Month: September 2011

The 2011 Women’s Day Speech I Did Not Give

Posted on by sterlingbennett

This is the English translation of the 2011 Mexico Women’s Day talk I did not give.

Its context is Mexico, the wide-spread abuse of women, and the 300-600 unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juárez durng in the last ten years, a plague which has spread to other cities in Mexico.

Women are not cows, nor mascots, nor toys to humiliate, dominate, and control.

You know this, but many men here do not.

Because some men don’t feel deserving, they have to rob and rape.

And not just adult women.

We know through Lydia Cacho about the extensive sexual exploitation of children as young as six years old.

Through Digna Ochoa (October 2001), we know that moral courage is extremely dangerous, and that many men do not tolerate a just and swift application of the law.

(Look up Digna Ochoa in Wikipedia. She was kidnapped several times and finally murdered, for her activities as a human rights lawyer. Amnesty International had celebrated her bravery with their Enduring Spirit Award. After a year of essentially non-investigation, Mexico City officials ruled her death was a suicide, even though a warning note had been attached to her body and forensics showed she could not have shot herself.)

We know that those who need impunity do not know how to love, neither others, nor themselves.

Through Atenco (May 2006), we know that the police – that is to say, men without much self-esteem – have to rob and humiliate. How would you otherwise explain their behavior?

‘He put his fingers in my mouth and vagina and forced me to give him oral sex. He spilled his sperm on my sweater, and then another policeman did the same thing and grabbed my breasts and said, this one’s suckling, the little bitch.’

Women are not cows.
Men, on the other hand, are frequently dogs.
But this incarnation is not obligatory.

In my opinion, we should not be celebrating Women’s Day, rather (celebrating) women themselves.

But how can we do this, if we men don’t even know how to celebrate ourselves?

My thirty years in men’s groups tells me that we do not really know who we could be.

We have learned just about two ways of relating to women, in moments of conflict.

By hitting them, or by going away pouting.

We don’t realize that the full range of emotions available to women is also available to us.

We haven’t learned how to talk to women. They are so much more skilled, tactically, in this area than we are – a skill they have learned in order to survive.

But we can learn to defend themselves, with words, and not have to feel panic and rage.

We can learn to feel (and distinguish) emotions.

We can gradually learn to recognize our disappointments, our anger, our fear, and deeply buried sadness for so many things. Sometimes, for the distant father, who may have learned distance and silence from his father.

We can learn to support other men, instead of competing with them. We can learn to talk with other men about what it means to be a man in this world.

And when we discover that we have emotions, and that we don’t have to feel shame because of them, then we can be less emotionally dependent on the women in our lives.

(Gradually) we can learn that there are no guarantees of loyalty, and that any form of domination or pressure, or presumption of loyalty makes a mature and satisfying love impossible.

And then, perhaps, we will learn that women are not cows, and that we are not dogs.”

Nut Cake

Posted on by sterlingbennett

We sat in the Café Zopilote Mojado. How shall I translate it? The Café Wet Buzzard? The four of us, his wife and mine, sipping cappuccinos and nibbling at a rich, perfect flan. I had also ordered pastel de nuez. Nut cake. My friend, an esteemed veterinarian, said, “You ordered nut cake?” He frowned in bewilderment. “But you don’t even know what kind of nuts.” My friend is cursed with a literal mind, and by a need for certainty.

“No, I don’t know what kind of nuts they are,” I admitted, inviting his skepticism. I know my friend, and I was glad to diddle with his need for verifiable information. I watched him, and took the measure of his doubt.

“Aren’t you going to ask them?” he smiled. He was referring to the two young women who were waiting on us and preparing the food.

“I doubt they know what kind of nuts they are,” I said. His look of bewilderment grew. There was a short pause, while he shook his head.

“You don’t care what kind of nuts they are?” he asked, as if we were getting to something about my character. Like a missing gene. I said I didn’t care, I would accept whatever they brought me.

