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Stranger things
the rise of anti-heroes
why we need contemporary art
myth and christianity
return to the sabbath
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Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s
STRANGER THINGS AND FAIRY TALES

Grace Marie Link

WHERE HAVE ALL THE HEROES GONE?

Katie Davenport

PASTORAL VIGNETTES 12
Mark Naida

WHY WE NEED CONTEMPORARY ART 14

Stacey Egger

FAULKNER AND FILM 19

Chandler Ryd

CHRISTIANITY AND MYTH 23

Emily Lehman

LEARNING TO REST 27
Sarah Borger

HILLARY'S INBOX 30
Noah Weinrich

VOLUME III, ISSUE 14

M i s s i o n S tat e m e n t

The Hillsdale Forum is an independent, student-run, conservative magazine at Hillsdale

College. The Forum, in support of the mission statement of the college, exists to foster a campus
environment open to true liberal education and human flourishing. We publish opinions,
interviews, papers, and campus news. The Forum is a vehicle to bring the discussion and
thought of the students and professors at the heart of our school beyond the classroom, because
if a practical end must be assigned to a University course, it is that of training good members
of society. The Forum brings the learning of the classroom into the political reality of campus.

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

Letter

from the

O C T O B E R

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Chandler Ryd
MANAGING EDITOR
Emily Lehman
EDITORS-AT-LARGE
Madeline Johnson
Sarah Reinsel
COPY EDITORS
Andrew Egger
Taylor Kemmeter
CONTENT EDITORS
Stacey Egger
Lara Forsythe
Ramona Tausz
FEATURED ESSAYISTS
Grace Marie Link
Katie Davenport
Mark Naida
Sarah Borger
Noah Weinrich
DESIGN, ARTWORK,
& PHOTOGRAPHY
Sarah Reinsel
Patrick Lucas
BUSINESS MANAGER
Beau Jarrett
FACULTY ADVISOR
Dr. John Somerville

Editor

2 0 1 6

During the past four summers, I worked as a gardener. I pulled weeds,

cut grass, planted flowers, trimmed bushes, and raked leaves, and as I
worked, I listened to audiobooks on Spotify. I fell in love with Hamlet,
Don Quixiote, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and heard
from G.K. Chesterton, Langston Hughes, and Jane Austen. Through
those peaceful, meditative summers, I have become more and more
convinced that the mind is like a garden.
As Michel de Montaigne writes in his essay, On Idleness, As we
see ground that lies fallow, teeming, if rich and fertile, with countless
kinds of wild and useless plants, and observe that, to keep it serviceable,
we must master it and sow it with various crops of use to ourselves . . .
so it is with our minds.
Hillsdale College is a great fertilizer of this garden. Our professors
and peers broadcast the precious wisdom of books, tradition, and
experience across the soil of our minds, but its cultivation is our
own responsibility. In the classroom and in conversation, we begin
to excavate the prickly and gangly thoughts to allow the fruitful ones
to flourish. But theres a certain amount of cultivation that can only
be accomplished through the written word. Just as the gardener has a
weeding fork, so too does the thinker have a pen.
If the mind is like a garden, then the act of writing is like the act of
gardening. Both are fundamentally solitary activities, but their effects
can be seen by the community; both require mechanical knowledge
alongside an aesthetic sense; and both require perpetual practice in
order for their products to be any good.
Through the arduous work of writing and rewriting, the
contributors to this issue of The Forum have brought their thoughts
from germination, to bud, to blossom, and now to the page, to be
shared by many. Grace Marie Link wrests a vision of the Good from
the land of the Upside-Down in Stranger Things. Katherine Davenport,
like Grace Marie, examines cinematic pop-culture and calls attention
to the weedy proliferation of anti-heroes in the growing body of superhero summer blockbusters. In response to his summer working on a
farm, Mark Naida meditates on the intersection between material
and function in a digital age. To provide more perspectives on art,
Stacey Egger plumbs the depths of fracture in contemporary art while
I bridge the gap between literature and cinema to find order in the
fractured writings of William Faulkner. Emily Lehman guides us
through the intersection of Christianity and pagan mythology, and
Sarah Borger urges Hillsdale students to rest in God by returning
to the old tradition of a regular Sabbath.To finish our October issue,
satirist Noah Weinrich presents us with much-needed comic relief
directly from Hillary Clintons inbox.
As the leaves begin to change, we invite you to pause for a moment
and walk through a garden. F
Chandler Ryd is a junior studying English.

The Forum reviews:

TELEVISION

STRANGER THINGS
and the return to faerie

A Contemporary Recovery of
the Moral Imagination
by Grace Marie Link

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

hoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Thats not it, is it?

After watching the eight-episode
television series, viewers will relate to Dustins
lament at the end of the beautiful, exciting, and
inspiring Stranger Things. The series includes
all of the necessary ingredients for a successful
television
show:
skilled
cinematography,
intriguing
plot, killer soundtrack, and
nuanced characters played by
top-notch actors. It brings the
viewer back to a nostalgic era,
the 80s, channeling classics like
E.T. and The Goonies. This is a
show that earns its fame.
But Stranger Things does
more: it offers something
unique to modern television.
It is, at its core, a fairy-tale for
contemporary viewers.
In J.R.R. Tolkiens famous
essay, On Fairy-Stories, he
asserts that a true fairy-tale
takes place within the realm of
Faerie, an imaginary world that
is somehow more real than our
own.
Tolkien
explains
this
seemingly
paradoxical
concept by describing the joy
contained in such stories
joy that expresses itself as
an amplification of the real.
For Tolkien, a true fairy-tale
manages to express a fuller
reality than does the actual
world. He writes,
The peculiar quality of the joy in
successful Fantasy can thus be explained
as a sudden glimpse of the underlying

reality or truth. It is not only a

consolation for the sorrow of this world,
but a satisfaction, and an answer to that
question, Is it true?

Stranger Things does exactly what Tolkien asks

it to do as a piece of fantasy fictionbut in an
upside-down way. For Tolkien, a true fairy-story
must accomplish three things: recovery, or a return
to something lost; escape, or a means of entering
a world other than our own; and consolation, the
promise of a happy ending. While Stranger Things
satisfies Tolkiens three-fold description, it puts
a modern twist onto Faerie that enhances the
moral imagination. The show provides the viewer
with a clarifying understanding of the Good by
depicting a world exactly like our own, but devoid
of goodness: a world known as the Upside-Down.
The show enhances the viewers understanding of
reality itself by demonstrating the purely good,
transcendental qualities that instill virtue in our
subjective modern age.
Chapter One: the Upside-Down Faerie
To the viewer, Stranger Things offers a glance into a
world within a world. At the outset of the show, the
viewer is plunged into a nostalgic Fearie realm: the
small Midwestern town of Hawkins, Indiana. This
throwback provides the viewers imagination with
recovery of a lost time, escape from the present,
and consolation for the future. At the same time,
the characters are forced to grapple with their
own Faerie world, the Upside-Down. While the
characters face an utterly distorted realm devoid of
goodness, the viewer is faced with two intelligible
parts of a wholethe Upside-Down in conflict
with the Right-Side Up.
As the curtain rises on Hawkins, local 12-yearold Will Byers goes suddenly missing under
paranormal circumstancessnatched away into
the Upside-Down. When his friends go looking
for him, they stumble across a mysterious girl

Wills
disappearance
deeply affects
the community,
as the moral
imaginations of
the characters are
slowly reinforced
and they become
more courageous,
selfless, and true.
named Eleven who has just escaped
from a secret government laboratory.
As the community immerses itself in its
search for Will, and strange men hunt
for Eleven, a terrifying creature stalks
the woods around the town.
The disappearance of innocent and
honest Will shakes Hawkins, a place
where nothing much happens, to its
core. Three distinct groups begin their
search: the adults, the teenagers, and
the kids.
It does not take long for Wills three
friends, Mike, Dustin and Lucas, to
believe in the Upside-Down. It acts as
an extension of their own imaginative
world. These kids have grown up on
the fairy-tale classics of the time
Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and
the like. They are even able to create
their own Faerie masterpiece through
the imagined realm of Dungeons
and Dragons. It is because of their
stimulated imagination that they are
so quick to believe and understand the
Upside-Down.
Meanwhile, the teenagers and the
adults have a harder time coming to
terms with the reality of the UpsideDown, because their imaginations

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

have long since dwindled through the

reality of day-to-day life.
Chapter Two: Will Byers
Will thus becomes necessary not only to
the characters but to the imagination of
the viewers. Hes not like you, Hopper,
Joyce, Wills mother, says to the chief of
police. Hes not like me. Hes not like
most. Joyce struggles to articulate what
makes Will so special. But the viewer
understands he is distinguished by his
good and powerful imagination: He is
connected to beauty and goodness in a
way that his friends and family are not.
Joyces ex-husband Lonnie calls Will
queer because he does not share his
fathers interestsWill would rather
play Dungeons and Dragons with his
friends in Mikes basement than go to a
baseball game. The series displays Wills
integrity and imagination early: During
a game of Dungeons and Dragons at the
beginning of Chapter One, Wills roll of
the dice will determine whether he lives
or dies in the game. Although Mike
leaves the room and his friends urge
him to lie, Will cannot be dishonest
to Mike about the outcome: he rolled
low, and the monster got him. Will also

loves to be creative, skillfully sketching

wizards and building a clubhouse he
calls Castle Byers. His soul is ordered
toward virtue and refined by beauty. He
is not like most. And it is because of
his active imagination that he is able
to emulate the noble qualities of his
heroes in his own pursuit of virtue. As
Alasdair MacIntyre writes in his book
After Virtue:
It is through hearing about
wicked stepmothers, lost children,
good but misguided kings, wolves
that suckle twin boys, youngest
sons who receive no inheritance
but must make their own way
in the world and eldest sons who
waste their inheritancethat
children learn or mislearn what a
child and what a parent is, what
the cast of characters may be in
the drama into which they have
been born and what the ways of
the world are. Deprive children
of stories and you leave them
unscripted, anxious stutterers in
their actions as in their words.

