Mostly About Stories

Søren Kierkegaard – The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like so many other thinkers of their time, saw their century as one engulfed by a crisis of faith. But whereas Nietzsche aimed to destroy the last remnants of a rotting Christianity to build a world where values might be reimagined, Kierkegaard attempted to create a new, fresh, and serious Christianity to take the place of the old and moribund one. In The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air we have three discourses analysing the famous biblical Sermon on the Mount. They fit into Kierkegaard’s larger goal of answering “what it is to be a human being”, especially from a “godly standpoint”, by teaching us a little about silence, obedience, and joy. Where Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work always aims at making us think, here the goal is almost the opposite – here he wants us to act and change our lives.

I still have not decided yet whether I liked this short book. Kierkegaard places huge demands upon his listeners to act and be true Christians, demands which are unlikely to appeal to anyone who is not devout already. For those wavering, Kierkegaard has very little time. His faith is an all-or-nothing affair. But that does not mean that this work is without interest to the rest of us.

First Discourse: Silence

In the Sermon on the Mount we are called to consider, among other things, the lilies in the field and the birds of the air. From this pair Kierkegaard draws the lessons of The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air. The first discourse looks at the pair as a source of silence and explains why silence is important.

First, however, we are introduced to the character of the poet. The poet represents an inauthentic relationship with nature masquerading as an authentic one. Society, Kierkegaard thinks, is full of people who listen to the Bible and would like to follow its teachings. However, they do not even try to do so because they believe such a life would be impossible. The poet dramatizes the wish to live religiously, thus obscuring the fact that it is actually possible. We must stop listening to poets and start listening to the silence of the animals.

Humans are gifted with speech, but we must learn to keep silence. The reason is that “becoming silent, silent before God, is the beginning of the fear of God”. And fearing God is a good thing – it draws us nearer to Him and His kingdom. The first step to reaching God is to be silent – not to do anything other than cease talking. Our speech is dangerous, it distorts our situation. The lily suffers, but does not speak, whereas a human suffers and talks and makes their suffering all the greater. “In this silence, the many thoughts of wishing and desiring fall silent in the fear of God”. In our silence we perceive God, we remind ourselves of Him and make ourselves small before Him. Poets may talk of silence, but they seek it in order to talk about it. Their search is dishonest, the opposite of what is needful.

Ceasing to think, to speak, is to become like the birds and lilies. They live entirely in the moment, untroubled – and through silence we too can live orientated towards the moment at hand. There is a lot here that reminds me of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, which I looked at earlier. The creatures, unlike us humans, are capable of repetition – they have faith that things will repeat, without needing to worry and distract themselves from the now before them.

Second Discourse: Obedience

Silence leads to the fear of God which leads to His Kingdom – that is the idea of the first discourse. The second takes us further by confronting us with a choice – an either/or. Either God or whatever we want, but not a God who is a half-measure. For Kierkegaard, if we think we can combine God with other interests, other choices, that means that we have a false conception of Him. In fact, if we don’t give God our everything, he continues, that means we hate Him. Wait a minute, you might say, that’s ridiculous. But Kierkegaard says that what God demands is “obedience, unconditional obedience”.

The lily and the bird are teachers of obedience. They do not complain about the circumstances of their birth; instead, they accept everything as God’s will. They then blossom or flourish as best they can, given whatever situation they find themselves in. We humans complain, we despair at our brief time alive – and all this disobedience gets in the way of us becoming who God wants us to be. It also makes us vulnerable to temptation. “Where there is ambivalence, there temptation is” and “where ambivalence is… deep down there is also disobedience”.

Accepting everything our authority tells us on faith, allowing no doubts or disobedience, and trusting that later we will learn the reasons behind these injunctions – how little such suggestions must appeal to a modern reader! If you are a Christian already, Kierkegaard is describing a harsh but honest way of living in a way that pleases God; but if you are not one, then this is just sinister and authoritarian rubbish, the kind of thing we’d expect from our dictators. And if you are on the fence now, in the twenty-first century, Kierkegaard is just going to push you right off into scepticism. But perhaps that’s what he’d want.

