This year (2012)
Previous years: 2011;
2010; 2009; 2008; 2007; 2006; 2005
Jan Assmann:
Moses the
Egyptian
William Boyd:
Stars and Bars
Mark Twain:
The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer
Thomas Hardy:
Jude the
Obscure
John Steinbeck:
The Grapes of
Wrath
Mark Twain and Charles
Dudley Warner:
The Gilded Age
W. Somerset Maugham:
Of Human
Bondage
Régis-Evariste Huc:
Lamas
of the Western Heavens
Anonymous:
The Bhagavad Gita
G.E.R. LLoyd:
Greek Science
H.E. Bates:
The Darling
Buds of May
Neil MacGregor:
A
History of the World in 100 Objects
W. Somerset
Maugham:
Rain and Other South Sea
Stories
William Faulkner:
As I Lay Dying
This was a Christmas present from an
Egyptologist relative in Heidelberg. The great figure there is the
author, Professor Jan Assmann. The book, with the subtitle "The
Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism", is extremely learned, with
48 pages of notes and references at the end. A difficult, academic
book to read.
But as anyone who has visited a modern-day
bookshop can plainly see, the bookshelves of the world, particularly
those marked esoteric, are
filled with countless volumes concerned with the religion of ancient
Egypt; its relationship to modern religions, to esoteric theories,
to secret societies, and all sorts of other things which are of
little interest to me. Thus it is surely a brave step for a
respected professor of Egyptology to add another volume to this
overflowing fountain of religious speculation.
Perhaps also for this reason, the text is filled
with even more complicated words and difficult sentence
constructions than is normally the case to be found in an academic
work. This book is not a translation from Assmann's native German.
Instead he wrote it in English, thanking a colleague who is a native
speaker of English for correcting his text. As an illustration of
the problems which might arise, I noticed that towards the
beginning, when dealing with the concept of "cultural memory", it is
said that somebody named Siegfried Morenz "spoke of the "Lebenszusammenhang" of
Egypt-Antiquity-Occident. Then in parenthesis, the German word is
translated by Assmann into the English "vital coherence", an expression which, if having
any meaning at all for a native English speaker, would certainly be
very much at variance with the meaning of the German word. But I
suppose it is silly to quibble too much about such things.
The subject of the book is something which has
been the subject of many investigations starting in the ancient
world (such authors as Strabo are
extensively quoted), through countless renaissance authors such as John
Spencer, and ending with Sigmund Freud, with his last
published book "Moses
and Monotheism". The idea is that in the Bible, the character
Moses leads his people out of Egypt through various travails, then
gets up onto his Mount, and proclaims huge numbers of commandments,
many of which seem to be quite strange. Upon closer examination, one
finds that most of these commandments (there are of course many more
than 10, as anybody who is actually prepared to read the Bible can
easily verify) - and especially the first one - are simply concerned
with prohibiting what was usual in Egypt and encouraging what was
prohibited in Egypt. That is to say, according to the Bible,
everything Egyptian is forbidden, taboo, impure. And on the other
hand, the Children of the God of the Bible are instructed to do
things which within the ancient Egyptian culture would themselves be
forbidden, impure. From the Egyptian point of view, we have the
writings of Manetho,
writing a history for Ptolemy II in the third century B.C.E. There
he explains that Egypt wanted to cleanse itself of the lepers, who
were expelled to Israel, and they were led there by a priest of
Helios, namely Osarsiph, who, for some reason is our Moses of
Biblical fame.
So was Moses really an Israelite, or was he an
Egyptian priest (and the one place in the Bible where this is
asserted is in 7:22 of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament), or is all of
this just a lot of mystical nonsense designed to get people to start
fighting with one another?
Of course the name "Moses" is obviously Egyptian.
For example we have the various kings named "Tuthmosis", and so
forth. According to Assmann, the word moses means "son" or "son of".
Then there is the interesting case of Akhenaten (ca.
1350 B.C.E.), the husband of Nefertiti and father of Tutankhamen. He
shocked his people by declaring that all of their religion was
illegal, and instead it must be replaced by his new, monotheistic
religion of Aten. No more of this absurd afterlife nonsense. Instead
we have the reality of Nature, the real world. All these horrible
priests should be driven out of their temples.
Yes, a very good idea!
So do we have the equation Akhenaten = Moses? Or
at least (The High Priest of Akhenaten) = Moses? You can go into
lots of bookshops, or examine the archives of amazon.com, and find
countless books "proving" such hypotheses. But of course Jan Assmann
is above such things. In reality, the memory of Akhenaten was
quickly stamped out of Egypt, perhaps only living on in a kind of
"cultural subconscious". In any case, this is the basis of the idea
that the high priests of Egypt guarded a "secret" knowledge about
the oneness of Nature, and that Moses belonged to such a caste.
The most interesting theory was that of Freud,
working on the idea that all of religion is nothing but a mass
hysteria, or neurosis. It was all part of a cultural Oedipus
complex. Namely, in the primitive world, the tribes of those simple
creatures were dominated by the prime male - the "father" - who had
the mating rights with all the females of the tribe. But then, as
this father figure aged and his sons grew in strength, they killed
the father so that they could also mate with the females. In this
interpretation, Moses was the father who was killed by the Children
of Israel. Thus the hysteria of religion is a symptom of the
suppressed cultural guilt of this original murder. Freud published
his book in 1937, perhaps with the hope of doing something to make
people understand the hysteria which was about to lead to the
catastrophe of the concentration camps. How sad and helpless all of
this seems today.
But what is the true origin of religion? Why are
there so many books on the subject, and why is it the cause of so
much human conflict and misery?
While a book such as this is interesting as a
history of many of the myths which people have been telling one
another down through the ages, it is not concerned with the basic
cause of the illness. And that has nothing to do with the details of
all of these myths. Assmann says that before Akhenaten, the various
gods were common to all people. You had a god of thunder, of the
winds, of the sun, and so forth. And while one tribe had one name
for them, and another tribe had a different name, the people could
simply agree that it was sensible to translate one name into another
to denote the same thing. And so people lived happily ever after in
peace with one another up until the unfortunate time that Akhenaten
brought in this monotheistic thing. Such may be the view of the
historian, with all his texts in ancient learned languages.
