“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the Washington Review of Books!”
Links:
For people such as myself, attempting to disavow judgement and aspiration entirely is dangerous; we run the risk of being like the man who rids himself of one devil only to play host to seven more. It is easy to act self-effacingly, but if there is no real internal reform, every smile becomes another addition to a great pile of resentment.
For hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère—surely you understand by now that in this affair, you are me and I am you. I write from inside the beast. That’s why I know it so well. I have greatly envied, and been greatly envied, and can’t recommend either experience. But I’ve learned one thing through my mistakes, and I’ll share it with you now: the real secret to beating envy is to realize that envy, in addition to being a great vice and an internal poison, is a drag. It is boring. Imagine, if you will, being summoned up to the great throne of God and experiencing a supercut of every time you’ve envied another person. I don’t think it would just feel like shame; it would be overwhelmingly monotonous, like listening to a monologue from the most tiresome person ever to be born, a mosquito-buzz of why not me what makes them so great why them why not me what makes them so great why them why not me what makes them so going on and on and on. And when I imagine that, I get over myself. Not forever, but for a while. Envy will resist self-laceration, but it’s vulnerable to laughter.
[Between this and an essay from 2021 on Pilate’s envy by Robert Wyllie The Lamp has cornered the market on interesting discussion of this vice. Wyllie there:
Our Lord surrenders himself to envy because envy is the original original sin. The Book of Wisdom tells us that through the devil’s envy, sin entered the world. Paradise Lost imagines these infernal councils in unforgettable ways. Why envy, and not pride? Ignorance is the precondition of the pride of Adam and Eve. They could be tempted to believe they were godlike beings worthy of divine knowledge and power because they lacked the self-knowledge that they were not such beings. The first sinner was not so ignorant. Lucifer sinned in the fullness of intellectual light. The son of the morning defied God despite having what Saint Augustine calls the angelic “morning knowledge” of creation. If Lucifer is proud of something he is not, or if Lucifer misunderstands the nature of his power and knowledge, what is the origin of this pride? Envy, in-vidia, is the passion that un-sees what is Good-in-itself, because it perceives what is Good, and imagines how it would be good if it were under our control and directed to our wishful purposes.
One thing Paradise Lost is sharp about is linking Satan’s rhetorical skill to his manipulation of what constitutes admissible evidence. Manipulation might be too strong a word; it is not so much that he cleverly evades and omits inconvenient truths as that he is incapable of recognizing them, and he argues like it. In Pandaemonium everybody basically agrees with him about the situation, and so he encounters no problems. Elsewhere he is reduced to simply making assertions, as in Book 5 when he responds to Abdiel saying that he and all the other angels were created by God:
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d
By our own quick’ning power, when fatal course
Had circl’d his full Orbe, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav’n, Ethereal Sons.
Our puissance is our own, our own right hand
Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try
Who is our equal . . .
The argument begins with his own understanding of the world (“We know”) and then interprets everything else through it. He cannot imagine that he is not God’s equal, so the only possible explanation for his creation is that he was “self-begot, self-rais’d.” This is an improvement on “why not me what makes God so great”—in fact, it was me, Satan says. I made myself.
But Satan’s envy only really becomes pathetic when he is confronted not with intellectual dispute but with the brute fact of what his envying has made him. In Book 4 when two angels find him “Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve” he is outraged that they don’t know who he is:
Know ye not then said Satan, fill’d with scorn
Know ye not mee? ye knew me once no mate
For you, there sitting where ye durst not soare;
Not to know mee argues your selves unknown,
The lowest of your throng . . .
The other side of Satan’s envy of those better than him is his scorn for those he sees as worse than him. They, he thinks, should envy him in turn. One of the angels, Zephon, then explains why they failed to recognize him:
Think not, revolted Spirit, thy shape the same,
Or undiminisht brightness, to be known
As when thou stoodst in Heav’n upright and pure;
That Glorie then, when thou no more wast good,
Departed from thee, and thou resembl’st now
Thy sin and place of doom obscure and foule.
“Thou resembl’st now / Thy sin”: his envy has warped him—warped him so much that, even as he immediately realizes what he has lost, his focus is on inessentials:
So spake the Cherube, and his grave rebuke
Severe in youthful beautie, added grace
Invincible: abasht the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Vertue in her shape how lovly, saw, and pin’d
His loss; but chiefly to find here observd
His lustre visibly impair’d . . .
