O Brave New World, That Has Such People In't

Okay.  Back on line , in theory.  Still getting used to my laptop.  Finished with my Shakespeare class.  Will update my readings this weekend.  Thanks for your unaccountable patience.

The Forsyte Saga

Although Galsworthy wrote nine volumes about this English family, I had previously read only the first two. I am currently enjoying "To Let", the conclusion of the trilogy which earned him the Nobel, and it is, if anything, at least as satisfying as the earlier installments. His pellucid prose is vastly relaxing in a world as different from Fortsytian England as possibly could be.

317 days, 43 novels, 45 works of non-fiction to go

The Decline and Fall of Cybernetic Civilization

Due to an unexpected computer virus, I will be posting only very intermittently until I update my system (with a new computer, as the old one has rigor mortis).

I beg your indulgence.

In the meantime, I have completed four books:

How Reading Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
The History of Natural Religion by David Hume
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


320 days, 43 novels, 45 works of non-fiction to go.

English Gothic

After two gloomy, drizzly days of leaden skies and adequate peace and quiet, I have managed to finish Chadwick, Waugh, and McGee.  I will attempt to give a rapid encapsulation of my response to each.

First, Chadwick on the Early Church.  This was at least my third attempt to get all the way through this survey of doctrinal developments in early Christianity, not because I found it tedious, but because the theology does tend to become rather intricate in spots, and the various heresies, synods, ecumenical councils, and contending figures become mixed up in a welter of just so many tempests in Alexandrian, Antiochene, Roman, or Constantinopolitan teapots.  Montanist?  Donatist?  Sabellian?  Arian?  Pelagian?  After a while, it becomes problematic to feel that any of these positions means very much in the struggle to know the ultimate God.

Next, Waugh on the decline of the landed aristocracy.  The first two thirds of this novel are fully as brilliant as anything that crops up in Vile Bodies or Decline and Fall.  The humor is superb, the satire is vicious, the characters are memorable and completely devoid of self-knowledge.  (Is the lack of all self-knowledge an inevitable concommitant of wealth coupled with youth?)  It is only when the scenery cuts to Tony's Brazilian adventure that Waugh seems to lose his way; it reads as a totally alien second novel suddenly welded onto the first, a darkly realistic foray into adventurous exoticism that seems utterly uninvolved with the snarky comedy of manners that has gone before.  Admittedly, Vile Bodies betrays this same strange and totally macabre sort of ending, so perhaps it's a Waugh tic, but I can't say that I'm a fan.

Finally, Selma, an historical novel that is perhaps better described as fictionalized history.  Because I wasn't expecting Dorothy Dunnett, I found Judge McGee's novel to be arresting and well-conceived, particularly in the brilliant formulation of permitting the War Between the States to pass in all its essentials as a vast caesura:  after the description of Sam's trial by fire, the narrative cuts immediately to the closing months of the conflict.  This serves to separate the novel into two unequal halves:  a longer first half which concentrates on describing the nuts and bolts of a slave-holding society, and does so much better than Margaret Mitchell did in her 1936 tome, and the Byzantine political infighting behind the march to secession; and a shorter conclusion which details the aftermath of a conflict which Judge McGee obviously feels might have been avoided had clearer heads been allowed to prevail.  The epilogue is as philosophical as Tolstoy's postscript to War and Peace. The noblest part of the novel, other than the author's usually fine ear for dialect, is the gripping immediacy of his description of First Bull Run, which I think moved me considerably more than the analogous battle scene in The Red Badge of Courage.  Perhaps it's the historian in me, but I am willing to forgive the occasional narrative contrivance in order to communicate essential historical background information to the reader.  And I was vastly relieved that the legal drama that forms the novel's conclusion did not take its expected Faulknerian descent into unrelenting tragedy and vulgar violence, but perhaps Judge Mcgee is more of an optimist than Faulkner was.

329 days, 45 novels, 47 books of non-fiction to go.

Okay, It's Official

Thanks to working too much and various other demands upon my time, I am now three books behind schedule after less than a month.  This does not bode well.

337 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."

Although I may continue with this blog for a century or more (I have enormous faith in the potentialities of gerontological medicine) and, accordingly, read more than ten thousand books, still, it is unlikely that I will ever again essay a work by an author with whom I happen to be well-acquainted personally.

Judge Val L. McGee is the father of my best friend from school in Alabama; like many brilliant and successful Southern gentlemen of a certain generation, he is a vastly erudite amateur scholar of the War Between the States (Yankees of the same social class and economic level tend to gravitate toward World War II, for some reason; perhaps one must be European to appreciate the sacrifices of Flanders).  Be that as it may, Judge McGee's historical novel Selma, set in the small city of that name in 1860 and ongoing, is less an American novel than an exercise in history as a novel.  The operant parallel here is, of course, War and Peace, although Judge McGee would be the first to decry any casual comparisons with Tolstoy, and, less obviously, Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea and, more obscurely, Israel Joshua Singer's The Brothers Ashkenazi.  In all four cases, a gifted writer weaves a similar tale of similar lives in dissimilar settings:  Alexandrine St. Petersburg, the Don basin, shtetl Poland, ante-bellum Alabama.

At this point I should confess to an ineradicable penchant for the roman fleuve and the dynastic biography a la Buddenbrooks and the Palliser novels of Trollope.  I am not so concerned with WHAT will happen to characters so much as why, when, how, and what everything looked like at the time.  I am the only person I have ever heard of who thinks reading all twenty-seven volumes of Jules Romains' Les Hommes de Bonnes Volonte would be a hell of a good way to spend a summer vacation.  I pray for a broken leg so that I can spend six weeks in traction in order to finally get past the "Ouverture" of  A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.  Thus, vast historiographical romps like Selma are very far from earning my enmity.

Do I need to know the in's and out's of Alabama's slave codes of the 1850's?  Do I need to follow the tug of war between secessionists and Unionists in quite the amount of detail which Judge McGee provides?  As I tell millionaires at my place of employment on a daily basis:  "This isn't about need; it's about want."  And I want to know as much as possible about the truth of slavery, because only with the truth of slavery THEN can I have the barest hope of understanding the reality of racism in America NOW.