But by studying such texts we only learn of the
folly of mankind, not its cause. Years ago I read a most interesting
book named "Games
of Life", by Karl Sigmund. There he shows how the behavior of
interacting organisms can be modeled using computer simulations. And
the question is, what is the most successful strategy for survival?
The answer is quite interesting. Basically speaking, the best
strategy is "tit for tat", or to use the Biblical term "an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth" (see Moses on the Mount for this).
Going beyond this, the strategies become more refined, and we find
that the optimal strategy for survival incorporates most of what we
think of as "moral" behavior.
It is also a very successful strategy to form
groups, or cliques within the whole population, mutually defending
one another and aggressively competing with other groups. Religion
is one method - perhaps the primary method amongst human beings - of
defining such groups. Thus religion is not some sort of neurosis
which can be cured by means of a cultural psychoanalysis. Instead it
is a means of expressing a basic property of life. In the jungle, or
wherever primitive people lived, such mutually aggressive cliques
could live their lives in continuous conflict, such as they were.
But in the civilized world, the myths of religion obscure the
catastrophe to which they lead.
A funny book about a character named
Henderson Dores, an Englishman in the U.S.A. He is an expert on
impressionist paintings for an English auction house. An eccentric
person in the Deep South - Georgia - has some paintings he would
like to sell. It is hoped that by selling them, the New York branch
of the auction house will become firmly established in the New York
art scene. Thus Henderson is sent down south.
It's a complicated story. Many laughs, but often
a bit drastic. I couldn't put the book down. These books by William
Boyd are always enjoyable. In the end, things become rather chaotic,
and the whole situation remains unresolved, up in the air. Like a
Hollywood movie.
Indeed, looking at William Boyd's Internet site,
I see that there was a movie made of the book. Unfortunately it only
seems to be available as a VHS tape, not a DVD. But we threw our
defective VHS player into the garbage years ago. A shame, since I
would have enjoyed seeing the movie.
This Christmas we were given a Kindle ebook
reader. I wouldn't have taken such a step by myself, but now we do
have it. According to the hype, reading such "electronic ink" is
just as pleasant and easy on the eyes as is reading printed words on
real paper. Well, the letters on the screen are not as sharp as
printed letters, and also there are only two basic fonts (together
with the italic versions). Also the screen is grayish, not like the
nice clear white of paper. And light reflects from the glass of the
screen, so you sometimes have to hold it at an angle to avoid the
glare. On the other hand, since the screen is passive it uses very
little electricity, so that the battery holds its charge for a long
time. And of course by avoiding paper, fewer trees are chopped down
in comparison with the situation if people buy the paper book.
Another good thing is that it has dictionaries in various languages
integrated into the device, so that if a word is unclear, you simply
move the cursor over to that word, and the dictionary entry is
immediately shown. And then it is possible to change the size of the
type, so that for people with weak eyes, a very large typeface can
be chosen.
We were also given a 100 euro gift certificate
for amazon.com, with the recommendation that we immediately download
a certain humorous Swedish novel in its translation into German.
Thus our credit with amazon was decreased to 90 euros or so, and I
started reading that book. But I must admit that after a couple of
chapters, I rather got bored with it. So then I decided to have a
look at the Project Gutenberg collection of books. These are older
books whose copyright has expired so that they can be freely
transmitted. And I see that many of them are offered in the Kindle
format. Having no real idea about where to look, I saw that they
list the 100 most popular books in the last 24 hours, or last 30
days, or whatever.
The most popularly downloaded book in
Gutenberg.org is the Kama Sutra. Having a quick look at the html
version for normal computers, just now, as I write this, I see that
it does not appear to include illustrations. It has a very modest
size of only 418 kilobytes. Yet the Kindle versions are smaller: 255
kilobytes, and for the version with illustrations it is 259
kilobytes. Thus I suspect that eager Gutenberg.org downloaders,
looking for titillating pictures to accompany the text, might be
disappointed by the fact that they add a mere 4 kilobytes to the
volume of the book.
The second most popular book is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
which I listened to as an audio-book a year or two ago. The third
most popular one is Dickens' Christmas Carol, which we read out to
one another in our reading circle recently. And the fourth book is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Downloading it into the Kindle, it starts off by saying that it
continues the story which was started in the earlier book about Tom
Sawyer. (Which is Gutenberg's 14th most popular book.) Thus I
downloaded that, and started to read.
If anybody does happen to read this and then
happen to think it would be a nice idea to read the Gutenberg Tom Sawyer, then let me tell
you that you should download the version with illustrations. In
fact, the normal html version does have the illustrations, and they
are much clearer on the computer screen in comparison with the
Kindle screen. The Kindle is really rather weak when trying to
reproduce illustrations.
But the book itself was an enjoyable read. Having
read it now, I am sure that I didn't read it as a child. Mark Twain
begins by telling the reader that it is for children, but he hopes
that grown-ups might enjoy it too. He tells us that the characters
of the children in the story are taken from his observations of the
children he knew, growing up on the banks of the upper reaches of
Mississippi, north of the Deep South. The one point which raised a
question in my mind was at the end, where Tom and Huck discover the
treasure which was hidden away in the cave by Injun Joe. Obviously
it was stolen property and was thus not lawfully theirs.
Nevertheless, the story ends with them openly displaying their
riches to the authorities in the town, and nobody objects to them
keeping the treasure. If it were a grown-up story, the end would not
be quite so sanguine.
The greatest thing about the book is the
illustrations. I didn't count them. There must have been at least
50, all very beautifully executed. I would recommend that you have a
quick look at the first few illustrations by following the link I
have given above. The first is a portrait of Tom Sawyer. How
different this picture is in comparison with the Walt Disney -
Hollywood version! How America has changed in the 150 years between
the publication of this book and today. The illustrations transport
us back into a world of bygone times. Was it a better world?
Looking further in Gutenberg.org, I thought
I'd try a slightly more "grown-up" book, and so downloaded this one.
Long ago, as a student, I did read Far from the Madding Crowd, but I can hardly
remember what it was about. Jude
the Obscure was the last book Hardy wrote. It was published
in 1895 (yet Hardy lived on until 1928). According to the Wikipedia
article on Thomas
Hardy, this book has some relationship to the life of the
author. Hardy was born into modest circumstances, and thus he was
denied the education he desired, never achieving a university
education. Also his wife became increasingly carried away with
morbid religious superstition. And in his early life, he was an
architect.
