Culture
Honestly, Ruben, maybe you should try not saying what’s on your mind for a change
A few years ago, I got into a lift with a former colleague I knew a little but wouldn’t exactly describe as a close friend. In the way that we all have done hundreds of times, I asked how he was, expecting a variant of the standard response: “Yeah, not bad thanks, mate. How are you?”
Instead, this colleague said flatly: “My wife wants a divorce.”
I can’t really remember how the rest of the conversation went in the short but excruciating journey to our floor, so paralysed by awkwardness was I. Did I offer sympathy, constructive advice, compassion? I hope so, but I can’t guarantee it. My colleague was merely saying what was on his mind, speaking his truth, but the lack of social filter, the brutal honesty of the interaction was too much and threw me entirely off-kilter.
Honesty is good. You shouldn’t lie. In most circumstances, it would be better if we all told the truth. In most circumstances. Not always.
There’s a lot to be said for the harmless lie, the artfully concealed truth, the slight diversion from your true feelings when it would be much better for all concerned just to hold back a little bit. Which brings us to Ruben Amorim.
The Manchester United head coach is a very honest man. Incredibly honest. In fact, he’s far too honest, seemingly a man incapable of hiding his true feelings when faced with questions from the media.
Here are a few examples of the extremely honest things he has said in public, since arriving at Old Trafford in November.
“I am not helping my players in the moment.”
“David Moyes is doing a better job than me, it’s simple.”
“I have to sell my idea, I don’t have another one.”
Ruben Amorim often bares his soul in press conferences (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
“Imagine what this is for a fan of Manchester United. Imagine what this is for me. We are getting a new coach who is losing more than the last coach.”
“We are the worst team maybe in the history of Manchester United.”
“This club needs a shock.”
“That is really clear (that United could get relegated), so we have to fight.”
Amorim has always been like this. Some of his former players told The Athletic in January that honesty and clear communication are among his strengths. “We prefer the truth,” one of them said.
But while the managerial straight shooter can be useful, constructive even, there must be a point where it becomes counterproductive. His public self-flagellation won’t necessarily tally with what he says in the dressing room, but you feel it’s unlikely that his players would have been fired up after he declared them the worst team in United’s history — even if he did clarify a few days later that he was referring to himself more than his squad.
It sometimes feels like we, the public, are participating in a mass therapy session, that Amorim is unburdening his soul at every possible opportunity. Maybe that’s good, maybe it feels cathartic, maybe it’s better than bottling it all up.
Imagine if you were his friend and he was constantly telling you stuff like this, though. You’d do your best to help him but there must be a point where you’d say: “Come on, mate… give it a bit of a rest.” He’d be the guy at a party bumming everyone out if he happened to have a bad day.
Amorim has overseen 10 wins from his 23 games in charge of United (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
And there have been a lot of bad days at United so far. It’s impossible not to have some sympathy for Amorim; a young coach who had already achieved plenty but who was coming to the end of a cycle at Sporting CP and was given an opportunity he didn’t feel he could say no to.
He wanted to wait until the summer, as was sensible, but United insisted that he take the job there and then, as was very not sensible. Perhaps he should have held his nerve, trusted that he could finish the season in Portugal and still get a bigger job, and avoid the swirling mess of Manchester United altogether.
But there he is, looking increasingly beleaguered on the touchline and then, once he’s facing the cameras and the microphones, shows the world his truth.
All of this would be very different if things were going better on the pitch. If United were winning, then this column might have been about how refreshing his honesty is, how it’s surely a virtue that has helped relate to his players. But like most other things in football, everything is viewed through the prism of results.
He doesn’t seem to be playing a character or presenting a persona, as managers sometimes do in order to create some distance between their actual self and their public-facing self.
Which, for those outside of United, particularly the media, is great. Having a manager bare his soul rather than stare blankly down the camera and offer a set of interchangeable platitudes is entertaining, an interesting diversion from the norm, grimly fascinating even.
Amorim is an engaging speaker… but not one for sugarcoating (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
For his sake though, it can’t be a good thing. Apart from the debatable benefits of public self-abasement, many of his statements only serve to emphasise the negativity around United — which doesn’t need much emphasising — and create more debate and fevered coverage.
Would anyone seriously be talking about the prospect of United being relegated, given the state of the bottom three, if he hadn’t mentioned it? What is the benefit of comparing himself negatively to Erik ten Hag or Moyes? These are the sort of things that might be true but you don’t need to actually say them.
Apart from anything else, from a self-preservation point of view, there must come a point where his employers think that he’s far too honest, that he is attracting more negativity to United than they can stomach.
Perhaps there was some evidence that the United boss can play the game when he downplayed Alejandro Garnacho’s reaction to being substituted against Ipswich Town in his latest press conference on Friday, saying that the 20-year-old will pay for a team dinner after disappearing down the tunnel rather than taking a spot on the substitutes’ bench.
Still, the advice to Amorim is just to dial it back a little. Everyone will understand if you try a little positive spin on things occasionally. Nobody will blame you for a little fib every now and then.
And if you get into a lift and someone asks how things are going, just say: “Yeah, not bad thanks, mate. How are you?”
(Top photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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