Cinderella's Mother Closed Her Eyes and Stopped Breathing

There is a very bright young girl, about six years old, with whom I have tried to discuss  Cinderella. My thinking in doing this was that she might be able to clue me in to fresh perspectives on this universal story that I have missed.

But I am sorry to say that, bright and quick as she is, she does not have any perception of what I am now able to see at the end of a life of many years of re-reading Cinderella. I can see she that she feels no awe before it, that she acts as if she knows all there

Anton Pieck's Cinderella

is to know about it, and that she is much concerned to show me how bright she is. She seemed blind and dead as a wall when I tried to talk to her about Cinderella's mother, the father, the birds, the tree, the step-mother and step-sisters, the ashes, the glimpses, the mutilations of the feet, the persistent prince, the wedding, the plucked-out eyes.

Part of the explanation for

Disney's Cinderella

her not getting it may be that she knows only a Disney film version of the story. But I think that the stronger explanation is that she has already, even at six years, been corrupted into the applause and admiration for being very bright. It seems that she has had so much applause for her cleverness that her pride, her ascendancy, has become a substitute for that essential love that would have kept her eyes open and her spirit alive.

Ironically, this problem is very much addressed in the opening lines of the story, recorded by the Grimms, begins as follows:

“The wife of a rich man fell ill, and when she felt that she was nearing her end she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, 'Dear child, continue devout and good. The God will always help you, and I will look down upon you from heaven and watch over you.' Thereupon she closed her eyes and breathed her last.”

That seemingly simple opening to the story ironically, profoundly, astoundingly, almost miraculously, describes my young friend's blindness and route to recovery. She was probably connected very early, but now she is barely breathing and her eyes are closed.

That mention of how the mother “closed her eyes and breathed her last” is not just a redundancy carried on for centuries unnecessarily. That theme of no longer being able to see is emphasized at the very end of the story, when the white doves peck out the the eyes of the mean, false, step-sisters. The last sentence of the story tells us:

“And so for their wickedness and falseness they were punished for the rest of their days.”

What is being said here is that when we lose our inner connection to our source, to our ground, to the earth from which we come, our inner groundedness, our true selves, our footedness, we are deadened and blinded.

I am not fooled by my young friend's cleverness, her brightness, her outward show. I can see that she is actually devastated inside, reduced to the level of cinders. I've been there myself, to my long sorrow and regret. I still go through it now in my old age, although I know more surely than ever that it definitely will work out well if I continue devout and true. The white doves from the branches of the hazel tree repeatedly tell me:

“Prithee, look back, prithee, look back

There's blood on the track.

The shoe is too small;

At home the true bride is waiting thy call.”

Now, the message couldn't be clearer. The message is repeated throughout the story in the smallest details, exactly in the way it's done in the “forgotten language of dreams.”

That's why Disney, and almost every single intellectual, scholarly interpreter I've ever read, do not understand the story of Cinderella even though it has “resonance” at a deep level in every culture on earth. It's written in the language of dreams, not materialistic, positivist science or somatic, cognitive psychology. It's not about experimental sociology or psychology.

The interpretations by severely academic interpreters always strike me as dead or even demonic in the sense that I feel the scholar is killing the story, destroying its real liveliness in a vampiritic way, sucking the life out of it for his or her own illusionary life.

The story of Cinderella is told in the symbolic language of dreams and myths and fairy tales. The symbols are derived from experiences in the world, yes, but they are combined and constructed and modified into  dreams and fairly tales that teach us primarily and usually about our selves, not what is “out there.” The symbolic theater or play of dreams during our sleep is usually directly about our selves, our own inner questions, rather than about what's “out there,” although the sign or gesture that gets symbolized is derived from waking experiences. The language of fairy tales and dreams is based in the commonality of the inner and the outer that is characteristic of symbolic interaction rather than of positivistic science, input/out computerism, environment/heredity causation, chemistry, neurology, biology, particles, the neocortex, and mechanistic metaphor.

This symbolism, this language, is founded in love – our ability to put our selves in the place of the other and thus to see what the other sees or hears by a symbol. That is why the great interpreters of dreams, such as you see in the Bible stories, are people who have been through hell, but have remained devout and true, which is to say “loving in truth” or “truly loving.”

