On Butler’s ‘Erewhon’

As an English major, with a particular interest in British literature, no less, it’s peculiar to me that I did not come across the fascinating novel, “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler, in my studies. Perhaps because of my personal religious inclinations at the time and my particular college of choice, Clemson, works that were critical of religion were, purposefully or not, conspicuously absent from most course syllabi.

"Erewhon"

In any case, my particular copy came from a friend who thought I might find it to be an interesting read. And indeed I have. To briefly outline the premise, the British protagonist and traveler, Higgs, is working along one portion of an island. The book doesn’t say precisely where, but the notes indicate that Butler was writing from his experiences while in New Zealand. Higgs subsequently decides to trek inland with another character named Chowbok to find a suitable place in which he can raise sheep for profit on his own. Butler was a sheep farmer in New Zealand from 1860-64. Further inland, Higgs, whose companion eventually abandoned him on the trip, finds a civilization called “Erewhon,” the people of which, he later learns, have a decided distaste for machines, sick people and reason, among other things.

In one town, called the City of the Colleges of Unreason, the protagonist comes across college professors that specialize in subjects such as inconsistency, evasion and worldly wisdom and societies such as the “Suppression of Useless Knowledge” and the “Completer Obliteration of the Past.”

In the book, the reader learns of all sorts of practices and strains of thought that are wildly foreign to even 19th century ears, much less 21st century ones. For instance, human conception is really an incarnation from a pre-existence. In these pre-existence, the people, in their pre-forms, are really in some kind of ghostly, ethereal state, and to get into the tangible world, that is, to be conceived inside a mother that is actually not of their own choosing, they have to sign a document waiving their right to choose and confirming that they agree to be conceived. They don’t get to choose what kind of family, poor or rich, into which they are born. Further, Erewhon’s inhabitants have come to believe that technology, and particularly in the form of “The Machines,” is dangerous to the survival of humanity because they feel that the machines could eventually eclipse humans in intelligence. This idea, of course, is quite ahead of its time since it’s really Butler who is writing it some 70 years or so before the first computer was ever actually invented.

The two most important sections of “Erewhon” in my view are the chapters titled, “The Musical Banks” and the three-part, “The Book of the Machines.”

The Musical Banks chapter is a criticism of religious hypocrisy and the almost insatiable desire of the faithful to raise money for the church (God, if he wanted churches to have paid employees and various programs, could he not provide for them outright without making their members pick up the tab with the notorious 10 percent business?). The Wikipedia entry on the book claims the chapter is partially about the ancient practice of “coinage,” but this may be too complicated an interpretation. Butler seems to simply be comparing churches to banks in their capacity and ability to collect and store money. The images of pagan gods on the Erewhonian money also alludes to the tie between the church and pecuniary interests.

Here is Butler’s rather biting conclusion of the Musical Banks chapter:

The saving feature of the Erewhonian Musical Bank system … was that while it bore witness to the existence of a kingdom that is not of this world, it made no attempt to pierce the veil that hides it from human eyes.  It is here that almost all religions go wrong.  Their priests try to make us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those whose eyes are still blinded by the seen, can ever know—forgetting that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no better. …

So far as I could see, fully ninety per cent. of the population of the metropolis looked upon these banks with something not far removed from contempt.  If this is so, any such startling event as is sure to arise sooner or later, may serve as nucleus to a new order of things that will be more in harmony with both the heads and hearts of the people.

The chapter titled, “The Book of the Machines,” outlines why the Erewhon people have come to mistrust machines and why they have, for the most part, done away with them in their society. As Higgs notes, all traces of machines (watches, for instance) have been stored away and are never used. Indeed, Higgs was heavily frowned upon and made to turn over his watch when he entered their city.

In a passage that eerily foresees the 2004 film, I Robot, the Isaac Asimov short stories from the mid-1950s, as well as the greatly diminished physical size of modern computer CPU chips, readers learn of the concern Erewhonians have for the evolution by which they fear machines may morph into something more than they are at the present:

The largest of them will probably greatly diminish in size.  Some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, and in like manner a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. …

“But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.  No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward.  Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it?  And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?

