Let's Write about the lost civilization Easter Island archeology mystery

Easter Island and the Allure of “Lost Civilizations”- Book Review.
Why Western writers have shrouded the history of Rapa Nui in myth and mystery. By Margaret Talbot published in The New Yorker.

A moai on Rapa Nui, photographed by Katherine Routledge in 1913. The statues were carved by Polynesian settlers whose descendants were long treated as living among the ruins of a civilization they did not create. Photograph by Katherine Routledge / Royal Geographical Society / Getty

Finding out what actually happened in the deep past can be a slog (IOW, takes a long time), so when ancient history is packaged as mystery—spine-tingling but solvable—it’s hard to resist. 

Who doesn’t want to know how a lost civilization got lost, or where it might be hiding❓ The trouble is that what gets touted as a lost civilization often turns out to have been there all along. The people who can’t or won’t see the continuity in front of them have typically been European adventurers or armchair archeologists, busy spinning dismissive theories about the cultures of non-Europeans. The idea that the Pyramids of Egypt are so awesome they could only have been built by aliens is now a meme-able joke, fodder for Reddit debunkers and cheesy History Channel shows.

Still, the fancy persists, implanted like a microchip, ever since Erich von Däniken’s 1968, best-seller, “Chariots of the Gods,” begat the hugely popular 1973, television special “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.” Von Däniken argued that extraterrestrials must have visited Earth to lend a hand with various prehistoric undertakings—the Pyramids, the massive stone carvings of Easter Island, the Nazca Lines.  

A group of geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru.[2][3] They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed.[4] There are two major phases of the Nazca lines,

What may have begun as trippy speculation fed on a darker premise: that the present-day peoples of Africa, Polynesia, or Latin America were simply not impressive enough to have had ancestors capable of such feats. (Stonehenge was the rare European site to make an appearance among von Däniken’s confounding examples.)

The belief that Indigenous monuments must have been made by outsiders has, in more respectable guises, long shaped Western accounts of Indigenous cultural achievement. It continues to do so. The Pyramids of Egypt and the statues of Easter Island are extraordinary, and before modern archeological methods it was often hard to see how such works could have been produced without metal tools or machinery. That conundrum, however, slid easily into a failure of imagination and, specifically, an inability to credit the capacities of people who were not white. Nineteenth-century European explorers concluded that the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, now thought to have been built by the Shona between roughly 1100 and 1450 C.E., must be the work of Phoenicians or Babylonians or intrepid explorers from another far-flung place or, basically, anyone but the Africans who actually lived there. The pre-Columbian mound complexes scattered across North America met a similar fate. Their builders were variously imagined as giants, a vanquished white race of some kind, or members of the lost tribes of Israel—the last a notion promoted by Josiah Priest, a nineteenth-century pamphleteer with an animus against Native Americans, cited by Andrew Jackson to justify the Indian Removal Act, and taken up, in recent years, by Tucker Carlson.

In “Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island”* (Mariner), a crisp, confident, and convincing new account of the place and its chroniclers, the British archeologist Mike Pitts calls these theories of lost European civilizations and alien drop-ins “demonstrable claptrap.” Yet a much more reputable but equally insulting theory about Easter Island has remained influential, even dominant, Pitts argues. In this version of events, Easter Island is a cautionary tale about a population that destroyed itself, its island paradise, and whatever mysterious civilization had created its thousand or so stone monuments, or moai. (A Dutch captain who landed there on, yes, Easter gave it the name many Westerners still know it by. Rapa Nui is the Polynesian name for the island; Pitts follows the convention of using “Rapanui” for its Indigenous inhabitants.)

Europeans who arrived in the late nineteenth century on this speck of land in the vast eastern Pacific encountered a very small local population in whom they saw little of interest or value. By contrast, the statues—hewn from volcanic stone, with beetle brows, long ski-slope noses, down-turned mouths, and distant gazes, once upright and now toppled or partly buried—earned their respect. They were blocky, minimalist, stylized, enormous, and strikingly different from the representational statues of people and gods the Europeans knew from home.

In 1868, when the British naval frigate H.M.S. Topaze stopped at Easter Island to assess its usefulness to the Empire, the captain instructed his men to find a statue that they could bring home. With the assistance of islanders, they dug out an approximately eight-foot figure—one of the smaller, more portable moai, whose head had been spotted protruding from the ground—and hauled it back to the British Museum, where it stands to this day. The statue, known to the islanders as Hoa Hakananai’a, caused a sensation and, Pitts suggests, helped set off a new round of fervid conjecture about Rapa Nui. (Chile, Germany, and the United States soon dispatched ships to collect statues of their own.)

Martin Farquhar Tupper, a poet and an antiquarian favored by Queen Victoria, argued that Rapa Nui was the remnant of a lost continent whose people had perished. The spiritualist Madame Blavatsky saw the statues as evidence of a vanished race of giants who’d fled a mythical continent called Lemuria just before it sunk into the sea. Rapa Nui, Pitts writes, was subjected to “the full fantasy treatment,” based on a cluster of false premises: that the stone was too hard to carve with simple tools; that the island and its inhabitants were incapable of the civilization implied by the monuments; and that the real creators must have come from elsewhere—South America, Mexico, “Lemuria,” or beyond—and then disappeared. 

Running through it all was a strong note of judgment. The trees were gone because the islanders had cut them down to make war, and their world had been ruined, as Pitts writes, “because they had worshipped the wrong gods and reached above their station.”

It was common in these late-nineteenth-century accounts, Pitts writes, to describe Rapa Nui’s inhabitants as “born cannibals,” and to wonder who could have carved the stone figures. Perhaps a cataclysm—an earthquake, a volcanic eruption—had driven those people away. The dearth of trees on the island implied to some that the inhabitants had cut them down to make clubs and shields.

When a serious archeological expedition finally took place on Rapa Nui, in 1913-15, its leaders, the British husband-and-wife team Katherine and William Scoresby Routledge, concluded that the islanders they’d met were indeed the descendants of those who had carved the statues. Yet much of their work—Katherine’s in particular—was later lost or ignored. Pitts, who edited British Archaeology for many years and has written books on Stonehenge and the search for Richard III’s remains, first visited Rapa Nui three decades ago and has taken an interest in it ever since. He seems to see a kindred spirit in Katherine, whose legacy, he believes, might have reshaped the island’s existing narrative had it not been cut short in a notably harsh way.

