It’s All Good

In my master Plan, I have written for year 9, “Richard Baxter: Dr. Johnson says all of it is good.” With that kind of recommendation from one of my heroes, I just had to read something by Baxter. At some point I discovered the title Practical Works. But at some later point (I don’t remember when or where), I must have learned that Practical Works is quite long (I’m looking at an offer right now on logos.com for an edition in 23 volumes), and I must have found a further recommendation or some intriguing information about an excerpt because my Plan then says, “Just read chapter 3.” 

At the beginning of this year, I gave myself a week for this chapter, called ““General Grand Directions for Walking with God,” thinking that I’d get ahead five or six days. Little did I know that the single chapter was as long as a book: about 300 pages! I had a schedule to keep and not much wiggle room this close to the end of the year, so I confess I had to skim the chapter. Fortunately, Baxter wrote this chapter in something like outline form, making it very easy to skim while making sure that I missed none of the key points.

The chapter contains seventeen “Grand Directions,” each of which has a number of sub-directions and other lists of subordinate points. Some tell the reader to “strive” or to “labour” to do some given thing, but most came in a form directing the reader to consider or understand or study some aspect of God’s character or of his relationship with us. Really following these directions instead of just reading (or skimming!) them properly needs some quiet and some time for meditation. For these times, there should be a zeroth direction: Strive to set aside adequate time for meditating on these directions. 

Consider some examples:

• Grand Direction IV: “Let it be your chiefest study to attain to a true, orderly, and practical knowledge of God, in his several attributes and relations; and to find a due impression from each of them upon your hearts, and a distinct, effectual improvement of them in your lives.”  

• Grand Direction V: “Remember that God is your Lord, or Owner: and see that you make an absolute resignation of yourselves, and all that you have, to him as his own.”

• Grand Direction VII: “Continue as the covenanted scholars of Christ, the Prophet and Teacher of his church, to learn of him, by his Spirit, word, and ministers, the farther knowledge of God.”

• Grand Direction X: “Your lives must be laid out in doing God service, and doing all the good you can, . . . remembering that you are engaged to God, as servants to their Lord and master.”

• Grand Direction XI: “Let it be most deeply engraven in thy heart, that God is infinitely good, and amiable.”  I especially like this sub-direction: “The great means of promoting love to God is duly to behold him in his appearances to man, in the ways of Nature, Grace, and Glory.”

• Grand Direction XII: “Trust God . . . ; and quiet thy mind in his love and faithfulness, whatever shall appear unto thee, or befall thee in the world.”

• Grand Direction XIII: “Diligently labor that God and Holiness may be thy chief delight.”

And the most poetically phrased of the Grand Directions:

• Grand Direction XVI: “Let you life on earth be a conversation in heaven, by the constant work of faith and love: even such a faith as maketh things future as now present, and the unseen world as if it were continually open to your sight.”

It’s too bad I had to skim the chapter; as Dr. Johnson said, it was all good. Reading it straight through over several days wouldn’t have been right, either, though. I think the chapter should be read one direction per day for as long as that takes. There. There’s my direction for you.

Trollope Comes Through Again

Last year, I wrote here that I couldn’t figure out which was the central plot of Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator, and that the title didn’t point the way since the Senator’s story was at most the C plot. This year, I read Trollope’s Mr Scarborough’s Family, and, although a large number of subplots weave their way through the fabric of the book, the story of the manipulative Mr Scarborough and his will and his two problematic sons is clearly at the center. It isn’t the last story touched upon, though. Trollope knew his main audience consisted of housewives and teenage girls, and he put in a love story, as well. According to his usual plan, he announces in the first few chapters who “is to be our hero” and who “is to be our heroine.” So we know right up front who is going to get married at the end of the book, and yet it’s still a fun ride getting the lovebirds to their nuptial bliss.

