Category: People

Beyond Treasure Island: Leo Damrosch on the Art, Debt, and Tragedy of Robert Louis Stevenson

Literary Hub: Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny

Leo Damrosch, now in his mid-eighties and the author of acclaimed biographies of Swift, Johnson and Boswell, Rousseau, Casanova, Tocqueville, and Blake, has given us another spellbinder in The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson: Story Teller.

Readers may fairly wonder why another Stevenson biography. There had been Frank McLynn’s 1994 life, which The Christian Science Monitor thought “magisterial,” followed by Camille Peri’s A Wider Shore, appearing only a year before this one.

Damrosch claims no new discoveries, and critics are right that his book is largely a synthesis. But I think it offers three things the others do not.

First, he lets Stevenson speak. Much of the life is told through the nearly 3,000 surviving letters collected in the eight-volume-volume Yale edition (1994–95) by Booth and Mehew.

Ironically, Stevenson found letter-writing a chore, yet drafted each one several times to make it seem casual. The result is a kind of autobiography he intended, but never wrote.

Second, Damrosch looks at the whole body of work, not just the famous novels. I was struck by the essays, where Stevenson defends indigenous peoples and condemns the excesses of capitalism, and by the poetry, which scholars have overlooked, revelatory of his inner life. We don’t think of Stevenson as a social activist, yet it was woven into his passionate nature.

Third, he shows how much landscape mattered. Although Stevenson disliked Scotland’s wind, rain, and chill, he delighted in the mountainous Highlands, its violent history shaping Kidnapped and its topography nearly a character, as in Thomas Hardy’s novels. His landscapes are kinetic in their motion, redolent in sound, felt rather than described. He disliked adjective pile-ups.

Nothing is overlooked: Stevenson’s lifelong respiratory illnesses and fragility that would launch a peripatetic search for a more favorable clime that concluded with Samoa, the temporary breach with his family when he renounced their devout Calvinist faith and refused to follow the family profession of engineering, his early amours, his friendships, and quarrels, his momentous marriage to flamboyant Californian Fanny Osbourne, a divorcee twelve years older than himself, with two children, defying social mores.

Fanny was central to his success, despite her mercurial moods, gifted with an intuitive critical intelligence that he took seriously.

There was nothing in his early years of schooling predictive of his future writing prowess. He found the curriculum boring and was averse to mathematics. His ennui continued at the University of Edinburgh, where he took a degree in law to please his worried parents. He wanted to be a writer.

Fluent in French, he was a Francophile, enamored of sun-drenched Provence, where he and Fanny lived two years, charmed by its hilltop houses of stone, winding lanes, and proximity to the Mediterranean. One novel, The Wrecker, co-written with his stepson, Lloyd, and several of his novellas, short stories and travelogues have French settings.

He read widely, focusing especially on Melville’s South Pacific novels, Omoo and Typee, with their depiction of an idyllic, unspoiled archetypal paradise increasingly imperiled by European intrusion—from lustful whalers bearing fatal diseases that ravaged Polynesian immune systems to missionaries enforcing Western norms on a traditional way of life.

Melville kindled in Stevenson an eager desire to taste the Pacific’s delights, inspiring the journey to his final Samoan home. There, he embraced the island warmth, cherishing the thunderous advancing surf and its reluctant, muffled retreat.

Tall and very thin, his clothes drooped from his skeletal frame like rags on a hanger. And yet his voice was magical and compelling, strong and melodious, rhythmically poetic, mesmerizing in his command of so many subjects. His presence filled a room. Congenial, he made friends easily.

Damrosch gives thoughtful attention to all the principal works, Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped among them, and wants us to see Stevenson as a deliberate artist, not just a writer of adventure stories. Stevenson himself believed the great storyteller satisfies “the nameless longings of the reader” and obeys “the ideal laws of the daydream.”

Rising early, he gave four hours to writing in the morning and two more in the afternoon, a conscientious sentence smithy, revising repeatedly for clarity, cadence, and eloquence.

Damrosch is candid about what made some of Stevenson’s novels succeed and others fail. While admiring a perseverance that transcended repeated bouts of respiratory illness and constant financial pressure, yielding adventure narratives that continue to fascinate readers young and old, Damrosch nevertheless considers his artistry modest when compared to the expansive idea novels of George Eliot or Henry James. A slight quality of the jejune hovers over his penchant for heroic romance, pirates, and high-seas ventures: a proclivity Stevenson constantly wrestled with in his quest to be taken seriously as a literary artist.

