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Amanda Holmes reads Nizar Qabbani’s poem “When I Love You,” translated by Lena Jayyusi and Jack Collum. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “When I Love You” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.
A mama bear gives a half-assed attempt to hoist her baby bear over a fence in the city of Monrovia, California. As if thinking of a million things she'd rather be doing, the bear looks like she's had it as she deals with her uncooperative fuzzy toddler — who does nothing to help her out. — Read the rest
It only takes a glance to see where the Lightbone floor lamp got its monicker – the connection point between the spherical glass globes and the wooden sections. Inspired by a bamboo forest on a trip to Japan and designed by FÄRG & BLANCHE for Oblure, Lightbone was originally exhibited during Milan Design Week 2017 as part of the “Armour Mon Amour” exhibition. At that point of the conceptual phase, the floor lamp was textile and measured up to three meters tall! In the following years it’s continued to evolve into the product you see here.
“We are really happy that we were able to develop this version of the Lightbone together with Oblure,” said the designers, Fredrik Färg and Emma Marga Blanche. “This time in solid Oak and all made in Sweden.”
The floor lamp can easily be used next to a sofa, but also looks amazing in a group or two or three. Multiples begin to resemble a small forest or act to divide spaces in hospitality projects.
Lighbone is available in natural Oak with a Black stain, Smoked Oak, and Cobalt Blue. It’s also available in custom colors on request.
Black Oak
Cobalt Blue Oak
Natural Oak
Smoked Oak
To lean more about LIGHTBONE floor lamp, visit oblure.com.
As an art student at the University of Texas Rio Grande, Josie Del Castillo came to appreciate the rich pigment of oils and how easily they spread across the canvas. “I didn’t get it at first, but it made me want to practice,” she says. “The techniques that I’ve developed now—I always go back to oil painting, even though I’ve tried other mediums.” A first-generation, Mexican-American artist raised in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Del Castillo produces self-portraits and portraits of her friends and family, her canvases depicting the landscape of her hometown, with its palm trees, resacas, and sunsets framed by tall clouds.
Growing up, Del Castillo and her family crossed the border often to visit family in Mexico. “I never really saw a difference between the two countries until I was older,” she says. “We always saw it as ‘going to the other side.’” Today she celebrates the similarities and differences between two cultures in her work, often by means of natural symbolism. The aloe plant, for example, “has healing powers in Mexican-American culture, so I use that to symbolize healing ourselves.” Del Castillo’s portraits often explore her own resiliency and that of her Brownsville community. “I’m intrigued by people’s personalities, how they present themselves, and what they do for the community,” she says.
The post Josie Del Castillo appeared first on The American Scholar.
Off the southern tip of South America, the remote and rocky Falkland Islands are home to one of the oddest birds of prey in the world: the striated caracara, which looks like a falcon but acts more like a parrot. Charles Darwin had to fend these birds off the hats, compasses, and valuables of the Beagle; the Falkland Islands government had a bounty on their “cheeky” beaks for much of the 20th century; and modern falconers have used their understanding of language to train them to do dog-like tricks. The other nine species of caracara that span the rest of South America are just as odd in their own ways. In his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature, Jonathan Meiburg follows their unusual evolutionary path across the continent and describes his encounters with these birds over the past 25 years. He joins us from his home in Texas to introduce us to some new feathered friends. This episode originally aired in 2021.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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The post The Falcon’s Odd Little Cousin appeared first on The American Scholar.
Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years by Heidi Julavits; Hogarth, 304 pp., $27
In his 1949 book of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argued that while the archetypal man’s journey is physical and outward, that of the woman is domestic and inward. Apart from the painfully reductive nature of this idea, what most annoyed me about the book was not so much Campbell’s distinction between genders but the implication that a journey inward is inherently less dangerous, less difficult, or less societally significant than a journey outward. In her new book, Heidi Julavits, a writer and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, rewrites that myth. Directions to Myself is about finding a way home in every sense of the word—and what it means to navigate there, not as Odysseus returning to Ithaca but as ordinary parents, teachers, writers, friends, and neighbors.
Julavits and her family split their time between school years in Manhattan and summers in Maine, and in Directions to Myself, she is concerned with finding a home in both landscapes. Each of the book’s sections opens with hand-drawn maps of places important to Julavitz—among them Small Point Harbor, Maine; Julavits’s childhood neighborhood in nearby Portland; and the neighborhood where she works and lives near New York’s Columbia University—complete with annotations like “do not climb” and “watch for broken glass.” The narrative moves associatively, rather than chronologically, through four years of Julavits’s life, documenting the effects of aging, shifting friendships, professional highs and lows, and the internal conflict she faces in preparing her children to go out into a world that feels increasingly destabilized.
Julavits’s central interest in geography is rooted in how our ability to navigate change allows us to feel at home, even if “home” is not a fixed place or concept. Realizing how she’s re-created the patterns of her childhood—moving to Maine, owning a sailboat—for her own family, Julavits writes, “Home is still defined by me as where I grew up, more or less, and so we bought this house, thus repeating the mistake of my parents, conscripting our children to spend summer vacations in a vessel that fills with water from below.” When she confesses that “as confusing and shameful as it is to be a homesick adult, homesickness becomes its own home after a while,” she is writing as much about the physical as she is about a period of her life that has slipped out of reach. “The older I get,” she goes on, “the more I understand [homesickness] as love that’s too big and has always been too big for one body to manage. That love is unbearable only when I’m not with the people who inspired it”—for Julavits, those people are her parents, her friends, and most of all, her children.
In a scene she returns to throughout the book, Julavits is approached by a famous writer who smugly “announc[es] that writers should never have children because each child represents a book the writer will not write.” Julavits offers a hypothetical retort: if she were his accountant, she’d ask him to run the numbers. Why is it children that this man sees as the primary impediment to his genius when bathing, eating, sleeping also must pull him away from his prolific and brilliant output?
And yet, Julavits acknowledges that she too sometimes falls prey to this belief. “For this reason, I kept my first pregnancy a secret,” she writes.” I’m ashamed now that I did this, even while I had what seemed like valid reasons at the time. … I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t serious about my career. If I were to visit a life accountant, my spreadsheet might reveal the following. … I have experienced the unceasing pressure of proving that, by having a child I’ve cost myself nothing, and this has cost me.”
