Eric The Blue

Books of the Bible: 1 Thessalonians

Regarding Romans, I noted how in the Bible Paul's letters are generally printed in descending order of length, which does not correspond in any way to date of composition.  Thus the earnest reader determined to rip through the whole thing, front cover to back, meets Paul first in the longest and fullest expression of his mature thought--the letter to the Romans--before experiencing a series of diminishing returns.  We've arrived now at 1 Thessalonians and things are getting fairly skimpy.  Five chapters, probably about four pages in any Bible you might own, so it comes in toward the back despite being widely regarded as the earliest of Paul's extant writings.  Putting together secular history with the description of Paul's career set out in the Book of Acts, the likely date of composition is the year 50 or 51.

Paul's mission to Thessalonica is described in Acts 17.  After preaching and teaching there for three weeks, he was run out of town by "wicked fellows of the rabble" organized by some ignoble Jews who were offended by his teaching (17:1-10).  It's understandable, then, that Paul should feel some anxiety about the fate of the converts left behind there.  Probably expecting the worst, he sent Timothy back to reconnoiter, and was obviously pleased and relieved when, upon returning, Timothy reported that the church there persisted in "faith and love."  This is all described in chapter 3 of 1 Thessalonians.  The letter might be brief but it takes a while to get going. 

We may surmise, from the content of chapters 4 and 5, what other news Timothy bore about the Thessalonians.  To put it bluntly, while the church might have survived, individual members had not--people continued to die.  This was perplexing because the expectation had been that the apocalypse was imminent and that Christian believers would then be rewarded for their faith.  But now some were dying before the reward could be claimed.  What's their status?  And, thinking about ourselves, the living, how long till we can collect?  When's it going to happen?

It wasn't only Thessalonian Christians who believed they were living in the end times.  The imminent Second Coming is a pervasive theme in early Christian literature, including in Paul's own epistles.  So it seems the rhetorical task was to tamp down an expectation that his  own preaching and teaching may have helped to create.  That the deaths of individuals should suddenly and unexpectedly create a new class of Christian souls shows just how keen the expectation was.  It's now a little hard to enter into this way of thinking, the grip and slog of twenty centuries having pretty much removed the need to tamp down the expectation.  But it was what the Thessalonians were thinking.

Paul's response to the first issue, concerning those who die before the Second Coming, is found at the end of the fourth chapter:

But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep.  For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.

 

What to make of this?  The scholar who wrote the section on Thessalonians for Peake's Commentary on the Bible sounds sheepish.  "Paul's intention is to comfort the Thessalonians, " he writes, "not to supply a literal description of the end of the world."  So it seems the scholar isn't buying it but for some reason the Thessalonians should.  Forgive me, but there is something unintentionally comical about the whole situation.  The Thessalonians were concerned about the fate of those who do not live till the Second Coming, and Paul says: No, no, don't worry, it's totally fair--in fact, the sleepers will be raised before the living, no need to be concerned. 

 

It's not like the fundamentalists, sunk in their left-behind fantasies, have necessarily strayed from Scripture.

 

The fourth chapter of 1 Thessalonians is also of interest, at least to me, on account of the light it sheds on something I've occasionally puzzled over, though not during baseball season.  On the one hand, I was told that grandma and mom's uncle were now "in heaven."  On the other hand, I was, or became, dimly aware of depictions of the Second Coming, in Christian art, that highlighted the bright sky, the trumpeter, and the people popping out of their popped caskets.  It didn't seem they both could be true and I wondered which was the sanctioned version.  On the authority of 1 Thessalonians, I think now I probably worried too much about being monitored by grandma on Friday and Saturday nights. 

 

Paul's answer to the Thessalonians' other question, about the timing of the Second Coming, is possibly canny.  It will come "like a thief in the night," when least expected.  One may detect in this formulation a whispered answer to a related and possibly embarrassing question concerning why we're still waiting:  it can't happen when you're expecting it, and you've always been expecting it, so naturally it hasn't  happened--and won't, so long as you keep looking for it (which, however, is what you're supposed to do).  The question weighs heavily on nascent Christian ethics, because obviously the way to live in the world depends somewhat on how long the world is going to last: you act one way if it's a month or a year, quite another if it's a few or twenty millennia.  Here is Paul's specific advice, from the conclusion of the letter:

 

And we exhort you, brethren, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.  See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.  Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.  Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil.

