On the other side, the next block and his apartment.

Clarence waited a second too long. Headlights rushed towards him, sending him back to the curb. In the next gap, he ran and stepped up onto the boulevard. Two quick breaths among the snow-c…

Read more

I never got the tattoo, as I needed that money for other things. Namely, food.

Many years later, I still think of that walk, of my intention.

After graduating, I drove across Canada with a couple of friends in a silver 1985 Volkswagen Golf. It was a beater. Glue didn’t hold the rearview mirror to the windshield. As it turned out, its absence gave a wider view and better focus on the endless spaces that unfolded before us. On a prairie stretch, we drove for two hours before realizing we were going the wrong way.

Spaces became circles when we stopped to meet other hackysack enthusiasts. We joined with strangers, keeping a cloth bag in the air as long as we could, in a parking lot or on a patch of grass. Across the country we found unanimity in the three simple hackysack rules: no hands, no serving to yourself, and ten pushups for saying “sorry.” Three easy things to remember.

Every chance we had, we swam, completing a circuit of freezing, baptismal plunges: Lake Superior, the Yukon River, and the Pacific Ocean in Tofino, British Columbia. Those points joined an immensity of space. Winding roads through Precambrian rock, wide skies stretched across fields dotted with silos, and long climbs though the foothills of the Rockies.

Years later, a Dutch student came to live with me. When I picked him up at the bus station, he first remarked on the absence on buildings or towns on the two-hour ride from Montréal to Ottawa. I chuckled, thinking about the old Volkswagen and our drive north across the scrubland to Whitehorse.

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould wrote of his fascination with the North. On the matter of distance and its natural coupling with solitude, he claimed that “Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.” I don’t know how happy we were after a day’s long drive. But we certainly found another happiness indispensable: joining others by finding another hackysack circle.

In those same university years, I took a Canadian economic history course. The syllabus had only one book: the professor’s own textbook. I can only remember his central argument. Canada, an otherwise improbable nation, had been built through economic agreement and conciliation. Across six times zone, distinct regions, different economies, French and English—on lands long stewarded by Indigenous peoples—all groups found common purpose to build a country. Groups thriving on their own, but better if joined.

In 1867, the Fathers of Confederation wrote the Constitution Act, proposing three aspirational goals: “Peace, Order, and good Government.” Three easy things to remember.

I grew up in Ottawa, a capital chosen in part because of its distance from the American border. The best thing about living in Ottawa is its proximity to Quebec. Growing up, the best parties were always the French parties. The food was better, too. Just across the river, we had a different language, a distinct culture, and a joie de vivre we were welcomed to experience.

In some ways, I have not changed much from that nineteen-year-old version of myself walking to that tattoo parlour. That young man wanting permanent proof of pride in his country.

I now have a new appreciation of that impulse.

Today, I would do far more than burn red ink into my skin to protect what we have.

“Clarence!”

He took a coupl…

Read more

He felt the urge to walk over. Be in its space.

She would be…

Read more

Further down, he stopped outside the Mediterranean Café. In the corner of the window, a handwritten sign sat propped: PALM READING BY DIANA. He peered in fro…

Read more

Switching off the main lights, he moved to the bench, where two gooseneck lamps pooled light across the half-ordered mess. He lowered himself into Hy’s green chair, leaning back, measuring its spring. Piano notes spilled from the old Capitol Theatre speaker on the wall.

“…that was Daniel Barenboim playing the first of Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, Opus 19b. And now, to take us to The World at Six, Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major.”

Beside the soldering iron sat a white plastic medical-surplus box. Digging to the bottom, he pulled out a clamp. The burnished steel felt cool in his hand. He slipped his fingers into the rings and squeezed. The catch clicked free. At the curved end, tiny jaws eased open.

Fixing the clamp to the fleshy mound on his palm, he closed the jaws to the first notch and let the instrument dangle. He swung his hand until the clamp fell into the ashtray. He fixed it to the same spot, closing the jaws to the second notch. A hard shake and the clamp held. Releasing it, he rubbed at the red mark on his skin. He pinched the spot, now numb. He dropped the clamp back into the box, on top of a scalpel.

From under the bench, he pulled out a portable vacuum and switched it on. Its high whine cut through the piano’s soft current.

After tidying Hy’s workspace, he powered off the bench. A woompf, then silence. His hand hovered over the switch before dropping to his side.

He walked to the front of the shop, to the streetlight’s dim veil, the window’s cold press.

Throughout the night, the sway lulled and the clangs found rhythm. At dawn’s breach, the cadence changed. Another state. Another town. North Carolina? Hy stretched his arms, peeled his shoulders from the leather seat back and felt the release of the train’s pull. Squealing wheels oscillated a steady, pitched tone. He reached for th…

Read more

Across the street, he saw them crossing Queen Street. Yes, definitely them. He turned sharply, shrinking forward. The memories came, the predator boys. The swimming pool. The locker room. He pulled at his collar, easing forth a deeper breath.

He crossed the red into a blasted horn.

They must have seen him.