As Julavits charts her journey through early motherhood, it becomes clear that having children has cost her something, in the way that any kind of care is inseparable from loss. When she spends a night laboring with and delivering her second child, a son, in her Manhattan apartment, Julavits evokes the language of Campbell’s hero’s journey and its cycle of departure and return with a gift:
People have been dying in childbirth for a thousand years and labor unites us. With my daughter, during the twenty-seven hours we lived between worlds, I felt more connected, as the pain swelled and ebbed, withdrew and revisited, to this lineage of strangers than I did to the human inside me that I hoped would choose life, and let me keep mine…I’m more confident, this time, that I’ll survive the trip. But she will never again be the only person with whom I’ve traveled through in-between places. And I’ll be bringing someone back.
Campbell, too, saw the abyss in childbirth—in part because of the very real potential for physical death—but Julavits seems to be alluding to a much less literal and much more ordinary death: having a child means losing the self who did not know the all-consuming love of motherhood. During labor, Julavits observes, “each completed orbit on this clock thins and thins the membrane covering the abyss where the self is annihilated and becomes the ghostly bridge connecting life with life.”
One afternoon, back on the ocean in Maine near where her son nearly drowned the previous summer, Julavits sees that he has grown increasingly independent. She guides her son, in a boat tethered to her own, as he makes his way through the same water she once navigated on long summer trips with her own parents. Recalling the night they spent together on that ghostly bridge of labor, Julavits writes: “I walked for longer than a day; I traveled a measurable distance through time and space to give birth to him.” Now, though, she is traveling a different bridge—the passage between her son’s childhood and adulthood. “I’ve been prepared for this day,” she explains, evoking the umbilical rope that connects their two boats: “His growing up is unfathomable to me, even as I can precisely mark the distance. My son is two fathoms away. He is three fathoms. He is four, seven, ten. As the tide rises and the beach shrinks, I start to lay the rope on the sand. I re-create the path the two of us took together before his cord was cut and our individual expeditions began.”
Directions to Myself is a book of dualities—about motherhood and childhood, birth and death, career and family, middle age and youth, the external and the internal. Even stylistically, it’s simultaneously serious and tender. Home, split both by time (childhood and adulthood) and place (Manhattan and Maine) is the book’s central duality—and it is Julavits’s ability to craft a cohesive narrative as she wanders through them that makes the memoir so striking.
By the book’s end, it seems that the real difference between the archetypal hero’s journey and the one that Julavits describes is that the latter is one on which all of us will embark—a natural consequence of caring deeply about our children, our work, and the landscapes we call home.
The post Sea Changes appeared first on The American Scholar.
The tallest house on the lane—the tallest of the seven structures that are houses, not barns converted into garages or workshops—is three stories. It sits with its back to the lane, a small faded green house huddled against it on one side and on the other side a freestanding old brick garage, a parking spot, and access to the front of the house. The house is painted bright blue, only not altogether bright. Something dark, a sort of warning note, is in the splendid color, as if the house is a peacock, tail spread, a single-color fan of attention-getting feathers held stiff as the bird glares over its shoulder at you, just daring you. The house holds a hint of that dark flashing eye. No need to shake and shimmer—not this dwelling with its back on you, the color unbroken except for two small windows in the rear and two on the side. The front of the house, with its wooden balcony and inviting porch, is not in view from the lane.
Does this color have a name? Electric occurred to me, as did royal. Bright blue, called añil for the plant whose berries provided the color, is the shade of the lower half of the whitewashed houses in traditional villages in La Mancha. The whitewash served to keep the houses cool in summer and to sterilize the homes, and the blue disguised the dirt and dust kicked up by horse or cart. No terracotta tones for those homes as you find across much of Castile. But that blue is not quite so bright and deep, and those blue and white houses, a whole tribe of them, do not individually demand your attention, as this house does in its setting, faded green cottage on one side, dull red brick garage on the other, and mostly cream and yellow buildings, weathered wood, and tan and gray stone along the street.
The color is one you noticed even before the recent paint job after some roof work. Now, freshened up, the house doesn’t so much draw your attention as seize it. I feel a bit wary of it. Imagine a teenager, big for his age, invigorated after a can of coke or a chocolate bar, poised to make a move. That is this house. The color is not a mix of electric and royal but the most of both. It’s an eye opener.
When I took the shortcut and stepped through my window onto the lane the morning after the house was freshly painted—the shortcut to the street, a neighbor had wonderingly informed me, favored by all the previous tenants too—the birds were just starting their chirping. A breeze was rising. I looked down the lane. The house, like a sunrise, was just coming into its own. It seemed to occupy more than its allotted space in the lane, as if it had just inhaled. How firm, how strong it appeared. A big block of blue. Not threatening, exactly, but ready to give orders. How long would it remain the prince of the street? All that day the house held its own and then some. But it couldn’t last. After two months, the other houses on the street and the oddly placed garages that go with them have resumed their regular low-key communion. The peacock house, like a flashy bird, or a brazen youth, or even an aging adult determined to stay in the game, may still think it’s to be reckoned with, and it may still impress a newcomer, but we others on the street know that despite its preening, it’s just a house.
The post Royal Electric appeared first on The American Scholar.
I must really be back in blogging mode, because I feel compelled to do that most bloggy of things — explain why I haven’t been blogging. My excuse is simple: I’ve been making great progress on my aforementioned book on Star Trek, which has left me very little energy for other writing. But I’ve been mulling a post on this topic since returning from my trip to the UK. The conference — at which I delivered my first official presentation on the Qur’an — was rewarding, and the trip My Esteemed Partner and I planned around it really hit the spot, with a more casual vibe in Edinburgh and a busy couple days in London. But what really stood out to me was how energized I was by simply hanging out with my academic friends. The combination of genuine friendship, shared intellectual interests, and — crucially — unstructured time was absolutely rejuvenating. We weren’t catching up over coffee in an appointment made months in advance, we were all simply there and available and up for conversation.
I italicize all these seemingly insignificant aspects of the situation just to highlight how bizarrely rare they tend to be in my life, and I assume most of our lives. I hit the trifecta late in college, then again in grad school. Cultivating various kinds of “third spaces,” like regular bars where I at least knew the bartenders enough to have random unstructured socialization, was also a good strategy, though primarily in my grad school years (when there were a lot of other Chicago-area grad students who similarly hovered around my regular place). At times, the old independent Shimer could approximate that feel, too, as there was a critical mass of people who had common intellectual points of reference and a willingness to kill some time, but the smaller size of the current Shimer faculty and student body has made that more difficult to achieve (though I’m hopeful that can change). I assume my experience now is more like that of a typical “busy” academic, who is relatively isolated outside the classroom and at many schools will not have ready intellectual interlocutors due to the perceived need for specialization and “coverage.” Often conversations among colleagues at the same institution will veer toward the shared topic of office politics, which can be cathartic but is not rewarding in the same way.
