The Reading List (and Links) - August 14th 2021
Friends, Romans, Newsletter subscribers -
Here are some thoughts about the things I’ve been reading in the earlier summer (May - June). I hope something here catches your interest. Articles and podcasts at the bottom -
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Virginia Woolf said somewhere that “to write down one’s impressions of [[Hamlet]] as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so [[William Shakespeare]] comments upon what we know.” It has hardly been an annual practice, but I’ve probably been to Elsinore three of four times. As a teen I was sympathetic to Hamlet’s angsty, adolescent monologues - they sounded worldly, resigned, rebellious against fate. A decade on, Hamlet’s most striking characteristic, his despair of life and the guilt it asks us to shoulder, seems more claustrophobic, reflexive: more fatalistic than rebellious. Can’t he see that he could escape this cloistered realm of horrors, that his action could bring something beyond the nullity of revenge and death?Lionel Trilling has written that, in the ocean of texts that we react to through life, this question is perhaps the most generative - what is real and what is illusion, and can’t the characters tell the difference? Leave this rack and ruin where it happened, Hamlet! New beginnings are available as long as life lasts - natality, the fact that new life begins, is the obverse of the fatality that so paralyzes our Dane.
But of course, Hamlet does not act, does not escape the contingency of his family’s crimes and misfortunes. Perhaps on my next return, this open-eyed, grudging advance towards the abyss will be the most poignant thing of all.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
In Tom Stoppard’s inspired retelling of Hamlet, the famous rottenness in Denmark is even more mystifying through the eyes of the insignificant courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Our heroes, unformed as babes, barely able to tell themselves apart, are summoned into being by a letter from Elsinore and for the rest of this “Waiting for Godot”-like comedy of dialogue and confusion, they attempt to puzzle out what role they’re expected to play. There is something of absurdism a la young Camus or Samuel Beckett here: of the farce of life without meaning, piecing together clues as we go along. This existentialist bent is redeemed (or maybe damned) by the final joke on his hapless characters: in a lucid moment before his proscribed death, Guildenstern realizes that there must have been some missed moment when they could have opted out of the whole thing… well, at least they’ll know better next time.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
John Ames is a septagenarian small town preacher writing his deathbed reminesces in the form of a long letter to his young son. In this setup, and in the life of this man, there is not much to grab a reader’s excitement - Ames is an amiable, faithful man who has lived a small life (one might even say a boring one) to the best of his ability. Yet Robinson’s language is exquisite, and the pervasive sense of wonder, gratitude, and spirituality she ascribes to Ames feels powerful and true. When this introspective, good man reflects back on his uneventful path and remarks “how I have loved this life”, or waxes poetic about the impossible, undeservable gift of love, it never sounds trite, or even succeptible to doubt.
The plot, such as it is, is a gradual revelation of three emotional struggles between fathers and sons: his John Brown-like grandfather and his lifelong battle with the complacency of American evangelicals in the face of slavery and inequality, personified by his pacifistic son; Ames’s brother’s religious strife with their father, when he is sent off to study towards the priesthood in Germany and comes back bereft of faith; and Ames’s best friend’s fraught relations with his youngest son Jack, named in Ames’s honor.
The subsequent Gilead novels (I think there are four, now) expand on these characters and relationships from multiple perspectives. I think the emphasis of this excellent review is overly heavy on the evangelical, racial motivations of the cycle, but I haven’t read the others to find out. While those issues contribute much to Gilead’s historical and novelistic interest, the main event is our narrator’s enviable sense of a life fully lived, suffused with gratitude and humility to the end.
Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
Fort Bastiani guards the mountain pass on edge of the Tartar Steppe. Within, the garrison waits in anticipation of an invasion that has never come. On arrival, when Captain Drogo tries to request a reassignment anywhere else, he is cajoled and tempted by older officers to stay for his full term - it might help his career, and protesting might do him ill. After a tortured night of contemplation he decides to stay it out - first for his assignment, but then, piecemeal, for the rest of his life. As he does to even greater effect in his short stories (Catastrophe, Seven Stories, Scala Scare), Buzzati brings out the absurdity of our vulnerability to hints and vague implications, and challenges the reader to question the things we have been encouraged to wait for. What we live in anticipation of is an expression of our values, of the way we wish to spend our finite lives; to let others pervert our values opens us to the very real possibility of wasting our entire life.
It is superficially easy to roll our eyes at the soldiers making their excuses to keep leading their pointless lives at the fort; but it is worth reflecting whether we are really so immune from addressing our lives towards opposing some nebulous barbarity: as Cavafy so movingly wrote, at least those people were some kind of solution.
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
My interest in Houellebecq was piqued by an accolade that he was “the Camus of his generation” - a comparison that, on the whole, I now find insulting to the elder Frenchman. Nonetheless, I will grant that he is a skilled provocateur - I have been wrestling with my impressions from this book for months.
It is a fairly artless novel, peopled by unbelievable archetypes who mostly represent facets of modern life which Houellebecq hates; but it is a powerful polemic, illustrating many of the common assumptions of our culture taken to their logical endpoints. I think my fixation on this book has been on its value as a chance to test my aesthetic and moral sensibilities, to improve the state of my psychic defenses. The next time that I encounter indifference, complacency, malaise, ennui, I will be more prepared - because of the angry response that Houellebecq sent me stomping off to write, I will know exactly where I stand.
My full review can be found here.
Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota Series
I picked up the first of these strange, wonderful books because of the author’s online writing about Ancient Rome. But the trilogy turned out to be the reading event of the early summer- I tore through all three between our packing, move and move-in. I made charts of characters and factions and fictional political motivations. I haven’t enjoyed a speculative or science fiction novel this much in a long, long time. Palmer’s work as a Roman historian lends her a great deal of nuance and experience to actual human nature, and a sense of the complexity of decadent societies, setting her apart from the average in this genre, even apart from her multifaceted world-building and characterizations. Come for a fantastically-paced thriller in a superbly crafted future Earth; stay for the diatribes about philosophy, tongue-in-cheek futurism, miracles, and self-consciously gothic subplots.
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
After writing her more widely known Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt spent the rest of her life refining her thoughts about the historical and philsophical revolutions of our understanding of our mortal condition, our capacities of thought, and the ways that we can act. Her aim, from the most ancient evidence of Western civilization through the launch of Sputnik, is to investigate the facets of our lives that haven’t (perhaps can’t) change. This is a complicated book and it definitely benefited from a second reading (all the books she’s inspired me to read in the intervening years surely helped). This work defines and elaborates the three components of the ‘vita activa’, or arenas of action in human life:
Labor: exertion required to stay alive; our metabolism with nature
Work: creating and maintaining a world of human artifice
Action: beginning something new and unpredictable in the political sphere created by the plurality of humanity
By dissecting the evolution of these three concepts and their effects on our world, Arendt asks us to consider wholly new (or very old?) visions of human flourishing.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
“Tiberius… was one of the bad Claudians. Yet he was, at times, easily tempted to virtue, and in a noble age might well have passed for a noble character: for he was a man of no mean capacity. But the age was not a noble one.”
Published in the 1930s, this is an influential classic within historical fiction - but in the best vein of that genre, like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin, it is a sort of revisionist history, calling us to look with fresh eyes at the overly familiar narratives of history. Our understanding of the past is wholly wrought by our imaginations, and I firmly believe that works like these can indicate the strangeness of the past as convincingly as traditional historical writing. The past is a foreign country, more opaque than anything contemporary, more alien than any possible fantasy. Graves focuses his story on the only Julio-Claudian who really never wanted the throne - an inhibited, partially crippled, intensely private historian, a close observer of the events of his time trying only to survive the endless procession of poisonings and plots that decimated his family.
Miscellaneous Roadtrip Books
- Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country: chronicling the creation of the “Mormon Empire” from the death of Joseph Smith to the middle of the twentieth century. I’ve just said that the past is a foreign country, but any history of a movement like Mormonism irrupting and taking hold in the midst of America affirms it. Brigham Young had 56 wives, besides being one of the most powerful political leaders of his century (“it is the most of any man I know”). Towards the end, it was interesting to contemplate Stegner’s assertion that Utah (and the Mormon movement) had become ‘not the future the pioneers set out to build, but a past to be commemorated’. Especially in age of either scornful or overawed discussions of the Founders and Framers of America, I think it is good to be reminded that those men were not mythic saints or heroes but actors trying to create a future. We ought to emulate them instead of merely venerating them.
- Ellen Meloy’s Seasons is a short set of humorous, perceptive dispatches on the flora, fauna, people and environment of her red rock country home. The Mormons won the race against the cattlemen to lay claim to this blasted corner of the San Juan country between Utah and Colorado, and that was about the last thing that happened there. I admire Meloy’s open-minded, attentive commitment to such a difficult place.
- Bernard DeVoto’s Across the Wide Missouri: this is a mostly forgotten, Pulitzer prize winning history of the Western frontier in the last days of the fur trappers (1835-1845). Reading this on the trail was a painful excerise in mental geography because my edition didn’t reprint any of the original maps… Nonetheless, DeVoto is justly famous for his ability to relate the minutia of a trapper’s life to the grand scheme of things, showing these hardy, desperate, lonely men of fortune as they would have recognized, and as the inadvertent vanguards of empire they turned out to be.
- Timothy Egan’s The Good Rain: the organizing conceit of this book is that Egan is following in the footsteps of Theodore Winthrop, one of the first Americans to ever come to Puget Sound and write about it. Within that structure, these essays and reflections on the Pacific Northwest, from his family’s history through the 1990s, were a really good introduction to the region. Egan is better than I expected on the industry, geography, ecology and local history of everywhere he went - his chapters on salmon and logging were particularly powerful.
This Week’s Links
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(Literature) I was recently introduced to the eminent twentieth century literary critic Lionel Trilling, and I really enjoyed his collection of essays The Liberal Imagination. I don’t have a link prepared, but see if you can find a copy of the book, or of his essays on “Reality in America”, “Princess Casamassima by Henry James”, or “Freud and Literature”.
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(COVID) I sympathize with this thread about public health, though I have no idea how to take action about it. The worse that the pandemic has been handled, the more of a role is given to the same organizations who have made mistakes, because the mistakes have worsened the pandemic’s effects. Not a virtuous cycle, that.
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(Technology) This piece made me think about communications and censorship technology as a new front for Cold War-style influence currying: How China Helps the Cuban Regime Stay Afloat through sale of internet control systems.
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(Food) Really enjoying this recipe for a summer salad with heirloom tomatoes, peaches, and halloumi cheese.
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(Climate) This was the first time I’d heard of long-term batteries using reversible oxidation
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(Philosophy, Literature) This essay by Becca Rothfeld raises an interesting point, tangential to the main argument: what would it mean for us to train ourselves to see moral failings like toxic self-importance as not just wrong but aesthetically ugly?
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(Literature) My favorite podcast of the last few weeks has been a chatty, well-read podcast about books: Backlisted. This episode on Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (which, as an aside, is a magnificent novel) is a great place to start.
That’s the list, and the links, and probably more than any of you needed for your Saturday evening, but it was long overdue and it had to be done! If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider sharing it with a friend.
Alex
Some of my other writing can be found here.
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