339 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

The Voyage of the Hero

 Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces is, like Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, one of the most intriguing books I have ever encountered.  This is because, among its major themes are two overarching questions.  First, are all mythic traditions, including all the world's religions, basically the same, with details differing due to geography and climate, because human nature is everywhere basically the same?  The monomyth and Jungian psychology seem to answer with a resounding yes.  Second, is the hero's journey one restricted only to a few extraordinary souls widely separated in time and place, or is it a process which every human being must undergo whether he will or no?

This brings us to a consideration of who and what goes toward making up a hero.  Obviously, Theseus and Heracles are very different from Ronald Reagan and Joe Dimaggio.  Is a supernatural or fanciful element required for a hero to achieve mythic stature?  If so, then St. George and Siegfried and Joan of Arc are heroes in a way in which George Washington and Winston Churchill and Otto von Bismarck are not.  Is heroism a function of courage (Achilles) or wisdom (Solomon) or faith (St. Francis of Assisi) or is it a combination of other qualities entirely?  Is the hero chosen by the gods, or does he choose himself?

It seems to me that the call to adventure is something which virtually everyone on earth experiences, usually in youth, and which virtually everyone on earth likewise ignores or rejects deliberately.  The hero, I think, must break out of the shackles of whatever narrowly circumscribed society in which he finds himself because he finds it irremediably inconsistent with the element of the divine within himself.  The drudgery of adhering to societal mores and sequences--"Birth!  School!  Work!  Death!"--is not his way, and he recognizes this early on and fights with every fiber of his being to seek another path.  This voyage of discovery takes him to strange and unfamiliar terrain which, like Marco Polo, will cause those who stayed behind to accuse him of falsehood and error; only the hero will realize that the journey was essential because of what he brings back with him.

So how does the survivor of the epic journey communicate with those for whom no epic journey is possible, who are so entirely blinded by the triviality of daily routine and money-grubbing and materialism and sex that other modes of organizing awareness can only seem like an episode of dementia?

Mathematics will not work, and this is why science has largely failed modern man.  The experience beyond all experience is irreducible to number, contrary to the hopes of the Pythagoreans.  But poetry, and even the poetry of music, may fare no better;  Keats, a profound hero in my eyes, was rejected by his contemporaries and remains rejected still.  The poetry of Jesus, second-rate as it no doubt was, has been so utterly twisted by twenty centuries of vested interests that it is hollowed of all value:  witness the fact that the teachings of Jesus, entirely anti-materialistic in their tendency, are diametrically opposed by the national culture of the United States, which, by staggering paradox, claims to be the most Christian of modern nations while at the same time is unquestionably the most money-oriented and least spiritual nation in the history of Western Civilization.  (Matt. 19:21 is the pertinent citation here)

Campbell is less effective when he mimics Fraser in his marshalling of evidence, and one wonders which of the two great arguments which he apppears to be making occupies the central place in his intellectual affections.  I suspect that in 1949 when this book first appeared he was more the scholar and therefore inclined to emphasize the first truth which, while hardly original, would still come as news to most humans living today.  The second, more profoundly Jungian reading of the mythic material, was one he probably came to embrace more and more as he aged and his wisdom, like Chateau Ausone 1846, mellowed.

339 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

 In what I hope will be one of the more aggressive projects within this blog, I will attempt to read several longer works of scholarship that have always intrigued me.  Among these, the major works of the magisterial French historian Fernand Braudel; in particular, both volumes of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II and the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism. Also, the two-volume abridgement of Professor Arnold Toynbees magnum opus A Study of History will be essayed, along with Professor Georges Lefebvre's classic study of The French Revolution and Eric Hobsbawm's four volumes of modern history.

To begin with, however, I've already commenced my delving into Joseph Campbell's four-volume masterpiece, The Masks of God, by reading his 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is both brilliant and fascinating.  Wish me luck!

341 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

Thank You, Barney's New York!

Okay, I realize that this blog is supposed to be a dry-as-dust compendium of my reactions to the great literature of the past and the great works of modern scholarship.  But, occasionally, Plato and Mendelssohn and Toynbee and Thomas Mann have to step aside for a bit of life that actually exists outside of their pages, in the straitened realm that is the only universe which most Americans ever experience, a world of music and drinks and a certain camaraderie which may be more or less ersatz, depending upon the setting.

Barney's New York at Northpark in Dallas is considerably more stylish than my addiction to books and the gym permits me to experience on anything like a regular basis, so wandering into the party on the second floor tonight was very much like the scene in Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, where the title character stumbles into the engrossing and enigmatic Lost Demesne, where grace and beauty and bafflement go hand in hand.  (Don't you just love the French?)  The music was on my wavelength, especially when the danseuse of a DJ played Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which I will always remember because of its vaguely millenarian music video of the early 80's  (Remember that she taught at an English boy's school at which the Anti-Christ was a star pupil?)  The pink martinis were exceptionally handsome in performing their duty as Faulknerian "imagination lubricant".

Most alarmingly, the effortlessly attractive Jan Strimple, so comfortably at the centre of the Dallas fashionista universe, made a special effort to approach me and ensconce me in the warm  glow of her inimitable supermodel flame, the embers of which will remain with me through the weekend, at the very least.  No doubt she mistook me for someone far more important, as Jahweh no doubt mistook the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai.  No matter.  The Decalogue persists!  And I glow in the Jane Austen warmth of her convo.

341 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

I bless God for my life

It has been seven days since my last post, an omission which I can only excuse by work-related pressures, an acute crisis of intellectual faith, unexpected news from my physician, and my arrival at a life-changing decision which will take at least a year to fully work out.  In the meantime, I will continue my reading.

