What Russians Do Not Wish to Know

    December 2024 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Russia’s first war against Chechnya, begun by President Boris Yeltsin in 1994. Chechnya had been conquered by the Russian empire in the mid-nineteenth century in a decades-long and very cruel military campaign that combined the Russian colonization of the area and the genocidal removal of the indigenous population. 

    Later, in 1944, the Chechens and the Ingush were collectively accused of collaboration and banditry and exiled to the Asian republics of the Soviet Union. The conditions of their deportation to the new regions were such that approximately every fourth or fifth one of them perished. Permission to return to the homeland was given only in 1956, and the Checheno-Ingush Soviet Socialist Republic was restored in 1957.

    In both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, Chechens faced a situation that was not about maintaining their statehood but about sustaining their existence. The very being of a people hung constantly in the balance. Large nations do not have such fears or such memories.

    In 1994, rejecting diplomacy and bringing in troops, Russia crossed that line a third time. Encountering resistance, the Russians under Boris Yeltsin did not step back but chose once again the imperial modus operandi — violent conquest of territory accompanied by a punitive policy of subjugation. This choice changed post-Soviet Russia profoundly, blocking the emergence of a potential federalism and laying the foundation for the restoration of an authoritarian system.

    Dzhokhar Dudayev, Chechnya’s first president and a former general in the Soviet Army, said in an interview in 1995 that “Ichkeria has curbed [Russia’s] appetite a little, but it has not stopped it. There will be a massacre in Crimea. Ukraine will clash with Russia on irreconcilable terms. As long as Russism exists, it will never give up its ambitions. Now they call it ‘Slavic’ — under this brand they want to subdue, as in former times, Ukraine, Belarus, to get stronger, and then . . .” At that time, anyone in the Russian democratic camp who criticized the war would nevertheless have insisted that Dudayev was exaggerating. What Russism? What massacre in Crimea? What clash with Ukraine?

    Today Dudayev’s words sound prophetic. The Chechens, with their experience of colonial violence, saw in us what we, the Russians, failed to see. We did not see it because we did not want to see it.

    In the final years of the Soviet Union, on winter evenings, in the dim light cast by the green shade of the table lamp, my grandmother recited poetry to me, from books or from memory. Born in 1908, a former aristocrat, she worked for the publisher of political literature at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She was the only editor of Lenin’s collected works who was not a member of the Party. Her work, her daily bread, was the Soviet language and Soviet words: she freelanced when she retired, doing proofreading at home, and I would peek over her shoulder, amazed. 

    But although she served the Soviet vocabulary professionally, when she spoke she rarely used official turns of phrase or words that smacked of newspeak. She spoke as if there was no Soviet Union outside the window. Even when forced to say “pioneer,” “maculature,” or “regcom” (regional committee), she pronounced them with an intonation that made clear that in her view the words were upstarts, invaders that she had to tolerate.

    I think she feared that I would swallow those words — children put whatever comes to hand into their mouths — and would not even notice that I had been infected, poisoned by Soviet diction, which would pop up in my speech like a chickenpox rash. The poetry that she recited to me was a practice of linguistic hygiene. Nothing written after 1917, naturally — only the classics, only the unmuddied springs of the former language: Tyutchev, Annensky, Fet, Pushkin, and of course Lermontov, the gloomy Romantic. I think my grandmother had a passion for Lermontov because — she never mentioned this — her maternal great-uncles, three young lieutenants, fought at Borodino against Napoleon in 1812, and the images in Lermontov’s poem about the battle secretly stirred her ancestral memory, which she preserved along with her dangerous aristocratic heritage.

    She completed the readings with a lullaby. Most frequently it was Lermontov’s “Cossack Lullaby”:

    Sleep, my lovely baby,
    Hush-a-bye.
    The clear moon quietly
    Looks into your cradle.

    Languor and sleepiness followed. The darkness gathered outside, turning glassy, floating in, night with all its dangerous fairytale creatures, ghosts, and evil beings, trying to break into the house, and my grandmother’s voice came in the same waves, as if from a distance or the depths of time:

    The Terek River flows over the rocks,
    Dark waves splashing;
    An angry Chechen crawls ashore,
    Sharpening his dagger.

    I knew what a dagger was, we had two at home, both war trophies from Germany. One was ornamental, with a dull chrome blade, the handle made from a roe deer leg with the hoof on top — a harmless trinket. But the other one was a bayonet-knife from a German carbine, sharpened, narrowed for trench warfare, for hand-to-hand combat, so that the blade could more easily penetrate layers of winter clothing. Its unpolished blade smelled of death and evil. It was this sinister dagger, a killer’s weapon, that I pictured in the Chechen’s hand.

    The word “Chechen” meant nothing to me. Zero, as if “Chechen” came from the universe of a different language, from beyond the Terek’s existential border. That suited me. I, too, was part of a general silent conspiracy of rejection and complacency and denial. “Chechen” was an opaque ritual name for the absolute Other, the absolute foreigner coming at night with a dagger.

    Grandmother, who usually liked to explain everything, clarified nothing. She just read poetry. Now, as I recall those evenings, for a moment I cannot resist that rhythm, the soundscape of her words. Grandmother put her soul into the reading, saving me from the desiccating disturbances of Soviet speech, handing down to me the ennobling high Russian language. Did she understand that even it could be poisoned by imperial chauvinism and colonialist xenophobia?

    I don’t think so. She, whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were officers, priests, engineers, gatherers of the Empire, would simply not have understood the question. 

    Can ignorance be part of a culture? It certainly can, in a double intertwined role: as a consequence of a cultural superiority complex and as a taboo imposed on the memory of one’s own crimes.

    Consider a small detail: enormous editions of James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Mayne Reid were published in the Soviet Union. (Mayne Reid was a nineteenth-century British writer who came to the United States and wrote adventure tales about the American West and the American South; he has been completely forgotten by American and English readers but he remains popular in Russia.) The communists published Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid, I think, because they could fit his tales under the rubric of “oppressed peoples.” I read every one of their books that was translated and I knew more names of the native tribes of America than of the indigenous peoples of Russia, whose stories seemed uninteresting compared to Indians, tomahawks, warpaths, tribal unions, and battles in distant lands. It is disquieting to consider now, but back then it went unnoticed; my ignorance of my own world was natural, almost physiologically natural.

    Of course, in kindergarten we had to learn the names of the eponymous peoples of the Soviet republics — Armenian, Azerbaijan, Belorussian, Estonian, Georgian, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Russian, Tajik, Turkmen, Ukrainian, and Uzbek — whom “great Rus united forever,” according to the national anthem (which was printed on the back covers of school notebooks). But the smaller nations who did not have the status of a Union republic, the status of a fraternal people, their own pompous pavilion at the Exhibition of the Economic Achievements in Moscow, their own color on the political map of the USSR, or capitals, emblems, flags, national costumes — they were like extras in a movie who flashed by in a shot and were gone, because the action was not about them.

    There were also novels that formed the colonialist canon of Soviet literature; their subject was the enlightenment of the small nations. The ethnic groups were described with the belittling optics of backwardness, insignificance, and servitude from which they were freed by Moscow’s civilizing role, the gift of “great Rus.” There were no alternative optics. It was only in the classics — in Lermontov, for example — that a different aspect appeared, from a previous era: the echo of imperial wars and conquests; but it was an echo that did not resonate with any solid knowledge, because the theme was taboo, hidden by the image of a peaceful annexation.

    On a school trip in the early 1990s to a museum, I had an unpleasant reaction to Vasily Surikov’s famous painting Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia, completed in 1895. From its title I had expected it to depict the overcoming of the harsh climate. Instead it depicted a sixteenth-century battle, and the local tribesmen, clearly unhappy with the appearance of emissaries from distant Moscow, ferociously shooting arrows at the Cossacks, who eventually prevailed. It was so startling, so unpleasant to see, that my eleven-year-old brain came up with a gentler explanation: these were the bad tribes, but there were very few of them. The good tribes, the majority, who were not in the painting, had of course greeted the conquering Cossack with open arms.

    This is anecdotal evidence of the intellectual atmosphere unwittingly absorbed by a child. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to say that Russia, or more precisely, its Russian majority, reached 1994 with a catastrophic misunderstanding of its history, of the long and bloody historical experience that determined Chechnya’s aspirations for independence and also the emancipatory aspirations of other republics.

    What was Russia like in 1994?

    I would note a characteristic feature that is important in the context of this discussion.

    It was already, in my view, a society disillusioned by democracy, which was directly associated with the economic collapse, and afraid of another collapse. The late Soviet Union was a state of controlled fear and regulated violence, I would even say transparent violence. People who had gone through this socialization knew how to read and conform to written and unwritten rules, and their compliance assured them of physical and economic security from the state. I think that, subconsciously, people thought this an important achievement that allowed them to manage their lives and have clear horizons for planning. 

    The paradox of perestroika, or if you will, the trap of perestroika, was that people wanted change for the better without the loss of that base of security, without personal risk. But the opposite happened. I remember the early 1990s: my fifty-year-old father would bring home his wages as a pile of cash, money that had almost no value; he regarded it anxiously, like a man who had been tricked by a magician. My grandmother, who had been a teenager during the Civil War, would remark, “Oh, well. I remember my father giving me a million rubles to buy a cup of sunflower seeds at the market.” She knew that you could live through such times. But for my parents, this was a catastrophe.

    Fears of the future overshadowed for them the concept of responsibility for the Soviet past, even for their own damaged family. Fears of the future forced them to isolate themselves, to expect nothing from the state, and to sacrifice any possible solidarity, trying to survive individually. 

    We watched television every weekend: news of the week and analytical reports. War was on the screen: standard gray apartment buildings, which looked like the ones across the street, destroyed by artillery fire, a burned trolleybus, again familiar to us. Visually this was the Soviet universe, Soviet space delineated in a familiar way. You would think that these recognitions would serve as a baseline for empathy — we lived in the same kind of house, we rode the same kind of trolleybus. But we watched the war news in silence, not grim, not anxious, just alienating. I do not remember a single discussion or a single emotional cry about what we were seeing. The only thing my parents seemed to worry about were my school grades. Now I understand that they were already thinking that I had to go to college in order to avoid the draft.

    We seemed to lack the necessary repertory of human responses. Say a word, any word, and it would require a response, an opinion, a discussion; so it was better, then, to say nothing. After the news came a movie, such as The Odyssey of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. And then we would start talking. 

    On June 17, 1999, my eighteenth birthday, I received a draft notice from the army to appear with my bag at the recruitment office.

    The notice was written on an official form of the USSR Defense Ministry. It was like being drafted into the Soviet army almost a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed. They had printed so many of these notices, in case of a big war and general conscription, that they had not run out of them eight years after the Soviet Union fell. Needless to say, I did not do as instructed.

    In the big cities it would be hard to find a young man who wanted to join the army (the enlistment was for two years of service). The army was seen as a space of total unfreedom, a Soviet relic in which hazing dominated. Twice a year, in spring and fall, the recruiters hunted for young men, who hid and evaded the draft by paying bribes, getting fake medical certificates, and looking for loopholes to stay out of uniform. Draft dodging was a social norm, and people talked about it openly without shame, sharing tricks and contacts. Everyone knew that you would be nothing but a slave in the army.

    The year before, in the early summer of 1997, I went on a geological expedition to the north. At the Leningrad Station several platoons of new border patrol recruits were loaded into the second-class compartment of the train. They were kids just a year older than me. But they didn’t look older. Quite the opposite. Dressed in ugly, uncomfortable, worn uniforms that had no military swagger, they looked like children — short, awkward scions of poor families who lacked the will and the money to hide or to buy their way out.

    It was a base emotion, I confess, this feeling of the natural superiority of a free man traveling on his own business, who belonged only to himself. But in fact it was not the superiority of a free individual at all. It was the superiority of a stronger, more clever, and more agile creature that would never be trapped in the snares of the hunter or caught by the hounds; a feeling laced by a kind of gratitude for the chumps who were the first to fall into the recruiters’ hands, to be fed into the maw of the state.

    The outskirts of Moscow were still flashing by when the lieutenant accompanying the recruits came into our compartment with a cardboard box under his arm. I had noticed the boxes on the platform; they must have contained rations for the road, hardtack and canned goods, and some of the soldiers had already been eyeing them expectantly. “Need some stew, campers?” the lieutenant asked. “I have loads, a hundred cans. And hardtack, too.” We were teenagers, the same age as his recruits. But we were free men with foreign backpacks, with money, and he was sucking up to us, trying to act as if he unexpectedly discovered an excess of those boxes of canned stew, and he wanted to make a little money.

    “Fuck off, creep,” said the senior member of our expedition, experienced in the north country and a doctor of geology and mineralogy. “You’re stealing from the grunts, bastard.”

    “Don’t want any? Fine,” the lieutenant said without a change in his voice or expression and moved on down the car. He came back a few minutes later — without the box.

    We were silent in our car. I was struck by the ordinariness of the officer’s moral indifference, his imperviousness to offense. I promised myself that I would do whatever it took not to end up in that army.

    Those recruits were lucky: it was the last call up before the Second Chechen War, and they served their two years in the north in border patrols, which were not sent to Chechnya.

    I ask myself now why we didn’t resist. It was the 1990s, after all, the time of rallies, strikes, and street actions; our age — schoolboy yesterday, student today — was the age of dissent, of rebellion. It was certainly in our self-interest to protest against a war to which we might be sent, to protest against an army that was still Soviet in spirit and essence. But we did not protest, not as a generation. We had chosen the strategy of individual salvation: some went to college, any college at all, just to get the education deferment; some went into hiding for years; some got health deferments.

    Why didn’t Chechnya become for Russia what Vietnam had been for the United States? Why, given the sight of all the horrors of war on the television news and all the pragmatic reasons for staying safe, didn’t Russia have a mass youth antiwar movement? 

    First, because we inherited the atomizing social tactics of our parents: avoid direct conflict with the state, always seek the private exit, the individual loophole, without thinking about the common fate or the possibility of solidarity. We were far below the level needed to meet the challenges of the time. We were proud — at best — of our personal non-participation in evil.

    Second, we, like almost all liberals, chose the convenient view of the war against Chechnya as merely a matter of political excess, a tragic combination of circumstances, a horrible byproduct, an error of the transitional period that had no decisive significance for Russia’s future as a whole. By localizing and diminishing the significance of the war, we spared ourselves from answering the ultimate question: what was Russia historically, if the Chechens had such a hideous account to settle with it, and were prepared to resist it so stubbornly and for so long?

    Third, if we thought about it, there was just one question at the heart of the war: do nations that are colonized and conquered by an empire have a right to exit? A right to recover political agency? If there had been serious peace talks, these questions could not have been bypassed. But public consciousness in Russia was dominated by the fetish of the “threat of disintegration” and the integrity of the state.

    In December 1994, in his speech to the nation explaining the policy toward Chechnya, Boris Yeltsin said: “Russian soldiers and officers are fighting in Chechnya for the integrity of Russia” — as if Russia would have fallen apart with Chechnya’s exit, as if three years earlier Yeltsin had not signed the Belovezh Accords abolishing the Soviet Union, as if earlier, in January 1991, when the Union still formally existed, as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, he had not recognized the state independence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. But he was not ready for similar steps to be taken inside the Russian Federation. And not only because it was now his domain, the realm of his power. It was, more fundamentally, because he did not perceive the other nations as partners within the Federation with a right to vote. That is why Russia could adopt and finalize the law “On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples” — it was amended in 1993 to state explicitly that these peoples, including Chechens, had been subjected to genocide — and shortly afterward prepare a terrible attack on one of these rehabilitated peoples.

    With its first shot, the Chechen war opened the door to racism. The camouflage of Soviet ideology proclaiming the brotherhood of peoples vanished with the collapse of the USSR, revealing the true face of the imperial nation, confused, no longer certain of its superiority, and therefore angry.

    We need to dwell on this racism a bit, because its cultural and social components make it hard to comprehend the country’s atmosphere if you are an outside observer. It is not like the racism experienced by African Americans, which comes from the long legacy of slavery and segregation. Such institutions did not exist formally in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. And it is not like the contemporary racism against immigrants in the West. After all, the residents of the national republics of the Russian Federation had not moved anywhere. It was Russia that came to them, and conquered them, and did away with their existing state structures, forcibly annexing them into its empire. It was the empire that migrated as it expanded.

    This racism is the rather unusual racism of the conqueror who lives in the same modern state with the conquered in which they supposedly have equal rights. The presence of these conquered nations built into the state system is the source of two contradictory cultural complexes for Russians. The first is a superiority complex, expressed in the idea of Russia’s greatness and the special state-forming role of the Russian people. These conquered territories and nations are natural proof of their imperial destiny. But there is a second complex, a hidden one, which is the Russian complex of alienation and fear. The Russians seem to want to see these other nations as part of the Russian Federation, but only in a purely formal and geographical sense, for the sake of the size of their territory, for the sake of their resources, for the sake of their symbolic scale; but the Russians also do not want them to leave their territories and become free actors in the country’s social life. In other words, their role is that of movie extras, preferably attached to the land. The other complex, the other option, is total Russification, giving up their national identity based on their place of birth and their inherited traditions. The movement of citizens of other nationalities towards the notional “center” of the Russian Federation is perceived as a threat, a challenge to the Russian position as cultural hegemon.

    In other words, Russians want to maintain their comfortable and dominant cultural position to which these “others” must adjust, sterilizing themselves of their ethnic identity, putting on a Russian linguistic mask, learning their masters’ social codes. Russians do not want to face the challenge, the question of responsibility for empire-building, which would rattle or undermine their accidental advantages of birth. 

    In this sense, the war against Chechnya, which “legalized” the alienation of Chechens and Caucasians in general and gave rise to the stigmatizing expression “person of Caucasian nationality,” has irreversibly changed the moral climate in the country. Casual racism, expressed in language and other means of communication, has become almost pervasive; Russians now have an “image of the enemy” with whom it has become habitual to exist.

    Another thing that the war in Chechnya created is Vladimir Putin.

    Not many remember that Putin came to the presidency with a public mandate for war, for a violent solution to the question of Chechen independence. A former KGB officer, Putin made the ultimate turn in political discourse, a turn that has become the new explanation and justification for military aggression. 

    It was the Soviet secret police that were responsible for suppressing the long national resistance to Soviet occupation in Western Ukraine and Lithuania during and after World War II, comparable in scale to the Chechen resistance. And the Soviet agencies invented and used a typical propaganda technique to deprive opponents of political subjectivity, to break the ideological link between resistance and national identity. Nationalist movements and formations and individuals were declared outlaws. They were nothing but bandits, criminal elements who had arrogated to themselves the right to speak in the name of the people, but in reality represented no one but themselves and used the rhetoric of the right to national self-determination only as a camouflage, a disguise for their purely self-serving goals, which were linked to the goals of the imperialist Western powers who sought to destabilize the situation in the USSR.

