355. "My education is superior to yours." True on debate day?

The debate tonight between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  What I want to find out is whether I was wrong all my teaching career about what I taught and the people I taught.

I believed that what I and my colleagues in a liberal arts college taught was superior to anything anybody else taught or could teach.  I know that that belief, stated, is surely arrogant, often offensive, and sometimes downright snotty.

Nevertheless I held it, and was sure I could defend it.  To demonstrate superiority I used the court-of-appeal test.   Where do we go to settle disagreements, the last place, with authority as final as human authority can be? 

With matters of fact the answer is clear.  We go to Western science.  Because it is most careful about belief.  You see the care in the tests imposed before a proposition is accepted as true.  In no other culture are these tests as severe and what "stands up" against them more firmly established.

Imagine a world forum.  Listen with ears uncharmed by culture-sentimentalists telling how close to nature primitive religions — like native American — were, how imaginative, how human, how far from the West's great crimes.  At a world forum that will need to be argued and tested. 

The sentimentalist — who I admitted may be an admirable humanitarian — will bring stories, anecdotes, the human touch, maybe with side screens of industrial inhumanity ready for your glance.  The unsentimentalist will bring facts, statistics, numbers.  Nothing in them, I pointed out to doubters, will be as ready for you as it is in the stories.  Numbers require imagination, an ability to see, unaided, little girls saved, little boys going into the future unmaimed, mothers presented alive to their families.

In matters of fact a sentimental education is always inferior to an unsentimental education, the kind the West introduced to the rest of the world, the kind offered in my college.  Are you arguing a case about disease? the stars? gravity? the atom? the effects of inflation?  Start with the best any other education can produce, have a disagreement, try to resolve it, and where do you finally go?  To a Western court presided over by the liberally educated.

In matters of worth the superiority of the West — you can tell I'm arguing against those who think all cultures are equal — the superiority of the West is less clear, though it is gained in the same way, through testing.  In a Western democracy, when we see forums of discussion, university conferences, parliaments with their debates, public journals with their polemic, we are seeing, even in the sloppiest ones, respect for dialectic.  And that respect derives from respect for Plato's dialogues, like the Symposium or the Phaedo, the respect continuing in the Academy, in today's colleges of arts and sciences, and in the academics who teach in them.

Where, in matters of fact, the question was, "What is better established?" the question here is, "What is worth more?"  You find out by asking the same question asked in Western science and Western philosophy, "What stands up?"

 In the public arena, in a democracy, you have to be careful arguing your case of worth since, from the sight of the pundits and politicians around you, you know what attacks you're going to get.  That's the Western arena, that's the theater in Athens, that's Aristophanes giving the government hell, that's Aneurin Bevan giving it to Churchill, that's Walter Lippmann giving it to Barry Goldwater, that, hopefully, will be Hillary Clinton giving it to Donald Trump.  What testers they are!

Who fails?  Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith and Joe McCarthy.  Who succeeds?  Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Taft and Joseph Welch, speakers there with the goods, the factual goods, the tested goods.

How often it happens, I pointed out, that the winners have checked with Socrates, the model of care.  They learned.  They got educated.  Where?  In a liberal arts college.  "If you don't get educated that way you're going to be a loser," I said, regardless of arrogance.

And now, judging by his poll numbers, I have to consider the possibility that Donald Trump, who rejects and indeed reverses my kind of education — and, if he's true to form, will show that rejection in his performance — may be considered the winner by a majority of viewers.  Who gets crowned depends on the audience.  I had assumed one that had absorbed Western education. 

Now the correcting voice:  "That can't be an assumption.  It's a hope."

All right, I say, it was my arrogant assumption.  And yes, Trump's standing in the polls has shown it to be a hope.  But that only makes my question about tonight's debate more urgent.  How far is my hope justified?  How far have the common people of our time become educated in the way my colleagues and I thought we were educating them, the way Thomas Jefferson thought they would be educated, the classical way of the enlightened West?  

