Different Roads to To Kill a Mockingbird (Part 2)

It seems though, that To Kill a Mockingbird is the sort of book that gives something to me every time I return to it. This year, it’s Bob Ewell I’m paying attention to, though I hadn’t planned on taking a closer look at him.

My drive to school these days isn’t terribly interesting. It’s mostly highway driving, and save for the leaves that bloom with color in the fall, there’s not much to look at. I feel more that I am driving away from something, then towards it. I am a mother now, to Hadley and Harper, and I haven’t gotten used to the fact that the three of us fumble through most of our days separately, when just a while ago we did it together. I know once I start teaching, once I see my students, I’ll step into a role I love. Teaching awakens a side of me that is vibrant and bold and I love that gal when she comes out. But every day I begin my commute, I ache a little.

So I think about Bob Ewell, and it occurs to me that he and Atticus Finch have something in common: both of these men have wives who died. We don’t know how they died, and we don’t know how Atticus and Bob mourned; perhaps they are still mourning when we meet them. I press my foot to the accelerator because I can’t wait to point this out to my students. What will they think about Bob now? What will they do with this information?

In the classroom, I write “Atticus Finch,” and “Bob Ewell” on the board in a Venn diagram, and ask my students to do the same on pieces of notebook paper. “lawyer,” “educated,” “takes care of his kids,” on one side and “drunk,” “illiterate,” and “beats his kids,” on the other. “White,” and “male,” are in the center.

“What else?” I ask, tapping the whiteboard.

“One’s good, one’s bad?” a student suggests.

“OK, but they have something else in common.”

The kids look at me in disgust at first, but I wait and one says, “They don’t have wives!”

“Yes!” I say.

“Because they’re both dead!” one exclaims.

“Atticus and Bob are dead?” another one, who is confused, asks.

“No! Their wives! They died!” three or four say in unison.

We are so excited about this realization, and I don’t believe it’s because we’re relieved that Bob had a bad thing happen to him. I think we’re pleased because we might’ve discovered another layer to him.

“Maybe he wasn’t always like this, you guys,” I say, pointing to the word, “drunk” on the board. The class is shiftless and silent—a sure sign they are captivated. I take this as a miracle I must not waste and dive in.

“What do you think Bob’s wife was like? Do you think they had a love story? Do you think he has any good memories?”

I ask everyone to get out another piece of paper. I tell them to write as though they are Bob Ewell. “What else can you say about him that goes beyond racist, ignorant, and negligent? What happens when you look at him as a human that was wonderfully and fearfully made?” And then I whisper because I’m afraid to say it: “Bob Ewell has been made in the image of God.” Their eyes dart up from their papers. Fifteen wide-eyed adolescents look at me and I wonder if I’ve gone too far.

A few years ago I pulled a similar stunt with 8^th graders. I suggested to them that maybe Judas had been forgiven. Maybe God could do that. The next day an infuriated mother walked into my classroom and screamed, “Judas is in hell! He’s in hell!” I shutter at the memory but continue with my experiment. “Go ahead and write,” I tell my students. “Let’s see what you come up with.”

“I am thinkin’ ‘bout my wife again,” one student writes. “I wish she could make her famous cornbread pancakes. I wish I could stop drinkin’.”

Another writes to Bob’s dead wife. “I don’t know why I write you these letters and bury them by your grave, but it makes me feel better. Every time I look at our children, Mayella especially, I feel an anger. I don’t know where it comes from but it consumes me. Mayella grows beautiful and strong, and she reminds me of you every time I see her.”

Some students reflect on Atticus: “Me and Atticus lived in the same neighborhood. We weren’t friends, though. I was jealous of him because he went to school. I always wanted to learn new things but my parents didn’t have time to teach me. Plus, they would be fighting every day.”

One wrote about Bob fishing as a young boy when his father was off at the bar, drinking. “Those were the best days,” he writes, “Sam and I would always jump in the pond and swim around.”

The class is subdued when they finish writing. There’s a feeling of confusion while they pack up and get ready to head home. I think they’re in the thick of wonder—when wonder is dark and mysterious. I hope I’ve introduced them to the real work of writing.

But as I drive home, I begin to second-guess myself. Was I wrong to encourage my students to imagine there is more to Bob Ewell than what we read in To Kill a Mockingbird? Should I have waited for his final murderous intention in the woods before I had the kids evaluate him? Have I set them up?

Different Roads to To Kill a Mockingbird (Part 1)

The first time I taught To Kill a Mockingbird to a group of 8^th graders, I was student teaching at Stephen K. Hayt School on the North Side of Chicago, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Each morning, I drove down Lake Shore Drive towards my students, wondering if there would be a time when I’d tire of looking at the skyscrapers and the water.

My dad worked at Northwestern University’s city campus, and normally was at work hours before I left the house. But the days I took my first steps into my career, he stayed at home until I was off Lake Shore Drive and setting up my classroom. He blamed crazy drivers, but I think he was more concerned about my driving. I found any excuse I could to take that windy road, and I think he worried I’d get distracted with the views and my habit of blasting the car stereo. He knew telling me a better was pointless. Since I’d had my license I was on Lake Shore Drive—by myself or with friends—whether my parents told me it was OK or not. So my dad made a compromise: I could drive on Lake Shore Drive if I took the cell phone and called him when I got to Sheridan, where the road ended on the North Side. He’d wait to start his workday until then. It wasn’t exactly the compromise Atticus and Scout make when he promises to continue to read with her if she agrees to keep going to school, but still, it is an example of a father giving his girl a chance to explore the world the way she wants to explore it.

Those days, 8^th graders with names like Gurendapal, Shacondalah, and Fatou howled at Dill, Scout, and Jem when they first met them. “Those are some weird names!” they all agreed.

“I suppose they are,” I said, deciding against telling them that if I were to ever have a baby, I’d like to name him or her Radley.

My students loved the scene where Scout gets in a tire and Jem rolls her down the street. They shrieked with haunted delight when she bumps into the Radley steps and is too dizzy to get up and run. They wanted to re-enact it. “I know the best house to ram into,” one said. “We just need a tire.”

