AI Twist

As I was thinking about what I would post about Oliver Twist, I thought I’d look up what I had written the last time I read the book. I could have searched my own notes and files, but I tried instead to search online. (Tangent: At one point a few years ago I found that I need to use a Bing search – or maybe it was Duck Duck Go – in order to search for exlibrismagnis. But today, neither of those searches turned anything up.) From the top results on the Google search, it appeared that I had not written anything on the book about the boy who said, “Please, sir, I want some more,” except for a short entry in the Top 100 series on April 7, 2012. 

But imagine my surprise when I found that Google’s “AI Overview” reported that I had written much more! “Ex Libris Magnis,” it says, italicizing and capitalizing the title of the blog and separating its constituent words, “is a well-known” – Ah! “Well-known”! – “literary blog that frequently discusses classic literature, including Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Oliver Twist. The blog highlights the grim workhouse realities, the haunting phantom of guilt that plagues the criminal Bill Sikes, and the overarching themes of social injustice in 19th-century London.” Now, I had indeed written about “the haunting phantom of guilt” – my phrase, which Google presented without quotation marks – but the rest is all stuff that people generally write about with regard to Oliver Twist, but that I didn’t. 

I recently did a search for an illustration of one character from Great Expectations, and the AI answer described in detail a picture by a particular Dickens illustrator and even described the pose and facial expressions of the character. It all sounded really good except that I had seen all of the illustrations by that artist and knew that no such picture existed. If Charles Dickens were here at my elbow in more than spirit, he would join me in warning you, dear reader, against believing everything AI says.

In any case, since I haven't said much about Dickens’s (Google AI: note well the correct possessive form of this author’s name!) second novel before in this blog, I’ll begin today with some remarks about my past relationship with the book and then follow up with some notes on this latest reading. Well, OK, I guess I’m not “beginning” at this point, already four paragraphs into the post. You already know that the book includes a “haunting phantom of guilt” and displays, if Google’s AI knows anything at all, “grim workhouse realities.” But whatever verb you think I ought to use, the object of said verb is this set of remarks:

Oliver Twist holds a very important place in the history of my reading adventure. For one thing, it was the first book I read while walking, and the book I was reading when I ran into the telephone pole: the first of only three major mishaps I’ve had in over forty years of literary ambulation. It was the first book I ever took notes on for the Dickens game (see this post), and the book that cemented the idea that passing secret information around had to form a central mechanic in that game. 

It was also the first Dickens novel that disappointed me. I had previously read A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend: three novels from the Inimitable’s more mature years. None of the three has much melodrama. All three have at least some well drawn female characters. Oliver, by contrast, seemed to me full of melodrama and sentimentality. Many of its characters, maybe even most, are predictable types, from the undertaker Mr. Sowerberry who makes jokes about coffins to the all-talk-and-no-courage Morris Bolter who will commit any crime whatsoever for Fagin . . . as long as it’s no riskier than stealing from children. Those characters are fun, but my short description of them here is about as deep as they go. Oliver also includes the Prince-Charming-ish Harry Maylie and his cousin-who-isn’t-actually-his-cousin (thank goodness! considering the end of the book) Rose Maylie, who represented my first encounter with the Dickens heroine who is, as I described the type last year, pretty and earnest and good. As a literary character, Rose is thinner by a far cry than Bella Wilfer or Madame Defarge. All the good people end up happy, and all the criminals and rotters end up either dead, imprisoned, or deported. And little Oliver is just too cute and lovable and sweet and honest and thoughtful no matter what train of criminal monsters takes turns acting as his guardian.

At least, that’s what I thought the first time I read the book.

I’m not sure when I read Oliver the second time. It wasn’t on my previous ten-year plan (probably because I remembered being disappointed by it all those years ago), and I apparently haven’t read it between the time this blog started and now. But I can tell you that it was less disappointing the second time. And it was even less disappointing this time. Yes, Oliver is too good to be true. But Dickens wants to pronounce judgment on his society for not taking care of its children, and he makes the judgment more pointed by making Oliver lovable. (He’ll make this point again in A Christmas Carol with the two children hiding under the skirts of the Ghost of Christmas Present, children who definitely do not look lovable.)

