On Strength

I open most new books with some apprehension. I am concerned: where am I and to where am I heading; do I want to be there? I wonder: who are these people, and do I want to keep company with their like? I have long suspected that a child’s aversion to reading might stem from the strangenesses entailed in entering a new book. I think of the child’s distress when dragged into the company of strangers: withdrawn, shy, uncomfortable and begging to be taken home. “When can we leave?” they ask. Blanche Dubois may have depended on the kindness of strangers, but I think children are uncomfortable there. Entering the perplexing world of a new book is a similarly estranging event and requires some effort to overcome.

When I do begin a book I leave this world and enter another, and at the outset I wander about somewhat lost. Sometimes I stay that way; there are sentences I read that I recognize I may never understand. Suddenly within those pages I am placed in contact with a population of new characters not necessarily of my familiarity or liking; I decide to journey with them to an assortment of new and even strange events; I follow the narration of someone whom I am not certain I can trust, and am presented with new ideas in vocabularies with which I may struggle; often my current itch is scratched. Thoreau says that a good book is one that requires that the one stand on tiptoes to read it. My calves grow sore though the itch gets relieved. Reading ought to be an active and not at all a passive practice, and one must have sufficient courage and strength to properly read. From the library what book will the reader pull off of the shelf and check out at the front desk. Sometimes I pick up a book for reasons that remain a bit vague and I say, “Here I am. Introduce yourself;” I ask, “What have you to say to me?” To the narrator I confess, “You can be unreliable but intrigue me.” Sometimes when I browse in the bookstore, I read a jacket cover, purchase the book and hope that it will give relief to the pricklings in my imagination. I have occasionally experienced many a relief and joy in this manner. The exact etiology of the inspiring discomfort is not always clear at the outset but in the reading I will learn its source and gain some relief and even sometimes wisdom. I call upon my patience and make myself available. 

Why this book at this time and place. Thoreau does acknowledge that by his reading he wishes “to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced.” Ironically Thoreau was a Concord townsman writing a book that was meant to address “our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.” I have wondered if he was condemning his own book to the remainder shelf because he was urging his town people to look beyond Concord for the writers with the wisdom that would their change lives. 

And sometimes I go to the bookshelves and elect to reread a book I remember having enjoyed in the past. Though the characters might be familiar and the story known, I know the experience of reading will be different; I am different. Such was the case in the choice to reread George Eliot’s novel, Felix Holt: The Radical. The appellation ‘radical’ has been pejoratively and erroneously thrown about a great deal these days by this present Republican government, though the term didn’t have the same meaning in the context of Britain in 1832. I had brought the book down to Lotus Land actually for reasons unknown: the last time I had read the novel was in the very early 1980s when I had been awarded a fellowship to study the Serial Novel: Dickens, Eliot and James at Longwood College (now University) in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County. Prince Edward County gained some notoriety when in the wake of Brown vs. The Board of Education it closed its public schools rather than integrate them. Farmville was also the last town through which Robert E. Lee passed on his way to Appomattox to surrender his armies to General Ulysses S. Grant to end the bloody Civil War. To seminar every morning I brought my heavy journal and the current text and engaged in discussion of the section we were studying; then I was free for the rest of the day. I had my lunch in the College dining hall and for the afternoon I sat on the sun plentiful college lawn and read the next day’s assignment. Then I would. turn to the other novels of the author under study that weren’t on the syllabus; George Eliot’s Felix Holt was one of the books I read. I was young then and without too many responsibilities. In the copy I have carried down here there are my early markings and annotations. I carried it down here now to Lotus Land because I wanted to stay immersed in the narratives of the 19^th century novel and to enjoy the depths of George Eliot’s style and ideas. And in the reading I came across a passage that had not scratched any itch then but did now. 

The narrator of Felix Holt raises the issue of strength; what is strength, the narrator wonders. The narrator’s addresses the  dilemma troubling Rufus Lyon. He had taken Annette and her baby into his home having found then abandoned and hungry on the roads; Lyon fell in love with her and this passion causes him a great deal of anguish. To act on his feeling would challenge his position as a vicar in the Church of England. Because Annette is a Roman Catholic.  Will Lyon’s exercise of strength allow him not to act on his love for Annette and continue to serve his Church of England congregation, or will he give up his ministry and marry Annette for whom he longs. To renounce Annette or to marry her was the situation that raised for the narrator the nature of and necessity for strength. The narrator wonders: Is strength revealed in the mere exercise of raw power which would  send her and her child to a convent because and so protect his position and the peace of his life? Or, the narrator wonders if perhaps strength is a “blind wilfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cords it tightens.” Is strength a willed ignorance, a refusal to see the complex contexts in which events arise and in which decisions must be made? Rufus Lyon is aware of these contexts and it is this awareness that causes him so much anxiety. And then I was led to consider the idea of strength when applied to our present so-called leader, of Donald Trump whose narrow vision s advertised as his strength is characterized by an unwillingness to see outside his tunneled perspectives leading him to be able not to see how his heartless arrogance had led for millions cruel, unnecessary agonies and privation; Trump’s strength is exercised to increase his power. Or, the narrator wonders, is strength “the narrowness of a brain that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of to-day.” I again thought of Trump and his pathological narcissism that apparently guides his actions; such might explain his obsessive concern to ensure that his name and visage appear everywhere and often where it does not belong. Is Trump’s strength defined by his vindictiveness that uses his position to punish those whom he believes have somehow hurt him when offering critique to his actions or accusations of his inappropiate behaviors? Or, the narrator wonders, is strength that which “tugs with emphasis for every small purpose, and thinks it weakness to exercise the sublime power of resolved renunciation?” Trumps’ absolute refusal to acknowledge uncertainties or mistakes and wrong decisions that have led to serious consequences for the United States and for the world. His strength, he asserts, tells him that he alone was born to set things right! But he is not Prince Hamlet, not even an attending lord. 

Strength has customarily connoted a positive quality: we go to the gyms to increase our strengths; pump irons and work the machines. Strength is what gets us to the finish lines in races and marathons. Strength is what we require to deal with the complexities of our lives including that when engaged with our families, our relationships . . . our even our studies. Be strong, we are from childhood advised. But Eliot’s narrator suggests to me another perspective on strength and one that complicated how I approach the world and my relationships and my studies. Reverend Lyon chooses to make Annette Ledru his wife and adopts Esther her daughter as his own. The decision costs him dearly and changes the direction of his life. But his act reveals an exercise of strength that understands and accepts the consequences of his actions; his act recognizes that his love demands fulfillment; nonetheless recognizing that the needs of others might take precedence over his own offered Annette rights of refusal. Acknowledging his doubts, his weaknesses and the needs of others, the character of Rufus Lyon reveals his strength.
           I am not far into this rereading of Felix Holt: The Radical, and I do not yet know what itch it was meant to scratch. But the narrator’s brief meditation has already clarified for me some of the concerns that trouble me about Trump and his administration and about the nature of strength. I came to see that Trump’s claims of strength in governing are merely a self-serving promotion, revealing what that so-called strength often amounts to: limited intelligence and a deeply disturbed personality. His claims of strength reveal his weakness. And there are others too susceptible to his influence who also claim strength, but what they display is overt prejudice and personal folly, exposing both the narrowness of their thinking and the absence of real strength.