Sorry Emerson: Money is NOT the Prose of Life

Ralph Waldo Emerson ranks high on any list of frequently quoted American sages. He has a special way of rendering human experience palpable.

Among his many essays, I’ve especially liked “Compensation,” which I first read as a young graduate student in an American Lit class.

Undoubtedly a residue of his exploration of Eastern thought, this essay has journeyed a lifetime with me in its karma undertones, buoying me up in its harbinger of moral recompense for life’s myriad inequities.

But on occasion, Emerson fumbled, as when he wrote that “money represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses” (“Nominalist and Realist,” Essays: Second Series, 1844).

Critics were quick to pounce, Marxists in particular seeing it as capitulating to capitalism. Emerson probably meant that the pecuniary is an integral component of the natural order.

Still, it seems a passage one wants to expunge like disturbing phlegm.

I like Saul Bellow’s correction: “Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from the face of the earth!” (“Seize the Day”).

But let me also share psychologist and poet Pamela Joyce Shapiro’s response to Emerson’s remark. Her poem speaks for me and perhaps for you:

If money is the prose of life
as beautiful as roses,
poetry it seems must be
the soil and sun of infinity,
without which surely nothing grows.
I see the pleasures each might bring,
when flourishing in abundant spring.
Though stocks and petals tend to fall
in drought or storm or just because,
poetry survives it all.
What losses can define what loss is?
Waning wealth or stolen roses?
Forget the till and till the mind,
plant poetry and praise the sky.

rj

 





Why I’m Still Reading Yeats

I’ve always been a devotee of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, though not of his metaphysics or his politics. Certainly, his reception in Ireland over the years has been bleak, the latest hostile critic, contemporary novelist Sally Rooney piling on, dismissing his politics as fascist, with the takeaway he isn’t worth reading.

Though he flirted with authoritarianism, agitated by the chaos he associated with democracy, he supported the Free State and later repudiated Mussolini, whom he initially admired. He was never the likes of Ezra Pound. In one of his final poems, “Politics,” he expresses his disillusionment with political ideologies proffering easy remedies for society’s ills.

Yeats should not be judged removed from the convulsions that gave birth to an Ireland free of its English masters.

Ireland’s ostracizing of its literary giants has a long history, not only with Yeats, but James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faoláin, and the late Edna O’Brien, all of whom chose exile.

I bristle against censorship and book banning to which it often leads. Things are changing in Ireland, a nation I know well, but old attitudes can find an audience still.

Yeats remains worth reading, his poetry arguing for itself in its craftsmanship, beauty, and relevance. His often quoted “The Second Coming” hovers over us in its prescient warning of autocracy’s sinister reach.

“A Prayer for My Daughter” remains among my favorite Yeats poems—subdued in tone, subtle in rhythm, redolent in wisdom.

Written in 1919 in the context of Ireland’s incipient nationalism that would spark a civil war and the country’s ultimate partition, the poem expresses Yeats’ hopes for his new daughter in a less turbulent future.

A poem abundant in symbolism, Yeats prays she shun hatreds, value inner over external beauty, find solace in tradition and ceremony.

I value the poem, not least, for its relevance to our own time.

Excerpt:

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

This last stanza obviously alludes to Maude Gonne, who had become a strident voice of Irish nationalism and to whom Yeats had twice proposed marriage, but was rejected.

In 1990, I was privileged to meet and converse with Anne, the daughter in this poem.

Whatever our views on artists such as Yeats, or antisemite T.S. Eliot, or Chilean fervent communist Pablo Neruda, I subscribe to the autonomy of art. It’s narcissistic to think artists must share our views.

rj

Sheer Lunacy: Trump’s Assault on the Environment

The Trump administration’s assault on the environment in the context of exponential climate change exhibits all too well the earmarks of corporate denial in the pursuit of monetary gain that will reap catastrophic consequences.

When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring appeared in 1962, it moved two presidents to take action, Kennedy ordering an investigation of pesticide use and Nixon founding the Environmental Protection Agency.

Unfortunately, Trump’s EPA version bears little resemblance and to chart his myriad changes would try your patience.

I confess to being an environmental zealot. I read eco literature vividly, keep up with the latest happenings, donate regularly to environmental groups.

I support protecting endangered species like the whooping crane, manatee, blue and finback whales. I accept evolution’s tapestry of a variegated offspring, reaping the legacy of successful adaptation over vast aeons of time, our human presence but a wink by comparison.

I do not subscribe to the administration’s either/or assumption of jobs vs. environment. On the contrary, abundant studies show commitment to the Green New Deal would inaugurate new technologies and promote GNP growth. According to a University of Massachusetts study, commitment to a climate jobs program would generate 1.5-2 million net jobs annually for a decade (Pollin et al.).

