Planting History

What I really should do, but will probably not, is to tell you about the important meeting that Trump had with Vladimir Putin. You will remember—or maybe you won’t—that Trump had promised to make a deal and settle the war in Ukraine in the first 24 hours of his presidency. He then met with the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, and berated him in the oval office with cameras rolling for not wearing a suit and not being grateful. It was agonizing to watch.

 

Now, Trump is doing what he can to divert attention from his dalliances with a couple of known sexual abusers—Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. So the idea of meeting Putin in Alaska (without the un“suit”able presence of Zelensky) got floated and instantly was taken up. This is not an administration fettered by overthinking.

 

It was horrifying, if all the details are correct. Trump got out the red carpet (quite literally, since there were marines on their knees rolling the damn thing out), and then stood waiting like a dog for his master to get off the plane. At which point he clapped, and then veered like a drunk down the red carpet. 

 

Things got worse. There were three of them and three of “us,” though how much “us” is in Donald Trump is debatable. Trump got off to a fine start by delivering a monologue that lasted 20 minutes and was largely disconnected from any reality that should have been dealt with. Putin sat quiet and let him talk. Then the flattery, along with the history lesson that Ukraine had been part of Mother Russia for centuries. Anyone could see that, especially a man with the insight and the erudition of Donald Trump. That alone would be sufficient to justify his very firm no, to the historical impossibility of ending the current war with anything but the “return” of the Donbas region. It’s a huge amount of land, and it includes, of course, Russia’s access to the Crimea. 

 

My knowledge of Russian history is less than Putin’s, but even I know about the Russian mania for the Crimea.

 

The whole affair was a bust, because there was no cease fire—which had been the goal. Actually, Trump had told everyone that it was gonna happen, because Putin really, really liked Trump and wanted to make a deal with him. Still, it didn’t happen, though the world got to hear Putin speak of being “neighbors” TO THE United States, and his wish to increase that good will which should exist between neighbors.

 

During the peace summit, Russia bombed Kiev severely and repeatedly.

 

Trump looked old and weak. Putin looked old and in control (that KGB training comes in handy). The European leaders looked aghast, when they put down their phones after talking with Trump. He was calling them, essentially echoing Putin’s talking points, one by one, when he called them for support in getting Zelensky to propose to his country that they give up the area about the size of the east coast of the United States, stretching from the northern tip of Maine to the southernmost Florida Key.

 

So they put down whatever they were doing that day and flew to Washington, to support Zelensky and try to quash any plans to give up the Donbas region. The strategy appears to be to flatter Trump, and then slip in whatever truth they want to impart. I get it—I do the same thing to my cat. I put the pill in a nice, dripping spoonful of tuna fish, and we’re all happy.

 

That was hardly the most important news, since really the whole thing was about appeasing a severely-stricken malignant narcissist who has also developed a rampaging dementia. He also has the codes for the nuclear football.

 

Just to exhaust the Fire Department, Trump set another fire, this time in Washington, D.C. by sending in 800 national guardsmen last week to “combat crime.” The number of guardsmen is now up to 2000, according to one report; the mainstream media is covering the spontaneous protests (which are apparently large) with reverential silence.

 

 

There is, in short, serious shit going down, but did Trump go down? Not at all, he went up—UP!—to the roof of the White House, apparently twice on two different days. Having settled (or not) the difficulties in Ukraine, Trump got out his developer hat (or hardhat) and did what any real guy would do. He surveyed the site of the new ballroom that has to be put on the site of Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden. The whole thing is part of redecorating the White House to make it look like Mar-a-Lago, and in this he has been entirely successful. We all remember the ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, though it’s always lovely to refresh the memory. 

 

 

All of this is really important, and a serious person would be telling you about it, but I am not a particularly serious person. I certainly wasn’t last Tuesday, when I had wasted my day finding a poem that I intended to bind into the indictment of Donald John Trump that Jack Smith had presented to the country in the first week of the year, before he skipped town.

 

But I was thinking about books, since the image of Trump on the White House roof (the cartoons the next day had crowds gazing up at the President and shouting “JUMP”) was too unsettling. Books don’t get up on the roof, generally, and they stick to their libraries until it gets timed to be rebound.

 

They lead quiet but not inconsequential lives. Actually, the most consequential thing about them is that against all odds some of them survive.

 

This post has no chance, I think, if someone or something wants to get rid of it. The website hosting this blog could have AI scouring their servers; my words and whatever thoughts they convey could be scrubbed from the internet in the time it takes to shut down my computer, stick all my stuff in a backpack, and head for the door to go home. I could disappear very easily, and so could Jack Smith’s indictment.