354. Clinton Loses Control. Shocking Statements. Wants to 'Plug Trump Between the Eyes.' Surges in Polls.

"Friends, I intended to talk about my program for childcare and early education today — you know, the way I was going to set it up, and keep it going, and handle the costs, with all the details I, as usual, thought voters deserved to know — and then I read what Donald Trump said about me on Friday: that I had started the questioning about Barack Obama's birth.

"So I prepared a statement.  [Begins to read.]  'Once again we see that Donald Trump is unfit for...'  [Moves to the side.]  You know, I'm so mad I can't see to read that.  It's so far from expressing what I really want.  You know what I really want?  I want to fight a duel with that man.  The way men used to do when one slandered another.

"Oh if only our laws and customs allowed it!  I wouldn't be a bit afraid.  I'll bet he's a terrible shot.  You know, the kind of cowboy full of brag until he gets called on it, has to fight, and sprays the walls with lead. Then the real cowboy plugs him in the head.  Right between the eyes.

"You think a woman couldn't do that?  What sex was Annie Oakley?  In my dream that's me.  Pow!  Right between the eyes.  Is that assassination?  No, it's a gunfight, an informal duel.  And I'll be doing the shooting myself; I won't be hinting like a wimp that somebody else do it. 

"I know, I know, a candidate for President of the United States should never, never go public with dreams like that, but let me tell you, at the moment I don't care.  I'm fed up.  I'm sick of getting nagged and nagged about things that have done absolutely no harm to the country while nobody seems to realize what terrible harm could be done by a President who has so little respect for fact or reality.

"If anybody had any doubts about that this birther thing should have removed them.  There was the evidence, the documents, right in front of him.  And he goes years before believing it — no, saying he believes it.  He treats evidence as if it were the oldest trick in the book.

"So what's he going to do when a National Security Advisor lays before him clear evidence, evidence as solid as the evidence for President Obama's birthplace, that a foreign leader — like maybe his friend Vladimir Putin — is taking steps to do us harm?  Take five years to believe it?  And then cover himself by making charges for which there is absolutely no evidence (like the charge that I started the birther thing). 

"Can you see him getting away with that kind of thing at a G20 meeting?  At the UN?  On the world stage?  Do you hear the laughter?  And that would be laughter not just at our President but at our country.

"I think that if anything can be called deplorable it's that stubborn refusal to weigh evidence that birthers show.  I think that if anybody on the political spectrum can be called deplorable it's birthers.  You are deplorable, birthers, and the people who go along with your beliefs are deplorable.

 I think any democracy that doesn't deplore evidence-ignoring people like that is in trouble.  Deploring is what I'm doing. And I challenge Trump to do otherwise.  Stand up, big man, and say I don't deplore birthers.  You're getting a lot of credit for "saying it like it is."  Well how is it here?

"I think most Trump supporters believe what I believe about birthers, and lot of other fringy things.  They just haven't realized it yet.  It's been the kind of election season where you don't have time to think.  And he says his wild things so confidently, in such a big manly way, with such an emphatic repeat.  But they, those basically sensible supporters, will get around to realizing it, and the debates are the time for it.  I will try to make my kind of sense, and he will try to make his. 

Mine is kind of boring, I know.  But so was Eisenhower's.  Though the nation was already into the greatest, longest surge of prosperity the world had ever seen there were big voices saying things were terrible.  Eisenhower called them "prophets of gloom and doom."  He noted their presence and then went on explaining, with costs and benefits, his projects — like the Interstate Highway System.  Aren't we glad the nation listened to him and held its course?

I can't believe that Eisenhower's kind of good sense — in the nation, in the Republican Party — has disappeared.  I think it's just been under a spell for a while.

Some politicians — and that's what I am, a politician — can  break a spell with a big speech.  A flash.  A counter-spell.  I'm apparently not capable of that.  But I am capable of plugging away with facts and figures, so that's what I'll keep doing — knowing I'll be there for you when the spell breaks.

353. Paris Review, Readers' Digest, God.

After struggling to find a less brutal characterization I have to say that the Paris Review has just published a Readers' Digest article.  The distilled Readers' Digest article.  "I [Did a Far-Out Thing] and Found God."  That is what the intelligentsia made fun of in the fifties and that is what "Letter from Williamsburg" (Summer Issue, 2016) amounts to.