“As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other.  Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller.  There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?—when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own? …

Some people may say that man’s moral influence will suffice to rule them; but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.

“Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being without this same boasted gift of language?  ‘Silence,’ it has been said by one writer, ‘is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our fellow-creatures.’”

The title of the book is an anagram for the word “nowhere,” and quite possibly, while Erewhon the place may be modeled after New Zealand, we can probably think of it in literary as a hypothetical space and not intended to represent any specific region, other than a remote spot where a civilization of people have developed a unique set of beliefs. Through these people’s thoughts and actions, we get a better understanding of what happens when religion plays the trump card and human morality takes a wrong turn. For instance, in Erewhon, sick people are treated as criminals, often dying while attempting to carry out their harsh sentences, while actual criminals are seemingly coddled and given a form of “therapy” to help them recover from their “immoral” state.

As if the satire was not laid on heavy enough while Higgs was actually in Erewhon, once he gets back to England, Higgs begins planning a way to attempt to ship a number of Erewhonians back to Europe, put them to work in a moneymaking venture, complete with shareholders, and convert them to Christianity:

By the time the emigrants got too old for work they could then by shipped back to Erewhon and carry the good seed with them.

I can see no hitch nor difficulty about the matter, and trust that this book will sufficiently advertise the scheme to insure the subscription of the necessary capital; as soon as this is forthcoming I will guarantee that I convert the Erewhonians not only into good Christians but into a source of considerable profit to the shareholders.

All things considered, then, the entire text of the book is basically a business proposal that includes some proselytizing ruminations, and hidden behind the plot is Butler’s own cunning way of dicing up elements of Victorian life with the satirical knife edge.

[Rating: 4.0]

Office read-off 2011: update (6,429)

For the first post on this read-off, see here. In short, Blake, a co-worker of mine and I are having a friendly office read-off to challenge each other on reading this year … or to torture ourselves. We’re not sure which one is more accurate.

In any case, 2011 is winding down, and at this point, I’m about 600 pages behind him. I’m not sure how that happened, except for the fact that Blake and I seem to deal with workweek loathing in different ways. I tend to drink more, read less and kill people in [[Counter Strike: Source]] more. He apparently just reads, and I respect that. Heck, tonight I worked almost 12 hours with only about a 30 minute break, wrote three stories for the newspaper after 7 p.m. and still found time to get through about 15 pages of “Freethinkers” (See my last post). Reading does provide a release. Oh, and if anyone is curious, no, we are not just speed reading or plowing through pulp fiction like Dean Koontz, although in order to catch up, I have seriously considered it.

For the most part, with a few exceptions, it’s all been non-fiction and fairly meaty material at that. I’m attempting to retain as much of the information as possible, and I’m sure Blake is as well, since, if you don’t read non-fiction to learn, you might as well not read.

I’m trying to shoot for at least 8,000 pages by the end of the year. Here’s the list:

– “Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920” – Gillis Harp – 264
– “Letter to a Christian Nation” – Sam Harris (reread) – 114
– “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” – David S. Reynolds – 592
– “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho – 165
– “Middlemarch: A study of Provincial Life” by George Eliot – 794
– “1491” – 403
– “Thomas Jefferson Vs. Religious Oppression” – 150
– “Night” by Elie Weisel – 120
– “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gaven Menzies – 491, finished in spring
– “From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion” by Robert Leckie – 623, finished in late spring
– “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson by Charles B. Sanford – 179, finished in summer
– “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James McPherson – 384, finished in summer
– “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South” by Albert Raboteau – 321, finished in summer
– “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” by John Andrew III – 199, finished in august
– “Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A.J. Langguth – 409, finished 9/7/11 = 5208
– “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788” by Pauline Maier – 489, finished 10/2/11 = 5697
– “The Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton and Jay – 527, finished 10/30/11 = 6224
– “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby – (Currently reading. On page 205 as of Nov. 7, 2011) = 6429

Of course, I will provide another update at the end of the year and list my favorite book, the most rewarding and the most difficult.

