At first, I was going to ask anyone reading this to keep in mind the struggles of the disabled community this holiday season. But that is insufficient, I believe now.
Try to keep in mind these
physically and emotionally vulnerable people constantly, this holiday season
and simply going forward. And together, let’s try to create a world where they
have a better chance of surviving—and wherever possible, thriving—for the long
haul.
Another force—God—will be the one to decide the final
scene to the movie of his life, but the Almighty is likely to be more merciful and
less fickle than Hollywood producers or even American filmgoers to daring, passionate,
complicated Francis Ford Coppola.
No matter the disappointing response to his latest, if
not last, film this fall, the sci-fic epic Megalopolis, Coppola is assured
a place in film history for, if nothing else, The Godfather Saga. His reception of Kennedy Center honors virtually certifies that.
Two speakers at yesterday’s ceremony helped to explain
the enormous risks that alternately raised his career to undreamed-of heights
and threatened to bring it asunder.
George Lucas: ““Here’s the thing: When you spend
enough time with Francis, you begin to believe that you can jump off cliffs
too.”
Al Pacino said the filmmaker was ready to break the
first rule of Hollywood: Never put your own money in your movie projects.
The image accompanying this post, of Garry Shandling
with then-girlfriend Linda Doucett, was taken Aug. 1, 1988, at that year’s Emmy
Awards, by Alan Light.
Mason’s essay appeared in the relatively early days of
American polarization, as ideologically driven cable news stations and Internet
sites were just starting to exacerbate real but still not unbridgeable
differences in the nation. Since then, more and more people are addicted to
their mobile phones and anti-social media.
Genres that require time, patience, and understanding—very
much including the novel—have been increasingly falling by the wayside in the
last quarter-century—and those “small passages of civility in our lives” that
Mason hailed are growing increasingly narrow.
(The accompanying outdoor photo of David Mason, taken
Apr. 24, 2012, was sent by the poet to Christine Mason.)
These biblical verses are the source of not one, but two prominent book titles. One phrase gave rise to one of the cornerstones of modern philosophy: Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 title, Fear and Trembling.
The other might not be as recognizable to those who have read a novel whose title echoes another verse here: Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.
Contemporary readers of this work from the mature period of American expatriate novelist will hear the character Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, explicitly likened to a dove because of her innocence, and leave it at that. (James, incidentally, left a clue to the real-life source of the character through the initials “MT”—Minny Temple, a vivacious, innocent cousin who died of tuberculosis at age 24.)
But readers in James’ own time, familiar as they were with the Bible—especially in the King James version—would have heard an echo in Psalm 55’s “wings like a dove,” and would think back to the entire passage—someone beset not just by the “terrors of death,” but also “the noise of the enemy” and “the oppression of the wicked.”
Milly, like the narrator of the psalm—though without knowing it (at least initially)—is at the mercy of conspirators: in this case, the cash-poor lovers Merton Densher and Kate Croy, who hope that, by Merton marrying the soon-to-die Milly, he will inherit her money, freeing him to wed Kate.
James’ personal religious beliefs appear to be unconventional, a byproduct of his father, Henry James Sr., who rejected orthodox Protestantism and became a follower of Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But traditional faith can leave an indelible imprint, and James—Junior, like Senior—would likely hear that phrase “wings like a dove” reverberate in the imagination in contemplating the object of the web spun by Croy and Densher.
Kate and Merton have committed the worst kind of transgression in exploiting the innocence of another human being. That violation will not go unpunished.
In the quest for material possession that justifies and finally undermines the love of Croy and Densher, the novelist might have found an equally apt literary allusion from Psalm 68: “The women at home divide the spoil, though they stay among the sheepfolds—the wings of a dove covered with silver, its pinions with green gold.”
(The image accompanying
this post comes from the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove,
with Alison Elliott as Millie, Linus Roache as Merton, and Helena Bonham Carter
as Kate.)
The attached photo of
Amor Towles was taken Aug. 9, 2018, by librairie mollat.
(The accompanying photo, showing Ebert giving an
interview at a Chicago public radio station, on the “Sound Opinions” program in
2006, comes from Flickr: Roger Ebert.)
.jpg)
The capstone of five years of growing control by
Napoleon and delicate negotiations by the papacy, the coronation was both a
half-hearted throwback to medieval papal authority and a rude foreshadowing of
the threats Rome would endure in the next two centuries at the hands of
tyrants.