Kristin Dombek and her boyfriend find a woman willing to go to their apartment and have three-way sex with them.  After the first of these experiences Kristin finds "a peace immanent and tangible as a body, some kind of giant embrace in the air, and it was most definitely not coming from my mind."  

After the third encounter she sees the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, "The one who watched, the one who did, the one who felt.  The one with power, the one who suffered, the bliss." 

 In the end she presents herself in what looks to me like a state of  bliss.  "There was a world outside the world I’d known.  I have never been so relieved in all my life.  And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray."

In the Readers' Digest piece you got both the thrill, often transgressive, of the thrust into the exotic, and the comfort, at the end, of your provincial (US: Mid-American) minister: God is everywhere and will reveal himself where you least expect him.  When you got on to more sophisticated periodicals you realized how facile this was, how shaped by editors for an unsophisticated audience.  When you got to great religious literature— Dante, Thomas à Kempis, Donne, Herbert — you learned how hard-earned such visions were.

You, reader of this blog, knowing that the author started as an unsophisticated member of a Mid-American church and became, by trade, a sophisticated reader of cosmopolitan articles, might predict his pulse as he reads Dombek's piece.  Sure enough, excitement at the thrust into the exotic.  He's a patsy, as of old, for the Readers' Digest editors. 

If you think that's not predictable you need to know that he's the kind of Mid-American who, when he first encountered toplessness in the Bois de Bologne, couldn't keep his eyes on the path.  No surprise now that he can't keep them on the page.

But exotic transgressions draw him back as they always do, and as cynical editors know they will do.  He feels the old thrill.  But then, "Wait a minute.  This is the Paris Review!"  I need an explanation.  Is there a higher Review?

I can't see behind the curtain of my age, and my age's age.  I can't see what the Paris Review editors see.  I see only what's in front of the curtain, and that looks like Readers' Digest superficiality. 

In the shadows, yes, I see something I might understand — instability so great it hallucinates stability (God) anyplace, a need for goodness so strong it steals words for their established goodness (as, "love" for a moment's physical warmth), a quest in which the mundane is never worth a look.  Or, less sympathetically, I see self-indulgence pushing for some justificatory vision at the end of an indulgence.

And I feel pity because the writer has so far to go.  Romantics generally have a long way to go but this one....I can't measure it.  I get an idea, though, when I picture the man in Frances Cornford's poem, bent over his love's "slight essential words" with "attentive courtesy" before they, like a man with his prized guitar, "begin to play."  Or Lear picturing daily prison life with Cordelia, the two of them chattering about "who's in and who's out" at court (see Post 349).  Will this  couple's threesomes ever arrive at chatter, vital chatter?  The first of their partners has two sentences, the second four.

Chatter apparently is limited to "those capable of monogamy."  (Oh, a glimpse, a pang.  Words to go back to, smart analyst.)  Is she the unfortunate outsider looking in?  Or has she simply not tested her capability, not pushed it past the laundry-stacking boredom?  She seems to know from the start that God will never appear to the housewife loading the dishwasher.  Nor to anybody in her church.

But back to that look over at monogamy, which I took to be a longing look.  That's not Readers' Digest.  Is this what the editors saw?  A feel for pain in the odd, an honest report from the cultural frontier — detailed, well-written, necessarily intimate but rare and courageous?

Taking it that way has many attractions.  It allows me to feel less a brute, and more welcome behind the curtain.  I'm the open-minded, adult academic whose oath of objectivity keeps him calm (what he hopes will be called cool) and his eyes on the page and the path.  Ah yes, threesomes.  It's an acquired insouciance, but it admits you to the company.

