Literature is life, and we're all going to die.

When my AP Literature students walk into my classroom at the beginning of the school year, I am aware that I need to try to change the way they think about literature in a number of ways.  I've given this speech—or a variation of it—to my AP Literature students early in the school year for the last two years, and, in preparation for the start of this new semester, I thought I'd write it out in full.  I usually get some horrified looks from my students as my monologue unfolds, but before I start my rant, I ask them to consider the phrase "Literature is Life" and discuss with their table partners what they think it means.

How many of you noticed that the literature you read in high school tends to have sad endings?  Have you ever wondered why that is? Are your teachers trying to depress you? Do they take pleasure in ruining your faith in mankind?  Maybe they are trying to prove Wesley's quip in the Princess Bride: "Life is pain...Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."

It actually comes back to the phrase we talked about earlier: "Literature is life".  I want you to say it with heavy emphasis on the second word. 

Literature is life.

Literature is life just as two plus two is four.  Literature is representative of life. It reflects life.  It is a snapshot of life. Hamlet says that the purpose of drama is "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature".  Its purpose is to illuminate the human experience. And other than being born, every human shares one universal experience.  Dying.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one of the reasons that there are so few happy endings to novels, stories, and plays is that there aren't really any happy endings in life.  We all die. In other words, if books worth studying (studying, not just reading) are meant to teach us about what it means to be human, then they are being disingenuous when they claim, "And they lived happily ever after."  "Messily ever after," perhaps. "In seasons marked by both joy and grief for the rest of their days," perhaps. But regardless of how we live, we will one day stop breathing, and die, our bodies decaying under the ground or reduced to ashes in a furnace.

If literature is supposed to help us understand the human experience, then it has to include death, doesn't it?  Just as the love of Romeo and Juliet is made more dramatic set in a society torn apart by hate, the writer who wants to convey the majesty and aching beauty of life must juxtapose it with its counterpart: death.

In many ways, though, death is not just the biological reality of this world.  In literary tradition, going all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve, death is connected with and even created by human foolishness.  It is the ultimate penalty for stupidity, for sin, for vice. And so literature becomes, as much as anything, the story of mankind's folly. In East of Eden, John Steinbeck claims that there is only one story, and that "all novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves between good and evil".

We cannot escape this reality, for if we are honest, we live it every single day.  That is why we shouldn't read to escape the real world; rather, we should read to immerse ourselves in it and learn more about it.  And we can't learn about life if we insist on happy endings, on characters who are like us, on people we understand immediately. There is beauty, however tragic it may be, in our recognition of another human's struggles against his own frailties.  More than that, there is deep empathy gained when we see ourselves in someone who initially seems foreign and incomprehensible. So although many of you cannot immediately understand the hubris of Okonkwo, the narcissism of Hamlet, or the aloofness of Mr. Darcy, when you remember that these characters are simply part of a great human tradition—as you yourselves are—of choosing folly over wisdom, the text becomes instantly more accessible.  These are characters unlike anyone you know in person. But they are human, and how wonderful it is to know that! And, yes, they are fictitious, but it doesn't mean we can't learn from them. So we need realism, for it is only in realism that we can see the world for what it is: broken and messy.

A hastily made list of the works of literature I teach or that I've taught in the past.  I think it speaks for itself!

Now, this does not mean that literature has to be depressing, for we know that so much of life is glorious and beautiful.  We are not living, to quote Switchfoot, "in the world of if onlys, stretched tight in between our birth and our graves". For a start, while literature may reflect our lives, it does not have to define them.  I think that there are actually very few stories that fail to offer hope. Our mistake is, I think, in always looking at the ending. If we measured our lives by how they end, then we are all, by definition, unsuccessful, because we ultimately fail at living!  But scattered throughout the pages of all literature—and our lives—are those transcendent, transformative moments where good rises out of bad. Redemption coming out of suffering, forgiveness when it isn't deserved, power in weakness, and victory in defeat. That's why we read.   These are universal traits of the human spirit. Of course, the most memorable and beautiful stories often have these moments at the end, but the reality is that we can find them anywhere in good books. Most significantly, though, while there is plenty of literature that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit, we read, not because we have escaped foolishness through our moments of glory, but because we can only find true glory through, after, learning from, or even in the very midst of our moments of foolishness.  Or, as one of my students put it, "We read because humans have been fools for thousands of years."

