Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Christ From Birth to Ascension)

"But our very Life came down to earth and bore our death, and slew it with the very abundance of his own life. And, thundering, he called us to return to him into that secret place from which he came forth to us—coming first into the virginal womb, where the human creature, our mortal flesh, was joined to him that it might not be forever mortal—and came ‘as a bridegroom coming out his chamber, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race.’ For he did not delay, but ran through the world, crying out by words, deeds, death, life, descent, ascension—crying aloud to us to return to him.  And he departed from our sight that we might return to our hearts and find him there. For he left us, and behold, he is here.  He could not be with us long, yet he did not leave us.” —St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Confessions of St. Augustine (401 AD), translated by Albert C. Outler (1955)

The image accompanying this post, The Ascension, was created in 1801 by the British-American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820).

Quote of the Day (Richard Carlson, on Why You Should ‘Listen With a Quieter Mind’)

“When you listen with a quieter mind to your loved ones, coworkers, educators, or anyone else with whom it's crucial that you really hear what's being said, both you and the person you're listening to will sense a world of difference.”— American author, psychotherapist, and motivational speaker Richard Carlson (1961-2006), Easier Than You Think...Because Life Doesn't Have to be So Hard (2005)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Affairs of Dobie Gillis,’ Showing How English Usage Has Changed in Academe)

[In the first class of his English course, freshman Dobie Gillis has said “Everyone has their,” only to be reprimanded by his professor that it should be “Everybody has his.”]

Dobie Gillis [played by Bobby Van, pictured with Debbie Reynolds]: “Gee, I don't know, sir. I think the way the people use a language is the right way and if the rule says no, then the rule ought to be changed.”

Professor Amos Pomfritt [played by Hans Conried]: “In the 25 years that I have devoted to this underpaid profession of teaching, I have heard many an asinine outburst but never one so asinine as yours. I can only assume that your recent passage through puberty has affected your mind, for you, sir, are a presumptuous driveler, a cretinous barbarian, a thick-tongued oaf, an ill-bred churl, and in the future, you will be good enough to keep your mindless opinions to yourself!”— The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), screenplay by Max Shulman, directed by Don Weis

Seven decades ago, when this musical was released, audiences would have looked at the accompanying picture of Bobby Van with Debbie Reynolds and smiled indulgently. No wonder poor Dobie couldn’t keep his mind on grammar! 

Professor Pomfritt was being hard indeed with that line about how “puberty has affected your mind.” A little remedial English—perhaps with an instructor whose looks wouldn’t distract Dobie—would be just what the young man needed to learn these rules.

Back in the Seventies, a debate opened up about the point of contention between Dobie and his prof. Edwin Newman, with his bestseller Strictly Speaking, could be counted on to take Pomfritt’s part, though there were others like linguist Geoffrey Nunberg who disagreed vehemently.

Nowadays, in many, many corners of academe—and a growing segment of the business world—it’s Professor Pomfritt and other grammar purists who would be in trouble. The prof could, in fact, trigger complaints by students who prefer gender-neutral pronouns.

The resulting academic board of inquiry might then charge him with being “an ill-bred churl” for showing insensitivity.

This is one of many examples of how films from the past might strike contemporary audiences in ways that its creators could never have remotely imagined.

If the movie is good enough—or, in the case of The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, a harmless waste of a couple of hours—a viewer will just chuckle, without needing a “trigger warning” from the well-meaning.

Quote of the Day (Roxane Gay, on the Trouble With Complaining)

“Complaining allows us to acknowledge the imperfect without having to take action—it lets us luxuriate in inertia. We all have grand ideas about what life would be like if only we had this, or did that, or lived there. Perhaps complaining helps bridge the vast yawn between these fantasy selves and reality.” — American fiction writer, essayist, editor, and social commentator Roxane Gay, “Why I Stopped Whining,” Reader’s Digest, May 2015

The image accompanying this post of Roxane Gay was taken Oct. 22, 2015, by Eva Blue in Montreal, Canada during an interview by Rachel Zellars.

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Swift, With Advice for an Aspiring Poet)

“Consult yourself; and if you find
    A powerful Impulse urge your mind,
     Impartial judge within your Breast
     What Subject you can manage best;
     Whether your Genius most inclines
     To satire, praise, or hum’rous Lines,
     To Elegies in mournful Tone,
     Or Prologue sent from Hand unknown.
     Then, rising with Aurora's Light,
     The Muse invok’d, sit down to write;
     Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
     Enlarge, diminish, interline;
     Be mindful, when Invention fails,
     To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.”—Anglo-Irish minister and satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “On Poetry: A Rapsody,” in Restoration and Augustan Poets: Milton to Goldsmith, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (1965)

Quote of the Day (Celeste Ng, on Fiction and Grace)

“Fiction makes you aware of complications. I'm interested in the times that things go wrong, but I'm also interested in trying to make some kind of meaning from that. Fiction should show you more dimensions. When you start to connect with other people, that's when that kind of humility that allows you to have grace comes in. Grace is something that you do after you've tripped: You're catching yourself and taking something that could have been a negative or a wrongdoing or a shortcoming and moving past it. Grace is about how you handle things when you are wrong or when you have done wrong. It's admitting that everyone, including you, is fallible.”—Author Celeste Ng quoted in “Soapbox—The Columnists; WSJ Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic; This Month: Grace,” WSJ. Magazine, December 2019/January 2020

The image accompanying this post, showing Celeste Ng at the 2018 National Book Festival, was taken Sept. 1, 2018, by Avery Jensen.

