During the third week in February, I enjoyed one of the best three-day stretches of my whole experience in scheduled reading. First, I started Mansfield Park, which was even better than I had remembered. Then I started Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, which had two stunning effects. First, the basis of his experiment is directly exemplified and verified by Austen's characters (and once he even refers to Austen), as if one were the demonstration of the other. Second, he said something on almost every page that provided that moment when you see something with import to your whole life that you hadn't thought about before and yet immediately seems obvious. Sometimes he challenged everything I thought about literature and made me feel I had been reading incorrectly my entire life. But then just as I would begin to abandon all hope, he would make another remark that made me feel pretty intelligent after all. The unassuming title hides the importance of what he has to say! The book doesn't present a throw-away idea that you might try out on a Sunday afternoon; it explains What It Means To Be Literary.
The experiment is this. Instead of beginning with criticism of books and then defining good readers as those who like the right sort of books, let's begin with criticism of readers and define good books as those that appeal to the right sort of reader. The first step in defining different kinds of readers is to see that they don't “like” different kinds of books. Using the same verb suggests that the same process is going on in various readers’ heads and that what makes a nonliterary reader is a taste for bad literature. But who has a taste for the bad? What the many nonliterary people do with books is simply not the same as what the few literary people do with books. Let's say that the many use books while the few receive them.
Those who use books want plot with exciting events. Description has to be just interesting enough to set the stage and must use hackneyed phrases: "her blood ran cold" cues the reader to register the idea of fear more strongly than “she was afraid” but does nothing to describe a particular fear in a particular situation. Those who use books want excitement, happiness, drama, tragedy or any other effect that will entertain, confirm, and present visions of possibility for the reader's life. But they don't grow by them; they always want to agree with what they read. They read books once and set them aside as accomplished tasks.
Those who receive books, on the other hand, enter into the world of the book as it is. They appreciate the artistic form of the work, and, while they may not change their mind on any position, they find out to their benefit what it is like to think differently. The users criticize immediately; the receivers defer judgment. Receivers read the same works “ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.” (Oh, dear. It doesn’t sound very good for me right now.) Literary readers hear the sounds of the words. (Whew! I’m literary again.) They have life-changing reading experiences akin to religion, love, and bereavement. (Now I’m very literary.) What they read keeps a prominent position in their minds, and they think about, quote, and mutter their favorite lines.
If I continued the summary at this pace, I would nearly have to reproduce the length of the book. So I’ll end with just a note about conclusions. Lewis’s main conclusion is that a certain kind of book rewards the kind of reading that literary people perform: such a book can be read several times and grows with each rereading, it challenges and changes readers’ ideas, it has beautiful, memorable, and speakable lines, and so on. But the conclusion that most struck me this time (I’m sure I will have to reread this book about rereadable books!) had to do with the related topics of agreement and judgment. I was feeling quite nonliterary for a while as Lewis talked down a reader being too quickly critical about works he doesn’t agree with. I have opinions, after all. Maybe I’m the reader Lewis is talking about. But then once more he reconfirmed my status in his club by proving me wrong about myself using my favorite example: Lucretius! I agree with hardly a single sentence in all of De natura rerum, and yet I love it. Lucretius’s theory of atoms gives me a vivid picture of an atheistic, materialistic world and helps me experience what it’s like for a brilliant, eloquent mind to think that way. Now I should inspire myself by my own example to take on a repertoire I don’t have much sympathy for or understanding of: contemporary poetry. I should read swaths of it and remind myself just to let it be what it is, entering into it without judgment and letting it help me see the world through the contemporary poet’s eyes. Just because.
Saturday, March 17, 2018
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Aristotle and Dickens
Speaking of villains (as I did nearish the end of the previous post), I promised in the last post of January that I would have to write someday about Aristotle and Dickens’s three types of villain. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me when I wrote that post that my opportunity would arrive in the very next weeks.
In book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about why people do bad things. He does this in part to combat a mistake his mentor, Plato, makes through most of his career: assuming that a person will act righteously if he simply knows the right thing to do. (Did Plato never go to a middle school? Or to a college faculty meeting?) Aristotle analyzes mistakes that even good people make in their moral reasoning (not seeing contradictions between the universals of knowledge and the particulars of appetite and other such Aristotelian explanations). But he finds three kinds of fault causing evil action that have nothing to do with syllogisms: vice, incontinence, and brutishness. The vicious person knows all about ethics but simply doesn’t care about the pain or happiness of others anywhere near as much as he cares about his own comfort. The incontinent person wishes she could be better but finds herself too weak to resist temptation. The brute on the other hand doesn’t think at all, acting merely to satisfy hunger and anger by the most direct means.
