TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 2023
Sacred Thoreau and his joy: Our view? The New York Times got it right when it signed Margaret Renkl as "a contributing Opinion writer."
Having said that, also this:
Suffering is visible all over the globe. Even so, rightly or wrongly, Renkl's new essay bears an unusual headline:
The Nature of Joy
She's writing about the nature of joy! Right at the start of Renkl's column, she even cites her brother:
The Nature of Joy
NASHVILLE — Thanks to a Covid infection early in the pandemic, my blood pressure goes haywire when the temperature and dew point are both very high, and I have trouble breathing when the air quality is poor, too, so I stay indoors much of the summer now. But last Sunday I woke early to the most beautiful day in the history of the world, as my brother calls every day of his life. All around my yard, the world was renewing itself.
[...]
While I was watching the robins from our living-room window, a tiny cottontail emerged from the depths of the pollinator garden. The wee rabbit would take a bite of clover and then leap straight up. It would take a bite of violet and then dash madly around the circumference of the pollinator bed, leaping and twisting in midair.
I can’t tell you how much delight I take in watching a young animal’s deep pleasure in existence, enjoying the power of its beautiful young body in a beautiful old world.
With all the suffering in the world, should Renkl be discussing joy and her ability to take delight in the natural world? Should she be discussing the "deep pleasure in existence" a young animal feels as it explores "a beautiful old world?"
People will judge such questions for themselves. For ourselves, we're glad the Times hired this person.
Regarding Renkl's brother, he is said to call every day "the most beautiful day in the history of the world." To see how he supports that claim, we'll strongly suggest that you click this link, a link his sister provided.
Reading Renkl's latest "guest essay," we thought again of sacred Thoreau, living out by the pond. Even as our struggling nation's Civil War approached, even as so many suffered in bondage, he described an ecstatic delight, perhaps a first cousin to joy:
Solitude
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...
Amid his nation's widespread suffering, should our Middlesex County neighbor have been spending his time on that?
There's no perfect answer to such questions. As always, the quandary rolls on.
Phonics.
ReplyDeleteGod bless you, Bob.
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
DeleteThis blog a bit out of character, Bob. Hope your recovery is going well. I’ve been praying for you.
I pray for Cecelia and David.
DeleteAnonymouse 4:28pm, thanks so much. I’ll return the blessing.
DeleteAnonymouse 6:44pm, I blame society.
DeletePraying is nothing more than virtue-signaling.
DeletePray to Joe Pesci. It's just as effective as praying to God
DeleteAnonymouse 9:00pm, are you sure you don’t mean Robert De Niro?
DeleteEven assuming a god, who’s nature would include the trait of omnipotence, thus nullifying the very need for prayer.
DeleteWould any human seek that relationship whether the parent or the child?
DeleteMargret Renkl would not approve of Somerby’s right wing blog, as she presents a progressive worldview, in opposition to Somerby’s.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, Renkl is a writer, not a biologist, and her notions about nature are inaccurate, which diminish the value of her musings. Yet here Somerby dispenses with his usual nitpicks about inaccuracies and misinformation in media. Huh!
Whatever.
Back to Renkl, for those of us that grew up in places like South Carolina (go Cocks!) and TN know that, whether the geography and climate is beautiful or horrible, humanity is lacking.
Renkl writes:
“Southern hospitality is a real thing, and generosity is endemic. You can count on almost anybody you meet down here to give you a ride when your car breaks down, fetch your sick child from school so you don’t miss your shift, help you clean up when a tornado roars through, even bring you supper when your dog dies. They won’t ask if you’re a liberal or a conservative. They won’t ask where you go to church, or if you go to church. They’ll just pitch in.”
This is all nonsense, having grown up in the hellscape that is the South. Southern hospitality is a myth; you can’t count on your neighbors, much less strangers - even if you’re white, and forget about it if you’re not; southerners are obsessed with what your politics are and what church you attend.
She is right about sweet tea, few things are better than SC sweet tea. And some might remember a remarkable daily local tv news segment in TN called The Heartland Series, which had a similar disposition to Renkl, if perhaps less an affectation.
I lived in Georgia, a little south of MTG’s district, many years. People were nice.
DeleteSome people are nice and others are not.
DeleteI object to the stuff about the rabbit. I think she was projecting her own joy onto that rabbit, because I doubt they have much capacity for self-reflection.
We used to call her sense of joy "spring fever". You don't feel it as intensely in places where the climate is more even year round, but I suspect it is hormonal.
