Balance

I want to say that I didn’t feel any emotion when I read Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. For most people, that comment would mean that the book wasn’t good, as if feeling were the only inner motion of the human psyche. (Of course, this kind of person is unlikely to read Hermann Hesse in the first place.) But for me it represents merely a curious aspect of my response to a book that made me think a lot in a very enjoyable way.

Sometimes art that I like just makes me think without raising emotion. The film My Dinner with Andre springs to mind. Some Asimov sci-fi stories also do this. It wouldn’t be a problem here except that The Glass Bead Game seems to say that we need emotional life to balance the intellectual.

Joseph Knecht lives in a future shaped by reaction to the horrible world wars of the twentieth-century. To get away from the irrational manias that destroyed Europe and to encourage the arts and philosophy and academics, a system of schooling is established and a whole district set aside for the training of the most promising youths (all boys!) in the sciences and humanities. Over the centuries the highest school develops a game in which any idea – a part of a piece of classical music, for instance, or a passage or theme from a great piece of literature – is represented by a configuration of colored beads on a board. Players add beads representing astronomical formulas, poetic phrases, mathematical formulas, philosophical tenets and more, tracing through the arrangement on the board the common threads that connect them all. The experience of the unity of pure knowledge gives these men perspective and peace, and the rest of society looks up to them as the guiding stars that keep them all from going to war again.

History is seen in this future world as the ebb and flow of passions that cause troubles and wars and is left out of the schools and out of the game. But eventually Joseph comes to see that the game itself has had a history and must come to an end. He admires the family life of a friend he makes in the world outside his academic cloister. And because of these insights and others, ultimately he decides that life must have a balance between the intellect and passion.

But does the book really convincingly demonstrate the need for balance? Everything weird and wonderful and new in the book has to do with the extremely erudite atmosphere of the game, and ultimately if the book makes anyone want anything it is to have more of the intellectual tranquility of the Glass Bead Game.

And of course it makes me want to experience the game itself. Hesse only gives cryptic descriptions, not much more detailed than what I posted here. But a handful of game designers have tried their hands at realizing the game, and a couple of the results are available (in part at least). One seems more like a method of exploratory conversation. Its promotional material suggests a question something like this: If music were astronomy, what constellation would Bruce Springsteen be? While the answer is clearly Ophiucus (I mean, obviously!), that implementation of the game doesn’t seem to capture anything like the idea of representing the connection on a board. But a couple of the others seem promising, and I’m going to have to order them or try contacting the inventors to see if they can share a copy.

Follow-up on Dickens’s Christian Message

Thinking over what I wrote last month about Dickens’s Christian message, I realize that I followed my train of thought down two avenues only: Dickens’s use of allegory and his explicit portrayal of the moral characters as Christians. Today I want to trace two other paths.

Sometimes Dickens just blatantly offers a Christian message in his narration. The example I think of first has to do with Jo, the little crossing sweeper from Bleak House. Jo is a homeless orphan. He has never known a day of education or a day of love (that he remembers). Dickens describes his illiteracy thus:

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?

One day, Jo is called upon to testify at an inquest, but the officers of the court find that he doesn’t know what it means to swear to the truth or what truth is or what the Bible says about truth. They are completely stymied by the question of what to do with such an uncooperative boy! But it never occurs to anyone in the court (representing the Christian state of the United Kingdom, remember) that what they should do is to give Jo a home and teach him to read.

Later Jo comes across a charlatan preacher named Chadband, who, as a minister in the Church, has even less reason than the bailiff at the court to wonder what to do with a boy wholly ignorant of the Bible. But Chadband leaves Jo just as unenlightened as he found him. After their initial conversation, Dickens’s narration addresses this apostrophe (I learned this use of the word from Dickens himself!) directly to the neglected child:

It may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet!

There’s nothing hidden about this message. If you are a Christian individual, organization, institution, or country, take care of children and teach them to read, because our religion depends on revelation found in a Book. Don’t be a Chadband! (By the way, “Chadband” is one of Dickens’s most successfully expressive names. As soon as the narration presents you with “Rev. Chadband,” you know you’re meeting pomposity and hypocrisy. And the beauty of it is, I don’t know exactly how the name conveys the idea so well. But how can any good come out of “Chadband”?)