At some point over the years, it occurred to me that Dickens’s villains often come in threes, and that they usually fall into three types. Maybe I first noticed the pattern with the Defarges and their horrifying partner, The Vengeance, in A Tale of Two Cities. Mme Defarge coolly knits the record of her victims, plotting and planning her private Revolution all the way, while her husband, who appears at times to have a good heart, often simply glides along with the bloody tide. On days of execution, Mme Defarge looks on with grim satisfaction, and M Defarge with sad resignation. But The Vengeance cackles with delight: she loves the sight of blood whether it drips from the neck of a nobleman or his innocent charwoman.
In reviewing Aristotle’s taxonomy of evil this year, I saw a clear parallel. Mme Defarge fits neatly into the Philosopher’s category of vice, M Defarge represents the incontinent quite well, and The Vengeance is a paragon of brutishness. And the pattern seems to hold in other novels, as well. In Oliver Twist, Fagin (Vice) uses children in cold blood to line his own pockets, Bumble the Beadle (Incontinence) finds himself unable to act contrary to the law that he calls “a ass,” and Sikes (Brute) beats Nancy to death in animalistic rage. The baddies in the Dickens I read this year, The Old Curiosity Shop, also fit the mold. Sally Brass (Vice) knows just what she’s doing as she calculates to bring misery into the lives of those around her. Her brother Sampson (Incontinence) isn’t smart enough to do any calculation of his own but acquiesces in his sister’s schemes. And Quilp (Brutishness) – okay, Quilp thinks and plots, but his primary motivation is just a kind of bloodlust.
Dickens’s funny heroes don’t succumb easily to categorization; each is uniquely hilarious. This post has gone on long enough already for me to spend much time on the humor of The Old Curiosity Shop. But before signing off, I want to take the opportunity to promote one of the funniest characters I’ve ever come across. Dick Swiveller may be overlooked becomes he appears in a book whose allegorical melodrama hasn’t suited English-language reading fashion for 150 years. But anyone of the weird few who have read this far in this post will be rewarded by becoming acquainted with a character who, in the serious business of making readers laugh and feel happy to be a part of Dickens’s world, stands tall beside the more well-known Sam Weller and Wilkins Micawber.
In book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about why people do bad things. He does this in part to combat a mistake his mentor, Plato, makes through most of his career: assuming that a person will act righteously if he simply knows the right thing to do. (Did Plato never go to a middle school? Or to a college faculty meeting?) Aristotle analyzes mistakes that even good people make in their moral reasoning (not seeing contradictions between the universals of knowledge and the particulars of appetite and other such Aristotelian explanations). But he finds three kinds of fault causing evil action that have nothing to do with syllogisms: vice, incontinence, and brutishness. The vicious person knows all about ethics but simply doesn’t care about the pain or happiness of others anywhere near as much as he cares about his own comfort. The incontinent person wishes she could be better but finds herself too weak to resist temptation. The brute on the other hand doesn’t think at all, acting merely to satisfy hunger and anger by the most direct means.
At some point over the years, it occurred to me that Dickens’s villains often come in threes, and that they usually fall into three types. Maybe I first noticed the pattern with the Defarges and their horrifying partner, The Vengeance, in A Tale of Two Cities. Mme Defarge coolly knits the record of her victims, plotting and planning her private Revolution all the way, while her husband, who appears at times to have a good heart, often simply glides along with the bloody tide. On days of execution, Mme Defarge looks on with grim satisfaction, and M Defarge with sad resignation. But The Vengeance cackles with delight: she loves the sight of blood whether it drips from the neck of a nobleman or his innocent charwoman.
In reviewing Aristotle’s taxonomy of evil this year, I saw a clear parallel. Mme Defarge fits neatly into the Philosopher’s category of vice, M Defarge represents the incontinent quite well, and The Vengeance is a paragon of brutishness. And the pattern seems to hold in other novels, as well. In Oliver Twist, Fagin (Vice) uses children in cold blood to line his own pockets, Bumble the Beadle (Incontinence) finds himself unable to act contrary to the law that he calls “a ass,” and Sikes (Brute) beats Nancy to death in animalistic rage. The baddies in the Dickens I read this year, The Old Curiosity Shop, also fit the mold. Sally Brass (Vice) knows just what she’s doing as she calculates to bring misery into the lives of those around her. Her brother Sampson (Incontinence) isn’t smart enough to do any calculation of his own but acquiesces in his sister’s schemes. And Quilp (Brutishness) – okay, Quilp thinks and plots, but his primary motivation is just a kind of bloodlust.
