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When I was 14, I went to the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. This is a story of a camp friendship, at a specific time, and a special place.

That was the summer of 1967: the Summer of Love in San Francisco, but in Detroit the summer of the 1967 (Rebellion), (Uprising), or (Riot)(—pick one). The Vietnam war intensified, against which public opinion was turning, and was first termed a "stalemate" (New York Times, by R. W. Apple, August 7). Martin Luther King, Jr. had declared "a time to break silence" about the War. These events were distant from pine woods between the lakes (Duck and Green), and music in the long summer evenings of the northwest lower peninsula of Michigan.

The National Music Camp (NMC) was was usually just called "Interlochen," then a woodsy crossroads with a state park and a camp store. (Now the Camp is simply termed the Interlochen Arts Camp to distinguish it from the Academy.) Joseph Maddy founded it in 1928. There were far fewer summer camps dedicated to music in 1967. NMC was distinctive, large, and long, a single 9-week session. Its prestige was bolstered by summer visitors such as Aaron Copland (1966), and annual visit by the boyishly handsome Van Cliburn who not only played but conducted. There are scores of notable former campers, in the arts and beyond. Well before 1967 it had become world class (and it still is).

For any 14-year-old, Interlochen was the real deal. I never would have applied without a teacher's earnest recommendation, because I never thought I could possibly be good enough to go there. My instrument was piano, so there was no shortage of competition for a limited number of places. My parents doubted I would be admitted and that they could afford the fees. I sent in an audition tape (reel-to-reel), knowing that a second tape might be requested, and was a few weeks later. Then thin letter arrived, a bad sign. But no!—not only was I admitted, but with a half-scholarship. My parents stretched to afford the rest, and with money left to me by my late grandfather, I had enough to accept admission.

Came Spring, came the deluge of mail: an introduction to the numerous rules and traditions. Lists of what to pack, what would be provided, and scores to choral music. Every camper studied in instrument, was in an ensemble, took theory, ear training, and an elective second instrument. Rather than one second instrument, I choose a class in which students got to play every orchestral instrument a little —not just once, but for several days. When I looked over the repertory list for my level of piano, my nerves rose; the choral music included Mendelssohn's Elijah: I began to be anxious: what had I gotten myself into? Did they really think I could do this?

Yet more mail: lots of rules. Boys' and Girls' camps were not only separated by the state highway, but were strictly off limits to each other. The whole camp was divided into zones by boundaries and those were clearly marked. Campers were strongly advised to sign up for the laundry service (I did). A swim test would be required if I wanted to take a canoe or sailboat out on Duck Lake. I had to sign the Camp Pledge (behavior, respect and commitment to artistic excellence), and then affirm it verbally my first day.

(Digression: Looking at the 2023 Camp Handbook, I'm struck by how little has changed as regards the basics, but how much more complicated life has become. We had no mobile phones, computers, drones, skateboards. I had Kodak Brownie camera (with film); I don't recall policies about substance abuse or weapons. There were definitely policies about "inappropriate intimacy," smoking, leaving your cabin at night, bullying, and misuse of the waterfront. The Camp Pledge is now twice as long. After 40 years of daytime life on a college campus, I hardly dare imagine all the challenges for the 2023 staff.)

Then there was the camp uniform. In 1967 we were told what to wear with no exceptions and little explanation. Now the handbook explains the idea: a tradition since 1928, the uniform represents unity, respect, a blurring of class distinctions, and membership in the Interlochen community. For boys in my day: blue corduroy pants, light blue shirts on weekdays, white on Sundays, always tucked in, with socks. Red sweaters or pullover red sweatshirts (except at performances). Girls wore Blue corduroy knickers and blue socks. Customization was limited to where you wore your camp badge: at the waist, or pants pocket, or on your shirt. (The badges tended to make holes in the shirt fabric, so pants were preferred.)

(Digression: In 2023 the uniform continues largely unchanged, but now boys can wear knickers as well. Wish I could have--I would have looked great in knickers, with long, thin legs. The Boys' camp east of the highway is now "Pines," girl's camps on the west side "Lakeside" and "Meadows." There are now cabins for nonbinary and transgender campers. I suspect they benefit greatly from the uniform: they can wear either and harmonize with everyone else. I'm so glad the world has changed in this regard. In 1967 that was beyond imagining.)

Came June, I finally arrived at camp—a four-hour drive north in those days. I was intimidated. I didn't even think of backing out, but my nerves and fears were at an all-time high. I was assigned cabin 3 with other 14- and 15-year olds and two counsellors, a "good cop" and "bad cop" (but the bad cap was not very bad, just a little stricter). Usually it all worked well. There were minor cabin disputes but I don't recall bullying or real conflict.

We filled our cabin, with barely enough room for bodies, bunks, clothes, and some musical instruments. Our cabin had special shelving for instrument cases—a small luxury; most did not. It also had recurrent problems with water pressure (each cabin had its own complete plumbing), and with 12 boys needing daily showers, that was a problem. Our counsellors had to beg shower space from other cabins; that's how I came to know the boys next door in Cabin 1. (Although arranged in rows under the pines, the cabins were not numbered in sequence, a scheme apparently invented by some chaotic woodland sprite.)

