The Dish

David Carpenter, who recently published a new translation of the Magna Carta, reflects on its 800th anniversary:

In 1215 Magna Carta was an elitist document, yet by the end of the 13th century it had become known across society, and all sections of society, legitimately or not, were laying claim to its benefits. … Already in 1215 itself the Charter had been translated from Latin into French, the vernacular language of the nobility. By the end of the 13th century the Charter was being proclaimed in English, the language of everyone else.

In around 1300, the peasants of Bocking in Essex … appealed to Magna Carta in a struggle against their lord’s bailiff. In the 1350s, legislation defined the “no free man” as “no man of whatever condition”. The Charter seemed increasingly to have a universal application. It had established the base from which it would go around the world. Its appeal lay not in its precise details, but in its assertion of the rule of law. Everything is of its own time, but only some ideas are taken up and spread. When human rights are still trampled on in many parts of the world, what happened in a meadow by the Thames 800 years ago retains its significance. Let us hope Magna Carta will still be celebrated 100 years from now.

Nick Higham also pays tribute to the document:

As to all the modern-day brouhaha around the anniversary – that rests particularly on another principle bequeathed by the charter to subsequent generations, a principle fundamental to British law and the law of many other nations, including the United States.

Magna Carta’s most famous clauses forbid the king to sell, deny or delay justice, and protect any free man from arbitrary imprisonment “save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land”.

“Free men” in 1215 accounted for less than half the population – the rest were serfs, to whom the charter did not apply. And “men” meant men – women, except for widows, merit barely a mention in Magna Carta. But the principle was established. The law could serve as a bulwark against tyranny. And once established, it has never been revoked.

(Image of Magna carta cum statutis angliae (Great Charter with English Statutes), early 14th-century, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jeanne Marie Laskas profiles the former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, including details about the depression and difficulties he struggled with after his historic journey:

After the moon, Buzz cracked up. There was nothing left to do. The media frenzy was worldwide; twenty-four countries in forty-five days—and that was just the beginning. NASA clearly had no further use for him in space; now he was just supposed to be some kind of NASA PR flack.

He resigned from NASA in 1971 and returned to the Air Force. It didn’t seem like the Air Force knew what to do with someone who had been to the moon. He was an outsider, the egghead from academia who’d just tumbled off the speakers’ circuit. He drank a lot. His marriage to the mother of his three children fell apart, and he retired from the Air Force. He went to rehab. He got married again, but that lasted a year. He drank a lot more, fell in love a lot more. His Air Force pension wasn’t much. That was when he started at the Cadillac dealership. He sucked at selling cars. Rehab was the first time he ever really talked about feelings. It turned out he had so many feelings. An emptiness so deep. He discovered the melancholy of all things done.

He was in his forties, a conqueror with nothing left to conquer but his own demons. The second man to walk on the moon. Number two.

His father never accepted the fact that Buzz was not number one. Grasping, his father waged an unsuccessful one-man campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to change its Neil Armstrong “First Man on the Moon” commemorative stamp to one that said “First Men on the Moon” so it could include Buzz. As for Buzz’s mental breakdown, his depression and alcoholism, his father never accepted that, either. Or if he did, he blamed the moon, the absence of gravity, the unknown physical properties of space. The moon must have ruined Buzz.

(Image of Aldrin’s photograph of his own bootprint on the moon via NASA)

Win Bassett, a seminarian at Yale Divinity School, looks back at what he learned as a hospital chaplain this past summer. Avoiding phrases like “everything happens for a reason” is among the lessons that mattered the most:

Instead of trafficking in speculations about why a person experiences pain or becomes ill, I found it far more helpful to ask the question “What now?”

Reynolds Price wrote that after his cancer diagnosis “the kindest thing anyone could have done for me…would have been to look me square in the eye and say this clearly, ‘Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now?’” I once presented this passage from Price at a conference, and a participant who had survived breast cancer told me that, years ago, she playfully added “2.0” at the end of her name.

