Here’s one extract.

Manuel: Last one: we might have a reading crisis, or maybe not a crisis, but some kind of decline. Is there something we —writers, critics, academics— should do?

Henry: Stop making bad arguments about the second order effects; stop being newspaper philosophers; stop using survey data to draw large (unjustified) conclusions; stop, in short, all the opinion-talk. Just do all the usual things that one would expect. Have children and teach them to read. Read yourself. Talk about the books you enjoyed. Remember that you catch more flies with honey. It might be true that the end of the Gutenberg Parenthesis comes with many risks for democracy, high culture, and some of the ways of life we have taken for granted. Are we going to make it all go away by writing impassioned social media posts? Do we know enough to justify our opinions? Do we understand the hidden incentives? Are we joining a moral panic with other people who already agree with us? How often do you see someone say something that is going to be interesting to the people who already disagree?

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Henry Oliver is not interested in my moral panic | In English

Henry Oliver is an English writer who runs the popular Substack The Common Reader and a podcast with the same name. He is a Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. And recently he started the project The Pursuit of Liberalism…

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14 hours ago · 19 likes · 6 comments · Manuel M. Novillo and Henry Oliver

There are wonderful accounts of writers like Matthew Arnold and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Power is a keen explicator of Logue’s techniques not just of “imagism” but of his use of camera language, quotations from popular culture, instructions, the addition of words like “consider” and “imagine” to Homeric images. He quotes very nicely, and has a knack for telling a story without letting the book get dragged under by the modern impulse for all narrative non-fiction to become a chain of anecdotes that cannot bear the weight of their conclusions.

The most surprising part of this book, for me, was discovering the sheer weird variety of translations undertaken by Victorians, who produced: an Anglo-Saxon-style Homer, one in Spenserian stanzas, one as an Icelandic saga, and a version that was cast in the language of the King James Bible. Here is the extract of the Saxon Homer that Power quotes:

Thus saying gallant Hector stretched  his arms towards the infant.
But back into the bosom of  the nurse with dapper girdle
The child recoiled with wailing, scared  by his dear father’s aspect,
In terror dazzled to behold  the brass, and crest of horsehair,
Which from the helmet’s topmost ridge  terrific o’er him nodded.
Then did his tender father laugh,  and laughed his queenly mother

And here is a passage in which Power explicates some of the borrowings in Pope’s translation of the Iliad when all the men are lined up on the beach outside Troy. (The passage in question is in the footnote, very good stuff.)1

What Pope doesn’t mention is how many poets he has drawn on to translate the nightpiece. Here are just a few of the poems in Pope’s patchwork: The conscious swains have wandered over from Pope’s earlier poem, ‘Windsor Forest’. Tip with silver recalls the moment when Romeo swears to Juliet ‘by yonder blessed moon . . . /That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops’. The arms of the Trojan warriors, umbered by the fire, recall the scene around the campfires on the night before Agincourt, as described in Henry V: ‘Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames/Each battle sees the other’s umbered face.’ Heaven’s clear azure is taken from the first book of Paradise Lost, where Satan’s feet move ‘Over the burning marl, not like those steps/On heaven’s azure’. The strange use of the deep serene glances back to Milton’s famous description of his blindness: ‘So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs.’ Pope heard thousands of voices in Homer, and he lets us hear them in his translation. To read it is to be surrounded by echoes of Shakespeare and Milton, and of hundreds of poets whose names are barely remembered now, but whose words survive here. All the fruits gathered on Pope’s childhood reading-rambles are preserved in these translations, just as the Homeric poems themselves preserve the songs and experiences of a whole culture. Samuel Johnson wrote admiringly that Pope had bequeathed ‘a treasure of poetical elegances to posterity’ in his Homer.

Power is at his best when he gets into literary details like this, such as when he explains this passage from Middlemarch:

“You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.”
“Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter.”
“Of course you can call it poetry if you like.”
“Aha, Miss Rosy, you don’t know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to separate.”

The joke is that Homer often describes cattle as eilipous (“circling in their gait”) and that “leg-plaiter” was Midlands slang for the way oxen put one leg in front of the other. Power’s love of the details of ordinary life in the nineteenth century novel is well-linked to the Homeric concern with such details.

The last third of the book is given to poets of the twentieth century. Some of these, like H.D., are highly deserving of this interest. I had not known of her Homeric writing and hope now to read it. But the overall balance felt strange to me when there is no chapter for Chaucer, Henryson, or Shakespeare. No doubt, they are not translators of Homer, but Power takes (persuasively) a capacious view of “translation”, which comes alive in his discussion of how the epic impulse lived more in novels than in poetry in the nineteenth century. There might be room to discuss the way that non-fiction took over from epic poetry, too. Carlyle and Darwin were the English epic writers after Milton and Wordsworth. These are quibbles, but good books are the ones most worth the quibbling.

Power is at his worst in the small moments when modern orthodoxies are preached, not for any purpose of illustrating Homer, or advancing Power’s own argument, but merely to recite the acceptable doctrine of his milieu. He ought to have remained more purely literary. Sometimes this is just Power signaling to the right people that he is the right person. That is fair enough, though why he needs to make feminist commentary about traditional rituals on a Greek island at a wedding he attended, or to signal that he does not share his grandfather’s imperial ideas, is unclear. Likewise, H.D.’s account of meeting Ezra Pound has to be doubted. To say “she allows his overbearing nature to shine through” her account of their meeting is, in turn, to allow modern ideology to cast its shadow on the story. We might simply try believing her!

Some of this is trivial, such as when Power dissects Samuel Johnson’s impersonation of a kangaroo to illustrate what a “strictly delineated” view of his own culture Johnson had, linking this to his views about Scotland. Perhaps Scotland was just as “marginal” to Johnson as Borneo. But he lived in a very different set of conditions to us! There is something equally parochial in Power’s inability to read Johnson’s impression of a kangaroo without interpolating these judgements. Sometimes an impersonation of a kangaroo is just an impersonation of a kangaroo.

Some of it is less trivial. Insisting on the fact that Balboa did not “discover” the Pacific because thousands of others had seen it before him presents things backwardly. The fact of colonization—and of Keats’s poem—requires discovery of an existing world by strangers. To the stranger, these ancient places will be new. Power’s story is about those discoveries. (No-one requires to be told that Keats was not the first person to discover Homer or Chapman!) He ought to stay inside that perspective, unless by stepping aside he can better help us understand it. As it is, these asides have the bathos of a health and safety announcement.

Notably, he does not feel required to do the same thing when it comes to Pope’s religion: in that case the stated facts are enough. Catholic rights are no longer a live issue, and so Power doesn’t need to comment. Perhaps this is the price of doing business. Perhaps Power believes these things so deeply that they animate his work. But no conclusion is drawn, no argument made. He is, no doubt, to be congratulated on his liberalism. But it matters not to the reader who wishes to learn about Homer and his translators. Some readers might reasonably object that they signed up for a lecture on Homer in English poetry, not whatever other lectures Power wishes to deliver.

To call the teaching of English poetry in the Empire a tool of conquest is relevant in the chapter on Derek Walcott, as it relates directly to Walcott’s poetry. But the uncomplicated statement that Homer seems to anticipate Locke’s “justification of colonialism” is simply too simple. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke writes of Native Americans:

neither Pagans there, nor any dissenting Christians here, can, with any right, be deprived of their worldly goods by the predominating faction of a court-church

Indeed, there is a whole scholarship on this question. David Armitage points out that Locke has no hierarchy of peoples (he does not see Europeans as superior), and that others like Grotius were explicitly defending imperial institutions (as Locke was not), and that in the Essay he made “greater use of ethnographic information than any other philosopher in Britain before the eighteenth century.” Locke said different things at different times, but he was one of the few thinkers who actually spoke to Native Americans and wrote of their “quick rationall parts.”2

That Walcott was reacting against a particular view of imperial history matters a great deal. That it was the version of history Power was taught in school in the 1980s does not. Homer Haunted suffers from these moments of bluntness in which the book’s perspective becomes narrow, acceptable, and potentially misleading. Power is wonderful at explicating the poetry, but he is much less interesting when he falls into moralising about history. However, Homer Haunted is well worth reading, whatever you think of these digressions.

