During the Second Punic War, there was an African king called Masinissa. This king aided the Romans, and when Scipio Africanus had subdued Carthage he allowed Masinissa to add a large part of Africa to his kingdom, Numidia. Masinissa grew old and died, and his son, Micipsa, became king. Micipsa had two sons, Hiempsal and Adherbal, and a nephew, Jugurtha. Though Jugurtha was older than the princes, he was reared with them. Growing into manhood, Sallust writes, he was endowed “with physical strength, a handsome person, but above all with a vigorous intellect.” Racing with his fellows, “although he surpassed them all in renown, he nevertheless won the love of all.” In hunting, “he distinguished himself greatly, but spoke little of his own exploits.” Seeing how much the people loved Jugurtha, the king grew to fear for his own sons. As Numidia now needed to aid Rome with wars in Spain, Micipsa decided to send Jugurtha as the leader of the Numidian force. In Spain, Jugurtha would probably “fall a victim either to a desire to display his valor or to the ruthless foe.”
Continue readingWriting
Godly Foolishness
“Come in,” said the Bishop.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, pages 85 and 86
The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.
…
“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
Jean Valjean stole the bishop’s silver while the bishop’s guest. In the morning, he is arrested and brought back to the bishop. And before Valjean is even accused of stealing the silverware, the bishop gives the thief silver candlesticks as well.
This of the bishop’s is assuredly a very unjust act.
True, the Lord says: “But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (Matthew 5:39-41). But isn’t this a direction for behavior in the face of adversity—not of restitution?
Continue readingIn Which I Visit a Farm and Feel Superfluous
‘Do you ever visit a farm,’ I asked Mom, ‘and get the feeling that you know how to do nothing of any use whatsoever?’
‘I was just thinking about that,’ she said. ‘I’ve read Wendell Berry, and that counts for—exactly nothing.’
We were in the car on Lazy Valley Ranch, in between the barn where you got registered and directed and the u-pick blueberry patch. I don’t know what parts of the surroundings went together, but it was the overall effect that was important to us. The blue-and-white buildings looked practical and aged. A large open shed overflowed with rusty pieces of what, perhaps not having eyes to see with at a brief glance, I can only call junk. More-or-less dry fields held horses, cows, a donkey, and an emu. Another field had several large pieces of equipment in it and hay bales scattered through it. The vehicles looked long and well used. And we felt like unnecessary and inferior city mice.
I’m reading Hannah Coulter right now, Mom just reread it and is reading some of Wendell Berry’s essays, and we’ve both recently read an interview with Berry in the CiRCE Institute’s FORMA magazine. Part of the message we’re getting is about the value and usefulness of small farms, and—in some ways—the unnecessariness or less-wholeness of sophisticated modern ways of life. Going to Lazy Valley Ranch, this farm which looked like something out of Wendell Berry, brought our reading and considering into a new proximity. I at least felt ashamed of being in the Tahoe there among those rusty vehicles, as if it were a faux pas of some sort (though Mom pointed out that that’s rather funny, as many Americans would look distinctly down at our chunky 2005 eight-seater).
Continue readingHaley’s Latest Fan: A Short Story
Kyim breathed deeply and stared at his bedroom wall. Then he stretched his stiff neck, rolled onto his side, and read the acknowledgements and the author bio. He almost always did. That way he could stay inside the book for as long as possible, even if he wasn’t reading about the characters anymore. At last he had to close the book. It was a physical one, paper and covers and ink. Kyim liked a book he could hold. This book was Haley Ferrier’s Ichthus: a Planet. He thought for a moment. Yes, he had read it five times now. Each time he wanted it not to end. A good book, he thought, should be like that: at the end you should feel both that it had to end there and that you wanted it to go on and on forever. Each time, too, he wondered about the second-last acknowledgement: To Kyim, who showed me all about the Leaf. Who was this mysterious person with his name? And how had this Kyim of hundreds of years before known how to describe a piece of modern technology so perfectly, even to the name? In her teen journals, Ferrier occasionally mentioned when she’d been alone for afternoons, even when she was sixteen, his own age. If only…
Kyim was getting the vacuum cleaner out when he realized: of course he could! He followed the silent little machine around, lifting chairs out of the way for it, in a daze. It would take some doing, of course. It wasn’t easy to secretly finagle a trip into the past, even when your dad did work in ACTeR, and that was short for Authorized Cross-Temporal Researches. But if Cora could do it, he could. And his sister had used it to go to some twentieth century Olympics or other!
