“Sunday Morning”: Wallace Stevens’ Secular Hymn


It was at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1979, while doing a course in modern poetry, that I first heard of Philip Larkin, featured among the poets we studied..

Many critics consider him Britain’s best poet since WWII. Later, I would make him a staple of my own university courses in modern poetry. One Larkin poem that impressed me tremendously was “Church Going,” with its somber reflection on Christianity’s demise and, by extension, religion in contemporary life. Larkin, a librarian at the University of Hull, was slated to visit our tutorial, only to cancel for whatever reason at the last minute. He died a few years later.

While “Church Going” remains my favorite Larkin poem, it had its thematic precedent, however, in modernist American poet Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” published in 1915 and revised in 1923. Like Larkin, Stevens takes up the embers of a once vibrant faith.

It’s not an easy read, Stevens perhaps with Eliot the most erudite of modernists poets. I’ve been thinking a lot of Stevens and this particular poem as Easter approaches. The resurrection is the poem’s temporal center:

I.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Commentary:

The poem commences on a Sunday morning, moving intermittently from the palpable, sensory present—an anonymous woman in nightgown, lounging on a couch, enjoying her coffee and oranges, a green parrot resting on her rug.

An interlocutor voice intrudes with philosophic reflection, setting up dialectic tension: nature’s plenitude versus a “silent Palestine/Dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” vague and distant.

II.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

Commentary:

The idea of paradise distant and abstract, vividly contrasts with the pungency of the physical world, sufficient in both “grievings” and “elations.”

III.

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

Commentary:

The ancient myth of Jove and his non-human birth yields a deity absent of human experience, a monarch remote from sensory, earthly life. Humans project on the universe their need for the palpable (i.e., “blood) to meet what fulfills their longing ( “requital to desire”) to comprehend life’s meaning. Earth, however, is our sole, sufficient paradise: “A part of labor and a part of pain.” Nature, woven into our experiential world, yields a friendlier, knowable cosmos, the stuff of human experience.

IV.

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

Commentary:

Here, Stevens address the poem’s pervasive anxiety, the longing for immortality. The woman worries that the beauty of the earth—the “green of April” or the “plum on the golden plate”—is too ephemeral to satisfy the human soul’s longing for something eternal. In rebuttal, the voice argues the insufficiency of vague, mythic afterlife narratives, the “chimera of the grave,/Neither the golden underground, nor isle/Melodious, where spirits gat them home,” to cyclic nature’s sustaining cornucopia of delight.

V.

She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Commentary:

The woman longs for assurance of a heaven with its bliss in the conflict between rejecting religion and persistent emotional need. Mortality, the voice argues, heightens our awareness of present beauty resplendent in human event.

VI.

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Commentary:

The interlocutor’s musing as to the nature of heaven. Is it a place of unchanging sameness, absent of ending ,where “fruit never falls” and the “boughs hang always in that perfect sky”? Is it a place, like earth, of continuing longing,
“With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find…?” Mortality intensifies an awareness of life’s intrinsic value.

VII.

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

Commentary:

The poem’s climax opens with an extended auditory image of a naturalistic celebration of life—“a chant of paradise”!—cognitive of mortality, enhancing acceptance of its ending:
“They shall know well “the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.”

VIII.

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Commentary:

The concluding stanza commences with the speaker’s rejection of the Resurrection:

“The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

Independent of a transcendent deity, we are granted autonomy (“freedom”), our lives governed by ancient, impersonal physical laws (the “dependency of day and night”) rather than a moral or spiritual prerequisite.

The stanza concludes with the image of an evening flock of pigeons making “Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”

“Ambiguous undulations” suggests impermanence, the inevitable intrusion of change as life transitions from beauty to death. We, like these birds, glide gracefully (“extended wings”), “sinking” inevitably toward the “darkness” of extinction.

REFLECTIONS:

Previous to my retirement, I had taught this poem for some twenty years as part of my course in Modern Poetry, unceasingly admiring its resonant Keats and Wordsworth innuendos.

