Paintings from two revered coastal art centers
“Under Dark Sky” (oil on canvas), by Eric Hudson (1864-1932), owned by the Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Monhegan Island, Maine.
The Cape Ann Museum, in Gloucester, Mass., is hosting a special exhibition, “Cape Ann & Monhegan Island Vistas: Contrasted New England Art Colonies,’’ through Feb. 13. It’s in collaboration with the Monhegan Museum of Art & History. The exhibition shows the growth of two of New England’s oldest and most revered summer art colonies. It features works by artists who visited and were inspired by both places, including Theresa Bernstein, Walter Farndon, Eric Hudson, Margaret Patterson, and Charles Movalli.
The village of Monhegan on Monhegan Island, with uninhabited Manana Island in the background. Monhegan has fewer than 100 year-round residents.
The Monhegan Island Light complex is now run as the Monhegan Museum, with exhibits of the island's natural, social, industrial, cultural and artistic history. The lighthouse tower's light mechanism is still operated by the Coast Guard, but the Monhegan Museum owns the tower and opens it to the public on occasion each summer season.
David Warsh: Competing with expansionist China while managing internal threats to our democracy
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
I have, at least since 1989, been a believer that competition between the West and China is likely to dominate global history for the foreseeable future. By that I mean at least the next hundred years or so.
I am a reluctant convert to the view that the contest has arrived at a new and more dangerous phase. The increasing belligerence of Chinese foreign policy in the last few years has overcome my doubts.
It was a quarter century ago that I read World Economic Primacy: 1500-1990, by Charles P. Kindleberger. I held no economic historian in higher regard than CPK, but I raised an eyebrow at his penultimate chapter, “Japan in the Queue?” His last chapter, “The National Life Cycle,” made more sense to me, but even then wasn’t convinced that he had got the units of account or the time-scales right.
The Damascene moment in my case came last week after I subscribed to Foreign Affairs, an influential six-times-a-year journal of opinion published by the Council on Foreign Relations. Out of the corner of my eye, I had been following a behind-the-scenes controversy, engendered by an article in the magazine about what successive Republican and Democratic administrations thought they were doing as they engaged with China, starting with the surprise “opening” engineered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1971. I subscribed to Foreign Affairs to see what I had been missing.
In 2018, in “The China Reckoning,’’ the piece that started the row, foreign- policy specialists Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner had asserted that, for over fifty years, Washington had “put too much faith in its power to shape China’s trajectory.” The stance had been previously identified mainly with then-President Donald Trump. Both Campbell and Ely wound up in senior positions in the Biden administration, at the White House and the Pentagon.
In fact the proximate cause of my subscription was the most recent installment in this fracas. To read “The Inevitable Rivalry,’’ by John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, an article in the November/December issue of the magazine, I had to pay the entry rate. His essay turned out to be a dud.
Had U.S. policymakers during the unipolar moment thought in terms of balance-of-power politics, they would have tried to slow Chinese growth and maximize the power gap between Beijing and Washington. But once China grew wealthy, a U.S.-Chinese cold war was inevitable. Engagement may have been the worst strategic blunder any country has made in recent history: there is no comparable example of a great power actively fostering the rise of a peer competitor. And it is now too late to do much about it.
Mearsheimer’s article completely failed to persuade me. Devotion to the religion he calls “realism” leads him to ignore two hundred years of Chinese history and the great foreign-policy lesson of the 20th Century: the disastrous realism of the 1919 Versailles Treaty that ended World War I and led to World War II, vs. the pragmatism of the Marshall Plan of 1947, which helped prevent World War III. There is no room for moral conduct is his version of realism. It is hardball all the way.
My new subscription led me to the archives, and soon to “Short of War,’’ by Kevin Rudd, which convinced me that China’s designs on Taiwan were likely to escalate, given President Xi Jinping’s intention to remain in power indefinitely. (Term limits were abolished on his behalf in 2018.) By 2035 he will be 82, the age at which Mao Zedong died. Mao had once mused that repossession of the breakaway island nation of Taiwan might take as long as a hundred years.