Eventually, the cake came. Along with my second cappuccino – a luxury I seldom allow myself. I spread out the accompanying whipped cream with my fork, then cut into the cake. There were no discernible nuts. There were many very small dark flakes of something slightly larger than the flour. The cake went down easily. I was quite happy.

“You didn’t get any nuts,” my friend observed.

I nodded, and added that I also didn’t know what kind of nuts I didn’t get. His wife and mine, meanwhile, were having a different kind of conversation. They were talking about how they had met us, the men. He had been studying at the University of California, Davis. They had found each other in a sociology class. Their conversation caught my friend’s attention, and he joined in. He had done post-doctoral studies in literature and sociology in order, he said, to make himself more attractive to women. At that point, our wives smiled, erected a gentle invisible wall, and resumed their own conversation.

He turned back to me. “To snare more beauties,” he said, with a wink and an understood jab-jab in the ribs. His wife clearly had been a beauty and still was in her sixties.

“I had trouble in the literature class,” he said. “But I loved literary criticism.” I had helped him read some Spanish headlines in the Mexican political weekly Proceso earlier in the afternoon. He had thrown up his hands at the first unfamiliar word he came across.

“It’s the same problem I had with poetry, only worse,” he said, referring to the Spanish. “But I loved symbolism,” he said.

I thought about that now. He loved symbolism, but not vagueness, and not any kind of delay in understanding, not puzzling out meaning, whether in poems, or articles in Proceso. I could not resist my lower nature. I said, when I had his attention, “According to the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a symbol changes a phenomenon (Erscheinung) into an idea (Idee), the idea into an image (Bild), so that the idea in the image remains always active and unapproachable, and, though expressed in all languages, including art, can not be put into words. Erscheinung, Idee, Bild.” This was something I had learned in graduate school, and I wasn’t sure I understood it any better now, as I said it, than I had then.

My friend looked at me as if I had just denied the existence of gravity.

“A symbol stands for something else,” he said.

“That’s allegory – the direct knowledge of what is meant. But what we have here – the nuts – is nothing more than simulation.”

He looked at me, uncomprehending, resisting what I had said, but also with sympathy – for a deficiency in me only a veterinarian could sense.

I continued. “If there had been nuts, instead of merely dark flakes, they could have stood for something, like for the essential nature of this cake. That would have been allegory. Nuts stand for essence.”

I was fairly impressed by my discourse, so I continued. “You know, like when Melville refers to the wild watery loneliness of Starbuck’s life. Wild watery loneliness stands for ocean stands for Starbuck’s life. Double allegory,” I observed matter-of-factly.”

At that point, not quite sure about what I had just said, I took a little more whipped cream on my fork, cut down on the cake, lifted the morsel, popped it into my mouth, and slowly chewed. I took a sip of cappuccino.

“They’re symbolic!” my friend said, with a fierce smirk of certainty. “The flakes are symbolic.”

I smiled at him indulgently and did not pursue the matter. He was a man cursed with a literal mind, and nothing Goethe, Melville, or I could say was going to change anything. He had snared his beauty, he was still with her, he had a successful veterinary practice – and he knew a symbol when he saw one.

When he died suddenly a year later, from an unexplained and permanent drop in blood pressure, three unaccounted for older women showed up at his graveside memorial. They were dressed in fashionable black and, like his wife, were enduring beauties. All three stayed in the background, but mixed graciously, when the occasion arose.

My friend’s college roommate, a man of many chins, bathed in a pallbearer’s sweat, explained in muttered confidentiality who the women were. I watched them as the minister spoke inaccuracies and other well-deserved praise about my friend. I could not take my eyes off the women. How had he done it? What explained this cadre of attractive women that had come to mourn him? There was some explanation, some cohesion of significance that hung just at the edge of my grasp. For some reason, I recalled the conversation mentioned earlier. Us sipping cappuccinos in the Zopilote Mojado, The Wet Buzzard. And now I did not know whether I stood before symbol, or an allegory. All I could think, as I watched his casket sink down out of sight, and what I heard now in my mind, was that he had been right about the nut cake, and that it had represented something more than just nut cake. But beyond that, I could take it no farther, other than to say that he was a man who, in the end, had been blessed with a literal mind, and had represented something I understood but could not express. Least of all in words.