As MacIntyre suggests, it is through

images and stories that children like
Will become thus inclined to virtue.
Wills disappearance deeply affects the
community, as the moral imaginations
of the characters are slowly reinforced
and they become more courageous,
selfless, and true. This becomes
especially explicit in characters like
Eleven, whose supernatural powers
prove essential to the defeat of the
monster. She is isolated and tortured
her entire life before meeting Mike,
Dustin, and Lucas. She comes to
understand friendship through the
demonstration of loyalty shown by the
three boys, especially Mike. Through
the cultivation of friendship, Eleven
is better able to understand concepts

of truth, of keeping promises, and of

putting others needs above her own. In
the end, she saves her friends and the
entire town in a final sacrificial act.
At the same time, this rediscovery of
essential virtues through the cultivation
of imagination enhances qualities like
courage and steadfastness. When he
first faces the monster, Will grabs a
shotgun to defend himselfand then
proceeds to survive in the UpsideDown for about a week.
Similarly, Nancy is able to rediscover
her imagination and put aside her
previous desire for popularity and
romance. When Nancys imagination
is reawakened due to Wills vanishing
and the appearance of the monster in
Hawkins, her bravery and strong will
come back to the surface. She suddenly
is able to understand her own moral
role in the search for Will Byers and the
hunt for the monster.
So while the characters are becoming
more courageous and loyal, they are
simultaneously becoming more fully
themselves. They are beginning to
understand their own reality through
the recognition of Faerie, just as the

viewers too are watching these events

unfold and feeling their own courage
reawaken in each passing episode.
Chapter Three: The Monsters
Meanwhile, the monster responsible
for the turmoil in Hawkins reflects a
distorted human naturethe inhuman
parts of the soul. He is described
numerous times as a man without a
facenearly human, but missing the
essential human characteristic. In the
human face, the soul is made visible.
Beyond even that, God himself is
visible, since man is made in His image.
The monster, while strangely humanoid,
manifests the soulless, inhuman parts
of humanity.
At the same time, one need not enter
the Upside-Down to find monsters. The
distorted, or the upside-down, parts of
human nature seen in the monster can
also be recognized in characters like Dr.
Brenner, an unscrupulous scientist, and
Lonnie, Wills absent father. Tolkien
refers to the Faerie world as that which
is distinct from the vulgar devices of
the laborious, scientific magician. Dr.
Brenner is one such scientific magician.

He not only physically and mentally

tortures Eleven for the entire course
of her life, but he manipulates her into
thinking of him as some sort of fatherly
figure. He is cruel, ruthless, and cares
only for what Eleven can offer him.
Lonnie also shows monstrous
qualities over the course of the show. He
cares very little for his son. When Wills
body is found and he is presumed dead,
Lonnie returns home, not to console
Joyce, but to sue the owners of the
quarry. Lonnie represents a distorted
nature in the real world. His love for
himself keeps him from properly loving
Will. He wants Will to be normal. But
Will is nothing like Lonnie. Certainly
they do not share the same interests, but
even more importantly, Lonnie has a
disordered soul. In fact, he is less real
less humanthan Will himself, as seen
in his inability to pursue these virtues.
As Guorian writes, A persons goodness
or badness is a valence and measure of
ones humanity or inhumanity.
Chapter Four: The Reawakening
Stranger Things clarifies the moral
imagination in a poignant way for

It is essential that stories

like Stranger Things exist
in contemporary art.
Stranger Things reminds
adults what it means to
be brave in the face of
unexpected dangers,
to love fearlessly and
unconditionally, to offer
oneself up completely.

contemporary viewers who have

It is essential that stories like Will is rescued and brought back to
very little exposure to stories that Stranger Things exist in contemporary life, the community is restored, and
follow Tolkiens three-part structure, art. Stranger Things reminds adults the imagination, reawakened.
especially when such stories are what it means to be brave in the face of
Stranger Things is a moderndisregarded as childish or juvenile. unexpected dangers, to love fearlessly day masterpiece of fantasy. It does
Tolkien writes, Fairy-stories have and unconditionally, to offer oneself everything Tolkien asks it to do
in the modern lettered world been up completely. It encourages adults to it inspires recovery, escape, and
relegated to the nursery, as shabby or be like Mike, Dustin, and Lucas and consolation in the imagination of
old-fashioned furniture
viewers. As G.K. Chesterton
is relegated to the play- The show leaves the viewer inspired puts it, Fairy-tales are more
room, primarily because
than true; not because they
by
his
own
imagination:
he
too
can
the adults do not want it,
tell us that dragons exist, but
and do not mind if it is fight monsters with nothing more than because they tell us dragons
misused. Tolkiens lament
can be beaten. It makes the
gasoline
and
a
baseball
bat.
over the disregard for
viewer feel like he could
these stories is precisely
be bravethat he could
why we need television
somehow be as sacrificial and
shows
like
Stranger
selfless as Joyce, as Hopper,
Things. It is not a kidas Nancy, as Eleven. It leaves
friendly show. There is
the viewer inspired by his own
strong language, violence,
imagination: he too can fight
brief sexual content, and
monsters with nothing more
frightening
imagery.
than gasoline and a baseball
But
Stranger
Things
bat; that he too can venture
acts as a recovery of the
into darkness and danger and
imagination. It revives
come out alive; that he too can
the imagination of the
struggle forward, even with
viewer, and takes what the
the whole world against him.
viewer once knew about
Stranger Things revives the
the world and gives him
moral imagination through
a clearer understanding of it. Tolkien trust in their imagination. The series the recovery of Faerie, a feat few other
writes in his essay, We needto not only acts as a return to the Faerie television shows have been able to
clean our windows; so that the things world of which Tolkien writes, but also achieve. F
seen clearly may be freed from the as an escape to a world more real than Grace Marie Link is a senior studying
drab blur of triteness or familiarity our own. And most importantly, joy English.
from possessiveness.
is found at the end of the story, when

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

Where
have
all the
Heroes
Gone?
by

Katie Davenport

Good guys are boring. They do the right thing all the time. But bad guys,
you never know what they're going to do.

he preceding quote is from director David Ayer explaining

what drew him to the concept of his latest movie, Suicide
Squad. Ayers words, though they apply to fictional characters,
embody an important aspect of American pop-culture. As
a whole, society is losing its taste for heroesor rather, it
is changing what hero means. From R-rated action films
like Deadpool and V for Vendetta, to stories as lighthearted
as Guardians of the Galaxy or Megamind, popular opinion
is shifting away from the quintessential good guy to the
darker, messier realms of the anti-hero: the misunderstood,
the reformed (or perhaps not-so-reformed) villain. While
this is not necessarily a bad thing, it is disconcerting to see
this rise in the anti-hero coincides with the dismissal of the
more traditional hero. Anti-heroes are considered gritty
representatives of the real world, whereas heroes who are

good simply for the sake of goodness are painted as the

inhabitants of a nave, mythical world of wishful thinking.
Take the realm of superheroes, for examplethe genre has
definitely shifted toward the dark side, and even the more
traditional good guys who remain are reimagined with a
dark side, be that an angsty inner struggle (Spider-Man),
a dark past (Wolverine), or a charming set of vices (Tony
Stark). Though such a change may seem trivial, a societys
taste in fiction often illuminates its views on deeper issues of
morality, human nature, and the like. What, then, are we to
make of this heroic drift?
One part of this changeand this has less to do with our
society and more to do with fiction as a wholeis that good
heroes are often harder to create than good villains. We all,
whether we care to admit it or not, know what it is like to

The grand irony of many antiheroes, however, is that instead of

being more realistic characters,
they are really just idealized
in a different way. Though we
all know of the evil present in
ourselves, we like to present a
more charming version of it in
our fiction.
lie, to desire power, or to hate. To create
a realistic villain, all one need do is
imagine their own personal dark side,
wholly unrestrained. But how many of
us could so accurately describe what
it means to be brave, to be humble, or
to selflessly love someone? While it is
one thing to discuss virtue in simple
little essays such as this, in real life
it is easy to fall prey to a sort of halfvirtue, allowing bravado or arrogance
to mingle with courage, or feigned selfdeprecation with humility, or our own
desire to be loved with our attempts to
love someone. If these half-virtues are
mistaken for their real counterparts,
attempts to recreate them in fiction
become skewed. When this happens,
the created heroes likewise become
somewhat stiff or feigned: smiling
plastic Disney princes, or straightlaced
moralizers that we cant help but
find annoying. Villains, by contrast,
perhaps because of their role as defiers,
renegades, or rebels, often take on a
certain strength and power that eludes
the pallid, half-virtuous heroes. In
such cases, it is natural for people to
gravitate toward the more compelling
charactersafter all, who wants to
watch a predictable, bland hero with
wooden dialogue when they can watch
the energy, vibrancy, and splendid
sarcasm of a villain? In some ways antiheroes are an attempt to remedy this
tendency by wedding the appeal of the
villain to the concept of a hero.
The grand irony of many anti-heroes,
10

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

however, is that instead of being more

realistic characters, they are really just
idealized in a different way. Though we
all know of the evil present in ourselves,
we like to present a more charming
version of it in our fiction. This is not
a mistake unique to modern fiction.
C.S. Lewis, in discussing literary
representations of evil, said that
Milton's devils, by their grandeur
and high poetry, have done great
harm. But the really pernicious
image is Goethe's Mephistopheles.
It is Faust, not he, who really
exhibits the ruthless, sleepless,
unsmiling concentration upon
self which is the mark of Hell.
The humorous, civilised, sensible,
adaptable Mephistopheles has
helped to strengthen the illusion
that evil is liberating.