When we fail in our human task of understanding the other, and just imagine that the other is thinking what we are thinking, that mistake is sometimes called “projection.” The word implies certain kinds of psychoanalytic theory that may or may not be accurate. It is certain, however, that we often make the mistake of thinking that other people see things the way we see things. It's an ego-centric, solipsistic, attribution to the other of what is inside ourselves. I die inside now as I think of how often I myself have failed in this matter. Tears and ashes.

This Astonishes Me More than Ever

There was a Charlie Rose interview re-run on US TV this last week in which he interviewed a group of US soldiers who participated in the battles of Fallujah.

Fallujah Occupation

The men were impressive, even formidable. They were physically imposing, sober, restrained, tough, traveled, experienced with the killing of people, bright, knowing, articulate, probably all in their late twenties. Many of my students were exactly like them, but veterans of Viet-Nam rather than Iraq.

Rose asked them at the end of the interview for their main conclusion, the big take-away lesson from their experiences in Iraq. Their answer was: We have to start becoming very thoughtful, and discuss it very carefully, before we go to war.

That statement left me physically shaken. How is it possible that such very bright young men can go into someone else's country - kill, wound, and dispossess people there, not to mention risk their own lives, limbs and souls - without working it through very earnestly before they do it?

Further, why wouldn't Charlie Rose, the most intelligent and informed interviewer on US television, ask these young men that question?

I've witnessed this, and thought about this, so many times in the past that it seems that I shouldn't be astonished by it. But it shocks me more than ever, and I think the reason it does is because my mind is increasingly able as I grow older to see its further implications, to take larger perspectives on its meaning for the future as well as the present and the past.

The hopeful bit is that youth may someday, widely and earnestly, identify and ask the question, which is the first step to solving not just this but untold other problems.

A Vision in The Journal of David Brainerd

I came across a beautiful passage yesterday in the journal of David Brainerd, a missionary to the Native American Indians. He seems to have been close to

David Brainerd, 1718-1747

Jonathan "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" Edwards and was engaged to Edwards' daughter at the time of his death at 29 years of age. Edwards published the diary with some biography, which is still in print now, two-hundred years later.

The passage from Brainerd's journal which I post here below contains a most extraordinarily beautiful vision. Brainerd utterly misunderstands it despite his sincerity, self-sacrifice, learning, respectability and benevolence. He describes the vision as “Satanic” and “iniquity” and thus became the thing that he so feared and the one who turned out to be the savage.

This may be the most beautiful thing I've ever read despite the abyss that Brainerd's misunderstanding represents, an abyss which is not, astonishingly, at all just limited to crazy “Christians.”

*     *     *

"What increases the aversion of the Indians to Christianity, is the influence their powwows have upon them. These are supposed to have a power of foretelling future events, of recovering the sick, and of charming persons to death. And their Spirit, in its various operations, seems to be a Satanical imitation of the spirit of prophecy, that the church in early ages was favored with.

"I have labored to gain some acquaintance with this affair, and have for that end consulted the man mentioned in my journal of the 9th of May, who since his conversion to Christianity has endeavored to give me the best intelligence he could of this matter. But it seems to be such a mystery of iniquity, that I cannot well understand it, and so far as I can learn, he himself has not any clear notions of the thing, now his spirit of divination is gone from him. However, the manner in which he says he obtained this spirit, was, he was admitted into the presence of a great man who informed him that he loved, pitied, and desired to do him good. It was not in this world that he saw the great man, but in a world above at a vast distance from this. The great man, he says, was clothed with the day; yea, with the brightest day he ever saw, a day of many years, yea of everlasting continuance! This whole world, he says, was drawn upon him, so that in him the earth and all things in it might be seen. I asked him if rocks, mountains, and seas were drawn upon, or appeared in him. He replied, that every thing that was beautiful and lovely in the earth was upon him, and might be seen by looking on him, as well as if one was on the earth to take a view of them there. By the side of the great man, he said, stood his shadow or spirit. This shadow, he says, was as lovely as the man himself, and filled all places, and was most agreeable as well as wonderful to him.

