Tech Bros Stuck in Sci-Fi Childhood

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2026

Wednesday

Although I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was never a fan of “the golden age of science fiction.” It was far too male and technocratic for me, unlike the 1970s science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, Marge Piercy, and Douglas Adams and the 1980s science fiction of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler.  (Wrinkle in Time, written in 1962, was a notable exception.) Nevertheless, I read with interest a recent Atlantic article on how Silicon Valley’s tech bros immersed themselves in the works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.

They also misread them.

Gal Beckerman’s article builds on an idea in Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Lepore writes that, for tech bros like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Jeff Bezos, science fiction is  

neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment. Nor is it read as a literary text or a set of cautionary tales; instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions.

Lepore asks how these men came to regard Earth “as a burden to be sloughed off.” Why do they embrace technology “that might just lead to our elimination”? Altman, for instance, imagines much of our planet’s surface being covered in data centers, and Thiel and Musk fantasize living away from Earth, whether in underwater cities (Thiel) or on Mars (Musk).

Beckerman blames their childhood sci-fi and fantasizes time traveling back and confiscating it. What they failed to understand, she writes, 

was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires. In 2009, Thiel, by then a man in early middle age, directed his venture-capital fund to focus on “science-fiction-type investing. So it’s basically: space, robots, AI.” The world we now live in was made from this misreading. We are all trapped under the covers with those 13-year-old boys.

Or as Lepore puts it, these dark fantasies reveal “the power and stubborn persistence of the adolescent mind.” 

Le Guin once observed that, in science fiction, the future is a metaphor for the present, and sci-fi authors from the 25 years following World War II can be seen as grappling with such contemporary worries as Stalinism (1984), McCarthyism (Fahrenheit 451), nuclear holocaust (Canticle for Leibowitz), rapid social change (Stranger in a Strange Land), dehumanization (2001), and social breakup (Foundation). The popular series Star Trek, meanwhile, used futuristic space travel to explore a wide range of current social and ethical issues, including civil rights, sexism, racism, nationalism, cross-cultural encounters, and global war. 

The tech bros, however, saw something else:

–From Asimov’s Foundation, about a man seeking to preserve human knowledge in the face of an upcoming Dark Age predicted to last 30,000 years, Musk “has pulled out the simplest, most self-glorifying story, about individual genius and foresight.” If anything, his DOGE dismantling of USAID, which has resulted in tens of thousands of African deaths, seems designed to return us to the Dark Ages.

–From the 1955 story “Franchise,” where Asimov imagines a future in which a computer ends democracy by electing the U.S. president, Altman draws the lesson than an AI president “makes a lot of sense.” As he told podcaster Joe Rogan, AI “can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level, and optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S.—that’s awesome.”

–Peter Thiel, enamored with all futuristic tech—perhaps he’s responding also to the cartoon series The Jetsons and the Tom Swift, Jr. series (e.g., Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter)–laments society not taking seriously its visionary scientists. “We’d have colonies on the moon, you’d have robots, you’d have flying cars, you’d have cities in the ocean, under the ocean,” he rhapsodized.

–Musk has named his AI program Grok, taken from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, although I can’t imagine someone less able to understand the concept than the man who declared, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” To grok is to connect with someone at the deepest level. One wonders if Musk misses the irony and actually thinks that an AI program can know and appreciate us more than any human.

–From Star Trek, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has “picked up on the show’s love of the extraterrestrial but ignored its morals.” Beckerman writes,

“He wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting the earth,” a local newspaper reported. “‘The whole idea is to preserve the earth,’ he said. “His final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.” 

“Where the billions of us who don’t fit on the yachts are supposed to go, I’m not sure,” Beckerman sardonically observes before adding, “And I’m also not sure Captain Kirk [played by William Shatner] would approve.”

Beckerman links to a Vanity Fair article about Shatner’s excursion (at the age of 90) aboard Bezos’s Blue Origin shuttle. Shatner returned from space with a vision diametrically opposite that of the tech bros:

I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna… things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

Beckerman blames arrested development, not golden age sci-fi, for the tech bros’ warped perspective. That being said, however, Le Guin was concerned enough about sci-fi’s technological focus to take the genre in a more human-centered direction, especially in her gender-bending novel The Left Hand of Darkness. Even in The Dispossessed, which involves space travel as an anarchist collective settles on a moon to escape capitalist society, she exposes the flaw of thinking that you can escape from yourself.

For it is this fantasy that Lepore and Beckerman find most nefarious about the tech bros. Beckerman quotes political philosopher Hannah Arendt on the 1960s space race–“Nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies”—yet this is how Musk et. al. regard our earthly existence. “What stayed with the Silicon Valley magnates,” Beckerman writes, “was the idea of abandoning our bodies and the messiness of other people, leaving behind our finitude for an infinity of stars and self-coding machines.” 

As a result, they are attempting (Lepore this time) to turn “a science-fiction dystopia into a fully functioning infrastructure.”

The Atlantic article ends on a positive note as Beckerman examines a tech bro who has seen the light. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who loved sci-fi as a child, now describes himself as “an innovation lover” who “is scared and says we’re not ready and we’re crossing thresholds.” Maybe significantly, the work he mentions is Stranger in a Strange Land, in which a human raised by Martians returns to earth and starts a universal religion. In other words, Heinlein doesn’t describe fancy gadgets but rather explores different ways of being.