I credit Damrosch for a biography truthfully told, a full portraiture of a gifted artist constrained by illness, Victorian taboos, and limited range from a greater achievement about to commence.

His books have never gone out of print. They speak to the human longing for the distant and the exotic. Stevenson’s gift was his ability to render that quest palpable.

Damrosch thinks Stevenson’s greatest completed novel, written during his Vailima sojourn, was Catriona, and Stevenson agreed: “I shall never do a better book than Catriona; that is my high water mark.”

Yet it is the unfinished Weir of Hermiston, set in the familiar Pentland Hills of his youth, that hints at a higher literary summit. As Damrosch notes, it is “no adventure yarn . . . but a tale of people trapped in the selves they can’t help being,” a tragic, richly autobiographical work marked by a central father-son feud and women far more fully realized than in any of his earlier fiction.

Pentland Hills

Every morning Stevenson paced the room, dictating it to his stepdaughter Belle, the words flowing as if the whole novel were already conceived.

Though a fierce opponent of imperialism, Stevenson lived in Samoa as a benign patriarch, operating his estate like a Scottish chieftain among his clan. The Samoans embraced him for defending their native autonomy, affectionately bestowing on him the title Tusitala, or “storyteller.”

Money worries dogged him incessantly. Having built the expansive estate of Vailima, Stevenson was the sole breadwinner for an immense extended household: his wife, mother, stepson Lloyd, stepdaughter Belle, her deadbeat husband Joe, and their son Austin. Compounding the strain was a retinue of nineteen full- and part-time Samoan staff, leaving Stevenson perpetually tethered to his desk to keep the estate afloat.

Vailima

They lived lavishly, as in his birthday feast, three weeks before his death, that included a whole heifer, twenty roasted pigs, and fifty chickens.

In those Vailima years, he had written “pot-boilers” to pay the bills and was ashamed of them.

Then came the evening of December 3. He had just filled the wine glasses and was helping Fanny make a salad when he suddenly grabbed his head and cried out, falling backward into the arms of his devoted servant Sosimo, never to regain consciousness.

Vailima had been a hiatus from chronic ailments. He seemed, though thin, to at last enjoy robust health. Yet in a cruel irony, the chronic lung trouble that had stalked him his entire life did not claim him. He died of a swift cerebral hemorrhage. He had just turned 44.

In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were interred on Mount Vaea, 700 feet above Vailima.

Vailima has been a museum since 1994, restored largely through American philanthropy sources, governed by a Samoan council, and attracting an estimated 180,000, visitors, mostly anglophones, annually.

News of Stevenson’s early death shocked his many friends in Europe, among them his lifelong friend and admirer Henry James who, reading his posthumously published unfinished Weir of Hermiston, lamented that its sheer beauty rendered his loss “doubly heartbreaking. . . the extinction of a talent that could still give one such a sense of freshness and life, of not yet having played, as it were, its highest card.”

–rj

In Memoriam: Annie Dillard (1945-2026)

With the death of Annie Dillard, another of America’s great writers has left the room this year. She made her first published appearance in 1974. Over the next several decades, she wrote more books, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a modern day Walden that’s become must reading for nature lovers and devotees of the meditated, simplified life. Then, with The Maytrees book in 2007, she chose not to write another: “I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.” In subsequent years, she focused on reading, painting, and walking.

In the rush of life, she gave me pause to weigh life’s essentials, to distill each day for what it is, to observe nature down to its minutiae with wonder and joy. I admired her passion for nature, her eloquence and candid confrontation with mortality and aging. Like the flowing waters of Tinker Creek, her legacy survives:

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

RIP, dear Annie.

Wendell Berry: He Tried To Teach Us

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
—Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

The NYT this evening is reporting the death of Kentucky sage Wendell Berry at his home in Henry County. Earlier this year, I focused on reading his major essay collections and two of his novels.

Berry stridently opposed agribusiness, advocating for family farmers and the sustaining of local communities. He refrained from using farm machinery and chemical fertilizers. Horses and mules, they did the plowing.

Berry had his stubborn ways, nearly Amish in his habits. He wrote his many books in pencil on a yellow legal pad, his wife Tanya typing them up for publishers. He never owned a computer or even a television. His clock was set by sunrise and sunset. In simplicity, he found a happiness that possessions could not give.