The Jude of this book was born into very much
more straightened circumstances. Everything takes place in Wessex,
which of course no longer exists in England. In medieval times, much
of the south-west portion of England was the Kingdom of the West
Saxons, or Wessex. (Essex was the Kingdom of the East Saxons, but
apparently that was a rather obscure kingdom in old England. The
true center of the Saxons was around the state of Lower Saxony,
whose capital is Hanover in today's Germany. For some reason which I
don't understand, the present state of Saxony is over in the eastern
part of Germany where Dresden and Leipzig are. But in medieval
times, that territory was occupied by the tribe of the Thuringians.
During the Saxon Wars around the year 800, all of this pleasant
tribal life was brought to an abrupt end by Charlemagne, who imposed
his cruel, oppressive Christian rule.)
Anyway, in Thomas Hardy's novels, this Wessex is
a kind of parallel, imaginary England, where the towns correspond
with real towns, yet they have have different names. The Wikipedia
article gives a table for translating these names. Thus, for
example, we have the correspondences Oxford = "Christminster",
Salisbury = "Melchester", Shaftesbury = "Shaston", and so forth.
The plot of the book is well summarized here. The
story has been filmed, most recently in a version
with Kate Winslet playing the role of Sue, Jude's almost, but not
quite, wife. But when reading the book, my picture of Sue was of a
thin, nervous, flighty person, the opposite of the sensual, earthy
Kate Winslet.
I very much enjoyed the book. It's written in a
very direct way, describing things - basic human emotions - which
still exist today, but now sometimes wrapped in different forms.
Thomas Hardy shows how religion, and the institution of marriage as
sanctified by religion, may lead to tragedy. Of course the church in
late Victorian England condemned the book, even to the point of
having it burned. The reaction against it was so great that Hardy
wrote no more books in his lifetime.
An unpleasant, dismal story. Much worse
than the movie with Henry Fonda. We follow the Joad family from
their small, indebted farm in Oklahoma, along Route 66 in a
dilapidated jalopy, to their end in the inhuman, rapacious cynicism
of Southern California in the 1930s. The book is a long, tedious
read, filled with unpleasant dialogue. I had the impression that at
least 50% of it consisted of this dialogue. Opening the book at
random just now, my eye happened to find the following fragment,
spoken by the "Ma" character.
"Didn't
none
of
these
here
have
no breakfast?"
And the answer from the children:
"We
et
good. We're a-goin' south to-night."
And so on.
Now it is true that when reading these words, I knew immediately
what the first sentence was supposed to mean, just as did the
children. Nevertheless, when the question is written out more
clearly, namely: "Did none of these here not have no breakfast?",
then I think that the overabundance of negations serves to make the
whole thing almost incomprehensible. It would be a challenging
problem on an I.Q. test to inquire as to whether a yes or a no
answer - or something else - would be required in order to convey
the information that at least some of the children did, in fact,
have breakfast.
The fact that this book is a classic obviously
rests not on the elegance of its prose. Rather it is the shocking
state to which the Midwestern farmers in the story are reduced, and
the thought that their story was shared by many during the Great
Depression.
According to the story - and perhaps it was true
in real life - the large land holders of Southern California
distributed hundreds of thousands of printed advertisements to the
destitute farmers of the Midwest, saying that there would be many
well paid jobs for fruit picking. The cynical motive was to flood
the country with hoards of desperate, starving people, willing to
work for almost nothing. These people, the "Okies", were to be kept
under control by brutal bands of police and militias, serving their
masters, the landed aristocracy of California. Yes, I'm sure it was
horrible. In a way, even more horrible than the experiences of Valentino Achek Deng in
South Sudan. Refugees who have fled to a foreign country have the
hope of regrouping and returning to a better life, or at least the
hope of forming a community within the foreign country to give one
another mutual support. The Okies were alone in the world with their
families, fighting one another to survive.
Undoubtedly many people would say that the book
is commendable, merely owing to the fact that we have sympathy with
the plight of the people who are represented in the book. But still,
having read it, I am left with a number of questions.
For example, much is made of the idea that these
Midwestern farmers were living life in some sort of "natural" way,
before their lives were destroyed by capitalism, by unnatural,
mechanical farming methods, and so forth. And thus John Steinbeck,
writing in the 1930s, transports us into the dream-world of the
modern "eco"-lobby.
But what about the lives of the Indians who were
living in Oklahoma in the days before all those lovable "granmas"
and "grampas" drove them out in the 1870s, or so? Surely they were
living more "naturally" than the "sod-busters" who came in, plowing
away much of the vegetation, annihilating the vast herds of buffalo
which roamed the lands. And going back even further, one can say
that the Indians were not living naturally (if we take this term to
mean what the eco-lobby apparently wants it to mean). After all, the
Indians regularly burned the vegetation in order to create the
"Great Plains". In a dry climate, such as that in Australia, trees
and bushes grow if they are not gotten rid of by people.
If the granmas and granpas of this book destroyed
the Great Plains of the Indians, then surely it was a natural
development for the small, inefficient farms of the sod-busters to
be amalgamated into larger blocks which could be more easily farmed,
using modern machinery. John Steinbeck devotes pages to
romanticizing the use of horses in heavy farm work. And then, after
the long trek along Route 66, his main character, Tom, expresses -
using his Okie dialect, as always - the pleasure of pounding away at
the ground for eight or ten hours a day, using a hand pick. In
contrast with this, Steinbeck gives us a long-winded passage
describing tractors as being dead objects, and the people driving
them as being mindless robots. And yet, strangely enough, he seems
to attribute more human characteristics to the lonely truck drivers,
driving their trucks along Route 66. Why is a truck better than a
tractor? Whereas a modern harvester retains almost all of the grain
in a field, the old methods with primitive, hand held tools,
resulted in as much as half the harvest being lost in the dirt to
rot and be wasted.
