The Juntoo

Among the boundless multiplicity of species found here on Earth, there are some, though not many, who choose as their period of dormancy the summer months. These animals, collectively ancient in their origin and amphibious in their habitation, are known to us all, yet we forget their shared scorn for the summer’s gilded months. Among them we number such beasts of the field and the stream as the diffident turtle—ever ready to enclose within himself his cautious manner and thoughts; the wrathful crocodile—a mammoth, crawling on his stomach, with skin as pachydermatous as his fangs are sharp; and the devilish snake—whose lithesome lies and sinuous sins are the unforgotten sibilant whispers by which our first mother, Eve was tempted.

It’s true, all animals—regardless of the antiquity, biology, or imaginative theology from which they’ve been spawned—require for their restoration a particular few months of the year. They need for their preservation a specific time, often one of long duration and commitment, for uninterrupted rest. It is an unperturbed and sacred remedy without which they’d no longer live. Sleep, during this interval, is crucial. For the turtle, the crocodile, and the oh-so slippery snake, and doubtless a few others, the summer is that time of the year for their pursuit of this panacea to toil and strife. Their summer slumber is the respite and the answer to that struggle for existence from which none is exempt.

As a boy, upon my learning of this fact, I was struck quite dumb. Granted, being quite void at that age of any real flickers of intellect and refinements of speech, I hadn’t a far way to go to. Dumb, for me, wasn’t so precipitous a descent—not so frightening a drop. I suppose, ultimately, the judgment is yours, but I like to think that it’s a pit—whose occupancy, one might add, won’t soon be exceeded—out of which I’ve since climbed. But at that age, I was incredulous to learn of these animals and their wasting of the summer’s holiest months.

What prodigality! I thought, as I considered all these animals, once so vigorous and wild in the opinion of my youth, carelessly throwing away the best part of the year. I, for one, would never dare be so impudent a recipient of the summer months, that triune of perfect temperatures to which we’re exposed once a year. I cherished very greatly the munificence with which they discharged and shared their matron sun.

You see, I was born and raised in the annual gloom of the great northeast—a region so parsimonious in its distribution of fair weather, that one who calls that corner of the world “home” can’t be blamed for his occasional lapse from his Semitic creed (be it Jewish or Christian). An apostate in waiting, he casts aside his rabbis and his catechisms, his Testaments Old and New, for a shameless new worship of the sun. Perhaps the epithet of “pagan” here applies, but—at least while you’re in the presence of the sun’s holy rays—no charge of profanation could be too severe. Helios, at least throughout the duration of those months, is the only deity—blazing and immovable in the heavens above—to whom northerners like me prostrate ourselves.

Summer, then, was pure salvation. To those like me, it was a divinely sanctified season deserving of our breathless gratitude and prayer. It was a time of the year, indeed a narrowly fleeting quarter of it, into which no interloping gust of wind nor flurry of snow ought to have been allowed to barge. Nothing, then, I thought, could be so wasteful, so torpid, and so unforgivably foolish as to spend one’s life as these animals do—in languid retirement from this pinnacle of the year. How could these creatures, whose antiquity and perseverance join in confirming their native genius, forgo the warmth, the radiance, the exuberance of the summer’s invitingly long days? Have they not encountered the gentle, fertile bliss that is June? How could they knowingly dispense with July’s celebratory glee? Why would they ever ignore August’s dizzying rush? Do they not know of the extension of the day’s holy light, of the activities to be done, of the deferral of dusk until every backyard, block-party, charred and grilled victory has had its say?

Evidently, they do not. A fact that would be destructive to my very soul, it’s one by which these beasts are very minimally bothered. They, care not, at least during the course of the summer months, for the vitality of that blessed season. As opposed to the act of hibernation—a term with which, in observation of our neighborly bears and our bantering bats, we’re mostly familiar—we call the conduct of the turtle, crocodile, and snake, this curious bestial proclivity to rescind from the liveliness of the summer months, estivation. One hibernates in the winter, fleeing the ravages of sparse nutrients and the copiousness of the cold, while one estivates in the summer, denying oneself the many splendors of those gentle UV rays and those engrossing, passing months.

But a reliable ailment, one by which I’m annually disturbed, has led me to believe in the wisdom of the animals of whom I have, so far, regarded so little. I’m beginning to see the value of an estivation during the summer months and it’s because, like clock-work during that time of the year, I become ill. It’s here worth noting that I’m not the type of person to whom illness comes easily—certainly not amicably. I rather pride myself in the impregnability of my body’s system of defense. I’m punctiliously well-rested, never risking fewer than seven hours of sleep each night. I’m diurnally devoted to exercise, paying the most careful and narcissistic attention to my body—dare I say my physique. I’m salubrious in my habits, abstemious in my drink, temperate in my consumption of food, and endlessly concerned with the equanimity of my mind. Meditation, though often incorporated into my day with negligence and strain, is but another of many salutary practices to which I’m committed for the continuance of my lofty state of health.

Yet every year for at least the past three, I’ve gotten sick at precisely the same time in precisely the same way. The following is a description of the genesis and progression of that illness by which I’m inescapably burdened. First, a febrile cloud, a moving miasma of disquiet and foreboding, descends upon me. Though it is, as it induces a headache and a bodily chill, an inevitability from which there is no escape, I attempt some futile holistic remedy like chamomile tea, broth barren of meat, or Vitamin C. Hydrating, yes, but unavailing, I’m soon engulfed by the illness. My preventive measures all fail. The cloud of a fever has broken into a storm and I’m caught in its thunderous grasp.

My sinuses, large cavities within my face so quiet that, on most occasions, they evade the detection of my sense, make fully known to me their contents and purpose. They take a peremptory position in the structure and contents of my skull. Phlegmatic, yellow, and gross, their rivulets of mucus rush through my nose, through that noble nasal orifice through which I normally inhale with such aromatic ease, into the exasperated embrace of a tissue waiting in hand. But the hand is no better off, for its every joint, from the tips of its fingers to the anchoring of its wrist, aches with unmitigated pain. So too ache those other multitudinous organic hinges—those knees, hips, and elbows over which the long and lumbersome bones are conditioned and expected to move. But their expectation is thwarted, and they’re made to stiffen in their place. Morning pandiculations and stretches do them no good, as they recoil, after the conclusion of a moment’s exertion, to their guarded and original resting place. Expectoration, rather than locomotion, is the only stimulus by which the body is now moved. Inertia, at this point, is only with exceeding difficulty overcome.

In this manner, shorn of energy, clogged with mucus, stifled by pain, and empty of thought save that of the wretchedness of my state, I succumb to the illness for five days to a week. It is a most unwelcome week of the year.  