 

But something altogether extraordinary might happen if I printed a bunch of these posts into a book and gave it to Johnny, my brother. Johnny might put the book into the Norwegian chest that came over on the (as usual) second boat, us having missed the first. And there the book might sit, enjoying the dark and the muffled sounds of life outside the chest. The living room and especially the dining room are really nice places to be.

 

And some ancestor might come along, some day, with a morning free to look at a manuscript in that old chest. The pages would be yellowed, perhaps, though if it were lignin / acid-free it would help. But long after the Internet had forgotten about Trump on the roof of the White House, well, my book would not. All I (and my book) depend on is Johnny, who is a superb older brother and generally reliable. The ancestor might learn that the “tourist visit” thousands of Trump supporters made on January 6, 2001, to the United States Capitol was a less than peaceful affair. Though it taught us a lot.

 

Books only have to deal with fire, floods, desiccation, ill-use to the point of abuse, termites and time. They don’t have to deal with evil or malice.

 

They’re the quiet dudes in the room. You have to open them up to get them to talk.

 

Or rebind them, since that’s what I was thinking about, as I walked to the Poet’s Passage. One of the great things about books is that for centuries they were damned expensive to make: outside of the time and labor to produce them, vellum and parchment weren’t cheap. I throw away paper when I glue an end-paper down—such a practice would have horrified a monk in a medieval scriptorium. He would have gathered up the scrap and used it to thicken a book cover. In fact, stuff crops up from time to time in book bindings, and it recently did several months ago. Here’s a hint from the BBC:

 

…the 700-year-old fragment of Suite Vulgate du Merlin – an Old French manuscript so rare there are less than 40 surviving copies in the world – has been discovered by an archivist in Cambridge University Library, folded and stitched into the binding of the 16th-Century register.

 

I’ll let the BBC continue the story.

 

Today, multispectral imaging (MSI), CT scanning and 3D modelling has enabled scholars to not only read the faded and hidden texts of the fragment, but to understand exactly how it was folded and sewn into the register. The Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory team at Cambridge University Library has even been able to analyse the different threads used by the Elizabethan bookbinders and the different decoration pigments used by the medieval illuminator,  whose job it was to "illuminate" manuscripts with decorative illustrations and rich colours.

 

Well, well, I thought—it’s an interesting world. We no longer need to take the cover off and undo the binding of a book to see what’s inside. I knew about that, since we are doing essentially the same thing with the Dead Sea scrolls that are far too fragile to unroll.

 

What I didn’t know—and was pleased to discover—was that a bookbinder could plant history, as it were. Kids put messages for unseen eyes in the improbable future to discover in empty bottles tossed into the sea. Why not bookbinders?

 

So I gassed on about the Irish-monks-saving-Western-Civilization to the people at the Poet’s Passage. Then I told them about the Merlin manuscript, discovered after 700 years of gentle sleep in the inside of a book cover. Then I read them the poem of Arthur Waley about censorship. The poem that I had wasted a day trying to find. You remember, the poem that ends:

 

It is not difficult to censor foreign news,

What is hard today is to censor one's own thoughts --

To sit by and see the blind man

On the sightless horse, riding in to the bottomless abyss.

Then it was time to slip the poem into the folded cardstock sheet of the cover, and to put glue on the marbled paper to the cover. I sealed it up in front of everybody, since who wouldn't be curious to see, and indeed want to see…

…history being planted.

 

 

 

 

      

Not Walking Alone

By this time, I had wasted my day.

 

That was nothing new and nothing important, in a sense. If I wasn’t actively, whole-heartedly, pushing-with-all-my-might-and-giving-it-200% fighting against Trump and fascism, I was doing nothing.

 

The problem was that everybody else was doing their Tuesday, and their Tuesday didn’t include restoring democracy to the United States. Their Tuesday was about going to work to pay the mortgage—or whatever else was more urgent (if not more important) than democracy.

 

The problem, I decided, was that I had a past. I had always known about ladies with a past, but what was I doing with one? And why was it hitting me so hard now?

 

It was hitting hard, I decided, because for over 300 years, a part of my family has been in the United States. Not a big part, I grant you. In fact, there aren’t even branches of my family that are historically interesting—it’s only a couple of twigs. But there they are, and they were weighing me down. According to my grandmother, her family had been burning witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They had been fighting the British in the Revolutionary War. They had fought in the Civil War and the World War II—they had been right there during all the right moments in American history, and they had been on the right side.