Beijing now intends to complete its military modernization program by 2027 (seven years ahead of the previous schedule), with the main goal of giving China a decisive edge in all conceivable scenarios for a conflict with the United States over Taiwan. A victory in such a conflict would allow President Xi to carry out a forced reunification with Taiwan before leaving power—an achievement that would put him on the same level within the CCP pantheon as Mao Zedong.
That led me in turn to “The World China Wants,’’ by Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese politics and history at Oxford University. He notes that, at least since the global financial crisis of 2008, China’s leaders have increasingly presented their authoritarian style of governance as an end in and of itself, not a steppingstone to a liberal democratic system. That could change in time, she says.
To legitimize its approach, China often turns to history, invoking its premodern past, for example, or reinterpreting the events of World War II. China’s increasingly authoritarian direction under Xi offers only one possible future for the country. To understand where China could be headed, observers must pay attention to the major elements of Chinese power and the frameworks through which that power is both expressed and imagined.
The ultimate prize of my Foreign Affairs reading day was “The New Cold War,’’ a long and intricately reasoned article in the latest issue by Hal Brands, of Johns Hopkins University, and John Lewis Gaddis, of Yale University, about the lessons they had drawn from a hundred and fifty years of competition among great powers. I especially agreed with their conclusion:
As [George] Kennan pointed out in the most quoted article ever published in these pages, “Exhibitions of indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country” can “have an exhilarating effect” on external enemies. To defend its external interests, then, “the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”
Easily said, not easily done, and therein lies the ultimate test for the United States in its contest with China: the patient management of internal threats to our democracy, as well as tolerance of the moral and geopolitical contradictions through which global diversity can most feasibly be defended. The study of history is the best compass we have in navigating this future—even if it turns out to be not what we’d expected and not in most respects what we’ve experienced before.
That sounded right to me. Worries exist in a hierarchy: leadership of the Federal Reserve Board; the U.S. presidential election in 2024; the stability of the international monetary system; arms races of various sorts; climate change. Subordinating all these to the China problem will take time.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.
UMass at Lowell engineer working on new ways to track Alzheimer’s
BOSTON
“Joyita Dutta, an electrical engineer from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has devoted much of her time to aiding in the fight against Alzheimer’s Disease over the past decade. Her expertise, specifically in image processing and artificial intelligence, has been crucial to this important fight since 2013. With a new funding award, Dutta now has the opportunity to expand her research.
“This funding award, a five-year $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, will allow Dutta to develop new models of brain imaging to track the progression of Alzheimer’s. The award was originally awarded to Massachusetts General Hospital, which in turn selected her for the project. The computer models Dutta intends to develop with the new funding will be able to predict the buildup of ‘tau tangles,’ proteins that can cluster into tangles in the brain and are associated with the cognitive decline found in Alzheimer’s patients. According to Dutta, UMass Lowell is an ideal place for both her teaching and this type of complex research.
“‘On a campus you are around an enthusiastic bunch of young minds and that is very energizing,’ Dutta said, adding that the university leaders ‘have provided incredible support in helping make all [her] research happen.’
Cumnock Hall at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell
Chris Powell: Yes, married people are healthier and more prosperous than unmarried folks
—Graphic by Samuel James
A black tie wedding reception held at the Society Room in Hartford, Conn. It needn’t be this fancy!
MANCHESTER, Conn.
You’d never know it from the constant clamor by Connecticut’s news organizations and politicians about “domestic violence,” but the wisdom of the ages may still apply insofar as two people can keep living as cheaply as one — at least if they can stand each other. Not all married people in Connecticut or throughout the country are trying to kill their spouses.
For a study published Oct. 5 by the Pew Research Center confirmed the old saying. The study reported that married and romantically partnered couples in the United States are more prosperous and healthier than single people.
The study’s bad news is that the married share of the population has been declining for 30 years and a larger share of the population now remains single well into adulthood.
Of course in theory single life may leave people with more options. Unfortunately their greater chance of getting stuck in poverty or illness may curtail their options. While in some respects people curtail their options by marrying, in other respects their greater prosperity increases their options.
The growth in the single adult population implies the disaster that the country long has been facing with childrearing. Children can’t have too many people to love, protect, and encourage them, but these days millions of children are lucky to have even one parent or guardian and so they start life at a disadvantage, compounded by government’s failure to draw policy conclusions from studies like this new one.
xxx
What has the Republican Party done this year to earn the resounding approval it has gotten in the most recent national poll by the Gallup organization?
