The Minister's Black Veil

The topic, it might be supposed, was obvious enough. There was the black veil swathed round Mr. Hooper's forehead and concealing every feature above his placid mouth, on which, at times, they could perceive the glimmering of a melancholy smile. But that piece ... to their imagination, seemed to hang down before his heart, the symbol of a fearful secret between him and them. Were the veil but cast aside, they might speak freely of it, but not till then. Thus they sat a considerable time, speechless, confused and shrinking uneasily from Mr. Hooper's eye, which they felt to be fixed upon them with an invisible glance.

In a previous life – or twenty-two years ago, which was definitely another life of sorts – I was forcibly subjected to the dismal science and its web of incongruities, a maze with a monster in the middle but neither egress nor ingress. This was a dull time no shinier in retrospect. Readers of these pages are duly aware of my attitude towards the accumulation of riches while millions are never given the chance to live on subsistence, and twenty some years ago my opinions were but cygnets compared to the majestic bird who now swims unmolested on my autumn lake. Yet my opinions were already formed. Economics may not only involve the pursuit of money or wealth, but that is ultimately what gears its engine, just like the pursuit of physical satisfaction will always be captained by something that cannot be love. Few actually study economics to help the victims of inequality; most either want money or the authority to direct the policy of money (look no further than the pandemic fraud of Marxism-Leninism), which ends up corrupting them just as much as absolute power. No, most people who like to talk about money – even theoretically – will sooner or later love money itself and use it as a barometer to measure public happiness as well as their own. Some even say that the loss of something valuable can lead to economic stimulation, a horrific fallacy that was most famously coined in a work by a French theoretician. Behind the broken window, however, lies another human event, namely that some of us will catch ourselves smiling at the misfortune of others – not only because of the worst of human emotions, Schadenfreude, but also because in their failures we espy our opportunities. The services of some citizens may indeed gain in demand from rectifying the woes of others; but over time there lurks the possibility that they may begin to wish for misfortune so that they might profit. And to those who enjoy watching others struggle and fail, financial and emotional distress can be similarly beneficial, a point made in this fine parable.

An excessively candid title does not detract from the vitality of the introduction, whereby we become acquainted with a young, unmarried sexton by the name of Hooper. Hooper is well-liked in his small community both for his humor and his mildness, and seems to exemplify at least in his words what the Puritan methodology on the enjoyment of life and our destination upon corporeal extinction might entail. His ostensible piety mitigates his choice one day to don a veil, an act that confounds his parishioners:

On a nearer view [the veil] seemed to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things. With this gloomy shade before him, good Mr. Hooper walked onward, at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat, and looking on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly to those of his parishioners who still waited on the meeting-house steps.

It is this "darkened aspect" that hints at those deeds to which we cannot be privy. Hooper's appearance at the pulpit is taken as part of his guise as preacher, as the presence he must possess to sway his constituents into the good and the favor of the Almighty. Hooper talks and all are enthralled because he seems to have pierced their consciences, derived from their darkest caverns the toils of their compunction, and encased them all behind his veil as if the veil itself were a box of sins to be fastened for eternity – or maybe a bit less than that. Yet his own misery makes him the subject of idle chatter, and those whose minds might indeed be plagued by something or someone see in him a worse version of themselves. And despite the uncertainty of his intentions (Hooper never quite explains what is gnawing at him) and the wickedness around their world, they cannot help but smile.

This uncertainty is augmented by the story's finest scene, and one of the finest in nineteenth-century literature, the subsequent funeral of a young woman. Hooper is expected to appear to send the departed on her way. But his actions, unquestioned for the most part by the mourners, cannot be deemed ordinary:

The clergyman stepped into the room where the corpse was laid, and bent over the coffin, to take a last farewell of his deceased parishioner. As he stooped, the veil hung straight down from his forehead, so that, if her eyelids had not been closed forever, the dead maiden might have seen his face. Could Mr. Hooper be fearful of her glance, that he so hastily caught back the black veil? A person who watched the interview between the dead and living, scrupled not to affirm, that, at the instant when the clergyman's features were disclosed, the corpse had slightly shuddered, rustling the shroud and muslin cap, though the countenance retained the composure of death. A superstitious old woman was the only witness of this prodigy.

One would guess that it is important that the only witness is both old and beset by the tall tales of more simple souls. Yet the matter is elucidated shortly thereafter by a couple in the procession:

"Why do you look back?" said one in the procession to his partner.

"I had a fancy," replied she, "that the minister and the maiden's spirit were walking hand in hand."

"And so had I, at the same moment," said the other.