 

Nobody in the family had much money, but we were there. True—it took us a while. We tend to get on the second boat that’s going places—never the Mayflower, but whatever it was that followed it. And we got it wrong initially at the Salem Witch Trials—Henry Herrick had been the magistrate, and had rounded up and (presumably) tried the women and found them guilty. He did, however, apologize for the affair. It had been a snare of the devil, and he had fallen.

 

Three hundred years takes the stench of burning or rotting flesh away—the witch trials seem quaint. But are they? If a child is starving on the bus going back home, I’m responsible for feeding him or her. But why, if the child is in Gaza, am I not equally responsible? And why should the deaths of a score of women and children matter less because they happened three centuries ago?

 

It was all going down on my own watch, and I hated it. Even worse, I now knew about Henry Herrick and Nicholas Coleman Pickard and my own grandmother and parents. I am no more responsible for saving democracy than a guy who has walked up from San Salvador a couple years ago, right?

 

Wrong, and I don’t know why.

 

I don’t like noblesse oblige, probably because I suffer from it. But we’ve been around for 300 years and counting, and we’re in a better position than the guy from Salvador. Or at least we should be. We’re supposed to know better and be better.

 

It was better when I was a teenager, and could cheerfully send my family to hell. I would have snickered at the witch-burning / hanging Henry Herrick: it was a long time ago, and what difference does it make, today? 

 

There were three or four of us in the family that I returned to over and over. There was Henry Herrick, who actually was involved in the whole process of finding the witches, getting them into the court, trying them, and executing them. Oh, and saying sorry afterwards.

 

There was Nicholas Coleman Pickard, my great-great grandfather. He had been a country doctor, sent his son off to fight the South in the Civil War, gone to collect his son’s body, and then “disappeared” for the last thirty years of his life. “He abandoned his family,” my grandmother would state, and then go on to attribute it to “gold fever.” In fact, he kept practicing medicine until three years before his death, at his daughter’s home in Kansas. What had caused this man to disappear from one part of his family only to appear again later, decades later and somewhere else?

 

There was my grandmother, who had written the story down (what she knew, what she remembered) and left out (wisely, Marc?) any mention of herself, though she did note her marriage, her three children, and a few details of her life. Details had slipped out: she was married and pregnant with twins in 1918, in a small, airless, Chicago apartment. The heat was infernal, that summer, and she was tired and lonely (her husband was a travelling salesman, selling paper from Wisconsin to businessmen in Chicago). Worse, the “Spanish flu” was ravaging her world just as COVID-19 had ravaged ours. She had endured, raised her children, and then was left a widow in her sixties. It was the depression, there wasn’t any money, she had gone to work (for the first time) operating the switchboard at the YWCA.

 

She had seen a lot, more perhaps than I. Her father had saddled horses and ridden his carriage down the country roads to see his patients. She sat, at the end of her life, with me, her young grandson. We watched the moon landing in 1969, and she marveled that such a thing was possible.

 

She had seen other marvels as well. She drove past and saw the quarter of a million black people gathered to hear Martin Luther King in 1963. She saw Europe and the United States fight Nazism and win. 

 

We had all been there, and we had been part of it, to one degree or another. I say “we” for a reason: I don’t walk alone. I have three centuries of family to account for and to answer to. One Herrick—either George or Henry—had even fought in King Philip’s War. I have the luxury of knowing only that there had been a war, that Henry / George had fought in it, and absolutely nothing else.

 

(AI knows, and can tell you: 

 

King Philip's War (1675–1678) was a devastating conflict between Native American tribes and English colonists in New England, named after the Wampanoag chief Metacomet, also known as King Philip. Driven by increasing English encroachment on Native lands and mistreatment, the war led to widespread destruction on both sides, with Native American raids on colonial settlements and significant casualties. It ultimately resulted in Anglo-American domination of the region, the deaths of many Native Americans, and their enslavement or forced migration, making it the bloodiest conflict per capita in American history. )

 

 

Wonderful—the slaughter of Native Americans gets dignified with high-falutin’ name. A century and a half later, my great-great grandfather takes off by train to collect his dead son’s body in Richmond, Virginia. Another hundred years: my grandmother and I are sitting in the living room on the family home on Bagley Parkway. The same home that will protect us, with its bomb shelter neatly in place. (True—we had never bother to equip the bomb shelter with food or water or even mattresses. But it was there, and we were safe.)