Nothing. The Republicans have just sat around like everyone else watching as the incompetence of President Biden and his administration makes the country miss Donald Trump.
According to Gallup, more people now consider the Republicans superior to the Democrats on both economic issues and international affairs. Some polls even show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical presidential rematch in 2024, though it is hard to imagine Biden maintaining the necessary stamina for even another year.
Of course 2024 is a long way off. But campaigns are already starting for next year’s elections for Congress, and the Democratic majorities there are paper thin. A switch to Republican majorities seems likely.
More than dissatisfaction with the Biden administration would be required to make next year’s Republican nominations for governor and Congress desirable in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut. But in addition to crime, Connecticut is full of serious issues that state government long has overlooked. Maybe the national polls will encourage Connecticut Republicans to try getting more relevant.
xxx
Now that the supply of dollars has been cut off with the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Afghanistan, Reuters reports that officials of Western governments and the United Nations are working to turn the spigot back on to prevent the country’s economic collapse. The new theocratic fascist Taliban government is no more capable of running the country than the puppet regime was. Indeed, Afghanistan is hardly a country at all, more like a grouping of medieval tribes.
The plan, Reuters says, is to get money to the Afghan people without also underwriting the Taliban. This is a silly delusion.
For a gangster regime like the Taliban easily can confiscate whatever it wants from the people, and any money sent to and kept by the Afghans will make them more content to be ruled by the gangsters. But hunger and general privation may encourage Afghans to overthrow the regime.
The Biden administration’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan forfeited to the Taliban military equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Taliban can sell that equipment to Iran or China and already may have begun to do so. In any case under U.S. occupation the Afghans had their chance to build and sustain a decent government. Being so primitive, most Afghans couldn’t have cared less, and the United States was stupid for thinking they ever might have cared.
If the Afghans are hungry or need medicine, their country has great mineral wealth and can sell the mining rights to China, which, having a gangster regime itself, will have no problem underwriting gangsters elsewhere.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
‘Sorrows of injustice’
Harriet Beecher Stowe House, in Brunswick, Maine, where, between 1850 and 1852, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her husband taught at Bowdoin College in the town.
“I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows of injustice I saw.’’
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), New England writer and abolitionist, on her momentous 1862 book Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Cruel slaveowner Simon Legree assaults Uncle Tom in the novel.
‘Passing ghosts’
Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.
— “November Night,’’ by Adelaide Crapsey (1878-2014), an American poet. Originally from Rochester, N.Y., she taught at Miss Lowe's School, in Stamford, Conn., from 1906 to 1908, after which she taught at Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., for two years.
Filing away calm moments
“Dusk III (detail)” (encaustic, oil and 23-karat gold leaf on panel), by Dietlind Vander Schaaf, in her show “We Are Poems,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Nov. 3-28. The gallery says that her paintings evoke brief moments of balance and stillness.
She lives in Portland, Maine.
Moulton Street in Portland’s Old Port section. The city is a major arts center.
— Photo by Bd2media
Todd McLeish: Some photographers are dangerously disturbing birds
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The increasing popularity of bird photography and the desire of photographers to showcase their images on social media is raising concerns that birds are being harassed and disturbed, leading to potentially harmful effects on their health.
Bird-conservation organizations around the globe, from the National Audubon Society to Britain’s Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds, are asking bird photographers to avoid getting too close and reminding the photographers of the codes of ethics that many wildlife photography organizations have established.
Local wildlife advocates have noted that it’s also an increasing problem in Rhode Island.
“It’s definitely a problem here, and it’s getting worse,” said one longtime birder who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. “There are more photographers, and there are more forums that photographers can post their photos on. It’s an ego trip for them. They want to post their photos and get likes, and that leads them to harass the birds.”
Laura Carberry, refuge manager at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s Fisherville Brook Wildlife Refuge, and Rachel Farrell, a member of the Rhode Island Avian Records Committee, said getting too close to wild birds can pose serious dangers to them. Birds see people as predators, and when people approach, the birds must stop feeding and instead exert extra energy they may not have to escape the area. They also may be forced to leave their nests unattended, making their eggs and chicks vulnerable to predation, thermal stress, or trampling.
