Nolan’s Odyssey—The Book Is Better

By Robin Bates | Published: July 28, 2026
Matt Damon as Odysseus

Wednesday

Julia and I watched The Odyssey Monday and I had the most predictable reaction imaginable: “It’s not as good as the book.”

Someone, perhaps novelist and scriptwriter Gore Vidal, once said that you can make a great movie out of a mediocre book but not a great movie out of a great book. It was certainly hard for me to appreciate a film based on a poem I have taught at least twenty times because I made constant comparisons. When I last taught it (in Sewanee’s “Representative Masterpieces” class), I used the Emily Wilson translation that Christopher Nolan reportedly consulted.

Wilson caused a stir with her use of “complicated” in Homer’s opening invocation of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry:

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home….
                     Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.

Matt Damon’s Odysseus is certainly complicated, but not in the way that Homer’s is. The original Odysseus does not appear to have qualms about sacking Troy, nor does he feel guilt over what happened to his men. In fact, he experiences a bloodlust when it comes to slaying his enemies: he kills every single suitor and is prepared to kill all those who show up to avenge them. He is stopped only by the intervention of Athena in the guise of Mentor (who, incidentally, is not poisoned, as he is in the movie). Here’s the passage in the Robert Fitzgerald translation:

Odysseus and his son now furiously
closed, laying on with broadswords, hand to hand,
and pikes: they would have cut the enemy down
to the last man, leaving not one survivor,
had not Athena raised a shout
that stopped all fighters in the tracks.

                                                            “Now hold!”
she cried, “Break off this bitter skirmish, Ithakans, and make peace.”

The poem then ends happily ever after:

[Odysseus] yielded to her, and his heart was glad.
Both parties later swore to terms of peace
set by their arbiter, Athena, daughter
of Zeus who bears the stormcloud as a shield—
though still she kept the form and voice of Mentor

When I taught the poem, I would tell my students that, more than one-eyed cyclopes and immortal island goddesses who turn men into swine, this is Homer’s most fantastical scene. All of us who have seen The Godfather (or read Beowulf or Huckleberry Finn) know how intractable family blood feuds are, how they can continue for generations. 

I appreciate how Nolan acknowledges this. In his version, Odysseus must kill the suitors by himself so that Telemachus carries none of the blood guilt. Unlike the poem, where Telemachus fights side by side with his father, his only battle in the film is with Melanthius, the goatherd who is funneling weapons to the suitors.

[Side note: I found it improbable that Odysseus’s son, trained in weaponry, would have such difficulty dispatching someone untrained. In the poem, not-blind swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius have no difficulty subduing Melanthius, tying him up with “cutting cord” so that “his bones ground in their sockets,” and hoisting him “in agony up a pillar to the beams.” Later they will hack off his nose, ears hands, feet and genitals.] 

By accepting exile for killing the suitors, Odysseus can end the feud and Telemachus can ascend to the throne with a clean slate. In ending his film this way, Nolan merges Homer’s Odysseus with Tennyson’s Ulysses in his famous poem by that name. Skipping Ulysses’s complaint about having an aging wife and a bureaucratic, non-adventurous son, Nolan turns to the following lines:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ 
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades 
For ever and forever when I move. 
…
Little remains: but every hour is saved 
From that eternal silence, something more, 
A bringer of new things; and vile it were 
For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 
And this gray spirit yearning in desire 
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Nolan’s Odysseus doesn’t go into exile alone, however, but is accompanied by Penelope in what feels like a second honeymoon. Together they will sail “beyond the sunset, and the baths/ Of all the western stars, until [we] die.” Perhaps they’ll “touch the Happy Isles and see the great Achilles.”

But back to Homer’s Odysseus being a complicated man. His psychological states are conveyed through his interactions with the gods, as though forces greater than his own individual mind are driving him. The poem begins with a conclave on Mount Olympus in which Athena complains about Odysseus being stuck on Kalypso’s island and Zeus agreeing that Poseidon must allow Odysseus to return home. Put in terms of a dialogue inside Odysseus’s head, the call of duty is finally (after seven years!) triumphing over his fear of setting out on another sea voyage. It’s not an easy decision given that he must, in so doing, abandon the comfort of living with an immortal island goddess. 

In the film, Nolan strips away this internal struggle. Combining an earlier adventure–Odysseus’s encounter with the Lotus Eaters–with the Kalypso episode, he has her using the drug’s memory-erasing qualities to treat his PTSD over having lost his crew. (Rather cleverly, Nolan has Odysseus gradually recall what has happened to him, thereby providing us with his backstory. There’s no reason now to include his journey to the Phaeacians, the islanders in Homer’s version to whom Odysseus tells his story.)

It’s not the first time in Homer’s poem that Odysseus has grappled with the decision whether to stay or whether to go. He remains with Circe and her “flawless bed of love” for a full year. (Only a day in Nolan’s version.) Indeed, I read the entire Hades visit, which occurs during his time with Circe, as Odysseus questioning whether he really wants to confront the rigors of the sea again. In addition to the men eaten by the cyclops, he has lost his other ships, along with their crews.

In Hades he encounters some compelling reasons to stay, beginning with Agamemnon telling him about his own fate upon returning home. “Indulge a woman never,” the king tells him, “and never tell her all you know.” Could Penelope be plotting something similar? Meanwhile, through Achilles Odysseus questions the concept of glory itself. When he observes that the warrior has been ranked with the immortals, Achilles responds, 

Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead. 

Perhaps, then, the best option is to stay forever in obscurity on Circe’s island rather than die while seeking fame.

Achilles changes his tune when Odysseus tells him about his son, however. After hearing of Neoptólemos’s deeds in battle, Achilles goes off “striding the field of Asphodel, . . . glorying in what I told him of his son.” Maybe this is what convinces Odysseus to set off for home. He too has a son, so perhaps he realizes there is a kind of immortality in family and generation.

In other words, what gives life meaning is not only living. “As tho’ to breathe were life,” as Tennyson’s Ulysses puts it after having described the Ithakans as a savage race “that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.” This is another version of Circe turning men into swine, a point that Nolan’s Circe explicitly mentions, and one can see why Zeus/sense of duty would object.