    The description of the Chechen resistance as banditry was used even during the first Chechen war. But Putin completed this turn in the discourse by shifting the semantic emphasis from banditry to terrorism, thus joining the post-9/11 global trend. In this way, the original meaning of the struggle for Chechen independence, and the historical reckoning between Chechnya and Russia, could be elided. The Soviet model was built on the presumption that the interests of the USSR and the Western countries were immutably opposed. Putin’s model turned out to be more cunning and adaptive: it presumed the possibility of common interests and cooperation in the fight against “world terrorism.”

    The numerous terrorist acts committed outside Chechnya against Russian civilians only reinforced this pattern and allowed Putin to appear not as a colonial despot but as a respectable ally in the fight against terror. It also completely blocked the possibility for the Russian liberal opposition to find solidarity with the Chechens and talk about the Chechen victims of the war. Not that this possibility was very likely.

    And there is another lesson, insufficiently noted, which the Russian leadership learned from their vicious wars against Chechnya. It is the lesson of impunity.

    The area of Chechnya is just over sixteen thousand square kilometers. Kosovo’s area is almost eleven thousand square kilometers. The Russian Bureau of Statistics gives an estimate of about 1.3 million inhabitants in Chechnya in 1994, on the eve of the war. Kosovo’s population in 1991 was almost two million. Chechnya has an external border with Georgia. Kosovo also has an external border, also on the southern side. Chechnya declared independence in July 1991. Kosovo declared independence in September 1991. So the two regions are similar. 

    Yet there is a significant difference between them. The invasion of Chechnya by the Russian army in 1994 did not provoke so much as an irritated diplomatic response from the West, even though Russia at that time was economically weak and dependent on foreign financial aid, which obviously could have been used as a lever of pressure. The West, I believe, feared a scenario of communist revenge, a replay of the Cold War finale, or a scenario of the further collapse of a nuclear power, and therefore it saw no alternative to Yeltsin. In addition, the Russian Federation guarded its nuclear sovereignty. Whereas the introduction of the Yugoslav army against Kosovo in 1998 led to a rather swift and harsh military response by NATO. (I am not considering the earlier dilatory NATO responses during the Balkan wars.)

    What did the Russian leadership realize from this? That the storyline of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, for which the West punished the USSR with political isolation, sanctions, and military aid to its Afghan adversaries, would not be repeated. In two identically difficult situations — a region demanding independence and a forceful intervention by the central authorities, resulting in massive civilian casualties — two categorically different decisions were made. The general conclusion to be drawn, then, was that the West will not enter into direct confrontation with Russia. There will be human rights rhetoric, there will be calls for peace, but even at the level of the economy there will be no decisive pressure. Credit lines will continue to operate.

    I believe that this is a fundamental psychological point about our geostrategic situation, the validity of which was confirmed by the Western policy of appeasement during Russia’s war against Georgia in August 2008. The West forgave Yeltsin and Putin for Chechnya, collectively hoping that this war was just an isolated episode, an excess, and that Russia would adhere to the principles of peaceful coexistence in the future. By doing so, however, an unintended but unmistakable signal was sent: what Serbia cannot do, Russia can. 

    The Balkan wars of disintegration happened in a relatively short period of time. They began (I am simplifying matters) with the attempt of the former federal center — Serbia — to prevent the independence of the former federal republics, which gained international recognition during the conflict, and they ended (conditionally) with Serbia’s attempt to keep Kosovo from seceding, that is, by changing the political geography of Serbia itself. The wars of the collapse of the USSR, which had a more complex national and administrative structure, had a different pace and rhythm. They began with the Transnistrian war of 1991–1992, the war between Georgia and South Ossetia in 1991–1992, the Georgian–Abkhazian war of 1992–1993, the civil war in Georgia in 1992–1993, the civil war in Tajikistan in 1992–1993, and Russia’s first war against Chechnya in 1994. These military actions took place, from a formal-legal point of view, within the boundaries of the newly formed and internationally recognized states that emerged from the former Soviet republics, and from the “breakaway” line, the line of perforation that passed along internal ethnic and linguistic borders, sometimes coinciding with the quasi-political form of the old Autonomous Republic that existed in the USSR.

    Russia participated in various forms in all conflicts beyond its Soviet borders, relying on national or linguistic minorities, but it did not openly or directly try to cede territories in its favor. The mechanism of partial accession — the case of Belarus — through the creation of a loose economic and defense alliance called the Union State, which required no formal loss of sovereignty, was also used. But this relative restraint changed overnight in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and declared it a part of the Russian Federation, in open violation of international law. It also established puppet regimes in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine. A mere twenty years after the start of the first war against Chechnya!

    During this period, governments and ruling parties changed several times in the West, and technological paradigms were transformed. The collapse of the Soviet Union, a quarter of a century on, seemed very distant, irrelevant to the present, and finally resolved. But Slobodan Milosevic, with his atrocious and extreme violence, did not, in fact, try to restore the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the full sense of the word. He was trying to alienate the ethnic regions, to let the process of mutual separation take a different course, to get more and give less. And this is also what Vladimir Putin is trying to do, not to restore the USSR in the full sense. Like Milosevic in the 1990s, he is speculating on the trauma of disintegration, on the resentment of the dominant nation, which has been confronted with the linguistic and political subjectivity of its formerly subordinate peoples, with the historical reckonings presented to it. And the fact that such rhetoric is still politically valid, more than thirty years after the formation of the Russian Federation and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and that it has not run out of steam, only testifies to the depth and the stability of the imperial complex within Russia itself, and to the archaic nature of its political structure, which is federal in name only.

    Among the most disgusting, the most shameful, things that Putin has achieved are the Chechen formations killing Ukrainians today.

    Going back to those last years of the USSR, to my grandmother’s reading of poetry, I remember lines that secretly bothered me and caused me bewilderment, lines from Pushkin’s narrative poem Poltava, about the battle in which Russia defeated Sweden in 1709. The Ukrainian hetman Mazeppa had joined Charles XII against Peter the Great.

    Now we would like to wage war
    on hated Moscow!

    and

    But it’s time for Ukraine
    to be an independent power:
    And I raise the banner of bloody liberty
    against Peter.

    These lines disturbed me because they seemed to be absolute nonsense: how could Moscow be hateful for Ukrainians? Why raise the “banner of bloody liberty” against Peter the Great? It was as much a mystery as the question of why the “angry Chechen” crawls along the banks of the Terek. Who is he and what have we done to him? Why is he sharpening his dagger?

    When I re-read these lines today, while monuments to Pushkin are being dismantled in Ukraine, I hear some Russian liberals (as well as Western Slavophiles) comment with palpable bitterness: what does the poet have to do with it? This is cultural heritage! But it is indisputable that the numerous monuments to Pushkin in Ukraine performed a powerful role for the Soviet authorities — a symbolic representation of cultural domination, marking the territory and denoting the hierarchy of cultures and languages within the territory — the primacy of Russian. It would be good to understand this.

    Such talk — the complacent denial of Russia’s continuous oppression of the smaller nations within its reach — is direct evidence that in the thirty years or so since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian culture and the Russian academy have wasted away to nothing, never having tried to engage in at least a minimum of de-colonial self-criticism, in even the slightest recognition of Russia’s historical responsibility to the once conquered or enslaved peoples. This overwhelming responsibility never became part of Russian political thought and Russian cultural development. Russia made a significant leap forward compared to the Soviet Union in terms of the market economy, but in national politics and in its understanding of history and in its attitudes toward national minorities Russia has remained stuck at the level of the USSR, where historical agency was replaced by folkloric surrogates instead of political rights.

    Neither the massive casualties of the two Chechen wars, nor the ferocious destruction of Chechen towns and villages and their ethnic cleansing, nor the invasion of Ukraine have made us fully realize the enormous extent to which Russia was created by colonial violence and continues to be held together by it. I often speak and write on this issue, and my point is that Russia’s imperial and colonial history must be reflected upon, criticized, and discarded. Otherwise a potential security threat will remain for all the states that were once part of the empire. 

    Russia’s history offers tropes of an earlier unity and powerful images of predestined togetherness, while covertly (and sometimes not so covertly) it was busily stealing sovereignties, turning independent states and nations into satellites and vassals designed to follow Russia’s lead. This mentality of aggression can be used also for internal purposes, within the smaller polities themselves, to eliminate attempts at emancipation, and it can be directed outward, beyond Russia’s borders, as in the case of Ukraine, where it insists that this particular territory is not considered capable of self-government. 

    Even within the liberal sector of Russian society, Russia’s colonial past is largely terra incognita, neither carefully studied nor properly problematized. So, alas, the main lesson of Russia’s two wars against Chechnya is that Russian society, and even the Russian opposition, has not learned any lessons from them, neither lessons of humanity nor lessons of historical responsibility. Demanding punishment for the perpetrators and a restoration of justice has never become an integral part of the Russian opposition’s agenda, although before 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine the wars against Chechnya were the main crimes of the Russian regime: estimates of civilian casualties in Chechnya vary, but we are certainly talking about many tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees. 

    And that is partly why we are now dealing with a half-mad dictator waging a bloody war of conquest in Europe: we Russians did not want to understand the nature and the scale of the evil that was growing before our eyes, because that would mean renouncing our own cultural and psychological comfort and questioning our own identity, recognizing its dark side, the ugliness of our path, and acknowledging that we have been and remain for many groups in the past and the present occupiers and invaders, destroyers of national memory, aggressors of language — in a word, villains.

    Wearing Sorrow

    Under the pearl-hued sky of Paris, as a welcome spring breeze ruffled the trees above, I walked with a friend through Montparnasse Cemetery to pay our respects to a long-dead artist we both admire. As we wove our way through the marble headstones, we passed a group of people convening around a grave. At first, I assumed that they, like us, had come to visit a long-buried hero or celebrity. Perhaps it was a highly cultured tour group, I thought, noting that the crowd was outfitted in brightly colored shirts and pale jeans. But as we passed by, I suddenly spotted the hearse parked around the corner. I paused, briefly—there was one, no, two men in black suits, heads bowed. The rest, though casually dressed, were similarly postured, all standing around an opening in the soft earth. This was a graveyard and we had run into a funeral.

    I thought of a passage in Knausgaard’s The Morning Star, in which a man invites a stranger to a funeral. His six-year-old daughter has died and he cannot bear to go alone. The stranger hesitates: he doesn’t have appropriate attire for a funeral, he says. “ ‘For crying out loud, man,’ ” comes the indignant reply. “ ‘It’s a funeral. Everything’s over. It’s all darkness and misery. Who the hell cares about clothes?’ ” Since I read it, I have been returning to this phrase consciously and subconsciously. It contradicted one of my axioms: clothing is not only about surfaces or trivialities. It ought to reflect the seriousness of an occasion. Was I wrong? Does it actually matter? Does a grieving father really notice if the men gathered at his child’s burial are besuited or in black? 

    Few sartorial traditions governing ceremonies remain. An old and thick tradition of rules and customs has disappeared almost completely. Debates now abound about whether one can wear white to a wedding. The custom of funereal dress has certainly fallen out of fashion. Since the late Middle Ages, plain black has been a symbol of bereavement. By the nineteenth century, there was a sartorial etiquette that governed grief: women’s periodicals outlined the ever-evolving social codes (down to the specific textiles deemed appropriate), and shops dedicated to mourning goods abounded. Black was the ultimate visual metaphor for the despair that attends loss. One was expected to dress for the abyss. 

    George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke is a beacon of radiant sincerity, her faith in God and her devotion to her role as woman and wife total. Following the sudden death of her husband, she naturally clothes herself in traditional mourning attire, worn by widows for a minimum of one year. (Widow’s weeds, they used to be called.) The picture that Eliot paints is apostolic: “The widow’s cap of those times made an oval frame for the face and had a crown standing up; the dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape; but this heavy solemnity of clothing made her face look all the younger, with its recovered bloom, and the sweet, inquiring candor of her eyes.”

    But, as Eliot writes, the attire is not purely an expression of devotion for her late husband. Though Dorothea may not have been in love with Casaubon, she does experience genuine grief in the palpable, sudden destruction of life as she knew and expected it. Mourning dress expresses the enormity of the upheaval, and communicates that upset to the people around her. Her crown of sorrow has a palliative effect. When her sister suggests that Dorothea take it off — Celia considers it a mark of enslavement, not bereavement — Dorothea declines. “ ‘I am so used to the cap — it has become a sort of shell,’ said Dorothea, smiling. ‘I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off.’ ” 

    As the time since the death stretched on, widows were expected to transition from black to grey, and then from grey to a full palette. But the transition had to be instituted with the utmost delicacy. An article in the Pittsburgh Gazette Home Journal from 1904 cautioned: “The discarding of mourning should be effected gradually. It shocks persons of good taste to see a light-hearted widow at once jump into colors from deep black downing as though she had been counting the hours. If black is to be dispensed with, let it be slowly and gracefully, marked by quiet unobtrusiveness.” For the mourner there is psychological wisdom in this gradualism: the slowness of the external transition to vivacity mirrors the slowness of sorrow’s passing. Meanwhile, many nineteenth-century writers — Dickens, Balzac, Baudelaire—observed that the universal European style of black dressing for men cast a funereal spell upon all of society. About the frock-coat style known as le habit noir, Baudelaire observed: “Is it not the inevitable uniform of our suffering age, carrying on its very shoulders, black and narrow, the mark of perpetual mourning? All of us are attending some funeral or another.”

    Death and mourning in the Gilded Age were fashioned by strict codes, but by the turn of the twentieth century the culture loosened. Critics argued that mourning dress trapped a woman in grief. By World War I, the practice was totally abandoned. It was impractical: there were too many dead. Since then, outside of religious communities, visual symbols of grief have by and large disappeared.

    Perhaps the custom was too unforgiving — especially for women who could not afford to purchase an all-black wardrobe for the occasion, a kind of anti-trousseau — but it served a purpose, allowing us to navigate the social world sensitively thanks to such external significations. Our culture suffers for its indifference to such manners and codes, even if the proliferation of them had become unwieldy. Modern mourners live in a culture of increasing casualness and informality, in which they have been bequeathed few methods to communicate grief publicly, silently, usefully. Loved ones die, the world spins on, and people are not reminded to ask how are you? in the old, familiar octave. 

    Death is a difficult subject to broach. It is striking that the Victorians, considered the paramount puritans, did not shy away from mortality. Prescriptions of time for mourning allowed the depth of feeling to be explored, not ignored, and black dress, a visual reminder of the loss, invited deference and sympathy and conversation. Today we avoid these conversations, and perhaps more to the point, we avoid addressing our own feelings about grief. We need all the support we can get, including the garments we wear, to face death.

    Did the father in The Morning Star notice how attendees were dressed at his daughter’s funeral? Knausgaard doesn’t say, but more than likely not. Yet we dress in black at funerals not only out of a respect for the dead, or for those still living carrying their memories, but for ourselves, a quiet moment to mark the new void in our individual universe. The casualization of our lives has come at a detriment, eroding the rituals and ceremonies that set the very foundation of society. We must hold on to this one. A moment to wrap ourselves in the blackness of grief.

    Taking Liberties in Tehran

    The first time I was beaten up by police I was sixteen years old. It was March 8, 2004, and more than four thousand feminists had gathered in Tehran’s Laleh Park to commemorate International Women’s Day. Hundreds of security forces were dispatched to the park to prevent our rally from going ahead. They were especially focused on driving men out of the rally. If women were celebrating “their day,” this could be cast as an ordinary community fair, just like other groups mark “their days,” but if men joined them, this would look like subversive politics. A police officer articulated precisely this “argument” after hitting me with a baton. “If it’s women’s day, what are you doing here?” he said.

    I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and not just because it was my political duty, or because of the electricity of the crowd. The crush was rife with political luminaries. Right before the police attacked, I was chatting with the feminist firebrand writer Nooshin Ahmadi Khorasani. I was a lanky sixteen-year-old in conversation with a superstar. She was running a mass feminist campaign while publishing pioneering texts in women’s studies. We debated Marxism and feminism; she urged me to read more Simone De Beauvoir. And in that same crowd, before and after the repressive batons whirled, we spoke of literature, of the latest novels we had read, of the upcoming plays at Tehran’s City Theater. All of this went together, all of it was our creed. The political theory, but also the plays.

    In that rich company, I was raised to see myself as part of the cultural resistance to the Islamic regime. It represented crude ignorance and we represented sophisticated courage. All of us writers and artists had to submit our works to the censorship boards, at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, or the state broadcaster, or other censorious institutions, and their very responses gave us a sense of superiority. The censors would ask us to cut a description of a kiss in a novel or a women’s ears jutting out of her hijab in a film.

    Ordinary life in Tehran was a form of resistance. Of course we were resisting when we marched in the streets for women’s rights. But we were also resisting when we immersed ourselves in the arts that we loved. There was a symbiotic relationship between these two forms of resistance. We were defending our values when standing up to the police and also when scheduling assignations with our “DVD guy,” who brought all the prohibited movies to our apartments like a drug dealer on the run. “Next week, I can get you some really good stuff,” he would whisper furtively to the salivating cinephiles. “The collected works of Michelangelo Antonioni.”

    We resisted the rule of the mullahs by hosting underground film clubs in apartments all over the city. There we would stay up past midnight watching and discussing prohibited films. Resisters knew that, at the speciously “kosher” cassette shop near Tehran’s central bus station, if you knew the right passcode, the man behind the counter could supply just about any music you could dream of. But an act or an activity didn’t need to be illegal for it to count as resistance. Resistance was also a photography class or a painting class, all legal and above ground, but still a place of gathering for the cultured men and women, who, with our minds, hearts, and bodies, preserved everything that the regime detested.

    The most visible annual occasion of resistance was the Tehran International Book Fair, organized by the aforementioned Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. It was a massive affair which assembled thousands of publishers from all over Iran and beyond, and it was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. It was all legal, sure, but the steady resistance which stretched the political noose in the 1990s and 2000s had forced the government to permit a bit more than it had before, and the book fair still benefited from that struggle. During the presidency of the reformist Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 to 2005, a wide variety of books were suddenly allowed to be published. One could buy Marx and Lenin and Jane Austen and Tennessee Williams. Even if she had to be censored in parts, you could certainly buy Simone de Beauvoir. 

    Oppression is difficult to institutionalize over a people that wants freedom, and the resisters recognize one another in the ceaseless fight against the government’s logistical crackdowns. The obscurantist mullahs and their henchmen might hold almost all the political power, but we persevered nonetheless. And there were so many of us! Despite receiving millions of dollars in subsidies, the pro-regime publishers sat alone in their booths, with few people frequenting them or touching their sumptuous bindings. They watched glumly as, a few steps away, an indie publisher with wares printed on a shoestring attended to a long line of customers. We were legion.

    And this wasn’t only the case in Tehran. I remember spending time in gorgeous southern cities such as Bandar Abbas and Shiraz, and in my paternal city of Arak. Their book fairs weren’t so big, but they existed. A European friend visiting Iran told me about going to a branch of the Book City (Shahre Ketab) chain in a small city and walking in on a well-attended event in which a literary critic was discussing the French novelist Patrick Modiano — and this was before he won the Nobel Prize and the attendant global acclaim. 

