I like this sentimental passage from David Copperfield after he has run away and has suffered a long, lonely, lost, and painful journey that has finally led him to his Aunt Betsy Trotwood's house where she takes him in, has foiled the attempts of the Murdstone's to retrieve him, and finally has decided to keep him:

After tea, we sat at the window - on the look-out, as I imagined, from my aunt's sharp expression of face, for more invaders - until dusk, when Janet set candles, and a backgammon-board, on the table, and pulled down the blinds.

'Now, Mr. Dick,' said my aunt, with her grave look, and her forefinger up as before, 'I am going to ask you another question. Look at this child.'

'David's son?' said Mr. Dick, with an attentive, puzzled face.

'Exactly so,' returned my aunt. 'What would you do with him, now?'

'Do with David's son?' said Mr. Dick.

'Ay,' replied my aunt, 'with David's son.'

'Oh!' said Mr. Dick. 'Yes. Do with - I should put him to bed.'

'Janet!' cried my aunt, with the same complacent triumph that I had remarked before. 'Mr. Dick sets us all right. If the bed is ready, we'll take him up to it.'

Janet reporting it to be quite ready, I was taken up to it; kindly, but in some sort like a prisoner; my aunt going in front and Janet bringing up the rear. The only circumstance which gave me any new hope, was my aunt's stopping on the stairs to inquire about a smell of fire that was prevalent there; and Janet’s replying that she had been making tinder down in the kitchen, of my old shirt. But there were no other clothes in my room than the odd heap of things I wore; and when I was left there, with a little taper which my aunt forewarned me would burn exactly five minutes, I heard them lock my door on the outside. Turning these things over in my mind I deemed it possible that my aunt, who could know nothing of me, might suspect I had a habit of running away, and took precautions, on that account, to have me in safe keeping.

The room was a pleasant one, at the top of the house, overlooking the sea, on which the moon was shining brilliantly. After I had said my prayers, and the candle had burnt out, I remember how I still sat looking at the moonlight on the water, as if I could hope to read my fortune in it, as in a bright book; or to see my mother with her child, coming from Heaven, along that shining path, to look upon me as she had looked when I last saw her sweet face. I remember how the solemn feeling with which at length I turned my eyes away, yielded to the sensation of gratitude and rest which the sight of the white-curtained bed - and how much more the lying softly down upon it, nestling in the snow-white sheets! - inspired. I remember how I thought of all the solitary places under the night sky where I had slept, and how I prayed that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless. I remember how I seemed to float, then, down the melancholy glory of that track upon the sea, away into the world of dreams.

As we have observed, Pancks makes clear that in a commercial country the only thing that matters is making money. What are the working class made for except for working. Pancks of course has an ironic view of things. He says it is only appropriate that he be worked to death without even enough time in his day to eat a meal because that is what he was made for. Arthur hopes there is more. Pancks counters with the question what more can there be than this. Pancks knows the truth however. As do we the readers. And if we don't get the irony we certainly get the sentimentality, but here I use the term with approbation though in other places I have condemned it as cheap and artificial. As Little Dorrit leaves Arthur Clennam's, she stops to thank him one last time for his kindnesses. Dickens renders the moment in these terms: “Little Dorrit turned at the door to say, 'God bless you!' She said it very softly, but perhaps she may have been as audible above--who knows!--as a whole cathedral choir." We are moved because we know as Arthur Clennam does that Little Dorrit and her entire family suffer from Clennam’s family’s greed. She is the exemplary victim of an evil system, a system obviously condemned by the divinities. The rest of this chapter descends painful rung after painful rung down into the labyrinthine depths of suffering and despair as Little Dorrit and her sad companion Maggy wander without lodging the streets of a foul and cold metropolis all night long. Sad, sad, sad! But such references to a underlying Christian faith and the use of such sentimental scenery are earmarks of Dickens’s style. Reformers, Dickens knew, must use whatever they have at hand to raise consciousness of rampant dehumanizing evil.

Another character who is much like Mr. Marcher in James's story Beast in the Jungle to which Plath refers in her poem Ennui is Arthur Clennam of Dickens's Little Dorrit, which I am rereading because I don't remember a thing of the first reading that took place some years ago. Arthur has come home from a dinner where he has been brought once again in touch with the love of his youth, Flora Casby. She is now a tittering obese foolish but also sad widow who makes much of their past, but Arthur is only frightened by the reality he has stumbled upon, a reality that brings him to this conclusion:
"Left to himself again, after the solicitude and compassion of his last adventure [he had helped A Marseille character from earlier in the book who has been run down by a mail coach], he was naturally in a thoughtful mood. As naturally, he could not walk on thinking for ten minutes without recalling Flora. She necessarily recalled to him his life, with all its misdirection and little happiness. When he got to his lodging, he sat down before the dying fire, as he had stood at the window of his old room looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys, and turned his gaze back upon the gloomy vista by which he had come to that stage in his existence. So long, so bare, so blank. No childhood; no youth, except for one remembrance; that one remembrance proved, only that day, to be a piece of folly.