More significant than all of these changes, which might have worked well with another director, is the fact that this is not a great movie. Nor a good one. It is a sub-HBO, three-hour TV special. It feels more like a mini-series than a film. Nolan’s cinematography has no elegance or beauty: he is a crude cameraman. The camera frequently cuts after one or two seconds, sometimes after as long as seven seconds—and for no appreciable gain in tension or atmosphere or narrative. Shots sit wide and empty without capturing the scale of the epic.

The space is filled with familiar scenes and furnishings: Calypso has wavy netting and beach-house style clothes; Circe is a TV witch; the suitors fill up the screen like the feasting scenes in Game of Thrones; Agamemnon strides around in black armour like Darth Vader. To compensate for the lack of anything visually memorable or striking, the music is always spooky or dramatic. In Hades it sounds like lasers (and is so loud you cannot hear Teiresias’ prophecy). At the end, when Odysseus kills the suitors, it gets faster and faster and faster for so long that it simply loses its scare factor.

The overall effect is flattening. The killing of the suitors is a prolonged argy-bargy of throat-slashing and sword-swinging; the war at Troy, is a constant barrage of women screaming while their throats are cut, soldiers spinning to their death (after getting their throat cut), towers belching fire before collapsing (three times, or four?). It is so relentless that the final third feels like a lot of squelch, crunch, splotch, snap, interspersed with shots of Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway looking at each other meaningfully.

And this.

There are Iliad people and Odyssey people, but the modern world is Odyssean: great migrations, gap years, road trips; we have lived with Odyssean technology for centuries: trains, planes, and automobiles; we all have careers, which means ‘journey through life’; our highest aspiration is still to undertake the new quest in space. The basic idea of the Odyssey is inescapable. People talk about their side-quests and being the hero of their own life, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once joked that she put on her bonnet just as knights used to put on their helms. Odysseus echoes in every advert where the father comes home and his children run to greet him. To be an individual is to be Odyssean, even if our journeys are small, infrequent, and domestic. We all quest, no matter the scale of our lives.

Nolan’s warning is that we risk living in the Iliad, that we are going to become more and more tribal, more distant from “Zeus’s law”, that we are going to put our own civilisation at risk. As this film implicitly acknowledges, nothing Nolan can do will alter that. We will forget the past. Reading the news, it seems apparent that we already have. We are, alas, midway on the waves. Nolan’s conversion of the Odyssey into an action film did not smother the underlying story, but it fits the pattern he warns against all too well. If Troy is going to burn again, watching this film will be little more than a distraction while the ships set sail. If Nolan really wanted to issue a warning, he might have made a film about our own civilisation, a song that will be all they have to remember us, a song of all the promises we failed to keep.

The piece was edited and one thing that got cut was the phrase “grim-dark”, which is what most of the fighting seems to be aiming at. You can read the full piece here.

A study conducted by the Federación de Gremios de Editores de España earlier this year, however, paints a starkly different picture of readership in Spain. According to the study, the percentage of the overall Spanish population that reads for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025, the highest level ever recorded. Meanwhile, the percentage of the population between 15 and 24 that reads for pleasure rose to just over 76%, a rate that (in the words of the authors of the study) “helps dispel one of the false myths that persists in our [Spanish] society, which holds that young people do not read.” Spanish readers are not immune to the transformations associated with the literacy crisis: the rise of social media platforms, the proliferation of video and audio content, the advent of generative AI. And from speaking to academic friends in Madrid, my sense is that the deterioration of some of the skill sets that Horowitch identifies in her piece can also be detected in Spanish universities. Neverthless, the evidence suggests that, at the least for now, Spain has not only staved off the decline in reading that we’ve seen in the United States but modestly increased readership across the generational divide.^[2]

From a longer piece by . Surely this raises some important questions. How can phones have killed Anglo reading but not Spanish? Is this linked to Anglo pessimism? In Spain, even the young people read. This is from the report Jeffrey quotes:

The data shatters the myth that young people don’t read. 75.3% of the population between 14 and 24 years old reads books in their free time.

Good news for . Democracy is safe in Spain!

Summarising the Odyssey, Aristotle wrote:

Thus the story of the Odyssey can be stated briefly. A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight—suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them. This is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode.

This is all well and good as far as it goes; but it is missing the most important thing about the Odyssey: it is a quest in which sons go in search of their fathers. Peter Leithart, summarising Ulysses, an Odyssean novel, says this:

Stephen is looking for a father, and Bloom has lost his son. That broken paternal-filial setting comes from the Homeric background, with Stephen playing the role of Telemachus mourning an absent father. Throughout this book, this is overlaid with constant references to Hamlet. Stephen is a brooding Hamlet at the beginning of the story. He has lost his mother rather than his father, and sees her ghost. Stephen’s family situation continues the story of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen’s search for a father, the rupture and reconciliation with a father is a key to his artistic development.

Joyce understands. The Odyssey is about the fact that, in Athena’s words, (in Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation),

Few are the sons and heirs who can measure up to their fathers;
Most are worse by far, and few are those who can best them.

We think of the Odyssey as the tale of Odysseus’s thwarted journey home. We think of him as the figure of the Tennyson poem,

For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

This complicated man: he must love the journey. One reason he doesn’t go back to Penelope more quickly, is because he is also going back to Laertes, his father. Once he has killed the suitors occupying his home, Odysseus continues his journey to Laertes.

Meanwhile, Odysseus
Drew close to the flourishing vineyard as he continued his search.
But as he went down to the great orchard he failed to find Dolios
Or his sons, or a single slave—it turned out they had gone off
To gather up stones from the field for a wall that would enclose
The orchard, and the old man was leading the way for them.
But he did find his father, alone…

His father, alone. Before going to look for his father, Odysseus tells his companions, “I will go and put my father to the test/ To see if he’ll recognise me…” Odysseus finds Laertes, a former king, old and bent, wearing protective clothes while he gardens. This is one of the most moving passages in the whole poem. I shall quote first Samuel Butler’s version

He had on a dirty old shirt, patched and very shabby; his legs were bound round with thongs of oxhide to save him from the brambles, and he also wore sleeves of leather; he had a goat skin cap on his head, and was looking very woe-begone. When Ulysses saw him so worn, so old and full of sorrow, he stood still under a tall pear tree and began to weep. He doubted whether to embrace him, kiss him, and tell him all about his having come home, or whether he should first question him and see what he would say. In the end he deemed it best to be crafty with him…

There is a plangent beauty to the plainness of this translation: to save him, woe-begone, so old and full of sorrow. But this scene can work, too, in a more highly wrought manner. Here is Pope.

But all alone the hoary king he found;
His habit coarse, but warmly wrapp’d around;
His head, that bow’d with many a pensive care,
Fenced with a double cap of goatskin hair:
His buskins old, in former service torn,
But well repair’d; and gloves against the thorn.
In this array the kingly gardener stood,
And clear’d a plant, encumber’d with its wood.

Beneath a neighbouring tree, the chief divine
Gazed o’er his sire, retracing every line,
The ruins of himself, now worn away
With age, yet still majestic in decay!
Sudden his eyes released their watery store;
The much-enduring man could bear no more.
Doubtful he stood, if instant to embrace
His aged limbs, to kiss his reverend face,
With eager transport to disclose the whole,
And pour at once the torrent of his soul.—
Not so: his judgment takes the winding way
Of question distant, and of soft essay;
More gentle methods on weak age employs:
And moves the sorrows to enhance the joys.