We are given only one more aspersion against the pastor's character, and it comes from yet another woman. Upon learning of the ineptitude of local representatives tasked with discovering the truth behind Hooper's apparent self-castigation, a woman named Elizabeth, called the sexton's "lover" yet for the time being just a candidate for marriage, approaches the man of the cloth with halfhearted curiosity. Elizabeth is not baffled by Hooper, yet neither is she without fear. Fear, one should add, of knowing enough of the truth to guess the rest as if at the threshold of an ancient manor an indefinite series of parallel doors opened to reveal, at their end, one's most hideous apprehension. There were, she intimates, "rumors already abroad in the village," but these rumors are expressed only in the "color [that] rose in her cheeks." Hooper does not confirm or deny any of her insinuations, preferring to lift his veil only in death. Elizabeth leaves and we understand that, although still young, he has forsaken his last chance for companionship in this world.

Hawthorne's works come in two forms: excellent and riveting, and excellent and bland.  The blander works may still find their way onto high school curricula and can invariably be praised for their locution and elegance; but his riveting works cannot be praised enough. For reasons not unrelated to this astounding work of genius, the plight of our veiled sexton has endured among Hawthorne's most read short stories and can be used on opposing sides of argumentation, especially given the delightful but not unsurprising dénouement. What argumentation, you might ask? Consider the sexton's first address to Elizabeth: "There is an hour to come when all of us shall cast aside our veils." And at that hour a dark box may or may not be unfastened for all to see, however thick our camouflage was on earth.

Borges, "Poema de los dones"

A work ("Poem of the gifts") by this Argentine writer.  You can read the original here.

May none in tears or with reproach then slight         
God's statement of His mastery, 
Who, with majestic irony,                    
Gave me at once both these books and the night.      

Of these books, now a city, lightless eyes         
He made the owners; eyes, it seems,      
Which in the libraries of dreams                     
Could only read some foolish tracts that tie         

The sun-ups to their zeal.  In vain the day        
Upon them foists its endless tomes;          
As toilsome as those ancient rolls        
That once in Alexandria decayed.                      

From hunger and from thirst (says a Greek tale) 
Near fonts and gardens dies a king; 
Such confines I roam, tiring          
Of this blind library, deep, blind, and pale.              

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East,             
The West, centuries, dynasties,            
Cosmos, symbols, cosmogonies             
Are fêted by these walls, if uselessly.              

Slow in my shade, this hollow darkness free 
With doubting cane I will entice;          
I, who imagined Paradise                     
As being but a kind of library.                 

Some thing that certainly does not entail 
That broad word "chance" – it rules these things;      
Once, many blurry evenings        
Another lost to books and to our shade. 

As through slow galleries I go astray,         
One sacred horror likes this plan:   
That I'm this other, the dead man,      
Perhaps with the same steps on those same days. 

What matters then that word which forms my name,              
(Which of us two has this verse spun,
Of plural I and shadow one?)    
When our anathema is but the same?          

Groussac or Borges, I thus gaze upon   
Our world, unforming, fading fast    
To palest and uncertain ash,                            
Akin to sleep or mere oblivion.                 

The White Ribbon

There is a subtle trick in this film that may not be readily apparent because we are accustomed as cinéastes to cosmic tricks, sleights-of-hand that cover everything hitherto seen and heard with a new coat. What is the point of such chicanery if it will result in no better understanding of the world it inhabits? Ah, but it does improve understanding, although what we learn constitutes but the first link on a very long and brutal chain. 

The setting, as you may learn from any reliable summarist, is Northern Germany in the year 1913. Even superficial students of history will note that this may have been the last normal annum in Germany's existence until the reunification of its as yet uncleft halves almost eight decades later. As the film begins we do not necessarily know the date (a news item much later on will give it away), but it is obvious from the rusticity of our setting – the candlelight, the carriages, the fiefdom of the obligatorily procacious Baron (Ulrich Tukur) – that it takes place in a world long since forlorn. Our narrator is the former village teacher (Christian Friedel) who remains anonymous throughout thanks to German forms of address that allow him to be known simply as Herr Lehrer. His voiceover, however, has the cadence and irony of a much older man; we soon learn he is recollecting, perhaps with some fuzziness, the happenings of the past. Nevertheless, at the time of the "inexplicable events" our Teacher is thirty-one, soft-spoken, and charmingly awkward. He is also a lifelong bachelor although greatly enamored by the Baron's seventeen-year-old nanny Eva (Leonie Benesch), and indeed their scenes together are distinct in their tenderness. They will represent the last hope in a realm already given over to the vermin. And there is no greater rat than the village Doctor (Rainer Bock).        