 ---

A new set of 8^th graders. A new neighborhood. This time, I was in South Bend, Indiana and my commute to school took me over the St. Joseph River where the Chinook salmon and steelhead trout swam upstream to lay their eggs before they died. I rounded a corner where Corby’s stood—a neighborhood bar my husband Jesse and I spent some evenings after football games or summer nights drinking Four Horsemen and watching fireflies. It took me past the University of Notre Dame, where Jesse was pursuing a doctorate in hurricane storm surge.

I could see the Golden Dome from just about anywhere, and it reminded me of being able to see the Sears Tower from anywhere in my neighborhood growing up, though the comparison stung. I have learned that I will forever be homesick for Chicago, but back then the ailment was so palpable it was hard for me to resist turning the car around and heading West towards the skyline, and not to school. A couple times, I did.

But I was there the day my students and I were struck by Mayella Ewell’s red geraniums that “popped in slop jars in her yard.” How did I miss that, I thought as I stood in front of a group of thirteen and fourteen year olds who were waiting for me to explain to them what we are to do with the sort of beauty that shouldn’t belong in the heap of the Ewell yard and the Ewell lives. I had no answer for them, but we all decided this scene needed to be illustrated so I passed out paper, they took out crayons, and we all tried to make Mayella’s flowers as beautiful as we imagined them to be. “I feel so sorry for her,” one student said as she colored. “I didn’t before; thought she was a jerk doing what she did to Tom Robinson.” She examined a red crayon before she looked at me, and said, “It’s more complicated than that, though.”

Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren spent a lot of time in homeless shelters in Chicago. This was in the 1940’s and 50’s. He wasn’t homeless, but when you read his novels and stories—especially when you realize the measures he took to get them right—you get the impression he wished that he was. He used to go to Pacific Garden Mission, a giant homeless shelter still in operation in Chicago to this day, and sit down with the drunks and down-and-outers. He’d eat dinner with them, play cards, and shoot the breeze. There’s one picture, taken by Algren’s photographer buddy Art Shay, which depicts a junkie with a hypo showing Algren how he shoots up. All of this produced the world’s first National Book Award-winning novel in 1950—The Man With the Golden Arm. Algren’s protagonist, Frankie Machine, a struggling dope addict, is based on one of the men he used to play poker with. It is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever written and certainly the most underrated. What makes it so good is what Algren inherently understood and then portrayed so sharply in the book: human civilization can actually only move forward at the pace of its least-of-these. That is to say, the speed of human progress is the speed at which a homeless man shambles down the sidewalk, peeking into garbage cans and begging for change.

Where Algren gets it right—and where I get it wrong time and time again, both as a writer and as a plain old human being—is that he dared to consider how beautiful the ugly things are. There’s a Christian tune I heard with the lyric “beauty from the ashes” but suppose the beauty is actually already in the ashes?

I don’t know if Algren was Christian or not. Probably not. Besides homeless people, he also hung around with existentialists and Marxists, archenemies of the Christians back then. This was at a time when a lot of Christians figured the appropriate approach to those that Christ Himself spent so much time with was to screech the Gospel at them from afar. But judging by the way Nelson Algren lived, not to mention the content of his body of work, he acted like a Christian—the way they’re supposed to act. My prayer for myself is simply, “Dear God, make me as good of a writer and as good of a Christian as Mr. Nelson Algren. Amen.”

Denise Levertov’s Birthday

Very recently, I turned thirty.

It’s a bit of a no-man’s land, emotionally, this turning thirty business. Anyone older, even by a few months, will dismiss all your grumbling (and will probably be strongly tempted to dismiss this post) with a patronizing chuckle and an eye roll. Anyone younger will take your grumbling far too seriously, and will try annoyingly hard to commiserate with and console you.

The morning of my 30th, facing my mortality, I scanned my bookshelves for some appropriately somber reading material and found Denise Levertov. I thumbed through to find one of Levertov’s long poems, “Relearning the Alphabet.”

I love this book. I’ve read it many times. Yet for the last three years or so, it has been gathering dust. As I re-read, I was shocked to discover that certain lines brought up vivid memories. Especially a passage near the end:

Heart breaks but mends like good bone. It’s the vain will wants to have been wounded deeper burned by the cold moon to cinder.

At twenty-three, heartbroken, I scratched my ballpoint pen emphatically beneath those lines and felt the haze of a painful breakup begin to lift. My twenty-five year-old self, devastated by the loss of a teaching job, found the lines again and muttered, “mends like good bone” like a mantra through the difficult end of that year. At twenty-seven, mourning a soured friendship, I circled “the vain will” and swallowed my pride.

I’d like to forget those low points, those past versions of me. They embarrass the cooler, calmer, older me. I hadn’t meant to revisit them on my birthday morning, of all days. But oddly, I drew strength for the coming year from those memories. Strength that I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else.

I once heard Robert Pinsky say that the reason poetry differs from all other writing is its physicality. It’s written to be spoken, so you not only hear it, you feel it—even reading silently, he said, your body imagines the words spoken within you. Perhaps it’s because of this physicality that poetry can carry memory, just the way a scent or a song stores memories.

Here’s my advice, from the crone-ish perch of this third decade (cue the well-deserved eye-roll): Find yourself a few poems that will travel with you, like dear friends. And visit them often.

(Painting by Henry Lamb)

The Poetry of Loss and Resurrection

Sometimes, especially when I’m most in need of meeting myself—the actual Jill long lost within the daily, rigid busyness of life—I hunt for myself in the files on my computer.

I look for me between the lines of what I have managed to write down, in words and images that, over time, come together in patterns and threads and whispers. And I try to understand what I believe I have been trying to tell myself. I have discovered that the Jill who has been writing these past few months is one who can’t stop talking about the past, about memory, about loss.

A few months ago, I stood in the cold corner of a funeral home with a twenty-one year-old college student whom I have come to love and admire very much over four years of teaching her. Just a day earlier, she was taking notes in her English literature class. Now, she was standing near the casket of her mother, killed on impact in a tragic car crash. And just like that, the month became not her first month as a college senior, but the month in which her mother died, the month she would forever associate with brutal and unexpected loss.

I know that grief and loss almost always find us when we aren’t looking. And even when we are looking, our God-given human instinct to exist, to expect others to continue to exist along with us still baffles our ability to navigate what we somehow feel was never meant to be—this road of vanishing faces, this road of vanishing moments. We feel we are made to last. We feel those we love were made to last. And yet, like pencil etchings on a growth chart, our human lives can feel so measured by the losses we endure, the grief we live with.