To this annual summer illness, this routine disease from which I can’t seem to escape, I apply that which I call my tripartite “S” treatment—a remedy comprising three sibilant components: starvation, sweat, and sleep. The first, starvation, is a somewhat controversial approach, but one, regardless of all the learned medical opinion of which I’ve no need, to which I’m devoted. At first encounter, I’ll admit, it does sound counter-productive, as if by emptying my stomach of all nourishment, I might somehow void myself of the nettlesome bug. I think, by abstaining from all incoming aliment and refusing entrance of any food item through the portal of my mouth, I actually rid myself of the ailment by which I’m consumed. The body, now bereft of sustenance, can use the entirety of its powers toward one unwavering end. It can direct its normally diverted attention—of which much goes into the transformation of calories into power and glucose into thought—to the uninterrupted fight against the disease. Untrammeled by its ceaseless digestion of food, it can recruit all the necessary respondents in a fight for a self-initiated cure.

After starvation, next comes sweat. Deliberately to strain oneself and to perspire is to make a movement toward the enhancement of good health. This is a maxim of mine from which I never deviate when well, and so commit myself with exuberant abandon to its practice when ill. Light to moderate cardiovascular exercise is what’s needed above all else. Walking is essential, a light jog more uncomfortable, but riding a bike, be it stationary or real, might be best. The ground reaction forces by which those vulnerable joints are abused are negated when one’s seated on the merciful rump of a bike. The exertion and the stress, a combination conducive not only to a fit body, but mind, awaken the hormones and the endorphins of whose normal production you’ve been dispossessed. They are, without a doubt, most helpful to healing, and fully to turn them on, one must open his pores to sweat.

Finally and, in my opinion, most importantly, the crowning “S” of my triangular treatment is sleep. Seven hours of it simply won’t suffice—nor, for that matter, will eight or even ten. On consecutive days, one must commit what amounts to a day, twenty-four whole hours, of pure and uninterrupted rest. Twelve hours each night, for at least two nights, will be requisite for the restoration of health. The need for this extended and excessive repose can’t be emphasized enough. One shouldn’t cringe at this seemingly interminable allotment of time during which sleep is to be deemed sacrosanct. Though seemingly slothful and contrary to the work ethic by which humanity is known to progress, there’s nothing indulgent about it. In deference to the sinuses, who regard with phlegmatic indifference the black of the night and the light of the day, one should elevate his torso for the purpose of facilitating his breath. A supine position won’t be one in which one can get through the night—and twelve hours of it is an awfully long time.

The combination of these three tactics—starvation, sweat, and sleep—is my “go-to” response to my annual summer cold. It’s the remedy, however medically suspicious, upon which I’ve relied for the past three years. The results, however, are admittedly inconclusive. Its efficacy leaves me in doubt; I’m not so sure that I rebound to wellness with any greater speed with its application. I might just be starving, and sweating, and sleeping a lot more than I should. I might even be doing myself harm. Maybe I just need to let this August illness, this Thermidorian Reaction against a libertine year of health, run its ruinous and natural course.

Or maybe I should model my medicine cabinet upon the wisdom of the beasts. Those who’ve lived longest, after all, have lived best. The turtles, crocodiles, and snakes—those Cambrian creatures of ageless life—know how, as healthfully as possible, to prolong and sustain their life. Their elixir is estivation, their salve a scorn of summer. It’s a practice of which I can hardly conceive, but might do well to practice. Next year, then, I join them in their languor.

In the words of that most honest, dauntless, and frighteningly eloquent of men, a “true autobiography is almost an impossibility”. Man, in the telling of his own tale, isn’t an author upon whom we can confidently rely. We know this well, but this knowledge is our own. It’s seldom shared with the autobiographical artist, the man through whom we hope to gaze, until after his portrait goes to print. Thinking himself as transparent as can be, so ostensibly frank an artist is vulnerable to countless intrusions, all of them subjective, and all of them indulgent toward his virtues and blind toward his vice.  

So, as in most every other case, Dostoyevsky is again correct. No man, setting our timeline from Shakespeare till today, was better able to measure the dimensions of man than was he. In conclusion of the aforementioned quote, Dostoyevsky goes on to warn us that man, this most consciously perfidious of beasts, is bound inevitably to lie about himself, and to do so quite often. That which should be the most accessible of subjects—namely his own self—turns out to be, when brought before the eyes of his fellow creatures, the most unreliable. What a strange observation made of man by man! It’s almost always the case that bias invades his candor, self-regard supplants his truth, and his amour propre, so restless wherever it rests, struggles to climb and mount its ascent. The desirability of posterity’s immortal renown is too tempting a goal to remain wed to the truth on the cold, hard ground. And so, he doesn’t.

All that being said, not all autobiographies should be automatically dismissed. Such an approach would be far too abstemious, plenary, and complete. We ought, however, to taste these works with care and discrimination—with a palate in possession of itself, though confessedly prone to being fooled.

In particular, two autobiographies should, indeed must be read. If not for their joined commitments to veracity, they must be read for their integral additions to philosophy, for their enduring elevations of beauty. These two autobiographical works are, as they allege themselves to be, confessions. As such are they named. The first, in both time and significance, is that which was written by Augustine—the fifth-century African churchman of unequaled import. The second, unrivalled in verbosity and sentimental scope, is that which was written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau—greatest of French feelers, if not thinkers as well.

Rousseau, it might be said, had a father but no mother. Of course, if we as humans are to live, we must have the philoprogenitive influence of both, but Suzanne Bernard—the homely Genevan from whose diffident womb Rousseau descended—wasn’t to live to see all of her son’s wondrous victories and follies, his varied conquests and excommunications. Her absence from his life, however, does little to explain what was to become the unique literary style for which her son became so extraordinarily famous. The femininity of his thought, the depth of his sentiment, the propinquity to his beloved nature, and the refined grace of his expression all have stamped upon them the nurturing imprint of a mother’s constant counsel. Yet, in his life, he benefited from this oversight not.

Alas, having brought into the world this boy—who himself would soon beget the school of the Romantics and, a bit later, the French Revolution—she failed to survive the young Rousseau’s infancy. He was a sickly child, as was, a century earlier, the deservedly-decorated Descartes, but his mother would be the one most prematurely to succumb to her fate. She was the victim, as too many of her age were, of the deficiencies of the mid-eighteenth-century’s attention to post-partum care. For the first decade of Rousseau’s life (and, lamentably, not a minute longer), the patriarchal influence was the only one of which the young philosopher had any knowledge. Prematurely bereft of his mother’s warm touch, he had only the insensate solicitude of a father busy with his work. In time, that work consumed him—and I mean by this no pun; the elder Rousseau was a watchmaker by trade—a job for which that ever punctual, ever neutral nation of Switzerland was (and continues to be) so deservedly renowned.