Glorious Insults

Posted on by sterlingbennett

“These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.” I don’t know who wrote that sentence, as it has filtered down through the Internet. As for the insults themselves, for best results read them aloud at the supper party table, after each guest has had two glasses of wine.

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
She said, “If you were my husband I’d poison your tea.”
He said, “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.”
“That depends, Sir,” said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”

“He had delusions of adequacy.”
– Walter Kerr

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”
– Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
– Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
– William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.”
– Moses Hadas

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
– Mark Twain

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”
– Oscar Wilde

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a
friend…. if you have one.”
– George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill.

“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one.”
– Winston Churchill, in response.

“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.”
– Stephen Bishop

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”
– John Bright

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.”
– Irvin S. Cobb

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.”
– Samuel Johnson

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”
– Paul Keating

“In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.”
– Charles, Count Talleyrand

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.”
– Forrest Tucker

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”
– Mark Twain

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”
– Mae West

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”
– Oscar Wilde

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.”
– Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”
– Billy Wilder

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”
– Groucho Marx

The Bishop and The Turkey Egg

Posted on by sterlingbennett

My friend – the ubiquitous writing partner you’ve heard about – is proof of God’s existence.

This is what people say: That people in your life are proof of God’s existence. This is when I say my own god – small g – is the god of the turkey egg.

A turkey egg is a lovely thing. A warm sand color, with brown specks. A couple of weeks ago, I ate a turkey egg for breakfast. The yoke was as large as two chicken yokes. The white was a little looser. The taste was not discernibly different.

That turkey egg proved the existence of God, capital G.

This is what people say. That is how believers argue. Everything bites or – in this case, pecks – at the tail of everything else. My shoe, for example, proves the existence of God. Anything I say or do proves the existence of God. The same is true, apparently, of everyone else on earth. We are talking about three, four, five, maybe six billion people. Each one is the proof of God’s existence.

This is what people say.

What we have here is a closed system of argumentation. God exists because he – or, as some say, she – exists. The question of God’s existence is exempt from all analysis. Logic and belief in God are mutually exclusive. God-believers use this circular argumentation to counter logic.

For example, logic says there is no proof that God exists. God-believers answer, as usual, You are proof that God exists. This is a clever but avoids the point. My existence, in fact, proves nothing about God’s existence, unless it is assumed – never proven, of course – that God created me.

Charles Darwin might comment: Evolution created you. Perhaps it created your God as well – although there is no evidence of the latter and overwhelming evidence of the former.

Sigmund Freud, in his little book, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” or as we know it, ”Civilization and Its Discontents,” postulates that humans suffer a need for dependency. On the deepest level, they want a father who will protect them from dangers, calamities, disease, and – most especially – from uncertainty.

This last affliction is the most grievous one. Facing uncertainty requires self-reliance and intelligence and courage. It is not easy to live, let alone die, with uncertainty.

Two paths extend from this point, one could argue. The rule of human law, on the one hand; and the rule of laws ascribed to God, on the other. The latter are, of course, often formulated by and to the advantage of groups of men who claim access to and understanding of God’s intentions.

The path of human law I would like to think of as the rule of good moral codes, formulated over time by wise leaders. The Old and New Testaments are filled with moral teachings. Generally, as enunciated by thinkers from Kant to Martin Luther, the best of them, the good ones, say, “Treat others as you would want to be treated.” Except that Kant made an exception regarding Africans, as Luther did for Jews.