Living in such proximity, boys could not avoid getting to know other boys: who had allergies, and who belched or snored. (Lots of fart jokes, too.) After the first day I loved that life. The first night out came a chessboard—I quickly learned that this was a camp for talented smart kids and I had better keep up. For the first time I felt I was with true peers. Being smart, musical, and a reader was not considered odd but normal. Nicknames: mine was Ferbs, a nickname re-invented decades later for my sons. I was more stimulated and challenged than I had ever been. I forgot the trials of junior high school. It was better than I could have guessed.

I surprised myself by passing the swimming test, so I could use the boats: rowboats (ugh), canoes (OK), sailboats (one- or two-person Sailfishes--cool). The sailboats became my go-to on "forced fun" Friday afternoons. Interlochen had to mandate "fun" because otherwise many campers would practice at any available time something else was not scheduled.

Practice could happen anywhere in the woods, but usually in the practice huts --a long row of narrow practice rooms. The huts were always busy and finding one with a piano could become a chore (although pianists were supposed to have precedence to use those). Practice hours were supervised loosely, because little supervision was needed: student musicians were almost invariably on task, and they had good reason.

The atmosphere of understated but intense competition centered around the practice of challenges. The procedure basically sorted players in a band or orchestra section from first (best) to last (least) by campers voting which of two players performed a designated excerpt better by several criteria. Supposedly the voting was "blind" (everyone had their heads down and raised hands silently to vote). Talk about stress!—but modified in a peculiar way: the player next to you in the section was both a competitor and a key collaborator. Somehow, you had to get along. With a healthy dose of Midwestern "nice," it usually somehow worked. Hence the desire to practice almost all the time.

The challenge system under the right circumstances motivated less skilled players to become more skilled, to buckle down and really work. It worked best when the faculty section leader reminded players: "We admitted you to Interlochen because we know you can do it. So now you're responsible for showing us that you can." It worked with the right musicians, who practiced whenever possible. Others simply grew to accept a chair way down the section. For some, the system felt terrible. Everyone put up with it because that's the way it was.

(In the piano studio, our rankings were based partly on camper vote and partly on faculty evaluation. The motivating prize were performance opportunities for groups ranging in size from the studio to the whole camp.)

The point of all this was the music. The ensembles hooked me. I had never sung before in an 80-member choir with 18 other bass-baritones all of whom, like me, were receiving rigorous ear training. Our first big piece was Vaughan Williams' Toward the Unknown Region, a harmonically lush twelve minutes with full orchestra and organ. The impact of 80 voices was huge, but surpassed by the full orchestra: I had never heard or performed music anything like this. For me, the performance was transformative. I really began to grasp how powerful music can be.

In its best moments Interlochen taught me (a 14-year-old!): it's about the art, its not about me. We were there to learn to do something that connected us with an art far larger than most teenagers could imagine. The experience communicated one thing brilliantly: the music mattered. We were part of something big, summed up in the tradition of the "Interlochen theme" (by Howard Hanson) that closed every concert. It was always conducted by a student (usually the first violinist) Faculty and staff adults left the stage: it was played by campers, conducted by a camper. It pointed forward. Someday this art would be ours.

I was forced to get to know a lot of boys (and a few girls) who were from very different backgrounds and places. As an introvert, a reader and not a talker, this was difficult at first, but I learned. There were some international campers, and scholarship kids like me, and some apparently from wealthy families. Most had siblings (the baby boom). A few had gone to boarding school. For boys from California or the South the weather was usually too cold; for Swedish boy was always far too warm. A lot of boys were from metropolitan Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Almost all of us had nicknames --as I wrote, mine was "Ferbs" . Our knowledge of each other's real names was much hazier --those were on the camp badges, of course, and when counsellors passed out the mail. Otherwise we knew each other by our camp nicknames.

Eppy was a boy from Brooklyn. He played the bassoon, and he was pretty good. He had an off-beat sense of humor, goofy at times, and had a knack for quietly skirting or just barely complying with the rules. He lived in Cabin 1, the cabin where my Cabin 3 often went to shower because of a lack of water pressure. I saw him daily, but usually just casually. Like me, he was a scholarship boy.

Eppy and I were in different musical orbits and ensembles. By chance we wound up in the same theory class, and had the same homework. He chose piano as his second instrument, so we also had that in common. When it came time for me to try to play bassoon for my elective class, I came to appreciate how difficult his instrument was. I was awful, producing something like a very sick goose. Eppy was much better at piano than I was at bassoon.

Eppy and I signed up for one of the sailboats a number of times. A boat allowed some sense of freedom and getting away -- a welcome respite from all the rules and traditions. We both picked up the basic skills quickly, and learned how to tack into or across the wind. Eppy liked sailing on fresh water, no salt. (I had never been on or in salt water.) One late afternoon we had to be towed in from across the lake, because the wind had vanished as storm clouds approached. We weren't in any disciplinary trouble, though. Getting pulled in felt mildly humiliating, but other boys thought it was cool. Sailing those little boats conferred some kind of minor status.