Being that he was more occupied with his chronometers than his son, and being that fatherhood suited his inconstancy and his restive nature ill, the elder Rousseau left his boy when the latter had reached the age of ten. He decided to embark upon a parenting approach as ancient as it is negligent; to keep his distance and to influence the boy in absentia. As any product of a dead-beat-dad well knows, this is a futile approach to the fostering of a child’s love and to the development of his juvenescent character—however conducive it might be to the prioritization of the old man’s work. At the conclusion of his tenth year and, concordantly, of his tenure beneath his father’s distracted gaze, Rousseau was given to extended family members by whom he was to be raised. Perhaps this cold treatment of which his warm spirit was the recipient determined, at a frighteningly young age, the later disregard with which he welcomed his own forgotten children into the world.

Contrary to that of Rousseau, the familial history of Augustine is not only the better known of the two (both in and outside of the halls of Christendom), but the one by which we’re far more encouraged and inspired. Similar to the situation in which Rousseau found himself, Augustine lived under the roof of a less-than exemplary father. An African pagan who preferred the gods of old, the culture of cupidity, and to the lucre of the Roman king, Patricius was a successful member in the world of Carthaginian politics. That said, by Augustine’s own frank admittance, he was a rather dissolute infidel of a man. A Berber by birth and an Algerian by modern geographic boundaries, Augustine thought him a barbarian in his conduct and his creed. The best of his qualities, as is so often the case for us men, were to be found in that treasury of merit that emanated from his wife. She, his other half, was the only prepossessing and redeeming part of him.

To the more pious parts of the western world, she’s known as St. Monica. Her hagiographic celebration is held annually, in accordance with the liturgical calendar, on the fourth of May. To Augustine and his siblings, however, she was amor matris—the very definition of motherly affection and love. Perhaps throughout the annals of the history of motherhood, so long as it’s stretched beyond our pre-historic past into the depths of our oceanic and prokaryotic roots, there’s never been a mother as doting, loving, attentive, solicitous, overbearing, anxious, and persistent as was Monica. So perturbed was she by her son’s blatant impiety that she worried herself literally sick. She argued for his early baptism into the Catholic church (then still an inchoate creed) but was refused—at first by her husband and later by her son. He was a rowdy, lascivious, and intemperate boy whose personality bucked against all attempts at control.

With the passage of time by which all boys are made to feel, if not to be, somewhat more mature, Augustine calmed the feverish desires of his youth by looking ahead to his future. Seeking the opportunity of a career advancement at the center of the world, he decided to leave his provincial Thagaste and Carthage in hopes of arriving—both professionally and personally—in the city of Rome. There, amongst the colonnaded atria and stoic stoa of that ancient town, he’d be able to sell his erudition at a proportionate price. Heretofore, the Numidian and Punic students to whom he lectured, though acquisitive of knowledge and the fruits of that tree, were unforthcoming in their payments for his service. Worse still, they were unbecoming in their behavior. Under his tutelage, these North African rapscallions proved reticent not in speaking—for, as a rhetorician, that was Augustine’s expertise and the skill he implanted into their mouths—but in untethering their pockets and paying his fees.

And so, frustrated by the early failures of his pedagogical career, a move across the Mediterranean was needed. But Augustine’s mother, loath to be detached from her unrepentant son, attempted to intercept him at the port out of which he was planning to sail. She wanted to stop his voyage, surely further into sin, by keeping him at home and closer to her own bosom and creed. This is the one frailty of which all mothers—regardless of how Spartan their nature and stoic their resolve—are in universal possession. They can’t bear to watch a son go. It’s the scene to which they all lugubriously and movingly succumb, as mine did when I left the house and hearth, as surely did yours. Thus, to leave behind his mother and forge his own road to Rome, Augustine submitted to trickery. Concealing from her his actual departure time and inviting the useful deception of a friend, he embarked upon the adventure for which he had so long yearned while she innocently recited her prayers in a church.

Inconsolable, she tearfully resolved once again to reunite with her itinerant, irreverent son. After the passage of some number of years, she followed her Augustine to Italy and settled in that soon-to-be papal state. Quiet in the face of his multiple, corporeal infractions and hopeful for the reformation of his lustful ways, Mother Monica proved to be an importunate and, more significantly, an important presence in her son’s wayward life. His ascension toward saintliness and his climb to world-reverence passed only through her. She was the ladder by which he arrived to Heaven, the crutch on which he so often landed and stood.

Be their motherly figures present or absent, doting or devoid, it mattered not for the early conduct of these boys. Both Augustine and Rousseau, though separated by the deep chasm of time and faith, of centuries and creeds, shared in enjoying throughout their youth wholly vagrant and lawless lives.

Rousseau, if the two are to be compared, must be judged the more deviant. Arrested, as Freud might say, in the anal stage of his development, Rousseau had a tendency of displaying to the horror or laughter of the young ladies of Geneva his bare buttocks. A proper “spanking” was the corporal punishment of which he was always desirous—precociously sexually so, if we’re to be uninhibitedly honest.

That said, he wasn’t completely indiscriminate in the display of his flesh; he was a scrupulous and considerate nudist, if ever there was such a being. He was strict and specific with what parts he would or wouldn’t reveal. Upon encountering a passer-by from the vantage point of the dark alley in which he stood, he would leap out, frighten the genteel lady, arrest her unassuming gaze, and display his “ridiculous” part (i.e. his buttocks). He’d then await, doubled over with a smile and barren anticipation, the girls’ exuberant or terrified response. Either way, it was always a lively scene. To note, Rousseau, upon his reflection of this display of anatomy and deviltry, is at pains to tell us that he never once revealed to these young women his “obscene” part—or that trinity of masculinity located just anterior to the pubic bone. Such a display would be unforgivably uncouth and Rousseau—though bawdy—was himself no barbarian.

Augustine, at least to our knowledge, was never so blatantly obnoxious. One could imagine, however, especially in the heat of the north African sun, the future saint opting to clad himself in the prelapsarian clothing of Adam, the wardrobe of the First Man—sans the fig leaf and the shame. But the two boys, much like that inquisitively hungry Adam, held a shared infatuation for the sport of petty larceny—especially when it came to the stealing of fruit.

Rousseau, in a moment of modest contrition and candor, describes to us how he would steal from his patrons their apples and their sundry sweets and goods. He did it not out of animus toward those to whom he was unwittingly bound, but out of idleness for its own sake. It was an act of tedium more than anything else.

Augustine, more infamously, stole the ripened and delicious product of an innocent pear tree. Satiated merely with the act of the crime, he took the fruit not for his own bodily consumption, but for the fulfillment of his naughty soul. Perfunctorily taking at most one bite, he would toss the partially eaten fruit—the product and treasure of an industrious man’s work—to some ungrateful swine. With voracious acceptance and gustatory glee, the pigs to whom he was tossing these goods—knowing not the provenance of that which rolled toward their dirty snouts—ate ravenously and ate well. At the same time, however, Augustine’s decency, much less his later divinity, were defiled. His conscience was covered in mud.