A few weeks after the funeral, I read a poem by Lisel Mueller that stunned me in all the aching and haunting ways the best poems do:

“When I Am Asked” by Lisel Mueller

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died, a brilliant June day, everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench in a lovingly planted garden, but the day lilies were as deaf as the ears of drunken sleepers and the roses curved inward. Nothing was black or broken and not a leaf fell and the sun blared endless commercials for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatiens and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me.

I think the poem haunted me because of how powerfully Mueller’s images portray a collision of experience—that relatable and agonizing experience of being alone in a cheery, bright world with your own dark grief. The placement of a hard “stone bench” in both the middle of her poem and the middle of a garden communicates something of the hardness and ruttedness one faces in the middle of loss. The flowers bloom beautifully and unsparingly, advertising their wholeness in a season where “nothing is black or broken” except the mourner, sitting on a gray bench, stuck between bloom and loss.

Mueller’s poem helps me understand the self I have discovered in the files of my computer. I think I write about loss and memory and the past because those things never really are lost or past. I think we write poems and read poems because, among other things, poetry becomes the landscape of resurrection. When Mueller finds that language, that poetry will “grieve” with her, she not only resurrects the memory of her mother, but she also raises up her own grief and gives it a safe space to unfold, to exist. In our busy lives, it does seem that there is little room to negotiate loss. But in the world of the poem, there is space, not only for those we mourn but also for those who mourn.

(Photo by Robert Friedus)

Hamlet, Hipsters, Irony

I credit my students’ ever-active brains with shaping a recent class discussion such that I found myself having to ask, “Do you really think Hamlet’s irony is like a hipster’s?” We had been finding the subtle contrasts between the type of the Shakespearean fool and Hamlet’s foolery under the guise of madness. We had established in a previous class that Hamlet’s wit was highly ironic, like Lear’s fool’s, but that it was perhaps even more ironic in that Hamlet does not require his wit to be effective. He gibes Polonius, who famously suspects, “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” but he never confirms what that method might be. He mocks his old school-buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after he comes to distrust them, and when they confess their confusion, he simply shrugs it off: “A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.”

It was this indifference to the effect of his methodical madness that seemed to suggest the comparison to the hipster’s aimless irony for the sake of irony. Now, I was torn about this. As a teacher, I appreciated their inventive contemporary connection. But I actually like irony — it suits my temperament — and I had just started to think that I liked Hamlet’s brand of holy foolery.

This may be hard to get in our earnest age of online outrage and self-righteousness, but I actually think irony is a powerful tool for the Christian. When directed back at ourselves, it allows us to participate in a sick society, to hold up to mockery what merits mocking, but also to avoid setting ourselves up as the standards of good or the arbiters of morality. To harangue like Hamlet — or in some gentler fashion — is to offer your audience an alternative explanation to the uncomfortable possibility that you may be speaking truth, i.e., that you’re nuts, or grumpy, or whatever.

In Hamlet’s case, his feigned madness comes off as a plausible way to respond to being called to an act of violent justice in a thoroughly perverse world. His is a nearly pure irony that enjoys its own insight aesthetically, for the beauty of the thing, rather than morally, for its effects.

Nonetheless, we determined as a class that the hipster’s irony is aimless compared with the Dane’s. To the extent that we can talk about “hipsters” as a coherent group, their irony stems not only from a sense that the world is broken but from an unwillingness to actively propose an alternative. They instead form para-cultural pockets of affinity who collectively opt out of all available social options. Hamlet feigns madness, ironically, because he cannot just opt out but must respond to his circumstances as son and heir to a murdered king. His irony stems from a knowledge that he will at last choose some alternative and from a desire to be as disruptive as possible until he can muster up the determination to do so.

But, interestingly, he does not quite get the chance to choose his course of action. Rather, events unfold around him, and he has to respond in the moment. Just before the final scene, his duel with Laertes, he explains to Horatio that he accepts he cannot manipulate events to suit his own ends. Instead, he must be prepared to act on what he knows is right: “the readiness is all.” Some years later Milton would similarly suggest that “they also serve who only stand and wait.” We do not always have the courage bred of conviction, and irony may be a legit stance until we discover it, but Hamlet shows us that irony cannot be an end in itself. There’s no drama to it, and where there’s no drama there’s no story, and certainly we must be a people who believe in story.

On Canons and Saints

It happened during the Q&A portion of Dr. Cairns' poetry reading. When a man at the workshop posed his question, Dr. Scott Cairns prefaced the answer by asking him if he had read The Brothers Karamazov. No, he replied. Suddenly, the bright, amiable room we sat in shuddered and darkened like a rift valley in a quake and descended into an animated, if not fiery, lecture on the essential nature of that book.

“Wow! Was that Socratics?” asked a panicky voice.

“Rhetoric, I think,” said another, catching her breath in the aftershocks.

“No,” said the voices of those who'd read the book. “He was finding the right ground for his answer.”

Of course, nobody outside my silly mind said those things and the ground falling away is a figure. But the initial incident was true and left the man's question, along with its answer, lost in a canonical chasm. And we who were exposed with poorer footing made an orderly bee line for the bookstore.

My habit is to read rather slowly for an hour a day in the early morning. So Brothers, a thick book, will take a while. (Another thick book I read, Centennial, took about a hundred years!) But someone once said that a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies so the amount of time is really no concern. What is, is the quality of choices for the lives and times I read. Dr. Cairns, knowing this, cared enough to risk his Q&A on the seismic question, “Have you read...?”

As Dostoevsky begins telling the story of Alyosha, the book's protagonist who would come to study under an elder, the narrator offers this picture:

What, then, is an elder? An elder is one who takes your soul, your will into his soul and into his will. Having chosen an elder, you renounce your will and give it to him under total obedience and with total self-renunciation. A man who dooms himself to this trial, this terrible school of life, does so voluntarily, in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, self-mastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life's obedience, attain to perfect freedom – that is, freedom from himself – and avoid the lot of those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in themselves.

* * * * * * * *

All Saints Day has just come. It sits on the liturgical calendar like an outpost in Ordinary Time and readies our journey into Christmastide. The Saints, like great teachers, point the direction, supply the need, and walk a distance alongside. They become fellow travelers from a different time that we do not see except by the light of words and imagination, and yet are there. In this relationship words become light and light becomes time. How small the leap, then, that word might become flesh when we see it so in the courses of other lives?