Office read-off 2011

So, a co-worker, Blake, and I are competing in a very casual read-off this year where we keep track of every book we read, the page numbers of each, etc. This is what book lovers do to entertain themselves, I guess. Anyway, I’m currently in the lead with 13 books under my belt so far, while he has read 10 thus far. I believe all of his have been non-fiction works, while all but three of mine were in that genre.

Continue reading

Book review: ‘Middlemarch’

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is party dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

***

Known as one of, if not the greatest British novels of the 19th century, “Middlemarch” by [[George Eliot]], which was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, is one of those novels that, if you love literature or study it beyond college, you have to read almost on principle alone. I had not read much, if any, of Eliot prior to this year, but the idea to familiarize myself with “Middlemarch” came to me while listening to the audio book of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” by [[Christopher Hitchens]]. One of the “new atheists,” as they are called these days, Hitchens used a different method in writing his book than some of his fellow nonbelieving authors by referencing or quoting various authors such as [[Joseph Conrad]], [[Salman Rushdie]], Eliot and others.

His reference to “Middlemarch” is helpful in understanding the novel itself. He opens “God Is Not Great” by mentioning one of his former teachers, Mrs. Watts, who, in her quaint way, attempted to teach young Hitchens and the other children in her class about nature and how God was at the center of it all:

However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs. Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said, “So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be.”

The young Hitchens thought this was nonsense, of course:

I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little anklestrap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinianevolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll. The secrets of the genome were as hidden from me as they were, at that time, to everyone else. I had not then visited scenes of nature where almost everything was hideously indifferent or hostile to human life, if not life itself. I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The  eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about.

Though terribly wrong on science, Mrs. Watts represented just the sort of character about which Eliot is speaking in the quote at the top of this post. As Hitchens said, she was a “good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith.” But nevertheless, like the central figure in “Middlemarch,” Dorothea, was mostly silenced by the engines of society and culture in the 19th century to living “faithfully a hidden life” and ultimately resting in “unvisited tombs.”

The novel’s subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” suggests that Eliot, unlike some of her contemporaries, will leave the fancy drawing rooms of the aristocrats, kings and nobles and tell the stories of a few small town residents. And this town is Middlemarch.

Though the plot weaves through rural England, it is epic in nature, spanning more than 85 chapters and is divided into eight books of about 100 pages each (I would not recommend the “Barnes and Noble classics” edition of the work because it contains numerous typos). The main characters are Dorothea Brooke (later Dorothea Casaubon); Lydgate, a young and budding physician with notions of bringing some reforms to health care; Fred Vincy, who is a bit listless and peripatetic through most of the work; Rosamond, Lydgate’s wife; and Will Ladislaw, the nephew of Dorothea’s first husband who does not have much social or economic clout. Readers are also introduced to numerous minor figures.

While many novels in Eliot’s day opened with two people meeting and culminating in a marriage near the end, “Middlemarch” begins with marriage as its starting point and investigates the tensions and troubles often brought on by real family life. For instance, Lydgate, being a young practicing doctor in a small town, eventually gets into some debt and must find a way to come up with $1,000 pounds to pay it off. This financial burden causes tension between himself and Rosamond. Dorothea, in marrying the much older, Casaubon, initially thought she could learn from the studious old man and be an able and helpful mate in his studies. She subsequently learns, however, that his labor is futile and will come to nothing, and he was rather cold in his relations with her throughout their marriage. He eventually dies of heart failure, and Dorothea is left a very young widow until late in the novel.

The finale seemed rather dreary and ambiguous to me, and we are left a touch unsatisfied because, while the novel centers around failed or less-than-satisfying marriages, the two people who would have been a perfect match — I won’t say which two — are only friends throughout and a relationship never consummates. While that scenario would have created a happier ending, I personally favor the way Eliot chose to end the book because it shows that, just like life, we humans don’t always get storybook endings. Many situations in life are chaotic, nonsensical or cruel. Romeo and Juliet don’t live happily ever after. Most marriages, nay, most relationships, fail or grow stale. And this is where Eliot leaves us in Middlemarch.