I think there is one other thing that literature offers us.  Beauty. You may not see this in all literature, just as you may not see beauty in all aspects of life, but both life and literature shine a light on things—like sacrificial love—that sometimes make no sense in this world.  We can't put our finger on it, but there are things we can never explain about literature. C.S. Lewis suggests that beauty is a mere reflection of something greater: "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited".   It is why it is a travesty to claim that Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, merely teaches us that war is bad and that it takes away soldiers' humanity.  To reduce the meaning of that novel to a clean, precise phrase—which is, unfortunately, what I will be trying to teach you to do in order to pass the AP Literature exam—is to merely look at it scientifically, splitting it up into all its component parts.  And when we write about literature, we can't really avoid this. But perhaps I can convince you, as you read and discuss, to linger over the magic of words and the way they stir our souls in ways we can't accurately express.

So as you journey through the world of Shakespeare, Achebe, Bradbury, Austen, Ibsen, Chopin, and Baldwin, I hope you will discover the sometimes paradoxical truths that these writers illuminate and embrace the fragile, ephemeral, complicated existence we all share, whether you like it or not.

I, Claudius?

At the end of this past school year, my brain addled by the almost 1,000 AP Literature essays I had read during second semester, I assigned my students one final — but slightly different — piece of writing. I asked them to write about which character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet resonated with them personally and why.

I think the sign of a good essay prompt is that it tempts even the teacher to write. And so it tempted me. Look, it had been a long school year; writing an essay was the last thing I wanted to do. But if you’ve ever read, seen, or experienced the tale of the Danish prince, you will probably understand my compulsion to write. The play delves so deeply into the human experience that if we interact authentically with it in any way, some form of response is necessary.

So what follows was initially designed to be an exemplar essay that I could use for my students next year—hence the citations — so the tone may seem a little un-bloggy, if that makes sense.

Humans are designed to live in community. Whether you hold the view that the traditional, nuclear family is best, or you see benefit in other, non-traditional family arrangements, it’s easy to see that humans thrive when they are in supportive, loving, and united communities. The antithesis of living in community is living in isolation. Isolation robs humans of the empathy that contact with others provides. It traps people inside their own minds. Most of all, it deprives us of essential support systems that even the strongest among us needs. Perhaps the most dangerous form of isolation is when it afflicts those who seem to live in (or have convinced you that they are part of) a healthy community. William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is full of characters who appear to the outside world to be in a thriving community yet live in isolation and suffer its pernicious consequences. Gertrude, bereft of her first husband, is shunned by her own son and cannot be honest with her new husband. Ophelia, without the guidance of her absent older brother, is shamelessly used by her father and dies broken and alone. Hamlet, of course, is the first to show the effects of isolation. For him, Denmark certainly is “a prison” (II.2.262), but it is the twin monsters of grief and mistrust that greedily devour any meaningful connection he has with other people. Much as I see myself in Hamlet — that’s a story for another day — it is Claudius and his relationship with isolation that fascinates me. In not only suffering from but also in actively fomenting his own isolation, the usurping King of Denmark showcases our — and my own — tendency to shut ourselves off from others. The cost of this is simple but devastating; it is nothing less than our humanity.

