A messed-up world

Tonight, Karin and I watched The Big Lebowski. … And right now, as I type this, I’m listening to one of its best songs: “Gnomus,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This week, I had an especially good session with my eighth-grade tutee. We discussed the religious differences among Britain’s thirteen North American colonies. This required me to explain the relationship between being a Puritan and being a Protestant, which necessitated a survey of the Reformation.

First, I explained about Lutherans (led by Martin Luther) and Calvinists (led by John Calvin). “And then,” I said, “the English church also split away from the Roman Catholic church. This was so that King Henry VIII could divorce his wife.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

“Who was the leader of that church?”

“King Henry VIII. He also cut off some of his wives’ heads.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, I explained how Puritans and Quakers, among others, emerged from the Church of England.

“The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania. They allowed other Christians to settle in Pennsylvania, too.”

“Were different kinds of people allowed to settle in the other colonies?”

“Not all the colonies permitted more than one kind of Christian group. The Puritans kept Massachusetts pretty much just for the Puritans.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, we went over Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” – line by line, just about, because my tutee didn’t understand a lot of the vocabulary.

As she grasped the meaning of each sentence, she exclaimed: “That’s messed up!”

But I had trouble getting her to finish reading the story.

When she told me she’d gotten to the end, I asked her how the narrator had killed the old man.

“I don’t know.”

So we checked the relevant passage, and I told her what its words meant. “So,” I explained, “the narrator held the bed against the old man’s face until he couldn’t breathe anymore.”

“That’s messed up!”

“All right, now: where did the narrator hide the body?”

“I don’t know.”

For someone so taken with the messed-upness of the world in general, and of the story in particular, my tutee was remarkably incurious about the story’s major plot points.

Which, I thought, was a little messed up.

On prefaces in history books

The most irritating part of a history book, I find, is its preface, in which the historian tries to justify his enlarging of the literature. Not that it isn’t fitting that he should give a justification – or, at least, an apology. On “big” topics, the literature is vast enough already; on “little” ones, it’s questionable why there should even be a literature (I mean, one financed by something other than the market. The authors whose books are bought for pleasure tend not to apologize in the way that I am about to describe). Again, typically, a justification or apology is in order. What’s irritating is how formulaic it usually is. “This book fills an important gap left by predecessors X, Y, and Z.” Then follow perfunctory, yet overblown, praises for X, Y, and Z, coupled with decrials of the inadequacy of X, Y, and Z. The most skillful writers make these decrials seem not terribly shrill. Yet this does not redeem the practice. If only one or two authors had ever followed this pattern, it might not have become so awful, but the fact that it is done consistently casts doubt on all who do it. It’s like crying wolf. So many plainly unnecessary decrials exist that I’ve stopped taking each new one seriously, no matter how urgently some gap might need to be filled, no matter if a wolf is present or not. The worst decrials are slander and false advertising; the best decrials are indistinguishable from the untrue ones.

Such are the feelings stirred up in me by pp. xv–xxxiv of Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich, the first installment in his gigantic trilogy about the Nazis. (Yes, I know that William Shirer’s lively classic has its shortcomings. That’s why I’m reading your book, Prof. Evans – that reason, and your book’s bright orange Penguin spine, and your reputation as an authority on why the discipline of history is worthwhile.)

Here, then, are two other prefaces that memorably fit the fatal pattern – in my opinion, more ingeniously than Evans’s does.

I do not apologize for producing a life of a king – and a life cast in traditional form – at a time when academic historians are rightly much concerned with exploiting the techniques of socio-economic analysis and the like. [That’s precious: And the like.] Biographies of monarchs still have their place, as well as their limitations. Nor do I apologize for producing a biography of seemingly so well-known a figure as Henry VIII. It is now sixty-five years since A.F. Pollard’s celebrated life of the king appeared; and none of the surprisingly few subsequent biographies has gone significantly beyond the limits of that pioneer work. In the meantime, a great deal has been written about the reign, not least by Pollard himself, which throws new light on the king.
[J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII]

This book began as my attempt to update The Indiana Way, a book I published in 1986. But simply updating that book proved unwise. Only remnants of it appear here. This is a new book, with a new title, because Indiana has changed. So has the knowledge of our past. New scholarship in the last three decades has given us a better understanding.
[James H. Madison, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana]

It is clever to seemingly give an apology without in fact apologizing; it is perhaps cleverer to seemingly withhold an apology while apologizing, as Scarisbrick does. And Madison apologizes only for bettering himself.