It's great! It stinks! A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev

And in 1790, he [Radishchev] wrote, anonymously, one of the immortal works of Russian literature: Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Nationalistic, insightful, mindful of the human condition, and understanding of the forces of human history, Radishchev envisioned a better world: His book was both a document and a pamphlet, the narrative of a simple pilgrim’s fantastic journey and wondrous musings about it. It was also a deeply subtle and learned work, and, at bottom, an ardent tirade against the evils of serfdom and corruption in Russia. It paid homage to religious orthodoxy, yet it assailed the superstitions of the clergy; it professed obedience to the monarchy, yet it justified popular rebellion against rulers who ran roughshod over the law, whether “a tsar, shah, khan, king, bey [or] nabob.” It described the dismemberment of families by conscription, and the abuse of serfs by masters…. He did not advocate revolution, but he asked for a merciful understanding of its advocates. … His language was poetic: “Let yourselves be softened, you hardhearted ones; break the fetters of your brethren, open the dungeons of slavery.”

- From The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788—1800 by Jay Winik, Chapter 8

He [Radishchev] has come to be regarded by the radical intelligentsia as its first spokesman and martyr. The sincerity of his book has been questioned both by his early advocates and by his later detractors. It would seem that he wrote it merely out of literary ambition and that it is no more than a rhetorical exercise on a subject suggested and familiarized by Raynal. However this may be, the book is devoid of literary merit.

- From A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 by D. S. Mirsky, Chapter 3

More coming on this work soon, but I love the comparison of comments. Not that they are mutually exclusive or fully contradict each other, as I'm finding out.

I seem to be suffering from literary ADHD, following leads of interest while postponing what I want to finish. I'll get to things mentioned yet, I promise (to myself), but wanted to post on these comments I found the other day.

The "inevitable" Peloponnesian War

S. N. Jaffe has an article at the War on the Rocks site titled "The Risks and Rewards of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War" that should be helpful to anyone attempting to read or write about the war. Jaffe is the author of Thucydides on the Outbreak of War: Character and Contest, a study of the first book of the History. From the "Description" tab on the book at Oxford University Press:

The cause of great power war is a perennial issue for the student of politics. Some 2,400 years ago, in his monumental History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote that it was the growth of Athenian power and the fear that this power inspired in Sparta which rendered the Peloponnesian War somehow necessary, inevitable, or compulsory.

In this new political psychological study of Thucydides' first book, S.N. Jaffe shows how the History's account of the outbreak of the war ultimately points toward the opposing characters of the Athenian and Spartan regimes, disclosing a Thucydidean preoccupation with the interplay between nature and convention. Jaffe explores how the character of the contest between Athens and Sparta, or how the outbreak of a particular war, can reveal Thucydides' account of the recurring human causes of war and peace. The political thought of Thucydides proves bound up with his distinctive understanding of the interrelationship of particular events and more universal themes.

The article at War on the Rocks provides an overview of the History and provides a nice summary of why it's wrong to accept Thucydides at face value when he states “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm (or fear) which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable … or necessary or compulsory.” The whole article is worth a read and I sincerely hope to read Jaffe's book for more on his interpretation. For now, here's part of the article's summary on that inevitability:

I maintain that Thucydides does not mean inevitability as efficient causation, or in any sense that suggests that the forces involved are fully external to the actors. Instead, I argue that the objective inevitability of a Peloponnesian War is in fact the product the subjective views of the actors themselves, rooted in the deeply opposing characters of Athens and Sparta, or in the ways that the cities differently privilege security, honor, and profit. To abridge a complicated story, what Thucydides means by necessity is perhaps best understood as the imperatives of the national interest, as the actor in question understands those interests, while these interests are themselves conditioned by overarching world views or disparate cultural outlooks.

To draw these threads together, a Peloponnesian war became “necessary” when the actors themselves came to see no alternative to it. This does not mean that they were correct to arrive at that decision, or that there were no alternatives to war. Instead, Thucydides illuminates the interactive chain of events by which the protagonists themselves became locked into path dependencies, firmly convinced of the reasonableness of their actions or policies, which, in fatal combination with one another, led to a mutually destructive war.

As Jaffe points out, there is "vigorous disagreement" on the study of Thucydides...what the author meant and how to apply his lessons. Whether or not you agree with Jaffe's remarks on Thucydides, his framing information should be of use to anyone wanting to read the History.

Upcoming posts / notes

My schedule has been overbooked for some time now, but the last few months I have made it a priority to focus on posting notes on books after I finish certain tasks. Unfortunately, most days I only get some of those tasks done, leaving no time to work on posts. In the next few weeks, though, I would really like to get a few posts out the door on some books I'd really like to share with you. In the (hypothetical) pipeline:

Passage through the Red Sea by Zofia Romanowicz
Originally published in Polish as Przejscie Przez Morze Czerwone
See the post at The Neglected Books Page for more information on this book, which included a review on an out-of-print book that described it as odd, repellent, and powerful. As the NBP editor noted, such descriptions are the call of one neglected book fanatic to another. Yes, I read it. And yes, it is odd. Repellent. And powerful. More on that soon.

The Disinherited by Benito Pérez Galdós
Originally published in Spanish as La desheredada
This is the novel where Galdós hit his stride. Starting with The Disinherited, Galdós published 22 novels in a decade, what are now called the Novelas españolas contemporáneas. It's clear in this book that Galdós was now on a higher plateau in writing, although he still had a little way to go to reach the level of Fortunata and Jacinta. Still, it's a pleasure to find writing of this quality.

The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr by Leanda de Lisle
See the publisher's page for the Author’s Note and the opening of the Preface. From the Author's Note:

This new portrait, informed by previously unseen royal correspondence, depicts a brave and principled king who inspired great loyalty but who was also a man of flesh and blood. Charles the Martyr and Charles the Murderer, lauded by friends and condemned by enemies, is largely forgotten, but in popular memory something just as extreme remains. Charles has been pinned to the pages of history as a failed king, executed at the hands of his own subjects, and now preserved like some exotic but desiccated insect. In may accounts it seems that Charles was doomed to fail almost from birth, his character immutable.

Lastly, a couple of books read last year on the American Revolutionary War. First is a work of fiction: Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts, which looks at the war from the perspective of a Loyalist. The second is Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth by Holger Hoock. Hoock focuses on the violence carried out by both sides so a reader can better understand what really happened during those years.

Andersonville

Last week I decided to take the long way back to Atlanta for my plane ride home. It turned out to be a meditative trip. Driving across the Florida panhandle, from the Alabama border to Tallahassee, allowed me to see some of the devastation from Hurricane Michael, which had hit the area a few weeks earlier. Entire groves of trees broken and twisted off at 15-20 feet above the ground, large signs strewn about like children's toys, hundred-year-old trees uprooted...demolition and spoliation I've seen before thanks to all the hurricanes and tornadoes while I was growing up in the south. Even so, each time is a reminder of the power of nature and a cause for marvel. Combine that with arriving home and having friends dealing with fires in northern and southern California and provides a check on thinking that Nature is always your friend.