Claudius has spent time curating the perfect image of a king: he is a shrewd diplomat, an effective ruler, a loving husband, and an apparently indulging step-father.   A closer look at his actions, however, would suggest otherwise.  We, of course, find out quickly that he murdered the previous King Hamlet — his brother — and then hastily married Gertrude, his former sister-in-law.  His villainy is clear, but I think it is intentionally maintained and increased by a lack of real intimacy with others.  Even when he refers to himself in the first person plural (the “royal we”), as he does throughout the play, it creates a false sense of togetherness. “We” and “us” suggests connectivity and communal decision making, but nothing could be further from the truth; at the heart of all Claudius does lies the one thing most humans crave: control. Claudius’ court is one of surveillance and spying, where “madness in great ones must not unwatched go” (III.1.202), where the watchmen can only "whisper" (I.1.91) their theories for why they seem to be in a state of war, and where he and Polonius, "lawful espials,...see[ing] unseen" (III.1.35-36), observe Hamlet's interactions with others.  This all serves to provide the King with information, but it also ensures that he protects himself from unwanted intimacy. Or any intimacy, for that matter.  Polonius does all his dirty work for him and passes on the "tea" so that Claudius can stay informed.  In the same way, I often rely on my wife to have those conversations with friends, the kids, even my own family members and then relay that information to me.  It's easy, clean, and the emotion greatly diminished now that it's a second-hand account.  I'm up to date but not really involved.  Facebook — when I was active on it — was the perfect way to do this: people giving you permission access to their intimate moments, albeit perfectly curated ones, without really making any of the kinds of meaningful connections that make life both rich and messy.

As a side note, it is perhaps worth pointing out that Claudius actually perpetuates isolation in others, even as he criticizes it. As Hamlet “persever[s] in obstinate condolement” in mourning for his late father, Claudius castigates him, calling it “unmanly grief” and accusing Hamlet of having “a heart unfortified” (I.2.96-100), and insisting that he stays with his family in Denmark "in the cheer and comfort of [his] eye" (120).  Claudius's inability to appreciate — itself a byproduct of his lack of emotional connection with his new stepson — the mechanics of grief merely deepens Hamlet’s own isolation.  To many, Claudius is simply saying the wrong thing, but his words are indicative of the real damage we can do when we attempt to help those who are suffering.  When my wife's brother died suddenly in 2005, I didn't know what to say, even to my wife or my in-laws.  My clumsy attempts at condolence were no better than Claudius's, and they exposed my lack of real intimacy in those relationships at that time and forced my wife into her own isolation of grief.  It was a dark period in our marriage.

As a Christian, I am usually comforted by the knowledge that God is with me and that He is the ultimate protector and comforter.  The times when I have felt separated from God have led to the most profound feelings of remoteness, and Claudius, it would appear, has done just this.  We first get the sense that Claudius is more complex than simply being a villain in Act III, Scene 1, when in a brief aside he refers to his duplicity and his "heavy burden" (62).   Then, in Act III, Scene 3, there is a remarkable moment where Claudius kneels alone, wrestling with profound ideas of sin, repentance, and forgiveness.   Admitting that his "offense is rank" (40), he claims that his guilt — the very conviction that he has done something wrong — is paralysing his attempts to make amends.   He knows full well that God has the ability to make his soul "white as snow" (50), but cannot bear the prospect of admitting to his crimes and giving up the benefits he has reaped from them.   He finds the notion of simply saying "Forgive me my foul murder" (56) ludicrous even as he knows that true repentance is the only way in heaven, where power and influence cannot "[buy] out the law" (64).  The climax of the speech comes with these heart-rending lines:

Try what repentance can.  What can it not?

Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?

Simply put, while Claudius longs to be free from the guilt and shame of his murderous, adulterous actions, he cannot bring himself to ask for forgiveness.  It is the story of so many of us when it comes to wrongdoing, of any kind.  It is amazing that we actually choose to feel guilty and to live with regret instead of asking for forgiveness.  We would rather stay isolated than return to the fold.  We would rather stay with brokenness than risk the renewed intimacy of healing.  The darkness feels safer than the light.  God's light of forgiveness exposes every corner of our hearts and many of us would rather hold on to those dark recesses, even if it risks separation from Him.  Even on his knees, Claudius still chooses isolation.

