Alan Jacobs

In one of his Prefaces to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien notes that many early readers of the book thought that the chapter called “The Scouring of the Shire” is a kind of commentary on the rigors of the immediate post-war years of what David Kynaston has called “Austerity Britain.” No, Tolkien insisted, it is not; that chapter “is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset.” That is, from the beginning of his tale he had foreseen what the dominance of Sauron (and Saruman) would mean for the Shire, and had understood that, should that domination be overcome, some kind of reckoning would be necessary. 

That reckoning takes the form of a “scouring,” and you should always pay attention to Tolkien’s words, especially when they are in any way unusual. He could have said “cleansing” or “purification” or could have invoked a very different image for putting things right.* But scouring is what we do to something that is not just dirty but has become encrusted — to a surface to which something foreign (old food, rust) has become affixed and cannot easily be removed. Scouring requires strenuous effort because the foreign object is highly resistant to removal — it seems to want to remain. And the foreign material obscures the intrinsic character of the object: the shining thing cannot shine. 

And so when faced with an object that requires scouring we are tempted, sometimes, to throw it away and start over — to give up on it. But let’s look a little deeper into the word. The OED tells me that there are closely related terms in other European languages and that they all trace back to a key Latin word: cūrāre, care (from which we also get “cure”). Scouring is ex + cūrāre, to care for something by cleaning it out. To cure it. To return it to its proper cleanliness and shine and gloss. 

To repair it. And the hobbits have to repair the Shire because it is their home. Starting over is not an option. 

As everyone knows, the hero’s journey culminates in a nostos, a homecoming. One of the other interesting things the OED tells me is that repair as a noun may have this meaning: 

return, return home, place one returns to, residence, home, abode (c1100 in Old French), meeting (12th cent.), place (13th cent.), visit, visiting, frequenting (13th cent.), place of refuge, refuge (14th cent.) … Compare post-classical Latin repairium, reparium, reperium harbour, haunt, resort 

Such a network of meanings survives for us, if at all, only as a comic archaism: Let us repair to the pub for a restorative draught! But they were once central to this word, not only in its noun forms but in its verb forms as well: 

Anglo-Norman repeirer, reparier, repairir, etc., Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French repairier, Anglo-Norman and Middle French repairer, reparer, Middle French reperer ... to return, go back, to go home, to head for, to go, to arrive, (of memory, strength, etc.) to return (also reflexive; end of the 11th cent.; also c1100 as repadrer), to dwell, reside, stay, to frequent (12th cent.) 

We could say, then, that at the end of The Lord of the Rings the hobbits repair to the Shire to repair it.

There is in both scouring and repairing a strong suggestion of restoration: of bringing something back to its ideal condition and proper function. (Not always, but sometimes — and this is a point I want to return to — the restoration is accomplished less by what we do than by what we refrain from doing. Thus Shakespeare in Cymbeline: “Mans ore-labor'd sense Repaires it selfe by rest.” Milton in Samson Agonistes: “Secret refreshings, that repair his strength.”) When we are away from home, home naturally falls into disrepair; and does so even more quickly if it is not left alone but rather is despoiled by those who do not love it. This can be seen as vividly in the Odyssey as in The Lord of the Rings.  

A question to ask myself: What do I despair of repairing? I would rather discard than scour. Scouring is a lot of work for an uncertain result. But I will do it for anything and anywhere I think of as my harbor, my place of refuge — my home. 

• Since writing this I have learned, from Volume IX of Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-Earth, that his father’s first title for this chapter was “The Mending of the Shire.” For obvious reasons I like “Scouring” better. 

About to watch the USMNT v. El Salvador, and having a thought: When you watch a well-managed team, you can easily see what the team is trying to do, how they’re trying to play. This is true for very successful teams (Liverpool) and intermittently successful teams (Leeds) and struggling teams (Burnley). Half an hour of close observation is enough to show you what the plan is. 

Since Gregg Berhalter took over the USMNT, I have watched every competitive match, and I have no idea what he wants the team to do, how he wants them to play. They may win, lose, or draw tonight but I doubt that I will be able to figure out what the plan is. 