The stop I wanted to highlight was my visit at the Andersonville National Historical Sight, near Andersonville, Georgia. Formerly known as Camp Sumter, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War, it operated for just over a year near the end of the war (1864-65). Approximately 45,000 Union soldiers were housed there during that period, with over 13,000 dying. The grounds have been left mostly undeveloped, with several memorials and recreations of one of the gates and corners of the compound, which I found...well, "refreshing" isn't quite the right word. But it did allow you to picture what this area would have looked like just over 150 years ago. National Park Services maps of the camp, cemetery, and surrounding area can be found here. From the park website:

Andersonville National Historic Site began as a stockade built about 18 months before the end of the U.S. Civil War to hold Union Army prisoners captured by Confederate soldiers. Located deep behind Confederate lines, the 26.5-acre Camp Sumter (named for the south Georgia county it occupied) was designed for a maximum of 10,000 prisoners. At its most crowded, it held more than 32,000 men, many of them wounded and starving, in horrific conditions with rampant disease, contaminated water, and only minimal shelter from the blazing sun and the chilling winter rain. In the prison's 14 months of existence, some 45,000 Union prisoners arrived here;of those, 12,920 died and were buried in a cemetery created just outside the prison walls.

In addition to the military prison area and the cemetery is the National Prisoner of War Museum memorial, another extremely moving exhibit. My visit there was too quick to give more than just an impression, but on my cursory walk-through I felt it well done and something necessary about an angle of war too often ignored. I'm sure it's difficult to please everyone with such an all-encompassing museum, but as I said I thought it well done. Hopefully it proves enlightening to those not growing up and hearing often about American POWs on the nightly news.

I wanted to highlight the sight since its location might be just enough out of the way of travelers). It's obviously not an uplifting place to visit, but one I think is important, which is why I'm publishing this post. I didn't take too many pictures, thinking I would rely on pictures posted online, but I didn't find that many I wanted to share. Here's one I took of the Providence Spring memorial, a shelter erected by Union veteran groups to commemorate a spring erupting from the ground, a godsend for parched prisoners. More on the spring and memorial with some additional pictures can be found here.

Right above the spring is a reconstruction of the North Gate (or rather one of the two North Gates), the entrance through which most of the prisoners would have passed through. I chose this picture to highlight the slope down to the creek that flowed through the camp. From the top of the hills on either side of the creek you have an encompassing view of the area.

The waist-high information sign on the right side gives you an idea of the scale of these imposing timbers. In the background to the left is the Ohio monument, one of several in the memorial area to the northwest of the prison site.

I loved the backroads I drove getting to the park and then heading to Atlanta. I know some of that was nostalgia, since I have lived in areas like these throughout the south. The overcast weather seemed to amplify the somberness I felt while there.

There are plenty of histories and webpages on Andersonville that are easily accessible, so I'll only link this one at History.com..

Aes Triplex by Robert Louis Stevenson

The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.

The title, if you're not familiar with it (and I certainly wasn't) is explained in the notes: The title, AEs Triplex, is taken from Horace, aes triplex circa pectus, "breast enclosed by triple brass," "aes" used by Horace as a "symbol of indomitable courage."—Lewis's Latin Dictionary.

After addressing the great divide and separation death causes and how reverential we talk about it, Stevenson looks at how little we allow it to influence our "conduct under healthy circumstances." He mentions South American citizens living on the side of volcanos ("fiery mountains") who act as if they are "delving gardens in the greenest corner of England," not impressed by the "mortal conditions" where they live. And then as he thinks about it, Stevenson claims this example "forms only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind" if we consider the many possibilities of wholesale catastrophes that could happen.

As Stevenson contemplates how old people act (for the most part), he uses a beauty and ruthlessness in his imagery, in passages such as

For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived someone else; and when a draught might puff them out like a fluttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaclava[6] was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.

and

Death may be knocking at the door, like the Commander's statue; we have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every hour, someone is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies. For us also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.

and

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Stevenson looks at some examples that literature uses to try and explain the human condition after he declares, "We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others; and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the Word life." Stevenson mocks philosophers if the best definition they can come up with is John Stuart Mill's "Permanent Possibility of Sensation." After all the word tricks that people play, "[O]ne fact remains true throughout—that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living." OK, that seems like he's using a little word trick himself, but he uses that distinction to come to his point about the necessity of courage (back to the aes triplex). With courage, we can do more than just stay alive, but truly live:

To be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

Just because we know we're mortal doesn't mean we should abandon intelligence, though. "As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world."

Last month I decided to read some of Robert Louis Stevenson's essays (available at Project Gutenberg), skipping around to different ones depending on how much time I had to read that day. Little did I know that a couple of days after reading "Aes Triplex" my mother would pass away. She was 97 years old and lived a full life. Her health had been in serious decline the past year, so while it wasn't unexpected, her passing still fit many of the descriptions of Stevenson's opening paragraph. I can attest that she lived fully with a triple brass shield of courage.

Despite my liberal use of quotes from the essay, there is much more in this short piece. Do make the time (in the "hot-fit of life") to have a look at the essay. And if you like what you read, be sure to check out the others. There's a lot of enjoyable writing in these pieces.

One Man Romeo and Juliet by Shelby Bond

We had a busy weekend, but the highlight for me was seeing "One Man Romeo and Juliet" by Shelby Bond. He has performed it at many spots around the world, and hopefully you'll get a chance to see it live. There is a lot of audience participation, and despite the title the kids had a chance to play parts in it, too. Bond is nonstop and changes roles in the blink of an eye. Judging by the line after the show to meet (and tip) him, I wasn't the only one that enjoyed it. Here's a trailer for the show and some links to more of his work. I'm looking forward to seeing the show he does at the Dickens Fair later this year. Enjoy!

Links:
Shelby's home page, with links to other characters/projects

His YouTube videos

At the risk of excessive exultation

The other major find yesterday was a "new" used copy of La Regenta, retiring the pictured copy being held together by rubber bands. While I have many fond memories of piecing together the old copy (literally) while reading it, I'm hoping this one survives re-readings. Which I hope to do soon. First, though, I'll need to finish and post on Galdos' La desheredada / The Disinherited, a pivotal book in an impressive career.

Do you keep track of your books?

Yesterday I was in a used bookstore and they had several Library of America books in good shape, ranging from $8 to $12. I wanted to pick up several of them, but a few of the books were by authors that had multiple volumes in the series. A couple of them I knew I didn't have, but a couple of books I wasn't sure if I had them or not (due to forgetfulness and a family member "borrowing" and not returning one). I was wishing I had a list or database of some sort to check against, so I was wondering if anyone kept track of their books for just such a situation. It seems like overkill, but I'm not always going to be able to text my boys to send me pictures of the bookcase so I could see if I already had a certain book.

I thought I wouldn't need such a list for too many books or series, but after buying a used history book to replace one I thought I had culled (and had not), I'm wondering if I need to include more in such a database/list. So do any of you keep such a list for your books? And if so, how do you do it?

