A Dollar a Pound

While we were packing for our recent move, the agent from the moving company came to the house for an estimate. He very kindly and modestly told us not to pay his company so much; he said that the move was going to cost us a dollar per pound, and that we should get rid of some things. We had already packed and stored about seventy boxes: nothing to do about those. But for all the rest still in the house, we kept repeating our new mantra – “A dollar a pound, a dollar a pound” – and tried to give away or throw away as much as we packed.

You would think it would have been a difficult decision, but it just came to my mind all settled one evening: I needed to get rid of the Britannica Great Books. As hugely important as they had been to me for the last thirty years, as much as I had learned from them, as much as they helped me fulfill my nearly lifelong determination to receive a liberal, classical education, I didn’t really need them anymore. Most of the works I would never read again. The ones I will reenjoy are all available on the internet. (Adler’s idea in creating the set, after all, was to get a cheap copy of copyright-free classic works into the home, a job now performed by Project Gutenberg, archive.org, etc.) And my old eyes don’t do so well anymore with the original set’s tiny print. I really only needed the books (1) that might have formatting issues online (e.g. Euclid) and (2) in which I had made copious notes (e.g. Aquinas). I ended up keeping eight of the fifty-four volumes; the goal of shedding as much as I packed was more than met.

Then I opened up this year’s reading list and saw that one of the first assignments was completing my reread of The Histories of Herodotus, and that’s one of the volumes I had given up. I remembered enjoying it again just a few years ago but forgot that I had split the task up into two years. I had no problem finding a very inexpensive digital copy of the book, and I cranked the font size up on my Kindle as much as I wanted. But the maps! That book was so hard to read the first time because I had to keep consulting the maps several times on every page. “Boeotia: is that the island northeast of Attica? No, that’s Euboea. And does the road from Susa to Sardis really go through Cappadocia?” But the maps on the Kindle version are virtually impossible to read. *sigh* Maybe I should have kept nine volumes. But “a dollar a pound”!

Despite the problems of keeping up with his geographical references, Herodotus is one of the easiest and fun reads in all of ancient literature. Of course, it’s mainly about a giant, bloody war, but the sidestories and backstories he tells along the way are wonderfully entertaining: the wealth of Croesus, the embalming methods of the Egyptians, the divine rescue of Delphi by landslides on Mt. Parnassus, Xerxes whipping the waters of the Hellespont (i.e. the Dardanelles).

But don’t get me wrong: the main story is gripping, too. Darius the Mede tries to bully the surrounding nations into subjugation to his empire, and is insulted when Athens says, “Nuts!” He sends what seems like a large force over, but the Greeks, led by Athens, defeat it at Marathon. (Herodotus, who got his information by interviewing many eyewitnesses, does not mention a runner covering 26-plus miles to deliver the news, so there’s an argument to be made for once that what isn’t in the ancient book is probably a myth.) His successor Xerxes, determined to put Athens in its place once and for all, sends two million soldiers (accompanied by as many support staff and camp followers) to finish the job. They build a pontoon bridge over the Hellespont and take several days to cross it. The army dries up several rivers along the way just quenching thirst. But then the Spartans (who wisely decide to join the defensive allies) meet the Persians at Thermopylae, thus giving their name as a legacy to countless high-school football teams. And then Themistocles comes up with a clever plan to defeat the Persian navy at Salamis. And then the last 300,000 Persians are soundly defeated at Plataea. The “free” Greeks’ distribution of liberty in 479 BC was even less than that of the Americans in 1776. But it still feels like the good guys win at the end of The Histories, so the read is ultimately as happily satisfying as, say, a novel by Austen.

I love this book! By time for the Book Awards at the end of 2024, will I have read some Pulitzer-winning history that outdoes it? Or will Herodotus simply suffer eleven months of fading memories while the more recent histories remain fresh in my mind in December? You and I both have to wait 343 days to find out.

By the way, we estimate that we threw away or gave away about 600 pounds of stuff over the last month of packing, and, sure enough, the ultimate weight of our load came in 600 pounds under the agent’s estimate. You know how much we saved!

Lessons from The Piano Lesson

I originally scheduled two plays by Tom Stoppard for 2024. But sometime last summer, for various reasons I remember, I decided to replace one with a play by August Wilson, and, for various reasons I don’t remember, I settled on The Piano Lesson. The decision paid off: I enjoyed the play and found great sympathy for and with the character who can’t play her piano because of haunting memories.

