Book Awards – 2012

The end of the year has come, so it’s time for a review, once again in the form of awards. I don’t have consistent categories in mind for these. I just make up the awards so I can talk one last time about some of my favorite reading from the past year.

Out of the Running for Any Category Because He’s in the exlibrismagnis Hall of Fame
Charles Dickens. ’Nuff said.

Best New Read: History
Durant on the Florentine Renaissance. After living an hour from Florence for four-and-a-half months, I came home to find that my Durant for the year covered the Renaissance there. I’d call it the perfect coincidence except that I wish I had read it just before we went, if only so I could have known that I needed to go just one block from where I stood several times to a church with some masterpieces by del Sarto. The voice of LOST’s Jack Shephard has been in my mind for months: “We have to go BAAAACK!”

Best New Read: Religion
Sermons by John Chrysostom. The Golden Mouth goes verse by verse, sometimes phrase by phrase, through the book of Romans and reveals nuances, implications, attitudes, and excluded alternatives. The last twenty to fifty percent of each sermon builds on the Biblical text to give wisdom and exhortation to lead a better life. "It is not suffering ill, but doing it, that is really suffering ill."

Most Pleasant Surprise
Don Juan. Byron’s poem had all the lush imagery and beautiful language I expected plus all the humor, philosophy, and morality I didn’t.

Best New Read: Drama
Wild Duck, Peer Gynt. Ibsen seemed to have changed a lot between college days and now. When I was twenty, I didn’t see why Hedda Gabler needed to shoot herself. But this year I read plays with deep, nuanced, and very sympathetic characters.

Best New Read: Fiction
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. I think the title exerts undue influence on some reviewers: the affair is only a small part of this beautiful tale of Everyman’s descent into sin.

Best New Read: Biography
Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes. Just this Thanksgiving, I played a game with my family called Evil Baby Orphanage, in which each player tries to take care of naughty little babies who will grow up to become infamous villains. Hitler, Caligula, Lizzie Borden, and all their bloodthirsty little baby friends are there. But so is Rutherford B. Hayes. “Oh, you know what he did,” says the card cryptically. I was horrified – but not by Baby Rud. OK, so he promised to pull occupation troops out of the southern states in return for their agreement to give him the electors in our history’s most disputed election. But, first, those troops had had only negative influence on long-term respect for Black’s voting rights. And second, the confusion in that election far outstripped the weirdness of 2000, and no one else had any workable solutions. Other than that deal, Hayes just appointed many women to federal posts, brought on an economic boom, stood against monopolies, and worked tirelessly for prison reform, citizenship for Indians, and civil rights and education for Blacks. Hardly evil.

Best New Read that Crosses Categories
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Theology, history, economics, philosophy, politics, cultural studies: every angle is fascinating.

Best Offroading
Roy and Lesley Adkins, The War for All the Oceans. Hefty quotations from source material feature on every page of this history of the naval side of the Napoleonic wars. It was a little strange to read several pages on the Battle of New Orleans and only a few lines on Waterloo, but then all the British troops in Louisiana came directly off of ships, and it is a history of the war for the oceans. It was also a little strange reading about the War of 1812 from a British point of view: they call it our Great Mistake.

Almost Perfect Fantasy
Summa Elvetica by Theodore Beale (Marcher Lord Press). This Christian fantasy book centers on a theological debate over whether elves have immortal souls, worded in Latin and patterned after the dialogical arguments of Thomas Aquinas. A novel's premise could not possibly appeal to me on more levels. If only it weren’t missing an absolutely essential “non” in a couple of crucial places!

Best Reread
Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion. I didn’t know enough about theology, Plato, psychology, or life to understand this book the first time I read it. I don’t understand it all now, either, but I definitely got more. Just hold your bucket under Williams’s wild, spraying fountain of mystical light. Most of it will miss your bucket, but what you catch will cleanse and satisfy.

And that’s it for 2012. Readers, may your New Year be filled with great books!

Christmas with Anthony Trollope

On Christmas Day, I read a charming little story by Anthony Trollope called “The Mistletoe Bough.” Ironically, Trollope’s frequent admission of fictionality in his narratives usually couples with some of the most realistic characters in nineteenth-century fiction. And I certainly found this true in “The Mistletoe Bough.” The story begins with a gentle argument between mother and daughter, and the narrator says after just a few lines, “The point in dispute was one very delicate in its nature, hardly to be discussed in all its bearings, even in fiction.” Even in fiction. If characters on stage break the fourth wall, what do characters in a book break? The cover?

