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Author: Gavin Ferriby

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In a time that is beyond unsettling and strange, I have found some comfort in returning to contemplate what a liberal arts education is or was, and how it interacted with elements in American culture which were horribly flawed with systemic racism. Such an education, when it worked, offered a way out of lying, self-delusion, and social delusion. For me, a liberal arts education above all meant engaging with ancient Greek and Roman writers.

While the label "classics" is unquestionably, unfashionably elitist and redolent of a great deal of European and American imperialism, it points out the way these ancient writers set a template for understanding tragedy, grief, and loss. These writers seem to read us as much as we read them: the warnings they suggest about how a life, world, and culture can fall apart is more pertinent with each passing month.

In these past several disastrous and tragic months, I was enlivened to read Andrea Marcolongo's The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek. La lingua geniale in the original Italian: "ingenious" is not an incorrect translation, but neither is it sufficient: ingenious suggests superficially clever rather than boldly inventive. The language provides undeniable evidence that ancient Greeks thought in a precise and different manner than how we might imagine them to have thought. As L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" —especially when the past is so remote and long ago.

I wish to turn to this theme of the utter strangeness of ancient Greek in some longer elegy for the liberal arts and the role the might have or could have played in American culture in the past two centuries. The two elements of aspect and mood in the ancient Greek language carry this water: these elements of verbs structure a different world of thinking through that channel, that language.

In English, the nouns do a great deal of the work of making sense transparent from writer to reader. In Greek, the verbs do the work. Aspect encodes a way of thinking about verbs and actions that go to the heart of Greek sense-making. Because most later languages so lack verbal aspect, it is impossible to describe without using too many words.

Begin with English. English verbs are locked into the iron frame of time: past, present, and future. What the person who acts intends by the action is either beside the point or rendered through adverbs or some other locution. Maybe the action is a layered past —before such-and-so happened, this-and-that had already happened (a past perfect), or some kind of ordering of future affairs: when that-and-this will happen, such-and-so will already have happened (a future perfect). In any case, the verbal periphrastic combinations establish an intricate temporal order.

Greek verbs live with but the haziest notion of this iron law of past, present, and future. A present aspect is durative: it's happening right now and maybe into an infinite future. (Marcolongo's example, "I'm calling you," καλέω) The aorist aspect (a-orist means indefinite or without bounds; an ὁριστής is a boundary-maker, with the α-negative or privative) is momentary, taken as such (and not necessarily in the past!) (Marcolongo's example: an idea of calling you, "I'll call you," έκάλεσα with no reference to when in present or future.) The perfective aspect is a completed action that stands completed with no going back on it. (Marcolongo's example: κέκληκα, I called you --and you never called back, lost the note by the phone, or are ignoring me). These aspects do not function as temporal "when" signals, but as "how" performative signals that take time, or are not yet in time or stand-or-fall on the facts. Ancient Greek retains aspect of verbs from the fabled proto-Indo-European language (that maybe never was), as does Serbo-Croatian, Hawaiian, and in some was African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

In modern languages, aspect and time become conflated: when it happened is taken to mean how it happened. Many Greek verbs have three distinct stems that are conjugated in different aspects: their suffix-like endings indicate 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person and singular or plural (or dual, another topic entirely). "I look and I am looking," όράω is a present durative action: still looking. What grammarians call the "future" ὄψομαι is really much more an indefinite intention: I'll look when I get around to it, I intend to look. The Greeks were not much interested in characterizing the future: it simply had to be experienced, like the will of the gods. The aorist εἷδον is I look, once, and that was enough, because: now the perfect: I am in the state of having seen, which is; I know οἴδα, and finally ὤφθην, I looked and it's a matter of record: it's known that I looked. That all these verb parts are stitched together by grammarians and lexicographers does not mean that ordinary ancient Greeks thought them related: they simply used them as the wished to make themselves clear.

Dividing how an action occurs from when it occurs is obvious only to a modern speaker of a few languages (Serbo-Croatian; Hawaiian). A bit closer to most Americans, the aspectual distinctions in African American Vernacular English, which sometimes obscure tense (time), can be the habitual, perfective, or resultant: "he do be eating," "he have bin ate," "he have done ate" (properly "dən ate"). Those may not tie the past or present action of eating to a time-frame, but indicate how it happens, or happens, or what is the result of it happening. This comparison begins to get at the power of aspect: how it happened.

To their credit, authors of high school or college grammars of ancient Greek, such those by as Herbert Weir Smyth, James Hadley & F. D. Allen, or H.L. Crosby & J.N. Schaeffer, completely fail to mention aspect, which seems to have come into the study of ancient Greek from comparative study of Slavic languages; the first OED entry for grammatical aspect dates to 1853. Joseph Dongell's much more recent Elementary New Testament Greek (2014) incorporates an unavoidably confusing discussion of aspect as internal (inside the event, "I am washing the car"), external (suspended above & viewing the action as a simple singular event: "Today we wash the car," as a flat description), and perfect: once-and-done "I'm happy to say I have washed the car". Dongell then muddies the water a bit with discussion of a perspective chosen by the speaker and not property of an action itself. His example is Jesus' resurrection, always a loaded topic (best stay away from it). When he notes that verbal aspect doesn't tell us very much about how to picture an event in reality, he appeals to the developing idea of a "fuller picture" of a verb called Aktionsart, a "type of action" distinguishing elements of activity, accomplishment, achievement, and state. Aktionsart picks apart categories on a grid of perception to get at a "fuller picture" a verb does, and has little practical consequence. Aspect is the contrary: by distinguishing how an action occurs: how a verb "walks" (as it were), Greeks could pick apart sense from nonsense. Plato wields aspect very carefully (see Timeaus 37e—38c: please don't complain that Timeaus isn't or wasn't by Plato)(See also two entries by Seumas Macdonald here and here.)