Before the age of the psychological novel and stream-of-consciousness narration, Trollope loves to give his readers insight into his characters’ thinking. Augustus Scarborough (son number 2) hardly does anything in the book without two or three secret motives. I have to admit to you, I often find myself saying, with regard to certain people who continue to cause me grief every few months, “Why did they do this? I have know idea what’s going on in their heads! I guess I’m glad I don’t understand how they think.” But somehow Trollope does understand (at least as far as I know) how young girls in love think, how lawyers think, how ashamed gambling addicts think. And he has to use an omniscient narrator to get into their minds, because almost no character in a Trollope book just says straight out what he or she is thinking. It’s even more seldom that a character says what he’s feeling. Even when they don’t have hidden agendas, these characters have to deal with Victorian standards of proper speech. Poor Mr Prosper once actually blurts out exactly what he thinks in a moment of frustration, in front of his vicar no less, and then spends a long time apologizing for the breach. And it’s all fascinating to me, this translation of thought to the language of acceptable intercourse. Of course, some personages of low character show their baseness precisely by expressing their thoughts directly, but in a Trollope novel, these people are usually mere plot devices and not characters with story arcs.

As far as characters with story arcs go, Mr Scarborough’s Family has quite a list of good ones. Mr Scarborough senior, who believes he knows morality better than the established law, goes to great, deceptive lengths to work around the law and do exactly what he sees to be right, even if he has to lie to and about his sons. Mountjoy Scarborough, son number 1, has a gambling problem but tries to kick it and believes he will have the strength to do it if he can only get Florence to marry him. Alas! Mountjoy is not Trollope’s designated hero, and Florence is the designated heroine, so we’re left at the end of the book not knowing if Mountjoy will find any actually available remedy for his problem, but we hope that he will. Harry Annesley is the designated hero. He and Florence aren’t very developed even by the usual standards of Trollope’s love-interest characters – until the last chapter, when we find that their married life is full of playful wit and good-natured acceptance of less than perfection. I wish Trollope had shared more of this humorous side of these two characters earlier. The public unjustly vilifies Harry for an action he commits right at the beginning of the book (we learn about his secret motives for not talking to defend himself), and his uncle, Mr Prosper, who has told Harry for years that he will inherit the Buston estate, decides he can’t possibly leave an estate to a man with a bad reputation and determines to disinherit him by finally marrying at 50 and having a son. His impractical plan (what woman of child-bearing age is he going to find?), his thoughts about how to choose a woman, the winner in Mr Prosper’s process (the delightfully named Matilda Thoroughbung), and their marriage negotiations are all amazing and hilarious. Then there’s Mr Prosper’s valet, who runs the house and Mr Prosper. And there’s Mr Grey, the lawyer, and his unmarried daughter, who doesn’t want to get married because she would miss her late-night discussions with her father about the law. I could go on. OK, OK, one more detail! Mr Prosper says he can’t possibly travel from Buston to Cheltanham. The trains don’t connect the two places directly, so he’ll have to go to London and and travel from one station to another, and, he asks, “What will I do in London for an hour and a quarter?” That’s the kind of detail that makes you love a man in a book that you might only get annoyed with in real life. But Trollope and authors like him teach us that we should love the real person and all his annoying foibles with all the forgiveness and even enjoyment that we afford the fictional character. 

I could also go on about the way Trollope compares views of marriage (as he kept in mind those teenage girls reading the book, marriage for love wins out, of course), distinguishes between legality and morality, explores many kinds of reactions by several characters when they find that they can’t force others to think and act the way they want, defends women’s social agency, and sympathizes with young and old, rich and poor, gentry and commoner. But I’ll just end by sharing one fun detail. As a clerk in the Royal Post Office, Trollope invented the public mailbox on the street. Even if you’ve never read one of his books or even heard of him, you’ve used Anthony Trollope’s gift to civilization many times. Many people write back and forth to each other in this book, and Trollope makes sure to mention on one occasion that the epistler deposited her message in the “letter pillar.”

Anthony Trollope wrote a lot of novels, so there’s a lot to get through. But I’m going to put this one on my list of books to reread someday.

Not So Great

Despite the name of this blog, I’ve mostly wandered away from what are considered (even if only under protest) the “Great Books.” In the first years, I had plenty to say about Greek tragedians and German philosophers, about medieval theology and modernist scientific treatises. But these things don’t fill my reading schedule now. If certain nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novels can be included in a canon of Great Books, then I guess exlibrismagnis still occasionally lives up to its name. But science fiction? Historical fiction from the last few decades? Recent presidential biographies? You have been indulgent and gracious to stick with me through those classic-adjacent books. At least I haven’t (often) written about Tarzan and Hercule Poirot!