With it, though, comes the academic's alertness to superficiality.  And reluctance to say, "I know," until he knows.  There's so much here I don't know.  You're young, says Dombek of herself, and you're trying to be good, and you're wrestling with God (who tells you what good is), and you get tired.  "So you give up."  So.  Therefore.  Everybody behind the curtain understands that.  Every reader of the Paris Review apparently understands it, the inevitability, the helplessness, without editorial intervention or gate-keeping,

But I can't say I understand it.  The problem is compulsion.  When is it resistible and when not?  When are you obliged to resist it whatever your knowledge of its resistibility?

There is no doubt about what you do in two of the great books in my Great Books Course, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.  In them the formula ("algorithm" now), which happened to be the formula of my and most other Mid-American ministers, was "reason over the passions."  Compulsion to a passion was never irresistible.  In both Paradise and Ohio your reason, feeling a passion, was supposed to suck it up and assert control.  That's what Adam was supposed to do and that's what I was supposed to do.

Dombek glances at Adam when she finds "a new kind of knowledge" in "just watching."

We [she and her live-in] had come to think that this might be some part of why God forbade eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: eat it and you can no longer believe that your happiness comes from him or me, God or me, him this or her that, or me this or me that.

Dombek tries, but I really need assistance here.  The couple had "come to think."  How?  I'm lost.  Thinking happens.  What a contrast with Milton, who (through the angel Raphael) patiently explains how happiness comes to a fallen creature: little by little, day by day, using his reason not just to suppress the passions but to get the most out of them.  The one hope of regaining the jouissance that came so easily before the Fall.  Raphael sees it as "light after light well used," the light of sensible daily care, familiar care, not the light of mystical vision.

If that's not understandable I can go back and note that what Adam (in Milton's eyes) lost most damagingly was his ability to respond.  That's a loss of Paradise whatever the external decline.  Getting it back takes work.  In a relationship it means listening to your opposite "with attentive courtesy," working your way back to the essential chatter — in which lies your, nay man's, nobility. 

That's clear.  To oppose it I need a comparable clarity.  Because I don't get it from Dombek I need help.  From somebody on the inside.  Until I get it all I'll see is what's in front of the curtain, the Readers' Digest.

352.The Big Media-Generated Mess Trump Depends On

Again, when can we accurately say our country is in a "crisis" or a "mess"?  Well, I'm pretty sure it's in a mess when its out-matched soldiers and sailors are spread around the world desperately holding off two veteran war machines until its machine can be built and gotten to them. And when it has an adversary with thousands of nuclear-armed missiles ready to launch at it.  And when it has to struggle to keep allies in line to meet the threat from that adversary and struggle to keep young men in line to be drafted.  And when it has to calculate the risk of starting World War III in every conflict with that adversary's clients.  And when adversary-fear puts it in a quagmire in Korea.  And when the same fear puts it into a really big quagmire in Viet Nam.

Do we have to have lived through the Depression and World War II and the Cold War and the Korean War and the Viet Nam War and the Nation-Shredding Sixties to know that "crisis" is a laughable word to apply to the present time?

This time when we haven't fallen into the Depression every informed person knew we were hair-raisingly close to; when we haven't (since the administration of Trump's party) plunged into any more Middle East quagmires; when we haven't continued pushing NATO closer to Russia, and the risk of her lash-back; when we haven't made any foolish commitments to Ukraine; when we haven't listened seriously to our humanitarian aggressors.

"Crisis" is Trump's word; "mess" is the word with his followers.  And they are the big problem, not he.  (Demagogues themselves seldom are.)  All that excitement, all those votes.  Our country is "in a big mess."  Now, when in comparison with what came before the sixties, we are unbelievably prosperous.  At a Fulbright party in Japan in 1966 I overheard a foreign service officer's report on the home country to his colleagues on station.  In two words: "They're fat."  The first layers of fat.  Think how many have been added since.  Think what we have to spare in case we have to diet.

What Trump has to fear is the moment of calm, when they think about the words they're using.  When they match them up with the external world.  You know, when they quit saying how deeply different their feelings are now from what they were when they felt great about America.

But they keep saying it and that lets us say that the whole mess is in minds.  Excitable minds responding to expert mind-exciters working up big scenes on little screens.  They have produced the mess.  And then, echoing each other, pumping up what the screens make them feel, they see a nation-endangering crisis. 