I don't recall any specific conversations with Eppy, though we talked. His brother, a year or two younger, did not come to Interlochen. Like me, Eppy was an introvert, but once started could tell stories about life near the beach in Brooklyn, a life I had not imagined before. He took the subway by himself, saw an occasional city rat, had been to Carnegie Hall, and had seen Bernstein conduct. I was impressed, but tried not to show it. He was a city kid from part of New York, and I was from a farm town in Michigan. He did not put on a sophisticated attitude, so despite our differences we got a long pretty well. I don't recall ever talking about girls or sex with him. We were growing up in a more innocent time. Whatever happened in the 1960s, it hadn't happened yet to either of us.

After I got to know Eppy a little, I realized that he was very smart. He was a reader -he introduced me to Tolkien's saga in the old Ballantine edition. I figured out that he had progressed well beyond ninth grade, though only a few months older than I. He had a big vocabulary, but did not show off. He was very quick with numbers and number games, cards, and chess. As a smart kid, he felt he was an outsider, someone who didn't really belong in our age group, and I shared that feeling with him, though I was by no means so smart as he. We both felt gawky, sometimes out of place, and confused: in short, we were 14-year-old boys.

Eppy's parents visited early in the summer and brought him food from Brooklyn. He missed bagels, and they brought some, but by the time they got to Michigan they were pretty hard. Apparently his family was Jewish, something he had never mentioned --there were other Jewish boys in our cabins, but they all seemed very ordinary and uninterested in this detail. Like my parents visited for a weekend, when his arrived, they fussed over him, embarrassed him mildly, and then left. Unlike my parents, his seemed to feel that their son was in a very strange place very far away. I had no idea how different it must have seemed until I visited someone else in Brooklyn years later.

Though I knew Eppy pretty well --I did sail or otherwise hang around with other boys as well-- ours was strictly a camp friendship. I did not keep up with him after that summer, nor did it occur to me that I might have (though we were all given lists of campers' addresses --that seems incredible now). Eppy receded into my memory, and I do not recall ever thinking about him in succeeding decades.

Like everyone else, I became passingly familiar with the name Jeffrey Epstein in the media twenty years ago --something about a very rich guy in Florida and sex with minors. Later on, we all heard much more in lurid detail. I remember noticing that he had some connection with Interlochen, as well as big universities and Bill Clinton. At the time of his death in a New York prison in 2019, I recalled reading that he had been a amateur pianist. I still did not connect the dots --and in fairness, how many boys over the years have gone to Interlochen with last name of Epstein, Epworth, or something like that. Only in 2022, when I read a complicated story about a cello and an aspiring American concert artist, did I read the key detail that Jeffrey Epstein had attended Interlochen not as a pianist, but as a bassoonist.

By now dear reader has undoubtedly concluded by Eppy was no less than Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous and lurid sexual predator entangled with enormous wealth, rich a powerful people, and numerous criminal charges. With that New York Times article, it all clicked. I had always unthinkingly assumed that somehow Jeffrey Epstein was older than I, and at the National Music Camp sometime in the late 1960s. Wikipedia told me that he had been born in January 1953 (I in July), and was at Interlochen in 1967.

This knowledge was disconcerting at first, to say the least. I certainly never saw it coming, not that I gave the boy I knew as Eppy (or the man Jeffrey Epstein) any particular attention. I asked myself: what did I miss? What eluded me? In short: nothing. Eppy had a sly sense of humor, was very smart, and could subvert Interlochen's numerous rules without going too far. He did not seem mildly threatening, just mildly eccentric.

The camp photograph of his cabin --a standard pose--shows him (standing, at left) looking vaguely annoyed, hands in pockets, slightly out of the even line of boys, possibly not wearing socks, long sleeves rolled up. This photo was probably taken on Sunday, since the boys wearing white shirts. The others seem much more present in that moment. (Two counsellors are standing at right, and third from right.) There is nothing in my memory, or in this photograph, that imply the later Epstein's blazing financial trail, criminal acts, and sad end. He became a dangerous serial fabulist, noxious con artist, repeat offender, fundamentally fraudulent --but none of that could have been foretold from what I saw in 1967. I saw another mildly confused 14-year-old boy.

The journey from Eppy to Epstein is utterly mysterious to me. I cannot resolve it in any genuine or meaningful manner. It's a very sad story, and that statement in no way dismisses or diminishes the profound suffering of his victims.

I had an eerie sympathy with another New York Times story I read in 2023, around the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing. The story told how impossible it has been for former friends and teachers of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the younger brother of the two bombers) to reconcile the friendly guy they thought they knew with the terrorist he became. One of his friends, Youssef Eddafali, eventually wrote two letters to Tsarnaev: to "the old Jahar," whom he thought he knew, and another to "The Monster." Eddafali's own life was turned upside down by the bombing, by interrogation surveillance by the FBI, and it has been a long road back to anything resembling normal life for him. (He expected no reply to his letters, and has received none.) A researcher of mass shootings, Jaclyn Schildkraut, said that such experience “is like being knocked into a parallel universe . . . and you can’t get back.”

I have experienced a minor echo of that getting knocked into a parallel universe --a suddenly rewritten past. I can no longer remember my summer at Interlochen quite so innocently, though it remains overwhelming positive for me. Those memories now come with an important question mark: how did that happen? (--as well as other realizations about how various people were treated there in the 1960s, especially women). I do not believe, theologically or in any other way, that life had to turn out as it did for Eppy. At various points, he made his choices.

