tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84421088164959645752024-03-08T03:14:01.792-05:00ex libris magnisone Christian's journey through literatureKen Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.comBlogger771125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-51969916233816956102024-02-25T12:36:00.001-05:002024-02-25T12:36:31.026-05:00I Auden to Make a Bad Pun on This Poet’s Name<p>For the second post in a row, I begin to write with trepidation, with concern that I am Not Up To The Task. I just completed reading a few hundred pages of Auden’s poetry; I enjoyed it, and I want to say something about it in these posts. But I see my stats, and I know that my piece on Shelley’s “A Summer Evening Churchyard” is one of my most popular posts. I hope that people come to it – and I imagine that some people even recommend it – because it helps them read the poem. I definitely know that if my 25-year-old self could have read that post, he would have been grateful. <br /><br />But I’m not sure I know how to help anyone read Auden. I’m constantly doubtful of my ability to help anyone walking with me on the dusty American road toward the enjoyment of poetry. (The roads to that goal in England are all lush and lined with hedgerows and thorn trees and other delights that make learning poetry easier and more fun, I’m sure.) but with Auden, the task seems doubly daunting. His poetry is cryptic, the meter is sometimes loose, and the language isn’t filled with the rhymes and the grammatical inversions and the luscious archaic words that immediately signify Poetry to my slow brain. At first I didn’t like not knowing what Auden was talking about:<br /></p><p> How will you look and what will you do when the basalt<br /> Tombs of the sorceror shatter<br /> And their guardian megalopods<br /> Come after you pitter-patter?<br /><br />Huh? <br /><br />But then I started thinking of the poems as songs. “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold.” “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night.” “When no one else would come, Shilo, you always came.” “Koo koo ja-joob.” I like all those lyrics without fully understanding them. Shifting my thinking freed me to enjoy watching Auden write the way he wanted to write about the things he liked writing about without always having to understand.<br /><br />And it’s not like I didn’t understand anything. Auden’s overriding themes seem to me to be (1) that all the noble and loving actions we see in the world are done by sinners, and (2) that every event that seems important to us – an act of love, a great journey. a death – makes no difference to the stars, to the birds, or even to the loving, sinning fellow who lives a couple of blocks away. I get it, and I agree with it, and, whaddayaknow, reading a few hundred pages of difficult poetry saying this gets the message through with a depth that cannot come across in any easier way.<br /><br />Now I want to have a go at talking through a poem a bit, but the poem I chose doesn’t really fit those themes. In fact, “We Too Had Known Golden Hours,” one of the last poems I read in my Auden frenzy of the last two weeks, gave me a new perspective on everything else I had read by Auden.<br /><br /> We, too, had known golden hours<br /> When body and soul were in tune,<br /> Had danced with our true loves<br /> By the light of a full moon,<br /> And sat with the wise and good<br /> As tongues grew witty and gay<br /> Over some noble dish<br /> Out of Escoffier;<br /> Had felt the intrusive glory<br /> Which tears reserve apart,<br /> And would in the old grand manner<br /> Have sung from a resonant heart.<br /> But, pawed-at and gossiped-over<br /> By the promiscuous crowd,<br /> Concocted by editors<br /> Into spells to befuddle the crowd,<br /> All words like Peace and Love,<br /> All sane affirmative speech,<br /> Had been soiled, profaned, debased<br /> To a horrid mechanical screech.<br /> No civil style survived<br /> That pandaemonioum<br /> But the wry, the sotto-voce,<br /> Ironic and monochrome:<br /> And where should we find shelter<br /> For joy or mere content<br /> When little was left standing<br /> But the suburb of dissent?<br /><br />Auden began his career in the late 1920s. As a general trend, intellectuals and artists in this modern period, disillusioned by the war of the trenches and worldwide economic depression, broke from the sentimentality and belief in progress that characterized much of nineteenth-century western culture. Painted representations of the human figure, those of women especially, became angular and ugly. Composers presented listeners with successions of unresolved dissonances. Authors rejected traditional forms of morality and searched in their stories for ways to survive in a world that had been, they supposed, proven meaningless. I don’t condemn these artistic movements; I merely point out that they greatly emphasized the ugly, the empty, the aimless, the relative, the confusing, the painful, and the broken side of life.<br /><br />But Auden says in 1950, after over twenty years of publishing his modern poetry, that he has experienced absolute goodness, truth, and beauty in his life but didn’t always feel free to report it. Faulkner would never tell us that a “body and soul were in tune” (a nice musical metaphor, by the way, that goes back at least two thousand years). Stravinsky never wrote a ballet in which true lovers “danced . . . by the light of a full moon.” Picasso’s people were never “wise and good.” O’Neill eschewed dialog that was “witty and gay.” But Auden says that these things happened to him. He says he felt an “intrusive glory,” i.e. a light from beyond, i.e. transcendent goodness. And he says that these beautiful moments broke down his normal human reserve and prompted him to “sing from a resonant heart.” That word “resonant” suggests again a tuning, a synchronicity of the human soul with the transcendent glory.<br /><br />So why have his poems up until this time always emphasized that any love or goodness comes from a severely flawed human being and radiates to meet a universally indifferent world? Because “crowds” and “editors” (the public and the profession) have made all language about absolute goodness sound cheap. He has been forced to write in the idiom that his readers will accept. He cannot be good-hearted, only “wry”; he cannot be sincere, only “ironic”; he cannot shine the intrusive glory through a prism and show its colors but must instead stick with the “monochrome” grays of modernism. Ultimately he feels stuck in the “suburb of dissent,” and, after learning of his friendship with Charles Williams, I can’t help thinking that the City his peers excluded him from is Williams’s City of “exchange and coinherence” [https://exlibrismagnis.blogspot.com/2018/10/dante-charles-williams-and-echoes-of.html], the sacred community of harmony, wisdom, and glory.<br /><br />I was planning to say something about diction and meter and figures of speech, but I’ve said too much already. I’ll just end by noting that I have recently found that Google searches no longer find my posts. I found the link for the post about Williams and the City by using a Bing search.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-16440401460737807992024-02-21T14:40:00.002-05:002024-02-25T12:43:03.056-05:00Saluting John Wemmick<p>For weeks now, I’ve been intending to write today’s post as a companion to <a href="http://exlibrismagnis.blogspot.com/2010/11/saluting-captain-cuttle.html" target="_blank">the post of November 23, 2010</a>, in which I salute one of my favorite comic characters from the Dickens cornucopia of great comic characters. But I just reread “Saluting Captain Cuttle” and have amazed myself at – please allow me a slight, immodest indulgence – how well I did in writing it. Truly to write a parallel piece, I would again today have to seek for the right poietic frame of mind and hope for it to appear. Were I in fact in the right poietic frame of mind, I would phrase it this way: I would say that I must needs call upon the Muses and humbly take whatever boon they decide to grant me. Indeed, I believe I have used the word “poietic” instead of “creative” in order to encourage their generosity.<br /><br />Alas, I am only in a slightly elevated blogging frame of mind, and will simply have to do my workmanlike best. But salute John Wemmick I must, so here we go!<br /><br />First of all, there are two Mr. Wemmicks; that is, Mr. Wemmick has two sides or aspects to him. “Walworth is one place, and this office is another,” he says when Pip asks him for personal advice. John Wemmick, clerk of the law office of Mr. Jaggers, adopts his employer’s legal morality and sees clients as neither good nor evil but merely as defendants who deserve the strongest case that can be made in court and then receive either favorable or unfavorable verdicts. He scolds potential witnesses for even suggesting that they might bend the truth but cares not at all whether what they say straightforwardly be truth or lie so long as it is defensible in itself and beneficial to the client’s case. He visits former clients in prison, not apparently in the enactment of Christian virtue, but rather in hopes of receiving small presentations of “portable property” from the condemned. He wears several rings obtained in this way and one cameo brooch. He admires the casts of the death masks of two former clients whose faces have been distorted as a result of hanging, smiling on the sculptures as if they were tokens of departed friends. He tells Pip he would be better to throw his money off a bridge than give it to a friend in need because at least then he would know where it had gone.<br /><br />Why he befriends Pip, we are not told. But clearly even the office Wemmick sees that Pip, in spite of his failings, has potential. It might be that he can sense that Pip has a heart for his fellow man, especially the downtrodden. (Perhaps he has heard in some way of little Pip’s kindness to the convict among the graves one Christmas morning several years ago. But that would be a coincidence, and Dickens never indulges in coincidences, does he?) Whatever the reason, befriend Pip he does, and asks him to dine with him at his home in Walworth. <br /><br />On their way to the Walworth home, office John Wemmick begins to fade, and smiles begin to show on Wemmick’s odd face that appear warmer than the smiles directed toward the death heads. He talks about ways in which he can assist Pip in giving financial aid to his friend anonymously. When they arrive at the Walworth home, Wemmick delights in showing Pip how to lower the drawbridge that crosses the small ditch that surrounds the property, a ditch that could be leapt easily with a single step. Pip notices crenellations on the house and a cannon on a tower. Walworth Wemmick has fully arrived and gives Pip a tour of his “castle garden.” Before they go inside, Wemmick asks Pip if he has any objection to an Aged Parent. Pip of course saying he has none, they step in to find the Aged Parent stoking the fire. John addresses him as “Aged Parent” and “Aged P.” Walworth Wemmick’s delight begins to mount as five o’clock approaches, at which time he climbs the tower and fires the cannon. The Aged P cries out exultingly, “He’s fired! I heerd him!” I don’t know if there is a more hilarious, eccentric, or beautiful portrait of love in all of Dickens’s works than this of a hard-nosed law clerk who leaves the office behind him and builds a castle in the suburbs just so he can fire a cannon and give his deaf father the joy of hearing something once a day.