This recondite aspective element of verbs combines with a second perspective on ancient Greek verbs: mood. The subjunctive mood in modern English is nearly disappearing, but most of us can still remember the subjective, distinguishing "was he a fool?" from "were he fool." In the first, he was or wasn't a fool, or perhaps we can disagree about that; but the second points to the real possibility that he isn't or wasn't but could be, might be, or might have been. "I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you. It's poor salesmanship," Ricky admonishes Elsa in Casablanca. (English also has the infinitive mood, to do something, and the imperative mood, do something! but they don't matter so much here.)

But ancient Greek adds a third mood: optative, the mood of desire. The optative depends on the slight shift in the speaker's desire and the conditions that might allow it. Marcolongo's examples are clear: "I want to sail/intend to sail" (indicative: my boat is docked, I'm ready); "I would like to sail; I might go sailing" (subjective: My boat is docked but the winds are foul); "I would like to sail/I might go sailing" (optative: My boat is docked; I don't know how to sail; I'll have to learn how and then I really want to), finally back to: "I would like to sail/I would have liked to sail" (but I don't have a boat; I live in Kansas; it's a lost cause--indicative again).

What separates those moods? Possibility, the speaker's projection of desire, and perception of herself as strong enough, brave enough, even decisive enough. That volitional optative is completely dependent upon her sense of responsibility and resolve to turn words into action.

Both desire and regret (negative in the optative) might not draw a line between possibility and impossibility, the desire that it might come true versus the historic indicative which indicates that it never will come true. If the odds are ever in your favor, as they say in Hunger Games, it could be optative (or merely subjective: they'll change, you know); if the odds are that you're going to die, the indicative. Between the poles of real and unreal is a whole force field of human desire, likelihood, or impossibility. That's where the optative supplements the subjective—but was utterly lost as Greek spread in the Alexandrian world. Hence in the New Testament, the only real optative is μὴ γένοιτο: may it not be! which the Authorized Version plumped up as:" God forbid!" The optative became a sort of second-string, bench-team subjective.

There are uses of the optative mood: volitional ("I want to write"); potential ("I could write") and oblique ("He said that I would write"), but enough already. When Odysseus says "Would that I were young and my strength firm," his fervent and binding desire is so strong that he uses the optative for the tenacity of his intention to return to Ithaka and reclaim his ancestral seat, even though it is (or seems) impossible. (Odyssey 14:70-71)

Back to our perilous present in which many wait in dread for violence they believe will ensue after the 2020 election. The liberal arts spoke to a nation that had been divided by war, failed to liberate and reconstruct, and stood by while robber barons plundered the wealth of many in the first Gilded Age. Liberal education, nevertheless, offered a way out of predatory capitalism and cultural enslavement to a renewed sense of purpose, even with its blind spots, that resulted in the achievements of the Progressive era and laid the foundations for the New Deal. The means of this education were a steady focus on language, on truth and its expression, on desire, on the aspect of how things come to be, choosing to hope in the optative in the face of impossibility.

That education was an heir of those who wrote an English language that we have lost the ability to speak accurately. Its speakers picked apart truth and desire because they mattered more than market indices and predictions of future profit. The care with which the far more remote ancient Greeks thought, about how things happen and how they desired them to happen contrasts oddly with their rather simplistic and one-dimensional view of the future. (Greek future verbs are almost an afterthought.) With the (controversial) advent of writing, they picked apart these elements in texts that lack punctuation and diacritics. Their flow of thought depended on particle and enclitics, those little bits of words that signaled the flow of thinking and of speech. Liberal arts educations --there was more than one model--flourished in an America culture that prized language and its use: the Lyceum circuits, Milton, the Bible, even Emerson. That care with language was a direct ally of intensive study of Latin and ancient Greek literatures.

I am working out more thoughts about these topics, using other concepts as well: what I have written is only a workshop model, a sketch, and maybe a bad one. The foundation of the liberal arts, the careful usage and analysis of expressive language, was foundational and now almost extinct outside of few precincts of wealthy institutions. Whether such an education can ever return is another subject.

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David Denby, staff writer and film critic for The New Yorker, published (June 29, 2020) an account of reading Crime and Punishment with a Lit Hum class at Columbia taught by Nick Dames, one of its best teachers.  "Lit Hum," or Literary Humanities, is a required course for all undergraduates, and depending on the teacher can be anything from brilliant tour to an arduous trek. Under Dames' astute guidance, the students and Denby read Dostoyevsky's impassioned, digressive, and intricate prose and connected the critical passages.

Illustration in The New Yorker by Tom Gauld

The survey course in Spring 2020 took place throughout the great disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic; eight hours of discussion of the novel took place after the great disapora sent students from on-ground class in Hamilton Hall to a Zoom room wherever each might have landed.  For Denby, the novel dovetailed with his  life stuck in an Upper West Side apartment, hearing constant sirens, joining the 7:00 p.m. banging of pots at windows, sounds that connected isolated individuals in their social responsibility with the city's life, in the catastrophic solidarity of a Greek chorus.

            Denby's moving account resists easy summary; I will not summarize it but pick out two elements that yet resonate now months later. Raskolnikov's haunting dream of social breakdown, a war of all against all in which each, infected by virus-like trichinae, knows that he or she alone is right, "each thought the truth was contained in himself alone . . . . They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good"—this dream struck several readers uncannily. One young student (Julia) saw in it a political science fiction, evoking our present conflicts and mutually-assured contradictions that brook no shared facts or vocabulary.  She saw in the faces of demonstrators in Michigan (in April, armed and angry at their state capitol) the unshakeable convictions of blind self-assurance, just as the fury of those infected by the novel trichinae in the dream.

