Quote of the Day (Janan Ganesh, on the Limits of Emotional Intelligence)

“People of genius-level EQ include con artists, pick-up artists, stand-up comedians, spies, abusive partners and, from double-glazing showrooms to the plushest investment bank trading floor, sales staff. Emotional intelligence is what tells you, in a work meeting, that a colleague who keeps touching their face and sipping water is nervous about speaking. Whether you then use that information to soothe them, or to ask them a tough question in front of the others, well, that is a test of your conscience—not your emotional intelligence.”— British journalist, author and political commentator Janan Ganesh, “The Truth About Emotional Intelligence,” The Financial Times, Aug. 26-27, 2023

Joke of the Day (Steven Wright, on Gifts From His Grandpa)

“One Christmas, my grandfather gave me a box of broken glass. He gave my brother a box of Band-Aids. Then he said to us, ‘Now, you two share.’"—American comedian Steven Wright quoted by Brad Wheeler, “Wright's Stand-Up Delivers on Deadpan One-Liners,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Jan. 31, 2010

(Photo of Steven Wright after a spring 1994 performance in Cohen Auditorium at Tufts University.)

This Day in Irish History (Republic of Ireland Act Signed)

Dec. 21, 1948—Twenty-seven years after guerrilla leader Michael Collins signed a treaty with Great Britain that brought Ireland closer to self-government but stopped short of independence, the head of the Irish Free State, President Seán O'Kelly, took the last step by signing into law a bill formally declaring a republic.

Longtime supporters of Irish independence declared the Republic of Ireland Bill had finally removed the last institutional barriers that Great Britain had insisted on in the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

But, as with so many events involving the cause, the implicit promise of the 1840s patriot song “A Nation Once Again”—i.e., one not only free, but fully united with all 32 counties—remained unfulfilled.

In fact, when the diplomatic moves and countermoves of Ireland and Britain concluded several months into 1949, it only solidified the partition between the Catholic-dominated 26 counties in the south and the six Protestant ones in Northern Ireland: what one mordant wit termed, when anti-Treaty forces lay down their arms at the end of the Irish Civil War, “three-quarters of a nation once again.”

This final push towards independence was not the work of Eamon de Valera, the figure who dominated the nation’s politics for four decades, but rather John Costello—who, despite wielding power over two terms in the Forties and Fifties, was correctly labeled “The Forgotten Taoiseach” [Gaelic for “Chief” or “Leader”] by John Bruton, who held that post himself some five decades later.

Why did Costello take this last step, particularly when de Valera had not done so when he had the chance?

Already, “Dev” had cleared so much diplomatic space through his wranglings and faceoffs with Britain.

Most notably, he had used the abdication crisis surrounding King Edward VIII to push through Ireland’s legislative body, the Dáil Eireann, the External Relations Act of 1936, which eliminated the Crown’s role in Irish domestic affairs while retaining its influence in external affairs, including as part of the British Commonwealth.

At the time of the act’s enactment, Costello had already expressed reservations about some of its provisions. (Not without justification: It was a typical study in ambiguity by de Valera.) A decade later, politicians across the political spectrum were perceiving even more issues with adhering to it.

In his address to the Dail on the Republic of Ireland Bill in early December 1948, Costello alluded to the continuing restiveness on the part of old IRA men who had never reconciled themselves either to the Anglo-Irish Treaty or to remaining restrictions on the nation’s self-determination, noting that the new legislation would be in “the interests of peace, order and the end of bitterness between Irishmen.”

And, in a phrase that would echo even louder when used more than 40 years later by Ulster nationalist leader Gerry Adams in calling for IRA disarmament, he hoped to “take the guns out of Irish politics.”

Yet a further motive lurked beneath the surface for Costello. 

De Valera and his Fianna Fail party had reaped political capital by pushing back against the limits set by Britain. As leader of the rival Fine Gael party that formed part of Ireland’s first coalition government, Costello now saw the movement toward a republic as a political opportunity.