When we got home, I brainstormed with My Esteemed Partner about how to cultivate something similar in my normal life, and we came up short. Realistically, I probably need to wait for those recharge moments at conferences — or maybe I should plan to head to Berlin next year, so that I can have ready access to (apparently) every American academic in a humanities discipline. Yet it seems like a sad commentary that the settings that appear best positioned to provide that kind of intellectual community instead wind up dividing and exhausting us, so that we don’t have any energy to spend our rare free moments together on anything but venting impotently about the institution.
Part of the problem, surely, is that we haven’t read and thought about the same things. That is definitely crucial to my friend group, as to the conference itself. (The structure of the conference brought that home, as there were two “streams” with very different backgrounds and interests, so that it became very difficult to have productive conservation with the whole group.) That doesn’t have to be a static “canon” — I have definitely picked up things simply because people I admire are reading them and I want to keep up. Specialization and the demands of scholarly productivity seem to militate against the formation of that kind of open-ended sharing of interests in many cases, as do heavy teaching and administrative loads. I’m exceptionally lucky, as so often, in the Shimer setting, because we have all read the same evolving core body of texts, and hence I can always redirect the inevitable office-politics venting to something more worthwhile, at least for short bursts. But often even people in the same small department will not have that kind of overlap.
And of course there is the sheer issue of time, especially as so many of the young academics who most hunger for this kind of contact are starting families. I don’t know what to do about that other than to suggest potentially radical changes in our living habits — let’s start a commune! — that I myself don’t actually want to do. But it does seem like there’s still room to rebuild some of the social habits and casual third spaces that collapsed in the pandemic. For instance, I notice that the culture of riding the train together has fallen by the wayside among my North Central colleagues who live in the city — maybe it’s worth making more of an effort to aim for the same train home? I don’t know! Or I could just hang around in the local Irish pub on “if you build it, they will come” grounds. That’s it — I’ll do that. Problem solved!
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Take any international trip, and the tourist-trap restaurants near the must-see landmarks will all be hawking the “national dish” you simply can’t miss: Greek souvlaki, Japanese ramen, Italian pasta, Mexican mole. Leaving aside the question of whether a restaurant with a laminated English menu could possibly serve good food, we must ask what makes a dish “national”—must it be an old recipe? A common one? Unique to that place? Anya von Bremzen poses these questions and more in her new book, National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home. Beginning in Paris with the 18th-century inauguration of modern French cuisine—and searching for the invention, or perhaps congelation, of pot-au-feu—von Bremzen travels across oceans and continents in search of what defines a country’s cuisine, unraveling notions of identity, nationhood, and politics in the process.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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The post Imagined Cuisines appeared first on The American Scholar.
For American farmers, life changed dramatically in 1937. That year, electricity began flowing to hundreds of thousands of rural households, including some 12,000 in Wisconsin. The Rural Electrification Act (REA), which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed into law the previous year, provided stimulus for utilities to install poles and wires where, until then, it hadn’t been economical to do so. Most farmers were thrilled. One who lived near Janesville, Wisconsin, said of the power company crew, “I thought sometimes that they weren’t ever goin’ to get here. The organizers told us we’d have juice by spring. But we finally did get it, and, by golly, I’m goin’ to shoot the works.” He showed a city reporter every electric light in his barn. His newspaper profile reads like REA propaganda, and it might have been. To persuade skeptical farmers—who were still feeling the effects of the Great Depression and balked at the prospect of a monthly electric bill—REA advocates mounted a forceful public relations campaign. Agents traveled across the country demonstrating electric appliances. Theaters presented a popular film, Power and the Land, which touted the benefits of electricity for agricultural operations and concluded with the line, “Things will be easier now.” Part of the campaign focused on convincing women. Electricity would give them lights, refrigerators, ovens, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and irons they could plug into an outlet. It would end their drudgery, the government promised.
But Jennie Harebo, a 64-year-old woman from central Wisconsin, wasn’t having it. After her town’s rural electric cooperative set eight poles and lines on her property, she sawed down one of the poles and parked her coupe on the downed wires. She stationed herself in the car, armed with a shotgun and a hoe. Newsmen called it a “sitdown strike,” a “vigil,” a “blockade.” Her husband, an “invalid,” brought her food. At dusk, she gathered blankets around her shoulders and lap and cradled the shotgun. One night, two nights, three nights she stayed. A sign on the windshield read, NOTICE: NO TRESPASSING. Harebo allowed no negotiating, entertained no tit-for-tat. Months earlier, she and her husband had won a case in the state’s supreme court that saved a riparian corner of their property from being seized by men who wanted to build a dam. The government’s lawyer must have suspected that his client’s case was doomed.
I imagine that Jennie Harebo, a woman of a certain age, was fed up with men’s impositions. Now they were trying to force lines through her vantage, light into her dark. Maybe she wanted to hold fast to twilight powers—the wonderment, the wisdom, the privileged views. Maybe she was simply cantankerous in the original sense of the word, which is rooted in the notion of “holding fast.”
What could she have seen in her three nights’ vigil? North Star, both dippers, crescent moon’s shine on the pump handle—the fixtures of haiku masters. Also, quotidian country lurkers and skulkers. Her night vision undefiled by electric shine, she surely saw scavenging raccoons, ambling possums, scuffling skunks. Maybe a lynx’s glassy gaze. She heard more, too, than her city relatives in their wired homes with their humming lights and fans and blathering radios. She could have made out the lawyer’s Pontiac approaching from a distance of 10 miles. She had plenty of time to aim her Remington out the driver’s side window.
Eighty years after Harebo’s stand, I took up wandering my rural Wisconsin property after nightfall. I longed for whatever sights diurnal living denied me. Trail cams mounted in the forest or by the creek had offered only glimpses: beavers adding branches to their dams, stock-still deer staring straight into the lens. The cameras, I was sure, didn’t reveal a fraction of the night’s secrets.
On clear nights, I stood under the Milky Way’s sprawling, splotchy canopy. I saw planets, constellations, comets, and once, a meteor afire and dying as it plummeted to Earth. The darkness of my rural township, an hour’s drive from the Harebos’ farm, was rare for modern times. In 2005, our town board passed a dark sky ordinance (whereas, whereas, whereas … and so, lights must be shielded, directed downward, calibrated, kept modest). Nevertheless, a yard light down the road, a sign at the corner bar, and the glow of a distant city interfered.