His 1961 novel anticipated the intense exploring that would characterize the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is why it became one of the novels that helped define the period. Gates says that Heinlein’s warning about belief in technology’s inevitability is a “grown-up” lesson.

Of course, this warning dates back to the novel that kicked off the genre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. And yet we continue to steal fire from the gods, consequences be damned.

Further thought: Arendt’s contention about no one previously regarding Earth as a prison isn’t altogether correct since this has been a longtime belief amongst a certain kind of Christian. It’s why some fundamentalists don’t care about trashing the planet. Their dreams of escape, similar to those of the tech bros, absolve them of the hard work of saving the planet.

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C.S. Lewis Speaks for the Trees

By Robin Bates | Published: August 31, 2026
Pauline Baynes, illus. from The Last Battle

Tuesday

As part of our church’s Sunday Forum, my friend and Sewanee colleague John Gatta recently talked about the importance accorded to trees in C.S. Lewis’s vision of God’s creation. John was drawing from his just published book, The Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm.

I thought about the talk as I read Rebecca Solnit’s recent Guardian article about Donald Trump’s assault on our national parks, including “crown jewel” Yosemite. In the Yosemite case, Trump is considering granting a real estate developer road access through a part of the park.

It’s even worse for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, national monuments in southern Utah that have ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, and scenic canyons. These are being reduced by 90% to open their coal and uranium deposits to mining interests. And then there are the massive staff layoffs, the drastic funding cuts, and the attempts to censor interpretation. Some of the funds designated for necessary park maintenance are being funneled to Trump’s Washington, D.C. vanity projects. 

Also, according to NPR, in early August the Trump administration “moved to roll back an environmental rule that currently blocks road construction, and by extension most logging and mining activity, on tens of millions of acres of public forest land.”

One of the most painful scenes in the Narnia chronicles involves logging. In The Last Battle. King Tirian and the unicorn Jewel are meeting with a centaur about worrisome portents when their meeting is interrupted:

[A]ll three of them turned their heads to listen to a wailing sound that was quickly drawing nearer. The wood was so thick to the west of them that they could not see the newcomer yet. But they could soon hear the words.

“Woe, woe, woe!” called the voice. “Woe for my brothers and sisters! Woe for the holy trees! The woods are laid waste. The axe is loosed against us. We are being felled. Great trees are falling, falling, falling.”

We quickly meet the speaker: 

With the last “falling,” the speaker came in sight. She was like a woman but so tall that her head was on a level with the Centaur’s: yet she was like a tree too. It is hard to explain if you have never seen a Dryad but quite unmistakable once you have—something different in the colour, the voice, and the hair. King Tirian and the two Beasts knew at once that she was the nymph of a beech-tree.

“Justice, Lord King!” she cried. “Come to our aid. Protect your people. They are felling us in Lantern Waste. Forty great trunks of my brothers and sisters are already on the ground.”

“What, Lady! Felling Lantern Waste? Murdering the talking trees?” cried the King leaping to his feet and drawing his sword. “How dare they? And who dares it? Now by the Mane of Aslan——”

“A-a-a-h,” gasped the Dryad shuddering as if in pain—shuddering time after time as if under repeated blows Then all at once she fell sideways as suddenly as if both her feet had been cut from under her. For a second they saw her lying dead on the grass and then she vanished. They knew what had happened. Her tree, miles away, had been cut down.

We have been introduced to the wonderful Dryads in Prince Caspian, in which there are also instances of deforestation. This time, however, the trees fight back. In a scene similar to Tolkien’s Ents ending the Battle at Helm’s Deep, the Dryads show up as the Narnians begin their battle with the Telmarines:

But almost before the old Narnians were really warmed to their work they found the enemy giving way. Tough-looking warriors turned white, gazed in terror not on the Old Narnians but on something behind them, and then flung down their weapons, shrieking, “The Wood! The Wood! The end of the world!”

But soon neither their cries nor the sound of weapons could be heard any more, for both were drowned in the ocean-like roar of the Awakened Trees as they plunged through the ranks of Peter’s army, and then on, in pursuit of the Telmarines. Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild south-wester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you; and was no longer trees but huge people; yet still like trees because their long arms waved like branches and their heads tossed and leaves fell round them in showers. It was like that for the Telmarines. It was a little alarming even for the Narnians.

It’s a wonderful scene, perhaps inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s “Letting in the Jungle” in The Jungle Books. 

The situation is far grimmer in Last Battle. There the talking animals have been bamboozled by a false prophet into thinking that cutting the trees is Aslan’s will. (One thinks of Trump’s Christian pastors egging him on.) Thus we see talking horses pulling logs to the river and talking water rats guiding them to market:

Before long they could hear the hack-hack-hack of axes falling on timber, though they could see nothing yet because there was a rise of the ground in front of them. When they had reached the top of it they could see right into Lantern Waste itself. And the King’s face turned white when he saw it.

