Page 1441 – Christianity Today (2024)

In the village of Wreay in Cumbria, five miles from the city of Carlisle, stands the curious and beautiful St. Mary's Church, which since its construction in the mid-19th century has aroused much commentary and a good deal of wonderment. The pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it "a church in the Byzantine style, full of beauty and imaginative detail, though extremely severe and simple" and by any measure "much more original than the things done by the young architects now." But he could not find words to describe the church well and wished for others to see this "most beautiful thing." A century later the great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had his own descriptive struggles: he dubbed the building's style "Byzantino-Naturalistic," and said it was "a crazy building without any doubt."

Yet when Pevsner put the question "What is best in church architecture during the years of Queen Victoria?" he insisted that "the first building to call out" had to be the church at Wreay. Similarly, Simon Jenkins, in his lovely book England's Thousand Best Churches, calls St. Mary's "one of the most eccentric small churches in England" but thinks it a masterpiece with no clear antecedents, no pattern from which it derives. Its architect was "a single original mind, … an individual genius." That genius was not a professional architect—indeed, lacked any formal architectural training—and was merely the chief landowner in the vicinity of Wreay. Her name was Sarah Losh, and in The Pinecone Jenny Uglow tells her story.

The story, obviously, takes the form of a puzzle: Where did the idea for such a building come from? How could Sarah Losh have come up with it? Perhaps even more inexplicable is the question of how she, and the people she hired to build it, pulled off the design so successfully. Few writers could be better suited to pursue these questions than Uglow, who in her previous books—especially her finest, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730-1810 (2002)—has demonstrated a great interest in how networks of like-minded people have the power to generate rich ideas and powerful inventions. The Lunar Men reveals how ambitious thinkers like the inventor James Watt, the physician and naturalist Erasmus Darwin, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, the potter Josiah Wedgewood, and the scientist, theologian, and radical politician Joseph Priestley fed one another's minds in the years that they all lived in or around the city of Birmingham. In that account the lines of influence and mutual encouragement are clear—but how to account for Sarah Losh's solitary masterwork? That seems a far greater puzzle.

And indeed, Uglow does not manage to solve it. There is just not enough information to go on. Uglow surrounds the core story of the building of St. Mary's Church with dozens of digressive mini-essays about—well, about almost everything pertaining to the place and time: the geology of Cumbria as it was discovered and explored in the Romantic era, the history of its churches and religious monuments, the rise and development of the city of Carlisle, the financial connections of the Losh family with the industrial city of Newcastle, Sarah Losh's father's friendship with William Wordsworth, the rise of Anglo-Catholicism and its influence on ecclesiastical architecture, the history of the village of Wreay after Sarah Losh's death. All of these excurses are interesting and well-written, but as I read The Pinecone I struggled to discern clear patterns. Uglow's description of the building of the church commences about two-thirds of the way into the book, and the reader who started with Chapter 15 would be about as well-equipped to understand Sarah Losh's achievement as the reader who had read every previous page with care.

Stripped of Uglow's ample and learned contextualizing, the story goes like this. Sarah—as Uglow calls her throughout; I will follow that lead—was born into a Cumbrian landowning family near the beginning of 1786. She and her sister Katharine were given the sporadic and piecemeal education that was about the best that girls of their time could hope for, though Sarah's evident brilliance led to her pursuing ancient languages further than would have been common at the time. The sisters were by all accounts quite attractive, but neither ever showed any inclination to marry, and after the early deaths of their parents they became the socially and economically leading figures in their small world. They were both especially beloved as benefactors of the poor, but few elements of their local life escaped their attention and care. Katharine was the more outgoing, Sarah the more introspective and intellectual, but both were deemed charming. Above all they were inseparable companions, both at home and on their occasional travels to the Continent.

And then, when Sarah was around fifty, Katharine died. Sarah was devastated by the loss, and never fully emerged from mourning in the 18 years of life remaining to her: on her death in 1853, she was buried with her sister, and their tombstone bears the inscription In vita divisae, in morte conjunctae—in life divided, in death conjoined—followed by a plea from the ancient hymn Te Deum laudamus: "Lord Let thy Mercy lighten upon us." But Katharine's death seems also to have driven Sarah into a period of astonishing imaginative creativity. The tiny local chapel of Wreay had fallen into disrepair, and Sarah convinced the local authorities to allow her to restore it; and then, on the discovery that it was too derelict for restoration, to do something more. In her own words, she agreed "to furnish a new site for the chapel and to defray all the expenses of its reerection," but only—and here we catch the glint of a steely will—"on condition that I should be left unrestricted as to the mode of building it." The offer, with its blunt condition, was accepted, and Sarah set to work.

The ultimate result was unlike any church in England, and in some respects unlike any church anywhere. Sarah knew perfectly well that the whole impetus of ecclesiastical architecture in England was toward the high Gothic style: indeed, many of the leading figures in the emergent Anglo-Catholic movement forcefully insisted that no other style was fully Christian. Sarah ignored them and built a church in a far simpler style that she herself called "early Saxon or modified Lombard": Romanesque, we might say, with rounded arches and small windows, but featuring certain structures, especially a rounded apse behind the altar, that recall churches built in Lombardy in northern Italy during its period of Byzantine power and influence. (Sarah might have seen some of these on her Continental travels.)

Only a very few of the oldest, and generally ruined, churches in northern England resembled it in the least, and Sarah may have had their basic structure in mind, which could account for her reference to "early Saxon." But the decorations both inside and outside the church—which she designed and even helped to create, carving some of the stone herself—have no real precedent anywhere. Uglow describes Sarah's insistent deployment of naturalistic forms, almost to the exclusion of any familiar Christian symbolism:

Around the central window a chrysalis rested on an oak leaf at each side, with six butterflies above, separated by poppy-heads, ripe with seeds, reaching up to lilies curving around two butterflies—their wings outspread and their antennae touching a band of ripe wheat. All these, including the butterflies, symbols of the soul, from their Greek name psyche, spoke of the earth. By contrast the carvings on the left-hand window conjured ancient oceans, with ammonites and nautilus fossils and staghorn coral. On the right, they took to the air. Fir branches met at the top and between the cones perched a raven, a scarab with open wings, a bee and a small, wise owl.

Sarah designed all of these images herself and, in a workshop she had built in her house, molded them in clay so local stonemasons could see in three dimensions just what she wanted. The forms are naturalized and yet stylized in a way that anticipates the Arts and Crafts movement and the kind of work that artists like Eric Gill would be doing some 75 years later.

The church abounds in curiosities. From the outer walls project a series of what Sarah called "emblematical monsters": a crocodile, a winged turtle, a snake, and (most charming of all) an open-mouthed dragon who serves to vent steam from a boiler. These are delightful, but some of the obscurest decorations tend rather to disturb, especially the iron arrows that stick into walls. No one has ever explained these, but local villagers believed that they were made in honor of William Thain, a soldier who was a close friend of the Losh family and who was killed in India as the church was under construction.

On a couple of occasions Uglow quotes the verdict of one Canon Hall—who, as vicar of Wreay for almost half a century, had more opportunity than anyone to see and reflect on the strange furnishings of the church—that Sarah's whole design is thoroughly Christian, every detail vibrating with theologically orthodox significance. Uglow is, I think, rightly doubtful about the good canon's interpretations, but her own tentative suggestion that Sarah was a Deist seems to me even less likely. The elaborate natural imagery of the church suggests rather something older, more pagan: an animistic world, pantheist or panentheist in tone. Sarah may have been no more sympathetic to the Deism common in the intellectual circles of her time than she was to the rise of the Gothic in architecture.

But we are guessing here. Again and again Uglow comments that Sarah Losh's surviving letters and notes, of which there are many, tell us little or nothing about what she intended or even what she believed. Lacking authoritative guidance, we might do well to remember that the profusion of natural things in her church—or rather, representations in stone and wood of natural things, presented with restrained simplicity and yet lavish—arose in her mind in the aftermath of her deepest loss. The death of her sister is answered by a church dedicated to organic abundance, one that celebrates life, life, and more life.

The two stone railings at the back of the little church's nave are capped, at their inside ends, with stone pinecones: one enters the nave by walking between them. Their prominence is no more explicable than anything else in the building. Uglow notes that "the pinecone is an ancient symbol of regeneration, fertility, and inner enlightenment," as well as embodying in its Fibonacci-sequence structure what natural philosophers of Sarah's time would have called "Sacred Geometry," and she thinks the image important enough to title her book after it; but whatever its public meanings, one has to wonder whether it had for Sarah a private one. It was known in the village that before William Thain died he had sent a pinecone from India to Wreay, intending it to be planted there. The villagers made as much of this as they did of the arrows; the idea of Sarah lamenting a dead lover has an obvious romantic appeal, even though there is no indication that she ever had or sought lovers.

But there is one further point to note. In addition to the church, Sarah had built for Katharine a tiny mausoleum, a strikingly and intentionally crude little building—"Druidical," some called it—made of unmortared and rough-edged stone with no ornamentation and a flat roof. But within it is a smooth white marble sculpture of Katharine. She sits erect, leaning slightly forward, her right hand crossed to her left shoulder. She contemplates an object resting in her lap, held in the folds of her dress by her left hand. It is a pinecone.

Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College and this fall will begin teaching in the Honors College of Baylor University. He is the author most recently of The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, due in October from Princeton University Press.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Home is where you hang your head,” my clever friend George used to say. Many of us know what it’s like to have a vexed relationship with home—particularly if we are bookish types, and grew up among people who didn’t understand that at all.

George fits that familiar pattern, though his story is more extreme than most. He grew up in Ulmer, S.C., which in the 2000 census boasted a population of 102. I met him in college—not any élite college, but just the University of South Carolina, in Columbia. Compared to Ulmer, it might have been Paris. And George was the most intelligent person I’ve ever met. For a paper on a novelist with a paradoxical bent, George wrote 100 pages (on an old-fashioned typewriter); on the 50th page, he began systematically refuting all his previous assertions.

Back home in Ulmer, George sold peaches from a roadside stand. The consensus was, “He’s got school smarts, but that boy’s got no common sense.”

In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher tells a similar story. He grew up in a rural stretch an hour north of Baton Rouge, near St. Francisville, Louisiana. It wasn’t a good fit. His Paw was an avid outdoorsman, but “[t]he last place I wanted to be on a wet, frozen Saturday morning was standing in the woods with a shotgun,” Dreher writes. He’d rather be “in the warmth of the camp kitchen, drinking hot, sweet Community coffee, eating jelly cake, and listening to the crazy talk from Oliver ‘Preacher’ McNabb, the old black cook” who’d spent time in Angola for murder.

Rod’s little sister Ruthie didn’t agree. “She really did love all of it—especially the hunting. As soon as she was big enough to carry a shotgun, she did.” Rod instead drank in the stories from his great-great aunts Hilda and Loisie, who had volunteered as nurses in World War I. He writes, “They caught the train at the bottom of the hill near their family home and didn’t stop their journey until they arrived at the Red Cross canteen at Dijon, France.” Time he spent in their tin-roofed cabin, listening to their stories and looking at old maps, whetted his appetite for the big world beyond the pecan grove. He grew into a teen who loved books and talking about ideas, someone his Paw found hard to understand.

Maybe Ruthie sensed Rod’s advantage in intellectual things; maybe that’s what spurred her to lifelong competition on other fronts. She was the superior athlete, and savored opportunities to prove it. One time Paw goaded Rod into doing some exercises to build up his strength. Dreher writes,

I was … struggling to heave out a pitiful few push-ups. Paw tried to keep Ruthie out of the house when this was going on, because he knew she couldn’t resist trying to outdo me.

“There she came up the hall, saw you on the floor, then flopped down and started pumping them out,” [Paw] recalls. “That was the end of that ring-dang-do. You just quit.”

Bullied at school, falling into frequent arguments with his dad, Rod perked up when he heard of a new residential high school for sciences and the arts. He packed everything into the family pickup and stood at the bow of the car ferry, on his way to a better life.

Many of us don’t feel at home until we leave home, and find out there are others like us. Like Andersen’s Ugly Ducking, my friend George was beautiful to us on campus, but within the nest he looked bewilderingly strange. (Rod writes, “In one of our yelling matches Paw accused me of bringing all this on myself for being so obstinately strange.”) And, as if one more alienating touch were needed, George was gay.