Or, as J.J. Lee put the matter in his magisterial history, Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society, Costello “stole Fianna Fail’ s Sunday suit of constitutional clothes. Who were the real republicans now?”

Whether expressed or not, Fine Gael’s rationale for moving ahead was rational. What the media, political insiders, and many ordinary citizens could not understand was why Costello didn’t undertake this sea change in Irish politics while on Irish soil, but instead did so while on a foreign trip originally expected to be inconsequential.

Several explanations have been offered—one easily dismissible, the rest not mutually exclusive. But all of them hark back to the phrase made famous in the 1999 film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut: i.e., “Blame Canada.”

That other country emerging from British imperial rule had played host to Costello in late summer 1948. One rumor of the time, almost certainly an urban legend, had it that, while drunk, Costello had blurted out his plans to declare a republic.

Another theory has more credence, simply because Costello himself told others at the time and later that he had been “stung”: i.e., subjected to dissing of his country and himself as its representative.

According to Tristin Hopper in Canada’s National Post and Philip Currie’s 2020 history Canada and Ireland, Governor General Earl Alexander of Tunis possessed Ulster unionist roots. Not surprisingly given that background, at a dinner party he’d hosted, the Crown had been toasted but not Costello.

An even worse affront occurred at the party when Costello caught sight of a flower arrangement at Alexander’s table featuring “Roaring Meg,” a replica of a cannon used in defending Derry against Catholics in 1689--the ultimate red flag for Irish nationalists.

Nevertheless, Costello’s September 8 announcement in Canada of a planned change in Ireland’s status more likely resulted from the fact that the Taoiseach was confronting a sudden press leak while in a foreign country—and, in those pre-satellite days, not enough time to convene his Cabinet and assemble a careful response.

Events then took on a momentum of their own, with Costello deciding it was easiest to answer the question honestly at the Ottawa press conference and ram the required enabling legislation through the Dail.

But in reacting on the spot, Costello surprised and annoyed the British government, which had been prematurely celebrating more cordial relations with Ireland than had existed under de Valera.

It bided its time through the fall, even as the Taoiseach guided the legislation into unanimous approval by the Dail, with the republic officially coming into being in April of the following year, on the anniversary of the Easter Rebellion.

Then, in January 1949, the British sprang their own surprise: Northern premier Sir Basil Brook’s call for a general election to be held in Ulster in February. Five days after Brook’s announcement, Costello and his Cabinet decided to fund anti-partition candidates in the Ulster polling.

The decision proved counter-productive, driving Ulster Protestants to circle the wagons against what they saw as absorption by the republic. Ulster’s Unionist Party reaped the same lopsided majority it had achieved at the time of partition in 1921: 40 seats to 12.

The final indignity—and the crushing of any early hope that reunification would occur any time soon—came via British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who, to appease the Unionists, introduced the following provision into the Ireland Act in early May:

“It is hereby declared that Northern Ireland remains part of His Majesty's dominions and of the United Kingdom and it is hereby affirmed that in no event will Northern Ireland or any part thereof cease to be part of His Majesty's dominions and of the United Kingdom without the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland.”

For the next 50 years, that provision only hardened unionist opposition to any concessions by the British government giving Ireland more of a voice in Ulster. 

As during so much of its recent history, the most fervent believers in a free, self-governing 32-county Ireland had to settle for a half-measure. However overstated, Lee’s scathing assessment of the process is, given the circumstances and outcome, entirely understandable:

“Whatever the merits of proclaiming a republic at that stage, the whole performance of the government, from Costello's Ottawa announcement to the inaugural Easter Sunday parade, seems to have been a shambles from start to finish, perhaps the most inept diplomatic exhibition in the history of the state.”