<br /><br />John Wemmick has a wooden face. His mouth is so straight and stiff, Dickens constantly makes references to its being a “post-office,” by which I suppose he means a mail slot. When I read about Wemmick, I try to think of the little door on the mailbox that allows you to put letters in without being able to reach your hand in to take any out, but I usually end up departing from the author’s metaphor and picturing Wemmick as a nutcracker. He has a lady caller named Miss Skiffins (perfect name) who also has a wooden face. One imagines the couple someday begetting a whole mantleful of little nutcrackers. Before they are married, John makes repeated slow and deliberate attempts to put his arm around Miss Skiffins’s waist, each attempt thwarted by Miss Skiffins's removing his arm, equally slowly and deliberately, and placing it on the table. I’ve given too much away already, so I won’t tell you how John delivers his wedding invitation to Pip, but it is priceless.<br /><br />John Wemmick, I, too, had a job I tried (but usually failed) to leave behind each night. I don’t have a castle, but I have a few castles in the air, and on every one, I fire a cannon to salute you!<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-49339337282041962202024-02-07T14:55:00.011-05:002024-02-08T14:10:59.031-05:00With a Title Like Great Expectations, How Could You Think It Would End Happily?<p>Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I’m usually in the middle of reading a Dickens novel on his birthday, and 2024 is no exception: I’m currently enjoying <i>Great Expectations</i> for, I think, the fourth time. My wife likes several of Dickens’s novels but hate <i>Great Expectations</i>. For many people, this is the Dickens book they had to read in some English class, and so they hate it. But I can’t help it; I love it!<br /><br />For my wife, I think that everything about Miss Havisham is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed, and I suspect that the same is true for a lot of other people. To be fair to my wife, who isn’t here to defend herself and doesn’t have her own blog, she might simply say that Miss Havisham is too unpleasant to read about. So let me respond to the other, totally hypothetical people who hold that she is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed. To begin with, many things in Victorian literature seem overdone: a crazy wife kept secretly in an attic comes to mind. But I believe that Victorians lived more dramatically than we do, that angry women truly stomped their feet and that orating men posed and used lofty language that often got away from them. And that some jilted women lived as recluses. Check <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/miss-havisham-charles-dickens-b2026479.html" target="_blank">this recent-ish article</a> claiming that one particular jilted recluse may indeed have been the real-life inspiration for Miss Havisham. </p><p>But I should also point out that Miss Havisham is a character in a book, with every right to memorable excess. And after all, she’s no more over-the-top than Scrooge or the hunchback of Notre Dame or Captain Nemo, and every bit as absolutely unforgettable. And she’s there for a purpose. We all know people who hold on perpetually to anger directed at some given person. And we see in the house in which Miss Havisham lives the representation of the life that results from her never-ending grudge: no sunlight ever enters, and spiders cover the uneaten wedding cake. She serves as the physical representation of the soul that Pip could shape for himself if he continues forever his determination to be a gentleman and his rejection of his brother-in-law, who is by his admission the kindest man he ever knew.<br /><br />Dickens was, to put it mildly, in a bad mood when he wrote <i>Great Expectations</i>. His marriage had just fallen apart (remember the spiders and the wedding cake?), and he was in no frame of mind to write a book with a happy ending. You know that The Man Who Invented Christmas is off his usual game within the first few chapters of <i>GE</i>, when the family dinner that gets ruined – by tar-water in the brandy and by the sudden intrusion of a band of soldiers – is a <i>Christmas</i> dinner. And the book goes on gloomily from there. Dickens wrote this novel in first-person narrative, with Pip admitting in his confessional account the deepest flaws of any Dickens hero. And, in Dickens’s original ending, he ends with nothing of the typical Victorian happy ending: he doesn’t get the money, and he doesn’t get the girl. (Dickens's friend John Forster convinced him that his public would feel cheated by a tragic resolution, and so our author rewrote the last page before publication. If you read this book be sure to read the original ending: it’s the only one that makes any sense.)<br /><br />And yet, he was still Charles Dickens, and the Ghost of Christmas Present couldn’t keep his horn of good will from sprinkling cheer here and there on the pages of <i>Great Expectations</i>. One early breakthrough has the irrepressible Joe Gargery forgiving an escaped convict for stealing food from his house. “God knows you’re welcome to it,” says Joe. “We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.” At this the convict represses a sob. Generosity, forgiveness, and repentance. What could be more beautiful and uplifting? <br /><br />Then there’s the hilariously ludicrous Mr. Wopsle, who reads in church as if he is acting Shakespeare and later acts Shakespeare as if he were a ten-year-old in a bad school pageant. And there’s Herbert Pocket, who stays cheery, identifies himself as an insurer of international trade even though he hasn’t been able to find the capital to start the business, loves his Clara with all the letters of the alphabet, and proves to be a faithful, helpful friend to Pip in his darkest hours. And then there’s . . . <br /><br />Oh, but the best will have to wait for another post.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-10753561779818944232024-02-06T14:22:00.002-05:002024-02-08T14:06:08.695-05:00Augustine’s Careful Method<p>I’m just finishing books XI-XV, the culmination of Augustine’s On the Trinity. I had in mind some things to say in today’s post, but then, just now, I read<a href="http://exlibrismagnis.blogspot.com/2021/02/augustine-is-really-smart.html" target="_blank"> what I wrote three years ago on this blog about books VI-X</a>, and my plan for today’s post almost completely changed. For one thing, I think I did a pretty good job in 2021, and I’m glad I don’t have to say anything more today about things like semiotics, which I had originally planned to do. <br /><br />(OK, I’ll say one thing about semiotics. Augustine’s various triads – thing in the world, image of that thing in our eyes, attention that trains the eye on the thing, for instance – and his explanation of the way a sign becomes the signified in a chain – thing in the world, image in the eye of the thing, memory of the image in the eye, present imagination of the memory, thought about the image in the mind’s eye, judgment of that thought, etc. – reminded me a lot of Charles Peirce. But I recently read my notes on my notes about Peirce (yes, another chain of signs) which said that the system was so complex, I couldn’t make sense of my notes. So I’m relieved that I don’t have to go back and try to figure out Peirce just to write something today about Augustine. So now you know why the one thing I want to say about semiotics explains why I don’t want to say anything about semiotics.)<br /><br />Back to the main thread now. The most interesting thing to me now about my post from three years ago is that I said then that I didn’t buy Augustine’s answer to his question, How can we love the Trinity without understanding the Trinity? I had completely forgotten my dissatisfaction. In the last five books, Augustine methodically moves step by step toward explaining his answer, and, not remembering that he had already given his answer in a previous book, I found it reasonable this time. The prose is dense and difficult to read, even for a guy who likes to read old books. But sometimes methodical explanations require dense prose, and clearly that density is effective, since, having slogged through it, I understand Augustine’s point now, when I didn’t buy it three years ago after he had merely stated it.<br /><br />Here is Augustine’s point. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God is in three Persons but one Substance: a mindbender, to be sure. But we are to love God, and how can we love anyone or anything we don’t understand? Well, we love other things that we don’t know yet because we see cause to assume a likeness to something that we do know and love. “If your brother is anything like you, I’m sure we’ll be great friends.” So surely we must be able to love the divine Trinity because we know and love something like a trinity that exists in the created world, and the trinity that we know and love is in the mind knowing itself: there we have the mind as known, the mind as knower, and the mind as will that focuses the attention on itself. The three aspects (it is difficult to decide on the noun to use) correspond to the three faculties of the mind: memory, understanding, and will. And all three, while distinct in concept, lie in the one substance of the mind.<br /><br />Now that’s not just the answer: it is the answer as well as an explanation for it of sorts. But that answer, for me anyway, isn’t really persuasive until one reads Augustine’s careful search through all other possible analogous trinities and his account of the reasons they don’t work.<br /><br />Reading is such an adventure! I had no idea of the story that would unfold when, ten years ago, I decided to scatter the books of <i>On the Trinity</i> through my ten-year plan and to devote the intervening years to other works by Augustine. Reading can be hard. It’s difficult to find the time, and it gets harder and harder for me to focus with my failing eyes and my wandering attention. But learning feels good, and that’s one reason I do it and a big reason I do it by a geeky, embarrassing schedule.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-89005930303092655462024-01-18T13:28:00.002-05:002024-01-18T17:13:51.955-05:00A Dollar a Pound<p>While we were packing for our recent move, the agent from the moving company came to the house for an estimate. He very kindly and modestly told us not to pay his company so much; he said that the move was going to cost us a dollar per pound, and that we should get rid of some things. We had already packed and stored about seventy boxes: nothing to do about those. But for all the rest still in the house, we kept repeating our new mantra – “A dollar a pound, a dollar a pound” – and tried to give away or throw away as much as we packed. <br /><br />You would think it would have been a difficult decision, but it just came to my mind all settled one evening: I needed to get rid of the Britannica Great Books. As hugely important as they had been to me for the last thirty years, as much as I had learned from them, as much as they helped me fulfill my nearly lifelong determination to receive a liberal, classical education, I didn’t really need them anymore. Most of the works I would never read again. The ones I will reenjoy are all available on the internet. (Adler’s idea in creating the set, after all, was to get a cheap copy of copyright-free classic works into the home, a job now performed by Project Gutenberg, archive.org, etc.) And my old eyes don’t do so well anymore with the original set’s tiny print. I really only needed the books (1) that might have formatting issues online (e.g. Euclid) and (2) in which I had made copious notes (e.g. Aquinas). I ended up keeping eight of the fifty-four volumes; the goal of shedding as much as I packed was more than met.