Alan Jacobs

I (a) announced that I was shutting down my Buy Me A Coffee page, (b) heard from some readers telling me not to do that, (c) announced that I won’t be shutting it down after all. A bit embarrassing … but it’s very kind of people to want to support me.

Klopp pulling a hammy while (a) celebrating the winning goal and (b) shouting at the fourth official is one of the great moments of this of any other Premier League season. ⚽️

I did not write about Tolkien, but I wrote about the return of the King.

I just finished teaching Susanna Clarke’s marvelous Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and probably my favorite scene in that book comes in the third volume, at a moment when magic, after several hundred years of absence, is rapidly returning to England. Many think this portends the return of the greatest magician and greatest King in the history of Northern England, John Uskglass, the Raven King, who in the Middle Ages reigned for three hundred years before suddenly disappearing — and, it seems, taking the strength of English magic with him. As Mr. Norrell, his cynical companion Lascelles, and his manservant Childermass make their way from London to Yorkshire — the county of which Norrell and Childermass are natives, and to which Lascelles is a stranger — Lascelles declares that it might be time to launch a renewed attack, in a periodical for which he writes, on the Raven King, a new declaration of his pernicious influence. Then:

“If I were you, Mr Lascelles,” said Childermass, softly, “I would speak more guardedly. You are in the north now. In John Uskglass’s own country. Our towns and cities and abbeys were built by him. Our laws were made by him. He is in our minds and hearts and speech. Were it summer you would see a carpet of tiny flowers beneath every hedgerow, of a bluish-white colour. We call them John’s Farthings. When the weather is contrary and we have warm weather in winter or it rains in summer the country people say that John Uskglass is in love again and neglects his business. And when we are sure of something we say it is as safe as a pebble in John Uskglass’s pocket.”

Lascelles laughed. “Far be it from me, Mr Childermass, to disparage your quaint country sayings. But surely it is one thing to pay lip-service to one’s history and quite another to talk of bringing back a King who numbered Lucifer himself among his allies and overlords? No one wants that, do they? I mean apart from a few Johannites and madmen?”

“I am a North Englishman, Mr Lascelles,” said Childermass. “Nothing would please me better than that my King should come home. It is what I have wished for all my life.”

Among the most neglected biblical images  — neglected in comparison to its importance — is that of the Return of the King. When your King has gone on progress, or for some other reason has left the kingdom or left the capital city, then you patiently but attentively await his return. You look for his appearance on the horizon and while you are waiting, you prepare the way of the Lord. You make a highway for him in the wilderness; you make the crooked places straight and the rough places plain; and then when you see him in the distance, you come out to meet him and escort him home. That’s how it’s done.

A failure to understand this essential practice is the primary cause of the wholly mistaken idea of the Rapture. Paul tells the Thessalonian church: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” The assumption of Rapture theology is that when believers go up to meet the Lord in the air, he immediately does a 180 and heads back to heaven, taking them with him. But that’s not what the text says, because it wouldn’t make any sense. Why would he come halfway between heaven and earth only in order to turn around? He could just summon them to heaven if that’s where they’re meant to be going. But the faithful, patient believers are not meeting the Lord in the air so that they can then go to heaven with Him. They’re meeting the Lord in the air so they can escort him into his Kingdom, what will become the New Earth, with its capital the New Jerusalem, where he shall reign for ever and ever.

It’s in response to this story that N. T. Wright wrote a delightful little essay, “Jesus Is Coming - Plant a Tree!” You plant a tree because every tree that you plant is a token of faith in the New Creation, and a means of preparing for the New Earth. Christians don’t often think that way because they assume that the idea of the New Creation means that everything that currently exists will simply be destroyed and then God will start all over from scratch. But that can’t be the case, because the first fruit of the New Creation is the resurrected Lord Himself, and His resurrected body bears upon it the marks of his crucifixion. Therefore his resurrection body is a glorified body, yes, but continuous with the body that was born into this world, and that left this world by means of crucifixion. Indeed, a different body might be glorious, but not glorified.

When you look at matters in that light, then, if you are a Christian, you have a very specific reason to practice repair. Every act of repair is a means of preparing the way of the Lord. Every act of repair is a preparation for and a contribution to the New Creation. Every act of repair is a step towards the renewal of this broken world. And that’s what God intends to do — make all things new, not simply erase them, not simply delete them and start over ab initio. Make them new.

---

P.S. If you understand this practice of greeting the returning King, then you will grasp what may be the most important element in the story of the Prodigal Son: the fact that when the disconsolate, dissolute, and broken young man decides to come home and beg to be no more than a slave in his father’s house, his father sees him a long way off – and comes running to greet him, to escort him home. The son thinks that his sins make him worthy to be no more than a slave, and that may be, in the world’s accounting, a sound judgment. But that’s not how the Kingdom of Heaven works. In the upside-down logic of the Kingdom of Heaven, a righteous father sees his self-ruined son – sees him from a long way off — and runs as a slave might run to greet his Lord, seeing the young man not as a debauched sinner to be judged and found wanting, but as a cherished and beloved one in whose honor a great feast must be held.

P.P.S. Only after posting this did I remember that, three years ago, I wrote about the same passage from Clarke, but in the context of what Jung might have called the Shadow — tragic or farcical, it’s hard to say which — of this longing for the King.

I wrote a while back about the ways that Silicon Valley is structurally sociopathic, but there’s another profession of which the same is true: journalism.

