Ah, Love Let Us Be True

Well, I’m off to Cannon Beach, not Dover Beach, and on a family trip, not a romantic tryst, but I’ll be with some of people I love most in my life (it’s only too bad Tyson and Jen can’t be with us), but somehow this trip still reminds me of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach:”

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, ‘nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Although I spent my first honeymoon at the Oregon Coast, I associate the coast with much more than romantic love. It’s too immense, too awe-some to limit it to just romantic love, not that romantic loves isn’t awesome.

To me, though, the ocean has always been a place to think. There is something both inspirational and moving about the ocean. As it turns out, I spent my first honeymoon at the beach, but I also drove down to the beach to clear my mind the night I decided to leave my first wife. Perhaps it is the sense of timelessness you sense at the beach that makes it such a good backdrop to make important decisions.

At times I, like Arnold, have felt the “eternal note of sadness” in the grating roar of the waves hitting the beach. I’m afraid I continue to hear it today in the sounds of war from a far shore.

I wish I could have the faith of our leaders that we will ultimately destroy evil, but I find it difficult to have faith that all is well and we can rely on God’s blessings to ultimately solve our problems. God probably wants us to take care of that by ourselves, and it’s increasingly unclear that we are really capable of doing that.

Today, just as on the day when Arnold wrote the lines nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, “we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

As a younger man, I might have put my faith in a lover, but now a wiser, older man, I’ll put my faith in Leslie, Dawn, Rich and, perhaps, most of all, my grandson, Gavin who finds joy wherever he is. (Though I’m sure hoping he doesn’t cry too much at bedtime in that small cabin.)

Perhaps after a week walking the beach, eating at restaurants, and flying kites, I’ll be ready with Jeff Ward’s recent help to come back and tackle transforming this blog into the MT masterpiece that Jonathon seems to expect of me.

(Besides it’s a good thing I’m leaving for a week or I’d be far too tempted to reply to Glenn Reynolds’ quote from Brenden O’Neil that “Rather than indicating a real opposition to Western intervention, our dislike of war seems to capture our fear of doing anything too decisive or forceful. . . . Surely there’s more to being anti-war than just not liking bloodshed…?” and I really don’t need to get dragged into someone else’s battle now, do I, Bb?

Banned Book Project

If you’ve read these pages very often you might have guessed that although I have some strong opinions I seldom come right out and support causes.

I guess part of that comes from having taught in the public schools for so long. In my role as a teacher I didn’t feel comfortable taking sides out of fear that I would unduly influence students. I didn’t want students to blindly accept or reject my views; I wanted them to be able to examine causes rationally and make an intelligent decision on their own.

I guess this reticence to support causes still carries on, but one cause I can support whole-heartedly is the Banned Book Project.

Even while teaching I took pride in the fact that several of the books I chose to teach in my classes were banned. I was proud to include Huckleberry Finn, Grapes of Wrath, and Catch-22 in my Honors American Studies class. My modern literature class included classic works of depravity like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. How in Heaven’s name do books like this make a banned list?

Although I thoroughly disliked the self-centered Holden Caufield, I couldn’t imagine banning Catcher in the Rye, and often recommended it to kids who I thought might like it and who were doing book reports for extra credit. I even created an extra credit report once that had students examine the claim that Holden was a modern-day Huck Finn. While I thought the claim was pure bull, I was perfectly willing to give an “A” to any student who could make a good argument proving his view.

The reality is, though, that I was affected by attempts to censor what was taught. I once voluntarily withdrew a poetry book I liked a lot because of a poem by Ezra Pound. But the same complaint also cited such controversial poems as Emily Dickinson’s “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed.” Obviously the district patron was too stupid to understand that line because he s/he didn’t know what a metaphor was, and s/he obviously didn’t want her/his kid to understand either. God forbid that a kid should actually learn more than the parent.

What’s worse is that I realized after the fact that I and the rest of the English department self-censored what we taught to avoid having to go in front of the school board to justify each and every one of our curriculum choices.

In the end, of course, it’s the students who suffer from such censorship because they see an unrealistic version of the world, a sanitized version that makes them less capable of dealing with the world that really does exist.

If there’s shit out there, and there’s no denying that there is, you’d better be aware of it or you’re going to step in it and make a mess.

Then, again, of course, the patrons can blame the schools for not educating their children.

A Tongue of Wood

It’s amazing how Crane could understand exactly how I felt about writing this blog over a hundred years ago, isn’t it?

There was a man with a tongue of Woodcraft
Who essayed to sin,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of Woodcraft
And knew what the man
Wished to sing.
And with that the singer was content.

As long as you’re here, I’m content to sing with my clip-clapper tongue.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

Although I generally prefer to sit down with a poet’s book of poems, occasionally I enjoy browsing a poetry anthology to discover, or rediscover, gems of wisdom.

It’s been a while since I’ve read any Stephen Crane poetry, so I’d forgotten just how much I liked these short, ironic poems. Here’s one of my favorites:

The Wayfarer

The wayfarer
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that no one has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”

How easy it is to forget just how hard it is to stick by the truth.

No wonder so few politicians can manage to stick to the truth, particularly when their constituents find it equally difficult to abide the truth.

It’s far easier to blame our problems on someone else rather than facing up to them and seriously attempting to solve them, isn’t it?

Doubtlessly there’s another way to solve the problem, one that will allow me to get re-elected.

Doubtlessly there’s another way to solve this problem, one that won’t require me to pay higher taxes.