Right through the middle of that ancient forest—that forest where the trees of gold and of silver had once grown and where a child from our world had once planted the Tree of Protection—a broad lane had already been opened. It was a hideous lane like a raw gash in the land, full of muddy ruts where felled trees had been dragged down to the river. There was a great crowd of people at work, and a cracking of whips, and horses tugging and straining as they dragged at the logs….

“Work, lazy brute,” shouted one of the Calormenes: and as he spoke he struck the horse savagely with his whip. 

The scene is so ugly that Last Battle was the only Narnia book I disliked. Among other things, I was appalled at how Tirian and Jewel, after killing the Calormenes mistreating the horse, unilaterally surrender. I felt a revulsion not unlike what many Americans are feeling about those entities (including certain Democrats) who fail to stand up to Trump.

Furthermore, even though I was a child, it was clear to me that anyone who associated wholesale deforestation with Aslan’s will (read, God’s will) was stupid. And I didn’t like to think of Tirian and Jewel as stupid.

The question is whether Trump’s National Park giveaways will do permanent damage or whether they can be undone. In the Last Battle, Lewis all but gives up on this world. As he sees it, the only hope is for everyone good getting raptured off to a permanently green Narnia.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, however, we’re given an alternative. As John Gatta pointed out in his lecture, when the four Pevensie children are designated kings and queen of Narnia, “they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down.” 

When we return to being a nation of laws, maybe we can pass such legislation as well. 

Two further items: Given the unprecedented levels of Trump’s corruption, it’s no surprise to—as the Guardian reported today—that the rollback of road regulations “is expected to benefit the companies that Tom Schultz, chief of the US Forest Service.” Schultz’s previous roles were as a timber industry lobbyist and executive.

Much as he tore down the East Wing of the White House without permission, DJT has also been felling cherry trees—60 in all—as he redesigns a public golf course in Washington, D.C..

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Fahrenheit 451, ICE, and MAGA Book Suppression

By Robin Bates | Published: August 30, 2026
Scene from Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451

Monday

Last week, when I was blogging on Fahrenheit 451 and those AI companies “scanning and destroying” books, I recognized something else in the firefighters: ICE agents.

While some people speculate that ICE agents are just in it for the money, I suspect a fair number of them are attracted to the license they are given to enact violence. Perhaps it is something comparable to the pleasure Bradbury’s firemen take in burning books:

It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon- winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

One of the tactics that protesters have been attempting against ICE agents is shame. A similar tactic is used by Calrisse McClellan, fireman Guy Montag’s adolescent neighbor, although she doesn’t shout at him through a bullhorn. Instead, when she befriends him on a neighborhood walk, she starts asking such questions as “Are you happy?” and “Do you ever read any of the books you burn?” It would be like asking an ICE agent whether he has ever gotten to know any of the immigrants that he’s ordered to arrest.

In Montag’s case, the questions start getting under his skin and he starts rethinking his life

He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy.

He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

By the end of the novel, Montag is horrified at what he has been called on to do, especially after a woman chooses to be burned alive with her books. When he tries to process the experience with his wife, however, he gets only the party line:

“Aren’t you going to ask me about last night?” he said.
“What about it?”
“We burned a thousand books. We burned a woman.”
“Well?”…
“We burned copies of Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius.”
“Wasn’t he a European?”
“Something like that.”
“Wasn’t he a radical?”
“I never read him.”
“He was a radical.” 

Unable to appreciate her husband’s distress, his wife continues to rationalize in way many MAGA fanatics rationalize the ICE killings and the brutal incarcerations:

“Mildred, how would it be if, well, maybe, I quit my job awhile?”
“You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books —”
“You should have seen her, Millie!”
“She’s nothing to me; she shouldn’t have had books. It was her responsibility, she should have thought of that. I hate her. She’s got you going and next thing you know we’ll be out, no house, no job, nothing.”
“You weren’t there, you didn’t see,” he said. “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
“She was simple-minded.”
“She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her.”
“That’s water under the bridge.”
“No, not water: fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life. God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I’m crazy with trying.”

Bradbury was a Democrat in his early years and Fahrenheit 451, like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—also written in 1953—were responses to the Joe McCarthy attacks on freedom of speech. In his later years, however, Bradbury became an ardent Republican. The real attacks on freedom of speech was affirmative action, and he was a big fan of both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In 1994 he wrote that his novel was even more relevant now than it had been in the 1950s:

It works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.

One wonders if he would have changed his thinking today when armed federal agents attack citizens for protesting and—even more to the book’s point—when librarians are fired for observing banned book week and teachers are fired for having libraries in their classrooms. This past year Luanne James, a head librarian in nearby Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was fired because she wouldn’t move LGBTQ+ themed/teen books into the adult section of the library.

In a sense, James is the woman burned with her books, whose last words are those of the Protestant martyr Hugh Latimer: “’Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’”

Latimer was burned by the Catholic Queen Mary I, along with Nicholas Ridley and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer. 

While Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently acknowledged that aspects of “Woke 1.0,” were “crazy,” leftwing purity politics never led to the wholesale firings and the book suppressions that we are seeing today, including the attacks on libraries. Would Bradbury have changed his politics if he had witnessed MAGA? Or would he have offered the rationalizations of Montag’s wife?