 

The network breaks for commercials. We go outside, my grandmother and I. My father has pulled me aside, before he and my mother left for six weeks in Norway, and told me that I am looking after my aged grandmother. My mother has pulled her mother aside, and told my grandmother that she is looking after me. I know this now, though we were both too delicate to mention that we were looking after each other, my grandmother and me.

 

We look up at the sky, at the moon. We totally believe that there’s a spaceship up there, with American astronauts, and there’s an American flag up there too, flapping in the non-existent wind.

 

We look up and we marvel.

 

We had been lucky, for the most part. We were on the winning side (if not the right side) of King Philip’s War. We had burned the witches, not been the witches. And we had been on the right side, I certainly knew, of the Civil War.

 

Things had been going along swimmingly, all those centuries of Herricks and Pickard and Newhouses.

 

I took off for the Poet’s Passage, to talk about Jack Smith and American Democracy.

 

I walked a couple of blocks to the Passage.

 

I did not walk alone.  

Slouching Towards Bedlam

It was all quite evident to me, after I had wasted a couple of hours looking for Waley’s poem, that things had gone to hell, as my mother Franny would have said. My “search” for the poem was proof of that—I should have gone to my bookcase, pulled out the little but quite thick book of “Great Poems of the English Language,” and begun leafing around page 400 or so—where the Victorians / Edwardians live. It’s a respectable neighborhood, and I would run into some great poems, often written by friends of Waley. He got around, was part of the Bloomsbury Group, knew the Sitwells and Ezra Pound.

 

Searches were inefficient, of course, but I could have wasted a very productive afternoon in finding / not finding Waley on the yellow-covered paperback book that has my brother’s name on it but which he probably never read. The journey was the destination, and if—never encountering Waley—I had had to re-read “Dover Beach” or “The Second Coming,” or Wilfred Sassoon and Edith Sitwell…well, the afternoon would have been delightful.

 

Well, the termites took the book off, and I’m left with my cell phone, which does and doesn’t in a way no book would dream of. My cell phone wants to give me what the algorithm for Arthur Waley is, or what it expects. In this case it’s The Tale of Genji, which I may in fact download and bind. But the faded yellow-paper back would have been there or it would not. The poem would be living around page 400—or it would have moved out. But I type one thing into my phone and it gives me another—it’s like reaching for a can of peas at the supermarket and finding almonds in your hand.

 

How easy it would be, I thought, for AI to remove all traces of the Trump indictment. One day, I type “Jack Smith Trump Indictment” into the Google search engine, and what do I get? Error code 440—file not found. More worrisome, the file might disappear not because of any one person making that decision, and typing in the command “delete existence of Jack Smith probe” into the system. The system, or the program, or the soul of the beast might come up with it on its own. A guy named Geoffrey Hinton says that there’s a 20% chance that AI will destroy humanity. Here’s a screen shot of a CNN article:

 

 

 

They’ve certainly been clever about it. Our phones know everything about us, which means the government knows everything about us. So I am paying about 80 bucks a month to a company that will sell my secrets and my life to the government. However, my phone also shows me pictures of cute babes with big boobs, which is the important thing.

 

Getting something off the internet, I think, would be easy. There might be pockets where the file still lurks, in some obscure server in Uzbekistan, perhaps, but the power of the internet would eventually prevail.

 

Libraries would be no problem. The easiest thing to do would simply be to get people not to open books. Not because you had told them not to, but because they didn’t know enough or care enough to have any interest. Burning books, or putting them in “Rare Book Collections” is bad form. Unless, of course, you really do need the theater.

 

The only chance, I thought, was a book NOT in a public library. A book in private hands. Something handed down from generation to generation. Mothers, giving the daughters the book at the end of their lives, and telling them, “here…read this…it wasn’t always like this…keep the memory alive.” Fathers, giving their sons the books that their grandparents had bound in the leather or fabric scraps found around the house. 

 

Books resting in attics, sleeping in trunks, dozing on book shelves. 

 

Bombs, ready to explode.

 

As they will, perhaps, if an honest historian gets their hands on them.

 

We’re lucky both in what we have (each manuscript is a miracle) and in what we don’t know that we don’t have. For any book to survive from Plato’s time to the present day is a miracle. The Codex Sinaiticus is one of our oldest bibles, and it only goes back to the 4^th century.

 

I had found the poem and I had found the path. The way was clear, all the way to The Poet’s Passage. 

 

Let the poems begin!