Lydgate dies in his 50s, and he and Rosamond, while they remained married, had an up-and-down kind of relationship. And Dorothea, the heroin, becomes like Mrs. Watts. She eventually, and happily, marries Will Ladislaw, convincing him that she doesn’t care about his lack of money or social clout. Dorothea, an intelligent character with philanthropic ideas early in the novel, largely abandons her personal aspirations and lives the rest of her life in Will’s shadow after he takes a job in the public sphere working for political reform. This is semi-tragic to me because the reader recognizes the untapped potential in a female character like Dorothea, but Eliot, we can only suppose, attempted to create a realistic picture of 19th century small town life in England, not an idealistic one. I will echo something one of my friends noted: I’m not sure she did her gender any favors in that regard. Nevertheless, if “Middlemarch” had contained one strong, independent female, it would have been Dorothea, but even she, with all that potential, faithfully resigns herself to the hidden life.

[Rating: 3.5]

“Middlemarch” by George Eliot: early thoughts

Just as with “War and Peace,” I plan to offer a book review of “Middlemarch” by George Eliot when I complete the work. I must be on a masochistic streak lately, since I have been reading some very long books in the last six months. The edition of “Middlemarch” that I have clocks in at a little less than 800 pages, and I’ve read 300 so far.

Credit: Amazon.com/Middlemarch (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The story is generally about two sets of couples who end up marrying the wrong people, and in that tension, Eliot spends a lot of time in the novel describing the real struggles that couples often face in marriage and in their relations with one another. As I told a friend recently, the frustration in reading Victorian novels is that, almost without fail, the reader can easily figure out who will marry who, almost as if when a man and woman of comparable age or class meet and have an extended conversation, they will usually become a couple. In essence, then, unless a person enjoys reading about relationships and all that they involve, readers may grow weary of novels like “Middlemarch.” Also, as a frequenter of the classics, it also gets tiring to read how 19th century writers often portray their female heroines. They are, almost without fail, the most beautiful creatures anyone has ever seen and often fragile, easily seduced and “silly” as the same friend termed it.

Thus, in “Middlemarch,” the reader has to wade through much of the prototypical Victorian subject matter. What is different about the novel, however, is that of its subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life.” Yes, it deals extensively with relationships and the joys and despairs they can bring, but it does so in reverse order. Lynne Sharon Schwartz put it eloquently in the introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition:

In any case, Middlemarch, unlike so many notable works of its period, does not end at the altar with the prospect of a settled, if unsatisfying, future; it begins with the marriage and traces the course of its agonies to the final death rattle.

I think this quote highlights why “Middlemarch” stands out among other novels of the day and why it is often heralded as one of the greatest British novels of the 19th century. The book, from what I have gleaned, does not begin and end in some aristocrat’s drawing room or at a court or at a princess’ foot, it begins and ends in a rural small town where change comes slowly and middle class people grind through their daily lives with as much or more passion than the affluent.

Eliot attempted to write a new kind of novel for her day, wherein women were portrayed more honestly, possessing both intelligence and intelligent independence. Whether Eliot succeeded, I’m not sure, since one of the main characters, Dorothea, a young flower in her 20s, married a man who was much older seemingly because she respected his intelligence and wanted to assist him in his studies. It’s, perhaps, one step forward that a woman would be concerned with marrying an intelligent man rather than just any man of means, but two steps back that she perceived that her own self-worth was tied up in him. My inclination is to think that Eliot purposefully made some of the female characters in “Middlemarch” literary foils of herself. But if that’s true, as the friend said, she didn’t do much of a service to women in general by portraying women as dependent on men for their happiness or for their meaning.

Still, I think Eliot’s treatment of women in the novel is one of the more fascinating ways to study the novel, and I hope to write more on this after I slay the 800 pages, and Schwartz is helpful on the final topic:

It’s true that Eliot has much in common with heroine (Dorothea), notably her ardor and her moral convictions. But she definitely does not share her innocence, nor her wealth or position or “oppressive liberty,” which Eliot never knew. In fact, she regards Dorothea with an affectionate irony. Dorothea never finds the elusive, ideal path for her energies. Eliot, by dint of steady labor and innate genius, transformed herself into a master of the English novel.