In a reasonable society, moral codes would be based on this golden rule and moral reasoning would guide all human affairs. Reason would be the basis for deciding what is just and good. Reason would allow a conclusion that just laws create the good life. Qualities like generosity, kindness, innocent until proven guilty, and habeas corpus would protect people from tyranny that is based on stolen power or stolen legitimacy.

A king who says, I am the law, is an example of stolen or assumed legitimacy, that is, without the permission of the people. A high priest or a senator or a Congressman who says, God’s law is the only law, is nothing more than a small king claiming a legitimacy which is not supported by reason – that which is good and just – nor by the will of the community.

When Descartes wrote, cogitat ergo sum – I think, therefore I am, in my opinion he undermined all kings and tyrants, all fundamentalists, and many believers. Descartes freed men and women from the need for dependence on a father figure who decides for us whether we exist or not. If a person thinks, in the sense of using logic (cogitat), he or she does not say, God exists, or, Reason has nothing to say about the existence of God, or, The priest knows better than I.

Belief in God, then, requires the suspension of reason.

Fine, I can say, I will suspend reason, keep it in a little box, and open this other little box and believe in anything I want to, in order to satisfy my need for certainty. I will maintain that there is Rana Gigantesca, a Giant Frog, who will save me from disease, hunger, war and natural extinction. This supernatural being will offer me certainty in an uncertain world.

This attitude would be fine until I started persecuting others who did not believe in my giant frog. When I started burning these non-believers at the stake or taking their children’s heads off with my sword or with my cluster bombs, I would be following the worst consequences of belief. I would be substituting a murderous assumed legitimacy for the rule of reason and for good moral codes such as fraternity, equality, and liberty. Not to mention generosity, respect for all living things and – the greatest of these – tolerance toward others.

Not long ago, a woman – Katharine Jefferts-Shori, was ordained a bishop in the Episcopalian Church. She is the first woman bishop elected in the past 500 years. A well-known high priest of evangelical fundamentalists and self-anointed spokesperson for God’s intentions, sputtered in consternation, while being interviewed on the matter.

The woman bishop, he protested, had said that Jesus is our mother, and that Jesus is not the only way to God.

But I say, by saying these things, Bishop Jefferts-Shori allows the two paths to co-exist: the rule of good moral codes and rule of faith in the existence of God. The god she talks about is no longer the domineering stern protecting Freudian father. Rather she is the comforting and tolerant mother. The concept of Christ as mother opens the door simultaneously to both tolerance and belief. The new bishop was advocating more than one path to well-being and the good life.

The evangelist responded with undisguised amazement. He giggled in derision. He conceded something to logic and immediately constructed an analogy. The path to God, he said, is like landing a small plane on a fifty-foot runway. There is only one way to do it, so that you land safely.

Of course, within the logic of his metaphor, what he says is true. There is only one way to land safely on a fifty-foot runway, and that is with great skill and unusual amounts of luck.

Alas, the male evangelist’s assumed legitimacy as paternal spokesperson for God is not enough make a good analogy out of a bad one. Just by saying there is only one way to have faith does not make it true.

I accept the little box Bishop Jefferts-Shori wants to open, and I like the vision she gives of her god or giant frog as one of generosity and tolerance.

As for myself, I will continue to eat turkey eggs when they become available. I will continue to marvel at the beauty of their evolution, at the soft shimmering luminescence of their sand-colored shells with their brown flecks. Though they prove nothing beyond the existence of themselves, they are at least laid by the mother of the species, and that – in and of itself – I find comforting in this uncertain world.