Thus, I embark on Brothers, which I should finish around Epiphany. I do it so I might ask questions grounded in the prospect of better insight, and as an act of trusting my teachers' admonitions that time spent in good reading is time being redeemed.

What time, by what light, do you read?

Snow Writing

While some deplore it, snow cover attracts many people, writers especially, when it first covers the ground and changes the usual view of things. In the countryside, snow cover might remain untouched and therefore quite appealing for some time. But in the cities, the snowscape gets mucked up quickly by our incessant industry — plowing, shoveling, de-icing, sanding away the inconvenience of it. Still, the snowy scene draws writers not only for its newness, but also for the awe and fear it can stir in the observer.

With little wind behind it, descending snow falls quietly and calmly while it re-creates the landscape. Oncoming snow accompanied by heavy, dark clouds and blowing winds brings on change so suddenly, it stirs fear in the observer. Out in the elements, our instincts tell us to prepare for fight or flight in the most primal conflict, human versus nature. However, a snowstorm can also invoke the sublime, a feeling that arises from yoking beauty and terror, creating a moment of overriding clarity. These circumstances arise in Emily Brontë’s “Spellbound”:

The giant trees are bending, their bare boughs weighed with snow. And the storm is fast descending, and yet I cannot go.

In a seemingly simple poem, Brontë creates the intersection of heightened fear with intense admiration, which causes near-paralysis, or stasis, in the observer. This fixation makes the speaker’s situation all the more precarious, so that in the last stanza we hear

Clouds beyond clouds above me, wastes beyond wastes below; but nothing drear can move me; I will not, cannot go.

At this point, the observer stands riveted to the spot, and “nothing drear” can cause her to do what instinct tells her to do — find shelter from a coming storm. Though she may know this landscape as an old familiar, this time she sees with unusual perspicacity: the snow cover lies eerily in weak light while dark, otherworldly figures of trees fix themselves in her imagination. The poem’s incantatory effects are not lost on us either. Maybe the observer feels the chill weather as an embrace, but the approaching storm threatens to overpower her. And so it does; it dazzles her senses, allowing her to understand in an instant her own frailty and temporality. David Baker, in “The Sublime: Origins and Definitions,” describes the experience as “instruction by means of solitary terror.” The sublime is often invoked through landscape that triggers a “magnified sense of out-of-proportionality.”

The beauty of Brontë’s poem lies also in its paradox: readers can step to the edge of oblivion, but from a safe distance. Jane Hirshfield, in Facing the Lion,” says that plainly “certain distance is required” to face overpowering conditions. She cites the example of The Inferno to explain: “The reason Dante is forbidden pity when he looks upon the damned [is that] to feel their fate too intimately would put his own salvation at risk.” Poets, by virtue of their art, are “acceding to fate while at the same time delaying it”; and readers are brought to withering, yet unshakable knowledge of how it is to be in the presence of superhuman, even divine, forces.

Taizé & The Glass Siblings

The first time I read Franny and Zooey, I was captivated by Franny Glass’s (admittedly unhinged) plan to repeat “The Jesus Prayer” until it became as natural as a heartbeat. I was less impressed by her brother Zooey’s admonishment, later in the story, that Franny should stop using the prayer “as a substitute for doing whatever the hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty.”

Upon a second reading, it dawned on me the reader’s sympathies ought to lie with Zooey (if the reader was the type of reader who could ever really sympathize with a Salinger character) and that Franny’s approach to the divine was a little precious, a little selfish.

Franny’s been on my mind lately, as I’ve started attending a weekly Taizé service. Taizé is a distinct style of worship, based out of a monastic community in France. The service is a series of repetitive chants interspersed with prayers and readings.

We meet weekly in the front corner of a beautiful, cathedral-like sanctuary. A circle of chairs surrounds a large wooden cross. The chants are simple — one line is sung 15, 20 times. One is even a Kyrie — the same words as Franny’s Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

It is a beautiful, sacred hour. The repetition is soothing and calming. Like all meditation, the chants open a space for mindfulness of my breath, of my heartbeat. Of all my chaotic worries that swirl up to cloud the quiet.

That hour focusing on repetition has made me more aware of the many less-sacred patterns in my weeks. I drive one route to work, morning and evening. I teach the same class to five periods of students. I put on the same make-up in the morning, and take it off every evening. I cook; I do the dishes.

Tallying up the hours I devote to these repetitive tasks gets discouraging. Oppressive, even. Zooey hones in on this feeling, describing a particular moment when the mundane hit him hard:

Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.

Later, he clarifies this rather bizarre image by telling Franny, “Don’t you know who the Fat Lady is? Ah, Buddy. It’s Christ himself.”

***

My favorite lines from the Taizé prayers come near the end, after most of the chants have been sung:   

Waiting for you, by night and by day, means letting our hearts grow so open to all, that as the years pass, we wish more and more to burn with one and the same love — ours and Yours.

This is followed by a chant:

Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless God’s holy name Bless the Lord my soul, who leads me into life.

The words acknowledge the circular nature of life: “waiting for you by night and by day.” Yet they also give hope of growth and expansion with the lines “so that we may turn to what lies ahead” and “our hearts grow so open.”

As Rilke says in The Book of Hours, “I live my life in widening circles.”

The Taizé service is another circle in my week now. Each Thursday, I sit in the darkened church and quiet my heart and blend my voice with the others and watch the stained glass blaze and fade into evening. And I draw strength from the beauty of it. Then I leave, and I do my best to bring that beauty with me into the less-lovely patterns in my week, that they might also lead me into life.

Both Glass siblings have a point — we should pray unceasingly for mercy, but we should do it while we “polish our shoes.” This, I believe, is how the circles of our lives begin to widen.

The Discomfort of Empathy

Each fall semester, I anticipate him. I keep open a substantial space in the syllabus for one of his plays. I move through Beowulf and trek through Chaucer until I arrive at that sweet spot – Shakespeare. But however giddy I am about the bard, each year I field the same question that, when pared down to its bare bones, asks – What does dead old Shakespeare have to do with me? What does this centuries old story have to do with my field of biology or law or business?

Like any educator, I welcome the questions. They give me the opportunity to acknowledge the relationship between the words we read and the world we inhabit. Especially, the questions give me the opportunity to talk about empathy, a topic getting a lot of press in education circles and one that has recently and brilliantly been addressed by Leslie Jamison in her book, The Empathy Exams.