He didn’t dare look back. Instead, he slipped into the foyer of the McDonald’s, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and stared at the tile floor. The smell of grease and burnt coffee. He counted his breaths.

Finally, he stepped outside and turned onto Wellington toward Parliament Hill.

Do I look back?

Don’t look back.

At the gate he stopped before the statue of Galahad, his body curved, bowed into the weight of courage. Beneath the bronze knight, Tennyson’s words carved into the stone:

If I lose myself, I save myself.

Maybe she was between computers, I thought.

She wasn’t. She arrived the same way for every class.

Without drawing attention to herself, she had made a quiet decision to eschew distraction.

I felt strangely nervous.

Most days I look out into a sea of foreheads, with the occasional pair of eyes tilting above laptop monitors. Sure, some students are following the slides. Some are taking notes. Others are almost certainly somewhere else entirely. No amount of charisma or careful lesson planning can compete with the manifold seductions only a browser tab away.

For the next several weeks, I walked into class knowing that I would have the undivided attention of at least one person.

So what did I do?

I found myself preparing more carefully. I walked to class carrying a fistful of fresh markers, determined to earn that attention.

Before teaching, I worked as a DJ. When the dance floor fills, you don’t relax—you work harder. Song selection matters more. You want to beat mix the crowd into the next groove.

I became determined to keep my dance floor of one engaged.

A couple of years ago, I experimented in a Macroeconomics class. I had grown tired of the repeated questions about why some economic events shift a supply curve to the right while others shift it to the left. I encouraged students to draw the graphs throughout class, an effort met with mostly indifference and still more questions.

“Okay,” I said one day. “Give me thirty minutes.”

For thirty minutes, they folded down their laptops while I breathed in the energy of a captive audience, reveling in a pedagogical renaissance.

The same thing happened.

With a captive audience, you work harder.

He shuffled into the kitchen and poured a cup. Rubbing his eyes, he took a sip and looked toward the door. A zipped-up duffel bag. Sunday had said she found a place.

The bathroom door swung open, spilling forth a ribbon of steam.

She stepped into the kitchen, rubbing a towel through her hair. She wore faded jeans and a black Harley Davidson long sleeve, the words spelled in cracked letters across her chest.

“You must be excited?” Clarence said.

“I get the keys at ten.”

“Where’s the apartment?”

“Rooming house,” she said. “Vanier.”

“Not far,” Clarence said. “That’s good.”

“I’m hoping it’s temporary,” she said. “It’s all I can afford.”

“You’ll have your own space.”

“I suppose.”

Her eyes darted toward the door. She dashed across the room and knelt down beside her bag. Whipping it open, she rummaged in a panic, pulling out a tangle of clothes. Plunging a frantic hand deep into the bag, she froze and exhaled. Her shoulders sagged. Palming the small item, she slipped it into her pocket and zipped the bag.

“All good?”

“Ya, it’s cool,” she said. “I gotta do my make-up.”

Clarence grabbed a bowl from the shelf. He reached for the cereal box, shook out some Cheerios, and carried breakfast over to the small Ikea table.

He heard the click of the medicine cabinet and looked over.

Sunday stood at the sink, leaning into the mirror. He watched her in the reflection, lifting an elbow to work the mascara wand through her lashes. Moving closer, she blinked and hinged back for touch-ups. Twisting up the lipstick, she pushed out her mouth, and drew careful lines. Rolling her lips, she capped the tube and collected her toiletries.

“You got everything?”

She looked around the apartment. Walking over to the trunk, she grabbed a hair elastic and rolled it onto her wrist.

Bending down at the terrarium, she tapped the glass. “See ya, Edgar.”

She stood, bringing a hand to her mouth.

“My cigarettes.”

“They’re on the fridge,” Clarence said.

She stuffed the pack in her back pocket and slung the bag onto her shoulder.

“I guess that’s it,” she said.

Clarence pursed his lips and nodded.

“Thank you, Clarence,” she said. “For everything.”

Her hair had dried, soft curls feathered the elegant ridge of her cheekbones. She smiled, the red of her lips startling against the winter pale of her skin. Clarence smiled back, then glanced down at the floor between them.

“I’m glad it worked out,” he said. “With the place.”

“Well, if it’s a shithole, you might see me again.”

Clarence forced a smile and said, “Maybe it’ll be fine.”

“Who knows,” she said, opening the door. She looked up the stairs and turned back, “Wow, don’t need a jacket today.”

“Goodbye, Sunday.”

“See ya, Clarence.”

He watched her climb the stairs, the bag bouncing off her hip. At the top, she hitched the strap higher on her shoulder and slipped from view.

Staring at the crumbling steps, he drew in air that no longer bit. The end of winter dripped water onto the plastic awning, each drop echoing down the stairwell. He closed the door and looked at the empty coat hook, then down at the key bowl.

She didn’t leave the spare.

He thought of running after her, but checked his watch.

Art gives courage.

This past week, however, I rounded the corner to find Prometheus no longer in its usual spot, rotated out of the gallery’s European exhibition.

Only slightly disappointed, I opened myself to new discovery.