The subject of the argument? Whether to hang mistletoe in the dining room of Thwaite Hall for the holiday visit of some young acquaintances of the Garrow family. Mrs. Garrow is for it, her daughter Elizabeth against it. It seems that Bessy (as her friends call her, and I consider myself a friend) has broken an engagement with one of the coming guests, Mr. Godfrey Holmes. So naturally she doesn’t want to find herself in an embarrassing situation at dinner one evening.

You can call the end of that story right now, and its predictable sweetness would be too precious, except for the reason Trollope gives Bessy for breaking the engagement. Bessy has decided not to be “vapid, silly, and useless” like most girls but instead to lead a life of religious purpose, which involves, in her view, a great deal of self-denial. In Bessy’s mind, self-denial itself is the goal of a pious Christian life, so clearly she can’t marry the man who loves her and makes her so happy.  (On the other hand, she takes it as an insult when her brother calls her a Puritan.) Trollope says it is as though she carries a fox under her tunic biting away at her just so she can have some suffering that she can stoically bear. Perhaps, like me, she has recently read Byron’s Manfred, and, inspired by the titular character, takes a morbid comfort in a self-inflicted punishment that can even go into Heaven. If so, it’s possible she should have done some other reading from my list for 2012. She could have learned from Peer Gynt that true Christian self-denial serves only to reveal the true self “with Master's intention displayed like a signboard.” Or maybe she could have read Descartes’s and William James’s searches for the self. Even better, Bessy, read Aquinas on ordinate and inordinate love!

I’ve known many, many believers whose most interesting characteristic consists of such venial heresies: eccentric beliefs that they hold proudly because by believing in them they feel especially spiritual. Trollope’s doctrinally passionate characters seem so utterly real to me, I sometimes think he openly declared them figments of his imagination just to keep their very nonfictional originals from complaining. In any case, slightly weird theologies make for such interesting drama, I wonder that more novelists haven't capitalized on the idea as much as Trollope did.

By the way, the last line of “The Mistletoe Bough” goes to an undramatic character: Kate, who must be one of the vapid, silly, and useless girls Bessy uses as a negative example, takes full advantage of the Mistletoe in partnership with Bessy’s brother, Harry.

Levels of Translation

Meaning happens on many levels. Take the simple phrase, “It’s raining.” It seems on the face of it that the two words convey information about the atmospheric condition. And someone might well say it to convey that information. “What’s it like outside?” “It’s raining.”

But the two words might be uttered or written outside the context of a query about the weather or the meteorological segment of the local news. And that’s because I might say the words for purposes other than that of conveying information. Suppose I’m standing next to a stranger on a corner waiting for the pedestrian light to change when the sprinkles start. I might say, “It’s raining” just to break the ice and make a human connection; certainly the other fellow can see the rain for himself and doesn’t need me to inform him. If my friend goes out in the rain without an umbrella, even though he knows why he’s wet, I still might shout “It’s raining!” to mean, “Take an umbrella!” or “Are you crazy?” I might even mutter the words to myself when I get caught in a downpour just to express my dismay. And I might write “It’s raining” not to convey information about rain but to call blog readers’ attentions to the possible levels of meaning in those two English words.

I’ve just been updating my list of Latin phrases that I come across in my reading, and an aspect of their use by William James, C. S. Lewis, James Boswell, Lord Byron, and others struck me with new force: as with “It’s raining,” the full range of possible meanings of each one of these phrases covers more than just its translation. Boswell quotes Johnson saying, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” and of course it translates as “I fear Greeks even when bearing gifts.” But did Johnson really fear Greeks? Of course not. So what is expressed, what communication takes place by the use of these words? Let’s cover Boswell first. He writes the words to tell his readers that Johnson used them previously in a letter; Boswell certainly doesn’t intend to express his own fear of gift-bearers. Johnson, on the other hand, wrote them to Boswell as a humorous comment on some marmalade Mrs. Boswell had sent him: Boswell’s wife didn’t much like Dr. Johnson at first, so he facetiously suggested that he should be wary of any attempt at poisoning. But if he could have done so by saying, “Tell your kind wife that I shall taste her marmalade in small portions at first in the event that she has tried to poison me,” why bother to quote Virgil? Using the line from the Aeneid added to the joke by magnifying a domestic squabble to epic proportions.