Reading the description of John Steinbeck's life
in the Wikipedia article I have linked to above, it seems doubtful
if he ever had the romantic "pleasure" of manually swinging a
pick-axe all day long in the hot sun. This was more of a pleasure
for his imagination. And quite frankly, I prefer to see horses in
their modern role as the playthings of young girls, rather than
being whipped by a cruel farmer in order to force them to drag heavy
plows across fields, or stuck with spurs and having their gums
painfully squeezed by bridle bits. For me, the sight of a man
sitting comfortably in the air-conditioned cabin of a modern tractor
or harvester, doing the work which in earlier times required
hundreds of men and animals, exerting themselves in back-breaking,
menial labor, is a magnificent testimony to the genius of the human
spirit.
There are parallels between the situation of the
1930s and that of today. 40 million Americans are on food stamps.
The true rate of unemployment, according to some estimates, is
greater than that during the depths of the Great Depression. The
level of debt is certainly much greater. The conditions in Greece,
or Spain, caused by the introduction of the common European currency
ten years ago, are a catastrophe. All of this is caused by a corrupt
combination of moneyed interests and a bloated government dependent
upon those interests. Back in the 1930s, such people as Steinbeck
romanticized the Russia of "Uncle Joe" Stalin, who was perhaps the
greatest mass murderer of all time. Hopefully in the modern world
people will be more sensible.
The Guilded Age,
by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
A longish, rather complicated story,
involving a simple family in the Tennessee of the 1850s which owns
thousands of seemingly useless acres of backwoods land. They move on
to another backwoods place in Missouri, and we are introduced to
various larger-than-life characters living there. All of them have
schemes for making lots of money at the expense of other people. The
main character we follow is Laura, who, after a tragic boiler
explosion on a Mississippi paddle-wheeler, lost her parents and was
adopted by the family. She grows up and goes to Washington in order
to convince Congress to buy the Tennessee land for millions of
dollars. The story now takes place sometime after the Civil War, in
the 1870s. She quickly becomes a leading lobbyist, manipulating
things at will. In the end, she becomes disgraced and dies of a
broken heart. The Tennessee land is not bought by Congress, but on
the other hand, one of the other characters close to the family
finds a thick vein of coal so that everybody is saved from poverty,
and everybody except Laura lives happily ever after.
The story is about the corruption and cynicism of
the politicians in Washington. I wonder how much of the book was due
to Mark Twain. Somehow it lacks his usual humor.
Obviously the situation in Washington has not
improved in the hundred and forty years between the time this book
was first published and today. Back then, in 1873, the details of
Laura's transition from a simple, but beautiful, country girl to a
powerful lobbyist are glossed over in a few implausible pages. A
contemporary author would undoubtedly revel in the sexual depravity
elicited by the modern Washington call-girl. The unfortunate thing
is that the power modern politicians have to produce evil has been
multiplied out of all proportion to the situation back in 1873. But
it is astonishing to read this book and to realize how little things
have changed in the United States in all that time. The religious
hypocrisy. The bumbling incompetence.
Having just read The Grapes of Wrath, this book puts that other
story into a different light. The world today seems to be entering
into a new Great Depression, perhaps even greater than that of the
1930s. The world is drowning in debt, owing to the fact that the
central banks of the world - following the lead of America's Federal
Reserve - have reduced interest rates to way below the level of
inflation. That is to say, government is paying speculators to
increase their debt beyond all reason, and if the various parties to
debt get into difficulties, then they can rely on their corrupt
lackeys in Washington to "bail them out", meaning that we normal
people must pay for their extravagances.
At least in 1873 money was a stable thing. The
dollar was backed by gold or silver. And so if you got 5% interest
on an investment, then you really got it. In today's world, if you
get 1.5% interest, while inflation is three or four percent, then
you are simply loosing things slightly slower than would be the case
if you put them in the piggy bank. And then you must pay a capital
gains tax on your losses!
Thus many people say that we should go back to
the gold standard. Perhaps that would be a good thing, particularly
in view of the absurd corruption here in Europe which has
accompanied the dreadful euro currency. Unfortunately though, as
this book shows, even a world with "real" money is no utopia. The
fact of the matter is that in earlier times, when coins were really
made of silver, most people had very few of them, and the 1% (or
more realistically, the 0.01%, or even less) of people who were rich
swam in their ill-gotten hoards of gold and silver.
As a final note, I must say that I found the
punctuation of the book to be very strange. Now of course I have no
idea about proper punctuation. Perhaps it was taught at school, but
I am sure that if it was, then I turned my mind to other thoughts.
Thus I have no idea where to place commas. I imagine that they
should be there in order to break up the ideas in a sentence into
logical segments which can then be more easily read. But both in
this book, and also in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, the commas seem to appear all over the
place, often in the most inappropriate places.
This is the story of the youth and coming
of age of Philip Carey, an English boy in the 1890s. Apparently
there are many parallels with the life of the author. Maugham was
born in Paris (in the British Embassy, so technically on British
soil) and grew up initially as a French speaker. Thus English was a
problem for him, and he developed a stammer, which was an
embarrassment. Similarly, the Philip of this book has a club-foot
which is an embarrassment. Maugham's mother, to whom he was most
devoted, died when he was only 8, and his father died two years
later. So he was sent to live with his uncle, a cold, straight-laced
vicar in an English country town. The Philip of the book had the
same experience. Both were sent to unpleasant boarding schools. Both
quit school and went for a year to study at Heidelberg. Both
returned to England to study accounting, for which they found they
had no aptitude. But at this point, the story of the book departs
from the story of the life of the author. The author went directly
into medical studies, whereas Philip decided to become an artist and
moved to Paris, where he spent two years amongst the English art
students, living the low life. In this way he was able to make up
for the French experience which the author had already lived through
as a small boy. After realizing that he had no talent for art, he
then returned to London where he also studied medicine. And at this
stage of things, the story of the author, and of his character,
Philip Carey, diverge into different worlds.
It is a wonderful book. Such a contrast with
Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence,
which I read a year or two ago. We suffer with Philip through all
his trials: love, money, the meaning of life.
At the beginning we are told that Philip's
parents left him about 2000 pounds. Putting this into the inflation
calculator, we find that the British pound of 2012 is only worth
about a hundredth of its value in 1900. Thus, thinking in terms of
today's ephemeral paper money, he had 200,000 pounds. This was
invested for him by the lawyer acting on his behalf in mortgages
which returned 5%, giving an annual income of 10,000 pounds. But of
course the 100 pounds he was receiving in 1900 was real money. It
wasn't disappearing in inflation. This was sufficient to pay for all
of his expenses.