And certainly many of our villains

and by extension our anti-heroesare
of a Mephistophelian, rather than a
Faustian, variety. Characters like Loki
or V from V for Vendetta have a definite
charm to themas long as they stay on
the big screen. But in the real world,
those who manipulate and murder are
not the type we would find delightful,
regardless how clever their dialogue
is. Its an ironic world where we are
angered by the stranger who cuts us off
in traffic, but delight in the swaggering
self-absorption of a snarky anti-hero.
Likewise, there is a similar reallife way to look at heroes. Though it

can be difficult to portray virtue in the

abstracted sense, we often recognize
it by example. Whether in our own
experience or anothers, we can all
recall something that made us turn
our heads and take notice, something
that we could not help but recognize
as good. This may be something we
continually associate with a person, or
more likely, a sudden flash brought on
by some courageous action or selfless
gesture. Sometimes it might come from
an unexpected place. Take for example
Oskar Schindler, the profiteering,
womanizing Nazi party member who
risked his life and all that he had to
save some 1,200 Jewish people from
the Nazis. At the end of the day, what
defines a hero is not a certain level of
moral perfection, but this conscious
decision to pursue and uphold the
right thing, regardless of the personal
cost. From Aeneas, to Gawain, to
Atticus Finch, the best loved heroes are
the ones who, whatever their personal
struggles, temptations, and failures,
grab a hold of some higher good and
refuse to let go. If what we mean by
anti-hero is simply a hero who does
this despite his flaws, well and good.
But if, as often happens, his flaws are
lauded, ignored, or disguised as good
things, then regardless of how amusing
that hero may be, we have no business
characterizing him as realistic.
All this aside, I suspect there is
another reason that society finds
something distasteful about untainted

heroes. Upstanding people, even

fictitious ones, force us to take a deeper
look into our own selves; often, when
placed beside them, we find ourselves
wanting. So, there can be a certain
sense of consolation in picking holes in
a heros image. An example of thisif I
may again borrow from the simplified
and wonderfully illustrative world of
superheroesis Captain America.
Cap is one of the few remaining heroes
who wants to do the right thing simply
because it is right. Does he have a tragic
backstory that merits bitter, angsty
brooding? You bet. But instead of that
becoming the central, consuming
aspect of the character, it is simply one
part of a man who consistently tries to
be the best version of himself he can
be. There is certainly room to argue
whether or not this is successfully done,
but I think we can agree that this is the
intended portrayal of his character.
This portrayal continued in the recent
film Captain America: Civil War, which

dared to make the following claim for

absolute morality:
Doesn't matter if the whole
country decides that something
wrong is something right. This
nation was founded on one
principle above all else: The
requirement that we stand up
for what we believe, no matter
the odds or the consequences.
When the mob and the press and
the whole world tell you to move,
your job is to plant yourself like
a tree besides the river of truth,
and tell the whole world-No,
you move.

A lot of people do love Cap for his

upstanding, good-guy ways, so it is
interesting that shortly after the release
of this movie, the current writers of the
Captain America comic book decided
to reveal that Captain America had
actually been an agent of Hydra, the
fictional equivalent of Nazism. Even
more interesting is the quote by Tom
Brevoort, Marvels executive editor who
approved said story arc:

no need for us to change, because to do

so is difficult, unpleasant, gritty, real.
It is much easier to assuage ourselves
with heroes who share the glamorous,
sanitized, fun version of our flaws,
and demand nothing from us.
At the end of the day, fiction is
just thatfiction. There are very
few characters who would hold up if
introduced to reality. As long as we
keep our minds straight as to where
fantasy and reality differ, there is no
harm in enjoying the antics of an antihero. Laugh at Loki, but remember
Faust. To Ayers words I counter, in
the borrowed wisdom of C. S. Lewis,
How monotonously alike all the great
tyrants and conquerors have been: how
gloriously different are the saints. F
Katie Davenport is a junior studying
English and art.

It means on the most fundamental

level that the most trusted hero
in the Marvel universe is now
secretly a deep-cover Hydra
operative. There should be a
feeling of horror or unsettledness
at the idea that somebody like
this can secretly be part of this
organization. There are perfectly
normal people in the world who
you would interact with on a
professional level or personal
level, and they seem like the salt
of the earth but then it turns out
they have some horrible secret
whether its that they dont like a
certain group of people or have
bodies buried in their basement.

If there are no morally upstanding,

good-for-the-sake-of-good
people,
then there is no reason for us to feel
guilty about our own failings; there is

11

Pastoral Vignettes
by

Mark Naida

Jsus, dis-je, il y a ici un nouveau monde?

Certes, dit-il il y a une terre nouvelle o ils ont
soleil et lune, et tout plein de bonnes choses; mais
celui-ci est plus ancien.
-Franois Rabelais, Pantagruel1

Artwork by Patrick Lucas

May
Fridays we ate rectangular pizzas baked in an oven
made of earth and straw. As I sat on a picnic table
whose joists were shimmed into poor but functional
repair, I brushed persimmon seeds off of my shoulders.
The Farmer said, This one is the male, the female is
out north of the rhubarb. We tossed the beads at one
another as they fell and adorned the pizza. We ate and
fortified ourselves against tomorrows brutal sun in a
shower of fertility, of plant life yearning its abundance.

June
From the herb garden, I could hear their conference.
Thyme, sage, and lemon balm marked my palms as
I stood and walked across the road to see one of the
birds open its beak and sound its bugling roar. This
was not the late autumn honking of geese, it was a
glimpse into the Jurassica picture of what remains.
These sandhill cranes rooted and laughed in the field
corn until, startled by the coughing of a tractor, they
took flight, living fossils stirring reminders of the
picture book pterosaurs that soar through my dreams.
When they came back around, I was snapping and
bundling sheaves of lacinato kale-or dinosaur
kale, a colloquial name meant to excite children. The

bubbled ridges of the kale prompted me to gaze up at

the roaring cranes and wonder how much had ever
changed.

July, Late
The arid summer offered little, until the blistering
height, when spit and moisture radiated from each
mouth as the sweet corn rippled and blurred in the
distance. When the soil had been sucked to sand by
rotated plantings of arugula, spinach, lettuce, and
basil, the rain came. All that had not fallen for two
months dropped on the thin sand like an anvil. I sat
on the covered patio of a caf in Ann Arbor when the
rain began, eating mussels from a steaming bowl. I
never even thought. Back at the farm that evening,
the rain had waned some but persisted through the
night. Two days before I had clambered up the limbs
of peach trees thinning unfit fruit. The limbs now laid
dismembered on the soft ground. The bottom where
the fawns had been grazing on carrot tops was washed
out into the forest. Basil stalks were bent over like
bunkered soldiers, scared to survey the damage. At
first light, the Farmer walked toward his tractor and
the mourning was stifled. We could only get onto our
knees and bunch the thin, exposed carrots for market,
rejoicing in the salvage.

Jesus, I say, is there a new world here?

Certainly, he says ... there is a new earth where there is a sun and a moon, and all of the best things; but this one here is older.
1

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T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

Reflection in Fading Light

We were born into a world that does not understand
itself. Unlike our the world of our grandparents, the
world into which we were born is defined by function.
Silicon has been held but never touched, copper is
encased by plastic, food is transported in plastic bags
without thought. I asked my brother what glass was
made out of. He said that glass was a type of rock.
Older generations had a technological baseline
grounded in rudimentary mechanisms such as
wheelbarrows and wood stoves, the inner workings
of which could be understood by children. An
advertisement for a plow in 1902 reads, Two Horse,
14-inch Walking Plow, Iron Beam. This advertisement
expresses a true equilibrium between material and
function. It answers the question of the tools purpose
while defining its constituent elements. People who
grew old during the twentieth century began their
lives with a sense of bareness. In those dusty times, a
man made a porch out of wood from trees that were
felled and milled on site; he carved clothespins out of
the scrap wood at the kitchen table when the sun went
down. There was no abstraction between material and
function. It was a moment of intimate contact between
man and his environment.
The people who saw the turn of the century saw a
progression from an elemental, self-taught world to
the cyber age. Aided by consumerism, new undefined
materials arose from laboratories whose names defined
a functional quality instead of a material quality.
Polyester does not stain. Nylon has remarkable elasticity.
Commercial outlets began to produce goods with
plastic, a new substance made of organic polymers
that defines contemporary material existence. This loss
of material knowledge is a reality without historical
precedent.
Those born in the early twentieth century preserved a
marriage between material and function that provided
a sense of a permanence: the earth remained constant as
the functionality of its elements changed. This marriage
should be reestablished in our minds and lifestyles. Our
focus on functionality must be diminished in order for
our awareness of physical reality to grow and inform our
actions. Perhaps canvas bags would find a resurgence.
Leather would be valued. We could walk the earth and
know that any function we place upon its contents
would represent only a human reality, rather than a fact
of existence.

August, Early

Artwork by Patrick Lucas

The Gardener carefully lifted a hop leaf to show me an

embryonic, featherless sparrow in a teacup nest. It exhaled
as it blinked its drowsy eyelids. A fat tomcat hid in a patch
of sweetgrass, provoking the chipping sparrows from
their nests in the hop vines. They chirped and flew circles
in alarm. The cat stalked around the herb garden, lolling
and crushing the dillweed as he waited. I remembered the
little bird in the teacup nest days later. When I lifted the
leafy curtain, the bird was gone. I glanced at the group of
sparrows circling each other by the bean trellises amazed
at how quickly the little sparrow grew and matured and left
the nest, knowing all the while its true fate.