My edition has a foreword by Toni Morrison in which she says that critics have faulted Wilson for his use of the supernatural in a way that seems to imply that they think the play would be better without the ghost. Now, I can’t say too much about the ghost, because I don’t want to give anything away, but he seems so central, I don’t see how the play could exist without him, much less be better. It’s like saying Hamlet would have been better without the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It’s like saying a three-legged stool would be better without the leg that you find least attractive.

My case also rests on three legs. (1) A black family moving from Mississippi to Pittsburgh in the 1930s has to be thinking about the frequent deaths they hear about in the news from home, and they have to be wondering if they have truly escaped. Do I have to say that a ghost represents death and fear? This ghost stands (or floats?) as a personification of the unspoken worries of the Charles family, allowing these characters to speak about other things, like watermelons and broken trucks, with subtext and depth. (2) The ghost also represents memory, as does the piano with its legs adorned by carvings of the family’s ancestors. The play’s central theme concerns, to my eyes, the problems of starting a new life without letting the memories of the things you moved in order to escape ruin the new life as well, and the ghost brings these problems to a head. (3) I’m more duty bound to silence here even than in the first two points, because the third has to do with the end of the play. I’ll just say that the ghost becomes a foil to Boy Willie in the last scene and made me rethink this main character’s whole story.

So I didn’t like Morrison’s point (or Morrison’s critic’s point) about the ghost. But I did very much approve of her argument that it’s better in many ways to read a play than to see it, which is just what I did.

Jules Verne Comes Through Again

I’m having a great time with Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island! I’ve reread several of Verne’s fantastic voyage adventures in recent years trying to relive adolescent joys. But I didn’t read this one when I was a teenager, and yet it occurs to me that a fresh book may be the truest way to recapture the old experience: Journey to the Center of the Earth was different the second time, and I had to keep thinking about what the first encounter was like, but Mysterious Island is entertaining me with all the power of a new discovery just as if I had first met it when I was fourteen. (Side note: I highly recommend the fairly recent translation by Jordan Stump.)

But my enjoyment of the book is certainly not a 1970s experience. My overriding thought is, “This book should definitely be made into a video game!” I love playing Factorio, a game in which a marooned astronaut has to chop wood and dig up iron and copper and coal and make machines that make bigger machines that make rocket parts so he can send up a signal to get rescued. The castaways on the Mysterious Island have to make shelter and fire, fashion bows and arrows, and hunt game in order to survive, and they also dig up iron like the marooned astronaut. But they were created by Jules Verne, so they won’t be satisfied until, through the scientific knowledge of the engineer in the party, they recreate the marvelous, optimistic, technological nineteenth-century civilization they left behind. And to this end, they make bricks to make kilns to purify the iron, they use the iron to make tools and simple machines, they use the tools to extract other chemical ores, they use the extracted minerals to synthesize sulfuric acid, they use the sulfuric acid to make nitroglycerine, and they use the nitroglycerine to reshape a cave. From pyrite, they make iron sulfate. From saltpeter they make nitric acid. If I were to make this video game, I would definitely have to learn much more chemistry than I remember from tenth grade!

Would I be able to learn this chemistry from Verne himself? Perhaps not. Here’s another way my current experience is different from what it was fifty years ago: I catch a lot of Verne’s mistakes now. To measure the height of a cliff, engineer Cyrus Smith places a six-foot stick (measured by comparing it against his own well-known height) in the ground, lies in front of it, and places his eye at the point on the ground at which the top of the stick and the top of the cliff line up. I recognize this very problem from ninth-grade geometry, and sure enough Smith starts explaining about similar triangles. But then he makes a blunder by saying that the distance from his eye to the stick forms a ratio with the distance between the stick and the cliff’s base that equals the ratio of the stick’s height and the cliff’s height. Of course the italicized phrase should be “the distance between his eye and the cliff’s base” since the two similar triangles share the eye as a vertex.

The slight difference in the answer the castaways calculate means nothing in the end: all the “known” distances are only estimated after all, and there’s no real practical difference to them between a 300-foot cliff and, say, a 320-foot cliff. But if Verne didn’t know geometry any better than that, he probably didn’t know chemistry all that well, either. His place in our culture, though, is not that of a technical writer who has taught science and math to generations of young people but that of an imaginative writer who has inspired and thrilled those generations of young people by his scientific vision. He certainly thrills this young person.