Progressing from petty crimes to mild misdemeanors to consequential carnal affronts, the two partook of numerous sins of the “flesh”—and I don’t mean those sophomoric ones of which the trouser-less Rousseau was very publicly guilty. Both men, in the opinion of that honest Augustine, were “bound most straightly to carnal concupiscence”. Indeed, it was a binding from which neither man could extricate himself with ease. Neither Christianity nor philosophy proved a capable and lasting remedy to the intoxicating pleasures of the skin. So completely dependent was Augustine on his enticing inamoratas, his countless concubines—be they in the torrid streets of Africa or the bustling brothels of Rome—that he felt his happiness inextricable from their presence. He thought that he would become utterly miserable, unless “folded in female arms”. Thus, like a cheap lawn chair, he was fell upon himself in two.

He begot at least one child, about whom he speaks only in passing. He does so without even a scintilla of paternal care. Not surprisingly, this was the result of a liaison out of wedlock, for the good saint never did take in marriage a wholesome wife. He preferred his paramours unattached (and, if possible, nubile), but was almost induced to plunge into that solemn, inviolable union between wife and man.

Augustine, we’re told, very nearly submitted to matrimonial vows, which would’ve been a stark deviation from his later imitation of Christ. Endowed with money disproportionate to her years, a young girl (aged but ten) was chosen to be the saint’s pre-pubescent bride. He decided, at least for two years, to dither and to see if this fleeting desire wouldn’t yield. It did. History, looking back, smiles upon his delayed commitment to chastity and his hesitation to be made pure. All the world, educated in the rudiments of Western thought, knows of the plea for which, in hopes of a response, he looked to God. Make me pure, said the desperate Augustine, but not yet. Not yet. Those two words, simply but honestly spoken, make the statement recognizable in the heart of every man. They resonate in every soul. That line is the most candid expression of ambivalence ever to have trickled out of a man’s mouth. A man, one might add, who is maybe the first to be so completely self-aware. Yet, in being so entirely known to himself, he’s known to all of us, because his struggle lives within all of us. At least, from time to time, that ambivalence does. As such, Augustine’s supplication is one with which we can all empathize—even after a thousand years.

Unfortunately, Rousseau—though raised in the rugged and temperate clime of Geneva—proved himself far more fecund. I say unfortunately because his children—a brood about whose names and whose destines we know next to nothing—were never given the chance to meet their biological father. Considering his situation in life always to be unconducive to the rearing of a family, he sent all of his offspring to foundling asylums and never heard from them again. These orphanages, then as now, were notoriously under-funded. They also seldom attracted the necessary numbers of sterile or simply charitable parents. These children were the recipients of scant food, blankets commodities, and love as the asylum managers under whom they lived sought desperately for funds to sustain their superfluity of kids. Expectedly, the mortality rate of those unwanted children was discouragingly high. It’s unlikely that any of them, in the case of Rousseau’s children, even survived long enough to foster an angry disposition toward their absentee dad.

Rousseau did this against the wishes of the children’s grandmother—herself a shrew with whom the beleaguered philosopher quarreled daily. The woman from whose womb these unwanted children infelicitously yet continually dropped, was called Thérèse. After a long and amorous affair with an older woman named Maman (an uncomfortable sobriquet reflective of her relatively advanced age), Rousseau took as his lover—never as his wife—the homely Thérèse.

The two made a decent pair. She was not quite commensurate with him in terms of intellect, eloquence, and taste—but who, outside of Voltaire, could claim in that age of Enlightenment to be? Innocent of philosophy, and—by Rousseau’s estimation—of nearly every other sin, she was a simple (and obviously fertile) girl with whom he got along well enough. Deviations from his devotion to her were infrequent and cautiously concealed, proving once again that philosophy and fidelity can sometimes co-exist. Only once did he deign to dally with a prostitute—a lapse in judgment for which he felt, much later in life, an inescapably heavy weight of remorse.

As you can see, both Augustine and Rousseau suffered from ailments of the soul. For Augustine, the remedy was a bishopric and a forgiving God. For Rousseau, the cure was solitary confinement and endless rumination about the original, guiltless state of man. But neither was immune to the decay of his own body. Sinners and saints alike join in their submission to maladies and anno domini. No amount of religion nor fame can provide so impregnable a shield as to halt the ravages of time and disease.

Augustine, by all evidence, was a robust and vivacious youth. Indeed, he had to be, if he were to evade—as all boys are wont—the smothering solicitude of his mother’s tender touch. It wasn’t until he acquired a post as a professor at the University of Milan that he developed an enigmatic pulmonary condition by which he was rendered breathless. That which ailed him continues to perplex modern doctors (of medicine, not of the church) as they persist in their pursuit of a post-mortem diagnosis. Perhaps, as is my hunch, the debilitating disease by which he was temporarily rendered voiceless was factitious in nature; he wanted nothing more than to be liberated from his professorial commitments, as a truant seeks any path by which to circumvent his school. And so, he “faked”, if you will, a tickled throat and a cough, and his future outside the university was cleared.

He was, at the time, teaching rhetoric to students desirous to pursue careers in such unsavory fields as government, diplomacy, chicanery, and law. The ability to make the worse argument the better was his expertise, and the spoken word—whose sole intention was, then as now, to inflate one’s power and one’s purse—was the means by which he buttered his bread. Disillusioned with that which occupied his working life, this profession no longer appealed to him. No word, save that which exalted God, could carry for him henceforth any significant meaning or weight. Short of breath, still shorter of patience, he was able to walk away from his position on what we might now call a “medical leave”. He went from sabbatical to sacerdotal, from professor to priest. The rest, as they say, is history; he rushed off to Hippo and became his religion’s second greatest man—the first place, at least at the time of this writing, still belonging to Christ.  

Shifting our gaze upon the Swiss musician Rousseau, we see that his disease never did leave him. Aside from the often mawkish, always contagious, emotion that coursed through his throbbing veins, he was ailed by the bothersome retention of his urine. It is, we must admit, a far less poetic malady by which one can hope to be infected. But not every ailment, be it penile or pulmonary, can be so nobly attractive. We must suffer our lot. That said, this problem, as did all his others, began when Rousseau was but a child. Micturition was, at that sensitive age of his youth, an immense struggle from which he found little relief. Every gulp of water and sip of cider portended an inevitable bout of pain. Hydration was, for him, no consolation—the lavatory no sanctuary from his distress.  

Upon entering his teenage and early adult years, he enjoyed a brief respite. Unmercifully, it lasted not nearly long enough. The ailment, so torturous and chronic, was later to return. It recrudesced as he gained in maturity and renown. Stridently opposed to medical intervention of any type (he thought it an infringement on the natural resilience and vitality of man), he never did seek for his issue the proper avenues and pharmaceuticals of help. He opted instead, with philosophical endurance and stubborn resolve, to combat the problem on his own. Though, ultimately, it wasn’t the cause of his death (an apoplectic stroke, arriving in his sixth decade of his life, sealed his fate), it did pester him for many miserable years.

