The Dilettante's Dilemma

I got a pop-up ad on my screen while I was writing an essay. The headline said, “Study smarter, not harder.”

I’m sure no one would object to the idea of studying smarter. There is, of course, the question of just what that means.

The headline introduces Bartelby Essays. Bartelby Essays are commercially available, as I understand it. A cynical person might conclude that the purchased essay would be submitted as the student’s own work. This certainly would, as the ad suggests, deal with the problem of “hours flailing away on your writing assignment.”

Stuck on an essay? We can help. Why spend hours flailing away on your writing assignment when a Bartleby Essay can give you the inspiration you need to succeed?

Here (above) is the ad in full, accompanied by the picture they provide. The picture (below) offers you a vision of what you could be doing if you did not have to spend your time flailing away on your writing assignment

It is the effect of the essay, as described, that puzzles me. I buy the essay. Presumably I read the essay. Then I am so inspired by what the author has done that it inspires me to succeed by writing an essay of my own Really? It is the inspiration that keeps me from writing in the “flailing away” mode.

Note that this ad is placed within the world of an undergraduate who thinks their problem is complying with the assignment schedule. Nothing in this ad suggests that learning how to write would be a good solution to “flailing away.” It also suggests that being inspired is the solution to the flailing away problem. Presumably, all you can do is to wait to be inspired. Or, of course, you could buy a Bartelby essay and hand it in.

I don’t want to seem insensitive to undergraduate dilemmas. I understand the effect good language can have on the mysterious process by which your own good language becomes available to you, as if by analogy. When I encountered some difficulty getting started on a day’s work on my dissertation in grad school, I would reach over and open one of the John Kenneth Galbraith books I had handy. It didn’t matter which one and it didn’t matter where I opened it. There was just something about the way Galbraith chose words and the way he connected ideas that greased the track for my own ideas. I would read Galbraith for a little while, then turn to my typewriter and start working.

So I get the idea. But Bartleby isn’t that. I’m opposed to cheating, of course, but it is the way the problem is set up that really bothers me here. The student’s attention is drawn to the fact that he is “flailing.” Flailing is a repeated action, please note. No consideration is given to why the student is flailing. Poor choice of topics? Inability to focus? Don’t know how to write? It’s all a matter of “inspiration,” which you can buy on line.

I don’t buy it.

The remake I watch of Miracle on 34th Street is the 1994 remake of a much remade Christmas story. Valentine Davies, who wrote the 1947 version says that he got the idea while he was waiting in line at a big department store during the Christmas season. The write-up of the novella he wrote says that the story is “about a disillusioned woman, her skeptical daughter, and a mysterious man who believes he is the real Santa Claus.”

In my version (1994) the woman is truly disillusioned. She says that she was not unhappy when, at the age her daughter is now, she believed in Santa Claus, but that when she grew up and found out it was all false, then she was unhappy. The daughter in this version is not disillusioned. She wants to believe in Santa Claus as much as she can get away with. My favorite line of hers is the plaintive question she asks her mother one night, “Do I have to not believe in Santa Claus all at once?”

The intriguing thing about this presentation for me is that the real Santa Claus is spending some of his (otherwise uncommitted) time before Christmas as a department store Santa Claus. The store in the version is called Coles. He isn’t one or the other. He is both, simultaneously.

Susan Walker, the daughter, is urged to join the Santa Claus line by her mother’s boyfriend, Bryan Bedford. They have a little chit-chat before Susan tells Santa confidentially, “I know how all this works. You are an employee of Coles.” Santa pauses a little, clearly gauging the effect of various correct answers and finally says, “That….is true.”

The question the movie raises is how to deal with the fact that one—only one—of the department store Santas, is also the real Santa. Always the presupposition of the film is that he is one or the other. He is the real Santa or he is Coles’ department store Santa.

They do some fancy stepping at several points, the fanciest is by the judge who is declaring the failure of the effort to commit Santa to an asylum, says that “Santa Claus exists and he exists in the person of Kris Kringle (gesturing at the defendant).” The first “Santa Claus” in that sentence refers to the mythical being who delivers toys to little children on a global scale in one night. The second refers to the man in the courtroom. The mythical Santa, the judge says, “exists in the person of” this actual Santa.

Pretty fancy, right? The ineffable exists in the person of a physically present person. And Santa the person plays with the persona too. He recalls a truth about “believing parents” and their children that he learned from Easter Bunny”who winters in Australia as you know.” This defendant Santa asks the prosecutor whether he has remembered to take down the old TV antenna because he remembers that he ripped his pants on it last year. It was the mythical Santa who ripped his pants; it is the physically present Santa who asks the question of the prosecutor.