Finally, Johnson’s use of Latin strengthened his bond with Boswell by referring to their common education. And this is the aspect that struck me this morning: while I sometimes have to look up the meanings of some words in these Latin quotations and almost always have to look up their source, the writers that throw them around so easily knew the sources and knew that their original audiences knew the sources, because they remembered studying these quotations in school when they were kids. To them, the quotations probably didn’t sound so erudite as they do to me; this was the stuff of grammar school. I suppose that if I wrote, “I cannot tell a lie,” a reader from outside the U.S. might think I had a prodigious memory for historical detail (which I don’t), when really I’m just repeating a phrase familiar to me from grade school (and one, by the way, not particularly historical).

In any case, knowing that the translations only begin to indicate the meaning of these phrases, I offer nevertheless a quiz on some Latin phrases I encountered this year in James, Lewis, Boswell, and Byron. Can you match each phrase with its (loose) translation?

1. Beatus ille procul negotiis.
2. Bos piger!
3. Crede experto!
4. De minimis non curat lex.
5. Et sepulchri immemor struis domos.
6. Mirabiles supra me.
7. Noscitur a sociis.
8. Nunquam enim nisi navi plena tollo vectorem.
9. Omne tulit punctum, quae miscuit utile dulci.
10. Totus teres et rotundus.

a. All the loose ends are tied up.
b. Get the meaning from the context.
c. Happy is the man who stays far away from business.
d. He who says something both useful and sweet has won the debate.
e. Heedless of their graves, they build houses.
f. I never cheat on my husband unless I’m pregnant.
g. Lazy ox!
h. Take it from somebody who knows!
i. The law does not concern itself with trifles.
j. Wonders too high for my comprehension.

DON’T SCROLL FARTHER UNTIL YOU’RE READY FOR THE ANSWERS!

Answers:
1-c
2-g
3-h, literally “Believe an expert!”
4-I
5-e
6-j
7-b, literally, “It [the word] is known by its associates.”
8-f, literally, “I never take on a passenger unless the ship is full.” Said by Macrobius of Julia.
9-d, literally, “He has won every point who mixes the useful and the sweet.”
10-a, literally, “Everything is smooth and round.”

Two Years Ago

Two years ago at my wife’s suggestion, I started this blog about my ten-year reading plan. Since then, exlibrismagnis.com has become a favorite hobby and an important part of my reading activity. In the first few months of the blog’s life, I wrote a lot about the details of the plan and ways I find time to read, and I posted several posts about books I had completed earlier that year or in the first three years of the plan, before I started blogging. Starting in January of 2011, in order to keep posting regularly, I had to start thinking about blogging while I read, and I started taking more careful notes. Sure, that’s exactly the wrong approach for some books, but for the most part, the exercise has improved my attention and retention. This is the 237th post, so I have continued to write a new one almost every three days on average, and I hope to keep up the same pace in the future.

In these last two years, I’ve read and blogged about a lot of old favorites, some exciting new finds, and some exasperating slogs through sloughs of words. The familiar friends include Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Dicken’s Dombey and Son and David Copperfield, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, and The Odyssey. The most exciting works new to me include the classic Persian saga called the Shahnameh and Byron’s Don Juan. The most frustrating reads include . . . oh, why bother mentioning them again?

I average about 700 pageviews a month now, over 11,000 altogether over the two years. I don’t understand how blogspot’s stats work: the “pageviews” are all keyed to a particular title, but I suppose that the number of posts read could be even higher if one someone clicks the main page or a particular month and then reads more than one post on the page. Most of these views originate in the United States, but at least 40% of them are registered in other countries – Russia, Germany, the UK, Ukraine, Italy, and France being the most frequent.

Most posts show from 8 to 16 views a piece. But then some posts have had 40, 60, 80, even as many as 350 views. And I have no idea why. The most viewed posts include my ramblings about  the best way to read O’Brian’s sea stories, Augustine’s view of angels, Latin phrases, a Chesterton essay on Christmas, Plato’s atomic theory, and Dickens’s view of human depravity and redemption. Fiction and nonfiction. Ancient and modern. Christian and pagan. I ponder what makes these posts show up appealingly in Google searches, but I have no good hypothesis.