The Rector of Justin has been on my list for decades; I suppose I must have stumbled across it while at Dartmouth and was intrigued enough by the first few pages to have mentally consigned it to some future quiet afternoon.  While the past septet of afternoons have been anything but tranquil, I can say without qualification that my initial instinct was not misguided:  this is an unquestionably great book.  But, of course, I find A Separate Peace and The Last Convertible and even The Rule of Four likewise memorable and worthy, so it is possibly that the setting and the subject comprise a lure to which my peculiar curriculum vitae leaves me unusually susceptible.

The fictional biography of a great man must have precedents in literature; it seems like the device a Balzac must have employed more than once.  But unlike Eugenie Grandet or James'  Washington Square, the life of Francis Prescott is a whole rather than an incident plus its corollary aftermath.  It is a  bildungsroman, but one which values every phase of a man's life on the same par as the halcyon days of his youth.  Along the way, it asks all the big questions about God, faith, love, family, a life's calling, the nature of education, and the true and proper appraisal of one's achievement.  It seems to me a hopeful book, although I can see how other readers might deem it otherwise.  Auchincloss seems to all but declare in his denoument that his purpose in writing is to inspire, but to inspire who?  And with what?

342 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

Alexandria, au revoir!

What is it about North Africa that leads novelists writing in English to write so disappointingly?  Not that Durrell does not have some good characters (the cabalist Balthazar, the lesbian painter Clea, above all the wealthy Copt Nessim) and some good scenes (the duck hunt which takes up most of Part Three is genuinely fascinating and suspenseful) but the exoticism which had lured me to read the book is overwhelmed by crudity and metaphysical blathering.  The writing is frequently arresting, and the thought is often provocative, but Justine the character is a frightful bore (I have always found neurotics entirely uninteresting) and the narrator-protagonist Darley is weak, spineless, and cruel to the hapless Melissa.

Nessim's descent into madness is the only element of dramatic suspense in the novel.  Minor characters like Pombal, Scobie,  the furrier Cohen, are interesting but essentially unnecessary; like much of the novel, they might have been edited out with hardly any loss.

It is difficult to finish a novel when neither of the main characters seem to possess enough character that we care whether they are run over by a streetcar or kidnapped by Bedouins.  Durrell may have shot his bolt with me, occasional lines of great poetic beauty notwithstanding.

349 days, 48 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

Ecce Homo!

That Jesus is the most mysterious personage in human history is a banality barely worth mentioning, but this mystery derives from three very specific facts:

First, the baffling paucity of information about the physical circumstances of his life have led some to deny his historicity altogether.  I shall take the Romans at their word, especially Flavius Josephus and Lucian of Samosata, and grant Jesus historical reality (besides, I should hate to have to give up Lao-tse).

Second, the fact that such a curious congeries of apocryphal words and legendary acts should have inspired the most universal and enduring mass of interlocking religious faiths yet to arise.  For this, I have no explanation.

Third, far beyond the mysteries of biography and propagation, is the theological mystagogia of incarnation, atonement, and trinity.  As any Sunni imam will tell you, this is very strange stuff.

So where does this leave us?  Obviously, with a plan of action, although I will dispense with Huston Smith's recommended works, as they are more than a little dated.  I propose to read one more book in the following year on each of the major religions, and at least three on Catholicism (Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy appear less attractive to me, intellectually, from Smith's summary). Only in the course of this study will I attempt to frame a critique of Christian belief.

349 days, 49 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.

"We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love"

Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet has been on my list for a long time, but, now that I am midway through it, I must confess to a certain disappointment.  I had attempted to read Justine in 2007, but was stopped cold by the following passage:

"A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house.  It is too heavy to transport to the slaughter-house so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive.  They hack through the white flesh--the poor creature looking ever more pained, more aristocratic, more puzzled as its legs are hacked off.  Finally there is the head still alive, the eyes open, looking round.  Not a scream of protest, not a struggle.  The animal submits like a palm-tree.  But for days afterwards the mud street is soaked in its blood and our bare feet are printed by the moisture."  (p. 62)

Not until page 112, when Justine makes the observation quoted above, does the purpose of Durrell's rather depressing art manifest itself.  He intends to portray, across the broad canvas of four interrelated novels, human love as inextricably akin to vivisection (Balthazar is gay, Clea is a lesbian, so even homosexual love will not be spared), and reading Justine certainly takes on more than a tinge of masochism.  The narrative follows its obsessional psychometry in a confused stream of conciousness which is explicated by the nameless protagonist (?) as follows:

"What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place--for that is history--but in the order in which they first became significant for me."  (p. 115)

Unquestionably there is art here, but it is concealed and turbid in a manner that is thoroughly unlike Faulkner's, where every word is guaranteed to coalesce into a seamless whole, eventually.  Here, the reader harbors no illusion that such closure is possible, given the cosmic dilemmas which Durrell has posed.  Unlike the cast of Paul Bowles' wretched The Sheltering Sky, it is impossible to doubt that Durrell's characters are real people, but one does wonder whether all the philosophy about love, life, civilization and its malcontents, is actually leading anywhere.

But, as I said, I am only at the half-way mark, and perhaps by being premature in my judgements I am also being somewhat unfair, like critiquing a Sibelius symphony after the adagio, which my colleague Jim would certainly regard as the mark of a boor.

351 days, 49 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

Adventures in Dog-Sitting

I'll be out of touch for the next few days as I take care of the Hound of the Baskervilles for Billy and Jim who will be in Charlottesville to watch the Horned Frogs crush the Cavaliers.  But given free run of their palatial Gothic manse, with its crennelated battlements and mouldering corridors, I should be able to catch up just a bit on my reading.  The books I'm taking along are:  the previously alluded to Conan Doyle; Prof. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which promises to be a tough slog; Homer; John Hale's magnum opus; Herbert Butterfield's classic The Origins of Modern Science, and my next novel, Lawrence Durrell's Justine, which has already defeated me once.  Wish me luck!