Dickens’s funny heroes don’t succumb easily to categorization; each is uniquely hilarious. This post has gone on long enough already for me to spend much time on the humor of The Old Curiosity Shop. But before signing off, I want to take the opportunity to promote one of the funniest characters I’ve ever come across. Dick Swiveller may be overlooked becomes he appears in a book whose allegorical melodrama hasn’t suited English-language reading fashion for 150 years. But anyone of the weird few who have read this far in this post will be rewarded by becoming acquainted with a character who, in the serious business of making readers laugh and feel happy to be a part of Dickens’s world, stands tall beside the more well-known Sam Weller and Wilkins Micawber.
Monday, February 26, 2018
The World Is a Curiosity Shop
The more I learn about Charles Dickens, the more he amazes me. Brilliant author. Reformer. Midnight wanderer. Actor. Hero at fatal railway accidents. One of the most amazing aspects of his career was his ability to create coherent artistic wholes while writing in a periodical format. The Old Curiosity Shop, which I read this month for the third time in my life, starts out as a vignette about characters met by a first-person narrator on a late-night perambulation through London (no doubt based on some real people Dickens encountered on one of his night-time walks). Only after this short item appeared in print did the Inimitable decide to turn the story into a novel. He even had to make an explicit change of narrators in order to lengthen the story. How could he have kept the whole thing unified?
Yet somehow he did. Several consistent themes run through the entire book and, in spite of the difference in tone and narrator, even incorporate the opening chapters. One such theme is one’s relationship to death. Nell often thinks about her approaching death. Other characters try to put off their approaching death, ignore it, fear it, and cause it.
Another theme explores attitudes of loyalty. Loyalty cannot be simply professed, as Tom Codlin does to Nell and Sampson does to Kit. It must be consistently shown, as with Nell to her Grandfather, the Marchioness to Dick, the Clergyman and the Bachelor, and the Sexton and his assistant. It must sometimes be earned, as with the pony and Kit. (Is this the only Dickens animal whose end is told in the wrap-up chapter as if he were a major character?)
But the theme that struck me most during this reading was that of the Old Curiosity Shop itself. Nell and her grandfather leave the actual, physical shop behind early in the story, and yet Dickens retained the title. Did he have a notion of using that title figuratively at the beginning of his creative process? Nell and her grandfather are certainly seen as curiosities by the first narrator. Or did Dickens decide to make a figurative theme of the title only after the abandonment of the literal Curiosity Shop made that title an inappropriate curiosity of its own?
One way or another, displays of curiosities abound throughout the book. (Humanoid curiosities stood out to me. Perhaps the figurative Curiosity Shop specializes in figurines.) Nell says that the rows of chimneys she sees at night appear to have faces. She works for a while at a traveling wax museum (and sleeps among the historical characters). The crowd at a race are described as being in a panorama, as are a group of pupils in the school, seated all in rows. Puppets make several appearances in the book (once sitting on tombs). And Quilp, perhaps Dickens’s most odious villain, often appears at a window, his bizarre face on display in a frame. All these images lead in the end to the effigies on the tombs in the church where Nell sits alone pondering her impending death (continuing the frequent connection of the curiosity-display theme and the death theme) and the imagined crowd of angels that accompany Nell’s soul to Heaven.
As I think about it longer, though, maybe it isn’t so strange that the title of Dickens’s fourth novel should shine light on a metaphoric thread running through its fabric. All of Dickens’s works are displays of curiosities. It’s the way he saw London, England, the world. He regularly set out in the wee hours to find and interact with social outcasts: prisoners, asylum inmates, the homeless. He did this partly out of a sense of Christian charitable duty (by contrast, I admit, with bowed head, that when I find myself on a night-time errand in a big city, I generally try to avoid human contact) and partly to feed his understanding of the wondrous variety of humanity. Even in daylight, Charles Dickens had an eye for the eccentricity in every human being. The artist René Magritte seems to tell us in his work that individuality, if it exists, is always hidden and that a person always presents as and instance of a type: the Lover, the middle-class Suit, and so on. But the author of The Old Curiosity Shop, like Rembrandt, reminds us that every human we are tempted to parse as nothing more than an embodiment of a category is actually a Dickens character.
Yet somehow he did. Several consistent themes run through the entire book and, in spite of the difference in tone and narrator, even incorporate the opening chapters. One such theme is one’s relationship to death. Nell often thinks about her approaching death. Other characters try to put off their approaching death, ignore it, fear it, and cause it.
Another theme explores attitudes of loyalty. Loyalty cannot be simply professed, as Tom Codlin does to Nell and Sampson does to Kit. It must be consistently shown, as with Nell to her Grandfather, the Marchioness to Dick, the Clergyman and the Bachelor, and the Sexton and his assistant. It must sometimes be earned, as with the pony and Kit. (Is this the only Dickens animal whose end is told in the wrap-up chapter as if he were a major character?)