"Here, he says, he tarried some time, and was unspeakably entertained and delighted with a view of the great man, of his shadow or spirit, and of all things in him. And what is most of all astonishing, he imagined all this to have passed before he was born. He never had been, he says, in this world at that time. And what confirms him in the belief of this, is, that the great man told him he must come down to earth, be born of such a woman, meet with such and such things, and in particular, that he should once in his life be guilty of murder. At this he was displeased, and told the great man he would never murder. But the great man replied, 'I have said it, and it shall be so.' Which has accordingly happened. At this time, he says, the great man asked him what he would choose in life. He replied, first to be a hunter, and afterwards to be a powwow or diviner. Whereupon the great man told him he should have what he desired, and that his shadow should go along with him down to earth, and be with him forever. There were, he says, all this time no words spoken between them. The conference was not carried on by any human language, but they had a kind of mental intelligence of each other's thoughts. After this, he says, he saw the great man no more; but supposes he came down to earth to be born, but the spirit or shadow of the great man still attended him, and ever after continued to appear to him in dreams, and other ways, until he felt the power of God's word upon his heart, since which it has entirely left him.

"There were some times when this spirit came upon him in a special manner, and he was full of what he saw in the great man; and then, he says, he was all light, and not only light himself, but it was light all around him, so that he could see through men, and know the thoughts of their hearts. These depths of Satan I leave to others to fathom, and do not know what ideas to affix to such terms, nor can guess what conceptions of things these creatures have at the times when they call themselves all light."--p. 204

Old Mrs. Pearson

I knew this old lady during my years in London, 1989-1995, who worked all night in a factory somewhere in the Midlands during World War II. She lived in the flat beneath mine with her cat, Clio. 

She was in pretty bad shape, physically, when I knew her and I knew she would die soon, so I did whatever I could for her, which was mostly just to be kind. We had some good talks in which she withheld nothing. The last time I talked with her was by phone a year or so after I left. She told me how she had recently fallen down into the gutter at the edge of the street and couldn't get up. “People were very nice about it, Valdemar,” she said.

She had a baby before the war by a guy named Pearson who didn't marry her but she used his surname the rest of her life. She told me that the last time she saw him she asked if he wouldn't help with child expenses and he told her, “I'm not a millionaire, you know.” “I never saw him again after that,” she said.

World War II came along and her boy was “shipped out” to some remote location. It was during the war that she walked this long distance to a factory and back home again under the stars. I believe she told me that it was a five- or six-mile walk. She said “What I remember most about that walk was looking up at the stars on way home. Looking up at the stars.”

I met her son a few times and he seemed pretty much out of it, as if he were  undeveloped in some way or as if something just plain missing. But that son, damaged though he was, meant more to her than the stars.

The Spell of Spellings

Nothing intrigues me more than the question of how it is, how it is possible, that the humble, simple person is often absolutely, plainly,  correct in his dealings with the most complicated, ineffable realities of the world and how often, in contrast, the most learned, sophisticated, long-toiling scholars are as blind, confused, lost and unknowing as if they were the birds in the garden.

I saw this astonishing paradox most strongly in my many years in the academy, where there was such a great display of learning, and pride in sophistication.

However, it was right there in the fairly tales I knew from early childhood. Those tales have a frequent theme in which the most unlikely brother, the simpleton as opposed to the clever - the open-hearted as opposed to the selfish calculator - achieves the treasure-hard-to-attain. The Percival legends have it. The great Cinderella story, which exists in some form in every culture, has it.

There is a feel for it in the best of Christianity. Here is St. Paul writing to the Corinthians:

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are

But I think the reality of this was most intense, in my own experience, in the academy. There is a mystique that is useful to the wordy person – spelling itself casts a spell. Spelling and a spell are cognate, and in other languages than English. My own field of specialization, sociology, was as full of abracadabra magic word as any other. I remember hearing the great Talcott Parsons talk about the fundamental functional prerequisites of social systems at a convention. Great respect was paid, as well as money, but probably no one knew what the hell he was saying, if for no other reason than that there is no such thing as a fundamental functional imperative of social systems.

Robert “Bob Dylan” Zimmerman uses this a lot. Nobody knows what he's saying, but it must be something because he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a member of the French Legion of Honor. There must be something there. There must be, you think, despite not even being able to hear the words, much less make sense of them.

There is no question but that highly abstract conversations have their place, but such conversations have to be capable of being understood by any normally intelligent person. That's the essence of the “publicly observable” requirement of objectivity and science.

