George Barker : 15 poems

 

Heroes and worms
 
The dragons of the breast
Devour and drag down
Those seraphim a the mind
Trumpeting to attest
That Destiny is our own.
But what is not is best.
 
I, cowboy with a spear,
Transfix my own heart
To kill the worm down there
Tearing St. George apart -
But O the worm turns
Into my heart of hearts.
 

My dragonfly roaring your engines

My dragonfly roaring your engines
Through my five senses soar,
As, seeking for its origin,
The bird goes up through the shower.
 
And over all that distance can
Or time will put between us,
Rise  O my rainbow and make span
Over what intervenes.
 
On their cotillion axles spin
 The automatic stars
 And take our silver kisses in
 Like penny pianolas.
 
 But far from me as my home is
 You move, and do not rest,
 With on your lip my thousand mile kiss
 And the grief at the breast.

Summer Song

 
I looked into my heart to write
And found a desert there.
But when I looked again I heard
Howling and proud in every word
The hyena despair.
 
Great summer sun, great summer sun,
All loss burns in trophies;
And in the cold sheet of the sky
Lifelong the fishlipped lovers lie
Kissing catastrophes.
 
O loving garden where I lay
When under the breasted tree
My son stood up behind my eyes
And groaned: Remember that the price
Is vinegar for me.
 
Great summer sun, great summer sun,
Turn back to the designer:
I would not be the one to start
The breaking day and the breaking heart
For all the grief in China.
 
My one, my one, my only love,
Hide, hide your face in a leaf,
And let the hot tear falling burn
The stupid heart that will not learn
The everywhere of grief.
 
Great summer sun, great summer sun,
Turn back to the never-never
Cloud-cuckoo, happy, far-off land
Where all the love is true love, and
True love goes on for ever.

Turn on your side and bear the day to me

Turn on your side and bear the day to me
Beloved, sceptre-struck, immured
In the glass wall of sleep. Slowly
Uncloud the borealis of your eye
And show your iceberg secrets, your midnight prizes
To the green-eyed world and to me. Sin
Coils upward into thin air when you awaken
And again morning announces amnesty over
The serpent-kingdomed bed. Your mother
Watched with as dove an eye the unforgivable night
Sigh backward into innocence when you
Set a bright monument in her amorous sea.
Look down, Undine, on the trident that struck
Sons from the rock of vanity. Turn in the world
Sceptre-struck, spellbound, beloved,
Turn in the world and bear the day to me.

Ode Against St.Cecilia’s Day

 
Rise, underground sleepers, rise from the grave
Under a broken hearted sky
And hear the swansinging nightmare grieve
For this deserted anniversary
Where horned a hope sobs in the wilderness
By the thunderbolt of the day.
 
Footfall echo down the long ruin of midnight
Knock like a heart in a box
Through the aural house and the sybilline cave
Where once Cecilia shook her singing veils,
Echo and mourn. Footstepping word, attend her
Here, where, bird of answer, she prevails.
 
Sleep, wormeaten weepers.Silence is her altar.
To the drum of the skull, muffled
In a black time, the sigh is a hecatomb.
Tender Cecilia silence. Silence is tender
As never a word was. Now, dumb-
Struck she mourns in the catacombs of her grandeur.
 
O stop the calling killer in the skull
Like beasts we turn towards!
For was the night-riding siren beautiful
Caterwauling war until her bed was full
Of the uxorious dead?
Let the great moaners of the Seven Seas
And only heaven mourn
With the shipwracked harp of creation on their knees
Till Cecilia turns to a stone.

 

Flight 462

 
Dear love, that I should go
into an unsetting sun
with only the lift of a hand
to you still standing there
like a young rowan tree
enislanded in the cloud
of this parting, these
true words is what that hand
lifted out of the past
conveys. The heart is this.
When, twenty-nine angels high,
I look down upon those veils
and robes of glimmering mist
that mantle the Atlantic,
there, in every glittering
distillation
of diamond, sun and dew,
I see, no, not the with-held tear that never fell
from your spellbound vision,
but in each diamond drop
I see the oval icon
with a babe under the heart
of you whom distance only
brings me the nearer to:
for the rocking seas may slide
under the hunting moon
and the capsizing con-
stellations overhead
tum death and destiny
further away or toward
the flying instant I am
whispering over these seas,
nevertheless, my love,
leaving you, leaving you,
I travel still and still
faster than Pan American
my last love, to you.

True Love true love what have I done

 
True love, true love, what have I done
That I can find no rest?
Only the breaking of this bedrock
Nightlong in my breast.
 
True love, true love, what have I done
To drive such a scissoring wind
Over the seas of my sleep like
A harpy of the mind?
 
True love, true love, what have I done
That, wherever I go,
I walk upon that sobbing fossil—
Eros in the snow?
 
True love, true love, what have I done?
 —So violent a thing
That every word and wind a witness
Against my breath will bring?
 
True love, true love, what have I done
Save watch it sail away,
That gold haired shell with Aphrodite
Nailed to a prow of clay?
 
True love, true love, what have I done?
O never and never return!
I have seen the lightning whip the shrouds
And watched the mermaids bum.
 
True love, true love, what have I done
That I can find no rest—
The gilded head, the wormwood image
Sink weeping in the west.
 
True love, true love, what have I done?
In the assuaging sea
I drown, but still the fishes whisper
Love without end to me. 

 

Grandfather, Grandfather

 
Grandfather, Grandfather,
what do pandas say?
Grandfather, Grandfather,
as among the rocks they roll
and rather sadly play
a game that seems
to do with dreams
of places far away.
Grandfather, Grandfather,
what do pandas say?
 
Grand-daughter, Grand-daughter,
when the pandas play
rather sadly in the rocks
this is what they say
to one another as they seem
to remember in a dream
those places far away:
'Let us tell no one
the word that we say
softly to one another
as we roll and play.
For if they ever heard it,
the tall two-legged Understanders
who always want to know what pandas
like us love to say,
yes, if they ever heard it
they would take it away.'
 

 

To My Mother

 
Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais, but most tender for
The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her -
She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.
 
She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith, and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.

 

Swansong of the Hyena

 
Where are those words that once
Alighted like swans upon
The silent deserts of sense
And gave us oases?
They have all turned into stone
Like Memnon's effigies.
 
The rat and the hyena
Nest in my innermost
And sacred tabernacle.
I and my soul have seen
A vision of that foul ghost
And heard its mad cackle.

Narcissus and the star

 
I will not look within
Where at the hot pit hisses
That diet of worms and a daimon
Adoring his mirror twin
More than any Narcissus
The issue of his semen.
 
But as the first and last
Dead suns rise and set
Over and hereafter
The sweet star and the past,
Glory without regret
All things ever after.

O Who Will Speak From a Womb or a Cloud?
 
 
Not less light shall the gold and the green lie
On the cyclonic curl and diamonded eye, than
Love lay yesterday on the breast like a beast.
Not less light shall God tread my maze of nerve
Than that great dread of tomorrow drove over
My maze of days. Not less terrible that tread
Stomping upon your grave than I shall tread there.
Who is a god to haunt the tomb but Love?
 
Therefore I shall be there at morning and midnight,
Not with a straw in my hair and a tear as Ophelia
Floating along my sorrow, but I shall come with
The cabala of things, the cipher of nature, so that
With the mere flounce of a bird's feather crest
I shall speak to you where you sit in all trees,
Where you conspire with all things that are dead.
Who is so far that Love cannot speak to him?
 
So that no corner can hide you, no autumn of leaves
So deeply close over you that I shall not find you,
To stretch down my hand and sting you with life
Like poison that resurrects. O remember
How once the Lyrae dazzled and how the Novembers
Smoked, so that blood burned, flashed its mica,
And that was life. Now if I dip my hand in your grave
Shall I find it bloody with autumn and bright with stars?
Who is to answer if you will not answer me?
 
