by Emily Ogden

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

—Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush,” 1900

The year and the century are dying; everything else is already dead. In Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” (1900), it is a dim day in the dimmest part of the year. Sunset will come early; night in Dorset, England, where Hardy lived, will last sixteen hours. A thrush sings, unwarrantably, of “joy illimited.” Why in the world? Or is his reason not of this world? Is he better informed than we? May we hope? Hardy’s subject is the close relationship between our own ignorance and our belief in another’s knowledge. To realize that we don’t know something is to realize that someone else might. To think that what the other knows might be good, might even be divine good, in spite of the earth’s sorry state—well, that is to celebrate Christmas.

“The Darkling Thrush” was first published on December 29, 1900, under the title “By the Century’s Deathbed.” There is a horticultural term for the season Hardy was then living at his house in Dorset, and that we in the Northern hemisphere are living now: the Persephone Days, named for the goddess of spring’s annual rape at Hades’ hands. You are in the Persephone Days, according to gardener Eliot Coleman, when fewer than ten of the twenty-four hours are light. Why ten hours? Because vegetables mostly slow or stop their growth with any less. “The ancient pulse of germ and birth / [is] shrunken hard and dry,” as Hardy wrote. Plenty of vegetables are cold tolerant. I have kale plants in my front yard now that can withstand a 10º F night. Darkness, however, stunts them. The problem winter poses for our survival is not the freezing of water. It’s the freezing of time. I’ll eat only what reaches maturity before the annual darkness comes.

Or I can always go to Whole Foods. Shopping and other glamours flurry about in the foreground these dark days, distracting us from Sol’s deadly swing toward Capricorn. Black Friday roughly coincides with the start of the Persephone Days; in Norfolk, Virginia (36.8º N latitude), they coincide exactly. Black Friday is itself a kind of heretical outgrowth from Advent, a time of holy anticipation; some of us confusedly observe them both by receiving toy catalogs, letting ourselves buy cheese balls from festive displays, and growing tired of ecstatic carolings. Call it Advert. If you were in America four weeks ago, you may have found the retail festival the most noticeable of the three, followed by the liturgical holiday, with the horticultural one coming in a distant third, if at all. But that’s the whole point of the first two: to be noticeable. So as not to notice the other thing. The very intensity of the annual danse macabre shows we have not entirely forgotten our fear of the dark. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

In 2018, Earth picked up about 40,000 metric tons of interplanetary material, mostly dust, much of it from comets. Earth lost around 96,250 metric tons of hydrogen and helium, the lightest elements, which escaped to outer space. Roughly 505,000 cubic kilometers of water fell on Earth’s surface as rain, snow, or other types of precipitation. Bristlecone pines, which can live for millennia, each gained perhaps a hundredth of an inch in diameter. Countless mayflies came and went. As of this writing, more than one hundred thirty-six million people were born in 2018, and more than fifty-seven million died.

Tidal interactions are very slowly increasing the distance between Earth and the moon, which ended 2018 about 3.8 centimeters further apart than they were at the beginning. As a consequence, Earth is now rotating slightly more slowly; the day is a tiny fraction of a second longer. Earth and the sun are also creeping apart, by around 1.5 centimeters per year, although the effect of tidal interactions is very small. Most of the change is due to changes in the sun’s gravitational pull as it converts some of its mass into energy by nuclear fusion.

The entire solar system traveled roughly 7.25 billion kilometers in its orbit about the center of the Milky Way. This vast distance, however, is only about 1/230,000,000th of the entire orbit.

In 2018, there were two lunar eclipses and three partial solar eclipses, each a step in the long gravitational dance making up the roughly 18-year saros cycle. During one saros cycle, eclipses with particular characteristics (partial, total, annular) and a specific Earth–Moon–Sun geometry occur in a predictable sequence; at the end, the whole thing starts again. This pattern has been repeating for much longer than humans have been around to see it.

I like knowing these bits of cosmic context because they link me to a larger world. I can echo the words of Ptolemy: “Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.” Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur 

In college, I took a course on American poetry, but I missed the class on Robert Frost. To be honest, I slept straight through it. That particular winter was brutally cold. I lived in a worn-out house some fifteen minutes from campus, and the water heater in the basement was broken. So I skipped the ice-cold shower at 8AM, the wet walk through a foot of snow, and the monotone reading of a few representative poems by a long-tenured professor. I stayed in my warm bed, wrapped up in the comforter.

From that morning until only a few weeks ago, my mental image of Robert Frost was that of a grey-haired, folksy New Englander who wrote modest poems about country life. I knew “The Road Not Taken,” though I didn’t understand it.  I was familiar with a handful of other titles— “Fire and Ice,” “Mending Wall,” “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”— but I can’t say if I had ever really read these poems. If so, they hardly made an impression on me. In short, I had Frost figured as a quaint poet of nature, a leftover from 19th Century America.

I now realize that I was wonderfully mistaken, that Robert Frost isn’t what he seems, and that the fundamental experience of reading Frost is discovering that the poems aren’t what they seem. Harold Bloom has called Frost a “trickster and a mischief maker.” In The New Yorker,  Joshua Rothman describes Frost’s “poetic sleight of hand,” his characteristic tendency for deception. In his own words, Frost considered poetry “the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.” For nearly fifty years, the poet hid ulterior meanings behind plain language. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

It is simultaneously awkward and exciting to read about your own consciously and responsibly adopted beliefs as something to be anatomized. It is also something atheists are not always much disposed to. On the contrary, perhaps: many forms of atheism present themselves as a consequence of free thought, of emancipation from tradition. The internal logic of their arguments prescribes that while religious beliefs, being non-rational, are in need of cultural or psychological explanation, atheism is really just what you will gravitate towards once you finally start thinking. One question here will be whether this is necessarily the case.