I said at the outset that autobiographies aren’t always to be trusted. I won’t depart from Dostoyevsky on this point. I admit that this remains the case, but that doesn’t mean we can help ourselves from being moved—especially when caught in the gravity of so massive a store of genius—to places of credulity, acceptance, and belief. Perhaps it’s here worth noting that Rousseau never openly promised us the truth. We merely expected it of him (in rejection of Dostoyevsky’s maxim to which we thought ourselves devoted). As for Augustine, a veritable saint would never lie. The object of Rousseau’s confessions, as he warned us early in his work, was to “reveal my inner thoughts exactly in all situations of my life”. His Confessions was to be “the history of my soul that I have promised to account”.  Yet the soul, for all its perpetual intrigue and ethereal clout, is never so easily grasped. Less so is it ever fully to be believed.

I leave you now to enjoy, in your own good time, these two immensely important autobiographies. By knowing them, you’ll know more of yourself. And, if so compelled, you can even make some of your own confessions—a welcome addition to the volumes that exist. We will read them, smile, and cringe. But as for the investment of our belief, that we must reserve; we can’t hope to know others until we move, if only an inch closer, toward a fuller knowledge of ourselves.  

Before ever there was an Atlantic to be crossed, there was an Atlantis to be conquered. Though we Americans are the beneficiaries of the combined accomplishment of the two feats, we tend not to focus on both as we should. Unfortunately, our attention is somewhat uncoupled on this matter and we can’t adequately realign it to fit our present needs. Of these two remarkable events by which the west was won and modernity defined, the second is given short shrift. Indeed, our attention lays upon the former to the near-exclusion of the latter. My argument, ever for the advancement of the unacknowledged and the underdog over whom we continually gaze, is that each is of immense import.

First, however, we review that feat with which we’re all most familiar. Familiarity, though, at least in my application of it, might be too neutral a term—one incapable of capturing in seven syllables the endless invectives by which this particular event has come to be surrounded. More than merely familiar, it’s the feat—especially at this truculent moment at the mid-point of October—by which we’re most contentiously aroused. Perhaps what’s said to be true of acquaintances can also be applied to conversations and to topics; familiarity becomes the breeding ground for contempt. We step into this fetid atmosphere and engage, if only in passing, with the topic of Columbus Day and the man by whom the beleaguered holiday was inspired.

A discussion of the advent of European settlers to the American continent is one always productive of tension. This wasn’t always the case, but certainly it is so today. Nothing, at least for this single week of the year, is quite as polarizing as that expedition which occurred in 1492—that annus mirabilis after which the world began to open and turn. Although I’m not naturally a man inclined to such discord nor disputation over fifteenth-century faits accompli, I find in this gap of opinion between which we all float nothing unworthy of a civil discussion. So long as we explore our past with proper circumspection and restraint (that is, in a way somewhat contrary to the approach by which those early Europeans came upon these shores), a plunge into this hemisphere’s history is bound to cause some dissent. But the descent is of great and abiding value, and we must take it when we can.  

The Atlantic Ocean was crossed in the year 1492 (a statement of history with whose veracity we won’t dare to contend) but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t also crossed much earlier. American by birth and temperament but Hibernian by ancestral inheritance, I like to think that the Irish monastics of the fifth-century, as opposed to the Spanish hidalgos of the fifteenth, were the first to have made the tempestuous passage from the Old World to the New. Filled with the winds of missionary zeal and inspired by a literal belief in the truly “catholic” nature of the presence and practice of Christ, these Irish monks set sail to make converts of pagans all over the world.

Most “Columbus-like” of these inchoate Celtic explorers was the legendary churchman and seaman, St. Brendan (lamentably, most church fathers of our day express their semen in different, far more deleterious ways). As the French writer and antiquarian Ernest Renan noted in his encomium on the children of Erin, St. Brendan’s was a spirit of unnatural devotion and extraordinary daring. He was, as proved by the multiple maritime endeavors of which he was in command, as pious as he was ambitious; as faithful as he’s now fabled. He led on regular pilgrimages around the Scottish archipelagos and the foreboding Irish seas an ardently-religious armada of Hibernian monks. These robed Irish eremites, crammed in their woven leather ships and imbued with the Lord’s holy ghost, found in their pursuits of heaven and new lands no obstacles by which their saintly efforts might be stalled. 

This, of course, came at a time when Atlantic navigation was in its infant stage. Nevertheless, St. Brendan succeeded in begetting a noble pursuit in whose seaborne wake many explorers and Christians later followed. The footprints of his tireless piety, revealed in the form of monasteries of which he was the unquestioned founder, were left on nearly every shore upon which he alighted. And, if the dissemination of a message is the sole criterion by which a missionary is to be judged, St. Brendan must be placed alongside that famous Syrian-Jewish apostate—that Damascene epileptic whom we’ve canonized as St. Paul.

What are we to make of this? Shorn of our ancestral bias and our inherent love of that emerald land, can we conclude with any degree of confidence that St. Brendan did in fact reach the American continent before anyone else? Suggestively, the master Renan, in his Poetry of the Celtic Races, offers a response that leans enticingly toward the affirmative. “Did they”, he asks with wonted eloquence, “not have a glimpse too of that great land, the vague memory of which seems to pursue them, and which Columbus was to discover, following the traces of their dreams?” Perhaps I need not be so explicit, but that great land of which he speaks was, and doubtless still is, America. The Frenchman’s sympathy for the United States, first lit during our Revolution, is present in him.

While the historicity of St. Brendan’s American landing is uncertain, that of Leif Erikson is not. Son of the rubicund Erik the Red, Leif Erikson (get it—Erik-son?) was an Icelandic explorer living in the eleventh-century after Christ. Indubitably, and to the great merit of that humble, frigid island about which little has been spoken since, Iceland gets the award for having been the first European state to send to that terra incognita across the Atlantic one of its own helmet-clad Viking sons. We thank her, with the collective gratitude of centuries yet to come and those since passed, for that ageless endeavor of which she was an initial and exuberant sponsor.

Landing at what was to be named “Vinland” (presumably for the fertility of its soil and the possible production of the grapes for that most Bacchic and Nordic of drinks), Erikson was awe-struck at what he found. The land was surprisingly vast, the climate invitingly familiar. The fisheries were temptingly rife, and the air—once filtered through the pliant whiskers of his gallant Norse beard—was virginal, vibrant, and pure. It was another, far more capacious world than that from which he came. Unlike that small, rather constrictive Icelandic island on which he was raised, that land beyond whose furthest boundaries most dared not reach, upon descrying the landscape of his newly-minted Vinland, the horizons and the land seemed interminable. No thought of its actual breadth could then be fathomed, nor would it be for many centuries to come.