The summer at Interlochen that I found life-changing and -affirming was apparently insufficient for another boy, who eventually walked a long ways down a much darker path. I would like it all to make sense, and it does not, nor ever will.

I wrote the piece below when I was at Hope College, in 1974. I was 21. I was able to locate this thanks to the digitization of the student literary journal Opus in Hope College's Digital Commons. I wrote this in response to reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (the first time I read it! in later years I have re-read it twice). I'm not sure what I meant by it.

Für Dich

In our past we were
Of our past we shall become
into our own, thus:

For what we did within the dream of memory
illuminates the darkened room wherein,
in quiet moments, yet we meet.
Our footsteps in the snow resounding
through the empty light in which we were,

Or were not. Only
we know where we might have gone,
in rings of light; snow.

Your smile was light, and
we were living, even then,
our lives gone backward.

Frank Bruni in his continuing series (New York Times, March 31, 2022) "For the Love of Sentences" thanks a reader who picked up this gem from Andrew Sullivan's Substack article The Strange Rebirth of Imperial Russia. (I don't subscribe to Substack and I can't read the whole piece.)

The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of postmodern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.

My point: this is a hazard peculiar to those who cherish the modes of Christian worship characterized by the language and ceremony of past centuries. That could be many groups, including ultra-Orthodox, ultra-traditionalist Catholics, and some Anglo-Catholics (especially those of the Anglican Church in North America variety). The mainstream, Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Church where I am a member and sometimes worship has quite a number of younger regulars who are entranced by the "mystery" (a profound, mesmerizing allure?) of the re-formulated 1549, 1662 and 1928 language in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. (You better believe reformulated! No more prayer for deliverance "from all sedicion and privye conspiracie, from the tyrannye of the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities.")

The profound, mesmerizing allure to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by can lead to disquieting fantasies. When I was in a very Protestant theological seminary in the late 1970s, certain students there were agog with the antiquity of Russian Orthodox worship, aided by the venerable and slightly scary, geriatric presence of Fr. Georges Florovsky. One hastens to mention that in 1979 that Russian Orthodox church was still very much under the thumb of the militantly atheistic Soviet régime, and that the profound, mesmerizing allure was enhanced by sympathy for a persecuted minority as well as implicit assertion that Russians weren't all bad, contra the ossified rhetoric of the Cold War west.

The seeds of a profound, mesmerizing allure to the recovery of meaning from past centuries was germinating, and unpredictably came to flower in the overblown, apocalyptic rhetoric of Ivan Ilyin, and Putin's Rasputin, Aleksandr Dugin (he of flowing locks and beard). The consequences of blasting away "all the incoherence and instability of postmodern life" and resuscitating "a new collective, ancient meaning" are now obvious to all, and should stand as a warning against those who romanticize parallel, Western "recoveries" as antidote to disillusionment with the shallowness of modernity. Russkiy mir in all its glories.

I might tell some of my fellow Episcopal congregants: you want to worship as in centuries past? OK: and throw in the complete suppression of women's rights and social role outside a narrow home-bound sphere, revive roaring homophobia and prejudice, and by all means re-assert property rights over other human beings. All characteristics of various Anglo-Catholic imperialist theologies of the 19th century. The past is all there, good and bad: you can't pick and choose.

Or: wisely adapt and retain your standing in modernity, with pointed and well-targeted critique of the shallows. Don't forget those previous decades or centuries, but do remember them—all of them. Before you blast away the incoherence and instability of postmodern life, consider carefully the consequences of the collective meaning that you seek to recover. The most powerful consequences are invariably those that were never foreseen.

Kurt Stüber, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Ash Wednesday has always been a conundrum for me. It rarely played much of a role in my own history as a Christian. Last year an acquaintance, now a bishop, wrote that in March 2021, "the Lent that never ended begins again," referring to the sudden closure churches and subsequent isolation starting the previous March, 2020. This year 2022, I might add, "the Lent that never ended begins again, again."


I was raised in a middle-of-the-road so-called "liberal" Congregational Church in Michigan. A church of GM regional middle management, local businessmen (1950s-1960s: they werealmost all men; my father was one), and agricultural commodities dealers (sugar beets!). Ash Wednesday was a small, add-on holiday for a congregation with a limited liturgical year—most characterized by what we did not do (ashes! unlike the Polish Catholics and German Missouri-Synod Lutherans who dominated the area at that time).


When I was in Princeton and later, my sense of Ash Wednesdays varied. I lurched, over a decade, from ordained Presbyterian ministry to lay membership in a medium-high Episcopal church in New York City ("off-Broadway" compared with Smokey Mary's "Broadway"). It led a socially edgy AIDS ministry in the 1980s and 1990s, and Ash Wednesday for me had varying levels of seriousness. Fast forward to the 2000s and I joined a progressive "Anglo-Catholic" Episcopal parish in New Haven that ostensibly takes Lent very seriously. With a touch of liturgically theatrical ostentation that I never found congenial. ("Anglo-Catholic" meaning what, really? pseudo-medievalist nostalgia? A 19th-century fable to justify empire?)


