I Can’t Believe It

I was going to start this post by saying, “I can’t believe I’m actually writing about Edgar Rice Burroughs in a blog purportedly about Great Literature.” Then I did a quick search in the list of authors in the right column of this page and found that a new opening was warranted. So now I officially begin the post by saying this: “I can’t believe I’m posting about Edgar Rice Burroughs for the second time.” But a couple of things about Tarzan the Terrible have brought me to it.

At this moment in our history, I felt especially guilty about reading a book about Africa by a racist. As a white guy, I may only get myself into trouble here, but I’ll venture to say that Burroughs’s racism isn’t a hate-filled strain that, for instance, sees the native Africans as worthy victims of Tarzan’s homicidal rage; the ape-man’s creator lets Germans play that role. No, his racism is a more paternalistic type that says, “Bless their hearts, they do surprisingly well given that they have so little to work with.” Burroughs probably found justification for his views in Darwin; he talks about evolution frequently to explain differences in character (he loves calling criminals evolutionary reversions). In any case, I’m happy to say that the racist ideas totally surprised me when I started rereading the Tarzan books. Maybe because Burroughs is such a terrible scientist, they just didn’t make sense to me when I was 12 and so didn’t lodge in my memory.

But while I didn’t remember the racism in Tarzan the Terrible, I did remember it as perhaps the best of the Tarzan books I read as an adolescent. Tarzan’s obviously an appealing character to begin with; he’s like a superhero with a secret identity except that both identities have superpowers. Like all a young adult’s favorite literary heroes, Tarzan discovers a secret that makes him special and gives him strength: the boy raised by apes is also an English lord. So any book where Tarzan has to negotiate both worlds is interesting, and in Tarzan the Terrible, the ape-man uses all his jungle skills to survive and rescue Jane so he can give her the peaceful domestic life she wants and deserves. (I should say that Jane can throw a punch and doesn’t always need saving!)

Tarzan the Terrible also scores points for using one of Burroughs’s favorite devices: an isolated world where human evolution has taken a unique path. In this case, the people have prehensile tails and opposable big toes and use these appendages to travel networks of pegs on cliff walls. To which the twelve-year-old in me says, “COOOOOL!” But even more, this world comes complete with a map and (drum roll . . . ) a language. So of course a kid is going to love it: reading the book brings not only entertainment but a sense of accomplishment. “I know a new language now! I know how to say ho-don (white man), waz-don (black man), ja-don (lion man), jad-ben-lul (the big lake), jad-bal-lul (the golden lake), jad-bal-ja (the golden lion), jad-pele-ul-jad-ben-otho (the valley of the great god), and other useful, everyday phrases.” Naturally I responded by determining to construct my own language and to write a Tarzan book entirely in that language. I started with an alphabet, which went quickly. But as soon as I got to whole words, I suddenly realized this was more than a two-day job. I had the same feeling I got when I was five twenty minutes after starting my tunnel to China in the back yard.

I look at Tarzan the Terrible’s language now as nothing more than a clumsy glossary. I readily admit that I still had fun relearning the glossary! But, really now. The syntax is exactly the same as English? [Time travel from later in the year: I have just finished Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She says she believed when she was a child that foreign languages were like codes, so that chapeau doesn’t just mean the piece of clothing that goes on the head but actually stands for the English word hat. That’s exactly what Burroughs does!] This weak stub of a language doesn’t even have a single verb. But Burroughs does hint at one juicy detail of the language of Pal-ul-don, and it’s the one thing I remembered the clearest from fifty years ago. In a tantalizing footnote, Burroughs reports that he simplified the grammar of the “actual” language in presenting it to his readers and gave just one example of its redacted eccentricity. The plural of a noun, he explains, is formed by repeating the initial consonant of a word. If kor means “gorge,” then “gorges” is indicated in this language as k-kor. D-don = men, j-ja = lions, etc.

This footnote lit a warm spark in me. When I started learning Spanish in school, I was especially attracted to the places where its syntax and grammar differed from English. (The plural of sombrero is sombreros? Boring! Me gusta for “I like”? Fantastic!) I even started to think of English constructions as weird. Tolkien fanned that linguistic flame, and I’m upset that he didn’t leave more detailed notes about the grammar of Sindarin and Quenya.