In 1913, Katherine Routledge set out for Easter Island. She was from a wealthy Quaker family in the North of England, and formally trained in modern history. (She had studied at Oxford but received her degree from Trinity College Dublin, in 1895, because Oxford did not then grant diplomas to women.) By the time of the expedition, she was in her late forties and had already carried out archeological field work in East Africa with her husband, Scoresby Routledge, an anthropologist in the gentleman-explorer mold. The impetus for Rapa Nui came from Thomas Athol Joyce, an ethnographer at the British Museum who’d urged the Routledges to go while elderly islanders who remembered the old ways were still alive. Katherine read everything she could about the place, and the couple secured support from the Royal Geographical Society and commissioned a two-masted, ninety-one-foot wooden schooner for an archeological and ethnological survey designed to collect “scientific facts in relation” to the “inhabitants and their arts.”

In the course of sixteen months, from 1914, to 1915, the Routledges and their crew crisscrossed the island on horseback, worked closely with an influential islander named Tepano Ramo a Veriamo, and produced a pioneering survey of Rapa Nui’s topography and monuments. But, the oral histories Katherine conducted, interviewing elderly islanders, with Tepano translating, may have been more valuable still. Her informants told her, for example, about funeral practices—about how they wrapped bodies and carried them aloft to the base of coastal plinths. Pitts thinks that Katherine came to understand not only the island’s physical layout but its “psychogeography”: what certain places meant to the people who lived there.

She also formed a bond with a Rapanui prophetess named Angata, the leader of an uprising against the sheep-ranching operation then dominating the island, which took place during the Routledges’ stay. Scoresby dismissed Angata as a “mad woman” and her followers as “ruffians.” Katherine saw a “charming, frail old lady,” with expressive eyes, at the center of a movement that could not be reduced to livestock raiding. As the only woman on the expedition, and as someone who had long chafed at the limits imposed on her in Edwardian England, Katherine may have been predisposed to sympathy. When she thanked Angata for a gift of poultry and potatoes, Angata replied that no thanks were needed; the food, she said, came from God.

However impressive the Routledges’ research, it was no match for the seductive notion of a populace living among the ruins of a once mighty civilization whose origins were a puzzle and whose downfall was an object lesson. That idea was spooky and poignant and metaphorically potent. In particular, the Routledges’ research was no match for the narrative skills and indefatigable energy of the swashbuckling Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Heyerdahl became an international celebrity largely on the basis of his fascination with Easter Island and his eagerness to prove his theories about it, at great personal risk. Heyerdahl, whom Pitts describes as “a charismatic expedition leader, and a driven writer and self-publicist untroubled by historical nuance,” shared the common supposition that the moai could not have been made by ancestors of the present-day islanders. His particular spin was that the moai’s true creators were people who had travelled from the Americas. 

Pacific peoples weren’t known to be strong on massive visages and the like, popular opinion suggested at the time, whereas groups like the Inca, the Olmec, and the Toltec were. But Heyerdahl had further theories about where these ingenious Americans had come from originally. He took the “patronizing premise” that the Rapanui were not up to the task, Pitts writes, “and bolted on explicit racism.” And so Heyerdahl recast the island’s earliest settlers as members of a Caucasian race who had migrated from what is now Iraq or Turkey to the Americas and then across the Pacific, and who were tall, fair, blue-eyed, and bearded—not unlike Heyerdahl himself, as Pitts wryly observes.

In 1947, to demonstrate that a pre-Columbian voyage from South America to Polynesia was at least possible, Heyerdahl and a crew of five set off from Peru on a forty-square-foot balsa-wood raft he named the Kon-Tiki.

After a hundred and one days and some forty-three hundred miles drifting through shark-infested waters, they landed on a reef near Tahiti. The journey showed that such a crossing could be done—which did not, of course, mean that it had been. Still, it was a daring thing to have pulled off, and it yielded a best-selling book, an Oscar-winning 1950, documentary, and fuel for America’s postwar tiki-bar craze.

Heyerdahl’s ideas have been disputed by many scholars working on Rapa Nui, but they found a large and receptive audience, in part because they aligned with some of the conventional wisdom about Rapa Nui’s culture and its supposed violent rupture with its past. In 1994, the island received the Hollywood treatment in a film co-produced by Kevin Costner, not long after “Dances with Wolves.” In “Rapa-Nui,” bare chests, male and female, gleam in firelight, and internecine warfare—a love triangle gone apocalyptic—tears the island apart. Far more seriously, Easter Island became the exemplary case study in Jared Diamond’s 2005, book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.” Diamond called it “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources”—through deforestation, soil exhaustion, and overfishing—turning it into a worst-case metaphor for our collective future. The “ecocide” narrative, with Easter Island as its emblem, was eagerly taken up by politicians and podcasters, liberals and conservatives alike. New evidence from pollen analysis indicated that the island had once been home to tall palm trees, possibly even a primeval palm forest. In his writings and lectures, Diamond posed a chilling question: “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree”—like the Once-ler in “The Lorax”—“say while he was doing it?”

The story Pitts tells—drawing on new archeological findings, a fresh reading of eighteenth-century visitors’ accounts, and a reconsideration of Katherine Routledge’s neglected work—is quite different. It will no doubt be contested; Rapa Nui studies is a notably argumentative field, perhaps because so little can be definitively proved in the absence of early written records. All the same, Pitts’s account reflects a broader shift in the consensus, one that many readers will find persuasive, as this one did. He begins from a premise now widely shared: that Rapa Nui was settled in around 1200 by Polynesians who’d sailed in dugout canoes across uncharted reaches of the Pacific from another island. It was an extraordinary journey, but one that requires no transoceanic, or extraterrestrial, embellishment. The settlers spoke a Polynesian language, practiced Polynesian customs, and left descendants who continue to. Genetic studies of ancient and modern Rapanui confirm their Polynesian origins while also suggesting limited contact with South America, likely the result of later voyages rather than founding migration.

The island that the settlers discovered was probably less lush and hospitable than the one they had left. Much of it was open and grassy and studded with rocks, its soil fragile. It had coral reefs but not at sea level, rough surf, and no permanent freshwater streams. Still, the Rapanui made a go of it. Within a few generations, they began carving moai from volcanic stone and mounting them on plinths. Far from self-destructive, the Rapanui proved remarkably resilient.

When Europeans first arrived—a Dutch West India Company ship in 1722, a Spanish expedition from Peru in 1770, a British voyage under James Cook in 1774, and a French one in 1786—they encountered a population that appeared stable and well organized. Visitors noted agricultural practices that included crop rotation and other methods of soil renewal, carried out with what the French captain Jean-François de La Pérouse called “a great deal of intelligence.” The islanders kept chickens and grew taro, yams, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, and bananas.

