Author: RJ

Retired English prof (Ph. D., UNC), who likes to garden, blog, pursue languages (especially Spanish) and to share in serious discussion on vital issues such as global warming, the role of government, energy alternatives, etc. Am a vegan and, yes, a tree hugger enthusiastically. If you write me, I'll answer.

Celebrating Emily Dickinson’s Birthday

Yesterday, Dec. 10th, marked the 194th birthday of Emily Dickinson (b. 1830), one of America’s most gifted poets.

Her love of nature, keen observations on life’s ironies, and daring truthfulness won me over early. I know of no poetry with more nuance.

Of her many poems, my favorite is “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” with its nature analogies exhibiting the incongruity of the outer appearance with the inner reality. We are often masters at concealing life’s griefs.

Though I’ve visited The Homestead (Amherst , MA) on several occasions, I’m ready to visit again to take-in the Dickinson Museum updates, which include the restoration of Emily’s beloved garden, her father’s gifted conservatory to Emily and her sister, Lavinia, and the recently completed reconstruction of the family’s carriage house.

In short, The Homestead is my literary Mecca, as there is much in Emily’s sensibility that resonates with me.

Below, Emily’s upstairs bedroom where she composed her nearly 2000 poems and many letters:

It was cerebral musician Patty Smith who reminded me of Dickinson’s birthday in her substack post, replete with quotations from her poems and letters.

I’m repeating them here, as they superbly express Dickinson’s keen sensitivity and writing acumen. Smith observes that any of them would serve well as a writing prompt:

“Forever is composed of nows.”

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

“That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

“The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul–BOOKS.”

“The lovely flowers embarrass me. They make me regret I am not a bee…”

“I don’t profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.”

“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”

“Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.”

“To shut your eyes is to travel.”

“your brain is wider than the sky”

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,–you must have noticed them in the street,–how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

“I have been bent and broken, but -I hope- into a better shape.”

–RJoly

I Altered My Routine Last Week


I altered my routine last week, signing up for an eight week edX course, The Living Amazon: Science, Cultures and Sustainability in Practice.

It’s all that I could hope for, an intense, but well-informed analysis of the Amazon’s plight, with 21% of its forest already harvested to make room for cattle ranches, mining and lumber interests.

The fallout for its 1 million indigenous, suddenly brought into contact with an entrenched, and growing profit-motive corporate presence, has been disastrous, violence not uncommon, indigenous lands degraded or appropriated, and cultures eroded.

Not only does the Amazon, so vital to mitigating climate change, need saving, but social justice must prevail.

The course, hosted by distinguished earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, is conducted in Portuguese, but subtitled in Spanish, and English.

Despite the Amazon’s plight, Nobre doesn’t lose hope that remedies can be found to halt the carnage while simultaneously offering a prosperous economic future, founded on eco-safeguards and beneficial for its indigenous peoples.

Frankly, if we don’t achieve solutions, the consequences will prove apocalyptic for all of us. As is, we’re nearing the tipping point of no return in the existential challenge of climate change.

In actuality, the Amazon transcends Brazil, the Amazon basin embracing portions of nine countries, housing the largest tropical forest on earth and, with its river system, 7 million square kilometers, or about 40% of South America.

50 diverse Andean-Amazonian ecosystems are within its traverse, collectively comprising 13% of the world’s biodiversity. 34% of the world’s birds and 20% of its mammals are endemic to the basin.

The Amazon biome functions as an important carbon sink, helping
to reduce the global heating rate. Unfortunately, its effect seems to be weakening, the basin experiencing diminished rainfall and forest fire occurrence.

I’m excited about this course and trust that informed, I can do my part in helping sustain the Amazon’s crucial contribution to earth’s welfare.

rj

From Pietas to Relevance: Reflections on the Death of the Classics

Boston Latin School

The ancient classics, once the hallmark of the liberal arts, have increasingly vanished from today’s college campuses.

I remember with fondness my Massachusetts education. In the eighth grade, we read The Odyssey. In high school, I enrolled in what was dubbed the “classical” curriculum, emphasizing languages and the humanities.

In those days, you could major in Latin for four years, culminating in reading not only Cicero and Seneca, but Virgil’s The Aeneid, a work that’s impacted me immensely across the years.