I still toy with my own devised language but haven’t made it very far. Every few years I think about it again, but then I can't make any significant progress because I’m too invested in making things as different from English as possible. If, for instance, I’m deciding how to say in my language, “I fell in the river,” I want “river” to be the subject. But then I don’t know what to do with the verb. One thing I do know: I will never use this language to write a Tarzan book.

Dr. Johnson and Coronavirus

Many years ago, my students all told me about the latest, absolutely true conspiracy theory: that playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz revealed connections so tight as to prove positively that Roger Waters had this bizarre format of hybrid entertainment in mind when he put the album together. It did no good to tell these kids that there wasn’t even such a thing as a VCR in 1973 and that one couldn’t just decide to watch a movie privately and then do it. The best evidence I saw for this very unlikely theory was the iconic prism on the cover of the album, its white light’s explosion into color being reminiscent of the film changing from sepia tone to color after Dorothy lands in Oz. I have a great deal I could say about this weird topic, but since this is a blog about literature, not film or music, I’ll just briefly note that the correspondences between film and album seemed wholly random and extremely interpretive to me when I tried it. (The scarecrow on the yellow brick road = the lunatic on the grass???) The explanation for what seemed convincing to America’s youth that year: both the movie and the music are full of iconic, suggestive images, and some coincidences are bound to occur. Since my students refused to believe me (heavens to murgatroyd, how dare they!), I proved it by watching Casablanca while listening to Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and finding ten times as many links, most of them really clear and a couple of them downright eerie. I wrote up my findings and got them published by a nationally syndicated column that appeared in hundreds of newspapers. Totally true.

What in the world do movies and Elton John have to do with James Boswell and Samuel Johnson going out for steak in eighteenth-century London? Well, when you read a book about people who converse on everything imaginable, you’re bound to come across commentary on situations relevant to your current circumstances. The coincidences are bound to happen even if they’re unpredictable in their detail. I might never have foreseen when I picked the book up this year that Dr. Johnson would tell me about living through a pandemic in the twenty-first century, but he did.

After that long tale, here finally is the diminutive dog. Or rather pair of miniature dogs. First is a note from 1772.

When one of his friends [says Boswell of his illustrious mentor] endeavoured to maintain that a country gentleman might contrive to pass his life very agreeably, “Sir (said he [i.e. Dr. Johnson],) you cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time, contriving not to have tedious hours.” This observation, however, is equally applicable to gentlemen who live in cities, and are of no profession.

Now I am a man permitted to lay out my own time. Between retirement and quarantine and a wife with many of her own interests, I have almost complete charge of my daily schedule. And I have many interests and hobbies and projects to occupy the spaces on that schedule. And yet . . . . And yet I cannot arrange away the tedious hours. I fiddle with things to put off the activity I’m most excited about. I read five pages and then get up to get a drink before I read another half dozen. I’ve had trouble finding the energy to write this post (which goes a long way to explaining the circuitous exordium). Oh, yes. Dr. Johnson knew the days of coronavirus.

And now the second little wagged dog, from 1774. The Scotsman Boswell writes: “I mentioned [to Dr. Johnson] a peculiar satisfaction which I experienced in celebrating the festival of Easter in St. Paul's cathedral; that to my fancy it appeared like going up to Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover.” Dr. Johnson responds in a letter:

You must remember, that your image of worshipping once a year in a certain place, in imitation of the Jews, is but a comparison; and simile non est idem; if the annual resort to Jerusalem was a duty to the Jews, it was a duty because it was commanded; and you have no such command, therefore no such duty. It may be dangerous to receive too readily, and indulge too fondly, opinions, from which, perhaps, no pious mind is wholly disengaged, of local sanctity and local devotion. . . . I am now writing, and you, when you read this, are reading under the Eye of Omnipresence.

Do I know that God readily accepts the worship I offer him from my home? Yes. Do I know that the CDC, the rector of my church, and my own sense of safe behavior tell me to worship at home? Again, yes. And yet I would have liked to celebrate Easter at my church with my friends and would have felt that worship to be more genuine. We are beings of soul and body offering spiritual worship in phsyical places and with material means. Like Spider-man with one web on a standing building and another web on a runaway train, we strain to stay connected to both worlds and can’t help but make mistakes and then make more mistakes in wondering about the first mistakes. (Don’t ask me whether the runaway train represents spirit or body!)