He had much to teach us about a way of life that yielded contentment through resourcefulness and the social intimacy of small-town America—a way of life lamentably vanishing in the throes of urbanization, the decline of the family farm, the corporate erosion of local industries, and the flight of young people to the cities.

I remember the America he loved: the small town with its eccentric characters; schoolmates, many from family farms; baseball on the town common; a trip to the big city a major happening; the doctor, with his little black bag, coming to the house; a trip to the barber, a conversation. Families seemed stationary, one generation succeeding another. Faces changed. The surnames remained. This is the America Wendell wrote about.

When hard times came, as inevitably they do, we were there for each other, binding up the wounds. We knew our heroes, and we gladly paid them tribute.

I miss that America. And I will miss Wendell.

He tried to teach us, but we didn’t listen. A voice is silenced, but his wisdom hovers.

Rest peacefully, Wendell, in the dark Kentucky soil you so loved.

RJ

The Fall of Jason Arday: Institutional Panic, Broken Vetting, and Academic Tragedy

Slender and youthful at 37, with chest-length hair and a gentle, affable demeanor, Dr. Jason Arday was widely popular among students and colleagues when he was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge in March 2023.

His hire made history. The child of Ghanaian immigrants, he was the youngest Black professor in the university’s centuries-old record, holding a prestigious seat alongside a Professorial Fellowship at Jesus College.

Yet, just three years later, Arday abruptly resigned.

Days after stepping down, on August 14, 2026, police found him dead at his Battersea, London residence under non-suspicious circumstances, a tragic end to a meteoric rise brought down by an escalating controversy over his academic credentials and personal backstory.

THE SHELVED INVESTIGATION
The unraveling began long before it reached the public. In September 2025, Jack Grove, a senior reporter for Times Higher Education, alerted by Arday’s extraordinary athletic claims, sent Arday three direct emails requesting a response to alleged instances of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis and journal publications.

Rather than addressing the queries, Arday hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, known for aggressive media litigation, and reported Grove to the Metropolitan Police for criminal harassment.

The Met spent four months investigating the journalist. In February 2026, an officer called Grove, ordering him to cease contacting Arday because the inquiries were impacting Arday’s mental health. Facing legal threats and police intervention, Times Higher Education shelved Grove’s draft article.

THE WHISTLEBLOWER AND THE BLOG POST
The story broke wide open through a different channel. In June 2026, an unnamed Cambridge faculty member, frustrated by what they alleged was an internal administrative cover-up to avoid a public scandal, approached Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosophy researcher.

Cofnas subsequently ran Arday’s 2015 doctoral dissertation through plagiarism-detection software and, in July 2026, published his findings on Substack, alleging extensive verbatim text duplication.

Cofnas was already a lightning rod for controversy. In February 2024, he had published an essay claiming that Black people possess lower average cognitive ability due to genetic differences, asserting that in a meritocracy the proportion of Black professors at elite institutions like Harvard “would approach zero percent.”

While a Cambridge University investigation concluded that Cofnas’s essay fell within lawful free speech under UK law, Emmanuel College severed ties with him in July 2024, citing the hostile environment created by his public statements.

Cofnas challenged his dismissal in court, but in March 2026, a tribunal ruled that while his philosophical beliefs qualified for legal protection, Emmanuel College acted lawfully in terminating his affiliation due to the disruptive impact and tone of his writings.

Despite Cofnas’s controversial background, his technical analysis of Arday’s text duplication was undeniable. On July 24, 2026, The Times published an explosive front-page exposé documenting passages in Arday’s dissertation that were identical or near-identical to previously published scholarship without attribution. Media scrutiny quickly spread to his published journal papers and his autobiography, which claimed he had remained non-verbal until age 11, illiterate until 18, and had run 30 marathons in 35 days.

RESIGNATION AND AFTERMATH
On August 5, 2026, Arday resigned his Cambridge professorship. In an open letter addressed to colleagues and the public, he maintained his innocence while pointing to the unbearable personal strain:

When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life… Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack… The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love… This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”

Following his death nine days later, his family expressed shock, stating that Arday was a “gentle man” who had been “subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse… by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.”

AN ACADEMIC EVALUATION
Who bears responsibility for this tragic aftermath? In academia, the appropriation of another scholar’s work is an unpardonable offense. In my view as a former academic, the evidence of Arday’s unacknowledged text duplication and hyperbolic biographical claims is beyond doubt. Multiple passages in his writing trace directly back to uncredited source material, while his personal timeline, progressing from total illiteracy at age 18 to a doctoral dissertation in his twenties without an established paper trail of remedial education, defies statistical reality.