But I’m also interested in what might be called the Great Subjects, and good American history treats all of them: religion, ethics, politics, science, education, and (to quote Gilligan’s Island) the rest. (What makes Great Television is a matter for a different blog.) So part of my plan for this ten-year schedule was reading the Oxford History of the United States. And now, after all that introduction, I’m ready to tell you a short story of how my wish to read the OHotUS led to me reading a Not So Great Book.

I started putting together this plan around 2015. The Oxford series didn’t have a volume on the early colonial era, but it had at least a plan for nine other volumes covering everything from the Revolutionary era to the twenty-first century. What could be better? I picked a different book on early American history to read year 1, and then had a handy 9-volume series to fill out the decade perfectly. The only potential hitch: Bruce Schulman’s entry, covering the years 1896 until 1929, wasn’t out yet. But I remember when I first saw the plan on OUP’s website, it said the book was expected in 2014 (hmm, maybe I started planning earlier than 2015), and I didn’t need that book until 2023, so the Plan seemed safe. 

But then Oxford Press changed the date. I definitely don’t remember all the steps, but every couple of years, the publication date crept back slowly until they finally just started showing “TBD.” Even the title changed. Still, other secondary sources – Amazon and Wikipedia, for instance – held out hope for the book, all saying at one point that the book would appear in November 2023. Just in time! Alas, November 2023 rolled around, and there was no Brand Name America or any other title by Bruce Schulman forthcoming. So I skipped ahead (a trial for my low-grade OCD) and read David M. Kennedy’s very good book on the Depression and WWII. Surely there was just a little delay, and I’d get my Bruce Schulman book in 2024. To boost my confidence, amazon.ca and amazon.uk started saying the book would come out in September 2024, they listed an ISBN, and they started accepting payment for pre-orders. But, woe is me! September 2024 came and went, with no new book on American history, 1896-1929. So again I read ahead, enjoying James T. Patterson’s excellent Grand Expectations, covering 1945 until 1974. 

But I couldn’t take the out-of-orderness of it all anymore. The fabric of my space-time continuum was tearing. I either had to read Bruce Schulman or find a substitute. It occurred to me to write to Oxford University Press. I got a very lovely reply confirming the ISBN I found on the other nations’ Amazon sites and saying that the book would come out in 2025. I wrote again in a few months to ask if they had any better ETA and got a less lovely reply saying only that clerk A would have to ask clerk B, who presumably knew better, and get back to me. It finally occurred to me to write to Bruce Schulman! I don’t know why it’s taking him so long to write his book, but it doesn’t take him long to write an email. I heard back from him within 24 hours, and he said that the people I talked with at Oxford must have incorrect information since he hasn’t finished writing the book, so it couldn’t possibly have an ISBN.

*sigh*

OK, this “short” story isn’t turning out to be so short.

*sigh*

I started looking for a substitute. But do you know how hard it is to find a book on American history that covers 1896-1929? Can you imagine how difficult it is even to find a combination of books that covers the period? I finally found John Milton Cooper’s Pivotal Decades, covering 1900-1920. I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Cooper’s biography of Woodrow Wilson, so I was sure this book would fit the bill. He’d probably say a bit about the end of the previous century and fill in the 1896-1900 gap. Now I just had to find a book on the 1920s.

Wait a minute! As it turns out, I remembered that the first grown-up, professional history I ever read was on the 1920s. I remember vividly reading it in my basement when I was about 15. I think it took about three days. I didn’t know what Prohibition was really like. I didn’t know gangsters had anything to do with Prohibition. I didn’t know about President Harding’s mysterious death. Wow! If this is what actual history books were like, why were the schools making me read textbooks?!

OK, now all I had to do was remember the name of that book, and my ten-year history-reading plan was saved. I knew it had the word “decade” in the title. But I couldn’t figure out how to construct a search query to find it. “book american history 1920s decade” didn’t do it. I talked to my son about it. He pointed out to me that I was still searching the way I did in the oughts. Back then, you could ask a question with all the little words, but the search engines just worked on the keywords. So I’ve just been searching by keywords for twenty years. But AI understands language well enough now that you can ask specific questions. So I searched, ‘What’s the title of a book written before 1980 on the U.S. in the 1920s that has the word ‘decade’ in the title?” Google replied, “There is no well known book written before 1980 about the U.S. in the 1920s with the word ‘decade’ in the title, but here are some other books that might work for you.” Then it listed a couple of books about the 1920s and a couple of books with the word “decade” in the title. Stupid AI! “No well known book”?! If it were well known, I wouldn’t have had to ask you! I depend on the internet to know less-than-well-known things! So I gave up on finding that book and chose another. I settled on Nathan Miller’s New World Coming.