    Our golden principle, our iron law, was that we never confused art for politics, and never justified the arts as a political tool. They were sacrosanct on their own terms. That was essential to our existence-as-resistance strategy. My generation rejected what we considered an embarrassing fusion of literature and politics which had been the hallmark of the resistance leaders who directed the revolution in 1979. Influenced by that blighted epoch, the Global 1960s, that generation often measured art simply by how “committed” it was to political principles and how “engaged” it was in political action. Maxim Gorky’s Mother was lauded not because it was a literary masterpiece but because of its transparently political agenda. Enjoyed in the same spirit were the works of the Romanian novelist Zaharia Stancu, not least his novel Descult, or Barefoot, from 1948. Of course the comrades wanted to read a novel about the downtrodden without shoes to wear!

    That attitude represented a rejection of its own ancestors’ reverence of art for arts’ sake. The founders of Persianate literary modernity, such as Bozorg Alavi, Sadegh Hedayat, and Sadegh Choobak, worked in the orbit of left politics and were, at one time or another, card-carrying communists. But their most important works were not ham-fisted defenses of communism; they were delicate meditations on human life. Decades later my crowd was not blindly resuscitating that ethos, but we certainly gained a new appreciation for the likes of Hedayat and we overcame the rigid obsession with the 1960s. One of the most remarkable literary figures of my era was Reza Rezaee, a preeminent chess player who had given up the game for a life of literary translation. In the 1990s Rezaee had translated more than a dozen volumes by chess masters. In the 2000s he set out to save literary masterworks that had been condemned to oblivion because their authors did not have the sanctioned political beliefs. By 2014 he had produced two Persian Nabokov novels and six each of Jane Austen and of the Brontë sisters. Leafing through a decorous Austen novel may not sound much like resistance to you, but that is precisely what it was in Tehran in the 2010s. For decades, a stultifying concept of literature as mere political instrumentalism had dominated. Rezaee scandalized many of his peers by reviving classics of the nineteenth century, with their humane interiority. In our land, art was political not because of any explicit or implicit political content but because it showed that life did not need to be reduced to political slogans. 

    But in rescuing culture from politics, my generation was also rescuing politics from culture. Our indulgence in arts-as-arts didn’t mean abandoning politics-as-politics. Hence the rallies and the patient, day-to-day, strategic work of politics. Feminists who stood for the most emancipatory of visions still voted in the elections held by the Islamic Republic, even though they were severely limited and pitted one caste of regime elites against another. Voting for candidates who could open the civic space, even by just a hair’s breadth, was what had allowed us to have that rich cultural life in the first place. We knew better than to confuse prudence with “normalization,” as American progressives like to call it. Strategies and tactics were always debated — but never on abstract moral grounds and always based on their consequences in the real world. 

    Alas, political patience can only last so long. Gradually, many people in the subsequent generations, worn down by the regime’s ceaseless brutality, gave up on the strategic approach to politics. It is seductive to believe that retweeting political slogans somehow transforms them into reality, and this generation replaced patient politics with brazen activism. They showed remarkable bravery, abundantly on display during the street protests of 2017, 2019 and 2022–23, but they fell short of the sort of patient institution-building that had helped the previous generations achieve real gains. To make things worse, this new generation loves to make a mockery of ours, derisively called the ’80s Kids. “You read all those books just to end up voting for the reformists?” they jeer. Many have abandoned our attitude to both culture and politics. 

    I can hardly blame them. Who can strategize calmly and earnestly while their government shoots their friends in the street? Moreover, the cool-headed incrementalism my generation preached and practiced failed miserably. Today Iran is less prosperous and less free than it was twenty years ago. But replacing books with TikTok reels will not build a better future, either. If there is something to recover from that golden era of Iranian history, it is that political resistance is not enriched or strengthened by encroaching on culture. And art is impoverished by slapping slogans on it. I don’t insist that art must be devoid of politics, not at all, but it must be allowed its own modes of expression. Art must be art and politics must be politics, two separate but essential spheres of human life.

    Istanbuls

    From Istanbul, you can witness the entire changing world and see the sedimentary layers of empires upon which that world was built. On either side of the city, there are Ottoman-style mosques. In their previous lives in Byzantium, some of the city’s mosques were Orthodox churches. Beyond the graveyard of Ottoman and Byzantine imperium, there is evidence of more recent political projects, like the Art-Deco influenced modern architecture of the Turkish Republic, founded a century ago by the revolutionary statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk’s face is inescapable in Turkey: printed on banners the size of buildings, tattooed on women’s breasts, staring down at you in neighborhood cafes. The modern buildings from the Ataturk period appear designed to serve as a physical attestation to Turkey’s rightful place among secular European nations. That secular European ethos, which itself conceals plenty of darkness, has been badly abraded by the country’s recent history. 

    On the ferry ride that connects Asia and Europe in what really is the most beautiful city in the world, I watch the big ships and write down their anthropomorphic names. With appellations like Ana Theresa, Lady Esma, and Johanna, they could be Bob Dylan muses. Later I track the ships’ positions and destinations on websites dedicated to maritime traffic. I try to identify what they are carrying between continents. Some must be transporting grain and sugar, others oil and cars, still others, weapons, contraband, and people. Up close, the ships are beautiful, vertiginous, and terrifying; I can’t look at them without thinking about disaster. From the ferry’s deck, I imagine them as the ship in James Cameron’s Titanic, a fake model vessel being swallowed by a digital sea. 

    In 2023, the extraordinary number of 83,892 ships passed through the Bosphorus. The narrow Istanbul Strait, which military and commercial ships traverse, is the second busiest in the world. Most of the ships sail under so-called “flags of convenience” — microstate tax havens: Panama, Liberia, the Marshall Islands. At first glance, these affiliations are confusing. Shipping used to be tied to the nation-state; the fact that ships sailed under national flags was a source of pride, particularly for the British, and their crews were comprised of well-paid unionized seafarers. Today those well-paid jobs have disappeared. Flags of convenience have made the cost of transportation much cheaper, facilitating the rise of globalization. Seafarers now overwhelmingly hail from lower income countries with scarce labor protections; the old romantic vision of the sailor on the open sea has been replaced with laborers described in the New York Times as “jail with a salary” — low-wage jobs with brutal working conditions.

    The entire world converges on the Bosporus; every major conflict intersects with it. Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, sixty million tons of Ukrainian grain were exported through it each year, transported directly across the Black Sea, through the strait, and into international waters, where it was dispersed to destinations across the Middle East and Africa. Russia’s war brought those grain shipments to a halt, until a deal brokered by Turkey and the United Nations in late 2022 allowed them to start again. Soon Ukrainian corn, wheat, and sunflower oil were once again exported from Ukraine’s southern ports through the Bosporus to the world.

    Meanwhile, there are visible signs of other proximate wars. Every time I leave Kadikoy pier on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, we pass the port of Haydarpasa, where a ship called Conscience has been sitting for months. The Conscience is a “Break the Siege” ship of the Freedom Flotilla, a group that seeks to disrupt the Israeli blockade and deliver five thousand tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza. 

    Turkey now acts as a major geopolitical power broker — it is no wonder, given its geographical location — while at home the government invokes conservative cultural politics. In recent years Istanbul has witnessed the proliferation of new Ottoman-style mosques, an initiative of the AKP or Justice and Development Party, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the past decade, the AKP government has nurtured the religious sentiments of the conservative majority, in an attempt to fuse the Turkish nation with Islamic civilization in the public imagination, an effort detested by secularists who claim it is a regression from Ataturk’s vision.

    The grandest and most recent of the Erdogan-era mosques is the Camlica Mosque, which was inaugurated in May 2019. It is astonishing in scale, as outsized and imposing as the palatial ships on the Bosporus. The Camlica mosque is designed to hold up to sixty-three thousand people; it has an underground parking lot that can hold up to more than three thousand cars. Inside, it is illuminated in a warm amber; the walls are painted with ornate gold motifs infused with bits of turquoise blue. The lights are arranged in concentric circles that resemble the rings of Saturn; the lights look like glass lilies. These are not merely aesthetic choices. The mosque contains almost obsessive historical details and references: the seventy-two-meter high main dome represents the seventy-two nations that live in the city of Istanbul; its six minarets represent the six articles of the Muslim faith. The minarets are exactly 107.1 metres high, a reference to the year 1071, when the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert to secure control of Anatolia. 

    But there are a multitude of Istanbuls. In addition to the pious city cultivated by Erdogan, there are also pockets of deviance, as seen in the derelict Tarlabasi neighborhood near Taksim Square, where brothels operate. Trans sex workers congregate in the street; there is little attempt to conceal the kinds of business anyone is getting up to. Sometimes described as “the most dangerous neighborhood in Istanbul,” Tarlabasi is often swarming with police. In their all-black riot gear and helmets, they look like giant bugs. 

    At a panoramic view, observed from the hill in Uskudar where the Camlica Mosque is perched, or on a ferry ride between continents, Istanbul is vast, civilizational. But up close, in its cramped neighborhoods where it leaves a more personal impression, its charm is not diminished. First, there are the cats. They are everywhere. Sitting opposite solo diners in cafes, eating silver fish on the Galata quay, sitting vigil in windowsills, stealing pieces of cheese from your Turkish breakfast: the city belongs to them. 

    But climbing up narrow staircases of rickety old apartment buildings, it is impossible to shake the idea that all of this is transient. Scientists predict that a major earthquake of a magnitude between 7.2 and 7.8 will hit Istanbul in the next several years, killing tens of thousands of people. The February 2023 earthquake in eastern Turkey killed nearly fifty-five thousand people, underscoring the region’s fragility and instilling earthquake anxiety in the population. Everyone has their own way of managing the background fear, but most shrug it off: If that’s our fate, then that’s our fate. There’s nothing we can do about it. If it comes, it comes. Yet the earthquake is always lurking around the edges of city residents’ consciousness. Even the Camlica Mosque has been built with disaster in mind. In the event of the geological catastrophe, the mosque can serve as an emergency shelter that can accommodate up to a hundred thousand people. Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, I am struck by the fragility of this buckling, lapidary place, and I imagine the buildings collapsing into piles of broken concrete and dust. But the threat only makes the city more beautiful. It must be enjoyed immediately, in the present. Who knows how much longer we have?

    The Complacent Admiration of Courage, or Ibsen and Us

    The production opened with a stutter. Entering through the aisles of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five actors in Ibsen’s Ghosts made their way to the stage and picked up bound scripts that were waiting for them on what would become the Alving family’s dining table, as if getting ready for rehearsal. Ella Beatty and Hamish Linklater began to play the first scene as Regine, the Alvings’ socially ambitious housemaid, and her father Engstrand, a drunken carpenter whom she is doing her best to leave behind. But they spoke in a barely audible monotone, as if they were “marking,” going through the lines while sparing the voice. After a few exchanges, they started over from the beginning, now speaking quietly, conversationally. The third time was the charm: after restarting the scene yet again, Beatty and Linklater finally became Regine and Engstrand, and Ghosts was underway.

    This framing device mostly left critics cold. Was it necessary to remind us that we were watching actors in a play? After the last scene, did we need to be dismissed back into real life by having the cast return with their scripts and slap them down on the table? But the warming-up makes more sense if it is understood as a reminder of the difference not between life and art, but between the present and the past. To leap over the chasm that separates 2025 from 1881, when Henrik Ibsen wrote Ghosts, it may be necessary to back up a few times and build up speed. 

    Starting with its title, the play itself insists that the division between past and present is an illusion. Ordinarily, a ghost is what we call a dead person who intrudes into the world of the living. But Ibsen inverts this supernatural definition. For him, it is the living who become ghosts, as they reenact the behavior of the dead and blindly follow their commandments. 

    The first such apparition in Ibsen’s play comes at the end of the first act, just after Mrs. Alving has finished explaining to Pastor Manders that her late husband, the locally revered Chamberlain Alving, was in fact a drunk and a womanizer. She realized this early in their marriage, when she overheard him making advances to their maid: “Oh, it still rings in my ears, so dreadful and yet so ridiculous — I heard my own housemaid whisper: ‘Let me go, Chamberlain Alving! Leave me alone.’ ” A few moments later, she overhears her son Osvald doing the same thing to Regine in the same room. “Ghosts,” Mrs. Alving shudders. “The couple in the conservatory — they walk again.”

    At the Mitzi Newhouse, a small theater, there was no conservatory; the seduction took place at the lobby door, where it could be heard but not seen. It was an austere production all around, directed by Jack O’Brien, with a functional set and costumes. Only the lighting design by Japhy Weideman aimed for expressionist extravagance. In the final scene, when Osvald collapses into a syphilitic stupor and can only murmur to his mother over and over again, “Give me the sun,” the glare was dialed well past the “bright sunshine” that Mrs. Alving had promised him, as if the world was being erased along with Osvald’s mind, in the way that intense light can obliterate everything. 

    For Ibsen himself, writing for and about the late-nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie meant well-upholstered stages teeming with furniture and objects. His stage directions tend to be lengthy and detailed, as in Hedda Gabler: “Towards the center of the room is an oval table covered with a tablecloth and surrounded by chairs. Further forward, by the right-hand wall, are a wide porcelain wood stove, a tall armchair, a footstool with a cushion and two stools. In the right-hand corner, at the back, is a corner sofa and a small round table.” And so on. 

    Early in his career, Ibsen worked for a decade as a theater manager in Bergen and Kristiania (as Oslo was then called), and had his own ideas about how his plays should be produced. He left these instructions for future productions and continued to include similar descriptions in play after play, as if it were a necessary step in priming his imagination. Realism meant presenting life on stage exactly as the audience lived it at home, so that they could be confronted with the ugliness of that life, which they worked so hard to ignore.

    Ibsen’s contemporaries found Ghosts the ugliest of all his plays. Two years earlier, in 1879, A Doll’s House had been a huge success, selling out a large first edition of seven thousand copies in Scandinavia. (Ibsen’s practice was to publish each new play as a book before it was produced on stage.) It went on to become a hit across Europe, turning Ibsen into one of the most important writers in the world, a position he kept until his death in 1906. The fuel of its success was controversy. Everywhere A Doll’s House was staged, audiences debated whether Nora Helmer was right to leave her husband and children, whether Ibsen was a prophet of liberation or a symptom of moral decay. The timing of his provocation in the history of European mores was perfect. 

    For Ghosts, the book, Ibsen’s Copenhagen publisher raised the print run to ten thousand, but this time there was no controversy: everyone agreed the play was grotesquely immoral, and almost no copies were sold. Two years had to pass before it was staged in Norway. Even many of Ibsen’s former champions were revolted by a play whose message seemed to be that marriage, family, and Christianity are wicked, while adultery and incest are admirable, as long as they are products of what the Osvald calls “the joy of life.” 

    “The joy of life? Can there be salvation in that?” Mrs. Alving wonders. Her own life has been spent in the service of the opposite principle: duty. Urged by her relatives to marry the wealthy Chamberlain Alving, she was so appalled by his character that after a year she ran away to Pastor Manders, the man she really loved. But the pastor overcame his own feelings, withstood temptation, and ordered her to return to her husband in the name of religious principle and wifely obedience: “It is the mark of a rebellious spirit to demand happiness here in life. What right do we mortals have to happiness? No, we must do our duty, madam!” 

    Mrs. Alving’s only remaining hope was for her son. Determined to protect Osvald from the influence of his father’s depravity, she sent him away to school at a young age, and as the play begins he has just returned from Paris, where he is making a career as an artist. Like the Greek tragedians, however, Ibsen believes that there is no escaping the past, and it turns out that Osvald has been doomed by his father’s debauchery after all: he has inherited syphilis, and by the end of the play it will destroy his mind. 

    Syphilis was widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, but it was never discussed openly, and certainly not on the stage. Even in Ghosts the name of the disease is not spoken: Osvald only says that a French doctor has told him he is “vermoulu,” or worm-eaten. This was enough of a hint for Ibsen’s audience. Today it is so oblique that theatergoers unfamiliar with the play might well be baffled about what’s wrong with Osvald and why his mother is so horrified. It doesn’t help that we now know syphilis cannot be inherited the way Ibsen imagined, ticking away in the brain for decades until it suddenly explodes.

    As if that were not wicked enough, Ghosts also brings incest onto the stage. Regine turns out to be Osvald’s half-sister, the child of the dalliance that Mrs. Alving overheard long ago. Yet even when he learns this, he still considers seeking “the joy of life” with her. Meanwhile, Pastor Manders, the play’s sole exponent of conventional virtue, is exposed in the end as a weakling and a hypocrite, willing to pay off the lowly Engstrand to take the blame for a fire that he himself accidentally started.

    All of this made the play a magnet for outrage. When Ghosts came to Britain in 1891, it had to be put on privately because the censor would not approve a public performance. That did not stop the critics from seeing it. William Archer, Ibsen’s first English translator, published an article titled “Ghosts and Gibberings” that collected quotations from dozens of incensed reviewers: “positively abominable,” “absolutely loathsome and fetid,” “a wicked nightmare.” Leading the pack was the Daily Telegraph, which devoted a whole editorial to Ghosts, comparing it to “an open drain,” “a loathsome sore unbandaged,” “a dirty act done publicly,” “a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open.” 

    What makes Ghosts a significant episode in the history of culture, however, is not that the establishment moralized against it, but that its conservative moralism provoked a tidal wave of progressive moralism, which turned out to be vastly more influential. Archer drew attention to the worst tirades printed about Ibsen because he knew that for Ibsenites the slurs were the best compliments. They proved that the playwright’s punches had landed. 

    Revulsion made Ibsen powerful. The Danish critic Georg Brandes — a now forgotten figure who before World War I was one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, as Morton Høi Jensen explained in these pages a few years ago — published long essays about Ibsen in 1867, 1882, and 1898, growing more ardent each time as the playwright’s stature continued to grow. In the last essay, Brandes observed that even at the age of seventy “his works are opposed, ridiculed, loved and worshiped as only a young or comparatively young man’s generally are,” so that “in French and English, such words as “Ibsenism” and “Ibsenite” have been coined from his name.” 

    George Bernard Shaw responded to the controversy over Ghosts with a pamphlet titled “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” in which he argued that the spirit of Ibsen was the spirit of the future. “The pioneer must necessarily provoke such outcry as he repudiates duties, tramples on ideals, profanes what was sacred, sanctifies what was infamous,” Shaw wrote. “What he does it is not given to all of his generation to understand.” But the young understood it, and the young in spirit, because they recognized that many of Western civilization’s official ideas were only apparently alive. In fact they had died long ago, and could now be described as undead — zombies, we might say today, or ghosts, in Ibsen’s image. “It’s not just the things that we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that return in us,” Mrs. Alving tells Pastor Manders. “It’s all kinds of old dead opinions and all sorts of old dead doctrines and so on. They aren’t alive in us; but they are lodged in there all the same, and we can never be rid of them.” 

    As is often the case, never arrived ahead of schedule. When Nora Helmer slammed the door on her marriage in 1879, it echoed around the world. Thirty years later Norway legalized divorce, and today the country has more unmarried couples living together than married ones. When Pastor Manders told Mrs. Alving to go back to the husband she hated, she did as she was told, because he was a minister of God. Today, surveys show that the Scandinavian countries are among the least religious in the world. 