 

It seems to me that the way of being in the world that is here recommended presupposes that the world might go on for awhile--else, why admonish the idle, or be patient with everyone?  The last sentence is consistent with Paul's barely suppressed skepticism about spiritual gifts that becomes  more pronounced in letters not yet composed.  Don't reject them outright, but test everything (the scientific spirit!), with the implicit teaching that some of it will turn out to be b.s.  It's this side of Paul, I think, that has made him a favorite of Scandinavian Lutherans, who at least in the stories of Garrison Keillor have adopted a similarly jaundiced view of all statements requiring an exclamation point.  The world is about to end?  Ya, shoor, but I t'ink I'll still plant da corn.  ("Admonish the idle.")

Whose horse is that?

Louise Erdrich, in "Holy Rage: Lessons from Standing Rock," at the website of The New Yorker magazine:

Understanding the natural world as more than just a resource for energy, or a recreational opportunity, or even a food resource, gives moral weight to the effort to contain catastrophic climate change. Imagine if Energy Transfer Partners planned to drill underneath Jerusalem. Of course, the company wouldn’t consider such a route. Yet it would be safer than drilling beneath the Missouri River.

Without saying so herself, Erdrich here reveals the bankruptcy beneath all the kvetching about Political Correctness.  The wingnuts have claimed the concept for their own but really it just depends on whose horse is being gored.  Israel is one of their favorite horses.

Putting Harriet Tubman's likeness on the twenty dollar bill would be an act of mindless obeisance to Political Correctness.  Running an oil pipeline underneath the Missouri River, however, makes perfect sense.  The Indians are against it?  They rest their case.

But don't try to tell them that the settlement project in the West Bank is unwise, illegal, an obstacle to peace, and against the long-term interests of Israel.  Anti-Semite!

The subject can't even be discussed, because a contrary view identifies a moral reprobate.

I think it's politically incorrect to point this out.

Not the normal Christmas music

Home alone sick on Christmas, listening to the Replacements.  Now that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel in literature, here's a small pastiche of lyrics from a real dark horse.  I don't know that anyone is better than Paul Westerberg on the subject of looking back with regret.  

Hold my life, until I'm ready to use it.
Growin' old in a bar. You grow old in a bar.
The fool who wastes his life, God rest his guts.

It's a little disconcerting to remember that the man who wrote all these lines was in his mid-20s.  The last is from the song "Here Comes a Regular," which includes the following objective correlative for sorrow over an empty life:

You're like a picture on the fridge that's never stocked with food.
 I used to live at home, now I stay at the house.

("Objective correlative" refers to "the artistic and literary technique of representing or evoking a particular emotion by means of symbols that objectify that emotion and are associated with it.")

Another thing Westerberg excels at is the sketchy ballad; sketchy, because the listener has to fill in some spaces. "A Little Mascara," about a haphazard marriage gone bad, is an example:

You and I fall together
You and I sleep alone
After all, things might be better
After one, and there's one that's long gone

For the moon you keep shootin'
Throw your rope up in the air
For the kids you stay together
You nap 'em and you slap 'em in a highchair....

Afternoon, things are quiet
Settle back now if you can
Stations click by like a rocket
Don't you worry if you wonder why he ran

All you ever wanted was someone to take care of ya
All you're ever losin' is . . . a little mascara.

I take the two "one"s in the first stanza to refer to different things--the first a time of day (one in the morning?), the second a person (the long-gone husband who doesn't come home?)--but I'm not really sure.  "Shootin' for the moon" is a cliche that works because the next line is such a perfect image of futility--"throw your rope up in the air" (without explicit mention of it falling to the ground beside you, because you can't lasso the moon).  And what about the next two lines for a summation of a certain kind of life?  He mentions napping the children, which must account for why it gets quiet in the afternoon.  "Settle back now if you can" is followed immediately by proof that she can't--"stations click by like a rocket."  She's trying to distract herself from the question of her life.  The whole scene, captured in less than fifty words, is of a woman, clicker in hand, young children asleep, sitting alone in a quiet house with mascara running off her face.  (That she's wearing it in the first place is a little like the rope thrown in the air.) 

He doesn't write a lot of happy songs but still you often smile while listening.  From "Left of the Dial":

Read about your band in some local page
Didn't mention your name, didn't mention your name. . . .
Passin' through and it's late, station started to fade
Picked another one up in the very next state.