 

 

  

Arthur What's-his-Name

Was any part of it sane?

 

I’d forgotten how deeply restful the Biden presidency was: weeks passed—months, even—when nothing seemed to happen except for the pandemic slowly disappearing, the economy teetering but recovering, civility gradually dawning after a very black night indeed. At least, that’s what I thought was happening. I had no idea that things were so deeply terrible that a Trump second presidency would seem like a good idea to even the most crazed.

 

Six months of this presidency has taught us a lot. The fascism is here, although it’s taking CNN and most major news outlets a long time indeed to get their heads around the fact. They’re still wondering whether we might be, well, approaching a constitutional crisis.

 

Dudes, we drove through that town a long time ago.

 

Things in the United States in 2024 were apparently terrible, and who knew? My frame of reference was Germany after World War I, and who would have thought I’d be making excuses for the Germans? But I remember the reels they showed me in History class (no idea whether that word “history” should be capped, but in a Trumpian world, it should be). Inflation was so bad that people were using wheelbarrows to go out to buy their daily bread. They were burning bank notes for fuel, to keep warm. They were even using bank notes as wall paper. Maybe it’s fake news, but I saw photos of all this before anybody had a computer, much less Photoshop.

 

 

I get it—I learned a while ago that you should never mess with people’s rice and beans. Or daily bread. But was it really so bad for people in the states that they had to elect a dictator, and someone who made no bones about it?

 

He told us exactly what he’d do, and we didn’t believe him, or so I thought. Because I had this mistaken idea that the American public was misinformed. I thought Fox News had poisoned the well. I assumed ignorance, not ill will.

 

So no, I decided. Things weren’t so bad that a dictator was needed, and people knew perfectly well what Trump was, what he had done, and what he would do. People were pissed (because he had made them so) and they hated the people Trump hated. People like me—who assume good will, generally.

 

Do I?

 

Yeah—think so.

 

I was in a dangerous place, as I still am. Because I cannot hate Trump—there’s just too much pathology to overlook. I don’t hate drunks either (how could I?). But they’re still dangerous.

 

At this point, I gave in to despair. And I thought how reassuring, on one level, it is to live in historically fraught times. The guy guiding his wheelbarrow full of worthless cash is at least doingsomething—horrifying and outrageous as it is. He’s scrambling, just the way we all did after Hurricane Maria. It was a blissful life, though we couldn’t fully see it at the time. We had left our 21^st century lives and become hunter / gatherers. True, we were looking for cans of tuna fish and D batteries, but once that was done, we could rest easy.

 

I told myself that in a situation so completely fucked up, when the possibility of doing anything is well below zero—well, I might as well go to the beach. Why not—my marriage is over, my country is gone.

 

If I go to bed sober and haven’t made anyone’s life demonstrably worse—well, what else do I have to do?

 

I tell myself I can write.

 

I tell myself that writing is useless…and it is.

 

But then?

 

I am now living in the space between my ears, and it’s hell. Because I cannot do anything that would make me feel good, for God’s sake. But I have to do something, because it’s driving me crazy.

 

Into this excruciating indecision comes the memory of a poem that I once read by one of those extraordinary British guys who beavered away and did extraordinary things. I knew that he had worked as a translator for every Oriental text (Japanese or Chinese) from Tale of Genji to the Little Red Book of Mao. I knew that he had worked a civil service job, during World War II. I knew a lot about the guy, including that he had written this really great poem.

 

It took me hours or searching, and was it worth it? No—but it was no worse than anything else I might have done.

 

And I was right—or at least I think I am. The guy’s name is Arthur Waley, and the poem is called Censorship.

 

You decide.

 

Censorship

Arthur Waley

 

I have been a censor for fifteen months;

 

The building where I work has four times been bombed.

Glass, boards and paper, each in turn,

Have been blasted from the windows -- where windows are left at all.

It is not easy to wash, keep warm and eat;

At times we lack gas, water or light.

The rules for censors are difficult to keep;

In six months there were over a thousand 'stops'.

The Air-Raid Bible alters from day to day;

Official orders are not clearly expressed.

One may mention Harrods, but not Derry and Toms;

One may write of mist, but may not write of rain.

Japanese, scribbled on thin paper

In faint scrawl tires the eyes to read.

In a small room with ten telephones

And a tape-machine concentration is hard.

Yet the Blue Pencil is a mere toy to wield,

There are worse knots than the tangles of Red Tape.