All right. October 2025. Time to read these histories and learn about 1900 to 1929. Cooper’s book was good, although he was much less critical of Wilson than he was in his biography of the President, written about fifteen years later. I agree with his later, negative critique, so I found his unqualified admiration for Wilson in Pivotal Decades surprising and disappointing. Still, good book. Written well. I learned a lot.

Next I started Miller’s book and loved the prologue about F. Scott Fitzgerald. To frame a general history with a story about one person, and that person an author and not a politician, was novel and intriguing. Things boded well for Miller. 

But then a surprising problem came up. After the prologue, the main narrative started, and Miller dipped back into WWI quite a bit as context for the 1920s. As a result, his subject overlapped Cooper’s in the matter of several years. Curiously, as I read along, I noticed that many details overlapped, as well. What are the chances that two authors would use the same anecdote to illustrate one point, that same quotation to summarize another point, the same statistic to emphasize yet another? Then I read a paragraph that I had just read a few days earlier. Gahhh! Over ten years of work choosing a history of the 1920s, and I had to choose one by a plagiarist! (Cooper's book came out several years before Miller's.) I’m still reading it. I’m fully into the 1920s now, well past anything Cooper wrote about, so my fits of déjà vu have gone. It’s very interesting and written well, but I can’t help wondering what talented author wrote this part originally.

Ugh! Yesterday I remembered the name of the book I read in the 70s: The Shattered Decade. I looked it up, and it’s long out of print. There’s one copy available on thriftbooks.com. I’m going to get it (don’t you buy it first!), but I’ll finish Miller. I’m too far into it now, and I have a schedule to keep.

A Villainous Post

I just wrapped up a season of fantasy baseball in a position typical for me: I finished 6th out of 8. I’ve loved playing this game for the last thirty years, but I’m so bad at it! I think the problem breaks down into three parts. (Thanks for reading while I work out my frustration in print!) First, I have a stubborn loyalty to ideas that I think ought to work, even if statistics suggest otherwise. Second, and maybe this is the same thing, I’m a slow learner: if I don’t see some relationship or pattern, memorizing a formula doesn’t work for me until I can finally internalize the reason for the formula. And I usually have to try something over and over and make, in my estimation, a hundred mistakes before the right way really settles into my brain. Third, fantasy baseball essentially boils down to having a drafting strategy in March and then watching for six months to see how that strategy works. It takes way too long for me to make my hundred mistakes in a game in which each turn lasts a year!

Yes, I’m a slow learner. It seems I’m often confessing my weaknesses in these posts, things about literature or the life and people and ideas depicted in that literature that didn’t really make sense to me until I was over 50 . . . or 60 . . . or 65. A few months ago, I wrote about realism in some heroines that many people don’t think are realistic. Today I want to write about realism in a villain that I didn’t really understand as realistic until just two days ago. I just finished C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet for the third time. I probably read it for the first time when I was about 20. The book has two villains: Devine, who wants to exploit Malacandra (we know it as Mars) because its abundant gold will bring him power on Earth, and Weston, who doesn’t care a fig for any single human being but wants Humanity with a capital H to survive forever by taking over the galaxy, even if that means killing sentient extraterrestrials. It’s Weston I want to talk about today. (I think I understood greed even when I was 20.)

To be fair to my younger self, the villains of my childhood and youth were all exaggerations. Snidely Whiplash (from Dudley Do-Right) and Dick Dastardly (from Wacky Races) took what were already exaggerations from melodrama and cartoonified them. The Joker and the Riddler (either the comic-book versions or the TV versions) could be taken either as mere personifications of weird ideas or as caricatures of serial killers. I’m not sure I ever took an outlaw from Cisco Kid or Gunsmoke seriously enough to think of him as a depiction of a character from life. Of course there were mad scientists, swamp creatures, the Blob, Frankenstein’s monster, Wells’s (and Welles’s) Martians, and other imaginative antagonists that didn’t appear anything like realistic to me. Then when I was 18, I met Darth Vader; it never occurred to me then even to wonder whether the man in the spacesuit who spoke while his machinery breathed for him and choked underlings with a hand gesture was realistic. Even the very idea of a villain, a character who constantly goes about trying to do harm to a given person or group, seemed to me more like a plot device than a realistic human being. I didn’t know anyone like that. Even the bullies at school just sat around being bewildered most of the time and only occasionally thought that abusing me might be fun. It wasn’t until I started reading lots of Dickens (I’m sorry I always seem to get around to him!) that I found out that a villain in a story might be something as mundane as a businessman who cares more about continuous profit than the well-being of his neighbor. It probably helped that I started paying attention to the news in the 1980s and learned about blackguards like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