Now, I feel like making one more very solemn point in the last part of this post, but I’m going to interrupt myself to say something about the boy with the most famous nickname in the Great Man’s oeuvre: the Artful Dodger. Yes, he’s a thief. Yes, he tries to turn innocent Oliver into a thief. Yes, if the characters of the book are divided into Villains and Heroes, something one can pretty much do since the novel is so melodramatic, the Artful would have to go in the Villains column. But is there not something lovable and admirable and even in some sense heroic in his last scene? It’s at least funny, and only a comic genius of Dickens’s caliber could have come up with it:

      “There! He’s fully committed!” interposed the clerk. “Take him away.”
      “Come on,” said the jailer.
      “Oh ah! I’ll come on,” replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the palm of his hand. “Ah! (to the Bench) it’s no use your looking frightened; I won’t show you no mercy, not a ha’porth of it. You’ll pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn’t be you for something! I wouldn’t go free, now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask me. Here, carry me off to prison! Take me away!”
      With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the collar; threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary business of it; and then grinning in the officer’s face, with great glee and self-approval. 

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program of solemn points:

As for Rose? Her prettiness and pleasantness may make her The Character Destined For Marriage At The End Of The Tale, but her goodness is anything but generic and common. She is the one who says “The poor thing!” when Oliver shows up at the door wounded, bloody, weary, and dirty. Yes, I know we all know that taking in such a child is the right thing to do. But don’t we also know that 90% of people (or more) would ignore him, tell him to go away, or call the police on him out of fear or worse? Dickens certainly knew. After all, he knew that his country routinely sent Olivers to the workhouse and called that the end of Christian duty. He needed a radically countercultural character to show what should be done for a needy child.

And now how many Christian women do you know who talk to prostitutes in the street and offer help without judgment? Rose does. Rose goes to Nancy primarily because she knows Nancy has information that can help Oliver: true. But she doesn’t treat Nancy as a disgusting thing or a necessary evil. She treats Nancy as a fellow pilgrim in need and offers sacrificial aid. Nancy replies to her:

      “Your haughty religious people would have held their heads up to see me as I am tonight, and preached of flames and vengeance,” cried the girl. “Oh, dear lady, why ar’n’t those who claim to be God’s own folks as gentle and as kind to us poor wretches as you, who, having youth, and beauty, and all that they have lost, might be a little proud instead of so much humbler?”

Rose may be thin as literary characters go, but she is not a common stereotype. The whole force of Nancy’s heartbreaking question rests on Rose being completely a-typical. In the preface to the third edition, Dickens has to defend his inclusion of thieves and prostitutes in his book. Many of his readers, enough to precipitate the defense anyway, were shocked, shocked I tell you, by having their purified imaginations soiled with such outrageous characters! I ask in all seriousness: if these professed Christians had lived in the first century, what would they have said to Luke when he produced his gospel? Nineteenth-century England needed Rose, and so does twenty-first-century America.
 
And, now, I am going to give away the ending of the book. Yes! The very last words! Oliver is in an orphans’ workhouse for a reason: he was born out of wedlock to a woman who, because of her condition, was poor and despised and deathly ill. But by the end of the story, once her identity has been discovered (by means of all that passing of secrets that will play such an important role in my board game), the good people in Oliver’s life, the truly good, the weirdly good, the all-too-rarely good, put up a memorial stone to her in the local church.

      Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble tablet, which bears as yet but one word: “AGNES.” There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many, many years, before another name is placed above it! But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love—the love beyond the grave—of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.

Agnes had been known and loved, had laughed and had made people laugh with joy. She was one of God’s lambs (“Agnes” comes from Latin agnus, meaning lamb, a fact that Dickens most definitely knew and had in mind when naming Oliver’s mother), and Jesus tells us what the angels do when the one lost sheep is found.

Nothing to Worry About After All

I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I started Gogol’s Dead Souls. It’s just the kind of classic that I absolutely have to read. But it’s Russian, and it has the word “dead” in the title. Was this going to be as dreary and as hard to get through as the steppes in winter? But it turns out, the book was – I would have to say – delightful.