I do know my favorites from the last year, though. Here are a round dozen:

Good and Bad Science Instruction
A Loser Like Jane Austen
Nelly and Descartes
Human Mysteries in Bleak House
Lights Will Guide You Home
Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2011
Funny Things Are Everywhere
Dining with Dr. Johnson Again
Durant’s Retrospective
Peabody’s Improbable History
Glory Is Out of Date
She’s a Funny Girl, That Belle

The hardest post to write was “Dining with Dr. Johnson Again.” I worked for hours in a fit of inspiration – and then watched it disappear from my screen. It seems that blogspot’s editor sees CTRL-Z differently from every other application on the planet. Apparently, blogspot thinks the “undo” code means that the writer wants to undo the last several hours of his life. I was sure I could never repeat the performance; I had to have that post back. It was somewhere on my computer or in cyberspace, I knew. Stuff doesn’t actually disappear from hard drives. A few more hours of work led me to the world’s most useful webpage. If you ever have the same horrifying experience, follow the advice the very kind Villeneuve family posted there. But better yet, avoid needing their help: use a word processor to compose, and copy to blogspot’s editor only as a last step.

Thanks again for sticking with me.

Optimistic Pessimism

To go along with my sizable sample of the poetry of Byron this winter, I read a chapter on Byron by Chesterton in a book called Twelve Types, in which he says (1) that most critics think of Byron as a pessimist and (2) that those critics are wrong. In Chesterton’s inimitable style, he argues that no one writes from pure pessimism, since there would then be no purpose in writing: one must be optimistic about something, even if one is only optimistic about pessimism. This, he says, is Byron’s position. He may offer cynical critique of nearly everything in human life, but to write about it at all shows that he has some hope his views will make things better. And Byron seems to agree, if this stanza from Don Juan is any indication:

 'Not to admire is all the art I know
(Plain truth, dear Murray, needs few flowers of speech)
To make men happy, or to keep them so'
(So take it in the very words of Creech)—
Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago;
And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach
From his translation; but had none admired,
Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

Chesterton claims that Byron’s optimistic pessimism only runs through his early works. By the time he wrote Don Juan, according to Chesterton, he was so thoroughly cynical, he could only throw one last disdaining guffaw at the human race. But I haven’t found that to be true in my reading. As I mentioned in the previous post, Don Juan has a lot of humor. It also has a lot of affection for several of his characters. Sure, Byron reveals the brutal truth – as he sees it – behind the masks of love (either an illusion or an infatuation with self), marriage (the original interest always wanes), morals (he doesn’t regret his youthful indiscretions and in fact finds that the experience – even the experience of negative consequences – makes him wiser), Wellington (wouldn’t his pension be better spent on the poor?), kings (selfish tyrants, all), high society (it consists of only two groups: the boring and the bored), Wordsworth (inscrutable), fame (which lasts only as long as the paper or stone that tells the story), power (the jailer is bound to the jail as much as the prisoner), war (the gains are almost never worth the cost), and more. But he also claims to be writing for the purpose of improving the world: “My object is morality (whatever people say).”

One thing Byron consistently praises is the experience of old age, as shown in this exchange between the young Juan and an older man:

'You take things coolly, sir,' said Juan. 'Why,'
Replied the other, 'what can a man do?
There still are many rainbows in your sky,
But mine have vanish'd. All, when life is new,
Commence with feelings warm, and prospects high;
But time strips our illusions of their hue,
And one by one in turn, some grand mistake
Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake.

And apparently the greatest lesson of experience is not to commit the passions.

The nightingale that sings with the deep thorn,
Which fable places in her breast of wail,
Is lighter far of heart and voice than those
Whose headlong passions form their proper woes.
And that 's the moral of this composition,
If people would but see its real drift.

Is this pessimistic? I prefer Bruce Catton’s characterization of Byron as melancholy. But better still would be to say that Byron, living in the Romantic age, had a view of the world distinctly unromantic. He admires the disillusionment of the old man Don Juan talks with (had Byron not admired, would he have sung?) and seeks the same for his audience. But, publishing the work bit by bit over time, Byron found as he went along that the romantic public wasn’t in the market for disillusionment. So he answered the public’s criticism of his poem by unclothing it himself to reveal its humble purpose and feeble reach.

O Love! O Glory! what are ye who fly
Around us ever, rarely to alight?
There 's not a meteor in the polar sky
Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight.
Chill, and chain'd to cold earth, we lift on high
Our eyes in search of either lovely light;
A thousand and a thousand colours they
Assume, then leave us on our freezing way.

And such as they are, such my present tale is,
A non-descript and ever-varying rhyme,
A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime.
When we know what all are, we must bewail us,
But ne'ertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things—for I wish to know
What, after all, are all things—but a show?