I think Thoreau is a pill. I also think Renkl did that same projecting of good will onto her neighbors and the entire South, without much to base it on. People called me Sweetie in the South, but that didn't mean they knew anything about me or cared either. I know who my actual friends are.
I drove cross-country with my daughter once and she blew a tire in MO, in an area without cell service. There we were, stranded by the side of the road, and no one stopped. It had nothing to do with our church attendance or politics. No one stopped for two stranded women. Someone would have in CA, you betcha.
There was a time when Somerby might have complained about such drivel. I like the woods too, but I don't romanticize them. Thoreau was a man of his times, but our times are different. Today we muse about how long we will have the chance to enjoy forests now threatened by fire and beetles, or how long rabbits would last without them. Today's Thoreau's are environmentalists working to cope with climate change. Romanticize that, Somerby!
Man, you people are drips. Just a load of laughs.
DeleteYesterday, Southerner Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted:
ReplyDeleteLast night in my DC residence, the television turned on by itself and the
screen showed someone's laptop trying to connect to the TV.
Just for the record:
I'm very happy. I'm also very healthy and eat well and exercise a lot. I don't smoke and never have. I don't take any medications. I am not vaccinated. So I'm not
concerned about blood clots, heart conditions, strokes, or anything else.
Nor do I have anything to hide. just love my country and the people and know how much they've been screwed over by the corrupt people in our government and l'm not willing
to be quiet about it, or willing to go along with it.
Is she ok, did she have a stroke or something?
Is there something in the water in the South?
Shouldn’t she have just offered to help the person with the laptop?
Most likely, her cable box just rebooted itself after a power interruption.
DeleteMean-spirited people coat their nastiness with a thin veneer of niceness. That false front that people present in the South keeps people at a distance. Those nicey-nicey folks will say the meanest things about you behind your back. And they have a lot of excuses for not helping, for not including people, for snubbing them and actively working against them, while smiling during face-to-face encounters. There is nothing kind about that. Being genuine (authentic) is part of being kind, in my opinion.
Someone who takes this Southern way of being, at face value, is being a social moron. Perhpas seeing what she wants to see and not what exists.
I think quite a few women in the South are like MTG, who I consider to be an awful human being.
Anonymouse 6:04pm, the most cringe- producing southern affectation is the coy “Bless your heart” play act that signals anything but good will.
DeleteIt’s so arch that I think that smug pose must have been instilled in southern society via some old movie.
It should be no surprise then that Trump’s staunchest support comes from the South.
DeleteAgrarian societies tend to view children, to a significant degree, as a source of labor and therefore focus less effort and energy in raising them, and more so in just merely producing a relatively large amount of them.
DeleteIn my neck of the woods, they call this sappy.
ReplyDeleteThe word we learned was maudlin.
DeleteThere is a deep streak of sentimentality that pervades Irish American culture. Somerby may share that with the Irish who settled some areas of the South.
DeleteThose with unresolved trauma often cling to sentimentality to avoid the eternal darkness of the abyss in their minds.
DeleteLike syrup clings to pancakes.
Not necessarily a good analogy but someone mentioned woods and sap, so my stomach oriented brain instantly became obsessed with maple syrup, which, I think, literally goes well with anything - God’s condiment.
Some people find deep joy in helping others.
ReplyDeleteAnonymouse 6:06pm, gloriously sappy.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/1qYCDEsersw
Bob’s big problem is that, as a sort of pacifist, he can’t abide being too too judgmental with anyone. His sentimentality about the South plays into this of course. To make the sins of the Right palatable, he has to drag the other side into the mud, overplay their sins. That had led his into cruelty and finally a kind of dementia. This new Trump tape blows a lot of his equivocating out of the water, and he can’t even make up a new excuse for the poor suffering Donald.
ReplyDeleteTrump in private: These are highly classified documents
DeleteTrump in public: It was locker room bravado.
“ Thoreau, living out by the pond. Even as our struggling nation's Civil War approached, even as so many suffered in bondage, he described an ecstatic delight, perhaps a first cousin to joy:”
ReplyDeleteThoreau lived at Walden Pond from 1845-1847. The book was published in 1854. It should not be omitted that Thoreau was a lifelong, passionate abolitionist, a major supporter of John Brown, lest anyone think he had turned away from politics, which seems implied by what Somerby says here.
No, I think Somerby is more on a circuitous route to “let’s just all get along” than saying Thoreau’s obsession with solitude in nature distracted him from the realities of his society.