There's a song called "Seen Your Video"--a high-spirited instrumental followed finally by the entire lyric:

All day, all night, all music video
Seen your video, the phony rock 'n' roll
We don't want to know, seen your video
Your phony rock 'n' roll

We don't want to know
We don't want to know
We don't want to know
We don't want to know

 

Some late writings of Tolstoy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tolstoy spent most of his 30s writing War and Peace and most of his 40s writing Anna Karenina.  The concluding installment of Karenina was published in 1877, the year he turned 49.  He then spent his early 50s in a state of near suicidal depression.  The most interesting document pertaining to this period was, not surprisingly, written by Tolstoy himself--the essay, or we would now probably say memoir, called "Confession."  Begun in 1879, it runs about 65 pages in my Portable Tolstoy, and wasn't completed until 1882.   It's hard to overstate how startling it is to read Tolstoy explaining, in the simplest possible way, that he saw no means of escape other than to do himself in.  He doesn't quite say it himself, but it seems his problem was akin to the malaise that currently goes by the name "affluenza."  It wasn't a case of too little but of too much.  He had been born into one of the leading families of Russia.  He was very wealthy.  By the time he was 50, he had published two of the best novels ever written. It was not a case of his genius being unrecognized in his own time, for his early works met with critical praise, and the lofty reputation enjoyed by his two great long works has not really grown very much in the 150 years or so since they were created.  They were commercial successes, too.  Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy--his contemporaries placed him in that company already, and while they were thinking of him like that, he was thinking of killing himself.

The thought of death--that's what really sunk him.  Its leveling effect has the potential to make its strongest impression on the most fit and fair among us.  You can see perhaps how Tolstoy would be horrified at the thought of being swept into oblivion right along with people who beat their horses and couldn't read.  "Confession" makes clear he thought that's where all were headed, into the common void.  His advantages and superlative achievements didn't change that.  You're going to die, like everyone else, and then there's nothing, so what's even the point in staying alive?  That is pretty much how Tolstoy, age 50, felt about things, and in "Confession" he says it in pretty much that way.

You could say that "Confession" is a sort of spiritual autobiography that begins with Tolstoy's orthodox upbringing, proceeding then to his rejection of the Christianity of his boyhood (on the ground that it did not stand up to rational scrutiny), and, subsequent to that, the soul's dark night I tried to describe above, the search for meaning, and finally the fruit of the search.  It's a curious fact that what he found seems anticlimactic, and I think this is because what precedes seems more vivid and convincing.  Reading it over again now, the conclusion is sufficiently shadowy to  make me think it's really from other sources that I know how the story ends.  Tolstoy accepted no received system of thought, did not convert to some other religion or sect.  Instead, focusing on the gospel narratives, especially the parts "more honored in the breach," he formed a version of Christianity that moved him out of the big house on the family estate and into the servants' quarters.  He ceased eating meat and eventually renounced the copyrights on his books, which decreased his income substantially.  His wife was alarmed, and indeed it was rising tensions on the home front that finally set off the last sorry events of his life, the subject of a recent movie.  He had contemplated killing himself and the remedy he devised led indirectly to his death. 

The great fictional work of this last period is the long story called "The Death of Ivan Ilych."  It was begun in 1882, the year he finished "Confession," and not completed until 1886.  As the story opens, there is a recess in "the Melvinski trial," and, amid some overheard courthouse chit-chat, a newspaper reader interjects, "Gentlemen, Ivan Ilych has died!"  The blunt title, followed by this blunt opening, removes all question about what is going to happen once the story of Ivan Ilych and his illness gets going.  Whatever interest the story has will not arise from the reader's glimmering hope that maybe Ilych isn't doomed.  The story is death-infused from the beginning, and it's also shot through with life's triviality, the telling detail here being "the Melvinski trial"--too famous to need identification, apparently, though of course the point must be that no one remembers it now. 

Someone said, of the famous double plot to King Lear, that it seems to have been devised as a deliberate attempt to assault the audience: it's not enough that there should be one wretched old man wandering the earth in misery and despair--there must be two.  Though there's no double plot in "Ilych," the story has a similarly battering effect, as if the author were determined to bludgeon happy, contented, cheerful people.  Exhibit A would have to be the way in which the details of the disease and of Ilych's suffering are emphasized, relentlessly, in plain detail.