Hardly Pope’s best work: but oh how moving! Odysseus plays a trick on Laertes, pretending to be someone else, and Laertes does not quite recognise him at first, due to all the time that has passed. Laertes asks this traveller if he has news of his son, and, hearing that he may be dead “the father, with a father’s fears” says,

That hapless guest, alas! for ever gone!
Wretch that he was! and that I am! my son!
If ever man to misery was born,
’Twas his to suffer, and ’tis mine to mourn!

Poor Laertes! If only the ingrate Odysseus knew what he was putting his father through! My favourite translation, E.V. Rieu shows the scene thus:

When Laertes heard this, a black cloud of misery enveloped him. Groaning heavily, he picked the black dust up in both his hands and poured it over his grey head. Odysseus’ heart was touched, and suddenly, as he watched his dear father, a sharp spasm of pain shot through his nostrils. He rushed forward, flung his arms round his neck, and kissed him. ‘Father,’ he cried, ‘here I am, the very man you asked about, home in my own land after twenty years. But no more tears and lamentation, for I have news to tell you, and there is need for haste.’

Odysseus has come home, seen his wife, established himself, and now, after his final honourable task—the killing of the suitors who are parasites on his house—he has come back to his father, the model of honour and kingship. Just as Telemachus looks to Odysseus, looks for Odysseus, so Odysseus ends up looking to Laertes. His pity is evoked because he suddenly sees himself in his father. Look again at these four lines from Pope.

Beneath a neighbouring tree, the chief divine
Gazed o’er his sire, retracing every line,
The ruins of himself, now worn away
With age, yet still majestic in decay!

See what Pope is saying: “retracing every line,/ The ruins of himself”. Himself is presumably Laertes, a reference back to “sire”; but it can also be read as a reference to Odysseus, seeing himself in his ageing father. All the time that has passed is suddenly witnessed in the majestic decay of the old man. In Laertes ageing, Odysseus sees his own ageing. This ambiguity is missing from Butler, and from Mendelsohn, in their plain translations. Mendelsohn has:

Thus, when the noble Odysseus, who’d endured so much, saw him
Worn down by old age, his mind weighed down by grief,
He went and stood by a lofty pear tree as his tears began to flow.

Pope may not have intended the ambiguity, but it is surely there; even though Mendelsohn provides a standard account, it is missing this crucial element. The rest may be accurate to the passage, but Pope is true to the spirit of the whole poem.

Tennyson’s Ulysses says, of Telemachus, “He works his work, I mine.” But in fact, one of the final things written in the Odyssey is of the reunion of Odysseus, Laertes, and Telemachus, fighting together, as honour dictates.

They were now joined by Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who had assumed Mentor’s appearance and voice. The patient, good Odysseus was overjoyed to see her. He turned at once to his dear son and said: ‘Telemachus, when you find yourself in the thick of battle, where the best men prove their mettle, you will soon learn how not to disgrace your father’s house. In all the world there has been none like ours for courage and manliness.’

And the thoughtful Telemachus replied: ‘If you care to, father, you will see me in my present mood by no means disgracing my father’s house, as you put it.’

Laertes was delighted. ‘Dear gods!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a day this is to warm my heart! My son and grandson competing in valour!’

Fathers and sons are the predominant relationships of the Odyssey. The Odyssey begins with Telemachus deciding to go on a journey to find his father; indeed this is the subject of the first five books; and it ends with Odysseus coming home to discover his father, and all three of them united in valour. The first four books are full of discussion about Telemachus finding his father. At the end, when Odysseus tells Penelope the tale of his adventures — Kikones, Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, Aiolos— he says that “fate would not yet let him reach/The beloved land of his forefathers”. When they fight the suitors, there is a small sequence that re-enacts in miniature this idea that the journey is towards the father:

Amphinomos then burst out at glorious Odysseus.
Darting in front of him, he pulled out his sharpened sword,
Hoping to get Odysseus away from the door. But Telemakhos
Was too quick: he dealt him a blow from behind with his bronze-tipped spear,
Right between the shoulders, driving it straight through his chest.
With a thunderous thud he fell, flat on his face, to the ground.
Telemakhos sprang back up, leaving his long-shadowed spear
Right there, inside Amphinomos—for he was terrified: what if
Some Achaean came out of nowhere and ran him through with a sword
As he pulled out the long-shadowed spear, or struck him down as he stopped there?
So he started to run, and swiftly reached his beloved father.

In his Introduction, Mendelsohn lists the other father-son relationships: Poseidon makes trouble for Odysseus because the Cyclops is his son; in Hades, Achilles asks Odysseus whether his son Neoptolemos has lived up to his expectations: “Did he follow me into the war as the foremost fighter, or not?” The final scene includes the fathers of the slain suitors, asking for justice. Mendelsohn calls this patriarchal, and perhaps it is; but that has been too much discussed in recent years; of course it is patriarchal: criticism wishes for knowledge that inhabits the poem, as well as taxonomising judgement.

The Odyssey’s many quests are one of literature’s earliest instances of the great theme: the pursuit of happiness. And that pursuit is centred on what, from Athene’s perspective in the first few books, is the whole impetus for the tale, and thus the aim of the poem: “To learn something of your father”.

As with all quests, the hero must come home, and see it all again as if for the first time, and know himself and it to be the same but also changed. He must see himself in his father and learn something of them both.

To get an Uber to go 1.2 miles through Farringdon would have cost £27, which is about $36. I tried the bus, one of the new ones with usb chargers, but the air conditioning was so inadequate that it was hotter than the street. There is air conditioning in most restaurants and hotels (telling that you need it there with no talk of turning it off because of climate change) but not in pubs.

At the Dr. Johnson House, James Marriott and I discussed the future of civilization. He worries that the decline of reading means the end of democracy. I think we are facing a disruption to which we will need to adapt. Just because we have not yet had democracy without mass literacy, doesn’t mean we can’t. More concerning to me than whether adults read novels is the fact that children are not being brought up to read enough. The schools are what most need reforming. James has written a polemical book (coming in September, I enjoyed it, and anyone who enjoyed his Substack post about it will enjoy the book) but he is a genial, affable, quietly insistent person, and he makes his case without any bluster or alarm. The best part of the evening was when we were shown an original copy of the Dictionary and a lock of the great man’s hair.

To the Duke of York Theatre (where Peter Pan first played) to see the new production of Arcadia. This is a great play, worth hearing, but alas this is a mediocre production. Many of the jokes fell flat. A lot of the dialogue lacked feeling. Some actors over egged the pudding (Benedict), some underbaked it (Hannah), and some simply weren’t enough for the role (Septimus). My worries that the London theatre has entered a decline were not assuaged. Perhaps I am too nostalgic for the days of Maggie Smith and Penelope Keith, but seeing a second-rate production like this makes me wish I had been there to see Felicity Kendal in the original. Modern actors often lack true theatrical skills.

The production is designed to feel like a streaming show. The actors have microphones, flattening the tone of their voices. The play is staged in the round (a mistake in my view: the house requires to be seen and felt as a house, with gardens, furniture, and so on, not an open, empty space), and each scene begins with a series of characters striking a pose, with some opening-credits-esque music, while a weird light show rotates above them. It is an obvious attempt to make it look like Netflix. As is so often the case, the very final moments of the play depart from the stage directions as printed, to little effect.

Arcadia’s real theme, beyond all the science-and-art together stuff, is the unknowability of history. Anyone who has been involved in real world events that people online tried to understand by reading the tea leaves of the internet—or indeed who has heard gossip about a mutual acquaintance, about who you know the facts—knows that there is no real history. Stoppard’s genius is to make both comedy and tragedy out of that fact. That is what makes Thomasina’s waltz at the end so sad, and it is why the corny final moments of this production, in which she stands on a chair and reaches towards the lights above the stage (an attempt to represent “science vibes”—look! atoms!) are so corny and against the spirit of the text.