That is how I found myself sitting in a darkened room watching Jin-me Yoon’s video installation, Long Time So Long.

The video lasts nineteen minutes. Nineteen uninterrupted minutes of a mostly uneventful scene. Feels radical in today’s world.

In nineteen minutes, I can work through multiple apps on my phone, answering emails, checking my portfolio, scrolling headlines, and stretching my attention across half a dozen tasks. A focus that easily submits to perpetual scatter.

Believing that sustained attention is indispensable for both creating and appreciating art, I settled into the darkened gallery room. Finding the bench uncomfortable, I sat on the floor, leaning against the back wall.

The camera films across an estuary at Iona Beach Regional Park in Richmond, British Columbia. At first, nothing happens. Low, disharmonic hums drift through the speakers. The water appears still, only the shimmer of light across its surface.

Then the eye drifts toward the center of the frame, where a tiny white shape stirs.

One can’t help but stare, trying to determine whether it is a person, a buoy, or a trick of the light.

My gaze wandered, but returned to that single point, searching for confirmation.

Only after several minutes does the eye finally register not just fluttering, but actual movement. With that motion, the video becomes a story, with a discernible subject.

The soundtrack, with its atmospheric drone, becomes suspense building. I was glad I didn’t read the gallery notes until after. Notes that state that “the sound evokes the body’s internal vibrations, reminding us of our connection to the ecosystem and our resilience in navigating overlapping global crises.”

As I sat there, other people entered.

One couple sat briefly then left. An older man wandered in, lingered for a moment, looked down at a guide book, and disappeared.

I stayed.

The tiny white figure continued its journey toward the shore, crossing the shallow water. My mind supplied details the video never confirmed, becoming convinced the figure was female. She wore white from head to toe, crowned by a large, round, futuristic helmet.

Eventually she reached the shore and stood in front of the camera.

Then another white figure appeared, back to the camera. My imagination filled in the blanks again, assigning this one male characteristics. A reminder of my brain’s tendency towards binary thinking. The two occupied the same landscape, only a few feet apart, yet never acknowledged one another. Isolated figures sharing the same space, before the woman disappeared and the man began the march across the estuary.

When the screen faded to black, I stepped into the bright corridor. In the gallery notes, I learned that Jin-me Yoon had created Long Time So Long during COVID-19.

Walking back through the gallery, I started thinking about my own experience of that first lockdown year. Time had expanded. So had landscapes.

Like many people, I went on long walks. Walks that began in Centretown, through the ByWard Market to Sussex Drive, across the grounds at Rideau Hall and into Beechwood. Distances that began feeling ordinary, across traffic-less streets. A city seen through a different lens.

Those walks were like sitting through Yoon’s nineteen-minute video. Neither offered much in the way of spectacle, but both rewarded with the gift of singular focus.

The Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky stated that “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

Perhaps that is what happened to me in that darkened room.

I experienced how art slows perception.

I experienced how art asks us to commit to an undistracted state and simply look.

Back in May, a member in my Facebook reading group mentioned her intention to read Joyce’s opus in June. Her comment was enough incentive for me to throw my own hat in the ring. Encouraged by companions, I knew my pride would help resist any bailing out.  

In the same space where my fellow member pledged her intention, a comment warned, “why would you read a book with over 200 pages of explanatory notes?” I suppose my “why” was to find out what justifies its preeminence as a titan of classic literature. To firm up this “why,” I needed to tune out those who would happily propose alternatives, which may include a thousand other books, re-caulking the bathtub, or weeding the garden.

To train for my Ulysses marathon, my “tempo runs” and “hills” included re-reading both Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (rough prequel to Ulysses) and the book upon which Ulysses is modelled, Homer’s Odyssey. Refreshing myself with both Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and Homer’s themes and structure, I felt confident getting the miles in.

Typically relying on library holds, I made an exception and bought the 980-page Oxford edition Ulysses. The excitement of cracking the first pages of the door-stop text quickly evaporated upon squinting at the tiny font. What is that? Eight-point? Too proud to return it, I placed it on my bookcase and uploaded the font variable e-book.

At first blush, the eighteen episodes seemed manageable chunks. Manageable if one is comfortable with a stream of consciousness, multi-styled text that is both highly allusive and highly elusive. With Odyssean determination, I shored up my resolve despite my wife’s comment, “why are you reading that?”

Halfway through the month, a colleague reminded me of Bloomsday, a day of celebration commemorating the day described in Ulysses: June 16, 1904. Less celebratory, I noted only 33% on my eBook and knew I had to quicken the pace. To that end, I downloaded the audiobook and imagined an Irish uncle reading it to me between swills of his Guinness.

Highly effective, this tactic led to my finishing the book on June 24. After finishing the oft-proclaimed modern masterpiece, I wondered why it is so inaccessible to members of this, the modern age. Perhaps Joyce is the only member of the modern age and we’re all just…pre-modern?

Would I recommend reading Ulysses? Same as whether I’d recommend running a marathon: only if you have the legs for it.