For the first half of the book, a charismatic fellow named Chichikov rides around finding landowners who are still paying taxes on the dead serfs they own (it was said that Russian lords own so many "souls," so these dead serfs are apparently the dead souls of the title) and offering to buy them. We don't know why for quite a while. We only know that he goes from house to house, one house per chapter, meeting the gentry and offering to buy their dead souls. The interest lies in the various reactions his offer receives. One is relieved to be rid of the tax burden and sells quickly. Another, sure that Chichikov is up to no good, refuses to sell. Yet another fancies himself a great bargainer and asks forty times as much as what Chichikov offers. The ludicrous conversations get funnier and funnier in a satirical way, and they made me start to think that these Boyars, who casually rate their wealth not by acreage or income but by the number of human beings they own, might actually be the dead souls Gogol had in mind. The comic stupidity of Chichikov’s valet and carriage driver make it clear that we’re meant to laugh. And the laughter and the satire, I’m guessing, got even some rich Russians at the time seeing the ridiculousness of claiming to “own a soul.” Perhaps a few even saw the evil in it.

In the second half, Chichikov reveals his plan. I’ll not give it away, but let’s just say that maybe Chichikov himself is among the dead souls. A fire consumed much of the second half of Gogol’s manuscript, and Gogol died young without ever rewriting the end. Apparently some people heard him read it, though, and some took notes or had bits of copies of it, so most editions, including mine, recreate the second half of the novel as much as possible. Still, the book ends mid-sentence. Yet it doesn’t matter at all. Maybe Gogol originally wrote a ripper of an ending that would have been remembered as one of the greatest endings in all of literature. But we don’t know it, so we don’t miss it. And all the while being thoroughly entertained, we seem to get the message Gogol had in view without any tidy wrap-up. 

Come to think of it, maybe a mid-sentence break is actually one of the greatest endings in history. It’s as if Gogol wrote, “I invite you to make a closer examination of your duty and the obligations of your official position on this earth, because all of us now have a dim conception of it, and we hardly — Oh, forget it! This kind of nonsense goes on in the world incessantly, so no ending makes sense. And if you don’t understand what I’m trying to say by this time, you never will. So let’s just call it a day.”

Two (?) Classics

I intended to start today by apologizing that my reading and blogging of the last few years doesn’t necessarily live up to the lofty standards implied by the title of this blog. But I just looked over the last few posts looking for examples, and now I’m not sure why I need to apologize. Maybe I was thinking that Infinite Jest is too recent to be considered a classic or a “Great Book” with a capital G and a capital B. And maybe I was thinking of the last time I apologized for this very thing, which I did in a post from October about a history book that included some plagiarism. But the last few months have seen additions to this site commenting on Ariosto, Galsworthy, Trollope, Richard Baxter, Aelred, Philip Sidney, Verne, and Boethius. Yes, Neil Simon found his way in there, too, but for the most part, I really do stick with books at least a hundred years old that have lasted.

Today I want to talk first about some books that are about a thousand years old that haven’t exactly lasted. For about a decade and a half, I’ve been looking forward to reading some of Albertus Magnus (his works must be great books because he’s known as Albert the Great!), known primarily, where he’s known at all, as the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. The volume I bought, called Spiritual Selections, included four little books. I read the first and enjoyed it. Then I read the second, which had some weird, ungrammatical translations. Then I started the third and realized it was just a different translation of the second book; I didn't read it even though the translation looked better. Then the preface to the fourth book said it was doubtful that Albert had written it, so I skipped it. When the compilation a twenty-first-century reader can buy of a thirteenth-century theologian’s writings has such issues, can the work be said to have lasted? And if not, can it be considered classic, as in “classic (adj): having stood the test of time”?

The first book in the anthology dealt with intelligence and the intelligible. Much of it explicitly acknowledged Aristotle and Plato, and much of it anticipated Albert’s famous student. So I was quite familiar with what he had to say. The best part categorized how well we do know and can know various things. Just as the presence of the sun is eminently obvious because of its light while the sun itself is impossible to know through direct observation (no solar filters in the 1200s!), theological objects, says Albert, are the most manifest but the hardest to know. Mathematical things are most firmly known. Physical things “fall away from intellectuality because of privation, matter and motion.” So, as Albert summarizes the situation, “divine things are said to be above the intellect, mathematical things in the intellect, and physical things below the intellect.”