            Raskolnikov's dream comes a few pages before the end of novel, an Epilogue that places the reader outside of the feral voices in Raskolnikov's head, so filled with conflict and outrage. Sonya, a teenage prostitute who befriended him in St. Petersburg, and despite his rejection even came to love him, followed him to a camp outside a distant Siberian town. He can no longer avoid confrontation with Sonya's lived, real-world "insatiable compassion" and the implacable necessity of his own suffering. He discovers that "instead of dialectics, there was life." Instead of acrid theories of banal murder, "he could only feel. . . . [S]omething completely different had to work itself out in his consciousness." Denby quotes Nick Dames' remark: "The novel is a strong rebuke to individual happiness and individual rights and autonomy." Denby concludes,

Every day, in Trump's America, it seemed as though we were coming closer to the annihilating turmoil—the mixed state of vexation and fear—in Raskolnikov's dream. . . . I kept returning to Dostoyesvsky's book, looking for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions and injustices, stoking hope and resolve along side fear, anything that would overtake the desperate anomie that Raskolnikov's dream had conjured: "In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why.

            The bells led me back to the ending of The Brothers Karamazov, and perhaps a durable response to Denby's and Rasknolnikov's searches.

            The Brothers Karamazov also ends with an Epilogue that ties up most of the complex narrative threads. A family drama, a who-dunit, a coming-of-age novel, and an ersatz romance (among many other angles), the novel is maddeningly difficult both to read and to conclude. Tthe characters' lives seem capable of carrying on with neither author nor reader.

            After five hundred pages, an unlikely sort of Greek chorus of schoolboys emerges on the heels of a hitherto minor incident. The impulsive Dimitri Karamzov humiliated an impoverished Captain (Snegiryov) by pulling him out of local tavern by his beard.  Snegiryov's proud, frail son (Ilyusha or Ilyuschechka) bitterly resented his father's humiliation and the mocking he had to endure from his schoolmates: he stabbed their leader, Kolya Krasotkin, with a pen knife. When Ilyusha threw stones at them, he accidentally hit Aloysha (Alexei Karamazov), the nineteen-year-old, handsome brother who is the moral center of the book: kind, energetic, and empathetic almost to a fault (as religiously very conservative for his generation). Alyosha reached out to Ilyuschechka and all the boys. They wind up obliquely commenting on adults around them.

            The novel careens through Dimitri's trial, who is charged with murdering their wily, fatuous, knave of a father. His brother Ivan organized his brother's defense and orchestrated his planned escape, along with the machinations of two women (Gruschenka and Katerina Ivanovna) who forlornly loved their Mitya.  Meanwhile Alyosha and the schoolboys inhabit almost a kind of parallel universe in the small, unnamed town, and the parallel drama of Ilyuschechka's death from tuberculosis two days after Dmitri's sentencing.

            As Aloysha rushed from Katerina's decisive encounter Dimitri and Gruschenka, church bells summoned him and the boys to Ilyuschechka's funeral. The melodramatic narrative of alcohol, flowers, Ilyuschechka's frail mother, and the passage of the coffin to the church gives way to solemnity of the boys standing watch by the casket through the service. This bells are no western, tolling bourdon; the extravangant, Russian tinntabulation that builds up overtones and reverberates down the streets conjures the otherworldly play of light, incense, chanting, and movement in the old church, "rather poor, many of the icons were without settings." The author himself experienced such shock, loss, and splendor at the death of his 3-year-old son Alyosha in 1878, as he wrote the book.

                        Dostoyevsky, turned to Orthodoxy after reading the Gospels in a Siberian prison, and always paid careful attention to liturgical details. After the Epistle (probably I Thessalonians 4:13-17), Snegiryov "suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing beside him, that the reading had not been done right," without explanation. During the Cherubic Hymn (sung at the priest's Entrance to the Sanctuary), "kneeling down, [Snegiryov] touched his forehead to the stone floor of the church, and remained lying like that for quite a long time," prostrate before the divine splendor. Though the hymn's text is short, the chant is in a drawn-out, ethereal style, a human supplement to the singing of the heavenly hosts:

We, who mystically represent the Cherubim, And chant the thrice-holy hymn tot he Life-giving Trinity, Let us set aside the cares of life, That we may receive the King of all, Who comes invisibly escorted by the Divine Hosts.

"Let us set aside the cares of life" is exactly what Snegiryov still cannot do in his grief, clutching at the funeral flowers from the casket, as he crumbles bread crumbs for the birds who will keep his son company in his grave, symbolically receiving the King of all on his behalf. But rising from the cares of life is exactly what Aloysha did, when he and the boys came upon Ilyuschechka's standing stone, where the dead boy had cried out against his father's humiliation at Mitya's hands. Aloysha's speech to the boys concludesthe book, "Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon." He commanded them to promise never to forget Ilyuschechka, "whom we once threw stones at—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much."

And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune—all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, altogether, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.

Even should one of the boys become the "most cruel and jeering man," he "will still not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment! Moveover, perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think better of it and say: 'Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then.'"  Alyosha implored them, "let us never forget one another . . . I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, and who united us in this good, kind feeling . . . who, if not Ilyuschechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages of ages! . . . . Dear friends, do not be afraid of life!"

And then the thrust of the whole book:

"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it really be true as religion says, that we all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyuschechka?"

"Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been," Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.

Then the detail both eschatological and incarnational: "Well, and now let's end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner.  Don't be disturbed that we'll be eating pancakes.  It's an ancient, eternal thing, and there's good in that too."  Kolya cried, "And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand!  Hurrah for Karamazov!"

