Beauty, Truth and Autumn

When we are in high school, we are forced to read poetry. “Forced,” that’s the way many of us feel though a happy few develop a love of verse. Yet, despite the “forced feeding,” some of the poems get through and stick for life, returning at unexpected times or dogging us with lines that we can’t get out of our heads, like a song heard on the radio in the morning, that follows us through the day.

I was one of those who had to be “forced fed.” I loved big thick novels, plots that made me think or puzzled me. With Ms. Cheryl Silberling, in our advanced literature class, we read “Crime and Punishment.” I loved that big thick book and was haunted by the questions it posed about forgiveness and salvation. And I remember Raskolnikov’s bloody socks. In high school, few things were as important as our appearance. I imagined wearing those socks to school and how bad they would have smelled! No one in their right mind would have wanted to be seen with me.

With Ms. Silberling, we also read poetry in English Literature. I liked “The Ancient Mariner.” Picture yourself wearing a dead albatross slung around your neck! We also read excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” where the poet declares “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” That appealed to the mystic leanings that were a part of my adolescence.

Keats, though, was something else. I can’t say I understood everything I read, but the sounds entranced me and I liked to read his odes aloud. I still read them aloud and today hear a much different tune. In high school we read “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Love, youth, frozen forever in clay, what can that mean to someone who is 17-years-old? At that age, eternity, be it eternal love or eternal beauty, does not appear beyond our grasp, at least it didn’t to me. I thought I’d always be thin, I’d always have long flowing brown locks, and my face would always be wrinkle-free.

Now when I read that ode, it cuts me to the quick. The lover in the poem remains ever poised on the threshold of love, his lady-love, forever young. They never kiss yet their love will never undergo the test of time.

Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has undergone that test, as beautiful today as when he wrote it in 1819, and if you haven’t read it since high school, I’d recommend you go back and have a second look. Its final lines, by far the most famous, are limpid in their simplicity yet enigmatic: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

 

 

Only yesterday, during an early evening walk, those lines came back to me. Despite a menacing sky to the east, it was the end of a perfect autumn day. The air was crisp and cool and low-riding cumulus clouds were tinged by the setting sun. Then it started to rain, a beating and cold downpour. I pulled up my hood and kept walking with, at my back, a still brilliant sun. In front of me, before my very eyes, a double rainbow appeared and I could even perceive its base (though I did not find the pot of gold). It was an overwhelming spectacle of natural beauty that made me feel grateful to be alive. 

 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, I thought, my mind returning to Keats, and then wondering what those lines mean to me today.

The rain stopped, the air was crystalline and every tree shimmered in the evening light. Once the rainbow disappeared, a breathtaking sunset took its place.

The natural world is not like us. It does not lie or create “fake news.” Its beauty is entire and its destruction all the more heart-wrenching. Some Americans, and among them, many who belong to the religious Right, doubt the reality of climate change. Yet, for people who consider themselves religious, isn’t it a duty to protect the natural world, a gift from God? Isn’t it a duty to look seriously at the climate change taking place in the world today and seek to understand its causes? “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but acquiring knowledge requires effort and good will.

Today is Sunday. Many residents of Schuylkill County go to church. It’s a good day to reflect upon beauty and truth. It’s also a good time of year. How I miss the explosion of color on the trees in autumn! There’s nothing in France to compare to a beautiful autumn day “in the Skook.”

But it is Sunday and somewhere deep inside me a preacher is lurking. Don’t worry. I will not preach, but I will quote a theologian and thinker who is important to me, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. On the subject of truth he writes, “Any authentic search for peace must begin with the realization that the problem of truth and untruth is the concern of every man and woman; it is decisive for the peaceful future of our planet.”

When Joseph Ratzinger was 16, he was drafted as an auxiliary member of the Luftwaffe. Though anti-Nazi, he was forced to serve the Reich. Reflecting in the 21^st century upon World War II and the millions of deaths directly linked to the lies of the Nazi regime, he writes, “How can we fail to be seriously concerned about lies in our own time?”

As I write, it is once again a beautiful autumn day. The natural world is decked out in her Sunday best and her beauty brings home a resounding truth: Nature has nothing to hide.

Since the 17^th century, scientists have sought to uncover her secrets and take control of her powers, and beyond their wildest dreams, they have succeeded. Yet Nature continues to show us her true face, in creation and destruction alike.

Legend has it that confronted with his father’s felled cherry tree, George Washington said, “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped it down.”

The real world is not like legend, yet wouldn’t there be great beauty in a President who aspired to tell the American people the truth?

As Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

 

The 21st Century Way: J'accuse!