I sought deeper darkness. I found it at the nature preserve halfway between my place and the Harebos’ farm. One night, a self-made astronomer and his telescope met me and others at the preserve for a moonlit hike. Inside the visitors center, I discovered my friend Liz in the crowd, and we sat together. The occasion was a penumbral lunar eclipse. The astronomer began his program with canned, corny jokes. He introduced his two assistants, women who knew the trails and would guide us on the night hike. He must have mentioned the alignment of heavenly bodies, how Earth’s shadow would fall on February’s full moon, the snow moon, once it rose. But I’ve never retained stargazing facts. I’m slow to make out asterisms. I can’t recall which planets appear where and when or what temperaments the ancient Greeks assigned them. I merely love to bask under them.
We were all traipsing outside into the snow when, unexpectedly, the astronomer announced that hiking would be too dangerous because of ice. Instead, he would talk to us during the half hour before the moon rose. The group groaned, and Liz and I looked at each other. Like the astronomer’s assistants, we knew the preserve’s trails, at least the main ones. We backed away from the others and stole into the darkness.
We padded slowly and quietly over the glazed snow, keeping our eyes on the ground, gathering scant reflected light from unknown sources. The woodland trail was icy only on rocks or railroad ties. In those spots we braced ourselves and reached out to steady each other. Soon we joined the wider trail, formerly the old state highway. There, the snow was ridged from snowmobiles’ belts. As we walked on the crusted ridges, Liz told me about living in Dharamshala a few years earlier. I pictured her humid quarters in the mountains of northern India, the buildings’ bright colors, the Buddhist pilgrims surrounding her. I sensed the peace she had felt there and nowhere else. I shared her desire to return to Dharamshala, although I’d never been there. While visualizing that faraway place, I kept my eyes on my surroundings. Moving in the dark was a balancing art. I felt most adept when I looked out with a broad, allowing awareness, when I didn’t fix on fine details or make assumptions about the terrain. Liz and I arrived at the path’s apogee precisely when the clouds parted, the full moon rose orange, and as if cued by the shifting light, coyotes began howling.
What I have seen by the light of celestial bodies: rabbit prints as lavender shadows in the snow; bare, black elm branches waving; the red glow of varmints’ eyes at the compost heap; stars in puddles and brooks; my lover’s silhouette moving beside mine.
What I have not seen in the night and been surprised by: knee-deep muck; a snorting, thundering herd of deer; a frog on a door handle that I smashed under my palm as I hurried to get indoors during a rainstorm; a pickup truck without headlights barreling down the road—and the drunk young man at the wheel who, after nearly running me over, reversed and asked, “Are you okay? Geez, are you okay?” in a tone that told me his real question was, What are you doing walking out here after dark?
To be moon-eyed is to keep your eyes wide open and to be awed. But to be moony is to be absent-minded, loony, or at least naïve. With better night vision, I thought, I could steer my life toward more moon-eyed moments than moony ones. Maybe I could take in more good surprises than bad and live with heightened awareness, less delusion. Seeing what I’d been missing all along might grant me new, original insights.
Humans are born with the ability to see in low light. But compared with that of other animals, our night vision is feeble. We lack the nocturnals’ giant pupils (think doe-eyed ) and their tapetum lucidum, a structure at the back of the eyeball that acts as a mirror, amplifying starlight into floodlight and reflecting it back onto the retina. Our natural night vision can be eased into—it takes a while for our sight to adjust to dimness—but in general, it can’t be enhanced. Using lubricating eye drops or eating more beta carotene, for most well-nourished Americans, won’t improve it. Other habits, such as staring at computer screens or the sun, can degrade it. Unfortunately for Harebo and me and others past their physical prime, night vision also diminishes with age.
To compensate for human deficiencies, engineers developed night vision goggles during World War II. Now every optics store sells them. Some years ago, craving a clear view of the outdoors after sunset, I bought a pair. I stood on our deck, held the goggles to my face, and scanned the horizon. Deer in the field glowed an unnatural phosphor green. Nothing more. No portal opened to a secret world. No mysteries were revealed. In the years following my purchase, I rarely picked up the goggles when I set out in the dark. What I really wanted was something innate and unencumbered, a better version of what I was born with.
Scientists have researched ways of improving human night vision. A chlorophyll derivative called chlorin e6 has shown promise in mice. In 2015, Gabriel Licina and Jeffrey Tibbets, self-styled biohackers with a group called Science for the Masses, gained notoriety for trying the substance. A solution of chlorin e6 was dropped into Licina’s eyes. Two hours later, he and others, acting as controls, were taken to a place where “trees and brush were used for ‘blending’ ”—presumably, an attempt to create a uniform backdrop for all participants. Licina and the control subjects were asked to identify letters, numbers, and other symbols on signs. The experiment appeared to have been successful. Controls correctly identified the objects a third of the time, while Licina did so 100 percent of the time. Afterward, he acknowledged to a journalist that the experiment was “kind of crap science.” Without knowing the potentially harmful effects of chlorin e6, the biohacker had been willing to risk his everyday vision for the possibility of gaining night vision, if only for a few hours (the drops’ effects wore off by sunrise). But Science for the Masses lacked sufficient funding to conduct the sort of extensive, ethical trials that more esteemed researchers require.
In photographs from that night, Licina stares at the camera like some mad alien, his eyes watery and opaque with their larger-than-life black irises—a consequence not of the chlorin e6 but of the oversize light-dimming contact lenses he wore. His creepy appearance and the report’s description of him roving in a dark wood made me think that the young men had especially enjoyed the homemade horror-film aspect of their experiment. Maybe they lusted after superpowers that would allow them to recognize and slay the dark’s monsters. After all, night vision is one superhuman capability that’s nearly achievable. Unlike time travel or leaping tall buildings, it’s only just beyond our grasp.
“Darkness, pitch black and impenetrable, was the realm of the hobgoblin, the sprite, the will-o’-the-wisp, the boggle, the kelpie, the boggart and the troll. Witches, obviously, were ‘abroad,’ ” journalist Jon Henley wrote of life before artificial lighting in a 2009 article in The Guardian. Real monsters coexisted with the fantastical. In the London, Munich, and Paris of the early 19th century, thieves, rapists, and murderous gangs roamed freely. According to Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close, humans were never more afraid of the night than in the era just before gaslights illuminated the cities’ streets. Murder rates then were five to 10 times higher than they are today. And yet, Erkich adds, “large numbers of people came up for air when the sun went down. It afforded them the privacy they did not have during the day. They could no longer be overseen by their superiors.”
Darkness made equals of poor and wealthy, servants and masters, women and men. Past sunset, oppressors needed artificial light to point out their symbols of country and religion, to run factories and enforce conforming behaviors. For the less powerful, darkness and the ability to navigate celestially meant freedom.