But you are the not yet dead, so cannot answer.
Hung by a hair's breadth to the breath of a lung,
Nothing you know of the hole over which you hang
But that it's dark and deep as tomorrow midnight.
I ask, but you cannot answer except with words
Which show me the mere interior of your fear,
The reverse face of the world. But this,
This is not death, the standing on the head
So that a sky is seen. O who
Who but the not yet born can tell me of my bourne?
 
Lie you there, lie you there, my never, never,
Never to be delivered daughter, so wise in ways
Where you perch like a bird beyond the horizon,
Seeing but not being seen, above our being?
Then tell me, shall the meeting ever be,
When the corpse dives back through the womb
To clasp his child before it ever was?
Who but the dead can kiss the not yet born?
 
Sad is space between a start and a finish,
Like the rough roads of stars, fiery and mad.
I go between birth and the urn, a bright ash
Soon blazed to blank, like a fire-ball. But
Nothing I bring from the before, no message,
No clue, no key, no answer. I hear no echo,
Only the sheep's blood dripping from the gun,
The serpent's tear like fire along the branch.
O who will speak from a womb or a cloud?

 

O Child beside the Waterfall

O Child beside the Waterfall
what songs without a word
rise from those waters like the call
only a heart has heard-
the Joy, the Joy in all things
rise whistling like a bird.
 
O Child beside the Waterfall
I hear them too, the brief
heavenly notes, the harp of dawn,
the nightingale on the leaf,
all, all dispel the darkness and
the silence of our grief.
 
O Child beside the Waterfall
I see you standing there
with waterdrops and fireflies
and hummingbirds in the air,
all singing praise of paradise,
paradise everywhere.
 
 

On A Friend's Escape From Drowning Off The Norfolk Coast

 
Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave
Beside him as he struck
Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave
Crossed him and swung him back,
And he saw his son digging in the castled dirt that could save.
Then the farewell rock
Rose a last time to his eyes. As he cried out
A pawing gag of the sea
Smothered his cry and he sank in his own shout
Like a dying airman. Then she
Deep near her son asleep on the hourglass sand
Was awakened by whom
Save the Fate who knew that this was the wrong time:
And opened her eyes
On the death of her son's begetter. Up she flies
Into the hydra-headed
Grave as he closes his life upon her who for
Life has so richly bedded him.
But she drove through his drowning like Orpheus and tore
Back by his hair
Her escaping bridegroom. And on the sand their son
Stood laughing where
He was almost an orphan. Then the three lay down
On that cold sand
Each holding the other by a living hand.

 

Song for the Countess of Pemroke

 
When I was walking
Down by that green gate
I had the butterfly in my guts
And the harp in my throat;
The wheel in my left hand
And in my right
The perpetual candle
That the wind can tremble
Or the least touch light.
 
When I was sleeping
The cold bird overhead
Came down to my bed
For comfort and I said:
O the gold-tufted, feather-crested,
Blue-eyed, passion-breasted,
Paradise bird has nested
So near my head.
 
When I was abject under
The gaudy summer tree
Out of the branches sprang a hand
With a sprig of misery and
All the blossoms of understanding
And gave them to me.
The foliage of the tree was golden and came down
Entirely over me
And covered me entirely with splendour
Like the laburnum tree. 

About 10 minutes' walk from my home in Loughton, Essex, a blue plaque on a modest semi-detached house announces the birthplace of "George Granville Barker, poet, 1913-1991". It is not a place of pilgrimage. Barker is one of those poets you struggle to remember. Today, hardly anyone reads him, most of his work is out of print, and he is barely mentioned in literary histories.

 Yet this was no minor poet. His work was passionate, intellectually challenging and highly original, his language incantatory and often hypnotic. There are echoes of Blake, Housman, Verlaine and Barker's contemporary, Dylan Thomas. At 22, Barker was a literary phenomenon. TS Eliot declared him a genius, accepted his first work for the magazine Criterion, commissioned him to write a volume for Faber (where Eliot was then poetry editor) and persuaded wealthy friends to set up a support fund. Yeats thought him the finest poet of his generation - better than Auden (whom Eliot initially rejected) and comparable in "rhythmic invention" to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

 Most critics thought the young Barker a better poet than the young Thomas, and the latter, who called his rival's poems "masturbatory monologues", seems to have been madly jealous. Nor did Barker's output ever flag. He regarded poetry as a full-time occupation and, save for a few visiting university lectureships, never had anything resembling a full-time job. He composed poetry until the day he died. If anything, it improved as he got older.

 If you like your poets to live wildly, irresponsibly and dangerously, Barker fitted the bill perfectly. He was a prodigious drinker, and an habitual user of Methedrine and Benzedrine. He never owned a home - his sole attempt at property purchase ended when a fraudulent estate agent absconded with his entire savings - and scarcely had a fixed address. As a young man, he accidentally stabbed his brother's eye out while they were fencing, an episode that haunted him all his life ("I see my hand / Passing over the palace of his face"). He was, for years, at the heart of the bohemian crowd in London's Soho. He fathered 15 children by four different women. One of them, the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart, determined to marry him and bear his children when she discovered his poetry in a London bookshop, long before she met him. He was to be the unnamed lover in Smart's masterpiece of prose poetry, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

 He quarrelled bitterly and sometimes violently with friends as well as lovers and once threw one of his works on the fire - because, he said, his then partner had read it with a sneer. When a visitor tried to rescue it, he hit him over the head with a shovel. The same partner threw an ashtray at him and broke his teeth. Another bit his upper lip so firmly he required 40 stitches. A third partner, who left him for his nephew, was so terrified of the consequences that she settled and married in Birmingham, believing (rightly, as it turned out) that it was the last place he would think of looking for them.

 In America he wrote pornography with Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. His poems, read on the BBC Third Programme, were excoriated for obscenity, and he never lost the capacity to cause outrage. "It's a woman's duty to be beautiful," he told the Sunday Times in 1983. "When we have a civilised society, they will put down ugly and stupid women." Brought up a Catholic by his Irish mother, he took confession, not long before he died, for the first time in 30 years. He had broken every commandment, he told the priest, except the sixth, "thou shalt not kill".

 So why did he fall so out of fashion that, despite settling for the last 24 years of his life just 20 miles from Norwich, the fledgling University of East Anglia, pioneer of creative writing courses, never invited him to take a single class? His second wife Elspeth - still living in the 17th-century farmhouse she rented with Barker, with his desk and chair still exactly where he wrote - says "he never did anything to promote himself, never went to literary parties, and was too difficult and argumentative to belong to anything like a literary school". He was, she said, "a very perverse poet who would often bugger up a perfectly good poem with a pun in the last line".

 By the mid-1950s, he was out of tune with the age. "It was rather like what happened to DH Lawrence," suggested Barker's friend, the poet and anthologist Tony Astbury. "There was a change in sensibility. Not a levelling down exactly, but a levelling out." Though his poetry became somewhat more colloquial, his extravagant language, overwrought style and inflation of reality continued to jar when the fashion was for detached, cool, ironic understatement.

 "He was mystical and mythical; the new mood stressed common sense," wrote his biographer, Robert Fraser. Despite his neglect of church attendance, and frequent assertions that he didn't believe in God, he feared hellfire and damnation ("a very superstitious Catholic," observed Elspeth) and his lifelong engagement with the moral drama of Catholic theology, wrote Fraser, made him "a religious poet in a secular age". Perhaps most important of all, he failed to die young in Manhattan, as Dylan Thomas did.

 Barker didn't stay long in Loughton, though he wrote often of nearby Epping Forest. When he was six months old, his family decamped to Fulham. At the age of nine, inspired by Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, he resolved to be a poet: "While other urchins were blowing up toads / With pipes of straw stuck in the arse, / So was I, but I also wrote odes."