    This evolution would not have surprised Shaw, who made an ingenious diagnosis of the sources of Ibsen hatred. In any society, he writes, seventy percent of its members simply accept established institutions without thinking about them. This majority, whom Shaw (following Matthew Arnold) called Philistines, were not troubled by Ibsen’s attacks on marriage or religion because they found the status quo “quite good enough for them.” The thirty percent who did get upset by such attacks were “idealists,” actively committed to the belief that “the family [is] a beautiful and holy natural institution.” 

    Idealism is ordinarily thought of as a good thing, but Shaw, with his typical love of paradox, turns it into a term of opprobrium. The reason that people are idealists, Shaw argues, is not because they think their ideal is true. It is because they know it is not true, and they fear that if the truth were to be revealed, the family along with most pillars of society would collapse. That is why the idealists wrote nasty articles about Ibsen, one of the rare individuals Shaw considers “realists,” able to describe things as they really are. Idealists hate the realist because they are “terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their hidden thought, at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence.”

    Ibsen is often described as a revolutionary dramatist, but Shaw’s definition makes clear that the revolutionary and the realist are quite different creatures. Both employ shock and destruction, and both claim to see what others do not. But a revolutionary makes war on powerful institutions, sometimes at the price of his own life, while a realist performs euthanasia on decrepit institutions, and sooner or later he is rewarded for it. 

    Nietzsche saw his own mission in similar terms. In 1882, the year after Ghosts, he published The Gay Science, which includes the famous parable of the madman who announces that God is dead. Crucially, Nietzsche’s madman does not say that God ought to die, or that he intends to kill God. Rather, he brings the news that humanity has already killed Him and doesn’t realize it yet. “This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars — and yet they have done it themselves,” the madman declares. This is what Shaw would have called realism — a report on a fact that most people do not wish to acknowledge.

    Like Ghosts, The Gay Science went unread when it was first published, but by the turn of the century it had been recognized as a work of genius, due in large part to the enthusiasm of Georg Brandes, who took up Nietzsche’s cause the way he had taken up Ibsen’s. Unlike Ibsen, however, Nietzsche didn’t live to enjoy his vindication. In an eerie coincidence, he suffered the same fate as Osvald Alving, losing his mind to tertiary syphilis in 1889. At the end of Ghosts, Mrs. Alving is left with the choice of whether to fulfill her son’s last wish and end his life with an overdose of morphine, or allow him to linger on in the way he dreaded — “lying there as helpless as a little baby, incurable, lost, hopeless — beyond salvation.” Nietzsche lingered in a state of imbecility for another decade, unaware that European intellectuals had finally begun to embrace his ideas. He was only fifty-five when he died in 1900. 

    With Ibsen, indignation turned into acclaim even more quickly. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving explains that she sent her son away to school early because “I felt sure my child would be poisoned just by breathing in the air of this infected home,” and Ibsen wanted to force audiences to acknowledge that their homes were equally infected — that all of bourgeois society was steeped in a toxic, decayed ideals. In response, critics insisted that he was the sick one — fetid, leprous, loathsome. 

    The next year he returned with An Enemy of the People, whose hero, Dr. Stockmann, informs his neighbors that the town’s spa, advertised for its curative powers, is in fact “a health hazard of the greatest magnitude,” its waters polluted by runoff from a tannery. He expects to be thanked for exposing this suppressed truth, which will enable the town to avert scandal and ruin by relocating the pipes that feed the spa. He even complacently tells friends that there is no need to organize “a parade, or a banquet, or a subscription list for a token of honor.”

    But when it is revealed how much it would cost the town to close the spa and rebuild it, everyone is determined to hush things up. Dr. Stockmann isn’t too surprised when his brother, the town’s conservative mayor, turns against him, but he is shocked when the editor of the local newspaper, known as a crusader, reveals that he is equally hypocritical and corrupt. Rather than confront the truth, everyone prefers to curse the messenger. “The man who flings such offensive insinuations at his own hometown has to be society’s enemy,” the mayor tells the doctor. 

    In the play’s climactic scene, Dr. Stockmann decides to embrace that accusation. At a town meeting, he declares that a man of integrity must always be an enemy of the people, because “the most dangerous enemies to truth and freedom among us are the solid majority.” Ibsen does not fail to spell out the implications for democracy. If “stupid people make up a quite terrifying, overwhelming majority the world over,” as Stockmann says, then majority rule is a recipe for disaster: “Never in all eternity, damn it all, can it be right for the stupid people to rule over the intelligent ones!” The only way to raise the general level of human intelligence, he concludes, is through eugenics — a program of selective breeding like dog trainers use to turn mongrels into poodles. “Oh, there’s a quite terrifying distance between poodle-humans and mongrel-humans,” Stockmann rages. 

    How cathartic these lines must have been for Ibsen, so often slandered and misunderstood: at last he could pour out his bitterness on the public. In the play Dr. Stockmann pays a high price for his insults: he loses his job, he is evicted from his house, and people throw rocks at his windows. But the story is more complicated. In real life, audiences embraced An Enemy of the People as enthusiastically as they had rejected Ghosts. Contrary to his usual practice, Ibsen didn’t send the script to theaters, but “waited with amused confidence for theater directors to come and beg,” writes his biographer Hans Heiberg. “This they all did, sooner or later. . . . Successes then followed thick and fast.” The Kristiania Theater, which had paid Ibsen two thousand five hundred crowns for the right to perform A Doll’s House, shelled out four thousand for An Enemy of the People.

    Why does an audience line up to buy tickets to a play written by a man who insists that “our entire civic community rests on a plague-infested ground of lies”? Did Shaw err when he estimated that out of a thousand people, seven hundred are Philistines and two hundred ninety-nine are idealists, and only one — Shaw himself, or Ibsen, or Nietzsche — is brave enough to be a realist? Not necessarily. Rather, the formula needs to take into account the speed with which the realist’s radical critique can destroy decrepit ideals — and then replace them, turning into a new kind of orthodoxy. The cultural success of realism disproves its own pessimism. Moral reform turns out to be within its powers. Realism may be another sort of revolution. 

    This is the paradox of progressive moralism, in our own time no less than in Ibsen’s. When Ibsenites in Norway and around the world went to see An Enemy of the People, they were sure that Dr. Stockmann’s wrath was not directed at people like them. Rather, they recognized themselves in his description of “the few, those individuals among us who have embraced all the new, vigorous truths. Such men stand at the outposts, as it were, so far ahead that the solid majority has yet to catch up with them.” At the end of the play, Stockmann famously declares that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” For more than a century, people have left performances of An Enemy of the People applauding this credo and flattering themselves that it refers to them — and thus making a mockery of it. 

    This irony has been unmistakable in the recent spate of Ibsen revivals on Broadway. This year’s production of Ghosts comes on the heels of An Enemy of the People last year and A Doll’s House the year before, all featuring starry casts. An Enemy of the People, whose plot can easily be assimilated to present-day environmental concerns, was especially hailed as a timely inspiration. Last year’s production used an adapted script by the playwright Amy Herzog, who invented lines for Dr. Stockmann that quiver with twenty-first-century eco-piety: “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” he says in this version. As for the line about the strongest man being the most alone, Herzog simply cut it, telling the New York Times, “That didn’t resonate with me at all.” 

    Ibsen himself could not have invented a clearer fable of the way idealism curdles into cant. Sam Gold, who directed the production, said that he saw a likeness between Dr. Stockmann and Greta Thunberg: “It takes a certain kind of personality to be able to say the truth, to be able to say you’re all being nuts, and I am just going to tell you the truth, which is we’re destroying the world.” But the message of An Enemy of the People, at least as Ibsen wrote it, is not that pollution is bad. It is that people — even liberals, maybe especially liberals — get very angry when you tell them truths that they do not wish to hear. In this way, with their prior certainty of their own rectitude, the audiences who are applauding Ibsen are also domesticating him, robbing him of his original force. 

    Nothing makes certain liberals happier, meanwhile, than telling truths that they do want to hear, and that they believe will bother other people — the backward, the religious, the traditional, the provincial, the patriarchal. One preview performance of An Enemy of the People was disrupted by protesters from an environmental group called Extinction Rebellion, who shouted “No theater on a dead planet!” The audience didn’t get angry; many initially thought it was part of the show. Afterward Jeremy Strong, who played Dr. Stockmann, praised the protesters: “I personally felt I wouldn’t have the right to finish the play if I had tried to stifle or silence what they had to say, which I think is correct and deserved to be heard.” 

    The protesters were angry at someone — oil company CEOs, people who drive Range Rovers — but clearly they were not angry at the people they were actually addressing. On the contrary, the disruption was an expression of solidarity with the audience and the actors, whose agreement was taken for granted. To use Shaw’s terminology, the protesters were idealists, who announce that what everyone holds sacred really is sacred, and not realists like Ibsen, who tell us that nothing is sacred. It is Ibsen’s compulsion to dissent, not his views on the sexual mores of late-nineteenth-century Scandinavia, that makes him an enduringly modern writer. 

    Lionel Trilling wrote that the distinctive quality of modern literature is its aggressiveness: for the modern writer words are weapons, “and one does not describe a quinquereme or a howitzer or a tank without estimating how much damage it can do.” No writer fits this definition better than Ibsen, above all in the three plays recently revived on Broadway. A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, written one after another, are the quintessence of Ibsenism as a dramatic genre — plays in which the moral corruption of respectable society is rudely exposed and punished, as inexorably as in a Greek tragedy. Ibsen dealt real damage in these plays because he aimed at vulnerable targets, and several generations of playwrights learned from his example — starting with his defender, Shaw, who took on prostitution in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, military honor in Arms and the Man, and the business of medicine in The Doctor’s Dilemma. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, about a businessman who knowingly sells defective aircraft parts to the Army during World War II, borrows major plot elements from Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community and The Wild Duck. 

    There were plenty of social evils left for Ibsen himself to blast at, if he had wanted to keep doing so. Instead, after An Enemy of the People, he began to turn his fire on his supporters and on himself, writing a series of plays in which idealism serves as an alibi for selfishness and cruelty. In The Wild Duck, from 1884, Gregers Werle cherishes a Stockmann-like commitment to the truth, which is why he insists on telling his friend Hjalmar Ekdal that his beloved daughter Hedvig is not really his. Gregers expects this revelation to bring Hjalmar and his wife Gina closer than ever, in “a way of life, a union, in truth and without secrets.” Instead Hjalmar reacts by rejecting Hedvig, who then kills herself in what she intends as an act of redemptive sacrifice. 

    Hedvig’s end is as horrifying as Osvald’s in Ghosts, but this time tragedy is tinged with the ludicrous. Ibsen seems to conclude that human beings are too weak to live in the truth, after all. We would rather have a “life-lie,” a story we can tell ourselves to make our wretched existences bearable. “Take the life-lie away from your average man, and you take his happiness with it,” says Dr. Relling, the Ekdals’ cynical neighbor.

    By the time of Hedda Gabler in 1889, Ibsen has reinterpreted idealism as a species of sadism. Hedda’s acts of cruelty start out small — insulting an old lady’s hat, refusing to visit a sick relative. But when Eilert Lovborg, an old admirer of hers, returns to town, they become shocking. Lovborg is a reformed alcoholic, but Hedda urges him to go to a drunken party where he is sure to fall off the wagon. She claims to be doing it for his sake, imagining him transfigured by wine into a Greek god with “vine leaves in his hair.” When Lovborg gets drunk and ends up disgraced and ruined, Hedda hands him a pistol to commit suicide with, once again out of idealistic motives. If he kills himself, she says, it will show that “there can be acts of courage born of free will in this world after all. Something imbued with a glow of impulsive beauty.” 

    One cannot feel indignation against Hedda Gabler, as one can against Torvald Helmer and Pastor Manders. They stand for social evils that right-thinking people, in Ibsen’s day and our own, feel good about attacking. But Hedda is too strange and unsettling to represent any institution. Marriage or the church or oil companies can be legislated against, but what kind of political movement can take on human perversity, the will to power and the refusal of self-knowledge? 

    If modern literature is a weapon, then the most modern writer of all is the one who turns that weapon against itself, who aggressively interrogates the sources of our aggression, showing how our claims to serve causes and ideals are actually ways of serving ourselves. Like his contemporaries Nietzsche and Freud, Ibsen is permanently modern because he achieved this kind of self-overcoming. The best tribute we can pay him is not to applaud him for having opinions so progressive that they were already being applauded a hundred and fifty years ago, but to ask what bitter things Ibsen would have to say about us — and not just about our enemies.

    The Passion Not to Be Lonely

    In “Songs Among The Ruins,” an essay that he published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, the English poet and critic Ian Hamilton wrote: 

    In the best works of poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath one finds not just a cerebral attempt for the distinguishably United States idiom but an impassioned exploration of whatever chances the imagination still has of making sense of a civilization that is bent on self-destruction, that cruelly cannot fail to involve the poet in its manic processes but demands also that he survive as guardian of what is being killed; to these poets America is distinct from other societies in the sense that it is more efficiently dehumanizing, having abused its promise as it now prepares to abuse its power, and the best that they feel able to attempt is to oppose its abstracting pressures with the full weight of whatever in their own lives seems concretely worth saving.

    Born in 1936, in Newark, New Jersey, the American poet C. K. Williams belonged to the generation after Lowell, Berryman, and Plath, but to revisit his poetry, not least on the occasion of the recent publication of Invisible Mending, a selection from the entirety of his work, is to confirm that his writing had much of the same drive behind it as that which Hamilton diagnosed in those who went immediately before him. 

    His is a poetry which, in its maturity at least, attempts to forge connections and to counteract loneliness — spiritual, physical, psychic — in settings which often seem to preclude any such attempts at communion. His are poems grounded in a concrete, recognizably modern, reality; urban, sensual, at times mysterious — which proceed from the self, its intimate tangles with experience, thought, and growth, its homesickness for a sort of imagined, or lapsed, purity. They are poems which acknowledge but do not unquestioningly accept a sense of dehumanization, and abuse, at all levels of society — often focusing their eye on the down-at-heel, their Baudelairean street scenes of drinkers, junkies, beggars — “Every misfit in the city, every freeloader, every blown-out druggie and glazed teenybopper” (“Flight” from Tar) — and other of thrusting advancement’s bothersome marginalia. 

    Williams’ early poems appear, on their surface at least, to be his most directly political, written around and out of the Vietnam War, but their often too-straightforward bombast ends up diluting, rather than sharpening, their attempts at forceful urgency. In setting out to lead with a forthright tone, they risk a pile-up of strafing, big feelings, straining for effect rather than trusting the language itself to create an ecosystem of organic meaning and sense. They tend, as in “Being Alone,” to veer into abstraction, to “drift inconspicuously / in the raw dredge of your power.” One finds, in those early works, a poet whose mind is outpacing his stride, catching hints of frustration in the syntax and, occasionally, in direct statements, such as in “Yours” from Williams’ second book, I Am The Bitter Name: “I’m working as fast as I can I can’t stop to use periods / sometimes I draw straight lines on the page because the words/are too slow.” 

    Rather than having to settle for drawing straight lines as his language — and his thought — gallops away from itself, Williams, between books two and three, hit on a far more effective method for letting in contemplation, plot, and diligent nuance. The poems in With Ignorance, in 1977, read like the work of an entirely different writer. Suddenly, through the use of a long clause-laden line, Williams is able to significantly bolster his poetic arsenal; no longer relying only on an abrupt, somewhat spikily Imagist approach, he has access to many of the techniques of the prose writer. Narrative can be added, character development, interior monologue, scene-setting, atmosphere, but without sacrificing the innate compression of poetry, its cinematic juxtapositions and jump-cuts offset by what Michael Hofmann has called “Bellovian fellow-feeling,” creating layered, condensed studies, rich in mood and founded on a speaking tone, rich in the felicities and warmth of the vernacular but maintaining a clarity of vision. 

    These poems have, at their core, a concern with silence, the experience of enduring loneliness and loneliness’ endurance — there is often an attempt at revisiting scenes from the past, dredging up memory, in order to come to an understanding of why these moments, in particular, have outlasted their occasion:

    All I know about that time is that it stayed, that something, pain or the fear of it,
    makes me stop the wheel and reach to the silence beyond my eyes and it’s still there:

    (“Bread”)

    The morning goes on, the sun burning, the earth burning, and between them, part of me lifts and starts back,
    past the wash of dead music from the bar, the drinker reeling on the curb, the cars coughing alive,
    and part, buried in itself, stays, forever, blinking into the glare, freezing.

    (“The Shade”)

    The roots of so much of what will come to characterize Williams’ best poems from this point onwards can be found in this first book of long-lined work: the seeking of common ground, the sensual search for justice and radiance in unpropitious circumstance, a constant attempt to exist somewhere in the unsettling gap between decision and resolution. Ongoing, too, is that sense Hamilton talked of in Lowell and Co., the drive towards using the weight of what most needs to be kept, and rescued, from a life and an experience as ballast against the encroaching, steamrolling forces of modernity, their attempts to degrade and debase being met with an urge to look towards radiance and longing; an accounting for simplicity and joy amid the rubble and renovations of a difficult, frequently barbaric, century.

    That Bellovian empathy that Hofmann touched on can be seen not only in Williams’ poems of human connection, but in those where creatures become the focus of his attention, too; all things feel prey to the same oppressive forces as the self, and as the human, such as in “The Storm” from perhaps Williams’ finest collection, Flesh and Blood, from 1987: 

    Down across the roof lines, the decorative dome of Les Invalides looms, intruding on all this,
    and suddenly a swallow banks around its gilded slopes, heading out but veering quickly back
    as though the firmament, figured by so many volumes now, were too intimidating to row out in alone.

    In fact, if one can characterize Williams’ view of life, or at least the sensual and coherent experiencing of it, it might be possible to do so with lines from The Vigil, from a decade later:

    so, sometimes, in the sometimes somber halls of memory, your life as you’ve known it,
    in the only way you can know it, in these disparate, unpredictable upsurges of mind,
    gathers itself, gathers what seem like the minds behind mind that shimmer within mind,
    and turns back on itself, suspending itself, caught in the marvel of memory and time,
    and, as the child’s mind, so long ago now, engendered itself in attachment’s touch and bestowal,
    life itself now seems engendered from so much enduring attachment, so much bestowal.

    (“Time: 1972”)

    That feeling of suspense, of “unpredictable upsurges,” is a constant in Williams’ poems of interiority, as is a feeling of “touch and bestowal” and “enduring attachment,” of a link between the sensate and the gift, the idea of grace being rendered through small physical acts, all fed by a lifelong “passion not to be lonely” (“Lonely,” from Falling Ill). Williams’ poems are often strung between twin poles, or competing impulses — the despairing, at times wrongfooting, note of “how separate we all are from one another” (“Archetypes” from Repair) which seems always in danger of creeping out from behind that hardwired fear of being cast adrift, and its counterpoint, the “soft herd-alarm, a warning signal from the species” (“Experience” from Flesh and Blood) which prevents, or precludes, an absolute resignation to the feeling of abandonment. 