Here is a sentence from one of my favorite

George Herbert Mead

philosophers, George Herbert Mead. Mead is not all that easy to read, despite being one of the American “Pragmatist” philosophers, who generally are understandable to a normal person. The generally-accepted founder of that movement in philosophy, William James, is remarkably readable. Anyway, Mead:

It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class of society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific, and it is not until its results can be so formulated that they must appeal to any enlightened mind that they can have universal value.

Mead is writing at a profound level there, not just “promoting ignorance” - as I have been accused of doing – by saying that we really can't just rely on the learned class in the academy. I found, during my several years of teaching and studying Mead and Pragmatism, that such a statement could be presented with teaching skill and empathy, so that often when I was done a student would think, “OK, so what else is new? Tell me something I don't already know.” But that is one of Pragmatism's ”proofs.”

But just try reading most other philosophy. You get the feeling that it is scholasticism, impenetrable to normal human beings. The disease of the academy is this obsequious deference to word collections, especially long-standing word collections, that can't translate into something that anyone else can understand.

The Child's-Eye View in Economics

A lot of life, money, time, and thought have been put into the study called “Economics."

 

It's an important and interesting study, but the first thing one notices about it from the outside is how very much disagreement there is among the people who are most informed, most conversant in the subject, people who have devoted their entire lives to studying economics.

Another thing that an outsider notices right away is the presence in economic discussion of metaphors, analogies, similes, comparisons on a symbolic level. Some of these metaphors are highly complex but some of the metaphors are extremely simple as in the attribution of agency to the stock market implied by the words “The market climbed higher today” or “The market corrected itself today.” It's hard to imagine the deception and damage that such metaphors can bring with them without having taken some area of study deeply and made a deliberate study of the matter.

These two observations, of deep disagreement and of the presence of inappropriate metaphors, might seem like child's-eye observations, unworthy of grownups who have the responsibility in the real world of getting things done.

But isn't that ultimately where the highly-sophisticated constructions of brilliant, life-long, highly-informed, experienced, persons in any area of study go wrong and thereby vitiate their entire life's work? It's in the basic assumptions such as in the image of what a human being is or what a dollar is, that we find what vitiates the very elaborate theories and distinctions of highly-sophisticated scholars.

So I think there is a lot of value to be found in what I am calling here the child's-eye view of economics.

Here is one example. I am listening to the CB during the night to the conversations of some truckers going on and on about the taken-for-granted evil of “government spending.” A lot of frustration, and hostility, is expressed, in loud voice, about government spending. Finally, I hear one sentence in low voice from a trucker out of the darkness say, “Well, sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money.” The remark put an end to all the discussion. Anyone who has ever tried to start a business or to run a business knows exactly what he was saying.

Here's one more example of what I am calling the child's-eye view. I am attending a town meeting in Durham, New Hampshire, which is primarily a university town. The issue being discussed is whether or not to build a new school, and various university people who value education highly are giving their highly-thought-out speeches for about an hour on why we should build this new school. There is a lot of heat back and forth between the university people and the ordinary townspeople as to whether or not to build the new school. Peter Macdonald stands up after about an hour of this and says in a quiet, simple voice, “We don't know yet what this new school would cost. Why don't we find out what it would cost before we decide to build it?” Peter Macdonald is often dismissed as a town simpleton, but his “simple” observation put a complete stop to a distressing discussion that had gone on for about an hour. Everyone at the town meeting was dumbfounded, silent. The moderator then tabled the issue and we moved on.

One of my teaching colleagues, an economist, was discussing this matter of basic assumptions with me in my office one day and said, “And we really don't agree in economics on what a 'dollar' is.” I remember colleagues in the art department saying that they don't really know what “art” is. I know that in sociology, which I studied deeply and taught for more than decade, that there is great disagreement on what a “group” is, and even on what the word “social” means.

I often think of the "efficient market hypothesis" and "the rational market hypothesis" and wonder if professional economists shouldn't give more respect to such as the following:

"Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber get paid how much?!"

"A Mini-Cooper costs how much?!"

The essence of objectivity and science is public observability, which therefore must include these questions.

Perhaps the main value of spending a lifetime in the study of economics is that it enables the student to understand the far-reaching implications of the basic assumptions that rely on the child's eye view.