DeletePerhaps, but he makes it clearer when he says “ Amid his nation's widespread suffering, should our Middlesex County neighbor have been spending his time on that?”. Thoreau was at Walden pond 13 years before the civil war. Thoreau did not urge people to just get along. He denounced slavery publicly and wrote a famous defense of John brown, who notably killed people in the name of abolition. Thoreau may have contemplated nature and solitude, but it was not for the purpose of “getting along.” That may perhaps be Somerby’s message, but it wasn’t thoreau’s. His whole decision to retire to Walden pond was a political protest.
DeleteWhat is the basis for assuming this post suggests Thoreau turned away from politics or abandoned his abolitionist stance?
DeleteI know some may quixotically try as hard as they can to reason otherwise but Thoreau's political beliefs are not relevant to main argument presented here which is about the appropriateness of focusing on joy amidst suffering.
DeleteIt is the nature of suffering that it prevents people from experiencing joy. Sometimes the people who exhort others to experience joy, gratitude, etc., are actually shaming them for feeling negative affect. But if those negative feelings are appropriate for what is going on in your life, who is Renkl to tell that we must watch rabbits and we'll feel better, even if your life is shit.
DeleteThis kind of simplistic joy-mongering is annoying.
9:46
DeleteThanks for sharing these thoughts. It is true that people who are encouraging joy and gratitude might inadvertently shame those experiencing negative emotions etc. and that people simply differ on this difficult issue.
However, you should NEVER be so cynical as to be wary over a Mississippi Miracle”.
DeleteYou should be wary when there is a reason to be wary. As Somerby himself noted -- there are no cheating scandals involving the NAEP. There is an obvious explanation that is consistent with the improvement -- big changes in how MS teaches reading. Being wary when there is no reason, is called paranoia. But in this case, because the wariness involves accusing black kids of cheating, it also reflects racism. It is like when the kids in Stand and Deliver were accused of cheating and their AP Calculus scores were erased, because they were Hispanic and no one thought they could do that well honestly.
DeleteAnonymouse 11:40am, Bob didn’t do any of that and wariness over miraculous test results is not indicative of paranoia.
DeleteHowever, being wary that you’re being shamed and virtue-signaled by an expression of joy and elation, does qualify as the most rudimentary example of pettiness and paranoia.
Yes, Somerby did do that.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete“Sacred Thoreau”
ReplyDeleteSomerby creates his own saints as he urges others not to do this.
Thoreau, like Lincoln, is only “sacred” if you decide to pick and choose what he said. In so doing, you run the risk of ignoring the human beings that they were. Just as Somerby buries Lincoln’s dedication to total war and his highly political nature, he also chooses not to quote Thoreau from “A Plea for Captain John Brown”, where he heaps scorn on those who condemned John brown, including the Christians of his day who saw the injustice of slavery and did nothing. He was not a man who would much sympathize with Somerby.
Sam Alito is the Donald Trump of the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteClarence Thomas ain’t no prize, neither.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteSacred mh, I hope you discover that’s there’s more to God and the world than what’s sacred.
Deletemh was talking about Thoreau, not God.
DeleteGrifters from stem to stern.
DeleteAnonymouse 8:22am, no, mh was knocking Somerby.
DeleteSomerby borrows other people's words and makes them his own, disregarding the meanings and intentions of those other authors. He has done that with Thoreau, just as he did with Langston Hughes yesterday. mh said that he doubted Thoreau would agree with Somerby. That seems pretty obvious to me. If not to you, then perhaps you should go read Thoreau and see.
DeleteAnonymouse 9:42am, Somerby used a quote from Sacred Thoreau to demonstrate that amidst all the gravity in the world, there is hope and beauty.
DeleteHowever, while you may wish to perceive this fact as a lack of concern similar to how you disdain Bob's failure to hate the right people, Somerby's sentiments are not consistent with his typical New England thinking, albeit influenced to some extent by California and the hippie era.
I hope Bob is ok.
In the sam way that Somerby borrows from Thoreau, you borrow Somerby's words and attach your own meanings to them.
DeleteFeelings of euphoria do feel good, but anyone can get them using any number of drugs. There is something sanctimonious about getting them from nature, as if there were something morally superior to it, but manipulating your nervous system in order to feel good has been part of being human since cave man days. The hippies didn't invent that, nor did Renkl.