    Williams’ poems of isolation often fight their own instincts, after a fashion, never fully being able to give in to the sort of desolation, or spiritual vagrancy, that their openings and settings hint might be their fate. It’s as if something within the poet, at times, forbids despair — that so much of his art is founded on that seesaw between opposites, between the necessity of acknowledging the damage wrought, the ugly multi-sensory incursions on simple enjoyment, and also something deep-rootedly hopeful, or at least never hopeless. Something of this can be seen at its clearest in “The Park” from Flesh and Blood and its progression towards an almost rapturous ending. It opens 

    In that oblivious, concentrated, fiercely fetal decontraction peculiar to the lost,
    a grimy derelict is flat out on a green bench by the sandbox, gazing blankly at the children.

    A narrative of childhood selfishness, a refusal to share “a lovely fire truck,” plays out until the poem veers back to the figure from the opening, now by virtue of grammar both individual but also emblematic:

    The ankles of the derelict are scabbed and swollen, torn with aching varicose and cankers.
    Who will come to us now? Who will solace us? Who will take us in their healing hands?

    That unexpected lurch in the final line hits a tone of desperation but also of rhapsody, and the shift to the third person plural becomes an implicating one, providing not just a bit of “soft herd-alarm” but also something more generational, managing to do what those early and more confrontingly political poems never could and involve the readers’ senses in the national plight, rather than only appealing to their outrage muscles. Williams, then, never abandons his search for justice, his abhorrence of tyranny or betrayal, but rather finds a means of involving the whole self in it, and in lining up his narratives, and atmospheres, to create environments in which the many abuses and underminings of a life can be given physicality, to see where they hurt. 

    Just as Williams is interested, in all his mature poems, in finding and unpacking the times that have stayed, there is something else at play in his selection and rendering of these particular narratives. As he writes in the title poem from With Ignorance, there is a need to isolate the true from the false, “a single moment carved back from the lie,” as he puts it there, behind so much of his writing. The desire to look so closely at the lost and the forlorn comes in part from his unwillingness to look away from the underside of what encroaching forces of barbarism — military, political, economic — have done, in the name of progress, but it is also tied to one of the other crucial drives behind all his writing: a sense of bearing witness. In part, this becomes an artistic decision, and a line can be drawn from the early deep Imagist principles which never fully leave the poet, however his prosody and lineation shift, from his deep-rooted belief that, as per “Combat” in Tar, “one’s moral structures tended to be air unless you grounded them in real events.” 

    Williams’ is a world in which — whether in the realm of the intimate and carnal, or on the broader political and economic scale, “justice won’t I know be served” (“Peace,” from Flesh and Blood) but yet, in spite of — or perhaps because of — all the world’s falsehoods, and the possibility of being powerless in the face of the lie, he feels a duty to give structure and language to things as they are, to attempt to dignify and preserve “tedious normality.” The aesthetic shift towards the longer line, the narrative poem, isn’t the only reason why Williams becomes a sort of barstool Scheherazade, counteracting loneliness through a brand of optimistic loquaciousness, even in the face of many reasons not to be so. The ending of “Time: 1978” from The Vigil is a more nakedly real-time rendering of the breathlessness and panic which lies beneath his need to chronicle, and to catalogue:

    . . . as I write
    this, trying to get it all in, hold the moments
    between the sad desolation I thought if not to avert then to diminish in writing it down,
    and this, now, my pen scratching, eyes rushing to follow the line and not lose Jed’s gaze,
    which dims with sleep now, wanders to the window—hills, brush, field cleft with trenches—
    and begins to flutter so that I can’t keep up with it: quick, quick, before you’re asleep,
    listen, how and whenever if not now, now, will I speak to you, both of you, of all this?

    This sort of devoted, enrapt, attention can be turned on the intimate, on the family or the lover, in Williams’ poems, and it can act — as it does here — as a means of arresting time, capturing in amber something the poet cannot bear to have disappear. It can — alternatively — be weaponized, turned into a means of holding the past and its cast list to account. There is an urge towards a settling of accounts, a righting of wrongs, which comes in with the latter version, as can be seen in “The Cup,” from Repair, a narrative of childhood about his mother’s coffee-drinking:

    that excruciating suction sound again, her gaze loosening again.
    I’d be desperate, wild, my heart would pound.
    There was an expression, then, “to tell on someone”; that was what I craved, to tell on her,
    to have someone bear witness with me to her awful wrong.
    What was I doing to myself? Or she to me?
    Oh, surely she to me! 

    While here this childhood urge to “tell on” his mother for a perceived wrong comes with an air of levity, a knowing adult slant on the confusion of his younger self, there is a darker edge to his recounting of a different matriarchal figure, in “Dirt,” where his grandmother “is washing my mouth / out with soap.” The present tense creates an immediacy, but the poem moves through a latter-day self-awareness and runs, almost, on parallel tracks of re-experiencing and restitution. Through this, Williams is able to both “tell on” the grandmother while also using the poem as a means of achieving some sort of “justice,” or at least finding a way of forgiving her this historic wrong: 

    I know now her life was hard:
    she lost three daughters as babies,
    then her husband died, too,
    leaving young sons, and no money.
    She’d stand me in the sink to pee
    because there was never room in the toilet.
    But, oh, her soap! Might its bitter burning
    have been what made me a poet?

    This isn’t the only time Williams associates burning in the mouth with the urge towards speech, or poetry — the coals on Moses’ tongues perform a similar role in “Spit” from With Ignorance, another poem about oral tyranny, and the fact that “every word we said would burn forever.”

    Williams doesn’t only lean on this desire to bear witness in poems of his own immediate experience, or memory. He becomes something of a chronicler of others, too, in part in that ongoing search — however unlikely — for justice, or at least an urge towards ensuring that those most put-upon or poorly served by the world will not suffer the second injustice of being ignored in the process. One of Williams’ great strengths as a narrator, and something which is enabled by his choice of the more prosaic line and clause-heavy diction, is his feeling “as though I were a portion of the story” in instances where he is more chronicler than participant. A self-implicating streak, a desire to get involved, comes further to the fore in these sorts of poems, such as “The Dirty Talker: D Line, Boston” from Flesh and Blood, or the countless other street scenes, overhearings, voyeurisms, and recountings in which the “I” of the poem is in part a camera, but in part an explicator, empathizer and occasionally inadvertent accomplice. 

    Indeed, Williams — in a manner akin to the omniscient narrator of a prose story — can do something like free indirect style, as Alan Shapiro highlights in his introduction to Invisible Mending, and by doing so we get the best of both arts, a poetic narrator with Williams’ gifts for incision and the clinching image, but also a disembodied generosity of perspective, a significantly bulked-up range of possibilities when it comes to the selves whose lives we might overhear, collide with, or encounter in a Williams poem. In those moments where he is less the revisitor of his own past experience and more our street guide, Williams becomes twinned with the woman at Les Deux Magots in Paris, where he lived for many years, in “Love: Intimacy” from Flesh and Blood: “not commiserating, really, just keeping record of the progress of the loss.” 

    Williams applies the same criteria for choosing his scenes from other lives as he does from his own, making a hierarchy of types of experience which might point to some of that warning signal of the species but also adding them to the store of items worth saving from the void, in lieu of any guarantee of intercession from a God, or the universe, to offer the same preservative benevolence. 

    It’s something stronger than a desire to witness or to catalogue which powers this degree of scrutiny, something more to do with a belief — however unlikely, or ultimately thwarted — that by keeping track or setting down these things they might be ripe for a second go-around, that the dead moments, and even the dead figures which populate them, might really live, and be had all over again. Something of this can be glimpsed in “Last Things” from Repair, where Williams acknowledges that he hasn’t any right, as such, in the telling of his friend’s story of photographing his child just after his death, but that “If you’re reading it, you’ll know my friend pardoned me, / that he found whatever small truth his story might embody/was worth the anguish of remembering.” 

    Remembering is not always — or only — anguish in Williams’ work. In “Still Life,” from Tar, we come close to seeing Williams’ desire to go back, to pin down and reinhabit, at its most bare, and fully palpable:

    I don’t know then how much someday — today — I’ll need it all, how much want to hold it,
    and, not knowing why, not knowing still how time can tempt us so emphatically and yet elude us,
    not have it, not the way I would, not the way I want to have that day, that light,
    . . . . .
    even, too, her gaze, so darkly penetrating, then lifting idly past, is so much imagination,
    a portion of that figured veil we cast against oblivion, then try, with little hope, to tear away.

    The tension between those two urges — to have “that day” again, but also knowing that it is finally just “so much imagination,” one “with little hope” — is fundamental to Williams’ tone, to the pathos of his desiring and sometimes self-deceiving faith, never fully abandoned, which he writes of in “Gardens” in Flesh and Blood: “The ever-consoling fantasy of my early adolescence was that one day time would stop for me.”

    If a poem such as “Dirt” moves through affronting experience towards something like forgiveness — “Dare I admit that after she did it / I never really loved her again? . . . I never, until now, loved her again” — it has something in common with another of the key engines of Williams’ work: a need for, and searching after, some sort of lost purity, or innocence. It’s no coincidence that Williams chooses, in poems such as this one, and “The Cup,” and his much-anthologized “My Mother’s Lips,” to return to scenes from early childhood, because — as he notes in “The Gas Station” — he remained “mad with grief for the loss of my childhood” long after it ended, and came to associate this grief, and this loss, with much of the oppressive desiring which goes on throughout his adulthood. Purity as an idea, or a lost paradise, recurs throughout Williams’ work, and never with anything less than a tug of the heart, a pining, desolate tenor. 

    While Williams states — severally — the sadness which accompanies his lack of faith in a God, something which takes up that part is hinted at across his work, with a number of references to “purity” in its various guises. Some of it is synonymous with innocence — not only, or even entirely, in the sense of blamelessness, but also a kind of untutored, prelapsarian one, still looking around for teachers, and for direction, as in “The Gas Station”:

    I still haven’t read Augustine. I don’t understand Chomsky that well. Should I?
    My friend at last comes back. Maybe the right words were there all along. Complicity. Wonder.
    How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake. Grace. Love. Take care of us. Please.

    This is one sense of the purity which sometimes hides behind that veil of experience, but it also has something to do with an instinct akin to the lyric lift-off, and to which Williams’ poems sometimes return, or at least reach — the “radiances / I believed passionately existed,” as he puts it in “Depths” from Repair. For all its injustice, its denial of rectitude and its potential for severing connections, or causing intimidation and despair, Williams’ universe is one in which — on occasion — some Platonic hint is offered, often in the least likely setting. “The Dance,” also from Repair, is one such moment, where a “middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it” moves “with effortless grace” and it creates “consoling implications” for the viewer, ending in something like unalloyed hopefulness:

    . . . so the world,
    that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

    This yearning quality is what prevents Williams’ down-at-heel flaneur persona from calcifying into tough-guy flippancy, and which ensures that the tour of thwarted ambitions and disappointments never risks becoming mere grief tourism, or vampirism. Something similar happens in a later prose poem, “The Broom” from All At Once, where the inhabitants of a Greyhound bus station suddenly find themselves thinking of “a wheat field after harvest” and “a brutal August sun none of us trapped here has beheld for centuries, only fancied, dreamed of, here in this hallowed, middle place of bland fluorescent longing.”

    This need, and the capacity, to acknowledge — and hope for — glimpses of real sunlight beyond the fluorescent longing is one means by which Williams can finally counteract the ache of loneliness, the lifelong battle for connection. Another is touched on in a recognition of the upside of the loss of innocence, laid out most overtly, perhaps, in “The Foundation” from his late book Wait, where “I’m not alone in my dancing, / my being air, I’m with my poets”:

    Watch me again, I haven’t landed, I’m hovering here
    over the fragments, the remnants, the splinters and shards;
    my poets are with me, my soarers, my skimmers, my skaters,
    aloft on their song in the ruins, their jubilant song of the ruins.

    From a poet for whom words were once too slow, Williams became someone who rebuilt what the poetic line might do, bringing in — as a result — many of the tools of the novelist, their possibilities for a more omniscient empathy, one in which — always — as in “The City In the Hills” — there are “humans implied so richly.” His poems became means of bringing what had most mattered along, out of the silence of the past, out of the unforgiven or troublesome disappointments of innocence-stripping adulthood, with accuracy and flair. In so many of the poems of experience one feels the need, however impossible, to re-experience things as they were, exactly, in something richer and more tactile than any kind of religious afterlife, but rather — as in “Realms” from The Vigil:

      . . . it must be actually you, not my imagination of you, however real: for myself,

    mind would suffice, no matter if all were one of time’s terrible toys, but I must have you,
    as you are . . .

    Williams’ most vital and lasting poems are those of “enduring attachment” — attachment to those he has loved, and to humanity itself, especially its would-be detritus, its otherwise unsalvaged. His brand of tensile empathy can sometimes make him part of the stories being recounted, overheard, “told on,” and there is seemingly nowhere that his voice, or his eye, cannot take him, nowhere that he is unwilling to look for those breakthroughs into unlikely, often unlooked for, loveliness, where the world wins back a little credit, for all its habits of disappointing. These are poems set against atomization, but which face up to it — to the divisions, humiliations, and affronts committed daily by those in power, or those involved in perpetuating “the lie,” against which Williams sought to carve out singular truths. They are often built from pain, fear, or loneliness — often forced to contend with the silence, the great void of indifference — but they manage, when taken whole, to ground their moral world in real events, and come as close as the genre will allow to having “that day, that light” in perpetuity. Williams’ songs among the ruins point towards a possibility for poetry as closer cousin to fiction, but with its own integrity, its own lyric potential for real-time reply, to offer its own kind of afterlife, as in “Again,” from All At Once, about his grandson:

    he calls my name each time he appears, and as I stand waiting, listening, watching him materialize again, it comes to me that if that old legend of having your life flash before you as you die is true, I’ll have this all again, and again.

    Can We Be Blissful on the Rack?

    Consider a political dissident who defies a ruthless dictator, is captured by the regime’s henchmen, and is publicly tortured to death. Your response would likely be outrage — you might appeal to Amnesty International, call for sanctions, or demand that the dictator be tried in The Hague.

    The Stoics reflected on a similar case in antiquity: Phalaris, the sixth-century BCE tyrant of the city of Akragas in Sicily and the Brazen Bull that he commissioned. Victims were locked inside the hollow bronze bull while a fire was lit underneath, slowly roasting them alive. Some accounts claim that the bull was designed to amplify and distort their screams, transforming them into eerie bellowing — a spectacle meant to amuse the tyrant and to terrify his enemies.

    Were the Stoics appalled by such cruelty? Not at all. They insisted that the wise and virtuous are just as happy inside the Brazen Bull as they would be enjoying a good meal with family and friends. Shocking? Certainly. But their view challenges a core modern moral conviction: that we should strive to eradicate suffering and fight injustice. If the virtuous can flourish even in the Brazen Bull, this is no longer self-evident. The burden shifts from the torturers to the victims — what matters is not what is done to them, but how they respond, the attitude they adopt. According to the Stoics, all that we should do by way of response to injustice is cultivate virtue. But even if we ultimately reject Stoicism, engaging with its defiant perspective — and its popularization as self-help literature in recent years — forces us to confront some of our deepest assumptions and brings into view an ancient ideal of flourishing and resilience that still merits our attention.

    Bending the arc of the universe

    In 1853, Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and fiery abolitionist, declared that while “the arc of the moral universe is long,” it “bends toward justice.” This wasn’t just rhetoric — he tried to bend it himself, sheltering fugitive slaves, defying the Fugitive Slave Act, and even supporting armed resistance against slavery.

    The drive to make the world better has become so deeply ingrained in our moral sensibility that we rarely ask whether it is justified. On a sunny morning in 2019, my children left their schoolbooks behind and grabbed the protest signs they had drawn the night before. My son’s was taped to a hockey stick: “S.O.S.,” with a painted Earth as the “O.” My daughter had glued hers to a tennis racket: “I’m sure the dinosaurs also thought they had more time!” They were seven and ten. In the schoolyard, they joined classmates for a rally against climate change. Like many parents, my wife and I went along — partly to support them, partly to keep them safe. We felt proud. On that day half a million people marched — the largest demonstration our city had ever seen. My wife took my hand. We smiled in the middle of the surge, the shouting, the urgency.

    It was a small moment in a much larger movement. Grassroots activists block pipelines, billionaire philanthropists fund vaccines, students march against war, UN peacekeepers are deployed to conflict zones. Superheroes battle injustice, celebrities launch charities, musicians call for change in anthems such as “Imagine” and “We Are the World.” We respond to wildfires, tsunamis, and pandemics with early warning systems, emergency aid, and scientific breakthroughs. The impulse behind it all is the same: the world is not as it should be, and it is up to us to fix it — through protest, policy, philanthropy, science, pop culture, and more. The arc of the moral universe will not bend on its own. We have to pull it in the right direction.

    There is no arc to bend

    According to the Stoics, all these efforts are pointless. We cannot improve the world because we already live in a flawless one. There is no arc to bend. If you list evils — war, crime, poverty, racism, disease, earthquakes — the Stoics acknowledge the existence of such things but deny that they are evil.

    Consider Job, God’s greatest accuser. He has a loving wife, thriving children, a large estate, and a trusted circle of friends; his piety appears beyond question. “Have you considered my servant Job?” God asks Satan. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” Yet Satan retorts that if you strip away all his blessings, his faith will collapse. God accepts the challenge, granting Satan free rein to make Job suffer. Enemy tribes plunder his estate and kill his servants; a fire consumes what remains; a storm destroys the house where his children gather, burying them in rubble; Job is stricken with painful sores “from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.” The only thing spared is his life.

    Job’s story highlights the age-old problem of undeserved suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people? For believers, in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God, there should be no unjust suffering — yet the world seems full of it. The Stoics dismiss this puzzle as based on a false assumption: that suffering is an evil needing justification. They claim the only true good is virtue and the only true evil is vice — everything else is irrelevant. Since virtue depends solely on our choices, it is within everyone’s reach. Had Job been wise, he would not have seen himself as suffering evil at all.

    The Stoics are equally unmoved by the challenges posed by God’s other accusers, from Candide to Ivan Karamazov. Candide catalogs horrors — war, earthquakes, persecution, slavery, colonialism, rape — to argue that no grand cosmic plan exists. Ivan goes further, insisting that even if a divine order did exist, it could never justify the suffering of a single innocent child. Yet the Stoics stand firm: none of this is evil. 

    They are equally dismissive of the things we cherish — first kisses, a toddler’s smile, landing a dream job, or winning a prestigious prize. Just as vice is the only evil, virtue is the only good. In a world of true Stoic sages, there would be no longing, no tragedy, no heartbreak. Odysseus’ yearning for home, Hamlet’s existential despair, Billie Holiday’s ballads of love and loss — none of it would make sense.