If you’re lucky enough to get into Philips Exeter Academy, not far from where I lived, you’ll find the classics still in full bloom, courses not only in Latin, but Greek, to an advanced level. There’s even a classics club.

In the main, however, exposure to the classics has undergone steep decline.

An early harbinger, the year before I entered the University of North Carolina’s English Ph. D. program, the required Latin reading exam was dropped.

Today, issues of relevancy, racism, changing student interests, and funding have sped up a near universal decline in classics exposure across college campuses.

While Harvard and Princeton still retain courses in the classics, though in English and within a comparative global setting, other colleges have been dropping classics programs altogether, among them, Canisius College, Whitman College, Elmira College, the University of Vermont, Valparaiso University and Howard University, the only historically Black college to feature a classics department.

But back to my New England boyhood days, I remember going “junking” as we called it, ransacking antique stores, among their fare, scores of Latin public school primers, palpable evidence of a discarding of a former ubiquitous cultural presence.

In nearby Boston, there still exists its premium public educational institution, Boston Latin School, America’s first public school, founded in 1635, a year before Harvard College.

In keeping with its traditional Latin emphasis, options in Latin language courses remain, but the trend, as elsewhere, has been to evolve curriculum to service a diverse student body and transition to modern educational priorities.

I accept it’s at least better to retain the classics in English translation where budgets permit than to guillotine them altogether and acknowledge we live in a global village and musn’t exclude its verities of wisdom contributory to fostering a better world.

For nearly thirty years, I taught The Aeneid on a private university campus in a course called Western Classics, the only professor doing so. Its notion of self-discipline over impulsiveness, the obligation to duty (pietas) and mission (fatum) remain integral to civil integrity.

As the late academic Louise Cowan aptly put it, “To lose the classics is to lose a long heritage of wisdom concerning human nature, something not likely to be acquired again. Yet most college curricula now remain sadly untouched by their august presence, or at best make a gesture in their direction with a few samplings for select students. Such neglect is one of the most serious threats our society faces today” (“The Necessity of the Classics,” Modern Age Journal).

–RJ

Blurring Boundaries: Bruce Duffy’s Vision of Wittgenstein and Cambridge Minds

To behold death in the face of this once, he knew there could be no reincarnation, and he thought it a blessing, to have this once to swell forth, then to be enfolded like a seed into the sheltering darkness of eternity — to be lost in time among such furrows as the sea makes (Duffy, The World as I Found It).

When Joyce Carol Oates praised Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (1987) as “one of the five best non-fictional novels,” I knew it would be my next read.

A blend of fact and fiction, it replays the legacy of esteemed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s complex life, thought, and turbulent relationships with fellow Cambridge contemporaries, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.

Born into a  privileged Viennese family of wealth and culture, much of his adult life was impacted by a domineering father, his experience as a combat soldier, frequent retreats from public life, and sustained quest for truth.

Enigmatic, his thinking underwent continuous flux, making Duffy’s achievement quite remarkable.

Duffy didn’t have the resources of extant biographies at the time.

Adding to his  challenge was integrating Wittgenstein’s complex thought into his narrative, yet retaining readers unversed in analytical abstraction.

Wittgenstein premised the insufficiency of philosophy in ascertaining reality, its true function one of providing examples subject for further investigation. It mustn’t attempt to usurp science.

The World as I Found It unfolds episodically, interwoven with asides to the three philosophers—their temperaments, perspectives, strengths and weaknesses.

Of the three academic luminaries, Wittgenstein and Russell captivated my interest with their disparate temperaments: Wittgenstein, the youthful upstart; Russell, the widely celebrated academic renowned for his contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics.

In contrast, though the elder G.E. Moore, brilliant and benevolent, serves as mediator between the two rivals, his serene domesticity and lack of the same intense character traits, renders him less compelling than Russell, ebullient with conceit, yet haunted by self-doubt and bouts of jealousy, the putative exponent of free love; or Wittgenstein, volatile in temperament, given to barbed tongue directness, unsparing and wounding when critiquing his colleagues’ scholarly endeavors.

Wittgenstein emerges a good man, sincerely seeking life’s meaning and doing the right thing; Russell, in contrast, competitive and self-indulgent.

It appears Wittgenstein underwent some kind of religious conversion during his war years, though not in the conventional sense, perhaps influenced by Tolstoy, whose Gospel in Brief he carried everywhere and could virtually quote from memory. 