The book's epigraph reads, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (John 12:24)

Karamazov's bells—ringing for Ilyuschechka, for the resurrection—answers the summoning bells in Raskolnikov's dream.  A westerner might assume that the bell's summoning in Crime and Punishment is a single ring, perhaps fast as in colonial New England--but in a Russian city "the bells rang all day," many bells in vivid strike and reverberation.  In this Epilogue, too,  Dostoyevsky's mastery of liturgical details goes to work. "During the second week of the Great Lent, it was [Raskolnikov's] turn to fast and go to services together with his barracks" (undoubtedly because the whole camp would fit in or even around the church). The Gospel for that Saturday (John 5:24-30) is the same as was used in the Orthodox funeral liturgy for Ilyuschechka: For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself . . . for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.  While Rodya moped, Sonya acted on behalf of the prisoners and families stood in for the healing Christ; "they even came to her with their ailments."

"Raskolnikov lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week" when he recalled his haunting dream in this liturgical context—but never named Easter directly. The second week after Holy Week, recovered enough to be put back to work, Raskolnikov walked out of his work shed and looked across a wide, desolate river, to see an utterly different, pastoral people live free, where "time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham and his flocks had not passed."  Suddenly Sonya was beside him, "came up almost inaudibly," alluding to Jesus' appearing to St. Thomas and the twelve (John 20:19 ff.), the traditional reading for the second week of Easter.  Where Jesus showed Thomas his side, Sonya gives Rodya her hand, and "it was as if something lifted him and flung him down at her feet . . . for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her," that he was capable of love.

"There already shone the dawn of a renewed future, of a complete resurrection into a new life.  They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."  But this is no romantic fade-out: "They still had seven years more, and until then so much unbearable suffering, and so much infinite happiness!  But he was risen and he knew it, he felt it fully with the whole of his renewed being, and she—she lived just by his life alone!"

All his past torments began to feel strange to Raskolnikov, unable to resolve anything; "he could only feel. Instead of dialectics, there was life."  In response, he took the Gospels from under his pillow, from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus." He did not even open the book; he did not yet know the kind of new life that would not be given him for nothing, which still had to be dearly bought, "to be paid for with a great future deed. . . "

Denby's search for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions finds no easy conclusion in Trump's America now, as Dostoyevsky's found none in Tsarist Russia. Dostoyevsky seemed in retrospect to have sensed all the warning signs of repression, Revolution and the descent into the Abyss of Stalinism (and now Putinism). Whether in the Spring pandemic (and its Summer and Fall continuation), the continuing racial unrest, economic disaster, environmental apocalypse, and craven, hypocritical electoral and judicial politics, many Americans have completely disengaged from the Constitutional order.  With all of our society's social and ecological danger signs are blinking red, is this search for signs in literature merely quixotic pursuit of bitter old people teaching impressionable youth?

I must answer No: Dostoyevsky's great books still offer us renewal through remembering our hope and suffering (such as the awakening to past and continuing witnessed this Summer). They can awaken us to responsibility for the ecological, public health, and economic mess that we have made.  Both Alyosha and Sonya point to what is greater: "instead of dialectics, there was life," contradictory, complex, compelling and above all creative. Those bells summon us to engage neither domination nor surrender, but memory and hope: to remember the great, humane story of suffering and rebirth that transcends our mess (bad as it is), to the ancient and eternal act of eating pancakes for the dead. In Beloved, Amy said to Sethe while massaging her swollen feet, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts." It's hurting now: life instead of dialectics.

These summons also suggest the fevered, prolix, impossibly complex Angels in America. At the end of Perestroika (Part 2) Prior Walter, in his final febrile vision, tells the Continental Principalities (Angels) "I still want . . . My blessing.  Even sick. I want to be alive." To which his Angel replies, "You only think you do. Life is a habit with you. You have not seen what is to come: We have: What will the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days bring?" Despite her vivid invocation of more horror than can be borne, Prior insists, "But still. Still. Bless me anyway.  I want more life.  I can't help myself. I do . . . . I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive.  We live past hope.  If I can find hope anywhere, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but . . . Bless me anyway.  I want more life."

We live past hope, past dialectics, past disease and chaos.  In this hinge of history, when horror meets horror and hope seems so much not enough, so inadequate — we still want more life.   We still hear the bells summoning us to responsibility, thrice-holy, with the One whom comes invisibly escorted by Divine hosts.  We stand at the stone of remembering, live past hope, and eat our pancakes for the dead.

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W. S. Merwin (1927-2019) was an essential poet: one who shows us life, who writes us into living and into becoming old. His last poems, collected in Garden Time, were written as he was going blind.

Kevin Young's beautiful remembrance tribute to Merwin in The New York (March 20, 2019) remembered his oysters; Dan Chiasson's remembrance reprinted his arresting and beautiful poem For the Anniversary of My Death:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

As Chiasson writes, now we know which day: March 12, 2019.

In the clip below, W.S. Merwin talks about writing poetry and about meeting Ezra Pound when he was 18 and still at college and Pound was in the psychiatric ward at St Elizabeth's Hospital. He then reads 'Late Spring', a poem included in his Bloodaxe Selected Poems. This film is from the Academy of American Poets DVD The Poet's View: Intimate Profiles of Five Major American Poets, which features Kay Ryan, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht and W.S. Merwin:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17029

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Timothy Snyder (Yale professor) has written two books that not only demonstrate—with exhaustive annotation—the intricate links between Russian and American oligarchs and autocratic fascism, but make pertinent observations about how to respond in a way that can retain and build up democratic institutions.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

In this crazy year, these books remain remarkably pertinent in a summer of pandemic, economic meltdown, and long-delayed social turmoil over profound, historic racial injustice.

