“Dean Jonathan Swift – of Savage Indignation, Contradictions and Vulnerabilities – and a lesson for our times" Remarks at The Inaugural Swift Lecture
Trim, Co. Meath, 7th July 2013
It was Einstein who wrote:
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
I thought of this important insight of one of the greatest philosophical scientists when I received the invitation to give the inaugural Swift lecture. Dean Jonathan Swift is one of the clearest examples of a writer whose total trust having been placed in rationality was to see it become the scourge of his life in terms of both its betrayal as a personal faith and its impossibility of achievement. Swift’s life reveals a vexatious response to the betrayal of rationality, not only in terms of it being insufficient as a strategy for life, but also, as the source of the terror it constituted when distorted or unfulfilled; when what was indefensible was presented as not merely rational, but inevitable. The result was as one writer put it – an ethical impoverishment even if it constitutes a literary excellence.
Is iontach an rud é agus is ábhar macnaimh é cinnte, go bhféadfadh duine a tháinig chun suntais trí chéad bliain ó shoin draíocht fós a imirt ar dhaoine agus go mbeadh moladh ag daoine dó i gcónaí. Ar ndóigh, is léiriú é sin ní amháin ar a tháirgeadh liteartha, ar litríocht í a bhí substainteach agus a raibh tionchar aici chomh maith; ach thairis sin, is léiriú é ar an rómánsaíocht, ar an leochaileacht agus ar na conthrarthachtaí a bhí san fhear é féin, ina shaol pearsanta, lena n-áirítear tomhas an chaidreamh a bhí aige le Stella agus Vanessa.
[It is remarkable and thought provoking surely, that a figure coming to prominence about three hundred years ago should continue to exercise such fascination and admiration. This reflects, of course, his literary output which was both substantial and influential, but it also reflects the romance, the vulnerability, and the contradictions of the man himself, in his personal life, including the enigma of his relationship to Stella and Vanessa.]
In Swift’s case the audacious courage of the intellect in engaging with the issues he has chosen is delivered again and again with an acerbic genius. Yet the person who is writing these blistering treatises is a very disconsolate person; a person of immense contradictions; the possessor of a powerful imagination and yet emotionally stunted. From the biographies on Swift I sense a longing, but a deep incapacity for the necessary comfort and consolation of intimacy. It is as if the instrumentality of reason had overwhelmed those instincts of the heart so necessary for survival.
It is on the intuitive mind, in Einstein’s sense, that one relies to provide the softness necessary for endurance of a life of contradictions when reason is insufficient or is betrayed. It is in that space that one can not only recognise contradictions but also one can attempt to transcend them, wait for new challenges to arrive, or construct out of the imagination such a range of possibilities as might make a utopian alternative.
The circumstances of Jonathan Swift’s life show how his several beginnings, his many reactions, his attempts at utopia are regularly frustrated and, that which might have been a utopia, is rendered dystopic, that is, the rejection by his contemporaries of the reasonableness of his analysis he feels is regularly being thrown back in his face and, as a result, he, while ferocious with his pen, “being timid in spirit”, as one writer puts it, is driven to reach for satire as his main weapon.
In doing so and using the multi-layered tool of satire, Jonathan Swift made use of a device well known to the Gaelic poets.
The enormous body of political writing for which he is responsible is mostly from behind a mask. He is probably among the first, if not the first, Anglo-Irish writer to see the opportunity of posing the truth to one’s times from such a protective space when the consequences of a public dissent were dire. It is behind the mask that truth can live and flourish, where irony in Irish or in English can be given full expression.
Given our present circumstances it is surely an appropriate time to reach back and allow the invocation of Dean Jonathan Swift to remind us of the importance, not only of critical thought in the wake of failed orthodoxies, but to celebrate the value of the dissident mind, in all its vulnerability and its capacity for hurt.
The discrediting of what was claimed to be not only rational but inevitable into dust in recent decades, in terms of its economic assumptions, stated and unstated. The failure of an ideology, that offered the Western world a single paradigm of the relationship of finance, economy and society, its exposure as a ‘house of cards’ makes it a very appropriate time for recalling the life and work of Dean Jonathan Swift.