But the theme that struck me most during this reading was that of the Old Curiosity Shop itself. Nell and her grandfather leave the actual, physical shop behind early in the story, and yet Dickens retained the title. Did he have a notion of using that title figuratively at the beginning of his creative process? Nell and her grandfather are certainly seen as curiosities by the first narrator. Or did Dickens decide to make a figurative theme of the title only after the abandonment of the literal Curiosity Shop made that title an inappropriate curiosity of its own?
One way or another, displays of curiosities abound throughout the book. (Humanoid curiosities stood out to me. Perhaps the figurative Curiosity Shop specializes in figurines.) Nell says that the rows of chimneys she sees at night appear to have faces. She works for a while at a traveling wax museum (and sleeps among the historical characters). The crowd at a race are described as being in a panorama, as are a group of pupils in the school, seated all in rows. Puppets make several appearances in the book (once sitting on tombs). And Quilp, perhaps Dickens’s most odious villain, often appears at a window, his bizarre face on display in a frame. All these images lead in the end to the effigies on the tombs in the church where Nell sits alone pondering her impending death (continuing the frequent connection of the curiosity-display theme and the death theme) and the imagined crowd of angels that accompany Nell’s soul to Heaven.
As I think about it longer, though, maybe it isn’t so strange that the title of Dickens’s fourth novel should shine light on a metaphoric thread running through its fabric. All of Dickens’s works are displays of curiosities. It’s the way he saw London, England, the world. He regularly set out in the wee hours to find and interact with social outcasts: prisoners, asylum inmates, the homeless. He did this partly out of a sense of Christian charitable duty (by contrast, I admit, with bowed head, that when I find myself on a night-time errand in a big city, I generally try to avoid human contact) and partly to feed his understanding of the wondrous variety of humanity. Even in daylight, Charles Dickens had an eye for the eccentricity in every human being. The artist René Magritte seems to tell us in his work that individuality, if it exists, is always hidden and that a person always presents as and instance of a type: the Lover, the middle-class Suit, and so on. But the author of The Old Curiosity Shop, like Rembrandt, reminds us that every human we are tempted to parse as nothing more than an embodiment of a category is actually a Dickens character.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Splintered Fragments
It has long seemed clear to me that a Christian can learn from someone of another faith or even of no faith, although many half-thinking Christians have disagreed with me or, worse, looked past me while declaring their purified principles to the air. But which of us Christians hasn’t had a teacher, a professor, a work supervisor that taught us things without agreeing with us on the Being of God? I’ve even learned spiritual things from Hindus and Greek Pagans and Atheists – without coming one step closer to converting. So I’m always happy to find a Christian author who recognizes what seems to me an obvious fact. Paul commending the Athenians for being “in every way very religious” and then quoting approvingly one of their own poets. Augustine declaring that “wherever truth may be found, it belongs to [the] Master.” Lewis calling myth “a splintered fragment of the true light.”
I discovered two more sympathetic souls this month in Lactantius and Justin Martyr. Acting on a tip, the source of which I’ve forgotten, I read just book VII of the Divine Institutes of Lactantius, who was an advisor to Constantine in the early fourth century. At that point in this apologetical work, Lactantius gives arguments for believing in the immortality of the soul and in divine judgment, using Greek philosophers, poets, Cicero, and even the Sibyls as evidence. He goes on to more specifically Christian doctrines, which of course he must support using the New Testament, not Cicero. (Of special interest to me was Lactantius’ belief in a literal Millennium between the reign of the Antichrist and the end of the world.) But starting with the pagan classics was a technique worthy of the Apostle’s sermon on Mars Hill.
Writing a couple hundred years earlier than Lactantius, Justin Martyr also had read the classic philosophers and even opened his own little philosophical college in Rome. Justin believed that some of the Greeks’ “splintered fragments” were pretty hefty shards. He thought that Homer had access to Christian truth that he did not understand and that the Sibyls were inspired by the true God and spoke their oracles unwittingly. Most amazing of all, he believed that Plato had read the books of Moses in Alexandria and understood them in all their prophetic sense to the extent that he could be called a Christian believer before the birth of Christ. Plato’s dialogs, says Justin, don’t reveal his Mosaic beliefs more explicitly only because he had to disguise the truth out of fear for the authorities. Justin himself had reason to fear the authorities: the Romans beheaded him for the doctrines he taught in his academy.