I recently heard of a local book club that discusses only one book: Ulysses. Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Joyce is drawing on a Guinness, slyly grinning at our collective perplexity: “I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.”

To get the attention of his readers, he could have opened with:

These are the times that challenge the character of man.

Or:

These are the conditions that strain the human spirit.

Instead, he wrote:

These are the times that try men’s souls.

After 250 years, that sing-songy sentence has lasting verve.

Why?

Part of the answer lies in the words themselves.

These. Are. The. Times. That. Try. Men’s. Souls.

Eight words, eight beats, all monosyllables. A sentence that marches forward like a drumbeat, in a deliberate rhythm of echoing stressed and unstressed syllables.

THESE are the TIMES that TRY men’s SOULS.

A sentence that moves through a hiss of sibilant s’s.

Rearrange the words even slightly and something significant changes:

Times like these try men’s souls.

The meaning survives, but the cadence is lost.

In First You Write a Sentence, Joe Moran argues that good writing works not only through meaning but through sound. “Chewy words” engage the tongue, lips, teeth, and throat. We do not simply understand them. We hear and feel them.

I thought about Moran recently while listening to an audiobook. One of the pleasures of aural reading is that my ear notices things my eyes might otherwise skip.

Walking through Ottawa’s Experimental Farm on my way to work, I was listening to Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women. Struck by a turn of phrase, I hit the pause button. I pulled out my phone and hit the thirty-second rewind.

Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads.

I listened again. Then a third time.

The image itself is not particularly remarkable - garbage trucks and dusty roads - but the sound stirs. Especially in the middle with the thunder through. Air pushed through with the tongue, a sound that whispers in a sentence that begins and ends with a stressed syllable.

GARbage trucks THUNder through DUST-billowing ROADS

Over the stressed and unstressed syllables, momentum gathers.

Not unlike garbage trucks on a dusty road.

Makes me wonder how many versions Berlin discarded before arriving at this sonic gem.

Long before novels, essays, and audiobooks, stories were spoken aloud. Beowulf, composed sometime between the eighth and eleventh centuries, was created for an aural audience.

For meaning that travels through sound, consider this Old English line:

GRENdel GONgan | GOdes YRre BÆR

Roughly translated:

Grendel came walking, bearing God’s wrath.

In the mead hall, gathered listeners hear the repeated g sounds before they get the meaning.

Grendel gongan, godes ...

The alliteration serves as structure, with the guttural sound, vibrating through the throat, evoking a sound appropriate for a story about monsters and warriors.

Sound that moves through the body before it reaches the mind.

Better Angels is a series of short reflections on great American writers, thinkers, and poets. Artists reminding us of hope in uncertain times.

Abraham Lincoln took office in March of 1861. At that point, seven southern states had seceded, preparing for a war that would begin a month later. In his inaugural address, Lincoln called for the “better angels of our nature” to steady a fractured nation.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies... The mystic chords of memory... will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Here, I take a look at those I consider part of America’s better angels, from Emerson and his public lectures to poet Emily Dickinson and her private prayers, and beyond, to the Reconstruction-era and the Harlem Renaissance, to modern voices that join the same chorus.

In recent days, I have tried to carve out twenty-five minutes for daily meditation.

A word often repeated by the meditation guide is witness. The act of attention. To sit and notice. To resist the pull of headlines, the beeps of notifications, and the endless stream of anxiety-producing news.

A twenty-five-minute escape.

Long before apps and the pox of cellphones, Ralph Waldo Emerson offered a similar prescription in his essay Nature. His concern was not with breathing exercises or mental health, but with wonder.

In his opening paragraph, Emerson asks us to imagine a world in which the stars appeared only once every thousand years. Humanity, he suggests, would be overwhelmed. People would gather in awe. The sight would become the subject of stories and prophecies for generations. Yet because the stars appear every night, we scarcely notice them. They arrive, as Emerson writes, as “these envoys of beauty,” lighting “the universe with their admonishing smile.”

Wonder is always present, but familiarity can blunt it.

For Emerson, the surest guide back to wonder is to recovery our childlike vision.

“The sun illuminates only the eye of the man,” he writes, “but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.”

Not yet burdened by schedules, grievances, ambitions, or regrets, a child sees the world as it is: wondrous.

Emerson found renewal in the woods, where the vigour of childhood seemed to return: “In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child.”

Wonder is something we can always recover.

And, in that recovery, we can not only reclaim wonder, but also imagination: “the long slender bars of clouds float like fishes in the sea of crimson light.”

The child and the artist share this gift. Both look at the world before habit has had a chance to flatten it.

And in that habit, something richer is always revealed.

“The world thus exists to the soul,” Emerson writes, “to satisfy the desire of beauty.”

For Emerson, beauty is not an extra, a bonus, it is one of the reasons the world exists at all.

These thoughts echo John Keats’s famous line:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Despite everything, the world continues to send “envoys of beauty.”

My challenge is to carve the time and space to bear witness.