The pomp and spectacle of the ceremony could not
conceal Napoleon’s literal power grab and more subtle insulted aimed at the
pontiff.
Reaction against the French Revolution’s creation of a
state religion that would have supplanted Roman Catholicism left the nation in
a position not unlike Russia after the Marxist attempt to impose a godless
society: with a new regime eager for the credibility of the surviving
institutional church.
But, unlike the Russian Orthodox Church’s complicity
in Vladimir Putin’s strategy of Christian nationalism, Pius, in his
sweet-natured but firm way, resisted.
Gallic revolutionary fever had disrupted the Papal
States enough that a Roman republic had been declared and Pope Pius VI taken as
a prisoner of France, where he died in 1799. Even after the threat receded and
something like the status quo ante resumed, the papacy was unsure how to
counter this new force in Europe.
But in Pius VII, Napoleon faced an adversary he’d
never encountered on the battlefield or in state chambers. Unlike so many of
his haughty but maladroit predecessors in Rome, this pontiff exhibited genuine
Franciscan gentleness and piety, a onetime monk accustomed to making his own
bed and mending his own cassock. He met insults and threats with equanimity
rather than fear or burning resentment.
After staging a coup d’etat on 18–19 Brumaire (the
revolutionary calendar’s equivalent of November 9–10, 1799), Bonaparte had
consolidated power by degrees. As First Consul of the republic, he named the group
who drafted the laws, as well as ministers, ambassadors, army officers and
judges; created the national bank; and reorganized the bureaucracy.
In resorting to one-man rule, use of censorship and
propaganda, and strengthening of the military, Bonaparte crafted a blueprint
for 20th-century authoritarians—a regime of ruthless efficiency and
lightning-fast moves that the ancient, creaky, rules-based Vatican continually
found difficult to counter.
Victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo
put Bonaparte in effective control of Italy. Even while celebrating military
victories abroad, the new strongman needed to quell unrest at home. Catholics
remained angry at the restrictions on the Church imposed by the revolutionary
regime, with some joining conspiracies and even assassination plots against
Bonaparte.
Not surprisingly, then, the dictator sent a signal that
he wanted a change in relations with the Holy See. “Tell the pope that I want
to make him a present of 30,000,000 Frenchmen,” he told an aide.
Whatever relief Pius VII felt over not suffering the
fate of his predecessor was short-lived, though. A Concordat concluded in September
1801 that recognized Catholicism as “the religion of the French majority” and
reopening churches proved to be far less than the Holy See had expected when it
signed the document, as Bonaparte soon issued 77 “Organic Articles” that
effectively nullified major concessions to the Church.
In 1804, after declaring himself emperor, Bonaparte
still wanted the credibility the Church could provide. His model for his
projected coronation was the ceremony for Charlemagne, who inaugurated a period
of order and learning after Pope Leo gave his blessing at a Christmas Day
ceremony in the year 800.
But, even as the emperor-in-name sought papal acquiescence
in the ceremony, Bonaparte wanted the pope—and even ordinary Frenchmen—to realize
who was in charge now. To that end, he:
*met the pope accidentally-on-purpose while out
hunting, so it would not appear to be a meeting of equals;
*gave Pius a wedding gift less substantial—and more
insolent—than it initially appeared: a jeweled tiara decorated with stones
stolen from the Vatican six years before; and,
*placed crowns on his own head and that of his wife, Josephine.
The prospective empress gave Pius his one point of minor satisfaction out of the whole affair: When she tearfully told him before the ceremony that Bonaparte had never gone through a Christian wedding ceremony, Pius said he would not go through with the coronation until this was taken care of first. The fuming dictator went through with it, with no witnesses present, the day before the coronation.
Pius' adventures with the pope were far from over. In 1808, French troops occupying Rome seized the pontiff and carried him off to the episcopal palace at Savona, where he was kept isolated from advisers. Relations remained tense between them until Bonaparte finally lost power at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
In the end, Pius did not merely outlast Bonaparte but triumphed over him. In the aftermath of the emperor's fall, when the pope offered his mother and sisters protection in the Papal States, Bonaparte had to acknowledge the goodness of the gentle man he had continually humiliated, calling him "an old man full of tolerance and light."
The pope’s conduct throughout the Napoleonic period
carried wider implications, too, according to Sir Nicholas Cheetham’s Keepers of the Keys:
“Pius' tenacious adherence to the principles of his
office, his fortitude in standing up to Napoleon and the patient humility with
which he had endured his sufferings had both enhanced his own prestige and
greatly encouraged the current Catholic revival throughout Europe.”
