Tag: First Things

FACEBOOK AND FRIENDSHIP


Thoughts of some of my Facebook friendships came to mind recently as I read an essay by William Hazlitt. In “The Pleasures of Hating,” Hazlitt talks about the many things we come to hate, especially as we age. “We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.” He continues:

Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them. Either constant intercourse and familiarity breed weariness and contempt; or, if we meet again after an interval of absence, we appear no longer the same. One is too wise, another too foolish for us; and we wonder we did not find this out before. We are disconcerted and kept in a state of continual alarm by the wit of one, or tired to death of the dullness of another.

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K. E. Colombini — First Things

 

FEMININE WONDER WOMAN


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Today’s needull discusses why Wonder Woman’s theme is not the usual feminism.

The story of Wonder Woman, far from being a feminist fable, is actually the archetypal tragedy of the goddess who falls in love with a mortal man who must die while she lives on immortally. It’s a version of Eos and Tithonus in classical mythology—and of Arwen and Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. There is also, dare I say, a Christian theme. “They do not deserve you,” Diana’s Amazon mother warns her daughter before she goes off with Trevor to save mankind from more ghastly slaughter than even the historical World War I entailed. The film’s arch-villain, the war-god Ares, dueling with words with Diana in a fashion that can remind readers of the Gospels of Jesus’s verbal duels with Satan in the desert, reminds her that while he is the powerful tempter, it is human beings themselves, with their weakness, greed, vanity, and murderousness, who have brought on their own self-destruction. Like Christ, Diana makes the choice for humankind anyway. She sees that men and women, despite their capacity for monstrousness, are also capable of selfless love. Her own human lover, Trevor, sets the example: He sacrifices his life to bring at least a temporary end to the destruction.

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Charlotte Allen — First Things

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FAMOUS STUTTERERS


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Many people who we know as confident public personalities were stutterer at one point in their life.

We all stammer sometimes, but a chronic stutter is more a physical problem, of breathing and muscle control, than a mental one—though exhaustion or anxiety can exacerbate it. Different ways of coping worked for different stutterers: Marilyn Monroe’s breathy on-screen voice, Churchill’s privately singing his speeches to practice them, and King George’s therapy sessions with Lionel Logue (the story told in the 2010 film The King’s Speech). McDermott concludes this brief book with “Twelve lessons for stutterers (and the rest of us),” drawing on all his subjects for the counsel he offers.

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Matthew J. Frank — First Things

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