The root of this tragedy lies in an elite university rushing headlong to project progressive credentials. Cambridge was under immense pressure to diversify. According to reporting by The New York Times (August 15, 2026), internal hiring documents reveal that the selection panel bypassed candidates with far stronger scholarly records, brushing aside early warnings regarding Arday’s work as “vile efforts” to discredit a rising Black scholar. In doing so, the university abandoned its primary duty: to act as an impartial arbiter of intellectual truth.

While it is imperative that we confront racism wherever it rears its head, when institutions substitute top-down equity of outcome for equality of opportunity based on individual merit, they do not defeat prejudice: on the contrary, they merely replace rigorous judgment with performance art.

By waiving standard vetting out of ideological panic or political ideology, Cambridge did not elevate Jason Arday; instead, it exposed him, elevating a vulnerable man to a height built on sand, leaving him defenseless when the tide of inevitable scrutiny came in.

This tragedy serves as stark warning for modern higher education. When universities lower the bar to purchase moral virtue on the cheap, the consequences are ubiquitous: real scholarship is devalued, public trust in academia is shattered, and the genuine, unassailable achievements of minority scholars are quietly cast under a shadow of institutional doubt.

Everyone gets a prize—until the bill comes due. Cambridge got its headline, the ideologues got their symbol, and Jason Arday paid with his life.

—rj

Milton for Contemporaries

Many years ago, I took a graduate seminar on John Milton centered on Paradise Lost (1667), one of the crowning achievements of the English Renaissance. But it was another work—Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defense of freedom of speech—that has resonated with me ever since.

Written in opposition to Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton argued that truth is strengthened, not endangered, by being tested against error, a bold stance in an age when dissent could invite imprisonment or execution.

 Milton’s intellectual hero was Galileo. In Paradise Lost, he evokes the great astronomer when describing Satan’s massive shield:

“…the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views…”

The “Tuscan artist” is Galileo, whose telescope transformed humanity’s understanding of the heavens.

In Areopagitica, Milton recalls visiting Galileo at his villa in Arcetri, where the aging scientist lived under house arrest after being condemned by the Roman Inquisition for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system.

Forced under threat of torture to recant what he knew to be true, Galileo spent his final years blind and confined. I like to imagine that Milton’s visit offered some measure of consolation to a man whose only offense had been to follow the evidence where it led.

Today, speaking one’s conscience seldom risks imprisonment in liberal democracies, but it can still carry severe consequences: reputational ruin, professional ostracism, organized harassment, and targeted campaigns intended to silence rather than engage.

Public discourse, accelerated by social media, spreads these consequences with astonishing speed, rewarding denunciation far more readily than disagreement.

Our universities bear part of this responsibility. Among the intellectual influences that have shaped portions of academic life is Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, mentor of the New Left. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse proposed a striking inversion of classical free expression:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

He made the practical implications explicit, advocating for the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.”

In Marcuse’s view, there are issues where “certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”

Whether one agrees with Marcuse or not, his framework represents a profound departure from Milton’s conviction that truth emerges through open contest rather than enforced orthodoxy.

I have no dog in today’s culture wars. Censorship has become an equal-opportunity temptation for both the Left and the Right. Battles over gender, sexuality, race, religion, history, and politics have produced book bans, withdrawn publications, disinvited speakers, removed art, renamed institutions, and ousted educators. The particulars vary; the impulse to silence does not.

Milton himself understood the cost of dissent. Like Galileo, he eventually lost his sight. Following his death in 1674, he was denied burial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner due to his support for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Buried instead at St. Giles Cripplegate, his grave was desecrated more than a century later by souvenir hunters who carried away portions of his bones as grisly relics.

Some may dismiss Milton’s model as anachronistic, but I remain convinced that falsehood is exposed by argument, not by prohibition. The remedy for bad ideas remains better ideas, fearlessly expressed.

History offers sobering reminders of what happens when enforced orthodoxy replaces open debate. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have always understood that controlling speech is the prerequisite to controlling thought.

America has never perfectly reconciled its ideals with its practice, which is precisely why freedom of speech remains indispensable.

We improve our republic not by silencing one another, but by arguing honestly, listening seriously, and trusting that truth has nothing to fear from debate.