I was happy to see multiple references to Season One of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective. McKee analyses dialogue scenes between Rust Cohle (Matthew McConnaghey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson). For the philosophical-minded Rust, Mckee points out the character’s higher register with his use of

“abstract, polysyllabic Latin suffixes of ‘-ion’ and ‘ity,’”

Conversely, he exposes the simpler, more accessible language of

“…Marty’s concrete images in iambs (da-DUM) and trochees (DUM-da): ‘alone,’ ‘empty,’ ‘murder.’”

Mckee further states,

“Nic Pizzolatto’s precise word choices contrast the loner Rust and his need for justice against the gregarious Marty and his need for empathy.”

That is, carefully crafted dialogue works below the surface, deepening subtext and shaping character.

Or, as Mckee says, “dialogue has the power to pull a story up through life’s multi-layered strata, thus lifting merely complicated telling into the full array of complexity.”

Halfway through McKee’s book, I began repeating, as mantra, his three, stated purposes of dialogue:

· deliver information (exposition)

· reveal who a person is (characterization)

· move something forward (action)

Beyond these rudiments, McKee expands to other “strata” and how dialogue can also express concealment and revelation, shifts in power, subtext, and micro-turning points where a conversation or plot line can change direction.

Talk about heavy lifting.

Writing workshop groups encourage eavesdropping on buses for ideas, but, as McKee says, “dialogue concentrates meaning, conversation dilutes it.”

To reinforce my understanding, I decided to pick up a favorite book and read it through McKee’s lens. How do authors craft dialogue to “concentrate meaning.”

Rereading James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, I was first struck by how many pages pass before anyone speak.

Baldwin spends a lot of exposition time developing his protagonist, John Grimes. Page after page, the reader gains access to the memories and thoughts of Baldwin’s character on his fourteenth birthday in Harlem.

One can argue that the extended dialogue-less text builds tension for the instance of dialogue when John moves from his bed to a kitchen filled with his two siblings and mother.

The conversation breaks through the surface, giving us a quick characterization of John’s younger brother:

“Don’t let Roy bother you,” said their mother. “He cross as two sticks this morning.”

A few lines later, she sharpens the tension:

“You could talk about your daddy all you want to,” said his mother, picking up her battle with Roy, “but one thing you can’t say—you can’t say he ain’t always done his best to be a father to you and to see to it that you ain’t never gone hungry.”

On the surface, this serves as exposition: hardship shapes the household and Roy resents his father (as does John). Below that, subtext emerges. The character of the father, Gabriel, is hardly angelic. Defending anyone by saying “he does his best” is the surest indication of significant failings. As for moving forward with action, this dialogue loads the spring for deepening conflict between Roy and his father.

Further on in the novel, after more great stretches of dialogue-free text, Gabriel’s sister Florence arrives to stir the pot. After Roy gets stabbed in knife fight, Florence challenges Gabriel’s authority:

“Yes,” said Aunt Florence, “I ain’t heard you ask that boy nary a question about how all this happened. Look like you just determined to raise cain anyhow and make everybody in this house suffer because something done happened to the apple of your eye.”

Florence is Baldwin’s truth-teller. If the mother’s dialogue serves to maintain order, Florence’s dialogue serves to expose the truth. Her comments land hard, directing the reader to the widening inventory of Gabriel’s sins.

Moving to Part Three of the text, The Threshing Floor, Baldwin presents John in a dream-like, ecstatic state, voicing internalized dialogue. John, wrestling with the sins of his father and the burden of inherited guilt, hears voices within himself:

“And I heard you—all the nighttime long. I know what you do in the dark, black man, when you think the Devil’s son’s asleep…”

Through McKee’s lens, this is dialogue at maximum density. At this point in the novel, we know well the breadth of Gabriel’s sins. John’s words are revelation, laced with symbolism.

The words burst the seams of John’s reckoning, allowing for his rite of passage, his coming of age.

He slid on a base layer of ice, arms flying up to catch himself. Steadying, he walked the rest of the way on the crusted edge, sounding out icy cracks.

Above, Jeff’s light flicked out, leaving only the streetlight beam.

He turned back to the quiet street. He squinted for movement between the parked cars. Snowbanks shouldered the sidewalk, absorbing the noise from King Edward, filtering only a faded din, a buzz of current through a wire.

He resisted turning to his apartment, hoping to lose the thought he felt to be true.

She was still there. In his space. He stood with it, feeling the weight.

He ducked under the yellow awning, descending the narrow steps to his apartment.

In the darkness, he reached above the door, tapping the glass globe to blink open the light.

Pulling out the key, he ran his thumb on the steel, his eyes tranced by the slow rubs until the air on his neck grew from cool to cold.

Jiggling the twist on the lock, he pushed through the door into the small hall that suddenly felt smaller.

He dropped the keys in the bowl and picked up Sunday’s coat. He hooked it on the rack. Catching something, he sniffed. A chemical tang scored the back of his throat. He brushed the fur-lined hood, releasing more of it.

The top of her boots sagged on the boot tray. Beside them, residual pools.

His stomach squeezed, pushing the taste of meatball sub into his mouth.