356 days, 49 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

Ye Be Gleg Aneuch with the Claymore, Laddie

Sir Walter Scott's Waverley is a romantic novel in which romantic love of the conventional sort plays only a surprisingly small role.  On the most surface level, it is a bildungsroman of a fairly traditional type:  the idealistic young protagonist who achieves maturity by being caught up in the passions and perils of warfare. Beyond that, it is an exercise in sociological memory, portraying to the best of Scott's very considerable ability the manners and mores of a Scotland that had largely vanished away "Sixty Years Since."  Modern American readers might resent the enormous lengths Scott goes to in resurrecting this vanished age,often more travelogue than narrative, but I found it entirely charming, with vivid scenes and vibrantly memorable characterizations.  As a fictionalized history of "the '45", the author is scrupulously careful not to stray far from the available sources.

But Scott's greatest achievement, it seems to me, is to call into question the morality of the English victors, by exhibiting in counterpoint a vanished way of life founded upon honour, generosity, hospitality to strangers, and loyalty to Clan and Laird. Ultimately, the destruction of the Highland clans after the catastrophe at Culloden was the twilight of a way of freedom through belonging to an extended family, the downfall of a system of obligations to a Laird who was immanent and personal and involved; against a modern state, with its alien ruling house, which is distant and impersonal and ultimately uncaring about the fate of the individual.

Waverley is not merely Scott's lament for the loss of a Scottish past aristocratic, romantic, worthy, and noble, to a British present increasingly crass, commercial, polluted, wage-driven, materialistic, anonymous, ignoble, and inglorious.  It is also the substitution of one kind of God for another or, perhaps, as the modern age has amply demonstrated, for none at all.

357 days, 49 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem

For an American born since 1949, whether Jewish or not, a profound and sympathetic understanding of the Jews, both as a people and a faith, is not a nugatory obligation: it is absolutely vital.  Even beyond the invincible fact that all the mansions of Christ rest upon Jewish foundations, every ethical human being is obligated to study the Jews because of their vast contribution to morality, one that is unique and uniquely absorbing, as the most cursory examination of the Tanakh will amply demonstrate.

And yet, my own exposure to Jewish traditions and Jewish thought has been massively conflicted.  Whereas Huston Smith reveals himself to be an unapologetic enthusiast, political events in the Middle East since his book first appeared in 1958 have inevitably served to temper any incipient adoration on my own part.  The Palestinian people appear to languish in a condition which some would say parallels that of the Hebrews at the beginning of the Book of Exodus:  downtrodden, economically subservient, a forgotten people without hope of redemption.  I will address three objections to Smith's essentially triumphalist description of Judaism in the paragraphs that follow.

First, the efficacy of the notion that God acts on behalf of Israel in historical time, and reveals his wishes for his chosen people through historical events, obviously must stand or fall based upon the demonstrable historicity of the Biblical accounts, but especially on the twin stories of the Covenant with Abraham and the epic of the Exodus, up to the revelation of the Pentateuch and the conquest of the Promised Land.  The first is an essentially private experience, no more provable or disprovable than the Buddha's awakening or the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed, so I will concentrate on the second.  While Biblical archaeology is a vast subject, my preliminary look at the question reveals that there is anything but concensus among the experts as to whether the event is or is not purely mythical; even among those who believe that the evidence supports it, dating of the Exodus varies from the Sixth Dynasty all the way forward to the Nineteenth, a span of some thirteen hundred years.  Since the deciphering of the Rosetta stone by Champollion, Egyptologists have largely dispelled the clouds of mystery that had heretofore hung over the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and there seems to be no evidence from any of the hieroglyphic inscriptions to assist in narrowing down this inexplicably vague answer to what should be, in a culture as literate as the Egyptian has turned out to be, a relatively simple question of dating what is described in the Old Testament as a vastly significant, even civilization-altering series of paranormal events.

Second, the ethical primacy of the Jews among the peoples of the Mediterranean world is called into doubt by the disturbing litany of conquests and massacres detailed in the Book of Joshua.  It seems irrelevant to me whether Jahweh authorized the extermination of the Canaanites or not; if the Sixth Commandment applies only to the Jews, while allowing them unfettered license to murder non-Jews, then the universality of Jewish ethical theory is irremediably compromised.

Finally, the question of Jewish exceptionalism, which Smith attempts to dismiss, I regard as a serious obstacle.  Any objective reading of the Tanakh leaves no doubt that Jahweh holds the Jews in a condition of especial esteem and that this esteem makes them superior to all other peoples on earth, none else of whom having been dignified with a covenant:  the Jews are to regard themselves as absolutely unique, and deservedly so.  As I mentioned in my entry of 1SEP09, a narrowly circumscribed religious dictum cannot, almost by definition, be held to possess an all-encompassing truth.

All of which leads me to remark, like the surfers of the Pumphouse Gang, very mysterioso.

358 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go. 

From the Pen of the Twelfth Imam

The depth of ignorance which prevails in America regarding the history and tenets of Islam is astonishing, considering the importance of the Arab world to US policy since 1949, and the fact that we have largely regarded ourselves as being at war with Muslim fanatics of one kind or another since 2001.  This is an ignorance from which I am myself not immune.

Muslims regard their religion as superior to all others, from the inarguable standpoint that it is unquestionably monotheistic and eschews even the barest trappings of polytheism, in history or practice.  Orthodox Jews may resent imputations of polytheism stemming from the Worship of the Golden Calf, but Muslims harbor an unconquerable belief that only their own faith is absolutely monotheistic and therefore righteous.  Unless one wishes to seem to argue for polytheism, it is difficult to fault their logic, at least so far as the Christian Trinity, the Community of the Saints, or the Adoration of the Virgin are concerned.  Whether this quasi-polytheism is mirrored by the reverence of the Jews for the Torah, as Huston Smith implies, seems less obvious.