Jennie Harebo’s vigil attracted reporters and photographers from across the state, their cars lining the roads near her farm. The visitors, she said, treated her courteously. A deputy sheriff persuaded her to put down the shotgun. And the REA’s lawyer finally relented, having decided to circumvent the Harebo farm after neighbors agreed to accept the poles and lines on their properties. The utility paid Harebo $25 for her trouble and removed the eight poles that it had installed on her land. “With nothing left to fight for,” a newsman wrote, Harebo ended her vigil after about 96 hours. “Storing her formidable hoe in the woodshed, [she] claimed victory today.” She abandoned her coupe, “her husky frame sagging a little with weariness.” The crowd that had gathered to watch the three-day standoff dispersed. “Ultimately,” another reporter mocked, the family’s “need for kerosene lamps continued.”
In opposing electricity, Harebo was a rare exception. Some farmers didn’t even wait for the REA. Two decades before her blockade, men who once lived along the road between my home and the nature preserve were so eager to have electricity that they collected their own poles and wire. They used tractors, shovels, and muscle to run lines from the nearest village. Theirs was the nation’s first farmer-led electrical cooperative. It functioned independently for 20 years, disbanding only in the early 1930s, when the state butted in and began interfering in its operations.
Although she opposed lines on her own property, I imagined that Harebo would have admired the farmers’ refusal to comply with state regulations. As one farmer remarked on the public service commission’s successful attempt to set his cooperative’s prices, it “was a good example of the chair-bottom warmers’ insatiable desire to run everything.” In the years since I learned about Harebo’s vigil, she’d become a minor heroine in my eyes. Here was a tough woman who had fended off the establishment. She had battled for her rights—to the darkness and the freedoms it brought her, to the preservation of her night vision—even if she was weary and sagging.
Standing on the groomed snowmobile route, Liz and I watched the full moon fade to yellow and shrink behind clouds. Then we left for the narrow forest trail. We picked over rocks and logs and a trickling, perennial creek. Farther on, we listened to our breathing and footfalls, nothing more. We found the meadow next to the parking lot of the visitors center. Ahead, clustered around the telescope, stood the astronomer and part of the group we’d started with.
The clouds disappeared again. I looked up to watch the space station dash a diagonal across the sky. The astronomer invited me to view the moon in the telescope. “Lean into the eyepiece,” he told me. “Don’t touch anything.”
Singled out in close-up, the moon nearly blinded me. The penumbral eclipse, a subtle shading on the moon’s surface, was too faint for me to detect. I kept my eye to the telescope only long enough to assure the astronomer that I’d made an effort. I didn’t like the way the instrument isolated the moon. Without its complement of stars and planets, it was a flattened, vapid object. I felt as if I were ogling it but not really seeing it.
Liz took a brief turn at the eyepiece, too. Then we walked to our cars, agreeing to meet again for more nighttime hikes.
People soon will be able to choose better night vision like they can choose to eliminate forehead wrinkles. Professional scientists—not only biohackers—are working on it. In 2019, Gang Han and his fellow researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced that they had enabled mice to detect near-infrared light by injecting nanoparticles into their eyes. After the injection, the mice could see phosphor-green shapes in the dark, as if they were wearing night vision goggles.
Not surprisingly, safety and security, national or personal, are often cited as reasons for such research and its funding. What if soldiers, for example, could see enemies after dark without the hassle and weight of equipment? In one article, Han suggested testing the eye-injected nanoparticles on dogs next. “If we had a ‘super-dog’ that could see NIR [near-infrared] light,” he told a reporter, “we could project a pattern onto a lawbreaker’s body from a distance, and the dog could catch them without disturbing other people.” As if criminals wouldn’t dodge behind obstacles; as if police with their natural night vision could make out the perpetrators well enough to project shapes onto them; as if dogs wouldn’t be distracted by all the marvels their new night vision revealed and dash away from their handlers.
The delivery method—an injection into the eye—also makes this night vision technique impractical. Recently, though, when I spoke with Han, he told me that his lab might soon begin testing a wearable device, such as a patch or contact lens, on humans. He imagined an application in which a security agent wearing a night vision patch could see details in facial recognition software that others could not. But for this, more funding would be required. Of the lab’s many projects, night vision research has received the most attention in the media. But not from industry or government. People at the big granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, Han told me, “can’t recognize its importance in daily life.”
Months after fixing Jennie Harebo’s image in my mind, I found an article about her that I hadn’t seen before. It included a photograph, likely taken after she ended her vigil. She looked nothing like the newsmen’s descriptions. Although the image was dim from age and poor scanning, I could tell that her hair was curled and styled. She wore a buttoned-up overcoat with a contrasting collar, maybe fur. She struck a movie star’s pose beside the coupe—jaw set, chin lifted, face turned slightly, gaze fixed on the middle distance. She was beautiful. Her frame was upright, not sagging. She showed no sign of weariness after 96 hours in the car. Shotgun held at her side, she looked ecstatic and carefree. Seeing the photograph chastened me. I had allowed the newsmen’s descriptions of Harebo to deceive me. I’d been willing to accept that she was crabby and exhausted from her ordeal. But the word vigil, after all, is rooted in “lively” and “strong.” Maybe she didn’t consider it an ordeal at all. Maybe she relished the standoff.
Harebo’s proud posture reminded me of when I lived in Lansing, Michigan, during college and joined friends to march down the middle of the street. We held posters or candles and shouted, “Women unite, take back the night!” We claimed our right to be safe from monsters in the dark—symbolically, of course. The real, human perpetrators were always about, day or night, visible or not. Who knows if our stand changed any policies. But it changed me. Marching to reclaim the dark brought me a sense of solidarity among women that school, work, and family had not. Even so, I thought as I studied Harebo’s photograph, my efforts hadn’t gone far enough. I hadn’t fully imagined what we would do with our freedom after we won the night.
During the summer after our first moonlit hike, Liz and I took more late-night excursions to the middle of nowhere. What I saw with my natural, flawed night vision: shooting stars, swooping bats, slumbering farm machinery, and the lift and dip of a rare, blue-glowing firefly. What I felt, as I listened and shared more stories with my friend: a keener attunement, an ease among shadows, and the assurance of being fully seen—so much of what daylight’s glare had been hiding.
The post Night Vision appeared first on The American Scholar.