<br /><br />Then I opened up this year’s reading list and saw that one of the first assignments was completing my reread of <i>The Histories</i> of Herodotus, and that’s one of the volumes I had given up. I remembered enjoying it again just a few years ago but forgot that I had split the task up into two years. I had no problem finding a very inexpensive digital copy of the book, and I cranked the font size up on my Kindle as much as I wanted. But the maps! That book was so hard to read the first time because I had to keep consulting the maps several times on every page. “Boeotia: is that the island northeast of Attica? No, that’s Euboea. And does the road from Susa to Sardis really go through Cappadocia?” But the maps on the Kindle version are virtually impossible to read. *sigh* Maybe I should have kept nine volumes. But “a dollar a pound”!<br /><br />Despite the problems of keeping up with his geographical references, Herodotus is one of the easiest and fun reads in all of ancient literature. Of course, it’s mainly about a giant, bloody war, but the sidestories and backstories he tells along the way are wonderfully entertaining: the wealth of Croesus, the embalming methods of the Egyptians, the divine rescue of Delphi by landslides on Mt. Parnassus, Xerxes whipping the waters of the Hellespont (i.e. the Dardanelles).<br /><br />But don’t get me wrong: the main story is gripping, too. Darius the Mede tries to bully the surrounding nations into subjugation to his empire, and is insulted when Athens says, “Nuts!” He sends what seems like a large force over, but the Greeks, led by Athens, defeat it at Marathon. (Herodotus, who got his information by interviewing many eyewitnesses, does not mention a runner covering 26-plus miles to deliver the news, so there’s an argument to be made for once that what <i>isn’t</i> in the ancient book is probably a myth.) His successor Xerxes, determined to put Athens in its place once and for all, sends two million soldiers (accompanied by as many support staff and camp followers) to finish the job. They build a pontoon bridge over the Hellespont and take several days to cross it. The army dries up several rivers along the way just quenching thirst. But then the Spartans (who wisely decide to join the defensive allies) meet the Persians at Thermopylae, thus giving their name as a legacy to countless high-school football teams. And then Themistocles comes up with a clever plan to defeat the Persian navy at Salamis. And then the last 300,000 Persians are soundly defeated at Plataea. The “free” Greeks’ distribution of liberty in 479 BC was even less than that of the Americans in 1776. But it still feels like the good guys win at the end of <i>The Histories</i>, so the read is ultimately as happily satisfying as, say, a novel by Austen. <br /><br />I love this book! By time for the Book Awards at the end of 2024, will I have read some Pulitzer-winning history that outdoes it? Or will Herodotus simply suffer eleven months of fading memories while the more recent histories remain fresh in my mind in December? You and I both have to wait 343 days to find out.<br /><br />By the way, we estimate that we threw away or gave away about 600 pounds of stuff over the last month of packing, and, sure enough, the ultimate weight of our load came in 600 pounds under the agent’s estimate. You know how much we saved!<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-6273340032736286032024-01-13T12:46:00.005-05:002024-01-13T19:53:49.721-05:00Lessons from The Piano Lesson<p>I originally scheduled two plays by Tom Stoppard for 2024. But sometime last summer, for various reasons I remember, I decided to replace one with a play by August Wilson, and, for various reasons I don’t remember, I settled on <i>The Piano Lesson</i>. The decision paid off: I enjoyed the play and found great sympathy for and with the character who can’t play her piano because of haunting memories.<br /><br />My edition has a foreword by Toni Morrison in which she says that critics have faulted Wilson for his use of the supernatural in a way that seems to imply that they think the play would be better without the ghost. Now, I can’t say too much about the ghost, because I don’t want to give anything away, but he seems so central, I don’t see how the play could <i>exist</i> without him, much less be better. It’s like saying <i>Hamlet</i> would have been better without the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It’s like saying a three-legged stool would be better without the leg that you find least attractive.<br /><br />My case also rests on three legs. (1) A black family moving from Mississippi to Pittsburgh in the 1930s has to be thinking about the frequent deaths they hear about in the news from home, and they have to be wondering if they have truly escaped. Do I have to say that a ghost represents death and fear? This ghost stands (or floats?) as a personification of the unspoken worries of the Charles family, allowing these characters to speak about other things, like watermelons and broken trucks, with subtext and depth. (2) The ghost also represents memory, as does the piano with its legs adorned by carvings of the family’s ancestors. The play’s central theme concerns, to my eyes, the problems of starting a new life without letting the memories of the things you moved in order to escape ruin the new life as well, and the ghost brings these problems to a head. (3) I’m more duty bound to silence here even than in the first two points, because the third has to do with the end of the play. I’ll just say that the ghost becomes a foil to Boy Willie in the last scene and made me rethink this main character’s whole story.<br /><br />So I didn’t like Morrison’s point (or Morrison’s critic’s point) about the ghost. But I did very much approve of her argument that it’s better in many ways to read a play than to see it, which is just what I did.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-72993522170577244462024-01-07T11:42:00.007-05:002024-01-08T09:57:18.858-05:00Jules Verne Comes Through Again<p>I’m having a great time with Jules Verne’s <i>The Mysterious Island</i>! I’ve reread several of Verne’s fantastic voyage adventures in recent years trying to relive adolescent joys. But I didn’t read this one when I was a teenager, and yet it occurs to me that a fresh book may be the truest way to recapture the old experience: <i>Journey to the Center of the Earth</i> was different the second time, and I had to keep thinking about what the first encounter was like, but <i>Mysterious Island</i> is entertaining me with all the power of a new discovery just as if I had first met it when I was fourteen. (Side note: I highly recommend the fairly recent translation by Jordan Stump.)<br /><br />But my enjoyment of the book is certainly not a 1970s experience. My overriding thought is, “This book should definitely be made into a video game!” I love playing <i>Factorio</i>, a game in which a marooned astronaut has to chop wood and dig up iron and copper and coal and make machines that make bigger machines that make rocket parts so he can send up a signal to get rescued. The castaways on the Mysterious Island have to make shelter and fire, fashion bows and arrows, and hunt game in order to survive, and they also dig up iron like the marooned astronaut. But they were created by Jules Verne, so they won’t be satisfied until, through the scientific knowledge of the engineer in the party, they recreate the marvelous, optimistic, technological nineteenth-century civilization they left behind. And to this end, they make bricks to make kilns to purify the iron, they use the iron to make tools and simple machines, they use the tools to extract other chemical ores, they use the extracted minerals to synthesize sulfuric acid, they use the sulfuric acid to make nitroglycerine, and they use the nitroglycerine to reshape a cave. From pyrite, they make iron sulfate. From saltpeter they make nitric acid. If I were to make this video game, I would definitely have to learn much more chemistry than I remember from tenth grade!<br /><br />Would I be able to learn this chemistry from Verne himself? Perhaps not. Here’s another way my current experience is different from what it was fifty years ago: I catch a lot of Verne’s mistakes now. To measure the height of a cliff, engineer Cyrus Smith places a six-foot stick (measured by comparing it against his own well-known height) in the ground, lies in front of it, and places his eye at the point on the ground at which the top of the stick and the top of the cliff line up. I recognize this very problem from ninth-grade geometry, and sure enough Smith starts explaining about similar triangles. But then he makes a blunder by saying that the distance from his eye to the stick forms a ratio with <i>the distance between the stick and the cliff’s base</i> that equals the ratio of the stick’s height and the cliff’s height. Of course the italicized phrase should be “the distance between <i>his eye</i> and the cliff’s base” since the two similar triangles share the eye as a vertex.<br /><br />The slight difference in the answer the castaways calculate means nothing in the end: all the “known” distances are only estimated after all, and there’s no real practical difference to them between a 300-foot cliff and, say, a 320-foot cliff. But if Verne didn’t know geometry any better than that, he probably didn’t know chemistry all that well, either. His place in our culture, though, is not that of a technical writer who has taught science and math to generations of young people but that of an imaginative writer who has inspired and thrilled those generations of young people by his scientific vision. He certainly thrills this young person.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-64360586177534149332023-12-31T18:29:00.016-05:002024-01-24T19:08:40.252-05:00Book Awards – 2023<p>One year ago today, I said that I was especially looking forward to Hugo’s <i>Nôtre-Dame de Paris</i> (about the hunchback), poetry and essays of Matthew Arnold, and a return to Dostoevsky’s <i>Brothers Karamazov</i>. Did these books reward or disappoint? Find out as you read the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2023!<br /><br /><b>Author of My Favorite Book: Charles Dickens</b><br />Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. This year, I gave myself four Dickens assignments. The first task was the second half of Dickens’s works for the stage, including the play that served in his head as the prototype for my favorite book. They were all fine, but it was clear that these pieces were meant to be performed by the Great Man himself and his friends. I also read many of the non-Christmas short stories and have to say that Dickens was consistently best in short fiction when treating of ghosts. In my latest reading of <i>Hard Times</i>, I discovered that imagining the members of Monty Python playing the (morally) worst characters made this most somber of the novels much more enjoyable. Finally, I reread for perhaps the seventh time (in addition to having read some exquisite chapters more like twenty times) the book that taught me what good fiction looks like. <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> always inspires me and never disappoints, no matter what cynical critics say about Charles and Lucie.