The second treatise was called "Clinging to God." It starts well with glosses on praying in your closet and worshiping in spirit and truth: let images fall away, and worship God in your intellect and will. But it gets Manichean: Albert eventually wants to say that physical objects are unworthy of our attention, and that only spiritual objects have value. I know that if I asked him whether the Incarnation didn’t prove the value of God’s physical creation (as if the repeated phrase “And God saw that it was good” doesn’t do it in the first place), he would temper his statements. But he was a medieval monk who believed that he could not serve God while enjoying itch-free clothing or a comfortable bed, and I don’t have any desire to denigrate his path to godly devotion.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia is clearly a classic. It’s old. It’s about great things. It’s still available in the book store half a millennium later. And its title has given the language a useful word. I found More’s depiction of a perfect society interesting and ideal, but I couldn’t stop thinking that it wouldn't work. Take the case of criminals who don't reform. If you do repent and make restitution as you are able, you are restored to full citizenship status. But if not, you become a slave of the state. The slaves are treated well and enjoy good, nutritious food, but they have to do all the demeaning work (butchery, for instance) that would lower the characters of citizens. Well, doesn't this kind of labor lower the character of the very people who need uplifting? After all, they haven’t reformed yet, but why not continue to give them a chance? And won't the demeaning work make them lesser in the eyes of citizens so that they end up not being treated well? And why is labor demeaning in the first place? Farmers, plumbers, stonemasons, road builders, and garbage collectors are all heroes of civilization, worthy of our thanks and admiration (and better pay). And the Bible tells of at least one very noble Carpenter. But maybe the book wasn’t meant to be a practical proposal. And I have to admit that I found the best parts inspirational and timely: why execute a man for theft of needed food instead of reforming the economy so that everyone has food?

PS: I don’t know what’s happening. exlibrismagnis now has half a million views. Blogspot no longer lets me see all the referring URLs. A few years ago, I could see a full list with links. Clicking on most of the links took me to pages asking me to pay for porn or betting or something Russian that I didn’t understand. Not that I clicked on “most of the links”! Let me say it a different way. Most of the few links I tried led me, disappointingly, to the abovementioned. Then at some point, Blogspot put in some filters, those links stopped showing up, and my views went way down to what I assumed were all actual views. But now the hits are way up again and I don’t know who they’re coming from. I know that most are from the United States and, of all places, Brazil. But Germany, Bangladesh, and Argentina take up significant portions of that particular pie chart as well. So what constitutes a view? Views seem to be tied to particular posts, hence the “Most Popular Posts” gadgets at the bottom of the page. If you scroll back and the title of a previous post comes up, does that constitute a separate view? The site has 825 posts now, so maybe the views stack up faster and faster as legitimate viewers scroll through looking for a post to spend a minute on. Anyway, half a million views. The world is weird.

Ad Infinitum

In the last few years, I’ve come to realize with my love for old books, I’ve neglected some recent fiction. I’ve checked a lot of lists online of “Best Recent Novels,” “Best Twentieth Century Novels,” “Best Novels of the Last Fifty Years,” “Best Novels of the Twenty-First Century,” and whatever else comes up. One novel that comes up on almost every list that encompasses 1996 is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a long one: over a thousand pages. But I got off to a good, quick start this year and had the time on my schedule. So I jumped in about a week before the Winter Olympics began.

Now you’d think (and I did think) that this would be the kind of novel I’d really like. It has footnotes. It has footnotes that have footnotes. It’s satire of our civilization includes the notion that time itself is now sponsored by corporations: most of the action takes place during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The best high schools mainly teach sports, and any kid who likes to learn things like – you know – science or literature is looked down upon as virtually insane. The main character of this book goes to a tennis school, and his college draft committee senses a problem when they see that his grades slipped from A-plusses to mere A’s one semester. See, as I describe it, and it sounds good to me.