I must say that I was surprised and pleased at the Koranic injunction for all believers to donate a fortieth of their net worth to the eligible poor on an annualized basis.  Except for the mandatory taxes on wealth enacted by the Roman Senate after the debacle of Cannae in 218 BCE, I am unaware of any similar exactions against wealth, as opposed to income.  This is, socially speaking, an extremely progressive notion which would be regarded as utterly poisonous by most conservative Americans today, and one can only admire the fact that it has been an integral part of Muslim society for nearly fourteen centuries.

I must confess that I have always harbored a deeply-rooted prejudice against Islam which will be very difficult for me to overcome.  This prejudice derives exclusively from its strict, even Calvinistic and Puritanical tendencies, as is amply demonstrated by what is for me its single most problematic dictum; namely, the absolute prohibition against figurative art.  Although far from universally adhered to (one remembers the glories of Rajput painting, e.g.), the proscription served to prevent the Islamic world from experiencing the glorification of the human form which was such a huge and positive element in the Italian Renaissance, the which served to strip Western Civilization of much of the morbid and moribund asceticism which had prevailed during the late Medieval period.  (The draperies of the columnar sculptures at Chrtres, for example, bear an astonishing resemblance to the draperies in early Buddhist sculpture, particularly the now destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan. This is a remarkable similarity in art forms expressing congruent world-denying belief-systems despite having had no possible artistic interactions.)

358 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

The Soft Overcoming the Hard

I try to re-read the Tao-Te-Ching every year.  Its marvelous concision allows it to be experienced as an integrated whole in a single hour, but consideration of its truths can fill a lifetime.  Pacifistic, anti-materialistic, strongly environmentalistic, it jibes closely with my own nature, but, because I first encountered it as an adolescent, it is possible that it strongly influenced the formation of those core beliefs.  Not precisely theistic, but far from rationalistic, Taoism embraces the mysteriousness of reality in a way which most developments in 20th-century physics appear to corroborate, particularly the Uncertainty Principle of Werner Heisenberg.

359 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

Dragging Myself Through the Negro Streets at Dawn Looking for an Angry Fix

OK, I got no reading done today, because Half-Price Books is having a 20% off sale.  I guess there are more shameful addictions than buying more books when you already have stacks three feet high forming castellated battlements on every available horizontal surface of my rapidly shrinking monkish cell.  But when you stumble over a book that seems to have been put there by the Gods themselves for you and you alone to find . . . well, you get the point.

And so, Professor Herbert J. Muller's Freedom in the Western World ($4) and Swami Prabhavananda's The Spiritual Heritage of India ($1.60) and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz ($5.60) and Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances ($3.20) and The Evolution of Medieval Thought (eighty cents) and Eight Elizabethan Plays (a buck) and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (forty cents) will all take their places in the line-up, waiting their turn, until someday, when I find that I have read nothing in their field for some time, I reach for them, pour myself a glass of shiraz, and turn the first page.

362 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

Bishop Berkeley: a Re-Appraisal

It seems I may have been unduly harsh in my initial reaction to Berkeley's abstruse epistemological essay.  When I came to review sections 110-117, in which Berkeley critiques Newtonian notions of Absolute Space and Absolute Time, he seems to come extraordinarily close to a conclusion which was made famous by a Swiss patent office clerk in a paper in physics published in 1905.  Of course, having only read Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity, and that in my boyhood, it would be presumptuous of me to suggest that Berkeley prefigured the discovery for which Einstein received the Nobel Prize by some 195 years. Making a less veiled accusation of plagiarism would require, at the very least, reading the 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and possibly the 1922 General Theory as well; in other words, a detailed study of the whole of early twentieth-century physics.

In the words of Gerald Ford (in his Chevy Chase avatar), "I was told there would be no math."

362 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

Confucius Say: Man who jump off cliff, jump to conclusion!

It's unlikely that any profound religious and ethical teacher in the history of humankind has inspired so many jokes, most of them scurrilous, as the ancient Chinese sage Kung Fu-tse; this character assassination nearly twenty-five centuries after his death makes two facts very clear.  First, the blase manner in which most Americans openly express their suspicions of, condescension toward, or blatant dislike for persons of Asian extraction, a racist tendency which would seem to them unacceptable and shameful if it were to be expressed toward African-Americans.  Second, unlike Zoroaster, Bodhidharma, Lao-tse, Mahavira, and the Guru Nanak, Concucius is the only Asian religious figure besides the Buddha to have survived, albeit in garbled form, as a living conceptual entity in the 21st-century American popular mentality.

I've read the Analects at least twice, in the James Legge traslation, and found it enormously wise, even if occasionally opaque due to its extraordinary pithiness and unavoidable grounding in alien Chinese societal norms vastly remote in space, culture, and time. With the Dhammapada, the Tao-te-Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita, and The Art of War, it's one of the classic works of Eastern wisdom I hope to re-read every few years until I die; I find that I derive new benefit with each re-reading as a result of my personal growth and the elapsed time in between visits.

I use that word "visits" decidedly.  Re-reading Confucius is like returning to the home of an old teacher, one who, although older, has not lost any shred of the mental acuity which first attracted you to him and caused you, in after years, to regard him as one of the formative influences upon your intellect, character, and life. The Analects is a perfect example of the way in which a thinking person can have a genuine relationship with another mind: two hands touching across the chasm of the centuries because of a shared love of thought and a respect for the undiminished power of ideas.

362 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

"I Refute It Thus!" (Kicking a Stone)

For my sins, I decided to take a break from the current batch of reading and essay something a bit more challenging, Bishop Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.  As exercises in antiquated epistemology go, this one was arduous but manageable, a claim that cannot be made for the tome which it attacks, John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  Having read Locke's Second Essay Concerning Civil Governnent little more than a month ago, I had high hopes that Berkeley's 1710 magnum opus would be less of an ordeal.  No such luck.

