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Democracies overseas are under siege, and some Americans think the United States should stay out of those struggles. But supporting our friends and allies against barbarism is both in our national interest and part of our identity as a people.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What Hamas wants Black success, white backlash Newt Gingrich’s degraded legacy Judge Chutkan’s impossible choice

Wars of Conquest and Extermination

Last week, I mentioned the field of counterfactual history, the intriguing what-ifs about how great events could have turned out differently. One of the most celebrated of all such stories is a 1941 novel by the prominent science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp titled Lest Darkness Fall, in which a 20th-century archeologist named Martin Padway finds himself suddenly transported to sixth-century Rome. Padway knows he has arrived just before the final Gothic War, after which Europe would descend into the Dark Ages, and he uses his knowledge of history and technology to fend off Rome’s collapse. In the end, he secures a better future for Europe and perhaps the world: “Darkness,” the book concludes, “would not fall.”

Padway succeeds because he has the gift of hindsight. He knows with complete certainty what will happen, when, and why, and so he can intervene at key moments to avert disaster. In real life, the rest of us have to plod along in sequential time, doing our best with what we know at the moment.

But sometimes, history shows us the darkness in the distance. We are living through such a moment now. The conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are warnings of the darkness to come.

For many Americans, wars in faraway places seem to be only dangerous snares that might lead us into the jungles of Vietnam, the mountains of Afghanistan, or the sands of Iraq. Involvement seems pointless. Advocates of a more isolationist foreign policy quote what they see as a prescient warning from John Quincy Adams to stay out of the global fray: America, Adams said as secretary of state in an 1821 address to the House, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Wise words in 1821. Today, however, free nations cannot hope to keep their liberties safe in a hothouse while authoritarian tornadoes bear down on them. America and its allies might not want to go abroad looking for monsters, but sooner or later, the monsters will be looking for us. We all have every incentive, in the most personal and concrete way, to prevent such regimes from roaming the Earth at will.

Step back for a moment from the specific nations at war in Europe and the Middle East right now, and think about what kinds of conflicts we’re seeing.

In Europe, a giant, paranoid, nuclear-armed dictatorship has embarked on a war of conquest and genocide against its democratic neighbor. The aggressor, abandoning all pretenses, has simply declared that another nation should not exist and its people must accept their new masters or die.

In the Middle East, a militarized terrorist organization is undertaking a campaign of slaughter, with the intentional aim of inflicting gruesome torture and murder on as many people as possible.

Two wars: one of conquest, one of terror, both aimed at national extermination. As the Atlantic contributor and Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen has put it, these conflicts pit civilization against barbarians. If the barbarians win, they will inflict more devastation, expand their goals, and encourage other regimes to engage in similar barbarism. Over time, they will join hands and ally against us. They will have one another’s backs not because of any tripe about “honor among thieves” or Milton’s “firm concord” among devils damned but because they are not fools: They know that their survival depends on supporting one another in their crimes.

If these barbarians succeed, they could one day affect the lives of Americans in ways most citizens cannot imagine. They could control the passage of goods across the skies and seas; they could hold hostage U.S. citizens who dare to travel abroad; they could imperil American lives by denying access to any number of resources. And if we squawk about any of it, the nuclear-armed powers among them can threaten to immolate an American city as the price of resistance.

The safety and the security of the United States is the easiest case to make for maintaining our commitment to help Ukraine and Israel. But we should not fall back on such narrow definitions of utility and interest. If we are not willing to offer our help and support to Ukraine and Israel at this moment, what does it even mean to be an “American”?

Blood-and-soil nationalists would dearly love to have Americans think of themselves as people attached to only borders and dirt (and, for some, particular strands of DNA) rather than an idea. But “American” is not an ethnic identity. It is a choice, a bond to the Constitution and its ideals. America is not a defense compact or a customs union. It is a statement: Human beings have rights that can never be taken away, and our nation values and defends those rights.

For Americans to say that they will protect such rights only for ourselves is to betray a fundamental part of our identity as a nation and as a people. But what can the average citizen do? Stay engaged. Just a third of Americans can find Ukraine on a map; be an informed voice among your fellow citizens. Stay in touch with your elected representatives. Do not let the most irresponsible voices be the only voices. Members of Congress—and I speak from experience as a former staffer—do in fact pay attention to messages from their district.

And remember that voting matters. Poland on Sunday turned back an authoritarian challenge with an approximately 73 percent voter turnout. Meanwhile, the state of Louisiana just elected the far-right-wing lawyer Jeff Landry as governor with a turnout of about 35 percent, meaning that Landry will walk into office as the choice of 18 percent of Lousiania’s eligible voters.