Thanks! Oh, by the way, here's the first picture my son sent me to make sure he had the right bookcase. I'll need to take better pictures of the bookcases on our landing and post them after I rearrange them to fit the latest acquisitions. They came about totally by accident, but I dearly love them.

Spirituality

There's no way to summarize California in just one picture, but this one covers a few aspects.

This picture was taken a couple of hours before sunset on August 5th at Manresa State Beach, a few miles south of Santa Cruz. There's a church holding baptisms in the ocean while surfers are enjoying waist-chest high sets and I just had to try to capture it. There would be many more surfers joining soon after the organized religious rituals were finished.

Choose your madness: King Lear or King Lear. Or King Lear.

Later this month (at least in some locations) you can choose the form of madness you wish to see:

• On Thursday, September 27, 2018 in select theaters is King Lear with Ian McKellen. The blurb at National Theatre Live:

  Broadcast live from London’s West End, see Ian McKellen’s ‘extraordinarily moving portrayal’ (Independent) of King Lear in cinemas.
  
  Chichester Festival Theatre’s production received five-star reviews for its sell-out run, and transfers to the West End for a limited season. Jonathan Munby directs this contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s tender, violent, moving and shocking play.

  Click on the above link or the one for Fathom Events to find a venue screening it on the 27th. It will be interesting to compare McKellen's performance now versus that of a decade ago with Trevor Nunn as director (which, coincidentally, is currently airing for free on Amazon Prime).


• Available on September 28th to Amazon Prime viewers is King Lear with Anthony Hopkins in the title role and directed by Richard Eyre. There's nothing beyond a description of the play on Amazon's site about the film, but plenty to find online from people that have already watched it. For the cast, see imdb.com.
  
  It's raining Lear.

On Shout! Factory TV: The Best of Fridays (TV series)

We've had Shout! Factory TV as a mainstay on our TV for a while but a current listing almost escaped my notice, so I wanted to pass it on to anyone else interested. Currently there are a few episodes from the Fridays TV series from their first season on ABC in 1980. I completely missed the entire series when it aired and had completely forgotten about it, so it was nice to see it available. I probably would have loved the skits at the time. Now...ummmm.

The main attractions for me were the musical acts. As you can see from the Musical Guests section on the show's Wikipedia page, there was a great range of acts performing over their three-season run. In the first season (spring and summer 1980), there was a nice mix of what would have been called pop, rock, punk, and new wave at the time. The two available at Shout that I really enjoyed are listed below. I've marked the approximate times in case you want to focus on just the musical performances.

Season 1, Episode 3: The Clash
Only a few months after the release of London Calling, The Clash performed four songs from that album on the show.
(~18 minutes) "London Calling," "Train in Vain"
(~34 minutes) "The Guns of Brixton," "Clampdown"

Season 1, Episode 10: Graham Parker and the Rumour
A couple of songs from The Up Escalator played to a welcoming crowd.
(~24 minutes) "Stupefaction"
(~32 minutes) "Empty Lives"


And for no other reason than to clear some space on my phone, here's a picture of Graham Parker and Brinsley Schwarz, taken almost exactly three years ago on their U.S. tour. Explore and enjoy!

1979 NY Times article on Anthony Hopkins

In looking up something this morning I ran across the September 9, 1979 New York Times article Anthony Hopkins: ‘Acting Is Like Being in a Public Confessional’, which had been behind a paywall when I was watching and researching the actor starring in Jean-Paul Sartre's play Kean. I had posted a 'bleg' for a copy of Hopkins performance, which I still have yet to see, but if you're interested in the actor or the role I recommend checking out the article while it's available.

I'll include two quotes from the article below. First:

‘It's a comic way of making a living, saying lines, but I can express something through acting. I can express myself through parts. I'm not good at expressing myself otherwise.’ Mr. Hopkins prepared for “Kean”—a demanding role of long, impassioned speeches, mercurial changes of mood, drawing‐room repartee—as he always does, by learning his lines, “Laurence Olivier has said, ‘Learn as much as you can, then throw the text away,’ ” Mr. Hopkins said. “And it was something Noel Coward used to require. I like to learn lines. I feel secure. I learn the whole part parrot fashion, by rote even for television and movies where the filming, of course, is done in segments.

Second:

Mr. Hopkins also read a couple of biographies of Edmund Kean and discovered that Sartre's play, a slapstick farce delightfully out of keeping with the playwright's more serious image, really has little to do with fact. For. instance, In the Sartre play, Kean and the Prince of Wales are rivals for the affections of an ambassador's wife.

“Kean did not have a friendship with Wales,” said Mr. Hopkins. “And Kean had only one known affair. He was not really a womanizer. He was obsessed with acting and drinking. He wanted to be a buffoon and was uncomfortable being a celebrity. Kean was used as a prototype by Sartre: the actor trapped by the illusion of the parts he plays. The actor has to be careful not to cross the line between reality and illusion, or he will go mad.”

Does Mr. Hopkins identify with Kean? “I'm a perfectionist. I think it's a vice. I'm very demanding. Kean was also like that. I'm terribly insecure as an actor. It's fear. I've tried to modify it, but I get very wrapped up in work and then lash out because of fear. I don't trust people to do their jobs.

“When Kean did his first performance in London,” he continued, “it was after he had struggled for years in the provinces, as I did. He was offered Shylock. He waded in with an interpretation no one had ever seen. But the audiences loved what he did. He was a very modern actor, with a great eye for detail. But he was very exasperating for the people around him. He wanted to rehearse all the time, like Olivier.”

It's a lengthy article with more information on Hopkins and some of his roles.


My previous posts on Kean can be found here.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018
Edited by Laura Furman (Anchor)

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. (from the publisher's page, which also has the book's Introduction, providing synopses for the twenty stories)

I'm not a big reader of short stories, not going out of my way to read many of them. I had heard some buzz about "The Tomb of Wrestling" by Jo Ann Beard, so I checked this book out of the library to read it for myself. I'm glad I did. I may not have loved it as much as some commenters, but it's far and away the strongest story of the ones I've read in this collection so far. It begins, “She struck her attacker in the head with a shovel, a small one that she normally kept in the trunk of her car for moving things off the highway.” The reader finds out there is so much packed into that swing, allowing us to see the lives of Joan and her attacker as they meet in a tense and violent encounter.

I've jumped around to different stories and have enjoyed most of them. Two others I liked, "Stop 'n' Go" by Michael Parker and "How We Eat" by Mark Jude Poirier, are available at the LitHub link below. The latter story takes a strong will in order to handle this dysfunctional family. Also in the book are the jurors' top choices and why they loved them, as well as brief notes from the authors about their stories. Definitely worth checking out. And makes me realize I probably need to visit some of the previous years' collections.

Links
Literary Hub has the list of stories and links to four of them

René Magritte's 1960 painting "The Tomb of the Wrestlers" and a little history behind the inspiration/challenge behind it.