They accuse me—Me—the present writer of
The present poem—of—I know not what—
A tendency to under-rate and scoff
At human power and virtue, and all that;
And this they say in language rather rough.
Good God! I wonder what they would be at!
I say no more than hath been said in Dante's
Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes;

Ecclesiastes said, 'that all is vanity'-
Most modern preachers say the same, or show it
By their examples of true Christianity:
In short, all know, or very soon may know it;
And in this scene of all-confess'd inanity,
By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet,
Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife,
From holding up the nothingness of life?

In his attempt to strip man of his pride, I’m with Byron all the way. And of course I see the connection he highlights between his message and that of Ecclesiastes. And yet, does not the loveliness of Byron’s language speak to a somethingness of life? For, though quoting the most familiar phrase from the Preacher’s book, he neglected to quote the next-most familiar, which localizes the vanity with relation to the Sun.

Four Surprises in Byron’s Don Juan

Before this year, I hadn’t read any of Byron’s poetry other than the short poems that show up in anthologies for English classes: “She Walks in Beauty,” “When We Two Parted,” and such. But I had an idea what I would encounter, knowing that Byron had a reputation for being a libertine. Last year I read a scene in A Stillness at Appomattox in which Bruce Catton characterized some of Byron’s works as melancholy. So my barely founded idea was that I’d find in Byron a poet who glamorized no-strings relationships and could grow wistful about lost loves. Deciding to start my encounter with Don Juan, I assumed I would jump right in to a poetic tale of just such a characer.

But Don Juan surprised me in several ways. First, it’s much longer than I thought: as long as a novel. Not knowing its heft, I didn’t really plan enough time to read it, so I’m pulling double shifts to get through it. But fortunately,it surprised me in a second way by not often using unusual words or complex, inverted grammatical patterns. So it’s not very difficult to read. The third surprise is that the lead character’s name is not pronounced “Hwan” but in two syllables, “JOO-un,” as if rhyming with “new one,” a rhyme which in fact Byron uses.

And that remark leads to the fourth surprise: Don Juan is funny. The opening story, for instance, is a romp involving Juan, his inattentive father, his mother who is proud of her education and wants more physical comfort than her husband provides, the neighbor who grants her desires, and his young wife, who turns to the teen-aged Juan for what she fools herself into thinking will be a Platonic relationship. Such stories usually end up comical farces, but in other episodes Byron finds humor in travel, court life, and even war:

Our friends the Turks, who with loud 'Allahs' now
Began to signalise the Russ retreat,
Were damnably mistaken; few are slow
In thinking that their enemy is beat
(Or beaten, if you insist on grammar, though
I never think about it in a heat),
But here I say the Turks were much mistaken,
Who hating hogs, yet wish'd to save their bacon.

As you can see, Byron matches the humor in the story with humor in his poesy, such as making fun of his own bad grammar and using “bacon” both as a bad pun and as a surprising rhyme to “mistaken.”

Byron uses even sillier rhymes in this description of the Russian army:

Achilles' self was not more grim and gory
Than thousands of this new and polish'd nation,
Whose names want nothing but—pronunciation.

Still I 'll record a few, if but to increase
Our euphony: there was Strongenoff, and Strokonoff,
Meknop, Serge Lwow, Arsniew of modern Greece,
And Tschitsshakoff, and Roguenoff, and Chokenoff,
And others of twelve consonants apiece;
And more might be found out, if I could poke enough
Into gazettes; but Fame (capricious strumpet),
It seems, has got an ear as well as trumpet,

And cannot tune those discords of narration,
Which may be names at Moscow, into rhyme;
Yet there were several worth commemoration,
As e'er was virgin of a nuptial chime;
Soft words, too, fitted for the peroration
Of Londonderry drawling against time,
Ending in 'ischskin,' 'ousckin,' 'iffskchy,' 'ouski:
Of whom we can insert but Rousamouski,

Scherematoff and Chrematoff, Koklophti,
Koclobski, Kourakin, and Mouskin Pouskin,
All proper men of weapons, as e'er scoff'd high
Against a foe, or ran a sabre through skin.