Rod went from the residential high school to Louisiana State University, to the Baton Rouge Advocate, to The Washington Times, where he could look out his apartment window and see the president’s helicopter rising into the air. And his gifts kept him on the move, from Washington to the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, to the New York Post, to the Dallas Morning News, to a major blog at Beliefnet.com, to the Templeton Foundation in Philadelphia.

Ruthie, meanwhile, stayed close to home. She became a teacher in the local public school, and soon stood out as having a way with difficult children. When other teachers would start griping, Ruthie would stand up for the student and find a solution, balancing discipline with encouragement. The results could be remarkable. Before long, a lot of people in St. Francisville knew and loved Mrs. Leming.

With his wife Julie and their (eventual) three kids, Rod returned to the family home a few times a year. He sensed a mostly unspoken contempt for his supposedly wealthy, urban lifestyle. Rod could tell Ruthie thought he was “a snob and a fraud.” She thought it was wrong for him to be paid for writing, because that wasn’t real work. She didn’t like his inclination to ponder great questions; one evening at dinner she said, “Rod, why don’t you say the blessing, since you’re so holier-than-thou?”

He couldn’t figure out how to talk with her and resolve this. Ruthie argued the way her father did; if she felt strongly about something, that meant it was objectively true. His visits home were too short to spend in futile conflict, so he kept postponing that conversation.

In the fall of 2009 Ruthie was in her kitchen, chopping some fresh jalapeno peppers, and she began to cough. “She never really stopped,” Rod writes. By the time she went to see Dr. Tim Lindsay “[s]he could barely complete her sentences without gasping or succumbing to her raspy cough.” The diagnosis was cancer: a large tumor wrapped around a major vein. Ruthie’s friend Abby asked a friend at the hospital how long someone with this cancer would live. He replied, “In cases like this? Three months.”

Rod flew home immediately. He sat on the porch with Ruthie in the last hours before his return flight to Philadelphia. Aware he might never see her again, he tearfully asked her to forgive any bad thing he had ever done to her; he’d inflicted a hundred big-brother taunts and tricks. They hugged and wept, but she waved away any deeper conversation.

When news got around that Ruthie Leming was sick, the response was immediate and strong. One of her husband, Mike’s, fellow firefighters, with tears in his eyes, turned his wallet upside down and shook out every bill. Another friend told Mike he’d never prayed before, but when he heard of Ruthie’s illness, “I prayed twice, dammit.” One of Ruthie’s “most challenging students” stood up during school assembly and told everyone that now they had to “make her proud.”

As Rod listened to the outpouring of love for Ruthie, he began to understand her better. She hadn’t gone to the nation’s capital and written influential columns. But she had done incalculable good, and changed the lives of many people. Rod was reminded of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who did not seek to approach Christ by great deeds or mystical rapture, but only by living in a simple, humble, helpful way—a “little way.” Rod began to see that his sister Ruthie was another saint of the “little way.”

Ruthie lived those three allotted months, and then she kept right on living. She kept leaping over months like a rider on horseback. A year passed, and then continued to turn. But she was weakening. One school morning she was sitting with Mike in her living room when she began coughing violently, coughing blood. “I can’t breathe!” she cried, and fell into her husband’s arms. The ambulance arrived too late.

Rod and his family left immediately for the funeral. Over the course of the next few days, Rod and Julie found they were having the same thought. The warmth and cohesiveness of the St. Francisville community was profoundly attractive. Ruthie’s loss left a big hole in the family. Why not move here and help fill it? They could help raise their nieces and care for Mam and Paw. Circ*mstances fell together providentially, and Rod was given an editorial position at The American Conservative that made it possible to work from home.

And so, in December 2011, the Drehers moved to St. Francisville. It’s a beautiful town, lush and flowering, and in the community there is a quality of steadfast love that is even sweeter. And yet—things haven’t turned out exactly as they’d hoped.

They had trouble connecting with the younger nieces, Claire and Bekah. Some invisible barrier stood between them. One night, Hannah—Ruthie’s eldest—told Rod that he should just give up that project, because it was never going to happen. All their lives their mom had made sharp and mocking comments about Rod. The girls had heard too much of that to like or trust him now. Ruthie had continued saying such things even after the day when Rod had asked her forgiveness and they’d made, he thought, a new start.

Rod and Julie were stunned. The central reason they’d rearranged their lives and moved a thousand miles was to be family to the girls, but Ruthie had apparently made that impossible even before they could begin. How could Ruthie be so kind to everybody she met, yet so unjust to her brother?

Rod still believes that Ruthie was a saint, but even saints aren’t perfect. Perhaps he brought it on himself, with all the pranks and teasing in childhood. Rod knows she loved him, but that doesn’t fix everything. Relationships are complicated.

Of course, given enough time, they can get better. But you don’t always get enough time. George introduced me to my husband, so he was a treasured friend. We planned that at our hippie wedding in the woods he would walk ahead of us in the procession. But a month beforehand he drifted into oncoming traffic, overcorrected, and flipped over into a ditch. He went home to Ulmer suddenly—sightless, voiceless, and still.

Home is where you hang your heart. You hang it out helplessly, whether you want to or not, in full reach of ordinary human beings, not saints. Even when they are saints, you just might be their greatest temptation. And whether we like them or not, whether they understand us or not, we are linked to them forever by the mystery of blood. From the first of life to the last, we are bound to them by unbreakable claims.

When we’re grown we can surround ourselves with whoever we like, but we all must begin life like this, vulnerable, in the midst of people we never chose. God chose them for us. If you have things to say, now is the time to say them. We will all be voiceless one day.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Prayer That Tunes the Heart to God (Paraclete Press).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

With approximately 1,500 students, Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, has sought to retain its character not only as a liberal arts college but also a distinctively Christian one. For almost 125 years, Gordon has anchored itself in the “historic, evangelical, biblical” faith. Like the pastoral stereotypes of its fellow liberal arts colleges, its campus is defined by residence halls, a campus chapel, and plenty of space for students and faculty to engage in the pursuit of answers to those large questions.

Facing the retirement of R. Judson Carlberg in 2011, the Gordon College Board of Trustees called upon D. Michael Lindsay to serve as the institution’s eighth president. On the surface, Lindsay’s selection was a surprise to many. As a faculty member at Rice University, Lindsay had garnered considerable acclaim for his teaching, his efforts to spearhead the Program for the Study of Leadership, and his publication of Faith in the Halls of Power with Oxford University Press. However, Lindsay had yet to serve as a senior officer for a college or university. Given his promise as a sociologist, a far more predictable trajectory for Lindsay was to continue with his growing portfolio of prominent scholarly pursuits.

Shortly before the start of his second year as president, when Lindsay welcomed the largest class of first-year students in Gordon College’s history, I met with him in his office in Frost Hall.

Not long ago you were a ranked faculty member at a research university—and now you are the president of a Christian liberal arts college. In what ways did you prefer life as a faculty member? In what ways do you now prefer life as a college president?

I love the fact that at Gordon I have a chance to be involved with all parts of the institution’s life in ways that you simply aren’t able to as a faculty member in a given department. I love the intellectual variety of this job, which spans everything from enrollment and admissions decisions to personnel matters, to finances, to intellectual agendas for the institution. I love the variety of constituents I get to work with. I love the pace of the job. It’s a very fast pace, and as a high-energy kind of person, I thrive on that. I miss from my time as a faculty member the deep relationships with students. I was a very active teacher and loved mentoring students. I’ve tried to re-create some dimensions of that in my role here through a couple of programs that we’ve launched, but I really miss it. As a faculty member, you have a unique opportunity to be walking alongside students in the moments of epiphany, and that’s incredibly gratifying; as president you don’t have that same kind of opportunity.

What propelled you to consider and then accept the presidency of Gordon College?

It was a long process of prayerful leaning. When the search committee approached me, I was deeply honored, but I thought this might be something that could be a possibility down the road. I never dreamed that I would move from a position as a faculty member directly to this role. That’s an unusual path. I think that God used several things in my life to begin a process of confirming that this was the right place for us. There was a season when I was really trying to discern if I should move forward with the process. I was very content at Rice, and I felt that I was doing exactly what God wanted me to do. We were on the cusp of some very exciting initiatives that I had been involved in helping to bring about. So I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to leave all that.

We’re in a setting that is intensely secular, and over a long span of time we’ve had to learn how to deal with those folks who don’t agree with our core convictions. Religious and cultural pluralism is not some trend that’s coming down the pike; it’s the air we breathe.

In the midst of this time of discernment, my 32-year-old cousin was killed in a car accident, and I was asked to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. I was close to him. As I was driving home from that funeral, I reflected on his life and began to think. I wondered what he was going to buy his kids for Christmas. It was early November, and I figured he probably had some ideas in mind; I wondered when he thought his next promotion might come at work and what that might look like; and I wondered what he thought he might do in ten to fifteen years. And, in that moment I realized that we are not promised tomorrow. If I did think that—in God’s providence, at some point in time—I might make the move into administration, why would I not explore the opportunity now, given this invitation to do so? And then, after my heart began to really turn toward Gordon, the real confirmation came from the fact that so many other people spoke into my life, saying this was a good match. They knew me; they knew the institution. And, I have to say, I think they were right.

Looking back on last year, what did you spend the most time on?

Learning. I needed to learn a lot about the Gordon community and get to know the people who are here; hear their stories; hear how their individual stories fit in with the narrative of the institution. I needed to get acquainted with New England. I needed to absorb the culture of the presidency. It’s a role that entails a steep learning curve.

Being located in the cradle of American higher education, what distinctive opportunities are afforded to Gordon College? And what distinctive challenges, if any, does such a location pose?

By far, the opportunities vastly outnumber the challenges. We have more interesting commitments to scholarly research, intellectual activity, and research collaborations in this community than you’d find pretty much any place in the world. There is a deeper understanding of the value of higher education and of the contributions that higher education can make to the state. Massachusetts loves higher education, and we have a good track record of contributing to that; our faculty are involved in research collaborations with institutions like Harvard and MIT and Wellesley. Our students are involved. It’s amazing. Gordon’s student body president built a consortium of Boston-area student body presidents, and I love that Gordon initiated it. So there is a lot of benefit that comes from having a larger milieu where higher education is really prized. The challenge we face at Gordon is that within our environment, there is not a deep understanding of the distinctive character of Christian higher education. Most people who do sense a difference don’t see it as a positive value; rather, they see it as somehow limiting us. When in fact, I think it provides tremendous opportunities for us. So we need to help our neighbors and friends—many of whom have negative perceptions of Christianity in general and of evangelicals in particular—to see that in seeking to advance God’s kingdom, we desire to advance the common good.

Gordon College is defined by the “historic, evangelical, biblical faith.” How do you define each one of those qualities?

Historically we feel a deep sense of connection with the church’s teachings and a deep respect for the way in which Christianity has developed. The dominant church affiliation in Massachusetts is Roman Catholic, and Gordon has been involved in a number of significant dialogues with Catholic brothers and sisters. And I think that we’ve demonstrated that we have a deep appreciation for all that we share; what we share is much greater than that which divides us. At the same time, we recognize that we have a distinctive role to play as an evangelical institution. We prize the Bible; we prize evangelism. So we very much want to uphold evangelical orthodoxy, the traditional teachings of modern American evangelicalism that hearken back to the time of Jesus but have contemporary relevance in a particular way. A number of very significant evangelical thought leaders have been part of leading Gordon College. Three of my predecessors, Harold Ockenga, Dick Gross, and Jud Carlberg, each left a unique stamp on the institution that reaffirmed our evangelical commitments in a particular time and place. Jud Carlberg, probably more than anybody else, has been involved in the relationship between science and faith. Dick Gross has demonstrated the relevance of the arts; he has a very deep appreciation for Christian engagement with the arts, and that has become one of our distinctives at Gordon. And then, Harold Ockenga contributed a strong commitment to public engagement. He was pastor of Park Street Church for many years, and I think most folks would agree that of his generation he was the evangelical luminary in New England. Gordon has been able to take advantage of that prominence, and I think that when most people in Boston think about evangelicals, they think of Gordon College.

So, will this presidency then be defined by a social scientist contribution?