We’ll never know since he died during the presidency of Barack Obama, who was a fan of Fahrenheit 451. Resistance to MAGA authoritarianism, however, is lighting a candle that we trust shall never be put out. 

Further thought: According to literature.net, there have been a few instances of Fahrenheit 451 itself being banned or at least targeted, with the objections always coming from the right. In 2025, the Elizabeth School District in Colorado removed the novel along with 18 other titles for review, raising concerns over its portrayal of religious views, LGBTQ+ themes, and violence. Earlier, in 2017, some districts targeted the book for removal from eighth-grade curricula, citing profanity and perceived anti-Christian language. Additionally, Conroe, Texas, saw complaints due to discussions of alcohol, smoking, and religious references.

Meanwhile, we are seeing version of the firemen’s “official slogan,” only with “ban” substituted for “burn,” cropping up all over the country: “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes.”

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Blaze Again, Like Fire in Every Leaf

By Robin Bates | Published: August 29, 2026
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Study for Moses and the Burning Bush

Sunday

Literature is filled with allusions to the story of Moses and the burning bush, often in poetry but sometimes in prose. Jim Casey in Grapes of Wrath describes himself as a former “burning busher,” and although he has lost the spirit, he has become a secular Moses. After government agents kill him, Tom Joad takes up his cause, a Joshua who will lead America out of depression-era capitalism into a promised land.

I also very much like André Gide’s rewriting to the Prodigal Son parable, which makes powerful use of the burning bush image. Although a short story, the son explaining his decision to his father often reads like a poem:

“I changed your gold into pleasures, your precepts into fantasies, my chastity into poetry, and my austerity into desires…”
“Think about the pure flame that Moses saw on the sacred bush. It was burning but did not consume.”
“I knew a love that consumed.”
“The love that I want to teach you refreshes. After a little time, what is left of it, my prodigal son?”
“The memory of these pleasures.”
“And the destitution that follows them.”
“In this destitution I felt closer to you, Father.”
“Was it necessary to experience misery to motivate you to return to me?”
“I do not know. I do not know. It was in the aridity of that desert that I loved my thirst the most.”
“Your misery made you better appreciate the price of riches.”
“No, not that! Do you not understand me, my father? My heart, emptied of everything, is filled with love. At the price of my possessions, I bought fervor.”
“Were you thus happy far away from me?”
“I never felt I was far from you.”

And further on:

Father, I told you, I never loved you so much as when I was in the desert.

In other words, this love burns brightest in the wilderness, when things are at their darkest. And unlike the things of this world, it is never consumed.

Last year I fell in love with the allusion found in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. As she sees it, the burning bush joins the natural world and the world of the spirit whereas our society too often fails to see how they are intertwined:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more, from the first similitude.

Today I share a sonnet by Malcolm Guite, who makes similar connections. In one of his Advent poems. he says that God becoming incarnate on Christmas day is prefigured by “the mysterious and awesome manifestations of God on the mountain in the sign of the burning bush.” He observes that, for early Christians, this bush, “full of the fire of God yet still itself and unconsumed,” was “a sign of the Lord Christ who would come, filled with God and yet in mortal flesh unconsumed.” 

Guite adds,

The elemental power, glory, and beauty of fire – yes and its holy danger too – is one with the nature of God himself. The Spirit is not only God’s breath upon us, God’s living water pouring down into out hearts, it’s the fire of his energies, passion, love and desire, burning within us and lighting all around. This is what energised those fragile disciples in their cold, closed dispirited house. This is where we too may source our own energy and only by noticing and waiting on this Spirit of fire as Moses did, can we hear God’s voice and his will for us as Christians and as Church.

Guite prefaces his sonnet with a prayer:

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extent

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm

O Adonai
By Malcolm Guite

Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue,
Unseeable, you gave yourself away,
The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day.

O you who dared to be a tribal God,
To own a language, people and a place,
Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face,
Come to us here, who would not find you there,
Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,
Who heard no more than thunder in the air,
Who marked the mere events and not the myth.
Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
And blaze again like fire in every leaf.

Guite explains that Adonai “touches on the ancient title of God himself, who was called Adonai, Lord, because his sacred name, the four letters known as ‘The Tetragramaton’ could not be uttered by unworthy human beings without blasphemy.” The Advent miracle is that “this unknowable, un-namable, utterly holy Lord, chose out of His own free will and out of love for us, to be known, to bear a name, and to meet us where we are.”

God touches the bare branches of our unbelief so that they “blaze again like fire in every leaf.”