On the couch, the blanket and sheet lay in twisted cords. On the trunk, McDonald’s wrappers and squeezed-out ketchup packs.

“Sunday?”

No reply, only the shower’s hiss.

He stepped into the bedroom. Steam leaked from the crack in the bathroom door. He heard a thud and imagined his giant shampoo bottle rolling on the tub floor.

Back in the living room, he busied himself. He kneeled before Edgar’s tank and tapped the glass. The turtle circled up from his rock, moving in languid swirls, his eyes sending out slow blinks. Clarence grabbed the food tin and tapped in a rain of flakes. Edgar stretched his neck, his toothless mouth working the waterline.

The aquarium light droned.

“Holy fuck!” She stood in a white towel, her eyes wide. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“I didn’t think—” he said, standing up before the green of the glowing tank. “I thought you would—”

“Ya, about that…” she said, tightening the tuck at her chest.

Wet patches of the towel clung, smoothing shape into her hips. Beads of water sparkled on her collarbone.

Clarence fixed his eyes on her face, but the rest of her pulled at the edges.

She pulled a wet strand from her mouth and ran her hand through her hair, stirring free the smell of coconut. Stepping toward him, she touched his forearm with a damp finger. “Lemme get something on.”

At the couch, she folded over and reached for her clothes. Clarence turned away, his eyes resting on Edgar and the humming tank. He turned back. The towel drew taut, her white legs stretching up to the seam. He followed the curve of her spine up to her shoulder to the blurred lines of an old tattoo.

She lifted and turned, holding a hoodie and sweatpants. “Turn around a sec.”

“Sorry—I wasn’t,” he said. “I’ll turn around.”

Clarence looked over at the TV stand. On the floor, empty boxes and VCR tapes lay scattered.

He heard the towel land. Her breath caught as she pulled on her clothes.

“OK,” she said. “I’m decent.”

She moved the twist of linens and plopped down on the couch.

Clarence took the recliner.

“I wasn’t sure when you’d be back.” She moved her hand under her sweater, making circles on her belly. “I was going to leave this morning, but I felt really sick. Something’s off.”

“Do you need to go to the hospital or something?” Clarence said, his eyes drifting to the trunk, to a metal watch tucked under a cheeseburger wrapper. A watch too large for her wrist. Clarence felt his own stomach churn.

“No, I’ll be alright,” she said, reaching over the trunk to palm the watch. “I had a friend bring me some food.” She dropped the watch in her purse.

“Oh, OK.”

“He didn’t stay,” she said, moving to the edge of the couch, her hands folding into her thighs. She smiled, flashing her gapped teeth, gesturing a hand toward him. “Do you mind if I stay another night?”

“ — uh.” His throat narrowed.

“I’ll be fine tomorrow,” she said.

“Ya, I guess so.”

“Do you have any Tums?”

“I’ll take a look.”

Clarence walked to the bathroom and closed the door. It was still damp. Clumps of black hair lay curled in the tub.

He turned on the fan, wiped the mirror, and looked at his face in the streaks.

In English literature, new aesthetic theories reflected the German philosophical trend to synthesize systems of knowledge to create greater harmony. Within this framework, it can be argued that the raison d’être of the English Romantics was to add to a unified system of knowledge. Or, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “to reduce all knowledges into harmony…and form a perfect mirror” (248). Inverting this proposed system, poetry becomes the mirror that reflects the harmony of nature and man, thereby adding to a body of knowledge. This dialectic serves as the blueprint for the aesthetic models presented to us in both William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” and Percy Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry. To that end, these essays propose methodologies that inspire the composition of poetry that provides faithful images of humanity and nature. Availed upon an inspired readership, these images are distilled through individual minds yielding common responses to universal knowledge.

For both Wordsworth and Shelley, the poet stands in the vanguard as a disseminator of knowledge. To uncover universal truths, and improve expressively upon that which “oft was thought,” Wordsworth’s poet relinquishes the elevated language of the neo-classicists to use a more democratic common language. While Wordsworth’s aesthetic is grounded in human experiences of man, Shelley presents a more abstract literary aesthetic. As “hierophant,” Shelley’s poet transcends reality to draw on the source of universal wisdom. While both methodologies differ in significant ways, the object of both aesthetics is the same: to add to a system of knowledge by mirroring man’s experiences.

Wordsworth’s methodology in the “Preface” represents the storming of the Bastille in an English literary revolution. Through his attempt to “excite” the reader, Wordsworth uses the language of the common man. Relieving himself from the pressures and “influence of social vanity,” Wordsworth dissociates himself, not only from the neo-classicists, but also from “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” (Abrams 241). Moreover, any embellishment with linguistic artifice serves only to confound the truth:

Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain maturity…and speak a plainer and more emphatic language. (Abrams 241)

The essence of Wordsworth’s “Preface” can be construed as an attempt to provide a clearer picture of humanity. As testament to this contention, Wordsworth exclaims in the essay’s most emphatic moment: “The subject is indeed important!” (Abrams 243). To focus on the subject, the poet must deny tendencies towards self-aggrandizement and flourishes of “capricious habits of expression” (Abrams 242). Through a simpler form of expression, Wordsworth proposes a purer mirroring that legitimizes poetry as “the image of man and nature” (Abrams 247). In Shelley’s essay, the poet focuses on his subject from a unique vantage, thereby producing fresh insight: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (Abrams 796). As poetry serves to unveil the beautiful essences of man and nature, both writers exercise prudence by addressing any impediments to that unveiling.