Berkeley prefaces the main body of his work with an Introduction of 25 sections which disputes the existence of abstract ideas.  So far, so good.  Then, in sections 1-33 of his treatise, he advances his main argument:  that as we have no direct experience of external reality, but only sense-impressions or ideas within the mind, it is entirely impossible to state with any certainty that any such externally existing material universe actually exists. Realizing how counter-intuitive this seems, he addresses twelve obvious objections in sections 34-81 and some religious quibbles in 82-84.  Then, he examines the ramifications of his Principles, first looking at IDEAS (85-100) and how they relate to Science (101-117), in which the 25-year-old Berkeley presumes to correct the mistakes in Newton's Principia, and Mathematics (118-132), in which he stumbles badly.  Finally, examining SPIRITS, he develops from his Principles closely related arguments for the Immortality of the Soul (133-144) and the existence of the God of the Christian scriptures (145-156) ending with a ringing condemnation of philosophy:

" . . .having shewn the falseness or vanity of those barren speculations which make the chief employment of learned men, [my treatise seeks] the better [to] dispose them to reverence and embrace the salutary truths of the Gospel, which to know and to practice is the highest perfection of human nature."

(As noted above, Berkeley's most flagrant error comes when he denies the infinite divisibility of line segments in geometry, an odd mistake to commit but perhaps inevitable given his orientation towards metaphysical pragmatism.)

While Berkeley was included in "The Great Books of the Western World", I can't see the value of this other than as a historical curiosity, and as a pretext for Dr. Johnson's amusing foray into the stone-kicking alluded to above.

363 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.

The Most Annoying Thing About Books

Well, I've just had that immeasurably unpleasant experience again, while reading Huston Smith's chapter on Buddhism:  the inescapable fact that, due to the profundity of the ideas under discussion and the brilliance of the scholar's exposition of them, I will be obligated to read his book again in the not very distant future.   I might have anticipated this, having only just this evening learned that Professor Smith was far more than merely an instructor in religion and philosophy for a prior generation of MIT undergraduates.  The fact that PBS and Bill Moyers would single him out for a five-part series (http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=1402988) moves him into that select fraternity which includes Joseph Campbell, Niall Ferguson, Jacob Bronowski, Sir Kenneth Clarke, and Mortimer J. Adler:  the public intellectual of scholarly weight, as opposed to the 500-word newspaper and magazine pundits forever mired in the transient political tempests of the moment.

Of course, despite Prof. Smith's newly-established stature, I reserve the right to disagree with him on certain points.  His insistence that Buddhism was a reform movement directed against Brahmanism, while probably true, scarcely justifies his extended analogy between the Buddha and Martin Luther:  describing Buddhism as "an Indian protestantism" (p. 101) seems to go wide of the mark, no matter how pharisaical orthodox Hinduism had become.  And Luther's translation of the Vulgate into German does not brook comparison with the Buddha's teaching in the vernacular:  the Buddha had no particular interest in liberating the Vedas and Upanishads from their Sanskrit obscurity, because his was a path of innovation, not a Lutheran battle for a Pauline primitivism that prefigured the administrative dominance of the Roman curia.  While Luther was nothing if not prolific, the Buddha consigned nothing to writing, despite having received a princely education.  And the Buddha was infinitely compassionate; Luther, in his "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants", went so far as to justify violence on the part of princely rulers to suppress peasant insurrection; this resulted in the killing of 100,000 German peasants in 1525 in the aftermath of the battle of Frankenhausen.

The two men could not have been more different, both in their lives and in the religions they founded.

364 days, 50 novels, 50 books of non-fiction to go.

Does My Sunburn Add or Subtract from My Karma?

By way of preliminary I have to admit that intellectual Hinduism (vedanta) has always held a very powerful appeal to me; it seems scientific in a way which none of the Western so-called "Peoples of the Book"-oriented religions have ever done.  Largely this is because I harbor an invincible attachment to an essentially empirical premise:  the reproducibility of experimental results derived from within the context of the scientific method.  Truth cannot be handicapped by narrow limitations in space or time:  experimental results which are valid only in the thirteenth century, or only on the western coast of Greenland, cannot, by definition, be true.

Hinduism, like Buddhism, Zen, and probably Taoism, are not rooted in historical transactions:  there are no necessarily prerequisite historical events toward achieving enlightenment.  It does not matter, in the cosmic sense, whether one man enacted a covenant with God, whether another received a book from God, whether a third died on a cross.  The scientific religions remain equally true, and equally apprehensible, even if none of the merely historical events associated with their transmission ever in fact occurred.  This is summed up, in the case of Buddhism, by the well-known advice to those seeking enlightenment:  "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"

Just as we might expect that all current science and mathematics could be rediscovered after a global cataclysm in which absolutely all knowledge was lost but humanity survived, it is safe to say that most of the four religious systems I have enumerated above, certainly their more significant elements, would all be rediscovered and replicated, eventually.  The jargon might differ, just as sacred words in English translation sometimes differ from the Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, or Japanese originals, but the essential ideational structure and psychological exercises would, I am convinced, eventually be replicated practically whole.

This is why I find the Upanishads so very much more impressive than the Old or New Testament (I can't speak for the Koran):  the sense of being on the right track toward real progress, in an extremely scientific sense, rather than getting bogged down in a congeries of historiographical myth-making.  The Tanakh, in particular, is of a piece with the Norse sagas like Burnt Njal or  the Nibelungenlied or the Volsunga saga, and, objectively considered, far less impressive as literature than these.  (But perhaps I have an uncommonly low threshold for jeremiads and lamentations; I don't care overmuch for the Vedic hymns, either.)

364 days, 50 novels, 50 books of non-fiction to go.

Burning the Topless Towers of Ilium, Anyone?

In addition to the pair of previously mentioned works, I'll also embark on yet another attempt to make it all the way through Homer's Iliad read aloud.  I've tried it with both Chapman and Pope (the Chapman version purely as an homage to Keats) but I've never manged to get too far past the catalogue of ships before indiscipline or laryngitis sent me hurrying down to Hades. (Perhaps I could manage more vocal stamina if I didn't try quite so hard to sound like a young Larry Olivier?)