 In my classroom, I often find that students struggle to connect the experience of discomfort to the experience of empathy. When my sophomore survey class finished Othello, some students kicked against the merit of a text they found so disturbing, so violently tragic. Despite their reluctance, the presence of their discomfort was the clearest sign that they had read the text with empathizing sensitivity. True empathy is a painstaking, uncomfortable process that resists the cheap comfort of stereotype, prejudice, and self-righteousness.

Writer James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

Baldwin’s words suggest that we read not only for our own sake but also for the sake of others. We read not to escape from our own pain but to connect that pain to something larger than itself. And that connection occurs when a thoughtful reading snags our senses on the heartbreak or even foolishness of someone else, and we stop in our tracks and walk alongside that struggling character. Empathy does not require the reader’s agreement with a character’s choices, but it does require his understanding of that character’s plight. There is something Christ-like in becoming a reader vulnerable to the pain and hardship of a story’s characters, in extending grace “to the least of these.” Yes, characters in stories are fictional, but perhaps, if a reader can practice the act of empathy in the world of fiction, she can learn to render it even more graciously in the world of the hospital and the law firm and the boardroom.

(Painting by John Edward Marin)

The Judgment, Backwards

I have for some time viewed the trial and death of Christ as, in a sense, the Final Judgment, only backwards. Jews of the first century had a deep expectation that the Messiah was going to come in final judgment upon the earth and rescue Israel from its enemies and set up an everlasting kingdom. Indeed, even to the very end, Jesus’ own disciples were arguing over who was to have the higher rank in that kingdom. And the judgment of God did take place, but in a way so far profoundly different from any way anyone expected. God Himself was judged, and declared guilty, and took the curse of death, which man had been long under, into his own body, and thereby broke it utterly.

But the backwardness of the judgment works on many levels in scripture. The means by which this judgment takes place is the darkest act ever committed by men — man’s judgment, condemnation, and execution of God — and yet, in astonishing irony, this is the very means by which God reconciles mankind to Himself. John emphasizes the irony of this backwardness again and again in his gospel, even from the very beginning: “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him” (1:10-11). Tragically backwards.

Yet, though I had seen the trial and death of Christ in this backwards sense for some time, not until recently did it strike me so forcibly how explicitly and intentionally John cast Christ’s trial and judgment in this backward way. First of all, Jesus is given a mock crown and a mock purple robe (the imperial, royal color) and given mock reverence, “Hail, King of the Jews!” (19:2-3). But John knows, and wants the reader to know, that these things are profoundly, ironically true, in ways far beyond the speakers’ knowledge (in a kind of double reversal: they mean to be ironic, but John points out how ironic is their irony, for they actually reveal the profound truth). But what struck me most forcibly of all was, when Pilate ceases his half-hearted defense of Jesus, he brought the latter before the people and he himself “sat down on the judgment seat” (19:13). No mundane detail; it’s as if the cosmic reversal is complete. Pilate, as the representative of the greatest kingdom of this world (a term which for John has all the moral connotation of the curse of sin), sits in judgment over the true judge of the world (cf. 5:22). God is declared guilty and put to death. But, as has already been mentioned, in the greatest irony of all, this very act was God’s acceptance in Himself of the original judgment upon mankind from the beginning of the human story: the day you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will sever yourself from me, the fountain and source of all life, and you shall surely die. Here, gloriously, astonishingly, this is undone, reversed, destroyed!

Realizations like this — this thread that John has woven throughout his gospel —remind me of the rich literary and theological subtlety of the Scriptures. So often seemingly simple and unadorned, in them are hidden the riches of Christ, if I have the attentiveness and patience to dwell in them and let them seep in, in the midst of the constant rush of our restless world.

(Painting by Antonio Ciseri)

Or Does It Explode?

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asks in the opening line of his poem, “Harlem.” Taken with the title, the first line ties us up in place and language in just a very few words. A “dream deferred” was one of Hughes’ overriding themes, and “dream” is a hard word to read without hitching it to that adjective “American” or dropping it in place in Martin Luther King’s famous speech. “Deferred,” too, begs for a larger audience with the American dream, especially considering how official-sounding it is, conjuring the authoritative action of a “deferral.” Though the line at first sounds almost speculative and relatively private in tone, “What happens to a dream deferred?” is a very public and enduring question.

In the body of the poem, the speaker attempts to answer his own questions with questions, ushering us through a number of similes that help us consider various responses to or fates of “a dream deferred”:

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

As image-based poems usually do, “Harlem” relies on us to turn its images around in our minds, allowing us to consider the nuances of each.

In “Harlem,” however, the images themselves are a type of encasing, the spinning of language around an absence, since the “dream deferred” remains undefined and abstract. One can read the poem as a congeries of images collected around an abortion, an act of creation in response to abstraction, negation, or even evil itself if we take non-being as evil. “Harlem” itself is the “crust[ing] and sugar[ing] over” of something that was but has been denied. However, if the poem is making something ugly or empty into something beautiful and promising, then it also represents the danger of art: it’s covering over something that, like an infected wound, must be dealt with openly.

But this is where “Harlem,” the title and the community, comes into play. Hughes, the microphone of Harlem, is there to record Harlem, to let the voices of Harlem come through. It’s “Harlem” that prevents the poet from making something beautiful of Harlem at the expense of making something true of Harlem. The last line of the poem, a line of italics, which Hughes often used to represent another voice, interjects a somewhat different answer to the original question:

Or does it explode?

The line is shorter by half than the rest of the poem’s images, notably unpoetic; it as such explodes upon us out of nowhere. And where the first speaker’s images rely on simile, the final line relies on metaphor — instantaneous metaphor: the dream deferred has gone from dream to explosion just that fast.

This year, I asked students to read “Harlem” in light of Ferguson, Missouri, another place that would have us hear something about the conditions of their community. Once again in Ferguson we saw an explosion stemming from a dream deferred: the dream inherent in the life of Michael Brown, and the collective dream of a community whose voices cry out in response to the forces of deferral.

“Harlem,” then, continues to be a helpful lens for American race relations. It is also a reminder of what art can do, what art should do, and what we might do with art —namely, let it interrupt our history, address our wounds, and help us avoid explosions.