Paradoxically modern in its delivery, cerebral and image focused, the poem is rooted in English Romanticism, celebrating the imagination’s witness to our fated passage into a parenthesis of light suspended between spheres of darkness.

Like much of Romantic poetry, again that of Wordsworth in its blank verse of unrhymed pentameter, melancholic disposition, rich symbolism, and lofty diction, its voluptuous fantasy, reminiscent of Keats, it supremely celebrates nature.

While there is an insistent tension through much of the poem between nature’s plenitude and the woman’s expressed need for something more, it’s crucial to Stevens’ purpose of philosophical debate.

The final stanza proffers epiphany, the woman’s possible acceptance of a cosmos devoid of divine certitude—“the old chaos of the sun,” a realm of “ambiguous undulations,” where no promise of resurrection intrudes upon the flux of being. We cannot be sure the woman is even present here. Critic Frank Kermode points out Stevens preference for open endings. He sees the poem’s final stanza as process, not conclusion.

Distinguished critic Helen Vender reads the poem as a movement toward a “natural supernaturalism”—a vision in which transcendence is reabsorbed into nature. The final stanza’s birds and “ambiguous undulations” affirm process, not permanence.

Stevens’ masterpiece, a secular hymn, grants solace not in transcendence but in the acceptance—and even the aesthetic affirmation—of metaphysical ambiguity: the freedom to choose, to become arbiters of all that we define as beautiful, grounded wholly within a mortal world.

–RJ

The Perfecț Evening: Tips on Social Etiquette

Pretense pervades most social relationships, less a flaw than a civic duty. There are ground rules that could be taken right out of Dale Carnegie’s landmark playbook, How to win Friends and Influence People. Obsequiousness is in. Sincerity a no-no.

When out with friends, be sure to temper news of your successes. It may sound like you’re boasting and, after all, your friends may have had a bad day. Best serve up your triumphs like a weak tea: faint, apologetic, and quickly forgotten.

Equally your woes. Everybody has them, and they’ll certainly not want subscribing to yours. And besides, nobody likes being cornered into false condolence. Nothing clears a room faster than earnest despair.

Try to agree with everyone. The food may be awful, but keep it to yourself. Silence signals discontent. Try a “thank you for a memorable meal!” It might get you invited again, and since you thought it “memorable,” having it again. If someone tells you of their transcendent ski venture at Aspen, a simple “awesome” suffices.

Whatever you do, don’t huddle up with someone, conversing in a corner. Avoid lingering In a conversation long enough to be known. Circulation’s democratic; depth, exclusionary. A minute per person hits the right balance between recognition and escape.

Encourage others to talk about themselves. Make them feel they’re the night’s chief exhibit, the most important person in the room, even though you can hardly stand them. It’s important to have people like you and, doing this, you can’t miss. It’s not an emotion but a technique. And who knows—this evening’s bore may prove tomorrow’s benefactor.

Be sure to dispense hugs liberally, even to those in daily life you eagerly avoid. Distribute them as though they were small-denomination currency passed out. Make them feel they’ve made the team.

At evening’s end, offer to help—clear plates, stack glasses, perhaps gesture nobly toward the tip if at a restaurant. Accept, with serene gratitude, the inevitable refusal. The offer, not the act, is what counts.

Should you encounter someone who violates these protocols—who speaks too candidly, listens too intently or, worst of all, means what they say, withdraw promptly. Avoid authenticity like a draft in an old house,

For instance, I have this “friend” on Facebook who “doth protest too much”(Hamlet). Practicing social etiquette, I don’t travel to his page anymore.

With these modest disciplines in place, your evenings are granted success: pleasantly forgettable, flawlessly managed, absent of those awkward intrusions—honesty, feeling, intuitive vapors that have been known to unsettle a perfectly good night.

—rj

ON TRUTH, POWER, AND THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES

In moments of political outrage, we often hear that some “moral compact” has been broken between the government and the people, as though public life rests on an understood promise of honesty and good faith. It is a comforting idea. It’s also, I think, a naïve one.

