— Sonnet V
Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
— Sonnet IV
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
— Sonnet III
Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
— Sonnet II
When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
— Sonnet I
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
— Equus
If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.
Jesus told the Pharisees that, if his disciples did not worship him, the rocks would do so instead. Nature abhors a lack of worship for the Son of God as it abhors a vacuum, and so fills it immediately.
Peter Shaffer’s Equus works from an inverse assumption—people have an innate need to worship, and will cry out to some other deity if not to God. For poor Alan Strang, that deity takes the form of Equus, a jealous horse-god. Alan is placed in the care of Dr. Dysart after having blinded six horses with an iron pick.
In his analysis of Alan, Dysart uncovers Alan’s worship of Equus. This malformed religion has driven Alan to a vile act, but still Dysart anguishes over taking it from Alan. “Can I take his worship from him?” Dysart asks. He knows that, perverse as it is, Alan’s worship keeps him from a boring, drab “normal” life.
In Equus, Shaffer names worship as the most instinctive, neccessary act of human life.
— Why I Prayed for Osama Bin Laden
Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
About two millennia ago, the Son of God sat on a hill and said that to his followers. Many of the things he said that day make sense to us. Do not lust after the spouse of another, do not pray publicly so as to glorify yourself, do not use giving to the needy as a means to win approval in the eyes of others. These things may not be easy to do, but it’s simple enough to see why they are good commands to follow.
Loving your enemy seems absurd. Why love someone who hates you? Why pray for someone who wants to kill you? Ridiculous. Yet, Jesus places it in the middle of his Sermon on the Mount, ending the section on loving our enemies with “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Being like God means loving our enemies like he loves his enemies.
Who are God’s enemies?
We are.
God placed people in a perfect world; we perverted it. The Old Testament tells how the Israelites violated God’s law constantly. Each time, he brought them back to himself. Each time, they soon sculpted new idols. We are all the same. God loves us more than we can fathom, but the history of the world is the story of people sinning against God just as much as they can.
We deserve death. We deserve a bullet to the face, a rope around our neck. But God loved us so much that he sent the only son he had to die for us. To sacrifice his life for people who spent their lives hurting him with their sin. Jesus took upon himself the crimes of everyone who ever lived or will live. These were crimes that hurt him personally every time. He took the guilt of those crimes upon himself. He climbed up on another hill and allowed nails to be pounded into his arms and legs so that he could be lifted onto a tree and asphyxiated.
He died for those who hurt him.
This is the love of God. This love is absurd. I can’t understand it. What love can be this encompassing and fierce?
This is the love God has for us. It is also the love Jesus asks us to imitate. If Jesus took upon himself the sins of every person ever—including Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Sherman, Hussein, Bin Laden—perhaps we can also seek to love the comparatively tiny number of enemies in our own lives.
This is why I prayed for Osama Bin Laden. I did not pray that he would be killed. I prayed that he would find the incredible love God has for us. I prayed that he would be brought into the Kingdom of Heaven. For the same reason, I will pray for Kim Jong-il, for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for Muammar al-Gaddafi, and for anyone else who would call themself my enemy. God loved me, a wretched sinner, enough to die for me. Loving my enemies is the appropriate response to God’s love.
Love your enemies.
— A Separate Peace
Something that I really admire in an author is knowledge of and honesty towards human nature, and John Knowles has it in spades. When I read A Separate Peace for the first time, however many years ago, I saw it mainly as a story about friendship and jealousy. This time around, that was still evident, but I now think that the story is more about the nature of our enemies. Gene and Finny are best “frenemies,” as the current idiom would have it; at least, they are such in Gene’s mind. Because of his selfish, grasping nature Gene creates a rivalry between them in his own heart. He sees Finny as intentionally trying to undermine him at every turn. In a flash of anger, Gene jiggles the branch they are both on, and Finny falls and breaks his leg.
The story is set during WWII, but the real war for Gene and the other boys is in their own hearts. After the incident, Gene realizes that the competition that existed between himself and Finny only ever existed in his own mind. Gene interpreted events in such a way as to make Finny his enemy, while Finny was only ever a good friend to Gene. Knowles knows (hehe) that each of us, according to our wretchedly self-centered nature, create enemies in our minds that are really no such thing. In another of my classes, we’ve been reading Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. In in, B. discusses loving our enemies and the fact that as soon as we love them, they are no longer our enemy but our brother. It seems to me that Knowles is getting at the same idea—having an enemy is a state of mind, not a state of being.
Gene expresses this idea in his closing narration:
Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy, and so began an obsessive labor of defense… All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.
— Titus Andronicus
Titus is possibly the first tragedy Shakespeare wrote that we possess. Reading it brings to mind Peter Jackson, who began his career making horror movies and then graduated to less bloody, more subtle films. Likewise, Titus is the most physically savage of Shakespeare’s plays. Later tragedies do not approach these gruesome depths. Hands are chopped off, people decapitated and most infamously, a pair of sons are killed, chopped up and baked into pies which are fed to their mother. Shakespeare wants us to face the absolute wickedness of human nature. Aaron, the Moor slave to the Goth queen Tamora, acknowledges his evil without remorse:
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
Much like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, all of this violence leads us to think on the worthlessness of revenge. Titus, driven mad by the treatment of his daughter Lavinia (she is taken by Tamora’s sons Chiron and Demetrius, who ravish her and then cut off her hands and out her tongue), seeks vengeance. He achieves his aim, killing Tamora and her sons. By killing them, he completes his revenge literally and metaphorically, as they had appeared to him earlier in the guise of Revenge, Rape and Murder. His enemies are dead, and he has killed (satiated) Revenge. But at what cost? Titus is killed in his efforts, and in the madness brought on by his unrestrained desire for revenge, he kills his Lavinia, the sweet child whose hurts were the reason for his revenge in the first place.
Stray thoughts:
- Tamora, after framing Titus’ sons for the murder of Bassianus, returns to find everyone gathered around a pit which contains Bassianus’ body and Titus’ sons. I laughed out loud at her exclamation in faux-wide eyed wonder:
What, are they in this pit? O wondrous thing!
How easily murder is discovered!
- When Chiron and Demetrius find out that Tamora has borne the child of Aaron, they are understandably upset. Aaron cannot resist that oldest of taunts:
CHIRON: Thou hast undone our mother!
AARON: Villian, I have done thy mother.
- I had forgotten the source of this particularly macabre practical joke:
AARON: Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves
And set them upright at their dear friends’ door,
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’
— Books
I have no idea how many books I read per annum. This is information that I would like to have.
So, I am going to do my best to give each book (or play, etc.) that I read in 2011 at least a brief blog post for the commemoration that’s in it.
Currently reading: The Bible, The Pursuit of God, Titus Andronicus and Teacher Man. Possibly more soon. Reading one book at a time is something that’s never really happened for me.