My church in New Haven has many important and estimable qualities: sponsoring a community soup kitchen; hosting an annual gathering of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim youth, providing a home for a "house of study" for young adults seeking a gap year of post-baccalaureate social service; reaching out to Yale students with an otherworldly, meditative Sunday compline during term. So many good things. I feel I should be more supportive, and I do what I can to support those ministries, but I'm no longer present there, figuratively and in many cases physically.


I feel utterly out of touch, so out of synch with Ash Wednesday this year. That never-ending Lent again, again. Pandemic, insatiable grievance, climate change and the collapse of nature; a live-streamed, intentionally brutal war in Ukraine, not to mention: wars in Colombia, Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, the Congo, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanamar/Burma, not to mention the Uyghurs, Taiwan, and North Korea. Much closer to home the unending cycle of urban murder. Way too many guns.  This wierd not-this, not-that, in-between time that we all live in, now with the shadow of nuclear war hanging over us again.


I cannot escape the heritage of Ash Wednesday that has focused so much on individuals' sexual and petty-moral sins. Like Annie Lamott's "enemies lite," but here "trespasses lite." I'm no angel, but my trespasses in the great heap amount to a pretty small hill of beans, and my obsessing about them is just a distraction. Granted the Great Litany rehearses life as it is: earthquakes, famine flood, war, hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, contempt, violence of every kind, boundless human suffering.  Nonetheless, in that classic catalogue, the sins that stick out again and again in Christian past practice: inordinate and sinful affections, and the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Complemented by a Rite-I prayer of confession with centuries-old, tradition cadences addressed to a distant emperor or peevish, bitchy Tudor monarch.  It's stylistically consistent but —for me, at least—just misses the point.


Lately I have read Margaret Renkl's confession that this year ecclesiastical Lent will not count her in and Jimin Kang's I Gave Up English for Lent. I'm in broad sympathy: the Lent of self-imposed sacrifice just does not speak to "the fears I cannot shake— for my country, for my planet — and [speak] toward a stronger faith in the possibility of redemption, a more certain conviction that all is not yet lost in this deeply troubled world." (Renkl) The power of language to shape and distort reality, to live outside of English: to find "what is uniquely yours to offer" that "can be gleaned only by what you can — and have already — received from the generosity of others." (Kang)


I'm inextricably bound in this body bound for ashes—at 68, I'm accepting more and more that these are the days of my one-and-only life, and that I war born and have lived in specific time that, with me, is passing away soon. (Though not quite yet!) Inextricably bound to a world of environmental degradation—how could I ever live without plastics, carbon, and petroleum, given the daily choices I face? Sorrowful for the communities I have known that have vanished, blown away by economies, drugs, and hatred —deaths of despair.  The sorrow that Patrick Laurie feels for Galloway, commodified with forest as a carbon offset for rapacious corporations elsewhere, resonates strongly for me even though my environmental and geographical location is so different.


This Lent is not an ecclesial Lent, at least not for me. I have learned from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer that the living Word, the encounter with the Word, may well (and probably will) take place far from the courts of house of the Lord. The center of our life in the periphery of our communities. the stranger unlooked-for among us. The refugee. The undocumented.


Somehow I still seek to find the practice of hope that eludes me, the practice of faith that somehow all is not lost for our world, my community, my nation. To acknowledge with Paul Lehmann the darkness of the Gospel: that the practice of love confronted with the power politics of the world is so utterly unfit, so laughably at odds with what passes for reality, that its presence transfigures the encounter on the frontier of life; another reality breaks in as a tangent touches a circle. Who would ever have anticipated the self-denying leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky? — speaking truth to power, who in the event of his probable death will become more infinitely powerful than his murderers-to-be could ever imagine.


The Lent that never ended begins again, again. Like Renkl, I feel more and more that I am an unchurched Christian. (Maybe "barely churched" is more accurate.) In the past two years, for the first time of my life, I have stopped attending worship regularly, even online. For a while, a long while, it was a hiatus not by choice. When I could choose to attend, sometimes —or often— I just have not heard the call. When I did attend it felt as worship by half-measures, too often undertaken with ever-watchful fear of contagion that allows for nothing unplanned, nothing unauthorized, inappropriate, or unexpected. Bars, cafés, and gyms were more than half-full, church not even half so. Hymns half-sung through a mask have seemed an exercise in liturgical nostalgia. I have become half-unchurched, sometimes suffused with regret, but often not. I don't know how long the other half of unchurched will take.


Lent was never an end in itself; it led on to passion and resurrection. The suffering of the planet, my neighbors, my friends, and countless others is a passion beyond description. Too many deaths, too much illness. On too many days, all seems lost for the world that I love. New life ,whenever it speaks, acknowledges wider reality beyond description. Outdoors, or with a friend, or when listening to the music so deep that we become the music. "The ploughman shall go out in March and turn the same earth / He has turned before, the bird shall sing the same song. // Shall the bird's song cover, the green tree cover, what wrong / Shall the fresh earth cover? We wait, and the time is short / But waiting is long."