And yet there was, from about a third of the audience, a standing ovation. Nonsense! Sit down! Have some respect for art!

Like Miracle Woman, Citizen Kane is a masterpiece of the Golden Age. Here is all the magnificence and munificence of the good old days of Hollywood. Here is the art of making real movies about real people and setting it all in a kind of fairyland. In everything, Citizen Kane is mighty: the scale, the scenery, the conceit, the careful arrangement of the pieces, the use of news-reels, flash-backs, real-time over-the-shoulder camera moves, the Alice in Wonderland quality of the distorted perspectives, the still moments that hang like paintings with a whole other story behind them.

My God, what a film.

For a long time, I assumed this was not a film I was very interested to see. It gets talked up as being about a newspaper magnate, as if it were a film of social importance, as if that were the criterion for art. Pah. Give me The Chimes of Midnight! Give me Sunset Boulevard, Notorious, Stagecoach! It was naïve of me to believe them, I know. And boy was I awoken in a mostly-empty movie theatre in Arlington when I experienced one of the great works of film that tells the story not only of a whole and complex and heart-breaking man, but of the way no-one around him—a newspaper magnate!—ever knew the real story.

From the first moment to the last Citizen Kane draws us down, down into its swirling world. This film is as expansive as Dickens. It has so much visual enchantment—the house, the great collection, the fireplaces! And so much sheer ingenuity. The way Welles keeps shape-shifting, the way the camera cuts so unmercifully onto Kane, the deep, deep shadows. The way the plot is put together with those little repetitions. The unexpected comic sequence that opens up into the whole second half of the story, the better part of the tragedy. The way it knows exactly where it’s going as a story while all the time doubting its own moral. The way it makes itself a Xanadu. The montages, the dancing girls, the failing marriages, the young bucks at the newspaper, the canny old men, the stifled women, the clothes. My God, what a film. Who could think of this as being primarily political when it is so human, so full of failure. So sad. So damn sad.

Welles’ fairyland carried me along perfectly. I had anticipated something of the ending, but not the exact details. The final shot! Oh my God, that final shot. Some art consoles; some devastates. Citizen Kane left me shattered. I wanted to holler. PLAY IT AGAIN. But I was too choked up even to whisper. I shuffled out into the lobby, the parking lot, the real world. What? Am I supposed to just go about my life now? I have to drive myself home? There is so much I wish to say, but that would give away the ending for any other lucky novices out there who might one day go and see this film on the big screen, unsuspecting, for the first time.

My God, what a film. Play it again. PLAY IT AGAIN.

…the future I’m describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier; the rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass.

…

The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?

From the Bible and Homer to Virginia Woolf and Helen deWitt, the quest is the fundamental mode of literature. The rise of the novel was the rise of realism, but also the adaptation of the old romance to the new idea of individualism. We might be leaving behind the culture in which novel reading was central to ordinary life, but we are not leaving behind the need to understand our lives as journeys, nor the ability of literature to cultivate “cognitive complexity.”

Brooks takes an institutional and psychological approach to this challenge: autonomy, competence, and relatedness are essential to motivation; schools and apprenticeships can be restructured for those ends; AI can’t “hunger for things”.

I don’t disagree, but as well as “help[ing] people learn to want more, hunger more” we need to enhance their ability to imagine themselves. Motivation relies on imagination. An individual is an imagined person: we are imagined by ourselves and by others and the gap between those two is often formative. We have all been surprised (or appalled) to learn what other people think of us, most especially when they are correct. Isn’t it odd that they can know us better than we know ourselves? They don’t have access to our inner thoughts and feelings. All they can do is imagine us.

Imagination is central to the way people understand themselves and each other. The novelists knew this, and they worked in tandem with philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith to elaborate a huge body of work that demonstrates and investigates what it means to be an imagined individual. If we want people to understand the quest of their lives, the journey of life as something they imagine themselves undertaking, we could do worse than to encourage them to read Swift, Richardson, Austen, Eliot, and James. In his latest book, Tyler Cowen notes that William Stanley Jevons, one of the first economists to theorise the idea of marginal gains, was directly influenced by Charles Dickens. The same is true of Darwin and Milton, Tesla and Goethe, along with many others.

Being able to change the world, act effectively in the world, relies on your mental model of the world—and of yourself. Those models can be significantly affected by the works of imagination you read, watch, and listen to. Those works give you new models all the time, new ways of connecting the inner and the outer life, new explanations for why people are the way they are, and new maps for the journey you might take. Imagination is essential to our notions of identity, language, and thought. That is part of Locke’s revolution in 1690. And those ideas gave the novelists their starting point.

If the continued improvement of AI means there will be cognitive polarisation, I suspect that imagination will be key to the divide. Rather than relying on a large simple model of the quest like Joseph Campbell, this gives us impetus to return to the great writers of quests, from all areas of literature—Dante and Beowulf as well as Dickens and Tolstoy.

It might just be the case that the future belongs to those who can imagine it.

So off we went on a chase to see these alien things, streaking and swirling across the sky above D.C. As we drove along the interstate to the Carillon, which stands next to the Marines Memorial, which takes the form of a large statue of Iwo Jima, they were right above us. Then one of them did a loop-the-loop. It was too late to park, so we changed course and headed to the Cemetery. But we couldn’t face the walk to the top in the heat (with children in tow).

As we drove out, another jet was holding itself vertical over the river before it dipped down and swung away. We followed it across the Memorial Bridge, full of the thrill of the display, and saw it whoosh over the Lincoln Memorial. There were people everywhere. Some of them were set-up under umbrellas on the bridge. Some sat up on the memorial, safe in the shade. Never have we enjoyed the D.C. traffic so much. Just as we crawled round the Lincoln Memorial Circle, the whole fly-past flew past: stealth bombers, fighter planes, and the terribly exciting Thunderbirds, who keep tight formations and make smoke patterns in the sky.

D.C. was jubilant. Sometimes, the first thing we knew about approaching planes was the whoops and skirls of people on the street. Roads were closed with army trucks parked across them, and soldiers stood baking in the sky, scratching their chin and yawning, waving kindly to children. They stopped and gaped too. Back in Arlington, we saw the Thunderbirds howling down Wilson Boulevard, pulling up steeply and making a circle back, before they flew right over us. The whole thing was truly extraordinary.

This is America at its best: confident, performative, high-tech, talented, patriotic, unafraid of its own character. Everywhere we went, we saw Americans full of the basic pride and happy energy that makes this country great. For the last few days, the hotel lobbies and streets have been full of that familiar American archetype: the traveller. They wear baseball caps inside, prefer sneakers and traveling slacks, and usually sport a polo shirt. When the traffic is stuck, they get out of the car, open the boot, stride off to see what can be seen. This is a land of magnificence and they are here to see it and enjoy it.

This is not the way everyone feels. When my wife walked down to see the planes, she ran into a journalist who asked her if she wasn’t upset by all this rampant militarism. This is not an uncommon attitude. Not in the particulars, but simply in the dislike of what is happening. So many people are just unable to enjoy the anniversary. The celebration feels decidedly muted. Where is all the jubilation? Where are the people dressed up as Ben Franklin? Where are the parades?

Perhaps it seems like this because I live in D.C. To me, this attitude is inexplicable. The world’s most successful revolution has worked and still works! We have democracy, liberty, and prosperity! It’s time to get out the flags! Let there be cakes and ale! (Or, indeed, hot dogs and beer.)

So often I hear and read laments about this Independence Day. Rather than celebrating that America has made it to a quarter millennium, so many Americans are worried that this is (almost) the low point for the whole history of the Republic. I find this attitude baffling. However bad things are right now (and yes, I find many aspects of American politics today truly lamentable; so much is so awful), they are simply not as bad as what has happened here in the past. Slavery. The failures of Reconstruction. The Trail of Tears. Japanese Internment. Lord knows, this country isn’t perfect. But if we cannot celebrate the progress we have made, we will make it all the more difficult to make any more. Justice and improvement are motivated by feelings of inadequacy, but the long work of betterment is done by people who believe in their country.