Earlier in the evening Mr. Pancks who works for Flora's father Mr. Casby and who joined them for dinner had pointed out that the rich only have contempt for the poor and only use them for their own survival. The narrative proceeds:

"Pancks dined with them. Pancks steamed out of his little dock at a quarter before six, and bore straight down for the Patriarch, who happened to be then driving, in an inane manner, through a stagnant account of Bleeding Heart Yard. Pancks instantly made fast to him and hauled him out. 'Bleeding Heart Yard?' said Pancks, with a puff and a snort. 'It's a troublesome property. Don't pay you badly, but rents are very hard to get there. You have more trouble with that one place than with all the places belonging to you.' Just as the big ship in tow gets the credit, with most spectators, of being the powerful object, so the Patriarch usually seemed to have said himself whatever Pancks said for him. 'Indeed?' returned Clennam, upon whom this impression was so efficiently made by a mere gleam of the polished head that he spoke to the ship instead of the Tug. 'The people are so poor there?' 'You can't say, you know,' snorted Pancks, taking one of his dirty hands out of his rusty iron-grey pockets to bite his nails, if he could find any, and turning his beads of eyes upon his employer, 'whether they're poor or not. They say they are, but they all say that. When a man says he's rich, you're generally sure he isn't. Besides, if they ARE poor, you can't help it. You'd be poor yourself if you didn't get your rents.' 'True enough,' said Arthur. 'You're not going to keep open house for all the poor of London,' pursued Pancks. 'You're not going to lodge 'em for nothing. You're not going to open your gates wide and let 'em come free. Not if you know it, you ain't.' Mr Casby shook his head, in placid and benignant generality. 'If a man takes a room of you at half-a-crown a week, and when the week comes round hasn't got the half-crown, you say to that man, Why have you got the room, then? If you haven't got the one thing, why have you got the other? What have you been and done with your money? What do you mean by it? What are you up to? That's what YOU say to a man of that sort; and if you didn't say it, more shame for you!'

After dinner when Arthur Clennam walks with Pancks towards their respective abodes, the narrative says further,

"When he began to come to himself, in the cooler air and the absence of Flora, he found Pancks at full speed, cropping such scanty pasturage of nails as he could find, and snorting at intervals. These, in conjunction with one hand in his pocket and his roughened hat hind side before, were evidently the conditions under which he reflected. 'A fresh night!' said Arthur. 'Yes, it's pretty fresh,' assented Pancks. 'As a stranger you feel the climate more than I do, I dare say. Indeed I haven't got time to feel it.' 'You lead such a busy life?' 'Yes, I have always some of 'em to look up, or something to look after. But I like business,' said Pancks, getting on a little faster. 'What's a man made for?' 'For nothing else?' said Clennam. Pancks put the counter question, 'What else?' It packed up, in the smallest compass, a weight that had rested on Clennam's life; and he made no answer. 'That's what I ask our weekly tenants,' said Pancks. 'Some of 'em will pull long faces to me, and say, Poor as you see us, master, we're always grinding, drudging, toiling, every minute we're awake. I say to them, What else are you made for? It shuts them up. They haven't a word to answer. What else are you made for? That clinches it.' 'Ah dear, dear, dear!' sighed Clennam. 'Here am I,' said Pancks, pursuing his argument with the weekly tenant. 'What else do you suppose I think I am made for? Nothing. Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.' When they had walked a little further in silence, Clennam said: 'Have you no taste for anything, Mr Pancks?' 'What's taste?' drily retorted Pancks. 'Let us say inclination.' 'I have an inclination to get money, sir,' said Pancks, 'if you will show me how.' He blew off that sound again, and it occurred to his companion for the first time that it was his way of laughing. He was a singular man in all respects; he might not have been quite in earnest, but that the short, hard, rapid manner in which he shot out these cinders of principles, as if it were done by mechanical revolvency, seemed irreconcilable with banter. 'You are no great reader, I suppose?' said Clennam. 'Never read anything but letters and accounts. Never collect anything but advertisements relative to next of kin. If that's a taste, I have got that.

Arthur meditates further on his day:

"To review his life was like descending a green tree in fruit and flower, and seeing all the branches wither and drop off, one by one, as he came down towards them.

He then says,

'From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days, through the rigid and unloving home that followed them, through my departure, my long exile, my return, my mother's welcome, my intercourse with her since, down to the afternoon of this day with poor Flora,' said Arthur Clennam, 'what have I found!'