Anyway, it's a glorious day out by the pool, I have the highly aural Robert Fagles translation of 1990, and I don't intend to do more than three or four books in one lazy sunny afternoon, taking rests in between books to swim laps, pump out some bicep curls, and meditate on whether the guiding passion of the Iliad is wrath, pride, jealousy, or something else.  The legendary beauty of Helen notwithstanding, it sure as heck ain't love (unless the marriage of Zeus and Hera is a paradigm of marital bliss with which I am entirely unfamiliar).

364 days, 50 novels, 50 books of non-fiction to go.

This Week's Books: Scott and Huston Smith

I've finally decided that Sir Walter Scott's Waverley will be my first novel, while Huston Smith's The Religions of Man will be the first work of non-fiction, appropriately since this project will be an attempt to achieve some measure of personal redemption through books.

364 days, 50 novels, 50 books of non-fiction to go.

The Morphology of Literary Genius

I was recently reminded of the biological truism of embryonic parallelism "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" when I encountered this statement in an annotated bibliography:

"The comedies of Plautus, written near the beginning of Latin literature, are full of lively humanity.  His comic animation and chaotic plots stand in sharp contrast to Terence's quieter, more polished and sensitive comedies of manners."

This distinction seems to be visible likewise in the English comedic tradition, with the sequence from Shakespeare through Ben Jonson to Restoration comedy mirroring Plautus, while Terence is emulated by Addison ("The Rivals", "The School for Scandal") through Goldsmith ("She Stoops to Conquer") to Wilde ("Lady Windemere's Fan", "An Ideal Husband").

I am less able to say whether the sequence remains true to type in French comedy.  Moliere certainly provides adequate exempla of the first mode, but I am insufficiently well-studied to know first-hand whether Voltaire and his contemporaries produced comedy of the other, as they are largely forgotten, at least in translation for readers of English.

Still, it would be interesting to investigate whether this process from farce to sophistication is universal:  does Aristophanes to Menander prove the rule or stand as a counter-example?  Does Chekhov have a farcical predecessor in Russian theatre?  And do American comedies of mid-century conform to either mode?

This all seems to echo the historical morphologies of scholars like Pitirim Sorokin et. al., who attempted to see patterns, even inevitable sequences, in aesthetic or historical development (most famously by Toynbee in his masterful A Study of History, quod vide).

Twenty-Four Hours to Go

Less than a day before I start and I have yet to definitely settle on my first book in each category.  The candidates in Fiction are Sir Walter Scott's Waverley; A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole; The Metamorphoses of Ovid; The Lady of the Lake by Scott; and the Thirteen by Balzac.  I can't seem to find my copy of Louis Auchincloss' The Rector of Justin, so that one will have to wait a month or two.  It's imperative that my first novel not be a mistake, so that I get off on the right foot.

Fewer possibilities in Non-Fiction:  Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, begun many times but never managed to get past the first couple of chapters; Roman Literature by Michael Grant; The Classical Greeks, again by Grant; Berkeley's dangerous Principles of Human Knowledge; and John Hale's weighty The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, which seems to have the inside track.

Any guidance on which of these to essay first will be greatly appreciated.

Faulkner's Imagination Lubricant: Boon or Hindrance?

Okay, so I went to a friend's 80th birthday party tonight in Old Preston Hollow, the mind-bogglingly rich neighborhood where former president George W. Bush has recently acquired some square footage.  Not sure whether the Frida Kahlo's and the Diego Rivera's gracing the walls were authentic, but the rest of the vast urban estate bore an unmistakable frisson of silent connoisseurship, impeccable taste, and invincible wealth.

Whenever I manage to wangle an invite to these enclaves of the hyper-fortunate, I find an excuse to wander the grounds, armed with a flute of champagne or a tumbler of single-malt, until I locate the library.  Just as some in the publishing world can derive hidden data about the sexual orientation of the guy who did the index (Kurt Vonnegut--Cat's Cradle), I learn a lot about my hosts from a few minutes studying the books on the walls.

Here, for example in addition to a plenitude of ordinary volumes:  Jude the Obscure in a Barnes and Noble hardcover, with the erudite maroon binding; Faulkner's Nobel-nominated late picaresque novel The Reivers; Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris in the original French; three plays by the martyred Spanish genius Federico Garcia Lorca;  Rand's Atlas Shrugged, but only in a cheap mass-market paperback (rather than enshrined in hardcover like a cultist of objectivism might display).

More indicative, everything on the shelves willy-nilly, without a hint of organization, except the volumes having to do with Mexican art, sculpture, and belles-lettres, here collected by subject.  Thus are the passions of a house revealed.

There are three reasons to keep books, and three only:  the lowest is to impress passers-by with your erudition and taste; like Jay Gatsby, you have the books without ever bothering to slice the pages open.  The median is stacks of good books organized only very generally, obviously in mid-read, a project in process of transferring ideas from barbaric ignorance to the bare beginnings of knowledge; such is my own working library au moment.  The third and highest is the library of an advanced mind, where the books have attained their places in precisely the same order as they occupy in the intellect of their owner, a sort of hard-copy for the overstuffed cerebrum, in which it is not necessary to remember the opening words of Cicero's First Oration Against Catiline, in the original Latin, because you know precisely where that volume sits (between Caesar's Gallic War and Suetonius, perhaps; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is on another shelf entirely).

The Viewless Wings of Poesy

Okay, so what about works of literature that are NOT novels?  Do they count?  Should they count?  After all, my most recent outing with Shakespeare (King Richard II) took two and one-half hours, about the same length of time I would expect to spend watching an actual production.  And some of the short novels I've counted during my previous training period (Stephen Crane's Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, to name just one example) took less than that amount of time to read.

So, do plays count?

And I have to say no.  After all, I don't want to read 25 plays and 25 novels, which would be relatively easy to do, and shift the onus of difficulty over onto the non-fiction works.  The novels have to remain challenging in order to forestall doomed attempts at (Good God!) Spengler.