A gift and an old friend

I was happy to get the perfect birthday gift this year—Vladislav Vančura's The End of the Old Times (Konec starých časů). I have been looking for a copy to call my own since I read the book about 4½ years ago. My comments on the book are here. It's a wonderful novel, enjoyable at both a superficial level and also as commentary on pretentious and pretending aristocracy. It has been on my wish list for five years, so I'm extremely grateful to finely get a copy.

The friend is the 1990 Baumard Quarts de Chaume, the last of a case I bought almost 20 years ago. Although it shows further aging potential, it's an old friend I want to enjoy this year. So I'm enjoying a Czech with something from the Loire...consistency has never been a strong point for me. I hope everyone's weekend will be as enjoyable as mine!

The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill

The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill
Alfred A. Knopf, 2017
Hardcover, 352 pages

The city had a rich, complex life long before you ever came along and started having your own personal little responses to it, Griffin. It’s bigger than you. … The lives lived by generations of New Yorkers in and around a historic building give it all kinds of layers of collective meaning—a patina of memory and grime and experience, really—that you can see, and even feel, if you open yourself to it. (30)

I read this book last year when it was released and intended to post a note on it. Better late than never, I guess. This book got some fanfare in major media when released, but I didn't see much from book bloggers about it. While it may be a little uneven, the parts I enjoyed have stuck with me and I thought worth passing on.

Set in mid-1970's crumbling New York City, the book centers on thirteen-year old Griffin Watts attempting to deal with his fractured family. Caught between warring parents just divorced, Griffin tries to simultaneously hold the family together while protecting his mom from a possibly abusive dad. Part of Griffin's plan is to understand his dad better, especially since he doesn't know exactly what it is he does for a living. Griffin's dad, though, gets easily exasperated by his son, especially when Griffin doesn't share his fixation on the beauty and meaning of architecture to the same extent.

“I don’t know how this happened to you,” he said. “But you, son, are going to learn to look up. You are not going to be another one of those blinkered goddamn New Yorkers who walk around town staring at their shoes, or worse, have their eyes so fixed on whatever goal they’re hurrying toward that they never see the city around them. You are not going to join that complacent army of blind men who went and let a civic cathedral like Penn Station get smashed to pieces right under our noses.” (31)

Unfortunately for Mr. Watts (Griffin's dad), there are plenty of that "complacent army" passively allowing the city to be overhauled. Watts' front as an antiques dealer hides an illicit business of scavenging sculptures and fixtures (including gargoyles) from buildings marked for remodeling or destruction. Watts' architectural education of Griffin starts innocently enough, cleaning molding and helping out around the office, but soon Griffin is assisting in the theft of sculptures off buildings all around the city, risking life and limb in some unconventional bonding moments. His dad's outlook toward learning about buildings and details doesn't initially seem that far out of the mainstream:

“People who study academic lingo learn facts about ornament, but the only way you can really come to know the ornament is by feeling its contours for yourself.” He fixed me with those green eyes of his. “If you do that, Griffin, the whole city will open up to you. You’ll find that you’re suddenly seeing ornamental sculpture, really wonderful stuff you never noticed before, on buildings all over town. You’ll learn to look up.” (47)

It's that outlook that leads to my favorite concept Watts tries to impart: the connection across time that buildings can provide. Or as Watts beautifully puts it,

“The bridge of time is very poignant,” he told me. “I think about the immigrant carvers who came over here and did this work on people’s homes—itinerant nobodies, many of them, with no stable homes of their own—and I meet them across time.” (92)

Griffin realizes that his dad's concerns are really a mania...an obsession that soon has Griffin imperiling his life to help his dad. One of Watts' assistants perceptively describes to Griffin what this fixation has done to his dad: “It [collecting] starts out as love. But it becomes something much more grasping and corrosive.”

At the center of most of the book is New York City and the 1970s. The city, caught between bankruptcy and renovation at this time, comes alive not just in Griffin's eyes but for the reader, too. Headlines of the day set the mood that seems reflected in many of the characters, and a lingering mystery—who stole an entire building from the Landmarks Preservation Commission—is given a possible solution.

While the relationship between Griffin and his dad takes center stage, the other people in his life provide important roles beyond just comic relief. His artist mom takes in boarders like some people take in stray animals. His sister seems distracted and Griffin assumes the worst when he tries to solve the mystery of her secret life. Griffin's friends and social life leave a lot to be desired, but then that seems to be the rule for most adolescents. As I mentioned earlier, the book can be uneven at times, and something is lost when the story leaves the city. Even so, I enjoyed it, both for the entertaining look back as well as for the message of possible connections across time.

Links:
John Freeman Gill's website, with more links to the book and additional works

The Prologue to the book: "Ghosts of New York"

An interview with Gill at the Los Angeles Review of Books

An interview at Business Insider; also an excerpt

The author talks about some of the processes of discovery in writing the book

Immortality by Andrei Platonov

Illustration by Ragni Svensson
From Platonov's Chevengur: The Ambivalent Space by Natalia Poltavtseva

The May 2018 edition of e-flux contains the Andrei Platonov story "Immortality," translated by Lisa Hayden and Robert Chandler. It is a fairly simple but moving story of the railway station chief Emmanuil Semyonovich Levin tirelessly working to keep trains running on schedule. In addition to the difficulty of his work, he has to manage incompetent and belligerent employees. He has a dedicated household worker, but her skills are limited. Levin sacrifices time with his family, sleep, and food in order to make sure things run as scheduled. While Levin could be held up as a Soviet hero, his co-workers are far from ideal. There's plenty of humor in Levin trying to help these workers in their personal lives so they will work better on the job, but I got the feeling Platonov was winking at the reader and saying there would always be excuses for them not to improve. Amid the humor, though, lies a feeling of pathos for Levin and other like him who are giving everything for the state.

A lonely man, Levin rarely saw in person those faraway people for whom he worked. “That’s what my daughter will be like soon,” Levin decided for himself. “She’ll be even better, happier … But the station chiefs won’t be like me. They’ll sleep at night and go away on vacation, and they’ll live in a family, with a wife, among their own dear children.”

Also in the same edition is the article "Articulations of (Socialist) Realism: Lukács, Platonov, Shklovsky" by Robert Bird that provides background information on the story and looks at how Platonov fit into historical socialist literature of the time. "Immortality" was one of two stories Platonov was commissioned to write in 1935 for a project titled “People of the Railway Empire” despite running afoul of Stalin several times. Regarding the realism of "Immortality," Platonov had said, “In this story there are no facts that fail to correspond to reality at least in a small degree, and there are no facts copying reality." Bird looks at how that fits in with realism as Georg Lukács and others understood it, and how they thought realism should "be retooled for the aims of socialism."

I missed the publication of this story in e-Flux, so many thanks to Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven for her post that brought it to my attention.