They also described the statues as depicting distinguished ancestors, and interacted with them—lighting fires in front of them, dancing around them, or sitting before them with bowed heads. None of the eighteenth-century visitors “made a cultural distinction between living islanders and the statues,” Pitts writes. “They took it for granted that the statues were made by the people they met, and had meaning for them.” Population estimates varied, but Pitts places the likely number at around five thousand. (That’s high when compared with other scholars’ approximations, but several thousand seems like a safe assumption.)

These eighteenth-century European accounts have been underused, Pitts thinks, in part because they were hardly systematic or scientific, and also because some were thought to be lost in a shipwreck and others were scattered and difficult to consult. Today, there’s a range of archeological and genetic work that tends to support their basic observations while countering, or at least complicating, the familiar ecocide narrative. A 2024, genomic study tracking the island’s population over roughly four centuries found no sign of the sharp demographic collapse that is supposed to have occurred around 1600. Research by the American archeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt, among others, suggests that the islanders continued to prosper, and to build stone platforms for their statues, well beyond that date.

The evidence for environmental ruin, too, turns out to be less stark than advertised. The landscape of Rapa Nui probably never incorporated the sort of primeval forest of palm trees imagined in popular accounts, Pitts writes, but was more mixed, and scrubbier, with no one species of charismatic megaflora dominating. And, besides, it seems unfair to single out the Rapanui for cutting down their trees when, as Pitts notes, forest loss is a nearly ubiquitous consequence of human settlement. Medieval Europeans, to take one example, cleared enormous stretches of woodland—up to seventy per cent in parts of France and England by the fourteenth century—for farming, fuel, and timber. Later archeological research, including forensic examination of skeletal remains, has turned up no evidence for cannibalism or for a particularly bellicose society on Rapa Nui.

Something cataclysmic did happen to the Rapanui, but it was no great mystery, or shouldn’t be. In the eighteen-sixties, an Irish entrepreneur named Joseph Charles Byrne proposed a solution to a growing problem facing the Peruvian economy. Plantations producing sugar, the red dye cochineal, and cotton, along with guano operations on coastal islands, needed labor, and the tightening constraints on slavery were making it harder to secure.

Byrne suggested looking west, to Polynesia, where, he claimed, workers could be obtained cheaply. So began a round of slaving raids in Polynesia. Rapa Nui was especially attractive because of its relative proximity to South America. “Some 1,500 islanders were taken or killed,” Pitts writes, “as the rest of the community hid in coastal caves and cowered inland.” Byrne skirted formal bans on slavery by having captives sign work contracts—in Spanish, which they could not read—and selling the contracts rather than the people themselves. The slaving raids became a public-relations problem, anyway. They drew criticism in Chilean and Peruvian newspapers, and the French Ambassador in Lima made a fuss. The trade was halted, and ships carrying Polynesian laborers were ordered back.

By then, the damage was done. Some captives had come down with smallpox during an epidemic in Lima and carried it home, spreading it to others. After the crossings and the returns, according to Pitts, more than six thousand Polynesians died, with the Rapanui suffering the heaviest losses. By the late nineteenth century, Rapa Nui’s population had fallen to a hundred and ten people, only twenty-six of them women.

Even so, the island drew outsiders seeking to save souls or make their fortune. First came Catholic missionaries from Europe, who found willing converts among a population still reeling from catastrophe. Then came Chile, which had a navy and a long coastline and was looking for a toehold in the Pacific; in 1888, it annexed Rapa Nui. (The island remains a Chilean province. In the Chilean Presidential elections that brought a law-and-order conservative to power last month, it voted for a leftist woman.) Then came the Chilean branch of Williamson, Balfour, a global firm founded by two Scotsmen with interests in everything from flour mills to railroads and oil fields in Chile and Peru. It alighted on Rapa Nui as the site for a sheep-farming enterprise. From the late nineteenth century to the nineteen-fifties, the island functioned, in effect, as a company state where, as Pitts observes, the sheep got better treatment than the people, with the pastures as well watered as a golf course. The population slowly recovered, but most of the land was given over to grazing, and the remaining Rapanui were confined to a walled settlement. As a result, “generations of gardens, houses and monuments lay abandoned and inaccessible,” Pitts writes, and the practices that sustained historical memory were badly disrupted. Knowledge of the statues grew tenuous among survivors of the raids and their descendants.

After the Routledges returned to England, they gave lectures about and published their findings; Katherine wrote a well-received book about their expedition. She also retained reams of notes, interviews, transcripts, genealogies, and sketches, evidently intending to write up further studies.

By the late nineteen-twenties, however, her marriage was foundering, and her mental health was in decline. In 1927, the couple agreed to separate. Living in a grand house overlooking Hyde Park, Katherine packed up Scoresby’s belongings, sent them to a warehouse, changed the locks, and left for Syria and Palestine.

When she returned, she withdrew almost entirely, barricading herself in her seventeen-room house. In 1929, Scoresby’s and Katherine’s siblings had her committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she would remain until her death, seven years later. She was diagnosed with “mania,” believed by her doctors to be hereditary (one of her brothers had spent his life in an asylum after attacking his wife), aggravated, according to the diagnosis, by her “spiritualism.” Katherine appears to have suffered from paranoia and, at times, auditory hallucinations—though not, it seems, during her years in the Pacific. She needed help. Even so, the outcome was undeniably sad: a woman whose life had been defined by travel, research, and writing was cut off from all three. In a 2003 biography of Katherine, “Among Stone Giants,” the archeologist Jo Anne van Tilburg writes that “there is no evidence she ever saw Scoresby again.” For long stretches, she was denied access to books and bridled against the monotony and regulation of institutional life. When she was granted limited freedom to pursue her interests, such as walking in the garden, she exceeded the agreed-on terms and told her doctors she had done so “on principle.”

Even worse, perhaps, the wishes Katherine had set out in her will—that her notes, manuscripts, sketches, and photographs be edited, published, and deposited in a public archive, under the supervision of Thomas Athol Joyce, at the British Museum, or some suitable substitute—were never carried out, even though she had left the means to pay for this work. Scoresby, living in Cyprus and in poor health, showed little interest, and after his death, in 1939, no one else took responsibility. The fact that Katherine had been institutionalized may have tainted her scholarly reputation.

But she is not quite the neglected figure Pitts suggests—there is van Tilburg’s biography, for one thing, and she is regularly cited among a cohort of formidable women archeologists of the early twentieth century. If her papers had been collected and published, they might not have overturned entrenched ideas about Rapa Nui as forcefully as Pitts hopes. He’s surely exaggerating when he writes, “It seemed to me that had Katherine Routledge’s research become fully public,” those reigning narratives “would never have been born.” After all, his whole book makes a strong case for their tenacious utility. Still, it’s a shame that the papers were not available to the archeologists and anthropologists who came looking for them later. And it’s satisfying to see her taken so seriously, by a writer whose indignation on her behalf nearly matches his impatience with the persistent misreading of the island itself.

