Liberal Arts Blog — “Truth Forever On The Scaffold. Wrong Forever On The Throne.” (James Russell Lowell)
Liberal Arts Blog — Tuesday is the Joy of Literature, Language, Religion, and Culture Day
Today’s Topic: “Truth forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne.” (James Russell Lowell)
In a moment, I’ll get to the topics of the day: James Baldwin (1924–1987), Robert Herrick (1591–1674), and Tisha B’av (August 12–13, 2024). But first a little commercial break.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Repetition is key to memory. But too much dulls the mind and turns you into a bore. A broken record. Today, in the title of the post, I repeat my favorite quote from last week’s collection of quotes.
Because I think it’s so good and so much worth remembering. Remember too that it is a line from the poem, “The Present Crisis,” which “was written as a protest against the Mexican-American War.” And remember that “decades later, it became the inspiration for the title of “The Crisis,” the magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
And it strikes me as so timely. It’s the era of deep fakes and shrinking attention spans. It’s the age of “what’s up” and “what’s new?” My goal is to change that question to: “So what are the seven most important things you learned in your life?” or “What joy is on your calendar today and what have you discovered so far?” or “What civic issue is on your calendar today and has your view on it ever changed? why? or why not?
BACK TO THE SCHEDULED PROGRAM
#1 2024 is the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth. Baldwin was a Black American writer and civil rights activist famous for his 1953 novel, “God Tell It To the Mountain,” and the essay collections “The Fire Next Time,” and “Notes of a Native Son.” What are the best sentences he ever wrote? That’s Part One of today’s post.
#2 Robert Herrick was “a 17th century lyric poet and Anglican cleric” most remembered for one line in one poem. Did he write any other lines in any other poems worth remembering? He is classified a “Cavalier” poet, specialized in the genre of “carpe diem” (seize the day) poetry. Do you remember the title of his most famous poem? Or its first line? Are you a fan of the genre? Of what poem in particular? What is its first line? Please share your favorite line of any poem in any genre. And perhaps the story of why it means so much to you. A few Herrick gems are Part Two of today’s post.
#3 Tisha B’av, I just learned this week, for reasons which I will disclose later if you don’t already know them, is the “saddest day on the Jewish calendar” commemorating the great disasters of Jewish history including the destruction of the First Temple by the Neo-Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70AD.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
PS — The full text of James Lowell’s poem is in the footnote below.
JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987) — novelist, essayist, civil rights activist — four quotes
1. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented mew most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
2. “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up.”
3. “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
NB: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
JAMES BALDWIN — three more quotes, together with the four, an Orion of Baldwin, have you made your first Orion yet? of what? please share. The “Fire Next Time” was Baldwin’s best selling book. The title comes from the African American spiritual, “Mary Don’t You Weep.” The couplet is: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time.” A premonition of a nuclear holocaust?
1. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
2. “It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: it is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
3. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
ROBERT HERRICK (1591–1674) “Gather Ye Rose Buds While Ye May” is his most famous line but, sure enough, there are more good ones. Below the eponymous depiction of the poem by Pre-Raphaelite painter, John WIlliam Waterhouse
1. “Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.” Wow! (See second link below for the poem “Tears Are Tongues.”)
2. The title of the poem of which “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is the first line is “To the Virgins, to make much of time.” On this theme, a poem which rivals this one is Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” which begins, “Had we world enough and time, this coyness, Lady, were no crime.”
3. “Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score; then to that twenty, add a hundred more; a thousand to that hundred: so kiss on, to make that thousand up a million. Treble that million, and when that is done, let’s kiss afresh, as when we first begun.” Now top that! A great poem for math class!
NB: “I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers: of April, May, of June, and July flowers, I sing of Maypoles, Hock-carts, wassails, wakes. Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.”
TISHA B’av — the darkest day on the Jewish calendar, commemorating the great calamities from the destruction of the First and Second Temples and beyond.
The “Western Wall” or the “Wailing Wall” (below) is all that remains of the Second Temple
1. Hamas planned the October 7th massacre to coincide with the Jewish celebration of Simchat Torah, a joyful day of celebration of the Torah which is the foundation for both the Bible of Christians and the Quran of Muslims.
2. Iran is planning a retaliatory attack for the assassination in Iran of the orchestrator of the Simchat Torah massacre (Ismail Haniyeh). That retaliation is planned for Tisha B’av — which, this year, is scheduled for August 12th through 14th.
3. Is this the beginning of a wider war? We are living big history.
BACKGROUND #1 — JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987)
Go Tell It on the Mountain (novel) — Wikipedia
The Fire Next Time — Wikipedia
Notes of a Native Son — Wikipedia
BACKGROUND #1 — ROBERT HERRICK (1591–1674)
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time — Wikipedia
Robert Herrick. Tears Are Tongues.
Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May (Waterhouse painting 1909) — Wikipedia
To His Coy Mistress — Wikipedia
Robert Herrick (poet) — Wikipedia
BACKGROUND #3 — TISHA B’av
Iran plans to attack Israel on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of disaster — report
Report: Iran plans to carry out retaliatory strike on Israel on Tisha B’Av, August 12–13
FOOTNOTE — “The Present Crisis” (James Russell Lowell)
When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.
Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart.
So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,
Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.
For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame; —
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.
Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,
That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea;
Not an ear in court or market for the low, foreboding cry
Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.
Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, —
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within, —
“They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.”
Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey; —
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.
Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes, — they were souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design.
By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.
For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;
Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn.
’Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers’ graves,
Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime; —
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that made Plymouth Rock sublime?
They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past’s;
But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.
They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,
Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires;
Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY INTO FOURTEEN BOOK-LENGTH PDFS:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to words, language, literature, religion, culture.
Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to Words, Language, Literature (eg. quotes, poetry, vocabulary) that you have not yet shared.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