Once Santa leaves the scene on Christmas eve, the fun is over. All kinds of miraculous things happen after that, but they aren’t really any fun anymore. The fun is this “imposter Santa Claus”—at a department store, they all have to be imposters, right—who speaks Russian and Swahili and who comforts a deaf girl in sign language, and who wears a suit rich with actual gold.

And throughout the whole film, no one ever uses the word “Incarnation.”

I have recently taken a shine to a character in Russell Hoban’s old (1975) novel, Turtle Diary. George Fairbairn is the keeper of the turtles at the Aquarium in London and potentially the antagonist of Naeara H and William G, who want to steal the turtles and set them free in the ocean. He is not an antagonist at all, it turns out, and helps them in every way he can.

Then, when they come back, he helps them a good deal more. George is comfortable with his life and with the person he is. “I don’t mind being alive,” is the way he expresses it and both Naeara and William refer to that expression, neither one capturing it quite the way George has.

His relationship with Naeara becomes romantic in time, but it is the revitalization of both of them that most caught my eye this time around. William, for instance, lives in a boarding house where one of the other residents, an East European who is considerably larger than William, keeps on fouling up the common kitchen area. William tries to launch a new life based on his successful theft of the turtles, but it doesn’t seem to change anything and eventually he gets into a fight with the East European.

He is lamenting his fate to George Fairbairn and in what seems like a moment of honesty—-not easy for William to come by—he says, “You can’t do it with turtles.” Having solved the challenges of that one project doesn’t solve even the most fundamental challenges of daily life. “Launching the turtles,” he says, “didn’t launch me. “

George’s response is, “You can’t do it with turtles, but with people, you never know straightaway what does what. Maybe launching them did launch you but you don’t know it yet.” I liked that. William is in a bleak and existential mood. George is saying very sensibly that although you always know right away whether the turtles are launched, you can’t be so sure about humans. About a given project, we must say maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. And we must keep paying attention.

Naeara went to the Zoo to see him afterwards to see if he had heard anything about the turtles. Sitting there on the duckboard behind the fish tanks, Naeara began to cry. “Don’t hold back,” said the keeper, “These are saltwater tanks.” That’s the first thing I really liked about George.

We learn nothing else about the developing relationship, if there was one, but Naeara wakes up the next morning in George’ apartment. “He had a clean look and a clean feel about him,” is Naeara’s early assessment, “nothing muddy. There was about him the smell or maybe just the idea of dry grass, warm in the sun.”

Several days later, Naeara looked around her apartment and assessed it this way. “I didn’t know how lonely I’d been until my loneliness stopped. Now when I looked at my flat, it seemed to have been criss-crossed in patterns of pain that had been there for years.”

She sees that as the effect George has had on her and you have to admit, it is a powerful effect. I wish her well.

It’s almost impossible not to like George Fairbairn, once yon notice him. It has taken me about forty years, but I really like him now. And I admire people who can have the kind of effect of people that George had on William and Naeara.

Many years ago, I stumbled across Raymond E. Brown’s book, The Birth of the Messiah. I learned a lot of carefully detailed things, such as the dilemma that the Greek kai—which usually means “and”—might, in this instance mean “but rather.” Joseph was a righteous man kai he was minded to be gentle and discreet with Mary’s apparent indiscretion. He was so minded because he was righteous? In spite of his righteousness? The word won’t tell us. We have to intuit Matthew’s intent.

But I also learned some very large clunky things. Brown’s book, for instance, is divided between Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus and Luke’s account. Matthew’s account makes up the first third of the book and Luke’s, the last two thirds. I learned that each narrative has an integrity of both narrative and tone and that each is different from the other. Just for practice, try to imagine the Matthean Mary breaking out in the Magnificat, when the actual Matthean Mary doesn’t utter a single word.

It is very hard for me to remember that Matthew’s account was meticulously assembled from sources he had access to; he never worked with the account of eye witnesses, even though it sounds like it. We are forced to imagine that the astrologers from the East wrote their memoirs when they got home and that is how we know that the reappearance of the Star as they headed down the road to Bethlehem ‘filled them with delight.” Matthew seems to know that.

With the top of my mind, I wholeheartedly affirm the nature of the narrative Matthew gives us, carefully assembled from diverse fragments. With the rest of my mind, I go right on thinking of the story in the way I first learned it as a little boy. That is why I keep discovering things that are logically entailed in the narrative approach and being surprised. Again.