 His father was variously a soldier, a temporary policeman, an insurance agent and a butler at Gray's Inn. Barker was conscious that "I had been cast a little low / In the social register." He left school at 15 and was never very comfortable with better-educated writers, writing of Auden that "behind . . . the poetry I discern a clumsy interrogatory finger questioning me about my matriculation certificate, my antecedents and my annual income". Discovering his girlfriend Jessica was pregnant, he married at 20. Since she, too, was from a Catholic family, the child was born in secret and given up for adoption, another source of lifelong guilt. Though they lived apart from the mid-1940s, she and Barker never divorced. Only when Jessica died, two years before Barker's own death, did he marry Elspeth, his last love.

 Though instinctively on the left, he had little time for politics and was apparently only dimly aware that Japan was allied with the fascist powers when he agreed to take a university lectureship there, starting in March 1940. He found the cadet force playing German martial music outside the campus house where he lived with Jessica. His lectures were attended by only three students. Receiving fan mail from the affluent and well-connected Smart, Barker appealed for financial help in escaping to America. She readily agreed.

 And so came about their first meeting, which forms the celebrated opening passage of By Grand Central Station, a fictional re-creation of their turbulent and passionate affair. She had only recently learnt that the long-awaited love of her life was already married. "I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire . . . But then it is her eyes that come forward . . . her Madonna eyes, soft as the newly born, trusting as the un-tempted. And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forgo my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire." Barker's account was less nuanced: "I stepped down into your lap, just as truly as I stepped down from my mother, and I have loved you completely and perfectly from that moment."

 Cynics would say Barker really fell in love with the freedom of classless America and that Smart was an infatuated groupie. But their on-off affair ranged over four countries and 18 years, and produced four children. Barker didn't formally leave most of his women. Rather, he drifted off, seeming to believe they should wait patiently in the kitchen while his absences grew longer. He became estranged from his children by Jessica, moving in and out of the lives of the others with unpredictability and frequently the charm and warmth of an English spring. "Poets are terrifying people to live with," wrote one daughter, then 15. "They rush off at odd moments and are neither seen nor heard of for months. Then . . . they suddenly appear on the threshold as if nothing had ever happened."

 From 1959, he lived in Italy with Dede Farrelly, estranged wife of his friend John Farrelly. Inspired by an ancient civilisation and by the Italian landscape ("Over the Campagna / As far as I can see / The farms flourish like flowers / And the confident olive / Whispers how civilised / Man and landscape can be"), he produced what many critics thought his finest poetry. He met Elspeth Langlands, a 22-year-old from the Scottish Highlands, on a visit to London in 1963. "He asked me what I thought of his most recent volume," she recalled, "and I said I hadn't enjoyed it as much as some of his earlier ones. He flew into a rage." But his relationship with Dede was deteriorating and, when Elspeth arrived in Italy with a young painter called Tony Kingsmill, he prised her away. Kingsmill fled to Greece, leaving a note of defeat on the kitchen table - "like Van Gogh's ear," Barker observed.

From 1967 he settled with Elspeth at the farmhouse (helped financially by his long-time admirer Graham Greene). They had five children and, for the first time, Barker lived with a family more or less uninterruptedly. According to Elspeth he became disciplined enough to stay off drink and rise at six to start work. She flushed the drugs down the lavatory. Only on Saturday nights, when it was open house for friends and relatives, did he indulge and fight as of old. "People wanted to sit next to him," Elspeth recalled. "Then they knew they wouldn't have anything thrown at them."

 "He may have been outrageous," said Astbury, "but he was a kind and loving man. There was great laughter in his life. He never wanted to be part of a canon. He prided himself on being an outsider." On his grave in Itteringham, Norfolk, a stone book - erected by a young bank robber whom Barker had befriended - states: "No Compromise". It was a phrase Barker often used, and it is a good epitaph, not only for his extraordinary life, but for his attitude to poetry. "I believe the responsibility or onus of the poet," he once wrote, "is to assert and affirm the human principle of perversity . . . I believe the nature of the poet to be at heart anarchic so that, in the inconceivable eventuality of . . . a society . . . possessing no faults to which one could rationally object, it would still be the job of a poet to object."

 Truly, madly, deeply.  By Peter Wilby. The Guardian, April 19, 2008.

Also of interest :
 
Rhymes of passion.  His father was a feted figure of the Thirties poetry scene, with a raging appetite for wine, women and words. His mother was a Canadian heiress and writer who crossed the ocean in search of love. Here, Christopher Barker recounts the tortured and tempestuous relationship between his parents, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart. The Guardian, August 20, 2006. 

 A Glimpse at an Irresponsible Poet! Norfolk Tales, Myths & More! , June 14, 2018. 

The “genius” George Barker – a “very peculiar fellow” in rural Norfolk’s earth.  Recently Retired Man,
December 11, 2018. 

Louise Glück : Nobel Lecture

 

When I was a small child of, I think, about five or six, I staged a competition in my head, a contest to decide the greatest poem in the world. There were two finalists: Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” and Stephen Foster’s “Swanee River.” I paced up and down the second bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Cedarhurst, a village on the south shore of Long Island, reciting, in my head as I preferred, not from my mouth, Blake’s unforgettable poem, and singing, also in my head, the haunting, desolate Foster song. How I came to have read Blake is a mystery. I think there were a few poetry anthologies in my parents’ house among the more common books on politics and history and the many novels. But I associate Blake with my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was not a bookish woman. But there was Blake, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and also a tiny book of the songs from Shakespeare’s plays, many of which I memorized. I particularly loved the song from Cymbeline, understanding probably not a word but hearing the tone, the cadences, the ringing imperatives, thrilling to a very timid, fearful child. “And renownèd be thy grave.” I hoped so.

 
Competitions of this sort, for honor, for high reward, seemed natural to me; the myths that were my first reading were filled with them. The greatest poem in the world seemed to me, even when I was very young, the highest of high honors. This was also the way my sister and I were being raised, to save France (Joan of Arc), to discover radium (Marie Curie). Later I began to understand the dangers and limitations of hierarchical thinking, but in my childhood it seemed important to confer a prize. One person would stand at the top of the mountain, visible from far away, the only thing of interest on the mountain. The person a little below was invisible.
 
Or, in this case, poem. I felt sure that Blake especially was somehow aware of this event, intent on its outcome. I understood he was dead, but I felt he was still alive, since I could hear his voice speaking to me, disguised, but his voice. Speaking, I felt, only to me or especially to me. I felt singled out, privileged; I felt also that it was Blake to whom I aspired to speak, to whom, along with Shakespeare, I was already speaking.
 
Blake was the winner of the competition. But I realized later how similar these two lyrics were; I was drawn, then as now, to the solitary human voice, raised in lament or longing. And the poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role. Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.
 
I liked this pact, I liked the sense that what the poem spoke was essential and also private, the message received by the priest or the analyst.
 
The prize ceremony in my grandmother’s second bedroom seemed, by virtue of its secrecy, an extension of the intense relation the poem had created: an extension, not a violation.
 
Blake was speaking to me through the little black boy; he was the hidden origin of that voice. He could not be seen, just as the little black boy was not seen, or was seen inaccurately, by the unperceptive and disdainful white boy. But I knew that what he said was true, that his provisional mortal body contained a soul of luminous purity; I knew this because what the black child says, his account of his feelings and his experience, contains no blame, no wish to revenge himself, only the belief that, in the perfect world he has been promised after death, he will be recognized for what he is, and in a surfeit of joy protect the more fragile white child from the sudden surfeit of light. That this is not a realistic hope, that it ignores the real, makes the poem heartbreaking and also deeply political. The hurt and righteous anger the little black boy cannot allow himself to feel, that his mother tries to shield him from, is felt by the reader or listener. Even when that reader is a child.
 
But public honor is another matter.
 