I recently heard Thomas Cahill tell Bill Moyers that the basic issue is kindness – whether a person is kind or not. He may be right - it may all ultimately be about something like that, rather than, say, 'survival of the fittest,' or 'more.'

Understanding, Forgiving, the USA

There are probably other people of my age who experienced the years of the U.S. war in Viet-Nam and who realize at some point that they have never really forgiven the US for what it did in Viet-Nam. It seems to me now that this lack of forgiveness isn't good, either for us or for the country. Something has to be done about it, some resolution found.

I also find myself still basically bristling from what the US did, with fun-loving Henry Kissinger and headache-inducing Richard Nixon, in Chile in the 1970's.

There is actually a long list of things that the US has done to other peoples, as well as its own people, that are hard to forgive. There is the whole slavery/Black thing.

Another one that touches me often is the extermination of the Great Plains Native Americans. I often think of the sensitive dark eyes of a beautiful young Native American girl whom I once met near Little Big Horn and how Old John Bartram, a third-generation Quaker yet, said that “The only way to deal with an Indian is to bang him stoutly.”

Bartram (1699-1777) - “The greatest natural botanist in the world,” said Linnaeus, – was a Quaker, an obviously able and intelligent man. He was just articulating the widespread, common outlook and assumptions of his age and the society of which he was a member, an outlook and assumptions that have pretty much been the same here from the time of Hobbes and Locke to the time of Bush, Cheney and Fox News. The fundamental outlook hasn't changed much at all - De Tocqueville's observations about the US in the 1830's feel as if they could have been written today.

So, yes, I have been angry and unforgiving about that outlook for most of my life. I realize also that other people have picked it up in me, and are as unsatisfied about it as I am. That bitterness, that anger, does no one any good, least of all ourselves. There is even a point at which the anger and unforgiving become the very thing which one despises.

Some kind of forgiveness seems necessary of My Lai, for example, of the people who made it possible, of the people who did it, of the people to this day who defend and excuse it, to choose one example of many US atrocities that just make my blood boil. Not to forgive seems like a dead end for everyone. Forgetting about the past is also a dead end. So how does forgiveness work in such situations as what the USA did in Viet-Nam or Chile or Iraq?

Understanding seems to me to be at least part of the resolution, of the “forgiving.” A nation's strengths, like an individual's strengths, are usually the other side of its weaknesses. The two are closely related. The US has a vitality about it, and an undying hope, a vision, that Old Walt Whitman articulated so beautifully. Weeping and wailing and bowing down to ancestors that lived thousands of years ago upon the earth – all that is so deadening.

It is understandable how a nation composed of people who left the “old countries” and went to the US could adopt such an outlook. It's the US at its best, and Whitman knew about it, sang about it, embraced it heartily.

But the weaknesses closely associated with such strength bring disaster to all if not acknowledged and handled properly, what Whitman called the “hollowness” to which it could default.

The most insidious evil that attaches to the US's strengths is, I think, the very devaluation of the past that is so appealing in other circumstances! The US did Iraq just as if Viet-Nam had never happened. The US voted for Bush-Cheney a second time, to the amazement of the world. “How could the US be so stupid as not to learn anything at all from the past?” One of my old teachers in Japan spoke despairingly of the US as being “half-baked.”

The past contains the materials, whether we are conscious of them or not, with which we approach our future problems. Being conscious of the past does not necessarily enslave us to it, but being unconscious of the past does enslave us to it. Reject it – good, fine - but be conscious of it.

Here is one last US weakness associated with its strength. The “Song of Myself” and “Song of the Open Road” - Yes! Yes! - but those songs can degenerate to “I've got mine. Fuck you, pal, and your family too. You're on your own. Loser.” There is a paradox in that our self-hood, our individuation, the construction of a mind, is achieved only through participation in the other. There's nothing more herd-like than the chant, “USA! USA! USA!” even though the chanters see themselves as so very independent of what anyone else might think or be.

Richard Rorty's, “Achieving Our Country,” is the only book I know that even recognizes the problem I'm working on here. I think what he is saying, basically, is that understanding the US will solve my problem: - that I have been too old-world, too smug, in thinking that there is some truth or ethic that is above human history and that I know what that truth or ethic is.