Maybe. I retain the title of professor of sociology, and I’m very proud of that. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking as a social scientist about how you actually develop leaders. That was one of the reasons the search committee was interested in me. Every institution of higher learning talks about developing leaders, and I spent two years studying the programs and initiatives in place at the top one hundred institutions in the country. I have a granular understanding of what these schools are doing in leadership development—and I can tell you, after talking with many of their directors, most of them are just guessing. They’re hoping that what they are doing will result in something good, but they don’t actually have the data. I collected data on people who are significant leaders and looked back on what their undergraduate experiences were like. Based on that research, we designed a whole series of initiatives and programs, some of which are public and some of which we are still working on, aimed at making a positive contribution to the leadership development of our students.

In what ways has Gordon been unique among other non-denominational evangelical institutions, such as Westmont, Taylor, and Wheaton?

We’re in a setting that is intensely secular, and over a long span of time we’ve had to learn how to deal with those folks who don’t agree with our core convictions. Religious and cultural pluralism is not some trend that’s coming down the pike; it’s the air we breathe. I think that Christian institutions will increasingly have to calibrate relative to those larger issues as they spread across the entire country, but Gordon has already demonstrated how it’s possible to be faithful to our core evangelical identity while at the same time building bridges of cooperation and friendship with folks who don’t always agree with us. My hope is that we will be able to continue doing that in the days ahead.

What role do the liberal arts play in the life of Gordon College? In what ways, if any, do they contribute to the larger effort to integrate faith and learning?

Gordon has a culture that values interdisciplinary conversations. There is a generalist orientation to the education that we provide. We want folks to be conversant with a whole range of issues, and to be fluent on a more limited range. It’s a model very different from the European system of higher education, and, if anything, the developments that are occurring in Asia today underscore the value of what we are doing. They are moving away from the three-year British system and embracing the four-year American system, and in large part embracing the liberal arts model because they recognize that creativity, innovation, and leadership emerge more consistently from a liberal arts environment than from specialized programs. Because Gordon is defined by this liberal arts orientation and commitment, we have a common framework in which matters of faith can become part of the warp and woof of the institutional life. We don’t relegate faith to classes in New Testament and Old Testament; instead, a Gordon education is informed by a broad understanding of the wideness of the gospel and its implications for all the areas of human inquiry.

Gordon College is one of only a handful of evangelical Christian colleges that has not invested in online and/or degree completion forms of education for undergraduates. What challenges do those decisions pose for Gordon?

I am persuaded—and I think almost all my colleagues are as well—that some dimension of online pedagogy is going to be part and parcel of the undergraduate experience for every institution over the next five to ten years. We’ve seen this realignment gaining momentum on many fronts. I think that that will become part of who we are. Gordon has been doing some piloted programs in online education for about three years, and I think that the pilot program was the exactly right way to go. It has given us a chance to see what we are doing and how we can make improvements. And for us it’s not about expanding the population that we serve, but instead it’s figuring out a way to better serve our existing population. We recognize that undergraduates today demand some engagement with multimedia. At the same time, we are committed to our core identity as a liberal arts college. One of the things that I think that Gordon can uniquely do is that we can demonstrate for other Christian colleges how it is that you can be committed to a liberal arts environment while at the same time preparing young people for careers. A liberal arts education prepares you not for a job but for a career. And it prepares you for a career that spans your entire lifetime. One thing that struck me in my own research is that so many of the people that I interviewed—over half of them, in fact—had a liberal arts degree. I asked them, “Why did you not major in business or in finance?” They said they were looking for something that would give a broad enough base so that they could be flexible and respond to the changing dynamics. That’s the value of a liberal arts education.

What role does chapel play in the life of Gordon College? In what ways, if any, does it contribute to the larger effort to integrate faith and learning?

Boston is home to more college students per capita than any other city on the planet; it is home to more institutions of higher learning than any other city in the world. Within that environment, Gordon College is the flagship evangelical institution. If there is any community that is going make the gospel compelling, plausible, and attractive to the world of higher education it’s the folks who gather in our chapel every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Chapel is a core element of our community. Whenever I am in town on chapel days, I make it a priority to be there. And we have fantastic student participation: we understand chapel to be a place, not just where we enliven students’ spirits, but also where we stretch their minds and deepen their faith. That’s one of the things that I love about Gordon.

When you are searching for faculty members at Gordon College, what qualities are deemed to be most critical?

I’m blessed to have faculty colleagues who are incredibly faithful, deep intellectuals and accomplished teachers. We want more people like that—above all, people who deeply love students, that love shaping the minds and the souls of young people. If I had to pick one word to sum up what I’m looking for in new faculty, it would be “love.” I think that is what’s most distinctive about a Christian institution of higher learning. We recognize that education is transformation, and we want that transformation to include not just intellectual development but also the shaping of Christian character—to develop young people who demonstrate love of God and neighbor. I’m looking for folks who know that love is the criterion of spiritual maturity and who demonstrate that in their lives every day.

Shifting gears, what do you perceive to be the greatest challenges facing colleges and universities as a whole? Christian colleges and universities in particular?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described most institutions of higher learning as approaching a fiscal cliff. The financial model for higher education, in general, is not sustainable. And institutions that have thrived over the last few years have done so is by growing themselves out of the problems. Enrollment growth. That is not a sustainable model because demographically the pool of the college-bound population is declining in the United States. So, there has to be a real attention to the financial model that sustains, that drives, the engine of higher education. I think that is challenge number one.

Challenge number two in wider higher education, I would say, is the emotional health and well-being of students. Twenty-two percent of Gordon students take advantage of our counseling center on an annual basis, and that’s the tip of the iceberg in the number of students who have real emotional challenges. I would venture that Gordon students are much healthier on an emotional basis than the average college student. What we are seeing is that students who are going to college today are more immature, have shorter attention spans, and have a lot more emotional baggage than the previous generation of college students (or at least they are more attuned to these issues that earlier generations of students were), and that requires enormous investment of resources and personnel.

For Christian higher education, I think that we are going to increasingly face challenges of how we respond to cultural pluralism, and that manifests itself in issues of legislation and government action. It also relates to perceived relevance to the big issues of the day and the coarsening of American culture. I think we also have to recognize that there is real intellectual and spiritual rot in our society, and Christian colleges have played a role over the last hundred years in helping to address those issues. But the problems are getting worse, not easier. So those will require a lot more of our time and attention.

When you retire (long into your future), what do you hope people will remember most about your presidency?

I really hope that over the course of my service at Gordon I can help the institution to honor Christ in a largely unchristian context in such a way that we are even more faithful to biblical orthodoxy twenty years from now than we are today—and yet also even more compelling witnesses to our unbelieving neighbors than we are today. That’s the big objective: to be open and yet still faithful. On the micro level, I hope every year to be able to invest in two to five students who are really exceptional. Henry Hagen is a Gordon sophom*ore. I’m investing in him because I think that he will probably lead something significant in his lifetime, and I want to be one of his encouragers. I’ve benefited greatly from mentors who invested in me, and I feel like I could do that for others. It’s incredibly gratifying to play a very small role in helping somebody both discover and then move further down the path of their God-given calling.

My own professional path had a number of different detours; in the moment it felt as if I had never gotten far enough down one path before I was going in another direction. I was an English major in college. I worked in the corporate world in IT. I went to Princeton Seminary, then worked for the world’s preeminent polling firm, then went to Oxford and studied theology with Alister McGrath. But then I changed tracks yet again and pursued a PhD in sociology, having taken one undergraduate course in sociology, and wound up in a tenure-track position at Rice, where I started a leadership center. All those different paths have perfectly prepared me for this particular experience, and in each of them I felt real confidence that God had led me in that moment.

My hunch is that there are readers of Books & Culture who are asking, God, what are you doing at this moment? They have an opportunity that they feel led to, but they don’t understand how it fits in, or they thought they would be going down one path their entire life and it doesn’t work out that way. I want to encourage people to earnestly seek God in those opportunities that come along the way. And frankly to have the courage and the confidence to pursue them. I am so grateful that I have had the chance to be here at Gordon for this past year. It’s changed my life in all good ways. I pray more fervently and more deeply now than I ever have in my entire life, and I find the work to be as fulfilling as anything I’ve ever done. I truly cannot imagine getting to do more intellectually engaging work than I undertake in this role. And I’ve had a chance to become part of a community that I absolutely love. My hope is that I could simply be a signpost: be open to opportunities that God can use for great good in your own life.

Todd C. Ream serves on the honors faculty at Indiana Wesleyan University.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

No one knows how many stories there are, told across how many nights, or who first told them, or in what language, or how long ago. Alf Layla wa-Layla, the Thousand and One Nights, accreted material over the centuries like a stalagmite. A 9th-century fragment of the title page survives. In the 10th century, both al-Mas’udi and Ibn Nadim mention the work, reporting that it derives from a Persian original. The oldest substantial Arabic version is a three-volume Syrian manuscript from the 15th century. It’s from this that Antoine Galland created Les Mille et une nuits, which acquainted the broader European mind with the beautiful storyteller Shahrazad at the beginning of the 18th century. Galland’s translation introduced many of the stories—Sindbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba—we associate with the Nights today, and subsequent translators have retained them. (Some have suspected Galland of inventing Aladdin and Ali Baba himself.) I see no reason Martian colonists, centuries from now, shouldn’t gather up a few of their own dusty tales and insert them into the book.

I wish I’d read the Nights when I was a child, but I didn’t get around to them (or some of them—the recent Penguin Classics edition runs to about a million words) until I was almost forty. I assume most readers are familiar with the basic frame of the Nights: betrayed by his wife, whose execution he orders, the Persian king Shahriyar begins to marry and bed a virgin every night, having her killed in the morning, before she too has a chance to shame him. When virgins start getting scarce, Shahrazad, daughter of the king’s vizier, offers herself. The first night, she tells the king a story to pass the time, and is still telling it when the sun comes up. Enraptured, eager to find out how the story ends, he decides to spare her life one more night. The next night, she finishes it but, of course, begins a new one, which is interrupted by the dawn … Thus her life comes to depend upon her ability to produce compelling fictions night after night (it’s never been clear to me when anyone gets any sleep).

Eavesdropping on the king’s bedchamber, I began to hear echoes of more familiar voices. As Borges learns to recognize Kafka’s influence on Zeno and the 9th-century writer Han Yu, I felt how deeply Kafka and Borges himself had impressed the anonymous writers of The Arabian Nights with their labyrinths and parables. Forget Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote: postmodernism begins here.

Their origins lost in clouds, Shahrazad’s stories themselves swim with mysterious confusions of identity—doublings and disguises, forgeries and frauds. The tale of “the second caliph” anticipates Paul Auster and Philip Roth: the caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, and his trusted vizier, Ja’far, are in the habit of disguising themselves to walk among the people of the capital at night. One evening, they see a magnificent barge lighted by lanterns sailing down the Tigris, carrying a beautiful young man on a red gold throne surrounded by slaves and attendants. It is, they are told, the caliph and his vizier, who sail the Tigris every night warning people to stay off the river.

“Stories are best told at night,” Robert Irwin writes in his superb introduction to Malcolm Lyons’s three-volume translation for Penguin Classics, published in 2008. “The night cloaks many mysteries.” The lamps and torches of the Nights reveal a world governed by caprice and ambiguity:

The Arabic for “mystery” or “secret” is sirr, but sirr is one of those numerous Arabic words which also comprehend [their] opposite meaning, so that sirr also means “a thing that is revealed, appears or [is] made manifest.” Many stories open strangely and they will only close when that strangeness is resolved and the truth “appears or is made manifest.”

Sometimes, in fact, the seeming resolution is as strange as the original mystery. It turns out that the second caliph is Muhammad ‘Ali, a jeweler who has been spurned by the Lady Dunya, his wealthy lover (and, in a characteristic coincidence, Ja’far’s sister), after he disobeyed her order to stay in the house while she went to the baths. She kicked him out, and he sold his shop, using the proceeds to purchase a grand boat and hundreds of slaves:

I called myself the caliph and I arranged that each one of my servants should duplicate the roles played by the caliph’s own followers, seeing to it that they looked like them. I had it proclaimed that if anyone cruised on the Tigris, I would immediately have him executed. I have been doing this for a whole year now, but I have heard no news of the Lady Dunya, nor have I found any trace of her.