Rapa Nui continues to generate serious research questions. One that has long absorbed archeologists concerns the movement of the moai: how statues weighing several tons were transported from the quarry where they were carved to their platforms. Some scholars favor a method preserved in Rapanui oral tradition in which the figures were kept upright and made to “walk,” rocked forward with ropes. Heyerdahl demonstrated the technique’s feasibility in the nineteen-eighties, and more recently Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt have done the same, though others still argue for sledges or rollers. The island, in other words, still inspires genuine wonder, which is something quite different from the manufactured mystery of a lost civilization. The real question we should be asking now, as Pitts suggests, is how a people forced to cope with an inauspicious habitat, enslavement, and exploitation managed to survive at all. ♦

Published in the print edition of the February 2, 2026, issue, with the headline “Stone Face.”

*Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island book by Mike Pitts. Challenges the traditional narrative of Easter Island (Polynesian name- Rapa Nui) as a cautionary tale of self-destruction, arguing that the island's devastation was primarily caused by European contact, specifically the slave raids of the 1860s, rather than solely by internal ecological collapse. Pitts, a British archaeologist, uses new research to present a different story of a vibrant, resourceful Polynesian society that thrived for centuries before being decimated by disease and enslavement, refuting theories of alien intervention or a simple "ecocide".

Let's Write about Senator Bernie Sanders and the state of Vermont's synonymous relationship

This report is no "puff piece". It includes a good summary about the post World War II Vermont history.

When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills (of Vermont):

Early in his life, Sanders left the streets of Brooklyn for the woodlands of Vermont. What did the man bring to the state—and what did the  state bring to the man❓

Echo book review essay published in The New Yorker magazine, by Jill Lepore.  Senator Sanders arrived in Vermont before the New Leftists did in the sixties, and he stayed after they left. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and hippies but with the working poor.

Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “VERMONT,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians like chipmunks in a sap bucket. Inside, you could find out about snow conditions and fishing holes, inspect a woodstove, get advice about the best time to go leaf-peeping, pick up a train schedule, and buy a jug of maple syrup. A year after the center opened, Alfred Hitchcock went to Craftsbury, Vermont, to shoot “The Trouble with Harry.” People in that little town, population seven hundred and nine, brought the crew blueberry muffins and found a 1913 Buick for the production to use, on the condition that no one drive it more than forty miles an hour, which is about as fast as anyone could drive on those roads, anyway. The trouble with Harry is that he’s dead, flat on his back on a hill outside town, on a patch of grass carpeted with red-edged golden oak leaves, near a fallen log on a spot with a sweeping view of mountains blue and green and purple and glorious. In an interview with Vermont Life, Hitchcock said, “If one has to die, can you think of a more beautiful place to do so than in Vermont in autumn❓”🍂

It was in the autumn of the “Trouble with Harry” shoot that Bernie’s brother, Larry, nineteen, brought the thirteen-year-old future mayor of Burlington and two-time Presidential candidate on a subway ride from their three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment, at 1525 East Twenty-sixth Street, Brooklyn, where they took turns sleeping on a bed in the hallway (versus the couch), to Rockefeller Center. Wandering around, they stopped at Vermont, the bureau, and returned home with a brochure titled “Vermont Farms and Summer Homes for Sale.” Somehow, miraculously, Bernie Sanders would eventually own one such property, a stretch of woods in the tiny town of Middlesex, population seven hundred and seventy. “This brook is my brook❗” he said, and “This tree is my tree❗,” 🌳even if he didn’t altogether believe in private ownership. (“I am not a capitalist,” he once told the talk-show host Phil Donahue.)

Mr. Sanders, who i now eighty-four years old, was Vermont’s sole representative in the U.S. House from 1991 to 2007, and he has served in the Senate as an Independent from Vermont ever since. He has been a notoriously ineffective legislator, having introduced only three bills between 1991 and 2020 that became law, two of which concerned the names of post offices. Yet he has wielded nearly unrivalled influence over American politics of a quite particular and distinctively local character: in his career as the country’s leading progressive populist and the second most successful socialist ever to run for President—beaten only by Eugene Victor Debs, the railman of Terre Haute, Indiana—Sanders has brought to the political stage the view not from the streets of Brooklyn but from the mountains of Vermont, and especially from its biggest city, Burlington, which in 1981, when Sanders was elected mayor by a margin of ten votes, had a population, whopping for Vermont but by any other measure minuscule, of a little under thirty-eight thousand. (It’s barely bigger this winter, at forty-five thousand shivering souls.) 

This past summer (2025), Sanders more or less said that he has no plans to run for President again in 2028. (“Oh, God,” he told CNN. “Let’s not worry about that.”) He has, however, filed papers to run for reëlection to the Senate in 2030, when he’ll be eighty-nine, even though there doesn’t seem much chance he’ll really do that. In short, if it’s not quite time to assess the Vermonter’s legacy, it’s getting close.

Aside from Sanders and Calvin Coolidge—born in Plymouth Notch, in 1872—Vermont hasn’t left much of a stamp on American politics, at least nationally. Notionally, well, that’s another question. Vermont is for many Americans something of a mythical place, a land out of time, and there’s a reason for that: a storybook America, all red barns and covered bridges, black-and-white mottled cows grazing in rolling green pastures, and dried-apple-faced farmers leaning on pitchforks, is how the place sold itself, beginning not long before those two teen-agers from Brooklyn got off the train in midtown. Vermont Life, launched in 1946 to promote tourism in the heady days after the end of the war, when Americans had money in their wallets and gas in their tanks, regularly ran as a full-page ad a photograph of a sugarhouse, steam billowing from its cupola, above a few lines of text:  Something of the ruggedness of the granite and marble has entered into the veins of the people of Vermont. They do their own thinking; they make their own decisions; they stand by their own convictions with the unyielding tenacity of their eternal hills.
—Bruce Barton.

This endorsement appears to have been specifically aimed at New Yorkers, since Barton, a Republican, had represented Manhattan in the U.S. House. Barton helped invent Vermont, even though, as far as I can tell, he never lived there. He wasn’t only a politician; he was also, and mainly, an adman, the longtime president of B.B.D.O., the agency that served as a chief inspiration for “Mad Men.” His contributions to a Rockwellian vision of America included creating the fictional all-American home cook Betty Crocker. Was Vermont ever really Bruce Barton’s Vermont? Rugged and flinty and possessing an unyielding tenacity may be how a lot of Americans would like to see themselves, but in Vermont, a place Coolidge called a “brave little state,” what began as an adman’s pitch to tourists became something of an official state attitude that, among other things, transformed the landscape, or, rather, it committed the state to preserving the landscape for tourists. 