Here are a couple quotes from his book:

p. 29. “Repudiating the correspondence theory of truth was Dewey's way of restating, in philosophical terms, Whitman's claim that America does not need to place itself within a frame of reference. Great Romantic poems, such as 'Song of Myself' or the United States of America, are supposed to break through previous frames of reference, not be intelligible within them. To say that the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem is to say that America will create the taste by which it will be judged. It is to envisage our nation-state as both self-creating and self-created poem.”

pp. 25-26: “Dewey's principal target was institutionalized selfishness, whereas Whitman's was the socially-acceptable sadism which is a consequence of sexual repression, and of the inability to love.”

Hard Teachings

This is actually a true story.

I'm talking to this young boy, in the 12-16 age range, about the social questions that trouble me, and I mention this story that is sometimes called the parable of the rich young man.
 
A rich young man who has everything and followed all the Commandments asks Christ what further he needs to do, and Christ tells him he needs to give away all his possessions to the poor and follow Christ's teachings. "When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions." 

So I'm relating this to the boy and he says to me, “That's a hard teaching.”

I just love that kind of thing that young people, and the young in heart generally, can say. Yes, there are indeed “hard teachings.”

Here's another one that I think about almost every day. This one is sometimes called the parable of the widow's mite and goes like this:

(Mark 12:41-44) 41 Now Jesus sat opposite the treasury and saw how the people put money into the treasury. And many who were rich put in much. 42 Then one poor widow came and threw in two mites, which make a quadrans. 43 So He called His disciples to Himself and said to them, "Assuredly, I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all those who have given to the treasury; 44 for they all put in out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all that she had, her whole livelihood."

I take the position that these two hard teachings are not just shallow, limited interpretations of reality just waiting for clever scholars to tell us what they really mean. My guess is that they are mythic, communicated in the language of dreams, deep far beyond the images and words, but readily available to the truly young and the pure in heart.

A young man criticized Jerry Falwell once during a TV debate at Oxford, and Falwell came back at him in anger, and contempt, even as a bit of a bully. He went on about how his church did many good works such as giving so many tons of food to what was then Yugoslavia. He ended with, “And what have you done?” The student, as I remember it, didn't know how to respond. But I knew the scenario very well, that we give what we can, and sometimes the person who gives what seems to be a mite in fact gives more than what seems to us to be a lot of money.

It's quite conceivable that in the end Falwell did more harm to the world, all told, then anyone else in the current era.

I suppose I feel in this way about it because I regularly reflect upon certain “simple” people I have known, like Betty Stocks, who gave like that widow, and who are like the stars in my own life.

More than Lions in the Winter

Hoyt Axton wrote a song entitled “Like a Lion in the Winter” that he sang with Linda Ronstadt:

Like a lion in the winter I can hear the summer call
Like a ship out on the ocean made of stone
And sometimes when I get lonely I can swear I hear you call
Oh, the nights are cold when you don't keep me warm.

And when I first saw you I first loved you
With a song that I sang to the fire in your eyes
But somebody told you that it wouldn't be easy
And you carried that lie for the devil to sing.

Some sail rivers deep and muddy some sail rivers clear and cold
But the river that I'm sailin' goes to sea
And sometimes I do grow weary sometimes I feel old
And sometimes I wonder if you think of me.

And when I first saw you I first loved you
With a song that I sang to the fire in your eyes
But somebody told you that it wouldn't be easy
And you carried that lie for the devil to sing.

Like a lion in the winter I can hear the summer call
Like a ship out on the ocean made of stone
And sometimes when I get lonely I can swear I hear you call
Oh, the nights are cold when you don't keep me warm.

And when I first saw you I first loved you
With a song that I sang to the fire in your eyes
But somebody told you that it wouldn't be easy
And you carried that lie for the devil to sing...

The theme of the song derives, I believe, from the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine /Henry II of a thousand years ago via the James Goldman play and the Katherine Hepburn/Peter O'Toole film, “A Lion in the Winter.”

Henry II and Eleanor, Hepburn and O'Toole, and Hoyt Axton are gone, and Linda Ronstadt is now sixty-eight and can no longer sing because of Parkinson's disease. So we can probably feel the strength of this song easier more than ever as we watch Axton and Ronstadt sing it. It seems to me that the very existence itself of this song and video makes it clearer than ever that we are something more than animals in the winter of our lives, more than ships out on the ocean made of stone.