At that moment, Little Dorrit enters spouting her name as if in answer to Arthur Clennam's question. It is Little Dorrit whose life he plans to save and whose saving will bring him the meaning that has been for a lifetime absent.

Plath's poem suggests that nothing exciting happens anymore--no battles that engage a person at the elemental, death-defying level. But wars abound on every continent, nearly, so of what does she speak? In fact, her examples have a heavy literary cast. Dragon killers and deity rebellers remain the stuff of fiction. Even though she starts with what might be a real encounter with the reader of leaves and palms, even here I am reminded of Eliot's Waste Land and Madame Sosostris. I especially enjoy her allusion to the Henry James story about the man who throws his life away waiting for some extraordinary event to occur, only to realize that he will merely die at the end of a failed and empty existence. James may have been talking about his own lonely, bored and boring life, but such a singular example does not a case for a bored humanity make. True, earlier peoples did believe in a world filled with extraordinary beings and symbolic meanings in the everyday details. Still, human kind really hasn't changed so very much, has it? Ennui has always been the luxury of the upper classes whose every whim and desire have been catered to and provided for so that eventually the glut leads to a familiar satiety. The ordinary fold remains as superstitious as ever and as afraid in the night of economic deprivation as little children. The dragons and the beasts indeed are real when you are facing homelessness and crying children with distended bellies. We might be more interested in a different take on ennui, that provided by Langston Hughes whose version of ennui in his poem of the same name creates an even archer irony than Plath’s:

It's such a
Bore
Being always
Poor.

Maybe my passivity and my disgruntlement with endless palavering politics is prompted by the persistent modern condition known as ennui. Sylvia Plath knows of what I speak. She says,

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

Could it have been a deep-rooted ennui that prompted her to stick her head in the eternal oven?

Yes, I am hankering for the days of that first true election involving partisan politics between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the one in which Adams voted for himself and virtually guaranteed his election. However, he was burdened with Jefferson as his VP, with some gridlock inevitably ensuing. Not much has changed since that time in many respects, except in the time it took to receive news of whatever wranglings and bickerings and attacks and counterattacks that were taking place in the campaigning and election process. I pray for the return to the time of such primitive and protracted conveyance of the national news. The truth is that these candidates didn't do much campaigning, and therein lies my desire to be transported to the past and the way things were done in that day. I am worn literally to the bone-weary stage, enervated, lacerated, incapacitated, constipated, nauseated, gut surfeited, mind numbed, soul dissipated, and just sick and tired in other words of this whole election process. Something is truly rotten in the state of American politics when this much money and verbiage and persistent effort by so many is required to bring about the election of a leader: it's simply outrageous and if we don't see that then clearly it would be better for everyone if we were to be taken over by the Chinese and the Russians because sumpin done did broke over here on this side of the world in a country that purports to be not only the land of the free and the home of the brave but the place where common sense supposedly matters. Matters, except when it comes to sex, sports, and politics. I just cast my vote for Jasmine, my two-year-old granddaughter, so I need no longer listen to the endless crap.

I have to admit that there was a time that I began each teaching day with an Insult of the Day. I thought it was an inspired idea: attack the gross violations of common sense and moral decency that one found running rampant in the various systems of our country's and our citizenry's personal daily lives: school, family, religion, government, corporate America, general corruption and stupidity wherever it might be found. And often it was done in the style of Shakespeare's Elizabethan tone and language. At this point in my career, I was using computers, which meant each student had a computer networked with mine, so I loaded up the lesson of the day and when students came in my room, they immediately accessed the lesson of the day, which included at the top any important announcements, homework assignments, the grammar lesson of the day, the actual assignment for the hour, and also the insult of the day, which usually provided a moment of humor as well as a serious morsel of real social horror for contemplation. Here is an example from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, the play I have talked about before involving the subtly evil Falstaff and the remarkable young prince Hal who later becomes Henry V; the insult is directed at Falstaff: That trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey Iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? I might come up with something akin about George W. Bush: That linguistic ruffian, that false distorter of the truth, that cruel water boarding torturer, that trampler on human rights, that runt of a mindless litter of pompous pups of power, that ignorer of human suffering, that profligate profiteer, that destroyer of economies, that chuckling huckster with a loser's leer and a swindler's heartless abandonment of conscience? My thinking was akin to my poem about the celebration that allows men to attack women and governments and fate in general as a way of maintaining a sort of mental equilibrium. A daily insult sort of cleared the air, vented the frustrations of combating the overwhelming sense that evil was triumphing in the world, and if it were not for a daily dose of moral resetting of the bearings of our beings, we might be overcome by its treachery.