On his return from Paris, when starting his
medical studies in London as a grown man, he gains control over his
finances. But he is not particularly thinking about them. An
experienced nurse in his hospital tells him that nobody commits
suicide for love; instead it is always the problem of money, lack of
it, hunger, homelessness. And so the book concerns itself with
similar subjects to those of earlier 19th century novels - one
thinks of Jane Austen - where everything is concerned with money,
wealth - and love. Only on the last page does the hero or heroine of
such a romance marry the wonderfully wealthy object of desire, and
we are left to imagine that life then continues forever afterwards
in perfect bliss.
But in contrast with Jane Austen's novels, Philip
experiences true hardship on his passage to the last page of this
novel. Rather than falling madly in love with the person who will
eventually fulfill his dreams, he becomes infatuated with Mildred, a
dreadful character. She really hates him, but since he spends huge
amounts of his money on her, hoping thus to buy her love, she finds
it convenient to use him. Dreadful scenes. We think surely he has
now realized that it is hopeless. And many times, just when we think
Philip has gotten himself into a more sensible path of life, Mildred
again turns up, weeping, asking for more money, and Philip takes her
back. This process was so painful that I often had to exclaim out
loud, "Oh no!". All of this leads to Philip becoming totally
destitute. He is starving. He sleeps on park benches. Thankfully
though, his uncle, the vicar, dies, leaving him enough to be able to
resume his medical studies.
In the end, Philip realizes that Sally, the
healthy, uncomplicated daughter of a good friend, loves him. He
thinks that he doesn't love her, since in his imagination love is
the selfish, destructive, one-sided infatuation which he had
experienced with Mildred. After a summer night's tender coupling on
a rural holiday with Sally's family, the question arose as to
whether she was pregnant. At first he was shocked, thinking that
this is now the end of all his romantic plans for travels to exotic,
tropical places as a ship's doctor. But then he comes around to
thinking that life would be good in a comfortable medical practice
on the English seaside, together with Sally and all the children
they would have. They meet and Sally tells him that he is free; it
was a false alarm. But he tells Sally that he loves her still, and
so they are set to marry and live happily ever after.
I first read this book about 30 years ago,
when it was published by the Folio Society, and now I have re-read
it. It seems to be possible to obtain copies through various online
antiquarian bookshops, and also through amazon.com. For those who
can understand French, there is a beautifully set pdf
version of the original publication from 1850.
Around the year 1845, Huc, together with Joseph
Gabet, both of whom were French Catholic missionaries to China,
belonging to the Lazarist
congregation, set off on a long trek from their mission in
Manchuria, through northern China and Mongolia, and then across the
mountains to Lhasa in Tibet. Their idea was establish a Christian
mission in that center of Buddhist religion. But they were not
religious fanatics. They dressed in the costume of "lamas".
According to the Wikipedia article, the definition of a lama is a
"venerated spiritual master", or to use the Sanskrit word, a "guru".
And thus they were accepted by all of those Buddhist monks traveling
about in central Asia as one of them. This despite the fact that the
Christian religion had been declared illegal by the Emperor of
China.
In fact lamas had much freedom of travel. Huc and
Gabet, being French, only had to make sure that nobody thought that
they belonged to the nation of those horrible "sea-devils", the
English. At that time, China was fighting a "war on drugs" involving
the opium which the sea-devils were bringing from India in their
warships to Canton. Unlike the poor Mexican drug barons of today who
live in fear of helicopter gunships, and all the other advanced
armaments of the United States, the sea-devils of the 1840s enjoyed
a military superiority with respect to the overwhelmed Chinese
police. Both in China, and also in Tibet, there was great fear that
the English in India, who were known for their trickery, might soon
cross the mountains and overwhelm central Asia.
The book is a fascinating account of their long
trek over some of the most extreme terrain in the world. Huc tells
us of the many conversations they had with Buddhist monks, and their
extended stays in large monasteries. Upon arrival at Lhasa, they
began by setting up a small chapel in some rented rooms. But soon a
suspicion arose that they might be English spies, making maps in
order to facilitate an invasion. Some years before that, the
Englishman William
Moorcroft settled in Lhasa, staying there 12 years or so. And
then it was discovered that he had spent his time making maps of the
country, for which he was executed. Thus Huc and Gabet were arrested
and brought to the worldly administrator of Tibet (the spiritual
administrator, the Dalai Lama, was a 9 year old child then, and
small-pox was going around, so it was decided not to introduce Huc
and Gabet to him). They had a nice long talk with the administrator
about philosophy, religion, geography, and what have you, and so
they became great friends with him. Of course the "Western Heavens"
from which they told everybody they came was Europe, and
particularly France, not
England!
The Chinese Ambassador, who at first put on a
show of force, also became great friends with these two French
monks. The Chinese Ambassador, whose name was Kichan (or Qishan),
had a few years before been sent by the Emperor to Canton to try to
deal with the sea-devils. He found that when they were not
drug-running, they were a reasonably civilized people. So he
negotiated with them, and agreed to let them have a small island -
Hong Kong - in the Pearl River Delta. When the Emperor heard of
this, he at first wanted to have Kichan executed for treachery. But
he spared him, and later sent him to the wilds of Tibet in order to
let him try and rehabilitate himself.
So Kichan was in a delicate position, and he
realized that if the Emperor got wind of the fact that he was
tolerating the presence of Christian monks in Lhasa, then he would
certainly be executed. Thus he ordered Huc and Gabet to leave Tibet
via China, rather than the more simple crossing of the Himalayas
into India and the English. They objected, saying that they were
guests of the Tibetans, and the Administrator of Tibet was very much
on their side. But they soon realized that the conflict they were
provoking could even lead to armed conflict between the small
Chinese force in Lhasa and the Tibetan forces, perhaps with further
consequences. Thus they reluctantly agreed to leave.
Kichan provided them with a large escort, and
they traveled with all the honors which would be accorded to highly
placed Chinese mandarins. But still, the difficulties of the return
journey eastwards through the mountains were again most extreme. In
the end, the old Chinese general who was accompanying them,
traveling back to retirement, and two other people of the
aristocratic class, a father and his son, died on the journey, so
that they finally reentered China accompanied by three coffins and
the ragged remains of their escort.