This is the entire explanation, which the real caliph accepts, impressed by “the passionate intensity of Muhammad’s love.” He arranges to have Muhammad reunited with his lady, as if it might occur to anyone, afflicted by heartsickness, to impersonate a political leader and forbid river traffic.

Lyons’s version of The Arabian Nights is the first complete translation of the authoritative Arabic text known as Calcutta II since Richard Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in 1885. It joins Husain Haddawy’s The Arabian Nights (1992), which offers only 35 stories, as the go-to Nights of choice for the contemporary English reader. Haddawy’s translation has recently been reissued in a marvelous Norton Critical Edition that includes, along with much else, al-Mas’udi’s and Ibn Nadim’s discussions of the text; Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”; and essays by Hofmannsthal, Borges, and Todorov. It’s a one-volume concordance to the human imagination’s debt to Shahrazad.

There’s not much reason to prefer either Lyons or Haddawy over the other—both translators write serviceable, occasionally plodding prose—except their different treatments of the Nights‘ frequent outbursts of verse. I don’t know how this stuff sounds in Arabic, but, as is the case with Eliot’s chapter headings in Middlemarch, I wouldn’t miss it if it were cut. That’s particularly true of Haddawy’s Englishings, which are abominable:

You left me burdened with the weight of love,
Being too weak even a shirt to wear.
I marvel not that my soul wastes away
But that my body can your absence bear.

But that my body can your absence bear! I know not but that I’m too weak even a joke to make. I’m a poet, of course, but anyone—Haddawy’s editor, for instance—should be able to hear how wretched this is. Haddawy has as much business translating poetry into English as I have starting for the Yankees.

Lyons translates the same lines as:

You loaded me with passion’s heavy weight,
Although even one shirt is too much for my strength.
I am not surprised that my life should be lost;
My wonder is how, after your loss, my body can be recognized.

This is not good poetry. It is, in fact, awful—it puts me in mind of Guy Davenport on Richmond Lattimore’s Odyssey: “Tone be damned, rhythm and pace be damned, idiom … be damned; this version is going to be punctiliously lexicographic.” But Lyons’s version has the virtue of employing recognizable English syntax.

Since Lyons also translates the complete text, he has the edge over Haddawy; but that Norton edition is splendid. Anyone interested in the Nights will want both.

Irwin observes that the Nights “should be understood as the collective dreaming of commercial folk in the great cities of the medieval Arab world.” The tales teem with shopkeepers, merchants, butchers, grocers, tradesmen, and other representatives of the class from which their readership was composed (“Sindbad was not a sailor but a merchant,” Irwin reminds us). The fantastic and romantic elements of the stories—princes, jinn, talking donkeys, lots and lots of sex—encode a kind of class longing, as perhaps the Avengers do in our day. Think of Walter Benjamin’s remark that “The world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms, is Kafka’s world.”

Indeed, the Jewish joke that Benjamin recounts in his essay on Kafka could, with minimal tweaking, have appeared in The Thousand and One Nights. In a Hasidic village, some folks are gathered in “a shabby inn.” They are all local people, except for “one person no one knew, a very poor, ragged man who was squatting in a dark corner at the back of the room.” As the night wears on, someone suggests that “everyone should tell what wish he would make if one were granted him.” The usual things are mentioned—money, a bride for a favored son, a new workbench, and so on—until only the beggar hasn’t responded. Reluctantly, he answers:

“I wish I were a powerful king reigning over a big country. Then, some night while I was asleep in my palace, an enemy would invade my country, and by dawn his horsem*n would penetrate to my castle and meet with no resistance. Roused from my sleep, I wouldn’t even have time to dress and I would have to flee in my shirt. Rushing over hill and dale and through forests day and night, I would finally arrive safely right here at the bench in this corner. This is my wish.”

The others are perplexed. “And what good would this wish have done you?” someone asks. “I’d have a shirt,” the man replies.

So much of what we treasure in the Nights is here: the mysterious stranger; the violent reversal of fortune; the beggar-king; the grandiose deployed for the mundane; the enigmatic, parable-like lesson. And, most of all, the story told by someone in a story. Shahrazad’s characters are constantly breaking into her narrative to begin stories of their own, which contain storytellers who tell stories about people who tell stories; and so on, like a Russian doll, a stack of turtles all the way down.

The funniest recurring bit in the Nights is the character who exclaims, “This is no time for a story!” For if the Nights teach us anything, it is that it’s always time for a story: our appetite for stories is insatiable, and life is an affair of listening to stories told. Stories end; even Shahrazad’s. The jeweler marries the vizier’s sister, and they live happily together for many years, until they are “visited by the destroyer of delights and the parter of companions.” While we are here, like King Shahriyar on his very first night with Shahrazad, we must be “glad at the thought of listening to a story.”

Michael Robbins is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In my parents’ basem*nt, inside a box marked “Lisa: Don’t Throw Away,” is a collection of souvenirs from my travels through high school and college. There’s a ticket to an Under the Sea-themed prom, a rough-hewn set of wooden wall hooks in the shape of hearts that I bought from some street kids in Guatemala, and the first wave of wedding invitations. The box also holds a formerly blank book that functioned as my diary during many of those years. It’s covered with crushed velvet in a deep shade of indigo that mirrored the Texas sky at night, the one I would lie under on top of the big trampoline in the backyard, alternately staring at the stars and scribbling in the book with the aid of a flashlight.

Tucked inside the front cover of the diary is a faded newspaper clipping that my grandmother sent me sometime in my early teens. I can’t remember just when. The details of the article have also faded, but the picture that accompanied it is sharp in my mind’s eye. A round young girl of indeterminate age—perhaps 8? or 10? or 12?—with dark hair and blunt bangs looks at the school photographer, a slight smile playing on her lips. The girl’s fat cheeks render her eyes sphinxlike, inscrutable. The news was that the girl had died from complications of what appeared to be criminal neglect on the part of her parents, evidenced chiefly by the girl’s incredible size; she weighed several hundred pounds.

My grandmother was a complicated woman, but her message to me was simple: lose weight or you will die. You will end up like this girl. I’d been on diets for much of my life, and I was no stranger to this particular admonition, though Grandma had put a particularly fine point on it. On my way to an even six feet, I was already several inches taller than the girl in the picture, was probably half her weight, and was already older. And no one could ever charge my parents with neglect, especially when it came to food, definitely not my grandmother’s daughter who fed us carob chip cookies and bought 50-pound bags of whole wheat that she milled herself in order to make the flour for her truly whole wheat bread. The dead girl and I had lived very different lives by most metrics, but she was me. I knew that much. I kept her story close, a friendly specter reminding me of what was at stake as I scribbled in my diary.

Edie Middlestein, the Jewish matriarch at the center of Jami Attenberg’s deft novel The Middlesteins, dies because she is fat. And so, as you might imagine, I felt a cold dread when a friend first alerted me to the book and suggested I might want to read it. As a fat person I often eagerly engage social commentary about the “obesity epidemic,” but it’s also terribly draining to be subject of what often feels like a nation of armchair pathologists.

My dread melted on contact with Attenberg’s beautifully wrought story. We meet Edie as a 62-pound five-year-old whose parents—Jews shaped by the particular sorrows of the early 20th century—agreed on only two things: “how to have sex with each other (any way they wanted, no judgment allowed) and how often (nightly, at least), and they agreed that food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything they desired. And if Edie, their beloved, big-eyed, already sharp-witted daughter, was big for her age, it did not matter. Because how could they not feed her?” By the time Edie is quietly taking early retirement, offered because the new partners at her law firm are uncomfortable with her obesity, she weighs more than 300 pounds.

The novel orbits around Edie’s girth, her body’s unseemly demise providing the story’s center of gravity. But each member of this family is a world unto him- or herself, with each chapter featuring a different person’s perspective. Via this rotating third-person narrative we’re introduced to the interior lives of the Middlesteins of Chicago’s northern suburbs: the henpecked husband who leaves his wife in her hour of need to make what he knows is his last play for love; the good-natured son whose care for his mother is, on two particular nights, breathtaking; the perfectionist daughter-in-law who is busy planning the b’nai mitzvah party for their twins and also spying on Edie; the caustic daughter who still harbors an adolescent grief; the granddaughter who is learning about living while her grandmother is dying.

The brilliance of The Middlesteins is on display in the disparities—small and large—in these overlapping narratives. The members of the Middlestein family sometimes succeed but more often fail to understand and care for each other well, and Attenberg captures these small triumphs and quotidian heartbreaks with pitch-perfect prose that skillfully makes a dysfunctional Jewish family in the Chicago suburbs every family everywhere.

Insofar as the protagonist seems to be eating herself to death, The Middlesteins could be heralded as A Novel for Our Time. But this book is both more and less ambitious than that. Food and eating feature prominently, but Edie is seldom reflective on the subject of her own eating habits. Unlike most fat people I know, she has rarely, if ever, applied herself to a diet of any kind, a detail that strains credulity. And the idea that Edie’s weight itself is a death sentence is never complicated by the increasingly large number of voices (Dr. Robert Lustig, author of Fat Chance, being the most recent addition) insisting that just as one can be thin and sick, one can be fat and fit. Edie is 6 feet tall, and her 300 pounds would not put her at death’s door without other complicating factors, including a sedentary lifestyle, extraordinary stress, and the poor quality (not just quantity) of her diet. If you’re looking for them, these indicators can be seen amid repeated references to Edie’s voracious appetite, but most readers won’t be looking. For my part, I appreciated a parenthetical remark about a box of fat-free cookies Edie consumes (top ingredient: sugar), hinting at the larger social shifts in food production that affected Edie’s choices and their outcomes.

That I was satisfied by such scant suggestion of the multifaceted nature of obesity is testimony to the riveting portrait of family life The Middlesteins paints, one in which Edie’s relationship to food is significant, but also clearly situated in her relationships to her dead parents, her husband, and her children. Attenberg doesn’t work to make us like any of this motley crew; her gaze is flinty. But she helps us to see that what looks like a choice from the outside often seems like a matter of survival from the inside, and the result is a deeply humane and often humorous story of how the struggle both to live with and to live without our closest relatives shapes us for better and for worse.

Attenberg reveals her sympathies most clearly in her descriptions of food. The pages are tables heavy laden with whitefish, bagels, lox, bright green pickles bursting with vinegar and salt, fast-food hamburgers with their salmon-pink special sauce, scallion pancakes, pork buns, seafood dumplings, and kugel. In one of the most lyrical chapters Kenneth Song, a chef in love with Edie, cooks for his paramour:

He wiped the flour from his hand and onto a towel. The finished noodles rested nearby. Kenneth threw the cumin seeds into a skillet. He thought about adding cinnamon to the dish. If cumin would be good for Edie’s health—he knew she was sick, even if she wouldn’t tell him the truth; her skin was too pale, her breath too slow—the cinnamon would be good for her passion.

It only took two minutes to roast the seeds. The chilies were chopped, the garlic, too. The crunch of the cumin would be a nice contrast to the tenderness of the lamb, and he knew Edie would enjoy it, the texture, the depth, the surprise of the pop. He mused on the cinnamon some more. How would Edie feel if she knew he was adding an aphrodisiac to her food? He decided all he would be doing was adding a little flame to an already burning fire.

In another departure from the family perspective, the twins’ much ballyhooed b’nai mitzvah is experienced through the eyes of a group of Edie and Richard Middlestein’s oldest friends. Their perspective on the Shakespearean tragic comedy of that event—complete with Edie throwing food at Richard—is laced with poignant reflection on their own mortality and underscores the nimble grace with which this elliptical tale is told.

I have a habit of identifying—perhaps over-identifying—with characters in the stories I read. Especially when they’re fat, as the girl tucked into my diary can testify. But I found The Middlesteins compelling not because I found a kindred spirit in Edie (or any of the Middlesteins, for that matter), but because in these pages I found a spirit so human it made me willing to claim all of these characters as kin. And it left me craving latkes with spiced applesauce. This little book dazzles.

Lisa Ann co*ckrel is an editor for Brazos Press and Baker Academic. She writes regularly for CT Movies and is working on a book about obesity, community, and the ethics of incarnation.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I’m not an expert on any aspect of antiquity, though I teach high school Latin and once interrupted Ralph C. Wood during a panel conversation about St. Augustine. I really thought the poor man needed my help. The lesson I took away from that day was this: in the presence of people who know what they’re talking about, it’s best to stay quiet and look thoughtful, as if you’re contemplating Roman tax law, or wondering why you never finished your master’s degree.