Additional links:
Robert Chandler on Andrey Platonovich Platonov at Asymptote Journal

One of Platonov's most characteristic images, always connected in one way or another to the theme of revolution and utopia, is that of the train or locomotive. In 1922, in a letter to his wife, Platonov described an experience from the time of the Civil War: 'Even though I had not yet completed technical school, I was hurriedly put on a locomotive to help the driver. The remark about the revolution being the locomotive of history was transformed inside me into a feeling that was strange and good: remembering this sentence, I worked very diligently on the locomotive . . . ' The sentence the young Platonov remembers is from Karl Marx: 'Revolutions are the locomotives of history.' By 1927, however, Platonov had grown disenchanted—a disenchantment symbolized in Chevengur by the catastrophic collision between two trains that takes up most of the chapter published in this issue of Asymptote.

I've already linked the article "Platonov's Chevengur: The Ambivalent Space" by Natalia Poltavtseva, but wanted to highlight it again since it is helpful in understanding Platonov and his writing

Trains play important roles in Platonov's writing. My post on the train wreck in Chevengur.

Being There by Jerzy Kosinski

Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: 1970

A few months ago I watched one of my favorite movies, Being There (1979), and realized I had never read Kosinski's novel on which he based his screenplay. If you're unfamiliar with the storyline, Chance is a simple-minded man living at the townhouse of a wealthy, old businessman. Chance's mother used to work for the old man, and when she died he was allowed to live in the house and tend the garden. When his benefactor dies, Chance is not mentioned in the old man's will, nor is there a record of him anywhere. Turned out from the house, he wanders the streets and is hit by a car belonging to business tycoon Ben Rand. In order to avoid legal unpleasantries, Chance is taken to Ben's house. Ben and his wife, Elizabeth Eve (EE) find Chance refreshing and let him stay in their house. In addition to his businesses, Ben is a powerful political player and friends with the U.S. president. Chance meets the president and during a discussion on the economy his talk of tending a garden is misinterpreted as a parable on how the president should handle things. The president mentions the "wisdom" of Chance during a speech and the gardener is propelled into the political and social spotlight. Chance's simple utterances are treated as deep thoughts and shrewd advice, and after Ben's death, key political leaders look at drafting Chance for the next presidential election.

Chance's mindset comes from his two loves, television and gardening, although there can be significant differences between the two beyond the obvious:

The set created its own light, its own color, its own time. It did not follow the law of gravity that forever bent all plants downward. Everything on TV was tangled and mixed and yet smoothed out: night and day, bit and small, tough and brittle, soft and rough, hot and cold, far and near. In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man.

By changing the channel he could change himself. He could go through phases, as garden plants went through phases, but he could change as rapidly as he wished by twisting the dial backward and forward. In some cases he could spread out into the screen without stopping, just as on TV people spread out into the screen. By turning the dial, Chance could bring others inside his eyelids. Thus he came to believe that it was he, Chance, and no one else, who made himself be. (5-6, 1970 hardcover edition)

The book conveys an additional depth to Chance that the movie can't show, allowing the reader to see a certain amount of reasoning when he mimics behavior he has seen on television.

Mr. Franklin shuffled the papers on the desk and drew out a page filled with fine print. “It’s a simple formality,” he said, handing the paper to Chance. “Would you be kind enough to read it now and—if you agree to it—to sign it where indicated?”

Chance picked up the paper. He held it in both hands and stared at it. He tried to calculate the time needed to read a page. On TV the time it took people to read legal papers varied. Chance knew that he should not reveal that he could not read or write. On TV programs people who did not know how to read or write were often mocked and ridiculed. He assumed a look of concentration, wrinkling his brow, scowling, now holding his chin between the thumb and forefinger of his hand. “I can’t sign it,” he said returning the sheet to the lawyer. “I just can’t.”

“I see,” Mr. Franklin said. “You mean therefore that you refuse to withdraw your claim?”

“I can’t sign it, that’s all,” said Chance. (23-4)

The book allows additional insights into the workings of Chance's mind, helping explain some of his behavior. For example, it's noted that people talked to Chance he would repeat parts of their own sentences, a practice he had seen on TV. Of course people thought this meant he was listening intently, understanding what they were saying even though he usually didn't. Still, this would draw people closer to him, help them feel relaxed and confide more to him. A good example of this is when he was at a party talking with Skrapinov, the Soviet ambassador to the UN.

Skrapinov suddenly bent toward him. “Tell me, Mr. Gardiner, do you by any chance like Krylov’s fables? I ask this because you have that certain Krylovian touch.”

Chance looked around and saw that he and Skrapinov were being filmed by cameramen. “Krylovian touch? Do I really?” he asked and smiled.

“I knew it, I knew it!” Skrapinov almost shouted. “So you know Krylov!” The Ambassador paused and then spoke rapidly in another language. The words sounded soft, and the Ambassador’s features took on the look of an animal. Chance, who had never been addressed in a foreign language, raised his eyebrows and then laughed. The Ambassador looked astonished. “So…so! I was correct, wasn’t I? You do know your Krylov in Russian, don’t you? Mr. Gardiner, I must confess that I suspected as much all along. I know an educated man when I meet one.” Chance was about to deny it when it when the Ambassador winked. “I appreciate your discretion, my friend.”

I love that touch since Being There is itself a fable, where people hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe. Most of the interactions between people turn out to be superficial...they might just as well be watching television instead of having a real person in front of them. The two sex scenes complement this message, where partners are present but unnecessary for masturbatory pleasure.

Chance succeeds just by "being there," a blank screen for others to project their self-absorption. As a critique of our culture, it works well. There are biblical allusions (Chance forced out of the garden, a potential mate named Eve), but there doesn't seem to be a payoff to this set-up. As minor notes, there are times the book feels slight while other parts feel repetitious. Even so, I enjoyed the book quite a bit I'm glad I decided to read it.

It's difficult to write about the book without mentioning the charges against Kosinski for plagiarizing Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz's 1932 novel Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy (Nikodem Dyzma's Career). I can't speak to this directly since I don't believe there is an English translation of the novel. Given the plot in the above link, there are some strong similarities but also some important differences. I have seen the 2002 movie Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy (with English subtitles), but it has quite a few differences from the novel's plot listed above, too, so I don't feel comfortable using the movie as a basis of comparison. One important point about Nikos (Nikosia) in this film adaptation is that he isn't simple-minded (sorry if that isn't politically correct) like Chance. It struck me that Nikos was a common man with an average intelligence, able to rise to a level of importance inconsistent with what we'd expect, although he does seem to be a quick study. Again, I'm not sure how reliable the movie is to the Polish novel but wanted to note it. And I would definitely buy a copy if someone decided to publish an English translation. (Subtlety has never been a strong point for me.)

To Know a Fly by Vincent G. Dethier

To Know a Fly by Vincent G. Dethier
Foreword by N. Tinbergen
Illustrated by Bill Clark and Vincent Dethier
Oakland, California: Holden-Day, Inc., 1962

Although small children have taboos against stepping on ants because such actions are said to bring on rain, there has never seemed to be a taboo against pulling off the legs or wings of flies. Most children eventually outgrow this behavior. Those who do not either come to a bad end or become biologists. (2)

In the forward, N. Tinbergen looks at the distance that had grown between scientists and the public (keep in mind this is in 1962) because the knowledge had become incredibly detailed and technology techniques so specialized. Tinbergen notes that outstanding researcher Vincent Dethier's gift of clear communication helps bridge that gap, especially in works like To Know a Fly, and I have to agree. This book is a delight to read, a time-capsule look into a branch of scientific study and scientific life as it stood over 50 years ago.

