Last week, I took the kids I nanny to the Nashville Public Library. As they played on the foam playscape in the children’s section, searched for books, and crowded around the air hockey table, I looked through the shelves, half reading titles and half glancing at the play area to make sure any yelling wasn’t from my charges. As I walked past covers and read titles, images hovered around me—dragons and unlikely heroes and small mice with big ears, dogs and princesses and bands of children on extraordinary quests—old friends from my own years as a middle grade reader. Halfway down one shelf, I saw a familiar cover and stopped, held still as memories crashed around me: a young girl, a silver crown, an evil school, and a feeling, visceral and overwhelming, of something wrong.
This happens all the time. An experience stirs up my middle school memory of some book, read so long ago that I have left the plot (and author and title), so only images remain. I couldn’t tell you what book I’m remembering, but the color of a character’s hair, a stained glass window, a clay dragon, or some other detail I once read will haunt me at odd times. Sometimes I find one of these haunting books and can restore these images to their plot. Often I can’t. The memories that echoed at the Nashville library—a silver and black crown, a sinister fortress, and a deep feeling of discomfort—have haunted me for years, and there, in the library, their source rested on the shelf before me: The Silver Crown, by Robert C. O’Brien. So of course I brought it home with me.
O’Brien is best known for another book, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which my father read to my siblings and I, along with its sequel, when we were kids. I also grew up watching the Don Bluth cartoon. All of these are nostalgic, but none of them have haunted me like this story, The Silver Crown. When I reread it, I was not any less chilled than at my first encounter. In fact, it disturbed me even more. I started the book at nine in the evening (a mistake) and read past my usual bedtime to finish it, just to feel some kind of resolution—some kind of peace—rather than pause in the middle of the unnerving story. Here is what happens.1
A girl, Ellen, wakes up on the morning of her tenth birthday, and finds a silver crown on her pillowcase. “She had known all along that she was a queen, and now the crown proved it. It was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes; it lay beside her on the pillow, shinier than silver, glowing softly, with twinkling blue stones set all around.”
That same morning, while she’s at the park, her house catches fire and the police tell her that her family must have died in the accident. As the police are taking her to the station, they stop to apprehend a store robber, a man in a strange green mask. He murders the cop who was supposed to help Ellen and the other police pursue him, leaving Ellen alone. She decides to hitchhike to her aunt’s house in Kentucky, as her aunt is her nearest relative. Along the way, it becomes clear that some force of evil is following her. A man offers her a lift at a gas station, only for Ellen to catch sight of the green mask in his glove compartment. He chases her into the woods and breaks her ankle, but she escapes. We don’t know why this man wants her, but we sense that it must be because of the crown, and other men appear in the forest on her trail. As she flees them, Ellen meets three allies: a boy named Otto, his adopted mother, and a gruff woodcarver. Joined by Otto, Ellen makes her way through the forest, until Otto disappears. To rescue him, Ellen must sneak into a mysterious school, a fortress surrounded by barbed wire.
Here, in this unnatural castle, deep in the woods and surrounded by thorns of wire, we find the source of the evil that has attacked and hounded Ellen. A man known as the King, who wears a black crown, the twin of Ellen’s silver one. A school of children, all under the influence of mind control, trained to love violence and then sent into the world to enact terror. A sentient machine, known as the Hieronymus Machine, who controls the students, their teachers, and even the king with his black crown. And its plan to spread more Machines throughout the world, creating a network of fear and destruction.
The school and the description of the children’s lessons reminded me of 1984. Compare this “fable” to the doublethink and brutality of Oceania:
“The boy’s voice read:
Aesop’s Fables: The Smart Little Horsefly.
Once there was a smart horsefly. He had a very sharp bite. He liked to bite horses and make them jump. The fly was so quick and clever that the horses could never catch him.
“That’s not like any Aesop’s Fable I ever read,” thought Ellen, following in her book.
The horsefly hated people even worse than horses. He hated nice, happy people most of all. One day, Mr. Brown, Mrs. Brown, and their four jolly children went on a picnic. The little horsefly hid in the car. He hid under the seat. Soon they were speeding along the highway at sixty miles an hour. Then the little horsefly zipped out from under the sea. He bit Mr. Brown first on one eye, then on the other.
“Oh!” cried Mr. Brown. “Oh! Oh! Look! Look! Look! I cannot see!”
The little horsefly laughed and flew out the window. Mr Brown could not steer the car. He drove into the wrong lane.
His car hit three other cars—crash! crash! crash! Mr. Brown and Mrs. Brown were killed. So were their four jolly children and eighteen other nice, happy people.