The Russian Soul Rises

Boris Pasternak had worked on it for half of his life. When Boris Pasternak handed a secret copy of his sweeping epic Doctor Zhivago to an agent for an Italian publisher, he said, “You are invited to my execution.” He was not being melodramatic. The novel had been rejected by the authorities in Soviet Russia — writers who sneaked their work out for foreign publication had a habit of waking up dead — and he was looking elsewhere. When the novel was published in Italian in 1957, and in English in 1958, some 1,500 writers had been executed or died in concentration camps since the 1917 revolution.

The nature of the Soviet Union’s persecution of artists and intellectuals is stuff of legend, as is Pasternak’s role, but what was it about the novel that they found so threatening? A fictional character: Zhivago himself.

Yuri Zhivago is born, as was Pasternak, in 1890. When his parents die, he is sent to live with relatives in Moscow. Concerned with social justice and the plight of the poor, Zhivago, like Pasternak, initially supports the revolution, but quickly becomes disillusioned when it becomes clear that the Bolshevik’s rule is based on blood and brutality. His life is circumscribed by the events of the revolution, but he continues to attempt to live meaningfully. Though he is a flawed man, he manages to do some good and love deeply, which under his circumstances could almost be considered success.

Speaking of his own weak heart to two friends, Zhivago tells them that cardiac hemorrhages are becoming more frequent in Russia. He says, “It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order.” He continues, “Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth.” He says, “It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity.” He speaks the truth that the Soviet authorities seek to suppress, to deny.

Dr Zhivago’s failure to be heard in the novel is simply, according to a Masterpiece Theater essay, “a sign that he was destined to become an artistic witness to the tragedy of his age.” He was also the Russian everyperson.

“You can make the Russian soul suffer,” Doctor Zhivago shouted to the Soviet authorities, “but it is indomitable — you cannot keep it down.”

Indeed, the threat Zhivago presents to the Soviets was clear from the first lines of the novel. As Frances Stoner Saunders explains, “‘Zhivago’, in the pre-revolutionary genitive case, means ‘the living one’. On the novel’s first page a hearse is being followed to the grave. ‘Whom are you burying?’ the mourners are asked. ‘Zhivago’ is the reply, punningly suggesting ‘him who is living’.”

The Tiresome Gift

For the first text in our creative nonfiction writing class, my students and I read St. Augustine’s Confessions. For the second, we read Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss.

I hadn’t read all of Wiman’s book when I assigned it, but I was pleased that the syllabus fairy saw fit to have me assign them together. Augustine’s book contains the meditations of an ancient church father; Wiman’s is subtitled “Meditations of a Modern Believer.” Augustine’s is addressed largely to God; Wiman’s is addressed mostly to us, and also to himself. When Augustine wrote his meditations, he was ill, run-down, beset by heresies, and in the midst of midlife turmoil, if not a crisis. Wiman’s book wraps around his own struggles with cancer and pain and belief. Augustine wrote to find, narrate, and uncover his faith — and Wiman did, too.

It’s beautiful, then, that two books by two men from opposite ends of history can speak to one another, and to us, so well, in so many ways. Wiman’s book, despite its subtitle, seems sometimes ancient; Augustine’s feels intriguingly modern.

One way they talk to their readers is this: we spend much time delighting in “the little things” these days. Cooking and design blogs and accessible digital photography and real-time updates let us revel out loud in the steam coming off a cup of coffee, a firefly spotted in a backyard, the smell of a new book, the feel of butter on your fingers when you’re making a pie crust.

There is a joy and beauty in the everyday, and yet, it can take over. We can feel not just deprived but despondent and despairing when they go away; we can fixate and acquire, needing more stuff, more experiences, to help us have that feeling. Augustine would say that these earthly pleasures are good, so long as they direct us toward love of God.

Exactly how that works, though, can still be a bit of a mystery. Wiman filled in part of that for me:

God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. To feel him — to find him — does not usually require that we renounce all worldly possessions and enter a monastery, or give our lives over to some cause of social justice, or create some sort of sacred art, or begin spontaneously speaking in tongues. All to often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.

That is, the work of directing our experience of the everyday toward God is not just reveling in the coffee and giving thanks — though this is important — but noticing the duller, more tiresome bits, and changing how we respond as an act of worship. The backache. The mosquito bites. The long commute. It’s not just beauty: these small things, too, can be funnels for my attention toward a greater Giver.

(Photo by Fausto Podavini)

Aimless Love

Billy Collins’ poem “Aimless Love” strikes a special chord with me. The poem, wherein Mr. Collins falls in love with “... a wren/ and later in the day with a mouse/ the cat had dropped under the dining room table,” makes me remember my first love. I was only a child, and it was a brief affair — a deep, fleeting affection that was not reciprocated — but which set the tone for many of my experiences as an adult. My first love, you see, was an ant on a clover in my neighbor’s yard.

My sister and I decided to “go on a safari” outside. So we packed a backpack with some paper, a magnifying glass, and several apples, and solemnly announced to our mother that we were Going Outside to Be In Nature. Off we went, and, through some series of events, I ended up face down in a neighbor’s yard watching an ant on a clover. As I watched it climb, I felt a sudden deep, fierce love for that bug. It was so small, and the flower it climbed was so much larger than it was, and the grass in the yard towered over it like a forest, and I was keenly aware of how large in the world I was, and how clumsy, and how apt I was to overlook small things like ants on clovers.

Such love seems very human. I always tend to roll my eyes when people throw around the phrase “God is love.” It makes me think of awful little Victorian cherubs and vacuous worship songs. I’ve always thought of God more in the Old Testament sense — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who spoke light out of the darkness, who stopped the sun in the sky while his people fought at Gibeon. God is love, of course, but I have always thought of God’s love in a more terrible, cosmic kind of way, not the kind that’s fussed by everyday details. That’s why the passage wherein God is described as knowing when a sparrow dies always startles me — it’s hard for me to imagine. But it is a beautiful thing to know that God does know when a sparrow dies, or that he cares even for the lilies in the valley, or that he can count the number of hairs on my head.

That ant was a long time ago. But I am now very familiar with that sudden, painfully clear love for small things. Like Collins, who falls in love with steam rising from a bowl of broth, whose heart is “always propped up/ in a field on its tripod/ ready for the next arrow,” I direct my affections at odd, unsuspecting people or objects — my friend’s face, illuminated as she bends over the stove; the shape of my cat on a chair; a particular shade of green. It’s a fleeting, aimless love. But I do like to think that, maybe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is looking with me and loving the details. Even the ants on clovers.