Vincent Dethier was a scientist in several fields over his career, but it was his work in entomology that he is best known for. His writings went beyond academic papers and industry-related books, including works on natural history for the general reader as well as humor and children's books. To Know a Fly could be described as a combination of those last three categories, with Dethier detailing some of the work he does as a researcher. He lays out the concerns, discoveries, experiments, and observations in his work with flies, engaging the reader all through the different areas in a lively, anecdotal manner.

Some of the areas he features highlight the ingenuity in developing experiments, coming up with ways to measure the behavior of flies, especially in regard to their senses and feeding habits. As Dethier puts it, "An experiment is a scientist's way of asking nature a question." The most obvious problem when it comes to flies is the subjects' size. The resourceful and innovative ways Dethier and his lab partners develop experiments, despite that issue, portrays the scientific method in action. This is conveyed in a humorous, droll manner, and also demonstrating his claim that properly conducting an experiment can be "an adventure, and expedition, a conquest."

The book can be read and understood from ages 10 and up, although adults would probably appreciate it the most. More than just a cultural artifact from over fifty years ago, Dethier succeeds in bridging the "gap" between scientists and nonscientists to make some of the scientist's work understood and appreciated. As he mentions in the closing, something as insignificant as a fly plays a role in our universe. Demonstrating the work done to unravel the mysteries of a fly, Dethier helps the reader appreciate both nature and those working to understand it.

The instrument of a scientist's destiny may be many things from the ultimate space of the farthest reaches of the universe to the ultimate particles of matter, and all things in between, not excepting man himself. It is of this the scientist partakes. A fly is just as much in the scheme of things as man. No less a person than St. Augustine remarked in the Fourth Century: "For it is inquired, what causes those members so diminutive to grow, what leads so minute a body here and there according to its natural appetite, what moves its feet in numerical order when it is running, what regulates and gives vibrations to its wings when flying? This thing whatever it is in so small a creature towers up so predominantly to one well considering, that it excels any lightning flashing upon the eyes." To know the fly is to share a bit in the sublimity of Knowledge. That is the challenge and the joy of science. (118-9)

Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn Tempest

Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn Tempest
Yale University Press, 2017

To a considerable extent this book will examine how Brutus' life has been recorded and transmitted from antiquity to today: a central contention is that, to appreciate Brutus the man, we must really probe the sources we use, to understand who is speaking and shy. From there, my aim is to make a significant contribution to the way we think about Brutus' life, as well as the conclusions we reach about how he conducted his political career. ... [T]his book will take an integrated approach to the topic, combining biographical exploration with historiographical and literary analyses. In so doing, it will offer a sense of who Brutus was and why he acted in the way he did, while simultaneously digging far deeper into the presentation of Brutus in the ancient evidence than has hitherto been attempted. As far as possible, then, it places his decisions and actions back into their real time, and it always prioritises an evaluation of the contemporary over later evidence for studying them. Wherever the evidence allows, Brutus is made to speak, argue and justify himself in his own words. Even when we do find ourselves having to rely on the works of later historians, I shall try to take us back to an understanding of them from the point of view of Brutus and his peers.
(Preface, page xi)

In a year where I've read a lot of impressive and enjoyable nonfiction books, Tempest's Brutus: The Noble Conspirator may be my favorite to date and gets my highest recommendation.

Brutus has been a controversial figure through the ages, including during his own lifetime. Some of the earliest references to Brutus treated him with respect. While the works covering Brutus of Titus Livius, Gaius Asinius Pollio, or Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus have not survived, mentions of their passages referring to him reveal that often the conspirators against Julius Caesar were regarded in a positive light. While Plutarch’s biography of Brutus paints a glowing picture, we have to keep in mind the author’s concern, which was drawing moralistic lessons in the comparisons of key historical figures. Plutarch’s pairing of Brutus with Dion, who overthrew the tyrant Dionysus II of Syracus in the 4th century BC, highlights the author’s praise for men who put Platonic ideals into action. Criticisms of Brutus and the conspirators appear early, too, with charges of parricide and banditry common in addition to that of tyrannicide. The letters between Cicero and Brutus and other letters of Cicero that speak of Brutus help provide a portrait of the conspirator, but these also have to be weighed against the concerns and agendas behind the correspondence. Tempest’s approach presents many points of view regarding Brutus in order to let the reader arrive at their own evaluation of the man. As Tempest puts it, “As we go in search of Brutus, this book will take an approach that combines history and historiography, in order to examine what we can learn not just about his life, but about how that life has been recorded and transmitted from antiquity to the present day.” (11)

An issue that is obvious but not always stated is that insight into Brutus' private life before the assassination of Caesar is clouded at best. Works he wrote before the Ides of March 44 B.C., such as On Duties, On Virtue, and On Endurance, now exist only in fragments. On his life after the assassination there is a considerable amount of surviving material but, as mentioned earlier, the views are slanted depending on the author's viewpoint. The sources also muddle actions and dates. What is clear, though, is Julius Caesar's assassination vaulted Brutus from a historical figure into the realms of mythology.

Tempest develops a theme from the sources that Brutus was intent on shaping how he was viewed, from early on in life up to his death. He stressed his family lineage, with ancestors on both his mother's and father's sides deposing or killing kings and tyrants. Although little is known of Brutus' early life, Tempest sets the scene for what a son of nobility would have experienced in Rome, Athens, and Rhodes during his studies and development. She also examines likely influences that would have shaped his thinking during these years. While privileged, Brutus faced challenges from this father's early death and the political climate (such as Sulla's changes in the laws, and Pompey's and Caesar's domination in politics). Since the book is geared for a general readership, Tempest's look at the late Roman republic is a helpful summary, especially when examining the tumultuous 50s (B.C., that is).

During the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Brutus chose to support Pompey despite Caesar's overtures. After Pompey's loss at Phrasalus (August 48 B.C.), Brutus turns to Caesar and is accepted into his camp, although it's not always clear where Brutus was at various times. Tempest notes, "Brutus' whole career displays a remarkable knack for political side-switching," (66), but it's difficult to fully know how much was opportunism and how much was due to his personal philosophy.

My favorite section of the book is when Tempest turns to Brutus' "philosophical leanings to understand more about his ethics and motives leading up to the assassination" (13). (For more on this topic, also see the article by David Sedley mentioned in the links below.) It must have been quite a struggle in his mind to join (and help lead?) the assassination plot. He was dependent on Caesar for his office, but if he had sworn an oath to and was assisting a tyrant, what were his options to escape such a dilemma? And how much pressure did he put on himself in having emphasized his family's history of insuring Rome's freedom? As stressed here and elsewhere (especially Ronald Syme's book The Roman Revolution), judging Brutus' actions because the assassination led to the final dissolution of the Republic is to judge from the results. The years before and after the assassination show Brutus as having singled himself out as a man with an upright code of conduct and virtue. It's difficult to determine how much his philosophical basis was behind his impetus for participation in the assassination plot, but it did make such involvement consistent with his declarations. There are additional considerations to take into account, such as Brutus' thwarted political ambitions because of Caesar's control on the city's machinery. As Tempest puts this point, "In short, if we want to understand what united the men who conspired to kill Caesar, we need to consider the one thing they all shared in common: political ambition, the desire to accrue dignitas and win glory—both in their lifetimes and beyond."

