The comment arrived yesterday morning under my August article about Ord, Nebraska, and it opened like a neighbor at the fence. “The other end of that geography: I walked Monowi, in Boyd County, on street view. Population one. Elsie Eiler is the mayor, the tavern keeper, and the librarian. She writes the town’s tax levy and pays it to herself. A town that stayed after everyone left.” Then the whole performance in four words: “Wrote the walk up:” and a link.
Ask a room of readers which of Shakespeare’s sonnets is the greatest and the same three answers come back every time: Sonnet 18, the summer’s day; Sonnet 116, the marriage of true minds; Sonnet 73, the yellow leaves. Those answers are accurate the way election returns are accurate. Ask which sonnet is the most beautiful and the most honest at once, and the room goes quiet, because that question is a confession booth. What comes back tells you what the reader wants and what the reader is willing to admit. Mine now is Sonnet 138, the one that begins with a woman swearing and a man pretending. I say now because it was not always so, and I would not trust a reader whose answer never changes. The road here runs through changes in tone and taste, in wants and abilities, in hopes I no longer have, and the road is the subject of this essay. A reader’s favorite sonnet is a diary entry with the lock broken off.
Continue reading → Love’s Best Habit: On Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138
In the spring of 2018, schools in England started taking analog clocks down from the walls of their examination halls. The reason arrived in the education press without a trace of shame: teenagers sitting their exams could no longer read a dial, they grew anxious watching a circle that told them nothing, and the schools judged it kinder to remove the clock than to teach the child. A deputy leader of the head teachers’ association explained that students were more accurate with digital displays. So the ladders went up, the hands came down, and an instrument that had governed rooms of learning for two centuries was carried to the storage closet as a courtesy to the people it once served. I have kept that ladder in my head ever since, because it shows the modern school system performing its signature move in a single gesture: confronted with an untaught skill, remove the evidence.
At a dinner table, the worst storyteller is often the person with the best memory. He begins with the route to the restaurant, the trouble finding parking, the waiter’s name, the table beside the kitchen, the appetizer nobody liked, and the exact minute when rain began ticking against the window. Twenty minutes later, he has not reached the thing that made the evening worth recounting. He is not lying. His defect is more serious. He has not decided what happened. Every remembered detail has presented itself for admission, and he lacks a law of relevance. The salt cellar enjoys the same narrative standing as the marriage proposal. The price of the wine competes with the sentence that ended a friendship. Accuracy has occupied the table, ordered dessert, and refused to leave. The teller possesses the evening as an archive, but not yet as a story.
The next decisive recording will arrive before our institutions are ready for it. It may show a governor accepting a bribe, a police officer issuing an unlawful command, a physician altering a chart, a candidate confessing contempt for the voters, or a military official announcing an attack that has not occurred. The image will be clear. The voice will be familiar. The setting will be plausible. Millions of people will see it before any newsroom, court, agency, or laboratory can establish where it came from. The accused will call it artificial. Supporters will not require proof. Opponents will not trust any proof offered in reply. Platforms will attach hurried labels. Forensic vendors will issue competing percentages. Partisans will treat technical uncertainty as political permission. By nightfall, the artifact will no longer be evidence of an event. It will be an instrument for measuring allegiance.
A mug sits on the desk with Marilyn Monroe’s face under the sentence Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The object is wrong at the name and prone to wording drift, and it keeps selling because the right sentiment can carry any name. The claim riding beside it has manners: why care whether the mug gives Monroe a line written by Ulrich, or whether a poster hands Voltaire a sentence built by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, so long as the line still stirs? Its appeal points to use over receipt. Its conclusion says the words have done good work in the world, and good work should settle the bill.
American race law rests on a piece of arithmetic no mathematician would sign: one drop of Black blood makes a person Black, and a flood of white blood makes nobody white. The formula runs in a single direction, and it has run that way for more than three centuries. Ask why the obverse rule never existed, why no statute, no census, no courtroom ever held that a drop of white blood confers whiteness, and you have asked the question that unlocks the whole machinery, because a rule that only works one way was never measuring what it claimed to measure.
Continue reading → The One-Way Drop: Why a Drop of White Blood Never Made Anyone White
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