The Courage to Learn

The process of learning good judgment, virtuous judgment, in Pride and Prejudice is extremely difficult. How does one know how to judge without excessive prejudice, excessive anger, and without arrogance, self-righteousness, and rigid intolerance? The answer implicit in the novel is through the prudence and wisdom to adhere to good principles in the first place, but also through the courage to learn, accept, and revise the places where one goes wrong. Pride and Prejudice is about cultivating the courage to be open to education through a constant revision of self-knowledge in order to try to understand one's principles better and to act according to them. Paradoxically, courage requires humility.

Sarah Emsley, Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues, p. 102

Half a Crown Here and There

The inattention of the two brothers and the aunt to Julia's discomposure, and their blindness to its true cause, must be imputed to the fullness of their own minds. They were totally preoccupied. Tom was engrossed by the concerns of his theatre, and saw nothing that did not immediately relate to it. Edmund, between his theatrical and his real part, between Miss Crawford's claims and his own conduct, between love and consistency, was equally unobservant; and Mrs. Norris was too busy in contriving and directing the general little matters of the company, superintending their various dresses with economical expedient, for which nobody thanked her, and saving, with delighted integrity, half a crown here and there to the absent Sir Thomas, to have leisure for watching the behaviour, or guarding the happiness of his daughters.

[Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Chapter 17]

If there's any sign of Mrs. Norris's lack of sensible priorities. Sir Thomas Bertram is fantastically wealthy. Not only does he have a top-tier estate, Mansfield Park, and any income from that, he also owns plantations in the West Indies. In Regency England this makes him one of the wealthiest people imaginable. It's true that most of his wealth is probably tied up in assets; but there is simply no imaginable situation in which Sir Thomas is hurting for a half a crown; saving him that amount is like saving a multimillionaire money by shopping for presents at the Dollar Store.

Wicked Professor

Before I handed back my students' projects today, I told them that the projects did not completely fail to be mostly not bad.

Radio Greats: The Cold Equation (X Minus One)

From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future; adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds.

Rather curiously, straight science fiction did not really have much of a place in classic radio until the era was drawing near an end. It's difficult to explain the dearth of science fiction in the early Golden Age of Radio, but the increased importance of science fiction later can at least partly be explained by greater salience of science fiction in general and partly by the fact that science fiction was still a genre that was very difficult to bring to television, and therefore it was an area in which the bleed from radio to television was very limited. You can move a series like Dragnet or Gunsmoke without any loss, but 1950s television really had very little that could compete with the imagination in the science fiction department. The late 1950s saw a surge in science fiction on the radio, however, both in mainstream series like Suspense and in primarily-SF series. It's generally recognized that the greatest of these science fiction series was X Minus One. The storytelling is often extraordinarily good -- it should be, since it adapted stories by authors of science fiction's own Golden Age -- and the production values were relatively high for a such a late radio program.

X Minus One itself was an attempt to repeat the success of slightly earlier series, Dimension X; all the early episodes, in fact, are re-done Dimension X episodes. But the quality was in general better, and so the series branched out into stories from the pages of Astounding and Galaxy, two of the most important magazines from the Golden Age of Science Fiction; the stories were by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and many others who eventually became big names in the genre. The stories are extremely diverse, so for this Radio Greats I will be focusing on one of the best dramatic episodes; and I will do one of the best comic episodes for the next one.

Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" was published in Astounding Magazine in 1954. It is consistently considered one of the best science fiction short stories ever written, and one of the highlights of Golden Age science fiction. Intriguingly enough, the story as we have it is due to editor John W. Campbell refusing to accept the endings that Godwin kept coming up with. Godwin kept trying to make it a happy ending; Campbell kept refusing to accept a happy ending. Thus a tragedy was born.

"The Cold Equation" -- sometimes it is given the same plural title as the short story, sometimes not -- is an excellent version of the story. A woman stows away on an emergency dispatch ship (EDS) in order to visit her husband; she's trying to make amends for an affair. The problem is that the fuel for an EDS is precisely measured, and there's not enough margin of error for her extra mass. Procedure is to jettison the stowaway. The astronaut cannot bring himself to do it. But the equations of physics do not care: there's only so much fuel, and it's burning faster than they can afford; they could jettison other things, but the ship is bare except for medicine that needs to get where it's going. Of course, a good re-telling of a science fiction's saddest short story is inevitably going to be sad.