The start of Claudius's soliloquy: "O, my offense is rank..."

After this profound experience, Claudius's isolation is so entrenched that he cannot bring himself to talk honestly to his wife.  At the beginning of Act IV, Gertrude and Claudius have their only private conversation (fewer than 40 lines) in the entire play.  Much of what the king says to his wife here seems to be either the product or the instigator of isolation: there no grief for his trusted advisor Polonius, whose death at Hamlet's hands Gertrude is recounting; rather, he is focused on self-preservation and how to best limit the damage to his own image, saying that "this vile deed we must with all our majesty and skill both countenance and excuse" (1.30-33).  The real give away, though, is not the lack of any mention of his deep regrets and inner turmoil — we can perhaps understand why he wouldn't confide in Gertrude his past murder of her husband and his future plan to murder her son — but the use of the decidedly cold and impersonal "your son" (3).  Earlier, in an attempt to ingratiate himself to his new stepson, he refers to him as "my son" or at least tries to get Hamlet to see him as a father (I.2.66, 111-112, 121).  He has now emotionally withdrawn from both Hamlet, which makes any possible understanding of Hamlet's erratic behaviour impossible, and his wife, who, perhaps sensing her husband's duplicity, seems to be withdrawing from him, too.  In our most difficult times, we need to be honest and transparent with those around us, especially with those with whom we would claim intimacy.  I feel this keenly, particularly with the malicious impact of depression, which often forces me deeper into myself and stiffens my mask instead of making me seek support and solace from friends, even from those who love me and who know me best.

Death, of course, is the ultimate isolation.  In the play’s denouement in Act V, Scene 2, Hamlet, who has just come to terms with his own mortality (234-238), dies in the arms of his best friend, whereas Claudius’ last orders, “Do not drink” (317) and “Help me, friends” (355),  are notable in that they are not obeyed. Claudius dies alone, hated, and victim of the ultimate truth: that tyrants’ paranoia is rooted in the fear of those they rule.  One of Hamlet's obsessions is ensuring that Claudius dies "unshrived" — without a chance to confess his sins — and I wonder whether, in his final moments, with the poison coursing through his veins, Claudius thinks back to his missed opportunity where he was so close to repenting in Act III, Scene 3.  Either way, as John Steinbeck suggests about people who die unloved, "his dying must be a cold horror".

I also think that isolation is becoming more and more a Western problem.  In April 2018, I spent a week in northern Jordan with Syrian refugees. When I returned home and started back at work, I was convinced that the trauma I had witnessed and heard about was far beyond anything my students in middle-class San Marcos had experienced.  And perhaps it was.  However, I quickly found myself feeling far more pity for many of my students who were experiencing hardship and suffering.  Most of the Syrians I met lived in the community of an extended family.  They shared meals and beds, but they also shared the heavy burden of grief and trauma.  Many of my students have iPhones, but they don't have extensive support systems.  Like most of the characters in Hamlet, many of them go through stress, anxiety, and pain on their own, often pretending that everything is fine.  It is no way to live.

Truthfully, I actually often take real pleasure in being remote.  I'm an introvert, so I do need to be alone in order to relax and recharge.  However, I often seek sequestration because I just don't want to be around others and because I don't feel like being vulnerable or even honest.  This is, of course, patently unhealthy.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian martyred by the Nazis just weeks before the end of the Second World War, put it this way: "One who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair."  It is here that we meet Claudius, where we are forced to acknowledge that even our very needs can have dark consequences.

Shakespeare, as he does so often with antagonists, humanizes Claudius in a profound and powerful way.  The beauty of literature is that it allows us to see ourselves in even the most villainous, which then helps us see the villainous things in ourselves.