I will be interested to read his upcoming book Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (to be published September 2020). Snyder fell ill on December 29, 2019; he did not have COVID 19. Yet his experience led him to reflect on how American health care is part and parcel of an evolving tyranny of "who deserves and who doesn't." The current pandemic and consequent economic collapse seems to have been precisely aimed at the pretentions of the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity (his terms). Facts come back to bite, as authoritarian fascists are discovering, from Putin to Trump to Bolsonaro to Xi Jinping. Will the world be able to respond in a manner than builds up healthy, human freedom, and economic and racial justice?

Certainly we shall be resurrected, certainly, we shall see one another again and we shall tell one another happily, joyfully, everything that has happened.
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Recently the author Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Wild Swan) said that he had come to think of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as "a book I’d spend my entire life intending to read." It wants focus and isolation (rather like Hans Castorp's years in a sanatorium on the mountain), "enormous in every sense of the world."

The Magic Mountain also reveals how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since 1924, "a reminder of a kind of relationship to a book that’s difficult to maintain, now."

How many of us, in 2020, can devote two months to reading one book every single night, all the more so when it’s a book that can be transcendent and can be exasperating? I’ve been thinking, ever since, about how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since Thomas Mann came and went.

Cunningham hated it on same days, adored it on others, and threw it across the room twice. Apparently he finished it, nevertheless.

I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.

I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.

Kay Bross, as I began to think of it, like The Magic Mountain demands two months of sustained reading—ideal for a time of pandemic and social isolation. It renders an entire world of a Russian provincial town named "Skotoprigonievsk" ("animal coral" or pen, a Russian version of fictional Winesburg, Ohio). Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Staraya Russa, a provincial town with several features that appear in the novel, such as the adjoining Monastery of the Transfiguration (Spaso Preobrajensky mon).

Spaso Preobraj Staraya Russa
Собор Спасо-Преображенский: улица Володарского, Тимура Фрунзе, Старая Русса, Новгородская область: Wikimedia CCA:SA 4.0

The world of the novel has many voices: Ivan's tale of the Grand Inquisitor, his encounter with "the Devil," the life and sayings of Starets Zosima (a holy man), the formal, authorial account of the trial of Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov, among others. It represents an immersion in an intricate, class-based society animated by concepts of honor and holiness that clash with newer, bourgeois ideas of commercial value, transactional relationships, and the "science vs. faith" argument. Reading the novel demands a great deal of energy and attention, but pays off with its celebration of humanity, both good and bad, and the promise of grace and resurrection.

Certainly we shall be resurrected, certainly, we shall see one another again and we shall tell one another happily, joyfully, everything that has happened.

The Karamazov Brothers, Oxford World's Classics, p. 974

When Aloysha, the unforgettable, cherubic third Karamazov son says everything —in a novel of 900-odd pages—he means everything. Not a flower petal, not a spring onion, not a child nor a thief, will be left behind.

I first read Kay Bross forty years ago, for a class on Russian Orthodoxy at Princeton Theological Seminary, taught by the legendary Fr. Georges Florovsky. Father Flo (as he was known only behind his back) was himself a character from Dostoevsky: born in Odessa in 1893, the erudite son of an Orthodox priest, exiled in 1920, further educated in Prague, ordained 1932 in Paris, teaching at St. Serge Institute there, then St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, New York, then at Princeton University until his death in 1979. I knew him only in his very last years, when he was entirely deaf in one ear, reading and commenting from his collected works. He was then a living connection to a lost world, a fragile, black-robed octogenarian on Mercer Street, a local saint living on the social margin of Princeton in the William Bowen and James McCord years.

Now forty years later I sometimes feel like a living connection to a lost world of prosperous, middle-class industrial Michigan as the working class began to decline even before the neo-liberal disaster of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama decades. The world of Kay Bross seems only a little more remote. Its vivid testimony to the power of grace in forgiveness, loyalty, and resurrection has touched me in new ways in a time of fear, uncertainty, and viral pandemic.

Kay Bross needs the reader to come to life, and all of the reader. It is both uncompromising in its demands and unstinting in its full humanity. Its run-on prolixity approximates the pace of human time: sometimes fleeting, sometimes hardly passing at all.

When Aloysha drenches the earth "with 'the tears of thy joy, and love thy tears' . . . threads from all God's countless worlds converged in his soul . . . He wished to forgive everyone for everything, and ask forgiveness—oh, not for himself, but for others!" (p. 456) In that moment, something firm and immutable as heaven entered his soul: God's grace to all, the Holy and Wholly Other. Certainly we shall be resurrected, surely the Divine shall draw us to God's self and transfigure our health, justice, and relationships. Hurrah for Karamazov!

As Barth's concept and usage of Krisis develops in the second edition, it becomes a key to understanding his revolutionary theological reading of The Epistle to the Romans.
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In September 1921 Barth wrote the preface to his second edition of The Epistle to the Romans, and one can fairly regard the second edition as written a period of intense and unpredictable turmoil after August 1918 (the date of the preface to the first edition), early 1919 (publication and critical reception), and mid-1921: Armistice and German capitulation, Swiss general strike, European famine, military demobilization (less prominent but still present in Switzerland), and the "Spanish" H1N1 influenza pandemic. General crisis pervades this historical backdrop, and lent authenticity to the concept of Krisis that Barth so effectively deployed in the second edition.