Kneeling

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I am an unwilling participant in my own demise. In October 1969, for example, as an off-duty flight-deck officer, standing at the rounded forward edge of the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga. The ship is positioned fifty miles off the coast of Vietnam. The evening is warm, the sea is sleepy. The bow cuts through the water at a restless three-quarters speed – something like twenty-five knots. That in itself should have been a clue. Also, pain has made me careless. My first wife has left me for my best friend. I turn and see a green light six hundred feet away at the other end of the flight deck. I hold up my hand and block out the green. This lets me see the area around the light. The starboard catapult has launched an un-programmed flight, and it is coming right at me. I have less than three seconds before it hits me. I leap off the bow. The safety net catches me six feet down. The sound of the jet passing over my head stuns like lightening that is too close. The safety net fails, breaking away at one end, and I drop, head down, until I am ten feet over the Niagara Falls of the ship’s bow wave. I am wrapped in the net, hanging like a fly in a spider web, my arms pinned, unable to move, swinging back and forth, in the dark. No one will find me until dawn. If the net fails completely, the ship will drive me down and drown me under its eight hundred and forty feet of hull – until one of its two great barnacle-sharpened props, turning at 472 revolutions per minute, cuts me in half, and the wake turns red – visible to no one.

These are the things I see in the half light of morning, just before my black cat pats me once on my forehead, to let me know it is time to unlock the door and let her out.

On a recent trip to Manhattan, an air-conditioned bus rushes at me. I no longer hold up a hand to block out the green lights. I have gained more confidence in the world. I step back in plenty of time. It stops in front of me, and kneels with a hissing sound. That is, the whole front of the bus settles so that it is closer to level of the street. The bus driver – a perfect stranger, with lots of experience – has decided that I need help in reaching the first step. Never mind that I climb 203 steps, all a little irregular and some quite high, in order to reach my house in the Mexican city where I live.

But that is not the point. The point is that the bus driver has some reference, some paradigm through which he views me, which lets him see something I do not see. In short, he has determined that I have reached the Age of Adjustment.

This is not a laughing matter. I am not sure how much he sees. I sight back over the idea of him, and I sense there are things to be aware of, beyond those that are air-conditioned and go whoosh and kneel.

I step aboard. I am relieved that he did not think it necessary for the bus to lie down, so I could roll onto it. I stick my Metro Card into the driver’s scanner and am accepted into the bus’s agreeable safety. The bus rocks me gently over Manhattan’s small irregularities, over the suggestions of dark complexity that lie beneath the city. My head nods. I lean back in my seat. I am in a gondola, gliding through a late Venetian afternoon.

At about 82nd Street, the bus hisses again and, like an elephant, kneels, and I step down onto the germ-covered afternoon pavement. I walk the one remaining block. I wear my wide-brimmed hat, that blocks out the sun. I buy a Senior ticket to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The woman selling me the ticket, less than half my age – but old enough to be a flight-deck officer – hands me a pamphlet that will guide me through the labyrinth.

The publication is about the size of a large letter envelope. Two colors make up one side of the pamphlet. Two grey blues, in different values. One fairly dark, the color of an approaching thunderhead, the other a considerably lighter value, like a thunderhead still at some distance.

I do not know what has makes me do this, but at some point I begin holding the blue-grays of the pamphlet up and sight across them, to the paintings of the renowned nineteenth century English landscape painter Samuel Palmer. I hold them up against the Impressionists Manet, Monet, Cezanne, and Morisot. And then, in another room, I hold them up against Rembrandt.

A guard approaches me. She stares down at my blue-gray pamphlet, as if I might be holding a nine and a half inch knife or something that will cast a bean on the portrait of “Tito Reading,” by Rembrandt, 1658, on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna – and turn it all black.

She asks, “Can you see through it?”

No, I see over it.

But I do not tell her this. I smile and say, “It’s the pamphlet, available to us at the front door.”

For the most part, she is satisfied. Still, she gives me a last disapproving look, turns, and walks away – leaving me to my secret device.

The guards continue to track my progress. Suspicious remains suspicious. Other visitors stare at my motions. For a fraction of a second, they ask themselves, what is he doing? And then the question recedes, and they lean over to read the titles placed underneath the Great Paintings.