His work is above all and most apt for our own times when we are left with the Weberian nightmare of a ritualistic irrationality, a structure of thought, of little value in facing our problems, one that threatens to quench originality and creativity, that stands in the way of the scholarship we need to design and manage the change we are undergoing. Swift’s great disappointment in his times is paralleled in the hopelessness of so many of our contemporary citizens who had placed their trust in institutions and representatives that failed them.
We claim Jonathan Swift for ourselves as Irish because matters Irish occupy the greater space in not only his more than seventy tracts, but also in what many regard as his greatest work, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’; the first three books of which deal with local and practical concerns. It is in Book 4 that Swift deals with human nature, making his case that it is less proper to refer to the human being as “rational” but rather one should say “capable of being rational” “rationis capax”. This, needless to say, drew a response of the greatest outrage, seeming to reject the dominant view then thought that the greatest distinction between the human and other animals was rationality.
That book, George Orwell said in 1946, was one of six that he felt should survive for all time.
But first a brief reflection on the man who is remembered as ‘The Dean’. Opening his chapter on Jonathan Swift in ‘Irish Classics’ Declan Kiberd writes:
“Jonathan Swift was nothing if not conflicted. Born in the parish of St. Werburgh’s, Dublin in 1667, he liked to pretend that he was really an Englishman, stolen from his country of origin as an infant and brought over in a bandbox. The truth was only a little more mundane. His father died before he was born and the family went back to England, but an Irish nursemaid who loved the child brought him home with her to Cork, when he was just a year old. Even in his cradle he was marked out for spiritual hyphenation: and in the years of his greatest power and influence in England, he was invariably treated as an Irishman.”
He never saw himself in any sense as a revolutionary defender of rights. In his adult life, he did not embrace the cause of the four-fifths of the population in Ireland who were Catholics and who were suffering under the penal laws. It would be fair to say that he begins with seeing the circumstances of the Ireland of his time as a place of the inefficient and incomplete project of empire. While he acknowledges the misery of this population of Catholics he is content to describe it as backwardness and to attribute it to their denominational adherence. He certainly does not see Irish Catholics as victims of imperialism or domination. He is conflicted psychologically insofar as he is forced to locate in Ireland while London has been, for so long, the seat of preference and ambition.
His personal story of ambitions thwarted and frustrated is combined, of course, with his courageous championing of controversial and unpopular positions, with all the risks that that ensued. This made his Deanery of St Patrick’s, for example, into a platform to influence the thinking of an age. That influence came to inform what has been called the phenomenon of “the aristocratic radical”. His purpose at even the pulpit was, as he put it, to vex not divert his public.
While perhaps his most famous work Gulliver’s Travels, has been transformed into a staple of children’s literature, its treatment of the futility of war, its satirical and imaginative power, its recognition of the importance of ethics, and the ethical difference in the values and assumptions of communities, is a universal message that continues to impress, and inspire also, in any arena where there is a contest of ideas and ideologies. And is there not in this great work, too, an attempt to envisage, describe and yearn for an ethical community?
It would be very unfair to see it in any simple misanthropy. One can understand the reaction too of the readers, drawn from ‘the nobility: If I may quote an extract from Book 4:
“One day, my Master, having heard me mention the Nobility of my country, was pleased to make me a compliment which I could not pretend to deserve: That, he was sure, I must have been born of some Noble Family, because I far exceeded in shape, colour, and cleanliness, all the Yahoos of his Nation, although I seemed to fail in strength, and agility, which must be imputed to my different way of living from those other brutes; and besides, I was not only endowed with the faculty of speech, but likewise with some rudiments of reason, to a degree, that with all his acquaintance I passed for a prodigy.
He made me observe, that among the Houyhnhnms, the White, and the Sorrel, and the Iron-grey, were not so exactly shaped as the Bay, the Dapple grey, and the Black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural.
