origins, and a warning against the appeal of power driven by resentment. Scruton delivered this address in 2003 but it reads like an explanation of all that has happened over the summer of 2020. You can read my more detailed Goodreads review here.

Confessions of a Heretic

Another excellent essay collection, this one ranging more broadly than mere politics. In each essay Scruton offers his “heretical” opinions on a given subject, whether art, dancing, modern architecture, conservationism, the proper role of government, Western civilization and its defense, or death. Every essay is wittily argued, gracefully written, and offers sometimes surprising insight into familiar topics. This may be the Scruton book I most enjoyed this year.

Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged

An excellent short account of Scruton’s views on culture, especially its collapse into ephemera, vulgarity, and vandalism in the modern world. This is also one of his most concise, clearly stated arguments against what he called “a culture of repudiation,” a culture we saw running in high gear through much of 2020. It’s excellent—a great starting point for Scruton’s philosophy and cultural critiques if you’re just beginning to read him. As a bonus, when Scruton summarizes he is at his wittiest and most trenchant, making this book a good deal of fun.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

This was the first book in the Farewell Tour, read before I even knew it would be the farewell tour. I finished it three days before Scruton died. It’s excellent.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition offers the reader a guide to the prehistory and origins of conservatism, from Aristotle and Cicero in the ancient world to Burke, the father of the modern movement, and traces multiple sometimes competing lines of conservative thought from Burke to the present. Along the way Scruton examines such disparate figures as Hegel and De Maistre, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville; cultural conservatives like Coleridge, TS Eliot, GK Chesterton, and CS Lewis; and Americans like John Crowe Ransom and the Southern Agrarians or William F Buckley and Russell Kirk, opposite sides of the fusionist conservative coin. Especially helpful are Scruton’s examinations of the way conservatism, as an anti-ideology, has pivoted to account for or counteract new threats, from liberalism and radicalism in Burke’s day to socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century to the Soviet Union and big government liberalism in the post-war United States. Scruton’s Conservatism is a big-tent review of centuries of thought, and makes clear the variety and richness of the tradition. (Every conservative will find at least one person profiled here that they don’t think belongs.) It’s also short and deftly written, making it an excellent introduction to a movement far richer and deeper than is often credited.

The book includes a long list of recommended reading at the back, so that if any one of the numerous thinkers outlined here piques your interest you can follow that trail deeper in. A few months after reading the book I borrowed the audiobook, read by Mark Meadows, from the library via Hoopla and listened to it on my daily walks. Excellent the second time around, too.

Conversations with Roger Scruton, with Mark Dooley

The last book I read in the Farewell Tour, and appropriately so. This book, though written several years ago based on a few days’ worth of talk with Scruton while Dooley stayed at his farm in Wiltshire, feels like a sendoff. Nevertheless the book is light and hopeful, wonderfully brisk and—as I’ve said so many times before of the other books in this post—wide-ranging. Think of this as a Roger Scruton sampler.

Conversations begins with Scruton’s life story, growing up in urban Britain with a resentful Labour Party father and discovering literature, art, and music; discovering, thanks to the student protests of 1968, which he witnessed, that he was a conservative; and following from there his forty years of academic and journalistic work in support of conservative philosophy. Scruton touches on specific books; works through the growth and development of his ideas over time; describes his repeated denunciations—both as an academic and a journalist—by Leftist colleagues and total strangers; and talks about work for underground universities behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Europe, work that got him arrested by the secret police in Czechoslovakia and honored, years later, by Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for his efforts.

There’s much, much more. I ended the book struck by the busyness and variety, the ups and downs, of his life, something he himself comments on a number of times.

Throughout Scruton is frank, humorous, understated, and self-effacing. Dooley also gives us some nice vignettes of Scruton at home on his farm with his family, giving the reader some sense of the environment which Scruton—this man to whom the oikos, the home, is so fundamentally important—has fashioned with his wife and children. When the conclusion comes, it’s hard not to want to stay.

I highly recommend Conversations with Roger Scruton. It would probably help to be somewhat familiar with Scruton’s work beforehand, but if you’re not this book could work as an excellent, friendly and accessible introduction both to his ideas and to the man himself. This intimate and personal book was, for me, a most welcome way to end the Farewell Tour.

Previously read

One reason I embarked on this Farewell Tour was because, despite my appreciation of Scruton, I felt like I had only read a fragment of what he had written. Which is not to say that what I had previously read was unsatisfactory. Far from it. I needed to make up for lost time.