Back to Lewis. Weston is taken by the Malacandrians (who are good, unfallen creatures) to meet Oyarsa, who is, as I understand it, the angel of the planet. He sees people living simply and assumes they are uncivilized and ignorant and superstitious. He hears the unbodied voice of Oyarsa and assumes a witch-doctor must be using ventriloquism. He identifies someone he believes to be the shaman (actually an old creature who has merely fallen asleep) and tries to tempt him with a cheap necklace from Woolworth’s. He dances around shouting “Pretty! Pretty!” to all the other creatures while trying to get them interested in the plastic baubles. All of this display only makes the Malacandrians laugh. I think I thought I was supposed to laugh at the ludicrous character myself. In an angrier mood, he tells them they have no idea who they’re dealing with and that if they don’t do as he says, “Me go Poof! Bang! and you dead!” You don’t understand the primitive mind, he tells his fellow earthlings when they urge him to stop. All of this looked to me like it came straight out of the recipe book for fictional bad guys, not out of observations from life. It was reasonable but inexperienced of me to think this way: I had read about people like Weston in stories and seen characters like him in movies, but I had never met anyone who did or said these things in real life.

But the other day, it occurred to me that I had actually known many people like Weston. Take out the details of the dance and the cheap necklace and the threat with the gun (I thank God I’ve never had to deal with that threat in real life!), and Weston is completely recognizable. He assumes he is the smartest person in any group he finds himself in. He assumes that a simple life, or any life unlike his own, indicates stupidity. He assumes a stupid person is of inferior worth. He thinks of all relationships in terms of strength and weakness, winning and losing. He cares only about his own wishes and believes he can manipulate anyone by means of his superior skills into suiting those wishes; if he ever thinks about the others’ wishes that he is violating, it’s only to think that their wishes don’t matter as much as his on some objective cosmic scale. And yet for all his supposed superiority he depends on tools – guns and trinkets – to get his way. I’ve known many people like Weston. I’ve worked with them. I’ve had Thanksgiving dinners with them. I’m sorry to say I’ve gone to church with them. It was an amazing, awesome, satisfying, revealing, sad, powerful moment when I suddenly found, in the middle of a fantasy about space travel, a stark bit of earthly realism.

Over the River

I’ve achieved a milestone: I’ve finished Galsworthy’s nine-volume Forsyte Saga. In some ways this last entry, Over the River, was the least satisfactory of the nine. Along with the interesting characters and mundane-yet-urgent conflicts, I’ve enjoyed the series most for the way each book critiques the old ways and then, in a surprising twist, critiques modernity. Over the River certainly had the solid characters and the poignant conflicts and the critiques of humanity’s ways, but it didn’t surprise me with a clever philosophical twist. Still, as a final volume, its main business was summarizing, I suppose, and it did that fairly well.

Dinny Cherrell took a prominent position again, which suited me just fine since I really like that character. But the main plot involved her sister, Clare, who has left her husband in India because he has experimented with the sadistic use of a riding whip. The case ends up involving a trial, which I read both literally and metaphorically. Clare has spent a platonic night with a male friend in a broken-down car out in the countryside on a dark night, and the rejected husband uses this event as the basis for a suit of divorce, since adultery remained at the time the only grounds for divorce among non-royals. Sadism isn’t on trial since Clare refuses to testify about the issue. The old rules for divorce are certainly on trial since both parties want to be free from each other and can only achieve their end by convincing a jury of a lie. (As far as this main point goes, I think Waugh did a better job skewering the practice in A Handful of Dust.) If modernity is allegorically on trial in the literal trial, it is only in its acceptance of a casual friendship between a young man and a young woman, and Waugh doesn’t seem to think the new social norm very bad, if only people aren’t so careless about it as Clare and her friend have been. 