Envy of Angels

What God must have told Adam makes no sense to us now. The problem, as Robert Farrar Capon saw it around the time of writing An Offering of Uncles, was that we had a sense of space but no sense of place, we always knew what time it was without realizing what it was time for, and we were content to be told what had happened never asking what it had happened for –– never even grasping this was a question that could be asked, let alone answered.

Capon summed up the dilemma with a kind of metaphor. A gray flannel man cruising down the turnpike in his automobile, stopping at one service plaza after another, each of them as identical as it was artificial, on a journey to nowhere through a manufactured landscape.

The solution, Capon figured, or at least the beginning of one, was to go for a little walk.

When you travel by foot the space you’re accustomed to traversing becomes a place again, a landscape you cannot pass through without first entering. This enlarged ground throws up challenges in the form of hills your car would flatten. It slows you down. It tests you. Scenic vistas yield themselves, spots you never would have suspected the existence of when speeding by, but their unanticipated beauties must be earned. On foot, you learn that the best views are only visible to those who arrive at them winded and aching.

My own recent habit of walking has born out most of this advice, though my landscape hasn’t yielded any marsh reeds. Yet. After a month on foot I knew my neighborhood better than I did after six years’ acquaintance from behind the wheel.

Along the way, Capon advises, you should pluck a marsh reed and bring it home with you. Tall as it is, the reed can only be carried like a prophet’s staff, or a king’s scepter. You will feel silly, which seems to be the point. How you get where you’re going matters. It matters, too, what you carry. In surprising ways the journey forms you.

Unlike us, the salaryman of Capon’s imagining still had somewhere to go. His places-become-spaces retained a physical presence at least. They could be found on a map. (And after half a century, if you travel from the generic chain store suburbs of one city to the next, Capon’s critique has lost none of its power.) Our spaces are becoming more ephemeral, though, as they become more virtual.

We travel them without feet and without cars, too. Without bodies of any kind, we find ourselves “present” in places which have no actual location or landscape, places that exist nowhere but the server farm, where they are as apparent to the eye as thoughts are when you gaze at a brain. I’m not sure where the marsh reeds are to be found.

The power of the reed, by the way, isn’t the embarrassment it causes, the make-believe prince or priest you become while forced to carry it. No, the power comes from realizing that there is no cause for embarrassment at all. A priest, a king is what you are. It’s what human beings were made to be.

Dominion over the land is ours by right, and whatever blinds us to the existence of the land, whatever makes us forget it exists or that we exist — that we are more, much more than disembodied desire — whatever does this to us is a usurper. That’s what God was telling Adam, more or less. “Do what you like; it’s yours,” Capon has him say. “Only look at its real shape, love it for itself, and lift it into the exchanges you and I shall have. You will make a garden the envy of angels.”

What we’ve made the land is anything but that, which might explain why we seem to measure progress in terms of removing ourselves from the landscape, even removing ourselves from our selves. The staff and the scepter are as embarrassing to us as the marsh reed would be, perhaps more so. It makes no sense that it was ever otherwise.

(Cover art from the first edition of An Offering of Uncles )

A Little Experiment

At Relief we’re always interested not just in great writing, but in getting that work into the hands of ordinary church-goers—no English degree required. But while plenty of people think of themselves as novel readers or even nonfiction readers, very few people think of themselves as poetry readers; the poetry people are always presumed to be in some sort of world of their own. But this summer I decided to try a little experiment and run a church small group on reading contemporary Christian poetry.

The good news is that it worked. Mostly. Some of what didn’t work wouldn’t have worked with another kind of small group either. But the fact that it worked at all was, frankly, a little surprising. As I think back on the experience, I’ve learned a few things I’ll try differently next time:

1. Go for it. I just submitted the idea without asking anyone. The church leadership was very open to it, and a lot of people were pleasantly surprised by it.
2. Set the bar high and your expectations low. That is, aim for as many people as you can hold, and ask everyone you can, but don’t be surprised if there is more enthusiasm than commitment — especially during the summer months.
3. Meet somewhere comfortable and quiet. A café can be nice but still noisy, and people are more likely to come out to someone’s home, anyway.
4. Choose a convenient weeknight. Most of us, including myself, had a hard time making every Sunday evening, for a host of reasons. Folks are a little more likely to be in “go” mode on a Monday through Thursday.
5. Find the right pace. This will be slower than you want to go and probably a little faster than the group thinks it wants to go. Hopefully this means most people will have the time to read during the week and that you’ll usually leave feeling like there was more to say (which will be true). We usually read 12-20 poems per week and actually talked about 3-4.
6. Empower your group. We began with Tania Runyan’s How to Read a Poem as a nonthreatening entrée into reading poetry, but anything you can do to permit people to respond honestly and candidly is important. I tried to model honest inquiry and authentic enjoyment as well as openness to ambiguity and mystery. It wasn’t easy for everyone, but we generally avoided the anxiety of the “right”
7. Don’t teach, but do lead. I didn’t come each week with any real agenda other than to help folks enjoy poems I also enjoyed and to learn how they responded to new poetry. Thus, I didn’t feel the need to lecture at them, though I sometimes did explain concepts or trends when relevant. What I did try to do, however, was to hold us all accountable to the text. I’d let us wander on a tangent inspired by the text, but if I felt someone was misunderstanding or getting a little loose with their reading, I’d call us back to the text to make sure we had solid footing. Occasionally, I’d see that I was misreading.
8. Our Community Life pastor always reminds us that small groups succeed when their leaders pray. Pray of course for the needs of your group, but pray, too, prayers of praise for the beauty of the written word.

(Painting by Edward Coley Burne-Jones)

Rehearsal Space

chair

It’s coming on autumn. Soon, I will feel compelled to read a poem by Gregory Orr to my senior class. I might ask each of them to read it aloud again for themselves. I will likely do the same in the spring, before they leave.

Ghosts at Her Grandmother's House

It is autumn and I can see the lake
because leaves have fallen.
The distant water becomes blue leaves
on the bare branches of oaks.

I look back at the house:
two empty armchairs on the porch.
She is sitting in one of them, and my wife
is a child in her arms.