This was one of this year's Folio books. It
is a very nicely made book, a beautiful cover, and many
illustrations by the (presumably Indian) artist Anna Bhushan in
water color, giving often dream-like, but apt visions of the
thoughts in the text. Of course you can also read the book in
various formats at Gutenberg.org. Unfortunately, I must say that
while most of the books of the Folio Society have sensible,
well-written introductions, providing the reader with a clear
picture of what the book is about; introducing him to the background
and the circumstances of the book; arousing his interest, the
introduction to this book fails on all these counts. It is written
by somebody named Amit Chaudhuri, obviously an Indian. Perhaps, as
with many of his literary inclined countrymen, he seems to imagine
that he floats above the world in an ethereal plane, inaccessible to
such primitive, simple-minded people as me. A far better
introduction is given by the Wikipedia article which I have linked
to above. There it is said, for example, that Gandhi came back to
the text again and again throughout his life, drawing inspiration
and guidance from it.
Famously, Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the
atomic bomb, says in this video,
that when observing the detonation of the first atomic bomb - for
which he determined that it be given the biblical name "Trinity
Test" - he thought of a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, namely:
"Now,
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
On the other hand, according to his brother, who is quoted here,
in reality, he simply said "It worked!". And others said that "his
face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief".
Be that as it may, I looked carefully through the
book in order to find this quotation, but without success. Thinking
that I must have missed it, I downloaded the Gutenberg.org version
of the book and let the computer search through the text, but it
failed to find anything resembling that quotation. Looking further,
I find that Oppenheimer actually learned enough Sanskrit in order to
read the thing in the original, and so that was his interpretation
of one of the verses. The verse must be 10:34, which in the
translation by Juan Mascaró, which is the basis of this Folio
edition, is:
"I
am death that carries off all things, and I am the source of
things to come. Of feminine nouns I am Fame and Prosperity,
Speech, Memory and Intelligence, Constancy and patient
Forgiveness."
Perhaps when thinking of the brilliance of the light emitted by the
atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was also thinking of 10:21, which is
translated as:
"Among the sons
of light I am Vishnu, and of luminaries the radiant sun..."
Indeed, the basic story of the text is that
Arjuna, a member of the warrior caste of ancient India, is about to
engage in a deadly battle. But he realizes that his adversaries
include members of his own clan. Is it right to go to battle and
murder his own people? In order to resolve this difficult problem in
ethical and moral philosophy, he invokes Krishna, the God of all
things. Krishna appears to him in human form and expounds at length
on the various points of his philosophy. It is, indeed, rational and
often inspiring. He describes in detail the things that distinguish
the upright, honorable man. One who lives in harmony with his
existence. And yes, for Arjuna, the message Krishna has to tell him
is that he should go for it. Fulfill his destiny as the great
warrior, conquering all before him. I can well imagine that
Oppenheimer saw himself placed into the role of the Arjuna of the
Atomic Age, and he gained some measure of inner peace with the
thought that according to Krishna, he was doing the right thing.
Thankfully I am not a member of the warrior
caste. Towards the end of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes the
various forms of yoga. Sattva yoga is obviously the most sublime,
being (according to 14:6) pure, giving light, health, and so on. Raja is passion,
thirst. "It binds the soul of man to action." I would hardly think
that applies to me. Yet having just now enjoyed a nice large portion
of very dry, salty popcorn, topped with sizzling butter, I see that
according to 17:9: "Men of Rajas like food of Rajas: acid and sharp,
and salty and dry, and which brings heaviness and sickness and
pain." Oh well. All I can say is that despite all of this, I enjoy
popcorn, consumed in a state of mind transcending the raja mode of
Indian philosophy.
Having just finished this book, I wonder
why I bothered to read it in the first place. One is simply
impressed with the fact that the ancient Greeks really didn't have
very sensible ideas about how things work. How was it possible for
Aristotle to maintain that the speed of a falling object is
proportional to its weight when even a small child, playing with its
toys, soon learns that such an idea is absurdly false?
And then we have their speculations on astronomy
- or rather their attempts to understand the movements of the
planets. Placing the earth at the center of the universe, and having
the universe rotate about the earth each 24 hours is no great
problem. After all, following Einstein we see that everything is
relative. According to Mach's principle, in such a frame of
reference this rapid rotation of the universe about the earth will
result in the centrifugal force which - in the usual frame of
reference - would be attributed to the earth's rotation in a
non-rotating universe. The real problem was the fixed idea which the
ancient Greeks had, attributing strictly uniform, circular motion to
the planets. This led to the nonsense of epicycles within epicycles.
The book has many illustrations to describe such things. Even
Ptolemy realized that his system simply didn't work, and later
writers were satisfied to say that the problem of describing the
motion of the planets is beyond the capacity of the human mind to
understand it. But we now know that the planets follow the simplest
paths imaginable, namely "straight" lines (geodesics) in the curved
space and time of the world. Somehow it is depressing to read how
the dogmas laid down by the earliest Greek philosophers blocked any
real progress for almost 2000 years.
But what is science? For the ancient Greeks,
living in a culture of debate, perhaps their main innovation was to
base their arguments on - more or less - rational ideas, rather than
simply appealing to the gods and to ancient superstition.
For us, science has a much more rigorous
definition. (Or at least it should have!) Given some physical
phenomenon, then hypotheses are put forward to explain it, and
experiments are performed to test the hypotheses. And even after
people have settled upon an agreed explanation, we are still open to
the idea that something might come up to falsify the explanation,
leading to a search for new explanations.
LLoyd shows that in medicine the ancient Greeks
were somewhat more practical. After all, sick people want to be
healed. They will not be satisfied with vague philosophical
reflections about nothing in particular. But surely many different
ancient cultures also accumulated practical methods for dealing with
injuries, sicknesses, and so forth. This is nothing unique about the
ancient Greeks.
So why do people say that "science" originated in
ancient Greece?