Krisis is a distinctive development in the second edition; Barth used the term only once in the first (and not in particularly theological sense, um der Gleichartigkeit der Krisis willen, in der alle Menschen aller Stufen immer wieder vor Gott stehen ("thanks to the similarity of the Krisis in which humans of all ranks stand before God"). By contrast, Barth introduces Krisis in the preface to the second edition. He responded to the charge that he imposed his meanings upon the text of Romans rather than drawing meaning from it --the charge of eisegesis in place of exegesis--"and that my method implies this" (Der Verdacht, hier werde mehr ein- als ausgelegt, ist ja wirklich das Naheliegendste, was man über meinen ganzen Versuch sagen kann.) He continued:

Wenn ich ein „System” habe, so besteht es darin, daß ich das, was Kierkegaard den „unendlichen qualitativen Unterschied” von Zeit und Ewigkeit genannt hat, in seiner negativen und positiven Bedeutung möglichst beharrlich im Auge behalte, „Gott ist im Himmel und du auf Erden”. Die Beziehung dieses Gottes zu diesem Menschen . . . ist für mich das Thema der Bibel und die Summe der Philosophie in Einem. Die Philosophen nennen diese Krisis des menschlichen Erkennens den Ursprung. Die Bibel sieht an diesem Kreuzweg Jesus Christus.

I translate this as:

If I have a system, it consists in this, that I keep in view as tenaciously as possible, in both its negative and positive sense, that which Kierkegaard termed the "infinite qualitative distinction" between time and eternity". "God is in heaven and you are on earth." The relation of this God and this human . . . is for me the theme of the Bible and the sum total of philosophy in one. The philosophers call this Krisis the origin of human recognizing. The Bible looks at [this] crossroad [as] Jesus Christ."

Sir Edwyn Hoskyns by distinction translated:

. . . if I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the 'infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: "God is in heaven and thou art on earth." The relation between such a God and such a man . . . is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy. Philosophers name this KRISIS of human perception—the Prime Cause: the Bible beholds the same cross-roads—the figure of Jesus Christ.

One can see here how Hoskyns subtly renders Barth more as a Cambridge don than as a brilliant, activist pastor. It is no denigration of such dons to note that their métier is careful nuance, and such nuances can tire easily. By translating des menschlichen Erkennens den Ursprung as the Prime Cause (of human perception), Hoskyns imports a philosophical term more allusive to St. Thomas than Barth's text really allows. (For example: Cum igitur Deus sit prima causa universalis non unius generis tantum, sed totius entis, impossibile est quod aliquid contingat; ST I:103:7, "Therefore as God is the first universal cause, not of one genus only, but of all being in general, it is impossible for anything to occur" [outside of God's governing].). "Philosophers calls this Krisis the origins of human recognizing" (or perceiving): Erkennens in the text is not exactly the same as its relative Erkentnis. The phrase "the essence of philosophy" shies away from Barth's declarative unity between the theme of the Bible and the sum total (Summe not Summa) of philosophy.

In the first usage of the critical term Krisis, Barth's received English translation already steers in a more philosophical and less expressive direction. Barth thanks his brother, the philosopher Heinrich Barth, for leading him "to recognize the importance" of Plato and Kant, but Karl does not wish to be philosopher in the academic sense, "I have also paid more attention to what may be culled form the writings of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky that is of importance for the interpretation of the New Testament. The latter I owe more particularly to the hints given me by Edward Thurneysen" —(und das vermehrte Aufmerken auf das, was aus Kierkegaard und Dostojewski für das Verständnis des neuen Testamentes zu gewinnen ist, wobei mir besonders die Winke von Eduard Thurneysen erleuchtend gewesen sind.).

As Barth's concept and usage of Krisis develops in the second edition, it becomes a key to understanding his revolutionary theological reading of The Epistle to the Romans.

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I have long loved the elegant verse of David T. W. McCord, "Books fall open, / you fall in, / delighted where / you've never been." Sometimes that's even true. (A poet with a day job, McCord also raised millions for Harvard as director of the Harvard College Fund.)

Several months ago a book fell open for me, one that I had long known about but never really read: Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans. I started to read it not long after I resolved to nurture my knowledge of Greek by reading some New Testament daily. I chose Romans because it was there (and because I read much of it for a seminar with the late great Prof. Christian Beker): it demands attention, is linguistically difficult, and seems to be found in the midst of every major turn in Christian history, such as Martin Luther and Karl Barth.

I also chose Barth because I also have access, courtesy of Princeton Theological Seminary Library, to the German text of Barth's second edition, 1922, which open the way for so-called "dialectical theology" and a decisive turn from previous liberal Protestantism by many German-language writers. So I could exercise my Greek, Latin (I read parallel in the Nova Vulgata) and German, languages that I spent a lot of time and effort learning when I was an undergraduate, and which I do not wish to lose at this later stage of my life.

Little did I realize, when I began this project in 2019, that it would become so timely. I began Romans exactly because I have been so dismayed by the slow slide into fascist authoritarianism underway in my native country. (I hesitate to call it my home any longer; I live here as a resident alien.) I had some inkling that it has something to say to my condition. I was little prepared for how much it had to say.

Barth's book came out in successive editions in 1919 (finished in the last days of the War, December 1918), and a second edition in 1922, as well as other later minor alterations, clarifications, and republication, with an English translation by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns in 1933. The Epistle to the Romans established Barth's early reputation as a disruptor; the second edition in particular critiqued (or bulldozed) the cultural liberalism of the Protestant theology of his teachers at Marburg and elsewhere. The term "dialectical theology" which arose in the early 1920s highlighted frequent use of paradoxical formulations and polar opposites by several writers (Barth, Gogarten, and Brunner prominent among them) and was always --given the prominence of "dialectic" among the heirs of Hegel, and especially Marx--something of a misnomer. There is a very great amount of distinguished scholarship regarding the origins and development of "dialectical theology" in the 1920s and the disagreements of its original proponents as time went on (and especially in the 1930s), and I do not intend to rehearse any of that here.

My focus instead is how unexpectedly contemporary the second edition of Barth's Epistle to the Romans now seems to be, despite its readily apparent and important differences with the present moment. I am enough of a historian to remember and acknowledge that history does not repeat itself, or even often rhyme (in words erroneously attributed to Mark Twain), but somehow sometimes retains a certain metrical force, like blank verse in iambic pentameter. Or in Yogi Berra's reputed words, "It's like déjà vu all over again."