The affix en was the subject of the lesson. Only one student had shown up, a young woman, 23, with a sturdy, athletic body, long dark hair, and a round face, who brings to mind my best friend in fourth grade, a skinny girl whose hair was blond, not dark, and who had her mother’s high cheekbones and a long, angular face, not a round one. But as a girl and later as a college student and then as a grown woman, my friend often had the same expectant expression as this student, equally confident and hesitant, as if she were waiting for the right moment to jump in with a joke or a funny story. It was a self-conscious look but without a trace of embarrassment or cunning. I remembered that about my friend, and here the exact same look was on this very different face. It was strange. I tried to forget my fourth-grade friend, but how could I when she kept reappearing with each subtle adjustment of my student’s expression? Here my friend was in different guise, across the room, waiting, alert but not wary, ready but not impatient. I almost expected the student’s shape and coloring to disintegrate and fall away and reveal my friend, laughing at how long it had taken me to recognize her in her getup. We might both be 10 again, playing hide-and-seek, and my friend hiding in plain sight. “I knew it was you!” I’d want to say when she shook off the disguise. “I guessed!” My friend would laugh merrily. No wonder I felt so inclined to like this student.
There comes a point when a student who has aroused my curiosity no longer fascinates me. It’s not that I discover I was wrong in my opinion and am now disappointed, but that I get used to the student. So far, however, this student has continued to intrigue me, even after five months of class. That evening, I watched her ponder the textbook’s questions designed to encourage (encourage) the use of words with the affix en. The first was whether a shortened work week with a longer workday was preferable to a lengthened work week with a shorter workday. I expected her to choose the shorter week of, say, four 10-hour days rather than the six-day week with shorter hours. She did. “By lengthening the workday and shortening the work week, you have more free time to enjoy yourself, even if it’s just sleeping,” she said, smiling.
I chuckled because I knew how much she likes sleeping. I had already learned that she sets five alarms to wake up, and still she often lingers in bed too long and has to pull on her clothes and run out the door, no breakfast, no shower, to avoid arriving late for work. I know her boyfriend is still slumbering in bed, having learned to sleep through the barrage of alarms, I know he doesn’t do housework, and I know that when she comes home at the end of a long day and gets into bed, the bed is unmade.
“I couldn’t do that,” I’d said when she’d shared this private detail earlier. “I couldn’t get into an unmade bed.”
My student had nodded. It seemed too silly, she’d explained, to make the bed before dinner only to mess it up again just an hour later. It was my turn to nod, showing that I understood the reasoning, though it didn’t seem silly to me at all. Making the bed isn’t only to have it neat all day, but to provide that precious moment of drawing back the covers, akin to removing the paper from a present. Or the lid from a Tupperware container where the leftovers are stored instead of on a plate shoved into the fridge. It’s about starting the night afresh, not just taking up where you were when you crawled out in the morning. It’s about having things right. She ought to understand—she likes her clothes folded just so and because her boyfriend doesn’t do it the way she likes, the laundry is her chore. So is the shopping, the washing up, and the housecleaning. “What does he do?” I’d asked when I learned this.
“The cooking,” she’d said, her face showing that wonderful combination of surprise and satisfaction. “He does the cooking. All the cooking. I hate cooking. And he does it all.”
Of course. The cooking done, the meal ready. You’d be grateful to come home to that and wouldn’t make a fuss about the unmade bed. “Besides,” she said, “I don’t care.”
And yet, I pointed out, she cared about how a T-shirt was folded. You’re going to wear the T-shirt, so let it be satisfactorily folded. You need to go to bed, so let it be inviting.
“But I don’t care,” she repeated, almost nervously but with that characteristic quick surprised laugh, adding that by that point, any bed, made or unmade, is inviting. Her smile was full of promise and quiet gaiety. If a smile were a footstep, hers would be a hop and a skip. Not a forceful stride, a leisurely stroll, a saunter or amble or march, just a happy, self-conscious hop, and then it’d be over. Until she did it again. Just like my friend.
In “Friend of My Youth,” Alice Munro’s narrator tells of seeing her mother in a dream. In real life, her mother had died after years of a debilitating disease, but in the dream she looks good—so much better than the narrator remembers that she is astonished. In the dream, her mother makes light of the signs already appearing of her coming infirmity. “It’s nothing much,” she assures her daughter, with her old liveliness and humor. How, the narrator wonders, could she have forgotten this? As I turn to my student to ask her opinion about one question or another in the book, I am not surprised by what I have forgotten but amazed by how well I remember a friend from my youth and by how strong her presence is. I am surprised by how real the past is and how tenuous everything else, how uncertain. How much fun my friend still is, slipping into a room quietly, drawing no attention to herself, hiding in plain view.
The post Friend From My Youth appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Maxine Kumin’s poem “Morning Swim.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Morning Swim” by Maxine Kumin appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30
It’s almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkin’s most (in)famous line of poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the communal Sullivan Institute, a rogue psychotherapy outfit on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that—over the course of its more than 30-year existence, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s—grew into a sex cult committed to abolishing within its midst the nuclear family, on the grounds that close romantic and familial bonds were psychologically harmful to adults and children alike.
But Stille has equally pungent material to work with. One Sullivanian is quoted saying of his own forebear, “It’s easy to be an anti-Semite when you grow up with a father like that.” Another’s mother is referred to as “that old womb with a built-in tomb.” The latter quotation comes from painter Jackson Pollock, who’s among a small parade of notables who wander like oddballs through this strange milieu. (Others include art critic Clement Greenberg, singer Judy Collins, and novelist Richard Price.)
Dishy as it is, however, Stille’s book is hardly an exercise in name dropping. The true heroes and villains in this story—most individuals, children excepted, take turns being both—are everyday people whose dramas are sometimes darkly amusing but more often heartbreaking. These are real members of nontheoretical families who found themselves at once the victims and willing enforcers of disastrous social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily. Through all phases of the story, from the kinky, free-love eccentricity of the early years to the insularity, paranoia, and criminality of the later years, Stille maintains an admirable, almost tenacious sympathy for his subjects—a sympathy some of those subjects, in retrospect, aren’t sure they deserve. But as the cognitive dissonance grows, so too does the tension, making the book an improbable thriller, propelling us from chapter to chapter to see how these unfortunates will extricate themselves (if they can) from a Gordian knot of their own creation. Will anyone make it out emotionally intact, reasonably functional? Will they be reunited with their own blood, whom they’ve been conditioned to regard with indifference if not hostility?
One cavil: Stille places the origin of his story in a typically caricatured version of 1950s America, an unsophisticated place marked by little more than stifling convention (Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), but with a hint of rebellion on the horizon (Rebel Without a Cause, On the Road ). The implication being that the Sullivan Institute was part of that incipient rebellion, a harbinger of the revolutions to come in the ensuing decade. This is misleading on two fronts.