Third Discourse: Joy

After all the business with the silence and the unconditional obedience, how happy we readers are to learn about joy! For after all, in spite of the suffering of the animals, they are actually joyous. In fact, they are “unconditionally joyful, are joy itself”. The best kind of joy for Kierkegaard is a state of being rather than a temporary state. He defines it as when one is “truly to be present to oneself” – that is, when one is silent about the future and past, and instead focused entirely upon one’s own existence within the present. He even says that “Joy is the present time”. The birds and lilies are joyous because they exist in the present.

But it is more complicated than that. After all, how could the creatures both “bear so infinitely deep a sorrow” while remaining happy? Because – and here Kierkegaard says something that sounds impressive, if nothing else – they cast all their care and sorrow upon God. With the help of faith, they offload all of their cares onto God, which empties them of their worries, and leaves only joy remaining. And even if there is only a little joy there, the absence of sorrow means that this joy will seem huge. Anyone can be happy, so long as they have no sorrow – that is the message. And from the creatures we can learn how to hurl or sorrows onto God – we can learn “dexterity”.

Conclusions

We have no excuses for not being proper, Christian Christians, in Kierkegaard’s view. Even in the midst of society one can still be a proper Christian, because birds group together, yet they still show unconditional obedience, are joyous, and are silent – and people are basically birds. If we too show unconditional obedience, unconditional joy, and silence our spirits, then we can abide in God – we can temporarily take part in the eternity which is God’s time. What a rousing conclusion, ay, readers?

As for me, I am not convinced. Or rather, I think that Kierkegaard’s description of a truly Christian way of living in The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. He smashes any suggestion that anything other than a life lived entirely for God can be a godly life, and for most of us wavering moderns this is a commitment far greater than what we are capable of.

At the same time, we can take away things from this piece. The value of silence is universal, and so too is the value of orientating ourselves towards the present. But as for the middle section, the authoritarianism and recommendation of political and social quietism are more curiosities, than things I hope we may actually want to learn from.

If you want more authoritarianism, you can read my comments on some essays by Thomas Carlyle. If you want more Kierkegaard, here’s my piece on Repetition.

Machado de Assis – Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

A Brazilian and grandson of slaves, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is probably the most important Portuguese-language writer of the past two-hundred years. When I asked my director of studies for recommendations for South American literature – beyond the usual suspects – she named various people, but when she mentioned Machado and this novel specifically, she spoke with such passion that I really had no excuse not to go out and get a copy. Also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner, I read Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in the recent translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, though there is also a new Penguin translation too.

There are many reasons for having a go with this book. It is short and immensely readable thanks to its equally short chapters; it is funny; it has an interesting narrative approach; and it tells a story whose messages remain valid a hundred years later – and will remain valid, I don’t doubt, for many hundreds of years yet.

The novel is the life story of the titular Brás Cubas, written by himself from beyond the grave, where he lies festering. Being dead allows him a certain degree of perspective on his life, but this is not the dramatic perspective of, say, the dying Ivan Ilyich, who realises that his entire world was a dreadful bourgeois lie. Instead, Brás Cubas gains just enough perspective to criticise the world, but not enough to properly criticise himself. As a result, there are two layers of irony here – first Brás Cubas ironises his world, and then the author ironises Brás Cubas. And what was Brás Cubas’s life? An affair, bachelorhood, and some politics. But how wonderfully is all that story told!

Style

Let’s begin with the style. After all, it’s unmissable. Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written in a style that is self-consciously imitative of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, but with an additional “harsh, bitter sentiment” – a kind of pessimism about human nature. What I mean is that the text knows it is a text: there are chapters that ask to be deleted, chapters that ask to be inserted elsewhere, and the reader is a regular partner in Brás Cubas’s narration. He is always talking to us, advising us, telling us what we think. His preface is wonderfully short because that’s the best way to “win the sympathy of… popular opinion”, and he regularly suggests that if we don’t like the book we can simply get rid of it – “the main problem with this book is you, the reader”.