    Radical egalitarianism

    Should we applaud the radical egalitarianism of the Stoics? They insist that virtue — the only thing that matters — is open to all, regardless of background or circumstance. Epictetus, a former slave, is just as much a Stoic sage as Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor. Success and happiness do not depend on gender, race, religion, class, wealth, or health. A black transgender woman in a wheelchair living in a shantytown can be completely happy, while an athletic white hedge-fund manager sipping champagne on his yacht can be utterly miserable. It all comes down to whether they choose virtue or vice.

    But this radical view comes at a cost. The Stoics seem to remove any reason to change the world. Why fight poverty, racism, oppression, or torture if none of these truly affect our wellbeing? As Epictetus puts it:

    If he [the director] casts you as one of the poor, or as a cripple, as a king or as a commoner — whatever role is assigned, the accomplished actor will . . . perform it with impartial skill. 

    Here lies the fundamental difference between modern activists and the Stoics. The modern approach aims to change external conditions so that everyone has a fair shot at a happy and flourishing life. The Stoics, by contrast, detach happiness and flourishing entirely from external conditions. 

    Sleepless nights

    Imagine if nothing could upset you — not a spilled coffee, not the loss of a loved one. The Stoics propose a path to this kind of freedom — they call it ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance — a deep and unshakable peace of mind. But can virtue alone really make us invulnerable to what Hamlet calls “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”?

    Consider three moments when my own equanimity unraveled. Growing up, my self-confidence was tied to academic success. I excelled in school and was rewarded with admiration. As class valedictorian, I was nominated for a prestigious scholarship. I burst with pride. After the selection process, I couldn’t sleep. Every morning I waited anxiously for the postman, my heart pounding. When the letter finally arrived, my hands trembled. “We regret to inform you . . .” was as far as I got before my world collapsed. For a year, I was consumed by shame.

    Vastly more terrifying is the thought of death. I don’t believe in an immortal soul — when my body dies, my mind goes with it. No afterlife, no second act, just vanishing into eternal nothingness. So I catch myself fantasizing: Could I upload my consciousness into a computer? Could science stop my body from aging? Could I merge with machines and live on as a cyborg?

    But the most visceral fear came when doctors discovered a growth in my six-year-old son’s brain — a rapidly expanding perivascular space, ominously labeled “giant” on the MRI. It was extremely rare, and all my wife and I could do was wait and watch. If it didn’t stabilize, it could lead to brain damage, surgery, or worse. There was no cure, no action to take — only the unbearable prospect of seeing our son’s life change in ways we couldn’t control. The helplessness was crushing.

    What tools do the Stoics offer to restore my peace of mind? First, they would remind me that the things I sought (recognition) and the things I feared (death, harm to my son) were not fully in my control. No matter how much effort I put in, uncertainty remains — a constant source of worry that, when hopes are dashed, turns into grief.

    The only thing I fully control, the Stoics argue, is my value judgments — whether I see success as good and failure as bad, health as good and sickness as bad, and so on. Desire and aversion simply follow judgment. First, I see the chocolate; then, I assess it. If I judge it to be good, the craving that draws me to it follows. Wisdom and virtue are nothing more than correct judgments, aligning our desires and fears with what is truly good and truly bad. Conversely, false judgments lead to misguided attachments and anxieties. I cannot control whether I see the chocolate or whether I will get to eat it — but I can control how I assess its value. For the Stoics, everything hinges on that.

    My desire for acclaim, my fear of death, and my worry about my son’s condition all stemmed from value judgments — that acclaim is good and that death and harm to a loved one are bad. In all three cases, the Stoics say, I was mistaken.

    So what is the cure? Philosophical therapy! Change your beliefs about good and bad, Epictetus instructs:

    It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them. . . . So when we are frustrated, angry or unhappy, never hold anyone except ourselves — that is, our judgements — accountable.

    Once I replace false beliefs with true ones, I will achieve ataraxia. But where did I go wrong? According to the Stoics, acclaim, death, and harm to loved ones are “indifferents” — they neither add to nor take away from our wellbeing. Remember: the only thing to pursue is virtue, the only thing to avoid is vice.

    The Stoics know that this is easier said than done. That is why Epictetus recommends many exercises to rein in misguided desires and fears. A sample:

    In the case of things that delight or benefit you, remind yourself what they are. Start small. If it’s china you like, say, “I am fond of a piece of china.” When it breaks, you won’t be as disconcerted. When giving your wife or child a kiss, repeat to yourself, “I am kissing a mortal.” Then you won’t be so distraught if they are taken from you. . . . Sickness is a problem for the body, not the mind — unless the mind decides that it is. Lameness, too, is the body’s problem, not the mind’s. Say this to yourself and you’ll find the problem pertains to something else, not to you.

    The goal is to gradually detach from what we cannot fully control — from possessions to people we love. It begins with reframing our judgments: we stop seeing their presence as good and their absence as bad. As desire and fear fade, we no longer cling or dread. Eventually, their presence brings no elation, and their absence, no distress. The result is peace of mind: nothing can sway us, either positively or negatively.

    Thumbs up to everything?

    At first glance the Stoic proposal seems absurd. Sure, the things that fill us with hope and fear, joy and grief, are not fully under our control. But how does detaching from them make life better? Isn’t this just Aesop’s fox declaring the unreachable grapes sour? The alternative to life’s ups and downs looks like a big, bleak void.

    The Stoics, however, double down. “Welcome events however they happen — this is the path to peace,” writes Epictetus. The shattered teacup, the maimed limb, the death of your child — not only are these not bad; they are good and should be welcomed. The Stoics want us not merely to endure losses, but to reverse our negative judgments about them.

    How can they justify an attitude that seems to run against every human instinct? To begin with, they are determinists: everything unfolds necessarily in a system of causes and effects. Say your child’s death from leukemia was inevitable — how does recognizing that help? For one, it frees you from guilt or resentment toward others for not preventing it. But even so, wouldn’t it still feel like a terrible loss?

    This is where the Stoics appeal to God. The system of causes and effects, Epictetus insists, is not a blind mechanical chain but one governed by divine intelligence:

    The chief duty we owe the gods is to hold the correct beliefs about them: that they exist, that they govern the world justly and well, and that they have put you here for one purpose — to obey them and welcome whatever happens, in the conviction that it is a product of the highest intelligence. . . . And this cannot happen unless you stop applying “good” and “bad” to externals. . . . Because, if you regard any external as good or bad, and fail to get what you want or get what you don’t want instead, you will blame the gods . . . for being the cause of your trouble.

    If we embrace Stoic theology and fulfill our “chief duty,” how would it affect our judgments? We would no longer see the shattered teacup, the maimed limb, or the death of a child as misfortunes, but as parts of God’s plan — products of “the highest intelligence” — through which he governs the world “justly and well.” That, for the Stoics, is what makes the world flawless: it is perfectly ordered by divine reason.

    Think of a child whose toy is taken away. He sees the loss as bad and cries. But the parents may have good reasons for making him cry: disciplining him, removing a health hazard, donating the toy to a refugee family. If the child fully grasped their motives, the loss might no longer seem bad but something to be accepted, even welcomed. 

    Yet even if the parents’ decision is justified, they still cause pain by removing something their child cherishes. Likewise, God appears to inflict harm on parents who lose a child, even if it is part of a larger plan where the benefits outweigh the costs. But in a flawless world any harm is too much. The Stoics handle this problem by denying that harm exists at all. External and bodily goods make no difference to our well-being. The only true goods are those of the soul — wisdom and virtue.

    Follow nature!

    Virtue, the Stoics argue, means “living in agreement with nature.” But don’t turn to physicists or biologists for guidance. The Stoics want us to align our lives with God’s plan as revealed in the natural order. Since God’s plan ensures that everything turns out for the best, the only rational course is to follow it.

    But how do we know what God prescribes for us? By looking at human nature in its purest form — before socialization distorts it. The answer, according to the Stoics, lies in the cradle. A newborn’s instincts reveal nature’s design. Breastfeeding? Thumbs up! Hunger? Thumbs down! Warmth? Thumbs up! Cold? Thumbs down! Walking? Thumbs up! Falling? Thumbs down! Epictetus puts it this way:

    Babies seek what is good for them and avoid the opposite . . . This would not happen unless they valued their own constitution and feared destruction . . . So one must realize that it is self-love which provides the primary motivation.

    Why did God implant self-love in us, making us naturally drawn to what preserves us and repelled by what harms us? Because our existence has metaphysical value: we are part of God’s plan. Just as a watchmaker wants every gear to exist so that the watch can function, God wants us to exist as part of the universe he has perfectly ordered.

    If self-preservation is our divinely decreed duty, then the Stoic’s life will often look like everyone else’s — as Cicero explains in On Moral Ends:

    For some [things] there is good reason to prefer them, . . . as is the case with health, well-functioning senses, freedom from pain, honour, wealth and so on. Likewise, . . . some offer good reason to reject them — for example pain, illness, loss of a sense, poverty, ignominy and so forth.

    The difference is that Stoics do not cherish what they pursue for its own sake. They don’t eat scrambled eggs because they are delicious, but because God wants them to eat them. If the eggs slip to the floor, they embrace the mess with equal joy — because that, too, is a part of God’s plan. They diligently care for their children, but if a child dies of leukemia, they will not shed a tear. They pursue careers, protect reputations, and invest in health care and pension plans, but if they are burned alive in the Brazen Bull they accept it with complete equanimity.

    To capture this paradox — that some things should be pursued even though they hold no true value — the Stoics invented the notion of “preferred indifferents.” These are things to which we are naturally drawn because of the self-love that God implanted in us, yet they ultimately do not affect our well-being. The Stoic sage is like an archer who does everything to hit the target — but whether he actually hits it does not matter. What matters is living in agreement with nature, that is, with God’s plan, which dictates both to aim at our goals and to welcome whatever outcome follows.

    Virtue eclipses everything

    But isn’t there a contradiction? If God implanted self-love in us and a natural desire for what preserves us, how can he also expect us to welcome what destroys us?

    The Stoics would reply that aligning our life with God’s plan is a higher-level form of self-preservation — not of the body but of the mind, which is the divine spark in us. We perfect this spark through wisdom, which means holding true beliefs about the value of things.

    Preserving the body and the mind often go hand in hand — we seek food, avoid danger. But if they come into conflict, we would be fools to complain — whether about broken eggs, a child’s death, or a house destroyed by an earthquake. Why? Because mourning the loss of these things means making false value judgments — believing that having them is good and losing them is bad, when in truth they are indifferent. And by making false judgments, we destroy the only thing that truly matters: virtue, our bond with God.

    Being attached to indifferent things is always a terrible trade-off — even when misfortune never strikes. It does not matter if the eggs get cooked, the child thrives, and the house stands. The moment we mistake these for genuine goods, we fall into false judgments — and lose virtue.

    To show how irrational that trade-off is, the Stoics use a series of striking metaphors:

    It is like the light of a lamp eclipsed and obliterated by the rays of the sun; like a drop of honey lost in the vastness of the Aegean Sea; a penny added to the riches of Croesus. . . . Such is the value of [external and] bodily goods that it is unavoidably eclipsed, overwhelmed, and destroyed by the splendor and grandeur of virtue.

    As a rule, ancient philosophers are ethical egoists, and the Stoics are no exception. Everything we do is driven by self-love — the desire for what is advantageous to us. But wise self-love is directed at the goods of the soul: wisdom and virtue, which consist in correct judgments. Chasing external goods is like trading the light of the sun for the glow of a candle or the wealth of Croesus for a penny — choosing something worthless over the one thing worthwhile. What could be more self-destructive?

    Stoicism stands or falls on the claim that virtue eclipses everything. If that is true, then nothing can shake a virtuous person’s equanimity. Once we have virtue, there is nothing left to gain or lose.

    We can now revisit the three moments when I lost my peace of mind. Had I been a Stoic, I would not have been upset by the scholarship rejection, the prospect of dying, or the perivascular space growing in my son’s brain. I would have seen them as part of God’s flawless plan and made the right judgments — not only accepting them but endorsing them. Eclipsed by the “splendor and grandeur of virtue,” my losses should hardly have registered at all. 

    Fortune’s rollercoaster

    Few rode the wheel of fortune more wildly than the Seneca.

    At the top: the Stoic philosopher was born into a prominent Roman family and built an impressive career, rising to high office and serving as mentor to the emperor.

    At the bottom: Emperor Caligula, envious of Seneca’s brilliance, orders him to commit suicide — only sparing him because he is gravely ill and expected to die soon anyway.

    Back at the top: under Emperor Claudius, Seneca becomes a trusted advisor.

    And down again: Claudius, angered by Seneca’s criticisms of autocracy, exiles him to Corsica. He loses his status, his property, and his homeland, spending eight years in exile, where he writes a letter of consolation to his mother, Helvia.

    Another rise: Agrippina, mother of the future emperor Nero, brings Seneca back to court. He becomes Nero’s tutor and later his advisor.

    The final fall: Nero, determined to rule without interference, murders his mother and commands Seneca to commit suicide. Seneca complies with equanimity, calmly having his veins cut while dictating his final thoughts as his life drains away.

    We can now explain Seneca’s trajectory in Stoic terms. Why pursue wealth, honor, and a political career? Because God implanted self-love in human nature, and these things help us preserve ourselves. And why not mourn the losses that came with exile and death? Because wise self-love preserves the goods of the soul through correct value judgments.

    That is exactly how Seneca consoles Helvia. The things taken from him — property, status, homeland — have no true value, he argues. And the things that have true value can never be taken away:

    This universe, the greatest and most splendidly furnished of Nature’s creations, and the most magnificent part of it, the mind of man, that surveys and marvels at the universe, are our own possessions in perpetuity.

    Whether at home or in exile, in a villa or a prison cell, we are always in the flawless universe. And a beautiful mind is an internal good, not an external one — something no tyrant can take away. So, Seneca reassures Helvia, she has nothing to worry about.

    Are the Stoics hypocrites?

    Among all the ancient schools, Stoicism enjoys by far the biggest modern revival. Today thousands of self-described Stoics pursue a sleek self-help version of the philosophical life. Athletes, military officers, executives, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are especially drawn to it — and not by accident. Repackaged by best-selling authors such as Ryan Holiday, Stoicism has become a toolkit for personal success, mental toughness, and peak productivity — less a path to wisdom than a strategy for winning: morning routines, journaling hacks, and motivational quotes from Marcus Aurelius, cherry-picked to fire up a CEO on a treadmill. But is this just a caricature of the ancient doctrine, as some maintain — or does it, in some way, capture its spirit?

    Stoicism can easily slide into a license for ruthless selfishness. The concept of “preferred indifferents” lets you chase wealth, power, and a sculpted physique — whatever enhances your resilience. And if divine providence governs all, then the misfortunes of others are not unjust — they are ordained. Virtue may be the only true good, but it turns out you can have that and the yacht. What begins with a bow to Socrates ends in a TED Talk on hustle culture.

    To be fair, one can give Stoic ethics a social-democratic twist. As a Stoic, you believe God has implanted self-love in you, drawing you toward health, status, and wealth. But you also recognize that same self-love in every other person — and that God wants their self-preservation as much as yours. Helping to create conditions in which others can flourish, then, becomes an extension of your own duty — and a part of aligning your life with God’s plan and assisting in its realization.

    This social-democratic Stoic might support progressive taxation. He may even look like a modern activist, working to reduce suffering and improve society. But beneath the surface lies a deep moral divide. The activist fights to fix a world he sees as unjust. The Stoic believes justice already permeates the universe. For him, activism is not about mending a broken world — it’s about playing one’s part in a perfect one. And whether he succeeds or fails makes no difference: the world remains flawless either way. 

    If, like me, you don’t believe in divine providence, that version of Stoicism is no more persuasive than the self-help one.

    Is Stoicism obsolete?

    Imagine you are the director of a UN refugee camp. The people in the makeshift tents have survived a brutal war and lost nearly everything. Would you hand them a brochure of Stoic consolation — telling them that everything unfolds according to a flawless rational plan, that nothing of true value has been taken from them, that their suffering is simply a matter of mistaken judgments? Or would you focus on protecting what they have left and creating conditions so future generations are spared what they endured?

    At first glance, Stoic consolation seems cruel — not only rationalizing away the refugees’ suffering, but adding insult to injury by blaming them for it. It is also based on a view of God and the universe that few moderns accept.

    Should we then give up on virtue and return to bending the arc of the universe? The liberal vision of justice looks roughly like this: securing for everyone the freedom to live as they please, ensuring a fair distribution of resources so that all have the means to pursue their life-choices, and guaranteeing equal opportunities, free from discrimination. Whether or not one embraces Stoic virtue is a personal matter — it has no bearing on this conception of justice. Virtue does play a role in modern liberal thought, but it is largely confined to civic responsibility: respecting others’ rights, upholding fair institutions, and participating in democratic life. That’s no small feat, to be sure. Still, on the liberal view, justice depends on the right arrangement of external conditions, with civic virtues as a means to that end; on the Stoic view, justice consists entirely in the virtuous choices of individuals.

    As I have said, I do not believe in the flawless, providentially ordered universe of the Stoics. But I am interested in the power of virtue — and have come to experience first-hand the resilience that the “goods of the soul” can provide. During my contentious divorce, several pillars of my world collapsed at once. It wasn’t just the marriage or the family structure that I had built my life around. Almost overnight, I lost access to the beautiful city and the country houses where our children had spent their happiest years — both houses owned by my wife. Parts of the social networks that had shaped our shared life unraveled. Much of what was familiar and stable was suddenly gone.

    And yet my life was not shattered. One of the things I most looked forward to during that time was teaching my university classes. For those hours, my mind was immersed in philosophical ideas, engaged in lively discussions with students. Reading, teaching, and writing offered not just reprieve, but moments of bliss. I grew close to a colleague who was also going through a divorce. We commiserated a little — but we were far happier talking about Plato.

    Another source of stability was moral action: I poured my energy into shielding my children from the upheaval, doing everything I could to keep their world as intact as possible.

    Of course I felt the losses. Of course I grieved. The goods of the soul — exercising my intellectual, creative, and moral capacities — did not “eclipse and overwhelm” everything, as the Stoics would have it. But they did offer some protection. They gave me something to hold onto when much else had slipped away.

    I reject the Stoic claim that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness — that we can be just as happy in the Bull of Phalaris as at a dinner party. But their radical position serves a crucial purpose — it throws into sharp relief an insight central to ancient philosophy from Socrates onward: the importance of the “goods of the soul” as a cornerstone of both flourishing and resilience.

    Stoic egalitarianism likewise goes too far. A flourishing life isn’t available to all just by making the right choices. Still, the goods of the soul are remarkably inclusive: they do not depend on race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, on good looks or perfect health, on great wealth, power, or prestige. They are, in short, very widely available.

    Aristotle or the Stoics?

    My conception of virtue is far closer to Aristotle’s than to the Stoics’. And the difference is significant. Aristotle scoffs at the idea that a virtuous person could be happy in the Brazen Bull: “People who claim that the person being tortured, or the person who has fallen on very bad times, is happy if he is good are . . . talking nonsense.” For Aristotle, the good life depends on external conditions from the moment we are born. Our upbringing, he insists, “makes all the difference.” Raised in a virtuous family and community, we are on the path to flourishing; raised in a corrupting environment, we are on the path to ruin.

