The Happy Feminist

SUNDAY QUOTATION BLOGGING

In honor of the Easter and Passover weekend, here is the first Biblical edition of Sunday Quotation Blogging.  This is the famous excerpt from the Book of Micah:

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and  bow myself before the high God?  Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?  He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

According to one of my favorite Unitarian writers, George Marshall, "These three verses from the sixth chapter of the Book of Micah have been called by many liberal religious persons the high point of the Hebrew Bible because they turn religion from the external forms to the internal faith which propels and guides people.  There is nothing more required than to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly."  In other words, Micah strips away all the mumbo jumbo, and gets right to essentials.  My kind of guy. 

SUNDAY QUOTATION BLOGGING: SOCRATES

For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know.  No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance which thinks it knows what it does not must surely be ignorance most culpable.

This, I take it, gentlemen, is the degree and this the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbor in any respect, it would be in this:  that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it.  But I do know that to do wrong and to disobey my superior, whether God or man, is wicked and dishonorable; and so I shall never feel more fear or aversion for something which, for all I know, may really be a blessing, than for those evils which I know to be evils. 

-- Socrates, as quoted in Plato's Apology

SUNDAY QUOTATION BLOGGING: TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR RELIGIOUS LIBERALS

1.       I will not exploit my fellow humans, using them as means to my own ends-- neither my parents nor my children; my husband nor my wife; neither those in my service nor those whom I serve.

2.       I will not let others do to me, insofar as I am able, what I would not do to them.

3.       I will be forgiving: remembering that forgetting takes a longer time.

4.       I will keep my promises.

5.       I will be forthright with my opinions, but I will listen when others speak.

6.       I will be honest in my thinking, as well as my acting, not only to others, but also to myself.

7.       I will try to keep my head, even if I've lost my temper.

8.       I will not fear changing my mind nor admitting to error.

9.       I will not pretend, nor live beyond my means.

10.     I will seek to have pride without arrogance; humility without cowardice. 

                                                              -- The Rev. Paul N. Carnes

SUNDAY QUOTATION BLOGGING A DAY EARLY: ON EMILY DICKINSON

Both men and women are passive towards death, God's vizier.  This intensifies the sexuality of [Emily Dickinson's] "Because I could not stop for Death," a parodic "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."   The lady kidnapped by her gentleman caller feels a chill.  "For only Gossamer my Gown-- / My Tippet only Tulle."  Gulled into the grave, the speaker finds herself ill-dressed.  Her garments of fairy-tale delicacy are Christian illusions about resurrection. This feminine persona is universal, symbolizing all mankind.  That is, humanity is feminine in relation to death, fate, God.  Men too wear the flimsy gown of false hope, transvestized by their own credulity.  Men too are raped by the trickster lover, God/death.  This illustrates the richness with which Dickinson invests femininity.  As in Sade and Swinburne, God condemns man to fascist oppression and sexual subordination.  Unable to advance or retreat, the dead rest in an infinity of checkmate.  Dickinson declares, "I saw no Way-- the Heavens were stitched."  There is no way to the tent of the inhospitable Bedouin god.  Death's victims, like serfs fallen into peat bogs, are sod androgynes, gelded or virilized into monuments of God and nature's indifference. 

-- Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae

(I have mixed feelings about Paglia.  On the one hand I kind of enjoy her personality and find her writing immensely entertaining.  On the other hand, she has made incredibly foolish and misguided statements about the nature of women and about the crime of rape, among other issue. She tends to spout off without knowing what she's talking about. As a literary critic, however, she is great fun.  I feel no such ambivalence about Dickinson.  Emily Dickinson is like me -- an alumna of Mount Holyoke College and a morbid, death-obsessed person!)

SUNDAY QUOTATION BLOGGING: DEFICIENCIES IN AMERICAN LIFE

. . . but the overall impression of television is one of triviality, glossy matter with little content, and anyone watching American television for any length of time begins to feel as if he has been subsisting on a diet of grape nuts and Coca-cola.

-- Chaim Bremant, The Jews 

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success.  They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.  They steal from their inalienable right to loafing and cheat them of many a good, idle, and beautiful afternoon.  The tempo of modern industrial life forbids this kind of glorious and magnificent idling.  But worse than that, it imposes upon us a different conception of time as measured by the clock and eventually turns the human being into a clock himself.

-- Lin Yu-tang, quoted by J.C. Cooper in Taoism: The Way of the Mystic

I have to admit to being thoroughly American in that I love watching television and I am indeed a human clock.  I am unlikely to even try to change, but I try to be mindful of the downside of my habits.  Television should be watched in moderation and with a critical eye.  As for the more serious problem of being overly governed by the clock, I think it's important to try to carve out periods of relaxation when one is unconscious of the ticking clock and one's "to do" list. 

