Alex's Reading List - December 16th, 2020
Happy Holidays, everyone!
I hope that all of you are finding somewhere cozy to hole up with family for a while (and something to read when family is too much.*)
Here are the books from November - I hope that something here catches your interest. If you have any friends left on your Christmas list, feel free to forward this email to them!
*(not my family, of course)
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel by Rene Girard
"By having our neighbor confined to a mental institution we convince ourselves of our sanity" - Dostoyevsky
Girard analyzes a handful of the grand novels of the Western canon to chart the development of 'ontological sickness' and 'metaphysical desire', from their first instance in Don Quixote, through their exacerbation in Stendhal, to a frenzy in Proust, and out of the frenzy towards an apocalypse in Dostoyevsky. (You could follow and learn from these arguments without having read any of the novels in question - I've only read about half of the novels he references.) One of the most fascinating concepts that Girard expounds is of the 'triangulation of desire'. In short, humans who have lost their sense of meaning (the ontologically sick) develop a metaphysical desire for this meaning to be restored. With no metaphysical solution on offer, we consciously or unconsciously select mediators, through which we our own desires, behaviors and goals are determined. As this 'sickness' progresses, the mediator gets closer to us: Don Quixote's mediator is the legendary Amadis of Gaul; Julien Sorel's is Napoleon; by Proust it is any other snob in the neighborhood - in Dostoyevsky it need not even be external, only the idea of someone opposing us. Girard is short on prescriptions for how we avoid such entanglements, except the way that they are resolved in 'all true novels',which is usually with a deathbed renunciation. It is fortunate that I enjoy his ideas, since I'm committed to the pursuit of becoming him, now.
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
"To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole lives traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships."
I savored reading these admonishing, clever letters over the last few months. Every day I'd sit with my coffee or a sandwich and read a bit of whatever Seneca was telling Lucilius that day. It was a great escape from the present. Nearly every letter has at least one sentence worth serious reflection, so these short, slow interactions and reflections were perfect. So many of the worries and stresses that we pretend are modern concerns can be found staring up at us from these 2,000 year old letters. With a wink and a nudge, Seneca commands us to stop feeling sorry for our contemporary selves, to avoid being busy, to duck the influence of the crowd, and to internalize that nothing fortune can bestow justifies any pride or sorrow.
Memoires de L'Outre Tombe by François-Rene de Chateaubriand
"There is nothing between the old France and the new but a transformation of virtue."
Chateaubriand was one gloomy, brooding, Romantic Frenchman - but the kind of pessimistic SOB you can't help but take a liking to. Early references to his mother 'inflicting life on him' are easy to scoff at, but his poor opinions of life and human nature make more sense as he unfolds his life to the reader. Most discomifiting are his memory of the first violent stirrings of the Revolution, and the horror brought home by his brother and sister-in-law being led to the guillotine side by side. He is widely credited as an inspiration to both post-Napoleonic conservatism ('De Gaulle read these books constantly while composing his own war memoirs - listen to the ring of 'I have defended the liberties of France') and literary Romanticism ('I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing' - Victor Hugo). In these novelistic recollections, he interweaves later history whenever he likes. He speaks to himself, to the reader, to oblivion, and to History. His introspective narrative intentionally casts doubt on his own memories or actions, occasionally relying on his memories over verifiable facts. Chateaubriand wanted to bury his book until fifty years after his death, and there is a radical candor to his reflections on famous contemporaries inspired by this desire to speak his judgments only from 'beyond the grave'.
Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs
'"All we can do, we who are spared the horrors, is to be happy and not to pretend out of a sense of guilt that we are not, to study as hard as we can, and to keep our feeble little lamps burning in the big wind." - Auden
This book attempts to recreate the wartime experiences and ethical positions of five influential Christian writers: CS Lewis, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil. Each of these five thinkers was concerned with challenging the prevailing narrative that by opposing the obvious evils of the Nazis, the Allies were leading a righteous cause. In 1943, as the outcome of the war became more obvious, everyone was beginning to speculate on what the postwar world should be like. Jacobs's primary effort is to recreate the positions and personal feelings of each of these writers at that momentous time - incidentally, posing some answer to a question I'd asked my father earlier this year: ‘where are the Christian reckonings with the crises of the 1940s?'
"To mobilize trillions of dollars on the credit of the taxpayer to save banks from the consequences of their own folly and greed violated the maxims of fairness and good government. Given the risk of contagion, how could states not act? Having done so, however, how could they ever go back to the idea that markets were efficient, self-regulating and best left to their own devices?"
Tooze is one of that small class of truly intimidating public intellectuals with a seemingly bottomless pool of time, energy and focus for producing highly thoughtful, discourse-shaping work. Though for the record, he also seems like a charismatic, generous person.) His field of study is economic history, and since I've been reading his essays, papers and newsletters for a while, I knew the voice and intellect to expect. And yet I was unprepared for the depth of context he could bring to bear over longer works, and the effortless way he was able to communicate both widely disparate political and financial elements, and highly technical systems, without losing any steam.
Crashed is a history of the 2008 financial crisis that elucidates every technical trick, policy instrument, and risky faultline of the highly profitable house of cards that collapsed that year. He traces the public response (or lack thereof) to each stage and facet of the crisis in the US, UK, Eurozone, Russia, and China. Along the way, he presents a compelling case that, when it comes to our shared financial history, the past isn't dead: the political crises and scares of the present moment, from 2016 to Brexit to the Eurozone to China's 2015 financial scare, are 'mutations and metastases' of 2016. As Tooze concludes, there are many questions that haunt us about 2008, as those about 1914 haunted previous generations. "They are the questions that haunt the great crises of modernity."
That's the list! Thank you for reading.
-Alex
These books, and those from previous lists, can be can be viewed or purchased here.
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