Ivan Ilych went out slowly, seated himself disconsolately in his sledge, and drove home.  All the way home he was going over what the doctor had said, trying to translate those complicated, obscure, scientific phrases into plain language and find in them an answer to the question: "Is my condition bad? Is it very bad? Or is there as yet nothing much wrong?" And it seemed to him that the meaning of what the doctor had said was that it was very bad.

[Snip]

Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn and serious.  There was the same familiar loathsome taste in his mouth.  His heart sank and he felt dazed.  "My God! My God!" he muttered. "Again, again! And it will never cease!"  And suddenly the matter presented itself in quite a different aspect. "Vermiform appendix! Kidney!" he said to himself.  "It's not a question of appendix or kidney but of life and . . . death.  Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it. . . .  There was light and now there is darkness.  I was here and now I'm going there.  Where?"

[Snip]

He slept less and less.  He was given opium and hypodermic injections of morphine, but this did not relieve him.  The dull depression he experienced in a somnolent condition at first gave him a little relief, but only as something new, afterwards it became as distressing as the pain itself or even more so.

Special foods were prepared for him by the doctors' orders, but all those foods became increasingly distasteful and disgusting to him.  

For his excretions also special arrangements had to be made, and this was a torment to him every time--a torment from the uncleanliness, the unseemliness, and the smell, and from knowing that another person had to take part in it. 

In making this point, one quotes almost at random, because it's mainly what the story is made of, except for the perfect villainy of his family, especially his wife, and the perfect goodness of the servant Gerasim.  The story is deeply affecting but we are also at a very great distance from the characters in the two long novels.  "The people in Anna Karenina seem more real than the people I know in real life, and when I finish the book I feel sad about not being able to be with them for awhile."  Versions of this have been expressed so many times by so many readers that it is almost a cliche, only without the negative connotations, since it's true.  But no one says that about Ilych, or his family, or the saintly servant, Gerasim.  The story is almost unbearably realistic and also has aspects of a moral fable.

The moral fable is Tolstoy's preeminent mode in his late fiction.  The goal is instruction, not a representation of life.  Many  of the stories seem meant for young readers, and the titles alone convey the author's high-mindedness:  "What Men Live By," "Where Love Is, God Is," "God Sees the Truth, but Waits."  The best of them is called "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" It was written in 1886 and concerns a small landowner who acquires more and more property but can never be content.  No matter how much he has, there are always neighbors who trespass or allow their animals to graze his land or do not keep bargains. Hearing that in a distant region there is so much land that the residents give it away, he travels there and discovers it's true: he can have all the land he can stake off from sun up to sun down, but he must get back to his starting point before the sun sets.  So when the sun rises he sets out.  He cannot believe his good fortune.  The land is so rich that he can hardly bring himself to plant a stake and turn, for what lies just ahead is always even more desirable than what's been traversed.  You can probably see where this is headed.  The sun rises higher in the sky, the day turns hot, fatigue sets in, he's far from where he began and in danger of losing it all by not getting back to the start.  Expending the last of his strength, he falls exhausted at his starting point just as the sun sets, and dies.  His servant digs a grave to lay him in.  The last sentence of the story is, "Six feet from his head to his heels was all that he needed"--the answer to the question asked in the title, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"

Last post about the last election

Probably it's silly to expect a generally consistent and levelheaded approach from our president-elect.  It would be a fool's errand to try and reconcile, for example, the tweet concerning how there should be no recounting of ballots (because the voters have spoken) with the tweet concerning how he actually won the popular vote (if the fraudulent votes are subtracted).  I suppose the cheaters are too devious to be detected.  Or something.  Kellyanne Conway could explain it.  Here she is being straight with Fox News viewers:

This election was not close.  It was not a squeaker.  There is a mandate there, and there is a mandate for his 100-day agenda, as well.

It appears that Clinton's final margin in the popular vote is going to be north of 2.5 million, and, in terms of percent, at least 2 full points.  According to David Wasserman, of the Cook Political Report, the current count stands at 65,316,724 for Clinton to 62,719,568 for Trump, 48.2% to 46.2%.  I suppose "mandate" is an elastic term. 