Inevitably, the people who paid the price for that preservation have been the poor and especially poor farmers. Today, you can board Amtrak’s Vermonter at Penn Station, heading north, and I promise you’ll know when you’ve crossed the border into that brave and beautiful and hard-luck little state.

Bernie Sanders crossed that border line just about as soon as he was able. His father, Eli, a Polish immigrant, was a travelling paint salesman; his mother, Dorothy Glassberg, born on the Lower East Side, suffered from congenital heart disease. She died in 1960, at the age of forty-seven. Young Bernard Sanders, who had been a high-school track star, watched her die in a charity hospital of a condition from which she might well have survived if the family had had more money. Two years later, Eli died of an apparent heart attack, having crashed his car outside a hospital emergency room to which he’d tried to drive himself. Sanders vowed to escape New York. He transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago, where he became a civil-rights activist and a devotee of the somewhat mystical and entirely sex-obsessed Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. After graduating, in 1964, mop-headed, bespectacled, and already famously slovenly, Sanders married, travelled in Europe and Israel, spent time on a kibbutz outside Haifa, and then went to Vermont with his wife. “We had never been to Vermont in our lives,” he later said. “We just drove up.” For twenty-five hundred dollars, they bought eighty-five mostly wooded acres, where they spent summers cooking on an improvised Sterno rig—old T-shirts stuck into coffee cans—that Sanders’s friends called Berno.

Vermont was at a turning point. In 1945, there had been twenty-six thousand family farms in the state. Twenty years later, when Sanders bought that patch of land, fewer than nine thousand farms were left, many families having lost theirs because the price of wool and milk was falling, or because the state had seized their land under eminent domain, to make way for the interstate highway, but also because, with all those skiers and second-home owners, including flatlanders like Sanders, property taxes had gone up, and farmers couldn’t afford to pay them. In other states, old farms became suburbs and strip malls, but not in Vermont, where most old farms reverted to forest. (Three-quarters of Vermont was farmland by the eighteen-fifties; three-quarters of the state is now forest.)

Mr. Sanders moved to Vermont, year-round and for good, in 1968, when droves of young people from all over the country headed for the hills. Much of the New Left, disillusioned with electoral politics after the fiasco of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, went back to the land. In Vermont, back-to-the-landers bought old hill farms for dirt cheap. By some estimates, a hundred thousand young people moved to Vermont between 1965, and 1975; by another, they set up more than a hundred communes. They kept the state rural, but they changed its politics. They started food co-ops and opened vegetarian restaurants and founded artists’ coöperatives and hooked up shortwave radios and published papers like the Vermont Freeman, a twenty-cent newspaper that was something of a radical, countercultural counterpart to Vermont Life, and whose editor distributed it out of the back of his VW. Year by year, under the influence of a movement sometimes known as Free Vermont, the stalwartly Republican state, which had voted for Richard Nixon by a wide margin in 1960, tilted further to the left.

Sanders doesn’t much like to talk about his early life, or, for that matter, his later life, and he declined to be interviewed by Dan Chiasson for the writer’s revelatory new book, “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place” (Knopf), but he left behind plenty of clues in Vermont. Between 1969 and 1974, Sanders contributed dozens of articles to the Vermont Freeman. In two pieces from 1969, for instance, he wrote about the wretchedness of city life (“the air is poisonous, the noise deafening, and the streets are dangerous to walk” ) and the hard lives of such “miserable people” as his father, taking the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan to do “moron work,” packed into subway cars with a faceless mob, then taking the train back at night to “family, dinner, arguments, TV and sleep”: “The years come and go, suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.” Like a miller whetting a stone, he readied his axe for grinding. A 1969 front-page teaser for one of Sanders’s articles in the Vermont Freeman works just as well for all of them: “Bernard Sanders views the ills of our troubled and dying society.” And that line could have served equally well as a slogan for his 2016, and 2020, Presidential campaigns.

Mr. Sanders, as Chiasson argues, considered himself a chronicler of Vermont’s transformation in the sixties, reporting that led him to a pained awareness of its economic costs. “I think Vermont has changed terrible since I was a kid,” a farmer told Sanders, in an interview published in the Vermont Freeman in 1970, a year when one in six Vermonters lived below the poverty line. (Currently, that number is one in ten.) “Vermont was beautiful, beautiful back in them days. And every farmer always paid his bills. He had the money to pay his bills. . . . And now, today, in the State of Vermont, the taxes is driving people right out of the homes that they own.”

Mr. Sanders boned up on socialism during his freshman year at Brooklyn College. But it was in the hills of Vermont that he witnessed the ravages of a particular kind of capitalism, saw families suffering in the hills the way his own parents had in the tenements. In 1971, he moved to Burlington and made his first run for the U.S. Senate, representing the Liberty Union, something of a counterculture political party. “I have only one donor, and he drove me here,” he said at a campaign stop, pointing to a friend. He won 2.2 per cent of the vote. That same year—blocks away from Sanders’s Burlington apartment, which wasn’t really an apartment, just a couple of rooms in what had once been a workers’ cottage, behind an abandoned glass factory—Dan Chiasson was born.

Chiasson, a poet, a longtime contributor to this magazine, and the chair of the English department at Wellesley, had a front-row seat to Sanders’s rise, and his “Bernie for Burlington” is nearly as much a memoir of its author as it is a biography of its subject and, not least, a history of the Green Mountain State. “It is no small irony that hill farms marketed to well-heeled city people piqued the interest of a thirteen-year-old Brooklyn Jew and future socialist who would arguably do more to impact Vermont’s traditional culture than anyone in the state’s history,” Chiasson writes, about the day Larry and Bernie stopped at that Vermont bureau and picked up that brochure. It is also no small irony that a boy who grew up in Sanders’s Burlington, only to leave it behind, would become its chronicler.

Chiasson’s roots in Vermont go back to his great-grandparents, Wilfred and Laura Delorme, French Canadians who met as teen-agers, in 1915, while working in a woollen mill in Winooski, across the river from Burlington. Burlington is so little, and Chiasson’s family history runs so deep, that his kin pop up all over the place. Wilfred fought in the First World War and then went back to the looms, but after the mills closed, in 1954, he began working for the state while also tending his farm in South Burlington. In the early sixties, one of Chiasson’s grandfathers worked on a crew that blasted a route through the Winooski River Valley to bring Interstate 89 up to Burlington.