Pius’ strategy of passive resistance had repercussions
that extended to the end of the century, noted Eamon Duffy in his history of
the papacy, Saints and Sinners:
“In the light of the Napoleonic era…it was entirely
natural that the popes should identify the defence of the Papal States with the
free exercise of the papal ministry. On the lips of Napoleon the call for the
Pope to lay down his temporal sovereignty and to rely solely on spiritual
authority had been blatant code for the enslavement of the papacy to French
imperial ambitions. Without his temporal power, Pius VII…had come within a
whisker of signing away even his spiritual authority. If the pope did not remain
a temporal king, then it seemed he could no longer be the Church’s chief
bishop. That perception coloured the response of all the nineteenth-century
popes to the modern world.”
The image accompanying this post, The Coronation of
Napoleon, was created by French painter Jacques-Louis David from 1805 to
1807.
.jpg)
Few people have refused to say “Amen to what the world
tells you you ought to prefer” so adamantly as Robert Louis Stevenson,
who died 130 years ago today, in Samoa—half a world away from his birthplace in
Scotland.
At crucial points in his twenties, Stevenson turned
away from what “the world”—certainly his parents—wanted him to do: wear the
conventional evening dress expected of one of his class, profess the
Presbyterian faith, and pursue the family trade of engineering.
The last choice would prove most decisive, as
Stevenson struck out determinedly on life as a writer.
In adolescence, I confess, I turned away from
Stevenson. I associated him too closely with A Child’s Garden of Verses,
and adventure books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped featuring
vivid illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. All kids’ stuff, I thought.
I wasn’t’ the only one: For some decades in the 20th
century, despite the admiration of the likes of Proust, Hemingway, Borges,
Nabokov, James, and London, Stevenson’s critical reputation tumbled.
The deeper I got into middle age, however, the more I
learned to appreciate him. Like G.K. Chesterton, he wrote vividly wherever his
interests took him—not just verse or genre fiction (as good as those could be),
but also travelogues and other essays. He more than fulfilled his aim of
presenting readers with works that were “absorbing
and voluptuous.”
Sickly for most of his
life, Stevenson’s body died young. But he heeded his advice about keeping the “soul
alive,” as a glance at almost any of his works will show you. Like the portrait
created by John Singer Sargent that accompanies this post, they invite you into
a world he never ceased to find intriguing.
Another manuscript by
the prolific author, Weir of Hermiston, was left unfinished at the time of his
death. Gillian Hughes’ fascinating 2017 post on the Edinburgh University Press blog analyzes how its bowdlerized published version in the early 1890s “inevitably
altered the form and spirit of what Stevenson had been writing.”
(With temperatures dropping in the Northeast these
last few days, I experience vicarious warmth just looking at this picture I
took then.)
The volunteer-run Julia Gabriel People’s Garden
is named for an area resident who saved the garden and its adjacent apartment buildings
in the 1960s and 1970s—a victory over redevelopment by no means assured in that
era.
The image of bell hooks accompanying this post was
taken Nov. 1, 2009, by Cmongirl.
Instead, O’Hara inadvertently provided more fodder for
his detractors. In a foreword, describing his need to get down on paper all he
knew about how the people of his town lived, he concluded, “I have work to do,
and I am afraid not to do it.”
More than a few critics, however—led by those in the highly
influential New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book
Review—transposed the key words at the end to read, “not afraid to do it.”
Just the kind of braggadocio you’d expect from O’Hara,
they noted.
Predictably, that observation only increased the fury of a man who perceived slights everywhere he turned. It also reinforced why he requested that his publisher, Random House, officially release his books on Thanksgiving: Because, unlike reviewers in the more high-profile Sunday Times Book Review, he would get a respectful hearing from the paper's daily critic, Charles Poore (who thought highly enough of his work and character that he delivered the eulogy after O'Hara died in 1970).
Worse, like so much else
associated with this gifted but touchy writer, the mangled quotation originated from anything but
a close reading of O'Hara's work.
Consider, for instance, Adrian Mitchell’s dismissal of
the volume in The New York Times Book Review: “It’s not the flat,
monochrome characters but the author’s flat, monochrome vision of their world
which is so often discouraging.”
But this largely forgotten British novelist, poet, and critic missed what other authors (including E.L. Doctorow, whose left-wing politics was diametrically opposed to that of the increasingly conservative O’Hara’s) have picked up on: that, while O’Hara’s prose might be prismatic, his presentation is anything but.