When reading the German second edition (available in the Karl Barth Digital Library, or via Hathitrust here (Vorsicht: Fraktur!), I immediately felt great sympathy for the late Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, translator (13th Baronet of Harewood, County Hereford, and Dean of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). Sir Edwyn faced the daunting challenges of Barth's German which intentionally pushes beyond normal boundaries with multiple-compounded words, neologisms, paratactic paragraph-long sentences, and now-obscure references to contemporaneous events and well-known persons. Sir Edwyn's English version of the German sixth edition (1928) unavoidably presses Barth's free-range German into Oxbridge English, and the language of the Authorized Version. He inadvertently misses or minimizes Barth's Sprachspiel or playing with the language in an attempt to demolish over-familiar and well-worn phrases bearing the echoes of discredited theologies, politics, and cultural outlooks. On the other hand, following Barth's German too closely would nearly completely obfuscate his meaning and significance for English readers, and linguistically daze them.

Barth's German is variously playful, allusive, hortatory, monitory, and nearly aphoristic. (I will give examples in succeeding blog entries.). It reminded me less of the weighty German of Barth's later Kirchliche Dogmatik than of writers associated with German "expressionism:" Georg Büchner (especially Woyzeck, adapted for Alban Berg's opera), Frank Wedekind (Lulu plays, the basis of Berg's opera, and Frühlings Erwachen or Spring Awakening, source of the 2006 musical), Franz von Unruh (especially Opfergang, anti-war drama written during the Siege of Verdun/Schlacht um Verdun). I also thought of writers associated with the Austrian Jugendstil, especially Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Georg Trakl (associated with Der Brenner, influential in the revival of Kierkegaard in German-speaking lands, and a link via friendship to Ludwig Wittgenstein). The influence of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are especially prominent in Barth's second edition of Romans, and has been studied thoroughly.

Barth used his expressive, nearly expressionist language to torpedo the discredited cultural, Protestant hegemony represented above all by his (respected) teacher Wilhelm Herrmann. A "Lutheran Neo-Kantian," Herrmann taught Barth to speak of God dialectically or in opposites: dogmatic/critical, Yes/No, veiling/unveiling, objective/subjective, in line with an emphasis upon the religious experience of the individual (from Friedrich Schleiermacher). So Barth did not repudiate everything that Herrmann taught him. But—Herrmann was one of the 93 signers of Manifesto "To the Civilized World" (An die Kulturwelt: Ein Aufruf), which unequivocally supported German militarism and military actions in 1914, specifically including the "Rape of Belgium" (in essence confirmed by later scholarship despite certain Allied fabrications). Herrman was not the only prominent Protestant theologian to sign An die Kulturwelt: so did Adolf Diessmann, Adolf von Harnack, Adolf von Schlatter, and Reinhold Seeberg (father of Erich Seeberg, the eventual Dean of the "German Christian" Protestant theological faculty in Berlin during the National Socialist régime). So Barth's demolition of the language of liberal Protestantism extended his cultural critique of discredited, compromised, fatally flawed accommodation of liberal Protestant theology with German militarism. Barth's citizenship and employment as a Swiss pastor allowed him both access to the German linguistic community and freedom from German war-time censors, however sympathetic the officially-neutral German-speaking Swiss may have been to the German side, and their consequential anxiety of about any kind of wartime dissent.

Barth began his project of demolishing the whole discredited line of Protestant piety focused on individual experience (and accompanying social and political irrelevance) in 1919 but by 1922 his second edition reflected his dismay with the disaster then unfolding in revolutionary Russia as it morphed into the early Soviet Union. Barth's demolition extended both to the right (socially mainstream, bürgerlich Protestantism), to the left (red to redder socialism), and the Roman Catholicism already susceptible to revanchist or restorationist, imperialial-fascist fantasies in Austria, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere). Safe in stable Switzerland, he nevertheless experienced (with the rest of Europe) the disorienting political and cultural shock of imperial crackup, and the cowardice of German wartime leaders, especially the Kaiser, Tirpitz, and Ludendorff. Nor did economic disaster spare Switzerland: the general strike (Landesstreik) in November 1918 strained civil society more than any time since the Sonderbund war of 1847-1848. The H1N1 "Spanish" influenza epidemic 1918-1919 hit Switzerland very hard, and the inadequate official response brought the nation to the brink of civil war.

Barth wrote his second edition, then, in a lightly industrialized (weaving) town in the midst of entrenched economic disaparities, national and international political dysfunction, and pandemic. This is not the same world as 2019-2020, but it seems eerily adjacent. Even more, the collapse of a public theological or religious rhetoric associated with denuded assumptions of political, cultural hegemony and the thorough discrediting of its moral authority (in Europe then), can only remind one of the cultural bankruptcy of American evangelicalism now, so thoroughly colonized or even weaponized by the current chaotic American régime. In America in 2020, as in Europe in 1922, all these deteriorating conditions reflect both acknowledged and unacknowledged wounds and diseases left festering for decades.

Barth's response was vigorous social critique and withering theological appraisal reflected his wide reading and wide-ranging cultural allusions that extend far beyond normal academic theological discourse. He speaks with a preacher's or prophet's voice, not the voice a professor (although he is certainly academically well informed). The world of his text —what it presumes, upon which it comments, whose pretensions it exposes—will be the content of further blog entries.

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By Wallace Steves, 1934/1935

A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.

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Three very different books take a good look at our students’ experiences that they bring to the classroom.  The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes Us or Breaks Us by Paul Tough looks at the challenges  of applying to college, staying in, and finishing.  Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost by Caitlin Zaloom (a JSTOR digital book) looks at the family conflicts and stresses built into the high-stakes, high-cost  college experience. Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities by John Warner looks at now only how we teach writing, but the bigger issues at stake in almost any class assignment.  Read these books, and you will sit in our students' seats –tolle, lege, take and read.