But Infinite Jest has a very dark streak running right down the middle. Everyone in the book is either using drugs or in rehab. Everyone using drugs resorts to crime. One poor recovering addict gets into the crossfire of a robbery gone wrong, and when he goes to the hospital, he’s unable to speak (because he’s been intubated? I could never quite tell) and can't tell the doctors not to give him narcotics because he’s an addict. And everyone accepts the idea that suicide is a reasonable response to the world.

I can see why some people consider it their favorite book and report having read it multiple times. And I don’t think you have to be crazy, addicted, or suicidal to like it. But it wasn’t for me. Especially as a book to read in between Olympic events!

Some American Poetry

After my quadrennial Winter Olympics marathon, I had some reading to catch up on. And now I have some blogging to catch up on.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read (among other things) some poetry by Carl Sandburg and some by Robert Frost. In each case, I bought an anthology of a few hundred pages and read most of the book. Carl Sandburg’s wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, and maybe because I felt rushed, I didn’t give myself the time fully to enjoy it for what it was. It was mostly free verse, and after having studied and worked to understand meter, I was at sea again. So much attention directed itself at the lines of varying length and at trying to confirm that there really, truly was no hidden meter, there wasn’t always enough left attention for assimilating the meaning of the text. But I did get the drift. The poems had a lot of praise for manual laborers (who can never have enough light shining on their dignity), for industrial advances (which haven’t always proven to be, shall we say, unalloyed blessings), and for the way the prairie land of Illinois shapes the lives of people living there (I’ll take his word for it). It didn’t grab me like the poetry of, say, William Cowper and William Cullen Bryant did. (Those two came up in earlier years of my project of planned reading.) But I definitely have a clearer picture of Sandburg as a whole now, where previously I really only knew the poet as the guy who wrote a poem about fog and little cat feet.

Robert Frost’s poetry sank in more easily, perhaps because he often wrote in iambic pentameter. But there were some surprises. From the little bits of Frost that I had read in anthologies or that I had heard quoted, I had previously thought of him as a nature poet. But most of the poems in the collection I read were narratives – or at least I should say that most of the pages are devoted to longer narrative poems rather than the one-pagers that might or might not be about nature. Another surprise: the narrative poems are full of dialog, with people speaking so plainly, the pentameter can barely be heard:

Our hens and cows and pigs are always better
Than folks like us have any business with.
Farmers around twice as well off as we
Haven’t as good. They don’t go with the farm.

Admittedly, the meter jumps out in that first line with the hens and cows and pigs getting naturally accented. But I needed the context for the last two lines, which I would say are typical.

It’s easy to understand why a poet would get known for one type of poem more than another more abundant type if the scarcer type is typically shorter: they’re easier to quote and anthologize. And I guess I’ll carry on with the skewing by giving more space to a shorter poem. Here’s one I found especially pretty:

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods---
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

I have to say first that I know from the meter “flowers” needs to be pronounced “flours,” which sounds more elegant to me somehow. (Knowledge of meter makes a difference!) I like the casual rhyme scheme: the rhymes come sometimes one line after another (reflect/defect) and sometimes in alternation (shiver/gone/river/on). That changing pace seems to suit the walk of a contemplative man through the winter woods. The poem has no elevated vocabulary as a poem from a century earlier would have had. But in the context, common words seem to take up meaning into the very shapes of the sounds. “Chill” and “shiver” sound cold with their sibilants and short “i” sounds. (Say “shiver” and “river” and tell me the first one doesn’t sound colder.) And while all of the first lines portray a picture in whites and light colors, doesn’t line 6 suddenly sound darker with its “oo” and long “o” sounds? I think Frost, despite his name and the topic of his most famous poem, would be happy in summer woods as well. But I like his warning to the trees to think twice during the winter. Don’t be hasty, as Treebeard would say. Let these fresh pools and the delicate flowers beside them, in them, and under them have their day and show us their picture. Plus, I like any celebration of life and color during winter instead of portraying it in the old, tired way as dead and gray.

I guess that’s part of why I watch the Winter Olympics every four years.

Consolation

Have I really not posted anything about Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy before? I thought I would look up what I said on this site during my earlier reading of the book. But it appears that I last drew consolation from Boethius’s philosophy in 2008, two years before I started this blog. In those early years, I wrote lots of posts about books I had read previously, but apparently not about this one.