Perennial
A calf is born and the Farmer says nothing. A whistlepig
lunches on a small patch of purple cabbage and the patch
is given to the thistles. The sour cherries grow and decay
more quickly than they can be harvested. Basil flowers
bloom and widen as the leaves shrivel. The deer eat the
sweet corn. The Farmer shoots a deer and lets it run off and
rot, leaving the buzzards their fill.
In late July I am in a field picking potatoes, barefoot with
burnt soles, when I hear a cicada singing from a maple
tree at the field margin. He has waited seventeen years
underground to sing his love song. He will live a few weeks,
calling into the night. The maple will become a chorus tree
and the eggs will drop from the cicadas as they die. The
silent entracte will begin. By October the eggs will hatch
and the nymphs will crawl into the ground to wait for the
moment when they too can sing their fated song. F
Mark Naida is a junior studying French and English.

13

Human
Waste and
Radiant:

C r e at i o n

Why We Need
Contemporary Art
An evolving
contemporary art is
necessary for preserving
an artistic tradition
and finding coherence,
and the possibility of
redemption, in a broken
world.
by

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T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

Stacey Egger

Art
polarizes.
Modern
and
contemporary art have become
entwined with numerous issues of
identity and value, such as ones
political leanings. The well-known
Political Compass Test asks test-takers
to affirm or deny that Abstract art that
doesnt represent anything shouldnt be
considered art at all. The conservativein-stereotype opts to skip the wing of
the museum that holds anything created
later than the beginning of World
War I, looking askance at the crowds
entranced by various objects he could,
he notes, have made in his garage.
Yet when the viewer is affronted by
a piece of contemporary art, he has
engaged with it, if against his will. I
hope to present a vision of art that not
only identifies contemporary currents
in art as fundamentally traditional in
the richest sense of the term, but also
demonstrates their importance to the
coherence, and thus the redemption, of
the world from which they emerge.
The origins of the discord that
surrounds contemporary art are not a
mystery. Contemporary art has gone far,
and there has been, at times, appropriate
offense taken. Andres Serrano has
created a piece of art so impious as to
be an unavoidably good example. The
artists infamous 1987 photograph Piss
Christ features a small plastic crucifix
submerged in a vat of his own urine.
He intends this piece, he says, to be a
statement of how religious icons have
become cheapened in modern life
he has accomplished his purpose. I
happened to see this photograph, and
vividly recall seeing it, at a very young
age. I remember the same feeling of

revulsion and guilt that I experienced

when I first heard a particularly nasty
slur actually directed at a human being
and the sound echoed in my head
against my will for weeks. The same
feeling that I experienced when I found
a book of headline pages from 9/11 on
a bookshelf in our house and turned
through every page. Once seen, I could
not ignore Piss Christ just as I could not
ignore the dusty screaming face on the
female body half buried in white rubble.
Neither was a lie. Do I wish that Serranos
piece had never been created? With all
my heart. But is it art? Yes. Serrano was
an artist in 1987 and his photograph is
a photograph of 1987. What I saw in his
photograph was the world I live in.
Art is an expression of humanity in
time. In order to present an image of
its world and continue pointing toward
one truth, art must change constantly. It
is precisely because standards of beauty
and truth remain constant that art must
moveupwards or downwardsas
the world moves. T. S. Eliot presents
this vision of the artistic tradition in
his essay Tradition and the Individual
Talent. Creating art within a tradition,
he argues, does not mean a blind
adherence to what has come before. To
conform merely, he writes, would be
for the new work not really to conform
at all; it would not be new, and would
therefore not be a work of art [The
artist] must be quite aware of the obvious
fact that art never improves, but that the
material of art is never quite the same.
He must be aware that the mind of his
own countrya mind which he learns
in time to be much more important
than his own private mindis a mind
which changes.

The German Romantic poet, artist,

and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel
developed a similar vision of art in the
early 19th century. He, like Eliot, was
critical of much of the art being made in
his day. Schlegel critiqued the art of his
contemporaries for falling into extremes
of slavish imitation or radical novelty.
Art, he emphasized, must draw from
the spirit of its time and place, not to
become more particular or specialized,
but to approach the more ultimately
human. Only by being drawn from
its time and place could it transcend
them, for only then could it be art, and
sublime.
As Schlegel wrote in his Lectures on
Literature, If we consider literature in
its widest sense, as the voice which gives
expression to human intellectas the
aggregate mass of symbols in which the
spirit of an age or the character of a nation
is shadowed forth; then indeed a great
and accomplished literature is, without
all doubt, the most valuable possession
of which any nation can boast. But if we
allow ourselves to narrow the meaning
of the word literature so as to make it
suit the limits of our own prejudices,
and expect to find in all literatures the
same sort of excellencies, and the same
sort of forms, we are sinning against the
spirit of all philosophy, and manifesting
our utter ignorance of all nature. For
Schlegel, because art shows forth the
spirit of an age, it would be foolish
to go to art from all places and time
periods and look for the same sort of
excellencies.
And yet, for all his emphasis on the
spirit of the present, Schlegel was by no
means in favor of neglecting the art of
the past. In his early work On the Study

15

Thus, if we dislike contemporary art,

it is our world that we should seek to
change and not the art that reveals it.
Because our world is fractured, our art
will be the same.

of Greek Poetry, in which much of his

artistic thought emerged, he attempted
to investigate what made classical art,
particularly linguistic art, so superior
to the art of his time. It was an essential
character of Greekness that made
Greek poetry great, but it was not
this same character that would make
German poetry great. While Greek
poetry had developed organically,
European poetrys development had
been stilted by pure imitation on one
side, and anarchic novelty on the
other. Art, Schlegel argued, must be
something not between but beyond
these two extremes. Art must find and
express the spirit of its own age, a spirit
which lies behind all great art, but can
only be found by the artist. As he wrote
in his Critical Fragments, You should
never appeal to the spirit of the ancients
as if to an authority. Its a peculiar thing
with spirits: they dont let themselves
be grabbed by the hand and shown to
others. Spirits reveal themselves only to

16

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

spirits.
For Schlegel, as for Eliot, carrying
on an artistic tradition did not mean
recreating the art of the past, but
preserving the spirit of that art through
labor and constant change. Romantic
poetry, of which Schlegel was a great
pioneer, sought not to be a completely
new type of art, or a better art, but to
partake in an infinitely increasing
classicism by becoming an image of
the age.
The century following this flowering
of Romantic poetry and art is a great
illustration of art changing alongside
world. Romanticism spread and
flourished until concentration camps
and the atomic bomb rendered its spirit
untenable. The Beat Generation was not
in rebellion against its time but in the
closest conformity with it. A Romantic
novel could not emerge from a postWWII world. If it did, it could not have
been inspired by or in conformity with
its own time. It would be either pure
imitation or completely disconnected,
and thus not art. It would have nothing
to say.

Fall

If Eliot and Schlegel are given credence,

it quickly becomes clear that the
necessity of a changing and emergent
art does not mean that any artistic
expression that emerges from an age is
valid. However, it also follows that art
is, always has been, and will continue.
That art expresses humanity in time
is not a dictum that must sit above art

and to which artists must carefully and

consciously conform themselves. It is
simply the nature of art. This should be
a comfort, particularly for those who
fear, or perhaps mourn, the death of art.
Humans are art-making animals, and
they are art-preserving animals. Great
art will last. The artificial, inorganic, and
meaningless will pass away. This should
check both our fear and our hatred of
currents we may personally dislike. If
we are right about their unworthiness,
then they will not live on.
Art cannot move away from man.
Brilliant 20th century music theorist
and composer Arnold Schoenberg,
in a reaction against what he saw as
the exhausted tonality of the classical
music tradition, pioneered innovations
in atonality, music that lacks a key
or hierarchy of pitches, and developed
what is known as the twelve-tone
technique, which sought to emphasize
all twelve notes of a chromatic scale
equally and thus avoid a key. He
believed that tonality had run its
course, and that it must be pushed past.
In 50 years, he famously quipped, the
postman will whistle my tune.
It was in part in reaction to this
kind of theoretical composition that
composers like Philip Glass and Steve
Reich pioneered minimal music in the
1960s. In a 1986 interview, in response
to a question about the importance of a
tonal center in his compositions, Reich
contrasted Schoenbergs work to his
own in a way that, I hope, serves the

distinction I am trying to draw. Reich

said,
All over the world you find
certain very basic musical
practices, and one of them
in terms of notes is that you
find the fifth. That interval is
omnipresent Now, many
people have suggested over the
years, and I think they're right,
that this is based on acoustics,
on our ear, and on how the
world is constructed physically.
Reeds vibrate a certain way so
that they cut in half first which is
the octave, and then they cut in
fourths which is fifth. If you say,
Oh well that's merely human
convention and we're going to
make a music of twelve equal
tones ... you're then neglecting a
basic human trait, at your own
peril Schoenberg said "In 50
years the postman will whistle
my tune," well it's going on a
hundred. And the postman can't
even spell his name. Because
the ear is not built to do that
I would say that this kind
of music is really pretty much
over; that those who follow these
people, particularly in America,
are totally irrelevant academics.

For Reich, an attempt to move

past tonal music would ultimately be
unsuccessful, because the human ear is
designed to experience and appreciate
tonality. Personal tastes set aside, this
moment in music history illustrates

well the inevitability of arts return to

humanity. Composers like Reich and
Glass, understanding the need that
Schoenberg recognized for a modern
music, sought, as Reich explained, a
restoration of harmony and rhythm in
a whole new way, developing music to
express their world, but returning it to
man. Art must develop to remain art.
Where, within this development, art
turns away from its end of expressing
humanity in time, it will not last. The
most complex theories and the most
elite enthusiasms are all subject to the
reality that they can only be carried into
the future by younger human beings.