Previous Posts about Moses and the Burning Bush
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michael Lewis: Earth’s Crammed with Heaven (March 22, 2025)
Chaya Lester: Ask Not for Whom the Bush Burns (April 20, 2024) 
Yakov Azriel: The Bush of Faith Resists the Flames (March 3, 2013) 
Harvey Shapiro: Passover Originated in Poetic Vision (April 4, 2022) 
D. H. Lawrence: A Conflagration of Green Fires (March 21, 2021) 
John Steinbeck: The Joads and Steinbeck’s Lenten Message (Feb. 27, 2016) 
Ahn Do-hyun: A Coal Poem for Attorney Woo (Oct. 2, 2022) 
David Whyte, Mary Oliver: Running into the Fire (Jan. 18, 2025)
André Gide’s Prodigal Son: Feeling Closest to God in the Desert (March 5, 2016) 

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Trudging Up Mount Doom with Frodo

By Robin Bates | Published: August 27, 2026
Sam and Frodo on Mount Doom

Friday Memories of Books that Shook My World

I’ve often said that Lord of the Rings was my favorite book growing up, but I’ve never explored how it shaped me. I encountered The Hobbit first, reading it at the same time as the Narnia books (see last week’s post on my eight-year-old experiences with The Silver Chair)—and in some ways it was a more comfortable book: the characters in the Hobbit don’t experience the inner conflicts that Lewis’s child protagonists do. As a result, I liked the Hobbit better, even though Narnia led to more inner growth. With Lewis I couldn’t just enjoy and move on, which is what I thought I wanted.

I’ll explain in a moment how Lord of the Rings was different.

Lewis wrote portal fantasy whereas Tolkien wrote immersive fantasy, which is to say that there are no humans passing through portals to get to another world or other world creatures invading our own (invasive fantasy). When Tolkien engaged in what he called “world-building,” there was only the one world, complete with its own history and languages. That being noted, however, Bilbo and then Frodo do indeed pass through a kind of portal, leaving the safe and familiar environs of the Shire to engage with trolls, goblins, dragons, giant spiders, and other fabulous creatures. At the end of the series, there is even an element of invasive fantasy as the hobbits must deal with Saruman’s takeover of the Shire.

If portal fantasy gives us many of fantasy’s best-known works (Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Harry Potter), it may be in part because it captures the experience of the reader. The book becomes our portal, with the world around us fading away as the fantastical takes over. I still recall experiencing this fading when my father read us the first chapter of The Hobbit. Once the dwarfs start singing of “misty mountains grim” and “pale enchanted gold,” the prosaic Bilbo loses his bearings: 

As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up—probably somebody lighting a wood-fire-and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End,Under-Hill, again

There are few thorny ethical questions in the Hobbit, however, which is not the case with Lord of the Rings. Despite the clear delineations between good guys and bad guys, the ring of power exerts its corrosive power over all that it touches, corrupting Isildur, Gollum, and Boromir and threatening Frodo and Sam. I’ve written in the past how Gimli the dwarf was my favorite character but I may have liked him best because he is relatively uncomplicated. Looking back, I realize the character who most impacted my development was Frodo.

In both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, we see the child-sized hobbits being abandoned (or so they experience it) by the protector wizard figure. As a result, they must figure out life for themselves. Gandalf leaves the dwarfs upon their reaching Mirkwood and then, more traumatically, is seemingly killed by the Balrog upon exiting the Mines of Moria. (When I read Fellowship to my children, my oldest burst into loud sobs at this point and I grappled with whether to provide a spoiler before choosing not to.) As a child, I too felt the immensity of the separation.

Then, of course, Frodo decides on his own that he must take the whole weight of Middle Earth on his shoulders, and he leaves the Fellowship to strike out alone for Mordor. Fortunately, Sam insists on joining him, which I found deeply gratifying. I find is hard asking for help and too often have not turned to others when I should have.

Nor is that the only way I identified with Frodo. My life has been marked by feeling perpetually responsible for whatever is going on around me, which means that I have sometimes taken on tasks too large for my capacities. It’s as though I have had an inner Gandalf driving me on. I think of the moment when the wizard presents Frodo with his quest:

“I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?’

“Such questions cannot be answered,’ said Gandalf. ‘You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.’

Once I take on a task, furthermore, I feel that I have made a sacred commitment that I cannot back out of. It’s as though the commitment is more important than the task itself. Once having said he will destroy the ring, Frodo speaks ambivalently about what it will accomplish:

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.

With this passage, I imagine Tolkien thinking of England as he is hunkered down in the World War I trenches. Frodo suggests that we shouldn’t focus on whether people are worth our sacrifice and whether they will be grateful for what we do. For that matter, our own happiness is immaterial. Noble sacrifice, not our own narrow desires, is what is called for. Duty above all.

Throughout my life, while operating on this principle, I have channeled Frodo and Sam trudging up Mount Doom:

All this last day Frodo had not spoken,but had walked half-bowed, often stumbling, as if his eyes no longer saw the way before his feet. Sam guessed that among all their pains he bore the worst, the growing weight of the Ring, a burden on the body and a torment to his mind. Anxiously Sam had noted how his master’s left hand would often be raised as if to ward off a blow, or to screen his shrinking eyes from a dreadful Eye that sought to look in them. And sometimes his right hand would creep to his breast, clutching, and then slowly, as the will recovered mastery, it would be withdrawn.

When Frodo’s strength gives out, Sam carries him:

They had reached the Mountain’s foot on its northern side, and a little to the westward; there its long grey slopes, though broken, were not sheer. Frodo did not speak, and so Sam struggled on as best he could, having no guidance but the will to climb as high as might be before his strength gave out and his will broke. On he toiled, up and up, turning this way and that to lessen the slope, often stumbling forward, and at the last crawling like a snail with a heavy burden on its back. When his will could drive him no further, and his limbs gave way, he stopped and laid his master gently down.