In the press, in print generally, America had gotten away from that sort of pumping,   Remember William Randolph Hearst's inflating, in his yellow way, an explosion on the USS Maine?  Now, though the technology is different, it's back.

Is the Trumpists' excitement too great by this time to allow them any moment of calm?  Might they find time just to listen to an unexcited voice?  You know, like the ones we used to hear coming out of the Pentagon, or Foggy Bottom.  "'Adversary,' you say?  Where? what capabilities?  How many divisions, now or on the way?  How many missiles with what range?" Adversary strength sets limits to a possible threat to our security.

So now, if it gets quiet enough to listen, we (they) just might hear that analytic voice reporting on the Islamic State.  And comparing it with former adversaries.  USSR compared to IS.  You'll have to forgive a laugh.  (Elitist bloggers can lose control of themselves too, you know.) 

What we soberly hope is that when the listening Trump enthusiast next hears "crisis" or "mess" he will have some doubts, which we hope will grow with memories of his history courses.  Our greatest hope is that before election day he will see that if we are in a "mess" now there are no words left for what we were in in 1961 or 1968.

What they need to do is (ha) read The Economist.  From the latest issue (9-3-16) comes a cool, analytical voice that hits just the note they need to hear.   It delivers facts like that in the decade up to 2013 the "likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack" fell to "one in 56 million."  Confirming what Barack Obama, our fightingly cool leader, had said earlier, that "the danger of drowning in a bathtub was greater than that of being killed by terrorists."  But under present conditions, goes the piece, "cost-benefit analysis becomes almost impossible." 

Are even Elitists fully aware of those present conditions?  The Economist points out that according to a recent poll "no less than 77% of Americans....who said they followed Islamic State news closely" agreed with the statement that the group was "a serious threat to the existence or survival of the United States."  Hillary Clinton must not be aware of them.  Friday night, on Wall Street, she put half of Trump's followers into a "basket of deplorables" (NYT, 9-11-16), thereby cutting herself off from them and their friends — just the people she needs, those friends.

There are apparently more populists, or populist-leaning, or soft-on-populism, or fellow-travelling non-populist, voters than the Democratic elite ever dreamed of.  Seventy-seven percent believe a baseless claim, or, to go populist, believe crap.  Those are the conditions that Donald Trump has taken advantage of to rise within two percent of Clinton in the polls.  Conditions no college teacher, looking at the numbers of graduates accumulating in the electorate now to over 31%, would in their wildest dreams ever have predicted.

Why do they try?  Why fiddle with words, trying to get the populist crap out of them?  There in a college or high-school classroom.  When in a few years they'll so easily open their mouths to a populist feeding them crappy words like "existential."  Yes, that's what they think the IS terrorists are, a threat to the very existence of our once-great country.  In the words of a contrarian populist of an earlier time, "Teachers shoulda stood in bed."

351. A Catch-All Explanation of Twentieth-Century Horrors

Everything is Understandable: A Poem

You read a history book and say how could a people like the Germans so intelligent such a great culture art and architecture and music oh god the music how could such a people do the things they did in world war two the Holocaust and you read other history books and say to yourself if you had to accept a peace treaty that ground you into the dirt and gave you no way to get up and made you responsible for every bad thing that happened to you and everybody else when you believed you weren't even defeated and thought you were only signing an armistice you'd do terrible things too those things all following from the terrible thing war that keeps demanding more and more terrible things until there's nothing left that's not terrible and though you don't have to go as far as Hitler did that's the chance you take.

Then you read the big history books and see how all the European nations were building up to the Great War bumping their chests together in Africa and read that it wasn't just the Great War they were building up to it was everything in every field science and philosophy and medicine and art and music and geography jesus geography pressing around every ocean and pushing to the poles just as they were doing in physics and chemistry with the whole world catching on my god what energy until you think of the Great War that started the chain of terrible things as just another part of the energy and you couldn't take the parts apart.