I read some Augustine this month, as well, but it had little to do with Roman gods or God’s truth being found in the mouths of pagan philosophers. In books I-V of his treatise On the Trinity, Augustine began laying out his views on this most important and most mysterious of Christian beliefs. The Bishop of Hippo lived and wrote just after the Church had worked out its teaching on the Trinity at the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople and had enshrined their conclusions in the Nicean-Constantinopolitan Creed. This creed kept the Latin and Greek churches together for seven hundred years before the two split, presumably over the addition of one word to the Latin version: the word filioque. The Greek-speaking half objected that the word represented a recent idea and, more importantly to them one would hope, a false one. But I was fascinated to see that Augustine very clearly states, six hundred years before the Great Schism of East and West, that the Holy Spirit proceeds both from the Father and from the Son (filioque). As for myself, I agree with Augustine, but I also believe that we understand so little what we mean by “proceeds” that the Churches had (and have) no business hurling anathemas at each other over either the word or the idea.
I discovered two more sympathetic souls this month in Lactantius and Justin Martyr. Acting on a tip, the source of which I’ve forgotten, I read just book VII of the Divine Institutes of Lactantius, who was an advisor to Constantine in the early fourth century. At that point in this apologetical work, Lactantius gives arguments for believing in the immortality of the soul and in divine judgment, using Greek philosophers, poets, Cicero, and even the Sibyls as evidence. He goes on to more specifically Christian doctrines, which of course he must support using the New Testament, not Cicero. (Of special interest to me was Lactantius’ belief in a literal Millennium between the reign of the Antichrist and the end of the world.) But starting with the pagan classics was a technique worthy of the Apostle’s sermon on Mars Hill.
Writing a couple hundred years earlier than Lactantius, Justin Martyr also had read the classic philosophers and even opened his own little philosophical college in Rome. Justin believed that some of the Greeks’ “splintered fragments” were pretty hefty shards. He thought that Homer had access to Christian truth that he did not understand and that the Sibyls were inspired by the true God and spoke their oracles unwittingly. Most amazing of all, he believed that Plato had read the books of Moses in Alexandria and understood them in all their prophetic sense to the extent that he could be called a Christian believer before the birth of Christ. Plato’s dialogs, says Justin, don’t reveal his Mosaic beliefs more explicitly only because he had to disguise the truth out of fear for the authorities. Justin himself had reason to fear the authorities: the Romans beheaded him for the doctrines he taught in his academy.
I read some Augustine this month, as well, but it had little to do with Roman gods or God’s truth being found in the mouths of pagan philosophers. In books I-V of his treatise On the Trinity, Augustine began laying out his views on this most important and most mysterious of Christian beliefs. The Bishop of Hippo lived and wrote just after the Church had worked out its teaching on the Trinity at the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople and had enshrined their conclusions in the Nicean-Constantinopolitan Creed. This creed kept the Latin and Greek churches together for seven hundred years before the two split, presumably over the addition of one word to the Latin version: the word filioque. The Greek-speaking half objected that the word represented a recent idea and, more importantly to them one would hope, a false one. But I was fascinated to see that Augustine very clearly states, six hundred years before the Great Schism of East and West, that the Holy Spirit proceeds both from the Father and from the Son (filioque). As for myself, I agree with Augustine, but I also believe that we understand so little what we mean by “proceeds” that the Churches had (and have) no business hurling anathemas at each other over either the word or the idea.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Notes About Notes
In my second decade of planned reading (2007-2016), I read all of Plato’s surviving works and almost all of Aristotle. For the third ten-year schedule, I decided I would simply read through my extensive notes on all these philosophical works. I thought this exercise would just remind me of the main points and the flow of argument, but some other interesting things have happened.
Take the Republic, for instance. I had read Plato’s blueprint for utopia twice in my life and had some clearish memories about how the dialog felt, how Plato’s version of Socrates got from point A to point B. Some of that flavor made it to my notes, but for the most part I had just recorded main lines of argument and the points stated. As I read through the notes on books I-V ten years after writing them, without the deceptively connective tissue, the arbitrariness of some of the features of Plato’s model society was clearer, the veneer of deductive logic almost transparent. Rulers must come from the military class? Slaves can’t act in plays? (People have to be slaves?)