In conflating their concern about Caesar becoming a tyrant with that of tyranny as criticized by the Greeks the conspirators seemed to severely misread what the populace wanted. They simply wanted the return to the rule of law they had enjoyed beforehand, not the murder of Caesar, which is why there doesn't appear to have been popular support for the assassination. Include the mayhem after Caesar's funeral into the mix and much of the populace may have wished the assassination never happened.

Since there are a great number of extant letters of Cicero, Tempest concentrates on what is in those letters as well as what is between the lines in order to understand how the assassination was received by Brutus’ contemporaries. The conspirators seem not to have thought too far ahead about what would happen after the assassination. Within a month of Caesar’s death, most, if not all, of the assassins had left Rome. By failing to seize the initiative immediately after the assassination, they were at the mercy of what followed from the backers of Caesar. “[O]pinions in how Caesar’s rule was to be remembered represented a new battlefield," (128) and the political and military jockeying had just begun. Routine events and annual spectacles became ways to influence public opinion, and with Antony in Rome he had advantages over the conspirators. Even with a lot of friction between them, Antony and Octavian were able to make a public display of unity which would work against the conspirators.

The conspirators (or liberators, as they billed themselves) and their supporters began to disagree on how best to handle the aftermath of the assassination. Misidentifying the problems they needed to address didn't help.

Yet, here and elsewhere, Cicero has underestimated the extent of the problem; as had Brutus, Cassius, Decimus and the rest of the Liberators. For, as we have seen repeatedly ..., Caesar was more than a man and, dominant though he was, there were far more players batting on his side than we sometimes remember, all with far too many vested interests. In other words, his celebrity, popularity with the veterans and plebs, and the movement Caesar spurred in Roman political life were far greater than the force of the assassins’ daggers. As the disagreements between Cicero and Atticus reveal, from the differing perspectives of two friends and contemporaries, each with his own view of Brutus, there is no simple answer to the question of why the conspiracy failed. Fear, anger, jealousy and pride have all played their part in this narrative, as indeed they did for a large part of republican history. But one thing appears certain: the real enemy was not Caesar, but Caesarism—and that was proving far more difficult to stamp out. (141)

The conspirators mostly separated in order to follow their own agendas although Cassius and Brutus, despite having sizable differences before and after the assassination, continued to work together. They headed to the eastern Mediterranean in order to gather support, funds, and troops. Brutus was able to masterfully take control of rich eastern provinces. What he did once he had that control, though, stained his reputation. His brutal rule called into question his stated defense of the republic. The mass suicide at Xanthus (in Lycia) as a result of his command reflected badly on him, although part of the event may have been driven by Roman rule in general. Cassius' actions were aggressive and cruel, too, which made it easy for opponents to conflate the actions of these two conspirators. Later, the results of the battles at Phillipi were mixed, but they led to the deaths of Cassius and Brutus. The battle for the shaping of public opinion on Brutus, though, didn't stop with his death.

[T]he wrangle over Brutus’ reputation generated competing sides to the man, as his friends and enemies alike tried to shape the memory he was to leave behind; already at his death, different ‘endings’ were being written for Brutus’ life. But these competing narratives in the historical material are a blessing rather than a curse. The legend of Brutus, the complexities of his character, and the questions that surround his legacy are all significantly enriched when we trace them back to the beginning, ... to the life of Brutus and how he was received by his contemporaries. (210)

As Tempest points out, a study of these contemporaries leads to a wide variety of responses, making definitive statements about him difficult beyond noting there were many sides to Brutus. Far from feeling disappointed in the recognition that Brutus was an enigma, Tempest makes the study and analysis of these many sides enjoyable.

In addition to the clear and detailed text, the book has everything I want in such a book (even if I didn't know I did). The maps are relevant and helpful. One appendix lays out the chronology after Caesar's assassination, laying ancient sources side by side so the reader can see where they coincide and when they differ. The endnotes fill in more information and point out alternative opinions, while the bibliography provides a great list of sources to explore. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope it gets the wide readership it deserves.


Links:
An article on the book at the Yale Books Blog

In Chapter 4 (Thinking about Tyrannicide), Tempest looks at the motives, personal and political, that would have spurred Brutus on toward the assassination of Julius Caesar, including his study of philosophy. One article she uses as the basis for part of the chapter is "The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius" by David Sedley, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 87 (1997), pp. 41-53. An online search may provide you with access to this article.

Kathryn Tempest is the Educator for this lesson in the TedEd Lessons Series: "The great conspiracy against Julius Caesar"

My notes on the book

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger
Translated from the German by Stuart Hood
New Directions, 1947
Original publication in German in 1939

From The American Scholar, July 20, 2015:
In 1970, the Scholar’s editors polled the literary lights of the day for their opinion on that book published in the past quarter of a century that they believed to have been the most undeservedly neglected.

W. S. Merwin
I’m not anything like well enough read to do justice to your question, and I should probably take some time to ponder it. But the first book that leaps to mind—since I think it’s a great book and virtually no one I’ve ever mentioned it to has read it—is Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs (New Directions, 1947). I’d certainly put it high in any such list, anyway. I should say that it’s been a few years since I last read it, myself—too long for me to venture to say much about it just like that.

I ran across Merwin's quote recently when I was looking for ideas on what to read, and since I had never heard of On the Marble Cliffs, much less read it, I thought I would give it a try. I'm glad I did, even though (and maybe because) it's the strangest thing I have ever read. The more I dig into the book and the author, the more intrigued I become.

German author Ernst Jünger presents troubling questions on the role authors play in totalitarian regimes. Jünger was part of the so-called "inner emigrates" during Adolph Hitler's reign, intellectuals staying in Germany during his dictatorship but passively resisting the regime. Some of his between-World Wars works complicates things. In 1943, Thomas Mann in 1943 described those works as "saber rattling," his militant activism contributing to the rise of Nazism. Jünger didn't try to deny or recreate his past once the war was over. I'm going to avoid saying much more on that topic (as best as I can), instead looking at this weird and marvelous book.

On the Marble Cliffs is an allegorical tale of two brothers living on an island who witness and are involved in a battle between islanders and forces allied with a character called the Chief Ranger. The book has a dream-like quality, which seems to be fitting since Jünger stated the idea for the story came to him in a dream. The book is mostly a mosaic of impressions and observations, with a gothic feel at times.