Camus: ‘The point is to live’

In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer. — Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa,” 1952

***

An online friend of mine has the above quote as one of her signatures in a forum that we both frequent. I don’t recall having ever come across it before seeing her signature, and I told her how profound I thought it was (or some paraphrase of that). I then said that I bet I could write an entire essay on just that sentence. After some prodding from her, I said I would write some thoughts on it after I finished the last John Brown post. So, with that said, here it goes.

***

I should make a concerted effort sometime to count every time the word “sun” is mentioned in Camus’ existentialist work, “[[The Stranger]]” (1942) or in his native French, “L’Étranger.” This is the book that came into my mind upon reading the quote from “Return to Tipasa,” and I will explain why.

Although some would argue whether Camus was actually an existentialist or not, his book about a murder on a sun-drenched beach drips with existential thought. Camus, not much for labels, seemed demure about having that particular one placed on him. Some say, rather, that he more closely followed [[absurdism]]. I would argue that absurdism is at least tightly bound up with [[existentialism]] or falls under the latter altogether.

Readers can follow the Wikipedia links above for explanations of the different strains of philosophical thought, but generally, existentialism is the idea that humans are self-determining beings responsible for their own choices in a seemingly meaningless universe. Some existentialists, like [[Dostoevsky]] and [[Kierkegaard]] were actually believers, but when I refer to existentialism here, I’m referring to the unbelieving segment of existentialists.

Now back to that beautiful winter and invincible summer. Camus in “The Stranger” uses the sun (typically signified by summer or spring) to justify in himself all sorts of emotions, from gaiety to annoyance. Here is the book’s main character, Mersault, narrating the story near the end of Part I:

Masson wanted to go for a swim, but his wife and Raymond didn’t want to come. The three of us went down to the beach and Marie (Mersault’s love interest) jumped right in. Masson and I waited a little. He spoke slowly, and I noticed that he had a habit of finishing everything he said with “and I’d even say,” when really it didn’t add anything to the meaning of his sentence. Referring to Marie, he said, “She’s stunning, and I’d even say charming.” After that I didn’t pay any more attention to this mannerism of his, because I was absorbed by the feeling that the sun was doing me a lot of good. The sand was starting to get hot underfoot. I held back the urge to get into the water a minute longer, but finally I said to Masson, “Shall we?” I dove in. He waded in slowly and started swimming only when he couldn’t touch the bottom anymore. He did the breast stroke, and not too well, either, so I left him and joined Marie. The water was cold and I was glad to be swimming. Together again, Marie and I swam out a ways, and we felt a closeness as we moved in unison and were happy.

A few minutes later on the shore:

Soon afterwards Marie came back. I rolled over to watch her coming. She was glistening all over with salty water and holding her hair back. She lay down right next to me and the combined warmth of her body and from the sun made me doze off.

So, in these passages, Camus sets up the sun as a source of warmth and happiness for Mersault. Later in the book, it will push him to murder an Arab, which would lead to his trial and execution.

Here’s a brief explanation of the shooting from shmoop.com:

Just as Meursault is about to turn around, to leave the beach altogether, we hear this line: “But the whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back.” “But,” he says. He would have left, but the sun was too intense. The sun “[makes him] move forward” toward the spring (and therefore, toward the Arab).

Whether instilling warm feelings in Mersault or agitation, the sun (or summer itself) is clearly established as a powerful force in the novel. Since “Return to Tipasa” was written 10 years after “The Stranger,” the sun/summer dichotomy must have still been pervasive in Camus’ mind. It should be clear at this point, but the “middle of winter” part of the above quote seems to point to a person’s darkest hours, hours of depression or loneliness or loss, while the invincible summer seems to denote the brighter moments in a person’s life, or the times in life in which a person feels the strongest, happiest or most alive.