I suppose the one area where the Greeks are
thought to have made important contributions is mathematics. But
again, this begs the question, what is mathematics? The Greeks
concentrated upon geometry, and the text of Euclid played a central
role. The idea was that, starting from certain basic assumptions,
geometric relationships can be proved. However, in fact, Euclid made
many extra, unstated
assumptions in his proofs, rendering the whole work inconclusive. In
contrast, we have for example Tarski's
axiomatic scheme for geometry, which reduces everything to a
clear, logical basis. Perhaps it is computers which have focused
peoples minds on the true basis of mathematics in the modern world.
If you write a computer program, then you must tell the machine what
to do, step for step, to accomplish the task you have set. If you
are going to write a computer program dealing with geometry, then it
would get you nowhere trying to define in the computer language such
things as: "A point is that which has no part", or "The edges of a
surface are lines", and so on. (See this
site for an online version of Euclid's Elements.)
I had always thought that at least Archimedes
accomplished lots of sensible things. Yet I was astonished to read
in the book that he wished the fact to be engraved on his tombstone
that the volume of a cylinder of radius r and height 2r is two
thirds the volume of a sphere of radius r. Was this his greatest
accomplishment? After all, such a cylinder has a base area of πr2,
and a height of 2r, giving the volume 2πr3. On the other hand, the
volume of a sphere is 4πr3/3.
Was it this later formula which Archimedes was so proud of? The fact
that the area of a circle is πr2
is demonstrated very nicely here. But
the business of the volume is a bit more complicated. The standard
method is to use a simple integral, as shown here. Archimedes
used instead something called Cavalieri's
principle, which also gives a very obvious geometrical
derivation.
Was all of this so very much unique to the
ancient Greeks? When thinking about this it is interesting to
consider the case of traditional Japanese mathematics,
which developed independently of European thought. In particular, we
have the achievements of the great Seki Takakazu.
The results were often simply written on wooden tablets and placed
as ephemeral offerings in the temples. Who can say that, for
example, the Maya did not also develop such a tradition?
According to both the Epicurean and the Stoic
schools of Hellenistic philosophy, the true goal of science,
mathematics, philosophy, is to achieve a state of peace of mind. And
so in a more peaceful world which is not as preoccupied with
progressing into the future as ours is, I can imagine people making
scientific discoveries which they then offer to the winds, or to a
temple fire, as a deep form of meditation.
Perhaps the thing that distinguishes modern
science from everything that came before is the technology we have,
enabling us to make machines which would have been unimaginable in
the ancient world. Thus the true basis of science is the gradual
accumulation of practical knowledge about materials in the 2000
years after Aristotle. For the scribes in the scriptoriums of the
monasteries of the middle ages, such things - the innovations of
blacksmiths, and what have you - were of no interest, and thus they
are lost to modern historians.
A very lightweight book. From his Wikipedia
entry, I see that this Bates was a prolific writer, satisfying the
imagination of the English reading public in the post World War 2
world of the 1950s. The story is concerned with the lifestyle of the
Larkin family. Before reading the book, I had vaguely thought that
it might be concerned with the family of the poet Philip Larkin. But no, the
Larkins of this book are ridiculous caricatures of what I suppose
the straight-laced, class-conscious English people of those days
secretly admired. The book is filled with unrestrained gluttony -
pork, eggs, beer, champagne... is consumed continuously from morning
to night. While the wife and mother is correspondingly fat, the
husband, at least in the illustrations in my copy of the book, is
not, and the children, particularly the sex-obsessed oldest
daughter, a pregnant, sweet sixteen, is depicted as being
breathtakingly beautiful. These must be the dreams of a bygone
generation of English people. Unfortunately, the children, or rather
the grandchildren of such families as the 1950s English Larkins have
now grown up to become the hooligans which infest such otherwise
pleasant places as Majorca or Ibiza.
The author is the director of the British
Museum in London, and this book has 100 short chapters, each
describing some particular object in the museum. It seems that the
idea for the book was the result of a series of radio programs on
the BBC, where these objects were described. It's all quite
interesting. MacGregor describes in detail what is known about the
circumstances of each object, what the people were like who made it,
and how their history fits in with the histories of the other
peoples living in the world at various times.
Of course, as a man of the modern world and the
representative of an iconic institution of the English
Establishment, the author takes great care to maintain a perfect
level of political correctness. In so doing, he diverges strongly
from the original founders of the British Museum in 1753. Their
curiosity was more concerned with the superiority of the English
race of people, and the fact that it could be demonstrated to the
public by means of an exhibition of the primitive artifacts of the
inferior races.
For example, MacGregor is at great pains to show
that the populations of the Americas were on an equal level with
those of the Eurasian populations in the time before Columbus. But
that is nonsense. The Indians had not yet invented the wheel. The
art of writing was only established within a few nations, based on
hieroglyphic structures. In the great empire of the Inca, it was
completely missing (their system of coding information using knots
on string seems to have mainly been used for recording numbers, but
perhaps some other information was coded as well). It is more
plausible to say that the more highly developed Indian civilizations
of 500 years ago - the Maya or the Aztecs - were comparable with the
classical Egyptian culture of 4000 years ago, or the Indus Valley
Civilization.
But who is to say that those peoples were living
at a "lower level", more "primitive", than the world of today? This
may be true when measured in terms of our modern idea of "progress".
We have many machines, artificial chemicals, and what have you to
help us in our hectic progression into the future, thereby
destroying much of what is naturally given to us on the earth. But
despite all of this progression from one thing to the next, the end
of life - death - is the same for us as it was for people in those
earlier civilizations. And who is to say that the period that
counts, namely our limited time in this world, is better today in
our hectic world than it was for the Indians. Of course the Incas
were dreadful people. Mass murderers. But there were many other,
surely more sublime, Indian cultures besides the Incas.
One object in particular has a great story to
tell. It is an Australian Bark Shield, taken from the Aborigines at
Botany Bay during Captain Cook's first landing in Australia on the
29th of April, 1770. A small group of people were on the shore, and
they ran away at the sight of these seemingly dangerous intruders.
But two men stood their ground, trying to tell the English to clear
away. Since that had no effect, they resorted to throwing stones at
these strange people, and Cook's reaction was to take a pot-shot at
them with bird-shot in one of his muskets. Thus they too ran away,
dropping this bark shield which is now displayed in the British
Museum. When thinking about this scene, I imagine that if I had the
choice of either being a member of the Aboriginal community living
at Botany Bay (but before
the intrusion of the English!), or being a common sailor amongst
Captain Cook's crew, then it is obvious which alternative I would
choose.
