You'll Never Guess What I'm Reading

A few years back, I was privileged to work on some tricky issues with a very gifted woman, my successor as President of the Board of Horizon House, Karen Lane Rahm. Aside from her various public service roles, she was curious and adventurous. (After she termed out of the Horizon House Board, she went to live in Paris for six months to polish her French and wrote charmingly of her explorations in a series of posts she called "Karen at Large.")

Somehow, one day, we talked of books and she mentioned belonging to an Anthony Trollope reading club. In my ignorance, I was astounded; I had read Trollope's Barchester Towers as a junior in high school, but assumed no one today bothered with that 19thC relic. I could remember nothing whatsoever about it and had only a vague sense that I had found it of no interest whatever. Callow youth.

Well, a few years ago, I undertook to re-read what I read or should have read those 75 or 70 years ago. I learned by these re-visits that my high school and college professors knew what they were about. I have re-read Moby Dick, Gulliver's Travels, Don Quixote, The Book of Job, Magic Mountain, You Can't Go Home Again and several others. (I also am now re-re-reading the Fagles translation of The Odyssey.) 

Last year, I came across a reference to Trollope's Palliser series of novels, so in honor of Karen, I decided to explore why such a keen intellect as hers would be enthused by an obscure 19thC English novelist, one whose works on Kindle were listed at $0 or a buck or so. I downloaded and opened Phineas Finn, the Irish Member because it appeared to be about English politics. And, indeed, it absolutely delighted me with its sly wit and descriptions of the foibles, pretentions, and posturings of upper class England. I found myself chuckling again and again; Trollope is funny!

Now I'm hooked. I'm 2/3rds through Can You Forgive Her? (1865), which preceded Phineas Finn in the series. Four to go. 

I am sure that this admission will not surprise my buddies but merely confirm, for them, their assessment of Fletch, their weird friend. So be it. 

In the Present

In these fraught times, one side is promising something wonderful about the future while the other, something horrible. Or one side is blaming the other for something in the past and and the other in turn, finding something new to blame the first for. One side magnifies past sins of the other, while the other heaps blame upon the first. Both make grandiose promises about the future.

Past or future; we need to stop for a moment and call out something uplifting from the present that we all can share, especially this semiquincentennial weekend (who came up with that!) Let me suggest:                 

    Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.

    For purple mountains' majesties above the fruited plains. 

    America, America, God shed his grace on thee

    and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

Words by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895 and set to the music Materna, composed by Samuel A. Ward in 1892. 

America the Beautiful says it all to me, plus I can sing it. And it isn't rooted in conflict, in bloody Fort McHenry or any other conflict. No having to extol courage under fire. We've had enough of bombs bursting in air. 

Of course there are many who have doubts about that brotherhood stuff; I can think of a couple whose initials are SM and JDV. Invariably, such patriots consider themselves good Christians, i.e., good Catholics or good Protestants -- or good Buddhists or good Hindus or good Muslims or good whatevers, despite that their creeds endorse universal brotherhood. These folks have been steeped in suspicion of the other, in dislikes of strange names or odd (to them) hats or foods or worship. (We're suspicious of their foods until one of them opens a hot restaurant in town.) 

Well, I've wandered away from something many of us should be able to agree on here in the present: America has beauty inherent in her. 

Let's work together to make it manifest once again.

        PS Ann points out to me that over half of the USMNT are immigrants.