Alan Jacobs

It was hard not to think of all this—of the Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so many burials, and of course of “Antigone”—as I followed the story of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unburied body over the past few weeks. I thought, of course, of canny politicians eyeing the public mood, and of the public to whom those politicians wanted to pander. I thought even more of the protesters who, understandably to be sure, wanted to make clear the distinction between victim and perpetrator, between friend and foe, by threatening to strip from the enemy what they saw as the prerogatives of the friend: humane treatment in death. The protesters who wanted, like Creon, not only to deny those prerogatives to an enemy but to strip them away again should anyone else grant them—to “unbury the body.” I thought of Martha Mullen, a Christian, who insisted that the Muslim Tsarnaev, accused of heinous atrocities against innocent citizens, be buried just as a loved one might deserve to be buried, because she honored the religious precept that demands that we see all humans as “brothers,” whatever the evil they have done.

This final point is worth lingering over just now. The last of the many articles I’ve read about the strange odyssey of Tsarnaev’s body was about the reactions of the residents of the small Virginia town where it was, finally, buried. “What do you do when a monster is buried just down the street?” the subhead asked. The sensationalist diction, the word “monster,” I realized, is the problem—and brings you to the deep meaning of Martha Mullen’s gesture, and of Antigone’s argument, too. There is, in the end, a great ethical wisdom in insisting that the criminal dead, that your bitterest enemy, be buried, too; for in doing so, you are insisting that the criminal, however heinous, is precisely not a “monster.” Whatever else is true of the terrible crime that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is accused of having perpetrated, it was, all too clearly, the product of an entirely human psyche, horribly motivated by beliefs and passions that are very human indeed—deina in the worst possible sense. To call him a monster is to treat this enemy’s mind precisely the way some would treat his unburied body—which is to say, to put it beyond the reach of human consideration (and therefore, paradoxically, to refuse to confront his “monstrosity” at all).

Anthony Green, “Finishing the Portrait of Mary Green”, 1965/2007-09/2010

Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another “until death,” are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, “die” into their union with one another as a soul “dies” into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing — and our time is proving that this is so.

Humility is one option here – the urge to kneel, or to sit very quietly, conscious of your microscopic brevity in relation to what is visiting you. Another option is resentment, at this impervious immortal thing that is immune to our mortality. (And doesn’t even exist, the bastard.) But humiliation – the sensation of being forcibly reduced or pressed down by power – doesn’t seem to come into it. It doesn’t seem to be in the nature of the presence you’re feeling that it should make you feel crushed or abject. It has no designs on your dignity, perhaps because of the way in which the power of the God of everything differs from all the other manifestations of power you’ll ever meet. This power is not exercised from the top of any hierarchy. It does not radiate from any local point within the universe at all. It works entirely through presence. Kings and caliphs, emperors and popes, televangelists and household bullies have all wanted to claim that their authority is a licensed copy of its universal reach, but their claim must always be incomplete at best. In the end, their power and His are unlike. Their power is rivalrous, in the economic sense. It is big because others’ power is small. It needs to be extracted from the submission of other apes like themselves. But His power needs nothing, competes with nothing, compels nothing, exists at nothing’s expense. You could no more be humiliated by Him (Her, It) than you could by the height of the Himalayas or the depth of the Atlantic or the number of oxygen atoms in the air. It may make sense to compare Him to a king, if a king is your best local image of unparalleled majesty, but even if He is like a king, kings are not like Him. He is more than any king. He is as common as the air. He is the ordinary ground. And yet a presence. And yet a person.

Responding to the claim that not just reading but “high culture” in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, “many people were indeed deep in high culture, but … this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe.” If reading really was supposed to “make you a better person,” then “when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps … to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do.”

