Saturday Links
Against “human flourishing,” Cynthia Ozick and Pio Edgardo Mortara, in search of Dupree Bolton, the end of “Image,” the many lives of George Eliot, and more.
Good morning! The phrase “human flourishing” has become something of a buzzword in academia and beyond. In The Lamp, Paul J. Griffiths explains why he doesn’t like it:
It seems at first blush unexceptionable to talk in this way. Who does not want to flourish, to thrive, to be healthy? Who would not support recommendations in any sphere of human activity which contribute to our flourishing rather than detract from it? Flowers, paradigmatically, flourish when things go well—florent flores: you can hear the bidirectional echo between noun and verb in English as well as in Latin—and wither when they do not, in the absence of sun, rain, soil, bees and butterflies for pollination. We humans would surely prefer to do likewise, to find the conditions appropriate to our kind for well-being.
So it seems. And yet this way of talking about what is good for us brings with it unanticipated, unintended, and often invisible damage. It malforms our imaginations by leading us to see what we do and what is done to us in terms of a dualism which is often crude: a sharp division between damage, which detracts from our flourishing, and repair, which supports it. The many particular patterns, events, and undertakings apparent in human lives are then allotted to just one of the two categories. If the former, they are to be removed or minimized wherever possible. If the latter, they are to be sought and nurtured wherever possible. More repair, more flourishing; more damage, less flourishing. The task is to place what we do and what is done to us in one category or the other, and act accordingly.
Image has called it quits: “To our readers, friends, program participants, donors, fellows, award winners, and the writers and artists who have appeared in our pages: thank you for the time, attention, and resources you’ve given Image.”
In Commentary, Cynthia Ozick writes about her early years with her father and her great-uncle, Pio Edgardo Mortara—yes, that Edgardo Mortara:
When I ultimately came face-to-face with Father Pio—the very one, the legend, the scandal—I was myself a child of eight. He had returned to Bologna to visit my father, his nephew; in his mature years it was his habit to seek out this and that remnant of kin, sometimes to proselytize, sometimes not. I was at the time alone in our apartment, darkened by too many draperies and densely adorned lampshades and antimacassars on velvet armchairs, all the heavy assurances of our Bolognese comforts. I let him in, as I had been told to do, prepared to explain that my father was delayed and would soon arrive. In the dining room a bottle of wine had been set out. He declined to sit, and simply stood there, in his long black gown and short black cape. It was as if he had no legs, no arms, only a neck with its Adam’s apple rimmed by a white cloth. His hat, round and black and broad, lay on the table.
He said, “Tua madre è a casa?” His voice was dark and thick, and his speech was no longer like ours. I told him that my mother was not at home. She was dead. His answer frightened me. He spoke it not as a man to a child, but as a child to another child. As if daring to tell a secret. “Anche mia madre è morta,” he said.
In a two-part essay at his Substack, Ted Gioia writes about his “search for the mysterious trumpeter Dupree Bolton”: “This trumpeter caused a sensation on the West Coast when he appeared—unknown and out of the blue—at the close of the 1950s. He made a small number of recordings marked by his blistering speed and unbridled creativity on the horn, and seemed destined to rise to the top. But Bolton was a secretive man, and—unlike every other player on the scene—went out of his way to avoid publicity. It was almost as if he had something to hide. And then he disappeared—leaving the scene as suddenly as he had arrived.” Part two of the essay is here.
Poem: John Talbot, “Kensington Church Street”
Revisiting Vincent Scully’s The Shingle Style Today: “Architectural historians can easily stray into advocacy. Consider Sigfried Giedion, the Swiss author of Space, Time and Architecture and a self-appointed propagandist of early Modernism, or Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who with Philip Johnson curated the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that launched the International Style in the United States. The late Vincent Scully, a Hitchcock student and longtime Yale professor of architectural history, was an advocate too, one of his early forays into advocacy being a book provocatively titled The Shingle Style Today: Or the Historian’s Revenge. Scully’s book was based on a lecture he had given at Columbia University, and any reader who ever attended a Scully talk will hear his bardic tones in the lively text. Published by George Braziller in 1974 and still in print, the slim paperback—barely more than a hundred pages—is well worth revisiting.”