OK, here’s my much better theory of a piece of recent art being inspired by The Wizard of Oz. In First Man, as Armstrong and Aldrin open the door of the LEM to reveal the surface of the new world they’ve just landed on, the grainy handheld cinematography gives way to steady, crystalline high-def images. You can’t tell me the filmmakers weren’t thinking of the changing film technique as Dorothy opens the door of Auntie Em’s cabin. If you’re having trouble scheduling away the tedious hours, may I recommend watching both movies?

Because They Are Hard

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Was President Kennedy a fan of Isaac Asimov? One of Asimov’s constant themes in his robot-and-empire-and-Foundation series is that going into space is good for humanity only if they do it the hard way. Is there an easy way, you ask? Well, in Asimov’s world there is: use robots to do it. They prepare the place, do all the construction, make the new home cushy. Then humans show up and just enjoy and turn soft and live long lives of four-hundred self-absorbed years. It’s a good thing the robots know better, and they arrange to make space travel difficult.

Retirement definitely highlights the question whether hard work is necessary for our well-being. Not that things have been particularly easy since I retired what with death and divorce among those close to me and illness and injury and quarantining affecting me directly. (How do I get through my reading assignments without being able to sit in a Wendy’s or a Chipotle for lunch most days?!) But money isn’t a problem. And I don’t have to deal with students complaining to the Dean when I give them a well-deserved D or problems with administrators who change the D to a C (or an A if they’re especially brazen or a P if they’re particularly cowardly). These are good things, right? In Heaven, there are no complaints about D’s and in fact no D’s awarded. And Heaven is the goal. Right?

And yet I find myself setting myself difficult tasks. I try to program a game just beyond my coding abilities. I try to learn some Japanese and some calculus. I work on a fourth ten-year reading plan. I’m not necessarily succeeding at these tasks, but I think I feel better failing at something hard than I would succeeding at something easy, like reading nothing but Agatha Christie (a definite temptation). Maybe I need to program a robot who will tell me when to do something difficult and when to do something easy. How hard could that be?

Through ripping tales of adventure and intrigue and philosophical debate among robots and humans, Asimov will get you thinking about such things as the human need for difficulty, what privacy means, whether emotions are merely mechanical, why beings with free will tend to act with statistical regularity, and other worthy conundrums. If you want to read his books in in-world chronological order (Asimov wrote three main series of novels and then spent the last years of his life writing books to fill in the gaps and tie the series together), here’s the list. Even if you don’t want to read them in order, here’s the list. I’ve arranged the titles into ten divisions for, I don’t know, maybe a ten-year reading plan.

(1) The End of Eternity, The Complete Robot (includes the I, Robot stories and more)
(2) Caves of Steel, Naked Sun
(3) Robots of Dawn
(4) Robots and Empire
(5) Stars Like Dust, Currents of Space, Pebble in the Sky
(6) Prelude to Foundation
(7) Forward the Foundation, Foundation
(8) Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation
(9) Foundation’s Edge
(10) Foundation and Earth
 

Grant’s Fine Lines of Thought

Our current President makes all Presidential biographies about himself. He challenges and flouts so many of the customs and norms of the American President, I can’t help thinking about him when I read about any other chief executive. Each episode in our history provides a study by contrast.

A week ago, I finished Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which I have since seen cited twice (once on television). Numerous sources ascribe to it the phrase “a masterpiece of the genre.” Now, Grant said very little about his Presidency in his memoirs. Perhaps he wanted to dwell on events that went better for him, like failed businesses. But in his observations about the country, he frequently provides an interesting contrast to the successor who currently occupies the Oval Office.

For instance, Forty-Five likes to talk about traitors. Well, Grant dealt with actual traitors: people who violated their oaths of office and military duty and took up arms against their country. Grant never lets the Confederacy have its way with semantics; he always refers to its “government” in quotation marks. But what does a republic do when it achieves victory over a rebellious army? How does a government "for the people" treat 5.5 million of those people who for four years have been loyal to a rebellious “government” once that rebellion has been quelled? Grant believed that the victory he did so much to bring about made immediate compatriots of these former enemies and abettors to enemies. He couldn’t rejoice over Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. “I felt like anything,” he says, “rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