Tough tells good stories, and his book is hard to put down. He shows in detail how well-off families game the system, and how the higher education system allows itself to be gamed.  He explores how different affluent colleges are from those which are insufficiently funded, and how at-risk students often do not possess the skills, tenacity, and good fortune to jump through arbitrary hoops and negotiate complicated financial circumstances.  You will understand how colleges work best for the affluent, the ambiguous role of the College Board, and how higher education winds up sustaining the many, present, socio-economic disparities that foster so many political and social divides.  Faculty may be particularly interested in Chapter 5, "Letting In" on the admissions-industrial complex, and subsequent "Staying In" and "Hanging On" on how students do or cannot complete their degrees, and what helps and hinders them. 

Zaloom's Indebted takes on the social and emotional realities families have to negotiate to sustain enrollment and expenses, and the "enmeshed autonomy" with its  "nested silences" that enable both students and parents not to discuss the levels of stresses that each endure.

"Today being middle class means being indebted.  It means feeling insecure and uncertain about the future, and wrestling with the looming cost of college, and the debt it will require.  It means being dependent on finance—and, crucially, on family—in ways that analysts of class, culture, and economy have not fully registered." (page 1) "I show how the system for financing higher education sets traps for students and their parents . . . . At its core, [this book] is about the largely unexplored ways that the financial economy has shaped the inner dynamics of American middle-class family life by forcing parents to confront the problems of paying for college." (page 3)

Why They Can't Write (discussed in a current series of lunch-time conversations in the CEIT) reads quite differently from the perspectives of Tough and Zaloom: student writing has become an extension of the academic-industrial complex that students negotiate to get a degree.  (Warner's discussions of student depression and anxiety are worth taking time to read.) Real learning can be overshadowed by test-taking, and the result is not only sub-standard writing but disengaged, distracted students (some with excellent reasons for their divided focus).  One cannot recommend these books highly enough --for summertime reading if not now.

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I finally got around to reading Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare years late, and after thoroughly enjoying the first part of his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. I emphasis first part, because that book is really two texts: one is a thoroughly entertaining and engaging account of how Poggio Bracciolini found and published the sole sizable manuscript of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, a text that informed 15th-17th century skepticism towards Christianity. The second, less recondite and rather pretentious text, is essentially an anti-religious polemic from a rather tired point of view, that the so-called "Renaissance" bloomed with insightful and wise humanism and overcame centuries of superstition and dogmatism --in other words, Burckhardt's or Gibbon's point of view of the Middle Ages. This second text springs not only from a historically questionable point of view, but contains factual errors (such as ascribing the New Testament sentence, "Jesus wept" to Luke rather than John --an easy error any publisher's fact-checkers should have caught). The failure of the second part of Greenblatt's text do not overshadow the value of the first, but one does wonder, why bother?

Will in the World is an equally engaging reading of most of Shakespeare's works (poetry and theatre) to inform careful speculation about his life, inner life, and how he came to produce them. It does not seek to explain Shakespeare so that his achievement becomes merely quotidian --far from it! Insofar as facts about Will's life are known, but threadbare, due to the careful record-keeping of legal proceedings in Elizabeth's England, Greenblatt bases his account on well-received points of text well-known to scholars. What Greenblatt brings is careful but not over-fussy readings of Shakespeare's text themselves with an eye to what may have informed his imagination, such as the premature death of his son Hamnet in the period just before Will wrote Hamlet --an unsubtle play on names, especially since both orthography and pronunciation were not standard in Will's time. Consequently Greenblatt's text is noticeably furnished with careful speculations, verbs including must have, likely have, may have, and words such as probably and apparently —all in service of trying to pry beyond the veil of historical silence to ask what was going on in Will's mind and spirit.

Scholars may or may not approve of some, all, or any of Greenblatt's well-founded conjectures, and David Stenhouse justifiably would retitle the book Will in the Work. Greenblatt discovers no new facts, but does not disguise his conjectures. For a non-specialist reader, he conveys vividly the peculiarities of London ca. 1590-1610, odd legal features of property and time (such as "liberties," a legal trick by which the civic legal authority over formerly monastic lands, once held by houses long since dissolved, continued to be limited). Will's world is evoked very credibly in many places; in others not so much. Will's Catholic sympathies, or down-right Catholicism, seems less well-established than Greenblatt would make it. Will's utter silence regarding the leading source of social unrest and legal danger in his time still seems more prudential than protective: we just don't know what he thought about any questions of faith.

The problem is that for a figure in his time, Shakespeare leaves no letters, very few reliably autograph manuscripts, no diaries, few reliable, personal reminiscences remain from those who knew him, and few legal records beyond the barely factual. No wonder speculation remains that the figure of Will was a front for someone more notably connected or well-born, who however remains equally elusive, or more so. Compared even with earlier figures such as John Calvin or Heinrich Bullinger, figures at home in a different but equally litigious, dangerous, and ambiguous culture, Will left so little --but what he did leave was sometimes startling revelatory of human feelings that are still accessible, as well as affections and desires long since, often thought unworthy (such as same-sex desire), but now recovered and celebrated.

I'm glad I read it --it helps me to hear Will's works and words on stage. Where's Will? is a more serious game of where's Waldo? however -- and he's still hard to spot. Greenblatt's New Historicism serves him well in this case. The book is worthwhile to read, and if you wish a dive into Will's texts, I recommend it. His reading alone of Julius Ceasar in Elizabethan context is worthwhile —and in the current age of political lies, alternative facts, fake news, looming tyranny, and unbridled ambition, is highly topical.