But poetry is a different matter.  Does Homer count?  Of course, even if in verse.  The Divine Comedy would count as three.  Paradise Lost but probably not Paradise Regained.  Idylls of the King.  John Brown's Body.  Orlando Furioso.  But not "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Pippa Passes", and other works of similar brevity.  ("Atalanta in Calydon" falls into a grey area, if only for Swinburne's tortured diction . . .)

So long poems, of book length, published and studied separately, count.  Plays do not (Well, maybe "Mourning Becomes Electra".  Good God!)

The Grandeur That Was Greece, the Glory That Was Rome

Which brings us to a major fact about this project:  I don't tend to read anything that's absolutely current.  With 25 centuries of important books to savor in a brief lifetime of seventy or eighty years, I'm not addicted to New York Times best-sellers or the latest fads of scholarship (Someone please assure me that Jacques Derrida is no longer in fashion.)

Glancing through a pile of books on international relations that I hope to include on The List, I see copyright dates of 1994 for Henry Kissinger, 1996 for Samuel P. Huntington, and 2002 for Philip Bobbitt.  Okay that last one is cutting it a bit close, but maybe it will seem more distant in time by next summer.  (I certainly anticipate feeling much older.)  So if you're reading this blog with hopes of getting a review of a current book, you're out of luck.

In fiction, I think twenty years or so will be the cut-off, or even further back if A Confederacy of Dunces fails to make it.  But I intend to vary The List of novels by both by era and country of origin:  not more than two novels from the same century and country in a row, and the 50 novels displaying a wide diversity of provenance when taken as a whole.  The same diversity will manifest itself among the works of scholarship through a diversity of subject matter rather than era or country of origin.

After all, the ultimate object of this project is to plug the woeful gaps in my apparently dreadful education.  (More on that to come.)

And in the Arena of Non-Fiction . . .

For works of non-fiction, the selection criteria are inevitably trickier, inasmuch as I can scarcely be equally expert in every field of study.  How then to determine which books are worth reading?  here, I will defer to the opinions of a previous generation, and attempt to read only those books which remain among the most seminal in their field despite being a quarter century old or more.

Take Joseph A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.  Weighing in at 425 pp. plus index, this is, by practically any yardstick, an astonishingly dull book.  But John Grisham has written relatively few works of economic theory and, before the collapse of Soviet-style communism, this book was highly regarded and much read by the intellectual element of the post-war generation.  Mine is a 3rd edition, meaning somebody liked it.  My bookmark, stalled hopelessly at page 39, is indicative that Schumpeter's style is--how shall I express it--somewhat lacking in sparkle?  But it's published by Harper Torchbooks, an imprimatur which in the 1960's was carried around a lot on campuses from Dartmouth to UVA, and possibly even farther south.

The names in the back of the book are a veritable laundry list of forgotten thinkers once regarded as being of the first water:  Jacob Bronowski, Jacques Barzun, Crane Brinton, Arthur O. Lovejoy, C. P. Snow, Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Barth, Martin Buber, Rudolph Bultmann, Jacob Burckhardt, Frederick Copleston, Johan Huizinga, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Tillich, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Soren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud.

Okay, some big names there.

So that should be the level I strive for.  Whether the books are of more recent date, or vintage Victorian scholarship, the determining factor should be this:  is this a book which would have been a staple of required reading for coursework at Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, back then even if not necessarily now?

What Should Count as an Important Book?

Okay, I've poured myself a very watery scotch, a veritable Easter Island of liquor in a lonesome South Pacific of ice and H2O, and I'm going to tackle one of the ontological questions of this project, namely, which books count?

Obviously, in literature, the classics by novelists who are household names:  Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, Mann, Joyce, Proust, et.al.  (Is Balzac a household name in the United States?  One hopes, one hopes.)  But also less celebrated works that have a certain permanence:  The Rector of Justin, La-Bas, The Sleepwalkers, Il Gattopardo, The Master and Margarita, for example.  I can't expect myself to take on War and Peace or Die Zauberberg every outing.

So, famous authors; authors who should be famous, were the world less crass; and one-offs like, well, Lampedusa's The Leopard comes to mind again.  (I guess I'll be trying to actually finish that one.)

Here I have a confession to make:  like many lovers of books, I've attempted probably three times as many books as I've actually finished.  Swann's Way I've started at least six times; Crime and Punishment three or four; Little Dorritt definitely twice; The Talisman, Ivanhoe, War and Peace, practically every novel by James Joyce.  I'm great at starting books; not so terrific about actually seeing them to a conclusion.

But everything this year started from the beginning except for the books I happen to be in the middle of right now.  My work schedule being what it is, I don't expect I'll finish any of those until the counting starts, but I'll consider them legitimate, given my previous track record (see above).  I'll need all the help I can get once I run out of the Shorter Novels of John Steinbeck.

Crossing the Rubicon

After seeing a movie this past weekend in which a woman cooks her way through every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year's time, I have been intrigued by the possibility of using this rather moribund blog to set myself a deadline and monitor my progress.  Specifically, for the past year I have been trying to read more of the Great Books and their lesser kindred, the significant and important works of literature and non-fiction.

In the last half of 2008, I set myself the goal of reading 50 important novels in 6 months:  I scored 28.  In 2009, it was 50 important novels along with 50 important works of non-fiction:  in the first 8 months, I've only scored 12 novels and 6 non-fiction works.

So how to bring my reading and research to the next level:  two books a week, week in, week out?  Setting myself a deadline and writing about it seems like a program that will achieve the elusive ideal of working as part of a crew rather than as an individual, even if the other seven guys in the shell are somewhere out in the aether of the internet; even if no one reads my reactions to the books I select, the possibility that someone might is motivation to keep to the schedule.

Of course, nobody is going to find David Hume as fascinating as Julia Child's coq au chambertin, or Stendahl as intriguing as  boeuf bourgignon, other than myself, I suppose.  But the American side of the web may surprise me; people are always telling me that I should give my countrymen a bit more credit.

I've chosen September 1st as my start date.  It seems a good day to commence ambitious projects with potentially dire consequences.