Whoever wanted to go to the Olympics?
Continue readingChoosing Loves in The Merchant of Venice
“Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire,” the gold casket says. “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves,” says the silver casket. “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he has,” says the lead casket. (II.VII, 5,7,9) The portrait of Portia, a beautiful and wealthy young noblewoman, lies in one of these caskets; if a suitor picks that casket, he weds her, but if he choose another, he must forswear marriage forever. Besides finding Portia’s husband, the caskets illustrate different ways – gilded but false, or true as a plumbed line – of looking at love.
Continue readingThe Masks of Richard III
Not all great men are good men: and as portrayed by Shakespeare in the play which bears his name, Richard III illustrates this excellently. In his first speech, laying out the setting of the play, Richard declares his intention “to prove a villain” and calls himself “subtle, false, and treacherous” (I.I, 30; 37). But this is only for the audience: when he interacts with the other characters, Richard wears a mask of plainness, gentleness, and honest loyalty—as he says, “I … seem a saint when most I play the devil.” (I.II, 337). He can lie, deceive, and murder his way into near-absolute power without blinking an eye except to shed hypocritical tears. He is skillfull and poised, walking, when he needs to, a knife’s edge such as that he dares when he bids Anne tell him to kill himself. By his own and the world’s standards, he is very successful; enough, I think, that he can be termed a great, if not a verily great, man.
Continue readingThe Dragons of Building: A Sonnet
The Dragons of Building
This land of dragons lies asleep, and we
Who walk it do not see on what we tread
Until we meet a hillside glade and see
The ridge’s other, serpent, shape lie spread.
They sleep. To see this land, you would not guess
The battles they have fought, the mountains made
And kingdoms crushed. Their mortal combat is
More great, strong, slow, than man can comprehend.
To us, they sleep. Or sleep uneasily;
We feel the shield-wall’s jar sometimes, catch how
Beneath our feet they war on steadily
With wing and claw of stone that ages grow.
The dragons of this land are huge and strong,
Seen but when science matches eye with song.
The Good, the Bad, and the Unwise in King Lear
After following Henry V with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, we read King Lear in my class through Roman Roads Media. I was assigned a “reading response” to each of these—I’ve posted the one about Henry V. The guideline about length is to make our responses 400-500 words long, and I had a hard time bringing my piece about the sonnets up to that. Once I’d found my subject(s) about King Lear, though, I had the opposite problem… I had to keep pruning comments and quotes I wanted to include, and if you subtract the words counted for line citations and count words typed like “[S]erve” as one word, this comes to exactly 500 words!
Besides the Fool, whose task is providing pithy commentary, there are three types of significant characters in King Lear: the all-out good, such as Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar; the all-out evil, such as Edmund, Goneril, and Regan; and those who intend good but do not properly use authority and/or discernment – Lear, Albany, and Gloucester.
You cannot get rid of Cordelia, Kent, or Edgar, no matter how hard you try. Disown them. Dismiss them. Put bounties on their heads. They’re coming back. These characters are the Christ-figures in the play, people who come back to those whom they love, even after being rejected, as God keeps coming back to us. “[S]erve where thou dost stand condemn’d,” Kent tells himself, mentioning “thy master, whom thou lov’st.” (I.IV, 5,6)
Continue readingHenry V, Changing Wars, and Powerful Words
Roman Roads Media offers several history/literature courses, and right now I’m enrolled in one focusing on Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets, and Milton. A recent assignment was to read Shakespeare’s Henry V and write a response to it. Here—somewhat edited—is what I came out with.
Henry V opens with English characters discussing whether or not to launch a campaign against France. The bishops at court have financial reasons for wanting the campaign pursued, while King Henry is more interested in whether he may “with right and conscience” (Act I, Scene II, line 96) claim the crown of France. I am not, however, going to only cover what they did discuss, but what, to my surprise, they did not discuss—whether it was morally acceptable for them to invade France!
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