Redemption

Art tells of its time. But what if we

inhabit a bad time? Does the honesty of
the most disgusting art redeem it from
its disgustingness? Clearly, the answer is
no. We should never rejoice in darkness.
But art is not in essence pretty or good,
it is in essence expressive and honest.
It shows our world starkly. Thus, if we
dislike contemporary art, it is our world
that we should seek to change and not
the art that reveals it. Because our
world is fractured, our art will be the
same. Expressionism, abstraction, and
the like presented the world as it was:
incoherent and fragmented. If artists
in the mid 20th century had made art
identical to that of a century prior, it
would not have been art. Indeed, in
presenting a coherence that was not
there it would have lied.
This is the precisely the artistry of T.

S. Eliots poetry. In working to move

away from older forms and invigorate
the field with his own he refreshed the
substance and meaning of twentieth
century poetry. For Eliot, it is only by
presenting the fragments of the world
that we can hope to begin piecing
them back together. By exposing the
shattered pieces of the world, Eliots
poetry shows that there is a complete
picture that has been broken. If it is
not made clear that something about
our world is broken, then it becomes
nonsensical that there could be any
whole into which the pieces fit. Only
by seeing the fragments clearly can
we begin to piece them back together,
to turn from them, or, perhaps, to see
what may be transcendent within them.
If we hold an incarnational faith, our
world contains something redemptive
in its fibers. Though splintered, our
physical world houses truth. And thus
where we can catch a few fragments

17

and hold them together, we can hope to make out a bit

of the pictureno matter how crass, dark, and hopeless
they may seem, no matter how skewed the artists intent
or vision may have been. Underneath our world, even in
its fragments, lies an order and a truth that art has a hard
time resisting. Beyond the intention of the artist, a piece
of art that catches the spirit of its world must also point in
some way to that worlds source.
Thus in some sense even the crassest contemporary
art, if it is art, has the potential for transcendence. It can
be hard to see, and perhaps frequently it is not worth
plunging into a particularly squalid piece to search for
its hidden lights. And so we return to the problem. We
return to Serrano and his horrifying photograph. Where
is the glowing coherence beneath Serrano? Perhaps it is
not there. Perhaps his fragments fall where they reflect no
light. Perhaps he points only downwards and should not
be celebrated. I find myself inclined to react in this way.
I will never hang the photograph on my wall and I will
probably always avert my eyes when I come across it.

Resurrection

In 2010, American poet Andrew Hudgins published

a poem entitled Piss Christ. He begins the poem by
remarking that if we did not happen to know that we were
looking at a small plastic crucifix suspended in urine, we
would see something very different:
we would assume it was too beautiful.
We would assume it was the resurrection,
glory, Christ transformed to light by light,
because the blood and urine burn like a halo,
and light, as always, light makes it beautiful.

We know what we are seeing. But Hudgins, with

a poets vision, moves not past or above Serranos
piece, but further into it.
the Piss Christ thrown in glowing blood, the whole
and irreducible point of his descent:
God plunged in human waste, and radiant.

F
Stacey Egger is a junior studying history.

18

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

Underneath our world,

even in its fragments, lies
an order and a truth that art
has a hard time resisting.
Beyond the intention of
the artist, a piece of art
that catches the spirit of its
world must also point in
some way to that worlds
source.

Faulkner and Film:

A Bridge Between Mediums

Reading The Sound and the Fury as if it were a film
by

Chandler Ryd

Faulkner
From the opening pages of William Faulkners
experimental novel The Sound and the Fury, its
immediately apparent that the story unfolds through
an unconventional narrative technique. Those
familiar with the body of Faulkners work will likely
notice his trademark use of stream-of-consciousness,
but in this novel Faulkner adds something even more
unusual. The novel is divided into four sections of
roughly equal length, each told from the perspective
of a different narrator commenting on the decline of
a southern aristocratic family, the Compsons, in the
early 20th century. The first section is, in my opinion,
the most formally interesting. It is narrated by Benjy
Compsonone of the three sons of the familyand
although he is thirty-three years old, his narration
betrays his stunted development; he is mentally
handicapped and has little temporal or linguistic
capacity. In choosing to narrate this section through
Benjy, Faulkner presents himself with a puzzling
literary challenge: how does one convey in writing
the stream-of-consciousness of a man without time
or words?
The answer: through images and sounds.
In the Benjy section, simple depictions of images
and sounds replace almost all commentary upon the
action. Most of the text is either terse descriptions
of actions or dialogue from other characters. On its
own, this disrupts the prose, but to make the language

even more fragmentedand to better illustrate how

Benjy sees the worldFaulkner frequently interrupts
the narration with images and sounds that come
from Benjys tangled memory and intrude upon the
present (these shifts are usually indicated by italics).
Take this example from the first page, in which Benjy
shifts from a scene in 1928 with Luster, one of the
Compson familys black servants, to an episode
involving his sister, Caddy, in 1900:
Wait a minute. Luster said. You
snagged on that nail again. Cant you
never crawl through here without
snagging on that nail.
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled
through.
On the first read, these abrupt shifts are likely
confusing, if not unsettling, but perhaps they
shouldnt be. In fact, this effect should be familiar to
us. As members of contemporary society, we have
witnessed it countless times, but always on a screen
and rarely on a page. To solve a literary challenge,
Faulkner relies upon a solution from another
medium: film.
Here, Faulkner is employing the cinematic cut. Just
as the filmmaker whisks the viewer from one shot to
the next through the power of editing, so too does

19

Eisenstein is keenly aware of the

interdependent relationship between
literature and film, and he uses montage to
bridge the gap between the mediums.

Faulkner instantaneously transport

the reader away from the present and
into the past. Its a remarkably simple
solution to the problem. Benjy cant
express language, so Faulkner expresses
images; Benjy cant conceive of time, so
Faulkner merely cuts.
An apt way to describe Benjys reality
is to compare him to a camera. Benjys
language is flat. One critic remarks,
his monologue is a series of frozen
pictures, offered without bias . . . .
The Benjy section represents extreme
objectivity, a condition impossible to
the ordinary mind. Even during the
most traumatic moment of the plot,
Benjy merely recounts his own actions:
I began to cry, he says. Like the
boundaries of the frame, furthermore,
Benjys narration focuses only on that
which he can record as sensory data.
When a character leaves his sight, he
merely notes the departure: Uncle
Maury went away. Versh went away.
He describes everything in visual terms
relative to him, much like the style of
a film script. Another way of writing
these two sentences might be, Uncle
Maury left the frame. Versh left the
frame.
This comparison between Benjy
and a camera may at first seem
dehumanizing, but in fact, Faulkners
terse descriptions of images and
20

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

sounds give Benjy a vibrant inner life.

Through them, the central concern
of the novel begins to take shape. It
becomes apparent that Benjy loves his
sister, Caddy, but is disturbed by her
loss of virginity as she matures and runs
off with ill-intending men. The entire
novel revolves around Caddys loss of
virginity and disappearance, and Benjy
has some profoundly human reactions
to these events; he is left feeling fearful,
lonely, and confused. But in order to
understand this inner life, its vital to
understand the cumulative effect of
the images and sounds over the course
of the entire narration. Essentially,
we need to treat Benjys narration as
though it were a film itself, and must
accordingly include the realm of
cinema into our literary analysis.
Film
Four years before Faulkner published
The Sound and the Fury in 1929, an
upstart Russian scholar, essayist, and
filmmaker named Sergei Eisenstein
astounded the artistic world with one of
the masterpieces of cinema, Battleship
Potemkin. The film chronicles a mutiny
onboard a Russian navy vessel, and
contains some of the most iconic
(and most often copied) imagery ever
produced in the medium.
In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein

like Faulkner in The Sound and the

Furyuses an unconventional narrative
technique that he calls montage. In his
book, The Film Sense, Eisenstein defines
montage: two film pieces of any kind,
placed together, inevitably combine
into a new concept, a new quality
arising out of that juxtaposition. The
key element of Eisensteins definition
is the word juxtaposition. When
juxtaposed, two shots create a meaning
that doesnt exist independently in
either shot, but arises only from
their juxtaposition. Elsewhere, he
uses the words representation and
image to elaborate upon this idea.
He defines a representation as any
sensory or descriptive information that
a storyteller may lend his audience,
while an image is the whole product of
several juxtaposed representations. In
a montage construction, therefore, the
juxtaposition of representations calls
to life and forces into the light that
general quality in which each detail has
participated and which binds together
all the details into a whole, namely, into
that generalized image.
In this definition, its important to
note two things. The first is that, in
montage, the image itself is distinct
from the representationsits not
merely a sum of the representations but
is a new creation. The second important

Battleship Potemkin was a major

source of inspiration for John Dos
Passos; James Joyce chose Eisenstein to
direct an adaptation of Ulysses, though
it never saw the screen; James Agee hailed
Eisensteins films as some of the greatest
works of art this century.
point is that Eisensteins definition
of representation is not limited to
images: it includes sounds, smells,
and even actions within its scope.
In Battleship Potemkin, for example,
Eisenstein brings the film to a frenzied
climax by juxtaposing various shots
of the inner workings of a battleship
preparing for war, including shots of
dials, knobs, guns being raised, and
crew members buzzing about. None of
these shots in themselves tell the viewer
that the ship is preparing for war, but
by cutting between them, Eisenstein
communicates this mere fact as well
as creates the climactic tension the
scene needs. To use Eisensteins terms,
the representations of the ships inner
workings collide to produce the image
of the frenzy before a battle.
Although Eisensteins definition
may seem limited to the medium of
film, Eisenstein makes a compelling
argument for the applications of
montage in the written word. In the
opening chapter of The Film Sense,
titled Word and Image, Eisenstein
singles out several renowned writers
as experts in written montage, citing
Joyces Finnegans Wake and Miltons
Paradise Lost as excellent examples of
montage through language. The chapter
is full of other examples; Eisenstein

dissects a prose passage from Guy

de Maupassant, poems by Alexander
Pushkin, John Keats, and Vladimir
Mayakovsky, as well as a written plan for
one of Leonardo daVincis unfinished
landscapes, The Deluge. In each of
these written works, he provides deep
analysis of the function of montage
and then produces an individualized
shooting script. Essentially, he sees
these as prime examples of cinematic
writing. Eisenstein is keenly aware
of the interdependent relationship
between literature and film, and he uses
montage to bridge the gap between
the mediums. He argues, there is no
inconsistency between the method
whereby the poet writes and the
method whereby the shots in a film
are made to flash in the hands of the
director through the agency of the
montage exposition and construction
of the entire film.
In fact, Eisenstein wasnt the only
artist to see the connection between
the mediums. Many twentieth century
writers admired Eisenstein and tried
to emulate his theory of montage in
their own writing. Battleship Potemkin
was a major source of inspiration for
John Dos Passos; James Joyce chose
Eisenstein to direct an adaptation of
Ulysses, though it never saw the screen;