What I am doing is this. If you hold thunderhead grays in a way that blocks off the bottom part of the gold frame, then the eye and the brain see things that are otherwise denied to visitors to the Met.

Do not take my word for it. Try it, and you will see things emerge. A small smirking figure with a stem of grass between his teeth. Or something that moves, something that glimmers. Old oranges (the colors, I mean) answer the rumbling blue-grays of the pamphlet and come forward, secret, illegal, that have waited long-suffering through the years – for a friend.

I do not know what you’re thinking right now. Maybe a reluctance to believe what I’m saying, about this or anything else. Perhaps you are thinking my device with its grey blues will not save me, and you don’t want to be the one that has to tell me.

After all, what emerges when I block out distraction will not always whoosh and kneel to give me sanctuary. Or wink from within the Palmer, shift the grass stem from one tooth to the next, and smile and say hello, old friend.

Rather, you might be saying, in the end, the last rope holding the safety net pulls farther apart, and I drop the last ten feet through the soft Pacific evening, down before the Ticonderoga’s thundering bow wave, and – still unwilling – meet the demise that has been hurtling toward me all along. All I had to do was lift my hand to block out your friendly faces, and I would have seen it.

Partial Inspiration for “The Tumor and the Baritone”?

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I made the following comment to a friend’s Facebook entry, where she was emphasizing the importance of singing and choirs in our lives:

“My father was a great singer. He would take his pipe out of his mouth, stick it still lit I fear into his pocket, clear his throat, get the A from the piano player (or some such note) and burst out into his rich warm baritone. He would do this because all the aunts had cried out, “Oh, Bill, please sing us something!” And then they would join, their bosoms heaving, and the whole house, along with candles, seemed ready to lift into the night sky and disappear forever.”

My Friend Tonio Kröger

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Recently, I ran into an old friend, Tonio Kröger. “Tonio Kröger” is the name of a short novel by Thomas Mann. Tonio’s father is a Lübeck patrician and the essence of North German purpose and propriety. Tonio’s mother is a southern dark-eyed beauty; she is passionate, musical, impulsive, and vague. She takes no positions on anything.

Tonio’s name comes from one of her brothers and is not northern and German enough. Tonio grows up learning how to see what is behind everything. He becomes a writer, a poet – and is therefore forever set apart from the blond, blue-eyed beautiful people who live robust lives of gain and satisfaction.

He wants his boyhood friend Hans Hansen to value him above all others. He is in love with Ingeborg Holm, who is more drawn to Hans Hansen. They – Hans and Ingeborg – are put off by Tonio’s brooding, sensitivity, his literary nature. Tonio becomes a sought-after writer. He scorns those who find themselves changed by his writing. He holds a long soliloquy in front of his Russian painter friend Lisaweta Iwanowna, who serves him coffee while he complains about not being one of those he wishes would love him – the blond and blue-eyed, who are popular and take riding lessons.

Lisaweta says, Tonio, I have listened to you go on and on, and now I am going to tell you what you are. I imagine her putting her hand lovingly on his shoulder. Du bist ein verirrter Bürger, she says. You are a member of the bourgeoisie who has gone astray. That is all she says, but the meaning is clear. He is a bourgeois, a city dweller, who has somehow fallen in among painters, writers, and musicians – at his own peril.

Lisaweta is a kind woman, a hard-working artist, and a friend. Tonio picks up his hat and leaves, unable to accept either intimacy or ironic truth. It is a great moment in modern German literature – Mann telling the truth to one of his own creations. A truth which ricochets in our direction. It goes to the question which secretly concerns most of us: To what extent are we artists? In which direction do we lean more – metaphorically – toward our orderly, somewhat melancholy patrician father, or more toward our passionate and beautiful southern mother? To what extent are we able to integrate both parts and achieve the creative tension between practiced persistence and dreamy passion?