There’s simply nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael, that necessarily transforms or even improves someone’s character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” Nevertheless, I am going to argue, from time to time throughout the course of this book, that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read — you’ve already seen that I’m not dictatorial about that — but also why and how. So consider yourself either warned or promised, according to your feelings about moralistic exhortation.

typeworship:

Timeless Alphabets

You can find a world of inspiration in any of Julia Trigg’s collected letters. These playful compositions make a feature of the yellowed, textured papers and vivid inky letters that she’s gathered over the years. 

A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Julia is based in Brighton in the UK. She keeps her eye out for all types of ephemera for use in her work; old stamps, postcards, packaging and woodblock type.

Unlike many of her contemporaries that practice montage work with collected items, she finds herself unable to cut the letters up, preferring instead to scan everything. This not only avoids any of the items fading over time but has the added advantage of enabling her to adjust the scale and colour of the beautiful details.

If you like this style I bet you’d be interested in the lettering work of other illustrators in this area that have featured on Type Worship:

Martin O’Neill: Gifted fidget, and found alphabet

Greg Lamarche: Gorgeous type compositions here and here

Paul Thurlby: Alphabet and other lettering work

Joan Miro’s ceramic art. My friend David Hooker called my attention to these.

“Creative People Say No” is an article has been making the rounds this week, about how creativity demands focus and time and suffers when it’s interrupted by extraneous jobs and tasks requested by others. The overall message works as a pique to get you to realize that you don’t have to say ‘yes’ to everything, and that doing so may prevent you from realizing your goals. That’s good advice. The problem is, that advice doesn’t work the same for everyone.

The article describes a researcher who tried to interview creators about their process, and who was struck by how many said ‘no’ to his request. But if you read the summary carefully, you’ll quickly realize that many of them said ‘no’ via assistants or agents. Of course, it’s much easier to say ‘no’ (or ‘yes, with strings’) when someone else does the negotiating for you, which leads to the excellent advice: be successful, wealthy, and confident already, then say ‘no’ via proxies.

Here’s a different idea about how creativity and success works: you have to say ‘yes’ for a long while before you can earn the right to say ‘no.’ Even then, you usually can’t say ‘no’ at whim. By the time you can say ‘no’ indiscriminately, then you’re already so super-privileged that being able to say ‘no’ is not a prerequisite of success, but a result of it.

Liberal Christianity has two meanings: there are two traditions here. They are deeply intertwined, but they must be pulled apart – for one tradition infects and corrodes the other. Only once this separation is made can an authentic liberal Christianity be affirmed.

One sort of liberal Christianity edges away from supernatural belief, and church ritual: it presents Jesus as a great moral teacher, the first humanist, through whose example we can learn to mend our world. It assumes a basic harmony between Christianity and the rational Enlightenment.

The other sort of liberal Christianity affirms political liberalism – the ideal of a state that rejects theocracy and protects people’s liberties. But it does not seek to reform Christianity in a rational-humanist direction: it understands that such “reform” undermines this religion, falsifies it.

Very simply, the latter sort of liberal Christianity is the only authentic version; it must be rescued from the deathly embrace of the former sort. Only thus can liberal Christianity be renewed.

The same problems bedevil the claim that we moderns reveal our essence in words we use more rather than less. Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile note that personalized and unique are up. Yes, but they replace words that once covered the same ground. Made to order has plummeted since the forties as personalized became more au courant, while unique picked up the ball from once-popular singular and ran with it. Discipline and dependability are up, and reveal us as focused on economic production and exchange? Dramatic notion, but what about how people a century ago were using steadfast even more than we use dependable now?

It’s hardly that the thesis that Americans think differently than they did a hundred years ago is mistaken—what would be unusual is if Americans did not. For example, it certainly means something that I come first is now a set phrase, of a kind that it is difficult to imagine a gaslight-era equivalent for.

However, the faddish attempt to apply the Big Data approach to social psychology via Google’s Ngram viewer tool will shed much less light on these matters than many expect. In any language, concepts are expressed by several words and phrases at any given time, all of which morph eternally with the passage of time.