It is not difficult to censor foreign news,

What is hard today is to censor one's own thoughts --

To sit by and see the blind man

On the sightless horse, riding in to the bottomless abyss.

 

 

 

 

 

Back to the Damned Monks

I had assumed we all knew about the Irish monks, because it was a part of my childhood, so why wasn’t it part of yours?

 

Well, well—you never got the Irish monks, or at least you weren’t in the Poet’s Passage last Tuesday night, when I was there. Because I bind books while people recite poetry, or give stand-up comedy routines, or sing songs. I get up on the stage, most nights, and talk about what I’m binding, and a bit about the author.

 

So I assumed that the reference could be glancing—I would invoke the Irish monks, and we would all get it. We don’t forget those monks, who first appeared in my life at Midvale Elementary School in the 1960’s. The dudes were important because they…

 

…SAVED WESTERN CIVILIZATION!

 

Like all true stories, it wasn’t particularly accurate. True, Rome had fallen sometime in the 5^th century (or sixth—anyway, a long time ago). Europe had entered what we called the Dark Ages (which to my Midvale Elementary mind meant that people were walking around, for five or six centuries, in a never-ending night.) The glorious light that shone from the works of the great classical writers had dimmed, as books and manuscripts were lost, burned, drowned, and crumbled. All that was left was our beloved Catholic Church, shining like a beacon through the darkness.

 

History, at Midvale, was linear and it was going up. Granted, there were dips—those moments when we regressed, when the footpads on the highway overran things. But the Irish monks had it under control. They were waking, shuffling reverentially to the scriptorium, and getting down to the task. Their brethren had killed the calves (one Bible in the 8^th century took 515 calf skins) to make the vellum. Somebody else down the production-line would sew the manuscript together, and stick a couple of boards on top of the text block for covers. But the real work, for which we all should be grateful, was done by those long-suffering monks who sat on wooden benches and sharpened their quills which they would dip into an ink made of oak galls (which, unsurprisingly, was the work of another monk.) The vellum doesn’t yellow and disintegrate, as does paper. As for the oak gall ink, I’m not sure that anyone knows when it will fade and disappear—it hasn’t yet, even on manuscripts from the 5^th century. 

 

What were the Irish monks doing?

 

Well, we know that they were preserving Western Civilization for us to enjoy and enhance, before we destroyed it. But the monks may have seen it differently. They were reading text from a manuscript that they either had in their library or they had borrowed, often by sending a monk out to get the manuscript from another monastery. Given that the roads were horrible, diseases were rife, goods were routinely stolen, and that violence was everywhere—well, getting a manuscript to copy must have been a challenge.

 

And the Irish monks hadn’t made it easier on themselves. They were not sitting on top of one of the seven hills of Rome, or a stone’s throw away from the Acropolis. No, they were sitting on remote islands in the Irish Sea—in their stone monasteries, far away from everybody and everything. None of it was easy, in order to save Western Civilization. But Christ had taken himself away to the desert, and the monks were in their isolated, frigid monasteries. 

 

I was a simple child, as I am a simple man. Joseph Campbell hadn’t come up with the monomyth theory yet (or they weren’t teaching it at Midvale). When I heard about it later, it made sense. Every hero evolves until he can stand the world no more. He retreats, meditates, struggles with his demons. He returns transformed to the world, which is forever changed by the bravery of a man who has finally fought his demons and won. I needed a hero, because children do—and the Irish monks were my heroes.

 

I knew that there were other monasteries in other countries. I knew that my teacher—was she Miss Ryan or Miss O’Connor?—had some skin in the game (or it could have been Flanagan). I later found out that there were also professional scribes, even in those days, who did their part. But the Irish monks were as much a part of my childhood as George Washington crossing the Delaware.   

 

We think of history as something inevitable, something that cannot be changed and could never not have happened. Rome fell, and we ascribed reasons for the fall (they were heathens, they were too proud and powerful, or maybe they had just had their day and were done for). The Irish monks had stepped in and saved many of the works we value and pretend to have read today. They rescued Western Civilization for us, and we had to be grateful. But we could forget about them, when we left the classroom.

 

I now know: we’re living in history. It’s all around us, and it’s shifting, and whatever we do makes it and changes it, at least potentially. It’s a dicey proposition, and we ignore it at our peril. 

 

I had my marching orders, last Tuesday, after my mother had stepped in to tell me to clean my room (that part never changes, however embedded in her afterlife she might be) and to print the indictment of Donald John Trump.

 

I was gonna be one of the damn monks.