The poems to which I have, all my life, been most ardently drawn are poems of the kind I have described, poems of intimate selection or collusion, poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator. “I’m nobody,” Dickinson says. “Are you nobody, too? / Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell…” Or Eliot: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table…” Eliot is not summoning the boyscout troop. He is asking something of the reader. As opposed, say, to Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”: Shakespeare is not comparing me to a summer’s day. I am being allowed to overhear dazzling virtuosity, but the poem does not require my presence.
 
In art of the kind to which I was drawn, the voice or judgment of the collective is dangerous. The precariousness of intimate speech adds to its power and the power of the reader, through whose agency the voice is encouraged in its urgent plea or confidence.
 
What happens to a poet of this type when the collective, instead of apparently exiling or ignoring him or her, applauds and elevates? I would say such a poet would feel threatened, outmaneuvered.
 
This is Dickinson’s subject. Not always, but often.
 
I read Emily Dickinson most passionately when I was in my teens. Usually late at night, post-bedtime, on the living room sofa.
 
                 I’m nobody! Who are you?
                Are you nobody, too?
 
And, in the version I read then and still prefer:
 
                 Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
                They’d banish us, you know…
 
Dickinson had chosen me, or recognized me, as I sat there on the sofa. We were an elite, companions in invisibility, a fact known only to us, which each corroborated for the other. In the world, we were nobody.
 
But what would constitute banishment to people existing as we did, in our safe place under the log? Banishment is when the log is moved.
I am not talking here about the pernicious influence of Emily Dickinson on teenaged girls. I am talking about a temperament that distrusts public life or sees it as the realm in which generalization obliterates precision, and partial truth replaces candor and charged disclosure. By way of illustration: suppose the voice of the conspirator, Dickinson’s voice, is replaced by the voice of the tribunal. “We’re nobody, who are you?” That message becomes suddenly sinister.
 
It was a surprise to me on the morning of October 8th to feel the sort of panic I have been describing. The light was too bright. The scale too vast.
 
Those of us who write books presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.
 
I believe that in awarding me this prize, the Swedish Academy is choosing to honor the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.
 
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“The Little Black Boy” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. Poetry and Prose of William Blake / edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London : Nonesuch, 1927
 
“Old Folks at Home” / “Way Down Upon the Swanee River”, 1851. Words and music by Stephen Foster.
 
“Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun” from Cymbeline (Act IV, Scene II) by William Shakespeare.
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. London : Jonathan Cape, 1937
 
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962. London : Faber & Faber, 1963
 
Sonnet XVIII: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” by William Shakespeare.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
The Little Black Boy
 
By William Blake
 
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.
 
My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east, began to say:
 
“Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
“And gives his light, and gives his heat away;
“And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
“Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
 
“And we are put on earth a little space,
“That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
“And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
“Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
 
“For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear,
“The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice,
“Saying: ‘Come out from the grove, my love & care,
“‘And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.’”
 
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy:
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
 
I’ll shade him from the heat, till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
 
 
 
“I’m nobody! Who are you?”
 
By Emily Dickinson
 
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
 
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
 
 
 

Nobel laureate Louise Glück has revealed her “panic” at becoming the 16th female winner of the literature prize for the first time, with her acceptance speech released as her publisher announced her first new poetry collection in seven years.
 
Glück won the 2020 Nobel prize in October, with the judging committee citing her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Since then, the 77-year-old has barely spoken publicly about her win. “Mostly I am concerned for the preservation of daily life with people I love,” she told the prize organisers on 8 October, when asked how she felt about winning. “It’s disruptive. [The phone] is ringing all the time. It’s ringing now.” Speaking to the press outside her house that same day, she said she felt “agitation and joy” before getting in a waiting car. “I’m sorry you’ve had to wait all day,” she said, before leaving.
 
On Monday, her acceptance speech was published, which reveals her conflicted feelings about the win. Writing of her lifelong relationship with poetry, particularly “poems of intimate selection or collusion” by William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she writes: “It was a surprise to me on the morning of 8 October to feel the sort of panic I have been describing. The light was too bright. The scale too vast.
 
 “Those of us who write books presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.” She writes that she feels the prize was a decision to “honour the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.”
 
On Monday, it was also announced that Winter Recipes from the Collective will be published in autumn 2021. Michael Schmidt, managing director of Glück’s longtime publisher Carcanet, said: “Carcanet started publishing Louise with The Wild Iris back in the 1990s and we have gone on to publish all her collections and her essays. It’s a joy to be able to continue as her publisher now that she is a Nobel laureate. At a time when performance is almost de rigueur, it is possible to see how radical the Nobel committee’s choice is, affirming the primacy of the art in the teeth of the preferences of the age. At Carcanet she has been an inspiration for the last three decades.”
 
American Originality, a collection of essays on contemporary poetry that was published in the US in 2017, will be published in the UK in April. Schmidt described it as “a forceful and revealing critical achievement, including erudite analyses of poets of interest to Glück throughout her career, such as Rilke, Pinsky and Dobyns”.
 
Penguin also announced its plans to republish some of her past work: Poems 1962-2012, a collected works, and her 2006 collection Averno, a reworking of the Persephone myth that is often considered to be her masterpiece.
 
Glück is the author of 12 books of poems and two collections of essays, and has previously won the Pulitzer prize, the National Book Award, the National Humanities medal and the gold medal for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
 
 
Nobel literature prize winner Louise Glück reveals 'panic' in acceptance speech. By Sian Cain. The Guardian,  December 7, 2020.

Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die

 

Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die: Steven Nadler in conversation with Alex Douglas.

 

“The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.” Spinoza
 
The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza has long been known for his “heretical” view of God and for the radical determinism he sees governing the cosmos and human freedom. Only recently, however, has he begun to be considered in a serious way as a moral philosopher. In his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, after establishing some metaphysical and epistemological foundations, he turns to the “big questions” that so often move one to reflect on, and even change, the values that inform one’s life: What is truly good? What is happiness? What is the relationship between being a good or virtuous person and enjoying happiness and human flourishing? In this conversation with fellow Spinoza scholar Alexander Douglas, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler connects Spinoza’s ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one’s best life (and death).
 
Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One of the world’s leading Spinoza scholars, his new book Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die is published in September.
 
Alexander Douglas is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He studies early modern rationalism, particularly various forms of Cartesianism and especially that of Spinoza. He is also interested in critiques of political economy and is the author of The Philosophy of Debt.
 
Recording of live webinar hosted by The Philosopher, on 21 September 2020.

 Princeton University Press

We often think of cancel culture as a contemporary phenomenon, driven by social media and rife in our hyper-connected world. But really, punishing people for their ideas and opinions has been going on for as long as people have been thinking. Take the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In the mid-17th century, Spinoza was charged with heresy and cast out from his Amsterdam Jewish community.

Since then, he's gone on to be canonised as one of the great Enlightenment thinkers — and even embraced as a hero of Judaism. But un-cancelling a cancelled philosopher is harder than you might expect, and three centuries later, there are still plenty of people who would prefer to see Spinoza hang onto his outcast status.

 Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and raised in the city's Talmud Torah congregation. He had a traditional Jewish upbringing and education, attending the local yeshiva until the age of 17, when he went to work in his father's importing business. But Spinoza remained a scholar, and over the next few years, he began to lay the intellectual foundations for what would become one of the most celebrated bodies of work in European philosophy. At the time, however, Spinoza's ideas weren't being celebrated within his own community. While Spinoza's exact heresies weren't documented, rumours began to swirl of his unorthodox views, and he started clashing with the local religious authorities. It's said that at one point, a fanatic shouting "Heretic!" attacked Spinoza with a knife on the steps of the local synagogue. Things finally came to a head on July 27, 1656, when the congregation issued a writ of cherem or excommunication against the 23-year-old philosopher.