And yet later:

The last stage of their journey to Orodruin came, and it was a torment greater than Sam had ever thought that he could bear. He was in pain, and so parched that he could no longer swallow even a mouthful of food. It remained dark, not only because of the smokes of the Mountain: there seemed to be a storm coming up, and away to the south-east there was a shimmer of lightnings under the black skies. Worst of all, the air was full of fumes; breathing was painful and difficult, and a dizziness came on them, so that they staggered and often fell. And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on.

When they finally accomplish their mission, more important than any official commendation is their quiet satisfaction at having accomplished their mission:

‘Well, this is the end, Sam Gamgee,’ said a voice by his side. And there was Frodo, pale and worn, and yet himself again; and in his eyes there was peace now, neither strain of will, nor madness, nor any fear. His burden was taken away. 

I don’t mean to either elevate or denigrate myself when I talk of my Frodo drive. Sometimes I have served my community well and sometimes I have taken on too much, doing a half-assed job while sacrificing family and my own contentment in the process. There are times when it would have been best for everyone if I had pulled out of commitments I made. (To cite one example, I should have stepped down from the department chairship a year before I did.) With life experience, thankfully, I have come up with better balance.

In Frodo’s quest, however, I found a way to invest my life with meaning, even though I was only 10. I was so grateful to Tolkien for having given me this gift that I wrote him a letter and he wrote me back. Addressed to “Master Robin Bates” and signed with the author’s distinctive signature, the letter hangs on the wall of my study.

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Fahrenheit 451 Anticipated AI

By Robin Bates | Published: August 26, 2026

Thursday

A young friend who regularly reads this blog asked me recently if Ray Bradbury anticipated the AI companies that are currently destroying books. Apparently Anthropic, responsible for Claude, has “Project Panama,” whose stated mission is “to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

The substack blog Card Catalog describes what is involved:

Destructive scanning means cutting a book from its binding, feeding the loose pages through a scanner, and discarding the book afterward. According to the court, Anthropic spent millions of dollars buying millions of print books, often used. Its service providers removed the bindings, cut the pages, scanned them into searchable digital files, and discarded the books. Anthropic kept the scans in an internal digital library and used books from that library to train the AI systems behind Claude.

Applying Fahrenheit 451 to AI provides some insight into what Anthropic is up to. In her Card Catalog article, Hanna Golden that asserted that, while books have always been destroyed, “they’ve never been destroyed like this.” As she sees it, we’ve entered “the third era of libricide.”

The first era, “Annihilation,” involves the destruction that comes with war, fire, or just plain neglect. While during Annihilation it’s possible to lose works entirely (say, Alexandria library destroyed by fire, the Mayan codices destroyed by the Spanish), at least we remember that they once existed. 

Hitler’s book burning was for “Spectacle,” aimed not at eradicating the offending texts (not possible) but sending a political signal. 

In the third era, “Destruction as Disappearance,” Golden is disturbed that it’s possible that rare books, caught up in mass purchases, are disappearing without a trace. Anthropic has especially been interested in “less common” books, preferring harder-to-find titles over mass-market ones. Although Anthropic claims that it doesn’t destroy “rare” or “antiquated” books, Golden notes that its assurance “can’t be tested from outside, because no list of what was bought has ever been made public.”

“The impossibility of answering what was destroyed,” she adds, “is what’s new.”

In one way, Fahrenheit 451 does not apply to scan-and-destroy as AI companies are not out to destroy all books, even if there’s a chance that they annihilate a few single copies. On the other hand, they are interested in locating and scanning every book in existence, which means that they share the global ambitions of the government in Bradbury’s novel. As I don’t know what is involved with training Claude and other AI systems, I don’t understand why they need older books or, for that matter, every one of the 130 million titles they estimate are in existence. Do they really believe that they will only be as wise as collective humanity if they get them all? It sounds like a Tower of Babel-type ambition.

Apparently, to teach Claude and other chatbots, AI companies don’t like to scan the internet since, increasingly, AI-generated texts are showing up there. Claude needs fresh material the way a vampire needs fresh meat. The question, then, is whether a well-fed Claude can generate better writing than humans are capable of and, in so doing, will humans dependent on Claude see their writing deteriorate. Writing is difficult and, if people lose that ability and the learning that comes with it, we really will become more stupid. Likewise, scientists, journalists, doctors, and others will lose essential skills if no one is doing the hard work of research and investigation, just relying on other texts synthesized by Claude. And how can one verify the synthesis if Claude doesn’t reveal its sources?

I could imagine the following downward spiral: having once sampled various literary classics, Claude would produce Reader’s Digest-quality work and, if it sampled that, the writing would become even more insipid. The fire chief describes such a process in a talk with protagonist Montag:

Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending….Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve- line dictionary resume.

The fire chief, it so happens, is fine with this evolution, warning, “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”

It so happens that Bradbury anticipates certain aspects of AI not involved with book destruction. I acknowledge to still being startled when Facebook uses my first name when notifying me of friend posts, but the author describes this happening in his 1953 novel:

Montag turned and looked at his wife, who sat in the middle of the parlor talking to an announcer, who in turn was talking to her. “Mrs. Montag,” he was saying. This, that and the other. “Mrs. Montag?” Something else and still another. The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars, automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous audience, leaving a blank where the proper syllables could be filled in. 