Here, in no particular order, are the five books I remember reading before 2020. I would recommend any one of them:

• The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope—The first book by Scruton I read, a caution against unwarranted and uncritical optimism and an argument in favor of low expectations. Full of wry wit. Right up my alley.

• The Face of God—Scruton’s 2010 Gifford Lectures. A critique of scientific reductionism. Thoughts established here are further developed in The Soul of the World (see above).

• On Human Nature—Clarifies and further develops some ideas from The Soul of the World (see above). I read these three way out of order. One of these days I’m going to go back through chronologically.

• Modern Culture—Much of Scruton’s pithy cultural critique in Culture Counts (see above) is foreshadowed here in deeper, more detailed and specific form. An excellent examination of the fragmentation and vulgarity of modern culture.

• How to Be a Conservative—Perhaps Scruton’s most famous book, this is an excellent introduction to conservatism via chapters explaining the truth and the error in prominent modern ideologies. Linked below are a couple of interviews Scruton gave specifically about this book. They’re worth your while.

Video and audio

Scruton not only wrote every day, he appeared frequently in interviews, documentaries, and recorded lectures until not long before he died. The following is a selection of my favorites, ranging from ten-minute audio essays from BBC Radio to full length lectures with Q&A sessions.

• Why Beauty Matters—One of his greatest legacies. In a number of interviews in his last few years Scruton mentioned that this documentary was one of the projects that students, correspondents, and others mentioned most often to him, the documentary having “found a second life” online. I blogged about this wonderful one-hour film last fall. You can read that here; Why Beauty Matters is embedded in a Vimeo player in that post.

• Apprehending the Transcendent—Another video that I’ve blogged about before, Apprehending the Transcendent is the title of the moderated discussion Scruton had with psychologist Jordan Peterson at Cambridge a few years ago. A thoughtful and wide-ranging set of critiques and meditations. You can read my blog post about it here; the discussion is embedded in a YouTube player.

• BBC audio essays—A number of Scruton’s audio opinion pieces are available on YouTube. These are a goldmine. Here are a few that offer short (usually ten minutes or less), pithy introductions to some of his representative concerns, especially art and its relation to human nature and society: “The Tyranny of Pop Music,” “Art Today, Fake & Kitsch,” “On Harry Potter,” “Offensive Jokes,” “Animals,” “The Religion of Rights,” and “The Witch-hunt Culture.”

• Uncommon Knowledge: How to Be a Conservative—A good interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution on Scruton’s book. Watch the interview here.

• Christian Humanist Profiles: How to Be a Conservative—An especially good podcast interview from 2016 conducted by my friend Nathan Gilmour of the Christian Humanist Podcast. Listen here.

• On The Future of Conservatism & Debate—A friendly conversation between Scruton and Spectator editor Douglas Murray. This wide-ranging discussion is especially worthwhile because of the wry, sometimes mordant British wit both men wield so well. Watch here.

• A Thing Called Civilization—In 2019, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute selected Scruton for its Defender of Western Civilization award. Scruton recorded his gracious acceptance speech on video. As far as I know this was his last semi-public appearance—an appropriate note for his career to end on. Watch here.

There is much, much more good stuff from Scruton out there; these are just the best places to start.

Conclusion—what Scruton has to teach us

Scruton is missed. We need his insight, his careful work, and the model he offered of a thoughtful conservatism grounded in virtue and ideas more than ever. If I were to summarize what we need most of Scruton right now, it might be:

• A proper understanding of human nature—what we are and what we need as rational and transcendent beings

• Love of home—not as mere places to exist, but places where human persons are rooted and connect with each other

• An understanding that persons are not free-floating individuals but exist in community

• An understanding of tradition and organic development rather than revolution as the source of freedom

• The necessity of order and the rule of law and its derivation from the bottom up, from a place and its people

And, finally, his most frequently repeated reminder, learned as he watched student revolutionaries trash Paris in 1968, that:

• Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

There is much, much more to Scruton’s philosophy than these, but these are good starting points. It is clear, after not only the last week but the last year—or perhaps decade—that even those who claim the title of “conservative” need to start over from fundamentals.

Appropriately, Scruton died on the birthday of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism. Burke took a set of traditions, intuitions, and dispositions and gave them coherent shape as a response to ideological radicalism, revolution, and political violence. That response has survived, in one form or another, to the present, though it is now in a bad way—certainly in America. My hope is that Scruton’s legacy will prove a similar cohering influence, shaping of a new generation of real conservatism in the face of a new generation of vandals menacing our homes from all sides.

Roger Scruton, RIP.