First, 1950s America was not some sheltered national virgin whose inaugural orgasm awaited in the mind-blowing, consciousness-raising ’60s. The conventionality we associate with the ’50s was partly a return to normal after the 1940s, a decade that—owing to war-related domestic upheavals—saw myriad social and sexual pathologies rise, some drastically. (Jack Kerouac’s dionysian On the Road, it should be remembered, was a chronicle of journeys taken mostly in the late ’40s, though the book wasn’t published for another decade.) Given this recent anomie, the return to conventionality in the 1950s was akin to what Stille observed among former Sullivanians, who left behind the commune’s deliberate parental chaos and loveless promiscuity to find shelter in the old-fashioned romantic and family structures the commune had forbidden.
Second, the ideas that animated the Sullivan Institute weren’t born in reaction to 1950s American convention. They were a proactive (if kooky) extension of theories that had emerged partly from the Frankfurt School in the prewar years. One of the Sullivan Institute’s founders claimed to have learned at the feet of, among others, the social psychologist Erich Fromm, who himself had participated with a Frankfurt School colleague, philosopher Max Horkheimer, on Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). That publication is a heady mix of Freudianism and Marxism that placed the family—its dynamics, dysfunctions, sublimations, and pathologies—firmly within a web of larger social and historical forces that acted on it. Those forces chiefly related to capitalism, under which fathers were seen to enact a kind of small-scale ownership and exploitation of their own families. If the surrounding society could be made more just and egalitarian, it might, in Horkheimer’s words, “replace the individualistic motive as the dominant bond in relationships,” giving rise to “a new community of spouses and children,” in which children “will not be raised as future heirs and will therefore not be regarded, in the old way, as ‘one’s own.’ ”
That’s a pretty fair approximation of what the Sullivanians fancied themselves pursuing. How did it go? “There was a feeling of pressure,” said one cult member, “that was really unpleasant, of having to conform in a certain way to unconformity.” Women endeavoring to get pregnant were required to sleep with multiple men while ovulating, to obscure paternity, which—said one male Sullivanian remorsefully—made it “easier to dissociate from the possible offspring.” Maternal bonds were broken as well, as children were taken from their mothers and raised in other parts of the commune by groups of men or women, with biological mothers being granted ruthlessly limited interactions with their offspring—and those offspring ultimately being denied knowledge of their origins. Per Horkheimer, children were not, in the old way, one’s own. Many of the children themselves came to regard their parents as “insane,” “basically a bunch of zombies.” In the long aftermath, one remarked, “I’ve thought three different men were my father in the past three years. I’m exhausted by having to relive the mistakes of my parents.” Another felt that he had been treated like an “experimental subject”—his childhood and his tender, developing psyche deformed by others’ commitment to validating a theory.
The Sullivan Institute insisted that every family—categorically—was a source of Larkinesque psychological damage. Then the institute became a scaled-up version of one and proved it.
The post Family Tatters appeared first on The American Scholar.
Quick, without looking, what color is the sun? Would you believe it's green? Also, please don't look directly at the sun.
The post What Color is the Sun? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting the vast array of hot dogs that America has to offer, consuming as many as four a day—and in one notable (or regrettable) instance, five. Chicago-style and the Coney Island special; drive-through and deli; chili and chile: Loftus devoured them all. Her ensuing book, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, brings the glory and the gory. It may be the first to detail not only the different genders of pickle jars one can buy at a gas station, but also the horrific treatment of animals and workers at slaughterhouses, conditions that got distinctly worse during the pandemic. Loftus—stand-up comedian, TV writer, and creator of such illustrious one-season podcasts as “My Year in Mensa” and “Ghost Church”—joins us to talk about the wild world of that iconic American food.
Go beyond the episode:
A few of the varieties mentioned in this episode:
But Loftus’s top five are:
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The post What Could Be Wurst? appeared first on The American Scholar.
John Prine wrote his song “Hello in There” at 22, when he was too young to have experienced the isolating effects of old age that he depicts with such sympathy.
You know that old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder every day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello.”
Children often wriggle like puppies, bursting out of their skins. As teens, they retreat into the edifices they build around themselves, the blinds come down, and it becomes harder to peak inside. The surface of those structures often has a high shine. No leaks or holes. Nothing gets in or out. But time wears you down. You rattle around within the confines of your own chosen habits. You are your own prison. As Roger Angell says in “This Old Man,” you become invisible though you sit in plain sight. Time strips much away but manages to leave remnants from your former life that knock about sadly. You are not a sponge soaking up everything and getting fuller and fuller but instead a hollow shell with bits of the past rubbing a raw spot. You further wither. Few people see you, much less show any interest. What to do?
A neighbor on my street, who, at 92, lives alone in the same house where she raised her children, is a fine example of keeping alert and interested despite old age. Her house faces south, as does mine, but being across the lane, her house gives onto a patch of meadow, not onto the comings and goings on the asphalt. Through her kitchen window or from her front patio, she sees flowers in the pots just outside her door and grass and trees in the land beyond the low stone wall, but no human activity. So what does she do? Gets her two canes and hobbles around the corner of her house, leaving her sanctuary to sit on a peeling plank fixed to the side of the building, under a bit of overhang. From there, propped against the wall, she sees every person who enters or leaves the dead-end lane, whether coming from the far end on foot or by car, or whether climbing the stairs behind the sports center to the lane that way. And because she’s there, you say hello. And she answers full of energy, “Hello, hello!”
One drizzly morning in early spring, I drove past the woman’s house on my way out of the lane. Nobody was about at that hour, nine a.m. on a Saturday. Strangely, smoke was seeping from a window in the back of her house. The friend I was with and I looked at each other. “What’s this?” we said. He was driving and stopped so I could hop out and check. The window was open, so I went to it, and now more smoke came drifting out. “Hello!” I called. “Hello! Anyone in there?” No answer. “Hello?”
I ran around the front of the car and headed past the bench where the old woman so often sat. I had never seen the other side of her house, the front side, but I barged right in to this inner sanctum. “Hello, hello?”
The front door was open and smoke wafted out. Beside the door a window was open too, into the kitchen. I peered into the smoky room. “Hello?” I said.
From the back the old woman answered. She leaned on the counter with one hand and with the other she fanned away the black smoke. “What’s happened? Are you okay?” I asked, and amid some coughs she answered that the coal in the old cook stove wouldn’t burn. “No tira,” she said. It won’t draw. She coughed again.
I urged her to come out. I asked if her son or daughter, who both checked on her daily, were around. Her son lived just three blocks away, and she had attempted to call, but hadn’t managed to. “You try,” she told me, shuffling to the window to hand me her phone. I found the number in the contact list and pressed to dial. Her son answered, and I passed the phone back. A jumbled account she gave him, but that was good enough—he was coming right over. By then my friend had parked the car and come around to the front of the house too. Speaking of the toxicity of coal smoke, he urged the old woman to come out of the kitchen, and she did, hobbling on her canes. She stood under the awning, out of the fine drizzle. The door was open behind her. She was fine, she said, and promised to wait for her son there. No, she wasn’t cold. No, she didn’t want a chair. She thanked us. And so, we left.