As Milton wrote in Areopagitica nearly four centuries ago:

“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

—rj

Britain’s New Prime Minister Is An English Major

I hadn’t known that Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is a fan of Philip Larkin—England’s premier poet since Auden. It aligns with Burnham having read English at Cambridge, making him rare among a long line of prime ministers.

I find that refreshing—not because English majors possess superior virtue, but because the finest literature is fundamentally moral in its urgings, even in unsettling works like A Clockwork Orange or Joyce’s Ulysses. As for poetry, moral resonance often defines its very existence.

Of course, Larkin has come under fierce attack, his published letters revealing objectionable racist and sexist views. It’s the familiar, troubling dilemma of separating an artist from the work.

I’ve just finished reading Sue Prideaux’s revelatory Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, with its unsettling account of his relationships with young native girls. Picasso physically abused several of his partners. Richard Wagner was a vehement anti-Semite, yet his music endures in our concert halls. Even foundational thinkers—Hume, Kant, and Hegel—harbored implicit racism, while Aristotle viewed women as flawed versions of men.

But back to Burnham. What does he see in Larkin? Will his affinity for the poet make him a more responsive leader, attuned to his nation’s pressing domestic needs?

This much is clear: Larkin possessed an extraordinary gift for bringing poetry into quotidian life, capturing present urgencies, human longing, despair, and the precise mood of the British landscape. I can still hear the train wheels rhythmically clicking along the rails, carrying newly married couples, in “The Whitsun Weddings.”

Larkin rendered poetry conversational and, in doing so, deeply palpable.

What better guiding text for a new prime minister than these lines from “The Mower”?

…we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Or from “Going, Going”:

Their kids are screaming for more
More houses, more parking allowed
More caravan sites, more pay.

Reading Larkin might just keep Andy Burnham anchored to the everyday lives of working people in an era of corporate autocracy, widening economic disparity, and self-interested oligarchy.

Larkin reminds us that ordinary lives matter, not a bad script for a new prime minister to follow.

–RJ

Water Over Smooth Stones: Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams

I hadn’t heard of Denis Johnson (1949–2017) until I read an Esquire article enthusiastically recommending Netflix’s 2025 film Train Dreams, an adaptation of Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same title.

I liked what I read—the story of a shy man, Robert Grainier, who finds words difficult. He arrives as an orphaned child in Idaho’s rugged panhandle at the advent of the twentieth century. A day laborer, he joins crews cutting giant timber and building massive railroad trestles; later, he founds his own venture, hauling freight across the Idaho wilderness by horse-drawn wagon. He falls in love. They have a child and build a cabin in the woods. Joy and grief follow.

The story transcends Grainier, who lives into old age as a witness to a vanished America we will not see again—a sweep of history moving from horses to railroads, cars, electricity, telephones, television, aviation and rockets into space.

I watched the film and read the novella, whose 117 pages go quickly. Directed by Clint Bentley and co-written with Greg Kwedar, the film stars Joel Edgerton as Grainier and richly deserves its critical acclaim, with several reviewers calling it one of the most moving cinematic works of the new century.

Nominated for four Oscars, the film fleshes out the book’s narrative. Page and screen offer apples and oranges, distinct yet equally absorbent and moving tellings, each capturing the life of a simple, everyday man carrying his grief with quiet dignity, portraying life’s randomness and impermanence through rhythmic sequences and soft-lit photography.

The book itself leaves no word wasted, flashing with lyrical intensity. Wolves howl. Sentry spruces keep watch, piercing solemn, low-wandering cumulus flotsam. Short sentences mirror time’s passage, moving like water slipping over smooth stones. The book ends, leaving behind a haunting lingering. Not surprisingly, critics have dubbed it an epic masterpiece rendered in brevity.

Johnson began as a poet and went on to write short stories, nine novels, a novella, and two plays. Train Dreams won an O. Henry Award, one of the top honors for American and Canadian short fiction, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Earlier, his Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award.

I now think of him as one of our contemporary best, agreeing with the critics ranking him alongside Cormac McCarthy in chronicling the American experiment, though doing it more gently, measuring what was gained against so much irretrievably lost.

rj

Resplendent Brilliance: A Birthday Tribute to Peter Singer

Today is renowned ethicist Peter Singer’s birthday, and I wish him everything well, both now and in the future. No one has shaped my values more than Peter, consistently monitoring the ethical dilemmas of contemporary life with courage, sensitivity, candor, and clarity—attributes resplendent in the intellectual brilliance of some fifty books treating animal suffering, poverty, mortality, the environment, affluence, and the plight of developing nations.