Nevertheless, I bet she sometimes heard the wrong words at the wrong times during her recovery. We’ve all said them, and we don’t do it because we fail to understand that these responses are theologically indefensible. We utter these words because they seem to be the only things that might give momentary comfort. Because these dubious phrases have become our default expression of consolation, we need God’s help to put them aside, to remain silent until we have something truer and therefore more helpful to say. Sometimes the words never come, and silence itself is enough. With or without words, chaplains are there to offer another loving presence, sometimes the only loving presence. As the Episcopal priest and poet Spencer Reece writes in a poem about his own experience in a hospital chaplaincy, “It is correct to love even at the wrong time.”

Peter Toohey’s new book, Jealousy, puts it at the center of our emotional lives. Musing over his arguments, Diane Johnson runs down the many ways it’s informed art, especially in the last few centuries:

Toohey tells us that beginning in the late nineteenth century, painting and literature would see an “explosion” of treatments of the subject, with obsessively jealous characters like Tolstoy’s Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata, or, later, Dickens’s Bradley Headstone—the reader will think of dozens of instances—Emma, or la cousine Bette, or the hero of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, who dies of it, or Così Fan Tutte, much of Verdi, “Frankie and Johnny”—jealousy is all over the place.

In painting and sculpture there’s a whole iconography of jealousy—ears, husbands listening behind doors, cats with their big green eyes, the color yellow. As the twentieth century approaches, artists begin reaching for means to express what jealousy feels like; here he points to the paintings of Edvard Munch and of August Strindberg, the playwright, who seems to have found painting to be more directly expressive of his jealous state of mind.

Toohey examines the discoveries of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century psychology by Freud and his colleagues. He doesn’t mention but we might think of Freud’s friend Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novel, the inspiration for the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, which details the psychic revenge fantasies of a husband whose jealousy in all its Freudian complexity is aroused by his wife’s erotic fantasies. One of Toohey’s more interesting findings is that a morbidly jealous person (as opposed to “normally” jealous) is especially zealous in seeking “visual evidence to confirm the truth of the way they are feeling”; Othello must see Desdemona’s handkerchief. This visual element makes film a particularly suitable medium for expressing jealousy. He suggests that stalking also arises from the visual need.

(Image: Jealousy and Flirtation by the 19th century French artist Haynes King, via Wikimedia Commons)

We’ve featured reviews of James Booth’s new biography, Philip Larkin: Life, Art, Love, over the last few months. Now, Dana Gioia notices an interesting wrinkle in the poet’s story – it was only after Larkin wrote two early novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, that he devoted himself to verse:

As his dreams of being a great novelist expired, Larkin poured his full talent into poetry. He discarded his lofty, early models, Yeats and Auden, and studied instead the homely genius of Thomas Hardy (another novelist-turned-poet). Larkin then brought a novelistic sensibility into his verse. Emphasizing the prosaic virtues of plot, setting, character, and narrative voice—the building blocks of fiction—he crafted a new sort of lyric poem, one firmly placed in the everyday world and yet charged with evocative power. His new poems also had personality; they were simultaneously savage and yet compassionate, very depressing and very funny. His language grew commonplace without losing its musicality, and he displayed a gift for using complicated verse forms in ways that sounded utterly conversational, as in the opening lines of “Annus Mirabilis”:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The change happened during his years in Belfast (1950–1955).

Always a good poet, Larkin suddenly became a great one, producing a series of works in quick succession that were destined for the anthologies—“Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” “I Remember, I Remember,” “For Sidney Bechet,” “Poetry of Departures,” “Toads,” and “Church Going.” Although these poems would become signature pieces of contemporary British literature, Larkin initially couldn’t find a publisher for them. After repeated rejections, the despairing poet sent his breakthrough volume, The Less Deceived, to George Hartley, a friend in Hull, who wanted to start a press. Larkin would regret the decision, but the small, unpublicized collection proved an immediate success with great reviews and steady sales. Larkin soon found himself named the central figure of “The Movement,” a celebrated group of young writers. To his own astonishment, he was famous.