The genius of Aristotle, on the other hand, seems to shine through no matter how much I condensed his words. In the Prior Analytics, Plato’s most famous student pretty much invents the formal study of logic and then begins to show how to use it in argument before the assembly. His advice covers a wide range: from analysis of your opponent’s syllogisms to knowledge about the psychologically best time to spring your conclusion on the audience. Plato would have dismissed it all as machination in the cause of power rather than truth, but then that’s why he and Aristotle are arguing in Raphael’s painting.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of my favorite books of philosophy. Just in books VI-X, which I reviewed this month, he covers many vital topics. He shows me why I sometimes do things I don’t want to do. He outlines the three prototypes of Dickens’s villains (a topic I’ll have to devote a whole post to some time!). He describes various kinds of friendship and helps me understand when and how both to forge a relationship and to break one. He explains why marriages fail (and by extension, how to make them last). His explanation of what a happy man gets out of true friends suggests the reason God, who needs nothing, wants happy people. And if, when Aristotle says in book X that happiness is the virtuous act of contemplation, a Christian recognizes the Triune God as the ultimate object of contemplation, Aristotle’s ending simply becomes a theological treatise on the purpose of creation and life. No wonder Dante gives Aristotle the most honored position among pagan philosophers in Limbo.
Now, to prepare to write this post, I went over the notes I just took this year: notes I took after reading the notes I wrote ten years ago. And now you’re reading my notes about my notes about my notes. You’re so far from actual Aristotle, you should stop looking at my blog right now . . . (hmmm, still here, I see) and read the Ethics for yourself. Of course, what you find there will be a translation of what scholars believe were students’ notes of the master’s lectures. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.
Take the Republic, for instance. I had read Plato’s blueprint for utopia twice in my life and had some clearish memories about how the dialog felt, how Plato’s version of Socrates got from point A to point B. Some of that flavor made it to my notes, but for the most part I had just recorded main lines of argument and the points stated. As I read through the notes on books I-V ten years after writing them, without the deceptively connective tissue, the arbitrariness of some of the features of Plato’s model society was clearer, the veneer of deductive logic almost transparent. Rulers must come from the military class? Slaves can’t act in plays? (People have to be slaves?)
The genius of Aristotle, on the other hand, seems to shine through no matter how much I condensed his words. In the Prior Analytics, Plato’s most famous student pretty much invents the formal study of logic and then begins to show how to use it in argument before the assembly. His advice covers a wide range: from analysis of your opponent’s syllogisms to knowledge about the psychologically best time to spring your conclusion on the audience. Plato would have dismissed it all as machination in the cause of power rather than truth, but then that’s why he and Aristotle are arguing in Raphael’s painting.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of my favorite books of philosophy. Just in books VI-X, which I reviewed this month, he covers many vital topics. He shows me why I sometimes do things I don’t want to do. He outlines the three prototypes of Dickens’s villains (a topic I’ll have to devote a whole post to some time!). He describes various kinds of friendship and helps me understand when and how both to forge a relationship and to break one. He explains why marriages fail (and by extension, how to make them last). His explanation of what a happy man gets out of true friends suggests the reason God, who needs nothing, wants happy people. And if, when Aristotle says in book X that happiness is the virtuous act of contemplation, a Christian recognizes the Triune God as the ultimate object of contemplation, Aristotle’s ending simply becomes a theological treatise on the purpose of creation and life. No wonder Dante gives Aristotle the most honored position among pagan philosophers in Limbo.
Now, to prepare to write this post, I went over the notes I just took this year: notes I took after reading the notes I wrote ten years ago. And now you’re reading my notes about my notes about my notes. You’re so far from actual Aristotle, you should stop looking at my blog right now . . . (hmmm, still here, I see) and read the Ethics for yourself. Of course, what you find there will be a translation of what scholars believe were students’ notes of the master’s lectures. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Top Three
I can’t agree with Stranger Things’s Dustin about the Three Musketeers candy bar. “It is Top Three for me,” he says to his buddies on their Halloween quest for free sugar rushes. Dustin loves his nougat. Me? I think a Three Musketeers bar is a Milky Way that forgot its best part.
The Three Musketeers the novel, on the other hand, I love. It has both the nougat of historical fiction and the caramel of broad comedy, and with the deliciously grim brooding of Athos, it becomes not just a Milky Way, but a Milky Way Midnight Dark. Yum!
A big part of my current list is meant to recapture the passionate engagement of my adolescent reading, and rereading Dumas’s rollicking tale of D’Artagnan and his friends certainly fulfilled that mission. Of course, the experience wasn’t the same as it was forty-two years ago: I’m not the same person I was then. I loved it this year just as much as I did then, but now I think I understand much better why it moved my teenage self so deeply.
In 1976, the characters of Athos and D’Artagnan especially revealed to me a whole new depth of life I didn’t know was possible. I saw in these heroes a nobility that had (I know I understood this even then) nothing to do with their wenching and their drunkenness. As immoral as the Musketeers are in many ways, at their best moments they act by internal principles. Athos especially avoids reacting viscerally to almost all present circumstances; he acts according to the inner man, a core somewhat shaped by past circumstance, yes, but internalized nonetheless. D'Artagnan on the other hand responds in the heat of the moment most of the time, but he can always explain his knee-jerk reactions as following lessons his father taught him or obeying the code of bravery.
