“Revenge is for losers,” is a quote I remember from a moody Scottish film the name of which I can’t remember.

It came to mind as I have started reading Simon Wiesenthal’s 1969 book The Sunflower: On the Possibility of Forgiveness, which is partly a memoir and partly a philosophical question. Wiesenthal, a Jew and concentration camp survivor, was asked by a dying German soldier for forgiveness from a Jew.

The book includes responses from 53 eminent people from all fields. Here are summaries of three.

The Dalai Lama compares the Jews’ orientation toward German Nazis to the Tibetan people’s toward the 1949-50 Chinese invasion and resulting loss of more than a million Tibetan lives. He says he wants to preserve the Buddhist culture of “nonviolence and compassion.” He quotes a Tibetan who says his biggest fear while imprisoned by the Chinese was “losing his compassion for the Chinese.”

Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor who died in the late 1980s falling down stairs, says Germany at the time was “impregnated with crime” and therefore morally ambiguous. He says Wiesenthal “did well” to refuse the soldier pardon: “in a case like this it is impossible to decide categorically between the answers yes and no; there always remains something to be said for the other side.” He closes by saying the soldier’s request was “tinged with egoism, since one detects in it an attempt to load onto another one’s own anguish.”

Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu compares Wiesenthal’s  apparent dilemma to black South Africans dealing with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the fall of apartheid. Tutu notes that “forgiveness is not facile or cheap. It is a costly business that makes those who are willing to forgive even more extraordinary.” He adds, “forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.”

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.” –Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

This is one of the most well-known quotes from Nabokov’s famous (to some infamous) 1955 novel about a middle-aged European having an affair with a 12-year-old American girl. Some say romancing someone so young is every man’s fantasy. I am thinking of this because of the controversy over the new movie Cuties (in English), a French film that seems to be about 11-year-old girls who “twerk” (meaning showing off their rear ends) on camera as a sort of dance routine to entertain adults.

I don’t want to watch this film based on what has been written about it. I know some say that it is unfair for me to comment without seeing it, but we all talk about people we have never met, and I think that is analogous.

A few thoughts:

• Children do sexualize early, but I think the best adult response is to tell them to stop and not publicize or usually put into art that it happened.
• There is a difference between doing what Nabokov did, writing a novel about exploiting a child sexually, and making a movie about it. In my graduate studies, it was noted that novelists could deal with difficult and risqué topics in ways that playwrights (the precursors of today’s screenwriters and film-makers) could not because theater audiences would be outraged and leave, demanding their money back.
• The movies based on Nabokov’s book used actresses who physically might seem to be adult; Cuties does not. To me, that is an important distinction. The fact that teenagers have adult bodies but immature minds is one of the things that makes adolescence so difficult.
• From what I have read of the plot, the new movie seems to be insulting to minorities and Muslims.
• The way to treat children is controversial. I have read that the modern notion of childhood only really emerged in the 19^th century. Before that, children were considered physically small adults. I suppose that is why some industrialists and farmers during the Industrial Revolution thought it acceptable to put children to work that was too onerous.

Some thoughts on another essay by Charles Krauthammer, this time a characteristically crabby essay about modern Shakespeare performances that dilute, distort, or corrupt the original texts. He starts derisively with with a quotation from the playbill of a Yiddish-language New York City performance of Hamlet that is “translated and improved.” It reminded me of college buddies I had during my year abroad in London who mildly mocked a woman they knew who said Shakespeare is really better in French.

Krauthammer as usual makes some sharp and insightful points, even though I think he is a bit too dour. He refers to “the prevailing academic notion of the critic being superior to the author,” which, I think, sums up a lot of the literary theory tension between strict textualists or close readers and the reader-response or new historicist approaches.

While I agree with Krauthammer and my college friends that it is odd to say Shakespeare is better in a foreign language, the issue of Shakespeare and translation is interesting. I mentioned in a past blog that one of my teachers used the year 1500 as a turning point when world cultures (with different languages) began to inter-mingle. Shakespeare, writing in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, must have been an important influence on the emergence of the English language as what one of my multilingual buddies referred to bitterly as “the global language of business” in the modern world.

“Starting with that ambiguous title, Here We Are is a novel about the interplay of stage magic and life’s tricks. Like Anne Enright’s Actress, which was published earlier this year, Swift explores the tension between persona and character, the strain of maintaining public and private personalities. Actors, at least, have a professional excuse; the rest of us, he suggests, perform free, donning one costume and role after another. The trouble is we rarely admit it.”

This from a book review earlier this week by Ron Charles of The Washington Post of British author Graham Swift’s new brief novel about magicians in the English resort town Brighton. I haven’t read Swift’s work but enjoyed the movie version of his novel Last Orders about a group of World War II veterans travelling across southern England to fulfill the wishes of a deceased colleague that his ashes be spread in the sea.

