In 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for his sexual leanings, which is both a reminder that queer people have always been here and also that though things are terrible right now they have been worse, which means correction of course is possible.
Oscar Wilde when he was still a society darling. During the Vietnam War, Hannah Arendt wrote her essay, Civil Disobedience, in response to the resulting American political and social upheaval. In it she defended the right of American citizens to protest and dissent, but argued such endeavor should come not from personal moral impulse but rather from the spirit and parameters of the law. She also argued that civil disobedience should be non-violent, as it is not a revolution, and serves another purpose.
Many have since argued (rightly, in my opinion) that this take fails to consider those oppressed by the social and legal contracts of this land.
And yet, much of what she wrote in 1968 feels urgently relevant. For instance:
Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.
Arendt was, in her text, in conversation with Henry David Thoreau’s essay of the same title. Thoreau’s essay was written in 1849, during the Mexican American War. It was also a time when slavery was legal. Thoreau approved of neither.
He was a tax resistor, arguing, in a way that echoes much of what I’ve seen on social media in the last two weeks:
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
Thoreau’s essay argues that one must value and act upon one’s own moral conscience rather than the shared conscience dictated by the law.
Arendt’s friend, Mary McCarthy, agreed with Thoreau, and said so in a letter.
This is a reminder that those before us have also had to consider how one should arrange one’s personal life in response to a grim political present.
In 1785 Robert Burns wrote this poem that captures perfectly how I feel right now (I am the wee timorous beastie, to be clear), which is a reminder that there are still some who won’t kill the mouse, a fellow mortal, with the plough, though in looking forward I, too, guess and fear and view the prospects as drear:
To a Mouse
On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss ’t!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
Other notes and news:
Bookshop.org is now offering e-books. I’m a paper and ink lady as a whole, but when I travel or backpack I love my e-reader, though until now a certain mega corporation has had a stronghold on the tech.
In celebration of this new means of having what we want with slightly less ethical horror attached*, I’ve made some curated bookshelves for you to browse on Bookshop.org.
Also, we have just returned from a long trip and I’m excited to be cooking in my own kitchen again. This week I’m pulling recipes from this book. Sadly, I couldn’t link on Bookshop, as it’s out of print. I bought my copy used many years ago and it’s been a trusty companion, having moved with me across the country more than once.
*Footnote to add that all tech objects are made of mined earth minerals and their consumption should be kept to a minimum and they should always be recycled when retired.