As increased industrialization threatens to rob humanity of its beauty, the need to legitimize poetry becomes a major concern to both Wordsworth and Shelley. Wordsworth refers to forces that “blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor” (Abrams 243). Through the combined mind-dulling effects of industrialization, the uninspired public lacks any spirited responses to beauty. Moreover, science redirects man’s passions towards ensuring dominion over the physical world. In this quest for dominance, humanity inevitably suffers. In Shelley’s words, “Man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave” (Abrams 798). As the elements are enslaved, science and technology reign as the primary social agents. As these soulless agents reign, the story of humanity is reduced to a compendium of facts, and the world is enslaved through the deprivation of beauty.

The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. (Abrams 794)

To reclaim humanity from its maligned vision, the poet is responsible for redirecting the focus on “facts” to a more vivifying pursuit of knowledge and truth. Whereas science moves to knowledge to gain dominance over nature, poetry adds to knowledge by achieving harmony with nature.

For both writers, the knowledge distilled through the poetic process is superior to the knowledge derived from all other disciplines. Unjustly, poetry’s knowledge has been neglected, as humanity has been preoccupied with the accumulation of “more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice” (Abrams 797). What needs development is that which produces this superior knowledge; that is, “the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge” (Abrams 798). Imbued with a greater understanding of human nature, the poet must nurture this faculty to dispel factual distortions and impart a richer wisdom. Only by minimizing restrictions on the creative faculty can the poet ensure the authenticity of his imparted wisdom:

The poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician…or a natural philosopher, but as a man. (Abrams 148)

Hardly a restriction, the pleasure principle is the surest indicator of a proper mirroring of the beauty and harmony of the perceived world. Through this truthful mirroring, knowledge and wisdom are subsequently gleaned. In the context of Shelley’s Defence, knowledge is produced only through the accrual of pleasurable experiences:

We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. (Abrams 247)

To produce knowledge, the poet must “pleasure” in the discovery of beauty. Furthermore, that which is produced as knowledge is the Keatsian analogue of beauty: truth. Whereas science dulls the mind with “facts,” poetry redeems the mind with unaltered eternal truths. By liberating himself from the confines of literary and social convention, the poet aspires beyond the knowledge of excessive “political and historical wisdom” to a realm of sublimity.

For both writers, the poet is a mystic through whom a greater spirit moves. As the source of universal truth and knowledge, this spirit chooses the poet as its vehicle of communication. In Shelley’s words:

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought. (Abrams 798)

Just as Shelley subordinates the pursuit of “facts” to the search for beauty, science is made subordinate to the totalizing system of poetic knowledge. While the scientist is temporally bound, the poet “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one” (Abrams 792). Furthermore, the active faculties of science and poetry differ in significant ways: “Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things” (Abrams 790).

Through reason, science highlights our separateness from nature, while poetry, through imagination, confirms our harmony with nature. In the “Preface,” Wordsworth confirms the same notions, albeit more succinctly, of the poet’s access to the infinite and the primacy of the knowledge that poetry represents: “Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man” (Abrams 248). By asserting the necessity of poetry as a knowledge-yielding discipline, Wordsworth and Shelley raise the dais upon which the legislative poet sits. And, with greater influence comes greater responsibility.

Chief among the poet’s responsibilities is to stimulate his capacity for empathy. Only by understanding other men can the poet hope to encourage the necessary veracity. For Wordsworth, the “passions and thoughts and feelings” evoked through the poetic process are “the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men” (Abrams 249). Just as the poet images nature’s harmony through his mysticism, he images man’s passions through empathy. And, while the poet reveals nature’s harmony by liberating himself from the bounds of temporality, he reveals the true nature of man by abdicating his sense of self. In Wordsworth’s words:

..the wish of the poet is to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs. (Abrams 246)

As he loses himself in his subject (man), the poet concretizes “the emanations of reality and truth” with his art. Through this replication process, the poet filters the “painful or disgusting” passions of men to uncover for us the virtuous essence of man.

In A Defence of Poetry, the poet’s depiction of man as virtuous leads to the development of a system of moral knowledge. To prove the enduring quality of the poet’s portrayal of virtuous man, Shelley uses Homer as example. By creating the heroes “Achilles, Hector and Ulysses,” Homer established a template for moral living. As the “auditors” read of Homer’s “immortal creations,” the tendency is to reproduce their virtue:

The sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. (Abrams 795)

Through an admiration for the poet’s creation and imitation thereof, the reader is implicitly following the suggestion of the Delphic oracle: know thyself. As a root of morality, self-knowledge becomes the workable variable in the development of each reader’s moral nature. That is, the reader “strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man” by using poetry as an instrument for gaining in self-knowledge and, by extension, morality. To ensure this flexibility of thought Shelley insists that the poet remain morally impartial:

A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. (Abrams 796)

By removing partiality from poetry, the poet aims to faithfully reflect the true nature of man. From this knowledge of the true nature of man, the reader is inspired to synthesize his own sense of “right and wrong.” By resonating eternal truths, superior poetry remains the fount of continuous revelations “that develop new and wonderful applications” (Abrams 794). As the poet reflects the eternal truths of both man and nature, the fountain of potential syntheses springs eternally.