All of which is to say that the gods function as a meaning system, with Odysseus’s interactions with them revealing his complicated nature. He’s just a different kind of complicated than Nolan’s Odysseus.

It’s not that I object to Nolan’s point. Although the movie was completed before Trump invaded Iran, America has a lot to be ashamed of when it comes to forever wars. Nolan’s Odysseus tells Penelope ahead of time that this will be an endless—or at least a very long—war, and he goes reluctantly. Then, in scenes which Nolan might have borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, he feels complicit in the atrocities visited upon the Trojans. Seeing the horrors of war through their eyes, it is as though he is seeing Gaza as experienced by the Palestinians or Iraq as experienced by the Iraqis. 

When the Greek invaders kill a Trojan priestess in a temple dedicated to Athena, Nolan’s Odysseus internalizes the young woman. She becomes his Athena within, his conscience, and as such becomes his moral center. It’s a bit confusing, however, because it’s not clear that he lacked such a center before. At any rate, it’s Nolan’s way of acknowledging that divinity is part of our internal make-up.

This Athena is a far cry from Homer’s Athena, however. It’s true, as I’ve noted, that the ancient Greek goddess brings about peace at story’s end, just as she placates the vengeful furies at the end of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon trilogy. But when Odysseus is killing the suitors, she’s in the thick of it:

At this moment that unmanning thunder cloud,
the aegis, Athena’s shield,
took form aloft in the great hall.
                            And the suitors mad with fear
at her great sign stampeded like stung cattle by a river
when the dread shimmering gadfly strikes in summer,
in the flowering season, in the long-drawn days.
After them the attackers wheeled, as terrible as falcons
from eyries in the mountains veering over and diving down
with talons wide unsheathed on flights of birds,
who cower down the sky in chutes and bursts along the valley—
but the pouncing falcons grip their prey, no frantic wing avails…

Don’t show this passage to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, since it captures his fever dream.

Homer, however, doesn’t let his bloodthirsty hero off the hook. Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, interprets The Iliad as an anti-war book because it exposes how force turns victimizer no less than victimized into a thing, and the same could be said of The Odyssey. Even more horrifying than the treatment of Melanthius could be Telemachus hanging the serving women who have slept with the suitors (and not necessarily because they wanted to, as Margaret Atwood points out in The Penelopiad). The horror lies in the tiny details:

“I would not give the clean death of a beast
to trulls who made a mockery of my mother
and of me too—you sluts, who lay with suitors.”

He tied one end of a hawser to a pillar
and passed the other about the roundhouse top,
taking the slack up, so that no one’s toes
could touch the ground. They would be hung like doves
or larks in springès triggered in a thicket,
where the birds think to rest—a cruel nesting.
So now in turn each woman thrust her head
into a noose and swung, yanked high in air,
to perish there more piteously.
Their feet danced for a little, but not long.

I’ve heard some of my elderly friends complaining about Nolan’s violence—the cyclops cannibalism scene echoes Goya’s horrific painting of Saturn eating his son—but imagine if the director had put bloodthirsty Odysseus and Telemachus into his film. When I say I prefer the book to the movie, it’s not that I like these passages but that they show me how complicated humans can be. Damon’s Odysseus and Tom Holland’s Telemachus, by contrast, seem shallow and sentimental.

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A Novel about Being Swallowed by Social Media

By Robin Bates | Published: July 27, 2026

Tuesday

I’ve just finished listening to Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking about This, in which a social media personality describes life in the age of social media through non-stop snippets. Harvard Review Online describes the book as “a novel retrofitted to tiny attention spans—like a feed, but on paper, with only one voice,” Indeed, the first half reads like a smart twitter thread. It was because someone on Bluesky shared one of the novel’s “posts” (if you can call them that) that I became aware of the novel. Here’s that passage:

Why did rich people believe they worked harder? Her theory was that it was because they identified with the pile of money itself. And gathering interest, multiplying hotly, climbing its own slopes like a fever, heightening its silver, its gold, its green – what was that but work? When you thought about it that way, they never slept, but stayed wide-eyed as numerals 365 days a year, every last digit of them busy, awake in the clinking, the shuffle, the rustle, while eagles with pure platinum feathers swooped above them to create a wind. When you thought about it that way, of course they deserved it all, and looked with rightful contempt at the coppery disgraces all around them: those two cents that refused to even rub themselves together.

Because the widening wealth gap between the very rich and everyone else has become one of our most pressing issues, it’s important that we better understand rich people. We can add Lockwood’s observation to those offered by F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Rich Boy,” and The Great Gatsby.

Because I am not a heavy social media user (blogging in my eyes is more like old-fashioned essay writing), I didn’t like Lockwood’s novel as much as some reviewers. Nevertheless, I appreciate how it is helping me better understand why people spend hours chatting with each other. Here are some insights I appreciated, delivered by the narrator in the third person:

Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and to be delighted.

And then:

When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her to an indestructible coherence.

At one point she talks about the high that comes with having a post go viral:

When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.

Ultimately, however, the portal, like drugs, delivers diminishing returns:

The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.

There are multiple ways in which people become this rat. Here’s one of my favorites:

[T]he generation following (hers) had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.

She describes users descending into a herd mentality:

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.

As a result, much of what we value takes a hit, including wit and language itself. “What began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play,” the narrator writes, “soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma.”

Suddenly, certain words lose their potency:

The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word. It was like a person becoming famous. They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were. Toxic. Labor. Discourse. Normalize.”

And then there’s “Merry Christmas”:

The words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant ‘Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the white ethnostate?’

“Why were we all writing like this now?” the narrator asks at one point and then responds, 

Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.

To be sure, new media has always released new energies. I think of how, in the 18th century’s explosion of print, there would be pamphlet wars, such as that conducted between Jonathan Swift and self-proclaimed astrologer and almanac writer John Partridge. People would breathlessly await the next exchange in that battle. But the speed and accessibility of the portal—“the cursor blinked where her mind was”–has upped the stakes. She fears that the portal is responsible for Donald Trump:

Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.