Goethe speaks about true freedom existing only within a limiting structure. Nietzsche designates the two sides as the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Lisaweta describes it as der verirrte Bürger. The bourgeois gone astray, but still bourgeois. Writing fiction may require the unfettered inner voice – the storyteller – and the external sober adherence to clear grammar, economy of expression, cadence, and sound. The storyteller speaks from internal images, of things seen and actions taken. A painter uses years of learned technique to  reproduce a moment of recognition, to such an extent that the viewer of his art believes that he or she has glimpsed something known to be true and striking.

Goethe criticized the German Romantics for their lack of order and limits, for their adherence to mental suffering and excess. Yet, some of the German Romantics knew how to remove their protagonists from bourgeois restraints. The hero wandered away from town, skipping out on hard, boring work, and got lost, traveled through strange landscapes, and went through the stages of individuation, die Mutternachtseefahrt, the mother-night-sea journey, which both Jung and Joseph Campbell talk about.

After Lisaweta’s comment, Tonio leaves Munich and takes a trip north. He visits his childhood home, which is now a municipal library. At the hotel, a policeman demands his papers, suspecting him of being a confidence man from the south. It is an old Thomas Mann theme: the similarity between the writer and the criminal, perhaps because they both steal. Tonio carries no papers. In an effort to establish his identity, he takes out a manuscript he is working on. This act only increases the policeman’s suspicion. Still, Tonio manages to cross over to Denmark. He stays in a well-known seaside resort. He walks along the beach. He rejoices in the booming green and white of the sea. He appreciates the northern bourgeois non-writers he finds himself among. His scorn washes away. He is at peace.

A group of tourists arrives. They are boisterous and happy. By stroke of fate – at least so it seems – among them are his childhood loves. Hans Hansen – nearly twenty years later, still wearing his sailor frock and tasseled Imperial sailor’s cap. He is still blond and blue-eyed, still presuming in his rank as handsome and deserving burgher. And there – at least so it seems – is Ingeborg Holm, a little fuller, her bright blue eyes somewhat more squinty, but as healthy and lovely as ever.

From the safety of the dark terrace, Tonio watches them dance. He moves closer and takes a seat. They pass right in front of him, over and over, but they never see him, never recognize him. And therefore, nothing has changed. He loves them anyway but this time feels no pain, no suffering from being rejected. In bed, on his pillow, the boy in him still prays that she will come to him – but she does not. He whispered two names into the pillow,” Thomas Mann writes, “these few chaste, Nordic syllables which were synonymous with what he knew about love, suffering, happiness, life, deep feeling, and home. At the same time, he saw himself eaten up by irony and intellect, laid barren and paralyzed by knowledge…caught halfway between sainthood and rutting…and he sobbed, out of regret and homesickness.”

The next day he writes to Lisaweta Iwanowna. “I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and for that reason it is not easy. You painters call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois are suspicious and want to arrest me…I admire the proud and cold, who venture out on paths toward demonic Beauty and who despise mere common people. But I don’t envy them. For if there is anything that can make a Poet out of a literati like me, it is this bourgeois love in me for what is human, alive, and common. All warmth, all that is good, all humor comes from this…When I write, I hear the sea churning, and I shut my eyes. I look into an unborn, shadowy world, which seeks order and expression, I see what looks like human forms waving at me, asking that I seize them and release them into Story. Tragic and ridiculous figures, or mixtures of both, I am very fond of them. But my deepest and most secret love is reserved for the blond and blue-eyed, the bright and vital ones, who are happy and kind and common.”

Thomas Mann redeems Tonio Kröger. But the question remains: Who will redeem us? To what extent are we the artist of der verwirrte Bürger, el ciudadano extraviado, the bourgeois gone astray? One part parched ordering patrician; one part feminine, fiery, passionate, and suspect. Does our own artistic grace lie somewhere on this continuum? Is that what we are looking for: redemption? I have not had answers to these questions. And that is why I was so happy to run into my old friend Tonio Kröger again, and Thomas Mann’s clear and passionate prose.