When a rare European bird was discovered at Snake Den State Park, in Johnston, R.I., last year and birders and photographers flocked to the site to observe the visitor, some photographers chased the bird across a farmer’s fields to get better photographs. Birders say that is a common occurrence whenever rarities are discovered.
Owls are particularly sensitive to disturbance, Farrell said, and the managers of Swan Point Cemetery, in Providence, have resorted to putting yellow caution tape from tree to tree around an area where great horned owls have nested in recent years to keep photographers from going too close.
“I remember seeing a photographer banging a stick against the bottom of a tree to get an owl to come out of its hole,” Farrell said.
Other birders recalled when a photographer played a recording of a screech owl for so long that one of the nestlings almost fell out of the nest because it was so distressed by the recording.
According to Carberry, Audubon has occasionally had to close parts of its refuges when owl nests have been discovered because photographers go off trail and disturb habitats to approach the nest. The organization has asked birders not to report where owls are nesting until after the breeding season to reduce the problem.
“We often tell people that if the bird is looking at you, you’re too close,” she said.
It’s not just a problem with photographers, however. Some birdwatchers are also at fault for similar behaviors. Some will play audio recordings of bird songs to attract the birds out into the open, for example, a practice condemned by ornithologist Charles Clarkson, the director of avian research at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island.
“The daily energetic demands of birds are extremely high, even when they are not actively nesting,” he said. “Distracting birds from essential tasks — foraging, preening, defending territory — can leave them in an energy deficit, which is difficult to make up,” he said. “To lure birds in using taped calls can have serious negative consequences for individual birds and even local bird populations where taped calls are used regularly. It’s best to leave birds be and use your own power of observation to find as many as possible.”
How to resolve the problem is unclear. Enforcing codes of ethics is difficult, and speaking up sometimes results in abusive responses. The Atlantic Flyway Shorebird Initiative is surveying birders and bird photographers to assess the scale of the problem and to see if educational messaging and communication tools could be developed to address the issue.
“I think folks lose sight of what they may be doing to the species they are trying to get a glimpse of or take a photo of,” Carberry said. “They should always think of the bird first and think if they are impacting it in any way. I think that if they put the birds’ needs first, they would be more careful about approaching a nest or getting a little too close.”
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.
Ike: ‘Don’t join the book burners’
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has cancelled a lecture to have been given by distinguished University of Chicago geophysicist and climate scientist Dorian Abbot on whether the climates of planets outside of our solar system can sustain life. Crazily enough, Professor Abbot’s talk was prevented because some identity obsessives at MIT and elsewhere were angry that he criticized the current obsession of many colleges and universities with “diversity, equity and inclusion’’ -- in admissions and hiring – that is, as the institutions define those three qualities. He has suggested that they may be creating serious new inequities in the process. Maybe, maybe not.
But surely a university as rich and powerful as MIT, a place that like most institutions of higher education, is supposed to be devoted to free inquiry and debate, however unpopular (or untrendy), can do better than this. Pathetic!
I remember vividly how Dartmouth College allowed the racist and demagogic Alabama Gov. and presidential candidate George Wallace to speak at the college in 1967. Yelling protesters interrupted his speech, which he ended early, after which the car he was in was surrounded by protesters in what came to be called “The Wallace Riot.’’ But the college admirably defended his right to speak.
And, in a commencement address at the same college in 1953, President Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, told the graduates, in an attack on the McCarthyism that had infected his party:
“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book....”
That’s what you should hear at a university. (Ike, by the way, also served as president of Columbia University.)
And dragging in CVS
Look at the misleading graphics by hitting this link.
It’s not them….
Consumers should be aware of a brazen new scam going around. But then scams breed like flies in the Great Dismal Swamp of the Internet. This one leads off with “Congratulations! A CVSReward has arrived!’’
People are being sent emails that most people would associate with Rhode Island-based CVS Health, the pharmacy chain. It’s all under “CVSReward’’. The emails involve taking a survey for which some (or all?) respondents receive a “free gift” of, say, a watch. The recipients allegedly are only charged for shipping and handling.
But in fact, the recipients are charged for the full price of the watch, from an outfit identified as “Elite Horology,’’ plus of course “shipping and handling’’.