The record we inherit suggests otherwise. Bill Clinton misled the public under oath. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson deepened American involvement in the Vietnam War under a widening credibility gap. Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld the full truth of his condition from the electorate. These are not anomalies. They are reminders.

None of this excuses Donald Trump, whose conduct stands as an extreme case in its brazenness. But it does suggest that the deeper problem is not the breaking of a compact, but our belief that such a compact has ever governed political life in more than name.

Niccolò Machiavelli understood that those who govern must often act against truth while preserving its appearance. Thomas Hobbes argued that we submit to authority not because it is virtuous, but because it is necessary. Between them, the so-called compact begins to look less like a foundation than a useful fiction, one that steadies public faith even as it obscures political reality.

If that is so, then the question is not how to restore a moral politics, but how much of our moral life we should ever have entrusted to politics in the first place.

Here Henry David Thoreau offers a necessary restraint: that government is best which governs least, not because it is especially good, but because it is always liable to be otherwise.

And Wendell Berry reminds us, more quietly, that the work of responsibility does not belong first to governments at all, but to persons, living within limits, bound to places, accountable to one another in ways no distant authority can finally secure.

We have asked too much of politics, and in doing so, we have misunderstood it.

Power does not keep faith; it manages necessity. It persuades, it conceals, it endures. It cannot bear the weight of the moral order we would like to rest upon it.

That burden remains where it has always been—closer to home.

Not in the abstractions of the state, nor in the promises of those who govern, but in the small, stubborn practices of truthfulness and care: in what we say, what we refuse to say, what we permit, and what we will not.

If there is any compact worth defending, it is not the one we imagine between ourselves and power. It is the one we keep, or fail to keep, with one another.

—RJ

A War America Can’t Win: The Iran Crisis

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated aerial strikes on Iran, ostensibly to induce regime change and secure stability in the Middle East.

Central to this strategy was the expectation of a mass popular uprising—something glimpsed in January 2026, when tens of thousands of unarmed civilians took to the streets and were met with lethal force. Estimates suggest as many as 30,000 were killed, 7000 independently confirmed. The regime they opposed—a repressive Islamic theocracy entrenched since 1979—remains intact.

This is a war America is unlikely to win.

Despite the destruction of command centers, arsenals, and the targeted killing of senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has demonstrated a capacity for resilience that was either underestimated or ignored.

Its response has been asymmetric and expansive: ballistic missiles and drone strikes aimed not only at Israel but at a widening circle of nations hosting American bases—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Recent launches have extended even farther, toward Crete, Turkey, and the joint UK–U.S. base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, 2400 miles distant.

At such range, the perimeter of vulnerability shifts. Southeastern Europe comes into view; with further technological refinement, even cities such as Rome or Berlin may not remain beyond reach; in a decade, the United States.

As this conflict widens, its economic consequences are already apparent. Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, has driven prices upward, with projections rising sharply. The leverage is stark: Iran need not defeat the United States militarily to impose severe costs. It need only prolong the conflict.

The political implications are equally stark. Domestic opposition is mounting here at home, shaped less by geopolitics than by inflation, felt daily in grocery bills and at the gas pump. A war that amplifies those pressures becomes difficult to sustain, regardless of its stated aims.

Even proposed escalations such as a seizure of Kharg Island, which handles a significant portion of Iran’s oil exports, risk becoming symbolic victories at disproportionate cost.

The comparison to Iwo Jima is not misplaced: a tactical gain unlikely to alter the strategic reality. Much of Iran’s missile infrastructure remains embedded and protected, beyond the reach of conventional assault.

Recent Trump statements suggesting that U.S. objectives have largely been met already signal a search for an exit. Yet an off-ramp may not be readily available. Iran’s advantage lies in time. By sustaining pressure, economic as much as military, it can compel concessions without decisive confrontation.

There was another path.