The brothers, former soldiers, have retired to an hermitage overlooking a lake/marina in order to work on classifying the flora. (I'm not convinced they are truly brothers, as the narrator refers to "Brother Otho," which seems more a title or honorific.) The area around the hermitage seems idyllic, a charming place, with splendid views of a marina, where the two men live austerely and immerse themselves in their work studying and categorizing the island's plant life. The people of the island all have different characteristics tied to their geographic location, whether living in the forest, the fields, or the marina city.

The opening lines of the book provides the reader with an idea of the strangeness that will follow:

You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. In the afterlight, too, the images stand out more enticing than before; we think of them as we do of the body of a dead loved one who rests deep in the earth, and who now in his enhanced and spiritual splendour is like a mirage of the desert before which we must tremble.

Nostalgia for happy times is a grief? Akin to remembering a now-dead body? I would think the "wild grief" when thinking of happy times only comes into play during unhappy times, so the narrator and Jünger seem to be telegraphing their feelings about the current situation. That doesn't stop the retelling of such happier times for the narrator, a taste of which follows:

To understand what is meant by living one had to look down to the Marina on one of these gay holidays. Early in the morning the whole gamut of noises rose up to us, fine and distinct, like objects seen through a reversed spy-glass. We heard the bells of the towns and the petards saluting the flag-dressed ships in the harbours, or it would be the hymns of pious processions going on pilgrimage to miraculous images, or the music of the flutes in a bridal train. We heard the chatter of the daws around the weathercocks, the crowing of cocks, the call of cuckoos, the horns of hunters riding out from the town gate to hawk the heron. All mounted up to us in harmonies so quaint that the whole world seemed to be merely a brilliant patchwork; the effect was as heady as wine drunk fasting. (page 31—all references are to the 1947 edition referenced at top)

This and other descriptions portray an idyllic place, but the image of bad things looming arises in the figure of the Chief Ranger, introduced on the first page, on whom the brothers "were on their guard against." A few other descriptions paint him as a ridiculous figure, but one who is still considered a grand master who leaves an imprint on one's memory. The Chief Ranger's power over those that the narrator knew started as rumors heard, "like the first obscure heralds of a pest raging in distant harbors," while a cloud of fear preceded" him "like the mountain mist that presages the storm." (29). Rumors of disturbances related to blood feuds surfaced, but they were "more bitter, ... obscured by new and unusual traits." (35) Violence was rampant and demands for payoffs became unbearable. What made things more menacing "was the fact that all these crimes, which set the land in an uproar and cried for justice, went almost entirely unavenged." (36) There were many signs that signaled a downfall in order and spirit. These signs started small but had a clear, ulterior motive: "the Chief Ranger administering fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance." (41)

While on a search for an elusive orchid specimen, the two brothers stumble across what they call the Flayer's Copse. Permit me an extended quote:

They [two large bushes that looked like laurels] grew on either side of an old barn with yawning doors which stood in the clearing. The light which played upon it was unlike any light of the sun, but was hard and shadowless, so that the whitewashed building stood out sharply defined. At intervals the walls were divided off by black beams with tripod bases, and over them rose to a point a grey shingle-roof. Against them, too, leaned stakes and hooks.

Over the dark door on the gable-end a skull was nailed fast, showing its teeth and seeming to invite entry with its grin. Like a jewel in its chain, it was the central link of a narrow gable frieze which appeared to be formed of brown spiders. Suddenly we guessed that it was fashioned of human hands fastened to the wall. So clearly did we see this that we picked out the little peg driven through the palm of each one.

On the trees, too, which ringed the clearing bleached the death's-heads; many a one with eye sockets already mossgrown seemed to scan us with a dark smile. Except for the mad dance in which the cuckoo flitted round the whiteness of the skulls it was absolutely still. I heard Brother Otho whisper half in a dream: "Yes, this is Koppels-Bleek." The interior of the barn lay almost in darkness, and we could distinguish only, close to the entrance, a flaying bench on which a skin was stretched out. Behind it other pale fungoid shapes shimmered out of the dark background. Towards them, as if into a hive, we saw buzzing swarms of steel-coloured and golden flies. Then the shadow of a great bird fell over the spot. Its movements were those of a vulture which swooped down on the teasel field on jagged wings. Only when we saw it rooting with its beak and sinking its red neck into the upturned soil did we become aware that a dwarf was working there with a pick, and that the bird followed his handiwork like a raven behind the plough.

Now the dwarf laid down his pick and, whistling an air, walked over to the barn. He was clad in a grey jerkin, and we saw that he rubbed his hands as if after work well done. When he had entered the barn there began a pounding and scraping on the flaying bench; he whistled his air throughout in elfish merriment. Then we heard the wind rocking itself as if in accompaniment among the pines so that the pale skulls on the trees rattled in chorus. Into its lament was mixed the swaying of the hooks and the twitching of the withered hands on the barn wall. The noise was that of wood and bone, like a puppet show in the kingdom of the dead. At the same time there bore down upon the wind a clinging heavy and sweet smell of corruption, which made us shiver to the marrow of our bones. Within us we felt the melody of life touch its darkest and deepest chord. (73-4)

It may have been a melody of life, but it was being played like a dance of death. The narrator notes that those busy with their jobs, even after seeing sights like this, feel invulnerable as they block it out of their minds. Into this world comes a visiting prince and two noble lords, intent on stop the Chief Ranger but ill prepared for their task. And this is what leads to the strangest passages of the book—an armageddon, complete with spike-collared mastiffs ("legions of hell") fighting first bloodhounds, then native venomous vipers. Conflagrations abound, severed heads are displayed, and survivors have to wade through mutilated corpses of fighters and dogs. The narrator notes his condition was "under the spell of a dream," and it reads like something out of Revelations. The devastation of the countryside and the marina mirrors the destruction felt within the narrator's heart.

It's quite a lot to take in, both for him and for the reader. We watch an almost-comedic thug rise in power in the country, only to destroy it in his quest for control and power. Even though this was published in Germany in 1939 I wouldn't call it prophetic, although parts of it are eerie in their prescience. I'll take Jünger at his word when he said the book wasn't aimed specifically at Hitler but focused instead on how such evil comes to power anywhere in the world as well as what it does to people. The narrator, smitten with the mission and nobility of the prince and nobles determined to stop the Chief Ranger, sums up his worldview in such times: "I would rather fall with the free men than go in triumph among the slaves." (105)

I wanted to pass on my reading of this short book and my initial reactions to its strangeness. Even though I don't have W. S. Merwin's excuse of it being a while since I read it, I also find myself unable to venture much more about it. There are no easy answers given in the book, although the repetition of the importance of a well-ordered life and the impact of doing nothing give the reader plenty of clues as to what Jünger probably had in mind as a way to combat such tyranny. Whether or not he felt it was enough to make a difference is another matter.

Links:
In the opening quote, "The American Scholar" notes that the English translation is difficult to obtain. It was fairly easy for me to get a copy using WorldCat, but if you don't have access to that I just found that the 1947 New Directions' editions is online at archive.org. The 1970 Penguin Books edition uses the same translation by Stuart Hood and adds an introduction by George Steiner.

The NY Times obit for Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger's Wikipedia page