Although the story of Brás Cubas’s life is told in a fragmentary, if realist, style, these chapters are then further broken up by more philosophical ones, including a selection of our narrator’s finest aphorisms, and comments on the construction of the book itself. Not for nothing does Brás Cubas refer to his book and style as akin to “a pair of drunkards” staggering down a street. Chapters and approaches never overstay their welcome – most are no longer than a page. What is more, the style is funny. At one point a character is discoursing tediously so our narrator announces his decision to cut him off and get on with the narration.

But at the same time, within the style itself there is already a hint of the pessimism that characterises the work. Brás Cubas’s mother dies and he cannot properly mourn her because he feels an obligation to move on to a happier chapter. After another death he lists various things he saw at a funeral – “this may seem like a simple inventory, but these were actually notes I took for a sad, rather trite chapter I won’t now write”. Brás Cubas’s disdain for these things, and a certain sense that he doubts the reader is interested, means that he ends up unable to write seriously about almost anything – the style and self-consciousness of what readers apparently want all end up reinforcing his own sad self-centredness.

Worms

Brás Cubas dedicates his novel to those worms that have been enjoying his decomposing corpse, and worms are a significant image throughout the novel. They are those things that drive us and eat away at our minds – negative things, mostly, such as ambition, vanity, and greed. There are few good characters in the novel. Old friends rob our main character or else steal his money in more indirect ways. Everyone is obsessed by a good political position, and even Brás Cubas’s own family is not exempt from these things. His father has told a pleasant lie about the family’s origins so much that he has now forgotten the rather more boring truth, while even the Brás Cubas’s priestly uncle is full of pride, hoping the child will turn out to be a great and powerful member of the clergy.

Our narrator himself is in no way exempt from all this. In fact, he’s more interested in justifying himself than anything else. At several points, he mentions his theory about “windows” in one’s conscience. Put briefly, it suggests that one good deed, however small, is more than adequate for cancelling out the awkward feelings created by a bad one. Brás Cubas uses this to justify all sorts, and especially his illicit affair with a friend’s wife.

Slaves

These worms draw our attention to the essential rottenness of the world, at least as Brás Cubas sees it. Another example of that, albeit one hidden behind a few of the text’s layers, is slavery. The novel was published in about 1881, and slavery in Brazil was only abolished a few years later (!). In the text slavery is regularly present, but often only in the background. Brás Cubas describes how, as a boy of six, he would take a slave “and I would place a rope between his teeth as a bridle, climb onto his back, and then, with a stick in my hand, I would whip him and make him carry me hither and thither”. This got an “ugh” in the margins of my copy, but it gets worse.

We encounter the same slave when our narrator is an adult, and by this time the slave is a free man. Brás Cubas meets him on the street, where the former slave is busy lashing a slave of his own in broad daylight. Our narrator explains the situation thus – “it was Prudencio’s way of ridding himself of all the beatings he had received, by passing them on to someone else”. There is no moral judgement of slavery in the text, certainly not by our narrator, but with comments like these the novel makes us aware of how violence perpetuates itself, not exactly to our world’s credit.

At the same time, our heroic narrator – who is anything but – discusses his own “slavery” to love. Oh, how hard it is to have a lover! He does spend a lot of money on her, true, but nevertheless I would still say that such a situation is slightly better than being someone else’s chattel. It is a ridiculous comparison – we can’t help but notice it. And it forms another aspect of the novel’s general view of humanity as not in a particularly good state – greedy, self-centred, and ultimately cruel.

Our Heroic Narrator

Towards the end of the novel there is a chapter, not containing any words, called “How I did not become minister of state”. And indeed, aside from his romance, there’s very little that might be called a success in Brás Cubas’s life. We do not notice, perhaps, for although this story is full of a certain emptiness – the wreckage of so many disappointed ambitions – Brás Cubas’s narrative style manages to make hollow “somethings” out of so many failures to do or achieve anything. At the end, Brás Cubas is pleased that he did not, at least, have any children, “and thus did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery”.