That charade is harder to maintain in an essay than on a stage with loquacious scholars, and so I hope David Bentley Hart will pardon me for asking to write this review of his excellent collection of short stories, The Devil and Pierre Gernet. This is Hart’s first published work of fiction, but he’s already well known as a theologian, church historian, and defender of the faith against Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens, Inc. And since it’s always hard to forgive a polymath, I’m perversely glad to report that his writing does bear a few scars of academia, including an alarming reliance on qualifying adverbs and a vocabulary that only a multilingual oenophile could truly love. Nevertheless, his prose is often lovely and always imaginative and emotionally rich. So, alas, some people do get to have it all.

But the main attraction here isn’t really writing, or even storytelling. What David Bentley Hart offers is more akin to architecture. Wandering through his superficially unconnected stories, you may have the feeling of exploring an old, sprawling house, each room dedicated to a central idea and decorated with its own measure of poetry, scholarship, and whimsy. Doors appear in unexpected places. Passing from one story to another, you realize that what connects them is an ancient way of looking at the world: a vision of ideas, dreams, and history itself as creations of a mind outside of time.

The title novella takes the form of a dinner-table conversation between a passive narrator and a fallen angel who “had walked the earth for ages, wearing countless guises and called by a multitude of names.” This is a familiar convention, and the demon’s vanity makes him good for a few Screwtapesque laughs:

[C]ertain of his boasts seemed a little too fantastic to credit. “I invented vegetarianism,” for example, or (more expansively), “I invented the agricultural revolution … and, of course, human sacrifice.” On one occasion, he claimed not only to be a champion of the avant-garde, but in fact the inventor of all conceptual art and its most generous patron.

Explaining the status of his lugubrious manservant, the demon gives us a glimpse of hell’s hierarchy:

“For us, you see, the world here below is a kind of abysmal mirror inversion of our former condition; back in the old days, in the warm light of the spheres above the moon, he actually stood much higher in the angelic hierarchy than I …. [S]ubjugation based purely on power seemed to conform to his moral expectations. In fact, he began to luxuriate in his degradations, to the point that I had to halt the beatings. A wise master denies his servants too many luxuries.”

Interestingly, the “inversion” principle of pandemonium doesn’t apply to Satan himself, who “remains terrible in his ruin,” dwelling at the bottom of a “deep, frigid pool.” His servants hear his “mesmerizing, metallic moan” but can only wonder about his powers. It’s in their nature to dream of revolution and cyclical change: “Perhaps I could crush him like an insect,” says the demon interlocutor, “but I dare not test his strength: it could be very painful.”

The conversation takes a more sinister tone (if that’s possible) when the demon describes how he once lured a devout scholar-poet, Pierre Gernet, to despair, drug addiction, and eventual death. Pierre’s descent began after his fiancée rejected him rather than lose her fortune, but at the core of his collapse was his “own pathetic devotion to a largely mystical past, to ‘timeless truth’ rather than to the truth of time.” Rather than learn to “doubt and to hate … so that something more primitive could break through all those conventions of thought and formality,” Pierre simply withered away in disappointment.

The demon longs to interpret this passive ruin as an act of rebellion, and he gloats over the memory of Pierre’s wrecked body—an “ideal monument to the futility of all those transcendental ecstasies that had tormented him.” Yet he’s still brooding over the last-minute appearance of a “great oaf of a blundering angel “who snatched Pierre’s body away to worlds unknown. “Caprice and whimsy!”

Other stories in the collection offer rare philosophical and historical pleasures. In “The Ivory Gate” (another long conversation in a restaurant: we must pity the waitress who attends the tables of Hart’s characters), a dying philosopher describes several labyrinthine series of dreams in which he passes further and further into what seems to him the real world, while the waking world feels increasingly like a prison. The story ends in an interesting twist, but what strikes me is how little depth the “real” characters have; the dream images (from the world of being) glow with vivid detail. This echoes Pierre Gernet’s devotion to “timeless truth” rather than endless revolution—the wearisome dialectic of the post-Enlightenment age.

In my favorite story, “The House of Apollo,” the apostate Emperor Julian visits Antioch in AD 362, hoping to breathe life back into the worship of the old gods. Even the local priest of Apollo sees that paganism is on its last legs; the old man faithfully tends the lonely shrine, but he admires the worshipers of “the Galilean” and bears them no ill will. With his portrait of this old pagan—”When at last he lay dying on his bed, on a warm summer afternoon full of the songs of innumerable birds”—Hart earns the price of the book. The priest’s beautiful deathbed vision of a departing god—the classical world in retreat—is ripe for explicitly Christian interpretation, yet Hart blessedly declines to spell that out, trusting his readers.

I don’t know whether David Bentley Hart will bother writing more of what he calls “fiction of ideas” as opposed to “ripping good yarns” (or, more generally, the “fiction of non-sales” as opposed to “ripping good atheists”). I hope he will, and I suppose there’s some reason for hope, since he says in an “Author’s Apologia” to The Devil and Pierre Gernet that “purely at the level of ideas I’ve never written a more serious book.” This may be theologian-code for “I’m still planning to write that voluminous work I promised on the desert fathers—just can’t seem to knock out the opening paragraph.” But I’d rather see it as a defense of fiction itself: the pursuit of truth through the halls of story. Argument and exposition flow from every academic and ecclesiastical spigot. What we thirst for in this technologically saturated but spiritually dessicated age is beauty that reflects what really is. And this is a beautiful book.

Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and essays and teaches Latin in Alabama.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, seals four Englishmen and a Bengali in a tank just after World War I’s end, and it seals a genetically altered mouse in a transparent diorama on the eve of this millennium. It crumbles the Berlin Wall in slow-motion for a TV audience, and it crumbles 1907 Kingston by dint of enough earthquake to awe a Jehovah’s Witness. White Teeth, then, zigzags across 20th-century history by way of Willesden—a corner of London where marriage and school and pubs yoke stodgy veterans to Jamaican evangelists, smug white biologists to estranged brown twins, and so on.

As for Smith’s latest novel, NW, it simply zigzags across Willesden. Or the quadrant of London, anyway, that contains Willesden: the northwest one. True, as in White Teeth, schooling ties the characters (now each thirtysomething) together; social-worker Leah Hanwell, lawyer Natalie (née Keisha) Blake, mechanic Felix Cooper, and addict Nathan Bogle all attended, as kids, a school named Brayton. And public housing unites them, too. Give or take a wheeled tea cart, all four have grown up with little in the way of privilege.

Other connections between these characters, though, prove inconsistent. Leah and Keisha, for example, become best friends in girlhood, in a wading pool, prior to any consciousness of ethnic difference (Leah is white, Keisha black) and remain close friends, although not without lulls and tiffs. Conversely, both know Nathan Bogle, during school, mostly by his enticingly bad reputation, which petty crime and drug abuse downgrade, afterwards, to the occasional unhappy sighting. And Felix Cooper they know only in adulthood and only for his newsworthy obituary.

Thus, when the second section of NW, “Guest,” trails Felix for a day between its renditions of Leah’s story (Part 1, “Visitation”) and Keisha/Natalie’s (Part 3, “Host”), the interruption seems unwarranted. At the same time, keeping company with Felix is a relief because it is only his death—not his sweetness or guile or blunders—that fails to make sense. Indeed, because Felix has quit drugs and a miserable relationship and because he has awakened beside his girlfriend, the formidable Grace, it is only his death that makes his story seem directionless.

Such is not the case with Leah. With a naïveté that can wax cynical, she dithers over her relationships: doting on and blushing at her Algerian husband, Michel; pitying and slighting her gauche mother, Paulette; needing and resenting her oldest friend, Natalie. She can adore her dog and neglect it. She can gift a junkie with thirty pounds and a secret, then badger her. She can script affectionate words for her father’s ghost to parrot back to her, then scorn herself for it. She cannot, however, imagine raising a child—or say so. Or, quite, say why.

Natalie, on the other hand, nags her beautiful toddlers almost absentmindedly, as if their existence imposes a script on her but occasions no questions. Her husband, Frank, meanwhile, who leaves the impression of having “been born on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean and raised by Ralph Lauren,” she regards coolly across manicured lawns and smart parties, having given up, apparently, on “help[ing] him become a real person.” Although she has not quite given up on becoming a real person herself. Still, Natalie describes herself as constantly “in drag,” and her wardrobe changes—from “court drag” (as a barrister, she proves joylessly competent) to “Jamaican drag,” from “mother drag” to “wife drag”—leave her uncertain which costume is “the least inauthentic.” Thus, she invents a secret identity for herself by way of the internet, registering as KeishaNW@gmail.com and flirting with perversion, which she mistakes for authenticity, as if it were impossible that anyone would ever make up the most awful things about herself.

Other scenes in the book disprove her hypothesis that what is ugliest in a person cannot be contrived. For instance, near the novel’s loose end, Nathan Bogle recognizes Keisha, whose troubles have launched her on an aimless nighttime pilgrimage across northwest London, and he troubles her further by chatting her up with the lucid but fickle patter of an addict. His leering and menace are ugly, but they are snake oil. This tiny moral, however—that we cannot rely on the authenticity either of polish or of meanness—does not justify a fable as difficult as NW.

What, then, if anything, does? Well, we know what we usually rely upon when justifying a book: its themes or thesis, its crafted plot or shrewd art, its likely characters or likable ones. NW, though, refuses to accommodate that orthodox a rubric.

As its “mixed reviews” attest. Take Ruth Franklin’s essay about NW in The New Republic. Early on, Franklin quips, “It is a novel about identity crisis, and it is a novel with an identity crisis,” and later she returns to this complaint with greater exasperation. “We get it!” she writes. “The content reflects the form.” She continues, however, with a caveat, claiming that the book’s fragmentation is, at times, “too pat …, too literal, too tidy in its untidiness.” She objects, in particular, to the way in which NW‘s omniscient third-person point-of-view hopscotches between free indirect discourse, where a character’s thoughts seep over into the narrator’s voice, and the intrusive authorial voice (e.g., “That was the year people began to say ‘literally’ ” or “Everyone believes in destiny”).

It is not true, though, that these interruptions undermine the novel’s fragmentation; rather, they extend it. Indeed, the pronouncements that break into the collage of Natalie’s story or Leah’s sensitivity mimic experience. Don’t we, too, find faddish platitudes and urbane one-liners cutting in on our self-consciousness, sentencing us or summing us up? And, as in NW, don’t they (the memes, the mantras) flatten profuse truths, reducing them to self-justification or self-help or self-loathing? I think so. What’s more, I think we read serious novels partly because they, unlike an unmediated life, sieve or single out truisms.

The trouble, then, with this novel’s thematic content and its formal vehicle—Smith’s jagged, sometimes lyric, sometimes despotic prose—is this: we don’t know how to accommodate its fanatic realism.

Modernism’s pensive ribbons and distractions: now, those we can handle. Consequently, many reviewers, noting that NW cribs from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, wish Smith had stopped at that, sticking only to the fussy daydreams and impressionistic sympathies of the sort that Mrs. Dalloway and Leopold Bloom carry around. Others, mostly notably Michiko Kakutani, pine for Smith to return to the more postmodern swagger of White Teeth. The exuberance of that first novel, these critics suggest, generates characters who bumble lovably. Their bluster is transparent, their hearts barely calloused.

Not so the cast of NW: Leah and Natalie, Felix and Nathan take turns at being unlovable. As well as, according to Kakutani, untenable; she numbers among the characters “more ham-handed cartoons than emotionally detailed human beings.” Then again, on this point, too, the reviews are mixed: Joyce Carol Oates argues (with apparent relief) that NW contains “no farcical interludes … and no paper-thin cartoon characters to enact them.”

Oddly, NW supplies evidence for either claim. Its characters do, after all, sometimes render themselves as caricatures, as when Leah, the only white social worker in a “boxy cramped Victorian damp,” writes, “I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY” and “doodles passionately around it.” But they also have dimension. Enough dimension, in fact, that none of them can quite plumb his or her self, so Smith traces their layered hypothesizing. The lies they tell themselves edge, unflagged, into the narrative—which spends none of its omniscience on judging the individuals fumbling about under it. Instead, Smith’s narrator apportions and labels her characters’ stories, deploying irony but never announcing its target. The inhabitants of NW, therefore, cannot rightly be called cartoons; they are far too ambiguous for that.