Importantly, Leif Erikson wasn’t eager to pursue the idea of just how far inland he might ultimately trek. The coast and the convenience of the trade winds were more conducive to the extension of his own life and his crew’s loyalty. Indeed, the former was reliant on the latter. Minnesotans, confounding their football with their founder, tend to believe that Erikson, weary of these coastlines and insensate to the concerns of his crewmen and the northern chills, went so far westward as to arrive at their state. It was then, upon reaching Minnesota, that he stopped, turned around, and headed back east. This part of the story is unlikely, but that doesn’t mean the state should discharge from its sporting heritage that virile Viking logo and the weight of its team name. We grant its hearty citizens, inured both to reason and to season, to winter and to facts, this apocryphal belief—if only they leave to me my St. Brendan.

Colonization, especially in the Middle Ages, appears to have been a wearisome and logistically daunting task. What’s certain is that it proved not to be one in which Leif Erikson wanted for the rest of his life to be engaged. Thus, he left no lasting impression upon the continent for who’s founding he’s mostly responsible. That task, for better or worse, would be left to the Spaniards by whom he was succeeded—nearly five-hundred years hence.

At the risk of a provocation to anger, I’ll skip over the discoveries of Columbus at this point. I fear you won’t impugn me of harboring anti-Italian sentiment (or worse) for having done so. I freely acknowledge the superiority of the Genoese merchant to the Hibernian monk. On previous occasions, on prior days on which Columbus’s memory is, if not celebrated or excoriated, then at least observed, I’ve spoken at length about his importance. I’ve declared freely, and quite reverentially, the way of feel about his outstanding achievement and its meaning for the world.

All deference having been thus paid, for the remainder of this piece, I’d like to change directions from the vast Atlantic to mythological Atlantis—from that which is to that which perhaps never was. I’ll return to the first line with which this century-spanning and patience-straining article began.

Outliving all memory and evading every scrap of our archaeological record, Europe’s battle against Atlantis, we’re told on the best of authority, occurred some nine thousand years ago. Yes—St. Brendan was ancient, but this struggle is inconceivably old. This, at least, was the preferred, if not universally accepted, chronology by which Plato remembered the tectonic event. Technically, I suppose, it wasn’t actually Plato who described for us this first “world war” waged between the empires of Atlantis and Athens, but Critias—a man to whose learned verbosity and oratorical prowess an entire dialogue was dedicated. Really, though, his eponymous inclusion into the Platonic folio might better be called a monologue, for it’s he and he alone who handles the entirety of the speaking.

Critias, like Plato, was a proud and brilliant Athenian. Though not quite the crème de la crème, he was a sufficiently remarkable citizen to acquire inclusion in the pages of the great Plato’s thoughts. The two shared much in common. Both of aristocratic stock and haughty lineage that, at a point not very distant in their shared past, a convergence was known to have transpired, Critias and Plato shared in living during an age of fearsome intractability and tumult. The most precariously unsteady of those days were those leading toward the end of the fifth-century B.C.—a true fin de siècle that went out with a bang.

The Athenians had failed in their expedition to the impregnable island of Sicily. The Peace of Nicias was infringed and neglected, the man for whom it was named was killed, the roguish Alcibiades was ostracized and later traitorously avenged, and the combined forces of the Sparta’s army and Persia’s wealth proceeded to crush those democratically-enthused, now decimated children of Athena.

Critias, at this point, was set to become the leader of the short-lived but long-despised “Thirty Tyrants”—the oligarchs by whom the Athenians, so accustomed to their liberty and their vote, were to be ruled for one whole calendar year. Slightly before this self-propelled accession to his tyrannical throne, however, Critias provided Plato with a disquisition about the state of Atlantis. It was, as most of the Greek world knew, the sole landmass of the Atlantic beyond which nothing of commensurate firmness stood. It was the final terra firma, the last step before the abyss, upon which a wayward sailor might land.

Upon one’s exit through the Pillars of Heracles, punctuated on either side by the rocks of Gibraltar or Jebel Musa, there was long thought to be nothing else. Ne Plus Ultra, “go no more beyond”, was the supposed inscription that draped atop these proud promontories. Ever since the earthquake that sunk the island of Atlantis, this was deemed forbiddingly true. Outside of the Mediterranean world, the literal “middle of earth” at whose center civilization’s heart did beat, there was to be found no sanctuary.

But Critias explains that this wasn’t always the case. There was a time when the Atlanteans, an auspicious people of maritime fate raised in the hand of Poseidon, were considered to be the most sophisticated and dominant in the world. As too often is the case with burgeoning powers to whom divine sanction is given—be it in revelation or in wishful thought—the Atlanteans entered and demolished the Mediterranean world. Nary a people could put up a fight and there wasn’t one army by which their eastward march was thwarted. The Iberians were subdued, the Carthaginians were conquered, and the Etrurians of Italy were fought to the very brink.  

All that remained for the preservation of the world as it was then known were the Greeks. The Egyptians were also, as of yet, unscathed, but the might of that ancient people’s military has always been dubious. It was the unique task of the Greeks, specifically the intrepid Athenians, to push back against these Atlantic interlopers.

With somewhat unforthcoming detail (Critias spends more time describing the structure of Atlantean society), he tells us how they did. Those sons of Atlantis were repelled from the Mediterranean and sent back to their land. Upon their arrival, despondent and bereft of the imperium of which they were so nearly in possession, their troubles compiled. Through the duration of their conquest, their rapacity for land was astounding. So too was the impiety with which they treated their dear creator. The punishment they were to receive for having affected so unholy a demeanor was one, we recognize, for which the ever-irascible Poseidon was infamous. He kissed their island with an earthquake, and it fell upon itself into the depths of his sea.

Thus, on this Columbus Day, we take time to acknowledge not only those various crossings of the Atlantic Ocean—performed by the likes of St. Brendan, Leif Erikson, and Christopher Columbus—but of the nation after whom that body of water is named. Open up to Critias on this Columbus Day celebration, and probe the depths of Plato as did Atlantis the sea.

For what was, in my opinion, a disappointingly average film, Joker—starring the inimitable Joaquin Phoenix and, so far as I could tell, no one else—has recently held the conversation of the day. What’s more, it seems not to be loosening its grip. Apparently, the film has been deemed inimical to the sensitivities and hostile to the delicate tastes of most viewers (for whom, one might point out, other similarly-rated films—all of them more graphic and violent than this—have aroused no comparable reproach), the criticism by which it’s been inundated has been shocking. News outlets can’t stop commenting on it, pious Christians can’t stop condemning it, and humble blogs, such as the one in whose vacant receptacle my thoughts seem endlessly to accrue, can’t keep their distance from its controversial allure.

Certainly, the energy with which this film has been analyzed by both “users” and critics alike is incommensurate with the film’s cinematic worth. That much should be said from the start. In a word, if I could be so blunt, the film is not very good. Most of the criticism, then, if it arrives not a this same conclusion, is an exhalation of wasted breath. That doesn’t mean, however, that the film and the studio by which it was produced are attempting to avoid the contentious, thick, and soot-filled intrigue of this air. Lifted by the winds of so much publicity (be it good or, in this case, bad), the film is prepared to encounter profits and to reach the height of commercial altitudes that seldom a film that’s so objectively bad gets to see. Still, while its revenues will be inflated, so too will its value—and grossly so.