The whole book is funny and silly, but it is still a highly pessimistic work. People live dreadful lives – the women all seem to die early, or die in poverty, or both, with their only chance at salvation being marriage to a rich man. This is easier said than done, given our hero rejects one girl because she has a lame foot. And indeed, Brás Cubas, for all his faults – at one point, he describes taking the dead to the cemetery as not unlike “taking money to the bank” – does not appear any worse, morally speaking, than the other characters. Everyone here is ambitious, and unable to show any concern for the lives of others. Why on earth were we born, our author seems to ask. Yes, if it weren’t so funny, this whole story would be rather depressing.

Conclusion – Layers of Irony

What redeems this pessimism is the feeling that that’s not all there is to Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The world he describes is cutthroat, money-driven, and incredibly petty. And he himself, for all his hindsight now that he is dead, still remains wedded to those values that he had had during his life. Only the sense that Brás Cubas does not quite understand all that he says saves him and his story. We have a feeling that Machado de Assis is hiding behind him, showing us that not all he says needs to be taken at face value, and that what drives our narrator – his vanity and the rest of it – need not drive us all. Life is more than political positions and making money and good marriages, and Brás Cubas’s own life – his bachelorhood and political failure – demonstrate that, even if he does not quite notice it himself.

Short, funny, serious, it’s well worth reading.

Our “heroic” forebears – Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians

On the very first page of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians he manages to get a date wrong. For any normal work of biography this would be a death sentence. But Eminent Victorians is not a normal work of biography – it comes to me, via the wonderful Richard Holmes, as an Oxford World’s Classic. This collection of four biographical portraits – of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon – is a brilliantly written takedown of the great mythic figures of Victorian Britain. Empire, Church, and Public School are rent asunder. We should read this book not for the facts – which, to be fair, are generally accurate – but for the feelings, for the mood. In this conflict between visions of the world – Strachey’s ironic modern view, and the earnestness of the Victorians – lies its great interest. And the prose is the most brilliant vehicle for bringing it all to us.

Introduction to the Players

Of the list – Manning, Nightingale, Arnold, and Gordon – I knew Gordon and Nightingale before I started reading. Manning was one of the most famous converts from Anglicanism, the state religion of England, to Roman Catholicism. His story centres around the finer points of religious doctrine, and the power politics of the Church. Florence Nightingale -perhaps the most famous nurse of all time – we know her particularly for her work in the Crimean War, but Strachey explores the whole of her long and rich life in his piece. Dr Arnold I should probably have known – he was a great reformer of the public school, Rugby. Gordon, Gordon of Khartoum, is one of Britain’s greatest Imperial heroes – which is perhaps not as great an honour now as it once was. Gordon’s claim to posthumous fame was dramatically dying in the Sudan while protecting British interests.

I shall go through each piece briefly, highlighting both its interest to the modern reader – after all, who cares about the finer points of Anglican doctrine? – and its sparkling prose.

Cardinal Manning

I am not entirely familiar with the finer points of church doctrine. One thing that strikes one, reading Eminent Victorians, is just how obsessed all of these people were over religion. Already by Strachey’s time one has the impression that people did not care. But back then, there were real crises of faith, real discussions – and dissentions – over baptism and all the rest of it. This Manning fellow was terrified by God from the age of four. He grew up well connected, was friends with Gladstone. “Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed with an infinite capacity for making speeches?” – what more, indeed, even today does an Englishman need? But Manning’s family ran out of money, and the ambitious young man had to settle with becoming a churchman, rather than a politician.