Rather than precipitating war, a strategy of containment through sanctions and patience might have allowed the regime to atrophy under the weight of its own contradictions. Iran faces converging crises: acute water scarcity, environmental degradation, declining agricultural productivity, economic duress, and deep internal dissent. A large portion of its population—diverse, young, and increasingly disillusioned—has already demonstrated a willingness to demand change at great personal risk.

That internal pressure, not external force, may have proven the more decisive agent of transformation.

–RJ

My Porch of Books

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges

This year I decided to overhaul my reading habits by adopting what I call focused reading—pursuing a subject deeply rather than wandering endlessly from book to book. Instead of grazing randomly across titles, I try to follow a particular vein: reading several works that illuminate a topic, an author, an era, or a historical moment until the subject begins to feel textured and alive.

For years, though my reading had been eclectic, and not without pleasure, I began to sense that the most memorable intellectual experiences of my life had come, not from isolated books, but from immersion, one work leading naturally to another, ideas conversing across pages and centuries.

Reading then becomes less a pastime than a form of exploration, the mind moving gradually through a landscape rather than darting past it from the window of a passing train.

This year I began, as usual, with my annual eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction culled from authoritative sources. But going forward, I hope to limit that list to perhaps twenty titles—books that seem especially deserving of attention.

Alongside these, I’ve begun concentrating on several areas. This year they include the farming iconoclast Wendell Berry; the conservative economist Thomas Sowell; the late historian Walter Johnson; and the classical world—an area where I lack deeper exposure.

Next year, should I still walk the planet, I can imagine expanding the method further: perhaps ten topic areas, each composed of primary and secondary works. Five books per topic would yield roughly fifty works of focused reading, in addition to the twenty eclectic titles.

To give an example, one of this year’s areas of focus is the classical milieu. Staying within my five-book limit, I chose the following:

• The Republic — Plato
• Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
• The Bacchae — Euripides
• Metamorphoses — Ovid
• Letters from a Stoic — Seneca the Younger

So far, my experiment is yielding dividends. I’ve committed to reading a minimum of fifty pages a day—assuming an average book length of about three hundred pages—and by mid-March I’ve completed twelve books. Last year, by contrast, I finished only twenty.

I should confess that Atomic Habits by James Clear helped inspire the discipline. Clear’s practical application of behavioral psychology, ideas traceable to B. F. Skinner, encouraged me to approach reading not merely as an aspiration but as a daily practice. Nowadays I cringe when my routine threatens the minimum and will sometimes delay sleep simply to complete my pages.

Such discipline may seem quaint in an age that offers a thousand distractions. Once it was linear television that eroded the nation’s reading habits; today, the Internet amplifies the trend. Last year, nearly half of Americans, 48.5 percent, did not read a single book. In Britain, the figure stood at 40 percent, according to a YouGov poll reported in the Times Literary Supplement.

Bottom line, Americans spend roughly four to five hours each day watching television or streaming media; in Britain, the average approaches four and a half hours. Platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Facebook dominate much of that viewing.

Add the hours spent on smartphones, computers, and tablets and the total easily approaches seven hours a day, nearly the equivalent of a full workday, devoted to screens. Much of that time is spent watching movies, sports, or the endless scroll of digital entertainment.

Younger generations, though still fond of sports and films, increasingly inhabit the fast-moving currents of TikTok, YouTube, and video games.

Reading, by contrast, has steadily fallen out of fashion.

Nor has reading alone suffered. The social fabric has frayed as well. I remember when houses faced the street with broad porches where neighbors gathered in the evening, waiting the advent of night’s coolness, conversation drifting unhindered from one subject to another, board games on small tables, laughter an abundant sprinkling of neighborly fellowship.

This simple act of sitting together seemed reason enough to linger.

Today, many houses turn their porches to the rear, facing private yards rather than the street, as if community itself had quietly retreated.

Perhaps this is why books continue to matter.