The many lives of George Eliot: Francesca Wade reviews Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question in The Nation:
“A Note on Names,” near the start of the book, offers a deft overview of the many transformations Eliot underwent across her life. She was born and baptized in Warwickshire in 1819 as Mary Anne Evans; her father, who managed the estate of a local baronet, sent her to local boarding schools from the age of 5 to 16 to care for her ailing mother. After her death, Eliot stayed on to keep house for her father, and when she was 21, they moved to Coventry. There, she fell in with a group of radical thinkers led by Charles and Cara Bray, whose spirited debates on politics and religion precipitated a crisis in Eliot’s own Christian faith. While she maintained an outward expression of piety until her father’s death in 1849, she began to translate David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, which questioned the factual basis of the Bible, from its original German into English.
In 1851, following a brief and recalibrating solo period in Switzerland, Eliot moved to London and changed her first name to Marian. The subtle shift announced a new beginning. In the capital, Eliot joined the Westminster Review, a left-wing journal founded by Jeremy Bentham, previously edited by John Stuart Mill, and recently acquired by John Chapman, a friend from Coventry who had published her translation of Strauss. Chapman was determined to create a platform for the latest thinking on science, politics, religion, and society, and he found in Eliot one of his most valued writers of caustic commentary as well as a skillful editor and business manager. The experience offered Eliot an apprenticeship in writing and editing as well as in complicated relationship dynamics: She briefly lived with Chapman, his wife, and his mistress, her burgeoning attraction to her mentor seemingly remaining unrequited.
Kay S. Hymowitz reviews Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class: “Hard-knocks orphan sagas are common in world literature, but Henderson’s story is extraordinary—and not because of cruelty, loss, truancy, and addiction, though there is plenty of that. It’s not extraordinary because of an uplifting story of triumph over adversity, though Troubled is a particularly impressive example of that, too; now in his early thirties, Henderson has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge. No, Troubled is extraordinary because of its author’s ability to mine both the grief of his childhood and the challenges of his rise into an elite world.”
Sean Durns reviews David Reynolds’s Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him: “Meant as a successor volume of sorts to Churchill’s own 1937 work, Great Contemporaries, which examined the lives and careers of 25 of the parliamentarian’s peers, the book explores the great British war leader through character sketches of eleven of his contemporaries. Reynolds is no stranger to Churchill. The famed Cambridge historian and frequent BBC presenter has authored numerous works and narrated several documentaries on the legendary British prime minister. But by exploring Churchill’s life through the careers of his contemporaries, friend and foe alike, Reynolds hopes to ‘discover a novel way both to narrate and also to interrogate this remarkable life.’”
Robert VerBruggen reviews Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America: “His point is not that race is irrelevant in modern America but that we should strive to make it so — and that this is best achieved by making race less salient rather than obsessing over it . . . In advancing colorblindness as both the path forward and the ultimate goal, Hughes does not claim to be breaking new intellectual ground. To the contrary, he extensively documents that colorblind ideas and rhetoric were common among those who defeated slavery and felled Jim Crow — people who certainly were not endorsing this principle as a dodge to avoid confronting racism.”
Forthcoming: Hana Videen, The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary (Princeton, February 20): “From gange-wæfran or walker-weavers (spiders) and hasu-padan or grey-cloaked ones (eagles) to heafdu swelce mona or moon-heads (historians still don’t know!), The Deorhord introduces a world both familiar and strange: where ants could be monsters and panthers could be your friends, where dog-headed men were as real as elephants, and where whales were as sneaky as wolves. The curious stories behind these words provide vivid insights into the language, literature, and lives of those who spoke Old English—the language of Beowulf—more than a thousand years ago. A delightful journey through the weird and wonderful world of Old English, The Deorhord is a magical menagerie of new creatures and new words for the modern englisc reader to discover.”
Another fabulous poem.