You can listen to "The Cold Equation" at My Old Radio.

Some Not-Quite-Love Poem Re-Drafts

A Woman Slew Me Yesterday

A woman slew me yesterday.
It happened in the common way:
a noonday knock upon the door,
a word or two, a settled score,
a spear of ice to pierce me through.
You know it well, for she was you.
No, not a word of hot defense,
for every killer must repent,
however justified the blow@
But sun still shines and rivers flow,
and though your insults shot me through,
perhaps today I live anew.
So let us not be trapped by pride,
and I will set the harm aside,
and let us love with zeal, not pain,
until you kill me once again.

Love by Universe

I love you more than all the earth.
It is not half enough!
Soon I'll love like solar systems.
Dismiss it all as fluff.
The after-day one galaxy
will scarce contain my awe --
but still too small, still too pale.
Wait, and have them all.

Unhand!

You catch my heart; yes, you presume
to catch my heart, and me to doom
to love of you. Shall such demand
be satisfied? My heart unhand!
Be satisfied to know my smile,
in passing tarry but a while,
like pilgrim in a foreign land.
Release me now, my heart unhand!

The Harp and the Vine

You ask, and I wonder,
but I still know my mind;
here in the garden the columbine
spirals and curls, begging for rain,
while your words like the thunder
echo from clouds;
I know your pain, but I am proud,
and here in the garden the rosy thorn
still mocks me,
filled with ruthless scorn.
You ask, but the iris will pay you no mind
as the wind starts to hum
through the harp and the vine.

In All the World Are None for Me

In all the world are none for me.
The lonely whispers from the sea
like shadows slink out on the sly
beyond the corner of my eye:
no words enmesh my wary heart,
nor force, nor faith, nor artless art,
and always-mocking almost-mights
still haunt the dark and lonely nights
like long-smashed idols made of sand
that whisper of lost promised lands,
or gnat-like nothings made of air
and pithless deserts, dry and bare.
But one small impulse deep inside,
so stubborn in its inborn pride,
will seek, will quest, and never stay,
till love is found, or judgment day.

How Strange Is That?

I felt I fell in love with you today; how strange is that?
Waiting for the bus we stopped and stayed to chat,
when suddenly and subito my head was overturned,
unbalancing my body as my blood began to burn.
I cannot even say I really caught your name!
Some devil-hearted cupid plays a mischief-ridden game;
uncanny things, ungrounded, maddening, and swift,
now throw the world off kilter, the earth begins to shift!
Meeting you but once, but for a little while,
I am haunted by your eyes, the flashing of your smile;
and though I hardly know you, nonetheless my brain
will spin imaginations as though your love were gained.
But swiftly comes its death as swiftly came its birth,
and if it pass away, what is such feeling worth?
The merest little fizzle, a frenzy in the brain,
and after sudden torrent nothing will remain
but cynic's self-suspicion, memories that fade,
and wry and quiet gravestones where madness has been laid.

Ender's Game

I went and saw the Ender's Game movie this weekend; some thoughts.

(1) The movie is much better than most big-budget science fiction movies made today. The special effects are especially well-chosen and sometimes truly impressive, which is getting harder to do -- visually, this is what Hollywood tries to achieve but usually fails at. There is no outright bad acting -- which in itself is impressive, particularly given the number of adolescent roles here (Asa Butterfield does an excellent Ender, and Abigail Breslin brings an extensive emotional range to Valentine) -- and pretty much every actor does quite a bit with what he or she is given. And it is surprisingly faithful to the book -- they fail to make proper use of the ansible and limitations on faster-than-light travel, but most of the changes are rather minor, and the handful of big changes mostly do help with the cinematic storytelling.

(2) The faithfulness to the book is, surprisingly, its primary problem, for two reasons. The first is that the story feels a bit rushed at times. There's too much here; you hardly get through one thing and you're off to another. The second is that the emotional punch of the book is largely missing. The reason the story as it stood was able to carry the whole book was that in the book you really do see the world through Ender's eyes; it's a very introspective story. You can't get on the screen, and so need something to compensate for it; because it mostly stays close to the book, we don't get anything that can do that.

(3) However, also because it stays close to the book, it avoids the usual problem with Hollywood adaptations, in which movies deviate from the book in extraordinarily stupid ways.