Boethius was a Roman senator and a philosopher living in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. He was a Christian who also loved reading and teaching the Greek classics and in fact translated many of them for the Latin-speaking world. He and Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville helped promote an outline for learning that lasted for over a thousand years. In this curriculum, beginners studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric. (In the twentieth century, some elementary schools were still called “grammar schools” because of this tradition.) These subjects formed the group of three roads, or trivium. Because the material is for the young, we get our word “trivia” from its title, as in, “What a beginner learns is trivial.” The word has had fifteen hundred years to morph, though. We now might say that much of what a beginner learns is essential, not trivial in that sense. And “trivia” is now thought of as esoteric knowledge, less so on Tuesday nights at the pub and more so on Jeopardy! Knowing that the word “trivia” comes from the trivium constitutes an excellent piece of trivia, I’d say, and I’d be super excited to see it come up on the great game show.

I digress from my digression of biographical background. After learning how to get one’s thoughts together and express them convincingly, students following the plan of Boethius et al. next studied the quadrivium: the mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. (These wise people acknowledged that knowledge of music theory was essential toward understanding how the world works!) Once a student had become a “master” of the quadrivium (hence the name of the second degree in the universities that would rise some 700 years after Boethius), he could move on to professional study in the pinnacle fields of law, medicine, philosophy, or theology. Those who finished this course were qualified to teach doctrine in those upcoming universities, and hence were called “doctors.” In our times, most people graduating from the third program of higher education in areas other than law, medicine, or theology receive a degree known as “Doctor of Philosophy”: PhD. All of this to say that Boethius’s books have been so influential that many of their ideas and terms remain with us after a millennia-and-a-half.

But Boethius fell out of grace with the government in 523 and was imprisoned. Feeling every wretched thought one might think in that situation, he began to think of the philosophy he had learned from Plato & Co. as something more than academic knowledge – as helpful, inspiring, consoling knowledge. And he memorialized the journey of his heart in the remarkable book known as The Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote between the time of his incarceration and the time of his execution a year later. He begins the book by bemoaning his fate and then declaring that the figure of Philosophy personified appeared to him to teach him his lesson.

Or to re-teach him, rather. Philosophy’s first point is that Boethius is unhappy because he has forgotten the end of all things and the means by which the world is governed. But he can’t simply be told those things. Learning – either the first or the second time – is a process. She tells her author that she must start with basic ideas that her student can handle now and progress only slowly to the great lessons of ultimate things he must relearn. Clearly, Philosophy has read his other books and knows to start with the trivia! So she begins the course by pointing out that it is better to be grateful for all one has rather than resentful for all one has lost. Wouldn’t it be great if we all felt better after hearing that?

But we don’t. So now she starts to talk about true happiness. Everyone agrees that the goal of life is happiness: it makes no sense to say that you want to be happy so you can use that happiness for a further goal. But what is happiness? Is it power, as some say? Is it wealth? Is it pleasure? All have their advocates, but none of these can be true happiness. What powerful person doesn’t have to keep constant guard over his power lest he lose it all? Is it really power then? And can it possibly be ultimate happiness if it can be lost at any moment? Similarly, no wealthy person is either satisifed with wealth or confident that the wealth is safe. And pleasure is the least stable, reliable blessing of the three. The problem is, she explains, that philosophers have divided true happiness up. True happiness consists of all these things together: power is good only if it is pleasant, and wealth is pleasant only if the wealthy has the power to keep it, and pleasure is only good if one has the means to attain it. (Notice here that Philosophy is actually a critic of philosophy!) She then says that the happy one must be powerful, wealthy, and comfortable (she talks of other goods: I’ve narrowed down the list so my post isn’t as long as Boethius’s book) not as possessing these things but in his very nature. And this is true only of the one God. Any true happiness on the part of a human, then, must come from participating in godliness.