A good man is hard to find

Just before the US presidential election of 2008, I remember having a conversation with someone about Senator John McCain, who was running against Barack Obama.  After some back-and-forth discussion about McCain's policies and record, she said, with an air of finality, "He's a good man."

I've been thinking recently about this and about the idea of legacy.  What is it that makes a person good?  At what point can you look at someone's life and objectively say, "He was a good man"?

Let's leave aside the obvious answer that someone we know, love, or already admire is going to have much more of an opportunity to claim that title.  Not knowing someone, their story, or their background leaves us, I feel, much more liable to judge harshly.

Clearly, the reason that this is problematic is that none of us are perfect.  Like drops of black paint added to a bucket of white, each of our mistakes, errors, failures, sins—call them whatever you want —changes the balance of good and bad in our souls, in some cases barely perceptibly, but as anyone who's ever painted a bedroom or a bathroom will tell you, almost white is not white.

Yet we can all recite a list of people whom we consider essentially good: Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Grandma, our children.  Ourselves.

So if we have these two truths—some humans are good, and no-one is perfect—then we must have a measure or a standard of goodness.  Maybe, like the ancient Egyptians, we have some kind of cosmic scales on which we metaphorically weigh our hearts.  Maybe there's a way to add up all the good we've done and place it next to all the evil we've done.  And if so, what's the tipping point?  50%?  If I can say that I've done more evil than good over the course of my life, then I can claim to be a good person.  Right?  That seems fair.

But now we run into some other, more murky issues.  Do some deeds count more or weigh more heavily than others?  Is murder 1,000 times worse than running a stop sign?  If I then run 1,001 stop signs over the course of my life - come to California if you don't believe it's possible - am I now worse than a murderer?  Or does committing murder make me evil, regardless of how much good I do before or after?  And what about good deeds?  Do some count more than others?  Is holding the door open for a lady a good deed, or is it just basic human decency?  Or is it condescending and archaic, thus adding to your myriad run stop signs and other nefarious deeds in your life?

Maybe we can agree on just making sure we obey all laws.  If you don't break the law, you're a good person.  This is problematic too.  What laws are we talking about?  Different countries have different laws.  Heck, different families have different laws.  I know you can't go to prison for teasing your younger brother (although I'm willing to hear arguments for it), but just like any society, our household operates under certain rules.  Or are minors exempt?

Aren't some laws, let's face it, inconvenient or foolish?  And aren't some—Jim Crow and other segregationist policies—downright immoral?  And surely it's possible to keep all laws and still be a horrible person.  It's not against the law, for example, to lie to my wife and tell her that I've been working diligently in the garden when I've actually been binge-watching The Great British Baking Show.  It's not even illegal to cheat on one's spouse, but most people would agree that it's a pretty despicable act, all the same.  There are many people who make a very good living out of helping people do lawful, but arguably unethical actions, such as managing our money so that we pay as little tax as possible.  And that's the key, isn't it?  "Arguably".

It is very hard to establish whether someone is "good" or not when we have considerable differences of opinion over what is right or wrong.  And if that's the case, it must be true that we do not all have the same standards of morality.

Does morality change with location?  With time?  With administration?  If I attempted to enslave my children or my neighbors, people would be outraged, yet Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and he seems to have been given a pass by most of us.  The discussion over statues of historical figures, such as Winston Churchill, whose lives, actions, and thus legacies, are rendered far more complex after an objective view of history or a rethinking of our values, is another good example of this.

A good man?

So, to recap, we don't have a way of determining how much good a person needs to do to be considered good.  Nor do we have a universal standard against which we can measure actions and determine them to be good or bad.

It's a bit of a mess, and we haven't even looked at actions that could be deemed immoral but "don't hurt anybody" or unintentionally committed crimes (or even accidentally committed good actions), or thoughts and ideas that are immoral but aren't acted upon.

I don't think it's a stretch to say, though, that regardless of the apparently arbitrary standards we set for ourselves (or is it only for others?), we have all done things that are either illegal, unethical, or immoral, even if we've never been caught.