As the film opens the Doctor is nearly killed tumbling off his horse; unfortunately, he will make a full recovery. Our narrator dutifully announces that what tangled the animal's legs was a thin, invisible wire that no one had ever seen before or since. The Doctor's reappearance about halfway through the film confirms a handful of unsavory suspicions, especially concerning his miserable neighbor and understrapper Ms. Wagner (Susanne Lothar). Even superficial students of German literature know better than to trust a doctor and a sidekick called Wagner, who has long since tended to all the Doctor's personal and professional needs (even, it is implied, before the death in childbirth of the Doctor's wife five years back) while raising her own mentally handicapped son Karli; that she is primarily a midwife and so referenced in the credits should tell you all you need to know. The Doctor's near-fatal accident turns out, as it were, to be but the first in a series of calamitous occurrences: a farmer's wife falls through some rotted wood in a barn attic and perishes; Sigi, the son of the Baron is abducted and savagely mistreated; the farmer's son razes an entire cabbage patch on the Baron's estate to protest his overlord's negligence; soon thereafter, the selfsame barn is burnt to the ground; and perhaps most horrifyingly, Karli is brutalized to the point of having his vision endangered. We witness only the fate of the cabbages, and only their suffering will be avenged. We also know the perpetrator in the impalement of the pastor's (Burghart Klaußner) bird, yet a very bad conscience seems to have been the only punishment inflicted.

Which brings us to another point: we may associate German wickedness with Faust and more recently with the dozen ignominious years that finally persuaded Europeans to put aside their differences, but these are not artistic implications. Karli is blinded because he alone can see the truth of his parentage but cannot speak; Sigi is injured so that his mother can escape the effete Baron, go to Italy, and find a new man (a gossipy scene mistakenly whispers that it is the Baron who was in Italy); the Doctor is viciously dismounted for trotting between familiar trees (therein could one also detect some sexual symbolism, but that is for computerized minds to ponder); and the death of the farmer's wife is remarkable in exposing the personality of her husband. Yet these crimes are neither symbolic nor factitious, as crimes so often are in fiction; instead they are real but not quite solvable, as crimes so often are in reality. This jarring disconnect with fictional conventions may lead a certain type of viewer to proclaim triumphantly that only two short decades later – the proverbial generation – Germans and fascists would become synonymous and Europe would teeter over its blackest abyss. You would not be wrong in such an assertion – the white arm-band will distinctly recur to a fascist appurtenance – but such an interpretation limits the nuances of other sidelights, and perhaps we have already said enough. 

The film's German title may be rendered as The White Ribbon: a German children's tale, and the children are a vital element, in no small part because there are so many of them that they become hard to distinguish as individuals. It is the pastor's children who are pinioned in a white ribbon arm-band to remind them of the virtues from which they have all too frequently drifted away, but the ribbons themselves rarely appear on camera. We are for many reasons invited to suspect the children of committing some if not all of the crimes, but scenes of cruelty are interspersed with touches of sweetness and innocence (the latter embodied by the pastor's youngest son). The magnificent scene in which the Doctor's son learns about the word "dead" is amazing in how logically and clearly the child proceeds from one assumption to another. Once he deduces everything he feels, quite rightly, betrayed, and we consider the first real time we as children understood that all of us would eventually have to die. But the film is not about children's mortality, nor even about their oppression in a German system that did not tolerate individualism from the young. Our village is not like other villages: most villages have their villagey ways, but this village has a tendency of being unpredictably cruel in a manner that hints at a malevolent air or curse, as if it were infiltrated with the very fumes of hell. Without giving more away, we should consider the following questions. What advantage is gained from having an old man tell the story of his youth? What advantage is derived from making the narrator a teacher who is not native to this village? What two minor details could not possibly have occurred? You may also think of how someone of some culture and intellectual curiosity would define the use of the past. I fear that last sentence might be a bit vague, but that would be in keeping with the initial effect of The White Ribbon, which upon review becomes painfully and shockingly clear like a pair of field glasses slowly capturing the face of the distant enemy. As one young character observes after traipsing over a very rickety and very dangerous bridge: "God must like me, since He did not kill me when I gave Him the chance." As if such chances were restricted by our own actions.

The Crooked Man

There was one thing in the case which had made the deepest impression both upon the servants and the police. This was the contortion of the colonel's face. It had set, according to their account, into the most dreadful expression of fear and horror which a human countenance is capable of assuming. More than one person fainted at the mere sight of him, so terrible was the effect. It was quite certain that he had foreseen his fate, and that it had caused him the utmost horror.