Anglicanism is often divided in High Church and Low Church. These two terms refer to its interpretation – are we to be closer to the Protestants, or to the Roman Catholics? The former term denotes a preference for Rome, the latter a preference for Geneva. Manning was always a High Churchman at heart, but this position always leaves one open to the temptation to go all the way – to become, in short, a Papist. This is what happens. Manning becomes convert, manipulates the workings of power at the Vatican, and raises himself through the ranks, all while continuing to be tormented by his bad conscience. At one point he appears to be on the verge of becoming pope but refuses to let his ambition get the better of him.

How strange all this reads to us, in our godless age. Not that these people were any different from us. If anything, Strachey’s account reveals that the petty power politics of the church are just the same as they are anywhere else. But their concerns seem so distant from our own. It’s hard to imagine these days the horror that swept over Europe when Papal Infallibility was affirmed and explained in 1870. But so it was. The whole piece, rather too long, is still an interesting window into another world.

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale is another one of the Eminent Victorians who was religiously insane. The popular image of her heroically giving up a life of riches and privilege to be a nurse is, to Strachey’s mind, slightly inaccurate. Instead, “A Demon possessed her”. Nightingale’s story I feel is particularly relevant to our own age, where activism often drives people to self-destruction. For she was an activist who knew no limits. She had been born into great wealth and privilege, but she also suffered from a religious mania. Strachey notes that “she could not bear to smile or to be gay, ‘because she hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of her sin’”. And so she works, and she works hard. Admittedly, “it sometimes happens that the plans of Providence are a little difficult to follow”, but with the Crimean War all was plain.

She went to the wretched hospitals of Constantinople and Crimea and fought the most deadly enemy of all – the British bureaucracy. She introduced many and serious improvements to the administration of these hospitals and cared for soldiers’ mental wellbeing just as much as for their physical one. But then we are finished with Crimea – the life we know as legend has ended, and Strachey keeps going. We learn of her tireless work back in Britain, to reform the army, then the hospitals of India, and hospitals more broadly.

We meet the great enemies of progress, such as Lord Panmure, for whom “duty was paramount; and he set himself, with a sigh of resignation, to the task of doing as little of it as he possibly could” and Ben Hawes, “a man remarkable even among civil servants for adroitness in baffling inconvenient inquires, resource in raising false issues, and, in short, a consummate command of all the arts of officially sticking in the mud”.

We learn that her great successes were not only thanks to her devotion to the cause, but also due to class. Yes, she was from the highest steps of society, and that counts for something. She may be a woman, but class can balance that out somewhat. We learn that Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, happened to have been a neighbour of her father’s in the New Forest. Nightingale was a success, but she had plenty of help.

And then there is the matter of how she treated those nearest to her. She was an invalid for much of her life, even though it barely stopped her from working the whole time. Still, she was dependent upon the help of others. Sidney Herbert, perhaps her closest friend, falls ill because of her demands of him. But she keeps demanding, and soon enough she breaks his spirit and he dies. Her friends draw away from her, but still, she keeps working. Strachey notes that “when the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplace of the moral judgement are better left unmade”. But of course, that is not the case – he knows it too.

Nightingale’s words on receiving the Order of Merit, “too kind – too kind” sum up her life. She made the mistake we all are vulnerable to, of forgetting the individual in one’s duty to the whole. Failing to care for those closest to her rather makes her drive, her “demon”, a little suspect. She did good, yes, but at what cost?

Dr Arnold

Ah, school! Dr Arnold was made headmaster of Rugby at a time when public schools like Eton or Winchester were dens of depravity and lawlessness – but still the place to be, if you wanted to make a Cabinet Minister. Arnold was as religious as the rest of our Victorians, but he had an ingenious solution to the problems of faith – he ignored them. The result was that “he soon found himself blessed with a perfect peace of mind, and a settled conviction.” In those days, “sheer force of character” was key to being a head man at a public school, those “very seats and nurseries of vice”, as Mr Bowdler, from whom we get the word Bowdlerize, described them, and Arnold certainly had something like that.