Some believe that America might not be America for much longer. They think the Constitution is under threat. Perhaps. But elections have been held. The court has not always decided in favour of the executive. The system may not be deciding everything as it ought to, but it is functioning much as it has always done.

All the Europeans who have fallen in love with America as they visited for the World Cup have been surprised to see beyond the headlines. The news is all about politics, injustice, incompetence, cruelty. No-one can deny the wickedness of the world. No-one can deny the tremendous failures: citizens have been shot by their government, wars have been started, a dismal rhetoric has become normal. But as the football fans drive around America, they see beyond the failures. They see that this country is more than its politics. Much more. They see the tremendous character of the nation. This is a country of hard work, high standards, and huge ambition. It is also a country that has to choose its own future. The choice might not be between two sides of a political argument, but between two cultures—one that believes in itself and its future, and one that increasingly struggles to see beyond the dismay.

As I look back to the UK—where we have political and economic failure too (and worse, God knows), but where we don’t have the same economic dynamism that might still save America yet—it makes me want to shake some Americans by the shoulders, and say, wake up! look around! this is God’s own country! and if you lose sight of that, you’ll only add to the problem!

However bad the problems are—and they are bad—the same spirit that animated the founding is still alive today. Get out your flags and cook some hot dogs. This country is still the world’s last best hope. If there is work to be done to rebuild America, to repair the damage and to renew the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution in the coming years, that work will be done best in the spirit of belief in this vast country. Renewal starts with America loving itself again.

This is the opening of the winning story.

They gave me the medal on a Thursday.

The foundation called it a Stewardship — a heavy bronze disc, a ribbon the color of dried blood — and a man in a good suit read out that I had given my life to the preservation of feeling, that I was, he said, a keeper. People stood. June was at the back, not-clapping in the particular way she had, her hands pressed together and still, smiling at me like I’d done something she would have talked me out of if I’d asked.

That night I lay down in the dark and ate the day.

Gwern says:

3. I think the best entries rose to the level of, “I am not upset to have spent my time reading them, and with careful editing, could be good enough I would want to reread them.”

It had not occurred to me before that this would happen, but the suggestion that many of the stories are AI allegories is perhaps not surprising: so much human writing is about human(s) writing, implicitly or otherwise.

While this may seem predictable in hindsight, given that the chatbot personalities are well-known to have various obsessions and tics, including fourth-wall-breaking or AIs, none of the judges expected this to happen or were looking for it, and none of the AI researchers Gwern has discussed it with had expected it (while noting that it’s not that surprising, again, in hindsight).

Why does this happen, when the prompts appear to successfully encourage a relative diversity of stories, everything from contemporary urban horror to wuxia martial arts comedy to creepy fairy tales? It may reflect a very high level of base writing skill (note in particular the stylistic variations in ctrlcreep’s two fairy tale anthology-style stories) combined with subtle systemic biases which gradually, over many tokens and iterations, converges onto stories which satisfy the ostensible requirements but are distorted into the mode-collapsed basins of the personalities’ obsessions.

Is Gwern becoming the leading literary critic of AI writing?

Blake Morrison wrote about the “distinguished line” of literary politicians. Giles Coren thinks Burnham’s English degree gives him a “grown-up hinterland”. Lord Smith, a former Secretary of Culture, wrote that there is “no better preparation for a career in public life than English literature, because it tells you more about character, relationships, society, joy, sorrow, emotion and intelligence than anything else ever could.” Even John Mullan takes it for granted that Burnham’s English degree is a good thing. (Mullan taught Burnham.)

But none of them compares the benefits of studying English with the alternatives!

Will these same people say that it was beneficial for George Osborne to have studied History rather than Economics? Was Harold MacMillan a great Prime Minister because he read a lot of Austen and Trollope?2 Lord Smith’s PhD was about Wordsworth and Coleridge. I’m sure he remembers J.S. Mill’s remark that Coleridge’s genius turned to buffoonery when he discussed the national debt.

Of course, people who love English Literature wish to defend their subject at a time of decline. But none of these arguments relate the benefits of an English degree to what is required of a PM. How will his love of Middlemarch help Burnham with the public finances, the bond market, the need for planning reform, two decades of minimal productivity, or decisions about the education and health systems? No-one can say. Apparently he loves Larkin, a poet who would not mistake an English Literature degree as preparation for appointing ministers, dealing with scientific experts, and handling international negotiations.

Judgement is domain-specific (something that Middlemarch knows very well, ironically). It cannot be easily transferred from an English tutorial to Whitehall without a lot of other conditions being met. English graduates have very little knowledge of economics. Nor does the subject tell them anything about how government works. Relying on their judgement could easily go wrong! Blake Morrison’s list is telling. After Disraeli (hardly a model we want to emulate!) and Churchill (again, outside the war, rather a mixed bag!), he gets down to “Jeffrey Archer, Edwina Currie and Ann Widdecombe.” He does not seem to be joking.

I wonder if Morrison would add Boris Johnson to his list, who has a first in Classics from Oxford? During the pandemic, Johnson didn’t know the difference between percentages and percentage points. Will any of the people celebrating Burnham’s love of George Eliot tell us that Johnson’s love of Homer and Shakespeare improved the way he handled Covid?

There are many wonderful benefits to studying—and loving—English Literature. I have written about them myself. But they are supplementary to many other, necessary, conditions for being a Prime Minister. It is a worthy addition to a true knowledge of government and political economy, not a substitute. The fact that English Literature’s advocates don’t make that distinction anywhere in their arguments might be taken as another negative signal…

Most of the commentary, understandably, focuses on these novels as “telling the story of women’s lives”, as well as on the fact that they establish an alternative tradition to modernism. There is a sort of pleasure associated with the “feminine middlebrow” that is quite different from reading James Joyce and his American inheritors. But that makes the genre rather a mixed bundle. Can we really put The Fountain Overflows, One Fine Day, or The Death of the Heart, in the same “middlebrow” category as Dorothy Whipple or Monica Dickens? Whatever that dreaded word is supposed to mean (and I think it is more properly applied to a sort of reader than to a sort of book), it cannot honestly yoke together Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Elizabeth Taylor.

The excellent work done by Virago and Persephone originated in the fact that it was women’s writing they were trying to save and re-issue. (When Virago re-published Rosamund Lehmann, she sold hundreds of thousands of copies.) But being written by a woman is not enough for a novel to join a tradition or be part of a critical grouping. The feminist angle that almost all commentary takes (from the mild end of the scale about women’s lives to the more political readings) too often risks, in my view, reading these books as social history, manifesto pieces, examples-of-a-favoured-idea, and thus begins to diminish them all to period pieces. The best appreciations treat them not as “feminine”, or “middlebrow”, but as art. None of this is to deny the importance of the feminist (or the feminine): it is merely to say that within the tradition that runs, approximately, from Mrs. Dalloway to The Blue Flower (this is artificial: it carries on today and can be traced back much further, as the novelists themselves are often careful to suggest in their books) there is so much more at play.

If I were to write a book about all this now it would perhaps be called Perpetual Summer, a phrase from A View of the Harbour. This captures the sense within so many of these novels of nostalgia: not in a narrow, melancholy sense, but as a perspective on the way lives and societies change over time. Some nostalgia is gloomy; some is accepting; some matures into wonder; some is cheerful. Perpetual summer is exactly what these books know cannot be achieved. What the women novelists saw, that cannot really be seen in books like A Handful of Dust, Lucky Jim, or Flaubert’s Parrot, is the profundity of ordinary life. This has often been dismissed as domesticity, as if everything in this category were, in Nabokov’s words, “the tinkling of teacups”. But there is a great depth of emotion to be found in daily life, small communities, and simple lives, and it takes all the resources of a great writer to bring that out fully and significantly. Why cannot life be perpetual summer—this seems to be the question the women novelists were investigating, seeing clear-eyed.