 Spinoza is vaguely accused of "evil opinions", "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", but what religious wrongs did he actually commit? His later philosophical work — particularly the Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 — could offer some answers.  In it, Spinoza articulates a conception of God that would have been highly offensive to any observant Jew at the time. Spinoza's God lacks all the attributes of the God of the Torah, having no will or emotions, no psychological traits or moral character. His God makes no plans or judgments, issues no commandments, and possesses no wisdom or goodness. Spinoza's God is neither transcendent nor supernatural, being more or less reducible to Nature. Indeed, Spinoza's preferred term for this entity is "God or Nature". It's all a far cry from the God of Abraham and Moses, who led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt — and hardly surprising that Spinoza's ideas landed him in such hot water with the religious authorities of his day.

 What's more surprising is that Spinoza has, over the centuries, gone on to become a highly regarded figure in contemporary Judaism, if still a controversial one.  But not all modern Jews have adopted his ideas or extracted a definitive theology from them.  Certainly, from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, Spinoza remains as problematic today as he did in the 17th century. But even anti-Spinozans will admit that many of the big questions that lie at the foundations of modern Judaism — What does it mean to be a Jew? What must Jews believe? Is it possible to have a secular Jewish identity? — are either direct responses to Spinoza, or spring from the history of his interpretation.

 Spinoza has even been hailed as a proto-Zionist. The documentary evidence for this is slim — largely based on his assertion in his text Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that the Jewish people would "one day ... establish once more their independent state", provided they could summon the requisite "manliness" to do so. The passage is more of a loose speculation than a prescient endorsement of a Jewish state, but 19th-century European Zionists took it to mean that Spinoza had envisaged a Judaism based on nationalism. Elsewhere in his work they found a champion of the kind of Jewish identity that they saw in themselves and their project: reason-based, democratic, and at pains to separate rabbinic authority from political governance. And this notion of Spinoza as a secular saint of Zionism carried through to the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called Spinoza "the first Zionist of the last 300 years", embracing him as not just a philosopher who happened to be born a Jew, but a profoundly and definitively Jewish philosopher. So taken was Ben-Gurion with Spinoza that in 1953, he published a laudatory article about the philosopher that kicked off a raging debate about the justice of his excommunication three centuries earlier. Calls rang out within the Israeli parliament and the international Jewish press to have the original cherem rescinded, and opinions were sought from chief rabbis worldwide. The debate remained inconclusive, largely because neither David Ben-Gurion nor most of the world's Jewish leaders had the authority to reverse the original decision. According to Steven Nadler, a long-standing Spinoza scholar and philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the only people authorised to lift the cherem against Spinoza is the community that issued it in the first place — the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam.

 As it happens, the Amsterdam congregation still exists. In December 2015, they held a symposium to debate the proposition that the ban should be lifted. Scholars from four continents were invited to the symposium, to act as an advisory committee. One of the scholars was Professor Nadler. "They didn't want us to express an opinion as to whether the cherem was good or bad," he recalls. "They wanted to know: what were Spinoza's philosophical views, what were the historical circumstances of the ban, what might be the advantages of lifting the cherem, and what might be the disadvantages?"

The debate was held before an audience of over 500 people and, at its conclusion, the current rabbi of the congregation handed down his opinion: that Spinoza should remain where he was, officially cancelled, and (to quote the 1656 decision) "expelled from the people of Israel".

 Despite the ruling, Professor Nadler says most members of the community would have liked to see the cherem lifted. "It would have been a great PR move," he says. "[To annnounce,] 'Look, we're not the intolerant community of the 17th century, Spinoza is one of us and we're proud to own him.'"

But the rabbi thought differently. Professor Nadler says the religious leader asked: "Who am I to overrule my 17th-century predecessors? Am I that much wiser than them?" The rabbi also held that Spinoza's religious views, considered beyond the pale in 1656, had not really been made any less problematic by the passage of time. Once a renegade, always a renegade — particularly when the renegade in question remained proud and unrepentant in his heresy. "Spinoza knew the rules of the game," says Professor Nadler. "The rabbis warned him, and his response was 'Hey, you know what? I'm leaving anyway.'  "So you can't call the cherem a terrible miscarriage of justice." So Baruch Spinoza, rebel philosopher and abominable heretic, remains officially cancelled for the foreseeable future. Fortunately — for philosophers and secular Jews, but also for Orthodox Jews who welcome a provocative challenge to their theology — his works remain.

 The Jewish philosopher Spinoza was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers. So why was he 'cancelled'? By David Rutledge.  ABC Radio National , October 3, 2020

The abominable heretic

 In July 1656, the young philosopher Baruch Spinoza was cast out of his Jewish community for "abominable heresies". We don't know what those crimes were, but we do know that Spinoza has remained a polarising figure within Judaism ever since. On one hand, his philosophy is atheistic, based on the complete rejection of any notion of a sovereign or even conscious God. On the other hand, he's often hailed as one of the founding figures of progressive Judaism - even as a hero of Zionism. Spinoza is a puzzle, and this week we're putting some of the pieces together.

 David Rutledge interviews Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler. 

The Philosopher's Zone.   ABC Radio National , September 9, 2020. 

On July 27, 1656, the governors of Amsterdam’s Jewish synagogue read out a proclamation of excommunication. With unprecedented ferocity, it excoriated Baruch Spinoza for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” and banished him from the community. “The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn against this man,” the judgment thundered, “and may the Lord erase his name from under the heavens.” With this the most famous Jewish philosopher in history was exiled by his people.

 
Spinoza, age 23, left Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter and Latinized his first name to Benedict. The causes of his banishment have been much debated. His father, a Portuguese merchant who had joined the flight of Sephardic Jews out of Iberia, had died two years before, leaving his sons a failing trading firm. Baruch Spinoza had scandalized his fellow Jews by having himself declared an orphan in order to escape his father’s debts.
 
But there can be little doubt that it was primarily Spinoza’s ideas, rather than his deeds, that condemned him. By 1656 he had likely begun to express his beliefs, later enshrined in his writings, that the Hebrew Scriptures were not the unerring word of God; that the Jews were not a chosen people; that there existed no immortal afterlife or divine providence. These views would have scandalized orthodox Jews but also the Christian governors of Amsterdam, at whose sufferance the Jews of the city lived in relative peace. Spinoza was a renegade whom the community could neither abide nor afford.
 
For the remainder of his short life Spinoza lived outside of Amsterdam, modestly and without family. To our knowledge he never left the Dutch Republic. He worked as an optical lens grinder, an occupation that probably killed him by filling his lungs with glass dust. Already versed in Hebrew language and Scripture, Spinoza secured an informal but rigorous education in the new philosophies of the era, particularly those of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes.
 
In the 1660s and ’70s, Spinoza produced one of the most significant intellectual systems in the history of Western philosophy. It encompassed natural science, religion, politics and ethics. Of his two masterworks, the “Ethics” was written first but remained unpublished when Spinoza began to fear the intolerant vigilance of the Dutch ministers. His “Theological-Political Treatise” was anonymously printed in 1670, to torrential public outrage. By his death in 1677, Spinoza’s infamy had spread well beyond Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter.
 
The standard biography of the man is the fascinating “Spinoza: A Life,” by Steven Nadler, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin. A revised edition of this much-admired book has recently appeared. It is highly recommended for the general reader. Spinoza’s philosophy is intricate and obscure, but Mr. Nadler writes with beautiful lucidity. There are large gaps in our knowledge of Spinoza’s life (his friends burned his papers), but Mr. Nadler fills out his narrative with absorbing accounts of Amsterdam’s Jews and Christians during the Dutch Golden Age.
 
Readers more interested in Spinoza’s philosophy, and particularly his ethical thinking, might instead turn to Mr. Nadler’s latest book, “Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die.” Spinoza inspires a rare devotion in many who study him. Descartes, Hobbes and Locke are all granted historical importance, but Spinoza is often read as a kind of timeless sage. There exists an entire genre recommending him to modern readers as a philosophical and ethical guide. “Think Least of Death” is just such a book. As an accessible introduction to the complex thought of Spinoza, it is a success. As an effort at advocacy, it is less of one.
 