Trump and his lackeys ignore such research. They are of a stubborn mindset, devotees of fossil industry interests,

Recently, this administration waived thirty environmental and public health studies in pursuit of building a wall through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, placing endangered species habitats and ecosystem corridors in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, they’ve slashed the EPA budget by 65%, cancelled or unenforced dozens of environmental rules, opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and US coastal waters to oil drilling, slated public lands with their indigenous monuments for auctioning, and severely reduced national park staffing.

As for the Endangered Species Act, this administration has compromised it to allow for economic considerations. Good-bye, my beloved manatees, the Everglades, Yosemite as we once knew it in its pristine beauty,

As Rachel Carson reminds us, “Beauty — and all the values that derive from beauty — are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar.” (Lost Woods).

Addendum:

Yesterday, my heart quickened as Dee Dee and I drove into Lexington, honked our horn at several groups of Trump protestors gathered along the way, who exuberantly reciprocated our waves.

We learned we’re not alone.

Collectively, it is our duty to resist.

RJ

Dare I Read a Nora Roberts Novel?

Parodying T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, I ask, Dare I read a Nora Roberts novel?

I ask this after coming upon Lulu Garcia-Narraro’s NYT interview with the author (November 19, 2023). Now 75 and still writing, Roberts indisputably reigns the queen of today’s romance genre, authoring some 250 novels, 224 of them making the NYT best seller list, and half a billion copies sold.

Roberts isn’t into harlequin narratives, her female characters resolute, resilient, independent women who may enjoy the company of men, but not their dominance.

Often fighting against the odds in a patriarchal world, they exemplify courage, daring and resourcefulness. They aren’t perfect, but this lends to their plausibility.

Feminists have criticized her for her preoccupation with romantic relationships, but Roberts, a self-declared feminist, sees nothing wrong in a partnership of equals: “Whether it’s a man or another woman, it’s someone you love that you build a life with,” Roberts says.

In real time, Roberts is politically engaged. She is incensed with frenzied book banning. Eight of her own books have been removed from shelves.

I remain conflicted. Do I want to enter a genre of preeminent feminine sensibility where in real life I may be resented as an intruder?

Then, too, I’ve always been suspicious of prolific novelists who seem to write effortlessly with sales in the millions. But then there was the Victorian Anthony Trollope, who could flush out a novel on a train ride, composing forty-seven of them, along with short stories and essays. Today, his books, celebrated as canonical, are admired and studied for their political and social insights.Genre writers, nonetheless, don’t win or get nominated for the literary awards that matter to the Academy, e.g., the Booker, National Book Award, Pulitzer, and Nobel prizes.

It’s grievously unfair, the line between the literary and the popular often porous. Take science fiction, for example, and writers like Wells, Huxley, Bradbury and Clarke. I think their prescience and literary acumen quite stunning. And yet they and their cohorts haven’t secured any of these prestigious awards, apart from two exceptions, science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Quin for her YA novel The Farthest Shore (1973) and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story {2002). Le Quin was a fierce opponent of genre discrimination.

The other exception is Margaret Atwood, winning a Booker in 2000 for her Blind Assassin (2019) and in 2018, the Golden Booker for her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, selected as the best Booker in fifty years.

I find this frequent condescension toward genre writers as faulty as it is snooty. It bothers Roberts, who now simply defines herself as a novelist.

But returning to the romance genre, the classical exemplum is surely George Eliot, whose Middlemarch excels in its delineation of relationships fulfilling or frustrating the human longing, not only for reciprocal love, but to be heard understood and free to pursue one’s authenticity.

I’ve read Roberts excerpts. She writes a nimble and witty prose.

Writing often clarifies things for me. Yes, I’ll dare to read a Roberts novel, but with this caveat—perhaps just one novel for now, knowing so many vibrant books, fiction and non-fiction, that stretch the mind, I still have yet to read.

rj

Reading Told Me I Belonged


It’s important we find time in a busy world to pursue what gives us joy.

Over a lifetime, it’s been growing flowers and hostas, studying languages, reading and writing. Arthritis has ended my gardening days, but those other interests compel me still, especially the reading of books that stretch my mind, grant me new awareness, and open unanticipated conversations.

I discovered reading early, resorting as a youngster to the Montgomery Street library—it’s still there—to escape Philly’s sultry summer streets, foreclosing on a boredom that promised mischief.

Reading became another world, generating deliverance from what might have become a narrow mindset, igniting new vistas redolent with expectation, though often tinctured with youth’s unbridled idealism

Favorite writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, taught me “that is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

Ever since, I’ve been all in.

rj

Banning Books: An American Tradition

America has a stubborn tradition of banning books. The First Amendment may guarantee free speech, but we’ve never stopped trying to police it.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses were once blacklisted. More recently, schools have targeted Harry Potter, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Kite Runner—and, with no sense of irony, 1984.