We live in an exceedingly dangerous time. And yet we continue our childish bickering. We wring our hands over false choices. And, perhaps worst of all, some Americans seem interested only in how these crises can help in their grotesque and sometimes inane efforts to score political points. Darkness threatens to fall. But it can still be stopped, if Americans can summon the maturity and the will to embrace their responsibility as the leaders of the free world.

Related:

Against barbarism Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable.

Today’s News

A federal judge issued a limited gag order on Donald Trump, restricting his speech related to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of his alleged attempt to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. The Department of Justice has begun a federal hate-crimes investigation into the stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy and his mother in Chicago this weekend. The boy was killed, and his mother was wounded. The Biden administration agreed to a settlement that, if approved by a federal judge, would prevent federal authorities from separating migrant parents who violate immigration laws from their children for eight years.

Evening Read

Daniel Ebersole / Nobel Prize Outreach / Reuters

Why Children Are Everywhere in Louise Glück’s Poetry

By Walt Hunter

Louise Glück, the American poet and Nobel laureate who died last week, was repeatedly drawn to stories about families. Her last published book was a short novel about twins in their first year, Marigold and Rose. And children appear throughout her 1975 book, The House on Marshland, in which she developed her instantly recognizable intimate voice. By placing children and mothers, in particular, at the center of her poems, Glück explored a world made of equal parts myth and reality, sketched out by her precise, timeless language.

When I learned that Glück had died, I found myself drawn first to “The School Children,” which begins with a trip to school.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Louise Glück, the American poet and Nobel laureate who died last week, was repeatedly drawn to stories about families. Her last published book was a short novel about twins in their first year, Marigold and Rose. And children appear throughout her 1975 book, The House on Marshland, in which she developed her instantly recognizable intimate voice. By placing children and mothers, in particular, at the center of her poems, Glück explored a world made of equal parts myth and reality, sketched out by her precise, timeless language.

When I learned that Glück had died, I found myself drawn first to “The School Children,” which begins with a trip to school:

The children set forth with their little satchels

And then switches to the home:

And all morning the mothers have labored

To gather the late apples, red and gold,

Like words of another language.

Glück places us in a familiar setting—almost like a picture-book—but the somewhat formal language of the poem (“set forth,” “have labored/to gather”) introduces a degree of unease, as if we’re reading a translation. The poem next introduces the teachers, and through them acquires mythical dimensions, with the teachers becoming almost like gods: they’re waiting “on the other shore” “behind great desks” “to receive these offerings.” The reader cannot help but worry a little about the trip the children are taking and whether they’ll be able to cross over. Suddenly, it seems like a long way to get there.

Reassuringly, the poem zooms into the smallest details of the school: the nails on which the children hang their “overcoats of blue or yellow wool.” The colors of the overcoats, and of the apples in the first stanza, stand out like the colors in a beautifully drawn children’s book by Barbara Cooney or Dick Bruna or Eric Carle (my personal favorite: Louhi, Witch of North Farm). But then, we come to learn in the last stanza, the mothers are in danger too:

And the teachers shall instruct them in silence

and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out,

drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees

bearing so little ammunition.

The world has been reduced, or simplified, to three groups of characters: teachers, mothers, and children. Those figures have been magnified and enlarged. The mothers are determined, desperate, and trapped. Instead of holding their children, they clutch the branches of the dead orchard trees. The children may be in danger and the mothers cannot protect them, or even get to them. The teachers, meanwhile, are offering a sober lesson for which there are no words.  

Like the best children’s books, and the most gripping fairy-tales, Glück’s poems do not present an innocent, uniformly happy vision of childhood—or of family relations. Take “Gretel in Darkness,” for example, which comes from the same volume. Gretel appears to the reader after she and Hansel escape from the witch. “This is the world we wanted,” Gretel says in the first line of the poem. But this odd sequel to the Grimm tale goes immediately haywire. Gretel is traumatized, can’t forget the witch, stays locked in the house because her father bars the doors. And “no one remembers,” “not even” Hansel, whom she fears is about to move out. “But I killed for you,” Gretel says to her brother, and a voice in my head says the same thing to my sister, though I never have. Gretel insists to Hansel that “we are there still and it is real, real/that black forest and the fire in earnest.”

Glück casts the lives of Gretel—and of Moses, Jesus, Achilles, Joan of Arc—into language that bridges the world of myth or ancient history or fairy-tale and the world of our present. Her preferred stories are ones in which the danger of abandonment and the repression of mourning threaten an intergenerational future. She does not spare her own family this treatment. “Still Life” tells of a family that condenses into the space of a lyric poem the epic canvas of a nineteenth-century novel like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks:

Father has his arm around Tereze.

She squints. My thumb

is in my mouth: my fifth autumn.