One can imagine a book like Parallel Lives, organised around some of the writers, perhaps linking each to a theme—Fitzgerald and God, Taylor and aging, West and the supernatural—but branching out to see the coherence and diversity that made a century of women’s writing so much more than “women’s writing”. They were often talked of as women writers by male reviewers, and that attitude led a great many men to misunderstand a great many books, some of them written by first-rate novelists, even a genius or two. These novels are often as subtle, conflicted, and sensitive as a poem by Philip Larkin. More should be written about those aesthetic qualities alongside the lives of the writers as professional writing women.

A great deal of attention has been given to Elizabeth Bowen, and no doubt she would merit a section of her own, but has enough attention been given to her place among these other writers? There are plenty of letters between her and people like Elizabeth Jenkins. (Bowen’s handwriting is utterly maddening to decipher, all loops and swoops, sprawling over the page, up the margin, with barely a concern for letter formation, but I cannot sit in judgement: her writing is almost as bad as my own.) They saw themselves as professionals and wrote to each other as such, perhaps not in the way that Dickens or Amis wrote about themselves, but Stella Gibbons had her own sense of herself as a professional writer and that is something that she and Monica Dickens and Elizabeth Bowen really do have in common.

I am, of course, proposing my own too-narrow category. Not only have I so-far kept Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch out of the lists (and why should they not be seen as part of the tradition of Bainbridge and Burnett?) but there are no men. And my argument is that these women are distinctive as women, but not as distinctive as women as some critics have suggested. One can hardly imagine this project without including E.M. Forster as well as Barbara Pym, Pritchett, Hartley, Green (and Greene) as well as Virginia Woolf. Part of the point of such a critical endeavor would be to insist not just on the inclusion of The Tortoise and the Hare within the tradition of Bowen and Taylor (and Agatha Christie incidentally) but also that of Henry James.

My own prejudices are on display in other ways. I have no time for William Trevor, who might be an obvious addition, but all criticism is personal, after all. As you might have wondered, I see Bowen not exactly as a modernist. And I have a biographical tendency. But these prejudices are all in line with the novelists I am writing about. Many of them wrote biographies, had mixed feelings (at best) about modernism, and were happy to admire some writers from a distance, or not to admire them at all. They worked their own work, and it will take a new effort of criticism, that gets beyond the perspectives already established, to see that work both in new lights and in its own light.

I remembered, as I was reading A View of the Harbour by the pool today, that when I was young I would have scoffed at the idea of “women’s novels”. No Handmaid’s Tale for sixteen-year-old me, thank you! But little did I think, that, at the same time, I was obsessed with Jane Eyre, had been the only boy I knew who read (and liked!) Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, and, though I enjoyed making jokes about Jane Austen’s inadequacies, had been quietly stunned by Sense and Sensibility. No such silly attitude can long survive the encounter with great writing and over the years I became as interested in Penelope Fitzgerald as I was once in Dickens.

I had, too, a young scepticism of modernism, while, again, not realising how incompatible this was with my constant fascination with T.S. Eliot, a poet about who I have never been less than intently conflicted. What I have learned in reading these novels (and still reading them, filling in outrageous gaps!) is that what has been called “feminine middlebrow” is a tradition all of its own. In its conflicts with (and connotations of) modernism, this writing became a century-long project of moral seriousness, expert technique, and great aesthetic pleasure.

What I had not learned in the arrogance of adolescence is that there is no such thing as “women’s writing”, there are only novels and writers, some of who are women, and some of who happen to be as absorbing, fascinating, and mind-occupying as those books we would never call “the male highbrow”.

Further Reading

So yes, local context matters. When I started writing reviews of novels, there were a number of relics from the postwar decades who were no longer writing their best stuff. So I have written harshly about books by Kundera, Mario Vargas Llosa, McEwan, others. I was runner-up for the no-longer-existent Hatchet Job of the Year prize for a review of a biography of Martin Amis. But I wasn’t trying to be a young gunslinger—I wasn’t especially young when I wrote some of the pieces, and would say the same thing now. I don’t think anyone could claim I was slating masterpieces. I find it silly when people say “I wouldn’t write that now.” It’s often untrue. Martin Amis regretted some of his antics from the early ’70s, when he went for Angus Wilson and Ballard and Philip Roth, but he was harsher on Michael Crichton and Thomas Harris two decades later. Finding a book or film or play or exhibition deficient and saying so when you are being paid for your opinion should not be dismissed as a young person’s game.

I think ridicule is OK, and maybe inevitable. I wrote a takedown of a history of the novel by the poet and publisher Michael Schmidt and he wrote me to say he should probably be jumping out of the window but was too busy laughing. You need to be direct. John Lanchester made this interesting point about what he called John Updike’s “very powerful negative review” of a Kingsley Amis novel, Jake’s Thing. He said it was “much less patronising, and more overtly hostile” than was usual for Updike. Actually that review isn’t negative, but I find that a useful distinction. You want to be actively aggressive, not passively so, closer to rude than snide.

From a long and interesting discussion with Leo Robson about the nature of criticim.

Archie Ammons was not your typical poet. He spent years as a chemical-glass salesman before he got a teaching job. He was a down to earth Southerner.

I was at a literary festival many years ago where he was the other poet. I did my best to avoid him because I felt we had litttle in common. But one morning I went into a tiny dive for breakfast. There he was sitting in a booth alone. He waved to me so I joined him.

We had a great conversation. He was warm and friendly—not the impression I had from his often austere and impersonal poetry. We talked about the stock market for an hour.

And this.

In the two days I spent with Ammons, he never wanted to talk about poetry. (Elizabeth Bishop was the same way.) But he was a dedicated amateur investor, and he didn’t seem to have anyone to discuss that at Cornell. He even wrote me later asking my opinion on particular stocks. He liked the fact that we both had a business background.

I was glad to meet him in such an unexpected but cordial and genuine way.

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about government support of the arts?

AMMONS

I detest it. I detest it on many grounds, but three first. And the first is that the government gouges money from people who may need it for other purposes. Second, the money forced from needy average citizens is then filtered through the sieve of a bureaucracy, which absorbs much of the money into itself and distributes the rest incompetently -- since how could you expect the level of knowledge and judgment among such a cluster to be much in advance of the times? At the same time the government attaches strings to the money, not theirs in the first place, to those who gave it in the first place. And third, I detest the averaging down of expectation and dedication that occurs when thousands of poets are given money in what is really waste and welfare, not art at all. Artists should be left alone to paint or not to paint, write or not to write. As it is, the world is full of trash. The genuine is lost, and the whole field wallops with political and social distortions.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel the same way about private support of the arts?

AMMONS

Not at all. Everybody who loves the arts should have the liberty to sustain the particular arts he loves, whenever, wherever. If the love and money go to the popular arts, that’s the way it should be. If there is an outcry for symphonic performances of the great Bs, then that is what should be addressed. High arts that hang on almost vestigial in a culture should be addressed in their own scope, and I think they would not perish but that genius and energy would burst out whenever it’s not already stifled by some blank, some holding grant, some template that just keeps blocking itself out.

From A.R. Ammons “art of poetry” interview in The Paris Review in 1996. The whole interview is great fun, especially this exchange.

INTERVIEWER

You said you wanted to eliminate Western culture from your poetry. Why?

AMMONS

Well, I sort of disagree with it.

INTERVIEWER

With the Cartesian mind, or with what? The philosophical tradition of the West? The Roman sense of justice?

AMMONS

If I get back to the pre-Socratics, I feel that I’m in the kind of world that I would enjoy being in, but nothing since then. Especially in the last two thousand years, dominated by Christianity and the Catholic church and other religious organizations. I feel more nearly myself aligned with Oriental culture.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve always been curious about why you’ve traveled so little. I think you spent a year in Italy.