Yet this ambiguity results in Natalie and Leah, especially, coming across as unlikely characters. They do implausible things for reasons they cannot name. They strike themselves as unlikely. Still, in that, they resemble most human beings in moments of crisis. What’s more, they further NW‘s pitiless fealty to reality.

Which brings me to what I object to in NW: its pitilessness. I don’t mind what The Guardian‘s Adam Mars-Jones calls the book’s “resistance to genre,” its resemblance to “an oddly shaped inner-city park.” Nor does the uneven pressure that Smith applies in drawing the outlines of her characters trouble me; it is, no doubt, how I would draw myself. As for the writer’s brilliance for detail—which puts “Mickey, Donald, Bart, a nameless bear, [and] an elephant with its trunk ripped off” in a “front bay window, … fabric faces against dirty glass”; which puts a “mammoth baby in swaddling clothes” in the arms of Our Lady of Willesden and beside a sign which reads “his hands big with blessing [though] to Leah there seems no blessing in it”—no one doubts that. Nonetheless, NW‘s narrative voice is, at last, that of a god without ruth.

Put otherwise: the novel’s omniscience stints on tenderness. It countenances everything, but never forgives, never winces, never grieves. Its hands are not big with blessing. Thus, its realism actually falters only in this—for the world is not unblessed, and the world’s squalor not unalloyed with light.

Jane Zwart teaches literature and writing at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When I began my career as an English professor, I heard about a teacher elsewhere who handed each new edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature to his teaching assistant. She dutifully copied his marginal notes from the old edition to the new. What laziness, I thought. Well, that was five or six editions ago. And when my 9th edition arrived a year ago in April (“with his showres soote,” as many Norton readers will recall), I gave it to my TA. She returned it after 11 hours of copying.

The NAEL, more commonly “the Norton,” is easily the industry leader. The first edition of the anthology appeared in 1962 under the editorship of the Romantic scholar M. H. Abrams and quickly displaced its rivals. Its two-volume format was suitable for the common, two-semester survey of English literature. It distinguished itself from other anthologies by adding prose and drama to the more typical poetry selections. It was both lighter and smaller than its competitors and yet, because it used Bible paper, much longer. There were initially 1,759 pages, now swollen to over 3,000 in the volume I use—the one that goes from Beowulf to William Cowper (d. 1800), the poet and hymnodist whose hymns have never actually made the anthology. Although exact sales figures are hard to come by, Norton claims that eight million students have read its English literature anthology—although “handled” may more accurately describe the contact I’ve sometimes observed.

Thirty years ago, when I was in graduate school, disputes over the “canon” of English literature were at their height. Like many students in the ’60s and ’70s, I was taught by professors whose approach to literature was influenced by Harvard’s General Education in a Free Society (1945), the famous curriculum known as “The Red Book”: “we envisage general education as an organic whole whose parts join in expounding a ruling idea and in serving a common aim …. In this view, there are truths which none can be free to ignore … truths concerning the structure of the good life and concerning the factual conditions by which it may be achieved, truths comprising the goals of a free society.” But those were about to be replaced. To take one illustration, drawn almost at random, consider the title of this 1988 article from a professor at the University of Wisconsin: “Gender and the (Re)Formation of the Canon: Is Politics All?” Her answer, predictably, is yes, politics is all—until the emergence of “a new paradigm of literary history that incorporates a feminine aesthetics and functions on a feminist theory of value.”[1]

In the ensuing decades, literary studies have embraced one form of power after another. It’s not surprising that professors would want their anthology to reflect that trend. And when that happened in 1998, with the appearance of a rival, the Longman Anthology of British Literature, the editors at Norton were alarmed. The Longman had “created a new paradigm for anthologies,” according to its publisher. Under the Norton’s next general editor, the new historicist Stephen Greenblatt, the venerable anthology followed along, beginning with the 7th edition in 2000. Like the Longman, it now included “The Wife’s Lament,” Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, Frankenstein, and works by Marie de France, William Hogarth, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie, among other overlapping materials.

One of the general editors of the Longman anthology, Kevin Dettmar, refers to the older way of anthology-making as the “bleeding hunks of meat” method: slicing a work from its context and “slapping it down” on the table of contents.[2] It took for granted Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture: “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” The new approach is “to convey the multiple contexts that ground every great literary work.” Who could quarrel with that? Beginning with the 1989 Heath Anthology of American Literature, Dettmar continues, anthologies now ask “best for what? Best for whom?” In practice, this cui bono? approach almost always presumes that the answer is one of power. Many of the Norton’s “thematic clusters”—shorter selections grouped around a theme—reflect this presumption: Women in Power; Low People and High People; Empire and National Identity.

To profit from many of the selections included under the new dispensation, it’s not necessary to share the editors’ ideological assumptions about power. I think all scholars are glad to see the Countess of Pembroke’s influential translation of the Psalms and the fine letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (added to the 7th and 9th editions, respectively). By the same token, you don’t have to buy Edward Said’s postcolonial theories in Orientalism to welcome the selections that illustrate the literary portrayal of Islam.

When editors are questioned about what stays and what goes, of course, they eschew the frank appeal to power. The other general editor of the Longman, David Damrosch, told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The biggest factor is what we find people are using in the classroom. The changes typically are less ideological than reflecting what people in the field want to use.”[3] Changes in the Norton are said to have the same pattern. In the same Chronicle article, the editorial director of Norton’s college division said, “We look to see what pieces are not much taught and figure out what could come out with causing too much pain.” Norton editor Stephen Greenblatt offered this example: the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon wasn’t getting used much, so it gave way to a medieval version of the apocryphal book of Judith. She’s a powerful female warrior, which makes a “handy counterpoint,” the article concludes, “to the ever-popular Beowulf.”

Feel better? But wait a minute. Is it possible that professors felt they needed a female counterpoint to Beowulf for ideological reasons? And why did they stop teaching The Battle of Maldon in the first place? It’s a poem about an English defeat at the hands of the Danish invaders. It ends with a doomed retainer saying: “Our hearts must be the stronger, our purpose firmer, our spirit higher as our might lessens.” The poem is about how to die with honor. A poem that talks about how to lose could raise questions in courses that place literature in a context of power. No wonder it isn’t popular these days.

And how about Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, which was included for an edition or two, then dropped in the 7th? That tale ends by reconciling a marital conflict through generous behavior on all sides. It gets the Canterbury pilgrims beyond the power struggles of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. The Franklin’s Tale asks them—and the reader—”Which character was the most generous?” Since the Canterbury Tales carry on an internal conversation about many issues, including marriage, wouldn’t the Franklin provide a handy counterpoint to the Wife’s point of view? Not if you want to portray the literature about marriage as encoding a power struggle.

As long as I’m on this subject, the last few editions of the Norton have excluded Swift’s poems that praise the wit of his beloved “Stella.” They now include a selection from Defoe’s Roxana (1724) in which the heroine makes love to a Dutch merchant, refuses to marry him, and offers this critique: “[T]he very nature of the marriage contract was, in short, nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority, and everything to the man, and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after—that is to say, a slave.” As the footnote reads, this “expresses her liberated views of marriage,” so it must be a good thing.

Really? Since the first edition of the Norton, we have liberated an additional 30 percent of our newborns from coming into the world with married parents. Is the Norton’s approach to literature “the best that has been thought and said” for them? This is not just a debating point. These editorial choices will please the professors who teach gender relations from the perspective of power. Roxana asserts power over her own body, while Stella and the Franklin disappear. But do these choices highlight the most important truths about sexuality? Samuel Johnson saw the purpose of literature in very different terms. “Poets, indeed, profess fiction; but the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of truth.” Putting an aesthetic of power at the center of literary and editorial practice inevitably blinds us to half of the literature’s truths and most of its pleasures. There must be a better way.

I’ll come back to pleasure and truth in a moment. But to anticipate a couple of objections: why not just skip Roxana, add The Battle of Maldon, and summarize The Franklin’s Tale in lecture? And if you’re still upset, forget about an anthology altogether, since about 90 percent of the Norton is available for free online. Here’s what makes this anthology indispensable to my teaching: its organization and critical apparatus, to say nothing of its extraordinary customer service. A literature teacher needs an introductory volume that guides students in sensible paths through a vast subject; introduces them to unfamiliar writers in fair, reasonable ways; and answers their questions about difficult words and passages without prejudice to the students’ own best thoughts. For the most part, the Norton still does that. Its adherence to recent ideological strains of criticism makes it increasingly difficult to use, but not impossible. You often have to argue with the anthology’s commentary and organization if you’re not focusing on English literature as the mirror of a sexist, racist, classist, and imperialistic culture. But it’s probably good for students to be aware of those arguments.

Until 1993, to take one example, readers of the medieval quest Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were informed that Gawain was “a man wholly dedicated to Christian ideals.” Part of the poem’s uniqueness lay in combining “a comedy … of manners and a profoundly Christian view of character and its destiny.” This invited the reader to consider how “character,” understood in the work’s religious context, develops over the course of a specific narrative. With a little background from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, students could begin to see the deep ethical appeal of this medieval romance. The old headnote didn’t prejudge one’s response to the poem’s meaning. Does Gawain fail because he breaks his word in avoiding death? Or, given that the Arthurian court makes light of his failure, does the poem teach forgiveness? Since the 7th edition in 2000, however, all that remains is that “Sir Gawain is being measured against a moral and Christian ideal of chivalry.” To be fair, the later editions explain the medieval ideal of “troth” (keeping faith, being true) better than the previous ones. But they lose the rich suggestions about character, then blur the ethical issues by loose writing: are “moral” and “Christian” ideals the same? And if the poem is about measuring up to an ideal, the reader is unlikely to attend to the character’s development. The editors even refer to Gawain’s ideal as “his” truth—as if keeping faith was true for him, but maybe not for us. Like other editing decisions in recent years, these revisions downgrade the work’s religious background and needlessly direct the reader away from the complex ethical appeal of English literature.

A number of the politically oriented headnotes raise similar questions. The more recent editions of the Romantic part of the anthology have included excerpts from Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others on the French Revolution. Burke had earlier “championed many liberal causes,” write the editors, and his “opponents and allies alike were surprised at the strength of his conviction that the French Revolution was a disaster.” Mary Wollstonecraft, by contrast, is introduced as being “outraged at the weakness of [Burke’s] arguments and … exaggerated rhetoric.” If I were encountering these writers for the first time, I’d be on the lookout for weak arguments and exaggerated rhetoric in Burke—not surprising in an author who’d betrayed his earlier beliefs. Since the editors fail to note that Burke considered religion the basis of civil society or that he promoted reform based on constitutional principles, I would be ignorant of his deepest beliefs. It would not occur to me that his convictions might actually bear more weight than Wollstonecraft’s.

Even though I’m quarreling about how the Norton organizes and introduces its works, I’m not quarreling with its announced criterion: to retain what is taught and add what people desire. A version of that criterion is, in my view, crucial to good literary judgment. Think about it: in one sense it doesn’t matter what’s in the Norton. What matters is what’s read and remembered and treasured and loved over decades by millions of readers. This is the criterion of “the common reader,” explored at various points in Samuel Johnson’s work. In his 1763 “Preface to Shakespeare,” for instance, Johnson writes that Shakespeare “has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit …. [H]is works … are read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure.” He identifies this principle in a biography of the poet Thomas Gray, which is oddly missing from the Norton. Although he generally disliked Gray—as a rather lazy professor, Gray didn’t have to support himself by the pen—Johnson rejoices “to concur with the common reader” in praising Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. “[F]or by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must finally be decided all claim to poetical honors.”