The first sentence pulls no punches: “Every day billions of people devote a significant amount of time to worshiping an imaginary being.” Spinoza, Mr. Nadler continues, exposed this anthropomorphized God—who commands, judges and governs—as a “superstitious fiction.” Mr. Nadler is here speaking for or paraphrasing Spinoza—but there is no doubt that he endorses these teachings. His book is marked by a profound identification with its subject.
 
 
Spinoza’s ethics emerged from his ontology, his theory of all being. With Descartes and Hobbes, he swept aside the Aristotelianism that had, once adapted by Christian philosophers, dominated European intellectual life for centuries. This older and still powerful tradition held that every individual thing had a particular essence and end, with the whole animated by the purposes of a providential God. The new thinkers of the 17th century instead taught that, beneath the deceptive appearance of discrete “things,” the visible universe was a swirl of atomistic matter. Creation might have been launched by a God of some kind, but it was not sustained by constant divine intervention. The mechanistic laws of nature drove the universe forward, toward incomprehensible and perhaps random ends.
 
Descartes’s dualism preserved a realm of non-bodily spirit, where individual souls and God might exist alongside the material universe. Hobbes bit the bullet and reduced all things to matter. Descartes preserved human free will. Hobbes was a determinist: Human will, for him, was merely appetite produced by the clash of atoms.
 
For his part, Spinoza produced something like a fusion of these views. He preserved a figment of Descartes’s dualism by arguing that “ideas” existed in parallel with material extension (or visible things). But whereas, for Descartes, spirit and matter were two different substances, for Spinoza they were not. “There is and can only be,” explains Mr. Nadler, “one substance or ultimate reality—God or Nature—and so the human mind and the human body must be modes of or items in God or Nature.” Mr. Nadler makes a heroic effort at explaining this inscrutable doctrine. For practical purposes, Spinoza’s account of existence most resembled that of Hobbes: The mind is buffeted matter, lacking free will; God, if we must preserve the concept, is nothing more than the sum total of natural causes in an eternal physical universe.
 
Spinoza’s account of nature informed his ethics, which is the primary subject of Mr. Nadler’s book. “The inviolable necessity of Nature,” he writes of Spinoza’s philosophy, “governs not only the world of physical bodies—where apples fall from trees and rocks roll down hills—but also the domain of human activity, including whatever happens in the human mind.” According to Spinoza, some traditional notions with a powerful mental sway—our own free will, our ability to objectively measure good and evil or to recognize true beauty and ugliness—were nothing more than subjective fictions.
 
One can begin to see why Spinoza has earned a coterie of modern advocates. He elevated the material methodology of natural science into a metaphysics. His system appeals to the reductive “naturalism” of the modern outlook and to the militant atheism that is particularly strong among evolutionary biologists. Mr. Nadler—with Spinoza—wishes to convince us that a universe of matter, necessity and appetite can be ethical.
 
This is a heavy lift. Spinoza’s humans have no free will. Like all substance, they only strive—without conscious intention—to “preserve” and maintain themselves. For this purpose they seek power. Our emotions (happiness and sorrow) and our conventional moral valuations (good and evil) merely reflect the random waxing and waning of our power. The dominant notes here are egoism and a fatalistic determinism. “Whatever is, just is,” writes Mr. Nadler; “whatever happens, just happens (and had to happen).” This seems, he concedes, “a rather bleak picture, one worthy of the most radical form of nihilism.”
 
For Spinoza, however, the path through this thicket of blind wanting and striving is a kind of quietude. Contentment, or “blessedness,” is achieved by those who minimize the emotional turmoil triggered in them by exterior causes. The wise man (Spinoza was rather less confident about the capacities of women) would come to see his modest place in the whole of nature.
 
It has never been entirely clear that all of this holds together as a coherent ethics. Is Spinoza merely describing what is rather than what should be? Buffeting the mind from external agitation in a world of chaotic matter seems an impossible task. What is more, minds governed by irresistible nature can’t really intend or purposefully will themselves to learn, and so Spinoza’s blessed humans presumably can only “recognize” the truth of the universe, like some sort of elect elite granted a revelation. Spinoza surrendered the vulgar—those incapable of true “intuition”—to what he considered the noble lies of religion. But if happiness is all that we seek, what is wrong per se about living with such comforting illusions? Why should the minds of the wise track the truth of the universe at all? And if they do, why is Spinoza’s intuition that we humans lack free will superior to the much more common intuition that we enjoy it?
 
Mr. Nadler explores all of these questions, shoring up Spinoza’s system with a series of thoughtful, but often rather charitable, interpretations. He tries to soften Spinoza’s elitism and misogyny and to massage away the paradoxes of Spinoza’s deterministic account of freedom.
 
In the end, what is most striking is how traditional Spinoza’s ethical system remains. Much of it is lifted from Stoicism and the Abrahamic religions, counseling inner peace, a resistance to ambition and to unchecked appetite, freedom from the fear of death, control of the passions. It turns out that control of the passions requires honesty, fortitude, altruism and charity. These traditional virtues can, perhaps, be recoded as strategies for avoiding conflict with the exterior world, but such an effort is tendentious. There is no particular reason to think that virtuous living will fortuitously maximize individual power and happiness. Like most accounts of “enlightened” egoism, the notes of enlightenment here often seem smuggled in from older ethical systems that have better claims on them.
 
There is, in short, a question-begging quality to Spinoza’s philosophy. His cryptic and even bizarre account of nature doesn’t produce a particularly unique ethical outcome, and so the ethics lend no added plausibility to the science. Spinoza’s system reconciles an unorthodox theory of being with a conventional ethics, but there is nothing incontrovertible about the result. In many ways the sacrificial, modest and pacific life that he commended—and that he led—is profoundly appealing. But it is an ethic better supported by belief in foundational good and evil and human free will.
 
Like all materialists, Spinoza can’t demonstrate that free will and objective good and evil do not exist; nor can he disprove a God distinct from nature or a soul that lives beyond the body. Such things are not subject to physical measurement or experimentation. His own belief in the mechanistic world of blind matter, and the similar belief of his modern devotees, is at bottom a mere opinion, a faith—if you will—in disenchantment. It is perhaps telling that these faithful so delight in Spinoza’s conclusion that disillusioned laws of nature will not upend our traditional moral inheritance. With these assurances, the old heretic has become a consoling prophet.

Spinoza: A Heretical and Modern Mind. By Jeffrey Collins. The Wall Street Journal, October. 9, 2020 

Socrates says in Plato’s Gorgias that there’s nothing more serious than “the question [of] how we ought to live.” We may aspire to live a good and happy life—but what does such a life consist in? Good in what way? And happy how?
  
For a pious Jew or Christian, perhaps, the answer seems simple: a life in line with God’s will as expressed in the Bible. But what about the rest of us who have turned our backs on revelation? One of the first to do so was the Dutch Portuguese Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza in the seventeenth century. The prophets had no wisdom, he claimed, and the Bible’s picture of God was utterly wrong: there is no creator God who performs miracles and reveals his will to Moses, let alone records it on tablets. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Jewish community in 1656 for “horrible heresies.” He was twenty-three.) Spinoza had to find a new answer to that most serious question. Forget revelation, he argued, and follow reason, which will lead you to peace of mind and lasting joy. If you want to be “blessed” and “saved,” let the philosopher guide you, not the prophet.
 
This may strike some as hubris, but Spinoza was in good company: from Socrates to the skeptics, all ancient philosophers advertised their teachings as gateways to eudaimonia—a happy and flourishing life. They didn’t just ponder philosophical questions but also campaigned for philosophy. If you want to succeed in life, they argued, don’t seek advice from priests, poets, politicians, businessmen, or celebrities. It’s the philosopher’s job to investigate the true nature of things, including that of happiness. Plato dismissed Homer and Hesiod long before Spinoza dismissed the Bible.
 