This isn’t new. Aristophanes’ 2,500 year-old comedy Lysistrata, in which women withhold sex to end war, was banned here from 1873 until 1954 under the Comstock laws. The crime? Mailing “lewd” material.

Easy to blame the Right. But the Left has been just as eager to censor.

In California, a liberal bastion, To Kill a Mockingbird was pulled from schools for its depiction of racism.

Progressives mirror conservative groups like Moms for Liberty. Campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books and Disrupt Texts demand the removal of classics: Huckleberry Finn for racial slurs, To Kill a Mockingbird _for “white savior themes,” Little House on the Prairie for its portrayal of Indigenous and Black people. Even Harry Potter  is shunned—not for witchcraft this time, but for J.K. Rowling’s views on gender.

The real answer isn’t banning. It’s conversation.

Read the books. Put them in context. Argue about them. That’s how we confront uncomfortable truths—and maybe even learn something from them.

rj

Classified Secrets, Political Scores: Trump and Bolton Revisited

The recent raid on the home and office of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, ostensibly to search for classified documents, reiterates a familiar narrative about Donald Trump’s abuse of power.

The raid is seen by many as a form of political vengeance against a former critic, ironically mirroring the very charges on which Trump himself was indicted for illegally possessing classified documents after leaving office, some of which reportedly contained nuclear secrets.

Bolton, in turn, exacted his own form of revenge by publishing his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, despite Trump’s feverish attempts to prevent its publication.

The book is intriguing for its revelations, among them, that Trump expressed his surprise to learn that the U.K. was a nuclear power and his confusion as to whether Finland was a part of Russia.

Further, that he asked China President Xi Jinping’s help with his 2020 reelection campaign by increasing US imports of agriculture products, while expressing approval of China’s concentration camps for Uygur Muslims and willingness to overlook the Tiananmen Square massacre and other civil rights issues.

Bolton says that Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, meanwhile withholding $400 million in military aid.

He hasn’t changed any, as his recent fawning over Putin in Alaska clearly demonstrates—incompetent, vindictive, narcissistic, autocratic and worse, willing to sell out his country to secure his personal interests.

–rj

What Makes It Poetry

I read a lot, but the genre that makes my heart beat faster is poetry,
doubtless because I’m a very feeling person.

A lot of what I read these days purports to being poetry when it isn’t.

I know I’m reading poetry when it becomes more than it is, words taking on nuance beyond themselves.

Often I find poetry in music. Take, for example, Bono’s “Grace,” transcending a girl’s name, to becoming extended metaphor of redemptive goodness:

Grace
It’s the name for a girl
It’s also a thought that
Changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness
In everything

Another example would be the Beatles’ haunting “Eleanor Rigby,” exemplum of loneliness, or disconnectedness, hidden amid the crowd, but profoundly present:

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

This, my friends, is poetry!

James Dobson Dies: A Legacy of Hate

James Dobson, the evangelical founder of Focus on the Family, and advisor to three presidents (Reagan and the Bushes), has died at age 89.

I do not mourn this disseminator of hate—he denounced President Clinton yet supported convicted sexual felon Donald Trump.

He vilified gays, same-sex marriage, and transgender equality, branding the gay rights movement “a particularly evil lie of Satan.”

In 2004, he absurdly warned that legalizing same-sex marriage would open the door to “marriage between a man and his donkey.”

His propagating “conversion therapy” continues to do irreparable harm.

At its peak, his radio broadcasts aired on 1,500 stations, reaching some 500,000 listeners weekly, while his 70 books, many still in print, sold an estimated 50 million copies.

He died a millionaire.

rj

Nature Isn’t All Butterflies

I want to step back from writing about politics, at least for now. We all have our views, and too often—much like professing religious beliefs—we run headlong into barbed-wire intolerance.

Some find distraction, even intoxication, in endless hours of media; others in sports; still others in hobbies that bring both pleasure and mastery—or in the familiar solace of alcohol.

I prefer reading, not just any kind, but what helps me grow and be more aware I’m not alone. Lately, it’s been nature memoirs, especially like H is for Hawk. I want to get back to my beloved Thoreau and not least, Wendell Berry. I miss Tolstoy.

Of course, we shouldn’t extract from nature what really derives from our imposed views such as we find in Wordsworth’s poetry. Nature, as writer James Rebank reminds us, “isn’t all butterflies, sunshine and healing.”

Still, whenever I step outside the human world, there descends this quieting solace, and I think myself made whole again.

rj