Recently I've have read in succession Philip Marsden's The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination, and Patrick Laurie's Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape. The first narrates the writer's challenging voyage by sail northwards through the western coastal islands of Ireland and Scotland, from Dingle to Ullapool. The second narrates a year in the life of a young farmer determined to bring back older, ecologically respectful, sustainable farming methods to a small plot in Galloway, an often-neglected southwest corner of Scotland. Each in his way narrates a point of view from a chosen periphery to the urban, digital culture that pervades our times, and each questions not only the cultural sustainability of such centers (or centres!)

The tension between center/periphery is a theme in scholarship about the Late Antique period in the scholarship of Peter Brown. In that era, urban elites sought to define Christianity formally at the same time that locations and individuals on the Roman periphery —the Holy Man in the desert, the missioner in Ireland, the so-called Monophysite Christians who took Christian with them on the Silk Road towards the East; the relative seclusion of the Ethiopian Churches—that these "peripheral" figures and communities possessed the imaginative power that characterized the passing of the ancient heritages to later centuries. The rhetorical power of the elites at the centers—Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem—had to compete with the powerful figure in isolation, and the sense that at the periphery the future was taking shape and would come back to characterize the center.

One portion of that geographical periphery were islands past which Philip Marsden sailed; another portion was the Galloway where St. Ninian founded Whithorn before his death in ca. 432 CE. Though connected to mainland Great Britain, Galloway may have figured as Pen Rhionydd in the Arthurian tradition of the three thrones of Britain. According to A. P. Jennings in the Oxford Companion to Scottish History, the name Galloway may derive from a Gaelic phrase for "stranger-Gaidheil," a people with Gaelic and Scandinavian ancestry. Its peninsular location meant it remained removed from much of the turmoil of the Scottish Borderlands, but the people are brutally treated after the 1603 Union in the Covenanter rebellion and subsequent wars.

This sense of periphery figures in both books, but in different ways. In Marsden's book, every Irish geographical feature has a story in the ancient sagas and annals, sometimes remembered by the locals, sometimes forgotten. The Scottish ancient annals figured poorly through subsequent violent wars, and some of the "invented tradition" (in the phrase of Eric Hobsbawm, 1963), or more accurately re-invented traditions. Hobsbawm's distinction between "invented" and "genuine" traditions founders upon the fact that all traditions, genuine or not, are humanly created, unlike some kind of natural deposit, and that "reinventions" may seek to express a long-standing point of view even in the phrases of a later invention, such as a "nation." Galloway has surely felt itself on the periphery of Scotland (and England) as have the western Irish counties. Nevertheless, Laurie roots his narrative in the geographical features that have long characterized Gallovidian lives, a felt geography as vivid as that of Ireland.

The sense of periphery has a literary function similar in each book: it serves to invert a sense of value, a sense of historical perspective, the sense of what's important. Both authors are lament of the trends of depopulation and marginalization, as though Galloway or the Western Isles were to become merely some kind of touristic theme-park for wealthy urbanites who seek a rest from the stresses of London, Dublin, Brussels, Edinburgh, or elsewhere. The dignity of the people who continue, dwindle as their numbers do, to inhabit these areas—dignitas properly understood as distinctive rank and traditional claim rooted in place—give ample reason to resist the arrogance of the social planners and politicians who are utterly alienated from any sense of place at all. Indeed the kosmos is not the polis—cosmopolitan does not in fact absorb and co-opt all before it in a newly imperial manner. (Perhaps cosmopolitan national planners, central bankers, and craven politicians are the re-invented tradition of 19th-century global imperialists, with all the self-righteousness of the self-possessed.)

Like the ancient sagas and traditions, the ultimate force of both books simply says, I was here. This was here. This world was here, and this world could be again a home for dolphins, curlews, and saints. In the face of catastrophic climate change, can this land, this sea, these people endure?

Alex Langland's Cræft: An Inquiry into the origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (2017) is fun to read and filled with many illuminating asides about numerous everyday matters in pre-modern life. For those of us interested in early medieval Europe, it's a treasure trove of suggestions for understanding the ways things were done or might have been done. I very much appreciate that this trained medievalist has chosen to write for a wider audience. He has solid hands-on knowledge of an astonishing array of subjects, sometimes gained during his work with BBC on programs regarding historical farming at various periods.

While he devotes attention and care to the traditional ways of tanning hides and producing varying qualities of leather, he does not explore the making of parchment or vellum for manuscripts, nor the manner of production of inks, writing instruments, or crafting environments. I felt this lack, because the production of manuscripts is an example of the intricate inter-dependencies of medieval cræft and orders of knowledge, trade, and wide cultural resonances. On the other hand, Langlands is a trained archaeologist, so texts are often for him a secondary concern.

I was left a little uneasy with the wording "true meaning," perhaps a subtitle inserted on an editor's insistence insofar as to those outside of the study of early medieval vernacular languages, cræft won't mean much. There were and are many meanings of this crafts and modes of production. Who is to say which of them is "true?" Langlands is at his best when he pursues the entanglements of environment, local customs, skills, and needs to show how almost all everyday customs and objects for ordinary people were sourced locally in reasonably sustainable practices. The truths he points to are practical insight gained at the intersection of skill, material, location, and tradition, a deeper sense of cræft as a form of life.