In their attempts to create a framework for the poetic arts, Wordsworth and Shelley remain ever mindful of the desire of their audience. Borrowing from Horace the principle that poetry must, above all, bring pleasure to the reader, both writers display an intention to write in service of their audience. In response to the notion of man’s desire to understand mankind, Wordsworth provides the truest image possible by stripping the poet of all social and literary conventions.

Unobstructed in his art, and mindful of his subject, the poet provides his reader knowledge of man that serves to inspire greater communal harmony. In response to man’s desire to understand nature, Wordsworth and Shelley denounce the divisive tendencies of science to extol the poet’s ability to reflect the harmony of nature. As the reader is supplied with more invigorating knowledge of both man and nature, he is given the inspiration to create a synthesis of these knowledges. What the poet passes on as the eternal images of man and nature cycles forward in the reader as new ideas and revelations. For Shelley, all humans have the potential to apprehend multiple systems of thought and render them harmonious:

But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. (Abrams 790)

To this end, poetry remains an instrument through which we may harmonize the otherwise discordant elements of man and nature to produce a unified system of knowledge.

WORKS CITED

Abrams, M.H., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Volume 2a. New York: Norton, 2000.

Coleridge, S.T. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 14: Table Talk. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

Better Angels is a series of short reflections on great American writers, thinkers, and poets. Artists reminding us of hope in uncertain times. In 1861, Lincoln called on the “better angels of our nature” to steady a fractured nation. Here, I take a look at those I consider part of America’s better angels, from Emerson and his public lectures to Dickinson and her private prayers, and beyond, to the Reconstruction-era and the Harlem Renaissance, to modern voices that join the same chorus.

I often think back to those time-flattened days of COVID. Two years plus that marked something of a reading renaissance. Not that I ever stopped reading, but I stepped it up in a significant way. Part of my own internal questing, I suppose.

During that time, I began an earnest dive into African-American literature.

The first that holds in my memory is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). The narrator, deliberately unnamed, is forced into several indignities, including a “battle royal,” where he is blindfolded and forced into a brawl for the amusement of rich white men. During the fight, he cannot see, heightening the feeling of the punches. The blindfold off, he watches “a dark red spot of…blood shaping itself into a butterfly, glistening and soaking into the soiled gray world of the canvas.”

Battered, he returns to a world where he can see, but remains unseen:

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass”

By novel’s end, he leaves the South on his mecca to Harlem.

From Ellison, I jumped to the redlined Chicago of the 1930’s and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Redlining was the systematic practice of denying municipal investment to black neighbourhoods. Apropos to that, Wright’s novel opens with his protagonist, Bigger Thomas, killing a giant rat in the cramped apartment where he lives with his family. The novel starts with violence and crests to deeper violence.

It was around this time I discovered James Baldwin.

Baldwin wrote an essay collection, a critical response to Wright’s novel, called Notes of a Native Son. Baldwin had grown concerned that “No American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull.” The problem, for Baldwin, was that Bigger’s agency is summed up in his reaction to white oppression.

A character with a more rounded sense of agency can be found in Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953). His protagonist, John Grimes, is already in Harlem. His journey is inward, not outward. Raised within the church, immersed in its language and judgment, John moves to a realm where he’s compelled to answer his own questions:

“John looked down the line of the armies of darkness, army upon army, and his soul whispered: Who are these? Who are they? And wondered: Where shall I go?”

Like John Grimes, Baldwin renounced the religion of his father.

A couple of weeks ago, I re-read Baldwin’s collection of essays, The Fire Next Time¹.

In it, I was reminded of Baldwin’s warning about Bigger Thomas and the violence of his murderous retribution. As Baldwin states, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

In one of the essays, Baldwin describes meeting the Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. By that time, Baldwin was very much a public figure, making the rounds on talk shows, and making himself a strong voice in the Black community.

Arriving to meet the venerable leader, Baldwin describes the austerity of the scene and the white-gowned women pushed to the edge of the room.

Not long into the conversation, Elijah Muhammad presses with questions as to know Baldwin’s religious position.

In the text, the answer falls with convincing weight.

“I am a writer.”

For Baldwin, his spiritual ascendancy was wrought on the “threshing floor” of his own artistic journey.

And, as a writer, a seer, an empathetic observer, the necessary commitment is to that opposite of hatred: love.

He slid on a base layer of ice, arms flailing up to catch himself. Steadying, he walked the rest of the way on the crusted edge, soundi…

Read more

Read more