Mrs. Montag is also given the illusion that she is helping script a television show (call it auto-script):

They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in some box tops. They write the script with one part missing. It’s a new idea. The homemaker, that’s me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines: Here, for instance, the man says, “What do you think of this whole idea, Helen?” And he looks at me sitting here center stage, see? And I say, I say —” She paused and ran her finger under a line in the script. “‘I think that’s fine!” And then they go on with the play until he says, “Do you agree to that, Helen!” and I say, “I sure do!”

What is the qualitative difference between this and a student ordering up an essay from AI to submit to a professor? To be sure Claude, drawing as “he” does from millions of books, can generate more interesting scripts than this. Perhaps it can generate a unique piece of writing every time (if anything that preys parasitically on other writing can be called unique). Yet won’t the final result just be a more sophisticated version of what Clarice observes in her fellow human beings? Clarice is the 17-year-old who first starts alerting Montag to his shallow existence:

“People don’t talk about anything.”
“Oh, they must!”
“No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

His mind set in motion by Clarice, Montag begins grappling with the human dimension of writing after he has burned down a secret home library:

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before….It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over.

In two columns I wrote about an Atlantic author’s despair over how English education is being hollowed out (here and here ), I pointed to a potent antidote, which is the literature itself. Don’t underestimate the ability of novels, poems and plays to step up to the plate when the going gets rough. An old literature professor helps Montag understand the nature of literature:

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only waxmoon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.

 Will Claude-generated writing, regardless of how many books it scans and destroys, ever do more than run a quick hand over life? The professor then continues with an observation that applies even more to AI’s parasitical nature:

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane. 

AI writing, as opposed to real writing, is Anteus separated from the earth. People may think that AI gives them special powers, but Hercules should be our real model, difficult though that path may be.

Bradbury ends his book on two notes, one dark and one light. If we are in our current situation, it is because people didn’t fight harder for books. The professor confesses,

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it’s too late.

So that’s one lesson for us.

The novel ends on a different note, however, although not after a failed manhunt and a nuclear bomb destroying the city (!). The authorities pretend to catch and kill Montag, using doctored footage to convince the public (today they might use an AI generated image). Then the city is wiped out in a one-day war. But because thousands of wanderers have been keeping the books alive by memorizing them, the civilization they will rebuild will have the classics for a foundation. As Granger explains,

Some of us live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau’s Walden in Green River, Chapter Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb’ll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person. And when the war’s over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”

Montag has himself memorized passages from Ecclesiastes and The Book of Revelations and the novel ends by demonstrating the power of writing. With Ecclesiastes we are reminded of the cycle of life: “To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that.”

Then Montag remembers the vision of New Jersusalem found in the Book of Revelation:

And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

John of Patmos said that his vision was inspired by God. More powerful than Claude.

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Dolly and Her Imagination Library

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2026
Dolly Parton

Wednesday

Dolly Parton started her Imagination Library 31 years ago, in the process giving away 332,000,000 books. Children enrolled in the program received an age-appropriate book each year up to the age of 5. According to Wikipedia, as of 2021 at least 1.7 million children in the U.S. were enrolled, with a net monthly increase of 20,000 to 30,000 children. 

Apparently the charity was started as a tribute to Parton’s father. His inability to read, Parton said, “probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”

“If you can read, you can teach yourself anything,” Parton once said and, at another time, “Imagine a world where every child, regardless of their background, was surrounded with books, stories, and a love for reading.”

The first work by Emily Dickinson I encountered as a child speaks to Parton’s vision. I suspect that the Tennessee singer knew the poem:

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

Rest in peace, Dolly.

Further note: A recent Emma Sarappo article in The Atlantic noted that Parton said many times

that she’d be happy to be remembered not as a generational talent or a dolled-up diva but as “the book lady”… I don’t know whether all of Parton’s fans knew how high she ranked literacy on her list of important causes, but when I watched tributes to Parton roll in this week, I noted that people I’d grown up with in Tennessee (mostly young women like me) kept posting the same tableaus on Instagram: photos of babies and kids sitting with their parents, reading a book they’d gotten from the Imagination Library.

Sarappo also quotes children’s-book author Katherine Marsh as saying that schools often fail to motivate kids to read because they “hyperfocus on analysis” and privilege individual paragraphs and sentences over entire narratives. Marsh counters that the best way to present abstract ideas to kids is by “hooking them on a story” and that the best way to hook them is by reading it aloud to them. Key to Parton’s project was building a bookshelf at home so that caregivers and kids could share stories as part of a daily routine. 

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Are Lit Teachers Giving Up on Novels?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 24, 2026

Tuesday

Recently I wrote about a Rose Horowitch Atlantic article that direly predicted, “The end of reading is near.” In some ways it was a follow-up to an article she wrote two years ago decrying “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”

“To read a book,” the headline sarcastically continued, “it helps to have read a book in high school.”

Staking herself out as the prophet of doom when it comes to reading, Horowitch researched her article by interviewing 33 despairing literature professors. Nicholas Dames at Columbia told Horowitch that his students “now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.” Lamenting that they no longer engage “in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next,” he asserted that “they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.”