In a new book on Spinoza’s ethics, Steven Nadler argues that Spinoza “fits well in this broad eudaimonistic tradition.” Over the centuries Spinoza has been many things to many readers: an atheist, a God-intoxicated man, a master metaphysician, a revolutionary, the founder of the radical enlightenment. But his “overriding goal,” according to Nadler, is to show us “the path to true wellbeing.” Nadler’s account of this path is clear, engaging, historically informed, and philosophically nuanced. But his ambition goes further. He suggests that the path Spinoza traces is one we can still walk on, as it provides “valuable insights about how to live today.”
 
It would be wonderful if Spinoza could show us a philosophical path to “blessedness” and “salvation.” It is “very hard,” Spinoza concedes in the Ethics, his philosophical masterwork, but “it can yet be discovered.” Nadler agrees; I don’t. Spinoza’s path is inseparable from his concept of God. As laid out in the Ethics, it starts with demonstrating God’s existence and nature, and ends with demonstrating that the best life consists in the intellectual love of God. That’s the God of the philosophers, to be sure, established by rational argument, not revelation. But it is still a God I doubt we can embrace.
 
There’s now a cottage industry of books that peddle philosophers, from Socrates to William James, as life coaches and therapists. The target audience is a secular, urban, often highly educated crowd eager for some form of “spiritual” guidance. Recent titles in this genre include John Kaag’s Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2020), Edith Hall’s Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (2018), and Massimo Pigliucci’s How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (2017).
 
Spinoza may well be the best bet for moderns seeking a philosophical guide. He suggests that we can have our cake and eat it too: attain blessedness and salvation in a disenchanted world.
 

Nadler doesn’t explain why we should prefer Spinoza over others, but what he describes as Spinoza’s “bleak picture” of the world and of human nature offers a powerful argument for it. For Spinoza, no transcendent God designed the world, watches over it, and gives our lives purpose and meaning. Everything, moreover, is strictly determined, including our will. (If you believe that you freely chose the merlot over the cabernet sauvignon, that’s because you ignore the causal chain that determined your choice from all eternity.) Human beings are selfish, seek their advantage, and strive to increase their power. No wonder Friedrich Nietzsche applauded Spinoza as a precursor!

 
And yet, Spinoza thinks he can carve out a space for a free and joyful life in which we rise above the rollercoaster of fortune and emotions to attain peace of mind. If we pursue our advantage rationally, moreover, we’ll care for the well-being of others as much as for our own. Given Spinoza’s ostensibly “bleak” outlook, this sounds pretty cheerful.
 
Nadler duly lists echoes of ancient philosophers in Spinoza’s work, especially of Aristotle and the Stoics. But what makes Spinoza so intriguing isn’t that he picks up the “eudaimonistic tradition.” It is that he reinvents it. Spinoza not only breaks with the God of the Bible; he also breaks with untenable versions of the God of the philosophers that underpin the ancient concepts of the good life—Aristotle’s unmoved mover, for example, or the Stoic divine mind that providentially orders the universe. That’s why Spinoza may well be the best bet for moderns seeking a philosophical guide. He suggests that we can have our cake and eat it too: attain blessedness and salvation in a disenchanted world.

But how disenchanted is Spinoza’s world, really? On Nadler’s view, it is “worthy of the most radical form of nihilism.” That’s exaggerated. Spinoza isn’t Nietzsche, for whom God is dead. For Spinoza, God is everything. True, he identifies God with Nature (“Deus sive Natura,” as he famously puts it). But Spinoza’s “Nature” isn’t the universe of modern physics: an expanding, mostly empty space that burst into existence 14 billion years ago. It is an eternal, infinite substance whose infinite power produces every possible thing. Nadler denies that for Spinoza this amounts to the best possible world—but it does. Spinoza’s world isn’t best in the sense that God has optimized it for human beings. But it is best in the sense that it includes every level of perfection from the highest to the lowest. Even the withering flowers you forgot to water on the balcony add to it. Their existence admittedly expresses God’s being and power in a very limited way, yet without them, the world would lack something. Spinoza, in short, equates being, power, and goodness. God is the best thing because his being and power are infinite. All other things have as big a share in God’s goodness as they have being and power. At work here is a version of the “principle of plenitude” that can be traced back to Plato.
 
If God is the best thing, he is as foundational for Spinoza’s ethics as he is for his metaphysics. Spinoza couldn’t be clearer on this in a letter to Jacob Ostens, his most forceful rejection of the charge of atheism:
 
    “Does that man, pray, renounce all religion, who declares that God must be acknowledged as the highest good, and that he must be loved as such in a free spirit? And that in this alone does our supreme happiness and our highest freedom consist?”
 
Plainly, we can’t detach Spinoza’s concept of the best life from his concept of God. What does such a life look like, why does he think we should choose it, and why does Nadler concur?
 
The shape of our lives depends to a large extent on the good we aim at. Consider how starkly the lives of Giacomo Casanova, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Immanuel Kant differed: the first pursued sensual pleasure, the second power, and the third wisdom as the highest good. Spinoza, like his ancient forebears, wants us to center our life on the true good.
 
One of his early works, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, opens with a stylized autobiographical text that also serves as the starting point for Nadler’s book. Spinoza tells us how he “resolved” to turn away from what “men regard as the highest good”—things like “riches, honor, and sensual pleasure”—to pursue “the true good” which affords “continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.” The conventional goods have in common that they’re transient and unstable: beauty fades, children leave the house, power and honor can be lost (Napoleon died in exile on St. Helena), health decays, crystal shatters, a villa burns down, the stock market crashes.
 
 If the love of God could reliably offer us superior joy (which, on top of it, doesn’t cease with our physical demise), we would be fools to neglect it for the sake of “riches, honor, and sensual pleasure.” That’s a big “if,” of course, but Spinoza is confident he can prove it. His portrait of the homo liber, the “free man” who pursues his advantage guided by reason, is meant to illustrate this choice. He is, Nadler contends, Spinoza’s “model of human nature,” the ideal we all should aim at.
 
But on closer inspection, it is not clear that “freedom” in Spinoza’s sense is better than “bondage.” Consider children: I love mine; they’re a source of great delight. But they’re also a source of anxiety: Will they succeed in life? Fall sick or be harmed in other ways? What will I do when the nest is empty? How can I prepare for the final goodbye? If my happiness depends on my children, I’m in bondage: how well my life goes depends on “fortune”—factors I can’t fully control. The anxiety this induces disrupts my peace of mind. The “free man” is free because he is able to detach from such transient goods and connect to the true good whose attainment is entirely in his power. Unlike me, he won’t lose sleep over a child’s fever or college entrance exam.
 
The “true good,” Spinoza argues, consists in intellectual activity: in particular, what he calls amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God. Just as all things necessarily follow from God’s nature, we can deduce all things from the idea of God. Since the idea of God is innate, not acquired, we depend on nothing outside of us. We do for nature’s rational order what a geometrician does for the properties of space: deduce them from self-evident axioms. In Spinoza’s view, the mind knows God as it knows the axioms of geometry (we know, rather than learn, that things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another). All we have to do, then, if we want to be happy, is to start deducing. And since God—in the form of his innate idea in our mind—is the cause of our happiness, we will love him in return.

But even if we buy into Spinoza’s rationalist account of knowledge, why should deducing truths from God be a source of supreme joy? Spinoza, as we saw, equates being and goodness. Since existing is good, all things hold on to their existence as much as they can (even the withering flowers on your balcony try to hang in there for as long as possible). This “strive to persevere” is Spinoza’s fundamental law of nature. Success here depends on power—the power to keep oneself going and ward off external threats. The more power the better. That’s why an increase in power is experienced as joy, a decrease as sadness. Power for Spinoza isn’t measured in the number of people you can boss around, but in the number of effects you cause. God’s power is infinite; he is the cause of infinite effects, Spinoza’s universe containing all possible things.
 