As an adolescent, I didn't really know any philosophy of life, any ethic. My Christianity consisted of believing the right things about events commemorated by major holidays and generally feeling pretty good about not making graven images, murdering, or committing adultery (pretty easy to avoid for a seventeen-year-old suburban kid). My daily, hourly, minute-by-minute conduct, however, reacted to circumstance based on feelings, and both the feelings and the reactions were almost entirely out of my control. Of course, I could (and often had to) justify my actions by some quick moral reasoning. But that was all after the fact. These two characters showed me, maybe for the first time, that there is such a thing as character, deliberate character, shaped and honed by adherence to principle and followed by determined practice until it becomes second nature.
My favorite scene in the book was and still is the lunch at the bastion at La Rochelle. The four companions, needing to work out some plans where the Cardinal’s men can’t possibly hear them, wager their comrades in the attacking forces that they can eat lunch in a rocky ruin in the middle of the battlefield. Their compatriots see the escapade as a daft bit of derring-do, but the Musketeers go to their noisy repast in full assurance of ultimate success. This is not the confidence of adolescence: the irrational sense I had at the age of my first reading that nothing could kill me (except rejection by a girl). It’s trust in training. It’s mature knowledge of one’s own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses. It’s mastery over fear. This scene has stuck with me and provided a model of courage many times in my life – not all of which, I’m afraid, found me faithfully following the model.
As book lovers know very well, reliving an experience is not always the best way to capture a cherished memory. We reread our favorite books over and over, but that activity can’t rebirth the unique moment of seeing Rivendell or meeting Captain Cuttle for the first time. Books in a series, though, provide the next best thing. Why I didn’t read the sequels to The Three Musketeers when I was seventeen, I can’t tell you. But they’re on my list to read now. We’ll pick this topic up again in 2020, when I’ll read Twenty Years After, and by which time, I hope, we’ll have two more seasons of Stranger Things that I can enjoy for the first time.
The Three Musketeers the novel, on the other hand, I love. It has both the nougat of historical fiction and the caramel of broad comedy, and with the deliciously grim brooding of Athos, it becomes not just a Milky Way, but a Milky Way Midnight Dark. Yum!
A big part of my current list is meant to recapture the passionate engagement of my adolescent reading, and rereading Dumas’s rollicking tale of D’Artagnan and his friends certainly fulfilled that mission. Of course, the experience wasn’t the same as it was forty-two years ago: I’m not the same person I was then. I loved it this year just as much as I did then, but now I think I understand much better why it moved my teenage self so deeply.
In 1976, the characters of Athos and D’Artagnan especially revealed to me a whole new depth of life I didn’t know was possible. I saw in these heroes a nobility that had (I know I understood this even then) nothing to do with their wenching and their drunkenness. As immoral as the Musketeers are in many ways, at their best moments they act by internal principles. Athos especially avoids reacting viscerally to almost all present circumstances; he acts according to the inner man, a core somewhat shaped by past circumstance, yes, but internalized nonetheless. D'Artagnan on the other hand responds in the heat of the moment most of the time, but he can always explain his knee-jerk reactions as following lessons his father taught him or obeying the code of bravery.
As an adolescent, I didn't really know any philosophy of life, any ethic. My Christianity consisted of believing the right things about events commemorated by major holidays and generally feeling pretty good about not making graven images, murdering, or committing adultery (pretty easy to avoid for a seventeen-year-old suburban kid). My daily, hourly, minute-by-minute conduct, however, reacted to circumstance based on feelings, and both the feelings and the reactions were almost entirely out of my control. Of course, I could (and often had to) justify my actions by some quick moral reasoning. But that was all after the fact. These two characters showed me, maybe for the first time, that there is such a thing as character, deliberate character, shaped and honed by adherence to principle and followed by determined practice until it becomes second nature.
My favorite scene in the book was and still is the lunch at the bastion at La Rochelle. The four companions, needing to work out some plans where the Cardinal’s men can’t possibly hear them, wager their comrades in the attacking forces that they can eat lunch in a rocky ruin in the middle of the battlefield. Their compatriots see the escapade as a daft bit of derring-do, but the Musketeers go to their noisy repast in full assurance of ultimate success. This is not the confidence of adolescence: the irrational sense I had at the age of my first reading that nothing could kill me (except rejection by a girl). It’s trust in training. It’s mature knowledge of one’s own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses. It’s mastery over fear. This scene has stuck with me and provided a model of courage many times in my life – not all of which, I’m afraid, found me faithfully following the model.