In fashioning a fictional biography, Duffy made numerous changes not conforming to the biographical facts or timelines:

No letters exist between Wittgenstein and his despotic father.

He assigns Wittgenstein two sisters. He had three.

Wittgenstein never met D. H. Lawrence, despite Bloomsbury’s Lady Ottoline Morrell’s best efforts.  

It was Wittgenstein’s excluded sister, Hermine, not Gretl, who sheltered Jews in Nazi occupied Vienna at great personal risk. This anomaly puzzles me.

Then there’s the inimitable, impulsive Max, rough in exterior, potentially violent, yet Wittgenstein’s faithful companion. Duffy confesses in his Epilogue that he never existed, reminding us of the controversy erupting on the book’s publication: Is it ethical to fictionalize historical figures and events, selectively altering character dynamics and outcomes to serve a narrative?

Still, the defining lineaments of Wittgenstein’s life are never distant: the interplay of a controlling father; the family’s wealth and cultural milieu; the several sibling suicides; the cottage built and retreated to in remote Norway; the two years of trench warfare on the Eastern Front in the Great War; the profound influence of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character; the failed teaching stint in rural Austria; the abandonment of Cambridge; the late sojourn in Ireland and visit to America; the move into his physician’s home as he confronted his fatal prostate cancer. Even his last words, “I have lived a happy life.”

Seldom have I read a book so beautifully written and stylistically riveting, the cadence of its sprawling sentences endowed with verbal exactitude, rendering scenes and personages into palpable visages, an exemplar for aspiring writers.

The New York Review of Books deemed Life as I Found It a classic, restoring its availability in a handsome Classic Series edition, replete with Duffy preface and epilogue.

At its core, The World as I Found It  transcends philosophy, embracing the often contradictory lives of those driven to understanding their world.

A narrative about ambition, genius, and the human condition, it offers profound insights into the interplay of intellect, emotion, and morality.

—RJ

 

What Happens Then? Trump’s Myopic Climate Change Agenda

Caring about Mother Earth like many of you, I lament Trump’s myopic approach to climate change reflected in his pledge to curtail the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Renewable energy alternatives like solar, wind, and electric vehicles will be curtailed, prolonging our fossil fuel dependency.

Unfortunately, climate change didn’t resonate as an important issue for many voters, inflation, job security, healthcare, and immigration taking precedence.

Not infrequently, public attention to climate concerns follows the oscillations of natural disasters and temperature rise, snuffed out shortly after each by more immediate local concerns.

As is, we’re already behind in our efforts to mitigate climate change, hastening earth’s demise and dooming future generations to apocalyptic consequences formerly the realm of science fiction.

Unlike the biblical Joseph, we are unlikely to stow up for the future. Alas, the seemingly distant phenomena of melting glaciers, droughts, famines, and biodiversity loss may falsely shelter us from their unfolding consequences.

The danger looms that Trump’s intransigence on climate change may motivate developing nations to do the same in view of budget restraints.

An excerpt from poet Neil Gaiman’s moving tribute to Rachel Carson, “After Silence,” speaks to our malaise.

What happens then?
Are consequences consequent?
The answers come from the world itself
The songs are silent,
and the spring is long in coming.

There’s a voice that rumbles beneath us
and after the end the voice still reaches us
Like a bird that cries in hunger
or a song that pleads for a different future.
Because all of us dream of a different future.
And somebody needs to listen.
To pause. To hold.

A Seat at the Table: Why Economic Rights Must Transcend Identity Politics

In a recent Brimmings post, I cautioned Democrats to avoid identity politics: “While minority rights matter, they musn’t be set against the economic rights of all Americans to a fair share. Otherwise, we reap continuing resentment, social fissure, and exploitation.”

To blame working class white males for Harris’ defeat isn’t where it’s at. Truth is America’s working class transcends race and ethnicity. 15% of Blacks voted for Trump; 41% of Hispanic voters did the same. Collectively, they provided the margin of victory in the battleground states.

Perceiving themselves as marginalized while others jumped the queue, they voted their resentment. Trump masterfully exploited that resentment, focusing on unchecked immigration (8 million) at the southern border under four years of Biden.

America’s healing lies in addressing their grievances; if not, we’ll continue to be prey to demagoguery and its selfish interests.