There is an old adage about forgiving betrayal because you cannot expect another person to love you more than he loves himself. That is only true, of course, in those cases where self-love is the catalyst; there is also the manifestation of malice. Malice as personal requital has been understood as both necessary and sadistic in the annals of literature, that chart and compass of the human soul, but I fear we all know such feelings quite well. The pinprick of the slightest treason strikes worst at the hearts of the very proud, of those who want to love and trust all and are confident in their ability, however overstated, to make their companions better by improving themselves. Revenge bubbles within such bodies as an extension of the spell of hatred that separates us from our good selves, from the ones who surely wish that life were not quite as meretricious. Yet perhaps the best revenge is still the gnawed conscience of the traitor that over a wicked life gains a voice and shadow. Which brings us to this story of crime.

The crime may not be a crime at all. Colonel James Barclay, late of a highly-decorated Irish regiment, is found dead in his library on a sultry September eve in the last years of Victorian England. And while his head incurred severe trauma, he may have already been dead by the time his body crashed into "a singular club of hard carved wood with a bone handle." Beside him lies his beloved wife, Nancy, a woman of exceptional beauty (in this regard, fiction makes exceptions seem the rule) in a dead faint; she will not revive by the story's end, nor will she need to do so, and Holmes and Watson proceed, mostly in flashback, to reconstruct what cannot be explained by conventional truths. Barclay and his wife have enjoyed "upwards of thirty years" of marriage, and despite the typical machismo expected of career military officers, it is he, to paraphrase this poet, who is the more loving one. He also boasts a few qualities uncommon in an erstwhile soldier:

Colonel Barclay himself seems to have had some singular traits in his character. He was a dashing, jovial old soldier in his usual mood, but there were occasions on which he seemed to show himself capable of considerable violence and vindictiveness. This side of his nature, however, appears never to have been turned towards his wife. Another fact which had struck Major Murphy and three out of five of the other officers with whom I conversed was the singular sort of depression which came upon him at times. As the major expressed it, the smile has often been struck from his mouth, as if by some invisible hand, when he has been joining in the gaieties and chaff of the mess-table. For days on end, when the mood was on him, he has been sunk in the deepest gloom. This and a certain tinge of superstition were the only unusual traits in his character which his brother officers had observed. The latter peculiarity took the form of a dislike to being left alone, especially after dark. This puerile feature in a nature which was conspicuously manly had often given rise to comment and conjecture.

"Comment and conjecture" have everything to do with the most vulnerable part of any man, his reputation. And as well they should: many soldiers are routinely visited by nightmares and obliged to forego any later interests in gunnery for fear of hearing the screams and explosions anew – but I digress. One need not be a soldier to comprehend the crimes on our colonel's conscience, and one need not have served a day in the armed forces to recognize a coward. A coward, as it were, still mindful of the indiscretions of the past.

If memory serves me rightly – and it usually is a galley slave – the BBC adaptation featuring this incomparable actor includes Holmes's ironic gratitude to Watson for the latter's quaint explanation of "military morality," Watson having been an old army doctor in Afghanistan back in his day. The line, which does not appear in the original text, has stuck with me and not only because of Holmes's cursory dismissal of Watson's suggestions. There lingers in the air of The Crooked Man the bitter scent of injustice that cannot be combated by ordinary legal avenues; one would almost dare to say that the impression of the British Armed Forces is one of indifference and cruelty. Internal rules and chain-of-command can stymie a group of unruly young men far more effectively than general philosophical tenets without any practical application. That may be why the destruction of individual thought processes has received such attention from critics of the military, even though the concept is hardly far removed from what is preached on fields, courts, and pitches all around the world in a variety of governments and political freedoms. I'm quite sure that our eponymous character, who shows up eventually, would love to "comment and conjecture" on that last point. And you might also want to brush up on your Book of Samuel.

Pushkin, "Поэт"

Another masterpiece ("The Poet") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Until he hears Apollo's voice
By sacred immolation's fire,                  
The world's vain cares will not inspire      
The poet, burdened against choice.     
By holy harp in silent thrall,                      
His soul will taste but chilling sleep,                    
And from the world's most artless keep,
Perhaps is he the worst of all.          

For only words of root divine                              
Could ever reach his pristine sounds;                 
Entranced, the poet's soul abounds
An eagle waking at a sign.     
No worldly pleasures; no, instead        
So alien to the rabble's talk,       
At icon's feet will he then balk, 
Refuse to bend his haughty head; 
And wild and fierce, he will but flee 
Full of commotion and of sound,
To shores of empty waves aground, 
To oaks still louder than the sea.