(4) They could also have done the scene after the final battle somewhat better; it's one of those things where you can to some degree see what they were trying to do, but it didn't quite work, in part because of the rush-along character of the movie.

(5) However, if you like SF movies, and particularly if you liked the book, this is one worth seeing; as I said, it's a much stronger movie than most science fiction movies made today. Had they improved the pacing and emotional tone a bit, this would have been truly stellar. As it is, it's just fairly good.

Passages on Fortitude in Sense and Sensibility

Chapter 15:

They saw nothing of Marianne till dinner time, when she entered the room and took her place at the table without saying a word. Her eyes were red and swollen; and it seemed as if her tears were even then restrained with difficulty. She avoided the looks of them all, could neither eat nor speak, and after some time, on her mother's silently pressing her hand with tender compassion, her small degree of fortitude was quite overcome, she burst into tears and left the room.

Chapter 31:

"...I have never told you how this was brought on. We were within a few hours of eloping together for Scotland. The treachery, or the folly, of my cousin's maid betrayed us. I was banished to the house of a relation far distant, and she was allowed no liberty, no society, no amusement, till my father's point was gained. I had depended on her fortitude too far, and the blow was a severe one—but had her marriage been happy, so young as I then was, a few months must have reconciled me to it, or at least I should not have now to lament it. This however was not the case. My brother had no regard for her; his pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly. The consequence of this, upon a mind so young, so lively, so inexperienced as Mrs. Brandon's, was but too natural. She resigned herself at first to all the misery of her situation; and happy had it been if she had not lived to overcome those regrets which the remembrance of me occasioned. But can we wonder that, with such a husband to provoke inconstancy, and without a friend to advise or restrain her (for my father lived only a few months after their marriage, and I was with my regiment in the East Indies) she should fall?..."

"... Surely this comparison must have its use with her. She will feel her own sufferings to be nothing. They proceed from no misconduct, and can bring no disgrace. On the contrary, every friend must be made still more her friend by them. Concern for her unhappiness, and respect for her fortitude under it, must strengthen every attachment. Use your own discretion, however, in communicating to her what I have told you...."

Chapter 32:

To give the feelings or the language of Mrs. Dashwood on receiving and answering Elinor's letter would be only to give a repetition of what her daughters had already felt and said; of a disappointment hardly less painful than Marianne's, and an indignation even greater than Elinor's. Long letters from her, quickly succeeding each other, arrived to tell all that she suffered and thought; to express her anxious solicitude for Marianne, and entreat she would bear up with fortitude under this misfortune. Bad indeed must the nature of Marianne's affliction be, when her mother could talk of fortitude! mortifying and humiliating must be the origin of those regrets, which SHE could wish her not to indulge!

Chapter 35:

Her exertions did not stop here; for she soon afterwards felt herself so heroically disposed as to determine, under pretence of fetching Marianne, to leave the others by themselves; and she really did it, and THAT in the handsomest manner, for she loitered away several minutes on the landing-place, with the most high-minded fortitude, before she went to her sister. When that was once done, however, it was time for the raptures of Edward to cease; for Marianne's joy hurried her into the drawing-room immediately. Her pleasure in seeing him was like every other of her feelings, strong in itself, and strongly spoken. She met him with a hand that would be taken, and a voice that expressed the affection of a sister.

Chapter 37:

"Your sister," he continued, "has suffered dreadfully. Mrs. Ferrars too—in short it has been a scene of such complicated distress—but I will hope that the storm may be weathered without our being any of us quite overcome. Poor Fanny! she was in hysterics all yesterday. But I would not alarm you too much. Donavan says there is nothing materially to be apprehended; her constitution is a good one, and her resolution equal to any thing. She has borne it all, with the fortitude of an angel! She says she never shall think well of anybody again; and one cannot wonder at it, after being so deceived!—meeting with such ingratitude, where so much kindness had been shewn, so much confidence had been placed! It was quite out of the benevolence of her heart, that she had asked these young women to her house; merely because she thought they deserved some attention, were harmless, well-behaved girls, and would be pleasant companions; for otherwise we both wished very much to have invited you and Marianne to be with us, while your kind friend there, was attending her daughter. And now to be so rewarded! 'I wish, with all my heart,' says poor Fanny in her affectionate way, 'that we had asked your sisters instead of them.'"