That highway, along with Interstate 91, made it easier for the skiers and the second-home owners to get to Vermont from New York and Massachusetts, but highways also risked ruining what had become, after the decline of both manufacturing and farming, the chief source of Vermont’s wealth: its natural beauty. In 1968, the state legislature passed what became known as the Billboard Law, banning billboards so that the view from the highway would not be marred, and two years later it enacted Act 250, known as the Postcard Law, strictly regulating development to insure the preservation of the state’s Vermont Life landscape. In 1978, the legislature passed the Use Value Appraisal Act, which lowered property taxes for owners who agreed to maintain their property for agricultural purposes or forestland. (About a third of all land in the state is now enrolled in the program.) Freezing the landscape in time is what the people of Vermont, and not merely tourists, want, but it’s also left residents with a vexed regard for visitors. “Welcome to Vermont,” one bumper sticker reads. “Now Go Home.”

Vermont’s struggle to stay the same—Vermont Life-worthy—even as its population and its politics were undergoing a transformation as big as any state experienced in the twentieth century, shaped Sanders’s view of what politics can do and what it can’t, and what money can do and what it can’t, or ought not to. In the early seventies, when his relationship with the Vermont Freeman began to sour, he briefly published his own alternative newsletter, Movement. It didn’t last long—and published so irregularly that he told subscribers newsletters would appear “when you least expect it”—but it advanced the Liberty Union, which, in 1972, nominated Sanders as its candidate for governor and endorsed Benjamin Spock for President. (More Chiasson-family cameos: when Sanders took a visiting Dr. Spock out for steak, Chiasson’s great-uncle Esau was tending the bar.) By 1973, Sanders had settled into campaign rhetoric that would hold him in good stead to the present day. “While Vermonters are paying outrageous prices for gas and heating oil, the oil billionaires are getting even richer,” he wrote. More of Vermont’s rural poor sold their land. In 1975, when developers were buying up failing farms and building retail shops and restaurants to support ski areas, Chiasson’s great-grandfather Wilfred sold his small farm in South Burlington—“for pennies,” Chiasson writes.

Mr. Sanders, by now a perennial candidate, perfected his craggy, scolding, mitten-waving style. He’d arrived in Vermont before the 1968 New Leftists did, and he stayed after they’d gone. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and the hippies but with the working poor. In 1976, in a bid for the governorship during the U.S. Bicentennial, he complained about corporate ownership of the media: “We should not have a culture where the three major networks are controlled by the Chase Manhattan Bank.” (The premise that CBS, NBC, and ABC lacked journalistic integrity in the seventies is unsupportable, but the charge that corporate ownership corrupts the integrity of news organizations is borne out daily.) Tourism, Sanders argued, was having a “devastating impact” on the state’s economy. Men and women who’d lost their farms and their factory jobs were working as “chambermaids and burger flippers,” while out-of-state developers were getting rich and the skiers at Stowe were driving Porsches and BMWs. Sanders lost in 1976, but he had found his groove.

Mr. Sanders soon left the Liberty Union and started the American People’s Historical Society, a Howard Zinn-style educational outfit that made filmstrips and documentaries about everyone from Ethan Allen to Eugene V. Debs. The material was every bit as polemical and tendentious as Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and Sanders distributed it to Vermont public schools in his beat-up Volvo. He was also a bit strapped. In 1978, he was evicted. The next year, he made a documentary film, titled “Poverty in Vermont,” that featured penetrating and compassionate interviews with people who were displaced by Burlington’s ill-considered urban-renewal initiatives and living in a public-housing project called Franklin Square. By the fall of 1980, the Burlington Free Press was reporting that Sanders, “the historian and film maker,” was “testing whether he can build a coalition of poor people, blue collar workers and university students” in his race for mayor. It turned out he could. In 1981, he was elected mayor, if not quite the Zohran Mamdani of the Reagan revolution (Mamdani won by two hundred thousand votes, not ten), then at least a sty in the Gipper’s eye.

Born: 1971 (age 55 years), Burlington, Vermont

Dan Chiasson grew up as the son of a struggling single mother. He watched Sanders change Burlington, very much for the better, by supporting small businesses, redeveloping the deserted industrial waterfront into parkland and public space, balancing the budget, bringing minor-league baseball to the city, and expanding affordable housing through a municipal land trust. Sanders also established a new culture of citizen participation and engagement. He had a public-access TV show, “Bernie Speaks with the Community,” in which, mike in hand and dressed like a schlub, he interviewed Burlingtonians, especially kids and senior citizens and even the occasional cocker spaniel. It was a program with all the daffy affability of “This Is Spinal Tap.” Chiasson seems to know just about everyone in old clips from the show. He’s the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon of Burlington. When Michel Foucault came to give a lecture at the University of Vermont, where he was to be introduced by Sanders, the postmodern French philosopher sat on an orange sectional in a lounge where Chiasson’s mother had once recruited students to babysit her son. When Jesse Jackson appeared onstage at U.V.M. with Sanders during Jackson’s 1988 Presidential bid, Chiasson, a high schooler, tried, and failed, to get inside. The next year, Sanders’s last in the mayor’s office, Chiasson headed off to Amherst College. On Election Night in 1990, Chiasson climbed to an upper floor of the Amherst library to catch the radio signal from Brattleboro, where he was able to hear that, unbelievably, the socialist mayor from Burlington would become Vermont’s sole representative in Congress. He writes, with astonished and complicated pride, “My guy won.”

Looking back over Sanders’s career in Burlington from the middle of the sixties to the end of the eighties, Chiasson argues that “Bernie did, in important respects, change; and Vermont, in troubling ways, did not.” I’m not so sure I agree with what’s on either side of that semicolon. Sanders has sounded the same for more than half a century, while Vermont has, especially recently, changed a great deal.

 “The Trouble with Harry” movie's plot turns on the question of who killed the poor man, and, as nearly everyone in town tries to work that out, they bury him and dig him up and bury him and dig him up again and finally strip him naked and stow him in a bathtub. Key elements of the mystery include a dead rabbit, a live frog, a pair of loafers, a rifle, a milk bottle, and a millionaire who comes to town in a chauffeured limousine. You could very plausibly shoot a remake in Vermont today, and it would look just about the same. 

Still, it’s a different place, and more different every day. Given the housing shortage that’s afflicted the whole country, the state, in 2024, revised the Postcard Law to allow for more construction, at least in certain areas. Dairy farming has all but vanished, down from more than four thousand farms in 1969, to fewer than six hundred. Fentanyl has devastated Burlington, and much of the rest of Vermont, too, and the prevailing harm-reduction approach has largely, and often spectacularly, failed. The state, which has seen more deaths than births for years, faces a fast-unfolding demographic crisis. In the past few years, it’s suffered disastrous floods owing to climate change; Montpelier, the capital, has been flooded in two of the past three summers.