    His world is flawed: crime, war, and earthquakes are genuinely bad. The wise may be less vulnerable than the foolish thanks to foresight and prudence (they won’t sail during hurricane season or build where wildfires rage). But they are not invulnerable.

    While Aristotle ranks the “goods of the soul” highest, he makes room for external goods. You cannot achieve scientific breakthroughs, just laws, or great works of art under just any conditions — say, if you are enslaved on a sugar plantation, trapped in an assembly line job, or growing up in a Mumbai slum. Aristotle’s flawed world is also one we can improve — unlike the flawless one of the Stoics. He holds the active life — a life devoted to justice and the common good — in high esteem. His Nicomachean Ethics is, above all, a guide for lawmakers — a manual for how to build a society in which all citizens can flourish. Moreover, a flourishing life means something different to Aristotle: realizing our moral, creative, and intellectual potential. With no all-encompassing providential plan, virtue cannot consist in giving the thumbs up to everything.

    Even if we attain the goods of the soul, we remain vulnerable to “torture” or “very bad times.” Yet in Aristotle’s view even the gravest misfortunes cannot destroy the virtuous person entirely:

    The noble shines through, when a person calmly bears many great misfortunes, not through insensibility, but by being well bred and great-souled. . . . The truly good and wise person . . . bears all the fortunes of life with dignity and always does the noblest thing in the circumstances, as a good . . . shoemaker makes the noblest shoe out of the leather he is given. . . . If this is so, the happy person could never become wretched, though he will not be blessed if he meets with luck like that of Priam.

    The Aristotelian would not emerge happy from Seneca’s rollercoaster, but he would not be crushed either. In the refugee camp, he would not collapse in grief or preach consolation. He would set about organizing food, shelter, and opportunities for creativity, learning, and conversation.

    Should we all become Aristotelians?

    The Aristotelian, it seems, gets to have it both ways. He works to improve the external conditions for flourishing — justice, peace, education, vaccines — while also cultivating the internal ones: art, friendship, moral character, wisdom. He acknowledges the role of luck yet strives to make us less vulnerable to its blows. He both bends the arc of the universe and invests in inner transformation. Unlike the Stoic, he does not deny the value of external goods; unlike the modern activist, he doesn’t limit his mission to distributing these goods fairly.

    Yet there are problems with Aristotle’s flawed universe — problems the Stoic and the activist would be quick to point out. They lie in his metaphysics, which the Stoic sees as incoherent and the activist as obsolete. Though flawed, Aristotle’s universe is still a far cry from the “disenchanted” one posited by modern science. Like the Stoic cosmos, it is ordered by a Divine Mind — “the first principle of heaven and nature.” But then where do the flaws come from, the Stoic wants to know. Meanwhile the activist sees no evidence for a divine order in the first place.

    Consider a table, Aristotle would tell the Stoic. It consists of matter — the wood — and form — the table’s shape. The wood has the potential to become a table; the form, imposed by the carpenter, actualizes that potential. All physical things, he argues, are made up of matter and form. At the most basic level lies prime matter: completely passive, featureless, and able to receive any form. But where there is potential, there is also failure. An acorn becomes an oak if it falls on fertile soil; it withers if the ground is barren. A gifted child’s potential is wasted if there is no school in town. Even Phalaris had the potential for virtue. His failure reflects the contingencies of embodied existence — nature, habit, and society. So Aristotle gets the Divine Mind off the hook: the universe’s flaws stem not from God, but from matter’s instability. The Divine Mind is all-good but not all-powerful. The rational order it grounds is compromised by the imperfection of the material in which it is realized.

    The Stoics reject this answer. If matter is completely passive and contributes only potentiality, then all outcomes must ultimately derive from the active principle — the Divine Mind. A flawed world would mean a flawed plan. For the Stoics, that is unthinkable. If the Divine Mind governs all things, flaws simply cannot exist. Metaphysically speaking, they have a point — and they are willing to bite the bullet for consistency, embracing claims that fly in the face of lived experience: You can be happy in the Brazen Bull! No reason to shed a tear over the death of a loved one! The suffering of the innocent is not evil!

    We moderns are tempted to dismiss the entire debate. We are not troubled by whether matter limits the power of the Divine Mind. Our problem is that we see no compelling evidence for a Divine Mind to begin with. What we observe is a vast, dark, mostly empty universe that burst into existence some fourteen billion years ago. In it, we spend a brief moment on a small planet in one of countless galaxies, living lives of no cosmic consequence. And these lives emerged from a primordial soup, shaped not by rational design, Stoic or Aristotelian, but by the random mutations of evolution and countless chance encounters across generations.

    Secular virtue?

    Can we still be Aristotelians in an indifferent universe? Does it still have an arc for us to bend? Aristotle, like the Stoics, believes that the moral order is inscribed in the structure of the world. The key difference is that for Aristotle we must work to actualize it — the potential for virtue in ourselves and for justice in our communities. Everything, in Aristotle’s world, has a telos — an end it naturally strives toward. Acorns aim to become oaks; human beings aim to develop their creative, moral, and intellectual capacities. Flourishing — eudaimonia — is not just a feeling, but the objective fulfillment of what we are meant to be. That telos is determined by nature’s rational order, whose ultimate cause is the Divine Mind. In an indifferent universe, however, there is no built-in purpose. Our capacities remain — but whether we ought to develop them is anything but obvious.

    Contemporary virtue ethicists have tried to preserve Aristotle’s ideal of human excellence without a divine order. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that without a conception of the human good — without a telos — moral talk about rules, duties, and virtues becomes hollow. He offers a stark choice: Aristotle or Nietzsche, teleology or nihilism. To avoid metaphysics, MacIntyre turns to culture: our telos, he says, is shaped by the traditions and narratives of our community. But that opens the door to relativism. What if you grew up in Nazi Germany and found your purpose in annihilating Jews and ensuring Aryan supremacy? Plenty of cultures promote ideals we find abhorrent — racist, misogynistic, homophobic, inegalitarian. Macntyre replies that only cultures that let us flourish as rational, social beings count. But in that case, isn’t he appealing to natural teleology — the very thing he set out to avoid?

    Philippa Foot does embrace natural teleology, but without the theology. If we can objectively assess what it means for an oak or an elephant to flourish, why not do the same for humans? But her answer begs a question: why should we want to flourish in this way? If Van Gogh or Kafka had flourished like vigorous elephants, we might have been deprived of some of the greatest works of modern art. And does flourishing entail moral virtue? The wild lion tearing into a gazelle may flourish more fully than the tame one in a zoo. But is it more virtuous? Can nature, purged of the divine, really provide an ethical model for us?

    In the end, neither MacIntyre nor Foot succeeds in detaching teleology from metaphysics. Of course, secular atheists are free to develop whatever capacities they please, and to fight for peace and justice. But if we seek a reason — if we want a coherent account of why we should strive to flourish and help others do the same — we need something like the Aristotelian framework: a universe that is both rational and flawed, a human good that is both objective and vulnerable, a moral arc that does not bend on its own but still gives us reason to try. 

    Otherwise, we are left with two extremes: the flawless universe of the Stoics, where justice already reigns, or the indifferent universe of the atheist, where flourishing and justice lack a deeper foundation. We may think that we are secular, but when we take our children to piano class, or nudge them to read, or encourage them to sell lemonade for a good cause; when we find comfort in books, art, conversation, or volunteering; when we do our part to make justice prevail — we unwittingly affirm the ethics and metaphysics of virtue.

    My Identity

    All my life, reading has made me feel on the verge of something,
    like a bird turning in the wind to lay itself bare
    before going higher — with feet stretched out behind —
    higher than the indifferent trees and noisy earth.
    I’m grateful to my teachers who nurtured this experience,
    education being our first need after food,
    for this created calm within the mutilated bower,
    where I lay — still a nascent thing —
    muttering language with its two beats
    speaking the music of my heart, and with three my mind.
    Many experience separateness as exhaustion,
    but I didn’t; instead, I felt so unified and whole,
    as when sunshine lights up the hut and all
    the ground about it is warm and dry again.

    Wild Type

    Mutants are not so very interesting
    as wild types and other natural strains,
    like penguins wearing tuxedos
    and tigers with black-striped orange fur.
    With my regular looks and manners,
    I am no mutant made of chemicals.
    Still, the world makes no sense to me,
    and sometimes it’s as if I am wearing
    the wrong eyeglasses. Then time passes —
    “Life is a stream!”; people often say this,
    though it isn’t really my experience.
    Is it possible a need to express myself
    with words is the result of my wild type?
    Lately, mutants have been in the news a lot,
    with the South African variant and the X-Men
    (super-heroes led by Professor X, a telepath).
    The wild types have felt a little neglected,
    though letting go of certainty has almost
    freed us from seeking the regard of others,
    that most lowly mode of satisfaction.
    Despite the nights when the moments seem
    to pass like hours (from sleeplessness),
    I am always so surprised and grateful,
    when morning arrives, to hear my voice
    asking again, with a burst of love
    in my hungry, wild-type heart,
    “Darling, how would you like
    your eggs cooked today?”

    “No One Over Fifty, Please”

    A man doesn’t cease to exist because he is invisible.
    He is like a lone guitar, or curly neck-hairs, or false water.
    Pull his arm when you go by, and he forgets
    it once was a fin (according to Darwin).
    Another year passes, never to be lived again.
    I remember being touched, but I cannot be and have been.
    Since we don’t know if we live beyond this life,
    let’s give ourselves to loving —
    to eyes, hands, lips, and ears.
    Do you hear those birds talking —
    is there anything more ravishing?
    In the world of things — so animalistic and blunt —
    we are but tumbles of flesh seeking definition,
    like sterile florets awaiting daybreak.

    Young Tom’s Room

    Gloucester, Massachusetts

    I.

    I’m sorry you were not my favorite.
    Probably your dark substratum was too much for me.
    I don’t believe in Hell; therefore, I don’t fear it.
    I’m no possum playing dead to conceal myself.
    Reading in your boyhood room, I feel like a counterpart to nature and the animals,
    and I still prefer Marianne Moore, who created a marvelous new idiom.
    But I love bicycling along your grey granite shoreline, from the boatyards to the port.
    And I love watching the pea fog burn off the icy water.
    Certainly, I fear death by water more than Hell.
    Yesterday, a fingerless man was selling cod.
    A child peered into a rock-pool at a sea anemone.
    The fir trees looked thirsty and seagulls screamed in the air.
    A schooner with a mermaid bowsprit sailed toward open sea.
    I was wearing my trousers with the cuffs rolled up like a knockabout sailor.
    Church-goers emerged into the marine light, but I felt no ancestor worship.
    Home and Mother were faraway.
    Still, the blue sea and birdsong beckoned to a place deep inside me. 

    II.

    At night, the wind howls and black waves smash against the rocky coastline.
    There are visitations:
    a skunk in the corridor, pictures awry on walls, wet pillows, coyotes baying.
    I read all night and drink wine with pistachios.
    I love the bare-rock outcroppings from glaciation that surround the house like staunch comforting arms.
    Tom, I agree that genuineness (your word) is more important than greatness.
    Tom, I agree that our duty is to serve, extend, and improve the language.
    Tom, I agree that forms have to be broken to be remade.
    I don’t want to write only from my head and cling to youthful experiences.
    I don’t want to become a dignified man who says what is expected of him.
    I don’t want to lose myself in a larger context, like a bee in the foxglove.
    Clambering over rock, I study the pool’s frail seaweed and the hungry starfish.
    I hear the song of the fishermen’s dories lowered into the deadly sea.
    At dawn, the pure sweetness of the hermit thrush calls to me.
    For all I know, the rest of my life is taking flight.

    Stephen Foster in Exile

    For my brother, Bryan Lightweis (1977–2024)

    Comrade, fill no glass for me 

    You might as well cancel the songwriter’s century. Nothing short of that could eliminate his hooks and rhythms, the vocables and caesurae and scansion that have, in each of his songs, a performance history of their own. Born in the American provinces, he traveled the sonic planet, pillaging traditions to build his own oeuvre. He wrote about places he had never or not yet seen — names on the map and nameless sites, too. The music dances with or without the motion of your body in space: you hear in his songs a certain strut, a spin, a pivot on the heel. Women’s names in his lyrics feel like wanted posters: the beginning of a love story or a missing person’s report. Sometimes, I wonder at his raw feeling; sometimes, at the purity of his commercial ambitions. No one was ever so tender or so grasping: a songwriter and a widget-maker all at once. He lived in the terrarium of his music; he seemed to ablate his identity, erase his own face. Some necessary shifts in the culture have nonetheless rendered his music dangerous: bad in the old and older senses. He stole something profound from the most powerless people in his world, and so we are left to contemplate reparative action in our own time, even at significant cost to his legacy. But any cost, any reduction in his status, rattles the foundation of vernacular music and — if it doesn’t sound too alarmist — the nation itself. How will they hum? How will they whistle? How will they sing? Perhaps a scalpel could remove those sounds from the American brain, but we would be left with his inheritors — which is to say, everyone. 

    Who, you might ask, is this artist who has defined America? No, not Michael Jackson. It is Stephen Collins Foster, the nation’s first professional songwriter. Think about their characters, all assembled in the singular and strange American canon: Susie and Susanna, Diana and Jeannie, Billie Jean and Nelly Bly. Think, too, of the troubles they travel with in contemporary America. One doesn’t want to linger on the subjects of “Pretty Young Thing” (1982), “Thriller” (1985), or “Smooth Criminal” (1987), which now seem like signed confessions of Jackson’s pedophilia. Foster’s danger, of course, feels more foundational to the composition of his music than Jackson’s not-so-secret life: blackface minstrelsy is more often the text than the subtext of his work. But it is nonetheless true that these two songwriters created our soundscape. 

    Myths circle Foster, who had the fortune — good or bad, depending upon your perspective — of life before MTV. Among those myths, there is a post-hoc conversion narrative that claimed he moved from the blackface stage to the domestic parlor with the conscious composition of more genteel music, that he redeemed the minstrel’s lampoon in “Oh Susanna!” (1848) with tender songs like “Nelly Was a Lady” (1849). Both songs pry apart a man and woman, but the latter ends with a widower’s lament — “toll the bell for lovely Nell / my dark Virginny bride” — that refuses the flattening language of the minstrel stage. The conversion narrative, however, is belied by any complete chronology of Foster’s career. The historian Emily Bingham demonstrates that he likely turned to — rather than from — the blackface stage in order to support his young family. Foster wanted to “build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refined people,” as he wrote to the showman E. P. Christy in 1852, “by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order.” 

    This is no conversion: Foster sanitized the minstrel song for the family piano, rather than wholly leaving the genre behind. Another famous songwriter, John Newton, is said to have given himself to God during a turbulent voyage in the Atlantic Ocean. He wrote “Amazing Grace” in 1748 and quit the ignoble profession of slave-trading after only seven more years of feathering his nest. Whatever pangs of conscience Foster felt, he similarly answered in the Augustinian tradition of saying “not yet.” He wrote plantation songs until 1864, when he drank himself to death on the Bowery in New York. His body was found with a potential first line — “Dear friends and gentle hearts” — scrawled onto a torn piece of paper and tucked into his pocket. He might have died of drink, or more efficiently taken his own life with a knife. Accounts vary. 

    Much of Foster’s myth was devised by his brother Morrison. An able promoter, he saw some advantage in inscribing Stephen’s birth on July 4, 1826, within a few hours of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson’s eerily proximate deaths. We approach Foster’s bicentennial — as marked in calls for academic papers and special journal issues and smaller-scale events near his Pittsburgh birthplace and spiritual home along the Ohio River — but we are unlikely to see his life memorialized in proportion to his influence. A few interested parties might turn to his music — from Paul Robeson’s stentorian “Swanee River” (1930) to the Byrds’ proto-psychedelic “Oh Susanna!” (1965) — with the blinds drawn and the volume low. In the opening scene of Blazing Saddles, written by Mel Brooks with Andrew Bergman and Richard Pryor, a white foreman demands a “good old work song” like “Camptown Races” — a Foster song from 1850 — from an all-black railroad crew. Instead Bart suavely sings “I Get a Kick Out of You” with that urbane indifference to racial aggression that characterizes every sublime second of Cleavon Little’s time on screen. But as soon as he is out of the line of sight of the white cowboys, Bart dances a modified chicken wing on a pump trolley. He sings Foster’s doo dah doo dah while he dances, though he claimed to prefer Cole Porter. I may try the same ruse.

    I arrived in Cincinnati close to midnight on an autumn day in November 2023, and found myself locked out of an AirBnb close to Washington Park. For a while I wandered in freezing temperatures, through cobblestone streets and slim rowhouses. I passed a ragged man sleeping under the awning of a Lebanese restaurant, closed for the evening. A woman leaned out of a third-story window to tell me that I shouldn’t smoke on this block, an interaction you will interpret as a sign of gentrification or the “authentic” neighborhood cultures that preceded it, depending on where you live. (I hurried along but did not extinguish the joint. A Louisiana resident for most of my adult life, I needed this simulation of a campfire on a cold winter’s night). Little alleys passed between the park and the interstate. Any lane might take you to the river eventually, but Cincinnati has been mutilated, like so many cities north and south of it, by ring roads and commuter loops.

    I had some fantasy of walking toward the Ohio River, where Stephen Foster lived from 1846 until 1850, but sensibly I waited for daylight, when my traveling companion could walk beside me. Near the site of the Foster marker promised by internet sleuths, I found unnatural changes in elevation — a hill up, a pitch down — that attend mid-century highway construction. The stadiums glowed across the interstate; a casino hunched a few blocks back on my side of the road. Able travelers will tell you that the expansion of gambling is a signal change of American spaces in the last decade; you see the billboards for sports betting, tribal bingo, or ersatz “riverboats” — terrestrial buildings defined by river frontage, not seaworthiness — everywhere you go. Foster had the Bowery to feed his appetites; we have the Hard Rock Cincinnati.

    Last decade’s headline from The Onion — “Mayor Hits on Crazy Idea of Developing City’s Waterfront” — springs to memory in places like the Cincinnati riverfront: tense collaborations between the lures of the historic quarters of a city and the monstrously ugly roads that carry you toward them. Once the sun set again, I let my vision blur and saw the exit ramps and frontage roads as modern echoes of the architecturally preserved Factor’s Walk in Savannah. The Walk is a series of stairwells and bridges built into the Yamacraw Bluff at Savannah’s Riverfront. They once served as transit between cotton warehouses, accountant’s offices, and the port below; now it is full of bars and gift shops. The riverfront neighborhood of Cincinnati had the same function in Foster’s America. A warren of antebellum buildings abut a tunnel to I-75; somewhere inside, the songwriter worked as a bookkeeper for his brother Morrison’s steamships. Here he wrote “Oh Susanna!,” which is not the song of the Gold Rush, whatever historical shorthand reports, but of what Ira Berlin calls the Second Migration: the forced displacement of slaves from the East Coast to the Cotton Kingdom. If the narrator finds Susanna in New Orleans, it will be because he boarded the “telegraph” ship that stole her southward. Perhaps it is the boat that slave trade “innovators” such as Isaac Franklin and John Armfield used to move captives from Alexandria, Virginia to Louisiana by water, rather than inefficient overland chain gangs used by their competitors. 