As book lovers know very well, reliving an experience is not always the best way to capture a cherished memory. We reread our favorite books over and over, but that activity can’t rebirth the unique moment of seeing Rivendell or meeting Captain Cuttle for the first time. Books in a series, though, provide the next best thing. Why I didn’t read the sequels to The Three Musketeers when I was seventeen, I can’t tell you. But they’re on my list to read now. We’ll pick this topic up again in 2020, when I’ll read Twenty Years After, and by which time, I hope, we’ll have two more seasons of Stranger Things that I can enjoy for the first time.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
In Which I Use the Word “Mobius-Strippy”
During my second decade of planned reading (2007-2016), I began every year with Greek drama. To begin this year – year 2 of my third ten-year plan – I stayed on the stage but moved forward 2400 years and read some plays by Tom Stoppard. I had read The Real Inspector Hound and The Invention of Love and seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare in Love and enjoyed every postmodern, mobius-strippy twist of dramatic logic. So wanting to experience more of Tom Stoppard’s special brand of surreality, I decided, in some way that I’ve since forgotten, to explore Arcadia and The Real Thing in the first few days of 2018.
I hate to be curtly dismissive of the work of an award-winning playwright and critical favorite, but compared to the others I had liked so much, these two plays just didn’t work as well in my view, as much as I again appreciated the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. The Real Thing, for instance, primarily seemed to ask, What is the real thing in relationships? But even the character who believes in romance and commitment divorces his wife and leaves his child. (Maybe romance and commitment aren’t entirely compatible principles.) It's a play about deep moral issues with no foundation other than feelings and ill-trained logic to build on. Living in a post-Christian world is tough for the ethicist, but surely we can’t accept the abandonment of children as the Real Thing.
I liked Arcadia much better, partly because its characters seem more genuinely concerned with the questions it asks: does love intrude on Newtonianism, for instance. But the play offers few answers. It struck me in the end as though Stoppard wanted to delve into the old conundrum of free will and determinism and tried to make it sound original simply by replacing “determinism” with a more specific scientific term (i.e “Newtonianism”). But no less august body of scientists than the Royal Institution named it one of the best science-related works ever written, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. In any case, the non-interacting interaction of characters from different times (Click the timey-wimey link and watch that Dr. Who scene again if you’d like; I’ll wait. —Back? Good, I’ll finish my sentence now. —Yes, I thought so, too.) culminating in a scene in which characters move across the stage like the feet in a cosmic waltz makes me want to see the play in the flesh.
It occurs to me that I’ve liked Stoppard most when the object of his characters’ lines are, recursively, characters and dramatic lines, objects that Stoppard knows very well. Who, ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is writing their lives? Are we watching a play, ask the critics of The Real Inspector Hound, or actually in a play? I have more Tom Stoppard planned for year 5 and year 8 (more details on this page), and I’m curious to see if the pattern of my reaction continues. If only I had my Tardis right here, I’d let you know today.
I hate to be curtly dismissive of the work of an award-winning playwright and critical favorite, but compared to the others I had liked so much, these two plays just didn’t work as well in my view, as much as I again appreciated the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. The Real Thing, for instance, primarily seemed to ask, What is the real thing in relationships? But even the character who believes in romance and commitment divorces his wife and leaves his child. (Maybe romance and commitment aren’t entirely compatible principles.) It's a play about deep moral issues with no foundation other than feelings and ill-trained logic to build on. Living in a post-Christian world is tough for the ethicist, but surely we can’t accept the abandonment of children as the Real Thing.
I liked Arcadia much better, partly because its characters seem more genuinely concerned with the questions it asks: does love intrude on Newtonianism, for instance. But the play offers few answers. It struck me in the end as though Stoppard wanted to delve into the old conundrum of free will and determinism and tried to make it sound original simply by replacing “determinism” with a more specific scientific term (i.e “Newtonianism”). But no less august body of scientists than the Royal Institution named it one of the best science-related works ever written, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. In any case, the non-interacting interaction of characters from different times (Click the timey-wimey link and watch that Dr. Who scene again if you’d like; I’ll wait. —Back? Good, I’ll finish my sentence now. —Yes, I thought so, too.) culminating in a scene in which characters move across the stage like the feet in a cosmic waltz makes me want to see the play in the flesh.
It occurs to me that I’ve liked Stoppard most when the object of his characters’ lines are, recursively, characters and dramatic lines, objects that Stoppard knows very well. Who, ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is writing their lives? Are we watching a play, ask the critics of The Real Inspector Hound, or actually in a play? I have more Tom Stoppard planned for year 5 and year 8 (more details on this page), and I’m curious to see if the pattern of my reaction continues. If only I had my Tardis right here, I’d let you know today.
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