<br /><br /><b>Best New Read in History: David M. Kennedy, <i>Freedom from Fear</i></b><br />First let me make honorable mention of Will and Ariel Durant, whose history of western civilization took a big turn upwards this year now that I’m away from their favorite historical incidents, about which they have praise too effusive for my taste. (By contrast, their effusive praise for Mozart this year was not and could never have been too much for my taste.) Now for the winner: I learned many things about the Depression and World War II from Kennedy, but the education all started with a good argument that Herbert Hoover was actually relatively progressive and kept the economic disaster from being, if you can imagine it, even worse. He also confirmed for me, after forty years, my mom’s assertion that people in rural Missouri (like herself) were so poor, they didn’t notice any change during the Depression.<br /><b><br />Best New Read in Fiction: Victor Hugo, <i>Nôtre-Dame de Paris</i></b><br />The year started with Verne’s wonderful <i>Children of Captain Grant</i>, which kept me enthralled for most of two weeks and made me think fondly of my childhood crush on Hayley Mills (who enthralled me for far more than two weeks). But Hugo’s magnificent novel in which a hunchback becomes a hero and a cathedral becomes a character made me laugh out loud with joy more than once on my morning walks and stuck in my thoughts all the way to December. (Note from Jan. 1, 2024: Rereading this paragraph in the morning, I realize that my reference to Hayley Mills was far too opaque. Miss Mills starred in, among other movies, Disney’s <i>In Search of the Castaways</i>, which was based on <i>The Children of Captain Grant</i>.)<br /><br /><b>Most Disappointing Read: Matthew Arnold, Poetry</b><br />I found Arnold’s language beautiful and his encouragement to live our best, cultured lives uplifting until it became clear that he wanted to educate the masses and give them a chance to live their best lives only because he saw others’ ignorance merely as an annoying impediment to his personal comfort.<br /><br /><b>Best Poetry: Edmund Spenser, <i>The Faerie Queen</i>e, books V and V</b>I<br />I got a little uncomfortable at times with the allegorical hints that people in the working classes shouldn’t get ideas of moving up, but I may have read implications that weren’t really lying between Spenser's lines. Otherwise, the knights demonstrating through their magical adventures the virtues of Justice and Courtesy were encouraging, and the constantly lilting meter made the lessons eminently palatable.<br /><b><br />Best New Read in Drama: Molière, <i>Festin de pierre</i></b><br />I knew the basic story of the Stone Guest from Mozart’s <i>Don Giovanni</i>. Molière’s original is hilarious and morally instructive all at the same time. <br /><b><br />Best New Read in Religion: Leo the Great, Christmas Sermons</b><br />Leo strongly urges that Christmas is not a celebration of the sun and tells worshipers not to turn and bow to the sun as they come into church. ( I guess that was still a problem in the fifth century!) And yet, while he tells people not to worship creation, he doesn’t tell Christians to despise creation either: “And so, dearly beloved, we do not bid or advise you to despise God’s works or to think there is anything opposed to your Faith in what the good God has made good, but to use every kind of creature and the whole furniture of this world reasonably and moderately.” May we all so do.<br /><b><br />Best Offroading: William Shirer, <i>The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich</i>, chapters 6-14</b><br /><b>Book that Caused Me to Shake My Head the Most Often: same as above</b><br />OK, I’m cheating with this award. Shirer’s “first draft of history” wasn’t on this year’s reading list, but it is on next year’s. It’s so long, though, I knew that I had to get a running start, so I read five chapters last year, nine chapters this year. These horrible events happened in the civilized world in my parents’ lifetimes. Chilling, Just chilling. Politics should be discussed face-to-face, not in a blog about literature, so I won’t say too much, only that more than once I read about a horrid scheme of Himmler’s right around the time I read of a similar policy being enacted this year in a certain southeastern state. Oh, OK, I’ll go ahead and get controversial and say that I highly disapprove of inciting violence in an attempt to take national power and then lying about it. You know: the way Hitler did.<br /><i><br /></i><b>Best Reread: Fyodor Dostoevsky,<i> The Brothers Karamazov </i></b><br />As I said last year when <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> won this award, maybe this is just a given.<br /><br />Let's see. What 2024 reading am I most anticipating? <i>Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde</i>, Grimms' Tales, a biography of Gen<i>.</i> Longstreet, Charles Williams's <i>Many Dimensions</i> (an old favorite), the rest of Shirer's <i>Third Reich</i>, and, of course, Dickens<i> </i>(<i>Great Expectations</i> and <i>Pickwick Papers</i> this year). To find out how these hopes pan out, stay tuned. </p><p>May your New Year be filled with an abundance of good books that entertain, teach, and inspire you!<br /><br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-87082442647241578752023-12-23T17:11:00.002-05:002023-12-23T17:11:26.565-05:00Coherent yet Mind-Boggling<p>I read the <i>Mabinogion</i> this month in preparation for starting Stephen Lawhead’s Arthurian books this coming year. The <i>Mabinogion</i> is a loose collection of fantasy and adventure stories (now defined as that set of stories translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in the nineteenth century) from twelfth-century Wales. Some of the stories mention King Arthur, whose historical inspiration may well have lived there, and a few of them make their way into Arthurian legend through adaptation by Chrétien de Troyes and other medieval French authors. <br /><br />From descriptions I had read, I was expecting something haphazard and broken like lists of knights and short sketches or fragments of stories: the stuff that will be read only by diehard Arthurian connoisseurs who want to read all the background legends. I couldn’t have been more wrong. These are full-fledged stories, each with a beginning, middle, and end, full of romance, adventure, intrigue, and unexplained magic (people with no hitherto discernible supernatural traits, for instance, suddenly changing form, as if mystical metamorphosis is simply a common fact of life). Here’s a sample summary of one story, “The Lady of the Fountain”:<br /><br />King Arthur takes a nap while Sir Kynon tells a story about himself: he sets out to find proof that he is the best knight. On his journey, a man at a castle tells him to look for a giant black man with one foot and one eye in the middle of his forehead. The giant, having been found, tells Kynon to look for a fountain with a bowl and a slab. He finds the fountain, fills the bowl and pours it on the slab. Thunder claps, and hailstones fall in such a violent way as to strip all the trees and kill all the animals. An earl rides out, knocks Kynon off his horse (who has been protected by his shield), scolds Kynon for killing all his livestock, and leads the horse away. Sir Owain decides to try copying this adventure. He has the same experience, complete with ELE hailstorm, but Owain kills the earl when he comes out to scold him. Riding toward the now-dead earl’s castle, he is trapped in the portcullis. A girl gives him a ring of invisibility to wear. When the guards come to raise the gate and nab their prisoner, Owain slips out unseen and makes his way to the girl’s room where he says he is in love with the lady he has just seen in the courtyard. The girl says the woman is the widow, and she then goes to tell the widow that if she knows what's good for her, she'll marry a knight from Arthur's court; of course she means Owain. Owain marries the widow and stays three years, "protecting the fountain" (but actually just extorting travelers), then asks to leave for three months in order to visit with Arthur. But Owain stays at Caerlleon (Arthur’s Welsh home) for three years, after which his wife comes and throws her wedding ring at him. Duly chastised, Owain returns to his earldom and his wife. After this he has a couple other adventures that tidy up loose ends, including convincing the black giant that he has been nothing but a tyrant terrifying travelers; the giant decides to be nice!<br /><br />Now that story is tightly constructed and perfectly coherent, and yet it’s mind-boggling. In reading stories of errant knights for some sixty years now, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that in order to answer any given whim or question that pops into one’s head, one gets on a horse and travels aimlessly, certain that the answer will eventually present itself somewhere along the winding path. And I’ve grown used to the idea that a knight looking for the key place in his quest, even though it’s located in physical space in a perfectly normal way, simply cannot locate it unless he finds someone who knows someone who knows how to find the place. But what kind of magic is this that causes water poured on a slab to bring on the Hailstorm of Death? And if you have the Hailstorm of Death Slab on your land, why do you wait until some clueless knight pours water on it instead of guarding it as if your livestock had some value? Why, given that there’s a girl who gives you a magic ring and invites you to her room for safety, do you opt for the woman you glimpse for a second along the way? And, given that you have opted for the woman in the courtyard, why in the world do you tell the girl? How exactly does Owain protect the fountain? And how does he go from robber baron to moral police over other robber barons?<br /><br />My first response to all these questions is simply to say, “I love it!” The combination of these surprising choices and this weird magic makes for a fantasy world that is just extremely attractive to me. I could read about this world for the rest of my life (which, of course, is exactly what I plan to do by continuing to enjoy various versions of the Matter of Britain). <br /><br />But my second response is that the weirdness of the “The Lady of the Fountain” isn’t really all that weird. The Arthurian world is, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>, our world. (I’m so pleased with myself that I found an opportunity to use that Latin phrase!) I often find that answers remain stubbornly hidden when I sit still looking for them in my mind, and then just come to me unbidden when I’m on the move. And I usually can’t complete the most obvious task the first time without guidance from others. I haven’t seen a bowl of water cause a lethal storm, but I have known a plane ticket found in a glove box to cause a marital separation, and I’ve known two poorly chosen words in a joke to cause a separation between good friends. And who can predict when Cupid’s arrow will strike or how a rejected lover will react?<br /><br />I’m so glad I was wrong about the <i>Mabinogion</i>!<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-67654985081429509922023-11-30T19:24:00.002-05:002023-11-30T19:24:50.192-05:00No Thoroughfare<p>First off, the complete works of an author as prolific as Dickens, all compiled into a single file, can be enough to crash a Kindle or Kindle app! But how else am I going to read Dickens’s plays? I actually do have a hard copy, but they’re in a little edition from the nineteenth century; the red leather is so brittle and flaky, patches of rust-colored dust cover clothes, furniture, and floor after even a short glance inside. So finicky Kindle version it is.