I made his Honour my most humble acknowledgements for the good opinion he was pleased to conceive of me; but assured him at the same time, that my birth was of the lower sort, having been born of plain, honest parents, who were just able to give me a tolerable education. That, Nobility among us was altogether a different thing from the idea he had of it; That, our young Noblemen are bred from their childhood in idleness and luxury; that, as soon as years will permit, they consume their vigour, and contract odious diseases among lewd females; and when their fortunes are almost ruined, they marry some woman of mean birth, disagreeable person, and unsound constitution, merely for the sake of money, whom they hate and despise. That, the productions of such marriages are generally scrophulous, rickety or deformed children; by which means the family seldom continues above three generations, unless the wife take care to provide a healthy father among her neighbours, or domesticks, in order to improve and continue the breed. That, a weak diseased body, a meagre countenance, and sallow complexion, are the true marks of noble blood; and a health robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body; being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality and pride.”
While desperately seeking to discard his Yahoo identity and become a member of the Houyhnhnms Gulliver seeks to assume the persona of a horse. However, he not only fails in that transition, but the book reveals that the Houyhnhnms as a people fail in their excessive obsession of the rational to the exclusion of softer feelings. There is a powerful parallel between their position, of impotence in the face of necessary change, and that of a public in the Western World of today in the grip of the suggested rationality of markets over which they have no control.
The literary achievement of Gulliver’s Travels is immense.
Edward Said has noted that one of Jonathan Swift’s greatest achievements was his ability to balance a commitment to style with the incorporation of the several different voices that were necessary for the populations of the different territories with which the books of Gulliver’s Travels deals.
The price paid for that style was high in the two decades that followed Gulliver’s Travels.
“1736 December, Swift to Pope:
I now neither read, nor write, nor remember, nor converse, all I have left is to walk and ride.”
The conflicted persona of the Anglo-Irish writer, who despairing of one system as to its ethical direction, is about to be disappointed again on the altar of rationality is surely reflected in the transition from book three to book four of Gulliver’s Travels in Gulliver’s leaving of the land of the Yahoos and his arrival with hope in the land of the rational Houyhnhnms. There is inescapably the sadness of envisioned utopias that turn into dystopias of insufficiency and delusion.
As to Jonathan Swift’s other writing, there is no mistaking the force and intent of the disturbing challenge of A Modest Proposal, nor is there any scope for doubting the zeal, energy and industry of the author of more than Seventy Pamphlets that addressed, in a robust highly engaged fashion, the great issues of his day. What surely endures, above all else, is the courage manifested in breaking silence in the services of a great, even if incoherent, moral purpose. The righteous indignation is an instrument aimed at exposing devious hidden intent, false language, hypocrisy and what was simply venal.
It is for his work behind the mask of Drapier that Jonathan Swift achieved notoriety in his own time.
It is of the greatest interest, that in a land known for informers that he was not betrayed by any of the craft workers in Dublin who were aware of his identity when, for example, he exposed the speculative venture of an English tradesman named Wood who in 1724 had won the patent to produce almost £200,000 worth of coins, one quarter of the currency supply, for Ireland. The brass half pence were to be sent in barrels to Ireland and while the Irish establishment sought to break the patent it was Swift’s words behind the mask of Drapier that addressed the insult that it constituted to Ireland and its people. Indeed that pamphlet had an effect that was beyond the intention of Swift insofar as it united different elements of Irish society.
Drapier also commented on other issues of the day including the pursuit of fashionable garments, personal adornments and cosmetics from abroad by females. Drapier favoured as Kiberd puts it “plain clothes and unfussy learning”. Swift was not alone in his condemnation of this heedless consumption. Clothing was a subject of energetic debate in the Eighteenth Century and the craftsmen in Dublin with whom he was familiar often confronted those wearing the embellishments of foreign materials and cosmetics. In such criticism Swift was joining in a project well underway on the part of the Gaelic poets who mocked the new accoutrements. Declan Kiberd tells us:
“Such strictures were not peculiar to Swift. Bishop Berkeley asked in The Querist whether ‘an Irish lady, set out with French silks and Flanders lace, may not be said to consume more beef than a hundred of our labouring peasants.’ The venom with which Swift wrote of such pampered belles was very detailed.”
Swift’s criticism then should not be taken as any simple misogyny but rather as a critique of an increasing and corrupting consumerism, a phenomenon that would not be confined to the Eighteenth Century.
The fascination with Swift lies too, I believe, as much in the life of the man, as in the significance of his literary output. The contradictions and inconsistencies of Swift and his times are relevant in a particular way to the men and women of today, at a time when so many certainties have been shown to be illusory, or indeed when, that certainty which had been claimed for what is not only incapable of verification, or devoid of moral consideration, that which was simply accommodatingly exploitative, has been exposed.