Moral: A little damage at the right time and place does a lot of damage.”
Or this monologue from a teacher on his student’s “progress” as they make Molotov cocktails and practice destroying houses:
“Race rights. Juvenile gangfights. Rumbles. Motorcycle rallies. Looting. Fires. Bombs. Snipers. Whatever it is, we’re there. And the police! They lock the doors of their squad cars, and they don’t get out. Our Kill-the-Cop Course is the best series we have…Especially when you consider that they learn entirely on dummies.”
“On dummies!” Ellen exclaimed, struck by a memory.
“Well, it’s hard to get real policemen to practice on.”
In both 1984 and The Silver Crown, everything is upside-down, inverted, wrong. Both horrify me. In both worlds, people are pushed into violent and inhuman states by an Other that nudges and monitors their every move, and even directs their thoughts. I’m disturbed by both visions of the world, by “the nightmare of thought-control”, as one critic described The Silver Crown, by the loss of human will and reason and how that intertwines with acts of terror, violence, and brutality. Man is a reasoning animal, Aristotle wrote. When man controls himself, these books suggest, he is rational; when something violates his will and controls his thoughts, he becomes an animal. It’s an awful idea, that some all-reaching power could force me to be less human, less myself, and so I’m horrified by stories about thought-control. The worst part is, of course, that I already live one.
Let me explain. I think a lot about attention. Last year, I wrote an essay collection on the spiritual habit of attentiveness, and when asked what being a writer means to me, I can say with Mary Oliver: “To pay attention / this is our endless and proper work.” I want to be a person who attends, to God, to nature, to other persons, to myself. I want to control my thoughts and where I direct them. I want to control what I love, what I want, what I need, what I think, not in an inhuman, robotic, or Gnostic way, but with a sober mind that notices and accepts, but also guides my impulses toward the Good. I do not what to be told who I am and what I love. But my world is fighting me for thought-control.
Here are the Hieronymus Machines that creep into my life. The first is advertisement, the omnipresent voice that invents dissatisfaction to promote its own panacea. America is a deeply iconographic country, only our icons are not of saints and martyrs, but of affluence and an unrest factory-made to sell us stuff. Wouldn’t I be happier, a voice asks—is it mine or the Machine’s?—if I owned this or went there or pretended, despite not having the finances for it, that I’m the kind of person who can afford expensive food or new clothes or regular trips to coffee shops, cocktail bars, summer outings, or whatever, because that person is glamorous and exciting, and we have no social images of a young woman in thrift store jeans that don’t fit quite right, with split ends from waiting as long as possible between haircuts, who shops at Aldi or Walmart and stretches grocery budgets, who drives a used car, who can’t afford to see every new movie or attend every concert. We have no images of her because she is not iconic, therefore, the media machine whispers, less fully human. But what is truly inhuman is the hijacking of our desires and the instilling of a lust for what is new and expensive and faddish, until we try to live inside an ever-changing, artificial image.
Social media is, of course, not a separate Machine, but an arm of Advertising, by which we become billboards to one another. Programmers design algorithms and interfaces to trap attention, because the longer you scroll, the more likely you are to see something once, twice, three times and decide without deciding that you need it, and then the corporations win and you—I—spend money. Or finally you force yourself to stop scrolling and then your brain is bored, restless, itching for new dopamine and so you buy something to create that buzz and the corporations win and you—I—spend money. Or you spend nothing, but hate your life because it doesn’t look like all the icons on the screen. Or you turn to pornography because you’re bored, or lonely because all your friendships are online, which is to say not real, and the tendrils of that Machine hook into your thoughts and tell you—I—lies about how women should look and act and how sex should be.
Then there are the other Machines. The polarization of opinions, discourse not with neighbors but with profile pictures, that leads people to view each other as graphics in video games, to be gunned down over disagreement. The desensitization to everything, the endless graphic content on the Internet, physical and sexual violence worse than what our ancestors would have known to attribute to demons, all of which we give to children to consume—or be consumed by—because we don’t know how to guard against the Machine, or worse, don’t care. These are the lessons fed to us by our modern Hieronymus Machine: distraction, consumption, addiction, violence, boredom, objectification, and thoughtless, vicious hatred, all whittling away at our humanity, everywhere, unseen, and more insidious because they are unseen. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I’ve read enough about the rise in mental illness, sexual violence, various addictions, loneliness, and overconsumption to assume others share these struggles. I have one friend who has even described her screen addiction as spiritual warfare, like a battle against demonic influence—or perhaps against a sentient Machine.