<br /><br />Secondly (second off?), these complete works collections available for $0.99 are fairly unreliable. Dickens wrote a play called <i>No Thoroughfare</i> in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, and then teamed with his friend again to write a prose version of the story, but my “complete” works file contains only the prose version and yet groups it with the plays. (Who knows? Maybe the dramatic version is in there somewhere under the wrong title and grouped with speeches or poetry.)<br /><br />Thirdly, I thought I had read the prose <i>No Thoroughfare</i> previously, but, as I went through it in recent days, I didn’t remember any of the story and was quite surprised to find that the “story” is actually longer than any of Dickens’s Christmas books. Maybe I just forgot it all, but maybe I hadn’t really read it before. In any case, I thought I was going to enjoy another one-sitting play but ended up reading a novella that took about three days.<br /><br />I don’t know if I would recommend <i>No Thoroughfare</i> to anyone other than someone like me who just enjoys reading everything Dickens wrote. Its story of an adopted orphan trying to find his birth mother may resonate with readers today. But the book also contains a character who implicitly trusts the owner of a business because, well, you know, because entrepreneurs are naturally honest and hard-working. I believe Dickens when he says that people like this or the Cheerybles from <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> truly existed and were known by him personally, but I understand that this kind of character doesn’t sit well with a culture that has lived through Bernie Madoff. It also involves a melodramatic fight scene on an Alpine cliff above a melting ice promontory and not just one or two but three wild Dickensian coincidences that are all essential to the workings of the plot. (One character continues to say, “The world is small,” as if the author knew he had to sell even nineteenth-century readers on the possibility of these freakish conjunctions.) Altogether, it’s just not what most people want to read now.<br /><br />But I liked it.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-35177068002397308022023-11-20T17:31:00.007-05:002024-01-01T11:24:36.718-05:00Read Your Notes!<p>My wife and I love to watch <i>The Amazing Race</i>. In this show, a ten-time Emmy winner for Best Competition Series, teams travel around the globe and perform challenges that might involve learning a location’s traditional dance, participating in a local business like food delivery or denture fitting (!), or matching portraits of historic figures with living models appropriately dressed and coifed. It’s an inspiring travelogue with the added bonus of human interest and competition.<br /><br />But occasionally during an episode, the viewer’s almost continuous sense of awe is interrupted by frustration as a team heads out on a challenge without picking up the required equipment or hails a tuk-tuk when the clue explicitly says to proceed on foot to the next destination. The most frequently uttered phrase on the lips of the <i>Amazing Race</i> afficionado: READ YOUR CLUE!<br /><br />I recently finished Charles Williams’s <i>The Place of the Lion</i> for the third time in my life. I remembered (incorrectly, it turns out) not understanding it before and amazed myself at how much I was able to absorb in this book by the most abstruse of my favorite authors. But today I read what I wrote eleven years ago after my previous encounter with the book. I appeared to understand even more then and recorded some very smart, very helpful observations. Why didn’t I review what I had written before rereading the book? Chapter 15 would have made so much more sense!<br /><br />Hmmm. Am I going to share any of those smart, helpful ideas with you, reader? No. Today’s post is only about admitting my intellectual frailty and publicly scolding myself to READ YOUR NOTES!<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-6188047156646345852023-11-10T17:08:00.007-05:002023-11-29T17:12:23.510-05:00Suffering<p>Well, we’ve finished our move. I lost the book I was going to read during the five days it took to travel across the country. Then we had unpacking to do. Then I hurt my back unpacking. So I’ve struggled in the last month to keep up even with reading – which gets interesting on heavy muscle relaxers! Finding opportunities to write for the blog has been almost impossible. It’s actually the end of November as I write this post, but I’m predating it to line up a little better with what I actually read when.<br /><br />A few years ago while I was visiting the site of the tragedy that made for the bloodiest day in the history of the United States, a park ranger at Antietam National Battlefield recommended Drew Gilpin Faust’s <i>This Republic of Suffering</i>. Prof. Faust discusses many aspects of death during and after the Civil War: what soldiers thought of impending death, how they brought themselves to kill, what burials were like, how families mourned, how people on the home front struggled to “realize” (we might say “assimilate”) the death of a beloved father, husband, brother, or son, and how the government took on the duty of accounting for every deceased veteran.<br /><br />Most interesting to me was the notion of the “good death” so prevalent then in the United States – north and south. Families depended on a loved one’s last words in order to get assurance of the dearly departed’s destiny in the afterlife. Being willing to die, expressing faith, and telling the family that they will all one day reunite on the other side were all good signs that brought endless comfort to the mourning family. Young men were so eager to provide their families with this assurance, they often wrote down their own “last” words before a battle after having a feeling they considered a premonition of death. Following the sudden death of a soldier who had not prepared in this way, comrades often did the best they could to write to the homes of their late messmates with whatever information they had that could be taken as indication of a good death.<br /><br />So much death, so well written about; the book was bound to be profoundly moving. Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. Ranger! <br /><br />(And could you tell the interpretive ranger at Andrew Johnson National Historic Site that Johnson is consistently ranked by historians near the bottom among other Presidents for a good reason, and that he is not to be ranked “somewhere in the middle”? The President who allowed Black Codes to flourish and virtual slavery to return after the Civil War is certainly not the equal of Coolidge, who balanced the budget after the First World War; Jackson, who kept the country together during Calhoun’s treacherous nullification movement; or Grant, who took down the first Klan.)<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-42277157667804775982023-10-30T11:26:00.003-04:002023-10-30T23:56:28.972-04:00Moving Wrap-Up<p>You thought I was promising that this post would be moving? That I was going to jerk tears from your eyes by announcing the wrap-up of the blog? Or the wrap-up of my life?<br /><br />Nope. It’s a moving post in that we’ve been packing and moving from one end of the country to the other. I’ve barely kept up with my book plan. Note-taking has mostly fallen by the wayside, and I certainly haven’t had time to arrange my thoughts into a form suitable for public consumption. But I didn’t want to let October go by without a post. So here’s a quick summary of the last six weeks or so.<br /><br />Because Bruce Schulman keeps putting off the completion of his volume of the Oxford History of the United States, I had to go out of chronological order this year. I jumped from 1896 to 1939 and read David Kennedy’s <i>Freedom from Fear</i>. This history of the Great Depression and World War II was excellent: one of the best offerings of the series. If I want to nitpick, I’d say that writing about a period with two “all-time biggest” events left Kennedy little time to talk about movies, literature, radio, schools, sports, etc. I do remember one interesting but brief note about clothing: that is, that skirts themselves became more interesting and brief during the war because of cloth shortages.<br /><br />On one level, you could say that Trollope’s <i>The American Senato</i>r is really about the English characters in the book. The Senator is only there to learn English customs, gather evidence to prove that American customs are superior in every way, and to give a speech in England trying to show its residents how misguided they are in all things. As an observer, he acts outside the main plot(s) and provides a bit of comic relief. But then Trollope did name the book for the Senator. Maybe the author was in a critical mood and thought his compatriots needed a fresh perspective. I also recently read three short stories by Trollope, all involving less-than-proficient writers submitting their creations to magazine editors. Funny and touching.<br /><br />I loved reading C. S. Lewis’s letters, but I can’t recall many details right now. I know he told several people writing for advice on living as a Christian that they shouldn’t worry at all if their feelings aren’t in line. I’ll try to ignore my feelings about forgetting so much.<br /><br />I wouldn’t call Zane Grey’s <i>Lone Star Ranger</i> great literature. I think I could call it an exciting adventure if it were cut down by about 20%. But I like Grey’s books because he’s taught me interesting things about the views of Americans at that time concerning the way men and women should act out their gender roles in order to keep America strong. Having just read a detailed account of the Depression, I can’t agree with Grey that city life is an easy life that makes people weak. But I’m in sympathy with him when he says that living in the rugged conditions of the West develops strength. I’m moving to a city in the West. I wonder if Grey would approve.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-49957333047667758012023-09-30T11:44:00.001-04:002023-10-04T11:53:28.281-04:00Maid in Waiting, Maid in Wanting<p><i>Maid in Waiting</i>, the seventh novel of Galsworthy’s <i>Forsyte Chronicles</i>, actually turns the focus from the Forsytes onto the Charwells (pronounced and spelled throughout the book “Cherrell”). At first the book felt really different from the earlier installments in the series, not only because of the turnover in the roster of characters, but because I didn’t see the pointed critique of modernity I’ve come to expect from Galsworthy. The dialog actually reminded me more of Dostoevsky, with the characters persistently discussing reasons for and against belief in God. Most characters remain close to a position maintaining that God exists but that, if the horrid reality of insanity is any indication, He must lack all mercy and active care for humanity. This anxious crisis of faith is a central feature of modernity rather than a critique.<br /><br />But on the second to last day of reading, I got it. The critique begins with portrayals of duty. Living with what appears to be a remote, uncaring God, the Cherrells find daily motivation in a family sense of duty. The protagonist, a young woman named Dinny, helps out a neighbor whose husband has just come home after years in an insane asylum, even putting herself at great risk of bodily harm to do so. Several uncles help Dinny’s brother, who has been accused of murdering a man in Bolivia and stands to be extradited. And Uncle Hilary, a clergyman introduced in the previous novel, constantly helps out poor members of his parish, often serving as a character witness in the trials that come their way so regularly.