The importance of open categories of thought, of universities free to undertake such fundamental and emancipatory scholarship, as will enable the paradigm shifts we urgently need in intellectual thought was never more acute. One is reminded of the criticisms by Swift of Trinity and Oxford. We surely could now benefit from a Swiftian analyses of the relationship between Higher Education and the State.
Thanks to the scholarship of Swiftians over so many years, we have a keen appreciation of how such tensions and contradictions informed the life of Swift and how those contradictions, of a moral and public policy kind, retain their force into our own times.
Celebrated as a radical and a champion of liberty, we know that Jonathan Swift’s radicalism was exercised in the interest of a Conservative and Tory view of society and the State.
While the public Swift was passionate and eloquent on the cause of the public interest, and the threats to it arising from the pursuit of private advantage, we know that much of his life, especially in his early years was devoted to the systematic pursuit of personal advancement.
The imperfection of the personal, however, hardly cancels this contribution or the grandeur of the public mind of Swift and its expression. After all, the intensity of the Swiftean belief in the rational required that it be delivered into the machine that was the power structure of his time. While Dean Jonathan Swift may have been one of those of whom Anthony Trollope might write so much later in ‘Barchester Towers’ as “had been hoping for preferment”, nonetheless his was a searing and powerful intellect engaged with the public world of his times.
While a passionate advocate of the constitutional liberty of the Irish Nation, Swift championed this project on behalf of the landed members of the established Church, was intolerant of dissenters, and somewhat indifferent to the status of the majority of the Catholic population, whose plight he saw, to a large extent, as a consequence of their denominational affiliation. As Declan Kiberd puts it in ‘Irish Classics’, in what I believe to be one of the finest assessments of the life and work of Swift:
“He railed against the inefficiency and completeness of the Anglicisation process in Ireland, and having despaired of it, he seems in later years to have sought impatriation among the Irish.”
His regular journeys between Ireland and London indicate a disconnect with a people he perceived to be pre-rational and, at the same time he held, even if he disapproved, an acute sense of manners, conceit, and calculation, which he perceived as necessary to court favour where power lay, in London.
As to contradictions in the personal life, the tenderness expressed towards Stella and Vanessa contrasts with the severe and bitter treatment he afforded so often to his contemporaries. Then too, misanthropy, with which he was so often credited from such behaviour and his writings, contrasts to the profound philanthropy reflected in his founding and endowment of St. Patrick’s Hospital, a bold and generous act.
A devoted and committed churchman, he was often suspected of being a non-believer but he was a fierce opponent of modernity and an orthodox interpretation of what he saw as revealed religion. Of course, his presence in history will be forever intertwined with St. Patrick’s Cathedral, yet he wrote that he was “horribly melancholy while they were installing me as Dean”. For others too, his installation in 1713 was a matter for concern as they posted on the Cathedral gate a prayer:
“Look down St. Patrick, look we pray
On thine own Clock and Steeple
Convert thy Dean, on this great day
Or else God help the People.”
Shaped, as all are, by the events of childhood and upbringing, Swift reflected all of the strengths, weaknesses, and complexities of an Anglo-Irish identity. Just as in our time, identity requires to be generously respected as complex, Swift contributed powerfully to the search for meaning and integrity, as he saw it, in the construction of such an Irish identity as might honour appropriately an Irishness that used independence in a moral way, even while he stayed aloof from some of the major exclusions affecting some minorities, and in an economic sense, a majority too, of poor Catholics.
It is also for what he exposes of himself and his self awareness as revealed, for example, in his letters, that Swift finds a ready place in contemporary society and contemporary literature. He was acutely concerned as to how he was perceived by his associates and his contemporaries. He was self conscious regarding his appearance, his physical frailty, his capacity to alienate and disturb others, his vulnerable dependence on patrons and associates, his weakness for polemics and dangerous controversy and, in later years, the scale and impact of his progressive physical and mental decline. This latter a scourge we must always remember of so many fine minds, and for some, the terrible price, of an elusive truth, pursued too far, and into the darkness.