This Day in Confederate History (Judah Benjamin, Sole Jewish Member of Davis Cabinet, Dies)

May 6, 1884— Judah Benjamin, who served close friend Jefferson Davis in three different Cabinet positions in the short-lived Confederacy, died at age 72 years old in Paris, thousands of miles and two decades removed from the slaveocracy in which he made his fortune and to which he devoted his considerable bureaucratic talents.

Few figures of the Civil War are as little known and mysterious as Benjamin. Much of that owed to his anomalous position as a Jew in a region of the country that was not merely Christian, but even overwhelmingly Protestant. 

But some of the obscurity that clings to his name derives from his actions rather than his character.

Like Aaron Burr, another enormously able politician and lawyer often perceived as traitorous, Benjamin put precious little to paper, even confessing that he had “never kept a diary or retained a copy of a letter written by me,” all aimed at frustrating attempts to ferret out the truth of his life by subsequent biographers.

In this effort he was only partly successful. While leaving little in his own hand, he couldn’t stop other people from writing about him.

And, as someone who served successively as the South’s Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, he couldn’t evade their judgments—more often than not, negative.

“Judah Benjamin was the most politically powerful, and arguably the most important, American Jew of the nineteenth century,” wrote biographer James Traub last year. “He was also the most widely hated one, not only in the North but in portions of the South. Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention.”

Had Benjamin done anything other than commit himself to the “peculiar institution,” he would have long since been acclaimed a great American success story. A native of British-owned St. Croix, he emigrated with his family first to North Carolina, then Charleston, SC.

At age 14, his brilliance shone so brightly that one of the city’s leading Jewish merchants offered to pay his tuition to Yale.

Even a dismissal from the university on mysterious grounds only slowed his progress rather than stopping it, for he simply relocated to New Orleans, where he transformed himself into an attorney with a thriving practice—and, courtesy of an advantageous marriage to the Catholic Natalie St. Martin, the owner of more than 100 slaves.

In 1852, Benjamin became the first Jew not to have converted to Christianity to win election to the U.S. Senate. Only a year later, he turned down another distinction—nomination as the first Jew to the Supreme Court—probably because the high court hadn't achieved the status it came to enjoy in the 20th century.

On the other hand, serving in the Davis Cabinet was an important but thankless job:

*As Attorney General, he soon discovered he didn’t have courts to speak off:

*Later, when Davis transferred him to the War Department, he had to laugh off taunts that he was the “clerk” of his strong-willed President, only to incur the wrath of the populace when, despite his flair for paperwork, armies in the field were missing vital supplies;

*Finally, after Benjamin accepted responsibility for a problem that really his, a grateful Davis moved him over to the State Department. Here, his exploitation of cotton’s commercial value in attempting to win diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France was “a luminous failure,” according to historian Frank Vandiver’s Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (1970).

In Richmond as in New Orleans, the short, plump, but witty Secretary of State cut quite a figure on the social circuit, leading to a late-20th century description of him as "the Confederate Henry Kissinger." 

Mrs. Harrison Burton recalled in a 1911 memoir that Benjamin brought to the home of a Richmond hostess “his charming stories, his dramatic recitations of scraps of verse, and clever comments on men, women, and books.”

All to little or no avail. Benjamin not only remained what Vandiver called “the most disliked man in Richmond,” but one who, despite considerable administrative skill and his failure to practice the faith into which he was born, elicited the latent anti-Semitism of much of the populace.

Most, if not all, of the criticism that came his way was unfair. As I noted in this prior post, the War Department may have been the most unstable of all the positions in Davis' rickety Cabinet, buckling under the Confederate President's touchiness and micromanagement, not to mention its disadvantages in materials and organizing a new government from scratch.

In the waning days of the war, Benjamin was nothing if not grimly realistic, advocating manumission in exchange for any slaves who joined the Confederate Army.

Then, as Ulysses Grant broke through the defenses surrounding Richmond in early April 1865, Benjamin refused to entertain the pipe dream that the government could somehow slip out of the city and reconstitute itself further west, where surrender was not yet an actuality.

In the war’s final days, Benjamin made one of the most daring escapes of any of the Confederates, resorting to one disguise after another—and even surviving more than one shipwreck—to make his way first to Florida, then to Great Britain, to which his birth in St. Croix entitled him to citizenship.

Benjamin had much more to fear from capture than his Cabinet counterparts: according to a June 2023 article in The Tablet by Jay Solomon and Jane Singer, his creation of a spy ring starting in the North and stretching into Canada led Union investigators to tie him to the assassination plot that killed Abraham Lincoln and nearly did the same to Secretary of State William Seward, an adversary dating back to their days in the Senate.

The U.S. extradition effort was no more successful than Benjamin’s wartime campaign for “Cotton Diplomacy.” His legal skills now allowed him to flourish in Britain, where he lived out much of the remainder of his life, building a prosperous practice, even reputation for brilliance, to rival what he achieved in New Orleans.

Though the former Southern politician entertained Davis on the few times his old boss came to England, Benjamin otherwise never looked back on his old life and never returned to the United States.

Unfortunately, success at the bar seems not to have brought happiness to the domestic sphere for Benjamin. 

Though he destroyed most of the documentation about his life, enough remained to show that he subsidized separate quarters in Paris for his wife, who had long provoked gossip with her spendthrift ways and extramarital affairs.

In one of the most heated Senate debates in the late 1850s, Benjamin dismissed an abolitionist’s jibe that, as the descendant of a people who had suffered at the hands of the Pharoah, he was being hypocritical in defending slavery—that he was, in effect, “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.”

Posterity has not shrugged off that charge so easily, complicating any attempt to come to grips with why this most brilliant of attorneys could be so blind to the foremost human rights question of his time.

(For a fascinating comparison of Benjamin with a Jewish appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court who served for years, see this August 2019 blog post from The Times of Israel by Tzemach Yehudah Richter.)