    Foster gazed across the Ohio River into captive Kentucky. The river rolled in his songs. The enslaved stevedores in nearby Louisville sometimes chanted doo dah, doo dah, as the legend goes. Foster tailored the sounds of their labor for the minstrel stage. More than the Mason–Dixon line or the Long Bridge, the Ohio River is the border between slavery and freedom. But if you go there looking for a hard line, you will find that it is a porous boundary. Perhaps these slender rowhouses and cobblestones are not what you expected from Ohio, but of course there was something before all the Rust: another obsolete economy that left an imprint on its waterfront. “In Native ballad form and melodic strain distinctively American he sang of simple joys and pathos to all the world,” the marker to Foster reads. And what is more distinctly American than dislocation? 

    Al Jolson enacts two tremendous masquerades in The Wonder Bar, a Busby Berkeley film from 1934, set on one busy night in a Paris club. In the film’s twenty-minute musical climax, he wanders through heaven, meeting various characters of the minstrel stage, including Stephen Foster’s Old Black Joe and the “cabin show” iteration of saintly Uncle Tom. He sings Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s “Going to Heaven on a Mule,” a hit for Rudy Vallee in the same year. He searches for his mule in the afterlife and they are reunited once the beast wins its own bright wings. Each angelic appendage looks like a leftover meal hastily wrapped in aluminum foil. The film is set in the contained space of a Paris nightclub, populated by American tourists, displaced Russians, and European demi-mondaines, but the set wildly expands during the musical sequence. Now the Wonder Bar is big enough to contain a rainbow bridge from the land of the living, a celestial Main Street as setting for the newly-dead’s welcome parade, a club-within-a-club for dice-throwing and roulette-spinning angels, and hundreds of extras — all in blackface — made to look like a crowd of thousands with the help of strategically placed mirrors. The Archangel Gabriel and Saint Peter appear, with their cotton-ball beards affixed to corked-up faces. Heaven has a skilled barber and a grove where cooked pork chops fall from trees. A chicken walks into an oven with claws and combs intact but comes out as a three-piece and a biscuit with no trail of blood and feathers.

    This is heady blackface — strong poison for contemporary viewers who experience minstrelsy as “moral typhus,” in Robert F. Moss’ words. Notably, there is very little writing about The Wonder Bar in the canon of film criticism, despite the marquee careers of its star and its director. Insofar as anyone seeks out the film these days, I suspect it is for glimpses of a pre-Hayes Code sexual morality. Older women on holiday in Paris boldly arrange adulterous liaisons with younger men. As the singer Inez, Dolores del Río can scarcely keep her dress on; she looks like she knows — to paraphrase Joan Didion — the erotic charge of a suicide pact. And while the Wonder Bar isn’t a gay club, it’s also not not a gay club. “Boys will be boys,” Jolson whistles when two men dance past him in a clinch. 

    But “Going to Heaven on a Mule” is the showstopper; it offers the audience some relief from Al’s romantic disappointment with the fickle Inez. The staging is closer to the deliberate artifice of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) than the sung-through verisimilitude of Les Miserables (1987). Which is to say: Peter and Gabriel and Old Black Joe and Uncle Tom and the blackface cherubs singing Cab Calloway’s hi-dee-ho do not advance the story, even if they provide eruptive pleasure for audiences. What we learn about Al — his circumstances, his mischief, his great escapes — comes from his earlier masquerade. Here Al Jolson is in costume as Al Wonder, but Al Wonder is not yet in costume as the blackface minstrel. 

    Strolling between his patrons’ tables, he instantly recognizes a White Russian. I dare not speculate about the reason for this recognition; I note only that a contemporaneous comedy, Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot in 1908, ends with the marriage of a Jew to a Slav in New York. David Quizano recognizes his new father-in-law as the man who killed his family at Kishinev, but the New World recognizes no reasons that the nuptials should not proceed. (David holds his peace.) Jolson’s Al Wonder, by contrast, commits to a more fleeting bond than matrimony, sitting with the Russian to spin a tale of romance, of a lost culture, of cheek-kisses and heel-clicks to salute the dead Tsarina. He weaves a tale of his family and gives them all elite jobs in the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky. The Russian never drops his drink or hesitates to part with his money for the unctuous host; he has been off-country so long that he doesn’t recognize a gonif from Srednik. The stakes of the subterfuge are minor; Al takes some pleasure in the old aristocrat’s sentimental treatment of him as a landsmann, then walks toward the audience and delivers the Russian chestnut “Ochie Chernye,” or “Dark Eyes,” which was written in 1843, with the same tenderness that he devoted to his “Mammy” in The Jazz Singer in 1927. 

    The masquerade is undone on the blackface stage; this is authentic minstrelsy, with the shtetl in the frame of the performer’s memory. Before we get to heaven, the audience sees Al applying black paint in the mirror, still humming the old Russian song about dark eyes. The mirror pose is a signature shot for blackface performers from the age of classic cinema — who, I hasten to mention, included black actors as well as white. This simple fact is often ignored, but it is nonetheless true that sweeping-away the minstrel tradition would, if successful, leave us bereft of performers such as Bill Bojangles Robinson and Dooley Wilson, and writers such as Bert Williams and James Weldon Johnson, and Jolson’s sometime-collaborator Cab Calloway, and his foremost interpreter Jackie Wilson. (Yes, that Jackie Wilson. In 1961 he recorded a tribute album to Jolson.) 

    Once Al changes from his tuxedo to his overalls and straw hat, he sits on the porch of a fake cabin. A little girl asks him, “Uncle Asa, are you going to heaven?” The musical sequence shows not only Al Wonder and Al Jolson but also Asa Yoelson, the cantor’s son who trained himself to emote sacred and secular music alike by holding a lit match between his teeth with the flame licking his tongue. When Al sits for the first haircut and shave of his afterlife, cherubs deliver newspapers to the men waiting for the barber. The little angel saves the Yiddish paper for Al. In translation, the headline reads Paradise Times and announces heaven’s new arrivals. For a moment, the camera freezes on the front page with cork-painted hands holding it up for the spectators’ perusal. Then Al lowers it slightly and, peering over the Yiddish lettering, lubriciously winks at the audience. 

    Pretending to be a Slav is a practical joke, but painting your face to answer to your own name is an authentic ruse: an excavation of unsayable sentiment, nostalgia, and yearning for dangerous places. Jewish Lithuania made Al Jolson, but it was a point of departure. Two years later, in The Singing Kid (1936), four music executives badgered Al to try something new. “Those Mammy songs have whiskers and they’re hammy songs,” sing The Yacht Club Boys, a vocal quartet, in disguise as management. “My Mammy may be ham today but she made me what I am today,” Jolson sings back. As they debouche the elevator, the executives hustle Jolson away from a black woman waiting to embark; they enforce a racial separation that minstrelsy incompletely resisted. (The earliest bowdlerizations of Mark Twain were by conservatives who were distressed by the ways in which Huck Finn — a racist by present-day standards — transgresses the color line.) 

    Yes, this scene is transferable to the twenty-first century, but the executives would have a different slate of objections. On the street below the recording studio, Al’s efforts are endorsed by an Irish cop, a Yiddish newspaperman, and an Italian window-washer trying out operatic trills. Nearly one hundred years later, the authentic ruse has accrued some sentimental attachments — without the paint, of course — because it became a pleasurable legerdemain for performers in the decades that followed. In Seinfeld, the hero’s Jewishness is acknowledged for the first time in Season 5, when Jerry exonerates himself for buying his Native girlfriend a cigar-store Indian. After all, he’s never gotten offended when someone asks “Which way is Israel?” The studio audience laughs in waves: incompletely, then slowly and with more conviction. For five seasons they have believed that Jerry’s Sicilian best friend is the son of two Jewish vaudevillians; Seinfeld’s own parents are portrayed by two ferocious Irish clowns. The WASP ex-girlfriend is portrayed by Julia Louis-Dreyfus: yes, the Dreyfus of the Dreyfus Affair. 

    This, too, is elaborate masquerade; and when the paint disappeared, some of its fluidity departed, too. Inoculating the popular culture against the “moral typhus” of minstrelsy has stripped it of some of the complex experiences of “white ethnics” in America. In 1927, The Jazz Singer could unbraid the tensions between assimilation and tradition because it was a comedy. Dramatic acting, on the other hand, had a stricter code of concealment for Jews: Leslie Howard (born Leslie Howard Steiner) went to the plantation, too, in 1939, playing Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, but his reputation was made by Hollywood’s marketing of him as a boarding school boy, an English gentleman, a leading man. Churchill chose Howard as the United Kingdom’s man in Europe. He died in this higher-stakes subterfuge, shot down by the Nazis over the Bay of Biscay.

    All of this is to say that contemporary thinking about blackface relies on a misapprehension. Eric Lott’s now-canonical book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, from 1993, reads the minstrel’s love as a kind of curiosity, a chaotic raid on racial boundaries led by painted clowns. But the minstrel’s love is a route into his own core, not into black culture. Blackness provides a shorthand for America itself. When I asked a friend to read a draft of this essay, she circled my reference to Busby Berkeley’s hundreds of extras in blackface and exclaimed “anything not to hire a black actor!” But of course the minstrel’s whiteness is the point: Al Jolson’s skin shows through the paint as he grips the Yiddish newspaper. Beards and wings are falling off the other minstrels despite the production values; only the ecstasy of performance — of tap-dancing, of appetite, of revelation, of wonder — can turn a painted face into blackface. 

    So what is being concealed? Jolson gave the audience his history; in the cliché of modern therapy-speak, he brought his whole self to work. No one would accuse him of loving Mama Yoelson a fraction less than his tearful performance of “Mammy” suggests; after all, she died within weeks of his arrival in the United States. When Jolson grew old, he collaborated with Columbia Pictures and dubbed his own voice over Larry Parks’ dancing body in The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949): yet another displacement. In short, he wrote his life story with the instrument that Stephen Foster — born a world away, in radically different conditions — had refined. And Jolson repaid him by singing the forgotten verse to “Oh Susanna!” Even postbellum minstrels omitted its hideous description of a boat accident that leaves hundreds of black people dead. Jolson sings it, with notable revision: 

    Oh I jumped abroad the telegraph and traveled around the bend
    The electric fluid magnified and killed five hundred men
    The bulgine bust, the horse run off, I really thought I’d die;
    I shut my eyes and hold my breath, Susanna don’t you cry.

    The original line does not refer to the dead as men. Jolson replaces river with bend; in Foster’s original version, river is an assonant rhyme with the n-word. (And a “bulgine” is an old word for a steam locomotive made up of “bull” and “engine.”) 

    Contrary to the notion that people have only recently learned to avoid the slur, I would note that it functions as a bright line between racists and their enemies among other whites as early as 1852, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When Simon Legree calls Tom by that name, gentle George Shelby punches him in the face. Without the racial slur, Jolson’s line is a postmortem collaboration with and correction of Foster, offered by a singer we can imagine as a grieving witness to exilic suffering, because he was. And once he painted his face, he could cry about it. 

    An addict has many guises. He wakes each morning to adjust the mask of normalcy and sanity. Perhaps the most refined of his masquerades is his performance as his child self. He feigns helplessness and disorder even though he planned the last bender as carefully as a trust fund kid plans their gap year. Skip the “he” and “one”: I am the addict in question. Sometimes, on the way to an act of self-destruction, I stop and remind myself that it hasn’t happened. I haven’t done it yet; I’m only wishing for it. Occasionally that pause opens a door for grace to enter. Sometimes, after fervent planning and long travels, I find myself sitting across the table from someone or something and think, “Why the hell did I do this?” And by this, I mean, why did I effect yet another plan that can only end in my death? 

    I suspect that Stephen Foster asked himself these questions; I know that his song “Comrades Fill No Glass for Me” (1855) proffers an answer.

    I know a breast that once was light
    Whose patient sufferings need my care
    I know a hearth that once was bright,
    But drooping hopes have nestled there.
    Then while the tear drops nightly steal
    From wounded hearts that I should heal
    Though boon companions may ye be,
    But comrades, fill no glass for me.

    Though boon companions may ye be,
    But comrades, fill no glass for me.
    When I was young I felt the tide
    Of aspirations undefiled,
    But manhood’s years have wronged the pride
    My parents centered in their child.
    Then, by a mother’s sacred tear,
    By all that memory should revere,
    Though boon companions may ye be,
    Oh! comrades, fill no glass for me.
    Though boon companions may ye be,
    Oh! comrades, fill no glass for me.

    There it is: the addict runs through his index of loss and failure, and that shame is a lure to, not a cure for, what ails him. He grieves his marriage’s dissolution into resentment and despair. Written in 1854 in proximity to “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” — likely a love song for his estranged wife, Jane — the narrator’s half-willing bond may be better than Foster could have hoped for. Jane Foster left him in 1853. By 1855, the light of retrospection offers him some clarity, but not enough to keep him sober. The grammar of songwriting is always more tangled than that of a plain prose sentence, but I suspect these “boon companions” are raising a toast to their poor friend’s wounded mother in the final lines, drinking by and for her suffering. He asks them twice not to fill his glass; perhaps they acquiesce to his plea. Sometimes they do not; this I can attest.

    By 1862, Foster had lived apart from Jane and their daughter Marion for nearly a decade, but the conflict surfaces again in “My Wife is a Most Knowing Woman,” co-written with George Cooper. “This life we all know is a short one, but some tongues are long, heaven knows,” they write. “And a miserable life is a husband’s who numbers his wife with his foes.” The wife here is not an archetypal fishwife, but a true antagonist; he takes pain to exclude all the usual reasons for strife, including sexual jealousy. Insofar as women notice the man in “My Wife is a Most Knowing Woman” on the street, it is because he reeks of booze and failure. 

    Historians impose a dyad on Foster’s songwriting: they are either parlor songs or they are written for the minstrel stage. Between and beyond those bookends, however, Foster wrote autobiographical songs with all the force and clarity of poets a century after him, in the postwar confessional genre. Yet there is a curious tendency to see even this branch of Foster’s work as political. The Library of Congress indexes his drunken laments as temperance ballads, as does the University of Pittsburgh, home of the Foster archives. But certain bruises to the soul, especially but not exclusively addiction, are not political, yet without being apolitical: that is an impossible fiction. It strikes me as strange to put Foster’s dissipation and despair into the Procrustean bed of temperance politics, which were, in the last decades of his life, coalescing into a radical movement that touched the same nerves as abolitionism. “I am a temperance man because I am an anti-slavery man,” Frederick Douglass told a Scottish audience in 1846. “And I am an anti-slavery man because I love my fellow men.” Foster’s drinking songs, by contrast, are singular: stories of one man in which his fellow men might find some corner of understanding. And — contrary to postmortem exonerations that are wholly unnecessary for the celebration of his music — Foster was no abolitionist.

    Fifteen years ago, as a fledgling graduate student and an untreated addict, I wrote about the “conversion narrative” in Foster scholarship — from minstrel to parlor, from racist to respectable — in hopes of understanding his relationship to race in the twenty-first century. The rhetorical ruse that begins this essay — the bait and switch between Michael Jackson and Stephen Foster — was one I tried then, with Foster and Mark Twain. I cited Norman Podhoretz and Elizabeth Hardwick calling Twain the soul of America and tarring his critics as Stalinists. The reader’s reports were terrible; a colleague later told me there was a kind of blacklist among musicologists, who mistook my argument for an attempt to cancel Stephen Foster. The essay has had an afterlife, though, and I have some small part in the coming bicentennial celebrations for Foster.

    Then and now, I write to say that an artist who bears the weight of the nation bears too much, and that a troubling artist excused in nationalistic terms has found poor defenders. No artist requires the imprimatur of national value or, for that matter, communitarian or identititarian value. Recent writing on Foster has asked that institutions such as the University of Pittsburgh and the Kentucky Derby place his fate in the hands of black communities — a suggestion often made by whites who endorse the truth and authenticity of a single perspective with which they agree and use as a shield against criticism. These calls reject the answers that Paul Robeson and Ray Charles and Marian Anderson and Mavis Staples have already offered in song; we do no justice by explaining their germinal performances of Foster as strictly commercial, or by imagining that they would sing a different song in these putatively enlightened times. 

    I didn’t understand the politics of antebellum America when I first wrote about Foster. Even now, I don’t fully understand their murkiness and imbrication: Roger Taney, Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks, and Eastman Johnson all lived on a single block in the District of Columbia in the decade before the Civil War. No public denunciations or revoked dinner invitations would have clarified, or resolved, their differing politics or brought Emancipation decades sooner. It took a war, in which more than half a million people died for three or four million reasons. “One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own — that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them,” writes Kathryn Schulz. The past was murky — not the clear young spirit of vodka or gin, but the long-distilled poison of my beloved, fatal deep brown single-malt whiskey. The borders were as fluid as the river between Kentucky and Ohio. 

    And this is the trouble with writing about the representatively American body of “Ethiopian music”: the paint is gone, but the music remains. The white performer lingers, but the black man he seems to lampoon was never there. It is blackface in the same way that clowning is whiteface — which is to say, not at all. It is a means of expression for people at the margins: immigrants and exiles, who sacrificed some portion of particularity, history, and expression to become straw men for arguments about whiteness. (As a young teacher, I sometimes quoted Malcolm X in a lecture about immigration; he said that the n-word was the first English word that immigrants learned. I hereby apologize to my grandparents for sweeping away the full range of their experience with these social justice pieties). Yes, blackface is injurious. But the cork paint was a Trojan mask: the artists inside are (still) a motley crew. 

    If you are a centenarian, you might have seen a performance of Foster’s songs on the blackface stage. You might have performed in black paint even if you are quite a bit younger — say, a current elected official to statewide office in Virginia or to national office in Canada. Younger than that, and you might only know Foster from Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny was a fan. Perhaps someone is reading this essay and learning Foster’s name; I assure you that you have heard him in the rhythm of a riverboat’s paddle. In 1985, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles performed “Swanee River Rock” — Charles’ adaptation of Foster — live in New Orleans with Paul Shaffer and Ronnie Wood. It takes two hundred and sixty four keys to make this song swing so hard. A video is widely available, and it is no exaggeration to call it required viewing. The camera begins on Lewis’ diamond-studded hands and moves to Domino’s grin; Ray Charles is a late addition, but his face transforms with pleasure for the music, and for the fellowship, too. The two are inseparable. 

    Estuaries of American music can, like the Swanee, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Pee Dee, take you somewhere familiar. Their iterability offers you something to grasp — a crew to roll with in the streets of New Orleans, even. The songs, as the fictional folksinger says in Inside Llewyn Davis, never get old though they never sound new. The conversion is not the songwriter’s retreat from his troubling genre, but your own adaptation to the sound of your life, your voice, your submerged and emerging histories. Every time the road brings you to Stephen Foster, like Jolson, you make him, but you never make him new. You make him yours.