Reading restores a community the modern world has forsaken.. Open a book and time folds in upon itself: Plato resumes his patient inquiry into justice; Seneca counsels composure in adversity; Ovid reminds us that the human story is one long sequence of transformations. The centuries speak again in voices at once distant and intimate.

Books, in this sense, comprise the old porch of civilization.

There we sit again with the living and the dead alike, the conversation unbroken. The room grows quiet, the hour late, yet the mind moves freely—wandering Athens with Aristotle, pausing in the tragic shadows of Euripides, or returning, perhaps a little wiser, to our own small corner of the world.

So I keep my modest covenant of fifty pages a day. Not simply to finish more books, though that is pleasant enough. I read because within those pages waits a larger company and a wider horizon.

In a distracted age, the turning of a page may be one of the last quiet forms of freedom left to us.

—rj

Ignored by Media: African Rangers on the Front Line

In a story largely ignored by the American press, armed militants attacked a ranger station in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Upemba National Park on March 3, 2026, killing five rangers and looting and destroying infrastructure.

The attackers remain unidentified but may be linked to Mai-Mai or Bakata Katanga militias, which have historically used Upemba and other parks as hideouts.

Britain’s Prince William, an ardent conservationist active in organizations such as United for Wikdlife, issued a statement lamenting their deaths: “Environmental protection has become one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.”

According to the Game Rangers Association of Africa and the International Ranger Federation, at least 630 rangers have been killed protecting wildlife and protected areas since 2011, including 200 in the Congo’s sprawling Virunga National Park alone, home to one-third of Africa’s endangered mountain gorillas.

Beyond poaching and militia attacks, Africa’s wildlife faces ongoing threats from illegal mining, oil exploration, and agriculture incursion.

Adjacent human populations also place enormous pressure on parks: many rely on charcoal and bushmeat, and some establish homesteads within protected areas.

Ranger deaths in Africa average 47–60 annually. Just between June 2024 and May 2025, 67 rangers were killed. Despite their sacrifices in protecting forests, wildlife, watersheds, and ecosystems on which millions depend, these defenders rarely receive the recognition afforded to soldiers, police, or firefighters.

The fate of Africa’s wildlife is dire. Upemba, established in 1939 and covering over 11,000 km² of wetlands, savannas, and mountains, is home to an estimated 1,800 species. Once teeming with 100,000 elephants in the 1950s, fewer than 200 remain today. Of the once-thriving zebra population, only 200 survive in Africa’s only park offering refuge for zebras. Its lion population, once flourishing, is now extinct.

Climate change further exacerbates these threats, disrupting weather patterns and causing long-term droughts.

Rapid population growth—Africa’s net population increase averages 2.5% annually, with Nigeria projected to reach 750 million by century’s end—intensifies competition for natural resources.

Meanwhile, poverty, especially in rural areas, continues to rise. Some countries, including Zimbabwe and Angola, have recently implemented reductions of wildlife herds to feed growing populations.

Addressing this complex dilemma requires holistic solutions. Key measures include:

   •   Financing protective strategies, including international support, especially given climate change’s role in ecosystem stress.

   •   Expanding access to birth control and reproductive health services, countering population pressures.

   •   Establishing community-based conservation councils and alternative livelihoods like eco-tourism.

   •   Protecting species through migration corridors, no-entry zones, and crop-compensation programs.

   •   Employing satellite and monitoring technology to track poaching and militia activity.

   •   Restoring degraded habitats and prevent illegal settlement and mining through government-NGO partnerships.

   •   Strengthening ranger capacity with training, equipment, and fair compensation.

The five rangers killed in Upemba on March 3 died in a park most of the world has never heard of

While Africa’s wildlife, forests, and watersheds are under siege, the greater tragedy may be how little attention this struggle receives beyond the continent itself. In remote parks like Upemba, rangers patrol landscapes larger than some countries, confronting militias and poachers with little recognition and fewer resources.

They stand, quite literally, as the last line between survival and disappearance. If the world continues to look away, the elephants, zebras, and forests of Upemba may vanish—and the quiet heroism of the men and women who died defending them will have been in vain.