With abrupt, often stunning endings, his stories
send readers scurrying back through these works, trying to pick up on the clues
they missed earlier.
It was true that O’Hara could be his own worst enemy: openly
craving the Nobel Prize, for instance, or an honorary degree from Yale
University, an institution of higher learning he’d been unable to attend
because of the financial complications following the death of his father. Asked
why the school had never awarded him that degree, the president at the time,
Kingman Brewster, responded simply, “Because he asked.”
But at his best—and the stories in The Horse Knows
the Way are consistently good—they fulfill his intention of trying to tell
the truth about his time.
Roughly speaking, his short stories occur in three
locales, the places where he had spent most of his time: New York, Hollywood,
and Gibbsville, PA (the fictional stand-in for his hometown, Pottsville). Like
much of his other Hollywood fiction, an example from The Horse Knows the Way,
“The Answer Depends,” spotlights the kind of actors who populate much of
the fare on Turner Classic Movies.
But my favorite stories from the book are set in Gibbsville, whose physical and emotional geography he knew with bone-deep understanding. These are the stories to seek out in this volume: "At the Window," "The Hardware Man," "The Victim," "The House on the Corner," "Aunt Fran," and "All Tied Up."
“For a while, at least,” O’Hara warned his loyal
readers, “this will be my last book of short stories.” It wasn’t so much that
he had descended into sloth, however, as that he decided to focus his energy on
other projects.
One, the novel The Lockwood Concern, which
appeared the following year, at least earned some critical plaudits as among
his better entries in the long form in the last part of his life.
The other activity, a syndicated column for Newsday,
lasted only a year, and did nothing but swell his reputation for bumptiousness
and bellyaching about his lack of respect.
Fortunately, he returned to the short story genre in
1966 with Waiting for Winter, whose title strongly hinted at his
increasing concern for aging and mortality.
The Horse Knows the Way appeared midway through a decade of flabbergasting productivity in the short-story form for O'Hara: from 1960 to 1968, seven collections of 137 tales, bringing his career total to more than 400.
Other writers (like my favorite, F. Scott Fitzgerald) impress with their shimmering style, but they never took the measure of so many people from so many walks of life as O'Hara. These late stories, like his earlier ones, rely heavily on dialogue.
But, because O'Hara feared that younger readers would be more likely to miss the resonances of his tales set decades earlier, they are often more ruminating, even melancholy, as in this passage from "The Answer Depends":
"I don't try to follow the plot lines of Ned Revere's films. In a few minutes after one of his pictures has begun to roll, I am in a daze of recollection, of remembering Ned as a gay companion: irresponsible, Quixotic, romantic, attractive to men as well as to women, and with no illusions then as to his stature as an artist."
Surveying where life has left them, the narrator, a retired actor named "Bobby," concludes: "I don't know who is better off: me, at my TV, with memories as fresh as the news in the morning paper, or Ned, scornful of those pleasant and profitable days, and with the lingering bitter taste of that one success on Broadway."
Understandably, considering that “the Moor of Venice”
is the only black character in all of William Shakespeare’s 38 plays,
current dramaturgy tries to examine how the playwright speaks to the racism of
our time. It has, as part of that process, thrown into question the common
practice of actors donning blackface for the role.
But the tragedy should also be subjected to literary
excavation to determine how the play was written, performed, and viewed in its
own time—an era of danger and secrets.
Shakespeare had learned his lesson well while crafting plays under the watchful eye of James’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I: searingly depict the society and psyches of courts swirling with intrigue, but set the action far away, lest listeners find the plots and characters striking too close to home.
(And Renaissance Venice was much farther away in time if not
distance from England than we can ever imagine today: storms in the English
Channel were known to delay passage to France for as much as two weeks.)
Clare Asquith’s 2005 study, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, with its
contention that the playwright was a secret Catholic when the faith was banned
in England, has hardly been universally accepted by Bardologists. But she draws
some interesting parallels between Othello and James, including that both
leaders:
*survived narrow escapes;
*professed that their wives offered life-saving love;
*came to their new status as foreigners (James had
been James VI of Scotland before assuming the English throne, while Othello,
“the Moor of Venice,” would have been understood by audiences of the time as
being from modern North Africa);
*celebrated Venice’s preservation from Moslem invaders
(James, in his poetry; Othello, in battle).