I will say this poem for their sakes, but also for my own. To read a poem is to breathe where it breathes, know as it knows. Inhabiting the consciousness of this poem, I become as composed as I struggle to be in life, as capable of seeing and trusting in the endurance of life, as capable of love. To read such a poem is a rehearsal.

After all, I am standing outside a house that holds few or no memories for me, within the gathering cold of a season of harvest and dying, and the rhythm of my perception is so untroubled, I feel at home. In such stillness, I am given to see living water, present to my sense precisely because the apparent fell away. In apprehending this moment, what’s far grows near. Distant blue (that mirrors sky and holds life unseen) limns the weathered trees before me. The convergence is so complete — conflating, as it does, earth and sky, water and air — it should shock my cognition, disorient, leave me bewildered, but the rhythm goes on being serene. The images that arrive are of deep rehabilitation, and they come as though expected: ghosts, guests. The attended imagination, I understand, is nothing to be feared.

How easy it would be now for me to become entranced, fall in love with the richness of the vision I've been given. Instead, in this consciousness, I turn. I turn from the element that filled an earthly depression and dazzlingly replenished life thought to be lost; I turn as though guided by what I saw, as though looking for its kin. I turn toward the life of my beloved. Again, loss and death are transfigured—necessary conditions, I see now, for me to see what I see now: the unending nature of remembered life. Here is my wife, years before the time I say I came to know her. And here is her grandmother, on this same porch, cradling the girl I will call my wife. Standing in the open air of autumn, I love what they love, and love them more for knowing them more.

For the time it takes to say the poem, I feel and know what it is for my self to dissolve into attentiveness, for time to coalesce, and for love to become more present.

And so, when soon I say this poem out loud and ask others to do the same (for I am a teacher), I will do so in the belief that when the bell propels us from the poem’s depths up to our own clamorous surfaces, and sends us out toward other people within a world that seems to be falling apart, something of this poem's consciousness will stay with us as we go.

Writing against Loss

This summer, along with a talented poet friend, Rosanne Osborne, I co-led a poetry and faith workshop using Dave Harrity’s book, Making Manifest. The book emphasizes writing as a way of recovering an awareness of ourselves and our Creator by focusing on the significance of single moments, both past and present. The makeup of the workshop was both surprising and just right, made up of multiple generations of women who discovered, through writing, how much more they had in common than any of us initially anticipated. For a month, writers in all stages of life wrestled hard with memory, paying careful attention to what Dave Harrity calls “the disappearing instant,”and living inside the particularity of a moment long enough to locate the images and words capable of capturing the moment’s essence and implications.

Writing about memory can be a tricky thing. “The writer must,”poet Jeanne Murray Walker instructs, “learn how to manage time and manage it well.”For writers, this managing of time is a tall order, particularly when, as busy human beings, we feel much more managed than managing. However, there is reprieve in the world of a well-written poem. That poem has the supernatural ability to stop time, to allow for the kind of reflection that counters the pace of the “real”world.

As challenging as it can be to set up the world of a poem, to find a way into the lyric or the narrative, to decide which lines to cut, to settle on the dominant image that, hopefully, will beautifully marry all the poem’s assorted parts, the poem that delves into memory offers the writer and the reader an opportunity to sit still inside of a single moment, to settle into instances crisp as the day they were happening. The poem offers the writer and reader the chance to recover something that has been lost.

Poet Ruth Stone writes that “memory becomes the exercise against loss.”Stone’s words imply high stakes for the writer who chooses to engage the past.   The struggle of that poet is the struggle to recover and locate someone else’s memory in her own, to be both universal and specific, and to do both in the breadth of a page or two. Those poems are difficult to write and often to read. But those kinds of poems are my favorite ones. Poems that strive to unearth the past push us to be our most human selves, to locate our forgotten persons and moments, to pull them from the margins of the past, and give them space to breathe again. Ultimately, such poems offer us the opportunity to have faith that our participation in this act of recovery truly is an exercise against loss.

(Illustration by Gurbuz Dogan Eksioglu)

The Mighty Tiny

“It was slow work grubbing them up amid the sand,”Henry David Thoreau said of digging lily-roots in The Maine Woods, “and the mosquitoes were all the while feasting on me.”I can’t help but imagine the walker of Walden Pond slapping and cursing and fleeing. “Mosquitoes, black flies, etc., pursued us in mid-channel,” he continues, “and we were glad sometimes to get into violent rapids, for then we escaped them.” The writing is typical Thoreau even if the response is not; the sentence itself is performative, as those pesky bugs drive Thoreau away from his primary topic, never to return to it.

“How can flies bite?” asks my younger son Aidan. His older brother Micah and I have returned from a trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, where the mosquitoes are bad, but the biting flies are worse.

We’d gone to the BWCA not just for fishing but for something more. I’ve decided that part of my job in educating my children is pointing out beauty. But even in the BWCA, that endeavor is not simple. By taking Micah into wilderness I was putting something at risk. It is possible to miss the forest’s beauty — the sublimity of rocks and trees, water and sky in concert with each other — for the mosquitoes. True to my fears, the black flies never went away during the day and the mosquitoes settled in at dusk.

A few sentences after Thoreau’s rather uncharacteristic reaction to mosquitoes, the man composed himself: “I noticed . . . that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight,”he writes, “and that they began again in the morning.” He can’t seem to help but devotionalize this moment: “Nature is thus merciful.”

I’m not buying it. There may be a sensibility that comes from meditating on mosquitoes and black flies, but it’s more complex and nuanced than what Thoreau gives us, a sensibility found more readily in G.M. Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” or in Annie Dillard’s “Fecundity.” Or maybe I just like the almost comic might of the mosquito, able to drive off the imperturbable Thoreau with its tiny mighty powers.

Despite the black flies and mosquitoes, Micah seemed to have no problem appreciating the glory in the boundary waters, apparent when he pointed our camera at a chipmunk, at the skyline at dusk, at a pine tree that pointed spire-like to the sky.

I’m not so sure Aidan, who by nature, no pun intended, gets more easily distracted and discouraged by things like biting flies, will have the same reaction. Next summer, I’ve promised him his own trip to the BWCA, and my work will be cut out for me in the teaching-to-see beauty department.   For now, his brother starts the lesson on my behalf.

“How can flies bite?” Aidan asks in disbelief.

“Just you wait,” says Micah.