Langland's concern for the destructiveness of modern and post-modern industrial practices (especially plastics) is well-warranted. He failed to note, however, the medieval and early modern agricultural practices which degraded some lands and environments. Granted that far smaller populations generated less negative environmental impact, it is still worth noting the inefficiencies and frictions of medieval and early modern societies that motivated some populations to move out to new horizons, and perhaps come into lasting conflicts with previous residents. Why did, for example, so many Norse leave Scandinavia? Could patterns of over-populations and customs of ever-smaller land holdings for agriculture have played a role? Was there sustained environmental damage done in some relatively fragile nordic locations, such that agricultural, hunting, and fishing yields diminished to the point that people emigrated?

I do enormously appreciate Langland's insistence that many traditional practices and cræfts embodied knowledge and a real wisdom concerning available materials, and that medieval people were far more clever and aware of their surroundings and impacts than modern scholars are often likely to credit. They were hardly stupid; for the same reasons, many sought to leave subsistence or exchange agriculture because of precarity, rising social expectations, and increasing awareness of the outside world and its possibilities. It wasn't an easy life.

One notes that Langlands does not discuss traditional cræft of medicine, healing, pain management, dentistry, or the challenges of plague and pestilence. Since the 18th century it's hard to argue that standards of living have not risen for a very great portion of the world's populations, and even deeply impoverished populations have more access to more resources than they might have had in centuries past. It's also impossible to avoid the realization that the modern and post-modern methods of meeting human needs are not sustainable. In a coming era of population stability or decline, returning to many traditional manners of living and working may help to alleviate some of the worst impacts of global warming (if anything can do that at all). No one will want to go backwards to traditional medicine, however, no matter how attractive natural remedies are. Selective pre-modern modes of life and production might well be introduced to leaven and reduce the impact of modern or post-modern modes.

What I learn again from Langlands is humility: the ancients and pre-moderns knew far more and far better than often is understood or realized by those outside rather narrow scholarly circles. To re-learn and re-member sustainable agriculture and societies that are environmentally low-impact will require unlearning a lot of facile and pseudo-knowledge and attitudes commonplace in complacent post-modernity. Langland's book is an engaging, readable, and positive wake-up call, even as global catastrophe seems unavoidable.

Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explain: Design and Pattern in Narrative rises from her own interest in narratives that proceed in patterns other than the classic Aristotelian arc (conflict, complication, rising action, climax, dénouement). This not only strikes her as "something that swells and tautens until it collapses" (very male), but also very dependent upon the power relations that characterize many sexual acts. John Gardner tied this to the "energeic" novel: exposition, development, dénounment: something happens, something changes. But fiction doesn't merely narrate. Alison is seeking a fiction that is organic, but not necessarily orgasmic.

She finds an alternative in Peter Steven's 1974 book Patterns in Nature. (Stevens is an architect.) There are several ways that energy can propagate through space and matter in the nature of the universe. His ideas were updated in a different direction by Philip Ball with a book with the same title. (Ball was an editor of Nature.). Alison takes such natural patterns: spiral (fiddlehead fern, whirlpool), meander (river), explosion or radial (splash of dripping water), as well as cellular, fractal and branching patterns. "There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Those natural patterns have inspired visual artists and architects for centuries. Why wouldn't they form our narratives, too?" (p. 22)

Alison goes on in the book to read fiction with an eye towards these patterns, with a lively set of authors: W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Gabriel Garcîa Márquez, Marguerite Duras, Tobias Wolff, Nicholson Baker. Each of these sets out fiction that takes a variety of narrative forms, building up patterns that spiral, twist, meander, explode, or form repetitive multiple perspectives that build a text differently from a single sweeping narrative. They do this even as all literature has to negotiate the word-by-word sequential act of reading, line by line.

I wondered if Alison might consider fiction or literature in other languages (not only through translation): how differently sentences can function in inflected languages such as German, Russian, or Greek, with the puzzles that can be placed within clauses finally to resolve in patterns by the end of the sentence. (The old joke about Thomas Mann's last work: he died before he could get to the verb.)

This is a very lively book that rewards reflection and thought, and it has led me to read authors I would not otherwise have read (probably), as well as re-read authors differently. I'm more aware of the variety of narrative forms that Dostoyevesky uses in a long work such as The Karamazov Brothers, and how these multiple layers of texts, some set pieces, build upon each other. What is the relationship, for example, of the famous episode "The Grand Inquisitor" with the process of Dimitri Karamzov's trial?

This book is not a how-to, but it made me want to write , to imagine. Alison is a novelist who teaches writing at the University of Virginia, and a wonderful translator of Ovid's tales of eroticism and strange sexuality in Change Me, based on Amores and Metamorphoses.

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.

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.

I have written previously about Matthew Battle's 2003 book Library: An Unquiet History (Norton)—see this link for text rescued from a previous blog, and page down to January 24, 2011 (or just page-search "Matthew Battles" and it's the second occurence). I took part in a recent informal conversation about this book at a recent library conference, and I enjoyed re-visiting it.

Battles seeks to "read the library" (page 14).