And:

Previously [our] communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”

This drama continues throughout the first half of the novel and then takes an abrupt turn when the narrator’s sister is diagnosed as having a fetus with a fatal abnormality. The world of the portal seems irrelevant in the face of both tragedy and beauty as the narrator both decries Ohio’s harsh anti-abortion laws and falls in love with the baby. “There is still a real life to be lived,” she writes, “there are still real things to be done.”

The Marxist scholar Frederic Jameson, faced with the endless relativism of deconstructionists, once wrote that “history is what hurts.” In other words, there is a limit to the endless framing and reframing of people who take refuge in irony and claim that everything is a construct. For her part, Lockwood’s narrator rediscovers sincerity, so much so that she wants to physically shake her former portal followers, exclaiming, “No one is talking about this.”

To do so, she discovers, means returning to a language that has gone out of fashion.

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Normalizing DJT’s Assaults on Democracy

By Robin Bates | Published: July 26, 2026
Trump concluding his remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner

Monday

Some political commentator (I can’t remember who) recently cited Bertolt Brecht’s “The Solution” when talking about progressives frustrated that people can’t see where their true interests lie. In his poem, Brecht ironically suggests replacing people who let us down with more amenable people. Here’s the poem:

The Solution
By Bertolt Brecht

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

The poem, which was not published until after Brecht’s death, was written following East Germany’s uprising of 1953, in which Germans resisted the Sovietization of their country. The uprising failed and it sounds like the Writers Union, which may have had Brecht as a member, tried then to ingratiate itself with the authoritarian regime. While Brecht moved from the United States to East Germany because he was hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he called out authoritarianism wherever he saw it.

The mention of the Writers Union brings to mind Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner, where journalists subjected themselves to attacks from a president who makes no secret of his loathing of a free press. Instead of reacting when Trump attacked their CNN colleague Kaitlan Collins, however—he complained that she “never smiles” and compared her to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney—they sat stony faced. By not booing or walking out of the room but simply shrugging—as they also did when Trump fantasized about running for an unconstitutional third term—they normalize appalling behavior.

When the president of the United States openly jokes about flouting the Constitution, that should be a five alarm fire. As historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote recently, Trump and those around him are not simply challenging laws and constitutional provisions. They are acting as if the Constitution doesn’t exist.

I use the word “normalize” because there’s a smart examination of the word in a novel I’m currently reading. In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This, an internet celebrity comments on how social media is sapping language of its power. At one point she writes,  

“Don’t normalize it!!!!!” we shouted at each other. But all we were normalizing was the use of the word normalize, which sounded like the action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him Norm as well.

Trump supporters and Trump himself accuse anyone who reacts violently to the president of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Instead, they want us all to become Norm when we are in his presence. 

Unfortunately, that is just what too many of the correspondents at the dinner did.

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The Spell in Every Seashell

By Robin Bates | Published: July 25, 2026

Sunday

Reprinted from July 30, 2017, Slightly Altered

One of today’s lectionary readings has Jesus comparing the kingdom of heaven to a “pearl of great price.” The image shows up in a fine Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) poem, and knowing the allusion adds resonance to the poem.

First, here’s the passage. It’s one of a series of metaphors that Jesus uses to capture the process of spiritual search:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls.  Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. (Matthew 3:45-46)

Elsewhere in the passage Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, to yeast, and to a treasure buried in a field.

H.D.’s poem is one of a series in her book The Walls Do Not Fall. H.D. belonged to the movement known as Imagism, noted for using images to capture complex emotional states, and in a way Jesus can be seen as an Imagist poet. Following Jesus’s lead, Doolittle starts with a humble object—a seashell—to find her way to that which puts her in touch with the divine, bringing the realm of the numinous—the kingdom of heaven–to earth.

The shell initially conveys how she goes through life with a hard exterior so that she won’t be hurt.  This seems necessary because she sees herself as a “flabby amorphous hermit” who can be devoured by sharks or crushed by the weight of the sea. At this point, there seems to be little spiritual in the image, just as there seems little spiritual in a mustard seed or yeast. The poem could well be H.D. grappling with her depression, which was treated by Freud.

However, while she may shut herself off from the world, sometimes with a snap, she has a rich interior life which seems more valuable than anything the world has to offer. That is the spell that is to be found “in every sea-shell.” Therefore, do not be fooled by the hard exterior.

The reference to the pearl reminds us how pearls are created. A grain of sand gets inside the vulnerable oyster, which must build up a defense against this denizen from the world out there. In responding to this assault, the oyster, like the introverted poet, creates something of transcendent beauty, a pearl of great price.

Jesus calls upon us to seek out a comparable beauty. Poetry can be a means of connecting with the kingdom of heaven.

From The Walls Do Not Fall
By H.D.

There is a spell, for instance,
in every sea-shell:

continuous, the sea-thrust
is powerless against coral,

bone, stone, marble
hewn from within by that craftsman,

the shell-fish:
oyster, clam, mollusc

is master-mason planning
the stone-marvel:

yet that flabby, amorphous hermit
within, like the planet

senses the finite,
it limits its orbit

of being, its house,
temple, fane, shrine:

it unlocks the portals
at stated intervals:

prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow:

but infinity? no,
of nothing-too-much:

I sense my own limit,
my shell-jaws snap shut

at invasion of the limitless,
ocean-weight; infinite water

can not crack me, egg in egg-shell;
closed in, complete, immortal

full-circle, I know the pull
of the tide, the lull

as well as the moon;
the octopus-darkness

is powerless against
her cold immortality;

so I in my own way know
that the whale

can not digest me:
be firm in your own small, static, limited

orbit and the shark-jaws
of outer circumstance

will spit you forth:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving.

so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,

selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.

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The Memoir Comes to the End (For Now)

By Robin Bates | Published: July 25, 2026
Eric Enstrom, Grace

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 42nd Installment

I wrap up this memoir with some reflections on what life feels like at 75 and what I foresee going forward.

Sartre writes that, when we die, we become our past, frozen in the minds of those who remember us. At three quarters of a century, I’m not sure that people will see me differently when I die than how they see me now, except for the fact that I will be more infirm. The final years of my father, who died at 90, and my mother, who died at 96, don’t loom as large in my memory as do the years when they were younger. In fact, I divide them into their working and parenting lives when I was a child and teenager; their working lives after I left home; and their retirement lives, which lack the variety of what came before. I see my own life through the same lens: child and adolescent; young married adult before children; working parent; professor whose children have left home; and retiree who life has settled. 