Of all people, Dinny’s Uncle Adrian sums up the critique of modernity at the end of the novel and the series. Society changes with time, he says, and this is inevitable. Humans are imperfect, so change is always needed. Modernity sees to have changed too much too fast, though, throwing out everything without pausing to distinguish the baby and the bathwater. People need some of the good things from the nineteenth century (I agree!) and they need continuity. But he doesn’t give details, and then he apologizes for being too philosophical. So it’s not the powerful commentary I so enjoyed in earlier volumes. I’ll share just a couple more quibbles. The characters go to see Cavalcade on the stage a few times, and I think Galsworthy lets this other artwork do a little too much of his work. (I sympathize with what I take to be his dislike for the show, though; I hate the movie.) Then there’s the confusion over the metaphor in the title. At one point the narration says time is a river and we can only go along with the flow, we can’t go over the river. But later Dinny is said to have gone over the river by getting married. Confusing. It seemed to me that Galsworthy would want to have said that she was moving against the flow of time’s river by participating in a traditional institution, not crossing over it. OK, a third quibble: Dinny marries a man she admires but doesn’t love just because she thinks she needs tradition as a shield against modern times. She, the series, and the philosophy deserve a better end.

I’ve achieved another milestone: exlibrismagnis.com now has over 300,000 views. I wish I could say they were all actual human visits, but I can’t. I had a lot of Russian bots back in 2016. The eager blogger, in hopes of being internet-famous, would check the list of referring URL’s and, hoping to find a mention of this site on some other blog or message thread, would click the sites on the list trying to see some actual referring link. Alas, I mostly got sites in Russian that seemed to be inviting me to gamble online. Blogspot’s host learned to block them soon after that, and then for many years I had only a handful of visits every day, which seemed like a legitimate representation of what a world of 7 billion people might do with my rambling thoughts. But in the last month or so, I’ve started having hundreds of views per day again. Yesterday 40 visits supposedly came mayo clinic dot org. (I spell it out in an attempt to protect against a robotic search.) Forty more came from what purports to be another healthcare organization. What’s that about? I understand the bots from nine years ago tricking me into clicking their link in an attempt to catch a fool ready to separate himself from his money. But why would there be a link for my blog on the Mayo Clinic’s site? On the other hand, why would a scammer pretend to be the Mayo Clinic? The link didn’t take me to a donation page or anything. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Anyway, if you’re reading this because a healthcare site (or a Singaporean university’s site) had a link to me, write to let me know. Or if it’s a scam and you understand it, explain it to me, please!

Quick Roundup

In between mini-trips, I’ll just drop some short notes on recent reading.

I continue my plan to read Finnegans Wake over the course of fifteen years, the time it took Joyce to write it. After having consumed my annual slice of Finnegan Pie for 2025, I can say that it remains as wacky as ever with its nonstop wordplay and elusive sentence structure. But I think the man (who has several names and stands for several people, I think, or maybe all men) goes to an inn, has a drink and a meal, and then hires a woman. If this is the passage that got the book banned for pornography in some places, then I’m pretty sure neither the boards who did the banning nor their kids – assuming they even read this far – understood it or got any excitement from it. I don’t see anyone ever reading Finnegans Wake and then thinking, “Oh, now that I’ve read that, I can’t wait to commit adultery!”

George MacDonald’s Heather and Snow is the first of the Scottish pastor's novels I’ve really enjoyed in at least three years. There is no wise old man this time, the kind that in other books me wonder if MacDonald saw himself in these lofty characters. There are no polemics in which some leading character decides that anyone who disagrees with him (i.e. with George MacDonald) isn’t doing Christianity right. The protagonist is a young rural woman who understands God the best she can, which is to say that she understands Him better and more biblically than her mother or silly neighbor. But then all of them understand and serve God the best they can, as well. There are no judgments, just discussions and respectful attempts to explain or to persuade. The differences are nothing as compared to the difference between the belief of the faithful and the disbelief of the local baron’s son. There’s also a brother with some kind of mental developmental issues and a big snow that causes some deaths and a neighborly intervention before fornication (which didn’t involve reading James Joyce!), and all these events lead to very interesting thoughts and discussions about life in all its complexities and how best to live it in service of God and neighbor.

Finally, I will merely recommend Anthony Trollope’s short story (with eight chapters it could really be called a novella) “Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices.” 

I’ll have more after the next trip!