His disappointments were not only personal. They had a material consequence. His falling out of favour with Queen Anne through his writings meant that what his friends had hoped for him ‘a lean Bishopric or a fat deanery’ was not to materialise.
This realistic vulnerability acknowledged in himself was accompanied by a deep pessimism about human behaviour. He was not such an idealist about social reform or popular progress as would ever lift him beyond a constructive pessimism. He believed that people behaved as they did in order to achieve reward and to avoid punishment. Higher motives were questionable, and largely absent, because, in Swift’s eyes, of the power of sin.
There are, of course, more powerful contradictions in Swift that are greater than that posed by commitment to a religious profession of a formal kind that need not be deeply spiritual.
There was a restless sense of endless beginnings fated to come to nought. This disillusion and despair is sourced in a deep and debilitating disappointment with reason itself, with the futility that flows from an unavoidable conclusion, that wisdom comes too late in old age when all the energy of youth is spent.
This contradiction, of the human condition, of being endowed with infinite imagination but cursed with finite life and an unavoidable ageing process with its loss of energy and above all pre-productive powers, of course, would be a concern of Yeats, Eliot and so many other writers. It is not confined to Swift. It would become a near constant in late nineteenth, twentieth Century poetry. In succeeding times it is not that it has disappeared as a poetic trope but rather that it is better evaded or hidden.
In Swift’s view society needed a strong State, and the State needed a strong Church to regulate or indeed control human behaviour, both through external constraints, and the inculcation of appropriate internal restraint. The price paid, by such a great intellect, for such a hard and repressive view was immense, even if adherence to it did yield the materials of letters and later scholarship.
Beneath that Augustinian pessimism, Swift’s determination to be active and to seek to defend, improve, and provoke, and to do so as a public figure is impressive, deploying as he did the full power of language, something that is as rare in our times, as it was necessary in his and is now in our contemporary culture and society. Swift had no doubt about the power of language appropriately deployed. He relished his capacity to ensure as he put it that:
“each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire”.
He deployed that power with energy but also with the force and illumination of a powerful creative imagination. He experimented with new literary forms, deploying satire with great effect. He achieved this, in the view of Edward Said, through his capacity to inhabit the views and perspectives of those he opposed.
His capacity to deploy and extend the arguments and perspectives which he opposed enabled him to undermine and defeat them by exposing their internal logic and revealing their potential for abuse. Through such satiric aesthetics he pointed the way for others who would in later centuries use the power of language, and ridicule, to counter oppressive domination.
Swift, however, had too good an insight into human nature to believe that this power was anything more than a limited instrument. While satire, and the deployment of irony, could mobilise and inspire, he was realistic about its limited capacity to convert. He wrote that “satire is a sort of glass wherein the holders do generally discern everybody’s face but their own”.
Can there be any doubt but that irony and satire remain powerful if neglected instruments in public discourse in contemporary society – after all there is so much material which invites just such treatment?
In our own time we have seen how the power of satire can indeed be applied in the pursuit of liberty and the overthrow of tyrants and oppressors. The voice of Swift can be heard echoing in the midst of those efforts, and at the source of so many creative challenges. Yet Swift concluded in his writings and it is in the evidence of his life, that more than irony was required. The price of omitting the next step towards more engaged and public confrontation of structures was to be high.
The power of words was the power he used, a power recognised in Swift’s writings by later public men such as Vaclav Havel, and one of Swift’s great admirers, Michael Foot.
In reflecting on the appeal of Swift in our time it is perhaps then appropriate to remind ourselves again, of yet another contemporary parallel. After all that one of the more significant examples of Swift’s engagement in public controversy was in relation to the currency and monetary policy which he saw as being imposed on Ireland and, while he observed that he “would avoid engaging with men of the law as readily as he would avoid disputing with a highway man with a pistol, or a troop of dragoons who came to plunder his house,” he did not shirk from this issue.
His, in his time, was a conviction as to duty rather similar to that of Jurgen Habermas’ notion of ‘deliberative democracy’ in the European Union of today. The suggestion is that citizens can only be asked to feel bound to those decisions in which they have been free, and afforded the opportunity, to participate.