But Vermont has been buried before, and dug up again, and even brought back to life. Property taxes have risen by an average of forty per cent since 2020, when fugitives made their hopeful escapes from New York and New England, worsening the cycle of rising land values, rising taxes, and bigger bills for longtime locals. Despite the risk of flooding on lower ground, hilly, chilly Vermont is a destination for climate refugees. Other types of farming are replacing dairies. A lot of farmers are growing hops, hoping to make Vermont for beer what the Napa Valley is for wine. The state has about the best rural broadband program in the country, opening doors for small businesses and digital nomads alike. (Even my own scruffy little hill got hooked up last year.) Back-to-the-land movements seem to come in thirty-year cycles: the United States is due for one, and, who knows, maybe a hundred thousand Gen Z-ers, fleeing Brooklyn, will turn up in the next ten years, wearing canvas Carhartt pants and carrying iPads and knitting needles and glossy seed catalogues. More people, in short, are likely to move to Vermont. What they’ll bring, and what they’ll take, is harder to say.

After Bernie Sanders left Burlington for Washington, D.C., he mostly said the same things he’d been saying since the seventies, except louder. “Never before in American history have so few media conglomerates, all owned by the billionaire class, had so much influence over the public,” he declared in 2024. “Today, we have a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.” It can sound like cant, but it is, unfortunately, true in much of America, if, thank God, a bit less true in Vermont, brave little snowy muddy fierce little mountain state. ♦

Let's write about how the author Jane Austen was motivated to create her classics

This is a short article is published the in the Fall 2025, Bowdoin College Magazine, (in Brunswick, Maine) by Associate Professor of English Literature Anne Kibbie*. 

I recommend following this seminar for anyone who appreciates a terrific reading group experience with a very scholarly leader. Thanks to Dr. Kibbie for sharing your Jane Austen scholarship. Her Bowdoin College email is at the link to her name above.

Shocking Jane Austen❗ Born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon Hampshire, England, and died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, Hampshire when she was 41 years old, having written novels like Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. She is buried in the Winchester Cathedral.

In recognition of the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, Associate Professor Ann Kibbie says the great novelist's real message goes beyond the world of love and romance.

During the 205th landmark anniversary for the fans of one of the greatest English language novelists, Jane Austen, who wrote about the lives and loves of the British landed gentry from the female perspective was born on December 16, 1775.

Dr. Ann Kibbie is one of her fans who teaches Austen and whose scholarship includes representations of money and capital in early modern literature.

Dr. Kibbie says her favorite response to Austen's work comes from the twentieth cectury poet W. H. Auden.  "He write that, despite the image of Austen as a prim and proper spinster, 'You could not shock her more than she shocks me'.  What did he consider so shocking❓  Her focus on that forbidden of subjects was not romance, but on money," 💰asserts Kibbe.

(No kidding❓😀😉 Who knew❓😮)

*Dr. Ann Louise Kibbie specializes in British Literature of the long eighteenth century. Her areas of research include representations of money and capital in early modern literature; the eighteenth-century novel; sentimentalism and the gothic; and eighteenth-century property law. Most recently, she has focused on the intersections between literature and medical history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her monograph, Transfusion: Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, was published by the University of Virginia Press (Fall 2019).

She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2021 for her current project, Fatal Labors: Obstetrics and the Disabled Maternal Body in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain.

Let's write about how old books influence who we are: About Old Books

Echo essay published in The New York Times by Roger Rosenblatt

To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution: Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of President Franklin Pierce (who❓), you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but, please, not your old books. 

Oh no❗ 😵😰Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.

Books are houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. But what’s that manic laughter coming from the attic?

Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur’s castle and in Ralph Ellison’s basement, each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought.

Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent? A tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks❓📗 📘

To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution: Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of Franklin Pierce you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but not your old books. Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.

Books are lie houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. 

But. wait❗What’s that manic laughter 😜coming from the attic❓👻

Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur’s castle and in Ralph Ellison’s basement, each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought.

Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent? A tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks? Someone with the wrong ideas, no ideas?

Someone with the wrong ideas, or no ideas❓😕

Yes, there were times when I’ve heard my books talk to me with mocking condescension. “Are you shocked by me❓” says Vladimir Nabokov with “Lolita.” 

Disgusted❓ Made uncomfortable in the cellar of a darker (not to say creepier) mind❓ “Are you frightened by me❓” says Mary Shelley with “Frankenstein.” 

Confused❓ Astonished❓ Made sad 😞and sympathetic❓ And who is the monster in the story, anyway❓ The creation or the creator❓ And if all that weren’t enough to wonder at, how did this tale come to be written by a 19-year-old girl❓

We read books, and books read us, especially if we approach them with easy assumptions. Before I gave it serious thought, I took “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for a story about a dope addict with mood swings. 

What Robert Louis Stevenson teaches is that under the influence, a person may be completely and irredeemably changed. The book says, in effect: Here in your facile judgment, learn something about our species. Whatever you think impossible in life is possible. Life is stranger and more dangerous than anything you may ever imagine.

And yet more forgiving, too. Here on my shelves is the autobiography of the early 20th-century Scottish poet, novelist and translator Edwin Muir. He resists psychotherapy at first but then sees a therapist and understands its value, writing, “I saw that my lot was the human lot, that when I faced my own unvarnished likeness I was one among all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs.” If one is searching for absolution, look no further.

That was a passage I dog-eared years ago, one among hundreds of dog-eared pages in my books. I wonder what sort of book would be produced by linking all the dog-eared pages. Incoherent or inspired❓ Or the infinite columns of marginalia, standing like beefeater guards beside the original texts. What secret books have I written that hide in all the jottings in the margins❓

Bright new books gleam like actors in tryouts, destined to grow gray with faded titles and bends and bruises on the covers.

“Bleak House” went with me to Crane Beach in Ipswich, Mass., when I was studying for a university exam. You can still feel grains of sand in the spine. A beaten-up book, “Childcraft,” came from my parents’ house — a children’s book my mother read to me. I drew pictures next to the poems. A squirrel, a fish, my father’s derby hat.

To say nothing of the nothing of missing books, the spaces created by those reluctantly lent to visitors who never returned them. Does one ever learn not to lend books? It’s grumpy bad manners to deny the borrowers, to be sure. But look at the holes that once held your valuables. Kidnap victims. If only there had been a ransom. Anatole France wrote that the only books he had in his library were those that others had lent him.