I alluded to the other kind of Christian message I want to mention in one confusing sentence near the end of the earlier post. But it deserves more space. This message is all-pervasive in Dickens’s books and stories. It is simply this. In Dickens, as in no other author whatsoever, every character – businessmen and lawyers, landowners and urchins, moneylenders and spendthrifts, belles and streetwalkers, butlers and innkeepers, parents and children, teachers and students, eccentric aunts and boring office mates, cart drivers and coal diggers, bashful grooms and jilted brides, clerics and showmen, aristocrats and scullery maids, conservatives and revolutionaries, doctors and nurses, detectives and engineers, criminals and judges, sailors and tailors and jailers, French and English, American and Indian – all are presented as humans and individuals, not merely plot points.

Most authors in a situation where a runaway boy needs money would simply report that he sold his jacket for a few shillings at a resale shop, perhaps mentioning a shopkeeper, maybe even giving him a generic line or two: “I can give you ’alf a crown at most.” Dickens, however, gives the man who buys David Copperfield’s jacket a weird rattle in his throat and makes him so strange and so memorable, I believe Tolkien found inspiration here for Gollum. The clear message is that the children of God in all their infinite variety of forms are worthy of our attention. The hypocrites and self-servers Dickens dignifies by scolding them. (Our contemporary society doesn’t understand that thought, but what good parent doesn’t know that loving the child sometimes means telling her she is very wrong?) Those characters with a heart, on the other hand, find their author’s mercy for all their doubts and missteps and hilarious foibles, and receive his honor and admiration for their best moments.

Were you to ask me for examples of people who treated prostitutes as dignified beings fashioned in the image of God, only three people would immediately come to mind: Jesus and, in their writing, Cervantes and Dickens. If we could each learn to treat every real person we meet on the road of life as Dickens treats the creations of his prolific imagination, we would have nothing to be ashamed of when we meet our own even more prolific Creator.

Cold Blood

I want to say it made my blood run cold. But the book is called In Cold Blood, so saying that my blood is cold makes me sound like a sociopath. I can think of two situations in which we speak of cold blood in humans. (More may exist that I’m not thinking of at the moment.) We talk of a person who murders when not in a rage as a cold-blooded killer. And we say when we encounter something horrific or uncanny that it makes our blood run cold. So here's what I actually mean: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood made my blood run cold in the best way.

OK, see? “In the best way.” That makes me sound like I enjoy murder. I don’t! Like Hercules Poirot, “I do not approve of murder.” But don’t we all like reading about it?

Sometime in the last couple of years, my wife and I saw a movie or TV show in which the character Truman Capote appears once or twice, telling dinner companions that he is writing not just a new book but a new kind of book. Neither of us can remember what that show was. If any of my readers recognize it, please remind me! (Note: he appears once or twice. I’m not talking about the Philip Seymour Hoffman film.)

In any case, with or without that source identified, I know that Capote thought this about his book. And now I understand what he meant by a new kind of book: it is a nonfiction book written as a novel. His beautiful prose descriptions of Holcomb, Kansas, raise a crystal-clear picture of the town to my mind’s eye. His presentation of the killers Hickock and Smith, based on extensive interviews, depicts the surprisingly numerous layers of their terrifying personalities in tragic detail. He recounts the story of KBI agents combing through evidence and tracking down the solution to the crime with all the suspense of Hitchcock. But the masterstroke is the way Capote portrays the victims, the members of the Clutter family, never of course known to him while alive. Yet the novel-style narration, based on interviews with everyone in Holcomb, makes it seem as if he did know them. I want to say he brought the characters to life, but of course that is exactly what he couldn’t do. I can say, though, that he honored them by making them stand up from the page in three-dimensional solidity with all their charm, all their morality, all their intelligence and beauty and strength and athleticism, all their ambitions, all their quirks, all their shortcomings, and all their foibles. Amazing.

I’d waited a long time for this one, and it exceeded expectations.

Refining the Arthurian Question

It seems like “Did King Arthur exist in any real sense?” is a good question to ask. I’ve asked it, read about it, thought about it. But, says Geoffrey Ashe in The Discovery of King Arthur, this is the wrong question. If you mean, “Was there ever an Arthur who was King of All Britain, seated with his Knights at the Round Table, chivalric defender of all good, beholder of the Holy Grail, aided and counseled by Merlin the Magician?” the answer is clearly, “No.” End of story. This Arthur begins to appear (some features of him at least) in the twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain by the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, whereas Arthur, if he was real, lived many generations before in (depending on your sources) the fifth or sixth century. Ashe says that the proper question is, “Which historical figure did Geoffrey have in mind when he created the legend?”