<br /><br />But is duty actually duty, a moral imperative based on foundational truth? Or is it a case of humanity doing not God’s work but humankind’s work, taking up God’s slack, so to speak, and attempting at least to do something where He appears to do nothing? Dinny’s brother, Hubert, says that his generation has “seen through things,” by which he means “religion and marriage and treaties . . . and ideals of every kind.” But, he continues, if everyone just tries to grab pleasure, then by competing everyone will make certain that no one gets any pleasure. “All institutions . . . are simply forms of consideration for others necessary to secure consideration for self.” So people have to keep to the traditions; Hubert thinks the traditions merely help people achieve their own selfish ends, but some characters say the respect for tradition is important “for decency’s sake.” Maybe the cynical Hubert is right. But if decency is indispensable, and dutiful service to tradition is all that keeps decency propped up, the habits of the virtuous landed gentry like the Cherrells show the way humanity must live. <br /><br />And yet Dinny’s dutiful actions don’t actually seem instrumental to achieving her desired ends (even if those ends are met through other channels, perhaps because of Galsworthy’s own traditional sense of the need for closure in a plot). Sir Lawrence says, “Has it ever struck you, Dinny, that history is nothing but the story of how people have taken things into their own hands, and got themselves or others into and out of trouble over it?” There it is. The modern assumption, that God either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care, in conjunction with an inescapable sense of right and wrong, leaves virtuous people depending on their own human resources to fix everything. Wipe the dust off your hands, Modernity; you’ve got the universe figured out! Except . . . except that history shows that these all-too-human attempts to right all wrongs ultimately fail.<br /><br />A final, unrelated note. At one point in <i>Maid in Waiting</i>, a missing person is found to have fallen down a well. Galsworthy here calls on tradition in another way by copying very closely a scene from Dickens’s <i>Hard Times</i>!<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-33417355450109078222023-09-03T21:54:00.000-04:002023-09-03T21:54:31.223-04:00Almost Exactly What I Was Hoping For<p>I've wanted to read a biography of the oddity known as "Stonewall" Jackson for a long time. S. C. Gwynne's <i>Rebel Yell</i> was almost exactly what I was hoping for in that it examined a fascinating and historically significant man with a bewildering combination of strong characteristics. I got a gripping story told in abundant detail: here was the tactical brilliance, the Christian piety, the weird quirks, the strict discipline, the hypochondria, the slave-owning, the stated tenderness toward blacks, and the burning desire for the Confederacy to stage a no-prisoners war of city-razing and slaughter. And it was all told in clear and elegant prose.</p><p>But although I enjoyed this long walk down a weird, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying path, I did find some irritating stones in my shoe now and then.</p><p>Gwynne ends his book with some quotations of praise for Jackson from northerners, including Union soldiers who fought against him. Yeah, that's weird. Americans didn't wake up after V-J day to find newspapers touting the courage of Admiral Yamamoto. We didn't read after Osama bin Laden was killed about his brilliance. And yet Union newspapers, in the days just after Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's death, praised him for his military genius, his bravery, and his Christian and moral convictions. That's super-interesting, and I'm glad Gwynne reported it. But I also felt, after having read the whole book, that the author included this material partly to justify his own admiration for Jackson.</p><p>OK, admiring the admirable in your flawed subject is just fine for a biographer. But, as I see it, Gwynne stepped over a line a few times. Consider his statement that Jackson never broke a law. First of all, Gwynne himself tells elsewhere of Jackson breaking the law in holding a Sunday School for slaves. But secondly, can we really say that a person can join a movement that declares its political independence from its mother country and then seize a military installation of that mother country without breaking a law? Isn't the point of rebellion that the rebels have decided they have to break the law and fight to the point that they won't be punished for breaking that law? We must indeed all hang together or most assuredly we shall hang separately, right?</p><p>One of the northern admirers Gwynne quotes near the end said he hoped Jackson's admirable traits could be laid against his betrayal of his country. That's an interesting sentiment to ponder. But it's the only hint in the whole book that Jackson's stand with the seceded states was a betrayal. Gwynne says that, at the crucial moment in April 1865, Jackson saw his loyalty to his state as higher than that to the United States. Come on! Surely at this point in our history, any responsible biography of Jackson (or of any of several of his similarly situated colleagues) needs to point out, at least, that as an officer in the United States Army, he had taken a solemn oath to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, to bear allegiance to her, and to obey the President. We shouldn't have to expect to read an author telling us with a yawn, "Oh well, he just decided that it was more important to <i>be</i> an enemy than to fulfill his oath to defend the United States <i>from</i> enemies."</p><p>But this attitude of treating treason as too insignificant to mention only came to the surface briefly a handful of times. Aside from that, this book was exactly what I was hoping for.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-72073534644821908572023-08-22T08:56:00.001-04:002023-08-22T08:56:10.380-04:00Half of The Brothers Karamazov<p>It’s hard to know what to write about this most profound of novels. What could I possibly say that could add anything to what Dostoevsky has said? If you don’t read the book, anything I try to tell you wouldn’t matter. If you do read it, you don’t need me to point out to you that Ivan’s question about children’s suffering is devastating or that Alyosha’s summary life of his mentor in the monastery is inspirational. You’d notice without any help from me! So I’ll just say a couple of brief things about my reading experience.<br /><br />I had difficulty deciding on a translation, but I decided to go with Constance Garnett, partly because her translation is cheap on Kindle, but also because I had read that she keeps Russian turns of phrase more than others. The book is strange enough to read with its Russian customs and Russian outlook; adding Russian conversational cadences only makes it weirder. But part of the reason for reading the book is to appreciate the perspective of the author in his time and place, so I prefer this experience to one in which the dialog has been translated so all the nineteenth-century Russians sound like twenty-first-century Americans. I know one way or another I’m reading Russian characters speaking English. But in my head, I want them to speak English with a Russian accent.<br /><br />Mortimer Adler divided up <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i> over two years in the original reading plan included with the Britannica Great Works set. So that’s the way I read it the first time. I had never done such a thing before, but I was amazed at how well I picked up the characters when taking up the book again after several months. I started thinking about <i>Star Wars</i> stories appearing in installments, about Dickens books originally coming out in serial form over the course of twenty months, and about Cervantes publishing the conclusion to <i>Don Quixot</i>e only after a hiatus of ten-years, and it occurred to me that splitting up the reading of a book over years isn’t as odd as it seems at first. Maybe I’m just jealous of my wife, who can sit down and read a whole book in a day. Anyway, I’ve split <i>Karamazov</i> up again. I just read half of it this month and then put it aside for the next book on this year’s list. I’ll finish it sometime early-ish next year.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-78970643947195654402023-08-11T15:06:00.001-04:002023-08-11T15:06:50.960-04:00Speaking of Being Expected to Know History . . .<p>In my last post, I noted that Winston Churchill expects readers of his <i>History of the English-Speaking Peoples</i> already to know the outline of the history he recounts so that he can spend most of his effort putting his own spin on it. I opened my next book only to find this dynamic even more applicable: Charles Williams clearly expects his readers to know the history of Christendom and of Europe before taking on his <i>The Descent of the Dove</i>. <br /><br />The passage that most clearly shows this assumption comes near the end, where Williams introduces one important personage, without naming him, simply as "the most famous man in all Europe," a man who cried "<i>Ecrasez l'Infame</i>." Now, I recognized Voltaire in the description. But I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t read about Voltaire and this motto only last year in the Durants' history. Did any of my readers recognize the man by the description?<br /><br />Williams is hard to read in other ways as well. He had a peculiar view of the Church and of the world and described them constantly in terms of “coinherence and exchange.” And he wrote as if we all knew what he meant by those terms. (Blogspot’s editor doesn’t know the word “coinherence”!) And he has a fondness for identifying biblical personages (including the Persons of the Trinity) by foreign forms of their names. Page 1 of <i>The Descent of the Dove</i> includes this intriguing passage: “The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the descent of the Paraclete.” I like it, but after reading two-hundred pages of this kind of writing, I can’t say I truly understood more than about 75% of it.<br /><br />What I did understand, though, I found inspirational – the last point especially. Belief is not exactly knowledge, and the Church flirts with pride and hatred when she treats people who don’t believe in Christ as if they don’t <i>know</i> as much as she does. (And every denomination within the Church runs the same dangers with regard to their attitudes towards Christians who don’t believe exactly the same.) What Christendom needs in order to be again “close to the Descent of the Dove,” he says, is to “feel intensely within itself the three strange energies which we call contrition and humility and doctrine.” I am called to be humble and contrite, as are all other Christians; what makes me think that we are not called corporately to feel, express, and act on communal humility and contrition?<br /><br />By the way, why don’t Americans know about the most famous man in eighteenth-century Europe and his crusade? Is it that we – No, let me correct that. Is it that the historians of our grandparents’ time decided that the most important fact about eighteenth-century Europe is that this country made a break from it, so that we Americans wouldn’t have to worry about the need for Voltaire’s crusade? Or do we think that we don’t need to learn about Europe’s past problems because we have found the proper solution to all Europe’s problems in our missiles and aircraft carriers?<br /><br />*sigh* We will be close to the Descent of the Dove only when we feel contrition and humility.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-75093834165975066822023-07-30T15:52:00.001-04:002023-07-30T15:52:24.886-04:00Studying History or Studying Churchill?