AMMONS

Three months. We had the traveling fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which was for a year, but we came back after three months. I lost twenty pounds and I couldn’t wait to get home.

INTERVIEWER

You didn’t care for the experience of being an expatriate?

AMMONS

I hated it. I’m not interested in all that cultural crap. It was just a waste of time for me.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe this is part of what you were talking about before when you spoke of your rejection of Western culture, by which I take it you mean more specifically a rejection of Europe or of European cultural domination.

AMMONS

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

But it occurred to me that one reason you have traveled very little is ...

AMMONS

There’s no place to go?

INTERVIEWER

There’s no place to go?

AMMONS

Yeah, that’s a good reason not to travel. Well, I’m interested in the Orient, but I’m really not interested in going there. I’m not interested in Europe. I have no interest whatsoever in going there. Every now and then I go to Owego and sometimes I go to Syracuse, sometimes to Geneva, Binghamton -- all over the place.

INTERVIEWER

Geneva, New York, rather than Geneva, Switzerland.

AMMONS

Geneva, New York, right.

A massive inferiority complex with the Old World revealing itself in hilarious braggadocio (“we have, like, ten Homers over here!”) that poorly conceals justified insecurity (we have, in fact, zero Homers over here). An inability to understand the scope and scale of human history (part of what makes Homer Homer is that people have been reading him for three thousand years). An adjacent belief that everything that happened before America didn’t really count (“we have it in our power to begin the world over again”—immanentizing the eschaton from the beginning). And yet, as a whole, the question flinches before it can go all the way (come on, ask the question you know you want to: “what is the American King James Version?”) It makes you understand James and Eliot.

Of the answers given, Frost, Whitman, and Melville were the ones that seemed closest to answering the case to me, though perhaps “nobody yet” is the true answer. I was surprised not to see Alexis de Tocqueville on the list. Why do we assume America’s Homer would be a poet? I was reminded of Flaubert saying, before he wrote Madame Bovary, that there was, as yet, no Iliad of the novel, and of Carlyle reading the Iliad as part of his preparation to write his French Revolution.

I suggest Hollywood. I would certainly put the great directors ahead of Tracy Chapman on a list of people who “capture the American spirit, the American story, the American identity.” Surely John Ford and John Wayne are one obvious answer? Maybe Gone with the Wind. Frank Capra seems too uneven, but Billy Wilder might not be. What about Chaplin? Or Coppola? I don’t think Hitchcock has the necessary scale, somehow. Perhaps just “Hollywood’s Golden Age” as a whole is the best answer?

NADWORNY: What made you want to memorize so much Shakespeare?

SUTTON: To prove to the other actors that I could memorize Shakespeare, I guess.

NADWORNY: (Laughter).

SUTTON: When I first had the idea, oh, yeah, I’m going to learn them all. I (vocalizing). I did not realize how much work it actually was.

NADWORNY: Do you think memorizing Shakespeare helps you memorize other things?

SUTTON: Yeah. I do. I also believe that just memorizing Shakespeare is just good for your soul.

From this interview at NPR. He memorised all 154 of the sonnets.

John Stuart Mill, also a defining liberal, can be seen a great critic of traditionalism. The Subjection of Women is a sustained attack on a tradition that he saw as an exercise of power, and not as the wisdom of crowds. On Liberty can be seen as a form of constructivism in Hayek’s sense: It offers a principle (the Harm Principle), discovered and defended by reason, that cuts like a knife through traditions.

I wonder if Mill has a more nuanced view of tradition—or at least of history. In the Subjection, he is careful to say that the custom does not have a right of prescription “in this case”, rather than rejecting the idea of custom per se:

The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no presumption…

Mill’s view of history is important because he believes that it can be used to promote whatever argument you wish to promote, but also that it does have real uses in showing “the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform.” This is not an argument against tradition, but rather a way of seeing how tradition evolves in progressive societies. In his address at St. Andrews, he spoke of “the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.”

And, of course, he wrote in the Subjection, that

When the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons.

We might see the phrase “common arrangement” as meaning something very close to “custom”. He also wrote to Harriet Taylor that women would continue to “beautify life”. Though he may be taken to have softened that view in the Subjection, his argument about the blacksmith suggests that he is open to the idea that the “common arrangements” between men and women might continue somewhat unaltered, or that what free enterprise, experiments in living, and competition would lead to was not a rational equality, but to a society in which women’s innate qualities lead them to different sorts of lives than men. He writes that “the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general rules to individual suitabilities.” Is that anti-traditional or rational?

In the Chapters on Socialism, Mill prefers the “utopian” socialism of Owen and Fourier to the radical socialism of the Continentals, and he says his preference is based on the fact that the first sort of socialism “need not, and in the natural order of things would not, become an engine of subversion until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of reconstruction.” This is not exactly pro-tradition, but it is not exactly rationalist anti-traditionalism either. He also says in the Chapters,

Sudden effects in history are generally superficial. Causes which go deep down into the roots of future events produce the most serious parts of their effect only slowly, and have, therefore, time to become a part of the familiar order of things before general attention is called to the changes they are producing; since, when the changes do become evident, they are often not seen, by cursory observers, to be in any peculiar manner connected with the cause. The remoter consequences of a new political fact are seldom understood when they occur, except when they have been appreciated beforehand.

This seems to be a vision of history in which things change slowly and (to us) unknowably, through the operations of “familiar orders”, which, to me at least, sounds Hayekian. In Auguste Comte and Positivism, he writes of “the peculiar phaenomena of English development” and “its exceptional character in relation to the general European movement.”

If I were speculating, I would almost venture to say that Hayek recognized some of his own ideas in Mill and felt “belated”, as a literary critic might say about one poet reacting to a previous poet. Think of Book V of Mill’s Political Economy, surely either an important influence upon Hayek or a book that made him realize that Mill had anticipated some of his insights, albeit not fully. If Hayek felt the pressure of Mill’s influence, and had to deal with what Walter Jackson Bate called “the burden of the past”, the spur of his surprising and (dare I say) irrational dislike of Mill might be due to this feeling of belatedness…

Five minutes after we left the house, which a very kind benefactor gave us the use of for the week, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge appeared. I had a half-memory of reading about this bridge some years ago. It was quite startling, to see it rising up like a city skyline, curving mightily above the bay. I was not brave enough to walk across the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and had to go over it in a taxi (we did that several times, the view is extraordinary), but by the time you can see the bridge it is too late to pull over. So on we went. I should not be surprised to find such man-made wonders in America, but the very idea of a 4.5 mile long bridge is extraordinary to me. This is by no means the longest bridge in the USA, let alone the world. There’s a 23 mile bridge in Louisiana. Having now crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I find myself yearning to drive that 23 miles. I want to drive the San Mateo-Hayward and the Jubilee Parkway. What extraordinary views of the bay! What an extraordinary human achievement to build such a bridge!

The day we crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, we saw wild horses at Assateague, paddled the Atlantic, ate pancakes and a burger, and drove miles and miles through Maryland, where BBQ grills billow at the side of the road. We drove through the Blackwater Wildlife Preserve and saw giant egrets, red-winged blackbirds, an eagle nest, and leaping deer. We crossed the bridge again, which is stunning every time. We saw houses where the corn is growing up around them, visited small towns, bought an Amish cake. Went to the Unicorn Bookshop and picked up a pile of old mass market paperbacks for a dollar apiece. We passed through the picturesque St. Michaels, had lunch in diners and crab shacks, drifted around antique stores, one of which was next to a parking lot filled with dozens of tractors.