Chapter 46:

The Dashwoods were two days on the road, and Marianne bore her journey on both, without essential fatigue. Every thing that the most zealous affection, the most solicitous care could do to render her comfortable, was the office of each watchful companion, and each found their reward in her bodily ease, and her calmness of spirits. To Elinor, the observation of the latter was particularly grateful. She, who had seen her week after week so constantly suffering, oppressed by anguish of heart which she had neither courage to speak of, nor fortitude to conceal, now saw with a joy, which no other could equally share, an apparent composure of mind, which, in being the result as she trusted of serious reflection, must eventually lead her to contentment and cheerfulness.

[...]"They have borne more than our conduct.—Do not, my dearest Elinor, let your kindness defend what I know your judgment must censure. My illness has made me think— It has given me leisure and calmness for serious recollection. Long before I was enough recovered to talk, I was perfectly able to reflect. I considered the past: I saw in my own behaviour, since the beginning of our acquaintance with him last autumn, nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself, and want of kindness to others. I saw that my own feelings had prepared my sufferings, and that my want of fortitude under them had almost led me to the grave. My illness, I well knew, had been entirely brought on by myself by such negligence of my own health, as I had felt even at the time to be wrong. Had I died,—it would have been self-destruction. I did not know my danger till the danger was removed; but with such feelings as these reflections gave me, I wonder at my recovery,—wonder that the very eagerness of my desire to live, to have time for atonement to my God, and to you all, did not kill me at once. Had I died,—in what peculiar misery should I have left you, my nurse, my friend, my sister!—You, who had seen all the fretful selfishness of my latter days; who had known all the murmurings of my heart!—How should I have lived in YOUR remembrance!—My mother too! How could you have consoled her!—I cannot express my own abhorrence of myself. Whenever I looked towards the past, I saw some duty neglected, or some failing indulged...."

Chapter 47:

"When the dessert and the wine were arranged, and Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor were left by themselves, they remained long together in a similarity of thoughtfulness and silence. Mrs. Dashwood feared to hazard any remark, and ventured not to offer consolation. She now found that she had erred in relying on Elinor's representation of herself; and justly concluded that every thing had been expressly softened at the time, to spare her from an increase of unhappiness, suffering as she then had suffered for Marianne. She found that she had been misled by the careful, the considerate attention of her daughter, to think the attachment, which once she had so well understood, much slighter in reality, than she had been wont to believe, or than it was now proved to be. She feared that under this persuasion she had been unjust, inattentive, nay, almost unkind, to her Elinor;—that Marianne's affliction, because more acknowledged, more immediately before her, had too much engrossed her tenderness, and led her away to forget that in Elinor she might have a daughter suffering almost as much, certainly with less self-provocation, and greater fortitude. "

There is a certain amount of ambiguity in these mentions of fortitude: Colonel Brandon's use of the term (both Chapter 31 passages) is so highly colored by his peculiar experience that it opens the question of how well grounded his sense of what fortitude requires might be; John Dashwood's reference to fortitude (Chapter 37) is not really worth anything; and the narrator pokes fun at Elinor's fortitude at least once (Chapter 35). It is almost certainly also significant that every mention by male characters of fortitude in a woman is about her relations to men, whereas every use by the narrator is about her relations to herself (in particular, keeping her feelings in check).

Comparing to other novels, 'fortitude' shows up once (in a clearly ironic usage) in Lady Susan, once in Pride and Prejudice, three times in Northanger Abbey, four times in Emma. All of these usages seem quite minor; there isn't a great deal of moral weight attached to them. The interesting comparison is with the two novels that can be seen as addressing fortitude most directly: 'fortitude' appears six times in Persuasion, at least most of which do put considerable moral weight on the term, and not at all in Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park uses the term 'constancy' and related terms instead; in all the other novels where the term carries moral import (it usually doesn't), 'constancy' just means faithfulness in a relationship, but Fanny Price's constancy, which, while not referred to extensively rises to the front at several key points in the plot, is not constancy in this sense at all, but is at least much more like what is called fortitude elsewhere.

So is this just a peculiar accident ,or is there, perhaps, some difference of association? Perhaps 'fortitude' suggests to Austen a power of self-mastery with regard to the behavior by which one expresses one's feelings -- this arguably would differentiate Elinor and Anne on one side from Fanny on the other, since all three exhibit constancy of a sort, but Fanny doesn't have the relatively iron control of Elinor or Anne, as shown by the famous fact that we find her crying fourteen times in the novel.