On January 13, 1898, on the front page of the French daily “L’Aurore” (Dawn), novelist Emile Zola addressed an open letter to Felix Faure, the President of France. In it, he accused those he considered to be the true perpetrators of the crime of treason for which Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery captain, had been convicted. Stripped of his rank, Captain Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guyana.

Zola wrote his letter in the name of truth and justice. He argued Dreyfus had been convicted, not because he was guilty, but because he was Jewish. At a time when antisemitism was rife and anti-German sentiment strong, Captain Dreyfus, a Jew born in Alsace in 1859, eleven years before the province was annexed to Germany, became a perfect scapegoat in a complex affair of espionage involving high-ranking officers.

After publishing his letter, Zola was accused of libel and his courageous act cost him his reputation. The day of his trial, an angry crowd assembled outside the courtroom, ready to attack the once beloved novelist if ever he were acquitted.

Despised, belittled, alone, such was the position of both Zola and Dreyfus in 1898. Zola died in 1902. Dreyfus was cleared of all charges in 1906, the year he was reinstated in the army. In 1908, the ashes of Zola were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, the final resting place of those men and women who have contributed to the grandeur of France.

In November 2019, a new film about the Dreyfus affair was released in France. In French, the title is “J’accuse,” in English, “An Officer and a Spy.” Critics praise the film, which has won three French Césars, the equivalent of Oscars, but it has not found a distributor in the USA. The reason? Its director is Roman Polanski, charged in 1977 with unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Convicted and sentenced once in an L. A. County court, freed from prison on good behavior and then charged again, Polanski fled the United States in 1978 and since that time has not returned.

On August 5^th, 1970, thanks to the generosity of my mother, I was visiting Winchester Cathedral in England. That summer, I’d travelled to France with Mrs. Alice Ney and a group of students from Pottsville Area High School. We also made a week’s excursion to England and Winchester was one of the stops. I have no memory of the cathedral, but I do remember a poster at a newsstand: the face of Charles Manson and the words, “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.”

On August 4^th, Manson, accused of the 1969 murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate, managed to enter a Los Angeles courtroom with a newspaper bearing the above headline and flashed it at the jury. His act made news around the world. The next day in Winchester, on the cover of an English tabloid, the crazed eyes of Charles Manson stared out at me.  

 

Roman Polanski, still today, is a fugitive from American justice. Convicted of the rape of a minor, he faced American justice once but fled his retrial. His case has not been laid to rest and for 43 years, director Polanski has been treated as a pariah in some parts of the world.

The current American president Donald Trump faces multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and rape. He denies them all, disparaging one of the women for not being his type. If she had been, would rape have been alright?

Certainly, his accusers should be heard out. The President should also be able to give his version of events. Word against word, memory against memory, and all pertinent evidence should be weighed. This, I would say, is the American way of justice.

On September 18, 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Thanks to her work as a lawyer, legal scholar and judge, women have achieved greater equality in society and before the law. Up until the day of her death and the end of her tenure on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised the Court’s collegiality. She and her eleven colleagues were “free to dissent,” and Ginsburg believed anger and annoyance are of no use when one seeks to persuade.

Since Antiquity, Justice has been personified as a woman. In one hand, she holds a set of scales, in the other, a sword. Her eyes are blindfolded; she is dressed in a simple toga. The scales represent the weighing of evidence; the blindfold, impartiality; the sword, the swift accuracy of a judicial decision; the toga, authority.

Lady Justice stands tall and erect, guided by reason, keeping her emotions under control. Above all, she is impartial, free of partisan interests, working for the good of all, very much like her disciple, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Judge Ginsburg served “We the People of the United States.”

“L’affaire Dreyfus” began in 1894. Captain Dreyfus had to wait 12 years for justice to be done. Since the founding of the United States in 1776, all have not been equal before the law and still today, a person’s skin color or socioeconomic status can determine the outcome of a trial. In 2020, “one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all” remains an ideal.

Is it an ideal we are still fighting for? Do Americans still aspire to remain “free to dissent?”

Today Zola remains a very popular novelist in France. Readers in the coal region would especially enjoy Germinal, a story about life in the mines of northern France at the end of the 19^th century. In 1993, it was made into a film with Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou.

 

In 1961, American novelist Walker Percy published The Moviegoer, a novel with a philosophical bent. I’ve never read it but it’s on my list of “must-reads” ever since I came across these words in an essay by the author written in 1957, the year of the forced federal integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Instead of despising him (the segregationist) as an enemy, one corrects him as a brother, all the while in fear and trembling for one’s own salvation.” And Percy adds, “No white southerner can write a j’accuse without making a mea culpa.”

Food for thought. On November 3^rd, who will go to the polls: “We the People” or bitter and intransigent enemies?