Princeton’s Anthony Grafton complained that most of his students “arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have.” Virginia’s Chinese literature professor Jack Chen found his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand. Georgetown’s Daniel Shore told Horowitch “that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.” Berkeley’s Victoria Kahn, who used to assign 200 pages each week, now

assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

I’m not entirely sure what to do with these complaints. I had professors at Carleton make similar complaints when I was there in 1969-73. A classics teacher, for instance, told us that he used to teach many more Greek tragedies than he now did, although we still read a healthy number. When I quizzed my parents, who had attended Carleton 25 years earlier, my father told me that was correct but noted that he didn’t get much more than the plot from all that reading. The goal was to recognize the plays, not explore them in any depth. 

My mother, meanwhile, recalled riding a train from Peoria to Minneapolis trying to read War and Peace, which had been assigned over spring break. Instead, she spent the trip helping a French bride with no English, who was going to join a Minnesota farmer that she met during the war. My mother didn’t face any consequences for not finishing the novel. 

While I myself was diligent, I do remember skimming some works. My Brit Lit I professor assigned all twelve books of Paradise Lost but most of it bypassed me utterly, with only the passages of Satan in hell and the temptation in the Garden of Eden making any impression. (I only taught Books I, II, V, IX, X and the end of XII when I taught it in my own survey.) And I remember one embarrassing moment when I was sitting next to my French “20th Century Novels” professor and him noticing that I hadn’t yet used a paper cutter on the pages that we were supposed to have read that day.

That being admitted, I also add that I had a very different experience than the professors interviewed by Horowitch. I taught many novels and got good discussions out of them, including Pride and Prejudice (which we read in a week). I also had my students read the 900-page novel Tom Jones in my Restoration and 18th Century Literature class; five Jane Austen novels in my first-year seminar; One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children, Beloved, Like Water for Chocolate, and Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Magical Realism; Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Catch-22, The Things They Carried, Handmaid’s Tale, and The God of Small Things in a 20th and 21st century survey (and those were just the novels); and comparable reading lists in other courses. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Maryland’s public liberal arts college, is no Columbia, Princeton, Georgetown or Virginia, but there are ways to teach that will excite students, whatever their background.

As I read Horowitch’s article, I wondered whether the landscape has changed that much since I retired in 2018.

Let’s imagine for a moment that it has. In that case, it’s worth looking at the reasons Horowitch gives for the decline in long-form reading. She mentions

—the rise of social media;
–grade inflation, which means that college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work;
–economic pressures leading to a shift in values (“while students can still read books, … they’re more concerned about job prospects”);
–high school teachers teaching towards the test and opting for informational texts to do so (“There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?”);
—since the pandemic, teachers no longer teaching “novels they’ve long revered,” like My Ántonia and Great Expectations, but settling for shorter works;
–kids no longer reading for fun (“In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.”)

Summarizing the work of neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, Horowitch points out that staying with a character through a novelistic journey “cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt.” As Wolf sees it, sustained immersion in a text (“deep reading”) “stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.”

If there is a decline, then, parents, high school English teachers, and college literature professors mustn’t give up the fight. It’s possible to excite students about lengthy fiction—I’ve seen non-readers become readers in my 37 years of college teaching—but it takes enthusiasm, imagination, and a hell of a lot of work. Work is involved in listening—really listening—to each individual student.

Perhaps the advantage I, as a public college professor, had over Columbia, Princeton, etc. is that I didn’t assume students automatically came in with a respect for literature. I knew I had to persuade them that reading was a worthwhile activity.

Given that literature reaches deep into the human soul, it’s not like we lack good material to work with. 

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To Find Your Walden, Look around You

By Robin Bates | Published: August 23, 2026
Illustration of Thoreau’s Walden cabin

Monday

Because our faculty reading group will be discussing Walden, I’ve just finished watching PBS’s illuminating three-part documentary on Henry David Thoreau. The series reveals that Thoreau was more extraordinary than I realized while also dispelling some myths about the Walden experiment. Thoreau, I learned, did not build his cabin in the woods to retreat from society but rather to understand society better. In fact, he wasn’t isolated from people since people visited him constantly. Indeed, he was quite gregarious.

Nor did he believe that one needed to travel to Walden to have his experience. He believed that we could each find our Walden wherever we lived. The documentary ends with Thoreau’s declaration,

You must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. Find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land. There is no other life but this.

Mary Oliver, who last week I said spent her life in a very Thoreau-like quest of figuring out what makes life worth living, understands this in a deep way. In “Going to Walden” she recounts refusing to visit, even though the Cape Cod writer could get there and still “be back by nightfall.” Rather than “hurrying here and there,” she writes, Thoreau taught us that the “trick of living” is finding life “where you are.” 

She hears this in Thoreau’s “far-off Yankee whisper” in “a book I read and cherish.” The book, of course, is Walden. My Sewanee colleague John Gatta, whose life was turned upside down when he encountered Walden as a boy, alerted me to the poem.

Going to Walden
By Mary Oliver

It isn’t very far as highways lie. 
I might be back by nightfall, having seen 
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water. 
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it. 
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: 
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool 
To miss a day away in the cool country. 
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish, 
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing 
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult 
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

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