So where does that leave us?  None of us are Jesus.  None of us are as evil as Adolf Hitler.  Most would say it is reasonable to assume that we all fall somewhere between those two extremes.  Where on that spectrum does good end and evil begin?  And who determines that?

It seems as if many of us have fallen into one of two camps.  First, we have those who have a sliding scale of morality.  It changes by situation, location, time period, and intention and becomes a personalized morality that we essentially adjust as necessary.  The cynic would say we do this so that we make sure we fit somewhere on the good spectrum, along with our friends, family, and those who vote the same way we do.  Realistically, then, the only people we can truly judge are ourselves because we know that others have a different idea of what is moral.  Or worse, we expose ourselves as hypocrites because we overlook or even excuse actions we would usually consider immoral in people we know or like, such as our preferred presidential candidates.  It's an "us versus them" approach to morality.

The other camp consists of those of us who basically say that everything is permissible.  Because we cannot agree on what constitutes moral behaviour, and any attempt to enforce it creates unfairness, unnecessary restriction, and abuse of power, then we leave people to their own devices.  "Hey, do your thing.  As long as you're not hurting anyone, who am I to judge?"  It sounds good, doesn't it?  What's interesting, though, is that by not judging, we are actually judging.  When we say, "I'm not judging you", I am not only making a judgement, I am implicitly judging your behaviour as acceptable.

There is a third camp, whereby you assume that all humans are evil.  William Golding, particularly in Lord of the Flies, has a lot to say about this.  So does the Bible.  So do, interesting enough, a lot of pieces of literature which explore the darker side of humanity.  Personally, I subscribe to this point of view—that humans are redeemed but inherently immoral—but there aren't a lot of people I know who consider themselves evil.  In a recent interview on NPR, archeologist Sarah Parcak said, "In spite of all the terrible things we have done to each other, I think we're 51% good."  While this is clearly meant as a statement emphasizing the speaker's hope for humanity, rather than an empirical evaluation, it does speak to the tendency we have as humans—even as we recognize evil in others and not in ourselves—to believe the best of our race.  And while believing the best in others can be wonderful, it can also cause us to be myopic.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry is confronted by the complex legacy of several characters about whom he had very clear-cut beliefs.  Albus Dumbledore, his hero, was seduced as a young man by Grindelwald's ideas, causing great suffering in his own family.  Godric Gryffindor took the sword, which only presents itself to the valiant in times of need, from the goblins who made it.  Remus Lupin, another mentor, attempts to abandon his wife and child.  And then, of course, there's Severus Snape, whose hatred for Harry cannot be disregarded even after we find out the depths of his bravery and love.  Harry's conflicting emotions regarding Dumbledore, in particular, threaten to derail his entire quest to defeat Voldemort, and he has to learn the nuanced view of humanity that his godfather Sirius tries to teach him two books earlier: "The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters."  We always struggle when someone we idolize turns out to have previously unknown faults: witness the fallout over the recent discovery of Ronald Reagan using racist language.

If there's a story that helps us understand our difficulty with processing morality, it is Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find".  In it, a prim southern grandmother comes face to face with an escaped convict called The Misfit.  At the start of the story, it is clear who is good and who is evil.  By the end, we see the selfishness and arrogance of the grandmother and we listen to the background and rationale of The Misfit's actions, and as we honestly evaluate their characters, we are forced to objectively and baldly conclude that they are essentially the same—or at least that they are no different.

It seems that we could apply some of the nuance required to study literature to our own views when it comes to the innately flawed people on whom we pass judgement.  Neither we nor those we love are as good as we think.  By the same token, neither we nor those we despise are as evil as we think.  I don't think it does us any good to claim that someone's legacy is anything other than complex, and if we are convinced otherwise, we should at least be prepared for legitimate challenges to our view.

To do otherwise is to propose that those we put on pedestals—both figurative and literal— are not human.