Here’s the current one. What was the name of Jesus’s father? This is not a biological question. Joseph named the child and made him a part of the family; he is without any question the legal father of Jesus. No, the question I have recently stumbled over is this: what was the name of Jesus’s father? There is no reason to think that Matthew knew. The name of the father, like the birthplace and the adulation of the gentiles who had seen the star, are important parts of the story, but they are not facts of history. Matthew gave Jesus’s father the name Joseph because he wanted to tell the story of a dreamer who learned in these dreams what God wanted of him and who promptly did just that. And that is exactly what Jesus’s father does as Matthew tells the story.

If you ask who the most famous dreamer in Hebrew history is, it takes very little time to arrive at Joseph, the penultimate son of Jacob. Joseph dreamed his way into a jail in Egypt, then into the Chancellorship of Egypt, then invited his family to come to Egypt so they wouldn’t starve in Canaan. So Matthew, as I picture the process, said, “I know, let’s call him Joseph. That way, when these dreams begin to drive his actions, people will say that is just the kind of thing “a Joseph” would do.”

That brings the name of Mary’s husband up from the naive presuppositions, deep in my memory, and into the reexamination I learned from Raymond Brown’s book. “Why did Matthew call him Joseph?” is a really good question, I think, but you can’t get there unless you can find a way to get away from “His name WAS Joseph.”

And, trust me, that is harder to do that you might think.

There are so many reasons to like Elizabeth Bennet. In Chapter 13 of Pride and Prejudice, she faces a very tough opponent. Her prejudice. [1] She is reading a letter from a man [Darcy] who has shown only contempt for her and in the letter, she is reading thoroughly damning charges against a man [Wickham] who courted her esteem very skillfully. You will admit that is a very difficult situation for anyone. It takes all of Elizabeth’s considerable strength to be willing to give the letter a fair reading, then to draw the conclusions she feels she must draw.

It is a letter that must be read the hard way.

We don’t really need to consider the case that is made. Let’s just follow the action as it unfolds. There is a commitment to fairness that lies behind all the exertions we see here, and an expectation of self control as well. She is amazing.

“With a strong prejudice against every thing he might say, she began his account of what happened at Netherfield.”

Although she begins to read with a strong prejudice; nevertheless, she does begin. When she has had all she can take, she folds the letter up. But she takes it up again because “it would not do.” That is not a judgment in favor of her comfort but a commitment to the possibility that these awful criticisms may have some merit.

“His account made her too angry to have any wish of doing him justice.”

She does not want to do him justice. Nevertheless, she does want to act in the ways she most values; to behave in accordance with her most important values. And that requires an attempt to do him justice even when she very strongly wants not to.

“…collecting herself as well as she could, she again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham.”

“…and commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence.”

It is the attempt to do what she really does not want to do that requires the “collecting herself” and that effort produces the ‘command over herself’ we see in the second quote. It enables her to evaluate independently the meaning of each sentence. One at a time. Is it really possible that the case being made in the letter, a case by a man she despises, is credible even though it is about a man she is attracted to? That is what is at stake.

She put down the letter, weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality…

I think Jane Austen does us a favor here by admitting that Elizabeth’s attempts to achieve impartiality probably don’t get quite there. Austen says earlier that that Elizabeth’s feelings were so strong as to be “difficult of definition.” She couldn’t even say with confidence just what she was feeling; the strength of the feelings simply overwhelmed the categories she could confidently use.

Many of [Wickham’s] expressions were still fresh in her memory. She was now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger and wondered it had escaped her before.

She remembered clearly the self-justification Wickham offered. Given that Wickham’s “countenance, voice, and manner” were so pleasing, she failed to give them the scrutiny she might otherwise have exercised. But now, reading and evaluating each sentence on its own merit, she wondered how it was that Wickham told her all these things given that they had just met.

Every lingering struggle in [Wickham’s] favor grew fainter and fainter..

Here we must remember that Elizabeth continues to struggle to favor Wickham. It is still what she wants. But she also wants to be in command of her faculties and further, she had a commitment to fair judgment. She realizes that she is exercising this commitment well after the evidence was gathered. She is demanding of herself the stringent examination of information she first accepted with simple credulity.

I have such admiration for Elizabeth. We have all been in her place, presented with information we wish to be false. We have not all—certainly I have not—demanded of ourselves the impartiality that costs so much. Why would I do that, we might say. Elizabeth doesn’t even ask that. She is committed to fairness and she understands that that commitment means nothing if she is not in command of herself.

[1] And, although this is not the pride of the title, she does say of herself in this chapter, “I who have prided myself on my discernment…”