On top of the strange names, Byron makes this passage humorous by such techniques as using two words to rhyme with one (“poke enough” with “Strokonoff” or “new one” with “Juan” ) and the frequent occurrence of two superfluous syllables at the end of a line of iambic pentameter (“And more might be found out, if I could poke enough”). I doubted myself for a long time, wondering if these features only sounded funny to me because they were unfamiliar. Maybe Byron just had a unique style that the experts consider lofty. No, my first impression proved true. The excessive syllables and the twisted rhymes involving multiple words all disappear in a passage about the death of a young girl:

Twelve days and nights she wither'd thus; at last,
Without a groan, or sigh, or glance, to show
A parting pang, the spirit from her past:
And they who watch'd her nearest could not know
The very instant, till the change that cast
Her sweet face into shadow, dull and slow,
Glazed o'er her eyes—the beautiful, the black—
O! to possess such lustre—and then lack!

The Mighty Plato Has Struck Out

A couple of days ago, I wrote in praise of Plato for all the good conclusions he reached, through reason, about things beyond his human comprehension, as for instance the existence of one, eternal, perfectly good God. I also mentioned a couple of ideas that were charming if not exactly true, such as the creation of the gods of the planets out of fire, and an early atomic theory involving particles that look like RPG dice. But after a couple more days of reading, I’ve soured on Plato some, and for this at-bat, I’m calling him “out.”

Plato’s first strike is a mammoth whiff that misses the ball by a mile. In the Timaeus, when speaking of the senses, he describes some surprising color combinations. A mixture of black and white, it seems, produces blue. Red mixed with black and white produces purple. And a combination of “flame colour” with black yields green. These mistakes are bad enough, but Plato clings to them with a terrible defense of “probability” over experimentation:

There will be no difficulty in seeing how and by what mixtures the colours derived from these are made according to the rules of probability. He, however, who should attempt to verify all this by experiment, would forget the difference of the human and divine nature. For God only has the knowledge and also the power which are able to combine many things into one and again resolve the one into many. But no man either is or ever will be able to accomplish either the one or the other operation.

Previously in the book, Plato explains that we depend on probability only for explanations of things beyond our comprehension. Now he’s afraid to mix paint. The result is a God-of-the gaps theory that completely stultifies science. The same eschewal of simple investigation leads him to say other silly things, such as that when we expire air through the mouth, it comes around and reenters the body through the skin, since nature abhors a vacuum and the space of the expelled air must be filled with something. Did he not see that the torso gets smaller when we exhale?

Strike two comes on that sinker ball that fools Plato time and time again in every dialog. “No one is voluntarily bad,” he says here in the Timaeus; evil actions are always caused either by disease or by ignorance. “Just teach kids that drugs are bad, and they won’t use them,” our school systems say. Right. See how well that’s worked? Aristotle and Aquinas say something similar but significantly different when they say that people always choose what they believe is in their best interest, although sometimes it isn’t. Pleasure is good as far as it goes, but often it seems to be in our best interest when it’s actually not worth the price to be paid later. People might have all the knowledge they need (“Doing this now causes regret in the morning”) but simply not take it into account when faced with an object that excites passion for a meritricious pleasure. Sometimes people even say out loud, “I know I shouldn’t, but . . . ,” just before commiting a vicious act. So, Plato, of course people can be voluntarily bad.

Plato blasts the third pitch down the left-field line, missing a home run by inches. Blood, he says, circulates throughout the body, bringing nourishment to all its members in order to provide growth and replenishment of decaying material. Very good and amazingly prescient. The only problem is that this nourishment comes in the form of triangles that separate and combine to form new particles of earth, water, air, and fire. But substitute minerals, amino acids, proteins, etc., and Plato looks pretty good here.

The manager is a little wary of his pitcher after Plato making such good contact, so he brings in a relief pitcher: George Gordon, Lord Byron. I started Byron’s Don Juan a couple of days ago, and coincidentally found him picking a bone with, of all people, Plato. Very near the beginning of Byron’s poem, young Juan begins his life of lechery in an encounter with a young, pretty wife who thinks she can hold the handsome youth’s hand while pursuing a strictly “Platonic” relationship, a plan that naturally does not work out as she pretends to hope it will. The poet comments:

O Plato! Plato! you have paved the way,
With your confounded fantasies, to more
Immoral conduct by the fancied sway
Your system feigns o'er the controulless core
Of human hearts, than all the long array
Of poets and romancers:—You 're a bore,
A charlatan, a coxcomb—and have been,
At best, no better than a go-between.

By the way, Plato’s original idea of the highest love, as found in his dialog called Symposium, involves sex. It’s just that the sex is all in the service of a love for a person whose exceeding comeliness lifts the lover’s thoughts and inspires him to contemplate divine beauty. The expurgation of carnal knowledge from the idea is a modern alteration.

Either way, it’s strike three. Plato is out.