Every time one recommends a book to someone else, that book becomes an ambassador, informing and changing minds one will never know about. And who knows how these minds will use their newly gained knowledge❓

Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound — all three wrote or were inspired to write in prison❗

Indeed, the thoughts that informed their works were their way of breaking out. Writing a book from prison, Adolf Hitler nearly destroyed the world. With another book, Nelson Mandela nearly rescued it.

My books are teachers but also companions who know more than I do and who in the long run wish me well. I would no sooner get rid of them than I would an old friend.

More like neighbors, standing in their front doors on my shelves, forever extending their welcomes. 

At night, when my house is dark and I am asleep, do they whisper to one another❓ Do they gossip about me? Does Hamlet have the last word, as usual❓

Books of poems. Of maps. Of adventure. Of cartoons. Books of photographs. Books on philosophy, psychology, philately, history, mystery, art. Short stories. Tall stories. Ghost stories. Right now I am trying to retrieve a passage of poetry that expresses the power of all my books, making the case for holding on to them more forcefully than I ever could.

Ah. Here it is, “The Far Field,” by Theodore Roethke: “A ripple widening from a single stone / Winding around the waters of the world.”

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”

Let's write about the Buddhism tradition of Bodhi Day

 Found this essay in The Conversation, by Megan Bryson, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee. 

In the article's lead, the importance of lighting lamps🪔 to combat darkness reminds me about how creating light to conquer darkness is a common theme in Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. A trifecta of enlightenment symbolized by candles and lamps.

(Just an FYI, in the Catholic church calendar, December 8 is a major Marian holy day. many celebrate as a Holy Day of Obligation.) My husband Dick and I visited the bronze Great Buddha of Kamakura, when we were in Japan.

We took the bullet train from Tokyo. The statue dates back to the 13th century; it is a huge iconic sight and a tourist attraction.

On Bodhi Day, Buddhists commemorate Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment by lighting lamps 🪔 to combat darkness. December 8, marks the celebration of Bodhi Day in Japanese Buddhism. Bodhi means enlightenment or awakening in Sanskrit. It commemorates the enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha. Buddhists throughout the world celebrate Bodhi Day, but they do not all celebrate Siddhartha’s enlightenment on December 8.


In China, South Korea and Vietnam, his enlightenment is observed on the eighth day of the 12th lunar month. In 2025, but they do not all celebrate Siddhartha’s enlightenment on Dec. 8. In China, South Korea and Vietnam, his enlightenment is observed on, this falls on January 7.

In the Theravada form of Buddhism, followed in Southeast Asia, Gautama’s enlightenment, is commemorated along with his birth and death during the Vesak festival celebrated in April or May. This is similar to Tibetan Buddhism, which also combines the observation of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death in the springtime Saka Dawa festival.

As a scholar of Buddhism in East Asia, I study how people adapt Buddhism to their own cultural contexts. Bodhi Day is a good example of how Buddhists in different parts of Asia developed their own versions of important Buddhist holidays.The story of Bodhi Day: No matter when Buddhists celebrate the Buddha’s enlightenment, the story behind the holiday is consistent.


Biographies of the Buddha describe how young Prince Siddhartha became disillusioned with the fleeting luxuries of palace life. He eventually left home to find a cure for the inevitable suffering caused by old age, sickness and death. Siddhartha sought guidance from various religious masters, including one who taught his students to practice extreme self-denial, such as eating only a spoonful of gruel per day. Following this method, Siddhartha wasted away until he was just skin and bones, but he got no closer to resolving the problem of suffering. It was at just this time that a young woman named Sujata* came by with milk porridge, which she offered to the skeletal Siddhartha.

This meal gave Siddhartha the energy he needed to resolve the problem of suffering once and for all. He realized that no external teacher could give him the answers he sought, and he would have to solve this problem on his own.

Siddhartha decided to meditate under a pipal tree, also known as a sacred fig tree, until he reached enlightenment.

Over the next seven days he meditated, deepening his insights into the true nature of existence. On the seventh day, Siddhartha attained complete awakening to become a buddha. Buddhas are people who reach full enlightenment on their own, like Siddhartha, without direct guidance from a teacher.

Monks and nuns in Japanese and Korean Zen Buddhism follow this model by meditating intensively for the seven days leading up to Bodhi Day.

As a buddha, Siddhartha began sharing his insights with other spiritual seekers, attracting a group of followers who were the first Buddhists. Buddhist monks and merchants spread the religion to the north, east and south, and by the fourth century C.E. it was well established in China.The Laba Festival and congee: China already had its own religious and philosophical systems, along with its own calendar of holidays, when Buddhism came onto the scene. Buddhists in China adapted their religion to Chinese language and culture, including some existing holidays.


The 12th and final month of the Chinese lunar calendar was already a time for making sacrifices for ancestors in advance of the new year. In fact, the 12th month is called La, which originally referred to the cured meat that people offered to their ancestors at this time of year. “Ba” means the number eight, so Laba translates to “the eighth day of the La month” or “eighth day of the 12th month.”
Buddhism entered China in the first century C.E. By the third century, Chinese Buddhists identified the eighth day of the 12th month as the date of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Celebrating the Buddha’s enlightenment – or Bodhi Day – at the same time as the Laba Festival required adaptation.

The Laba Festival involved meat offerings and hunting, both of which violate Buddhist rules against killing animals. Over time, a compromise emerged, and rice porridge, or congee, became this holiday’s signature food for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. Rice has been used in Chinese religious offerings since at least the eighth century B.C.E., and rice congee also recalls the offering of milk porridge that helped Siddhartha on his journey to Buddhahood.
Light in the darkness: Another aspect of the Laba Festival, or Bodhi Day, is that it falls around the winter solstice, the darkest part of the year. Like other holidays at this time of year, Bodhi Day involves lighting lamps to combat the darkness. 

For East Asian Buddhists, these lamps 🪔 symbolize the Buddha’s enlightenment, which lights the path for others to follow.
Bodhi Day is celebrated in Japan and throughout the Japanese diaspora on December 8, because Japan switched from the lunar to solar calendar in 1873. Buddhists in other East Asian countries, such as China, Vietnam and South Korea, will observe Bodhi Day on January 7, 2025.

East Asian Buddhists will celebrate the holiday in different ways – some by lighting lamps 🪔, some by eating congee, some others by meditating for a full week straight. But for all Buddhists, Bodhi Day represents hope and the potential to overcome suffering.

*Julie's personal editorial comment, stands to reason, a woman brought Siddhartha the nourishment he needed to achieve enlightenment, just my opinion.