Blessing of Unicorns: Politics and virtues, 18 Jewish stories in 18 languages, and more books

This week’s Unicorns round up thoughts on politics and a lot of good books.

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Jake Meador poses (and answers in the emphatic affirmative) the following question in Plough: “Is Tolerance Still a Virtue?” A taste:

We are stuck with each other. All that remains is figuring out how to make it work.

This brings us to an idea that was deeply in fashion not that long ago but has now passed into obscurity: the idea of tolerance. Once widely hailed and regarded as necessary in the 1990s and 2000s, it has fallen on hard times in more recent years. Today it is not uncommon for people to regard tolerance as something harmful, a euphemism for “being indifferent to the presence of great evil.” The notion that progressives should tolerate socially conservative Christians who reject gay marriage would sound like an appalling injustice to many on the left. Likewise, the notion that right-wingers should tolerate people who do not share their politics or values sounds to many like an unforgivable embrace of weakness and a political loser’s mentality.

Yet when we push past the bluster, we find that we need tolerance after all. The kind of homogeneous America that many on the left and right equally desire is no more real or coherent than the university without deans or committees or students that my professor jokingly wished for. Regardless of how anyone feels about the matter, we are stuck with tolerance as a necessary practice that we all must take up to varying degrees…

When we practice tolerance, we are essentially telling ourselves that some particular thing we find objectionable or distasteful should be patiently endured so that some higher, better good can be enjoyed. To take a simple example, most of the coffee shops I frequent as a full-time remote worker are owned and staffed by people who do not share my traditionalist Christian social democrat politics. But their business tolerates my presence because there are other goods we enjoy together. Their distaste or disapproval for my political views, or mine for theirs, is not the sum total of our relationship. That component is real, but not exhaustive.

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Jeff Bilbro says something important that has to be said right now: “Voting for a President Won’t Save the Republic.”

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Miles Smith on “Race, Religion, and Republic in Herman Melville’s Redburn.” A taste:

Herman Melville published his autobiographical novel Redburn in 1849. The work proved to be one of his best, and in many ways remains his most quintessentially American novel. Redburn lacks the exoticism that typified Typee and Omoo, both set in the South Pacific. Likewise Redburn never rises to the heights of metaphysical contemplation that made Moby Dick so attractive after its rediscovery in the 1920s. Melville told his publisher he had “shifted my ground from the South Seas to a different quarter of the globe—nearer home—and what I write I have almost wholly picked up by my own observations under comical circumstances.”

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Olga Zilberbourg reviews a fascinating book, 18 Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages, edited by Nora Gold. A taste of this project:

We begin in Brooklyn with an excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s 2010 novel Hostage set in the era of Gerald Ford’s presidency, translated from French by Catherine Temerson, only to find ourselves on the next page, reading Andrea G. Labinger’s translation of the Varda Fiszbein story “The Guest.”

The story of a grandfather is presiding over the Pesach table in Buenos Aires in 1940, during which a brave guest oversteps family rules over redeeming afikoman to propose to the daughter of the family, is followed by an excerpt from S. Y. Agnon’s novella “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight” translated from Hebrew by Michael P. Kramer that takes us to the town of Buczacz during the reign of the Emperor Franz Joseph. From here, we move on to Hungary in 1969 in “The First Christmas,” a story by Gábor T. Szántó, translated by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry, before a story “Purimspiel” by Jasminka Domaš translated from Croatian by Iskra Pavlović asks us to picture a woman in Zagreb, preparing for a Purim party, magically transported to Kochi, India, “speaking a strange language and trying to explain something.” 

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Jeff Reimer reviews Charles Taylor’s latest (but is it greatest?) magnum opus for The Bulwark: “Lost in a Forest of Symbols.” A taste:

Cosmic Connections sits at the confluence of a number of streams that flow through Taylor’s intellectual project: It offers a historical and philosophical examination of Romanticism, focusing especially on the role of disenchantment in the era’s poetry. The book, however, is not simply a historical study. Taylor’s investigations of Romanticism stem from his desire to understand—and, ultimately, to recommend—the Romantics’ particular strategy for addressing “the human need for cosmic connection.” While he has gestured at and digressed into this territory many times in prior works, this is the book in which he maps it out.

The Romantics understood, along with their intellectual predecessors in the Enlightenment, that the new capabilities and social forms of the nascent modern world seemed to require the dismantling of the imaginative architecture of premodern life. But unlike most Enlightenment thinkers, they felt keenly the desolation such advances wrought, and they gave systematic articulation to their resulting sense of loss. Modernity, they knew, was irreversible, even if it came at a heavy cost; and they had no desire to turn back the clock in any case. In this context, art in general and poetry in particular had to reflect the changes of the past two centuries, but it also had to productively inhabit the ambivalence brought on by those changes and the new sense of alienation from nature that accompanied them. The work of the poet was no longer to read a universally recognized meaning off the world but to forge, in Taylor’s words, an “interspace”—a “locus of potentially transforming experience” that links cosmic meaning to personal expression. Construed in this way, poetry is both a record of the writer’s encounter with the world and a place of encounter for the reader. Even more, the poem itself is the encounter.

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Two writers I appreciate in conversation with each other: Dan Darling interviewed Lucy S. R. Austen about her Elisabeth Elliot biography.

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And here’s an interview with Greek historian John Ma on his new doorstopper sized book, Polis. A taste:

I started writing the book in 2012. At the time, during a conversation with Josh Ober, a Stanford University professor and one of the great historians of Athenian democracy and Greek society, it occurred to me that I probably had a grasp of a lot of the things that made the Greek city-state tick—“the polis from soup to nuts,” as Josh put it.

It took me over 10 years to work those ideas out. They reflect an old obsession with city-states, ancient Greece, and the possibility of democracy and freedom in local contexts. The theme stayed relevant, even after I moved from the U.K. to the U.S. to teach at Columbia in 2015: We still live with issues that Aristotle, the great theorist of the polis, flagged in his Politics—how government should provide public goods, what political community is, and how to manage tension between political equality and economic equality. 

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I am half-way through Evan Friss’s fun book, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. And then I read this essay, on a related note: John Byron Kuhner, “I Bought a Haunted Bookshop.” A taste:

My wife and I purchased this Steubenville bookshop—called Bookmarx—to keep it alive, as the former owners were retiring and threatening to liquidate their stock. It’s named for the former owner, Peter Marx, a worthy man with no relation to the Communist Manifesto (though there was dynamite in that book, too, of a different sort). Peter said to me, “John, I’ve been in the book business a long time. You can never get enough of great classic literature in your shop. Other stuff comes and goes. But there will always be people that have not read the classics and want to.” We have taken this as our business plan. 

Now the books are my companions on drizzly October days—the books and the ghosts who haunt them. The titles call out to me as I pass—spine-tingling spines. One can hardly imagine how these little packages of dried-out wood pulp could enchant us so. I see my customers go home with The Count of Monte Cristo and Sherlock Holmes and Jane Eyre; they cross the glaciers with Frankenstein’s monster and stand at the crossroads with the woman in white. They come to the Lonely Mountain with the hobbit and talk of poetry and revolution with the man who was Thursday. 

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Last but not least, don’t miss Norman Wirzba’s gorgeous book launch essay on his new book, Love’s Braided Dance, this week here in Current. You can also get a taste here. And I enjoyed reading and reviewing this book for The Dispatch.