One wonders, maybe yearns, for such a pamphlet as he would write now on the dominant controversies of contemporary Europe, Ireland and the world, or the priority taken by issues of currency, over either the common decencies of citizenship or the greater vision of a Europe not only at peace but secure and prosperous for all its people.
It is that power of language and literature to inspire and challenge which, I believe, is the most powerful aspect of Swift’s legacy for us today. It matters little that the issues which inspired Swift and the causes which he championed in his day are at a distance from our own experiences, challenges and sympathies.
It is Dean Jonathan Swift’s passion, his method, and the exemplary power of his imagination which rings true across the centuries.
Each generation, up to our own, may have sought to appropriate Swift’s creative effort and apply it to its own reality, not mattering to take into consideration that Swift himself would in his intentionality have been bemused, if not outraged, by some of the causes to which that legacy was put. After all neither moral indignation nor outrage is selective as to utterance and it is the moral intention that precedes the utterance that surely defines the utility.
Swift himself said that “what I did for this country was from perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression”. Our understanding of the definition of this country and our experience of tyranny and oppression may be far removed from Swift’s own experience, but it is the engagement, the determination and the power of language which inspire. With Hazlitt we can “feel little disturbance at his political sentiments, which died with him considering how much else he has left behind him of a more solid and imperishable nature”.
It is, in the end, the witness given to the possibilities of the future, as yet unrealised that obdures, and it is that witness that matters rather than any words that might even reveal the threatening hopelessness, or the vulnerability, of present experience; and surely it is to that part of the imagination that gives a moral purpose, to the engagement of intellect, to the power of language and to the impact of ideas, that each generation must look with all the available tools of memory and imagination for the resolution of its crises.
Of course we must have the instruments of good analysis, and the sustained application of well-honed expertise; of course we must have institutions which are well designed and fit for purpose; of course we must have laws and regulations which are effective in providing confidence about conduct, both public and private, but it is by the quality of the vision, however, that we are tested. The assumptions having been truthfully stated, the end purpose to which an invitation is made clearly declared, allowance must also be made for such a rage as a frustrated moral indignation provokes.
Without the engagement and passion of people, without the raised voice of the intellectual and the poet, without the willingness to engage in public discourse at the price of personal risk, without the willingness of the powerful and the well connected to feel such a thorn or scruple as will impel them to disturb the composure of their class and peers and go on to champion the cause of the marginalised and the excluded, we will not have a society which is worthy of the support and allegiance of all of the citizens.
There are so many places in our world where a story unfolds of the importance of such vision but also of the fruits of courage and creative imagination, in sustaining people in times of trial and, especially in times of defeat, and when despair in the face of tyranny might have been so tempting but was rejected. The willingness and the capacity to speak out in words and in such forms that touch the imagination and fire the spirit is vital not only in keeping the spark of freedom burning but in appointing the possibilities of a transforming humanity to emerge.
So it does matter for us to know and to celebrate the story of vulnerable Swift’s public engagement with his times, and to recall how in the words of Pope “the rights a court attacked, a poet saved”.
Abstracted from the detail of the events and causes of his day, it is the spirit of Swift of whom it was said “Fair liberty was all his cry” that we celebrate today.
And I conclude with an obvious suggestion. It is that we must always bear in mind that none of those we admire in history are flawless. As Dylan Thomas has the Reverend Ely Jenkins in ‘Under Milk Wood’ say
“We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood
And Thou I know will be the first
To see our best side not our worst”.
Only the manner, and the time of the revealing, of those flaws are variable but it is all the more right to celebrate those, who had courage as well as their vulnerability, to respect their legacy all the more in the light of our appreciation of the flaws within ours and their humanity.
We know enough about Swift to recognise the man of flesh could be a trial when provoked, and a provocation too. But the man and the enduring of his works is truly to be celebrated.
Agus onóir á tabhairt dá ghuth, tugaimid onóir do ghuthanna uile na scríbhneoirí, na bhfilí agus na ndrámadóirí sin a chothaíonn agus a spreagann an spiorad daonna, fiú agus iad ina n-aonar agus faoi bhrú.
[In honouring the voice, works and life of Jonathan Swift let us honour the voice of all the writers and the poets and the dramatists who, often alone and under pressure, still keep the courage to nurture and inspire the human spirit.]