James Agee hailed Eisensteins films

as some of the greatest works of art
this century. Agees admiration went
even further. To Agee, Eisenstein was a
great hero and an artist with a unique
blend of poetic, intellectual, and purely
animal energy. Faulkner himself had a
brief encounter with Eisenstein while
working on the film Sutters Gold
in Hollywood and later mentioned
Eisenstein by name in his novel The
Wild Palms. This evidence, though
anecdotal, describes the interdependent
relationship between twentieth century
writers and the then-fledgling medium
of film. Gertrude Stein puts it simply:
twentieth century writers were doing
what the cinema was doing.
The Bridge
In the Benjy section of The Sound
and the Fury, Faulkner does what
Eisenstein was doing; that is, Faulkner
uses montage. To reiterate my earlier
statement: Benjy is like a camera. Benjys
narration, therefore, is like a strip of
edited film, and Faulkner uses cinematic
logic to carry the prose from scene
to scene. Montage is the mechanism
of this logic. To use Eisensteins
language, the images and sounds in
Benjys narrationfrom both past and
presentare the representations, and
Faulkner juxtaposes them to create the
21

image of Benjys inner life. In a book

titled Faulkner and Film, critic Bruce
F. Kawin speaks to Faulkners use of
montage: [Benjys narration] is words
about a wordless experience . . . it was
conceived as a visual montage and
recast into language.
And montage is the perfect formal
technique for the subject matter because
its truly the only way Faulkner can
adequately express Benjys inner life.
Because Benjy has no concept of time,
he cannot differentiate the past from the
present. So something that Benjy can
see or hear in the presentthe gate on
the edge of the Compson property, for
examplelaunches Benjy into the vault
of his memory, where he is gripped by
previous experiences. In Benjys mind,
therefore, all is present; his entire past
collides in his consciousness at the
impetus of mere sensation. As Jean-Paul
Sartre says in his essay on Faulkners
metaphysics of time in The Sound and
the Fury, for Benjy, the past takes on a
sort of super-reality . . . the present . . .
is full of gaps, and through these gaps,
things of the past, fixed, motionless,
and silent as judges or glances, come
to invade it. Indeed, Faulkner himself
asserts a similar claim about the effects
of these montage-like shifts: To that
idiot, time was not a continuation, it
was an instant. Only montage can
accomplish the immediacy of Benjys
narration because it is the only narrative
technique that allows for instantaneous
and sometimes inexplicable shifts
between the present and the past.
Nowhere in the Benjy section is there
expositional language like, Thirty
years ago . . .; rather, Faulkner cuts.
Its important, therefore, to note
what exits on either side of Faulkners
cuts. What does he cut from and what
does he cut to? In almost every case,

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T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

Montage is the perfect

formal technique for the
subject matter because
its truly the only way
Faulkner can adequately
express Benjys inner life.
the answers to those questions revolve
around Benjys sister, Caddy. When
Benjy sees the gate on the edge of the
Compson property, Faulkner cuts to
past incidences involving the gate and
Caddy. The same thing happens when
he hears the word caddy spoken by
passing golfers, and again when he
encounters any number of objects
in and around their house. Benjys
narrationlike the novel itself
revolves around Caddy, and Faulkner
fundamentally expresses this through
the novels form.
But what if he hadnt? What would
be lost if Faulkner told the story
with without montage? A somewhat
montage-free version of The Sound of
the Fury does, in fact, existironically,
as a film. In 1959, Twentieth Century
Fox released a screen adaptation of
the novel written by Irving Ravetch
and Harriet Frank Jr. During this era
of Hollywood production, most films
adhered to the continuity system of
narrative structure, which favored
clear, chronological storytelling over
experimental, poetic styles. For the
film, the screenwriters chose to discard
much of Faulkners experimental

montage in favor of accessibility by

telling the story linearly and entirely in
the present. In doing so, Ravetch and
Frank abandoned the very technique
which makes the novel so cinematic.
Benjys inner montage is gone. In fact,
through removing it, the screenwriters
almost eliminate Benjy from the story.
He becomes little more than a prop,
having almost no depth or significance.
His stream of consciousness, and his
love for Caddy, is absent. Instead, the
film opts to record Benjys face, which
is wholly inadequate. If only Ravetch
and Frank had heeded Sartres words
on the experimental structure
Faulkner did not first conceive this
orderly plot so as to shuffle it afterwards
like a pack of cards; he could not tell it
in any other wayperhaps then some
of the richness of Benjys character
would show through.
In choosing Benjy as the narrator
for the first quarter of The Sound and
the Fury, Faulkner forces himself to
step outside of traditional narrative
forms. To honestly convey the reality of
a man who cant understand language
or time, Faulkner expresses the story
through images and sounds juxtaposed
through cinematic montage. In so
doing, he molds the form of the novel
around Benjys inner life and Caddys
loss of virginity. Personally, what I find
so captivating and liberating about
montage is that it suggests a bridge
between a very old medium and a very
new one, and Eisensteins work as a
scholar, essayist, and filmmaker is the
foundation of this bridge. Furthermore,
it suggests interdependence between the
mediums that may often be overlooked.
If montage is one bridge, I hope that
many more already exist, and that many
more are yet to be discovered. F
Chandler Ryd is a junior studying English.

Christ
&
Mithras
A Chestertonian Defense
of Christian Myth
by

Emily Lehman

This essay was also presented as a lecture for the Fairfield

Society on September 29, 2016.

e lumbered over the remains of stone

pillars heaped like fallen stacks of
spools, scraping our shoes over ancient
foundations and glancing up at the Greek
countryside on a day that vaguely threatened rain. And
this, our guide said, was the site of the cult of Mithras,
the center of an ancient Greek cult that involved eating
bread and drinking wine. Mithras was the son of a virgin.
Born in a stable. Visited by shepherds. She looked up,
refusing to allow us to miss the point. Sound familiar?
Students began looking uneasily at one another or
laughing consciously. The group rambled on.
At the time of the Collegiate Scholars trip to Greece,
I had recently studied Chestertons The Everlasting Man
and was exhilarated by the appearance of a Christ-like
story in pagan mythology. My friends, though, seemed
uneasy, even disheartened. Here, I grasp toward an
account of the situation in which we found ourselves, an
attempt to understand the Christian myth in light of the
other myths of the cultural world. I will make no attempt
to substantiate the Christian myth, or to villainize pagan
myths, or even to insist that the Christian myth is the best
one there is. My point is simple: the fact that pagan myths
reflect and anticipate the story of Christianity in often
striking ways does not in any way cast a shadow upon the
truth of that story.

Artwork by Patrick Lucas

23

The lingering concern at the heart of

my friends dismay was, I think, this:
the fact that the Mithras myth predated
Christianity seemed to imply that it
caused Christianity. On analogous
lines, there is skepticism about the
scriptural story of Noah because of the
way in which versions of a great flood
linger in various cultures. Because it
appears so often, some conclude it
was merely stolen from other cultures
and put into Scripture. The problem
with this claim is many cultures
remembering-or mythologizing-a
worldwide flood seems to imply
more that it did happen than that it
did not. The widespread mythologizing of the flood leads
to skepticism only if one is already a skeptic-if one doubts
that the flood happened, then one will not think Scripture is
right about it, but one need not aggregate various cultures
myths to make that point. For the problem at hand, they are
irrelevant.
My friends predicament does differ from this case,
however. Since the Mithras worshippers long predated Christ,
one cannot make the claim that they were remembering a
historical event common to Christianity and other cultures.
Mithrass unusual story seems to anticipate Christian stories,
and thereby unsettles Christian believers. Why? Well, at
first, the answer seems quite obvious. Surely a cultural
anthropologist could make the claim that Christianity simply
arose out of these earlier traditions, gleaning for itself out of
pagan mythology the seeds of a world that would appeal to
all mankind. But did it?
To answer this question, there are two questions one must
ask first. The first is whether the Mithras storys predating
Christianity means that it caused Christianity. The second
is why Christian believers hold Christianity to be true. The
answer to the first question is fairly apparent; just because
something comes before something else doesnt mean it
caused that other thing. Its a pretty simple concept, but one
that slips into argument almost unnoticed. There are various
weaker conclusions one can draw-for example, that the
Mithras myth isnt derivative from Christianity, and therefore
is not immediately ruled out as a component cause-but they
are only tangentially relevant. At the very least, we would
need more information to conclude that the myth of Mithras
was the cause of the story of Christ.
But answering the second question will shed light on the
first. Why do Christian believers hold Christianity true? They
do not believe that it is true because people have believed
in Christ since the time of the ancient Greeks. Instead, they
claim that a particular man called Christ walked the earth
at a particular time, and that they have received trustworthy
24