All of which is to say, I see myself at this age as having become my past, Sartre’s frozen state, since I don’t see my life changing much going forward. And that’s fine with me.

Although my life has a sameness to it, I don’t find it dull. I play tennis, write my blog, read and listen to novels, do occasional traveling, go to church, correspond with friends and family, and engage in various communal activities. I don’t feel that I need to accomplish more than I am accomplishing, and I don’t fret about missed opportunities. The incessant worry of professors—that we’re not doing as much as we could for our students and that our scholarly work is falling short of expectations—is no longer a part of my life.

In other words, I’m not like Tennyson’s restless Ulysses, mentioned in my last post, who feels that “some work of noble note, may yet be done,/ Not unbecoming men that strive with gods.” I no longer feel the need to prove myself. 

Is that a version of the static existence that Ulysses accuses his son of living? Admittedly, I am not out there smiting the sounding furrows so that I can touch the Happy Isles and meet the great Achilles. Nor am I taking on gulfs that could wash me down. I’m not living a heroic life.

Unlike Tennyson’s Ulysses, whose restlessness lands him in one of Dante’s lower circles, Homer’s Odysseus is told he will die in peace. His fate, predicted by Teiresias in the underworld, is not unlike that of my mother, who died in her sleep only a few feet from where I am sitting now:

               Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
And all this shall be just as I foretell.

Living in the house where both my parents grew old and died means that I think about my end quite a lot. This house is filled with those memories—of playing Mozart and reading poetry during my mother’s final hours before falling asleep next to her—and I sense that I am walking in their footsteps. To be sure, I know that my children won’t come to live with Julia and me as she and I lived with my mother so the odds are that at least one of us will end our days in a senior center. It’s easier to imagine it all finishing out here.

Yet if my life is quieter and more reflective, it is far from static. My mind feels constantly stimulated by the novels I’m reading and the essays I’m writing. In a way, retirement has allowed me to shut out the distractions that once made my life a never-ending emotional roller coaster, such as that described by John Wilmot:

But we, poor slaves to hope and fear,
Are never of our joys secure;
They lessen still as they draw near,
And none but dull delights endure.

I am privileged in that my experience of retirement, bolstered as it is by Medicare, social security, and a pension and so far marked by good health, means that I can choose to focus on what brings me the most pleasure. Literature thrills me as much now as it ever did, as does the companionship of friends, on the tennis courts and around the table. And then there are our two sons and our five grandchildren. I am filled with gratitude for all of it.

Of course, life being what it is means that that I can’t remain entirely complacent. The threat of autocracy looms and I worry about the world we are leaving our grandchildren, especially when it comes to the climate. I will continue to participate in No Kings marches and vote and make my voice heard through the blog. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t assume that life at 85 will look like life at 75. Perhaps there is still some work of noble note to be done. If so, I’ll report on it when it happens and update this memoir. 

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026) 
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026) 
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
After the 2nd Death, a Book Project (April 17, 2026)
Making Lit Meaningful for Students (April 24, 2026) 
Horizons Broadened (May 1, 2026) 
Obama’s Election and a Blog Launched (May 8, 2026)
Expanding Outward at 60 (May 15, 2026) 
On Losing My Father (May 22, 2026)
Cavorting through Literature’s Wonderland (May 29, 2026) 
An Academic Life Sidetracked? (June 5, 2026)
Sports as a Spur to the Imagination (June 12, 2026)
Entering Retirement (June 26, 2026) 
My Early Literary Civics Lessons (July 3, 2026)
My Friendships Grounded in Literature (July 17, 2026)
My Memoir Comes to an End (For Now) (July 24, 2026)

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ICE, the Summoning Dark, and Sam Vimes

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2026
Richard Dormer as Sam Vimes in The Watch

Thursday

I promised last week to say more about Terry Prachett’s insights into police going over to the dark side—a not insignificant issue as ICE killings continue to mount—so here goes. First, however, a thought on why Pratchett isn’t taken more seriously as a social commentator, even though I find his thinking to be profound.

I once attended a panel on “Fantasy and Humor” at the annual conference of The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. There a fantasy author—I didn’t recognize him—observed that, while he had won more literary awards than Pratchett, Pratchett was by far the superior author. The reason, he said, is because fantasy enthusiasts have problems mixing fantasy with humor. They prefer the high seriousness of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, not the hilarious wit of Discworld.

I think the same holds true when it comes to Pratchett addressing social problems, especially in the novels featuring Commander of the Watch Sam Vines. Because Pratchett is constantly joking about what the police must do to maintain order in crime-ridden Ankh Morpork, which resembles Dickensian London, we can miss his deeper message. For instance, at times he appears to fantasize about police violence reestablishing the peace, as in the following scene in The Fifth Elephant. 

Watchman Detritus, a dim-witted but likable troll, has used his muscle to sort out a bar fight. Concerned, Commander Vines warns him that he must start using tact and diplomacy to keep ancient rivalries between trolls and dwarfs from getting out of hand:

“You have come to der right troll for that, sair,” said Detritus.

“You did push that man through that wall last week, Detritus.”

“It was done with tact, sir. Quite a fin wall.”

Vimes let it go at that. The man in question had just laid out three watchmen with a club, which Detritus had broken in one hand before selecting the suitably tactful wall.

For those cheering Detritus’s use of force, I note that the City Watch also has DEI policies, which make it far more effective than if it were made up only of male humans. After all, it must deal with a multicultural population. Along with the troll there is a female dwarf, a man raised among dwarfs (Captain Carrot), a zombie, a golem, a female werewolf, a female vampire, an “Igor” (think Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein), a gargoyle (Constable Downspout), a gnome, a fundamentalist (Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets), and Corporal Nobby Nobbs, who needs a certificate to prove that he is human.   