Near the copper beech

the spaniel dozes in shadows.

Not one of us does not avert his eyes.

Across the lawn, in full sun, my mother

stands behind her camera.

This poem is a manifesto, an ars poetica, a recipe for a poem. Its elements: family, time, place. And something else: “not one of us does not avert his eyes.” We cannot look at what is right in front of us. I kept asking myself why the poem ends with the mother taking the picture—instead of beginning with that detail. Then I realized why: until that moment, the poet had been occupying the place of the mother. It is she, the poet, who stands behind the camera. Like “The School Children,” this poem is deep with an honest despair about mothers and children—why are we unable to avert our eyes from what we love?—but also with a poignant realization that the poet has taken the place of her mother. Glück, who was raising her young child when the book was published, may have had that substitution on her mind.

Here it might be worth pointing out that The House on Marshland was published just after Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) and before Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III (1976). Like Robert Lowell’s earlier Life Studies (1959), these three books explore how an ordinary life might be brought into poetic form without reducing the poem to mere autobiography.

Glück wrote about walks to school and family photographs and tried to understand what prompts people to avert their eyes from life’s ordinary and inevitable losses and griefs. From Meadowlands to Averno, Glück returned again and again to the scene of despair, of a foreclosed future, of an irrevocable decision: Persephone’s descent to hell, Achilles’s rage, the apple taken from the tree of knowledge, the unseen unhappiness that shadows every smiling family photo. Her poems can be despairing, foreboding, vigilant, and deeply affectionate, somehow all at once.

Glück read mythology, she read the Bible, and she understood how hung up we can be on confusing feelings and contradictory desires. She took Genesis and wrote a poem called “The Garden” and set the clock ticking on two people who think their marriage is going to last: “And they think/they are free to overlook/this sadness.” What sadness? All they’re doing, the two young people, is planting some peas as it starts to rain. Yet the garden itself says: “I can hardly bear to look at [the scene].” She had the ability to see bare reality in mythological terms (they are heroic for thinking that their happiness will last). She was equally good at cracking open the myth to find the humble reality at its core (the story of Adam and Eve happens every day in every suburb, every garden).

But while her poems stare straight into sadness, they do not leave us without recourse. Nor do they feel hopeless, despite recurring themes of darkness. In a late, gorgeous poem titled “A Children’s Story,” a King, a Queen, and a bunch of little princesses are “tired of rural life” and have decided to return to the city, to society. But they are frightened by that great unknown, the future, which the children, not the parents, will have to inhabit. The thought leaves them all sad and shaken, but also determined:

Despair is the truth. This is what
mother and father know. All hope is lost.
We must return to where it was lost
if we want to find it again.

Reading “A Children’s Story” and “The School Children” the day of Glück’s death, I did what I always do with poems that move me. I texted them to my infinitely patient friends and colleagues, and to my partner. Finally, for good measure, I sent the poems to all the students in my class on twentieth-century poetry. “Read these for Monday!!” I wrote. “She was kind to me once when I was younger and lost,” I added childishly, picking up my satchel.

When I was a college student myself, I once heard Glück give a reading of her book The Seven Ages. I was pinned to my seat for the entire reading. To me, her voice carried a moral intelligence that I found lacking elsewhere (although Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Jorie Graham all have a similar effect on me). It has taken me until the day she died to see that this voice carried a singular trust that language can guide us to the places where hope was lost, or in danger of being lost. Her poems contain very few historical markers that would link them to a particular time or place. But this absence of context has the paradoxical effect of tugging the poems closer to us, making them into apt vehicles to share, to think about, to live inside.

Poetic language, for Glück, is not hyperbole, effusiveness, or evasion, but a forensic investigation into the loss of hope and into the origins of despair. The beautiful poem “Gemini” includes Glück’s description of her own childhood, a set of brief, exacting brushstrokes:

So the past put forth

a house filled with

asters and white lilac

a child

in her cotton dress

the lawn, the copper beech—

Glück rarely fell under the spell of the things that can make twentieth-century poetry so challenging to some (and, to others, enchantingly difficult). Does a word really refer to a thing? Does breaking the structure of a sentence disrupt reality? Those questions are absent in Glück’s poetic world, where a faith in the medium of poetry–and of its ability to narrate and describe–prevails. One gets the sense from reading Glück that those questions are far more removed from us than the Mediterranean landscapes of the Odyssey or the garden of Eden or the forest of Hansel and Gretel.

Writing children into her poems, Glück trusted in the authority of stories and of language to examine the truth of despair and the recovery of hope. That is not a popular position to claim in an era in which that kind of trust, and the exhortation to look deep within culture as well as history, has all but disappeared. But it is one reason why her work deserves to be celebrated, and why it will endure.