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

testimony to that effect. Rather than seeing their religion

as having been drawn gradually out of ages of mythology,
Christians believe in a singular event that transformed the
course of history, about which they have written records
and an oral tradition that they consider credible. Of course,
this act of belief is complex-rather than being a simple
conclusion from empirical evidence, Christian belief arises
out of something called faith, a virtue and therefore in
some respect a gift, though (depending upon ones strand of
tradition) allied in some way to human assent.
Whether or not the Mithras myth anticipates Christianity,
then, is in a certain respect a moot point. Christians believe
that Christianity is true on evidence apart from pagan
mythology. The question of whether the Incarnation actually
happened is a question that Christians, as Christians, already
have an answer to. For those who are outside Christianity,
the question of whether the Incarnation happened is perhaps
best approached by attempting to discern whether the
authority Christians place their faith in is in fact trustworthy.
Whether or not pagan myths pointed to the Christian one
is not a material point for determining whether or not the
Christian myth is true. If they do anticipate the Christian
myth, interesting; if they do not, also interesting. Either way,
since Christianity as such does not rest its claims on pagan
myths having or not having anticipated it, the question of
Christianitys truth is an independent question.
There is, of course, one important objection that cannot be
sufficiently dealt with in brief, so I will simply gesture toward
an answer. The objection is an epistemological one. The
ancient Greeks seem to have believed in Mithras in the same
way that Christians believed in Christ, relating similar stories
to the one that we relate, participating in similar rites. How
can we be certain that we are not similarly deluded, if indeed
we think the ancient Greeks were deluded? For one thing, we
must realize at the outset that the similarity of the stories is
what leads to particular uneasiness in this case, though really
any epistemological challenge to Christianity could lead to

similar uneasiness. It is disorienting to find that

a certain ancient people believed something so
strikingly similar to what we believe-an ancient
pagan god who was worshiped by shepherds in a
stable? Epistemologically, however, this is not any
different from any encounter with people whose
beliefs differ from our own. If (as in the Jimmy
Stewart movie Harvey) a man believes that his
best friend is a six-foot invisible rabbit, this is
in a certain respect equally epistemologically
threatening to the believing Christian, or really
to any person. If someone believes something
different from what we believe, then that is
frightening because they, like we, have faith,
and they, unlike we, are wrong (in our opinion).
The question then must fall back upon the
foundations of ones belief: whether the one in
whom one has believed is in fact trustworthy.
Does Jimmy Stewart have the same grounds for believing in
Harvey that Christians do for believing in the story of Christ?
Reassuringly, there is an additional distinction to be made
here. Our childhood belief in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus
was not the same kind of belief we had in the earth going
around the sun. Cultural beliefs, though sometimes held as
fact, are perhaps more often held as something in between
fact and fiction, objects of cultural rather than intellectual
adherence. Pagan cultures did not, to all appearances,
believe in their mythology in the same way that Christians
believe in theirs. Where Christians died at the stake for
their one God, various pagan cultures happily incorporated
the deities of conquered and conquering cultures. Where
Christians struggled intensely to recognize the claims of the
philosophers about truth with the historical narrative with
which they were provided, in pagan culture philosophy and
mythology ignored each other with impunity. Here I draw
upon Chestertons The Everlasting Man, where he lays out the
situation of pagan mythology in relation to pagan philosophy:
Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to
the pagan what Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was
never a view of the universe satisfying all sides of life;
a complete and complex truth with something to say
about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one
side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious
side; and I think it is truer to call it the imaginative
side. But this it did satisfy; in the end it satisfied
it to satiety. . . . Precisely because mythology only
satisfied one mood, they turned in other moods to
something totally different [i.e., philosophy.] But it is
very important to realize that it was totally different.
It was too different to be inconsistent. It was so alien
that it did not clash. While a mob of people were
pouring on a public holiday to the feast of Adonis or
the games in honor of Apollo, this or that man would
prefer to stop at home and think out a little theory
about the nature of things. Sometimes his hobby

would even take the form of thinking about the

nature of God; or even in that sense about the nature
of the gods. But he very seldom thought of pitting his
nature of the gods against the gods of nature. (The
Everlasting Man Part I Ch. 6)

Rather than conflicting with one another, philosophy and

religion ran parallel and separate courses (in the main) until
the advent of Christianity. The martyrs who died in the
arena, the saint who punched someone in the face during
the Council of Nicea, even the heretics who burned at the
stake, were fighting for no mere myth. Instead, they believed
that Christianity had introduced something new into the
world-something that brought truth and myth together.
Christians believed in the truth of their myth in a way that
other myth-believers simply did not, and with the advent of
Christianity, man came to know a claim about truth that was
also a historical reality, bringing the transcendent down to
earth like a lightning strike. Nothing like Christianity had
ever happened before. And its claims, unlike those of pagan
mythology, are based upon faith-not irrational faith, but
rather the virtue of faith based in the testimony of credible
witnesses.

And what does this mean for my friends and me, rambling
over Greek ruins? If we believe that Christianity is not based
in pagan myth, and we realize that whether one believes in
Christianity has little or nothing to do with Christianitys
being anticipated by pagan mythology, then the exploration
of the similarities between pagan mythology and Christianity
becomes an exhilarating treasure hunt, like tracing out the
constellations or searching for the authors intention in a
great novel. Every similarity between the Christian story and
stories before it strikes one like an electric shock-here too!
At first, the pattern seems random. It seems that lightning
sometimes strikes twice-and sometimes a dozen times,
as over and over throughout the myths of the pagans the
Christian finds the dying and resurrected god. As Chesterton
might say, it begins to look like a plot. And the Christian
might wonder whether he ought to be surprised at all, or
whether, from the beginning of time, something in the heart
of man knew the traces of the future, found them carved into
the depths of his being and repeating themselves again and
again in his dreams until the myth came true. F
Emily Lehman is a senior studying English.

25

26

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

learning
how to

rest

The Importance of Sabbath at a School that

Wont Stop Moving
by

Sarah Borger

ife at Hillsdale often seems like a busyness

competition. At the beginning of each new
semester, or during class registration time, many
conversations revolve around course loads and
credit hours, and become competitions for who
has the most extracurricular activities or works
the most hours. The silent contest for who has the
most credits launches, and questions of whether
we should take this course or that seminar intrude
on our conversations. In the midst of this, we often
find ourselves so overwhelmed that we may skip
meals or stay up into the wee hours of the morning
doing homework, just to find ourselves completely
exhausted the next day. We forget what we love to
do for fun, and lose the concept of hobbies. But,
we tell ourselves, this is just how it has to be. It is,
after all, Hillsdale, and we pride ourselves on our
academic rigor and achievement.
But what do we do when the stresses of normal
college life reduce us to barely surviving each
semester, or waking up just to start the countdown
until we can sleep again? What happens when
this life triggers a panic disorder or fractures
relationships between friends and family? We say
strength rejoices in the challenge, but are we truly
rejoicing? Or are we merely scraping by until the
next break? When we cease to recognize our own
stress thresholds and care for basic bodily needs,
such as meals, sleep, or exercise, our strength
degenerates into desperation and our rejoicing
turns into mere surviving.
Perhaps we tell ourselves that we are leading
a balanced life because our semester has a wellrounded mix of seminars, classes, work hours,
volunteering, and extracurricular activities.
Perhaps were searching for something better, but

resign ourselves to the stress because we think that

this is what Hillsdale is supposed to be like. Perhaps
we feel that there is no escaping the load on our
backs because we dont have a choice, because we
have to be doing this.
Or perhaps we put a different kind of pressure on
ourselves. With so many opportunities at Hillsdale,
we want to do it all. We want to learn, pursue our
interests, and gain a wealth of new experiences, and
this isnt bad. Taking fascinating
classes is a good thing. Being We say strength
involved around campus is a
good thing. Taking advantage rejoices in the
of the opportunities at Hillsdale challenge, but
and trying new things is a good
thing. Unfortunately, its hard to are we truly
enjoy our activities when over- rejoicing?
commitment makes us burn out.
Soon we feel like were missing
out because, even though were taking thoughtprovoking classes, we dont have time to really
focus on each one. While were participating in
interesting clubs and organizations, were pulled in
too many directions and cant be as involved as we
want to be.
As a student here at Hillsdale, I understand the
pressures we put on ourselves. I see the stress eating
away at dear friends of mine, and Ive felt it take its
toll on me. It seems like theres no way out of it. We
look around and see others who seem to have it all
together, who do everything and then some, who
overachieve to succeed, and who seem to be living
out what it means to be a Hillsdale student. I wanted
to be that perfect Hillsdale student, not just because
it seemed like who I was supposed to be, but because
it was who I wanted to be. I took a good amount
27

God calls us to
Sabbath because
he knows how he
created us and
wants to bring us
into his rest, even
in the midst of
Hillsdales culture
of busyness.
of classes, bumped up the credit load
with music extracurriculars, started
two on-campus jobs, and made sure I
volunteered every week and had some
clubs on my resum. I thought that this
was what I was supposed to do, because
thats what I saw in the people around
me. They did everything, they did it
well, and they were praised as examples.
However, beneath this image, people
such as these students are struggling
with perfectionism, anxiety, feelings
of inadequacy, and a crumbling fear of
failure. They cannot rest because if they
do, the sphere of commitments theyre
juggling will surely come crashing
down and leave them far behind in life.
I propose that the life that I am
describing is not what Hillsdale is
about. Hillsdale was never meant to be
a rat race that we try to hide beneath our
pressed suits and nude heels. Learning
should not be a choreit should be
a joy. When we forgo rest in favor of
work, we end up exhausted. We should
be seeking knowledge not because we
feel like we should, but because we
love to learn and desire to seek beauty,
truth, and goodness. But how can we
do this? I believe the answer lies in an
old-as-time concept: The Sabbath.
In the Beginning
In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth, the seas and
everything in them, the land and its
beasts. He created the skies and the stars
above and the plants below. He created
the birds and the lilies, the fish and
28