These are the lessons fed to us by our modern Hieronymus Machine: distraction, consumption, addiction, violence, boredom, objectification, and thoughtless, vicious hatred, all whittling away at our humanity, everywhere, unseen, and more insidious because they are unseen.
So how do we fight the Hieronymus Machine? In The Silver Crown, the Machine controls its slaves through a stone called malignite, even the King and his crown. But the one who wears the silver crown controls the Machine and, ultimately, can destroy it. What are the silver crowns with which we can guard against the forces that fight for control of our humanity? I offer two: the crown of wisdom and the crown of loving what’s real. From the first page, Ellen knows that she is a queen and that the crown is hers. She doesn’t waver in her authority or her responsibility, even in the story’s darkest moments. When she finally faces the Machine with the silver crown, she realizes that it will serve her, that she could command the world, and yet she chooses to destroy it. In doing so, she frees the enslaved students and her family, who had not been killed, but only captured and imprisoned.
In his book The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr challenges our assumption that technology is on our side. If we think about technology—which we often don’t, preferring an invisible, but helpful servant—we assume it serves our purposes. This is a dangerous assumption, because, as we have seen, while we are using it for one purpose, it may be using us for another. Like the Hieronymus Machine, our technologies and our media move us according to their desires, but unlike the Machine, they are not sentient, but are tools which men design. Can we accept the crown of wisdom, and with it, the responsibility to face the Machine and fight it for our self-control? Do we, whether creators or consumers, have Ellen’s strength to destroy what dehumanizes, even when it promises power?
Secondly, on the importance of the real. Most of The Silver Crown doesn’t focus on the Machine and its plan to control more minds. We only encounter the Machine at the end of the novel and Ellen destroys it over the course of a few short chapters. Rather, most of the novel takes place in the forest, during Ellen’s journey. There are long descriptions of camping and woodcraft as we follow the children on their quest. O’Brien lingers on trees and rivers and campfires, on the allies Ellen finds, on the stories they tell to encourage and spur her on. It is as if O’Brien is showing us what Ellen truly needs to overcome the Machine: friendship, kindness, beauty, valor, and memories of wood and dirt and water, the real things of the world. Even without the crown, the Machine cannot control Ellen’s mind. She is the only person in the world who can resist its power. The story never fully explains why, but I would suggest that it’s because Ellen is so deeply rooted in what’s real. She knows herself to be a queen, which is to say, she is a master over herself and her world. The Machine cannot control her because she already possesses herself.
This is the only antidote to powers that dehumanize or, demon-like, control us. We must possess ourselves, as full persons, before they can.
This is the only antidote to powers that dehumanize or, demon-like, control us. We must possess ourselves, as full persons, before they can. For the Christian, we know that our power over ourselves flows from the dominion of Christ, Who captures and captivates our hearts, but in His kingship, bequeaths to us our own silver crowns, that we may become masters of ourselves. And having been set free from the greatest nightmare of thought control, the power of sin, how can we guard this gift, the chance to start again as reborn Adams and Eves, new kings and queens over Creation and ourselves?
I don’t fully know. As I’ve said, I’m still fighting the Machine for control over my life. This is an essay about my fear for myself, as I’ve noticed my attention and my thoughts slipping away from me. But I know what I will try to do. I will try to love real things: reading books, making art, taking walks, talking with people face-to-face, attending to hawks and lakes and friendship and family. I will assume that every person has good reason for the things they believe, even when I disagree, and I will remind myself that everyone I meet is as fully a person as myself. I will be okay with shabbiness, with oldness, with sameness, with smallness, rather than pursuing anything that stirs an animal dissatisfaction. I will remember the words of St. Irenaeus, which I have taken as my watchword in this season: "The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God." I want to be fully alive. And I wonder if the saint meant, not only that to see God is the end of man, but that a living man sees the world as God does, which is to say, as its loving king. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ,” Scripture speaks, “he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” We are crowned, we are recreated, we are new, in all this more than conquerors. So let us wake and learn to wear our crowns.
Next week, I begin an essay series titled A Brief Foray into Everything, on the value of making art badly and how amateur loves help us to live fully alive. I’ll talk about painting, cooking, rock’n’roll, and a whole lot more, filtered through my usual stream of words. Don’t want to miss it? Consider subscribing.
A note: I don’t believe in spoiler warnings in essays about books. When I’m going to talk about a book, I try to give a warning by introducing it. If a spoiler surprises you, I’m sorry, but please take it up with the genre.