In this remarkable observation, Grant walks straightly (and soberly!) along a fine line in which he both praises his fellow Americans for traits he can admire and blames them for taking up an execrable cause. (And by the way, Grant says from the beginning of his account of the war that that inexcusable cause was slavery. No side-stepping the elephant and talking about states’ rights. Grant, having been sentient during the 1850s knew the cause of the Civil War.) I believe he was right in everything that I know he said and felt and did at that surrender, but it took subtlety of thinking, the ability to see both sides of an argument in the best light possible and then to choose on principles, the wisdom to understand that a human being is a mixed bag. I know these are difficult virtues to achieve, but they are too shockingly rare these days. No one can find praise for those who, they believe, take up poor causes. And no one upholding any cause can hear critique of that cause without taking it as a personal attack. We no longer understand the difference between opponents and enemies.

Grant has only a few words to say about his disastrous predecessor as President, Andrew Johnson, and those are to say that Johnson did the wrong thing in trying to punish fellow Americans from the South for having taken up the wrong cause. Grant virtually said, “We need a uniter, not a divider.” I’ve heard too many times in the last twenty years – from friends variously embracing all portions of the political spectrum – that they wish they didn’t live in the same country with those who oppose them politically. This attitude seems to me so completely un-American that I’m tempted to agree with it just long enough to get rid of those who hold it. But, trying not to be a walking oxymoron, I don’t. Part of our country’s ideal is precisely the ability to live in community with people who differ from us politically. We take recourse to the ballot box, we challenge what we see as injustice through the courts, we lift our voices in the street, we post signs in our yard. But we don’t shoot our political rivals, we don’t jail our political rivals, we don’t force our political rivals to leave the country, and we don’t abandon the nation to our political rivals. Yes, it’s an ideal very, very imperfectly realized. But the ideal says that we must shake our rival’s hand (when not in the midst of a pandemic!) and vow to remember that we agree on something really quite astonishing and weird in the history of this weird, old world: laws and debate and free elections cut way down on killing. So now let’s apply those laws fairly, debate honestly, and make our elections equally accessible to all eligible voters.

I started off thinking I would talk about Grant’s other fine lines of subtle thought, but I’ve ranted on the first one for too long. Science fiction next. That couldn’t possibly get political, right?

A Notice to Made-for-TV Movie Producers

I’m writing today about a book that left my mind wrestling with two puzzles when I first read it, in college in the late 1970s. My second reading of Frank Norris’s The Octopus brought a partial solution for one of the puzzles, but I’m still mystified by the second.

I first heard about Frank Norris in an American lit class. He was presented to me as the epitome of the naturalist movement. According to what I was told, in naturalist writing, as exemplified by Norris, descriptions are factual, not interpretive, not emotional. Details that a reader would see as symbolically significant in earlier fiction represent nothing in naturalist fiction. It sounded unlikely to me that an author of any era would want to tell a story without meaning anything by it: surely an author at least means to say, “I like this story” or “I believe the people and events in this piece of narrative worth your time and contemplation.” But my professor said this was the way it was, and I know that humans go for all sorts of fashions now and then, so I accepted the lesson.

Then in an American history class in a later semester, the professor assigned The Octopus by Frank Norris. “Oh, great,” I thought, “400 pages of dry depiction of events that didn’t actually happen told with details about which I’m not supposed to think.” (Hey, I was young. It was hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to do anything in a way that I didn’t understand and approve of.) But, as wrong as my take on naturalism may have been, I can say even now that I was quite justified in being surprised at what the Master of Naturalism in Fiction brought to the table in The Octopus. Biblical symbolism of death and resurrection in the life cycle of wheat? Emotional, referential descriptions of nature? A man calling to people telepathically? (I’m obviously not really clear on my literary-criticism terminology, but if it were up to me, I’d call telepathy supernatural.) Did I remember the lesson correctly? Was this a different Frank Norris? My lit professor got her line about Norris and naturalism right from the author himself, so you can’t much blame her, I guess. But whatever Norris meant by calling himself a literary naturalist, either he didn’t mean that he would never use symbolism, metaphor, and evocative images, or else he simply didn’t end up writing the way he set out to write.