And here we come to the profound implication: Camus seems to suggest that in his darkest hours, man can actually feel his strongest and most alive, that out of wreckage can come hope, out of despair can come scorn, out of heartbreak can come consummation. If the “scorn” statement sounds shocking, that’s because it is, but witness another astonishing line from Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus:”

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

We see the implications of the invincible summer played out, first, in Camus’ essay about Sisyphus, in which Camus imagines that [[Sisyphus]], condemned to push an ever-tumbling boulder up a mountain over and over again, as a man at peace.

Here are a couple important lines:

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.

and

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Thus, even in anguish or monotony or hard labor or loneliness or depression, a man can find peace, if not in existence itself, in the struggle “toward the heights.” That, to me, is existentialism in a nutshell.

Or, in Mersault’s case, in facing an execution. While Camus himself may have not been apt to welcome labels upon himself, the final passage of “The Stranger” is sun-drenched in existential thought and imagery, and it deserves an airing here. Mersault is in the final moments of his life, and as dawn breaks, his execution for murdering the Arab looms:

I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman (his deceased mother). I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life, she had taken a ‘fiance,’ why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

So, like Sisyphus, in a moment that would shake most anyone to utter despair, Mersault is happy. And here is the consummation for Mersault and for the “Return to Tipasa” quote: Mersault had lived. He had experienced good times and bad, but in both, he found peace.

Or, as Camus said in one part of “The Myth of Sisyphus:”

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. … The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.

Reading lists for 2010, 2011 (Updated)

Since I’ve added a few more reviews than usual to the site, I have installed a new plugin that will allow me to rate the books and movies via a five-star system. This is how it will look, and I already used it in my review of the movie, “Agora“:

[rating:4/5]

Also, I plan to make a concerted effort to keep track of the books I read this year. I’ve never done this pragmatically, so it will be interesting to see how many I can get through. I’m not John Milton (He supposedly studied from 6 a.m. until midnight and then repeated the cycle), and I probably have more hobbies than good ol’ John (Learning and writing being his main pursuits), so I will likely be a little disappointed in the result come December 2011, but I’m at least going to give it a ago and try to top my numbers for 2010. I’ve got quite a few in the cue and began a new one, “Positivist Republic” by [[Gillis Harp]] today. Next up will either be, “Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years” by [[Carl Sanburg]] or possibly, “1421: The Year China Discovered America.” I have read negative reviews on the latter, so I may defer to something else when the time comes.

That said, and since I didn’t make a concerted effort to keep track of what I read this year, here is an annotated and approximate list of books that I read in 2010 based on memory, listed more or less chronologically from most to less recent:

Book review: ‘War and Peace’

Only the expressions of the will of the Diety, not depending on time, can relate to a whole series of events that have to take place during several years or centuries; and only the Diety, acting by His will alone, not affected by any cause, can determine the direction of the movement of humanity.” — Epilogue, Part Two, Chapter VI

***

I’ve heard that when one completes a long, dense or engrossing piece of fiction, one feels a bit as if a best friend, or perhaps, a limb has just been lost. So it is with “War and Peace” (This links to the actual edition I own).

After completing the 1,386-page work last night, I experienced something like this. Although by the time Leo Tolstoy had gotten around to the 100-page epilogue, I admit I was quite ready for it to be over. The rather dry, theology-heavy ending only enhanced this feeling. But the next day, I felt compelled to choose which unread book in my library I was going to begin next. Not able to decide at once, today I grabbed the December 2010 edition of Forbes magazine lent to me by a co-worker, which featured a story on the now-ubiquitous WikiLeaks.org head Julian Assange.

War and Peace

That said, here are some thought the longest piece of fiction I’ve read to date. I’m not sure what was the longest prior to this. Perhaps “East of Eden,” “Crime and Punishment” or “The Brothers Karamazov.” All three are probably denser in language than “War and Peace,” so their 500-600 words kind of felt like 700-800 words.

Either way, for those unfamiliar with the plot details, here’s a brief summary (I offered early thoughts here).