It’s neither tragic nor heroic, but tedious from its start till its end. Granted, the performance put in by Phoenix (who, like the bird for whom I think him aptly named, seldom fails to arise from the latencies of a long-lived Hollywood career and enflame us with the passion of his craft) is astounding, but it is narrowly confined. At the expense of breadth in the form of supporting actors and plotlines, there is remarkable depth in his singular person and the force of his skill. In this film, there is but one locus upon which our attention is permanently fixed. That would be on none other than the character of Phoenix, his Arthur Fleck—on every inch of his sadomasochistic soul.

Yet even Phoenix, despite his theatrical genius, risks becoming wearisome for the audience before which he laughs, cries, and kills. It soon tires of his mental illness, his nihilism, and the shrillness of his laugh. It searches in him for something onto which it can hold, but nary a crag is to be found. It’s for this reason, along with innumerable others, that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is uncontestably the superior film of the two: not only is Nolan’s Joker (upon whose figure the late Heath Ledger forever stamped his name—an approbation, I might add, that still applies, even in this ascendant age of Phoenix) more perfectly personified, but the context in which he exists is far more diverse and compelling.

One could, and—at this point—probably should indulge his desire for a digression. The temptation to do so, by which all those who think like me are overcome, is to celebrate The Dark Knight’s superiority and Heath Ledger’s unconquerablemerit. We must, at this time, show our restraint. We must forswear so jubilant a remembrance of a truly monumental person and film. Admittedly, such an encomium is on the tip of my tongue, but I’ll swallow it and I’ll resist. I’ll instead opt for another path.

Comparisons aside, Joker—whether it was intentionally made to be so or not—was a philosophically-rich film. That, of course, is quite different from it being cinematically worthwhile. Perhaps I was—through the duration of a yawn-inducing film—reading into its plot philosophical schools and ideas that didn’t actually apply, but I thought I sensed in this film the influence of two thinkers in particular—each one of lasting provocation and, upon your reading of them, pernicious renown.

Upon seeing, and—due to the craftiness of the cinematic approach—very nearly sniffing the rapidity and the insatiability with which Phoenix’s “Arthur Fleck” consumed his endless cache of cigarettes, my mind immediately leapt to Sigmund Freud. How could it not? This terrible and insalubrious habit, I thought, must be representative of what the good doctor of Vienna and its discontents might’ve called an oral fixation—one manifesting itself inappropriately late in life. Normally, during this psychosexual stage of Freudian development (which spans, for all those young parents concerned, the time from the child’s immediate birth until the first year of his age), all pleasure is derived from the lips. This is the stage during which the basic acts of sucking, nursing, and exploring with the all-too-sensitive tongue are of the greatest import and of the most incessant application.

Deprived of this opportunity for oral exploration and tactile glee, the child—now grown—must find a way to appease that of which he was, in his youth, bereft. Thus, an “oral” person, whenever laden by anxieties or burdened by despairs, will satisfy his desire by holding something in the mouth. It’s made clear that young Arthur Fleck, the adopted child of a deranged and delusional woman under the employ of the Waynes, was denied the solicitous care and bounty of his mother’s love—most readily transacted and communicated in the milk of her breast. It’s because of this that cigarettes, though noxious and destructive with the inhalation of every plume, substitute and appease this latent desire. It might also be noted that no other character, so far as I can recall, was to be seen with a cigarette in her hand.

Following Freud just a bit longer, though probably—as tends to be the case with that devilish Austrian shrink—just an inch too far, a psychoanalytically-inclined audience member might accuse poor Arthur of suffering from an Oedipal complex. In this particular case, the Jocasta of his heart’s yearning would be the mentally-unstable matriarch by whom he was once adopted, and with whom, much to our discomfort, he still lives. Until he decides to smother with a pillow her ailing and expressionless face and, having done so, hasten the arrival of her inevitable death, Arthur is rather morbidly infatuated with his mother. He bathes her, he feeds her, he dances with her, and he sleeps at her side—all while she appears quite capable of handling at least the first two of those activities well-enough on her own. Until his liberation in the hospital from her Sophoclean pull, he is, in a word, enamored of his mom. The solicitude with which he exerts himself to tend to her every need and ease her life of dubious decrepitude, would be enough to make blush that royal Theban prince—now an incestuous Grecian king.  

To fall into the Freudian rabbit hole is, as most modern psychologists will admit, a dangerous descent. Yet, however ample our forewarning, this trap lays open, even yawning, at our feet. It sits before us, a gaping chasm in the terra firma of this, the “hard” science of psychology, out of which the Freudian devotees and the acolytes of psychoanalysis seldom climb. Once a plunge is made into its depths and a breath is taken of its air, the future possibility of an ascent is unlikely. It is, in a word, a most powerful and persuasive intoxicant.

Often, the attribution of Freud’s ideas to people, much less to fictional characters, studied from afar is misplaced. One can go very wrong in evoking the reliability of his creed. I concede as much, but still commit myself, although coyly and without sufficient scientific trust, to the notion that Phoenix is a Freudian figure. I feel no hesitation, however, in calling upon another philosopher to round out and color in the darkened hues of the Joker’s lurking shades.

The thinker upon whom my mind pivots next in its exploration of this character and of this movie was the great German sage, Friedrich Nietzsche. The Joker might find in him a person, albeit historical rather than fictional, with whom his tortured empathies might be shared. Toward the end of his short life, Nietzsche was—to put it mildly—an affiliate of the cognitively insane. Such was the consequence of lapse of his celibacy. His mind, already unstable, was overcome by the syphilitic venom that coursed through his veins.

Still, though sexually-compromised by this communicable “Gallic” disease, Nietzsche was able to beget nearly an entire brood of philosophical thought. This progeny would prove endless and his mind, while it lasted, devilishly fecund. In the coming decades, his children, his ideas, would dance and grow, eventually becoming a stimulus for the minds of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin.

Nietzsche was, in an ironic partnership with the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard, the father of Existentialism. We might designate Kierkegaard the mother—the Hera to Nietzsche’s Zeus. Without delving too deeply into this theory of thought (to which the Frenchman, Jean-Paul Sartre—by naming and popularizing it—gave impetus), we might most broadly categorize it as an extension of Nihilism. This too reads to most eyes as a pretentious and foreign term but it means, quite literally, “nothingness”. It means nothing else. Nihilism captures the idea that there is no inherent value in life. There is no objective ideal, no absolute meaning, no Platonic “Form”, no Judeo-Christian God to which we humans all jointly aspire.