THREE HUNDRED PAGES DOWN, SIXTEEN HUNDRED TO GO

For those of you who may have doubted my ability to read the Bible straight through, I'll have you know that I should be finishing up Deutoronomy tomorrow morning.  It has been quite an enjoyable exercise thus far. 

I had no idea that the list of forbidden foods includes not only pork, but ostrich, hare, and a variety of other animals.  And then of course there are segments that get my feminist dander up, like the section that excuses an unmarried man from any culpability for raping an unmarried woman as long as he pays her father fifty shekels and marries her.  And of course there is all too much stoning for my taste. 

But the most important thing is that one is almost able to see the development of monotheism and a universal morality unfolding before one's very eyes.  It strikes me as a pretty big leap to jump from a strictly tribal way of looking at the world to a morality that values kindness and fairness towards strangers and aliens, a morality that constantly reminds its adherents that they themselves were once strangers and aliens in the land of Egypt.   For all the primitivism in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, it's a darned good story with memorable characters and an important message.  Patriarchal though it inevitably is, I am pleased that the Bible is part of my Jewish and Christian heritage. 

I'm also partial to Old Testament names. I might well consider naming a son Jacob and a daughter Eve.  These are two characters who grabbed life by the horns and made things happen, rather than sitting around passively.  They may have broken the rules at times but they sure as hell got things done.  (Of course, Jacob was blessed by the Lord, despite the fact that he lied and cheated his own father and brother, whereas Eve wasn't quite such an honored figure.  Funny how that works . . . ) 

I'M BACK WITH SOME SUNDAY QUOTATION BLOGGING

I'm back!  Apologies for my long silence and to any of you whose emails I have not answered in the last few days. Work was beyond crazy last week.  On a couple of days, I left the house at 4:30 a.m. and didn't get home until 9 or 10 at night, and was frantically working all the hours in between.  It's good to have exciting stuff happening at work -- but it didn't leave much time for anything else.  Yesterday, I spent recovering, catching up with my husband, and seeing some old friends, and today I am slowly starting to get back into a sane routine. I should be back to blogging full throttle tomorrow. Today I will dip my toe slowly back into the blogosphere with this Sunday quotation from Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt:

Anton Schmidt was in charge of a patrol in Poland that collected stray German soldiers who were cut off from their units.  In the course of doing this, he had run into members of the Jewish underground . . . and he had helped the Jewish partisans by supplying them with forged papers and military trucks.  Most important of all: 'He did not do it for the money.'  This had gone on for five months from October 1941 to March 1942, when Anton Schmidt was arrested and executed . . .

During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt.  And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question-- how utterly different everything would be today, in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries in the world, if only more such stories could have been told.

SUNDAY MORNING QUOTATION BLOGGING: THE PESSIMIST'S EDITION

Alright-- today's Sunday morning quotation blogging is going to be a little less happy and shiny and positive than usual.  I need to balance out the sentimentality of Friday's post on Oscar and Edna!  So here goes:

These are all from The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford:

In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor -- a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or one's career.  For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses.  It is really death to do so-- that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.

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Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful fluorish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.

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Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?  Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people -- like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords -- broken, tumultuous, agonized and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies?

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And finally just to end on a slightly less depressing note:

He was cursed by his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a half-mad wife, who drank and went on the streets.  His daughter was totally mad-- and yet he believed in the goodness of human nature.  He believed that Leonora would go to the trouble to go all the way to Ceylon in order to soothe his daughter. 

SUNDAY QUOTATION BLOGGING: WISDOM FROM THE SWAMI

Do you not remember what the Bible says:  "If you cannot love your brother whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you have not seen?"  If you cannot see God in the human face, how can you see him in the clouds, or in images of dull, dead matter , or in mere fictitious stories of your brain?

I shall call you religious from the day you begin to see God in men and women and then you will understand what is meant by turning the left cheek to the man who strikes you on the right.  When you see man as God, everything, even the tiger, will be welcome.  Whatever comes to you is but the Lord, the Eternal, the Blessed One, appearing to us in various forms, as our father and mother and friend and child; they are our own soul playing with us.

As our human relationships can thus be made divine, so our relationship with God may take any of these forms and we can look upon Him as our father or mother or friend or beloved.  Calling God Mother is a higher idea than calling Him Father, and to call Him Friend is still Higher, but the highest is to regard Him as the Beloved.