John Prine died in the spring of 2020, an early casualty of Covid. He had just finished a European tour. This woman survived the pandemic, fairly isolated in her home. Her birthday was a few weeks after the cook stove incident. “Can you eat sweets?” I asked when she told me about her upcoming birthday, the very next time I saw her. She was seated on her wooden plank, and I had stopped to say hello. “I’ll make you a cake,” I said, sitting down beside her. No, no, she said, as I had expected. Thank you, no. She patted my leg. She could eat sweets, she added, but had never been very fond of them. “Like my father!” I exclaimed. It was a nice connection to the old woman. But the tighter connection was me peering into the smoke and calling, and her appearing in answer.
The post Hello in There appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Portrait” by Stanley Kunitz appeared first on The American Scholar.
Beaumarchais and <em>Electronic Enlightenment</em>
The addition to Electronic Enlightenment (EE) of nearly 500 letters from the Beaumarchais correspondence is a significant event in eighteenth-century studies. Drawn from the second volume of Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz’s edited collection, Beaumarchais and the “Courrier de lÉurope”, first published thirty years ago in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, these letters join with 175 letters from the first volume (previously included in EE). The total of 660 letters in this collection include a combination of letters printed in that periodical and letters from public and private collections. (In 2005, von Proschwitz published a selection of 107 of these in a French edition, entitled Lettres de Combat.)
Collectively the letters being published by EE represent the largest tranche of Beaumarchais letters available for online research; moreover, they constitute approximately one third of Beaumarchais letters published to date and over one sixth of all known Beaumarchais letters in existence.
In the context of eighteenth-century correspondences, the Beaumarchais archive stands out for several reasons. The first is the volume of the archive. The known portion of the Beaumarchais papers is over 4,500 documents, constituting one of the largest corpora of eighteenth-century papers known. The full archive, if ever fully inventoried and edited, would run somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 documents. At the upper range it would become among the largest known archives of personal papers of the period.
The second is geographical breadth—from Vienna to Madrid to the Netherlands to England and North America, the Beaumarchais correspondence is important because it shows how actually we limit our understanding if we focus on solely “French” or “Francophone” correspondence networks.
The third is sociological breadth—Beaumarchais as an historical figure offers us insights into the eighteenth century that stand apart from the major figures whose correspondence has been edited and studied. He was an artisan, a musician, a financier, commercial entrepreneur, printer, investor, politician, judge, diplomat, spy, litigant, criminal (he was imprisoned in at least four capitals), husband, lover, brother, father and, of course, a playwright. His correspondence, and thus the network of correspondents connected him to a wider swath of eighteenth-century European and North American society than almost all personal correspondences studied to date, rivaling and perhaps exceeding the Franklin and Jefferson papers in this respect.
The editorial history of the Beaumarchais correspondence extends over two centuries of literary and political history. Since 1809, when the first edition of Beaumarchais’s Oeuvres was published, over 1,500 letters have been edited—though most of them not with the critical apparatus of the Proschwitz letters published by EE—over the course of more than two centuries.
Nearly 500 letters were printed in partial editions of Beamarchais’ work or correspondence, from 1809 to 1929. The first edition of his complete works edited by his amanuensis, Gudin de la Brenellerie (seven volumes, 1809), included 55 letters that Gudin had transcribed. A second edition, by the journalist, historian and politician Saint-Marc de Girardin in 1837 included 53 additional letters. A collection of 29 letters from the Comedie Francaise archives were published in the Revue Retrospective (1836). In his two-volume biography, Beaumarchais et son temps (1858), Louis de Loménie, referenced and included partial transcripts of hundreds of letters, but included in the appendix only 35 complete texts of previously unedited letters. A second biographer, Eugène Lentilhac, in his Beaumarchais et ses oeuvres (1887), included 12 partially transcribed letters not previously published. In 1890, Louis Bonneville de Marsagny published a biography of Beaumarchais’s third (and longest lasting) wife, Marie Thérèse Willermalauz, and claimed to have consulted “sa correspondance inédite” though no letters are reproduced or directly referenced.
In the early twentieth century, the first effort to produce a complete edition of the correspondence was made by Louis Thomas; however, as he explains in the preface to his edition entitled Lettres de Jeunesse (1923), his military service during the Great War put an end to his research; so in 1923 he published 167 letters from the first two decades of Beaumarchais’ adult life, some of which had been previously published. Several years later, in 1929, the eminent French literature scholar in the United States of the day, Gilbert Chinard, edited a collection of Lettres inédites de Beaumarchais consisting of 109 letters acquired by the Clements Library at the University of Michigan; these consisted of letters to his wife and daughter.
In more recent decades, over 1,000 additional items have been published, between the edition launched by Brian Morton in 1968, continued by Donald Spinelli, which added an additional 300 previously unpublished letters over four volumes of Correspondence, and then in 1990, the Proschwitz edition.
Proschwitz, a noted philologist, added to these letters the most extensive critical apparatus associated with any edition of Beaumarchais letters. He did not seek to produce a critical edition or a material bibliography of these letters, approaches that are difficult to apply to eighteenth-century correspondence in general and to the Beaumarchais archive in particular. Rather, Proschwitz in his notes emphasized the significance of these documents for our understanding of Beaumarcahis’ life and of the eighteenth century. In these letters, we see Beaumarchais not only as a playwright seeking to circumvent censorship to have Marriage de Figaro finally staged, but also as an entrepreneur, a printer, an urban property owner, an emissary, and a transatlantic merchant. Through this window we have a window on the eighteenth century that is geographically, socially, and culturally much broader and more diverse than what we generally encounter through the correspondences previously published in EE.
With the appearance of these letters and the launching of the first new projects on Beaumarchais’s correspondence in 50 years, including the effort spearheaded by Linda Gil to produce a definitive inventory with a material bibliography, and my own work to analyze the network of correspondents from the known correspondence, this publication in EE offers eighteenth-century scholars new reason to consider a longstanding, but still little understood, figure of the age.
A version of this blog post was first published on Electronic Enlightenment.
Featured image by Debby Hudson on Unsplash (public domain)
Two friendly doggos were out to make some friends, wagging their tails as they greeted a pack of wolves. But the frozen wolves did not reciprocate, giving their uninvited guests long cold stares. The playful pups did not seem to take the hint, however, even after the wolves warned them with a chase down a hill to stay the hell away. — Read the rest
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