<p>I’ve spent so many decades trying to learn history by reading history books! I’ve come to see that the goal of my lifetime project is a bit like trying to learn what other countries are like by reading travel books. But no travel book is a substitute for travel. No book about Italy can tell you as much about the land and its people as a visit to a to a grocery store in an Italian town. I’ll go farther: no picture of the Eiffel Tower can show you what it’s really like as much as an hour sipping coffee at a café on the sidewalks of Paris with the Tower in view. <br /><br />Without a time machine, though, I can’t actually visit history to “really” learn it. But I’ve come to realize that by reading not books <i>abou</i>t history but books <i>from</i> history, I come as close as possible to visiting history. Spread out over this third decade of planned reading, I’ve been rereading Winston Churchill’s<i> History of the English-Speaking Peoples</i>. I first read the multi-volume work forty years ago trying to learn the history of England (learning the history of other English-speaking nations was less urgent to me at the time) and was frustrated by how unclear some of it was. On my second experience with the series, the books are clearer, but only because I know better the history that the Great Briton narrates. <br /><br />So now I understand Churchill better. Because Churchill had a reason for telling this history. Writing in England in the 1930s, he could assume that his audience had learned the salient facts in school. (<i>O tempora</i>!<i> O mores</i>!) His purpose was not to restate those facts but to synthesize them and teach a lesson about the greatness of that history of slowly growing justice and to convince his country and, more importantly, the United States that they had to join forces in order to stop the evils spreading across Europe and Asia. So of course he’s going to rush past philosophies and social movements, perhaps mentioning some of them but never explaining them, and concentrate on battles. It’s not a history; it’s a view of history. Since I need no convincing about the need for my country to help stop Hitler, what I get most out of these books is Churchill’s view.<br /><br />And what a view! Britain took India “almost by mistake” and never intended to create an empire? Wow! The Battle of New Orleans created the “evil” myth that the War of 1812 had been a second war of independence? This from the leader of a country that once impressed our citizens while at sea and expected those Americans to fight Britain’s war. Maybe Churchill wanted to show that Americans and Britons worked “together” to stop Napoleon and hoped the story would inspire us to work together again to stop another tyrant trying to take over Europe?<br /><br />Despite howlers like these, I’m enjoying the books and I’m glad I’m rereading them. In some ways they’re worse now (my naive younger self may have believed him forty years ago when he said India came under British rule by an innocent series of mistakes), but in other ways they’re better, too, and somehow better because they’re sometimes worse, because now my purpose is to learn Churchill, virtues and flaws together. Anyway, here’s the moral of my story: read novels and poetry and philosophy and theology from England’s history in order to learn the history. Or read a dry textbook. Then read Churchill.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-2272814904067003672023-07-07T11:36:00.002-04:002023-07-07T11:36:33.597-04:00Tremendous Trifles<p>You can read <a href="http://exlibrismagnis.blogspot.com/2020/12/long-futile-searches-through-chesterton.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://exlibrismagnis.blogspot.com/2021/05/were-going-for-cheese.html" target="_blank">here</a> about my tortuous forty-year journey to find the Chesterton articles I so wanted to reread. Today, I’ll just quickly get into it and say that over the last week, I reread one of the books I originally read during my happy time at Baylor University, and that in that book I came across the passage that made me fall in love with Chesterton forever.<br /><br /><i>Tremendous Trifles</i> is a wonderful title! The alliterative moniker might rightly be seen to refer to the newspaper columns reprinted within. But GKC explains in an introduction that the title actually refers to the commonplace things all around us, heavy with significance, but ignored in our jaded familiarity. A piece of chalk when used to draw a simple figure on a piece of brown paper becomes an angelic herald proclaiming goodness and purity in the world, and the very ground in southern England, overlooked and downtrodden, becomes a piece of chalk! The forgotten remains of train tickets in Chesterton’s pockets become philosophical treatises. A toy theatre provides – literally – a small window on the world, and every child who has looked through a telescope made of a loose fist knows how a small window makes the world look magical. A toy seller becomes Father Christmas.<br /><br />But Chesterton makes some important observations about . . . well . . . um . . . about observation itself. For instance, he says we must never give up the amateur jury, because justice should rightly depend on convincing people for whom courts and procedures and crimes are novelties, not jaded professionals who see these things everyday and don’t understand them as unusual. Later he claims that the destination of every trip is home and that the only way to appreciate home is to go away from it and come back; otherwise you can't see what is ordinary in your home but foreign in other places.<br /><br />In a piece about watching prisoners coming off a train, Chesterton offers a sane definition of a sane person: one who can have tragedy in the heart and comedy in the head. But an even saner remark comes a little later in a complaint about sentimentalists who say torture is a relic of barbarism. Weak, wrong-headed attack! The plough, the fishing net, the horn, and civilization itself are relics of barbarism. The problem with torture, he says, is not that it is a relic of barbarism. “In actuality it is simply a relic of sin.” I’d almost forgotten the moment and the effect, but reading that sentence again after forty years, ending with that powerful three-letter word, brought it back in all its details. I even remember the exact place I was standing in our Waco student apartment when I fell in love.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-81463808834628589142023-06-30T12:03:00.009-04:002024-02-21T15:05:40.220-05:00Recommendations<p>It’s hard for me to fit in a new book. Once upon a time, I had so many books to read, I made a ten-year schedule. Then another. And then another. Right now I’m honing my fourth ten-year reading plan. When someone recommends a book, when am I supposed to read it? Often I just don’t.<br /><br />But what if one of the books I read makes a recommendation? Lewis’s <i>Surprised by Joy</i> has added several things to my list. (In fact, I had to remind myself after rereading it the last time that this spiritual and intellectual autobiography was the inspiration for my whole reading project thirty years ago.) Seven years ago I read a history of Victorian literature that showed me there was a whole lot more to the era than Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot; I devote a large portion of my Fourth Decade plan to Ainsworth, Kingsley, Oliphant, Gaskell, and others of the time.<br /><br />Boswell and Dr. Johnson, of course, incessantly talk about literature, much of which I want to add somewhere in the plan. A couple of times in Boswell’s classic, he recommends Edward Young’s <i>Night Thoughts</i> – recommends it highly. He calls it “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced” and says that its lessons are “solemnly and poetically displayed in such imagery and language, as cannot fail to exalt, animate, and soothe the truly pious.” I noted his effusive praise during my second ten years of planned reading and put the book on my third yen-year plan. And this month, its time finally came round!<br /><br />I had a lot of trouble understanding the opaque grammar of this lengthy poem at first. After many pages I came to realize that Latin influenced Young constantly. Many sentences and clauses leave the verb “is” implied. Many compound sentences using the same verb in each clause omit it from the first clause (where a more modern elegant form would omit it from the second clause). With these two notes in mind, the poem became much clearer, and reading became smoother.<br /><br />Young had lost his wife, step-daughter, and step-son-in-law and wrote <i>Night Thoughts</i> in answer to an infidel called “Lorenzo” in defense of faith in the light of tragic death. He offers views of death as nothing to be feared, proofs of immortality, expositions of Christian faith in a future state of both individual self and the world, an answer to the person who wants to be a “worldly” man, and much more. Altogether, <i>Night Thoughts</i> offers a thorough philosophical guide to the Christian who wants to think rightly about ultimate concerns.</p><p>I noticed in the poem three passages that certainly must have influenced Lewis: one gives an argument of immortality from desire (all the physical desires of my soul – hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc. – find their object existing in the real world, so I may believe, based on my desire for ultimate happiness, that that object also actually exists), another outlines the benefits of pain, and the last, in a survey of the planets, asks, “And had your Eden an abstemious Eve?” <br /><br />Fortunately, as regards my future reading plans, <i>Night Thoughts</i> is not like Lewis in one key feature. Where Lewis continually makes reference to books I want to read (or reread), Young recommends only one book: the Bible.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-75544748597309635532023-06-29T11:57:00.005-04:002023-06-29T11:57:34.206-04:00Shaksper<p>In my continued determination to write briefly after some computer troubles this month, I head this post with one of the shortest of the Bard’s signature spellings.<br /><br />I don’t remember what made me add <i>3 Henry V</i>I to my reading list this year, but I’m glad I did. This one is slow and tediously expositional at first. But once Richard of York (the future Richard III) gets involved, it becomes good and almost essential as a prequel to the really good play. And, yeah, <i>Richard III</i> is really good. This is one of the ones I plan to read every few years. I sometimes wonder ahead of time if it’s really worth the time to revisit some old dusty drama yet again. But <i>Richard III</i> never disappoints. Was the real Richard this evil? Did he really order the deaths of the two princes in the Tower? I don’t know. Let’s just say the play is not about the historical personage but <i>is</i> about the character that Shakespeare made out of the historical personage. However near or far the two lie in relation to one another, Shakespeare’s Richard is horrifyingly fascinating.<br /><br /><i>Hamlet</i> never disappoints, either. The poor prince berates himself so much through the first four acts for trying to accomplish his deadly mission of revenge through nothing more than clever talk and “mad” wordplay. Then at the end of Act IV, after he sees Fortinbras head off to Poland ready to kill, he shouts, “O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” The reader might think the line shows that Hamlet is now truly determined to obey his ghostly father’s commands. And yet he still does nothing until he finds that he has been stabbed with a poisoned dagger and has only a few minutes to live. Anyone who believes faith is dead without works and yet lives with unwilling flesh can’t help but find awe in the mirror Hamlet holds up.