I explore the library's intertwined relations of fancy and authenticity, of folly and epiphany, of the Parnassan and the universal. My method . . . mirrors that of Eugene Gant [a character is Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River]: I pick up a volume . . . . [and] follow a trail. . . I drop on passage to follow another, threading my way among the ranges of books, lost among the shelves. . . . What I'm looking for are points of transformation, those moments where readers, authors, and librarians question the meaning of the library itself.

pages 20-21

Battles does not seek either a reductive account nor a comprehensive exposition of the history of libraries, but points out transformations of text, reader, author, and librarian. His pursuit takes him to ancient Mesopotamia and classical antiquity, ancient China, the Aztec realm and its predecessors and successor, Renaissance and early modern Europe, all the way to Nazi Germany and the ethnic wars of southeast Europe. His most recent example is probably the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban which sought iconoclasm and destruction to enforce their lethal, ideologically pure, and ethnically cleansed mockery of Islam.

One of Battles' major points is that the same insight that has led some cultural, political, or military leaders to found, build, and sustain libraries is the insight that has led to their destruction: a library is a source of power, prestige, and memory, and when power changes hands, prestige is re-distributed, and memories (in the new leaders view) must be extinguished, libraries are destroyed. Whether or not the library of Alexandria was in fact torched by Romans, Muslims, or Christians, whether or not the First August Emperor (Shi Huangdi) of China in fact destroyed all records of previous states as well as élite or Mandarin writings, libraries have withered and been dispersed as surely as they have been built. Nazi German librarians made a Faustian bargain to preserve themselves, some of their books, and their profession by subordinating it to fictions of Volk, blood, and soil, only to see themselves even further marginalized in war and the subsequent re-founding of the German states (Jahre Null). Libraries have an unquiet history not despite their development and success, but exactly because of it.

The years since Battle's 2003 publication have only confirmed this, alas. Islamist insurgents fleeing Timbuktu before advancing French soldiers torched two library buildings in 2013, destroying priceless and unique Sufi manuscripts --the Sufis insufficiently Islamist in their view (many of the manuscripts were subsequently found to have survived). Many other manuscripts of this center of Islamic learning had been (or have been) moved and recorded elsewhere (and subjected to the dangers of humidity levels never occurring in Mali). In 2012 and after, manuscripts had to be protected again, in a remarkably multi-pronged and multi-part effort brilliantly described in Joshua Hammer's The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or Syria, ISIL or ISIS or Daesh) destroyed many cultural artifacts of ancient civilization in their crude, terroristic, and bigoted reign, including the Central Library of Mosul, the University of Mosul, the library of a 265-year-old Latin (Dominican) Church, and the Mosul Museum Library. The Peoples' Republic of China has determined to destroy Uighur culture and many artifacts and collections of Kashgar and elsewhere in Xinjiang, a remarkable example of Han Chinese racism and bigotry that goes hand-in-glove with Han Chinese destruction of Tibetan culture.

Digital destruction is also certainly possible of a kind that marginalizes Nicholson Baker's carefully enacted, idiosyncratic, and self-hyped outrage at the "loss" of newspapers that were already acidifying (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001). By "digital destruction" I mean the promulgation of (anti-) social media and its assault on any concepts of truth, such that cultural memory is relegated to the memory hole. The infuriating, bland shallowness of Mark Zuckerberg leads as example one, but many others follow, including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Steven Huffman and Alex Ohanian of Reddit, who celebrated "freedom from the press." These panglossian, superficial, and flashy developers with the sketchiest, and most desultory, slap-dash notions of "freedom of speech" and neo-liberal deregulation have unleashed hordes of edge-lords whose only real goal is to burn it all down: language, truth, discourse, respect for other points of view, and tolerance for disagreement. They join the insufferably woke of right and left to rend any democratic policy and polity, and to worship authoritarian ideologies masquerading as enlightened thinking. Their red pills become the cyanide tablets concealed by the romantic spies of the thrillers. All this digital destruction is as assuredly an assault on the web of language, concepts, habits, skills, and dispositions that build and enact libraries and inquiry, as the depredations of Communist Chinese, Islamists, and fascists of every stripe and country, an assault that moves forward 24/7/365.

What might save libraries? Ironically: burial, or going off-line, inaccessible, and impossible to locate. What goes around comes around, in the long run, but it can be a very long run. The arc of history may or may not bend towards justice, but it does oscillate between truth, power, brutality, and lies, and in the end the truth is surprisingly durable. How else did anything at all survive from antiquity, whether classical, Asian, or Meso-American? One of the keys is librarians —who remain slightly suspect and patronized by academic leaders because they know, deep down, that librarians don't only work for them and their institutional goals and objectives. Librarians have something bigger in mind —as Michael Moore knows, and said ten years ago when HarperCollins attempted to intimidate him, and require a re-write of his book Stupid White Men to tone down his criticism of George W. Bush.

I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.
They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?

Daily Kos, October 20, 2009

Well, not the ass end of everything. Rather like Balaam's Ass (Numbers 22:21-39): inconvenient both to Balaam and the rulers of the Moabites, seeing an angel blocking the narrow passage to the future, and pointing out injustice, inaccuracy, and lies. It's a tougher job than many might think, rarely recognized, and frequently obscured by librarians' own professional commitments —but speaking through the unlikely and the disparaged, and shining a light on truths, nevertheless. Caveat lector.