I enjoyed Ashe’s book a lot. A lot! And I like his answer: Looking only at the contradictory chronicles from Britain, it is difficult to pinpoint a person who might be the source of the legend. But if we note that Geoffrey of Monmouth three times associates Arthur with the reign of Emperor Leo (r. 457-474) and has him traveling to Gaul near the end of his life, we find a historically documented person who matches: Riothamus, called “King of the Britons,” who came to Gaul in 469 at the request of the western emperor to fight off Euric, King of the Visigoths. (It appears that Riothamus could be a romanization of a Brittonic word meaning “high king,” which could explain why no British document includes the name. “Riothamus” presumably corresponds with some “Arthur” or “Aurelius” in one of the British or Saxon chronicles.)

But is Ashe’s question really the right one, either? Am I satisfied to know that Geoffrey of Monmouth, when he gave us the greatest king in British history (whether real or imaginary), had in mind a fellow whose exploits in Gaul are the only historically certain facts? I am not. Maybe it will help to think of the problem.

The problem is that, since the protectors of civilization and education, i.e. the Romans, had abandoned Britain in the early fifth century, and illiterate barbarians, i.e. the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, had begun to swarm in around the middle of that same century, there is no consistent British record of British events written at the time. It’s hard for us to imagine in an age when almost any Google search brings up hundreds of thousands of written pieces of information, but we only have a few documents out of Britain from the time when Arthur supposedly lived or even from the next couple of centuries. Now, the authors of those sporadic treatises had to have learned to read and write somewhere, so presumably literacy was preserved in some tiny pockets, but those grocery lists and inventories and theological musings have all disappeared. What we have left are just a few writings, spread out over centuries, that mention various kings with little consistency of names or dates (or dating systems). So the question can’t be “Which established historical personage of British history from the time is the prototype of the legendary King Arthur?” There are no clearly established historical personages since the document record in Britain is so sparse and erratic.

Geoffrey of Monmouth mentions an “ancient British book” that he used as a source. Now, he might have been pulling our leg. Cervantes claimed that his book of Don Quixote came from a history by Cide Hamete Benengeli. Goldman says that The Princess Bride is an abridgement of a book by S. Morgenstern. These authors merely used a fun device to make their fiction seem more worthy of our suspension of disbelief. Geoffrey might have done the same thing. On the other hand, he might conceivably have been in earnest about his source, and so one might propose that The Question is “Where is that missing ancient British book?” Since that question has not been answered satisfactorily in nine-hundred years, however, we should set it aside for now. Besides, is that really what you or I want to know? A handful of historians, I’m sure, would die happy to have found that book. And I would be very excited to hear that it had been discovered in some monastic cellar. But surely the whereabouts of that book cannot be the central question we all have in mind about King Arthur.

So what do we in fact want to know? I suggest that the question is simply, “Did some king unite the Britons for a while in the dark times of Saxon invasion?” And the answer to that question is clearly, “Yes!” Whatever his name was – Arthur, Aurelius, or Riothamus (I think his name was probably Arthurius Aurelius and that the Romans in Gaul knew him as Riothamus) – all those otherwise irreconcilable documents and all other evidence agree that a high king once led the petty British kingdoms and kept the Saxons at bay for a while. Maybe it was in the 460s; maybe it was in the 530s. If we depend on British sources, we’ll never know. But they all agree it happened: the world as Britons knew it was ending, yet some king held off the apocalypse for a season. And that’s a story that gets handed down, even in Dark Ages of illiteracy. That’s a story that acquires legendary status and then legendary episodes and characters. That’s a story that could inspire Geoffrey of Monmouth to get the ball rolling on the greatest theme in British literature, what has become known simply as the Matter of Britain.

Yes, that king, whom we know as King Arthur whatever his real name might have been, existed. And now, having read Ashe’s work, I believe that that king must be the same as Riothamus, because only a king who had quelled the waves of Saxon invasion in Britain could have afforded to take his army to Gaul to help out there.