Andrew Sullivan, in an article on how to cope in these times, wrote about W.H. Auden. Lovely piece! I excerpted the part with W.H. Auden...
I’m particularly drawn to W. H. Auden these days, not simply because of the transfixing wisdom and beauty of his poetry, but because of who he was, and how he led his life. I recommend two essays about him, one by Hannah Arendt in 1975 in The New Yorker and one by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books. I stumbled upon both recently and am glad I did.
Auden is an antidote to Trump and to our times. He despised celebrity; he ran from fame and money; he never “signaled” his many virtues to anyone; in fact, he went to great lengths to hide them from view. “Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York,” Mendelson recalls. “She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.” He privately paid for the tuition of a succession of war orphans until his death; he made himself look like an asshole in demanding immediate payment for some work — but only so he could quietly give the money to Dorothy Day’s homeless shelter in New York. Mendelson also recalls how “I got a phone call from a Canadian burglar who told me he had come across Auden’s poems in a prison library and had begun a long correspondence in which Auden gave him an informal course in literature. Auden was especially pleased to get him started on Kafka.” It turns out that there were countless such acts of quiet generosity.
He hated to grandstand. He knew the temptations of the easy political stance. He gave a public speech in the U.S. just after he arrived here in 1939 and got a rapturous response from the liberal crowd. But he wrote to a friend afterward: “I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring … It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.” He took full, deep responsibility for his misjudgments born out of excessive, if well-intentioned, zeal. Arendt noted: “He turned against his early leftist beliefs because events (the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and experiences during the Spanish Civil War) had proven them to be ‘dishonest’ — ‘shamefully’ so.” She goes on: “In the 1940s there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether.”
Most important of all, he never succumbed to the belief that evil was always on the other side, that those fighting for the good weren’t also capable of great wickedness, and self-deception. He was not one of those, in Mendelson’s words, “who can say of themselves without irony, ‘I am a good person,’ who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own … He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland.” I love that line. But what he saw most potently was that victims are also capable of becoming victimizers, that the best intentions come wrapped in the crumpled tissue of human fallibility, that “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” He was, like Orwell, a patron saint of anti-tribalism.
Thank you for giving this advance warning. I'm also easily confused by rapidly shifting plots.
This advice will make the movie easier for others (like us!) to follow...
I think that when a movie is shot entirely from beginning-to-end without plot interruptions
it is called "shooting in continuity." An example of this was "Saving Private Ryan."
Now, three cheers for the Brits! Not only did they save the world from Hitler, they
have some of the most beautiful men. And sexiest escorts.
I watched yesterday, even if you know details about the story (most Americans don't care about history) you'll be in suspense with the music and the acting.
Best movie of the year so far, but that's just my opinion.
A British actor of TV, film and stage. Damn good-looking, in my opinion and can do a decent job with the Rogers and Hammerstein "Soliloquy" from Carousel during a Proms performance a couple of years ago.
JulianLondon reacted to marylander1940 in Under25
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JulianLondon got a reaction from + pitman in Cute Critters to Take Our Minds Off Everyday Stresses
JulianLondon got a reaction from + quoththeraven in Cute Critters to Take Our Minds Off Everyday Stresses