Just because I am a crybaby Democrat doesn't prove the whole system isn't rigged in favor of Trump and the Republicans.  There are three branches to the federal government.  The executive branch will be occupied by Trump and his appointees, on the strength of his 46-48 "victory" at the polls.  With respect to the judicial branch, this means, for example, that Trump will be filling the current vacancy on the Supreme Court--a vacancy that only exists because Republican senators refused to grant a hearing and a vote to Merrick Garland, whom President Obama, having been re-elected to a 4-year term in 2012, nominated last March.  The decisions of the Supreme Court apply to all of us, without regard to the state in which we happen to live, and the extra 2.5 million of us who would have preferred that Clinton make those appointments are just going to have to knuckle under to the will of the minority. 

Then there is the legislative branch, which is made of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In 435 House elections, Republican candidates received 61,483,071 votes, compared to 58,255,286 for Democrats--51.3% to 48.7% of all the votes, if you discount ballots cast for third party candidates.  This popular vote margin yielded a 241 to 194 advantage in terms of actual seats in the House, which is a 55-45 Republican majority.  So a 2.6% margin of the people's vote resulted in a ten point advantage in actual representation.  This kind of mismatch is an ongoing theme.  In 2014, Republican candidates got 53% of the votes and 57% of the seats.  In 2012, Republican candidates got 49% of the votes and 54% of the seats.  (Yes, a small Democratic "victory" among the country's voters yielded a 54-46 Republican majority in the House of Representatives.)  Before that, the mismatch is less pronounced, which points the way to the cause: the Republican sweep of 2010, a census year, put them in charge of an unusually large number of state legislatures, and they used the power to draw congressional districts in a way that guaranteed Republican dominance.  It's estimated that, given the current configuration of districts, Democratic candidates would have to win a 10-million ballot victory with voters to have a chance at regaining the majority in the House.  More here, here, here, and here.

The "people's House" doesn't refer to anything currently in existence.  It's the Republicans' House.

What about the Senate?  Lots of us were hoping that Democrats would get to 51, or even 50, which, had Clinton won the presidency, would have made for a voting majority (ties in the Senate are broken by the vice president).  But Republicans ended up losing just two seats (assuming they prevail in the upcoming runoff in Louisiana, a very red state), and will have a 52-48 majority.  Democratic Senate candidates actually won more votes than Republicans this year, but, as has been pointed out, that's not a very good measure of public opinion, since only a third of the seats were up for election.  Further skewing the aggregate vote for US Senate is the fact that California had a senate election in which "the Republican" got no votes, since there wasn't one on the ballot: instead of having a Republican primary and a Democratic primary, the Golden State has one primary election in which the top two finishers move on to the general election, and the top two finishers were both Democrats.  (Republicans should hope that the maxim concerning how America's future arrives first in California doesn't always hold, because the state's Republican party seems to have been euthanized.)

The issue with the Senate is that every state, no matter how big or small, has two.  So this year in California Democrat Kamala Harris won with more than 7.4 million votes, while in South Dakota Republican John Thune won with about 265,000 votes, and soon as they take their seats and commence voting themselves they'll almost always cancel each other out.  But the number of people who stand behind this 1 to 1 tie is tilted wildly in one direction.  If you want to know how this all works out at the macro level, a reasonable exercise is to determine how many Americans are represented by a Democratic senator, and how many are represented by a Republican.  Since each state has two senators, let's just stipulate that each one represents half the state's population.  If you assume that the Republicans will hold the seat still pending in Louisiana, and consider Independents Angus King and Bernie Sanders as Democrats (since they caucus with the Dems), then it turns out that 52 Republican senators represent about 140 million Americans, and the 48 Democrats represent about 175 million Americans.

Now, I know that the US Senate, with its inherently undemocratic features, was devised by the sainted Founding Fathers.  But they didn't do it because it was just, or wise--the "they" here referring to the best and wisest of them, as opposed to the ones who, being from states with small populations, just wanted to boost the power of their home state.  Here is Alexander Hamilton on the topic, in Federalist Paper No. 22:

Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.

The only part of this that isn't true is the last clause.  For the next two years at least, the Republicans are going to be in complete control of the national government.  They have the presidency (though more Americans voted for the Democrat), they have the Senate (though more Americans have chosen to be represented by a Democrat), they have the House (which, on account of a gerrymandered map, they will continue to have into the foreseeable future), and, because they have all that, they will be filling the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with judges friendly to their views.  Yet for some reason the majority, "upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties," seems okay with this hocus pocus.