–RJ

Love and War: A Moral Perspective

“This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since. The dark human monstrous thing comes and tramples the little towns and never even knows their names. It would make Port William afraid and shed its blood and grieve its families and damage its hope.

“I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies. I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies.”

—Wendell Berry, Jaber Crow

Exploring Japan: Collective Kindness

I’m currently reading travel connoisseur Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, a delightful read. Unlike many travel writers who guide us to a country’s tourist amenities—sights, hotels, restaurants—Iyer illuminates its culture. He knows Japan intimately, married to a Japanese wife and calling the country home for the past thirty-two years.

As a serviceman, terribly young at the time, I visited Japan twice on R & R. I was impressed by its remarkable post-war recovery and, even more, by its people—the most courteous, polite, clean, and honest of any nation I’ve been privileged to visit. Leave a camera in your room at checkout, and they’ll have it waiting at the desk when you return to inquire

The Japanese aim to please, integral to a culture of collectivized kindness.

Iyer shares a German visitor’s observation from 1910:

“If a fisherman sees you emerge from the ocean after swimming, he will quickly remove the sandals from his feet, bow, and place them before you in the sand so that you do not have to walk down the street barefoot.”

It’s still that way.

Purchase a gift and it will often be wrapped—even in newspaper, say from The New York Times—simply to heighten your pleasure.

Don’t be surprised to find a basket of toothbrushes, toothpaste, and floss in your hotel bathroom.

For sheer convenience, Japan has 5.6 million vending machines—more than anywhere else in the world.

In America, convenience stores are a way of life, especially along interstate highways. They are also, sadly, frequently robbed.

In Japan, which has more than 50,000 convenience stores in a nation roughly the size of California, they are places of safety when one fears assault.

Outwardly and inwardly, they are uniform—for your convenience.

And yet they differ.

Some deliver.

Some are expansive, two-story outlets.

Some are specialized for the elderly.

If you need someone to console you in your grief, Amazon Japan can send a Buddhist priest to your door.

Feeling lonely? There are companies that will provide a pseudo-relative or friend—a mother or father, even a girlfriend.

Train stations, spotlessly clean, often feature signs:

“In order not to bother other customers, please show good manners and create a comfortable atmosphere.”

One of my special memories of Japan—beyond the scalding baths where nudity among the sexes was not a problem (though that may be changing as immigration increases) was the custom of not opening a gift in the giver’s presence, lest one reveal disappointment or offer false praise.

I like Iyer’s observation of Japan’s intuitive grasp that some things cannot be perfected:

“Japan has a sharp-edged sense of what can be perfected—gizmos, surfaces, manners—and of what cannot (morals, emotions, families). Thus it’s more nearly perfect on the surface than any country I’ve met, in part because it’s less afflicted by the sense that feelings, relationships, or people can ever be made perfect.”

I adore the Japanese penchant for harmony with nature, of which we are a part—reflected in meticulous gardens replete with lanterns, bridges, fountains, lakes, and ponds; sculpted cherry trees and moss marking the seasonal passage; myriad stone and pebbled pathways; sanctuaries of stillness instilling reflection—the way of Zen.

I love their cherishing of the ceremonial, their intuitive sense of inherent beauty in redeeming a pattern—whether arranging flowers or serving tea.

Above all, I love Japan’s simplicity. Dressed in kimono, I slept on floors in narrow rooms divided by fragile sliding doors: beneath me, my shikibuton; my head resting on a single makura; a kakebuton drawn close against the night chill. Nothing excessive. Nothing clamoring. Only wood, paper, cloth, and quiet. A nation refined not by accumulation, but by restraint.

Japan—a place apart. May it always remain so.

—rj

My Experiment in Simultaneous Reading

I’ve just finished Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch alongside Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America.

I’ve never read two books simultaneously before, but the pairing worked. The Goldfinch proved a genuine page-turner for me—a Dickensian, plot-driven suspense novel layered with thematic, even philosophical, meditations on life’s meaning.