The quotation from Charles’ review made me think about how teaching often made me uncomfortable. While speaking to colleagues, I joked that I might feel better using a ventriloquist’s dummy to teach an entire course. One of the others remarked seriously that what I was talking about was having a teaching persona. It is an example of the sometimes fraught line between public and private that most, if not all, people have to negotiate. This can be a problem for some. Wikipedia defines imposter syndrome as ” a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments or talents and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.”

Persona can seem a nuanced and sometimes acceptable version of the normally wrong phenomenon of lying. As T.S. Eliot put it, “there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” My hunch is that women often make better teachers because they are more comfortable generally presenting public images that differ from private reality, simply for example in the use of make-up. In “Among School Children,” W.B. Yeats’ poem inspired by a visit to nuns who taught, he questions at the end: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Third-wave feminist thinker Judith Butler’s concept of performative acts holds that “given the social nature of human beings, most actions are witnessed, reproduced, and internalized and thus take on a performative or theatric quality,” according to Wikipedia.

I’ve got a screw loose… literally on the track that holds sliding doors to my clothes closet in place. I am trying to fix it myself, but there is a broken part of the screw stuck in the groove… I may need professional help.

“What if they threw a blog and nobody came?”

Prose and cons of living alone:

Pro: Time to write

Con: Lack of audience/purpose

Pro: No one to slow your journey

Con: Uncertain destination

Pro: Silence when you want it

Con: Lack of real conversation

Pro: Finding value in everyday interactions

Con: Lack of depth

Pro: Possibly finding depth in everyday interactions

Con: Possible paranoia about the everyday

Pro: Time for prayer or meditation

Con: Time for wildly discursive thought/feeling

A reason not to ask a store clerk you just met about the risk of spreading Covid-19: the response began “it’s like when you p–p your pants…”

I suspect she was the one making fun of me. At least she didn’t say, “you know how that is” after this initial remark.

I think I will like this city, even though I have warned a young nephew against potty humor.

“OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!” –Rudyard Kipling

I lived in Asia almost three years but don’t claim to be expert on the “East.” I am thinking of the differences between Eastern and Western culture today. Kipling also wrote a poem about U.S. imperialism in the Philippines called “The White Man’s Burden…” One of my high school teachers mentioned it I think as an example of racism, and I made a comment that it might have been an ironic phrase. He chuckled at me in a dismissive but friendly way.

Also in my adolescence, a priest said in a sermon that he had been talking to a young man who was fascinated with Eastern religions and philosophy. The priest said his response was that the man needed to understand his own culture first.

I think there is a sense in the West that Eastern thought is too subtle and slippery for most Western minds. An example is the Asian concept of “un-naming.” I think it has to do with meditation and removing clutter from your mind. Personally, I prefer words, even or especially when they are ambiguous. But, yes, of course you can have too much information.

“Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted.” —Emily Dickinson

Going to get somewhat personal again. I haven’t really been reading or following the news today other than the cable news in the background of my hotel room. I am about to move into a very old building for a year-long rental lease. I am looking forward to the move-in. Old buildings are beautiful to me. I think Henry James wrote about how he preferred Europe to the U.S. because it has aging ruins.

The one I am moving into reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. It isn’t quite 170 years old and is larger than a seven-gabled home (it was formerly a large inn).  It is odd the way a place can affect your emotions. T.S. Eliot said, “time is time, and place is always and only place.” But place does make a difference to your mood and emotional well-being. And, as I recall, one meaning of ethos in the ancient Greek rhetorical sense is understanding your place.

I am not afraid of potential ghosts in the building.

“Humor is subjective.” I think many of us have heard this saying. I recall it is a line in the recent psychological thriller movie Joker just before the eponymous character blows out someone’s brains. I liked the movie and think the lead actor is interesting but eccentric.

Humor is subjective, yes. I think a shared sense of what is funny is one of the main reasons people socialize with each other. I saw a Rowan Atkinson comedy recently. He was asked in an interview what is funny, and my recollection is he replied with one word: “cruelty.” It was a profound answer, in my opinion. Is something like humor that brings so many people together also viciously cruel to the ones who aren’t part of the group that humor helps to convene? Is this why the English use the word “bloody” metaphorically so much?

When I was teaching rhetoric, one of the writers on the topic with whom I identified most was Kenneth Burke, a major influence on rhetoric and composition classes now taught at many universities as a requirement for first-year college students. What I liked about him was his idea of group identities. He seemed to be saying that in order to identify and socialize with others, you need to agree on a common enemy or enemies. In some ways, this is the dark side of much humor to me. To find something funny and share laughter with friends, you have to agree someone else is ridiculous.

But I still like to laugh. Some people seem to equate humor with satire alone. I don’t agree. Maybe if humor isn’t directed at another person, it is directed at God or the universe. I once heard that “God can take a joke.”