There’s a lot in these sentences. Critics, scholars, and teachers, Johnson says, often read to gratify their “literary prejudices.” By contrast, “common” readers go back to books and poems for pleasure. That’s how the claim to literary fame begins. That’s what should merit consideration for a place in the Norton. I love illustrating this by devoting a day each year to “bad poetry”—deservedly forgotten works from the 17th and 18th centuries. By this time in the semester, my students have read Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton. They can easily see that my favorite bad poem, “Dr. Duncan’s ‘Moral Hints to the Rising Generation,’ ” (1783), should not make the cut:

Rouse then, exert thy talents, neither weak,
Nor ‘mid the sons of dulness doom’d to sneak.
Get learning: ’tis the grace of Science fair,
That gives the lib’ral mind its noblest air

But the criterion of the common reader is just the “test” of literary merit. Pleasure gets the book on our shelf but doesn’t tell us why it deserves fame—or keep it there for long. How does the poem achieve its beauty? What does it tell us about human nature, the good society, God? To quote Johnson again, “the mind can only repose upon the stability of truth.” That’s where Johnson himself located his critical work. That’s where the teacher and anthology maker legitimately come in. And that’s precisely why the critical apparatus of the Norton—the headnotes and footnotes—are so important.

In addition to telling the confused reader that Chaucer’s “showres soote” are simply the freshening rains of April, the editors need to give some indication of the value and meaning of the author. Accomplishing this without giving way to one’s “literary prejudices” and “dogmatism” is difficult. But they should try harder—much harder—especially because professors and students who use this anthology pay more heed to its judgments than they often should.

The Burke-Wollstonecraft selections, like the Defoe excerpt, occur in sections of the anthology called “Thematic Clusters.” These are the most changeable parts of the anthology. Even more than the authors and works in the main part of the Norton, these short selections reflect changing literary and social questions of today. And so they should. The clusters in the 3rd edition (1974) included medieval “Contempt for the World” and 18th-century “Genius,” which raised questions that readers are not much interested in today. But as any teacher knows from constructing a reading packet, you choose a snippet in order to illustrate your own point or to frame your own approach to a question, whether that is “Renaissance Love and Desire” or “The Gothic.” That leads inevitably to objections like the ones I’ve made. But what’s the alternative?

One alternative is to provide more variety among the “thematic clusters.” If the Norton editors are concerned about unfairly neglected works, they could add a cluster on English hymns—Cowper comes to mind, along with Watts and Wesley in the 18th century; or Newman, John Mason Neale, and Christina Rossetti in the Victorian volume. They could include material from Walter Scott’s Talisman to complicate their treatment of “Romantic Orientalism.” More important, the rest of the anthology should include as many full works as possible. Here the Norton is to be commended. Recent editions of the anthology have included the full texts of Paradise Lost, Johnson’s Rasselas, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, and many other works. Together with over a thousand additional texts in a supplemental e-book, available for the first time to purchasers of the 9th edition, this gives the teacher more flexibility and responsibility.

No one understood his literary responsibilities better than Johnson himself. In his Life of Milton, he wrote, “Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.” That’s where the true power of literature lies. I regret that the final work in the Norton’s first volume is Cowper’s “The Castaway,” the poem of a mentally ill man who was convinced that God had abandoned him. But it is an imaginatively true account of such a state of mind. It complements the very first poem in the anthology, “Caedmon’s Hymn,” which resulted from another spiritual failure. For our first poet, however, the sense of inadequacy was completely sane. He just wasn’t up to the task of participating in his monastery’s after-dinner singing. An angel gave him a hymn of praise that celebrated the Creation, and with that poem English literary history began. Put those texts together with Sir Gawain, Paradise Lost, and Johnson’s own sense of inadequacy, and your view of English literature is different from the subtext of the Norton. You’re likely to experience something closer to the power made perfect in weakness.

Daniel E. Ritchie is professor of English and director of the Humanities Program at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author most recently of The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer (Baylor Univ. Press, 2010).

1. Cyrena N. Pondrom, ADE Bulletin, Vol. 91, p. 25.

2. Kevin Dettmar, “Tales from the Cutting Room Floor,” English Language Notes, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 197-204.

3. Jennifer Howard, “The Literary Anthology, Revised and Excised,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 21, 2007.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1695, Joseph Addison secured political patronage and a diplomatic travel mission by doing none other than penning a poem with the simple title, “A Poem to His Majesty.” Addison dedicated it to a prominent Whig politician—John Somers—and thus won a step up in politics.

Fast-forward to 2013 and, if Facebook privacy settings allowed, you would see what I saw: a prom invitation to a young woman: “The prom is dumb. Come with me. We’ll have fun.” How could she resist, she typed coyly, and the date was apparently set.

Because poetry carries intent, especially when gifted from person to person, the power of a poem can be surprising indeed. While it may eventually have broader appeal and provoke diverse interpretations (though perhaps not in the case of our Facebook poem), its effect on the individual can change the course of a relationship, even the trajectory of a life.

Such is the case, according to Matthew Hollis, with one of the most famous American poems: “The Road Not Taken.” Within this single poem is a whole relationship, and the way that relationship unfolded for Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.

Now All Roads Lead to France: A Life of Edward Thomas uncovers the secrets of Frost’s poem, through what at first appears to be a straightforward biography of Thomas but turns out to be an extended reflection on poetry and this poem in particular.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) scraped out a living for himself and his family as a prolific reviewer, essayist, and literary jack-of-all-trades. A contemporary of Eliot, Pound, Brooke, and Owen, Thomas was himself a poet at heart. Robert Frost knew this early on and encouraged his friend’s latent ambition much as Thomas promoted Frost’s professional success. Frost would later say Thomas was “the only brother I ever had.”

And it is brotherhood at play in Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—the kind that pokes a little, laughs a little, hopes a lot. But Thomas did not fully understand: he thought Frost was urging him to serve in World War I. As brothers sometimes will, Thomas could not stand the tease and felt he must prove himself in the face of it.

The poem’s power issued from its image of two roads diverging. Many a day and evening, Thomas and Frost had walked the lanes of England. Frost knew how Thomas struggled to choose a way. It was a gentle joke now, tucked into the lines, “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden back.” In other words, neither road really had “perhaps the better claim.”

Edward Thomas enlisted.

He had long suffered from severe depression, and who knows if his inability to settle, in myriad ways, had anything to do with this condition. At various times, he had searched for a savior—not the moral kind, but someone or something that would give him volition and clarity of mind. Nothing ever came. The closest was this decision to prove himself to Frost (and thus, perhaps, to his own self) by going to war. Once enlisted, he pushed the issue further by volunteering to move to the front lines; in a 64-line poem that Hollis understands as an answer to “The Road Not Taken,” Thomas penned these words:

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company

With their pattering,
Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

The poem features its own form of brotherhood—the dead lightly dancing, keeping Thomas company, hushing the roar perhaps of his own ruminations and despair. Beyond that, there is the assent: all roads take us where we truly want to go; none has the better claim. It could be seen as a deterministic “Yes” to Frost. “Yes, it matters not which road I take in the wood. Now all roads lead to France.”

Whether Frost himself adhered to such determinism is up for discussion (and Hollis does not discuss it). But Thomas understood Frost’s poem that way, and was embracing the American poet in brotherly love by speaking the language they ultimately shared as one man to another, one poet to another—the powerful language of poems.

L. L. Barkat is managing editor of Tweetspeak Poetry. She is the author of six books, including The Novelist: A Novella—about a blocked writer who, through the rituals of tea and meeting a “tea empress” on Twitter, comes to find an unexpected story locked inside. She also has a book called Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing, which was twice named a Best Book of 2011.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“For each home ground, we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.”

—Scott Russell Sanders, from “Buckeye”

I sit on my porch swing at 600 North High Street in Hartford City, Indiana, waiting out a lazy shower on the end of a storm. I’m learning that a midwestern spring thunderstorm—the quality of light across the sky, the texture of saturated clouds, the sound the rain makes on the sidewalk—is different from how it happens where I come from. In my native Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, the sky seems to climb into the hills; it has corners, or pockets. Rain runs down steep slopes into gorges, creates mud, and swells the Barge Canal, the Mohawk River, and dozens of streams and creeks whose names have been forgotten. My adult hometown, the city of Rochester, abides by its own natural rhythms as well; one is never unaware of living on the shore of the great lake, Ontario, whether in the persistent breezes of July or the lake effect snow squalls of, well, most other months. The summer sky gets hazy as you look toward the shore.

Those are conditions I understand, and I’ve learned to express what they do and how they feel, the movement and the atmosphere. I’m a proponent of García Lorca’s poetics, in which he claims that creating art depends in part on a “connection with soil.” For him, it was Granada, Andalusia; for me, upstate New York. I developed a specific language to account for the place, a register of images that emerged from a combination of instinct and lifelong observation.

But I’m not there anymore. As a northeasterner in the heartland, it’s difficult to know how to reconcile myself to the soil or the sky. Take tornado warnings, for example. They feel like a game to me. I discovered that before coming here, deep down I didn’t actually believe that tornadoes existed. Each time a funnel touches Indiana ground, I need my neighbors to delineate the variance between a “warning” and an “advisory,” and just how many miles per hour does wind normally move, anyway? What’s an acceptable range?

What are the rules of engagement for this place? Maybe there’s a pamphlet at the Chamber of Commerce, or a website.

I don’t have the basics down yet, much less an authoritative store of earned images and the voice to articulate them with precision and potency. I have little language at all for Indiana; my premature attempts fall short, and I wonder how long it will take and whether it will ever come. I’m a writer; I need this language. Furthermore, I teach writing, and one of my obligations is to foster in my students a deliberate and reflective relationship with their soil, which, in general, is this place, now our place. Yet I’m nearly at a loss when I’m driving from the university in Upland down narrow, flat Route 26, where the sky rolls in at me, corn on one side and soy beans on the other.

I need to let this place inside, and that will take time. It should; growth always does. But I also need to participate in the creation of meaning. I began by learning the facts the way all writers do: by asking—and answering in the affirmative—the question Mary Oliver asks not once but four times, always in italics, in her poem, “Ghosts”: “Have you noticed?”

Even as I noticed this place and grasped facts, meaning did not automatically accompany them. There was more work to be done. I’d looked at the geographical map, but I needed what Scott Russell Sanders calls “living maps”: “stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs,” because, he continues, “We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.” I wanted to interpret the facts of this place in the spirit, as Jack Leax has said, “of hope, not expectation,” not just to write about it or teach others to write about it, but to live from wholeness.

Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere

The default in our culture is to see, and define, the interior of America in terms of absences, like a photographic negative. “It’s the middle of nowhere,” a student says. “It’s a cornfield,” one friend said with a wry smile and a wave of his hand when I told him I’d accepted a professorship at Taylor University.

We all know that Hollywood sets an overwhelming percentage of its TV shows and movies in New York, LA, and several other major cities, encouraging the perception that those are the only options for one who would seek a life of meaning, especially in the arts. As the Cincinnati hard rock band Greatmodern snarled, “New York stone, California sand: in between, we’re all damned!” The Midwest is flyover country, at best simply a place to leave, like Willa Cather’s Jim Burden, or like James Dean turning from bucolic Fairmount, Indiana (just a few miles from here) to follow his dreams.

It is easy to love New York and LA, or the idea of such places, to project onto them our hopes and aspirations for ourselves. This seems especially true in a visual culture where the camera never lingers more than a split second, jumping and cutting spasmodically between the sexiest shots, each flicker of city light representing possibility. My cornfields and soybeans do not make the final edit in that world.

Yet the student’s statement, and my friend’s words, do not signify. The “middle of nowhere” is, by the rules of the game, somewhere. And what is a cornfield, exactly? My instincts tell me that it’s infinitely more interesting—that is, connected to our souls—than we would suspect. Maybe I’m romanticizing. But if there’s any truth in the notion that beauty will save the world, then I must learn how to see the beauty that is here, and create a bridge from the experience of beauty to language. Simone Weil wrote, “Let us love the land of here below, for God has seen fit that it would be difficult yet possible to love.” What is rural Indiana if not just that: difficult yet possible to love, seemingly resistant to our efforts?

I knew that art would be, for me, a portal to love. So I took the first steps toward reading the living maps of the Midwest, haphazardly and with no specific goal in mind—simply to acquire language, to learn and grow and begin to understand how to love this place, to see what it might require of me.

I revisited Sinclair Lewis’ Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with high-spirited Carrie Milford, and followed the scoundrel Elmer Gantry around the preaching circuit. I watched Wing Biddlebaum’s frightening hands flutter about Winesburg, Ohio. I read the story of Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, who illuminates the small-town Midwest in important ways through the perceptions of an immigrant suffering along a journey that lands her, at last, in Iowa. I read William Maxwell’s keen perceptions of life in early 20th-century rural Illinois. I went back even further to Hamlin Garland’s prairie stories in Main-Traveled Roads (1891). It was Alfred Kazin—that self-styled “walker in the city”—who asked, “Was it not in Garland that American farmers first talked like farmers? Was not Garland among the very first to dedicate his career to realism? It is true.”

