Consolations


A lot of people are taking comfort from poetry and religious imagery. Claude Muncie, who is not a Bush supporter, finds the President's words that the astronauts "did not return safely to Earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home..." to be poignant.

William Sulik posts the entire passage:

In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing."

Jay Manifold posts the entirety of Psalm 107 in memory of STS 107.

Polymath Orrin Judd posts a number of poems and passages, including Reagan's Speech on the Challenger Disaster and High Flight among other entries.

Victor Davis Hansen made an interesting observation at his Fig Garden Bookstore lecture a few days after 9/11/01 about the importance of literature. Hansen, who is a Classics professor, has been fighting a losing rear-guard action on behalf of Classics against the proliferation of Women's Studies, Chicano Studies and other special interest group programs that are sucking the atmosphere out of academia. His point was that Classics inculcate a knowledge of the skills of rhetoric and the substantive knowledge of human precedent which a modern leader can fashion into a meaningful message, whether to motivate warriors to fight or to console a grieving country. Without such knowledge, these important and legitimate functions of public rhetoric - often viewed as a dirty word and a dishonorable practice - won't get off the ground.

These passages show the importance of a common high culture. For that matter, the Green Hills of Earth is affecting to the extent that one shares the culture of Science Fiction and remembers the story of Rhysling, the "Blind Singer of the Spaceways," whose songs appear throughout Heinlein's Future History corpus. In Green Hills of Earth, Rhysling, who is a kind of interplanetary bum, puts the "Green Hills of Earth" into a final form while standing a last duty at a broken reactor. Themes of duty and rational sacrifice on behalf of others are quite common in Heinlein stories, which is not surprising in light of his background as an Annapolis graduate.

Sharing a common culture is important. Occasionally, we need to fight as a people and grieve as a people. Biblical references are one part of that culture. Hanson is right that we need rhetoric. The low culture of Hollywood and Television, Survivor and Married with Children, will never furnish the material for rhetoric. We would be poorer if Bush were prevented by a dogmatic First Amendment fundamentalism or a poverty of literary knowledge from fashioning Isaiah as was done yesterday.