I was somewhat put off by The Moon and Sixpence, but the
stories in this book are very good. Well worth reading. Each of them
is only 20 or 30 pages long, so it would be simpler for you to just
read the stories, rather than reading what nonsense I have to write
here about them. I've linked to an online version of the title
story, Rain. In most of
the stories, much is made of the fact that the women are wearing "Mother
Hubbard dresses", which were imposed upon them by the
intolerant Christian missionaries.
One of the stories, namely The Pool, did remind me of some
of the things I objected to in The
Moon and Sixpence. The story of the Pool describes the way
an Englishman ruins his life by "going native" and marrying a young
maiden of the Samoan Islands. At first our hero travels to Apia, the
capitol of Samoa, to escape the English climate. Perhaps he had
tuberculosis. He gets into the habit of swimming in a small,
isolated, natural pool of water, surrounded by the beautiful, lush
vegetation of the tropics. A young woman also swims there. Her
father is a Swede who has "gone native" and married a Samoan woman
whose family belonged to the ancient royal caste of Samoa. All the
regulars at the local pub, or at the "English Club", tell our hero
that he should just enjoy himself with this half-caste woman, but it
would be a disaster to actually marry her. Despite this, he does it.
Thus all the fine ladies of the European and (white) American colony
in Apia are embarrassed to have anything to do with him. He becomes
an outcast, resigned to spending more and more time in the
overcrowded, somewhat soiled hut of the Swede and his extended
native family. Thus he resolves to return to England with his exotic
wife. At first she is excited about the prospect, but in England,
the cold and darkness gradually gets to her. And one day she
secretly disappears with her children, taking the next ship back to
her home in Samoa. The hero is devastated. He follows her, but finds
himself despised by both white society and the natives who see him
as a despicably weak person. His wife hates him. But he grovels in
his sorrow, in the end drowning himself first in alcohol, then
finally in the pool.
I suppose W. Somerset Maugham was describing the
true situation of racial intolerance in the South Seas back in those
days, a hundred years ago. In The
Moon and Sixpence, he seemed to be adopting this view as
his own. But surely today, most people would say that it would be a
wonderfully romantic thing to see a young couple in the situation of
this Englishman and his South Seas bride, swimming in a tropical
pool in Samoa.
During the 1920s and 30s it seems to have
been the fashion to write stories as if they were incoherent
riddles, using fragmentary, illogical bursts of words and half words
in order to describe - or at least to convey in some measure - the
thoughts of the characters in the stories. The most famous example
of this technique must be James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. As a student I did try wading
through the first couple of pages of that book before deciding that
there are better things to do in life than to spend large amounts of
time trying to make sense out of nonsense.
This book by William Faulkner starts off in this
tradition. It consists of short chapters, each of which describes
the thoughts of one of the characters in the story. There are many
characters, all of which have extremely strange names. But by
putting the book aside, then coming back to it after a couple of
days when getting into the mood and just reading a few half
understood pages, then putting it aside again, I did gradually get
into the story.
It all has to do with an extremely dysfunctional
family of farmyard hicks, somewhere in the Deep South of the USA, or
maybe they are hillbillys, or something. The mother of this family
is in the process of dying. The eldest son, whose name is Cash, is
sawing timbers in order to make a coffin for the mother. This sawing
business goes on and on, being observed by the various characters,
using their various, more or less incoherent effluences of words.
The student of literature may be able to read into such things one
or another philosophical observation on the futility of life, the
role of religion in the bucolic mind, the hopelessness of the
downtrodden, and what have you.
But things finally get going when the mother
expires and enters the coffin. The family has the task of
transporting the mother's corpse to the distant town of Jefferson,
using the primitive means available to it, namely a broken down
wagon drawn by a mule of two. The task is made difficult due to the
circumstance that a heavy rain has fallen, causing the local river
to overflow its banks, washing away the bridges. The simplest thing
would be to just bury the body near the local farm. But for some
reason the family feels obliged to transport it to Jefferson for
burial. Other characters, not part of this crazy family, also have
their short chapters, offering to help in some way. The father,
"pa", whose name is "Anse", refuses help. He continually says that
he does not want to become "beholden" to others. Thus the nights are
spent crouching by the wagon in the rain, refusing the food and
accommodation offered to them by less dysfunctional farmers in the
districts through which they pass.
At least the prose of William Faulkner becomes
progressively more coherent in inverse proportion to the chaotic
wanderings of the family in their trek through the waterlogged Deep
South. When attempting to draw the wagon through a ford in the
raging river, the wagon overturns, drowning the mules. Yet the
family manages to salvage the wagon together with the corpse in its
coffin. But also Cash is a casualty of this business, suffering a
broken leg and various other injuries. So he is strapped on top of
the coffin, and the caravan proceeds ever onwards in its journey to
Jefferson. The decomposing body emits an increasingly revolting
smell. Cash's leg begins to putrefy. The family decides that rather
than consulting a doctor, the best idea would be to pour concrete
around the leg to "set" it, which increases the level of
putrefaction. During a further episode, the second son of the
family, "Darl", apparently in a fit of madness, sets fire to
somebody's barn. So he gradually disappears into the hands of
Justice. The daughter, "Dewey Dell", has gotten pregnant, and she
enters one drugstore after another on the trek, seeking some illegal
medicine for aborting the fetus. An unscrupulous druggist takes
advantage of the naivety of Dewey Dell and rapes her himself.
And during all of this narration, we find out
more about the dead mother and why she wanted to be buried in
Jefferson. She was not the happy center of Apple Pie America, which
we had at first suspected. In fact we find out that she was the
cause of this whole mess of a family, not only in the sense that she
bore the children of Anse, but also because she created the initial
seeds of discord.
It certainly is an unpleasant story. Yet despite
this, it is considered to be one of the great classics of 20th
century literature. Such are the whims of fashion. For those who
have a destructive view of the human condition, it might perhaps be
said that the story is a surreal allegory on the life of Everyman.
But at least the edition of the book which I read, from the Folio
Society, is interspersed with beautiful watercolor illustrations of
various scenes in the whole drama.