I remembered liking the book a lot, confused as I might have been about what label I was supposed to attach to it. So this time around, forty-some years after my first reading, I was less concerned about whether some label was correct or not and more interested in just experiencing and absorbing the novel for whatever it was. It was every bit as interesting and exciting as I had remembered. Sure, it’s not naturalist the way that word is defined in literature. So Norris changed his mind – or didn’t know his own style. So what? Whatever the style, this book is great! Wheat farmers in southern California in the late nineteenth century contemplate the meaning of life and death. Family businesses struggle with the inexorable forces of the American corporation. Victims of the railroad’s repression debate political solutions: Socialism? Anarchism? Democracy? Democracy with bribes? A poet struggles to write the great American novel. A girl gets called from the dead. There’s a barn dance. There are lots of shootouts. There’s a train hijacking. There’s a rich, respected family who think of themselves as lords of the land until they find out that the railroad company didn’t really mean what they thought it said when it leased them the acreage. And there’s a beautiful love story involving a crusty farmer who falls in love with and is softened by the daughter of his farmhand, a girl who rolls up her sleeves every morning to dip her beautiful arms into milk without realizing what effect the sight might have on her boss.

And all of that brings me to the second, still unresolved, mystery. Why hasn’t this wonderful story of love, drama, action, intrigue, faith, and politics been filmed? When I read it in the 70s, it seemed absolutely perfect for a miniseries. It’s forty years later, and a ten-part Netflix series would be even better. Come on producers! Somebody please rediscover this intelligent, exciting book!

Twenty (or Forty) Years After

A little more that forty years ago, I read The Three Musketeers for the first time. I knew then that the rollicking historical novel had a sequel called Twenty Years After, and I definitely wanted to read it. But loving the original so much, I never imagined it would take me over twice as long as the period in the title of that sequel to get around to it.. But I knew I would one day: my dad told me to.

We were probably in the local public library when he said it. He and I often went up and down the aisles looking at the titles, my dad giving me his opinions and advice. Well, not so much advice. When it comes from Dad, it’s more like life instruction. One day, son, when your beard begins to grow . . . . One day, son, you’ll have to make difficult decisions about balancing family and career . . . . One day, son, you should read Twenty Years After . . . . Yeah, it sounds different in that context, doesn’t it? And after all, he was right about the beard and the career. So I owed it to the Old Man to read this book and keep his record spotless.

And, boy! am I glad that I did! I woke up every day of the last few weeks looking forward to my time with D’Artagnan and his friends, and not a single page disappointed my expectations.

I suppose I have to admit that there are reasons the first book is so famous, so popular, so ingrained in public consciousness, and so frequently filmed, while the sequel languishes in obscurity. For instance, as much as Dumas tries to tell us that Cardinal Mazarin, though a smaller man than Richelieu, is just as interesting, the successor to Richelieu just comes out, well, smaller. The real Mazarin did big things like making France (and himself) rich and contributing to the principles of Westphalia that continue to govern international relationships, but somehow Dumas only saw the mean side of the man. Perhaps the author could never forgive the later cardinal for being Italian.

There’s also the problem of names and factions. I thought the rivalries between King, Queen, and Cardinal were confusing when I first read The Three Musketeers. Well, that political situation was a simple game of tic-tac-toe compared to the intrigues of Twenty Years After. It didn’t help that almost every major player in the machinations went by at least two names. Dumas’s original audience probably knew that J. F. P. de Gondi was also a cardinal named Retz and was also “The Coadjutor.” But I felt like Lois Lane landing the biggest scoop of her life when I discovered halfway through the book that they were all the same person. And then there’s le Duc de Condé, who is sometimes, without explanation, referred to as The Prince.

But all that got straightened out. And in any case, none of the confusion detracted from the joy of going on new adventures with the musketeers, four of the most wonderful characters I’ve ever encountered. And what adventures! They find themselves in battle against each other early on (those tricky factions!) and discuss (while battle rages around them) how to remain loyal friends to each other while continuing to perform their respective duties. (I know of some people in Washington who could learn from this book.) They chase and are chased by Lady de Winter’s son. (The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the rotten tree.) They protect young Louis XIV during the Fronde. They try to rescue English King Charles I from execution. (They fail, as actual history determines they must, but Dumas allows himself to place Athos under the scaffolding where he holds a hushed conversation with Charles during that unfortunate monarch’s historically documented quiet moment to the side before he placed his head on the chopping block.)

I have The Man in the Iron Mask, another sequel, scheduled for 2022, year 6 in my third ten-year plan of reading. But now I discover that Iron Mask is only the last part of a trilogy that, in its entirety, is a sequel to Twenty Years After and completes the story of D’Artagnan. Two other Dumas novels – each with nineteenth-century length – fill in the gap between what I just read and what I plan to read in two years. What do I do? What do I do? I wish I could ask Dad.