At Assateague the wild horses are sacred. The land was ours before it was theirs, but they have been there for four hundred years now, and the humans have ceded precedence to the horses. As such, when a horse drifts onto the beach, the lifeguard stands up and starts yelling: “Guys! I need you to be ready to get up and move your stuff. Move your food away from the horses.” A national park worker has a gentle water spray he uses to try and dissuade the horse from coming down to the sunbathers, but the horse doesn’t mind that. He just walks right on by. He knows he has right of way and plods along the beach, sniffing at deckchairs and coolers. Cars frequently have to come to a standstill while the horses occupy the road. Sometimes they cross leisurely. Sometimes, as on our way off the island, they walk right down the middle of the road, in full knowledge that the traffic will have to wait for them, as it did on both sides. On the beach, the waves were large and whooping, crashing up around our shorts, leaving a long sea mist along the edge where sand and water meet.

I was in Maryland to attend a week-long seminar at St. John’s College. This was a meeting of the Catherine Project, organized as a development session for some of their volunteers. I was accepted as an interloper. This allowed me to understand more about both the Catherine Project (which regular readers will know I believe in very deeply) and about St. John’s and their method of teaching the Great Books. The Project has grown out of the College, guided by its foundress Zena Hitz, whose wonderful book Lost in Thought was part of what contributed to my decision to quit my job and become a writer.

We read Theophrastus on plants, Goethe on botany and Nature, parts of Genesis, and Ecclesiastes. We met twice a day, for two hours, in small groups, led by two session leaders, one of who was a St. John’s tutor. I am unused to seminars. It was not a significant part of my university. Perhaps I have attended more seminars this week than I did in my three years as an undergraduate. I was frequently out of my depth, not only in terms of trying to understand the material (my last formal study of biology was aged eighteen and I am no Bible scholar), but as a seminar participant. Not only am I prone to day-dreaming (when something in Goethe seems relevant to J.S. Mill, or when someone says something that makes a new connection for me in Genesis), but sometimes people express themselves in philosophical terms (either formally or informally) which it takes me some time to apprehend.

But that confusion is a necessary part of the process. I was struck by the way that these seminars moved from confusion to clarity. After a few days, there was a real sense in the room of people working things out, together and individually, and a real sense that we were not only starting to come to terms with Goethe, but to understand plants themselves a little differently. As well as reading, we went outside to draw plants, brought leaves and flowers inside, and cut things open. I sliced open a magnolia bud and pulled a pine cone to pieces, laying it all out on the table. In this way, pulling things apart, comparing them, really trying to see, we began to find examples of what Goethe was talking about, and could not only see the plants differently, but could go back to the text with a better sense of where he was making sense, and where we felt confused about what the truth of the matter might be. The Great Books are not merely books. This is not about words on paper. Great Books call us to the things of this world—to the leaf and the stem and the petal.

The other thing I learnt is that the Catherine Project is becoming a social movement. People talk about “Johnnies”, the graduates of St. John’s who seem to share a certain culture—smoking in the boathouse, singing in rounds, struggling to read in Ancient Greek as a hobby, knowing (as I, alas, do not) the life-changing sensation of studying Euclid—and there is now emerging a set of Catherinites, those people (many from St. John’s, but by no means most of them) who are organizing and leading reading groups, online and in person, which work on the seminar model. I spoke to people from Oregon to Texas to Illinois to New York. I spoke to a software engineer, a therapist, a federal finance worker, several educators, a sexologist, a homeschooler, some graduate students, an artist, a carpenter—and they all share this Catherinite temperament. I felt like I was seeing the beginning of something—there is a shared purpose, a deep love not only of the books, but of this sort of life, this devotion to reading and to the practice of reading in seminars, in which, as Zena says in her statement on the Catherine Project website, “We read, speak, and listen, not to draw a boundary between ourselves and others, but to uncover bonds of human unity.”

Wherever I go, Americans tell me their country is in trouble. Everyone complains about politics. Some tell me this is an empire in decline. Of course, one sees this in the news. But I don’t share this pessimism. This is not what I experience as I drive around. Ah, I am new here, they tell me; you should have seen it before covid, or before 2008, or in the 1990s. Indeed, I had more than one conversation about this in Annapolis. (And then a viral tweet made the same point.) Perhaps I am too much an outsider enamored with the excitement of being here. It is easy for me to drive in wonder around Assateague and go to the National Cryptologic Museum (one of the best museums I have been to in the USA; my favourite is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and to get excited about road-side BBQ. It is easy for me to go to Chick and Ruth’s Delly on Main Street and say to my wife, “ah, it’s just like the diners we used to see in the movies.” I grew up in the golden age of American culture being exported all over the world. I come here and I think of childhood days, lemonade, romance!

And I see that while the Americans are worried about their country, there are still students singing in the boathouse at St. John’s (no, I did not offer my rendition of Lydia) and horses keeping their sacred status at Assateague. The deep woods still line the great roads. It is not too late for America to save itself, not too late at all. It may not even need saving. There has been so much brutality and cruelty in American history—this is not the end, and it may not even be the beginning of the end. Life keeps going apace here. America is still full of the energy that made it great. It is still debating itself and looking to its future. The spirit of childhood days, lemonade, romance! is not gone yet. Even today, as they do every day at 08.30, the customers in Chick and Ruth’s all stood and made the pledge of allegiance, just as you can see them doing in a photo on the wall from 1994.

The last thing I did before leaving Annapolis was to look around the statehouse. I had meant to go all week. This is where George Washington resigned his commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. It moved me very deeply. It is one thing to read about this event, quite another to go and see the room where it happened. This was one of the great events of world history, a founding moment in the idea of America. The room is restored, not original, but it is laid out as it was at the original meeting. It is plain and simple. The members of Congress sat on dining chairs, loaned by local residents. Washington stood before them and delivered a short, emotional speech. That was all it took. Words, which stand for all our ideas and feelings and spirit—words, which have their own web and network of meanings and associations—words made the American Revolution possible, because they were spoken and written and heard and read by people who felt the power of being able to gain and lose power by the means of letters. Words called them to the things of this world. I shall never forget standing in that room.

I take the ending to be deliberately ambiguous. The main theme of the film is that people only pay attention to what is happening right in front of them, right now. That is why the Korea/WWIII situation is always in the background. Everyone is paying attention to the “wrong” thing. So the alien disclosures have to be broadcast as an interruption to make people pay attention. But what they are then paying attention to… Spielberg leaves open! Have they missed the real war that was about to happen, or are they about to enter some empathy-based utopia as Hugo suggests? We don’t know.

The film’s theory of empathy is Humean. Emily Blunt can literally feel what other people feel; she reads their minds. But the film is not interested enough in the sinister implications of this. Colin Firth uses that power in a cruel way, but at the end he just gives in. Did Emily Blunt manipulate him with the “device” or did he just become nice because she reminded him of his wife? It’s lame either way! If the aliens who gave her this power are so empathetic, why do they need the device to perform that function?

At the point when Colin Firth gives in and lets Emily Blunt make the disclosures, the guy who tried to shoot her that afternoon just walks out in disgust, letting the disclosure happen. All of this comes right after Jane re-appears, walks through the middle of dozens of armed men, and hands Emily Blunt the device—these are the same people who have been chasing her for the whole film. That was the point of the plot.

So, when Emily Blunt then delivers a message from the alien, are we supposed to think that empathy has just been used as a means of take-over by the aliens? If so, how to make sense of the way the two main characters were “activated”? It makes sense that the aliens activated Josh O'Connor fifteen years ago so that he could infiltrate the archive of information about alien visits and release it. But why was Emily Blunt only activated two days ago? She is a TV weather girl, so she has access to the broadcasting system. But she was given her powers by the aliens when she was ten. The mathematical ability they gave to ten-year-old Josh O’Connor led him to his work, but her powers do not… so they either knew the future (nothing else in the movie suggests this) or they just got lucky. And what about Hugo? Is he so amenable to them because he was just a nice guy? Or did they get him too?

I watched the whole thing and had fun, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind this isn’t.