Vimes himself has a history of violence—as a child he needed his fists and feet to survive the Ankh Morporkian backstreets on which he was raised–and he shakes his head  when the noble Carrot attempts to follow the Marquis of Fantailler Rules in a fight with a rogue werewolf. As Pratchett explains in a footnote,

“The noble art of fisticuffs” mostly consisted of a list of places where people weren’t allowed to hit [the Marquis]. Many peole were impressed with his work and later stood with noble chest outthrust and fists balled in a spirit of manly aggression against people who hadn’t read the Marquis’s book but did know how to knock people senseless with a chair. The last words of a surprisingly large number of people were “Stuff the bloody Marquis of Fantailler—”

[Side note that is of interest to me: This is a reference to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, formulated by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, which formed the basis of boxing. If my great-great-grandfather William Scott was, as our family believes, the natural son of Charles William Henry Montagu-Scott, 4th Duke of Buccleuch—after Charles died William would go on to manage the estate of Buccleuch’s best friend, Lord Bunbury–then he would have been second cousin twice removed of the Marquess. Unofficially, of course.] 

So far, it appears that Pratchett is appealing to our testosterone-charged manosphere, the one that cheers Trump and Hegseth when they bomb fishing boats and indiscriminate Iranian targets.

But if Vimes sometimes fights outside the rules, he does so only when necessary and he draws the line at killing. In a conversation with professional assassin Inigo, who has been sent to protect him, he objects to his palm knife:

“This is not a weapon. This is for killing people,” [Vimes] said.

“Uh…most weapons are,” said Inigo.

“No, they’re not. They’re so you don’t have to kill people. They’re for…for having. For being seen. For warning. This is for hiding away until you bring it out and kill people in the dark.

Vimes, we learn, has never deliberately killed anyone. He knows he has a dark side, however, and when he has just managed to subdue a werewolf that has been going for his throat, he experiences the primal fury that may have overcome various ICE agents in Maine, Minneapolis, and elsewhere:

Make them stay wolves, said a little inner voice. The more time they spend on four legs, the less bright they’d become.

A deeper voice, red and raw, from much, much further inside, said: Kill ’em all!

The rage was boiling up now, fighting against the chill.

Time and again, however, we see Vimes suppressing this impulse. The struggle is most acute when, in the later novel Thud!, Vimes is a father who sees his beloved son threatened. In that novel, he is in danger of being taken over by a dwarf curse that unleashes out-of-control rage in whomever it touches. Known as “the Summoning Dark,” it goads Vimes to enact extreme vengeance on those who would harm his loved ones. Here’s the scene where we watch him overcome it:

[Vimes] said: “What are you?”

The entity stirred, like an old fish in a deep pool. It was too tired to flee.

“I am the Summoning Dark.” It was not, in fact, a sound, but had it been, it would have been a hiss. “Who are you?”

“I am the Watchman.”

“They would have killed his family!” The darkness lunged, and met resistance. “Think of the deaths they have caused! Who are you to stop me?”

“He created me. Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Me. I watch him. Always. You will not force him to murder for you.”

“What kind of human creates his own policeman?”

“One who fears the dark.”

“And so he should,” said the entity, with satisfaction.

“Indeed. But I think you misunderstand. I am not here to keep darkness out. I’m here to keep it in.” There was a clink of metal as the shadowy watchman lifted a dark lantern and opened its little door. Orange light cut through the blackness. “Call me . . . the Guarding Dark. Imagine how strong I must be.”

The Summoning Dark backed desperately into the alley, but the light followed it, burning it.

“And now,” said the watchman, “get out of town.”

The Summoning Dark, goaded by the president, has taken over various ICE agents and spread to a segment of the population, with tragic consequences. Vimes, however, models a heroic alternative. I like what reviewer Andrew Brown wrote of Pratchett after he died tragically at 66:

Pratchett wrote some memorable villains, but his heroes were much more vivid.  What makes them so unusual is their unheroic and everyday quality, even when they are being heroic or, if necessary, saving the world. Sam Vimes may be the most fully realized decent man in modern literature. He’s not a saint, but there are some things you know – and he knows – he will never do, and some temptations he will never yield to.

As we witness the assaults on our democracy, we must access our inner Sam Vimes, standing strong while not yielding to overpowering rage.

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The End of the World – Robert Frost Called It

By Robin Bates | Published: July 21, 2026

Wednesday

Periodically I rerun the following climate change essay—last posted on July 20, 2022—because its pessimism becomes truer every year. As wildfires run rampant throughout Canada, Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” takes on new urgency.

Included at the end are links to all the posts I have written on the ongoing catastrophe.

Of course DJT wants to blame anything rather than climate change, which he is supercharging with his attacks on renewables and his support of big oil and coal. The only time he cares about poor air quality is when it comes from abroad.

If, worldwide, we made a concerted effort to dramatically reduce the hydrocarbons we are sending into the atmosphere, we could still stave off the worst. How many more signs does the GOP need before it commits fully to the necessary measures? 

Reprinted from July 20, 2022

 “Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice,” Robert Frost writes in his well-known poem, and it increasingly appears that all these someones are right. The current heat wave, often accompanied by fires, follows terrifying reports of accelerating glacier melt. According to National Geographic three years ago,

Greenland ice sheet is losing mass about six times faster than it was just a few decades ago, whatever tenuous balance that existed before long since upended. Between 2005 and 2016, melt from the ice sheet was the single largest contributor to sea level rise worldwide, though Antarctica may overtake it soon.

Within the past 50 years, the ice sheet has already shed enough to add about half an inch of water to the world’s oceans, and that number is increasing precipitously as the planet heats. During this summer’s extreme heat wave that parked over Greenland for a week and turned over half its surface ice to slush, meltwater equivalent to over 4 million swimming pools sloughed into the ocean in a single day. Over the month of July, enough melt poured into the ocean to bump sea levels up by an easily measurable half a millimeter.

Frost, who may have Milton’s hot hell and Dante’s cold hell in mind, is writing about relationships, not climate change. As he sees it, the relationship is in trouble whether the partners are fiery passionate or icy cold. Fire is louder and more flamboyant, but the silent workings of cold can be just as deadly:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

The poem is just as relevant to our current situation, however, where apocalypse is looking increasingly likely.