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-75744452213260119142023-06-28T11:04:00.005-04:002023-06-28T11:04:33.223-04:00Short<p>My apologies for the time between the last post and now. I had computer troubles. *uggh* Note to self: Next time go to James at TCS IT first!<br /><br />So to help catch up on reporting about my reading, I’ll keep it brief today with some short notes about Dickens’s short fiction. My plan was to read everything under the rubric “Other [i.e. non-Christmas] Short Fiction” in a giant Kindle collection that claims to present the complete works of Dickens. Some stories included in this section were excerpts from the novels, but, having read all the novels several times each, I skipped those stories. “A Thousand and One Humbugs” is a satirical send-up of the Parliament of the day. Not knowing enough about enough of the politicians involved, I gave it up after a few pages.</p><p>I did, though, read and thoroughly enjoy “Hunted Down,” the best story in the section. I can hardly give any details at all without unfairly spoiling the story since it’s a murder mystery. But I can say that an insurance adjuster serves as the detective, that a disguise in the plot made me think that Conan Doyle must have known and enjoyed this story, and that the point about the validity of first impressions rings true although it may have been surprising at the time.<br /><br />“George Silverman’s Explanation” is told by a man raised by oppressive parents very strict in their misguided version of Christianity. Upon hearing Jesus say, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ ” one might begin to obey by reading this excellent and heart-breaking story.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-45526852688221360952023-05-24T11:11:00.002-04:002023-05-24T14:24:43.204-04:00Who Was the Emperor?<p>OK. First off, I want to make this post the only thing you will ever read about the Holy Roman Empire that doesn’t tell you what Voltaire said.<br /><br />Secondly, I have to admit that I gave up on a book, something I’ve only done a handful of times in all my life. It’s not like Peter Wilson’s <i>Heart of Europe</i> is a classic of great literature, so I don’t feel too guilty, just a little lopsided in a mild-OCD way. Wilson claims up front that he didn’t arrange his 600-page book chronologically but thematically, with a timeline at the end. So when he says that such-and-such an event hadn’t happened since Otto II without having told the reader about Otto II or provided any contextual dates, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Could any reader know?<br /><br />I’d rather have a story with an appendix of interpretation than a thematically ordered history with an appendix of dates. Of course, I’d really rather have something like a narrative with explanation and interpretation folded in all along the way. But it seems that’s too much to hope for in a history of the HRE. The other longish book I saw on Amazon claimed the same thematically driven organization. So I just settled for the <i>Very Short Introduction to . . .</i> from the Oxford series (this one by Joachim Whaley). These little guides are also not anything like great literature, but every one I’ve tried has done a good job of laying down a foundation of understanding about some difficult topic.<br /><br />The big question on this topic is always, “What was the Holy Roman Empire?” I’ve come to the oxymoronically temporary conclusion that the question is perennial because it’s simply the wrong question. The better question is, “Who was the Holy Roman Emperor, and what did he think the Empire was?” The Empire was at least an ideal whose chance of realization definitely started in 800 and definitely ended in 1806, but apart from that, it doesn’t seem to have been much of anything. There were many years in the Empire’s history in which no emperor was crowned. The Emperor never had a central army or the ability to raise taxes. Starting in the fourteenth century, the electorate was codified as one set of seven (later eight, and then nine) German leaders who wanted the prestige and stability of an emperor. So the Emperor represented seven out of millions, but to what extent did this elected figurehead preside over and unify the territories of these princes, not to speak of the hundred-fifty or so towns, duchies, and bishoprics that got no vote? At times over the years, some groups of towns and territories within the Empire, most famously the Hanseatic League, formed mutual defense and economic pacts, leaving other parts of the Empire out. The Empire fought a civil war in the seventeenth century that lasted thirty years. In the eighteenth century, various pieces of the kingdom sided at different times with France against “the Empire” and yet remained within the Empire. And in Napoleon’s time, several of the Empire’s territories voted to become part of France.<br /><br />Now what kind of country would the United States be if, say, West Virginia had been able to form an alliance with ISIS and yet stay within the U.S.? What would Italy be if Tuscany and Umbria could form their own army and make a trade pact that excluded Venezia? What would Canada be if Alberta could just vote to become a part of Mexico and then be exactly that, without any further ado?<br /><br />So the story of the HRE, I think, is really a story of people. It’s the story of Otto I, the first German Emperor; of Henry IV, who made obeisance to the Pope in the snow at Canossa; of Frederick II, the <i>stupor mundi</i> (wonder of the world); of Charles IV, who wrote the Golden Bull enshrining the election process; of Charles V, who cared more about Spain and American colonies than he did about German lands and left his brother to try to handle the Reformation; and of Charles VI, who really only cared about Austria. These fascinating people all had ideas about what the Empire was and tried to make it what they wanted it to be. But if generations of potters continually work at the wheel trying to make and reshape the same vase, is it ever really a vase?<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-19230433558165926932023-05-20T08:06:00.002-04:002023-06-29T12:01:56.314-04:00Better Times for Hard Times<p>Around some twenty-five years ago, I used to see the occasional student walking around campus carrying a copy of <i>Hard Times</i>. Some course at the U of Oklahoma – maybe in English, but more probably in history – required it, and I used to feel sorry for the members of this captive audience since they were, as I saw it, asked to become acquainted with my favorite author through my least favorite of his novels.<br /><br />The book has its advantages for academia. It’s the shortest of the complete novels (the unfinished <i>Edwin Drood</i> might be a touch smaller), making it much easier to fit into a curriculum than, say, <i>Bleak House</i>. And it gives clear presentations of two important movements in nineteenth-century British history: utilitarianism and labor unions.<br /><br />But it has its drawbacks, as well. For one thing, the language of the characters is unusually difficult to read, even for Dickens. Either they’re trying to speak philosophically, or they’re trying to outdo one another in piling up politenesses at the beginning of every simple sentence (I hope I do not show too much presumption when I say to one of your upbringing that, and so on), or they’re speaking in a mid-England dialect. Young people reading a novel look to quotation marks for relief; they won’t be happy when that punctuation introduces language actually more complex than that of the narration.<br /><br />The problems with the language make it difficult for the average young reader of today. But not for me. The feature that bothers me most is that <i>Hard Times</i> is just so dreary! While others keep an eye out for quotation marks, I journey through the sad, bitter parts of a Dickens novel in anticipation of the happy home (Aunt Betsey’s, for instance) or the lovable clown (Captain Cuttle or Dick Swiveller). An element such as these serves as a pole star, centering the story as it whirls around in seeming chaos and providing the moral compass for the reader trying to find the way to rest and resolution. <i>Hard Times</i> has Sissy Jupe, but we hardly get to know her as we do Oliver or David or Pip or Nell in other novels. Sissy has a happy ending, but the narration only reports it rather than portraying it, and we don’t learn any of the important details. Dickens was just too focused in <i>Hard Times</i>, as perhaps the short form allowed him to be, on the villains and the conflicts and the social dysfunctions to give the reader a periodic haven of rest.<br /><br />I will say, though, that, at least in the chapters before Stephen Blackpool shows up, I read the novel this time with a new enjoyment as I imagined the mind-above-heart father and the ludicrously utilitarian schoolmaster being played by Eric Idle and Graham Chapman. The first fifty pages or so, read in this way, struck me as darkly comic, and I actually laughed several times. I would declare these passages deliciously biting satire, except that the introduction in my Oxford edition assures me that many schools at the time were run in this very way and that Dickens is here doing more recounting than exaggerating. <br /><br />I still feel sorry for any student who is required to read <i>Hard Times</i>, but at least I’ve found a strategy for myself.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442108816495964575.post-52976980182020977392023-05-06T12:27:00.003-04:002023-05-08T11:02:48.820-04:00In Jeopardy!<p>I generally don’t expect people to know that the author of <i>Gargantua</i> is Rabelais. If I were to eat out for lunch today and then go to the Visitor Center in Great Smoky Mountain NP and then to the grocery store, I would guess that not one person out of the hundreds I see would know this information. I wouldn’t expect my neighbors to know it. I wouldn’t have expected any of my students to know it.<br /><br />But I expect Jeopardy! contestants to know it. And yet in an episode a couple of weeks ago, one clue sought the author of <i>Gargantua</i>, and not one buzzer sounded. I’ll lower my expectations even lower: I don’t expect any Jeopardy! contestants to have read this comic masterpiece. But I expect them to be able to come up with, for instance, any author and title in my Britannica Great Books set. At Father Guido Sarducci’s university, “I say ‘economics,’ you say-a ‘supply and-a demand.’ ” Shouldn’t the traditional canon be in the heads of national-class quizzers and trivia enthusiasts at that level at least? I say ‘Gargantua’ and you say ‘Rabelais’?<br /><br />It gets even worse. This past week brought the clue that went something like this: “So-and-so tried founding an ideal community based on this work by Plato.” <br /><br />Crickets. <br /><br />Honestly?! If you’re going to know about one ancient classic other than the Bible, isn’t it going to be Plato’s <i>Republic</i>? Okay, maybe the <i>Odyssey</i>, but you get my point. The next day, players were asked to identify the literary character who said something about Mr Darcy. Total silence again. Isn’t <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> our culture’s favorite nineteenth-century novel?<br /><br />Jeopardy! contestants also don’t seem to know the Beatles or Carole King. But that’s a rant for a different blog.<br /></p>Ken Stephensonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11696343326764489028noreply@blogger.com0