OK, but now Boethius has some questions. If happiness depends on God, then what about fate and chance? Is God bound by either? Why do bad things happen to us if He isn’t? And what about free will? If God knows everything, how can we be free? And if we’re not free, how can we be happy? Like a lot of us, even those of us who haven’t been put in prison and await execution, Boethius doesn’t want be happy and good and godly and serve the Creator and Sustainer of the universe just because it’s the right thing to do: he wants some answers! The post is long enough. I’ll only say that Philosophy provides very good answers to these questions; if she didn’t the book wouldn’t have brought actual consolation to so many people over so many centuries.

Maybe I’ve said enough to entice you to find the answers in this book. Just try not to wait until the government comes to get you.

PS: I’m pleased to see that blogspot's editor knows the words “trivium” and “quadrivium.” I’m confused to find that it doesn’t known the word “sustainer.” But then it doesn’t know the word “blogspot,” either!

First 2026 Roundup

I’ve had a good start with my reading list in the first three weeks of the New Year – such a good start that I have five things to report on already.

I started the year with some plays. Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers was entertaining and interesting, but was it really worthy of a Pulitzer? Two Jewish boys have to live for a year with their grandmother, who, in Yonkers now as the title suggests, has previously lived the difficult life of a Jew in early twentieth-century Europe. She’s hard and prickly and tells the boys it does no good to be sentimental. Her daughter, the boys’ aunt, confronts her for being so harsh, and the scene is interesting and provides a vehicle for the actors’ emotional display, but does either character come to a conclusion or learn a lesson? Or is the lesson that some people are just abrasive? I guess the grandsons accept her in the end even if her children don’t exactly.

Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, also a Pulitzer winner, was better. But, boy! was it weird! The family depicted is so crazy and dysfunctional, the audience (or reader) is left wondering how much is real and how much is in the imagination of . . . of somebody in this broken family. In some ways, hardly anything happens: half the first act consists of a conversation between a man on a couch and his wife, who is offstage. But the “action” of unfolding the psychology of these relationships is intense. And, yes, the title of the play indicates the elephant in the room: there is a child buried in the garden tha no one wants to mention.

I’ve read about a dozen books by Jules Verne, and he’s only disappointed me once (Michael Strogoff). He famously likes science but often gets it wrong. He loves geography and exploration even more but often gets that wrong. I think he wants his heroes to be godless rationalists but – thank heaven! – doesn’t get that quite right, either. And yet it all works, and it all makes me happy. The spirit of adventure and wonder in the not-so-accurate world Verne depicts is captivating and inspiring, and Around the World in Eighty Days provided fascinating treats on every page, even though I’d read it before. Phileas Fogg is described as being entirely mechanical, but he’s like Oz’s Tin Woodman: he has a heart that beats passionately once duty calls it into service. And Passepartout is one of the great sidekicks in literature: his position is maybe not so lofty as Sancho’s or Watson’s, but he’s close.

I have two quick, extra notes about Around the World. First, the narration says early on that Fogg was a member of the Reform Club (an actual institution in London) and replaced one of its great orators. I had to look this up! Who was the great orator of the Reform Club that Verne’s fictional character was supposed to have “replaced.” My internet search led me to a list of fictional members of the Reform Club, a list that included, from a Trollope book appearing just four years earlier – wait for it – Phineas Finn! Look at those names: Phileas Fogg and Phineas Finn. Can there be any doubt that Verne at least got his character’s name from Trollope’s? And maybe the fictional Finn is even the great orator that Fogg supposedly overshadowed. 

Second, I reported at the end of last year that I would try to read this book in French. I read it at a normal pace in English (well, normal for me, which is rather slow), but I am indeed also reading a bit of it in French every day. I’m in chapter 3 of the French, so I’ll probably finish it up around June if I can keep up the pace. The vocabulary is harder than I thought it would be, but I’m slowly learning. The goal is to practice on this familiar novel with good English translations (I read Butcher’s) that can serve as guides, so that later, sometime in the next few years, I can read some of Verne’s more obscure novels in French without having to rely on the problematic English translations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’m also following through on my idea to read just one “directive” from chapter 3 of Richard Baxter’s Practical Works each day. That plan isn’t working as well as reading Verne in French. I’ll say more in a few weeks when either the piecewise reading has started to work or I’ve given up on the experiment.