His envy leaves no room for realizing just how much he has lost. Instead, it supplies a coping mechanism; he starts envying the angel’s physical appearance. The worse envy makes him, the more reason he has to envy others. The vice reinforces itself. —Steve]
Reviews:
In The New Republic, Evan Kindley reviews a book about Edgar Allan Poe (Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe, by Emily Ogden, September 29):
She also tracks Poe’s surprising influence on psychoanalysis. There is a strong resemblance, Ogden suggests, between Poe’s “spirit of perverseness” and Sigmund Freud’s notion of the death drive: “The two concepts circle around the same mystery: why do we frustrate ourselves?” But a more direct line of descent runs through Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon and close associate of Freud. Poe’s stories had terrified Bonaparte as a child, and when she was analyzed by Freud in the mid-1920s, she decided to deliberately induce anxiety by revisiting them. Thus, “she read Poe’s stories in the evenings, dreamed about them overnight, and recounted both the stories and the dreams to Freud in the morning.” Freud went along with the plan, though he himself was not a fan of Poe’s writing: “I was so close to throwing Poe out the door, he is too ridiculous,” he wrote to Bonaparte. A year into the treatment, he was urging her to switch to Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Don’t you think Hawthorne is refreshing, compared to such a psychopath?”
[This has to be the only time in history Hawthorne was described as “refreshing.” —Steve]
N.B.:
Ninth-graders in China are now required to read Jane Eyre. [A good first step towards requiring them to read the WRB, the world’s leading Brontë newsletter. There’s a lot in here about Jane Eyre presenting a version of feminism that the Chinese Communist Party can get behind; it makes no mention of Jane’s specifically Christian feminism, but it would be pretty easy for those not from a culturally Christian background to not make anything of it. —Steve]
A profile of Fitzcarraldo.
Raccoons making and playing with toys.
Dealing with pigeons by hiring falconers.
New issues:
The Lamp Issue 37 | Christ the King 2026 [As linked to above.]
The St. John’s Review [Back from the dead. —Steve] Volume 63, Number 1 | Fall 2026 [There’s a great lecture in here by Henry Higuera on the history of multiplication up to the mid-nineteenth century, about which more in Critical notes below. Math stuff can only be so high up in the run of the WRB. —Steve]
Poem:
“Winter: My Secret” by Christina Rossetti
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I: Perhaps some day, who knows? But not to-day; it froze, and blows and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But only just my fun. To-day’s a nipping day, a biting day; In which one wants a shawl, A veil, a cloak, and other wraps: I cannot ope to everyone who taps, And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall; Come bounding and surrounding me, Come buffeting, astounding me, Nipping and clipping through my wraps and all. I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows His nose to Russian snows To be pecked at by every wind that blows? You would not peck? I thank you for good will, Believe, but leave the truth untested still. Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust March with its peck of dust, Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers, Nor even May, whose flowers One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours. Perhaps some languid summer day, When drowsy birds sing less and less, And golden fruit is ripening to excess, If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud, And the warm wind is neither still nor loud, Perhaps my secret I may say, Or you may guess.
[Rossetti’s winter is much more alive than her spring and summer. Winter’s winds “Come bounding and surrounding me, / Come buffeting, astounding me,” and so have a force and energy to them. Spring, on the other hand, is characterized by “brief showers” and “sunless hours,” and summer is too far gone. The birds are exhausted; they are “drowsy” and “sing less and less,” and the fruit “is ripening to excess” implies a lack of the equanimity desired in “not too much sun nor too much cloud.” This transformation of the usual seasonal tropes makes her secret—that is, what else she knows, what else she sees that the rest of us don’t—more intriguing. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Out tomorrow:
Eris Press: Art Is Absolute Truth: Constantin Brâncuși in His Own Words edited by Doïna Lemny
Out Monday:
Columbia University Press: Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac by Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Arcade Publishing | October 6
A Table for Fortune
by William T. Vollmann
From the publisher: In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award–winner William T. Vollmann depicts the last half-century of American politics, war, and life in this four-part, 3,000+ page novel that is at once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic.
Volumes 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past––Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses––to form a vivid and mesmeric saga centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Volumes 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott’s son, whose efforts to escape his parents and divine the fate of his life result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.
Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together––with Vollmann’s generous wit and Olympian prose––a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family’s descent into resentment and gloom. Elliott and Matthew Stevens are “passengers within a divine bullet,” which, like Gogol’s troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation’s end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.
[We linked to a review in WRB—June 10, 2026.]
Also out Tuesday:
Doubleday: Will and Attention: A Memoir by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Graywolf Press: There’s a Monster in the Lake: The World as a Fantastical Place by Laura Fernández, translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida
Penguin: Agate Head / Stone Soup by Patricia Lockwood
St. Martin’s Press: Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty
University of Chicago Press: The Rope in Bloom: A Bilingual Edition by Radu Vancu, translated from the Romanian by Paula Console-Şoican and Cyrus Console-Şoican
W. W. Norton & Company: Fair Ones: A Double Novel by Lydia Millet
What we’re reading:
Steve read Salomé by Oscar Wilde (translated from the French by Alfred Douglas [Better known for other work? —Steve]). [My revisiting this was prompted by Alan Horn’s piece on Max Beerbohm and Wilde, which we linked to last week. Beerbohm is right that Wilde’s play lacks any real dramatic interest—I also went back and listened to Richard Strauss’ Salome, which is much better because the music supplies the dramatic interest that the text lacks. Strauss’ opera also improves on the play by cutting a lot of the idiotic banter between minor characters.