Furiously Taking Notes on Orlando

I’ve written before about the importance of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso to my reading project. I wish I remembered what work by C. S. Lewis mentioned Orlando and made me want to read the classics that the good professor knew so well. But I do remember the exact spot I was standing on – on a sidewalk in Norman, Oklahoma – when I read the Lewis passage. And I remember how excited I was when I finally got to Orlando a few years later and found that it was indeed worth reading. My only regret about my first encounter is that I read the epic over six years, one sixth of the long work each year. This time through, I’m reading it in thirds. The next go around, I’ll probably read half of it at a time.

Reading a third of it in the last two or three weeks makes me realize that the plot is more tightly constructed than I previously thought. There are lots of cuts from one strand of the tale to another and many groups of characters that meet or get separated while wandering in the woods, narrative devices that give the book a feeling of being only a wobbly web of randomly arranged episodes. But when the girl captured by pirates in canto XIII finds her lost love in canto XXIII, you know Ariosto sees the connections between all the parts. In canto XXII, when Ruggiero and Bradamante are freed from their magical illusion, see each other clearly, and kiss again for the first time in a long time, only then to be separated when Bradamante runs into the woods after Pinabello, who stole her horse in canto III, you know Ariosto has a plan. 

So I’m taking lots of notes – some in a separate file, some in the margins of the book itself – to help me when I read Orlando a third time: notes like, “This is the letter Ruggiero wrote in XXV, 85-92.” Supposedly contemporary readers or listeners had no trouble keeping track of the multitudinous threads. The poem is written in 46 cantos, and it helped me a lot to realize a few years ago that it must have felt then like a 46-episode television series. Just as any one episode of LOST or Stranger Things or Rings of Power cuts abruptly from one subplot to another, and just as some subplots in any of those series are sometimes set aside for a couple of episodes, and just as a guest character in season 1, episode 4, may return and become a major character in season 2, episode 7, so Ariosto juggles his storylines and hits on two or three in each canto. But I have my own issues with attention, and I live in an age of video, and it’s harder for me to keep track of it all when I’m reading than it is when I’m watching – and it’s pretty hard for me when I’m watching, to begin with! I’ve tried different methods of keeping notes on Renaissance epics before. I made a giant spreadsheet for Faerie Queene, but I decided it didn’t do much good after all that time compiling it. For Orlando Furioso, besides my marginal notes, I’m writing a canto-by-canto summary as well as character-by-character synopses. It helped immensely to keep referring to the ones from last year as I read this year’s third of the work. So I’m hoping it will all help me keep the storylines straight the third time I read Orlando. But I have to say that I love every bit of storytelling that happens in Orlando Furioso, even when I’ve forgotten the context.

As I was writing this post, I started thinking, “Will I ever read Orlando a fourth time?” Then I had a curious thought that, if I get the chance to know someday that I’m in the process of dying, I might want to comfort some of my hours with Ariosto’s great poem. When my dad was dying of cancer, he wanted me to read Dickens’s Little Dorrit to him, just because it was the last Dickens book he had obtained. (I had given it to him the previous Christmas.) I already know that if I find myself in that situation, I’m going to have one of my kids, or maybe my grandson, read Dombey and Son to me. But I may want to give Orlando some time, too. I guess it’s a version of the desert island question: if you knew you had six months to live and felt too weak to hold the book yourself, what book would you want a loved one to read to you? You can let me know if you come up with an answer.

By the way, I reached the part this year where Orlando becomes furioso. He’s been in love with Angelica since the beginning. But I’m giving the plot away and telling you right now: if you ever read this book, don’t waste any time hoping that 1500 pages later Lando and Angie will get together and live happily ever after. Halfway through the epic, just before she leaves the tale forever and Ariosto tells us he’s glad to be rid of her, Angelica runs off with a fellow named Medoro. They carve their names in entwined knots on trees and leave notes in caves telling the world how much they love each other (and how much fun they had in the cave). Orlando sees it all and goes crazy. Whatever will Charlemagne do now that he’s lost his greatest paladin? Will Paris survive? Or will history change? Everything up to this point including enchanted castles and magic shields has been absolutely historical, of course. But maybe Ariosto wants to veer into alternative history now and let the Saracens take the French capital. Or maybe Astolfo will ride a hippogriff to the moon to search for Orlando’s lost wits!