Berry, by contrast, is at his consummate best in The Unsettling of America, distilling a passionate defense of the rural, the sanctity of non-industrial agriculture free of chemicals and heavy machinery. It is, finally, a lament for the erosion of community in our contemporary drift toward urbanization and accumulation. Berry is Thoreau à la mode. Simplicity, he reminds us, yields contentment.

I’m now reading Berry’s Jayber Crow, perhaps the finest introduction to his Port William novels, sixteen in number.

Since my experiment of reading two books at once has proven fruitful, I’m also reading A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by renowned travel writer Pico Iyer.

Iyer never disappoints in his genius for illuminating the subtle ambiences of disparate cultures. I confess I’m easy prey for this particular read as a longtime devotee of Japanese culture, now under threat. May ikigai, the art of pursuing one’s bliss, never meet its end.

My decision to weave a topical thread through my otherwise eclectic reading marks a meaningful turning in my reading approach. Last year I read twenty books. With ten already read this year, I anticipate—barring life’s interruptions—fifty or even sixty by year’s end.

But numbers surely are incidental. To read this way is to live more than one life, testing long held convictions, enlarging sympathies, and keeping my mind unsettled in the best sense of the word.

—rj

Growth is Good?

When driving, I not infrequently see bumper stickers proclaiming, “Growth is Good.” I’m not sure about that. I never have been.

I’m drawn to solitude. I can’t fully explain why; I only know it has always been so.

From childhood, I loved my native New England—its rural charm, its villages gathered around commons harkening back to Revolutionary times. I miss the sea, the rolling mountains, the stone walls and white-steepled churches.

Vermont has long held me in its grip, with Maine not far behind—rural, twisting lanes with scant traffic, mountains rising beyond charming villages, the faint salt scent of the seashore.

For all my love of open space, my early years were divided between rural Rowley, MA, and Philadelphia. I’ll take Rowley any day over the so-called City of Brotherly Love. I have returned to Philadelphia twice; both visits stirring up memories I would rather forget—urban blight, high crime, dirty streets, endless row houses and sweltering summer nights.

When I lived in Rowley in the 1950s, the town numbered about 1,600 souls. Thirty-five miles north of Boston, it has since tripled in population to roughly 6,400 and become a fashionable bedroom community for Boston’s well-paid professionals, aided by the MBTA Commuter Rail—a comfortable fifty-five-minute jaunt into Boston’s North Station.

We lived on Bennett Hill Road, a mile’s walk from the common. In summer I would rush out the door, glove hooked over my bicycle’s handlebar, eager for baseball on the green.

I loved walking that narrow, curving road lined with beach plum bushes and open fields, breathing the smell of nearby salt marsh bordering the ocean, as I waited for the school bus at the corner.

Home was a two-hundred-year-old house set on twenty-six wooded acres of pine. Its long driveway was lined with boulder stone walls in the old New England manner, guarded by towering elms like ancient sentries.

Deep in those woods I had a private place I visited often, drawn by its stillness—the scent of pine rising from fallen needles that softened the earth beneath my feet.

Today, Rowley finds itself embroiled in debate over a state mandate requiring density zoning for roughly six hundred new multi-family housing units near the train station.

Bennett Hill Road has changed. The beach plum bushes are gone; open fields have yielded to wooded suburban enclaves. In the 1950s, the average home sold for $10,000. Today it approaches $1 million.

I cannot forecast Rowley’s fate, though I hope it doesn’t become another Danvers or Peabody—once distinct towns now absorbed into the dense sprawl of greater Boston.

A major development called “Rowley Farms” proposes a “town within a town,” combining denser housing and retail—an idea that would have been unimaginable in 1957.

Bumper stickers may insist that growth is good. I remain unconvinced. I am, and likely will remain, a stubborn holdout for a way of life that prized quiet contentment—secluded from the noise, the restlessness, and the accumulated griefs of urban life.

—rj