But you didn't learn that you really couldn't take them apart until you read Thucydides' history which you should have read first because it showed you that giving the first big push toward all those good things the Academy and the Parthenon and all were people who did terrible things like get into a great war with the Spartans that made them do the all the usual terrible things and worse like kill all the Melians and the only thing that stopped them from doing more terrible things was that they didn't have the machine gun yet and Thucydides' only explanation for their behavior was that they were energetic people who couldn't let themselves or anybody else rest and that exactly fits the European nations bumping chests in Africa up to the Great Bump in Europe and that makes all the terrible things of the last century understandable as a manifestation of energy you can't separate into parts the digging in the atom from chest-bumping in Africa not even to explain the Holocaust.

350. Purists in the Ointment

Get a rash — of pollutants in the atmosphere, of terrorists in the sky, of Trumpists in the presidential campaign — go for the ointment, and oh no, there's a purist in it.

Purists are one-value absolutists, sold on a single principle and never to be bought out.  Like absolute freedom of speech, by which they plague ACLU boards, or by the absolute purity of nature, by which they plague environmental groups, or by absolute dedication to liberal values, by which they plague the Democratic Party.

Right now the rash of Trumpists has our closest attention, and deservedly so.  It's virulent, and spreading.  Hillary goes for the practical remedy, Co-optation Ointment, and lordy it's full of  Bernie Sanders flies.  You'll never apply it smoothly, Hillary.

ACLU boards know all about purists.  In 1940 they insisted, against the majority, on the right to keep communists on their board no matter what the evidence of the Communist Party's intent to overthrow democratic governments by infiltrating their liberal institutions.  There were to be no blacklists, no giving away liberty for security.

In 2004 they threw the board into turmoil over lists of suspected supporters of terrorism, to be taken as guides to hiring.  No lists, no lists of people who shouldn't be allowed on airplanes, no lists at all.  As for keeping suspected terrorists out of the ACLU in order to hang on to a revenue privilege from the government, "no amount of money is worth violating our principles'' (NYT, 7-31-04).

The environmentalists, I see, have been blessed by the willing departure of one of these purists, or (to experienced committee members) pains in the ass.  For leading activist Paul Kingsnorth the movement had quit worrying about "protection of the non-human world," nature, and had started worrying about social justice, human beings, something called sustainability. "I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing.... I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking" (London  Review, 8-11-16).  A rare case of a fly unsticking itself from the ointment and bugging out on its own.

A purist is a species of sluggard, an unwilling thinker.  Get one principle that guarantees your virtue and whew, back to your bed.  No more of those painful distinctions and gravelly specifics.

That's bed for the mind.  The body can go on to throw blood into files, burn down ROTC buildings, or trash research labs.  Carrying its goodness guarantee in the other hand.

The purist reasons not by logic but by association.  He tastes ideas.  A no-fly list "smacks of" blacklists.  He hears sounds of evil.   A terrorist list "evokes eerie echoes of our McCarthy-era past" (Stan Furman, ACLU).  He is the opposite of the accountant, demanding the specifics of every action, balancing the cost against the benefit, and facing all trade-offs.  Our most impure thinker.

I don't know how many purists there are on Hillary Clinton's staff, but by her failure to take the practical remedy, moving clearly and firmly to the center (where she can turn unhappy Republicans into Clinton Republicans) she shows that there must be a few, with some influence.

What they need is a sales pitch on our ointment.  It smells bad, it often stings, but it works.  You just have to get it on in time, with an even smear.  You can't do that if there are a bunch of flies in it.  So, purists, get with the treatment or get off Hillary's staff.

349. Chatter, Vital Chatter

Rebecca Mead, of the New Yorker, right about so many things, is wrong about the importance of chatter in a relationship.  She thinks it's fluff, weightless.  Talk about "school districts or visits to the in-laws or the follies of the Bush Administration" (8-11-03) couldn't possibly be what Milton was referring to when he made "a meet and happy conversation" the "chiefest and noblest end of marriage."

I didn't realize just how wrong she was until the other day I ran into this poem, "The Guitarist Tunes Up," by Frances Cornford.