The highest point of all is to see no difference between lover and beloved.  You may remember, perhaps, the old Persian story, of how a lover came and knocked on the door of the beloved and was asked: "Who are you?" He answered: "It is I," and there was no response.  A second time, he came and exclaimed: "I am here," but the door was not opened.  The third time, he came and the voice asked from inside:  "Who is there?"  He replied: "I am thyself, my beloved," and the door opened.

So is the relation between God and ourselves.  He is in everything.  He is everything.  Every man and woman is the palpable, blissful, living God.  Who says God is unknown?  Who says He is to be searched after?  We have found God eternally.  We have been living in Him eternally.

-- Swami Vivekananda 

MY READING LIST: QUO VADIS AND THE BIBLE

I just finished reading Quo Vadis? by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel-prize winning novel originally published in Poland in 1896.  The book caught my eye at Borders because I have long been a fan of the movie that was made from the book, a campy 1951 technicolor Hollywood epic, starring goody two-shoes Deborah Kerr, a wooden Robert Taylor, and a hilarious Peter Ustinov as the Emperor Nero.  The movie is worthwhile just for the Ustinov performance, and also for the corny, overwrought, epic-scale scenes of Roman decadence. 

Quo Vadis tells the story of an aristocratic Roman soldier, Vinicius, who falls madly in love with a young princess from Lygia (which is in modern-day Poland), the adoptive daughter of a distinguished Roman family.  It turns out that Lygia (she goes by the name of her homeland) is a member of a strange new sect that worships a crucified God called Chrestos, or Christ.  Meanwhile, Rome is in the grip of its mad emperor Nero, and the decadent aristocracy and masses simply try to survive from day-to-day while sating themselves on bread, circuses and the pleasures of the flesh.  The novel follows Vinicius and Lygia's adventures as he learns more about her mysterious religion.  They also have to work around the efforts of Nero and others in the imperial court to thwart their love. They struggle to survive when Nero sets fire to Rome and then persecutes the Christians as his scapegoats.  Peter and Paul make cameo appearances.

This book was right up my alley because I am fascinated by the ancient world, including ancient Christianity.  This book has three elements that made it engrossing to me: (1) detailed and sensual descriptions of every aspect of Roman life -- from the debaucheries of the Imperial court, to the teeming slums on the other side of the Tiber, to life in a well-ordered aristocratic household, to disturbingly sadistic tortures of human beings for the entertainment of the multitudes in the Coliseum; (2) strong and memorable characters, including perceptive psychological explanations of their behavior.  When the main character, Vinicius, initially tries to abduct and control the woman he loves, he can only be described as a "batterer" in modern parlance, and the book's description of his thought process strikes me as right on point in terms o f the psychology of abusive men.  The book also does an excellent job of explaining the power of Christian ideas over the early followers, especially the idea of freedom in Christ when contrasted with the enslavement of even the most "powerful" Romans to the whims of Nero.; and (3) non-stop action and suspense, particularly towards the end. 

Unfortunately, Sienkiewicz, a man of the nineteenth century, was no feminist.   My enjoyment of the book was significantly marred by his belief in and glorification of female masochism.  All three of his portrayals of women in love involved significant abuse of these women by their lovers.  There is Acte, who had been Nero's lover in her youth, only to be cast aside and forgotten, kept on only as a household slave;yet, her whole life was defined by an all-consuming love for Nero, this monster who had treated her as less than dirt.  There is Eunice, a gorgeous woman who was a slave to Petronius, and who was so in love with him that she begged him to whip her rather than to give her to another master; when Petronius finally killed himself, she decided to die with him rather than take him up on his offer to live as a free woman and heiress to his fortune.  And finally, there is Lygia herself, who falls in love with the main character, Vinicius, even as he was trying to rape and abduct her by force.  The difference between Lygia and the others is that she loved Christ more, which led her to excercise her will in a manner independent from her lover's -- but she still fell in love with him despite his appalling behavior towards her.  Still, the book is a good enough read, that I would still recommend it to both my Christian and non-Christian readers, even if you have to hold your nose during the description of these women who love to be abused. 

Next on my reading list is the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which I started on this morning.  I reckon that I have read most books in the Bible twice, what with various high school and college courses and my independent interest in the subject.  But I have never read the Bible straight through and, as a result, a lot of it is just a jumble in my mind.  As a child, I tried repeatedly to read the Bible straight through but always seemed to drop it-- the result being that I've read Genesis a million times, and I made it as far as Deutoronomy at least once.  But in my maturity, perhaps I'll do better.