“War and Peace” follows the lives of five Russian aristocratic families from July 1805-1820, and the most central characters are Pierre (the protagonist), Prince Andrey, Natasha, Nikolay, Marya, Count Bolkonsky, Kutuzov (the real commander-in-chief of the Russian army during that period) and Napoleon himself. The plot flips back and forth between various conversations of love, war and politics at home (in Moscow and Petersburg) between members of these families and other luminaries and back to the theater of war, in which Tolstoy, quite omnisciently, relates Napoleon’s exploits in moving toward and eventually invading Moscow to Napoleon’s retreat and the Russians reclaiming their town and their eventual normalcy. In addition to Napoleon and Kutuzov, the novel includes many characters who existed in real life.

Pierre, an orphan and the person we can most closely relate to Tolstoy himself, is the hero of the novel, and the narrative rarely strays far from his steps. Prior to being captured by the French, which had overrun Moscow, Pierre had dreamed up an idea to assassinate Napoleon. This plot was thwarted, however, when Pierre was thrown off his plan by attempting to return a lost girl to her parents. He was eventually rounded up by the French and stayed in captivity for some time. While a prisoner of war, Pierre witnessed the execution of about eight others by the French, but for some reason — Pierre and Tolstoy himself would probably say because of Providence, or simply, God — he was spared. Pierre, ever the thinker but not a very reasonable person, moves from nonbelief, to freemasonry to a more traditional belief in God near the end of the novel. Again, Pierre’s thoughts on theology seem to run parallel to that of Tolstoy himself. Pierre is later rescued by the Russian army and eventually marries and settles down with children after years of free-living, revelry and shiftlessness.

The end of the novel was my least favorite part of the book because as the narrative reaches its end, Tolstoy then begins a rather long exposition of his views on history and “the force” that moves men, armies, societies, nations and individuals. Throughout this section, and unlike some other philosophers, Tolstoy recognizes, but seems unable to accept, the very unreasonableness of life by which some men can kill each other or be led to massacre while others live lives of prosperity and peace.

The challenge readers will face with “War and Peace” is not with the language or the density of the content. I have read much more tightly packed and difficult narratives. Steinbeck and Dostoyevsky again come to mind. The challenge for readers will be mentally holding together a large cast of characters, many of which appear in one chapter and may not appear again for hundreds of pages. Sons often carry similar names as their fathers and often unrelated characters have similar names as major characters. As I said previously, and it held true throughout the rest of the book, I tended to enjoy the descriptions and movements on the battlefield more than I did the dialogue and happenings at soirées and other gatherings at the estates. That said, I suppose we could add another point to Tolstoy’s greatness: to provide themes of love and war in the same epic, thus appealing to a wider audience. Here’s more: Tolstoy’s ability to describe human emotion and the intricacies and complexities of human relationships is unmatched, and his ability to swoop the reader from the battlefield to a children’s bedroom to a P.O.W. shelter to the emperor’s chambers is stunning.

And in all the scenes of love and war, the reader, indeed, is met with the very unreasonableness that, in one town, lovers exchange enchanted glances and hold hands, and in another, soldiers burn and pillage and rend sons from fathers. All the while, the reader is asked to either accept the unreasonableness of it all as a matter of life — as I do — or defer to Tolstoy’s omnipotent “force” that governs and determines everything. And that force is God.

[rating: 4.8/5]

‘War and Peace’: First thoughts

This is probably the longest I’ve gone without writing anything for this blog. For the eight people reading this, my apologies. Blame Leo Tolstoy. Or, any of my other various hobbies.

So, yes, I have begun the stifling task of engaging myself in one of the longest novels ever written, War and Peace. This is the version I have, which clocks in at 1,424 pages.