Arnold had a chance to reform public education. But in Strachey’s view, he messed up. Instead of broadening children’s minds, bringing them into contact with educated men and women, or building an enlightened community, he focused on making the school “a place of really Christian education”. School became a theocracy, “the boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race”. All this is very funny, but not what people want. Once, Arnold even makes a newspaper – “the paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone”. Strachey enjoys pointing out that these religious people have a rather poor understanding of what people actually want from life.

Even the religious-educational side of things did not really work. Arnold, who naturally preached to the children often enough, like my own dear headmaster at my old public school, managed to make something of a cult around himself. Strachey leaves the whole thing smelling of idolatry and children, not knowing better, drawn in by a strong character. Arnold failed in his reforms, and he failed to reform man himself too. Oh well. At least the piece is hilarious.

General Gordon

My favourite of the Eminent Victorians Gordon of Khartoum. How could it be otherwise? Gordon’s story reads like a curious mixture of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat. We are introduced to a wanderer in Palestine, a man with childish sincerity in his eyes and the “sunburnt brick-red complexion” of any Englishman abroad. Strachey warns us immediately that the man’s peace – he has spent the year reading the Bible and solving millennia-old riddles – will soon be broken, and he will be destroyed. Conrad here, for sure, is visible in the murky style Strachey employs – “one catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last – so it almost seems – like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe”. Yes, here is Conrad – the smallness of the individual, the unknowability of the truth, the sense of doom.

But who was Gordon? Like the others, he was a fanatic. Not for Empire, like the monstrous Cecil Rhodes, but for God. He feared His retribution, was all-too-aware of his own fallenness. But he was an adventurer and an Englishman, all the same. He fought in China, he destroyed the slave trade in Sudan (“the savage inhabitants were to become acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a government monopoly in ivory was to be established”), helped the government accidentally annex Egypt.

What one gets from Gordon’s story is a sense of the bankruptcy of Empire. Gordon is a chess piece, played among different members of the Liberal Party back in Britain – some wanting still more Empire, the others trying to leash the dogs of war. The press, too, play a role in demanding war, in puffing up Gordon, in forcing the government to let him get to work. Gordon goes to the Sudan a second, final, time, to deal with a religious rebellion that is threatening the government in Egypt. Ironically, his abolition of the slave trade helped foment this rebellion to begin with – and the only way he can put it down is by reinstating the trade. A lesser evil, he might have said. Once he is there, in Sudan, Gordon is Gordon Pasha anyway. Like Lord Jim, he has become a new person, free from the old world.

In Khartoum, Gordon is besieged. Communication lines are cut, and he has to hold out. He goes increasingly insane – no small feat, since he didn’t exactly seem normal earlier. He is convinced that Ernest Renan – the author of the ground-breaking Life of Jesus – is out in the desert, waiting for him. He continues noting down ramblings directed to God. They run out of food, morale wavers. Two days before a relief force arrives, Gordon is killed. If the government had acted sooner – and Strachey shows wonderfully the workings of government with the telling phrase “surely, firmly, completely, in the best English manner, and too late” – he would have survived. Instead, he became history.

Things work themselves out. Really, “it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring”. For the individuals like Sir Evelyn, the villain of the story, the lives of the Arabs do not matter. Indeed, nobody matters except themselves and increasing the amount of British pink upon the map. Strachey both tells the story of a heroic life, but as with all the rest, it is one that is consumed by madness of a certain sort, given up in service of something not entirely good on retrospect. But hey, it’s a cracking story.

Conclusion

One comes away from Eminent Victorians with a sense of the sheer power of these men and woman’s convictions, and the sheer irrelevance of most of them. If only they put their energies into bettering the world by our modern standards. But we should not judge them too harshly. Did they not, at least, have faith and convictions – the things most of us lack these days? They were manic, many of them, yes. But even through Strachey’s irony it is impossible to avoid the sensation that these were people who would crush us now by their sheer force of character. The Victorians may have been prudes, but they had their power. Indeed, they have it still.

For another Victorian character not spared a certain madness, I have written on Thomas Carlyle here.