In the absence of a system of values or of any recognizable meaning, we humans are left to the caprice and to the assertion of our own individual wills. Because there is no prescribed morality, no blessed good nor an odious evil by whose lines we would otherwise abide, we’re free to transcend all boundaries and create those values of our own choosing. Nietzsche thought that these silly concepts of “good and evil” were simple impediments beyond which we ought to move—and move vigorously, at that. He who was most capable of asserting his “will to power” would do so—ending ultimately in the acquisition of the title of Ubermensch, a term loosely defined to mean Over- or Superman.

The Joker is no such super hero, but he is a Nietzschean apotheosis of the first order. He is Nietzsche incarnate—a man risen from the solitude of the philosopher’s beloved Alps. To the Joker, all is without value, and all is for the taking. He is, or at least he becomes, completely nihilistic in his approach to life. It matters not what he does, so long as it wills it done. A definitive moment is when, in reference to the Existentialism of which I made earlier mention, he tells the distracted social worker in whom he’s compelled to confide that he’s felt himself to be non-existent for the majority of his life. Though not an original sentiment (indeed, one catches in its utterance a waft that’s very Fight Club-esque), it’s nonetheless arresting. However, once the Joker begins to kill, he begins more palpably to live. Only in death does he come alive. This is the assertion of his will to power, and it’s through this assertion that he comes to exist.

Is this too deep a reading into a mediocre film? Probably. But it’s where the mind, when not transfixed by the action and development of the plot, tends to go. Philosophy remains the greatest of life’s fascinations upon the stage behind our eyes. There’s no limit on one’s inward viewing when the exterior is so disappointing.  

The preferment of liberty to tyranny was, so I thought, an entirely settled case. After all, was this not the question, the eventual casus belli, indeed the vital dichotomy over which our inchoate nation fought its first real war? Our mid-eighteenth-century American forebears, a distant group of men and women with whom the majority of us—so varied in our provenance and the hues of our skin—share rather philosophic than biologic links, made their intentions on this matter quite clear. In fact, they strained to make them uncompromisingly lucid, if only to avoid them being lost in the shades and the colorings of time. Their hope was that their preference to the light of liberty, to the incandescent, inviolable burning torch of freedom, wouldn’t require very much in the way of an explanation nor a studied defense.

For that reason, one need not plunge especially deeply into the depths of her patriotic soul, nor peruse with learned patience the lines of that age’s oratorical giants if she’s to retrieve from their undying words an example of their collective thought. Merely utter in the busy exhalation of your next departing breath the following three words, “Give me liberty…” and the immortality of the line’s second half will, as if involuntarily compelled, follow. The alternative to liberty, as that Virginia governor, that eloquent attorney, and that fatherly founder to whom we owe so much resoundingly declaimed, “Give me death!” Something of a Hobson’s choice in a Hobbesian moment (with war inching ever closer to his own front step), Patrick Henry was primed not to take what was first and most easily available to him (the tyranny of the British crown), but what was most natural to man and, paradoxically, most strenuously to be acquired—the right to one’s own liberty and the freedom to be.

Today, we observe with shame and, frankly, with disquiet as a third option introduces itself alongside those aforementioned two. Liberty and tyranny, strung at their opposites with a painful disharmony, tension, and noise, continue to waft in the air like an ancient tune. The former’s tendency, if Aristotle is to be believed, is to devolve into the latter. History has too often proven correct “The Philosopher” (as the Medieval scholastics, known for their mononyms, preferred to call him) by whom the great Alexander was taught. Liberty, left unchecked, becomes unstable. Unbound by convention and aristocratic oversight, it slips with dizzying verve into tyranny, as does an insouciantly dancing boy off the edge of a cliff. Tyranny is the net into which he falls. The surface by which his descent is interrupted is not soft and the echo made upon his landing is extreme. It creates a monotonous, often cruelly monarchical sound to which our slavish ears are made to submit.

The third chord to this all, the final ingredient in this mix is profitability. The music and the fall is thus complete. To review, we see set before us liberty, tyranny, and the motive for a profit. Usually, only two of the three can cohabitate, though never the first and second. Profit, however, is conformable to any environmentand, in the thicket of nearly every political jungle, can blend in and find its way to coexistence and to thrive.

This is the triangular web in which the NBA now finds itself entangled. Over this weekend past, the General Manager for the league’s Houston Rockets franchise, Daryl Morey, shot off a tweet. “Fight for Freedom”—he somewhat un-controversially declared—with the addition, indeed the imploration that we ought to join with him and “Stand with Hong Kong”. I hope, in having kept yourself abreast of the situation embroiling that formerly British province, I need not delve into the issue at this time. Suffice it to say, the situation by which Hong Kong, for at least twenty consecutive weeks, has been kept awake and on the edge of revolt is tenuous.

Not unlike that Patrick Henry line by which we still, all these years later, feel ourselves completely possessed, Morey’s words were brief. Added, I think, to this well-conceived brevity was whole mountain of moral clarity—a weight similar to that with which Henry’s were carried. It’s amazing to see how much movement can be effected with so little being said. That said, as were Patrick Henry’s words, Morey’s were inimical to the power under whose nose the burgeoning, freedom-loving country was shaking and clamoring. Tencent, the technology platform through which NBA games are to be streamed in that country, immediately broke its relationship with the Rockets. It threatened, at the risk of prodigious monetary loss, to do the same to any other team whose manager might find himself burdened by his conscience.

The opportunity for the league to display its moral clarity and courage, to announce and affirm the scruples on which it’s supposedly founded was ripe. It need only be plucked. The NBA, however, bobbled the attempt. It picked up the chance and tossed it to the floor, as if were a deflated ball and an empty cause.  

The NBA, having established a germinal presence in swelling Chinese sports and entertainment market, was quick to distance itself from Morey’s remarks. The fertility of the Chinese audience (to whose Eastern relish basketball has arrived like an intoxicating Western drug—much as their fentanyl has crossed the Pacific and succeeded in intoxicating us) and the prospects of the sport’s future popularity in Asia demanded that it demur from the support of one of its own. Left with his liberty to express himself on Twitter’s enticing platform, Morey was left alone, quite in isolation, for the audacity of having done so. The NBA, to whom cupidity and dollars are obviously more important than liberty and morals, has shown no compunction in leaving out to dry Morey as he feels the wrath of that Sino-serpentine, Dragon-like state.

In the pursuit of its dollar, so far as the NBA is concerned, liberty, tyranny, pusillanimity—all three are welcome so long as they pay. The preferment seems to be confused: is that which we most value liberty or tyranny? Or will profitability always come out on top? Morey, in this case, is learning that it does. Thus buried, not only by the Chinese media but by his own employers, we reach down to raise him up—and raise the point he was so bold to make. Freedom is not a gift given, with a complacent shrug of the shoulders and a blink of an eye, but an acquisition for which we and, now, the Hong Kongers continue to fight. Fight on, Hong Kong, fight on Patrick Henry, and fight on Mr. Morey.