Rowan Williams: 

We are used to plaintive cries that not enough students opt for scientific subjects, and related worries about the supposed drift of our culture towards an anti-scientific relativism or, ultimately, a post-truth mentality. But one of the things we have learnt in the past ten months is that we set ourselves up for profound confusion if we talk about “science” as a source of self-evidently clear and effective solutions, as if narratives and values played no role. Bland claims to be “following the science” have acquired an unhappily hollow sound. […] 

What does it mean to “fail our children” in this broader context? It means backing away from the scale of change that we face, and from the job of resourcing young people to respond with intelligence, imagination and honesty. It would be ridiculous to pretend that there are a few simple restructurings that will achieve this. We need a courageous rethinking of our ingrained assumptions about education. We need to pay some critical and sympathetic attention to those despised and frequently attacked parallel worlds of the Montessori and Steiner systems. We need the issue of resources for the human spirit to be at the heart of educational vision – including craft, drama, sport, exposure to the raw natural world, community service. And anyone who thinks this is somehow in tension with responsible scientific training has not understood either sciences or humanities. 

Those with ears to hear, let them hear. 

Was Dorothy Day Too Left-Wing to Be a Catholic Saint? No. 

Was the Life of Dorothy Day Too Catholic for the New York Times to Grasp? Yes. 

I want to write here about something I don’t understand.

My friend Robin Sloan alerted me to this post by a passionate advocate of crypto/blockchain’s power to … well, something awesome, I guess, though no matter how many times I read posts like this I can never tell exactly what is supposed to happen.

Now, that may be because writers like this fellow, Jacob, are writing for insiders – people who already know the details, who already have clear use cases in mind, who are already excited about the future of blockchain and crypto and web3. But when I ask knowledgable people about these matters, I always get pointed to posts just like this one, which are, you know, right there on the open web for all to see. So I think questions like the ones I am raising here are legitimate to raise.

So: Jacob is particularly excited about what he calls “hyperstructures”: “Crypto protocols that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries.”

Wow, for free! But hang on a sec … Later, expanding on that definition, he says, “there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.” So when he says that hyperstructures can run for free, what he actually means is that no additional cost is imposed over and above the cost of making transactions, which is something that fluctuates, fairly dramatically, according to supply and demand.

But they run forever! Well … let’s look at the expanded definition of “forever”: “It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.” Okay, so how long is that? “Hyperstructures … can continuously function without a maintainer or operator, and they can run for as long as the underlying blockchain is running — which can be at the very least a decade.”

So “forever” means “at least a decade” and “free” means “whatever the gas cost is when you make an exchange of any kind.”

See, this – along with the seemingly complete inability of anyone involved with this stuff to tell me one thing I could use it for – is what makes people call crypto a big con game. Maybe it isn’t! But I can’t find any of the advocates for it who can, or are willing, to explain why it’s not. 

Stefan Collini’s review of Claire Tomalin’s book on H. G. Wells is very strange indeed. For one thing, he only mentions the book under review in the final paragraph. But more odd still is the refrain with which he begins and ends the review: “It​ can be hard, from this distance, to see what all the fuss was about,” he says in the first sentence; and then he concludes, “Tomalin is a weighty advocate, and her admiration may help to spark a revival in Wells’s reputation, though perhaps even her noted empathy and artistry still cannot quite re-create for us, now, what all the fuss was about.” 

I can easily understand a reader today not thinking highly of Wells’s fiction. But if you can read The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica and fail “to see what all the fuss was about,” I don’t know what to say to you. Wells’s fiction touches on most of the major themes and concerns of British culture in his lifetime, and a failure to grasp this is a failure of readerly and historical imagination. You don’t have to think him a great writer to see that he was a ceaselessly dynamic and provocative figure, even if his ever-more-pompous predictions, warnings, and commandments ended up making him look somewhat ludicrous (as in the caricature of him as Horace Jules in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). 

I haven’t read Tomalin’s book — devoted just to the first half of Welles’s career — but I have read Adam Roberts’s “literary life” of Wells, which masterfully puts all of Wells’s voluminous writing into proper context. I’ll leave you with a passage from that book: 

As the world has grown bigger and more complex, as well as more complexly interconnected, a kind of socio-technological sublime increasingly threatens to overwhelm our individual subjectivities like Hokusai’s great wave. Steampunk is, inter alia, an attempt to dress technological advance in the habiliments of a more elegant and refined age, and Wells is one of the ways of focalising that. More, this cultural representation — the boyishly mobile and inventive Wells, the Wells of diverting scientific romances and sexual liberation — speaks, in part, to an ill-focused desire to assert ‘the little man’ (less so ‘the little woman’) in the teeth of this intimidating vastness. There is enough of Wells actual life-trajectory in this to give it bite: the physically small individual from small-scale roots who created himself as a world-class writer and thinker. He takes his place alongside other pervasive cultural myths of the small-man who effects great things in a baffling and alarming world — heroic hobbits, magical schoolboys: contemporary iterations of a fundamentally infantalising legendarium of underdoggishness. One need not deprecate these contemporary myths, any more than one need look down on Wells’s extraordinary achievements in the field of science fiction, to think this sells his larger achievement short. If there has been one through-line in the present work it has been that Wells was a literary artist of immense, underappreciated talent, a writer whose literary genius, whilst it must of course be central to a literary biography, deserves to be resurrected in a much broader cultural context too. 