Speaking of apocalyptic accounts that get at our situation, I have cited two other works in this regard, Homer’s Iliad and C. S. Lewis’s Last Battle. I wrote the following about the Iliad in August 2019 in conjunction with the burning of the Amazon rainforests:

My anger finds some articulation in a horrific scene in The Iliad. Because Hector has killed his dearest friend, Achilles reengages in the war and goes on a killing spree so bloody that the River Scamander reacts in horror. When Achilles clogs its channels with dead Trojans, it rises up in a giant wave and bears down on the Greek warrior.

Because Achilles is beloved by the Gods, however, the iron-working god Hephaistos enters the fray, and his technology is brought to bear. I think of the Amazon’s unparalleled biological diversity as I read what happens next:

                 Then against the river 
Hephaistos turned his bright flame, and the elms 
and tamarisks and willows burned away, 
with all the clover, galingale, and rushes 
plentiful along the winding streams. 
Then eels and fish, in backwaters, in currents, 
wriggled here and there at the scalding breath 
of torrid blasts from the great smith, Hephaistos…

And further on:

[The river] spoke in steam, and
his clear current seethed,
the way a caldron whipped by a white-hot fire
boils with a well-fed hog’s abundant fat
that spatters all the rim, as dry split wood
turns ash beneath it. So his currents, fanned
by fire, seethed, and the river would not flow
but came to a halt, tormented by the gale
of fire from the heavenly smith, Hephaistos.

This isn’t the only time that Achilles is associated with devastating fire. In an earlier passage, Homer uses fire imagery to capture his slaughter:

                               A forest fire will rage 
through deep glens of a mountain, crackling dry 
from summer heat, and coppices blaze up 
in every quarter as wind whips the flame: 
so Akhilleus flashed to right and left 
like a wild god, trampling the men he killed 
and black earth ran with blood. As when a countryman 
yokes oxen with broad brows to tread out barley 
on a well-bedded threshing floor, and quickly 
the grain is husked under the bellowing beasts: 
The sharp-hooved horses of Akhilleus just so 
crushed dead men and shields. His axle-tree 
was splashed with blood, so was his chariot rail, 
with drops thrown up by wheels and horses’ hooves. 
And Peleus’ son kept riding for his glory, 
staining his powerful arms with mire and blood.

Achilles may be Iliad’s hero, but Homer fully intends for us to experience the tragedy of what happens. Once the most humane of the Greeks, as Caroline Alexander points out in her superb book The War that Killed Achilles, Achilles has lost all perspective and grinds to dust everything that is human and sacred: Nature is ravaged, bodies are desecrated, and people’s hearts are torn apart. One can plausibly argue that The Iliad is the world’s greatest anti-war work as it exposes the colossal waste of armed conflict.

The war that today’s humans are waging against nature is occurring on an epic scale and is having epic consequences. Unlike in The Iliad, however, reactive nature will dole out consequences that even heavenly fire cannot resist. Our descendants will curse us for the world we have left them.

***

Now on to sea-level rise. Here’s the passage I cited from the last work in the Narnia series, where Lewis rewrites the Book of Revelation:

At last something white—long, level line of whiteness that gleamed in the light of the standing stars—came moving towards them from the eastern end of the world. A widespread noise broke the silence: first a murmur then a rumble, then a roar. And now they could see what it was that was coming, and how fast it came. It was a foaming wall of water. The sea was rising. In that tree-less world you could see it very well. You could see all the rivers getting wider and the lakes getting larger, and separate lakes joining into one, and valleys turning into new lakes, and hills turning into islands, and then those islands vanishing. And the high moors to their left and the higher mountains to their right crumbled and slipped down with a roar and a splash into the mounting water; and the water came swirling up to the very threshold of the Doorway (but never passed it) so that the foam splashed about Aslan’s forefeet. All now was level water from where they stood to where the waters met the sky.

When fire and ice team up, we’re in trouble like we’ve never seen before. As a character tells Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the popular television series by that name,

When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.

Previous posts on literature that casts light upon issues raised by climate change:
Stanley Kim Robinson’s Cli-Fi Predicts a Grim Future (June 25, 2026)
Trump and Lear, Two Wind Obsessed Narcissists (Sept. 3, 2025)
A.I. and the Tech Bro Accelerationists (June 12, 2025) 
Barbara Kingsolver and God’s Wonders in Appalachia (March 15, 2025)
George Eliot Applied to Climate Change (Jan. 26, 2025)
Verses upon the Burning of a House (Jan. 12, 2025) 
Raymond Chandler: Red Wind in California (Jan 8, 2025) 
Neither Rage Nor Tears but Radical Hope (Oct. 16, 2024)
Wendell Berry: Advice for Climate Prophets (Sept. 30, 2024)
Trump, Quixote, and Windmills (May 19, 2024) 
Earth Hearted Hope for Dark times (March 6, 2024) 
Cloud Cuckoo Land and the Power of Story (Dec. 19, 2023)
Overstory, Cloud Cuckoo Land: More Entries for the Cli-Fi List (Sept. 25, 2023)
It’s Hotter’n Milton’s Hell (July 27, 2023) 
Silko: Indigenous Authors May Save Us (Oc. 6, 2022)
Octavia Butler’s Nightmare Climate Change Vision (Sept. 11, 2022)
H.P. Lovecraft Foresees Our Future (Aug. 29, 2022) 
H.D.: Cut the Heat, Plow through It (July 25, 2022) 
Mary Oliver: Add Climate Change to a Week of Disasters (May 9, 2022)
Scott Bates: Manchin Delivers a Lump of Coal (Dec. 19, 2021)
The Tornadoes and America’s Fairy Tale (Dec. 12, 2021)
Wanted: Poets to Fight Climate Change (Sept. 29, 2021) 
Hurricane IDA and Murakami’s 1Q84 (Sept. 7, 2021) 
Aslan as Eco Warrior (Aug. 26, 2021)
Poets and Climate Changes Five Alarm Fire (Aug. 11, 2021)
William Blake: Hydrocarbons Are Our Dark Satanic Mills (June 30, 2021)
Neil Gaiman: Ragnarok, an Extreme Weather Event (Dec. 22, 2020)
Richard Wilbur: Without Nature, No Language for the Soul (Aug. 29, 2020)
Read to Grapple with Climate Change (July 27, 2020)
To Fight Climate Change, Plant Gardens (Jan 14, 2020) 
A Hitchhikers Guide to the Nativity (Dec. 19, 2021) 
Joy Harjo: A Map to the Next World (July 20, 2019) 
Lord Byron: Winter’s Assyrian Invasion (Feb. 4, 2019) 
Byron’s Climate Change Nightmare (Dec. 20, 2018) 
We Have Chance the Gardener as Our President! (Nov. 18, 2018)
George MacDonald: Befouling America’s Future (Oct. 17, 2018)
Silko: Climate Change, a Witch’s Curse (Oct. 12, 2018)