I will offer only a few thoughts here. When I finish it (I’m about 625 pages in), I’ll most likely write a fuller account of the experience. I call it an experience because reading a book such as this isn’t quite like plowing through whatever predictable plots Dean Koontz might be churning out this week. It’s the kind of book that you carry with you everywhere. You read it in 10-20 page chunks whenever you get some free minutes. You reread certain passages to make sure you catch the meanings. You put off reading anything else, for if you try to juggle two or three books at one time, “War and Peace” may never be completed, or at least not this decade. It seems to require a religious-like devotion (for lack of any better word). And when you are engaged with the text, you know that you are far, very far removed from the social and political climate described therein, but you are drawn back to that time by Tolstoy’s godlike ability to bring you inch-close to the dirt under the warhorse’s hoof or the fire inside a lover’s gaze. He tells you, not only what the main characters think, feel and dream, but even what various animals might be thinking at certain points within the plot. For instance, what a wolf may be thinking when it pauses to weigh its options on a hunt or what a horse may be thinking on the battlefield as bullets whiz by.

For someone who may undertake “War and Peace,” the first 200-300 words will be the most difficult, as you will be immediately hit with a barrage of characters, some minor, some major, and in the early going, the reader is not quite sure which is which. Tolstoy crafts the opening beautifully with one of numerous soirées related throughout the book, which gives the reader the opportunity to, first, become acquainted with many of the characters, and second, become familiar with the type and content of the conversations that will be prevalent throughout the novel. I attempted to read “War and Peace” about a year ago, but the endeavor ended only after about 150 pages. But I am resigned this time to soldier on. And soldier I will … until the Great Man, Bonaparte, falls in 1812.

As it happens, I was scanning the Web for something to write about this evening and came across this piece about our brains’ ability, or not, to understand what’s real and what’s figurative. It was literally the first thing my eyes glanced at when I went to The New York Times’ site. I decided to feature this because of this coincidental “teaser” that accompanied the column:

This Is Your Brain On Metaphors: Our brains are wired to confuse the real and the symbolic. And the implications can be as serious as war and peace.

The plague

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. — “The Plague,” Albert Camus

In separate research, scientists learned recently that the bubonic plague, which wrecked the lives of millions of Europeans starting in the 14th century and continuing through the 17th, indeed originated from China. The plague is said to have killed off 30 percent or more of Europe’s population at its height, and reemergences of the disease continued about every 10 years for centuries.

In the above-referenced article from The New York Times, the causal element of the plague was a bacterium known as Yersinia pestis.

According to the article:

Dr. Bramanti’s team was able to distinguish two strains of the Black Death plague bacterium, which differ both from each other and from the three principal strains in the world today. They infer that medieval Europe must have been invaded by two different sources of Yersinia pestis. One strain reached the port of Marseilles on France’s southern coast in 1347, spread rapidly across France and by 1349 had reached Hereford, a busy English market town and pilgrimage center near the Welsh border.

The strain of bacterium analyzed from the bones and teeth of a Hereford plague pit dug in 1349 is identical to that from a plague pit of 1348 in southern France, suggesting a direct route of travel. But a plague pit in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom has bacteria of a different strain, which the researchers infer arrived from Norway.

The three plague waves have now been tied together in common family tree by a team of medical geneticists led by Mark Achtman of University College Cork in Ireland. By looking at genetic variations in living strains of Yersinia pestis, Dr. Achtman’s team has reconstructed a family tree of the bacterium. By counting the number of genetic changes, which clock up at a generally steady rate, they have dated the branch points of the tree, which enables the major branches to be correlated with historical events.

In the issue of Nature Genetics published online Sunday, they conclude that all three of the great waves of plague originated from China, where the root of their tree is situated. Plague would have reached Europe across the Silk Road, they say. An epidemic of plague that reached East Africa was probably spread by the voyages of the Chinese admiral Zheng He who led a fleet of 300 ships to Africa in 1409.

“What’s exciting is that we are able to reconstruct the historical routes of bacterial disease over centuries,” Dr. Achtman said.

What’s terribly unexciting is the message pregnant in the conclusion of Camus’ “The Plague,” that the bacterium may not be done with mankind yet, and as we’ve seen through the centuries, there’s no reason to believe that it won’t rear its menacing head again at some point in the future. In isolated cases, it already has. Luckily, we live in an age of modern medicine — far alien to people in the 14 or 17th centuries — where mass outbreaks could likely be quelled.