I will grant Wilde, though, that the idiotic banter is essential to his effect. This is a play in which Salomé and Jokanaan are connected by their incomprehensibility to everyone else, and to each other. Their speech and motivations are frequently misread. Salomé, with her love for death, and Jokanaan, with his religious ecstasy manifesting in prophecies of doom, have attained (here is Decadence) such exquisite and perverse states of feeling that they have nothing in common with everyone else at Herod’s court. Herod, who is a horny politician that likes seeing naked ladies, and the young Syrian, who moons over Salomé and then kills himself (the play is glad to be rid of him), present “normal” sexuality. The Jews and the Nazarenes, with their unedifying and noisy disputes, present “normal” religion. This is the rest of the world; it is characterized by its lack of Decadence.
The dance of the seven veils, then, is a concession to the non-Decadent world. If you want a scandal, as Wilde surely did, kissing a severed head has nothing on putting a naked woman on stage. It concedes too much, lingering on Salomé’s manipulation of Herod and not her real passion, and when performed live it must have killed whatever forward momentum the play had. (Strauss’ opera also suffers from this problem.) Decadent characters can live, at least in the mind, in their versions of Des Esseintes’ house; Decadent authors have to consider the public they intend to shock. —Steve]
He then started reading Chinese Postman by Brian Castro (2024). [We linked to a review in WRB—Aug. 19, 2026.]
Critical notes:
Adam Roberts on Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle:
I wonder if too gimlet-eyed a focus on the content of Marcher’s vision. Rather, it seems to me that The Beast in the Jungle elaborates a particular shape taken by anticipation: that we look forward to something, something marvellous or terrifying (Marcher is unsure which his anticipated event will be), perhaps we look forward to this for a long time, maybe even structure our life around this looking-forward, and then, as we go through life, it suddenly occurs to us that the thing we were anticipated has happened, is now behind us, and we didn’t notice.
[Reading the sentences of late Henry James, with all their revisions and refinements and retracings, is also like this. —Steve]
E. A. Robinson (h/t Patrick Kurp):
Sometime ago you asked me how I accounted for our difficulty in making a correct estimate of the poetry of one’s own time. The question is a difficult one. I don’t even say that it has an answer. But the solution of the thing seems to me to be related to what I said about the quality of finality that seems to exist in all real poetry. Finality seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself to any great extent.
[In the piece in The St. John’s Review Higuera says this about i (the imaginary number):
To get my full point across I’d need to invent a whole new notation, since with i there’s no way of notationally distinguishing the sign-flipping aspect from the multiplying aspect of “multiplying by i.” For this reason I wish i had come to be written as “⏊ 1” or something, a “half-way negative one.”
The notation is what it is; there’s no real point in wishing it was different. What I find interesting, though, is the form Higuera’s wish takes. ⏊ 1, taking the symbols to mean what they usually mean, does not mean “half-way negative one”; it means “perpendicular to” and “1.” “Perpendicular to 1” doesn’t mean anything, but interpreting it as “one unit in the perpendicular direction” shows that Higuera is smuggling in things he knows about complex numbers not immediately apparent from pondering “the square root of negative one.” The imaginary number line is, in fact, perpendicular to the real number line, and the two lines determine the complex plane. On that plane multiplication by i is equivalent to a 90 degree rotation counterclockwise. Rotating 1 90 degrees counterclockwise brings it to i; rotating i 90 degrees counterclockwise brings it to -1. Multiplication on the complex plane being equivalent to considering the numbers being multiplied as vectors and then multiplying their magnitudes and adding their angles is not something Higuera gets into, but conceiving of i, as ⏊ 1 would have us do, as having something to do with perpendicularity and rotation makes the world of complex numbers much more intuitive.
I say all this because, to me, i poses a pedagogical problem. The math student first encounters “the square root of negative numbers” in Algebra I because the quadratic formula sometimes spits them out, but it would be silly to derail an Algebra I class with discussion of complex numbers. Even Algebra II (at least, as I took it, which was a while ago, and assuming I recall it correctly) presents complex numbers mostly as symbols to be manipulated. It was only when I saw complex multiplication as something involving rotation, whenever that was (Calculus II, maybe?), that I understood the motivation for any of this.
What this means for math pedagogy I don’t know. You obviously can’t show Algebra I students Euler’s formula and expect them to make anything of it. But I do think letting on, when the quadratic formula results in square roots of negative numbers, that i and complex numbers more broadly have something to do with rotation off the real number line (as opposed to just being some mysterious new kind of number) is worthwhile. It supplies a motivation for setting complex numbers aside for the moment and a framework for understanding them later on that is generally missing from the student’s first encounter. —Steve]