Prior to October, 2018, I compiled the following annotated list of climate change posts. Several were about climate change denial:

Kingsolver Explains Climate Denial — Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior includes a deep dive into why poor Appalachian whites don’t believe that climate change is happening.
Climate Scientists, Our Cassandras–Climate scientists must feel like Agamemnon’s Cassandra as they try to warn the world.
Civil War Battle, Image of Climate Denial – Ambrose Bierce’s famous short story “Chickamauga” helps us understand why people ignore the facts about our changing climate.
Donne’s Warning about Climate Change – Donne mentions the movement of the spheres in his poem “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” but they are distant, and he makes the important point that we only see the effects of nature that occur right before our eyes, not the larger patterns. Think of Senator James Inhofe bringing a snowball to the Senate to disprove global warming.
Tolstoy and Climate Change Denial – We can see that climate change denialists follow in the footsteps of the Moscow aristocrats in War and Peace, who can’t believe that Napoleon will take the city.
Out of Denial and into Responsibility – Jack Burden in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men gives us a great description of the philosophy of denial, which he calls “idealism.” By the end of the novel, fortunately, he decides to face up to reality.
Obama: A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall – Poet Henry Vaughan decries fools who “prefer dark night before true light,” and Alexander Pope in The Dunciad goes after the dunces who turn their backs on science, intelligence, and logic.
GOP Denies a Giant Problem – For another instance of denial, it is hard to top Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians, who refuse to believe that other men like Gulliver could exist. Their philosophers conclude that he must have dropped from the moon.
Haiyan, Climate Change, and King Lear – King Lear also closes his eyes to the family and political storms  that he has triggered. His most trustworthy counselor advises him to “See better, Lear,” thereby earning banishment.
When American Fantasies Are Dangerous – In American Gods, Neil Gaiman gives us a great example of denial: southern slave owners refuse to acknowledge that there has been a successful slave rebellion in Haiti.
Melville and Climate Change Denial – Another instance of slave society denial occurs with Captain Delano in Melville’s fine novella Benito Cereno refusing to see the rebellion going on right before his eyes.

Some write about the grim future ahead:
Elemental Joy in California’s Wildfires? – Can it be possible that some people are revelling in the consequences of climate change?
Will Warm Days Never Cease — Classic poems like Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” suddenly look different as climate change has its way with us.
Still Falls the Rain – Hurricane Harvey, exacerbated by human-caused climate change–invites comparisons with the London blitzkrieg, as described by Edith Sitwell.
How Will the Future Judge Us for Trump? — Jane Hirshfield has a poem that gets us to look at ourselves from a future perspective, including what we did not do in the face of disaster.
Caves of Ice, Prophecies of War – Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” poem came to mind as I heard the catastrophic news about the breakup of arctic ice.
Neil Gaiman and the Pipeline Protests — Gaiman’s American Gods should us what will happen to us if we offend the local deities.
Our Children Will Reproach Us – Lucille Clifton shows us how our children will view us.
Climate Change, Fairies Fighting – Climate change, as described by Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Climate Action Will Lead to Dystopia – Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is about nuclear holocaust, not climate change, but it captures the same disregard and contempt for future generations that climate denialists are exhibiting.
Hydrocarbons Unleash an Angry God – Euripides’s The Bacchae shows how nature responds when we try to impose our will upon it. The control freak King Pentheus is torn apart at the order of Dionysus.
This Is the Way the World Ends – Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” sounds as though it was written for climate change. Will the world end in fire or ice? How about both?
Will Californians Become the New Okies? – The droughts that climate change is visiting upon California (not to mention other parts of the world) bring to mind the ecological nightmare described by John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.
 The Mariner’s Advice to College Students – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner can be read as an ecological parable—the arrogance that the mariner exhibits by shooting the albatross unleashes “life in death” upon the world.

Some authors provide useful advice for climate activists:
Kingsolver Tries to Save the Planet – Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior directly takes on the issue of climate change as it shows disruptions in the migratory patterns of monarch butterflies. Most usefully, Kingsolver shows various constituencies that must learn to talk to each other if we are to address the issues.
To Save the Planet, Scientists Must Protest — Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior shows why climate scientists cannot simply retreat into their labs.
Being Right on the Climate Is Not Enough – Along these lines, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People has important lessons for climate activists: if you want to change people’s minds, avoid self-righteousness.
Climate Change: Signs of Witchery – Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo writer, vividly captures environmental devastation in her novel Ceremony but also has her protagonist discover a healthier way of living in the world.
Climate Hope Shines in Dark Times – Madeleine L’Engel has a wonderful Advent poem that I shared after the world gathered in Paris this past December to combat climate change. Despite the grim forecasts, we experienced a glimmer of hope.

And finally, if you are in the mood for light verse about the environment, here are a number of poems by my father, a deep lover of nature:
An ABC of Our Attack on the Earth
The River’s Blood Turned to Stone
The Animals Are Trying to Warn Us
The Koch Brothers: Oligarchs of Oil and Ordure 

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Ahab-Like Trump Will Sink Us All

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2026
Captain Ahab confronts Moby Dick

Tuesday

I’m trying to figure out what I think of a comparison that Trevor Potter, the Republican former chair of the Federal Election Commission, has made between DJT and Herman Melville’s most iconic character. “It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick,’” said Potter after the president pressured him to resign while firing the two Democratic members of the commission, whose job it is to assist election boards around the country. Potter elaborated,

He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.