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Thought, ‘The Seed of Action’)

“Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought to the end, that it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done. What is in, will out. It struggles to the birth.”— American essayist-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Art,” originally printed in The Dial, January 1841, reprinted in Society and Solitude (1870) 

Quote of the Day (Walter Lippmann, on ‘Truly Effective Thinking’)

“In truly effective thinking, the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted.”— American writer, reporter, and political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Public Opinion (1922)

This Day in Literary History (‘Wuthering Heights’ Author Emily Bronte Dies of TB)

Dec. 19, 1848— Only a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, the single novel that assured her literary immortality, Emily Bronte died at age 30 in her family’s Yorkshire parsonage of tuberculosis, the same disease that had taken her older and troubled brother Branwell only three months before.

To my knowledge, there has never been a set of talented creative siblings quite like the Brontes. The closest might be the Jameses—philosopher William, novelist Henry, and diarist Alice. But the three Jameses managed to survive well into middle age, enabling them to achieve a prolific output even individually.

In contrast, Emily—along with older sister Charlotte, younger sister Anne, and even Bramwell—died while still young; and the melodramatic plots and Gothic settings of their works—what biographer Juliet Barker calls “Wild Genius on the Moors,” and what contemporaries often labeled “coarse”—could not be more removed from the refined intellectual, urban content of the Americans.

One aspect of Wuthering Heights that especially fascinates me is how, even with its complex, multi-generational plot, it still leaves space on important matters that has invited considerable speculation.

(For instance, who were the orphaned Heathcliff’s parents when Mr. Earnshaw discovers him on the streets of Liverpool? And what was Heathcliff doing in the years away from Wuthering Heights that enabled him to become rich and return to wreak vengeance?)

In the same way, Emily, perhaps the least documented of the three writing Bronte sisters (two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, also died of TB in 1825), also had gaping holes in her history that biographers sought to fill—with perhaps even more speculation than has revolved around Heathcliff.

Most of what we know about Emily came via Charlotte, either directly (in her "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell," two pseudonyms adopted by Emily and Anne to circumvent sexist publishers and book reviewers of the time) or indirectly (novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte relied heavily on her friend’s reminiscences about her sister).

At the time, Emily had endured fierce criticism from critics (e.g., “The reader is … disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance”).

Charlotte, desiring to protect the posthumous memory of the younger sister she loved, depicted her, in a preface she wrote for Wuthering Heights after Emily’s death, as a homebody who preferred seclusion, and thus “had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.”

Recent scholars, like Juliet Barker in her epic biography of the family, have pushed back against such well-intentioned but one-dimensional portrayals. Some have theorized that Charlotte, not content with creating a genteel image for Emily, may have taken matters a step further and burned a manuscript that was intended to be Emily’s follow-up to Wuthering Heights.

(Emily’s publisher wrote her at one point to agree that she shouldn’t send her the manuscript for her second novel until she was satisfied with it. But the manuscript has never been found after Emily’s death.)

Charlotte might have been the driving force in the publication of the sisters’ work, and, as I wrote in a prior post, she certainly upended Victorians’ notions of what women could do with Jane Eyre.

But Emily’s genius is no less astonishing. As vivid and evocative as the film adaptations (1939, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; 1970, starring Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall) of Wuthering Heights are, they don’t prepare viewers when they encounter the novel for the first time.

Only full exposure to the source material enables one to see how dexterously Emily Bronte handled its plot, setting, and the flawed, selfish soulmates Heathcliff and Cathy who form its passionate center.

In addition, 175 years after the death of its author, contemporary readers are likely to be more aware of themes that have become even more relevant since the novel’s original publication, including inequality, domestic abuse, social constraints versus the freedom of nature, and the agony of displacement.

(The image accompanying this post comes, if you haven’t guessed it already, from William Wyler’s classic adaptation of the story, showing Laurence Olivier’s tormented Heathcliff visiting Merle Oberon’s Cathy at her deathbed.)

Quote of the Day (Oliver Sacks, on the Human Need to ‘Transcend, Transport, Escape’)

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.”— British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), Hallucinations (2012)

The image accompanying this post of Dr. Oliver Sacks was taken in 1985 by Bernard Gotfryd and is part of his collection at the Library of Congress.