In his essay “Imagining the Midwest,” Scott Russell Sanders notes:

While Midwestern characters, like the writers who create them, often experience the human world as a series of cages, they also feel restored and liberated by contact with the land. In our vagabond culture we have no ready language for this nurturing link between person and place, so we speak of majesty and charm, dignity and fulfillment, a thrill of recognition, applauding poplars and singing forsythia, the trout leaping, the heart hiding in long grass.

The very writers who bitingly denounced midwestern provincialism could also rhapsodize about the land and all that it meant to them, even after they’d lived away for many years. That was one of my first clues about the paradox of this place, a paradox still potent.

Sanders became one of my first guides to thinking about today’s Midwest and the Hoosier state we both call home, a place that, culturally and physically, has changed a great deal in the last hundred years and yet stayed much the same. In Writing from the Center, Sanders evokes the “battered corner of Ohio” where he spent much of his boyhood, the regal red-tailed hawk gliding across the open sky. In the essay “Buckeye,” he offers the buckeye tree and its seed as a wholly midwestern yet transcendent image: its beauty is as subtle and restrained as life in rural Ohio—but it’s also poisonous. He talks about how his father knew the folk names of trees rather than the scientific Latin terms, showing us that midwestern knowledge was traditionally agrarian, privileging personal experience with the land over other forms of knowing.

And yet I learned this through reading. I soaked up the language, the stories, the imagery, the particular styles and tones and harmonies that signify this place and its people and history, and I began to feel that I could and would write about my life unfolding here, and maybe soon. First, though, I wanted to read more and better understand what this place had in common with other areas, as well its unique features.

In a Los Angeles Times piece on Sanders’ book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, the reviewer concluded that Sanders “proposes a different kind of citizenship.” I take it that in his understanding, citizenship has to do with learning to love this particular place, learning the literature of the land and its people, and the rhythms of the natural world we’ve inherited here.

Chinua Achebe and Writing Place

Just how radical a proposition is this “different kind of citizenship”? One of the most effective “living maps” I’ve ever read is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. When I teach the novel in my World Literature course at Taylor, I talk about personal identity as it’s related to the literature of a region, and remind students that when Achebe’s novel was first published, in 1958, little had been written about place and culture by a Nigerian. Achebe had his work cut out for him, to both provide common ground to readers elsewhere and describe that which was uniquely Igbo.

I start by reading the first few paragraphs of the novel aloud, then stop and ask students how he’s doing so far at writing his place from the inside, inviting us there:

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.

The drums beat and the flutes sang and the spectators held their breath. Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water. Every nerve and every muscle stood out on their arms, on their backs and their thighs, and one almost heard them stretching to breaking point. In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat.

That was many years ago, twenty years or more, and during this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan.

When we begin to parse these paragraphs, we see that Achebe manages to redefine an entire continent in less than a dozen sentences. It would take too long to make all the necessary points, but for starters, Achebe names people and places, thereby inviting the Western reader to reckon with the specific spellings and pronunciations that are so much a part of the life of any region. He shows us activity: a sporting event—an ancient Greco-Roman one at that—that we can identify with, providing common ground on which Western readers can walk side-by-side with their African counterparts.

The event includes music, so the identification is even stronger; furthermore, one of the finest athletes is nicknamed “the Cat.” Regions that cheer for teams nicknamed after animals, including the Tigers and the Lions, are invited to relate at a deep level. Achebe tells us that Okonkwo’s “fame rested on solid personal achievements,” demystifying the cultural hierarchy of the tribe and preparing us for some of the more difficult-to-accept tribal practices that will come later in the narrative (such as polygamy). He gives us action that rests on direct conflict, propels the narrative forward, and reveals character.

Then he invents a new, and very African, simile for us to chew on as we adjust ourselves to the world of the story: “Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan.” In order to unpack that image responsibly, one might have to do a bit of research to understand the features of the harmattan, and explore the characteristics of a bush-fire there, including the consequences it would entail.

In class we can, from the literary side, trace the image of fire to classical Western material we read earlier in the semester, from Dido’s burning passion (and her literal burning on a pyre) in Virgil’s Aeneid to the fires of the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno. From the cultural side we can examine the issue of fame; from the biblical side we might begin thinking about pride and its spiritual consequences for the individual (which indeed will play a major role in the eventual fate of Okonkwo).

All this to say that Achebe has done something extraordinary: he has shown us that there is as much that connects us with tribal Nigerians as there is that separates us from them, that Okonkwo is perfectly us and at the same time perfectly Other. World Literature happens at the moment each of us in the classroom begins to consider the profound implications of this state of things, that the paradox is, as Richard Rohr says, “radically okay.”

Is Achebe’s example relevant for me? Is the difference between coastal America and the Midwest extreme enough to warrant considering a “different kind of citizenship”? Do we truly need living maps to navigate a region of our own country?

I remember once showing a poem to a veteran writer from Berkeley, California. His own recent book included poems set in famous European capitals, complete with italicized phrases in French and Italian. My poem used apostrophe, the poetic device in which the speaker addresses something that can’t talk back, often a place. In my case, the speaker spoke to the city of Cincinnati, in deep earnest.

The older poet couldn’t get past the title without a smirk and a comment: “Ha! Funny, I forgot that some people write about places like that.”

I’m sure detractors held similar attitudes about Chinua Achebe and the story of his Igbo tribe, questioning the value of writing about a place that had been written off: “In between, we’re all damned” indeed.

Nevertheless, some people do write about “places like that.” And many more who will never put pen to paper live and die in places like this town where I live right now. They deserve a voice. Maybe a “different kind of citizenship” is in fact needed in the Midwest.

I’m thankful that there are living maps available to those of us who have decided to love this place—maps that help us define ourselves as midwesterners, “Hoosiers” in my case, where we can explore and examine and question those definitions fruitfully. While place is only one facet of identity, it’s surely a powerful one. Studying our living maps is a way to know ourselves and write from what we’re learning and unlearning, losing and gaining.

Norbert Krapf’s Indiana: Familiar yet Mysterious

One book that has helped me on my journey toward new citizenship is Norbert Krapf’s Bloodroot. Krapf was the poet laureate of Indiana from 2008-2010. Author of many collections of poems, he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Like Achebe’s fiction, Krapf’s work often contains the names of towns and bodies of water and bridges and Hoosiers, from the Mississinewa and the Wabash Rivers to James Whitcomb Riley to Jasper, Indiana; the poems spill over with the richness of this place.

In his preface to Bloodroot, he notes that the poems in the volume “articulate [his] major allegiances”: “Bloodroot brings together,” he says, “the essential poems rooted in my native place that engage the details of the natural and human history—the external and internal cosmos—of the landscape that I was given as a birthright.” He goes on to call Indiana his “familiar yet mysterious universe to explore.” We know we’ll find common ground in his poems, while the promise of mystery holds our attention.

When I first came upon the collection, I could see that my instincts would be affirmed: that living “in the middle of nowhere” was in fact living somewhere—somewhere “familiar yet mysterious.” Krapf’s poetry is helping me acquire the images and language that I crave. His poems notice and faithfully record and illuminate.

Krapf sometimes works in broad, expansive images that somehow still exude intimacy and appreciation of place. One could argue that, at his worst moments in the abstract mode, he essentializes Indiana life through common cultural memories or even stereotypical scenes. But I’ve found that the poet’s skill and restraint, rendered in hard-earned plain speech, highlight dimensions of place that feel at once traditional and perfectly alive today.

In the poem “God’s Country,” Krapf uses the second-person point of view not only to place the reader more immediately into the action but also to create a nostalgic distance between the speaker and the scene. He writes in the second stanza, “When you steer around / a curve in God’s country, / the language on the side / of the red barn coming/ at you tells you what / tobacco to chew / and a sign on the side / of the road tells you / when church begins.”

While “you” are steering around a curve, with a barn “coming at you,” another version of “you” seems to be hovering over the scene, or sitting quietly nearby, on the grass, maybe in the shade of an old a tree. And that version of you reckons carefully with the intertwining of tobacco culture (in the hills of southern Indiana which borders Kentucky) and traditional churchgoing; it is, after all, “God’s country.” You get to be the character in the truck and the implied one sitting under the tree at the same time. That way, you’re not too busy at the wheel to read the words on the barn, or to feel deeply the simple dirt under you and the weight of generations of sober citizenship in this place. Neither are you too lazy under the tree to be compelled by the motion of the truck, an energy that defines daily existence, the movement required in a place where the yield of the land still determines the prosperity of an entire county.

Later in the poem, the immediacy becomes more poignant through the combination of sight and smell: “Through the screen door, / your nose takes in the scent / that tells you onions have / lain down in bacon drippings / in the iron skillet and made / friends with potatoes boiled / in their jackets, sliced into / thin white coins of the realm.” The economy of a place is told through the impersonal but specific details that enable the reader to see, smell, and hear, and, at the same time, perceive the larger significance of the scene. While the camera pans (with no people in the picture yet, other than the shoulder of the “you”), we come to understand the fullness of these establishing shots, the richness of the oeuvre. And we come to know this place more robustly, its familiar aspects inextricably linked to its mysterious beauty.

Krapf also brings the camera in for close-ups, even extreme ones that capture the minutest—and sometimes most telling—details. Consider his poem “Hauling Hay”:

As the sun burned
on the back
of your neck

you grabbed a bale
with both hands
by the binder twine
heaved it high
enough to clear
the mounting stack
on the back
of the wagon
pulled along
by a tractor
groaning in low

someone stacked
it just right so
the whole load
somehow held
in balance

and the chaff
swirling in hot
air like a swarm
of sweat bees

settled on your
shoulder,slipped
beneath the collar
of your sweat- sopped shirt

and pricked
the skin stretched
across your spine.

Here, rather than mediating the distance between reader and scene, the second-person point of view invites readers to identify with the “you” in the most elemental and intimate way. Krapf matches form to content by stripping away all but the most terse language, allowing himself a maximum of two syllables per word but using mostly one-syllable words where one syllable will do. Likewise, most of the lines contain no more than four syllables; many contain only three. The omission of internal punctuation creates a sense of the whole in each of its parts, and establishes the careful rhythm through the repetition of foundational sounds, through rhymes and slant rhymes. There’s a precision in this construction as precarious as that of the wagon load which, we are told, “someone stacked … / just right.” The speaker seems to “[groan] in low” like the tractor, doing the work of the poem efficiently and without ceremony. The prick of the chaff—the most ordinary experience—becomes climactic here, pricking our senses and pricking us out of our comfort as we sit with the book and imaginatively inhabit the image. The chaff and its impact register on the smallest of scales, like the tiny shock of recognition we feel as we discover that a whole world, a whole state, a whole heartland swirls in the air of the poem like a city in a snow globe.

I taught “Hauling Hay” at the Writers Center of Indiana Gathering of Writers in Indianapolis in 2012, when I was just getting to know the poem myself. The Gathering brings in writers from all around the state and the surrounding Midwest. I read the poem aloud and as I finished—before I asked a single specific question—an elderly man raised his shaky hand and simply said, “I know that. That was … my life.”

I don’t farm, but I live among farmers. I don’t harvest the fields, but I walk and drive by them every day. I see them and consider them; they are becoming “the furniture of [the] mind,” as Thomas J. Watson described “what we hear, read, observe, discuss, and think each day.” As are other Indiana images: I go to the Muncie Civic Theatre for a show; I attend church with my friends at Gethsemane parish in Marion; I sit on my porch in Hartford City and watch a storm come and go.

And I read the poems of Karen Kovacek and Norbert Krapf, ponder David Pierini’s photographs, read Susan Neville’s essays and Cathy Day’s fiction, meditate on the metaphors of Scott Russell Sanders and the wisdom of Dan Wakefield. I hear their words hanging in the air as I hear the words of my neighbors in line at the grocery, the hardware store, and the pizzeria.

I drive down Route 26 from Hartford City to Taylor University in Upland, the sky rolling in at me, corn on one side and soy beans on the other.

Daniel Bowman, Jr., is assistant professor of English at Taylor University. He is the author of A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country (Virtual Artists Collective).

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