For all the coding and deflection that Shakespeare,
like other literary figures of the time, resorted to throughout his work, he
was also sending “an urgent message” to James in this new play: “Royal
authority must not fall into the hands of base men like Angelo [the Me-Too-like
abuser of Measure for Measure] and Iago; it must be exercised responsibly.”
Starting in 1600, Shakespeare wrote what are often
considered his four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and
Othello. Of these, the last is the most tightly constructed in character
(three main ones: Othello, Desdemona, and Iona) and time.
The time element may be the most important, as Iago,
with an energy to match his cunning, sets in motion with stunning speed the
plot that will destroy the life, reputation, and happiness of his commander.
Two days after Othello and Desdemona reunite in Cyprus with mutual ardor, they
are dead.
Commercial, overcivilized, seething with intrigue,
Venice provides a ripe environment in which Iago can plant the seeds of the
downfall of his plain-dealing commander. But such is his sense of invention
that even a military outpost like Cyprus, more congenial to Othello, furthers
his nefarious purposes: this time, the innocent Desdemona is utterly at sea.
The Venetian republic had depended on foreigners to
defend itself from Moslem attacks, as seen in the play by service personnel
from Spain (Iago—interestingly enough, Spanish for “James”) and Othello (from
North Africa). Even so, the court of King James and throngs who saw the play at
both the open-air Globe playhouse and the indoor Blackfriars in the next couple
of decades would have known that its possession Cyprus had eventually fallen to
the Ottoman Empire.
Venice could ill afford, then, to lose the likes of
great commanders like Othello, and their absence from future councils of war
could only increase the vulnerability of the republic.
Even in this point of geographic deflection,
Shakespeare was hinting to his audience that the personal could become the
political very quickly.
In the case of the English monarch, listeners had a
strong reason to think so: a monarch’s inability to produce a male heir had
pushed the nation into the cohort of Protestant European nations under King
Henry VIII, then had hastened the transition from his childless (Tudor)
daughter Elizabeth to James (Stuart).
Literary and theatrical culture supplied Shakespeare’s
plot. His major source was an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli
Hecatommithi, translated into French (where, presumably, the playwright saw
a translation).
Cinthio's “ensign” brings about the fall of his chief
in this tale, too. But the lesson is decidedly different from what Shakespeare
conveyed: children should obey their parents, even if—especially if—
this means the bride should not marry a black male without their permission.
Shakespeare also drew on a tradition better known to
English theatergoers: morality plays that were popular in his teens. As
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt observes in Will in the World,
these productions had fallen out of favor by the time the playwright reached
his creative zenith late in the Elizabethan era, but they had concentrated
viewers’ attention on a representative figure of evil, often named Vice.
In Othello, the sin—jealousy—becomes the tragic
flaw that Othello, so used to commanding men in battle, finds impossible to
quell within his heart, with Iago serving as the supercharged symbol of evil.
I have seen several productions of Othello onstage or
onscreen, featuring such compelling actors as Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier,
James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Ron O’Neal. This has continued the
tradition that began with Shakespeare’s leading player, Richard Burbage,
playing the role before King James.
But Jones’ 1982 Broadway hit crystallized one of the common dilemmas of the play: No matter how magnetic the star playing Othello might be, the spotlight, more often than not, swings to the actor embodying Iago.
Ecstatic reviews for that show’s Iago, Christopher Plummer, considerably
annoyed Jones (and, let’s face it, brought out a jealous streak not unlike his
character), who was already perturbed by his co-star’s penchant for hamming up
scenes with crowd-pleasing humor, according to Plummer's memoir In Spite of Myself.
But this tendency of Iago consuming greater viewer
attention is also grounded in the play itself:
*Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies such as King
Lear, evil is massed in one character rather than dispersed across multiple
ones;
*Iago not only has more lines than Othello, but also,
because he appears before he comes onstage, has the opportunity to set
expectations about their relationship;
*Iago’s soliloquys render the audience complicit in
his plotting;
*Iago neither makes amends for nor adequately explains
his actions—indeed, he offers so many, with so little real justification, that
he appears to be grasping at straws to fill what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
memorably called the villain’s “motiveless malignity.”
The great essayist William Hazlitt, in his book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, aptly summarizes Iago as possessing a "diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter."
(The image accompanying this post shows a particularly
celebrated influential production of Othello, from 1930 at London’s Savoy
Theatre, with Paul Robeson as the title character and Peggy Ashcroft as
Desdemona.)
(Photograph
of Rebecca West by Madame Yevonde.)