Do CVS, the Federal Trade Commission and other authorities know about this? Is there a security gap at CVS that lets these con men obtain customers’ email addresses?
Elite’s phone:
(phone: 888-534-9649)
Questions/comments on this site: Email rwhitcomb4@cox.net
Snarls at sunset
“Dog Park at Dusk” (watercolor on cradled board, encaustic), by Nancy Whitcomb, a Providence-based artist and member of New England Wax (newenglandwax.com)
Mystical physics
“The Mystic Alone Sees the Sun Aglow at Midnight,’’ (tar and gold leaf on canvas), by Christopher Volpe, in his show “Alchemy and After,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Nov. 3-28. Art New England says:
“Christopher Volpe’s paintings are stark conduits of the inherent oppositions between human beings and the natural world.”
He lives in Hollis, N.H.
Monument Square and Hollis Town Hall
Cross-species resemblance
“{During our hunting season} there’s a lot of noise, and now and then we hear a bullet slap into the clapboards, and once in a while we have to stop husking corn and go up in the woods and bring out a wounded hunter. Bringing out a wounded hunter wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to listen to his companion say how he looked like a deer.”
— John Gould (1908-2003), Maine writer and humorist
20th Century poster
Even ‘real men’ will drive this Ford electric pickup truck
President Biden test-driving a pre-production Ford F-150 Lightning at Ford's Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, in Dearborn, Mich.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A huge swath of American drivers and the electric utility industry are waiting for a pickup truck. Not just any pickup truck, but one that could change the way we get around and, for many, how we work.
The pickup truck that’s expected to cause the Earth to move is the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning. Electric utilities are keeping a wary eye on it and so is an enthusiastic public, jamming Ford’s order books ahead of the arrival of the first trucks next year. Year after year, the gasoline-fueled F-150 has been America’s best-selling truck both for work and pleasure.
In Texas and much of the West, the pickup truck is more than a vehicle: It is a symbol of a way of life and the freedom of the open road. It fits the cowboy inheritance.
But it is also a vehicle for work. Many kinds of work depend on pickup trucks and the Ford F-150 is the leader. Dodge Ram and Toyota Tundra are right behind Ford in this extremely competitive and profitable market.
Builders, carpenters, painters, farmers, delivery services, along with others beyond enumeration, use pickup trucks as the base of their business activity.
In Texas, they are preferred transportation for many individuals and families. With an extended cab, a pickup truck is a car with load-carrying capacity, having the ability to tow a boat, a horse trailer, or a camper with ease.
But they also are luxurious. The interior and the ride of the modern pickup truck is a thing of beauty, the automobile crafters’ art at its zenith. If you haven’t ridden in one, try it. You may never want to stoop to a car again or settle for an SUV, which is a halfway point to the glory of the American pickup truck.
With the Ford F-150 Lightning, workers will be able to plug such electrical equipment as saws, pumps and drills into their trucks.
But there is something else generating grand expectations: It is that the Lightning, if it works as advertised, will turn millions of skeptics into buyers.
All-electric pickup trucks will have a revolutionary impact, especially where driving a truck is the norm. For millions in the South and the West, the new pickup trucks will make electric vehicles socially acceptable, destigmatized. No longer will EVs be the effete preserve of the coastal elites.
That will be a breakthrough for EVs in general and will have a significant impact on the rate at which they are adopted and, consequently, on the rush to install charging infrastructure.
Still, there will be a range of issues. Ford says the basic Lightning (at about $42,000) will have a range of 230 miles; one with two batteries and additional horsepower, costing an additional $10,000, will get 300 miles. If the power-takeoff features are used for operating equipment, the mileage will come down.
Nonetheless, the Lightning is expected to streak across the automotive sky and supercharge the popularity of EVs. If the Lightning performs as expected, it will usher in a whole family of all-electric pickups. It will also speed an increase in demand, which the auto factories won’t be able to meet in the immediate future.
The utilities will have to get ready, too.
Texas, which has one of the largest, if not the largest, penetration of pickup trucks per capita, may be facing electricity shortages in the years ahead. Data companies have been moving to the state, putting a strain on electricity demand.