I prefer to find joy in my relationships with other people and in certain activities I like to do. I don't seek euphoria because, to me, that is a distortion of reality and not an accurate readout on existence. The purpose of emotion is to tell us where we stand in relation to our environment and important goals (such as survival). We aren't supposed to feel good all the time because it would prevent us from making necessary changes to improve our lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8S2hCUVisg
Holy Modal Rounders -- Euphoria
“Took a little walk and I just got back/Saw a junky mother boostin’ Simulac/With her works in her hand and her baby on her back/Singin’ eu-phor-i-a…”
Somerby is 76 (or thereabouts). He can sit and contemplate his pear tree as long as he wants. The rest of us have things to do that may or may not involve feeling extra special good.
Try this movie to explore this subject more fully:
Delete"In 1996, the movie Brain Candy by The Kids in the Hall based its comedy on the funniest topic the Kids could think of: depression. In the movie, doctors devise a new antidepressant drug that locks the patient into his or her happiest moment, reliving it over and over."
There's that poor rabbit enjoying the sunshine when, whoosh, a hawk comes down and drags into the sky because it wasn't paying any attention to danger around it. But hey, it died happy.
Delete“I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.”
DeleteC.S. Lewis
The way to feel good: orgasm.
DeleteRabbits wholly agree.
DeleteRenkl used a lot of words but what did she actually say? Has anyone really come out against joy?
ReplyDeleteJoy always feels as though it’s your first experience of it. It’s always new.
DeleteEvery once in a while Somerby goes into raptures over some innocent person, usually female. Renkl is the latest, but before her Somerby gueshed over Anne Frank, and before that it was Malala and there were a couple of 12 year old black girls from his middle school class who exemplified some sort of dignity and noble being. I think it is embarrassing (for Somerby) when he goes off on one of these tangents. But one's object of joy doesn't have to be a young rabbit enjoying its body. It can be a gross old man enjoying watching youth as it explores its world too.
ReplyDeleteWould Somerby have liked Renkl's column as much if she had been from the North instead of the South?
The rest of us read her column and wondered why the NY Times feels compelled to add yet another conservative writer to its op-ed page. Pamela Page is awful and this one appears to be no better. Next she'll be musing about where rainbows come from (not the gay kind but the kind nature provides when the sun accidentally comes out during a rain shower). Gee whiz, boys and girls, have you ever wondered at a rainbow and thought about God's promise to man? Can't wait for that essay!
How much pleasure should the rest of us take from this:
ReplyDelete"Some of the Republican Party's leading 2024 presidential hopefuls are scheduled to speak this week at this week's "Joyful Warriors" summit in Philadelphia, hosted by Moms for Liberty, an organization designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-government extremist group. Scheduled speakers include Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, and Vivek Ramaswamy."
I do find it irritating when religious or political people co-opt the word joy to apply to their own evil doings.
Here's another oddity with Renkl's essay. She says:
ReplyDelete"I can’t tell you how much delight I take in watching a young animal’s deep pleasure in existence, enjoying the power of its beautiful young body in a beautiful old world. "
Does that mean that joy is only for the young. Somerby and many of the rest of us have creaky old bodies that move only with painful complaint. Does Renkl look at us and not see our inner world, our own joy? Is joy only for the young, while the rest of us must stand around observing what they do, and smiling at their imagined pleasure?
I don't know about Somerby, but I'm not done living yet. I am a full participant in my life, not a bystander smiling at rabbit antics because my healthy young body is a thing of the past. Ageism can be subtle.
Ageism may be subtle.
DeleteAnonymices never are.
One could interpret it as meaning joy was meant for barren old hens as well as the young.
DeleteHow old do you think Renkl is? She says 61. For your interpretation to make sense, should would have had to be watching an old rabbit run around. She emphasized the body of the rabbit, which is itself kind of kinky:
Delete"I can’t tell you how much delight I take in watching a young animal’s deep pleasure in existence, enjoying the power of its beautiful young body in a beautiful old world. "
Nothing there about old hens.
This looks like where Renkl may have cribbed her essay from:
ReplyDelete"Totally unexpected, fully spontaneous. Simply put, I found joy. That's the nature of joy; it discovers us, surprises us. It finds us in the ordinary and the extraordinary, in good times and really difficult ones, in the boring and mundane, and in the hilarious and exceptional."
https://www.oblates.org/updates/the-nature-of-joy#:~:text=Totally%20unexpected%2C%20fully%20spontaneous.,in%20the%20hilarious%20and%20exceptional.
The Oblates are a religious order. This kind of charismatic language is common in religious writing. You expect Renkl to give you her testimony after her over-wrought essay.
Ecstatic experiences are part of why some people are religious.
DeleteIf a spheroid is like a football it's prolate, but if it's like a doorknob it's oblate.
Delete