Most Atheists Just Don’t Get It

To the extent that what I just said is a recognizable self-description, we deserve the injustice that John Gray does to us in his Seven Types of Atheism (2018). Of the seven types Gray distinguishes, only two – its more withdrawn, Epicurean or mystical manifestations – get a positive review. One other version (‘God-haters’) is interesting but also confused, hardly atheistic, and of course evil. The remaining four types are primarily variations upon the theme of the naive progressivist: people who think they have left behind monotheistic religion, but who have in fact replaced it with a new God: humanity, or some proxy to humanity – science, or progress, or Enlightenment, or secular political utopia.

Idolizing or deifying something while claiming to be an atheist requires some self-delusion, according to Gray, and he readily psychologizes this phenomenon. Atheists’ understanding of religion has been “unthinkingly” inherited from monotheism (5); new atheists are “unwitting disciplines” of Comte’s positivism (11); twenty-first-century atheists are “unthinking liberals” (20); secular thinkers have continued to try to harmonize Jewish and Greek views of the world “without knowing what they are doing” (29).

A charitable reading of this is that Gray is not pointing out lack of cognitive capacity, but lack of historical awareness. Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

Certain phrases choke us with their ubiquity at some point:

• “Just do it.” (Nike)
• “Let’s get ready to rumble!” (Sports announcer Michael Buffer)
• “That’s hot.” (Paris Hilton)
• “Hasta la vista, baby.” (“Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” as delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger)

Did you know these have all been trademarked? This means that you are supposed to have the owner’s permission to use any one of these phrases. These sentences were so popular at some time in history that their crafters applied to trademark and thereby protect the specific saying.

A trademark is any name, symbol, figure, letter, word, mark (such as the Nike Swoosh), or other device that is used by a manufacturer or a merchant to identify and promote a specific good or service and differentiate it from other similar goods or services from a competing manufacturer or dealer. Once you register a trademark, it is yours. You own it. In the United States, it is registered with the Patent and Trademark Office and only you can enjoy the exclusive use of your trademark. The word “trademark” was first recorded in the mid-16th century. (Property rights go way back in law; you could make the argument that they are the reason that laws arose.) Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

A pretty doll in a box at the foot of the bed – what could make a better Christmas morning for a little girl?

“Aaw, she’s so pretty.” The doll promised happy days to come – hair to brush and style, outfits to make and match, private chats to be had. Good chats, with someone who only listened, never talked. A doll was the essence of childhood for millions of young girls over centuries, even millennia. A toy became a baby, a little sister or even a “little me”. The doll was a simple thing until the middle of the last century but alas, it is no longer, like childhood itself.

“You can’t find toys like that anymore,” say the oldsters about their memories of playthings. In reality, grumbling adults are indifferent to such things, unless they are collectors. To children, toys and dolls are as new and exciting as they have ever been. We may think modern dolls have morphed into figures of complexity, controversy and even creepiness. They have become trend setters, celebrities and psychotic misfits – analysed, criticised, rarely praised. Are dolls still loved? Are they innocent companions – or sexist props, propagandists for adulthood, training aids for womanhood?

It is narcissistic, this human urge to fashion models of ourselves, and it’s quite ancient. In prehistory, dolls represented some aspect of religion. Gods themselves are invisible dolls, fashioned in the human image and likeness. Early dolls were fetishes. The origin of this word was in sorcery, charms and spells, exposing the purpose of dolls. The fetish differs from an idol in that it is worshipped for itself, not as a representative of an invisible spirit. Read more »

by Max Sirak

As we approach the end of the year, it’s that time again. Not to flip the page to the next month, but to buy a new calendar. (Who am I kidding? It’s probably only me and your grandmother who still uses paper wall calendars…) And also to reflect. 

I learned a lot in 2018. I learned about how the genealogy of Batman can be traced to Alexander Dumas. I learned about the importance of taking ownership of our emotional reactions. But, by far, the most important thing I learned was the importance of not growing up.

Say What?

It’s not that I have anything against being an adult. Working, making money, buying stuff, and maybe owning the place you live are all fine and good, I guess. But after doing these things for a while, I realized I was feeling pretty empty inside.

These things, which mean so much to so many and most seem to organize their lives around, didn’t do it for me. They didn’t satisfy me. And the more I tried to fake it, the more I tried to buy in and force myself to care about these things that practically everyone else seemed to be completely absorbed in – the worse I felt.

Until one night, toward the beginning of September, when I stumbled back into joy. Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

Guinea and Redhead were part of a large food chain. Beyond campus’ freshly-baked sidewalks, a Cowboy Mafia ferried contraband from the south. They landed small prop planes on ranch land outside of town, cut powder with dental anesthetics and broke up the bales. Their wares clumped on our cafeteria trays and glinted in tiny screw-top bottles. The capo, a local big-hat business man,who ran a palatial kicker-dance hall and owned the ranch. That legit business and his crew’s discipline kept them out of jail. Maybe a hat full of cash in the bargain.

My Trumpet buddy shared an apartment in a low-rise student complex. Trumpet’s Roomie was in with the Cowboys. I found out when I made a visit. From outside, the shitty drywall construction leaked sound and odors like a window screen. Inside, eucalyptus gas wrapped around my head. I knew Roomie a little. He didn’t seem to remember. Wide-eyed, fidgeting, he appraised me.

“You cool?”

I reckoned I was. In his bedroom, he kicked aside some laundry and slid open a door. On the floor, a bulging black Hefty bag yawned. Inside, Tolkein magic: lichen grown thigh-deep, whispering in shadow. Despite mind-expanding potential, there was no joy in babysitting a large ingot of fools’ gold. Read more »