As a dedicated environmentalist, I wouldn’t be a vegetarian were it not for Singer: “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet—for the sake of hamburgers” (Animal Liberation).

Across the years, I’ve made transparent my profound admiration for utilitarian John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty is a must-read. In Singer, we have his worthy successor, reinvigorating the intrinsic value of philosophy rooted in the factual and empirical, while putting to the test the prejudicial assumptions that deter our collective happiness.

In a time of ubiquitous existential despair, he reminds us that humans possess a latent altruism that can respond and make for a better world; one more equitable, lived with empathy and tolerance.

And Singer walks the talk. Upon graduating university, he began donating 10% of his income to charity. Today, that’s mushroomed to an astonishing 33% of his income, directed entirely to high-impact charities. On winning the coveted Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2021, he gave its $1 million award entirely to charity.

Singer has restored philosophy as an axiom of the purposeful life, writing that “philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

The happiest of birthdays to you, Peter, and many more!

–RJ

Presidents’Day and the Enigma of George Washington and a Nation

Painting: John Trumbull. George Washington resigns as Commander-in-Chief, Continental Army.

I grew up in an America that celebrated George Washington’s February 22 birthday as a national holiday, signed into law by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879 as a federal workers’ holiday, then extended nationally in 1885.

Things changed in 1968 when Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, providing longer weekends and consolidating observances. Washington’s Birthday was reassigned to the third Monday in February, still legally designated as his birthday, though some congressional members proposed including Lincoln’s February 12 birthday under the broader aegis of Presidents’ Day.

That broader title caught on. Retailers and state governments increasingly adopted “Presidents’ Day.” Like so many holidays, it became a corporate sales opportunity.

Accordingly, the first item in my email this morning was a Presidents’ Day furniture sale—the first of what will no doubt be a barrage as the third Monday approaches.

Historian Jonathan Horn finds it absurd that we no longer distinctly celebrate Washington’s Birthday, given that it was observed in the young nation even before the framers of the Constitution met in 1787 (“Just Call It Washington’s Birthday,” Free Press, Feb. 11, 2026).

We owe much to this exemplary leader. Ken Burns credits Washington as “the glue that held it all together” in his PBS documentary The American Revolution. Facing superior, disciplined British forces, Washington understood that victory would require patience: knowing when to retreat, striking unexpectedly, and prolonging the war.

After defeats in New York, expiring enlistments, and desertions, matters reached their nadir during the winter encampment at Valley Forge outside British-occupied Philadelphia in 1777. Starvation loomed. Smallpox ravaged the ranks. Soldiers were unpaid, underfed, and poorly clothed.

With sagacity, Washington enlisted the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben, who molded the army into a disciplined fighting force. Recruits followed in greater numbers.

After General Gates’ victory at Saratoga, Washington was able to engage French support, working through liaison with the Marquis de Lafayette.

The decisive blow came when French naval forces blocked Cornwallis’s escape at Yorktown. Washington had deceived Cornwallis into believing New York was his objective while covertly moving his troops south. The British capitulated, leading ultimately to peace in 1783.

Washington had endured criticism without vindictiveness, even surviving a mutiny threat by disgruntled, unpaid officers.

For Burns, Washington’s greatest moment was not Yorktown or Trenton, but his resignation of his commission in Annapolis in 1783. As Burns tells it, he “knew how to defer to Congress, knew how to inspire ordinary people in the dead of night, knew how to pick subordinate talent—just had a kind of presence to him that, without him, we don’t have a country” (Chadwick Moore, New York Post, Nov. 11, 2025).

He did something similar in refusing a third presidential term. His 1796 Farewell Address remains prescient in its warnings against partisanship, permanent foreign alliances, sectionalism, and constitutional usurpation: “Let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”

Yet Washington has come under fierce attack, criticized for slave holding and judged by contemporary moral standards. Some view him primarily as a symbol of racial oppression and seek removal of his name and likeness from public spaces.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020 and the ensuing unrest, efforts accelerated to eliminate reminders of racial injustice, including monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Streets, buildings, and schools were renamed; statues toppled or defaced.

In Portland in 2020, protesters toppled and defaced a statue of Washington in a public park.

At the University of Washington, protesters called for removal of his statue.

In 2020, a statue of Washington at George Washington University was beheaded.