The Last Man Who Knew . . . What?

I’ve read in my life about two people being called The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Isaac Newton and Athanasius Kircher. One is extremely famous, and the other is Athanasius Kircher. I first heard about Kircher in a History of Music Theory class I took at the University of Iowa around 1985. There, he was presented as a polymath, which I learned was a fancy word meaning someone who knows everything. Among the things he knew, apparently, was music theory. But I never learned much of the details because his works on music have never been translated from Latin. (I started reading Kircher's Latin once and quickly realized that deficiency in Latin is one of the many gaps that make me Not A Man Who Knows Everything.)

In any case, learning more about Kircher had been on my mental back burner for decades, and this month that simmering pot finally got brought to the front and spilled its savory contents into my bowl. I had originally put Paula Findlen’s Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything on my reading list for year 4. (You can still see that title on the master list under the "Third Decade" tab at the top of this page.) But last year as I was buying the books for this year’s literary trek, Amazon’s “Customers also bought” feature changed my mind. It seems Amazon readers prefer Joscelyn Godwin’s Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World. It is a beautiful big coffee-table book filled with marvelously clear reprints of hundreds of amazing illustrations from Kircher’s books. Godwin explains that since most people today will have a hard time understanding the Christian and proto-scientific worldview and ideas by means of the texts of Kircher’s many works, the illustrations actually provide the best access to Kircher’s world for the twenty-first century reader. And for the most part he does an excellent job fulfilling that promise.

The book, for all its outstanding virtues, disappointed me in two ways, though. First, Godwin makes at least one mistake in explaining Kircher’s old-world view of the hierarchy of existence. In one diagram Kircher illustrates the inanimate, the sensitive, and the animate by means of three pictures, pictures which he lays out in a triangle and does not label, making it unclear from the text alone which picture goes with which concept. The pictures show – in alphabetical order – a cock and stag, a magnet’s needle, and a palm tree. Godwin’s explication links the inanimate with the needle, the animate to the animals, and the sensitive to the palm tree – the “sensitive palm tree,” he calls it. No one will argue that, of the three pictures, the magnet represents the inanimate. And the forms of the words sure suggest that the ANIMAls represent the ANIMAte. But are palm trees especially sensitive? I mean, do they cry when you insult them? If Godwin really knew the major sources of this Jesuit scholar (he repeatedly says that Jesuits were bound to accept Aristotelianism as interpreted by Aquinas), he would understand that these words represent levels of being. An iron needle has existence but, in spite of its movement, no life; it is inanimate. In addition to existence, a plant has life (Latin anima), but no sense of sight, hearing, etc. So it is animate but not sensitive. Animals, on the other hand, have existence and life and the five senses to boot, so they are sensitive. (Humans reach a fourth level of being, sharing existence, life, and senses with animals but adding reason. But rational creatures weren’t part of Kircher’s present purpose and so didn’t make it into the picture.) Now if Godwin got this central tenet of Aristotelianism wrong, what else, I wondered, did he misinterpret for me in illustrations of things that I knew less well?

I was disappointed in Kircher himself, as well, though. I thought he actually knew things in all the hot fields of study among seventeenth-century European intellectuals. But as Godwin explains (and here I have no reason to doubt him), all we can really say is that Kircher wrote about history, languages, astronomy, music, history of religion, ethics, geology, anthropology, mythology, and physics. What he didn’t know, he just made up. He claimed to have decoded the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but every obelisk ends up saying virtually the same thing in his “translations.” He drew pictures of many machines, only some of which he claimed to have built and seen working. He claimed to have a box of cards that wrote music automatically for the person who knew how to pull the cards out and interpret them, but he only showed samples of music that had been written this way (by whom?), not the system of cards itself.

So this dream I had enjoyed for thirty-five years, a dream of one day knowing about a fascinating genius that no one else knew about, my vision of having secret knowledge about a guy with secret knowledge, my hopes of being more entertaining at parties have all been dashed. I guess I’ll have to settle for Isaac Newton as my example of an intellectual paragon.

But actually, the Last Man Who Knew Everything was probably a woman who didn’t feel the need to tell the world about it.