My family tell me they love my veggie soup, but what they really get excited about? The accompanying parmesan toasts.

Freddie deBoer: “We have a prevalent concept of the ‘practical college major’ in our society, but that concept is vague, not buttressed with evidence, and shifts according to whim and prejudice. And the ultimate point of stressing the practicality of certain majors while denigrating the frivolity of others is to blame people for economic conditions they can’t control.”

Elle Griffin: In 2020, “only 11 books sold more than 500,000 copies — which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films last year saw more than 68 million views — in their first month. If even our best-selling books hit only a fraction of the audiences of best-performing films, books as a medium just don’t have an audience — or rather, they have a very niche audience.”

Greg Afinogenov:

Kropotkin’s understanding and appreciation of societies then regarded as primitive, from Africa to the Arctic, forms a striking contrast both to Social Darwinist racism and the historical developmentalism of traditional Marxism. It shares the Romantic impulse that drove his old populist comrades to lionise Russian peasant communities, but instead of fixating on the national particularity of rural Russia it takes in the whole human and natural world.

The last century of human history has dampened the appeal of Kropotkin’s optimism. The anarchist trade unions and co-operative movements that inspired him in his own time have lost much of their significance, and it would be hard for an outside observer to dispute Eric Hobsbawm’s claim that ‘the history of anarchism, almost alone among modern social movements, is one of unrelieved failure.’ 

Perhaps so; but its failures are different and less shameful than the failures of Marxism. There are many ways for a social movement to fail, and I prefer those that don’t result in the murder of tens of millions of human beings. 

“There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.” — Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister.

I’m rewatching and re-evaluating Kurosawa.

Here is the great Takashi Shimura as Kambei Shimada, the leader of The Seven Samurai (1954):

A man to be reckoned with. A calm but unyielding and fearless leader of warriors. And here’s Shimura two years earlier, as the dying bureaucrat Mr. Watanabe in Ikiru — a timid man, a man so lifeless and dull that one of his co-workers nicknames him “the Mummy”:

He was also the kindly peasant woodcutter in Rashomon and the professor in the original Godzilla! Which is a pretty remarkable string of major roles, comparable perhaps to Harrison Ford’s run in the early 80s as Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and Rick Deckard. But Shimura’s sheer range is unmatched, I think. Even now, forty years after his death, we ought to be talking about what an astonishingly versatile actor Shimura was, compelling in every role.

But that’s just by-the-way. What I really want to talk about here is the filmmaker most closely associated with Shimura, the director of Rashomon and The Seven Samurai and Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa. (No, Kurosawa didn’t direct Godzilla, but if he had….) The argument I want to make here is that Kurosawa has experienced a fate that no one would have predicted of him fifty years ago: as a director, he is significantly underrated.

For many years, starting with the overwhelmingly delighted response to Rashomon at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, Kurosawa was the Japanese film director — he eclipsed all others, at least in the eyes of Western audiences. (Indeed, you could make the case that The Seven Samurai is the most influential film ever made — even if you think only of how many movies have stolen its most obvious plot device, the let’s-assemble-the-gang first act. But the way Kurosawa films his action scenes, copied by filmmakers ever since, has been equally influential.) But this celebration of Kurosawa did nothing to elevate the status of other Japanese filmmakers, including the two who have a strong claim to be his superiors: Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. They only gradually made their way into the public consciousness.

One of the best film critics alive — one of the best ever —, David Thomson, has written that he has often been rather hard on Kurosawa precisely because he is annoyed that Kurosawa’s reputation has displaced Ozu and Mizoguchi, whom he thinks obviously the greater artists. But that was a mistake, for two reasons: first, because you cannot elevate the reputation of some by attacking the reputation of others — it just doesn’t work that way; and second, because it is not at all obvious (to me, anyway) that Kurosawa is a lesser filmmaker than Ozu and Mizoguchi.

I don’t say this carelessly. If I had to pick a Greatest Director, it would probably be either Ozu or Jean Renoir. But lately I have been thinking about this: Kurosawa is best known for his historical films, especially the ones focused on samurai culture, and yet Ikiru — a film set in 1950s Japan, in an urban setting, focusing on family and the workplace — in short, a film very like Ozu’s most famous ones, a perfect example of the shomin-geki — may well be Kurosawa’s masterpiece. And it is in every way worthy to be compared with Ozu’s transcendentally great Tokyo Story and Late Spring.

That still could easily have been from Ikiru, though in fact it’s from Late Spring. The two films occupy much the same world.

To be sure, anyone who knows Ozu’s cinematic grammar would never for a moment think that Ikiru was one of his films. The camera is too mobile; the height of the shots too variable; the transitions too different. (Kurosawa frequently employs horizontal wipes to change scenes, something Ozu probably never did in any of his forty or more films.) Still, Ikiru and Ozu’s masterpieces of the same era are spiritually kin — closely kin; they tug at my heartstrings in very similar ways, with very similar effects. And if Kurosawa could make an Ozu-like film, Ozu could never in a million years have made The Seven Samurai.

So I’m on something of a Kurosawa kick right now, and re-evaluating his body of work. He’s much less subtle than Ozu and Mizoguchi … but subtlety isn’t everything. Sometimes the direct approach is the best. And rarely did any director make the direct approach more skillfully and compellingly than Kurosawa does.

Really excited for this work-in-progress by Samuel Arbesman called The Magic of Code.