Andres Carvallo, a polymath friend, is a former electric utility executive and now is a principal at CMG Consulting and a professor at Texas State University. He points out the possible stress on electric utilities. “ERCOT [Electricity Reliability Council of Texas] is about an 80-gigawatt energy market at peak capacity today. There are around 22 million registered vehicles in Texas,” he says, “If they were all-electric and each had a 100-kWh battery, they would require 2,200 gigawatts to charge at the same time. So how do you manage the gap?”
Down the road, Texas and the rest of the country is going to need an awful lot of new, clean electricity.
Of course, there won’t be 100 percent deployment of electric vehicles for many decades, and they won’t all be charging at the same time. But this shouldn’t escape the electric utilities, which have to plan now for then.
When real men start driving all-electric rigs, things will happen — revolutionary things.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
‘The more barrels, the more Boston’
Boston Harbor and East Boston from State Street Block in mid-19th Century
— Photo by John P. Soule
"Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans, and the rest, are the names of wharves projecting into the sea (surrounded by the shops and dwellings of the merchants), good places to take in and to discharge a cargo (to land the products of other climes and load the exports of our own). I see a great many barrels and fig-drums, piles of wood for umbrella-sticks, blocks of granite and ice, great heaps of goods, and the means of packing and conveying them, much wrapping-paper and twine, many crates and hogsheads and trucks, and that is Boston. The more barrels, the more Boston. The museums and scientific societies and libraries are accidental. They gather around the sands to save carting."
— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
iberty Mutual, a NEC member, has given the Boston-based nonprofit Bridge Over Troubled Waters its largest ever grant of $2.5 million. This grant will help the organization combat homelessness amongst teenagers and young adults and expand its supportive-housing initiatives.
Bridge Over Troubled Waters is a nonprofit with an annual budget of over $10 million that provides services to over 2,000 people between the ages of 14-24 per year. In 2018, the nonprofit used a $1.1 million grant from Liberty Mutual’s foundation to open the “Liberty House” in Dorchester. “Liberty House,” one of the many housing initiatives of the organization, is home to young people who took advantage of other Bridge programming and are now living independently, responsible for paying monthly rent as well as other bills. With this latest grant, Bridge Over Troubled Waters will use the funds to expand the “Liberty House” arrangement, serve more homeless people, and upgrade computers and other equipment.
“I call them about legal work, real estate work … it’s not just financial,” Elisabeth Jackson, Bridge Over Troubled Waters’s executive director, said of Liberty Mutual. “It’s really understanding what we do and what we’re trying to do with our young people.”
The New England Council celebrates Liberty Mutual’s commitment to ending homelessness in the New England region.
Don Pesci: Simone Weil’s faith amidst the world’s agonies
Simone Weil (1909-1943)
VERNON, Conn.
When you were very young, in college, you ran across some authors, almost by accident, who took your breath away, so lucid and creative were their minds. And you promised yourself – someday I will return to your table and feast again on your wisdom. Will it be as nourishing then. you wondered, as it is now?
Simone Weil (pronounced VEY), whom Albert Camus thought was the most courageous person among the writers of his day, some of them, including Camus, literary giants, was hauled into the Christian faith by the following George Herbert poem:
Love (III)
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
Weil, whose parents were of Jewish background, was strongly tempted to join the Catholic Church but resisted, she wrote in letters to Father Jean-Marie Perrin, a member of the Dominican order, because she felt her place was outside formal structures. She could best serve from the outside, looking in. And she loved what she saw.
Five years after her soul had been besieged by Christ, she knelt for the first time at the shrine in Assisi and persuaded herself at last to say the Pater Noster daily with such attention that she felt at each repetition Christ himself had “descended and took her.”
Her’s was a hard mind and brilliant, like diamonds. Her religious experiences did not – could not – separate her from the agonies of daily life. She was driven by the wild horses of her personality never to separate herself, in any fashion, from the misfortunes of others. For this reason, she refused for a time to leave Paris, then occupied by Nazis. She eventually joined Gustave Thibon, a lay theologian in charge of an agricultural colony in the south of France. Later, she would petition Charles De Gaulle to parachute her into Paris. He refused.