I was a teenager working in a bookstore when this book, with this cover, came out. One day a lady came up to me and asked, “Do you have Billy Graham’s book Angels Angels Angels Angels Angels?”

Newsletter: Sir Shi and the Wanderer

Can’t stop, won’t stop.

This post on being defenseless has nagged at my mind, reminding me of something, and I finally made a couple of connections.

1. My brilliant friend Sara Hendren’s Substack newsletter is called “undefended / undefeated” – and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Being undefended in this world, putting yourself at risk, but not being defeated by that risk. You can’t repair the world without exposing yourself to pushback, blowback, attack. But the world must be repaired.
2. Simon Tugwell, in his Ways of Imperfection: An Exploration of Christian Spirituality, says that Franciscan spirituality is “a way of radical unprotectedness.” What a phrase. What a terrifying and exciting ideal. 

Gary Saul Morson:

How did Dostoevsky anticipate what would happen? For one thing, he took the beliefs of intellectuals seriously. It is one thing to have ideas, it is quite another to define oneself and others by them (and that is what the Russian word intelligent — not exactly “intellectual” — suggests). Dostoevsky asked: what would people who defined themselves by ideology do if given the absolute power a revolution confers? Solzhenitsyn, who experienced the answer, asked a related question: why were previous evildoers, like those in Dickens and Shakespeare, content with a few murders whereas Bolsheviks executed millions? “The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses,” Solzhenitsyn explains, “because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what … gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” The sort of ideology Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn had in mind displays two essential attributes: absolute (“scientific”) certainty and the division of people into purely good and purely evil. One does not break bread with someone from another political party. Once one thinks this way — as ever more people do — literally anything is possible to those commanding sufficient power.

I have many, many thoughts about Morgenbesser. I have often thought of writing little vignettes about him doing mundane things in New York City: “Morgenbesser Eats a Pastrami on Rye,” “Morgenbesser Takes In a Knicks Game,” “Morgenbesser Observes the World Trade Center.” Each vignette would be an opportunity for one of those absurd-but-maybe-also-profound Morgenbesserisms.

One of my favorites among the real ones: Someone told Morgenbesser that the most essential philosophical question is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He replied, “So what if there was nothing? You’d still complain!”

Or is that a real one? You can’t tell, so many stories seem to attach to him. But it seems to me that his primary achievement in life was to perform Morgenbesser in such a way that he became a magnetic attractor of a certain kind of story. And in that sense, even the stories that aren’t true are true. They embody Morgenbesser whether they “actually” happened to him or not.

I keep thinking about this by Rivka Galchen in the LRB:

Berman is keen to dispel the notion that those who refuse vaccines suffer from an information deficit problem. Anti-vaxxers collect evidence in order to disrupt or conceal the truth, not to uncover it. For those who are sceptical of vaccination without necessarily being anti-vaxxers, the most effective public health strategy remains unclear. Berman argues that ‘reactive’ responses, such as mockery, are counterproductive. He cites a series of studies that demonstrate what we might feel instinctively: showing people information that contradicts their beliefs rarely makes them change their minds, and often hardens their convictions. Factsheets like those used by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention tend not to work, both because they are less powerful than personal narratives and because the other side produces misleading literature in the same format. Online bots and trolls are a source of both pro and anti-vax messages, in more or less equal amounts: the amount of contradictory and unstable information is as much, if not more, of a problem as the information itself.

Maybe some problems can’t be solved. If every imaginable way to persuade people to change their views on a subject only serves to confirm them in those views … what then? My suggestions: 

• Don’t invest much hope in changing minds; 
• But don’t absolutely write anyone off; 
• Be patient and gentle; 
• Vary your methods and arguments; 
• And above all, focus 95% of your energy on younger generations — on people who haven’t yet screwed up their lives by being Extremely Online — in hopes of helping them to have better habits than their benighted elders. 

From Alan Lee’s illustrations for the Mabinogion