The more effects we cause, in short, the more powerful we become, and the more our life is filled with joy. We produce the largest number of effects by deducing true insights from the idea of God in us. Intellectual activity, therefore, is our greatest source of power and joy. (On Spinoza’s scale, Albert Einstein was much more powerful than Adolf Hitler.) It also makes us successful in more conventional ways. Expertise in nutrition and anatomy, for example, helps us to efficiently preserve our health. The “free man” navigates the world wisely, but this is but a side benefit. The main value of knowledge lies in the joy derived from understanding.
 
All of this will be a tough sell to secular readers looking for guidance in confusing, fitful times. Even if we acknowledge that a “strive to persevere” defines us, are we also ready to attribute this to our being finite expressions of an infinite God who hold on to the portion of goodness that constitutes our existence? Do we persevere most successfully by deducing true insights from the innate idea of God? And are our fellow human beings valuable only as a means to our persevering? This doesn’t mean that Spinoza was wrong, of course (Charles Darwin’s theory also was a tough sell, and still is in some circles). But Spinoza’s view is surely not obvious, and certainly not immune to challenge. If Nadler wants us to embrace it, he needs to do a lot of convincing. There is a great deal of strange metaphysics we must take on board if we want to view the world through Spinoza’s eyes.
 
Though Nadler sketches the metaphysical foundations of Spinoza’s free man, he doesn’t defend them. Instead he argues that the ideal is inclusive (he translates “homo liber” as “free person” to signal that women can be free, too, despite some unflattering things Spinoza says about their intellectual abilities). And he shows that it is attainable on Spinoza’s terms. That’s persuasive enough. But what we want to know is not if the ideal is attainable on Spinoza’s terms, but on ours. Does Spinoza’s love of God remain a viable path to a good and free life?

Nadler’s book is strongest when he explains what the free man’s life actually looks like. Detaching from transient goods (“riches, honor, and sensual pleasure”) allows him to be moderate, courageous, and generous, as well as to avoid hatred, envy, and vanity. He’ll also do everything in his power to promote the well-being of others—not because he is an altruist, but because he knows that a life in the company of wise people like himself gives him the best shot at focusing on the love of God. Here Spinoza builds on one of the greatest draws of the eudaimonistic tradition: making morality, including caring for others, part of seeking one’s own advantage. Spinoza even manages to rationalize Christ’s command to love our enemies: if I love my enemy, I do good things for him, which increases his power and joy. Since we necessarily love the cause of our joy, my enemy’s hostility toward me will turn into love, which, in turn, increases my power and joy. Everybody wins!
 
Nadler insists, correctly, that the free man remains part of, and interacts with, the natural and social world. Nobody can live from the love of God alone. As Spinoza writes in the Ethics:
 
   “It is part of the wise man . . . to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater and other things of this kind, which anyone can use.”

But Spinoza stresses that he does so “in moderation . . . without injury to another.” To the extent that these things are empowering, they add joy to the free man’s life. Detaching from transient goods, then, doesn’t mean rejecting them altogether like an ascetic, but desiring them in the appropriate way—as means to the true good, not as ends in themselves. What allows the free man to maintain the right measure of detachment—neither succumbing to the lure of transient goods nor despairing over their loss—is that the joy derived from the love of God overpowers whatever joy transient goods offer and whatever pain their loss inflicts. This, Nadler contends, is the key to freedom for Spinoza. Like everyone, the free man is affected positively and negatively by the things around him. But these things can’t move him to act. He won’t eat the apple because it looks tasty but rather because it sustains his intellectual activity. Love of God, not love of the apple, draws him to the fruit basket. From deducing to eating, he is always in charge of his acts.
 
Even marriage and children, Spinoza says, can be beneficial in this instrumental way. And if the free man’s child were in hospital with a severe illness, he’d behave like a good parent—do all he can to save the child, cheer the child up, and delight in the child’s love. But if the child dies, the free man wouldn’t shed a tear. The pain of the loss is eclipsed by the joy derived from the love of God.
 
My objection is not that I find this behavior heartless; I just don’t think that we can make it work. For a Spinozist, it makes perfect sense to choose freedom over bondage. Detaching from transient goods—including loved ones—liberates the Spinozist to wholeheartedly embrace the good he deems most worth desiring. It’s an excellent trade-off. But if Spinoza’s true good doesn’t exist, then detaching from transient goods leaves us with no good at all.

 
 Grasping the order of things caused by God, Spinoza contends, provides supreme joy. But how delightful is understanding the structure of the universe, really? Can it comfort us over life’s losses? Frankly, I don’t find reflecting on the age, size, and composition of the universe and my place in it especially uplifting. I can’t see how it would help me come to terms with the death of a loved one. Nadler thinks that determinism does much of the comforting. But will parents not be devastated over their child’s death from leukemia if they recognize that it was inevitable given the system of causes and effects? I think detachment is Spinoza’s key to consolation, which, in turn, requires loving God. So unless we can make a compelling case for Spinoza’s God, or some other God who can do his job, the fleeting joy of transient goods is all we have (nights wrecked by anxiety over children notwithstanding). In the disenchanted world, we can manage our bondage more or less well, but not break the chains and attain blessedness and salvation.
 
Nadler’s book is an excellent introduction to Spinoza’s ideal of the free man. He shows how appealing this ideal is—but I doubt that he’ll convince many readers to adopt it.
 
Are we doomed, then, if we can’t find a way to God through either faith or reason? I don’t think so. For one thing, transient goods are goods, and there’s plenty we can do to make them less vulnerable to fortune: from finding cures for diseases to distributing health care, wealth, and recognition fairly.
 
We should, moreover, seek rational guidance to manage our attachments to transient goods, though less from metaphysics than from empirical sciences such as biology and psychology. In often surprising ways, these correct our assumptions about what makes lives better or worse. Psychologists, for example, have shown that winning the lottery or becoming paraplegic affects a person’s well-being much less than we would expect.

Attaching to a higher good that gives our life purpose adds a great deal of value as well. But we’ll have to take it down a notch: not Deus sive Natura, but contributing to an artistic or literary tradition, joining a scientific endeavor, finding meaningful work, championing a noble political or social cause. Such attachments, besides being valuable in themselves, surely also help to mitigate losses we suffer among more fragile goods.
 
Finally, not looking at the universe as perfect by default (even in Spinoza’s sense of perfection which doesn’t mean perfection for humans) makes it much easier to embrace one of the most distinctive ideals of our time: to make the world better (and, with increasing urgency, preserve it from destruction).
 
Note, also, that I’m not saying that Spinoza’s God doesn’t exist. Einstein famously equated Spinoza’s God with what he considered the universe’s intelligibility. When a cardinal charged his theories as “cloaking . . . ghastly atheism,” an upset rabbi from New York cabled Einstein: “Do you believe in God?” Einstein cabled back: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the lawful order of existence, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and doings of mankind.”
 
What I am saying is that we can’t have the one without the other—Spinoza’s path to well-being and freedom without amor dei intellectualis. If we want to convert modern readers to Spinozism, we need to convince them that Spinoza’s God exists and that loving him is the highest good.
 
But if Spinoza can’t sway us, is this a reason not to study him? That surely doesn’t follow. On the contrary: What better opportunity to break out of our echo chamber than a philosopher of the past who has put together—with exceeding care and powerful arguments—a view of the world and of the good life that we disagree with? At the very least, it’s a chance to critically reflect on and give reasons for our own convictions. If we engage in conversations across religious, cultural, and ideological divides to consider alternative views and entertain the possibility that the other is right and we are wrong, why would we make a pass on as astute an interlocutor as Spinoza? We may not agree with Spinoza’s answer to Socrates’s question in the Gorgias—“the question of how we ought to live.” But he can certainly help us to avoid the “unexamined life” which, as Socrates says in Plato’s Apology, “is not worth living.”
 
 
 
Can We Deduce Our Way to Salvation? By Carlos Fraenkel. Boston Review , December 14, 2020