She worked in the vineyards with peasants until her health, always fragile, broke down. At first Thibon mistrusted her motives. She had already attained a reputation in Paris as a radical intellectual, and here she was perversely “returning to the soil,” eating what peasants ate, sleeping as they slept, clothed in poverty, and giving lectures to them on the Upanishads.
In time, Thibon became closely attached to her – as did many others with whom over the years she had established close contact. It was to Thibon that she entrusted her journals and occasional jottings, which he decided to publish after her death, caused in part by her refusal to eat any more than French soldiers had at their disposal. She died in exile, in London, in 1943.
Fr. Perrin, the anvil upon which she hammered out her thoughts on Christ, was a great friend and confidant. In the introduction to Waiting on God, a invaluable collection of Weil’s letters and essays, Leslie Fielder writes, “One has the sense of Simone Weil as a woman to whom ‘sexual purity’ is as instinctive as breath; to whom indeed any kind of sentimental life is scarcely necessary. But a few lines in one of her absolutely frank and unguarded letters to Father Perrin reveal a terrible loneliness which only he was able to mitigate to some degree and vulnerability which only he knew how to spare: ‘I believe that, except for you, all human beings to whom I have ever given, through my friendship, the power to harm easily, have sometimes amused themselves by doing so, frequently or rarely, consciously or unconsciously, but all of them at one time or another.…’”
For Weil, who suffered from crippling migraines for a good portion of her life, suffering is not a nullity. Nor was it a nullity for Christ pinned to a cross: “…persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry ‘My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?’ If we remain at the point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow – the very love of God… Extreme affliction…is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time… He whose soul remains ever turned towards God, though pierced with a nail, finds himself nailed to the center of the universe…at the intersection of creation and its Creator…at the intersection of the arms of the Cross.”
It is nearly impossible for the postmodern, materialistic mind to believe that such airy effusions are other than poetry, and dangerous poetry at that. But if postmodernism wishes to argue the point with Weil, its arguments will lack conviction; for Weil’s larger point is that the believing Christian is, in truth, a slave to the truth, a convict of Godly love. To attend is to love.
It may shock the shriveled, inattentive mind of postmodern academics that Herbert’s poem, which opened to Weil a window on the splendor of Christ the criminal, is not poetry either. It is the life-giving breath of God.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
‘Embracing chaos to make art’
“Chaos Gives Birth To Being’’ (oil on canvas), by Daniel Heyman, in his show “Summons,’’ at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, Oct. 30-Dec. 31.
Kathleen Tolan in the “Summons’’ catalog essay, writes:
“{T}h giant, squatting on bright green rocks in a blue sea, his body covered with babies crawling on him, being born by him. He points up at a bunch of purple grapes. I think of Dionysus, of the playful lover of life, and I think of the necessity of embracing chaos to make art.’’
The gallery says:
“Daniel Heyman is an artist whose work in drawing, printmaking and painting directs the viewer's attention to contemporary social and political issues. Deeply interested in narrative, he uses images to tell stories that combine a love of history and myth in an effort to provoke discussion and empathy. In his recent “Summons’’ series, Heyman emphatically returns to images without words. His previous effort, the monumental woodcut “Janus’’ from 2019-2020, represents time as an endless string of birth, renewal and death for creatures and ideas. Here, even the very human act of making culture is seen as both creative and destructive, signaling the profound influence Japanese art and culture has had on his work.’’
Daniel Heyman lives in Tiverton, R.I., partly a Providence and Fall River suburb and partly an affluent summer place with a beautiful shoreline and some farms, too.
The Union Public Library, part of the Tiverton Four Corners Historic District, has been operating since 1820.
View from Ft. Barton, in Tiverton
‘Overturns laws of space and light’
Early fall Foliage in the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge, on the eastern shore (the Vermont side) of Lake Champlain
What’s left of late-fall foliage outside Jennings Hall, Bennington (Vt.) college's music building
— Photo by Jared C. Benedict
“In the same way that serious cold seems to invoke a new set of physical laws — altering the way sound carries, making the air less elastic — the {autumn} coloring of maples and hickories and oaks overturns laws of space and light that have been in force since spring.’’
Michael Pollan (born 1955) in Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. A graduate of Vermont’s Bennington College, he’s an author, journalist and professor best known for food-and-environment-related writing.