With what attentive courtesy he bent

Over his instrument;

Not as a lordly conqueror who could

Command both wire and wood,

But as a man with a loved woman might

Inquiring with delight

What slight essential things she had to say

Before they started, he and she, to play.

That one word "essential," after "slight."  Essential to their love, to the ecstasy they will play their way into, essential to their relationship.  There it is, the whole refutation of Mead, a refuting the way poets refute, a brain-shaking combination, with a power no academic's argument, whatever it's length, will ever reach. 

I would have heard "talk about the follies of the Bush administration" as fluff when I was a high-theorizing graduate student.  That was before I really listened to King Lear.   Stripped of the big kingship things, standing with Cordelia as she asks to confront the sisters who will imprison them, he stops her:

No, no, no, no!  Come let's away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage....

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too —

Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out —

And take upon's the mystery of things

As if we were God's spies, and we'll wear out,

In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.

There's day-to-day life together!  The essential in the slight.  In this passage what invitations there are to superimpose the other — Lear bending over Cordelia with "attentive courtesy," his pleasure in their kind of play, their "singing i' th' cage" coming through as well-tuned guitar music.   In Cornford what invitations to expansion.  See, as Mead does, the connection with Milton, and realize that marital back-and-forth is exactly what Milton was talking about, and you can see the lovers' play going on, with children, into larger play, with more variations, more personalities, more to play with.  A well-tuned family.

One can understand why 95% of our literature, and maybe 99% of our movies, appeal to our interest in the exotic ­— what's outside our daily experience.  Getting excited  about what's inside, the introtic, say, is so difficult.  You really have to crank up your imagination.  All while resisting the exotic's force of attraction.

Are you in doubt about that force?  Look at what Roget gives as synonyms for "exotic": alluring, colorful, fascinating, enticing, unfamiliar, romantic, glamorous.  Even better look at the antonyms:  boring, uninteresting, standard, usual, dull, common, familiar, normal, regular, ordinary.  Think what it must take to overcome that!

Exotic things are essential to those whose imaginations are not yet strong enough to penetrate the fluff, to get to what's in play, the love, and yes the conflict, the competition.  Managed and played with.  The love.

The disproportionate lure of the outside to youth is understandable.  There, and possibly really there, is the New York stage, or an ambassadorship, or a Nobel prize, or the Great American Novel.  You have to live a while, and not get a Nobel, to know what Lear is talking about.  Also now there are new chemicals for our sensors, new kinks in the sex chain, all there for the exciting exploration our affluence allows, all alluring, fascinating, unfamiliar, and enticing, none standard, normal, regular, ordinary, or dull.

It's not a competition, though, where we can go all-out either way.  I favor the inside game but I have to back the youth who might, just might, playing outside, write the Great American Novel.  On the other hand there's what Lear opens up for us: the chance to become God's spies into the mystery of things.  That can't be boring, uninteresting, standard, or dull.  Not if you're spying on human beings. 

There's a problem with our word "exploration."  It nearly always means to us "movement into the outside, the unfamiliar."  It seldom means "digging deeper into the inside, the familiar."  What the lover is doing when he inquires into the slight essential things the loved woman has to say.  What parents in the well-tuned family do, and the children learn to do.  Attending to the slight things that reveal a spouse's character, or a child's capacities.  There's no other word for that than "exploration," and no other suggestion it can make than "exciting."  Any dullness has to be in the observer.

Is that the inside game's highest promise, the nobility, a chance to see into the mystery of things?  A blaze of light, Truth on a mountaintop?  I don't want to deny any possibility that might give the inside game an advantage over the outside game, but I can't claim it. 

I can, though, give advice on a bet.  If the winner is going to be the one on top at the end put your money on the inside players.  Shakespeare has given me a vision.  I see Lear and Cordelia, inside those prison walls, gabbing away, wearing out "packs and sects of great ones." I see our two, Cornford's two, bouncing their ball back and forth, wearing out packs and sects of romantic questers.  On and on.  When those on the outside are worn out those imaginative ones on the inside will still be fresh.