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

bees. He created man, and he created

woman, and he called his creation very
good. And then, he rested.
The Sabbath is built into the very
foundation of the world. The first day
after creation was deemed a day of rest;
rest is the first activity of the newlymade world. Gods example of resting
began the narrative of humanity,
infusing a need for rest into human
nature. The Sabbath is ingrained in us.
This is how we were meant to be.
In a sense, practicing the Sabbath is
a sacrifice. It is a discipline, requiring
us to set aside our productivity, our
sense of busyness, and our feeling of
usefulness, in order to rest in him. It
requires discipline to put the books
down and not check work emails. It
takes practice to learn how to rest. In the
culture of busyness that we are swept up
in, the idea of rest is somewhat foreign.
It seems wrong, even wasteful. But as
this practice of resting on the Sabbath
continues and we begin learning how
to rest, it becomes easier. The sacrifice
becomes a gift.
By tithing our time and giving a day
to rest in the Lord, we receive more
blessings than we sacrifice. We can
rediscover the passions God has woven
into our spirits. The Sabbath allows us
to relax in communion with God, a
communion found by participating in
the seventh day rest with him. Soon
we are more refreshed, we have more
energy, and we are discovering joy in
what we do. As we embrace our natural
need to rest with our Lord, we can live

more fully, bringing renewed energy to

our studies, our friendships, and the
challenges we face in everyday life. God
didnt command us to keep the Sabbath
day holy because he needed worship.
I believe that God calls us to Sabbath
because he knows how he created us
and wants to bring us into his rest, even
in the midst of Hillsdales culture of
busyness. Though Ive tended to resist
rest, I still need it. Last fall semester, I
piled on as much as I could, but was
continually burning out, just trying
to make it to the next school break so
that I could recover. But even those
breaks didnt help, because I had gotten
myself so worked up in this busyness
mentality that I became anxious when
faced with free time. I didnt know how
to rest even when I had the chance.
Learning How to Rest
Learning how to rest is difficult.
Despite its being instituted in the very
beginning of time, it doesnt come as
naturally as we might hope.It makes us
anxious, frustrating our feeling of selfworth and pushing us into withdrawal
as we begin to pull away from our
addiction to busyness. And then,
something wonderful happens as the
sacrifice becomes the gift. The Sabbath
becomes a day to look forward to. We
dream up things to do and adventures
to go on when Sunday arrives. We
explore passions that once sat dusty on
our shelves and learn that productivity
does not define our self-worth. Our
worth does not lie in some utilitarian

checklist items, but in our identities

as children of God, redeemed by
Christ. We can participate in this
identity more fully in worship on
Sundays, since were focused on
Christ and not on an afternoon to
do list.
We find an example of this
participation in the Biblical account
of Mary and Marthas visit with Jesus.
Martha scrambles to cook and clean,
while Mary doesnt do anything to
help her. Mary simply sits at Jesus
feet, listening to his words. Martha is
the Hillsdale student with 18 credits,
4 volunteer hours per week, 2 parttime jobs, and heavy extracurricular
commitments. On the side, she
tutors Spanish students and runs
a social media page for a local
business. She is distracted with
serving (Luke 10:40). The things
she is doing are not inherently bad.
They can bring great joy to her and
those around her, glorify God, and
help those who need help.
Mary, on the other hand, might
seem like an underachiever here at
Hillsdale. She might only take four
classes per semester, be active in
only a couple activities or work a
part-time job, and volunteer once a
week at the preschool. She might not
seem as driven or high-achieving
as Martha, and perhaps she worries
about what others might think.
Then Jesus visits. He is there with
them, and while Martha is bustling
about trying to make everything just
right, Mary simply sits and listens
to Jesus speaking. She shares in this
communion with Christ while the
world rushes past. And Martha, who
is pursuing so many good things and
struggling to meet all the spoken or
unspoken expectations, knows Jesus
is there. But she cant stop. Theres
too much to do, and she has to make
everything good enough. She cant
let her carefully orchestrated rush of
activity crash to the ground.
Then Jesus speaks, calmly and
quietly. He knows her heart, and
he knows that she is trying to do

whats right. And with his words,

he beckons her into his rest, into his
Sabbath:
Martha, Martha, you are anxious
and troubled about many things,
but one thing is necessary. Mary has
chosen the good portion, which will
not be taken away from her.
Recognizing her anxious and
troubled state, he welcomes her into
a vulnerable communion with him,
and calls her to turn to the good
portion, to this communion with
her God. Thus the sacrifice becomes
the gift.
Bringing the Gift to Hillsdale
When we look at Hillsdale, it seems
impossible to practice the Sabbath.
Hillsdale is more demanding than
other schools, we tell ourselves,
and we cant afford to take a day
off. A couple of years ago, I didnt
understand how this could be
possible. Maybe somewhere else,
but not here. Homework already
consumed my life. I didnt have time
to take an entire day out of every
week to not work. I was nervous
that my grades would fall or that I
wouldnt have enough time to get
everything done.
I tried it, though, figuring that it
was worth a shot. It was a sacrifice,
and it wasnt without its struggles,
but I have never been so excited for
Sundays before. I was less stressed
during the week because I had the
Sabbath to look forward to, and come
Monday, I had renewed energy for
the week. I began to care more about
my classes and was more engaged in
what I was learning. I still had time
to do homework, and had more
time to dedicate to friendships and
hobbies. I realized how fun it was to
bake without a time restraint, color
for hours, connect with friends and
family from back home, and really
enjoy church without the distraction
of a Sunday to-do list.
Taking the Sabbath at Hillsdale
isnt without challenges. Its difficult
to practice the Sabbath alone,
especially in the Hillsdale culture.

There is a loneliness to it when

everyone else is so busy with school
and work that they dont have a
break. Man was not made to practice
the Sabbath alone. The Sabbath
should be a time for community.
If Hillsdale students took the time
to practice the Sabbath together,
we might discover a community
that goes beyond classes and work.
Maybe wed go to church together,
lingering after worship to chat with
each other and connect to others in
the congregation. We could enjoy
brunch together, chatting about life.
Wed talk, wed laugh, and we
wouldnt worry about time slipping
away, because there wouldnt be an
agenda. We might discover what
we love to do and do the things we
love. We could explore the world of
Hillsdale beyond the favorite study
spots in town. We could share quality
time with each other, learning about
who we are beyond our credit hours
and resum fillers.
Through the Sabbath, we could
find renewed energy with which to
pursue our studies and engage in our
learning. There would be time for
Sunday afternoon naps and writing
letters back home and having movie
nights without worrying about
homework. During the week, we
could focus on our studies and
delight in what were learning,
energized by our Sabbath rest. We
could rejoice in the challenge instead
of trying to survive it. By practicing
the Sabbath, we might find that
resting, something that may seem
like it doesnt fit into Hillsdale
culture, actually allows us to become
better Hillsdale students. F
Sarah Borger is a junior studying English
and Spanish.

29

SELECT
CORRESPONDENCE:
The Clinton Emails the Mainstream Media Doesnt Want You to See
by

Noah Weinrich

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: wclinton@clinton.net

April 20, 2015

Bill,
Please refrain from [REDACTED] while on the campaign trail. We dont want a repeat of 98. At least you didnt
[REDACTED] this time around. Also, can you make sure Sid picks up the dry cleaning? I cant drive out there in this
heat. Plus you know how I feel about the Asians.

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: customerservice@ebay.com

August 17, 2015

Hello,
Im writing to report an issue with my billing. I was charged $94.50 for my new phone, but my bid was $84.50. Please address.

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: habedin@clinton.net

August 20, 2015

Hi Huma,
Heard about Anthonys latest. Dont let it get to you. Men are pigs sometimes. I mean, when Bill was out and about
in the 90s I always stuck with him. Of course, we didnt have Tweeter and Slapchat in those days. Just smile and bear
with him. Itll all be great!

From: doctork@kmdandassociates.com
To: hclinton@clinton.net

October 12, 2015

Mrs. Clinton,
Our records indicate you are 142 days overdue for an appointment and medication refill. Please make an
appointment at your earliest convenience.

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: vlad@state.ru

November 16, 2015

Hi Vlad,
Look, I know youve got a lot on your plate, what with the territories to invade, but I need your help. How do you
do the internet? Like stopping people from lying about you? Bill showed me how to see MSNBC comments on my
Blackberry and Im not a fan. MAGA_1776 said I had Parkinsons, which is crazy. Obviously its just [REDACTED], at least if you believe the doctors.

30

T h e H i l l s d a l e F o r u m October 2016

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: customerservice@ebay.com

November 22, 2015

Hello,
My bidding issue has still not been resolved. PLEASE RESPOND.

From: nprince@millionaires.ru
To: hclinton@clinton.net

December 2, 2015

Good afternoon,
I am Prince Abadom Igbo. You have been selected to win the Nigerian state lottery. Please log into millionaires.ru
with your email and password. Congratulations on your win!

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: jbiden@whitehouse.gov

December 2, 2015

Joe,
It happened again. How do I get viruses off of my computer? Do I have to change my password?

From: jbiden@whitehouse.gov
To: hclinton@clinton.n

December 4, 2015

Fwd: Fw: Fw: Fw:

HEY HILLDAWG, FIGURD BILL WOULD APPRECIATE THIS. COULDNT REMEMBER HIS EMAIL BUT
MAKE SURE HE GETS IT. TELL CHELSEA UNCLE JOE SAYS HI. ;)
TOP TEN SINGLE DC INTERNS
[REDACTED]

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: customerservice@ebay.com

December 15, 2015

Never mind. It was just shipping.

From: hclinton@clinton.net
To: habedin@clinton.net

July 2, 2016

What is this Pokemon Go? Is that the weird Japanese thing? Throw that in my next speech.
Also, sorry (again) about Anthony. Just give him one more chance. Maybe two.

31