I well remember the shock all over an English
teacher’s face in my parochial high school in the mid-1970s when one of her
students confessed that he’d never read a book all the way through. When she
was finally able to recover her composure, she demanded to know how
he’d managed to get through 11 years of elementary and secondary school without
accomplishing what she saw as a basic educational task.
My high school classmate would have plenty of company
these days. Rose Horowitch’s report from the current groves of academe begins
with a student telling a teacher in the literary humanities course at my
college alma mater, Columbia University—an institution considerably more
selective than my high school way back when—that she, too, had never read a
book cover to cover.
Columbia is hardly the only college facing this
dilemma. Most of the 33 academics contacted by Horowitch related similar
experiences.
So, what gives? The article offers several reasons for
this, including:
*Electronic devices that compete for attention with
apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
*New educational initiatives such as No Child Left
Behind and Common Core that led to short informational passages that mimic
standardized tests, rather than longer texts.
*Shifts in values rather than skill sets—i.e.,
students can still read long books, but they don’t want to.
*Jobs and extracurricular activities that sap the time
they need to read in depth.
*Identity politics that makes young readers less
inclined to tackle the thinking of writers far away in place and time.
*Grade inflation that doesn’t penalize students for
failing to keep up with the course load.
I read with particular interest an admission by Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American Studies professor at the school, that, in
now teaching a seminar on short works in American literature rather than a full
survey course, he had dispensed with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in favor
of the author’s Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the
Scrivener.”
For my American lit survey course back in the day, my
class had to read these shorter works and the epic novel. Our professor
urged us, if we had time, to get a jump on Melville’s stab at the Great
American Novel: “It’s a long whaling expedition,” he joked.
I finished reading this article right after listening
to a podcast on the English novelist Anthony Powell, who created a 12-novel
sequence chronicling more than four decades in 20th-century life, A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell’s style is not daunting, and believe it
or not, readers years ago managed to plow through most, if not all, of this
work.
But it’s inconceivable to me that many readers today
will make it through just one of his novels, let alone all of it.
It should also be said courses in STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and math) have made the appeal of humanities course offering
mass immersion in reading less lucrative.
That high school classmate of mine, for instance? He entered
the armed forces, where he learned computer sciences—and ended up making
considerably more money, after he left the military, than fellow high school
graduates who took the time to make it through one long book after another.
(The image accompanying this post, if you haven't guessed it from the guy with the long hair, is a relic from a bygone era, in more ways than one. It shows a Shimer
College student reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty under a tree on
the school's original campus in Mount Carroll, IL. The photograph was published
in the school's 1973-1974 catalog. I hope that this seminal work of political
science, at any rate, continues to be read in its entirety, but I’m not betting
on it.)
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was published. It was a notable success that enabled him to marry Emma Gifford, and to give up architecture so he could concentrate on writing.
The novel also marked a turning point in his subject matter and setting, as he first used the name “Wessex” to represent an imaginary region of south and southwest England.
The heroine of the novel,
Bathsheba Everdene, was played by Julie Christie (pictured here) in the 1967
film adaptation by John Schlesinger.
The image accompanying
this post, of Tom Hanks at the premiere of his film Elvis, was taken June 6,
2022, by Eva Rinaldi from Abbotsford, Australia.
Patient [played by
John Butler]: “How should I know? They looked all right to me!”
Psychoanalyst: “Was
either one of them ever psychoanalyzed?”
Patient: “No,
of course not.”
Psychoanalyst: “Just
how would you describe your phobia?”
Patient: “My
what?”
Psychoanalyst: “Your
phobia—this fear that you seem to have—uh, what it is you're afraid of.”
Patient: “Oh,
I seem to be afraid of falling all the time, falling off things.”
Psychoanalyst: “You're
afraid of falling off high places.”
Patient: “Huh?
Uh, no—off of low places.”
Psychoanalyst: “Would
you please explain that a little more fully?”
Patient: “Well,
whenever I get on anything low like a milking stool or a suitcase—you know, [motioning
toward his knee] about that high—I'm just afraid I’ll fall off, that's all.”
Psychoanalyst: “Well,
it's a clear case of gluctophobia. Have you ever actually fallen off a milking
stool or a suitcase?”
Patient: “Oh,
sure—all the time.”
Psychoanalyst: “Very
interesting, very interesting. When did you first notice this?”
Patient: “When
I first fell off.”— Mental Poise
(1938), film short written by American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945) and directed by Roy Rowland