I hesitate about making the comparison because Ahab’s obsession with the whale that cost him his leg is elevated by his madness, somewhat like King Lear, on whom Melville partially based him. By contrast, DJT is just monumentally petty. Ahab at least is a competent sea captain, even if he loses sight of his main mission, whereas DJT is an incompetent bumpkin whose frail ego has never been able to admit that Hillary Clinton received more votes than he did, that Barack Obama drew more people to his inauguration, that Joe Biden won in 2020, or that his razor-thin win over Kamala Harris was anything other than a blowout victory. 

Ahab at least acknowledges that Moby Dick bit his leg off.

Both men, however, feel emasculated by their defeats and can’t stop obsessing how they feel diminished. Both, furthermore, bring about the destruction of their respective ships (ship of state, in DJT’s case). Melville is fairly clear that the Pequod is a metaphor for America, with its multicultural crew, its industrial might (the ship functions as a processing factory), and its frontier spirit. But whatever democratic spirit exists within the crew—I think of Ishmael’s friendship with Queequeg and of the fellow feeling engendered by squishing sperm with his fellow crew members—is put at risk by the authoritarian who rules over them. 

Neither authoritarian, however, could indulge his mania if he didn’t have compliant underlings, although Ahab’s three mates at least have some excuse. To function well, a ship must have a strict hierarchy, which is spelled out so minutely that third mate Flask, who can only begin eating after his fellow officers have sat down and who must be done before they get up, barely has time to feed himself. Trump’s subordinates, by contrast, have sworn an oath to the Constitution, not to the president, and have the responsibility of impeaching him (in Congress’ case) or invoking the 25th Amendment (in his Cabinet’s case) should he imperil the enterprise. 

Yet even Ahab knows he must get buy-in, or at least non-resistance, from the crew and from his three mates. He achieves the first with Trump-like drama:

Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”

“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.

Like Trump, Ahab possesses the power to enroll the mob in his personal vendetta:

“Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”

“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”

First mate Starbuck, by contrast, is harder to win over. In fact, he is horrified at what Ahab is doing:

“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

Ahab’s manic energy, however, overwhelms Starbuck not unlike how Trump has overwhelmed the Republican Party. “They think me mad—Starbuck does,” he says to himself, “but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” For his part, Starbuck, again like far too many in the GOP, believes he can’t fight such madness and gives up, saying to himself,

My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! … I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.

Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder has observed that we are experiencing “super power suicide.” Just as Ahab’s mad quest results in the destruction of the ship and the death of all but Ishmael, so Trump is determined to destroy the climate, the rule of law, the electoral process, and the world order. In the face of that, there’s only so much that the Starbucks and Ishmaels amongst us can do.

That being said, had the three mates and the crew all worked together, they could have stopped Ahab. The same is true of the American public.

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Argentina: Trapped in a Bell Jar against Spain

By Robin Bates | Published: July 19, 2026
Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump

Monday

As a France fan, I felt for Argentina as I watched the World Cup final: like the French squad, the Argentinians learned how Spain’s superb midfield can suck the life out of any attack, no matter how potent. It didn’t matter that, in the course of this tournament, Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi smashed through World Cup scoring records. Once they confronted the Spanish it was like (here are the two literary examples that came to mind) they were trapped under Sylvia Plath’s bell jar and crushed by the torture stones in Arthur Miller’s Crucible.

I’ll get to those passages in a moment. First of all, however, earlier in the tournament Argentina had me thinking of a different literary work. Its late game heroics reminded me of how Mac the Knife wriggles out of trouble time after time in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. 

Mac is the charismatic highwayman and charming bigamist at the center of the 18th century musical, which Bertolt Brecht later appropriated for Three Penny Opera. He escapes the hangman’s noose twice in Gay’s play, although the second time requires a miraculous reprieve.

The scene is as follows: After capturing Mac a second time, the prison authorities prepare to hang him instantly and his fate seems sealed. At this point, however, the play goes meta—the movie Wayne’s World does something similar—as someone watching it begs the beggar author to change the ending:

Player. But, honest Friend, I hope you don’t intend that Macheath shall be really executed.

Beggar. Most certainly, Sir.—To make the Piece perfect, I was for doing strict poetical Justice.—Macheath is to be hang’d; and for the other Personages of the Drama, the Audience must have suppos’d they were all either hang’d or transported.Player. Why then, Friend, this is a downright deep Tragedy. The Catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an Opera must end happily.

Luckily for Mac, there’s a quick fix:

Beggar. Your Objection, Sir, is very just, and is easily remov’d. For you must allow, that in this kind of Drama, ’tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about—So—you Rabble there—run and cry, A Reprieve!—let the Prisoner be brought back to his Wives in Triumph.

I’m aware that certain people—most notably the Egyptian coach, whose team was up two goals on Argentina with 11 minutes left in regular time—think that the fix has been in for Messi’s team. And certainly we have seen top-down reprieves in this tournament, most notably with the U.S.’s Florian Balagon. But just as we can’t help rejoicing when Mac pulls off yet another miraculous escape, so most neutral advisors revelled in the artistry of Messi, who whether with a goal or an assist saved Argentina time after time.

The magic ran out against Spain, however, as Messi, like the French attackers before him, had no room to maneuver. Expertly maintaining ball control while breaking up most of Argentina’s passes, the Spanish were like the torturers squeezing the life out of Giles Corey:

Proctor: Then how does he die?

Elizabeth, gently: They press him, John.

Proctor: Press?

Elizabeth: Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. 

Plath’s novel, about the mental breakdown of a college-age woman, has its own graphic account of suffocation. The novel, I’m fairly certain, borrows its central metaphor from a famous Joseph Wright painting, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump. In it, a scientist methodically pumps out the air to prove something (what? that birds need air to breathe?) while the spectators demonstrate a range of emotions. I identify most with the woman who can’t bring herself to look and with the child who gazes in horrified fascination. An objective scientist might have seen Spain’s performance against France and Argentina in the same light: a masterful imposition of will on a previous vibrant life form.

Here’s Plath taking the metaphor and applying it to her protagonist:

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

A bad dream.

And

If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

And:

I sank back in the grey, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir.

For much of their time against Spain, France and Argentina felt as though they couldn’t stir but were stewing in their own sour air. The Spanish press crushed the life out of them. They were trapped in a bad dream.

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