In 2021, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to rename a school honoring Washington, later reversing course after public scrutiny.

A Washington, D.C. working group, commissioned amid racial justice protests, recommended reviewing public names and monuments, suggesting federal sites be reconsidered for contextualization or renaming.

While some of this fury can be understood as anger over longstanding injustice, historian Howard Zinn argues in A People’s History of the United States that Washington’s mythic stature obscures his slaveholding and his violent campaigns against Indigenous peoples. Jill Lepore, in These Truths, likewise underscores the inseparability of his leadership from slavery.

It is painful to read, but much rings true.

Burns recounts Washington’s 1779 campaign against the Iroquois, ordering the destruction of settlements in retaliation for their alliance with the British: “Lay waste all the settlements around… that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” Towns and crops were burned. Many perished in the ensuing winter from famine and disease.

America was founded on a compromise that would lead to civil war and immense loss of life. Our history is marked by both courage and cruelty, liberty and bondage. We diminish ourselves if we pretend otherwise.

But we also diminish ourselves if we forget the magnitude of what was achieved: a fragile republic wrested from empire, sustained not by perfection but by discipline, restraint, and the voluntary surrender of power.

We are a nation still struggling to reconcile our ideals with our conduct. The work of ordered liberty, of constitutional self-government, of moral reckoning without erasure, remains unfinished.

The Revolution continues—not in the toppling of statues or canceling history, but by whether we can tell the truth about our past without losing the capacity to honor it.

—rj

Learning What Is Enough

On winter mornings, before the day has decided what it will become, the fields hold a stillness that feels provisional—frost clinging to the grass, fence lines darkened with damp, the land waiting without impatience. It is a good hour for reading slowly, for choosing words that do not hurry ahead of their meanings.

I have begun the year reading Wendell Berry. Now in his ninety-second year, he continues—more slowly, more deliberately—to farm and to write, unchanged in his fidelity to limits: the authority of place over abstraction, the moral claims of the local over the corporate, tradition understood not as nostalgia but as knowledge earned through use and endurance.

I read him most mornings. His work steadies the day. It does not offer solutions so much as orientation—toward what is given, what is sufficient, and what must be borne. Berry has always made room for joy, but never without sorrow, nor for hope without the acknowledgment of failure, including one’s own.

Some of his most influential prose appeared early, when his voice was still finding its public footing. The Long-Legged House and The Unsettling of America argued, quietly and insistently, that culture and agriculture are inseparable, and that when land is treated as commodity rather than community, both soil and people are diminished.

I return often to his poetry, especially A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems. Written on Sundays and largely free of polemic, these poems are acts of attention. They move patiently through the stages of a human life—birth, labor, love, diminishment—offering a sacramental vision of ordinary days lived close to the ground. Among them is Berry’s most widely known poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” whose calm acceptance of life’s ephemerality offers not escape from anxiety, but release from the burden of false mastery:

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

The peace the poem offers is not consolation so much as proportion. Its discipline lies in relinquishing the anxious reach into the future and reentering creaturely time—where life is finite, local, and sufficient.

That same discipline governs Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” first published in 1987 and often misread as a rejection of technology itself. It is instead a meditation on the moral weight of tools. Berry does not deny their usefulness; he questions their claims. Certain technologies, he suggests, quietly privilege speed over deliberation and convenience over care, reshaping habits of attention until efficiency becomes an unquestioned good.

The good life, in Berry’s accounting, is not optimized. It is inhabited. To live well requires learning the difference between what is necessary and what merely promises ease.

Barbara Kingsolver, another Kentuckian, names this work plainly when she writes:

“I consider it no small part of my daily work to sort out the differences between want and need. I’m helped along the way by my friend Wendell, without his ever knowing it. He advises me to ask, in the first place, whether I wish to purchase a solution to a problem I don’t have.”

Berry’s essay is not finally about computers at all. It is about scale and consequence. It asks not simply what a tool can do, but what it may undo—what forms of patience, responsibility, and mutual care it quietly displaces. It asks how our choices shape our relationships to family, to community, and to the land that sustains both.

Berry still writes with pencil on a yellow legal pad. He still farms, though within the limits age imposes. He still publishes—new poems, even a recent novel. The persistence itself feels instructive.

In a culture bent on expansion and acceleration, Berry’s life suggests another measure of success: fidelity to place, restraint in use, and the long patience required to learn what is enough.

—rj