Everyone needs to feel they’ve a place at the table, regardless of race, origin, or background.

—rj

Beyond Self: The Power of Empathy in Troubling Times”

In this anxiety-ridden age, I’m sometimes tempted to tune out the endless cacophony and retreat into a myopic vista of self-concern. But in doing so, I’d foreclose on empathy, essential for promoting understanding, compassion, and a kinder world.

It’s why I read daily and widely. To not do so exacts a price I’m unwilling to pay. Favorite author Elif Shafak expresses my sentiment superbly:

“It is the Age of Angst indeed, but it will be a more dangerous and broken world if it were to become the Age of Apathy. The moment we become desensitised. The moment we stop following what is happening in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan… the moment we stop thinking about our fellow human beings, and their stories and silences, here and everywhere…. the moment we stop paying attention, we stop connecting across borders, we stop caring.

“If there is one emotion that really should frighten us, it is the lack of all emotions. It is numbness. It is apathy.”

—rj

Early Voters Signal a New Day for America

According to the most recent polls, Harris and Trump are in a dead heat, the outcome uncertain. Sounds awful? Relax!

The polls are wrong.

Trump blew the Latino vote with the Madison Square Garden hate fest. Early voting returns show women voting in record numbers for Kamala. Same with seniors, concerned about healthcare under Trump.

Wednesday morning, a new day for America, a glass ceiling shattered, democracy prevails, and a watching world rejoices.

—rjoly

Trump’s Madison Square Garden Debacle: Is This the End?

Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last Sunday may very well have alienated Latinos across the country and cost him the election.

The wound was inflicted not by Trump, but by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who appeared as a warm-up act before Trump took the stage.

Drawing from a barrage of stereotypes targeting Black, Jewish, Muslim, and Latino communities, Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as “a floating isle of garbage,” adding that Latinos “love making babies.”

Welcome to the October surprise!

Although the Republican campaign attempted immediate damage control, the fallout of rage was immediate and widespread.

Pivotal state Pennsylvania has a 427,000 Puerto Rican population. Then there’s North Carolina (115,000), Georgia (101,000), and Arizona (65,000), all of them battleground states essential for a Trump victory.

Nationally, 36 million Latinos are eligible to vote next week, up from 32 million in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.

Trump’s been on shaky ground from the beginning, many Puerto Ricans still nursing a grudge over the former President’s reluctance to grant islanders $20bn in aid in the aftermath of hurricane Maria in September 2017 in which 3000 died. Puerto Rico went without power for 181 days.

His acting Homeland Security secretary, Elaine Duke, reported to the NYT Trump proposed selling or divesting the entire island of Puerto Rico. following the disaster.

In the meantime, Democrats have made it a priority to grant Puerto Rico statehood, an obvious political maneuver giving them two more senators and, with the probable inclusion of Washington, DC, two more.

As for the Puerto Rico commonwealth, its voters on election day will again be deciding on statehood. The 2024 plebiscite differs, however, the previous six allowing voters the popular option of remaining a commonwealth, exempt from federal taxes. This year’s plebiscite omits that option. It’s simply statehood, independence, or independence with free association, virtually assuring statehood approval.

Critics claim that House Democrats, in collaboration with Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party (PPD), rigged the plebiscite by passing the Puerto Rico Passage Act (2022), which established the current plebiscite with its limited options (Plebiscite).

Meanwhile, Puerto Rican voters on the mainland are not unappreciative of Democrat overtures on their behalf, nationally and in Puerto Rico. “We are not garbage and we are not lazy and we’re all American citizens ready to vote in this election,” said Luis Miranda, founding president of the Hispanic Federation and chairperson of the Latino Victory Fund (Puerto Rican Jokes).

Statehood, nevertheless, remains an uphill climb. To achieve congressional approval of statehood, Democrats will need to control both chambers. Although a simple majority vote is all that’s needed in each, in the way looms the Senate’s filibuster with its sixty vote threshold.

Kamala Harris has pledged to temporally suspend it in any vote to restore Roe v. Wade, a move opponents argue could make the filibuster obsolete.

There have been two attempts on Trump’s life, possibly a third. Fortunately, these efforts failed. However, the fiasco at Madison Square Garden may have dealt a fatal blow to Trump’s chances of returning to office in a close election.

–rj